Trenton Makes

by Tadzio Koelb

  “There’s the doctor himself, natch,” Dion was saying, “and some pills, maybe an EKG guy, I don’t know. Dr. Dodge wants it all up front because there have been guys got their four-F and then kept the dough. What’s he going to do, go to the pigs and say, ‘Man, these cats didn’t pay me for breaking the law’?”

  A voice Art didn’t recognize said, “And you’re sure it’s going to work?”

  “I’m sure there’s a good chance the guy is going to pocket the bread and tell me to go to hell.”

  “Or Vietnam.”

  “Right, whichever comes first, or all of the above. Hey, it’s not like I’m going to run to the cops either. The Turtle says he’s okay, so I’m going to give it a try, but honestly, he could just be planning to take the cash and drive to Mexico.”

  “It’s a popular choice right now,” said Bets a little bitterly. Art tried to sit up but somehow it felt instead as if all he did was blink his eyes. When he opened them again he was looking up at a bunch of faces, Bets and Dion and someone else, and Dion was smiling at him, saying, “Hey, brother, that was almost cool, the way you went down, you know? Like you were dancing.” He helped Art into a sitting position. They were in a semicircular diner booth with a metal-rimmed table. “Did you eat anything today?”

  “What kind of dance?” Art asked, and Dion laughed, not his usual cursory noise of appreciation, but a real laugh, the kind that your body gives you, and it made Art happy to think he had done that because Dion, who was always amusing other people, hardly ever laughed himself, even before the lottery and the low number and the gnawing worry. Dion said, “Let’s get you something, like some toast and a coffee, I guess?”

  “Where are we?”

  “The Reverend Mother’s,” Bets said coldly.

  “What’s that?”

  “Man, Reverend Mom’s is like a holy rite of passage,” said Dion. “I thought this was your old neighborhood.”

  “It’s a soup kitchen,” said Bets, “for people who could mostly afford their own soup.”

  “I don’t want soup,” said Art, shaking his head, and Dion laughed again.

  “I didn’t want to come here,” Bets told Art while Dion went off in search of food. “But Dion was the one carrying you, and we were close, so here we are. You should be more careful to eat, baby.” She ran a hand down his face.

  Dion came back followed by a small barefoot woman. She was wearing a flimsy dress, her wrists and ankles buried in bracelets, long hair swinging almost to her waist. She talked as she stepped through the group of men seated on the floor, her voice strident and purposeful and hectoring. At some point in her speech, she put a tray down in front of Art. He could see her bare breasts inside her dress as she bent over, and he tried not to look but he felt as if there was no strength in him at all. She was still talking when she left. The tray held coffee in a chipped cup, and a plate with two pieces of buttered toast, some jam in a little plastic cup, and a spoon filled with peanut butter.

  Art started to eat. The moment he did, he felt better, but immediately he was overwhelmed with a sudden worry that he had dreamed of Bets and Dion in his faint, that somehow his desires had risen to the untended surface. It was like the feeling that he sometimes had after a lot of weed, that others around him could know his thoughts, but far worse, because in his moment of oblivion he might easily have told them what he was thinking or imagining out loud, himself, no telepathy required, a blast of self-incrimination—and how afterwards could he know? Had he floated across his unconscious back to the morning before the lottery, when he had stood looking through the doorless hole to their bedroom where Bets sat on top of Dion, her breasts dipping through the thin slice of daybreak that lay between them?

  Art had been completely unable to look away, filled with desire but also with fear at what noise he might make in trying to move back, so he had remained suspended there, breathless, enthralled, scared that one of them would turn in his direction, but captivated. The memory of them invaded his dreams, joining the naked body from his parents’ room, his father’s lover and the summit of the old man’s hypocrisy: the hard-breasted woman who against his wishes had occupied his dream life for so long already. Any of this might have been mumbled or screamed or moaned as he lay unconscious in Dion’s arms; he couldn’t be sure.

