on the vig, doesn’t return my phone calls—” he was ticking off the offenses on his fingers—“makes plans to meet me at noon today and then doesn’t show. You know how long I sat and waited for that deadbeat? An hour and a half. Like I don’t got other, better things to do.” He put his head to the side. “It’s guys like your dad keep guys like me and Yurko here in business. Do you think I like coming to your house? Driving all the way out here?”
I had thought this was a rhetorical question—clearly no one in their right mind would like driving all the way out where we lived—but since an outrageous amount of time passed, and still he was staring at me like he actually expected an answer, I finally blinked in discomfort and said: “No.”
“No. That’s right, Theodore. I most certainly do not. We got better things to do, me and Yurko, believe me, than spend all afternoon chasing after a deadbeat like your dad. So do me a favor, please, and tell your father we can settle this like gentlemen the second he sits down and works things out with me.”
“Work things out?”
“He needs to bring me what he owes me.” He was smiling but the gray tint at the top of his aviators gave his eyes a disturbingly hooded look. “And I want you to tell him to do that for me, Theodore. Because next time I have to come out here, believe me, I’m not going to be so nice.”
xvii.
WHEN I CAME BACK into the living room Boris was sitting quietly and staring at cartoons with the sound off, stroking Popper—who, despite his earlier upset, was now fast asleep in his lap.
“Ridiculous,” he said shortly.
He pronounced the word in such a way that it took me a moment to realize what he’d said. “Right,” I said, “I told you he was a freak.”
Boris shook his head and leaned back against the couch. “I don’t mean the old Leonard Cohen-looking guy with the wig.”
“You think that’s a wig?”
He made a face like who cares. “Him too, but I mean the big Russian with the, metal, what do you call it?”
“Baseball bat.”
“That was just for show,” he said disdainfully. “He was just trying to scare you, the prick.”
“How do you know he was Russian?”
He shrugged. “Because I know. No one has tattoos like that in U.S. Russian national, no question. He knew I was Russian too, minute I opened my mouth.”
Some period of time passed before I realized I was sitting there staring into space. Boris lifted Popchyk and put him down on the sofa, so gently he didn’t wake. “You want to get out of here for a while?”
“God,” I said, shaking my head suddenly—the impact of the visit had for whatever reason just hit me, a delayed reaction—“fuck, I wish my dad had been home. You know? I wish that guy would beat his ass. I really do. He deserves it.”
Boris kicked my ankle. His feet were black with dirt and he also had black polish on his toenails, courtesy of Kotku.
“You know what I had to eat yesterday?” he said sociably. “Two Nestlé bars and a Pepsi.” All candy bars, for Boris, were ‘Nestlé bars,’ just as all sodas were ‘Pepsi.’ “And you know what I had to eat today?” He made a zero with thumb and forefinger. “Nul.”
“Me neither. This stuff makes you not hungry.”
“Yah, but I need to eat something. My stomach—” he made a face.
“Do you want to go get pancakes?”
“Yes—something—I don’t care. Do you have money?”
“I’ll look around.”
“Good. I think I have five dollars maybe.”
While Boris was rummaging for shoes and a shirt, I splashed some water on my face, checked out my pupils and the bruise on my jaw, rebuttoned my shirt when I saw it was done up the wrong way, and then went to let Popchik out, throwing his tennis ball to him for a bit, since he hadn’t had a proper walk on the leash and I knew he felt cooped-up. When we came back in, Boris—dressed now—was downstairs; we’d done a quick search of the living room and were laughing and joking around, pooling our quarters and dimes and trying to figure out where we wanted to go and the quickest way to get there when all of a sudden we noticed that Xandra had come in the front door and was standing there with a funny look on her face.
Both of us stopped talking immediately and went about our change-sorting in silence. It wasn’t a time when Xandra normally came home, but her schedule was erratic sometimes and she’d surprised us before. But then, in an uncertain-sounding voice, she said my name.
We stopped with the change. Generally Xandra called me kiddo or hey you or anything but Theo. She was, I noticed, still wearing her uniform from work.
“Your dad’s had a car accident,” she said. It was like she was saying it to Boris instead of me.
“Where?” I said.
“It happened like two hours ago. The hospital called me at work.”
Boris and I looked at each other. “Wow,” I said. “What happened? Did he total the car?”
“His blood alcohol was .39.”
The figure was meaningless to me, though the fact he’d been drinking wasn’t. “Wow,” I said, pocketing my change, and: “When’s he coming home, then?”
