Highway 101

There's no telling how long you stand there. All you know, with express gratitude, is Maddie doesn't ask why. She can hear it enumerated in your breathing. Matching her inhales to your exhales. Her exhales produce a softer smudge on the smudge of night, while your body temperature stays uncannily numb. The siren revolves like some huge, carnivorous gnat sniffing you out. Getting closer at once, then farther away, then practically up your asses one second more. A harsh noise erupts with gunshot clarity and you reflexively jerk before realizing Maddie has cleared her throat. You fear this means she's about to speak and that if her concern is in any way related to the baby's fate over your own, you'll throttle her right here and give Punditte a crime scene to retire on. Instead, she whispers, "My neck's not bleeding anymore."
"Good."
"Stubs, is that man--?"
"Dead?"
Barely audible. "Yes."
"I don't think so." Replaying the scene. "No, he isn't."
"And does Lefty have--?"
"He f****n better."
A busy silence ensues. You're still those same two Bunker Hill privates, only now waiting out the battle's denouement in a remote trench. "Thank you," she says. Before you can ask what for, the inky bubble of the lot is punctured by two golden highbeams. You hear the grating traction of metal on metal and a dumpster being plowed across blacktop. All throughout, you're too blinded to see anything except the back of your own hand, which you hold up like a visor. The headlights are extinguished just as abruptly as they came, replaced by a swimming world of psychedelic amoebas that mar your vision. Presently, a fireworks display goes screaming down the outer street, silhouetting what is unmistakably the Astro's bulbous frame wedged into the alleyway like a dormant rhinoceros. Punditte (or Punditte's comrade) fishtails around the next corner, his lights vanish, and the siren fades away.
A door swings open into the dumpster and a dimmer light snaps on in the Astro's cab. Lefty is behind the wheel, shirtless, fumbling to squeeze out and cursing at a volume uncustomary for one wishing to evade detection. "Come on," you say. Maddie shuffles along. Her breathing has leveled out and she's stopped holding her neck so much.
He slams the door, and by the glow of an external lamppost you can see him inspecting the dumpster so critically it seems he's still trying to reckon what the hell he hit. When you call his name, he whirls around and belches, propounding the smell of tequila, vomit, and cigarettes fifteen feet from where he stands. "Where the f****n hell have you been?" he slurs.
"I could ask you the same thing."
"Me? I waited on the roof for something like an hour before I said screw it and Max said screw it and he went off to screw some cheerleader 'cause he figured that's what you two were doing and there I was, pissed-off, drunk, with no one to screw, so I thought I'd go take a swim but couldn't--couldn't find the water."
"Is that why you're naked?"
"I'm not naked," he refutes.
True, the corduroy slacks still sag around his waist, upheld somehow under a wingspan of pelvic bones. His waist curves like a woman's into crudely gashed ribs and collarbones prominent enough to evoke an actual collar. His bony arms gesture with disrhythmic autonomy, and the tufts of hair popping out every which way from under his hat would bring to mind a skeletal muppet if not for the blue circulating veins ridged high enough inside his forearms to produce their own spiderlike shadows.
"Wait, where'd Max go?" Maddie snaps to attention.
Talking over her, you demand to know how Lefty found the van.
"Well, it obviously wasn't where we left it, so I said ugh: either the tank's been towed or Stubby stashed it away somewhere, and then, plinko-plunko, I remembered this place and I said to myself that's where I'd hide the b***h and ol' Stubs, ol' Stubs is almost smart as me."
A sideview mirror lay on the ground. Paranoid of its implicating properties, you pick it up--ceding, as you do, that your paintjob is streaked all across the dumpster's face anyway. "Everyone in the van," you bark, and preempt Maddie's refrain by saying, "Call him up yourself when we get you home." Lefty climbs in back and Maddie has ample room to enter the passenger door. Before starting the engine, you listen again for sirens. They're not so close, but close enough to set you on edge. "Maddie, what direction is your house?"
"East of here," she says. "Not far. Head south and take the first left you can."
Good. The sirens are to the west. You wrench the key, back out without checking for traffic, and follow Maddie's directions. "What next?"
