The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 7

“Ever hear of an eye doctor?” Jack laughed. “You’ve only had about twenty-five years for ’em to heal up, right? Why didn’t you just beat the shit out of him then?”

  “He was a friend,” Radloff lied. “Plus, hello? I was blind. It took awhile for my anger to really blossom on this deal. But let me say that a Radloff, once crossed, is vengeful. And patient. I’ve waited for the prime opportunity.”

  “Why not sue? Why didn’t you ever sue?”

  “That’s coward shit, kid.”

  “So now we’re gonna egg this poor bastard’s trailer?”

  “Yes. Fucking piece of shit. Sunny side up.”

  “Ever think that he might have gotten what he deserved, Radloff?”

  “Is your mom sending you to some kinda socialist school?” Radloff asked. He didn’t wait for Jack to answer. “His living in a trailer doesn’t mean shit to me. The guy nearly blinded me. You can think Radloff is a pushover. Go ahead, do as you please, then one day, when you are at the depths of your misery, along comes a little bird named—”

  “Radloff—”

  “Cor-rect, Rad—”

  “Just shut up, Radloff.”

  Radloff would not shut up. Radloff was on a roll. He hadn’t even considered working this bird monologue into his mission. It just came to him. More came to him. “Huevos rancheros on aluminum?” Radloff seethed to an imaginary foe. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. You did order huevos rancheros, correct?” Then he laughed, extinguished the butt. Jack sat on his hands, did nothing to encourage additional bizarre dramatic monologues.

  The car continued as the road turned back into a county highway. The two said nothing. Three more miles tacked on the odometer.

  “This is turning into a friggin’ road trip,” Jack complained.

  “We’re right there, Science Underachiever, we’re right—”

  “Do we even have eggs?” Jack interrupted, just as the rural desolation gave way to a small scattering of ranch-style homes. A fringe community. Lots of painted plywood lady legs wearing polka-dotted bloomers doubled over in the front yards. Some even had red reflectors screwed into them. Maybe the reflectors served a purpose. Maybe some residents got too drunk. Maybe a pizza guy, if pizza guys even traveled this far, could better negotiate the driveway in a snowstorm.

  “Under the newspapers in back. Buy ’em the day before, on the other end of town, and no one is the wiser,” Radloff explained, and he fished around in the backseat with his right hand. He pulled out a mask, not eggs. “Merry Christmas. Wear this Arctic Cat thingamabob. I’ll let you out fifteen yards in front of the trailer, paratrooper-style.” Jack shrugged. Radloff put both hands back on the wheel and drove silently for another minute.

  The car coasted into the trailer park, Classic Heritage Acres. Radloff tapped the brakes as the car crept over some patchwork tar and through the gates. The Cutlass made very little noise; Radloff had had the muffler perforated. A little superfluous shop trick performed by a deviant troll for whom Radloff hid porn.

  The troll’s wife was Baptist. Staunch. Shunned porn. Had porn radar. Radloff had an empty closet, miles away. The troll’d give a call. Radloff’d ferry the jerk books over to the garage. The troll did some self-pleasuring, then some auto surgery. At a discount. It got to the point where Radloff’s Cutlass had endured so many nips and tucks, the troll finally resorted to tight-ening the mirrors, recapping the nozzles on the tires with tiny, after-market chrome disco balls, and tricking out the muffler. It paid off.

  “Game time!” Radloff whisper-yelled. I’ll kill the lights and drift along.” He let his right arm drift across the dashboard, in a mock survey of the battleground for Jack. “You hurl as many eggs as possible. Make as many strikes as you can.”

  A light wave of gravel percolated beneath the back fender. They passed some grizzled, junkyard, flat-faced, weatherbeaten pooches. A stray growl or two barely volleyed off the tin shoeboxes. The whole trailer park was a series of concentric cul de sacs. A curbless maze. A cyst-ooze yellow GMC pickup truck passed them and exited. There was, thankfully, no other traffic.

  Jack tried on the mask, unzipped the marsupial front pouch of his anorak. Radloff continued to navigate the maze and used a free hand to feed some eggs into the pouch. He lined the packed eggs with crumpled paper towel. Fed a few more eggs in on top of it. Again with the paper towel. Again with the eggs. Once it was stuffed, Jack zipped up the pouch, made for the door handle.

