Chapter Fourteen
Blaine was there, in a full tuxedo and without Lana. His family members were the only ones adhering to the black tie mandate. The rest of us did the best we could to dress up. We looked like wedding guests, and the hosts looked like the wedding party. The Casino Night employees were in bow ties, too, but wore gaudy vests to insure that no guests would be dressed like the help.
I took a deep breath, approached Blaine, and asked him where Lana was.
“She didn’t want to come, since none of the other Barrio kids would be here,” he answered, looking around the room for a way out of talking to me any further.
“Soren!” he found his excuse. “Excuse me, Nick.”
I watched him glide through the crowd over to Soren, who noticed that I had been left behind by Blaine. Soren said something to him about it, to which Blaine responded by shrugging and waving off any concern. I wasn’t interested in calling him on it, certainly not in front of Soren, so I drifted over to one of the gaming tables.
I didn’t know how to play any of the games aside from the most basic rules, so I figured I would observe for a while and learn some of the nuances before laying down any of the chips I had been handed by the Casino Night employee at the door.
I never did play. I was too fascinated by watching the people rather than the games; specifically the parents, as the kids haphazardly tossed some chips onto some tables and half-heartedly indulged the theme before rushing into Blaine’s media center to play video games on their enormous screen. It had been a while since any of us enjoyed access to it. The parents, meanwhile, wrestled with emotions even more acute than the ones experienced during the ragtag sporting events or the video game contests.
At the Casino Night tables, they had no opponent to focus on, no skills to employ; it was just themselves and their luck, neither of which they had felt very good about for some time. And with misfortune as the sole exterior force they could blame, their reaction to losing was not anger, it was despair. They had cleansed their anger in the streets and the TV rooms. They had thrown equipment and hit pillows and accused other players of cheating. Now all they could do was sit under their own private rain cloud and re-live the day they came home to find the foreclosure cross on their front lawn, and the dreadful trickle of inevitability that carried them to that broken point as they watched one card after another reveal something they didn’t want to see, watched the roulette marble bounce and skip dozens of times before settling in some other slot, watched the dice come up with the wrong combination no matter how many times they rolled them. They watched the house win again.
When one of them would beat the house for a few chips, they would nearly weep with joy. They would look upward and hug their spouse. As the night aged, the hugs grew larger with every small victory, with everyone hugging each other when someone beat the odds. Even Blaine’s parents joined the group hug when a rare hot streak ignited at one of the tables. Someone was winning. Someone was proving it was still possible.
But then they would get greedy. Again. They would reboot their elevated sense of self and imagine they had discovered some secret, had realized some unique skill that allowed them to succeed where others had failed. And they would fail. Again. The collective hugs would become consoling rather than celebratory. Everyone kept their arms around each other, and they would not let go until it was perfectly clear that the run was over, that they would have to move elsewhere to find something to cheer.
After watching the cycle repeat itself a few times, I grew curious as to how things were going with my generation over in the media room. They had fallen silent since their exit from the gaming floor. The doors were shut, but I still expected to hear some muffled shouts and cheers now and then.
Upon entering I was treated to the cause of the quiet: Soren had turned the first-person zombie shooter game on the screen into a clinic on marksmanship.
“Relax your grip on your weapon,” he was instructing Blaine, who was a willing student, and also the only one, apparently, as everyone else in the room was sprawled out half-conscious, as though an actual shooting spree had left Blaine and Soren as the last two standing. “If you can’t relax with a plastic firearm, how are you going to do it when you’re holding the real deal?” Soren continued to coach. “Hold it like a bird; firm enough to keep it in hand, light enough so you don’t kill it.”
“There’s more fun ways of killing things, eh Soren?” joked Blaine.
But Soren maintained a grave demeanor. “Killing isn’t fun, Blaine,” he lectured him. “It’s only done when necessary.”
“Like in a zombie apocalypse.” Blaine persisted in trying to keep the session light, blasting away at the undead onscreen.
“Actually these zombies can still be instructive,” Soren stood his ground as well. “If someone wants what you have, and they want it bad enough, they’ll just keep coming at you. One shot won’t do the job.”
I looked around the room and exchanged looks with some of my dozing ex-classmates. How could Blaine keep buying into this guy?
“You think people wouldn’t kill to live in a house like this?” Soren barked at Blaine like a personal trainer trying to get more sit-ups out of a client. “You think a guy wouldn’t risk life and limb for a chance at what’s inside? The priceless art? The beautiful women?”
