“It’s everything,” he said, “everything,” and even in my protectiveness toward his feelings, I couldn’t play dumb. We both knew what my mother thought of him, after all. She had been generous in her attitude toward him for a long time, but now thought Ricky was essentially a bum, and I was anxious for him to stop proving her right.
But after the summons, things only got worse. He went to Father George in the hope of getting extra work to cover the mounting bills, but he and Chris had just put in the fall garden the previous month and Father George claimed to have no additional work for him. This annoyed me as much as it did Ricky, because I felt the man should come up with something for him to do. Ricky was asking for honest work, and God knew—whether or not Ricky did—that Father George could have stood to pay a few pennies on his personal karmic debt by helping out a young man in need. But it was not to be, and twice Ricky came home from the rectory empty-handed.
One evening he and I were sitting beside each other in the plastic chairs of the Laundromat near his house, waiting for his laundry to dry and sketching in our respective sketchbooks. It was what we always did at the Laundromat, and since I was right-handed and he was a lefty, we could sit shoulder to shoulder in a cozy way and still draw without any trouble. Often I drew portraits of whoever was nearby; Ricky typically created stylized, graffiti-like designs, usually of a large-eyed, small child in the midst of a gritty street scene. Our perspectives on art were always quite different—almost opposites, really. I enjoyed drawing portraits of children’s faces, detailed flowers and the like; if my work had a unifying theme, it was to say, See, in spite of everything, the world is filled with beauty. Ricky’s, by contrast, seemed to focus on the strange or unnerving quality of any given thing and exploit it. I agreed with him that art need not be moral, but I never traipsed through the outlands of what that meant, whereas he did nothing else.
On this occasion he had sketched a beach scene, with palm trees framing the water and two children, a boy and a girl, building a sandcastle as a vendor walked by pushing a cart with a picture of two Popsicles on the side. It was an oddly idyllic drawing for Ricky, without any dark subtext that I could see, so I laughed in surprise when I glanced at it. “What’s this?” I asked.
He said, “It’s Cancun. What do you think?”
“Looks nice. We should take a weekend there.”
“Weekend, hell,” he said. “We could drive down there and live on the beach. Sell sand dollars to tourists by day, then make love under the stars.”
“Sounds brilliant,” I said. He had a jokey tone, and I was playing along.
“What do you say to next weekend?”
I laughed and said, “I’ll clear my schedule.”
Then he wrote MARRY ME, KIRA across the sky above the water. He erased KIRA, wrote CLARA instead, and drew a waving banner around it, then a small airplane, as if it were a message trailing behind a biplane. He nudged my shoulder, and I just pushed him back a little harder than he had pushed me. “You need a ring for that, buddy,” I said. I know that seems unromantic, but coming from Ricky this was not very meaningful. He toyed with asking me in these lighthearted ways, and other times he would go into monologues about how silly it was to put love under contract. I think eventually he would have meant it, but at the time I couldn’t take him seriously.
That weekend rolled around, and on Sunday I was about to leave for noon Mass when I received a call from Clinton’s wife, my sister-in-law, Susie. I told her I’d have to call her back. She sounded agitated but reluctantly agreed that it could wait until later that day. Ricky’s birthday was the next day—he was turning twenty-four—and we had a fun evening planned with Chris and Liz, so I knew I wouldn’t get around to returning her call until later, but I let it go.
That evening we all piled into Chris’s car—it was a ’79 Plymouth Horizon, which forced the backseat passengers to hunch over like potato bugs—and drove to Champion’s to play pool. Forrest met us there with some other friends from his band and Ricky had two or three beers, but it was just enough to put him in a fine mood. It had been weeks since I’d seen him so cheerful and relaxed, which caused me to feel more at ease, too, since he and I were so tied to each other that way. The bathroom at that place was a closet-like space at the end of the hallway, just one for the whole place. It was a dimly little, yellow-walled room. I wasn’t surprised when he followed me there, because he had been drinking and probably needed to relieve himself, but when I tried to come out and let him have a turn he pushed me back inside in a play-wrestling sort of way and locked the door behind us. Under normal circumstances I would have been less accommodating, but it was his birthday and he’d been in such a sour mood for weeks. I remember the room’s particular light, the shifting shadows and citronella glow, and the faint cloying floral of the air freshener. When he lifted me up and pulled my legs around his waist, I felt his affection and his strength, and those things always appealed to me. The whole time he had me against the wall other customers banged on the door and rattled at the knob and he kept laughing about it. When he finished he made more noise than usual, just for show, and I punched him on the shoulder and cursed at him for that, which made him laugh more.
Not long after that we parted ways with Forrest and got back in the Horizon. As soon as Chris climbed into the driver’s seat he pulled out his baggie of cocaine and began chopping a line with his credit card onto a cassette tape box. “That is much too small for that purpose,” Ricky observed in a jokingly prim tone. “That’s like coke for a tea party.”
“It’ll do the job,” Chris said.
I wasn’t surprised or concerned by this, as I saw Chris do it every day, but I was surprised when Ricky switched seats with Liz, taking the front passenger seat as she moved to the back, and asked Chris to pass him the coke. Though he used to do this occasionally—truthfully, we both had— he had stopped after he overdid it one night and had an episode in which his heart raced so badly he was afraid he would die. Because his sister had died suddenly of a heart-related issue, anything of that nature was especially frightening to him, and I hadn’t seen him use it since then. But now he sidled up to Chris, stuck the rolled-up twenty in his nose and snorted two lines up each nostril.
Chris laughed with delight. “You’re a fucking anteater, man,” he said, and Ricky rubbed his nose and replied, “Seize the day.”
I should have realized then that something wasn’t right, but Ricky could be impulsive, so I attributed it to that. We drove a short distance, then pulled into the worn, broken lot behind the strip mall where he used to work. All the access doors on that side were painted gray, and the buildings were just beige cinderblock, with Dumpsters and exposed metal pipes and a loading dock for the grocery store. Chris turned off the headlights but left the car running, and Ricky got out. I watched him walk up to the back of Spectrum Supply and let himself inside with a key. “What’s he doing?” I asked
“He’s picking up his last paycheck,” Chris said.
I knew that couldn’t be true because Ricky owed them money, not the other way around, and he had been working at the Circle K again for months by that point. But I stayed quiet because it wasn’t difficult to see that something bad was going on. I figured that if Ricky was taking more money from the register, he and I could argue about it later. I wasn’t going to fight with him in front of Chris, since Chris would take his side and my effort to talk sense into Ricky would be pointless. Yet I felt sorry for Jeff Owen just the same. He was a very decent man, fair to his employees and friendly with his regular customers, who were San Jose’s ragtag collection of local painters and sculptors. He was an inch or so shorter than Ricky, with an outdated mustache and a shy demeanor, and as a young man had been an artist, himself. He had opened Spectrum Supply as a way to subsidize his career in the arts, but over the years the balance had shifted as he became, as he put it, “married to this store.” He didn’t deserve to be robbed, not by Ricky or anyone else.