So much to figure out, and no help from the manager. What was she hiding from him, behind her beautiful sloe eyes, besides her love? Worst-case scenario: Adam was leaving the band. Best-case scenario: Bobby was leaving the band. Now, at the end of the touring cycle, would be the ideal time to let him go. Who needed a Root-Note Ronnie with hands of mud to hold the music back? So why wouldn’t Joey just tell him about it? Bobby leaving the band was
great
news.
Two skinheads, taller than the other ones, walked past them, and he floated in his shoes a little. They were probably friends with the kid he’d pulverized, with the kid upon whom he’d released more than just his rage. Self-disgust coated his thoughts.
Joey took his arm. “Are you cold?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re shaking like an old fucking engine.”
He wanted to grab her, hold her, try a little tenderness. But no way would she reject him again. No way would she make him feel like a chump for emerging from the darkness of the double helix to throw light.
Another green phone booth beckoned, and he secured Joey’s credit card, a nice break from the ridiculaphone. He dialed Jesse; the ship was not going to sink with all his coke, speed, and unlicensed guns aboard. He would
not
be greeted at Long Beach by an ATF agent holding a mug shot of his dad and a warrant for his arrest.
In a fiber-optic sleeze-itude, he shot over the North Pole, ripped through clouds above Ellesmere Island, pounded down pine forests outside Calgary, bounced off radio towers in Nevada, repelled static in Sacramento, and landed in Jesse’s soft, small-time drug-dealing palm.
“Dude,” the dealer said. “I’m in my Benz. Bad news and good news. Which do you —”
“What are you eating?”
“A burger from In-N-Out. Got the Double-Double and a chocolate shake. Breakfast of champions, bitch!”
“I’d kill for one of those. So what’s the good news?”
“There’s no cops at the house.” He sucked down ice cream. “The windows in the back were open and I just hopped right in. Didn’t the old man make bail?”
Dad was hiding, Darlo knew, down in the dungeon, and probably not alone.
“Bad news,” Jesse said, “is that I didn’t find a thing.”
“Did you look where I told you to look?”
“No, I looked where you
didn’t
tell me to look. What the fuck do you think?”
Darlo formed a vision of his room, saw the red walls, the G-Swing hanging in the corner, and the four-poster bed that Dad had assured him had belonged to Jayne Mansfield. He saw the scratches on the poles where hundreds of girls had run their nails, stretching their hands out, reaching, grabbing, coming.
“Darlo?”
“Hold on, I’m fucking thinking.”
He saw the closet, hanging clothes, big-buckle belts of Harley-Davidson, Wall Drug, Queen, Aerosmith, the state of Texas, shirts of silk and satin. On the shelf above his clothes lay the velvet shotgun box, wherein lay the doobage, the powders, the apparatus, and the several illegal firearms.
“You got up there and really looked? It could have got pushed back. You’re short — did you get a chair and look all the way in the back?”
“Nothing was there, bro.”
“Are you sure?” Darlo asked. “Are you sure you’re not lying to me?”
“Are you crazy? Why would I lie to you?”
“You’re a fucking drug dealer, that’s why.”
“And you’re a fucking drug
user.
So that makes us even.”
He looked down at his hands. Joey was right. Shaking real hard.
“Don’t fucking lie to me, Jesse. I’ll fucking kill you.”
Jesse laughed as if someone had slipped on a banana peel, light and surprised and joyous. “Dude,” he said. “Come on, now. Jesus in fucking heaven, man.”
Joey tapped on the booth, then tapped her watch. Darlo turned away.
“Maybe you put it somewhere else in the house,” Jesse said. “What about the pool cabana? Isn’t that where you keep it sometimes?”
Darlo cringed. Bad memories tracked him. On his last trip home, the pool cabana was where he had found his father fucking some coed from UCLA whom Darlo had brought home a few times. The man’s face loomed up out of his mind’s murk, popping around every corner, a paternal Whac-a-Mole. Was there a location he could think of in which his father did not hide?
“Too much chlorine in the pool.” His dad had laughed as the girl, Shirelle, had shrugged, like Who cares. “Better go fix the balance and let Mr. Rooter finish cleaning the pipes.”
“Darlo?” Jesse said. “Suggestions?”
“Try the pool,” he said. “Have you seen anything about all this shit on the news?”
“Do you want me to say no?”
“What channels?”
“I just saw something on the Entertainment Network. What the hell’s a racketeer?”