  Dion tried to move the leather bag Bets carried from its place by her side in the little booth, but she pulled it away from him and slipped it behind her back to make space for him instead. “You still know what’s what?” said Dion as he sat down. “Or do we need to call that Helms again?”

  Art offered him the paper from his jeans pocket, on one side the information Jacks had given them in numbers that looked like the blocks a child might draw, on the other in Art’s own tiny, self-conscious writing a pair of addresses. Art pointed to the first address. “That’s the one where she was when I called, but her second shift is at this one. She’s going to be leaving the first place by twelve-thirty, he said, so I guess where we go depends on what time it is.”

  Dion checked a naked wrist. “Half past a freckle, my friend. Let’s find out.” To someone sitting nearby he said, “Hey, man, what time is it?”

  The man shrugged and said, “Reverend Mother doesn’t have any clocks.”

  “Right, sure. Anybody else?” Dion said, looking around. “Anyone know the time?” He looked at the men cross-legged or reclining on the floor. “Any of you guys?”

  A man in a soiled white collarless shirt and cutoff jeans was sitting in the lotus position, his back very straight, his eyes closed. Without opening them, he said, “I’m late, you’re late. It’s just one more plan to divide and conquer, and I refuse to play their game. It’s just like money, man.”

  Then they were all at it. “That’s right,” someone said. “I’d rather have a piece of paper with a poem on it or something than a portrait of some old slave owner. That has more value to me.”

  “Like, hey brother, can you spare a Byron?”

  “Who has change for a Walt Whitman?”

  “This is why I don’t like Reverend Mom’s,” said Bets quietly to Art. “All these middle-class white kids at a hippie theme park.” She bent over her purse and dug around.

  “What about you, man?” said Dion to one of the others. “You have a watch?”

  “I had one, brother, but I threw it away. I just couldn’t deal with that kind of pressure.”

  Bets sat up in the booth with one hand held high over her head and said in a loud voice, serious almost to the point of anger but still with a hint of her sweet, triumphant mockery, “I will give all the shake left in this dime bag to whoever can tell me the fucking time.”

  At 12:57 they left for the place where Art’s mother was starting her second shift of the day.

  * * *

  ·

  Bets said it was easiest to cross back the way they had come. There was a bus that stopped near the boardinghouse; it would take them in the right direction. They walked again into the old neighborhood, Art hanging behind the others, still harried by the fear that he might have said something he shouldn’t during those missed moments when Dion had carried him in his arms, the longed-for embrace unseen and unfelt. At home he knew that he would talk in his sleep, the running brook of his ideas heard gurgling through his throat, and he had sometimes woken up to his father drunkenly demanding he repeat himself. Of course Art never even knew he was speaking, so for his father’s sake he would invent what he might have said, talking about school or something the neighbors had told his mother until the old man grew bored and wandered off to comfort himself with the sound of ice cracking in tepid liquor.

  Over the ten minutes or so of their walk the anxiety of the idea that he might have spoken spread to anything else Art would think of, so that a thin fear ran through him when someone outside the Italian butcher’s recognized him and raised a hand in greeting. As they crossed the street where the boardinghouse stood, Art hoped that they wouldn’t run into Jacks: it was as if a second
visit would trigger some unnamed problem they had magically avoided the first time, might somehow undermine the perfect kindliness of their earlier good-byes, call to the surface all the words that lurked in his sleeping mind. He wondered if he could see Jacks again and still maintain his silence about his father.

