Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Sure,” Donnie wheezed. “What would I do with it?”

  “Some gimps might not like holding swag,” Dirk replied, waving the end of the cane before Donnie. “Some gimps might get the idea of turning it in. But you wouldn’t do that after all these years, would you?”

  “Dirk, it’s all still in my locker—just like you gave it to me. Two watches and that car radio.”

  “Good.” A dark smile shadowed his face. “Then I won’t have to rough you up.”

  Donnie whined, sweatdrops standing out on his face like the heads of pins. “Help me up.” His eyes reached for Dirk. “Please.”

  The shadow of Dirk’s smile flitted away. “See you downstream, fool.” He left the cane where Donnie could reach it and backed off.

  Even with his hand on the cane, Donnie recognized that he was going to fall. His shoulders, icy with fatigue, couldn’t pull him up except in wild, lurching movements that would snap the branch holding the cane. He hung there quivering, a whimper opening from the center with the certainty that he was going to take a beating.

  Lani looked at Dirk with pinched eyes and rushed away over the gnarled ground. Dirk flicked his middle finger at her and dropped the silver disc from his eye. He caught it below his hip. “Women,” he said with resignation. He faced Donnie, whose round face shivered. “They don’t understand, do they?” He walked the long coin between his fingers, grinned at Donnie like a bat, and walked away.

  ***

  Dirk caught up with Lani at the ranger station, a building of gray planks and unlathed tree trunk posts supporting a sun-battered shake roof. The place was empty except for a husky Hawai’ian woman behind a counter of pamphlets about exotic birds and plants. Lani strode across the gravel parking lot to the charter bus that had brought their class to the volcano park when Dirk took her by the wrist. “Hey, slow down.”

  “Let me go,” Lani said with clenched intensity.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Before Lani could say anything, a shriek sounded from beyond the blossom-fired shrubs as Donnie Lopes took his fall and began crying from the lava field. “You’re cruel,” she said with flat indignation and turned to walk toward the bus.

  “Me?” Dirk followed, arms open at his sides, revealing his obvious innocuousness. “You don’t know Donnie Lopes, sister.”

  “He’s a gimp, Dirk,” she said without breaking stride. “You beat up on a gimp.”

  “So what? He holds stuff for me. I got to keep him in line or he’ll think he has something on me. What do you want me to do? Go back and apologize?”

  “Don’t shock me.”

  Dirk took Lani’s arm again, and she stopped to face him. The woman at the ranger station hurried out of the building toward Donnie’s cries. Dirk shrugged. “Okay, I was a little hard on him. I’m sorry. I can’t stand the sight of him limping around studying rocks and plants like he’s some kind of scientist. He gives me the creeps.”

  “You give me the creeps,” Lani said coldly and pulled her arm from his grip. She had been warned about Dirk. Her brother, gangleader of the Judas Boys, a street-crew of mongrel youths that Dirk had been dealing with for the last year, had warned her. The Judas Boys sometimes used him to move stolen goods, because he knew most of the reliable fences in town. Her brother had pegged Dirk as an angry clown bound to make a fool of her. He was right. “I don’t want to be with someone who steals from gimps.”

  “Steals?” Dirk’s face opened wide with incredulity. “I never stole anything from him.”

  “Then what’s that metal thingee you took from him?”

  Dirk reached into the thigh pocket of his safari pants and pulled out the silver ovoid. “This piece of junk?” He held it out to her, and his fingertips felt chilled and the air around it looked burnished and scratched with hair-thin rainbows. “I don’t even know what it is. I’ll give it back to him if it makes you feel better.”

  “You want to make me feel better?” She stepped away from him. “Leave me alone.”

  “I would if I could.” He sidled up to her. “You know I’m hung on you.”

  His gentle tone mollified her anger, and she didn’t stop at the bus but kept walking to an asphalt path that wended through a brake of banana trees. The arrow-shaped sign there read “Lava Tube.” Dirk had a golden scent about him—a woodmeat odor Lani liked—and when its damp sawdust fragrance touched her, she calmed enough for him to take her hand.

  They strolled without speaking down the switchback path under boughs of red ferns and along lava walls glisteny with moisture and splotched with yellow and blue lichen. The lava tube appeared ahead, a dark tunnel loud with echoes of some tourists at the far end. In this darkness cool and silken as the inside of a cloud, Dirk drew Lani closer and was bending to kiss her when a thick hand gripped his shoulder.

