Chinese Handcuffs (5 page)

“Nice day,” Dillon said from behind him, and Preston started slightly in the chair, not so much from being surprised as being brought back.

“Yeah.”

“You just getting in?” Dillon asked.

“You my mother?”

No, you asshole,
Dillon thought,
I'm not your mother. Your mother got sick of this crap and left, remember?,
but what he said was “Not the last time I looked.”

“Then you don't need to know when I'm getting in.”

Dillon backed way off. “I didn't mean to get nosy,” he said. “I was just worried about you, that's all,” and he turned to walk back into the house. “I just thought . . . Never mind.”

Preston didn't respond.

Dillon knew there were going to be times when Preston was moody. He had refused to enter into any kind of drug treatment program, wanted to see if he could do it on his own first. “Sometimes when I'm hurtin',” he'd said at the outset, “I feel mean enough to kill, so those are probably good times to let me be.” Dillon and his dad had agreed they would, but Dillon hadn't realized it would be so difficult. He had a temper, too, and his first reaction to being jumped on was to jump back, hard.

But on this day he walked back into the house.

 

Dillon's door cracked open like a gunshot two hours later, bringing him out of his bed like a sailor in a fire drill on a nuclear submarine. When his mind caught up, he saw Preston balanced on his back wheels in the bedroom doorway, a big smile plastered across his face. Seeing him like that, Dillon couldn't recall for certain whether their earlier encounter was real or a dream.

“Let's go shoot us some tin cans,” Preston said.

“Some of my best friends are tin cans.”

“All of your friends are tin cans. Let's go shoot some.”

Dillon was aware this was the first time the two had
joked around in a long time, maybe years, and he wasn't about to let it get away. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed as Preston dropped his front wheels back to the floor. “Meet me at the van in five,” Preston said. “I got the shootin' irons.”

Dillon was never much with a gun. That was his father's and Preston's territory. They were the hunters; he was the gatherer. He knew he'd probably drop a couple of Abe Lincolns or maybe even an Andrew Jackson on bets, as Preston fanned down a row of cans and bottles while
his
bullets strayed harmlessly into tree trunks and Mother Earth, but any connection was worth it. This was the first hint of anything that felt like
family
to him for a long, long time. It was only a crumb, but he'd had no idea how much he'd missed it.

Preston guided the van slowly up Cedar Street as Three Forks began to come alive. They stopped at Jackie's Home Cookin' for some pancakes and eggs, and Preston talked about old times—back
before
times—as he watched people passing by on the sidewalk from his window seat. “Remember when we were little and Dad used to take us on the mail run?” he asked, without waiting for an answer. “We'd come down here for breakfast really early in the morning and listen to the old neighborhood guys talk about shit they
didn't know anything about, only we didn't know it. God, I think the smell of this place is the best memory I have in the world.” He was quiet a second, and Dillon started to answer, but Preston went on. “Sometimes we'd ask Stacy along and then fight about who she was with, remember?”

“She was with you,” Dillon said.

Preston shook his head. “Man, I really messed that up.”

Dillon wanted to say something about finally learning that Stacy would always be Preston's, no matter how much he wanted her to be his, and that he thought he'd finally let go of all that in the last year, but Preston started talking to the window again about buying the motorcycle to try to be a big shot and about losing his legs in the accident. He seemed so
empty.

“Things would have been real different,” Dillon said. “Some bad things happened that no one would have predicted.”

“What are you talking about?” Preston said, and Dillon realized Preston wasn't aware he'd been talking aloud.

“You okay?” Dillon asked.

Preston came back. “Yeah, I'm okay. Tired, is all.”

“Wanna go back home and catch some shut-eye?
Gun down some tin cans later?”

Preston shook his head. “No. I'm not that tired. This is the day for it.”

Dillon thought he meant shooting cans.

