The Taciturn Hottie

 

    
 

 

 

 
 

 

The following is fiction, kids:    

 

 

 
 

 

“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.”

– Raymond Chandler

 

 

PART ONE:

SOME PRETEEN KIDS WERE PLAYING TENNIS. I knew them from around the club, the Portuguese Hills Racquet Club. I had even hit with them and their parents a few times. We had played doubles. Now I just idly passed the time watching their game. They swung mightily at the ball, concentrating so fiercely, so sincerely – and then whiffed. They burst into laughter at the other guy’s mistakes, rubbing it in for all they were worth. No, they didn’t argue about line calls very often, only every two seconds.

 

One in particular of these four kids would toss the ball up for his serve, and it was so bad it would spray out ludicrously at a 45 degree angle. Unhittable. He bravely swung at it, though, to no avail. He didn’t have pockets, so he’d come up to serve with two tennis balls, as you’re supposed to, but he very carefully would place one of the two down at his feet so seriously, so solemnly, it was unbearable. The racquet was almost as big as he was, I’m required to say at this point. Then the crazy ball toss out to the side fence, and the other kids, anticipating this now, erupting into a riot of drunken laughter. They were absolutely drunk on laughter. Sometimes they didn’t like me, my solitariness unnerved them, or they thought I was putting the move on their mother. I dunno.

 

A guy in a fancy suit came up to me. He drove up in a sleek red sports car over the gravel parking lot, a car so new it was perfectly immaculate, sexy red, red, red. It gleamed low to the ground, as it should have, and it must have been a Ferrari or something else properly Italiano. It looked like it was fast – yeah, somewhat. Anyway the guy gets out ceremoniously, comes up to me, smiling, and pulls out quietly what looked like a regular old ball-point pen. He shows it to me for some reason. He still didn’t say a word; he never spoke the whole time. He wore a dark and rather expensive suit that shimmered in tandem in the bright sun with the shiny, hot car.

 

He was younger than me, and he wore a ridiculous pink tie, without self-consciousness, without irony. He had a white flower in his lapel, a pathetic daisy. He proceeded to flip open the front end of the pen, and it rotated down on some hidden, mysterious hinge. I just stood in silence observing this, the tennis game forgotten for the moment. He pulled a dart out of the tube of the pen, and showed it to me, smiling more maliciously now. It had a tip that looked so sharp as to be lethal, and a somewhat fat middle for stability in flight. It, too, looked fast. It looked as balanced and as well-formed for killing as a Cheetah.

 

He put the dart back into the tube, opening up the other, closed end. He then gestured briefly with his hands, European-style, towards the children. It was self-evident what was to be done now. He handed the instrument over to me carefully, slowly, even elegantly, his game-face on at this point. We stood there on the grass picnic area outside the high chain-link fence that surrounded the courts. The kids’ distant voices came back into my ears now, and one of them hit a high ball over the fence, and it dribbled crazily up to my shins. I fielded it awkwardly, with the instrument in my right hand, and I threw the ball back to the kids over the twelve-foot high fence with my left.

 

They then started arguing about the score, making spectacles of themselves, easily heard throughout all the club. They provided four straining, high-pitched voices, all competing against one another. Absolutely piercing, believe me. They were just about to appeal to me to play referee in their dispute. But I raised the blow-gun thing wickedly, aimed, and shot the dart hard at little Derek through the chain-links of the fence. It traveled magically, like a beam of light, not hitting anything but the side of Derek’s nine-year-old neck.

 

The dart pierced the peach-fuzz on his skin viciously, and dug several inches in. A stream of blood trickled down. Derek grabbed at his neck immediately, of course, whirling in pain and confusion. The other children grew quiet and afraid as the situation unfolded. Derek went down on the court, crying, sad plaintive sounds emanating from his young, gasping lungs. He looked at me eventually, as he sat on the court, miserable, through the circle of the other three kids.

 

He looked right into my eyes, his whole face, in its disbelief and in its forlorn, betrayed state, wordlessly forming the question, “Why?” I squirmed inside my heart like a weasel. Then I awoke with a shudder. It was just a dream. I propped myself up in bed, my senses straining acutely in the silence. The clock ticked. Thank God it was just a dream, it hadn’t really happened. Thank Goodness I wouldn’t have to face Marie, his mother, with that same question “Why?” on her face, too. It had seemed so real, amazingly real now that I had awakened. In the moments when I had seen Derek reeling, I had felt like a walking corpse. At that moment, I would have given anything to un-do it, even my life, I would gladly, with great relief, have given my life to un-do it. But I didn’t have to – I hadn’t hurt an innocent child. Thank God that’s not who I am. It hadn’t happened, I kept telling myself. Thank God I was still a man.

 

I sat up on the couch where I slept, swung my bare feet to the floor. It was about 4:30am, and I was drenched in the sweat of a horrible nightmare and in the heat of the season. I breathed deeply to prove to myself it was really true, it was just a dream. I almost wept with relief. I knew, though, that I was walking on the edge of a razor, perdition on one side of me and oblivion on the other. That part was not a dream.

 

And a bundle of questions occurred to me, making their presence known from the much ballyhooed periphery of consciousness. Who am I that I would so much as dream a dream like that? I got up, walked across the bare, wooden floor, and looked out the old window, down into the dirty, empty, nasty streets of the City of Deep Gorge, CA: “The City of Good Neighbors.” That’s who I was, that’s who I was becoming. The courtyard below was still, and shadowy, as the full moon shone through the patchy clouds, casting long geometric shapes of darkness as it hit the steps, the little Greek arch at the entrance, and a sauntering cat from next door. Who will I choose to be? I thought. But, then again, was this all just self-dramatization? Isn’t a dream just a bunch of crap in the brain? I dunno, kids. Onward, Christian soldiers.

 

It was about 5:00am by now; first light and sunrise were less than an hour away since it was early July. They would bring a moral epiphany with them. I climbed back into bed. It’ll come clear in the light of day, right?

 

…..to be continued…..