Wolf at the Table, page 30
“East St. Louis is on the other side of the river,” the boy explained. “The Illinois side.”
“Land of Stinkin’ Lincoln,” Alec said. “You here with your parents?”
“With my moms,” the boy replied.
“Isn’t she gonna be wondering where you are by now?”
“Nah,” he said, sipping his slush. “She’s busy playing blackjack. She was up when I skated.”
“What if she goes looking for you?”
“She’ll prolly just think I met a girl. Like at the swimming pool. Or in their bumb-ass workout room.”
“That happens a lot, I’ll bet,” Alec said. “You meeting a girl.”
“Definitely enough,” Jermaine said.
“Your mom’s okay with that?” Alec asked, offering the boy the rest of his cheese tots.
“She knows I handle my business,” Jermaine said, accepting Alec’s tots without hesitation. “Long as I use my jimmies.”
“Jimmies?”
“Jim hats,” the boy said. “Condoms,” he added, when Alec’s face was still blank.
“Aaah.”
“She trusts me.”
“Trust is an important thing,” Alec said sagely.
“I’m hip,” Jermaine said. “Mad important.” And then he stared out the window as if working through a difficult thought. He loved gnawing on that straw. “She’s not really my moms if you wanna know the truth,” he said.
“Who is she?” Alec asked.
“She’s more like my auntie.”
Alec tossed their trash into the outdoor bin, and they swung back out onto Highway 61. The early-evening air was heavy with humidity. There was an inevitable feeling lacing the coming night. A velvety assurance that soothed the fine hairs on Alec’s forearms. His new punch-pink Hawaiian shirt had been a good purchase. One hundred percent rayon. Only forty bucks at the Harrah’s casino gift shop. Super soft to the touch and patterned with marigolds. He liked the way it made him feel.
Alec turned on the radio. Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” was playing. Alec immediately turned it off.
“Thank you,” Jermaine said. “Can’t stand that song.”
Alec was enjoying his new friend’s company. They were definitely becoming buddies. The mosquitoes would be feasting soon, he thought. They always started hunting around sundown.
“Your name’s John, right?” Jermaine said.
“Indeed it is,” Alec said.
“So where we goin’, John?”
“Anywhere you want,” Alec answered. “But there’s not a lot to see here in Tunica. You need me to take you back to the casino?”
“Nah,” the boy assured him. “I like the change of scenery. The environmentals and whatnot.”
“I got weed back at my place,” Alec said.
“Bet?” the boy replied. “Let’s do that.”
On their way to his place, Alec asked Jermaine if he was an actual baseball player or if he was just a fan wearing the costume.
“I’m legit, John,” he said proudly, at work on a fresh coffee straw. “I play, yo.” And Jermaine went on to say he was the starting shortstop on his varsity team as a freshman, batting leadoff.
“What school?” Alec asked.
“East St. Louis Lincoln,” he said. “The Tigers.”
“What are your school colors?”
“Orange and black.”
“Makes sense for tigers. You’re starting as a freshman?”
“Word is bond,” Jermaine said.
“Wow,” Alec said. “So you’re what, fourteen?”
“I’ll be fifteen in August.”
“Fourteen is a perfect age,” Alec said. “So much ahead of you. I thought you were older.”
Whether it was true, Alec didn’t know, but someone had once told him that American Blacks develop quicker than their white contemporaries because of all the fast-food hormones. It’s why they go through puberty sooner. And why they have bigger dicks and get diabetes. Alec, himself a late bloomer, was cruelly denied his first pubic hair until he was fifteen.
“You probably don’t even shave yet,” Alec said.
The boy definitely had a baby face.
“I know you do,” Jermaine countered. “At least you need to.”
Alec laughed. It was true. He hadn’t shaved in days. His salt-and-pepper scruff was starting to look a little wolfish.
“You prolly don’t got a wife,” Jermaine said. “Or a girlfriend.”
“What makes you say that?”
“’Cause you can’t eat no pussy with all that mess on your face.”
“I stopped eating pussy about three thousand years ago,” Alec said.
“You musta hit a nasty one.”
