Death Sucks

by Andrew Mallen

  “You were a fisherman?” Maria asked in surprise.

  I was a fisherman? I was a fisherman!

  Memories erupted in his head. Smiling faces and bending rods, roaring motors and screaming reels, cheering and shouting, salt and sun spray, it all rushed back, chasing the emptiness away.

  “Weekend warrior with my dad, he had an 18 footer. Holy shit, I remember! It was just a little center console but man did we slay’em. Stripers in the spring. Fluke and Porgies all summer. Then the big Blues, Choppers he called them, until Blackfish season opened in the October. I loved it, not as much as Dad, but close.”

  Dad…man I wish I could see him or talk to him. I messed that up, I can feel it somehow.

  “You okay?” Maria asked, the Reaper went from elated to brooding in the blink of an eye.

  Bobby shook his head, his deep hood exaggerating the gesture.

  Maria had a feeling she wasn’t going to like what he had to say but needed to hear it anyway, “Tell me.”

  He shook her off again.

  Maria wasn’t having it, “I told you my secret and it…it helped me. Maybe telling me will help you.”

  Bobby knew she wouldn’t stop until he gave it up. “I think I messed thinks up with my dad but I can’t remember how or why.”

  An image of incredible clarity surfaced from the depths of his fickle memory. Deeply wounded and infinitely sad, a man’s eyes searched studied his, searching for the cause of the anger and hate they harbored. Tears welled, perching momentarily on the lower lashes before falling. They were his father’s eyes, of that Bobby had no doubt. They closed and disappeared.

  Dad! Dad, what did I do?

  “Are you okay?”

  Stupid fucking question. Nothing will ever be okay!

  "My dad was a good guy, definitely a lot cooler than regular dads, that’s for damn sure. He loved me, I don’t remember it but I feel it, I know it. I wasn’t a good kid, I know that too but he loved me anyway. I hurt him, I really hurt him.” Bobby lowered his head, hiding in the hood he despised nearly as much as he despised himself. “I did something to him, something horrible.”

  “Fathers forgive. They understand. He was a son before he was a father,” Maria, wanting to reach out but forcing herself not to, offered.

  Bobby heard what she said, it made such simple sense but he couldn’t shake the guilt. “I hope you’re right. I loved him, I love him, you know, I just…I just…I don’t know. I remember, we were close, like friends, but then we weren’t. I think I just dropped him, like he didn’t matter to me anymore. I turned my back on him, why would I do that? Fuck, it’s so frustrating, I wish I could remember. All he did was love me, and I really hurt him, I can see it in his eyes. I’m such an asshole. And now this, now I’m dead and whatever I did to end up in here is just the icing on the cake. My parents, they must…they probably regret the day I was born.”

  I gotta find out what I did.

  “You cannot lose a parents love,” Maria scolded.

  “I should, I don’t deserve it.”

  “That’s not for you to decide. We might choose who to love but we cannot choose who loves us. If he’s as wonderful as you remember then I’m pretty sure he still loves you.”

  I hope you’re right.

  “Thanks,” Bobby replied, raising his eyes to meet hers. “Didn’t mean to get all deep on you.”

  “Deep’s okay, I can do deep. The deep stuff, the stuff buried way down in your guts, that’s the poison, that’s the stuff that you have to get rid of.”

  “Wow, you just got super-duper deep.” Bobby golf clapped.

  Maria curtsied. “Now come on Sherlock, let’s figure out who we’re babysitting for the next fifty years.”

  “Fifty?” Bobby cried in exaggerated surprise. “He keeps this lifestyle up and you’ll be home by Christmas.”

  Maria frowned.

  She doesn’t want to go back. Holy shit! She wants to stay here…with me!

  “Unless we help our mysterious friend here to help himself. You know, healthy life choices, career goals, spiritual fulfillment and all that.”

  “Bobby, don’t,” Maria said, wagging an angry finger. “You promised.”

  “No tricks, just options.”

  Maria glared.

  Even pissed she’s gorgeous. Dude you’re whipped and there’s not a kitty in sight!

  *.

