Poison Shy (11 page)

“Fuck you.”

“What the hell did you need the uniform for?” I said.

“For effect,” Darcy said. “Spice the fantasy up a bit.”

I looked at Melanie. “And you went along with this?”

“I already told you. I can't stand the bitch.”

“You two are unbelievable, you know that?” I quickened my pace.

“Don't you want to know what happened?”

What happened was this: Melanie let Darcy into my place so he could “borrow” my uniform. Darcy also “borrowed” a few of my beers — not for liquid courage but liquid aggression, as he put it. Then they went over to Sarah's place, a mouldy old six-bedroom mansion she shared with five other girls. Darcy knew that Sarah's bedroom was located on the main floor. He also knew that Jill, Sarah's anorexic roommate, liked to crank up the heat. Because of this, Sarah would often keep her bedroom window open, though she kept the curtains drawn, especially at night. Melanie and Darcy crept into the backyard. Sure enough, Sarah's window was open. They could hear her belting out Cyndi Lauper's “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” from the other side of the curtains.

At this point in the story, Melanie chimed in to say that after hearing Sarah butcher such a classic, she hoped Darcy wound up raping her for real. She hoisted Darcy up through the window. Someone in the room screamed, but it wasn't Sarah. It was her roommate Jill, all eighty-nine pounds of her, with soaking wet hair and a towel wrapped around her naked body. Darcy stared at her with a half-erection jutting out from the crotch of
my
uniform. Jill continued to scream. One of Sarah's other roommates appeared, took one look at the scene, and called 911. Darcy and Melanie were sitting in the back of a cop car by the time Sarah, who'd had dibs on the shower after Jill, even knew what was going on.

“She must have calmed her roomies down and told them she'd invited me over or something,” Darcy said. “Then told Detective Dipshit there were no charges to press.”

“You realize I will never wear that uniform again,” I said.

Darcy raised his ratty eyebrow. “You got a problem with my dick cheese?”

Melanie bent over laughing.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets and left the idiots in the street.

“Explain it to me again,” my boss Dick said. “Just so I'm clear.”

“My girlfriend's idiot friend broke into my home, stole my uniform, and almost got himself arrested for unlawful entry.”

“And
why
isn't the uniform back in your possession?”

“Because . . .” I cleared my throat. “Because while he was wearing it he got an erection.”

Dick stood up and rested his knuckles on his desk. “Let me get this straight. Some perverted muttonhead stole your uniform and was so jacked by his little game of dress-up that he got a raging hard-on and mucked up the inside of your duds?”

“That's basically what happened, yes.”

“You expect me to believe that bunk?”

“It's true, I —”

“Get the fuck out of my office, Brandon. Starting now you're on an unpaid leave of absence until I decide whether or not to fire your ass.”

“But Dick —”

“Now go home and have a shower, for Christ's sake. You look like hell.”

Bad decisions. That's what it came down to. Getting involved with Melanie was a bad decision. Giving Darcy the benefit of the doubt was a bad decision — he truly was a terrorist in the making. Getting a job at Kill 'Em All seemed like a bad decision, because I wouldn't have met them otherwise. Being born in the first place wasn't a bad decision on my part, but I could easily blame that one on my parents.

Humanity was God's bad decision, plain and simple.

When I got to my apartment, I found Melanie's key on my coffee table next to a post-it note.
I think it's time for a break
, it said. No apology, no admission of guilt, nothing.

I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. My phone rang, but I wasn't in the mood to speak to anyone. My machine picked it up and I heard a woman's voice say, “Hello, this is Saint Aiden's Hospital calling for Mr. Brandon Galloway. Your mother had an accident and was brought to emergency. She's okay, but, ah, she doesn't seem to want to accept our help, and . . . Well, you were listed as her emergency contact person. Please come to the hospital as soon as you get this.”

Was all of this really happening at once?

I stared into the sink and actually started laughing. My mother was lying in a hospital bed and I was staring down a drain hole, tittering like a circus clown. I poured some beer into a thermos and drank it on the bus on the way to Saint Aiden's.

The woman at the reception desk literally pinched her nose when I told her I'd come to see Eileen Galloway.

“Room 309. Elevator's down the hall.”

Some big lug stepped into the elevator behind me. It wasn't until I'd pushed the button for the third floor that I noticed he was hospital security. The receptionist must have put him on my trail.

I found room 309 and went inside, afraid of what I might find. My mother was propped up in her bed, flanked by pillows and — what else? — the orange blanket. Her half-closed eyes were glued to the little TV that sat on a shelf on the wall. She didn't look at me, but I knew she knew I was there. When I sat down beside her I noticed she was strapped to the bed like a mental patient — which I suppose she was, now. It had finally come to that.

