No Country: A Novel

by Kalyan Ray

  Next year I shall definitely come visit you in America, in the autumn. I am saving every penny. I’ve been looking at reproductions of the great paintings in its Metropolitan Museum. I want to discover Greenwich Village together, Neel, and we must go to the Blue Note to listen to jazz and stay up all night! There is so much to do. I so look forward to exploring New York together, then visit your university, and go for walks in those maple woods of yellow and red. I miss you.

  Your loving Grandpa

  Something in the letter reminded me of my own, very different, father: intent, open, and wondering, as if those two men who had never met had come together in my mind. I felt a growing tenderness, knowing that Neel had included me in this letter, although I was not its intended recipient.

  When Neel returned, his anorak smelt of snow, and I held his cool hands in my warm ones.

  VIII

  For every tatter in its mortal dress

  Billy

  Upstate New York

  Thanksgiving, 1989

  Four and a half years. Shit, it’s been that long. Closer to five. I wanted to marry Gillian, but she insisted that we complete our twelve steps before standing at the altar. But we went ahead and fixed the date, for a week before Christmas.

  But there was still one step I needed to complete: To make peace with those I had hurt. I had to square things with Mom. I owed her that much.

  “Billy, you gotta do it,” my basement friends urged. It nauseates me to think of being turned into Billy the kid again, Archie’s shitty son. The ghosts of all my humiliations lurked, a line of wounded soldiers from a disastrous campaign. I argued back and forth with myself, Gillian, with my sponsor Jerome. Gillian was certain that I would live through the reconciliation, as she called it. Jerome too.

  “Ya’ll be the stronger for it,” he assured me, coughing before and after the sentence.

  “He ain’t got no power over ya,” announced Jerome, smiling, wrinkling the greenish veins around the rheumy estuary of his eyes. Flicking away the butt, he announced, “Ya’ll see, Bill. Hey, five years of sobriety, man. Yo’mum—she’ll be proud o’ya. When’s ya anniversary?”

  “You don’t know Archie Swint,” I grumbled.

  “Yeah,” he said, his chest burbling with phlegm, “but he don’t know what y’are now. Ya need to get this off ya mind. Once and fer all, Billy. Ya’ll do it.”

  “He won’t care,” I said with dead certainty.

  “It’s for your mom, Billy,” Gillian reminded me. “She’ll be glad to see you for Thanksgiving. That’ll be nice for her.”

  “He’ll be nasty,” I began, but Gillian just kissed me and said, “Call me when you are through, and I’ll drive over and get you.” She was having Thanksgiving dinner with her sponsor, Rachel. She was going to bake a pumpkin pie and a big batch of my favorite cookies, and expected me back for dessert.

  “You might be having dinner, or watching the football game,” I said. It was my desperate Hail Mary pass.

  “I’ll come when you call, Billy. I promise.” We looked at each other, and I remembered the odds we had overcome and felt a surge of confidence. I am going to be fine. It’s been five years, goddammit. He could even be dead. Or paralyzed.

  “Why don’t you let me drop you off?” Gillian persisted.

  “I’ll take the bus.” I was sure. “I need some time by myself going there.”

  So it was decided. Gillian would drive our trusty blue Datsun. I would join her later, as soon as I was done.

  • • •

  I HAD KEPT away from my folks all this time. Three years ago, I saw Mom carrying a heavy grocery bag. I was about to cross the street to help when I saw Archie inside her car, tapping the steering wheel impatiently.

  Lost in these thoughts, I got off the bus and started to walk toward our old house at Haddon Place, then had to snap myself back into the present and realized I was almost a mile away from Mom’s apartment. I am calm, I am calm, I told myself as I walked.

  Camelot Apartments, declared the flaked sign. I half-hoped that they had moved again. They would have had no way of letting me know. Or, he could be dead. Oh yeah, oh yeah, sweet Baby Jesus, oh yeah.

  “Fuck this, I am going to pull myself together,” I told myself. I’ll see Mom and return her pendant in my gift box. I will tell her how I made this box, about the delicate tools I used, about Peter Foley and my job. And Gillian.

