By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Date XX
It's always exciting when people act unpredictably. Kerran being on time would have been unpredictable. Kerran being on time would have been new and exciting.
Kerran will have to content himself with being exciting in other ways. He is contradictory, maybe, but never unpredictable. People could be in danger, his friends could be in danger, and that would matter to him; matter enough to get him out of bed, but not enough to make him be early.
And so we sat in a caravan of two cars in front of Trolley’s on sleepy, little used Mt. Pleasant street. I sat in John Slater’s car while he sat on his hood and talked to Brenna, who was standing near him. I couldn’t hear a word they said.
I could, however, hear Teddy’s pleading voice in my ear and I kneaded my fist into my leg in frustrated anxiety.
Around us, it had become dusk and people wandered home with grocery bags. Groups of friends, people we vaguely recognized, went into Trolley’s with their arms clasped around each other. Others were already staggering out. The Happy Hour Crowd. On a different night, we might have been among them, but tonight happy hour felt frivolous and I felt superior to them, these people who'd had a happy hour, though I knew that this was a ridiculous feeling.
Of course, on nights when I had staggered out of Trolley’s, I had believed myself superior to those who were not staggering out of Trolley’s. On those staggering nights, I had not been on any type of mission, or, I had been, but it had been a mission to stagger home. Mission easily accomplished. Not much sacrifice necessary for that.
I had finally gotten my mind off waiting for Kerran and that’s when he had appeared, shambling up to the passenger window of John Slater Alcott’s Volkswagon on foot. No van. Without the van, we were not going to be able to rescue anyone from anywhere. How could we rescue 20 people in two cars, each with two passengers already and room for 3 or 4 more each...max? If Jean and I didn’t go then there’d be room for two more. But, how could I ask that of her (not to mention that she was most familiar with the situation and how to get to Teddy’s through the alleys). And didn’t Teddy call me? And wasn’t there supposed to be danger? Could I ask them to face a danger I would not face?
Plus, I had my camera with me. There was some photographic redemption to attempt.
Kerran got closer. He was wearing cut-offs with big holes. The long sleeve shirt he had over his t-shirt was ripped. He was unshaven and his hair was matted. There were deep dark circles under his eyes, but his usual boyish grin, half Dobie Gillis and half-Spicolli from Fast Times At Ridgemont High, was intact.
I rolled down my window and shouted at him, “Kerran, how are we going to do this without the van?”
He leaned in, reeking of alcohol and cigarettes. “That’d be a good question,” he said. “But, you’re assuming I didn’t get the van and you’re wrong,” he said and pulled a long chain of keys from his pocket.
At one end of the chain was a bottle opener that was chipped and gnashed like it had been chewed by a dog. It was connected to a long thick steel chain that looked like a leash and was connected to a shiny steel ring on which hung hundreds of keys in dozens of sizes. There were other keychains attached to that ring...plastic tabs, a rabbit’s foot, a cheap metal representation of a absurdly over-proportioned man having sex with an absurdly over-proportioned woman. By pulling on a mechanism on the back of their bodies the interlocking figures could be made to hump each other.
“Where is it? Is it far?” I asked.
“No, it’s just 'round the corner,” he said and gestured in two entirely separate directions.
“Well, go get it then!” I said, shaking my head in exasperation.
“Well, stop talking to me then,” he said and broke into a slouching half-run towards the street behind us.
Five minutes later, a long black van pulled out from the same side street. A giant very angular blue monkey was painted across the van, a haze of red paint around the monkey’s stomach was supposed to make it look like the monkey was bleeding, but, it was hard to tell what the red haze was supposed to be and so it was just confusing. Later, I found out that it had been done quickly and left unfinished because Wayne, whose van it actually is, refused to pay the “artist” any more money.
Kerran pulled the van around, parked behind John Slater and got out. I got out too.
“Is the equipment out of it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Lucky, we were practicing last night. If not, then the whole drum kit would be in there.”
"How many can it hold?” I asked.
“Probably 15 in the back if they’re scrunched up tight,” he said.
Brenna and Jean got out of Brenna’s car too and the six of us stood in a ring on the sidewalk next to John Slater’s car. No one said anything. We all looked at the other ones as if hoping someone would say something, then when we realized that no one was going to, we all looked away or down at our feet.
Ten minutes ago, waiting was all we could do and by waiting we were doing all we could, but now we actually had the means -- the van -- to take action and that was worse than waiting.
Finally, John Slater broke the silence, “Jean, there’s an alley behind their house, right?”
“No, around the side,” she said.
