Disclaimers: I don't own "The Outsiders."
"Leader of the Pack" is by the Shangri-Las.
A/N: Written for a Valentine's Day prompt. Purely an exercise in imagination; I know none of this would happen in real life. I've had some terrible writer's block as of late, so if the stuff is shit, please tell me.
Leader of the Pack
[Well, well.]
[Fuck.]
[Look what the cat dragged out.]
No two ways about it, you were drunker than shit that night. Whatever beast was in those bottles fucked you up right and fucked you up good. The kicker? You didn't know it at the time. You kept slamming back, slamming back, slamming back like it was nothing, ordering two beers at a time, one for yourself and one for a friend that didn't show. That was the way you stayed classy in these parts.
[How 'bout tellin' me somethin' new for a change?]
You knew the way you played pool mattered. The way you held the stick in your hands, the look in your eyes as the balls clicked across the velvet, cool or hot, all of it was held to high criticism, your every move picked apart and analyzed. Pool was the standard by which the town measured you, and if you didn't size up, well then, cowboy, tough shit.
[Extra, extra, read all about it?]
You clenched your jaws, letting a razor-thin smirk cut across your face as the cue cracked into a nine. You knew if there'd been anythin' worse than getting your ass kicked by a bunch of drunken jackasses, it was getting your ass kicked by a bunch of drunken jackasses and then called a punk kid.
[Old news, no news.]
Bluish peals of smoke shrouded the bar. Two turns prior you'd gone dangerously close to sinking an eight ball in a pocket corner: huge no-no, since every sunk ball represented a tooth knocked outta ya fool head.
Or so they claimed.
[Simple 'thanks' woulda been enough.]
You picked up the cube lying on the table, whittled now to a flattened disc, and used it to grind excessive powder into the end of your stick. Streaks of white coated your fingers as your gaze flickered from one shadow to another. It was a night for wishin' you had more friends. Or at least more friends who were good men and not fair-weather flakes.
[Why'd you come?]
[I felt like it.]
When you tell yourself the story years later, it seems as though time doesn't distance the memory from the narrative. That is to say, the farther away you are looking back at it, the more the irony of a good man walking in at that exact moment seems like too much, even now.
[That's it?]
Time's strange that way—stranger than alcohol, certainly. It distorts color and motion and space, bloats your sense of yourself as protagonist, turns tragedies into comedies and all such bullshit. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
[You got a better reason?]
See, you hadn't been looking when your stick cracked across the green. You hadn't been watching the balls careen into one another except out of the corner of your eye, almost in askance, as if you couldn't have endured witnessing the end result. That was Reason Number One. Reason Number Two had been him, when he strolled in and perched on a stool in front of the oily counter.
[You don't, do you?]
He must have mistaken you for another wild native, because he'd turned around to lean against the counter while the keep took care of the drinks, scoping the place out for friendlies.
[Y'know, Christ, fuck off.]
[Sorry, man, I don't speak Moron.]
For a split second you got a glimpse of your kind—the way you must have looked from a stranger's point of view—and you rubbed a hand down your chin, lightly streaking it with white. You said to yourself, Damn, I wanna smash that kid's face in. And then you moved around the smoky pool of light illuminating the table to get a closer look. One of the shadows, a plaid shirt with a black cowboy hat and silver Texas-star belt buckle, said something low to you. A ruddy hand placed itself on your shoulder and pushed you two inches backwards. But where sober you would have barreled fist-first you merely let slide drunk. You'd bumped into his shoulder, see, and you almost knocked his half-finished beer over, its brown meniscus spinning wildly inside the curves. Beers ain't cheap, ya jacked-up little piece of shit. You didn't hear. You didn't detect the first rumblings of collapse until they practically lay on top of you.
[Fuck. Off.]
[You know they're gonna come after my ass now.]
Sunglasses glinted blue neon.
[That's your own damn fault.]
Aviator lenses.
[Is it?]
There was a filter in his mouth, the end of which glowed scarlet.
[Whatcha get for stickin' your bacon in the fryin' pan, anyway.]
He took it to the pinprick between his lips and sucked.
[Wouldn't be the first time, Shep.]
The keep came back with the booze, but he left it alone.
