Читать книгу Toll Booth - Michael Aronovitz - Страница 7

She’s a pussy-dog, and you know it, Jimmy.

No she isn’t.

Is! She looks like a leprechaun.

She’s half beagle and half fox terrier. That’s why her ears stick up like that. And she’s really nice.

Nice! Dog’s ain’t supposed to be “nice.” They’re supposed to be faithful. They’re supposed to have big paws and lots of hair. They’re supposed to chase after sticks, guard the house, and flush rabbits and pheasants out of the brush and shit.

She barks when strangers come . . .

She yips! She’s a yip dog.

Well, I like her.

I know you do, Jimmy. Hell, I like her too. I was just kidding.

Really?

Yeah, she’s awesome. For a gay, faggot, pussy-dog.

*

Kyle winked, pushed out of the pit, and crawled under the caution tape. On tiptoe I peered over the lip of our new hiding hole and watched him walk across the abandoned job site. He stopped by a stack of cinderblocks and a pile of long steel bars with grooves in them. He turned and scratched his head. He stroked an imaginary beard. He hawked up and spit into a red wheelbarrow with a flat tire, then spun away, spread his feet, and fumbled with his pants. He started pissing down the side of a dented fifty-gallon drum. His shoulders were shaking as were mine, and his stream went through a number of unsteady spurts in rhythm with his laughter. He started gyrating his hips and the urine that dissolved the old dust in shiny splatters became a pattern. He was writing his name.

“Kyle, don’t.”

He zipped up and climbed into the cab of a bulldozer.

“Don’t what?” He grinned and started yanking on the gear handles. He was not quite tall enough to reach the floor pedals with his feet.

“Don’t mess around.”

“But Jimmy, this piece of shit won’t move.”

More yanking. Hard. His teeth were clenched beneath the thinnest of smiles and sweat ran through his dirty blond crewcut. The scene was becoming a familiar one. It was a hot summer day in Westville, we were thirteen years old, I was Kyle’s new pal, and we were out making mischief.

“C’mon,” I said. “You’re gonna bust it.”

He stopped.

“So? What are they going to do, take fingerprints? Next, you’re about tell me that the Chief of Police is gonna connect some busted dozer gear with my name written in piss over there on that drum. You’re a paranoid little jerk-weed, ain’t ya?”

I shrugged. He shrugged back and we both laughed. It was the usual standoff. My base instincts screamed “foul” long before we chucked apples at the Levinworths’ tin roof, or doused the church doorknobs with bacon grease, or lit up a bag of dogshit on the top step of Mr. Kimball’s front porch. I was the worried voice of what could go wrong and Kyle would twist my words around to prove we wouldn’t get caught.

I rested my forearms on the edge of the trench and looked for a place to draw pictures in the dirt. There was a half-buried tube of liquid nails and a scuffed-up red gas cap next to a fanned-out toss of broken green glass pieces. The bent-up Genesee Cream Ale bottle cap was a foot to the left, and I made note to possibly flip it at Kyle if the moment was right. I rubbed my index finger into the ground. It was good dirt. Soft, with pretty little mica specs in it. I drew a cartoon penis and a cartoon vagina. A stalk with a bulb and an oval with an upside down “Y” in it. Why did vaginas look like peace signs anyway?

“So,” I said. “This is the big secret?” I looked up. “We rode bikes five miles just to trash some old dozer? You said you had some new surprise out here that was ultimate pisser.”

Kyle put his elbow up on the steering column.

“Still drawing pussy instead of getting it, Jimmy?”

I frowned and rubbed out my dirty cartoons.

“So, how much kootchie are you getting?”

“Enough,” he said. Just ask Billy Healy.”

I had heard the stories. Supposedly, Kyle had copped a feel of Jeanette Wallman’s crotch at the Thatcher Park Shopping Center in the back bed of a pickup parked behind the Overbrook Deli. The legend was that she was wearing tight white jeans and his dirty hand left actual prints.

“Got any gum, Jimmy?”

He was staring. It sort of hurt to look back at it. For the millionth time that day, I looked down, and to my dismay, started drawing in the dirt again.

“You know I don’t,” I said. My mom didn’t let me have gum. She didn’t let me have Twizzlers or corn chips either. She was a health food freak-a-zoid and stocked the house with granola, wheat germ, and soy products. She also did regular room checks.

“That’s OK,” he said. “I do.”

