Beautiful Children Read online

  Even with the windows broken and the side door open, it was like a sweatbox in the ice cream truck, and rubbing a warm bottle of piss on her neck did nothing to help. She tore a nearby flyer off the back door of a van, planning to use the limp and ancient paper for a fan. Not to be FUCKED with read the flyer, a combination of cutout fonts and scratch-off stencil patterns. $8. 3 kegs. 10 warmup bands. cum get WASTED out in the desert. Off I-15 where the pigs don't cruise. In some ways it meant nothing, a paper creased into thirds and torn around the edges, a crude drawing of a skeleton with missiles for tits, some coarse advertisement for some long-ago desert bash. Only the girl with the shaved head had seen Not to Be Fucked With play live, she'd seen them like four times, actually, always at a party out in the desert, off I-15 where pigs never cruised. The girl referred to the band as the Nots and she had minor crushes on each of the band's four members and she totally adored their thrasher music, its hard and fast pace, power chords and violent hooks. This one song, it had this refrain; this boss oi oi oi thing in its chorus. Three short blurts, oi oi oi.

  Zitty Mohawk guy lifted his beer in a toasting motion, took a dramatic swig, and sprayed beer all over Piggy, who squealed asshole. Glancing down at the flyer, the girl raised her hand and ran a palm over the part of her neck where her spinal cord ended and her skull took over. The follicles felt bristly and odd. Her knees jangled together and she popped her thumbs and squirmed in her seat and felt a faint urge to pee and looked down again at the flyer. Her foot tapped, oi oi oi. Her knees waggled, apart, together, oi oi oi. She kind of worried about giving the room a free show, and at the same time, it was like, fuck those fuckers, you know? Oi oi oi. The girl had played the song on her stereo hundreds of times, maybe thousands. Alone in her room. The girl with the shaved head had rocked out and geeked out and gotten wicked goofy to the Nots; their chorus of ois had saved her soul more times than she could count. The needle of the battered record player inside the ice cream truck may have been scratching against the label of the old zydeco LP, but just then the girl with the shaved head could not have heard those ois any clearer if Not to Be Fucked With had been playing right next to her. Without a doubt, she knew their demo had to be somewhere in the ice cream truck. Somewhere amid that pile of identical-sounding demo tapes and burner-produced compact discs that kids from incestuously connected local bands played late at night for one another in garages and dens and makeshift hangouts like this here ice cream truck. The possibility even existed that right then, someone might play the demo, the possibility existed that the demo would just happen to be cued up to the song, right at a part with the oi oi ois. The girl with the shaved head wondered how to figure the chances. The formula that explained how light traveled through space popped into her head. She thought of partial statistics from a math paper she'd done, which showed the world famous Las Vegas Strip was undoubtedly visible from the moon. The girl thought about wasted power and that maybe it could be used to save people in Ethiopia and then she thought that nothing said PUNK more than a big white Mohawk. She wondered if maybe a Mohawk and a three-piece suit were just costumes, both of them. She started thinking about the difference between the song with the ois and some song a corporation had bought for a commercial: how the song with the ois had struck a chord inside of her, expressed her feelings better than she ever could herself, this kind of emotional bond it made, this sort of trust. And when a corporation bought a song to use in a commercial, they were trying to take advantage of that bond, trying to take all your good and secret feelings and transfer them to their lame product.

  Nobody was paying the girl a spit of attention and for the first time she was not paying attention to them either, but just sitting, shredding the edge of that flier, being alone with her aloneness. Being alone like her mother.

  Wait.

  No. Not like that.

  See, the girl's mother, she'd come into the girl's bedroom. Two or three times a month. Usually late. Two, three in the a.m. She'd get home from another terrible date. Or maybe after the latest guy had bailed. It would be the tail end of another night at some honky-tonk or when she just could not sleep. The girl's mother would not be able to handle being alone and so she would come into her daughter's bedroom. She would slide in under the covers and wrap her arms around her daughter. Locking her bedroom door when she went to bed seemed cruel to the girl. It seemed wrong. She'd leave the door unlocked and her mother would get into the bed and would form a cocoon around the girl's body. Most of the time the girl pretended to be asleep. If she actually was asleep, then upon her mother's entrance, the girl would wake to a crush of hot breath and whiskey and perfume, and she would hear her mother weeping. She would hear how much her mother hated men. How much her mother hated her own life. The girl would lie there feeling helpless and trapped and also that her mother was kind of pathetic, and although the girl had a tender and unspeakable love for her mother, she felt distant from her mother too. The girl was strong, she was smart, she was never going to end up like her mother, no fucking way.

  And this is when Ponyboy ambled to the back.

  Ponyboy of the Gibraltar biceps. Ponyboy the beautiful.

  He said, “Scootover,” and simple as that, there he was, there they were, scrunched together on the ice cream truck's spare tire.

  He was older, she knew this much. Seventeen. Eighteen. Twenty-two, max. A college dropout finding himself. An escapee from the correction facility in Tonopah. There were all kinds of whispers. Whispers about where he slept at night. About hijacking clothes from unattended Laundromat dryers. About hustling games of speed chess and a hot stripper girlfriend, about printing fake IDs, all kindsa shit, serious shit, the kindsa shit Ponyboy didn't really like talking about, although he never did Thing Uno to dissuade the whispering.

