by Ryan Gattis
"Is anyone else gonna get that?" I called out to a dark house but I got no answer. Dad was sleeping of course, but where was Jimmy?
I got up. Flicked on the light. I was still pretty much dressed so that was a relief.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Well, anyone come to transfer me would at least've been more subtle. I actually thought that as I shuffled into the hall, straightened the leftover half of the busted woodcarving, the bridge and river, the sugar-cane-white/yellow core of the wood hiding underneath the stain, and unlocked the door without asking who it was. I swung it open and walked into the kitchen. Really, I needed a glass of water. Vikes gave me cottonmouth, bad. I just assumed it was Remo. It wasn't.
"Just what in the fuck was wrong with you today?" It was Melinda.
"Here to see Jimmy?"
For some reason, alarm bells weren't going off in my head that she'd paid me a visit so late at night.
"No, I came to see you." Melinda was confrontational and she had blood on her shirt. Great. Exactly what I needed with my head and half my body feeling like it'd been dipped in glaze and left to dry. If she wanted a fight, it'd be pretty one-sided.
"I took too much Viking," I said. "Want a glass of water?"
"No."
"So," I said after a long glug from a smudged glass, "if you're not here to see Jimmy what are you here for?"
"Rico's gone."
"Well, you ought to treat your dogs better then, feed them puppy chow instead of that store-brand shit."
She pushed a palm into her fist and cracked some knuckles.
"See, I asked some real hard questions around about why you guys had to fight your way out of that cafeteria kitchen. At first, I just assumed you messed up, got unlucky, I don't know, something, but then with the way Ridley's been acting, not even looking in on the rolls yesterday, I knew something was wrong."
The silence in the house was different now that the oven was off.
"You knew the whole time, didn't you? You knew someone set you up and you just figured it was me, huh?" Melinda was pointing her finger at me. On any other day I probably would've broken it.
"Yeah, I figured it was you." No use lying to her now, although it probably wasn't the best time to cop to my meeting with Ridley, and what he'd said about her. That'd just bring up too many questions that didn't need to be answered with half a working brain. Besides, I knew she wasn't acting. Maybe it wasn't her that set us up.
She got close to my face. So close her hair brushed my droopy eyelid and made me blink her back.
"Fuck, Jen! How could you think I'd sell out like that? To Ridley? Jesus, what about Connie?"
"Who?" I asked, still not 100% awake or alert.
"Connie! My fucking sister, Jen! Or did you forget what Ridley did to her?"
Oh god. That one made me lose eye contact. I couldn't believe I'd forgotten that. Connie was Melinda's older sister and used to be an Aunt in the Wolves. She got a little too fond of Ridley's prime product. There were rumors. Like Connie sold her soul for that shit but Ridley only ever wanted her body. Like Connie was the first person he ever cut, how she gave him a taste for it, fostered him along, said she loved him, maybe she even liked it. Yeah, there were rumors, but the bottom line is still this: she took too much junk into her veins and she died. That was before Cue even went to Kung Fu. Blame it on the stress. Blame it on my jealousy of her and Jimmy. Blame it on a missing Cue. Blame it on my crazy dad. Blame it on anything. Still should've remembered. I couldn't even look at Melinda, hearing her breathing all heavy in front of me but still feeling so numb that her breath didn't register on my cheek nerves. I could smell blood though. I didn't want to know how it got in her mouth. I fully expected her to hit me.
"Good news for you, I did find out who it was, who sold you out, and you know, I had every intention of keeping it low profile, changing this person's mind, and using their information to our advantage against Ridley, but"—she opened the door and went outside, when she came back five seconds later, she was dragging a very bloody Rico onto the tiles of my hallway and closed the door on his foot—"I got a little carried away."
"Fuck! Is he did?"
"No, he's still breathing."
"Are you gonna transfer him? Here?"
"Nope." She kicked him. "We're going to clean him up and drop him on his mama's doorstep and ring the bell."
"We? Aw hell no! You need to be doing it, you started it!"
Really, I was sorry and all but she was asking for too much.
"And you're gonna help for not trusting me!"
