A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

  “These rats have a job to do,” he says, giving her hand a squeeze before returning to his full height. “You think you can handle helping them? Before you go check on Trevor?”

  “I can do a lot of stuff,” Bev says, her cheeks flush with blood.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I can tell.”

  He opens the closet door and for a second Bev sees herself in the mirror: a short, hunch-shouldered girl with ratty shorts and messy brown hair, her dirty blue T-shirt a couple sizes too small, her nose and lips all pink with excitement.

  Then her reflection is gone and the closet door is open. Inside on the floor is another aquarium, but this one has grass all over the bottom and a piece of driftwood that looks like a giant blond turd. Plus there’s a snake in it, a fat black thing with ugly yellow patches all over its winding back. Its tongue flashes and Bev shrinks away, her shoulders colliding with Joey’s chest. She trembles against his tall body. She hides her face against the skeletons on his T-shirt. He laughs and wraps his fingers around her upper arms, tells her to be steady, to relax. He steers her back to the filing cabinet and tells her it’s only hard for the first time. Only sad for the first time. And then he tells her to choose a rat.

  V.

  Joey shows up a lot over the next two weeks, but he never comes inside the house. Sometimes he drives Collie to work, honking his car horn and waiting outside. Other times he only stops by when he’s taking her home. He stays in his car and watches Bev walk up the street. She waves at him and he waves back, all in shadows like a friendly dog at the midnight park.

  Bev hasn’t told Sissy about the snake and the rats. She hasn’t even told her that she’s been in the room. But Sissy keeps asking about the key, almost every day, and whenever Bev shrugs, Sissy points to a stack of FINAL NOTICE envelopes on the coffee table, as if it’s Bev’s fault the bills go unpaid. But Bev knows she’s not old enough to be responsible for paying any bills, no matter what Sissy says. That’s normally a parent job, she thinks, but because their parents are either missing or brain-dead, it’s a Sissy job.

  Then one Sunday afternoon Sissy and their mom come home from grocery shopping and the stakes get higher. Their mom wears her usual look of drooling emptiness, but Sissy is fuming, pale lips squeezed shut and a bunch of wrinkles between her eyebrows that make the top of her nose look like a gash.

  “Key,” she says, hovering over Bev’s shoulder while she does the dishes. “We need that key.”

  “Why?”

  She grabs Bev’s wrist and yanks her arm behind her back, cranking it up toward her shoulders, so that Bev feels like something might snap. Bev squeals once, really loud, but then the pain takes her breath away and she recoils from the sink, splashing soapsuds all over the counter and cupboards. From the corner of her eye, she sees Cindy in her high chair, a curious look on her face, calmly watching.

  Just when Bev thinks her arm can’t possibly bend anymore, Sissy lets her go. Bev sinks to her knees, gasping. Soap bubbles slide slowly down the lower cupboards and burst an inch above the floor. Sissy towers over Bev, furious. “Mom wandered off at the grocery store. She found herself a great, big piece of asphalt in the parking lot and she threw it through some fucking Muppet’s windshield. We have to pay him or he’s going to call the cops. Do you understand what that means? Key. It means key.”

  “But Joey has it. He hardly ever comes inside.”

  “Then you invite him in and you get it. Otherwise don’t come home.”

  So on Monday night, when Collie waddles out onto the front step to meet Joey, Bev squeezes out behind her and tries to catch his attention. He’s looking right at her, but he doesn’t register her waving hands, her cocked thumb pointing back inside the house. Collie does though, and she tells Bev to go inside in case Trevor rolls out of his crib or something. “Do I pay you to make a stupid circus on the front lawn, or what?”

  Bev inches back inside the house, craning her neck to see Trevor still safe in his crib, and then she peeks through the crack of the front door. Collie scratches at her hairy birthmark as she approaches Joey’s car. He’s got the window down, his long arm hanging out and a smoke fuming between his fingers. Bev can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but she gets the feeling he’s enjoying Collie’s approach, all her jiggling bits and pieces, and before she rounds the hood of the car to the passenger side door, she slaps one of her double-burger palms on his arm and sort of strokes him like he’s one huge muscle. Then, when she gets inside, their heads bump together as they kiss. For a second it looks like Joey is going to caress her birthmark, but he sticks his fingers in her hair instead.

