33 Snowfish (2 page)

When they wasn’t looking I pissed in it. I bleached up that mop water real good.

As soon as that security guard took his cigarette break I skated to the food court and found a table by Sbarro and hid my feet under a copy of the
Daily Shopper
.

Bob Motley walked over to me all fat and slow with his beard and his sunglasses and his big hairy shoulders and gave me a slice of pepperoni pizza and pointed to the
Daily Shopper
and told me he’d buy me some new kicks if I took a ride with him.

“A ride where?” I asked.

“Just a ride.”

I was like, “Cool.”

He got me a pair of Pro Flyers with lightning on the sides and took me over to his house in Rockdale.

That’s when he started owning me.

In the TV room at Bob Motley’s there was this hole in the wall where he was always hiding shit. He called it the Dumdum Hole. He kept a bike chain and a paddle with nails in it and a pair of nunchucks and a Louisville Slugger baseball bat in there. The Dumdum Hole went through the entire wall, and when you peeled the newspaper away you could see the front yard. There wasn’t much to look at but a rusty-ass barbecue grill and a bunch of weeds. I think he made the Dumdum Hole by pushing Lottery’s head through the wall. Lottery was this seven-foot Indian who lived on a houseboat on the Illinois River. He used to fall down and have epileptic seizures a lot, but he was good at hearts and he didn’t never fuck with you, and once in a while he even gave you some beef jerky to eat.

Bob Motley says he cured Lottery of them seizures when he made the Dumdum Hole. Lottery didn’t never come by after that.

“Cleared that boy’s head right up,” I heard Bob Motley bragging to the rest of his crew one night. There was like eight of them suckers, and Bob Motley’s duplex was like their headquarters.

Bob Motley had a PlayStation II and a Mitsubishi VCR and so many videos you couldn’t even count them joints. He also had this big electric saw that he kept in the kitchen. He used it to slice up roast beef and Virginia honey-basted ham, and it would spit little meat boogies all over the place. He’d always make me clean it up, and whatever I missed the bugs got.

Bob Motley never really looked at me, and he yelled a lot, but he kept me fed and got me them Pro Flyers and sometimes when he was in a good mood he would even let me touch his pet iguana, Mercy. He got Mercy from this man from Minooka who owed him some money. He kept Mercy in a glass box next to the electric saw. Mercy was cool cuz she would flick her tongue on your hand.

After a while Bob Motley started calling me Boy, which was cool cuz before that he’d just call me Hey.

Before I skated me and Bob Motley made like four films together. The best one was called
Girl Eats Boy,
where Bob Motley puts this black pillowcase over his head and pretends like he’s cutting me with the electric saw. Then he grinds up my legs in a hamburger maker and feeds me to this little girl who lives under the kitchen sink.

Making
Girl Eats Boy
was pretty cool cuz I got to scream a lot.

The little girl’s name was Wendy Sue. She was like seven or some shit. I think she belonged to one of Bob Motley’s boys, but I ain’t sure. Wendy Sue stayed with us for a whole weekend. It was cool cuz she slept with me on the Sealy Posturepedic mattress in Sergeant Dick’s room. One night I pulled her shirt up and stared at her body. She didn’t even know it cuz she was sleeping.

After that weekend I never seen Wendy Sue again. You got to wonder what happens to a kid like that.

Bob Motley said he was going to get
Girl Eats Boy
put on the Internet. He said you can make crazy bank with them computer films.

Making movies is fun, but watching movies is boring. When him and his boys would play hearts, Bob Motley used to make me watch this movie called
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
is like the most boringest movie ever made. It stars this man called Dick Van Dick, which is a pretty wack name if you ask me. My favorite part of the movie is when Dick Van Dick saves all these kids from a evil child-catcher. He sings this pretty crisp song called “Hushabye Mountain.” These two rich kids are hiding under this toy maker’s shop, and they get lured into this candy truck and wind up at the baron’s castle where the child-catcher lives, and they meet up with all these other kids who are hiding under the castle, and some of them was already
in
the castle, but they escaped and they kept talking all frantic about how they had to pretend that they was like dolls so they wouldn’t get caught and that’s when Dick Van Dick comes and sings the song.

