Crooked Roads Page 2

  “Goddamn,” said Kristos.

  “Well,” Sophia said, “guess we should head.”

  Bump said, “I got a better idea.”

  Kristos grinned, made it seem, for the first time, like he gave a shit about anything he had to say.

  “This house belongs to us,” said Bump. “Let’s call some folks, have a party.”

  NO HARD FEELINGS

  A Quick Word about My Daddy

  My daddy always said, never underestimate the stupid other folks is capable of. He accidentally blew his brains out with a pistol one night. Thought it wasn’t loaded. Kept sticking it in his mouth and pulling the trigger. Guess a bullet had hid in there or something. Put his skull all over the wall behind the couch in the family room. The couch I slept on. Mama said she weren’t none surprised. Said Daddy weren’t too bright himself. The hell knows? All I remember is sitting on a lawn chair outside the trailer, waiting for folks to clean the mess so I could get some sleep.

  Missy Vaughn

  Missy Vaughn said we was something. Said so all over Haggard High. Fine by me. I knew she let me cork her to get revenge on her daddy. Now, I ain’t calling her daddy one of them uppercase fellows what liked to poke his own daughter. Didn’t seem that type to me. But he had a strange sense of humor that could suffocate you. And he never tried to hide his disappointment that his daughter got plowed on the weekends by a resident of Neptune Park.

  The Vaughns lived in a house. Like all respectable folks. Third or fourth time I come over to get with Missy, her daddy asked me if I ever had trouble finding their place. Like I might be too stupid to remember where I’ve been before. Real funny guy. They lived in Ravenswood, this jigsaw puzzle cookie-cutter development near Merrilville. Houses looked like buildings I seen in a Robin Hood movie.

  I played along, though. I said to Mr. Vaughn, “Took me a while, sir.”

  He went into this bit about how that didn’t offend him. On and on, he went—“Oh, Dwayne,” he said to me, “I’m not the least bit upset about that, not the least.” Over and over and over. I could see why his daughter wanted to jab him a little the way daughters always jabbed their daddies—with her choice of boyfriend. If the thought of trailer trash corking her didn’t make her daddy break down and cry, she’d go to college and run a few black fellows through her. Eventually, when things like bills and survival became an issue, she’d settle down with the type of man her father had told her to go for from the beginning. You know, rich.

  But I liked Missy. She kept her area between her legs fresh. I never once got a whiff of what I smelled inside the girls from Neptune Park. And she’d read to me after we smashed. All this fancy stuff she needed to know in order to sound smart if she decided to go to college. Fancy stuff like that Freud fellow. He said everybody did everything they did just to get laid. I didn’t need some fruitcake from Europe to point that out, but the way he put it sounded better than any way I could. She also read to me about Marx and Engels. Pretended like she gave a shit about the fact that me and Mama had just enough money to pay rent on our lot. That we used a rusty space heater from the last century to keep the trailer warm in winter. She said someday working class folks would kick the rich right square in their gold-plated beanbags. Fine with me.

  Well, we went at it one night in her bedroom, quiet but vicious. She tired out before I did, said, “Finish, already.” So I filled her up and rolled over. I caught my breath while she scraped between her legs with tissue. She said, “You know Bill Shipwick, lives across the street?”

  “Sure,” I said. Bill Shipwick used to be the football coach at Haggard High. Never took the team to state. His wife died in a car wreck a few years back. Semi hopped across the rail on 65 and turned her Buick into an accordion. Only contact I’d ever had with Bill Shipwick was at the drive-in off the exit to Crown Point. I stole Daddy’s truck to take this big girl named Tricia to see one of them Transformer movies. Had no interest in the show. Just wanted to plow Tricia somewhere our parents couldn’t stumble in and laugh at us. So we’re waiting in line with a bunch of other cars. Gates ain’t opened yet. SUV behind me starts honking. I looked in the rearview like, Hey, buddy, can’t you see nobody’s moving? Well, that yuppie wagon just kept on barking. So I rolled down the window and shouted, “Quit with the fucking horn already!” Next thing I knew, Bill Shipwick marched up, fists clenched. He started hollering, “My what horn? My WHAT horn?” Once upon a time, that man might have been a contender.

