In the Shape of a Man Read online

  “Aw,” said Rad disdainfully, “fuck him! He can’t do nothin’. We ain’t breaking any laws.” As Rad steered Tawny toward the door, he looked at the Ford, making a mental note to check on the veracity of his comment later when he had the time. He believed he was in the right. After all, his dad had often worked on his trucks or boats or cars in their driveway, or in front of their house when he was growing up. South San Francisco, or South City, as the people who lived there called it, was all right with that. It had always been a blue-collar town, unlike “The City” of San Francisco with its many lawyers and business people. But in the last ten years a lot of yuppies who couldn’t afford houses in “The City” and in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, were snapping up the South City bargains and putting their stamp on the place. Contractors like his dad were renovating and upgrading houses as fast as they could into big four- and five-bedroom jobs that would cost four hundred and fifty thou and up when sold. And, sadly, many of the orchards and plant nurseries that Rad had grown up around had been sold, knocked flat by dozers, and turned into developments for wealthy yuppies and immigrants, mostly Chinese. At worst, Rad theorized, Mr. Peepers might be able to make trouble for him with the landlord.

  Rad slid his hand down Tawny’s side, to where her hips flared out, and he dug his fingers in slightly, forgetting about trucks and boards of supervisors and skateboards and Mr. Peepers. All he could think about was sliding into Tawny. He’d loved her the moment he met her. So did his dick, becoming hard at first sight of her. And all he thought about was making love with her. Except for right after they’d made it. And then, after about ten minutes, he wanted to do it again. At the shop he thought about it a lot, whenever he wasn’t working on a board. Skating and fucking. They were his life. Nothing else mattered and the world could go to hell.

  As they went into the house the phone rang. Tawny picked it up.

  “Hi, Terri. Yeah. No, not tonight. Maybe next week, okay? All right. Later.”

  Rad smiled at Tawny as she hung up the phone. “Let me guess… she invited you, a good Catholic girl, to a Buddhist meeting.”

  Tawny smiled. “Well, I’m not into the big organized religion thing anymore, but the Buddhism seems different. I’m gonna check it out sometime. But not tonight.”

  Rad nodded. Tawny’s friend, Terri, had been trying to get Tawny and Rad to one of her Buddhist meetings for the last year. One of Rad’s friends had been to a meeting and told him they chanted first, then gave testimonials, and then tried to sign everybody up for it. Rad had already told Tawny that if she wanted to go she’d have to go by herself. He too had been raised Catholic, but had let it lapse. And he wasn’t interested in any kind of religion at this point in his life.

  “Did the mail come?” he asked her.

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything from Pygmy’s?”

  “No, Babe.”

  Two months earlier Rad had sent Pygmy’s, a skateboard manufacturer, a tape of himself at a skate park, doing his stuff. It was some pretty gnarly footage. Tawny had shot and edited it and she was really good with a video camera. The tape had edge and a fluid beauty, with a nice soundtrack, a cut from the band, Garbage, that Tawny and he had picked out. He was hoping it would get him Pygmy’s sponsorship for the X Games. All of the board companies sponsored skaters. If Pygmy’s sponsored him, he had a shot. But if not, forget it. Without a corporate sponsor, you could literally be the best skater in the world but you’d never get into the X Games.

  Tawny leaned close. “There you go again, fading on me. I’ll make you forget about that shit.” She grabbed his buttocks and deep kissed him. He picked her up and carried her into the darkened bedroom.

  Much later Rad got out of bed and opened the curtains. The day’s light had faded completely and harsh orangish, electric streetlamp light filtered in, illuminating Tawny’s voluptuous body. He lay back down beside her and slowly rubbed his face against her breasts. The cool metal of her nipple ring tickled his skin.

  Tawny ran her hands through his hair. “Your mom called earlier,” she said.

  “What did she say?” he said softly.

  “She invited us to dinner Sunday… tomorrow.”

  “And?”

  “I said we’d be there.”

  Rad sat up. “Shit, Tawny! I wish you hadn’t.” He got out of bed and started pacing.

  Tawny shook her head slowly. “Babe, your mom is so nice to me… I couldn’t say no to her again. I’m sorry.”

