Here They Come

by Yannick Murphy

  A pack full of Puerto Ricans chase me down in the park and make me crash and steal my bike. There’s nothing I can do except run after them yelling for the police, but the Puerto Ricans disappear quickly. I run to the cop on horseback and stand by his stallion’s shoulder and tell him what happened and he says there’s nothing he can do. I tell him sure there’s something he can do, he’s got a stallion, why doesn’t he take the stallion and gallop off and find my bike, and the cop tells me not to get so smart and I tell him I’ll ride his stallion if he can’t, and I’ll get my bike myself. The cop pulls on the reins and turns and the stallion walks off and I run after the stallion and now I am talking to the stallion, telling it to fucking find my bike, asking the stallion what kind of a stallion is he anyway and I’m crying too and everything in the park is now blurry, and the stallion looks like it’s swimming in water and not walking, and then it turns around and looks at me and snorts and shakes its head and I think the stallion is telling me that yes, it will try to find my bike, it will look for my bike even if the cop on his back won’t, he will go to the ends of the earth to find my bike.

  Oh, what a stallion, I think and I have a little-girl dream of owning my own stallion and riding him every day across open fields in the country.

  John pulls out a milk crate, the milk crate he usually keeps for himself to sit on when it is not lunchtime and he tells me to take a seat and to watch the hot dog stand and that he will go after those Puerto Ricans himself and I see him go, his apron strings flying out behind him as he walks off. While he’s gone I lift the lids and look inside the metal bins at the floating hot dogs in their greasy water. Some guy comes by and wants one, but I put the bun in the palm of my hand without first putting a napkin there and the guy walks off disgusted while I’m putting the hot dog in the bun. I’m yelling for him to come back and I’m waving a napkin in the air, saying, “Here, here’s your fucking napkin,” but he won’t turn around. When John comes he’s saying he couldn’t find the Puerto Ricans who stole my bike, but I see he’s putting his apron back over his head and he probably didn’t go looking for my bike at all, but probably just had to take a crap in the park’s public bathroom.

  I see potential hot dog men on the six o’clock news every night. They are being bombed or rioting in their own countries, throwing Molotov cocktails at buildings already crumbled from some skirmish from wars before. Their women scream and lay down on the ground rocking the dead and injured, their hair come undone from buns at the backs of their heads, their feet bare, twisted out at odd angles under them, their bony ankles surely hurting against rubble on a blown-up road.

  Our father has a new film to make. A documentary about thoroughbred racetracks. He has been funded by grant-lending institutions, but the money’s not as much as he thought it would be. He can roll the camera, but who will do the sound for free? His slut says, not me, so he asks Louisa. She’s terribly shy and he yells at her to get in there, to hold the microphone close up to the trainers’ and the jockeys’ faces. He has seen the film before he has finished making it, how it will start with the early morning mist and the sound of the hooves as the horses breeze by the rail.

  At the yearling sales the buttery fat horses are led on the straw-covered stage. The auctioneer is red-faced from yelling out the figures, from pounding his gavel. Handlers click and whistle low and long when their horses rise up, wanting to exit the stage.

  At a house he’s rented to be close to the racetrack, he unloads his film inside a black bag and changes out the canisters, his hands hidden in the black cloth and the cloth moving, looking like an animal was captured inside.

  “That was good,” he tells Louisa. He means the whole day, the footage of horses having their teeth floated and their hooves shod. The blacksmith with the brand iron filmed in an orange circle of sparks. Louisa is sitting on the couch, sewing more patches onto the crotch of her blue jeans.

  “It was a day from God,” he says. “Tomorrow, the next day, days after, who knows, maybe we will have nothing but shit. But today,” he says and he lifts up the film he has transferred into a metal can and he kisses it.

  His shoulder is sore from holding the camera. He walks stiffly, sometimes massaging his shoulder as he walks around the kitchen, preparing the dinner with Louisa and me.

