by Martin Seay
Yes, Claudio’s split lips corroborate. It is just as my friend has told you. A telephone pole.
All along the walk, Claudio whispers, then falls silent. Relentlessly repeating himself. I looked every place for you, he says. All the morning I looked for you, and all the afternoon. I had so many things I wished to tell you. I had so many ways I had learned to make our lives better. And I could not find you. Where were you?
Stanley clenches his teeth, says nothing.
The first round of knocks brings no one to Welles’s door. A second round—hard and protracted—also dies away with no results, and Stanley is about to jump from the stoop and try the side door when the lace curtain swings aside to reveal Synnøve’s face, her pale paint-smeared hand over her horrified mouth.
She wraps Claudio in an afghan—the same one Cynthia used last night—then makes another icepack, and hurries from the room to the telephone. Stanley holds the new pack to Claudio’s face; Claudio keeps the freeze on his cracked hand with the other one. His forehead is corpse-pale; he’s bruising quickly under both eyes. Where were you, Stanley? he says. I looked every, every, everywhere.
Listen, Stanley says. Shut up a minute. Tell me who did this.
The hoods.
No shit it was the hoods. What hoods?
Claudio’s mouth goes sour. It doesn’t matter, he says.
It does matter, kid. Who was it? I gotta—
Where were you? Claudio says. A sharp note creeps into his voice, sad and dangerous.
Kid, Stanley says. You need to tell me, right now, who did this. Because if you don’t, then I’m gonna have to guess. And I’m gonna guess whoever it was had a lot of help, and I’m gonna wind up making a bigger mess than I need to. Now. Who? Whitey, right? How many more?
Why did you want to make any deal with them? Claudio says. Why did you think it could be any good?
Who else? Stanley says, moving the icepack to Claudio’s opposite temple, coming around the chair to face him. The boss? If you don’t tell me, then I’m gonna think yes. Got it? You understand what that means?
Claudio’s slotted lids blink at Stanley. Then he looks away. His lips open and close. It was the one you guessed, he says. The white one.
Okay. Who else? The boss?
Claudio shakes his head, winces.
What about those other two? The ones we saw with Whitey at the penny-arcade?
Yes. Those. No more.
Stanley lifts the icepack to move strands of hair from Claudio’s eyes. His brow is clammy. What happened, kid? he says.
I do not wish to talk about this with you.
Goddamnit, kid. Why didn’t you fight ’em off like I taught you? Why didn’t—
Claudio reaches up with his icepack, bats Stanley’s arms away. I fought them, he hisses. I fought them like you said. And look.
He tries to lift his broken hand; grimaces. Skin’s missing from the knuckles; Stanley hadn’t noticed that before.
I fought them, Claudio says. I tried to go with no fighting, but they would not permit me. They would make me do a thing that I did not want to do. They tried to make me, but I fought them. In the way that you said. I kicked them, and I hit them with my hand, and when I hurt my hand, I kicked them again. I hurt them. I made them go.
Stanley nods. Okay, he says, touching Claudio’s hair. Okay. That’s good. It’s good that you tried. But, kid, if you’d done like I told you—exactly like I told you—then you wouldn’t have a busted hand, and we wouldn’t be in this fix. You got a lot of heart, chum. But we still got some work to do toughening you up. Next time—
No, Claudio says. He cocks his head under Stanley’s hand, looks him in the eye. Then he lifts his left fist and punches Stanley in the forearm, hard. It’s a glancing blow, but it hurts. Stanley takes a step back. Claudio sits up just enough to hit him again, in the shoulder, moving him farther away. Whoa, Stanley says. Take it easy, kid.
Why do I have to do these things? Claudio says. Why, Stanley? I do not want these things. You want them. Tough? God damn you and your tough. I do not want to be tough. I want to be brave. I want to be beautiful. I want to be famous.
Stanley rocks back on his heels in the little kitchen, rubbing his arm with his thumb where Claudio struck it. Tomorrow he’ll have a bruise there. Okay, he hears himself saying. That’s fine. We can do that. I’m sure there’s ways we can do that.
Claudio settles in his chair, picks up the icepack, puts it on his hand again. There are one million ways we can do it, he says. One million times did I try to tell you. But you did not listen. You did not listen.