  I turned the corners of the fake-brick apartments, laid out like a kid’s building blocks on the scarred lawn. When I came to 114D, I recognized the dried flower and pinecone garland my mother used to hang on the front door of our Haddon Lane house, dusty and tatty now, with Mom’s Ford Turd Pinto rust buggy, parked in front. I rang the bell.

  I could not see into the dim stairway when the door opened, even under the cobwebby stairwell light. Mom stood on the mat, its gray plastic bristling around her bedroom slippers, her hair flurried with gray, as she peered at me uncertainly, her face eroding into a shy grin of recognition. Then he came.

  Archie Swint loomed over her, standing squarely behind her on the first stair, his thick fingers proprietorially on her sweatered shoulder. “They said they’d taken the garbage away,” he sneered, “but here it is, on our doorstep, see?”

  “Oh Archie,” began my mother, reaching out to me. His fingers closed on her shoulder, holding her back.

  “What brings you here?” my father asked.

  I held out the Saran-wrapped parcel of chocolate cookies Gillian had baked at home. “Happy Thanksgiving,” I managed to say, out of breath.

  • • •

  I STARED AT the dull glaze of the plastic under which the patterned tablecloth lay limp and fuzzy, a far cry from my house-proud Mom’s previous home. I looked surreptitiously at my father. Gaunt, hard, indestructible. His sour, masculine odor infested the apartment. Gray stubble stretched over his bony jaw. Flared nose over thin lips. The birthmark on his cheek seemed to have grown larger, a drop of clotted blood. Ropy muscles slid snake-wise under the wrinkled cover of his skin. He had been about fifty when I was born. It seemed impossible that he had ever been a boy, a child, anyone’s baby. He looked more than ever made of rock and embedded metals.

  Mom, only sixty, looked as if he had kept her long submerged under stagnant water. Her skin had grown loose and porous, and her nostrils drooped between puffy cheeks, filamented with tiny veins, and gray pillows under her eyes which had no light in them. She moved slowly, uncertain of her feet. I glanced at them. Toenails overgrown, ankles shapeless as undone pink socks. She smiled, at nothing, as if trying to listen to some whisper, her mouth vague and wet around the fissured edges. I wanted to hold her, but felt Archie’s swiveled gaze, under tangled, complicated eyebrows, alert to every move.

  A bare tree branch clawed at the fogged window pane. Mom had put zucchini and carrots into a plastic colander. Steam rose from it, and the kitchen was close with the smell of vegetables past their prime. The kitchen occupied all of my senses, pushing out everything else, taking over the recesses of my memory. As she puttered about, he sat on his chair facing the dim window. I could see his nostrils cavernous, his downturned mouth, his presence seeping into everything, like sludge-drip from under a car.

  I stood next to Mom to get as far away as I could from him and his glass of whiskey, which he clutched in thick, root-like fingers. In the close botanical fug, he was speaking low, a growling generator spewing smoke. As much as I tried to block him out, his words were undoing me, bubbling up from that bitter stream, “loser, shithead, ungrateful, illiterate,” as if he were dictating my biography.

  Moving to the window, I began to wipe at the pane, desperate to remind myself of the world outside, where Gillian and I lived, the lumberyard, Peter Foley’s whistling, carpentry, clean cold air. I did not know when I would ever have the opportunity to speak to Ma alone.

  Mom went to the living room, and I followed her. The backs of her hands, resting on the doily on top of the television, were blue and disorderly, a wrigg
le of earthworms breaking surface. Her rings looked like some strange stone bait, shiny and sharp. Archie had trailed after us, a buffalo on the mudflat of the carpet, his baleful eyes watching. The coffee table held four small framed pictures, all of Sandy’s wedding. I urged my eyes away from them and smiled gamely into the cramped room with its sofa, hassock, bulging recliner, the defeated throw pillows.

  Absently, Mom had taken out an enormous feathered hat from a closet and put it on, throwing her face into deep shade. Was she losing it, I worried, relieved when she, just as absentmindedly, reached up and took it off with both hands, holding it carefully, as if it were a full tureen of soup and set it down on the worn magazines on the coffee table. My father looked on, unmoved by the bizarre ritual.

  “One more plate,” whispered Mom escaping into the kitchen. Now it was Archie and me in the ring.