  It wasn’t that fighting with his father was anything unusual, a sudden change. In that way, it wasn’t even really an event, no different from the rest of their interaction except in scope—a louder, more virulent version of the conversation Art believed they were engaged in all the time, whether together or apart. The real difference was that Art, maybe encouraged by the knowledge that Bets and Dion waited for him, that he had a kind of home with them when this one was taken from him or he gave it up, whichever it was, had at last spoken up for himself. He had turned the question of guilt and virtue around so that for once it faced his father, for once it reflected not Art’s weakness and inadequacy, but his father’s false claims, his reliance on his wife’s income, and above all his duplicity. How long had Art been waiting to confront his father with this, the knowledge of the other woman, the one who had taken his affection from them, who had stood naked in their home? Dion and Bets had set this budding urge against his fear, an urge based on their conviction that honesty would lead to freedom, that he should accept the need, should confront his father.

  The bus stop was on a busy block. There were shops with faded signs up and down both sides of the street, and stoops where old men sat in their undershirts and stared at the passing traffic. Dion talked a pair of girls wearing almost identical outfits of tight sleeveless T-shirts and flares into slipping him their transfers. A bus pulled in and they got on. One of the girls handed the transfers to Dion out the window, the papers flapping like little flags, Dion running alongside to snatch them from her tiny fingers. It was always amazing to Art to see how people gave him their trust, the attention that seemed by nature to be his, the unenvious, heartfelt acceptance that even strangers laid on him like a leafy crown. Art was filled again with admiration and yearning, the strange feeling he had of wanting not just Dion’s notice, not just his love, but to have Dion within him, to be the other person so unlike the one he had been trapped in.

  Dion half jogged, half danced his way back to them, waving the long slips of yellow and white paper, one in each hand. To Art he said, “You look better. You went completely white before.”

  “What color am I now?”

  Dion patted him on the shoulder. “The usual, man,” he said, “just, you know, Art color.” He lit a cigarette and said, “Bets told you about my brother, she said.” Art nodded. Dion nodded, too, and Art tried to think of something he could ask him, but then he saw in his face that Dion was gone again, distracted by his swift-running fears. Dion followed his thoughts out into the road, and stared out past them at the long tube of hot tarmac in search of their bus.

  Art looked over at his reflection in the glass of the bus shelter: laid like a ghost over the people on the other side of the partition was the stringy, unwashed hair, the limp arms falling like sausage links from the short sleeves, the triangle of flat chest, hairless and slightly sunburnt, and on it the necklace of wood and braided leather Bets had made for him. There were wet spots around his armpits and under his belt, and his face was shiny with sweat, beads that set off one after another on the slow journey to his neck. In the middle of it all, barely visible in the spectral vision but as evident to him as a flashing light, sat the rupture: warped mouth and nose, the right nostril flaring above the curled lip, the emblems of his body’s treachery.

  Bets appeared over his shoulder and smiled at him, a face of kindness and sympathy. He made up his mind to ask her. “Did I say anything while I was out or unconscious or whatever?”

  “You were so quiet I worried for a second you weren’t breathing.”

  “That’s good,” said Art.

  Bets almost laughed. “Baby, somehow only you would think that was good,” she told him. Then Dion was with them, saying, “Heads up, boys and girls, this is us.” The bus rolled in.

  As they climbed the steep steps Bets said to Art, “They’re not wrong, you know, those guys at Mom’s. About money and time and all the rest of it. But so what? Talk like that isn’t what’s going to keep Dion out of the army, sitting around saying the system shouldn’t be what it is. People who shout about how they don’t recognize the authority of the court still wind up in jail, you know what I mean?” But suddenly Art wasn’t listening any more, because through the window of the bus he found himself looking straight at his father, the old man looking back at him from the driver’s seat of a truck facing the other direction. Art would have run if he could, but there was nowhere to go, so instead he stood where he was, completely still. They stared at each other blankly for a moment until the bus pulled away. He was aware suddenly of his heart, how it shuddered and bumped against his ribs.

