So, is that like Sid Vicious?
Because I told rotynd there might be another scene posted sometime soon. In this, we meet the third humour of An Ill Humour; I'm sure a lucky guess may be made as to which one:
Early June should not have been this hot, but try taking a calendar outside and waving it around, telling-what? the air?-that the solstice wasn’t for two weeks yet, no need to be so quick turning up the heat.
Since the roof of the new house was still being worked on, every Sangre kid but the youngest one or two had been turned loose and told to go play somewhere else. In traffic, their mother had suggested, but they’d settled on a field behind the house instead. Gracia, the eldest present at sixteen, was helping the smaller girls tie pink and yellow ribbons to tree branches, and then watching them sway to and fro in the breeze.
From the field Gracia could see the blackened silhouettes of men walking around on the roof, and figured that roofers, while probably being touched in the head from working under the sun all day, if they weren’t already for choosing to do that to begin with, at least had a sort of catlike balance, being able to stand and walk on those slopes without falling.
Or, so she thought-until one of those silhouettes slid, and fell two stories into the flower beds by the back door.
“Oh shi … eesh,” she finished, jumping out of the tree. “Everyone, stay put. I’m going to make sure that no one died.” Flip-flops chafed between her toes as she took off toward the house.
Flip-flop, her feet drummed, flip-flop, flip-
Stop. “Are you dead?”
She stood carefully in the flower bed, so her mom wouldn’t yell at her for trampling the flowers the roofer didn’t take out, and leaned over him. He might have been her older brother-in age, only, as he was way too dark all-around to be any of her siblings. His eyes were shut, but he muttered something, so she figured he’d heard, but maybe didn’t understand. “Do you speak English? ¿Está usted muerto?”
His eyes were yellow when they shot open. “I’m American, you airhead!” he barked hoarsely.
“’Kay.” Gracia took a step back while he climbed to his feet and brushed himself off. “There’s grass on your butt.”
“How old are you?” he demanded.
“Sixteen.”
“Aren’t you a little young to be staring at men’s asses?”
Was he kidding?
“Vicious!” a man shouted down at them. “You still alive?” The fallen man muttered something like “Unfortunately.”
“Vicious?” Gracia repeated, blinking her eyes. Green; virtually all the Sangres had green or blue eyes. “Are you related to Sid Vicious?”
Was he related to-Vicious wasn’t going to dignify that with an answer. Instead, he looked away toward the foreman, and his boss, Rex Robinson, walking up to him, frowning at him. “Is there a problem, Rex?” he asked, feigning nonchalance. He didn’t much care for Rex, who hung around the trucks all the time while everyone else fried their brains working. The only thing he had going for him was that the business was called Robinson Roofing, headed by his mother, the widowed Regina Robinson.
Rex cut to the chase. “Have you been drinking, Paul?”
Ass, only guy here who still called him that. Not that he coveted his nickname-which if he figured right, he’d received somewhere between punching a now ex-coworker who’d gone on a half-assed rampage; and asking one of the drivers (how the man got that position was beyond his comprehension) if his mother had binge-drank while pregnant, and as it turned out she had died in a car wreck not a month before, drunk driving-but Vicious was better than Paul, his inheritance from his father the “ascetic.”
(Should have seen that coming: Paul the Elder was so “ascetic” he thought an individual name was superfluous.)
“How could I be doing that? I can’t buy anything.” He was only twenty, as stated on the paperwork that Rex had supposedly-emphasis on supposedly-read.
“I’m not making any accusations…” Rex spluttered.
Bull.
“… just heard some of the goings-on with your people, accounts of alcohol and peyote…”
He winced, and opened his mouth to correct him-
“Peyote,” said the redhead girl, the one that’d been speaking Spanish to him. One of the Sangre kids, no doubt.
Rex blinked. “What?”
“Pe-yo-te. Rhymes with co-yo-te. You know, those wolf things that howl at the ground and play tricks on people?”
Vicious smirked as Rex grew more blank faced. “Who’re you?”
“Gracia. Gracia. Not Grace-Gracia. Sangre. My parents hired you guys.”
“Oh. Well, I think you’re supposed to be playing somewhere.”
