And The Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day (8)

A/N: I've started writing this again.

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I sit in the bathroom on the toilet for two hours, with my pants on and the seat down. I feel all lazy and guilty not getting up, but I every time I try, it's like my legs turn into treestumps with fleshy roots growing through the linoleum and through the ceiling of the apartment below us. I feel spindly and transparent and feathery, like bones viewed through an x-ray. Empty, empty, empty. I think that's what the roots are for. They're trying to find a source of laughter or relief, sucking like baby mouths. I don't cry. That wouldn't be very manly. Oscar wouldn't want any tears anyway; you can't buy anything with them. They're useless little baubles that slip through your fingers and shatter on the tile quick as anything. Pretty to look at, I guess, to some people.

Mother bangs at the door.

She wants to get at her dope.

She must not understand that I can't move, and I don't bother to clue her in to that fact. I can't seem to make my voice work either. It's ground out. Someone has taken it. I try to ignore her, with her watery, empty eyes and her chickensquawk voice. Her curses and her threats slip under the door all hoarse and frantic.

She goes away eventually.

Then Maria comes.

“Hey. Kid. You ever gonna come out of there?”

I can't say anything.

“Something bad at school? No? Well, listen. You can't stay in there forever, mi chamaco. Gonna come a point when you run out of stuff to empty yourself of. Gonna have to fill up again. Quesedillas tonight?”

The words I want to say to her fly out of my open mouth and disappear unspoken, like campfire sparks. I think, Quesadillas would be great.

“Listen,” Maria says. “People get hurt. That's just part of life. A load of crap, sure, but we all gotta live with it. There's no point in getting all stuck over teeny-tiny things. Big things, too. You gotta take em all the same. You gotta take em just as things. Good, bad – don't matter. Because things are gonna happen to you and everyone else all the time. What will make it better, is to do something about it. Don't never settle for keeping it inside. Unhealthy. Eat you up, starting with your heart and your soul. You gotta push it out, see. Unload it onto something else. Whisper it into the reeds, or take a gun and blow holes into cans and mailboxes, but you gotta do something. You're gonna be part of that toilet soon if you don't and then you'll have a load of crap in your lap, cause I'm not going in the backyard or anywhere else.”

I feel all shivery now, like a plucked guitar string. I bite the inside of my mouth until I get blood, which tastes warm. I gotta do something. Something. Anything?

“Kid, you're too old for me to be sit out here forever and babytalk to you. So either get a little bit of spine and come out of there and help me with some tomatoes or rot in there.”

I hear her walk away.

Anything.

**

The man is domino-toothed and he smells of grease and gluttony. When he moves, he creaks and snaps and groans and he moves over to the chair behind the desk, which is clean and simple, like the back of a working man. Breathing through his mouth, he stares at him. His eyes hustle him up and down and they register nothing. Blank and dead, like flies that have collected along the windowsill.

There is a ceiling fan in the room, churning up the clay air, and the walls are smooth and yellow. A window is open and the sounds of the town outside slip into the room on eelskin and they gather until the only thing they can hear is the soft sea-murmur of hundreds of voices.

The man taps a cigarette out of a pack of Marlboro's, puts it between his lips, and sighs like a bedspring as he searches in his pocket for a book of matches. He lights up. Louis's stomach gets all hollow and empty feeling at the sight of a good, American cigarette and he licks his lips. The man watches him still. And he smokes. His fingers, all black under the nails, play with the matchbook and the cigarette smoke makes his eyes as cloudy as headlights in the fog.

Frog-throated, Louis points at the crumpled box of cigarettes.

¿Puedo tener uno?

The man smiles.

Por supuesto.

He gives him a cigarette and lights it up for him and lets him sit back down. The man's face is swollen with his smile, a blooded tick. He leans back again. “In english.”

“Okay.”

“You have killed a man and stolen his horse.”

“Yes.”

“You do not appear grieved.”

“There's a body born every minute.”

“Hard talk from a boy.”

Louis draws on the cigarette. “Yeah, well.”

“Do you know the con-sequences?”

“Prison.”

The man smirks a little bit again, and his blackwidow eyes wither a little. “Yes. Prison. There is no death penalty here. A lucky thing for murderers and horse-thieves, I suppose.” He leans forward and props his forearms against the desk, hanging the rest of his weight on them. The cigarette dances on his lower lip. “Why did you come here, huh? Why did you come all the way down from wherever to kill a man and take his horse?”

