Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Jim says.

She keeps walking, off the curb and into a fresh downpour, each drop flaring like a match as it hurtles through the abrasive orange glare of the mercury vapor lamps that ring the parking lot. She’s skinny and pitiful, and her cereal’s getting soaked. We’re getting soaked, too. The rain stings my eyes and burrows through my hair to chill my scalp, and I’m just about to tell Jim that it’s over, I’m through, when he steps in front of the woman and turns to face her.

“You’re under arrest,” he says.

She doesn’t break her shuffling stride, so Jim grabs her wrist, but he isn’t ready for the fight she puts up. All her limbs go at once, kicking, punching, scratching, and Jim barely manages to disentangle himself. He backs off a bit, then lunges, catching her in the throat with his elbow. They both fall splashing to the ground, and in an instant Jim’s kneeling between her shoulder blades, immobilizing the upper half of her body while the bottom tries to crawl away. He tosses his handcuffs to me, and I kneel and cinch the stainless steel around her wrists, careful to avoid her grasping fingers with their ragged, septic nails.

She comes easy to the break room with us, crying some, and Jim sits her in a folding chair and secures her to a pipe on the wall with another pair of cuffs. His sopping wet shirt is missing two buttons, and a scratch puckers his face from the corner of his eye to the bottom of his jaw. Me, I’m shaking so bad, I’m sure he can see it. I can’t help thinking I could have stopped what happened, but I don’t know how, which is the way I feel about most things in my life these days. Just to be doing something, I buy two cups of coffee from the vending machine and pass one to Jim. The Muzak’s loud in here, that Carpenters song about birds suddenly appearing.

The woman has lost her slippers. Her bare feet look sad and strange tapping on the linoleum. She hums to herself and rocks back and forth in the chair, head down. Jim turns away to tuck in his shirt. He’s still breathing hard and sways a little when he asks the woman for ID. She doesn’t have anything to say to him.

“Fine,” Jim continues. “Let the Man deal with your shit, then. I don’t need it. I just want you to know I’d have given you the money to pay for that stuff if you’d asked, okay. Think about that when you’re doing your time, how close you came to the good side of this world.”

I can’t decide whether he’s trying to teach her something or make her miserable. Not that it’s relevant, because she’s still rocking, still humming, oblivious. Jim and I step into the hallway, and he gives me the keys to the cuffs.

“Walk her out to the parking lot and let her go,” he says.

“After all that?”

“The bitch is crazy. A couple days in jail isn’t going to change it.”

He’s going guru on me again, smiling enigmatically.

“Stop fucking around,” I say. “I know you, and you know me, and this is bullshit.”

“Exactly, grasshopper. Maya, the grand illusion. Now cut her loose.” He leaves me dangling with a little bow, and I have to say, philosophically speaking, I think I liked him better as a junkie.

I pull the woman up off the chair and practically have to drag her through the store. Outside, she doesn’t react when I free her from the cuffs, just stands stock-still at the edge of the parking lot.

“Fly away home,” I say. “Get along little dogie.”

She takes one or two stuttering steps that rev up into a run. When she’s halfway to the street, she turns back and yells, “Motherfucking Hitler!” and I fake like I’m coming after her until she runs again, disappearing into the rain. I light a cigarette and squeeze into a dry spot next to the pay phone.

Scarlett’s hair is wet and smells like peaches. She opens her coat and lets me crawl inside. I should be nicer to her than I am. She’s a good girl, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything quite as right as her warm body against my cold one. I tell her what Jim said, the illusion crap, and she laughs and rests her chin on my chest and gazes up at me with a look I’ve done nothing to earn, a look so full of love that it shames me, because I don’t even know what color her eyes are. Just as I’m squinting to find out, a flash of lightning erases everything. She holds on tight in anticipation of the thunder, and when it comes, it forces a tiny sob out of her.

“It’s not fair that God hates us so much when we don’t even believe in him,” she says.

“You know what,” I reply. “I think it’s time we end this,” and she cries even harder.

At eleven p.m., I take my last break. With only ten dollars to see me through the week, I skipped dinner, but now I splurge on a Snickers and a Coke to keep me awake until closing. The one checker still on duty grudgingly leaves his textbook and calculator to ring me up. There are no customers in the store at this hour, and I imagine them hunkered down for the night behind triple dead bolts and steel doors. They pay a price for that kind of security, sometimes burning to death because they can’t get out of their houses fast enough when fires start in the rotten wiring.

Cases of dog food and creamed corn and paper towels are stacked to the ceiling in the cavernous back room of the market. I’ve been in museums that have the same musty, dusty smell, and churches. Rain ticks against the roof as I arrange a few boxes into a kind of couch and stretch out on them. The wind keens in the rafters, and the candy hurts my teeth. I try to think a thought I’ve never thought before, a daily challenge designed to keep my brain from softening. Nothing comes.

The box boy who enters a few minutes later doesn’t see me lying in the shadows. He swipes an apple from a crate near the freezer and bites into it. I rise from my bier like Dracula and bark, “Hey!” making him jump and sag against the wall. Then I take an apple for myself.

“That wasn’t cool, homes,” the kid says, his hand pressed to his fluttering heart. “That was fucked-up.” He’s a little Mexican guy whose short hair grows in a swirl that resembles one of those crop circles in England that everyone thought were made by UFOs until they turned out to be a hoax. I apologize for scaring him, and he says, “You didn’t scare me, you just caught me off guard.”

I take out my Swiss Army knife and help him break down some of the empty cartons piled up in back, in preparation for feeding them to the trash compactor. It’s not one of my jobs, but the kid’s funny and has a sweet way with a story. He shows me pictures of a trip his family took to Yosemite.

When he claims he can throw my knife more accurately than I can, I bet him that he can’t, even though I’ve never thrown my knife before. There’s a calendar with a picture of Jesus on it hanging on the wall, but the kid frowns at my suggestion that we use that as our target. He finds a Magic Marker and draws three concentric circles on a box of toilet paper instead, filling in the smallest, the bull’s-eye. We agree on five throws apiece. A broom handle serves as the foul line. I go first, and the knife bounces off the wall two feet from the target and clatters to the concrete floor.

The kid laughs and laughs and then all of a sudden he’s not laughing anymore. He goggles at something in the doorway behind me. The devil looms there, a red ski mask pulled down over his face, the snout of his sawed-off shotgun sucking all the air out of the room. I should apologize to the kid, as I’m definitely to blame for conjuring up this horror, having seen him before in countless nightmares and casual morbid thoughts — the Raiders jacket, the ratty Jordans — but before I can, the devil says, “You best move your fucking asses.”