Coronado

Mushrooms

Her boyfriend, KL, is driving, and she and Sylvester are packed beside him in the front seat of the Escalade, sucking down Lites as they drive through the rain from Dorchester, Massachusetts, to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Every twenty miles or so, KL reaches over her shoulder and taps Sylvester’s neck and says, “Sylvester, you know my girlfriend, right?” until Sylvester finally says, “Hey, KL. Okay. We’ve met.”

She and KL dropped two hits of GHB just before they picked Sylvester up, and she thinks it’s starting to show. She keeps touching her face with sweaty hands and giggling because they’ve forgotten the bullets and it’s been a long time since she’s seen the ocean and here it is raining and because KL keeps flinching every time a puddle explodes against his silver rims.

“KL,” Sylvester says, “this girl is fucked up.”

She says, “Sylvester, your nose is weird. Anyone ever tell you that? One nostril is tiny. And the other is, like, jet-engine size.” She tries to touch his nose.

“Serious, KL,” Sylvester says. “Fucked up.”

KL says to him, “Relax. Find something on the radio, look at the scenery, do some fucking thing.”

Sylvester rests the side of his forehead against the window and stares out at the rain snapping off the highway, boiling in puddles.

When they reach the beach, it’s empty, even the boardwalk, just like KL figured. They sit on the seawall and KL gives her his pissed-off glare. She can’t tell if he’s pissed off because she left the bullets in her other jacket or if he’s still part-pissed about the whole situation in general. Eventually, he gives her a smile when she raises her right eyebrow. He kisses her and his tongue tastes like metal because of the GHB and then he says, “Sylvester, come smoke this with me.” He and Sylvester walk down the beach in the rain and she sits on the wall in the cold and watches while they walk into the ocean and KL holds Sylvester under the water until he drowns.

He hands her the gun when he gets back, tells her to hold on to it.

She says, “That’s kind of risky, don’t you think?”

He puts his thumbs under her eyelids and pulls them down, looks into her eyes. “Drugs making you paranoid. That’s a good gun.”

They walk the beach for a bit as KL tells her how he did it, how he bluffed with the gun, put it against Sylvester’s head and forced him down into the water. “I tell him I’m just going to teach him a lesson, hold him down for a minute because he fucked up with Whitehall and that Rory thing too.”

“He believe you?”

KL smiles, kind of surprised himself. “For a few seconds, yeah. After that, it didn’t much matter.”

She watches the water to see if Sylvester pops up anywhere, but the waves are cold and gray and high, like whales, and KL tells her there was a pretty strong undertow out there too. Clams, a few inches below the wet sand, spit on her feet as she stares at the sea and KL wraps his arms around her from behind. She leans back into his chest, the heat of it, and KL says, “I had a dream about killing him last night. How it would feel.”

“And?”

He shrugs. “Wasn’t much different.”

She wasn’t always old.

Not long ago she was a girl, a girl without breasts, with a little boy’s body really. She walked back from school one day in a skirt she hated — an itchy, woolen thing with pleats, black-and-gray plaid, a chafing thing. She walked alone — usually she was alone — and the streets she followed home were tired, like they’d had a flu too long, the buildings leaning forward as if they’d topple onto her braided hair, her nose, her little boy’s body.

She cut through a playground, and there was a man sitting on the jungle gym, drinking a tall can of beer. He wore an army uniform that had sharp creases in the pants even though the shirt was wrinkled. He stood and blocked her path. She met his eyes and saw that there was a kindness hiding in them behind the rest of what lived there, which was good, because the rest of what lived there was hopeless, as if all the light had been vacuumed out. She never knew how long they stared at each other — a day maybe, an hour, a year — but everything changed. Her little boy’s body disappeared forever, sucked into those blasted eyes, replaced with a new body, a body that ached, that tingled as he watched her, a body covered with skin so new and thin it felt raw.

He said, “Fuck you waiting for, little girl? A hall pass?” And he bowed and held out his arm and she saw light fill his eyes for an instant, a moment in which she saw how beautiful they could be, powder blue and soft, love living there like a morning prayer. When he caressed her ass as she passed, she resisted the urge to lean into his hand.

When she got home, she saw his eyes in the mirror. She ran a hand over her new body, over the sudden nubs of her breasts, and she knew for the first time why her father sometimes seemed afraid and ashamed when he looked at her. She knew, looking in the mirror, that she was not of him; she was of her mother; she felt buried with her in the dark earth.

The next day, when she walked through the playground, he was waiting. He was smiling, and his shirt had been ironed.

What happened to Sylvester was all Rory’s fault, really, part of the stupid shit that went on in their neighborhood so much that to keep up with the whos and the whys you’d need a damn scorecard.

