Dead Boys

by RICHARD LANGE

  I’m clenching my jaw so tight, my teeth hurt. Any minute something inside me is going to burst. I lean against the wall, close my eyes, and breathe deeply, which only makes me feel worse, because the air in the corridor reeks of shit and medicine. There’s a TV on somewhere. A woman on it asks, “Do you love me?” and a man answers, “I don’t know right now.” “Do you love me?” the woman screams. I begin to pace, ten steps up the hall and ten steps back. The world narrows into a strip of snot-green linoleum over which I have complete control. It should always be this easy.

  Suddenly Maria arrives, flushed and sweaty-palmed. Another teacher took over her class, allowing her to leave school early. She’d left her phone in her desk. The doctor informs us that Sam has a hairline fracture of the tibia. Nothing serious, but he’ll need a cast. It’s two-thirty. I can still make my rendezvous with Moriarty and Belushi if I go now.

  “Hey, I left my stuff at the site,” I tell Maria. “I should probably pick it up before they quit for the day.”

  “Okay. Go ahead.”

  “You’ll be fine here by yourself?”

  “See you at home.”

  I kiss her on the cheek and force myself to walk until I’m out of her sight.

  BOOM!HERE WE go, rolling in out of the heat and noise and destroying the silky air-conditioned calm of the bank. Today it’s Mexican wrestling masks and happy-face T-shirts, party clothes to commemorate our final heist. “Get down,” I yell, “down on the floor,” showing my gun. There are one, two, three customers, and they drop like trapdoors have opened beneath them. Moriarty beelines for the security guard, who meekly holds out his hands to be cuffed. One, two, three customers, all secure. I wonder if the plants standing in the corners are real or made of plastic. Something tickles my neck. I reach up and snag it, a long black hair, Maria’s. I raise it to my lips as Moriarty hurdles the counter and makes his way down the line of tellers. No trouble there. They’ve been trained not to resist. Just push the silent alarm and back off. Well, supposedly silent. The signal zips up my spine like a thimble on a washboard, and all of my pores are screaming. One, two, three, old lady, fat man, vato. Each second is disconnected from the one that came before it, so that they bounce around like pearls cut loose from a necklace. Moriarty’s finished. He heads for the door, the bag slung over his shoulder. I follow him out to the car, dive inside, and Belushi slams his hand against the steering wheel and screams, “Yes!” He swings out into traffic and we’re gobbled up into the steaming maw of the city, where we disappear for good.

  IF IT’S TRUE that the same God will judge both El Jefe and me, I want this added to the record: In the end, I didn’t lie to my wife. When she wondered about the money, I came clean. I hadn’t planned to, but I did.

  “Where did you get it?” she asked.

  “I robbed a bank. Lots of banks.”

  She stiffened in my arms — we were in bed at the time — then rolled over to watch my face.

  “Will they catch you?”

  “No.”

  It took the rest of the night to work through it. Maria felt I’d put the family’s future in jeopardy and wanted answers to a lot of questions I hadn’t dared ask myself before for fear that the answers would have pulled me up short, destroying the ruthless momentum that had enabled me to do what had to be done. I explained as best I could while she waffled between tears and outrage. Dawn found us silent and drained at the kitchen table, sharing a pot of coffee. The walls of the bungalow ticked and popped in the gathering heat, and the fresh light of the new day stumbled over the cracks in the plaster left by the last earthquake. Her decision was conveyed by a simple gesture. She reached across the table and took my hands into hers: We would go on.

  I’M SITTING ON the couch, using a Magic Marker to draw a spaceman on Sam’s cast. He keeps leaning forward to monitor my efforts, and isn’t pleased with how it’s turning out.

  “No, Papi, his body’s not right.”

  The phone rings, and Maria picks it up in the kitchen. Another real estate agent. We’re driving up to Big Bear on Saturday to look at houses. Only a week has passed since the robbery, and already things are changing. So many options, so many decisions. To tell you the truth, it leaves me a little dizzy. I’m like a dog that’s finally managed to jump the fence and, rather than running like hell, sits in front of the gate, waiting for his master to let him back in.

