Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

The clerk is Indian. Turban, the whole bit.

“I’m here to see Karl Wright,” I say.

He checks the register and then the cubbyholes where the keys are stored.

“Wright is out,” he says.

“He told me to meet him here.”

The clerk grabs a key and taps it three or four times against the thick Plexiglas separating us. “He is out, out, out. This is his key.”

“What’s that music you’re listening to?”

It’s a woman wailing over some kind of half-assed bagpipes and penny whistles dipped in mud.

“Indian music. From my country.”

“What’s she saying?”

The clerk shrugs. “She loves him. He has robbed her heart.”

I step back into the lobby. A few men are hunched on the spavined couches, rapt before a silent television chained to a shelf up near the ceiling. I take a seat and do my best to mimic their institutional quietude. These boys know how to wait, I think to myself while the audience on TV applauds us soundlessly. In one corner of the room, a small aluminum Christmas tree lists under its burden of twinkle lights and tinsel.

The old guy beside me is wearing a blue polyester suit coat, the cuffs of which hang past his knuckles. He smells like yeast and mothballs. For a while he stares openmouthed at the screen, his tongue worrying his dentures. Then he stands and faces me.

“Hit the road, punk,” he wheezes.

“Say what?”

“Time’s up.”

“Sit down, you crazy fuck,” one of the other men shouts.

“Yeah, asshole,” another chimes in.

The old man’s chin trembles; his eyes shine with tears. He returns to his spot on the couch and sits with his head in his hands. I’d trade any ten people I know for one of him. His desolation is as beautiful as a broken mirror.

My brother laughs. He’s been watching everything from an easy chair by the door. He’s handsomer than me, taller, more graceful as he strides across the lobby, muscular arms outstretched.

“Karl?” I ask, knowing full well.

He wraps himself around me. I feel his fists on my back, drawing me closer until my mouth and nose are pressed against his shoulder. I want to return the embrace, I should, but it’s awkward. I can’t figure out where to put my hands.

“My bro,” he whispers. “My big bro.”

We separate, and he wipes his eyes with the ball of his thumb. He’s wearing a denim shirt and a pair of tan chinos, and I wonder if these are the clothes the prison provided when they released him. Everyone in the lobby is smiling at us, as if our meeting has allowed hope to slice its way through the scar tissue surrounding their hearts. I don’t want to be responsible for that.

A siren screams past outside, and Karl doesn’t even flinch. I reach out and tousle his hair like an older brother would a younger brother’s. He grabs my hand and kisses it. It’s one of those moments when you wish you weren’t always watching yourself from across the room.

WE WALK TO a McDonald’s a couple of blocks off Skid Row. I suggest sushi in Little Tokyo or one of the Mexican places over the river, but Karl says no, no, McDonald’s is fine. The streets down here are something else. The sun never quite reaches them over the tops of the buildings, and those who have chosen to live in this constant twilight collide with those who have no choice and those who are simply, in one way or another, lost. On this cold, late December afternoon, it could be any miserable, man-eating place in the world. Cheap wine, crack, lies loudly told — these are the bonfires that keep the wolves at bay.

OH, MAN, YOU really want to get into that mess? It makes me look stupid. Like a real idiot. But okay. Me and this fucker Edgar I used to hang with, we were heavy into downers. I was staying away from smack, but anything else, bring it on. This was in OKC, before the bomb and whatnot, and Edgar knew this guy who knew this guy who. . well, if you were a serious pill popper and you got to thinking, “Hey, where do they keep all the drugs in this town?” you might come up with this, too — the hospital, right? So Edgar tells me about this buddy of his who shot himself in the hand with a twenty-two, then went to the hospital and told them it happened while he was cleaning the gun, and they set him up with a nice, fat scrip for Percodan or Darvon or some such wonder. We’re thinking right on, right. Voilà! You’ve got to be in pain to get painkillers! Neither of us had the balls to take a bullet, but we worked it out where we’d toss a coin and the winner would hit the loser in the head with a piece of pipe just hard enough to cut him and lump it up so it’d look like maybe he fell off a ladder, which is what we’d tell the doctor.

A few beers later, we do the toss, and I lose. Edgar gets the pipe from under his mattress and I sit at the kitchen table and he fuckin’ nails me. I mean, he knocks me the fuck OUT! I wake up on the floor, blood gushing, my ears ringing, and Edgar zips me over to the emergency. Well, first off they shave half my head to stitch me up, then there’s all kinds of X-rays and Y-rays and Z-rays. I must have been in there four or five hours, crying this hurts and that hurts and doc, you got to help me, and after all that, do you know what I walked out with? Tylenol. Fucking Tylenol. Long story short, we drive to this dealer’s house and bust down his door and steal his stash. He ratted us out, saying we took his TV, and me being on probation already for some other rinky-dink beef, that was that. Your little brother hit the big time.

THE MCDONALD’S IS all plastic and chrome and perfect and horrible. Karl lifts the bun of his hamburger to remove the pickles. He’s tattooed the letters of his name on the fingers of one hand, a sloppy, homemade job, the ink already faded to green. The one thing I see of myself in his face is its only imperfection, the bulbous tip of his nose. We can thank our father for that.

“How long’s it been?” Karl asks.

“Oh, hell, what, twenty-five years maybe. He dropped by on his way to Vegas once, when he still lived out here. He was with your mother then. She was pregnant with you, as a matter of fact. We’ve talked on the phone a few times since.”

“You never missed having a daddy?”

“My mom kept trying. There were always men around.”

“But not your daddy.”

I shift in my seat and fight off the exasperation his earnestness provokes in me.

“We never had pets, either. Should I feel bad about that, too?”

“You got an answer for everything,” Karl says, his smile a bit too knowing.

“So what’s your story?” I ask.

He shrugs, dips a fry in ketchup. “How old were you when he bailed?”

“Three.”

“I was barely a year.” His voice takes on a harsher tone, as if something inside him has suddenly cinched up tight and he has to force his words around it.

“Momma did her best, but it was hard in Texas. Different from here, the people and all, how they treated us. Especially her family. They were too cruel half the time, too kind the rest. By the time I was fourteen, she’d had enough, so she gave herself up to cancer. And I’m glad, you know, because look at me.”

He strikes himself in the chest with his fist and would do worse, I know — tear his guts out, take an ice pick to his skull. It’s the kind of self-immolating rage that drives men to decisive, if reckless, even destructive, acts, and I have often envied it in others, as the dead must surely envy the living.

I sip my coffee and watch him seethe. He closes his eyes and exhales loudly, then rotates his head from side to side, his neck cracking and popping.

“He had a house on a golf course out there in Florida, a boat in the driveway. A girl answered the door, looked like us, and there was a boy, too. Daddy wouldn’t let me in, though, didn’t want to upset his family, like I was somebody, I don’t know, nobody. So we walked out to the garage. What did I want, he wanted to know. I said, ‘Just to see you. You’re my daddy.’ ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. Are you sure? Can you believe that? I lost it. I got him by the throat and took him down to his knees.”