“Yeah, I’m sure he did. You guys want another shot at him?”
Sixteen Years Ago
“Great. On top of being the size of a Panzer tank, he bats for the Yankees?” asked Twitch.
“That’s the word,” Junior said. The forty-pound iron barbells clanked as he lifted them off the rack.
Word had spread around The Home that Zach Bingham had “got” a couple of guys. The last thing you wanted at The Home was to get “got,” since what you “got” was a twelve-gauge poopchute for your troubles.
“I haven’t heard anything yet,” said Twitch, straining his scrawny arms with the fifteen-pounders.
“You seen Delgado lately?” I asked.
“No.”
“Exactly.” I had seen Delgado, if only for the briefest of glimpses. He’d made himself invisible since Tuesday last, when Zach supposedly caught him alone in the food storage room. It wasn’t like Delgado was hiding, per se, he just turned into a shadow. A ghost that walked the halls of St. Gabe’s. A ghost that has started walking kind of funny.
That was the main reason we’d all assembled into crews like we did. Rectal self-preservation. Some crews assembled for the opposite reason. It was a lot easier to take out your sexual frustration when you had a couple of like-minded guys to hold down your fuck puppet. The counselors loved it when we worked as a team on projects, but there were only so many things you can build out of Popsicle sticks.
You were a cobra or you were a mongoose. Offense or defense, both sides evenly matched until one managed an advantage.
Zach Bingham was a goddamn six-hundred-pound gorilla in a room full of cobras and mongooses. The natural order was disturbed by that psycho’s presence. And our six-hundred-pound gorilla didn’t only sit wherever he wanted, apparently he stuck his tallywhacker into whoever he wanted to.
“I—heard he—fucked Sherwood—too.” Junior said between grunts. Before Zach arrived, Junior had owned the biggest biceps at The Home. He’d been working out viciously ever since. Being in second place pissed him off. Junior and I both took pride that we already had the workout-honed bodies of grown men before we were even halfway through our teens, but there were limitations to what we could achieve against Bingham’s base genetics.
“No shit?” I said. Sherwood was the alpha dog of one of the more powerful rape gangs. I couldn’t help but smile at the idea. As disturbed as I was by Zach’s presence, the idea of Sherwood getting a taste of his own medicine tickled me eight shades of pink.
“Nope. Kinda poetic, ain’t it?”
“Yeah. The guy should be laureate.”
“He should be a lasso?” Junior put the weights back and flexed, obviously pleased with his development. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“That’s a lariat.”
“Isn’t that what you said?”
“Never mind.” I picked up the weights he’d deposited and started doing my own reps. “The point is that I’m not going to lose any sleep about the guy so long as he’s banging the bangers. Fair play, I say.”
“Delgado wasn’t a banger,” said Junior.
“I say we take the motherfucker out.” Twitch’s eyelid jumped a couple times in emphasis.
“What, for some light dinner and dancing?”
“I’m not joking, Boo.”
I knew he wasn’t. I looked him right in his beady pink-tinted eyes. “But we don’t make a move until he does. He doesn’t bother us, we got no beef.” I had to admit, as much as the guy made my skin crawl, he hadn’t aggressed on us at all.
“What do we do if he does?” asked Junior. “I hate to agree with Twitch—”
“Thanks,” said Twitch without a trace of sarcasm. Usually nobody agreed with him.
“—but, this guy needs to be taken care of before and not after he decides to use our asses for pussy practice.”
And like the summoning of some mythological beast, the door opened and Zach walked into the weight room. Slowly, he moved his eyes over each of us.
We watched him watching us. The staredown was a standoff at three to one. Then I looked at Twitch’s rigid posture. I knew he wanted to say something.
Zach smiled at us as he picked the forty-five pound plates up off the floor. He scraped them slowly onto the thirty pound bar, wincing pleasurably as he did. It didn’t take Freud to figure out the subtext there.
Twitch slowly turned back to us, his face a mask of murderous rage. “Now’s our window, guys.”
