I kept telling myself these things as we skidded to a halt in the snow in front of Ginny’s apartment.
Junior and I ran up the steps and banged on the door. We were both out of breath by the time we hit the top step. Christ, we were out of shape.
The door opened. “Ginny…” I wheezed. The rest of the sentence was caught in surprise when I saw that the door had been opened by the guy from the roller derby match—the one in the Liberace getup and the complicated moustache.
Junior shook his head. “The fuck are you doing here?”
“Excuse me?”
Ginny popped into the doorway between us and Liberace. “Hey, guys,” she said, a rigid grin nervously plastered on her face. “Everything okay?”
“Uh, yeah. All’s good. Wanted to make sure you were all right.”
The stage smile stretched wider. “Okay, good. I’ll see you guys at work.” She went to close the door right in our faces.
I stopped the door with my palm. “Hey, hey! Listen! If Byron shows up again—”
Ginny’s eyes went wide. “You found him?”
“He came here,” I said.
From around Ginny, Liberace grabbed the door and pulled it back open. “Byron? What about Byron?”
“Dana…” Ginny said.
“We kicked his ass, dumped him on Revere Beach,” Junior said. “So you tell Dana that he won’t be—“
Fury lit behind Liberace’s eyes. “Why don’t you tell me yourself.”
“I’m sorry. The fuck are you again?” I asked.
“I’m fucking Dana!”
What?
It sank in. Ginny pursed her lips and squeezed her eyes shut. I glared at her.
“’Scuse me,” Junior said. “How are you fucking Dana? Is that why Byron was so pissed?”
Dana’s jaw dropped.
“Junior…”
“No offense, but if my girl was messing around with this guy? Frankly, I been thinking you were on the fruity side this whole time. Again, no offense.”
Sweet, bleeding eyes of Jesus.
Ginny’s jaw dropped.
My jaw stayed where it was, since I’ve known Junior for over twenty years.
We all stood in the doorway for a couple seconds, be it in shock, horror, confusion. Take your pick.
Then…
Junior’s jaw dropped. “Wait tha—WHOA!”
He got it.
“This is fucked up, Ginny,” I said. “You didn’t tell us we were…”
“That you were what, Boo? That you were helping a guy with his boyfriend?”
“No! You didn’t say that. That is precisely a thing that you did not say.”
“You we’re also helping me, Boo. Does that part matter?”
Dana stepped in between us, fury blazing in his eyes. “What did you do, Ginny?”
“I took care of the problem, Dana.”
“What did you do?”
“We discussed this,” Ginny said.
“We discussed scaring him off, but you never said anything about hiring goons.”
I wanted to protest, but the goon shoe kinda fit. Pretty comfortably, actually.
“What did you think I was going to do, wear a scary mask?” Ginny said, her voice rising.
Junior pulled my sleeve. “Let’s bounce, dude. This ain’t gonna get any less fucked up the longer we stand here.”
Dana stormed out and grabbed the sleeve of Junior’s coat. “No! You’re staying right here and telling me what you did to Byron.”
In a flash, Junior’s eyes were ablaze in a fury that surprised even me. He swatted Dana’s wrist with enough force to smack it painfully across the doorjamb.
“Get your faggot hands offa me, you hear?” Junior snarled, pulling his fist back. Now my jaw dropped.
Dana flinched and took a step back.
Ginny yelled, “No!” and stepped in between the two of them, her arms splayed back protectively across the doorway.
Junior opened his fist and stormed down the steps toward Miss Kitty.
Junior’s sudden turn to aggressiveness had thrown me. And there wasn’t a lot that could surprise me where Junior was concerned.
That reaction? That surprised me. But I still had to have his back. I turned to Ginny. “You should have told us what we were in the middle of.”
“Should it matter, Boo?”
I waved a hand toward Junior. “Yeah, apparently it does.”
“Then how the fuck could I have told you? Assholes.” She slammed the door in my face. Immediately, I could hear her and Dana yelling at each other.
Miss Kitty’s engine roared to life. “Boo! Let’s go!”
So, my inner voice said. Looks like we’re done here.
I trotted down the stairs and climbed into the car.
Junior seethed quietly until we turned onto Huntington. “The fuck was that?”
“My sentiments exactly.”
“Goddamn it. I do not appreciate not knowing the depths of the shit I’m sticking my head into, Boo. Am I wrong?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then caught myself. I wanted to say, “no,” but Junior’s reaction was way uncalled for. Even though I was incredibly irate at Ginny for the little game she played us with, Junior took it to a whole ‘nother dimension.
Junior wasn’t wrong to be put-off, but I had to question his full reasons why.
I wasn’t wrong to feel pissed off at how the whole shebang unfolded.
But something was wrong. Felt wrong.
Gay, straight, that part shouldn’t matter, right? Especially when it came down to who deservesd a good smack in the head. Byron was a royal fucktrumpet either way.
So why was that little detail bugging me?
Maybe I wasn’t as open-minded as I liked to think…
Shit, the guy got over on Junior. And a half-capacity Junior was still a force to be reckoned with under most circumstances. Byron could hold his own.
