Killing Time in Crystal City (5 page)

GOOD IDEA

M
y uncle's no-guests rule strikes me as a pretty decent cruel-funny joke since at this very moment the only active member of my invite-a-pal-over list would be him.

So it's natural enough that I am headlong on the path to rectifying the friendlessness situation. I feel the strangeness of the key in my pocket, withdraw it, then pause staring at the dangling brass beauty hanging off the end of the moose-head key chain. This constitutes one of the simple pleasures I plan to enjoy in the new life I'm composing for myself. It had been six months since I had had my own key, to let myself in if I was curfew transgressive. Not only do I not now ever have to sleep on the porch, I can come home to my own, empty place. Mine.

As I stride the street I have a shiny black Montblanc in one pocket, a key in another, and something of a waddle to my walk because dammit, I ate every last bit of Syd's beautiful beast breakfast and it feels like it will be with me for some time. Because Kiki Vandeweghe doesn't skip the most important meal of the most important day.

Crystal City indeed.

I passed through a good bit of the city when I bumbled around trying to find Syd's place, but I couldn't really say I saw it. As I retrace much of it now it begins opening itself more fully and I begin entering it for real.

It's not quite as polished as the name might imply. There are lots of shiny parts, that's for sure, with some blocks being completely unbroken strings of neon-and-video shopfront windows. I like the fact that some parts of the commercial zones are a complete jumble of different businesses like cheap electronics next to a tarot reader next to a shoe shop next to a holistic medicine and massage therapy shop. I like the fact that that district is followed immediately by another block that is all about motors—used cars, car repairs, car parts, motorcycles, and biker gear.

I like the fact that the city is large enough to even have zones. Ass Bucket was just one zone.

When I feel I've picked up enough of the city's bars and restaurants and gyms and playgrounds full of guys like me just sprung loose for the summer, I catch a whiff of the river not far off. I follow my nose until I reach it. It's a canal, actually, and I walk along the towpath between the water and the hip-high dry grass for a while. I feel like a big cat, all stealth and stalking, as I walk into the sun and toward the bus station.

It is the only idea I have, other than to walk aimlessly and endlessly for the rest of my life until I find her again. And if I don't find her, it will be the end of my life even if that's tomorrow. Because then I'd just start yet another new life and hope it works out better.

I figure there's no limit to the number of times you can reboot if you need to. Unless there is a limit. Let's hope I never have to find out.

As I approach the line of glass doors at the front of the bus station, I suffer a small flutter of worry that had not troubled me at all as I'd marched my way through
my
new city, all new, clean slate, yet to be written. Suddenly, as I see my reflection there, I see the uncertainty, and the need. I see the chump who was not supposed to follow me onto that bus. The reality is that you can be anybody you want to, as long as you don't have to see yourself.

I shove the door out of the way as I muscle myself into the station like a real man on a real man's mission.

“Hey, jackass,” she snaps as she catches the door with her good hand.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I say, nothing at all like a real man on a mission but everything like a little boy on his knees. Then, “Hey! Stacey!” I shout, again letting honest emotion obliterate my cool. Got to stop that.

“Did you try and bash me with that door on purpose?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, you were staring right at me when you did it.”

“Staring right at . . . ? No, no, it was my reflection. In the glass. It's very bright out here. Completely unintentional I assure you.”

“Okay, good. 'Cause the door assault was bad enough, but that foul look you were giving to whoever it was, that was true murder.”

“Yeah, well, I am a killer after all.”

“Um, uh-huh, sure. So, killer, what happened yesterday? With Mr. Derek? We were motoring so fast, by the time we stopped for a breath he was nowhere to be seen and neither were you.”

“Oh, that. I kicked his ass.”

“Phwaaaaa-ha . . .”

She laughs for long enough that I look at my watch. Then I join in, but at roughly 10 percent of her gusto.

“Sorry,” I say, “did I say ‘kicked'? I meant ‘tripped.'”

