A developed thought coheres: Ho's voice has the quality of a type of: ointment.
Any displaced and shaggy Nuck head in these windows chancing to look out into the yard now would be able to probably see Lenz depositing another chunk of meat in front of the pet and removing something from up near his shoulder under his topcoat as he's melting stealthily all the way around behind the dog to sort of straddle the big dog from the rear, easing the last of the loaf down in front of the dog, the big dog hunched, the crunch of Don's cornflake topping and the goopy sound of a dog eating institutional meat. The arm comes out from under the coat and goes up with something that looks like it would glitter if the windows' yardlight reached far enough. Bruce Green keeps trying to wave his breath out of the way.Lenz's fine coat billows around the dog's flanks as Lenz braces and leans and gathers the hunched thing's scruff in one hand and straightens up with a mighty grunting hoist that brings the animal up onto its hind legs as its front legs dig frantically at empty air, and the dog's whine brings a lei-and-flannel shape to the lit space above one speaker overhead. Green doesn't even think of calling out from his shadowed spot, and the moment hangs there with the dog upright and Lenz behind it, bringing the upraised hand down in front and hard across the dog's throat. There's a lightless arc from the spot Lenz's hand crossed; the arc splatters the gate and the sidewalk outside it. The music balloons without cease but Green hears Lenz say what sounds like "How dare you" with great emphasis as he drops the dog forward onto the yard as there's a high-pitched male sound from the form at the window and the dog goes down and hits the ground on its side with the meaty crunch of a 32-kilo bag of Party-Size Cubelets, all four legs dog-paddling uselessly, the dark surface of the lawn blackening in a pulsing curve before its jaws that open and close. Green has moved unthinking out of the vanshadow toward Lenz and now thinks and stops between two trees by the street in front of 416 wanting to call to Lenz and feeling the strangled aphasia people feel in bad dreams, and so just stands there between the treetrunks with a finger in one ear, looking. The way Lenz stands over the hull of the big dog is like you stand over a punished child, at full height and radiating authority, and the moment hangs there distended like that until there's the shriek of long-shut windows opening against the Ho and the dire sound of numerous high-tempo logger's boots rushing down stairs inside 412. The creepily friendly bachelor that lived next to his aunt had had two big groomed dogs and when Bruce passed the house the dogs' toenails would scrabble on the wood of the front porch and run with their tails up to the anodized fence as Bruce came by and jump up and like sort of play the metal fence with their paws, excited to see him. To just like set eyes on him. Lenz's arm with the knife is up again and ungleaming in the streetlight's light as Lenz uses his other hand on the top of the fence to vault the fence sideways and tear-ass uphill up Brainerd Rd. in the southwest direction of Enfield, his loafers making a quality sound on the pavement and his open coat filling like a sail. Green retreats to behind one of the trees as beefy flannel forms with leis shedding petals, their speech grunty-foreign and unmistakably Canadian, a couple with ukuleles, spill out like ants over the sagging porch and into the yard, mill and jabber, a couple kneel by the form of the former dog. A bearded guy so huge a Hawaiian shirt looks tight on him has picked up the meatloaf's baggie. Another guy without very much hair picks what looks like a white caterpillar out of the dark grass and holds it up delicately between his thumb and finger, looking at it. Yet another huge guy in suspenders drops his beer and picks up the limp dog and it lies across his arms on its back with its head way back like a swooned girl, dripping and with one leg still going, and the guy is either screaming or singing. The original massive Nuck with the baggie clutches his head to signal agitation as he and two other Nucks run heavily to the slingshot Montego. A first-floor light in the house across Brainerd lights up and backlights a figure in a sort of suit and metal wheelchair sitting right up next to the window in the sideways way of wheelchairs that want to get right up next to something, scanning the street and Nuck-swarmed yard. The Hawaiian music has apparently stopped, but not abruptly, it's not like somebody took it off in the middle. Green has retreated to behind a tree, which he sort of one-arm-hugs. A thick girl in a horrible grass skirt is saying "Dyu!" several times. There are obscenities and heavily accented stock phrases like "Stop!" and "There he goes!" with pointing. Several guys are running up the sidewalk after Lenz, but they're in boots, and Lenz is way ahead and now disappears as he cuts like a tailback left and disappears down either an alley or a serious driveway, though you can still hear his fine shoes. One of the guys actually shakes his fist as he gives chase. The Montego with the twin cam reveals muffler problems and clunks down off the curb and lays two parentheses as it 180s professionally around in the middle of the street and peels out up in Lenz's direction, a very low and fast and no-shit car, its antenna's gay lei tugged by speed into a strained ellipse and leaving a wake of white petals that take forever to stop falling. Green thinks his finger might be frozen to his ear's inside. Nobody seems to be gesticulating about anything about maybe an accomplice. There's no evidence they're looking around for any other unwittingly guilty accessory-type party. Another wheelchaired form has appeared just behind and to the right of the first seated backlit form across the street, and they're both in a position to see Green up against the tree with his hand to his ear so it looks like he's maybe receiving communiqués from some kind of earpiece. The Nucks are still milling around the yard in a way that's indescribably foreign as the one Nuck staggers in circles under the weight of the expired dog, saying something to the sky. Green is getting to know this one tree very well, spread out against its lee side and breathing into the bark of the tree so his exhaled breath won't plume out from behind the tree and be seen as an accomplice's breath, potentially.
