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powderblueblood · 6 months ago

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the king of hawkins high

hawkins, indiana. 1960-somethin'. al munson reckons with the reality of his brother being shipped off to vietnam, and carries on a years-long tradition of swapping a ring with his best friend, ray doevski. which could mean nothing. cw: swearing, mention of criminal activities, era-typical misogyny and implied homophobia, guys is it gay to wipe motor oil from your homie's face when they've possibly just set a heinous crime in motion, murder but kind of not really. i didnt proofread this i am really just running on the fumes of vibes atp wc: 6.1k. what goes on. tagging @slowdancer, without whose continued interest in the old man yaoi aspect of hellfire & ice, this would not be possible. i appreciate you more than you know part of the hellfire & ice universe

He comes to with his head against the tile.

Comes to as in wakes up or comes into jettisoned back to sobriety by the force of his own piss stream, he’s not sure, but he is here and he’s awake.

With his dick in his hand.

Al’s mouth feels like a fucking shag carpet. Every bud on his tongue has grown its own ecosystem after the amount of beer and whiskey and tobacco and ketchup and mustard and sugar and salt and smoke and someone else’s spit he’s let populate there.

It’s been a long… however long it’s been, cooped up in this clubhouse on the outskirts of town.

Undesirable types like to hole up here and pretend it’s a bar, but it functions more as a halfway hovel. Some genius calls it the Hideout.

Al just about keeps himself steady as he shakes the last drop out (more’n three and you’re playin’ with yourself), zipping his pants back up with a hop that he instantly regrets. A knife slices right through his temporal lobe.

The tubular bells have begun to ring and remorse starts to churn in his stomach.

Time’s up, party’s over, away we go home.

Staggering back out into the front bar, Al catches a fond sight–a shapely, tanned rump lying bare across the pool table. Given that he’s missing a shirt, he figures he must have been splayed underneath that body before nature had called.

God given miracle he’d made it to the bathroom in whatever state he was in.

One of Al’s hands reaches out and caresses a perky, round cheek, giving it a squeeze. A grumble from the mouth it belongs to, buried under a mass of blonde curls.

“Kar-ennn,” he sing-songs, voice sputtering like a fuckin’ chainsaw, “It’s after ten.”

“Mmnff.”

“On a Sunday.” He bends, bringing his mouth to the peachy mound. Teeth sink in. “You’re gonna be late for–”

“--church!” yelps the blonde, darting up and rolling over in this mad scramble to get her frilly old halter dress back on her body. “Shit! Shit-shit-shit!”

“Oh, slow down,” Al says, his brain moving a little slurrier than he’d anticipated–which is to say, he’s still polluted. He cages his arms around Karen where she’s sitting, leaning his perspiring forehead into her chest which stills her in an instant. “God ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

“Yes, but my mother is,” she grabs him by the ears, yanking him to her eyeline–woof, way too much movement, “gonna kill me.”

“Proposal,” Al mumbles, leaning for her mouth but landing on her neck, “I tell your mama that we’re gettin’ married. Tell her the next time you enter the house of God it’s ‘cause you’re gonna make an honest woman outta me.”

“Al,” Karen sighs, shoving him off and dismounting the pool table. This bouncy blonde, this head cheerleader apple pie type… Al had her nailed the moment he walked into her homeroom that first day at Hawkins High. Stacked to the ceiling, her gorgeous baby blues stuck on him like a fly trap.

He hadn’t expected to stumble across a babe like her in this glorified cornfield of a town.

“You’re very cute, and you’re a lotta fun. I mean, we have,” she shuffles in her little skirt; so cute, scandalized by herself by the light of day, “a lot of fun, but no matter how many times you ask, there’s no way I’m marrying you just so you can avoid shipping out.”

He adopts a slump. “But what if I said I loved ya?”

“You’d be lying!” Karen cries, a phosphate giggle. She manages to find that letterman jacket she came in here wearing and slides it over her shoulders. Lobs a guilty look over her shoulder at Al.

Like he’s supposed to share in some reverent moment of shame, like he should feel bad that he’s giving her what that Wheeler meathead can’t.

Guy’s graduated and still insists that she wears his letterman jacket. It’s sad.

“Look, are you coming to that Gomes chick’s party, at least?”

