Blood Brothers (16 page)

“Didn’t know pigs were deaf. Did you,
Nita?”

Anita Cole sat still in her seat. Her eyes
looked from her pitiful son to her husband. It was a simple
question of survival. Michael knew she wanted to stick up for him,
but she had to be concerned for her own safety, too. You see,
Michael wasn’t the only family member that Martin raised a fist
to.

Apparently Anita’s silence was acceptable
while Mike’s was not.

“You eat twice as much as a grown man. And
you got titties bigger than your mamma’s. Hell, kid, ‘fore long
we’re gonna have to start dressing you in fucking tents instead of
clothes, you fat shit.”

Michael Cole thought he already had skin as
thick as an alligator, or even a used car salesman, but words still
hurt. They cut, and they poked, and they stabbed.

He willed himself not to cry.

“Nita, grab me another beer.”

Obediently, Mike’s mother rose from her seat
and padded over to the fridge, the cloud of smoke from her Camel
cigarette traveling with her. Both Martin and Anita smoked, Michael
figured it was a good thing he didn’t have asthma or anything.

“Why don’t you go outside or something? Go
play in the street. Burn off some of them calories.”

“It’s cold outdoors, Dad.”

“Cold?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“What difference does that make?” To Anita,
“Cold, he says. Sheesh. Big baby.” He took his beer from her. Pabst
Blue Ribbon. He popped the top and took a good swig before
continuing. “You got so much blubber on you, boy, a little cold
won’t hurt you none.”

Martin was tall, a little over six feet. To a
man like him a string bean would be overweight. He looked like skin
stretched tightly over a skeleton. Anita, on the other hand, while
certainly not fat, had that home grown corn-fed look about her.
Martin had long greasy hair, Anita, short curly locks close to her
face. Martin preferred work pants and flannel, Anita, sun dresses
in the summer and jeans in the winter.

“Martin,” Anita finally said, having
enough.

“What, woman. Hell, look at the fucking kid.
The damn floor’ll fall in if he eats desert.”

Now, Michael finally had enough, too. Instead
of voice his rebellion, he simply stood and pushed his plate
away.

“Bet that took a lot of effort, porky.”

If looks could kill, Martin Cole would have
been a dead man. Still, Michael held his tongue. Some things just
weren’t worth it.

“Where you going?”

“To my room.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Just let him go, Martin,” Anita said.

“Like hell.”

Michael continued walking. From the small
kitchen into the small living room.

“Get back here, boy! I didn’t excuse
you.”

Michael placed one foot in front of the
other. His stomach bubbled as his father’s voice grew louder and
rougher.

“Didn’t you hear me, shit-for-brains?”

“Martin.”

Martin Cole turned on his wife. He jumped up
from the table and backhanded her. The slap rang out in the tiny
space. Anita spun, her hand instinctively rising to her face. She
sat down and said nothing else.

“I said, come back here.”

Though Michael had not seen the slap, he’d
heard it well enough. Too good, actually. He knew what was coming.
He’d been here before. Familiarity, however, did not breed
confidence. It was a big thing for him to ignore his father. He was
really quite proud of himself. That didn’t last long.

When the blow came to the back of his head,
Michael was stunned, to say the least. He hadn’t heard his father
come up behind him and he wasn’t expecting it. Well, truthfully he
was, just not all this soon. Although the elder Cole was as skinny
as a rail, he was larger and stronger than his son and his punch
packed quite a wallop, as they say.

Michael crashed to the ground and rolled over
on his head, landing on his back. The floor of the trailer shook so
hard the walls vibrated.

“You little fucker,” Martin said, towering
over him like a demon from a nightmare. “It’s high time you learned
you some manners. And I’m just the fella to teach ‘em to you.”

Martin reached out and snatched his son up by
the collar of his T-shirt. Not to help him to his feet, dust him
off and send him on his merry way. Oh no. But to pummel him again,
this time with leverage working with him. Martin only hit his son
twice: once in the gut and the other, in the forehead. Each jab was
like the rise and fall of a piston in a well-oiled engine. The
impact was like a heavy boulder falling from on high. Crushing.

