Saints of Augustine

by P. E. Ryan

  He uncoiled the hose from the side of the house and dragged the nozzle over to the car. The hit was fairly fresh; it all but vanished when the water blasted into it.

  Someone had once told him that birds were color-blind, but Charlie didn’t believe it. How could you even know such a thing? If he had to bet, he’d say seagulls could tell colors apart just fine. They obviously loved bright red.

  He was going over the hood with a towel when a car rolled to a stop in front of the house. He looked up. It was Derrick Harding’s silver Eclipse.

  He felt his face draw tight across his skull.

  The passenger door opened first. Wade Henson got out, his orange mullet haircut like a flame on top of a fat candle. He grinned at Charlie and made a pistol hand, casually pretending to shoot him. Then the driver’s door opened.

  Derrick Harding was a tall, thin guy. He wore an untucked mariachi and a pale-blue fishing cap with the bill turned up. He should have looked ridiculous in such an outfit. But somehow he looked tough. Dangerous. His face was narrow and sharp, his expression always just slightly unamused. He’d graduated from Cernak and had turned into a business what he’d already been doing since the ninth grade. He considered himself a businessman. He called his buyers “clients.” He had a reputation for making things go his way.

  After his mother died, Charlie had spent a couple of months in a kind of emotional hibernation, trying to interact with as few people as possible. When he came out of that, he felt like he no longer knew most of the friends he used to hang out with. He hadn’t really missed seeing any of them—not like he still missed Sam—but he felt like a stranger. Then he hooked up with Derrick.

  Mr. Fishing Hat. Mr. Laid-Back. For a few stupid weeks, Charlie had looked at Derrick as his new best friend. But it was mainly because Derrick had a great CD collection and was letting Charlie borrow whatever he wanted, and because Derrick was getting him high every time he went over to his apartment and sending him home with a Baggie. “I’ve got to start paying you for all this pot,” Charlie remembered saying to Derrick more than a few times, and Derrick would always pat him on the back and say something like, “Don’t sweat it, bro. You can pay me later. It’s no big deal.” And, once, “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll start keeping a tab with your name on it.”

  “Do that,” Charlie had told him. “I’m good for it.”

  Wade was always there: sitting in an armchair in a corner of Derrick’s smoky living room, rocking his big head to the music, laughing at all of Derrick’s jokes, never saying much to Charlie—until Derrick started sending him around to harass Charlie about his debt.

  Derrick leaned against the side of the Eclipse while Wade planted his feet apart at the end of the driveway.

  “Hi, Derrick,” Charlie said with less volume than he’d intended.

  Derrick let his head tilt to one side. “Perrin. You disappoint me.”

  “Sorry I haven’t been around in a while. I’ve been pretty busy.”

  Wade chuckled.

  “Yeah,” Derrick said. “I miss your company. You know, Perrin, this is really awkward for me, having to come to your house like this. I mean, we’re friends, right?”

  Charlie felt himself nod.

  “Business should just…flow between friends, so that it doesn’t even feel like business. But there isn’t much flow going on lately, is there?”

  Charlie exhaled and sucked in a breath. “I know I owe you some money.”

  “That you do. What it’s up to now, Sutton?”

  Wade held up five fingers.

  “Five hundred bucks,” Derrick said. “And, you know, it’s so embarrassing for me to have to come over here like this that I feel like I should add on gas money, just to save a little dignity. But I like you, Perrin. I always have. So let’s just call it five even. No gas money. No embarrassment tax. Just five. I’m about to be the new DJ at the Mix Club, and I need some equipment. You’re kind of holding me up.”

  Charlie’s mouth was dry. One day he was going to own a private island and be on ESPN discussing his record-breaking contract. Was this really happening to him? “I’ll get it to you, Derrick. I’m—I’m really sorry about not getting it to you before now.”

  Derrick looked up at the sky. He looked down at his shoes. “You don’t have it?”

  “Not right now. Not all of it, anyway.”

