Dead Boys (30 page)
I wouldn’t let her hang on to me on the way down. That was wrong. I told her it was time she got over herself. She closed her eyes and clung to the safety rail in the gondola, and I acted like I didn’t know her.
Dear Robin,
How is Alaska? How is your husband? How are the kids?
You asked last time for a sexy story. Does this count?
“You again?” Danisha said when I showed up at the bar. She was a stripper. I had to wait for her to get off work. The lock on the door to her building was broken, and the lobby smelled like a toilet. I was worried about my car, parked out front, because I didn’t want anything to happen that I’d have to explain. Danisha took my hand and pulled me up creaking stairs to her apartment. Her dress rode high on her ass, and she wasn’t wearing panties.
“Help me with this,” she said.
We worked together to turn the couch into a bed. The walls of the living room were papered with photos of rappers torn from magazines. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I pulled the bottle of tequila that I’d bought on the way over out of my pocket and took a drink. The lamp had a scarf draped over it, a piss-elegant touch. My eyelid twitched. My stomach fluttered.
“Want to get high?” Danisha asked, examining her forehead in a mirror.
I held up the bottle of tequila.
“Well, I’ma get high,” she said.
She stepped through a door and closed it behind herself. I heard a TV and voices.
This is where I get robbed
, I thought.
This is where I get killed.
I was too scared to sit down, so I walked to the window. The glass was broken. It was all over the floor.
What does she do when it rains?
I wondered. I tried to see my car but couldn’t.
“Where the fuck else am I suppose to take him?” Danisha yelled.
I couldn’t hear the answer. She appeared again in the living room with a big smile on her face. I sat beside her on the dark green sheet, and she pushed play on a boom box. It was some woman with a gravelly voice. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. Danisha put a glass pipe to her lips. Her lighter had Tweety Bird on it. The smoke she exhaled wrapped around us and drew our bodies together. It tickled our noses. Danisha fell back on the mattress, and for a second I thought she’d fainted. Then she reached for me.
While I was banging away, she coughed, and her pussy tightened around my cock. After half an hour, she pushed me off her and said, “That’s it unless you got more money, honey.” I was all shriveled up anyway. I’d been faking it for a while. I walked to the window and cut my foot on the glass. I laughed, and she laughed. Then she told me I better leave. There was blood all over the place.
Remember how you said it’s dark there six months out of the year? Well, it’s dark here all the time.
P.S. Don’t write back.
K
RESS RETURNS TO
work. I see him walking down the hall. I see him at the Coke machine. People seem to be respecting his wishes; they stay out of his way. He’s an old guy, with one of those comb-overs that you laugh at behind his back. Someone said that he and his wife were married for thirty years. I feel bad for joking with Adam about his loss. I don’t know where we get off.
Adam’s voice mail picks up when I try his desk. The receptionist says he didn’t show up this morning and didn’t call in. I dial his apartment, but there’s no answer there either. I wave away the worry that flutters around my head. He’s a flake. Everybody says so.
Donna and I proof some copy. She smells like sour milk. A cereal accident, I bet, while she was rushing to get her kids ready for school. What do I think of Heidi? she wants to know. I say she’s doing a great job. “She is, isn’t she?” Donna murmurs, bent over the table, squinting at a photo through a loupe. I get the feeling I’ve just cut my own throat.
It’s drizzling outside. Little drops are swallowed by larger ones that race hungrily down the glass. I order a cheeseburger from the cafeteria in the basement. Louise calls. She won’t be home until Sunday night. Things are crazy there. I can’t prove she’s lying, but I’ll hire someone who can, I swear to God.
“You know that test you wanted to give me, the one that would tell me when I’m going to die?” I ask.
“What are you talking about?”
“In the magazine on the way to the airport.”
“What about it?
“I’m ready to take it now.”
She pauses, then laughs. “I threw it away. It was stupid.”
Later, I follow Kress into the bathroom. He locks himself into a stall, and I stand at a urinal. I wash my hands when I’m done. My new mustache looks funny in the mirror. It looks like a mistake. I open the bathroom door and close it, pretending to leave. Instead I wait, my breath stilled. Kress groans. He punches the wall. “Goddammit!” he screams.
This is grief. This, I understand.
T
HE TRASH SMELLS
awful. There must be some chicken in there, some rotting meat. I grab the bag and carry it down to the Dumpster. It’s dark outside. The streetlights have come on, a nightly miracle. I like it when things work like that. I like knowing that the garbage man will come on Tuesday. It’s comforting.
The kid with the Chihuahuas passes by, hurrying them along before the rain starts again. He yanks their leashes when they try to drink from oily puddles.
“What happened to that guy down the street?” I ask.
He doesn’t know. I walk with him to the house, and we pause in front. It’s shut up tight. There’s no car in the driveway, no flickering TV. I cross the lawn and climb the three stairs to the porch.
“Don’t!” the kid hisses.
The welcome mat is red, white, and blue, like the flag, and a menu for a Thai place hangs from the doorknob. I peek in the window. I put my ear to the door. Nothing. I want to knock, but I don’t. The kid and the dogs are gone when I turn around.
T
HE ARTICLE IS
called “Hideouts: 10 Places You’ll Never Want to Leave.” I can’t get through it. My eyes drift off the page every few minutes and wander around the living room. The apartment’s pops and cracks make me flinch. I add the magazine to a new pile I’ve started so I’ll know where it is when I need it.
It’s late in Denver, but I call Louise’s hotel anyway. The phone rings and rings. She never picks up. What happened to buying a house and having a baby? I want Whatever she wants from now on.
The rain is really coming down. I stand at the window and watch it bounce off the street. My foot throbs. It’s bleeding again. I must have ripped open the cut somehow. There are no Band-Aids big enough in the medicine chest.
I try Adam again. I’ve been calling every hour all day long. Finally, he answers.
“Hello?” he says.
Tears well up in my eyes and get away from me before I can blink them back. “You’re alive,” I sob. “You’re alive.”
Thank you to everyone at Little, Brown, especially Asya Muchnick and Michael Pietsch, who took a big chance.
Thank you to my agent, Timothy Wager, who found me and stuck by me.
Thank you to everyone at the publications in which some of these stories were originally published. Without you, this book would not exist.
Thank you to T. C. Boyle and Jim Boyle, who encouraged me in the beginning.
And, finally, thank you to my family and friends, who make my life the good thing that it is.
Richard Lange’s work has appeared in
The Southern Review, The Iowa Review,
and
The Best American Mystery Stories 2004
. He lives in Los Angeles.