  I said, “Why the hell are you honking so damn much?”

  He gave me a boo-hoo about how he had his grandkids in the car and they were “just having fun.”

  I said, “That’s disrespectful, honking for no reason.”

  So he called me a jerk.

  I looked at Tricia. She shook her head, like she understood I’d have clobbered that fossil with one pop.

  “Old man,” I said to Bill Shipwick, “get the hell away from my car.”

  He nodded, like he’d won a pissing contest or something, and marched back to his fancy SUV. Called me a jerk one last time.

  “Yeah,” I said to Missy, “I sure do know who Bill Shipwick is.”

  She finished cleaning my stain from her thighs and told me Bill Shipwick won the Hoosier Millions.

  “What?” I had to hear it again.

  She said he’d circled the block holding the ticket over his head like a trophy, telling folks how he’d been patiently playing the same numbers for ten years and it finally paid off.

  “How much?” I asked.

  She said she wasn’t sure. “Minimum bucket,” she said, “is always a million.”

  “Good for him,” I said. Maybe he’d get the hell out of Lake County and move somewhere nice, where the sky hadn’t turned piss yellow and sick gray from the smokestacks in Gary.

  Missy laughed. “Don’t you get it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Some folks are lucky, others aren’t.”

  “We’re lucky,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re going to take that ticket from him and we’re going to escape.”

  “How the hell am I going to get his ticket?”

  Well now, manicured girls like Missy Vaughn understood instinct-wise how to use what they had to persuade any man to do anything they needed. She nuzzled under my chin, kissed all over my chest, rubbed her little titties against me. “Don’t you want to run away?” she said. “Don’t you want to be with me?” she said. “Don’t you want to be rich?”

  That last question? No-brainer. She snaked her tongue down my chest, showed me why the first two were just as easy to answer.

  Bill Shipwick

  I suppose you could call it a generalizing-type of excuse, but I decided Bill Shipwick had enough. He lived in Ravenswood. In a McMansion, goddammit. So his wife died, so what? Life’s mostly suffering. You got a house instead of a trailer, you shouldn’t do much by way of complaining. That’s what I told myself the night I put on a black t-shirt and jeans and snuck through the shadows of Haggard. Tougher to do in Ravenswood because all the streetlights worked.

  I almost bashed the old man’s front door down. Then I seen he had stickers for Yale Security on his windows. Sometimes that shit meant something, most-wise it didn’t. Just a show, to scare off folks like me. I ducked around the back, found a stick about half as heavy as a baseball bat and threw it against a door that looked like it led to Bill Shipwick’s kitchen. Nothing happened. No alarms, no lights came on. No rent-a-cops itching to hand me off to the real police.

  A few smacks near the latch on a window and I jarred the lock loose and slid it open. Took a struggle, but I managed to wiggle my way in before tumbling to the floor. Knocked my skull on a small, round table. In the dark, I could make out a calendar on the wall from 2012. Maybe that’s when Bill Shipwick’s old lady died. I didn’t remember. I sifted through pieces of paper on top of a cabinet. Didn’t see nothing that looked like a lottery ticket. I moved into the kitchen, found a lot of bingo cards. N
ot sure what the hell Bill Shipwick had them for.

  Down the hallway I crept, trying to figure what that old man did with the damn ticket. I pushed a door open to a room filled with bookshelves. Hard to believe Bill Shipwick read anything. Missy would have liked it, though. I wondered if I should take some, you know, for when we hit the road with all that money.

  A shadow crossed a light on the second floor. The steps creaked awful rough. Then I saw Bill Shipwick, crouched close to the wall with a shotgun.

  “You got about three seconds,” he said. I guess a man’s proud enough, he don’t stop looking for a fight until they dress him up in pine.

  “Mr. Shipwick,” I said. I held my hands high, hoping he wouldn’t get anxious and pop a shell. “I’m just here for the lottery ticket.” I made my way out of the library, toward the bottom of the stairs.

  He said, “You fixed on going to jail?”

