Ricky Read online

  It was still there. He pulled into its moonscape of a parking lot, crawling along so as to avoid scraping the undercarriage of his mom’s car against the epic potholes. Then he dawdled while locking the car, gazing around at the buildings. Vino’s looked shockingly the same. In the windows were all sorts of unlit neon signs which he had forgotten about but which he recognized now.

  The interior was similarly weird, the shock of all these prosaic details that had bothered to continue existing even though it had never occurred to him to bother recalling them. At the same time, none of the people he had invested the power of his memory in were there, their important positions filled by bit players, as if the blockbuster movie of his childhood had been adapted into a television show with the same set but unknown actors. There were a couple of faces he recognized, though, and it was an ugly shock to see how they’d aged. Part of him felt obliged to say hello to them, to explain that he’d just gotten out of prison. But these punk-scene lifers all happened to be guys he hadn’t thought about in years, whose names he couldn’t remember, and he couldn’t walk up and tell them something like that if he couldn’t even call them by their names.

  At Vino’s, you lined up at the counter to place your order and pay in advance. Ricky hesitated before getting in line as if there were some chance that he might do it wrong.

  He wasn’t in the line very long before he noticed there was a cute girl at the head of it, taking orders. It had been years since he’d touched a woman, except for Elly earlier, and his horniness had reached a painful peak in the days before his release, but today’s drama had drowned out those feelings. But at the sight of the chipmunk-cheeked girl behind the counter, a hard-on asserted itself with such force that he would have been embarrassed to keep standing, if he hadn’t been so distracted.

  His turn came. He stood there a long time without saying anything, staring at the girl, feeling stupid. She took it in stride, leaning against the counter, her arms outstretched as she braced herself against her palms, surveying him with her small dark eyes, her head cocked, her mouth neither firm nor lax. She didn’t deign to snap him out of his dumb reverie; finally the guy behind Ricky said, “Uh, dude?” Ricky said, “What beer’s good?”

  The girl shrugged. “We have a microbrewery. That’s pretty good. I mean, it’s fresh, we make it here.”

  “Okay. I’ll have that. A pint. And a slice of pizza.”

  “What kind?”

  Ricky gaped, said, “What pizza’s good?”

  Now she smiled for him. “A lesser man would’ve just said cheese.”

  “I’m not a lesser man.”

  She rolled her eyes, but didn’t stop smiling. “The Supreme’s good,” she said.

  “I’ll have a slice of Supreme.”

  As she rang him up it occurred to him to wonder if he had enough money in his wallet, but when he opened it he saw that his mom had put in a hundred-fifty. He handed her a twenty, then hesitated once he’d gotten his change, trying to remember the rules. “Do I tip you?” he asked.

  “Did I do a good job?” she answered.

  He gave her a five, which was almost as much as all his stuff had cost, total. Without comment she put it into the community tips jar, then said, “Someone’ll bring it out to you. I got to take the next customer.”

  He planted himself at a wobbly table and wolfed down his food. His elbows on the table kept rocking it back and forth and threatening to knock it over. He couldn’t stop looking around the restaurant, and he wished that the whole thing had been leveled, that he’d pulled up and seen the whole neighborhood remodeled. This was the worst, the place being exactly the way he’d remembered it yet leaving him so lonely. The worst were the guys that he recognized but couldn’t remember.

  He finished his food but there wasn’t anyplace for him to go so he just sat there compulsively wiping his mouth with his napkin and looking around nervously, nursing his beer. After forty minutes he started to figure he was going to have to order another one.

  There was no line now. Ricky was only sitting about ten feet away from the girl, and he stared at her profile in the sunlight while she stole these few minutes of doing nothing. What did it mean that she pretended not to notice him staring? For she had to be pretending. His beer was finally empty, and he realized that he could use that as an excuse to go and talk to her, so he stood up.

  She raised her eyebrows as she saw him approach. Ricky decided that he could interpret her expression as wry pleasure.

