But the kid didn’t have to know that. “No wonder you’re so skinny,” Doug said. “There isn’t enough in this kitchen to keep an anorexic rat alive.”
The kid wasn’t skinny, though. There was muscle on him, muscle that reminded Doug of the days when he was a one hundred and seventy-five pound gung-ho high school jock who practically lived on the baseball field. Doug had been something to see, back then.
Amy’s lover was something to see, now. He looked pretty funny even with the muscles-naked, dripping wet, tied to a chair and all.
After pulling the kid out of the shower and punching him a few times so he’d stop screaming, Doug had tied him to an armchair in the living room using a bunch of neckties that he found in a briefcase by the front door.
Doug had wondered what the kid did with all those ties. He had imagined all kinds of things. The kid tying up Amy. Amy tying up the kid. He began to think that maybe he’d missed photographing something really interesting.
But then he’d found the kid’s business card in the briefcase. Ethan Russell was the kid’s name. He was a tie salesman at a department store. Kind of a stupid job. But, hey, Doug was a bricklayer. That wasn’t much better. And right now he was a bricklayer on workman’s comp.
The kid grunted, trying to say something through a wadded Armani that was held in his mouth by a wide Serica knotted behind his neck. His arms were tied to the arms of the chair with a couple psychedelic paisley numbers that might have been cut from a dead hippie’s miniskirt. His legs were secured by gray ties shot through with little dribbles of metal-flake orange. Doug thought the latter combination of colors was particularly revolting. He had pissed that same bright orange just weeks ago, when he’d been gobbling antibiotics for a kidney infection.
The kid strained against the ties. Doug wished he wouldn’t do that. The knots were plenty tight, probably cutting off the kid’s circulation. Sure it was uncomfortable. But if the kid kept on struggling, it would mean that he wanted to put up a fight.
“I never learned to tie a tie,” Doug said. “Sorry about my knots-they’re not very good either. Anyway, with ties I always use those clip-on things. Amy used to give me a hard time about it. I remember at the senior prom…”
Doug let it go at that. He didn’t like the disgusted look that had bloomed on the kid’s face at the mention of Amy’s name. Doug knew the kid couldn’t imagine Amy with a fat slob, and he didn’t want to tell the kid his life story.
He didn’t have the time. His life story wasn’t worth the time, anyway.
And it was all Amy’s fault. Not just his life, but the damn kid. April had figured that a richy like Amy would crumble at the very mention of blackmail, but Doug had known better. Amy wasn’t like that. She wouldn’t give up without a fight. Just like in the old days, she would go along, buying time, looking to weasel her way out of trouble.
Like she was doing now. Threatening to walk out on the whole thing. Pulling little tricks. Doug wondered if the lot manager at April’s place had really bothered Amy, or if she’d made the whole thing up. April had one of those portable phones. He could imagine Amy leaning through the doorway with the phone in her hand, pressing the doorbell so he’d hear it. He could imagine that very easily.
Doug’s stomach complained. He pulled open a couple of drawers. Nothing. Herb tea and vitamins and silverware. An ice-cream scoop and a pie cutter. Jesus. What did the kid need with an ice-cream scoop when he didn’t have any ice cream? Why did he have a pie cutter when he probably never ate any pie?
Ethan Russell grunted. The necktie that secured his right wrist started to give. The chair rocked back and forth.
The bricks in the kid’s belly were flexed for serious business. Bulging veins road-mapped his arms. Doug Douglas had once had arms like that. Once upon a time, he’d had bricks in his belly, too.
“It’s not that I hate you or anything,” Doug said. “It’s just Amy. I know she’s not going to do what I tell her. I know she’s going to try to screw it up. I’m really sorry, but I can’t let that happen. I can’t let her walk all over me like that.” He laughed, short and hard. “You understand. I bet you know how she is. You tell her to do something, she does something else.” He shook his head. “I mean, she’s not going to do what I want her to do, so why should I do what she wants me to do?”
Doug felt funny with the pie cutter in his hands. It was silver and had little roses on the handle. It kind of reminded him of the trowel he used when laying bricks, except the edges were very dull and it was way too small. And there were those faggy roses, too.
The kid struggled.
Doug’s stomach rumbled. He wasn’t happy. He was hungry, and his belly was a beach ball that had been scarred by a couple of hernia operations, and he hadn’t been one hundred and seventy-five pounds of base-running muscle in a long, long time.
The bricks in Ethan Russell’s belly heaved.
The pie cutter caught the light. The silver roses gleamed between Doug’s big fingers.
Doug blushed, making a tight fist around the roses.
He found a whetstone in the silverware drawer.
Metal whispered against stone in the quiet apartment.
Doug’s stomach growled. He went to work.
3:31 A.M.
The old piece-of-shit Ford truck takes the turn too hard and everyone yells-Griz Cody behind the wheel, Bat Bautista riding shotgun, Todd and Derwin and Marvis slouching in the back. Twelve-packs of screamin’ cold Bud Dry slide across the scarred bed toward the rear of the truck and Marvis is afraid that the tailgate is going to disintegrate because it’s pockmarked with rust and looks like it is suffering the advanced stages of leprosy. But the tailgate doesn’t have leprosy and it doesn’t disintegrate because it was made in Detroit by real American working men with union jobs and that means it is made of sterner stuff and can stand up to whole kegs of beer let alone miniscule and nearly powerless cans. So the twelve-packs slam against the tailgate and ricochet toward Marvis and Todd and Derwin just as the truck makes another sharp turn, this time onto a gravel road. Marvis is so drunk and high his teeth are numb and he can’t even feel the wind whipping his face or the itchy flakes of white powder under his nose- drunk as a house nigger on the day the massa died his daddy says-and the truck shudders out of the turn and he loses hold of the projector and it skids across the bed and threatens to batter the tailgate just like the beer did but a renegade twelve-pack heads it off, ramming the projector with all the intensity of a particularly vicious defensive lineman in a Bud Bowl commercial, stopping it cold in its tracks.
And those beers will never amount to anything, Marvis knows it, because his daddy says that sports ruin young beers and rob them of bright futures and hardly any of them ever get to be in a Bud Bowl. Derwin MacAskill doesn’t know that, Marvis’s daddy says, became he’s a Stepin Fetchit lawn-mowing kind of Negro who makes the rest of us ashamed. Marvis worries that his daddy spoke through his lips but it doesn’t seem likely because Derwin is laughing high and long at the Bud Bowl lineman caroming around the truck and Marvis would laugh like Derwin but Marvis’s father is in his head saying that lawn-mowing black idiot laughs like a baboon and someone should teach him some manners because he is an embarrassment. Marvis chuckles at that assessment because he is nothing like a baboon and certainly wouldn’t be mistaken for one under any circumstances but he can see that Derwin does kind of resemble an ape if you look at him the right way. He is not like butterscotch Marvis he is really black. Black as unsweetened chocolate and black as Guinness Stout. And then Marvis’s chuckling ends because it tickles his numb lips and he notices that Derwin’s laughter is gone because Griz Cody has put the pedal to the metal and the truck is roaring and Griz is roaring a rebel yell, damned ignorant cracker, Marvis’s father shouts, damned stupid redneck doesn’t he know that grit-eating cracker army was stomped into the ground back in 1865? And Todd chimes in with a rebel yell and even Derwin chimes in because he’s a lawn-mowing baboon, that stupid burrhead doesn’t even know what he’s doing that nigger needs to be taught a lesson! Marvis even thinks about shouting but his daddy is in his head and his lips are numb and he only manages a squeak like a little church mouse, like a little insectile shutterbug.