  During the day I hold equipment for them while they film. I have learned to bet. Two dollars here and two dollars there. Our father has told me how and has explained exactas and trifectas. I understand past performance and bloodline.

  Grooms chop carrots into feed tubs, and farther on down the shed row black hot walkers can be heard singing about how they will walk and talk with Jesus one of these days. Our father films a race and asks Louisa and me to go near the rail and take sound of the horses’ hooves galloping by. In front of us a horse breaks down. While the others continue galloping, this horse stumbles forward on its knees. There is blood coming out of its nose and it is breathing hard. We know they will come and take it to the blue room and give it an injection and put the horse down. It’s called the blue room because it’s really just four walls with no ceiling. What the horse sees before it dies is the blue of the sky. The jockey jumps off and puts his hand on the horse’s sweaty neck as it tries to stand but keeps falling back down on its broken leg.

  “Whoa, whoa, sorry girl,” is what we hear the jockey has said on the tape we listen to back at the house. Our father plays the tape over and over again. “Sorry girl, whoa, whoa, sorry girl,” Louisa and I hear at night while we try to sleep in our beds.

  At home our mother’s arm rises up in her sleep and stays there. Could she be waving at her minions? At a dance with a partner just about to take her hand? At the riviera in the water, waving at her mother and her father on the shore?

  “Merde,” she says in the dark. We are in the dark again. My brother has figured out that we can get electricity from the outlet on the exit light. We plug in an electric pot and slow-cook a chicken while we wait in the hallway in the dark for it to be done. Louisa sits on the window ledge. It is five long flights down but she sits there almost asleep, her head drooping to the left, out toward the sky, as if the sky were some stranger’s shoulder to lean upon throughout a trip on a train. She says she sleeps better sitting on the window ledge than in bed. I sleep on cheap scratchy sheets patterned like graph paper. It hurts my eyes to look at them too long. My bare arms and legs spread out on the sheets in this hot weather like lines drawn from axis points. Our mother hates our sheets. She is afraid some hot morning she will stand up from bed and on her naked body will be the squares and lines of the sheets from the cheap material’s dye having bled with our sweat.

  My brother takes his expensive guitars and throws them around in his room and crashes them against tables and walls so that the necks break from the bodies. Jesús comes up in the elevator and says, “Qué pasa?” and we tell him it’s Toffee again and Jesús tells my mother she should call the police and my mother tells Jesús, “But Jesús, that’s my son,” and Jesús nods his head and then he goes home to the South Bronx after patting my mother on the back.

  Suddenly my brother opens his door and he runs into the closet and pulls out the twenty-two and the bullets and meanwhile my mother is pulling at his arm and screaming for him to put the gun away, but he doesn’t and he just throws my mother against the bookshelf. Still holding the gun and the bullets he goes back into his room and slams the door. My mother is hurt at the bookshelf. She can’t catch her breath and books fall down around her, their dusty covers dirtying her face and shoulders. The dog is barking, running from my brother’s door to my mother.

  “Shh,” my mother says to the dog and lifts her finger to her lips. We lift my mother up from the pile of books that have rained down around her and she goes to my brother’s door and she calls to him and bangs on the door but he tells her he will shoot himself now if she doesn’t go away, if she doesn’t leave him alone. The only one he will talk to, he says, is our father.

  The phone compan
y in our neighborhood is on strike. No one has service except an emergency phone center set up a few blocks down in a hotel lobby. “Call your father,” my mother says to me and Jody, “and run,” she yells, so me and Jody run to the hotel and there’s such a long line winding around the outside of the building that if we wait on it it could be too late.

  “My brother’s got a gun, he’s going to kill himself, let me use the phone!” Jody starts to scream and the people make way and everyone is staring at us while Jody is fumbling for the dime and someone reaches out and gives us one and Jody calls our father where we know he’s staying at his apartment uptown.

