Creamy Bullets (13 page)

The next morning, Jodi came over to ask us if we could “possibly be quieter when it’s late at night.” I didn’t know if she was joking or being angry. My wife laughed and told her that we were going to ask her to do the same. Jodi glared at me in disgust. My wife stopped laughing. We all stood there, thinking. I went to call James.

James arrived with a canister of ant poison and a tool belt, heavy with blunt objects. “There’s a way we can get in over here so that it doesn’t actually damage your walls.” He led Jodi, my wife and myself to a place in the basement. “Sometimes we get varmints down here,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if he was totally serious about that. I thought
varmints
was a made-up word that country people used.

“Whatever it is might be more active at night because that’s when it gets quiet. It might be sleeping right now,” said James. “We’ve had raccoons before. So it’s possible that I may have to call someone else down here if that’s what it is.” He jostled open a small door that I guessed would place him somewhere under our bedroom. He turned on a large flashlight. “Stand back on that bench,” he said, pointing behind us. We scuttled back and stood on the bench. The basement was full of other tenants’ storage and some maintenance equipment like saws and pipes and paintbrushes. Someone had a warped pool table leaning against one wall, next to a taped-up poster of some teen girl singer I didn’t recognize.

James stuck his head and shoulders into the square space. It looked like it was big enough for one person to crawl into if needed. I wondered if anyone ever stuck a dead body in there. James poked his head back out and coughed. He wiped at his eyes and spit on the ground. “Shit,” he said, and stuck his head back in.

We all watched him and started to get a little concerned. “Is it safe to do that?” my wife called out. James stayed there, emerged a few seconds, then braced his foot on the wall and pushed himself up further. All we could see now was his left leg, dangling out of the dark hole. A brief rustling sound was heard. After a minute, he lowered himself back out.

“It’s right where you said it was,” he said to all of us. He stood there like he was trying to think of something else to do. “Come look,” he said, pointing just at me.

I walked over and scanned his eyes for clues as to what it might be. “It’s okay,” he said. “She’s a sound sleeper.”

I looked back to my wife and saw a look of jealousy, as if she wanted to be the one looking in this darkness and between the walls. She turned to Jodi and said, “Men are so stupid.” I could tell she was just trying to provoke.

“Let the men get dirty,” Jodi answered. “They all like to get dirty.”

I stuck the flashlight in ahead of me. It didn’t seem like dirt up there really. More like a rough cement gutter, leading to tufts of sharp pink insulation. There was more room between the walls than I expected. After climbing a little further up I saw some movement. At first I thought it was a tail but quickly realized it was a trail of ants, an inch-thick army leading into a larger opening. I felt my feet searching for leverage and pushing against the wall under me. I tested a pipe for its temperature before grabbing it and pulling myself all the way up to see into the opening.

My eyes loomed wide and unblinking on the scene. There were dusty ant carcasses all over the place, males with wings torn half-off and heads smashed gruesomely. In the middle of all this was the queen ant, the egg layer. She was about the size of my hand, sprawled—as much as you can imagine an ant being sprawled—on a mound of sandy-looking dirt. She didn’t move or even flinch, even with a couple of males copulating with her huge thorax. One winged male fluttered softly around her head, also eager to mate.

I began to smell a brew of scents that arose from the busy colony. First lemons, then the musty smell of cheddar popcorn, then burned toast.

Some of the ants were fighting to get to the queen, crawling over others until they too could clutch her thorax for a few valuable seconds.

“Is everything okay?” I heard someone ask. Either Jodi or my wife.

The queen ant stirred a little then and she began twitching. It looked as if a number of eggs were expelling from her abdomen and oozing forth. Many of the males mated with her aggressively even as she did this. Here is where I noticed the knocking sound. It banged and echoed in the space where I was. I tried to cover my ears and noticed the queen leaning forward with her head pointed at me. I thought I could make out the eyes, golden green. It looked as if she were bracing herself or thinking. I stared back weakly, and for the first time, felt like an intruder.

Krystal

T
he number four most requested song began playing. Conner had three and a half minutes to talk on the phone. “When does she have to go back to the doctor?” he asked her.

“Next Monday,” she said. “That’ll be your day. Plus I’ll need your half for daycare. So you owe me three hundred and sixty dollars now.”

“Okay. I’ll get it to you by next Wednesday when I drop her off.”

Conner pressed the button on the switchboard and his ex-wife’s voice ceased in his head. He turned up the sound in his headphones and tried to nudge himself into some sort of rhythm that would shake his mind from his troubles. He often found that if he let his body swell with the music while he worked his night shift, the problems in his head subsided or at least were clouded over momentarily. He called the weather line quickly to get the current numbers before the song faded out. He popped in the weather bumper and hit the button that triggered its dramatic intro: Portland-Portland w-w-w-w-weather!

