Pym had been holding something hidden behind him. Now he whipped the hand from behind his back to reveal a snowy white top hat, which he plopped atop his Dennis the Menace cowlick. He patted the top of the hat, which sat at a jaunty angle above his broad face. It struck Malcolm that if he lived another 50 years, he would never see a more ridiculous sight.
But Pym was pleased. “Going out in style,” he told Malcolm. “That Dwayne believes in doing things with style.” He looked down at his watch then and sudden concern creased his smile. “You know, he should have been back by now. Hope he hasn’t run into trouble.”
“What about me?” Malcolm heard himself ask. His throat felt dry. The words croaked out of him.
The great head came up. “Say what?”
Malcolm swallowed. “I said, what about me? What’s my part in this crazy scheme of yours?”
“You?” Pym grinned. “You’ll be with us in the park.”
“I’ll be in the van?”
Pym shook his head. “You’ll be on the van,” he corrected.
Malcolm was not sure he had heard. “On it?”
Pym bobbed his head. His grin was boyish. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Chained right on the front, like a hood ornament.”
Something swept over Malcolm at that, a sense that he was not here and this was not real. Could not be real. The room seemed to tumble about him. He felt a nausea so strong he thought he might vomit.
Pym didn’t notice. He checked his watch again, muttering to himself. “I wonder where the hell Dwayne is.”
Dwayne was running pell-mell, south on Michigan Avenue, trying to put as much distance between himself and that woman as he could. He finally stopped four blocks later, on the bridge crossing the river. Only then did he realize people were staring.
“Take a picture,” he told some old lady. “It’ll last longer.”
She put her nose in the air and turned away from him like something dirty. He hardly noticed, too busy looking over his shoulder to make sure that woman wasn’t coming. He hoped he had gotten away from the crazy bitch—he was pretty sure he had—but even if he hadn’t, he could not go another step. A thick, ropy ache had settled itself into his legs and made them useless. He doubled over now, hands gripping his knees, a line of spittle dripping from his mouth, cursing her over and over again in his mind.
Stupid, crazy-ass bitch!
Dwayne’s jaw still ached from where she had socked him with that bony little fist. How in the hell was she able to get up and slug him like that after he had knocked her down? Man, was he out of shape. Look at him, chest heaving, legs quivering like a Jell-O factory in an earthquake, and all he had done was run four blocks. Four fucking blocks! And the worst part was, he was running from some stupid cunt who by rights should still be lying on a parking garage floor wondering what hit her. Instead, she had gotten to her feet and chased him. Him. And he had panicked and run like some little girl and even left his grandfather’s Luger behind.
Damn. He loved that gun.
Dwayne thought briefly of going back to get it; it would have his fingerprints on it, after all, and probably some DNA, too, and the cops could use it to do some CSI shit and identify him. Besides that, it was worth a whole lot of money, an heirloom like that. But going back would be crazy. That garage would soon be lousy with cops. And even if they figured out who he was, there was probably no way they could find him in time. Besides, he could hardly walk. In fact, he thought he might be sick. He lowered his head until it almost touched his knees, nausea bubbling like some witch’s cauldron in his gut.
Forgetting for a moment that he did not expect to be alive after tonight, Dwayne Ray McLarty made himself a solemn promise. He was going to get his ass to a gym. He was going to get back in shape.
“You okay there, bud?”
Dwayne glanced up. Some citizen was standing over him, some clean cut, clear-eyed guy had laid a consoling hand on Dwayne’s back and was gazing down with concern. Dwayne snarled at him. “Fuck…” it took a moment to gather sufficient breath “…off.”
The guy’s eyes sharpened. “Well,” he said, “you just looked sick is all.”
He waited—for an apology, Dwayne supposed. When he saw that none was forthcoming, his nose went up and his back went stiff. And he went storming away.
Fucking priss, thought Dwayne. Too bad he had lost his grandfather’s Luger. He’d love to shoot that guy right in his tight ass.
