Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  It was Christopher. His hair was rain-soaked, and though Elwin couldn’t be sure because of all the dripping, he looked to have been crying. He had a pillow under his arm.

  “Doc! Jesus, been banging like crazy—saw the Jeep—figured you was back—just . . .”

  “Is everything okay?” Elwin asked, adding the obvious: “It’s kinda late.”

  Emptying his lungs through his nose, and lowering his gaze to his shuffling wet sneakers, Christopher said, “You mind if I crash for the night, Doc?”

  “Yeah, sure, come’n in,” said Elwin, glancing past Christopher’s shoulder to make sure Maura wasn’t lurking there, her reconciliation mission having been upstaged at the last minute. “What’s up?”

  “Fucking usual. Dad’s being a prick.”

  “Couch or the guestroom—your pick. How so?”

  “Couch’ll do. Just won’t stay off my fucking ass.”

  Elwin flipped on the living room light and assessed Christopher in its glow. The old saw about looking like a drowned rat, he decided, fit with an unfortunate precision: Christopher’s sniffling runny nose evoking a rodent’s twitchy snout, the rainwater dripping from his mustache as from whiskers, his eyes beady and raw. “I’ll fetch you a towel,” Elwin said. “Maybe some—dry clothes.”

  When he returned he found Christopher on the couch cupping his head in his hands. Elwin set a towel before him on the coffee table, and beside it a t-shirt and pair of sweatpants that wouldn’t possibly fit him but oh well. Christopher didn’t move. For an awkward minute Elwin stood there, rubbing his hands, until finally he asked, “You want to talk about anything?”

  Christopher looked up. So he had been crying, Elwin confirmed: the red evidence of it was ringing his eyes. But he’d also been drinking. That yeasty beer smell. Owing to recent episodes in his own life, Elwin didn’t need reminding that the two activities could sometimes conjoin. “Yeah,” Christopher said, and then paused. “Y’know what I wanna talk about, Doc? Fishing. The Mets. This chick I met Friday at McGuinn’s, gave me her number and all that.”

  Elwin blinked a few times. “That sounds pretty good,” he said, while thinking: but not at 3:30 A.M. when I’ve got an eight o’clock seminar to teach. He picked the towel off the table and pressed it upon Christopher who gave his wet face a halfhearted swipe.

  “But you know what I gotta talk about,” said Christopher, “instead?”

  Elwin shook his head.

  Christopher screwed up his lips, as though preparing to spit, and rocking his head back and forth he began, “That motherfucking—that old fucking sonofa—”

  Boomboomboom. Now came another knocking at the screen door, sharp and insistent. Christopher, knowing better than Elwin who was at his door, closed his eyes and went limp. “Hold that thought,” Elwin said, thinking surely this time it was Maura, but when he swung open the door he saw:

  Big Jerry. Red-faced but not red-eyed, dressed in a New York Giants nightshirt with a torn collar exposing a swath of wet pink shoulder in something like (but also very unlike) the old Flashdance style from the ’80s. (Maura had torn her shirts like that back then, kicking her legs to Jane Fonda videos on the old TV, something Elwin had found unbearably sexy.) Big Jerry’s hair was bed-crazy, gray spikes shooting everywhere, which only added to the air of toxic lunacy Elwin sensed. He realized at once that he’d dropped or been dragged into the bad middle of something.

  “Sorry to bother you at this crazy hour, Doc,” Big Jerry said, his hands forming and unforming fists, his big voice pinched and tense, “but I saw the light was on, and I’m looking for—”

  At that moment he drew his gaze past Elwin’s unexposed shoulder and there on the couch he spotted: “Christopher! You piece of shit! Get your ass out here!”

  Elwin said, “Whoa, Jerry, let’s calm down . . .”

  Big Jerry wedged a foot inside the doorway while Elwin widened his defensive stance, their bellies lightly crashing. Big Jerry seemed oblivious to Elwin’s presence, however, as if blocked by a fence or some other inert matter. “You can’t hide from me, you little shit!” He was poking a meaty finger in the air toward Christopher, close enough to Elwin’s ear to provoke evasive head action. “You gonna take it like a man!”

