Landon

 

“I wish they’d hurry their asses up,” I breathe into the icy air.

 

“They’ll be here,” Titus says.

 

He’s pacing again, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his low-slung jeans. The waistband of a pair of white boxers peek out and a cigarette droops from his mouth.

 

I suck hard on my own, biting back the urge to cough. I hate cigarettes.

 

“Stop pacing, dude. You said they’ll be here,” I spit out, trying to get Titus to stop moving.

 

“I don’t like it,” Titus says, not to me, but to someone else who isn’t there. “Don’t like it one bit.”

 

“We don’t need ‘em, anyways,” I offer.

 

“Like fucking hell we don’t. We don’t need ‘em.”

 

But Titus’s stupid. I know it, and Titus himself knows it. He’s got good plain street smarts, though—something I don’t have and desperately need to learn.

 

He’s the best teacher, they all say.

 

But I could never tell Titus I like English. The only fucking class I like in school. The class I look forward to even.

 

Better than having my ass kicked by my old man all the time.

 

Like when we read Hemingway last week. The Sun Also Rises. Those long-ass French meals, all the different courses, all the—what the fuck were they called—aperitifs. They ate and drank like nobody’s business. As if it all hadn’t happened like eighty fucking years ago. The same. People never changed. All they wanted was to eat, get sloshed, and get laid. There was something beautiful in that. The guy got his dick blown off in the war or something, and the girl was pissed ‘cause he couldn’t fuck her properly...

 

It trips me out. It reminds me of myself. Why, I can’t explain.

 

But I could never explain that to Titus. He’d probably beat the shit out of me.

 

Just like Dad.

 

“Your mom know where you are?” Titus asks.

 

“She’s drunk off her ass.”

 

“She’s a cunt.”

 

I hide my flinch, as if Titus has struck me a blow. Even though it’s true, I know he doesn’t mean it. In Titus’s own sick way, it’s a compliment.

 

You wanted this, Landon, now you’ve got it, I think. Gotta ride it all the way.

 

A picture of my mom flashes before my eyes. She’s sitting in front of her vanity mirror, shaking out her long black hair. My dad used to call her “Crystal” after Crystal Gayle, because she’d let it grow past her waist. Their song was always “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” They’d be dancing in the middle of the kitchen floor like idiots, humming and laughing, practically screwing right there.

 

At least when he wasn’t knocking the shit out of her.

 

I had tried to stop him once. And my mom had gone ape-shit on me. Her hands were hard on me, pushing me away, slapping at my face. The shock and shame and hurt in her eyes. Like it was me who had been the one that had punched and kicked her and left ugly, mottled bruises on her arms and neck for fifteen years.

 

In the street, a wave of black bile rises in my throat. Tears sting my eyes but I blink them back. The smoke and my breath hiss out in one furious plume.

 

Titus stops pacing. His lips curl back in an ugly grimace.

 

“Fuck this shit. I’m fucking tired of waiting. We do it now, then run back to the house. They’ll have the door unlocked. If not, we’ll run out back and jump over the fence. Hide out on the patio.”

 

I nod. My feet feel frozen in their black, steel-toed combat boots. I scuff the soles across the hard, shiny gravel, reveling in the defiance of that abrasion. It’s too damned cold to think. The adrenaline is like a pulse—a motor set to running, a thin steady beat waiting to kick in and seduce me.

 

“So who will it be?” I ask.

 

“Doesn’t matter. But they gotta be old. Or a woman. Somebody weak-lookin’. You’ll know. You’ll feel it. It’s all about the feel, the ride, you know? Like sex. Like crack. It takes you for a ride. It’ll be a good trip. You just feel it, man. Smooth as ice.”

 

Yeah, I was high and tripping already. Good shit it was, too. Everything in my line of vision was hard and glittering and polished.

 

“Fine,” I say. “Let’s go.”

 

We flick our cigarettes out onto the cold, black, wet fingers of the street. The butts ricochet off the asphalt where they hiss and spit tiny fumes. I raise the hood of my jacket over my head and thrust my hands in my pockets. My tall, lean body moves with the wind.

 

A man walks out of the pharmacy. Hunched over, wobbling, a brown paper bag cradled in his gnarled hands.

 

No, I suddenly think, Titus’s face a white blur on the periphery of my vision. It’s too quick, too easy. It doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. Suddenly I think I’m going to be sick. The high is diminishing already, leaving behind a vague sickly urgent emptiness, and I need another hit to ease my stomach.

 

No time, man. Gotta do it.

 

Just do it. Like the fucking Nike commercial.

 

Something about the old man, the feeble way he’s walking, reminds me of someone.

