Vanity Kills, page 12
Eddie groans. “You know damn well I don’t know what fiduciary means.” He wriggles stubbornly on the twin bed like a child throwing a tantrum. “Shit, man, this place is so boring. I feel like I’m watchin’ grass grow. I don’t know how y’all do it. I’d go crazy in here.”
“Why ‘da hell you think I keep inviting you ova’? Entertain me, clown.” Mick hurls the quarter at his friend, hitting him hard right in the side of his exposed pectoralis.
“Ow! Jesus!” Eddie bolts up, temper flaring. Zero-to-sixty in a second. “Keep callin’ me clown, jerk-off. I’ll put a parking boot on your chair, lock up ‘em wheels like a towing company!”
Even though Eddie is genuinely infuriated, Iris can’t help but laugh. The simple guy has been nothing but a sweetheart to her every time he’s visited and she has a hard time taking him seriously. She’s seen them play rough on multiple occasions, enjoying a form of strange, twisted tough-love like two brothers might share in a tight-knit family.
“You know what,” Eddie continues, staring hard into Mick’s eyes, “how ‘bout you clown for me for once? Do some tricks in that thing. Pop-a-fuckin’-wheelie! Do somethin’ with your life, man!” His southern accent has never been more prominent. The country bumpkin is fired up.
Mick takes it with a grain of salt, comments rolling right off him. He giggles and crow’s feet form in the tan skin around his eyes. “I ain’t ya’ damn circus monkey.”
Mick finally breaks eye contact, rolling his head to the snickering woman in the doorway. “What brings you to my lair, doll?”
Iris sits next to Eddie. Perches, really. Like a bird ready to flit to safety at a moment’s notice. Her hands drum anxiously against her tight jeans. “You and Jack are close, right?”
“Last I checked.” Mick nods, pursing his lips, granting her his full attention.
“Today he made a joke about being in–”
She struggles to say the word. She just doesn’t want to believe he’s capable. As if saying it, putting it out there in the universe, would somehow make it real.
“Jail.” The weight of the word is heavy on her mind.
There it is. In the universe now.
“No,” Mick says, with total seriousness. “Not jail.”
Just as she breathes a sigh of relief, he speaks again.
“Prison.” After a pause, he speaks again, shaking his head. “He had a helluva time jus’ getting’ his probation officer to even let ‘im come do ‘dis trial.”
A silence lingers, thick in the air. Air that suddenly feels like it’s been sucked right out of her throat with a high-powered vacuum.
“I see.” She feels dizzy, wanting to stand but afraid she will hurl instead.
She’s been spending so much time with him. She feels like a fool. She’s been alone with him on mutiple occasions. In the woods, in the bayou, places where a former wing-slinger wouldn’t just have to be found and taken to the hospital. No, she’s been kayaking with him in places her body wouldn’t even be found. Thoughts of those outings ending in violence make her head swim.
“Why you ask? I mean, what’s it matta’? ‘Dat ain’t, like, who he is.”
“With what I’ve… I’ve been through a lot and,” she struggles, “I guess I just needed to know if he was, you know…”
She chokes on another word. It's a brick in her mouth, wedged tight.
Mick stares at her, baffled by what she’s trying to say.
“Dangerous.” She winces.
Mick laughs aloud at the ridiculous notion.
Eddie expels air in a comical pffffft. “Jack? No, girl, Jack is harmless.”
Mick’s face is gravely serious now. “Listen, you didn’t hear any of this from me. I’ll deny every mu’fuckin’ word of it if you blab.” He hesitates, looking at his fidgeting hands, picking at his short, chewed nails, then lifting his mocha-brown eyes back to her. “He and his wife got in an accident–”
The words smack her like a bag of sand now.
His wife???
“He’s married?” Her words are quiet but her expression screams: appalled.
“He was.”
There is a moment of quiet reverence between them all. Iris feels a twinge of shame for her reaction.
“One day, he and his wife were suppose’a have dinner at her mom’s house. Her mom was a… real intimidatin’ woman. She scared the shit outta Jack. Kate offered to, uh, help relieve some stress on the drive home, if you catch my drift.” Mick starts to mimic oral sex and then thinks better of it, offering some rare tact. “Next thing you know, BOOM. The engine, it…” he smiled.