After a moment, the nausea passed and Dwayne was able to unbend. He clung to the railing. A tour boat was passing below—one of the last of the season before the cold would clamp down on this city and nobody with any sense would want to be outside, much less near the water. The deck was crowded with asshole tourists who had paid almost $30 apiece to look at buildings they could see for free and listen to some asshole tour guide’s corny spiel. The tourists were bristling with cameras—cellphones, point and clicks, Canons and Nikons with foot-long lenses.
In fact, he realized, some orange-haired woman was pointing one of those long lenses right at him. Dwayne gave her the finger, bobbing his hand for emphasis. She lowered the camera, looking shocked. Then she gave him the finger in return. But that wasn’t enough. She tapped the man next to her and pointed. The man—black hair, thick black moustache and built solid as a load-bearing column—scowled up at him. So Dwayne gave him the finger—and grinned.
Fuck him. Fuck everybody. Dwayne was in a mood.
He tried to think what he should do, now that he had the disc. He didn’t want to just return to the warehouse without accomplishing his mission. Obviously, there was no way he could walk it back down to the jewspaper. But what about that editor guy? Even if he no longer worked there, he could probably still get into the building, couldn’t he? And he probably knew who to take the disc to. All he needed was the right incentive.
That was the smart move, then. Dwayne would go back to the editor guy’s house. Sitting across the street in the stolen pickup, eyes and ears straining, Dwayne had heard him yell to the crazy bitch that he would be back by two. So Dwayne would meet him there and somehow get him to take the disc to the jewspaper.
But that meant Dwayne would need a new gun, in order to convince the editor guy to do what Dwayne wanted him to. Luckily, he knew exactly where to find one.
His course settled, Dwayne’s mood improved. He stood straight. His legs felt almost like legs again, his lungs no longer flamed. This clusterfuck could be fixed. He was convinced of that. Secure in that conviction, he headed north, back in the direction he had come.
Ten minutes later he reached the stolen truck, which was illegally parked on a side street right across from the newspaper. Dwayne snatched the parking ticket from beneath the wiper blade, crumpled it in his fist and threw it on the floor between the two front seats. He climbed in, started the engine, and took off. He was headed home.
He hated going home.
Dwayne’s mother, the former Edith Hinkley, still lived in the house where he’d grown up, a brick bungalow where the front yard was largely dirt and there was an oil stain on the street from a car she had once owned. He went there as little as possible. In fact, he hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen her, in almost three months, having spent most of that time crashing with Clarence, living off Clarence’s disability check, as they laid their plans for today.
It wasn’t like he didn’t love her. He did. She just made him crazy, is all. Still, she was his mother.
So it was with a sigh of resignation that Dwayne pulled up to the house, parking over the oil spot. He checked his hair in the mirror and was dismayed to see a little purple bruise blooming near his mouth where the crazy bitch had clocked him. It made him shake his head. How could such a small woman hit so hard? Maybe she took some kind of karate class or something. Maybe she was even a black belt.
Dwayne liked that thought. He decided to believe it. It made him feel less like a wuss.
He fished his keys from his pocket as he climbed out of the truck, unlocked the acco
rdion security gate that guarded his mother’s door, then unlocked the door itself. Some little kid pedaling a Big Wheel paused on the sidewalk to watch. “What are you lookin’ at?” demanded Dwayne over his shoulder. Then he saw the girl’s mother, walking about six feet behind her, staring at him angrily. Dwayne darted inside. He’d had enough of crazy bitches for one day.
Daryl was sitting on the couch watching ESPN and spooning Fudgy O’s—a cheaper, store-brand knockoff of Cocoa Puffs—into his face. He’d been sitting in the same spot doing the same thing the last time Dwayne had seen him. Now Daryl glanced up. “Well, well,” he said. “Nice of you to drop by.”
“Fuck you,” said Dwayne.
Daryl and Dwayne were fraternal twins. As far as Dwayne was concerned, this meant they were twins who hated each other.
