Sex & Violence

by Carrie Mesrobian

  “Use everything you got from your feet up, and you’ll lay the other guy out flat,” Tim said. “Keep hitting, beyond the point of impact. Don’t stop once you make contact. Push all the way through to the other side. You do that and it’s over before it starts. Guaranteed.”

  I nodded, feeling less stupid, because Tim was smiling-yet-serious and I could tell he didn’t think I was completely hopeless.

  “Let’s get some water and see where the fuck Layne is,” Tim said.

  I gulped water like I’d been in the desert. My arms were burning.

  “I gotta pick up some Tylenol,” Layne said. “Harry’s got a fever. You’re doing good, Evan.”

  “Yeah, he’s picking it up quick,” Tim added.

  “Don’t you have to be somewhere?” I asked Tim.

  “Not until nine,” Tim said, with a grin that made me instantly jealous of the fact that he had a chick waiting for him.

  We kept on with the heavy bag. Tim’s phone rang again, but I didn’t eavesdrop this time. I just imagined Tate Kerrigan’s square face and Patrick Ramsey’s hammy one and thought, One lucky punch.

  “Pull back fast,” Tim said. “Out and back. Assume the first punch didn’t work and you have to do another one. That’s how boxers work, at least. But your right’s pretty strong. That’s your advantage.”

  I hit a few more to the bag, and Tim said, “You better stop, or you’ll be sore tomorrow. You can unwrap them wraps by yourself?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. Tim pulled out a wad of keys and started fiddling one off the ring.

  “Here,” he said. “For if you want to come and hit if I’m not around. I’ll pull down the garage door, but this one locks up the side one when you go.”

  He was grinning as he walked out, and I didn’t know why until I got to my car and standing there, swinging her purse on her shoulder, was Lana.

  Dear Collette,

  It turns out fighting is about thoughtless efficiency and speed. I know this now because Layne and his brother Tim are teaching me to box, which is very embarrassing to be taught, Collette—even though I’m told one of my hands is “good.”

  I shouldn’t be surprised that being ready to throw-down without getting tangled in questions and decisions—in thinking—is a key skill in fighting. If there’s one thing I used to know, it’s how to be ready without a second thought. I used to be a fucking expert in not thinking.

  A good fight, so I’m told, has just one punch. I think the same’s true of getting down. The more I learn about fighting from Tim and Layne, the more I realize I already knew.

  I am an expert in being a slutty fucker. I should have my own advice column. Who needs college?

  Later, Evan

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  After I started boxing regularly out at the tow shop, I slept like a fucking rock. So I went as often as I could. The morning after a particularly long session with the heavy bag (and Lana showing up as I finished), my father and I were both crunching through cereal in silence. Typical morning. But then he went and said something completely atypical.

  “You need some new clothes.”

  “What?”

  “Every time I see you, you’ve got an old crappy T-shirt on,” he said. “I make decent money. Just because you don’t have a mother to tend to this kind of thing doesn’t mean you have to go around looking like a hobo all the time.”

  “Like a hobo?”

  “It’s not just you. Brenda’s been on me about how I wear the same thing every day. She thinks a little color wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Dad?”

  “I’m saying let’s go buy some new clothes, Evan.”

  “Brenda’s gay boyfriend coming with us?”

  My father laughed. I shivered with a kind of happiness, hearing him laugh. He did it more and more lately. Though usually never with me. I usually heard it coming through the window of my room as he sat out on our deck with Brenda drinking whiskey sours and playing Tripoli or cribbage.

  So he drove us in his Mercedes—an odd car for two badly dressed guys, no doubt—to what amounted to the main shopping center in Marchant Falls: a Sears surrounded by a strip mall. It made me feel sad for Marchant Falls, compared to other places we’d lived. But also a little protective. So what if Marchant Falls was tiny and unhip? I’d rather go fishing with Tom or eat chili dogs at the Dairy Queen with Jesse or knock around Story Island with Baker, and if it meant there was no Macy’s or Cheesecake Factory, then so be it.

  “Are you almost out of gas?” I asked, as we pulled into the parking lot.

  “No, the gauge is broken.”

  That was weird. My father tended to be anal about things being broken.

  “Aren’t you going to fix it?”

  “Probably not. The nearest Mercedes dealership is sixty miles away. I should get rid of this car. I think it makes me look like a prick.”

  I had never considered this, but Marchant Falls was the first place we’d lived where the car stood out.

  Despite becoming a man of the people as far as his car was concerned, my father didn’t seem wild about shopping at Sears, so we started with the strip mall. Right away he found a pair of blue flip-flops in a giant bin sitting outside of a dollar store. While he went to buy them, I went to the nearest men’s clothing store. I was staring at dress shirts when he came into the store, wearing the blue flip-flops.

  “Where are your other shoes?”

  “In the trunk.”

  “What the hell is on your toenails?”

  My father smiled down at his feet.

  “Nice, huh? You really missed out last night over at Brenda’s.”

  “Whiskey sours aren’t my thing, Dad.”