He slid two more forty-fives onto the bench. Two hundred and ten pounds.
“We can end this here, Boo,” Junior whispered toward the floor. “I’m tired of looking over my shoulder for this guy.”
“Yeah.” A dangerous gleam danced behind Twitch’s eyes. “All we gotta do is grab a side of the bar and push…”
The last two forty-fives. Three hundred pounds.
The air in the room crackled around us. “No,” I said softly.
Zach bookended the bench with two twenty-fives. Three fifty total. He lay down on the bench and lifted the weight easily. Sweet peanut butter and Jesus.
“Boo…”
“No!” I whispered hard, and turned on Junior. “You want to be those guys? ’Cause we can turn that corner right now, if that’s the call you wanna make.” He knew what I meant. We weren’t killers. We didn’t execute people. In St. Gabe’s, despite all the tough-guy posturing, all the violence that we were ready to distribute—we both knew we had lines we had chosen not to cross.
Junior, jaw set tight, said, “No.”
We never said it, but despite it all, we wanted to be good guys. St. Gabe’s didn’t have too many. We were still between the ages of adult reality and the childish notions that the myth of the superhero was one to be aspired to.
“I’m okay with it,” Twitch said.
“No,” I said to him one more time.
I didn’t know if Twitch heard my words at all. His eyes were locked on the immense weight on Zach’s bench press.
He took a step.
I put my hand out to his tiny bird-like chest.
Twitch charged.
I roped him around the waist and lifted him up off the floor.
“Let me go,” Twitch said flatly and without emotion.
“He’s got a lot of weight on that bar already,” I said. “Maybe gravity will take care of him for us. Let’s go.”
The weight clanged as Zach placed the bar back onto the bench and sat up. He was smiling at our impromptu wrestling match on the other side of the workout room.
I dropped Twitch and shoved him through the doorway. I turned back as Junior passed by me and then met eyes with Zach’s.
He was still smiling. The pink tip of his tongue flicked to the corner of his mouth.
I shut the door behind me, unease pulling at my more violent instincts.
There’s not a lot of times that I think back on and wish we’d been “those guys.”
But there are a couple.
Chapter Six
“What are you talking about?” I passed the bottle back to Ginny. She took another swig, and I tried not to think nasty thoughts about my co-worker as the whiskey moistened both her plump lips and my libido.
“Byron. Byron Walsh. He’s my roommate’s asshole jazz musician ex. He’s been stalking Dana ever since they broke up. He left his stuff in our apartment when he went on tour and he wants it back.”
“Define ‘stuff’?” I pulled out my Parliaments and lit one.
“May I?” Ginny asked. I offered her the lit cigarette from my mouth. She winced. “Can I get one without nose blood on it?”
I held the open pack to her. She took out a blood-free cigarette and leaned forward for me to light it, the deep opening of her cut T-shirt falling forward slightly. I tried not to peek at the cleavage. I failed.
“What stuff?” I said again.
“I have no idea. Dana says that Byron borrowed money that he never paid back, so Byron’s shit stays put until then.”
“D
oes he?”
“Does it matter?” Ginny flipped a lock of blonde hair out of her eyes and put her hands on her hips.
“Yeah. It does if Byron’s beef is righteous, and your girl Dana is playing some ‘woman scorned’ bullshit on all our asses.”
Ginny smiled quickly…at something I couldn’t see the humor behind. “Listen, Boo. Dana and I talked about this and we want you guys to scare him off. The guy is a serious dickweed. He’s been harassing—”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s between him and Dana.”
“Then I’m perfectly fine leaving it that way. Junior and I have no intention of getting in the middle of some boyfriend-girlfriend drama.”
“Believe me, you won’t be. If it makes you feel better, think of it as me giving you five hundred bucks to keep that asshole away from me. He was here tonight trying to get to Dana through me. He said he was coming back tomorrow. He’s already tried to break into our apartment once.”
“What?”