Guy didn’t even have a solid enough spine to convincingly talk down a teenage girl. Vicious rolled his eyes, wiped some sweat off his forehead, wiped his hand on his pants, and stood up straight. He was almost six foot, a feat in his family; Rex Robinson was just under five foot and a half. He wore a fierce sunburn and had never quite recovered from the time that both Pauls lived a month on onions and onion byproducts, while Rex was pink-tinged, while didn’t help the effect his rounded features rendered. Vicious had made his way through life on a path slicked in sweat; Rex slid through on Mother’s Milk.
Thus, Vicious thought himself most entitled to use a faintly but audibly disdainful tone when he said, “You might want to check the chronology of some of those stories you heard, and which Paul they’re about.” He shrugged. “And if we all judged people by their parents’ conduct, I’d probably not be walking round you without a shirt on.” He really wasn’t sure that Regina Robinson had ever bothered reading his paperwork, either.
While Rex appeared t think that over, and not comprehend, he asked the Sangre girl-Gracia-“Do you have any agua I can … bebo?” He’d probably fucked that one up.
Probably, from the look she gave him. “Drink? There’s a sink in the kitchen.”
“I’m taking a break,” Vicious told Rex. “I’m dehydrated.” Plus he sucked at balancing; somewhere in that combination of factors was the cause of him taking a fall.
“I was pretty sure there was a hose somewhere out there,” Gracia said in the kitchen. She gave him ice water in a plastic cup with Disney characters on it.
“There was.” He drank. “The big mother hen woman took it out because she thought we were drinking more than we were roofing.”
Green eyes widened a little. “‘The big mother hen woman’ … That’s my mom.”
So that’s what Diana Sangre looked like. Taking into account the number of kids he’d seen, Vicious wondered if Mr. Sangre was blind. He paused, twisted his mouth into a half-frown. “She’s kind of a bitch,” he decided.
“She’s been stressed from moving,” Gracia defended.
“Moving,” he pushed, “to this house; or moving, in general?”
Gracia screwed up her face. “Or, maybe she’s on the rag.” His face mimicked hers. She considered him a moment, then said, “You’re kind of an ass.” He shrugged, and drank down the rest of his water, trying not to get a brain freeze as he did. “So, are you related to Sid Vicious?”
Seriously? “Completely unaffiliated,” he replied. “All I know about that band, is I know about that band.”
“So you’re not related?”
No. “Do I look British to you?”
“You look brassed.” She smiled while he glared at her. “What are you, then?”
“Half-Paul, half-Veronica.” Fuck if he knew. Outside he caught sight of a half-dozen red-gold heads, just a sample of what he’d seen earlier. “Those all your siblings?”
“Not all. A few are cousins.”
“So, what, you guys are Mormon or something?”
“I don’t … think so. What’re you?”
He thought of Paul the “ascetic.” “Disgruntled.” He drained his glass and set it down. “Going back to work. You’re a better hostess than your mother hen mother.”
And so Vicious met Gracia Sangre, and would later wish on more than one occasion that he hadn’t.
Not long after the Sangre job was done, Vicious found himself “let go.” Due to his age, twenty-two-year-old Rex had told him. Regina wanted better assurance of her employees’ commitment, which a higher age seemed to provide her. Vicious had a hard time believing that Rex was that stupid and decided it must be denial-Regina Robinson hadn’t hired Vicious for his work, he’d found out to his displeasure, but since he’d told her in words that basically translated to his having no desire whatsoever for old tuna, and showed no sign of being persuaded otherwise, she saw no reason to hang on to him.
“Heh,” was all he said when he got the news from Rex, who looked like he was afraid Vicious might attack him.
Adding with a sadistic grimace, “Fellow could sue over that kind of thing,” just to watch Rex squirm.
He wouldn’t, of course. Vicious had no desire to unnecessarily entangle himself in a mess of legal labyrinth. Not when he could do it one better, swifter, himself.
A week later, San Maria’s hot topic gossip was word that someone in Pine Copse had seen someone bearing strong semblance to Regina Robinson in the vicinity of the free clinic. This single, fragmented seed of a detail was enough to take root in people’s minds and make their imaginations run wild.
Meanwhile Vicious collected unemployment and smirked as the number of jobs for Robinson Roofing plummeted.
