I own nothing, but my everlasting gratitude to overnighter for setting the scene (or, scenes, really). She is truly amazing!
Anything that is remotely good about this chapter is hers. The sucky parts are mine.
A second and equal thanks to crashcmb, the best beta in the business.
I give you chapter three--the one in which we finally meet up with our intrepid hero. Oh, and the chapter where overnighter wouldn't let me throw a socket wrench at Ryan! Even though I really, really wanted to.
Place names are completely made up for my own amusement.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chapter 3
Ryan leaned back in the passenger seat of the old Plymouth junker, tilted his head slightly and fixed his gaze out the window as Paulo slipped the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. Wearing a seatbelt wasn't an option, since the metal tongue had been cut off, the black strap hanging, looped through the bracket, its frayed end circled around the belt and tied off in a rough knot.
"You're gonna wanna put down the window—this piece of shit's got no air."
Ryan rolled his head in Paulo's direction and Paulo continued, gesturing to the empty space the radio had once occupied, "Oh, and no tunes. Some motherfucker broke in last week."
"That sucks," Ryan empathized, his voice sounding thin and strained to his own ears.
"Tell me about it, man. It was pretty sweet, too—I just put it in a coupla months ago."
"Yeah, I remember," Ryan nodded, slightly.
"How's that?"
"Trey gave me a lift home from Reggie's—I dunno—three, maybe four weeks ago."
"Is that so?" Although Paulo's voice didn't noticeably change in tone or register, Ryan knew, without a doubt, that he'd just managed to rat out on his brother. A transgression for which Trey was probably going to kick his ass, no matter how inadvertent the slipup had been.
"I thought—I mean—Trey drives this all the time, doesn't he?"
Fucking great! Now he'd just managed to dig his brother into an even deeper hole through his total and utter verbal fuckeptitude.
"Yeah, he did. Did, as in used to. He got picked up about four months ago on a 420. He wasn't driving, but it was his car, and the dumbass agreed to a suspended license as a part of his plea. How do you not know this?"
Ryan shrugged, "Trey hasn't been around much lately—and when he has? Well, he hasn't said a whole lot about what's goin' on with him."
"Well, all's I gotta say is—if your brother's the reason my ride gets impounded, he's a dead man, and that ain't a threat, it's an actualization." Paulo's words hung heavy in the air around them. Any other day, they would have passed right through Ryan's filters. Today, they snagged, sounding strangely ominous, thanks in no small part to the presence of the gun wedged firmly between Paulo's ass and the back of his seat.
After a few minutes of driving in silence, Paulo spoke again, his thoughts apparently never straying far from Trey, the car, or the missing stereo.
"You wanna hear the most fucked up thing about all of this, though? The most fucked up thing about someone jacking my shit?"
Ryan shrugged again, noncommittally.
"The face plate wasn't even in here," Paulo's short laugh was completely devoid of humor. "You tell me, what's the punk-assed little thieving piece of shit gonna do with a useless radio?"
"It doesn't make a whole lot of sense," Ryan agreed.
"Naw, you're right, it makes no fucking sense, no fucking sense at all. Just like it makes no fucking sense that he only took one CD, just one motherfuckin' CD, even though I musta' had twenty in here," Paulo was shaking his head in disbelief, tinged with anger.
Not knowing exactly how he was expected to respond, Ryan chose to keep his mouth shut. After a couple of seconds, Paulo continued anyway, "I'm talkin'—I got Eminem, Everclear, Korn, a whole bunch of other shit, and the sumbitch takes off with one lousy disc and a trash-assed piece of shit useless radio."
"What did he take?" Ryan finally asked, when Paulo paused again.
"Trial by Fire, dude—I mean out of all those CD's, who the fuck's gonna take that piece of crap?"
"I like Journey," Ryan offered, and immediately wished he could take it back, considering how lame it sounded, even to himself.
"Yeah, I figured as much, so does your brother." Paulo still stared out the front windshield, lightly tapping on the steering wheel, to a tune only he could hear, "It was his fucking CD."
Of course it was. Paulo didn't exactly look like the type who'd rock out to Journey. Not that Trey particularly did either. But Ryan knew the reason behind Trey's affinity for the 70's band, and for that album in particular. It was the same reason Ryan liked them, even though he wasn't much into music otherwise. But, Journey, and more specifically, that album, Trial by Fire, was one of the last tangible reminders that the brothers had of their father before he was sent upstate, and it played a dominant role in one of a handful of shared memories that wasn't otherwise tainted by one of their dad's more serious vices—alcohol, drugs, violence, or apathy—that, either singly or in combination, seemed to tinge most of their other childhood recollections.