  The weak buzz of a dying doorbell got Roger up and moving in a hurry. At the same window he used to bid farewell to Ron Akash, he leaned out to see who it was before tossing down a rabbit foot tethered key he kept on the sill for just such an occasion.

  “Felix, mi hermono!” Roger cried as a lean, pony-tailed teenager barged into the nasty living room.

  “Yo big man, where you been bro?” Felix checked out Roger with bright, intelligent eyes. “What’s with the eighties sweats bro? Shits are way too tight homie, I can see brain.”

  Roger looked down, he was still wearing Flushing General’s latest fashion. “Long story dude.”

  “Save it for me bro, I’m on ‘till closing but if you want to chill later text me up. Maybe we can rock out with C.O.D, I got some sick new load-outs you’re gonna wanna see.”

  Roger perked-up at the idea. “Sounds good. Just swing by after you get off, I ain’t going nowhere. I got the herb but grab some beers, I only got like three left.”

  Felix smile a dazzling smile, handed Roger the pizza box and waited. Roger stood like a statue, lost in the aroma drifting up from the cardboard coffin.

  “Yo?” Felix snapped. “Gotta bolt bro, pay the man.”

  “On yeah, my bad. I haven’t eaten real food in days. Gimme a second,” Roger said as he dropped the pizza on the bumpy coffee table and headed for his bedroom to get the kid his cash.

  Once Roger was out of sight a genuine sneer of disgust quickly overcame the fake smile and he breathed into his hands to escape the apartment’s stale atmosphere. “Yo, I almost forgot, Geno says what’s up?” Felix shouted after a few cleansing breaths. “He says he’s been trying to get in touch but your phone’s disconnected or some shit.”

  Roger trotted back from the bedroom with the money in his hand and fear in his eyes, “He pissed?”

  Felix plucked the cash from Roger’s unsteady fingers. “Nah, don’t think so. Just call him, I don’t want to hear him bitch’n all night,” the kid replied unconvincingly.

  “Yeah, sure…no problem.”

  But there was a problem, obvious to both the living and the dead, a big problem.

  “Alright….later.” Felix spun and made for the door.

  “11:30 right?” Roger asked with more than a pinch of desperation.

  “Yeah, I’ll text you if I get caught up or if I’m too wiped!” Felix yelled from the stairway.

  “Grab a Redbull if you’re tired,” Roger called after him.

  As he closed the door he remembered something and ran to the window as if his ass was on fire. “I don’t have a phone!” he yelled once he had it open.

  The screech of spinning car tires answered him and his face sunk.

  *

  “He looks scared,” Maria said as Roger paced, circling the coffee table and the untouched pizza while mumbling about something not being his fault.

  “Our boy is in some deep shit,” Bobby agreed.

  “Geno?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “The boat?”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “What should we do?” Maria asked, caught up in the suspense and the mystery of it all.

  “Do? We can’t do anything right?” Bobby reminded her.

  “Right, I know that. I just mean…you know…I mean what should we do now?”

  Sure you did.

  “Really?” Bobby’s eyebrows danced, the gesture lost beneath his hood.

  “Really!” Maria snapped.

  “Okay,” Bobby replied and smiled hoping to relax her. “We will just chill, kick back and wait. Looks like our baby-faced buddy here
has got some secrets. It could get interesting, like reality TV.”

  Bobby walked to the stain riddled armchair and carefully lowered himself onto the filthy cushion.

  Maria fidgeted. She’d already grown attached to Roger, even if he was a mess. She didn’t like seeing him so scared, and she didn’t like thinking about what caused it.

  I know that look.

  “Never met a loser you didn’t like, right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “An old saying of my grandma’s. She was a sucker for strays too. Cats, dogs, losers, you name it, she always saw the good in everything and everyone.”

  “Good people make mistakes,” Maria said sharply. “Everyone does. It’s not about judging them, it’s about helping them.”

  Bobby loved the way she thought, everything was fixable and everyone was changeable. He shook his head and smiled.

  “Don’t make fun of me,” Maria growled.

  “I’m not! I promise!” Bobby raised both hands in surrender. “You’re just different from most people…most people I know anyway.”