“It was an accident, man.”

“Of course. There's an accident born every minute.”

“I wanted to see the horse again. He walked in and spooked me.”

“You beat him to death.”

“Got spooked. Listen, I don't have any excuses. It just happened.”

The man leans back again and stares up at the ceiling. The yellow walls seem to sag and wilt, like ladies in church on a hot day, fanning themselves with dainty hands. The man's bones grind and croak as he swings away from the chair and gets to his feet.

Without another word, he walks out of the room and leaves Louis sitting handcuffed in his chair.

**

I flick the wheel of Oscar's old zippo lighter and a flame ratchets to life, wavering and small, like a downy feather.

There is an unlit cigarette in my mouth.

Do something about your problems.

Whisper them to the reeds.

I flip the lid of the lighter closed on the flame and I look at the building again. Squatfaced and hunkered down on its haunches, it reposes here in the dark with me, like some giant animal with old leather skin and contemplative breathing, slow and deep and hardly there. There is nobody out here at two in the morning. Just me and a fistful of thoughts, sitting on the curb. The darkness bends and warps things, turning buildings and streetlights into hunched over, eyeless beings with rasping deadskin and bony shoulders.

Stars are few and dying. They shudder and wink like the gaudy lights of a penny arcade.

At my feet, there are three bottles of gasoline, with little strips of cloth stuffed in their mouths.

It seems like even if I breathe a little hard, they tinkle together quietly. I chew on the end of the cigarette. I watch the building in front of me and I think about Maria's words.

Do something.

You just gotta let it out somehow or it'll grow up inside you until it comes out your eyes and your ears and your mouth and then eat through your skin. I know this will happen if I don't do something about Oscar. I won't be able to function no more. I'll rust up.

I stand up and lift one of the bottles and I heft in my hand. Heavy. Heavy as a sigh.

A single car passes by, with rheumy-eyed headlights, tired and blue in the night, like a starch-collared preacher. I flip open the lighter and flick the wheel. I lick my lips.

For Oscar.

I gotta whisper his name to the reeds.

I touch the flame to the strip of cloth, soaked in gasoline, and it catches fire. I walk forward. Then, grunting, I toss it at one of the widows of Mallet's downtown restaurant and a beat later the unbroken windows blush and the shattered glass-panes gape like the teeth of hell and Satan himself. I light the other two and toss them through the windows of the restaurant, calm. There's a smell of smoke and gas in the air already. I see bow-legged flames spread inside the building and oily, black smoke churns out of the windows, like the mucusy insides of spiders when you mush them with the cover of a book.

I walk away with my hands in my pockets and spit the cigarette out of my mouth.

Somehow, I don't feel any better.

**

The two men lead him out behind the prison, holding his elbows.

There is a slatted shed that leans across the plot of land with its shadow, wood groaning like a kid with a bellyache. The two men walk mechanically. They walk with labored, shoveling movements, with their jaws unhinged and chewing emptily on tobacco and stale air and their joints squeak, unoiled and old, rusty as bicycle chains. The ground expires as they shuffle across it and Louis has to squint to see anything. In the distance, the horizon shivers with heat mirages. Dry wind blows by mildmannered and easy as a beatnik.

They stop at a chainlink fence and one of the men jiggles the lock open and they lead Louis into a fenced off cage. There are two lengths of lead pipe in the corner of the cage. One of the men starts to take off his shirt and the other one winks at Louis and puts his finger to his lips.

Shh.

Everthing's gonna be okay.

Louis looks away and bites his tongue.

The man without his shirt on has a spine that pokes up the skin of his back like the gummy, nubbed teeth of babies. The other one has dirt under his fingernails and a lily-face that perspires in the heat.

No circule demasiado, he says.

Louis backs up and swears, looking up at the sky, faded and tired, like a mother's face.

He keeps his screams inside. He bottles them up and shelves them to collect dust as they beat him, because that's what a man does. They beat him until his nose runs with blood and both his eyes are swollen up and he can't barely move anymore and then they sit and smoke cigarettes and watch him and then they toss the butts at him.

The sun harvests his tears away.