Saints of Augustine (3 page)

“I don't know,” Sam snapped. He really wanted to change the subject now and was relieved to see Jasbo waddle into the room. “Wow, is Jasbo fatter than he was yesterday?”

Hannah jumped off the bed and squatted down, holding her arms out to the copper-colored dachshund. “He's fat as a piglet. Come here, Jasbo. Bring your fat butt over here.” Jasbo made his way across the carpet and lowered his head, allowing Hannah to scratch his neck. “You're a good old fat dog, aren't you?”

“Has he eaten breakfast?”

“He's been eating all morning! He ate half my egg.”

“Well, let's go feed him half of mine,” Sam said, and ushered his sister out of the room. The dog waddled after them.

Things would make more
sense if Charlie woke up one day to find that someone had actually cloned him when he was a baby, and that all along there had been five of him. It would explain how one of the Charlie Perrins was just this normal, happy-go-lucky guy with a girlfriend and a car and a year left to go in high school. And how another Charlie Perrin was a slacker who walked around feeling sad whenever any thought of his mother entered his mind, which was about a million times a day. And how the third
Charlie Perrin was able to think of his future and imagine grand success on a pro ball team, while the fourth had already concluded that he was a loser and a daydreamer. And then there was the fifth Charlie Perrin, who seemed to have never even met the other four, and who liked closing out the entire world and getting high.

He'd smoked pot for the first time almost a year ago, a few weeks after his mother died. A couple of teammates—Troy and Taylor Sullivan, twins who were good players but not exactly his friends—had invited him over after the team had won an afternoon game against Ocala. Charlie had played well, scoring twenty-five points. With the brothers, in the rec room of their large house, he ate hot dogs and watched a movie and played a half dozen games of Splinter Cell. Then Taylor put on some music and closed the blinds.

“Hey,” Troy said, dropping down next to Charlie where he sat cross-legged in front of their giant television, “good game today.”

“Really good game,” Taylor said from the stereo. “You were electric.”

“Thanks.” Charlie felt himself nod. “You guys were great, too.”

“Just doing our jobs,” Troy said. “So, hey. You been doing okay?”

“Fine,” Charlie said. He was still looking at the TV screen but felt the twins' gaze from either side. He set down the joystick. “You?”

“Sorry to hear about your mom dying and all,” Taylor blurted out.

Troy shot his brother a look. “Yeah. Sorry about that. That really sucks.”

Charlie had no idea what to say. Yes, it sucked? Thank you?

“Our mom,” Troy said, “you know,
her
mom died when she was really young—when
our
mom was really young—and she told us it was awful, and that it, it must be really rough on you.”

So that was why they'd asked him over all of a sudden, having never talked to him off the basketball court before. Their own mother had put them up to it.
You two ought to ask that poor Perrin boy over to the house. He could probably use some cheering up.
Charlie felt the hot dogs he'd eaten start to churn in his
stomach. He didn't really want to be in the Sullivan house any longer but didn't know how to just leave, since he was dependent on Mrs. Sullivan for a ride home.

Fortunately, both Troy and Taylor seemed more than ready to move on from the topic of his mother, now that it had been officially acknowledged. Taylor stepped away from the stereo and reached up high on the DVD shelf for a small wooden box. He lifted the lid and took out a twisted cigarette. “Want to get high?”

“Yeppers,” Troy said.

Charlie looked from one brother to the other. Were they serious? He tried to sound casual. “What about your parents?”

“They
never
come in here. The only person in here besides us is the cleaning lady.”

Taylor chuckled. “And she wouldn't say a word, because she doesn't want to get deported.”

Charlie felt himself shrug. He nodded.

The three of them shared the joint, which made Charlie cough, but almost immediately he felt more comfortable in the twins' rec room. They laughed at
how red his eyes looked, though their eyes looked red, too. The music, whatever it was, started to sound incredibly great.

“Are there any more hot dogs?” Charlie asked.

“Why? You hungry?”

“Yeah. I don't why, though. I just ate.”

Troy and Taylor started laughing again. Charlie started laughing, too. “You're
stoned
,” one of them said, and the other one said, “You. Are. Stoned.”

