Blood Relations Read online

  She stood, took a last gulp of her coffee as she watched me. “I have a feeling. I think Angel may be here tomorrow. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?”

  “Thank you. Okay, I’ll try. Thanks again...”

  “Call me Felina,” she said, changing somehow with the distance, back into someone steely and tall and motherlike at the top of the porch steps. When she pivoted and disappeared back into the house, I fumbled out a couple of pills and ate them like Flintstones chewable vitamins.

  Hang Fire

  I SPENT THE NEXT DAY where the doctor, my mother, and even Evelyn said I should have stayed in the first place. Bed. Spring sprang full that week, the sun shone, and I hid inside. The sun makes me nervous sometimes.

  Without dragging out all the gories, what I did was hang in my room, listen to music, and amuse myself privately. I was beginning to hear the footsteps that were the end of my medication run with no refills. The bottle that was supposed to last me two weeks, if the pain persisted, was two-thirds empty after three days. Shouldn’t’ve shared ’em with Sully, was the problem. Or maybe rotten-ass Terry got at ’em. Not that he would eat them, hell no. He says that drugs are ungoddamn American and that all they do is pervert the experience of beer. What he would do instead is dump them down the toilet and leave me groping in the dark so that I woke up in the promised land with a pill bottle cap stuck in my throat.

  So I slept with them under my pillow and worked it out so that I could make it on one pill every few hours and if I took it with a beer that I shot right down without breathing, I could achieve and maintain a certain precious state. Hold it for quite a while, stretch out the ride over my whole rehab vacation.

  On Tuesday I listened to the same disc all day, Out of Time by R.E.M. All day. I put it in the machine in the morning and hit the repeat button. I counted how many times it played altogether, but then I forgot how many that was. Sully swears that R.E.M. and Pink Floyd are the same band. Maybe, but after listening to them however the hell many times, I don’t think so. Just to be sure, I planned to listen to Dark Side of the Moon all day on Wednesday.

  Wednesday is a total blank.

  Thursday I listened to Dark Side of the Moon all day. It’s a different band.

  No idea how much time had passed, but when the music stopped, I snapped to with my eyes wide again. Sproing.

  “Told ya it was the same band,” Sully said as he stood over the stereo. “But never play Moon while you’re sleepin’, it screws your head. You were screamin’ pretty good.”

  I was propped up rigid on the bed, my arms extended behind me to keep me from falling back. I could feel my eyes wide and dry, the moisture from my eyes coming out on my forehead instead.

  “Mick, you look like you don’t know who I am,” Sully said.

  “I know who you are, numbnuts.”

  “There.” Sully relaxed. “That’s better,”

  “I was screaming?” I asked.

  “Who the hell is Felina?” he answered.

  “Shut up. How long have I been sleeping?”

  “How should I know? What time did you fall asleep?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Afternoon. Three, three thirty.”

  Sully looked at his watch. “Seventeen hours.”

  “Cut the shit,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “Ten past eight. I just stopped to look in on my way to school.”

  “Eight? In the morning? It’s not Thursday anymore?”

  Sully laughed at me, waving me off like I was some big joker. “Pretty screwed, huh, Mick? I thought you had big plans for cuttin’ back against the grain. You don’t mind my sayin’ so, this looks kind of like your old grain.”

  “Takes time,” I muttered, slouching lower in the bed.

  “Ya.” He laughed. “I hear changing your spots can be a pretty tricky operation.”

  He had me beat. I lay there without answering.

  “Who’s Felina?” Sully pressed.

  “She’s my mother,” the cold voice growled from the doorway.

  Sully stood frozen, staring.

  Toy stared back. With his arms over his head, his hands gripping the door frame above, he looked all spread wide, staring down on Sully, bearing down on him. Like a meal. The hawk and the squirrel.

  “Holy smokes,” I said, and leaped out of bed. My knees buckled and I got intensely dizzy, so I had to sit back down. Fell down, really, while the blood got back to all the needy places. “Oh god. Ouch. Oh god.”

