• • •
THAT NIGHT FRED STAYED with the star-girl. She said her name was Loreen Ferebee. Her bed was a mattress on the floor.
“When-ah, when are they coming back?” Fred asked when she turned out the light.
“Who?”
“Ah-Dave. And-ah Umberto.”
She whispered, “Fuck if I know, Sailor,” and climbed on top of him. Beginning to move, she whispered, “Fuck if I care.”
Later she rolled away, sat on the edge of the mattress and said, “Huh.” Shaking a cigarette out of its package, she looked at him sideways. “You ever been with a woman?”
That was one of those questions that might be a riddle, so he thought awhile, but he couldn’t figure it out. “Yeah.”
She shrugged and smoked. “You got nice equipment, I’ll give you that.” She smoked a little longer, then stubbed it out and went to sleep.
In the morning the sky was no color, and rain was tapping against the box fan that sat in the window. He was lying on a mattress on the floor. The star-girl was asleep beside him. He couldn’t remember her name. He knew she told him the night before, but it always took him a while to remember a new person’s name. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do, if anyone would be mad if he got up and walked around or left, so he lay there and waited. He had to pee, but he held it. He looked around from where he lay. On a dresser across from the bed there were glasses and bottles and an ashtray and a framed picture of a boy with dark hair and big front teeth. There was a TV on the floor, and a chair, and everywhere else all over the room clothes slumped in piles like exhausted children. He turned and watched the star-girl sleep. He saw she was older than he’d realized in the bar, not really a girl. And her hair was no longer star-like. It lay squashed against her head, limp and dark at the roots. And it didn’t smell like raisin cookies. Just smoke.
Three
BESIDES WHAT HE WAS WEARING, this is what he’d brought with him from the Cape, all zipped into his orange knapsack:
extra pair of underpants
extra shirt
extra pair of socks
toothbrush
toothpaste
razor
The Little Prince
seventeen single-serve packets of grape jelly and eleven single-serve packets of strawberry jelly and two single-serve packets of syrup collected from diners
Neel’s pocketknife with the toothpick missing
June’s map of St. Lawrence, Criterion and Franklin counties
He didn’t bring extra pants or deodorant, because he’d forgotten to, and he didn’t bring the rest of his clothes or any of his other things like the box that held the letters June had written him when she was still alive, and the rest of her maps, and the pictures of their family, June and Neel and Ava and Fred, at Batter Hollow where he had grown up. He didn’t pack any of these things because he hadn’t known he wasn’t going to return to the Cape. If he’d known he wasn’t going back he would have brought them, and also the notebook where he wrote down important things, for instance important telephone numbers, for instance Dave’s and Ava’s.
But it turned out not to matter what he’d packed and what he’d forgotten, because he didn’t have any of it, because the orange knapsack was still in the backseat of Dave’s car, and Dave and Umberto didn’t come back the morning after they left the bar, and they didn’t come back all the next day. Or the next night, either. During this time it rained steadily and Fred stayed inside the apartment with the star-girl (What’s your-ah, name again? Oh my God, for the hundredth time, Loreen Ferebee, want me to write it down?) and the other girl, the one with the bruise-colored eyes. Her name was Tonya or Tee and she spent a lot of time walking loudly around the apartment, her bare heels banging the floor, sending shivers through the wood.
The long, narrow apartment was on the ground floor of a house that backed up on the mill river. It was dim inside, the air gray and almost grainy, and it smelled like mice and like milk that has turned. It was split unevenly into two rooms: a big one with a mini-kitchen and a beanbag chair and a bed and a table with folding chairs and a TV, and a small one with a dresser and a TV and a mattress on the floor. The small one was where Loreen slept. Each room had one window. The big room’s window looked out the front, onto a street of attached houses. The small room’s window looked onto a row of metal garbage cans chained to an aluminum fence. Through the links in the fence you could see the narrow river, and the window fan blew in a breeze that smelled like boiled cabbage and feet. When Fred said, “Pee-yoo,” and pinched his nose, Loreen said, “Paper mill. They shut it a few years back, but the river still stinks.”
Even though the apartment had only two rooms, Tonya or Tee paced it like she was waiting for something to happen. Like she was waiting for someone to burst through the door. Fred had the feeling if someone did she’d punch them in the face. She passed back and forth through the skinny archway that connected the rooms. This archway had no door, only bare hinges and long strings of red plastic beads hanging down, and every time she passed through it, the beads would spatter and rattle. Every now and then Tonya or Tee would take a rest and sit down, only to spring up suddenly and start pacing again. “That bitch,” she would say, suddenly backhanding the beads and appearing in Loreen’s room. Or else she would say, “That asshole.”
“I know,” Loreen would answer calmly. “She is a bitch.” Sitting on the floor like she liked to do, with her eyes closed and knees pressed out like butterfly wings, the bottoms of her bare feet touching. She’d take in a long, slow breath and let out a long, slow breath, as if nothing mattered. Nothing in the world. Her hands palm-up on her knees. “He is an asshole.”
