Deathskull Bombshell (2 page)

“Stop,” Kylie said.

“Pain. Whoa-whoa.” Parker smiled at her, his
weird all-teeth twitchy-eyed smile he reserved for annoying his
sisters. It was funny. When he timed the twitches just right, it
looked like an epileptic seizure.

He drooled out his mouth a little, just to
piss her off.

“Mar-got,” Kylie whined.

“You kids calm down up there,” Margot said,
not looking up from her homework, “or I’ll hijack the steering
wheel and drive this dumb car straight to Oklahoma, where we’ll all
die of heat stroke. You shouldn’t be goofing off while you’re
driving anyway, Kylie. And Parker, seriously. Grow up.”

Parker crossed his eyes at her.

“I wasn’t goofing off,” Kylie said. “It’s
Parker’s fault.”

“All my fault,” said Parker.

Margot sighed. “I gotta work on these term
papers. You guys shut up.”

Kylie glared out at the road, but she didn’t
say anything, just kept the music on. It made ignoring Parker
easier. Kylie hated Oklahoma. She’d be damned if Margot got her
way. Maybe she was joking, though. It was hard to tell with her
sometimes. She always wore a serious face, so even an empty threat
looked real. Anyway, the last time they were in Oklahoma, visiting
someone on the Cherokee side, a prairie dog crawled into the glove
compartment and died. From then on she always associated Oklahoma
with the hot smell of rotting fur and flesh.

April 2003

Nick O’Doole hunched over the full sink,
lamenting his existence. Dishes everywhere. No respite. Each time
he finished a load of dishes, Frasquita and Polly just gave him
more. He’d be here all night at this rate.

He wiped the sweat from his brow. Stupid
glasses kept fogging up. Same shit, different day. The end of his
Saturday night shift at Lardé’s Bistro drew close, but there were a
million things to do before quitting time.

A group of drunk theatre types came in and
ordered pretty much every item on the menu. They looked so happy.
Nick wished he could order that much food in one setting.

But he was only a dishwasher.

His paycheck? A meager seven dollars an hour,
plus tips. The boss, Newt Larson, said promotions were decided
every year around Christmas. But it was only April. He had a while
before his first promotion. Surely he’d earn one, though. He was a
hard worker. Some nights when they were understaffed, like tonight,
he had to be both dishwasher and waiter.

Frasquita, a former Hooter’s girl,
second-oldest employee at forty-one, discovered if you had a good
pair of scissors and a sewing kit, you could modify your work
uniform. More cleavage meant more tips. It quickly became a fashion
trend with the waitresses at Lardé’s. Brought in more customers, so
the boss never reprimanded anybody for it. Somehow Nick’s own pasty
chest didn’t elicit the same response.

Talk about sexism in the workplace.

Everyone at the theatre table wore
ridiculously gaudy Elizabethan costume. It looked like something
out of an old Shakespeare movie.

The theatre people chattered and gossiped,
oblivious to his presence. A drunk old man in pointy buckled shoes
spoke with his mouth full, waving around a chicken leg in the
exuberance of his storytelling.

Nick cleared his throat, feeling cheap and
anachronistic in his dirty apron and black jeans. He was supposed
to wear slacks, but he never did. He hated shopping. “Excuse me,”
he said, “do any of you need me to take your plates?”

“Only to refill them!” chuckled the man with
the drumstick. Everybody laughed.

Nick stretched a smile over his face.

“Oh, don’t mind him,” one of the women said
in a Cockney accent, rolling her eyes. She wore blue mascara. This
idiosyncrasy made him like her a bit more than the others. Blue
mascara was a thing of the past, but a past he recognized to some
extent. “Sir Fenwick always gets carried away.” She handed him her
plate. A few other ladies followed suit. “Thank you for your
trouble.”

Nick nodded, keeping the plates flat against
his palm. De rien, he thought. Thinking in French helped him study.
Wisconsin sucked. If it weren’t for Brooke and Parker, he’d move to
Quebec or something, speak nothing but French and eat poutine
forever.

“It’s nothing,” he said, in English. “What’s
with the costumes?”

The woman laughed. “Costumes? My dear boy,
this is the Cacahuet Renaissance Faire troupe. These are our
working clothes.”

