To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (12 page)

Tony walks almost all the way to Studewood, past all the car lots and hubcap lots and the tombstone place. He stops outside the gate of the big cemetery so he can look at the trees.

When Tony gets home, his mom is talking on the phone and watching the news from her place on the living room couch.

“Here’s Tony. He looks hungry. I got them some ham to make sandwiches,” she says, gesturing towards the kitchen with her cigarette.

Tony steps between the table holding his mom’s ashtray, Coke and phone and the table holding her cigarettes, lighter and newspapers to give her a kiss on the cheek. She takes it with a drag on her Winston Light. He steps over her phone cord and lamp cord on his way to the kitchen.

“Manuel should be home soon,” he hears her tell her friend. “Oh, my God—they
did
shoot him—you were right,

Chela!”

She’s talking about someone who got shot on the news—not someone real. Tony sits at the little yellow kitchen table with his sandwich and the last can of Coke.

“Oh, here comes Manuel down the street.”

Tony chews the bread and pushes crumbs around he paper plate.

“Here he comes up the steps.”

Tony watches a squirrel through the kitchen window.

“He just came through the door.”

Tony takes the last drink of his Coke.

“He gave me a hundred dollars grocery money and two cartons of cigarettes. He’s such a good boy.”

Tony very quietly burps.

Manuel walks into the kitchen. His black hair, wiry but all pushed into the same direction, almost scrapes the light bulb hanging from the wires in the middle of the ceiling.

“Hey, man,” he says.

Tony nods.

“You know Rudy’s back?” “Yeah,” says Tony.

Manuel nods. He takes his cigarettes from the pocket of his black Members Only jacket and waves them at Tony, who waves no, thanks.

He smokes his cigarette. He looks out the window, at the picture of the Aztec princess on his mother’s wall calendar and then at nothing at all. Tony picks the food from his teeth and wipes it on a paper towel.

Manuel stubs out his cigarette in the big conch-shaped ashtray that serves as the table’s centerpiece.

“You wanna go see if mom needs anything from the store before
MASH
comes on?”

Tony nods.

“You need anything? You need any money?”

Tony shakes his head. “Nah, man, thanks.”

“All right, man. I gotta take off. Take it easy, all right?”

“All right, man. Take it easy,” says Tony.

He watches the clean-cut back of his brother’s neck and then the shininess of his shoes as Manuel goes back out the door, back to work.

Tina unties the green and red flowered sheet stapled above her window, blocking the view from the street. Then she turns on her radio. It sits on the nightstand with the lamp and the Barbie whose hair has been permanent-marker-ed sultry black. She adjusts the tuning knob, careful not to disturb the masking tape holding the radio’s batteries in. She’s able to bring in a popular dance song; strong enough on its own that she can let go of thee radio and take a tentative step back, like a mother watching her toddler stand on his own.

Tina stands still for a while, listening.

Last week, her school held a homecoming dance. She didn’t go. But if she had gone, she probably would have danced. She half-closes her eyes to picture it better, sees herself spinning and undulating in a watermelon-pink satin dress.

The index finger of her right hand taps against her thigh.

She would have worn high heels and tossed her hair so it rippled with the rest of her body. She would have thrown her arms in the air.

The shadow of her, on the wall, is much larger than life. Even so, the twitches of her hips are barely detectable. Back and forth, the tiniest bit, steady to the music.

“Hey, girl! What are you doing in here?”

Tina shrieks as she spins around, knocking he radio off the nightstand so that one of its batteries tumbles out and rolls under the tattered pink bed.

Rudy laughs loudly, as if he just watched someone fall down on TV.

“What do you want?” she says, crossing her arms in front of her chest to stop its heat from shooting into her face.

“Nothing. I just came to see if you were in here writing love letters.”

Tina’s lip curls but she can’t think of anything to say to this. Rudy takes a step forward, forcing her to take a step back.

“I thought you were gonna be writing love letters to your new boyfriend, but you’re doin’ a little dance for him, instead.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Yeah, you were. What are you gonna do for him, huh?”

Rudy moves forward again. Tina leans back as far as she can towards the nightstand and the wall.

“What are y’all doing in here?”

Rudy whips around and, at the same time, takes all his steps backwards again in one big jump. Then he sees that it’s only Eddie, Tina’s younger brother. The smart ass.

“Shut up, punk. None of your business.”

“You shut up,” says Eddie.

“Say what, man? What’d you say?”

Eddie looks into Rudy’s eyes, or at a spot between them, and doesn’t look away.

Rudy turns to Tina, whose eyes are wide on her brother, and then laughs. “Man, you’re lucky I don’t feel like kicking your ass right now.”

He pushes past Eddie and ruffles his hair hard enough to shove his head forward and then back again.

“Man, fuck you!?” says Eddie.

He turns to slap Rudy’s arm away, too late to hit it very hard. Rudy quickly turns back and slaps Eddie lightly on the face.

“Man, fuck you!” he mimics. “Watch your mouth, boy!”

Eddie swings a fist at him and just misses as Rudy jumps away again, now hopping on his toes like a boxer on speed and, of course, still laughing. Eddie balls both fists and stays where he is.

