Dangerous Men Read online

  Calvin took his cigarette and drew circles in the air in front of the kitten, who was fascinated. The orange ember left visible trails, like pinwheels in the dark.

  The skinny, acned night desk guy was playing chess by himself and didn’t even look up as we came in. The elevator stopped more or less at the fifth floor and we jumped down into the hallway, except for Calvin, who’d been limping slightly. He sat, dangled his legs, then stood. Outside our door we stopped as I hunted for the key. I was hoping Calvin would keep on going—I’d had enough of him for one night.

  “What are you guys going to do?” he asked.

  “I’m kind of tired,” I lied. I felt as if I’d probably be awake for the next week. This was not a happy, fun drug we’d taken. This was a twist-your-head-up-in-knots drug. I just wanted it to be over.

  “Mind if I hang? I don’t like it when that guy goes off.”

  For the past week or so, right around midnight, someone on one of the upper floors had been letting loose with a series of bloodcurdling screams. We called him the Wildman. Legends had begun to appear scrawled in marker on the elevator wall: “Wildman Lives” and “Have you made your Peace?” While we all figured it was just some student with a twisted sense of humor and probably not the Angel of Death, the screams themselves were definitely unnerving.

  I was a little surprised. “You’re not scared, are you?”

  “I just don’t like it.” Behind him, the dim hallway gaped like a mouth. He was vibrating slightly, possibly out of fear, but it could have been leftover nerves from the accident, or even just a trick of the hall light.

  We let him in. Ed mashed up some saltines with water for Ella and put them in a dish. Calvin sat on the floor and took off his shoe. His ankle was swollen up like a grapefruit and had begun to turn a greenish purple.

  “You walked on that?” Ed asked.

  “I didn’t know what it looked like.”

  “But you must have felt something,” I said. “I mean, Jesus, that’s ugly.”

  “I felt something, I guess. I don’t know.”

  It was a bad moment. I thought he might cry. He kept staring at his ankle and shaking his head. “We should ice it,” I said. Someone needed to take charge here.

  “Where do we get ice at this time of night?” said Ed. He brought over our bottle of Jim Beam and some plastic cups.

  I took the elevator back down to the Pepsi machine, pumped it with all our laundry quarters, got back on with an armful of cold cans.

  Between the third and fourth floors, the elevator stalled. Then the lights flickered and went out. I stood there in total darkness holding five cans of soda, feeling their icy outlines against my ribs. From someplace high above, a person began to scream, making the kind of sounds that might come from someone being turned on a rack, or having their skin slowly peeled from them. I bent my knees and lowered myself to the floor. I decided to separate myself from this. Filtered through the elevator shaft, the sounds had a surreal quality, and I tried to imagine how one might notate them. After a while, I couldn’t even tell if my eyes were open or not. I dropped the sodas and put my hands over my ears.

  The howling stopped about a minute before the power kicked back in and the light returned. I collected the cans, stood and pushed the button for our floor again, taking comfort in the familiar graffiti, the fake wood-grain control panel, the ordinariness of it all.

  Calvin sat with his foot up on Ed’s bed. I arranged the Pepsis around his ankle.

  “How’s that feel?” I asked.

  “Cold.”

  The pale blotchiness of Calvin’s cheeks made me think of packaged supermarket tomatoes.

  “Whoever that guy is,” said Ed, “he’s seriously whacked.”

  “Vietnam,” said Calvin. “You know that guy with the blonde hair and beard who always eats by himself, wears an Army jacket?” He sipped at his drink, put it down hard on the edge of the desk. “He was over there. Went out on patrol with a buddy, and his buddy tripped a mine. Blew off part of his leg. That guy dragged a man two miles through the jungle, a guy who was already dead. When he found out, something in him just sort of snapped.”

  I knew for a fact this wasn’t true. The guy with the beard who ate by himself was from Spokane, Washington, where he taught second grade and played piano at a Holiday Inn lounge, evenings. I’d talked to him once, when we’d both been waiting for the elevator. His name was Pat, and the main thing about him was his shyness. Of course, he might still have been the Wildman, but if so, it had nothing to do with Vietnam, or legs getting blown off.

