Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

  “Can you help me?”

  I sat back in my chair and smiled. It felt great to be talking out loud about Chipper, even if Nana didn’t understand a word I was saying. I was aglow. I’d walked to the convalescent home from school, but Chipper was picking me up here after football practice. He told me he thought it was a good thing that I came to see my grandmother every Monday. “You’re a good guy, Danny,” he’d told me. I had nearly cried.

  At every game, I was there, cheering him on from the bleachers. I’d force Troy to join me in chanting: “Send in Paguni! Send in Paguni!” Sometimes we’d get everyone around us chanting. The coach never listened, however. So it was his fault that the team never won. If he’d only send in Paguni, the team would win.

  I sighed. “I don’t expect that Chipper feels the same way for me,” I told Nana. “He likes girls. So do I. I’m not gay. I’m bisexual. And see, here’s the thing. Maybe Chipper is, too, deep down. Elton John says everybody is deep down. Maybe even you, Nana!” I laughed. “Sometimes I get the sense that Chipper knows how I feel, and that it’s okay with him. Though I’ll never ask him. It’s fine if he doesn’t like me that way. I can live with that. I just like being with him. It’s enough.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Oh, Nana.” I shifted in my chair. “You know what? I’ve got to read this book for school. If I don’t pass the next test, I might get kicked out of the play. And that can’t happen. I have a real part this year. I wish you could come see me. I think Mom and Dad are going to come. I told them about it, anyway.”

  I reached down and lifted my latest assignment from Brother Pop’s class.

  “Moby Dick,” I said to Nana. “Did you ever read this? It’s a huge book. How about if I read it to you? Then I can visit you and get my homework done at the same time. How’s that sound?”

  “Can you help me?”

  I opened the book to the first chapter. “Call me Ishmael,” I said.

  “Can you help me?”

  “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—”

  “Can you help me?”

  “—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”

  I waited, expecting to hear Nana chime in, but she didn’t. So I went on. I read to her, and for the whole time, she was quiet. No more of her anguished routine questions. She just locked her eyes on me and seemed to listen. I didn’t think she actually understood what I was saying, but somehow the sound of my voice lulled her. I read her the entire first chapter of Moby Dick. I had even started on the second—“Chapter Two, The Carpet-Bag”—when a hard rapping on the open door startled me. I looked up.

  “Troy!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Your mom called me.” He stood in the doorway, looking at me with his blue glasses. “She needs me to take her to some bar.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “I knew you were here. I want you to come with us.”

  “No way. I’m tired of her craziness.”

  “Well, I don’t want to go alone with her. She’s your mother.”

  “Well, you should have told her no.”

  “I couldn’t do that.” He gave me a plaintive frown. “I told her I’d pick her up in fifteen minutes. Please come, Danny, okay?”

  “Oh, man.” I stood, gathering my books. Leaning over, I kissed Nana on the forehead. “I’ll come back and read again to you, Nana. Thanks for listening to me today.”

  “Can you take me home?” she asked, the record once more spinning under its broken needle.

  I smiled sadly. At least that hideous bow was gone from her hair.

  In Troy’s car, I threw my books into the backseat and folded my arms across my chest. “My mother shouldn’t be calling you,” I grumbled. “She’s out of her mind.”

  “She says she got a lead.”

  “She’s always getting leads. Which take her fucking nowhere.”

  “She says the Rubberman told Warren that Bruno is back in the state, and that he spends most of this time at this bar in Naugatuck.”

  “Naugatuck? Where the fuck is that?”

  “I don’t know. Down near Waterbury. Your mom has directions.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  The thing that pissed me off the most was that Chipper was going to show up at the convalescent home to pick me up and I wouldn’t be there. And there was no way to get word to him that I was taking off. I’d have to explain to him later tonight. Hopefully, he’d understand. He knew how crazy Mom was, after all.

