Mick

by Chris Lynch

  He looked at me, expecting I don’t know what. A nod, or a smack in the mouth. But I wasn’t giving him any. “And me, Sul? What about me?”

  “Mick, I swear, I never thought in a million years they’d pull any real shit on you. I still can’t believe it. I guess... I guess the rules’ve changed.”

  “Playin’ a new game, Mr. Sullivan. The rules have changed big time.” The way I said it, and the way I just let it hang there between us, Sully knew that I was sort of putting it to him, a question, a need for him to declare.

  “You know, Mick, I don’t mind that Toy’s... that he ain’t in the family. I was just surprised. He’s just so shadowy, he makes me nervous. I need to know things, you understand that.”

  Again he waited for me to lighten his load. Again I didn’t.

  “I heard he got away fine. Not a scratch.”

  I didn’t even blink.

  “I’m a go-with-the-flow kind of a guy, Mick. This against-the-grain stuff is hard for me, doin’ things different than I usually do ’em.”

  “So it’s hard for you, Sul. I know that. So what’s wrong with hard? What if I tell you I’m gonna be an against-the-grain kind of a guy from now on? What’re you gonna say to that?”

  He stood up, paced. Finished his beer and got us two more out of the refrigerator. He sat down close to me, almost touching me, but not touching me. We don’t do that. “I say, that’s really hard for me. I say I don’t know what I say. I say gimme a pill. But just one.”

  I smiled and threw the pill in his mouth like I was feeding a fish chunk to a seal. We drank the beers down.

  “Come with me,” I said, and the two of us wobbled down the hall to Terry’s room. I pulled open the top two drawers of his dresser and pulled out every one of his precious collection of pocket T-shirts. I gave Sully the neat little stack of navy blues and yellows. I kept the three different shades of green. Sitting cross-legged on the floor and using Terry’s own Swiss army knife, we took turns cutting the pockets off all those shirts. It was like gouging the heart out of some game animal.

  We fell into a laughing jag as we did it. In the end, as we stood over the dead pile, I said to Sully, “He never, never leaves the house without one of these stupid damn things on. So now, he’ll never leave the house again. Thus, we have already made the world a better place.”

  It made perfect sense at the time.

  Out in the Sun

  SOMETHING HAPPENED TO ME when I attacked Terry’s shirts. I woke the following morning bold as a blue jay. “Nice shirt,” I said to Terry when I saw him later that day. He was wearing one of the navy Ts, with a second one turned inside out underneath to cover the gaping hole in his chest. He didn’t say anything back to me. I knew he wouldn’t. One thing you could always count on with dear Terry was that he couldn’t remember half of any previous evening. And while my own recall was pretty shabby, I retained just enough to enjoy the hell out of this. He was always doing pointless, idiotic things under the old influence, protesting something—gays in the military or an IRA bomb that failed to kill the Brit it was meant for—that he could never recall or care about again. And I knew he thought he sliced up his own clothes and now felt like a schmuck.

  “Fall down, didja there, Terry? Good thing you had two shirts on, huh?”

  “Wanna be dead?” he growled as he grabbed his coffee to go.

  “Better dead than red,” I said. I’d been waiting all my life to say that to somebody. But he wasn’t even listening anymore. He slammed the door in my face.

  Cock o’ the Walk, I had no school for the rest of the week, and a doctor’s note in my pocket to prove it. Sure there was a little headache to go along with it and the occasional oozy discharge from a stitch, maybe some dizziness, but I had my medicine—now there’s a thought—and nothing else but time.

  I decided it might be fun to go to school. Not to school, actually, not inside, but there, around it. To see my babe.

  “What are you, nuts?” Evelyn snapped. “Don’t you ever, ever call me that again. Not even in your dreams. How hard did you get hit in the head?” She had me so frazzled I thought it was a real question. “It was kind of like when a car falls off the jack—”

  “It will feel like a powder puff compared to how hard I’m going to clock you if you ever use that sexist ignoramus crap on me again. You got that?”

