Too Much Freedom
by Jonathan Ayala
Before he left, Benny checked the tire pressure and oil levels of his Jeep Wrangler. It was 7:00 a.m. and his mother stood beside him in the driveway, arms crossed, watching him work. She was up earlier than usual and standing on her own. A good sign.
The day his mother went in for her last chemotherapy treatment, Benny spent his morning on the phone with the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena box office. While his mother’s blood was infused with small bits of heavy metals, his own heart raced as he listened to a Muzak soundtrack on loop waiting to be get through to a ticket seller. A small part of him believed he was willing her recovery with the purchase, committing money to a future and not worrying whether she was going to be in it. After two hours, he was patched through to an operator. “Just one. For Blond Ambition,” Benny said, and charged the $75.87 to his credit card.
Benny finished checking the Jeep and walked his mother back inside. The usual smell of rotting bananas in the kitchen had been replaced that morning by a thick smell of anise from the café de olla on the stove. His sister, Birdie, sat slouched at the kitchen table, drinking a cup and reading the paper.
“You’re sure everything’s ready?” his mother asked.
“Car’s fine. I’ve got an extra map in the glove compartment. Motel’s booked.”
“You hungry? I can make some eggs before you go. There’s some stale sweet bread from yesterday, but you can dip it in the coffee.”
“I’ll get something on the road.”
“Make sure you eat. I don’t want you coming back looking like you starved the whole weekend. Also, don’t drive so fast on the highway.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t come back a father, huh?”
“Really, Ma?”
“And if someone tries mugging you in L.A., just give them whatever they want.”
“No one’s going to mug me,” Benny said.
“Never know,” Birdie said, not looking up from her paper. “Just read about a lady driving to New Jersey. Picked up a man she met at a gas station. Drove through ten states together, and when they got there, they were arrested. Turns out he was wanted for murder.”
“Glad you’re not driving to New Jersey,” their mother said.
“I should head out,” Benny said.
“I’ll walk out with you.”
“No, Ma,” Birdie said, looking up from the paper. “Poor air quality this morning. Can’t risk more exposure.”
Benny rolled his eyes. It was one of Birdie’s newest hobbies, calculating the relative risk to the body from doing activities. Breathing the outdoor air, eating spicy foods, walking too long around the block—it all had a cost on the bones and blood. But hadn’t Birdie noticed? The house didn’t smell like rotting fruit anymore. Their mother had been standing on her own in the driveway and, though she still looked as fragile as a bird, she was gaining weight.
“Call me when you get there,” his mother said.
Benny hugged his mother, her shoulder blades weak as crushed paper. Birdie offered an anemic wave goodbye, and he answered with the same. His mother walked Benny to the front door and watched him from the living room window. He could tell she was crying, and it made his face warm with embarrassment. His mother rarely cried before her cancer, and now she did anytime that he left the house and she was awake to see it. He checked the rearview mirror, backed out, and headed toward the interstate.
When Benny finally made it to Los Angeles, his lower back ached, and his eyes felt like they were on fire. After 13 hours staring at the road, he couldn’t see straight, but he didn’t care. The sky was the color of blueberries and the air smelled like jasmine and, if he paid close enough attention, car exhaust and wildfire. On the radio, 95.5 FM played Madonna songs, and it felt like he was watching the pinnacle of human achievement: California, 1990. Leading up to the trip, he’d spent hours studying the Los Angeles Spartacus guidebook. Sometimes, if it was late, he even began recognizing his face in the photos of men, bodies bronzed by sun, at Aleph, A Different Light, Ginger Rogers Beach. At least, he imagined his own face mimicking their light expressions, their great, stirred eyes, the lips upcast knowing they’d made it to the coast.
Benny found the Sleep N’ Suite, located off Victory Boulevard, a few blocks beyond the Hollywood Freeway overpass. The discount motel was announced by a neon palm tree touting vacant rooms and free cable. His room was a simple one: queen-sized bed with a comforter that smelled like wet cigarette smoke, and dim light that came from a single lamp atop the nightstand.
Birdie was probably waiting for his call, their mother already having gone to bed. He picked up the receiver and dialed the number, using a calling card he picked up at a gas station in Arizona. She picked up after two rings, answering in a voice rusted with exhaustion.