  Bev smashes a plate after they drive off. It was one of Collie’s hotdog dishes, but now it’s just a bunch of ketchup-splattered glass. Maybe this is how Sissy felt when she watched the back of the snake-man’s head, except he looks bored in that picture, like he’d rather be with Sissy than Collie. But Bev can’t really say the same for Joey, can she? He actually likes that fat whore. Rather than clean up the glass, she put her shoes on and kicks the big pieces under the fridge. The rest of it can stay on the ground.

  Bev spends most of the night ignoring Trevor and wondering about Joey. Does he think she’s a baby because she couldn’t bring herself to feed the ugly, yellowy-black snake? Because she burst into tears when it killed the rat? She’ll never forget how the snake hovered and coiled. The rat seemed blind to the threat. He started scrubbing his whiskers and snout, and then there was a sharp, chew-toy squeak when the snake sprang and seized and wrapped him up in the tightly wound knot of its body. The rat kicked his legs and wriggled his tail. His eyes bulged. His lips and ears turned red with blood. So did his little nose. After a long time, he died. Then he looked like a toy, except for the little trickle of blood coming from his nostrils.

  Joey held her while she sobbed. His body was warm, like walking by the oven after it’s been on for a long time. She thought he was cradling her, running his rough fingers through her hair, but maybe he just wanted to get rid of her. Maybe he thinks she’s stupid and for the rest of her life she’ll be watching him cuddle with Collie. She’ll be like Sissy in the photograph. She’ll be good for nothing, too.

  So Bev calls her sister to tell her Joey won’t be coming, and there’s no way for her to get the key if he doesn’t, but please can she come home tonight anyway. Sissy’s quiet for a second. Bev hears her anger like static on the phone line. “Just wait there,” she says. “I’ll handle it. As usual.”

  Bev doesn’t know what that means, so she falls into the living room couch and stares at fuzzy images on the TV. If Joey were here, he’d fix the rabbit ears. He’d rub her shoulder where it hurts from when Sissy attacked her in the kitchen. She’d let him stick his finger inside her if he wanted. Her thing would be like a wedding ring. He’d wear her wherever he goes, and Collie would have no choice but to wait for her husband to get out of jail. Bev imagines the two of them making love, Collie’s fatso legs and arms kicking slowly, Joey’s eyes bulging as she crushes him.

  Sometime after dark, there’s a knock at the front door. Bev’s expecting Sissy, like maybe she’s going to pick the lock and break into the snake room. Maybe kick it down like an action movie hero. Whatever. Bev doesn’t care. She’s angry at her sister and just yells at her to come in.

  “Well looky this sad little angel.”

  It’s Joey. He’s standing in the entrance, a lit cigarette burning in his mouth, yellowish smoke twisting in the porch light. He’s wearing a plain black tank top, and for the first time Bev sees cold black skulls tattooed on his biceps. Flames swirl around them. His thumbs are hooked in his tight jeans and his fingers tap his thighs. He steps inside, closes the main door, and locks it.

  “You came!” Bev can’t help herself. She’s jumping off the couch and running to hug him. She’s feeling his arms encircle her, feeling a gooey, squeezy pressure as he wraps himself around her.

  “Yeah. Well
. I guess that’s one of the things I’m good at.”

  He leads her away from the door and past Trevor’s crib, a stinky smell rising from it. The outline of his keys bulges through the back pocket of his jeans. They flash in the dim light of the hallway as he unlocks the snake-room door. They step inside, the filth of the house left behind. Bev feels a lump in her throat, but she can’t seem to swallow it.

  Joey sits in the captain’s chair and fiddles with his belt buckle. It’s silver and shaped like a motorcycle. She can’t look him in the eye, so she studies his face reflected in the mirror on the closet door. He says, “This is a little different, even for me,” and he blinks slowly, like maybe he’s drunk, like maybe he was at the bar drinking and hanging out with Collie, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Bev, so he came over even though it’s illegal to drink and drive. He says: “I never knew Harry had such a soft spot for your sister. No way, missy, no way.”

