7

I went with Cathy to break the news about M&M to her parents and to explain why we were so late. Her father was sitting up waiting for us, and when I saw his face I was glad that I had a real good excuse, even though I was quite a bit bigger than him. Her mother got up and came into the front room in her housecoat. She got real upset when we told her what had happened, but her father said, “He’ll be home tomorrow—that kid’s been going through this stage for months now.”

“It’s not just a stage!” Cathy cried. “You can’t say, ‘This is just a stage,’ when it’s important to people what they’re feeling. Maybe he will outgrow it someday, but right now it’s important. If he never comes home it’ll be your fault—always picking on him about silly, goofy things like his hair and flunking gym!” She sat down and began to cry again. Her father just looked at her and said, “Honey, I know it’s because you’re worried that you’re talking like this. M&M’ll be home tomorrow. He’s a sensible kid.”

“Then why didn’t you ever tell him so?” Cathy sobbed irrationally. “I don’t think he’s coming home tomorrow. He doesn’t do things on the spur of the moment; he thinks things out. He’s not going to come home!”

By now two or three younger kids had wandered in, dressed in their underwear or not dressed at all. They got enough out of the conversation to gather that M&M was gone and they began crying too. It was a big mess and I felt really uncomfortable. Mark was waiting out in the car, and, as it was two in morning and I had to go to school in a few hours, I wanted to leave; only I just didn’t want to leave Cathy. I wished I could take her home with me. Her father said, “Bryon, thank you for your help. I think you’d better be going home, your mother is probably worried.”

I could have told him that Mom never worried about Mark and me—she loved us but let us run our own lives—but I only said, “Yes, sir.” I suddenly noticed that where he wasn’t bald his hair was charcoal-colored too and that his eyes, though smaller with age, were the same as Cathy’s and M&M’s. I wondered if it was strange, seeing your eyes in someone else’s face. I was tired and thinking funny.

“Everyone uptight?” asked Mark when I got back into the car.

“Yep,” I said. “I don’t blame them.”

“They don’t have nothin’ to worry about,” Mark said. “Half the kids on the Ribbon are living in someone else’s car or house or garage. Shoot, I remember last summer, you and me sometimes didn’t come home for weeks—we were bumming around the lake or somebody’s house. Remember when Williamson rented that apartment for a couple of months with two other guys? I bet half the kids in town stopped there overnight.”

“Yeah, but M&M is just a kid.”

“So are we. Nothing bad happens to you when you’re a kid. Or haven’t you realized that?”

“Youth is free from worry,” I said sarcastically. “You’ve been listenin’ to too many adults.”

“I don’t worry. I’m never scared of nothing, and I never will be,” Mark said, “as long as I’m a kid.”

“You can get away with anything,” I said, because that phrase came through my head whenever I really thought about Mark.

“Yeah, I can.” He was quiet. “You used to be able to.”

I looked at him, and suddenly it was like seeing someone across a deep pit, someone you couldn’t ever reach. It was like the car had widened into the Gulf of Mexico and I was seeing Mark through a telescope.

“What’s happening?” I said, half out loud, but Mark was asleep.

*  *  *

M&M didn’t come home the next day like his father thought he would. Cathy and I ran up and down the Ribbon every night for a week, but it wasn’t fun any more because we were looking out for M&M. We never did find him. We must have stopped sixty million little long-haired kids, thinking they were M&M, but none of them was. I began watching for him everywhere.

I got a job in a supermarket and I did a pretty good job of changing my attitude, outwardly at least. I couldn’t help thinking smart-aleck things, but I could help saying them. Sacking groceries wasn’t the most fun job in the world, but I was bringing in money. Mark was bringing in money, too, more than he ever had before. I couldn’t imagine him stealing all of it, so I figured he must have gone in serious for poker. I never asked him where he got it, and Mom didn’t either. Of course, she would never think Mark was getting it dishonestly. Besides, none of us was in any position to turn away extra money.

One night a couple of weeks after M&M disappeared, Mark and me went goofing around by ourselves again. It was almost as if we had never felt a gulf between us, never been separated by something we couldn’t see. We drove up and down the Ribbon, trying to pick up chicks and get into drag races, even though our car wasn’t all that fast. I was kind of halfhearted about picking up chicks, too, as I was more serious about Cathy than I let on, even to Cathy herself.