  He comes down on his bicycle wearing a beret. The bicycle is a WWII bicycle, army green with a clever design that features a wing bolt in the center support bar that when loosened lets the rider fold the bicycle in two. The beret is black wool. He leaves it on when he stands on the top of a ladder outside my brother’s door and tries to look down over the wall of my brother’s room that doesn’t reach all the way to the ceiling. The folded bicycle rests against the hallway wall looking deformed.

  This night my brother doesn’t kill himself and I finally fall asleep with the image of my father still on the ladder with his beret on talking to my brother over his wall.

  My mother’s bruise on her arm from my brother throwing her against the bookshelf heals like a hurricane swirl seen on radar when the weather’s reported on TV. The eye is the purplest part, the part that days afterward still makes her say merde after she brushes by accident up against a wall.

  My brother stays inside all the time and lets his hair go greasy like the hot dog men. I come home and he is watching all the soap operas I’ve watched for years, asking me who the characters are, asking me to catch him up on years of destroyed lives.

  He still keeps the gun in his room and sometimes I can hear him opening it and I don’t know why, except I think to look into it, at all the black that he can see.

  It’s dark in Rena’s basement where she’s having a party and we play spin the bottle. Whenever the bottle spins to me I kick it with my toe so I won’t have to be kissed because I know the boys all want to kiss Rena instead. I leave them in the basement and go upstairs. It’s the middle of the day and Bonnie isn’t home but Bonnie’s Hells Angel boyfriend’s motorcycle is parked in the middle of the floor and I see him sleeping on Rena’s mother’s bed. He sleeps naked. On his arms I see tattoos so faded I can’t tell what they are. I walk up close to him. He needs to shave and in the corners of his mouth is white spittle. He smells like some kind of liquor he either drank or threw up. His eyes move back and forth under his veiny eyelids shiny with grease or sweat. His eyelashes have lint stuck to them. There’s a round scar on his forehead that looks like a doctor didn’t know where to give him a vaccine and stuck it in his forehead instead. He whines a little, like our dog does in her sleep. I watch his feet too, to see if they’ll move the way her paws move, but they don’t. They are like women’s feet, pale and long and thin. Fuck, this Hells Angel would die in the desert, I think. He would die in the jungle, in the wilderness he would not survive. Bonnie walks in.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she says to me and takes off her clothes in front of me and then sits on her bed and swallows a pill from a bedside waterglass and lies down next to her Hells Angel and closes her eyes.

  I walk home. It’s hot and all the gum stuck to the street once dried has now gone to goo again and collects on the bottoms of my shoes and when I walk it’s like moonwalk, a slow labored lift for each foot, the gum in strings I try to walk off. I stop at a phone booth and check the change return for coins. I find dimes and nickels and then I turn to go, but I decide to put the coins in the slot and start dialing my father. His slut answers and says he’s not there. I want to know where he is but she says goodbye and then hangs up on me before I get the question asked.

  The telephone booth floor is metal and rough, a good floor for wiping off the bottoms of my shoes, which I do, saying at the same time, “That fucking slut.”

  A woman wants to use the phone, she raps on my glass door with a coin. I don’t look at her. I keep wiping off my feet. She starts pressing her face up against the crack in the door, telling me I’m not using the phone, so I should let someone else use it.

  “I’m using it,” I tell her and then I lift my foot up as high as it can go and I pull the phone off the hook and I start using the mouthpiece to wipe the gum off the bottom of my shoe.

  At home the telephone rings, but we can’t find it. We find the cord, hold it with both hands and crawl and follow it like bomb specialists in search. It’s deep under our tower of garbage.

  “Let the damn thing ring itself to death,” our mother says. But couldn’t it be some boy? Some cray-pas boy drawn to the best of Louisa’s abilities? Or could it be our father?

  “Oh, find the phone,” we say. We stand up on all the bags and toss them down where they split and ooze black liquid, where their ties come undone and hellish stink rises up in vapors and so we open up our mouths to breathe through them instead. The ringing gets louder. Wipe the maggots off it, I yell to Jody, who has found it first, who instead of wiping them off, flicks them while they lift and curl hidden in the dial holes.