But the good ol’ Massachusetts liberal in me kept tsk-tsking me for beating up a gay guy. Like that alone made our actions wrong—whether or not the guy had earned the hell out of it.
That little voice in my head kept yelling that beating up a gay guy was no better than beating up a woman, as if being gay automatically equated weakness.
Meanwhile, the fading bruises on Junior’s face indicated otherwise.
Years of sensitivity conditioning, most of which I’d happily spent my life ignoring, were in a mighty conflict with my current reality.
And it was giving me a real-world headache.
Junior slammed his palms on the steering wheel, shocking me out of my liberal guilt. “Lookit, my fucking hands.” Junior held up his scarred knuckles, a couple of them now raw, one split open from his enthusiastic application of them to Byron’s face. “Guy bled all over me.”
“So?”
“What if that motherfucker has AIDS?”
“That’s messed up,” I said.
“I know!”
I wasn’t agreeing with him.
But I wasn’t about to disagree with him either.
Junior pulled Miss Kitty hard to the right and stomped the brakes into a squealing stop in front of a Store 24. He stomped into the convenience store. I didn’t have any idea what the hell was happening anymore. I cracked the window and lit a smoke, trying to wrap my mind around the issue and how to handle it on all sides. For fuck’s sake, we all still had to work together.
That said, Ginny wasn’t wrong to question whether or not we would have stepped in with as much gusto.
I already had that answer.
We wouldn’t have.
So she was wrong too.
And she wasn’t.
Goddammit.
It wasn’t like there was a man code written down anywhere, but there was an unspoken rule: a man handled his own. There were exceptions, like with any rule. But if you were having girl trouble? Handle that shit. Like any battle a man has to take on, you take your lumps, be they bruises on your face or on you
r heart, and you move on. And if you were capable, you gave some back along the way.
But this…this was new territory.
The current situation was wayyyyy-hey-hey outside the handbook, written code or unspoken. And I was having a bad time processing it. Man code should apply to all men, right? No matter what orifice got your rocks off. Right?
Right?
Or was a bully always a bully?
Who the fuck was I asking?
Junior stormed back out, dumping a mini bottle of hand sanitizer on each hand, vigorously rubbing his hands together like an OCD nutjob.
Try not to judge Junior too hard. Everybody hated somebody for one reason or another. And we feared others for sometimes the same reasons.
Most people who get called homophobes weren’t suffering any kind of phobia at all. They were just assholes. Junior, on the other hand, had a real, deep-seated paranoia. And it was one that, even though I couldn’t condone it…I knew where it came from.
We drove the rest of the way back to my apartment in silence, me chain-smoking to have something to do other than converse with my friend, who no doubt had more nasty words in reserve to toss my way.
My face still hurt from having a foot planted off it the night before, and muscle soreness was settling in from the cold, a lack of sleep, and the other events from the past twenty-four. I just wanted my bed for a couple hours before I had to head in for the night shift.
Junior pulled into my driveway. I went to give him the old bro-smack-handshake farewell. (I don’t know what the fuck it’s called. Do you?) But Junior held his hand up. “Nah, man. I don’t know what’s on these hands.”
“Other than a gallon of Purell? I’m gonna guess ketchup and possibly a booger.”
“Shit ain’t funny, man.”
“It’s a little funny.”
Junior glared at me. One of the cornerstones of our friendship was our ability to bust each other’s balls when we were being stupid. And Junior was being stooooopid. However, he was in a stupid place that was too deep for me to even throw a rope into.
So I just rolled my eyes. “Movie tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Can we see something with tits?”
“I think John Goodman’s in something.”
“Again. Not funny.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.” I shut the door and walked in front of the car.
“Yeah. Have fun with that shift tonight.”
Aw hell. It was Sunday. I was working with Ginny. Junior stomped on the gas, spinning the wheels, spraying me with slush and gravel.
It was going to be a long night.
And if I’d had any idea how long that night was going to be, I might not have gotten out of bed.
I almost forgot to disable the booby traps that Twitch had installed for a security system after a surprise visitor had shot me in the leg last summer. Sometimes it was good to have equally paranoid sociopaths in your inner circle of friends. Except for the first time I forgot which direction I needed to turn the key to disable rather than arm. One face-full of foam chemical mace later and I wasn’t about to forget again.
Burrito, the world’s fattest Chihuahua, was yapping up a storm a good ten feet from the door. The night I took a chemical facial, Burrito decided to lap up the mace that hit the floor while I screamed and tried to pull my eyes out.
Since then, he’d learned to stand back when I walked through the door. He was also less likely to nosh on whatever fell off my face, be it an escaping buffalo wing or foamed mace.
I lay down on my bed, needing the rest, but with a brain that was a fitful ball of swirling, conflicted emotions. Anger at being deceived. Feeling foolish because I wasn’t sure that I had been. Yeah, we’d been played, but only because Ginny needed us.
And would we have stepped in otherwise? Would we have given her the help she needed?
