We were near the end. I wanted to tell him I loved him. I wanted to tell him not to go.
He said, “Justin, listen to me.”
“Okay.”
“If you remember one thing, one thing and only one thing in this life, remember this. Are you with me?”
“Yes.”
“The world doesn’t belong to assholes. Now stop behaving like one.”
I couldn’t spit it out fast enough.
“Fuck you, man!“
I tore the photograph in my hand into four pieces and threw them in the air. I leaned forward in my chair and horked great gobs of spit all over the photographs on the table in front of me.
“Fuck you, man! Fuck you, fuck you, and fu-uck you!“
Sly leaned across the table, grabbed me by the collar, and threw me on the floor. Then he kicked me down the hallway and tossed me into the street. I fumbled for my cellphone and called a cab.
“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” I screamed into Sly’s machine later that evening. “Are you ever dead! Are you ever motherfucking dead!“
But he was by then, and the incident was closer than ever.
He was killed by a jealous boyfriend. That wasn’t what the West Coast wanted to hear, but those were the facts. I’ve told many people what I’m going to tell you now and probably only one in ten agreed with me. Sly would have appreciated being brought down by one of the world’s primal furies.
“Why do you say that?” Lily asked.
“Because he was prone to them himself.”
“That’s no answer.”
“Because Sly respected primal furies. He respected chaos. He knew his life was a loan.”
The West Coast wanted Sly’s death to have blockbuster status. The dicks were sent out. Give us cause, give us reason. The West Coast didn’t want to be associated with a quiet, woody tale of New Hampshire teenage lust (the girl’s football captain boyfriend plugged him). The West Coast had its own rules, its own expectations. It looked at Sly’s death and demanded a re-write. A down-note ending? No, no. Send it back. Give us something we can believe. I forgot about my phone message. The dicks found it. My words made the papers. My face made CNN, Entertainment Tonight. My star flashed once, twice, then flared out. I didn’t kill Sly. I had nothing to do with it. The police discovered that quickly enough. They locked me up for twelve hours, but they let me go. They interviewed me and cleaned out my drugs. They had nothing to hold me on. Bigger fish, bigger kicks, drew them away from me. I only saw this later, when the drugs finally let go. When Lily was gone. When I turned my thoughts – finally – to tomorrow. And how things began. The West Coast didn’t forget, though. The West Coast thought I was in on it. The West Coast wanted me to be in on it. The world doesn’t belong to assholes, Sly had said. I tried to reform. I tried to get back on track.
I really did.
###
Hercules
The day Hercules died the noon sun pushed the temperature over thirty-eight degrees. It was the fifth day in a row the temperature peaked over thirty and the weather office had issued a heat warning, a humidity warning and a smog warning. No matter. Work was work. The foreman showed up everyday with a cooler full of ice and bottled water and no one said boo if you put down your tools for a minute and sucked back on something cold. The crew was two men short that day. We were on top of a nine-story apartment block, replacing the roof. Late in the afternoon, at nearly quitting time, I saw Hercules straighten his back, smile, wipe his face with his forearm. Ten minutes later he fell forward, dead, onto the tarmac.
At Hercules’ funeral I met his daughter. I knew she was in medical school, studying to be a surgeon.
She asked, “Are you Shawn?”
I nodded, tilting my head.
“He talked about you.”
“No.”
“He was very happy to have met you,” she said. She took both of my hands and looked into my face. She pulled me forward and kissed my cheeks in the European manner. She had thick dark hair, an olive complexion. Ruby lips. I blushed.
She said, “My father called you his friend.”
I asked if I could meet her sometime for coffee. She reached into her purse for a pen and I wrote her phone number on the palm of my hand.
Hercules was Vincent Torlini. He’d worked in construction since he was a teenager back in Italy over fifty years earlier. When he told me that, I said, “No way.”
“Yes sir, it’s true.” He beamed, his cheeks pulled high, strong.
He was as tanned and fit as any of the crew. He told me he didn’t need the money but a man’s got to work.
We became friends my first week on the job. I was late three days in a row; the foreman was ready to fire me. Hercules intervened. “Give the kid a chance. He works hard.” It wasn’t true. Tarring roofs was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. I did half the work of the others. After the first day I was sore and blistered. My skin was scorched and my head pounded all the way home on the subway. That’s it, I thought. I wanted to be any other place but on that roof with shovels, wires and a pot of bubbling tar.
The only reason I’d got on with the crew was because my mother wanted me out of the house. My mother and I shared the three-bedroom apartment she’d rented since my father died in a car crash when I was six. My sister, Lisa, had left home over a year before, marrying her manager at the grocery store where she’d worked since she was fifteen.
My mother said, “Do something with your life.”
She said, “You’re not a boy any more.”
I was nineteen. Three years earlier I’d been in juvenile detention. I’d robbed a convenience store, resisted arrest, was found with more marijuana than I could consume alone in a year. The only thing wrong with my life was the fact that I’d got caught.
