Читать книгу Twentynine Palms - Daniel Pyne - Страница 6

Imagine a perfect square of impossibly blue sky.

Darkness frames it; a handmade ladder of two-by-fours reaches into it.

It could be Heaven.

The boy has butterflies in his stomach, and an urge to turn back. He knows, somehow, that if he climbs up into the sunlight, nothing will ever be quite the same.

Fourteen-year-old Tory Geller waits upstairs in the master bedroom of this half-finished California-Ranch-Mission-Tudor-Mediterranean-whatthefuck tract home, sitting in the yawning gap where doors with modest pan-European ambitions will someday be hung. Tory is cocksure and cool. His legs dangle over the hardscape twenty feet below and he smokes and gazes out across the cheerful clutter of downtown Santa Barbara, to the slate-water harbor and the smear of Channel Islands hanging just above the ocean horizon.

“You better’ve brought something.” Tory says this with sharpness, doesn’t turn.

Behind him, Jack Baylor, also fourteen, steps off the construction ladder and out of the stairless stairwell. Smaller than Tory, still growing, Jack wears thick glasses and a gold-and-blue St. Stevens Day Camp windbreaker with frayed elastic cuffs. A green glass bottle of Mickey’s Big Mouth beer comes out of one pocket of his jacket, Oreos from the other, and Jack lays his offerings down on the plywood subfloor next to Tory.

“So,” Jack says, diving in, “like. Tory, hey. I’m really sorry about this whole deal with Cathy—”

Tory opens the Mickey’s and takes a noisy swallow.

“—it’s just, my mom knows her mom from church, the thing’s a setup,” Jack pleads his case. “I mean, like I even want to fucking go to the stupid dance.” Not bad. He’s added the “fucking” at the last minute, nice touch, flinty and hard-assed, he hopes.

Tory belches. “You swipe this brew?”

Jack’s face reddens. There is nothing in his mind now besides this wholly blind desire to purchase Tory’s respect. But, here, at fourteen, Jack has not yet perfected his lies. “No.”

“Wuss.” Tory smokes, belches, drinks.

Wuss. Jack waits, and wonders what will happen next. His friends have warned him that Tory might just beat the shit out of him. Jack has never been in a fight.

“You gonna stand there all day?” Tory says. Jack sits—safely distant in case Tory gets an itch to shove him off the edge. Tory’s nostrils spill smoke dismissively. “Relax, Baylor. N.B.D. Know what I’m saying? Hell. Sutton’s already done her.”

Done her. Jack knows what this means. Nods gravely.

Tory smokes. He looks sidelong at Jack. “Sutton says she got both his balls in her mouth, at the same time.”

This, to Jack, sounds wrong. He wrestles with a mental picture of shy-but-perky Cathy DeLong, varsity football Peppette, vaguely arranged ass-up and head south between the splayed hairy legs of the pothead, Tommy Sutton. “Is that good?” he wonders, aloud.

A geyser of beer spews from Tory’s mouth. He’s laughing. After a worried moment, Jack joins in, slowly convincing himself that he meant it to be funny.

“All right.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Tory offers Jack the crooked cigarette. Jack accepts, slips it between his dry lips, but doesn’t smoke. His mouth is cotton. Tory swigs the Mickey’s and considers the ocean again.

After what he believes to be a reasonable interval, Jack tries to give the cigarette back. Tory waves it away. “All yours, man.”

“I . . . no, better not. My, you know, mom. If she gets a whiff, on my breath—”

Tory holds up an Oreo. “What do you think these are for? Kills the stink completely.”

In point of fact, Jack thought the cookies were for when Tory got hungry. But he keeps the cigarette. Puffs and puffs and puffs without inhaling, nevertheless beginning to feel kind of tingly and sick. The Mickey’s drained, Tory throws it down into a pile of scrap lumber below, where the jade glass shatters.

“You know what’s on those islands?” Tory is pointing west, into the haze.

“Goats.” Jack did a report on the Channel Islands in fourth grade. “Sheep, sea lions, seals, gulls, fossils.”

Tory looks disappointed. For a moment Jack wonders if Tory wanted to tell him this himself, or did Tory, in fact, believe that there was something else out there?

“But at some point,” Jack continues, “somebody brought all these goats out there, and they let them go wild—” Tory’s bored already, but Jack’s in too deep, he has to finish—“and they just kept breeding and breeding and now there’s thousands of wild goats and nobody knows what to do with them. It’s messed up. Sometimes they let people go out and hunt them and junk.”

Tory shrugs. “Yeah, well I know for a fact there’s frat guys that go out there and, you know, fuck the goats. Part of the initiation.”

Jack’s horror and speculation prevent him (oh Jesus) from processing Tory’s subsequent spare but graphic (goats!) recitation of this apparently long-standing UCSB Greek system sacrament.

“Oh, man,” Jack says, when Tory finishes. “Who told you that?”

“I get things here and there. You know. And what I know, man—well, I know what really goes on. It’s like, they teach you one thing. But what really goes on? Is something else.”

Wind comes through the house like an emotion, filling it with an easy silence, pushing paper scraps around in corners and sifting the sawdust.

“The guys all said you were gonna kill me,” Jack confesses.

“Which guys?”

“You know—some of the guys—” Jack hesitates, sensing a misstep here, accidental betrayal in the making. Will Tory kill them?

“—Christ, they’re such pussies,” Tory says.

Jack’s empty grin, like a lawn jockey’s, cuts cold and meaningless.

“They don’t get it,” Tory is saying, “they’re full of shit. It comes down to one thing and one thing only.”

Jack wonders: What? What one thing?

“You know.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, hey. Girls’ll come, and girls’ll go. But you and me—?” Tory deliberately leaves the sentence hanging there, looking at Jack, without expression, as if the completion of his thought is so obvious as to be unnecessary, as if it’s implicit.

And Jack nods, pretending he knows, fourteen in full, confounded, confirmed, content. He gazes out across the lazy green ramble of the seaside city he has always known to be home.

Out toward a colorless ocean, and the vague, private islands of goats.