“Fifty-eight degrees on a sweet Thursday night. Expect it to be a little cooler tomorrow, with a high around sixty-six. You keep asking for it, we keep giving it to ya’, here’s the newest from Ricky Martin; the third-most requested on the Killer, KKLR.” He had three minutes and sixteen seconds. He answered phones.

Conner wasn’t surprised anymore about the immaturity of his audience. They had thin, frail voices like rubber squeak toys and could barely pronounce the word “request”. Once in a while he would get into these awkward conversations with lonely teen-age girls. These were his radio groupies.

They were girls barricaded in their houses by their controlling parents. Girls who found it easier to talk on the phone or send e-mails rather than talk with people face-to-face, body-to-body, insecurity to insecurity.

“You’ve called the Killer.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. Whaddaya want to hear?”

“What?”

“What song would you like me to play?”

“No. I mean, I just wanted to ask you if you knew something.”

“Okay. What is it?”

“Is Ricky Martin gay?” The voice belonged to what sounded like a 13-year-old white girl trying to sound black. Conner turned to look at one of the posters of the Latin pop star that hung throughout the station.

“Well, he does wear leather pants that lace up in the front. That’s serves as a clue for me.”

“So, will you guys stop playing him if he turns out gay?”

“No. I don’t think that’s a factor anymore. Ever hear of Elton John?”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

“Are you gay or something?”

“No. Sorry to let you down.”

“My dad says that Conner Cavanaugh sounds like a gay name.”

Conner sucked a strawfull of Mountain Dew in his mouth and let the taste seep into his tongue. “I think some uncles on my dad’s side of the family leaned that way but their name was Litswick.”

“Huh?”

“Did you want to request a song?”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Her sentence seemed to be punctuated by a drag on a cigarette.

“No. I’m too young,” he lied.

“Yeah, right. I bet you’re like forty years old and married.”

Conner twisted in his chair, putting things that looked like old eight-track tapes into the machines around him. He pushed a button and an electronic voice said, “Portland’s non-stop music station. The K-K-K-K-Killer.” The second most requested song started with no music, just vocals. Some country music singer doing the crossover into pop.

“I hate this guy,” the girl on the phone said. “All those country music people are racists.”

Conner thought about responding to that but learned from previous experience that it was useless to argue with a teen-ager. “So, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Why, are you going to ask me out on a date?”

“No. No, no, no.”

“You’re not going to ask me out?”

Conner tried to think of something clever to say, something that would leave that option open. She did sound kind of cute. He let out a short noncommittal huff.

“Well, my name is Kristy, but my friends call me Krystal.”

Conner wrote her name down so he wouldn’t forget. He thought of Crystal Methamphetamine. He had never done it before because he thought it would probably make him delusional. He saw television news shows that talked about people who thought they could fly or people who could be hit in the face with a hammer and not feel it because they were on the drug.
Did he just see that on TV
? Maybe he saw that when he was a kid. They were more freaked out by drugs when he was a kid.

“So, where are you calling from, Krystal?”

“Southeast. Out by Oregon City. Where do you live?” It had come out so quick, so smooth that it caught Conner a little by surprise. Was she making a move?

“I live out that way too. In that area around 82nd. All those used cars.”

“You ever go to that paintball place? The Battlezone?” she asked him.

Paintball. He’d thought about playing it when it first became popular but none of his friends wanted to. Who played paintball anyhow? Teenagers? War veterans? Jocks? Lawyers? Was it cool?

He cleared his throat. “I haven’t been there before. Do you go there?” he asked.

“I’ve only done it once but I go there sometimes with my brother and just play the video games.”

“Only played once, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s such a jock thing. These guys were shooting at my tits.”

“Nice.” He immediately felt weird saying that. He realized he had to get ready for the next song. “Hey, hold on a second, okay?”

He pushed a button and brought up his mic volume. “Here it is. For the third night in a row. The most requested song on the Killer.” A glassy computerized drumbeat pounded and a pair of rappers began to rap so fast over the beat it almost made the need for it unnecessary. Conner could barely understand every other word.
Slang slang slang beep/slang slang slang beep beep
…

“I love this song,” Krystal said when he punched her line back up.

“Yeah, well. There’s actually a couple of other songs on their CD that are a lot better,” he said.
Was he sounding too snobby for her?
“I mean, yeah. It’s a cool song though.”

It sounded like she laughed a little, or sighed, or yawned. “Do you want to meet me at the Battlezone this weekend? I mean, I’m going to be there, like, with a couple of friends and stuff. They would think it’s cool to meet you.”

He lingered near the change machine with a couple of crisp dollar bills in his hand. It was just past two in the afternoon and the place was crowded. He had no idea how he would tell her from the others. He saw a couple of girls that he wished were her but knew they probably weren’t. She told him that she looked a little like Julia Roberts but she was half-Mexican and not as skinny. That could have meant anything. Sometimes he looked in the mirror and saw Sean Penn looking back. Or Sean Penn’s chubby brother. It depended on his mood.