Doing some washing today to make sure I have enough shirts underwear et cetera to see me through at OJ's place until Sunday. His car doesn't have AC so he wants to beat the heat and come get me tomorrow morning before it gets too hot; I mentioned a couple of entries back that I'll be selling ice at some fiesta in Topeka this week, make some money that way. Which is good, because it looks like I might have to shell out an amount that, while not exceeding $100 yet, is still a nice chunk of change that I "owe" through means that were definitely trickery on the bank's part, maybe a mistake on mine; but it may do best to throw down a green sacrifice when I metaphorically burn that bridge (close any and all accounts with that bank, maybe verbally abuse a few tellers, and say how I'll badmouth the bank to any acquaintances and potential clients of theirs in the future) so that they may never ever hound me again, before my poor green is demanded in triple number amounts ==+
Not that I'm going to completely murder my pride and do the same for the collection agency that's been bugging me off and on since January--because those circumstances were based entirely on deception, no mistakes hinted at whatsoever, and they're much much easier to give the finger and disregard without consequence. It helped that I'm not returning to my previous address at the school, and I also changed my phone number.
Ugh. Moral of the story--don't trust security even when they're supposed to be on your side, don't go to doctors even if you might have an infection, basically, don't trust anyone with a legal status above your own who might then use said status to deceive/extort from you. I'm getting a new account with a new bank after I move into the duplex; don't plan on going to a doctor's office or hospital ever again unless there's a lot of blood gushing out of me or my ears are in painful need of tending or something; returning to the persuit of alternative medicine because it's bullshit when they try charging $300 for looking at a bitemark for maybe five minutes after making a person wait two hours; and I may never again put my full name and contact info et cetera on any legal sort of paperwork. Clean your wounds, bury your dead, keep your name, all that good shit.
Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm a Socialist or a Libertarian, or some very complex probably scary hybrid between those two very very different ideologies.
With that in mind, I think sometime this week, or next week after I get back and square away all this bullshit with the bank, I'm calling up Jack for a number with an arts magazine over there that I might be able to get a little side work with. I'm still looking for a real job as soon as I move in over there, because I don't trust money that I can't feel solid in my hand, but if I get something supplementary rolling before the move, that'd be pretty neat.
P.S., to anyone who might know, is it just me or does part of the tune for Duran Duran's "Do You Believe In Shame?" sync up with "Suzy Q"?
Early June should not have been this hot, but try taking a calendar outside and waving it around, telling-what? the air?-that the solstice wasn’t for two weeks yet, no need to be so quick turning up the heat.
Since the roof of the new house was still being worked on, every Sangre kid but the youngest one or two had been turned loose and told to go play somewhere else. In traffic, their mother had suggested, but they’d settled on a field behind the house instead. Gracia, the eldest present at sixteen, was helping the smaller girls tie pink and yellow ribbons to tree branches, and then watching them sway to and fro in the breeze.
From the field Gracia could see the blackened silhouettes of men walking around on the roof, and figured that roofers, while probably being touched in the head from working under the sun all day, if they weren’t already for choosing to do that to begin with, at least had a sort of catlike balance, being able to stand and walk on those slopes without falling.
Or, so she thought-until one of those silhouettes slid, and fell two stories into the flower beds by the back door.
“Oh shi … eesh,” she finished, jumping out of the tree. “Everyone, stay put. I’m going to make sure that no one died.” Flip-flops chafed between her toes as she took off toward the house.
Flip-flop, her feet drummed, flip-flop, flip-
Stop. “Are you dead?”
She stood carefully in the flower bed, so her mom wouldn’t yell at her for trampling the flowers the roofer didn’t take out, and leaned over him. He might have been her older brother-in age, only, as he was way too dark all-around to be any of her siblings. His eyes were shut, but he muttered something, so she figured he’d heard, but maybe didn’t understand. “Do you speak English? ¿Está usted muerto?”
His eyes were yellow when they shot open. “I’m American, you airhead!” he barked hoarsely.
“’Kay.” Gracia took a step back while he climbed to his feet and brushed himself off. “There’s grass on your butt.”
“How old are you?” he demanded.
“Sixteen.”
“Aren’t you a little young to be staring at men’s asses?”
Was he kidding?
“Vicious!” a man shouted down at them. “You still alive?” The fallen man muttered something like “Unfortunately.”
“Vicious?” Gracia repeated, blinking her eyes. Green; virtually all the Sangres had green or blue eyes. “Are you related to Sid Vicious?”