“Ha. Really? Did you get him?”

“Right onto his face. Broke his cast in half too.”

“Way to go, you. The Cast Avenger!” She extends her cast-fist and bumps with mine.

Then, emerging out of nowhere or possibly Stacey's backpack, is Molly. She sticks her cast into the celebration. “What's this for?” she asks.

“Hi, Molly,” I say.

“We're paying proper respect to the boy who saved the day yesterday,” Stacey says. “Word's all over town how he gave that Derek character a good public flogging, defending
your
virtue.”

“
Real-
ly?” she gasps and looks up at me with a big dewy-gooey-eyed expression that nobody has ever looked at me with before. It's a little bit thrilling and frightening.

“It was kind of less swashbuckling than that,” I say.

“And modest, too,” Stacey says, elbowing Molly, making a show of making mischief. “By the way, I looked you up, Mr. Vandeweghe, and you're holding up pretty well for a guy who played in the NBA thirty years ago. You never played any defense, apparently, so maybe that kept your mileage down.”

Ah, for God's sake, here comes the blushing. I can feel my head just about percolating.

“It's a common name,” I say.

“Right. Anyway, Kiki, so what are you doing back here? One night on the street enough to convince you to go home where you belong?”

“I am not a street person. I came here to see somebody.”

“Right, so did I. I just don't know who it is yet. So then, what are you doing back at the lovely bus palace?”

Think, think, think. Be cool, don't be pathetic and needy.

“I didn't come looking for you, if that's what you're thinking.”

“That is what I'm thinking,” she says boldly, grinning right in my face and probably having the time of her life.

“It's a little bit sad, then,” Molly says, sadly. “Because we came looking for you.”

“Yes, sir, we did,” Stacey says, firm and proud.

Why can't I be firm and proud and just say what I mean and live with that meaning without coming off as some kind of a gink?

“Come on, Molly,” she adds, towing her past me and out the door I just came in through. “Looks like we've been dumped.”

“Dummy,” I say, banging my cast sharply off my temple. Twice.

I rush back out through that door, taking a right turn this time, and quick-step up the street after them.

“There are laws against what you're doing to us here, KV,” Stacey calls out, embarrassingly loud. She doesn't bother looking back at me even though most everyone else on the busy sidewalk does, including a smiling and waving Molly.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Are we a ‘we' now?” Stacey asks.

“Ah, let's be a ‘we,'” Molly says.

“I'd like that,” I say. “Yes.” Then I remember my two years of French, and because I am such a smoothie decide to put it to use. “
Oui
. See, I just agreed in French there, see?
Oui
and we? So how can you resist?”

“With moves like that, why would we even want to?”

I'm rolling now.

•   •   •

Where we wind up is a place known as Crystal Beach, which is actually the short stretch of gritty, sandy, marshy land along which the city's working waterfront is joined by the canal. It's not the kind of recreational beach you would go to if you had a
beach
to go to, but it has what you might call charms of its own. There is trash here and there on the ground, and a faint taste of iron in the salty air. You'd have to be of a certain
stripe
to see this as a destination shore.

Such as a bunch of kids roughly our age gathering in groups and gaggles, kicking balls around, chucking rocks and each other into the water, and generally treating Crystal Beach like it is not only a proper beach but also its own population within a population.

If a particularly hard-core high school had, among its facilities, its own waterfront, it would look a lot like Crystal Beach.

And the reason we are now a part of it is that we have as our guide somebody in the know.

“So, are you actually
from
here, Molly?” Stacey asks, plunking down cross-legged in the sand, facing the water and the commercial boats chugging across the bay. Molly and I sit on either side of her in a sea-facing crescent formation.

“What?” Molly says, waving the idea away like it's an unusually comical mosquito. “Oh gosh, nobody is from Crystal City as far as I know.”

“But, it's your home now,” I say.

She looks my way, seems about to answer, then gives me both a shrug and a nod. “My mother and me. This is where we came to.”