  I could smell that old person stink—you know, like Band-Aids or something. “Mr. Shipwick,” I said, “I’m not here to cause no trouble. I just want that ticket so me and my girl can have a nice life someplace else.” I grabbed the barrel of the shotgun before he responded and slammed the butt into his face. He flew against the wall, blood spilling from his nose.

  “I’m a head upstairs,” I said. “You stay put.” I took the gun with me.

  The first two rooms on the second floor were empty. I kind of got angry, thinking about all us folks in Neptune Park, crammed in these tiny aluminum cans while folks in Ravenswood had so much space they didn’t even need half of it. I found the old man’s bedroom. You’d have thought he lived in a black and white sitcom. Two single beds, separated by a nightstand. Bill Shipwick’s keys and wallet were on it. Sure enough, I looked in the wallet and found it—a Hoosier Millions ticket. Had to be the one. I stuffed it in my pocket and tossed the shotgun on one of the beds.

  The bannister groaned as Bill Shipwick pulled himself onto the second floor landing. He couldn’t breathe too regular, but he felt like wasting air anyway—“Listen here,” he said, “I’m going to do what your father obviously failed to do.”

  “You don’t know nothing about my daddy,” I said. I tried to walk around him, but he grabbed me, yanked on my shirtsleeve. I pulled away hard enough to send him tumbling right back down the stairs. I followed him, normal-wise, of course, and stepped over him to get to the front door. He didn’t move. He’d probably learned his lesson.

  * * *

  I considered cashing the ticket myself. I turned it over and read the instructions. It said it would have to be mailed in. So I went to Missy’s, climbed the gutter near her window.

  “You got it?” she said.

  “Sure, baby.” I gave it to her.

  “This is it?” she said.

  “Says Hoosier Millions, don’t it?”

  “Crap,” she said. “Mr. Shipwick’s an idiot.” She held the ticket in my face.

  “What?”

  “Look, dummy,” she said. “Mr. Shipwick’s been saying he played the same numbers for ten years.” She pointed to the date at the bottom. “He’s been playing the same ticket.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. I guessed we wouldn’t be going nowhere after all. “You got some grape juice or something?” My throat had gone dry. Couldn’t have told you why if I had known myself.

  One Last Word about My Daddy

  There’s been a lot said about me in the newspapers. For whatever reason, they like comparing me to my daddy. I suppose that’s okay. I loved him, even when he beat me for being dumb. Like that time he told me to get rid of the leaves on the gravel by our trailer. I gathered them together and dumped lighter fluid on them. I guess one of the flames jumped to a tire on the trailer. Melted the rubber. My daddy made me put the fire out with my winter coat. Promised I’d be thinking about what I did come December and January, when I’d be walking to school with nothing but a sweatshirt and jeans. He wasn’t lying. That winter got cold as hell.

  AMERICAN CHIVALRY

  It was Wednesday. January rains were in full force. The sidewalks were minefields of puddles and people wore their ugliest faces. None of that would have mattered to Rex Burris had he not lived by the mercy of strangers. For whatever reason, when the sky opened and showered the buildings and soaked the concrete, the pockets of those capable of charity dried up. Rex resorted to less than commendable means of getting what he needed. The last time he was threatened with an empty take, he rolled an anorexic actress wanna-be on the 4 bus. Today, he would haunt the 20 bus on Wilshire, going from downtown to Westwood. Santa Monica, if necessary.

  It had taken him the entire morning to collect the buck twenty-five needed to board the 20. The suits and ties and fancy office skirts waddled past with glassy stares. Not a single, “Sorry, I have nothing,” followed by a half-hearted pat-down of the pockets. The men stalked on with their backs stiff and the women raised their snouts as though that might lift them up and over the offending man in the doorway asking for spare change. Rex averaged twenty-five cents an hour and feared he might miss the afternoon bus. That would be disastrous. The 20 was fruitful only when Korean wives rolled out of bed, dolled themselves up, and headed west to spend their husbands’ money at The Grove. Koreans carried cash. Always.

  As the clock tower at the Catholic church on Kingsley and Wilshire struck noon, people flooded out of the offices to eat lunch. Rex collected the final fifty cents in a twenty-minute span.