"Go right at the next stop sign." Maddie then audits to see if Lefty is paying attention; but he's not, he's digging around in the backseat for something, so she bites her lip and drops her voice from its declarative tone. "Stubs, you know what I have to do, right? And you can't talk me out of it?"
You play dumb and say, "You're talking about the kid, I take it?"
She gives an affirmative silence.
You take the right without slowing and ask what next. She says just keep going straight a few more blocks. This neighborhood resembles the one by the B.P. where the woman wouldn't give you a Pall Mall; in fact, you think you must pretty near there. "Give us a half-hour." To your dismay, everyone is talking in questions, even when they don't mean to.
She muses a moment, as if there's anything to muse. "Okay. No longer than that."
"And be smart. Let Punditte do his job for once. Tell them whatever you have to to keep yourself out of trouble."
Lefty pops up between the seats, wiping his nose. "Who's in trouble?"
Maddie expertly ignores him and you're surprised to see a shadow of a grin on her lips, "You know I'm a good liar." Her wound is on the opposite side so you can't study how it's healing, but you tell her to swab some alcohol on it before she does anything else "unless you want to go f*****g rabid."
She laughs.
"I wasn't trying to be funny."
"I will, Stubs. Don't worry about me."
Lefty has given up trying to understand and lies down. For a while, nobody speaks. The radio lectures softly:
"--although Bernanke claimed in a public statement that even the Fed's top economists had no way of predicting that last year's housing crisis could foreshadow the multilateral recession our nation finds itself in now.
A warning is still in effect concerning the escape of two inmates from Sequoia Parish Mental Facility of Mariposa County, California diagnosed by Chief Director of the Restrictive Ward, Dr. Richard LeClair, as 'clinically sociopathic' and 'behaviorally inclement'. The patients, Camille Seward, age 23, and Elliot Ujvary, age 19, escaped last week Friday from confined treatment by fault of 'a freak lapse in security', the Board stated in Saturday's press conference, managing to steal away with '$13,000 worth of generic and name-brand medications' besides themselves. No specifics are being made public from either patient's file, but a red-flag release issued immediately after the breakout explicates the two escapees as dangerous and not to be physically apprehended by citizens. Photographs are available on the Mariposa County Sheriff's Department website, and an official hotline for--"
"You take a left after this next block."
Lefty is motionless in the backseat. You lost count how many times during the broadcast your fingers twitched with a burning desire to spin the dial, but always reasoning last second it would only draw her attention to something she didn't appear to be listening to. Given all that had occurred tonight, it's not surprising. Another cove of your conscience says maybe you want her to know, if only via some ridiculously noble sense of quid pro quo. A secret for a secret.
The update ends and a Weezer song picks up as you take the prescribed left onto an arboreal street marked Dead End, past houses of a more diverse and populated nature than those on Beecher. Little orange pesticide flags bob on wire stems like lonely conformist flowers. Star-spangled bowties flap from the lampposts, and loose lawn trimmings whisk down otherwise clean gutters. Clean gutters, for christ's sake.
Shortly before you'd be forced to orbit the cul-de-sac, Maddie points out a "green" house. In this late hour, you can't segregate green from blue from violet, so you pull into a driveway that seems most accurately to be at the end of her finger and she doesn't object. The house is a stout A frame with two protruding wings and a door inverted between them, brought flush by a small cement porch with a white gate. The right wing is a garage, and you creep up until a basketball hoop floats over the Astro's hood. There is a lull while Lefty pretends to be asleep and Maddie doesn't get out but insists on searing you with a gaze you absolutely refuse to acknowledge, instead focusing dumbly on the Chevrolet hood ornament until her open door engages the tiny bulb reflected in the windshield.
She steps one foot out.
Finally, you mutter in a pseudo-helpful tone, "If you feel you ought to say something, don't worry. You're wrong."
"--Stubs? Come in with me a minute? There's something I have to show you."
