Fuzzyland : Part 4

Dead Boys: Stories
by Richard Lange

(Page 4 of 9)

We play Marco Polo and shark attack. I teach Kendra to dive off my shoulders, and she begs to do it again and again. Cassie, on the other hand, won't let me touch her. Liz bounces her up and down and drags her around making motorboat noises, but every time I approach, she has a fit and scrambles to get away. "You're so big," Liz says, but I don't know. I'm not sure that's it.

A man unlocks the gate in the fence that surrounds the pool, and a little blond girl about Kendra's age squeezes past him and runs to the water, where she drops to all fours and dips in her hand.

"It's warm enough," she shouts to the man, who smiles and waves at Tracy.

"Hey, whassup," Tracy says.

She bends her legs so that he can sit on the end of her chaise. His hair is spiked with something greasy, and his T-shirt advertises a bar. I dive down to walk on my hands. When I come up, they are laughing together. He reaches into the pocket of his baggy shorts, and I swear I see him give Tracy money.

"Where are you going?" Liz asks as I paddle to the ladder.

"I want to swim, Daddy," the blond girl yells.

"Not right now," the man answers without looking at her. He stands at my approach, smiles. A salesman. Maybe not for a living, but I've got him pegged. We shake hands professionally.

"The big brother," he crows, jokey jokey. My sister should be more careful.

"Philip's going to paint my place," Tracy says. "All I have to pay for is the materials."

"Unless we get burned out," he says.

She frowns and puts a finger to her lips, nodding toward the kids.

I scrub my hair with a towel and find that I'm sucking in my gut. It's sick. A flock of birds scatters across the smoky sky like a handful of gravel.

"You live in L.A.?" Philip says to me. "I'm sorry."

A real tough guy, going for the dig right off the bat.

"I like the action," I reply.

"I was down there for a while. Too crazy."

"You have to know your way around."

I adjust my chair, sit. Philip fingers the soul patch under his lower lip. I'm staring at him, he's staring at me. It could go either way.

"I. Want. To. Swim. Now," Philip's daughter wails.

"Your mother'll be here any minute."

The girl begins to cry. She stretches out facedown on the pool deck and cuts loose.

"Go to it, Daddy," Tracy says, giving Philip a playful kick.

He stands and rubs his eyes. "This fucking smoke."

"Nice meeting you," I say with a slight lift of my chin.

He walks over to his daughter and peels her off the concrete. She screams even louder. He has to carry her through the gate.

"He know what happened?" I ask Tracy.

"What do you mean?"

I stare at her over the top of my sunglasses. After a few seconds she says, "I told him I was in a car wreck."

"So he's not like a friend friend?"

"Hey, really, okay?" she warns.

I throw up my hands to say forget it. She's right. I don't know what I'm doing, all of a sudden muscling into her life. The girls are calling for me again. I run to the edge of the pool and dive in, determined to get Cassie to play sea horse with me.

The kids turn up their noses at the cabbage rolls, so Tracy boils a couple of hot dogs for them. She's more accommodating than our parents were. Seems like a terrible waste of time now, the battles fought over liver and broccoli and pickled beets. And what about when Dad tried to force a lamb chop past my teeth, his other hand gripping my throat? Somehow that became a funny story, one retold at every family gathering to much laughter. Nobody ever noticed that I would leave the room so cramped with anger that it hurt to breathe.

Tracy pushes food from one side of her plate to the other as she talks about her job. She manages a Supercuts in a nasty part of town. The owner is buying a new franchise in Poway, and she once promised Tracy that when she did, Tracy could go into partnership with her. Now, though, the woman is hemming and hawing. The deal is off.

"I turned that shop around. She used me," Tracy says.

"Tough it out," I advise. "Regroup, then sell yourself to her. You have to be undeniable."

"Jack, I quit two weeks ago. I'm not going to take that kind of crap."

"Well, well," I say. "Man."

"Sounds like it was time to move on," Liz interjects.

"What I'd like to do is open my own shop."

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.