JOSH

 

Having showered and dressed at my place, I ran over to the other side of campus where Charlie’s block resided. I strolled through the place like I’d lived there my whole life, all the guys saying hello and the girls smiling mischievously at the sight of Josh Kelly in their block. When I got to Charlie’s room, I knocked hard, the sound echoing through the corridor. I immediately heard the kid shuffling around inside, and it wasn’t long before the weedy little guy was standing—or cowering more precisely—in front of me at his open door.

“Hey,” he said weakly, both arms wrapped around his little frame as if he were cuddling himself.

“Hey!?” I replied indignantly, raising my eyebrows. “Is that all you got?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. I hear you’re not up for tonight. Is that true?”

“I never said I wasn’t up for it, I just said that I wasn’t feeling too good.”

“You ill or something?”

“Not exactly. I just…”

But I didn’t let the kid finish and simply snapped, “You gonna keep me waiting in the hallway?”

“No,” was his meager answer and he showed me into his room where I immediately took the first seat I found, positioning myself in the center of the place and ushering Charlie to sit down on the bed opposite.

He closed the door and dragged himself over to the bed. While he seated himself, I took a smoke out and lit it. Then I leaned back in the chair and spread my legs out like I owned everything in that room, including old Charlie himself. I spent a good minute enjoying my smoke, blowing the pale blue fumes up into the air and filling the room. At the same time, Charlie sat there all hunched forward, his hands still gripping his ribcage while his frightened eyes studied me.

“You don’t smoke?” I asked as I blew more of the stuff into the air, watching it float up to the ceiling and hang like cobwebs.

“No,” he whispered.

“And neither does your roommate?”

“No.”

Turning my eyes sharply on Charlie, I observed that he was shaking and had started to bite his nails, abandoning one side of his ribs for the moment.

“Then why the fuck,” I said firmly to him, my piercing eyes glaring through him, “do you just sit there and let some prick smoke in your room?”

“I don’t know,” he answered in a shaky voice.

“It’s because you’re scared of me,” I immediately put to him. “You let me do as I please, seat myself where I want, treat your room like shit because of fear.”

I abruptly made a point of illustrating this last statement by flicking my cigarette end into the corner of the room, the thing exploding into orange sparks. Charlie instantly went scuttling after it, found it underneath his roommate’s desk and ran it into the bathroom before throwing it down the toilet.

All the time, I simply sat there watching him with a disinterested air. When he came back and sat down once more, I shook my head at him.

“Do you know what the worst of it is?” I asked. Without letting him answer, I went on. “It’s that you needn’t be afraid of me, Charlie.” My expression softened as I said this and I leaned forward, so that our eyes were level, his own instantly recoiling from my look and facing away. “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” I continued. “If you had told me to put the smoke out the moment I lit it, I would have. You simply needed to say so, but you just sat there gazing at me like a fucking mook. Then, when I flicked it in the corner, you should’ve told me to clean it up—you should have demanded it—but instead you went scurrying after it. The point is, you didn’t need to.”

“You would’ve told me to fuck off.”

“Then you would have told me harder.”

“But then what? You hit me?”

“Have I ever hit you before?”

“No, but…”

“And I never would,” I broke in.

“But you’ve hit people in the past.”

“When?”

“Billy Randall saw you,” he claimed. “You were with Kane and Terry fighting some guys in the street out in the city. And they say that you were picked up by the police lots of times for fighting and that your father always gets you off.”

“Oh that! That’s just bar brawling. Guys letting off steam. I never throw the first punch and I don’t believe in using violence to get what I want. I just get a little messed up now and then and have a fight with some barfly piece of shit.”

“But you could hit me,” he suggested.

“The point is I wouldn’t. And the bigger point is that it isn’t the talking that your fists do that makes you a man, it’s the way your mouth does it, the way your eyes do it and the way your body and clothes do it. Take a look at me,” I offered, casting a hand over myself. “What’d you see?”

“I don’t know,” the kid let out in bewilderment.

“Well, I’ll answer for you. I’m wearing Oxford blue Armani suit pants tailored personally for me, cut off just above the ankle the way I like them. On my rippled torso I’m wearing a tight white v-neck t-shirt of thin cotton that displays the top of my beautiful tanned chest, its sleeves wrapped tightly around my sinewed biceps. On my body I’m wearing the scent of Gucci for Men, not too much, but just enough to mix with my own musky aroma. Essentially, I look and smell the way men are supposed to; the way that every human on this planet is programmed to believe a man should look and smell. In my appearance and my scent I am triggering perceptions in their subconscious which suggest to them that I am power.” I held this last word for a second or two and gazed into his eyes. “Then we come to what you’re wearing,” I put to him in a blank tone. “A cum-stained Pink Floyd t-shirt and gym pants that if I’m not mistaken have a particular scent of urine hanging around them.”

Charlie went red from embarrassment. But this was just a joke, and I didn’t really smell piss, I was just trying to make a point.