This seemed enormously funny, and the three of them laughed for what felt like half an hour.

Finally Troy cleared his throat and said, “You know, you're a cool guy.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said, wiping his eyes with his fingers.

“He is,” Taylor said. “You are. When our dad, you know, when we told him we wanted to try out for the basketball team, he started bitching about how he never should have put that hoop in the driveway. ‘You boys join the basketball team, you're going to be hanging out with nothing but blacks.'”

Troy cracked up at his brother's impression of their father. “That's
exactly
what he said!”

“And we were like, I don't think so. White guys play basketball, too. Of course, he was kind of right. I mean, there
are
a lot of black guys on the team this year.”

“More than a lot,” Troy said.

“And it's not so great wondering if you're gonna get, you know, mugged in the middle of a game,” Taylor said.

Charlie had been laughing all through this. He stopped. “Huh?”

Taylor shrugged. “I know it's a cliché, but clichés are based on truth, after all.”

Charlie cleared his throat. He wiped his eyes again. “Wow,” he said. “You guys really
are
snobs.”

The amusement drained out of both brothers' faces simultaneously. “We're not snobs,” one them said.

“Well, okay. Racist.”

“We're not
racist
,” the other one bit out, sounding shocked. “We're
real
.”

“Well, when you say…when you say…” Charlie couldn't figure out how to vocalize what he was thinking. Suddenly he realized he didn't have to. “Wow. I'm feeling pretty good.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah. The only thing is…” He glanced at the brothers, squinting. “I see two of you.” This cracked him up until he was practically folded over with laughter. The twins looked bemused; they'd probably heard this joke before. “Where do you guys get this stuff?” Charlie asked.

“The buzz?” one of them asked—was it Taylor or Troy? Who cared?—and then made a thumbs-up with one hand. “Our Dr. Feelgood goes by the name of Derrick Harding.”

“Derrick Harding,” Charlie repeated, trying to place the name. “Graduated last year? Kicked out of student government?”

“The very same,” one of the twins said. “We should give you his number.”

And they did. Charlie never hung out with the twins again after that night. He never wanted to. But a week later he called the number they'd given him. Derrick remembered him from high school. He invited Charlie over to his apartment, got him stoned, sent him home with a sandwich Baggie of pot. Derrick was as friendly as could be. He was
funny and easy to be around and generous: He always sent Charlie home with a bag, which he told Charlie not to worry about paying for. “Later,” was his famous line. “You can pay me later.”

A year had passed like smoke in a breeze. Suddenly, later was now.

 

When Charlie got home from the grocery store, his father was at the kitchen table with the newspaper spilled out in front of him, several pieces of it on the floor next to his feet. Without looking up, he said, “There's Charlie.”

A glass of weak-looking orange juice sat next to his elbow.

“Hi, Dad.” Charlie set the grocery bags on the counter. “I picked up some food on the way home.”

“Oh—thank you.”

As he unpacked the bags, Charlie listened to the newspaper pages turning, as slowly and regularly as sedated breathing. His father reached the end of the section, then turned the paper over and started paging through it again. He was dressed in pajama pants and a white T-shirt, but he had on his bedroom slippers. Sometimes he spent entire days in his pajamas.

“I started reglazing the windows of the Danforth house today,” Charlie said. “It's pretty cool, because I'm replacing all the cracked windowpanes, too, and the only way to get them out is to smash them with a hammer.”

His father didn't look up from the paper. It was as if he hadn't heard a word Charlie had said. Charlie raised his voice a notch and asked, “What did you do today, Dad?” He already knew the answer.

“Me? I kept pretty busy.” His father cleared his throat and squinted at an article.

“Did you go anywhere?”

“Why do you always ask me that?”

Charlie shrugged. “Just curious.”

“I went downtown to the office, took a look at some new listings.”

“How was that?”

His father cleared his throat again. “Not a lot going on this time of year. Fall's better. Less rental action, more buying.”

Charlie didn't believe him. In fact, he didn't think his father had left the house in days. “Did you eat lunch out?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

“Me?”
Who else?
“No. I ate here.”

