Victor didn't laugh when his mother died. He cried. He cried on Max's shoulder. He cried on Max's breast. He cried on Max's belly. He cried on Max's lap. Then he got ridiculously high on JumpJuice and drank. He did that for about a week. Then he threw up for two days. The following morning, he woke up, brushed his teeth, dressed, and said only one thing to Max before he left. It was the first thing he ever confided to her. "One day,"he said,"I am going to love someone as much as my mother loved me." Then he walked out of the house. She did not follow him.
Leer listened with keen interest to everything that Max told him, attempting to judge where she was headed with the whole monologue, while recognizing that he was supposed to be all of these things she told him he was with the exception that now he was changed, transformed by death and resurrection into what Leer hoped he could present as a new and better Victor; all without raising the suspicion of those who lived, worked, fought and loved within Victor's world.
Max told Leer about Victor's gang, though she complained about personalities and clothing styles, he got the point that they were pretty tight and that any one of them would have loved to be his friend. He had made it clear in ways both subtle and not so, that he neither wanted nor needed friends. They were loyal, mostly stupid but loyal, and since the death of Victor's sister, the only "family" he had, except for a nephew. The nephew, according to Victor, was too young to be good for anything. This evaluation was based upon the circumstances that the boy was home when Victor's sister was killed and couldn't or didn't do anything to stop it.
The story goes that these guys were going to "invite" Victor's sister out for a little party. The boy said that he had heard a bunch of laughing coming from upstairs, so he went upstairs saying,"ma?" - Victor's sister then shushed him and sent him away and went back to laughing. About twenty minutes later the boy heard his mother saying "no". Then louder,"NO". Then louder,"Just get the BAST OUT OF HERE!" - Then the boy heard a loud crash followed by a thud and three different voices saying, "bast", "Damn!" and "BAST!" respectively and footsteps running out of the house. He went upstairs and found his mother, Victor's sister, Gloria, dead. Her head was bloody and a shattered vase lay upon the floor beside her body. The boy told the police who had been visiting his mother.
The following morning, the three visitors were on the front page of the local newspaper, dead. They had each been stuffed into a fifty gallon drum full of water, their legs sticking up like flowers from a vase.
That was the way Victor dealt with loss, swift and mighty vengeance.
No comments:
Post a Comment