  “Last night was sangria,” he corrected. “Also, Bailey’s milk shakes. It was a kind of girls’ night. Quite a sociological experience. Your mother wasn’t so rigidly feminine, of course, so my background knowledge isn’t extensive. But Baker was having a crisis so there were certain female rituals to be observed.”

  “What happened to Baker?” I tried not to sound as alarmed as I felt.

  “She was looking for you, to start with,” my father said, sorting through a rack of shirts.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said you were out. Probably with some girl, knowing you.”

  “You didn’t really say that, did you?”

  “I did,” my father said, and I could tell he was smiling, even though his back was to me. “I think I’ll try this red one.”

  I didn’t get why he didn’t just try on the damn thing over his current shirt; that was how I always did it. Of course, since the uniforms at Remington Chase, it had been a long time since I’d deliberately gone out to buy any kind of clothing at all.

  “Baker asked me if you had a girlfriend,” he called from the dressing room. “I told her it was usually plural, but I currently didn’t know. She didn’t believe it when I said most of the numbers in your phone are girls. I told her that you didn’t tend to keep those numbers long, though.”

  This was a little surprising. Given that he seemed to know nothing about me except that I was fucked-up. But like his calls with Dr. Penny, he was showing a definite sneaky side. Like he could only be interested in me when I wasn’t looking.

  I was hovering between wanting to punch him and loving that he knew anything about me when he opened the dressing room door.

  “What do you think? Is red a good color for me?”

  “I don’t know. How can you tell?”

  “No idea.” He stared at himself in the mirror, the stubble on his head golden in the harsh dressing room light.

  “Well, it matches your toenails.” The saleslady behind us snickered.

  “I look like my father,” he said, sighing. “But he had all his hair. And never wore red.”

  My dad took his red shirt to the counter, and I added a couple of T-shirts in boring colors—grey, black, white—and he shook his head.

  “No color? No style, Evan? Really?” />
  “What the hell did those women do to you last night?” I asked. “Cut your balls off after they painted your toenails?”

  He laughed again, and I couldn’t help smiling too.

  “You have to understand,” he said, as he handed the cashier his credit card. “It was a female crisis of tremendous proportions. Baker’s boyfriend came over, and there was a big throw-down of some sort.”

  “‘Throw-down’?” I asked. “Like, he was violent?” My hand curled up into a fist reflexively. Thumb out. I was a little surprised at how quickly I’d absorbed the Beauchant brothers’ lessons.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “They just had a loud argument in the yard.”

  “So, what did Brenda do?”

  “Hell if I know,” he said. “From what I could make of it, it sounded like they shouted at each other and finally the guy just left. Something about her best friend cheating? That part was sort of unclear to me.”

  “I think it’s unclear to Baker too.”

  “By the time I went over there, it was over,” he said, as we exited the store. “Peggy was blending up Bailey’s milk shakes. I hadn’t had Baileys in years. Your mother used to like it with coffee. They were good, though Peggy thought they clashed with sangria.”

  “Who’s Peggy?”

  “How long have we been living here, Evan? You know

  Peggy! Tom’s mother?”

  I kind of wanted to punch him again. Like he was in the habit of knowing people’s names! I couldn’t help it if I was bad with names. I never had good reason to remember them. Which was mostly his fault, to be technical.

  “Then Baker took out this device used to sand off calluses from your feet,” he continued. “For some reason women endeavor to make their feet as defenseless as a newborn’s. Brenda wanted to use it on me, but the damn thing looked like a vibrator. The polish is where I drew the line.”

  “Dad!” I looked to see if anyone was behind us.

  The next store was all perfume, and strangely, my father wanted to go in.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Do you have somewhere else to be, Evan?”

  “No.”

  “Then relax already.”

  The perfume store was staffed by two cute girls who I might have thought appealing, had I not been with my toenail-polished father at the time. But he had no embarrassment whatsoever, accepting the samples one girl gave him and listening patiently while the other told him about the deals of the day, then thanking them both politely like they’d just handed him the Nobel Prize instead of samples and a coupon. It kind of cracked me up, but the place gave me a headache, so I dragged him out the door.

  “What the hell made you want to go in there?”

  “Those girls were cute, didn’t you think?”

  “Dad!”

  “It’s not like I’ve got work to occupy my mind, Evan. Why not get your thrills where you can find them?”

  Because that’s how you lose a spleen, Dad. If you recall. Again, I wanted to punch him.

  “Those girls were my age. And perfume shops aren’t exactly thrilling.”

  “Brenda would never wear any of that crap,” he said. “She prefers essential oils. She says they integrate better than synthetics with the skin’s chemistry.”

  “How would you know that, Dad?” I asked, a little shocked. “You paying attention to Brenda’s skin these days?”

  He reddened all the way up to his shaved skull. I was happy to have popped him in a sore spot for once.

  “What’s going on with you and Brenda?”

  “Nothing, Evan,” he said, in a voice that was familiar. Economical. Inviting no more discussion.

  The last stop in the strip was a sporting goods store and my nonathletic father acted like the whole thing was another sociological experiment so he enthusiastically followed me in.

  “So what happened with Baker and her boyfriend?” I asked.

