by Michael Oren
Mornings, we’d start out again.
“Where to, Perry-berry?”
“Atlantis!” I’d holler. “The moon!”
“The moon it is,” she said, releasing the brake and turning out of the rest area. “First stop, though, Atlantis.”
My mom drives hunched a bit, her eyes almost even with the steering wheel. Her hair is cut short like a boy’s, with a color much like our car’s. She wears ear studs and jeans and sleeveless shirts that show her tattoos—three hearts nearly broken in half.
“Why only three?” I’d always ask.
“I ran out of arm.”
“And why broken?”
“Cause hearts are like eggs with little baby birds inside them. One day they hatch and fly, Penelope.”
I like it when she calls me by my real name. The name, Mom said, of a woman she’d heard about when she was a kid, maybe from her own mother. This lady lived long ago—longer even than that little girl in the wagon—and waited many, many years for her husband to return from sailing around the world. I liked the name but wondered if Mom got it backwards. Weren’t we the ones traveling? And who was waiting for us?
“Nobody, except for you-know-who, and no way we’re hanging around for him.” I could feel her stepping on the gas a bit and was frightened she’d get a ticket. “We’ll keep moving, you and me, and you’ll always be my little girl.”
“And you’ll be twice as old as me.”
“Which means that when you’re twenty I’ll be, let’s see, forty.” Mom pouted at me but said to the dashboard. “And when you’re forty, I’ll be…driving.”
But I didn’t want to grow up. I didn’t want to own a car and wash my kid in public bathrooms. I wanted to stay just as I was, gazing out of the back window at the white highway lines trailing behind us like smoke puffs from a train. I liked riding beside my mom, listening to her stories about real-life cowboys and soldiers who never came back from the war. Not once did I feel fear or a need to protect her, not until that night near the ocean.
She promised me we’d see it, when the sun shone through the windshield. Sand, waves, water, she said, bluer than my eyes, if that was possible. But before we could park, the car began to wobble. Mom held the steering wheel real tight and grumbled one of those words she never said around me. Then, nicer, she said, “No problem, Pip, it’s only a flat tire.”
She told me to sit tight and not open the door for anyone, just before locking me in. I heard her fiddling around in the trunk—the basement, we called it—and slamming it shut. Some clangy noises followed and I felt the car rise and fall. What fun, I thought, until our car suddenly filled up with light.
I pulled down the rearview mirror and saw two headlights like scary eyes pull up behind us. Then the lights went out leaving a burning red dot, just like my mom’s cigarette, only I didn’t think it was hers.
And then, nothing. I sat there for I don’t know how long, wanting to bawl, wanting to holler for her and run out of the car. But I didn’t. No, I just sat and played with the dials, imagining I was watching TV. I waited and waited until my cheeks got wet and my legs started shaking. But there was no sign of her, not even a red dot. Only quiet.
Then, suddenly, her door opened, and Mom fell in. She was breathing hard and smelling strong—not only her smells but some others.
“Mom?” I asked, because she didn’t brush my forehead like she usually did and kiss it. “Mom?” because she didn’t call me Poppy or Pooh Bear or even Penelope. But she just sat there breathing for a while before finally turning the key.
That’s when I saw it. In the glow of the dashboard, on her arm and sprinkled around those broken hearts, blood.
I cried, “Are you okay?”
She looked down at her arm and, with her other hand, rubbed the arm clean. “Fine. No problem.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” She turned on the car and swung back onto the road. “The Old Osifegus.”
I slept that night to a crashing sound that in the morning I saw was waves. The sand was very white and the water shiny but not as blue, Mom said, as my eyes.
And for the first time I thought: someday I will grow up. I’ll get a job and make lots of money and buy us a real home with real beds, TVs, and a pool. Mom won’t have to drive anymore, won’t have to run away. We can lock the doors at night, the windows, too. Nothing will ever catch up to us.
“Well, looks like we’ve run out of country,” Mom laughed a bit and hit the wheel with her palms. “Looks like we’ll just have to turn around.”
