A/N: A special shout-out to ILovePepsi2: I'm sorry! That just isn't how I roll. This stuff happens in real life every single day. Myself, I've been blessed with a happy life, thanks be to God. But this is kinda my way of saying I understand it if you don't, ya know? The characters' pain reflect what we might be too scared or ashamed to see in ourselves. But that's not to say life is all bad, or should be. It does have its moments of light and love, and those little moments should be what we strive for...that's what I was just thinking, anyway...Kathy and Two-Bit...(musing) One-shot, maybe? We shall see.
Thanks to all reviewers. I just realized that my writing's not the clearest thing in the world. Thank you all so much for sticking with it.
Why?
Why...one word throbbed in my brain. Why? Why? Why? And not just why Angie died. No—that one was too easy.
Why did we live this way? Why did we almost kill each other day after day, when we were supposed to be family? Especially when there was no mom and no dad to beat us down? Especially when we were supposed to work to stay together? Why did the Curtises get broken up? Shouldn't that have been me and Angela in the car that night, with Tim snapping and whaling like a crazy person on the windows? Why hadn't it been us? I mean, we weren't no saints, but...didn't we all know each other, stand up for the other when someone threatened us? We weren't no Curtises, but—weren't we at least a little bit better than the rich kids, who didn't give two damns if someone in their outfit got smashed up? Or did we just do it because some dead guy said we had to? Who knew these things? And how would I know if he knew when I found him?
Why didn't I wanna go home, where there was supposed to be a soft place to land? Why couldn't I tell my own brother to fuck off from time to time, just like any other kid? It hadn't been the MS—that I could deal with...it was something else. Why'd Dallas torture us here most of the time? How'd he fall in love with Angie—just another girl, too tough and too scared—if he didn't see something in her we couldn't? And Angie—why'd she get pregnant with Dallas Winston, the biggest hood on this side of town? What'd she see in him she couldn't see in us? Why did she have to run away to no-man's land? Weren't we good enough for her? Why couldn't she just stay here?
"You," I said finally. "You killed her."
He kept staring at the dust motes that swirled in the yellow air.
"You killed them both," I said. The room started spinning. "You found her letter before I did."
But, then, I realized, if that was true, he must have been rummaging around in the box that held Dad's revolver. No one was ever allowed to touch it; he didn't even look at it. He wouldn't have ever seen the letter in the first place, and then Angela wouldn't be dead. So why had he been looking in the box? He had no reason to...
...except for...
We started talking at the same time.
"I'm so sorry, Curly," he kept whispering through his teeth. His teeth gritted together as his eyes grew bright, and his Adam's apple kept bobbing up and down his throat. He kept shaking his head at the floor, too. He couldn't meet my stare. The passing coal train grew louder. "I'm fucked up inside."
"You couldn't take it," I said. "You knew she'd leave with Winston. You tried to lock her up, but she ran away. You read the letter because you been lookin' in that box, and you knew where they were going to meet up. You knew where she'd be."
"I was aiming at Winston," Tim went on. He spoke too softly, too fixedly. "My—my—my fucking hand kept trembling—"
I whipped around, slapping him to shut him up. "Bull fucking shit!" I screamed. "Who're you tryin' to convince, me or yourself?"
"I never meant—I was seeing red—"
I went to the kitchen and walked back out.
"Do you have any idea what you've done?" I said.
I squeezed my eyes shut. My gut lurched, and the bottom of my throat burned with acid—I was way too close to popping now. I turned around and let it out. My fist slammed down, and so did the anger and the tears that slipped all too easily now.
"YOU KILLED OUR SISTER!"
I felt the snap. I didn't open my eyes for a long time.
My blood hummed in my veins. The minute hand on the clock broke, and was stuck on an eternal five to seven, so I knew it had been my heart pounding in my ears this time. Tick, tock...tick, tock...tick, tock...tick, tock.
The steak knife stood seven inches out of his hand.
His hand stopped its eternal tremble. Large, gobbing black streams quietly welled up from where I drove it in, and glided down the armrest where he'd picked the threads off, staining the light blue rose embroidery with streaks as slow and as heavy as oil. Oil—was he a fucking machine? Was our family even fucking human? Last time I knew, my blood had been red. That's it. Just red. Winston's, too. But Angie—hers was violet. And Tim—just heavy, and black. It just kept coming out and out and out of him, slow and steady, glittering like oil from a spring.
He looked down. He didn't even scream. He was expecting it. He just looked down, closed his eyes, clicked his jaws, then looked up at me with that god-awful twisted look on his face, like he was about to start crying. His eyes gleamed red, as if he didn't even register physical pain anymore. Maybe he looked the way I felt. Broken.
Why was I playing Russian roulette with my own brother?
In Tim's silence, I heard Bennie's voice: "No, not that. That game, you get five chances to win."
Then it hit me. In the game of life, you get no safeties.
"There's only one way you win this game."