Preston pulled the van up next to the high old wooden fence surrounding the Crown Point Cemetery, about four miles outside the city limits. Crown Point had been the main graveyard in the 1800s, when Three Forks was a spot in the road rather than a budding city of two hundred thousand. Dillon reached into the back and hauled out Preston's chair, custom made of light alloy with special athletic wheels, carried it around the van, and opened it next to the driver's door. His dad and he had pooled their money and got it for Preston when he came home from the hospital in hopes that he'd get interested in wheelchair athletics. It didn't work. Preston played on a wheelchair basketball team for a little while, and he wasn't bad; but in a short period of time he secretly named it the Miami Express and started running drugs out of the Dragon tavern for the Warlocks. He had told Dillon at one point that the bartender in the Dragon checked a person's ID about once every third year, so he had no trouble coming and going from his new home base.

Preston extracted their grandfather's old German
Luger out of the glove compartment and tucked it in his belt. For as long as Dillon could remember, Preston had kept that gun oiled and polished as if it were brand-new. Dillon collected both twenty-two rifles from the back and leaned them against the van before scouting the area for unsuspecting bottles and cans. Crown Point was a well-known make-out spot for Three Forks teenagers and offered up an abundance of beer and pop containers, and Dillon filled two empty cases with them while Preston wheeled the weaponry to a good flat spot from which to shoot.

While Dillon placed the targets carefully on tree stumps and fence posts and in the crooks of the branches of trees, Preston loaded the Luger's clip and filled the chamber of each of the rifles. Their game was simple: Choose a target; miss it and the points double for the other guy. No target was placed closer than thirty yards, and at least four of eleven were more than forty-five. Preston didn't miss one in the first round and finished it with a count of seven to Dillon's four. When Preston shattered a Bud bottle Dillon could barely see in the crotch of two large tree branches for his seventh to end the first round, Dillon hustled out to set up another eleven, thinking all the while how strange Preston was
acting, how he kept shifting from loud and engaging to distant and silent. Preston had been silent throughout the last four shots.

“You feeling okay?” Dillon asked, walking back toward him from the tree where Preston had shattered the final Bud.

Preston had wheeled his chair nearly twenty feet from the spot they'd been shooting from, leaving the rifles back on the ground. The Luger was in his lap.

“Not tough enough, huh?” Dillon said. “Need a little bigger challenge?”

Preston picked up the pistol and fingered it slowly, looking down at it momentarily, then back at Dillon. Dillon thought for a split second Preston was going to shoot him. “Hey, Pres,” he said, stopping at the rifles, “what's the matter?”

“A lot,” Preston said. “A lot's the matter.”

“What.”

“Well, to start with,” he said, picking up the gun in both hands and leveling it at one of the closer bottles, “you. You're the matter.” He pulled the trigger, and the Luger jumped in his hands. The bottle nearly vaporized.

Dillon watched carefully, confused as to how he should feel, whether to be scared or not, as Preston
leveled the gun again, this time kicking a can on the cemetery fence post ten feet into the air. “What're you talking about?” Dillon said. “What do you mean I'm the matter?”

“I got to go out honest,” Preston said. “If nothing else, I got to go out honest. Do you know what it's like watching what I could have been if I were big and strong and so goddamn
cool
all the time? So frigging
funny?”

Dillon took a breath. “No, I guess I don't.”

Preston nodded. “Nope. I guess you don't.” He nailed a bottle at the edge of a ground squirrel hole. “Well,” he said, “it ain't a lot of fun.”

Dillon started toward him, but in that instant the barrel of the Luger was tight against Preston's temple. He said, “Stand fast, soldier.”

Dillon stood fast. “Hey, Pres, you on something?”

Preston reached into his coat pocket and turned it inside out, dumping a mid-size street pharmacy onto the ground. “Yeah,” he said, smiling, “I'm on a little something.”

Dillon's throat knotted. He knew he might not have a chance to slow this down with Preston on drugs. He couldn't for the life of him predict Preston when he was high. For one thing he never knew what drugs Preston had taken, and even if he did, he'd never
known all that much about the effects of drugs anyway. “We can talk about this,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, we can. We can talk about it.” Preston lowered the Luger to his lap. “Go ahead, little bro. Go ahead and talk about it.”

Dillon stood dumb, his heart pounding in his ears.

“At a loss for words?” Preston mocked. “You?”