  Rad glared at her. “Well maybe you should go by yourself. I told you I didn’t want to go over there.”

  “All right, Rad,” said Tawny, a slight tinge of anger now evident in her voice. “Call her back and say you won’t be there. But don’t be a dick about this.”

  Rad said nothing for a while. Then, “Sorry. I shouldn’t have jumped on you like that. Is my sister and her husband coming?”

  “Yeah,” said Tawny.

  Rad thought about how when his sister Helen and her husband Roger and their son Jay were around, Rad’s dad was a little more restrained. He wouldn’t rag on Rad about Ridgeline College with them there. Rad had been enrolled at Ridgeline in their plumbing and pipefitting program. He had been preparing to go to work in his dad’s contractor business. His dad had been paying his tuition and his grades had been good. He was just fifteen units from getting his certificate when he and his dad had had their big fight over skating, in particular, the X Games. Rad had talked about maybe taking a semester off to get in shape to compete. It was just an idea at that point, and he was just thinking out loud, but his dad had exploded and told him that if he took a semester off then he would have to go to work for somebody else and pay his own tuition. They hadn’t talked since. Rad’s mother called every week and he visited her sometimes when he knew his dad was working late. But he and the old man stayed out of each other’s way these days.

  Rad knelt to Tawny and kissed her. “C’mon. Let’s get something to eat.”

  Tawny sat up.

  “Shit!” said Rad guiltily, “I was gonna barbecue.”

  Tawny smiled. “This was more fun. I’ll throw the leftover Chinese food in the microwave.”

  Later, after Rad had cleaned up in the kitchen, he came out into the living room. Tawny sat in the big red beanbag chair before the TV watching a music video. “I wonder if Gabriel came by to feed Ketsel?” he said to her.

  Tawny frowned without taking her eyes off the TV screen. “Hmm, I don’t know.”

  “You want to go see?” said Rad.

  Tawny looked up at him. “Not really. But if you’re going to, I’ll watch you.”

  Gabriel had been Rad’s roommate before Tawny had moved in. Tawny had never liked him, and neither had Rad, actually. But Gabriel had shared the rent, and so he and Rad had co-existed in the house, speaking only enough to make the arrangement work. They never hung out together, and when Gabriel’s friends came over, Rad and Tawny usually went out or else just stayed in Rad’s room.

  Gabriel had a big snake for a pet—Quetzalcoatl, or Ketsel, for short—a Burmese python, which he kept in the basement behind a sort-of enclosure he’d built by sectioning off a ten-foot-wide portion of the garage behind a wall of 2x4s covered with chicken wire. He’d built a door into it so he could go in to feed the snake. Gabriel’s cute little pet had not been the only thing to turn Tawny off to Gabriel. He was punk, with lots of piercings and tattoos, which didn’t bother her; it was the really weird, black candle occult stuff he was into that left her cold.

  Rad opened the door and went down the three steps to the concrete floor of the garage. Tawny stayed just behind him. She was always nervous when she went in the garage, afraid Ketsel had maybe gotten out of his enclosure and hidden himself somewhere close to the door, ready to spring up at her, or drop down on her. She knew how they captured their prey, having seen it on the Nature channel, biting and quickly encircling it in their powerful coils, like a large, muscled man putting someone in a headlock.

  They scanned the enclo
sure side of the garage. Ketsel usually camouflaged himself beside the old Persian rug they’d stripped off the corridor floor and put down there, or behind the wooden pallet on which Rad had piled their earthquake supplies, or around the water heater.

  Ketsel had supposedly been twelve feet long when Gabriel left. They had no idea how long he was now. Gabriel had split when the rent was due, leaving Ketsel as his good faith deposit on his half of the rent. Although Gabriel came by and fed the snake occasionally, he had never paid Rad the back rent he owed, nor had he ever come by to collect his snake.

  Rad spotted Ketsel back by the water heater, behind the tires, and went inside the enclosure.

  On her side of the enclosure, Tawny looked at the growing mound of dirty laundry piled on the floor and up against the chicken wire separator next to the washing machine. She leaned down and start tossing some of the clothes into the washing machine. She noticed that a section of chicken wire bulged out near the floor where it had come loose from a nail, and she made a mental note to tell Rad about it.

