Blood Relations Page 7

  I couldn’t play. Maybe later I could play but not now. I had, had, I had to have someplace I could go. I wasn’t sure if there was such a place for me, but I did know there was a place that took in everybody.

  I didn’t feel so foreign this time, as I cruised the skanky streets on the east side of the school, past the neighborhoods that belonged to somebody else, down down deeper toward the bay, to that mongrel patchwork of a subcity for nowhere people. I felt kind of right when I got down to the fish-packing plants and slanty apartment houses of Toy’s world.

  “Is he here?” I asked hopefully, tentatively, though I somehow already knew that he wasn’t.

  “What are you talking about?” Felina asked wearily, sagging against the door frame. “It’s the weekend. He isn’t here on the weekend. This is the ghost house once Friday comes.”

  “I’m sorry...” I said, already wishing I hadn’t come.

  Everything was making me weak, draining me of life. Terry and Augie and Bunky and Bobo and Ballantine at nine. Sully-who-loves-me’s house. Ruben’s nightmare dog. Felina and her tired voice and her big black hollow eyes. I felt as sapped as Felina looked.

  “Do you like coffee?” she asked, like the recorded time and temperature voice on the phone.

  “I like coffee.”

  “Would you like some, coffee?”

  “I would like some. Coffee.”

  I went in there, and up, up the stairs behind Felina. Into the house at the end of the world. I followed her, like I figured I was supposed to, not talking, as we passed through the living room where I met her that first time. But I didn’t want to think about that. I followed her down a hallway so narrow that the knuckles of both of my hands brushed the walls as I walked. With a three-foot lead, Felina reached into doorways and yanked each door shut, two on the right, one on the left, before I could see in. “Wasn’t expecting company,” she said. “You understand.”

  In the kitchen, she pointed to a chair. I sat in it, an orange vinyl-covered swiveler on big ball casters. Three more like it surrounded the circular brown Formica table. The room felt small, maybe because of the grapefruit-size roses on the grease-bubbled wallpaper that seemed to be closing in from every direction.

  “So,” she said, stirring coffee in a saucepan on the stove top. “Why are you here?”

  I hadn’t expected that. What had I expected?

  “Toy, right?” I said weakly. “I’m lookin’ for Toy, remember?”

  “Oh,” she said, and kept on stirring. “It’s just that, you weren’t here last Saturday. Or the Saturday before. Or any of the other Saturdays. And the only other time I ever saw you, you seemed a little banged up and freaky.”

  I thought of three different things to say, none of which really answered her. “Should I go?” is what finally came out.

  “Oh, but there was that other time,” she said, walking toward me with the hot pan in her hand. She smiled shyly, slyly. “You did come here that one other time, didn’t you?”

  I swiveled side to side to side to side in my chair. Couldn’t get that image out of my head now, of the first time I saw her, on the couch with her big old hairy husband and that other woman. Couldn’t get the image out. She’d planted it back in my head just like that and I couldn’t get it to stop playing over and over again. Didn’t totally want to get it out, to tell the truth. Her back. Her long, smooth, S-curved red-brown back. If she wasn’t here, in front of me, I could love that. But it was making me squirm now.

  She pulled down two mismatched mugs from a tree in the middle of the table, held the pan high, and poured. She didn’t comment on my long squiggly silence. Then she let me off the line. “But anyway, most of the time, is my point, most of the time you seem to show here when you’re sort of limping. You limping now?”

  “No,” I said indignantly. I straightened up, stopped fidgeting in my seat, and grabbed my mug.

  Felina picked up her mug too, took a sip. She winced, held the sip in her mouth, ran and spat it in the sink. “Don’t drink that,” she said, coming back to swipe my cup away. “I’m sorry. That was old stuff. I’m sorry. I have something else. I have these little packets, instant, but flavored, you know, vanilla, mocha. Came in the Sunday paper. I’m sorry.”

  It seemed like some really big thing to her, that she gave me bad coffee. Like she was in trouble now or something. She hurried to put on the kettle and tear open the foil pouches of instant coffee.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said. “I don’t usually even have coffee. Probably I would have liked it just fine.”