  Every time the girl had seen Ponyboy, his hair had been a different color, and on Saturday night it was black as fucking death, defying gravity in these totally amazing Vaseline spikes. His broken nose had healed pretty good, and now a new set of silver rings braided his eyebrows. There were so many barbell studs on his face that they were like pimples, and between the studs and braids, the hard ridges of his jaw and features, and the round wooden cork things that weighed down his earlobes, it was like he was bionic or something.

  Oh, and that glaze to his eyes, that beautiful layer of animosity. It all but dared the girl: Try, break through.

  Purposefully mumbling as if he were some actor from back before color films, he asked, “Wanna lager?”

  She had issues with the sexual objectification of women in those beer commercials. Besides, the texture made her mouth-insides feel yucky. But thanks.

  “A joint?”

  The glowing ember passed across their mutual darkness. The girl told Ponyboy she was going to write a poem about firefly embers. She told him she was just thinking that maybe like the ice cream truck was its own little society. That maybe everyone in here was here because this was the place the fucked-up world wanted them to be.

  Ponyboy leaned forward, not so much taking in her words as taking her in. “Interesting.”

  He stared down at his combat boots. “Kinda like being on the streets.”

  Now straightening, he stared at the girl, his eyes large and tender. “Days are like dog years out there,” he said. “You start living with an eye over your shoulder, you know? Like, you kind of get used to not knowing where you are when you wake up, not having nothing to do with time but get through it.”

  He looked down now while he talked and spread his legs wide and the tip of a knee grazed against the girl's. She blushed and Ponyboy smiled, kind of shyly but also with confidence, and he started to open up, tentatively and vulnerably reciting a monologue the girl vaguely remembered hearing before: how he'd bummed and squatted his way from this Covenant House to that detention center to the friend of some relative's friend's pad. “Vegas through Hollyweird by way of Seattle. Stops along the way in Portland, the Tenderloin, and the Orange Curtain Underground.”

&n
bsp; He pulled up the bottom of his T, revealing abdomen muscles like a series of steps on a ladder. “That's a tattoo for each city, a piercing for each gig.”

  From the beer plank, Pretentious Superior Sellout Green Wool James was doing a terrible job of pretending not to watch her, whatever, fucker. The sound of a flooding engine carried from up front. There was cussing. A door slamming. Someone popping the hood.

  Ponyboy finished with the significance of the Gothically styled stallions along his rib cage. His words were more honed now, but genuinely so, coming at a raised pitch, an excited pace. “What I really want”—he grinned, relishing the suspense—“is to shove a triple-A battery through my schnozz.” He waited for the words to register on the girl. “Way I see it, every limp dick has a tatt nowadays. And even the biggest Urkel is pierced. My boy Alkaline did it and Alks told me that alls you need to do is like get your nose pierced. Then you just have to like take the stud out yourself. And then, right before the cartilage and the hole closes up and shit, right then, you have to just like take the little nub on the battery, you know that nub thing on the plus side? Well, what you have to do is jam that little nub thing into the hole in the cartilage, you got to fucking jam that bitch in there right before the hole closes up and then, right after that, you just kind of like push, get the rest of that battery through.”

  It was in the middle of the part about making sure the battery acid didn't leak in with your mucous membrane that the girl with the shaved head imagined how Ponyboy would look clean. If all the goop and dye was washed from his hair. She imagined him bathed and scrubbed. Scented with environmentally friendly soaps made by wrongfully imprisoned Tibetan monks.

  Jasmine and lavender were turning pirouettes through her head when she kissed him, short and awkwardly, a forced pressing of lips, and the instant she realized what she was doing, the girl broke it up and wanted to laugh and wanted to die.

  Ponyboy took a long drag of the spliff. Then he kissed her back. Opening his mouth to her, blowing a stream of sweetness into her. Ponyboy and the girl kept kissing and their kiss was soft and wet, and then it was hot and hard, and then it was over and her panties were moist, the smoke leaking out of her lips, drifting upward.

  “Damn, you look sexy,” Ponyboy said.

  And damn, she felt sexy.

  And so he kissed her again.

  Shoved his tongue down her throat. Invaded her tonsils like he had a schedule to keep.

  There was lurching, the van suddenly in motion, the pair sprawling onto each other. The truck made a left turn, began accelerating.

  “So,” Ponyboy said, once his hands were on the girl's shoulder, and had steadied her. “Why didn't you gimme the digits last time?”

  “Oh. My. God.”

  “Oh—” Now his right hand was a blur, the scar across his wrist revealing itself as cragged and deep. “Right. What happened was, I was gonna call. Really. I meant to. See these guys at Circus Circus, it was like . . . What I mean is . . .Okay, they hired me to do this stag thing with them.”

  “SAY WHAT?”

  “You kept having to dress and undress—”

  “Owh. My. God.”

