by Ted Neill
My team won that day. I threw two touchdown passes to Brad. After that, I sat with the football guys at lunch. I never said much there, but it was cool because the girls sat on the other end of the table, and we could flirt with them. At least Brad did. The rest of us watched and said nothing. Pablo and Jeff didn’t move to our table; there was some silent understanding that they were not that cool, but they would hang out near us when we picked teams for football, and I always picked them so they could play with us.
Dave didn’t come to school for a while. He finally came back when we had finals. He didn’t come out for recess anymore.
I turned the TV off. The anchor woman had moved on from the Nobel Prize announcements anyway. I poured my coffee into the sink and dumped my toast in the trash. I wasn’t hungry. I stared out the window for a while. The sun wasn’t up yet. I noticed our fence needed repairing before the neighbors complained. There were dishes in the sink. I set the coffee mug on top of them, and they settled with a slight clatter. There was a putrid smell of garbage coming up from the trash can. Coffee grounds, withered vegetables, and rancid milk cartons. I removed the lid and pulled up the bag to take it out. I pushed the backdoor open with my foot, and a blast of cold air hit me in the face.
Dammit, I was a stupid kid.
16.
Every Time I See You
Don stepped out of Phil’s house. A black cat with a white face ran across his path. He started walking to the street, which was empty. Not a single car in sight. It was after midnight. When he reached the street, a boy called out to him.
“Excuse me, sir, do you have a phone on you?”
The boy was standing across the street, leaning on a bike. Don looked around for anyone hiding in the bushes. Phil had said the neighborhood was safe. Phil had been living there for ten years or so. Phil had been playing poker games with his buddies on Saturday nights all those years. This was the first one Don had been to. The men had smoked cigars and talked about sports and women. Don watched the TV that was on with no sound. A beautiful woman was the news anchor and when Don saw her in all her proper and stiff beauty he had said,
“I’d like to eat her hair pie.”
Don knew the guys would have found it funnier if he had not laughed so hard at his own joke. He had never played cards with them before that night. That was because he had a beautiful wife, Felicity, whom he loved and he’d rather spend time with her. She was younger by a decade, but that just upped his status, he imagined. But even Felicity said Don should go out on Saturday nights. She said it was good for him to be alone or with guy friends. Felicity seemed happier when he went out. He usually would go to a movie, but tonight he’d tried going to Phil’s.
Don had told the guys at the poker table about his arrangement with Felicity. They asked to see a picture of her. Then they asked what she did when he was gone. He said she read. Then they said she was cheating on him. Don said they didn’t know her. He stuck around to play a few rounds, but the fun was gone after that, so he left. So much for guy friends. Don’s friends Sidney and Daniel had said the same thing about Felicity. Sidney said he thought she was sleeping with a guy named Lance. Daniel had agreed. Daniel had been kind, circumspect about it. Sidney had not. He had been more direct. Don had not spoken to either of them since.
The men at the poker game had pressed Don too.
“Do you ever ask her what she does while you’re gone?”
“No,” Don said. They had all looked at each other.
Someone said, “You should.”
That was when he left. That was when Don got up and left. Assholes.
“Do you have a phone?” The boy asked again, leaning on his bike.
“Do I have one or have I seen one?”
“Have one.”
“No, why?” Don lied. He knew sometimes drug addicts would ask to borrow your phone and then run off with it. That was what you got for being kind, and Don knew he was often pegged as an easy mark. He figured it was better to lie to this kid.
“I had an operation on my knee, and I fell off my bike back there—a cat ran in front of it—and now my wound has reopened.”
Don was in the middle of the street but not moving any closer. The boy lifted his pant leg, and Don saw that his sock was stained with blood. Blood had dribbled down the waffle soles of his running shoes and pooled on the cement of the sidewalk.
“That looks bad. You said the wound re-opened?”
The boy, he was around sixteen or maybe seventeen, started to lift his pant leg higher.
“No, I shouldn’t, I don’t want to gross you out.”
Don was surprised by so much discretion in a kid.
“My friend’s house is just back there, you can use his phone,” Don said.
“No, I don’t want to cause a fuss.”
Don stood in the street. A car was coming. He crossed to the boy’s side. The car passed. The boy sat atop his bike and used his right leg, his good leg, to start pushing down the sidewalk. He let the bad leg dangle off the side and bleed. He was going real slow. Don realized he would surely walk by him and pass him since they were going the same way on the same sidewalk. It would be awkward when he did—and Don couldn’t think of any excuse to walk to the other side of the street—maybe if he saw a friend or something, but it was after ten, and that wouldn’t be happening. So, Don slowed his pace when he came alongside the kid.
“What kind of operation was it?” he asked.
“I had a tumor they had to take out.”
“When?”
“About three weeks ago. I just got the stitches out three days ago. This was only the second time my mom’s let me go out since.”
Don thought it must hurt.
“I was wondering if I could call my mom; maybe she could come pick me up. She’s going to be angry, I bet.”