  “You should hang out with better people.”

  “A little late for that,” Bobby sighed.

  *

  Bobby quickly realized that watching someone else playing video games was a lot less fun than actually playing them. Sitting on the nasty green armchair he stared at the fast paced action of the war waged by anonymous foes on the big screen with complete and utter contempt. Roger talked a lot of shit, a great big mound of the stuff, into the headset microphone he wore. His gameplay definitely didn’t back it up.

  “He’s not even that good.”

  No one but the living was there to hear his whining. Maria had ventured off to further explore Roger’s bedroom a few minutes earlier. Bored, he decided to join her.

  It wasn’t what Bobby expected. He’d envisioned cheap posters of bikini-clad, hungry eyed, silicone enhanced models to hang on every wall overlooking piles of filthy laundry surrounding a yellowed, sheetless mattress marinated in Roger sauce. Instead a tidy queen bed dresses in light blue cotton sheets with matching pillow cases and comforter sat neatly under the room’s only window. The nightstand beside it was home to a silver lamp, reading glasses, a box of tissues and a short stack of tattered paperbacks. A few magazines peered guiltily from beneath the bed, their glossy covers reflecting the overhead light, disguising the cover models in the harsh glare.

  “Wow! This is not what I expected at all,” Bobby remarked.

  Maria rolled her eyes and pointed to the magazines.

  “Can’t fault him for being a guy. He’s neat at least. No TV, there’s a shocker right? And books! Come on, give the guy a little credit.”

  “You mean every guy has this…this stuff?” Maria looked appalled.

  Uh oh! Mayday! Mayday!

  “Well, not exactly. The mags, that’s kinda old school,” Bobby explained, if he could’ve turned red he’d look like a hooded summer tomato.

  “Old school?” Maria cocked her head like a curious puppy.

  “Like you,” Bobby chuckled. “You know, like, old fashion.”

  “The 70s were not old fashion.”

  She’d never heard such nonsense, the 70s were revolutionary.

  You’re on a roll in the wrong direction dude.

  “Technology wise is all I mean.”

  “Oh, right.” Maria had to agree, there was a lot she didn’t understand about the world that Angel school hadn’t taught her.

  “So now everybody gets everything out of their phones, their devices, you know what I’m talking about?”

  “The little television screens they carry?”

  “Yeah but they’re not televisions though, they’re like little computers and they’re all linked by this big invisible web of information called the internet.”

  Maria frowned, “I know about the internet.”

  “Oh right, you learned all about it in Angel school right?”

  “Refresher classes keep us up to date on what’s going on in the living world, but it’s been so busy that I missed a few.”

  Busy? That’s weird. Was there a war or a plague or something I don’t know about? Whatever, I’d bet diamonds to donuts they don’t teach them the hard truth about everything anyway.

  Bobby felt obliged to fill in the gaps, “So the thing with the web is that you have to look to find. Nothing comes to you unless you search for it. If you never Google ‘donkey dick’ then you’ll never see a donkey’s dick.”

  “Bobby!” Maria cried and covered her mouth with one delicate hand. “That’s disgusting!”

  Bad example dumbass. PG Bobby, P-fucking-G.

  “It is, sorry, but it’s just an example.”

  “A bad one.”

  “Agreed.”

  Maria waited for the gruesome image to fade before moving on, “So Roger is into old fashion smut. Could that mean anything?”

  Smut?

  Bobby weighed the question, he didn’t want to miss something obvious. “Bad internet but I doubt it, not the way he games. He’s gotta have a computer here somewhere, probably a laptop. A laptop would be great, we could do some research. I could find out how I died.”

  Maria watched as Bobby searched the closet and the nightstand drawers. At first it seemed all too convenient, his memory loss, faking ignorance was a cowardly but effective way to conceal his past. But he seemed genuinely desperate to discover what happened to him.

  “You all right?” Bobby asked when he noticed that the Angel was a million miles away.

  “Yes…just thinking.”

  “Anything good?”

  “Nope.”

  Someone doesn’t want to share.

  “You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?”

  Maria shrugged.

  Soooooooo beautiful.