Dillon said, “Yeah, I guess I am. I mean, I don't really know what's wrong, Pres. I didn't even know you were pissed at me.”

Preston smiled and relaxed a trifle, and Dillon believed there
might
be a chance. “Ah, it's not just you. You're only a
little
of what's the matter, really. Got time for a story?”

“Yeah,” Dillon said, moving a little closer, “I've got all the time you need.”

In a flash the gun was back to Preston's temple. “Just sit tight,” he said. “I can tell it from a distance.”

Dillon stopped, and Preston lowered the gun again. “When I left last night, I was hating you bad. Both of you.”

“Me and Dad?”

“You and Dad. I was sick of all the patronizing bullshit. All the goddamn
support.
All the time telling me I'm not the reason Mom and Christy left. Where'd you
guys learn that stuff? You been talking to a shrink?”

Dillon said, “Dad talked to a drug counselor, I think. Hey, man, we didn't know what to do. You wouldn't go get any help or anything.”

“Yeah, well, I was full up to about here of you guys,” Preston said, measuring off a spot just under his chin to show exactly how full of them he was, “and thinking I'd been straight just about long enough. So I went over to the Dragon to look up a few of my old buddies. By the way, Dad'll be a little pissed when you get back. He's missing about three hundred bucks. Square it up for me, will you? Like, tell him I'm sorry.”

“I'm not going back alone, Pres,” Dillon said.

Preston smiled. “Oh, you're going back alone, all right. Unless you pick somebody up on the way.”

Change swept over Preston before Dillon's eyes. The meanness drained out of him like dirty bathwater. “It's not you, Dillon. That was a bad rap. If it were, I'd shoot
you.
All you ever did was show me what I'm not.” He was quiet for a long minute; Dillon stood frozen, realizing for the first time that Preston
really
meant to kill himself and that he had no chance of doing anything about it unless he could keep him talking until Preston came down from the drugs.

“There was a woman in the Dragon,” Preston said, and he was glazed over now. “A girl, really. I'd be surprised if she was seventeen. Nobody checks ID. She was crazy to be there. Everyone else was bikers and biker's mommas and dopers. The place was thick with meanness, and this girl was pushing it all the way, waving her boobs around like they were water balloons at a summer picnic, grinding her butt in the air over by the pool table. Picked herself up a following.” Preston put the gun up to his temple and made a firing sound with his throat, as if in dress rehearsal, then rested it back in his lap.

“I had about a half dozen cross tops in me and a nose full of coke, washed down with a pitcher of Bud, and I was making a deal for a little crack—four months of clean living wiped out in fifteen minutes. And I tell you, little bro, being on shit is the only way I ever felt big. And I was feeling
big.

“So somebody—hell, it might have even been me—said we oughta give this honey some of what she was asking for. It went up for a quick vote and came back by God unanimous. Wolf goes over and picks her up—she's squealing and pawing at him—and throws her on her back on the pool table; you heard her head hit. All of a sudden she's scared, real scared, starts to fight him,
but hell, one of Wolf's
tattoos
weighs more than her whole self. He just pins her down by the throat with one hand and tears off her skirt and goes to town. And then they line up.”

Preston stopped a second and lowered his head. Dillon quickly considered charging him to try to get the gun, but too much distance stood between them. And he knew he wouldn't get a second chance. Preston was serious.

“I watched it all,” Preston said. “I cheered them on. I even hollered out some techniques I thought ought to be tried, and every one was. By the time they were halfway through, she was dead behind her eyes.” Preston paused and looked away. “Then I'm being lifted out of my chair, laughing and all surprised, and next thing I'm on my back on the table, 'cause I don't perform all that well with no legs and all. Wolf tells her to straddle me, while he's undoing my pants. She gazes at him, and she's a mess, face all bruised and blood trickling out of her nose, and she says no. I don't know how she could have it in her to say no; but she does, and old Wolf slaps her so hard I think her face will come right off her head, and then his knife is at her neck. So she does it finally, and somewhere in there Wolf's attention turns away, and she passes out, just slumps over and
falls off the table. No one but me even noticed. It was over for them when they sat her on the cripple.”