I hope that our few remaining friends
Give up on trying to save us
I hope we come up with a fail-safe plot
To piss off the dumb few who forgave us
— No Children, The Mountain Goats
By the time she came in, I'd already dumped six sugar packets into my coffee and downed most of it, the unsaturated crystals gritty on my tongue— it was an old addict cliche, and that wasn't even mentioning all the fossilized sour candy I had floating around my pockets, collecting lint. Thus, the cavity in my top left molar ached like a dental drill to the nerve, the pain radiating up through the top of my jaw, but hell. Hadn't I always been dogshit at predicting the consequences of my actions.
"Soda?"
I didn't recognize her at first, even when she stared back at me with Dad's dark brown, feline-tilted eyes, which I should've been able to recognize at the end of the world. She had lines starting to form around her mouth, a slight triangle, which shocked me enough to shut down any higher functions. I was thirty-three, which would make her thirty-one, but that couldn't be right, either. "You look so different," skidded out before I could rein it back in. "Older."
"Sonuvabitch." Jasmine raked her hand through the front of her Aqua Net-frosted hair, and sputtered a laugh that sounded like she was spitting out seawater. "And they used to call you a real ladykiller, back in the day."
My grimace cemented itself in place, as she pulled her chair out and slung her purse over the top, and waved the waitress over to get a coffee of her own. At least she hadn't walked right back out the door. Before I could stop myself, I slid my hand across the table to try to touch her; before she could stop herself, she pulled away. I felt her wrist beneath my fingertips the same way Boyd from my unit said he still felt his amputated leg, the bump of the bone, the flutter of her pulse. I swallowed bittersweet bile.
She dumped three sugar packets into her own coffee, the way I knew she would. We Curtises had always been devoted chocolate milk people, no matter how old or sophisticated we got.
"Darry says you have a new job at the stables, out past Claremore." The sentence hit me like a baseball to the face, she launched it with so much velocity. "Amount you was caterwaulin' over Mickey Mouse when he was sold, hope you don't get too attached to none of the horses this time around…"
I was still trying to get enough stashed away to buy Dandelion, like how some people saved for a lake vacation or a retirement that'd never come, but I could tell she was aiming for funny even as it just came off caustic. "Yeah, hell, I love it," I said, bouncing my knee under the table so hard it shook. Quiet feet, Soda. "Got enough respect for Dad's memory not to join the rodeo circuit, but I always reckoned I'd be back in the saddle, eventually."
"You plan on stickin' around here, then?" She sounded like she was really asking how attached she should be getting to me. "For good, settlin' down?"
I got clean for the last time in '78, and after all the vomiting, shitting, and sweating had finally worked its way out of my system, I hit the road— there was nothing left for me in Tulsa that I hadn't already doused in gasoline and tossed a match onto, and I was the last one standing out of all my old junkie friends, at that point. I figured once I'd been everywhere, given life one last Hail Mary try, I could always kill myself, too. After San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dad's people down in New Mexico, El Paso, living out of my truck or in cramped motels, doing a million odd jobs that muffed every thought in my head, I'd started to nurture the delusional hope that they might want to see me back at home.
"All depends on Bonnie," I said, because that was really what it came down to— and just as I'd made my homecoming, she'd started itching to get out of Oklahoma. As long as it was out in the country, with her, I was happy. "Probably gonna be here for the next little while, though." Put down some shallow roots like a cactus.
She made a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat. I couldn't even begin to tell what she meant by it. Thanking God I'd decided to park my ass in the smoking section, I lit up just to burn off the nervous energy.
Jay's used to be one of the trashiest hangouts on the East side, and if you were looking for dinner and a show, you could watch two or more greasers put each other in the hospital for free every night. They'd since cleaned up the joint beyond recognizability, a crowd of— what did they call them now? yuppies? preppies?— milling around, the kind of people who bought gourmet cupcakes with organic frosting. The TV hanging on the wall was playing, of all things, a Jazzercise video, a bunch of girls in neon Spandex whose group cohesion would've made my old drill sergeant proud. Sometimes I felt like a time traveler, dropped off in 1981 without so much as a guide to who the hell Duran Duran and Billy Idol were supposed to be, much less anything more important.
For example, my baby sister's son had already started junior high, and I still couldn't picture him without a bib hanging off his neck.
