Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality

by Bill Peters

  At Necro’s house, the lights are off except in the rectangular window in the basement that used to be Necro’s room. I kneel down and look in. There’s concrete floor where the carpet used to be; leftover hardcover Native American history books, a road sign, a leash, a three-ring binder, maybe one of the ones where he kept printouts of Encarta entries on things like Utilitarianism, the Greenhouse Effect, Niels Bohr.

  I take out a receipt that’s been in my wallet since I was sixteen—$2.59 worth of Gummi Bears from the Wegmans bulk section, on September 26, 1994. School had just started, I’d just gotten my license, and that night me and Necro stood outside the Ames and did breakdance moves and told shoppers we were the East Side Breakers and needed money to get to London. I pull up the grass with my fists, and dig into the ground with my index and middle fingers until they’re swollen and there’s a basketball-sized hole in the ground. I drop the receipt in the hole and armful the dirt back in.

  The moonlight is chalk colored, shadows of branches visible. It’s cold now, the season of cross-country and toilet-papered trees and amazing-tasting cigarettes. Good is not how I feel at all. But I do feel like I could walk past the sliding doors of apartment complexes and wander into parties by myself, give myself a new name for every day if I wanted: Colson McNeil, Kent Rigg, Brian Robinson, Jack Stelson, Mason Devereaux, Blake Chilton, Grant Jackson, John Puma, Ricky Esposito, Scott Grant, Dax Maysinger, Matt Helkinfauer, Jed Carlyle, Jake Mustang, Auggie MacIntyre, Griff Batmanson, Jason Grange. Any one of those.

  TWO BALLERINAS, FALLING

  I wake up another day with the sun bleaching the edges off everything in Mindy Fale’s room. She and her parents have gone to work, and it’s always quieter when you’re alone in a house that’s not yours, like you could stand in their kitchen and scream and hear a tiny ringing in the metal of a frying pan. Those are my keys, almost falling off her nightstand. There is the car, leftover heat from the summer fattening its insides. Nearly a month of this. For our two-month anniversary, she glued me together an ashtray with glitter-hearts, so I can smoke menthols in bed. She makes me dinner and uses real garlic. Big cloves, the kind you have to hit with a hammer to get the peelings off.

  After her work, Mindy Fale brings me along to Meigs Street to look at an apartment, closer to the Bug Jar. The place echoes like a church: the sunlight inside it is tan as a WANTED poster in a Western; brick walls like a fire station; hardwood floors like a basketball court.

  The real estate agent, a college-age girl with a tank top and a long skirt, taps her clipboard and says, “It’s a very young, hip area.”

  Mindy Fale tugs my finger. “This place is so mine,” she says. Her hair is pulled back; highlights in the brown, the way hairdying and bleaching gradually age into hair-highlighting. She giggles and bites the side of my cheek, which really irritates me for a second, like I could have broken up with her right there.

  “We’ll take it,” I say.

  Mindy Fale lets out a long “eeeee” in my ear, and now, I guess, I’m finally Platinum-Murman-Card Gold Membership Nate. No more High School Frito Pace-Offs. No more Rochester Classic Drivearounds.

  Neither of us read the lease. On move-in day I listen to my bedroom get more echo-y as I move a few boxes and take my fifth last look at the four punctures in the carpet where the bedposts used to be. I take the tape of the techno song Necro and I made in my basement after Necro got that keyboard and we sampled me saying “My name is Owlie Fatburger” over Techno-Pyramid Beats. I take the Cosimus Belvende Propeller from the basement and wedge it diagonally into the U-Haul.

  Mom buys me cubes of toilet paper rolls and paper towels; a silverware set; a placemat set with sketches of maple trees on them; a water-powered vacuum cleaner with the bubbles moving up the plastic tube on the body; boxes of dish detergent, with the metal pour tab that you need a Thumbnail of Iron to pick open. She also buys herself a new car and transfers ownership of her old one over to me.

  The new apartment? I sweat through two T-shirts moving boxes in. Me and Mindy Fale sit on the floor and use a turned-over plastic bin as a table for a few days. The bathroom is small and humid and has a way of retaining shaving cream scent but not soap scent. I buy aerators for the faucets; I buy caulking tape; I set up a lawn chair by the window and make a point to sit during afternoons and imagine cozy-sounding piano playing as all the different lives and whatnot walk through this city; I buy a broom.

