Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

“Come swim with us, Uncle Jack,” Kendra calls. She can paddle across the deep end by herself, while Cassie, wearing inflatable water wings, sits on the stairs, in up to her waist. I make a big production of gearing up for my cannonball, stopping short a number of times until they are screaming for me to jump, jump, jump.

We play Marco Polo and shark attack. I teach Kendra to dive off my shoulders, and she begs to do it again and again. Cassie, on the other hand, won’t let me touch her. Liz bounces her up and down and drags her around making motorboat noises, but every time I approach, she has a fit and scrambles to get away. “You’re so big,” Liz says, but I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s it.

A man unlocks the gate in the fence that surrounds the pool, and a little blond girl about Kendra’s age squeezes past him and runs to the water, where she drops to all fours and dips in her hand.

“It’s warm enough,” she shouts to the man, who smiles and waves at Tracy.

“Hey, whassup,” Tracy says.

She bends her legs so that he can sit on the end of her chaise. His hair is spiked with something greasy, and his T-shirt advertises a bar. I dive down to walk on my hands. When I come up, they are laughing together. He reaches into the pocket of his baggy shorts, and I swear I see him give Tracy money.

“Where are you going?” Liz asks as I paddle to the ladder.

“I want to swim, Daddy,” the blond girl yells.

“Not right now,” the man answers without looking at her. He stands at my approach, smiles. A salesman. Maybe not for a living, but I’ve got him pegged. We shake hands professionally.

“The big brother,” he crows, jokey jokey. My sister should be more careful.

“Philip’s going to paint my place,” Tracy says. “All I have to pay for is the materials.”

“Unless we get burned out,” he says.

She frowns and puts a finger to her lips, nodding toward the kids.

I scrub my hair with a towel and find that I’m sucking in my gut. It’s sick. A flock of birds scatters across the smoky sky like a handful of gravel.

“You live in L.A.?” Philip says to me. “I’m sorry.”

A real tough guy, going for the dig right off the bat.

“I like the action,” I reply.

“I was down there for a while. Too crazy.”

“You have to know your way around.”

I adjust my chair, sit. Philip fingers the soul patch under his lower lip. I’m staring at him, he’s staring at me. It could go either way.

“I. Want. To. Swim. Now,” Philip’s daughter wails.

“Your mother’ll be here any minute.”

The girl begins to cry. She stretches out facedown on the pool deck and cuts loose.

“Go to it, Daddy,” Tracy says, giving Philip a playful kick.

He stands and rubs his eyes. “This fucking smoke.”

“Nice meeting you,” I say with a slight lift of my chin.

He walks over to his daughter and peels her off the concrete. She screams even louder. He has to carry her through the gate.

“He know what happened?” I ask Tracy.

“What do you mean?”

I stare at her over the top of my sunglasses. After a few seconds she says, “I told him I was in a car wreck.”

“So he’s not like a friend friend?”

“Hey, really, okay?” she warns.

I throw up my hands to say forget it. She’s right. I don’t know what I’m doing, all of a sudden muscling into her life. The girls are calling for me again. I run to the edge of the pool and dive in, determined to get Cassie to play sea horse with me.

THE KIDS TURN up their noses at the cabbage rolls, so Tracy boils a couple of hot dogs for them. She’s more accommodating than our parents were. Seems like a terrible waste of time now, the battles fought over liver and broccoli and pickled beets. And what about when Dad tried to force a lamb chop past my teeth, his other hand gripping my throat? Somehow that became a funny story, one retold at every family gathering to much laughter. Nobody ever noticed that I would leave the room so cramped with anger that it hurt to breathe.

Tracy pushes food from one side of her plate to the other as she talks about her job. She manages a Supercuts in a nasty part of town. The owner is buying a new franchise in Poway, and she once promised Tracy that when she did, Tracy could go into partnership with her. Now, though, the woman is hemming and hawing. The deal is off.

“I turned that shop around. She used me,” Tracy says.

“Tough it out,” I advise. “Regroup, then sell yourself to her. You have to be undeniable.”

“Jack, I quit two weeks ago. I’m not going to take that kind of crap.”

“Well, well,” I say. “Man.”

“Sounds like it was time to move on,” Liz interjects.

“What I’d like to do is open my own shop.”

It’s not that I don’t understand her disappointment. I made it to sales manager once at a Toyota dealership, but they put me back out on the lot after less than a month, saying I wasn’t cutthroat enough. The owner’s son took my place, and it just about killed me to keep going in every day. We had debts, though. We were in way over our heads. It was a shameful time, but I didn’t crack. Two months later Sonny Boy went off to rehab, and I was back on top. A good couple of years rolled by after that.

While Liz and the girls clear the table, I follow Tracy onto the patio. She closes the sliding glass door and retrieves a pack of More menthols from its hiding place inside a birdhouse. Placing the elbow of her smoking arm into the palm of her other hand, she stands with her back to the door so the girls can’t see her take a drag. It’s a pose I remember from when we were kids, a skating rink pose. That’s where she and her dirtbag crew hung out before they were old enough to drive. Barely thirteen, and rumor had it she was already screwing some high school cokehead. Guys called her a whore to my face.

The backyard is tiny, maybe fifteen by fifteen, no grass at all. A shoulder-high fence separates it from the neighbors’ yards on all three sides. I can see right into the next unit: a Chinese guy on his couch, watching TV. The sound of a Padres game curls through his screen door. I tried to talk Tony out of buying this place, but he wouldn’t listen. His deal was always that I was too negative. Now Tracy is stuck with thin walls and noisy plumbing.

“You guys are still the happy couple,” Tracy says. “Obviously.”

“Most of the time, sure.”

“The good part is you don’t seem a thing like Mom and Dad.”

“We got lucky, I guess.”

Tracy’s shoulders jerk. She turns her head and spits vomit into a potted plant. I’m not sure what to do. It would frighten her if I took her into my arms. We’re not that kind of people. I’m sorry, but we’re not. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and hits her cigarette again, then walks past me to stand against the fence, looking into the neighbor’s yard so that I can’t see her face. A gritty layer of ash covers everything now, and more is sifting down. The smell of smoke is stronger than ever.

“I still have some of the insurance money from the accident,” I say. “What if you take it? You should get that shop going as soon as possible.”

“Everything’s up in the air,” Tracy replies. “Maybe I’ll go back to school.”

“Use it for that, then.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

“Hey. .”

“It’s funny, that’s all.”

She kneels to drink from a hose attached to a faucet at the edge of the patio. After the rape, she drove herself to the hospital. Nobody else in the family had that kind of fortitude. Our dad was a notorious hypochondriac.

Carrie slides the door open with great effort and says, “Mommy, what are you doing?”