“Gomes? Gloriana Gomes?” Karen’s gone all incredulous on him. “Al, I’m going to have to try and sneak past my mother after being out here all night–you really think I’m going to risk my neck going to some greaser cookout?”

“Tell them you’re goin’ to Bible study. Repenting and all that.”

Her mussed curls shudder as she shakes her head, heading for the door with her tennis shoes in her hand. “See you at school. Last week of senior year!”

—

To Al’s shock and delight, someone’s been paying the phone bill at the Hideout–he wonders what kind of bootlegging operation necessitates a phone line, but he’s thankful for it all the same. Lets him punch in one of the only numbers he knows in this shitheel town and bark, “Bring the Caddy ‘round, Jeeves!”

Forty minutes, his found shirt and a flat beer later, a battered, rusted truck kicks up dust outside of the Hideout.

“Thought you were dead,” a clipped voice echoes out the driver’s side.

Al takes his time ambling over. He reaches through the driver’s window and chucks Ray Doevksi’s chin with his ringed hand.

“Wished I was, more like.”

The greased slick of Ray’s pompadour catches an offensive amount of light, and Al’s got to shield his eyes. He throws himself into the passenger side and lets Ray size him up with customary disapproval.

“Christ, you smell like Corn Nuts and pussy.”

“Take a big whiff, Doevski!” Al rifles through the glove compartment before Ray shoves a soft pack of cigarettes at him. “Might be the last one you get for a while, seeing as you’re liable to strike out tonight.”

“And what makes you say that?”

“Because you’re sniffin’ after a girl whose big brothers are known Hawkins heavies,” Al scoffs back a mouthful of smoke, more to curb the ever-present craving than anything else. “You don’t got the stones to see a thing like that through.”

He catches Ray’s sidelong glance at him, the line of his hardened jaw with the shiny fucking hair on top. A dollop of oily black, showing up starkly against his pristine white t-shirt. Ray is crisp and calculated-looking, without the starched strangulation of looking like some prep. Ray looks like they peeled Jimmy Dean off the blacktop and reinflated him, gave him a Presley dye-job.

Brought him back wrong.

See, Ray Doevski, Al’s best friend, he looks like the sensitive type but he’s all mean streak.

Al, ever the other boy’s foil, looks like exactly what he is. A hick with a perpetual hard-on and a mouth too smart for his brain to catch up with. Luckily, Al sucked up all the charm in his gene pool; Hawkins has been a cakewalk ever since his folks moved him and his sullen older brother down here from the good ol’ hills of Appalachia.

In fact, Ray was the first person to step to him about that. Make some crack about they got running water up there yet? Or y’all still bathin’ in pig spittle?

‘We haven’t quite gotten to experience the spoils of modern plumbing, but your mama was kind enough to let me wash off after I balled her into oblivion.’

Up went the scuffle, and they were immediate friends after the fisticuffs were thrown.

Since then, Ray’s led Al into the underbelly. The doper contingent that Ray’s foster family has connections to, the bikers trafficking shit through places like the Hideout. The only exciting thing about a town like Hawkins is how many secrets it can hold, and there’s not a whole lot, but enough to keep them entertained for now.

Ray has designs on fleeing to business school after they graduate.

The only designs Al has on are his boxer briefs.

Speaking of, he scratches his crotch.

“Don’t get crabs on my passenger seat,” Ray monotonously scolds him.

“This passenger seat’s a ward of the state,” Al grumbles. Translation: he knows this truck is stolen.

“Am I driving you home, then? Is your tail sufficiently tucked between your legs yet?”

Al hates when Ray acts like he’s his own personal O. Henry story, reading him down to the last punctuation.

See, his last three lost days on the tear with Hawkins’ grimiest and all their passers-through had been the result of some family problems. Well, not problems. Consequences. Of living as a part of the greatest country in the world.

Al’s brother Wayne had been drafted. Ticket up, number called. Death certificate as good as signed.

You’re next, boy, Al’s father had said, If they can find any goddamn use for ya.

“I’m conscientiously objecting to the whole thing.”

“Shit. Didn’t know you had one of those.”

“Just trying it on for size. I can still return it for store credit.”

The rubber on Ray’s tyres squeal onto Philadelphia, stopping dead outside of the Munson household. Clapboard. Best they could do on short notice–needs a lick of paint that no one got around to sticking their tongue out for. But it’s home.

