by Tadzio Koelb
But that’s not true, either, he told himself. In fact, he had thought about all sorts of things—if thinking was the right word for the flashing, spectral images. He had even thought that he might kill the boy, although his imagination never offered a view of the death itself, only a suggestion of the still, recumbent body, unmarked, immaculate except for the wound he had been born with, the twisted ball of his face, until at last in this strange, gathering vision, while the boy lay as if the spirit had passed of its own accord, the abdication of living a gift, an act of filial piety, sparing Kunstler the sounds of death, the slow, dark lake of blood, even the boy’s face was finally washed clean of disfigurement, in its place a soft nothingness.
He had imagined, too, that he might just stand there and make the boy say it again, shake him, beat him if necessary, until he said the words. He wanted to hear him say them so often and so loud that at least there could be no doubt, and then keep saying them until they lost their meaning, until he lost the ability to speak, until time ended or they both died. He told himself that for every problem in the past there had been a solution, that his safety had always been his own doing and no one else’s, and so it would be this time. The boy was young, a child: he could be convinced, dissuaded, threatened. He could be beaten until he knew nothing for sure except that Abe Kunstler was a man. Kunstler tried with eyes closed to see the moment in the future when he made this happen, but he couldn’t. For one shocking instant he saw the past instead: the face of the man as he fell to the floor of the basement kitchen.
The missing fingers on his right hand started to hurt. Wherever they had ended up, rotting in a garbage can behind the factory, or probably buried in dirt and pathetic sentimentality somewhere by that idiot Jacks and decayed since to nothing, they were throbbing now. Would knowing where they were make the pain less? He let his eyes close, but gave his head a shake: he refused to imagine pleading with the boy, or with anyone. He wouldn’t beg. What was there even to beg for? He would tell the boy his mother was dead and then throw the ungrateful little intruder out in the street. Then he would come home, where he would tell the mother the same: that the boy was dead, that there was nothing to be done. He would be there when she cried over it, the child lost too late, a drink offered to soften the blow. A ceremony, he called it in his mind.
A ceremony: he imagined Jacks in the factory parking lot with a priest and a Bible and a tiny satin-lined box for the remains of his fingers, the liturgy, the committal performed in miniature, the priest a doll leading a toy hearse, all in keeping with the relative size of the deceased—which was also the size of Jacks’ brain, that sap. It almost made Kunstler laugh to think of it. He couldn’t ever understand why the boy’s mother was so committed to the oversized fool, and always had been, even in the days when they had worked together in the factory, and Jacks to her, and to the boy, all of them together. Jacks the moronic janitor with his rolling bucket and mop like a housewife, Kunstler working the coils and capstans: the old days, now missed, when Kunstler had gone out every morning to yell his voice into existence. He hadn’t needed to do that in years. The effect was fixed at last, his voice his own, one thing that didn’t need to be constructed daily, just as once the bleeding had finally stopped a few years ago he had no longer needed to keep hidden from the girl that he shared with her the container of Modess wool tampons under the sink, carefully refilling them from a box stored behind the service panel under the bath. Maybe it was these changes that had made him forgetful, he thought, encouraged him to grow careless. Had the falling away of the routines he didn’t need led him into complacency? He hardly even shaved any more. He would go back to it, he promised, go back to them all: I will be myself again, he told himself, thinking of a young, hard-boned face in a mirror in the basement all those years ago, and again he caught an image of the man, dead, but he forced himself awake and blinked it hard away. Awake or asleep, these days he dreamed always of the man.
Inez was there. “I’m leaving now,” she said. Kunstler, belt undone, short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned and undershirt showing the ragged blue edge of his bandage, looked up at her from his seat at the tiny table. Circles of sweat already fouled his polyester underarms. “Are you working today?” she asked. She turned to the clock that ticked on the little counter. “But you don’t start for hours. Why are you up already?” She stood looking in through the door to the kitchen, still an alley, the same space with the same dimensions in a building that was different but not different enough, the stairway still a mountainside, the tiny bedroom filled still with the same twin beds, which time had left hammocked and lame. Nothing was new or fresh, no veneer was intact: the linoleum had worn through to the wood, the enamel on the sink retreated from the black iron below. The paint and plaster fell away from the walls and the ceilings and the windows rattled in frames they no longer fit. Even if she never said a word about it, he knew she was disappointed. He could smell it on her. He didn’t move.