“Then we come to my presence within this humble abode of yours,” I began once more. “Look at the way I wear this chair.” This made the kid smile and a spark of joy emerged in me at its appearance on his face. But I didn’t revel in it; I wasn’t here to make him laugh, and merely went on. “My legs are wide open and I lean back like I could cover the whole of this little cupboard of a room with my body.” I paused, giving my words time to take effect. “Then there’s you,” I resumed in a dull tone. “You’re all hunched forward and gripping your ribs with one hand and chewing the fingers off of the other.”

Again the kid gave the whisper of a grin.

“I’m just real nervous is all,” he said in his whiny tone, his voice barely audible.

“And that’s another thing. You’re fucking voice. When I speak I mean to be heard, whereas you hope to Christ that no one’s heard you. You’re like a fucking mouse. How tall are you?”

“I’m five-ten.”

“Five-ten. Well, I’m only three inches taller than you and yet I look as if I were a mountain standing next to a molehill. Look at the way you’re all hunched up like a cornered spider. You gotta start making yourself bigger so that the whole world sees Charlie Hodge walking down the corridor.”

I’d raised my voice at this last part, stretching my arms out to give emphasis to my words of encouragement. In the meantime, the kid had grinned widely, giggling and losing his anxiety for a moment.

“See,” I said, pointing my finger at him, “you like the idea of being big old Charlie Hodge. I see it in your eyes. You got balls in you. It’s just that they’re tucked up inside and we gotta pull 'em out.”

Charlie wriggled on the bed a little, his laughter increasing, an immutable beam draped across his lips.

“And the first step of that,” I said, my voice becoming more serious, “is taking those old bastards for all they got tonight at their little snap game.”

“But I hear your stories of them,” Charlie whimpered, his face becoming worried again, his mirth dealt a sudden death. “They sound like lunatics!”

“Ah! Me and the guys only bullshit about that. They’re as slimy as a sweaty eel, but they ain’t that bad.”

“But you guys were talking about them telling stories about killing people.”

“They were doing what we were doing when we told you those stories—they were bullshitting to scare us. Charlie, I wouldn’t take you into something that was going to be dangerous.”

“But it will be, though.”

“Why?”

“If they catch that I’m card counting.”

“But they won’t,” I insisted. “Those old bastards drink like they can’t wait for death, so they’ll be too wasted to ever spot it. It’s not like Vegas in there, there’s no cameras, just this old woman with one eye that deals, a couple of heavies at the door ready for the alarm to be triggered, and the drunk old farts at the table. No one’s gonna spot you.”

“But they’ll see that I’m scared,” Charlie put to me, his earlier smile long evaporated.

“They’ll expect you to be scared. The first time Terry almost shit his pants, but he was okay. And Kane too—you know, college quarterback Kane—he sat trembling a full ten minutes when we first got inside. Scared is okay, they’ll expect you to be scared. What we don’t need, however, is you being so scared you faint the moment we get in there.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” he reassured me.

But I wasn’t convinced.

“And what we really don’t need is you giving your skill away,” I said.

“But that’s what I’m real afraid of: that they’ll guess.”

“Look,” I sighed, rubbing both my temples with my fingers and closing my eyes, “we’ve been through this. You lose a few hands every now and then to knock them off the scent. It’s that easy, just lose every so often until we get them toward the end.”

“But if they find out,” came Charlie again, making me angry.

I held it down, though, and plowed on:

“That’s not what you should be focusing on, Charlie. You should be focusing on how you’re gonna feel walking outta that place with your pockets filled with their money. Last month they hustled us and now we’ll hustle them. They were sloppy; it was a typical gang-up routine that looked to consolidate their own pots while slowly absorbing mine and Terry’s. But tonight we’re gonna hit them not with bullying or ganging up, but with the power of your beautiful mind, Charlie.”

The kid’s eyes brightened up, but he still didn’t seem to be buying it completely.

“Charlie, it’s as easy as this,” I told him. “Last month they took forty grand off of two of the main men here at college—me and Terry. Even we got laughed at a little, and fuck it, we deserved it. We got run outta town. But”—here I moved onto the bed, right beside Charlie, and put my arm around him, beckoning him to see things from my point of view—“imagine if this time tomorrow everyone at this college knows that it was Charlie Hodge who went back there for his Alpha House buddies and won back every penny, as well as taking all of those gangsters’ money. You’ll be a king, Charlie Hodge. A fucking king.”

I watched as the kid showed off his yellow teeth, his cheeks rising up to his eyelids. With this last thought in mind, Charlie nodded his head, stood up sharply, throwing my hand off of his shoulder, and announced, “Let’s fucking do it!”

“That’s the spirit, Charlie,” I said, clapping my hands, happy that everything was back on track.

Once again, I had gotten my own way and I felt pleased with myself. In truth, I didn’t give a fuck about Charlie or his prestige at the college. All I cared about was getting my revenge on those old toads around that table.

The only thing Charlie was to me was my in. Nothing else.