You always saw this stuff on TV about how real twins shared everything, how they looked alike and talked alike and confided in each other and finished each other’s sentences. But Daryl could not have been less like Dwayne. Fat and already balding at 27, dumb as a bag of hammers, he worked some loser job at a gas station at $11 an hour, 35 hours a week. They had an older brother, Earl. He was doing time in Stateville for armed robbery. They also had a younger sister, Karen. She had gone off to college in Rhode Island and never returned, though they got cards from her every year at Christmas and on Ma’s birthday. A large portrait of Karen, blonde, pretty, and resplendent in her blue cap and gown, dominated the room from the wall above the mantel. Dwayne walked beneath it on his way to the kitchen.
“Denise has been by here a couple times,” called Daryl. “Says you promised to have some money for her.”
Denise was the mother of Dwayne’s two kids and a first-class cunt. “Fuck her,” said Dwayne, pulling a beer out of the refrigerator.
Daryl’s chuckle was full of scorn. “You already did, you dumb bastard. That’s why she’s after you.”
The amusement left Daryl’s face when Dwayne came back into the room, holding a bottle of beer. “Hey,” he said, “you don’t put nothin’ in the fridge, you don’t take nothin’ out of it.”
Dwayne took a long, deliberate pull off the beer. “Fuck you,” he said again.
His brother shook his head. “You already said that. You have a very limited vocabulary, you know that?”
Dwayne nodded toward the back of the house. “She in there?”
“Where else she going to be?”
“How she doing?”
This brought a shrug. “Same, I guess. Doctor says it won’t be long now.”
“What the hell do they know?”
“They know,” said Daryl. “You would, too, if you were ever around. You should stay in closer touch. She asks about you.”
Dwayne shifted his weight, tried to think of what to say, and came up with nothing. He took another pull off the beer instead.
Apparently done with the conversation, Dwayne’s brother used the remote to raise the volume on the sports network, then spooned another helping of chocolate cereal into his mouth.
Thus dismissed, Dwayne nevertheless lingered a moment more, making a pretense of watching an interview with some hockey star. But he knew he couldn’t put this off forever. Finally he drained the beer, set the bottle down hard on the counter that separated kitchen from living room, and went to see his mother.
The hallway was dark, but Dwayne still paused before a grouping of school pictures of him and his brothers hanging on the wall across from the bathroom. The symbolism, Dwayne had always felt, was explicit. The mantel was for Karen and her college picture. He and his brothers resided here in the shadows across from the toilet. Ma had never been particularly subtle.
For a moment, Dwayne stood face to face with his second-grade self, smiling a crooked, goofy smile that was missing three teeth. Like Daryl and Earl, he had failed to finish high school, so there were no graduation pictures. There never would be.
There were four doors in the hallway. Dwayne passed his own room without looking inside. Karen’s was locked, but he knew without opening it that it was still maintained exactly as she had left it. No one was permitted to open that door except Ma, who went in sometimes to clean it or just to sit. His mother wanted the room to be there for her just as Karen remembered it in the event, increasingly unlikely though it was, that she ever decided to return home. Facing Karen’s room was Daryl’s room. Dwayne poked his head in. The walls were bare; the only furniture was a particleboard dresser, the pieces of which were slowly surrendering to gravity. Daryl slept on a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A copy of Hustler lay on the floor next to this makeshift bed, open to a picture of some dull-eyed babe fingering herself.
Dwayne withdrew his head, vaguely amused. Daryl always acted so superior, but look at this.
There was one door left at the very end of the hall. Dwayne took a moment to steel himself. He knocked on his mother’s door, then pushed it slowly open and poked his head through. “Ma, it’s me. It’s Dwayne.”
Edith Hinkley McLarty was sitting up in a tangle of sheets and blankets, with plastic tubing running from her nostrils to an ever-present tank of oxygen that rested on a little rolling handcart by the side of the bed. She’d been watching television, but she lifted her remote and brought the volume down at the sight of her son.
“Well,” she said, “isn’t this a pleasant surprise. The prodigal returns.” She didn’t smile.