“Benny? Are you there?”
“At the motel.”
“How was the drive?”
“Done. How’s Mom?”
She talked about the day, about their mother’s midday nausea, appetite at dinner, twilight bedtime. It was 10:00 p.m. in El Paso and she was probably sitting in the dark living room watching television. A typical Friday night for her. Him too, for too long.
Birdie and Benny used to joke that their mother’s bone cancer, which onset when Benny had just turned 21 and when Birdie should have started her third year at UTEP, was their mother’s last-ditch effort to keep both of them home. It worked. Benny scrapped plans to move out of his family’s house on Frankfort, and Birdie quit school to nurse their mother full-time. He worked full-time as an assistant manager at Miller’s Outpost, and in the evenings, he helped take care of his mother, while Birdie cared for her during the day and shuttled her to her different appointments. The illness demanded a communal approach to life and work, misery and money evenly distributed.
Once, when Birdie was out shopping, their mother was asleep in her room when Benny heard a groan and yell from her bedroom. Benny dropped the wooden spoon he was using to stir the chicken caldo on the stove and galloped down the hall. He smelled the shit as soon as he opened the door and asked her what was wrong.
Benny helped her to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and helped his mother undress. He wanted to puke. His mother was crying hysterically, saying she was so sorry and begged Benny to turn away. He helped her step into the shower, where she sobbed beneath the warm water. A few moments later, Birdie came back from the grocery store and took over. Benny walked out of the bathroom hating them both. His mother, for having a body that could fail her so spectacularly, turning her into a shivering, fragile animal without the strength to even wake herself up and shit on the toilet.
And he hated Birdie for not being angry. She did that labor day after day, and when she complained, it was because they didn’t have enough money, or because their mother had snapped at her while brushing her hair, or because she didn’t feel like cooking and couldn’t understand why Benny wouldn’t help out around the house a little more. But never about losing such a crucial age of their lives and having to know the body only by its failings and vomit and rotting smells.
“You must be tired. I’ll let you sleep,” Birdie said finally over the motel phone.
“Night, Birdie. Tell Mom I called.”
“Will you call again tomorrow?” she asked.
He’d planned an entire day’s worth of activities before the concert the next day. Sushi, and the beach, and a gay bookstore. He had too much freedom to waste any of it on long-distance calls back home.
“Hey, Birdie?”
“What?”
“Even the air smells different here. It’s exciting. Like anything might happen.”
“That’s something else, Benny,” she said, and hung up.
Parking in East Hollywood, he’d read, was a pain and he parked three blocks away from Aleph. He got out of his car and crossed onto the west side of Lexington, where Benny noticed two men standing close together in the shadow of a shuttered storefront. Maybe we were meant to be together, even though we never met before. We got to move before the sun is rising, and you’ll be walking slowly out the door. The men wore FILA jackets, though it was already May, and muttered to each other. One of the men smoked a cigarette and looked down at his dirty sneakers while the other man’s eyes met Benny’s.
They were brown eyes, and skipped from side to side, down and then up. He had brown skin, black hair, chin and cheeks sporting a week’s growth. The man didn’t shift his eyes away from Benny immediately. Instead, he nodded, and Benny mirrored the same. They looked at each other in a way that, Benny assumed, meant they were cruising. Sweat pooled around his neck and underneath his arms, and his heart groaned like an upset stomach. It felt necessary to try and touch him.
Before turning to cross Westmoreland, Benny turned back, to silently plead with the man to follow. He stopped at a corner store on the next block to give the man a chance to catch up to him. Inside, the shop owner sat behind the checkout counter and eyed Benny as he walked to the soda cooler, watching intently to make sure Benny didn’t pocket anything.
After picking out a can of Coke, Benny closed the door of the soda cooler and heard a noise that sounded like neighbors banging pots on New Year’s Eve. Two men had entered the store. FILA jackets. Dirty sneakers. The first man pulled the Proof Coil chain and lowered the shop’s front shutter a little more than halfway. The second man, the one with brown eyes, approached Benny and grabbed his shoulders with his left arm, pulling Benny in close, as if they were sitting in a movie theater that had just darkened.
