by Chris Lynch
I looked at Sully. Sully looked at me.
“Gracias,” Toy said, then turned to me. “You’re on.”
I took the phone again, fuzzy again. I was thinking as much about Toy now as I was about Evelyn. Spanish? Why didn’t I know that? Had I said anything ignorant that might have offended him, back before I knew? Sully, Toy’s good buddy just minutes before, was standing three feet away from him now, looking most confused. Evelyn took her sweet time coming to the phone. I thought I heard something.
“Olé,” I said, but she wasn’t there yet.
“The word is hola,” Toy said, disgusted. “Don’t even try. I think English is enough of a chore for you.”
“Yes?” Her soft but very serious voice came over the line.
“Ya, hello, Evelyn. Hi.”
“Who is this, please?” she said, a lot more suspiciously than she needed to. I was slipping away already, I could feel it.
“How ’bout could we talk first, and then I could tell you who I am?”
“If you don’t tell me who you are right now, I’m hanging up.”
“It’s Mick.”
Click.
“Well, you got a couple of sentences deeper than I thought you’d get,” Toy said. “It’s a promising start.”
“And finish,” I said. “It’s unbelievable, how much I’m hated by that girl. I can actually feel it, the hate, when I’m near her. It’s not a good feeling, Toy.”
“You’re doing fine,” Toy said, sticking a cigar in my direction. “She just doesn’t know you yet. She will like what’s inside, when she sees it. Trust me.”
I took the cigar, pointed it back at him like a teacher’s pointer. “You know her. I mean, really know her, don’t you?”
He lit up his cigar with a sly grin, gripping it in his teeth. “I know lots of things,” he said.
Toy offered a cigar to Sully, who had been staring dumbly at him since the phone thing. He didn’t take it. “You speak Spanish,” Sully said flatly.
“I speak Spanish,” Toy repeated, same tone.
“How come you never spoke it around us before?”
“¿Porqué no hablas Español alrededor de mí?”
“What does it matter, Sul? This is Toy, for chrissake. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know, Mick. Toy, I don’t know what I’m thinkin’. But I’m thinkin’ something. I mean, a guy just wants to know these things about another guy, that’s all. I don’t know. A guy shouldn’t hide stuff, that’s all. Y’know, for trust, he shouldn’t.”
“I don’t hide,” Toy said, mean enough to scare me.
“I don’t agree,” Sully answered, not nearly as tough, but pretty aggressive for Sully.
We all stood looking each other over for a minute. It was weird, like we were meeting for the first time all over again. It started out as another Toy-Sully thing, but I was doing it too. It was uncomfortable.
“I’m gonna go,” Sully said. “I’ll catch you all.”
We didn’t say anything to him, not even good-bye, because nothing would have been quite right then. It was good for him to go, and it was good for us to move on to something else.
“You think you have the guts to see this thing through?” Toy asked, trying to sound light.
“Which thing?”
“Miss Evelyn?”
I got the butterflies again. I nodded.
“Let’s go pay her a visit.”
“At her house?” I said.’ “No, Toy, I know you know her and you know everything about everything and all, but, no, I can’t go there.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? ’Cause I got a problem, is why not. A reputation, a stigma, a bullseye on my ass, is why not. And if I do make it through the neighborhood all the way to Evelyn’s house, she’ll shoot me herself right there on her doorstep.”
Toy laughed at me and started pulling me along by the arm. “I can take you there,” he said. “You’ll be fine. What the lady needs from you is sincerity, she likes sincerity. You go there, show her the effort, she’ll see you’re sincere. The door will open. Trust me.”
I badly wanted that door to open. And I did trust Toy. Even if he did hide things.
Spillover Burn
THE DUMB MONKEY, I waddled along behind Toy as he led me just like that to the place I so wanted to go. He walked the way he always walked, medium slow, side-to-side rock, but looking straight on, with purpose. I followed roughly in his steps, but looking everywhere else. My nerves were acting up again. It was a case of wanting to be at Evelyn’s house without having to get there.
