Kamikaze Lust (33 page)

Neil’s house did not have a flag out front. Instead there were a few spiky flowers hanging from macramé planters, and in front of the door was a fuzzy mat that said “Welcome.” I thought of the sign Neil had plastered on the basement door when he’d moved down there—“Keep out: I break wrists.”

A boy wearing baggy clothes and a baseball hat turned backwards met me at the door. I asked for Neil and he pushed open the screen door, motioning for me to enter with the flick of his neck. I loathed teenagers, the way they thought they owned the universe with their untied sneakers, their feckless aplomb. As we stepped inside to the smell of cigarettes and dog hair, he screamed, “Yo Ne-al!” No answer. He screamed again, this time hopping up the staircase to the left of the foyer. “Ne-al! There’s a lady here!”

Lady? I saw myself more as the kid’s contemporary than Neil’s, or RR’s for that matter. Alexis had called me on my latent spurt of adolescence, the raging hormones and braggadocio outside, while inside crept that forever-awkward, I’m-never-gonna-get-laid feeling. It hit me big here in Neil’s living room.

Magazines were strewn about the floor:
Rifle Enthusiast, Vegas Week, Modern Gaming.
There were newspapers opened to the point spreads with numbers circled; there were teen boy things, a baseball bat, hockey skates, stacks of video game cartridges; there were also shotguns, a double barrel lying out on the coffee table, and a couple more on the shelf above a torn easy chair.

Footsteps and muffled voices coming downstairs shook me. Get this over with quickly, I thought. Neil appeared, followed by the boy, and I realized I was touching the shotgun on the table.

“It ain’t loaded,” Neil said. “No bullets allowed in the house.”

“Oh.” I pushed the gun away.

Neil nodded. “Want a beer?”

“Do you have anything without alcohol?”

“Right,” he squinted at the boy. “Sonic, get my sister here a…Coke, okay? Good, go on and bring me one, too.”

Neil settled back into the easy chair, flinging his battered cowboy boots in the air. “In case you were wondering that’s his real name.”

“Oh.”

“He was born on the airforce base, so she named him Sonic. Better than 747, right?” I laughed, though I wasn’t sure it had been a joke. Neil explained that “she” was Vera Dooley, his girlfriend, and this was her house. He’d moved in a few years ago. They weren’t married, but they were a family, at least more of a family than we’d ever been back in Brooklyn, he assured me. His words brought the same smothering spitefulness I felt whenever Mom and Hy discussed their wedding plans, as if they had one up on me in the game of life, underscoring my own losing streak.

I was surprised by how much Neil with his run-on sentences reminded me of Mom. He talked nonstop until Sonic returned with our Cokes. “She don’t look like your sister,” he said.

“What’s that mean, shithead?” Neil said and the familiarity of his tone chilled me. “Nothing.” Sonic dropped his droopy teenage shoulders, looking lankier than before, almost shy even. “It’s just that she looks kind of normal.”

“Hah, hah…you’re so fucking funny.”

“No, really, she’s the nine.”

“Thanks,” I said. It wasn’t his language, but the way his eyes lit up that told me being the nine was a good thing. Like in baccarat. I looked down at my feet and thought it was the jeans and platform boots that nined me. Still, the kid wasn’t so bad.

“All right, you’re interrupting a private family moment,” Neil said. “Get out of here, go practice shoplifting or something.”

“Shut up!” the boy shouted. His cheeks and neck clouded pink. I felt badly and wanted to defend him. Being with Neil always forced me to take sides.

Sonic grabbed his skateboard from the floor with a quick swish. “What’s the matter, you embarrassed?” Neil cackled. “You should’ve thought about that before you forgot to clip the magnet bars; you steal like a spic.”

The kid backed away, leaving the screen door bouncing behind him. I was suddenly afraid of him being gone, of being left alone with my brother, who was laughing so hard I could see the brown stains on his teeth.

“Little shit,” he muttered, and I felt three decades of anger starting to brew. Neil tilted his head back and sipped from his Coke bottle. I tried to pretend we were just beginning, popping up in cement like the blocks outside. What would I say if we had no history, if we hadn’t shared anything but a couple of Cokes on a sunny afternoon?

“This must be a nice place to live,” I said.