He didn’t know exactly why he was smiling, though. It was some strange coping mechanism he’d developed at a young age, grinning through the painful times. He swallowed hard, looking down at his finger-less gloves.
“Crushed her skull in his lap. Shattered his whole pelvis, broke some’a his ribs. Her head bein’ wedged against the steerin’ wheel pinned him inside the car. SUV caught fire.” He made a poof noise and flicked all his fingers out like a quiet bomb. “Burned him up all over.”
She’s speechless.
Eddie lifts his head a little. “Guy likes to act like he's fine, but inside, he’s still all fucked up.”
Mick glanced up, his intense eyes finally locking onto hers. “Doctors put him in a coma ‘til the burns healed and ‘den he and I met a few weeks later in physical therapy for my knees. He was out on bond. After he was well enough to stand trial, they sentenced him. Manslaughter, I think. He did a couple years and when they let him out, he-done moved in next to me.”
“Wow.” Her eyes bulge, staring at the hardwood floor. “Poor guy.”
Mick points at her. “No!” The motion seems aggressive, but his voice is informative. “See, that’s why he doesn’t tell people. He don’t like the pity. Still feels guilty about it. I’m sure he will ‘til the day he dies. Thinks it's all his fault, that he’s some horrible person.”
“He’s a good guy,” Eddie nods, “just a little fucked up in the head’s all.”
“But, hey,” Mick laughs. “Ain’t we all?”
43
Alan stands against a tree on the sprawling back lawn near the water’s edge, comforted by the shadows of the southern night. Lightning crackles through the clouds overhead, but no rain falls through the steamy fog of oppressive heat lingering across the bayou. The booze is hitting his empty stomach and he feels his body growing to match the stove-like temperatures of the summer night. He relaxes into the shadows, chugging greedily from the bottle of tequila in his hand. He enjoys how the inebriation seems to silence the thoughts in his head, rushing and swirling anxiously, all the time. Despite not doing anything strenuous all day, he feels exhausted. The mental toll the last few days have taken on him weigh heavily on his conscience. He’s replayed the hallucination and the attack in his mind a thousand times.
It all seemed so real… until it didn’t.
He was amazed with his own strength, remembering the way Chase’s face bled. Rivulets of crimson streaming down the curves and features of his frightened face. Features that were flawless until his balled fist met flesh. He found something strangely erotic about the marring, finding a sick pleasure in transforming something so perfect into flayed flesh and twisted bone. It was similar to the feeling he got when he carved his own…
Footsteps approach in the grass, preceded by the weak glow of a hanging lantern.
He hopes to himself that it’s Chase. He’s eager for a chance to explain. Eager to apologize again.
Eager just to be around him for any reason.
To his delight, though he’d never show it, Chase appears, waltzing up to a lawn chair.
As he goes to sit in it, he spins, notices Alan, and groans a terrified, “woah,” while clutching his heart. He stands fully, still clutching at his shirt. “Jesus, I didn’t see you there.”
“Sorry.” Alan breathes after a painful swig of cheap liquor.
“You’re just standing out here in the dark? No flashlight or anything?” Chase’s tone is almost accusatory, angry.
“Easier to see the lightning when its full dark.” Alan points up at the roiling sky with the half-filled bottle, and instead of looking where he’s motioning, Chase notices the bottle instead.
“Holdin’ out on us?” He points to the bottle and Alan laughs a little with an inebriated sneer.
“Mick gave it to me. Said he didn’t need it for that ho’ any more, whatever that means.”
Silence.
“Want some?” Alan offers the container up and Chase approaches with hesitation. “You don’t mind?”
“What? Like I’m gonna drink the whole bottle by myself?” Alan scoffs.
Chase doesn’t think it’s that far-fetched. He wouldn’t put anything past the guy. He’s a wild card, and not the fun kind, he thinks.
