Dead Boys by RICHARD LANGE Page B

the kitchen table and he fuckin’ nails me. I mean, he knocks me the fuck OUT! I wake up on the floor, blood gushing, my ears ringing, and Edgar zips me over to the emergency. Well, first off they shave half my head to stitch me up, then there’s all kinds of X-rays and Y-rays and Z-rays. I must have been in there four or five hours, crying this hurts and that hurts and doc, you got to help me, and after all that, do you know what I walked out with? Tylenol. Fucking Tylenol. Long story short, we drive to this dealer’s house and bust down his door and steal his stash. He ratted us out, saying we took his TV, and me being on probation already for some other rinky-dink beef, that was that. Your little brother hit the big time.
    T HE MCDONALD’S IS all plastic and chrome and perfect and horrible. Karl lifts the bun of his hamburger to remove the pickles. He’s tattooed the letters of his name on the fingers of one hand, a sloppy, homemade job, the ink already faded to green. The one thing I see of myself in his face is its only imperfection, the bulbous tip of his nose. We can thank our father for that.
    “How long’s it been?” Karl asks.
    “Oh, hell, what, twenty-five years maybe. He dropped by on his way to Vegas once, when he still lived out here. He was with your mother then. She was pregnant with you, as a matter of fact. We’ve talked on the phone a few times since.”
    “You never missed having a daddy?”
    “My mom kept trying. There were always men around.”
    “But not your daddy.”
    I shift in my seat and fight off the exasperation his earnestness provokes in me.
    “We never had pets, either. Should I feel bad about that, too?”
    “You got an answer for everything,” Karl says, his smile a bit too knowing.
    “So what’s your story?” I ask.
    He shrugs, dips a fry in ketchup. “How old were you when he bailed?”
    “Three.”
    “I was barely a year.” His voice takes on a harsher tone, as if something inside him has suddenly cinched up tight and he has to force his words around it.
    “Momma did her best, but it was hard in Texas. Different from here, the people and all, how they treated us. Especially her family. They were too cruel half the time, too kind the rest. By the time I was fourteen, she’d had enough, so she gave herself up to cancer. And I’m glad, you know, because look at me.”
    He strikes himself in the chest with his fist and would do worse, I know — tear his guts out, take an ice pick to his skull. It’s the kind of self-immolating rage that drives men to decisive, if reckless, even destructive, acts, and I have often envied it in others, as the dead must surely envy the living.
    I sip my coffee and watch him seethe. He closes his eyes and exhales loudly, then rotates his head from side to side, his neck cracking and popping.
    “He had a house on a golf course out there in Florida, a boat in the driveway. A girl answered the door, looked like us, and there was a boy, too. Daddy wouldn’t let me in, though, didn’t want to upset his family, like I was somebody, I don’t know, nobody. So we walked out to the garage. What did I want, he wanted to know. I said, ‘Just to see you. You’re my daddy.’ ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. Are you sure? Can you believe that? I lost it. I got him by the throat and took him down to his knees.”
    “I’ve dreamed this,” I say. “I’ve killed the fucker in my dreams.”
    Karl pauses, derailed momentarily by my interruption — shocked, if that’s possible. He swirls his straw in his cup.
    “I had a pistol,” he continues, “but it’s when I reached for it, when my fingers touched it, that I lost my nerve. I slapped his ass around until he gave up your name and that you were in California and all, and then I got the fuck out of Dodge. ‘Son,’ he called after me. ‘Son.’ But I didn’t look back. He put another notch on his going-to-hell belt that day, that’s for sure. And me, I haven’t had a mean spell