Candy Everybody Wants. Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Читать онлайн книгу.
she inhaled. Jayson had learned to smoke from old movies, and while he was still partial to the languid Old Hollywood method of smoking, he made a mental note to try out Franck’s more masculine method one day soon.
‘It’s real nice, Toni, real nice.’ Franck nodded. ‘Got a real nice view too,’ she added, giving the cotton sundress-clad Terri a sultry once-over from her head to her bare feet.
Jayson thought he heard Terri whimper, but it seemed impossible given how stiffly paralyzed she seemed.
The beleaguered Tom stepped forward and put his hand on the top of the twins’ heads.
‘Well, we’ll be getting on home now. I think everything’s okay for the immediate future, Toni,’ he said.
‘Thank you Tom,’ Toni smiled and winked. ‘And, Terri, be sure to take your trash with you.’ Toni pointed toward the wincing Officer Unsinger who was rubbing his jaw while slowly regaining consciousness.
Toni went around behind the car and started emptying several beat up cardboard boxes out of the trunk. Several were torn at the sides and spilling out unfamiliar clothes…flannel plaids, drab army colors, black leathers.
‘How long you staying?’ Jayson asked Franck, who was warily watching Terri, Tom, and Unsinger cross the yard back toward their house.
‘Dunno,’ Franck said, pulling a cane out from the front seat. ‘As long as your mother puts out, I guess.’
‘So you and my mother are dating?’
‘Maybe. We don’t like to use patriarchal words.’
‘You’re a lesbian.’
‘Yep, if you’re into labels.’
‘And so’s my mother?’
‘Guess so, chum.’ Franck leaned her weight on the cane and sighed. She winced as if the pain of punching out a man three feet taller and a hundred pounds heavier was just catching up to her.
‘What’s wrong with your leg?’
‘It’s my hip. Dysplasia. Always been like this.’
In addition to her smoking style, Franck’s cane, in Jayson’s eyes, was her second redeeming quality. Ever since watching an episode of Happy Days where Ralph Malph broke his leg in a skiing accident and suddenly found himself the center of Mrs. C’s and Joanie’s sympathies, Jayson had wished for some sort of physical impairment. He’d spent an afternoon last year slamming his forearm against the kitchen counter waiting for a sickening bone snap that never came.
Franck fished a Slim Jim from inside her leather jacket and unwrapped it. Willie immediately appeared at her side.
‘Want some, buddy?’ Franck asked him, a wide smile spreading across her face, softening her features so that she suddenly appeared ten years younger.
‘Just a little,’ Willie said shyly. He really wanted a lot, but had long since realized that his luck was better when asking for a little of something than all of it. Franck put the end of the Slim Jim into his waiting mouth.
‘He’s not supposed to eat after six. He has Prader-Willi syndrome,’ Jayson said.
‘Toni told me all about it,’ Franck replied, smiling widely at Willie. ‘I get the willies too sometimes.’ She fake shuddered from head to toe. This made Willie giggle.
She held out the jerky stick toward Willie’s face. ‘Now bite down and pull. Hard’
Willie did, and came away smiling, the jagged end of jerky sticking out of his mouth.
‘Fwhank you,’ Willie said, chewing.
‘You’re mighty welcome, chum,’ Franck replied, putting her non-cane-using arm around Willie. The two of them followed Toni, who was carrying the boxes of Franck’s clothes into the house.
Stopping just inside what used to be the door to the garage, Toni peeled the remote garage door opener off the Velcro tape that held it to the wall. She turned around, pointed it at the empty air where the overhead door used to be, and pantomimed pressing the button repeatedly with her thumb. This made Willie giggle. Which made Franck giggle. Which made Toni giggle at her own joke.
Jayson shut the driver-side car door that Toni had typically, absentmindedly left open, and followed his new Fall Season family into the house. This was undeniably a major cast-shakeup, Jayson thought. And right before school started. He wasn’t certain that the big producer-in-the-sky knew what he was doing.
Fortunately Officer Phillip Unsinger was sufficiently embarrassed at being knocked flat by a four-foot-eight lesbian to decline pressing charges against her. Unfortunately, the emasculating experience stiffened his resolve to rescue Jayson and Willie from what he viewed as their depraved existence.
At Terri’s urging, Unsinger filed a complaint with a Waukesha County judge which allowed Unsinger surprise visitations to the Blocher household. Unsinger took full advantage of the ruling, showing up at the Blocher house nearly every day, which, Jayson thought, sort of negated the whole ‘surprise’ part of the visitations. Most every afternoon, when Jayson and Willie stepped off the bus, Unsinger’s brown, county-owned Buick sedan was parked in the driveway. He’d set up a kind of counseling office on the picnic table in the side yard between the Blocher and Wernermeier houses. It must have seemed like neutral territory to him. The Switzerland of Lac LaBelle Drive.
At first Unsinger tried engaging Toni in the counseling sessions as well, but after forty-five minutes of listening to her rant about the patriarchy of uniforms, he resigned himself to focusing his therapeutic efforts on Jayson and Willie. The two brothers and he would sit at the broken picnic table for an hour of ‘life lesson rap sessions.’ Unsinger was partial to decade-old hippie church terminology, and Jayson frequently had to stifle his laughter. Jayson often caught Terri Wernermeier’s shadowy face peering at them from behind her kitchen window screen. Tara had revealed to Jayson that Unsinger went to their church and that her mother had a secret unrequited crush on him.
The crux of Dectective Unsinger’s ‘therapy’ consisted of scare tactics. He’d tell Jayson and Willie stories of juvenile delinquents he’d worked with in the past who, as he said, ‘traded in God for Odd.’ He told story after story of teenagers running away to ‘the big city’ to get ‘hooked on Mary Jane.’ These lost souls partied in abandoned warehouses and ‘violated their bodies in ungodly ways’ with other ‘punk hooligans.’ Jayson wasn’t exactly sure what body violation entailed, but it sounded deliciously edgy–very ABC Monday Night Movie-ish. It seemed to Jayson that Unsinger’s professional failures lived much more fulfilling lives than those he’d redeemed.
Unsinger also seemed preoccupied with offering up Trey as an example of ‘clean living.’ To Unsinger, Trey was the perfect young man next to whom Jayson looked like God’s worst failure. Unsinger urged Jayson to spend more time with Trey, ‘playing ball’ and ‘drinking soda pop.’ If Unsinger really knew just how eager Jayson was to spend time with Trey, Jayson figured he might receive different advice.
Willie, of course, understood none of what Unsinger preached, and frequently lay down on the picnic table bench to take a nap.
The worst part of the ‘rap sessions’ was how they concluded. Unsinger would pull a handful of acrid, plastic-tasting, sugarless hard candies from his vest pocket and try to make Jayson and Willie ‘trade in’ a bad behavior in exchange for a piece of candy. ‘Trade in one way,’ he’d say, to which the two of them would have to reply: ‘for the right way.’ Jayson had a hard time not gagging when he put the hard rubbery diabetic candy in his mouth. Even Willie, whose culinary palate included coffee grounds found in trash cans, would spit out the candy as soon as Unsinger turned his back. Under normal circumstances, Jayson wouldn’t ‘trade in’ a case of acute poison ivy for