  He hustled to the depot at the corner of Wilshire and Vermont. Mexican and Korean schoolchildren protested when they got a whiff of him. He smiled and nodded, hoping he’d lodge a nugget of guilt in their consciences. The only people that ever seemed to work on, however, were goofy white kids who made the mistake of leaving Iowa to come to LA to make movies.

  The bus arrived and made a show of braking before it hissed like a dragon and the doors opened. As Rex climbed on board, he got the usual looks of distress from the proper passengers. First they smelled him, then they saw him. After an unconsciously prompted look of horror, some lowered their faces in shame. The Mexicans and Latinos cupped their hands over their noses.

  He chose the seat closest to the back door. Nobody else wanted it because someone had slashed it open and pulled out the styrofoam stuffing in a clump resembling a heap of mashed potatoes. Graffiti, fashioned with permanent blue and black markers, decorated the cushion on the back of the bench. One messenger, no doubt a Crip, had written Fucc Slobs. Someone else, unaffiliated, crossed out the original greeting and scribbled Western Avenue Hoodsta’ Killa’ over it. Rex stuffed as much of the styrofoam back into the seat as he could and sat with his left leg lifted higher than his right. His location allowed him to size up everyone who got on. He hoped a Korean woman boarded sometime before they reached La Brea. If that didn’t happen, he would have to wait for a white girl. Either scenario involved following the woman when she got off, grabbing her at the perfect moment, snatching her purse, and running. He prayed for a Korean woman. They always had enough cash on them to buy two or three fifths of whiskey. A single bottle would get him through the night. He could settle down and sleep anywhere, even in the rain.

  At Hobart, a Korean woman with sparkling red and silver manicured nails, no older than twenty-eight or twenty-nine, stepped onto the bus. She opened her purse, maybe Marc Jacobs or Prada, Rex could never tell the difference, with her thin fingers and pulled out a billfold. Flipping through the money inside, she produced exact change and paid her fare. She sat in the front, on a seat reserved for senior citizens and expecting mothers. She wore thigh-high leather boots and a plaid skirt. Her white, button-down shirt was opened wide enough to let anyone interested see that her husband had bought her perfect, balloon-sized breasts. Her eyes and face were shaded to make her look like a magazine model. Had she not been sent to America with children to look after, she could very well have gone to Hollywood and briefly ruled as the studios’ favorite token-Asian. She was gorgeous and had no business being on a city bus with a herd of migran
t workers and a bum like Rex. She knew it, showed it in her blatant disregard for the needs of the elderly or pregnant.

  The bus crawled through Koreatown traffic. When it stopped at Western, three young men got on. They were dressed roughly the same—gaudy tennis shoes, black and yellow, with the laces removed and the tongues pushed forward, as though their feet were talking to you as they walked. Expensive winter jackets with the Pittsburgh Steelers logo on the back helped cover their midsections, left exposed by sagging Levis. They were wanna-be ‘gangstas,’ rich kids intent on embarrassing their parents by landing in jail for something a real Blood or Crip would never be dumb enough to try in public. As soon as they saw the Korean woman, they were on a mission. They gathered around her, hanging on to the bar overhead.

  One of the thuglets rubbed a tiny tuft of hair on his chin he no doubt thought was a beard. His head bobbed, like he was on a used car lot and had found exactly what he was looking for.“Damn baby,” he said, “for an Asian bitch, you got some fine-ass titties.” His friends jumped up and down and gave each other the latest version of ‘high-five.’

  One of them said, “But Asian bitches ain’t got no booties. What about you, boo? You got something worth a train?” He tried to push the woman sideways. She slapped his hand.

  “Bus driver,” she said. Her English was beyond broken and her lack of volume betrayed her lack of confidence.

  The driver glanced in his giant rearview mirror. He was an older Latino with wrinkles carved so deep into his face he looked like he might slump over and die. “Leave the lady alone.” His voice carried the conviction of a slug.

  The Korean woman beat on the aluminum divider between her and the driver. “Bus driver!”

  “You can move to the back,” he said.

  Encouraged, for reasons that wouldn’t make sense just about anywhere else in the world, the trio of Romeos closed in on her. The two on the outside rested their palms on the windows, arching over her. The urban pillow talk continued, one thuglet after the next revealing his tender feelings for her: