by Alex Behr
Gabe rode with a hitch every mile or so, the chain jerking off the derailleur. After cursing his brother, he jammed the bike on the sidewalk and turned the pedal so the chain engaged with the gear teeth. He breathed in bus and truck exhaust; the wind made his eyes tear up. Still, he felt better riding than sitting around like he used to, doing bong hits all day.
To the east, the hills rose up, embracing the flatland. The silhouette of trees formed a wave against the sky. He passed folks at bus stops, in hairnets or Raiders jackets, with anxious kids kicking at the plastic walls.
Gabe crossed against traffic, shooting up to the Redwood Hills. In the park, his bike wheels rocketed down a path. The sun was setting, but the dirt path radiated heat and kicked up dust. A lizard scrambled off a rock. Gabe rode off the trail down a smaller path, toward a stream where salmon spawned. He held on to the handles, but he had to brake to avoid hitting a tree. He spun out and fell in the dirt, his bike landing next to him. A rock tore his pants and cut his knee.
He picked up the bike and looked it over. The chain had come off again. When he attached it to the teeth, he moved the pedal to tighten it, like he had all afternoon. He wiped his greasy hands on his jeans and noticed something new. One of the nuts on the front tire fork was loose. He tightened it, thought of Dylan fixing the derailleur, and wondered, Did he loosen it? If the front tire had fallen off, Gabe could’ve reeled over the handlebars and onto a rock. But Dylan wouldn’t have done it; he wanted the money Gabe owed him.
At Karen’s, Gabe sat on the balcony overlooking the backyard. Karen was at her sister’s for the weekend, so he wouldn’t be hounded about the bruises and scrapes. He pretended he lived in a neighborhood that had some action. A BART train flashed by on the elevated tracks, as if rushing to someplace important, not more stops along the East Bay sprawl.
After the train passed, Gabe heard arguing from the front yard. Big Daddy was yelling and slapping his grandson again. Big Daddy, long-time occupant of the block, owned it. He was an older black guy who seemed to know all the gossip, but that wasn’t shared to Gabe at first. Maybe all the gossip was a lie. Who knows? It was a crack “hotspot,” according to the papers. But Gabe considered himself lucky to be out of his mom’s house. He ended up here because it came with Karen. He was nothing if not an opportunist. And he didn’t view that as self-criticism.
He could tune out the ruckus, and he tried to ignore the sound he knew was Dylan, pounding on the front door and yelling his name. He heard Big Daddy telling Dylan to shut up. Big Daddy liked the twins most of the time. They drank beers with him out of the cooler kept in Big Daddy’s trunk. Gabe figured Big Daddy liked them in that shallow way drinkers tolerate each other across racial lines. Neither Gabe nor Dylan had been into Big Daddy’s house, but Big Daddy lent Gabe his edge trimmer to keep the block looking good.
Gabe met Dylan outside, mocking the BB gun in his brother’s back pocket. Big Daddy’s grandson, Petey, ran over and asked for a quarter. Dylan gave him all the change in his pocket.
Gabe and Dylan headed toward a few bars they liked on University Avenue, a mile or so north. Shattuck Avenue looked static, its car dealerships quiet for the night. Shattuck, a former railroad line in the 1800s, was four lanes wide with a green median strip, and the stores’ parking spaces were separated from the thoroughfare by more concrete strips: one way in, one way out. The sidewalks were vacant, except for couples out for a quiet evening. The brothers passed cheap Chinese restaurants, used bookstores, and a second-story massage parlor that never seemed to get much business.
Gabe counted the blocks that consisted of silence on his end and stories from Dylan’s. His brother didn’t even need a grunt or a nod to keep going. He talked about being in Iraq, about guys in his Army unit who had liked him, for the most part, but he had a couple of enemies, too. They hated him for no good reason except they wanted to be home and he rubbed them the wrong way. They’re looking for you to fuck up, Dylan told him. If you stumbled, if you coughed, you heard about it for days. Dylan walked faster. He held out his BB gun.
Gabe pointed to flags waving around a car lot. “No snipers here. The only thing I want to study is the bottom of a pint.”
Dylan took out his BB gun and shot it toward a street sign.
“Shit,” Gabe said. He ran and laughed, then stumbled on his sore knee. Dylan helped him up.