“You saw a cat?”
“It jumped out in front of me. I swerved and fell. Actually, my right trouser leg is torn worse than the left, but the left is the one that’s bleeding.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“Work. You?”
“Poker game.”
Don realized this made him sound very manly.
“You like poker?” the boy asked, still pushing himself down the sidewalk.
“It’s good. You know, passes the time. It’s kind of late to be coming home from work.”
“Yeah, I’ve been there all day. Someone was sick and they asked me to stay for a double shift. I spent five hours there yesterday, just waiting to get a uniform. I was just sitting in the manager’s office.”
“Five hours, that’s a long time to wait.”
“They put me on the clock though, so I got paid.”
“That’s good. Where do you work?”
“Freddy’s. I just started two days ago. I’m just learning how to grill hamburgers. Tomorrow I learn how to do the fries. Do you like Freddy’s?”
“No.”
“You a Wendy’s man then?”
“No. I really don’t eat fast food. I haven’t been to Freddy’s, McDonald’s, or Wendy’s in years. Actually, that’s not true. A few years ago, my wife and I were travelling all over Europe, and one night we were in Zurich and we were broke, so we went to McDonald’s.” Don lied again. They went to McDonald’s because Felicity had said she was craving “American” food. But he thought that made her sound like she didn’t have much class. Saying they were broke, he realized, also might build some sort of solidarity between him and this young man, who obviously knew the value of a dollar and a hard day’s work. “Previously I had been proud to say that I hadn’t been to McDonalds in over five years, but I can’t say that now.”
Don kept walking along with the kid. They seemed to be going in the same general direction. Don figured the boy would be going towards Ridgewood, one of the less affluent neighborhoods. Don would walk along. His own lakeside townhouse wasn’t too far away.
“Is that your uniform?” Don looked at the boy’s pants.
/> “Yeah.”
“I’m sure they’ll replace it for you.”
“Yesterday it was locked in a locker, and they had lost the key. That’s why I had to wait so long.”
“Have you ever read E.M. Forster, A Passage to India?” Don asked.
“No.”
“I had to read it for a class in college. But there’s this line in there that says something like, ‘The English are always so calm in a crisis’ and that kind of reminds me of you now. You’re really calm, even though you’re bleeding all over the fucking landscape.”
Don wanted to sound cool, so he cussed, but the kid didn’t laugh. Maybe he was raised not to cuss. He knew some working-class folks could be quite religious.
“Excuse my French.” Don realized it was a bit of an awkward expression to use after talking about English literature. The boy didn’t say anything. Don thought that maybe he had confused him. “Were you raised not to cuss?”
“Oh, cussing is all right,” the boy said. “I was cussing a lot back there when I fell. I was cussing all over the place. Crying some too. Not so much from the pain, but from the frustration.”
“It’s been a bad day.”
“Yeah. My basketball team lost. Not Duke, everyone around here cheers for the Duke, but UNC, they’re my team. You follow college basketball?”
“Not really.”
“Well, it’s been a bad day since that happened.” He was quiet as he looked down and briefly pulled the wet trouser leg from where it was sticking to his knee. “My mom is going to get all panicky when she sees my leg.”
“At least the cat lived,” Don said. “Animal lovers everywhere are indebted to you.”
Don thought of talking about his bike wrecks from when he delivered newspapers, but he decided not to; it was better to keep the kid’s mind off the pain. He had a nice bike. It was silver. Don bet the kid had bought it just so he could get to work at his new job. He was leaving little drops of blood along the side walk. There would be a whole trail to his house, like a trail of bread crumbs. Don yawned. It was late, but he would walk the kid all the way home. Maybe the boy would remember him; maybe he would remember that this stranger had done something nice for him. They walked along a while. No cars passed. Not one. At one point the boy said,
“See the hedgehog up there?”
“The what?”
“The hedgehog up there.”
“No. Where?”
The boy pointed across the street. Don looked, but saw nothing. He was about to lie and say he saw something, when he saw a fat furry thing waddling near the curb.
“Yeah, I see it. It’s big. I’ve never seen a hedgehog before.”
“Yep. In two or three days it will probably ruin the garden, if there is one in the back of that house. You can’t touch them; they’ve got little spikes.”
“You mean it’s a porcupine?’
“No. Wrong habitat for porcupines in this area. Hedgehogs just got little spikes.”
“Oh. But you still wouldn’t want to touch them?”
“No.”
“Sounds like a porcupine to me.”
The boy shrugged, steadying his handlebars. They had reached an intersection. The boy said, “That’s my house down there, with the white car.”
Don couldn’t see the house. It was hidden by the hedge. The car was a jalopy.
“Okay, can you make it all right?”
“Yeah.”
The wet pant leg was glistening in light from the street lamp.
“How long were you hobbling along before you saw me?” Don asked.
“What?”
“How long had it been between you crashing and seeing me.’
“I don’t know, five minutes or so.”
