[Fiction] Lay Me Down Easy by rl goldberg

FICTION - ISSUE FOUR

Lay Me Down Easy

RL GOLDBERG

Mikey Jr. turns on the car radio and his father turns it off. His father says, “Do you want it or not? You can keep on being a little boy if that’s what you want.”

Mikey Jr. says, “I guess I want it. Yeah, I want it.”

His father says, “This is going to be good for you.”

Mikey Jr. says, “Yeah I know.”

Mikey Jr. and Mike are idling in a bank parking lot. The bank, like many other businesses in Delray Beach, has been vacant for years. It is a squat white building with dirty windows, clouded like cataracts. The roof is hidden by a bulk of decomposing leaves and Spanish moss, old tennis shoes that teenagers have tossed onto the pile, hoping to see something exciting: perhaps a small, terrified animal scurrying from beneath the mass. Under the drive-though teller lanes, a woman is leaning against a deposit tube, reading a book. Mike pulls up to her and rolls the window down. He says, “You busy?”

The woman dog-ears a page in her book and smoothes her hair. She says, “Depends.”

Mike says, “This is my son, Mikey Jr. It’s his first time and he wants something tasty.”

The woman sucks her cheeks in. Mikey Jr. thinks she looks like a skeleton--haggard, pinched, practically caving into her ribcage. She says, “Yeah, all right. He’s of age?”

Mike laughs. He says, “You’re funny.”

Mikey Jr. splays his fingers over the car’s air vent. His palms are sweating. His father nudges him and says, “Well, get out. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

Mikey Jr. unbuckles his seatbelt and walks behind the car. The woman is wearing a faded jean jacket with a Florida Dolphins t-shirt underneath. Mike repeats, “Pick you up in an hour, big guy.”

He rolls up the car window and drives away. Mikey Jr. doesn’t look at the woman. She says, “So what did you have in mind?”

He shrugs. He’s staring at a crack in the asphalt under his feet. He wishes he could turn into some kind of liquid metal and drip through the cracks, harden, stay wedged in the road. Or a silver cavity filling, lodged in someone’s rotting molar. Mikey Jr. says, “This isn’t my first time.”

The woman says, “Your papa just said it was.”

Mikey Jr. says, “I mean, he thinks it is, but it isn’t.”

The woman says, “Don’t be rude. Look at a lady when you’re speaking to one.”

Mikey Jr. mumbles an apology but doesn’t look up. The woman draws Mikey Jr.’s chin up with her fingers. She says, “What a handsome face. That’s better.”

Mikey Jr. says, “So do you just do people right here?”

The woman gestures to a nook behind an old ATM. She says, “Right there. Ain’t nobody can see you from the road right there.”

Mikey Jr. nods. He says, “I don’t want to do you, though. No offense.”

The woman sniffs.

Mikey Jr. says, “What’s your name?”

The woman says, “Cash Machine. I mean, that’s not my Christian name, but that's what everyone calls me.”

Mikey Jr. says, “Cool.” He says, “There’s this girl in my class that I like. That’s why I can’t do you. You’re really pretty, it’s just that I don’t want to mess things up with her.”

Cash Machine says, “Don’t have to apologize. We could just sit here, fine by me.”

Mikey Jr. isn’t sure why he told Cash Machine that she is pretty. Her teeth are square and flat, horse like. She sits down heavily and starts to read again.

Mike parks the car in front of the old courthouse and waits. He aches with pride imagining Mikey Jr., his jeans and boxers bunched around his ankles, pressed up against the blowzy woman in the teller lane. Mike cracks the window and is glad that the weather is perfect for Mikey Jr.’s first time. Damp and saturated like a waterlogged couch; not too hot. He imagines Mikey Jr.’s confident, assured hands reaching, and groping, and probing. Earlier that morning, Mike told Mikey Jr. of the two happiest moments of his life. The first—the first time he came. Mike said, “But the girl wasn’t your mother, so I won’t tell you that story.”

The second, he said, was the time he tried to teach Mikey Jr. to skateboard. Mikey Jr. had been three or four. He was wearing blue pajamas, a size too small. It was Christmas. Barefooted, he stood upright on the skateboard as Mike pushed him slowly, tentatively, on the hardwood floor. Mike shouted, “Shift your weight, shift your weight!” as Mikey Jr. stiffly stuck his arms out, his limbs rigid and straight. The day ended in the emergency room—Mikey Jr. had cracked his chin open. Mike said, “Do you remember that? You didn’t even cry.”