Bullettime (15 page)

It swings open. He knows the man standing there. It’s the detective from years ago, from his high school days. Giovanni—greyer and fatter, but his face as placid as ever. For a moment only. I can smell it on the Kallis Episkopos; he’s excited. It must be kismet. The kind detective.

Then Giovanni’s eyes widen and he pantomimes a shiver, and shouts, “Gun! He’s got a gun!” and reaches for his own sidearm. He plants a bullet in the head of the Kallis Episkopos. Maybe it’s the same thick Holbrook skull that saw young Dave through a number of high school beatings, but he—
I
—hangs on for a few moments, just for a few nanoseconds. Giovanni pulls a second pistol from his belt. I feel it pressed into my stiffening hand before the light in this universe goes out entirely.

D
ave Holbrook realizes that he needs to take the initiative. That’s why Erin has him going so crazy, why he’s such an easy target for every racialized faction at school. That’s what the gun is, after all—a totem of potency. His
mojo
, still underdeveloped thanks to a slow-ticking puberty. Dave was born toward the end of the year; most of the bullies and jocks and geniuses toward the beginning. Eleven months to catch up on. If only he were still in ninth grade and not tenth.

That’s loser talk, Mr. Holbrook
, he thinks. Dave is so enamored with his executive functioning, with the mind behind his mind, that he stops for a second, sensing something. Sensing me, in the Ylem, watching him, living him. He shakes it off and without thinking anything else at all, stands up, slips his jacket on and walks downstairs, right past his mother and out onto the streets. To Erin’s house. This time, he thinks, he’ll be the unpredictable one. He’ll be the trickster. And there was the matter of “Uncle Bill” as well. It’s only about ten blocks to Vroom Street, and the sidewalks seem to roll Dave toward the building. He even has something to say in case he encounters Erin’s father again.
I brought her homework—we’re in every class together
. Only at the door to the apartment building, with his finger on the buzzer, does he realize that his line would only work if Erin actually stayed home today. If she cut school entirely and was out wandering around, demanding fingerfucks from other boys or bailing kids out of hospitals, he’d be doomed. He buzzes anyway. Be the trickster, be the wild one.

There’s no ritual salutation from the intercom, just a louder return buzz and the
clunk
of a bolt opening up. Something about the immediacy of the buzz says
Erin
to Dave, so he takes the steps two at a time. He knocks on the apartment door and she opens it a crack, peering at him with one eye.

“What do you want?” she says, like he’s a stranger.

“We’re in a secret society together, remember? Just you and me. What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours, that’s what I guess that means.” He sees the flesh of her shoulder, creamy save for a pimple or two, and one long hair. Erin doesn’t open the door, so Dave says, “Let me in.”

“Okay,” she says. Erin’s wearing pajama bottoms and a blue T-shirt for a restaurant called
GYRO PALACE.
She turns her back to him to lead him into the apartment, which is cluttered, the walls covered in photos, vaguely Greek statuary and vases on the coffee table and on otherwise barren bookshelves, and he reads the legend on the other side of her shirt:
I HAD A GIANT PITA!

“Sick today?” Dave says.

“Yeah, I got a cold.” She leaves him standing in the middle of the room and plops herself down on the overstuffed couch. It’s the sort of furniture only old people have, and with plastic coverings. Erin puts her feet on the coffee table and flexes her toes. The nails are painted purple. “Did you bring me any homework?”

“I didn’t stay in school either today. I’m sick too. We didn’t get homework in math for once.”

“So you came here to make me sicker?” There’s a glass of ice water on the coffee table; she takes it and drinks it down.

“I played hooky and went to the mall. I ran into my mom there, but she was all cool about it because I’ve been having a hard time lately.” He gestures toward his face. “Then we got home, she got soused and started laying in to me.”

“Did she buy you that coat?” Erin asks. “It looks cute. Doesn’t your friend Trigger have something like it? Why is he named after a TV horse, anyway?”

“Tigger—and there was a horse named Trigger?”

“You know, Roy Rogers.”

Dave laughs and sits without invitation next to Erin. “Roy Rogers! How old are you anyway, grandma?”

Erin says, “I have an old soul. All Greeks do.”

“Have you ever seen that movie,
My Big Fat Greek
—”

“Yes,” she says flatly. “Why are you here, anyway?” She tugs on the hem of his coat.