“Hey,” Mark said suddenly. “Lookit who’s over there in the parking lot.”

It was Angela and a bunch of other chicks—her type, by the way they dressed and the way they were acting. You can always tell when a girl wants to be picked up.

“Let’s pull in,” Mark said. He was smiling.

“Sure,” I said, feeling, with the old sense of thrill, that something was up, something was going to happen. We pulled into the parking lot, and immediately we were surrounded by girls.

“Outa the way,” I said superiorly. “I want to see Angela.”

“Bryon!” she yelled, and jumped for me the minute I got out of the car. “Bryon, I’m so glad to see you!”

She was pretty drunk. I let her hug me though, catching Mark’s wink. “Where ya been keeping yourself, Angel?” I said. “How’s married life?”

She let go with a string of swear words which told me pretty well what she thought of married life, her in-laws, and her husband.

“I never cared about him anyway. I thought I was having—I mean, I thought I was, but I wasn’t—and that’s the only reason I married him, the louse.” She was half-crying now, between obscenities. “You’re the only boy I ever cared about, Bryon.”

“Sure,” I said. I still hated the sight of her. She was as beautiful as ever, so striking that she could have been a movie star, but I remembered all the trouble she had caused, compared her to Cathy, and hated her. I let her hug me and bawl into my shirt front because Mark was winking at me.

“Angel, let’s go for a ride,” Mark said. “You and Bryon can talk over old times and maybe I can get some more booze for you.”

“Sure,” Angela said, always eager for free booze. I couldn’t believe she was that glad to see me.

We drove around for a while, Angela telling us all of her problems—her husband didn’t have a job, her brothers were both in jail, her old man was drunk all the time, and her father-in-law was always slapping her bottom. I had always taken her family for granted—they weren’t so different from most of the families in our neighborhood. But now that I had seen Cathy’s home—not rich, not much more than poor, but where everybody cared about each other and tried to act like decent people—the picture Angela was painting was making me sick. I could hardly stand for her to be hanging onto my arm.

At Mark’s request I pulled into a parking lot across the street from a liquor store. Mark got out and disappeared. He was looking for somebody to buy the booze. You can’t legally buy booze until you’re twenty-one in this state, so we always have to get some old guy to buy it for us, usually somebody’s big brother. If you can’t come up with one of them, there was bound to be some rummy hanging around who was willing to buy it if you gave him a little extra to buy something for himself. I sat in the car and talked to Angela, who had completely given up to tears—it was the first time since I had known her that I had seen her cry. She was a tough little chick. Her eye makeup was running all over my shirt front, but that didn’t bother me as much as the way it was running down her face in dark streaks. She almost looked like she was behind bars.

Mark hopped back into the car with some rum, and we got a carton of pop at a one-stop store and took off for the lake. It was too cold to go swimming, but the lake is always a good place to go. There are a mess of them—lakes, that is—around here.

“I get so sick,” Angela was saying. “I feel like I can’t take it any more, life is so lousy. I’m lousy, everything is lousy. I can’t stand it at home, I can’t stand it at school, I can’t stand it anywhere. I always thought, hell, I can get what I want. Get what I want and everybody can go to hell. But it doesn’t work that way, Bryon. I’m going to hell right along with them. I’m already there.”

Tomorrow she would be tough again, hard-as-rock Angela Shepard. Tonight she was tired. And drunk.

She passed out on my shoulder. We were stopped on a little dirt road, one of the millions that run along the lake and through the woods surrounding it. Mark sighed, “I thought she was never gonna shut up. I sure hate to see gutsy chicks break. Destroys my faith in human nature.”

“You’re never gonna break, huh?”

“Nope,” Mark said. He pulled a pair of scissors out of his pocket. “Picked these up at the one-stop.” He reached over and began cutting off Angela’s beautiful long blue-black hair. Close to her head.

“You ain’t gonna cut it all off?” I said, stunned.

“Yeah, I am. Setting up Curtis like she did, gettin me cracked like that. She coulda had me killed.”

