Gypsy Davey Read online

  “And that’s it.” Phil addressed the crowd, who didn’t seem to care. “This young man is all paid up.” He leaned over and pulled Davey up to sitting position, “What is your name again?”

  “Davey,” Davey answered, removing his hand to expose an already swelling, bluing eye.

  “Nobody hits Davey no more.”

  “Yo Phil, yo Phil, yo Phil,” the lions chanted, something they’d clearly had to practice for.

  Phil sat back down next to Joanne. “See, babe, I took care a ya.”

  Joanne looked at nobody. Tears welled in her eyes but did not fall. Instead she tipped her head back and spit. Spit blood, through the space in her front teeth, a high, arcing stream better than any ballplayer with tobacco juice, clearing the sidewalk to land in the oily street.

  Davey leaned toward Joanne, right over Phil as if he weren’t there. “You okay, Jo?” he asked. “You need me?”

  She just leaned back on her elbows and stared off blankly, like the rest of the lions. Phil put his arm around her and leered. Jo sighed but didn’t resist. Now Phil had to be repaid. For his kindness.

  REGULAR COOL

  I’m on my bike. It’s cool on my bike. Always is, cool, the only place that is. I don’t mean cool like aren’t I the big man and doesn’t everybody wish he was me. I just mean regular cool. Like the weather isn’t so hot on my bike the way it seems to be everywhere else. The breeze puffs nice over my brow and stops the heat that’s always under there. And I’ve got a lot of brow.

  And with the cooling, the thoughts, my thoughts, come easy and orderly and slow the way I figure everybody else’s thoughts come all the time.

  I stayed on my bike one time, last weekend, for twenty-four hours straight. Mostly just to see if I could do it. Not moving every second of the time, but pretty much. Sometimes I took a break to just straddle the bike for a few minutes and watch stuff, but then I’d get all nervous and sweaty and jumbled again until I pedaled it away. Where I went in twenty-four hours of biking was everywhere. I rode out ten miles late Saturday afternoon, all the way to the quarry. Sometimes I can go to the quarry and find nobody there and I can scream, loud enough and long enough so that I nearly pass out, and then I can stand there and listen to myself scream back at me. But on a Saturday afternoon you don’t find nobody at the quarry, you find a bunch of kids drinking beer in tall cans and pony bottles, smashing the bottles on rocks right near me with a pop like dropping a lightbulb. Kids with air rifles who shoot frogs in the water and who see a kid like me and start to run in my direction and say things like “Hmmm humm, maybe we ought to get the pants off of this young man and see what we got.” So I didn’t stay but a couple of minutes at the quarry before I pedaled so hard my great mountain bike that I got from my dad that I kicked up rocks and a cloud of quarry dust big as a hot air balloon.

  I rode the ten miles back into town, which is where I spent the rest of the time. Riding, looking at everybody. Riding up close to the little kids at the park because I cannot get enough of little kids at parks. I could go on watching that, little kids playing on the swings and slides and turtles mounted on great big springs that coil up out of the ground, I could watch it forever even if I wasn’t on my bike. I smile there like no place else in the world just because I can’t help it. I can feel the difference in my face, the muscles all stretched out and tired at the corners of my mouth and on the balls of my cheekbones. And they like me back, little kids, because they run up to me and slap the fence with sticks and poke their tongues out at me and smile just as big as I do. But every time, I feel it, and I have to go. The deep heat of the stares I’m getting from the mothers who are sitting on the benches and sipping diet tonics and talking to each other but looking at me. And they’re all now scowling, or frightened, and then one or two or four of them stand up and inch their way my way and I have to go before they reach me.

  But I think I saw just about everything in town last weekend. That’ll happen when you ride for twenty-four hours. A lot of those hours though, the latest ones and the earliest ones especially, there’s not much to see except in the places Ma tells me not to go. “There.” Don’t go “there,” she tells me. Stay out of “there.” But I realized a while ago that there was about half the world I’d never see if I didn’t pass through “there” sometimes, so I started doing it.

