WHO: Tragos WHEN: Sunday night/Monday morning - two days after the bachelor party WHERE: Chez Tragos WHAT: Home sweet home WARNINGS: Mentions of domestic violence, toxic masculinity
Here’s a house.
The paint is white, but under the layer of grime the intended colour doesn’t matter anymore. There’s a palate of colours gunked up underneath each weatherboard, the black of mold, the brown of shit, the green-grey of unspecified slime. The paint’s peeling and cracking like sunburned skin, too.
The house stands on the corner of two streets, and doesn’t touch its neighbors. A couple of windows threaten nextdoor with their broken glass teeth. Nextdoor threatens right back. A chainlink fence separates the two, and a moat of cracked slabs of concrete, pockmarked and oil stained, surrounds the house. There’s no lawn, there’s never been a lawn; lawns in this area turn to wild swampy marshes. The only green is some kind of weed twisting up the chain link fence. Few weeds grow through the cracks in the drive, years of leaky oil have soaked into the earth here. The ground is poison.
On the drive sit three cars, two dead and in various stages of vehicular disembowelment, one still running, only by the grace of the sacrifice of the other two and hours and hours of work.
There’s a metaphor in that somewhere, but Tragos doesn’t go in for metaphors. His younger brother Kaden might be able to tell you the difference between a metaphor and a simile but it’s not the kind of conversation that’s ever had around here.
Inside the house: three bedrooms. Kaden’s asleep in his single bed; he has school tomorrow. Tragos is awake on his double futon on the floor; he has work tomorrow, and should be sleeping too. Across the hall Cy sleeps off a heavy hangover from Saturday’s bachelor party. In the master bedroom at the top of the hall, claimed by the oldest brother several years ago, the night their father was arrested, Barak and his girlfriend are fighting.
It’s a bad fight but it always is. She’s screaming as much abuse as he is, and the crashes could equally be shit she’s throwing at him or shit he’s shoving her into. Tragos gets up to shut their bedroom door – Kaden always leaves it open on his nighttime bathroom runs, a fact that Tragos can’t stand – and overhears some of the fight. Something about Barak being a pathetic excuse of a man. If Tragos was in there he’d warn her not to aim that low, but he never gets involved, and besides, Cin should know better by now. The way she yelps in pain as Tragos closes the door says she hasn’t learned anything of the sort, but other people’s survival isn’t Tragos’ problem.
Cindy’s been around for years, on again off again. Barak’s never put her in hospital and she’s never reported him. As relationships go, it’s better than their parents was. Plus she lives up the block, so unless one of them moves or goes to jail (or dies, Tragos supposes) then she’s probably going to be around a while longer.
It’s alright, Tragos has headphones - good ones - and Kaden sleeps through anything.
Neither of them are there in the morning and the car’s gone. Barak’s bedroom door’s hanging open and his room’s more trashed than usual. So is the kitchen. Tragos kicks the worst of the broken glass into a corner of the kitchen and snaps at Kaden to go put on shoes before he makes breakfast.
No sign of Cy either, so it’s just Tragos and Kaden this morning.
Things could be a hell of a lot worse.
Tragos has oats for breakfast (Kaden thinks oatmeal’s gross, but ‘slow release carbohydrates, motherfucker’ Tragos tells him) and Kaden nukes the leftovers he finds at the bottom of a greasy bucket of chicken (‘KFC, motherclucker!’) and they have the TV on as they eat, sprawled on the couch. It’ll probably be the longest Tragos sits down all day (behind the wheel of a car doesn’t count) and even now, he’s not static. One legs stretched across the couch toward Kaden and the other jiggles constantly, his foot on the ground. The news is on, but all the high-up shit going on in the world never feels as important as their real lives. What does an election of a man across the country matter when you’ve been picked by Ares, right? None of the boys are voters.
Kaden talks about it, though. He’s still in school. A whole bunch of the other kids care and it’s rubbed off on him. “You need to give less of a shit,” Tragos tells him. “Focus on something else.”
“Hurr duuur, like punching,?” Kaden says, mocking, and Tragos, foot already dangerously close, aims a kick squarely into his arm. “Ow!”
“Man up, dickhead.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Kaden shoots back, and they abandon breakfast for a wrestle till Kaden yields.
Outside, the world is a swamp in the early morning light. The trees are loud with birds, feasting on the bugs that thrive in the still water pooling on the streets. It’s a part of New York that sits too low to connect to the rest of the city's sewage system, so the neighborhood relies on tanks and cesspools. Many are old enough that they’ve burst underground and there’s a few vacant lots every local knows to avoid unless they’re dumping something worse than sewage.
The land around here is a crater, five blocks between Brooklyn and Queens that sit thirty feet below the rest of the city, as if the border had pressed its heel against the earth and slowly crushed the land down.
