Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

When Tracy was released, she moved to a marijuana plantation in Hawaii. I still have the one letter she sent. In it she asks for money to buy cough syrup and says she’s learning to thread flowers into leis. She spends half a page describing a sunset. There’s dirt on the envelope. The stamp has a picture of a fish. It made me angry back then, but envy can be like that.

I try to keep my eyes closed until we’re past the accident, but the part of me that thinks that’s silly makes me look. A truck hauling oranges has overturned, the fruit spilling out across the freeway. Two lanes are still open, and traffic crawls past, crushing the load into bright, fragrant pulp. The truck’s driver, uninjured, stands with a highway patrolman. The driver keeps slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand and stomping his feet. The patrolman lights a flare.

Things clear up after that. We zip through Irvine and Capistrano and right past the nuclear plant at San Onofre, which looks like two big tits pointing at the sky. The ocean lolls flat and glassy all the way to the horizon, sparking where the sun touches it. At Camp Pendleton, the marines are on maneuvers. Tanks race back and forth on both sides of the freeway, and the dust they kick up rolls across the road like a thick fog. The radio fades out, and when the signal returns, it’s in Spanish.

We stop in Oceanside for a hamburger. The place is crawling with jarheads who look pretty badass with their muscles and regulation haircuts, but then I see the acne and peach fuzz and realize they’re boys, mostly, having what will likely turn out to be the time of their lives. I convince Liz that we deserve a beer, so we step into a bar next to the diner. The walls are covered with USMC this and USMC that, pennants and flags, and Metallica blasts out of the jukebox. It’s not yet noon, but a few grunts are already at it. I have the bartender send them another pitcher on me. They raise their mugs and shout, “To the corps.” I can’t figure out what it is that I hate about them.

A FIRE ENGINE forces us to the side of the road as soon as we get off the freeway at Tracy’s exit. I see smoke in the distance. The condo development she lives in rambles across a dry hillside north of San Diego, block after block of identical town houses with Cape Cod accents. The wiry grass and twisted, oily shrubs that pick up where the roads dead-end and the sprinkler systems peter out are just waiting for an excuse to burst into flame. There have been a number of close calls since Tracy moved in. Only last year a blaze was stopped at the edge of the development by a miraculous change in wind direction.

We get lost on our way up to her place. There’s a system to the streets, but I haven’t been here enough times to figure it out. The neighborhood watch signs are no help, and the jogger who gives us a dirty look, well, better that than gangbangers. They keep a tight rein here. The association once sent Tracy a letter ordering her to remove an umbrella that shaded the table on her patio because it violated some sort of bylaw. I’d go nuts, but Tracy says it’s a good place to raise kids. A lucky turn brings us to her unit, and we pull into a parking space labeled VISITOR.

Her youngest, Cassie, opens the door at my knock. She’s four, a shy, careful girl.

“Hello, baby,” I say.

Her eyes widen, and she runs to hide behind her mother in the kitchen.

“Cassie,” Tracy scolds. “It’s Uncle Jack and Auntie Liz. You remember.”

Cassie buries her face in her mother’s thigh. Her older sister, Kendra, who’s eight, doesn’t look up from the coloring book she’s working on.

It’s been almost a week since Tracy was attacked, and she still has an ugly greenish bruise on her cheek and broken blood vessels in one eye. She herds us into the living room, asking what we want to drink. The place smells like food, something familiar. “Cabbage rolls,” Tracy says. “You loved Mom’s.”

“So how are you?” I ask. That’s broad enough in front of the kids.

“Better every day, which is how it goes, they say. There are experts and things, counselors. It’s amazing.”

“You see it on TV, on those shows. I bet it helps. I mean, does it?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Time’s the main thing, though.”

“Come sit with me,” Liz says to Cassie. She’s trying to draw her out of Tracy’s lap, give Mommy a break.

“No,” Cassie whines as she wraps her arms tighter around Tracy’s neck.

My beer tastes funny. I hold the can to my ear and shake it. This big brother business is new to me. Tracy and I have never been close. We were in different worlds as kids, and since our parents died we’ve seen each other maybe twice a year. She came back from Hawaii, settled in San Diego, and met Tony. They married in Vegas without telling anyone. Whew! I thought. I’m finally off the hook .

But Tony’s been gone six months now. Tracy used star 69 to catch him cheating. He was that stupid, or maybe he wanted to be caught. I notice that some of the furniture is different, new but cheaper. The couch used to be leather. Tony took his share when he left. Everything had to be negotiated. Tracy got to keep the kids’ beds, and he got the TV, a guy who makes a hundred grand a year. It’s been downhill since then. Battle after battle.

“You owe me a hug,” I say to Kendra. “I sent you that postcard from Florida.”

Exasperated, she slaps down her crayon and marches over. We scared the hell out of her when she was younger, showing up one Halloween dressed in a cow costume, Liz in the front half, me in back. She’ll never trust me again.

She grimaces when I pull her up onto the couch. “What’s the deal?” I ask.

“What?”

“What’s shaking? What’s new? How’s school?”

“It’s okay, but my teacher’s too old. She screamed at us the other day, like, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ ” She has to scream, too, to show me how it went.

“Kendra!” Tracy says.

Cassie sees her sister getting attention and decides that she wants some. She leaves her mother to pick up a stuffed pig, which she brings to Liz, who soon has both girls laughing by giving the pig a lisp and making it beg for marshmallows and ketchup. There’s a creepy picture of an angel on the wall. I ask Tracy what that’s about. We weren’t raised religious. We weren’t raised anything at all.

“It was Kendra’s idea. We saw it at the mall, and she was like, ‘Mommy, Mommy, we need that.’ ” Tracy shrugs and shakes her head. Her fingers go to the bruise on her cheek. She taps it rhythmically.

“Angels, huh,” I say to Kendra.

“They watch us all the time and keep us safe.”

“Who taught you that?”

“Leave me alone,” she snaps.

I walk into the kitchen with my empty beer can. Everything shines like it’s brand-new. Our mother would wake up at four in the morning sometimes and pull every pot and pan we owned out of the cupboards and wash them. Dad called it her therapy, but that’s bullshit. She’d be cursing under her breath as she scrubbed, and her eyes were full of rage.

Something is burning. I smell it. The fire must be closer than it seemed. I press my face to the window, trying to see the sky, while the girls laugh at another of Auntie Liz’s jokes.

ASH DRIFTS DOWN like the lightest of snowfalls, disappearing as soon as it touches the ground. It sticks to the hood of a black Explorer, and more floats on the surface of the development’s swimming pool, where the girls are splashing with Liz. The sun forces woozy red light through the smoke, and it feels later than it is.

I tug at the crotch of my borrowed bathing suit, one thing Tony left behind. My sister sits beside me in a chaise, fully clothed, to hide more bruises, I bet. The rapist got her as she was leaving a restaurant. That’s all she told me. In a parking garage. That’s all I know. “I’m lucky he didn’t kill me,” she said afterward. Her hand shakes when she adjusts her sunglasses; the pages of her magazine rattle.