“Hey, Ma.” Dwayne crossed the room and gave her a hug. His mother had once been a robust woman. Now he feared to hold her too tightly. You could feel her bones moving beneath her thin nightshirt.
“Where have you been?” she asked as he drew back. “We were worried about you.”
“Had stuff to do, Ma. That’s all. You know I would have been here if I could.” He knew she knew he was lying. But the way he figured, caring enough to lie about wanting to be there was almost as good as actually wanting to be there.
She said, “You got a cigarette, honey?”
“Ma, you know the doctors say you can’t be smoking.”
She made a derisive sound, turned her head. “Doctors,” she said.
“If you want to get better, you need to listen to them,” he told her.
She cut him with a grin. “Get better? Is that what you’re expecting? Oh, you poor child.”
“I’m just saying, Ma. You should never give up hope.”
The grin took another slice. “You always were a little slow on the uptake, honey.”
“Ma, come on. Don’t be like that.”
“Don’t be like what? I’m dying, Dwayne. You’d have to be pretty damn dumb not to have figured that out.”
“I’m not dumb. But miracles happen everyday, Ma.”
His mother looked at him. “Miracles,” she said. She pronounced the word the same dull way she’d said “doctors.”
Dwayne shifted his weight. He wanted so badly to be out of there.
“Dwayne, you need to face reality. And reality is, shape I’m in, one cigarette is not going to make a whole lot of difference.”
“Well, you still shouldn’t be smoking. It’s dangerous around the oxygen tank.”
This time she laughed. “You’re worse than that other one,” she said, meaning Daryl. “He always says the same thing.”
“Well we’re just trying to look out for you, Ma.”
“Yeah. You and your brothers, you been real good at that.”
Dwayne was desperate to change the subject. “So, how you been, Ma?” He hated the words even as they came out of his mouth. What a stupid fucking question. How you been? Emphysema. That was how she had been.
Dwayne braced for her comeback. But she did him the favor of ignoring his question. “I got a call from Karen this morning,” she said. “She’s doing real good at work, just got a big raise. Says she thinks she’s going to go ahead and get her master’s degree. Of course, that’ll keep her away from home a while longer, but it’s probably worth it, don’t you think?”
He wa
nted to scream at her.
She’s not coming home, you stupid cow! Don’t you get it? First chance she got, she ran as far away from you as she could without swimming. Didn’t that give you a clue? She hates her whole fucking loser family and I can’t say I blame her!
“Yeah,” said Dwayne, and the words tasted like ashes on his tongue, “I think that’s good for her. Get all the education she can.”
“And then she’ll come home, don’t you think?”
Dwayne hated the hope he saw in her eyes, the way her voice lifted on the last words, reaching for assurance. He knew she had never in her life had that tone in her voice while asking about him. He swallowed. “What you watchin’?” he asked.
She sucked her teeth. “News,” she said. “They keep interrupting my stories to talk about that damned election.”
On the screen, Barack Obama, in shirtsleeves, was walking in a phalanx of Secret Service men, waving to a crowd that lavished him with cheers. His mother regarded the image for a moment, then said, “Looks like they’re going to elect this guy.”
“Yeah,” said Dwayne, “looks like.” He was relieved to see the conversation move to safer territory.
“Almost makes me glad I won’t be here to see,” said Ma. “He’s going to mess this country up real bad.”
“Ah, don’t give up hope, Ma. For all you know, he won’t ever become president.”
“They say all the polls have him way ahead.”
“Yeah,” said Dwayne, and he felt something secret, delicious, and electric tingle through him, “but you never know what could happen.”
She was still watching the screen. “Well, we better hope something does happen. Otherwise, this whole country is screwed.”
After a moment, she turned back toward her son. “So where’s the Incredible Hulk?” she asked.
This was her name for Clarence. How many times had he asked her to stop calling him that? “Ma, come on. He’s got a name. He’s got feelings, too.”
“That elephant hide of his, I’d be surprised he could feel anything this side of a tranquilizer dart.”
“Ma, stop it. You’re being mean. I’ve told you before: he’s got a condition.”
Grant Park Page 18