  Toy walked into the room. He walked right to Sully, getting in real close, aggressive close, uncomfortable close. Ready to talk, ready to listen to anything having to do with the last time they saw each other. He made it so that, with Toy’s chest in his face, Sully had to do something.

  Sully’s face turned red, his eyes turned down. “Glad to see you got away okay,” he mumbled.

  “Ya, thanks a bunch,” Toy responded.

  Sully left without a word.

  When Sully left he grunted at something in the shadow of the hallway. Then Toy’s other surprise stepped into the room. Evelyn.

  “Jesus, this is a damn party,” I said, excited and silly like a kid. “Where’ve you been, Toy?”

  Toy was not at all excited or silly. “Where’ve you been?”

  “The disabled list,” I joked, still failing to read the mood of the room. “Evelyn, love, I knew you’d come back to me.”

  She shook her head and flared her nostrils in disgust as she looked me all over. “You know, you got a boca loca, boy. Every time I see you, you say something moronic to me.”

  “I’m stupid with love,” I moaned.

  “You’re stupid with something, that’s for sure.”

  I laughed, feeling it was a compliment of some kind, then looked up to Toy for him to share it with me. Toy had this way of showing his expression even while hiding most of it under his hat. And he was showing me something angry now.

  “So where you been?” I chirped. “You look good.”

  “I was on a vacation.”

  “Excellent. Where’d ya go?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Maybe we picked a bad time, Toy,” Evelyn said. “We’ll see him at school next week.”

  Without thinking, I reached for my pills. Toy snatched the bottle out of my hand and read the label.

  “What’s your problem?” Toy demanded.

  I hate it when people ask me that. “Maybe she’s right,” I said. “Maybe you should go now.”

  “Do you know that it smells in here?” He leaned down into my face. “It smells like a toilet. Are you aware of that?”

  “Well, I wasn’t, but thank—”

  “Jesus, Mick, are you sick? Where is everybody?” He stopped, reached down on the floor, and picked up a brown half-moon-shaped something. “Jesus Christ, is this a hamburger? Isn’t anyone taking care of you?”

  “I’m not sick.” Suddenly I felt defensive, angry. “They’re all out working right now. Shoppin’, maybe. My mother brings me in food. The other night my father asked me, from the other side of the door, if I wanted him to wheel in the TV for a couple of hours. So you see I’m taken good care of, thank you very much.”

  Maybe that was a good thing to tell him, because when I said it he stopped picking on me. He just sighed and slapped his thighs loudly with his hands.

  “You really don’t look well, Mick,” Evelyn said, brushing past Toy. She came close and raised my chin with two fingers. She was so warm, not that she had any special feeling for me, but because she was one of those people who cannot ignore hurt things—even if she does try to make exceptions. She was so beautiful, she made me want to hurt myself.

  “Can I have my pills back?” I said flatly to Toy.

  He reached right over Evelyn and grabbed me. With his big hand he seized me by the neck, his thumb pressing on my jugular, two fingers squeezing, crackling the vertebrae in back. I let out a small scream.

  “Toy, don’t!” Evelyn yelled. She grabbed at his
arm and I saw her nails sink into the underside of his biceps, the part that should be soft but on Toy wasn’t. “You’re hurting him, Toy, stop it.”

  She kept trying but he moved as if she weren’t even there, dragging us both down the hall. When we reached the bathroom he shoved me inside, flipped on the light, and jammed my face into the mirror.

  “Look at that garbage,” he said.

  I hadn’t looked in a mirror in a while. Not since the weekend, probably. Not on purpose though—it just wasn’t something I did very often.

  My eye sockets were deep and black, my skin was blotchy, off-white, and chalky. My hair stood straight up in the air on the left side and in front, and lay pasted to my head everywhere else. It was all matted together in lumps and shiny with oil. My teeth were dark.

  “Hot damn, I look like Keith Richards,” I said, snarling and bobbing my head at myself.

  “Fool,” Toy snapped. “The right response is supposed to be ‘Oh my god, I look like Keith Richards.’ It’s not really a good thing.”