Shit. It'd been a long time since I'd seen someone so thoroughly beaten, just picked apart. Ten times worse than what Karl did to Jimmy. I leaned in close to Rico. Even his ears were torn up. Eyes swollen to the size of small planets in orbit, the left was caved in at the browridge. His left nostril had been carved open, probably not intentionally, just with one of Melinda's rings. He was missing two teeth and he'd bitten part of his tongue off the tip. Which probably meant he hadn't expected Melinda to hit him and his mouth was open so he bit down by reflex. There was a real bad cut on his scalp. He was breathing like he had more than one broken rib: short little wheezy gasps. I didn't want to look under his shirt to see more damage.
"I wouldn't know where to start on this kid," I said.
"Call your doctor friend up then, he can help."
But there was no need, because Remo and Jimmy walked in right then. Perfect timing. I found out later that Jimmy'd gotten Remo to come over and make sure I wasn't sick and after he figured I just needed some sleep, Remo invited Jimmy to his mom's for dinner because he had to cook for her anyway. Turned out I missed out on his only decent dish, frijoles negros. Damn.
"Oh, what the fuck is this? Now I gotta make house calls for randoms too? Sheyit." Remo dropped to his knees and checked Rico's pulse. "Help me get him into the bathroom!"
"Is this Rico?" Jimmy craned his neck sideways to get a better look before picking up the right leg. That's how torn up he was, the kid genuinely needed confirmation. I got his left leg. Remo had his left arm and Melinda grabbed his right.
"Yup, that's the motherfucker that sold you out to Ridley, right there. We in this together now."
Rico got put in the bathtub, mostly because it was the easiest thing to clean in the whole house. Jimmy swabbed the tile and the front step. Melinda and I helped Remo as best we could with his requests for gauze, disinfectant, soap, needles, surgical thread, benzo. Good news was we had a lot of that stuff in the house. I had to dip into Cue's old stash for some of it. Still though, it was a weird situation. A love-hate thing watching Melinda freak out about Rico's health after doing all the damage herself.
"Tomorrow," Melinda said, "after school, we're taking it to Ridley before he has a chance to take it to us. I'll be here early. Be ready."
And with that, she dragged the stitched-up Rico out the door and pushed him into the flat bed of her dad's pickup truck. I had no doubts that the kid's mother was about to get the shock of her life.
It was probably the right idea. Attacking first before they could attack us. Ridley would probably be halfway ready for us though. I mean, he'd be bound to notice that something had happened to Rico. Guess I really didn't have time to think about why Rico sold us out when he was sitting there bleeding, but the more I thought about it through my mild haze, it made sense. Jealous of Jimmy for one, and for two, maybe he thought Melinda had gone soft. I don't know. Maybe if I was in his position I would've done it too. The Wolves were going down sometime. And at the end, it was all about survival.
Jimmy wanted to talk but I told him to get some sleep instead. Remo had an early morning, so he took off without really saying good-bye. Dad must've taken his meds because he hadn't woken up through the whole thing. I was up for another hour after everyone left and Jimmy had a shower and turned in. Stretching, mostly. That, and trying to get the numbness out of me. Taking my own time in the cold of the backyard to loosen up my joints around the floating la
ck of feeling. Work a few combos anyway. Practice the Sand Witch and imagine Cue there to laugh at me. See him leaning up against the side of the house like he used to, always there to correct my posture, my form.
"Look here now," he would say, always sounding funny, the funny teacher. "You need to coil your leg sooner, start at the toes, then the ankle and flex all the way up your leg," and he would point with his fingers, "your calf your knee, your quad, your ass." Then he'd poke me in my splenectomy scar, habit, and we'd both laugh, habit too.
"Now," he'd say, "try it again, and when you start that leg whip, really feel it. Feel the ground through your foot as you wind up, don't start by just flexing the quad and kicking, you'll hurt yourself Keep your whole leg tight for the strike."
And you know, he was right.
