On the backside of Hope, in a small space between CJ’s Grocery and the Drive On Inn there was a little burger stand called Val’s, and on the side of the building they had a covered, outdoor area that was closed up with a metal cage at night. In that cage was a row of video arcade games, and on most days after school, and on the weekends, Rodney could put himself with other kids his age, mostly boys but not always, packed around the machines, knocking fists against the metal sides and feeding those machines a week’s worth of quarters in a single afternoon. He spent a good amount of time and pocket money there himself, when he could. It was easy to blend in with the bodies that crowded that place, to pretend he wasn’t alone, not having to worry about saying or doing the wrong thing.
On this day, Rodney put his bike out front where he could keep an eye on it, because he knew that a simple padlock wouldn’t keep people from messing with it as they had before, pulling his chain off or loosening the bolts on his wheels or emptying the tires. He positioned himself near the Night Driver machine though he wasn’t playing it, or even planning on playing it, really. Sometimes, he decided, it was better to watch everyone else at their consoles, to see the way they drummed on the buttons and swore at the screens, amped up like addicts, many of them this close to crying. Even with the all racket and chaos, Val’s was something of a calming place for Rodney, the kind of space he could enter into and be invisible for a while. Invisible in plain view.
“Gimme room, dumbshit.” Two boys crowded the Sea Wolf screen, all block shoulders and cracking voices. High schoolers, Rodney figured. He didn’t know them, but he’d seen them most every time he came to Val’s. They wore their hair in spikes and jeans with holes torn in the knees, and they smoked joints in the small space behind the cages, joints that they called Jesus’ Candy. And even though everyone knew what was what, nobody ever said anything about it.
“You’re wasting your quarter,” the taller one said. There was the ping of the fake sonar, and a static explosion, and he slammed his hand against the console.
The shorter one dug his hands into his pockets and said, “I’m empty.” And when he looked past Rodney, out into the street maybe, he straightened up and said, “Oh baby, look who rolled up.”
It had been a week since Otis Dell had been by the house and Rodney had not seen or heard from the man since, which was fine by him. His mother hadn’t mentioned his name, and Rodney had not brought it up again, not since that morning in the kitchen. Lately, it had almost been as if he had never existed. Except here he was.
Otis kept on the street side of his car, and Rodney did not get the sense that anyone around him was concerned that he might do anything more than what he was already doing.
He walked around casually to the front end of the car and rested his hand on the hood. He was wearing blue jeans and a baseball T-shirt this time, with chunky combat boots, but there were still those sideburns running down his face like smears of shoe polish. Rodney stayed well behind the others, holding himself safely in the shadows.
This all went on for a while, Otis walking from one side of his car to the other, stopping to lean on the fender. Now and then someone would walk past, falter in their step and look back over their shoulder at him. At one point, Otis called out something, and one of those passersby stopped in his tracks and circled on back to him. This was an older fellow, older than Rodney’s father maybe, and while he stood there with Otis he kept his hands tucked down in the pockets of his camouflage jacket.
They talked for just a minute or so, and then the man looked back up at Val’s for a split second before moving a hand from his pocket right into Otis’s, straight into the front jeans pocket it looked like. And with that, Otis gave the guy a slap on the shoulder and climbed back into his car and left without another word to anyone, but not before gunning the engine a good three or four times and laying a stripe of rubber all down the concrete. Someone said, “That dude is crazy.”
People went back to their games. Rodney counted out the quarters in his pocket and when he looked up, he noticed a couple of girls leaning over a pinball machine in play, staring at him. They were girls he knew from school, though not very well. The stout one, named Donna, glared at Rodney, raising an ugly crook in her lip. Barely a week after he’d showed up in class she had tried to talk him into letting her copy his geography map. There had been sweet talk, and an effort to play herself as some social queen, someone he’d want to be friends with. He’d refused though and, as a result, wound up as more or less dead to her and everyone else. Which was fine by him.
“Your mom works at Kruger’s.” The other girl—he thought her name might be Kate, or Katrina, maybe—screeched over the racket of the pinball machine.
“So what,” Rodney said. “Like I don’t know that.”
She leaned in to her friend, her black hair ratted out like crow’s feathers, and yelled something into her ear that Rodney couldn’t make out. She looked back to him. “I seen your mom and Otis Dell around town. My apartment is right across the street from Swain’s Tavern. They like to go there an awful lot.”
“So what?” he said again.
“So what?” she mimicked, folding her arms over her chest and throwing a smirk at him. “And yet you stand there, acting like you don’t even know him.”
“I don’t know him,” he said.
Katrina said, “Wait till he starts beating on her. My mom works with a lady who went with him for a while, last fall. She mouthed off to Otis this one time—the lady did, not my mom. Anyway, he backhanded her right across the face.”
Rodney said, “They just barely met. He hasn’t done anything yet.”
“Yet,” she echoed, her mouth pinched tight. A beak.
“Anyways, he wouldn’t dare,” he added.
“Or else what?” she said, looking him up and down. “You’ll kick his ass? Yeah, right.” Donna reached across the pinball glass and swatted at her.
There were options that drifted into his mind, things he could do to Otis—the kinds of things the people in his comics did (but seldom got away with). All the same, he could not imagine his mother letting anyone so much as lift a hand to her, much less strike her.
Katrina shook her head. “Don’t bother calling the cops,” she said. “My mom said that if the cops could do anything with Otis he would have been in jail a long time ago.” She nodded to her friend and the two of them left the machine, whipping their hair like horse tails as they pushed through the crowd and disappeared out the back of the arcade.