CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)

by Cora Brent

  Dario, one of the other mechanics, was heading toward my neighborhood so he gave me a ride. It wasn’t far, only about a mile, but in this hellacious heat I was always happy to have a way to stay out of the sun. Dario blasted heavy metal music for the quick ride and gave me a friendly wave when he paused in front of my house.

  Sure enough, Roe’s silver Prius was still parked next door. At least she was supposed to leave tonight. Maybe she wouldn’t find her way back down here for a while. It was bad enough I had to deal with Erin and Stone rolling their eyes at each other every five minutes. The last thing I wanted was even more tension added into the mix.

  I was all greasy and dusty from spending the day at the garage so I decided to go home and shower before heading over to Erin’s. My mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway but the front door was unlocked. I searched around the kitchen for some food but the pickings were slim. The cheese was moldy, the milk carton was empty and a lonely box of corn flakes had expired nine months ago. There was a fresh carton of eggs in the fridge but I wasn’t desperate enough to eat them raw, or to turn on the stove. I finally stuffed a piece of white bread in my mouth because it was better than nothing.

  My back was to the doorway that led from the kitchen to the living room. That was why I was caught off guard when an elephant tackled me.

  “Stone! Shit, get the fuck off.”

  We collided with the fridge and I reared back to try and dislodge my brother, who’d hopped on like he was expecting a fucking piggyback ride. Stone had been working out hard these past six months and I felt every pound of his obnoxious muscles. I could hold my own though. I gritted my teeth and elbowed his six pack until he fell off.

  When I whirled around Stone was there shirtless and grinning, already back on his feet.

  “About time you showed up,” he announced before opening the fridge and removing the block of cheese I’d rejected a moment ago.

  “Some of us work,” I said pointedly.

  He tossed the cheese from one hand to another. “I work.”

  “Hustling isn’t working.”

  He stopped tossing the cheese and threw me a look. “You come by that little slice of piety from Mom or from Erin?”

  I ignored the question. “You’re not gonna eat that.”

  “Sure I am.”

  “Bad idea.”

  He held the cheese up, considering. “Why?”

  “It’s got more mold than the Gnome’s toe jam.”

  Stone cracked up. The Gnome was once the mayor of Emblem and he was one of many local jokes. Stone tossed the decrepit cheese into the garbage pail.

  “Seems like a waste,” he clucked. “There are starving people on Main Street.”

  “There are starving people in this kitchen.”

  My brother yawned and sank into a chair. “Well damn it then. Go get cleaned up and let’s hunt down some dinner.”

  I felt pretty good as I showered off. It was Friday night and it was summer. That right there was reason enough to feel good. Hopefully late tonight I’d get some alone time with Erin. I’d been aching extra hard ever since that night under the bridge, the night of the blackout when we’d almost given in. After the lights blasted back on I was glad we hadn’t and I knew Erin was glad too. But still, the ache was there.

  My good feeling went away a little when I returned to the kitchen and found my mother standing there with her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. It seemed like she got a little bit more unhappy every day. She was unhappy with the messy house, she was unhappy with her job, she was unhappy with whatever shithead she was hooking up with at the Dirty Cactus and bringing home to bed. But above all she was unhappy about putting up with us.

  She barely took a breath between declaring, “This place is disgusting,” and “Stonewall you haven’t done a damn thing today,” and “Conway I thought I told you to keep your distance from that sneaky little girl next door,” and “My god would you look at that yard,” and “Never thought I’d have two sons who acted like good-for-nothing Gentry trash,” and on and on and on.

  Stone gave me an eye roll and flapped his right hand a few times to mimic her running mouth. She stopped mid-rant and glared at him but said nothing. It was me she turned to next. My mother crossed her arms and gave me a frank once over that dripped with contempt. Even though Stone’s constant antics had a long history of giving her more heartburn, I was actually her least favorite. We all knew it.

  “How many times do I have to tell you to stop smoking in my damn house?”

  I glanced down at my empty hands. “I’m not smoking in your damn house.”