  Recalling Christopher’s middle-fingered response to his father on the night they’d cleaned the deer, and therefore wanting to be prepared for Big Jerry’s inevitable blitz if Christopher did likewise tonight, Elwin glanced back at Christopher. But Christopher looked incapable of anything remotely like that. Perhaps the excess beer had emboldened him that far-gone night, or maybe the obstructed distance between Big Jerry in the bedroom and himself out on the driveway, or the safety net of his mother’s hovering influence. But there was no safety net now, Elwin realized (save Elwin himself), and Christopher was cowering, his forearm raised to protect himself. With a despairing scowl, Elwin noted the forearm: the way Christopher was holding it appeared subconscious, almost instinctual, as if he wasn’t even aware it was raised, a nurtured rather than natural response that signaled to Elwin all he needed to know about Big Jerry’s parenting tactics. Christopher was twenty-two years old yet in that ugly and trembly moment he looked ten, or six, a teary-eyed boy afraid for his life. A quick fusillade of ah-has went rippling through Elwin’s mind, as he recalled some of Christopher’s darker quirks, like his hair-trigger temper and his tendency during tantrums to assault inanimate objects, or the bullying tone he developed after six or seven beers at McGuinn’s and the related paranoia that somebody in the bar was keen to kick his ass. Dropped hints, mumbled clues, inscrutable little tics. It all made sense now—or if it didn’t quite make sense, because nothing human ever did (Maura, for instance), it pointed in the general direction of sense. Big Jerry fathered with his fists. Elwin felt a stiff turning in his gut, a revulsion spiked with outrage, and turning to Big Jerry and placing a palm against Big Jerry’s chest he said with uncommon firmness, “We need to calm it down.”

  Big Jerry sneered down at Elwin’s hand, through which Elwin could feel Jerry’s chest throbbing, and leaning into the palm so that Elwin’s forearm muscles went taut against the pressure, he hissed, “Move out the way, Doc.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” was all Elwin could think to say.

  “This ain’t your fucking business.”

  “But it is my—my fucking house.”

  Big Jerry leaned in harder, compressing the distance between him and Elwin so that their bellies were now in full contact, and bellowed over Elwin’s shoulder, “You tell your new best friend here how you got fired from work? Didya?” Elwin could feel wet droplets of spittle cooling on his ear and cheek. “I didn’t think so.” To Elwin he said, “I set ’im up with that job, me. That was a legacy hire, right there. Fucking dipshit can’t get to work on time. Made me look like a piece of shit.”

  “Maybe it’s for the best,” Elwin offered.

  With a squealing lisp Big Jerry echoed him: “Maybe it’s for the best.” Now he leaned in harder, Elwin’s leg muscles tightening as he fixed his stance. “Get the fuck out the way, Doc. This here is a family matter and you ain’t got no right sticking your nose in it.”

  “Everyone needs to calm down,” Elwin suggested, as much to himself as to Big Jerry, because the stiffening in his gut was now iron-hard and spreading, his shoulders tensing and the fingers of his free hand flexing. After glancing back at Christopher, still silent and crouched, he felt his weight shifting forward into his palm. It all felt like a slow-motion collision, their parts straining toward mechanical breakage.

  Big Jerry felt it too. “Lemme ask you something,” he said, his gaze pinned downward as though addressing the hand against his chest. “You been payin him for all that work on your car?” Tilting his head upward to lock eyes with Elwin, he snorted, a ribbon of irate drool unfurling from his bottom lip. “I didn’t fucking think so.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Just move your fat ass so I can bring that piece of shit back where he b
elongs.”

  “You need to go back home, Jerry,” Elwin said.

  “You need to move, fatass!” he shouted, emphasizing the word move with a two-handed shove to Elwin’s chest. The shove was fully leaded; Elwin felt it all the way to his ribs, emitting an oof of startled pain. In his peripheral vision, as he listed backwards, he saw Christopher rise from the couch, and then, listing forward like the big weeble-wobble he was, as he regained his balance, he saw Big Jerry’s enraged face as a giant maw of coffee-stained teeth and woolly gray mustache, a face that appeared to Elwin ten times its actual size, as if anger were inflating Big Jerry’s head.