  I nodded, dumb as a bug. I felt my eyes blinking, beating like hummingbird wings. I didn’t do it on purpose, but it worked in my favor anyway. She relented.

  “So how are you feeling?” She scowled.

  “My head hurts a little.”

  “Well, go home to bed, fool,” she said. It wasn’t unpleasant, and it wasn’t totally cold, the way she pushed me around.

  “Okay,” I told her dutifully. “Will you come and see me after school?”

  “No.”

  “But Toy told you to check on me, remember?”

  Now she got truly concerned. “You’ve seen him?”

  “No. He’s still not around?”

  She just shook her head solemnly, gave me a weak wave, and walked back to school.

  Well, that’s enough, I thought. This much I can do. And I walked to Toy’s house.

  I pushed the buzzer six times, then held it on the seventh, all pissed off and adrenalined about I really wasn’t sure what.

  “Ya, ya, ya, YA!” The woman snarled as she ripped the door open. “What’s your prob-lem, goddamnit?”

  She froze me. I hadn’t thought it through this far, to someone actually being there and answering the door, and it left me standing there with all my stupid hanging out. She looked down from the step above, thick peach-colored terry-cloth bathrobe hanging on her very loose, soaking up fresh shower water from her skin. A white towel twirled up in a cylinder from her forehead like a ten-gallon pillbox.

  “Hey,” she said, snapping her long fingers in my face. “I said, what do you want?”

  After a few more mute seconds, “Toy,” I blurted.

  As I said Toy’s name, the irritation ran out of her face. But it wasn’t replaced by anything else. She folded her arms across her chest, breathed in audibly through her nose, and exhaled the same way.

  “Toy isn’t home,” she said.

  “Well, um, could you tell me where he is? I’ve kinda been wo—”

  “No, as a matter of fact I can’t tell you where he is.”

  She let that one hang there, even though it was obviously unfinished. Could she not tell me because she wouldn’t, or because she really didn’t know? The way she said it, kind of harsh and pugnacious, seemed like she was daring me to ask.

  “I am his friend,” I said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  She gave me the tiniest little half smile, the same thing as saying “Duh” to me.

  “I know who you are,” she said. “It’s not like you need a damn program to keep up with all Toy’s many compañeros.”

  I got a little embarrassed, remembering the one time we’d met, when she had no shirt on. Suddenly, I could not shove that picture out of my mind, and it made it even harder to talk. “Oh, ya,” I said, trying mightily to be as cool as I could, which was none too cool. “Ya, I believe, I believe, we did meet, I think I remember.”

  Her smile grew and became more like a real smile, less like a poke. “Yes, I imagine you do remember. What is it you want with my boy?”

  “Well, I just want to check on him, to see that he’s okay, that everything’s all right.” I stopped, looked for her reaction, but she didn’t respond. She just nodded the way teachers do when they think you can do better. “I miss him,” I said, and was amazed to hear it.

  “Good answer,” she said, turned, and walked back into the house. She didn’t close the door, so I didn’t go away. In a minute I heard her coming back down the stairs. She walked out onto the porch with a mug of coffee in her hand, strolled to the top step, and sat down. She’d left the towel upstairs. Now she shook out her wet head, letting her long, kinked, si
lver-streaked brown hair hang down to dry. It was one of those first good warm mornings of spring when if you stood in the sun sixty-five degrees felt like eighty-five, heating up your head and your still March-thin blood. “I like to let the sun do its work. Normally I blow-dry it, but when the sun is right I like to just put myself in its way and let it soak into me. My hair feels better after that, and it smells better, and I feel, I guess, cleaner. From the sun, you know?”

  I turned my back to her and looked up into the sun, to check. It hurt my eyes. Always did. Damn too light eyes. I closed them, and it still hurt, right through the thin pink lids. But I knew what she meant.

  “Ya, it feels good,” I said as I turned around to look at her through the sun spots. “It does make you feel, I guess, cleaner is right. You feel kind of weird and kind of dirty if the sun is out and you stay inside all the time. I love the sun.”

  “Really? You don’t look like it.”