Inez roused him with a hand on his shoulder. “Look at you, you’re barely awake. Did you sleep any at all?” she asked—but he noticed that as she said it she didn’t really look at him.
“Maybe,” he said, running his good hand over his face, pushing the sweat down to his jaw. It was as if he had only just then remembered the heat. “Who knows.” He picked up his open pack of cigarettes from the table but didn’t take one. He stood.
“So stay, Abe. Rest.” She briefly put her open palm near his face but didn’t touch him. “Your fingers hurt? From the humidity?”
“Even if they do, I still have to go,” he said.
“I’m taking an extra shift this week,” she said. “A late shift, time and a half. We can afford a day off for you.”
He shook his head. “No, I have to go. I missed too many days already. They’re getting pissed off with me upstairs, and I can’t say that I blame them, even if they are filthy son of a bitches.”
She nodded, and then asked quietly, “Is Art still off with his friends?”
“Sure,” he said. “He’s running around with some of those hippie kids.”
“Did he call? Did he give you a number?”
Abe looked at his cigarettes again. “I could barely hear him. They were somewhere, a party. It was loud.”
“When did he call?”
“Summertime is all one big party, no day, no night. The kids now don’t work when they have time away from school the way we did, they hang around and listen to that music. He should be working now. A summer job, teach him some responsibility, not running around all the time.” Inez nodded again. He knew she wouldn’t argue with him. She never argued with him any more. He wasn’t even sure if she knew or not that he was lying.
“You want some help with your shirt buttons?”
“Don’t do that,” he yelled. “Don’t start again with your goddamn coddling. Jesus, that’s what, that’s what—” He couldn’t finish. He shook his head in silent anger as he swung past her and down the short, dark hallway towards the bedroom, his empty belt buckle clicking as he moved, his breathing loud.
Inez walked to the front door and snapped open the locks. She had left the chain unhooked in case Art came home. For a moment they were both quiet, then almost in a whisper she said, “Maybe…” but she seemed to change her mind. Putting on a hard, bright voice, she said instead, “Maybe make Jimmy drive. You can get some rest that way.”
Kunstler leaned a shoulder against the wall, his body motionless except the hurdled suction of his breathing. With a claw of thumb and ring finger he began to pick a cigarette from the crumpled pack, but let it drop back. Finally he said, “Driving’s my job. Where the hell did I leave my shoes?” Once he heard the front door shut he took the old sales receipt out of his hip pocket and read it again: Rudy’s Record Store. Item…$5.98. The slip was more than two years old, but it was the only thing in the boy’s room he had found so far with an address on it. The boy had used it as a bookmark. It was ridiculous that a child who had never worked a job had money
to spend on things like this, could afford to buy himself trinkets and garbage. Wasn’t it a sign of the life Kunstler had given him, this invader who had stolen the place, the life, intended for someone else, for a strong boy who could grow into a man, a real man, who could take the place of the man who had died, accept the inheritance Kunstler carried? And still Kunstler had provided for this usurper, this changeling. No father, he felt, could claim the gratitude of his child more than he could.
And hers, too, the boy’s mother: Hadn’t he carried her through the doorway of their apartment? Hadn’t he eaten with familial solemnity the meals she made and acquiesced to her urgent domesticity, to the electric percolator and the ridiculous knick-knacks, the saucered cups, flowered covers for the pillows, the matching twin beds on layaway? And hadn’t she for her part accepted the bargain when she accepted his clothed body beside her naked one, the probing hands when to spoon was all she wanted and preferred, saying quietly in the morning as a gesture of her submission, as a vow that sealed their union, even though her eyes might be averted, “I enjoyed last night,” in exchange for all of which he had given her a child?