Martin, having flushed the aggression out of
his system like flushing a toilet, was now free of such Neanderthal
cravings. He said nothing to his son. He just plopped down in his
worn, army green recliner and picked the newspaper up from the side
pocket.

Michael half-walked, half-limped his way out
of the room. Falling back on his bed, he couldn’t hold back the
flood of tears he’d kept dammed up for so long in front of his old
man. Even under the tremendous pressure of being teased and yelled
at, even when he’d heard his dad hit his mom and could do nothing
to help her, and even when his father had beat on him, he’d never
let that bastard see him cry. He realized it must be sick in some
psychological way, but he got some small pleasure from denying his
father the tears he so badly wanted to see. But here, in the
relative safety of his room, he let them flow freely.

When the tears dried and the explosion of
pain was no more than smoldering discomfort, he got to his feet and
left his bedroom. Walking lightly down the hall, in the opposite
direction of the kitchen and the living room where, from the sound,
his parents were, he eased open the back door and crept out.

Night had fallen, but it was still warm on
this late summer evening. Stars shone in the sky against a backdrop
of pure velvet. Somewhere, grass had been freshly cut and the smell
of it intoxicated Mike, gave him a bit more strength. He used that
strength to take long, purposeful strides away from his home. He
wanted to be out of view before anyone inside realized he was gone.
Paying for sneaking out was one thing, but having to do so before
he had time to clear his head—the whole purpose for leaving in the
first place—was not what he wanted.

It took him only few seconds to lose himself
in the maze of trailers. And what old trailers they were—ancient.
Not like the new, fancy ones down at the dealer’s lot. No, these
had seen better days when Lincoln was president.

At the perimeter of the mobile home court,
Michael located the loose board in the ramshackle fencing and
pushed his way through. He found himself in the back lot of a run
of stores: Barry’s Trading Post and Carver’s Meats.

No hanging bulbs spilled any light, but
Michael knew his way well enough to make it through without
crippling himself on the scattered debris. And the crap behind a
pawn shop and butcher shop was not something you’d want to run
into. Michael knew that firsthand. Walking dead-on into a rancid
pile of the butcher’s garbage would ruin anyone’s appetite, even
Mike’s, for a few days.

From the back lot, he passed over the
seldom-traveled Maple Street—this always made Mike chuckle since
there were no maples on either side of the street. This brought him
to the parking lot of the coin-op Laundromat. He pushed his way
inside, earning a few stares from the adults waiting on their
tumbling loads in the huge washers and driers.

Michael noticed Mr. Rhynes, a neighbor,
flipping through the pages of a comic book. Rhynes was an older
man, graying at the temples, but Michael suspected he was a few
cards short of a full deck. Not just because he read comics. In his
opinion there was nothing wrong with that. No, it was more his
habit of walking around the common area of the trailer park in
nothing but his big, once-white boxer shorts, whistling the theme
to The Lone Ranger. Kind of funny when you thought about it.

A few seats down from Mr. Rhynes was Becky
Wilhite, a mousy looking woman who could have been pretty if
something hadn’t happened during conception or birth that left her
looking more like a rodent than a real woman. She was friendly,
though, and smiled a little at Michael as he walked past.

Back past a couple rows of molded plastic
chairs the color of rancid orange juice was the local war hero,
Johnny Checkett. Johnny had enlisted with the Air Force before he
could be drafted by the Army and went off to fight in a little war
called Vietnam. Michael doubted he’d ever actually seen combat, but
he sure liked to make people think so. Now in his thirties with a
growing beer belly and eyes that never seemed to focus on anything,
he lived off a welfare check because he insisted he’d been wounded
in the war but that the bureaucrats wouldn’t admit to it and wanted
him to go on working for a living. Saying that Johnny was bitter
was an understatement. Since he didn’t have enough courage to
really show his dark side to adults, he was a fearsome dread for a
child to encounter alone. While never daring to put his hands on
any kid—at least not yet, or not that Michael had heard about—he
had many other tools in his toolbox for making you rue the day you
ran into him. Thankfully, he didn’t take notice as Michael strolled
by him, continuing his journey to the back of the building.

