Misanthropes

Sitting in a convenience store deli at a laminate table scratched with “FUCK PIGS,” they argued about Kai’s gun, a black Beretta .32 currently stashed in Kai’s car. He wanted Travis to hold it for the day. Even concealed out there in the parking lot, Travis could feel the pistol’s warping effect, the way he sometimes felt his own big lie—another’s awareness of it—changing the atmosphere.

“You shouldn’t put a friend on the spot,” Travis said.

“You’re excused from school all morning,” Kai said. He was odd looking—despite his smooth brown skin and gloss of dark hair—he wore a perpetual half-smirk and had a mischievous twinkle in his eyes that got annoying after a while. But his unhandsome features and his casual obliviousness to the inner lives of others made their friendship easier for Travis. Not once had he jerked off thinking of Kai. “Just take it home,” Kai said.

Wanting out of the conversation, Travis inventoried the steel pegboard across from their table, hung with off-brand nail clippers ($2.99) and tree-shaped air fresheners in scents like Fresh Shave. The store smelled of brewing coffee.

According to Kai, someone had ratted to the administration. And a rumor about a gun couldn’t be ignored anymore. A month earlier, Barry Dale Loukaitis had dressed up like a Western gunslinger and killed his teacher and two classmates in a small town in Eastern Washington. Kai was sure the administration would search his car today. He figured the best approach was to show up at school like normal and allow it to be searched. When the search was squeaky clean, they wouldn’t have reasonable suspicion for a repeat. Made sense, but Travis didn’t want any part in it.

He could guess Kai’s reasoning for asking him to help. Travis’s mother was an alcoholic who’d developed Korsakoff syndrome—a fancy way of saying she’d drunk herself into dementia. Lately, she’d been feeding the mice that infested their pantry (the food on little saucers also attracted ants), naming them as pets. Travis wasn’t worried about her finding the gun. But the social worker was coming today. A neighbor had reported Travis’s mom and, after a year of opaque bureaucracy, Gary the social worker was on the verge of determining whether Travis would have to live in foster care—the last thing he wanted for his senior year. 

“Hide it in the garage,” Kai said.

He had no garage, which Kai should know—they’d been friends since first grade. As they’d grown they’d had less and less in common. Kai loved selling weed. Travis had no use for it. He kept a high GPA because school was easy. He avoided disciplinary problems because the administration didn’t fuck with kids with good grades—especially boys (rare in his school and good for statistics). But they were both outcasts—drug dealers didn’t play sports, and the guys who did were the ones who gave Travis the worst time, doing limp wrists and lisping at him, even though he thought he seemed manly enough, whatever that meant. Plus Kai got obsessed with oddball shit—lately, he’d been getting high and hanging out with the squid fisherman down on the pier, just watching them, blasting Vivaldi concertos on his Discman’s headphones. 

“You don’t even need…” Travis paused, lowering his tone. Across the store, the clerk banged one of the coffee carafes on the countertop, then yanked and refilled a filter funnel. This was their meeting place—The Beach Stop Market. Really it was just a Texaco station with a deli. And this wasn’t the beach. It was downtown Des Moines, Washington, just past seven A.M. But here you could buy a ninety-nine-cent breakfast burrito and get a free water cup and the clerk didn’t object when you filled it from the 7up nozzle. “You should ditch the gun,” Travis said. “For good.”

Kai sold dime bags out of his car. He was the only kid with a cell—a nice flip phone. He didn’t need a gat. He didn’t need to be a dealer either, coming from a big Catholic family—Filipino by way of Hawaii—who took good care of their own. But he’d seen Scarface and discovered his calling. And a proper dealer carried.

“I’ll take it back at lunch,” Kai said. He claimed the search would happen first thing. “And you’ll get your scrilla.” He’d offered Travis fifty bucks for his trouble—which Travis had declined, but Kai was still pushing.

Outside in the lot, Travis handed over his backpack. He’d parked close to Kai’s Celica, and Kai contorted through the narrowly opened door, protecting the paint. Travis glanced at his own reflection in the window glass, conscious of being too pretty for a boy, though he worked to hide it—skater clothes, self-administered buzz cut.