  Turned out she was wrong about it anyway. Except for one time when they made a little circle around me, these guys with the sunglasses and baseball hats, and one of them said “Maybe, you’re gonna hafta give up the cycle, junior.” Well I just sat there on the bike and I looked at him and I didn’t say a thing. I slowly crouched down low over the handlebars, practically lying on the bike the way a jockey does with his horse, and I wrapped my arms around it. I kept looking up at the man. Because he couldn’t have it, whether he was one big scary man—which he was—or six big scary men with their arms folded across their chests—which they were. They could not have the bike. It was then just as it is now and will be tomorrow, that you can take my bike if you have to take it but you’re going to have to take my life along with it. Because that’s what you’d be doing anyway, taking my life when you took my bike.

  So I got to keep it, I guess because I made everybody laugh so much the way I hugged onto my bike like I was going to keep it from them. “Go on now, goofy kid,” the man said to me. His name was Lester, and I did go on when he told me to.

  But I went back. I passed through there all the time, sometimes day and sometimes night, because I was forever riding and there are just not enough places in this world to ride if you ride forever. Unless you ride out and don’t come back. “Whatcha doin’ back here, little crazy boy,” Lester said when he saw me again. I rode in a circle around him, around and around the way I would when I wanted to see something up close but I didn’t want to stop riding. The circle got tighter and tighter until I could keep my balance while buzzing in a four-foot circle like a circus trick rider. Lester liked that, standing in the center with his arms folded trying to follow me from behind his sunglasses without moving his head.

  “Riding,” I answered. “I like to ride.”

  “I guess you do,” he said, and we began having little conversations like that all the time. Sometimes I would ride that way just to have the thirty-second talk with Lester.

  “You back again? Boy, don’t you got no home?”

  “I got one.” I circled and circled him.

  “Then go there,” he snapped, stamping his foot. I took off, whizzing down the street, but it was play. Lester was the person who never really chased me off.

  “Gypsy boy,” Lester said next time. I could tell he was starting to like seeing me. If I didn’t come by one day, he’d be twice as excited the next. “The boy with no home. The day-and-night cycler.”

  “You’re always here, too,” I said. “You got no home?”

  Lester smiled, nodding. He was like a flashing neon light as I spun around him. His big electric smile with the two gold front teeth on one side, the six-inch gold lettering L-E-S-T-E-R flashing across his black satin baseball jacket in back.

  “What is your name, boy?” Lester asked.

  “Davey,” I said as I peeled away, suddenly feeling the need to fly.

  “Gypsy Davey,” he called after me. “There go the Gypsy Davey.”

  So when Lester and his friends saw me time after time after time during my twenty-four hours, he didn’t think anything of it other than to say, after a while, “Gypsy boy, y’know, if you’re gonna do all this motoring around for nothin’, then here, why don’t you take this little package over to so-and-so street and give it to so-and-so little man and here, keep this little fi’ dollars for your trouble.”

  And I did it. Lester was pretty happy when I came back, and he gave me another package and another five dollars. And then one more. But I asked him, after the last time, when the person I brought the package to came out to the sidewalk in some leopard-skin bikini underwear, with a gun in his hand and a baby on his
hip, I asked Lester if he’d be mad if I didn’t go to any more houses. Lester didn’t mind, and I hung around some more until my twenty-four was up and I went home Sunday afternoon to sleep for about twenty-four more. On my way in the house Ma said, “You missed lunch, Davey.”

  But now I’m back. I’m rested and I’m on my bike and I’m at the quarry. But it’s not Saturday afternoon and the place is all mine. I passed the playground and drew a stare, even though I didn’t even slow down. I wish I could tell them. I wish they could see how I take care of the baby Dennis, so then they could feel better and I could feel better. But I can’t and they can’t because there just seem to be things that can’t work that way.

  I scream across the quarry, like I’m blowing all my air out, and the scream and the air sails out and over, bounces off the far granite, then comes back to me like I wanted it to.