She met my eye blankly. “Home?”
“From the hospital.”
Rapidly, she shook her head; looked around for a chair to sit in; and then sat in it. “You don’t understand.” Her face was empty and strange. “He died. He’s dead.”
xviii.
THE NEXT SIX OR seven hours were a daze. Several of Xandra’s friends showed up: her best friend Courtney; Janet from her work; and a couple named Stewart and Lisa who were nicer and way more normal than the usual people Xandra had over to the house. Boris, generously, produced what was left of Kotku’s weed, which was appreciated by all parties present; and someone, thankfully (maybe it was Courtney), ordered out for pizza—how she got Domino’s to deliver all the way out to us, I don’t know, since for over a year Boris and I had wheedled and pleaded and tried every cajolement and excuse we could think of.
While Janet sat with her arm around Xandra, and Lisa patted her head, and Stewart made coffee in the kitchen, and Courtney rolled a joint on the coffee table that was almost as expert as one of Kotku’s, Boris and I hung in the background, stunned. It was hard to believe that my dad could be dead when his cigarettes were still on the kitchen counter and his old white tennis shoes were still by the back door. Apparently—it all came out in the wrong order, I had to piece it together in my mind—my dad had crashed the Lexus on the highway, a little before two in the afternoon, veering off on the wrong side of the road and plowing headlong into a tractor-trailer which had immediately killed him (not the driver of the truck, fortunately, or the passengers in the car that had rear-ended the truck, although the driver of the car had a broken leg). The blood-alcohol news was both surprising, and not—I’d suspected my father might be drinking again, though I hadn’t seen him doing it—but what seemed to baffle Xandra most was not his extreme drunkenness (he’d been virtually unconscious at the wheel) but the location of the accident—outside Vegas, heading west, into the desert. “He would have told me, he would have told me,” she was saying sorrowfully in response to some question or other of Courtney’s, only why, I thought bleakly, sitting on the floor with my hands over my eyes, did she think it was in my father’s nature to tell the truth about anything?
Boris had his arm over my shoulder. “She doesn’t know, does she?”
I knew he was talking about Mr. Silver. “Should I—”
“Where was he going?” Xandra was asking Courtney and Janet, almost aggressively, as if she suspected them of withholding information. “What was he doing all the way over there?” It was strange to see her still in her work uniform, as she usually changed out of it the second she walked in the door.
“He didn’t go meet that guy like he was supposed to,” whispered Boris.
“I know.” Possibly he had intended to go to the sit-down with Mr. Silver. But—as my mother and I had so often, so fatally, known him to do—he had probably stopped in a bar somewhere for a quick belt or two, to steady his nerves as he always said. At that point—who knew what might have been going through his mind? nothing helpful to point out to Xandra under the circumstances, but he’d certainly been known to skip town on his obligations before.
I didn’t cry. Though cold waves of disbelief and panic kept hitting me, it all seemed highly unreal and I kept glancing around for him, struck again and again by the absence of his voice among the others, that easy, well-reasoned, aspirin-commercial voice (four out of five doctors…) that made itself known above all others in a room. Xandra went in and out of being fairly matter-of-fact—wiping her eyes, getting plates for pizza, pouring everybody glasses of the red wine that had appeared from somewhere—and then collapsing in tears again. Popchik alone was happy; it was rare we had so much company in the house and he ran from person to person, undiscouraged by repeated rebuffs. At some bleary point, deep in the evening—Xandra weeping in Courtney’s arms for the twentieth time, oh my God, he’s gone, I can’t believe it—Boris pulled me aside and said: “Potter, I have to go.”
“No, don’t, please.”
“Kotku’s going to be freaked out. Am supposed to be at her mom’s now! She hasn’t seen me for like forty-eight hours.”
“Look, tell her to come over if she wants—tell her what’s happened. It’s going to completely suck if you have to leave right now.”
Xandra had grown sufficiently distracted with guests and grief that Boris was able to go upstairs to make the call in her bedroom—a room usually kept locked, that Boris and I never saw. In about ten minutes he came skimming rapidly down the steps.
“Kotku said to stay,” he said, ducking in to sit beside me. “She told me to say she’s sorry.”
“Wow,” I said, coming close to tears, scrubbing my hand over my face so he wouldn’t see how startled and touched I was.
