Fuzzyland : Part 2

Dead Boys: Stories
by Richard Lange

(Page 2 of 9)

Her ex- husband is up to no good, she says, using the attack as an excuse to press for temporary custody of their daughters. Her attorney has assured her it'll never fly, but she's worried all the same. She keeps apologizing for bothering me, which begins to piss me off. I throw the rest of my sandwich into the trash and pour myself another cup of coffee.

"We're on our way," I say.

"It's hard, all of this. I can handle it, but it's hard."

"Shouldn't take us a couple of hours, depending on traffic."

After I hang up, I grab the sponge and start washing dishes. It's one of those days when normal things feel strange. The soap smells bubblegummy, but when I get some in my eye, it hurts like hell. The window over the sink faces the avocado tree, where Zeus, wearing a beekeeper getup now, is spraying with what looks like a fire extinguisher. The hive is soon covered with thick white foam. Liz comes up behind me and yanks on the waistband of my sweats.

"I'll drive," she says.

"I saw an actor at Canter's the other day. Big guy, dark hair. He was in Private Ryan and that Denzel Washington movie. Went out with Heidi Fleiss."

"Oh, I know. Tom . . . Tom . . ."

She screws up her face and stares at the ceiling, folding and unfolding the dish towel. The grass is dying out back, even though I have watered and fertilized. A few bees trail after Zeus as he carries the foam dispenser to his truck. One of them veers off and begins bashing its brains out against the kitchen window with a fury that is truly humbling.

The freeway is clear until we get into Santa Ana, a few miles past Disneyland, then it locks up. I punch over to the traffic report. Whichever lane Liz chooses stops moving as soon as she weasels her way into it. She keeps humming three notes of a song she has stuck in her head. My mouth goes dry when I spot flashing lights.

"There's an exit right here," Liz says.

"I'm okay," I reply.

Car wrecks twist me all around. My parents died in one ten years ago now, out there in the desert, on their way back from Laughlin. Big rig, head-on, whatnot. It was an awful mess. My sister lost it. She'd just graduated from high school. She was arrested twice for shoplifting in one week. The second conviction got her a month in jail. I intended to visit, but I was working twelve- hour days selling time on an AM oldies station where the general manager told everyone I was gay when he caught me crying at my desk shortly after my parents' funeral.

When Tracy was released, she moved to a marijuana plantation in Hawaii. I still have the one letter she sent. In it she asks for money to buy cough syrup and says she's learning to thread flowers into leis. She spends half a page describing a sunset. There's dirt on the envelope. The stamp has a picture of a fish. It made me angry back then, but envy can be like that.

I try to keep my eyes closed until we're past the accident, but the part of me that thinks that's silly makes me look. A truck hauling oranges has overturned, the fruit spilling out across the freeway. Two lanes are still open, and traffic crawls past, crushing the load into bright, fragrant pulp. The truck's driver, uninjured, stands with a highway patrolman. The driver keeps slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand and stomping his feet. The patrolman lights a flare.

Things clear up after that. We zip through Irvine and Capistrano and right past the nuclear plant at San Onofre, which looks like two big tits pointing at the sky. The ocean lolls flat and glassy all the way to the horizon, sparking where the sun touches it. At Camp Pendleton, the marines are on maneuvers. Tanks race back and forth on both sides of the freeway, and the dust they kick up rolls across the road like a thick fog. The radio fades out, and when the signal returns, it's in Spanish.

We stop in Oceanside for a hamburger. The place is crawling with jarheads who look pretty badass with their muscles and regulation haircuts, but then I see the acne and peach fuzz and realize they're boys, mostly, having what will likely turn out to be the time of their lives. I convince Liz that we deserve a beer, so we step into a bar next to the diner. The walls are covered with USMC this and USMC that, pennants and flags, and Metallica blasts out of the jukebox. It's not yet noon, but a few grunts are already at it. I have the bartender send them another pitcher on me. They raise their mugs and shout, "To the corps." I can't figure out what it is that I hate about them.

A fire engine forces us to the side of the road as soon as we get off the freeway at Tracy's exit. I see smoke in the distance. The condo development she lives in rambles across a dry hillside north of San Diego, block after block of identical town houses with Cape Cod accents. The wiry grass and twisted, oily shrubs that pick up where the roads dead- end and the sprinkler systems peter out are just waiting for an excuse to burst into flame. There have been a number of close calls since Tracy moved in. Only last year a blaze was stopped at the edge of the development by a miraculous change in wind direction.

We get lost on our way up to her place. There's a system to the streets, but I haven't been here enough times to figure it out. The neighborhood watch signs are no help, and the jogger who gives us a dirty look, well, better that than gangbangers. They keep a tight rein here. The association once sent Tracy a letter ordering her to remove an umbrella that shaded the table on her patio because it violated some sort of bylaw. I'd go nuts, but Tracy says it's a good place to raise kids. A lucky turn brings us to her unit, and we pull into a parking space labeled VISITOR.

Her youngest, Cassie, opens the door at my knock. She's four, a shy, careful girl.

"Hello, baby," I say.

Her eyes widen, and she runs to hide behind her mother in the kitchen.

"Cassie," Tracy scolds. "It's Uncle Jack and Auntie Liz. You remember."

Copyright © 2007 by Richard Lange

About the Author

Richard Lange was born in Oakland, CA, in 1961 and spent his childhood in various small towns in California's Central Valley. He moved to Los Angeles at 17 to attend film school at the University of Southern California. While there, he took fiction writing courses taught by T.C. Boyle and was awarded the Ed Moses Fiction Writing Grant two years running. He also worked 32 hours a week at a supermarket in order to pay for costs his scholarship didn't cover and feels that he learned as much there as he did in school.