  “It’s okay, dead end anyway. No laptop.”

  “Cheaper maybe?”

  Bobby frowned.

  “The magazines,” Maria clarified.

  “Uh uh, free online.”

  “People do that kind of thing for free?” she asked, flabbergasted.

  “No but the sites are free because they slam you with ads and pop-ups. Advertising pays for the world’s porn girl!”

  Gotta love the internet.

  “That’s terrible!” she grimaced.

  “It’s a whole new world young lady. Times are changing and not for the better,” Bobby did his best Dan Rather imitation.

  Maria frowned again.

  Bobby shrugged, “I didn’t invent it.”

  Maria didn’t like where the conversation was going and quickly changed course, “Should we check the bathroom?”

  Bobby was more than happy to oblige, “Feeling brave are we?”

  “Not really?”

  Another one over her head.

  “I mean it’s probably gross in there. You might want to leave that stone unturned.”

  “Oh…right,” she smiled, lips curling and eyes narrowing in impish victory. “You’ll do it then?”

  Bobby laughed, he’d been played and loved every second. “Nicely done.”

  Maria cocked her head and bowed gracefully.

  Oh man! That smile! It might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!

  Bobby would have done anything and everything for that smile.

  *

  The tiny, pink-tiled, pink-commoded, pink-sinked, pink-everythinged, 1940s, vomit inducing bathroom was an eyesore at best, but spotless. The bowl was unsplattered, the sink shiny, the toothbrush in the toothbrush holder, the toothpaste capped and the towels folded on the small built-in shelving above the empty laundry basket.

  “No way,” Bobby croaked.

  “What?” Maria asked.

  “It’s spotless, ugly as sin but Martha Stewart clean.”

  Maria nodded in agreement from the doorway as she surveyed the six-by-six ode to Pepto Bismo.

  “Our boy wallows in filth all day but keeps his private stuff squeaky clean,” Bobb
y thought out loud. “Makes not a drop of sense.”

  “He’s an unusual man.”

  Maria’s description tickled Bobby’s funny bone. “Yes he is,” he agreed around a broad smile.

  “You’re making fun of me again,” Maria groaned.

  “No…I’m not…I swear I’m not.”

  “You’re laughing at me!” Maria insisted.

  “I was just… kinda… enjoying the way you see things, the way you say things,” he replied figuring the Angel could probably smell a lie and, for some peculiar reason, he didn’t want to lie to her anyway.

  “Oh…” it was Maria’s turn to stammer. “Well…okay, I just don’t want to…to be made fun of is all.”

  “Not what’s happening here.”

  “Okay then….thanks, I guess,” she replied and turned away quickly so the Reaper wouldn’t see her blush. He couldn’t because she couldn’t, but she wanted to be sure.

  6.

  11:30 came and went. Felix never showed.

  Roger polished off six slices of pizza and three beers in between tokes on the pipe he stowed in the lone coffee table drawer. He checked the time on the cable box nearly as much as he paused his game to listen for any sound of approaching company.

  “Dude’s lonely,” Bobby observed from where he slouched in the armchair.

  Maria sat cross-legged in the narrow space between the television and the coffee table, staring up at the screen. The mayhem cast a kaleidoscope of colors across her face but they weren’t enough to hide her concern. “It’s all death and killing and war,” she whispered, automatic gunfire quickly drowned the sentiment.

  Bobby knew what she’d said, he’d been studying her lips as if there was going to be a test. Every curve, every line, every movement she made fascinated him. He’d definitely get a hundred, and probably even go for the bonus questions.

  “Cool right?”

  “No! Not cool. Children should not see this kind of thing. They should never be exposed to this….this…horror!” Maria spun on her ass to face him as she fumed. “This is…it’s a…a sin!”

  “Really? A sin? I mean it’s violent but…” Bobby had no idea how to defend it but luckily the rumble of a powerful motor saved him. “We got company.”

  Bobby felt a vibe he couldn’t explain, it wasn’t a good one. Hushed voices, deep ones, discussed something for a brief moment just outside. Keys jingled, the outer door opened, and footsteps climbed the stairs.