No motion is made from the backseat to ward off this insane request. That b*****d's not even breathing. He leaves you to clench the steering wheel, ruing the fact you ever smelt her perfume. There is no place possibly more dangerous for you and him to be right now. Lefty doesn't care because he doesn't know the half of it, but Maddie does. She's got a civil obligation and still she's willing to waste your time. Waste the child's. She wouldn't in vain though. If you kick her out now, you'll never be free of the what ifs. Biting your tongue lest some cuss word slip out with the last of your dignity, you kill the engine but leave the battery engaged so Lefty can listen to the radio and maybe prolong his endurance. It's not like he'll have bitching rights later, you've given him more than enough space to object. Maddie thanks you again. The two of you step out into the night. She is quiet on the way up to the door. It feels like this weird medieval date where everything went wrong but still you're provincially decreed to have sex. A flagstone path hooks off the driveway's brick-stenciled border. There are hastas arranged before the porch and someone is clearly watching TV in the home's forequarters. A blue luminescence dances on the cut-glass panels of the door. When you stop dead in your tracks and point this out to Maddie, she faces you with an obliquely calm expression, taking your hand. "That's just uncle Hugh. Come on."

* * * *
Twenty minutes later you emerge, shutting both the main oak door and its flimsy screened counterpart behind you.
Blaring music vibrates the Astro's windshield. Lefty has reclaimed his post as navigator. He does his best to upset the stale bliss of Maddie's neighborhood short of honking the horn. To your right, someone has nailed a corn cob to the trunk of a maple tree outside what you now know to be her bedroom window. The kernels have efficiently been gnawed off by squirrels. Her bedroom vacates the parallel wing as the garage and it's all you can do not to try and spot some movement in the blinds. The blinds you drew. Lunar searchlights filter through the clouds, and you can smell that electric earthiness of a storm approaching.
When you open your door, the music pummels you and Lefty ignores you. He has the mismatched drumsticks and is hammering out a solo on the dashboard of far more rhythmic acuity than you could ever execute. Even though the song is Amy Winehouse, he still manages to syncopate in jazz time and make it sound good. You're grateful he opted for this instead of the trumpet. Maybe he lost the trumpet and is just too ashamed to say so. Maybe he forgot it up on the roof of the bar. Idle prayers, you think, and start the Astro. The radio cuts out for a second, but Lefty never does and comes in right on cue. A TV still flickers behind the cut-glass door, and you watch it a while, unconcerned, backing out your tail end into the cul-de-sac, then light forward revving the engine and craving, more than anything, total indiscriminate absorption by a big city.
Lefty eventually turns the volume down, once the song is finished and he sees you reading streetsigns, making confident turns, passing the B.P. "You know how to get out of here?" He asks, not sounding half as pissed as you'd expected.
"Maddie tried explaining it to me. She didn't do a very good job."
"Looky up there!" He points. Across the street, at the next intersection, is Food Mart. "You know I probably got this whole town about memorized? Just can't remember the way we came in. Does 101 take us straight to Seattle, you know?" He's of the same mindset you are.
"Pretty far. Takes us to Olympia and then we merge onto some interstate, I can't remember which."
"Well if I doze off, wake me when we get near Olympia and I'll check the map."
"K."
"You hungry yet?"
"Not really, actually. Not anymore."
"I'm starved!" He taps one more time on the window. "What say we swing through the drive-thru and get a box of fetus fries for the road?" When he sees you've caught sight of the Planned Parenthood clinic tucked dolefully away in the shadow of Food Mart's posterior, he cackles with triumph, and even you allow a grim smile that has nothing to do with Lefty's joke. "--Naw, f**k fries. F**k food in general, right?" He goes for his back pants pocket and pulls out a crushed pack of cigarettes. "I pissed and moaned at Max to gimme the whole thing before he ditched, as like a token of our friendship. He ate it up, the whiny little b***h. I'm not surprised he drove whatzerface to lezzyhood. She got used to having to fill Maxi-pad's man pants all the time. Tell me, was she kinky?"
"Extremely." You come to a fork and choose left at the behest of a 101 road sign. This leads you propitiously to the outskirts, where houses grow fewer and far between, taking on a slightly more dilapidated look. You pass a car dealership, a shotgun motel, some mobile homes and a small church with a cemetery.
