Burned Page 5

  “It's too fucking early, Trapper. Go get it yourself,” I grumble, rolling over to face the back of the floral chintz sofa. I curl my heels back so that I can fit my entire length on the narrow, overstuffed cushions.

  Trapper stands up, cocking his head to one side for a moment before loping back into the kitchen. He nudges his bowl to the side with his nose until it is positioned under the stainless steel hopper. With a couple of gentle prods, he activates the ramp that sends a healthy-sized portion spilling into the bowl.

  That’s a good boy. Now I’m going back to sleep.

  My cell phone chirps and buzzes on the oval coffee table, rotating an eighth turn. I pull a ruffled pillow over my ear and mash it down with my arm. A few seconds later, the phone chirps again.

  Fine. It’s four in the afternoon. Seems like a perfectly civilized time to wake up anyway.

  I groan and roll onto my back, throwing my arms up over my head and arching my whole body in a long, strong stretch. Fumbling blindly against the coffee table surface with one hand, I find my phone. I drag it in front of my face, finally opening my eyes when the screen is just inches from me.

  Six texts from Nico. How did I miss that?

  Oh yeah. Rum shooters and a late-night burrito. Sleeping the sleep of the blessed, that’s how.

  Dropping the phone back on the table, I curl myself to a sitting position and jam my hand down the front of my cotton boxer briefs, rubbing absentmindedly against my nuts. My dick is a little bit sticky too... oh yeah, that would be the blowjob. I’d forgotten about that. No wonder I slept so long.

  Tina… Trina… Something like that.

  Leaning forward calmly I drop to the sculpted carpet and pound out a quick thirty push-ups, my breath bursting out in hydraulic puffs. Trapper trots back to the opening between the kitchen and the living room. He watches me as I open my stance and switch to my left arm for another thirty, then my right for the final set. When I hop back to my feet, Trapper turns around slowly and walks back to his bowl, sitting right in the middle of a pile of extra dog food.

  The cell phone buzzes again. I don't even really hear it. I stare at the cow-shaped clock on the kitchen wall. Is 4 o'clock a respectable time to head to the marina? I’m not sure.

  I’m also not sure why I really care whether or not there is a respectable time. Who’s gonna judge me? The Sheriff? The hairdressers’ union? All the townies already look at me like I’m from another planet.

  Getting my drink on while the sun is up is probably just what they expect from guys like me anyway. But still, I wish they’d just loosen up a little. The people in Oriental just seem so goddamn decent.

  Not that I really know them. They sort of keep to themselves at the hardware store, the grocery store, the quaintly named Trad’n Post. Being Southerners, they view us Yankees with a bit of a suspicious attitude and seem happy not to intermingle. But also being Southerners, they know how to keep quiet about us.

  Still, the other Family guys will probably be at the marina already. The old guys will be playing dominoes at the small round tables on the deck, swatting at the seagulls as they fly by them. Nico could already be there for all I know. Probably Angelo, Frankie… The old guys are always there, it seems like.

  Then again, where else are you going to go in a dinky little backwater like Oriental, North Carolina?

  Running my tongue along the inside of my mouth, I shuffle to the modest, pink bathroom. I swat the shower tap on and hop in right away, shuddering under the ultracold water as it slowly heats it up. Rivulets course over my skin as I stand there with my palms against the tiles, bracing myself against the frigid spray.

  When the water warms up slightly, I straighten and grab the bar of value priced soap. I scrub it all over my torso and the back of my neck. Pausing for a second under my nuts, I try to remember that blowjob. Redhead? No. Brunette? Big tits? Anything?

  Nope. The images slip away from me like soap suds down the drain. Must not have been that good, and I can’t even get my dick to even pretend to get hard. Great. Just another drive-by blowjob in Oriental.

  My hair is so short, I can wash it and everything else I’ve got with this one bar of soap, from the top down. It is all real efficient, just the way I like it.

  A quick shave as I drip dry on the fluffy white bathmat, and I am just about done. 4:15. That has to be pretty respectable, anyway.