One day when I was watching
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
I went into Bob Motley’s room to use the toilet, cuz the one in the basement was busted. His boys had skated and Bob Motley was asleep on his waterbed. He was making this face like he was in a car crash, and whenever he made that face he wouldn’t wake up for nothing. For some reason I opened his closet. There was all types of stuff in there, like boots and boxes of porno magazines and a electric guitar. There was a gas mask in there, too, and when I put it on it made me feel alive and dead at the same time.

There was a shoebox that had D
EATH TO
A
LL
W
HO
M
EDDLE
on it. I opened it and there was my gat, just waiting for me to take it. It was the blackest thing I ever seen, and as soon as I touched it I got a boner and I knew I wouldn’t never be able to let it go. I’ll bet Bob Motley still don’t know I took it. He probably had like a whole collection of them little guns.

It only fires twenty-twos and it ain’t no bigger than a hand and the trigger’s busted, but a gat’s a gat, and that’s that.

It’s only got four bullets in it, but four’s better than none.

Once, I heard this old, blind sucker at Renfro Park say that if you shoot the right four or five people you’ll grow a new life. He’s one of them Vietnam vets who lives in a refrigerator box. He said he missed the ones he was supposed to hit and hit the ones he was supposed to miss. He says that that’s how come his life never grew back right. That’s probably how come he lives in a refrigerator box in Renfro Park.

I ain’t shot nobody yet, but I would. You never know who’s gonna creep up behind you.

Anyway, when it comes to names, that Wallace Henry Walters kid’s got one of them fancy ones. You can almost
sing
that shit.

A baby without a name just ain’t marketable.

Even cars get good names. Horizons and Neons and shit like that.

Besides, the baby is Boobie’s little brother, and Boobie don’t want that non-name on his head always reminding him of what he done back home. It’s like naming the baby makes shit new again.

Even a non-name will get behind your mind. That’s how come ghosts always call out a name when they’re floating through walls and shit — they know it’ll get stuck way in the back of your head where the brain can get a scream caught in it.

Even though it ain’t hers, Curl thinks we’ll get at least five hundred for the baby, but she don’t really know. She’s too busy fiending.

“Five hundred,” she’ll say. “Five hundred solid, right Boobie?”

I keep telling her you can’t just open a catalog and look up some numbers — it’s a
baby
. And some people might think there’s something wrong with him, cuz he’s got this little seam down the middle of his forehead.

At first Curl wanted to take him by Sidekick’s. Sidekick is this man who used to make movies with Bob Motley. He was tall and skinny and he laughed so much you thought his teeth was going to fall out and shit. His favorite thing to do was to chill in parking lots with his big, long arm hanging over the door to his El Camino. He mostly just hunts little kids. Sometimes he hunts kids who are littler than me. He finds them lost at the mall or stranded down by the Rockdale bus station.

Once Sidekick found this little half-nigger called Ulysses crying under the big sign at Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips. Sidekick gave him a pack of Fleer baseball cards and Ulysses got right in his El Camino like there was about skeighty-eight more packs in the back seat or some shit. Sidekick always keeps Tootsie Rolls and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum in his pockets, too.

After Sidekick got Ulysses to get in his El Camino he made him put his seatbelt on and gave him a 1999 Susan B. Anthony silver dollar.

I know all that cuz Ulysses showed me the silver dollar. Susan B. Anthony looks like a man; like her name should be
Dave
or some shit. Ulysses used to come over to Bob Motley’s duplex with Sidekick for the Thursday hearts game. They would stick him in Sergeant Dick’s room with me, and we would watch
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
and he would tell me all the wack shit Sidekick was doing to him.

Ulysses was only like seven or eight and he talked with a stutter and he had this little purple spot on his neck that looked like a flower. He was a dirty-ass little half-nigger, too — a lot dirtier than me. And he wasn’t dirty in no dusty way, he was dirty in a
skanky
way. Like he was always shitting his pants and sitting down in it and stuff like that. That’s probably why his parents didn’t want him no more.

Once I asked him where he was from.

I was like, “Where you from, Ulysses?”

He just looked at me funny and went, “The United States of America.”