Through the window Kunstler saw that the sun was rising. The morning’s narrow cool would soon boil away. A pair of ripe, heavy summer flies buzzed stupidly against the screen. He put the paper back in his pocket and started the long job of doing up his shirt buttons.
* * *
·
With the claw of his right hand, Kunstler shifted down; the truck slowed. He watched the sidewalk rather than the street. At the corner they passed a building nearly hollow, with soft fire-black stripes above the windows. Jimmy looked up from the book he had been reading. “Oh wow, would you look at this place,” Jimmy said. He pulled his sneaker off the dashboard and sat up. “I don’t think I’ve been over here since the riots, man. That’s some heavy shit.”
Outside an empty-faced storefront sat a group of older men, all of them black, on lame and rusted office chairs pimpled with silver tape. Some younger men in tight shirts with heads like black cotton balls leaned on the vast hood of a vinyl-top sedan. Most necks seemed to turn slightly as the truck shuddered by, but otherwise nobody moved. A woman leaned in a doorway, her eyes closed. The truck’s open windows filled with a smell of summer garbage, gasoline, the carbonized innards of the ruined building. A large pothole caught the right front wheel and everything in the cab lurched and bucked.
“Jesus, this can’t be right.” Jimmy pulled his binder from between the seats and started flipping through the pages.
“I don’t know.” Kunstler didn’t look at him, or at the men who stood and sat around in the heat, at the woman in her doorway; he stared, he even spoke, as if he were completely alone, hardly bothering to be heard above the engine and the sounds of the city around them.
“You mean you don’t know if we have a delivery over here?”
“What’s that?”
“Abe, man, what’s your bag? Do we have a delivery over here or what?”
“Don’t we?”
“Wow, Jesus, Abe. Give me the route sheet. Come on, man, the route, huh? The route?” Still looking past Jimmy to the street rocking slowly along, Kunstler pulled a clipboard from the door pocket. Jimmy grabbed it from him. “Abe, man, what the hell? We don’t have anything around here for a million miles.”
“Sorry,” Kunstler said without any change to his distant expression or tone. “I got turned around.”
“Turned around?”
“There used to be a record store over here.”
“Are you kidding me? I mean, there used to be a lot of goddamn shit, but we have work to do. What the hell?” The young man’s expression was full of confused and annoyed inquiry, and for a moment Kunstler filled with the dream of blotting it from his face, replacing it with the blank look of pain. Instead Kunstler nodded as if accepting Jimmy’s condolences. He said, “I haven’t been sleeping, couple of nights. Maybe it’s the heat; it hurts my hand. So I guess I got turned around. It’s not like you were helping, is it? With your feet up and your face in your book there, like this was your living room. So just tell me where’s next.” Jimmy looked at him again, but Kunstler didn’t look back. He didn’t seem angry, or sorry, or even concerned at being lost. He just stared as if at a thing a million miles away, something he was trying to remember the shape of.
“From here? From here, man, it’s like…Well, hell, I don’t know. Give me a minute. A record store, Jesus. You want music, man, turn on the radio. We’re going to be late for every goddamn thing now. The guys upstairs are going to shit all over us if we don’t get everything off the truck by closing.”
“Yeah,” said Kunstler as he examined the passing buildings. What else had there been in the boy’s room? He tried to think. The single bed, unmade, and across the short wedge of flaking linoleum floor a collage of things so disordered he had found it hard to focus on any one of them. What were they? He had seen schoolbooks, math and history. There were records, and the portable record player responsible by itself for the endless din now that Inez had finally stopped playing the radio all the goddamned time. There were some magazines with a crowd of costumed hippies on the covers. A few photos of the boy and his friends pinned to the wall by the bed. Some half-burned candles, the boy’s dirty clothes piled on the chair: nothing.