  “The number musta fallen outta my jeans—”

  She listened with some hesitation, and took as much time as she needed, composing herself. “Then you're bi?”

  Ponyboy's face turned red. Whether he was blushing or just overloading with anger, he took a moment, sucked deeply on the spliff, then exhaled white streams through his nose.

  “They buy me, I'm sexual.”

  3.5

  Like a shot Newell was off his stool, the cartoon child who has just realized his pants are on fire, the stagecoach driver with bandits on his tail, whipping the horses, flooring it, pedal to the metal, balls to the wall, he was sprinting, pushing through any opening that might present itself, shoving to create openings. Away from the slot machine island, away from the fuzz. His arms churned and his squat little legs pumped, and his reaction time was not quite as fast as it needed to be, leaving him unable to completely avoid the exposed chest of a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt.

  “Scuse me,” Newell yelled, and caromed off the man, bouncing with the impact, the momentum carrying him away and in a new direction. Upon reaching the mouth of the video machine bank, he shouted, “Pardon me,” successfully swerved around a retired farmer type whose barrel stomach hung out from the bottom of his T-shirt, and then swerved once more, this time as if his hips were on a hinge, a trick that allowed him to avoid, by fractions of an inch, what surely would have been a fatal collision, this time with the farmer's significant other, a brightly attired blue-haired woman, whose mooing face was inside a pocketbook the size of a Winnebago.

  “GANGWAY, MAMA,” Newell screamed.

  But what was this? His legs were entangled, constricted, they weren't working properly, there was a malfunction, something was happening, his oversize jean shorts had slipped too far, gravity had betrayed him, mayday, mayday, he was going down, leading with his face, plummeting amid a group of aged tourists, taking with him a laminated name tag from a nearby breast pocket.

  Jackpot nickels flew out of his fun cup and scattered all over the carpet's flourish of patterned card suits. Blood roared through Newell's ears. Before he could decode any messages or recover any nickels, a hand pulled at the back of his collar. Considerable force was yanking, bringing Newell upright. Busted, he thought, and had a momentary flash of jail bars.

  He almost did not recognize the face at first, for it was focused in a way that belied its usual uncertainties. Kenny's brow was tight, his eyes calm yet alive. The muscles in his jaw flared out of the sides of his face. Kenny looked at him and did not blink and then was on the move, taking the lead and pulling on Newell's collar, manhandling the boy, dragging him in the opposite direction of the table games, along a barrack of video poker machines, confidently directing their route, as if he'd already surveyed the floor and considered possible exits. Newell checked over his shoulder. He stumbled. Keeping up was a lot harder when you had to hold up your shorts.

  “I think he's going for his holster,” Newell said.

  Kenny's hair bounced lightly on his shoulders with every step; his elbows flailed. He looked in both directions for any more security guards, saw the wall of buxom women in sequined dresses, the oily jugheads with muscles popping out of brightly colored Italian shirts. To avoid a change girl and her pushcart of racked coins, he had to let go of Newell, and now moved a bit farther ahead of the boy, veering toward a wall of partitioned fun-house mirrors.

  “We're losing him,” Newell said. “Keep going.”

  3.6

  Bing Beiderbixxe lived in a small house in the valley with two guys he knew from college, both of whom were in the second year of business school. Most weekends, the housemates’ girlfriends were around, lounging around in sweats and/or their boyfriends’ boxers, halfheartedly tossing their immaculately groomed heads, watching sports with their men and passing Bing's cereal between each other, picking at it, straight from the box. Usually around nightfall, the boyfriends would rummage through the overhead cabinets, pulling out dented pots and pans that Bing's sister had long ago outgrown and passed down. The girlfriends would chop vegetables, start on a pasta sauce. Garlic would bubble on a front burner, maybe some chicken breasts lightly sautéing on the back. For his part, Bing usually stood to the side, ready to help but not exactly jumping in (he was kind of out of his element once you got beyond spreading peanut butter on bread).

  Their most recent meal had been like so many others, agreeable and, for the most part, easy, the dining area busy with the small talk of people who casually knew one another, the guys discussing the securities market, a girlfriend voicing polite and good-natured jealousy about how amazing the sauce tasted. Bing, however, remained fairly quiet, hunched over his food. An encouraging comment floated in his direction—been losing weight, huh, buddy? He looked down. His silverware scraped loudly against his plate.

  It
was the first weekend of August and the night was enjoyably cool, with just the slightest hint of a breeze. Standing outside, on the front walkway, Bing felt a mild summer wind pass over him and stared down the street for a while, looking at the houses with their trim lawns, the homes with the front lights on, and the homes that were dark and empty. Crickets and cicadas and other bugs were doing their thing and the night sky was the gentle purple of swaddling blankets. Many were the times Bing had sat on the front steps of his house and sketched the driveway. He used variations of this sketch whenever he needed something to take place on the street where his hero lived. That night, Bing went back inside to his room, sat at his drawing table, and looked at the mess of art books and movie stills and half-finished panel drawings on bristol board. For a time he stared at a black-and-white cityscape photo from the 1920s, which he was trying to adapt into a backdrop. Then he got up and looked for his cordless.