Dangerous Men Page 7

  “They’re downstairs,” she says, stating the obvious. These people are older—in their mid-twenties at least. They have long hair and smell strongly of beer. It is as if a motorcycle gang has stepped into her house.

  One of them, in a torn T-shirt, with a mustache and a pockmarked face, grins at her. “Is that where they are?” he says.

  “Are you friends of Rick’s?” she asks. Maybe they have the wrong house.

  He looks at the others. “Are we friends of Rick’s?” The one carrying the guitar nods. Though he has said nothing, Duney gets the sense that he is in charge.

  “That’s right, we’re friends of Rick’s. Who are you friends of?”

  “I live here.” She does her best to seem unimpressed, turns and walks over to the table. “You can go downstairs.” Picking up the newspaper, she pretends to read, but keeps one eye on them. When they open the basement door, it’s almost like opening a blast furnace, the way the noise explodes into the kitchen.

  She sits for a while, uncertain whether she has made a mistake allowing these people into her house, and a little angry that Rick didn’t explain the people coming over weren’t just kids. The music grinds to a halt, and a minute later Rick bursts up into the room. He starts rummaging in the cabinets.

  “Who are those guys?”

  “Friends,” he says. “Didn’t Mom buy any chips or peanuts, or anything?”

  “Over there,” she says, pointing. “Aren’t they a little bit older than you?”

  “I guess so. That one guy is Riggy. I might buy his guitar.”

  “Buy his guitar? You just bought yours.”

  “Well, trade maybe.”

  “What do you think Mom and Dad are going to say about that?”

  “Lighten up, will you? I can do what I want. You’re not them. Anyway, they mostly came to check out our band. They’re professionals—they play all around. All the local bars.”

  This interests her. She knows the names of some of the local bands, mostly from Beth Ann, who keeps up with that kind of thing. “What are they called?” she asks.

  “Jackal. Ever heard of them?”

  She hasn’t. She’s been out to a few bars in town, but not ones where they have music. It’s one of the things she imagines herself doing when she gets to college, going to bars and dancing all night. “I like the name,” she says.

  “It’s all right.” He discovers a bag of Cheetohs and seizes it. “I like our name better.”

  She feels like teasing him a little. “Your name is pretentious. Nobody is going to know what it means anyway. Jackal is much better. It’s sleek, and a little angry sounding. A good rock-and-roll name.”

  He sticks a Cheetoh in his mouth and looks at her, obviously irritated. “What would you know about it anyway?” he says. “You like Elton John.” Having dealt this blow, he retreats to the basement.

  Duney walks around the house, feeling the vibrations under her feet, sipping at her drink. Though it’s nearly supper time, she’s not hungry at all, just very lightheaded. Going upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, where she’ll be able to hear better, she calls Beth Ann.

  “It’s me,” she says. “What are you doing?”

  “Setting the table,” says Beth Ann. “You sound toasted.”

  “Maybe a little. I’ve had a few.”

  “Wish I could join you. How are things at Madison Square Garden? Any windows broken yet?”

  “No, but listen. Some guys came over, older guys. They’re in a group called Jackal. Ever hear of them?”

  There is an audible gasp from the other end. “That’s Riggy Banks’s group. They’re great! Well, I’ve never actually heard them, but they play around a lot. I think they even have a record. How come they’re at your house?”

  “Rick wants to trade guitars with him or something.”

  “I’d be careful if I were you. Those guys have a pretty wild reputation.”

  “Oh?” she says, running her hand along the surface of her parents’ bed. It is made so neatly, there isn’t the slightest wrinkle. “Do you think I ought to be worried?”

  “Not worried, just careful. I don’t know, if things get out of hand you could always ask them to leave. Or call the police.”

  “Beth Ann!”

  “I’m just kidding. What are they doing?”

  “Who knows? They’re in the basement.” Standing, she looks out her parents’ window onto their driveway where the rusted station wagon sits, a misfit among the well-trimmed lawns, looking somehow ominous in the gathering shadows. “Why don’t you come over?” she asks.