"… He's always arguin' with his daddy," she said ruefully. We'd been there for twenty minutes, and she'd deflected every question about herself onto the kids like she was made of Teflon; I wasn't sure if she was doing it on purpose, or if they just occupied that much room in her brain. "Says he can't tell him what to do, that he treats him like a baby, that kind of junk— the way Darry was actin', after Dad got out, you remember." If we were taking an autopsy of our childhood, Darry had never really gotten the chance to stop acting that way before Dad's tragic death. "The last time he was over at his place, he was tryna tell him what could be fixed up to raise the asking price. Damn well near got a measuring tape out." She rested her forehead in her palm, gave her head an exaggerated shake. "Worst of all, I'm pretty sure he was right. Better qualified than Curly, at any rate."
"Not sure why Curly's lookin' to sell— Tim fixin' to let him move back onto his couch, or is he gettin' the classic divorced dad two-bedroom apartment, or what?"
Her lips pursed slightly, and she started to mess with the band of her watch— she'd said more than she intended. For the first time since she'd come in, I realized that she was still wearing her wedding ring, those three massive carats gleaming on her index finger. "We're not… divorced. We're separated."
"Which the state of Oklahoma makes you do before you get a divorce."
She looked as guilty as shit— same look she used to throw Mom and Dad's way when she and Sylvia cut class to hang out at the Dingo, and never bothered to give Darry period. I might've been a tenth grade dropout who'd spent the past decade trying to nuke every last remaining neuron, but figuring out where this was headed didn't take no rocket surgeon. "Well, I'm not makin' any decisions until I've weighed all my options—"
"Your other option is findin' a man who doesn't bring you home a love child to raise."
I'd never taken as much refuge in sarcasm as the rest of my family, but its siren song was just proving impossible to resist. Call me naive, but despite having grown up with parents who'd treated 'thou shalt not commit adultery' as a nice goal to aim for rather than a commandment, it hadn't ever occurred to me that she might want to take him back— I'd assumed the only reasons nobody had signed the paperwork yet were logistical, waiting for Curly to get off probation, arguments over who'd take what kid when. Hell, after all this, was she still in love with that scumbag?
"Don't talk about Dani like that," she snapped, a mama lion swiping my face with her claws, "you think it's that child's fault Curly couldn't keep his dick zipped up, or that Sheila reckoned she'd harsh her cosmic energy too much on her way down to Jalisco? Besides, you're one to talk, when you was fixin' to walk down the aisle with Sandy and raise Daddy's maybe—"
"I was sixteen, Jasmine, that ain't the same thing and you know it." I wasn't angry with Sandy anymore— at this point, she'd long since dripped out of the colander of my brain— but Christ, was I a moron back then. Trying to lock a girl inside a Barbie Dream House and throw the key out the window once I'd gotten her past the threshold. I might've cheated on me too. "You really want Dani to grow up thinkin' this is normal, that when a guy cats around, it's her job to turn the other cheek an' forgive him?"
That was what Darry said to me, when he threw me out— she was lyin' for you, tryin' to cover for you, is that what she's gonna do when her husband beats on her, too? Make all kinds of excuses for him?
"You don't get to do this." Her jaw was clenched in a way that made me imagine a screw being tightened. "Judge me— you have never even met either one of my goddamned kids, and now you want to tell me what's best for them? Their daddy just got out of federal prison, they've both had multiple homes in the past few years, excuse me for tryna give them an ounce of stability at this point." She slammed her coffee cup down hard enough on the saucer, a few drops stained her jacket. "Listen up, Soda, and hell, you can pass this one along to Darry too, 'cause I'm gonna staple the next divorce lawyer's business card to his forehead— I am a grown woman, and you ain't my fucking boss. Whether I stay or go, that's not up to my big brothers to decide."
"Lord, thirty or not, you're still throwin' out the same lines you was usin' at fifteen."
I was pretty lucky that she'd indeed matured since then, because when she was fifteen, she would've cheerfully flung that cup of coffee in my face and stormed out the door— the family dinner where Darry said she dressed like a two-dollar whore was a formative memory of mine. Darry never understood that you had to take the subtle approach with Jasmine, though, that you'd never get anywhere with headlong stubbornness, but that she could be shockingly easy to manipulate if you came at her from the right angle. "We just don't want you to get hurt anymore, honey." This time, when I rested my hand on hers, she was too frozen stiff to cringe away. She always took concern as judgement, which was why I tried to soften my voice to the consistency of a down pillow. "Neither of us."
She leaned back a little in her chair, folded one leg over the other, smiled with just the tacked-up corners of her mouth. "You think Curly's the man who's hurt me the worst, Soda?"