  BIG NOW

  Joanne was tired. A very tired fifteen. Where she used to flop with her friends, just like her friends, leaning back on her elbows on the steps killer cool like she wasn’t lazy, just too mean and pubescent pretty to care, now she lay flat out, wasted. Stretching herself across the middle step of Celeste’s porch, she didn’t care about people stepping over her, didn’t care about sunburn, didn’t care if somebody, maybe Phil or maybe somebody else, got an urge to reach out and grab a quick piece of feel now and then. Long as they didn’t squeeze too hard or too long.

  Davey minded, but he learned to live with it. Learning to live with it. That was what he seemed to be learning best. Lois taught him, the way she taught everything, by accident. Joanne taught him. And Joanne’s friends—who she once called “The Lions,” but now dismissed as “The Dogs,” even as she failed to quit them—taught him. Phil, alpha male, king of the lions, lead dog, Joanne’s thing, bigger than the rest, so that was how everything was decided, Phil was an educator.

  So if big old Phil was smoking a little dope one day and feeling a little generous and decided to blow dumb old skinny Gypsy Davey a little shotgun just for a hoot and to relax the boy, then who was there to say that wasn’t okay? Because even though he sat still as a floorboard and hardly said a croak, he gave off a tenseness that made Phil squirm.

  “There you go, sonny,” Phil said from behind a glassy-eyed grin. “Now recline, and stop bein’ so tight all the time.”

  So who was there to say that it wasn’t okay?

  Not Davey, who breathed the smoke in deep, held it as long as he could like he’d seen everyone else do, then coughed a wheezy, painful cough for five minutes.

  Not Joanne, who lifted her head off the step for a few seconds, looked at the hunched and heaving back of her little brother with some concern, then let her heavy head drop again. She slapped his back weakly from her repose.

  So who was there to say it wasn’t okay?

  So what if Davey’s head started snapping at every movement on the street, every passing car, every skinny cat, every wad of spit that flew over from the crowd behind him, like he was watching a tennis match at five thousand RPMs. And so what if he was starting to list to one side a little? Who wasn’t, right? Joanne reached out and straightened him up and gave his back a reassuring rub to calm him until the next helpless tilt when she did it again. He turned his great cow eyes to her, lost, begging—still without speaking—for her to right not just his posture, but the world around his head.

  “Stop that,” she said, “stop looking at me, Davey.” She pushed his face away, turning it back out toward the street. It was the kind of thing that at first gave her a shudder, a scared-little-girl crackling of the heart, to watch what she watched happen to Davey. But it was the kind of thing she would get used to fairly quickly at this point, if he only wouldn’t look at her too much. She felt, like she felt for herself, that this all would be better for the kid anyway. She was too tired to feel it any other way. She took a toke, and she felt it more.

  So who was there to say that it wasn’t okay?

  Walking home, Joanne played a hunch that wasn’t exactly a guess. “You hungry, Davey?”

  He panted, as if he’d been holding his breath and could now let go. “Oh Jo, I’m so hungry I’m gonna eat my clothes if I don’t get something.”

  She laughed at him loud enough to make him smile. “Then why didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t know. Didn’t know if I was supposed to be hungry, or not. I was afraid of sounding like a dip.”

  Still laughing and shaking her head, Joanne roughly grabbed him by the collar and manhandled him through the glass doors of DoDo’s Roast Beef. She loved roughing him up because he’d gotten so tall that she had to stand on tiptoe to do it. And because Davey let her do it.

  DoDo’s stayed open every night till three a.m., and that was when they did most of their business. At that time of night, their pizza rolls, onion rings, and gristly red meat swimming in sauce were like milk and cookies to the kind of people who were out scaring up food. Those were the same people who were there in the daytime too, only fewer because most were still sleeping.

  Joanne fished through her jacket pockets, the breast pockets, inside wallet pockets, outside hand pockets. She wedged her hands into her packed-tight-to-the-skin jeans pockets, front and back, until she’d squeezed out every dime she had. Then she shook down Davey, jostling, spinning, groping, and frisking him clean. The haul was $3.80, enough for a small Beefy with cheese and a pizza roll.