She stops right there, and appears to think that's enough.

“So, you live with your mother,” I say.

“Nope. She hated the place, didn't last a day here. Mother was never very patient. The whole of Crystal City smells exactly like my father did, apparently. He worked on fishing boats. Mother said she had already vomited away enough of her days because of that man and she wasn't going through that hee-haw ever again. Right back on the bus she went.”

“How come you didn't go with her?”

Molly looks over to Stacey as if I'm joking or something, then back to me. “Because it's great here, obviously,” she says. “‘Suit yourself, kiddo,' is what Mother told me to do and so I suited myself. I think she's suiting herself too, but I'm not sure.”

Stacey leans over and pulls Molly into a quick neck hug, then releases her again.

“She stays in a Catholic hostel here in town,” Stacey says. “I stayed there last night myself. Not bad. Comfortable, but you gotta deal with the church-every-morning business, which—”

“I thought you said you liked church,” Molly says.

“I said I liked churches that had bedrooms attached.”

“Can just anybody stay there, for free?” I ask.

“Only if there's room,” Molly says, “and if a resident sponsors you.”

“I'm a friend of Molly, Molly's a friend of Jesus, and so I'm all tucked in and comfy. Sorry, Kiki, no room at the inn for you.”

“You can come,” Molly says anxiously. “We'll find some room.” She's up on her haunches and leaning toward me, saucer-eyed. She has a look that makes you want to make things better for her.

“I'm okay, thanks,” I say. “I have a place. A relative in the city. He even made me an incredible breakfast, massive steak, and onions, and—”

“That's
what I smelled,” Stacey says, leaning close to me. “Oh, man oh man, you sure landed on your feet.”

“True enough. I never saw steaks like this. Hardly even had to chew, and with the salad and the mushrooms and onions all sautéed—”

“Shush,” Molly says, looking at the variety of beach bums all around.

“Huh? Why?”

“Because that's the kind of breakfast some people would kill you for. And some others would kill you just for
talking
about.”

Stacey starts laughing, then realizes she's the only one and starts laughing even harder.

“Okay, calm down you two,” she says. “The chances of anybody killing you are not that great. But the chances of them following your onion-scented ass back to the
source
of such riches might be pretty good.”

“Yes,” Molly concurs. “Everybody steals. Everybody, everybody. But especially that bunch over there.” She points to a half-dozen people who are draped all over a cluster of boulders half in and half out of the water. They are mostly motionless, slapped onto the rocks like big starfish, and they are all so skinny it's hard to tell what the male-female breakdown is. “When they aren't here, they're either out trying to steal stuff or they're pacing back and forth in front of the pharmacy waiting for it to open so they can get their methadone.”

“Wait, I think I passed by that pharmacy,” I say, as if she's just mentioned a treasured old landmark.

“It's between the closed-down movie theater and the sex-shop-dry-cleaners.”

“That's it.”

“Yeah, every decent-size town's got them guys,” Stacey says. “The Green Party.”

“Yes!” Molly says.

Stacey reads the small confusion on my face and helps me out. “It's because they're kinda green, if you get up close. Don't get up close.”

“Right,” I say. “I get it. Don't get too close to the Greens, and don't give anybody the bright idea to rob me.”

“You're welcome,” she says brightly. “Now, let's go to your place and party.”

Aw, hell.

“Oh,” I say, getting up and stretching. I am only lately realizing that when I hit a tense part of conversation I spring into preflight mode. “It's . . . not like that. Maybe at some point. But right now I'm not in a position to have full rights to the place to that extent. Possibly after a while, when my uncle gets to see that—”

I interrupt my own explanation to address the disruption that has broken out among my audience. Stacey is sniggering, covering her mouth with her hand and leaning over Molly heavily enough to topple her. Molly, for her part, looks stunned.

“Did I say something funny?” I ask. I hear in my voice that my next line should be “Would you care to share the joke with the rest of the class?” But it's already too late to help it.