“Come on out, old man,” the man told the shop owner, who had reached for the telephone.
Benny felt metal jutting into his shoulder blade. When Benny tried looking down to see what it was that poked him, the man gripped the back of Benny’s neck and kept his head staring straight ahead at the old man behind his plexiglass. He guided Benny, like a blinded horse, to the checkout counter.
“I don’t want to make a mess out here. And you don’t want to have to clean it up neither. Come out, come out. Pretty fucking please.”
The man who had lowered the front shutter kept watch at the entrance. “Hurry the fuck up,” he said, jittery as an unspooling cassette tape.
The man with the gun was missing a tooth on the left side of his mouth, and his patchy beard reached all the way down his neck. Hot air, peppered with the scent of liquor and tobacco, blew against Benny’s face and a firm arm held him close. The contact almost felt like a hug, and for a moment, Benny was more worried about what the shop owner would think of him standing so close to another man.
“Walk, motherfucker,” the man said, and Benny walked with him, approaching the counter.
The assailant’s arm was wrapped around him tight, and Benny felt his shoulder blade cramping. He wanted to say, “OK, that’s enough, you’re hurting me.” When he realized that doing so was a bad idea, and that his mouth wouldn’t work to form the words, anyway, he feared for his shoulders. What was protecting them beneath the man’s arm besides a Book of Love t-shirt? His body shook, and fear traveled deep in his lungs, shortening his breath. The small of Benny’s back was drenched, and beads dripped from his armpits along his obliques as he tried to peel away the man’s fingers. Benny thought briefly that his mother could never know what was happening.
“Sir, please,” Benny said. “My mother has bone cancer. And my sister doesn’t work. I need to call them.”
He didn’t respond and kept his gaze straight ahead at the shop owner. Benny followed the man’s eyeline. The shop owner looked back at them with a gaping mouth.
It clicked suddenly. If the men wanted whatever was behind the counter, why was the old man just standing there? Why was the assailant’s arm so tight? Had that squealing come from Benny’s own throat? Why was it so hot when it was only May?
The shop owner stepped out from behind the counter, hands held up. He lay on his stomach, face flat on the floor, without being told. The jittery man sprinted to tear the keys dangling from the old man’s hip. He opened the cash register to put what cash there was into a black plastic bag. After, he stuffed liquor and cigarettes into a green Jansport backpack. His were expert moves. The old man shook his head over and over and over and let him take everything.
When the jittery man took as much as he could carry, the assailant loosened his grip on Benny. “Get down. On your knees,” he said.
Benny slinked to the floor and crouched, arms over head, eyes clenched, after he saw the man’s weapon for the first time. The assailant laughed and said in a low voice, “I bet you’re scared right now, and I don’t blame you.”
The assailant slapped Benny’s cheeks gently.
“I’m not lying. Please. My mother has bone cancer, and my sister doesn’t work.”
He tapped one finger against Benny’s lips to keep him quiet. “Your wallet. Please. Pretty please.”
“Fuck! Let’s go,” the assailant’s partner said, his voice a sharp note in the room.
“Drink your Coke,” the assailant said to Benny, ignoring his partner. Benny looked at his hands and saw a can there and had forgotten that it had been there the whole time. The shop owner was still on the floor, shaking his head, and Benny felt as though his bladder might rupture.
“I’m not from here,” Benny said. His chest, the left side, ached with each breath. “You can keep everything I have. I’ll get you more. Anything.”
Again, the assailant touched Benny’s lips.
“Open the fucking Coke.”
Benny opened it expertly, cracking open the seal to release enough gas before opening it all the way—the best way to keep from making a mess. He wanted the assailant to see how well he could follow directions, and to keep giving him directions.
“Drink. Please drink,” the assailant said.
Benny put the frosted soda can to his lips and watched the assailant comb his wallet and pocket his $35. He fished out Benny’s license and studied it.
I want Birdie.
Benny thought he’d said the words in his head, but the man looked down at him and his eyebrows wilted. Benny’s face felt hot, embarrassed. He bit his tongue to postpone crying for as long as possible.