Kai planted the backpack between his knees. Travis scanned the corner for anyone watching. Empty sidewalks. Des Moines was rough around the edges. The apartments along Highway 99—the Green River Killer’s old hunting grounds—kept police busy. But it was quiet on a Tuesday morning, and no one expected there’d be anything to see at The Beach Stop.

When Kai handed back the bag, it was heavier. But not just that. It seemed to carry a charge that, at any moment, could deliver a painful shock. Briefly, Travis thought he might puke.

*

Gary the social worker wasn’t arriving until ten o’clock, so Travis stopped at Zach’s apartment, thinking Zach might be willing to babysit the gun. Zach had been their classmate until his expulsion for bashing out a classroom window. Now he worked nights driving airport shuttles. Zach greeted him in his stoner drawl—despite his temper, he’d mastered faux chill.

“Where’s your homie Kai?” Zach said. His place was tiny and reeked of weed and ham-and-cheddar Hot Pockets. “He’s supposed to do me a favor tonight.” Zach was perpetually chasing a hustle.

Zach settled back into the plastic and metal outdoor lounger he used as his TV chair, its hinges whining. The year out of school hadn’t served him well. He’d gained weight, which made his eyes look narrow and beady. Blond hair littered his head like a pigeon’s nest. Today, he was watching pro wrestling. The noise of passenger jets overhead marked the passing minutes.

“Hey, can you do me a favor?” Travis said.

“Doubt it!” Zach said, laughing.

“I’m serious. Kai is making me hold his stupid gun because he’s getting searched, and I don’t want to carry it around all day, so… I don’t know.”

Zach looked confused, then said, “Oh, here? Fuck no. No thanks.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, dude.”

“I’ve got a social worker coming to my house.”

“They’re not going to search you,” Zach said. He knew Travis’s situation—no father, dead stepfather, wack-a-doo mom.

“If it were me, I wouldn’t put up with that guy anyway,” Zach said. “You’re what? Seventeen? Almost done, man. And they’re coming around to see if you need a new home? It’s fucking stupid.”

“It is.”

“And weird. Some guy judging your family.”

On the Trinitron, Stone Cold Steve Austin had ripped off his shirt and his big meaty fists were wrapped around a pair of beer cans, squeezing gouts of white foam all over his head and the ring. Travis wondered on what subconscious level the young, straight-male audience appreciated that their hero was bare chested and ecstatically ejaculating at them.

When Travis got up to leave, Zach said, “Sorry I’m not helping out, man, but when you see Kai, do tell him to get his ass here.”

*

This visit from Child Protective Services was critical. Gary the social worker would want any custody change done before Travis started his senior year. Travis had prepared—draining a little alcohol into the sink each day, timing it right—as of last night, the cupboard was dry. He’d promised his mom a resupply, but he wouldn’t make good on it until after the visit.

She wasn’t doing well. She’d mistaken him for his dead uncle (liver and bone cancer) several times this week, calling him Jackie, asking about his wife (Aunt Leelee—not dead, but run off). She’d accused him of being cruel to her—common when she was feeling sorry for herself. And she’d called him a pansy again. Twice. He’d been called worse, but from his mom it landed differently. Fortunately, her convictions about him got quickly washed away by drink and dementia.

The expectation of a booze resupply should make her docile today. And with luck the demon in her brain would rest.

At the Big Sooper, his checker was Marvin. Marvin knew Travis’s mom and would sell Travis boxed wine—her preference was cheap whisky, but the store didn’t have liquor and she would accept Franzia as a substitute. He’d keep it in the trunk until Gary left.

Travis awaited Marvin’s inevitable inquiry. “How’s Janice?” As always, Travis was ready with a lighthearted anecdote. He made them up if need be, because that’s what people wanted. Not the nighttime clatter and smash. Not the towel jammed under his bedroom door to keep out the mice of madness. Not last Christmas Eve when he’d forced himself to puke up a Unisom so he could drive her and her freshly broken rib to the ER.