“I don’t have your money,” Gabe said. “But you can have my paycheck. Serious.”
At a bar on University, a couple of women noticed the twins, as they always did. They bought the pitchers. As twins, Gabe and Dylan attracted women who would do things for them, until the women learned better. Dylan lit a five-dollar bill on fire, just to see what a college chick in a halter top would do.
Gabe challenged Dylan to a game of darts. The stereo system played Rush and AC/DC. Dylan played air guitar, indifferent to people’s stares. Gabe drank a soda, alternating it with the beer.
Gabe picked up a dart and steadied himself behind the line. The board was in front of a black curtain, at regulation distance. Gabe admired the Brits on TV who didn’t play darts professionally until they were fat enough to rest a beer on their gut. They didn’t waver, even with a cigarette hanging off their lip.
He threw the dart and it hit the outer circle. He swore, hoping no one besides Dylan saw.
Gabe flagged down a waitress for another pitcher and sat back with Dylan. He wasn’t sure how to bring up the weed business. Dylan didn’t approve of drugs. Then Timmy came in, looking around. Gabe waved him over. “What’s that asshole doing here?” Dylan asked. Gabe told him to be quiet. No big thing.
Gabe knew Timmy from Chico. Timmy first gave him weed in elementary school and later sold pot for his own family. People erroneously believed the pot was better in Humboldt, the golden triangle, but the hotter days in Chico stressed out the plants and made the weed stronger.
Gabe was adept at business, starting with selling and trading baseball cards. He amassed good ones, like the Reds’ Pete Rose and Bill “Spaceman” Lee, and sold them to buy weed in the boys’ room. The math was simple. A dime equaled one gram, and an eighth was three-and-a-half, so he could buy an eighth, sell two grams at ten bucks each (back then), and have a gram and a half left to smoke.
After high school, Gabe’s big break in dealing came when Timmy figured out he could be trusted. First he was allowed to pet the dog in the front room. It was a poodle in diapers. Gabe was too high not to laugh.
During the next visit, he got to enter the living room. Timmy’s dad, Stuart, was the closest Chico came to the white-trash mafia. He didn’t just sell local weed; he moved it for the Mexicans. He had heavy, lidded eyes and wore a cowboy hat with a silver buckle. He sat on a couch in front of a low dining room table, facing the door. Gabe handed him a present, a book of Civil War maps. Stuart opened it to one of the Battle of Antietam. “General Lee, man,” Stuart said, drawing his finger across the Confederate lines. “The genius lost his shit on that one.”
Gabe took a rolling paper and dropped some of his own leaves into the crease, rolling an even joint. He brought it to his lips and Timmy shook his head, but Gabe sealed it with saliva anyway, hoping the ends wouldn’t be wet. His hand shook when he handed it to Stuart, but he took a hit without coughing and handed it to one of Timmy’s cousins.
For two years after high school, Gabe worked for Timmy. Every day, he slept until 1:00 p.m. His breakfast consisted of a Big Gulp and a McD burrito. When he came back and plugged in the answering machine, he jotted down five or so calls and answered the phone, which constantly rang. He made the rounds in a green Pinto, getting high with most of the people he sold to. He could buy anything he wanted, like an electronic bong that lit up purple.
Timmy poured himself a pint from the pitcher. He had bad skin and was missing a tooth. He talked quickly, confusing Dylan with Gabe.
Dylan got up to play a round of darts. Timmy stood by the board with his hand over the bullseye, daring him to throw. “Don’t be a squ
irrel,” Timmy said. “Just do it.”
Dylan threw a dart. Gabe watched its arc and descent. He winced. The dart entered the board about an inch from Timmy’s palm.
Timmy laughed and said, “I’ve been jabbed with needles thicker than this dart, buddy.”
“Watch this.” Dylan took out his BB gun and shot it into the center of the board. The bartender yelled over the music to get the hell out, but Timmy walked to the line and patted him on the back.
“Things will look up for you, Gabe,” he said.
“I’m Dylan. I’m straight.”
“It’s cool,” Timmy said. His words were slurred. He nodded at the college girls. “Good evening, ladies.” He dropped a twenty on the table toward the tab.
