The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [77]
“Is this a … joke?” I ask him. “I mean, because I know what a fucked-up guy you are, dude, and I know that this isn’t a joke and, man, oh shit.”
I open the door to the bathroom and see the kid, young, white, blond, maybe ten or eleven, wearing a shirt with a tiny horse on it, faded designer jeans, his hands tied up behind his back with a cord and his feet bound by rope and Peter has stuck something in the kid’s mouth and put duct tape over it and the kid’s eyes are wide and he’s crying, kicking at the sides of the bathtub that Peter stuck him in and I slam the door to the bathroom and run over to Peter and grab his shoulders and start shouting into his face, “What the fuck you think you’re doing shithead what the fuck have you done you fucking shithead?”
Peter is staring calmly into the TV screen.
“He’ll bring us money,” he mumbles, trying to brush me away.
I’m squeezing his fat beefy shoulders harder and keep shouting “Why?” and I panic and it causes me to swing a fist at him, hitting Peter hard across the head and he doesn’t move. He starts laughing, the sounds coming out of his mouth don’t make sense, can’t be connected to anything else I’ve ever heard.
I punch his head harder and sometime after the sixth blow he grabs my arm, twisting it so hard I think it will snap in two, and I fall slowly to the floor, one knee at a time, and Peter keeps twisting harder and he’s not smiling anymore and he growls, low and slowly, four words: “Shut—the—fuck—up.”
He yanks my arm up, giving it one more hard twist, and I fall back, holding my arm, and just sit there for a long time until I finally get up and try to drink a beer and lay on the couch and my arm is sore and the kid stops making noises after a while.
I find out that the kid is skateboarding at the parking lot of the Galleria that Peter and Mary scoped out all morning long and Peter says they “made sure no one was looking” and Mary (this is the part I have the hardest time picturing, because I cannot imagine her in motion) drives up to the kid as he’s tying a shoelace and Peter opens the back door of the van and very simply, without any effort, lifts the kid up and calmly shoves him into the back of the van and Mary drives back here and Peter tells me that even though he was going to sell the kid to a vampire he knows who lives over in West Hollywood, he’d rather deal with the kid’s parents instead and that the money we receive will go to paying off a fag named Spin and then we’ll head for Las Vegas or Wyoming and I am so freaked out that I cannot say anything and I have no idea where Wyoming is and Peter has to show me in a book, on a map, a purple state that seems far away.
“Things do not work out like that,” I tell him.
“Man, your problem, the thing that screws you up, is that you don’t relax, man, you don’t lay back.”
“Is that right, man?”
“It’s bad for you. It’ll be bad for you, dude,” Peter says. “You’ve got to learn to flow, to float. To mellow out.”
Three days will pass and Peter will watch cartoons and he will forget about the kid laying in the bathtub and he will pretend, along with Mary, that there never was a kid and I will try to keep cool, pretending to know what they are going to do, what will be accomplished, even though I have no idea what will happen.
I go to the car wash because I wake up and Peter will be heating a spoon in front of the TV and Mary will stagger in, thin and tan, and Peter will make jokes while shooting her up and then he will do himself and before the car wash I smoke pot and watch cartoons with Peter and Mary goes back to the mattress and sometimes I can hear the kid kicking against the tub, freaking out in there. We play the radio loud, praying the kid will stop, and I piss in the sink in the kitchen or go to the Mobil station across the street to shit and I don’t ask Peter or Mary if they feed the kid. I will come home from the car wash and see empty Winchell boxes and McDonald bags