Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

ASHOTGUN BLAST AT DAWN SEPARATES NIGHT AND DAY. I come awake awash in adrenaline before the echo has faded and roll off the bed to sprawl on the nappy motel shag, where I hope I’ll be safe if war has broken out between the crackheads in the next room and the pimp downstairs. The carpet reeks of cigarette smoke and spilled perfume. I press my face into it and wait for another explosion, but there’s only this dog somewhere, putting together long and short barks into combinations reminiscent of Morse code. I imagine that I’m able to decipher the gruff pronouncements: He who feeds me is a liar and a thief. His hand upon me is a curse. God sees all and does nothing.

The parking lot is quiet when I finally muster the guts to crawl to the window and peek between the drapes. The other rooms are shut up tight, and a perfect mirror image of the neon vacancy sign shivers in the placid, black water of the swimming pool. So I guess I dreamed the gunshot, or maybe it’s Simone again, my dead wife, trying to drive me crazy.

Linda is still sound asleep, too, but that doesn’t prove anything. A stone speed freak, her standard routine is seventy-two hours up and twenty-four down, and when she crashes, she crashes hard. Right now she looks as serene as an angel or a sweet, dead baby. A blanket hides most of the damage: the tracks; the scabs that keep her nervous fingers busy; the bruised skin stretched thin over her ribs and spine, elbows and knees. She’s sixteen years old and has been raped three times, and I’m like an uncle to her, like a big brother, she says, because I let her stay in my room when it’s cold outside. No, I’m not fucking her. I’d like to, but then Simone would kill me for sure.

I rejoin her on the bed, careful to keep to my side, and watch the walls go from blue to pink to white, until the river of grief twisting through me unexpectedly swells and jumps its banks. At the first rush of tears, I get up and shut myself in the bathroom, and it’s as rough as it’s been in a while, but by the time the liquor stores open, I’m showered and shaved and empty enough to bob like a cork on the surface of another day.

THE LISTLESS WINTER sun doesn’t do much to warm the chinky concrete of the pool deck, where I sit sipping beer and tomato juice, my feet dangling in the frigid water. The pool is the heart of this place. From here I can keep an eye on all of the doors and windows. I can see everything coming at me. I work on a letter I’ve been meaning to write. Dear Simone, please leave me alone. Relaxing my neck by degrees, I let my head fall back until I’m staring up at the sky, which is crawling with choppers and blimps and spectral silver jets. The wind steals half of every cigarette I light.

The bad guys sleep at this time of day, so the kids who live here are running wild, making the most of the few hours when it’s safe for them to be out of their rooms. While their mothers cluster around the Coke machine, as vigilant as nursing cats, they play hide-and-seek among the cars in the parking lot and pedal tricycles in sloppy circles. I ignore them as best I can. They make me nervous. I’m afraid that at any moment they’ll go off like a string of firecrackers and disintegrate into acrid smoke and drifts of shredded newspaper.

A couple of them, little boys, rattle the gate of the fence that surrounds the pool and beg in Spanish to be let in.

“Vamoose,” I say. “Adios.”

Undaunted, they snake their skinny arms through the bars and strain to reach the lock. I scoop some ice from my cup and fling it at them, and they fall back laughing as a police car eases into the lot, no lights or sirens. Before it has come to a stop, the boys’ mother is herding them back to the family’s room, and the other mothers, too, gather their children. Within seconds the parking lot is empty. The sudden silence makes my palms itch. Mrs. Cho, the owner of the motel, leads the cops up the stairs, and I lift my feet out of the pool and stomp some feeling into them in case things get ugly and I have to run for cover.

When the eviction party reaches the second floor, it’s round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. Room 210: old guy, Mexican, Cuban, something. Wears a cowboy hat and plays the radio loud late at night to drown out the whores’ comings and goings. The kids and their mothers watch from behind half-closed doors as one of the officers knocks with his baton. His partner cups his eyes to peer in the window, but the glass has been covered over with tinfoil. Mrs. Cho dials her cell, and the phone in the room rings and rings and rings. After a bit of discussion, she unlocks the door with her passkey and moves off down the walkway so the cops can do their stuff.

“Police!” they shout in unison as the door swings open. Guns drawn, they roll into the room, one high, one low. Such caution is unnecessary, however — the guy has been dead for a while, judging by the stench that billows out and settles over the motel like another coat of stucco. Mrs. Cho backs away, covering her nose and mouth. She bumps into the railing and slides along it toward the steps. Then the cops reappear on the walkway. One of them says something snide to the other and both laugh, but they’re not happy, and neither am I. I’ll be smelling death for days.

Are you happy now? I promise I’ll take the blame for what happened to you if you’ll just let me be.

MY SHADOW LIES beside me, a wan and shapeless stain in the gutter. I drag it into the liquor store, to the beer cooler, the register, and out again. The effort leaves me winded. Twisting the cap off my forty, I drop onto a bus bench, but I’m barely settled when a passing car’s backfire sends my heart wheeling with the pigeons from the telephone wire overhead.

Eightball rolls up on his bicycle with Linda perched on the handlebars. Eightball, because that’s how black he is. He doesn’t care for the name, but so what, the little dope fiend, the little thief. I don’t care for how he professes to love Linda one minute and pimps her the next. She’s welcome in my room, but he is not allowed.

“S’up,” he says. He feigns interest in a billboard across the street, a giant hot dog adorned with a bolt of yellow mustard. He can’t look me in the eye.

Linda slides off the handlebars and sits beside me on the bench, then immediately pops up again like something has stung her. She stands on one foot, using the other to scratch the back of her leg. She’s tweaking, every hair of her platinum crewcut in frenzied motion, her nostrils rimed with dried snot.

“Fuckin’ that dude killed himself,” she blurts through clenched teeth. “We saw’m carryin’m out. Smelled like fuckin’ I don’t know. Like shit. You see it? Hung himself in the closet. C’n I have a hit of your beer?”

I give her one, and she tries to sit again, but is soon back on her feet, rocking from side to side like a metronome marking loony time.

“They took’m away in an ambulance. What they do with guys like him, with no family and shit, is they take’m to the hospital and give’m to the students there. They’re learnin’ to be doctors, and it’s a law they c’n do experiments and shit on your body if you’re poor. That’s why I made a will and left it with my mom. If I die, they got to burn me and spread my ashes over Hawaii.”

A car sidles up to the curb, driven by a kid with a mustache that looks glued on. He rolls down the passenger window and calls out to Linda, “You for sale?”

“Yeah, she for sale, she for sale,” Eightball says. He pedals to the window and practically climbs inside. “How much you got?”

The kid speeds away in a panic, tires squealing, and Eightball’s lucky his head doesn’t go with him.