The brothers staggered back to Karen’s apartment after 3:00 a.m. Dylan fell asleep on the couch, and Gabe took the bed. He woke to a paper bag of empty beer bottles by the front door. Dylan was gone.
Gabe pulled back the mismatched curtains to let in some sun. Karen had gotten them from the Goodwill bin. He wasn’t sure he could stay with someone who let one curtain hang down farther than the other.
In Karen’s kitchen, Gabe limped to the fridge. All that walking last night after the bike accident had tweaked his knee. Gabe counted nine salad dressing bottles; most were half-empty and expired. He ran them under the sink to wash off the residue and lined them on the counter. He rubbed his eyes. He called his son, but when he heard the high-pitched voice on the outgoing message he hung up. Sometimes it was too painful.
He hadn’t wanted to be a dad, but his son’s mom didn’t want to have another abortion. She had cried when she thought of sitting next to the vacuum machine, the little cells and bits of tissue going into the hazardous waste disposal. She couldn’t go through that again. Plus, he believed they would stay together.
The phone rang—it was Dylan. He told him he took Gabe’s job. He said the boss didn’t care if it was one brother or another. Gabe didn’t care, either. He could find another job putting in sheetrock. Construction and restaurant jobs—they were felons’ occupations.
Done with housekeeping, Gabe looked through the listings for a car. He called someone named Maggie Holmes about a ’73 Ford Gran Torino, green with a wide body and a 351 engine. He didn’t care if it was a gas-guzzler; it was cheap, only $900. Maggie didn’t know its worth. On the phone she said she had inherited it from an ex-boyfriend. Gabe listened because he felt he could talk her down even more.
He took a BART train to her house. It was a small bungalow with hydrangeas under the picture window. She seemed a little shaken at first, like she wasn’t used to having a strange man in her kitchen. She offered Gabe a beer.
“My landlady—she walks around naked sometimes.”
“I’d like to see that,” Gabe said.
“Yeah, but she sleeps in my bed when I’m out. She told me she has herpes. But she doesn’t sleep in it when she has an outbreak.”
“Damn,” Gabe said, glad he didn’t take a glass for his beer.
He noticed the landlady had her own bedroom, pristine, with a hippie altar and Grateful Dead bears in the corner. Gabe felt bad that Maggie, with her red-hennaed hair, had a landlady who sullied her sheets. Women shouldn’t live together. It made them territorial and nutty.
But this landlady was in Belgium visiting her parents, so he could relax. On the fridge was a list of things Maggie was supposed to clean, like the tops of the doors and the light-switch plates.
“Do you want to hang out sometime? Talk about your landlady?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’m off on Mondays.”
But Gabe felt guilty. He wanted to stay true to Karen. He liked how this North Berkeley girl smelled, though, and how her body moved under the dress. He liked the Gran Torino, too.
He blamed his condition on being a twin—that feeling that another life similar to his was being led simultaneously, and he could never judge which one was better. There was no preferable choice, just different ones. Like when he heard his kid coughing on the phone, and he hung up, relieved he would get a good night’s sleep and his kid’s mother wouldn’t. He felt guilt, but it passed as soon as he turned on the TV.
He said yes to the car and got Maggie to agree to a drink later that night. He liked it that her bra strap was showing, and she tried to hide it. It was compulsive, like knowing which people would buy drugs. He could tell people who were susceptible to good salesmen.
The Gran Torino ran out of gas a block away from his mom’s house, under shoes dangling from the electric wires. He cursed and put the car in neutral. He forced down the window with one hand on top of the glass and the other shoving the broken handle in circles. He saw the kids down the street—the ones he was sure had torn up his mother’s lawn.
He got out, as if he planned all along to get some exercise. He had to lean inside to steer, trying to push a few thousand pounds of metal and plastic down the road, not veering into the other cheap cars on either side. The kids came closer. Someone chucked an acorn at him. Then another. Then a rock. They ran behind him, aiming at his bare legs and ass.
When he lived in Chico, he used to sell weed to kids about their age. One kid with a Nike fade cut into his scalp and a ripped t-shirt sat on the hood. Gabe turned the wheel as if it to take on these kids, as if the rusted Ford vehicle with the peeling roof could become a battering ram at will. He breathed deeply and shoved the Ford, but two other boys started pushing from the trunk. Just as Gabe felt a rock hit his shoulder, he lost control of the car. It hit the side of a Toyota sedan. The impact triggered the car-alarm sensor.
