Candy and Cigarettes Read online

  “Done?” he asked after some minutes. He turned back to the old man, so thin with white paper skin. His bushy, gray beard was unkempt, and its wildness was a contradictory sign of vitality. Lloyd pulled toilet paper from a loose roll on the tank and handed the wad to Grandpa. Lloyd squatted and put Grandpa’s hand on his shoulder for support. The old man wiped his backside with the other. Lloyd drew a bath and wiped the old man down with a yellow cloth. He squeezed the cloth over Grandpa’s head, just to make him smile the way he always did, eyes squinting to repel the soap, popping his lips as the soapy water ran over his face.

  Lloyd served the old man two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches after he put him back into the bed. He changed out the empty oxygen tank. He clipped the old man’s neglected toenails and then placed slightly stiff socks over the man’s feet.

  “Getting cold out there, Grandpa,” Lloyd said. The man glanced at Lloyd, distracted by the words. He looked back to the television, licking the jelly at the corner of his mouth. “Bye, Grandpa.”

  Lloyd tossed the painted T-shirt among the filth of his bedroom and put on a somewhat clean thermal shirt and then his flannel over it. He took an old Army fatigue jacket from the closet. His eyes were starting to bruise, going from hot red to purple. His nose was aching through the alcohol a bit. Lloyd left the house, wondering when he might see those bastard Cutters again.

  Chapter 5

  Lloyd’s sister died under his care when he was eleven and she was two. He drew them a bath, and she drown in it. It was an accident. It incurred no sympathy for Lloyd. The ghost, as the children called him due to his white hair and pale complexion, had killed his little sister. And didn’t just kill her: he did things to her, sex-type things, true because they all knew. They chased him over schoolyards, down elm-lined streets, the chanting mobs, accused him of things he hadn’t known of before. He was beaten often when found alone in the Horton. And if he was in Horton, he was alone. The incident on the highway with the paintball gun was nothing more than predictable extrapolation from the day he’d lost his thoughts in television while his baby sister choked on her No More Tears.

  Lloyd’s parents left him on the porch of Grandpa and Grandma’s. He looked back as they backed out of the short driveway. He could not see through the glass of the windshield for the darkness, but he told himself that they were looking back at him with hearts of fragile ash and that they had to leave him because he was the wind.

  A year later, he put on his Halloween mask and waited for Grandma to come up the stairs with the fresh laundry from the basement wash room.

  As Grandma looked up from the top step, the skeleton Lloyd jumped into the doorway. Grandma shrieked. She truly believed she’d been called upon by Death himself as she tumbled down the wooden stairs in a dust devil of socks and underwear. She landed hard and crooked on the concrete floor.

  Lloyd stood at the top of the stairs and waited, but Grandma wouldn’t move, wouldn’t moan, wouldn’t breathe. Lloyd closed the basement door and waited at the kitchen table. He pulled off the mask and stared at a single cigarette burn atop the scarred Formica for more than two hours, until Grandpa came home from work.

  “Where’s Ma?” Grandpa asked, coated gray with rail yard dust and asbestos. Lloyd pointed to the basement door behind him without turning from the table.

  “Oh. I need a shower. Tell her to get that dinner on.”

  Lloyd waited until he heard the rush of the shower and Grandpa singing about surfing safaris. Lloyd left the house left to wander Horton until it was done.

  Strikes and spares and gutters, buzzing conversation, smoke and beer, flashing lights and four-bit graphics. Lloyd stood rigid in the game room of the bowling alley. He fed quarters into Donkey Kong. He was playing his best game ever when he was pelted with the contents of a large soda cup from the snack bar. He froze, looked over his dripping clothes, searched for the thrower. Upon the screen, a final life was taken.

  Lloyd saw the Cutters, younger, just as mean. Lloyd could not look angry, only curious.

  “What you looking at Biz-Bang?” The drawl was fresh and thick, as the young Cutters were recent transplants from Tennessee, their father brought in by the still-booming Horton furniture industry.

  “Why did you do that?” Lloyd said.

  “You really kill your sister?”

  “No.”

  “Liar. And you messed with her too.”

  “Uh-uh, no.”