  “What the hell you doin’?” Radloff asked and grabbed for Jack’s arm, pulled it off the handle.

  “I’m gonna jump out and egg, doy.”

  Radloff shot Jack a pained glance. He let go of Jack’s arm and yanked the pouch’s zipper open. “Here, why give yourself an additional hurdle?” he whispered harshly. “You have to be able to reach in for the goddamn eggs, right?”

  Jack rolled his eyes, slapped Radloff’s hand away. “You done yet?”

  “I’m just getting started,” Radloff rasped.

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “Well,” Radloff lightly pinched Jack’s left arm through the anorak, “which trailer you gonna egg, pal?”

  They both looked around the lots, made eye contact with each other, scowled.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” Jack shrugged.

  “For starters, we’re not even there yet. It’s up ahead on the right. Miami Dolphins’ colors.” Radloff pointed to an aqua trailer half a block away.

  “That light blue hunka shit?”

  “Correct.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “It’s my mission,” Radloff insisted, even though, in truth, his intelligence on this matter was thirdhand and more than a little suspect, seeing as it came from a friend’s brother who’d been fired as a rural postal carrier for throwing his mail satchel in a creek and claiming he’d been mugged. On three different occasions. The ex–postal worker was on serious meds now and not employed.

  The trailer sat back fifteen yards from the street. An old black lawn lamp yellowed a withering halo near the road, and the light from a Humvee-sized console TV flickered through the curtains of the trailer’s bay window. Other than that, nothing. The nearest streetlight was burnt out and the ones that were lit stood thirty yards away in either direction. The burnt streetlight was a lucky coincidence.

  “Let’s do this,” the kid groaned.

  The trailer was perpendicular to the street and the bay window faced out toward Radloff’s car. On the left side of the trailer, midway back, some fiberboard had been sawed and hammered to make a staircase that led to a door. The car crept closer to the house. Radloff tapped the brakes. He looked at Jack. Jack looked out the back window at the red brake lights. Radloff threw the car into park.

  “Ever see Full Metal Jacket?” Radloff whispered.

  Jack ignored the question, opened the car door, and slowly skulked away. He also ignored the unrelenting instinct that he was not supposed to do this. He turned back to the car and shut the door almost all the way. It didn’t quite catch. Radloff heard the impotent grab of the latch and took it as a gesture of Jack’s will to ultimately wuss out. To go about his mission half-assed. He sucked his teeth and yanked the door snug. Radloff, of course, constantly took survey of his life. Mental inventories. Were he asked for a summary, he had one at the ready: Who hasn’t failed me?

  As Jack fidgeted outside with the eggs, Radloff reminded himself that the whole genesis of this mission was to put some points on the scoreboard. Whining and moping about the car door wasn’t what got him and Jack out here with a backseat full of eggs. Whatever would transpire from this moment on was pure frosting. He looked out the passenger window at Jack, made two air pistols with his fingers and fired them skyward. Jack sneered, faked tripping, losing the precious eggs. Radloff tapped his watch. “Your quiz, your quiz, you little fucker. Give this asshole his medicine.” He strained to think of something to motivate the kid. “Then science! I’ll help you out, get you into DeVry.”

  Jack paused, squinted at the car. H
e couldn’t make out what Radloff was mouthing. “I’m not gonna cry! What the fuck?”

  “DeVry!” Radloff mouthed hard. Squinched his hatchet face. “The tech institute. Sciences! That’s attainable for you, with a little elbow gre—”

  “Stan-ford,” Jack interrupted, shook his head. “You’re DeVry material. “

  Jack turned away from the vehicle once again and looked at the trailer. He heard a semitruck rumble in the distance, then nothing but wind. Even the smush-faced guard dogs at the gate had probably burrowed in the wheel-well of something. It was an owls-only kinda night. Fat things with glowing eyes and sharp beaks excelled in this weather. Attached their faces to fleeing rodent spines and snapped ’em.