  “Where do you get your information?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Classified. I could tell you, but then I’d have to shoot you.”

  Ed coughed.

  “You are so amazingly full of shit. I’ve talked to that guy. He’s never been out of the country.”

  “Do you believe everything people tell you?”

  “Do you believe everything that pops into your head?”

  I looked over at Ella, who’d found herself a spot on Ed’s bed, where she was busily licking one extended leg. The radio, which had been playing jazz, segued into crunching guitars. The water stain on our wall reminded me of something from biology class. I took one of the cans from next to Calvin’s leg, tore off its pop-top.

  He was silent, looking around the room. His eyes rested on my picture of Lili Arnot. “That your woman?”

  I nodded. In truth, Lili Arnot would have probably been surprised to know I even had a picture of her, let alone that I was telling people she was my “woman.” In the picture, she wore cutoffs and a white blouse and held a tennis racket under one arm.

  “She gave me a blowjob once.”

  His face was a marionette’s, grinning, wooden, vaguely evil. I hurled my open soda at it. The can glanced off the side of his head, continuing on to the wall, then to the floor where it spurted and frothed for a few seconds onto the stained carpet.

  Considering his ankle, Calvin came at me with amazing speed. He threw me against the opposite wall. I’d cut him with the can, and blood dripped down over his ear. There was an oniony smell of perspiration about him, mixed with a sweeter scent of hair stuff. I put my hands around his neck and tried to choke him, while at the same time, he threw hard punches at my stomach and sides. There was a kind of purity to the moment, as when a thick August afternoon finally transforms itself into rain. This was where we’d been heading tonight, after all. If we couldn’t beat up fags, we could at least beat up each other. I figured he might kill me, but I refused to worry. That was my role—the guy who worried—and I was tired of it. Ed shouted at us to stop, but we’d locked up like jammed gears. Calvin bit my shoulder and I jerked forward with all my weight, enough to push him off balance, causing him to step back. He cursed loudly and sat on the bed, where he pounded his fist up and down on the mattress.

  “What?” I said. “What happened?”

  “He twisted it worse,” said Ed, going over to take a look. “Maybe it’s broken.”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Calvin.

  “You want to go to the hospital?”

  “We can’t take him to the hospital,” said Ed. “They’ll take one look at him and call the cops. Look at his pupils. They’re the size of dimes.”

  “I’m all right,” said Calvin, grimacing.

  We decided on more aspirin and repacked the sodas around his foot.

  No one said anything for a while. My sides hurt where I’d been punched, but basically I was OK, though I did feel a little stupid. Ed, who was wearing his “Bird Lives” T-shirt, started doing curls with a thirty-pound barbell. Calvin reached over and took my notebook along with a pair of number-two pencils off the desk, began playing drums atop my arranging homework. I didn’t stop him, I just watched, painfully aware of my inadequate pencil marks on the stiff paper. They looked like a road construction project abandoned after only a few feet. Finally, I asked, “Did the lights go off here?”

  “Ligh
ts?” said Calvin. “What lights?”

  “When I was on the elevator, the lights died.”

  “Somebody should put that elevator out of its misery.”

  I sat down in a chair and had one of Ed’s Kools. There were less than two weeks left to the summer. Soon, other people would have this room. It was wrong to think that our presence would linger on, though it was to this notion that I realized I’d been grasping all along, the idea that in some way we were etching ourselves onto the air, leaving shadows that would remain forever.

  After a minute, Calvin put aside the pencils, took his knife out again and began flipping it. He seemed to have forgotten all about our fight, or the way we’d let him down earlier. He seemed to have forgotten about everything. I thought about the rockets we’d watched by the water, the way they rose in one big fiery line, then separated into smaller projectiles, burning out slowly in their own, solo descent.

  “I know these two girls that share an apartment a few blocks from here,” he said. “I met them at a record store. Very cool, very good-looking, and their parents are away. I’m serious—we could go over there.”

