Pain, Roberto A Robles [best classic novels txt] 📗

wasn’t all that young now, and I suspected his hearing wasn’t what it used to be. Trenton’s mom wasn’t all too partial to the ball game, so she’d go into the living room or the kitchen and, if she wasn’t cooking or something, she’d sit down at the kitchen table and read, sew, write letters, whatever, but always with the radio on. Of course, her husband’s TV could be heard in the kitchen, so she’d also turn up the volume on her radio.
Whenever Trenton and I were at his house on a given evening, we’d close the door to his room and put some music on ourselves. And, you guessed it. We didn’t turn it up because his parents didn’t let us hear the music, they didn’t, but we played it loud because we liked it loud.
Ginny? She played the violin. Have you ever attended a concert by a philharmonic orchestra? Think of those few minutes before they start playing, when every musician is fine-tuning a different instrument in that confined space, at the same time, and you’ll get an idea what Trenton’s house was like in the evenings.
I loved it.
He said it drove him crazy, but I never believed him.
There’s another reason why there could be noise in Trenton’s house, one which has a bearing on what I have to tell you.
The Dobbs could get angry as fast as an alpha gorilla when somebody’s poked his butt with a fork. A red-hot fork. And just as viciously.
The first time I witnessed this transformation in my friend’s family, I was as bewildered as that old man at the end of the movie about nuclear war, The Day After, do you remember the one? Yes, I was as frightened as he was, as well.
Just about anything could spark a fight among members of the family, and then barroom fights jumped to mind and you felt like ducking and taking cover.
They loved each other, I’ll swear to that, and they could be as tight as any family you’ve known, and as fun as any child growing up could wish. It’s just that they all had the same quick fuses and strong personalities, that made them want to dominate everyone else. Think of Hitler, Mussolini, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Indirah Gandhi living as roommates for a few years, and picture each of them telling the others what the arrangement of the furniture is going to be, what they’ll watch on TV, what they’ll eat, which room is whose. Not that my friend’s family were evil as those I mentioned, you understand, but, at times, they certainly seemed as fierce.
The last full-scale fight I ever witnessed chez Dobbs, happened on a weekend.
We’d just finished lunch. Trenton’s mom and dad had lit cigarettes. This was back in the days when people felt free to smoke without the guilt produced by a meddlesome society censoring their habits. As they enjoyed their cig, they were considering sending Trenton and me to the nearest Starbuck’s for a couple of alto lattes. We didn’t mind. These requests usually came accompanied by a chance to drive Mr. Dobb’s car, which was sweet, especially considering our only set of wheel was my old beetle, not precisely a babe magnet, you understand, and babes was what Starbuck’s was all about back in those days. Too old for us, you say? Sure, but we’re talking ogling here. We were teenagers, and the days of the C were fast approaching behind the horizon.
Then Ginny said, “I’ll get your coffee, dad, it’s Trenton’s turn to do the dishes.”
My bubble burst. Not for long, though. If I wanted to see babes, I just had to come over to my friend’s house, remember?
However, Trenton was disappointed.
“Bitch,” he said, not quite in a whisper.
“Mind your mouth, boy,” his father said, just as Ginny yelled, “What? Mom!” in that inimitable teenage girl style.
Silently, I willed Trenton to say he was sorry. I knew how fast tempers flew around here.
“Apologize to your sister,” Mrs. Dobbs demanded.
“Why? She’s a bitch.”
Ginny flew at him so fast, she seemed to have beamed herself from one corner of the kitchen to the other. One moment she was standing by the fridge with her jaw hanging open, looking like a seventeenth century duelist’s fiancée whose honor has been called into question, five feet away from my friend, the next she was slapping Trenton’s face. Hard.
I flinched when I saw/heard the slap. She was fiery. I’m ashamed to say I found her delicious just then, with her tight jeans poised at an angle my eyes just couldn’t resist being drawn to, as she bent slightly forward getting in Trenton’s face.
“Call me a bitch once more, asshole!” she screamed.
As many fights as I witnessed between brother and sister, I never saw him hit her, I’ll tell you that. He cut her, deeply and painfully, with his sarcasm, squeezing metaphorical lemon on the open wounds of her adolescent lack of self-confidence. With well chosen slights, belittling comments, and knowing full well what buttons to press, with the right amount of scorn and a cruel streak inside him, my friend could pour venom as deadly as that cooked up by Sleeping Beauty’s nemesis.
She, on the other hand, hit him often enough that, had he received all the blows she gave him in the years I knew them, one after the other in a single night, he would have found himself beaten to a pulp, unrecognizable, drooling, brain-damaged, and toothless.
“Stop, both of you!” Mrs. Dobbs yelled.
“I’ll call you a bitch,” threatened Trenton through clenched teeth, ignoring his mother. “What you’re gonna do?”