It always will be. Al understands that might be why his heart feels like it’s sinking.

He feels Ray watching him as he stares out the passenger side. A dry swallow.

He doesn’t want to go back in there. He toys with the idea of telling Ray to hit it again, to keep driving til the wheels come off this thing, so he can stay unmoored and un-privy to the disappointment dripping down the walls of that house. Those stains don’t lift.

They never will.

“Pick me up at eight, sugar?” Al snaps back into character, simpering with Donna Reed sweetness at Ray. He rolls his eyes under long-lashed lids.

“If you survive ‘til then.”

A heave to the rustbucket of a door and Al’s hopping out of the truck.

“Al,” Ray calls, gunning the engine back to life. “If I make it with Gloriana Gomes tonight…”

“Mighty girthy if.”

“... that calls for a changing of hands.” Ray gestures to the rock on Al’s finger. The Hawkins High class ring, the big brass bastard with its imitation emerald. Green and gold, the colors of their proud and mighty cowpat of a school. It had been Ray’s originally, seeing as how Al had all but dropped out at this point. But there were few things Ray had that Al didn’t want, and vice versa.

Balls. Charisma. Something big and ugly and shiny.

Something to be proud of.

So one day Al goes, ‘Bet your ring I can’t aim this stink bomb clear through O’Donnell’s classroom window,’ continuing his habit of torturing the newest faculty member. Ray’d said sure, because Al’s aim was reliably shitty– except for that day. Bullseye. Screaming.

Ray had reluctantly handed over the ring.

Then, at the derelict drive-in where they’d watched On the Waterfront together, Ray’d said, ‘Bet your ring I can’t shake down the candy shack for whatever’s in the register.’

A made-up kid-choking emergency and fifty-odd dollars later, Al was handing the ring back.

It went on like that, the bets increasing in risk and moral soundness. The ring bearer was dubbed the King of Hawkins High, a stab at the squares that actually gave a shit. Al lived for it. Not because Ray was easy to best, he wasn’t. One really had to get creative, or not be afraid to be hauled in by the heat. Ray was a worthy adversary.

Made Al feel like he could accomplish things.

“That’s a little tame, don’t you think?” Al says. The stakes had crawled up a little higher than balling some chick, no matter how white hot her family supposedly was. Unless, this is Ray really trying to prove something.

The Gomes brothers were the number one name in town for racketeering, gun thuggery, speed distribution… you name it, they had dominion over it.

If he won over their princess Gloriana, eased into their good books… that’s the making of a man. Al knows that.

Ray knows Al knows that, leveling him with a steel-edged stare over his sunglasses.

“See you at eight, sugar.”

—

The Munson household is dark and quiet, thank Christ, allowing Al to slink into the bedroom he shares with his elder brother and catch some well-earned hungover shuteye.

Sleep sinks him quick, his exhausted, wrung out form hitting the mattress without so much as kicking his boots off. His dreams are vivid and vague, parched and sweaty, indecisive and arresting as they always are after a sleepless bender. In the one he can recall the best, he sits behind a cartoonishly large wheel of a cartoonishly small van. He’s driving around labyrinthian turns, around a trailer park that he vaguely recognises from the outskirts of town.

Gravel crunches underneath, sounding like bones cracking. Grinding teeth.

He wants to get out, but he can’t find the lot that he’s looking for. Someone’s yelling at him from outside the vehicle; and he can’t exactly turn his head to see, but he’s vaguely aware of a baby girl lying in the passenger seat beside him. She’s crying and he’s hushing, promising that they’re almost there.

It’ll all be okay, honey bear! Al’s gonna fix it.

The window of the van is slung low, and hailstones begin to rain in on him and the baby, pelting him in the forehead–

Takes him a minute or two to come to. Wayne stands, a shadowy figure in the doorway with a handful of peanut shells.

“Dinner,” the elder Munson grumbles.

“I’m comin’! Jesus!” Al whines.

“No, this is your dinner,” Wayne keeps tossing the shells. “You wanna run off and join the circus, you better get used to circus food.”

“I’d sooner crawl inside of a lion’s asshole than bend over and take it up the chute for Uncle Sam, I’ll tell you that,” kid brother grumbles into his flat, yellowing pillow.

“Real nice, Allen.”