 

Glasses. Watery eyes. The old-man shirt, the polyester kind with needlework on the front. Ballpoint pen in his pocket....My grandfather had always kept a pen in his pocket to use every day on the crossword puzzles he loved. He was too smart to use a pencil; he always knew all the words. When I was nine, he’d shown me how to eat sweet cornbread soaked in a glass of milk with a spoon. We’d eat cornbread and milk and watch The Love Boat together. Or Fantasy Island. God, those shows were great. They just don’t make television like that anymore. Later, I would get to sleep in the big bed, nestled right between my gramma and grampa. Everything warm and cozy and safe, the portrait of Jesus glowing and winking at me in the dark, my gramma’s delicate head propped on a weird pillow to keep her crazy beehive hairdo safe.

 

God, I’d loved my grandparents. That is, until they’d died within a year of each other.

 

The sudden, rapid blur of motion is like a dance. A scene in a war film. No music, no voices. Utter silence amidst a storm of images. Running, shooting, falling and ducking on the ground, bodies flying...

 

The old man suddenly doubles over, sucking in great gulps of air as if he were choking. I realize Titus’s dealt him a single blow to the gut.

 

“Dude!” Titus yells. “Get the wallet!”

 

I’m shocked into action. Suddenly my hands are like instruments or surgeon’s hands. Smooth and quick and precise, as if I’d been doing this for years. The paper bag’s already been mashed into the ground. Orange plastic bottles have burst and splintered on the sidewalk like weird, angry sunsets. Red and blue capsules wounded, their guts spilling out in white powder and granules...I have found the bulging leather wallet. Now the man falls in a sitting position to the ground, sensing the end, clutching at the pain in his stomach as if he can remove it.

 

“Run!” Titus yelps.

 

Faster and faster now. Still the music-less soundtrack—only this time it’s accompanied by the hollow, reverberating thud in my ears. Somewhere, a part of my consciousness dislocates and watches me detachedly from afar. I’m fascinated by how my body knows where to turn even though my mind doesn’t. This way, that way. Smoothly, seamlessly.

 

Why, in that moment, do I think of her? The one in my English class—Michelle, with the short, light brown hair. Just like the chick in the Hemingway book. She’d look great in that weird style of dress they wore back then, the cropped hair, no tits (though hers were pretty big and beautiful), the boyish, sexless dresses. The way that chick had thrown herself at the narrator, rubbed against him in back of all those damned taxis they took across the moonlit city. I had been hard under my desk, thinking about it and thinking about Michelle.

 

Later that day, I’d had to go with my dad to the supermarket to buy formula for my infant brother. We couldn’t buy the expensive kind. We had to buy the generic with food stamps.

 

I had tried, fumbling and ashamed, to tell my dad about Michelle.

 

“Have you fucked her yet?” my dad asked loudly in the aisle.

 

“No, Dad.” I was hot with rage and embarrassment. But I couldn’t tell my dad I was still a virgin. The conversation had been dropped until my dad noticed a young girl, no more than ten years old, in the canned vegetable aisle.

 

“Hey, son,” he’d asked with a leering grin, pointing to the girl. “How ‘bout that one?”

 

“I dunno, Dad. She looks pretty young.”

 

My dad laughed, a rough, gravelly sound. “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed, right? Well, she’s probably a little bitch, anyways. They all are, son.”

 

We’d said no more after that.

 

Back at the apartment, the door is thankfully unlocked. Ron and Walker are waiting for us. The air is permeated with the stench of weed, beer, and cheap incense.

 

“You got it?” Ron asks.

 

Titus snatches the wallet from my hand, lumbers to the couch and slaps it in Ron’s hand. The two begin talking, but I can’t make anything out. I mumble something incoherent, go to the bathroom, and lock myself in.

 

Harsh spasms of vomiting shake and rattle their way through my body. I sink into the corner, my tall, too-big body wedged between the toilet and the bathtub’s mildewed edge. I huddle my knees together and wrap my lanky arms around my legs and let my face fall into the darkness of denim. It’s like a cave fragranced by the smoky, vomitous stench of my breath.

 

I cry softly, like a young child, like when first my grampa died, then my gramma. The doctors had said it was the emphysema that finally did her in from the smoking, but she’d been fine before. I knew, after Grampa was gone, she’d had no reason left to go on. Nobody to make her famous sweet cornbread for or yell at for forgetting to turn off the TV.

 

My body shakes with the force of my sobs. I think I can hear music from the living room, a harsh voice raised in angry rap. Somebody knocks on the door but I tell them to go away, everything’s okay, I’m fine...

 

I’m hungry. Hungrier than I’ve ever felt in my life. I want my gramma’s cornbread and milk. I can taste the cold, white milk, the golden, sweet, fluffy cornbread, light as air.

 

Hours seem to slip by. Finally, I hear the front door of the apartment burst open. They’ve found us, as I hoped they would. A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. I wonder if they serve cornbread in prison.

 

Seconds later, a cop busts through the frail bathroom door, and I look up with a tear-streaked, swollen face, already resigned, hungry, and praying for the worst.