“Asshole. Why don’t you go back to jail with your dad?”

Rudy gets still. “Say that to my face, faggot.”

“You heard me.”

Just like in her dreams, Tina is frozen, only able to watch, not to scream. But, just like in her dreams, she can eventually whisper.
Quit it
. . .

And then she talks. “Quit it . . . .”

And then, finally, she wakes up and yells for help. “Quit it! Quit! Grandma!”

Her grandmother’s already shuffling down the hall. “What in the hell are y’all making all this noise for?”

Tina says nothing. Eddie says nothing. Their brown eyes are matching blanks in their faces.

“Nothing, Grandma,” says Rudy.

“Don’t you nothing me. I heard y’all fighting.”

Tina sees her youngest brother Jesse standing in the hall, watching.

“Shoot, I don’t know,” says Rudy. “I just came up here to tell Tina she needed to go help you with dinner. Then this little punk came in and started trying to hit me for nothing.”

Their grandmother looks at them, one by one. Tina and Eddie still say nothing.

“Well . . . Well, y’all better behave. Unless you want me to get the broom on y’all.” She shuffles towards the door. “And, Tina, I do need you to help me. Come on.”

The minute she disappears around the corner, Rudy slaps Eddie across the top of the head. “Y’all better behave.” He turns and lightly runs out after their grandmother, giggling.

Eddie is breathing hard enough for Tina to hear. She swallows hard and doesn’t cry. Jesse practically hisses.

“I hate that motherfucker! Let’s go get him, Eddie, when he gets in his room,” says Jesse, his voice not even breaking. His eleventh birthday was the week before.

“Nah, man. Nah,” says Eddie. “He’s just a punk. Forget his stupid ass.”

He stands still for a while, visibly becoming calm, then turns to Tina. “How come you don’t have a lock on your door?”

“A lock? I don’t know,” she says.

He goes away, Jesse following. He comes back with a hammer and a thin block of wood about a half foot long.

“You got a nail?” he asks his sister.

Tina crosses the room to where a defunct sink sits on a cabinet in the corner. She yanks open one of the cabinet drawers, which has become stiff with many layers of pain and humidity, and finds a long rusted nail.

Eddie takes it from her hand. He goes to her room door, closes it and hammers the block of wood into the molding at its side. He swivels the wood, across the door, and then counterclockwise up again.

“There’s your lock,” he says. He leaves the room. Jesse, who’s been waiting, follows.

“Check this out, man. Check it out!”

“Aw . . . Damn. Where’d you get that, man?”

Tony takes a sip of his beer and pushes away the crumpled magazine nudging his arm. It’s opened to a picture of a naked chick doing something nasty with a banana. Rudy brought it to the store in a brown paper bag, and he’s handing it around for all the guys to see. Tony doesn’t touch it. He doesn’t want to know where it’s been.

“Hey, man . . . Look what else I got,” says Rudy.

He sticks his hand in the paper bag and pulls out some weed, holding it close so the kids and old ladies passing by won’t see it, even if they hear him talking about it loud as hell.

“Aw, man!” says Chuy, who’s not even old enough to buy his own beer.

“Hell, yeah. Check this shit out. This isn’t the same old shit from Manuel . . . I found out a way to make it better.”

Tony knows Rudy’s lying, but he doesn’t care enough to argue about it.

“Come on, man. Let’s go to the lot and roll a joint.” Rudy puts the weed back in the bag along with his magazine.

“All right, man.”

“Hell, yeah!”

They head towards the empty lot two blocks down that’s conveniently outfitted with vine-swarmed trees and an abandoned couch.

“You coming Tony?”

“Nah, man. I got stuff to do.”

“Yeah, man, let him go. He gots stuff to do. Like jerking off!” says Rudy, laughing and slapping Tony’s arm.

Tony pushes his hand away. “Hey, man . . . I already told you. I don’t play that shit.”

The other guys stop laughing. Their tones and faces are somber as they say, “Hey, man” and “Come on, man” and “Come on, Tony man.” Rudy tones his cackling down to a smile.

“Yeah, man, Tony. Why you gotta get mad? Come on, man.”

“It’s cool,” says Tony. And so it is cool, and they let him take off.

It hasn’t rained in a while so it’s too humid to walk around. Tony goes home, thinking he’ll watch
Donahue
with his mom. When he reaches his empty house, he remembers his mother talking to her friend the night before about getting a ride to the doctor’s.

He goes to the kitchen and looks in the refrigerator, then takes out the ham and the cheese and sets them on the counter. He picks at his teeth for a moment.

He goes to the bathroom. Then, he goes to the room that he used to share with Manuel and Danny and sits on the edge of the bottom bunk. He chews his nails for a while. He spits out his results and lies down.

That picture of the chick with the banana was pretty disgusting. Normally, he doesn’t think about stuff like that, but sometimes you can’t help yourself.

His legs are jittering and his eye is twitching worse than usual. Finally he gives up, reaches for a dirty t-shirt on the floor behind his head and then unzips his jeans.