T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

That put me over the line. I wanted to make a martyr out of him, wanted to kick him to death right there, right in the driveway and with the whole world looking on, and who knows what would have happened if Philip hadn’t grabbed me from behind. “Rick!” he kept shouting. “Rick! Rick!” And then he wrestled me up the walk and into the house, Denise’s scared white face in the door, the mob howling for blood and then lurching right into another weepy, churchy song as if they were in a cathedral somewhere.

In the safety of the hallway, the door closed and locked behind us, my brother turned on me. “Are you crazy?” he shouted, and you would have thought I was the enemy. “You want to go back to jail? You want lawsuits? What were you thinking anyway — are you stoned on something, is that it?”

I looked away from him, but I wanted to kill him too. It was beating in my veins, along with the Desoxyn I’d stolen from the clinic. I saw my nephews peeking out of their room down the hall. “You can’t let these people push you around,” I said.

“Look at me, Rick,” he said. “Look at me.”

I was dodging around on my feet, tight with it, and I lifted my eyes grudgingly. I felt like a kid all over again, Rick the shoplifter, the pothead, the fuckup.

“You’re just playing into their hands, don’t you see that? They want to provoke you, they want you to go after them. Then they put you back in jail and they get the headlines.” His voice broke. Denise tried to say something, but he shut her up with a wave of his hand. “You’re back on the drugs, aren’t you? What is it — cocaine? Pot? Something you lifted from the clinic?”

Outside I could hear them, “We Shall Overcome,” and it was a cruel parody — this wasn’t liberation, it was fascism. I said nothing.

“Listen, Rick, you’re an ex-con and you’ve got to remember that, every step you take. I mean, what did you think, you were protecting me out there?”

“Ex-con?” I said, amazed. “Is that what you think of me? I can’t believe you. I’m no ex-con. You’re thinking of somebody in the movies, some documentary you saw on PBS. I’m a guy who made a mistake, a little mistake, and I never hurt anybody. I’m your brother, remember?”

That was when Denise chimed in. “Philip,” she said, “come on, Philip. You’re just upset. We’re all upset.”

“You keep out of this,” he said, and he didn’t even turn to look at her. He just kept his Aqua Velva eyes on me. “Yeah,” he said finally, “you’re my brother, but you’re going to have to prove it to me.”

—

I can see now the Desoxyn was a mistake. It was exactly the sort of thing they’d warned us about. But it wasn’t coke and I just needed a lift, a buzz to work behind, and if he didn’t want me to be tempted, then why had he left the key to the drug cabinet right there in the conch-shell ashtray on the corner of his desk? Ex-con. I was hurt and I was angry and I stayed in my room till Philip knocked at the door an hour later to tell me the police had cleared the mob away. We drove to work in silence, Philip’s opera chewing away at my nerves like a hundred little sets of teeth.

Philip didn’t notice it, but there was something different about me when I climbed back into that car, something nobody could notice unless they had X-ray vision. I was armed. Tucked inside the waistband of my gray Levi’s, underneath the flap of my shirt where you couldn’t see it, was the hard black stump of a gun I’d bought from a girl named Corinne at a time when I was feeling especially paranoiac. I had money lying around the apartment then and people coming and going — nobody desperate, nobody I didn’t know or at least know through a friend — but it made me a little crazy. Corinne used to drop by once in a while with my roommate’s girlfriend, and she sold me the thing — a.38 Special — for three hundred bucks. She didn’t need it anymore, she said, and I didn’t want to know what that meant, so I bought it and kept it under my pillow. I’d only fired it once, up a canyon in Tujunga, but it made me feel better just to have it around. I’d forgotten all about it, actually, but when I got my things out of storage and shipped them to Philip’s house, there it was, hidden away in a box of CDs like some poisonous thing crouching under a rock.

What I was feeling is hard to explain. It had to do with Philip, sure — ex-con, that really hurt — and with Sally and the clinic and the whole Jesus-thumping circus. I didn’t know what I was going to do — nothing, I hoped — but I knew I wasn’t going to take any shit from anybody, and I knew Philip didn’t have it in him to protect himself, let alone Denise and the kids and all the knocked-up grieving teenage Sallys of the world. That was all. That was it. The extent of my thinking. I walked into the clinic that morning just as I had for the past week and a half, and nobody knew the difference.

I cleaned the toilets, washed the windows, took out the trash. Some blood work came back from an outside lab — we only did urine — and Fred showed me how to read the results. I discussed the baseball strike with Nurse Tsing and the prospects of an early spring with Nurse Hempfield. At noon I went out to a deli and had a meatball wedge, two beers, and a breath mint. I debated dialing Sally just once more — maybe she was home from school, headachy, nauseous, morning sickness, whatever, and I could get past the brick wall she’d put up between us and talk to her, really talk to her for the first time — but when I got inside the phone booth, I just didn’t feel like it. As I walked back to the clinic I was wondering if she had a boyfriend or if it was just one of those casual encounters, blind date, back seat of the car — or rape, even. Or incest. Her father’s voice could have been the voice of a child abuser, easily — or who even knew if he was her father? Maybe he was the stepfather. Maybe he was a Humbert Humbert type. Maybe anything.

There were no protesters out front when I got back — they were all in jail — and that lightened my mood a bit. I even joked with Fred and caught myself whistling over my work. I forgot the morning, forgot the gun, forgot Pasadena and the life that was. Coffee kept me awake, coffee and Diet Coke, and I stayed away from the other stuff just to prove something to myself — and to Philip too. For a while there I even began to suffer from the delusion that everything was going to work out.

Then it was late, getting dark, and the day was almost done. I pictured the evening ahead — Denise’s cooking, Winnie-the-Pooh, my brother’s scotch, six wind-blown blocks to the store for a liter of Black Cat — and suddenly I felt like pulling out the gun and shooting myself right then and there. Uncle Rick, little brother, ex-con: who was I kidding? I would have been better off in jail.

I needed a cigarette. Badly. The need took me past the waiting room — four scared-looking women, one angry-looking man — through the lab, and into the back corner. The fluorescent lights hissed softly overhead. Fred was already gone. I stood at the window, staring into the nullity of the drawn blinds till the cigarette was a nub. My hands were trembling as I lit another from the butt end of the first, and I didn’t think about the raw-looking leftovers in the stainless-steel trays that were like nothing so much as skinned frogs, and I didn’t think about Sally or the fat-faced bearded son of a bitch shackling himself to the bumper either. I tried hard to think nothing, to make it all a blank, and I was succeeding, I was, when for some reason — idle curiosity, boredom, fate — I separated two of the slats and peered out into the lot.

And there she was, just like that: Sally.

Sally in her virginal parka and fluffy boots, locked in her mother’s grip and fighting her way up the walk against a tide of chanting zombies — and I recognized them too, every one of them, the very ones who’d been dragged away from my brother’s door in the dark of the morning. Sally wasn’t coming in for an exam — there weren’t going to be any more exams. No, Sally meant business. You could see that in the set of her jaw and in the way she lowered her head and jabbed out her eyes like swords, and you could see it in every screaming line of her mother’s screaming face.