  Elwin had never been in a physical fight in his life. The closest he’d ever come was in third grade, when he’d accidentally elbowed Danny Parsh in a recess game of touch football and Danny Parsh had jumped him to the ground, the boys forming a tight circle and chanting fight fight while the girls fled to alert the nuns. Back then he’d folded himself into a wimpy fetal ball, much the way a potato bug did when threatened with a stick, while Danny sat atop him trying to wrest him into submissive position, but before Danny could land a punch he was plucked off by a nun gripping his collar and then forced to shake hands with a quivering Elwin who was from that day forward never again a competitive touch-football player. So he had zero fighting experience, unless you counted being sat on as a nine-year-old. He was certainly without any adult precedent for what to do when physically challenged. He might’ve known, otherwise, how to defuse such a situation (when curling up like a giant potato bug wasn’t a moral option). Or, barring a peaceable outcome, he might’ve known how much force to deploy or not deploy when responding to a shove like the one he’d just absorbed.

  All he did know, at that moment, was that Christopher was closing in behind him, one horrible and conflicted step at a time, and that there wasn’t any way he was going to allow Big Jerry a whack at his poor son under his roof, or, worse yet, watch Christopher leap in to defend him, watch this whole episode devolve into bruisy mayhem, and, somewhere else inside him, in a secondary but insistent voice, that Maura wasn’t ever coming back, she’d dumped him and it was over, and even if she did come back his answer wasn’t yes but no, because he was done with being sat on, he was done with being not-enough, he was done with being totaled, he was done with his own obsolescence, he was done he was done he was done.

  So he shoved Big Jerry in the same precise way Big Jerry had shoved him, tit for tat because the only fighting tactic he knew was the one that’d just been used on him seconds ago. But despite resemblances this was not Big Jerry’s shove: the tit far overwhelmed the tat. Into that shove Elwin funneled all his 334 pounds (according to his last weigh-in, six hours prior), exerting a sixth-ton of impact that sent Big Jerry floundering backwards and then, to Elwin’s horrified astonishment, farther backwards, almost but not quite airborne, his wet slippers skidding across the porch, his thick lineman’s arms pinwheeling, and then even farther backwards until his back slammed the porch post, and with a grunt of pain he went spinning leftward into the porch railing, and then slipping in a puddle on the porch, where a clogged gutter was spilling filthy sheets of rainwater, he went down in a jellied heap. And was still.

  “Holy shit,” he heard Christopher say behind him.

  Elwin was staring at his hands as if they weren’t his own. “I didn’t mean to—oh God I’m sorry—Jerry?”

  From the drenched pile that was Big Jerry came a moan. Rolling to his side, he reached up for the porch post, missed it, and then latching onto the railing he slowly and brokenly began pulling himself upward. Elwin stepped out onto the porch, shaking timidly, saying, “Jerry?” But Big Jerry raised a hand for him to stop, unloosing a watery-sounding cough as he unbent himself to stand upright, or rather almost upright, reaching around with his other hand to caress his lower back. Across the driveway Elwin could see Myrna behind the stormdoor, clutching her robe to her neck, squinting out at the black rain. Big Jerry rubbed his face hard, as if to squeegee the water from it, and then took two steps toward the porch stairs, his soaked slippers going flop-squish-flop-squish. With a forlorn sigh he took in the view: his twenty-three-foot Bay Ranger, his sons’ matching Ford F-250 4x4s in the driveway, the fleet of quads in the backyard, the junked old BMX bikes leaning rusted and tangled against the fence, Myrna with a hand above her eyes peering anxiously out the stormdoor like a ship’s watch. Slowly he pivoted back toward Elwin, who held up his hands and said, “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to do anything—even close to that—”

  Big Jerry threw up a hand, waving away the words. “You can keep him,” he croaked, shaking his head and grimacing. “I’m fucking through.”

  “Jerry, please—” Elwin started to say, but by now Big Jerry was hobbling down the steps, clutching at the stair rail. Elwin watched as he went limping across the driveway, pelted by the rain, his waterlogged nightshirt clinging to his back, and then, as Myrna opened the door, on into his house. Elwin saw Myrna’s eyes widen, and before the stormdoor rattled shut heard her say, “What happened? Where’s Christopher?” Then the entry light went dark, and outside there was only rain.

