Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

“How’s Liz?” he asks. “Good, I hope.”

“You know us. Slow and steady.”

“Are you still selling, what, restaurant stuff?”

“Why do you have to be that way, showing up late and everything?”

“Did she tell you to say that?”

I check to make sure Tracy and the kids are still in the store before continuing.

“She was raped, man, and you’re coming at her with lawyers? Have a little compassion. Act like a human being.”

“I said, did she tell you to talk to me?”

“I’m her brother. I took it upon myself.”

I meant to approach this a bit more obliquely. Three years ago, two, I’d have had him eating from my hand, but these days I feel like all the juice has been drained out of me. We stare at each other for a second, then look away at the same time.

“She was wasted,” he says. “Ask her. She was coming out of a bar. She barely remembers. Read the police report. There are doubts.”

My vision flickers and blurs. I feel like I’ve been poisoned. Kendra runs out of the store toward us, followed by Cassie. I push myself away from the car and search the ground for something — a stick, a rock. The pigeons make horrible fluttering noises in their throats.

“Hi, Daddy,” the girls sing. They climb into Tony’s car. Tracy watches from the store, half in and half out. I wish I was a gun. I wish I was a bullet. The girls wave bye-bye as Tony drives off.

“Can you believe that a-hole has a Volvo, and I’m driving this piece of shit?” Tracy says.

“He shouldn’t smoke in front of the kids,” I reply.

We pass an accident on the way back to her place, just a fender bender, but still my thoughts go to our parents. When they died I was almost to the point where I could see them as people. With a little more time I might even have started loving them again. What did they stand for? What secrets did they take with them? It was the first great loss of my life.

TRACY WANTS TO treat us to lunch in Tijuana. We’ll ride the trolley down and walk over the border to a steak house that was written up in the newspaper. That’s fine with me. Let’s keep moving. What Tony said about her is trying to take root, and I won’t have it. She’s my sister, see, and what she says goes. I don’t want to be one of those people who need to get to the bottom of things.

We drive to the station. The crowd that boards the trolley with us is made up primarily of tourists, but there are also a few Mexicans headed for Sunday visits. They carry shopping bags, and their children sit quietly beside them. Tracy and Liz find two seats together. I’m at the far end of the car, in the middle of a French family.

We skirt the harbor, rocking past gray destroyers big as buildings. Then the tracks turn inland, and it’s the back side of trailer parks and self-storage places. The faded pennants corralling a used car lot flap maniacally, and there’s always a McDonald’s lurking on the horizon. Liz and Tracy are talking to each other — something light, if their smiles are any indication. I wave, trying to get their attention, but it’s no use.

The young son in the French family decides to sing. He’s wearing a Disneyland T-shirt. The song is in French, but there are little fart sounds in it that make his sister laugh. His mom says something snippy to him, but he ignores her. Dad steps in, giving the kid a shot with his elbow that jolts him into silence. There’s a faded tattoo on Dad’s forearm. Whatever it is has teeth, that’s about all I can make out.

TO CROSS INTO Mexico, we walk over the freeway on a bridge and pass through a turnstile. I did this once before, in high school, me and a couple of buddies. If you were tall enough to see over the bar, you could get a drink. That was the joke. I remember a stripper in a gorilla suit. Tacos were a quarter. The only problem was that the cops were always shaking someone down. The system is rotten here. You have to watch where you’re going.

Tracy’s got things wired, though. Apparently she’s down here all the time. It’s fun, she says. She leads us to a taxi, and we head into town, passing ramshackle body shops and upholstery shops and something dead squished flat. Dirt roads scurry off into the hills, where entire neighborhoods are built out of old garage doors and corrugated tin. The smell of burning rubber sneaks in now and then and tickles the back of my throat.

Calle Revolución is still the main drag, a disco on every corner. It looks tired during the day, like Bourbon Street or downtown Vegas. Hungover, sad, and a little embarrassed. It’s a town that needs neon. We step out of the cab, and Tracy laughs with the driver as she pays him off. I didn’t know she spoke Spanish.

I want a drink. The place we go into is painted bright green. Coco Loco. They sell bumper stickers and T-shirts. We get a table on the second-floor terrace, overlooking the street. Music is blasting inside, and lights flash, but the dance floor is empty except for a hippie chick deep into her own thing. The waiter is all over us as soon as we sit down.

I order tequila and a beer; Tracy and Liz get margaritas. Some poor guy in a ridiculous sombrero cha-chas around with a bottle of mescal in one hand and a bottle of Sprite in the other. For a couple of bucks he pours a little of each into your mouth and shakes your head, all the while blowing on a whistle. The sound of it makes my stomach jump. I’m startled every time. When my tequila arrives, I drink it down and guzzle half the beer.

“You guys wait here,” Tracy says. “I have to run an errand.”

“In Tijuana?”

“Tylenol with codeine, for a friend who hurt her leg. They sell it in the pharmacies.”

“Wait a minute, Trace —”

“It’s cool. I’ll be right back.”

She’s gone before I can figure out how to stop her.

Everybody around us is a little shady. It hits me all of a sudden. Not quite criminal, but open to suggestion. A man wearing mirrored sunglasses and smoking a cigar gets up from his chair and leans over the railing to signal someone in the street. His partner is having his shoes shined by a kid with the crookedest teeth I’ve ever seen. The sombrero guy blows his whistle again, and a big black raven lights on the roof and cocks his head to stare down at us.

LIZ INSISTS THAT Tony is full of shit when I tell her what he said in the parking lot. I lean in close and speak quietly so no one else can hear. She says that men always cast aspersions on rape victims, even the cops. “You should know better,” she says.

“I didn’t mean anything like that.”

“I hope not.”

“She can do Whatever the fuck she wants. Get her head chopped off, Whatever.”

“That’s nice. That’s just lovely.”

It’s the alcohol. It makes me pissy sometimes. Liz doesn’t know the worst of it. Like the time I went out for a few with one of my bosses and ended up on top of him with my hands around his throat. He didn’t press charges, but he also wasn’t going to be signing any more checks for me. To Liz it was just another layoff. Quite a few of my messes have been of my own making. I’m man enough to admit it.

The bathroom is nasty, and there is nothing to dry my hands with. My anger at Tracy rises. She’s been gone almost an hour. “Hey,” I yell to a busboy from the bathroom door. “You need towels in here.” He brings me some napkins. I have to walk across the dance floor to get back to the terrace. A kid bumps me and gives me his whole life like a disease. I see it all from beginning to end. “Fly, fly, flyyyyy,” the music yowls. “Fly, fly, flyyyyyy.”

THEY STILL HAVE those donkeys painted like zebras down on the street, hitched to little wagons. I remember them from last time. You climb up on the seat, and they put a sombrero on your head that says KISS ME or CISCO and take a picture with some kind of ancient camera. Liz and I hug. We look like honeymooners in the photo, or cheaters.