Coronado - Dennis Lehane [30]
The bed is small too, and we lie down on top of the covers, and for some reason, I feel comfortable for the first time since I entered this monster. I lie there with Lurlene and after a while she says, “How come we couldn’t do nothing?”
“I don’t know.”
“How come we didn’t even try?”
I say it again: “I don’t know.”
“She talked trash about me at school,” she says. “Told people I was cheap. Made fun of my clothes. Said I was common.” She slides an arm across my chest and holds on tight. “I’m not common. I’m not shit.”
I kiss her forehead and hold her.
“You still gone beat up Lyle?”
“No,” I say.
“Why?” She gives me those green eyes and they seem bigger as they look down into mine.
I get a picture of the jungle for some reason, a world of green leaves, dripping. I see John Wayne telling that little yellow kid in The Green Berets, “You’re what this is all about,” and I think how I don’t have no fight left in me. I think how John Wayne is full of shit.
I pull the gun out from behind my back and place it on the bed beside me, wonder what’ll happen if we hear the sudden turn of a key in the front door lock upstairs, the rich family coming home and us down here hiding in the bed like a pair of big bad wolves waiting for Goldilocks. I wonder what I’ll do then. Make that pudgy man in the picture go get one of his shotguns maybe. Make that pudgy man draw. I don’t know. I know that at the moment I hate the pudgy man more than I hate Lyle.
And, yet, it was Lyle’s house I fucked up. And I know I ain’t going to do nothing to the pudgy man’s house except wait down here with his gun. Why that is, I can’t rightly tell you. But I feel ashamed.
I see my daddy out in the backyard, his face leaking, and I see my mother with that hand over her eyes, and I see the red sky I chased in that shitty truck. I see John Wayne in the jungle and LBJ in that picture and Lurlene standing up on the fridge, ballerina-like, and I see Lyle dropping that ball on the one, and those stands gone empty of fans under the black sky, and I think how it would have been nice for someone besides my dumb, drunk daddy to have told me that this is it. This is the whole deal.
“Maybe we should go down to Corpus,” I say.
Lurlene curls into me. “That’d be nice.”
“Just go down,” I say. “Disappear.”
Lurlene’s hand runs over my chest. “Disappear,” she says.
But we don’t move. We lie there, the house quiet all around us, the quiet of a sleeping baby’s lung. We listen for a sound, a click, a generator’s hum. But there’s nothing, not even a bed creak as Lurlene shifts her body a little more and places her ear to my chest and pulls my hand between her breasts. I can’t feel her heartbeat, though. Can’t feel my own, either, my chest gone still as the house as she lies against me, listening for the sound of my heart. Waiting and listening. Listening and waiting. For the steady beat, I guess. The dull roar.
MUSHROOMS
HER BOYFRIEND, KL, is driving, and she and Sylvester are packed beside him in the front seat of the Escalade, sucking down Lites as they drive through the rain from Dorchester, Massachusetts, to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Every twenty miles or so, KL reaches over her shoulder and taps Sylvester’s neck and says, “Sylvester, you know my girlfriend, right?” until Sylvester finally says, “Hey, KL. Okay. We’ve met.”
She and KL dropped two hits of GHB just before they picked Sylvester up, and she thinks it’s starting to show. She keeps touching her face with sweaty hands and giggling because they’ve forgotten the bullets and it’s been a long time since she’s seen the ocean and here it is raining and because KL keeps flinching every time a puddle explodes against his silver rims.
“KL,” Sylvester says, “this girl is fucked up.”
She says, “Sylvester, your nose is weird. Anyone ever tell you that? One nostril is tiny. And the other is, like, jet-engine size.” She tries to touch his nose.
“Serious, KL,” Sylvester says. “Fucked up.”
KL says