She goes up the hall gracefully, and Chico watches her, smoking. She is a tall
girl–taller than he–and she has to duck her head a little going through the bathroom door. Chico finds his underpants under the bed. He puts them in the dirty clothes bag
hanging just inside the closet door, and gets another pair from the bureau. He puts
them on, and then, while walking back to the bed, he slips and almost falls in a patch of wetness the square of cardboard has let in.
‘Goddam,’ he whispers resentfully.
He looks around at the room, which had been Johnny’s until Johnny died (why
did I tell her he was in the Army, for Christ’s sake! he wonders… a little uneasily).
Fibreboard walls, so thin he can hear Dad and Virginia going at it at night, that don’t quite make it all the way to the ceiling. The floor has a slightly crazy hipshot angle so that the room’s door will only stay open if you block it open–if you forget, it swings stealthily closed as soon as your back is turned. On the far wall is a movie poster from Easy Rider–Two Men Went Looking for America and Couldn’t Find it Anywhere.
The room had more life when Johnny lived here. Chico doesn’t know how or why,
only that it’s true. And he knows something else, as well. He knows that sometimes
the room spooks him at night.
Sometimes he thinks that the closet door will swing open and Johnny will be
standing there, his body charred and twisted and blackened, his teeth yellow dentures
poking out of wax that has partially melted and re-hardened; and Johnny will be
whispering: Get out of my room, Chico. And if you lay a hand on my Dodge, I’ll
fuckin’ kill you. Got it?
Got it, bro, Chico thinks.
For a moment he stands still, looking at the rumpled sheet spotted with the
girl’s blood, and then he spreads the blankets up in one quick gesture. Here. Right
here. How do you like that, Virginia? How does that grab your snatch? He puts on his
pants, his engineer boots, finds a sweater.
He’s dry-combing his hair in front of the mirror when she comes out of the
John. She looks classy. Her too-soft stomach doesn’t show in the jumper. She looks at
the bed, does a couple of things to it, and it comes out looking made instead of just
spread up.
‘Good,’ Chico says.
She laughs a little self-consciously and pushes a lock of hair behind her ear. It
is an evocative, poignant gesture.
‘Let’s go,’ he says.
They go out through the hall and the living room. Jane pauses in front of the
tinted studio photograph on top of the TV. It shows his father and Virginia, a high-
school-age Johnny, a grammar-school-age Chico, and an infant Billy -in the picture,
Johnny is holding Billy.
All of them have fixed, stoned grins… all except Virginia, whose face is its
sleepy, indecipherable self. That picture, Chico remembers, was taken less than a
month after his Dad married the bitch.
That your mother and father?’
‘It’s my father,’ Chico said. ‘She’s my step-mother, Virginia. Come on.’
‘Is she still that pretty?’ Jane asks, picking up her coat and handing Chico his windbreaker.
‘I guess my old man thinks so,’ Chico says.
They step out into the shed. It’s a damp and draughty place–the wind hoots
through the cracks in its slapstick walls. There is a pile of old bald tyres, Johnny’s old bike that Chico inherited when he was ten and which he promptly wrecked, a pile of
detective magazines, returnable Pepsi bottles, a greasy monolithic engine block, an
orange crate full of paperback books, an old paint-by-the-numbers of a horse standing
on dusty green grass.
Chico helps her pick her way outside. The rain is falling with disheartening
steadiness.
Chico’s old sedan stands in a driveway puddle, looking downhearted. Even up
on blocks and with a red piece of plastic covering the place where the windshield
should go, Johnny’s Dodge has more class. Chico’s car is a Buick. The paint is dull
and flowered with spots of rust. The front seat upholstery has been covered with a