“Racketeer?”
“Oops.”
Darlo banged the phone on the glass. What about all the other girls in the dungeon? What about every time he hadn’t gone down there to stop the screams, and what about the year — no,
years
— he had been away?
Someone had to get down there. Someone without a badge.
Darlo told him. He spoke of the stairway, way down. He spoke of hidden rooms and dungeons and a girl there, and screams through the canyon.
“So I need you to go down there,” he said. “The combination on the lock is 664. Neighbor of the beast — 664.”
“No way, dude.” Jesse’s voice had gone sharp. “Even if I did believe you, no way.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“A girl, hidden in a dungeon, part of a sex-slave ring, your dad?” He said this with the cadence of
a man, a plan, a canal, panama.
“No, I fucking don’t.”
“Why is that hard to fucking imagine?”
“Because if it’s true, I don’t want to know, dude. I don’t want to get the fuck involved with your sick family.”
Darlo knew Jesse was serious. He heard the jaunty tone leave his voice.
“How could you do this to me?” Darlo said. “I thought you had my back. After all we’ve been through.”
“What have we been through, exactly, besides squillions of drugs?”
“I’ll call you back,” he said, because Jesse had him cornered. “Just sit tight. Can you at least do that?”
“Sure. I’ll help you whatever way I can. But no way I’m going —”
“I heard you the first time.”
SARAH FOUND BOBBY
on the sidewalk outside the Van Gogh.
“Sorry,” he said. “Let’s go back inside.”
“You’ve gone pale,” she said, and stopped him. “What’s happening? I can tell when something is wrong.”
“I don’t want to bore you,” he said, and heard the sound of people chanting, marching down a nearby boulevard. “Seriously, Sarah, I’d put you to sleep with my patheticness.”
“What would I be doing here if I was bored, huh?” She shook her head. “Now come on, tell me what’s wrong.”
He spoke of band woes, and laid it on pretty thick, trying to get her to shut him up with a kiss. That was the way they did it in movies; if he didn’t know which way was up, then fuck if he was going to go gently through this confusion.
“I hate the band, but it’s my life,” he was saying. “I dream of slicing up Darlo and —”
“Darlo?” she said, as if he’d never said the word before. “That’s a nice name.”
“Nice name?” He nodded though the back of his head pulsed. “Yeah, I guess it is. But just wait until you meet him.”
“What do you mean?”
He stood on a precipice of envy. The wind blew in his eyes. An icy cliff. Would he fall?
“Look at that,” she said, getting him off the hook. “Right on.”
From the direction of Vondelpark came a few hundred protesters, small in number but making a racket. Even from a distance, Bobby noticed how nicely their skin glowed. They looked as if they were on a school field trip.
“I should be marching today,” Sarah said. “That sick war.”
“My brother, Darren, was in Seattle during the WTO,” Bobby said. “He went down there just to see what was happening and ended up right in the middle of it. The National Guard was out, and they carried, like, five-foot blocking poles.”
“I’ve seen books about that,” she said. “People running and screaming while clouds of tear gas hover in the air. The pictures are beautiful, which is crazy. But they are beautiful.”
The kids marched by, lightly singing.
Bobby’s phone rang. He let it vibrate in the dark of his pocket and watched the protesters skip on. She took his hands by the wrists and looked them over. Band-Aids fluttered, discolored. Raw flesh glistened in stygian pools of lymph.
“We need to get you some new bandages,” she said. “My house is not far. Ugh, you poor thing — they are falling apart.”
“What about Van Gogh?”
“He’ll always be here, but your hands may fall off. Come now.”
They walked half a mile. The neighborhood turned to single-family houses that looked like the pictures of where the Beatles grew up, which to Bobby, in their ponderous black-and-white exposures, were Dickensian and foreboding, as if the electricity were always out and the gardens always dead and the air-raid sirens always ten seconds away. Sarah stopped at one of these bleak houses, but up close the signs of children appeared: child-painted doors, washable rainbows on the panes. Toys littered the yard like flowers. A few empty garbage-can lids were strewn on the grass.
They went through the main hall. The smell of sausage cooking held dominion, mingled with that of tobacco. Cigarette smoke radiated from the kitchen.
“Marcus is home,” she said, annoyed. “My stepfather.”
Marcus had a bushy mustache and sat at the table reading the newspaper. His glasses covered half his face; they were the kind worn only by biology teachers and mass murderers. On top of that, he wore a lumberjack shirt that was pure Green River Killer.