  Bev shrugs, bites her lower lip, and keeps her eyes averted. “Who’s Harry?”

  “You don’t know Harry? Sure, you do. He’s Collie’s old man. Throws one fucking hell of a party, he does. Keeps a mean snake, too.”

  Staring into the mirror, she sees Joey sigh and shake his head, as if to say, But what can you do? His mirror-fingers begin unbuckling his belt and unzipping his pants. His mirror-penis appears from a tangle of scratchy-looking black hair. He smiles, gently, and beckons for her to come over. She does, and his hands fall on her shoulders and he kneads her muscles a bit too roughly.

  “You know what to do?”

  Bev nods, even though she doesn’t have a clue. But she’s seen late-night TV. She knows the general motions, the up-down-up-down, and anyway her mom saw this coming as soon as Bev was born.

  Bev takes Joey’s mirror-penis in her hand and starts pulling on it. He buries his bulging red face against her neck, and his stubble is sharp against her skin.

  He sighs and says, “You like your sister up close.”

  Afterwards, there’s a smell of sweat and wet salt. Bev hears the rats rustling in the filing cabinet. Joey puts his penis away. He zips up his pants and buckles his belt. He stifles a belch. He eases himself out of the chair, crouches in front of the desk, and slides open a drawer. His hands scurry out of sight. Then he smiles, pulls out a big, brown envelope, and winks.

  “This should go a long way to fixing up yours,” he says, holding the envelope between them. “But two things. Number one, you really don’t want Collie to know about this. She’s having a hell of a time making ends meet, and Trevor is Harry’s kid, too. Second, Sissy said I could have a bit of a finder’s fee.”

  He reaches into the envelope, raises his eyebrows, and slips a few bills out. Then he passes it to Bev. She wipes her hand on her pants and takes it.

  “It’s best you leave now, Beverly. Best I get back to looking after Trevor. I’ll tell Collie you quit. Honestly, rightly or wrongly, she won’t be surprised. She hates you girls. Woman’s intuition, I guess.”

  Outside, the night is cool and there are no stars. Joey’s car sits black and silent on the street in front of the house. Bev looks over her shoulder, but Joey doesn’t appear at the living room window to wave as she walks home. It’s Friday night, and kids are getting drunk at the park. They’re fighting.

  Sissy is waiting for her when she gets in. She sees the envelope right away. She bites her cheeks so she doesn’t smile.

  “Here you go,” Bev says, trying to sound like a private detective from TV. “This is from Joey.”

  Sissy snatches the envelope and rushes into the kitchen to count the money. Bev sits with her mom, and Cindy sleeps softly in her crib. She imagines Joey just down the street. He’s sipping a beer and watching sports. Maybe he still feels her hands all over him, and he can’t stop smiling, because he loves her.

  Burger Life Fitness

  I.

  Wally sees them blitzing down the sidewalk, and for a second, he’s a teacher again, worried his students might turn out like these two monsters: a boy and girl with matching scowls, dragging feet, and atrocious posture. They’ve got tatty backpacks slung over their shoulders. They’ve got extensive facial piercings and battered army boots, obnoxiously coloured hair with asymmetrically shaved patches, and baggy clothes snapping in the filthy breeze.

  But Wally’s not a teacher anymore. He’s a mascot engaged in one of Bolek’s promotional stunts, all dressed up like a sesame-seed bun, his heavy gut pushing against the seams of the plastic outfit, oval-rim glasses sliding down his sweaty nose, but they’re not reachable by hand because of the suit’s absurd proportions, leaving him no choice but to throw his head back at regular intervals, so that his ropey hair lashes sweat down his back.

  “Look,” squeaks the freak girl. “A fat fuck sandwich.”

  “Quiet,” hisses the boy. “I might have to work with it.”

  This latest indignity plunges Wally into a bath of retrospection. Why is he here, a hapless employee of Burger Life Fitness, a pawn in mortifying plots devised by Bolek Murzyn, the chisel-chested owner? Why, when he used to be a math teacher? Why, when’s he’s thirty years old, twice the age of most entry-level fast-food drones?

  Why?

  Because his father was right.

  II.