*

Travis sat at the kitchen table, watching his mother and Gary in the living room out of the corner of his eye. Summoning patience, he glanced around at the “antiques” his mother had once collected. An old painted plate on a high shelf, a framed vintage magazine cover. Not true antiques, just pointless junk, defying notions of stable earthly meaning.

Gary always carried an uptight little portfolio with a college-ruled pad, and today he was wearing a cheap Easter-yellow polo shirt with some dumb fucking duck embroidered on it in lieu of a polo rider. He was tall, bearded and bland, but still the guy made Travis’s skin crawl. Maybe it was the prim set of his broad shoulders, or the way he sort of pouted his lips after every question. He knew the guy probably couldn’t help himself, and he was sympathetic that it must’ve been harder for guys like them growing up in the seventies. But his distaste persisted.

“You have a wife, Gary?” Janice was asking.

“Not yet.”

Travis chuckled to himself. Not ever.

He thought of the pistol. He’d tucked it under the front seat of his Honda—his mom’s car, really, which he kept her from driving (“lost keys” was an easy trick with her). Travis mostly didn’t sweat his part in these home visits, because of his grades and whatnot. But he had a bunch on his mind, and today he feared it might seep out and spoil things.

“I’ve got a lot of men calling on me,” Janice said. She hadn’t seen a man—other than a concerned neighbor or a solicitous store clerk—in years. “That widower down the street was after me. But I don’t want some old man chasing me around with his wang out.”

Gary giggled. Travis looked down and sighed. He felt a grim pride in her during these meetings, especially when she managed to act halfway sensible. Despite it all, she could still charm Gary.

His mother’s decline had been quick as hell. She’d always been a depressive and a sometimes drinker, but when Travis’s stepfather died suddenly, the whole enterprise went off a cliff.

Travis’s eyes twitched at the living room floor—some bit of movement. To his horror, a mouse of madness emerged from under the sofa. Was it sniffing Gary’s shoe?

A week’s worth of newspapers were stacked on the table in front of him. Before he had time to form a conscious intention, he darted a hand, sweeping the papers off the edge. They smacked the hardwood. Gary stopped mid-sentence and stared over. Travis’s mom didn’t seem to notice—she looked vaguely from Gary to Travis. “Sorry,” Travis said. The mouse had booked.

*

The visit over, they left Janice and went out to the driveway. Travis walked toward his car, “Thanks, Gary—see you later.”

“Bye, Travis,” Gary said, walking toward his own car. As Travis settled behind the wheel, he watched in horror as Gary changed direction, sauntering up to Travis’s passenger door. He knocked on the window. Travis leaned over and cracked the door. “Can I help you?”

Gary opened the door wider, leaning inside, his dense chest hair tenting his undershirt. “I’m coming back tomorrow, with a doctor. Her symptoms seem worse. She needs a reevaluation.”

“She’s fine, Gary, really, but I’ve got to go,” Travis said, hoping his urgency sounded genuine.

“You know you can share personal challenges with me, even if they’re not about home,” Gary said, climbing into the passenger seat now, one leg still out on the pavement. “Internal struggles.”

“Is this part of your job, Gary?” Travis said.

“Of course,” Gary said, his eyes dewy with compassion.

“I have to get back to school.” He could see Gary wasn’t relenting. “We’ve been on our own for a long time. We can make it until I’m eighteen.”

“How’re your friends?” Gary reached down to slide the seat backward. Travis pictured the gun wedged under Gary’s bulk.

“Can I get sent away for not having friends?” Travis said, wanting to put this douchebag on the defensive, worrying more about the gun than the evaluation. “I thought this was about parenting?”

Gary remained conciliatory. “Do you have someone special? This doesn’t need to go in my notes.”

“I’ve got a girlfriend,” Travis said, sitting up straighter, feeling his jaw unclench, his balled fists relaxing. “She’s a sophomore. And the head she gives, Gary,” Travis said, looking him in the eye, chuckling, shaking his head in feigned wonderment. “It makes my dick queasy.”

Gary looked out from under his eyebrows, skeptical. “Sure, Travis.” And with that he finally got out of the fucking car.