He fished a square of Bazooka out of his pocket and chucked it to me. It fell a bit short and I reached out for it eagerly. It felt like Christmas when you could scarf up a freebie. I ripped it open, licked the sugar powder off the comic no one ever read anyway, and jammed the gum in my mouth. I had chewed it three good times before I realized that Kyle was still wearing that hard, blank expression.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I didn’t want my half anyway.”

My shoulders sagged. Kyle Skinner was the most wild and obnoxious boy that went to Paxon Hill Junior High School, but he also had these cast-iron rules of etiquette. Figuring out the boundaries was a constant source of pain for me, but it also fascinated me in some deep, secret place. Somehow, these were the laws of growing up your mom never told you about.

He turned away and gazed out at the woods that flanked the dirt road.

“Come up here and have a smoke with me, Jimmy.”

“My mom will smell it on me.”

“Huh?”

“My mom will smell it!”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” he said. “Butt breath goes away in fifteen minutes.”

“How do you know?”

Kyle bent his knee and slapped the sole of his foot flat to the bulldozer’s control panel. He hiked up the bottom edge of his jeans and dug for the smoke pack hidden in his sock.

“Bobby Justice told me.”

I was silenced. Just the fact that Kyle had conversed with Bobby Justice was an instant credibility. The guy was seventeen. He took shop classes half the day, majored in raising hell, and even got arrested once for selling grams of Hawaiian pot under the bleachers on the school football field. He drove a jacked-up black Mustang. He wore shit-kicker boots, and a chain hanging out the back pocket in that half-moon that said in its dumb, blind sort of grin, “Fuck off, Chief.” Rumor had it that he once pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of his trunk at a Hell’s Angels biker party, somewhere between the tube-funnel beer-chugging contest and the motor throw, because some dude was wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt that he wanted.

And it was mind-boggling to picture Kyle extracting this information from Bobby Justice in casual conversation. The only reason this bully ignored kids like us was that we were still too young to beat up.

Kyle drew out the pack, ripped away the cellophane, and let it float off on the wind. With a mild sort of alarm I noticed that the brand in his fist was the filterless Chesterfields. Last time it was Marlboros.

He scratched at the foil cover and pinched one up.

“Come here, sit down, and have a smoke with me, Jimmy.” He held it like a pointer for emphasis. “I’m not asking you to steal the change from your mom’s purse like I did. I’m not asking you to go down to the Rexalls and tell the old fart that the butts are for your old man, neither. I’ve already done all that myself. The only thing I want is for your first puff to be with me. Ain’t you my new best friend no more? Don’t ya want to hang out with the big boys?”

I climbed out of the trench, my face burning, my mind racing. In the past two years friendships had suddenly twisted around by definition, and it was like I hadn’t been paying attention in math class or something. The “cool” kids had access to Penthouse and Gallery magazines, and stuff like Pop Rocks, cherry bombs, pump BB guns, and exploding gag cigarette loads. They were building monster album collections with the complete works of Zeppelin, Sabbath, Kiss, and The Who, while the only things Mom let me have was this shitty eight-track, a tape by Helen Reddy, and a commercial, pop anthology you ordered from TV called Autumn ’73.

I walked to the dozer.

Kyle scrambled from the big bucket seat and sat on the dozer’s thick tread strip between the two side wheels. He slapped the area next to him and I took my place at his side. Our weight bowed the track pad down a bit and I cupped my hands between my knees. His arm was across my shoulders.

“Now listen,” he said. “Don’t suck it down like you’re gulping a Pepsi. And don’t use your teeth. Take a small puff, hold it in your mouth for a second and then breathe it in slow. And when you blow it out don’t try to do smoke rings. That shit is for girls.”

I nodded.

“Go on then, Bozo. Take it,” he said. He was holding the pack out with my cigarette jutting up about a half inch from the others.

I reached for it. My fingers were shaking a bit.

“Breathe,” he said. “Breathe, baby. Stay with me.” In a far-off way I noticed that his arm had disengaged itself. I put the cigarette between my lips. Took it back out. Wiped off a little drool. Reinserted. “OK, OK,” he said. “Here we go.”

He struck a match, cupped it, and brought it across. I leaned in going cross-eyed. Close up it looked beautiful and deadly. I sucked in carefully and got braced for the hot, nasty swallow.

It was awesome.

Sharp, it hit the back of my throat and rolled into me like a chocolate cloud. It was potent and rich. Forbidden. I blew it out and watched the gray smoke make art on the air. My head spun a bit in a friendly sort of a way, and I knew I could handle this. I was older now. Better. I spit my gum out and took another deep drag.

“Now you’re ready for the surprise,” Kyle said. He was studying me, smoking one himself now. His eyes were thin, but his expression was otherwise neutral. I leaned back.