  Sam asks me to give him the pen so that he can finish the spaceman himself. I leave him to his work and walk into the kitchen, where Maria is making notes on a legal pad, the phone’s receiver pressed to her ear with her shoulder. I’m too big for the bungalow tonight. If I move too quickly, I’ll break something.

  “I’m going out,” I whisper, motioning to the door.

  Maria frowns and holds up her hand to indicate that I should wait for her to finish. When I come out of the bedroom after putting on a clean shirt, she’s still on the phone, so I just wave and go. Sam is busy with his drawing. He doesn’t hear me when I say good-bye.

  I stop in at the Smog Cutter. There’s a country song playing on the karaoke machine, and old Fred is singing. I grab a stool and settle in to see if Moriarty will show up for his regular Thursday-night session at the pool table. We haven’t seen each other since the robbery, since Belushi presented us with our account numbers and the partnership was dissolved. For security reasons we agreed to go our separate ways from that moment on, but I just want to say hey and find out how he’s doing.

  Because I can, I buy a round for the house, and I’m everybody’s best friend for five minutes. It makes me laugh to see how easy it is, and how quickly it fades.

  Nine comes and goes, then ten, and still no Moriarty. He must have changed his routine. Hell, he may already be in Idaho. And Belushi’s not home either, or at least he doesn’t answer when I push the button for his apartment on the intercom downstairs. Well, fuck it, then. “Here’s to us, fellas,” I say, raising a pint of bourbon in the parking lot of a liquor store. The only good thing about the moment is that I’m pretty sure that as long as I live I’ll never feel this lonely again.

  The shotgun Moriarty loaned me is locked in the toolbox in the bed of my truck, where I put it when Maria told me to get it out of the house that night. I’ve been meaning to dispose of it, and this seems as good a time as any.

  I drive up to Lake Hollywood. The lights from the mansions in the hills circling the reservoir are reflected in its inky blackness. I press my face against the chain-link fence, then turn to gaze up at the stilt house that caught my attention on my earlier visit. Someone inside is playing a piano. Another belt of bourbon, and I swing the shotgun up and fire twice into the air. The blasts roll across the reservoir and back.

  I toss the shotgun over the fence, where it plops into the water and sinks from sight. The piano is silent, and a shadowy figure crouches on the deck of the house, watching me. I stare up at him and tip the bottle again, hoping to spook him even more, but when I slink away, it’s with darkened headlights, so that he can’t make out my license plates.

  THREE POLICE CARS are parked on the street in front of the bungalows when I get back. Their lights, red and blue, wash over the trees. My hands begin to shake as I drive slowly past, trying to see what’s happening. The cops are gathered in the courtyard, and the doors to all the units are open.

  I should keep going, return later just in case, but I can’t. My family is there, frightened probably, worried. I park down the block and head up the hill on foot. I’ll go easy if it comes to that. They won’t have to club me or twist my arms to get the cuffs on. If Sam saw that, it could scar him for life.

  The cops tense up as I step into the courtyard. A few hands move toward guns.

  “Papi,” Sam yells. He hobbles to me, dragging his cast, Maria right behind him. “A burglar was here,” he says. I reach down and pick him up.

  “The Floreses surprised somebody breaking into their place,” Maria says. “He ran out the back when they came in the front.”

&nb
sp; “Jesus,” I say.

  The cops go back to their discussion, ignoring us.

  Maria hugs me close and whispers in my ear, “I was so scared.” I apologize to her, tell her everything will be okay.

  We’ll be like this for a while, tightening at the sight of police cars, losing hope every time there’s a knock at the door. But the years will pass, the fear will fade, Maria will stop wondering what other secrets I’m keeping, and someday I won’t even be the same man who took down those banks. It will be more like a crazy story I heard than something I lived.

  Sam won’t let me put him down. He wants to be carried. I put my other arm around Maria, and we walk to the bungalow, step inside, and lock the door behind us. Safe — oh, please let us be safe — for at least another day.