  “You’re a good boy,” she said.

  When finally she sat at the table across from me, I got a chance to study her face. It wasn’t an old face. It had a lot of deep lines in it, and the skin around her eyes was a little gray, but still, it wasn’t an old face. It wasn’t, to me, a mother face.

  “I don’t think I’ll buy this coffee,” she said, sniffing and stirring. “It’s weak.” Then she looked up, looked at me looking at her. “Thirty-three,” she said.

  “What?” I got nervous and started looking down into my own cup. “Nah, I think it’s fine. I’d buy it. Though I don’t really know much—”

  “I’m thirty-three.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “No, but you’re looking. And you’re thinking. So there it is for you. I’m thirty-three, Angel is seventeen. You want me to do the math for you?”

  I shook my head and sipped my coffee.

  Felina pushed her coffee away with a frown, then waited. She was waiting for me to say something but nothing was coming to me. Except that vision of her on the couch again, but I didn’t want to talk about that.

  “I forget, did you ever tell me why you are here?” she asked, folding her arms.

  “Ya, I was here for Toy, but he’s not here so I should go. I have to get a haircut, I just remembered.” And I was happy to remember, because I was getting nervous as a cat, though I didn’t know why. I gulped down the coffee and started bowing and stumblebumming out of the room. “Thanks. Thank you. Tell Toy—”

  “I could cut your hair.”

  Thrilled and scared at the same time, it came out like this: “Hummina hummina huh?”

  She smiled a big wide, bright-white toothy smile. “I never cut a red before. I used to work in a salon. I’d love it, and save you a buck.”

  “Oh, there, ya see,” I fumbled. “That wouldn’t work for me. I don’t do salons, I go to a barber.”

  She laughed, took me firmly by the hand. “I can barber.”

  I let her lead me like a balloon on a string. First, to the kitchen sink. “Hope you don’t mind, but your hair is, well, filthy.”

  “I know,” I said. “I had to leave kinda quickly this morning.”

  She sat me in a tall chair in front of the sink, gently tipped me back until my head was in the basin, my neck leaning on the edge. She sprayed me down with warm water, using one of those old gunlike rinsing hoses. As she worked the papaya shampoo into my head, my eyes fell closed and I relaxed.

  “So what was the rush to get out of the house?” she asked.

  “Sometimes, I just really, really can’t stand to be home,” I said.

  “Hmmm. Carlo feels the same way. A lot. So does my son, as you can tell. Myself, I wish I could run out like that.”

  “Why don’t you then?”

  “Because Carlo might come home. He doesn’t like me to be out. One time he was gone for three weeks and when he came home I was out. It wasn’t a good thing. So, it’s better that I stay.”

  “What do you mean? What could he—?”

  She just shook her head and placed a fingertip lightly on my lips. “So what goes on at your house, makes you want to leave?”

  Something about the warm water, the gentle scratching massage of her long nailed fingers, lulled me into honesty. “Well, every year on this weekend my criminal brother and his friends get psychotically drunk and do like rapes and beatings and vandalism and stuff at the colleges.”r />
  Felina stopped working momentarily. “Oh. I see.”

  “And see their headquarters is at my house and I didn’t want any part of it this year, so...”

  “Let me guess. If you’re not a perpetrator, you’re a victim.”

  “That’s about the size of it, ya.”

  She finished washing, turned up the hot water, and rinsed me off. She worked the hose with one hand, the temperature almost high enough to hurt me, but not quite, so it felt great instead. With the other hand she gently pushed and stroked, kneading the water and soap and filth out of my hair.

  I sat up straight, all combed and ready. “So how do you want it?” she asked.

  I thought, and thought immediately about Ruben’s look again. But he had curly hair and I didn’t. He also had a thin braid running a few inches down the back of his neck.

  “Cut the sides way short,” I said, “and leave the back just the way it is.”

  “How’s that?” she asked after clipping away for a few minutes.

  “Shorter,” I said, tilting my head and staring into the hand mirror.

  “How about that?”

  “Shorter.”