"Right on, you lucky b***h! God gave women got all the sex appeal, even smart women know that. I won't push you for details, I'll just get you piss-drunk sometime."
Sometime apparently being now, he wrests a bottle of Bean from under the seat and offers you the first swig. You accept. Thank You For Visiting Port Angeles whips by on a sign, astonishing in its absence of any reference to Twilight.
After watching you slam a few draughts, Lefty takes the bottle back and guzzles between commentary like it's mineral water. Over the course of mere minutes, his tongue's tropical Cuervo buoyancy is hewn down and dirtied by a whiskey pick-ax. The laidback Lefty is gradually supplanted by the coarse, insecure Lefty and he goes rapidly from extolling women to execrating them. When it gets too outlandish and too personal, you order him to get some f*****g shut-eye.
"Good plan, brah, good good plan. But seriously, when's the last time you had one? I mean just f*****g forewarn me is all I ask so I know to lay some newspaper 'n s**t down when we switch sides." He tucks himself away in the corner. Times like this, you're more disgusted with yourself . . .
The night of the van heist, less than 36 hours after the bust, you couldn't sleep worth a damn. Tensions ran high, as they say, and what an understatement. Your head just rattled against the window over there where Lefty sits now, enduring a morbid slideshow of dreads, doubts, and capital dilemmas to pan across the backs of your eyelids. At that time, you were still 100% sure you'd be caught and caught soon (now you're about 80/20). But when they did--this was the real pest--would they be lenient enough to protract your whole 'insanity' rap or would they flush it entirely? You didn't have to go to jail to know the clinic was a f*****g spa in comparison. "Stubs, you asleep?" Lefty had asked from the wheel, and something in his voice roused you to such an acute diagnostic plane that no one said another word. Without lifting your head even, you reached over and found him there rock hard. He half-gasped, half-moaned in gratitude, helping you fumble with the corduroys. You both managed to finish each other off that night. Lefty never took one hand off the wheel, much less pulled over. And when it was done, nothing had ever been less awkward because nothing had ever been more meaningless.
People, like Astros, need oil changes now and again. Here you were trying to think adroitly under life-altering circumstances, but the deprived mechanical requirements of your biological shells were hindering all attempts at relevant postulation. With that out of the way, Lefty wiped up his lap with a fistful of napkins from the glove compartment and said, "Yo, I ever tell you about my nagyi's thumbs?"
He eventually starts to snore.
When you do the math, Lefty hasn't consecutively slept for more than an hour since the bust. It's crazy and a little bit unfair to think that some people can't function without a good night's sleep, a cup of coffee at breakfast, no junk food before bedtime, etc., while others can plug their bloodstream with raw sewage, never eat, never sleep a wink, and always seem fit to run a marathon.
The radio crackles in and out with static but it's quiet enough to resemble the washing of waves, such as the breakers outside your window. The highway flattens out at sealevel for a few miles with nothing but beach and dark water to your left and ominous, hooded mountains rising like ingrown toenails to your right. A milky, coastal fog still persists--unflagging residue from your memories of the Costume Shop. In time, like the fog, those memories will dissipate. Nothing leaves its mark for long. You want to roll down your window but it's not worth waking Lefty. The horizontal axis looks mean, occasionally pulsing with maroon lightning and the water spewing forth is laden with whitecaps. Vancouver Island must be getting bashed right now. You'll probably end up racing the storm south all the way to Olympia before hooking back north around Puget Sound, through Tacoma, and meeting it head-on in Seattle. It will be easier to ditch Lefty in a storm. Park the van and take him on a convoluted tour of the city, memorizing your course (like he'll count on you to do anyway). Then lure him someplace sheltered to get out of the rain, a tourist hub like Pike Place Market, and lose him in the bustle. You'll be back to the van before he figures out he's lost, and somewhere on the other side of town before he admits your treachery and punches the nearest stranger's teeth in. Seattle might prove to be a key phase in Lefty's erudition. He never had a chance to grow up in the clinic, he's still a kid. Seattle will shape him into whatever it is we all must become.