  “How are you, Dad?” I said, sounding faint and diffident.

  His teeth gleamed at me. “A nice question,” he said, the air slipping sibilantly between his teeth, “a nice question surely.”

  “I’ll see if I can help Mom,” I muttered, panic rising in me as in a dream where you dreaded a wet basement, but your feet dipped into water at the very top of the staircase. The kitchen linoleum shimmered underfoot, reflecting the overhead fixture, a blurred sac of light that followed me like an eye every time I moved.

  “Something I can do, Mom?” She kept wiping her dry hands in the towel she held, then put a number of cookies on a plate. “Have some,” she said.

  I chewed on one. I knew these well. The anise-flecked Christmas cookies took me back to childhood. “Merry Christmas,” she said brightly.

  “You mean Happy Thanksgiving?” I asked, bewildered by her mistake. After a wavering second of indecision, she righted herself. “Yes,” she said, smiling brightly, “have another cookie.” She had lost a tooth at the side of her mouth.

  “You made them for Thanksgiving this year,” I said, trying to fill the silence. Her eyes blazed at me. “These are Christmas cookies,” she said sharply. I had no idea what we were arguing about. In walking up to their apartment, I had given up all rights to logic.

  I looked at my fingers splayed on the kitchen counter, scabbed knuckles, nails bitten to the quick in the last few days, then fixed my eyes on the box of cereal propped in a corner, observing the letters on it begin to slip and slide, an obscene inky wriggle. I felt the gorge rise in me and turned away.

  I watched Mom, my only protector, helpless, smelled the stale odor of age, saw the failing carpentry of her teeth, the pauses in her speech.

  “I am so sorry, Mom,” I said to her as quietly as possible. “I’ve brought back something that belongs to you.” I felt I was a small boy again, back from school. She was holding out another cookie in her hand. Her eyes looked moist. “You went away, Billy,” she said, as if betraying a secret. “Why did you come back?”

  “Mom,” I whispered, “Mom, did you miss me?”

  I gave her the little cedar box, but she absently put it away in the sagging pocket of her apron without a glance. “Miss you?” she muttered vaguely. I reached over, wanting to touch her hand, but saw that minute flinch of her shoulder, the alarmed curling-up of her fingers.

  “Mom—” I began, but she was looking away, raising her trembling veined hand, her back tense.

  All this will make sense somehow, I told myself. Jerome, Gillian, my basement friends can’t all be wrong. I felt my head and chest burn with words, longing to tell her about my home with Gillian, the smoky church basement from where we emerged time and again baptized into hope. I wanted to tell her that it was all right, that I was fine, inspite of . . . well, inspite of everything. I had brought back her pendant. I had made her the little box with all my skill and love. I wanted her . . . to pay attention. But all I felt was her frailty, her fear, seeping into me in the close air.

  As if on cue, Dad walked back into the room. I could hear the roar of the toilet somewhere in the background. He was smiling, at my elbow, holding out a glass of whiskey before my unguarded face.

  “Let’s drink to Sandy and her new baby in Scranton,” he ordered. I stared at the amber tilt and wink of the whiskey.

  “Well?” snarled my father. The half-empty bottle sat on the counter. The old voices in my head had jolted awake. I willed them to be quiet, but could not help shivering as I glanced to see if he was wearing his belt.

  “I . . . I’ll have s-some soda,” I faltered, sitting down.

  “Whiskey and soda?” Archie Swint was looming over me. I felt his breath on me.

  “Just soda,” I said. This is his space, and he commands it still. The old tomcat spraying his pungent piss. I tried to push the glass away, hoping Mom would come to my rescue. But it was he who reached out and cupped his hand around mine, the first time his flesh had touched mine. I went limp, the intervening years erased, unable to stir in this choking nightmare.

  In a surprising tilt, he poured the whiskey into my mouth. Some of it dribbled on to my collar as I tried, too late, to clamp my lips. The terrible warmth down my gullet startled me.

  “Don’t waste it,” he chortled gleefully, filling the glass again.

  I coughed and choked, but when I looked up, there was the second glassful. “To the baby,” crowed my father. The world was tilting. I held on to the tabletop.