  “Somebody should cut off your little pecker.” Terry punched him in the stomach, and Lloyd fell to the floor like an ape’s barrel. He wrestled with simultaneous need to vomit and to breathe. The pair began to kick and stomp with a boy’s strength. Lloyd covered and took it.

  “Get the fuck out of here! What’d I tell you?” The voice came from over top of youth. “Get the fuck out!”

  The Cutters ran off, and Lloyd found himself at the feet of the Chief of Police, called simply “Chief,” the only peace officer in Horton.

  “Been looking for you, Lloyd. Guess I found you just before you were gonna get your head kicked in again.”

  The boy stood. He didn’t look at the man. He went back to his game, fed it a quarter.

  “Uh-uh. You need to come with me,” Chief said, grabbing a thin arm. Lloyd submitted to Chief’s force as the man led the boy from the bowling alley. Lloyd was dragged and became a holiday float, the main attraction of the two-person parade, led before the eyes of stalled bowlers in league play. Each of them knew his face, his white head of hair. They knew about his sister, and while none of them knew him to be guilty, few of them considered him an innocent, if they considered him at all.

  Lloyd sat in the back of the cruiser, caged, viewing all before him through a crisscross of metal. Chief drove with the utmost disregard for traffic law. It was dark and the white light of the street lamps invaded the cockpit with an irregular rhythm.

  “What happened at the house today, Lloyd?”

  “Grandma fell down the stairs.”

  “She fell. On her own?”

  Lloyd thought. “Yeah.”

  “Hm. You hesitated there, Lloyd, and see, that’s not good. Hesitation means you’re thinking about what to say instead of sayin’. And when people are busy thinkin’ about what to say, what they should be sayin’ gets changed up.”

  “I didn’t hurt her.”

  “I didn’t say that, didn’t even think it. You think I should think like that?”

  Lloyd watched chief. The light washed into the car, invading the passenger side first and then flowing over the CB, the shotgun, Chief’s blue uniform. The light never made it to Chief’s face. He was a headless body and voice.

  “What’d you do?”

  “It wasn’t on purpose. I just wanted to scare her with my skeleton mask.”

  Chief took in the words, made sense of the scant retelling. He put the final piece into the scene and it fit.

  “I’d say you succeeded,” Chief said. He started to laugh, lightly at first but the chortle grew and swelled until Lloyd could almost hear the laugh-induced tears falling from the blackened void of Chief’s face. The blue torso bounced, and Lloyd strived to see the man in the rearview, but the face remained hidden by shadow. The cruiser careened left, and they both felt the thump as Chief sacrificed a gray squirrel to the memory of Grandma Bizbang.

  Chapter 6

  Terry and Zeke sat behind the house drinking beer and smoking weed. They burned garbage in a rusted Franklin stove. The whitish wood of their shared house was green and black and earthy with moldy life. Daddy loved the house because it was the only clapboard he’d seen so far up north. Now, behind the grown Cutter boys, the rotting wooden boards were falling from the frame. The shed where they’d found their daddy hanging from his neck ten years earlier, lungs motionless and swollen with asbestos and cancer, sat in disrepair, wooden slats felled, exposing the piles of stored items and water-damaged keepsakes, broken tools. Zeke shot a stream of lighter fluid into the stove between himself and Terry. The fla
mes ate up the liquid, chased it from the fiery hole atop the stove and back to the bottle, creating a flaming rope through the air. Zeke cut the fuel, and the line of flame sizzled away to nothing but smoke and the smell of scorched plastic. The Cutters watched the flame and fed it like vengeful gods.

  “Tonight? You sure?”

  “You ain’t scared, are you?” Terry asked the younger Cutter.

  “Hell no. I just,” he looked at his older brother, at the hard, ridiculing smile. “Hell no!”

  Chapter 7

  Lloyd found the Bohl twins at the Rush Creek bridge over by the Al Ryder’s sports card shop. The shop was closed for good, had been for a stretch, but the long-term lease had been paid in advance, so the shop sat full of dusty merchandise. The sign above the entrance hadn’t been touched up since the year before last, same day Al Ryder was arrested and the doors locked up indefinitely. The round plywood baseball hung large and childlike. “Ryder’s Sports Cards and Memorabilia” is what it said in rain-cracked and sun-blistered paints.