In a rush, he just says it. “I want you to suck my cock, then I want to fuck you.” Before Erin can say anything, the words tumble out of his mouth. “I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of being teased. You’re supposed to like me. That’s why we hang out, isn’t it? That’s why we did what we did in the bookstore, isn’t it? Well, if you can pop in and out of my life, I can do the same to you. That’s fair. That’s fairness.” Then he adds, his eyes locked on Erin’s, “And I like you. A lot.”

“I have my period,” Erin says. Her voice sounds raw, like she really is sick. She takes her glass and gets up without another word, walks into the open kitchen which is packed with shelves—themselves packed with restaurant-sized canned foods—opens the refrigerator, and refills her glass with water from a pitcher. Dave knows he’s doomed, but tries to act like a real guy, keeping his eyes on her ass the whole time, though her pajama bottoms are baggy and are a kind of plaid suggestive of an item from the boys’ section of a discount clothing store.

Erin comes back to the couch and says, “And fair . . .” She hoists her glass, proposing a toast. “To the fairest!” She clears her throat with a grumbling noise, then gulps down about half her water, letting some of it dribble from the corner of her lips. “You have a lot to learn about women. We’re really not so mysterious, but even the most straightforward of girls wouldn’t fall for a line like ‘That’s fairness’ when it comes to spreading their legs for a guy.”

“I . . . I don’t apologize,” Dave says. “You’re a cocktease, you know that?”

Erin smiles—a thin little line on her face. “Are we breaking up?” she asks.

Dave’s face explodes with heat. “We . . . we were together?”

“Were?”

“You’re just fucking with me again,” he says. “I should slap you across the fucking face.”

“Dave, I don’t feel well . . .” Erin’s voice is light and dreamy now. She stares off at the corner of the room, as though the cobwebs were suddenly intriguing. Dave can’t help but be reminded of his mother in that mellow stage between three drinks and five. He really wants to apologize—truly, he should. There’s a world in which he does, and it makes him feel better, and he gets a few more weeks of relative peace before picking up a gun and taking it to Hamilton.

“Take your coat off if you’re going to stay,” Erin says. “Just looking at you makes me feel hot. Feverish, I mean.”

Dave shrugs it off his shoulders, but doesn’t hang it up. He has nothing to say.

“Are you a member of the Trench Coat Mafia now?” Erin asks.

“Maybe,” Dave says.

She leans in close, and whispers in his ear. “Do you have a gun? Do you want one?”

“What would I do with a gun?” Dave says slowly, carefully.

Erin shrugs. “Wave it around. Scare people. Maybe get punched in the face a little less often.”

“Get arrested, go to jail . . .”

“Oh Davey,” Erin says. “Everyone knows that white kids don’t end up in prison for shit like that, unless they actually shoot someone.”

“What do you know about guns, anyway? They don’t sell them with a side of fries, you know.”

Erin squints and licks her lips. “You don’t know much.”

“It’s about that guy, isn’t it? ‘Uncle Bill’—is he some criminal you know? Is he going to get me an Uzi?”

“He’s not a criminal.”

“He stabbed me with a pen.”

“It wasn’t him.”

“How do you know?”

“I know everything,” Erin says.

“You’re just picking another fight with me,” Dave says. “This is stupid.” He reaches for his coat.

“Wait,” Erin says. She takes his hand. Her own hand is very warm. “I need your help. I’m really not feeling well. Will you go to the bathroom—it’s down the hall and to the left—and bring me the cough syrup? It’s on the sink, where I left it, I think. No need to look through the medicine cabinet, understand?”

“Okay, sure,” Dave says. And he goes, and the cough syrup isn’t on the sink, so naturally he looks in the medicine cabinet for it. It’s there,
sans
label and in a glass bottle rather than a plastic one. And he sees an assortment of pill bottles. He takes a look, but the prescription information is all in Greek. He tries to figure out whether the name “Erin” appears anywhere—
E is the same, isn’t it, and doesn’t the Greek r look like an English p
? But maybe Erin wasn’t even her real name. Her real Greek name.

“What’s taking so long!?” Erin calls out to him from the living room. Dave takes a swig of the cough syrup—it tastes odd, like something old and licorice-y—and brings it into the living room. He’d half-hoped that she would have her pants off or something similar, but no. She held out her arms and wiggled her fingers like a baby. “Thank you, thank you!” she says as she takes the bottle and drinks from the cap. “Thanks again.”