  “Mistah Romance, you gonna get dirty lick’ns.”

  The gruff voice sounded like a boulder trying to speak. Dirk turned and in the blackness faced the denser darkness of two large men.

  “Lani, walk,” the boulder said.

  “Ipo, leave him alone,” Lani insisted in a quavery voice.

  “Mistah Romance get moh romance dan you sistah,” Ipo’s gravel voice crunched on. “Da Judas Boys say bus him up. Poetic justice. Whateveahs.”

  Terror quacked like a choking duck in Dirk’s chest, and he couldn’t get his voice to work. He had heard about Ipo and his silent partner, Chud, two legendary Judas Boys who had done time as juveniles for murdering a cop ten years before and had gone on to become hitmen for the Japanese mob, the dreaded Yakuza. “Hey, what’s the problem?” Dirk asked, and his voice sounded like tinfoil.

  “Da problem is—you wen feel good an da Judas Boys not.” Ipo’s thick voice chewed the air around Dirk, and he could smell something like squid on the big man’s breath. “You burn da Judas Boys, toilethead—now we wen unscrew your face.”

  “Hold on!” Dirk squealed. “I never burned the Judas Boys. You don’t like what I gave you, give it back. I’ll get your money for you.”

  “Oh yeah, you fine dat money awright—wit’ interest, toilethead.”

  “Sure,” Dirk agreed, the word smoking up from the hot ingot of his stomach. “Anything the Judas Boys want.” Dirk’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he could see the golf clubs that Ipo and Chud carried. Their shaven heads looked like the silhouettes of footballs.

  “What’s going on?” Lani wanted to know.

  “I sold the Judas Boys some ice and they think it’s been stepped on.”

  Lani stared at him with plangent surprise. “You don’t deal drugs, Dirk.”

  He never did. His mother had been a junkie. He shrugged off Lani’s disappointment. “I was helping a Hotel Street girl. She’d lifted it off a sailor. It was no good for her. Money’s kinder.”

  “K-den, toilethead, you wen geev us a towsand.”

  “A grand?” Dirk looked to Lani as if this were a joke. She looked white as a pulled blind. “The ice cost them two-fifty. I spent a hundred of that already, but I can borrow it back. I ain’t got a grand.”

  “Den you get mess up.” The head of Ipo’s golf club came up swiftly under Dirk’s chin and clacked his teeth together forcefully, sharply nipping his tongue. “You mess up, you stay mess up, toilethead. Now you wen pay. Either wit’ money or wit’ pain. Fo you decide.”

  Dirk swallowed the gummy taste of blood. “I’ll get the money.”

  “Try get foa next day.”

  “We’re just getting back to the Home tonight. How can I get up that kind of money in one day?”

  The head of the golf club pushed tighter against his throat, gagging off his breath. His hands moved to pull the club away, and the other club came up between his legs just hard enough to send a jolt of nausea from groin to scalp. “Try get next day behin’ da keiki field—or wen next time, no talk, jess hard rub.”

  The golf clubs fell away, and Ipo and Chud turned and slouched into darkness.

  Lani stepped closer. “You a
ll right?”

  “Yeah, I eat pain.” One hand massaged his throat, the other clutched the throbbing ache of his crotch.

  “What you going to do?”

  “Get the money,” he said, though he couldn’t imagine how he could pull together that much cash so quickly.

  “Was the ice bad?” Lani asked.

  He shot her an indignant look. “It was a real bride. I wouldn’t touch it otherwise.”

  That news deepened Lani’s frown. “Then you’re in bad. They want to break your face, don’t they?”

  Dirk walked out into the sunlight, and plaited scents of water-rubbed rock and blossoms gentled him. “So why are you hanging out with me?”

  “My brother says you’re a bad time,” she admitted. “But you know me—I never listen to anybody but me. Come on—let’s get back to the bus.”

  Dirk didn’t move. While holding the pain in his pants, his hand touched the object he had taken from Donnie. A peculiar feeling streamed from it, through the pants fabric and into his hand. A worshipful sensation, like the indigo dark of trees at dusk, whelmed through him, and his hurt seemed tiny by comparison. Suddenly, he wasn’t in his body anymore. He lofted through a darkness chained with stars. And though the air brisked very cold, black as oil and filmy with rainbows, a boast of euphoria swelled through him.