“Show me.”

He hopped down, went to his knees, and reached behind the dozer’s front roller. I couldn’t see his arm from my angle, and I had the sudden premonition that he was going to fake like something grabbed his hand. He would open his eyes in wide surprise and jam his shoulder into the front of the dozer, giving the illusion he was being yanked really hard from something lurking in the shadows under the load bucket. Of course, this didn’t happen. If it had, however, I would have been ready and it made me smile. I really was changing for the better.

He came back up with a cardboard box about the size of a car battery. It was old and stained, and the front had a sticker that said “16D.”

“What is it?” I said. He carefully set it down on the tread a few feet to my left.

“This here,” he said, “is a fine example of why most grown-ups have shit for brains.” He took a deep drag of the smoke he’d been lipping, then pointed to the box with the lit end for emphasis.

“Notice, James, the ‘16.’ This stands for three and a half. The ‘D’ stands for ‘penny.’ Put them together and the ‘16D’ means three and a half inches of nail. But please explain to this dumb-ass kid what ‘D’ has anything to do with ‘penny,’ and what ‘penny’ has to do with hand nails which are so obviously made of steel and not copper.”

I let go a nervous laugh.

“Where did you get—”

“I clipped them from my Pop’s tool box,” he said. “Look.” He flipped open the top, dug up a nail, and held it outward. It was bent and a bit jagged.

“Why’s it all screwy?” I said.

“When my Pop’s done framing a house, he walks the job and yanks out all the bent nails.”

“Why?”

“He brings them all back to the tool-house and pulls a major bitch and moan. Gets paid back for each and every one of them.”

“Then he’ll miss that box!” I said. I had jumped to my feet, and I chucked away the smoke. “Geez, Kyle, why did you go and do that? He’s probably going to kill you and then come for me!”

His eyes narrowed.

“I ain’t that stupid, James. I found the empty box in the garage two months ago and stashed it in the closet behind my old board games and Lego garbage. I’ve been filling it up one nail at a time. Cripes, don’t be such a fucking dipshit!”

I forced a wounded grin.

“You’re the one with a dipshit pal and that makes you a total bonehead.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I must be freakin’ bonkers.” He was smiling but I found it hard to mirror. Just because Kyle knew how to handle his old man didn’t mean I’d figured it out.

Mr. Skinner was Westville’s definition of a good ole boy. He drove a mud-splattered, light brown Chevy pickup and always had the back bed filled with ladders, lumber, upside-down wheelbarrows, and power tools. He had an American flag on the hood-side opposite the antenna and a bumper sticker that talked about ripping his pistol from his cold, dead fingers. On the driver’s door was his company logo, “One-Truck-Johnny.”

I sat back against the tread and kicked a bit at the dirt.

“So, what are the bent nails for?”

Golden question. Jackpot. Kyle was glowing.

He brought the box to head level and gave it a shake. The nails clacked inside and he moved to the sound in a sarcastic rendition of the “Do-Si-Do” we learned in gym class two winters ago. His head was sort of sideways, one eye regarding me in a sly sort of observation. He was doing a circular motion with the box now like the Good & Plenty choo-choo boy on TV. He shuffled past me. He stopped. He pulled up the box top, drew out a nail, and tossed it into the middle of the dirt road that cut through the job site.

He turned back with raised eyebrows. I was sorry to disappoint.

“What are you doing?” I said.

He shook his head, took out a second nail, and flipped it to the road from behind his back. He grabbed another, lifted his leg, and chucked it up from beneath. That particular one landed with its sharp point angled straight to the sky.

I shot off the tread.

“You can’t do that!” I looked back to the Route 79 overpass that spanned the horizon to my right. “If someone takes a wrong turn off the highway you know they’ll be trucking, shit, they’re gonna run over those nails and pop a tire!”

Kyle looked up at the sky with his arms spread out.

“By George, I think he’s got it!”

The taste in my mouth was electric. Three months ago the construction men had blocked off exit 7 up on the overpass while completing the off ramp, but the job got delayed before the new extension could be finished down here. Dirt road city. The plans for pouring and paving had come to a dead halt and long since, all the road barriers up on the turnpike had been stolen or moved. It was an old joke by now, that bum steer on the overpass and everyone knew not to take the deep, unmarked turn. Everyone.

Unless they weren’t from Westville.

Every now and again some goober took the exit by mistake and barreled down the ramp to the dirt road. It was a major pain too, as the rough detour stretched for five miles through the woods before hitting the outskirts of Westville Central. Bumpy ride. Slow as all hell.