Nick raised an eyebrow.

She smiled, putting her elbows up on the
table and leaning her chin into her hands. All of a sudden, she
grabbed the strings of his work apron, pulling him close to her.
For a moment he thought she meant to slap him, and he closed one
eye, bracing himself. Instead, she slipped a ten dollar bill into
his apron pocket, then pushed him back on his feet. “For your
service.”

He nodded again. In the face of such charity,
he could only choke on his words.

Her perfume, nauseating and sweet, like a
poison pink flower-cloud. Oh god, it hurt.

“Thank you,” he croaked.

“Never you mind, dear,” she said. “Go buy
some lucky woman dinner.”

“Oh! A man in love!” the old man said through
a mouthful of bird and mashed potatoes. He chuckled. “Good for you,
friend.” Before Nick could protest, he reached into his velvet
British-looking trench coat and procured a twenty-dollar bill.
“Compliments of the Cacahuet Renaissance Faire. Have fun.”

Christ. Evidently the entire world conspired
in his favor this evening. Too bad it was under false
pretenses.

Man in love. Hah.

Nick took the money anyway. No sense in
morality when dealing with the uncouth. He walked back to the
kitchen with two armfuls of dishes, vowing to mop all the floors as
penance for that thought. He and Brooke were going to eat like
royalty after work.

“Potatoes au gratin, if you would, Sir!” a
blonde woman yelled after him. She wasn’t the best actress. Her
accent kept switching countries throughout the night.

“On it!” he yelled back.

In the kitchen, Polly Larson leaned over a
pile of diced vegetables, carving little shapes into the chopping
board with her paring knife and looking depressed. She sighed
heavily, turning to face him. Polly was the boss’s daughter. She
knew everything about running the kitchen, and she hated everyone
who worked there. Frasquita told Nick that long ago, Polly wanted
to be an Olympic runner, but then her boyfriend shoved her around
too much and she couldn’t run anymore.

“Nick, you’re not supposed to wear your apron
on the floor,” Polly said.

“My bad.”

He scraped the dishes and stacked them in the
sink, filling it with water and soap. He sprayed the hot water
hose. It took forever – you rinsed everything, let it soak, then
ran it all through the hot water dishwasher. The water steamed.
About the same temperature used to boil lobsters. When it was done,
the dishes were immaculate. It was strangely satisfying.

Although a converted Buddhist, Nick enjoyed
the Catholic tradition of hard work and punishment through
sanitation. Considering his obsessive-compulsive tendencies, his
gayness was an ironic turn of fate.

He hated sex, though. Well, maybe he’d never
done it yet, but he hated it just the same. Society’s obsession
with sexuality got on his nerves. Everyone acted like it was the
greatest thing in the world, bedding someone who didn’t give a
rat’s ass about your emotional well-being, spewing some fluids and
ruining the sheets unless you were fast enough to do the laundry
before the stains set in. That wasn’t love. It was gross. What’s
more, it lacked moral commitment. It didn’t mean anything.

Nick could stay a virgin forever. Most of the
men he knew were kind of stupid.

There was somebody, though. His boyfriend,
sort of, he supposed. At seventeen and fifteen, they still hadn’t
done it. Maybe they never would. His love life, if you could call
it that, demanded secrecy.

Most of the punks figured it out anyway when
they started holding hands at shows. They didn’t really give a shit
one way or the other. Tons of people experimented with being gay in
the punk scene. Shock value, mostly. It freaked people out.

It was his parents, really. What would they
say? They liked Parker, because he was calm and smart and good, but
they didn’t know about the two of them. One time, his mother told
Nick that she was glad his friend Parker was a good influence, but
he was so nice and why didn’t he have a girlfriend? They had a good
laugh over that.

His older sister Brooke always managed to
steal the spotlight, given her 4.0 grade-point average, guitar
talent, and recent brush with the law. An off-duty police officer
caught her on Dagwood Street, falling-down drunk, arm-in-arm with a
well-known graduate student, the journalist son of a political
representative, shamelessly canoodling with him and her best friend
Elizabeth Ericksen.

Scandal.

The incident led to a citation. The officer
was vague in the written ticket, but it amounted to public
intoxication, underage drinking, a fake ID, and too much
swearing.