  The Bogo-Indian Defense

  SOMETHING HAD CHANGED. I SENSED IT AS SOON AS I walked into the doughnut shop. Nobody was playing chess, where always before there had been at least one game going on. All the guys just sat glumly at the little plastic tables, staring into their coffee or fiddling with empty sugar packets. And the radio was off. No Dodgers. In the middle of the season. Impossible.

  I thought it might be me. I have this tendency. I’ll pick a bar, for example, and stop in for a drink every evening for six months, a year, know all the bartenders’ names, all the regulars, get slipped a free one now and then, feel right at home, but then one day, out of nowhere, it turns to shit. Same bar, same stool, same gin and tonic, but suddenly the mole on the face of my favorite waitress makes me sick, the Christmas lights framing the bottles are a terrible joke, and the ice cubes feel like broken glass in my mouth. I hurry out in what always seems like the nick of time, never to return. I’ve fled bowling alleys in the same cold sweat, restaurants, apartments I loved, too many jobs to count, an entire city. Denver — just the thought of that place makes me shudder.

  So that’s what I assumed was going on when I saw those men I’d never known to be anything but cheerful fighting back tears and not even Cocaine Bill could muster a greeting. I stepped to the counter for a coffee, waiting for that inexplicable dread to grab me by the throat and once again force me out onto the street. It was no use even sitting. I stood in the corner, holding my cup in one hand, jingling the change in my pocket with the other.

  But then Whitey roused himself with a heavy sigh, running his fingers and thumb over his big silver mustache. He glanced at me with bloodshot eyes before turning back to the window, on the other side of which cars raced up and down Sunset on missions of great importance.

  “Bud passed away,” he said, letting me in on the reason for the pall. “Heart attack, apparently, yesterday afternoon.”

  José crossed his tattooed arms on the table in front of him, bowed his head, and began to sob, while Bill, that miswired fuck, ran out the front door and attacked a parking meter, kicking and punching it until Ray Ray screamed at him to stop.

  I got a refill on my coffee and settled in for a long night in my usual spot next to the video game. Yes, things had changed. But this time it was the world, not me. Was it selfish to feel relieved? I couldn’t decide.

  BUD LEARNED TO dream in Vietnam. Before that, back on the ranch — Montana, Idaho, wherever it was he grew up — he’d turn to stone as soon as he hit the sack. His mind shut down till morning, when his father’s voice resurrected him, calling him to breakfast and days heavy with heat and dust and endless chores.

  At first it scared him. He’d be sleeping in a bunker deep in the jungle, and his head would fill with yellow or red or green. He thought he was going crazy, like the private from Tulsa who came off a long night at a listening post on the perimeter and started in with “Pete and Repeat were sitting on a log. Pete fell off. Who was left?” and was still at it two days later when they choppered him out. But then Bud discovered that if he focused — squinted was how he put it — the colors coalesced and he’d find himself starring in the wildest movies.

  It was a revelation. In the midst of all that desperation and fear, where even the birds made sounds like people dying, he could turn in and visit his mom or bang Raquel Welch or eat a steak that doubled in size every time he took a bite. At first he dreamed exclusively of home, but after a while crazier scenarios played themselves out. One night it was pirates, all pirates; the next he rode a bike through Rome, Italy, wearing nothing but skivvies and flip-flops.

  When his tour was up, he returned to the ranch, but he could no longer stomach the early mornings. He wanted to sleep, to dream, till noon, then maybe nap again after lunch, which didn’t sit well with his father, who expected him to pull his weight as he had before. A friend from the army invited him to Buffalo, and the two of them boozed away a couple of good years, screwing hippie chicks and shoveling snow, until the friend started talking to God and decided to shack up with a waitress. Bud split for Florida then, but the humidity down there brought on his first nightmare. He was back in the jungle, carrying a severed hand that had little mouths that wouldn’t stop screaming on the tips of each finger. Fuck this shit, he decided, and set out for California.

  It took him ten years to get here. On the way he married and divorced a couple of times, went to barber college, did time for burglary and aggravated assault, learned to weld, and lost the sight in one eye. L.A. was everything he’d hoped it would be, though. As soon as he hit town, he said, he put it in neutral.

