33 Snowfish Read online

  THE SKYLARK

  THE OTEL MOTEL

  THE VAN

  SELDOM

  THE ITTY BITTY FARM

  On top of everything else, Boobie’s got the clap. On Highway 53 he couldn’t stop swallowing screams. It got so bad he had to pull over and get out of the car. When I checked on him he was backed up against a telephone pole pouring Gatorade down his pants like some kind of scientist.

  Curl kept going, “What’s he doin’, Custis? What’s he doin’?”

  I guess he thought them vitamins and nutriments would cool that burning. The Gatorade was green like Martian blood. I never heard someone scream so loud in my life.

  Curl’s got the clap, too, but she quit crying after we changed to Highway 38. Her face went soft and dreamy all of a sudden. Them towns like Maple Park and Elburn and Cortland went by all quiet and spooky with their fields and cows and farm machines.

  “Look at that big dumb cow,” Curl kept saying. “And that one, too. Look at him. He’s so big and dumb.”

  Curl says you get used to the clap after a while. She says living with that burning’s like breaking in new shoes.

  I’m in the front seat scouting pigs.

  Pigs get crafty on the highway and you gotta concentrate. They go undercover and paint their cars and tint up their windows. On Interstate 80 a pig car might be red and it might be blue. I seen one once that was yellow like a banana. It’s all about them big antennas. If it’s got one coming off the trunk and it’s a Impala or a Caprice Classic, you can bet your spending money it’s a pig.

  I got my gat in my pocket and my hand’s on top of it just in case. It’s been on top of my gat ever since we skated. It feels like my fingers is all grown into the trigger.

  Curl’s in the back seat trying to name the baby. She’s got her new dress on. It’s green with this big sunflower down the front and when she sleeps she keeps her hand on the stem like she picked it in a field. This rich man from Joliet gave her the dress. Them rich suckers is always coming off the Harrah’s gambling boat walking all tall and supreme like they ain’t never gonna have no pain.

  The radio’s broke so Curl keeps singing Pepsi-Cola commercials and making Pigmy feet on the window; that’s when you press the side of your fist up against a steam blob. If you press it right it looks like a little Pigmy foot. You can make toes with the tip of your finger.

  Whenever Curl’s fiending for bazooka, she smokes Boobie’s Basics, and whenever Boobie’s tapped out she makes Pigmy feet.

  She’s been counting blackbirds, too. She thinks that if she counts enough of them it’ll clean her bazooka habit. Sometimes she counts them even though they ain’t in the sky. Her voice gets all wack and desperate like someone’s chasing her with a stick.

  This morning there was this whole flock of them flying south. It looked like a big black flag flapping around in the sky. Curl got so excited she pressed her face up against the window and smeared all her Pigmy feet. She said she counted forty-seven of them, but I only counted eighteen. She spent the rest of the morning looking for them blackbirds like they was gonna come back and ask her for her telephone number.

  Since then I’ve only seen three more, and one of them suckers was smashed to the road. Boobie pulled the car over so he could study it. Even though it was smashed you could still see its face. It looked like it was screaming.

  Curl ain’t been eating none lately either. You used to always see her with a fish sandwich and some French fries. Curl’s crazy about fish. You stick some meat in her face and she won’t eat it, but if you show her a live fish she’ll cut its head off, clean it, and cook that joint up like she’s been starving for the longest.

  She used to go fishing in Bolingbrook with Old Man Turpentine. Old Man Turpentine says the best fish east of the Mississippi swim in the Des Plaines River. Him and Curl would drop their lines right next to those niggers with the straw hats who drive up from Kankakee in their old broken-down cars. Skankakee niggers, I call them. Even though they got their own river all to themselves they still come up to Bolingbrook. Old Man Turpentine says all they talk about is how rotten and little the fish are down in Skankakee.

  Curl uses this old bamboo pole she found under a bridge, and even though it’s all warped and smells like foot fungus she catches carp and bullheads and cooks them up in the barbecue pits over at Renfro Park.

  I ain’t never fished with Curl, but Old Man Turpentine says she catches more fish than them niggers from Skankakee, and that’s all they do.

  Curl keeps promising Boobie that she’s through with bazooka, but you know she’s still fiending. You can see how them froggy eyes of hers slide to the left like she thinks she can smell it cooking somewhere, like she can picture it getting scraped out of the pot and trimmed up on the kitchen table. And you can see that yellow starting to crawl where her eyes is sliding, too. Naming the baby’s the last thing on Curl’s mind.

  Boobie wants to name it, cuz you can’t sell no baby that don’t got no name. He wants to call it Eugene or James or some shit. One of them rich-sounding names from New Lennox or Frankfurt or the west side of Joliet.

  I knew this kid from the west side of Joliet called Wallace Henry Walters. He lived on Western Avenue, and he had a pool in his backyard with two diving boards. He let me live in his tree house for a few days cuz I stole him a calculator from the RadioShack on Larkin. It was cool cuz it had this window and you could watch squirrels and shit. He said I could live there as long as I wanted, but then his pops — this big sucker who looked like a anchorman — caught me pissing in the bushes and called the police.

  Wallace Henry Walters.

  Rich people like a name like that.

  If you ask me, the more names you use, the better chance you got of selling a baby. As long as it’s got two eyes and all its fingers and it ain’t no nigger. That’s what I keep telling Curl, but she just shakes her head and sets them big froggy eyes on me and tells me I’m evil.

  “We’re lucky he ain’t no nigger,” I’ll say. “We’re lucky.”

  “You a evil boy, Custis,” she’ll say. “You evil like a priest on Monday.”

  Curl thinks I got evil in me cuz of Bob Motley — this fat man who used to own me. He was keeping me at his duplex over by the Rockdale water tower. I stayed in the room where Sergeant Dick used to sleep. Sergeant Dick was his dead pit bull, and you could see where he was trying to chew the door up. Sergeant Dick’s room was cool cuz it was warm and I got to sleep on top of a real Sealy Posturepedic mattress. Even though it was on the floor and it smelled like dog spit, it was the first real mattress I slept on since I stayed at this halfway house in Lockport, and them mattresses was all skinny and wack.

  In Sergeant Dick’s room you didn’t care about the pit bull smell so much cuz at least you was warm and them Rockdale vagrancy pigs wasn’t gonna fuck with you.

  Bob Motley found me at the mall when I was stealing half-Cokes from the food court. You can get pretty full on half-Cokes if you drink them fast enough. You can swallow air in between so it makes you feel fuller, too, but sometimes that gives you ass failure, so you can’t swallow too much.

  That day in the food court I wasn’t wearing no kicks cuz I left them in that tree house on Western Avenue. This security guard tried chasing me but I hid behind them caramel corn ladies with the big fat stomachs.

  “Hey, ladies,” I said. “Let me mop your floor. I’ll do it for free.”

  “How old are you?” they asked, smiling like big, happy dolphins.

  “Old enough,” I said.

  “How old is old enough?” one of them replied.

  I was like, “Eleven, twelve, thirteen. Twenty-seven.”

  They just thought I was cute and let me mop their floor. They didn’t even notice my bare feet.

 
; “What’s your name?” the fattest one asked me.

  I was like, “Ronald.”

  “Ronald what?”

  “Ronald McDonald.”

  They laughed and laughed.

  I stayed behind the counter and ate caramel corn while the water was filling up the mop bucket.

  “Make sure you add some bleach to that water,” one of them ladies said.

  “Oh, I will,” I promised. “I’ll add some bleach.”

  When they wasn’t looking I pissed in it. I bleached up that mop water real good.

  As soon as that security guard took his cigarette break I skated to the food court and found a table by Sbarro and hid my feet under a copy of the Daily Shopper.

  Bob Motley walked over to me all fat and slow with his beard and his sunglasses and his big hairy shoulders and gave me a slice of pepperoni pizza and pointed to the Daily Shopper and told me he’d buy me some new kicks if I took a ride with him.

  “A ride where?” I asked.

  “Just a ride.”

  I was like, “Cool.”

  He got me a pair of Pro Flyers with lightning on the sides and took me over to his house in Rockdale.

  That’s when he started owning me.

  In the TV room at Bob Motley’s there was this hole in the wall where he was always hiding shit. He called it the Dumdum Hole. He kept a bike chain and a paddle with nails in it and a pair of nunchucks and a Louisville Slugger baseball bat in there. The Dumdum Hole went through the entire wall, and when you peeled the newspaper away you could see the front yard. There wasn’t much to look at but a rusty-ass barbecue grill and a bunch of weeds. I think he made the Dumdum Hole by pushing Lottery’s head through the wall. Lottery was this seven-foot Indian who lived on a houseboat on the Illinois River. He used to fall down and have epileptic seizures a lot, but he was good at hearts and he didn’t never fuck with you, and once in a while he even gave you some beef jerky to eat.

  Bob Motley says he cured Lottery of them seizures when he made the Dumdum Hole. Lottery didn’t never come by after that.

  “Cleared that boy’s head right up,” I heard Bob Motley bragging to the rest of his crew one night. There was like eight of them suckers, and Bob Motley’s duplex was like their headquarters.

  Bob Motley had a PlayStation II and a Mitsubishi VCR and so many videos you couldn’t even count them joints. He also had this big electric saw that he kept in the kitchen. He used it to slice up roast beef and Virginia honey-basted ham, and it would spit little meat boogies all over the place. He’d always make me clean it up, and whatever I missed the bugs got.

  Bob Motley never really looked at me, and he yelled a lot, but he kept me fed and got me them Pro Flyers and sometimes when he was in a good mood he would even let me touch his pet iguana, Mercy. He got Mercy from this man from Minooka who owed him some money. He kept Mercy in a glass box next to the electric saw. Mercy was cool cuz she would flick her tongue on your hand.

  After a while Bob Motley started calling me Boy, which was cool cuz before that he’d just call me Hey.

  Before I skated me and Bob Motley made like four films together. The best one was called Girl Eats Boy, where Bob Motley puts this black pillowcase over his head and pretends like he’s cutting me with the electric saw. Then he grinds up my legs in a hamburger maker and feeds me to this little girl who lives under the kitchen sink.

  Making Girl Eats Boy was pretty cool cuz I got to scream a lot.

  The little girl’s name was Wendy Sue. She was like seven or some shit. I think she belonged to one of Bob Motley’s boys, but I ain’t sure. Wendy Sue stayed with us for a whole weekend. It was cool cuz she slept with me on the Sealy Posturepedic mattress in Sergeant Dick’s room. One night I pulled her shirt up and stared at her body. She didn’t even know it cuz she was sleeping.

  After that weekend I never seen Wendy Sue again. You got to wonder what happens to a kid like that.

  Bob Motley said he was going to get Girl Eats Boy put on the Internet. He said you can make crazy bank with them computer films.

  Making movies is fun, but watching movies is boring. When him and his boys would play hearts, Bob Motley used to make me watch this movie called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is like the most boringest movie ever made. It stars this man called Dick Van Dick, which is a pretty wack name if you ask me. My favorite part of the movie is when Dick Van Dick saves all these kids from a evil child-catcher. He sings this pretty crisp song called “Hushabye Mountain.” These two rich kids are hiding under this toy maker’s shop, and they get lured into this candy truck and wind up at the baron’s castle where the child-catcher lives, and they meet up with all these other kids who are hiding under the castle, and some of them was already in the castle, but they escaped and they kept talking all frantic about how they had to pretend that they was like dolls so they wouldn’t get caught and that’s when Dick Van Dick comes and sings the song.

  One day when I was watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang I went into Bob Motley’s room to use the toilet, cuz the one in the basement was busted. His boys had skated and Bob Motley was asleep on his waterbed. He was making this face like he was in a car crash, and whenever he made that face he wouldn’t wake up for nothing. For some reason I opened his closet. There was all types of stuff in there, like boots and boxes of porno magazines and a electric guitar. There was a gas mask in there, too, and when I put it on it made me feel alive and dead at the same time.

  There was a shoebox that had DEATH TO ALL WHO MEDDLE on it. I opened it and there was my gat, just waiting for me to take it. It was the blackest thing I ever seen, and as soon as I touched it I got a boner and I knew I wouldn’t never be able to let it go. I’ll bet Bob Motley still don’t know I took it. He probably had like a whole collection of them little guns.

  It only fires twenty-twos and it ain’t no bigger than a hand and the trigger’s busted, but a gat’s a gat, and that’s that.

  It’s only got four bullets in it, but four’s better than none.

  Once, I heard this old, blind sucker at Renfro Park say that if you shoot the right four or five people you’ll grow a new life. He’s one of them Vietnam vets who lives in a refrigerator box. He said he missed the ones he was supposed to hit and hit the ones he was supposed to miss. He says that that’s how come his life never grew back right. That’s probably how come he lives in a refrigerator box in Renfro Park.

  I ain’t shot nobody yet, but I would. You never know who’s gonna creep up behind you.

  Anyway, when it comes to names, that Wallace Henry Walters kid’s got one of them fancy ones. You can almost sing that shit.

  A baby without a name just ain’t marketable.

  Even cars get good names. Horizons and Neons and shit like that.

  Besides, the baby is Boobie’s little brother, and Boobie don’t want that non-name on his head always reminding him of what he done back home. It’s like naming the baby makes shit new again.

  Even a non-name will get behind your mind. That’s how come ghosts always call out a name when they’re floating through walls and shit — they know it’ll get stuck way in the back of your head where the brain can get a scream caught in it.

  Even though it ain’t hers, Curl thinks we’ll get at least five hundred for the baby, but she don’t really know. She’s too busy fiending.

  “Five hundred,” she’ll say. “Five hundred solid, right Boobie?”

  I keep telling her you can’t just open a catalog and look up some numbers — it’s a baby. And some people might think there’s something wrong with him, cuz he’s got this little seam down the middle of his forehead.

  At first Curl wanted to take him by Sidekick’s. Sidekick is this man who used to make movies with Bob Motley. He was tall and skinny and he laughed so much you thought his teeth was going to fall out and shit. His favorite thing to do was to chill in parking lots with his big, long arm hanging over the door to his El Camino. He mostly just hunts little kids. Sometimes he hunts kids who are
littler than me. He finds them lost at the mall or stranded down by the Rockdale bus station.

  Once Sidekick found this little half-nigger called Ulysses crying under the big sign at Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips. Sidekick gave him a pack of Fleer baseball cards and Ulysses got right in his El Camino like there was about skeighty-eight more packs in the back seat or some shit. Sidekick always keeps Tootsie Rolls and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum in his pockets, too.

  After Sidekick got Ulysses to get in his El Camino he made him put his seatbelt on and gave him a 1999 Susan B. Anthony silver dollar.

  I know all that cuz Ulysses showed me the silver dollar. Susan B. Anthony looks like a man; like her name should be Dave or some shit. Ulysses used to come over to Bob Motley’s duplex with Sidekick for the Thursday hearts game. They would stick him in Sergeant Dick’s room with me, and we would watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and he would tell me all the wack shit Sidekick was doing to him.

  Ulysses was only like seven or eight and he talked with a stutter and he had this little purple spot on his neck that looked like a flower. He was a dirty-ass little half-nigger, too — a lot dirtier than me. And he wasn’t dirty in no dusty way, he was dirty in a skanky way. Like he was always shitting his pants and sitting down in it and stuff like that. That’s probably why his parents didn’t want him no more.

  Once I asked him where he was from.

  I was like, “Where you from, Ulysses?”

  He just looked at me funny and went, “The United States of America.”

  After a while, Ulysses just disappeared. Whenever I’d ask Sidekick about him he would just say he wasn’t “useful” no more, or how he kept getting “smaller and smaller” till he just “faded away.” Then him and Bob Motley would laugh their stupid laughs and trim up some hurricane on the kitchen table.

  On Thursdays Sidekick would bring other kids to Bob Motley’s, too. It was like you would see them for a while, but then one day you wouldn’t no more.