  “You want another?” she asked.

  He let a second go by, then said, “What’s your name?”

  She waited, thinking about it. “Jesse,” she said.

  “Jesse. Hey, Jesse. I’m Ricky. I used to come here, years ago.”

  “But then you found something better to do, huh,” she said. Something clenched inside him, and he had to remind himself that she didn’t mean to be hard—she was only protecting herself, to her he was an unknown quality. And even if he’d been known, well who would be able to blame her even then.

  “I don’t know if I would say better,” he said.

  “Well. So how does Vino’s compare to the good old days?”

  “Exactly the same. Except for the people.”

  “Were the people much different then? Before you answer, I do got to warn you I like the people now.”

  “No, no. That’s good, you’re right to like people.”

  He said this with such earnestness that she gave him a funny look, before saying, “I’ve been coming here since I was thirteen and it’s basically always been the same people.”

  Ricky gaped at her. “Thirteen?” he repeated. “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  He kept staring at her a few seconds longer before saying, “I guess that’s about right.”

  “Well. Okay. It is right. I was coming here for eight years and everybody knew me, and not even the coolest stoners would sell me a drink. This is where I bought my first legal beer, on my twenty-first birthday. And then I started working here like a week later and have been ever since.”

  “I must have seen you towards the end. If you really were coming in all the time. Because this was totally my hang-out.” He stared at her with great intensity, trying to remember, but then his eyes dulled as the tension drained out. “I guess we wouldn’t’ve paid attention to you, if you were only thirteen.”

  Jesse raised her eyebrows and made a face like she was about to say something worldly, or witty, or risqué, but when the moment had passed and she hadn’t thought of anything she let it go. She did a good job of rearranging her face to look like she was just waiting for Ricky to go on speaking and had been the whole time; he couldn’t think of anything any more than she’d been able to, but he did show that he was flustered, and by coming in and saving him she got to retain the upper hand: “So how come you quit coming in for the last, like, ten years?”

  Ricky could feel puke-acid fizzing underneath his stomach, and his face starting to burn. He had blown it; he had bored her and she saw him as a baby, and now that that had happened it was fucked, he had fucked up, he was just some dickless piece of shit so he may as well say anything now. Not quite glaring, because he was trying to bear in mind that nothing was this chick’s fault, he bit off the words, “I was in prison.”

  She looked at him differently. The owner walked over and hovered, a gruff older guy that Ricky recognized with that becoming-familiar shock, someone he’d never known by name and who hadn’t missed him. And whom he hadn’t missed. Jesse grabbed Ricky’s pint glass, to make it look like she wasn’t just standing at the counter chatting. She refilled the glass, slowly, pouring it without any foam. Before she’d finished the owner had walked away again. Jesse handed Ricky his beer. “I know you didn’t technically order that,” she said under her breath. “You don’t have to pay for it if you don’t want to.”

  “I want to,” Ricky said, formal and cold. He took out his wallet and handed Jesse some money.

&
nbsp; She took it, rang him up, and made change, without looking at him. As she was putting the money in his hand she asked, “What did you go to jail for?” She sounded subdued, maybe by the seriousness of the subject. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  Ricky folded the bills and put them in his wallet, put the wallet back in his pocket. The coins he let fall with a clatter into the tips jar. “Wrong place, wrong time,” he said. He tried to make light of it as far as possible, although he knew better than to chuckle or anything like that.

  She kept looking at him.

  He said, “I was driving a car for these guys who were just supposed to pick up some weed. Not even a lot, like a couple pounds. And they wound up shooting the guys we were getting the stuff from.”

  “Jesus.” She was looking at him like he was crazy. “Was it, like, a robbery? A double-cross?”

  “No. It was just a fight. One-thing-led-to-another kind of thing. They had some guns, and my friend Tony had a gun, and then they started talking shit.”

  Jesse kept staring at him. Then she said, “Are you Elly’s big brother?”