I saw an arm rise from the pile and beckon. It took me a moment to recognize it was attached to Nub. I leaned over so he could speak softly in my ear. “Soren has some real guns and said anyone who listens to him can shoot them,” he said. “Sounded cool at first. Then he started talking.”
I stifled a laugh and turned my attention back to the lesson.
Now Soren hovered over Blaine’s shoulder as though trying to make his voice serve as Blaine’s conscience. “Plus it’s still an accurate representation of the human body. It’s a zombie, but you can still size up a head shot, or a shot to the midsection. And which one is best?”
He turned to the rest of us, expecting an answer, but only Blaine responded.
“Dead center,” he called out. “That way you still hit something even if you choke.”
Soren noticed me.
“Oh, hey Nick. Didn’t see you come in.”
I nodded.
“You running the tables out there or what?” he asked.
“Just checking in,” I shrugged. “Seeing how much fun everyone’s having.”
Some brief snorts of laughter rose from the surrounding pile. Soren flashed an agitated smile.
“Always got something to say, don’t you, Nick?” Blaine said as he fired away at the undead.
I was so surprised to be addressed by Blaine that, contrary to his accusation, I had nothing at all to say. I sighed and moved toward the door.
“Wow,” he said. “No comeback? How refreshing.”
I halted my exit. “It’s going to be really sad to see you go,” I quipped.
Blaine paused the game and turned to face me.
“What makes you think we’re going? I don’t see a sign on our front lawn.”
“You can take a tombstone off a grave, but there’s still a body there.”
“Are you saying we hid the sign?”
“Easy, zombie hunter. It’s just a metaphor.”
“And there it is!” Blaine raised his arms. “The condescending, smart-ass remark we can always count on from you.”
“What did I ever do to you, Blaine?”
“Don’t play innocent, you back-stabber.”
The groggy piles of kids slowly started to animate, casually re-positioning themselves to see the action.
“Let me try again,” I said. “What…did…I…do?”
“You really want me to say it in front of everyone?”
“I don’t know,” I extended my arms in exasperation. “I can’t have an opinion on something I know nothing about.”
Now that everyone was watching, even though they were pretending not to watch, Soren capitalized on the moment to try a
nd look wise.
“This is neither the time nor the place,” he put a hand on Blaine’s shoulder and extended the other in my direction, as if it had healing powers. “Let’s talk about this later. Take a time out. Give ourselves a chance to cool down.”
“Us? Ourselves?” I said. “What does this have to do with you?”
“I know you’re upset now, Nick,” Soren kept up his peacemaker performance. “I get it. And I understand. I’ve been there…”
“You haven’t been shit,” I snapped. “All you’ve done is memorize a bunch of clichés. And Blaine would rather listen to you than me? Fuck both of you.”
I barged out of the room and marched toward the front door. There was some congestion there, however, and I didn’t want to shove my way through it. I turned to see that the path to the backyard was clear, so I headed in that direction, slid open the glass door, and went outside. There didn’t seem to be anyone there, so I let out a long, throaty growl from the pit of my stomach and launched into a diatribe about people saying the same damn things over and over again.
But my rage had enlarged my blind spots, and it turned out there was someone in the yard with me.
“Work hard, play by the rules, and you can be anything you want to be,” she said.
I only knew whose mother she was because aside from seeing her at the block parties and a sales pitch for genetically-modified earthworms, I once saw a reflection of her and her husband trying to have sex one night as I sat in a tree that allowed me to see the full length mirror attached to the front of their bedroom closet. He had gotten mad at her for directing him on certain acts that she felt were just missing, and a fight ensued that ended with him watching soft core porn in the living room. She said it again:
“Work hard, play by the rules, and you can be anything you want to be.”
She was leaning against the wall to the side of the sliding glass door, her arms crossed, her eyes glassy, looking straight ahead as though her night had not gone well.
“Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?” she finally looked at me. “The kind of thing people say over and over?”
She looked like a mother who would organize a lot of fund raisers and drive her kids wherever they needed to go; but that wasn’t possible out here, and she wanted to look sexy tonight, so she squeezed into a dress that must have looked good on her back when she dreamed of a very different future.
“Yes,” I said.
“Anything you want to be,” she stared back out at the darkness above the wall. “That’s the crazy part, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said. “Working hard and playing by the rules, okay…but how does that get you to anything you want to be?”
“Well, it keeps you out of jail,” she said. “And you can’t be anything you want if you’re in jail.”