*

The Honda stalled as Travis was coming through a curve on First Avenue, almost to Des Moines on his way to school. When it came to a stop, he tried the ignition and heard only a clicking, the dash lights dimming. Dead battery. Which meant a failed alternator—he knew that much. He wondered if his mom had the money for that. He looked over at the passenger seat, knowing he had to contend with the secret underneath. The closest payphone was probably a mile away—Zach’s apartment was a bit further in a different direction.

He walked down the hill toward Zach’s, his shoulder sweating under his backpack strap, the bag once again holding that terrible weight. Traffic whooshed. A few hundred yards away behind the trees was a low tide—he could smell rotting kelp and the exhalations of a billion sandy lifeforms. He thought of what he didn’t tell Gary. The furtive, spurting fling (his only) with a married man last summer. The way those encounters made him shake with eagerness but also fear—at being found out, mostly. But also at being in over his head with a grown man whose interest in Travis made him a predator. Whose life was a lie. Who, despite being afraid of his own nature, was tall and powerful and could overpower Travis if he felt the need.

Zach answered the door, blond pigeon’s nest still littering his head. He didn’t seem to care why Travis was back.

“Kai’s coming over,” Zach said.

A news teaser played on the TV, showing the Loukaitis kid being perp-walked into a courtroom. The screen read: Loukaitis tried as adult? They’d let him wear his own clothes—a plain white oxford shirt buttoned to the top, no tie. He looked like some old-timey preacher.

Kai arrived an hour later. “I can drop you at home,” Kai said, “but we’ve got to make a stop.”

*

As Kai drove the three of them, Travis worried about tomorrow—the wine was still in the trunk of the broken-down car, and anyway Gary and the doctor were going to be around. Another day sober was a stretch for his mom. They say people die of loneliness, but what about lifelong misanthropes? His mother had never seemed to really like anyone, including his stepfather. So why’d she imploded when she’d lost him? He supposed there was a sort of love between them. But not the kind he wanted.

Zach was sitting shotgun. “I’m selling my package, too,” he said, his tone indicating they’d already gone over this.

“Fuck no,” Kai said, giving a single exaggerated shake of his head. “I sell weed. Period. That shit comes with a different kind of jail time. It’s evil, dog.”

Travis didn’t want to know about any of it. But riding in the back, having no responsibility, catching the window breeze—that felt good.

Kai turned into a long driveway. The house sat in a low place. It must’ve caught runoff from the road because the driveway lay muddy between the car and the uncovered stoop, despite the dry weather. They stamped their feet on the wooden steps. The sky was gloaming behind steely clouds.

Martin’s dad answered the door, a hulking man with thinning red hair and a goatee and a shirt worn too many days in a row, eyeing them through the screen. He glanced at Kai, but his eyes lingered on Travis, his look both amused and demeaning. “Leave it open, we need some fresh air in here.”

On the edge of the counter in plain view was a glass pipe. Crack or meth probably. The house had a grizzly-cage smell. Old and cramped, with an L-shaped main floor. Straight ahead through the kitchen was a family room where Martin’s dad had been watching TV, and Martin’s bedroom was off to the right, in what might’ve once been a covered porch, now walled in. Martin, redheaded like his dad but lanky, closed the door behind them and dragged the bedside table away from the wall. He told the three of them to sit on the bed and pulled a chair from his corner desk, overflowing with Nintendo Power magazines, half-empty bottles of Mountain Dew and a box of Ziplocs.

Kai pulled out a sandwich bag of weed, stuffed tight like a pillow.

“On the phone you said you had something else, too,” Martin said, addressing Zach now, his tone noncommittal. 

From his coat pocket Zach pulled a stack of floppy disks held with a rubber band, setting them on the table. “A whole lot of pictures for your dad.”

“You guys do that shit another time,” Kai said.

“What’re their ages?” Martin said, sounding dubious and mildly entertained.

Kai tried to intervene. “Martin, I told Zach…”

“Fuck man, I didn’t look at them,” Zach said, ignoring Kai. “But the guy I got them from said there’s all kinds.”

