The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  I touched the bulge of money on my thigh with my thumb. “Do you want me to come with you?” That’s what I always said.

  “No, asshole.” That’s what she always said, but she smiled, because she liked to have me ask.

  The grimy bus stopped at the grimy bus station. The bus door opened and humid air swept in, breaking the seal of the interior. People stirred. I stood up first, hopped down the steps, and waited for Jenny on the hot asphalt. Rain tapped my face. She pushed the big pink suitcase ahead of her; I gave her my arm as she alighted, steadying her. I walked her through the bus station to the line for the Lauderdale bus on the other side. Short, dark ladies speaking Spanish; a skinny white girl carrying Rollerblades; old people in sun visors: Florida’s finest. And Jenny, square and solid, her hair freshly washed, as always, for the Monday run, the rest of her draped in cherry-red nylon. You couldn’t miss her. As the line started to move, I pressed myself up against her, reached into my pocket, pulled out the roll of cash, and slid it deep into the pocket of her jeans.

  “Mi amor,” she said, winking.

  I bit her earlobe. “Hurry back, honey bunny.”

  “Can’t wait, love bug.”

  “You have no idea, sweet thing.”

  She patted the cherry-red nylon over her heart, bent her head. “Forever,” she whispered, wiping away a nonexistent tear.

  I grabbed my crotch. “Yeah, baby.”

  The skinny white girl with the Rollerblades narrowed her eyes, looking at Jenny, looking at me. The line moved into the darkness and Jenny waved to me from the top of the bus steps, clutching the big pink suitcase. I watched as she rammed it into the overhead rack, then sat down firmly in the first seat. I blew her a kiss; she closed her fist, pressed it to her heart. The bus pulled away.

  Still laughing, I wandered into the men’s room to pee. I was beguiled by the tiles over the urinal—they were a surprisingly subtle, washy pale blue, with scattered rays of gold, weirdly beautiful, was one loose?—when I noticed that the man at the next urinal, still unzipped, hard, was smiling at me. He was a compact man, salt-and-pepper hair, exophthalmic hazel eyes, uncircumcised, a gold band on the ring finger of his left hand. He glanced down appreciatively, two beats too long. I stroked my dick lightly, but it was already way ahead of me, yearning, pointing. He lowered his gaze, as if to say, You’re too much. You’ve got me.

  I nodded—how did I know how to do that? it was as if I had dreamed it—and he quickly dropped to his knees and sucked me off. I came so fast it was ridiculous, almost embarrassing. I think I made a sound. His hands on my ass and his thick thumbs pressing against the front of my hips made me hard again and he sucked avidly, pulling, until I thought I might faint. He stroked himself, kneeling there on the filthy bathroom floor, his wedding ring flashing up and down his dick. I came again into the strong pull of his mouth and then I did stumble, falling forward. He caught me with one arm, coming into his other hand; we teetered awkwardly, off balance. “You’re a mess,” he said softly. “Look at you. You’re a mess, kid.” I leaned against him, clutching the top of his head, panting.

  We stood like that for just a second, my hand in his salt-and-pepper hair, my jeans at my ankles, him holding me around my legs, steadying me as I had steadied Jenny stepping down from the bus with her clattering pink suitcase barely fifteen minutes ago, but in that second I woke up. I remembered all my dreams. “Fuck,” I said. “Fuck.” I said it as if I were surprised by what I had done, as if none of this had ever occurred to me before.

  He glanced at the door, zipped himself up, smoothed his hair. Shaking slightly, I reached down for my jeans, pulled them up, zipped. He handed me a twenty. “Ciao,” he said, and he was gone, the bathroom door shutting hard and loudly behind him.

  Altogether, perhaps five minutes had gone by. A man on a walker shuffled in. I began to cry helplessly, clutching the creased twenty. I hoped I wouldn’t pee myself. The man on the walker shook his head as he passed me. On the bus home I kept taking the twenty out, smoothing it on my leg, putting it in my pocket, then taking it out again and pressing my palm against it. It felt like magic, like a ticket to another galaxy.