“You know what,” Al, annoyed now, rustles up in bed, furiously blinking his bleary eyes at Wayne, “When did you go and get so fuckin’ patriotic anyway? Far as I know, your greatest contribution to society was teaching me how to boost a car on my sixteenth birthday.”

Wayne scoffs, tossing the last of the shells onto the floor. “Yeah, and a fat lotta good it did. Still got that… Doohickey pansy chauffeurin’ you around, huh?”

“Christ, you really fell out the sad bastard tree and hit every branch on the way down, huh? Just ‘cause you ain’t got no friends, man–”

“Allen.”

“--doesn’t mean you need to go buzz your head and get a rifle about it, I mean, my god–”

“Al.”

“I think it’s really pathetic, y’know, real pathetic that you’re gonna go play stooge for a system that wouldn’t piss on folks like you or me or Ma or Pa if we was on fire–”

As if Al really gave a damn about the system.

“Al, you’re gonna have to grow up pretty soon. You know that, don’t you?”

That plugs him up fast. Al’s vision has unbleary’ed itself. A cold jolt arcs through him, one he tries to scoff away. Wayne always does this, drags out the stoic shit because he knows it’s a surefire conversation ender. He’s so solid that way, this living full stop Al has to call a brother. His way or the highway. His way or the chopper.

Wayne was always telling Al no, always telling Al do this and do that and take the fall, they won’t care, you’re the youngest, they’ll go easy on you and watched as their father snatched a knot into Al’s head that a navy man couldn’t untie.

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Wayne leans a little heavier on the doorframe. Al can see paint chips loosening where his shoulder presses.

“Means I gotta go and do this because Ma and Pa won’t be able to survive if I don’t. Not if they got you leechin’ off ‘em still. Which, signs point to,” Wayne gestures to their shared bedroom. A harsh split down the middle; Al’s side is a ragged explosion of dirty socks, underwear, records, comics, cigarette butts. Wayne’s side is so orderly, Al bets he could bounce a quarter off the bed.

Like he’d been waiting to ship out his whole life.

“I’m warnin’ you, boy,” Wayne’s tone darkens. Al wishes it didn’t make him flinch on instinct, but it does. “You better clean up your act. Get some kinda life together. Otherwise, you’re gonna end up in prison before your ticket’s even drawn.”

He lets it simmer for a minute, drawing out the silence that he’d usually feel like he has to fill. It’s so muggy, it has been muggy, this quiet between them since Wayne decided he was the kind of person that wanted to do the right thing. Do what he’s told, more like.

Another knot of a different kind tightens in Al’s sternum. Fear. He doesn’t look at Wayne because to look at him, he would know. Wayne would see it in Al’s face, and Al would see it in Wayne’s. They’re terrified, the both of them.

Munsons are no heroes. They don’t pull out of things like this.

Even if Wayne uses all the right moves, likelihood is he catches a stray bullet or blowback from a bomb and goes down. Stupid for him to think anything else would happen.

Every time Al looks at him, he knows it might be one of the last.

Then again, what else has Wayne got? He wasn’t happy about being dragged by the ear from Appalachia to Indiana. He couldn’t shake the stubbornness to make friends in town. Left school before he even broke tenth grade. He couldn’t hold down a job for nothin’-- Hawkins decided they didn’t like the smell of hick shit that the Munsons were dragging through the place. Their father was barely hanging onto the gig he’d moved them here for, drinking what little he did make. Their mother was catatonic most of the time, drinking twice as much as their father did.

Wayne is floundering, if not practically dead in Lover’s Lake already.

Might as well die someplace tropical.

But where does that leave Al? Al, the spitfire kid who needs Wayne to anchor him so he doesn’t spin completely out of control. He gets this notion of speed, thinks he’s capable of beating God at his own game–not in small part spurned on by Ray Doevski. Gasoline, matches. He needs Wayne, needs his big brother to remind him that the ground below him is hard, not soft. What goes up must come down, and all that shit.

So, how dare he.

How dare he choose Vietnam over Al.

“Well, brother mine,” Al says in a tone smooth as silk, rolling onto his back and stretching his wiry arms up like a languid cat. Smug beats stoic. “Just so happens that army green ain’t really my color. I’ll take my chances.”

—

Hastily scrubbed and half a shoulder of stolen bourbon deep, Al kicks rocks in his shoddy driveway. If he had a watch that wasn’t broken, he sure would check it, then drunkenly shake his fist at the sky and curse Ray Doevski’s tardiness.