“What the fuck’s birdie?” he said. He looked at the wallet again and took out the concert ticket.
“Motherfucker, let’s go.” The partner was clutching his sides and pacing in circles.
The assailant looked down at Benny and cocked his head to the right.
“You in town for a concert?”
Benny started crying. He wanted to tell his mother and sister that he didn’t blame California. At least he wasn’t in New Jersey. He nodded at the question.
“I’ve heard of her. She the one that dances around in that stupid bra?”
“I promise I won’t say anything. I have a bad memory. Take the ticket. Take the wallet. It’s real leather.”
“You drove all this way just to see some bitch dance half-naked?”
“I’m so sorry. Please.”
“I know a place up on Lexington, you can see the real thing, only it’ll cost you $15. And that’s $15 if you’re feeling generous. You interested in that?”
The revolt in Benny’s body was complete and he’d lost the battle against his bladder. Piss streamed down his jeans and puddled around him. He dry heaved and thought he was going to vomit.
“But you don’t strike me as the kind of man interested in watching a bitch dance naked.”
“Fuck,” the assailant’s partner groaned. He went to the cooler and Benny heard him open up a can of something, and belch after a long chug.
The assailant still looked down at Benny and smiled a penetrating smile. He cut the ticket in half, then again in fourths, and then once more into even smaller pieces.
“This is me doing you a favor,” he said. “That kind of man’s a dangerous thing to be these days.” He slapped Benny’s face again, and it left a cold sting.
“When they ask, can you all make my hair blonde? Why’s it always gotta be brown skin, black hair? Do that for me, huh? Pretty fucking please.”
The two men crawled out the gap between the floor and the front shutter and disappeared. Benny imagined them leaving together, perhaps on a motorcycle, hips-crushing-hips as they drove off. For a second, Benny even imagined himself riding with them, experts in getting away, ruthless in their freedom.
Benny, sitting in his heavy jeans, asked the shop owner, “What should we do?”
Escape? His mother’s hospital visits had shown him that, sometimes, there’s no such thing. Even so, after all the sicknesses that threaten the body, the work that turns hair gray too soon, after feeling sick in your chest when you realize you’ll break your mother’s heart when you fall in love—after all that, what else is there to do, but try to escape?
When the cops finally showed up to the convenience store, they wanted better answers. Was Benny sure he hadn’t gotten a good look at the guys? Any detail was important, especially since the shop owner flatly refused to say anything other than, “What they took wasn’t even worth the work.”
Benny had, maybe, gotten a quick look. Not a good one, not at all. If he had to, he’d say one of the men had a red beard. Light skin. Green eyes. But he couldn’t say for sure. He hadn’t paid much attention to the eyes.
The next evening, Benny, ticketless, called from a payphone outside the arena. It was Saturday, 8 p.m. in Los Angeles, 9 p.m. in El Paso. She picked up after two rings.
“Birdie?” He heard his own breath in the phone receiver.
“Benny, you haven’t called all day. Where are you?”
“Change of plans.”
“You’re not at the concert?”
“I meant about when I was getting back to El Paso.” His mouth was chattering like it was cold out.
“Benny, what’s wrong?”
“I’ll be back a day later, I think. Two at the most.”
He’d wanted to call after the robbery. He’d even dialed the first few numbers before hanging up again. He didn’t want to hear her cry, lecture, tell their mother.
“Birdie?”
“You’re joking.”
Benny still wanted to fall asleep on the beach. Try sushi. Have a drink at Aleph. There was too much to experience in California to fit it all in one week. Two wouldn’t even be enough.
“How’s Mom?”
“About the same. You sound weird, what’s going on?”
If he had it in him, he could stay longer than two weeks. Pretend he didn’t have a sister and mother who needed him. He’d establish a life that had nothing to do with sickness, and dance to Madonna records in his living room, instead of locking his bedroom door at night and playing the music so low to keep from waking anyone. He’d find an apartment in Pico Rivera, work at the Miller’s Outpost in Montebello, be the kind of man who spends every weekend finding someone with darting brown eyes. That kind of man was a dangerous thing to be.
“I’ve got to go,” Benny said. “Show’s about to start.”