  “Would you lighten up for once,” I said, turning away from the mirror.

  “You big spoiled baby,” he said, blocking me from leaving the bathroom. “I finally realize, you have no problems that you don’t make up all by yourself.” He hesitated, his lips pulling in tighter, harder, as he struggled for words. He looked straight up at the ceiling, then back toward Evelyn, as if she could make it come out clearer. Suddenly his face whipped back around to me. “You have no right,” he finally said quietly. “No right. You have no business. You have everything.” He let me go and shoved me backward at the same time. “You make me sick.” With that, Toy stomped down the hall and out of my house.

  I was thinking about what he said, agreeing with him, but at the same time missing the pills he’d just taken away. As I headed to the kitchen for an eye-opener, I bumped into Evelyn. She had stayed. My heart started beating again.

  “He’s so intense,” I said, shrugging.

  She folded her arms. “I think it’s your self-pity, self-absorption, self-flagellation, self-mutilation, all that self-stuff that Toy can’t relate to.”

  “Huh?”

  “Grow up.”

  “Oh. I get it.” Not that I actually did. “Where was he all that time, Evelyn?”

  She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know. He doesn’t say.” Evelyn started walking down the hall toward the door, and I followed her.

  “He certainly came back with a stick up his ass,” I said.

  She shook her head. “What is it like for you, to live every moment entirely beside the point?”

  “You like me, I know it.”

  “Good-bye, Boca Loca,” she said.

  “Wait,” I said as she started down the stairs. Suddenly none of it seemed funny anymore. I was very nearly alone. “Could you stay with me for a while?”

  “No. I have to go to school.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s right, I forgot. I’ll be going. Next week, I’ll be going again.” I was mumbling by the end of it, backing away from the door, thinking already about the refrigerator.

  “Don’t do what you’re thinking about,” she said, shooting her arm straight out from the shoulder and pointing at me. As if she knew exactly. It gave me a shudder. She sat down on the top step, and I came out to join her.

  “I only have a couple of minutes, then I really have to go.”

  “I know. That’s okay.”

  “He seems to really like you. Toy, that is. For some reason.”

  “I like that. I mean, even if he’s yelling at me and calling me garbage, there’s something I like about it.”

  Evelyn nodded, looking out at the street.

  “How about you... Evelyn?” I asked as timidly as I could without snuffling around her ankles. “Could you? Do you think? Like me?”

  She squared around to look at me. My heart sank as I saw my rotten face reflected back at me again, in her black eyes.

  “No, I don’t think so. I mean, anything’s possible. But I don’t think so.”

  She stood up, started down the stairs again. I remained slumped on the step, head dropped, staring into my crotch, staring at the same cutoff denims and same yellow-white T-shirt I’d been wearing since... when?

  “Maybe,” she called back, snapping me right out of it, “I could take another look. Maybe, you could bathe. Maybe, you could get some vitamin A into yourself. Maybe, you could detoxify by the time school’s out this afternoon...”

  I jumped up and called, much too loud to be cool at all, “Maybe.”

  As she slinked that confident, slinky walk down the street, I grabbed my head with both hands. The jump had done the screwy thing to my circulation again, making me teeter. And I smiled so hard my dead face muscles ripped me with a sensational pain.

  I showered with lavender soap, my mother’s Jean Nate shower splash, and dandruff shampoo that felt like battery acid seeping into my scalp. I worked a big gob of some spermy hair conditioner through my hair, clipped my curling, doglike toenails, and baby powdered all my problem areas. I even shaved, even though I was a couple of weeks shy of needing to, just so she could see and smell the effort of the blood on my neck and the lime Edge gel in the air.

  Two hours before school was out, I was ready, sweating, thirsty, my stomach all flippy. I sat, nibbled saltines, sipped ginger ale, changed my shirt twice, watched Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Andy Griffith.

  When Evelyn walked up to the house, I sat on the front steps shining dully like a pearl.

  She laughed out loud.

  “I’m goin’ in the house, dammit,” I said.