Just as that thought occurs, of course, Ray hits his mark. Skids up to the facade on Philadelphia with a little more urgency than usual.

“Don’t burn that rubber too fast, now,” Al says, almost missing the step as he climbs in, “You know how tyres are a bitch to lift.”

“Ain’t you gonna offer me a drink?” Ray’s voice is a little reedier than usual–that usually means he has something on his mind. Something cooking.

Through the encroaching fog of his inebriation, Al gives him a little once over. He’s got a smudge of motor oil on his cheek.

Al wipes it away with a clumsy hand and feels Ray stiffen. His dark, delighted eyeballs seem to jitter in his skull before he jerks his head away from Al’s hand.

A moment throbs, and Al pushes the booze towards him. He doesn’t totally understand and it shows as much on his face.

“S’goin’ on with you?”

He watches as Ray mechanically reminds himself to relax, chill out, they’re headed for a party. Like the gears are clicking behind his face, evening out his expression.

“Lemme ask you something,” and that vibrancy is back in Ray’s voice, “Your folks still on your ass about gettin’ a job?”

“Like flies on shit.”

“What if I told you I had an opportunity that would make them very happy?”

“Happier than they are with my brother, the Colonel?”

“Way,” Ray’s teeth gleam in the late Autumn sunset, the bodacious orange twisting the planes of his face into a handsome Jack o’ Lantern. “Real cash. And fast.”

Al slugs a little whisky and slouches further down in his seat. “Can’t be any dumber than the bullshit I’ve already heard. Hit me.”

“You’re gonna fuckin’ flip,” Ray shakes his head, “The Gomes brothers wanna cut us in on a deal. They, uh, they’ve gotten familiar with us. Told you it was worth showin’ your face at the Hideout every once in a while.”

Every once in a while, sure… Ray and Al skulking the parking lot, chainsmoking and playing marbles like a couple of errant kids in order to get familiar with the local heavies. Prove they were trustworthy. That they’d see shit, but they wouldn’t say shit.

Flies on shit.

Al jerks forward as Ray steps on the gas.

“A deal, huh?” Al finally manages.

“Distribution,” the gentlemen’s term for slinging dope. Speed, hash, benzos. Whatever. “This is a real business, Munson. With real payout. We make the right connections, there’s no tellin’ what we can do with it.”

Ray’s just about frothing at the mouth; Al’s never seen him so jazzed about something before. Similar to Wayne with that cool as ice, hard rock front. It’s unnerving to see it crack. Al’s stomach winches.

Prison before your ticket’s even drawn.

Then again, what else has Al Munson got going for him?

Ray’s shark eyes reflect a bolt of lightning that doesn’t appear in the sky.

Al’s groan sounds like thunder. “Fuck it. Sure.”

“Thatta boy! We gotta be at the pickup spot at midnight sharp, Cinderella.” Ray’s hands drum against the wheel, and Al could swear that he sees his bare ring finger twitching. “And–listen, Al. Don’t go spreadin’ this around at the party, alright? Especially to the boys. Mixin’ business and pleasure… just puts a bad taste in people’s mouths, y’know.”

“I’ll behave.”

—

Easier said than done.

Al wobbles through Gloriana Gomes’ backyard with the grace of a newborn gazelle, but at the very least he can make almost falling into the band’s drumset look cute. Lantern lights above him triple, quadruple, and he’s wondering just what the hell the bruiser bitch put in this punch.

“Munson.”

“Ah! The lady of the hour,” Al manages almost coherently. “Lemme get look at you.”

He squints through one eye to take in Gloriana’s shapely figure, packed tight into a halterneck catsuit that would make any man shed a tear and cry glory to God. She’s stunning, this chick, with her blunt black bangs and her lacquered cherry lips and her spike heels–but by god, is she lethal.

Al needs exactly this amount of Dutch courage to even fathom speaking a full sentence to her.

He heard she keeps a switchblade in her bra, which is how she’s won so many pageants. Pure intimidation.

He wants her to shave him bald all over with that very same switchblade.

Lurching forward, his lips brush her bouffant and almost swallow her earring. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

“It’s not my birthday,” Goddamn, he can feel her nails dig into his bicep. Whisky dick is being rendered a myth with every passing second. “It’s just a party.”

