Читать книгу King - Tanya Chapman - Страница 7

My neck won’t move so I can’t look left, and right isn’t much good either. That’s what I get for napping on the couch. But the neck thing will go away. The thing that won’t go away is that King didn’t sleep here last night. Not on the couch or anywhere else in the trailer. I sit for a while not thinking about the caps girl.

And then, before I have time to do much more worrying, King is at the door looking godawful, half walking half stumbling into the trailer. He slumps down on the rocker to tell me the whole story. Last night he was in jail. Nothing serious, a B & E that was more like trespassing.

King likes to go to this old gravel pit with Spiney. King and Spiney used to be in a rock band together. There’s great acoustics in the pit, so they climb over the fence and scream their heads off, making the sounds of all the instruments and singing the mostly forgotten words to all their old songs.

I heard it once. In a small town you can hear just about everything. Listening to them in the pit going off like banshees made me want to scream along with them, scream out loud for all the times I couldn’t make any noise at all and scream for the times I thought it would be better not to – there are a million reasons for screaming once you get going.

When King and Spiney are on a rage in the pit, it doesn’t take long for the cops to collect them and throw them in jail for the night. So if they don’t wrap up their screaming and get out pronto, then that’s what always happens, and they end up in the drunk tank. But they’ve never had to stay the whole night before. King is a natural charmer, so usually when they get thrown in jail King starts talking and convinces the cop on duty to let them go. That’s another small-town thing, I guess: eventually you meet all the cops. They start talking about the old days and the band and next thing you know King is a free man.

That’s how it usually goes, but last night they had to stay. No amount of charm could get him home.

Today, after jail, King must have gone over to Spiney’s trailer and tried to drink away the night. He’s home now, but it’s only four in the afternoon and he’s already on a rant about being the victim of crazy mindless rules and how it all sucks. This is the ten-beer rant, so I figure he’s been drinking for a while. My guess is that the boys went straight to the beer store as soon as they got let out this morning. So right now King is sitting on the rocking chair in our little trailer living room, but he sure isn’t rocking.

‘Hazel,’ he says, ‘you know there’s only so much a person can do to have fun, and when you run out of ideas there’s only trouble.’

‘There’s only trouble everywhere, King.’

‘Yeah, you’re right, but sometimes you can stay out and it’s all okay. It’s times like this that come around and ruin everything.’

‘You crossed into trouble way back, and sometimes you jump back to the normal and somewhat boring side of things, but then you always go back to the crazy side.’

‘I have to go back, Hazel.’

‘I know you do. You just have to keep testing that line.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can’t let it get too far away.’

‘Like you.’

King can hardly see because the cops maced him. I’m surprised about the police using mace on him but I don’t say a thing. So while we’re talking down the night, he’s kind of crying. He keeps telling me it’s just the mace. There’s a tear on his cheek, and I wipe it off with the bottom of my dress. King puts his hand on my hair and pulls me into him.

I try to imagine my King in jail. Not jail where he probably knows the guards, but real jail. The Big House. Even one night seems impossible. He is so huge and free. I can’t picture him in a little room made of concrete and bars like you see in the movies. In my mind, King couldn’t possibly fit in a space like that.

Sometimes, like now, it feels as though even the whole big world isn’t big enough for King.

I close my eyes and lean against him for a second, and when I open them again I see the blood. ‘They got you good, King.’

‘Absolutely shit-kicked,’ he says and grins.

‘What did you do?’

‘They said I was being aggressive.’

I shake my head and look to the corner of the kitchen at my fish mobile. It’s a ratty thing at first sight – little coloured glass fish tied to chopsticks with fishing line – but if you take the time to look at it and see it in just the right way, you can believe that you are underwater so completely that you hold your breath.

I go to the bathroom for peroxide and bandages to clean him up. The cuts are on his head, elbow and knees and down his leg. I wipe as gently as I can. There’s lots of dirt and tiny pieces of gravel mixed with the dried blood. I start to worry a bit, wondering how much damage the cops did and how much he did himself. I wonder how serious a B & E can get, but I don’t say anything out loud. It wouldn’t be right to bring out my worry, not now. King would just tell me it was nothing, no matter what, and that everything was going to be okay. Even with his previous charges piling up on top of this new one. But the previous charges and the piling are another thing not to think about. The mobile spins slowly, and the fish swim and swim.

I use the bubbly peroxide and a cotton ball to wipe carefully, not wanting to cause more hurt. Maybe it’s because I don’t say my thoughts out loud that the worry settles in me. I can feel it deep in my chest and somewhere in the bottom of my stomach.

He reads my mind. ‘I don’t think this is all from the cops, Hazel. I was doing some damage before they got us.’

‘Ripping it up,’ I say and I smile because I can tell he’s kind of proud of himself.

‘Damn right,’ he says. ‘So now I have to go to court.’

I close my eyes and swallow down the bad thoughts.

‘Damn,’ I say. ‘Court is always so early in the morning. No jail, though, right?’

‘Nah, they won’t put me in jail.’

‘Because, you know, I can deal with a lot of things … ’

‘Yeah, I know,’ he says. ‘You can deal with anything but jail.’

I stand up and sit King straight in the rocking chair. I bow to the invisible judge sitting on the couch and pace the courtroom. ‘Is this the kind of person you want to lock up, sir? Sure, he was screaming at the moon, but if this guy wants to throw himself down a gravel pit, why should we care? And besides, Your Judgementalist, he’ll keep it down next time.’

I curtsy to the judge and smile at King.

‘Hazel, you’re hired.’

‘Better than the guy they’ll give you anyway,’ I say.

‘Better than anything.’

He pulls me into his lap and we rock back and forth for a while and talk about the fun parts that happened last night. King and Spiney always have a good time together – they can hang out for days on end without getting sick of each other. King tells me about how he almost wrote a song while they were in the pit. He was singing something that could be a really good bass line and wishes he could remember it.

And then we fall asleep. We sleep despite the cuts and the worry and the mace and the worry. When we’re together we can sleep anywhere, at any time, under any circumstance. That’s the kind of people we are.