There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,29
the floor. I’d pick up the gun and point it at Octavio’s head and look at Charles.
“Give me the gun, Calvin. Get the fuck out of here,” Charles would say.
“I’m not leaving,” I’d tell him.
“Shoot him then,” Charles would say.
Then me and Octavio would catch eyes. I’d notice for the first time that Octavio’s eyes were green. I’d look into those eyes so long it’d make Octavio mad, and he’d slam Charles back into the cupboards. Then I’d tell them all how they’re gonna make Octavio drink, that he was gonna drink until he couldn’t stand up anymore. I’d tell them that if they made him drink enough he wouldn’t remember shit. We’d make the blackout so bad it would go forward and backward in time, swallow the night.
My eyes were closed. For a second I wondered if I might still be in the car, dreaming the scene from the backseat. It was a night like so many others I’d had before. Maybe I’d wake up in the backseat, we’d go home, and I’d get back to the life I was trying to make that didn’t include any of this shit.
I opened my eyes. Octavio was still holding the gun, but he was laughing. Charles started to laugh too. Octavio set the gun on the table and they hugged, the two of them, Charles and Octavio. Then Carlos got up and shook hands with Octavio.
“These are the pieces you had made?” Charles said to Octavio, picking up the white gun.
“Nah, this one’s special. You remember David? Manny’s little brother. He made them in his fucking basement. The rest just look like nines. Go on, tell him,” Octavio said to Charles, looking at me.
“You remember when I told you about that Laney powwow, you said you wanted to go because there was that big one coming up at the Oakland Coliseum, and you were on the powwow committee for work. You remember that?” Charles said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You remember what else you told me?”
“No,” I said.
“About the money,” Charles said.
“Money?” I said.
“You said there would be something like fifty thousand dollars in cash prizes there that day,” Charles said. “And how easy it would be to steal.”
“I was fucking joking, Charles. You think I would fucking rob the people I work with and then think I could get away with it? It was a fucking joke.”
“That’s funny,” Octavio said.
Charles lifted his head toward Octavio like: Whatsup?
“That anyone would think you would rob the people you work with and think you could get away with it. That shit’s funny to me,” Octavio said.
“This is how we make it right,” Charles said. “You’ll get a cut too, then we’ll be good, right, Octavio?”
Octavio nodded his head. Then he picked up the tequila bottle. “Let’s drink,” he said.
So we drank. We went through half the bottle, shot after shot. Before the last shot there was a pause, and Octavio looked up at me, then lifted his shot glass toward me and gestured for me to get up. We took the shot, just me and him, then he gave me a hug I forgot to return. While he hugged me, I saw Charles look at Carlos like he didn’t like what was happening. After Octavio let me go he turned around and got another bottle of tequila from the top cupboard, then he sort of laughed at who knows what and stumbled across then left the kitchen.
Charles lifted his head up to me like: Let’s go. On the way to the car we saw a kid on his bike watching everyone from far off. I could tell Charles was almost gonna say something to him. Then Carlos tried to punk him by acting like he was gonna hit him. The kid didn’t flinch. Just kept staring at the house. His eyes were hella droopy but not just like he was high or drunk. I thought about Sloth from The Goonies. And then I thought about a movie I saw one Saturday morning when I was, like, five or six. It was about a kid who woke up blind one day. Before, I’d never thought about the idea that you could just wake up to some terrible shit, some fucked-up shift in what you thought life was. And that’s what it felt like then. Taking those shots. Octavio’s embrace. Agreeing to some doomed-ass plan. I wanted to say something to the kid on his bike. I don’t know why. There was nothing to say. We