some freak of nature writing about how she got off when her boyfriend gave her the Dirty Sanchez. If chicks were willing to brag about licking their own shit, what would they be willing to shell out for an inmate’s dirty drawers?
Anybody could sell clean boxers. In fact, Eddie was pretty sure the sheriff had a side business doing just that. What he offered was lived-in stuff. Pissed in, shit on, cum-filled and bloody, the messier the better. He had Wade set it up with a classified and a post box. First week, they got a dozen orders. Doubled it the next week. Finally had to bribe a couple of deputies to get the boxers out.
Eddie felt like a captain of friggin’ industry. Escape. Are you kidding?
“Knuckles, bro? Fury. That some kind of promise?”
“A reminder. Finally stood down the old man.”
“Righteous. He back off?”
“Nah. Kicked the shit outta me.”
They were barreling west on U.S. 60 in a Lexus that Wade had boosted from a movie theater parking lot, where they had just seen Starship Troopers for the upteenth time. Wade geeked over science fiction. Eddie didn’t mind. It gave them somewhere they could go together and disconnect. For them, sci-fi wasn’t a theme. It was a place.
“Remember when we use to fly paper airplanes off the Alma School overpass?” Eddie said. “Like we were X-wings making a run on Death See if we could make it to the pavement before getting crunched.”
“Yeah. Till you taped an M-80 to one. Nearly caused that trucker to jackknife.”
“Man, I’ll never forget that dude’s face.”
“Funny stuff, Eddie. Long time ago.”
“Not for me.”
Eddie’s body devolved. The pain was exquisite. He saw his muscles thin out and flatten. His limbs shrank. Broken bones snapped fresh, bulging under his skin, then fused together as if they had never been broken at all. Tattoo blue vanished. He could literally see his manhood fade as he slipped into adolescence, his life clicking away like slides in an old-style View-master, the selector switch set to suffer.
He tore through the boy’s pod, his clothes, books, finally fingering the three-by-five picture under the mattress. Eddie hated the boy. He was a pampered puss, a crybaby. One of those kids who didn’t think he belonged in juvie, no matter his crime.
The picture proved it. Family Vacation 101. Silly smiles backdropped by Arizona red rock, the boy front and center, arms draped around a bored little sister and brainiac brother. Mom and Dad flashed peace signs over their heads.
The boy treated the picture like a piece of magic, rubbing it through his pocket, peeking glances and talking to it when he thought no one was watching. It only made Eddie hate him more. It confirmed that whatever the boy had done, it would eventually be forgotten. Not so for Eddie. The picture people knew it. Their smiles ridiculed him.
Eddie dropped the picture on the floor between his feet. He unbuttoned his pants and began jacking off.
The old man came out of Eddie’s bedroom wagging a pipe and baggie. He was dressed in his police uniform and he put the weight of the badge behind his voice.
“You’re a walking felony, Eddie. Guess it’ll be Christmas in Durango for you,” he said. “I’ll process you through intake myself.”
Eddie held the old man’s eyes. Kept quiet even as his father shoved him bodily into the back of the patrol car. What could he say? The pipe wasn’t his. Neither was the dope.
“Go ahead, Eddie. Cry entrapment. Tell them how I planted the evidence. Nobody’s going to hear anything you say.” The old man cranked his head back and laughed through the metal cage. “Done you same as we do the niggers. Nobody hears them either.”
Desert twilight crept like a sepia claw toward the end of the hallway where Eddie cowered outside of his parents’ bedroom. He strained to hear the voices on the other side of the door, primed for violence.
He knows. Eddie screwed his mind down on the thought, rejecting it. Impossible.
Then the door opened and the old man loomed over him in the shadows. Eddie tried to look past him to where his mother waited in the room. Surely she would defend him. He was just twelve. How could it be his fault? “Mom?”
She averted her gaze, giving him up to the old man.
“Shhh, boy.” His father’s face cracked into an indecipherable jigsaw of emotions. Eddie could see anger, fear, and hate clamoring to escape. “She can’t talk to you.”