The next thing you were aware of was a series of events that led to the thing you remember most about that night. You'd known for a long time that Dallas liked to stir the hive to see who got stung. You'd known that. But it was a little different when you were stuck inside, and in very real danger of getting stung to death.
[Hell, you'd think you liked it or somethin'.]
You remember a quietness—but maybe this is your brain tricking you again, the fiction coming out to meddle around with the reality, make it neater than it actually was. Whenever something important happens a stark hum always descends, as if noise can't ruin the gravity of the moment. The truth was, you don't recall the song playing on the jukebox. Buck Owens, maybe, some high wailing tune that receded into the back of your mind like the smoke and the smell of chalk. Words melted into the twang of guitar until they really weren't words at all, just hymns about trains and prison and good ol' boys and Mama. Why the hell country singers had mommy issues, you couldn't fuckin' tell. The point is, it was a white noise. Equilibrium. The shadows were placated and you could more or less hold them off at arm's (or stick's) length.
[What if I did?]
Why the hell the jukebox even offered that selection was beyond your powers of speculation.
[Then you're an even bigger idiot than I thought you was.]
A quietness filled the room. Again, maybe fiction, maybe not: heels, his heels, clacked across the wooden floor, a shiny sound that made your teeth touch together in the ghost of a grimace. Ki-clack. Ki-clack. Ki-clack. A few apparitions in the group grunted comment but it wasn't until he made a point of flipping through every page and sighing loudly they started to get bugged.
Christ, talk about dramatic.
The dime tumbled into the slot, and through the speakers you heard this abomination:
[My folks were always putting him down
(Down, down)
They said he came from the wrong side of town
(What do you mean when you say that he came
From the wrong side of town?)
They told me he was bad, but I knew he was sad
That's why I fell for the leader of the pack]
Pool sticks slapped down. The shadows growled and grumbled, the whites in their eyes no longer mere drunkenness but active, burning, visceral anger. Somehow they'd moved from regular drunk to malice drunk. Killin' drunk not too far off.
You jumped the cue over the seven and sunk the eight ball in the corner pocket.
It's hard to piece together what happened next. Dallas smashed his filter into the juke's wooden panel, strode over to you, smacked a palm against your cheek (which registered more like a ripple than a sting), and said something you can't remember to this day.
Not that you would've, but still.
The back doors screamed open and by some joint miracle of gravity and biology you managed to land on both feet. There was no going back for either of you. You had no more money anyhow. If you had attempted to go back in you would have been barred by sharp gleaming edges—hunting blades and jackknives, big boy toys compared to your pipes and switches.
That song shattered the night. You wanted to shatter his face.
The next scene unfolded like something out of a movie, its importance stretched slightly askew in your mind. You looked at him for a heartbeat, two, and then your hand—actually a half-curled fist—slammed into the bridge of his nose. Once. Twice. Three times. You felt impact, the muffled breakage of softness beneath skin. He cursed like a sailor and staggered against the wall.
[That's for the jukebox]
[That's for 'rescuing' me]
[And that's for pissin' off the town waterin' hole you fucking]
[Dumbass piece of]
[Shit—]
Blood flowed from one nostril, a black bead that slipped down his chin and darkened pale denim. With a great effort he placed a hand against the concrete and pushed himself up... and between quaking shoulders you heard the most gruesome sound you could.
Laughter.
Now, you've been called a myriad of names in your life. They play in your head like a record, the voices slightly worn and grainy but their tone irrevocably the same. Good-fer-nothing. Street rat. Riff-raff. You've let them bounce off you like rain off a tin roof. But every now and then even the best tin roofs get leaks.
You've got to wonder sometimes.
[Fag.]
Funny word. Between silences, between low mirthless hiccups of laughter, a strange vibration of sound and echo, and when you asked it again he said it again, multiple times,
[Fag.]
from behind glassy teeth,
[Fagfagfagfag—]
like bullets tearing out of barrels—
[Is that s'posed to hurt me?]
Dallas grinned, the most dangerous drunk in the world, and said
[Sticks and stones],
[I'll get sticks and stones and break your bones]
[and we'll see how much names won't hurt you]
and the next thing you knew was the taste of blood and stale Kools in your mouth.