“There are gouges around the lock on our door. Luckily, we got a good lock. Then he keyed Dana’s car, he smashed our window—”
“Not interested.”
“C’mon, Boo...”
“No.”
Junior, seeing the intensity of the conversation that he wasn’t a part of, felt the immediate need to butt in. “Hey, what’s going on?”
Ginny smiled at me again, then turned to Junior. “Boo won’t take my five hundred bucks to go toe-to-toe with Byron again.”
Junior wrinkled his nose in distaste at me. When you’ve had your nose broken as many times as Junior, that’s a lot of wrinkling. “Shee-yit. For five hundred bucks, I’ll go toe-to-toe with Brock Lesnar.”
“Glad one of you isn’t a pussy,” she said.
I glared at Ginny. She knew where my buttons were. She knew how to push them. “We don’t have the time for this. In case you hadn’t noticed, Junior, we’ve got problems of our own right now.”
Junior held up a finger. “Yeah, but in case you hadn’t noticed, your problems ain’t paying me five hundred bucks.”
True that.
“Fine.” I threw my hands up in the air. “You want it, it’s yours.”
“Oh c’mon. You know it’s only a matter of time before your Knight In Shining Armor dysfunction kicks in. Damsels! In distress! You live for this shit,” Junior said.
“I would really appreciate it,” Ginny said.
Junior waved his hands between me and Ginny. “Go on,” he said to her. “Bat your eyelashes. He’ll show up tomorrow on a fucking white horse.”
“I am not batting my eyelashes,” Ginny said.
I glared at Junior. Mostly because he was right. The first pangs of guilt had already started eating at me for dismissing Ginny’s need for us. Even though every rational instinct told me it was a bad idea. The whole deal had more red flags than the Chinese Army on parade. “Fine. If I agree to this, will you shut up?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll settle for maybe,” I said.
“Hot diggidy.” Junior clapped and rubbed his hands together. “Who’s Byron again?”
Looked like Junior and I both suffered concussions that night.
Ginny thumbed toward the door. “You kidding me? Byron’s the guy who owned you about three hours ago.”
“Hey,” Junior said. “First of all, nobody owned me. I slipped and—”
“And he’s a jazz musician, tough guy.”
“I got taken down by a jazz musician named Byron?” Junior looked like he wanted to hurl.
Ginny sat at a table and motioned for us to sit with her. “He and Dana broke up about three weeks ago.” Ginny took another swig from my bottle. I took it back and took a bigger swig. “He’s been harassing us ever since for his shit, saying he’ll give Dana the money once he gets his stuff. Dana saying to pay up first, then he gets his stuff. Back and forth, back and forth. I guess he got tired of waiting and decided to go all aggro about it.”
“Done and done,” said Junior. “Tell us where we can find the prick.”
Ginny shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think Dana knows either. Soon as he and his band came back from Europe is when all this crap began. He was staying with us for a couple weeks before he left, so I don’t even know if he has a place.”
“Oh, that old chestnut. What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?”
“Homeless,” Junior and Ginny said at the same time.
“He said something about being back tomorrow,” I said. “Was he talking about here or your place?”
Ginny shook her head again. The smoke-diffused light caught in her wheat-colored hair. I wondered what it smelled like. “He knows I don’t work tomorrow.”
“How does he know your schedule?”
“Dana’s my roommate. He used to date Dana. When you live with roommates, you tend to use the alone time whenever you can get it in the apartment.” She explained it in a tone normally used to speak to five-year-olds.
“Ah,” said Junior, a couple seconds later than he should have.
“So he’ll be back at your place tomorrow?”
“Either that or he’ll try something at the roller rink tomorrow afternoon.” Ginny played roller derby on Sunday afternoons. I wasn’t sure if “played” was the right word for it, but I didn’t have another. “We have to leave by eleven. Byron knows the derby schedule too, so if he’s going to try a smash-and-grab, I’m going to guess that it’ll be when we’re at the rink.” She handed me half of a blank bar check with her address on the back.