  I looked down at my hands, white and dry as rice paper. “Well, I do need to get more of it.”

  She nodded, almost as if she wasn’t listening, took a sip of coffee, and leaned back. “What happened to your face?” she asked, sounding like she already knew. Although everything she said sounded to me like she already knew.

  I reached my hand up automatically, my fingers lightly touching and covering the bad spots. I had forgotten about them, and now I felt grotesque.

  “Do I have to tell you?”

  “Certainly not,” she said, and kindly moved on to something else. “He goes away sometimes. Trips. He calls them just that, trips. His father calls them that too, trips. Captain Trips, is what I call his father, who also likes to go on trips. They go off together a lot of times. Alone lots of times too.”

  I nodded, because I was supposed to.

  “Toy is not his name, you know, and I never call him that. That’s just a stupid thing his father started calling him when he was tiny, because that’s all Carlo thought of having a baby, was that it was like having a great toy around. His name, though, is Angel.”

  Whoa. Why did that change things? Of course I wouldn’t know, but I did know that things were changed. Angel. Angel? God, there was so much more now. With him gone, there was so much more here, now. Somehow it felt more like I’d gotten inside him. I would probably never use his real name—he did call himself Toy, after all, and I wasn’t about to mess with what Toy wanted—but it was there just the same, wasn’t it?

  “So then, is he gonna be here, you know, anytime soon?”

  When I didn’t hear anything for a few seconds, I looked up to find she’d been staring at me, distantly, dreamily. “Sometimes it’s a long time. Sometimes not so long. But as he gets older, the trips get longer, and more frequent. I worry. It all scares me. Not like with Carlo, because who cares? But with Angel? It’s very sad. And I can’t touch him. He is a wonderful boy, and warm, but he’s off by himself. And when he returns? He’s gone, off even further. I cannot touch him. Not with words, and not with the mother’s hands. I cannot touch him.”

  She wouldn’t stop staring at me. I liked it. It made me uncomfortable. I wanted her to stop, but she wouldn’t. I couldn’t be there anymore, even though I decided I liked her very much, I could feel the time running out on this, running out on me as I got anxious.

  “Well, okay,” I said in a moronic, light, casual way, like I didn’t come here for anything big in the first place. “I’ll just try again, maybe next week.” I stood, wobbled, started sidestepping away.

  She stood, took a last gulp of her coffee as she watched me. “I have a feeling. I think Angel may be here tomorrow. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?”

  “Thank you. Okay, I’ll try. Thanks again...”

  “Call me Felina,” she said, changing somehow with the distance, back into someone steely and tall and motherlike at the top of the porch steps. When she pivoted and disappeared back into the house, I fumbled out a couple of pills and ate them like Flintstones chewable vitamins.

  Hang Fire

  I SPENT THE NEXT DAY where the doctor, my mother, and even Evelyn said I should have stayed in the first place. Bed. Spring sprang full that week, the sun shone, and I hid inside. The sun makes me nervous sometimes.

  Without dragging out all the gories, what I did was hang in my room, listen to music, and amuse myself privately. I was beginning to hear the footsteps that were the end of my medication run with no refills. The bottle that was supposed to last me two weeks, if the pain persisted, was two-thirds empty after three days. Shouldn’t’ve shared ’em with Sully, was the problem. Or maybe rotten-ass Terry got at ’em. Not that he would eat them, hell no. He says that drugs are ungoddamn American and that all they do is pervert the experience of beer. What he would do instead is dump them down the toilet and leave me groping in the dark so that I woke up in the promised land with a pill bottle cap stuck in my throat.

  So I slept with them under my pillow and worked it out so that I could make it on one pill every few hours and if I took it with a beer that I shot right down without breathing, I could achieve and maintain a certain precious state. Hold it for quite a while, stretch out the ride over my whole rehab vacation.

  On Tuesday I listened to the same disc all day, Out of Time by R.E.M. All day. I put it in the machine in the morning and hit the repeat button. I counted how many times it played altogether, but then I forgot how many that was. Sully swears that R.E.M. and Pink Floyd are the same band. Maybe, but after listening to them however the hell many times, I don’t think so. Just to be sure, I planned to listen to Dark Side of the Moon all day on Wednesday.

