“Let’s get this party started!”
They beat him until he rolled off the couch. They beat him until All My Children went off. Then they beat him some more.
When it came time to write, the brother wouldn’t let anyone else hold the Magic Marker. He wrote all over the stepdad’s naked body. PERVERT STOP RAPING MY SISTER LEAVE HER ALONE!
Then they all went over to the friend’s house and raided his mom’s refrigerator.
The boys and the hunchback guy ate all the pudding and chips and Kool-Aid while the sister quietly supped a small cup of vanilla ice cream. They watched for a long time to see if she would say something about it, or maybe cry, but she just kept holding her brother’s hand like he was her hero. She kept looking up at him and smiling.
Then everybody went home.
The Roof
When the friend finally sees the brother again, he has two black eyes.
It has been a whole month since the friend has seen him.
He has to get the ladder out of the shed so the brother can climb up on the roof with him. The brother can’t just do a pull-up to the low roof like before because his arm is in a cast.
The friend passes him the Mad Dog and whistles through his teeth. “What he do to you, homeboy?”
The brother swallows slowly from the pint. “You better watch your back, homes. He might come after you.”
“Me?”
“Watch out for cops too,” the brother says. “He called them and they came over and got him out of the cuffs while we were at your house. Washed off all the Magic Marker stuff I wrote. They’re probably out to get you too. Thump you up a little bit so you won’t tell on him. But maybe you’re all right. Maybe you shouldn’t worry about it too much. They had most of their fun with me already. I took one for the team.”
With his good hand, the brother digs the joint out of the pocket of his jeans and passes it to the friend, who pushes it between his lips and lights it.
“Nothing happened for a couple days,” the brother explains. “Then I was at the Cuban man’s store and two of them showed up, told the Cuban man they had caught me shoplifting, go check the camera. What camera? You know the Cuban man ain’t got no camera in that store much as we swipe stuff off him.”
The friend inhales the sweet essence from the joint. His cheeks puff, and he coughs it out, fanning. “Yeah. I know.”
“I didn’t argue. I figured I was dead anyway. They beat me up and threw me in the trunk. I could hear them talking loud about the scary stuff they was gonna do to me. I was in there for like two hours with my heart pumping out my chest. But I focused on what we had did and that got me through. Then they brought me home and told my mom I had shoplifted and gotten hurt trying to run, but because of who my stepdad is they took care of it and got me off with no charges.”
The friend ponders something he does not share with the brother. There are things you don’t share even with your best friend. Things you have to keep to yourself. Things that make you sound crazy. Not crazy in a hard-core I ain’t scared, I’ll do anything dangerous kind of way. But crazy like in a real smart way.
Behind all these walls in all these houses. How many snakes in how many eyes? The baddest crime you’ve committed in all of your fourteen years is not as bad as this. The baddest crime you shall ever commit is not as bad. Six of one. Half a dozen of another. You shall grow up to be a preacher, or a criminal, or maybe even a superhero. It all depends.
The friend pinches the lit joint between two fingers but he does not smoke it. His breath smells like Mad Dog 20/20 when he says, “What about your sister?”
The brother shakes his head. “He don’t mess with my sister no more.”
“Yeah!”
“He better not. He know I’ll kill him next time.”
“Yeah, man.”
They high-five, and the brother signals for the joint, which the friend passes to him.
He emphasizes each phrase with a hit off the joint. “I am fast as the wind. I got lightning in my hands. I got thunder in my hands. I am a superhero. I will kill you if you mess with those I love.”
“Yeah, man,” the friend says.
The friend stretches out on the roof and stares up into the earth’s yellow sun. The sun is so beautiful, better than Krypton’s red sun any old day.
The Monkey’s Fist
by Christine Kling
Straits of Florida
(Originally published in 2006)
They had been married twenty-two years when he came home early one afternoon and announced he had bought himself a boat. She sat at the kitchen table grading papers, and she looked up at him, trying to break her focus away from Reynaldo’s interpretation of Crane’s “The Open Boat.”
“What did you say?” She thought she hadn’t heard him right, had somehow confused his spoken words with Reynaldo’s written words. He’d probably bought himself a new coat.
He lifted her heavy gray braid and kissed her on the back of the neck. “It’s an Irwin fifty-seven. I know that’s pretty big for a first boat, but I wanted something we would be comfortable on when we go to the Bahamas.” He slipped off the windbreaker with the company name stenciled across the back and draped it over an empty chair. “No crappy little shower in the head or doing without air. And ice, gotta have ice. This boat’s got it all. Tons of electronics, radar, GPS, chart plotter. A ten-KW generator, nice big Ford Lehman diesel. Ketch-rigged too,” he said. He’d been staring out the windows as he’d listed the boat’s amenities, but now he glanced down at her for a brief moment. “That means it has two masts, honey.”
“Right,” she said.
He’d dropped his briefcase on the kitchen counter, and he took a highball glass out of the dishwasher, filled it with ice at the refrigerator door, and walked into the living room, headed for the bar cabinet and his bourbon. She heard the sound of the television as he clicked it on, and she knew he would be sitting in there in his chair with the television blaring — and reading.
He’d started buying sailing books about a year earlier. First, there were the adventure tales of couples who had crossed the oceans and cruised the South Seas. He stacked those on the end table next to his BarcaLounger. Then he got into the how-tos, and lately she noticed he had purchased a cruising guide to the Bahamas.
She kept her books shelved neatly by subject with separate sections for poetry, novels, short story collections or anthologies, and critical works. He had reshelved her poetry, stacking the slender paperbacks on top of her Oxford English Dictionary and Riverside Shakespeare to make room for his sailing books. He now had enough to require a shelf of his own.
She bent her head over the stack of essays from her eleventh-grade AP English students and went back to work. After deciding Reynaldo was parroting someone else’s thoughts, she gave him a C and moved on. The kitchen table was her favorite spot to work; the light was good thanks to the corner windows that overlooked the backyard, the pool, and the canal beyond. She could get away without having to wear those damn reading glasses as long as the light was good enough. She could also watch the birds from here, the blue jays and mockingbirds who frequented the feeder she’d hung in the old oak, the only tree he’d saved on the lot.
They’d moved in about five years ago when he had finally started doing really well and branched out on his own, building spec houses and small groups of town houses. She often missed the simple, cinder-block, two-bedroom home with a white barrel tile roof they’d sold for almost three times what they’d paid for it. She had invested time there in painting bookshelves, polishing terrazzo, and potting orchids, and she’d reaped the good memories of their early years together.