In the next room the phone returns to its cradle with a soft chime, and Synnøve rushes back into the kitchen, opening cabinets and closing them. I reached Adrian at the office, she says. He’s leaving work early. He’ll be home soon, and then he’ll drive you to the hospital. For now, let’s keep the ice on your hand. And—here, Stanley, here’s a bottle of Tylenol. Get Claudio some water, and have him take two. I’m sorry, I’d do it myself, but I’m filthy from the studio. I have to clean up before Adrian gets here.
Where’s Cynthia? Stanley asks, but Synnøve’s gone from the room before she hears him. As he opens the bottle and shakes the white pills onto his palm, Stanley hears her move through the house: running water, opening drawers.
He puts the Tylenol and the dripping glass on the tabletop next to Claudio’s hand. Claudio’s fingers release the icepack, pinch each pill in turn, bring them to his lips. Then he washes them down with sips of water. He moves very slowly. His eyes are closed.
Not talking to me, huh? Stanley says.
Claudio slouches in his seat. His lips and eyelids are bluish. A vein flutters in his forehead, shrinking and growing like the belly of a snake. His bloody inflated face hangs on his skull, and for a second Stanley can’t remember what he really looks like.
I had so many things to tell you, Claudio mumbles. But you never listen.
For a long time Stanley watches him like that: sipping from the crystal glass, fighting to keep his head up. He’s sideswiped by a memory of the long rainy days that closed out their February: the kid reading his stolen screen magazines while Stanley read The Mirror Thief. Stanley was combing his book for clues; Claudio was just killing time. That’s what Stanley thought, anyway. In Claudio’s head, of course, it was the other way around. Stanley’s known this before; maybe he’s always known it. Now he understands it differently—harder, colder, more serious—and it feels like he’s met a high wall, or a fork in the road. This kid has his own warm body, living and dying, and a black-box mind that cannot be seen: just the same as Stanley, or anyone. And Stanley can’t know him; he can barely know himself. There are many questions that Welles’s book can aim him toward the answers to, but this is not one of them. The best it can do is convince him that questions like these don’t matter, and Stanley hopes one day it will.
He stands behind Claudio and stares at the back of his skull until he can’t take it anymore. Then he steps to the side door—his rubber soles soundless on the linoleum—unlatches it, and slips onto the porch. He does this without so much as creaking a plank, but Claudio must feel the air change when the door swings open. Stanley? he says.
Stanley leaves the door ajar behind him. He’s pretty sure that Synnøve’s in the bathroom, not anyplace where she’ll see him leave, but he rushes across the yard anyway, vaults the fence, jogs the half-block to Pacific Avenue. He’s breathing hard now. His own pulse hammers his eardrums like the footfalls of pursuers.
By the time he makes it back to the squat the wind has picked up, levitating loose papers from ashcans, rocking streetlamps into herky-jerky pendulums. Below the wall of incoming clouds a sliver of red sun has dipped into the ocean. Stanley glimpses it for a second as he passes Horizon Ave; when he turns onto Horizon Court he loses it again.
Before he left this morning he put his things away with care, just like always; it doesn’t take him long to find the items he needs. After a minute of packing up Claudio�
�s stuff he’s on the street again, dodging oncoming cars on the Speedway, moving with tunnel-visioned ease, like he’s lived in this neighborhood for years. Even with the sun gone and bad weather coming, the world feels disenchanted, shrunken. Stanley’s on familiar ground now, comfortable and sad.
The first big drops catch him on the boardwalk, as he’s settling onto a bench; they flash under the streetlamps, leave jagged silver-dollar-size sunbursts on the wooden planks. When they strike his skin they’re heavy and cold, like shoulder-taps from a ghost.
He watches the windows of the penny-arcade—still a block away—until he’s good and soaked, and his wet shirtsleeves have become loose reptile-skin on his arms. At this distance he can just make out faces: Whitey with a fat lip and a swollen eye, his two junior punks with minor scratches. All three look sullen, unhappy with each other and with themselves.