Old men sat on stools outside the six-table restaurant, the Boca Loca. The overwhelming smell of garlic and cinnamon rolling out the open door somehow came together and made sense, made me hungry, made me calmer. We passed Soraya’s Children’s Boutique with silly-looking tiny versions of adult clothes on scary gnomish mannequins in the front window and nobody inside. We passed the bowling alley that sounded like thunder with the twenty-candlepin lanes and Los Violines nightclub—“Open All Day”—right next door, playing salsa out of a gigantic jukebox and advertising THE AMAZING RUBEN BLADES AND SON DEL SOLAR, on a life-sized concert poster. Under the poster was tacked a hand-lettered sign, “He ain’t gonna be here, but we like him anyway.”
When we hit Pablo’s Complex of Beauty, it was time to turn off Centre Street onto South. Evelyn’s street. On one corner three men were taking parts off a new white five-liter Mustang and transferring them to an old, red one. On the other corner was a phone company van.
I had never been down South Street. I didn’t even know anyone who had walked down South Street. And I guess South Street sort of saw me the same way. I got some looks. I recognized guys from school, walking past, sitting on cars or on steps. People who just didn’t bother with me at school, but now, here, shot me the intense, no-fooling look. Most just nodded, or grunted, respectful-like, at Toy as he cleared me a path.
“Almost to the promised land,” Toy said over his shoulder. “Place with the pink door there, with the Mary-on-the-half-shell in the yard.”
We were almost there, approaching the statues—Mary standing in an upturned bathtub, draped in flowers and surrounded by pink flamingos standing on one leg. There were a lot of other Mary statues around, but this was the slickest. It made me smile, which helped the raging butterflies that were overtaking me. Suddenly, something else overtook me, from the street side.
The phone truck that had been parked at the end of the street two blocks back was here now. And not parked, but moving beside us. Creeping. At exactly our pace. I stopped, peered right into it.
“Shiiit!” I yelled. “Toy, we gotta run.” I pulled his sleeve, but he yanked it out of my hand.
“What for? I ain’t running nowhere.” He puffed up a bit, made two fists and looked in all directions.
Doors popped open all over the van. The front passenger side, sliding side door, back doors. Out came Augie, Danny, one fat Cormac—the other stayed at the wheel—and a more-than-typically demented-looking Baba.
“All right, cut the shit now,” I said, holding up my hands and walking toward them. “Where’s my brother?” What did I think, that I could fix everything? By talking? To Terry? There was no Terry anyway. He would be home, at the Bloody, pulling the strings and obeying his restraining order.
They didn’t even acknowledge me. Augie in the lead, pulled a cop nightstick from behind his back, dipped a shoulder into me and bounced me aside. Then Baba came along, his eyes red-rimmed tiny black dots. He wore something on his fist, like a dog chain with the links welded together to fit perfectly, rigidly across the knuckles. “Come on, Baba,” I pleaded, trying to tap into something that wasn’t there.
He walked right over me. Literally, like in war clips on the news when the tanks roll right over the tiny people. So wired he showed no comprehension of who I was or that I was rolling under his feet. So died a lifetime friendship.
I looked up to see Augie walk to Toy—who of course
had not taken a single backward step—and raise the nightstick. Before Augie even had the thing over his head, Toy shot him a rocket right hand, out of nowhere, no windup, no crouch, no leverage, that picked up boosters out of the air and dropped Augie like a sack of soup bones to the sidewalk. The nightstick clacked across the cement. Toy stood. His feet never even shifted. I got back to my feet, but stood there like a spectator.
“Too long, too long,” Cormac called, sticking his head out the van window. “Gotta go.” No one was particularly concerned with Augie holding his face and rolling on the sidewalk.
Baba stepped up to Toy, raised his chain-encrusted fist, turning it around and back again, admiring it.
Finally, Toy took a step back. He reached around behind him, down into his pants.
Shik. The blade, six inches, was out and up, between them. Baba moved on him anyway.