Charlie didn't believe this, either. There hadn't been anything to eat in the house, except maybe cornflakes. “You need to eat, Dad.”

“I ate,” he said to the paper. “Don't harass me, son.”

“Well, I've got to get cleaned up. Then I'll make us some spaghetti, okay?”

There was such a long stretch of silence, Charlie started to wonder if he'd been heard. Then, as if he didn't even know what they were talking about, his father said, “Okay, Charlie.”

 

He showered, spending a long time under the spray with his eyes closed, the warm water batting against his forehead.
I wish, I wish, I wish
, he thought.
I wish Mom was here. She'd put Dad back on track.
Though that didn't really make any sense, because his father wouldn't be in the shape he was in if his mother hadn't died.
I wish I'd spent more time on the court this summer. I wish I'd never laid eyes on Derrick Harding. Why in the hell did I ever get involved with that guy?

Of course he knew why. Despite his ability to play a pretty good game, he didn't fit in with the
jocks—at least, not with those guys who talked about nothing but sports and walked around like they held the deed to the school in their hand. And since his mother had died, he wasn't exactly in the mood to meet new people. He had a—what was the word? He'd learned it in English this past year.
Dearth
. He had a
dearth
of friends. Guys just to hang out with. Not that he wanted an entourage. In fact, one good friend—a best friend, someone he could really talk to—would probably have been enough to keep him from sucking up to a creep like Derrick Harding.

Someone like Sam Findley.

But that friendship was over. Charlie didn't even know why. He and Sam had been best friends since they were nine, and then one day their friendship had just…stopped. Sam was the one who had ended it, and he'd never explained why. They both lived in the same neighborhood, they went to the same school, but for over a year now, since before Charlie's mother first got sick, they hadn't spoken a word to each other.

Charlie finished showering and pulled on a T-
shirt and a pair of basketball shorts. As he stood in the kitchen boiling the spaghetti, he thought about going down to the court at the end of their neighborhood and shooting some baskets. But his father went back to vodka and orange juice before they started eating, and by the time Charlie was loading the dishwasher, he'd downed at least three. He started making little remarks to the news program on TV (“You think so?” “I doubt it!” “Oh, come on, where's the hard evidence for
that
?”), and Charlie got so irritated that he lost his energy and just retreated to his room.

He'd earned a little unwinding time, hadn't he? He'd worked for eight hours, dealt with Wade, brought home the bacon—more than enough crap for one day. He had his unwinding routine perfected: He cranked open his window, set the little gray fan on the sill, then dug his pipe and lighter and film container of pot from the bottom drawer of his nightstand. Crouching in front of the fan, he lit up and puffed, exhaling smoke that was immediately sucked outside.

Not long after that, he was lying flat on his bed,
listening to music and thinking about the girl he'd seen coming out of Gatorland. He rolled over onto his hand.

Then he remembered Kate: He was supposed to have called her an hour ago. He scrambled for the phone on his nightstand and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” he said. “It's me.”

“I thought you were going to call earlier than this.”

“Sorry. My dad made me do all this stuff around the house as soon as I got home.” He'd never told Kate about how his father had started drinking again since his mom died (not that she knew he'd had a problem in the first place). “I just completely lost track of time. What are you up to?”

“I had this enormous fight with my mom. She doesn't want me borrowing the car anymore because, get this, she says I got it
too dirty
the last time I used it. Remember that big rainstorm a couple of weeks ago? She said I splashed mud all over the fenders. I said, hey, did I make the storm? Blame God. Well, that
really
got her mad. You would have thought I'd torn a page out of the Bible.”

Kate was a force of nature. She was strong willed, and spoke her mind, and didn't put up with any bull from anyone. It was what had first attracted Charlie to her back when they'd had sociology class together and she'd spoken up so freely about stereotypes and “looks-ism” (Charlie still wasn't sure what “looks-ism” was, but he liked hearing Kate rail against it). And she wasn't only smart, she was the hottest girl in the school, as far as he was concerned. Mellowing into the thought of her, he said simply, “You're great.”

“For what, fighting with my mom?”