  He stared at her. “You’re friends with Elly?”

  “No. I don’t really know her. But she used to date my boyfriend.” She looked down and to the side. “I mean my ex-boyfriend,” she said.

  3.

  He went back to his seat with his refilled beer, and now he sat there twitching and drinking, and fuming. All day, ever since before his release even, he’d felt basically dead. He didn’t know how he could feel dead and still suffer but he did. He watched Jesse rub down the counter with a wet washcloth; it was dirty now plus irredeemably stained from all that work it’d done in its time, and Ricky felt like he was drowning in washcloths like that one, like he was at the bottom of a vat of them. Except not at the bottom, because then he would have had the hard floor of the vat underneath him. Like he was in the middle of the vat, a huge vat, all those washcloths soaked in room-temperature water. Everything was eating in on itself, eating in on itself—Ricky couldn’t stand it. He forced his hands to relax before they smashed the glass that they held because even if they did smash that glass it wouldn’t be like something really happening, it would just be more washcloths. He forced his hands to relax but it was hard because it was just so fucking stupid, and it was unbelievable, it was so fucking stupid that it was unbelievable. Did he feel trapped under ice? No—it was a movie set and it was styrofoam ice he was trapped under. If he didn’t get out he was going to kill himself, he was going to no shit kill himself, and it wouldn’t be like giving up when he did it, either, it really would be the right thing to do.

  He was going to do something. He went ahead and drained his beer, slamming it down in three gulps because it would have been pretentious to leave the full glass there, like he’d gotten all carried away. He stood up, marched over to the counter where Jesse was now, tidying, someone else was working the register, that was why he could approach her, why she was relatively accessible. She looked up warily as he approached, he must have looked pretty intense. Without any preamble he said, “You want to go on a date or something?”

  She took a step back and laughed, a surprised and not a cruel laugh. “Um. I don’t know you,” she said.

  Sweat was pouring off him. He jammed his hands into his pockets, he figured that if he wiped his face that would only call attention to the sweat. “But I’m not asking you to get married or anything.” Sweat dripped into his eye and he yanked a hand out of his pocket to wipe his face off.

  “Well, I know you’re not asking me to marry you,” said Jesse, sounding like whatever bizarre charm his proposal might have had was rapidly wearing off.

  He couldn’t breathe, colors popped in front of him, he would kick, slam, punch to break down the plaster and to get the fuck out of this! “Look, I just got out of prison,” he said, raising his voice.

  At least her face got a cold-water-splash look at that, which gave him a sort of apocalyptic micro-buzz, but the buzz didn’t last. “I know you just got out of prison,” she said, numbly.

  A big tattooed guy with a beard, a basically friendly-looking guy, came and stood real close to him. “You need to leave, man,” he said. “Come on, get out.”

  It was only out of the corner of his vision that he saw the guy. Keeping his eyes locked on Jesse, he insisted, “You have to help me!”

  The big guy put his hand on Ricky’s arm: “Man, you got to go.”

  “No, wait, hold up, it’s okay,” said Jesse suddenly, “I’ll take care of it.”

  The big guy was devastated, as if he never did stuff like this and now that his help had been rejected he felt like a fool. “Are you sure?” he practically wailed.

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” she said, waving him off, coming out from behind the counter and taking Ricky by the arm and heading him toward the front door. “I’ll be back in just a second,” she said over her shoulder.

  On the cracked sidewalk in the press of the hot sunlight she led Ricky a few feet away from the door, to not exactly privacy but its approximation, a gesture offered for lack of the real thing. They stood there with their hands in their pockets, looking at their shoes. Jesse cleared her throat and, not knowing how to start, she asked, “So, like, do you have anybody?”

  He thought of Elly, his mom. He said, “I don’t know.”

  She ran her hand through her hair and left it on the top of her head. “It must be really hard,” she said, in a giving-everything-its-due tone. “I mean, I can’t even imagine. I’d like to help you if you need help, I mean, if I can. But, I mean, when you said ‘date,’ when you put it like that, it was just kind of weird. Because we don’t know each other. But if you need, you know, somebody to talk to, then I’d totally be more than happy to listen.”