  After that, whenever I saw Jenny off at the bus station, I’d stop in the men’s room, and then I began going to the bus station on my own sometimes. I never told Jenny. I knew she would have felt betrayed, and then she would have wanted a cut. There was a certain balance between us; she was sensitive. Also, when it came to anything involving money, she was pretty mercenary; I didn’t trust her to understand what it was like for me. The sweating businessmen, the sun-reddened guys who had just gotten off their shifts doing construction, the old guys in polyester shirts, all on their knees—like Laurie and Anne and Traci, like the stuffed ox with the glittering horns and the men’s watch with its straps undone, I collected them, and I loved them, in a way. They were nicer to me, actually, gentler and more ordinary than you might think. They were grateful, a little sad, fervent. When I put my hands in their hair, maybe tugging a bit, I felt like Superboy. I felt as if I was giving them something special that they would take back, secretly, into their everyday lives, in the same way that I had added the vase with the bubbles in the glass, the silk flower, the ties, to the houses of strangers. That night, they would remember me when they saw the red creases on their knees from the dirty tiles; the next day, they would remember my taste; a week later, they would remember me standing by the urinal, and hope that I would be there again. As I came into their mouths, I understood why my mother kept sending out those envelopes marked FIRST CLASS: she was launching a vibe into the universe, a message in a bottle. Maybe the waves would bring a message back.

  I dutifully put most of the bus station twenties into the shoe-boxes, but every now and then I’d spend all of what I’d made in an afternoon on the stupidest stuff you can imagine: candy, ice cream, a super-size panda for Jenny, Pac-Man. Never anything useful, never anything I could keep. I certainly couldn’t show up at home with big, glaring new sneakers; my mother and Caroline counted every penny in the coffee can and their ethical system was very rigorous. When I think of those afternoons, I mostly remember being half sick on sugar and trying to force down dinner anyway, so my mother wouldn’t suspect anything. Then I’d go to my room and count my day’s earnings and listen to my father’s transistor radio, turned down low. In Brewster, his station was big band music. I would think: I can do this. I know how to do this. It was comforting.

  I didn’t break into houses anymore. I didn’t have the time. I needed to stay focused. And after about a year, I had amassed $7,000, which is a lot of money for someone in high school. Or it was then. I began to devise some schemes. I felt the distance to the moon getting shorter. I looked at my mother and Caroline marching around the Sunburst with their checklists and thought about how much happier we would all be once we were back on Tinker’s Way, how foolish and unreal Florida would seem.

  Caroline, who had definitely become a weird girl, with much too much long black hair for Florida and only three friends—a strangely tall guy with a big head, a ferocious short girl with a faint mustache, and a pen pal in Sweden—was a senior, but she refused to apply to any colleges, which made our mother furious. “I plan to travel” is all she would ever say. It didn’t help. She missed dinner more than once, came home with scratches on her arms, tangles in her hair, bruises on her knees. Our mother spited her by refusing to ask where she had gotten them. Caroline bought her own Ace bandage, wrapped one ankle in it; a week later, her wrist.

  At school, Caroline more or less acted as if she didn’t know me, but she left a note in my locker one day that said, “Gabriel—are you so sure about your new friends? Love, Caroline, your sister.” For a minute I thought she meant the guys at the bus station, and I was terrified, but then I realized she meant Jenny and all of that. I tore the note up and slid the pieces into her locker. If she didn’t understand, I wasn’t going to explain it to her. She didn’t mention it again. The point is: we all had secrets. Secret plac
es, secret agreements, secret things we did. My mother’s entire heart had become a secret, for example. What did she care about bridge? That was just her cover, like an alias. All she really cared about were her envelopes that said FIRST CLASS. She sent them out vehemently, furiously. And maybe she knew I wasn’t an angel anymore, that I was a bit of a devil. Only an angel to the guys in the bus station bathroom. Taller than her by now, with red hair like hers, but the hair was everywhere, and sweat that stank. Or maybe she didn’t know anything. Maybe she made Cities by herself at night, then kicked them all down before we woke up in the morning.

  I didn’t know. I put it out of my mind. When Caroline was in a good mood, which was rare, we’d say we were going to the beach in the next town, the bigger town with the bigger beach. But then we’d drive past it, Caroline hanging one hot arm out the driver’s side window. We’d go three towns, four towns, passing one strip mall after the next. She would never tell me where we were headed, because that was part of it. We had to be like explorers in uncharted territory, although I guess I was the only one who really was; she knew where we were going. We’d pull over to some edge, or down a dirt road, and when we got out of the car Caroline would spray me all over with bug spray until I was shellacked. She was very serious and thorough, spraying me down to the fingertips, the earlobes.