Since Barak has taken the car, they can’t drive through the shin deep, murky brown lake that’s drowned the road between their house and the closest bus stop out of here. Which means leaving early enough to take the long way around, cutting three blocks north through the deepest part of the neighborhood. There’s still some puddle jumping to be done, but they’re both long legged boys, both born here, both know how to judge distance and stick a landing.
There’s as many vacant lots as there are houses here, most of them so overgrown the reeds are higher than Tragos’ head. They don’t see many other people as they head toward the bus stop, sometimes racing, sometimes chasing each other. There’s chickens roaming free, and dogs. And neither of them talk about it but they both cross a road toward one particular vacant lot. This one's a car graveyard as much as it is anything, but behind a rusted and burned corpse of a car there’s a white cross they both wordlessly acknowledge. Beneath it is Sniper, the pitbull they’d had since he was a puppy and the reason Tragos knows dogs as well as he does. Barak had stolen him, Cy had named him, Tragos taught him and Kaden loved him.
His death had been a nightmare.
Tragos leaps onto the bonnet of a car and breaks the silence, leaping from one to the other, running across a discarded pile of corrugated iron onto one of rotting wood, over a couch, and finally up the huge mountain of rubble and grass at the far end of the block, till they’re both at the top, Kaden slightly out of breath. In the distance, they can see the bus coming. “Go,” says Kaden, but they’re both already moving, jumping and sliding down the slope. This mound of broken concrete is proof of what happens when developers tried to build here – nothing lasts. Every promising development that tries to find feet here just ends up sinking.
It takes talent for anything to survive here.
It takes art.
They don't stop running. Heading fast toward the double laned road that's like an artery to this place. Faster and faster. The bus is trundling along in the far lane but coming the opposite direction is a blue articulated truck and Tragos's heart is racing because he's already calculating how fast he's going to need to be to make it across the road in front of that truck and he's not stopping and Kaden's not stopping either and for one brief second their eyes meet and the race is on. Feet hit the flat ground and speed up, feet hit the road itself and speed up, the truck's horn rips open the air as they sprint across in front of it, and they they both howl along with the sound because they've made it, and the truck shakes the parked cars on the road as it thunders past and tugs hard at their clothes and Kaden's baseball cap is whipped off completely. He has to chase after it, snatch it off the pavement as he runs the last few feet to the bus stop.
Tragos' heart is beating a grin onto his face, one that doesn't quickly fade.
Kaden makes it to his bus on time, heading out toward his school in Queens. Tragos pad back across the road at a less insane pace, and gets the next one going the opposite direction; back toward the gym.
The bus takes him out of The Hole in literally minutes. It’s only a few blocks. Public housing rises high on either side of the road, there’s shops again, there’s people. The sudden change would be amazing, but it’s not, it’s just home. Tragos finds other things to be amazed at.
That fight, between Ares and Apollo.
That face off on Saturday, between Ares and the madam – Kitty? The hooker had screamed her name. Something like Kitty. She’d been a fucking dagger. They way she and Ares had faced each other, growled words stolen by the music. Tragos has been sure they were all about to witness a double murder, and then when Ares followed her out onto the street he was sure he was about to be summoned to drag their bodies somewhere. (Hey, he thought without emotion while waiting for Ares to come back; at least he knew a few good vacant sunken lots where a body would happily disappear.)
But Ares had returned and the drinks had only gotten stronger. Tragos barely remembers getting home. Only remembers quaffing a bottle of blue powerade before passing out.
No body cleanup duty the next day either. Not that Tragos wants them to be dead. Not that he wants his duties to extent to handing dead women. That wasn’t… that wasn’t why he followed Ares.
Still, he figures he knows how the world works and women in that line of work do tend to die more than anyone else. If he numbs out the memory of the genuine fear on the tattooed girls face (and the tiny bit of pride he’d had in her when she called Barak a hillbilly fuck) then he’d be able to do what he needed to do if Ares askes him to dump her body somewhere. That's just strategic. Be prepared, right?
(What would you have done if it had been Marcie?)
Tragos can't numb that thought out.
(What will you do when it's Marcie?)
He can get off the bus early and run the rest of the way, though.
His shoes hit the pavement running. Tragos has good shoes. The best. There is absolutely no point wasting any of the money they get from Ares by spending it on their house; instead, the money goes toward things. Boxing gloves that fit his hand perfectly. Clothes that mean he doesn't look out of place either in the gym or behind the wheel of one of Ares’ sleek and powerful cars. Food. Good food, clean food, food that’ll help build the muscle he needs to survive. Good noise cancelling headphones. Parts for the car that he can't scavenge from the graveyard.