When you went home you had to wonder if it was written on your face, or buried in your eyes, or hidden somewhere on your clothing. Something—the littlest thing—would give you away. Had to. As you killed the engine and sat in the driveway, listening to the tick and hum, you realized you might've done all you'd done on a principle instead of a whim. Which one, though, you'd no time to figure out, because then your mother came rushing out of the blue dark with a police blotter in her hand and a mean glint in her eye and it was over. The blotter smacked your windshield and flickered, its pages splayed across the glass. You didn't need to look at the damn thing to know what you were in for this time.
[Timothy, what the hell is this?]
So vanished the night.
Why'd you do it? You don't know. Maybe it had been to prove you still had a point. Maybe he'd given you another chance to put up or shut up. Maybe—and the supporting evidence was purely circumstantial here—it had been just one more chance to take your potshots and deliver a blow right below the belt, if you were really right, that is, if you had enough reason to, which you didn't. You wouldn't cross the line once if you could manage to do it twice.
Supernovas swam and burst in the thin darkness stretched over your eyes.
[Jesus.]
'66. Fall. You see rain glide down stark ebony suits like falling stars. You hear it patter between the shrunken brittle leaves and you think: This ain't you, man. This ain't him bein' laid so quietly into the ground, no bullshit, no fanfare. There's no way. And if he could see his own procession he'd set a corner of the church on fire with a discarded cigarette just to see the old priests wheeze and run.
You remember a story about heaven. Man croaks, stands at the pearly gates, goes inside and takes a seat. Paradise isn't a mansion built in the clouds; it's a humongous bar, with stained glass lights and oak pool tables, all pine shelves stretching to this side and that of eternity. Any kind of booze you can dream of, ripe for the taking, glittering in crystal bottles. Man can't believe it.
Angel comes up, says:
[What're you havin'?]
Man says:
[Are you kidding me?]
[Is this the face of a joker?]
Man slams down tequila, whiskey, vodka: chaser follows chaser. But something's wrong, you see. Man gets frustrated. Damn angry. Slams the glass down.
[The hell is this?]
Angel says nothing at first, only goes about its eternal task of restacking the glasses.
[Ain't it obvious? Here you can drink all you want.]
And he offers a smile only the holy can afford.
[But you can never get drunk.]
It occurs to you there might've been a moral in there somewhere.
For a moment these thoughts of yours solidify the possibility that Dallas is sitting there somewhere behind you, filter burning to a crisp between his lips, sunglasses gleaming in the dim light.
[This is wrong.]
Now. Smoke rolled thickly into the sewer and you tasted its salt at the backs of your teeth. Brick and mortar scratched your shoulder blades; it was pushed to the wall you felt the th-thoom of your heart, a steady drum beating in time with the hollow suck and pull in your lungs, with that goddamned song still leaking through the mesh of the back door—
[Wrong's only as far as you can take it.]
Somewhere behind you there's a mouth pressing the fine black down on the nape of your neck. Somewhere in that empty rain-filled space is a voice that fills your brain with a cold whisper, a dirt-cold whisper—
[He sort of smiled and kissed me good-bye
The tears were beginnin' to show
As he drove away on that rainy night
I begged him to go slow
But whether he heard, I'll never know
Look out, look out
Look out, look out]
Frigid sweat clings to your undershirt, seeping from an unknown place, oozing through your pores even though you're freezing on the inside, hell to feel and hell to slough off—
You slam down on the gas, to hell with whoever hears the screech. The streets are surprisingly empty, and the needle climbs 40, 50, 60, dipping as you jerk the steering wheel. Your heart pounds against your chest, th-thoom, th-thoom, th-thoom, and doesn't lessen simply for the passage of time; you feel air seeping in the corners of your eyes as though they're flung open, but they're not, they're not, you don't fling your eyes open ever, not for—
[Me, Shep?]
He was the only one who could say your name that way and make it sound as natural as the full word. Of course, you wouldn't have minded the full name every now and then—you could've pricked it in the black hole between his lips. But that was you.
Dallas?
All he had to say was
[Gone, gone, gone, gone
The leader of the pack, now he's gone]