  “Don’t lie to me. I can even smell it in here now.”

  “That was me,” Stone declared cheerfully. He linked his hands behind his neck, a bemused smile on his face. “I’ve sitting in the living room all afternoon chain smoking and binge watching porn on pay-per-view.”

  My mother pretended he hadn’t spoken. “I saw you, Con.”

  She was lying. There was no point in jumping on that merry go round though. She was forever plucking one thing or another out of thin air and deciding to get pissed about it. She’d always had one of those hair trigger personalities, as easy to strike as a match, but she hadn’t always been this sour toward us. Elijah’s slow slide toward death had exhausted her and left a mean-spirited shell that had little use for motherhood.

  “Sorry,” I told her even though I wasn’t because I hadn’t done anything.

  Her nostrils flared and her mouth puckered. She was trying to come up with another bullet to fire. Once again Stone spoke up.

  “I drank your last beer too,” he announced, propping his bare feet up on the kitchen table in a way that was bound to drive her nuts. “And I broke the washing machine.”

  That got her attention. “You broke the washing machine?”

  “Yup.”

  “How?”

  “I needed to clean a hammer.”

  She chewed her lip, probably trying to decide if he was serious or not. With Stone, the answer was usually not, but tossing a hammer in the washing machine seemed like the kind of thing he might do just to be perverse.

  I stifled a laugh. It didn’t quite work. A sound like a gasping bird escaped my mouth and my mother refocused, glaring. All at once though she seemed to grow tired of interacting with us. She shouldered her purse and started to push past me out of the room.

  “What’s for dinner?” Stone called.

  “Get a job and buy your own dinner,” she snapped but she reached into her beach bag-sized purse, withdrew a twenty-dollar bill and slapped it on the table. “Bleeding me dry,” she muttered.

  Stone grabbed the money and raised an eyebrow at me. “Mom, can I please borrow your car?” he asked in a voice of pure innocence.

  “Don’t push me, Stone,” she grumbled. She was already gone from the kitchen but then she suddenly doubled back and wagged a finger at me.

  “Let me tell you something, Conway. You get that crazy little slut knocked up, don’t come crying to me to bail you out of it.”

  I tensed. She could say whatever she wanted to about me but I wasn’t going to stay quiet while she talked about Erin like that. I didn’t know what the hell she had against Erin, other than the fact that Erin was my girlfriend and my mother probably figured any girl who liked me had to have a few screws loose.

  “Don’t worry, Ma,” Stone said airily. “I’m sure I’ll make you a grandma long before he does.”

  “I don’t wanna be a grandma,” she howled. Then she left once and for all, muttering about ‘ungrateful brats’ all the way down the hall before slamming the door to her bedroom.

  “You ever get the feeling she’s counting the days until we’re history?” Stone asked.

  “That’s nothing new. But what the hell was up with that last line?”

  Stone was rolling the twenty into a tight tube. “What?”

  “You got some bad news you want to share?”

  His blue eyes found mine. People o
ften commented how much we looked alike. We did, but no more than any other brothers. Just about every girl in town and a fair number of the women blushed and licked their lips when we walked by so I didn’t have any doubts that they all liked what they saw.

  Stone snorted. “I was just messing with her.”

  “Good. You better be careful.”

  “Come on,” he scoffed. “You think I don’t know any better than to cover my head when it’s pouring?”

  “Every time?”

  “Every time.” Stone’s face broke into a mischievous smile. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  Stone looked pointedly out the window toward Erin’s house. Then he looked back at me.

  “None of your business,” I growled.

  “Still? Seriously? You guys have been together forever. I could string together every non-relationship I’ve ever been involved in and it wouldn’t come close to the time you’ve sunk into Erin.”

  “Let’s go eat,” I said, a little grumpy.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “No. Not discussing this with you.”

  “Okay. But can I ask you one more thing?”

  “As long as it has nothing to do with where I put my dick.”

  Stone looked thoughtfully out the window. His voice grew quiet, almost wistful. “What’s it like?”