“Or an entire school,” Alec said. “As in fish.” He popped a square of Nicorette into his mouth. “You like doing that?” Alec said.
“I love the shit, yo,” Jermaine replied. “I don’t care what they say. Gimme a coupla Bacardi-and-Cokes and a proper spliff and I’ll lick a pussy all night.”
Alec laughed for a solid minute and let the image linger for the next few miles. They drove past a car that had been abandoned on the shoulder. Someone had already smashed up the windows and taken the wheels.
“Can I let you in on a little secret?” Alec said after turning onto the exit ramp. And this is where he revealed his prized possession: his 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie card.
“For real?” Jermaine said.
“Maybe the best center fielder in baseball history,” Alec said. “Hall of Fame. Bona fide Yankee legend. Card is in mint condition.”
“Mickey Mantle?” Jermaine said. “Word?”
“I shit you not,” Alec said. And then he asked if the boy liked to play video games.
“Hell yes,” the boy said. “I got a Nintendo back at my auntie’s place.”
“I have one too,” Alec said. Which was truer than the blue in a southern blue sky. And then Alec made his offer: “You any good at Donkey Kong?” he said.
“Hell yeah I’m good at that shit,” Jermaine boasted.
“Beat my high score and I’ll give you the Mantle card.”
“For real?” the boy said.
“For real,” Alec confirmed.
“What’s it worth?” the boy asked.
“At least a hundred grand,” Alec said. “Maybe more.” Which, according to the recent blue book citation, was also true.
“And what if I don’t beat it?” Jermaine asked.
“Then you don’t get the card.”
“But what do I gotta do for you?”
“Nothing,” Alec said. “The pleasure of your company is plenty good for me.”
“How much time do I get?”
“Let’s say until the sun comes up.”
“Then fuck it,” Jermaine said. “I’m down.”
AND NOW HERE THEY are, in Alec’s living room, just after seven a.m. Donkey Kong is definitely a game Jermaine has played before; he’s better at it than Alec speculated. It only took him about two tries to get within a reasonable range of Alec’s high score. He is clearly fluent in the ways of this older 1988 system.
“How many of those coffee straws do you go through in a day?” Alec asks him.
“Like skeighty-eight,” Jermaine says. “Red straw’s my thing.”
“Well, you’ve chewed the absolute bejesus out of that one.”
Jermaine’s eyes are fixed on the screen. He’s hardly blinked the entire time Alec’s been standing there. “Can I get another Red Bull?” he asks.
Alec turns and heads into the kitchen. He opens the fridge, which is loaded with Red Bulls and Coors Lights. He grabs a Red Bull, returns to the living room, opens it, and sets it down beside the boy on the half-inch fire-retardant carpeting.
Jermaine completes a round of the game and exhales, frustrated.
“You’re definitely getting closer,” Alec says. “I just might have to go dig out that old rookie card after all.”
“I’m definitely gonna wax your score,” Jermaine says.
Alec’s house, a double-wide with baby blue vinyl siding, sits on fifteen-foot-high reinforced timber stilts. In the front a cedar staircase zigzags up to the entrance and a matching one in the back serves as a fire escape. He bought the house two years ago for $18,000 cash. It has two bedrooms, a full bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, and surprisingly good central air. Built in the early seventies, it used to function as a kind of weekend hunting, fishing, and drinking lodge for a man named Carl Ulis and a coterie of his buddies. Ulis, who’d purportedly smoked filterless Pall Malls since he was nine, lived to be 106, and willed the house to no one, which made it an easy grab when it went up for probate. The smell of Pall Malls and Zippo fuel had been so thoroughly absorbed into the Sheetrock that Alec was driven to start smoking Pall Malls himself, a habit he was able to kick only with the Nicorette gum that he is now addicted to.
Alec hasn’t done much to improve the place, but he did add a satellite dish, a microwave oven with a lazy Susan interior platter, a stacked washer-dryer unit, a halfway decent chocolate-brown leather sectional, a drip coffee maker, and the Samsung television that Jermaine is currently planted before, all of which were paid for by his beloved slot machine in the third row of the casino’s fruiters room.