The first time they had this exchange, Fred thought it was a joke so he said, “Ha ha.” But Tonya or Tee whipped around and glared at him and he could see it wasn’t a joke. He swung his gaze away and bobbed his head: little bounces, very fast, so the rainy window danced on the wall. Then—he was relieved—the crack of her heels on the floor as she spun herself around again; the clamor and crash of beads as she propelled herself back into the larger room. Fred began to hunch his shoulders near his ears whenever she veered close, whenever she said, “I can’t believe they did that!” the “did” so sharp he saw it snagging, ripping her throat. He tried not to look directly at her. Once he did by accident and she caught him. Her heavy lids drooped even lower, and her eyes were like the holes of guns. “What is. Your fuck. Ing problem. Retard.”
He ducked his head, clasped his hands. His heart thudded and his breath went shallow. Here is the church, here is the steeple, he told himself, hearing June’s voice, seeing June’s hands as he put his own two pointers together and made them into the steeple, until at last Tonya or Tee moved away again.
Once she punched the wall behind him. Once she threw an ashtray in his general direction and the contents went flying, the bent stubs of cigarettes skittering across the floor, the ashes ghosting up into the air and then settling back down, coating Fred’s tongue, stinging Fred’s eyes.
“Take a chill,” Loreen said when that happened, and this time her voice did not have a nothing-matters lilt. It was flat and hard. She had been painting her toenails and now she looked up and pointed the tiny brush at Tonya or Tee, and a blue vein like a river on a map stood out on her neck.
For a moment everything froze: the girls, the TV, the rain outside, the blades of the window fan. Fred tried to stay frozen, too, to hide in the stillness, but an invisible siren was blaring closer and closer until it was right inside his head and he could not help clapping his hands over his ears.
Then Tonya or Tee yanked a raincoat off the back of a folding chair. “Fine. But he’s not staying,” she said, jerking her chin toward Fred. “I want him gone. And if those assholes don’t show up with my shit by tomorrow, you’re paying me back.” And she pushed out into the noisy downpour, letting the door swing shut with a smack.
“Shh,” said Loreen, without taking her eyes off the TV. She put one arm around Tonya or Tee and with the other hand took the paper bag and tipped it toward her own mouth.
Fred inched away to the far corner of the mattress, where, leaning against the wall, he wrapped his arms around his drawn-up knees. He watched the huddled girls and the cold blue light of the TV flickering over them like rain and he felt something but he didn’t know what. Like a metal machine was cranking inside his chest, its handle turning and turning and he couldn’t make it stop.
• • •
THE WHOLE TIME he was at their apartment, this is what Fred did:
eat cereal
watch TV
sleep
watch the drips collect along a seam near where the ceiling met the wall and then drop down onto a rolled-up towel that Loreen had put under it
try to tell if the drops were falling in any pattern he could measure by counting the seconds between them
decide that they were not
try not to look at Tonya or Tee
look out the front window and try to see Dave’s car
count how many cars drove by in an hour: 23
On the second morning Fred again woke first. For a long time he just lay there, not moving, like he had the day before. He looked at the box fan and the dresser and the glasses and the clothes and the framed picture of the boy and now they were all a little familiar. He did an experiment of lying very still, almost frozen, to see if time would speed up and then maybe the next time he moved Dave would already be walking in the door, coming to take him back to the Cape.
He lay as motionless as possible but time didn’t speed up. Maybe because he still had to breathe, and his heart beat no matter what.
The sky was no color again this morning but the rain had stopped and the window fan blew warm, sour-smelling air around the room. Then remembering what had happened the night before, he slid his thumb into his mouth.
During the night Loreen had climbed on top of him again. This time she had whispered instructions and placed his hands where she wanted them to be, and moved his hands the way she wanted them to move, and one time, surprising him with her quick strength, she rolled both their bodies over together so she was under him. She showed him what she wanted him to do and doing it was not hard but it made him breathe loudly and it also loosed up other noises from his throat, which made her whisper, “Shh . . . be quiet . . . come on, shut up . . . you’ll wake her . . .” and he tried to be quiet both because he didn’t like the noises he was making and because he didn’t want Tonya or Tee to wake up. When the noises came out of him anyway, Loreen had pressed her small hand over his mouth and her fingers were like chicken bones, and he had the thought of sucking the meat off them, like the wings in the bar that had been covered with not-too-spicy orange sauce, and he thought of Dave, how Dave had come up behind his barstool and lurched forward and rocked back and said, You sure you don’t want to come?
You sure? Had he been sure? Who knew. Sure or not, he hadn’t come. He’d stayed in the bar with the girls and gone home with the girls and Dave hadn’t come back and now he was here on this mattress on the floor in this sour-smelling apartment in this town with the blue thread running through it on the map and without his orange knapsack and Neel had a word for that: consequences. Let him live, Neel’s voice came thundering into his head, as if he were here somewhere nearby, with the consequences of his actions.