  “Hey Lloyd,” one of the twins said.

  “Hey Lloyd,” the other said.

  “What are you guys doin’?” Lloyd asked. He eyed the twelve-pack between their matching shoes.

  “Dropping stuff in the creek. These empties. Rocks and stuff.”

  “Can I get one of them beers?”

  One of the twins dipped a hand into the beer box, pulled out a can and threw it to Lloyd. It was gloriously cold in his hard hand.

  “Thanks.”

  “Welcome,” the twins said. One of them dropped his empty in the water. His brother punched him hard in the shoulder.

  “There was still beer in there man!”

  “Just a few drops!”

  “Bullshit!”

  The twins shared the pointed little faces of brown weasels, sharp cheeks and chins dotted with sparse black hairs. They fought each other like weasels, snapping jaws and teeth spewing snarly insults, scratching and smacking with tiny paws. They were small tropical men, adopted as a pair twenty-five years earlier from Honduras. They were still thin, very small, their true stature robbed away by three years of near-starvation before arriving stateside with their adoptive parents, two excommunicated Christian Scientists. John and Jason’s thing was the demolition derby every summer and all they cared to talk about. The shared single-minded interest suggested a banality of wits and an overall slowness of mind, however, no one granted the pleasure of their company could deny that they had a knack for steering a conversation to the derby, either next year’s or the previous year’s or the cars they were getting ready for the derby. That had to be worth something.

  “You got any money?” John asked.

  “No,” Lloyd said.

  “You sure? We want investors next year for the derby,” Jason said.

  “Invest how?”

  “We’ll split the prize with anybody who helps us buy a car.”

  Lloyd shook his head, no money.

  “Figure we need ’bout five-hundred bucks for the cars and modification,” John said.

  “What’s the prize?” Lloyd asked.

  “Three hundred bucks.”

  “Tempting. Hey, you guys see Terry and Zeke tonight?”

  “Is that who messed up your face?”

  “Yeah. Have you seen them?”

  “No.”

  “If we did, we’d probably look like you.”

  “You maybe,” Jason said. “I’d fuck them up.”

  “Like last time. When they stuck you up the ass with the pine cones.”

  “If I’d known they were coming, I would have been ready. And you just hid in the bushes and watched. Probably liked it, you perv.”

  The weasels began to snap at each other’s faces again. They pushed and clawed and bit at each other. Lloyd grabbed another beer before separating them.

  “You going to the derby tonight?” One of the twins said, cracking a beer.

  Lloyd nodded. “Probably.” Lloyd downed the beer in several long gulps. He dropped the empty from the bridge and into the dry creek bed. He tried to let his thoughts drift, the way the can would have had the water been running underneath him; but like the pile of cans, they were stagnant and unwilling. Lloyd found himself getting philosophical and asked for another beer. He downed it the same as before and dropped the can over the side of the bridge. He watched it fall and dismissed platonic allegory. Gravity, acceleration, wind resistance, the transfer of energy, and a pile of empty beer cans, these were the only lessons lying below the bridge.

  Chapter 8

  The woman was crying because her boy was missing. Chief comforted her the best he could but was ineffective. He watched her bob like a gelatin desert in her orange, fuzzy sweater. The neglected cashmere was layered in billowing lint that created a blurry aura of orange over the woman’s shoulders. The husband was leaner than his wife, and he was becoming even more so as he paced in the background, near the phone, hands to face, rubbing his red eyes, full of anger and hope, in full knowledge of, but willfully blind to, the probable truth. He looked academic and was, an entomologist from the university, called from his office by the panicked sobs of his wife through the telephone.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” he’d said.

  “He’s not. I can feel it. He’s hurt.”

  Dr. Philips was not one to trust feelings in lieu of evidence, but he loved his wife. He went home. He caught her worry like a gangrenous infection of the brain.

  Chief asked the right questions. He eyed the parents with the necessary suspicion, but he did not believe them to be guilty. They were distraught. The grief continued out of eyeshot. Actors act for an audience.