They had still been living in Fresno, in the little brick house that their father bought when he was still working full-time at the factory. It had been about a year since he'd been able to pick up a full shift, with the downsizing and the layoffs—hell, he'd been a lot luckier than most to hang in there as long as he did—but, he'd been painting houses and doing some roofing on the side and the money was coming in fairly regularly. Their mom was working the breakfast shift at a local diner, and she'd mostly confined her drinking to the weekends in honor of the early-morning hours. There was food on the table for breakfast and dinner, even if the boys had to fix it themselves, and it had been months since the cops were called to the Atwood household for any reason.
Trey and he were sitting on the porch steps with their gloves, waiting for Danny and Chris McCauley, the 10-year-old twins from around the corner, to pick them up for a game of stickball in the field by the overpass. Their mother was sitting on the old metal porch swing, sipping her first Friday-night cocktail, a Seven and Seven, and actually attempting to talk to the boys about their day at school. Ryan was answering for both of them since Trey had recently taken a full-body plunge into a particularly surly adolescence, adopting an attitude that was equal parts anger, resentment and aloofness. The relationship between Trey and both of his parents had deteriorated to the point where he seldom spoke to, or even acknowledged, either one of them voluntarily.
Ryan remembered the dull clink of ice cubes as his mother caught sight of his father and sat up, abruptly.
"Boys! Ry—hey, is that your father coming up the street?" she asked, clearly startled. It was barely past five o'clock, entirely too early for their father to be coming home on a Friday afternoon. Friday's were payday and their dad usually stopped off for drinks at the Dew Drop Inn on the outskirts of town, the Oak Table, a few blocks away, or even the Grog, if there was a band playing. Rarely did he come straight home.
Ryan immediately stiffened, and in the charged space between them, he felt his brother tense up, too. Their father coming home this early on a Friday was never a good sign. It meant he'd lost a job, or a shift, or had copped early, and was coming home drunk or stoned on whatever he'd been able to find that was going for a dime a bag out on the street. Once in a while, it meant that he'd won at the track, or in a back-alley dice game, but unexpected pocket-weight wasn't exactly good news, either. All that meant was that their parents were about to embark on a weekend bender, and that never boded well for the boys.
His father was swinging a plastic bag as he walked up from the corner bus stop, whistling a tune Ryan didn't recognize.
"Go see what's he got in his hands," Dawn called out softly, uneasiness filling her voice.
Trey had glanced at Ryan out of the corner of his eye and shrugged, punching his hand idly into the pocket of his glove, and Ryan knew that he sure as shit wasn't going anywhere, least of all straight into the lion's mouth. Ryan glanced back at his mother, hoping that she'd change her mind, but she just nodded in agreement with herself and made a little shooing gesture with both hands.
Letting out a soft, little sigh of defeat, Ryan dropped his glove and reluctantly pushed himself up. He jumped down the remaining steps of the stoop and broke into a slow jog when he hit the front walk. He trotted up the sidewalk and met his father about halfway up the block. His dad was still whistling jovially.
"Hey, Ry-guy," his father said, tousling his hair with the hand that held the plastic bag. Ryan sniffed the air carefully, but all he could smell was oil paint and turpentine and his father's Juicy Fruit gum. There was no alcohol evident under the gum's sweet scent. No drug-sweat.
"Hey, Dad," he said, finally. "How come you're home so early?"
His father raised his voice so that it carried to the porch.
"I've got a surprise for your mother. Well, for all of us, really."
That didn't make Ryan feel much better, since in his short lifetime, experience had taught him that surprises weren't necessarily good things. In fact, they rarely were. But, his mother was smiling now and Trey was looking at them curiously, still pounding his fist into his glove, over and over.
"Here, Ry," his father said, ruffling Ryan's hair again. "Give this to your mom." He handed Ryan the bag.
As Ryan bounded up the steps, Trey reached up and snatched the bag from his hand. He peeked into it, his face broadcasting his disappointment and disgust.
"Jeez, Dad. Some great freaking surprise this is—it's just a lousy tape."
Dawn came to the edge of the porch, smiling nervously and twisting her ring.
"What lousy tape is it?" she directed her question at Trey, but kept her eyes on her husband.
"Hey!" his father said in his serious voice—the one that always sent shivers up Ryan's spine and usually made both boys scatter like a couple of cockroaches caught under an unexpected light—but he was still smiling, and the boys remained frozen where they were. "Do not insult Journey."