  “Hello,” Jody says. And it is our father and we sit down on the garbage and listen.

  “What are we doing?” Jody says, she looks around her at the garbage everywhere, and then at me.

  “Watching television,” I say.

  “Watching television,” Jody says into the phone.

  “Let me talk now,” I say and Jody turns away from me so I can’t grab the phone. Finally it’s my turn, and there is nothing much to say and I can hear him wanting to get off, playing with something in the background, my sister talked him out and now he is talkless and bored. I hear something in the background. More coins on his mantel? The clasp on a briefcase? And then I know, I figure it out, it’s the hinge on his refrigerator, opening and closing. He is perusing for a meal.

  “When can we see you, when can we visit?” I say. He is busy, oh so busy, there is the film, its early-morning and every-day hours.

  “Do you know,” he says, “that some people don’t know the sun is a star? Do you know?”

  He says there are more morons than you can imagine, more stupidity in the world than we could ever think up, the statistics are astounding, the stupid rule the earth, never be smart, if you want to learn something, any one thing in your life, you must learn to never be smart because you will lose every time. “Learn to be stupid,” he says. “It pays.”

  Then we ask him again. Can we come, please? we say and he says all right. We are allowed once again to visit him at his summer rental.

  The corn is ready to eat. There are special instructions to follow. Instructions my father’s father insisted on. Boil the water first, then go to the garden and pick the ears from the stalks and run with them in your arms to where the water is boiling on the stove. Shuck the ears as quickly as possible, as close as possible to the boiling water, let the husks fall to the floor, don’t even spend time leaning over a trash pail trying to make sure the silk doesn’t go all over the place. Cook the corn for no longer than four minutes. Use a timer. Don’t cover the pot. Roll the corn back and forth on top of a stick of butter. Use hickory-smoked salt. Enjoy. When you are finished biting the kernels off roll the cobs in butter again, suck on them, then roll them again in the butter a third time and throw them outside where the dog can hold them between his front paws and gnaw on them for hours.

  My father is ripping off the husks. Silk is hanging from his elbows and his forearms like tassels from a cowboy’s suede coat. His slut is amused. She’s sipping wine. Behind her in the window I can see the sun setting over the fields.

  “Faster! Faster!” she says, she laughs and sips. The windows start to steam and I can no longer see out them. We eat with the cornsilk and husks still in a pile on the floor by the stove.

  “You can smoke it,” my father says and after dinne
r, while his dog is gnawing on his corn, my father rolls the silk in cigarette paper and lights it. It burns so quickly there’s not even enough time to put your lips to it and inhale. His slut laughs.

  “You’ll smoke your fingers instead,” she says while standing in the doorway. The stars are out. So many stars my father can’t find the constellations. He’s seeing handles of big and little dippers in groups of stars that are constellations not yet named.

  * * *

  One day our father comes to our house.

  “What’s he want?” our mother says, looking out from the window, watching him jump off his bicycle and come through our doors. He wants things that belonged to his parents, he says. Things he says that are rightfully his. He heads first for an Indian bowl.

  “The Navajos used it to cook,” he says. There are fire stains going up around the sides. The old bowl, passed on down from his great-grandparents, is worth money, he says, and he will have it appraised. Our mother seethes. She holds her hands in fists jammed into front pockets of her cardigan. We can see the bumps of knuckles plainly through the wool.

  Our father takes the bowl off our shelf.

  “Leave it,” she tells our father.

  “Oh, no. This is mine,” our father says. “This was never yours.”

  “I want the money from it, then. Money for the children,” our mother says.

  “Sell it? Sell it?” our father says. “You don’t know anything. You don’t sell something like this. That’s what a dumbshit would do. That’s what an asshole would do.”

  Our mother runs up to our father, her fists coming out from her cardigan pockets.

  She flies at our father’s back, her hands still fists, a bit of lint from her cardigan pocket perched on a white knobby knuckle.