“The weather’s okay, at least in winter.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of like Miami in the day and New York at night.” I took a swig of soda, felt the bubbles choke the back of my throat.

“So, you ready to tell me why you’re here?”

I took a deep breath. “It’s just what I said, I’m on vacation. I had to get away, I mean, things kind of suck at home, you know…with Aunt Lorraine.”

“What about her?”

“Nobody told you?”

He shrugged and held open his palms. “What?”

“She’s got cancer,” I said, stopping to catch my breath. I hated saying it out loud: every time. I managed to keep my emotions in check as I continued, telling Neil about Mom and her Norma Desmond dramatics, Rowdy and his video camera, Kaminsky and his suicide pamphlets. But I left out the promise I’d made to Aunt Lorraine. Whether I went through with it or not, it would remain between the two of us.

Neil asked no questions, letting me talk until I couldn’t think of anything else to say. After a brief silence, he rolled his eyes. “See, I knew something was up, I just felt it,” he said. “It should have been Mom.” I stared at him, his blank smirk making me feel as if I were conspiring with the goddamn devil. I’d thought that myself, but never said it out loud. Somehow, Neil and I had ended up on opposite sides of the emotional spectrum: I felt guilty merely thinking certain things, while he seemed to act without consequence. He lit a cigarette and a craving enveloped my lungs, my throat.

“Give me one of those, would you?”

He threw me the pack, then a purple bic. “Didn’t think you would smoke.”

“I don’t really.” I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, staving off the jumpy feeling in my stomach, if only temporarily. Neil stared at me. I picked nervously at the white hairs on my jeans. “Do you have a dog?” I asked.

“A mastiff, or so she says. He’s really a mangled German shepherd—Henry, king of the tool shed. The thing’s older than Sonic, blind so he’s got all this crap in his eyes and has to wear this plastic funnel around his neck. If I had my way I’d shoot him and get it over with.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Not Vera, she’s into natural shit. She bathes him with Epsom salts and feeds him Metamucil. Got to keep him regular, says it’s better for everyone this way.”

I was about to ask who’s everyone when I heard the screen door fly open and the sound of something hitting the floor. I turned my head. At the stairs a girl stood in leggings and a big T-shirt that made her look like a shrunken health club addict. She smiled at me, though the movement of her lips seemed tentative, sad. Her eyes, too, were a somber sort of brown, like my own.

“Dammit, Ivory! Get back here and help me!” called a voice from the doorway.

“You heard her,” Neil said, and she scrambled away without looking at him.

The thought of my brother living with a prepubescent girl made me nauseous. All of the holes he’d drilled in the walls, the broken locks on my bedroom door, everything I tried to forget with a Coke and a smile came rushing back, and I remembered how much I’d once wanted to hurt him. I couldn’t fight him off the way I’d learned to do with Rowdy, kicking him in the knee caps every time he smacked me or slammed a deck of cards over my knuckles until they bled. Neil never fought with his hands; not once did he touch me. He was more like an evil telescope, always watching, always knowing more than he should. I didn’t know enough not to believe him when he told me my nipples were too small for my breasts or said the birthmark inside my right thigh made me deformed. Nor when he blamed me for Dad’s death.

I’d been sitting at the kitchen table, studying for finals with a pile of cashew nuts and a large bottle of diet soda in front of me. I remember having to pee, but was holding it as long as I could. By the time I finally ran to the bathroom, I thought I would piss on the floor. The bathroom door only budged a few inches. I leaned up against it with all my weight, pushing and heaving until I fell through the doorway and landed on top of my father’s body. He was crouched in front of the toilet, eyes wide open, pants down to his ankles. I jumped up and screamed. Then I peed in my pants.

Neil came running. “Poor bastard.” He bent down, grabbed Dad’s wrist and then looked up at me. “What were you doing in the bathroom with him?” he said.

Too shaken to say anything, I just cried.

“You probably killed him,” he said and walked off, leaving me wailing on the bathroom floor with my dead father. At that moment, I knew Neil had no soul, and in the few years that followed my hatred of him became a physical thing. I nurtured it with fantasies of graduating from college and getting out of my house. But whenever my brother came within a few feet of me, I felt the twitch behind my left eye, a cramping in my neck and shoulders.