  When I met him at the doughnut shop, he was living off VA money in a garage apartment owned by a Filipino slumlord. He slept twelve hours a day and once a month took a five-dollar turnaround bus to Vegas to work on a keno system that was going to make him rich, something that had come to him in one of his dreams. He was full of shit and worse, but who among us wasn’t? I was rooting for him. We all were.

  WHITEY MADE THE arrangements. Apparently he and Bud had discussed the inevitable a number of times and shared with each other their last wishes. That kind of foresight was astonishing to me.

  I’d never been to a funeral before, but I’d seen them on TV, so I knew to wear a tie. Bill asked me to pick him up because his license had been suspended again. “I will be high,” he said, “but ignore it.” I did my best. The whole way there he played bongos on the dashboard and rocked back and forth in his seat. Every so often he’d unpin the fist-size rose he’d stuck to the lapel of his jacket and shove it under my nose and say, “Smell that. Pretty, huh?”

  It was a big church, and new. The ceiling arched over us like an umbrella, and every little sound had an echo. I’d never known Bud to be religious. In fact, the only comment I’d ever heard him make on the subject, while gloating over a particularly profitable chess victory, was “The devil is in the details.” But I guess there were certain times when certain words had to be said, and where else outside of a courtroom were you going to get people to shut up long enough to listen?

  We only took up the first two pews; the rest stretched out behind us like some kind of tricky maze. The mourners were all men except for Nita, the Cambodian lady from the doughnut shop. It was nice that she showed up. A thing like that needed a woman’s tears. I felt the pew vibrating beneath me and noticed that Bill was shaking like a car with its idle out of whack. Ray Ray was on one side of him, Dennis on the other. They each reached over and held one of his hands to calm him.

  Bud’s ashes were in an urn on the altar. The cross suspended behind it was smooth and clean, without a nail hole or a drop of blood. The preacher did the best he could with his send-off, being a stranger. He told a few stories Whitey had fed him, like the time Bud took up a collection to buy José’s kids presents when José got laid off right before Christmas, and how he once gave a whore his only pair of shoes, then walked around barefoot for a week because he said he needed a lesson in humility.

  Toward the end of the service a man slipped through the door and stood in the shadows at the rear of the church. He stayed only a few minutes, was gone before we’d raised our heads following the final prayer. Whitey insisted it was Bud’s brother, the
only member of his family to make an appearance, but I don’t know about that. With a life like Bud’s, the possibilities were endlessly exotic.

  WE ALL MET up at the doughnut shop later. Everyone was on the program except Bill and me, so the two of us kept stepping outside to guzzle bourbon between cups of coffee. Nita had made chicken and rice, and someone brought a couple of supermarket pies. The radio was on, and the urn containing Bud’s ashes had a table to itself. Pretty soon Ray Ray and Dennis set up their pieces for a game.

  Whitey seemed old that night. His hand trembled when he lifted his coffee. Various people sat down across from him and tried to get him talking, but he just nodded or said, “Oh, really?” never picking up his end of it. Even when Bill and I played the video game, the noise of which Whitey always claimed gave him a migraine, he couldn’t muster the energy to cuss us out. My guy had iron fists, and Bill’s shot fire from an amulet on his chest. We fought in a ring in the middle of a desert.

  Whitey followed me when I stepped outside for a smoke. A line of people waited to get into the nightclub across the street. We watched a couple of pretty girls jaywalk to join it. The door opened, and the music and laughter that spilled out were louder than the traffic. I wondered what the fuck was wrong with me.

  “Youngblood,” Whitey said, pointing at my cigarette. “Those things will kill you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Give me one,” he demanded, and I handed him the pack.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” he said.

  “I have a job,” I replied, and it was true. I’d been working at U-Haul for six months.

  “Someone’s got to deliver Bud’s ashes to his daughter. It’s what he wanted done.”

  “His daughter?”

  “She moved out here from Florida a while back. Her and Bud only met once, and it didn’t go so well, but it’s what he wanted done. She lives in Downey with her husband and kid. Won’t take you an hour.”