All five of us were now standing, and the spacious kitchen seemed to have inexplicably shrunk. I stood, helpless behind my chair, as if I planned to clear the table and wash the dishes so the row would be solved; Mrs. Dobbs stood almost between her son and daughter, clearly intending to intervene any second now; Mr. Dobbs stood between his chair and the table, and watched in sullen silence, clearly disgusted by what he saw.
Ginny couldn’t find an answer to her brother’s challenge that would be offensive enough, so she resorted to the kind of thing that made him see red. “Master swine,” she called him lowering her voice. Experience had taught her that when she insulted her brother, a low voice yielded better results; also, she could be utterly creative.
“Oh, here comes the wit of a fourth grader again!” he mocked in return.
“You’re a boil on a maggot’s ass!” Ginny said.
Do maggots have asses? I wondered incongruously.
She went on before her brother could reply, “Your birth certificate is an apology from the condom factory.
“You’re the slime in a hooker’s toilet.”
Oh, I liked that one.
“Stop it!” their mother hollered.
“If you were twice as smart, you’d still be stupid,” she paused for breath.
“Damn it, Jackson, do something!” Mrs. Dobbs charged her husband. “Don’t just stand there!”
“Oh, you stupid girl,” Trenton now spat at his sister, “you never know when to stop.” He took a step towards her, which forced her to take a step back towards the wall, as their faces were already inches from each other, making me fear this might be the first time I was going to see him hit her. “Name calling is the best you can do,” Trenton said, forgetting he had started this whole thing with name calling. “I ought to punch your mouth and be done with it!”
“Don’t you dare, Trenton!” his father finally yelled at the same time his mother cried, “Shut up! Shut up, now!”
“Do it!” Ginny challenged her brother, “put your hands behind that big cesspool you call mouth, and do it!”
Mrs. Dobbs slapped Ginny. As hard as she had slapped her brother, now her mother returned the favor. Caught off guard, Ginny’s head turned with the blow, and her body followed, almost losing its balance. Trenton honked in surprised and pleasure at his mother’s intervention, but, returning her arm to its usual position, she backslapped Trenton’s face, as well.
“I am sick of your fights!” Mrs. Dobbs shouted at them. “Why the hell do you have to use that language in my house?” She was panting, she had really put everything behind those two blows. Her face was red, strands of hair were on her face. For a moment I feared she might have a stroke or something.
“Get out of here!” she screamed. “Get the hell out of my kitchen! Get the hell out of my house!”
“Marion,” Mr. Dobbs said to his wife, “you punish violence with violence, where does that leave us?”
“Shut up!” Both Mr. Dobbs and I flinched. True, the timing of his comment was misguided, but I had never seen her talk to him like that. “If you can’t act like their father when you’re needed, then shut up! You don’t like the way I handle it, the next time do something about it!” She stormed out of the kitchen.
Mr. Dobbs looked sadly at his children, “Thanks a lot,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen, too.
Ginny was holding her face and shooting mortal darts through her eyes at Trenton. I touched his shoulder and pushed him towards the door, “Go man,” I said to him, “have a smoke in your room, I’ll be right over.”
Amazingly, he did. He looked at his sister one final time, lowered his eyes, and walked out of the kitchen.
I turned to Ginny but, before I could speak, she said “Can it, priest. I don’t need your sympathy.”
“Actually, I was gonna say you’re really something.”
“Something, yeah” she said. “Road kill, the way I pissed off my mom.”
“You were great,” I insisted. “I wish I could say the things you say when I’m angry, but I just stutter and look pathetic. I can never think of a single thing to say.”
She smiled. I got that at least; she had a lovely smile.
“The slime in a hooker’s toilet?” I quoted, and we started giggling.
“Sshhh!” she put a finger to her lips. “They hear us laughing you’ll get it, too!” But of course that got us laughing even harder, albeit silently.
If ever I had a chance to get something going with Ginny, that was it, but I got cold feet. I mumbled something about seeing how Trenton was and fled the kitchen. I never forgot the way she looked right then, though, all disheveled and flustered, flushed by anger, with the red, angry mark of her mom’s hand on her face.
Talk about lost opportunities and its consequences.

“The operation’s tomorrow,” Trenton told me two weeks later on the phone, “at nine. You think…”
“I’ll be there,” I said, guessing he wanted me there, but didn’t feel good about asking. “I’m not sure I can make it at nine, but I’ll be there.”
“Thanks, man,” my friend said. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but...”
“I love him, too, Squig,” I said. “You know that.”
I hung up the phone and stared at it for a few seconds. This is where I’m supposed to tell you that I knew something was wrong. I’m supposed to say that I had this feeling that something would go wrong. But I didn’t. I stared at the phone because I was concerned for Mr. Dobbs, just like anyone else, and I wished it were already tomorrow, after the operation, with him recuperating in his hospital room, so I could go in and tell stupid jokes to Ginny and his mom, trying to lighten up the moment.
I didn’t get any bad feelings or presentiments of impending doom mostly because I’m not psychic, but also because there was no problem with the operation; it