“They’re from Bakersfield, most of them,” Roy said. “They come through here a lot. Best parties this town ever sees.” Then he leaned forward and said, “Bobbi’s husband is down there with them right now, you know.”
“Who’s Bobbi?” I asked.
“The woman who brought you here,” he said. “That girl gets around. So does her husband. I hope you used a condom.” Of course I hadn’t. I felt sick. I felt like I’d been stuck in that town forever.
“Me, I never use them,” Roy said. “I like to feel everything.” Then he rambled on and on about everything he liked to feel, and everything he wanted to do with Trace, and everything was my cock this and my cock that, and Trace just sat and ate and drank and smiled like it was the best joke he’d ever heard. I got sick of it. I told Roy to shut the hell up and leave. “Look who’s Mister Manly all of a sudden,” he said. “I bet I could make you cry.” He unbuckled his belt. “I could make you call for God.”
That’s when Trace threw a bottle at him. It shattered on the wall. Roy got wet from the spray.
“Settle down, Butch,” Roy said. “I’m just kidding.”
Trace took another bottle out of the case and threw that one, too. It barely missed Roy’s head. “Leave Phil alone,” Trace said.
Roy’s mouth opened and he stared at Trace. “It was a joke,” he said. His voice wavered a little, but he didn’t move.
“Trace,” I said. “Come on. It’s no big deal.” But Trace wound up and threw another one and this one thumped Roy in the chest. It made a dull, hollow sound. Roy cried out and jumped off the bed, limped toward the door. Trace kept throwing, and even as I was telling him to stop I found myself picking up a bottle and letting fly.
Roy fell once.
By the time he got the door open there was blood on his face, but I don’t know if we hit him straight on or if he got cut by a ricochet. For some reason he stopped in the doorway to yell at us. “You guys are insane,” he shouted, his hands in fists. “You guys are sick.” I picked up the pint bottle that Bobbi had bought and I threw it. Roy ducked, and it sailed over the railing. I heard it shatter in the parking lot below. Then Roy was gone, his uneven steps thunking down the stairs, his undone buckle jangling.
We’d wrecked the room. The carpet, soaked. The bedside light, broken off the wall and dangling from its wires. The mirror, hit dead-on, angry cracks snaking out from the point of impact. Blooms of beer seeping into the walls, into the fabric of the coconut print. I stripped the sheets and blankets off the bed and Trace crawled onto the bare mattress, the only thing in the room not covered with glass.
“We should get out of here,” I said.
“I’m going to sleep,” he said. “I’m all of a sudden sleepy.”
It was only then that I remembered the baby. I asked him if the cops had taken it.
“Oh, the baby,” he said slowly, like he was remembering the night one frame at a time. “The baby.”
“Where is it? Did you have it at the party?”
“I gave it to someone,” he said. He closed his eyes. “Mo would want one that’s her own.”
Then he fell asleep. I didn’t think that was a good sign. Like maybe his heart was giving out.
I know I should have tried to find the baby. I may even have wanted to. But outside was a dark town with too many people I didn’t want to face alone. Inside was Trace, who needed me to make sure he kept breathing. I shook the glass off a chair and sat, watching him, trying not to think about the baby, trying not to think about my life. I watched for cops, but they never came. Neither did any friends of Roy’s. No angry husband, no fucked-up bikers. No one. In a way, that made it worse.
Trace woke up just after sunrise, and we walked through an arroyo toward the gas station so we wouldn’t be seen. We sat inside the van and waited for that bastard of a mechanic to show up.
We made it to Alaska, but we never got out on a fishing boat. Instead we had to work at the cannery, keeping the drains clear underneath the giant waste pipes, twelve-hour shifts in a chill rain of fish guts. I only lasted a month. I caught pneumonia and had to go home to live with my father and his new wife while I recovered. At the end of the summer, Trace moved to San Francisco with some girl he’d met up there after I’d left. A year later, he would be dead. He hit bottom, and Mo — who’d married the Yankee — offered to f ly him back to New York and pay for rehab. His mom told me he hanged himself in the basement at O’Hare during the layover.
Who knew airports even had basements?
One night when we were in Anchorage, Trace won a storytelling contest at a bar. Five-hundred-dollar prize. He told the story of his first kiss — a story that I’d been the first one to hear, that he’d told me the morning after it happened. How he was eleven and she was sixteen, how this older girl had punched her tongue into his mouth and held it there, puffed up like an insult, not moving. How she’d just had lunch and he could taste everything caught in her braces: tuna salad, peanut-butter crackers, banana. It wasn’t so much the story as the way he told it, smiling and flapping his arms and dancing and shining with self-deprecation, offering every word like it was his last cigarette and he was glad to let you have it. He blew the five hundred in an hour, buying drinks for all of us in the house. Trace could be a hero. You just had to be watching at the right time.
Like the day we destroyed the house he grew up in with sledgehammers. His sister and her husband had bought it from Trace’s mom and wanted to redo the interior, so they hired the two of us to gut the place. I had to stop and rest, but Trace was like a machine, swinging the hammer harder and harder, grunting with every stroke, grunts that echoed louder as one by one the walls fell into rubble. I held the ladder for him as he broke apart the brick above the fireplace, where, for a few years at least, a whole family — mother, father, sister, and Trace — had hung their Christmas stockings. I watched him as the chunks of brick and mortar flew under each stroke, and before long I picked up my hammer again, believing that this was the most honest work either of us would ever do.
Jumping Jacks
The skyline of a city you’ve never visited blazes in night-vision green on your TV screen, and the audio track is all thumps and sirens, pippitypops and batterclangs, and you are reminded of the hiss and spit of sixteen flaming fuses on a pack of jumping jacks on that day twenty years ago when you and your best friend, Bunk, burned six acres of forest to the hot black ground.
Jumping jacks. You buy them on Mott Street from a toothless grocer who natters on about fun-fun and bang-bang beneath a canopy of decapitated poultry. You decide this man is a fool. Jumping jacks may look like firecrackers, but they don’t bang-bang. This man knows not what he sells.
Tear open the red paper wrapping, and a fine peppery dust darkens those candy-cane swirls. The fuses are woven in a gorgeous lace of potential energy. Don’t you see it? Can’t you feel it?