The Coward

by Jarred McGinnis

  When we watched tv or a movie or just stared at the city lights from the top of a parking garage, she nibbled and sucked on the tips of her hair. While she slept, I once inched my face close to hers until I could feel her sleeping breath against my lips. I put that strand of hair in my mouth and sucked, but it didn’t satisfy me either.

  She told me her secrets. I told her my lies. Her dad was on to family number two and had no interest in Melissa. Her mom too had other things than parenting to think about. She never raised an eyebrow seeing me, this teenage boy, always in her kitchen eating. As I waited for Melissa to wake up, her mom would ask me to fix her a coffee and shuffle back into her room. Melissa complained about the way her mother wheedled money from her father and a parade of other men. Melissa was bored of her school. Bored of her friends. Of her easy comfort, of her prettiness, of her sidewalk-trimmed subdivision full of people she’d known since elementary school, of her emergency credit card used for shopping and her allowance, the fridge full of food, the closet full of clothes, the mall, the boys groping at her under the bleachers at football games, the after-school piano lessons and tutor two times a week. Bored of being bored.

  To her I was a Ken doll that she could play grownups with, trying to figure out the rules to this boy vs girl game. I was happy to be toyed with, but sometimes my unsatisfied lust became anger. Her refusal to acknowledge my need for her made everything she said irritating. I would snap at her and storm off to leave her alone for a few days until she called me crying, apologising for whatever she did to upset me. I’d say it was nothing, and we’d be back to planning our next adventure.

  ‘Let’s run away,’ she said.

  ‘Get your shit. Let’s go.’

  She hesitated before calling my bluff.

  I led us to the train yard, a scratch of buildings at the end of a tangle of tracks among rusting heaps and diesel air.

  ‘What do we do now?’ she asked. She sounded fearful.

  ‘Wait until one moves,’ I said with weary knowing. One of my lies was that I hopped trains all the time.

  That first time was exciting enough to sustain us through the shuffling hours. I told her train-hopping stories stolen from books and zines. When an engine lurched forward, we sprang from our hiding spot and flung ourselves into a boxcar’s wide-open mouth.

  It was years later that I learned that a three-hour wait was lucky. We had no idea of the danger we flirted with. Would my life have been different if Melissa or I had sprained an ankle jumping into the boxcar? If we had sat there all day, sitting on our haunches, socks bloated with rain, without a train moving out? If I had seen the future that is now my past, would that have been enough to keep me home? The time a tweaker attacked me with a rake handle while I was sleeping under an overpass. Or when two redneck cops with guns drawn, calling me faggot, stole my clothes and dropped me off in my underwear on the wrong side of town. If I had known I was going to watch a teenage boy fall out of a moving train and snap his spine miles away from any help, would that have been enough to save me and Melissa?

  Instead, Melissa and I sang ‘Movin’ Right Along’ and let our feet dangle out of the car. We chucked rocks at the blur of yellow and green landscape. We had jumped a shuttle between depots only half an hour apart. The train slowed to a stop and we jumped off. We ran through the yard as if chased, but only picked up a half-interested glance from the driver as he came down from the engine.

  Our finish line to cross turned out to be a few streets of singlewide trailers surrounded by weathered picnic tables and trucks trimmed in rust and bumper stickers. At the edge was a convenience store called Big Bob’s where we celebrated our adventure with Cokes and day-old donuts.

  That night we lay in her bed together to giggle and recount our adventure. We planned other places to go and my knowledge of the tracks from my lonely hikes helped me falsify my image of veteran train-hopper.

  We wrestled and horse-played. She held my wrists and used her body to pin my shoulders to the bed. She dug her chin into the nest of my shoulder.

  She counted to two before I pushed her off and we struggled against each other. I slipped her grip. I jumped on top of her, held her wrists, looked into her eyes. One . . . two . . . three . . .

  I still held her as I said, ‘Hogan retains the championship.’