  Insideout’s scan lasted about six seconds. While Dirk stood entranced by the magnetic stimulation of his midbrain, the alien replaced its images of Donnie with those of Dirk. In the exchange, it saw them together: At lunch in the high school cafeteria, Donnie reading while he ate, oblivious to the clamor around him, and Dirk leaning across the table to sprinkle Donnie’s soup with fishfood from biology class; Dirk sitting behind Donnie on the bus, pelting him with paperclips, slyly tying his shoelaces to the seat post and dropping to the curb with laughter when Donnie tripped and couldn’t get up before the bus pulled away. Inside the laughter lurked more cruelties, memories of trapping Donnie in his locker, rigging a ball bearing to the tip of his cane in the middle of the night, and dropping insects into his ear while he slept.

  Dirk hated Donnie, because they both came from the Home—O’ahu State Boys’ Home—and the sight of Donnie staggering around had filled his days for the last eleven years, since Mady, Dirk’s mom, went to prison for prostitution and the State committed him to the Home. He had been six then and used to wandering: Mitch, his dad, had been military, and before a land mine chopped him to pieces, leaving them stranded in Honolulu, he had taken them with him to Germany, Alaska, Virginia, and the Philippines. Dirk grew up as a stranger in the world, and Mitch saw to it that the boy learned how to hold his own. He taught his son hand-to-hand combat when he was three, and he instilled in him a predatory watchfulness before the boy could even speak well. An animal genius possessed the boy, and he excelled at shattering pine boards with his hands and kicking water balloons dangled above his head.

  If Mitch hadn’t died three years later, his discipline would have shaped Dirk into a Marine. That’s what Mady told the teachers who called her to the schools because of Dirk’s brawling. Dirk went to five different O’ahu elementary schools in two years. The rage of losing his father had been uncontrollable, and since all that was left of Mitch was the merciless fighting style he had passed on, he fought,

  Dirk spent the rest of his childhood perfecting and augmenting the skills his father had taught him. Thinking back on it, as he often did during the long bus ride from the Home to school that passed the gates of the military base where his father had served, he was glad for his fighting heritage: That alone kept him whole when Mady went bad after Mitch died. Alcohol and pills cut the grief of enduring without Mitch, and Dirk spent a lot of time on the street running purchase errands for Mady and her clients. A six-year-old copping pills on streetcorners lured perverts from every rathole in the city, and Dirk became proficient at warding off threats and inflicting injuries.

  By the time Mady got busted and jailed, Dirk had become a street viper, spindly from malnutrition and venomous with rage. His face clenched in a defiant scowl, even in sleep, his furiously scrawny body fit with muscles taut as razors, he terrorized the other kids, even the senior boys and the social workers. Small as he was, no one could stand up to him when he was enraged. Fury jagged in him like lightning and moved him faster than most people could think.

  Six older boys, blighted by child abuse and toughened from years of vengeance, ganged up on Dirk in the lavatory during his first week at the Home. Three were hospitalized. Shoved into a urinal, bigger than he was at that time, Dirk spun about on the wet, scooped ceramic and gouged the air from the lungs of his nearest assailant. His flash-stab forced fingers under the boy’s sternum and touched his heart with a pain like the silver tip of an acetylene flame. The kid curled up no better than a torched insect, and that happened so swiftly that the other five boys didn’t appreciate the dark skill they had just witnessed. The scowling wastrel whirled, whip-punching testicles, elbowing a kidney, kicking a knee to splinters, biting a half moon of flesh from an arm, and slicing the cornea of an eye with a precise finger flick. No one in the Home ever threatened him again.

  Dirk, of course, didn’t require threats to vent his rage, and soon he had used his terror to buffer him from the Home: Other boys made his bed, completed his chores, prepared his homework, and helped him hawk the drugs he scored from his old street contacts. This was a smooth arrangement for him, until Mady got out of prison four months later and left the islands without him. He didn’t blame her. She had married Mitch at sixteen. That was in Stuttgart, where she had grown up near the military base. A war baby, fathered by one of the many occupation troops who had used her mother to flash their lust, she suffered in Germany, especially after her mother’s suicide. It was a tired story. Dirk knew all about it. During Mady’s drunken binges, that was all she talked about.