  “He has a little lump about midway,” said Rad. “Gabriel must’ve fed him a nice fat rat last week.”

  “Uh huh,” said Tawny. “When is he going to take him out of here?”

  “I don’t know. He hasn’t answered any of my messages for the last month.” Rad pulled the door of the enclosure closed.

  Tawny threw a scoop of soap in the washing machine, dropped the lid, and twisted the knob. Water began running into the machine. “Let’s go upstairs, Babe,” she said.

  Chapter 3

  1015 Skyview Drive. As Allen walked up the driveway he wondered what was for dinner. Tina got home an hour earlier than him. That allowed her to pick up the kids at daycare and start dinner. As he opened the door he thought he smelled roast chicken. Allen had put on a few pounds in the years he’d been married to Tina, but he didn’t care. Tina was a good cook and it was worth it.

  He called into the kitchen, “Honey, I’m home.”

  “Hi, Honey,” Tina smiled at him.

  Allen put his briefcase by the door. Christine sat on the couch, watching TV. With her blond hair curled by Tina into little ringlets, Allen sometimes fancied she was every bit as pretty as the young Shirley Temple had been in her heyday. He called to Christine, but she was so engrossed in the cartoon she didn’t hear him. Allen walked down the hallway and looked in Reynaldo’s door. The little guy sat at his desk, pencil in hand, evidently working on some assignment that Tina had given him. Although Reynaldo was seven, he was still quite small for his age and people took him to be four or five. His hair was crew cut and accentuated with a little pompadour. His upper incisors were a little pronounced and he would need orthodontia in a year or two. But for now they only added to his boyish, Norman Rockwell painting-like good looks.

  How’re you doing, Reynaldo?” Allen called in to him.

  Reynaldo’s handsome brown face curved into a smile. “Good, Daddy.”

  After dinner Tina brought a tin box over to the table. She opened it and took out a chocolate cupcake, placing it before Christine. Allen was surprised when she covered the tin up and took it back to the counter. He frowned. “Uh oh,” he said, “my little boy must be in trouble.”

  “Yes,” said Tina, “he is. And he’s not getting down from this table until he says sorry.”

  “Sorry, Mommy,” said Reynaldo.

  Tina ignored him.

  “What did he do?” said Allen.

  “Tell Daddy what you did,” said Tina.

  Reynaldo frowned and looked down at the table. “I made a mark on my desk, Daddy.”

  “No,” said Tina angrily, “you put a hole in ‘my’ desk. It’s ‘my’ desk, not yours!” She stared at him, then said in a mocking tone, “made a mark…”

  “Sorry, Mommy,” Reynaldo said, his handsome little brown face full of sorrow.

  Tina turned to Allen. “He drilled a hole in the wood with his pencil!”

  Allen tried to compose his face into an appropriately stern frown. “Oh, Reynaldo, what did you do that for?”

  Reynaldo gave him a puzzled look. “I don’t know, Daddy.”

  Tina glowered at Reynaldo. “Get down and go wash your hands. No desert for you.”

  “Yes, Mommy.” Reynaldo slid from his chair and carried his plate to the countertop. He went out of the kitchen.

  “Finish your work,” Tina called after him. “I’ll be in to look at it later.”

  “Yes, Mommy,” Reynaldo said.

  Allen spent about a half-hour on the dishes. As he finished up he heard Tina telling Reynaldo that he could now come out into the living room and watch TV. When Allen came out a few minutes later, the little guy was sitting alone on the couch watching TV. A golden retriever wearing a basketball uniform was sinking shots by leaping up and head butting the ball into the basket. “Reynaldo,” Allen called, “what is that?”

  “Air Bud, Dad. It’s a movie.”

  Allen smiled as he watched for a few minutes. He recalled Belinda, one of the daycare teachers, being amazed at the fact that a little guy like Reynaldo had such an interest in basketball, and, despite his size, seemed to have some talent for it too.