People pass between Stanley and the arcade in a steady stream, moving quickly in the rain: some share umbrellas, some huddle under newspapers. Their silhouettes pulse across the windows like gaps between cards on a Mutoscope spool. From time to time someone joins Stanley on his bench—a drunk, a grifter, a pervert—but Stanley won’t look and won’t say a word, and eventually they all go away.
Stanley thinks of Welles’s list of names in his pocket. He should have left it at the squat; the ink will run when it gets wet. Not much to be done about it at this point. It was probably bullshit anyway. It was a bad move, trying to play the game on Welles’s terms instead of his own. He can see that well enough now.
One of the two punk Dogs—the one farthest from the door—finally steps away from his machine, headed for the john. Stanley rises from his bench. He closes the distance in a hurry without breaking into a run, and he takes deep breaths as he goes. A couple of the people he passes must be able to read the intention in his face; they avert their nervous eyes, give him a wide berth. Soon he’s standing in the door, puddling the concrete with the rain he’s accrued. The punk is just a few feet ahead, his back turned. Whitey’s clear across the room, facing Stanley, blinded by the game he plays, or by whatever he’s thinking about. For a flickering instant Stanley thinks what he always thinks at these times: You don’t have to do this. You can walk away. The idea slows him up more than he’s used to. He feels like he’s at the first tall drop of a rollercoaster track; his eyes are squeezed tight with the effort of imagining himself elsewhere. But of course he is not elsewhere. He is here.
He takes a few quick steps, passes behind the first punk, stops, and elbows him in the kidney. A half-human moan bursts from the guy’s lips as his knees fold. Stanley drops with him, fingers tangled in his greasy hair, to drive his face into the steel coinbox.
Stanley scrambles on all fours to the corner, past the row of machines, then stands up as he circles around to Whitey. A couple of people are staring at the fallen punk; a few more hotfoot to the exit, but Whitey plays on without looking up. Stanley is close enough now to see his score: two million points, one ball left to play. The guy isn’t bad; he knows what he’s doing.
As Stanley comes up behind Whitey he peeks over his shoulder for a second at the bubbling seahorses and topless mermaids of the playfield, the flash of the silver ball. He lets Whitey keep playing until the guy feels eyes on his back, realizes that something is wrong. His concentration wavers. The ball drains.
Stanley pulps Whitey’s right hand against the cabinet’s edge with the swung blackjack. Then he hits him again on the side of the head, and keeps hitting him until he’s motionless on the concrete. A girl a few machines down screams.
The third Dog isn’t yet finished in the john, so Stanley goes in after him, kicking his stall door open, bringing the blackjack down until it connects with his face. The Dog balls up, sags against the spattered wooden panel. Through a small glory-hole over the roll of paper Stanley sees someone cringing in the next stall. Oh god, a voice says. Oh my god.
On his way back to the boardwalk, Stanley pauses to club Whitey one more time, taking care not to step in the slick of blood that spreads from his body toward the ocean, carried by the downgrade of the concrete floor.
48
It takes no more than a minute to clean out the squat. Soon Stanley’s on the street again, his dad’s fieldpack on his back, Claudio’s duffel slung over his shoulder, walking through wind-driven rain as the crack-bulbed streetlamp overhead creaks and thrashes on its black cables. He’d planned on using the Speedway, but flashing lights of squadcars and ambulances—he can’t tell how many—have congregated at Westminster, a block from the penny-arcade. He stops under a leaky canvas awning to watch as red pulses from their gumball beacons throw the gigantic shadows of rainslickered cops against the sides of buildings. Stanley thinks of black scorpions attacking Mexico City.
He doubles back to Market and heads inland, into town, taking Cabrillo to Aragon to Abbot Kinney, taking Abbot Kinney west again. As he’s making the left on Main an ambulance rockets through the intersection behind him, siren keening, and this makes Stanley feel a little better: if the guy inside was dead, nobody’d bother with the siren. At least that’s what people used to say back in the neighborhood.
Wave Crest comes up in a few blocks. As he’s crossing Pacific the clouds open up, the wind sweeps the rain into a solid-seeming wall, and he hastens to the doorway of a bakery for shelter, already firehose-drenched. This is probably where Synnøve bought last night’s bread; today it’s closed for Shabbos, its carefully labeled window racks—TEIGLACH ךעלגײט – HALVAH הבלח – HAMANTASH שאט־ןמה—bare and swept of crumbs. Stanley puts his wet nose to the glass and inhales, but it just smells like glass, like nothing.