“Take off, Toy,” I said. He stood there.
“Let’s go!” Cormac yelled, putting the van in gear.
Then there was a click. The tiny noise that shot through everything else. We all looked to see Danny with the gun pointed Toy’s way. His hand was shaking, and I would have bet anything he couldn’t do it. But there it was.
“Go,” I yelled at Toy. “They ain’t gonna bother me. Go!”
Toy hesitated, then ran, his boots clicking loudly down the street. I thought Danny was going to faint, he looked so drained and relieved as he let the gun swing down at his side. He helped Augie to his feet and they all started piling into the van. “We ain’t lettin’ him get away,” Augie muttered.
“Let him go,” Cormac the driver said. “We made him shit his pants, that’s what’s important.” Like the rest of them, Cormac was not as hot about the operation as Augie was. Like most of the rest of them, anyway.
“Waste ’im. Waste ’im,” Baba growled through gritted teeth. He was walking past me, the last to get back to the van. He stopped, stared down at me, and if he recognized me this time, he sure didn’t show it. But he was fired with hate anyway.
Crash. And crash again. The first being Baba’s big fist, big as my face, coming down on the side of my head, the chain links pressing their shape into the bone. The second was me hitting the sidewalk.
Run, Toy, they won’t bother me. How many times could I be wrong? How little did I know about everything now?
I couldn’t see it, but I heard the van tear away, down the street in the direction Toy ran. “Hope the natives make Spaniel chow outta ya,” one of them called.
Then there was silence. I opened my eyes. They closed again. I opened them again. My cheek was pressed against the grainy pavement, most of my weight supported by the side of my head and my shoulder as I lay crumpled, my ass in the air. I blinked to focus, blinked to focus, got something a little clearer each time, but not good. Two sets of blurry feet walked right by me without even a hitch for the curiosity.
Then the door opened on the porch closest to me, the door I had come to open in the first place. As Evelyn took a few steps out, I made my eyes wider and wider to see her. She stood there looking down, her bare feet hanging over the top step. She was wearing a white gauzy Communion-type dress, almost to her ankles. Her feet bare. She was brushing her hair handover-hand, pulling it down over the front of her shoulder with one hand, brushing it out with the other, pulling it down, brushing it out. Casually, like she had all day to do it.
I struggled, pushed off the ground, wrestled myself up to sitting position. I steadied myself by putting one hand flat on the ground, while with the other I tried to smooth and straighten my hair.
There was a haze around Evelyn, one of my eyes being washed with the blood, the other with, I guess, tears. I would blink it away, but in seconds it would be back, and she would be floating again. When I thought my hair was nice, I tried to smile at her, instead toppled back over, my head pressing again to the sidewalk. I tried to get up but I couldn’t do it.
“Well, at least we got one of them,” she said, her dress whirling as she turned back toward the door.
“I’m not one of them,” I said, closing my eyes.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Blue-Eyed Son Trilogy
A New Game
FAMILY WAS MY PROBLEM. Not simply the obvious problem of who was in my family—my brother, Terry—but the whole idea of family itself. Where I come from, it’s a big word, family. You hear it a lot in my neighborhood. And it means the neighborhood as much as it means actual blood relations. It includes the guys you grew up with and the guys your dad grew up with and the girls they hooked up with and the kids they all squeezed out. It wasn’t all important that everybody in your “family” be all Irish; you could throw in a little Pole here, a little Goomba there, without it mattering too much, as long as they lived inside your boundaries and acted like you acted and were Catholic. What family was, mostly, was what it kept out.
But the new thing I was learning was that family was as hard to get out of as to get into. All the old jokes were coming too true for me: You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family; Family—can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.
Maybe they couldn’t shoot you, but they sure could break your head if they wanted to.
When I opened my eyes, lying there on the sidewalk in front of Evelyn’s house, the first thing I felt was confusion. Could this have happened? Could I have gotten my ass whipped just because I wanted to visit this particular girl, and because I was walking with that particular guy? Everybody has these scary, violent dreams, I told myself, but then you wake up sweating to find that it wasn’t real.