One girl came up and asked him for a cigarette. He didn’t want to give her one but he did anyway, just to try and talk with her. “Do you know a girl named Krystal?” he asked nervously.

“Oh sure,” she said, snapping her gum and lighting her free Marlboro. “Go over to the bathroom and pretend you’re watching the battles on the TVs.”

He was going to question her but he already felt stupid. He was probably getting involved with another high school freshman. He watched the girl as she weaved through the kids, supposedly to find Krystal.

There was a big monitor near the bathrooms so anyone could watch some of the paintball battles going on in the other part of the huge old building. The screen was divided into four sections and he watched a variety of wild-eyed cavemen slumping through and sometimes little kids as well, paint splattered and limping with grimaces on their faces. He looked for any females doing battle but had no luck. He painfully felt the need to see a woman with paint splattered on her chest.

“You want Crystal?” a young man next to him said. Conner looked over and saw a tall teenager wearing a mesh t-shirt and baggy jeans. The young man had a buzz-cut and his hands dug so deep and recklessly in his pants that Conner could see his pubic hair poking out, red and gangly. Pushed down any further, the kid’s dick would come flopping out.

“I was just supposed to meet Krystal and some of her friends,” Conner informed him.

“Friends, huh?”

“Yeah, um…do you know the Krystal I’m talking about? Looks kind of like Julia Roberts but a little heavier. Part Mexican.”

The teenager laughed viciously, his pants almost falling. “C’mon,” he said, and held the door to the bathroom open. No one else was in there. “Here,” he said undoing the loose belt on his pants. “This ain’t really Mexican but that shit is so bogus anyway. If you want some real imported stuff you should try Canadian.” Conner watched as the teenager pulled a bag of powder from the inside of his pants. In the dull bathroom light it looked gray and sand-like. Conner felt his arm move without him. He grabbed the bag and sensed its weight.

The door swung open and an older man lunged in. He was wearing a white battle suit and it was covered in orange and green paint. “God damn, they got me in the ear! Fucking hearing aid’s all fucked. God damn!” The teenager grabbed the two dollar bills out of Conner’s hand and darted from the bathroom before the door even closed behind the wounded man. Conner stuffed the bag in his jacket and headed out as well. “Hey! A little help, God damn you! Can I get a little help?!” the splattered man called out.

Conner made his way back to the change machine and looked for the girl he had given the cigarette to. He wasn’t quite sure what just happened in the bathroom. Was he daydreaming? He thought that since he had to pay so much attention to everything at work that sometimes he spaced off when he was out doing other things. Once, he took his daughter to the park to play and as he sat on a bench, his little girl, then three years old, wandered too close to the skateboarders and accidentally got hit. Her arm was broken and she had to wear a tiny pink cast for three weeks.

“Hey, are you the DJ?”

Conner looked at a young girl whose resemblance to Julia Roberts was nowhere to be found. “Hey. Krystal?” he asked.

“I can’t deal with this place anymore. Let’s go for a ride or something.”

As they walked outside, Conner felt a nervous surge heating up around his armpits. She looked like she could be eighteen and she was actually pretty attractive. Like Roseanne Arquette in
Desperately Seeking Susan
. He felt a pliable energy around her, as if he could eventually have his way with her, sooner not later.

Conner held the door of his Rabbit open for her. He started it up and the squall of an old hard rock song slipped out of his stereo until he turned it down. As they were pulling out of the parking lot, the tall teenage boy who had given him the bag in the bathroom came rushing up to his window. “Hey buddy. Hey. Hey!” Conner pulled out into traffic and tried to pretend he didn’t know the kid. He turned up the radio again but could still hear the yelling. “You only gave me two dollars!”

“I know who that guy was,” she kept saying as they drove. Conner was going to take her to his apartment but he was driving in a strange roundabout pattern, hoping she would not remember how to get to his place. She kept jabbing him and smiling weirdly, like they’d known each other for a long time and she knew when he was hiding something. “I know you got something from that guy,” she said.

“I don’t know who that guy is. You tell me,” Conner finally said, trying not to smile too much.

“Let me see what you got from him.”

Conner pulled out the bag and placed it gently in her lap. He tried to gauge her reaction. “Pull over right here,” she said anxiously. They pulled up next to a closed barbershop. “This looks like the same stuff I had last weekend. Good fuckin’ shit.”

Conner didn’t want to ask what it was. He was cool enough to have it, wasn’t he? Why blow his cover now? He thought for a few seconds that maybe he should become more of a druggie. Especially if it meant getting to mess around with Arquette-look-a-likes and watching old army vets have their hearing aids blasted out by paintball psychos. She pulled out a popsicle stick and wet it with her tongue. She brought up a perfect mountain-shaped lump and snorted it up her flexing nostril. She licked the rest off and passed the stick to him.
What happened to using straws?