Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [26]
“Something I want to say,” he muttered.
I was touched by his penitent tone and then it all kicked in, the dope, the broken arm, the early hour. I realised that it couldn’t have been easy for him, my moving in with Celine. Gonzo and I had been living together for nearly twenty years, wards of the state after a drunk driver orphaned us. All our lives we’d been shunted from one institution to another, being fucked over by staff, or bigger kids, or teachers who knew they could vent their frustrations because no one gave a fuck about us back home.
We’d grown up and grown hard, fighting the odds and always losing, but one thing we never did, we never took it lying down. An allergy to penicillin was about all we had in common, but he was my kid brother and all through the bad years, even during the hassle from the Dibble, the Provo threats when Gonzo started dealing, nothing had prised us apart. But even that doesn’t tell you how close we were.
“I wanted to tell you,” he said, “that I fucked Celine.”
I didn’t kill him. That’s how close we were.
The worst thing was the way he smiled when he said those words. It was a canine smile, dead and dry. I sat there, dumb, the cigarette smouldering as I read the No Smoking sign on the glove compartment over and over again. Not knowing if I should laugh or cry or kick someone’s head in. Celine’s, preferably, but Gonzo’s would have to do because you don’t hit a woman. Not even if she’s dug her talons in deep, ripped your guts out, so you don’t have to go to the bother of puking them up whole.
After that night I knew only two things for sure. One, you play the player, not the cards. Two, I would never, in my entire life, be as happy again as I was before Gonzo said those three simple words, ‘I fucked Celine’.
It took me a while to realise that Gonzo smiled that way because he was relieved I finally knew. Not about Celine, that was the first and last time Gonzo and Celine got it together, although it was the kind of once that tends to last. Gonzo wanted me to know what he was really like, what he was capable of, who he really was. I’d always known he was erratic, even begun to suspect that he was actually a sociopath, gone so far as to get a book out of the library and check off the symptoms. But I’d never thought there was a vacuum at his core.
When he smiled that night though, I knew there was no line he wouldn’t cross. Gonzo had screwed Celine simply because he knew Celine was the only woman I had ever considered living with, having kids with, getting old with. Maybe even being happy with.
Celine cried for a week solid but I hung tough, moved out of the apartment, sleeping on Chizzer’s couch for a couple of weeks until I found a bed-sit down near the docks. It was just about big enough to let me exhale all the way out but I didn’t mind, I wasn’t planning any dinner parties.
After a month or so Gonzo called around and after a couple of false starts we kissed and made up over a bottle of Southern Comfort, Ritz mixer, because, come hell or high hippies, Gonzo was my brother and we had no one else. All the while I knew that screwing Celine was only part of it, that Gonzo needed my feedback to fully enjoy his sick kicks. I ignored the self-loathing by hating Celine. Not blaming her, just hating. Sometimes you just need to hate.
It would have been neat and tidy if I’d met Denise on the rebound but it was nearly a year later when I walked into the bank, got skewered by a bold gaze, big brown eyes. The smile was the clincher. It was wide and warm, and when she turned up the wattage it warned off shipping.
One night I bumped into her in Bojangle’s and told her, flushed with maybe three pints too many, that she was the kind of beautiful that would finally persuade the UFOs to land. She liked that, said it was