Now it was my turn to pout.
“Alright, Pepper, you win.” She brushed the hair from my forehead. “But first, we’ll go for a swim.”
Surprise Inspection
With two fingers on each side of its brim, Hardet straightened his drill sergeant’s hat. He stuffed his shirt tight inside his canvas web belt and shot out his military cuffs. Looking down, he inspected the stripes on his sleeves and the crease in his trousers. His shoes vaguely reflected his face—the heatless blue eyes, the functional nose and mouth, chin like a mallet. Only when assured that his appearance was in terrifying order, did he hit the power switch, push open the door, and storm inside the barracks.
“Lights on, limp dicks! Up and out! And I mean fucking now!” he shouted in a clipped cadence, heels percussing each bark. “Attennnn-hut!”
But Company A was already out of its bunks, on its feet, and standing pillar-like.
Hardet stood silent for a second, just long enough to glance up and down the row of t-shirts and skivvies. The underclothes, like their wearers’ hair and skin, gleamed under the naked bulbs. Hoisting his most pissed-off scowl, the sergeant resumed:
“Tell me I’m wrong, please, but you are the sorriest lump of duck shit I have ever seen. You’re worse than duck shit. You’re snake shit. Fuck, you’re widget shit.”
No one in the unit flinched, much less shivered. Not even the first turtle-head who remained motionless while Hardet squared off in front of him, rose on spit-shined shoe-tips, and hollered, “You are widget shit, aren’t you, Private?”
“Yes, Sergeant!”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Hardet mimicked him, falsetto at first, then roared, “Yes, Sergeant what?”
The joe replied without hesitation—without, Hardet noted, a blink. “Yes, I am widget shit, Sergeant!”
“As you were.”
If the enlisted man eased, Hardet didn’t perceive it. He was already pouncing on the next one.
“And you, rust-bait, what’s your number?”
“3335335.”
“Holy mother of twat, what do we have here, a fucking vibrator?”
“Sorry, Sergeant.” The cherry repeated and roared. “3335335!”
Hardet snorted and moved on.
“And you, junk heap, where the fuck are you from?”
“I’m from Sunnyvale, Sergeant.”
“Sunnyvale? Sounds like some senior citizens’ whorehouse.” Hardet pouted and puckered his lips like some old, sad man. “It does, don’t it? Like poon town for geezers.”
Nobody spoke. Nobody nodded or laughed, certainly.
“Not funny?” Hardet asked the barracks. “Not funny, microwave?” He turned to another cherry. “And what junk yard are you from?”
“I’m from Sunnyvale, too, Sergeant.”
A voice at the end of the row volunteered, “We’re all from Sunnyvale. Sergeant.”
The pucker vanished from Hardet’s mouth, along with his anger. “All from Sunnyvale,” he said under his breath. “Course you are.”
Another silent moment followed, different from the first. Hardet gazed not at the sprogs but at the caged lights and the whitewashed walls that had witnessed so many inspections like this and so many green recruits. But now there were no more chinks or spics or jiggaboos. No bible thumpers or bagel biters. Hayseeds or sewer rats. No one to dub four-eyes or pizza-face. And no flabby lumps of duck shit to forge, through brutal discipline and train
ing, into soldiers.
Hardet planted one toe behind a heel and pivoted. Back straight, head pinioned, he marched at precisely thirty inches per step, arms fast at his sides. Past the line of t-shirts and skivvies, wheaten hair and blemishless skin, he strode, but paused at the open door.
“You, A Company, I know that A stands for Androids,” he said without about-facing. “And I don’t give a fuck. Wherever you come from, whoever made you, you’re mine now and I will break you. I will break you, day and night, until broke feels like fixed. And then I will build you, from scrap if I have to, into men. Fighting men. Real men.”
Pinching his hat brim, stiffening, Hardet uttered, “That’s all,” and exited. He closed the door behind him and stood alone in the darkness. Then, with a sigh, he hit the switch, and powered down his company for the night.