“It’s a liquid olive branch.” Alan approaches, leading with the bottle. Chase takes it, suspicious. “You mind if I…?” He points to the lounge chair right beside the one Chase was about to sit in.
“Free country. At least, last I checked,” Chase says, his anger biting.
Alan takes a seat, the back of his bare thighs already sticking to the plastic with a dew of July sweat. He smacks a mosquito on his irritated neck and looks to his lap, but it’s fallen into the darkened abyss of night. He sweeps off his black surf shorts just in case. “These fuckers LOVE me!”
Chase swallows a mouthful of the stinging amber liquid and grimaces, pulling the bottle away to look at the label. He cocks his head to the side and laughs, “At least someone thinks you’re sweet.”
Alan smiles at Chase, grinning at the burn, taking it as a positive sign that Chase is even a tiny step closer to forgiving him for the attack.
Alan leans in, their elbows nearly touching. He examines Chase’s face, a look of surprise plastered on his own. When he’d last seen Chase, sitting on his floor, towels scattered around him in disarray, he feared that the man would need stitches for sure. But now, only a small butterfly bandage held everything in place, the busted skin nearly healed. It really was a miracle. “Damn. Nose is almost completely healed.”
“Yeah,” Chase stares forward, trying to stifle the urge to say something sarcastic. He knows it won’t help anything. “Can’t believe these pills really work. Shoulda seen Walsh when he had to set the bone straight earlier. Looked like he was about to shit himself. Not because of the damage but just… how fast it was healing.”
Alan smiles weakly, glancing down at the tall grass, bugs frolicking through waves of it, blackened by night, whipped by the wind of an incoming storm. Illuminated only by the lamp. “I’m really sorry.” He can’t even look Chase in the eye as he says it. His tone seems genuine though, and Chase softens a little, taking another sip from the bottle and handing it back.
Alan takes it timidly and carefully wipes the rim of it before taking another sip.
It’s a gesture Chase notices. Even through the darkness.
His smile fades. “Hey,” he’s nervous to even ask, “I’m curious. What did you see before you decked me? You were… clearly hallucinating. In retrospect, I can see that now. Talkin’ to yourself and everything.”
Alan swigs, clearly tortured by the answer to the question, but doesn’t speak. He can’t.
How can he talk about something so personal with a stranger who probably hates his guts? How can he put into words what the hallucination was of… and why it infuriated him?
Sensing he won’t respond, Chase speaks up in in attempt to make things easier on him.
“You know, growing up, I carried this crushing weight around. Scared of what people would say when they found out I was, you know… Fabulous.”
That makes Alan snicker. His eyes soften and drift up to the ghostly imprint of Chase’s black face against the dark night. A shimmering bolt of lightning flickers through the cumulonimbus clouds above, rising into the violet-tinged sky like the smoke from a detonated atom bomb, never striking down into the swampy land below it. It flashes again, making Chase’s eyes twinkle. Alan can’t tear his gaze from them.
“I’d try to overcompensate by acting super butch to throw people off when they’d say things about me being flamboyant. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a beard. I dated her from seventh grade til my junior year of high school. I played football, basketball, baseball, you name it. I drank beer out of a can. I did all the things I thought men were supposed to do. But I wasn’t being… me. And, you know, folks sometimes don’t take kindly to that stuff. Case in point.” He points to his nose, getting a dig in.
Alan feels remorse when he says it.
“When I finally knew I had to say something, to… be the real me… I was so scared of how my parents’d react. I’ll never forget the day I told my mom and dad. I’m 17, sitting at the dinner table, sweatin’ like a whore in church. My mama said grace and then I just blurted it out: ‘I’m gay and I’m in love with a man named Tim.’”
Alan nearly spits up the swig of tequila he’s downing. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine.”
The way Chase is enunciating and motioning with his hands makes Alan wonder if he had always expressed himself like that. Or was it a more recent development? Like sonar to non-verbally attract other gays or clue them in without outright saying it.
Chase smiles a little, suddenly forgetting that Alan is a foe. His southern ways seep in and he forgets for a moment that not everyone in the world is a friend.
