The Lost (22 page)

Which itself was fucking scary.

“I trashed a house once.”

She waited for him to continue. He decided to give it to her pretty much straight.

“I was fourteen, fifteen. Me and Tim, who I guess was like, twelve, we’d both run away from home. He had his reasons and I had mine though mine were basically that I was pissed at my parents, that’s all. It just seemed like a cool idea. Run away, just get the hell out of there.

“Anyhow there was no place we could crash where somebody’s parents wouldn’t tell
our
parents but Timmy knew of this place up on Stirrup Iron Road where his father’d done some work as carpenter. Used to bring Timmy along on weekends, show him how to hold a hammer. Some macho bullshit. Make a man of the kid, that kind of stuff.”

“It didn’t take, I guess.”

“Hey, Timmy’s all right. You just got to get to know him a little.”

“Sure I do.”

He decided to let it pass.

“Anyway it was way the hell out in the boonies and he knew that the owners only used it in the summer and here it was March or maybe April so the two of us broke in there. Big four-bedroom job. Rich people. So rich that now they don’t even bother to use the house at all anymore or even to rent the thing out. It just sits there all year long. Fully furnished. You believe it? Sheets over all the furniture. Man, I don’t get it. Goddamn fucking waste if you ask me.

“But breaking in was easy because they had these big glass double doors off the patio in back that were easy to jimmy. We stayed two, two-and-a-half weeks. All they had to eat was this brown rice and pasta, some canned stuff, tuna and fancy soup and canned tomatoes and Spaghetti-Os for their kids I guess. So we lived on that. Man, to this day I hate brown rice and Spaghetti-Os. But the liquor cabinet was full and we found a case of beer in the cellar. I figured out how to turn on the pump so we had running water but no electricity and it was cold out there in March so we busted up some of the furniture and made fires in the fireplace and by the end there wasn’t much furniture left because we’d burnt it all.”

The leggy blond waitress appeared and asked him did he want another drink. He decided he did and to hell with the price. He was feeling expansive sitting there in the warm night breeze, expansive because of Kath and because of the story. Kath was still sipping her drink and said she was fine for now.

The next part was possibly a little risky but he decided to tell her anyway.

“I found a twenty-two rifle in the master bedroom closet and a thirty-eight Ladysmith revolver in the nightstand along with some boxes of shells. We were amazed they’d just leave them sitting there and nobody home more than half the year. But see, the worst thing about running away was the fucking boredom. You couldn’t watch television or listen to any of their records which were mostly classical anyway because there wasn’t any electricity, the pool was drained in back, so all we did was smoke dope all day and drink and look at magazines and hang around the house.

“So we took to trying to pot birds and squirrels and shit out from the glass double doors. The idea I guess was to vary our diet so to speak with some squirrel meat stew but what it really was was to relieve the goddamn boredom.

“We never hit anything. I mean, we were
lousy
shots. I got better eventually but at the time I couldn’t hit shit and neither could Tim. So we started target practicing
inside
the house. Set a plate up on the mantel, shoot it. A lamp, a bottle, a beer can. Some of those dumb china figures they had. It was fun because whether you hit the thing or not, you had to dodge this bullet whizzing around after you, you had to dodge the ricochet. I guess we were pretty stupid. We could have got killed in there. But we were pretty stoned and it was a kick. We even shot the television. It wasn’t any use to us anyhow.

“Anyway to make a long story short one morning we get up and realize that the house is a fucking disaster. I mean, we never washed a dish or a glass never mind pots and pans so the kitchen’s a wreck, the living room’s a wreck with broken glass swept up into little piles everywhere and hardly a stick of furniture, the liquor cabinet’s empty and we’re out of tuna and sick of Spaghetti-Os. There’s no more pot, we’re bored shitless, so we said, fuck it, we’re outa here.”

“Where’d you go?”

He shrugged. “Home. Told ’em we’d spent two weeks or whatever it was just hitching around. We both got grounded for I don’t know
how
long, but I guess they just decided to believe us. We never did get caught or anything. But that house—that house was a wreck, man. I mean, the second or third night we were there Tim had too much to drink and puked all over the bed-sheets. All he did was move to another bedroom. I mean, that house was
funky
.”

His drink arrived and he thanked the waitress.

If he lived in New York he’d have chased her ass to hell and back. The waitress was a stone looker. He lit a smoke.

“So,” he said. “What’s the worst thing
you
ever did?”

“That would be lying to my mother.”

He laughed. “Lying to your
mother?
That’s the
worst
thing?”

“One lie in particular.”

He waited.

“The
complete
truth, right?” he said.

“I remember.” She sighed. “My mother was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic when I was somewhere around twelve. But she was crazy long before that. I hardly remember her sane in fact. She went from being this decent mother I guess and this terrific painter, an abstractionist—she had shows in San Francisco, Rhode Island and even here in the City at the OK Harris Gallery, this real prestige place run by the guy who discovered Warhol. Anyhow she went from there to thinking the entire art world was out to get her. And not just the art world either but the cops and the Mafia, aunts, uncles, cousins. Pretty much her entire family. And oh yeah, the FBI too.

“But my father refused to commit her. I guess he still loved her or maybe he just couldn’t do it. So she’d be in and out of hospitals all the time. On and off every kind of drug you can think of. You think you know about smashing up houses? My mother could have given you guys a few lessons.