Or you wake up bleeding to find that it was.
Some of the blood was already dry when I reached up and touched my eyebrow lightly. Something was dripping, though, new and cold, dripping on my head. I looked up. Evelyn was standing over me, a sandwich bag full of ice hanging from her hand.
“You’ve been bleeding up my sidewalk,” she said, pushing the bag at me.
I sat up and took the bag. I didn’t even try to talk yet as I pressed the ice that felt so good into my crackling skull.
“This like an elephant thing or something, where you wander off looking for a place to die, and you pick my house?”
I could die now, I thought; I at least got her talking to me. She made me smile, even if she didn’t make herself smile. Not much ever did make her smile, actually.
“You going to live?” she asked.
I gave it a little thought. “I’m going to live.”
“Fine.” She turned and walked away.
“Wait,” I yelped anxiously, hurting my head in the process.
Evelyn turned, arms folded. “Why?”
“Because,” I said, trying to think of why she should. “Because I’m your guest. I’m in this situation because I was coming here to see you.”
“You were coming here?” she asked sweetly, “to see me?”
I nodded.
“I don’t recall, did I invite you?”
How mean could she be? For how long? Even blood wasn’t good enough for her. She didn’t wait for a response to that last one.
When she was gone, I sat there, my legs splayed out on the sidewalk in front of me, the ice melting in my hand but pleasantly numbing that corner section of my brain.
It’s not like I’ve got anything more to lose, I thought, climbing to my feet. I trudged slowly up the stairs and rang the bell.
The door opened. “Yes, who is it?”
It was Ruben. “Goddamnit,” I said, delighting him.
“Hello? Who is it, please?” he asked, looking past me. “Is there anyone there? Hello?” He stood on his toes to look over my head, then back down to look left and right, like I was invisible. “Hello, is there anybody out there?”
I turned around and walked back down the stairs, back toward home.
Maybe it was blood loss. Maybe it was the numbing effect of the ice, slowing me down, chilling me dead, taking away the pain from my head and now taking everything el
se with it. The small patch of temple gone dead with the cold, then the feeling spreading until my whole skull simply teetered up there like an empty shoebox.
Everybody else in the neighborhood seemed to have the deadness too. The eyes I met on my slow serpentine weave down the sidewalk showed me nothing. Nobody showed me any pity, not that I should have been looking for any. But nobody showed any surprise, either, at what must have been a pretty gruesome sight. And nobody showed any smartass, good-for-you sucker kind of pleasure that you might have expected. Nothing. No thing. Smaller than nothing and farther away than Jupiter, that’s what I saw they saw when they saw me. The high school kids I recognized, nothing. The couple strolling past me, licking ice cream cones and pushing a baby carriage together, nothing. One giant four-generation family massed on the front steps of a yellow triple-decker, nothing. Not that I expected love from these people, but I was looking for something when I took the trouble to look at them instead of at the ground. I mean, somebody should notice a thing like this, shouldn’t they? I would, if it was me. I’m hurt, I thought, and I don’t know if I will make it to the corner without falling and hurting myself more. I was walking sideways like a crab, dizzy and weak, and if I fell I would be left there on my face like a piece of garbage until I could get myself up and out by myself. Just then I got a picture of me like that, in my head, lying there alone, and I felt like I wanted to cry for him, for myself, the self I was watching there alone in a heap on the pavement.
By the time I turned the corner from Centre onto my street, Scotia, I’d regained some strength. I was walking steady now, but I still felt like I’d been hit by a car.
“What happened to you?” marveled Mrs. Ryan as she hung laundry on the clothesline in her front yard. Her clothesline in her front yard, like it’s attractive. “Come over here now, you.”
I went to her unquestioningly because I seem to automatically do anything I’m told by women my mother’s age. She took my chin in her hand and yanked it side to side to get the best look.
