Fuzzyland : Part 7

Dead Boys: Stories
by Richard Lange

(Page 7 of 9)

He's driving a new Volvo. He squints when he sees me, then gives a lazy wave. I'm all smiles as I hop out and walk around to his open window. He grew up on the East Coast somewhere and moved to California after college. Tracy cut his hair, that's how they met. He works in computers. I rest my palms on the roof of his car and bend over to talk to him.

"Yo, Adrian," I say. I used to kid him that he sounded like Rocky.

"Jack."

"They should just be a minute. The girls were getting cranky, waiting so long."

Tony lights a cigarette. The ashtray is overflowing with butts. Don't you sometimes see a chick and just want to tie her up and slap her around? He asked me that once while he was still married to Tracy. We were camping in Yosemite, all of us. The women and kids had gone to bed. I remember looking up at the stars and down at the fire and thinking, Whoops! He pushes his sunglasses up on his nose and flicks ash out the window, between me and the car door.

"How's Liz?" he asks. "Good, I hope."

"You know us. Slow and steady."

"Are you still selling, what, restaurant stuff?"

"Why do you have to be that way, showing up late and everything?"

"Did she tell you to say that?"

I check to make sure Tracy and the kids are still in the store before continuing.

"She was raped, man, and you're coming at her with lawyers? Have a little compassion. Act like a human being."

"I said, did she tell you to talk to me?"

"I'm her brother. I took it upon myself."

I meant to approach this a bit more obliquely. Three years ago, two, I'd have had him eating from my hand, but these days I feel like all the juice has been drained out of me. We stare at each other for a second, then look away at the same time.

"She was wasted," he says. "Ask her. She was coming out of a bar. She barely remembers. Read the police report. There are doubts."

My vision flickers and blurs. I feel like I've been poisoned. Kendra runs out of the store toward us, followed by Cassie. I push myself away from the car and search the ground for something - a stick, a rock. The pigeons make horrible fluttering noises in their throats.

"Hi, Daddy," the girls sing. They climb into Tony's car. Tracy watches from the store, half in and half out. I wish I was a gun. I wish I was a bullet. The girls wave bye- bye as Tony drives off.

"Can you believe that a-hole has a Volvo, and I'm driving this piece of shit?" Tracy says.

"He shouldn't smoke in front of the kids," I reply.

We pass an accident on the way back to her place, just a fender bender, but still my thoughts go to our parents. When they died I was almost to the point where I could see them as people. With a little more time I might even have started loving them again. What did they stand for? What secrets did they take with them? It was the first great loss of my life.

Tracy wants to treat us to lunch in Tijuana. We'll ride the trolley down and walk over the border to a steak house that was written up in the newspaper. That's fine with me. Let's keep moving. What Tony said about her is trying to take root, and I won't have it. She's my sister, see, and what she says goes. I don't want to be one of those people who need to get to the bottom of things.

We drive to the station. The crowd that boards the trolley with us is made up primarily of tourists, but there are also a few Mexicans headed for Sunday visits. They carry shopping bags, and their children sit quietly beside them. Tracy and Liz find two seats together. I'm at the far end of the car, in the middle of a French family.

We skirt the harbor, rocking past gray destroyers big as buildings. Then the tracks turn inland, and it's the back side of trailer parks and self- storage places. The faded pennants corralling a used car lot flap maniacally, and there's always a McDonald's lurking on the horizon. Liz and Tracy are talking to each other - something light, if their smiles are any indication. I wave, trying to get their attention, but it's no use.

The young son in the French family decides to sing. He's wearing a Disneyland T-shirt. The song is in French, but there are little fart sounds in it that make his sister laugh. His mom says something snippy to him, but he ignores her. Dad steps in, giving the kid a shot with his elbow that jolts him into silence. There's a faded tattoo on Dad's forearm. What ever it is has teeth, that's about all I can make out.

To cross into Mexico, we walk over the freeway on a bridge and pass through a turnstile. I did this once before, in high school, me and a couple of buddies. If you were tall enough to see over the bar, you could get a drink. That was the joke. I remember a stripper in a gorilla suit. Tacos were a quarter. The only problem was that the cops were always shaking someone down. The system is rotten here. You have to watch where you're going.

Tracy's got things wired, though. Apparently she's down here all the time. It's fun, she says. She leads us to a taxi, and we head into town, passing ramshackle body shops and upholstery shops and something dead squished flat. Dirt roads scurry off into the hills, where entire neighborhoods are built out of old garage doors and corrugated tin. The smell of burning rubber sneaks in now and then and tickles the back of my throat.

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.