  I knew what he meant. But it took me a minute to think of an answer. Over the years, Stone had a long string of girls, but never a girlfriend. Some of them he’d liked more than others but even the best of them could only hope for being kept at arm’s length for a short while until he moved on. Erin told me what the girls all said about Stone, as if I didn’t already know. They said he was a shark, a pimp, a player, not that it stopped any of them from chasing. Yet despite his chronic sarcasm, somewhere inside of Stone, in a place that was nearly unreachable, lived a tender heart. I was probably the only one on earth who ever saw that side of him. Earlier, when he chimed in and interfered with my mother’s tirade it hadn’t been done solely to irritate her, although he probably considered that a convenient benefit. These last few years she’d made it a habit to swoop in on me out of nowhere and when she did he always did his best to take the heat off. Stone would go to the mat for me. Of that I never had a doubt. He was a good brother. Even if he could be a fucking jackass sometimes.

  “It’s nice,” I told him and he seemed satisfied with the answer, inadequate as it was. It was nice, being wrapped up in someone and knowing she was every bit as much into you, maybe more. I would wish the same thing for him too, that he’d learn how to open his heart to people other than me.

  Stone stopped me when I started to head next door to Erin’s. He said he was hungry enough to eat a Gila monster and didn’t want to get stuck in a tornado of girl activity that would mean another two hours would go by before we got to eat. Usually I would have balked and dragged him over there anyway but I was starving. Plus I felt a touch of guilt because Stone didn’t ask me for favors very often. So I texted Erin that I’d be back in an hour and then we could all figure out how to pass the summer night in this great metropolis.

  It was only a little over a mile to Main Street but the heat slowed the journey down. I was wishing I’d brought some water along when Stone seemed to read my mind and took a sharp right into a quiet yard with a garden hose hanging from the rusty bib on the side of the house. He switched the water on without a pause and watched the stream flow for a good minute before bending his head to take a drink. Every kid who ever grew up in a hot climate knows that you never touch the first gallon of water to spill out of the hose. A few years ago some boy who’d just moved from the crisp Rocky Mountain air of Colorado took a dare and burned his lips to blistering. That’s what happened if you weren’t careful.

  Stone handed the hose to me silently. The water was warm and tasted somewhat like metal but it felt good going down my throat. Some boyish remnant inside of me felt ridiculously happy, sharing a stolen drink with my brother in a yard that didn’t belong to us and wiping my mouth on the back of my wrist. It was the dance of a thousand childhood days that had come before.

  We took a shortcut through an alley that ran along the backside of one of the town’s most prosperous streets with its courtyards and swimming pools and small orchards full of well-tended citrus trees. The occasional gecko or ground squirrel darted in front of us before disappearing into unseen holes beneath the block fence. As we reached the end of the alley, a decent-sized chuckwalla turned around and stared at us boldly rather than scurry into the shadows. I stared back. Stone, a few steps ahead, let out a low whistle.

  “What are you doing?” I asked uneasily as I left the lizard behind and noted the way my brother was staring with interest through the open window of an expensive car.

  Stone made a tsk-tsk sound. “Left the keys in the ignition. Dipshit.”

  It was parked discreetly around the corner beside a sprawling Santa Fe home that occupied on acre on what passed for prime real estate around here. I knew who the house belonged to. I knew who the car belonged to. I knew what that gleam in my brother’s eye meant. I didn’t like any these things.

  “Come on,” Stone urged. “Fifteen minutes. He’ll never know it was gone.”

  I let out an exasperated breath. “Is getting arrested on your bucket list?”

  Stone drummed his fingers on the hood of the Cadillac and broke into a slow smile. “Nobody’s getting arrested, son. The Gnome is probably asleep in his coffin up there in the big house. He’ll never know. We’ll just ride through the Burgerville drive thru and bring it right back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we can. Because I’m tired of walking. Because the fucker is tempting fate by leaving his shiny cock compensation tool out here with the keys inside.”

  I paused. “Keys are really inside?”