  I also put on my pre-faded going-out jeans that Mindy Fale bought me and walk with her to the East End Festival, where they tent off parts of East Avenue, set up white plastic chairs for the crowds, and serve wine in plastic cups. The bands playing are the Skycoasters, who say they’re New York’s No. 1 Party Band, and Nik and The Nice Guys, who say they’re America’s No. 1 Party Band.

  The sky is the color of Pinot Grigio. Under the tents are women with bright white visors and tanned fifty-year-old men in pastel yellow shirts and Dockers. When me and Mindy Fale go up to the counter in the beer tent, I smell a combination of locker-room sex and rotting toothpaste that can only mean one thing.

  Toby. Standing over us, yellow on the edges of his white dress-shirt collar. He hasn’t shaven. His hair, and receding hairlines, have grown out, liquor sweat all over him. Which only makes me realize how much, now, I actually do shave. His lower lip is puffed downward.

  “Oh Nate, you’re here,” he says. He looks at Mindy Fale and rubs the corners of his lips.

  “Toby, you know Mindy,” I say.

  “Mindy?” he says. “You look, uh, healthy! You’ve really—I mean, it’s good to see you.”

  Mindy Fale—even though she’s fully aware that Toby’s practically made a plaque that says National Night at the Stalls Award for her—she looks at him, smiles out of the corner of her mouth, and waves with her fingers!

  The sunset snots up in Toby’s forehead sweat. He looks like he has pink eye. “I’ve got a girl too, Nate. We’re getting married. She’s almost eighteen.”

  He crushes a plastic wine cup on the ground when he takes one step backward.

  “What’s wrong?” Mindy Fale asks.

  “It’s just that we can’t exactly get married now,” he says. He slings his arm around Mindy Fale, which immediately has me planning for a way to Warp Whistle out of here. He sucks in his gut. “Can’t get married for like, two or three years, maybe,” he says. “At least.”

  “Why?” I say.

  “Parents,” he says. “Her parents.” He smears his palm across his right eye. “They want us to break up.”

  “Aww,” Mindy Fale says, like she’s spotted a one-eyed stray.

  “She’s very school-oriented,” Toby says. “She said she had homework until eight, very grade-oriented. Whereas I’m more relationship-oriented. So until she can move out, we’ll just have to wait for each other.”

  “She will,” Mindy Fale says, side-hugging him. “I dated a guy who beat up a Wegmans cashier who said he was too drunk to buy beer for football. He was in jail for a little while. We weathered it.”

  “I’ve just, I’ve been really kind of down, lately, on myself,” he says, face drooped, like a sad pie. “Between this girl, and ever since I Went Off the Top Ropes on Necro. I gotta get some control, you know. I’ve been on these prescriptions. But I take them and I’ll think, for real, that out of the corner of my eye, that I see somebody—the mailman!—in my basement!”

  And with that, after one last play in my head of the Toby and Nate Great Plays Highlight Reel of any time I tried to tackle him on the way home from some party in the woods, or anytime he played that VCR tape of “Bum Olympics” on Life Without Shame, I look to Mindy Fale, fake yawn, and I am no longer friends with Toby.

  Except, I fake-yawn again. How long is she going to let Toby’s arm stay around her? I raise my eyebrows and shift my eyes toward the street—all of which are Classic Warp Whistle Gestures to let someone know you want to get out of here. But instead she mouths, angrily, “What?”

  “That’s why, ve
ry soon, Nate, I need to bang her,” Toby says, and, voice getting hoarse, suddenly, like he breathes an aerosol form of sausage: “The parental decree could come any day where they just tell her ‘no more.’ After which my dick is fucked. My dick is a can of worms.”

  Because, what Mindy Fale doesn’t know is the last time Toby’s dick was a can of worms? There were teeth marks on his neck, and not in a good way.

  “That’s why, Nate, I need a favor. I had to sell my car, I’m trying to take classes at MCC, take this downness I’m feeling and squash it. I need a ride, to go find her tonight.”

  “I’d give you a ride,” I tell Toby, “but Mindy has to work tomorrow, and we walked—”

  “We live three blocks away, Nate,” she says. “I’m a big girl, I can walk myself.”

  I look at Mindy Fale, Warp-Whistle Gesturing until my face evaporates.

  “Go on, go! Help your friends!” she says, shoving my arm.