Was he related to-Vicious wasn’t going to dignify that with an answer. Instead, he looked away toward the foreman, and his boss, Rex Robinson, walking up to him, frowning at him. “Is there a problem, Rex?” he asked, feigning nonchalance. He didn’t much care for Rex, who hung around the trucks all the time while everyone else fried their brains working. The only thing he had going for him was that the business was called Robinson Roofing, headed by his mother, the widowed Regina Robinson.
Rex cut to the chase. “Have you been drinking, Paul?”
Ass, only guy here who still called him that. Not that he coveted his nickname-which if he figured right, he’d received somewhere between punching a now ex-coworker who’d gone on a half-assed rampage; and asking one of the drivers (how the man got that position was beyond his comprehension) if his mother had binge-drank while pregnant, and as it turned out she had died in a car wreck not a month before, drunk driving-but Vicious was better than Paul, his inheritance from his father the “ascetic.”
(Should have seen that coming: Paul the Elder was so “ascetic” he thought an individual name was superfluous.)
“How could I be doing that? I can’t buy anything.” He was only twenty, as stated on the paperwork that Rex had supposedly-emphasis on supposedly-read.
“I’m not making any accusations…” Rex spluttered.
Bull.
“… just heard some of the goings-on with your people, accounts of alcohol and peyote…”
He winced, and opened his mouth to correct him-
“Peyote,” said the redhead girl, the one that’d been speaking Spanish to him. One of the Sangre kids, no doubt.
Rex blinked. “What?”
“Pe-yo-te. Rhymes with co-yo-te. You know, those wolf things that howl at the ground and play tricks on people?”
Vicious smirked as Rex grew more blank faced. “Who’re you?”
“Gracia. Gracia. Not Grace-Gracia. Sangre. My parents hired you guys.”
“Oh. Well, I think you’re supposed to be playing somewhere.”
Guy didn’t even have a solid enough spine to convincingly talk down a teenage girl. Vicious rolled his eyes, wiped some sweat off his forehead, wiped his hand on his pants, and stood up straight. He was almost six foot, a feat in his family; Rex Robinson was just under five foot and a half. He wore a fierce sunburn and had never quite recovered from the time that both Pauls lived a month on onions and onion byproducts, while Rex was pink-tinged, while didn’t help the effect his rounded features rendered. Vicious had made his way through life on a path slicked in sweat; Rex slid through on Mother’s Milk.
Thus, Vicious thought himself most entitled to use a faintly but audibly disdainful tone when he said, “You might want to check the chronology of some of those stories you heard, and which Paul they’re about.” He shrugged. “And if we all judged people by their parents’ conduct, I’d probably not be walking round you without a shirt on.” He really wasn’t sure that Regina Robinson had ever bothered reading his paperwork, either.
While Rex appeared t think that over, and not comprehend, he asked the Sangre girl-Gracia-“Do you have any agua I can … bebo?” He’d probably fucked that one up.
Probably, from the look she gave him. “Drink? There’s a sink in the kitchen.”
“I’m taking a break,” Vicious told Rex. “I’m dehydrated.” Plus he sucked at balancing; somewhere in that combination of factors was the cause of him taking a fall.
“I was pretty sure there was a hose somewhere out there,” Gracia said in the kitchen. She gave him ice water in a plastic cup with Disney characters on it.
“There was.” He drank. “The big mother hen woman took it out because she thought we were drinking more than we were roofing.”
Green eyes widened a little. “‘The big mother hen woman’ … That’s my mom.”
So that’s what Diana Sangre looked like. Taking into account the number of kids he’d seen, Vicious wondered if Mr. Sangre was blind. He paused, twisted his mouth into a half-frown. “She’s kind of a bitch,” he decided.
“She’s been stressed from moving,” Gracia defended.
“Moving,” he pushed, “to this house; or moving, in general?”
Gracia screwed up her face. “Or, maybe she’s on the rag.” His face mimicked hers. She considered him a moment, then said, “You’re kind of an ass.” He shrugged, and drank down the rest of his water, trying not to get a brain freeze as he did. “So, are you related to Sid Vicious?”
Seriously? “Completely unaffiliated,” he replied. “All I know about that band, is I know about that band.”