Gabe knew the leader, a kid named Aja. He balanced on the rail of a fence about a few feet away. A thin boy with a Ghanaian dad and a white hippie mom, he looked graceful standing on the fence with his arms outstretched, as if he could ascend to Heaven. Instead, he bent his knees and jumped onto a stained mattress on the sidewalk.
A kid in a Bob Marley shirt pointed at Gabe and yelled above the alarm, “Your DSDD!”
“Your DSDD” meant, he was fairly certain, “your dad sucks donkey dicks.” Ludicrous. He left the broken car. He ran down the sidewalk and grabbed his crotch. The gesture was too late. The boys had moved on, around the corner on their skateboards. The only people who saw his junk clutch was his mother, frizzy-haired and eating a bagel with hummus and sprouts, and his son. His son was not smiling. He had his baseball cap pulled down low.
ZÀI JIÀN
Hazel didn’t invite people over. Her husband, Tom, had painted the house black before he left on tour. It was supposed to be a rebuke to bucolic Laurelhurst’s setback charm, and it did reduce the footsteps and doorbell ringing of plastic-wrapped children shaking her down for candy on Halloween. The couple balanced wise real estate decisions (buying in a good neighborhood in Portland) with a healthy misanthropy.
Tom put a cow’s skull over the door. But Hazel took it down. She worried it would confuse pagan Burners. They might think it was an invitation for fire-licked drum circles. Some knew Tom used to drum at Anton LaVey’s house parties back in San Francisco. She never went. They were racists. No amount of punk fashion could hide the fact she was Chinese. Tom had said: “They’re being ironic. Besides, Anton’s LPs are collector’s items.”
She put a large NO SOLICITORS sign over the door. Plus their dog sounded like Satan’s pet when he barked.
Then Hazel’s mother moved in. She didn’t have anywhere else to go. She held her suitcase in front of her as a shield against the dog.
One night, fingers rubbed across the skin of Hazel’s face. Ears picked up vibrations. Do ears have knowledge of a personal sound versus a stranger’s sound? Her skin was rough. She felt across wrinkles. To the hairline where lice once shit and bred.
“Hazel!” Her mom said her name like each syllable was a ring tone on the phone. It was 3:00 a.m. The dog barked and put his paws on the window above Hazel’s bed.
Hazel wrapped the bathrobe around her. She shut the door on the dog. He scratched and whin
ed to be let out. She walked down the hall, scaring herself. But what was there to be scared of? It was only her mother.
Her mother increased the repetition of her name. Hazel hated the sound of it coming from her mother. Raspy. Her mother added her middle name, Mei (the orphanage name). Then her last name.
Hazel opened the guestroom door slowly and turned on the light. She had always studied her mom. She was the daughter-in-waiting. The woman-in-waiting. Blood dripping. Eyes glowing from the closet. The cat’s eyes, peeing on the laundry. She was small and her mom was ever growing.
Hazel bent down to hear her mother’s breath. Her mother put a hand on Hazel’s neck. She lifted Hazel’s chin and stared at her. She plucked a hair with tweezers.
“Ow!” Hazel said.
“Damn it,” her mother said. “That was bothering me all day.”
“Mom, you need to sleep.”
“Give me a huggy-bug.”
Hazel rubbed her eyes. Trains were bringing in Chinese goods from container ships all night long. She’d heard train whistles all her life, even used to travel on boxcars from El Cerrito up to Portland when her head was shaved. She remembered them from when she walked along the railroad lines picking up iron ties. She carried them in her Army coat, thinking she could hit someone in the head if he tried to rape her.
In the old days, Chinese rail workers wrapped up the bones of the dead and sent them back to China. They went by train, then by ship.
In 1868, a schooner sailed from San Francisco with thirty-nine boxes of Chinese remains and traveled back to the home villages. So the ghosts would rest.
She had no place to send her bones. No known village. No known mother besides this one here. The remains of the females rotted in the sun. They weren’t important. Only the men were shipped back.
She tucked her mother in and kissed her on the forehead. “Goodbye,” she whispered in Mandarin. There were ten different ways of saying this simple word. For all her mother knew, she was saying, “Goodnight.”