  Throw, run, and then hop in the safety of Radloff’s Cunt-less, Jack thought. He patted his egg-belly. The vandal in him was giving the total pussy in him a guilt trip. This was a cinch, the vandal insisted. Jack began to agree. How could it not be? Part of his science class involved making dioramas. Scale things down to get a better understanding of how they function. Jack had a pretty good idea on this situation. On his odds of a clean getaway. In fact, if someone asked him to make a diorama, to put scissors to a shoebox and construct a mini–trailer home for museum-like viewing, dollars to dogshit it would be stocked with a tiny glass bong, a seventy-two-inch TV set, a sectional sofa resembling the Pentagon, and some lard-bellied blood-pressure victims chain-smoking teensy generic Menthol 100s.

  “Medicine time!” Radloff interrupted. “Give this faggot his oats.”

  That did it. The total pussy and diorama-making vandal were in agreement: if Jack couldn’t outrun or outwit anyone within a two-mile radius, especially the schlub that Kool-Aided Radloff’s peepers, who probably now weighed four hundred and fifty pounds, then he was a solid gold retard who’d flunk his science quiz and be stuck cleaning the shitters at DeVry until he was seventy-five.

  Jack turned and made his way across the lawn. He started humming the intro to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” He slipped, briefly, into the splits on an oily dog turd—or possibly mud, he didn’t have time to get olfactory about it—and quickly corrected his footing. His heart rate quickened.

  Radloff gently shifted the Cutlass back into drive and the sedan inched forward, away from the Dolphins’-colored trailer. “See?” he said to himself and cackled. The whole thing was playing out just as he imagined.

  Radloff’s Thoughts on Eggings

  As a Child or Teen: Egg and run. (See earlier “When you’re fifteen, do whatever the fuck you want,” paragraph.) He had a laissez-faire approach on all youth matters, except of course Kool-Aid to the eyes of a compadre. That remains a no-no.

  As an Adult: When an egging is attempted as an adult, miles from your own home, it is a two-person job. Why? Such a distance facilitates the use of a car. And (1) Can you throw an egg out of a car, from a seated position, with a steering wheel in the way and even come close to hitting your target? No. (2) Do you want to leave the vehicle to egg and have to make a sprint back to it, start it, and drive off? No. Why not just leave it running, you ask? Do you want to leave your unattended vehicle running in a strange neighborhood while you are vandalizing property nearby? No.

  Radloff convinced himself this mission was a two-person job. A family job. A relationship saver. Having Jack along made sense. You’d simply never send two adults on an egging, unless one was stealthy, no-nonsense Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, or maybe famed MLB base-stealer Rickey Henderson. Why? Actual non–professional-sports-playing adults sprain too easily. Tear important cartilage. Complain. Go to jail if caught. Besides, Radloff didn’t know any adults who even remotely had the sense or the balls to tackle this egging with him. None who could empathize with the torment he’d suffered. Best to get a youngster. Someone who existed in the vicinity of the random adolescent lash and recoil.

  Jack was now ten feet from the house. He could see his breath. He could see Radloff’s taillights creeping away, but he didn’t freak, told himself that Radloff’s feather-foot on the gas was necessary. Jack’s feet could make him vanish in a nanosecond; by the time the turkey in the trailer hobbled to his window, there’d be nothing, no kid, and certainly no getaway car. If Jack chucked his eggs now, it would just be a forty-yard dash to Radloff’s Cunt-less.

  So Jack calmly reached into the anorak. Pulled out one of the eggs. Felt like having a look at it, but didn’t. Felt like squeezing it so hard it’d crack in his paw just so he could gauge the shell’s tensile strength, get an idea of the materials he was operating with, but didn’t. Instead, he cocked his right arm, placed his left foot forward and hurled the egg so hard the trailer’s whole bay window shattered. Dropped like a fucking curtain. That definitely surprised him. In retrospect, the cold air probably helped a little bit. That and the fact that Radloff’s vehicle’s heat only worked on feet, so the eggs had gotten nice and cold on the drive. Whatever. A jolt of glee and accomplishment briefly warmed Jack, followed quickly by a massive wave of guilt. He paused to imagine a glass company pickup truck beeping in reverse across the lawn up to the window in the dead of night.