  They sat in a booth, where Joanne divided the items almost evenly with a white plastic knife. Davey had already swallowed his half of the pizza roll before she’d managed to saw through the beef. In two minutes, their places, with untouched napkins lying square and white in front of them, looked so clean it appeared they were awaiting their food rather than done.

  “I’m gonna eat this napkin, Jo,” Davey said in total seriousness. “I’m hungrier now than before we ate.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  They got up to go, but just before they reached the door, Joanne noticed a couple, middle-agey and shadowy in the corner booth. The kind of people Joanne always found to be easy marks when she wanted to hit strangers up for money, which she liked to do when she was stoned, whether she had money on her or not. People always paid her to go away quickly when they were eating.

  “ ’Scuse me folks, but me and my simpleton brother were trying to get us something to eat. No shit, he’s got them genuine I’m-a-idiot cards, but he’s havin’ a new batch printed right now—”

  Joanne could see the man, a small, rotund, blue-faced creature with active sweat, was immediately ready to crumble to her. But it was Jo who buckled first when the woman who had been hanging under the floppy hat and cigarette smoke looked up, and was Lois.

  It was almost difficult to recognize Lois still—even as she pushed her face menacingly toward Joanne—under the heavy poundage of eye makeup she was sporting. Yet Lois it was, her mother, though she was not about to admit it.

  “Get away,” Lois snapped. Her date said nothing.

  When she realized the tack her mother was taking, Joanne regained power. Davey, paranoid, terribly confused, stepped behind Joanne.

  “Please, lady,” Joanne moaned. “We’re destitute. We eat garbage. We live in the street. Our mother is a—”

  “Get . . . away,” Lois growled with such crackling low menace that the bald man and Joanne both pulled back from her. But Jo would not quit.

  “We should just give them something,” the man said timidly. “They do look pretty bad off. Look at their eyes.”

  Davey now hid his face completely, but Joanne turned her own dewy, reddened cow eyes on Lois and the man.

  “Leo . . . ,” Lois warned.

  “Here you are,” Leo said, pressing a ten-dollar bill into Jo’s hand.

  “Bless you, bless you,” Joanne said, bowing as she backed away, into Davey. “And thank you too, Mom, I mean ma’am.” Davey started pulling Joanne backward by the jacket, toward the exit.

  “Hell no,” she said. “We’re eatin�
�.”

  Jo took the money up to the counter and piled it on. Two more pizza rolls, two more sandwiches—big Beefys this time—onion rings and large Cokes.

  “To go?” Davey said hopefully over her shoulder.

  “No go,” she said, and led him back toward the booths, past the near booths, down the aisle, to the far corner again. They sat down in the booth directly across from Lois and Leo’s.

  Joanne smiled sweetly at the couple when they looked at her, then popped an onion ring in her mouth. Davey shrank down in the seat, but still ate, and started giving the fish eye to his mother’s other man.

  “Maybe we should go now,” Lois said.

  “In a minute,” Leo said, sipping coffee out of a tall yellow paper cup.

  Lois tried to ignore, but couldn’t keep her eyes off the scene in the next booth. Jo was spinning onion rings like greasy little hula hoops around her fingers before eating them. She was taking bites out of her sandwich so big that she couldn’t close her mouth fully to chew them. In the middle of it all she was seized by a giggling fit that would not stop, making her gag on her food, cough little pieces across the table to land on her stunned brother’s face. But the crowning event, the cherry on top, was when she very, slowly, very dramatically took a five-inch pizza roll and, turning to face her mother, pressed the whole thing gently into her own throat. Tilting her head back, like a sword-swallower, she lowered the entire roll down her gullet without so much as a catch. Just as it disappeared, along with thumb and index finger up to the knuckles, she slowly drew it all back out again, intact, dragging it out between her lips. Then she took just the daintiest bite out of the tip.

  “Leo, we’re going,” Lois said, fairly leaping to her feet. Leo was slow to react, still sitting enraptured over the pizza-roll performance. Davey was the only one who missed it, having been occupied with staring daggers into Leo.

  On his way by, Leo smiled and nodded at Jo, who winked in return. Lois simply pointed her finger at Jo like a gun, and showed all her teeth.