"Frank, what did you go and do that for?" Their mother scolded playfully, a smile now in her voice. "You know we can't afford—"
His father cut her off by grabbing her around the waist and swinging her down from the porch, "Relax, woman, it was on sale. Besides, it's their first new album in a decade. I couldn't exactly not buy it."
"Is Faithfully on it?" Dawn asked, expectantly, then clarified for the boys' sake. "That's the song your dad and I danced to at our wedding."
"No, hon, it's new stuff," their father's attention was still locked in on his wife, so he missed it when Trey rolled his eyes at his little brother, mouthed the word "losers," and lifted his right hand to his forehead, displaying a fingered "L" for emphasis.
"Journey's first album in ten years, right when things are going so good, it's gotta be an omen, a sign. I think that the old Atwood luck is finally turning around, babe."
He sounded so eager, so hopeful, that Ryan wanted desperately to believe him.
"Now, c'mon, woman, let's give these boys a lesson in real music."
The boys entered the house, trailing behind their parents, unsure of how long the good mood would last. Trey reluctantly skulked off to fetch the battered boombox he kept hidden under their bed, and Ryan went to the kitchen to get his father a beer and to freshen up his mother's drink.
When Ryan came back out to the living room, Trey was sitting on the floor beside the tape player, watching his father carefully as he inserted the new cassette, the plastic remnants of the packaging scattered all around. Dawn had settled into the corner of the couch. Ryan handed her a new drink and, after a brief hesitation, he placed his dad's beer on the coffee table, climbed up and leaned up beside her.
The music started, filling the quiet living room with a hard-driving backbeat. Trey automatically wrinkled his nose and tilted his head to the side, skeptically.
"Dad, dude, this totally sucks—and it ain't got nothin' on Coolio. That much, I can tell you," he said. Their father groaned theatrically and cuffed his older son lightly across the head.
"Have I taught you boys nothing?" he said. "I offer you Journey, the greatest band of all time, and you've gotta compare it to that no-talent gangsta, hip-hop, rap-crap."
As the third song started, a soft ballad, his father took a swig of his beer and stood up abruptly.
"I think they're playing our song," he said, and held out his hand to his wife. Ryan sat up to let his mother go and, without saying anything, Trey came over and plopped down on the couch next to him. The brothers watched, transfixed, as their parents danced clumsily around the room, laughing and grinning.
Less than three months later, their father knocked off a Circle-K at gunpoint and was caught on the surveillance video. The police showed up on a similar Friday night, when their father had once again come home early and unexpectedly, a night in which he had spent the majority of his time sweaty and jumpy, turning quick circles around the living room and stealing surreptitious glances out the front window—briefly pulling up a small corner of the curtain to reveal the black of the night outside, before letting it fall back into place once again.
With his vigilant surveillance, it was surprising that he missed the cops' approach entirely, even if they had killed their headlights a block before the Atwood residence, left their darkened cruisers several houses away, and advanced on the house from the side by cutting across several neighboring lawns. The officers knocked, announced and kicked in the door in rapid succession, entirely too quickly for any of the home's occupants to answer. Two officers came in with guns drawn. There was another on the porch, just to the left of the front doorway—and a fourth covering the back kitchen exit.
Ryan's father had been arrested in the very same living room where he'd so optimistically toasted to the improved Atwood luck and Ryan watched out the front window—his small form silhouetted by the backdrop of the white curtain—as the cops led his father down the steps of the porch and across the small yard, his arms handcuffed securely behind his back. He had held a palm to the cool glass and almost convinced himself that he had seen his father turn back to the house and nod a curt goodbye, even though the nearly impenetrable darkness of the night would have made such an observation impossible.
And, just like that, the fragile threads that had held the Atwood family together snapped, instantly and forever broken.
It was only when the throbbing in his cheek changed its beat again that Ryan became aware that he had completely spaced-out, that he was still staring at Paulo's fingers where they gently rested on the steering wheel, tapping lightly. As Ryan forced his thoughts back to the present, he felt a familiar, prickly heat color his ears, and he slowly turned his head back towards the open window.
Jesus! There was a very real possibility that he was maybe just a little bat-guano crazy himself.
The landscape outside Ryan's window turned from mixed use, to industrial, to residential—and then back to mixed use again. It was mainly industrial, but with little pockets of residential housing. Those streets were filled with small, dilapidated one-story houses, each one crappier than the next, and all of them surprisingly cruddier than Ryan's own shitty abode. There were porches collapsed in heaps, and gaping holes in roofs and siding, which were haphazardly patched up with royal blue tarpaulin. There were whole blocks of houses, which he would have sworn were abandoned, but for the telltale signs of the satellite dishes attached to the eaves and the kiddie paraphernalia scattered across the yards.