  The smushed-face dogs howled once again, but besides that it was still eerily silent. The song in his head was the stomp and clap intro to “We Will Rock You.” As Radloff’s Cunt-less drifted farther down the road, Jack could hear the TV noise bleeding out of the hole. Full House. Radloff had the car idling six trailers down. Jack figured, he might as well get rid of all the eggs. He started launching them through the window’s hole and into the living room of the trailer. The curtain quivered. Jack then launched a few precision shots above the trailer’s door, so that whoever came out would get a head full of yolk. Radloff got impatient and began driving the car slowly away from the whole mess.

  “Okay, kid, start running. Time to move out,” Radloff mumbled. He craned his head over his right shoulder, trying to get a read on the destruction. He considered laying on the horn, but didn’t. He took his foot completely off the brake and let the car pick up a little more speed.

  Jack stood on the lawn admiring his work. He was dumbfounded by the fact that besides the Queen numbers in his head and the trailer’s TV, the only thing he could hear was a light breeze softly rustling through the few remaining dead leaves still attached to nearby trees. There were no sirens, no shouting, no alarms. It got to be too much quiet. For some odd reason, he wanted to make Radloff proud.

  “Come out and get me, you fucking sad ass!” Jack shouted.

  It didn’t take long. The broken window had looked like a movie screen to Jack, but now a guy in a shitty V-neck T-shirt came right out of it like a crazed, giant, ballsy rat. He was definitely never a Kool-Aid thrower. He was more biker. More steel cutter. More prison tattoos, rendering plant foreman kinda guy.

  He wouldn’t have used beverage granules on Radloff. He’d have used chains. Hurricane fence. Pliers. A little girl stood watching from the window, bawling in pistachio-colored footy PJs. The guy worked his way across his lawn like a navy Seal. Jack could smell onions on him.

  Jack decided to put the basketball shoes to work, sprinted toward Radloff’s fleeing car. He figured it would be close, but if he hauled ass, he’d hit the car running. Maybe claw on to the trunk and ride out of the lot that way, anything to get away from this fucking zombie. That thought evaporated when a nylon dog leash corkscrewed into the soil on a steel triangle spike got him. It was camouflaged by the overgrown dead grass. Jack was thrown into a dive.

  The road had a pretty nice left-winding bend in it. Radloff’s foot was on the gas now, hard. Since he could not see Jack—parallel to the ground, flying in midair—Radloff fooled himself into thinking his cursory glance in the rearview was more than just a token look at other nonegged trailers nearby. Radloff was stuck on two thoughts: (1) The kid took things too far, and maybe deserved some punishment. After all, he’d said nothing about breaking glass, and Radloff was certain that he definitely heard some glass breaking. (2) He’d better just keep driving.<
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  Before Radloff could refocus on the road in front of him, the car crunched a bike with training wheels. Radloff took consolation knowing that probably no one was on it. He motored out of the trailer park and figured at some point there might be some explaining to do. But not now.

  FIVE

  Jonathan Lethem

  (fīv) n 1: the cardinal number equal to 4 + 1 2: the fifth in a set or sequence 3: something, such as a quintet or a basketball team, that has five parts, units, or members 4: a five-dollar bill 5: number of sexual encounters necessary before nihilistic urges overtake the relationship

  1.

  “I feel different from other people. Really different. Yet whenever I have a conversation with a new person it turns into a discussion of things we have in common. Work, places, feelings. Whatever. It’s the way people talk; I know, I share the blame, I do it, too. But I want to stop and shout, no, it’s not like that, it’s not the same for me. I feel different.”

  “I understand what you mean.”

  “That’s not the right response.”

  “I mean what the fuck are you talking about.”

  “Right.” Laughter.

  She lit a cigarette while E. went on.

  “The notion is like a linguistic virus. It makes any conversation go all pallid and reassuring. ‘Oh, I know, it’s like that for me, too.’ But the virus isn’t content just to eat conversations, it wants to destroy lives. It wants you to fall in love.”

  “There are worse things.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Famine, war, floods.”

  “Those never happened to me. Love did. Love is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  “That’s fatuous.”

  “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

  She was silent for a full minute.

  “But there, that’s the first fatuous thing I’ve said. Asking you to consider my situation by consulting your experience. You see? The virus is loose again. I don’t want you to agree that our lives are the same. They aren’t. I just want you to listen to what I say seriously, to believe me.”