“I hope you’re nicer than the boy I met this morning,” Marcus said when Sarah introduced them. “Your sister really outdid herself. She brought home a boy who looked like a junkie. Disgusting.” He waved his hands around, dragged on his cigarette. “But what can I do — she is not my daughter. There is nothing I can do to make her more like you, sweet Sarah.”
Sarah smiled in a way that indicated that she was both the good girl of the two and no fan of Marcus. Bobby kind of liked him. He liked guys who looked like one-hundred-percent highway-roaming psychopaths.
“We’re just stopping by to get Bobby some bandages,” Sarah said.
“Nothing like you,” Marcus said, not to be interrupted in his groove. He lit a cigarette and cupped it in his hand. “Why can’t she be?”
Sarah pulled two bottles of Heineken from the fridge. She cracked one for Marcus and one for her and Bobby to share, then proceeded to stroke the man’s head as he talked to himself, becoming more heated as he recounted how fed up he was with Danika, her sister, and how this guy she’d brought home had matted blond hair and looked as if he’d been living out of a Dumpster. Stroking his head had the effect of turning down a burner.
“He looked like slime from the Dam,” Marcus said, his face tightening into a twisted modulation of the permanently upset. “But I showed him.”
“What’s for dinner?” she asked. “Are you cooking?”
“I followed him outside and showed him.”
“Is Mom going to be home for dinner?”
“Clapped him around the ears is what I did.”
Sarah tapped on the beer bottle. “I think we should wait for her before we eat, don’t you?”
“He was asking for it. Little punk.”
She smiled at Bobby and rolled her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “We should wait for her.”
Family life. He hadn’t seen it in so long in any form. He hadn’t been around fathers and daughters interacting. He had forgotten about fathers and daughters and taking out the garbage and ruminating at the dinner table and every other shade of the domestic spectrum. Never before had families seemed enviable. The heat of reassessment pulsed through his mind.
Bobby wondered how a dysfunctional Dutch family differed from a dysfunctional American family. What were the mores by which this dynamic occurred? Could a young American woman cook up the cocktail — two parts coddling, one part ignoring, a splash of disgust — that constituted Sarah’s strategy with her stepfather?
“We’ll be upstairs,” Sarah said when Marcus took a breath. “OK?”
“Fine,” he said, and winked at Bobby. “See you, boss.”
Climbing the stairs, Bobby stared at the curve of Sarah’s ass. “Nice guy,” he said, imagining her crotch in his mouth.
Sarah stuck out her tongue so it lolled at the side and made the crazy sign with her hand. “Speaks English for you,” she said. “Wants to impress you.”
After Bobby had covered his hands in a new set of bandages, he sat on a chair in her room and marveled at this Dutch plot of IKEA modern, soft spongy couches and clear glass tables and a bed of the finest Swedish pine. He wondered if he could stay in here while everything shook out. It wasn’t a cozy room, but he would be fine here. He would hide while Darlo and Shane fought, Joey fudged and frittered, and Adam ran out the clock.
On her blue dresser stood a bunch of pictures. One was of Sarah and some dude locked in a kiss of clear passion. He looked like Shane.
“Boyfriend?” he said, motioning to the picture.
“Ex-boyfriend,” she said, and smiled, a little bit sad. The room went warm all of a sudden.
“I’ve got an hour before I have to go to dinner,” he said. “It’s going to be like a last supper.”
Sarah lay on the bed. “Come over here.”
He lay down next to her. Her covers portrayed some kind of ironic scene involving deer in the forest. Well, he hoped it was ironic. If it wasn’t, they should just put him in handcuffs for being such a chicken hawk.
She leaned up on her elbow. A chain-linked onyx bracelet hung from her wrist. “When I saw you at that café,” she said, “I thought you were so cute.”
“Really?” He tried to hide his hands behind his body, but it just looked like he was arresting himself. “Seriously?”
“Mm-hmm. I thought, how am I going to get his attention? I didn’t need to check my e-mail, just killing time before school, but I sat down and checked it anyway, and then you sat down opposite me but wouldn’t make eye contact.” She played with a stitch in the comforter, looked down, looked up. “Very hard to get. So I went outside to have a cigarette, but you didn’t take the hint, kept looking up at me but didn’t get up. I was just about to leave when you had that tantrum and Ullee kicked you out.”