“Benny, are you sure you’re OK?”
“See you soon, Birdie.”
“Hold on,” she said, but Benny had already hung up.
The day his mother went in for her last chemotherapy treatment, Benny spent his morning on the phone with the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena box office. While his mother’s blood was infused with small bits of heavy metals, his own heart raced as he listened to a Muzak soundtrack on loop waiting to be get through to a ticket seller. A small part of him believed he was willing her recovery with the purchase, committing money to a future and not worrying whether she was going to be in it. After two hours, he was patched through to an operator. “Just one. For Blond Ambition,” Benny said, and charged the $75.87 to his credit card.
Benny finished checking the Jeep and walked his mother back inside. The usual smell of rotting bananas in the kitchen had been replaced that morning by a thick smell of anise from the café de olla on the stove. His sister, Birdie, sat slouched at the kitchen table, drinking a cup and reading the paper.
“You’re sure everything’s ready?” his mother asked.
“Car’s fine. I’ve got an extra map in the glove compartment. Motel’s booked.”
“You hungry? I can make some eggs before you go. There’s some stale sweet bread from yesterday, but you can dip it in the coffee.”
“I’ll get something on the road.”
“Make sure you eat. I don’t want you coming back looking like you starved the whole weekend. Also, don’t drive so fast on the highway.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t come back a father, huh?”
“Really, Ma?”
“And if someone tries mugging you in L.A., just give them whatever they want.”
“No one’s going to mug me,” Benny said.
“Never know,” Birdie said, not looking up from her paper. “Just read about a lady driving to New Jersey. Picked up a man she met at a gas station. Drove through ten states together, and when they got there, they were arrested. Turns out he was wanted for murder.”
“Glad you’re not driving to New Jersey,” their mother said.
“I should head out,” Benny said.
“I’ll walk out with you.”
“No, Ma,” Birdie said, looking up from the paper. “Poor air quality this morning. Can’t risk more exposure.”
Benny rolled his eyes. It was one of Birdie’s newest hobbies, calculating the relative risk to the body from doing activities. Breathing the outdoor air, eating spicy foods, walking too long around the block—it all had a cost on the bones and blood. But hadn’t Birdie noticed? The house didn’t smell like rotting fruit anymore. Their mother had been standing on her own in the driveway and, though she still looked as fragile as a bird, she was gaining weight.
“Call me when you get there,” his mother said.
Benny hugged his mother, her shoulder blades weak as crushed paper. Birdie offered an anemic wave goodbye, and he answered with the same. His mother walked Benny to the front door and watched him from the living room window. He could tell she was crying, and it made his face warm with embarrassment. His mother rarely cried before her cancer, and now she did anytime that he left the house and she was awake to see it. He checked the rearview mirror, backed out, and headed toward the interstate.
When Benny finally made it to Los Angeles, his lower back ached, and his eyes felt like they were on fire. After 13 hours staring at the road, he couldn’t see straight, but he didn’t care. The sky was the color of blueberries and the air smelled like jasmine and, if he paid close enough attention, car exhaust and wildfire. On the radio, 95.5 FM played Madonna songs, and it felt like he was watching the pinnacle of human achievement: California, 1990. Leading up to the trip, he’d spent hours studying the Los Angeles Spartacus guidebook. Sometimes, if it was late, he even began recognizing his face in the photos of men, bodies bronzed by sun, at Aleph, A Different Light, Ginger Rogers Beach. At least, he imagined his own face mimicking their light expressions, their great, stirred eyes, the lips upcast knowing they’d made it to the coast.
Benny found the Sleep N’ Suite, located off Victory Boulevard, a few blocks beyond the Hollywood Freeway overpass. The discount motel was announced by a neon palm tree touting vacant rooms and free cable. His room was a simple one: queen-sized bed with a comforter that smelled like wet cigarette smoke, and dim light that came from a single lamp atop the nightstand.
Birdie was probably waiting for his call, their mother already having gone to bed. He picked up the receiver and dialed the number, using a calling card he picked up at a gas station in Arizona. She picked up after two rings, answering in a voice rusted with exhaustion.
“Benny? Are you there?”