“Well, I mean, she knows how it is. Her dad died too.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes, a few years ago. In a motor accident, as well. They weren’t that close—”
“Who died?” said Janet, swaying over us, a frizzy, silk-bloused presence redolent of weed and beauty products. “Somebody else died?”
“No,” I said curtly. I didn’t like Janet—she was the ditz who’d volunteered to take care of Popper and then left him locked up alone with his food dispenser.
“Not you, him,” she said, stepping backwards and focusing her foggy attention on Boris. “Somebody died? That you were close to?”
“Several people, yeah.”
She blinked. “Where are you from?”
“Why?”
“Your voice is so funny. Like British or something—well no. Like a mix of British and Transylvania.”
Boris hooted. “Transylvania?” he said, showing her his fangs. “Do you want me to bite you?”
“Oh, funny boys,” she said vaguely, before bopping Boris on the top of the head with the bottom of her wine glass and wandering off to say goodbye to Stewart and Lisa, who were just leaving.
Xandra, it seemed, had taken a pill. (“Maybe more than one,” said Boris, in my ear.) She appeared on the verge of passing out. Boris—it was shitty of me, but I just wasn’t willing to do it—took her cigarette away from her and stubbed it out, then helped Courtney get her up the stairs and into her room, where she lay face down on the bedspread with the door open.
I stood in the doorway while Boris and Courtney got her shoes off—interested to see, for once, the room that she and my dad always kept locked up. Dirty cups and ashtrays, stacks of Glamour magazine, puffy green bedspread, laptop I never got to use, exercise bike—who knew they had an exercise bike in there?
Xandra’s shoes were off but they’d decided to leave her dressed. “Do you want me to spend the night?” Courtney was asking Boris in a low voice.
Boris, shamelessly, stretched and yawned. His shirt was riding up and his jeans hung so low you could see he wasn’t wearing any underwear. “Nice of you,” he said. “But she is out cold, I think.”
“I don’t mind.” Maybe I was high—I was high—but she was leaning so close to him it looked like she was trying to make out with him or something, which was hilarious.
I must have made some sort of semi-choking or laughter-like noise—since Courtney turned just in time to see my comical gesture to Boris, a thumb jerked at the door—get her out of here!
“Are you okay?” she said coldly, eyeing me up and down. Boris was laughing too but he’d straightened up by the time she turned back to him, his expression all soulful and concerned, which only made me laugh harder.
xix.
XANDRA WAS OUT COLD by the time they all left—asleep so deeply that Boris got a pocket mirror from her purse (which we had rifled, for pills and cash) and held it under her nose to see if she was breathing. There was two hundred and twenty-nine dollars in her wallet, which I didn’t feel all that bad about taking since she still had her credit cards and an uncashed check for two thousand and twenty-five.
“I knew Xandra wasn’t her real name,” I said, tossing him her driver’s license: orange-tinged face, different fluffed-up hair, name Sandra Jaye Terrell, no restrictions. “Wonder what these keys go to?”
Boris—like an old-fashioned movie doctor, fingers on her pulse, sitting by her on the side of the bed—held the mirror up to the light. “Da, da,” he muttered, then something else I didn’t understand.
“Eh?”
“She’s out.” With one finger, he prodded her shoulder, and then leaned over and peered into the nightstand drawer where I was rapidly sorting through a bewilderment of junk: change, chips, lip gloss, coasters, false eyelashes, nail polish remover, tattered paperbacks (Your Erroneous Zones), perfume samples, old cassette tapes, ten years’ expired insurance cards, and a bunch of giveaway matchbooks from a Reno legal office that said REPRESENTING DWI AND ALL DRUG OFFENSES.
“Hey, let me have those,” said Boris, reaching over and pocketing a strip of condoms. “What’s this?” He picked up something that at first glance looked like a Coke can—but, when he shook it, it rattled. He put his ear to it. “Ha!” he said, tossing it to me.
“Good job.” I screwed off the top—it was obviously fake—and dumped the contents out on the top of the nightstand.
“Wow,” I said, after a few moments. Clearly this was where Xandra kept her tip money—partly cash, partly chips. There was a lot of other stuff, too—so much I had a hard time taking it all in—but my eyes had gone straight to the diamond-and-emerald earrings that my mother had found missing, right before my father took off.
“Wow,” I said again, picking one of them up between thumb and forefinger. My mother had worn these earrings for almost every cocktail party or dress-up occasion—the blue-green transparency of the stones, their wicked three a.m. gleam, were as much a part of her as the color of her eyes or the spicy dark smell of her hair.