I'd been waiting for the blow from the second I saw her face again, but no matter how hard I'd tried to brace myself, it still landed like a rock to the skull. I'd imagined there'd be some catharsis to this moment, finally getting nailed to the cross like I deserved— what a fucking idiot I was. "I'm sorry," I said, but I knew the words were laughable, meaningless, even before I bothered to come out with them. What was the point of being sorry, when the things I'd done could've gotten me kicked out of hell? "It don't matter it was an accident, but it was. I didn't even realize what the hell I was doing until I heard the crack."
Like breaking the actual bone was the worst thing, and not what I'd said. You owe me, and I hadn't had to spell out what for. She'd begged me not to: if I was really being honest, I'd done it for myself, and I'd enjoyed every moment of carving his face up before the grand finale of stabbing his eye out, too. It foretold what a fantastic soldier I'd make: a lot of the other new recruits needed months of training to even manage to point and shoot at a moving target. Meanwhile, they could've had me torturing POW's with lit cigarettes and jumper cables from the start, given the right motivation.
"I don't want your fuckin' NA amends, Soda, all your self-pitying apologies— I've made plenty of them myself." She bared her teeth, a pitbull ready to go for the throat. "The wrist healed a long time ago, doesn't even hurt when it rains anymore. What I care about is that I never heard from you again for the next fucking decade." She laughed hollowly. "Not when Curly got locked up, or when I was strung-out in rehab three separate times, or when I had a kindergartener still in diapers dropped off on my doorstep with her clothes in garbage bags. You really liked ridin' them ponies that much, huh, Soda?"
I didn't like nothing, baby girl, you don't understand. The trouble is that I had to do it unless I wanted to blow my brains out. "Curly said I couldn't come around no more—"
"I didn't realize Curly had jumped you into his gang, that you'd started takin' his orders."
Curly sold me horse back in '72. I was desperate, my old hook-up, the one who'd given me and the other guys who'd served 'veteran discounts', had gotten sent upstate after he got busted selling to an undercover cop. I figured I might try my luck with a family discount next. He didn't want to, but he had his kid grizzling on his hip; I wouldn't have done it, but Curly didn't know and I knew he didn't know that. I didn't care that was my toddler nephew, Ponyboy's namesake. I didn't care that he said he'd put a bullet between my eyes like a rabid dog if I ever came back. I'd gotten what I came for and I thought I was happy.
I couldn't remember any of this in more detail than a half-forgotten dream if you did put a gun up to my temple. I found it all out after Curly caught me at Darry's place and promptly tackled me to the floor. And I'd be damned if that wasn't supposed to be my move.
"You're a coward, and you're selfish." It would've hurt less if she'd said it angry, instead of coolly resigned, like she'd never expected better in the first place— the way I imagined Mom thought about me. I wondered what Ramirez family member she'd learned that tone from, and how many years it'd taken her to master it. If my own past was a void, hers, from her teenage marriage to her will-they-or-won't-they divorce, was doubly so. "Don't give me some bullshit about how you stayed away for my own good. You just didn't want to face up to all of it, and God knows how many times you almost overdosed before you had to."
The sound of Olivia Newton-John in the background, urging us to stop talking and get physical! already, was adding the touch of comedy I always figured these conversations needed. So did the couple at the table beside us, rubbernecking, in their own polite, inconspicuous way, like we were a flaming car crash on I-244. "I used to wish you'd died," she said, injecting one last dose of venom. "Come back in a coffin with an American flag on top, so we could put you in the ground like Mom and Dad, move on with our lives. Instead you kept us stuck in limbo forever. No matter how hard I tried to stop giving a shit, it just never worked out for me."
"I used to wish I'd died, too." Sometimes I still did.
"Stop makin' me feel sorry for you. Goddammit." She checked her watch again; I wondered where else she wanted to be. "You know, I fuckin' hate you, I really do, and I reckon I've got every right. And I fuckin' hate Sheila, too, sometimes I'm packin' Dani's lunchbox and I think, that useless fucking junkie ditched her own daughter to score, don't even call on her birthday, God forbid pay child support. Then I remember that's exactly what Tim and Gabi think about me, and that knocks me off my high horse just a little bit."
"I'm sure they don't," I said, though what I knew about Tim, I vaguely disliked, and the only thing I recalled about his wife was that she was more Catholic than the Pope. Jasmine always thought everybody hated her.