“What happened, Mom?”

“They want my organs, I know it,” she said. “They want to cut me open and sell my insides to inspectors, spies, and Satan's minions.”

“Don't be ridiculous, Ma. What happened? Did you fall?”

She moved her arms around under the straps. They were wrapped in bandages up to her elbows.

Tears welled up in my eyes, but I fought them back with everything I had. “Did you do something to yourself?”

She looked at me. Her eyes were weak and full of the pain of a tortured existence. “How am I supposed to live, Brandon? Tell me how.”

It wasn't a rhetorical question. My mother never knew how to live. I was beginning to think that I didn't either.

The security guard paced the hall outside.

“You'll be okay,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “These people are going to take care of you better than I can.”

“I don't trust them. I don't trust anyone.”

With all of my heart I wanted to say
Neither do I
. Instead I said, “I love you, Mom.”

She gestured for the cup of water on her bedside table. I held it to her mouth as she drank.

“I want you to know something,” she said. “It's about your father. Something he left behind before he died.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I didn't want you to know, but you have to. You have to know. Your father hurt me badly. Sinned his heart out all his life. But you have to remember that love takes no pleasure in other people's sins, but delights in the truth. You have to know the truth, Brandon.”

“Jeez, Ma.”

“There was a woman named Gloria Sands.”

I stopped breathing.
Sands.
That name . . .

“She was your father's mistress. Well, one of his mistresses.”

“Mom —”

“I found out about the affair on your eighth birthday. I went to her house, Brandon. I went to her house to kill her.”

“Mom. Please.”

She started crying, and I realized I was crying too.

“I couldn't do it,” she said. “Not after I saw her. I just couldn't. She was pregnant with your father's child.”

My vision blurred. I stood up quickly. Reached into my coat pocket for the thermos and spilled it all over the floor.

That was enough for the security guard. He stormed in and tried to tackle me. I swerved to avoid him and slipped on the beer on the floor. My head hit something hard. The last thing I remember before going unconscious is the look of pity on the guard's fat face.

I woke up on a stretcher in an empty room. My clothes were still on, but my shoes had been taken off and placed on the bedside table to my right. I could smell them.

When I sat up, I could almost hear the blood rushing out of my head. I touched the back of my skull and felt something gauzy and wet. My fingers came away red. I didn't need a mirror to show me that my head was wrapped in a turban of blood-soggy bandages.

I needed to get out of the hospital and find Gloria Sands. Frayne was a small town, but not so small that this Gloria was necessarily my father's former mistress, or even Darcy's mother for that matter. It was all a coincidence and I wanted to prove it.

I opened the door and poked my head out into the hall. Nothing but a few whistling orderlies, a bare-assed old man hooked up to a drip stand, and the cold stench of sterility and death. I zipped up my jacket and walked casually to the elevator. Pushed the down button and waited for the security guard to tap me on the shoulder.

When I stepped into the elevator and watched the doors close without anyone else getting on, I knew I was free. The doors opened in the lobby and I strolled out of there with my hands in my pockets, nodding at the bare-legged smokers and wheelchair-ridden vegetables, sympathizing with them, feeling like a member of their clan.

There was only one Gloria Sands in the phone book, though my source was a water-logged edition I'd found in a public booth. The pages were crunchy and smelled like piss.

Sands, Gloria.
111
-
57
Malt Rd.
444-5903
.

The address was three blocks from the hospital, in an area known to Fraynians as either The Lantern District or Hooker-town.

It was cold, but the weather didn't keep the streetwalkers from doing just that. There were white hookers and black hookers, Asian hookers with small breasts and pert little asses, she-males with fat collagen lips, their packages on display in red leather tights. Goth chicks with tattoos on their faces and fat chicks in ass-less mesh nightgowns. They saw the bandages on my head and shot me sex-hungry looks of compassion, their mothering instincts still alive beneath their skanky exteriors. A teenaged girl in jeans and a bra told me she'd rub both my heads for twenty.

Standing outside Gloria's building, smoking a bitch-stick the length of a pencil, was a buxom redhead in sunglasses and a fur coat. She saw me approaching and smiled. “You looking to spend some time, honey? Ooh, what happened to your noggin?”

“Sorry, not interested.” I moved to go inside.

She lowered her sunglasses. “Hang on a second. Darcy?”

I looked at her again. It was Suzie.

“You've got the wrong guy,” I said, and pulled the door closed behind me.