“Thassa damn shame, ‘cause here I am with this biiig ole gift for you,” Al’s choking on the chemical tinge of her drugstore perfume and the copious amounts of hairspray she wears. This, the girl with always has a lit cigarette perched in her fingers… walking fire hazard. White hot.

Al’s hand slides over Gloriana’s hip, only distantly aware that he’s likely in Ray’s direct line of vision–that man rarely takes his eyes off the baddest Betty Hawkins has to offer.

“You wanna see it? S’in my pocket…”

Those Dutchmen are really onto something.

Her nails dig again and Al wonders, with a throb to the crotch, if she’s drawing blood yet.

“I’m gonna do you a favor, creep,” Gloriana hisses into Al’s ear, “I’m not going to slap the shit out of you in front of my brothers and their friends, because I don’t feel like helping anybody chop up your lousy little body tonight. I just did my nails fresh.”

“I can feel that.”

Gloriana lightly but politely shoves him off. Her face curls up into this charm-offensive, butter-wouldn’t-melt smile, which is completely at odds with her tough girl appearance. Still, it’s like a cherry nipple on a milkshake tit. Just perfect.

“You and that foster home freak are made for each other,” she says to Al, and he sees two pairs of ruby red lips instead of one. She makes it sound like she’s being friendly. Foster home freak—that’d be Ray’s calling card. Hawkins loves to remind Ray and Al that they don’t really belong here.

And then she’s gone, and Al feels a hand physically propping him upright. It’s dinky, bony and feminine so it can only belong to one person–

“Joycey!” he bellows into the young Maldonado birdy’s face. Now, Joyce is a gal that Al has always had a minute for and vice versa. She was always good for a smoke and a jaw about nothin’, as was he, but he didn’t love having to share his stash of finely toasted tobacco with that lug Jim Hopper she’s so goddamned fond of.

Joyce flinches at the greeting, wiping a little of Al’s spittle off her cheek. “Jesus H., Munson, wake the neighbors muchly?”

“Oh, between me and Dick fuckin’ Dale over here,” he gestures in the vague direction of the garage band that belongs to one Gomes or another, he’s sure, “they’ll be up all night. What’s shakin’?”

Joyce digs around her grubby jeans for her smokes, doing Al the honor of both putting it in his waiting maw and lighting it. She shrugs in that tight-shouldered way that she has, always wound up about something or other. She’s so twiggy, this girl–probably why Al’s never tried to put a move on her. He’s scared she’ll have a nervous breakdown or something.

“Just wanted to see how you were.”

That’s the other thing. Bleeding heart Maldonado, always checking in on her good pal Al. Ever since he’d broke the news that Wayne was Viet-bound, she kept looking at him sidelong, all sadlike.

“Me? Spiffy, sweetheart. Just darling, if you must know,” Al says, volume and theatricality increasing. “Any day now, I’ll have a full bedroom to myself. Ain’t that exciting?”

Joyce snorts, a puff of smoke coming out of each nostril like she’s the world’s most anxious dragon. “Gonna invite Karen over for a sleepover?”

“Ixnay on the aren-kay, Joy-say! My god, we can’t have the whole of Cherry Lane know I’m balling a cheerleader,” hands cup around Al’s mouth, cigarette still dangling from it, “It’d be just about my ruination!”

Joyce giggles all big and unbridled, which Al likes because he likes when she loosens up, but it’s swiftly cut off as Al finds himself stumbling into the nearest deck chair–which is to say, into the lap of the person sitting on it. This lucky customer happens to be one Leonard Gomes, affectionately nicknamed Lurch. Guy’s built like a brick shit cathedral, not just a house, with a selection of fascinating prison tattoos covering his neck. Al can’t make ‘em out, even up close.

“Myyy sincerest apologies, big boy!” Al slurs, but doesn’t get up right away. Lurch’s little black eyes are blackening and blackening. “But hey, I’ll catch you later. For our big date, right? Right? Can ya gimme any clues for what we’re movin’, can–”

Oof, hauled up by the front of his ribbed tank! Only Ray Doevski in full crisis management mode could manage such a feat.

Just kidding. Joyce could probably do it if she put her mind to it. Al’s about a hundred pounds soaking wet.

