Broken Piano for President (6 page)

“Dude, don’t forget we have practice tonight,” Henry says as Deshler struggles through the door. A slice of cold wedges in behind him.

Dean looks down at his jeans, splattered red from Malinta’s towel. He needs to change, fast. “I’m fine, really,” Deshler rumbles. “Don’t ask how I am or anything.” The greeting reminds Dean how little respect his bandmates pay. Jerks.

“Dean, if I got worried every time you magically disappeared from a bar,” Henry blows smoke through his nose, lying on the couch. “And wander back home at noon, I’d have an ulcer.”

“Nothing says, ‘
I care
,’ like an ulcer.”

“Please,” Henry laughs. Dean notices an ant hill of white dust on the coffee table. A snowdrift, really. “You’re a big boy. Not much of one, but you are, technically, an adult.”

Dean tiptoes around the room’s few open gaps. Their apartment is so tight Deshler regularly gets leg cramps. Each room is so rotten with beer stains and old newspapers that Hamler’s allergies fight constant wars. They’ve shared this place for over a year, but neither has bothered to decorate much beyond plugging in the television.

“Well, I care. See,” Dean says, feet kicking away microwave dinner boxes. “I got you your favorite.” He tosses a candy bar.

Inspecting the bright wrapper, Henry perks: “Awesome. You’re not such an abortion after all.” His voice lacks its usual enthusiasm for comparing Dean to terminated pregnancies. Henry’s mind seems to be chewing on bigger things.

Dean knows he should ask what’s up, but doesn’t. Henry is one of maybe two people Dean hasn’t pushed completely away. Friendly little moments like this only exist with his best friend. Dean knows he’s lucky because of that, but would never admit to the fact.

“You’re a real sweetheart. Why so dressed up?” Deshler yells from his bedroom. He digs through a clothes pile for his uniform. The bedroom isn’t much larger than the living room. It’s stacked to the knees with clothes and records and empties. Some days it’s more like a birdcage with ashtrays.

Henry watches his belly stretch the dress shirt buttons, teeth ripping through chocolate and nougat. He notices a dribble of Christopher Winters on the breast pocket. Just a splash where syringe and neck became one. “Job interview,” Henry mumbles, massaging stomach muscles that have been cramping since removing the cufflink from the old man’s flesh.

“Didn’t go well, huh?” Deshler says, walking out in wrinkled black pants and a red crested white blazer. Hair designed by Tornado Alley.

“Eh, who can tell?”

“You’ll land one, don’t sweat it. You’re a smart guy. It’ll happen.”

“I don’t know if I even want what I’m going after.” Henry lights up another cigarette and dips a finger through the powder. He sticks it in his mouth, closes eyes and melts back into the couch with ecstasy.

“Dude,” Deshler says, slipping on a tie.

“Drop it.”

“Are you eating sugar?”

“Lay off. I just needed something sweet, you know?”

“Beyond that candy bar you just wolfed down?” Dean regrets saying that, judging by his roommate’s eyes.

“Eat shit.”

“Don’t start snorting it or anything.”

“It helps me relax.” He frowns. “I need this stuff.” Hamler rolls over. A ghost of cigarette smoke hovers above his body like Christopher Winters haunting him.

“Okay. So, practice tonight. Seven?” Dean wildly checks pockets for keys until he spots them on the coffee table.

“No, man, nine-thirty, same time we always rehearse,” Hamler says, questioning Deshler’s dedication to the band. “Don’t miss it. Pandemic was pissed last time.”

“Right, right, right, sorry, man. I’ll be there. I gotta run to work.” He twirls the keys through the air in a jangly cartwheel. “Apparently rich assholes still can’t park their own cars. Take it easy.”

“
Nine
-thirty. We’ve actually got a gig this week!”

The door slams and Henry listens to the cigarette burn away in the silence. His stomach is a bucket of snakes. He is always sick with guilt after a job.
Why do I get stuck with all the dirty work
?

These greasy heaves are different than the ones after breaking no-name executives’ fingers and extorting trouble-making branch managers. There’s a powerful urge to apologize.

Henry feels like Lee Harvey Oswald. He has destroyed an icon.

Leaving the estate in their fake news van, that kick of sickness worked up Hamler’s chest. “Henry,” Tony said, patting his protégé’s shoulder. “You did an awesome job. You’re getting so good at this. I think soon you’ll be ready to go out on your own. We really trust you. You’re the best junior agent Olde-Tyme Hamburgers has.”

“Tony,” Hamler’s face faded into gray. “I don’t know if this is for me. I feel like shit. Do you know who that guy is?”

