Dead Boys: Stories

Telephone Bird

IN A DECENT WORLD, LOSING THE CAR WOULD HAVE been the last knot in that particular string of bad luck. The Denver boot they called it, and there it was one morning, big and orange and clamped to the left rear wheel of my Nissan. What kind of nastiness was that? A few unpaid parking tickets and they came down on you with a sledgehammer?

Bobby didn’t answer. The joint he’d smoked half an hour earlier had put him into a scientific frame of mind, and he held two dead leaves he’d found on the prickly yellow lawn out at arm’s length, shifting his gaze between them.

“You know what I did?” I continued, not worried if I seemed to be rambling a bit, as it was just the two of us. “I slashed the tires and cut every hose in the engine. I put dirt in the gas tank and took a screwdriver to the radiator, turned it into a sieve. What they towed away was a junker they won’t even be able to auction off. They’ll have to sell it as scrap. This is the new me, you see. Things used to happen to me; now I make things happen.”

“You were crying, though,” Bobby said, still intent on the leaves.

“Hello?”

“I heard you.”

“Give me a break.”

Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. He’d made it all the way to law school before his brain seized up. Now he watched too much television and labored over a trilogy of novels chronicling the Great Elven Wars of a land called Tybor. There was no sweeter kid if he took his medication and stayed away from hard liquor, but you wanted to shake him sometimes when his memory went spotty.

A bird cut loose with a trilling electronic chirp, and I nudged Bobby and pointed in the direction of the sound, somewhere near the shed at the back of the yard. It was this bird we were looking for, the one that had somehow learned to mimic the ring of my telephone. The first time it had perched outside my window just after sunrise and twittered that way, I’d sat up in bed and grabbed the receiver, certain that the temp agency was calling with a last-minute assignment. Since then, there’d been many more such false alarms, and my patience had been exhausted.

Because it was my problem, I took the lead. As stealthily as Hollywood Indians, we crept from apricot tree to lemon tree to avocado tree, finally crouching next to the rickety outbuilding. The boards of it were warm through my shirt, and I couldn’t believe how much I was sweating.

I peeked around the corner, where an old orange tree twisted out of the ground. Then, lying on my back, I wormed myself to the base of the tree’s trunk, my eyes fixed on the confusion of leaves and branches swaying against the sky’s blue blankness.

There! Its little chest puffed, its throat swelled, and out came the ring. I watched the bird bustle from branch to branch, a feathered twitch, more motion than mass, until a sudden ripping tumult frightened it away. The fist-size rock responsible dropped from the tree and landed too close to my head.

“I get him?” Bobby asked.

“Well, he knows he’s not wanted now, anyway. That might do the trick.”

I was trying to be hopeful in those days, you see, hopeful but forceful.

THE BIRD WAS back the very next morning, ring, ring, ringing, at the crack of dawn. Again I snapped awake, paranoia an icicle lodged in my bowels, my lower body puckered and clenched. The bill collectors were prohibited from harassing me under the terms of the bankruptcy, but the damage had already been done. At the end, right before I filed, they were calling all the time, some even threatening me. “You never got in over your head?” I’d scream at them. “You never had a beautiful wife you couldn’t say no to?”

The trap in the shower was clogged with hair, and someone had watered down my milk again, to hide their pilfering. Emma, the owner of the house, came into the kitchen while I was stewing over my cornflakes. She had her church dress on. She’d been a nun until 1988, and still went to Mass every day.

“Want some tea?” she asked. Water screamed out of the tap, thudded into the kettle.

“The milk fairies have been at it again,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Five people in one house is just too many.”

“That depends on the people.”

Emma smelled funny. Everything smelled funny. A hundred years’ worth of grease hung in the air, a slick of it settling on top of my coffee. What strangeness a man could get used to.

“I have to move out,” I said. “This place is killing me.”

“We’d sure miss you. Scrabble wouldn’t be the same.”

“Don’t look,” Sandal yodeled on his way to the refrigerator. He was wearing nothing but a pair of red bikini briefs. There was a house rule about that, about running around half-naked, but Sandal ignored it. He lived rent-free in the biggest room on the second floor in exchange for acting as handyman, and this, he felt, entitled him to certain privileges.

He leaned against the counter and tipped a container of yogurt into his mouth. With his ponytail and those panties and the dusty morning light, he could have been a woman in some screwy dream.

“Are you working today?” he asked me.

“No, Sandal,” I replied. “I always dress for breakfast.”

“No, really, how much are they paying you? Because this friend of mine hooked me up with an extra gig on this movie. I can probably get you on, too, and maybe Bobby. We’d make like seventy-five dollars.”

“Thanks, but I already committed.”

Emma brought her tea to the table and sat in the chair across from me. She was a nice lady, I liked her, but still I felt a little crowded. My knee wobbled, and the soles of my feet itched.

“What’s the movie about?” she asked.

“It’s a postnuclear deal, L.A. after the bomb and all that. I’m one of the zombies.”

Emma smiled, then bowed her head. She lifted the rosary hanging around her neck to her lips as she whispered a prayer over her tea. I glanced at Sandal, ready to exchange smirks, but his head was ducked, too. I waited until they’d finished to light a cigarette.

I WAS WORD processing for the gas company that week. The regular employees were out on strike, and every morning and evening we scabs were bused through an angry picket line. The strikers spat and cursed at us as we passed, their faces monstrous with rage, like those you see on the news, in footage from other countries. With rumors of guns in the throng, we rode most of the way bent double, hugging our knees, and I wondered if this was what war felt like. Afterward the bus’s windows would be glazed with snot and broken eggs that caught the sun and sparkled almost prettily.

SANDAL CROUCHED OVER a triple-beam scale placed on the coffee table, dividing a pound of marijuana into quarters and eighths. This was one of his jobs as handyman, because in addition to renting out rooms in her house, Emma also dealt small quantities of sinsemilla to a select and established clientele. Both Sandal and Bobby — sunk deep in a recliner, profoundly stoned — were still in makeup from their movie roles. Their faces glowed a purulent yellow and were riven with thick-lipped, oozy gashes.

“We looked even better on the set,” Sandal said. “With these gnarly false teeth and contact lenses.”

His elbow directed me to a stack of Polaroids he’d taken during the shoot: Skyscrapers in flames. Hordes of malformed creatures running riot. He and Bobby sharing a pint of bourbon, a severed head shrieking in the gutter between them.

“So it’s a documentary,” I joked, thinking of the picket line.

A baseball game fizzed on the big-screen television. It was an archaic projection model, and the lenses had been knocked out of alignment long before I’d moved in, so that three pitchers, red, green, and blue, occupied the mound at the same time, throwing to three overlapping batters. It helped to be high if you were going to watch it, and I wanted to see the game, so I reached for the joint Sandal offered.

How nicely the couch cradled me then, like the softest cloud. I lost track of the game, charting the snaky creep of darkness across the rug and up the wainscoting. The black tide slopped over onto the wallpaper, drowning the roses row by row, and I was right there when it reached the ceiling, the only witness as night overtook us. My head tingled with exciting plans for the future, and if I’d had a pen, I might have written them down.

AFTER THE GAME Bobby and I walked to the liquor store for a six-pack. The gang members who lived in the house up the block were gathered around a car parked at the curb, trying to install a stereo by flashlight. I whispered that perhaps we should cross the street, but Bobby refused.

“It’s my neighborhood, too,” he said.

The gangsters grew sullen as we approached. I stiffened my arms and clenched my fists. I crammed my hands into my pockets and pulled them out again. I made my face as blank as it could be. Grim stares greeted us as we drew abreast of the gangsters. Tattooed fingers tightened around wrenches and screwdrivers.

“Hey, ese, you seen a puppy? A little pit bull?” This from a fat kid sitting on the hood of the car, holding a fat, naked baby.

“Not us,” Bobby replied. “No puppy.”

“Don’t be shitting me.”

“I’m not shitting you.”

We were past them then, and gravity decreased with each step we took, as if we were hopping from planet to planet. Somewhere around Pluto everything went back to normal, and I was ashamed of being afraid. It was my neighborhood, too, after all.

The Korean man at the liquor store winced and averted his eyes when we brought the beer to the register. I understood why upon catching a glimpse of Bobby in the security mirror over the door. He was still wearing his makeup, and it was awful under the fluorescents.

“Take me to your leader,” Bobby said to the Korean, handing him our money.

The Korean examined him more closely, then laughed. “Trick or treat,” he said. “Okay, I know trick or treat.”

He called to his wife, who was watching a portable TV behind the counter. She gave a little scream when she saw Bobby and almost fell off the milk box she’d been sitting on. The Korean laughed even harder, his shoulders jumping up and down.

I SMOKED ANOTHER joint, drank a couple beers, and decided to turn in. Foster was frying eggs and bacon when I stopped by the kitchen for a bowl of ice cream to take with me to my room. He worked nights unloading trucks and claimed to be a Hells Angel. Shortly after I’d moved in, he’d accused me of stealing his radio and punched me in the mouth. Emma said she’d throw him out unless he apologized, and we’d been okay with each other since then, though I suspected it was he who was sneaking my milk.

“The Donster,” he said. “Donald Duck.”

“Foster Freeze. The bee’s knees.”

I heated a spoon by running hot water over it, then dug out a few thick curls of ice cream. Foster hissed to get my attention. He drew a pistol from the waistband of his jeans and slid it under a towel on the counter.