“Wow. You’re tough. Hang in there.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
Don decided not to wait and watch him walk all the way to his house—he might think Don was a pervert or something. Don walked home.
Before he left Phil’s house, Don had called Felicity. There had been no answer. She must have been asleep. Moths flew around the street lamps as he walked. When he arrived at his place, he took the stairs by twos and slid the key into his door. The lights were off inside. He made his way to the bedroom, guiding himself through the living room with his hand on the couch. He found Felicity in bed. She rolled over when she heard him come in.
“Hey, Honey, how was poker?”
“Fine. Good.” He went to the bathroom and turned on the light. He could see her face. She still looked awake and alert. She must not have been sleeping long.
“Felicity, I met this amazing boy on the way back.”
“On the way back from Phil’s?”
“Yes.”
“That’s nice.”
“Don’t you want to know what made him amazing?”
“What made him amazing?”
He was not sure if she was just making conversation for the sake of it, or if she was really interested. “Never mind. I’ll tell you in the morning.”
“I’m just tired, Honey. What was it?”
Don hung up his shirt and pants.
“He was just real tough. Real tough, that’s all. The boy was a man.” He said the words again, slower as if they were new and intriguing. “The boy was a man.”
“That’s good,” she said.
She rolled over. Don sat on the bed awhile in his boxers. He didn’t want to get ready for bed, even though he was tired. Felicity was quiet beside him. She was probably falling back asleep. Don looked at her book on the night stand. It was a thick, hardback edition, with the shiny raised letters on the front. Very thick, very shiny. He stared at his shoes, which he had worn into the bedroom and set side-by-side in the closet.
“You didn’t see Lance tonight, did you?” he asked.
“Hmmmmm?” she said, like she was just waking up, again.
“I said, ‘You didn’t see Lance tonight, did you?’”
“Lance Mulherin?”
“Yeah, Lance Mulherin.”
“Why would Lance have been here?”
“I didn’t ask if he had been here. Just if you had seen him.”
“But why would you even ask?”
“I don’t know. I just saw a car like his driving down the street on my way here.”
“A lot of people drive cars like his, Don. What are you suggesting?” she said, sitting up in bed.
“So you didn’t see him tonight.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m speaking English.”
“No! Goddammit, Don, I did not see Lance tonight. How could you say that?” she said, slapping the mattress.
“Calm down. Calm down. I’m sorry. I just, well you didn’t answer when I called. I thought maybe he dropped by.”
“When did you call?”
“When I left. Check your phone.”
“What time was that, Don?”
“Around 9:45 or so.”
“I was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed. Then I was reading. I must not have heard the phone.”
“Reading?”
“Yes.”
He picked up the book from the bedside table. He flipped through it. The bookmark was on page one hundred. He took a breath before he spoke again. “The bookmark is in the same place as last night. I was just curious and had looked at what you were reading and noticed you were on page one hundred, that’s the only reason I really recall.”
“Just because the bookmark is there doesn’t mean I’m on that page,” she said. “Goddammit, Don.”
She got up and closed her nightgown tightly, then went into the bathroom. Don sat in the darkness, the book in his hands. He heard the toilet flush, the water running, the tank refilling. She opened the door and looked at him, then turned out the light, and it was dark. Her nightgown made a slinky noise as she moved across the room. The bed groaned as she got back in it.
“I supposed you’re going to quiz me on what I read.�
� She was on her side, facing away from him.
“No.”
“I’m on page a hundred and thirty. I left the bookmark on one hundred because it’s a passage I really like. It flows nicely. It’s written with the flowery language that I know you like in your books.” She rolled over. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Don sat on the bed. He didn’t feel like sleeping. He sat a while. Felicity didn’t say anything else, but he knew she wasn’t sleeping. He got up, left the room, and headed downstairs, moving without thought through the living room to the kitchen where he sat down at the table. He heard the plunk of raindrops on the boards of the deck outside. Curtains of rain drew across the lake, blurring the surface and shattering the reflection of the lights of houses on the opposite shore. He loved the lake, all its moods, the textures of its surface, brought on by the interaction of seasons, the angle of light, and the weather of the moment. Thunder rumbled far away. It began to pour. Good thing that kid has gotten home by now, he thought. Don hoped his mother was not too hard on him.
He turned on the small television on the counter, the volume on low. But he wasn’t listening or watching it. He realized that he was holding Felicity’s book in his hand. He slid his hand along its side before he cracked open the pages to where the bookmark waited. Page one hundred. His hands were trembling. He closed the book, set it down on the table, and went to the liquor cabinet. He poured himself some gin. The ice rattled in the glass as he held it. He couldn’t stop it and was afraid the noise would travel upstairs to their bedroom. He opened the cupboard and pulled out a stack of paper cups. He poured the drink into one. The ice still rattled, but it was just a soft tapping now. Felicity wouldn’t hear. He drank it quickly then carried the cup and bottle over to the kitchen table.