Now everyone started talking at once and then everyone, realizing that we were all talking at once, stopped and then no one was talking again.
It was John Slater who finally came up with a plan.
The easy part was that we would drive down 16th street with Brenna in the lead so that Jean could direct us through the alleys. She and Frank had almost made a game out of exploring them and had used them more than the streets they connected.
We would make a left down U Street and cross up on New Hampshire, entering the circumstance of alleyways whose entrance was just before New Hampshire turned into Florida.
The turnoff into the alleyways was barely visible, an orifice of paving stones surrounded by a mouth of weeds and overgrown trees, an abandoned washer/ dryer set looking perfectly white and useable stood just inside of the entrance.
Trash was everywhere; the alley seemed paved with it. Gigantic weeds and other plants grew from between the trash. It was easy to imagine that this wasn’t Washington D.C., but its ruins and that the far off day, imagined in so much science fiction, when the Mall will be as overgrown and broken as the Forum was now had actually arrived and this was the abominable future. The bottom of the cycle. Instead it was its seed, the virus ready at the first sign of weakness to infect the cell.There couldn’t be more than just a few blocks to the alley system and yet it seemed to stretch forever, a full maze. Some of the yards we passed behind were barren, others wild and overgrown, others fastidious. Most were enclosed by chain link or wooden-slatted fences, a few even had barbed wire above so that these homes were like fortresses or prison-camps.
There was the occasional person standing in the shadows. I pointed them out to John Slater. “Lookouts,” he said. “I noticed them when we turned in to the first alley.”
One yard, perfectly visible through the chain link, had a large ornate italianate fountain at its center and statues of dancing fauns and nude grape-eating gods and goddesses spaced around it. Christmas lights ran through and around all of it, blinking and winking and flashing.
From next to me, John Slater said, “Should we knock and see if whoever lives there is wearing a toga?”
“No, with our luck, there’s a miniature of the coliseum in his basement and we’ll have to fight the statue of a lion,” I said.
It was lucky that this house existed because we passed it for the 2nd time, we could definitively call ourselves lost.
“Maybe we should call Teddy?” John Slater said.
“How?” I asked.
“I have a mobile phone in my glove compartment,” he said.
“Really?”
He reached over and opened the glove compartment and pulled out a handset about the size of two and a half packs of playing cards.
“Cellular phone,” he said.
“It’s so small,” I said. The last cell phone I’d seen had been the size of a brick.
“Yeah, latest thing,” he said. “I’ve been doing constituent work for my dad...unpaid, of course...and they issued me one.”
But, before we could actually make the call, Brenna stopped up ahead. Jean got out and ran back to our car. I opened my window.
“Sorry, it’s just two turns away. Brenna thought that we should find out who was in the area before we got to Teddy’s.”
“Oh, not a bad idea,” I said, not having thought of scouting the area. Jean ran back to tell Kerran and then back up to Brenna’s car. We started to pull away and around the corner.
I had started taking photos when we’d pulled into the alleys. I wanted to try and construct a full narrative and not just isolated shots. I’d already gotten the Roman yard and another of Brenna stopped up ahead; I even attempted to get one of the lookouts, but John Slater had grabbed my camera and pushed it down. “Are you crazy?” he said. “We’re already worried about it being dangerous. No reason to invite it.”
It had been too dark anyway. I might have gotten the shadows of light on the shrubbery around the lookout, but even that would have looked like a gray smudge against a full frame of darkness, even at ASA3200.
We’d pulled around the corner up ahead and made a right. I sort of recognized where we were. Down the the alley to our right, I could see the Metro work site. The house next to the one on the corner was Teddy’s.
We had already turned our lights off. Now we turned our engines off. We all got out of the cars and, without speaking, and trying to move along in silence, moved towards Teddy’s back gate, which was unlocked, and then through the backyard. It was overgrown and full of trash bags, soccer balls, broken toys, and other things that I couldn’t quite make out. There was some rustling and I knew that there were rats running in among the trash and just near our feet. For the first time, I felt a little bit of terror shoot through my chest. My skin got clammy and I felt cold. I kept moving, but it was tough. My knees were shaking. I had thought that the lookouts were for drug deals. It hadn’t occurred to me that they might also be looking out for us.
We went to the basement door and knocked. It was dark through the window. No one answered at first and I worried that they’d already left or been kidnapped or were all dead and we were going to be walking in on a blood-spattered massacre.
But a minute later, my eyes adjusted fully, and I could see someone looking at me through the window and could hear someone fiddling with the lock on the other side of the door. It was Teddy.
“What took you fuckers so long?” he asked.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