  Ricky started to feel desperate and graspy again. This was just like everything else. When he spoke his tone obviously surprised Jesse: “No, that’s not what I meant, I didn’t mean something else from what I said. I meant a date, where we kiss at the end.”

  Jesse stared at him, made an affronted noise, looked off into the distance again. “Um.” She shrugged. “I mean, I. Um. I don’t know what you expect me to say.”

  “I don’t expect anything. But, I mean, what do you expect me to do? Have some line for you?”

  “That’s how it’s usually done, yeah.”

  “I don’t want to bullshit you. I’m just being honest with you here, I just have a feeling about you.”

  She couldn’t look in his face, but she couldn’t get away with staring off into the distance anymore either, and her flustered eyes flittered everywhere, as if searching for aid. “I guess if you really feel like you need help, I’m happy to help you,” she said helplessly. “But don’t call it a date. You can’t call it that.”

  Well, okay, that was fine with Ricky. They could call it whatever she wanted. They could call it hanging out, or having a heart to heart. With a start like this, though, Ricky felt that in the end he’d be able to turn it into something else. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Jesse was twisting around on herself. “I need to go back in,” she said, turning her body towards the door but unable to be so rude as to just leave with no word from him.

  He said, “Can I get your number?”

  She recited the number, he repeated it back twice, fixing it in his head. “I need to get back to work,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll give you a call. We’ll see each other soon.”

  “All right,” she said, and went, not looking back at him, keeping her eyes down. He watched her disappear inside.

  And the truth was that, though it really was okay, it wasn’t what he’d wanted. He couldn’t call it “good.” His fantasy had been that she would be charmed by something. Not by him, exactly, but by some quality he’d imagined magically imbuing him. He’d imagined her smiling, things like that, laughing, looking away because he’d made her shy, not upset.

  Still, it was something, her distress. It w
as something, at least.

  4.

  The next morning the cops came to say Elly was dead. Her apartment had been broken into and she’d been stabbed fourteen times.

  His mother was screaming. Ricky sat on the living room couch with his hands hanging between his knees, embarrassed because the two cops were watching. They seemed embarrassed, too. “Why didn’t she have time to call 911 while he was busting in the window?” he asked softly, almost to himself. Then he decided that the killer must have broken in before she’d gotten home and had been lying in wait for her. Breaking the window would have made a big noise, but nobody had called the cops, because they were afraid of how stupid they would feel if it turned out they’d called the cops for nothing.

  His mother was leaning with her back against the wall opposite him, pushing the heels of her palms against her eyes while she yanked steadily on the hair wrapped up in her fingers. Right now she had her teeth gritted and was making a kind of whining growl. Ricky watched her where she leaned against the fake wood paneling. If his release had been the first time he’d seen her since having gone into jail years ago, if she hadn’t come to visit, he wouldn’t have recognized her. When he’d gone to jail she’d been at least two hundred and fifty pounds. Now she was a lean little woman, albeit flabby, loose skin and deflated flesh hanging off of her. And then this house. The same one he and Elly had grown up in, but it was practically unrecognizable too. When he and Elly had been kids it’d been a pigsty, not just garbage and old papers and dirty clothes everywhere, carpeting the place, but old food too, slices of pizza moldering for months on paper plates on the scuffed-up coffee table, fries forgotten in their McDonald’s bags that had gone translucent from the grease. Now the place was spic and span. The house he and Elly had grown up in.

  His mother stalked over to him without seeming to use her eyes, bent over at the waist, pressed her hot wet angry face against his, grabbed him around the neck with her arms and tugged him towards her. “Christ!” she roared. When the call had come he’d seen that she’d had no feeling of surprise to distract her from the pain. It was the kind of thing you were always secretly convinced would happen.