There were only eight names on the tenant list in the lobby, all of them single syllables.
Bragg, Ford, Gale, Katz, Sands, Smith, Ward, Wynne.
I punched in the code for Sands, and after a few beeps a crackled voice said, “Who is it?”

“Um, it's, ah . . .” I paused. “This is going to sound crazy but I think you used to know my father. His name was Jack Galloway.”

Static.

“Hello?” I said.

“What do you want?”

“Can I come in and talk to you for a second?”

“I don't even know who you are. Goodbye.”

“No, please. I need to know if you ever had a son.”

Another pause. “What did you say your name was again?”

“It's Brandon. Jack Galloway was my father. Did you know him? Please just let me in.”

As I stood in the lobby with my head wrapped in bloody bandages, it occurred to me that the last thing this woman should ever do is let a lunatic like me into her building. It surprised me when the buzzer sounded. I opened the door and made my way down the dark, cabbage-scented hallway to room 111.

The door was ajar. I knocked lightly three times. A calico cat curled around the door and pranced past me down the hall. I knocked two more times. “Hello?”

I heard something like dinner plates clanking together, and a few seconds later the door opened. I saw a yellow-eyed woman with long witchy hair, a mix of grey and sandy blond. She wore a pair of stonewashed jeans and a tank top, exposing a splatter of faded tattoos on her arms and shoulders. She sort of gasped when she saw me, then quickly composed herself.

“Miss Sands?” I asked.

“Jesus Christ, Brandon,” she said. “You look so much like your father.”

I cleared my throat. “I think your cat escaped.”

“Jackie's always escaping,” she said. “She likes to wander. It's okay. Do you want to come in?”

Her apartment was small and cramped. There were boxes of stuff in every corner. The layer of dust on them was thick. Two more cats were curled up on filthy mats under the coffee table. The whole place reeked of cat litter.

“Is your head okay?” she asked. “It looks pretty nasty.”

“Just a little accident. I'm all right.”

She sat down on her couch with a sigh, and I took the wooden stool across from her. A small TV on a shelf showed a fuzzy episode of
The Sopranos
. I looked around the room for pictures of Darcy, but there was nothing. No pictures at all.

“So you did know my father, then,” I said.

She smiled a sad smile, her eyes on the rug. “I did.”

“You know, I think I remember you from that bar. What was it called?”

“The Jug,” she said. “I remember you too. You were such a cute kid. So quiet and well-behaved. I still work there, you know, only it's not The Jug anymore. Some restaurateur took it over and called it Parker's Grill. Tried to class it up a bit, but nothing's changed. We serve Stella instead of Blue. Big deal.”

There was a silence. On the TV, Tony Soprano said, “It was just a little suicidal gesture, that's all.”

I could feel Gloria looking at me, but for some reason I didn't want to look at her.

“So tell me,” she said. “Why are you sitting in my apartment right now? What is it you want? Most guys who come to this part of town are looking for something . . . specific.”

I fidgeted with my shirtsleeve. “I'm not looking for . . . whatever I think you mean.”

She crossed her legs. “What do I mean?”

I wasn't interested in playing games. “Did you and my dad have a kid?”

She put her head down and laughed softly. “Is that really why you're here?”

“Of course it is. I thought I said that already.”

She rubbed her eyes. “Sorry. I'm sorry. That's right, you did mention that.”

“Well?”

“Jack never wanted you to know. He threatened me.”

“My dad was an asshole and a drunk. And you know what else? He's dead.”

“I know that.”

Something scratched at the door. Gloria stood up and let her cat back in. Picked it up and cradled it like a baby. Its purr was laboured. It might've had a lung problem.

“Anything else you want to know?” she asked, a little scornfully.

“Do I know anything yet?”

“God, you're just like your father. Of course we had a kid. A boy.”

She didn't need to tell me more. I knew the truth. I reacted with dull acknowledgment, a small step up from indifference. Darcy Sands was my half brother — big fucking deal. In practical terms it meant less than nothing. It didn't even feel like a revelation. More like someone pointing out a mustard stain on your shirt after lunch. On the other hand, something told me there was a storm of shit on the way.

“You okay, Brandon?” Gloria said.

I was surprised to find she was sitting right beside me. The cat was in her lap, and her hand was on my knee.

I nodded. “I should go.”

“Please stay,” she said. “Have a drink with me.”

I looked at her jaundiced eyes, her tattoos. Her breasts sagged almost to her belly.

“I've met Darcy,” I said. “I know him. I know him well, actually.”

She took her hand away and stood up. “That little bastard sent you here to make a fool out of me, didn't he?”

“No! Miss Sands, that's not what I meant . . .”