“Anyhow this one Saturday afternoon, I was fourteen, my mom’s in one of her rages, she’s off her medication again and she’s tearing up the flower garden out in front of the house, in front of the
neighbors
, it’s a nice day and half the street is out there and she’s insisting I help her, pulling up violets and begonias and shrubs and I don’t know what else and scattering them all over the lawn and rushing over to me and grabbing my wrists and insisting I help, yelling at me to go and get the shovel from the garage goddammit because there’s somebody
buried
in there. It’s a plot by the police and art dealers to pin some murder on her and get hold of all her paintings.

“Finally I’d had it up to here with all this crazy bullshit so I told the lie.

“I told her my father had come into my room the night before and said that he was leaving her any day now. That he was sick of this too. And that he was taking me with him. So fuck her and her bodies buried in the garden, she could dig them up herself.

“I think I did it because it was a combination of the fact that that was what I was wishing for, that he
would
take me away somewhere, that and because I thought that she’d
tell him
what I’d said. Confront him with it. I couldn’t tell him myself. We didn’t have the kind of thing where I could just go up to him and say, ‘Come on, dad, let’s get the hell out of here, let’s put her in a loony bin and split.’ But I guess I thought she’d confront him with what I said to her and that way he’d know how I felt.

“But she didn’t. What she did do was constantly accuse him of
planning
to leave. Like now he’s part of the conspiracy against her. She’d search his drawers for maps and tickets and travel folders. Call the bank hour after hour to make sure he was actually there at work and not flown away to some island somewhere. She was driving him and his assistants bananas. Not once that I know of did she mention me saying
anything
to her or even mention me much at all. It was like I
couldn’t
be part of the conspiracy, I was out of the evil loop because I was her daughter. When in fact if anybody was conspiring against her, it was me.

“Anyhow that was kind of the last straw, her not being able to trust my father. The conspiracies got crazier and crazier, with satanists involved. She’s calling the cops on a daily basis only she’s calling them in Orange County because all the cops in our county are all after her and crooked and finally she gets this thing in her head that my father’s given her syphillis, so that she’s rotting away inside.

“Medication didn’t work. You couldn’t medicate her because she’d hide whole bottles of pills and say she lost them and then take more than she was supposed to. Or else she’d decide she was fine and the meds were part of the problem anyway, part of the plot. So when medication time rolled around she’d hide her pill under her tongue and then spit it out when we weren’t looking.

“Then one night while we were asleep she went downstairs. She went to the kitchen. We had all the knives and all the sharp stuff locked away by then. We had an electric range, though, not a gas stove. She turned the two front burners on high and waited till the coils were red and she put both her hands on the burners and held them there and woke us with her screaming. The idea was, she was trying to burn away her fingerprints. It’s not even possible to do that. I remember the coils were still smoking when we got down there.

“She wouldn’t let my dad touch her. Just me. But I didn’t know what the fuck to do with burns that bad and basically neither did he. So we had to wait for the emergency crew, me holding her squatting on the floor while she’s howling and sobbing and my dad at the kitchen table just sitting there crying into the palms of his hands. The way I knew he was crying was I could see his shoulders shake. She never painted again after that Even though after a while she could have once the burns had healed. When she got out of emergency care and was stable enough, he finally committed her.”

He sat back in his chair looking at her. He realized his second drink was almost gone. He finished it.

“Damn,” he said.

She finished hers too.

“That’s three questions each,” she said. “You want to go another round?”

He thought it was a hell of a story.
What he had here
, he thought,
was one tough girl
.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Neither do I. Let’s get out of here.”

She raised her hand for the waitress and asked for the check. The girl smiled and did the addition and tore the check off the pad and put it facedown beside his drink, telling them both to have a lovely evening. You too, he said and had a look at the check.

“Steep?”

He guessed she could see by his expression.

“Nine bucks. Steep where I come from, anyway.”

“Leave her a dollar.”

“That’s only ten percent. You sure?”

“No. I mean leave her a dollar, period.”

“Huh?”

“The blonde you’ve been eyeing every damn chance you get, Ray. Stiff her.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m asking you to. Will you do that for me?”

He wondered what they did to you walking out on a check in New York City. But okay, he thought, we’ll play that game too. He reached for his wallet and saw that the blonde was taking an order from a table to the left, she was leaning over a fat man with a mustache and mostly had her back to him. He pulled out a dollar and put it on top of the check and put the ashtray on top of that. He stood and shook his head.

“You’re something,” he said. He meant it. He’d never met one like this before. “Let’s go.”

Somewhere inside the Lincoln Tunnel she thought how odd it was that she’d told him as much as she had, in such detail and that telling it still hurt. She thought of her father visiting her mother in the hospital tomorrow morning and that what he’d be visiting would be a vegetable, basically, a catatonic. Somebody who sat there and rocked and stared and maybe moaned but that was all and who used to be her mother.

He’d asked her to come along.

She was glad she hadn’t but maybe she should have.

She didn’t know.

Fuck it She had other things to think about right now. Like this guy here smoking a joint and driving her back to Sparta.

What to do with Ray.

“I’ll just walk you up the stairs. Make sure you get in okay.”

She smiled at him as though to say she was a big girl and besides, the line was transparent as hell but sure, okay, why not? A complicated smile but then he got the feeling all her smiles were complicated in one way or another.

“All right.”

She led him up the walkway and up the stairs and fished her keys out of her purse and then turned to him very serious and looked at him. He realized his heart was pounding. He felt like a kid on his first date ever and his first date ever just happened to be the senior prom.

“Thanks, Ray. I had a really good time.”

He put on the grin. Wore it like a Halloween mask.