Dangerous Games

by John Shannon

  “Oxycontin, you dummy. Give me something for the pain, now. Oh, Jesus.”

  “I take it you’d prefer to remain conscious and waving the gun at me.”

  “Yes, yes. Gimme something local.”

  With maddening deliberation, the doctor sent his nurse for a syringe and swabbed the mangled tip of the boy’s penis with alcohol.

  “Owww!”

  “I could rebuild it a little bigger if you’d like, but it seems quite large already.”

  Keith put both fists on the pistol and poked it at the doctor’s midsection. “I swear to God, one more dumb joke about my dick, and I’ll put yours in the same place.”

  “Patience, my friend,” the doctor said in a firmer voice. “I mainly treat cooze in here, but I’m making an exception for your rough manners out of the goodness of my heart, and the anticipation of a lot of money. Your mistreated member will be blissfully beyond pain in less than a minute. And then we can see about making it just like new.”

  “Hurry the fuck up!”

  “What says the gentleman?” Kenyon Styles asked.

  The squat brown man in a denim jumper was a Filipino and had very little English, and he did mainly tire changes or brake linings and other simple repairs for the ramshackle garage in Silverlake. The Chicano owner undertook to translate.

  “He say you tell him when you want him to start.”

  “Could we get him to sample it right out of an axle to start?”

  “No problemas.”

  The Chicano owner had been given a finder’s fee that was even more than the Filipino was getting, but the Filipino didn’t know that. Rod Whipple was feeling grumpy. He’d been fired from a porn shoot and then had an exhausting eighteen-hour industrial shoot the day before and he’d rather be alone right now to unwind, despite an abiding general loneliness. He caught sight of himself in a small cracked mirror under a leggy pinup. The unexamined life, he thought. And then abruptly examined. He was none too proud of what he saw, but turned his attention back to the old Buick going up on the lift.

  He had already collected the release, and he had it folded and stuffed into his breast pocket. As the mechanics worked to pull a wheel, he took the paper out and glanced at the name the man had signed and painstakingly printed out on the release: Diosdado Macpagal. He’d expected Jesus or Miguel or something. Diosdado, for Chrissake. Must be God’s something or other, he thought. But what god would care about this dumpy old brown man?

  “Heads up, Rod.”

  “I’m ready, man.”

  “Then roll tape.”

  I will endure, he thought. Better than this fucked-up guy will. Diosdado Macpagal reached into the opened wheel hub and scooped out two finger’s worth of brown axle-grease, wicking up a fine tail like melted cheese. He licked his fingers once and then sucked the whole gooey dark mass of axle-grease off his fingers like peanut butter. Rod’s stomach gave an involuntary spasm of disgust. He’d had several sugary doughnuts on the set and a lousy midnight meal of Chinese, and it had all backed up inside him, waiting for something healthier.

  He moved slowly sideward to get a better angle as the little man scooped out another gob of the grease and nibbled it coquettishly off his fingers, then broke into a big grin for the camera.

  The Chicano owner held out a big opened can of fresh grease with a tablespoon in it, and the Filipino began to eat ravenously right out of the tin. “He like it,” the Latino said for the camera mike. “I gotta order extra grease all the time. He make sandwiches.”

  “Wash it down,” Kenyon Styles’ voice called out as the man kept spooning out the viscous substance, the texture but definitely not the color of melted butterscotch, taking it into his mouth and chewing ostentatiously with his mouth open.

  The Chicano handed him a yellow plastic bottle of 30-weight Pennzoil, and he screwed off the cap and upended it into his mouth like a cold bottle of beer. When he brought it down again, a trickle of gray oil ran down from the corner of his mouth. He wiped his mouth off with his sleeve and grinned broadly. “Mmmmm, que bueno, hombres.”

  By the skin of her teeth, Luisa had escaped being shoved into the trunk of the Cadillac CTS. She gave them a solemn promise to make no trouble, and now she sat primly in the soft black leather back seat. It was like riding inside an expensive glove. The car wound effortlessly up into the tan hills overlooking the coast. The ocean below was stunning, stretching off toward a few container ships on the horizon. The way the colors interwove, it was a pinto surface of green and deep blue, dotted with the bright sails of yachts that were heeling over on the breeze. She had quickly grown to love the changing look of the ocean and wondered if anyone ever got tired of looking at it.