  Wednesday is a total blank.

  Thursday I listened to Dark Side of the Moon all day. It’s a different band.

  No idea how much time had passed, but when the music stopped, I snapped to with my eyes wide again. Sproing.

  “Told ya it was the same band,” Sully said as he stood over the stereo. “But never play Moon while you’re sleepin’, it screws your head. You were screamin’ pretty good.”

  I was propped up rigid on the bed, my arms extended behind me to keep me from falling back. I could feel my eyes wide and dry, the moisture from my eyes coming out on my forehead instead.

  “Mick, you look like you don’t know who I am,” Sully said.

  “I know who you are, numbnuts.”

  “There.” Sully relaxed. “That’s better,”

  “I was screaming?” I asked.

  “Who the hell is Felina?” he answered.

  “Shut up. How long have I been sleeping?”

  “How should I know? What time did you fall asleep?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Afternoon. Three, three thirty.”

  Sully looked at his watch. “Seventeen hours.”

  “Cut the shit,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “Ten past eight. I just stopped to look in on my way to school.”

  “Eight? In the morning? It’s not Thursday anymore?”

  Sully laughed at me, waving me off like I was some big joker. “Pretty screwed, huh, Mick? I thought you had big plans for cuttin’ back against the grain. You don’t mind my sayin’ so, this looks kind of like your old grain.”

  “Takes time,” I muttered, slouching lower in the bed.

  “Ya.” He laughed. “I hear changing your spots can be a pretty tricky operation.”

  He had me beat. I lay there without answering.

  “Who’s Felina?” Sully pressed.

  “She’s my mother,” the cold voice growled from the doorway.

  Sully stood frozen, staring.

  Toy stared back. With his arms over his head, his hands gripping the door frame above, he looked all spread wide, staring down on Sully, bearing down on him. Like a meal. The hawk and the squirrel.

  “Holy smokes,” I said, and leaped out of bed. My knees buckled and I got intensely dizzy, so I had to sit back down. Fell down, really, while the blood got back to all the needy places. “Oh god. Ouch. Oh god.”

  Toy walked i
nto the room. He walked right to Sully, getting in real close, aggressive close, uncomfortable close. Ready to talk, ready to listen to anything having to do with the last time they saw each other. He made it so that, with Toy’s chest in his face, Sully had to do something.

  Sully’s face turned red, his eyes turned down. “Glad to see you got away okay,” he mumbled.

  “Ya, thanks a bunch,” Toy responded.

  Sully left without a word.

  When Sully left he grunted at something in the shadow of the hallway. Then Toy’s other surprise stepped into the room. Evelyn.

  “Jesus, this is a damn party,” I said, excited and silly like a kid. “Where’ve you been, Toy?”

  Toy was not at all excited or silly. “Where’ve you been?”

  “The disabled list,” I joked, still failing to read the mood of the room. “Evelyn, love, I knew you’d come back to me.”

  She shook her head and flared her nostrils in disgust as she looked me all over. “You know, you got a boca loca, boy. Every time I see you, you say something moronic to me.”

  “I’m stupid with love,” I moaned.

  “You’re stupid with something, that’s for sure.”

  I laughed, feeling it was a compliment of some kind, then looked up to Toy for him to share it with me. Toy had this way of showing his expression even while hiding most of it under his hat. And he was showing me something angry now.

  “So where you been?” I chirped. “You look good.”

  “I was on a vacation.”

  “Excellent. Where’d ya go?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Maybe we picked a bad time, Toy,” Evelyn said. “We’ll see him at school next week.”

  Without thinking, I reached for my pills. Toy snatched the bottle out of my hand and read the label.

  “What’s your problem?” Toy demanded.

  I hate it when people ask me that. “Maybe she’s right,” I said. “Maybe you should go now.”

  “Do you know that it smells in here?” He leaned down into my face. “It smells like a toilet. Are you aware of that?”