“That’s right,” I said, and suddenly all the hatred I had had for Angela, for her brother Curly, for everything she stood for, came back. I sat and watched Mark cut off all her hair. He tied it all up neatly when he had finished the job. It was a couple of feet long. Even with her hair gone and her makeup streaked all over her face, Angela was a beauty. She would always be. A lot of good it did her.

We drove home about three that morning. Mark and me finished what was left of the rum. We dumped Angela and her hair in her front yard. She never even woke up. I didn’t think she’d remember getting into the car with us, but her girl friends would probably tell her that. She’d know who had cut off her hair.

She wouldn’t do anything about it though, because one thing I knew about ol’ Angel, she was proud. She’d say she had her hair cut at the beauty shop. She’d say, “I was sick of all that hot mess.” She’d never let on.

I started crying on the way home from Angela’s and Mark had to drive. Sometimes rum affects me like that.

I was still crying when we got home. We sat on the porch and I cried while Mark patted me on the back and said, “Hey, take it easy, man, everything’s going to be all right.”

I finally quit and sat sniffing and wiping my eyes on my shirt sleeve. It was a quiet night. “I was thinking . . .”

“Yeah?” Mark said, in the same easy, concerned voice. “What were you thinkin’, Bryon?”

“About that kid Mike, the one in the hospital. We talked to him a couple of times, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. He got beat up tryin’ to do a black chick a favor.”

“How come things always happen like that? Seems like you let your defenses down for one second and, man, you get it. Pow! Care about somebody, give a damn for another person, and you get blasted. How come it’s like that?”

“You got me, Bryon. I never thought about it. I guess ’cause nothin’ bad has ever happened to me.”

I looked at him. Nothing bad had ever happened to him? His parents had killed each other in a drunken fight when he was nine years old and he saw it all. He had been arrested for auto theft. He had seen Charlie shot and killed. He had nearly been killed himself by some punk kid he had never seen before.

Nothing bad had ever happened to him? Then I knew what he meant. Those things hadn’t left a mark on him, because he was Mark the lion—Mark, different from other people. Beautiful Mark, who didn’t give a damn about anyone. Except me.

I suddenly knew why everyone liked Mark, why everyone wanted to be his friend. Who hasn’t dreamed of having a pet lion to stand between you and the world? Golden, dangerous Mark.

“You are my best friend, Mark,” I said, still a little drunk. “Just like a brother to me.”

“I know, buddy,” he said, patting me again. “Take it easy; don’t start bawling again.”

“I sure wish I knew where M&M was,” I said, and tears were running down my face again in spite of myself. “I like that dumb little kid. I wish I knew what happened to him.”

“He’s O.K. Take my word for it.”

“You know where he is!” I said. “He’s been gone all these weeks and you know where he is!”

“Yeah, I do. If he wanted to come home, he’d come home. Don’t worry.”

“You gotta take me to where he is, Mark,” I said, knowing I sounded like a drunken nitwit—but I couldn’t help it, seeing how I was so drunk.

“Sure, Bryon, don’t cry. I’ll take you there tomorrow. But don’t count on him comin’ home.”

“Cathy is awful worried about him. You know, Mark, I think I’m gonna marry Cathy.”

“Come on, man,” Mark said, trying to pull me to my feet. “Yeah, marry Cathy and be sure and name all the kids after me. Let’s go in the house. Try an’ be quiet, O.K.? You don’t want the old lady to see you like this. I shoulda known better than to let you drink all that rum.”

“Didn’t you drink any?”

“Naw, I was drinkin’ plain Coke.”

“I drank all that rum by myself?” I couldn’t believe it. I’m not much of a boozer.

“ ’Cept for what Angela drank.” Mark was helping me up the steps. I was weaving back and forth. If he hadn’t been hanging onto me, I would have dropped flat on my face.

“Poor Angel—we shoulda left her alone, Mark. That was a mean thing to do, cut off her hair like that.”

“Please, Bryon, for Pete’s sake, don’t cry any more.” He half-dragged me into our room and pushed me onto my bed. I passed out. I could hear Mark moving around the room, feel him taking my shoes off and pulling the blanket up over me, but it was all as if he was real far away, or I was way down inside myself.

“What’d I ever do to deserve you, Mark? Pull a thorn outa your paw?”