  “I don’t understand. Heckle and Jeckle came by my place the other night to make a purchase, and they said you’d called them asking if they’d sell you some buzz. So I’m confused on two counts. One, that’s a hell of a markup you’re paying, if you’re getting it from them after they get it from me. And two, what did you pay them with? Are you broke or not?”

  “Pretty much….”

  “Well, here I am, looking at a really nice vintage car you didn’t have six months ago. I mean, it’s nothing I’d ever want to be seen behind the wheel of, but it must have cost you a chunk of change. And six months ago, you already owed me—how much was it?”

  Wade held up three fingers. He was such a loudmouth when he was alone; around Derrick, he became a silent clerk. A yes man.

  “And now it’s five, and you’ve bought this nice car. Unless your dad bought it for you.”

  “Nobody bought it for me,” Charlie said.

  Derrick clucked his tongue. “I just can’t make sense of the math.”

  “I’d been saving up for it. I’d been planning to buy it for a year.”

  Derrick clucked his tongue again.

  “Wait here,” Charlie said, feeling a very different sense of panic flooding his chest from the one he’d felt earlier, with his father. “I’ll see what I can get.” He threw down the towel he’d been using to dry the hood and walked into the house.

  There were two twenties and a ten in his wallet, on top of his dresser—the money he’d planned to use when he took Kate to the Vargo Steak House. He stuffed it into the pocket of his shorts and walked back to the front of the house, his mind racing for where he might find more.

  His father was taking a nap on the couch in the living room. Charlie froze for a few moments, arguing with himself silently. Then, his heart pounding in his ears, he strode back down the hall to his father’s bedroom. He was sweating. His hands were shaking. He took his father’s wallet off the nightstand and opened it. There was a ten-dollar bill folded into thirds. That was all.

  How the hell was he going to scrape together five hundred dollars? Sell something, he thought, glancing around the house. But sell what?

  Back outside, he kept Wade in his peripheral vision and approached Derrick, holding out the money palmed in one hand.

  Derrick counted it. “Sixty. Wow, Perrin. Our friendship really means nothing to you, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ll get the rest to you!” Charlie said. He cursed himself for bothering to glance at Wade as he said this, as if he owed Wade anything.

  “Three days,” Derrick said, stuffing the money into his jeans pocket. “I think that’s reasonable. After that, I can only assume you’ve decided to throw away our friendship.”

  “I don’t know if—”

  “You don’t know what?” Derrick asked. “If you can get the rest in three days? Come on. A superstar jock with a nice car like that? You’re like money waiting to happen. Use your imagination. Otherwise, wow. I’m not good at this kind of thing, Perrin, it’s not my style. But it could get messy, you know?”

  “I just don’t—”

  “Sure you do. You know.”

  Charlie felt himself nodding. His feet were shifting around in ways his brain wasn’t telling them to.

  Wade climbed back into the Eclipse. Derrick turned toward the driver’s door, then glanced up and said, “Oh, and I want my Stones CD back. You’ve had it for three months.”

  He dialed Kate’s number again that evening. Her mother answered—again. Can’t these people get an answering machine? he thought. “Hi, Mrs. Bryant. It’s Charlie.”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie, but—
” Same old line. He cut her off midsentence, thanked her, and hung up.

  This is why no man is an island, he thought sourly. He should tell Mr. Metcalf that. Nobody’s an island because people are always getting in the way, telling you what you did wrong, telling you what a loser you are, pissing and moaning or getting all bent out of shape for no reason.

  He rolled a joint, grabbed his basketball, and headed out the door. On his way past the VW, he stuck his rolling papers and half the pot he’d bought from the twins into the glove compartment. Kate wouldn’t even talk to him, and he was supposed to pretend he wasn’t getting high for her sake? He couldn’t keep whatever he wanted in his own glove compartment, in his own car? Who did she think she was, Mother Teresa?