He used his other hand to lift the latch of the chestnut box...and I realized—he was going to kill us one by one—
But I didn't care. He wanted it this way? Fine. Let's play fucking ball, Timmy.
I got up, and pressed my stomach into the barrel.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"Go ahead," I said. "Go right ahead."
"No," he said, and drew the barrel up, pointing it towards the ceiling and away from me.
"Look," I snarled, "you already got one. Now you're gonna finish this."
"Curly—"
"Do it!" I screamed, clapping my hand down on his wrist. "You sure didn't say that two nights ago! Come on, Tim, what're ya chickening out for now? The train's coming now, big guy! The train is fucking COMING!"
He pushed me onto the floor with all of the strength left in his good hand, forcing the barrel into my gut. I went tumbling on my back. I looked up. The steak knife still stood out of his other hand. I could see it pierce clear through it; five inches of it had been sodded down with black. He towered above me, a dark, bleeding, writhing giant."Dammit, I ain't hurting you!"
His voice had been so soft and low that this made me jump back a little.
"Listen to me," he said, his voice descending. "Just listen, and maybe you might get it."
I spat on him. That was approval enough.
"You know when Bennie was shooting people?—I understood him. Damn. That's all that went through my head. Damn. You say he's crazy, you say he's sick. What do you know? Bennie didn't want to go to Nam. He wasn't crazy. He was just a guy who didn't want to take the shit life handed him."
"What the hell does that have to do with anything?"
"When you're sick, when you're off, when you're...different,"—he smiled— "people look at you fucking sideways. They don't see you. They see the sickness. If I told anyone about it, they'd say, here comes the bitch." His smile grew even wider as the veins in his forehead throbbed. His voice came in a dry, cracked gasp through his teeth. "There goes the bitch. Dally slashed MS's tires today. You think MS is gonna get home on time? And then the state says to you, MS, MS, you're not fit to take care of these kids. So I tried to be the best I could be. I tried to keep you outta trouble. I did."
I said nothing.
"I didn't want my brother and sister growing up like me—no mom and no dad, just living on whatever life handed you. It—shit, kid, it hardens you. It's like a train, when you play chicken and you look down, and you see your feet are cemented to the tracks. Kid, when Angie told me she was—was pregnant—with Dally's kid—I felt like the train already hit me. I don't know, I...I wasn't ready for all that. It was like he had come in and took her away from me when I wasn't looking. And then she just ups and goes, throwing everything I gave her away, and...and Dallas was my friend, too, Curl, and even though it might not look like it, I loved him, too...I mean... How could he do that to me? Why? Why now?"
Water started streaming silently down his face, chattering and hopeless in the morning light.
"When Bennie started shooting people—I understood him," he whispered. "What kind of sicko does that?"
I fell silent, too.
"I wouldn't have been able to take care of her—I would've had to send her off with the social workers. I was too scared. Scared for her. I knew the minute she opened her mouth and said, I'm pregnant, that she'd leave me alone, and then you would, too, because you love her just as much as I do. Maybe even more. You'd have followed her.
"And it's not because I couldn't take care of myself—I can. I just didn't know what I'd do when you left. I'd probably go crazy like when I was punching holes in my arm. Don't you think I miss Mom and Dad? I missed them every single fucking day, but I got up every day because I knew I'd have somebody to come home to—and who'd listen to me when life handed me shit. I could have sent you away, but I didn't. I wanted to keep us together, to prove myself I could do it, to do right by you."
He almost smiled—I'll never forget it. It was broken and white and quivering and...fucking beautiful.
He said: "Because I loved you two, Curl. I kept us together because I loved you more than I hated myself."
Tim turned Dad's old Smith and Wesson once in his good hand, burrowed it slightly into his cheek, and shot himself in the face.
I caught him as he stumbled forward. He crashed into me before he slid down, and as he did, he kind of sighed into my arm, his chest decompressing like a balloon deflating.
He was dead before he hit the floor. There was nothing left to fill the air now but the whistle of another coal train headed to Oklahoma City.
I looked down. I put my hand on his head, trying not to think about anything. He wasn't in pain anymore, I thought. At first, I didn't know if the bitch had won, or if he had surrendered. I was young then...I didn't know there was a difference. I'd seen guys go down swinging, but this...had somehow been braver than any of that. Tim felt things too much. He had to—no one who's sick can't say they feel nothing. And he had to get real hard and tough to make up for it. He and Dally saw much of the same thing in each other.
Some kids, like me and Ponyboy, played chicken to show how tough we were. Tim just lived every day.
Some kids died to show how big they were. Jim Jones warranted his own death. Tim had been driven to his.
The bitch wouldn't take him alive—she drove him to that edge; she was the one holding the gun on Adams Street; she ripped our sister away from him that night. He fought her the best he could—
But he'd never have that.
"You needed to trust us," I murmured. "But you didn't."
The greatest fear we have ain't dyin'. That's the easy part. No. The greatest fear we got is dying alone.
Then I snapped. I filled the silence in our house...because I was through with silence and with words, and because silence was just another word for love.
To be continued.