“So we’ll have to split up the watches.” I looked at the half-empty bottle in my hand. Had I drank that much already?
“So you guys will take care of this for me?”
I clapped my hand onto her thigh. Damn if roller derby didn’t tighten up Ginny’s legs. “For you, Ginny, anything.”
Ginny peeled my hand off her leg like it was a large insect of questionable motive. She looked at Junior. “Is he tanked?”
“Getting there,” Junior said.
“I am not,” I lied. “Can’t a man...” I couldn’t figure out how to phrase the rest of my question.
“No, he can’t,” Ginny said as she stood, buttoning her coat. Then, back to Junior, “Has he been bitching about that Kelly chick again?”
Junior tapped his nose.
Ginny smacked me on the back of the head. “Get over it. Night, boys,” she called out to Twitch and G.G.
“Night, Ginny.” G.G. held up his beer.
Twitch was too busy focusing on lining up the eight ball. With a sharp crack, he sank it coming off a hard angle into the side pocket.
“Damn, little man,” said G.G. “You’re a shark.”
Twitch smiled and shrugged. “I’m gifted.”
I supposed that was one way of looking at it.
They both moved to our table. “I should’ve known better than to play pool against a dude who shoots a moving bat in a snowstorm.”
Twitch held up his hands innocently. “Again, I have no idea what you guys are talking about. And, again, I was aiming for his head.”
Yup. Still wished I hadn’t heard it the first time. More so the second time.
“Well, I’m out,” said G.G.
“You mind putting in some early work tomorrow?”
“You payin’ me?”
“Sure.”
“Then I’m there.”
I handed him the paper with the address. “Ginny’s got a guy who’s been trying to get in. Her roommate’s ex-boyfriend.”
“Uh-oh. You sure we want to get in the middle of a lovers’ brawl?”
“No, but it’s a favor for Ginny. Can you be there by eleven?”
“In the morning?” G.G. looked at his watch. “It’s cruel, but I can do it. She got cable?”
“I dunno,” I said.
“She better. I ain’t missing the Patriots game.”
“We’ll
relieve you before kickoff.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He grabbed his backpack and was gone.
Twitch looked to the two of us.
“No,” I said firmly.
“What?”
“We don’t need you for this job.”
“Well, fuck you very much.”
“It’s a brawn, not brains or bullets kinda situation, brother. No offense.” Junior put it better than I could, considering my current state.
That explanation seemed to placate Twitch. “If you need me, ring me.” He mimed a receiver to his ear as he backed out the door. The snow was still swirling behind him. I couldn’t help but wonder where he’d stashed the gun.
“I’m taking off in a minute before this is completely un-driveable.” Junior’s ’79 Buick, Miss Kitty, could drive through a Himalayan mountain, but the last time the heater worked, people still thought Nickleback was cool. “You need a ride?”
“Nah. I’m gonna crash out here, if we gotta be at the rink early. Just pick me up here.”
“You sure?” Junior’s bulldog face wasn’t able to express much concern, but it was there, nevertheless.
“Yeah. See you in the morning.”
“Mañana. And, Boo?”
“Yeah?”
Junior raised an eyebrow at me. “You could’ve told me that Kelly had a little sumthin’ sumthin’ to do with tonight.”
“She really didn’t,” I lied.
“You’re lying, brother. Don’t even know if you know it, but you are.”
“Actually, I am well aware of my own delusions.”
“Well, quit it.” He zipped up his coat and flipped me off before he put his mittens on. “You know better than to think you have to lie to me. And you also have to know better than to think that I’m not gonna call you out on it.”
“Does it make it better that I’m mostly lying to myself?”
“Nope. Later, dick.”
“Later, fucko.”
Alone in the bar, I listened to the hum of the ice machine in the kitchen and the demons in my brain. Being alone with the demons made me realize what a wallop it was seeing Kelly again. I hadn’t laid eyes on her since I gave her the heave-ho. I decided to make a big dent in what remained of the whiskey to shut the demons up before they started.
Rough Trade Page 5
