Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

“Fuck all y’all,” Eightball hisses. He lurches away like some wronged and wounded hero, and I think how funny it is that he gets to play that part.

“Deshawn,” Reggie cries. “Son.” He hurries after him, but I don’t wait to see what happens. I’ve had it up to here with tragedy.

WHEN I’VE FINISHED off my twenty, Gina takes up the slack. She came right over from the post office to get blasted after a particularly nerve-racking shift.

“Do you think they’d hire me there?” I ask.

“Sure. I’ll tell them you’re a good guy.”

“But am I?”

“Sure you are.”

We drink for hours, through the quitting-time crowd and the before-dinner crowd and the after-dinner stragglers. It’s so nice to be warm and full of beer and whiskey, to watch the people come in out of the rain and shake off their umbrellas. In a little while I’ve forgotten all about Reggie and Eightball and my dead wife’s vengefulness. Buddha smiles down on me, and I smile back.

Gina and I move to a booth, where it’s easier to kiss and cuddle. She keeps making me put my mouth on a certain spot on her neck — her G spot, she calls it — and bite down hard. When I do, she rolls her eyes and moans “Oh, yeaaah.” I get confused a couple of times coming back from the bathroom, because of her uniform. Once I think she’s a cop, and another time a sailor.

“Anchors aweigh!” I shout, and she laughs so hard, she spills her drink, but then the song playing on the jukebox makes me cry, and I lay my head down on the table and bawl like a baby.

“Do you love me?” I ask Gina.

“Sure,” she says.

“Can I live with you?”

“No problem, no problem.”

She gets up to go to the bar for some napkins so I can blow my nose. When I open my eyes again, she’s gone. I sit and wait for her until the bar closes and the bartender tells me to leave.

THINGS HAVE GONE to shit in the last few hours. The buildings that line the alley are crumbling, the mortar between their bricks eaten away by the rain, their nails rusted. They lean into each other, forming a dripping black tunnel that is the only way out, and I know what Simone is up to, but what else can I do? I throw my arms over my head and make a run for it. I say, “Okay, fuck it,” and enter her trap. I just want it to be over with.

There’s a grating sound, metal on metal, and the heavy crash of collapsing masonry in the darkness all around me. Louder still is the slap slap of footsteps approaching. Simone, broken-boned and wormy, cracked and oozing like a rotten egg, pursues me with awful puposefulness. Her dirty fingernails clutch at my hair, and her graveyard perfume brings bile to my throat. My screams echo off the concrete that closes in as I rush deeper into the slippery blackness.

The tunnel narrows and the ceiling descends. I hit my head and drop to my hands and knees, and still she jerks and slides toward me. Scrambling over broken glass, I cut myself to ribbons, and the passage squeezes tighter, so that I’m forced to squirm on my belly with my arms pinned to my sides as Simone giggles and licks my heels. Down and down I go, my blood slicking the way, until the rubble finally clenches around me like a fist and forces the last bit of air from my lungs. I gasp once, twice, but it’s no use. Simone’s teeth work at my calf. She tears loose a mouthful of flesh and gobbles it down. Utter darkness descends over me like a condemned man’s hood as I dig my toes in and give one final push, as I wedge myself even further into the tomb.

And then there’s the rain again, cold on my naked body, its drops spreading across my eyeballs like spiderwebs. I lie on my back and run my fingers lovingly over the sidewalk beneath me, ignoring the police cruiser that jabs me with its spotlight.

A cop pulls himself out of the car and steps up onto the curb. He nudges me with his boot and asks, “Do you know where you are?”

“Chinatown,” I reply.

“And your clothes?”

I point to the drainpipe I spurted out of, the one that now dribbles bloody water and the sound of Simone’s frustrated weeping.

“My wife took them,” I say.

He doesn’t get it, and I really didn’t expect him to. Trying not to laugh, he turns to his partner and says, “Pat, better dig that blanket out of the trunk.”

So everything’s okay for now, but I don’t kid myself that I’ve beaten her. I’m not that crazy.

I OPEN THE bottle of pills they gave me upon my release from County General and shake a few of them into my hand. They’re as blue as the sky is sometimes. The psychiatrist I talked to during my stay was a very busy woman. She ran quickly down a list of questions only a lunatic would give the wrong answers to and then asked if there was anything I wanted to discuss. I said no, not really, that I’d been under a lot of stress lately, thinking about my wife’s suicide, and maybe that and the booze had led to what she referred to as my episode. She nodded understandingly and scribbled something in my file, and after seventy-two hours they cut me loose.

I swallow the pills without water. Linda is looking at herself in the mirror. She moans and falls on the bed and starts to cry. Two black eyes, her nose probably broken — Eightball’s revenge. He caught up to her this afternoon over at crackhead park and beat the piss out of her, and not one person stepped in to help her.

“They said they was my friends,” she wails.

I dip my cup into the cooler to fill it with ice and pour whiskey over that. I’m living it up, because this is my last week in the motel. I’ve run out of money, and the welfare checks I’m due to start receiving won’t cover the rent here. Things are finally going to get worse.

Something crawling on the carpet gets my attention. I walk over and step on it. When I bend down, I see that it’s a false eyelash. Where the fuck did that come from?

“Want to watch TV?” I ask Linda.

She rolls over and reaches out her arms, and here it is again, a chance to get it over with once and for all. Kill me, I tell Simone as I move toward the bed. Kill me .

I lie down next to Linda. The pills have turned my brain into a cotton ball. She winces when I hug her and says, “Careful.” My fingers stroke the dead leaves between her legs, and I position myself on top of her. She draws the sheet over her ruined face.

“Could you give me some money when we’re through?” she asks. “I want to go back to my mom’s.”

“Sure,” I reply, but I won’t, because I don’t have any to give, and she knows it. She’s just setting things up so later she can yell at me and call me a liar, and that’s fine. Whatever it takes to make her feel better about this.

Before I can get inside her the bed begins to shake. A low rumble fills the room, and the TV skips off the dresser and crashes to the floor. Every board in the building creaks with the strain of the wave swelling beneath it. Linda rolls away from me. She scurries to the bathroom and crouches there in the doorway as the toilet cracks behind her.

“It’s okay,” I say, and stand up to prove it. The carpet writhes beneath my feet like the back of some great galloping beast. A chunk of plaster falls from the ceiling, and Linda screams.

“It’s okay,” I say again as the window rattles, desperate to be free of its frame.

I’m ready to die. I stand with my arms outstretched, a smile on my face, but we drop back to earth after a final jolt. The rumble fades away, replaced by the wails and chirps of a thousand species of car alarms, and my disappointment almost sends me to my knees. Really, her viciousness is astounding.

“It’s just my wife,” I explain to Linda.

“What the fuck’re you talking about?”

“She gets jealous.”