  Felina brought out the electric razor and cleaned me all around my pointy little devil ears. She shaved my sideburns up to the hairline. On top she left it medium floppy long. “Beautiful,” I said. “Can you do a braid?”

  Her fingers worked quickly, surely, giving little tugs on the back of my neck. I couldn’t suppress a smile as I felt it coming together. When it was done, Felina pulled it around to let it lie over my shoulder in front. Even I didn’t realize how long my hair had gotten, and it looked a lot longer with the sides so short. My clean new braid glistened like a skinny young red snake.

  “You are awesome,” I said, hopping out of the chair. I still held the mirror and swung my head side to side to let the braid slap my face. “Can I pay you or something?”

  “Of course you can’t,” she said, shaking her head as I bounced around like a fool.

  “Goddamn straight,” I said to my reflection. “Oops, sorry Felina.”

  “Eeek, I’m shocked,” she said, laughing at me again. “But where are you going to now?”

  “I’m goin’ home,” I said, gritting my teeth.

  “Is that a good idea?” she asked.

  I shrugged, but I still felt myself grinning. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but I’m gonna find out. Is it my damn home, or isn’t it?” I shook my fresh cut head again, frisky as a clipped dog.

  Felina followed me to the door, stood on the porch drying her hands with a dish towel as she watched me trot down the stairs. “You could stay here,” she said. “In Angel’s room.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said, stopping and turning to stare up at her. I wanted to then. I wanted to stay there. And I didn’t want Toy to come home, and I sure didn’t want big old Carlo to come home. Which was another good reason to get out of there.

  But mostly I wanted, I had to go back to my own house. Mine. A guy’s got to have a place, or he ain’t nothin’.

  “Thank you very much,” I said again, “thanks for everything.” Then I started my high-bounce, tail-swinging march home.

  Brother Love

  I HEARD THEM BEFORE I even turned the corner. They were out back barbecuing. The charred meat smell brought the reality back to me. I got a shiver. Did I really want this? No, but it wasn’t as if Terry and his boys and this neighborhood and all the crap that goes along with it were ever going to go away. So what was I worth if I couldn’t stand up to it?

  “What the hell happened to your head?” one fat Cormac said as I reached the back porch. The Cormacs were spread out on lounge chairs flanking a giant Coleman cooler, guarding the beer like the two stone lions outside the Copley Plaza, only with bigger heads, bigger mouths, bigger bellies. Danny was passed out lying in the grass on his back. There were two middle-aged barflies from the Bloody wearing green nylon Emerald Society windbreakers, pitching horseshoes at the far end of the yard. Terry, working the grill, stared up at me as he sucked on a beer so hard it made a small whirlpool in the bottle. He was staring at my hair.

  “I got me a new do,” I said. “Like it?”

  “Hell no,” the Cormacs said.

  “Hell no,” Danny said, keeping his eyes closed.

  “You got a call,” Terry snapped as he squirted lighter fluid all over the meat on the grill, raising a three-foot flame. “Some wench named Evelyn.”

  I gritted. “And?”

  “I told her to bring her little brown ass over to our party.” He looked up at me and grinned hard.

  I turned around. I thought I wanted to play. I realized now I didn’t.

  “Where you goin’, boy?” he called.

  I stopped at the door but didn’t turn to face him. “I’m goin’ into my room, in my house,” I said.

  “Don’t be a damn pig!” he yelled. “You can’t go in there. Frankie and Ned are in there with Honey.”

  I sighed. “Why my room?”

  “You jokin’? I don’t want that shit all over my sheets.”

  The Cormacs laughed, the old guys laughed, I heard the three people laugh from my room. The dogs Bobo and Bunky lifted their heads from where they were lying stupid under the porch and they howled.

  “Hey,” Terry called. “That Evelyn, she that spaniel bitch Baba told us about? You tappin’ that, Mick?”

  I turned now, walked down the stairs toward Terry, and got in his face. “What was that, Terry? I didn’t quite hear ya.”

  First he laughed it off, looked over my shoulder at his laughing buddies, pretended to pretend to be scared. He took a step back and started working the grill again. I stepped up to him again, talking straight into his ear. “I said, I didn’t hear you, Terry.”