“That’s for you, for the bird,” he whispered. “Don’t let Emma see it, or she’ll freak.”

“Jesus, Foster.”

“It’s just a pellet gun. Like you had when you were a kid.”

The pistol felt creepy in my hand, and when I stuck it in my pants the sharp edges of it scraped my stomach.

“Watch out,” Foster said, dropping a slice of bread into the frying pan to soak up the bacon fat. “The Donald’s packing.”

I passed Bobby’s room on my way upstairs. He was talking to himself, and I put my ear to the door to listen.

“No!” he said. “No! No! You won’t get past me. You won’t get past me.”

It sounded like he was off his meds again.

THE PHOTOGRAPH I chose for target practice showed my wife and me on the beach in Mexico. Our last trip before the credit card companies cut us off. The memory of how happy I’d been then sometimes kept me awake late into the night. And her — radiant is the word people use to describe such a smile. It was a smile you believed, or I had, anyway.

I leaned the picture against my pillow and crouched at the foot of the bed. The pistol sighed sharply each time I squeezed the trigger. I blew both our heads off, then shot the beach up just for the hell of it. When I flipped the picture over, the scattering of raised perforations left by the pellets reminded me of braille. I closed my eyes and ran my fingertips across them. When the money ran out, Cathy did, too. There should have been signs. I should have seen them.

I turned out the light, and the darkness tightened around me, sticky as a spider’s web. Lying in bed, I drew circles in the air with the cherry of my cigarette while every sound I’d ever heard in my life poured through the open window at once. I chose a single thread of the clamorous snarl to concentrate on; the plashy roar of the ocean, it might have been, or teardrops striking asphalt, amplified a thousand times. My rude lullaby.

WE WERE ON our way in one morning when the strikers broke through the police cordon and began rocking the bus. Glass shattered and a woman screamed. I lifted my face off my knees to watch somebody crawl up the aisle, an Indian named Subhash. He pressed a hand to the side of his head, blood and hair between his fingers.

“They have killed me,” he wailed.

He rose to his knees as the driver gunned the engine to make a run for the gate. The sudden lurch slammed him onto his back, and he lay there silent and still. The driver ordered us not to move him, which meant that some of us had to step over his body to disembark.

Word went around later that he was fine — his cut had been fixed with a Band-Aid — but that he’d been so frightened he’d wet his pants. Curtis, whose terminal was next to mine, couldn’t stop talking about it. He felt sure Subhash would sue for stress and humiliation and wind up collecting a million dollars.

“Motherfucker gets a million for pissing,” he said. “I’m gonna shit myself tomorrow, see if I can get two.”

Someone else heard Subhash had died, but that the company was keeping it secret. You’d be surprised how many people wanted to believe that one.

IT WASN’T UNTIL Saturday, when Emma shopped garage sales after church, that I could hunt in earnest. The crushed soda crackers I spread over a bare patch in the yard drew a whole flock of small brown birds, any of which might have been the one I was after. This was an unexpected complication, but I didn’t let it discourage me. A picnic table and an old canvas tarp served as a blind. I had no trouble dropping a bird with my first shot. The others leaped into the air and disappeared when it fell.

The bird lay on its back, not quite dead yet, and I walked out to examine it. Its scaly little claws made me nauseous, the way they jerked and clutched as if trying to tear something apart. I rolled it over with the barrel of the pistol, and the blood welling up in its open beak was like a shiny red berry.

Suddenly it began to thrash about, its spastic wings beating the dirt into dust, and I ran to the porch and stood there shaking, my hand on the doorknob, ready to flee if the bird came at me. It quieted down quickly enough, though, and I finally worked up the nerve to approach it again and fire three more times, putting the last pellet right into its hateful black eye.

I waited for punishment then — the bird had suffered, after all — but the sun glowed just as brightly, and the ground stayed firm beneath my feet, and I knew the disappointment some criminals must feel when their most daring transgressions fail to make the papers.

I used a shovel I found leaning against the house to scoop the bird up and toss it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, and the others returned and settled onto the saltines before I’d even concealed myself again. Their greed disgusted me. There was no need to take aim, and I didn’t bother to remove the bodies of those I killed after that. The flock dispersed each time one of their number went down, but reassembled out of nowhere seconds later, like something snapping suddenly into focus. They ignored the dead completely, bouncing merrily over the corpses.

I fired until the pistol was empty, which was a mistake, because some of the birds were still alive when I finally went out with the shovel to gather them up. I couldn’t bring myself to wring their necks, so the wounded ended up with the dead in a hole I dug at the back of the yard.