  “All three of us?” I said.

  “Yes, all three of us.” He was suddenly enthusiastic. “They wouldn’t mind. We could say we were hungry, get them to make us eggs. That would get us in, then we could just see what happened from there.”

  “I am a little hungry,” Ed admitted.

  “You really want to go out again?” I asked. “You’ve been through a lot. Think about it. You got hit by a car.”

  He wasn’t listening. “The hard part will be getting past the security guy at their building. We’ll need a diversion. After that, we’re home free.” He dug a piece of paper from his wallet, and on it there was indeed a name, Nicole, written in loopy, high-school-girl handwriting. It was followed by an address. There was a distinct possibility that this was real.

  “We’ll get ’em to make us omelets,” he said.

  For a moment, I saw Calvin as a distillation of my own, ugly soul, and in his grinning, wicked eyes I thought I saw a reflection of all the bad things I’d done, as well as the ones I would do.

  “It’s really pretty late,” I said, quietly.

  But Calvin was already putting on his shoes.

  DARLING NIKKI

  I’m soft and always have been. Nikki’s the tough one, the one who always got into fights, who couldn’t wear a pair of pants two days without ripping the knees out climbing something. Which was kind of a gyp, because when I got old enough to want them, there was nothing for me to inherit—no lipstick or mascara, no pretty clothes she’d grown out of. Mama had to start fresh with me on everything, and what with Mr. Quitts doing most of the providing for us, I couldn’t just stick out my hand and ask for, say, money for a bottle of Rive Gauche. Not that I was deprived or anything; I had plenty of nice stuff, and I hate people that complain about how awful it was for them as kids and how if only this, or if only that, and everything would have been different.

  It was me that convinced Nikki about nursing school, after that idiot coach at St. Mary’s switched her from first base to outfield, then forced her to start throwing differently. You don’t take the best first baseman in the state of Iowa and put her in right field—it’s borderline criminal. Nikki said it was like buying a Harley, then taking it apart to build a go-cart. The amount of muscle damage she did to herself, you’d almost think she was trying to prove the point.

  After she was out of the hospital and done sulking, I showed her some of my catalogues. She paged through them for a little while, stopping at the end where there was this picture of a smiling graduate, wearing her RN uniform, holding two little children, one black and one white, by the hand.

  “Karina?” she asked me, curling the corner of the page. “Do you think I can do this?”

  “Sure,” I told her. “It’s not hard. A little chemistry, some biology, five clinical semesters, and we’ll have our BSN’s.”

  “Not hard for you.” Her face tightened up and I knew what she was thinking. I was always going to be a nurse—I’d been telling people about it since I was five. Lord knows where I got the idea, it just got planted there, somehow. But Nikki’s talent was softball. The best grade she’d ever gotten in school was a B once, in a social studies class where she did a report on motorcycle gangs. This was a real change in plans.

  “I’ll help you,” I said. I meant it, too. I loved my sister, and there hadn’t been many moments in life where I’d seen her vulnerable. I also knew her, and I knew that if she decided she was going to do something, she’d do it with fire and determination. She’s a mule about things if she wants to be. Just look at her shoulder.

  Nikki drove us up to Iowa City on her bike, and it was kind of interesting, because I’m sure people watching us zip by thought she was a guy and I was her girlfriend. I had on a skirt that showed a lot of leg, and Nikki had just cut her hair almost totally off. It was a hot day, and I could imagine what she felt like under that leather vest, but she’s a stickler about how she looks when she’s on her bike. Leather is essential. Me, I was glad for the breeze.

  We found an apartment in a new building, with carpeting that went right into the bathroom and a refrigerator that Nikki immediately stocked with a twelve-pack. Mr. Quitts had given us each a hundred dollars as we were leaving, and he couldn’t have surprised us more if he’d told us he were coming along too. Not that he’s an ungenerous person—he’s provided well for Mama nearly ten years now, and never really had a harsh word for either of us, except for the time Nikki borrowed his truck without asking and ran it out of gas. But pouring concrete for a living, day after day, has in my opinion sort of crusted over his soul. We had his money in our wallets, but it was hard to say if it had been a gift, or a loan, or what, and neither of us felt exactly right about spending it.