  I became embarrassingly aware of my erection and that she too must have felt it pressing against her. Melissa’s eyes darted across my face, and I ached for her to find what she was looking for.

  We touched cautiously but grew bolder. We kissed hungrily, peeling clothes away. She took off her bra and panties, then pulled my underwear off. Those eyes of hers that always knew more than she said. Those eyes that dissected the stories I told to make myself someone else. Those eyes, they were uncertain and fearful. Her body was rigid and tense. She gripped my arm as I guided my penis into her.

  This was her first time too.

  I kissed her and whispered, ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Okay,’ she agreed.

  They weren’t the most romantic words to say before we lost our virginity, but they weren’t the worst. It was going to be okay and we needed that reassurance. We were children taking one of those irrevocable steps toward adulthood. A moment for both of us, never to be repeated or shared with any other person. Of course, I thought none of this as I pushed myself inside her. I moved softly and slowly and felt guilty when she winced.

  It was over too quick but neither of us knew that yet. We lay embracing, surprised that it had happened.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said and went to the bathroom. She returned and I drank in the vision of a nude girl, my first, climbing into bed with me. She curled into the nook of my shoulder, her body still heated, and ran her hand back and forth across my chest.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  Melissa, the unattainable girl who had just taken my virginity, had said ‘I love you’ unprompted. How many times had I dared myself to say that sentence? Her ‘I love you’ burned so bright that she had to nudge me to make me realise that I left her in no man’s land by not responding.

  ‘I love you too.’

  She smiled, nuzzled closer and sniffled. We fell asleep quickly.

  Our time as girlfriend/boyfriend was brief. I hiked home in the mornings, every limb sore. My lips still feeling the kisses and the memory of her body like the ghosts of waves after a day in the ocean.

  Dad had long ago been reduced to a spill, an unflushed toilet, the remains of a bottle, the tang of smoke from a pizza forgotten in the oven, a closed door, an inert body on the couch, a cut on my fat lip or bruise under my eye. The house itself began to disappear once I met Melissa.

  25

  In an attempt to avoid any more trouble with Jack or the new parents next door, I wheeled to the public library, took my spot at the rows of computers, and looked for a job. I had learned to go early to avoid the teenage boys taking up all the machines to play video games, but not so early as to have to sit next to the old man who watched online videos of women doing yoga while scratching at a patch of eczema on his neck.

  The first email was from a book store. The subject line read ‘I’m so sorry’. I deleted it without reading yet another email that blamed too-small employee bathrooms or a step at the entrance. They always felt terrible but not so terrible as to make their place more accessible. The second email was from a chain restaurant. They took a different approach and listed all the reasons that I was wrong to apply. There were three more emails to go through.

  The middle-aged man seated across from me stared. I felt his eyes but it took a few beats for him to notice that I was staring back.

  He gave a brief smile and dipped back to his screen.

  ‘Were you wondering what happened to me?’ I asked.

  ‘Was it a car accident?’

  ‘Gluten. One-way dinner roll ride to misery. Now it’s a life of sitting in my own shit with nothing but people’s pity and useless noodle legs,’ I said.

  He hid
behind his screen again. I deleted the remaining emails.

  ‘Motherfucker Betty Crocker,’ I yelled and went home.

  I sat at the kitchen table listening to the baby monitor, a small blue box with its one fat antenna-arm stretched to receive. It burbled electricity and static. Occasionally, a breathy coo, grunt or baby gurgle fired shooting-star quick from the speakers. I leaned in, waiting for those moments when the wife came in and spoke to her baby. I tried to recall my mom’s voice. It felt like an insult that I couldn’t. I didn’t register Jack’s key in the lock.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Jack feigned friendliness, but he looked tired. He eyed the bag of cat food on the table. He was looking his age. It was hard getting used to how suddenly Jack had become old. I had packed him and Mom away with everything else. Jack hadn’t existed for me for a long time.

  ‘Listening to the radio,’ I said.