After a while, Ulysses just disappeared. Whenever I’d ask Sidekick about him he would just say he wasn’t “useful” no more, or how he kept getting “smaller and smaller” till he just “faded away.” Then him and Bob Motley would laugh their stupid laughs and trim up some hurricane on the kitchen table.

On Thursdays Sidekick would bring other kids to Bob Motley’s, too. It was like you would see them for a while, but then one day you wouldn’t no more.

That’s how come I’d never get into Sidekick’s El Camino with him — cuz it was like if you got in it and the door closed you would start to disappear. That’s how you wind up on the back of one of them milk cartons you see at the Econofoods in Coal City.

I ain’t no fucking milk carton kid, I’ll tell you that right now.

When we got to Sidekick’s crib with the baby the windows was all boarded up and the El Camino was gone and there was this big black X painted on the door.

Sidekick lived in Bolingbrook over by Old Man Turpentine’s Fun Shop. That sucker always had the pigs or some bill collector looking for him. He’s probably been in thirty different states by now. Or maybe he’s down in Mexico eating a taco or some shit?

I skated from Bob Motley’s duplex after I found out he was gonna put me in this snuff film. One day when him and his crew thought I was sleeping I heard them talking about shooting the film and how much money they could make and how many hookers they could get and how much hurricane they could buy.

I was in the kitchen sneaking some Folger’s instant coffee.

“We could use your boy,” one of them was saying to Bob Motley. “One minute he’s doin’ his thing, and the next thing Mr. Snuffleupagus pays him a visit and it’s all over. He won’t know the difference.”

Bob Motley was like, “I guess we could, I guess we could.”

After his crew left I had to hide in the basement till Bob Motley drank his two bottles of Mad Dog and fell asleep in his big corduroy chair.

When I came up from the basement I peeled away the newspaper, pushed the Louisville Slugger aside, crawled through the Dumdum Hole, and ran all the way through Rockdale.

That night I slept under a bread truck in the parking lot of the Dominick’s on Jefferson Street in Joliet. When I woke up I had a burn on my arm that still bleeds when I lean on it wrong. Curl thinks it’s a evil spirit that got freed when I left Bob Motley, but I just think it’s from the bread truck.

At the Fun Shop Bob Motley was always telling Old Man Turpentine how he’s gonna cut off my hands when he finds me. Old Man Turpentine don’t never say nothing, though, cuz I used to clean his floor for him.

I knew Boobie wasn’t going to let Bob Motley touch me, though, cuz whenever some sucker started messing with me Boobie would just walk up to him and use his fist or a stick or something he’d find on the street. Sometimes he’d even just stand there and stare at them with his black eyes. He did it to a nigger in Lockport once and the nigger started running away all frantic like his house was burning down and shit. Boobie’s protective like that with Curl, too.

But the thing about Boobie is that most of the time you don’t
never
know what’s on his mind. No one does. That’s cuz he don’t never hardly talk. He mostly just
does
shit. And when he ain’t
doing
shit he’s thinking real quiet or he’s drawing pictures in this special book he carries around with him.

At first I thought he was writing scary stories, but Curl looked in the book and she said it was just a bunch of drawings.

One page’s got a picture of a old man with no mouth.

Another one’s got a picture of a horse getting attacked by a hawk.

Curl said he names them pictures, too, but even though she’s smarter than most people, she can’t read too good.

I learned how to read a little in the basement of this Catholic church in Streator. This nun called Sister Pat teached me the alphabet song and had me putting letters together and building them syllable parts. Sister Pat had all of these sores on her mouth, and she was always blessing me and making them crisscross signs with her hands.

Sometimes if I would get letters fixed together right to build them words, she would try to kiss me on my face, so I started calling her Sister Blister.

I’d go, “Cool out, Sister Blister,” or some shit like that, and then she’d get pissed and make me sit in the holy chair and sing this wack church song about God and the love he’s got for children and blind people in Maryland or Jerusalem or Jahozifatz or some place.

And sometimes Sister Blister would make me hold the Jesus picture and sit in the holy chair and do thirty-threes. A thirty-three is when you count to thirty-three. It’s supposed to make shit slow down. Sometimes it worked, but I’d usually fake it and be like, “Oh, I feel much better,” just so she’d stop sweating me.