  I snag a fresh pair of cargo pants off the top of my rumpled laundry basket and snap them in the air to try to get at least a couple wrinkles to smooth out. Then I pull on a fresh tank and button a generic beige work shirt over that.

  There, perfect. I could be anybody. Totally anonymous, really. Won’t even stand out among the old Family guys at the bar. I look like I could be there to fix the printer or the store surveillance camera or something.

  After rubbing a little bit of wax on the tips of my fingers, I run my hands through my closely shorn, wavy hair. Some girl left a tub of it on my bathroom counter, and eventually I got curious and tried it out. It’s good stuff.

  It is my only weakness about fashion, whatever that word means. I like my hair like this now, all shiny and a little hard, heh. If I don't use the wax, it gets kind of bushy and unruly. At least like this, it stays close to my head in a nice, orderly pattern.

  After a leisurely walk around the block with Trapper sniffing every ground squirrel burrow and trashbin he can find, I finally close the front door on my candy-colored, grandma-style rented cottage. I snap the deadbolt out of habit, though I am probably the only person in a mile radius who even bothers to do it.

  Late afternoon sun warms my skin through my shirtsleeves. The last of the hangover seems to wither and fall away as I imagine my next drink. Tequila? Rye? Not rum, though. That was enough of that.

  Ohhhhh, wait, it was Nina. That was her name. I remember it suddenly as she twists around when I approach. It is almost like she heard me coming. She looks cute in a pink tank top and tiny, dark red shorts that show her long, lean, tan legs. She swings her feet back and forth as she sits on the railing.

  As soon as she sees me she dips her head, peeking out at me from underneath her thick, honey-colored bangs. A blonde, now I remember for sure. I smile and bob my head once in greeting.

  Her hand goes out, but before she can catch my arm I cut across the boardwalk and duck into the shaded front door of the marina bar. I think maybe I hear her behind me, but I can't really be sure.

  No, actually, I am pretty sure. It just doesn’t make a difference either way. I have played this out a bunch of times. Every one of them thinks I’ll make an exception for them, if they just play it the right way. But there are no exceptions.

  I have a rule: one time, one night, per girl. That is it. It keeps things neat. The sooner Tina figures that out, the better.

  No, Nina. Nina. Right.

  All the eyes turn slowly toward me as I walk into the darkened bar. I stand for a second and let my vision adjust to the dim interior. Frankie and Angelo are here, all right. Bobby and Loverboy, too, which is nice. I haven’t seen them in a while since they’d both gone off to visit grandkids or something. I don’t know. I don’t really care either, but it is nice to make conversation with people from back home, either way.

  Lisa smiles at me from behind the bar. I smile back, but it takes a second to convince myself to move forward. Nico’s here, and I’m tempted to leave. I can grab a sixpack and go home to watch some kind of sports on the old tube television in my cottage and not even have to deal with his crap.

  But Nico doesn’t see me right away. I see Knuckles tugging at Nico’s shoulder insistently. Nico swivels his head to listen to Knuckles mutter something confidential against his shiny, faggy shirt.

  Taking this chance, I dart around the corner in the bar and take a seat just out of view of Nico's eye line. Lisa drops her citrus knife on the cutting board and comes over, her head cocked in a sassy challenge.

  “What, you don't feel like socializing with the riffraff today?” she dare
s me, her perfectly sculpted eyebrows raised in neat arches.

  “It's all riffraff, Lisa,” I sigh, looking around. Besides Nico, I have to be the youngest guy here by about forty years. Well, maybe Knuckles is in his early sixties. He still likes to challenge me to a bowling match every once in awhile, anyway.

  But everybody else is pretty long in the tooth, which is sort of the point. Oriental is supposed to be a nice, calm retirement home for benched mobsters. Sort of a Family pasture. Cute little rented cottages that overlook the ocean. A few peaceful, dead-end streets. We’ve got a little sailing, a little fishing, and a nice, private bar to drink our worst memories into a dull roar.

  Nico and I stick out as the young guys, the guys who are still supposed to be working. Nobody has ever asked me about it, and I guess that means everybody already knows what happened, or everybody already thinks they know what happened.