When Paulo finally turned onto Beachtree, it was no better or worse than any of the others. But, to Ryan, it still felt ominous and sad. Trey's squat was in the middle of the block, with a white clapboard house on one side and a vacant lot on the other. Several high-voltage power wires were suspended directly overhead, attached to the huge metal pyramid standing sentry less than 10 yards away.
The front yard was fenced in with chained-link and two pit bulls were pacing restlessly back and forth across the hard-dirt-packed yard, each attached to a fetter made up of thick, interlocking metal rings, the ends of which were hooked into an iron hoop that was imbedded in a square of concrete that had been poured into the middle of the yard for no other apparent purpose. There was no shade in the empty yard, and the smell of old waste and dog piss was strong through the Duster's open windows.
Trey's house was fronted by a porch, the steps leading up to it were made of plywood, painted white, though most of the paint had blistered, flaked and peeled away years ago. The house was wrapped in cheap siding that had sun-faded to a washed-out, and decidedly ugly, pukish green. The brown border around the doors and windows had rotted through in many places and left huge chunks missing. It gave the framing a mottled, pockmarked effect, since the wood underneath the paint was of a distinctly lighter shade. The windows were all hidden behind thick black security bars, as was the front door. There were several shingles missing on the roof, and those that remained were covered in moss.
Ryan knew that this was where Trey was crashing from the navy blue Impala parked out in front, its hood propped open, and from the familiar, slight, dark-haired figure in the grease splattered white t-shirt and faded blue jeans, torn at both thighs, who was standing up on the curb, bent over the engine-block, holding a socket wrench in one hand and a dirty, oil-stained rag in the other.
As the car slid to a stop next to his brother, Ryan watched how Trey's grip shifted, just a bit, on the wrench to make the tool a more effective weapon, and how he moved, almost imperceptibly, but still achieved his clearly intended result of putting the vehicle's substantial body between himself and the possible threat. Ryan was amazed that Trey could do all of this, while still giving absolutely no other outward appearance that he'd even noticed their presence at all. Hell, Ryan wouldn't even have picked up on Trey's subtle defensive maneuvering, if he hadn't known what to look for.
Paulo held a fingergun sideways out his open window—thumb and forefinger parallel to the ground, and aimed it right at his ex-roommate's head.
"Bang," he said, in a soft, cold voice.
Trey didn't even look up. Instead, he just resumed what he'd been doing, lining up the bolt with the socket.
"Nice digs," Paulo noted, when it became apparent that Trey was going to continue to ignore him.
Trey bent down and picked out two other sockets from the tool chest at his feet, tested them on the engine's bolt, found the one that fit, and changed out the socket in the ratchet.
"You'd do best to recognize, you scrawny little bitch."
Paulo's voice was still cold and even and Ryan couldn't tell if he was getting annoyed, or if this was just some type of bullshit macho game the two were playing. Not for the first time since he'd accepted Paulo's offer for a ride, he wondered just how friendly Trey's move-out had been.
Trey let a few more deliberate seconds pass before he verbally acknowledged Paulo's presence.
"What the hell're you doing here, Lennie?"
"I got an extra five bucks, I figured maybe your moms could use the work."
"Two doors down," Trey used the wrench to count off two quick beats, then flicked his wrist towards his left, his head still bowed, attention fully focused on the car, "Just make sure you count your change, that bitch'll stiff ya'."
Ryan felt like he'd been sucker-punched in the stomach. Oh, sure, he'd heard his brother diss their mother a million times before, both in and out of her presence. This time, though? Knowing that Trey was completely unaware that he was there? Somehow—somehow, it just felt wrong. Insulting family in front of family was one thing, but insulting their mother in front of someone else? It was like Trey had broken a sacred family code. And it made Ryan feel sad that the chasm between his mom and his brother was much wider than he'd allowed himself to believe, and that his brother's bitterness towards her was much more than the casual fronting that Ryan'd half-convinced himself was in play.
"Yeah, well, since we're speaking of blowjobs—" Paulo continued, and Trey's complete and utter non-reaction further confirmed that this wasn't the first time he'd allowed this particular brand of trash-talking regarding their mother. "You probably oughta know that that geared-up little coke-head keeps coming by looking for you."
"Who, AJ?"