“At the motel.”
“How was the drive?”
“Done. How’s Mom?”
She talked about the day, about their mother’s midday nausea, appetite at dinner, twilight bedtime. It was 10:00 p.m. in El Paso and she was probably sitting in the dark living room watching television. A typical Friday night for her. Him too, for too long.
Birdie and Benny used to joke that their mother’s bone cancer, which onset when Benny had just turned 21 and when Birdie should have started her third year at UTEP, was their mother’s last-ditch effort to keep both of them home. It worked. Benny scrapped plans to move out of his family’s house on Frankfort, and Birdie quit school to nurse their mother full-time. He worked full-time as an assistant manager at Miller’s Outpost, and in the evenings, he helped take care of his mother, while Birdie cared for her during the day and shuttled her to her different appointments. The illness demanded a communal approach to life and work, misery and money evenly distributed.
Once, when Birdie was out shopping, their mother was asleep in her room when Benny heard a groan and yell from her bedroom. Benny dropped the wooden spoon he was using to stir the chicken caldo on the stove and galloped down the hall. He smelled the shit as soon as he opened the door and asked her what was wrong.
Benny helped her to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and helped his mother undress. He wanted to puke. His mother was crying hysterically, saying she was so sorry and begged Benny to turn away. He helped her step into the shower, where she sobbed beneath the warm water. A few moments later, Birdie came back from the grocery store and took over. Benny walked out of the bathroom hating them both. His mother, for having a body that could fail her so spectacularly, turning her into a shivering, fragile animal without the strength to even wake herself up and shit on the toilet.
And he hated Birdie for not being angry. She did that labor day after day, and when she complained, it was because they didn’t have enough money, or because their mother had snapped at her while brushing her hair, or because she didn’t feel like cooking and couldn’t understand why Benny wouldn’t help out around the house a little more. But never about losing such a crucial age of their lives and having to know the body only by its failings and vomit and rotting smells.
“You must be tired. I’ll let you sleep,” Birdie said finally over the motel phone.
“Night, Birdie. Tell Mom I called.”
“Will you call again tomorrow?” she asked.
He’d planned an entire day’s worth of activities before the concert the next day. Sushi, and the beach, and a gay bookstore. He had too much freedom to waste any of it on long-distance calls back home.
“Hey, Birdie?”
“What?”
“Even the air smells different here. It’s exciting. Like anything might happen.”
“That’s something else, Benny,” she said, and hung up.
Parking in East Hollywood, he’d read, was a pain and he parked three blocks away from Aleph. He got out of his car and crossed onto the west side of Lexington, where Benny noticed two men standing close together in the shadow of a shuttered storefront. Maybe we were meant to be together, even though we never met before. We got to move before the sun is rising, and you’ll be walking slowly out the door. The men wore FILA jackets, though it was already May, and muttered to each other. One of the men smoked a cigarette and looked down at his dirty sneakers while the other man’s eyes met Benny’s.
They were brown eyes, and skipped from side to side, down and then up. He had brown skin, black hair, chin and cheeks sporting a week’s growth. The man didn’t shift his eyes away from Benny immediately. Instead, he nodded, and Benny mirrored the same. They looked at each other in a way that, Benny assumed, meant they were cruising. Sweat pooled around his neck and underneath his arms, and his heart groaned like an upset stomach. It felt necessary to try and touch him.
Before turning to cross Westmoreland, Benny turned back, to silently plead with the man to follow. He stopped at a corner store on the next block to give the man a chance to catch up to him. Inside, the shop owner sat behind the checkout counter and eyed Benny as he walked to the soda cooler, watching intently to make sure Benny didn’t pocket anything.
After picking out a can of Coke, Benny closed the door of the soda cooler and heard a noise that sounded like neighbors banging pots on New Year’s Eve. Two men had entered the store. FILA jackets. Dirty sneakers. The first man pulled the Proof Coil chain and lowered the shop’s front shutter a little more than halfway. The second man, the one with brown eyes, approached Benny and grabbed his shoulders with his left arm, pulling Benny in close, as if they were sitting in a movie theater that had just darkened.
“Come on out, old man,” the man told the shop owner, who had reached for the telephone.