Travis saw Kai’s look, and he knew this was going to escalate. “I’m going outside,” Travis said.

“Sit down,” Martin said.

“Fuck off,” Travis said, lifting his backpack, opening the door, realizing he was emboldened by being the one with the gun—a source of power he could reveal anytime.

He hesitated just a moment outside the bedroom. Martin’s dad was watching television again. As Travis banged through the ripped screen door, he heard voices rising in Martin’s bedroom. Zach’s voice boomed above the others, the words indecipherable but the tone suddenly threatening. Worried, Travis paused on the porch. He thought of walking home—hiking up to the road and not looking back.

More yelling in the house. Travis looked back through the screen. Martin’s dad had heard too. He lifted his bulk out of his chair and went to a cabinet, reaching high, his hand coming down with the hard, vulgar shape of an unpainted wood baseball bat. Not noticing Travis, he lumbered toward Martin’s room, looking focused.

“Hey,” Travis said, hearing his voice tremble, feeling dejected at being dragged into this. “Don’t.” Martin’s dad shot him a glare—laced with bigotry and disdain—but he plodded on toward the bedroom.

Travis stood in the twilit yard, pulse rushing. He dashed his right hand into the backpack, shaking, clutching the strap with his left. “Hey, stop,” he called again through the screen. He pulled his hand back out, reaching to open the door, stepping inside. Then back into the backpack, finding the gun by touch. Almost to the bedroom now. His hand closed on the grip.

The bag hopped powerfully in his hands. There was a loud pop—like a book slammed on a desk, only louder than he’d ever imagined. He didn’t notice the smoke right away, but it smelled like summer firecrackers wafting up. He looked up through the bedroom doorway, shell shocked, panic welling.

Kai had his hands over his ears. The others scanned the room for damage. For death. But there was only a hole in the floor, a couple feet from Martin’s dad’s foot, defiantly small, like a puckered mouth.

Travis’s ears rang. For a moment, he thought of the school shooter, Loukaitis, the way that first trigger pull must’ve felt: the gun whamming, a fissure opening in life as it’d been, something unmendable.

He pulled the gun from the bag now, pointing it at the floor. The first shot had been an accident, but they didn’t know that—maybe Kai suspected. What if the cops came? At least he’d avoid tomorrow’s home visit.

Kai cursed loudly. “We’re going,” he said, looking at Martin’s dad, then at Travis. No one resisted their leaving. The glass pipe, the squalid addict’s home. More illegal porn somewhere in the house. Martin’s dad wasn’t calling the cops.

Out in the driveway, Travis climbed into the back seat, not speaking. He scanned the muddy lot. How loud had it been? Neighbors would be wondering what they’d heard over their blaring TVs. But calling 9-1-1?

Kai’s tires spun. Martin and Travis scrambled out to push, the car splatting muck. Running now, they chased the open passenger door, diving in.

They turned onto Des Moines Memorial Drive. Travis took his first full breath since they’d parked, wishing he was in bed. “Take me home now, Kai.” He grabbed Kai’s phone from the cupholder.

“I’m low on minutes.”

Travis glared at Kai in the rearview.

When his mother heard his voice she said, “Jackie, is that you?”

“It’s Travis, Mom.” He waited for her to speak again, wanting to gauge if she’d had a drink. It was the last of dusk—she got anxious as evening approached (he knew just how, he felt it too). And when the bottles were dry, she got resourceful. How quickly did he need to get home? A year in foster care was at stake.

“I was expecting Jackie to call.” This was sort of progress—knowing who Travis was counted as a win, even if she didn’t remember Uncle Jack was dead. More importantly, her voice was steady—crisp and clear as cold gin. “This is Travis? You sound so grown up.” She often reverted to when he was about nine—asking about old friends, worrying why he wasn’t at soccer practice.

“You doing OK?” he said. “I’m running late.”

“There’ll be fog tonight,” she said, as if the weather made a difference in her life. His stepfather had once been in the Coast Guard, and he had tracked marine weather until the day he died. “Remember that Christmas Robbie was still alive and it snowed so hard. Everyone came to dinner and got stuck. You couldn’t tell the road from the yard. And he had that pickup with the sandbags and the snow tires. Drove every last one of them home. Three across with someone’s legs spread for the shifter. Driving all night.”

