Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

“They have killed me,” he wailed.

He rose to his knees as the driver gunned the engine to make a run for the gate. The sudden lurch slammed him onto his back, and he lay there silent and still. The driver ordered us not to move him, which meant that some of us had to step over his body to disembark.

Word went around later that he was fine — his cut had been fixed with a Band-Aid — but that he’d been so frightened he’d wet his pants. Curtis, whose terminal was next to mine, couldn’t stop talking about it. He felt sure Subhash would sue for stress and humiliation and wind up collecting a million dollars.

“Motherfucker gets a million for pissing,” he said. “I’m gonna shit myself tomorrow, see if I can get two.”

Someone else heard Subhash had died, but that the company was keeping it secret. You’d be surprised how many people wanted to believe that one.

IT WASN’T UNTIL Saturday, when Emma shopped garage sales after church, that I could hunt in earnest. The crushed soda crackers I spread over a bare patch in the yard drew a whole flock of small brown birds, any of which might have been the one I was after. This was an unexpected complication, but I didn’t let it discourage me. A picnic table and an old canvas tarp served as a blind. I had no trouble dropping a bird with my first shot. The others leaped into the air and disappeared when it fell.

The bird lay on its back, not quite dead yet, and I walked out to examine it. Its scaly little claws made me nauseous, the way they jerked and clutched as if trying to tear something apart. I rolled it over with the barrel of the pistol, and the blood welling up in its open beak was like a shiny red berry.

Suddenly it began to thrash about, its spastic wings beating the dirt into dust, and I ran to the porch and stood there shaking, my hand on the doorknob, ready to flee if the bird came at me. It quieted down quickly enough, though, and I finally worked up the nerve to approach it again and fire three more times, putting the last pellet right into its hateful black eye.

I waited for punishment then — the bird had suffered, after all — but the sun glowed just as brightly, and the ground stayed firm beneath my feet, and I knew the disappointment some criminals must feel when their most daring transgressions fail to make the papers.

I used a shovel I found leaning against the house to scoop the bird up and toss it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, and the others returned and settled onto the saltines before I’d even concealed myself again. Their greed disgusted me. There was no need to take aim, and I didn’t bother to remove the bodies of those I killed after that. The flock dispersed each time one of their number went down, but reassembled out of nowhere seconds later, like something snapping suddenly into focus. They ignored the dead completely, bouncing merrily over the corpses.

I fired until the pistol was empty, which was a mistake, because some of the birds were still alive when I finally went out with the shovel to gather them up. I couldn’t bring myself to wring their necks, so the wounded ended up with the dead in a hole I dug at the back of the yard.

The telephone bird rang louder than ever from a lemon tree as I smoothed topsoil over the grave, and I sat down and cried for a while, brokenhearted because I’d saddled myself with another secret, this butchery.

SANDAL SHOUTED ME out of a beautiful dream in which my wife and I were planning a ski trip, and the water-stained ceiling of my room was almost too much to bear. I’d been asleep since burying the birds, and my legs felt hollow when I got up to unlock the door.

“Bobby’s on the roof again,” Sandal said. “He’s all whacked out.”

“Can’t you handle it? Or Emma?”

“The only thing I’m going to do is get the cops to haul him off to the fucking loony bin. I’m so sick of his shit. Besides, you’re the one he wants.”

It was usually a phone call from his mother that set Bobby off. She was kind to him, and nothing but supportive, but all he heard in her voice was pity and disappointment. He’d been royally fucked, as far as I was concerned. What good was it to be crazy if you still felt shame?

The window in Sandal’s room opened onto a small balcony, and from there a ladder led up to the roof. Emma stood on the balcony, her hands cupped around her mouth, her long gray braid coiled on the back of her head. She was talking to Bobby, even though she couldn’t see him.

“I said we’re going bowling. Don’t you want to come?”

Foster was out there, too, shirtless, his tattoos looking like some kind of disease. When I started up the ladder, he said, “If he’s gonna do it, let him. Get too close, and he’ll put a death grip on you.”

My bare feet were sweaty and kept slipping off the thin iron rungs, and the ladder rattled against the house as I climbed. I expected Bobby to be crouched on the edge, where I’d found him before, but this time he was straddling the very peak of the dizzyingly pitched roof, holding on to the TV antenna with one hand, a bottle of Wild Turkey clutched in the other.

“Didn’t you hear?” I said. “We’re going bowling.”

“Have fun,” he replied.

“Can I get a hit of that Turkey?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

I worked my way up the steep incline backwards, like a crab. When I reached the top, I turned and swung a leg over so that I sat astride the house like him, and he passed me the bottle. I drank more than I meant to, and my throat closed off. I spit, but the wind blew it back in my face.

The sun was setting behind the scraggly palms and sagging telephone lines. In the distance, the Hollywood sign leaned rosy against its dark hillside while the sky over the Boulevard soaked up the cheap reds and greens of the tourists’ neon. Bobby stared off in that direction, sliding his thick glasses up his nose with the knuckle of his thumb. What to say now was always a problem, or whether to say anything at all.

“Looks like it’s going to be a nice night,” I ventured.

Bobby nodded.

“Maybe we should get out, see a movie or something.”

“Did you go to your high school reunion?” he asked.

“The ten-year, sure.”

“But you were married then, right? You had something to show off, your wife.”

“My wife? Yeah, I guess I showed her off. Somebody should have shot me.”

Bobby smiled around the bottle, which he’d raised to his lips. Pulling himself up with the antenna, he stood and balanced on the peak of the roof.

“Now, hey,” I said. “Bobby.” If a funnier joke had ever been played on me, I couldn’t remember: putting me in charge of saving someone’s life.

Televisions blared from every open window in the neighborhood, and three kids chasing a soccer ball across the empty lot next door called each other dirty names in Spanish. The streetlights flared once, twice, then all snapped on at once.

“Give me another drink,” I said.

Bobby edged over to hand me the bottle. A good beginning, except that now that he was away from the antenna, he held his arms out like a tightrope walker, wobbling back and forth.

“I’m not going to mine,” he said. “They sent an invitation, but forget it.”

“You won’t be missing much.”

“I was class president, you know. And valedictorian.”

“Hey, meet Best Dancer and Best Hair.”

Bobby sat down again just like that and motioned for the bottle, and my first thought was to break it over his silly head.

“I’m the biggest damn bull in the barnyard, aren’t I?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied. “Yes, you are.”

Something tickled the back of my throat, and I coughed, catching Whatever it was on my tongue and bringing it to my fingers. A feather. Bobby straddled the roof of the house again, and pretended to ride it like it was a bucking bronco, screaming, “Yeeehaw!” his heels scraping the shingles in sync with my squirming heart.