  Getting tired of things was a funny idea, she thought. She wondered if men ever got tired of trying to hammer away at every woman they met to make sure they got their share. So many of them approached the whole thing in a permanent state of rage. If they’d just calm down a little, everybody could try to have some fun.

  The bald one called Levine was driving the Caddy, and the Jamaican was bent forward doing something with the big revolver in his lap.

  “You’re a cute kid. How’d you end up with a douchebag like Keith?” Levine submitted.

  “I ran off from home and I did the best I could. People keep telling you how pretty and nice you are and they’re going to take care of you, and just when things seem to be maybe okay, some guy with a mean streak grab’s you by the hair.”

  She stopped and thought about what she’d just said and wondered if it would piss them off. She admitted to herself that she bore some responsibility for her plight, too. She’d done a little hopeful fibbing to the diary, but it wasn’t like she’d been so attracted to any of these guys of the last week, except maybe Rod, and he was pretty pathetic really. The only thing she could say for sure was they seemed to get bigger and stronger all the time.

  “I believe that’s a pelican,” she said, a little surprised. It was unmistakable, with the big pouchy bill, gliding along parallel to the car as if checking them out, and then peeling away back toward the ocean. She’d never seen a pelican, though seagulls made it as far inland as the Owens Valley all the time.

  The Jamaican had looked up. “Him be pemmican, for sure—just a scuffle for he bread in the water. You overstan de beast of nature?”

  “I’m an Indian. I know stuff.”

  “Look hyere, dawta, you mean you Red Indian?”

  “Well, I ain’t no spot-on-the-forehead Indian. I’m a Paiute.”

  “I-and-I penatrayit. Dat somefing fine. Your mind born free.”

  The car came off pavement and jounced along on a well-graded dirt road in the hills.

  “Where are you taking me?” A chill of fear had overcome her.

  The Jamaican looked over at the driver, as if for permission to let her into the secret.

  “We’ve got a crib up here,” the driver said. “You be a good girl, and we’ll all get along. Are you really Keith’s old lady?”

  “I don’t belong to nobody, and not especially that creepoid. He just started to think he owned me. He made me work as a model and then a hostess. I didn’t like it.”

  “You mean he turned you out?” the driver said.

  “I don’t know what that means.” The Jamaican was looking over his shoulder, watching her, and he grinned with some private joke as the driver spoke.

  “It means he made you fuck guys,” the driver said.

  “I guess. It started out one way and kept changing and then I was stuck with this Japanese guy doing stuff I didn’t like at all. I came to the city to be in movies. Little Deer sent me to some guy, and he seemed okay. Maybe I met the wrong people after that.”

  “Maybe you’ve met the right people, now—that is, if you want to get over,” the driver said. “I remember Little Deer.”

  “Oh, man, I seen that Likkle Deer, too. She got the shining of Ras in her ownself.”

  Luisa thought of the poor dying woman she had met and didn�
�t think it would help matters to tell them about her. “Sometimes I think I ought to just go waitress at Denny’s.”

  “Gwaan, girl, dat just an ordinary ting, and you start dat and you be stuck dere for you life. You wan some herb?”

  The fact that he pronounced the H confused her at first, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what he meant when he held out the fattest cone-shaped hand-rolled number she’d ever seen, like a small trumpet.

  “Good God, is that all weed?”

  “You ain’ never seen a proper spliff?”

  “Even Grandpa Russell would choke himself on this.”

  He had it going already, smoking like a steam engine, and she took a big hit, and tried to hold it in and not to cough. It was raw and harsh, not smooth like the weed that Russell grew up in the Sierra canyons, but she felt the buzz right away. She handed it back.

  “You wicked, girl.” He grinned and took another long, slow hit.