“Bryon, buddy, you are as wiped out as I’ve ever seen you. I think you’d better shut up and go to sleep.”

“When did we start runnin’ around together, Mark? Remember?”

“We’ve always been friends. I can’t remember when we weren’t.”

“How come your old man shot your mother? She shot him back, but it was too late because she was dying anyway.” I really was drunk, because I had never mentioned that to Mark in all the years I had known him.

“It was me. I was under the porch—I could hear them real plain. And the old man was sayin’, ‘I don’t care, I ain’t never seen a kid with eyes that color. Nobody on my side of the family has eyes that color—not on yours either.’ And the old lady says, ‘That’s right Why should he look like anybody in your family? He ain’t yours.’ And then they start yelling and I hear this sound like a couple of firecrackers. And I think, well, I can go live with Bryon and his old lady.”

“Did you really think that?” I opened my eyes, and the room was turning around slowly. It was making me sick. Something was making me sick.

“Yeah, I did. I didn’t like livin’ at home; I got sick of them yelling and fighting all the time. I got whipped a lot, too. I remember thinking, This’ll save me the trouble of shooting them myself. I don’t like anybody hurtin’ me.”

“I’m glad you came to live with us.”

“Me too. Now you really better shut up, man.”

“Why you tryin’ to shut me up?” I said, making an effort to sit up. It made me even sicker, so I lay back down. “You got a cigarette?”

“Right in the old secret place.” Mark pulled back his mattress and got a pack of cigarettes. He always kept an extra pack there. When we were little and didn’t want Mom to know we smoked, we kept our cigarettes hidden. It wasn’t till much later that we found out she had known about it all along.

I couldn’t light my cigarette for some reason. Mark lit it for me and stuck it in my mouth. He sat back on his bed watching me, his elbows on the window sill. I could see the end of his cigarette glowing.

“Charlie, he tried to help somebody out and look what happened to him,” I said. This was connected with what he’d said about Mike somehow, but Mark followed my train of thought, just like he always had.

“Charlie wasn’t about to let a couple of his friends get beat up by some hicks. What happened then, well, that was just the way things turn out sometimes.”

“Yeah, but listen, Mark, if somebody had said to him, ‘Is savin’ a couple of dumb kids from gettin’ beat up worth your life?’ he woulda said, ‘Hell, no!’ Charlie woulda said that, Mark.”

“Sure he woulda said that. But you don’t know what’s comin’. Nobody does. He sure knew he was taking a chance. Bryon, he musta known those guys had guns. He knew they were rough guys. He took a chance, and he got a rotten break. That’s it.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. Like you gettin’ busted with that bottle. A little harder and you woulda been dead.”

“But I ain’t. This is the way it is, Bryon. Angela Shepard is a tough little chick who set out to get a shy guy who didn’t know she was alive, so she sweet-talks some dummy into fighting for her, and I happen to be friends with Curtis, happen to be sittin’ on the car with him when the dummy picks the fight with him, and I happen to be a little high. So I step in between Curtis and the punk. Now, if Angela wasn’t tough, if she was a nice girl from the West Side—maybe she woulda left well enough alone and given up on Curtis. If Curtis was a playboy like you, he woulda picked her up when she wanted to be picked up. If that kid wasn’t so dumb, he would have never taken on Curtis, who is no slouch of a fighter, man, I can tell you. If I had had a date that night, I woulda been somewhere else. But Bryon, that ain’t the way things went. You can’t walk through your whole life saying ‘If.’ You can’t keep trying to figure out why things happen, man. That’s what old people do. That’s when you can’t get away with things any more. You gotta just take things as they come, and quit trying to reason them out. Bryon, you never used to wonder about things. Man, I been gettin’ worried about you. You start wonderin’ why, and you get old. Lately, I felt like you were leavin’ me, man. You used to have all the answers.”

“I can’t help it, Mark. I can’t help thinking about things. Like Mike and Charlie and M&M and you—it’s all mixed up and I can’t help it.”

“You can help thinking about it.” He leaned over his bed, reached across the short space that separated us, and yanked my cigarette out of my fingers.

“You’re going to go to sleep and burn us alive,” he said.

I remember I was going to say, “No I ain’t,” but I was asleep before I could get the words out.