STILL NUMBED UP
I couldn't take a shower. For some reason, I just felt heavier when I got back in the house and brought the thick glass deck door to a shut kind of rest before popping the safety pole down to keep it closed. The heat leaned on me, a wounded family member, and I alone was carrying it. As a general rule, I never take drugs because they stay in my system so much longer than a normal person. Remo tried to explain it to me once but I wasn't listening. Something about metabolism, which was weird because mine's pretty high. I always figured if I had a high one it'd get the stuff out of me right away but that's just not the case apparently. Probably should have paid better attention.
It was all quiet inside. So much so I couldn't hear Dad snoring. I chalked it up to that same heat. Heat makes everything shush. That, or it was the Vicodin. The pills were still a massive coat over my entire body, pulled up over my head and zipped to the collar, the lining stuffed into my ears, mouth, and nostrils. No lights on at all. Dark in all corners, the living room no longer smelled of casserole. I wished the gas wasn't on so that I still had to run the oven 'til it croaked and stopped giving me warmth, the sound of a warped fan, and old smells that put my mom back in the present long enough for me to miss her and hate her all over again. She was gone and definitely not sleeping in the next room. Felt that.
So of course I bumped into the wall as I turned down the hallway. Didn't even feel it, just threw me off balance a little which produced a big lean into the last family portrait Dad ever painted. I was losing it. Needed to feel something, probably more psychological than anything. The wall held me up and the carpet made sure I didn't pitch over. Peeled my sweatshirt off once I got to the threshold of my room and bumped the door open with my nonhurt hip. Sheets pulled tight over my ribs and cocooning my chest, that was what I needed to feel.
But there was a person sitting on my bed, blocking me off from that cotton chrysalis I just had to have. It was Jimmy. I knew it. Didn't need to see him but the outline of his posture against the white wall told me that this was an Armageddon-type thing, a last-night-on-earth thing. A what-would-you-do-if-you-had-thirty-minutes-before-the-nuclear-bomb-got-plunked-down-on-your-head kind of thing and even given the scenario in fourth grade, not even knowing what it really was, everyone in my class agreed it was sex.
A whole mob of ten-year-olds had said the word like it had two x's, then giggled excitedly. It was a word our parents would never let us say but we watched television. We knew the rule. If everything was going to blow up and be gone, you had to have sex with your last moments on the planet. You know, if you were going to die. So no, Jennifer, eating your favorite food was the wrong answer. It was the worst answer. The answer was sex. Everyone knew that! How could I not? What was I, retarded or something? A big fat moron? Because somehow I should've known that you had to have "it" to be human and no one wanted to miss out. If I didn't know that instantly then I was stupid. That was what my classmates said to me.
So my big fat moronic mouth wanted to say: leave, Jimmy. Leave, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, skeleton in the marrow closet of my bone. Leave, you son of my blond mother's blond sister. Leave, my link of denied whiteness, because see, we're not white together. We're not cream together. We never shared that skin. So different, me, the half Latina and you, my cousin, all half Taiwanese. Like we each got a hold of the albatross and we're tugging the body but not rocking no boat, trying hard to break the wishbone inside by new rules: nobody wants more, we each want less. We each want the little part. We each want the smallest broken bit of forked connective tissue. So shatter that hollow density. Tear that too-white bird. Unfuse those clavicles, I say, pull. You can have your wish.
But it can't be like this Jimmy no middle name Chang. You know it and we've discussed it already, because what would my "no" mean if I went back on it? So get your near-to-naked ass out of my bed and stop looking so fine. Stop tempting me. You scare me good, and you probably know I got this strange thing inside of me, the not wanting to, but wanting something, but not being able to feel it, and I mostly don't know, just like always, so give me an excuse to kick you right out of here with my toothpick arms that feel like stripped timber logs piled up in a quickly clearing forest.
Instead, I just asked, "So, boy, what was Hong Kong like?"
And I went and sat down hard on the homemade bed right next to him, my knee pressing against his. The carpet had thrown me, the bed had caught me, held my weight up, and my skin felt nothing. The boards underneath the mattress didn't make a sound. They wouldn't tell.
"It wasn't really Hong Kong, that was just the nearest big city," he corrected me. "I just tell people that so they don't ask too many questions."
