me, he took out my driver’s license and licked it. “Roger,” he said and laughed. “143 Union Avenue. Let me guess, white picket fence, two-car garage. Does Mommy know what a bad boy you’ve been? Maybe I should stop in and let her know where you are.”
“No!” I screamed. “Stay away from her, you fucking maniac. If you touch her I’ll kill you.”
“Enough with the yelling already! You make too much noise. I hate noise.” With that, he put the gag back in my mouth, tying it tight until it felt like my cheeks were tearing. “If I find these rags out again, I’m gonna wrap you with barbed wire.”
Tooth was frantically trying to kick at Skinny Man, but the leg irons barely let him get his feet up.
He reached into my front pocket and played his fingers around near my balls. “And what do we have here.” He pulled out the pair of dice I had taken from my kitchen that morning. “Snake eyes,” he read, and rolled them around in his hand. Next, he fished around in Tooth’s pockets and took the cell phone. He threw it at the wall and it exploded like a firework. My heart sank. Tooth stopped struggling and hung his head. We’d been counting on the phone.
Sensing our defeat, Skinny Man did a little dance back toward the center of the room and stopped. He spun around and muttered something under his breath, looked back at us. “Any of you all see a head, about yay big, with white teeth, long brown hair, pretty mouth? It was here a minute ago.” Then he started laughing again, occasionally flicking his tongue at us.
He searched Tooth’s pockets once more, looking for anything he may have missed, and wound up with Tooth’s driver’s license. “David McNulty,” he said, reading it. “Thirty-two. Shit, you ain’t thirty-two. Where’d you get this, Boston?”
Tooth mumbled.
Skinny Man punched him in the face. “You liar! I don’t like liars.” He went and opened the door to the stove, bent down and reached inside. When he stood up, a pile of glowing embers sat on the fake ID, orange heat pulsating on the surface. They looked like little magic gemstones. In his other hand he rolled the dice about. “Oh boy, oh boy,” he said, “been a while since I made a wager of any kind. You hear that rattle, huh, that’s luck being shook up like juice. You gotta mix it all together and get it just right or else you get too much bad luck and that’s no fun. Or you could get too much good luck, which might seem a good thing, but it just leads you on until it runs out and then you got nothing. Nope, gotta shake it up just right for this game. Roger, you want high or low?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Okay, I’ll decide. You’re low, and yer buddy here is high. Place your bets.”
He bent down and tossed the dice on the ground and I suddenly knew where this was going. He was betting on our fates. Any combination of two through six would represent me-low-and combinations of seven through twelve would represent Tooth-high. The dice came up a five and a three. High.
“That’s too bad,” he said looking at Tooth, whose dazed head was already hanging to the side from the punch. He undid the gag and forced open Tooth’s mouth. I started screaming but my gag was so tight I barely made a noise. He shoved the fiery embers into Tooth’s mouth.
Tooth went crazy, flailing his head, spitting out the embers as well as fresh blood. Skinny Man punched him again and I nearly vomited when I heard the crack of bone. More blood shot from Tooth’s nose and sprayed on Skinny Man’s face like a Pollock painting. The man went back to the stove and collected more of the hot orange gems, came back and punched Tooth in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. He thrust the embers in Tooth’s mouth and then, using both hands, he forced Tooth’s mouth to stay shut and tied the gag up again.
I looked away. I kept looking away, listening to Tooth’ groans of pain, hearing them from someplace else. A place from our past, from our future. Block it out, I thought, just block it out, go somewhere else. You’re not here, you’re wherever you want to be but you’re not here. And before long, there was Tooth and me stealing lawn ornaments, there was California with the waves crashing on the beach, there was us driving on Route 66 on our way out West, the purple sunset blanketing the dusty buttes. At some point, through my closed lids, I saw the light turn off. I heard the door open and the man go back upstairs, his cackling dying away into the night.
I kept my eyes closed and listened to Tooth cry for a long time, not knowing what to do, just feeling like a kid again, yearning for my parents’ bed. And always asking, like a skipping CD in Tooth’s Camaro, the same stupid question that wouldn’t go away: Why was this happening? Why wouldn’t I wake up?
Stress and fatigue finally took over, shut me down into a semiconscious state. It wasn’t exactly sleep, because I could still hear the choking sobs of my friend, but it removed me from the larger picture. I didn’t know it then, but those moments before the ember attack would be the last time Tooth would look like the friend I had grown up with.
CHAPTER 14
Morning, or at least I thought it was because I could swear I heard birds chirping somewhere. I was leaning against the wall, the gag still tight in my mouth. My whole body ached like it had been steam rolled. On top of that, the bite on my leg was beginning to itch, a possible sign of infection. The room was pitch black, which meant the embers in the stove had burned out. Tooth was snoring. The rain had stopped.
I said a little prayer to God, feeling like a fair-weather fan, slinking back for acceptance from an establishment I’d eschewed. But still, it’s funny how you find God in such moments, almost instinctively, like a caterpillar on a strand of silk stretching for the first branch it sees, even if the tree is dead. Yeah, it may seem pointless, but at least it’s something. I even swore that if I survived I would go to church.
Church. Would I really? All those nights listening to Tooth’s dad preach about God and faith and Heaven. I thought he was just a sad old drunk, but the truth was that he was home tossing back a cold one and we were chained in some psycho’s basement. He was watching television; we were watching human dismemberment. Perhaps he wasn’t so crazy.
I wondered if he’d be smart enough to come look for us. In all the years I’d known Tooth his father had never seemed too concerned about his whereabouts. He’d let Tooth spend that weekend in jail, and Tooth’s mom rarely visited or called. She had a new life in New Jersey, or so Tooth said.
I remembered being at Tooth’s one night when his mother had come back for a brief stint, back when we were in junior high. We all had dinner in the living room while we watched sitcoms. Tooth’s dad had ordered a pizza. A commercial came on urging parents to get to know their kids better, you know, talk to your kids about drugs and sex and shit. Tooth’s parents kind of looked at us like they knew we’d started experimenting with drugs, but they didn’t say anything.
Tooth got this funny look on his face and he asked, “Hey, do you remember our password?”
At first I thought he was talking to me, but I didn’t know what password he meant. We had so many passwords for so many things they were hard to remember. Like, we had a fort in the woods behind his house and the password was pussylicker. (As with most kids, curse words were taboo to us and therefore used
His father answered, “Wasn’t it macaroni and cheese?”
“That’s it,” his mother said.
I thought, what the hell are they talking about? Macaroni and cheese? What fort did that get you into?
Tooth said, “Yeah, that’s a stupid password.”
After that, we all went back to watching sitcoms. I found out later what the password meant. It was in case anyone had tried to kidnap Tooth. If anyone had approached him when he was younger, he would have asked for the password that only his parents knew, and if the person didn’t know it, he’d have run away. It dawned on me that despite the dysfunction that overshadowed their family the majority of the time, there was still a modicum of love under it all.
My family never had a password.
I was thinking about this when the basement door opened and Skinny Man came in carrying something large in his arms. The sunlight from upstairs drifted down and backlit his frame. He was dressed in jeans and a button down and was wearing a baseball cap that said Mack Trucks on it. Butch was at his heels, running in circles as if he was about to get a juicy steak.