Their parents were beside themselves with
disappointment. Their only daughter. How embarrassing.

Right.

If they ever really paid any attention to
either of them, they would have noticed she’d been getting free
whiskey at Smelly’s Tavern nearly every time her band did a gig
there. Smelly’s never checked for ID. Pete, the bartender, said
that ID cards were a tool of the oppressor.

Good old Brooke. A regular barrel of laughs,
that one. Bartenders loved her. Concert-goers were enamored with
her. Not to mention the whole Trevor issue. Life was a constant
plea for attention with her, but Nick was the only one who seemed
to catch on. All of it was fake.

Brooke was hard to live with. At the same
time, Nick couldn’t imagine life without her. She was fiercely
overprotective of him and Parker both. If anyone ever gave them
shit she had no problem exacting her revenge.

He wasn’t sure how his parents were going to
respond when he eventually told them. It was entirely possible they
were more open-minded than regular parents. All that Cultural-Anth
training. Then again, you never really knew how a person would
respond until that pivotal moment.

They were so busy. On those infrequent
occasions when they were both home, dinner was more about “listen
to this fascinating trivia regarding the West African marriage
system! And now let us discuss our adventures studying the mountain
people of Tibet!” and not so much about feelings or accomplishments
or anything Nick-related.

Nick focused his attention back to work.
“Potatoes au gratin,” he barked, feeling like a drill sergeant with
influenza. His lungs still felt tired from the woman’s damned
perfume.

“Yeah, yeah,” Frasquita said, leaning over a
bubbling pot of split pea soup, adding bacon bits and a dash of
pepper. She made a grab for the farmer’s cheese. “In a minute.”

“It’s cool,” Nick said. Frasquita hated being
rushed with her cooking. A woman had to take time with such things,
she liked to tell him. Can’t hurry perfection.

“When you leaving tonight, mijo?” she
asked.

“Um…” He searched his brain for an estimated
time and came up with nothing. He probably had to stay late. Even
after two full courses of food, the dinner party showed no signs of
slowing. “’Bout eleven, I guess.”

“I should pee in the pea soup.” She had a
crooked tooth that showed when she smiled, which was always.
“Fuckers.”

They laughed. Rich people sucked.

October 2010

“Fuck!” Nick said. He punched the loaf of
wheat bread into the counter, then immediately regretted his
mistake. The bread, a 2.99 loaf, looked sunken-in and defeated,
like a melted candle. “Damn it.”

He glared at the bags of groceries, all seven
of them. So much food. All that money.

God.

He just needed a break. The second he got
home today, he had to make a grocery run because everyone else
forgot. Then he was stuck putting groceries away alone.

Not to mention the phone call.

“What’s wrong?” his roommate Alex Dhenke
asked, peering at him from the narrow doorway that connected the
living room to the kitchen. “Is everything okay?”

Nick shook his head. He ran his hands through
his hair, feeling agitated. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” Alex said. He sat at the kitchen
table, tossing a dim smile at the apples and mini-pumpkins in the
wicker basket. “You get any squash? Did you know Hershey’s Kisses
has pumpkin flavor? Isn’t that neat? I like pumpkins.”

Nick ignored him. He shuffled through the
grocery bags and got the majority of their contents into the fridge
and cupboards. He furrowed his brow, concentrating only on the
motion. Ritual. Meditative. Work.

Alex scowled at Nick, crossing his arms and
leaning with his elbows on the table. Mr. and Mrs. Dhenke beat him
when he was younger, from the sound of it, so he spent a good part
of his youth sleeping outside, or at shelters and hotels. At
nineteen, he was the youngest roommate. Nick suspected his immature
behavior helped him cope. He couldn’t hate him, but it got pretty
annoying after a while.

Alex dug through his backpack, sandy hair in
his eyes. He sighed in an exaggerated way.

Nick stopped moving for a while, regarding
his roommate. “You want to help me put these away?”

“Sure,” Alex said, and just like that it was
over. He wore his moodiness like a favorite old coat, shrugging in
and out of it at will. As Nick unloaded more groceries, Alex
arranged the cans of beans and corn in a row on the counter. “You
know, if the world ever ends, they say you’re supposed to get
non-perishables. Do you think these are non-perishable?”