  The manager, Lou, gave us our keys and showed us where he lived, which was two units over, in a smaller apartment, on the ground level. Or rather, subground—his living-room window looked out on a sunken concrete deck where he had one plastic chair and a slightly old-looking bowl of cat food.

  “Any problems, you call me,” he said. “I’m here most of the time, except when I’m in class. If I’m not, there’s a machine.” Lou was dark, with short, thick hair, and arms that pushed out of the sleeves of his polo shirt like carved table legs.

  I asked him what he was studying and he told us dentistry. “I have one year to go, then I’m going to move to Colorado and get into a general practice. I figure two years of that, max, then I go out on my own. You girls have very nice teeth.” He looked back and forth from my mouth to Nikki’s and I pressed my lips together, because it was like having someone try to look down your shirt. “Is that a cap?” he asked.

  Nikki reached up and touched it with her forefinger, while I rolled my eyes and for a second almost forgot who’d done it to her, which was me, when I was thirteen and she was trying to teach me to throw. Mama called from the house to say she’d made us some sandwiches, and Nikki turned to answer just as I let go of the ball. Being bad at sports doesn’t always mean being a poor aim. It can also mean being generally out of sync with what’s going on. I knocked Nikki over like a bowling pin—she wasn’t expecting it. The tooth cracked right in half. The amazing thing is, she never blamed me. She always says she should have seen it coming.

  “It’s yellowing a little,” said Lou. “I could fix that.”

  “I like my tooth,” she said. “I’m used to it.”

  Lou stepped closer to her, seeming to think about this. He had the outline of an enormous wallet protruding from the back pocket of his jeans. “You know,” he said, “you’re right. That tooth is you—it’s part of your personality.” As if, after twenty minutes, he could really know the first thing about her personality.

  “Jeez,” I said to Nikki when he was gone. “What a charming guy. My respect for dentists just dropped about eighty points.”

  She was standing at the windo
w, looking out into the street. Her new haircut jutted toward the ceiling like the crest of some bird. “Maybe we should have a party,” she said. “A kind of housewarming.”

  “We don’t know anybody,” I pointed out. “Except Lou, of course.”

  She turned, looked at me, shrugged and went into the kitchen for a beer. Right then, I knew we were headed for trouble—everything seemed to shout it to me, the blank walls of the apartment, the little red fibers in the otherwise blue carpeting. Nikki’s Harley stood out by the curb, sunlight reflecting off one of the mirrors. We could just get back on and leave, I thought. Maybe we should.

  Nikki knew about as much about men as she did about higher math. She’d drunk plenty of beers with them, even made out a couple of times at parties back in high school. But basically they were a mystery to her. Sometimes, when I used to talk to the Gray brothers on the phone, she’d come into my room, sit in the wicker chair next to my collection of plastic horses, and just listen. I didn’t mind. Troy Gray was Nikki’s age and I dated him for over a year, but all that while I was secretly seeing his brother Graham, too. The fact was, I liked them both, and they made me feel like somebody, like a queen. Nikki couldn’t believe I’d kept it up so long, without either of the brothers finding out about the other. “Harlot,” she’d say after I hung up. Then she’d tackle me and we’d wrestle and try to tickle each other until I gave in, which I always did.

  I didn’t care for Lou much, and it about killed me to see Nikki mooning over him. It just didn’t fit her. She kept coming up with excuses to go down to his apartment and borrow a hammer, or a wrench or something, and often she let his cat, Yowzer, come in to our place, even though I’m allergic. Yowzer was a slender thing, with a checkerboard face—black in two quarters, white in the others. He had scars all over him from fighting with the other local cats, and I didn’t like the way he looked at me. Lou was always forgetting to leave a window open for him, so we got to see a fair bit of Yowzer.