  When Wally was a kid, his dad took him to the airport’s mail-sorting depot, where the family income was heaved off conveyor belts with a resignation that could only be described as ambitious. Wearing an oversized hard hat and a safety vest that hung to his knees, Wally roamed the warehouse floor, stopping when his father had to muscle huge packages off the conveyor line and into air-freight containers. Supervisors in special uniforms criss-crossed the warehouse hollering load tonnages and shipment quantities, and Wally recorded these numbers in his mind. This went on for ten hours, during which Wally’s father didn’t talk or smile, his bare, defeated face mostly neutral, except for when a heavy box caused him to grunt. Later, after swallowing a ham sandwich under the humming lights of the lunchroom, he rubbed his eyes and burped without covering his mouth.

  Barely tall enough to see over the conveyor, Wally was transfixed by the thousands of packages floating down the line. He didn’t really care what was in them. It was where they were going that made him curious. He imagined mountains, oceans, and forests. He saw the details: wind rippling the surface of a tropical river, snow gathering on the peak of a lofty mountain, animals sleeping in the shade of a humid jungle. He imagined the places and then himself striding through them, hard hat and all.

  Toward the end of the day, after the adults lost interest and left him to wander alone, Wally watched a geometry set tumble down one of the chutes and land on the conveyor belt. Now this was something he was interested in. The set was packaged in branded tin, battered and dented by its long journey from depot to depot. The destination sticker was scuffed and almost illegible, so Wally grabbed the package off the line for a closer look: 11 South West Eleventh Street, London, England, SW1 1SW. It felt good in his hand, and there was no one around, so he slid it into the pocket of his jeans.

  “See, son,” his dad said on the long bus ride home. “That’s how a living is earned. It’s no fun, but that’s how it’s done.”

  Wally shifted, hoping his shirt covered the bulge in his pocket. “I’ll get a fun job, dad. I know I will.”

  “Listen Wally.” His dad trailed off and looked around the bus. Across from them, a gaunt-faced woman in a long coat had the words call karen fuck off written in blue pen on the top of her hand. “Listen, son. Life isn’t really about that. I wish it was, but it’s not. A man needs to learn how to separate what he wants from what he needs, okay? That’s what life’s about.”

  The next morning, Wally tiptoed into the kitchen, eyes bulging behind the oval frames of his glasses, which were too big for his face and used to be his aunt’s. Dressed in work pants and button-down denim, his dad flipped through a newspaper and
drummed his fingers on a coffee mug. His nightie-clad mother fried eggs with her back to the kitchen. Shell shards littered the floor by her feet. Wally, his hands cold and trembling, laid the geometry set on his dad’s knee, squeezing his eyes shut and flinching as the newspaper rustled. “Dad,” he whispered, “I’m really sorry.”

  An hour later, he wore a clip-on tie and sat quietly on the bus as it gasped and lurched to the end of the line. At the depot, the foreman was thin, pale, and scruffy. He leaned against his tiny desk and hooked his thumbs in his dusty pants. He tilted his head, eyelids twitching as he entertained Wally’s confession. Then he tossed the geometry set on his desk, sent Wally home, and began reprimanding his dad.

  Wally lingered at the door. “You’re going to send it off, right?”

  Both men turned to look at him, but only his father spoke. “You know your way home, don’t you?”

  When he was older, Wally became a teacher and moved into a one-bedroom apartment downtown. On the weekends, his neighbours came home late, and he watched them through the peephole of his front door. The best was the woman across the hall. She wore pretty dresses when she came home from parties, and he grasped the doorknob, thinking he’d invite her in for a nightcap. But she always unlocked her door before he could open his own, so he drank the nightcaps by himself. Then he ate chips, ice cream, and cookies. And then he went to bed.

  The only exercise he got was walking to work. He took a lot of breaks, stopping in front of travel agencies and studying the window displays, noting the figures so he could use them in problem-solving exercises during class: If Rachel and Billy have $3,000, and plane tickets for a two-week trip to Belize cost $800 each, plus 20 percent for taxes, insurance, and other fees, how much money do they have left after they each buy $80 hiking boots, $70 cargo shorts, and $100 in backpackers’ accessories? Answer: $580.