Ryan was more than a little disappointed in the direction that Trey's mind automatically jumped. It solidified his suspicions, and would have put Trey even further up his list of probable suspects, that is if it was in any way possible to move up from number one—or most wanted.
"Naw, man, not your pops," Ryan stiffened involuntarily at that, and he noticed how the muscles of Trey's neck contracted, even as his brother's face remained impassive. "That other guy, the one running the chop shop down on the corner of Finlee and McCurry, the greasy little pumped-up midget motherfucker—you know, the one who looks like he's been pouring the juice on his Wheaties."
At that, Trey looked up for the first time.
"Yeah? What's he want?" he asked in a flat voice, stepping off the stoop and walking over to the car. He slowed down, just a bit, when he noticed that the car carried a passenger, but broke into an uneasy smile when he saw who it was.
"Oh—hey, Ry," his greeting was nothing, if not predictable. "What're you doing over here?"
"I need to talk to you, Trey," Ryan said, though he was suddenly at a loss as to exactly how he was going to do this.
Trey pulled down the corners of his mouth and shrugged amiably enough, "Yeah, sure."
After Paulo and he skinned palms, Trey leaned into the open driver's side window and caught full view of Ryan's damaged face for the first time.
"Damn, Ry, what's the other girl look like?" he asked, his face dead serious, despite his choice of words.
"Like Bilbo Fucking Badass, only with arms like a gorilla and a face that fucking matches."
Trey couldn't help but grin as he asked, "Shit, man, you remember that?"
"Hell, I'm surprised you do," Ryan observed, since his brother was monumentally wasted and just minutes away from being arrested on the Christmas night that he'd smashed a bottle of whiskey against the side of the house and challenged AJ to a streetfight with similar words.
Trey leaned back, looked upwards and began tapping his fingers lightly on the top of Paulo's window. Ryan could almost hear the gears start up and the wheels begin to turn behind his eyes. A few seconds later, he indicated his decision by jerking his head in the direction of the house, "Hey, Apollo, why don't you land this piece of shit cruiser and both of you can come on inside?"
He backed away from the car when Paulo nodded his agreement and slowly made his way back over to the curb. As Paulo turned into the next driveway, backed out, and pulled behind Trey's car, Ryan's eyes never left his brother. He watched as Trey squatted down next to his toolbox and wiped the rag around the inside of each of the sockets, before carefully replacing them. Trey then shut the lid and locked the box, stood, and walked over to his car, where he disengaged the hood prop and let the hood slam down. He had to do it a couple of times, putting the full weight of his body into the effort before the latch finally caught. Then he started to deliberately wipe his hands on the grimy rag—his head bowed, paying careful attention to his task.
Ryan opened the Plymouth's door carefully. The ride hadn't been very long, but his muscles had stiffened and they began to protest loudly as he got out of the car. He had almost fully extracted himself, when his left leg suddenly gave out under the unexpected sharp pain of a charlie horse that had somehow worked its way deep into his upper thigh, the apparent location of a particularly effective kick from AJ's steel-toed boot. It caused Ryan to fall clumsily against the door—and he wasn't the least bit surprised when he hit his injured left shoulder, yet again.
"Goddamnit!"
As the jolt of pain temporarily blurred his vision, he sucked in a long stream of air through gritted teeth. By the time he managed to get himself up onto the curb and shove the car door closed, Trey had sauntered over.
"Jesus, man, you don't look so good."
"Yeah, tell me something I don't know," he spat out, glad that the pain was giving him some of his anger back—he needed something to focus in on if he was going to accuse Trey of stealing a handgun. The fact that his brother may have kicked his ass by proxy was just about as good as anything else that came to mind.
As Trey reached out towards his face, Ryan flinched back, instinctively.
"Trey, don't," he warned.
Trey grabbed his chin anyway, and positioned Ryan's face so that he could better examine the left side of his little brother's face.
"Dude, I think the motherfucker mighta busted your cheek."
"I'm pretty sure he did," Ryan muttered. "I think I heard it crack."
"C'mon, Ry, let's go inside, I'll get you some ice." Not waiting for Ryan to respond, Trey turned and took a few steps towards the house, before calling over his shoulder in Paulo's general direction, "Leave the piece in the car."
Ryan watched as his brother went up the front walk to the depressing little house. He had his head down and was moving quickly and purposefully, but Ryan noted that he couldn't resist holding out his left middle finger at the dogs, as they tested their tethers, raised up on their back legs, straining, growling and snapping at him as he walked by, just a few, short feet out of reach.