  ‘Jarred, I’m going to get serious here. You need to pay attention: you and me both are too old for this shit. This is my house. You are welcome here, always have been. But it is my house, not yours. You need to quit horsing around the neighbour’s house. You need to tell me why we seem to own a cat these days. And you need to stop treating me like a moron. You understand?’

  I kept my eyes on my hands and the baby monitor. Jack leaned on the back of the chair across from me.

  ‘I do.’ I looked at him, hoping he’d see that I was sincere.

  ‘I wish I believed you.’

  My eyes fell back on the monitor.

  ‘This stuff just happens,’ I said.

  ‘No, this stuff just happens because of you. Then everyone else has to deal with it. We’re done with that. You’re twenty-six. Aren’t you tired of this? This is the same kind of nonsense that got that girl killed and you thrown into a wheelchair. How many more chances do you need? Get your shit in one sock, Jarred.’

  I had nothing to say. Jack had said out loud what had been simmering inside me.

  Jack calmed himself. ‘What have you been doing for ten years?’

  ‘Probably the same you have. Nothing.’

  Jack tried again. He sat at the table. ‘Do you remember when you gave your house keys to a runaway in Phoenix? The kid was maybe twenty-three, a guy named Eman.’

  ‘No.’ ‘I do. Because he showed up at my door with a note in your handwriting: “Admit One. Signed El Presidente”. You gave him your keys and said he could stay as long as he wanted.’

  I chuckled nervously. ‘What’d you do?’

  He took the baby monitor from my hands and examined it. ‘I let him stay. He was a mess. He had your room for about two years. I got him into the programme, my first sponsee. He met a French lady and moved to Canada. I still get letters from time to time calling me Dad. He’s doing good.’ He set the monitor back down.

  ‘Maybe I should’ve come back from Arizona,’ I said and turned the monitor on, but it received only static.

  ‘Maybe.’ He picked it up again and the monitor disappeared in the cradle of his rough hands.

  ‘Truce?’

  ‘Jarred, you’re the only one fighting.’

  I cleared the tears welling in my eyes. ‘Let’s take a walk. Get a coffee?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m tired. Is anything even open now?’

  ‘There’s a place called the Filling Station across from the big grocery store.’

  ‘Fine with me.’ He stood and put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘One sec.’ I wheeled into my room and returned. ‘Check it out. Which one do you like better?’ I held up a t-shirt with ‘Not interested in Jesus or telling you why I am in a wheelchair’ scrawled in Sharpie.

  ‘Are those my goddamn undershirts?’

  ‘Or this one.’ I held up another shirt.

  ‘Charming,’ Jack said. ‘The second one. It’s punchier.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’ I exchanged my shirt for one that said, ‘I am not your good deed for the day’.

  At the Filling Station, Jack examined the art on the walls. He made his jokes about rabbit food and hippies as he looked at the vegetarian menu but marvelled at the bromeliads hanging from the fixtures like light bulbs. He stood on a chair to study how they were hung, talking about the species. He pronounced their Latin names like absolutions.

  ‘I never knew this was here,’ Jack said.

  ‘Can’t find new places if you don’t get lost or new friends if you don’t talk to strangers.’

  ‘Where’d you pick up that little aphorism?’

  ‘You, I think.’

  ‘Well, it must be right then,’ he said, still looking at the plants.

  ‘How’s Incredible Mister Shakey?’ Sarah asked as she delivered our coffees to the table.

  Jack raised his eyebrows.

  ‘The squirrels are unimpressed but he’s happy. This is my dad, Jack.’

  ‘Is this coffee-flavoured coffee?’ Jack said to Sarah.

  ‘Hello, Jack. Drink your coffee and no sass,’ she said, disarming him with a smile, and walked off.

  ‘She’s a keeper.’ Jack took a sip. He put down his cup, clattering and spilling. He shook out his arm, his face worried.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Pins and needles.’ He pumped his hand open and closed. ‘It’s fine. Too much coffee, not enough sleep.’ He had been doing double shifts.