  Florida has swamps. More of them than you might think, some not far from the highway, some a stone’s throw from a shopping mall. I thought they were a secret, too, the swamps, Florida’s secret. Caroline loved them. After a while, truthfully, I knew that our expedition was always going to be into a swamp, but I pretended to be awed and surprised because I didn’t want her to stop taking me. It was the one place she’d let me go with her, out of all the times she took the car and drove away. I wondered if this was where she’d gotten her scratches and bumps, but she was so careful when we were there together, so delicate, almost reverent. She walked lightly.

  “This way, Gabriel. In here.” And in we’d go, walking right into solid green. If someone had been looking, they’d have seen us disappear, as if we had walked into a time machine. But it was really that Caroline knew how to part the dank branches in such a way that the swamp would let us in, then close behind us. The sound of the insects was phenomenal, like they could eat the entire earth. If you walked as delicately as she did, it was almost as if you were walking on water, because the land was so tenuous and boggy. Caroline walked ahead of me, slender little flying bugs with bright blue wings studding her black braid. She stepped lightly. I stepped lightly, too, imagining that I was walking inside her footprints. We’d both be sweating in the long-sleeved shirts she made us wear, stepping in our cheap sneakers like flamingoes.

  “Look.” In her hand, maybe, a small damp frog with yellow spots on its back.

  She put it on my palm. I cupped my other hand over it. The tiny webbed feet of the frog seemed to adhere to my skin, and its belly moved against my palm like a beating heart.

  “Shhh.” She leaned down and peered at the frog in my hands. “Little swamp guy. Okay, let him go, Gabe.”

  I bent down so he wouldn’t have too far to hop.

  As you go farther into the swamp, things change. You might think it’s getting more and more impassable, but then all of a sudden you’re in this incredible light and the water is moving. There are alligators. Caroline taught me how to spot their snouts. She told me they carry their young in their mouths. When you get in farther, some of the earth-eating insect noise dies away, leaving a thin curtain of insect sound between the outer world and this world, a world on swamp time. Swamp light is sweet. Many people don’t know that, but Caroline knew it. She knew the swamp’s secret: that inside the thick, dry shell of Brewster was somewhere beautiful and strange and very slow. You could imagine that inside an alligator it might be beautiful, too, gorgeous strong tendons and a translucent, cool, jade-green alligator heart. In case you ever got swallowed by one, you could look around in the jade-green light and see what was in there. Pieces of garden hose. Baby rattles. The bottom curve of the cool jade-green heart, like a sun hanging on the horizon of another planet. But when I was with Caroline in the shimmering swamp, I knew the alligators would leave us alone.

  As we wandered, Caroline would tell me the names of things and all about them. “You can eat this one, Gabe.” Holding up a long leaf. “But not this one.” Holding up a leaf just a little less long, but with more of a sheen on it. “At night, you have to learn to sleep in a tree. We should be practicing.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Sometimes she let me have one of the sandwiches she’d brought, but sometimes she’d say, “Look around. What can you eat that grows here?”

  There was bark with a rich, dank taste, somewhere between old coffee grounds and sardines. There were leaves not unlike kale: tough, but nothing special. Crayfish, if you can manage to build a small fire on top of a tree that has fallen into the water, take a long time to boil right, and I always got that metallic taste from Caroline’s tin cup, blackened from many fires. The boiling doesn’t make the spindliness go away, but back then I thought the spindliness was interesting and I was proud of myself, eating crayfish out of the swamp. Water has to be carried in with you; you’d be a fool to drink swamp water. I never did learn to sleep in a tree, though I think Caroline could. She was good at teaching herself things like that: ice-skating backward, finding north without a compass, holding her breath for minutes at a time underwater, waking up at a certain hour without an alarm clock. I guess she was practicing for when she was far away, in places where they ice-skated backward and didn’t have alarm clocks.