Boris was cackling. Amidst the cash he’d immediately spotted, and snatched up, a film canister, which he opened with trembling hands. He dipped the end of his little finger in, tasted it. “Bingo,” he said, running the finger along his gums. “Kotku’s going to be pissed she didn’t come over now.”
I held out the earrings to him on my open hands. “Yah, nice,” he said, hardly looking at them. He was tapping out a pile of powder on the nightstand. “You’ll get a couple of thousand dollars for those.”
“These were my mother’s.” My dad had sold most of her jewelry back in New York, including her wedding ring. But now—I saw—Xandra had skimmed some of it for herself, and it made me weirdly sad to see what she’d chosen—not the pearls or the ruby brooch, but inexpensive things from my mother’s teenage days, including her junior-high charm bracelet, ajingle with horseshoes and ballet slippers and four leaf clovers.
Boris straightened up, pinched his nostrils, handed me the rolled-up bill. “You want some?”
“No.”
“Come on. It’ll make you feel better.”
“No, thanks.”
“There must be four or five eight balls here. Maybe more! We can keep one and sell the others.”
“You did that stuff before?” I said doubtfully, eyeing Xandra’s prone body. Even though she was clearly down for the count, I didn’t like having these conversations over her back.
“Yah. Kotku likes it. Expensive, though.” He seemed to blank out for a minute, then blinked his eyes rapidly. “Wow. Come on,” he said, laughing. “Here. Don’t know what you’re missing.”
“I’m too fucked-up as it is,” I said, shuffling through the money.
“Yah, but this will sober you up.”
“Boris, I can’t goof around,” I said, pocketing the earrings and the charm bracelet. “If we’re going, we need to leave now. Before people start showing up.”
“What people?” said Boris skeptically, running his finger back and forth under his nose.
“Believe me, it happens fast. Child services coming in, and like that.” I’d counted the cash—thirteen hundred and twenty-one dollars, plus change; there was much more in chips, close to five thousand dollars’ worth, but might as well leave her those. “Half for you and half for me,” I said, as I began to count the cash into two even piles. “There’s enough here for two tickets. Probably we’re too late to catch the last flight but we should go ahead and take a car to the airport.”
“Now? Tonight?”
I stopped counting and looked at him. “I don’t have anyone out here. Nobody. Nada. They’ll stick me in a home so fast I won’t know what hit me.”
Boris nodded at Xandra’s body—which was very unnerving, as in her face-down mattress splay she looked way too much like a dead person. “What about her?”
“What the fuck?” I said after a brief pause. “What should we do? Wait around until she wakes up and finds out we ripped her off?”
“Dunno,” said Boris, eyeing her doubtfully. “I just feel bad for her.”
“Well, don’t. She doesn’t want me. She’ll call them herself as soon as she realizes she’s stuck with me.”
“Them? I don’t understand who is this them.”
“Boris, I’m a minor.” I could feel my panic rising in an all-too-familiar way—maybe the situation wasn’t literally life or death but it sure felt like it, house filling with smoke, exits closing off. “I don’t know how it works in your country but I don’t have any family, no friends out here—”
“Me! You have me!”
“What are you going to do? Adopt me?” I stood up. “Look, if you’re coming, we need to hurry. Do you have your passport? You’ll need it for the plane.”
Boris put his hands up in his Russianate enough already gesture. “Wait! This is happening way too fast.”
I stopped, halfway out the door. “What the fuck is your problem, Boris?”
“My problem?”
“You wanted to run away! It was you who asked me to go with you! Last night.”
“Where are you going? New York?”
“Where else?”
“I want to go someplace warm,” he said instantly. “California.”
“That’s crazy. Who do we know—”
“California!” he crowed.
“Well—” Though I knew almost nothing about California, it was safe to assume that (apart from the bar of “California Über Alles” he was humming) Boris knew even less. “Where in California? What town?”
“Who cares?”
“It’s a big state.”
“Fantastic! It’ll be fun. We’ll stay high all the time—read books—build camp fires. Sleep on the beach.”
I looked at him for a long unbearable moment. His face was on fire and his mouth was stained blackish from the red wine.
“All right,” I said—knowing full well I was stepping off the edge and into the major mistake of my life, petty theft, the change cup, sidewalk nods and homelessness, the fuck-up from which I would never recover.
He was gleeful. “The beach, then? Yes?”
This was how you went wrong: this fast. “Wherever you want,” I said, pushing