  Troy drove across town to the apartment complex to which Mom, Dad, and I had moved a few weeks earlier. It was a boxy, orange-brick place, with four apartments per unit, two up and two down. We were downstairs on the right. There were only two bedrooms—one for Mom and Dad, and one for me—but Mom had insisted that Becky, when she came home, should not feel that she’d lost her place in the family. So my room, which was small enough to start with, had been summarily divided in two. Mom had actually hung a sheet from the ceiling. On one side was Becky’s bed, made up in pink and lace; her teddy bears still sat waiting for her against the wall, and her easel waited for her to finish the painting of the white house. On the other side of the sheet was my bed. The dresser was so close that I couldn’t get out of bed except by climbing over the footboard.

  I hated that apartment. It was horrible. Oh, it was clean enough. Mom had been worried about bugs, but so far there hadn’t been any. I think if there had been, I would have run away. The apartment was just so small, so plain. I missed our yard. I missed Chipper being across the street. We’d had to sell most of our furniture, and what was left was crammed into the living room of the apartment: the stereo system balanced on top of the television, which sat on top of Mom’s hope chest. For the size of the room, our old couch was way too big, but it served its purpose: Dad slept there most nights. The walls of the apartment were so thin that I could hear him pouring whiskey in the middle of the night from my room.

  Mom was waiting outside of the apartment when Troy and I pulled up, her leather jacket draped over her arm. I got out of the car and let her get in front. “I think this is our lucky break,” she said as I slid into the backseat. “This time I really think we’re onto something.”

  I didn’t reply. In fact, I didn’t say a word for the whole hour it took for us to get to Naugatuck, all the way down on Interstate 84 and then onto Route 8. I pressed my face against the window and watched as giant tractor-trailers rattled past us. A Buick LeSabre driven by a harried-looking woman and filled with screaming little boys passed us on the left. As it did so, one of the brats stuck his tongue out at me through the back window. I gave him the finger.

  We pulled onto a side road. “That’s it,” Mom said, yanking on her leather jacket. “That place up ahead.”

  The sign out front said THE BLUE DOG. There was nothing blue, however, that I could see. It was a dark shingled building with a red awning over the front door, the only wooden structure on a street of concrete warehouses. Motorcycles were parked out front, and there were broken bottles everywhere, but still it wasn’t as desolate as that place in Yonkers, the one with the three x’s on its roof. I’d had nightmares about that place.

  Troy parked the Jaguar on the street, and Mom immediately opened the door. “You boys can wait here,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m going with you.”

  And since I was going, that meant Troy was coming along, too. The three of us crossed the street and walked up the steps under the awning.

  “Please God,” Mom prayed in a little voice before opening the door.

  It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. When they did, the first thing I noticed was the men staring at us from the bar. Big men, in black shirts and with long hair and fuzzy arms. Across the room, two other men had paused in front of the dartboard, darts in hand, to look our way. Mom fooled her
self that she could pass for a biker babe in that leather jacket; that was why she wore it, she said, so she could get into these places. But few biker babes wore Keds sneakers or walked around with two teenaged boys still wearing their dorky school pants and white button-down shirts.

  Mom leaned up against the bar. “Warren here?”

  The bartender, a fat, bald man with a full gray beard, shook his head.

  “He told me to meet him here,” she said, trying to sound tough.

  No one said a word. The men sitting at the bar continued to stare at us. At least the guys playing darts resumed their game.

  The place reeked of beer and piss. Some drunk had pissed on the floor once, I suspected, and that smell was never going away. The jukebox was playing Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sweet home Alabama, where the skies are so blue… I’d been in enough of these places to wonder why these Yankee bikers seemed to have such a love for Southern rock. I had a pretty strong hunch that their counterparts down in Alabama didn’t harbor a lot of love and good feeling for Connecticut boys, whether they rode Harleys or not.

  “Hey, Peg,” came a voice from the darkness. Some guy was coming out of the bathroom. I squinted my eyes, expecting it to be Warren. But it was his friend Lenny. He recognized me. “Hey, buckaroo.”