  “No, no, no,” she said, grabbing my hand and putting my little fire right out. “I didn’t mean to make fun. I think this is nice. You do smell like about twelve different things, but each and every one of them is better than what you smelled like before. Truly, I’m moved.”

  Truly or not, I bought it. “Where should we go?” I asked.

  “The museum.”

  “The museum? You’re taking me, to the museum?”

  “Well, I’m not taking you anywhere. I’m going to the museum, and you seem to want to go someplace with me, so there we are. You don’t have to go.”

  “No, I want to, I want to. I was there before. Eighth-grade field trip. Had a swell time. It was colorful, I remember.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said, smirking, “that’s the place.”

  The museum looked like a neat clean prison, with its tall slitlike barred windows, concrete everywhere, flat roof where there might be armed guards planted on all corners. High above the main entrance hung a massive banner with pictures of round cupids flying over a sign that read THE AGE OF RUBENS. The cupids were shooting arrows downward, and my eyes followed, down to where the arrows would land, down to the broad front lawn of the grounds, where they would lodge if they were real arrows, which they weren’t, and if the cupids were real, which they weren’t, into the back of the crying Indian who lives there on the lawn on his horse. I pass that Indian a couple of thousand times a year and I look at it maybe ten. Because it does something to me and I don’t like what it does to me. He has a full headdress on and it’s falling down his back as he stares straight up at the sky. His hands are pointing straight down at his sides, his palms facing us on the street. He might be crying, which is why I call him the crying Indian. He might be screaming. He might be laughing, but he doesn’t feel like a laughing statue. He might just be soaking up the rain, or the snow that lies on his naked arms so much of the year and makes me feel stung frozen and hollowed out just to look at him.

  The Indian stood there when the big banner said RENOIR. He stood there when it said DEGAS. And when it said GOYA, and THE SECRETS OF THE EGYPTIANS, and EAKINS, and THE WATERCOLORS. But I never had even a little bit of interest in walking past the crying Indian to go see any of it.

  I wasn’t aware that I had stopped walking. “You going home, you staying there, or you coming in?” Evelyn asked.

 
It’s different when you’re an eighth-grade kid, though, isn’t it? Everybody was stupid and ignorant then, so it wasn’t a problem.

  But it was a problem now. I couldn’t go in there now, with Evelyn, and have her see. She belonged in there. I belonged out on the lawn with the Indian.

  “To tell you the truth, Evelyn,” I said, “I don’t really go for angels that much.”

  “Cherubs,” she said. “They’re called cherubs.”

  Exactly, I thought.

  “Right,” I said. “But I’m starting to feel a little run down. Still recovering, you know.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You going to be all right?”

  “Sure, it’s just, I just don’t want to hold you back.”

  Evelyn nodded, I nodded. She went her way, inside. I went back my way. I spent a few minutes with the Indian before going home.

  At least she got me to bathe.

  The Grip

  “I DIDN’T EVEN SAY THANK you, for everything, the other day.” I stood as frigid and lifeless and white as a snowman outside Evelyn’s homeroom. It was Monday morning, my first day back at school. I’d only been out for a week, but it felt like Baba’s big hand had knocked me into next year. Even the Friday afternoon I’d just spent with Evelyn felt already like another life, like something that couldn’t possibly have really happened to me.

  “What are you thanking me for?” she said, slapping the air between us. “You never even got past the front entrance.”

  “Ya, but,” I lowered my head and my voice as two girls passed by, walking into class. “You took me. You got me interested for a minute there. Hey, next time I might even go inside.”

  “How come I didn’t see you be shy before?” she asked.

  “Because, ah, because I’m not, that’s why. Not that I know of anyway.”

  By then Evelyn’s class had filled, as had all the others. As I stammered away a smallish fist hit me in the back.

  “Hey zombie boy, welcome the hell back,” Sully said.

  Not that I wasn’t happy to see him, but I was talking, or trying to, to Evelyn. “Go,” I snapped, pointing toward the bank of pea-green lockers across the corridor. “Go. Wait for me over there. Go. Get over there, I said.”