Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [57]
When he drifted back home and turned on the tiny television in his room, he saw the gun-holding couple from the poster in a commercial. “In the dark corridors of a violent city,” the voice-over intoned, “there is no time to lose.” Weapons, he noticed, were being drawn on about half of the channels on his cable system. There were soldiers carrying rifles, villains swinging machine guns from their hips, housewives cowering in closets with silver-plated .22s, ready to fend off intruders and rapists. Some of the scenes were filmed in squat palmlined residential neighborhoods that looked much like his own. People fired guns while crouched behind cement walls; they fired guns in kitchens; they fired guns while falling from airplanes; they fired guns and then jumped into lakes and rivers; they fired guns in warehouses, pinging bullets deflecting off iron beams.
Danny had become a member of the fraternity of gunslingers, and, like the people on the television screen, he began to feel looked-at. When he finally returned to school at Hollywood High, he drew stares everywhere he went. One of the football players said hello and gave him a hearty, friendly punch on the shoulder. Girls touched his scar with soft fingers that brushed against his cheek. Sandra, the one with the flowing black curls, the girl he had stared at for months without saying a word, cornered him by surprise in a hallway. For the first time, he was close enough to take in the scent of her perfume, a basket of overripe peaches that had dissolved into the air around her. Like everyone else, she had heard about his accident.
“Are you okay? I mean, that must have been awful, to be in a coma,” she said. “Are you totally, you know, like healed?”
No other schoolmate had asked about his health. Only Sandra had been thoughtful enough, which to Danny immediately confirmed what he had always imagined: that she was as saintly as she was beautiful. Now he was speaking to her, his nerves steady because he was a wounded warrior, not a boy. They talked about his accident, about life and death, about the school and how stupid everyone was. Sandra wanted to know what it felt like to be dead: She was convinced that he had “passed over to the other side and come back.” He made up a story about seeing clouds and angels that brought tears to her eyes.
Part of it was true; the old Danny had gone to sleep and died and this new Danny had taken his place, a Danny who wasn’t afraid to touch Sandra’s hand the third time they talked, a Danny who knew when to reach over and kiss her, how to wrap his arm around the arch of her back when they necked. A few days after they first spoke, they were under the bleachers at dusk, tugging awkwardly at each other’s clothes, scattered cups and hot dog wrappers at their feet. A week after that half-consummated encounter, they were in his room, fully naked on the bed with the football curtains and his baseball glove as witnesses.
When they said their goodbyes and he watched her walk away down the sidewalk from the perch of his bedroom window, he knew for certain that the old Danny had died forever. He felt possessive of her in a hard, brittle way: Her blue jeans belonged to him, her lips, and the small scar on her chin. It was an unexpected thing