Soon to be stalled out and stranded.

I looked up at the overpass and, from behind its triple guard rail, heard the cars shooting past. They couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see them. A double blindfold.

“Pick ’em up, Kyle,” I said. It sounded like a command backed at least by a shred of confidence, and of that I was glad. Kyle replied by flipping another nail into the road.

“You sound like your mother.” His voice rose to falsetto. “Let’s talk about you and how you feel about yourself, James. Let’s have a big pow-wow.”

His tone went back to normal.

“Damn, Jimmy. Your ma just won’t leave you be, will she? The lady has you turned pussy is all, hell, why does she have to know everything anyway? She don’t even give you an allowance.”

“What does that have to do with—”

“Well she don’t, does she? Does she?”

My eyes felt hot and bloodshot.

“She gives me money.”

He snorted.

“Exactly! But ya got to ask for it every time. That’s how she keeps tabs on what you’re going to do with it. Don’t you see? Anytime you want to buy something fun she gets to shoot it down. She wants to keep her little baby-boy, don’t she? She won’t let you have secrets. That should be a crime or something.”

He nodded at me meaningfully.

“I know you’re a charity case, Jimmy. That’s why I want to help ya. That’s why I like ya.” He held up a crooked nail. “This ain’t gonna cost nothing. This here secret is gonna be a freebie.”

My mouth opened and I shut it. Like always, Kyle had twisted my mother right into the crux, and though the correlation was clumsy, the effect was damned potent. Most of my friends were starting to get out more, like after dusk and all, but I still wasn’t allowed. I had to stay home with mother so we could talk. Talk-talk, some nights she had me at the kitchen table until eight o’clock, asking about the details of my day and hanging on the words. She was lord, judge, and jury, always cramming my head full of her interpretations. Oh, she was a regular code-cracker all right.

So yeah, since Dad left it had become a big responsibility being the man of my family. A responsibility I was starting to resent with or without Kyle Skinner.

He pushed the box out toward me and gave it a shake.

“Go on, Jimmy. Do a nail, man.”

I scooped my thumb and index finger into the box, drew out a nail, and underhanded it out to the road. My nail looked like a crooked finger, pointing.

This was not the way I imagined I would turn out.

I took a step forward and bent to one knee so I could grab back my nail.

“Too late for that shit!” Kyle said from behind.

There was a shhhuuuuckkk sound to my right followed by a flock of shadows spinning madly across the road. A shower of nails pelted down to kick up a scatter of dust.

The lane was covered.

I thought of picking up the nails one by one, but I stopped myself right there. I wasn’t the one who dumped the whole box. It wasn’t my idea to leave someone stranded out here with a flat.

I decided to let him get his own Goddamned nails and pick mine up in the process. What did I owe him? A Chesterfield and a piece of gum? I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to do this. I had enough guilt dumped on me at home.

I turned to tell him all this, but Kyle wasn’t looking my way. He was staring at something off to the side. Something absolutely mesmerizing.

I followed the line of his gaze and saw the car coming down the ramp.

It was coming fast, and the air suddenly tasted rusty and harsh. Kyle grabbed my arm. My stomach was a lead ball, my ears hot as branding irons.

We scrambled behind a red dumpster and there was the gritty sound of a car bumper banging from roadway to dirt. Kyle dropped to his knees for the low view and I stayed up high.

Sharp sun lanced off the chrome and plastered a hot glare to the windshield. It was a dull orange Honda Civic, already swerving, plumes of dirt spitting up high behind it.

My mouth was working the word “no” silently.

There was a series of sharp “pop” sounds. The car did a rapid back-and-forth, left to right to left to right, then shot straight toward us. Like a yanked sheet the glare on the windshield vanished, and I was eye-to-eye with the driver.

She had straight blonde hair. I thought she was wearing one of those plastic, red, three-quarter-moon hair bands that formed her bangs into their own separate little statement, but I couldn’t be sure at the moment. Her face had a sharp sort of beauty that was almost regal, and of that I was quite sure. Then the moment was gone. She overcompensated for control and yanked the wheel the other way. Now I saw the back of the car and the huge oak tree rising up ahead of it to the left of a jobsite trailer.

There was a hard clap. The butt end of the car actually jumped, and small fragments of bark and glass burst to both sides. The car bounced twice and settled, and the raised dirt blew off into the woods.

The car horn sounded.

Its steady wail fingered its way into the afternoon sky and spiraled up to an accusing, hot summer sun.