"I got sober after they took Mike in, trying to prove a point, but of course it didn't stick and I landed my ass right back in rehab. And Gabi's cussin' me out over the phone, really lettin' me have it— and I deserve it, you know, what the hell am I even supposed to say in my own defense to the woman raising my baby for me?" Now I vaguely disliked Tim's wife, too. "But then she asks me how can you love drugs more than your own child, so righteously outraged, and I'm just thinking, what a fucking stupid question. I didn't love shit, it'd been wrecking my life since I was fifteen years old, it took everything from me. If I had another choice, I would've grabbed it with both hands."
I understood.
"What were you even on?" Darry's accounts of what I'd missed were all broad brushstrokes, a fucked-up funhouse mirror of a Picasso I had to fill in the gaps of myself. I knew Curly & The Gang had gotten busted up for coke dealing, but I just couldn't picture her into party drugs. If my baby sister had been shooting up, or so much as smoking horse, I was going to kick her ass and then track down whoever'd given it to her.
"Booze, mostly, you remember my usual. A lot of it. It wasn't until I started mixing it with crushed-up Valium that it got real bad." Her smile was a wry dare as she rolled up her sleeve to reveal a long, pale scar, winding around her arm like a river to nowhere. My own arms were chewed up like tire rubber, like I was some kind of burn victim who'd barely made it out of the explosion alive, impossible to find a vein on— I still couldn't take my eyes off of it. "I never got to finish pulling a Jim Morrison, though, third time was the charm. I'm two years clean now."
"Do you ever miss it?" I asked in the impulsive way I'd never been able to curb.
I didn't expect her to answer honestly, but she did. "All the time, at first, it was like a parasite eatin' my brain." She twined her hands together. "Not so much now. I've worked some shit out… it ain't so unbearable to be alive anymore, you know? I don't feel like I need to be sedated every second just to catch my breath."
The problem with all those don't-do-drugs lectures we used to get in health class was that they were actually that good. Heroin was something I didn't know people got to have before they went to heaven. It was like living inside of an orgasm. It was like frolicking through a fucking sunshiny rainbow unicorn paradise where the trees were made of cotton candy. But I was nothing at all after the comedown, lymph nodes under my pits swollen to the size of baseballs, so wasted away my hipbones left bruises when I slept. Thin as a skeleton, I was already rotting in my own grave, whether I wanted to admit it or not. Loving me, back then— could you have called it necrophilia?
"I can't forgive you—"
"You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to," she said sharply. "Maybe it doesn't matter. I still want you around more than I want you to stay gone." Her words had the air of a rehearsed speech, like she'd practiced before coming inside, her delivery calm and steady. "Christ knows the next time I hear from you, it'll be 1991 and I'll be gettin' some proof of life postcard from Mobile, Alabama."
"Nah, darlin', you won't catch me nowhere east of Houston. My hair couldn't handle the humidity out there."
Her face twisted, and at first I thought she was trying not to cry, but she was biting the inside of her cheek to stifle a smile. "Are y'all happy, you and Bonnie? Tim still thinks it's funny as hell, that you're with his ex, and after he warned you off, too."
I only ever talked about the war with Bonnie, and that was only sometimes, after waking up from lucid dreams that left me lashed to the bed with sweat and sticky shame. I didn't want her forgiveness or her absolution and she never offered it to me, the way my brothers, or hell, even my sister would've crammed it down my throat like the antidote to all my dark. She accepted that I was a bad man trying his damndest to be good and took what was left of me. "I figured I'd long since blown out everything in my brain that could be happy, like a stereo cranked up to max volume," I said. "But I was wrong."
"Good," she said firmly, then, like it'd all been settled. "You deserve that much."
Midday sun streamed in through the glass doors, bathing us in amber light. I felt the warm, baby blanket peace of an opioid high cover me, but I was completely sober. "You know..." and I paused like I was really about to say something profound. "I think Mom and Dad would be proud of us."
She gave me a look so utterly deadpan, I couldn't help but burst out laughing. And if all them preppies weren't cranking their heads around once again, wondering where the pack of hyenas had come from. "Okay, you know what, those two didn't have no fucking room to judge," I sputtered, wiping a tear from the corner of my eye. What did I think I was on, an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood? "Christ, at least none of us ended up in the big house, we gave them that much." Even if some had escaped that happy fate by the skin of our teeth.
"We sure do know how to set the bar high," but she was laughing, too. I didn't push it like I wanted to, asking if I could meet the kids, about Curly, content to put it back together piecemeal. Existing in that moment was enough.
Dedicated to everyone who wondered how this ever ended up happening (other than, Jasmine's not renowned for her good decision-making).