End Notes
1. Because he'd been sworn to secrecy, Green doesn't tell Lenz that Charlotte Treat had shared with Green that her adoptive father had been one-time Chair of the Northeast Regional Board of Dental Anesthesiologists, and had been pretty liberal with the use of the old N2O and thiopental sodium around the Treats' Revere MA household, for personal and extremely unsavory reasons.
2. ®The Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., Hilo, HI—"A Low Sodium Food."
3. Popular corporate-hard-rock bands, though it shows where Bruce Green's psychic decline really started that, except for TBA5, these bands were all truly big two or three years past, and are now slightly passé, with Choosy Mothers having split up entirely by now to explore individual creative directions.
AT NIGHT
BY DAVID RYAN
Back Bay
(Originally published in 1998)
He sits there and regards the waitress, wondering what she would think if she knew he occasionally followed her home; if she knew about the Window Trick in her Fenway flat; if she knew how her breath sometimes sped in the dark; how once he touched her sleeping throat and her back arched, or how she then rolled over. And what if she woke and saw him, his silhouette stiff against the wall lit by moon and perhaps a streetlight spilt in against his shadow; what if she heard his breath on her ear, discovered an estranged print of his foot, a piece of cast mud, a matted leaf or a fresh stain on the floor? He reviews the list repeatedly and his coffee chills.
She belched in her sleep once.
How many times had he imagined her on the bearskin rug in the pamphlet?
* * *
Through the window of the restaurant, across Newbury Street, a woman talks into a pay phone by the wine shop. Sunlight glints off the chrome of the old phone bank, though if he tends to squint with the sun, he squints without it too. And he feels this gives him away; it displays his attempt to conceal his weaknesses.
He believes she does not see him, does not notice his deep-set eyes, the flaps of skin wrinkled around them. He is young for such old-set eyes.
His coffee is weak as tea.
Summer brings out the cleft at the base of their calves, tanned s
kin shaved smooth—a few razor scrapes, or a nick—to the mid-thigh, droplets of perspiration clinging to the down above.
* * *
The woman at the pay phone waves her free hand against the sun impatiently. The other hand clutches the phone to the side of her mouth. He imagines a chance conversation. He catches himself moments later speaking to the empty chair that faces him. As if to reconcile this indiscretion, he lines up a bubble in the window glass, positions it to her ankle, then rides his eye up along her leg.
Pow.
In the autumn, they bundle up. There comes a time during the course of a day when they must bundle down, the cold comforter slipping up, softly, caressing their prickly goose-pimpled thighs. Outside, the dry morning smell of cedar and orange leaves rises from the chill.
Winter conjured the bearskin rug from the pamphlet he keeps in his top drawer. The fur, matted and stained in the center, glows white from the sun and blue snowdrifts that shine through the window. He imagines large umbrella flashlamps set outside the photograph that add to the artifice of a snow-lit day in the pamphlet's room. The glossy cover tells him to Ski Colorado. In the pamphlet, Colorado is a mountain range two inches tall. The bearskin rug on the back flap is larger than the mountain on the front.
In the spring, everything was wet and animals copulated.
In the summer, the dew dried. The sun burned it off by a certain hour in the morning, the sky lit differently from the other seasons; though often the film remained, covered the air like a moist tarp.
He's grinning until the waitress spoils it, catches him with his teeth showing, asks if he'd mind paying now seeing as—she waves her hand over to several people who wait by the door—they want to sit and your coffee's been long going. If you don't mind. She is too aggressive awake. A cheap bracelet shakes on her wrist. He wishes he could take one of the metal charms from it, touch it to his mouth and suck. He has seen her take it off her wrist before she retires, though only now has he found pleasure in his mouth from the idea.
"A minute," he says. He wants to say, I know how you sleep. A minute and a glance suffice, however. He is the center of that glance, the implications of it. In her unwitting world, he is God.
She walks off to the future table with her hands raised shrug-level. He's already singing a fire-song inside his head.
