I studied it for a moment longer, with a clenched, ill feeling behind my breastbone, a cramped sensation of anxiety that wasn’t entirely a product of the Phoenician’s rage and threats. I tucked the picture into my shirt pocket and eased over to the cash register. I put the twenty on the counter, thinking, with a shudder, That’s his money, and what’s he going to do when he realizes you never gave it back? Better look both ways when you cross the street. Better look both fucking ways, Fags. See, I even insulted myself.
“Sorry about the mess,” I said. “That’s for the thirty-two-ounce soda.”
“Whatever, brah. I ain’t gonna charge you for that. Just a little spilled sugar water.” Mat pushed my money back toward me.
“Okay. Well. I owe you one for not letting him kick my ass. You saved my life there, Mat. Sincerely.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, although he had narrowed his eyes and was giving me a puzzled smile, as if he weren’t quite sure what I was talking about. He considered me for a moment longer, then gave his head a little shake. “Hey, ask you something?”
“Sure, what, Mat?”
“You talk like we know each other. Have we met before?”
4
I WALKED OUT OF THERE with my nerves jangling and a sick buzz in my head. By the time I left, I was reasonably certain that Mat didn’t have any goddamn clue who I was, and had no memory of ever seeing me before, never mind that I walked into that Mobil every day and had been reading his used copies of Popular Mechanics for more than a year. He simply didn’t know me anymore—an idea that rattled me badly.
I told myself I didn’t understand, that it was crazy, that it didn’t make sense, but this wasn’t entirely the truth. I already had a notion about Mat’s sudden forgetfulness nibbling at the edge of my consciousness. I was aware of it in the way you might be aware of a rat scuttling inside the walls. You can hear the furtive scrabble of its claws, the thump of its torso against the drywall. You know it’s there, you just haven’t set your eyes on it. My notion about Mat and the Solarid was so horror-movie terrible—so Steven Spielberg impossible—that I couldn’t bear to consider it straight on. Not yet.
I returned home in a state of persistent, low-grade panic. It took me ten minutes to cross the distance between the Mobil and my house on Plum Street. In my mind I died seven times on the way.
Twice I heard the Phoenician’s tires squealing on the blacktop and turned to see the shiny chrome grille in the half second before the Caddy slammed into me.
Once the Phoenician slid to a stop behind me, got out with a tire iron, chased me into the woods, and beat me to death in the brush.
He ran me down as I tried to scamper across the Thatcher family’s front yard, and he drowned me in their purple inflatable wading pool. The last thing I saw was a headless G.I. Joe sunk to the bottom.
The Phoenician drove past nice and slow and hung his left arm out the window with a gun in it, put two bullets in me, one in my neck, one in my cheek.
He drove past nice and slow and lopped my head off with a rusty machete. WHACK.
He drove past nice and slow and said, Hey, kid, how’s it going? and my weak heart stopped in my fat chest and I fell dead of a massive cardiac arrest at age thirteen, so young, so full of promise.
The snapshot was in my shirt pocket. I felt it there as if it were a square of warm, radioactive material, something that could give me cancer. It could not have made me more uneasy if it were kiddie porn. Possessing it felt criminal. It felt like evidence . . . although of what crime, I could not have told you.
I cut across the grass and let myself into the house. I heard a mechanical whirring and followed the sound into the kitchen. My father was out of bed and using the electric beater on a bowl of orange-tinted whipped cream. Something was baking in the oven, and the air was redolent of the warm scent of gravy, an odor quite like a freshly opened can of Alpo.
“I smell dinner. What’s in the oven?”
“Battle of Stalingrad,” he said.
“What’s the orange stuff you’re whipping up?”
“Topping for the Panama Thrill.”
I opened the fridge looking for Kool-Aid and found the Panama Thrill, a mountainous sculpture of Jell-O, cherries suspended within its quaking mass. My father only knew how to make a few things: Jell-O, pasta dishes with ground beef in them, chicken topped with sauces made out of Campbell’s canned soups. His real gift in the kitchen was for naming the meals. It was Battle of Stalingrad one night, Chainsaw Massacre the next (that was a weird mess of white beans and meat in a bloody red sauce), Fidel’s Cigar for lunch (a brown tortilla stuffed with shredded pork and pieces of pineapple), and Farmer Pizza for breakfast (an open-faced omelet piled with cheese and random chopped leftovers). He wasn’t a fatso like me, but thanks to our diet he wasn’t anyone’s idea of trim. If we passed each other in the hall, we both had to turn sideways.
I poured the Kool-Aid, drank off the entire glass in four swallows. Not good enough. I poured another.
“It’s almost ready,” he said.
I made a humming sound of acceptance. Battle of Stalingrad was mashed potatoes topped with shaved steak and a bottled gravy-and-mushroom sauce. Eating it was roughly like consuming a bucket of liquid cement. I felt boiled after my hike to the Mobil and back, and the dog-food smell of dinner was making me ill.
“You’re not enthusiastic?” he asked.
“No. I’m eager.”
“Sorry it’s not Mom’s apple pie. But I got to tell you, even if she was here, I don’t think she makes pie.”
“Do I look like a kid who needs pie?”
He glanced at me sidelong and said, “You look like a kid who maybe needs a shot of Pepto-Bismol. You okay?”
“I’m just going to sit in the dark and cool off,” I said. “I haven’t been this hot since I was fighting off the Cong outside Khe Sanh.”
“Let’s not talk about that. If I start thinking about the boys we left behind, I’ll begin crying in the whipped cream.”
I went out whistling “Goodnight Saigon.” My dad and I had an ongoing riff about the time we’d spent fighting the North Vietnamese together, the arms we’d run to the Contras, the helicopter crash we’d barely survived on a mission to save the hostages in Iran. The truth was, neither of us had ever been out of California, except for one trip to Hawaii, when we were still a family in the traditional sense. My mother was the one who had adventures in faraway places.