The Scar
“I think I like the macramé.”
He listened as a siren revolved in the night, spinning down Amsterdam Avenue. Blue and red lights, like trapped tropical birds, darted around the walls.
“Did you hear me? The macramé, I said.”
The siren rounded 110th Street, he reckoned, out of earshot. The colors seemed to escape through the open window.
“You didn’t. You didn’t hear a word.”
He caressed the cleft of her back, tense where her thin shoulders met the spine. “I am. I am listening.”
“What did I say, then?” He could feel her flanks contract.
“About the invitations…”
“What about the invitations?”
“You liked the design we saw today.”
“Yes, but which one of them?”
He remained silent, stroking some moles, reading her body’s braille. He felt her sigh.
“The macramé background, I said. It’ll make the lettering stand out. You don’t want people to look and just think, ‘yeah, your run-of-the-mill wedding.’”
“No, course not.” He patted the back of her hair. Longish, dark, worn straight the way he preferred, though someday—after their first child, he assumed—she’d cut it.
“Macramé it is, then.”
He did not argue with her often. An honest, level-headed, woman, a stable woman—in truth, she was almost always right. It was one of the qualities he admired most. That and her values—those counted, didn’t they?—her work ethic. Inexperienced when they’d met, she seemed capable, he believed, of someday satisfying him. Meanwhile, there were her parents who loved him, and his parents who loved her, responding to the news with a joy so deafening he had to jerk the receiver from his ear. They deserved that after all he’d put them through. Difficult child, untethered adult. He liked the feeling that all their travails had been, in the end, rewarded.
He looped his arm around a ribcage, fit his body into the curve of hers, and embraced her so tightly his shoulder pressed against her cheek. In the fractured light that escaped their blinds, he could detect the strict ridge of her jaw, the outline of an ear that he secretly associated with furry animals. Her neck was thin but not so thin that he feared hurting her while resting his chin in its crook. Firm enough breasts that could be grasped but not too hard, she’d once scolded him. So, sometimes the hard way, he’d learned her limits.
Another siren whirled. Their two-room apartment came without appliances, without anything really, but especially without air conditioning, which meant they slept with the window open to summer nights like this. City smells—hot sidewalk, pizza, faint garbage—melded with the scents of hairspray and lubricant heavy above their bed. Four floors below, a man cursed loudly in Spanish.
“Jesus, what’s that?”
He shrugged, “somebody’s mighty pissed off.”
“No, this.” Her cheek tapped the ball of his shoulder, which was still raised in shrug. “I’ve never noticed that before.”
Perhaps it was her modesty or his own embarrassment, but they’d rarely seen one another fully unclothed, confining their lovemaking to darkness. Furtively, she undressed each morning, allowing him merely glimpses of a body slim, even bony, well-proportioned, womanly. In time he’d come to know it better, he told himself. Someday, they’d explore.
“That what?”
“This thing you have on your skin here. It’s a scar?”
His chin pivoted to let him see what she had; the old wound framed in a random patch of light. He nodded into her neck.
“How come you never told me about it?”
“You never asked.”
“Well, I’m asking.”
Now it was his turn to sigh. His pelvis pushed and retreated from the back of her thighs, skin sticky with sweat. “Must I?”
“Yeah-uh.”
“Alright.” He brought his wrist up to her lips so that she could kiss it. He needed that encouragement before returning to that place. The kiss he received was perfunctory, meaning he had to begin.
“I grew up in a tough neighborhood. I did tell you that. Tough kids, big kids and I was, well, different. Kind of fat, kind of klutzy. Bully bait. They used to wait for me when I got off the school bus. Gang up on me. I tried to run. There was a neighbor, a Mrs. Vogt, who lived a few houses from the stop. If I could reach her front door before they did, she’d let me in. But I wasn’t a fast-enough runner. Most days, they caught me before her driveway. They beat me up pretty bad. Gary Prezzisosi kicked me in the kidneys. Buddy Edmundson broke my nose.”
