“Steak,” I said. “Gotta be steak. Or maybe ribs with lots of sauce. Or chicken. Burgers don’t smell that good.”
“Burgers rule.”
Bobby was Burger Man. He’d eat burgers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if he could get away with it. McDonald’s, Burger King, Jack in the Box, Bobby didn’t care as long as it was a burger. I always figured it was part of him wanting to be Bobby instead of Roberto. Nobody could like burgers that much.
“Burgers suck,” I said, just to piss him off. “Give you Mad Cow Disease.”
“Do not!”
He went to shove me, but I veered off the sidewalk into the street. I mooed at him and he laughed at me.
“Mad Cow,” I said, and mooed again, then we both started to laugh.
Half a block away from the empty house, Bobby started walking slow. He eyed the house like it was going to bite him. It wasn’t anything special, just like any other old house in the neighborhood except for the For Sale sign. Sure, the lawn was dried out and the yellow paint on the outside of the house was peeling, but half the houses we walked by were in worse shape.
“You sure nobody’s there?” Bobby asked, eyeing the rusty old white Toyota parked in front of the house.
“It’s Saturday. They don’t work on Saturdays. I told you, I been watching.”
Watching long enough to know that the Toyota belonged to the house next-door. That meant the neighbors were home, but I could hear the deep thump-thump-thump of a rap beat coming from their house. Whatever me and Bobby did, they’d never hear us.
“I’m hungry,” Bobby said. “We should get something to eat first.”
He was stalling. Maybe he’d decided to back out. I could start the fire myself and it would still be cool, playing the game was always cool, but it wouldn’t be as much fun without Bobby. Friends did shit together, that’s what being friends was all about.
“You backing out on me?” I asked. I stepped up close to him, getting in his face. “Huh? Roberto?”
Bobby backed away from me.
“No,” he said, defiant-like, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I don’t think this is such a good idea. I mean, this is somebody’s house.”
“No, it’s not.” I pointed at that puke-ugly sign. “Nobody lives here, nobody’s gonna care. They’ll just fix it up again.”
“Yeah?”
I smiled my sweet, innocent smile. “Yeah. It’ll make them happy, give them more work to do. They’ll get more money. Everybody’s happy when they have more money.”
“What if we get caught?”
“We’re not gonna get caught.”
I slugged him in the arm, not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to let him know I was getting tired of his shit.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said.
I walked to the backyard gate and pretty soon Bobby followed me like I knew he would. The sidewalk around the side of the house was littered with cigarette butts.
“Look at this.” I kicked at a cigarette butt with my toe. “I bet they’ll blame the whole thing on these guys, smoking on the job.”
“Smoking’ll kill you,” Bobby said.
Bobby’s old man smoked, but it hadn’t killed him yet. Drinking hadn’t done it, either. Maybe he should take up running. I heard that killed a lot of people.
I opened the gate. The hinges creaked and the gate sagged, its wooden slats scraping against the concrete sidewalk. Bobby winced and looked over his shoulder like it was an alarm or something, but I knew it didn’t matter. All the houses around here have tall wooden backyard fences. Everybody wants privacy, and everybody else gives it to them. It’s rude to peek through the cracks in the fence to see what’s going on in your neighbor’s backyard. Once we got behind the fence, we could do almost anything and no one would know.
Bobby walked through the gate and I closed it behind us like we belonged there. No sweat.
Most of the backyard was just dirt, but some of it had been lawn before the workmen trampled it down. Their big, ugly boot prints were all over the place. Scraps of lumber and little bits of chalky walling and rusty nails were ground into the dirt right along with more cigarette butts. In the back corner a couple of piles of dog shit drew flies. I wrinkled my nose against the smell. Debris from inside the house — big pieces of walling and insulation and scraps of wood and little bits of wire — was piled against the inside of the fence, and more stuff was jammed in a battered metal trash can next to the back gate.
The guys who worked here were slobs. Good thing. Hidden underneath all that debris was the little red Sold sign I pulled off the top of the Realty Masters sign the day before. If they’d cleaned up their mess they would have found it. Some people make it so easy to play the game. They deserve what they get.
The sliding-glass patio door was unlocked, just like it was yesterday.
“Easy,” I said. “Told you.”
I slid the door open and grinned at Bobby. It wasn’t my sweet, innocent grin, more like a shared-secret kind of grin. My playing-the-game grin. The best grin of all.
The door opened into a room I guessed was supposed to be the dining room. A paint-splattered plastic sheet covered dirty carpet. The room was empty except for three doors propped up against the walls. Yesterday the white paint on the doors had still been wet. Now the doors were dry, but the house still stank as bad as it had the day before, maybe even worse because it was so hot inside.
I looked at the white door closest to the patio door. The scratches I’d made the day before with a nail in the new paint at the bottom of the lowest panel were still there. Not quite my initials — I’m not stupid — but enough of a mark that if anybody looked close, they’d know somebody did it on purpose. I wondered if anybody would notice before they put the door back where it belonged.
“You do that?” Bobby asked, leaning in to look at the door.
“Yeah.” I laughed. “Cool, huh?”
“You’re a freak, you know that?”
If anybody else had said that, I would have slugged them. But Bobby knows he can call me that and I won’t get mad.
“And you’re the freak’s friend, so what does that make you?”
“Freak Man!”
Burger Man. Rebound Man. Now Freak Man. That was just too much. Bobby could always make me laugh. We stood there on that paint-splattered piece of plastic, busting up in the middle of a hot, stinky dining room over something that was only funny because I was in the game.
We were both freaks, and that was fine by me.
Things started to go bad when I showed Bobby the dead hamster.
I didn’t think it through, I guess. Animals are just animals to me, nothing special. But Bobby, he used to have a dog before his old man found a mess it made and beat the crap out of it. That’s the only time Bobby ever stood up to his old man, and that piece of shit turned his belt on Bobby. He ended up with a bruise on his arm the shape of a belt buckle, and probably more on his back that he wouldn’t show me. I wanted to wrap that belt around his old man’s neck and squeeze, pull it tight until his face turned as purple as Bobby’s arm. I didn’t do it, though. Part of the game is to pick the right time. One of these days it will be the right time for Bobby’s old man.
“C’mon,” I said after we finally quit laughing. “I gotta show you the weirdest thing.”
The dead hamster was inside what was left of a wall in an upstairs bedroom. I found it the day before, just a piece of stiff, dried-up fur with sunken holes where the eyes used to be. The guys working on the house had punched out a hole in the wall between two of the bedrooms, and the hamster was wedged in tight next to a beam in the empty space between the two sides of the wall. I figured maybe it got inside somehow and couldn’t get back out again. Stupid thing probably starved to death.