“
Was
, do I know who he
was
. The answer is yes, of course I did. But today he was just another job, all that terrible horseshit he’d done before, you heard him. Concentration camps like summer camps.
Gross
. The boss is right, Christopher Winters was a loose cannon. He was a security threat.”

“I can’t think like that.”

“You will.”

Hamler loses focus when the neighbors start having sex. The thin apartment walls thump and crackle. It makes Henry’s stomach flip completely over, calculating the months since he last slept with anyone.
I need to get out of here. Go buy some new strings.

Slipping on shoes, he reconsiders.
God, our band is stupid. I don’t want to practice tonight.

The guilt from the Christopher Winters job embroiders his every thought. For a second, Henry considers jumping through the apartment window and breaking his neck. He dreams about taking off his other cufflink and stabbing himself. He thinks about going to the store for more candy.

He chooses candy.

Dean stands in front of a hotel forty hours a week.

The hotel is a tall cube of white brick. Carved beasties spout water from the rooftop during storms. When politicians or Hollywood stars swing through town, they stay here. Both hamburger companies treat foreign dignitaries in its mosaic of meeting halls. Dean parks all their cars.

“Come on, just answer the question. Which way would you want to die?” Dean says.

“Can you really die from a falling coconut?” Napoleon asks.

Standing straight on his little legs, Napoleon’s a sawed-off shotgun in a white dinner jacket. A block of mushy flesh and tattoos hidden underneath. He’s worked this shift several years longer than Dean. It was the first job he took after deciding high school was a dead end.

“Yeah, man. Those bastards are heavy, all that coconut milk. I heard they fall at something like two hundred miles an hour. That’d crush your skull, buddy.” Dean rubs Napoleon’s buzzcut.

A slim silver car pulls up. A woman in sunglasses floats past without looking either in the face. Napoleon jumps behind the driver’s seat. He returns to the awning a few minutes later. “Well, I mean, I guess coconut.”

“Really? I saw you as a shark man.”

A black car worth several years of Deshler’s salary rolls slow and gropes the curb.

“The shark would be drawn out and bloody…I’d be helpless. Way too much biting and chewing for me. Plus, salt water in an open wound…no thanks. I guess if a coconut killed me, it’d be over in a snap.”

“I’m disappointed,” Deshler says, straightening his jacket. “I’d give you a fighting chance against a shark.”

“Thanks,” he says with pep. Napoleon eyes their next customer. “Hey, man, you know that video camera I bought?”

The man in the car is a blob. He oozes out like the seat is waxed. He flips a few stray French fries from shirtfront to his mouth. A bulldozer chest fills out his ketchup-colored suit to the point of demolition. Each stitch is pulled rigid as a violin string. He looks like Christopher Winters twenty years ago, if Christopher Winters had swallowed a tugboat.

“Uh, no I don’t…” Dean says, fading. His headache almost completely gone.

“It’s cool, really cool, just picked it up a couple days ago. Some old Sony, it actually uses VHS tapes.
VHS tapes!
I’m getting pretty handy with it. There’s some stuff you need to check out.”

“Yeah, buddy, sure.”

“Twenty bucks at the Goodwill. Shot some crazy footage last night. You should see it. You’re the star of the show, if you know what I mean.”

“
What?
Yeah right. Whatever.”

Dean marvels at how the man’s suit wraps his skin like a red ink stain. Extra chins waggle under a plump brown mustache. He stands tall and adjusts the mustard yellow tie around a mustard yellow shirt.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Deshler growls, helping the thick man with the door. “Welcome to the—”

“Hey there, Mystery Boy.” The man flashes a set of teeth like crumbling cement. “Long time no see.”

A familiar, confused sensation weighs Dean’s body down. The same feeling when that Malinta girl woke up and started talking. Dean is perfectly comfortable blacking out, but he’s not so wild about this sudden trend of forgetting Cliff Drinking acquaintances.

Some things, he decides, are better left ignored. “Thank you, sir. Will you be staying with us long?”

“Seriously, Deshler, you need to drop this gig. What are you trying to accomplish by parking cars? It’s like you’re on one of those religious missions, like self-punishment. Ask yourself, if life were a tasty hamburger would you be the onions or the ketchup. Wait no, let me start over.”

“Sir?”

“Would you rather be the relish or the
something-something?
”

“I’m not following.”

The man smiles and undoes a jacket button. “Good one, buddy, never mind. You do what you gotta do. You know where I’ll be.” The man wobbles a line to the door. Napoleon holds it open as the man turns back: “See you at the Beef Club tonight, Dean?”

Deshler’s successful morning of lying rears back. “You…bet,” passes from his throat and through the chilly air in gray gas. He stands for a few seconds and lets the breeze scratch his cheeks, failing to recall any time they might have met.