  Back inside, Elwin didn’t wait for Christopher to speak. “Go put those dry clothes on,” he said, and obediently—maybe even fearfully—Christopher nodded. Elwin was still staring at his hands when he drifted into the kitchen, and with amazement watched them as they went through the routine maneuvers of fixing a pot of coffee. While the coffeemaker gurgled he sat down with his palms upon the tabletop, in his mind replaying scenes from what had just happened in much the same way he’d spent so many recent nights replaying scenes from his dreams. He found that he kept pausing, in his playback, at the moment Big Jerry had risen from the wet porch and fixed his wincing gaze across the driveway at his own house and arrayed accessories, his own accumulated monument: What had Jerry seen there, or not seen? What could’ve possibly gone through Jerry’s mind as he’d surveyed all that—the sum product of his sweat and sacrifice, all of it rendered hollow by his terrified half-man son whom he’d then, out of spite or surrender, chucked to the curb? Maybe nothing, Elwin decided. Maybe he’d merely been catching his breath and gauging his injuries. Or maybe he’d been inventorying all he stood to lose if he uncapped the murderous rage he was no doubt feeling for his unneighborly neighbor. “The goal of life,” Elwin’s father used to say, quoting Jonas Salk, “is to be a good ancestor.” The idea had always seemed clear, to Elwin—painfully clear, actually, when years ago the doctors concluded his immotile sperm were the cause for his and Maura’s childlessness. But maybe it wasn’t so clear, he thought now. Maybe Big Jerry harbored the same goal, and all that he’d seen in that moment—the rusted BMX bikes, the quads, the matching pickups; even the job he’d bequeathed to his son—was the concrete proof of his effort. In the midst of these thoughts Elwin found himself staring at his hands again, causing another thought to interrupt: How can I possibly understand another person if I can’t even recognize my goddamn self?

  “I think your dog’s dead.” This was Christopher, standing in the kitchen doorway. He looked ridiculous, awash in Elwin’s XXL Marasmus State t-shirt and clasping the waist of his borrowed sweatpants to keep them from falling off. Ridiculous, and pathetic: a boy unprepared for manhood—or deprived of the means for it, same difference.

  “No,” Elwin said. “He’s not dead. He just sleeps hard. You’ll see.”

  Christopher nodded, and came shuffling toward the table. “What the . . . fuck, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Elwin said, knowing there was so much more to come, a whole lifetime of talking before sunrise. “You hungry?” he asked, and when Christopher nodded yes Elwin stood up and opened the refrigerator and pulled from it a package of thawed deer steaks. As the coffeemaker beeped its completion, and as Christopher started talking, fumblingly, as if in a new language he had just that night begun to learn, Elwin rinsed the steaks in the sink, watching the blood turn pink under the faucet and then dissolve altogether, flushed into the ancient p
ipes running invisibly beneath New Jersey, the buried iron channels undergirding the world, holding it up, and draining who knows where.

  6

  MATTY BOONE DID NOT, at first, show much promise as a scavenger. For one thing, he lacked the ability to carry in his head a mental inventory of needs, and therefore didn’t know what to look for when canvassing the streets without Talmadge or Micah to guide him; he judged everything he found on its condition, rather than its utility, as in the newish-looking blowdryer he fetched out of a West Village trash bag and proudly delivered to Micah despite (a) her unblowable dreadlocks and (b) their lack of functioning electrical sockets, or the brass birdcage he found on Jane Street, or the size-XXL velvet Santa suit he pulled from a bag on West 15th Street just after Christmas. (He tried putting the Santa suit to use as pajamas, to blunt all the grief he was taking from Tal, but the floppy cuffs kept tripping him up, only sharpening the grief.) For another, he couldn’t seem to grasp the ecological landscape of trash, the way some areas were ripe for the picking and others poor, no matter how much Talmadge tutored him (“Dorms and nursing homes and residence hotels are always good. Anywhere you find people moving in and moving out a lot”), nor could he get a handle on the fixed schedule of scavenging, the tidal regularity of when grocery stores cleared the old produce (typically Mondays and Thursdays) and when delis dumped their warmed-over buffet items (4 and 11 P.M.) and how the sanitation pickup schedule changed north of 28th Street. How pigeons managed to cram all this into their M&M-sized brains was one of those mysteries of nature that Matty used to enjoy seeing solved on the Discovery Channel after several bong hits and a Vicodin chaser. Now it just pissed him off.