  “Lenny, where’s Warren?” Mom asked. “He told me to meet him here. He said Bruno might be—”

  Lenny motioned for her to be silent. Dropping a leathered arm around her, he led us over to a corner where we could speak more privately. “Warren’s in the hospital,” Lenny told us. “He got some infection.”

  “Oh, dear!” Mom seemed genuinely alarmed. “Is it serious?”

  “I dunno. But listen. I know where Bruno’s living. I been there. It’s not far from here. And he’s got a coupla bitches living with him. Maybe one’s your daughter.”

  “Take me to him!”

  Lenny shook his head. “Nope. Bruno’s onto the fact that somebody’s looking for him. I don’t know if he knows why, but I think we can’t trust the Rubberman anymore. I think he gave Bruno your name. That’s why you’ve gotten those threats.”

  “Then he must know we’re looking for Becky!”

  “Maybe. All I know is I can’t be showing up at his house with some old lady, even if she is wearing a leather jacket.”

  Mom didn’t seem to take offense at being called an old lady. “So how do we find out if Becky’s with him?”

  “You know, I’ve never said this before, and I can’t quite believe I’m suggesting it now,” Lenny said, giving us a little smile, “but maybe you should just call the cops.”

  Mom’s face hardened. “They’ll never go. They don’t even take my calls anymore.”

  “Then I don’t know what to say,” Lenny told her.

  Mom had turned to look at me. “Danny,” she said, “you go with him.”

  “Me?”

  The idea terrified me. I had heard the voice on our answering machine. It was the voice of a killer. A crazed demon who would snap my neck without a second thought. The Rubberman had killed men with his bare hands; I was sure Bruno was just as capable of doing so.

  “Yes,” Mom said, turning from me back to Lenny. “Take Danny!”

  There was something about her words that cut right through me. Take Danny. Take Danny, and bring me back Becky. As if she would have been glad to make the exchange if it might actually work.

  “I don’t know,” Lenny said. “You know, Warren’s in charge of this. I shouldn’t be stepping in here.”

  Mom pulled out an envelope from her jacket pocket. “I brought the money he asked for,” she told Lenny. “Please. We can’t delay.”

  I had no idea where she’d got more money to give these guys. Dad’s hours had been cut back at the church. We had no more savings. But there she was, thrusting a crumpled white envelope filled with cash into Lenny’s hands.

  He looked down at her and frowned. “I didn’t know Warren was asking you for more money,” he said.

  “It’s okay. It’s not for him. It’s for the Rubberman, so he can keep feeding us tips.”

  “We’re cut off from the Rubberman now,” Lenny said, “and Warren knows that.” He pushed the envelope away. “I don’t want your money, Peg.”

  “Please,” she cried, near tears. “My daughter may be at that house!”

  Lenny turned to me. “What about it, buckaroo? Want to go for a ride?”

  “Please, Danny,” Mom begged, her eyes wide and moist in the darkness of that bar. “Please, Danny, you must! Go find Becky, and bring her home to me!”

  I looked at her. My insides turned to mush.

  “What do I have to do?” I asked Lenny, though I kept my eyes on my mother.

  “We’ll just take a ride up to the house. Bruno knows I got some young friends that I teach how to ride. We’ll just ride up there and see who comes out. You keep your helmet on, and if it’s your sister, she won’t recognize you.”

  “Oh yes, Danny, go!” Mom screeched. “Go, please!”

  I saw the wildness in her eyes. I realized how much she had stopped looking like the mother I remembered from a long time ago. She was skinny and drawn, and she wore a leather jacket. Her voice was different, too. Everything about her was different. My mother, the one who used to make me drink ten glasses of milk a day, the one who worried that I’d catch poison ivy again like that time in seventh grade, would never have asked me to do what this woman was asking me to do now. My mother would never have allowed me to get on a motorcycle and ride away with a guy we hardly knew. It hurt me far more than that slap she had given me across the face.

  “Okay,” I said quietly.

  She wrapped her arms around me in gratitude. I didn’t hug her back.

  Outside the bar, Lenny tugged at my shirt. “This will have to go.”

