“What?”
“Are you high? Because your pupils about as wide as the bottom of this can,” Buddy Lee said.
“I have a prescription,” Christine said.
“I’m sure you do. I bet you got a shit ton of them.”
“I’m not going to stand here and be lectured by some white trash redneck ex-con,” Christine said. She stomped her red-bottomed heels past him. He caught a whiff of her as she passed. Not her expensive perfume, but her. The fresh-scrubbed sweet scent of her. In an instant he was back in the aforementioned Camaro. His mouth against her neck. His nostrils full of the same raw fresh scent. This exchange was a microcosm of one half of their past relationship. They’d hit each other with one verbal haymaker after another. Searching for the soft and secret places to make the deepest cut in a way that only someone who has shared your bed more than once can do effectively. There would be no replay of the remaining half of their past relationship. Buddy Lee sipped his beer. That part was always the fun part.
“We was both shit parents. But at least I showed up to watch him go in the ground. You coming here now is more than a day late and way more than a dollar short,” Buddy Lee yelled. He heard her stop in her tracks.
“Fuck you, Buddy Lee,” she said without turning around.
“So much for peace,” he mumbled.
He waited until he knew Christine was out of earshot. He walked up to the graves and knelt on one knee. He opened the other can of beer and poured the entire contents over Derek’s grave.
“No offense, Isiah, but I didn’t know what kind of beer you like. Derek was a Pabst man at one time. I gave him his first one when he was fifteen. This was before I went down for my last visit to the ‘graybar hotel.’ I thought it would make a man out of him. Stupid. I know that now,” Buddy Lee said. He finished his own beer before crushing the can.
“I just wanted to tell you that me and Ike, we did something. We got one of them. I know it’s not what you would want me to do. I think I’m finally starting to understand you could never be the kind of man I am and I couldn’t be the kind of man you was,” he said. He crushed Derek’s can and put both cans back in the brown paper bag.
“I know if you was here you’d tell me to let it go. That it wasn’t worth it. Then I’d have to steal one of your lines,” Buddy Lee said. He rose to his feet and brushed the dirt from his jeans. His eyes burned but he was too tired to cry.
“This is who I am. I can’t change. I don’t want to, really. But for once I’m gonna put this devil inside me to good use.”
SEVENTEEN
Ike opened his eyes. His lower back felt like it was filled with spun glass. He rose from his office chair and listened to his knees pop like rifle shots. His watch said it was a little after eight. He checked his phone. Mya had called a few times. She’d also sent him two terse texts. Both asked where he was and when he was coming home. The first one was longer than the second. The guys would be rolling in in a few minutes. Jazzy would be late as usual. They had seven jobs today from Queen County all the way to Williamsburg.
Ike walked around his desk to the spot where he’d killed the kid. A pressure washer and some bleach had cleaned up the blood nicely. He hadn’t killed anyone in sixteen years. He hadn’t had a fight in eleven years. Eleven years of walking the straight and narrow gone to shit in a matter of minutes. The two of them had slaughtered that kid like a pig and fed him to the wood chipper like a mama bird feeding a chick.
The two of them. Eleven years. One plus one was two. When he was inside he had read a book that said some numbers had a mystical significance in some religions. Not for the first time he considered all the weird knowledge you could acquire when there was nothing to do but lift, read, and fight.
Ike went out to the back lot of the warehouse. He grabbed the water hose attached to a hose reel near the back door and pulled it over to a smoldering barrel near the corner of the building. He soaked the ashes in the barrel until they stopped smoking. The kid’s jeans and shirt had gone up like kindling. It had taken his boots a lot longer to burn down to barely recognizable lumps. He sprayed some water in his hand and splashed it on his face. He’d given Buddy Lee a big tough speech about spilling blood, but he hadn’t expected it to happen this suddenly.
That was the thing about violence. When you went looking for it you definitely were going to find it. It just wouldn’t be at a time of your own choosing. It jumped up and splattered your nice new boots before you were really ready. The thing is, if you chase it long enough, you realize you’re never really ready for it. Shit happens and you either roll with it or you don’t. Eventually you got used to it. When he was a kid he liked to think that made you hard. He hit the barrel with the hose again. After a few years inside he figured out that was bullshit. Human beings were wired to get used to just about anything. That didn’t make you hard. It made you indoctrinated.