“So you’re not related?”
No. “Do I look British to you?”
“You look brassed.” She smiled while he glared at her. “What are you, then?”
“Half-Paul, half-Veronica.” Fuck if he knew. Outside he caught sight of a half-dozen red-gold heads, just a sample of what he’d seen earlier. “Those all your siblings?”
“Not all. A few are cousins.”
“So, what, you guys are Mormon or something?”
“I don’t … think so. What’re you?”
He thought of Paul the “ascetic.” “Disgruntled.” He drained his glass and set it down. “Going back to work. You’re a better hostess than your mother hen mother.”
And so Vicious met Gracia Sangre, and would later wish on more than one occasion that he hadn’t.
Not long after the Sangre job was done, Vicious found himself “let go.” Due to his age, twenty-two-year-old Rex had told him. Regina wanted better assurance of her employees’ commitment, which a higher age seemed to provide her. Vicious had a hard time believing that Rex was that stupid and decided it must be denial-Regina Robinson hadn’t hired Vicious for his work, he’d found out to his displeasure, but since he’d told her in words that basically translated to his having no desire whatsoever for old tuna, and showed no sign of being persuaded otherwise, she saw no reason to hang on to him.
“Heh,” was all he said when he got the news from Rex, who looked like he was afraid Vicious might attack him.
Adding with a sadistic grimace, “Fellow could sue over that kind of thing,” just to watch Rex squirm.
He wouldn’t, of course. Vicious had no desire to unnecessarily entangle himself in a mess of legal labyrinth. Not when he could do it one better, swifter, himself.
A week later, San Maria’s hot topic gossip was word that someone in Pine Copse had seen someone bearing strong semblance to Regina Robinson in the vicinity of the free clinic. This single, fragmented seed of a detail was enough to take root in people’s minds and make their imaginations run wild.
Meanwhile Vicious collected unemployment and smirked as the number of jobs for Robinson Roofing plummeted.
Doing some washing today to make sure I have enough shirts underwear et cetera to see me through at OJ's place until Sunday. His car doesn't have AC so he wants to beat the heat and come get me tomorrow morning before it gets too hot; I mentioned a couple of entries back that I'll be selling ice at some fiesta in Topeka this week, make some money that way. Which is good, because it looks like I might have to shell out an amount that, while not exceeding $100 yet, is still a nice chunk of change that I "owe" through means that were definitely trickery on the bank's part, maybe a mistake on mine; but it may do best to throw down a green sacrifice when I metaphorically burn that bridge (close any and all accounts with that bank, maybe verbally abuse a few tellers, and say how I'll badmouth the bank to any acquaintances and potential clients of theirs in the future) so that they may never ever hound me again, before my poor green is demanded in triple number amounts ==+
Not that I'm going to completely murder my pride and do the same for the collection agency that's been bugging me off and on since January--because those circumstances were based entirely on deception, no mistakes hinted at whatsoever, and they're much much easier to give the finger and disregard without consequence. It helped that I'm not returning to my previous address at the school, and I also changed my phone number.
Ugh. Moral of the story--don't trust security even when they're supposed to be on your side, don't go to doctors even if you might have an infection, basically, don't trust anyone with a legal status above your own who might then use said status to deceive/extort from you. I'm getting a new account with a new bank after I move into the duplex; don't plan on going to a doctor's office or hospital ever again unless there's a lot of blood gushing out of me or my ears are in painful need of tending or something; returning to the persuit of alternative medicine because it's bullshit when they try charging $300 for looking at a bitemark for maybe five minutes after making a person wait two hours; and I may never again put my full name and contact info et cetera on any legal sort of paperwork. Clean your wounds, bury your dead, keep your name, all that good shit.
Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm a Socialist or a Libertarian, or some very complex probably scary hybrid between those two very very different ideologies.
With that in mind, I think sometime this week, or next week after I get back and square away all this bullshit with the bank, I'm calling up Jack for a number with an arts magazine over there that I might be able to get a little side work with. I'm still looking for a real job as soon as I move in over there, because I don't trust money that I can't feel solid in my hand, but if I get something supplementary rolling before the move, that'd be pretty neat.
P.S., to anyone who might know, is it just me or does part of the tune for Duran Duran's "Do You Believe In Shame?" sync up with "Suzy Q"?