  “This deed will not go unrewarded, Nate,” Toby says. “This deed is, like, the Sacred Gold Coin, buried in the Secret Cave of Zargon or Whatever, worth 8 billion points. Let me just go tell my mom.”

  Toby sits down at a white plastic table under one of the tents, and touches the arm of some arthritis-faced lady with a pink sweater tied around her neck and whose hair is thin like blond cotton candy. Which, I guess, is his mom, who I’ve never seen ever, in all the years I’ve pulled into his driveway.

  “Why are you being weird?” Mindy Fale says.

  “I’m not being weird! I’m trying to get out of here.”

  “You can’t be tired. You’re off tomorrow.”

  Toby slings his arm around my neck and we walk off to my car. The street lamps are turning on, mansions on East Ave, some converted to dentist’s offices, others still mansions for whoever here has money, with goldshine in the windows. I think to myself: I wish I were bored more often. Your nerves shrink when you’re bored. That’s why time moves slower.

  But, nerve shrinkage. Just reciting the things Mindy Fale knows calms me down: Nobody knows why or how cats purr. Or how the red in your eyes in photographs isn’t from the film quality, or the lighting in the room, or even from the camera at all. It’s from the blood in your pupils, reflecting back at you like violent coins.

  On 490, Toby has the passenger window down, forearm on the windowsill, turning the radio to the Nerve. We head into Pittsford, an electric-awning bread maker of a town. We turn into a neighborhood whose name involves an animal trail—Fox Gulch Something—where there are pastel-colored houses and timed sprinklers still rotating in some front yards.

  “This is her house!” Toby says. “Turn off your headlights! Turn off your headlights!”

  Toby’s girlfriend sits Indian-style on her front lawn, shin bones shiny. Her hair is dark and short in the back but reaches down to her chin in the front. Her shirt, a tank top, is supposed to be tight fitting but it’s loose around her stomach. A lot of knee bone still in her legs, which makes me wonder how old she really is.

  She folds her body into the corner of the car’s backseat. “What’s up!” she says in this guy-type way that’s way too old for her. When she closes the door, there’s a feeling of being vacuum-packed, the air sucked out as the door seal licks around the rim of the door. The radio’s volume is ant-sized. I don’t even get introduced. She’s wearing blue sneakers that have orange shoelaces, socks that have Snoopy and Woodstock on them. Toby hangs his palm over the headrest, and she hooks fingers with him.

  “So let’s go get that drink already,” she says, faking a twang. “Pitcher of Get-the-Hell-Outta-Here Juice.”

  Toby rubs his chin. “We could always drive to the Kove, Nate.”

  Good God. Not the Kove. I haven’t even told you about the Kove. I practically contributed lambs and small countries to God hoping I wouldn’t have to bring up the Kove. The fact that Toby’s bringing up the Kove—a Toby museum exhibit—is enough to make you pity him until he turns into his own brand of syrup.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” I say.

  “I was, shall we say, reminiscent,” Toby says, more loudly, to the girl.

  “I could be persuaded,” she says, again, in a loud adult way that doesn’t belong to her.

  “Very well! But, to the liquor store first, captain!” Toby says.

  The Kove? The Kove is this abandoned hardware store where Toby and his older friends who I haven’t seen in years, people you’ll never meet, used to drink vodka and wrestle each other unconscious in sleeper holds. Matt Sullivan, Mitch Keisler, Ryan Glasscock, last name actually Glasscock. They furnished the Kove with some sofa they stole from a curb, and some cafeteria chairs Toby stole from the high school. And, the other thing—the only guy who has the keys to the Kove’s padlock? Toby. Glasscock gave Toby the key one night when he was drunk enough to think he’d lose it, before he went off to college and became a regional accounting manager in North Dakota.

  I remember, one time, how Toby described sex: like a hammer covered in skin.

  My car crackles over some gravel at some liquor store parking lot, and Toby gets out to buy a cube of Genny and a plastic thing of tequila. The light from the store makes Toby’s girlfriend more visible from the rearview mirror. She frowns out the window.

  Looking at her, though, I think, right then, she’s someone who could help me do the first right thing I’ve done in some time.

  “Do you really want to be with Toby?” I say.

  She droops and glazes in the backseat.

  “I’m taking the GED. He supports me,” she says.

  “Why would you quit school? You live in Pittsford.”