  It was past nine. The neighborhood was dark and quiet, the only sound the occasional thump of his basketball against the sidewalk as he walked to the park. Once there, he stood off to the side, out of the streetlamp’s light, and smoked the joint halfway down. He started to put it out, but he couldn’t think of any reason not to smoke the rest of it, so he kept pulling at the wet paper until it was just a tiny roach he tossed onto the ground. The pot went straight to his head. He felt relaxed, a little dizzy. He’d never been in the park when he was high before. The court felt expansive, the rusted hoops a mile apart. He stood just dribbling the ball for a while, enjoying the sound it made when it hit the pavement. Then he started putting a little back-spin on it. Amazing. It felt alive when it hit his hands. He put more of a spin on it and caught it again, then did it a third time and his hands missed the ball entirely, so that it rolled up his chest and popped him on the chin. His teeth knocked together. “Ow!” he said. “To hell with you!” Who was he talking to—the ball? It was a funny notion, standing on a court all by himself, talking to a basketball. Only he wasn’t talking to the ball at all. He was talking to himself.

  He jumped and lobbed the ball toward the hoop. It popped off the rim and bounced like a rabbit over to the cinder-block wall that bordered one side of the park.

  New game, he said, walking toward the ball. It’s called To Hell with You.

  He dug the ball out from behind a palmetto bush.

  He didn’t feel like dealing with the hoop anymore. It looked way too small for the ball to get through, anyway. To Hell with You would be a warm-up game. A fierce drill of chest passes. He walked down to a spot where the bushes stopped and it was just open wall. He dribbled, passing the ball from his right hand to his left. Then he caught it, lifted it to his chest, and as he fired it toward the wall, he said, “To hell with you.”

  It shot back, and he caught it: a dead, clean stop, and a great sound, his hands against the burnt-orange rubber skin. He launched the ball again.

  “To hell with Kate.” As if it were metal and his hands were magnets, the ball shot straight out from the wall and into his palms.

  He launched it harder. “To hell with my dad.” Caught it. Launched it. “To hell with Wade.” Caught it and launched it again. “To hell with Derrick.”

  The ball stung his palms when it made contact. He launched it as hard as he could against the wall.

  Suddenly it felt as if the entire joint caught up with him. A flood of heat rose from his stomach and funneled up his neck, filling his head. I don’t want to be here, he thought. I should be in bed. The three blocks to his house seemed like a long, open field dotted on either horizon by tiny houses on a treeless landscape. Go home, he told himself.

  Then the ball appeared out of nowhere and smacked into the side of his face. The pain, just like every other sensation, was amazing.

  10.

  (This might sound kind of lame.)

  So, Justin’s e-mail began, I’m a little rusty at this, but here goes….

  Would you like to hang out on Saturday? I wasn’t thinking about anything glamorous. In fact, I was thinking about being totally UN-glamorous and going to a few of the cheesy tourist traps in town, because I’ve never seen any of them.

  You either a) have hit Delete by now, or b) are rolling around the floor laughing. If none of the above, then c) let me know. I’ll be hanging from a steam valve, waiting for your answer.

  Yours,

  Reverend Scott

  Sam stared at the screen. He was sitting at his desk, one of his knees moving up and down. How was he so lucky? Justin McConnell was the coolest guy he’d met in a long time; he was great-looking and funny and smart. Why in the world would he want to hang out with Sam?

  Sam’s knees were scissoring up and down now beneath the desk.

  He glanced behind him to make sure his bedroom door was closed. The last thing he needed was his mom coming in and seeing an e-mail like this on his screen. Not that the subject line read INVITATION TO A GAY DATE, but still he didn’t want her coming in contact with anything even remotely connected to…that part of him. It was a part of him, right? It wasn’t going to go away. And since he’d met Justin—no, be honest, it was long before that, ever since his falling-out with Charlie—it had been more and more difficult for Sam to pretend, even to himself, that he was attracted to girls. They left his mind whenever he started to fantasize, and now he was beginning to wonder if they’d ever really been in there at all. But his mom couldn’t know about it. Not after what had happened with his dad, and certainly not after he’d denied it so fiercely during their argument a couple of days ago.