It stunned him. She remembered his stepfather was dead. And she could grasp that Christmas in all its sentimental detail, distinguishing past and present with pristine confidence. She was having the best kind of night.

“I remember it,” he said, his voice croaking a little. Everything had been smoother back then. She’d been focused on his stepfather, and he’d been just a skater kid too young to display any irksome orientation. He cleared his throat. “Rob gave me that table he made from my old skateboards.”

“Will you take it with you to college?” she said. “Robbie would’ve liked that. I hate to think of you moving out.”

“I’m not leaving for a while still,” Travis said.

*

The next day dawned with the same milky sun. Travis hunched at the table, picking at the deep gouge of the “F” in “FUCK PIGS.” He had another half-day pass and no car, so Kai had skipped class and picked him up for an extended bullshit session.

“The look on Martin’s face when it went off,” Kai marveled, shaking his head and chuckling.

“Kai, I told you. I don’t want to hear about it again.”

Kai laughed, bumping the table with the base of his fist. He looked up at Travis, eyes twinkling. “You’re a fucking gangster now.”

Travis glared. He stood up, ripping his backpack off the floor, pushing out through the glass doors, beelining for the sidewalk.

A couple hundred yards up the road he heard Kai’s tuned exhaust slowing to an idle behind him, tires crackling on the gritty pavement, the power window opening. “You can’t walk all the way home from here,” Kai said. “You’ll be late. You can’t show up all sweaty and fucked-up looking for the social worker.”

Travis walked on, eyes locked ahead.

“Maybe your mom is messing the place up right now. You wanna get there before that douchebag.”

Travis sighed, turning toward the car. He got in, settling his backpack between his legs. Kai revved and sped away with a flourish. Travis kept his eyes fixed out the passenger window.

Kai reached and shook him by the shoulder. “If they’re gonna foster you out, we’ll go on the run man, you and me. Fucking desperadoes.”

“Just shut the fuck up, alright?”

Kai gave up, going quiet, slouching behind the wheel in false toughness. Travis glared at him. They’d crossed some mysterious line—the safety he’d felt with Kai had been lost, but the change was bigger than that, more nuanced and mysterious. Maybe Kai knew it too—the twinkle had gone out of his eyes.

“I don’t think I’m up for this anymore,” Travis said.

Kai said nothing, but he seemed to deflate a little.

The car was silent for the rest of the ride. Kai’s words throbbed in Travis’s head, “You’re a fucking gangster now.” It wasn’t true of course, but there’d been a shift. He thought of yesterday’s conversation with his mom, and the older memory of the headlights of his stepfather’s truck in the snowstorm. He’d felt safest when Rob was alive. Though even that had probably been an illusion. After graduation, he’d have to take care of himself, regardless of who lived or died or stayed his friend. And he was done running—had lost interest in hiding. There was nowhere safe anyway.

As the car pulled into his driveway, he felt a pang of anxiety, not knowing what he might find inside. Kai killed the engine and looked over at him, his face serious.

“You want me to wait?” he asked.

Travis shook his head. “It’s okay. Thanks for the ride.” 

Kai nodded. Travis got out of the car. He walked slowly up to the front door, taking a breath before pushing it open.

Inside, he found his mother sitting on the sofa, her face streaked with tears. She looked up and tried to smile.

“Travis, honey, I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice warped by sorrow.

He sat beside her. He could see Kai’s car out in the driveway—what was he waiting for? “Sorry for what?” Travis said. There were a million things, most of which it was too late to fix, but he wanted to know what was in her head.

But her mouth only opened. Her words failed. He could see her struggling, the significance of her apology already erased.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said, wondering if she’d ever again speak the meaning of anything or if it was all just useless noise. “We’ll figure it out.”

He leaned back into the sofa, his mom sitting on the edge, wiping tears on the sleeve of her robe. Through the window, in the driveway still spotted with oil stains from his stepfather’s truck, he watched Kai’s car back slowly out of view.