  “You mean the unfortunately named Jim Sweet? Good god. His mother must have hated him.”

  “Jim’s not all that bad. Though his name sucks.”

  My father laughed and continued. “Mostly it sounded like they both regretted their behavior. I don’t know. Much time was spent explaining to Baker how she was going to college and things would change anyway. That if she valued loyalty, she should insist on it in the future. Then we ate a bunch of ice cream.”

  I doubted loyalty was important when you were non-monogramous. But it didn’t seem like Baker understood that concept any better than Jim Sweet could pronounce it.

  “Then what happened?”

  “More beautification activities. And a debate about whether Baker should just ask you out. Of course, I said that would probably make your summer.”

  I spun around from the wall of running shoes I was looking at.

  “You. Did. Not.”

  “Of course not. I may have only had one girlfriend my entire life, but I’m not that stupid.”

  “Mom was the only girl you ever went out with?”

  “Being into math isn’t exactly an aphrodisiac, Evan.”

  True enough. Neither was baldness. I kind of felt sorry for him, then. For missing out on so much. Although, at least he had his spleen still. Though it was possible Soren might have had a go at him at one point. I couldn’t imagine my dad in a fight.

  “Baker doesn’t believe in girls asking guys out, anyway.”

  “Well, I don’t see how that makes sense. She practically grew up in The House That Feminism Built.”

  “She didn’t explain all her weird rules?”

  “Bailey’s milk shakes don’t make people terribly articulate.”

  He picked up a horrible sandal that had so much Velcro on it that I grabbed it out of his hand and forcibly set it down.

  “Those are awful, and if you buy them, you will look like an old man,” I said. “And do me a favor and stop going over there drinking if you can’t keep your mouth shut about my sex life.”

  “I didn’t realize we were discussing your sex life,” he said, very entertained. “Does Baker factor into your sex life?”

  “As much as Brenda factors into yours.”

  My father turned away. Like he was suddenly very interested in basketball jerseys. Take that, nosy fucker, I thought.

  I found some clothes at the sports store. Things with actual colors, even. My father looked at the baseball bats and soccer cleats and hockey sticks like things in some kind of museum or zoo set up for his amusement. Sports had never interested him before, but now he was asking me all sorts of questions about things he assumed I knew about, being that I wasn’t allergic to physical competition.

  “I don’t know shit about football, Dad,” I said, when he asked about the helmets. “I’m not really one for team sports.”

  “At least you like athletics in some fashion,” he said. “I should buy some running shoes. Maybe I should start running with you? You still run, right?”

  “I’m kind of getting into boxing, lately,” I said.

  While he tried on running shoes, I explained about Layne and Tim and the heavy bag at the tow shop. (Everything except how Lana and I sometimes did it on the foldout sofa, of course.)

  “I would love to see that,” my dad said.

  I thought of my nerdy math and computer genius father with the Beauchant brothers—Tim’s prison tattoos and Layne’s mouth full of chew—and the whole thing made me want to die a little.

  We went to Mackinanny’s for lunch, and by then, though I was feeling okay, I was also tense. Aware that we hadn’t done anything like this in … ever. Obviously, we had gone to stores and restaurants and everything. But it was different that day. Not that he was telling me all his feelings or asking me to explain all my secret desires, either, but we were hanging out as if we did it all the time, as if it was normal for us to shoot the shit and laugh at each other’s jokes. To steal french fries off the other’s plate. For him to ask the waitress, without even blinking, to bring two glasses with the
pitcher of beer.

  As we sat there with our guts stuffed, me finishing off the pitcher of beer, he asked, “You boxing for any particular reason?”

  There. That was why I was tense. I’d been waiting for him to bring up something like that. Say that he was worried. Or that we’d be moving.

  But what could I say? Dad, I’m learning to box so I can fuck my boss’s half sister? Which wasn’t really true, though it wasn’t all false, either.

  “I told Layne what happened in North Carolina,” I said, trying to act casual. “He asked about it because of my medical form at work. It was kind of his idea.”

  “It’s a good idea,” he said, sipping his beer. “I wish … I guess I’ve always been pretty passive in my approach to conflict.”

  “The Beauchant brothers know their way around a street fight.”

  “Really?”

  “You can’t meet them for one of your sociological experiments.”

  “My father used to beat us,” he said.

  I set my glass down with a loud thump. “What? Grandpa Carter?”

  “Random and for no reason.” He was solemn, staring at the greasy paper in the onion ring basket we’d demolished earlier. “He was a volatile, angry son of a bitch. You never knew what might provoke him. Soren and me. Our mother too. She tried to get between us, protect us, but that usually made it worse.”

  “I didn’t know that.” I suddenly felt a little shitty for thinking this whole day was about me. That everything was about me, actually.

  “I didn’t see a reason to tell you,” he said. “He died before you were born, anyway. The only reason I bring it up now is that when he was sixteen, Soren fought back. Our father, the bastard, never expected it. Because Soren was calculated. Had waited and planned. Figured he had nature on his side, of course. It was all another cycle for him. He was growing, our father declining. So, one day, when something set him off, Soren hit him back. Put your grandfather in the hospital.”