When the truck reached the end of the block, he put it in neutral; the long stick fretted at his open palm, passing across the nubs of his missing fingers. There was no other traffic on the street, and they sat there silently for a minute. Sweat ran down Kunstler’s temples, and his shirt where it touched the vinyl seat was soaked through, but he made no move to cool or dry himself. Instead he just sat and looked at nothing, his lips moving a little bit from time to time.
“I see it now,” Jimmy said. He pulled a bandana from his jeans and wiped his face. “We better hang right.”
“Okay.”
“So? Abe? Turn right.”
“Sure,” Kunstler said. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, and lit it with a plastic lighter. He thought about the photos on the boy’s wall. He thought briefly about pushing Jimmy out of the cab and driving straight to the apartment to look at them, kicking him with the full force of his heel to the chest or head, leaving him in the street to run uselessly after the truck. He thought, too, about the little bottle of gin he kept in the door pocket, a flask-shaped lump of plastic, how much it would help him to think if he could only drink some. Kunstler flexed the fingers of his claw and looked over at Jimmy.
“Christ, Abe. Do you want me to drive?”
Kunstler shook his head. “You grind the gears.” He put the truck back in first and pulled hand over hand at the wheel.
At the first delivery Jimmy went inside to get a signature and have them open the storeroom door. To speed things up Kunstler unloaded the boxes off the gate and stacked them on the hand truck. Maybe, he thought, he should start instead with the child’s mother: he would go to her, tell her the boy was dead. He would bring her a drink to comfort her, vermouth with a little gin, nothing too strong to start, enough just to dull the pain. It would smooth the path forward to the place where in her grief she could again be linked to him by need as she had been at the dance hall, stand alone with him in the spinning room of her drunkenness. During her pregnancy there had been the nausea she claimed to feel at the very smell of alcohol, but that was a long time ago. It was Kunstler who felt nauseous now. It was hot out, really hot, the sun was an open white sore in the sky oozing heat, the boxes were heavy, too heavy for one person, really. It felt like hours since his last drink.
But lying to the mother would mean that the boy had to be kept away, and that put Kunstler back where he had started, where he already was: looking for the boy, wandering around the city with Jimmy hanging over his shoulder, having to look God knows where. And then what? Pay him off, somehow, or if he didn’t want to go, chase him away. Kunstler wondered desperately how long the boy had been planning on making his nasty litt
le claims. Was it hours or years? Of course it didn’t matter as long as he had kept them to himself. Of course he has, Kunstler thought. Anyone would know it was lies, after all. It was an unbelievable story to tell about someone who’s a father, a factory worker, a married man, a soldier who had been wounded in the war. No one could believe it.
No, Kunstler decided, the boy was a coward, still digging in the dirt for the courage to say something. Is that what the miserable little monster used to mumble about in his sleep, the inarticulate sounds that had made Kunstler so nervous, the mindless puckering? He had been right all along: from the moment of its birth, Kunstler had known without question that the child was a grotesque inversion of everything he had worked for: not a strong or vital boy but a purple-fleshed weakling, his lip split and curling like a leaf. This was not his son.
Inez somehow didn’t see the deception of the thing, insisting that they pour their money down the drain trying to make the boy look normal, when everyone knew that if it had been a dog born so deformed they would have drowned it. Worse was that the arrival of the boy had left Kunstler no way to start again, because it took all the girl’s attention, all her affection—because she loved it. The girl who had overlooked so much could easily see Kunstler’s disappointment. He hadn’t found room left in himself to hide it, not with all the rest, not after all the other defeats, the setbacks and disillusionments, after losing the factory and with it the money to keep the car, the apartment in the old neighborhood. He thought of his lost fingers, the relics of his old life now disintegrated to the bone.
He had expected that once the baby was out of her, Inez would be herself again, that they would get back to their routines, their places, their drinks and dances. He had looked forward to diving again into nights of boozy contact, where her naked body was his, but instead it had disappeared from him. He would gladly have continued trying with her, doing whatever it took to have a real son, the true son that was Kunstler’s goal and right, his offering to the spirit of the dead man who was his own true father, reassembled in himself.