An irksome light keeps slashing across your periphery that you can't quite place since the sideview mirror is gone. Finally you identify it as the searching beam of a lighthouse that must be stationed back in Port Angie, though you never noticed while you were there. Port Angie, Christ, listen to you. Two loam embankments rise from the ditches and you're driving through sort of a trench when the first two headlights you've seen since town appear half a mile down the straight gray ribbon of road. They first form as a solitary snowball, gradually bisecting and growing into two fluffier snowballs.
Lefty shifts and mutters in his sleep: ". . . Jacob, be reasonable". He always talks in his sleep. You've surmised a lot about his past that way, however you have no ideas on who Jacob is. As the snowballs widen, your right foot grows inexplicably heavier and you arch your back. Webs of sand blow across the road. Your hand drops off the wheel and the van tilts into the left lane. It's when the sound of the other driver leaning on his horn reaches the Astro that Lefty creeps awake--limply at first, then snapping upright when he calculates his bearings, the Astro's bearings, in connection to the snowballs'. His head swivels from the road, to you, the road, to you, but you don't defer a word of explanation. The next thing you know he's rolling his window down and the horn inveighs a thousand times more crystalline through the night. When the car maneuvers into the right lane, you reciprocate ever so deftly, almost like a delayed mirror image, like your two bumpers are joined by a rapidly shortening cable. Then he (or she) will swerve back, and so on and so forth.
Lefty starts with just his head out the window, hollering nonsensible jeers and insults at the top of his lungs. Progressively, he eases out up to his waist, pants slipping down his asscrack, smacking the door panel like Seabiscuit's flank. The speedometer reads 77. Your contender must be slowing down, waiting to brace his victory on a chance procrastinated maneuver or maybe even debating whether to flee the car. Wouldn't that be a sight! You openly heckle along with your co-pilot. In retrospect, around this time (shortly before the point of no return), a soft jangling melody does register in the nadir of your consciousness, but you must write it off as a radio ad, lending more foresight to the handling of this daunted sedan, so close now you can make out its purple paintjob and Cadillac coat of arms. Fate is beyond your hands now. Let the Astro do as it will. Your evasion comes so late even Lefty's screams dampen, as though reverting to a Hindu chant, when your left hubcaps practically kiss. The Cadillac honks one parting imprecation, which washes out with speed and distance until fundamentally it's just another gull cry in the vast, impartial night.
"Cut it close there, muchacha."
Lefty toasts the whiskey bottle after pulling himself back inside. His hat is gone but he hasn't noticed. Other than that, there's no remarkable change about him except that his voice sounds breathless and sad.
A sign passes. Port Townsend: 35 miles.
You struggle to intuit the familiar significance of that name, then recall it was Punditte's old stomping grounds before he got transferred. You mention Punditte to Lefty for the sake of conversation and because it's the kind of story he'd appreciate.
"Ooohh," he says when you're done. "So that's who Punditte is."
"Sure, didn't Max share anything?"
"Oi, don't even mention that kid! I stopped listening when--"
Before he can finish, the sound returns. That strange, subliminal jangling sound from before. Almost like a cheap pinball machine or a ringtone. And at that last correlation your muscles tense. All elements keep dragging you, as it were, kicking and screaming back to the Costume Shop, but for the life of you you can't remember pocketing the phone or not pocketing the phone. After foolishly deleting the messages, then what?
What did you do with it?
Using one hand to frisk yourself, you take a curve too close and grind momentarily inside the pebble ditch. The ringtone adopts a dementedly new impudence as its origin stays hidden, but you swear the phone is nowhere on you. You're about to ask Lefty to help ransack the seats and floorboards when he speaks up first with a polite colloquial inflection, "Hello?"
Dumbstruck, you look over and see him posed there quite comfortably; cross-legged, picking at his toenail (thonged, you first notice, in a Birkenstock), and striking you as the happy replica of a teenage girl, especially with that cellphone lodged between his ear and left shoulder. How and when he managed to get his hands on it are precisely the questions that strike you dumb.