  “I can’t,” says Beth Ann. “We’re having dinner, and then I’m supposed to baby sit across the street. Listen, I’ve got to go. My Mom’s shouting for me. I’ll call you later from the Schanbergs’.”

  Duney goes into her own room and stands looking at it, biting at her thumbnail. She still has bunk beds. She has had them for so many years that she almost never thinks about them, but right now they look positively ridiculous to her. She wonders why she would have ever wanted them in the first place. For years she’s been sleeping on the bottom bunk, ignoring the upper one entirely. But looking at it, she remembers vaguely that when she was younger she did sleep on top. It had felt like being an explorer to be so tiny and elevated to such a dizzying height. She remembers the sensations, but as if they belong to another person—a feeling of being high off the ground, able to reach out and almost touch the ceiling, of knowing what it was like to be in a place where no one, not even the grown-ups, ever went.

  She decides to have a cigarette. She has a pack she keeps in her desk, and she takes one out and gives it a sniff. She knows cigarettes are supposed to get stale, which means that these, over a month old, are certainly candidates. But she smokes so rarely that she can’t see it making a difference. How do people know their cigarettes are stale? It seems impossible to her that smoke should have such subtle qualities. If she smoked for years, she doesn’t believe she’d be able to tell. Rummaging around, she finds she has no matches. She goes back downstairs. There are some in the kitchen, but first she pours a dollop of scotch into her glass. One of the kitchen drawers is full of matchbooks collected over the years from nearly every restaurant her parents have been to; since neither of them smoke, they are all untouched. Boring, she thinks, looking into the drawer, pushing the little boxes around with one finger. How incredibly boring. She closes it without taking out any matches, then, slipping the unlit cigarette between her lips, opens the basement door.

  The downstairs has been transformed. Cigarette and reefer smoke mingle in a thick haze, and the air is ripe with the smell of perspiration, like a gym. The music has stopped for the time being, and people are hanging around everywhere. Duney had not realized what a crowd had come over—without counting, she guesses there are about fourteen bodies down here. Empty beer cans all over the place. Two of the guys from the station wagon are seated on the sofa, each with one of the halter-topped freshmen in his lap. The one with the pockmarked face leers at her, but she ignores him and goes over to where Rick is standing, looking, she thinks, very young in this company.

  “How’s it going?” she asks.

  “Not bad,” says Rick. “Do you need a light for that?”

  She nods, feeling that for the moment some kind of gap has been bridged between them. Rick knows she could have lit the thing upstairs.

  “Wait a minute.” He goes over to the drum set, where the guy who had brought over the guitar is seated, spinning lazily back and forth on the drum stool, a guitar in his lap. Even before she hears Rick speak his name, she knows that this is Riggy. There is a kind of easy authority about him. She likes the way he smokes and plays at the same time, not even bothering to remove the cigarette from his mouth, just blowing smoke out one side. He stops playing and produces a lighter from his front pocket, which he hands to Rick, who brings it over to Duney and lights her cigarette for her.

  “Thanks,” she calls over to Riggy. He nods back. Duney decides he doe
sn’t look dangerous at all. A little dirty maybe.

  Rick pokes her arm. “How does it sound?”

  “What?”

  “The music, idiot. Do you think it sounds all right?”

  Duney almost never says anything positive to Rick about his playing, for fear of encouraging him. But she is feeling magnanimous. “It sounded really good,” she says. “I was amazed.”

  “Yeah?” For just a moment his mask drops and she thinks she sees her real brother. But it is only for a second, and he quickly begins nodding his head to some inner beat, at the same time looking around the room in case anyone should notice him spending so much time with his sister.

  “How come you stopped? Are you finished?”