* * *
The restaurant, not much more than a coffee shop, is air-conditioned. No sound comes from the unit, just the sound of spoons and conversation. With his eyes closed, it sounds to him as if the spoons are speaking. He imagines the street outside burning up, now sees the woman at the phone, a grate outside shoots hot air under her dress, ballooning it up, her long legs rising, lengthening . . . To watch them struggle, their free hand no longer waving off the sun but pushing into the thin, flowered fabric, trying to hold the dress down while their legs grow long underneath. Oh, to watch them blush like that all day: her hand still crimped down against her brown leg; the back of her thigh turned toward him. Tomorrow the phone she holds in her hand will look like the black box they remove from the charred debris of airplanes. It will leave its coke all over fingers. It will stain pants, shirts, fingertips, and the gaze of eyes. Bricks will hold the smoke splattered over them like shadows fused to the surface.
He had more than once been told his features were strong, but he knew by the pause that indicated the search for euphemism that his features were not fairly or truthfully found in the word.
He crushes a dollar and sets it on the table. He passes the table of the future, gives them a thumbs-up, then churns his middle finger from it like some sleight of hand. He laughs, pushes the door open into the hot sun. He stops in the heat as though he has forgotten what he is doing, or where he is going. He leans against the wall of the coffee shop and squints at her again, bolder this time because he is in the open air and only across the street. The train underground did it, the T caused the wind to push their skirts up through the grate like that.
* * *
He reaches up and sniffs his finger; it smells like sulfur, like the safety matches he keeps in his pocket. The irony in the words safety and matches makes him think. He squints and laughs. He attracts attention this way; he forgets, then remembers, he was put on this earth for everyone to see, like the gutted cat in science class years ago that wore the glass tube full of honey-colored fluid. He occasionally forgot they could see him, like the time he was very small and first realized he was not invisible. Dirty trick.
* * *
Tomorrow, those hands will blacken if they touch that phone. A crowd will gather and know how it is: it was his way of being invisible.
His erection softens; she has hung the phone on its cradle.
She walks away, her skirt now settled against her sides, pushed by the wind slightly so that a long vertical dip has formed between her legs.
In that science class, he threw the lit alcohol burner down, and said it was an accident as students scattered and the flames spread around his feet like a burst water balloon. It was a beautiful gush, blue and pure, scalding hot. It burned off the alcohol, then left a mark in the linoleum that said, Walter did it.
The rest of the school year he sat next to his teacher up front, facing the class. He could look up the girls' skirts, sitting in the front there like that, but instead stared right through them at the cat floating frozen at the back of the room: mouth open, caught with its guts hanging down in the anemic yellow liquid, dangling like a skin brassiere from a clothesline . . . or thinking of how he yelled Timber! from his bed with his little voice as smoke filled the stairwell and how he climbed out of the comforter and how the beam from the attic came down sparking the banister and how he saw his mother in their Dorchester duplex, saw her mouth freeze open, heard her shriek between the ash and smoke that cloaked her like static-charged laundry. Cinders were floating like snowflakes . . . or how when he opened the window, a ball of heat rushed at him and left his arms bubbled under gauze for weeks. "One fried little peanut," he heard whispered from the hall as he danced in a big circle, flames consuming his childhood, his family; yes, his, he supposes, though at times nothing is clear. They went up like paper boats in the winter, when the wood was peeling from itself and dry; they went up like origami swans dangled over a candle.
* * *
He runs his tongue across his lips. He watches the big eye in front of him blinking. He squats and scratches his back against a brick wall. He kills time until nightfall, passes down Newbury, cuts through Copley Square. He buys a soft drink. He circles a city block several times. He walks and walks, Copley to South End, South End to no-man's-land then west to the edge of Roxbury where before turning back he finds a shoe in a gutter. This shoe he ties to his belt. He spits twice. He comes back by way of Mass Ave. Back, then deeper to where the city softens, the trees are large, the streets cooler. The neighborhoods that look nothing like where he grew up.
With night fallen, he can get down to it. Certain nights he must wait for hours until the right moment. But he can be very patient. He can persuade time at her apartment window, or—once she falls asleep—he can climb inside with the Window Trick and listen to her breathe. He could count the stars and wait for them to fall if he wanted, but he does not do this. He stuffs the rag inside the jar instead. Clots of the remnant mayonnaise bob suspended in the gasoline. He screws the lid on and pulls a strip of cloth through the hole he has punched, forming a wet wick. A little gasoline leaks onto his scarred hand. It feels cool in the night air. He will sit still and wait in the dark for the right moment. He tilts the jar upside down and drizzles more gasoline on the scars. It feels good, the smell comforts him. Tomorrow the building that holds the pay phone will not be a building, only a pile of sticks and brick.
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