Rory stole some guy’s Zoom LeBrons one night while everyone was goofing in the hydrant spray. When the guy asked around, one of Rory’s girlfriends, Lorraine, told the guy it was Rory. Lorraine hated Rory because he’d saddled her with a baby who shit and cried all night and kept her from her friends. So the guy kicked Rory’s ass and took his LeBrons back, and one night Rory and his buddy Pearl took Lorraine up to Pope’s Hill and caved in her head with a tree branch. Once she was dead, they did some other things too so the police would think it was some psycho and not a neighborhood thing.

Rory told some friends, though; said it was like fucking a fish on ice. And Sylvester heard about it. Sylvester was Lorraine’s half brother on the father’s side, and one night he and a carload of boys came cruising for Rory.

It was summer and she was sitting on her stoop waiting for KL. Her father was inside snoozing, and her sister, Sonya, was sitting on the big blue mailbox at the head of the alley, saying she was going to tell their father she was seeing KL again, catch her another beating. Sonya was singing it: “I’m a tell Dad-ee / You and KL getting bump-ee.”

Then Rory came out of his house and she saw the car come up the street with the windows rolling down and the muzzles sticking out and she began to step off the stoop when the noise started and Sonya floated for a second, as if the breeze had puckered up and kissed her. She floated up off the mailbox and then she flipped sideways and hit a trash can a few feet back in the alley.

Rory danced against the wall of the Korean deli, parts of him popping, his arms flapping like a stork’s.

When she reached Sonya, her sister was covering her kneecaps with her palms. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes and held her shoulders until her teeth stopped chattering, until the tiny whistle-noise coming from her chest stopped all at once, just whistled back into itself and went to sleep.

KL calls them mushrooms. It’s like that old Centipedes game, KL says, where you have to shoot the centipede but those mushrooms keep falling, getting in the way.

Sometimes, KL says, you’re aiming for the centipede, but you hit the mushroom.

KL found out the Whitehall crew from Franklin Park was looking for Sylvester because he owed them big and hadn’t been making payments. When KL told them he knew firsthand that Sylvester had been borrowing elsewhere, Whitehall agreed to his offer. Just do it out of state, they told him. Too many people hoping to tie us to shit.

So KL waited until October and they ended up driving to Hampton Beach with Sylvester, kept going even after she realized she’d forgotten the bullets. Sylvester, leaning his head against the window, so stupid he doesn’t even know KL’s girlfriend is the sister of the girl on the mailbox. So stupid he thinks KL’s suddenly his best friend, taking him out for a Sunday drive. So stupid.

Period.

On the beach, she asks KL if he looked into Sylvester’s eyes before he made him kneel in the ocean, if maybe he saw anything there.

“Come on,” KL says, “just, fuck, shut up, you know?”

She’s been out to the ocean once before. Not long after KL got back from Afghanistan and she met up with him, he scored off this cop who’d been part of the Lafayette Raiders bust. This cop had known someone who’d served over there with KL, someone who hadn’t made it back, and he sold the shit to KL for 40 percent of the street value, called it his “yellow ribbon” price, supporting the troops and shit. KL turned that package over in one night, and the next day they took the ferry to Provincetown.

They walked the dunes and they felt like silk underfoot, large spilling drifts of white silk. They ate lobster and watched the sky darken and become striped with pale pink ribbons. On the ferry back, she could smell the sun in KL’s fingers as they played with her hair. She could smell the dunes and the silk sand and the butter that had dripped off the lobster meat. And as the city appeared, all silver glitter and white and yellow light, she could feel the hum and hulk of it wash the smells away. She pressed her palm against KL’s hard stomach, felt the cables of muscle under the flesh, and she wished she could still smell it all baked into his skin.

She walks up the wet beach with him now and they cross the boardwalk and she thinks of Sonya floating off that mailbox and floating, right now, somewhere beyond this world, looking down, and she feels that her baby sister has grown older too, older than herself, that she has run far ahead of time and its laws. She is wrinkled now and wiser and she does not approve of what they have done.

What they have done needed to be done. She feels sure of that. Someone had to pay, a message had to be sent. Can’t have some fool traveling free through life like he got an all-day bus pass. You got to pay the freight. Everyone. Got to.

But still she can feel her sister, looking down on her with a grim set to her mouth, thinking: Stupid. Stupid.

She and KL reach the Escalade and he opens the hatch and she places the gun in there under the mat and the tire iron and the donut spare.

“Never want to hear his name aloud,” KL says. “Never again. We clear?”

She nods and they stand there in the sweeping rain.

“What now?” she says.

“Huh?”

“What now?” she repeats, because suddenly she has to know. She has to.

“We go home.”

“And then?”

He shrugs. “No then.”

“There’s gotta be then. There’s gotta be something next.”

Another shrug. “There ain’t.”

In the Escalade, KL driving, the rain still coming down, she thinks about going back to school, finishing. She imagines herself in a nurse’s uniform, living someplace beyond the neighborhood. She worries she’s getting ahead of herself. Don’t look so far into the future. Look into the next minute. See it. See that next minute pressing against your face. What can you do with it? With that time? What?

She closes her eyes. She tries to see it. She tries to make it her own. She tries and tries.