Welles and Synnøve must have taken Claudio to the hospital by now; nobody seems to be home, which is what Stanley’s counting on. To be certain, he bangs on their front door, leaves the two packs on the stoop, and waits in the yard, crouched between the sundial and the row of dark hibiscus, out of sight from the street. Nobody answers. Stanley stands up, knocks again, hides again. To kill time, he reads the brass letters set along the sundial’s circumference. It takes him a second to figure out where to start. I snatched the sun’s eternal ray, they say, and wrote till earth was but a name. Raindrops drum against Stanley’s back as he bends to read.
He makes a quick circuit of the house to look for lights in windows and finds none. Under the shelter of the deck he crosses the side porch to the kitchen door. A burbling drainpipe pukes dark water onto the pavement; a prefab concrete channel aims the flow into the flowerbed, where it forms a puddle. The knife-edge of the peaked roof appears in the puddle’s rippling surface, black against the moon-green sky.
Stanley pulls an old roll of maskingtape from a jacket pocket; it’s swollen now at its edges from the damp. He tears off strips and tapes over the door’s lower right-hand windowpane, the one closest to the knob, until it’s covered entirely. He overlaps the strips so everything will stick. His hands are cold and stiff and badly puckered from the rain, and it takes him a while to do it. When he’s done, he puts the tape-roll back in his pocket, takes off his jacket, folds it in two, and presses it against the taped-up window with his left hand. Then he punches it with his right fist: a hard, glancing blow. The pane breaks with a flat crunch. A few slivers, smaller than rocksalt, sprinkle the porch and glitter around Stanley’s feet. He shakes out his jacket, drapes it over his shoulder, peels up the layer of tape. Almost all the broken glass comes away with it; he sets this aside. Then he reaches through the window and lets himself in.
The air inside is dry and warm and full of strange smells that Stanley hasn’t noticed before, or that weren’t here. He feels like an archaeologist who’s just unsealed a tomb. He moves quickly through the house to the front door, hangs his dripping jacket over the banister, and hauls the two packs in from the stoop.
In the john just off the staircase he finds a towel, dries his hair and hands. Then he opens his pack and comes out with the thick wad of cash—Alex’s junk money, the take from t
he boardwalk con—that he’s amassed over recent weeks. He combines this with what little he has in his pockets now, counts the total, and divides it in half, as well as he can with the bills he’s got. It’s even within a few bucks. Stanley puts the smaller half back in his fieldpack, tucks the larger half into Claudio’s duffel.
Then he searches the house. He grants cursory attention to the ground floor—pump shotgun under a dust-ruffle in the tidy master bedroom; weird sculptures in Synnøve’s cluttered studio, adipose blobs, skinless and shapeless, like organs without bodies—but Stanley already knows what he really wants to see.
Upstairs in Welles’s study, he throws the bolt on the big barred door but finds the internal deadbolt still locked. He steps back to look at it. There’s probably something downstairs in Synnøve’s workroom that’ll knock the lock off or pry it open, but that seems inelegant, amateurish, and Stanley isn’t sure he has time for it anyway. Besides, he has a feeling Welles keeps a key stashed close by.
He checks the obvious places first: the undersides of the desk and the swivel chair, the drawers and the backs of the drawers. The desk is still unlocked, the two pistols within easy reach. Welles doesn’t lock up his guns, but he keeps that big black door locked. Cynthia’s room, he called it. Bullshit.
Stanley opens drawers and closes them. Every time he bends down he smells the bandage on his leg; he still hasn’t taken the time to change it. Every time he sits up his vision swims, he gets lightheaded. He feels like he’s running a fever. Outside, the wind gusts; cold rain hisses against the windows and the french door.
After a while Stanley sits in the swivel chair and leans back and thinks. Trying to imagine his way into Welles’s big pipesmoked body, into his swelled head. He’s not having much luck. He runs his fingers along the edge of the desk, lingering in the spots where the wood is worn, the finish faded. The letter he found last night—the one from the hospital in Washington—lies open on the desktop, and it looks as though Welles has started to draft a response:
