"California Girl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Parker T. Jefferson)

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THAT NIGHT MAX and Monika Becker loaded their four sons into the Studebaker and drove across town to the Vonns’ house. The Studebaker was a green fifty-one Champion with the big conical nose for a front end and an oddly sloping rear. They called it the Submarine. They cruised along Holt Avenue through the groves, Max erect behind the wheel and Monika’s straight yellow hair lifting in the window breeze.

Nick sat on the scratchy backseat, felt his knuckles throbbing all the way up into his ears. Still seeing double sometimes, his neck thick with pain and a big lump risen on the back of his head. Didn’t say anything to his parents about the vision trouble because he hated doctors.

David sat up front beside his mom, thinking he’d be glad to get to State, out of this stupid small-town stuff, into something more than oranges and fistfights.

Clay sat in the back, pummeling Casey Vonn again between thoughts of this Dorothy girl in his homeroom. Wished he could smoke like his dad was doing. The Vonns were shitheels.

Between Clay and Nick, young Andy sat with the pride of the new warrior, his heart beating hard and true. He had fought alongside Nick, and they had won. The world outside the windows of the Studebaker now seemed not only larger but more attainable.

The Vonns’ house was old but it sat right around the corner from a new tract freshly cut from an orange grove. The house was wood-not stucco like the new ones-and the white paint was peeling and the roof sagged and two of the windows were plywood. The lawn was just dead weeds. The new tract had streetlights but they stopped short of the Vonn place.

“We’re staying here, boys,” said Monika Becker, turning her pretty face to the backseat.

“I’m not going to apologize,” said Clay.

“You’ll do exactly what your father told you to.”

“I won’t mean it.”

“That’s another topic, Clay. For now, keep a civil tongue in your head and mind your manners.”

Nick watched his father flick his cigarette butt into the curb and start up the dark driveway. Khaki trousers and a white shirt tucked in with the sleeves rolled up. Irish Setter boots and a belt the same color. Nick had always liked the old man’s walk: loose and casual but his head always up and steady. His father didn’t miss much. He could tell what was wrong with an orange grove by looking at one leaf from it, tell a grower how to up the yield without running down the sugars or ruining the soil. Hardly needed his lab over at the SunBlesst corporate building for things like that. He could see his wife’s depressions coming days before they hit, would rearrange his work hours to be there for her. Or, if they stood in the corner of an orange grove in early September with their Remington pumps, it was always his father who saw the birds way out in the blue, his father who could tell a dove from a nighthawk through a hundred yards of twilight. And of course he’d knock it down before you were really sure you saw it.

A porch light went on and the door opened. Nick saw a small woman, then a tall man with overalls and no shirt. The woman’s hair was dark and pulled back tight. She looked older than his mom, but Nick figured they must be about the same age. Mr. Vonn had long, active muscles that bunched when he shook Nick’s father’s hand. A dark triangular face, small chin. He looked to Nick like a man from another country.

Nick listened to their voices through the open window of the Studebaker, but he couldn’t make out much. His father gestured back to the car, canting his head inquisitively. Then Mr. Vonn disappeared and Mrs. Vonn turned and watched. She brought her hand to her collar. A minute later the three Vonn boys came single file onto the porch-Lenny, then Casey, then Ethan. Casey’s eyebrows and cheeks were covered by white tape.

“Oh my gosh, boys-what did you do to that poor Ethan?”

“That’s Casey,” said Clay.

“Don’t confuse the issue, Clay.”

“They started it, Mom,” he said.

She snapped around and caught his face in her big hand. When she was angry her voice went to a throaty hiss and her lips pulled back around her big straight teeth and Nick thought she was scarier than his dad. “You started it, Clay. You started it with the baseball cap and your arrogant attitude. Don’t you lie to me.”

“No, ma’am, no.”

“Someday someone’s going to rain on your parade in a big way, Clay. That, I guarantee. And when it happens we’ll see how tough you are.”

Then Max Becker turned to wave them out of the car.

Monika locked eyes with each of them in turn. “Do not disappoint me, boys. Do exactly what we talked about.”

They stood behind their father on the porch, spread in the pool of light. The Vonn boys faced them from a few feet away. Nick saw that Casey’s face was swollen badly and Lenny’s nose was huge and red. Their big ears were backlit pink by the porch light. He saw that Mrs. Vonn’s knuckles were big where she held her collar and stared at him with shiny black eyes.

Clay apologized unconvincingly but handed Casey a dollar to cover the baseball cap. Said to give him the change at school.

Max Becker cleared his throat.

David and Andy said they were sorry.

When it was Nick’s turn he was looking not at the Vonns but beyond them, into the living room behind the open door, at the peeling walls and sagging brown sofa and the floor lamp with the dented shade and the fraying braided rug and the cheap lighted china hutch with nothing inside it but a few coffee mugs and votive candles and a collector’s plate with the face of the Virgin Mary on it displayed upright in the flickering light.

He had never seen such failure before. And he understood in one instant that it could be his someday.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He meant it for Lenny but couldn’t take his eyes off the room.

The Vonn boys didn’t say a word. Nick figured they were thinking revenge.

Just then the Vonn daughters hustled into his vision, the older one still in her dirty pink blouse, holding a cob of corn and glaring at him. Then Janelle Vonn, changed into a white dancer’s tutu that hung almost to her knees, clunked across the floor in her cowboy boots with a small guitar slung over one shoulder. She had the same inquisitive look she’d had out in the orange grove, and one eye swollen shut and blackening.

“I’m sorry,” Nick said again.

Mrs. Vonn turned back into the house and the girls scattered away like chicks. The door slammed.

His parents said nothing on the drive back home. Nick could tell that a new worry had taken ahold of them. Not the rumble. That was over now. Their dad had locked their shotguns in the gun cabinet and told them there’d be no bird hunting this year. Said that boys who couldn’t control their fists couldn’t be trusted with firearms. Pretty goddamned simple. Backhanded Clay hard above one ear, sent him spinning. Would have taken a belt to them like the old days, but even Andy was too big for that now.

No, the new worry was Janelle, and how she’d gotten her eye closed. Nick was pretty sure it was connected to him hitting Lenny. And Clay hitting Casey. And Ethan hitting David. Maybe even his father hitting Clay. Each hit causing the next one until there was no one left to hit but a little girl with a tutu and a guitar.