  “That child won’t be a Swint,” he growled, “but what of it? Swint was just a name I chose.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him, sitting up, dumbfounded. This was news to me.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said, “how I chose Swint. But have another drink. He bent over me, his fingers curling down over mine around the heavy glass, its design pressing into my flesh.

  “Swallow,” hissed my father, sipping his own with relish, “and I’ll tell you what exactly a Swint is.” My mother shrank back into the corner, her hands inside potholders like amputee stubs.

  Who am I? I drained my glass. Tell me, tell me. The sharp smell of whiskey clawed at the basement of my being, scratching and swatting something awake deep inside me. He reached out and poured another glass of whiskey. Full to the brim. I shook my head no, nonono, but there he was, one eye oozing goo, a gleam in the other one, his shrewd, goatish look making it clear what he thought of me: Scumbilly, Billy-swine.

  “Where do we come from, Dad?” I pleaded with him, “we Swints?” I was reaching beyond him to ancestors I had never seen, dim shapes in my blood who would raise me up, above and beyond my father, but it was through him I had to reach out, I thought helplessly.

  “Swints?” he said, turning his face about. A small ooze ran down one eye into a fissure on his cheek. “Fecked if I know. I could be part Eskimo,” he said.

  “I had no name when they found me. Who knows where? They weren’t great note-takers those days. Packed me off to Boston, is all I was ever told, and that I’d been left in the streets . . .” His voice trailed off, then began again. “Some of the priests were always looking for nancy-boys. They’re the ones had it cozy. The meaty soups, yeah—woollen socks, even handkerchiefs. For those dainty pantywaists. I got my nose broke, learned to fight, knocked out teeth as needed. Not like you,” he jeered, swiveling toward me.

  I looked down at my glass. He filled it.

  “What about the name?” I persisted.

  He ignored me. “Reckon I was fourteen when I lit out. Caught a train and sneaked off it at Rochester. When I climbed up the stairs, I saw this poster of a boxer pasted on a wall: Archie Swint, King of the Ring. Gloves held up, eyes that meant business. Mustache, solid legs. I liked the name. Shit, I never heard anything more about him. Maybe he croaked. Who gives a squat.”

  He drained his glass. “I got my first job in a car dealership. I was the doll-up man’s assistant. My job was to shine up the wheels, the bumpers, running boards, headlights. My boss did the body. Old Gordie Potts. Took a shine to me.” He chuckled at his own joke. “When they asked me my name I told them, ‘Archie Swint.’ That was that. Nobo
dy else had heard of the damn King of the Ring but me.”

  “But didn’t you have a name . . . at . . . at the . . . ?” I pleaded, not knowing how to name the place.

  “Orphanage, you wimp. Having problems saying the word? Always were a softie. I don’t even know how many I’d been in by the time I was old enough to understand.”

  “Maybe they knew the name which was really yours,” I pleaded.

  “Naah.” He gestured dismissively. “They knew nothing about me, so they made one up. I figured I’d name myself. Why the hell not?”

  “But a name’s important,” I grumbled.

  “A rose by any other name smells as shit?” He barked with laughter, pleased with himself. He stood up to pour another drink.

  “Oh Archie,” said my mother, “I’ve forgotten the cranberry sauce.”

  Archie Swint turned and smacked her. It was exactly halfway between a slap and a hard pat; that was the baffling part. He always knew how to confuse us.

  She turned away quickly and leaned over the open oven, as if she were checking it. She must not have remembered to turn it on, for no heat emanated from it. I could see her shoulders quivering. I rose to my feet. But Archie was already standing over her, head swiveled sideways at me, daring me to move. With one hand he reached for her buttock and cupped it, his fingers working into the fold of her crotch. She jerked upright, her face damp and startled. He wrapped her in his other arm and swung her close. “Oh, love, is that you?” she squawked in panic.

  A shudder of revulsion shook me.

  “I’ll get the cranberry sauce,” I said, rushing out, “so I’ll take your car, Mom,” and picked up my gloves and the keys from the bowl on the small table at the top of the stairs. I needed to get away from the groping reach of Archie Swint. I needed to throw up in peace. “Get me some canned peaches,” he called out from above. “Canned peaches!”