  ‘Jack,’ I said, concerned.

  ‘If you’re going to fuss, I’m sure as hell not going to tell you about the dizzy spells,’ he joked.

  ‘Not funny.’

  ‘I’ll cut down on the caffeine,’ he said, took another sip of coffee, and winked.

  ‘Or, I don’t know, go to a doctor like a normal person,’ I said. If Jack was talking about his problems, it was serious.

  ‘Tell me about some of the places you’ve been. What was Arizona like? I always wanted to travel more. Your mom was agoraphobic, quite bad. She was scared of the world. I tried and tried.’

  ‘Jack, you remember when you picked me up from the hospital?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I almost ran off the night before.’ He looked at me seriously. I continued: ‘I was sad and scared. I was in a lot of pain. My roommate was with his girlfriend and I felt so alone.’

  Jack gripped his coffee mug with both hands. He frowned and I thought he was angry. When he spoke, I understood.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t . . . didn’t run off that night,’ he said, his voice cracking.

  ‘I wouldn’t have gotten far on foot.’ I forced a laugh to clear the sadness enveloping us. I wanted to tell him the truth about that night, about Melissa, everything, but I couldn’t. I blurted, ‘I have a job interview tomorrow.’

  ‘Really? Are you up to it? Don’t rush it if you aren’t ready.’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  26

  Melissa and I were walking past a shopping centre.

  ‘Let’s go bull-baiting for some hooch,’ she said. ‘I want to get drunk.’

  ‘Pass.’

  ‘You’re going to be boring, aren’t you? I bet you’re cute when you’re drunk. C’mon.’ She put her arms around me.

  ‘I don’t drink.’ Drinking for me was the broken man in our garage constantly following that Mickey Mouse glass and shaming Mom’s memory.

  ‘Boring.’

  ‘So, I’m boring.’

  She grabbed my hand and I let her drag me with her. ‘We’re doing this, McGinnis,’ she said, looking over her shoulder.

  ‘I thought we were going to break into the drug-dealer castle.’

  ‘We’ll do both. I am the woman. You have to obey me.’ She switched tactics from commanding to cajoling. ‘Please, please, please, with cherries on top. I’ll show you my boobies.’ She lifted her shirt to flash her bra.

  ‘I’ll steal but I’m not drinking.’

  She kissed me. She set those eyes on me. ‘You’re going to drink with me.’

  Unlocked and uninhabited, getting into the drug-dealer castle was easy.
The neighbourhood gossip was that the house was unfinished because the drug-dealer owner had gone to prison. Knowing what the neighbourhood said about Jack and me, I had my doubts, but the amount of gold trim and pink marble made the rumours credible.

  Already adept at the simple mechanisms by which boys operated, she got me to drink. Listening to a radio left by the construction workers, our legs tangled with each other, we sat in the master bedroom on the top floor and looked out onto my forest backlit by the glow of streetlights near the horizon. Between us was a bottle of orange soda spiked with shoplifted whiskey.

  ‘You’re a freak. Look how tiny your nipples are.’ She pinched my nipple then pushed me away as I pretended to breastfeed her.

  We sipped at the whiskey, enjoying our view and each other until a crash came from downstairs.

  ‘Shh. Listen,’ I said sharply.

  ‘They’re breaking a window,’ she said.

  ‘Quick, get dressed.’ Wide-eyed, I watched the darkness beyond the bedroom doorway. There were more noises downstairs. Melissa held on to me.

  ‘We’ll go out through the garage,’ I said. Another sound. A girl’s laugh? We looked at each other and strained our ears. More laughter.

  ‘It’s kids,’ Melissa said. We descended cautiously until we saw three guys and two girls stepping through the house.

  ‘Hiya,’ Melissa sang.

  They jumped and turned. They fell over each other laughing. Everyone spoke at once, Melissa explaining our fear, they explaining theirs. One of the girls told us that while the boys were breaking the window and crawling through, the girls went around and tried the door and found it open.