  Glad he wouldn’t have to hear that anymore, Dirk nonetheless despaired at being kenneled in the Home until he was eighteen. His despair made him sloppy, and the Home counselors caught on to his drug trade and called in the police. Not much the police could do to a seven-year-old, but his street contacts deserted him, and the counselors isolated him and kept him from abusing the other boys.

  Denied human targets for his vehemence, Dirk turned on the inanimate world, breaking windows, clogging toilets, and scrawling obscenities on walls. Punishment fed his furor, and eventually the medical staff sedated him. He was on and off medication for the next six years, examined by countless psychiatrists and childcare specialists and finally abandoned as incorrigible. By then puberty had assailed him, and he found a new outlet for his violence.

  Ruddy blond, with eyes pale as water, thick-shouldered and tall, Dirk from the age of twelve attracted women. Several times a year, he’d run away from the Home and seek out the contacts Mady had made in Waikiki. Most of them had left the islands or gone to prison, but friends of friends were always available for a boy as ruthlessly handsome and aggressive as Dirk. He ran purchase errands again for the prostitutes on Hotel Street, and they paid him in favors, which for Dirk at the age of twelve worked better than money.

  By the time he reached fifteen, though, he had gotten bored of sex and became intrigued with love. His first lover, Tina, a social worker at the Home, a woman in her early twenties had hair the color of a violin, eyes the subdued gray of clouds, and a voice like the northern lights, bright, shifty with moods and colors, and far away. Dirk fell in love with her beauty and her tranquil equanimity—a sureness of character that he had never witnessed in any of the girls on Hotel Street.

  Tina’s attraction to Dirk was pure animal magnetism. At fifteen, Dirk had become a rangy, sandy-haired boy with eyes of crushed glass in a face hewn by summer sunlight. They made love in the attic storage room among shrouded hulks of unused furniture, dim mirrors, and tiger shadows from the window grills.

  For the six months that his affair with Tina lasted, Dirk’s mischief stopped. The Home counselors initially thought
he might be sick. When they finally came around to believing that the hellion had made a change of character, Tina departed for L.A. to seek her fortune, leaving Dirk bereft. Rejection did not mix with his innate outrage, and he railed against love and women in his graffiti and aloud, in feverish ranting. From then on, Dirk resolved to love only for convenience.

  Lani saw him shivering, eyes glazed like blue mints, and she assumed he trembled with fear of Ipo and Chud. She knew then she had been a fool to go for this bullying and deceitful loverboy. She had been attracted to him by his brash good looks and perpetual bravura—though now she saw how shallow that act was. A pang of pity lanced her remorse, and she shook her head sadly, more for herself than for him. Now she’d have to find someone else for good times.

  Dirk’s trance drifted off like a cloud shadow. Again he stood in white wine sunlight, surrounded by mossy walls of black rock and long, bashful green giraffes of ferns. He saw Lani walking away, but he didn’t care. Like a crescendo of alcohol, power surged in him. A sound like the music of icicles chimed from the sky. He wondered what was happening to him and suspected that somehow, whatever was happening, it might be coming from the silver disc Donnie had found. But how could that be? This was just a piece of metal, not much bigger than a bottlecap—how could it make him feel anything?

  He turned to follow Lani back to the parking lot, a shout of amazement beginning in him before he saw Ipo and Chud watching him from the mouth of the lava tube. In the sunlight, their shaved heads and faces looked like lacquered wood. Ipo, barefoot in red nylon shorts and sleeveless undershirt, leaned on his golf club, sunlight peeling off the globes of his shoulders in a sweaty gloss. His squashed face chuckled. He thought Dirk had been shuddering with fright. Chud, who stood behind him with his golf club across his bare shoulders, stared with the impassive ferocity of a tiki god.

  Dirk flicked his shoulders back. Let’m think I’m scared, he told himself, as the incredible trance he had just experienced shrunk to a smell of cider-turning apples and a dewy feeling in his lungs like after a long cry or before a thunderstorm. He didn’t know what had happened to him. The disc had shocked him, not with electricity but with some colder and more ethereal force. He still felt it. The faceless coin in his fist hummed icily, and an exhilaration pungent as autumn smothered all fear. When he passed the thugs, he stared far into their eyes, into the back of their heads, and the frost light in his gaze made them both flinch.