She shifted faintly beneath the sheet. “And the scar?”
For a second, he considered turning on the light. He could show it to her in more detail. The ragged curlicue, thickening and swelling as it twirled. His fault, actually. If only he’d showed it to his parents right away instead of keeping it hidden for days, weeping through the band aids and his shirts. By the time they noticed it, the mark was permanent.
“They caught me one day. Not even halfway to Mrs. Vogt’s, they caught me and put me up against a tree. They got hold of some horse rope and tied me to it.”
“Horse rope?”
“I don’t know. It’s just what we called it. I guess they used it for horses. But a real thick rope and long. It wrapped around me and the tree with plenty left over.”
“And then?”
“Then?” His body stiffened, his chin burrowed into her nape. “Then they whipped me. With the end of the horse rope. Ten, twenty times, I don’t know. All I remember is that it hurt more than anything I’d ever felt. That I screamed and howled. I can still see the bark of the tree in front of my eyes.”
“How terrible…”
“I cried for help. I begged them to stop. But they just went on whipping me. I could feel the rope cutting into my skin, across my back. On my shoulder…”
A car with a broken fuselage clacked down the avenue. More cursing in Spanish, from two men now: an argument.
“I can feel the pain and worse than the pain.”
Her head motioned side to side, dislodging his chin, forcing him to continue. “The humiliation. It’s why I never told my parents. Never told anyone, ever, about any of this. The humiliation…”
The bed was shivering, vaguely at first but then with a rocking motion that revealed its uneven legs. For a detached moment he thought how interesting it was that their bed reacted the same way to sex.
“Don’t you see?”
She didn’t, apparently. Or maybe she did.
“The whole time I was tied up, the whole time I was being whipped, I knew that I could have escaped. I knew it. I knew it.”
He knew it several more times, he told her, but she couldn’t hear him because his words were lost in his sobs. His face slid downward, replacing the sharp chin with wetness. He cried into her sinews.
“The shame of it. The shame…”
He cried and if she moved at all it was into herself. Knees subtly folding, forearms shielding her breasts. No matter, he assured himself. In time she would learn to cope with such things and in her stable, level-headed way.
A third man joined the argument
downstairs and a siren tumbled toward them. The reds and blues again fluttered through the blinds and into the walls.
And he would find a place for the past, safe behind Mrs. Vogt’s doorway. The scar would deepen, darken, fade maybe. Or maybe not. Either way, she would never ask him about it again.
The Man in the
Deerstalker Hat
In the last booth in the back of the bar, where the reek of stale beer and cigarettes mixed with stink from the john, he waited for me as planned. The bar was the cheapest in town and dim, the booth feebly lit by an old pinball machine that nobody bothered to unplug. Yet, even there, he pressed himself into the darkness of the corner. No matter. He knew who I was and why I’d come. Precisely in places like these, he knew, deadly contracts are signed.
I slid onto the opposite bench. “Name’s Ray,” I said stupidly, and then looked stupider still. “You?” In the depth of shadows, I thought I discerned a smirk.
“Ray,” he said after a pause.
“Thank you,” I said, trying to control my nerves. “You can’t imagine how long I’ve waited for this. How long I’ve scrimped.”
The man stayed silent. He didn’t shake my hand. And still I babbled. “We’re talking about someone who ruined my life. He ran our business into the ground. He stole, he embezzled. He destroyed me.”
The man interrupted me, “Let’s get down to it.”
“Yes, of course. It.”
From my jacket pocket, I extracted an envelope so stuffed it had to be rubber banded, placed it on the table and pushed it toward him. The hand that took the payment was surprisingly delicate—an artist’s hand. I was expecting something meatier and scarred. The grip, though, was steady and the movement, sweeping it from the sticky table top, graceful. But then I recalled: the guy was a professional.
“Gambling, whoring, booze, drugs. He did it all.”
“When?” the man asked.
“His entire life.”
“No,” the man named Ray grunted. “When?”