  The car drew up to the most beautiful house Luisa Wilson had ever seen, all glass sides and flat roof and patio. There was another house, a little like it, a hundred yards farther on, and a few others scattered on lower roads, but this one seemed to be on the very top crest of the weedy hills. The driveway slumped down into a sunken three-car garage where the door came open automatically to show the rear of a big wide SUV, like something the army would use.

  She finally let the smoke out, a slow blue hiss. “You fellows sure got you a house.”

  “Dawta, we don settle for no lowdown ’commodation.”

  “Make yourself comfortable, my dear,” Levine said. He even opened the car door for her, and she felt like a princess, all of a sudden. “No one is going to harm you here, I promise. But this is our house, and we’ve got two rules for you to remember. No crying is allowed here—all crying is blackmail. And, number two, if you got a problem, you come and ask us about it only if you want to get it fixed. It’s what we do. You just want to whine, that’s what your girlfriends are for.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “I bet you leave the toilet seats up, too.”

  “You want ‘em down, get your own house.”

  Gloria was already frowning at him as he peered in the French window. The room was well lit, and the boy stood facing the far wall, his left hand rooting in a big bowl of what looked like chicharones on a barstool. With his right, he was using a spraycan to add dimension to a swelling bulbous graffito the size of a bicycle that seemed to be spelling out nothing more adventurous than THUMB.

  Jack Liffey watched patiently for a while. The boy had excellent control of the spray pattern. He wouldn’t have thought you could get that subtle a shading with an ordinary spray can.

  “Jack, this is making me uncomfortable.”

  They were, of course, plainly visible to anyone who might come along the alley or peer out the kitchen window of the house. She stood a few feet back from the window, her badge on a chain around her neck just in case. She had insisted he leave his pistol at home, but she had hers clipped inside the back of her skirt.

  “That’s a new one,” he said. “An uncomfortable cop. You’ve got the neon sign that gives you the right to do absolutely anything you want to in this town.”

  “I know some cops treat the badge like that, but it’s not my way.”

  “Okay, vamanos,” he said and rapped on the window twice before pulling it open. He’d already told her this was the only way in.

  Thumb Estrada looked around and made a disgusted face when he saw Jack Liffey stepping over the sill.

  “Missed you at the lawn mowing today,” Jack Liffey announced. “I thought we had a deal.” He glanced back to see Gloria standing at the window like a sheep standing patiently at a field gate. “Thumb Estrada, this is my friend Sgt. Ramirez of the LAPD.”

  “No te doy color,” the boy snapped.

  “Sorry, I didn’t get that,” Jack Liffey said. “Something about giving you color?”

  A lot of emotions were passing over the young man’s face, some angry and some just confused.

  “He says, basically, that you don’t exist,” Gloria explained.

  “Ah. That may well be, Thumb, in your world, but I’m lifesize in mine. We had an agreement. In case you’ve forgot, if you don’t mow my lawn, I turn you in. That’s pretty simple, really. It’s straight as I can make it. We are not sorry for our sins if we are not willing to make amends. I don’t think Sgt. Ramirez here agrees with this deal I made with you, but I think she’ll let me honor it if we get started pretty quick. The mower’s all sharpened up and ready.”

  “Fock you, man.”

  “I forgot. I also promised to teach you how to write an essay. Nice mural, by the way.”

  The boy looked back at his name on the wall, as if longing to add a few touches. He shook the spray can absently, and the ball inside rattled. For some reason, Jack Liffey felt a heavy pressure against his chest, as if a belt were tightening around him. He’d had a collapsed lung not long ago, and he was sensitive to feelings in his chest.

  “The wall’s not going anywhere.”

  “Caifás con me lana,” Gloria said sharply.

  The young man answered in sullen Spanish, and they talked for a while. As near as Jack Liffey could tell, she was seething with suppressed anger, but probably as much of it was directed at him as at the boy. That was where it came from, he realized, this sensation in his chest. The pressure of her anger was like a standing shock wave.

  “Okay, I go with you.” Thumb’s face was rigid as a steel mask.

  “Why don’t you skip trying to be an outlaw for a while? It takes so much extra energy. I’m offering to be a friend.”