The telephone bird rang louder than ever from a lemon tree as I smoothed topsoil over the grave, and I sat down and cried for a while, brokenhearted because I’d saddled myself with another secret, this butchery.

SANDAL SHOUTED ME out of a beautiful dream in which my wife and I were planning a ski trip, and the water-stained ceiling of my room was almost too much to bear. I’d been asleep since burying the birds, and my legs felt hollow when I got up to unlock the door.

“Bobby’s on the roof again,” Sandal said. “He’s all whacked out.”

“Can’t you handle it? Or Emma?”

“The only thing I’m going to do is get the cops to haul him off to the fucking loony bin. I’m so sick of his shit. Besides, you’re the one he wants.”

It was usually a phone call from his mother that set Bobby off. She was kind to him, and nothing but supportive, but all he heard in her voice was pity and disappointment. He’d been royally fucked, as far as I was concerned. What good was it to be crazy if you still felt shame?

The window in Sandal’s room opened onto a small balcony, and from there a ladder led up to the roof. Emma stood on the balcony, her hands cupped around her mouth, her long gray braid coiled on the back of her head. She was talking to Bobby, even though she couldn’t see him.

“I said we’re going bowling. Don’t you want to come?”

Foster was out there, too, shirtless, his tattoos looking like some kind of disease. When I started up the ladder, he said, “If he’s gonna do it, let him. Get too close, and he’ll put a death grip on you.”

My bare feet were sweaty and kept slipping off the thin iron rungs, and the ladder rattled against the house as I climbed. I expected Bobby to be crouched on the edge, where I’d found him before, but this time he was straddling the very peak of the dizzyingly pitched roof, holding on to the TV antenna with one hand, a bottle of Wild Turkey clutched in the other.

“Didn’t you hear?” I said. “We’re going bowling.”

“Have fun,” he replied.

“Can I get a hit of that Turkey?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

I worked my way up the steep incline backwards, like a crab. When I reached the top, I turned and swung a leg over so that I sat astride the house like him, and he passed me the bottle. I drank more than I meant to, and my throat closed off. I spit, but the wind blew it back in my face.

The sun was setting behind the scraggly palms and sagging telephone lines. In the distance, the Hollywood sign leaned rosy against its dark hillside while the sky over the Boulevard soaked up the cheap reds and greens of the tourists’ neon. Bobby stared off in that direction, sliding his thick glasses up his nose with the knuckle of his thumb. What to say now was always a problem, or whether to say anything at all.

“Looks like it’s going to be a nice night,” I ventured.

Bobby nodded.

“Maybe we should get out, see a movie or something.”

“Did you go to your high school reunion?” he asked.

“The ten-year, sure.”

“But you were married then, right? You had something to show off, your wife.”

“My wife? Yeah, I guess I showed her off. Somebody should have shot me.”

Bobby smiled around the bottle, which he’d raised to his lips. Pulling himself up with the antenna, he stood and balanced on the peak of the roof.

“Now, hey,” I said. “Bobby.” If a funnier joke had ever been played on me, I couldn’t remember: putting me in charge of saving someone’s life.

Televisions blared from every open window in the neighborhood, and three kids chasing a soccer ball across the empty lot next door called each other dirty names in Spanish. The streetlights flared once, twice, then all snapped on at once.

“Give me another drink,” I said.

Bobby edged over to hand me the bottle. A good beginning, except that now that he was away from the antenna, he held his arms out like a tightrope walker, wobbling back and forth.

“I’m not going to mine,” he said. “They sent an invitation, but forget it.”

“You won’t be missing much.”

“I was class president, you know. And valedictorian.”

“Hey, meet Best Dancer and Best Hair.”

Bobby sat down again just like that and motioned for the bottle, and my first thought was to break it over his silly head.

“I’m the biggest damn bull in the barnyard, aren’t I?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied. “Yes, you are.”

Something tickled the back of my throat, and I coughed, catching Whatever it was on my tongue and bringing it to my fingers. A feather. Bobby straddled the roof of the house again, and pretended to ride it like it was a bucking bronco, screaming, “Yeeehaw!” his heels scraping the shingles in sync with my squirming heart.

A CHEER THAT could be heard throughout the building went up from the picket line. The strike had ended. Our supervisors thanked us for all our hard work and sent us home early, and the strikers chanted, “So long, scabs,” as we were bused out for the last time. It was a solemn ride back to the underground parking lot where we’d gathered each morning for the past month. Some of the women sniffled into great wads of Kleenex.

We’d been cut loose again, and being cut loose was never pleasant, no matter how bad the job. You always took it personally, and it made for some awfully scary grudges. According to the experts, the best strategy to avoid depression was to update your résumé and stay close to the telephone. The agency would call the next day with something else, or the next week, or the next month. It helped to have a friend there, but I didn’t.