Jermaine comes to the end of another game, fails to get within even three thousand points of Alec’s high score, and frustratingly discards the control module. “I gotta take a piss,” he says. He jogs down the hall toward the back of the house, his braids bouncing, and closes the bathroom door.
While the boy is in the bathroom, Alec heads over to the fridge and opens the freezer. He contemplates putting a pepperoni pizza in the oven, smothering it with a can of black olives, but thinks better of it and shuts the freezer. A pizza will only make him sleepy, after all.
From the fridge he removes a Coors Light, pops the top, drinks half of it in one swig, and belches epically.
“Hey, man,” Jermaine says, having returned from the bathroom, “something don’t smell right back there. It’s like shrimp gone bad. Like something straight up died.”
“It’s my septic,” Alec says. “The tank leaks when the water table’s high. We happen to be in a flood zone here at the lovely Tunica Cutoff.”
“Why do they call it the Cutoff?” Jermaine asks, chewing on yet another red straw.
“Because round these here parts is where things tend to get cut off,” Alec says with an exaggerated redneck accent.
“Like what?” Jermaine says.
“Electricity,” Alec answers, shedding the accent. “Phones… heads. I’m kidding.” Alec drinks, burps again. “Back in nineteen thirty-something,” he continues, “the Army Corps of Engineers cut off the flow of the Mississippi in advantageous spots to help commercial ships avoid a bunch of lengthy pain-in-the-ass U-shaped contortionist bends. They did cutoffs in over a dozen places.”
“Were you in the army?” Jermaine asks.
“Me?” Alec says. “No way. Not even close.”
Then Jermaine asks him what he does for a living.
“I’m an independent contractor,” Alec says.
“So you, like, work for yourself?”
“That’s right,” Alec says. “I’m my own boss.”
“Word,” Jermaine says.
Alec opens the cupboard above the sink. He thought there might be some Lysol spray in there. Something to cover up that shrimp smell. No luck. He closes the cupboard. “Hey,” he says. “I know one thing we have in common.”
“What?” Jermaine says.
“The Mississippi,” Alec says. “That endless legendary godforsaken river.”
They toast to the Mississippi. A Coors Light and a Red Bull.
“To the Mississippi,” Alec says.
“To the Mississippi,” Jermaine echoes.
From his pocket Alec produces his package of Nicorette, pushes two squares though the foil, pops them into his mouth.
“What are them bags of cement for?” Jermaine asks, pointing toward the end of the hallway, where five orange bags of Quikrete are stacked, one on top of the other, with a shovel propped against them.
“A home-improvement project,” Alec says. “I need to reinforce the stilts that support this house. Every few years you have to re-cement their bases, or things can start to get wobbly.”
“But why’d you bring ’em inside?” Jermaine says. “Ain’t they heavy?”
“Yeah, those bastards are eighty pounds each,” Alec says. “It wasn’t no cakewalk hauling ’em up here, let me tell you. I about wrecked my back, but you can’t leave ’em outside. They get wet and it’s all over. I’d throw a tarp over ’em but someone could still take ’em. Around here damn near every nimrod and their ugly sister has a pickup truck. They’ll grease the hinge pins right out of your front door if you’re not careful. Trust me, it was worth the haul. All five bags, all four hundred godforsaken pounds.” Alec shakes his head, takes a breath. “I’m fifty-four years old but I still got some gas left in the tank. Tearing up my back a little wasn’t nothin’ a few hours of icing couldn’t help. You’re an athlete, you know about that kind of stuff. Inflammation and whatnot.”
“John, yo, you fifty-four?” Jermaine says. “I thought you was, like, forty at the most.”
“Well, I’m flattered,” Alec says. “You’ll have to tell that to my knees.”
“Arthritis?”
Alec nods. “It’ll flatten your ass faster than a frying pan,” he says, and takes another drink. “I bet you’re fast,” he adds. “You a base stealer?”
“Yeah,” Jermaine answers, “I steal bases. I stole home once.”
“You got those young fast-twitch muscles,” Alec says, and finishes his beer. He crunches it in his hand, tosses it behind him. It clatters in the empty sink.