  They think we killed Sal. Nobody will come out and ask outright, but if we’re here then they figure we must have done it. That Don Dante made this our punishment: early retirement.

  Yeah, like that is what would happen if we had anything to do with our brother’s death. Retirement? Not likely. If there had been any real evidence, Dante would have had us ended. That’s a Family law. No blood spilled within the Family.

  Something happened, but nobody here knows what. Sometimes I’m not even sure. But I know Aldo did something to point Don Dante in our direction, because he is still home and we are stuck here. Aldo and maybe that snake Alphonso, then Charli had to open her mouth…

  No. I am not letting that woman back into my head. Absolutely not.

  Don Dante implied we were getting off easy, and I guess we did. The oldtimers give us our space. They give Nico all the respect a Capo should get, even if they roll their eyes a little bit behind his back. Capo of the gangster retirement village? Not the gig he had his eye on, I assure you.

  Every time I think about that part it makes me laugh, just a little.

  But it’s really not so bad here. It’s peaceful. The food is good. There is very little chance of getting popped in the middle of the street. Even if life seems sort of pointless now, at least it’s going to be long. Super long, by the looks of these guys.

  Loverboy tops them all at an impressive, ripe eighty-six years old. Despite what people think, Family guys usually live for a long time anyway. We are a healthy sort.

  This is a fact that I know only too well. That means that if I get to live to Loverboy's age, I have fifty-fucking-five more years to spend in my early retirement purgatory.

  It makes me want to throw up.

  Loverboy's nickname was given to him based on some rumors about the size of his cock, but nobody wants to confirm it. He stopped fucking girls a long time ago and as far as he is concerned, the stories can get grander every time he tells them.

  At this rate, my own nickname when I get to that age is in some doubt. Loverboy? Yeah right. By that time they’ll probably be calling me the Gelding. Eunuch. Numbnuts.

  There aren't a lot of women in Oriental to begin with, and my single-serving rule makes the situation a little bit more difficult. I spend a whole lot of time alone, way more than I ever would have guessed. There are only so many push-ups a guy can do. Even jerking off has gotten depressing. Maybe they’ll call me the Monk.

  Every tourist bus that comes to Oriental gives me a little bit of hope, though. They’re like rolling vending machines full of new, wrapped candies in strappy sandals and pastel dresses. Even Trapper can hear the buses when they rumble into town and he gets excited for me, tail wagging, ears up expectantly. Though they’re mostly families and retirees, there’s always at least a few college girls in the mix. Thank God for college girls.

  I wish there were a few here now. Just one, even. One freckled, big-titted college girl with a smart mouth and a...

  Lisa sighs and pushes her weight to one hip, bouncing her knee impatiently. She knocks on the bar in front of me to wake me up. I know she wants me to order a drink but what’s the rush? I’ve got years.

  Leaning forward, she wets her bottom lip with a slow swipe of her pink tongue. Her eyes narrow keenly. “Nina was asking about you. You see her out there?”

  “I thought her name was Tina.”

  “Oh, stop,” Lisa scolds me, rolling her eyes. Her sigh says that she knows we’re not going to talk about it. Not even if she presses me.

  It took her an impressively long time to figure that out, but after a couple years even Lisa stopped asking too many questions. When we first got here, she was understandably curious about me and Nico. She tried to wheedle the information out of us: what were we doing here? How did we end up on the geezer farm? How were we planning on making life bearable?

  It took a lot of stonewalling and more than a few dirty looks for her to finally understand that we were not going to be playing “Let’s talk about our feelings and get real close.” I don’t do that shit anymore.

  I admit, if I was going to do it, her pretty green eyes would have been practically irresistible. And maybe she gave up right before I gave in. Those eyes… Yeah, it could have been possible if shit had turned out differently.

  But it didn’t turn out differently, and so here we are. Her on one side of this bar, and me on the other.

  She turns a rocks glass up on the shiny wood and picks up two bottles, Jack Daniels in one hand and Maker's Mark in the other. I jerk my chin toward the Makers. She nods and tips it over the glass, letting out a healthy three fingers.