I chuckled. She didn’t. She kept her attention on the night sky beyond the wall. I considered asking her how her son was doing, as I had never been very close to him, but decided that was not something she wanted to hear at the moment. Instead I offered her my Casino Night chips.
“I never got around to playing,” I explained. “It was more interesting to watch.”
“Thanks,” she said, taking them from me. “This may give me enough to win the Hopi prayer basket.”
She smiled at me, gathered herself, and before heading back inside said, “As long as I don’t blow it.”
Now positively alone, I admitted to myself that I had been wondering the whole time if she was going to make a pass at me, was a little disappointed that she didn’t, and was disappointed in myself that I was so subject to teen movie fantasies. Still, though, I asked myself if I would have done anything if she had.
I came to the realization that I would have been too embarrassed by my lack of experience (even though I knew how she liked certain acts performed on her) and embarrassed by her lack of dignity, just as the sliding glass door opened with a whoosh. Soren stepped out onto the patio with an over-compensating smile.
“Contemplating the stars?” he asked.
“No. Not that.”
“Your troubles with Blaine?”
“No,” I kept the denials coming. “That’ll take care of itself. We’ll both be outta here soon enough.”
“Too bad,” he said. “Guys like you should really stick together.”
“Guys like us?”
“Natural born leaders.”
“I’m not a leader,” I said.
“But you’re smart,” he volleyed. “Naturally smart.”
“You like that word. Natural.”
“It’s the way of the world, Nicky…”
“Nick.”
“The people who makes things happen, the leaders, the smart people, those are not learned traits. We’re born with those.”
“Okay. Thanks. I guess.”
“But we can’t take those talents for granted,” he changed the tone to a more admonishing one. “We have to develop them. Practice them.”
“Oh, I get it,” it dawned on me. “Sorry I interrupted your class back there, Soren.”
“And we can learn some things that help maintain the ideal circumstances to develop those natural talents, keep us safe so we can actually make that difference.”
He didn’t seem to notice my apology. “I said I was sorry.”
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” he started to sound like he did with Blaine during the video game gun clinic. “Winners don’t apologize. If you do what you know is right, then there’s no need to say you’re sorry. Greatness doesn’t compromise.”
We stared at each other for several moments. He was very proud of his speech, and I didn’t know how to respond to it.
“I should go,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
“It’s getting late,” he nodded. “You’re absolutely right. We’re running out of time.”
“We?” I was genuinely confused. “You can stay if you want. I was just talking about me.”
“I’m not,” he said, continuing to grandstand. “I’m talking about all of us who have a responsibility to use our God-given talents for good, before it’s too late.”
He walked over toward the entrance to the tunnel. It didn’t occur to me at first that he knew about it, but as he walked in a straight line toward our homemade birdbath it became clear that he did.
He stood next to our secret gate, the lower half of his body illuminated by the light coming from the house, his upper half in shadow. I could see him point down at our creation, but couldn’t see his face when he spoke.
“Every day, every hour, every minute, there are people trying to undo what people like your family have done.”
I was furious. “Did Blaine tell you?”
“It’s not his fault,” he tried to sound comforting. “Lana came through one day when I was here. She knocked on the glass door and I wondered how she had gotten into the backyard with such a big wall in her way.”
“Didn’t he tell you why we made it?”
“Yes he did. And I explained to him why it was a bad idea.”
“So why is it a bad idea, Soren?”
“On principle,” he barked. “People who build walls don’t deserve to have them undermined.”
“We just wanted to hang out with each other.”
“You wanted to hang out. They wanted in.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
He walked in my direction, stepping into the light. “Wrong, Nick. Wrong. I’m telling the truth. You’re just too young to believe in it yet. And that’s good. You should be that way when you’re young. You should want to see the best in people. But it’s a tough world out there. It’s a hard world. And you’re reaching an age where you have to start understanding that. Because if you don’t, it will eat you alive, and you’ll never have a chance to use that brain of yours.”
I couldn’t even manage to say good night. I just turned around and headed back into the house, to the front door, and out into street. I walked ar
ound the neighborhood several times before going home; past the empty houses with their front yards growing wild and their windows as lifeless as they were dark, past the playground we had defiled with its tanbark almost completely drained from its base and its slide covered in skid marks from our bicycles, past the construction site with the edges of its wood frame chipped and splintered from our constant battering and the materials stored inside now completely depleted and scattered in pieces around its perimeter. We had indeed been stupid, been naïve; and I was no exception. I gave Soren credit for that. But what constituted smart was hardly settled in my mind.