  Chief drove Sheldon Road east, away from the parents and toward the missing boy, but he did not know it. He followed the boy’s assumed route and pulled a U-turn as Davies waved in the rearview.

  Davies was all smiles as Chief stepped out of the car, always all smiles, couldn’t help his face, black and fattened and smiling despite any circumstance.

  “You are looking for the boy?”

  “I am. You seen anybody at all?”

  “I saw the Amber. They say the boy has a paint gun?”

  “Paintball.”

  “Yes, and I find an opossum in my fields. She is covered with paint.”

  “But no people?”

  “The Bizbang boy. I see him in the dump today.”

  Beyond the house, the gravel drive became two tracks of dirt separated by a strip of grasses and white-puffed dandelions. It curved back and around lazily, between the fields and to the junkyard. Chief could see the nondescript piles and realized light was fading fast as the darker clouds moved in.

  “Sure it was Bizbang?”

  “I saw the white hair.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Just walking, poking in the junk. I tell these kids, ‘Kids, stay out of my fields!’ but they don’t listen. I give up.”

  Chief looked into the fields, back at Davies, through him. He knew Bizbang, and the thought of his involvement made Chief lick his lips, shook him hard. “You got any of that palm wine?”

  “Yes, Chief, yes.” Davies nodded behind the large, wooden flatbed cart of fruits and vegetables, his farm wares. His palm wine was a concoction with routes in West Africa. Unseen behind the house were seven giant, metal drums full of a milky liquid, white and just slightly opaque, like watered-down skim milk. Davies had picked up a couple American farming tricks since he’d emigrated, but most of the techniques were identical to those that had come over hundreds of years before, chained to great wooden ships.

  Chief put a worn out fiver in the metal cash box on the cart. The box used to sit free during the day, retreating indoors with Davies in the evenings, until a kid on a motorbike snatched it up at 30 miles per hour. It happened right before Davies’s eyes, and the little man didn’t know what to think. He cursed his own lack of foresight, realized America had softened him, and he must never let his guard down. Davies secured the ne
w box to the table by driving long, thick, wood screws through the metal bottom. A week later, the same kid on the bike nearly tore his left arm off. Davies felt African again, dispensing Togo justice.

  “Opossum covered in paint, huh? Mind if I have a look back there?”

  “Of course! Do you want my tractor, Mr. Chief?”

  “Thanks. I’ll walk.”

  The short, chubby man followed behind, his quick steps keeping him matched to Chief’s long stride. Chief tried to step naturally as he kicked at the dandelions in his path, scattering them as far and wide as the wind decided, a milk jug full of palm wine slapping his thigh. It felt good in his hand, and he convinced himself that it had been way too long.

  Chapter 9

  Young Lloyd went to a juvenile corrections camp after Grandma fell down the stairs. Chief had taken him from the bowling alley down to the station and placed Lloyd in a cell. Lloyd listened as Chief made phone calls. Chief talked to the medical examiner. He talked to social workers. He talked to a judge. Lloyd heard all of these conversations.

  “He’s not right in the head is what I figure. Baby sister died while he was watchin’ her few years back. Now Grandma fell down the stairs with him right there.”

  “I didn’t hurt her,” Lloyd said from the cell.

  “Hold on.” Chief covered the phone receiver. “Your opinion ain’t worth a sack of sand, Lloyd, so quit yer squealin’! I got a plan for you and it’s happening. Best thing for you is to just shut yer mouth.” Chief put the handset back to his ear. “Sorry.”

  Lloyd sat down on the hard jail cell cot. A snap trap in the corner snatched up a foraging mouse. The mouse wasn’t dead. Its back was broken, and the front end was scrambling for anywhere, while the end behind the crushed vertebrae laid limp, content in truth. The mouse wore itself out eventually and then just sniffed the air and looked around the cell with nervous jerks. Lloyd kept it going with scraps of sandwich and drips of water for several days. After he shipped out, it took two days for the mouse to die of starvation and even longer for Chief to find it. When he finally did, it went into the trash. The sweet death smell lingered for a long while in the thin, cheap bedding of the cell. It made Chief remember Lloyd when the whole point had been to forget about the little fucker.