And if he doesn’t understand? If he doesn’t get what those consequences will be? That was June. Her voice coming from the next room. Because now he is Freddy, with the moon in his window and his thumb in his mouth, drinking in the sounds that sift through the wall between his bedroom and his parents’, and if he doesn’t understand exactly what they are saying, he does know how to listen for clues that they are talking about him. And it gives him a flutter when he hears his own name: Freddy, says June—so they are talking about him. He rocks himself from side to side and slurps at his wrinkled thumb, listening for all the hes and hims that follow, each one sending a little gush of heat through his body. He is in two places at once! Here in his small captain’s bed in the darkness, and also in their mouths on the other side of the wall. He is in their conversation, cupped by their voices, cradled at the center of their thoughts.
Nature teaches all children what suffering and pain are. Neel again. If we let it. Give him the opportunity to experience the consequences and he will learn.
What if he doesn’t? June. What if he can’t?
Risks are inseparable from life.
Stop quoting at me, Neel. I’m trying to have a conversation. With you, not a dead philosopher. Who managed to be very certain of his hypothetical children. What is it? “School them in hardship—”
School them to hardship. Actually, “School them to the hardships they will one day have to endure. Harden their bodies to the changes of seasons, climates, and elements, as well as to hunger, thirst, and fatigue; dip them in the waters of the Styx.”
The Styx, Neel. Do you hear yourself? He’s not your experiment, your test case. He’s your son.
And Freddy, swaddled in blue shadow and watery moonlight, tucks his thumb neater into the warm purse of his mouth and sucks and drifts, content to float away on the raft of those words: he’s your son.
But there is too much drift. Dave has drifted away, in his rattling old car, along with Fred’s orange knapsack, and The Little Prince, and June’s maps and Neel’s pocketknife and all the single-serve packets of jelly and syrup, and he hasn’t come back, and that is called consequences, and Hey Sailor, where’d you go? this was consequences, too: Loreen putting her hand on his cheek now and making it so his face looked back at her; Loreen rising up, arching forward and rocking back, pressing her small fingers against his mouth, pushing his lips hard against his teeth, slipping her fingers between his lips and inside his teeth for him to suck and taste and they weren’t like chicken wings but like his thumb, salty and then wet and slick and faintly sweet with his own saliva; Loreen whispering shh even as her own breathing became raspier, and then she let out a little string of moans and their sounds spilled loose together; and their slippery skin slid between them; and the warm paper-mill-smelling air blew in through the window, with bits of wetness getting sucked between the fan blades so a spray of sliced-up rain speckled his back, until there came between them a shuddery collision in the windy dark hot small room.
After a minute she sat up and lit a cigarette.
That’s more like it, Sailor. Blowing out the match. That’s what I’m talking about.
• • •
ON THIS SECOND MORNING, he lay there sucking his thumb while all the pieces of the night washed over him, and then all the pieces of the day before and the night before that and the day before that and of June’s yellow face and Neel’s pocketknife and the bar with its bottle skyline and the lost jelly and syrup and maps and dust motes and the tiny wet stars of rain prickling his back. Finally he had to move, to pee, and he got up and did. At the far end of the front room, he saw the bed where Tonya or Tee slept was empty. He was relieved. She must have gone out again in the night. He helped himself to some Cap’n Crunch, which he could do because it was the second morning and he knew where it was kept and also that he was allowed to have some. The milk carton had been put back in the fridge empty.
He ate the dry cereal with a spoon, standing up, looking past the fan blades out the window. No one was around. The sky was very pale, although in the far distance there began to be some colored streaks. He looked at the chain-link fence and the clotheslines and the electrical wires and the flat, brown mill river, until all those long, straight lines began to make him feel dizzy and anxious, and he turned around and continued eating with the cluttered dresser as a table. First he had to push aside some glasses and a bra and an ashtray to make room for his bowl. Then he ate while studying up close the picture of the boy with the dark floppy hair and the big front teeth. The boy looked him right in the eye, smiling, not a big smile, just a chink. Like he knew a joke.
“What time is it?” asked Loreen, her voice froggy. “Jesus, Sailor, you always get up this early?”
“Ah-no.” Fred wondered if his crunching had woken her. Cap’n Crunch without milk was pretty loud.
Loreen got up and went to the bathroom. Through the open door he could hear her peeing. Then he could hear the toilet flushing. It flushed a long time without stopping. Then he could hear the scrape of the toilet tank lid being taken off and the flushing stop and the scrape of the lid going back on. She shuffled back into the bedroom, sat on the mattress, picked up a bottle of cola that was on the floor and took a swallow.
“Who-ah,” he said, “who-ah’s that boy?” Holding the picture out to her.
“Put it back. That’s Jimmy. My kid.”
He put it back. “How come-ah, how come I never ah-saw him?”
She looked at him a long minute. Her hair was squashed flat on one side, sticking out on the other. She shrugged. “Staying with my folks right now.” She searched with her hand for something in the sheets and found it: her little green lighter. “Anyway, you should be worrying about things that concern you. You know what day this is?”
“Ah-no.”
“Sunday. Your asshole buddies took our money Friday. Now it’s Sunday.” She ran her thumb over the ridged metal wheel and made a flame lick out. Then she let it go. She did this again several times, making little tongues of flame and killing them. He began to feel dizzy and anxious again. She gave a little laugh through her nose. “Maybe you’re supposed to be our collateral.”
No Book but the World: A Novel Page 23