  Allen quietly backed out of the living room and went down to the garage to the little primitive study he’d built there. It was really just a reading space with an old La-Z-Boy recliner and a thick old-fashioned blue hook rug to keep his feet off the concrete floor. He’d set it off from the shabbier portions of the garage by a screen and a ceiling-high bookcase. Allen sat and read the newspaper.

  A half-hour or so later a knock came at the door that led up to the kitchen. Reynaldo and Christine queued there to get their goodnight kisses. Allen got up and went and gave them both a hug and a kiss, then went back down to his newspaper. When he came up later, Tina was sitting alone watching a movie on the Lifetime channel. He sat beside her and half watched, half slept for the next hour, speaking with her during the commercial breaks. After they’d gone to bed, he was still awake when Tina finally emerged from the bathroom. As she slid into the bed beside him he felt a stirring. He ran his hand up her leg. “You tired tonight?” he said.

  “Umm,” she said, “not too…”

  Afterward, Tina went into the bathroom. She always went into the bathroom afterward, Allen thought lethargically. He remembered the young women at college, how they would lie with him afterward, he in them, sometimes falling asleep in each other’s arms. Not Tina. She was too obsessive about germs. She had to go wash everything off. He frowned as he listened to her libations. Theirs wasn’t a perfect marriage, but whose was? He yawned. That’s just the way it was with her; other than that, they were okay.

  Tina came out and slipped into the bed.

  “How’s work, Honey?” he asked her in the dark.

  “Oh,” she said, “I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You know,” he said, “it’s funny… When I came out of the kitchen, Reynaldo was watching a movie about basketball on TV.

  “So?” said Tina.

  “Oh, it’s just that, for a tiny guy like him to have such a big interest in basketball, it’s just funny, that’s all. Did Belinda ever tell you how much he likes to play basketball?”

  “Uh uh,” said Tina as she pulled the covers up around her.

  Allen laughed. “Belinda says he’s quite good.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Tina disinterestedly.

  “You know what, Honey?”

  “What?” Tina yawned.

  “We could put one of those portable basketball hoops in the back yard. That way he could get a little exercise and ...”

  “No,” said Tina. “He’s not getting any hoop until he does better with his schoolwork.”

  “But Honey,” said Allen patiently, “if he works out from time to time, he’ll burn up some of that energy. Then he’ll be able to concentrate better when he does his schoolwork.”

  Tina turned her back to him, shaking the bed. “No. He’s not getting any ho
ops. Not until he does better with his schoolwork.”

  Allen said nothing further, instead turning on his side. When Tina made up her mind about something, it was almost impossible to budge her. They argued a lot about her treatment of Reynaldo and he had begun to worry about what kind of damage that might do to the kids. Parents were supposed to present a united front; he’d heard that on a family counselor’s radio talk show. It made sense—a smart kid would look for an opening, a weakness to exploit and get what he wanted. And so Allen had decided to, as much as he could, leave Tina’s arbitrary, and sometimes seemingly over-the-top calls, unchallenged, and then deal with her later when the kids were asleep. It had seemed to work in the beginning. But, he thought, maybe it hadn’t. Maybe he had just been consoled by having a plan of action.

  Allen sighed deeply. The hell with it. He’d have to work on her another time. He closed his eyes and slept.

  Chapter 4

  1030 Skyview Drive. Rad and Tawny walked up Skyview to catch the bus to his dad’s. A slight breeze washed over them, keeping the summer temperature to a tolerable level. Rad wished he was skating. That was his default go-to fantasy when he found himself in uncomfortable circumstances. Skating was his thing, the one thing he’d achieved a sort-of mastery over. So what the hell had come of the videotape he had sent to Pygmy’s? God! If they would only sponsor him. Shit. He wasn’t vain by thinking he was good. He was. Everyone knew it. When he went to the park all the kids moved off the course, too embarrassed to be skating at the same time as him cause they didn’t want to look too bad. He’d work out while they all sat around on their boards, some, the young ones, watching him in open admiration, the other, older kids disdainfully looking elsewhere, as if they didn’t care what he was doing, when he knew they did—a lot! Shit. You absolutely could not get into the X Games unless you had a sponsor. He sighed. Maybe Pygmy’s would call tonight when he and Tawny returned home.