  “Nina... right,” I sigh. She was nice. Now I remember more of it: so enthusiastic, so bouncy. I had leaned back against the sink in the men's bathroom and she climbed right up on top of me, one knee on either side of the porcelain. Throwing her head back, she wriggled enthusiastically on my dick for a full twenty seconds before deciding suddenly that she really wanted my cock in her mouth.

  How could I say no? She dropped to her knees and sucked me off right there, her cheeks caved in like a porn star, her eyes rolled back in her head. She had swallowed too, which is always one of those things that gives me an extra thrill. When we were kids, the guys always acted like swallowing was one of the dirtiest things a girl could do. Well, that shows you what kids know.

  She hadn't gotten off, but what was I going to do about that? And now that I’ve been to that well, it might as well be dry.

  “I know you know her name,” Lisa says as she pushes the glass toward me with her dainty beige fingertips. “You Italian boys have excellent manners. You would never forget a lady's name.”

  I wink at her and nod once before splashing all three fingers of whiskey to the back of my mouth. I swallow it all in one gulp, nearly choking on the huge volume. Then I slam the glass back on the bar and gesture for another.

  “Oh, Lisa, you know me too well. How are we going to keep this conversation interesting for the next fifty years if you know all my secrets?”

  She shrugs one shoulder, making a hollow behind her collarbone. “I guess we’ll have to think of something, Tek. Wait, Jesus… Do you really plan on being here for another fifty years? I sure as hell don't.”

  I shake my head, forcing myself not to shrug. It is certainly looking that way. Permanently benched at the ripe old age of thirty-one.

  “I’ve decided to stick around until I get a cool nickname like old Loverboy over there,” I explain.

  She looks over one shoulder at Loverboy who is sitting alone in a booth, his shoulders curled forward. His forehead bobs gently toward the tabletop like a buoy in the harbor. Apparently he is napping.

  “Nicknames are good,” she agrees vaguely, sighing. She turns up another glass for herself and pours a couple inches of Jack. “You know what they used to call me?”

  I blink, my mouth curling up in a lopsided grin. “Was it something sexy?” I ask.

  “Nope,” she says, popping the P sound emphatically.

  “Was it something rude? Do you need me to go ice somebody?”

  She shudders. “I ha
te when you boys joke like that. I never know if you're serious or not.”

  Lowering my chin, I stare at her intently. Yeah, it’s a joke. I wouldn’t really go off without a good reason. But something about her makes me just a bit protective, like she’s my cousin or sister or something. Yet bangable, one day. I’m saving her for an emergency, or maybe for my last.

  “I am deadly serious, Lisa,” I growl. “If someone hurt your feelings, you just point them out to be right now and I'll —”

  “Little Lisa.”

  That stops me in mid sentence and I think for a second. “And… you're mad about that?”

  Her eyes go wide with indignation. “Yeah, I'm mad about that! Can you think of something more boring than just being called little for your whole life? Not sexy Lisa or spunky Lisa or mysterious Lisa. Little Lisa. Because I'm little. Like that's so fucking clever you have to say it out loud or something?”

  I hold my hands up, trying not to laugh. The tip of her nose is getting pink like when she’s drunk. “Okay, okay, okay. I see what you’re saying. You just point him out to me, like I said…”

  “Yeah, like I really remember anymore,” she mumbles, clearly disappointed in my reaction, her voice drifting off. “Because it doesn’t even matter much anymore. Nicknames don't really mean shit anyway.”

  Shrugging, I look away. Nico is still talking to Knuckles. I hope they’re planning on leaving together, and soon.

  “Do you have a nickname?” Lisa wonders aloud. “Is Tek a nickname, wait... Yeah, Tek sounds like a nickname, for sure. Is it a nickname?”

  I narrow my eyes at her slightly, waiting for her to catch up. She is busy putting the bottles away and looks up at me, startled, when she realizes what she has done.

  “Oh, I'm sorry,” she mumbles in a rush. “Look at me, all nosy! I don’t know what I was thinking. Your name is your business, of course.”

  “It’s cool. Forget about it,” I say, hoping she gets the drift. I mean, it is cool, but she really shouldn’t do that. The wrong guy could get pretty upset about too many questions.