  This time he looked up and into my eyes. Then he looked away. “Nothin’, Jesus, what’re you comin’ in here all tense about, Mick? Jesus. Have a beer for chrissake, will ya? Jesus.”

  He hadn’t finished talking before one of the brothers had rolled a beer across the lawn, landing it near my feet. “No thanks,” I said.

  Terry scooped it up. “Your loss,” he said. “But stick around anyhow, ’cause Baba and Augie are gonna be back any minute with some wicked entertainment. Relax, bro.”

  If ever I heard an invitation to beat feet, that was it. Terry’s sudden turn into sugary snaky sweetness, the power drinking going on in all corners, combined with the million possibilities of what Baba and Augie could bring back as “wicked entertainment,” reminded me quickly and finally that it was a mistake to have come back. “We missed ya,” Terry said, putting his arm around my shoulder, fingering my braid.

  I made like a bullet for the front of the house. I passed Honey standing by my bedroom window, her hair all sticky and matted around her round face. I was almost out of the yard when someone yelled, “They’re here.”

  Augie came marching down along the side of the house, so blasted he didn’t see me right off. “Check it out,” he said, as he grabbed my arm, pulling me along with him. When we got back to the yard, everyone gathered in a circle. The Cormacs threw full beers, bullet passes bouncing off chests and cheeks to hysterical laughter and whoops. Augie crouched down and got a headlock-type grip on Bobo, stroking his boxy head and whispering in his ear.

  “So where’d ya get it at?” asked Danny, upright and full of life now with a fresh bottle of vodka in his grip.

  “We grabbed it at... whatchacallit, that faggot art school over in the Back Bay. Just had ta give the loser spook security guard a bottle a 151 and he took a long lunch. What the hell do they need a mascot for anyway, they don’t play nothin’.”

  Terry laughed, loud, machine-gun style, but nervous and weird. Not any kind of happy laugh. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he said, waving his hands like bringing the runner home from third.

  “All right,” Augie said. Then he stuck two fingers in his mouth and peeled off an ear-shattering whistle. With that, Baba came lumb
ering down along the side of the house tugging a small white goat. A baby. Or a pygmy. Anyway, it wasn’t much bigger than Bunky the Boston terrier. Baba walked the goat to the middle of the circle, and called for a horseshoe and one of the metal stakes.

  “Jesus, cut the shit,” I said as Baba tied off the goat’s rope and hammered in the stake.

  “Shut up,” Augie said. Terry laughed more crazily.

  “I’m not gonna let you do this,” I said.

  Terry must have been waiting for me to say something like that. I never even saw him move before he had grabbed my braid and slammed me, backward, to the ground. At least three of them worked on me, I don’t know, but in a second I was flipped over on my belly, my chin in the dirt, with a two-hundred-sixty-pound Cormac on my back. Somebody pulled my head up by the hair, turning my face toward the action.

  “Bobo, get it!” Augie screamed, and released the monster.

  First, the little goat dipped his head and tried to jab the dog with his knobby blunt horns. But Bobo was running so hard all he did was just run right through him, the two of them bowling and barreling until the rope snapped tight. Bobo charged again, and the goat tried to run in the other direction, stopping short when the rope yanked his throat, choking him. He tried to keep running anyway, and even had the stake pulling loose when Bobo caught him from behind.

  The big dog turned his head sideways and clamped his jaws shut across the goat’s spine. He picked it up and slammed it down, first on one side, then the other. He tried to pull harder, but lost it when a big mouthful of white hair and red skin tore loose in his mouth. The goat fell and Bobo jumped him again, kicking up divots of turf as he scrambled to grab a purchase on the goat’s head. He did, pinching the thin layer of flesh along the temple area, throwing him down again, turning him over to get what he wanted, what his nature told him he needed. When he grabbed the little animal’s throat, Bobo was so excited he bit nearly clean through the neck.

  The kicking and bucking stopped, the strangled bleating stopped, but Bobo went on, throwing the empty carcass around, biting it, snarling at it, cracking bones, tearing off pieces and letting them fall out of his mouth.