  My hoard grew. At one point, I had close to $9,000. Think about it: if I’d invested that $9,000 in 1987, let’s say in a CD with a reasonable rate—and remember, interest rates back then were high—I’d have had five times that much ten years later. I was a minor. I could have said I’d saved it mowing lawns and doing odd jobs—who would have asked anything further? Especially in Florida. They like cash in Florida. All my subjects in school—geometry, history, the tragicomedy of my French class, gym, English—were puny compared to what was in the shoeboxes under my bed. Classes were just talk. I had proof of that, mostly in small bills. For the first time since we’d moved, I felt hopeful. There was even one girl, Felicia, who I thought could maybe be my girlfriend. She was lush and happy, and she drew these great pictures of jungles. They looked like album covers. She kissed in a really deep, not shy, way. She put her hand on the crotch of my jeans—lightly, firmly—and kept it there. I thought Felicia and I looked good together, like a picture in a magazine.

  When I looked in the mirror, I liked what I saw there, too. I liked my curly hair that was just a little too long, I liked that I was getting ropy in the arms and legs, I liked the way my jeans hung. I thought that if I sneaked in Felicia’s window one night, like a sly fox gliding over the sill in the dark, she wouldn’t mind. I thought about how that would be, so easy. One good thing about Florida is that it’s generally warm at night. Every day, it was as if I was hard all the time, even when I wasn’t. It was as if I had an axis, a trueness. I knew what I was doing. $9,250. $9,565. I skimmed a lot less off the top than I could have, considering how much Jenny had come to trust me. I think she might have had a crush. She even showed me which panda she hid all her money inside of (it was the one with the red hat). I hit $10,000 like a Triumph taking a curve.

  Meanwhile, every day my mother paced the concrete corridors of the Sunburst like a queen pacing her battlements, wreathed by cigarette smoke. She gazed outward, like a queen looking at the sea, but you couldn’t see the ocean from where we were, just scrub on the side of the highway. She looked at the scrub accusatorily, but, honestly, I still thought she was so pretty. Once, when I saw her standing there, frowning in her cloud of smoke, I almost told her. I almost brought out the boxes and opened them for her and said, Look.

  But I didn’t do that. Maybe I should have.

  Instead, Jenny and I made plans. The pi
nk Samsonite suitcase bulged with product; we expanded to the high school in the next town. We talked about Miami, how we could live there. Jenny said she was going to go on a diet. In the afternoons now, I’d go over to Felicia’s huge, freezing, empty house. We drew album covers for bands that didn’t exist. I unhooked her bra incredibly slowly; I left perfect hickeys on the insides of her upper thighs. I felt like I was going places, finally.

  When I got home from Felicia’s one afternoon, my lips sore from kissing, my mother was waiting for me at the kitchen table. Her braid was tighter than usual, as if she’d just rebraided it before I came in. Caroline was standing behind her, silent.

  “Gabriel,” my mother said, “I’ve had a call from the police.”

  Caroline shook her head, put her finger to her lips.

  “The police?” I gazed at the ceiling. I began to sweat. Not one of those guys had ever asked me how old I was; I could say that; I got ready to say that.

  My mother looked at her hands, which she had laid flat on the table. “They picked up Jenny at the bus station.” I exhaled with relief. She hesitated, then drove herself forward. “Gabe, you need to show me what you’ve been keeping under your bed.”

  The universe folded in on me. “No,” I said. “No, no.”

  She didn’t care. She marched down to my room, threw the door open, and hauled out all the shoeboxes, the covers falling off as she shook their contents out onto the bed. She was a giant, tearing up the refugee camp. Laurie and Anne went flying, crying; they’d never make it to the City now. When my mother saw all that money, it was as if she had been hit. I thought she was going to be physically ill. I had left my body and become a fly. I was hovering somewhere around the ceiling fan, my spirit getting dizzy as the dusty blades circled. My small, once delicate mother stood surrounded by tumbling stacks of grubby money, her sun-baked face in her hands. Then she lifted her face from her hands and hauled off and smacked me in the face as hard as she could. It hurt: I was no longer a fly, just a cruddy fifteen-year-old boy. “You little shit,” she said. “You rotten little shit.” She pushed handfuls of money at my eyes, at my mouth. “For this? Are you kidding me? What is wrong with you? I didn’t teach you this. You fucking creep. You horrible, horrible kid. You little bastard. You’re an asshole, just like your fucking father. You’re a thief.”