  * * *

  ·

  Their fight had come all at once, irrepressible: there had been the old man, rummaging for lost change and someone else’s hoarded savings but with the righteousness of a landlord assessing his estates, imperious somehow even as he dropped to his knees to sweep an arm through the dusty cupboard. He had cursed at Art, and then cursed Art’s absent mother, the woman he had used and cheated on, the woman who was at that moment working the job that kept the old man stocked with gin. Within Art stirred the thought that had long been kicking for delivery, the thing he had always fought down because, however much he wanted to express it, expel it, he could see it only in the color of his own complicity: because he, too, had lusted for the ungenerous, the hard and foreign body glimpsed from the bed’s perilous underdark, desires that terrified him most because they were shared, however unaware the partner.

  Art felt in that moment as if he had waited for years with the exact words stored and macerating somewhere just below his gut, and once he had accepted finally to release them they bubbled out suddenly and in a voice that jerked and trembled, ran far beyond its owner’s control: “Don’t talk about her like that.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do, not under my roof.” His father spoke almost indifferently, busy pushing aside the small and fragile things Art’s mother cherished in keeping hidden, the cups and saucers, the glasses, which rattled weakly.

  “Your roof? Where do you learn this stuff?” Art became aware as he spoke that he was screaming, his tone stretched and fraying. He tried to make himself sound reasonable, but it was impossible: his voice was no longer his own. It belonged instead to the hysteria of his emotion, and so he bleated like a farm animal: “It’s like there’s some kind of handbook full of these ridiculous sayings for…for shitty fathers.” His father looked up at that, and Art had an inconceivable feeling. It mixed fear with pleasure, stirred together the satisfaction of having pierced the tin shell of his father’s indifference with alarm at what perhaps waited inside. He wanted to stop, but also to go on, and stopping now seemed impossible, so he fell forward into his own words. “And anyway,” he bleated, “anyway, who are you kidding? How is anything here yours, you know? Ma pays for it all. Ma does all the work.”

  Was that when his father had stood, small and dense and full of quiet menace? Was that when Art had noticed that the sofa stood between them, a hurdle that protected him? Art’s father said, “I’m going to tell you something that you don’t know. Without me, your mother would be nothing. Men paid to rub against her and call it dancing. For a nickel, she was doing that, with strangers, for nothing more than a nickel. Girls like that, Jesus. You think the world loves a girl like that? Without me, your mother would be nothing, and you would be nothing. I made this family. You owe me everything.”

  “What the hell do you do around here except drink and…and…” Art found himself crying, scared of his own sudden desire to hurt but unable to hold back the emerging thing until at last the simplicity of it slipped through his mouth like a yolk cracked loose from an egg: “and lie.”

  A
be’s head jerked suddenly. It was the first time in his whole life that Art remembered seeing the hard coating of his father’s expression change so drastically or so fast. When Art didn’t answer, the old man made a gesture with his hand as if he were moving some invisible curtain out of the way, and demanded again, louder this time, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Art, his mind full of the woman, his father’s secret lover, who had walked naked in his parents’ home, screamed back at him finally, his face straining and his throat caught in a tourniquet of effort: “That’s right, lie. And you think nobody knows, you think you have everyone fooled,” he went on. “But not me. Because I’m not blind. I’m not fucking blind.”

  “What are you talking about?” his father asked. “You little bastard, tell me what the hell you’re talking about, you lying little piece of shit.”

  “Do you know I once saw you?” Art yelled. “Do you know that I was there once, in your bedroom? I was there, and I saw.” The words were a strangled croaking now, his body was so full of fear and rage and the painful relief of his silence finally bursting, and they shook and trembled as they left him but he said them again if for no other reason than because he couldn’t stop the flood once it was unleashed, screaming over and over, “I saw, and I know,” and he could tell that his father had understood him because the old man’s face turned a sudden bloodless white, his lips pressed together so hard they almost disappeared. For a moment the two of them were both quiet and still, the only noise the heavy movement of sobbed breath through Art’s open mouth, the old man’s broken face hanging silent on the twitching head. Then Art ran while his father screamed after him. If any of the sounds the old man made were words, Art didn’t hear them.