Dave sits back down. Erin passes him the bottle. He swigs right from it, without bothering to use the cap. They pass the medicine back and forth for a while, not saying anything, but enjoying the touching of their knees, the brushing of finger against palm.

“Why do you think people pick on you?” Erin finally says.

“I dunno,” Dave says. “They can, I guess. They pick on Tigger too, but not as much.”

“Because he’s a little crazy-looking.”

“And there are a few Armenians in the school. Some big guys—they’re like trucks who wear sweaters. They’re all tight.”

“And you got nobody, eh?” Erin says.

Dave giggles. “I got you, babe . . .” he says, voice a sing-song.

“And I got myself a gun,” she says, another melody.

“Why all this gun talk?” Whatever Dave’s been drinking, it’s not over-the-counter. His blinks are longer than his looks.

“You think you’re the only one being attacked?” Erin says, that edge back in her voice. Or maybe the cough syrup doesn’t coat her throat quite as well as it could. “Why do you think I enrolled in that shitty school? Why we’re living out here in
Joisey
instead of Astoria in this dump above some third-cousin’s luncheonette?”

Dave doesn’t have anything to say to that. Is it another wind-up to a joke only Erin will ever get?

“Whatever . . . it was a rhetorical question,” Erin says, finally upset about something. Angry rather than mocking. Defeated instead of enthusiastic. Petulant and not scintillating. From the Ylem I scream
It’s a trap
! and Dave does get a sense of foreboding, but he doesn’t listen.

“Why don’t you get a gun, then?”

“I have two already,” she says. She struggles to get off the couch and again walks to the kitchen and then through a small door Dave hadn’t noticed before. A few moments later, she returns with a pair of very real-looking guns. Uzis, just as he had said. “Minis. Easy to hide in a coat like that.”

“Machine guns?”

“Of course not. These are sub-machine guns. They use pistol ammo.”

“Where did you get them?”

“When you have family in the restaurant business in New York, you just get to know people, you know?” Erin says.

“Are those legal?”

Erin stares at Dave as though he, in the space of a breath, had developed Down’s Syndrome. “No. Nor is taking them to school and waving them around. This is a Bonnie and Clyde gig.”

“Who?”

“Sid and Nancy?”

“Still nuffin’, sorry,” Dave says. His tongue is beginning to feel leaden.

“Mickey and Mallory?” Erin says.

“Oh, okay,” Dave says. “But no killing, right?”

Erin sits down next to Dave again, the guns heavy in her little hands. “I don’t think either of us have that in us.”

And in a way, Erin’s right. She’s never done her own dirty work. Not in the beforetimes when the world was young and Zeus faced down Typhon with the victory goddess Nike at his side and Eris on the side of the great hundred-headed dragon, not in Greece where she chucked an apple into a party to which she was not invited, and not now either.

And she’s right about Dave Holbrook, in most cases. I couldn’t have done it. I still wonder if that’s why, with a flick of the wrist and a blanket, she exiled me here. The one who did it hardcore, he was able to spread discord after a fashion with his “movement” of malcontents, but in the great scheme of things, all those high school goons didn’t add up to much more than a handful of suicides, one copycat stabbing spree by a kid in Massachusetts who couldn’t get his hands on a gun, and a pop culture footnote of less import than Charles Manson. Someone somewhere made enough money on those resistance symbol stickers to buy a small house in Berkeley, California’s worst neighbourhood, but that’s about it.

Erin never does show up that day, though. Dave does. He decides that he’s going to, right now. He won’t brandish the gun, he says to himself, unless someone starts something with him. Then he realizes that someone starts something with him nearly every damn day. So he won’t take it out unless someone pulls a weapon, or if he ends up on the floor of a hallway, books scattered everywhere. But what if the gun goes off from the impact? There’s a safety on it, sure, but . . .

“We should go someplace and practise shooting these.”

“You want to practise shooting machine guns?” Erin asks.

“Yeah, we can do it in the swampy area by the Liberty Science Center. Shoot over the river or something. It’s not like the bullets will make it to Manhattan.”

“Yeah,” Erin says, suddenly bright. “And if they do, it’ll just blend in with the criminal weather over there.”