“Hey, this is my favorite shirt, man! Don’t stretch ‘er out!”

A seething Ray hauls him all the way to the front of the house and about heaves him into the truck. Al complies pretty limply, not hating the feeling of being puppeteered around. His limbs were getting heavy.

“Daddy’s givin’ me a time out,” Al pouts. And promptly leans out the passenger door and pukes. It’s all bile, three or four days of full bender bile. He’s barely eaten. It scores his nostrils and steams up on the pavement.

Ray stands just out of the splash zone with his arms folded, waiting for Al to let up.

When all the blood has been sufficiently drained out of his face, he does. Slumps against the seat.

Ray doesn’t exactly look at him with anger. Or annoyance, even. There’s a pillowy nature to the way he stares him down, before he walks over to the Gomes’ garden hose and turns it on, stretching it so it’ll reach Al.

He laps at the water gratefully. A hound.

Ray digs a vial from his pocket, the kind that comes complete with its own little spoon. Something he’d lifted from some foster kid he’d lived with, he had told Al before. This little number is a sight for sore eyes.

“The smelling salts. You shouldn’t have.”

Al huffs a bump up each nostril and shoves the heels of his hands into his eyeballs.

Whammo. Slowly coming back to reality.

“Sorry.”

“S’alright.” Ray’s head swivels around, evidently spotting the Gomes brothers heading to their hot rod. His voice comes out tight and he bolts for the driver’s side of the truck. Moves so fast he makes Al dizzy. “We gotta move anyhow.”

“Midnight already?”

“The witching hour.”

—

His head wedged into the corner of the open window, Al breathes deep the dusty night breeze on Holland. On the drive out here, you can count down the seconds until you smell the lake.

Five, four, three, two… Cannonball.

They drive in an imbalanced silence. Tense on Ray’s end, nauseated on Al’s. But he’s just about starting to come to, starting to clock into the reality of their situation.

Al had tossed around a little grass before; he came by it easy and could move it even easier. An operation like this, however, with clandestine pickups under the cover of night, with the armored Gomes vehicle tailing them–this is serious.

Wait.

Hold on.

Al cranes his neck to get a look out the back window. They’ve lost the Gomes’ headlights. Nothing but dark, dark road beyond the reddened back beams of Ray’s truck. That’s funny. Guys of that caliber, big pieces of gristle and meat, they’re hardly going to be tardy to their own drug pick-up party.

“Where’d they go to, Ray?” Al’s voice is a croak when it comes out, fighting against his burning throat.

“Shut up, Al.”

“Ray–”

“Shut up, Al.”

Al shrinks down in his seat, a child admonished. Ray’s hand flexes over the wheel, a man desperately trying to keep control.

They pull around to this shitheap looking place on Lover’s Lake, so bent it’s practically sliding down the embankment. A van already sits there. Black, sleek. The kind a serviceman would have or something.

Ray kills the engine and some force from beyond prompts Al to grab at his arm before he can jump on out.

“Ray.”

“You’re doing this for your family,” Ray seamlessly reminds him, the gaze he turns on him empty. There’s not a waver in his voice. Like he’d been preparing this little bon mot of encouragement. “I’m doing this for mine.”

“But w–”

“Doing it for love. That’s honorable,” Ray nods. His features have taken on this waxy sheen under the moonlight that threatens to bring Al to a dry heave. He’s like a ventriloquist doll, down to the wooden way he’s moving. “I’ve done things for love that you wouldn’t believe. Now get out of the fucking truck.”

Beat for beat, Ray exits the truck, Al exits the truck, then a guy in overalls appears from the shiny black van. All of it moving in this rhythm that’s making Al’s head swim–feels like an unreality. Feels like he’ll blink, be behind the wheel of that van with a crying baby to his right. Feels like a dream.

Al, for once, clams up. Doesn’t say anything at all, because it’s the only way he can mask the nervous twitch his face takes on when he’s this piss-pants scared.

But it’s funny. It’s not like a drug operation he’s ever dreamed of. There’s no real shadiness to it. Guy just opens up the back of his van and tosses Ray a brick wrapped in brown parcel paper.

“Lurch and Palo on the way?”

It’s incredible. To Al’s knowledge, this guy, this guy with all the drugs in the back of his fucking van, has never seen Ray before but implicitly assumes he’s taking point on this deal. What if he had been a cop?!