My counselor, Peter, saw things differently.
I told him how when I was eight I started a fire in the garbage bin behind our building. Six fire trucks came. No one knew who did it but a week later I told my sister and a couple of kids at school. The police came. They told me I better stay out of trouble because they had their eyes on me. I don’t know why but I didn’t listen. Over the next eight years they got to know me real well.
Peter said, “What do you think you wanted when you set that fire?”
“Just good times, man. Just a big crazy fire.”
“Is that what you got?”
“Yeah man. Big fire. Good kicks.”
The walls of the room glared. There was just a table and two heavy wooden chairs. On the wall was a poster of a hand gun with a cigarette in the end of it. Captioned below the gun: Don’t play Russian Roulette with your health.
He said, “The other guys aren’t here, Shawn. You can tell me the truth. I won’t tell anyone. Do you trust me?”
“I trust you.”
“Are you telling me the truth about the fire?”
I told him partly yes, partly no.
Peter asked me to explain myself.
“I was just a little kid. All those trucks came. I liked it.”
“What’s the ’no’ part?”
I wanted to say something about my father but I didn’t know what. A week earlier I’d shaved all the hair off of my head and told Peter I wanted to go straight. I knew what Peter wanted to hear. I hated my life, I was lashing out. But I knew my father was dead. I knew he was never coming back.
“Look,” I said. I tried to keep talking but I couldn’t. I tried to slow down my thoughts, slow down my heart, my breathing. The tears came then.
“It’s okay,” Peter said.
Peter said, “Let it out.”
When I told Hercules about my time in the lockup I was scared it would change the way he looked at me.
He said, “You work hard, life will look after you. You make mistakes, you fix them.”
He told me to meet him downtown the following Saturday.
He asked me about my life; I told him some things. My father was dead, my sister married. My mother weighed three hundred pounds.
He listened, expressionless, then he said, “You happy?”
I shrugged.
“Why the shrug? I ask you if you’re happy and you — “ He imitated my shrug, making a face of disgust. His eyes pulled into his face, red and hurt.
Then he did it again. “What is that?”
I tried to smile.
“Listen,” he said. “Life is beautiful.”
As he said this he made a fist and banged out the syllables on the table. I waited for him to continue.
He was staring at me. “You sit here. You look at the people. They come from all over the world, from a hundred countries. They walk down this street. This one right here, right here under our feet. They buy coffee. They talk.” He smiled broadly. “It’s a miracle, don’t you think?”
No one had said anything like this to me before.
“Shawn, you and me here today, the weather beautiful, the people beautiful, the day beautiful. For what more can I ask?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes, yes. Good answer.”
We didn’t talk for another five minutes. He turned and looked out to the street. A woman walked past pushing a baby carriage. The cars were backed up at the traffic light. I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair.
“You got a girl?” he asked.
“No.”
“Job number one, you get a girl. Don’t go chasing any of the easy ones. You think that’s what you want. It’s not. Find a nice girl. You look after her, she’ll look after you.”
“Okay.”
Two days earlier he’d said to me, “Life owes you nothing, that’s a fact. But life gives some people a head start. It doesn’t matter. It’s what you have in here that counts.”
He tapped his chest. I thought he was indestructible.
At work the guys teased him.
“Hercules, you should have been a priest.”
“No, no. I’m like Jesus. I work with my hands.”
I came home every day exhausted, sought my bed. I started to give my mother money. At first she didn’t want to take it but I forced it on her.
“I’m all done taking,” I said holding the bills in front of her.
She took the money.
“I’ll save it for you.”
“Don’t you dare. I don’t want it back.”
Hercules’ daughter’s name was Judi. I met her for coffee, then a movie, then a week later for dinner at a shadowy Italian restaurant. The walls were painted a murky red and mirrors on the ceiling reflected candlelight.
Halfway through dinner I said, “He was some kind of man, wasn’t he?”
“Yes he was.”
I picked up the bottle of Merlot and refilled her glass, then mine. It took me ten minutes to ask her what I wanted to ask her. We’d already talked about medical school, my family, her family, the vacation she’d taken last winter to Cuba and the fact that I’d never once been on a airplane. She had the darkest eyes of anyone I’d met and every time I looked at them I felt as transparent as paper.
Finally I said, “You happy?”
She put down her utensils and glanced slowly across the room. Our waiter was passing three tables away but he didn’t turn to see us.
She said, “My father used to ask me that.”
I nodded.
“Did he ask you?”
“Yes.”
I tried to avoid her eyes. I cut into my steak and took a bite.
She smiled and picked up her wine glass.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m happy — but not so happy that there’s not room for more.”
I felt her foot press on mine under the table.
It felt like fire.
###
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Wandering the Earth: A Selected Stories Sampler Page 8