  And whose business was it, anyway?

  He clicked reply, then stared at the blinking cursor for a minute. Finally he typed:

  Sounds great.

  What time?

  Do you have a bike?

  He clicked send, and just before the e-mail zapped off into cyberspace, it looked like the dumbest thing anyone had ever typed.

  Justin’s response was rendered like a telegram:

  YES TO BIKE QUESTION, BUT ALSO HAVE

  CAR STOP

  CAN PICK YOU UP AT NOON STOP

  NEED ADDRESS PLEASE STOP

  VERY GLAD YOU WANT TO GO END

  Sam replied with his address, logged off, and changed into his running shorts and a loose-fitting T-shirt. His Discman still wasn’t working, but he didn’t care. He was so charged up, he could barely get his shoes tied.

  When he came back from his run, Hannah was curled up on the floor in front of the television. He heard her sniff loudly, and when he looked at her face, he saw she’d been crying.

  “Hey,” he said, “what’s wrong?” He sat down cross-legged next to her. His mind immediately went to Teddy. Teddy had done something to upset her, Sam was sure of it.

  But Hannah said, “Dad, that’s what’s wrong.”

  “What about Dad? Is he okay?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What do you mean, you guess so? Did he call?”

  “Yeah. He said for you to call him day after tomorrow, in the morning. It’s too late now because of that time-zone thing.”

  “Well, what’s up?”

  “He’s staying in that stupid city another month.”

  Sam was drenched with sweat. He dragged the sleeve of his T-shirt against his forehead, but the sleeve was already soaked. “Hannah, we already knew this. He told us he was coming back late September.”

  “Not anymore. I talked to him, and he said he has to stay longer. Now he won’t be back till Halloween.”

  “What?”

  “Clean your ears,” she snapped; she’d gotten that line from him. “He won’t be back till Halloween. When Mom heard me talking to him about it, she practically ripped the phone out of my hand.”

  “And?”

  “And I was just like, hel-lo, I’m talking on the phone.”

  “No, I mean what happened when Mom talked to him?” Sam asked.

  “They had this total fight.” She wiped her nose. Her hand squeezed a button on the remote clutched in one hand, and the channels started rolling.

  Sam grabbed the remote and turned off the TV.

  “Hey!” she said. “What is this, National Grab Day?”

/>   “What did they fight about?”

  “She asked him—” He shushed her a little. She lowered her voice. “She asked him if he was staying over there because he wanted to, or because David was there.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He must have said both, because she got mad and told him ‘both’ was ‘just terrific.’ Then she started talking about you and me, and she said Dad was choosing David over us.”

  “She said that?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “Wow.” He wasn’t sure what to think. On one hand, he was glad his mom had said it, because his dad had been gone half the summer already and it was crazy to think that he wouldn’t be back till Halloween, that he was choosing to stay away that long. But on the other hand, Sam felt that his mom shouldn’t have made the remark at all. It didn’t seem fair, because it wasn’t like their dad had stopped being their dad; he was just away. This was all really about David, Sam suspected. Which meant that it was all really about his dad’s being gay.

  His brain was just getting around to wondering how Hannah was piecing all this together when she asked, “Why does Dad like David so much?”

  Sam swallowed. He handed the remote back to her. “David’s a nice guy. What, you don’t like him now?”

  “I didn’t say that.” She turned the television back on and started absently clicking through the stations. “He’s nice. I like him. I just don’t see why Dad needs to be in London. David’s the one who had to go. And why can’t Dad do book research here?”

  “Maybe the research is better in London right now.”

  She glanced at him and all but sneered her lip. “No, it’s not.”

  “You don’t even know what book research is.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s when you…when you…lose a book twice…and you search for it again.” She started laughing, even though her eyes were still damp from crying. Sam cracked up, too, which made her laugh even harder.