  “Just taking a break. We might all go for a walk and get some pizza.” One of the girls climbs out of the lap she’s in and presents Rick with a joint, without so much as a glance at Duney, who feels as if she has somehow turned transparent. As she watches Rick inhale, she imagines hanging the girl by the back of her halter top over a huge tub of strawberry perfume until she begs for mercy. This is the first time Rick has smoked dope in her presence, though she knows he does it, and he knows she knows. She can find no comfortable place to cast her eyes, not on her brother, or on the couples making out on the couch, or on Riggy, gyrating smoothly back and forth on the drum stool. She should not be here; she is an irritating presence. It seems obvious to her that the young girls are the real reason these guys came over, not to listen to Rick’s band. It makes her angry to see her brother taken advantage of, but she’s not going to say anything; she knows he wouldn’t listen if she did. And after all, it’s his party.

  “I’m going back upstairs,” she says.

  “Right,” says Rick. “See ya.”

  Duney makes her way back to her room and lies on her bed, staring up as she has a thousand times at the sworled patterns in the wood grain of the underside of the upper bunk. There is one spot that looks like an eye, and she remembers thinking once, after coming home from Sunday school, that it was in fact the eye of God, or at least a kind of peephole from which He could look down on her. Now she thinks it looks like a spinning galaxy, or maybe just a large chestnut. She’s not sure. From downstairs she hears the sounds of her brother and the others leaving, a lot of indistinct voices echoing in the stairwell, then the slamming of the kitchen door and silence. For a while she listens to the silence, which feels like cotton around her ears. Then she closes her eyes.

  When she opens them suddenly, aware of tiny sounds from across the hall, she is unsure if she has been asleep or not. As quietly as she can, she gets up and walks out of her room. There is someone in her parents’ bedroom. She looks in and sees it is Riggy.

  “What are you doing in here?” she says, surprised at the sharpness of her own voice.

  He turns around. He has been sitting on the bed, fooling with the television. “Nothing,” he says.

  “You’re not supposed to be up here. Didn’t my brother tell you that? What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing,” he says again. “I just thought I’d watch a little TV. Your brother said to make myself at home.”

  She takes another step into the room, suspicious. “There’s a television downstairs.”

  “OK, so I was exploring a little. Sorry, I’ll split.” He looks sincerely apologetic, and Duney wishes she hadn’t come on so angry. He also has nice eyes, she notices.

  “I thought everybody went out for something to eat.”

  “They did. I wasn’t hungry.”

  “Well,” she says. She can think of nothing else.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” he says, standing. “I’m Riggy.”

  “Duney.”

  “Duney? What kind of name is that?”

  “Actually, Rick gave it to me. When he was little, he couldn’t say ‘Diana’ right—he was always tagging after me saying ‘Duney.’ It just stuck.”

  “Sounds like a cartoon character. ‘Duney T. Chucklehound, Private Investigator.’ Something like that.”

  She laughs. “It’s better than ‘Riggy.’ That sounds like a disease.”

  “Riegert Banks,” he says, grinning. “It’s a family name. Not many people know it, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around.”

  She likes this, the fact that they both have nicknames, though she’s tired of her own. She has been planning on dropping it entirely once she leaves for school. “Duney” is no name for a grown woman.

  “Even Rick and I aren’t allowed in here,” she says, taking another step into the room.

  “Why not? It’s only a room.” Riggy has shoulder length brown hair and thick eyebrows that knit together when he speaks. His eyes are bright, bright blue.

  “Would you like a drink?” she offers. She is amazed at herself for saying it. She wonders how drunk she really is.

  “Hey now, that sounds real good.” Where Riggy was sitting on the bed, Duney sees a noticeable depression. She leads him from the room, conscious of his thick, ungainly presence behind her. If he touches anything, she thinks, he’ll probably break it.

  At the liquor cabinet, he chooses bourbon, and she winces as he pours himself nearly a half glass. Unwilling to make any more obvious inroads, she extracts a dusty bottle of Campari from the back of the cabinet and pours herself an equal amount.

  “Ever had that stuff?” he asks.

  “Sure, I drink it all the time.” In fact, she has no idea what it will taste like, but she is already pleased with the way it looks, like liquid rubies in her glass.