Those sensations flooded back, though Neil was a man I hardly knew, a man well into his thirties with rolls of fat around his stomach and hair loss settling in. Still, his every movement seemed aggressive, the way he kept crossing his legs and fiddling with the lever of the easy chair, how he twisted his gold pinky ring. He tapped into the worst of my violent impulses, made me feel as if I could actually harm somebody. No wonder they banned bullets from the house.

The movement of bodies slinking across the carpet told me I had to calm down. Vera Dooley appeared with the girl attached to her hand. “Well, hello there,” Vera smiled. I said hello, but couldn’t get beyond the scars on her face, like teardrops running down each cheek.

Vera sat down on the couch next to me with the girl clinging to her leg. She whispered something in her mother’s ear. “It’s Neil’s sister,” Vera said. “She came all the way from New York City where the World Trade Center is, don’t you want to say hi?”

“No,” she murmured through clenched lips, brought her feet up to the couch, and rested her elbows on her knees: preteen defiance.

“She’s got a thing against talking,” Neil said.

“That’s not true,” Vera said. “She’s a little shy maybe; I was the same.”

“Me too,” I said. “How old is she?”

“Ivory, come on, tell her how old you are.”

The girl looked over in my direction, staring fiercely, but didn’t speak. She buried her head back in between her elbows. Vera, stroking her daughter’s muddy brown hair, said, “She’s ten. I know what you’re going to say—she’s small for her age. But she’s big on brains. Right, honey?”

“Rocket scientist,” Neil said.

“Look who’s talking,” Vera said. Her scars stretched and released, as if she were really crying. She couldn’t have been much older than me, yet she had a weather-beaten look about her that made her seem generations away. Maybe it was the kids, or her clothes, the white running shoes and jogging suit of crinkled nylon like those Mom had taken to wearing these past years.

“So what brings you to Vegas?” she said.

“She’s on vacation, with some dickhead boyfriend,” Neil said.

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Oh, what a relief.”

“Would you act human, please?” Vera said. “You want her going back and telling everyone what a jackass you are?”

“That’s okay,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to change anything at this point.”

Vera laughed. “You two got the same sense of humor.”

I cringed at the thought of having anything the same as my brother. He cranked the lever on his easy chair, lit another cigarette.

“So what do you do back in New York?” Vera asked me.

“I’m a reporter, at least I was until we went on strike last fall.”

“Oh that’s right, I saw it on TV.”

“What did it look like out here?”

“I don’t know, like everything else, I guess.”

“I saw a woman on TV from New York,” came Ivory’s muffled voice from between her knees. “She used to be a man and then she married a man who said he wanted to be a woman too. It was messed up.”

“I’ll say,” Vera said. She kissed the top of her daughter’s head. How light she seemed, so tender I’d almost forgotten the scars on her face. I had to know who’d cut her like that, if my brother was in some way responsible.

Neil smoked silently, eerily. Vera turned her attention back to me. “Listen, you’re a writer and all…I got tons of stories, you should come and see me at the casino.”

“Casino?”

“Where I work, it’s not a big one or nothing, but I do all right. Come now if you want, I gotta be there in a half hour.”

“What?” Neil said. “I thought you were working late.”

“I told you I was on evenings yesterday and today.”

“You did fucking not!” Neil screamed, jugular vein popping. Ivory covered her ears and ran from the room. Neil slammed down the lever on the chair, planted his feet on the floor. “I got a huge motherfucking fight tonight. I can’t stay with her.”

“That’s the deal, you’re the one who works at home!” Vera shouted. I was astonished to see my brother fighting about child care. “We both can’t leave, I mean, maybe if Sonic was here, where is he anyway?”

“Probably out smoking my pot.”

“I’m sick of hearing that, don’t blame your habits on my son. Now, where is he?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Neil said. A quick look in my direction told me not to mention that he’d practically banished Sonic with his skateboard dragging between his legs. I’d felt for the kid, just as I felt for Ivory. Neil had sent me running from too many rooms in my life.

There was a short break in their argument. Neil paced; Vera rubbed her temples.

“I’ll stay with her if you want,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” Vera said. “You’re on vacation.”

“Really, I’d like to.” It was the first time in days I hadn’t felt burdened by blow jobs and hundred dollar bills, the first time in days I felt as if I didn’t have to perform. I’d almost forgotten why I’d come to the desert. And after the way RR had left me, I thought there might be trouble in Boulder City.