Jermaine seems agitated. Something has shifted in him.
“Everything okay?” Alec says.
Jermaine just stands there chewing his straw. Fatigue is finally starting to soften his face. His braids look dumb. Alec suppresses the urge to pull off each of the little pink rubber bands and watch the boy’s braids unfurl themselves and bloom into some intergalactic soul brother’s Afro from the seventies.
“You want me to drive you back to the casino?” Alec says.
“Not till I beat your high score and take that rookie card,” Jermaine says.
He doesn’t want to return the boy, of course—no, not in the least—but sometimes it pays to reverse the psychology. He figured this out long ago, with the first boy he took in. It had happened in Versailles, Missouri, during the summer of 1982, when he brought a Greek boy back to the basement of a derelict home he’d been squatting in. The basement had been furnished with a half-collapsed bucket-seated corduroy sofa and a Ping-Pong table. The Ping-Pong table came complete with a pair of paddles and a dusty, unopened box of balls. Versailles, pronounced “Versayles” by the locals, was a shitty little town with a halfway decent lake, hardly a police station, and its share of abandoned houses. It was just after July Fourth weekend and you could still smell the fireworks hanging in the humid, mosquito-infested air. Alec was riding a cheap ten-speed bike he’d purchased for twelve dollars at a yard sale. Held together with duct tape, the bike was workable as long as he used only the first three gears. Alec came across the boy on the outskirts of town, walking alone on a frontage road. He appeared to be in a daze, as if the dragonflies darting about the dirt shoulder had hypnotized him. With his dark hair and large eyes the color of charcoal, the boy reminded Alec of himself at that age. He was a little fleshier in the middle than Alec had been but he liked him nonetheless.
He hopped off his bike and befriended the boy by offering him a stick of Wrigley’s spearmint chewing gum, a gesture he followed by telling the boy about the prized Ping-Pong table. It turned out he loved Ping-Pong, almost as much as Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots—but not quite as much. The boy said his name was Teddy. He was eleven.
Just as they were about to enter through the cellar door of his house, Alec used a similar reverse-psychology tactic on Teddy, insisting that he probably shouldn’t play Ping-Pong with a stranger, especially without his parents’ permission.
“I don’t need permission,” Teddy insisted. He had a foreign accent that Alec couldn’t quite place but liked.
At first things couldn’t have gone better. They played a best-out-of-three tournament. Alec let Teddy win, of course—he played with his left hand—and it was the most fun he’d had in as long as he could remember. To celebrate Teddy’s decisive victory, Alec took the paddle out of his hand and led him to the sofa, where he opened a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, which he poured into two Dixie cups. Teddy drank two mouthfuls but didn’t want any more after that because he said it tasted like medicine.
At first Alec was gentle with the boy—he didn’t want to be like the priests had been with him—but then Teddy got scared, and just as Alec’s blood went heavy with desire, the boy started fighting with him, grabbing at Alec’s wrists and whining and whimpering. Alec was overwhelmed by a feeling of shame so profound that he felt his only choice was to make it disappear, to somehow reverse its hold on him, to clear out the gunk thickening his blood. And he finally did something about it—something he’d wanted to do for a very long time. He thought of it as simply putting the boy to sleep. The act gave him so much peace.
Later, while going through the boy’s clothes, Alec would see the name THEODORE DRAKOS scrawled in permanent marker on the inside of his light blue, short-sleeve Sunday school shirt. It was the first name of what would come to be many. Theodore “Teddy” Drakos. A name he would never forget.
“I wish I could make us another batch of mai tais,” Alec says to Jermaine now. “Sorry my supplies were low. I wasn’t expecting company.”
“More weed would be better,” Jermaine says. “Help me focus.” He sits back down.
“Hey, before you start,” Alec says, and reaches into one of the many pockets of his cargo shorts. He produces a postcard and hands it to Jermaine.
Jermaine studies it for a moment. “Isn’t that your house?” he says, pointing at the color image on the front of the postcard.
It’s true. It’s Alec’s house, with the baby blue vinyl siding, the stilts, the satellite dish on the roof, and the address, in black pig-iron numerals, just above the mailbox.