  They sit in the living room and sip their drinks. Riggy leans way back in his chair, filling it entirely, crossing his legs with the ease of someone who feels right at home. Even though he must be seven or eight years older than she, Duney likes the fact that he doesn’t make a big deal about it.

  “Your brother didn’t say he had a sister,” he says. “Otherwise, I might have come to visit sooner.”

  “You know he’s only fifteen.”

  Riggy shrugs. “You can do a lot at fifteen. I know I did. Got into all kinds of trouble.” He sips at his drink and examines a scuff mark on one of his black leather boots.

  “You mean those two teenyboppers downstairs?” she says, teasing. “I’ll bet they do a lot.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. I just came along for the ride and to take a look at a guitar. Fifteen isn’t my style. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it though. Just not for me.”

  “Oh.” says Duney, “So what is your style? Forty-year-old divorcees?” She can’t believe she is having this conversation. She wishes she had a tape recorder.

  “My style,” he says, “is something for other people to figure out. I do what I want and let the rest of the world worry about it.”

  “Just a ramblin’ man, huh?”

  He looks at her quite seriously. “That’s right,” he says. “That’s exactly it. Hey, don’t laugh.”

  But she can’t help it, she is giggling. “I’m sorry,” she says, putting a hand over her mouth. “I was thinking about what you must have looked like when you were a little boy. I can picture you walking around everywhere with a set of cap guns on.” She can’t control her laughter—it spills from her in nervous eruptions. “I’m sorry. I must be drunk.”

  “Damn,” says Riggy.

  Taking a deep breath, she manages to stop. The corners of her eyes are wet with tears.

  “You want to go for a ride?” asks Riggy.

  “A ride?”

  “That’s right, the Riggy-mobile’s right outside.”

  She feels bad that she has insulted him, and looking around the living room with its neatly vacuumed corners, the carefully hung paintings and photographs, she thinks she wouldn’t mind getting out of here at all, for a while. She takes another gulp of the sweet, thick liquid in her glass.

  “Absolutely,” she says. “Who would I be to pass up the Riggymobile?”

  The interior of Riggy’s station wagon smel
ls of gasoline and stale cigarette ash. The dashboard is full of vacancies—there are gaping holes where the glove compartment and radio ought to be. Empty beer bottles collide on the floor of the backseat whenever they make a turn—a dumb, cheerful, clunking sound. Duney is feeling drunk and strangely aggressive. She makes Riggy drive right through the center of town, hoping that someone will see them—one of her friends, or one of her parents’ friends even, it doesn’t matter. She just likes the idea of being spotted in this beat-up car alongside someone so disreputable. But they see no one she knows, and besides, it is dark out, so even if they did, she would just look like anyone else, out for an evening cruise.

  The air has cooled, but it is still extremely humid, and at the far end of town, after Duney has made him drive up and down the main street three times, Riggy pulls up to a stoplight and puts a hand on her knee. “I’ve got an idea,” he says. “Let’s go for a swim.”

  “A swim? Now?”

  His hand squeezes momentarily, then returns to the wheel. “At the quarry,” he says. “It’s about seven miles. What do you say?”

  She knows she should not do this, but there is a childishness to Riggy that she finds appealing, and while she doesn’t exactly trust him, he doesn’t scare her either. She likes the way he seems to know exactly what he wants, unlike the boys her own age she’s been out with, who drive her crazy with indecision—where to go for dinner, what movie to see, whose car to take—as if any of that really mattered. She feels she is on an adventure, and to cut it short now might be to cheat herself out of some chance she’ll never have again.

  “I love to swim,” she says.

  Just outside of town, Riggy pulls into a small tavern that Duney has never seen before. He leaves the engine running and comes out a few minutes later with a six-pack of beer. Her stomach turns a little as she mentally runs down the list of different drinks she has had since this afternoon. She tries to think of some reason to refuse another, but before she can speak they are moving, and Riggy has placed a freshly opened can into her hands.