  Jack Liffey held out his hand, but the boy only glared at it as he stalked past him.

  “Well, maybe later,” Jack Liffey said brightly.

  Dear Diary,

  I dont know if this is all going from worse to better or what, strange things happen in this life. I was laid low by everything when these new guys show up & everything is different again. I seem to be starting to get over that boy Keith. My new friends make me laugh and that is what grandfather said always saved the Paiutes from bad times. Ha-ha. I laugh at Keith holding his thing & owwing after Trevor circumscribe him. Way to go Trev or Terror as he is also AKA. I sens that my destiny is now with these two. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

  TWELVE

  The Ugly Contest

  It’s just too difficult to decide who someone is, he was thinking, what he’s really like, which one of all the contradictory parts is going to step front and center and which one is going to retreat. He could barely work out who he was himself, or Gloria, but there were worlds of bad faith standing between himself and this boy. Hang on tight, he told himself.

  He had decided it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to sit up on the porch like a strawboss while Thumb slaved away at the lawn so Jack Liffey got out the old edger to keep his hand in. He was hacking away along the walk and the driveway but only managed to gum up the dull blade with damp grass so that it was virtually useless.

  Thumb was doing a conscientious job, his shirt off to expose the tattoos on his brown torso, mostly blue and blurry and unreadable in Olde Englishe letters, the usual prison or juvie tats. He mowed an up-and-down pattern rather than the shrinking spiral box that Jack Liffey favored, and when he emptied the last bag of cuttings into the rose bed, Gloria brought them both lemonades and the boy, forearming sweat off his brow, took his gratefully.

  “¡Ay, que padre!” he exulted after a long swallow.

  Since his English was perfectly good, Jack Liffey figured Thumb was getting his own back by excluding him from the conversation.

  “Do you go to the JC?” Jack Liffey asked him.

  The boy just stared at him without speaking.

  “I saw the history book,” Jack Liffey said neutrally.

  “It’s for a GED, I told you,” he finally allowed. It was as if he’d forgot for a moment that he was supposed to be hostile, and then somet
hing hard came into his eyes again and he turned away. “Pendejo.”

  “There’s nobody else here so you won’t lose face if you’re polite. You ever smell rotting meat?” he asked out of the blue. He’d tried this ploy once with a particularly snotty girl, and it had worked like a charm.

  The boy’s face opened up a little, curious.

  “It’s that almost sweet repulsive smell that makes you want to throw up. I was near a dead body once in Nam. Imagine stepping on a cat that’s been in the gutter for weeks, that’s turned soft as jelly with maggots crawling through it.” He paused for effect. “Believe it or not, that’s what starts to happen to your insides when you disrespect yourself. Act like a cheap hoodlum, and your bones start turning into wet cardboard. Pretty soon you’ll smell, and not even your mother will want to be anywhere near you.”

  Jack Liffey went off on in this vein—crazily, he knew—for a little longer, inventing grosser and grosser details of rot, just to see if Thumb could be made to react. Eventually, the boy shook his head and waved a hand casually, as if flicking something repulsive off it. “You one spacy dude.”

  “Listen to me,” Jack Liffey demanded. “I do this for a living, dealing with kids who think they’re tough punks. I’ve seen a million just like you. You know what, there’s always a lonely lost kid inside, under all that bullshit, trying to look hard as nails but crapping himself when the cops show up to take him away. What you really want is respect from the world, just a little respect, It’s not much to ask, I know, but you don’t have a clue how to get it.”

  He saw the first flickerings of self-pity expose themselves as he looked evenly at Thumb. The cold reading was a cheap trick, really: every fortune cookie was true of everyone. All it took was enough force of personality to shift someone’s perceptions a few inches so that they acknowledged what you pointed out. He saw the boy’s eyes flick up to where Gloria had been—but she’d known enough to absent herself. This was a moment between men.

  “Why you being like this?” Thumb’s voice spiraled down into a drone. “I’m sorry I shot at you. I said I was.”

  “That’s a start. Look, I’m trying to work on my own anger. Why shouldn’t you try the same?”