story: Bad Boys

Bad Boys
by Jack Swenson - swenjack@comcast.net

We were playing poker in my apartment. It was just a friendly game, nickel and dime. What we were doing in fact was keeping Ben company, trying to cheer him up. Ben's girlfriend had dumped him; she told him she didn't want to be with him anymore. I asked him why, and he shrugged. "She didn't say," he said sarcastically.

I'd had my own women troubles not long before. My wife threw me out when she found out I was sleeping with her best friend. Then our friend said adios to me and to her husband and ran off with a high school social studies teacher.

J.T. and Frank were work friends of Ben's. They were both married, happily or not, I don't know. Frank was a glassblower, and J.T. was an engineer, like Ben. They all worked in Silicon Valley, in the computer chip biz.

When Ben and his friends showed up at my place, they were wearing what they wore to work. Ben had on a navy sport coat, grey slacks, and a tie. I had a couple of cats, so I told him to hang up his coat before he sat down so he wouldn't get cat hair on it, but he made a face like he didn't care what he got on his coat, and he sat down with it on and loosened his tie.

Ben drank Heinekens, one bottle after another. I drank old fashioneds, bourbon in a glass with ice and a maraschino cherry. T.J. drank scotch, and Frank didn't drink much of anything. He had a couple of beers.

A little after midnight, somebody got the idea that we should throw soap into the swimming pool. I don't know who suggested it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had a box of Salvo, and we went out onto the balcony of my apartment, which was on the second floor, and pegged the soap cakes, each about the size and shape of a hockey puck, into the pool area. The swimming pool was in the center of a quadrangle of two and three story apartment units.

Some of the missiles hit the water, and some of them didn't. The ones that didn't exploded like grenades on the concrete pool apron.

When the party broke up, after Frank and T.J. left, I told Ben that he could sleep on my couch, but he said no, he had to be at work early in the morning. Some people have real jobs, he said.

I walked as far as the landing with my friend, and as he walked down the steps, I saw the slump of his beefy shoulders beneath the fabric of his coat. He was shedding hair like an old tomcat heading home from a lost war.

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bio: Jack Swenson is a former teacher reborn as a penner of everyday mysteries. He writes about life in the slow lane and occasionally about memories of another kind of life. More than three dozen of his stories have been published in ezines including Burning Word, ken*again, Cenotaph, The Adirondack Review, and ausgang.