  Stone reached through the window and seconds later the silver keys came hurtling through the air. I caught them easily and stared at the innocent way they laid inside my palm.

  “Well?” Stone prompted and when I looked at him I understood the game. I knew that boy better than he knew himself. It was all a grand old play. He expected me to say the hell with it and toss the keys back through the window. We would continue on our merry way and go stuff our faces full of greasy fast food. We would laugh at dumb shit and insult each other and be glad when the sun sank below the horizon. We would pass another uneventful summer evening bullshitting with friends and non-friends beside the banks of the canal or in the shadows of the old train bridge or at the base of the butte. There weren’t a lot of options to choose from when it came to Emblem nightlife. Then we would stumble home in the darkness, fall into our sloppy beds and let the day end without a single thing out of the ordinary happening.

  “Okay.” I shrugged nonchalantly. “Let’s go.”

  Stone’s face changed as I twirled the key ring around my finger. I kept my eye on him as I closed the distance to the car and opened up the driver’s side. A twinge of doubt crossed his face. He hadn’t been serious. He’d been expecting me to scoff and stalk away. He would have followed with laughter and plenty of teasing all the way to Burgerville and beyond. But now that I’d accepted the challenge there was no backing down, not for Stonewall Tiberius Gentry.

  “I’ll drive,” he said coolly but he shot an uneasy glance around our quiet surroundings. The sprawling house beyond the gate watched impassively, a stucco giant that wouldn’t have any reason to get excited over car thieves. Overhead a carrion bird circled, a bad omen. I watched as he noticed, took a step back, then set his jaw.

  “Nope,” I told him, jumping into the driver’s seat and feeling a dangerous thrill. The car was hot and smelled of leather and money. With a flick of my wrist the engine purred to life and I cranked up the air conditioning.

  Stone climbed into the passenger side and shut the door quietly. I only knew he was uneasy because I understood him so well, always had. He was older than me by ten months but t
hat head start had always seemed irrelevant. We enrolled in the same kindergarten class and hit just about every landmark of experience together. People were always forgetting that we weren’t twins and sometimes even I forgot. Stone had always been right there with me and it was unlikely he remembered that brief breath of time before I’d been around. So we weren’t twins. But we weren’t like the other brothers we knew either.

  Stone flashed me the cocky grin that drove all the girls to weak-kneed idiocy. I grinned back at him.

  Suddenly his smile dropped a notch. “Fifteen minutes,” he warned with a raised eyebrow.

  I shifted to drive and eased the car down the street, feeling bad and feeling damn good at the same time, like I always did when we were doing something we shouldn’t, from scribbling on our bedroom wall with magic markers to tossing the principal’s chair into the town pool. It was an ancient feeling as old as my memory. It had always been this way.

  We didn’t make it to Burgerville. As we closed in on Main Street it occurred to me, rather belatedly, that we weren’t invisible. In fact we were attracting a fair amount of attention cruising around in the former mayor’s luxury sedan. Emblem wasn’t a tiny town but it wasn’t a huge one either and probability dictated there were a few people who recognized the Gentry brothers and wondered why they were sitting in the Gnome’s Cadillac.

  No cops though. No cops anywhere in sight. Stone shifted in the seat beside me when we stopped at the light on Main and Terrace. He was facing forward with a passive expression. Beyond him I caught a glimpsed of slack-jawed Mrs. Perry behind the wheel of the Honda stopped beside us. She owned the only flower shop in town. She was a friend of our mother’s. All at once the shittiness of this whole escapade struck me. If I had any sense I would just haul ass back to that fancy street before someone more important than Mrs. Perry took notice of us.

  “Hey, look at that.” Stone pointed over my left shoulder. “We’ve got company.”

  A horn blasted and I turned away from Mrs. Perry’s wide eyes to see Tony Cortez laughing in his prehistoric Camaro. The thing looked like it was one gearshift away from disintegrating but I was in auto shop with Tony and knew the car’s insides looked a whole lot better than its outsides.