Benny felt metal jutting into his shoulder blade. When Benny tried looking down to see what it was that poked him, the man gripped the back of Benny’s neck and kept his head staring straight ahead at the old man behind his plexiglass. He guided Benny, like a blinded horse, to the checkout counter.
“I don’t want to make a mess out here. And you don’t want to have to clean it up neither. Come out, come out. Pretty fucking please.”
The man who had lowered the front shutter kept watch at the entrance. “Hurry the fuck up,” he said, jittery as an unspooling cassette tape.
The man with the gun was missing a tooth on the left side of his mouth, and his patchy beard reached all the way down his neck. Hot air, peppered with the scent of liquor and tobacco, blew against Benny’s face and a firm arm held him close. The contact almost felt like a hug, and for a moment, Benny was more worried about what the shop owner would think of him standing so close to another man.
“Walk, motherfucker,” the man said, and Benny walked with him, approaching the counter.
The assailant’s arm was wrapped around him tight, and Benny felt his shoulder blade cramping. He wanted to say, “OK, that’s enough, you’re hurting me.” When he realized that doing so was a bad idea, and that his mouth wouldn’t work to form the words, anyway, he feared for his shoulders. What was protecting them beneath the man’s arm besides a Book of Love t-shirt? His body shook, and fear traveled deep in his lungs, shortening his breath. The small of Benny’s back was drenched, and beads dripped from his armpits along his obliques as he tried to peel away the man’s fingers. Benny thought briefly that his mother could never know what was happening.
“Sir, please,” Benny said. “My mother has bone cancer. And my sister doesn’t work. I need to call them.”
He didn’t respond and kept his gaze straight ahead at the shop owner. Benny followed the man’s eyeline. The shop owner looked back at them with a gaping mouth.
It clicked suddenly. If the men wanted whatever was behind the counter, why was the old man just standing there? Why was the assailant’s arm so tight? Had that squealing come from Benny’s own throat? Why was it so hot when it was only May?
The shop owner stepped out from behind the counter, hands held up. He lay on his stomach, face flat on the floor, without being told. The jittery man sprinted to tear the keys dangling from the old man’s hip. He opened the cash register to put what cash there was into a black plastic bag. After, he stuffed liquor and cigarettes into a green Jansport backpack. His were expert moves. The old man shook his head over and over and over and let him take everything.
When the jittery man took as much as he could carry, the assailant loosened his grip on Benny. “Get down. On your knees,” he said.
Benny slinked to the floor and crouched, arms over head, eyes clenched, after he saw the man’s weapon for the first time. The assailant laughed and said in a low voice, “I bet you’re scared right now, and I don’t blame you.”
The assailant slapped Benny’s cheeks gently.
“I’m not lying. Please. My mother has bone cancer, and my sister doesn’t work.”
He tapped one finger against Benny’s lips to keep him quiet. “Your wallet. Please. Pretty please.”
“Fuck! Let’s go,” the assailant’s partner said, his voice a sharp note in the room.
“Drink your Coke,” the assailant said to Benny, ignoring his partner. Benny looked at his hands and saw a can there and had forgotten that it had been there the whole time. The shop owner was still on the floor, shaking his head, and Benny felt as though his bladder might rupture.
“I’m not from here,” Benny said. His chest, the left side, ached with each breath. “You can keep everything I have. I’ll get you more. Anything.”
Again, the assailant touched Benny’s lips.
“Open the fucking Coke.”
Benny opened it expertly, cracking open the seal to release enough gas before opening it all the way—the best way to keep from making a mess. He wanted the assailant to see how well he could follow directions, and to keep giving him directions.
“Drink. Please drink,” the assailant said.
Benny put the frosted soda can to his lips and watched the assailant comb his wallet and pocket his $35. He fished out Benny’s license and studied it.
I want Birdie.
Benny thought he’d said the words in his head, but the man looked down at him and his eyebrows wilted. Benny’s face felt hot, embarrassed. He bit his tongue to postpone crying for as long as possible.
“What the fuck’s birdie?” he said. He looked at the wallet again and took out the concert ticket.
“Motherfucker, let’s go.” The partner was clutching his sides and pacing in circles.