Michael found himself at the extreme rear of
the big room housing the industrial-sized equipment. There were
three doors. One, a unisex restroom. The second, an office, secured
with a mean looking padlock. The third was a storage room with a
simple knob lock. Pulling a key from his pocket, he slid it into
the keyhole and turned. Now unlocked, the door opened easily for
him and Michael stepped in.

He flipped the switch on the side wall and
the small room burst into light. Shelves holding spare parts and
used ones that no longer worked, a dozen or so cardboard boxes
stacked three high in four rows hugged the wall to his left. A
couple of plastic chairs the same putrid orange color as those out
front sat in pieces in center of the room.

Scooting a seat up to the cardboard boxes,
Michael started digging through the contents of the one marked JUNK
PAPER. What he pulled out was not, in fact, junk paper but a glossy
magazine filled with photographs of pretty girls in various states
of undress.

Rudy White had introduced young Michael to
the world of Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse early last summer when
Michael took to walking the streets during both day and night to
keep himself out of the house when his parents were home—which
seemed like way too much. Seeing old Rudy outside the Suds n’ Duds
on his outings, he, despite his nearly handicapping shyness,
eventually began talking to the white-haired man. A good-hearted
fellow whose wife had passed a few years back—the Big C Rudy called
it—he was desperate for someone to talk to. He had to be to strike
up a friendship with twelve year old Mike.

But what really solidified the relationship
between the young boy and old man was Rudy’s stash of nudie books.
Not that Michael abused the friendship just to catch a glimpse of
what girls really had under their clothes. Really, it all came down
to trust. Rudy could get into a heck of a lot of trouble if anyone
found out he was letting a young whipper-snapper peer through his
back issues. Even though the country wasn’t in such an uproar about
nudie magazines at that time, there were still some groups out
there. Michael deeply appreciated the trust Rudy placed in him and
when he was presented with his very own key to the storage room he
took the responsibility seriously.

Now, this dark musty little concrete room was
his sanctuary, his retreat when life got too far out of control,
which it often did. Even if there were no magazines, Michael would
seek this place out when he needed to be safe, needed to hide
away.

Deciding on a particularly thumbed-through
issue of Hustler, Michael sat back and spread the thin book.

When, at last, he was finished with the book,
having not only worn his eyeballs out on the pictures but the joke
section as well, he replaced the book as inconspicuously as he’d
found it. Making sure he’d left the room just as it had been before
his visit—a bit of courtesy to Rudy who’d be in first thing in the
morning to go about his business maintaining the machines—he
stepped out.

The Laundromat was dark.

Odd.

Michael wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d
spent in the room, but he was sure it hadn’t been that long.
Besides, he could never remember the place being dark before.
Always, the huge plate glass windows at the front bathed the front
walkway with creamy golden buttered light from sundown to sun-up.
Twenty-four/seven clothes could be laundered inside the Suds n’
Duds. Everything from watermelon juice from a summer picnic to
eggnog spilled at Christmas party could be remedied within this
fine shop.

Tickles of fear, of the unknown, began to
work at the tender flesh of Michael’s neck. Silence greeted him as
he moved into the expansive blackness behind the building. There
was no swooshing of washers, no whirring of dryers. While the
lights were burning bright in the street on the other side of the
building, they were too weak to help him this far away.

“Hey, Mikey. What’ya been doing back there,
pulling your pudding or choking your chicken?” Jerry’s voice.

“Or was you fingering yourself?” That was
Bobby.

His dire situation was not lost on Mike. Here
were his two evil arch-enemies. Two very mean, very hateful boys
with too many muscles and not enough brains to control them. Alone
with them, in this place, at this time of night, Michael had no
hope of a parent, teacher, or even a perfect stranger
interrupting.

The two boys were mere shadows, but their
lack of substance made them no less menacing.