But Ray Doevski does have this thing about him. Gives you one good, meaningful look and he has you shackled for life. You can’t help but trust him.

Still waters, man. Just like Wayne, Al thinks and feels something different rise in his throat.

“Lurch and Palo got caught up. Car trouble.”

Overalls guy just shrugs and helps load the rest of the packages into the passenger side of the truck. Al, he just stands there. Rooted. Watching him. Ray doesn’t pass any heed; like he’s not even there.

“Not much of a talker, your guy?” Overalls jerks his head in Al’s direction.

“Nah,” Ray grins in the briefest of flashes. “Strong and silent type. Right, Munson?”

A light flashes on at the porch of the half derelict looking house. Al can spot a hulking figure in the window, obscured by what has to be clouds upon clouds of smoke.

Ray raises a hand in the form’s direction, as howdy doody casual as a fucking neighborino.

“Who is that?” Al hears himself ask.

“Rick. I’ll introduce you next time. You two’ll like each other.”

Next thing Al’s physically aware of is the pile of packages at his feet as Ray guns the truck to life. This insufferable smirk curls up the corner of his mouth, the kind that Al has an immediate instinct to slug right off.

A bad feeling, a terrible feeling twists up his guts.

It’s justified about fifteen minutes into their drive back.

Al sees the flames licking around the plumes of black smoke first, easing up into that inky sky stabbed through with needlepoint constellations. He sees mangled hot rod hardware wrapped around a great big tree. He sees blue lights, he sees red. He sees an ambulance. He sees two stretchers and two body bags.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he spits, his lips feeling loose and panicky. “Ray, Jesus, we have to stop!”

“You wanna stop?” Ray laughs, voice so light you’d swear Al had asked him to pull in so he could take a piss. “You’re sittin’ on a small fortune of narcotics and you wanna stop? Don’t be such a morbid little rubbernecker, Munson.”

—

The untimely passing of the Gomes brothers brought with it a varied reception. The angle from one end of town was that it’s great when God deals with hoodlums before the law has to. On the other, someone had to pick up the slack and keep the seedy underbelly of this wicked little place nice and satiated.

Ray Doevski didn’t leave Gloriana Gomes’ side from the moment she got the news about her beloved brothers. She’d broke down wailing in his waiting arms, her red lipstick bleeding at the edges.

Those same brothers who regarded the scheming nowhere kid with such distaste that they’d never let them anywhere near their sister, or their business.

Over their dead bodies.

The only reasonable move was to remove them from the picture entirely, and step in gallantly. The hero. A picture of suave severity, backroom business acumen seeping from his blacktop hairdo. He’d fill the hole, he’d keep the cash flowing.

When he got the time to cut the Gomes’ break lines, we’ll never really know.

Al couldn’t fathom pulling off such a stunt.

Ray never admitted to it, of course. Can’t show your hand. Not to anybody, not even your best friend. But there was always this sense of knowing… even if he didn’t do it, he was capable of it.

Once he got over the shock of it all, how quick and seamless Ray had made that elimination, Al was overtaken with admiration. Tinged with latent fear, of course, but admiration all the same.

When Ray dropped him off at the house on Philadelphia in the wee hours of the morning, Al pressed the Hawkins High class ring into his hand.

“Well played, my liege.”

“Couldn’t’ve done it without ya,” Ray smiled. “Pleasure doing business.”

Business was right. At Al’s feet sat serious cash. Cash he could use to pull his weight around the house. Cash he could use to get out of Hawkins entirely. Cash he could rub in Wayne’s face, show him, hey! I’m not nothing! I can move this, I can be part of something huge and heavy! I can run this fucking town!

But he didn’t have any clear designs on doing anything without Ray’s say so.

The only designs Al had were on his boxer briefs.

He was only really sure of one thing. He’d spend his entire life trying to best Ray Doevski. Trying to get that ring back on his finger.

Just for the love of the game.

#published by powder #hai brainrot #a. munson by powder #r. doevski by powder #al munson #this is really for like. the real real ones. who else would care not only about my oc but about her dad's homoerotic friendship with #eddie munson's dad #eddie munson fic #fuck it you never know #sorry i need to put my hands up and say it i've thought about and i love al munson #yeah he's a dick. can i fix him? no. do i want to? also no #he's my fun little disaster #munson family values

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