False Memory

mattresses, he thanked God as he bounced. Then he realized that in free fall, when each lightning-quick thought could have been his last, his mind had been filled with Martie, and that God had occurred to him after the fact.
    The Sorensons had purchased first-rate mattresses. The impact didn’t even knock the wind out of Dusty.
    Skeet, too, had crashed into the safety zone. Now he lay as he had landed, face planted in the satin-weave ticking, arms over his head, motionless, as though he had been so fragile that even a fall into layers of cotton batting, foam rubber, and airy eiderdown had shattered his eggshell bones.
    As the top mattress quickly became sodden with rain, Dusty got onto his hands and knees. He rolled the kid faceup.
    Skeet’s left cheek was abraded, and a small cut bisected the shallow cleft in his chin. Both injuries had probably occurred as he had rolled across the roof tiles; neither produced much blood.
    “Where am I?” Skeet asked.
    “Not where you wanted to be.”
    The kid’s bronze eyes had a dark patina of anguish that hadn’t been evident during the manic minutes on the roof. “Heaven?”
    “I’ll make it seem like Hell, you smacked-out creep,” Motherwell said, looming over them, grabbing Skeet by his sweater and hauling him to his feet. If the sky had been split by lightning and shaken by thunder, Motherwell could have passed for Thor, Scandinavian god of the storm. “You’re off my crew, you’re finished, you hopeless screwup!”
    “Easy, easy,” Dusty said, scrambling to his feet and off the mattress.
    Still holding Skeet a foot off the ground, Motherwell rounded on Dusty. “I mean it, boss. Either he’s gone, he’s history, or I can’t work with you anymore.”
    “Okay, all right. Just put him down, Ned.”
    Instead of releasing Skeet, Motherwell shook him and shouted in his face, spraying enough foamy spittle to flock him like a Christmas tree: “By the time we buy new mattresses, three expensive mattresses, there goes most of the profit. Do you have any clue, you shithead?”
    Dangling from Motherwell’s hands, offering no resistance, Skeet said, “I didn’t ask you to put down the mattresses.”
    “I wasn’t trying to save you, asshole.”
    “You’re always calling me names,” Skeet said. “I never call you names.”
    “You’re a walking pus bag.” Straight Edgers, like Motherwell, denied themselves many things, but never anger. Dusty admired their efforts to lead a clean life in the dirty world they had inherited, and he understood their anger even as he sometimes wearied of it.

    “Man, I like you,” Skeet told Motherwell. “I wish you could like me.”
    “You’re a pimple on the ass of humanity,” Motherwell thundered, casting Skeet aside as if tossing a bag of garbage.
    Skeet almost slammed into Foster Newton, who was passing by. Fig halted as the kid collapsed in a heap on the driveway, glanced at Dusty, said, “See you in the morning if it doesn’t rain,” stepped over Skeet, and proceeded to his car at the curb, still listening to talk radio through his headphones, as though he’d seen people jumping off roofs every day of his working life.
    “What a mess,” Ned Motherwell said, frowning at the drenched mattresses.
    “I’ve got to check him into rehab,” Dusty told Motherwell, as he helped Skeet to his feet.
    “I’ll take care of this mess,” Motherwell assured him. “Just get that cankerous little weasel-dick out of my sight.”
    All along the rainwashed circular driveway to the street, Skeet leaned on Dusty. His previous frenetic energy, whether it had come from drugs or from the prospect of successful self-destruction, was gone, and he was limp with weariness, almost asleep on his feet.
    The security guard fell in beside them as they neared Dusty’s white Ford van. “I’ll have to file a report about this.”
    “Yeah? With whom?”
    “The executive board of the homeowners’ association. With a copy to the property-management company.”
    “They won’t kneecap me with a shotgun, will they?” Dusty asked as he propped Skeet against the van.
    “Nah, they never take my recommendation,” the guard said, and Dusty was forced to reevaluate him.
    Rising out of his stupor, Skeet warned, “They’ll want your soul, Dusty. I know these bastards.”
    From behind a veil of water that drizzled off the visor of his uniform cap, the security guard said, “They might put you on a list of undesirable contractors they’d rather not have in the community. But probably all that’ll happen is they’ll want you