  I removed my white collar shirt, standing there in just my undershirt. Lenny reached down and pressed his hands on the street, gathering up grime. Then he wiped them all over my beige school pants. “That’s better,” he said. Mom made not a word of protest.

  Lenny handed me his helmet, and I slipped it on. It was way too big for me, but he secured it with the strap. I liked the smell inside the helmet, a deep musk that reminded me of the pile of dirty clothes in the corner of Chipper’s room. In fact, I kind of felt like Chipper in that moment, since Chipper also wore a helmet, albeit one of a very different kind. I couldn’t deny a certain thrill in straddling Lenny’s bike again, wrapping my arms around the giant ribs in front of me, my face pressed into the back of Lenny’s leather jacket.

  But that didn’t chase away the feeling that Mom was trading me for Becky, that the chance of finding my sister was worth the risk to my life.

  “Hang on, Danny!” Mom shouted as Lenny’s motorcycle roared into gear. Troy echoed her, “Hang on, Danny! Hang on!”

  In moments I was sucked into a cyclone of sound. With a squeal of rubber, the bike bolted forward onto the road. We didn’t go far. After just a few minutes of whizzing along the winding lane, we were slowing down, veering to our left, and rumbling over a cracked pavement road. We stopped in front of a row of dilapidated Victorian houses. “Keep your helmet on,” Lenny whispered as he dismounted the bike. “Stay here and keep an eye out. If you recognize her, don’t say anything. We can’t tip them off. Just be cool, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said in a small voice.

  He sauntered up the broken front stairs of one house and rapped on the door.

  I got off the bike and leaned against it, trying as best as I could to see through the helmet. Someone had come to the door of the house. I thought I heard a female voice. “Have Bruno come out,” Lenny was saying. “I want to show him my bike.”

  I started to panic. Bruno is going to come out here. He would see me, and he’d know who I was. He’d slit my throat without asking any questions. I forced myself to calm down. Lenny was still at the front door of the house, talking. Laughing, even.

  “What’s your name?” he was asking someone.


  “Mary Beth,” came the answer.

  But it sounded like Becky’s voice.

  Dear God, it sounded like Becky’s voice.

  I strained to see. Lenny was in the way, but there were two girls on the steps now. One was a blonde. The other was dark. I couldn’t see them clearly.

  But the dark girl. She might have been Becky.

  She might actually be Becky.

  All of a sudden my heart was beating wildly in my chest. It seemed to have come alive like a bird and was attempting to fly its way up my throat.

  On the steps of the house, a man had joined them. He was bald, with a big black beard, standing not more than five-five. He barely came to Lenny’s chest. I was taller than he was, for God’s sake. This was Bruno?

  I steadied myself. The four of them were walking toward the bike now.

  Please let it be Becky, I prayed—even though most of the time I wasn’t sure if I believed in God anymore. But in that moment, I did. Please, God, let it be Becky. Let me go back and tell Mom I’ve found her. We can call the cops, and I’ll tell them I saw her with my own eyes.

  I imagined the joy on Mom’s face when I brought her back the news. I imagined our lives returning to what they had been. I imagined how grateful to me Mom would be.

  But then a crazy, unexpected thought intruded.

  If it was Becky, and if Becky came home…what would that mean for me and Chipper?

  “Yep,” Lenny was saying as the four of them gathered around the bike. “It’s a brand new motherfucker. An FLT, with a rubber-isolated drivetrain.” I stepped aside so he could caress the motorcycle’s chrome. “The engine and transmission are hard bolted together.”

  Bruno was looking it over closely. The girls hung back a bit. Nobody paid any attention to me. Which allowed me to check out the dark-haired girl. She had her shoulder to me, preventing me from getting a full look at her face. From the back, she could definitely be Becky. I took a step forward, trying to get a better glimpse.

  “And who’s this?” Bruno suddenly asked, and I felt his black eyes on mine. Instinctively, I looked at the ground.

  “This is my latest buckaroo,” Lenny said. “Teaching him how to ride.”