  “You try serving up ice cream at Abbott’s, and having some ex-boyfriend that’s at every show you go to.”

  “I’ve known Toby for a long time,’” I tell her. “Has he told you why he brought you out here? Has he told you that out of boredom he tried to convince me my best friend was a serial arsonist? Has he told you this?”

  She looks at the car’s floor.

  “Give Toby three months, he will bring you to a bar so his friends can lick tequila out of your navel. Give Toby three years, he’ll shove aside the dinner you make. He will never have enough money to take you anywhere. We can Springsteen this car back home, while he’s still in there. We can unkill the time we’ve lost tonight.”

  I let the crickets, the occasional car that breathes by, help my point sink in.

  “Are you hitting on me?” she says.

  Toby walks out of the store, silhouette only visible in the store light. He strains the shocks when he angles, ass-first, into the backseat next to his girlfriend.

  “And we’re off! Commander Spock, take us away!” he says, holding the girl’s hand. He cracks open a beer one-handed and opens the bottle of tequila.

  I drive onto 104, which noodles out past towns like Holley and Albion that are maybe the size of a tic-tac-toe board on a map. Towns that have 1st St. or an on-a-whim 5th Ave., like they’d wanted to start a city, but only got as far as one or two lights on at night and maybe one smokestack, where a large, muscular arm of smoke might reach upward, until sunrise.

  Toby says something into the girl’s ear. In the rearview mirror, I see the girl stretch out, like she has to think with her body.

  “Well, I guess there was one other guy,” I hear her say. She murmurs something else, and pushes his sweat-shiny palm away from her dress. “I don’t know. I’m not mean like you.”

  There appear to be steroids in the air. Toby gets bigger by the breath.

  But when I pull into the Kove lot, there’s a sushi restaurant in its place, dark inside and closed for the evening, with an awning that has some Japanese lettering, some tiny bamboo plants on the windowsills.

  Toby gets out of the car, leaving the door open, just before I come to a full stop. The girl gets out after him. His voice sounds like it’s been strung up and hanged; he grips his forehead-fat with his hands: “Oh no no no no. Oh no no no no. Come on. No.”

  Toby run
s to the restaurant’s door, stabs the Kove Key at the keyhole, and hurls the Kove Key across the street, where there’s a gated-off dirt lot, further off, and a Home Depot that has large letters that spell COMING SOON across the windows.

  It’s late enough, and getting cold enough, to see our breath in the light from the street lamps. The girl plants one hand on her hip.

  “What,” Toby says to her. Their bodies are backlit in a way where you can see their arm hair from far away. I stay by the car, to give them the idea that I can’t hear them argue.

  “You didn’t say it’d be this far out,” she says. “I have to be home. I told you we have my parents’ boat.”

  Toby jams the heels of his hands into both sides of his temples three times, audibly. She sticks her jaw out, like she’s ready to yell, but Toby cuts her off:

  “Oh my GOD! You always do this!” he says, spit leaping off his lower lip. “Whenever I make a wrong turn, whenever I write down the wrong address. I provide the money! I provide the car! That’s something I do.”

  Toby pulls her in, arms like chompers on the back of a garbage truck. “It’s just that I try so hard,” he says, lips pressed into her scalp, “and all I want is to die all the time.”

  Since I’m calling this evening over, I twirl my keys around my index finger. But suddenly I feel a scrape on my knuckle and my keys are gone, because Toby has just yanked my key ring off my finger, hooked the girl’s body with one arm, and opened the driver’s side rear door and slammed it shut. He slaps down all the locks on the windowsills and immediately grabs the girl by her hair and facebombs her on the lips. I hear her gag and try to say something, and Toby’s suctioning her whole face practically, and something creaks in the car, and a handprint smears on the window, and I see Toby’s fist under the back of her shirt, and the girl’s hair mats up against the glass, and Toby almost rolls into the seat well, and the car shakes when he palms the floor, and then I see the girl’s hand, trying to push Toby’s face away, and then I realize Toby’s trying to rape her, and my chest clenches into a trash compactor, and every other building is closed, and I look down, and I find I’m poised, somehow, like a shortstop, but just standing there, knees bent, and all I can say to myself is Oh God Oh God Oh God, because the girl yells, “Please no!”—muffled by Toby’s chest, and the glass begins to fog up, and she jams a thumb in Toby’s eye, and, with a cylinder pump, Toby pins her arm to the seat.