The assailant looked down at Benny and cocked his head to the right.
“You in town for a concert?”
Benny started crying. He wanted to tell his mother and sister that he didn’t blame California. At least he wasn’t in New Jersey. He nodded at the question.
“I’ve heard of her. She the one that dances around in that stupid bra?”
“I promise I won’t say anything. I have a bad memory. Take the ticket. Take the wallet. It’s real leather.”
“You drove all this way just to see some bitch dance half-naked?”
“I’m so sorry. Please.”
“I know a place up on Lexington, you can see the real thing, only it’ll cost you $15. And that’s $15 if you’re feeling generous. You interested in that?”
The revolt in Benny’s body was complete and he’d lost the battle against his bladder. Piss streamed down his jeans and puddled around him. He dry heaved and thought he was going to vomit.
“But you don’t strike me as the kind of man interested in watching a bitch dance naked.”
“Fuck,” the assailant’s partner groaned. He went to the cooler and Benny heard him open up a can of something, and belch after a long chug.
The assailant still looked down at Benny and smiled a penetrating smile. He cut the ticket in half, then again in fourths, and then once more into even smaller pieces.
“This is me doing you a favor,” he said. “That kind of man’s a dangerous thing to be these days.” He slapped Benny’s face again, and it left a cold sting.
“When they ask, can you all make my hair blonde? Why’s it always gotta be brown skin, black hair? Do that for me, huh? Pretty fucking please.”
The two men crawled out the gap between the floor and the front shutter and disappeared. Benny imagined them leaving together, perhaps on a motorcycle, hips-crushing-hips as they drove off. For a second, Benny even imagined himself riding with them, experts in getting away, ruthless in their freedom.
Benny, sitting in his heavy jeans, asked the shop owner, “What should we do?”
Escape? His mother’s hospital visits had shown him that, sometimes, there’s no such thing. Even so, after all the sicknesses that threaten the body, the work that turns hair gray too soon, after feeling sick in your chest when you realize you’ll break your mother’s heart when you fall in love—after all that, what else is there to do, but try to escape?
When the cops finally showed up to the convenience store, they wanted better answers. Was Benny sure he hadn’t gotten a good look at the guys? Any detail was important, especially since the shop owner flatly refused to say anything other than, “What they took wasn’t even worth the work.”
Benny had, maybe, gotten a quick look. Not a good one, not at all. If he had to, he’d say one of the men had a red beard. Light skin. Green eyes. But he couldn’t say for sure. He hadn’t paid much attention to the eyes.
The next evening, Benny, ticketless, called from a payphone outside the arena. It was Saturday, 8 p.m. in Los Angeles, 9 p.m. in El Paso. She picked up after two rings.
“Birdie?” He heard his own breath in the phone receiver.
“Benny, you haven’t called all day. Where are you?”
“Change of plans.”
“You’re not at the concert?”
“I meant about when I was getting back to El Paso.” His mouth was chattering like it was cold out.
“Benny, what’s wrong?”
“I’ll be back a day later, I think. Two at the most.”
He’d wanted to call after the robbery. He’d even dialed the first few numbers before hanging up again. He didn’t want to hear her cry, lecture, tell their mother.
“Birdie?”
“You’re joking.”
Benny still wanted to fall asleep on the beach. Try sushi. Have a drink at Aleph. There was too much to experience in California to fit it all in one week. Two wouldn’t even be enough.
“How’s Mom?”
“About the same. You sound weird, what’s going on?”
If he had it in him, he could stay longer than two weeks. Pretend he didn’t have a sister and mother who needed him. He’d establish a life that had nothing to do with sickness, and dance to Madonna records in his living room, instead of locking his bedroom door at night and playing the music so low to keep from waking anyone. He’d find an apartment in Pico Rivera, work at the Miller’s Outpost in Montebello, be the kind of man who spends every weekend finding someone with darting brown eyes. That kind of man was a dangerous thing to be.
“I’ve got to go,” Benny said. “Show’s about to start.”
“Benny, are you sure you’re OK?”
“See you soon, Birdie.”
“Hold on,” she said, but Benny had already hung up.