“I was young, dumb, full a’ cum, and head-over-heels for my baseball coach. He was gor-geous! Oh my God,” he waves his splayed hands in front of his face. The sheen on his nails almost looks like fireflies in the glow of the lamp. “I digress. So, I tell them I’m gay and then my dad turns to me and says: I know.”
Growing more animated, he clutches Alan’s shoulder and laughs. “Turns out, they’d known for years. Like, since I was little. And yet, I had only just figured it out for myself. It’s like… I was the last to know.”
Chase leans all the way over to him. Alan can feel the gentle whoosh of air that pushes into him like an errant breeze from the approaching storm. His whole body stiffens.
“I’m not blind, babe.” Chase touches the almost-completely faded scars running the length of the man’s pale forearms. “You went up the highway, not ’cross the street. Seein’ that road map of self-hatred carved in your arms,” he slides it up, wraps his hand around Alan’s bicep, and gives him a comforting squeeze, “that there… that tells me you might just be the last one to know.”
Alan feels like Chase is looking straight into his soul. The feel of Chase’s hand on his skin makes his shorts feel tight and the blood in his head rush elsewhere. He swallows hard and tugs his arm from Chase’s grasp.
Chase looks down at Alan’s writhing legs, squirming uncomfortably and his gaze rises to the bulge in the man’s shorts. He is not sure how to react and remembers squeezing his arm, a gesture he thought nothing about in the moment.
Alan’s glare is steely and Chase can’t make heads or tails of it. He wants to believe that it’s all just a trick of the light as Alan slides his hand down to disguise the bulge. He wants to believe that the misguided guy truly heard what he was trying to say. But the expression on Alan’s ghost-white face is one of bitterness, evolving into fury, all-too-familiar with the look of self-hatred.
Alan finally looks away, gritting his teeth so hard that his jaw flexes. He knows Chase noticed his erection. He knows he didn’t hide it fast enough.
He prays to God in his mind that this is just another hallucination. Another all-too-vivid haze that he will snap himself out of.
The soft tinkle of rain sounds over the water in front of them, sending a million tiny shock-waves through the surface of the water. Alan feels the cool patter of it thrumming against his pulsing skin and breathes deeply, hoping his hard-on will die down enough for him to pull the rip-cord and eject himself from this uncomfortable situation.
“Well,” Chase sighs hard, takes one more swig, and hands the bottle of booze back, “I’mma head in.” He stands, avoiding looking anywhere near Alan’s direction as he ambles up the slight hill toward the main house, leaving Alan to sit in the rain.
44
Iris is on her belly, sprawled across her bed, feet bobbing playfully in the air behind her. She struggles to find the right wording to fill out her patient journal.
How do you say thanks Doc, you gave me my life back? Or thank you for ridding me of the constant reminder of the worst day of my life? She wonders, instead, if she should give Eddie the cash to buy a thank you card…
Just then, an orange paper airplane soars through the air silently, landing on the floor just in front of her. She smiles, recognizing the construction paper as Jack’s, brought from home for his origami creations. She shoves her journal and pen to the side, creeps to the edge of the mattress, and strains to pick it up from just within reach on the floor. She sits up, legs crossing, and unfurls it, fighting the grin that is manifesting on her face.
R U STILL AWAKE, it asks in blocky permanent marker.
She writes YES below it in pen, refolds it, and sends it careening back through the open door, across the hall into his room. She hops down and pads across the hardwood floor after it, leaning against his door frame.
There he sits in a confetti pile of construction paper squares, like boredom incarnate. She can see the glimmer of his grin reflecting in the blue-tinged security light seeping through the slats in his window blinds, basking him in slivers of pale teal light. His hood is down and his mop of brown curls glints as he looks down, bashfully, picking at the fingernails on one hand with the ones on the other.
“Hey,” she whispers. She instinctively starts to reach for the light switch but thinks better of it, knowing that will spook him back into hiding, like a nocturnal animal, shooting down into its darkened burrow for safety.
The amount of trust he’s putting in her, even aided by the veil of the darkened night, makes her feel somewhat special. She wonders how long it’s been since he didn’t have it pulled up around other people.