"Hello? Hello? . . ." The volume is loud enough and the answering voice shrill enough you can eavesdrop verbatim on what sounds to be a woman, middle-aged.
"Mom?" Lefty calls, biting his tongue to bung the laughter.
". . . Max?"
"Mom?"
"Max, where-- Is this you?"
"What do you need, mother?" Lefty sighs patronizingly.
"This isn't Max. Who is this?"
"Your son."
"It isn't. How dare you lie to me."
"It's Grandpa Vinny."
"Listen young man, you hand my son the phone right now. I want to talk to him."
"Well he doesn't want to talk to you. No ma'am. Maybe you can call back?"
"I will not call back! Tell him if he's not home in fifteen minutes he can kiss the car good-bye."
"He says he'd rather kiss you good-bye."
"Excuse me?"
"He said he'd rather watch daddy f**k-your-face!"
There is a stunned silence. Lefty covers the receiver and grins so boyishly, rocking back and forth, you'd think he just asked the woman if her refrigerator was running. Then you can hear her scream into the background: ". . . Robert! Robert, come here! . . . It's one of Max's wretched little friends on the line. He won't tell me where--where Max is, and you wouldn't believe . . . so incredibly rude . . !"
"Hello?" A stern male voice now.
You push on the accelerator.
Clearing his throat, Lefty retorts, "Hi, can Rudy come over?"
The man pauses. He answers, baffled but with reactive courtesy, torn between his wife's accusations and the guileless voice on the line. "Rudy's in bed."
Lefty rocks some more, inwardly hysteric. A pill bottle rolls out from under his lap onto the floor. "Oh," he composes himself. "Well, no, don't wake him up for this, I suppose, but could I possibly borrow your wife's a*****e instead?"
You can perfectly visualize this man, Robert, as the polo-shirted eraserhead standing outside the supper club. He's the sort of man whose face would redden at the slightest provocation or humiliation, much less what Lefty's inflicting, and whose glasses perpetually slide down the bridge of his nose on a film of hormonal sweat. "Who the hell is this? Max is not to associate with you any longer! You tell him to bring his a*s home, and I'll deal with you later you filthy goddamn punk . . !"
Lefty lets him blow off more steam, not speaking for a deliberate stretch of time until the man's rage seems routed right in your ear: "Answer me! I can hear you there, boy! Don't you f*****g ignore me you s**t-eater!" His wife prattles openly in the background, at once sublimating and egging him on to avenge the outrage of her maltreatment. Competing with each parent is Rudy's intellectual rat terrier, miffed by the upheaval of routine and making his objections heard. "Louise!" Robert shouts. "Take Holly out of here, I can't hear myself think!"
Lefty booms his next statement above the domestic madness, yet maintaining businesslike tones. "Put Rudy on the phone if you ever want to see your firstborn again." His eyes flit over on you, deathly serious, to gauge a reaction, but there's none to gauge. Something like empathy does stir in your core though for that voice bleating on the line like a retarded goat. "You're not being funny. Give Max the phone right-this-instant, or I swear to Christ I'll knock every goddamn tooth out of your sorry head."
"I'm anything but sorry, sir."
"You will be once --"
"Shut-up!" The business tones are gone. Fierce gobs of saliva fly from his teeth, savagely bared at the phone. "Once you what?" he taunts. "Run me over with your big diesel truck, or blow my head off with a .12 gauge? You don’t even have the slightest clue where I am, you backwards hillbilly f**k, so get real and shut-up! Do as I say."
Agitated breathing. "Let me-- Louise, get that dog out of here!-- L-let me talk to him first." There’s a poorly concealed plea possessing what was meant to sound authoritative.
"No."
"Jesus Christ, he’s my son. If this is your idea of a prank--"
"You’re just begging me to prove it’s not, ain't you? Think you could hear a neck snap over this s****y connection?"
"You’re sick."
"Enough. Let me talk to Rudy. Wake him up and put him on the phone."
"You won’t say a word to Rudy! I’ll talk to Max before anything happens!"