Byron had tipped our hand. My hand, at least. I could only speak for myself when I said that I would have gladly taken the second shot at the guy for any number of reasons—taking down Junior being one. For me, it was about Ginny, about stepping into a situation that homegirl had found herself in the middle of. My White Knight instinct overrode my common sense. I knew it…I somehow fucking knew that we needed to keep our noses clear of the situation.
But once again, I ignored the same senses that I prided myself on having in my capacity as a bouncer.
It may have looked like a pile of shit, but once again, all I smelled was perfume.
And as messed up and baffled as the situation had left me, I could only imagine what bugfuck chipmunk was tearing sharp-clawed laps inside Junior’s brain.
Family could be fucked in the head sometimes. Other people had an uncle who spent his day on Facebook re-posting Tea Party pictures of Obama as a witch doctor, or a sweet Nana who’d tell anybody who’d listen about how that Mexican maid kept taking her jewelry. As much as I didn’t like to come to terms with reality, my brother was a straight-up homophobe.
Part of me understood where Junior was coming from, what he felt deep down from the way-back days.
There was a part of me that felt the exact same way.
I understood.
The difference was, I wasn’t comfortable with the cards fate had dealt me as a kid, the opinions and observations that were branded into my mind from those years back at St. Gabe’s. I still felt them. But I fought them.
Sometimes I won.
Sometimes I didn’t.
But Junior? He wore those scars as badges. All of them. He stubbornly held on to those marks, loud and proud. To try to get rid of them would be to lessen their significance. To Junior, those hard-earned scars were the proof that he had survived.
And who was I to try to take that victory, his very survival, away from him?
I was his brother.
I didn’t always agree with the things he felt, thought, or said.
Even when I understood them.
But I wasn’t the one to tell him he was wrong.
Finally I was able to drift off with that comforting self-assuring horseshit inside my mind. I was at Junior’s back. I was always going to be at Junior’s back. Period.
Some days he made it harder than others.
But I had his back.
***
The insistent chirping of my beeper woke me. Immediately after I thumbed the button to make it stop, a heavy knock sounded at my front door. Burrito lost his goddamn Chihuahua mind, yapping up and down the hallway.
I didn’t like visitors. Not since the last unannounced one put a bullet just above my knee.
I jumped out of bed, shivering in the cold. I threw a dirty sweatshirt over my head, pulled the jeans on fast. Shoes on, no time for socks.
The knock sounded again. I turned down the hallway, saw two gigantic shadows in the glass. Really large shadows…
Fuck. Had to be Summerfield’s boys. Two more of Marcus’s IronClad goons coming for round two. Either that, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been hitting the HGH hard lately.
Well, the jokers were going to be in for one hell of a surprise when I rained down Twitch’s booby-trapped hell on them.
That was what I thought, before the one on the left kicked the door off the hinges, brand new locks and all.
I was still three feet away from the panic buttons.
Shit.
The two roided-out monstrosities charged at me down the hallway. One of them, a black dude with long cornrows, got to me first, hit me low, and pulled my legs out from under me. I came down hard, the back of my skull slamming off the hardwood. My head filled with stars even before the huge fist slammed into my cheek.
My head snapped to the right—just in time for Burrito to enter the fray. Bad news was, he started biting me on the ear instead of sticking his little razor teeth into the guys trying to end the person who kept him in kibble.
Cornrows stood up and grabbed a leg. The other dude could have easily been a defensive lineman for the Pats. He grabbed my other leg. I knew what was c
oming, and covered my balls. The Lineman’s gigantic boot came down on my hands. It hurt like hell, but I was thankful my hands took more damage than my balls. The two started dragging me down the hallway to the door, intent on bringing me somewhere with them.
I had no intention of going anywhere.
Some days, I thank God I’m a lazy housekeeper.
As I slid by my toolbox, I reached into the top and gratefully wrapped my fingers around the handle of my hammer. I slammed it down onto the inside of Cornrows’ ankle. He screamed as the knobby bone made a satisfying cracking sound. He dropped to his ass and clutched his leg.
Burrito finally got the hint on who the real enemy was, and with a snarl that would have impressed the Chihuahua version of Cerberus, he chomped onto Lineman’s hand.
Lineman squeaked in pain, a strange sound to come out of a physical specimen of his size. He flung Burrito into the living room, where the dog skidded along the floor, coming to a stop under the coffee table.
But he’d done enough. My legs were free.
I jumped up and hit the comically large Staples EASY button. The two cans of mace attached on opposite sides of the door at eye level sprayed right into Lineman’s neck.
Sadly, eye level isn’t the same for all of us.
The dispersion caught him off guard, but didn’t exactly have the crippling effect I’d hoped for. The thick froth layered across his throat and collarbone, all of it foaming a good five inches under his eyes.
So I improvised. I grabbed both sides of his neck, rubbed my hands vigorously in the chemicals, and jammed them right into the fucker’s eyes.
That did the trick.
Lineman screamed and toppled backward down my icy front steps. Cornrows was already hobbling down the street toward their car.
Really?
Was he getting into a fucking Prius?
He was.
Lineman, half-blinded, staggered a serpentine path toward the car as well.
I threw my hammer at the back of their car, but missed by a good four feet.
Rough Trade Page 9
