Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

The same afternoon, he gets back to Cheri's place. She's recovering from her shift, wrapped in silk sheets, snoring like a twin cam engine. Ponyboy hooked up the Chink's videotape machine to hers. Cheri's VCR was programmed to tape the morning show with the rich white bitch who made quilts so your home looked all homey. It was also programmed for the one with that black whore who got all meaningful and sensitive-looking while she explained why every trouble in a relationship was the man's fault. Well, Cheri'd have to live without her shows for a day. She was a big girl; she'd be fine.

Cheri's living room carpet was plush and white, so snowlike in appearance that Ponyboy fought the urge to whip out his dick and write his name on it. He disengaged his ammo belt of interlocked backpacks, unlinking their straps from across his chest. The packs landed with a thud and dust went everywhere and Ponyboy dumped out the contents of the nearest sack. A whole stash of them different-colored videotapes from Jabba's office fell out and now Ponyboy dumped another bag, this one full of generic black videotapes. Walking around in a circle, Ponyboy checked to make sure Cheri's bedroom door was shut, then he cranked speed metal on her stereo and swallowed fistfuls of cheese crackers. Pony-boy plopped down with his back against the bottom of the couch Cheri had dragged his ass to the furniture store to see. He banged his head to the beat and hit play on one VCR. He found the remote control for the second machine, then depressed > and rec simultaneously. Ponyboy stretched and took a long breath.

Instinctively his weaker hand reached for the opposite tricep, and a tattoo — his fingers running along smooth warm stretches, raised indentations, ink over flesh over bone. From the point of his elbow to the bottom of his armpit — a tattoo of a long, opened zipper. Four hours of detail work had been devoted to making it look like the teeth of the zipper were open, as if exposing the flesh of Ponyboy's body, revealing the thick scar from where Jabba had cut him.

After Jabba had sliced Ponyboy, he'd let Ponyboy use the phone. Cheri was supposed to be back on the stage in five minutes, but when she'd gotten that call, she'd driven like the proverbial bat out of hell. Ponyboy told her no hospitals, he did not want those fuckers to kill him like they'd killed his brother. Cheri had not known what to do, right in front of her eyes, her boyfriend was bleeding like a stuck pig. But her disconnect gimmick must have kicked in, because later she told Ponyboy that she'd seen herself watching him bleed. She'd watched herself help Ponyboy into a seat belt, and then seen herself get into her Jeep and floor the gas, eighty miles an hour back to the apartment. Ponyboy had been mumbling words that Cheri could not understand, and she'd propped his weakened and bloodied body up on her toilet and spoken patiently to him, like she was guiding a first-timer through the patter of a lap dance: Just reach up, okay baby? For the shower rod, okay?

Her hands had been shaking and she had fumbled through the medicine cabinet and found the blue painkillers she used whenever her muscles hurt from squatting over the clothed dicks of men she didn't give a fuck about. Putting the little blue doodads in her boyfriend's mouth, she'd tilted his head back and told him swallow, swallow, and when he'd finally swallowed, she'd run and gotten the sewing kit she always meant to use for making quilts like on the WASP woman's show. Then she'd folded up one of the bathroom towels and put it in between her boyfriend's teeth and told him to bite down.

Like Cheri was in a movie about Mother Teresa, she had saved him, sewing his body back together, bearing his flinches and convulsions, laying him down in her marble tub and running warm water over him and scrubbing. Later, she told Ponyboy that in this scene of the movie of her life, there was a part where the camera pulled up and back, into a wide shot, and from the corners of the screen darkness began creeping in, until the lighting around the two of them was like this fuzzy little cave, and the image of the movie star Cheri bathing her battered Ponyboy was like this small and almost holy moment.

Yes sir ree bob, his girlfriend had sewed him up and spoon-fed him and pampered him. She'd put on her Horny Stripper Nurse costume and checked his fever and, oopsie, flashed him all the way up the length of her leg, to a high-cut panty. On an individual and regular basis Cheri had made Ponyboy feel like his health and welfare actually mattered — made him feel like he was worth something. Cheri Blossom was a lifesaver, a fucking miracle, this angel from the goddamn sky. Ponyboy knew it was true in that moment of crisis and he knew it was true now, in this moment of decision. He ran a callused palm over the raised stitch indentations of his scar, felt the hot pinching sensation of electric needle drilling into the skin of his mind.

All the cool shit that Cheri's fake tits had purchased weren't enough for her to forgive Ponyboy for talking her into getting them done, he knew this. But he was equally sure there was money to be shaken from the tree of pornography. Ponyboy would have rather died than lose Cheri and he would have rather killed himself than gone back to peddling his ass on street corners to a bunch of old pervs. The bass from the stereo system was making Cheri's porcelain clown figures vibrate on their mantel, and Ponyboy was staring into the seventy-eight-inch high-definition flat screen that Cheri had purchased right after her tits had paid for themselves. He was shoving another fist of baked cheese crackers into his mouth and now he was fiddling with a fourth of July sparkler. And a plan was slowly starting to form, its barest and most scant beginnings. Not for a second would Ponyboy consider the strain this plan would bring into his relationship with the woman he loved. He would not think about how wrong things can go between two people, or how desperate he soon would be to make things right. Ponyboy rose off the carpet and made sure the second videotape machine was recording. He watched the wide and wondrous screen.

5.4

During that first fall, in the fallout of the boy's disappearance, Lincoln Ewing remained clean-shaven. His collared shirts remained pressed. He asked no quarter from his superiors at the Kubla Khan; neither did he try to lock his suffering away from the people he worked with. Quieter in meetings, he became less of a textbook alpha male, though not to the extent where he retreated behind any kind of granitelike exterior, the way loss seems to harden so many men. Rather, Lincoln considered more options than he ever had, took more input, and delegated more, all without abdicating his responsibilities, or foisting his duties onto others. In this way he empowered members of his staff, placing them in situations where each could carry out those functions for which he/she was best suited. Consensus in the office held that Lincoln's newfound openness added to the poignancy, made the whole thing sadder. His department flourished and his staff quietly set up a fund to help find Newell and, in short order, other divisions at the Kubla Khan contributed to the fund. Lincoln would stop in the middle of a hallway and quietly thank a coworker for their concern and contributions. He'd return the hugs of secretaries, exchange kind and hopeful words with anyone who was kind enough to be hopeful. And then he would retreat to his office and tell his assistant he needed a minute.

Closing the flimsy door behind him, Lincoln would switch off the Nokia wireless he used for personal calls, and the BlackBerry that his office had him carry, and he'd sit and stare — gazing at the parking lot below him, or perhaps the rotating triangles on his screen saver. He played computer solitaire until the game's tracking meter could document a physical day of his life that had been wasted, at which point, disgusted with his inertia, Lincoln dragged the program into the trash. Although he did not care about his stocks, Lincoln fell into the habit of refreshing the webpage that tracked their progress so often that it became a nervous tic. He would return messages from his dad, compose loving and supportive e-mails to Lorraine, and receive updates from whichever private investigator he had on the case at that moment, all this while wrangling with law enforcement and missing-child agency staffers, politely handling their bureaucratic idiocies, smooth talking whoever he needed to approve his latest request, even as he secretly wished he could ram a cluster bomb up all of their asinine asses.