The man's will is audibly breaking. All Lefty has to do is retreat into silence, his most effective tactic thus far. Within seconds, Robert beseeches his wife to go fetch Rudy out of bed. No questions. Meanwhile, he tries engaging more conversation, but Lefty muffles the phone against his shoulder and sighs with fatigue, like a common daylaborer reaching midafternoon. "Better gimme the Bean," he says.
You do. There's half left. All things considered, it's a miracle that only one esoteric little detail nags at your brain. "Lefty," you ask, "is Max in the van?"
He gulps heavily and swipes a forearm across his lips. "We can dump him in another mile or so."
"--F**k."
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing. We're in a hurry is all."
"It'll be alright, I don't wanna bury the little--Wait. Hold on." Lefty tests the phone to his ear, mumbling aside, "I think he’s coming . . . Hello? Of course I'm f*****g still here, why are you? Is he coming? Uh-huh. Put him on. Ah, Rudy? Rudy! Hey homey, you know who this is?"
Rudy is more softspoken than either of his parents. You can’t hear but a tired murmur in the way of his responses.
"Don’t you recognize my voice? Think hard now. You’re still in dreamland, I can tell. Wipe those crusties. What? Yes, yes, that’s right! It’s your uncle Lefty, and Stubs is here too, right beside me. Remember Stubs? . . . Rudy, pay attention please. You’re a real prodigy, you know that? Considering what sort of mentors you got. Don’t mind them. It’s just you and me talking now. Old buddies. Listen, how are you? . . . Max? Uh-huh. Not back yet, is he? Well, is that so surprising? We both know what a distant personality that boy has . . . Uh-huh. Rudy, listen to me a second. No, just listen. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate Max as a brother, one being--No, Rudy! Just ignore them! Don’t you give--Tell your dad if he takes the phone I’m hanging up. Say it . . . Good boy. Now where were we? Um, on a scale of--it doesn’t matter. I know enough to tell Max was a s**t brother. I’ve got six brothers, Rudy, so I’m no slouch on the subject . . . Uh-huh . . . Is that right? Well anyone can do those things, Rudy. That’s just common animal decency. I’d bet my life every motive he ever had was manipulative. Sheerly controlling, so you’d do favors for him. He used you, dig? Your charm and your confidence, to get chicks and s**t like that. He was so self-conscious, Rudy. Why do you think he hid himself, youknow, under all that hair and makeup . . . What? No, that don't make no difference. But you don’t have to worry about it no more. Not no more, and you got me and Stubs to thank for it. Tell dad to turn his room into a disco or something. Word on the street’s you’re a hell of a dancer . . . Rudy? Rudy, wake up, what are you--oh for chrissake, ignore them! Rudy! Get outta here, you twats! The boy and I are trying to have a conversation! . . . Listen, Rudy, you’re upsetting your ol’ buddy greatly. You really like letting your friends hear you cry? You must really like getting your a*s kicked. I bet Max never ever once stood up for you, did he? Am I right? Answer me--Goddamnit, Rudy, that’s totally irrelevant to what we’re talking about! Pay attention! I’m trying to . . . to get a word in edgewise. Don’t give that fat f**k the phone. Listen to me: Max is with us. Tell that to your minions so they stay f****n cool. He’s with us and he’s fine--Huh? . . . Mommy wants to talk to him. Well, I’m sorry but that’s out of the question . . . No, you can’t talk to him either. You see, Max, the klutz that he is, went and choked on a bottle of vodka. Do you believe it? Yeah, the whole bottle. It exploded into a million pieces inside his throat, you can’t make this s**t up. And, youknow, I mean, you try talking after something like that . . . No, don’t be so matronly, he’s fine! There was hardly any mess. Got his shirt soaked through with Smirnoff, but most--listen to me--most of it, I think, drained into his stomach . . . Hello? Who’s--"
"I’m getting the cops you psycho! Don’t call this number ever--"
"Aw, f****n hell." Lefty unrolls his window just far enough to lob the phone. The phone smothered with his fingerprints.

Reviews

[wyrd]

another great chapter. Again love the way you put your vocabulary to work.