"Right, yeah, okay." My words were slowing down.
"It was exactly like home except bigger and with no..."
I could feel pressure as I let go of my lean and crumpled against him, my arms going tight to my body as he caught me, like a chicken's wings once it realizes it can't ever really take off and stay up in the air. That it's just fooling itself with all the flapping. If they ever do, realize that, I mean. Jesus, the Vicodin was still crawling around in my head too, all up in my brain. I wondered if the water I drank made the effects worse. Like if it got digested first or something but then I could only smell Jimmy's soap-clean skin on me. Mostly it was the scent of the generic crescent spring stuff that sat in the back corner of the shower that we all used and it just made me sad. It was too familiar. It was still the brand left over that Cue used to buy, what he used to smell like. Jimmy wasn't talking anymore though. He was lowering me, flat-backed, onto the mattress.
I didn't want to sniff soap anyway, never Cue soap then. I didn't mind the not talking but I wanted to smell the licorice I smelled before when Jimmy raised his body up from sleeping in my bed and I tended his wounds, his first real wounds, his broken cherry blood. That was us, together, that scent. I needed it again, to light my brain up somehow, to wake up my legs and spine gone heavy, to lift up my head gone soft to pillow, to turn the warning lights on inside as he leaned over me and rubbed my stomach in little too-close circles like I was some damn car and he was waxing me, grazing my pubic hair through my thin shirt on the rotating downward turn of each circle and then back up, onto my belly. He bent down to kiss me and got turned-cheek instead of mouth. That was for you, Mom.
"Is this okay?" Jimmy's words sounded far away.
I could feel the pressure of his weight pushing my intestines against my backbone, at least that was how I visualized it, already full inside. And I tried hard to imagine how it would feel, him touching me with vertical strokes better than his massage, his confident working of my tattoo. I'd seen his hands, those skinny fingers that looked like a secretary's—too damn soft—where even the calluses seemed like they'd been filed down and I wanted to remember how they felt. Not like a fighter at all, but like someone who types too much. Someone who'd never had a broken hand start to look like rotting fruit even when healed but nonetheless purplish on the edge of what was still considered the flat of the hand even if it was now normal for it to be more bent than a pot rim.
I felt his breath on my neck. He brought that small mouth of his to my ear.
&nbs
p; "Is this okay, Jen?" He asked twice more. Didn't say my name the second time.
Maybe I just nodded.
Don't hurt me, Jimmy. Don't hurt me too bad. I've never been punched on the inside before and I need to walk tomorrow. I need to run. Those words didn't get to my mouth. They left my tongue well alone and just rebounded off the walls of my skull.
But none of it mattered because I would die tomorrow. Nobody would ever find out. I would die and I wouldn't tell. See, breathing was ease in his arms. Not easy, not easier. Just ease. No other word for it. My fingers twitched less, even when he pulled me over onto my side. His hands snuck behind me, spread over my tattoo, gripping at it and maybe even pinching but being frantic like someone so new and inept at putting a body together with another and I guess I felt a thin pity then, a see-through veil over my brain that covered my eyes from the inside, as he rolled me again to my back. I felt bad for him. How he was untouchable. How he'd never learned. How most women must've been afraid of him. Like maybe he would break them, even in his temple suburb of Hong Kong, I just knew he was the loneliest boy.
So would I actually be able to feel him inside or would it just be pressure? Would it feel like my fingers felt or just more strain, rounder, larger? And would he taste me? Maybe I wouldn't mind if he kissed me just afterward so I could taste too. How I tasted on him. Not like licorice at all. Probably like sweaty hidden skin I mostly wished wasn't there and clean teeth and tired tongue and of course it was pointless. I was numb inside too. I didn't bother moaning, didn't fake pleasure or pain I couldn't feel, didn't touch him more than to hold on, but that was all I needed then, to clutch our heat between us and grab him tight as I possibly could while knowing—just a deep-down, silent kind of knowing—that he'd never ask me to let go or loosen my grasp, wouldn't even twitch if it was too hard because there was no such thing. Jimmy could take my strongest grip and never, ever complain or wish it gone. He was a rock.
