Glass Boys

by Nicole Lundrigan

  For the first time in years, Lewis did not feel well. He wondered if he had caught a summer flu, and if the first symptoms were a waning appetite and a powerful ache behind his eyes. As though there was a storm inside his head, pressure mounting, and the only possible relief valves were his locked tear ducts. He laid down his fork, rubbed his hands over his face, and then opened his eyes. Once again he was introduced to the empty chair, and resented the fact that there was no one to talk to. No one with whom to share the turmoil of the day. No one to make him a cup of tea, and say, Things are going to turn out just fine, Lewis. Just fine. No one to assure him that he had nothing in common with Eli Fagan. Nothing at all. And that the faintest hint of pity he had for the old farmer, that faintest hint trembling on those skeletal legs inside his head, would soon fold in on itself. Fade away. But Lewis knew he had married a ghost of a woman, and that even if she were here, she would still be gone.

  Melvin. Ah, Melvin. What was he going to do with Melvin?

  So gentle as a child, and now he was like an apple dropped one too many times. Skin still shiny, bright, but Lewis knew there were soft spots, bruises, some hint of sweet rot if he were to smell close to the core.

  “Melvin?”

  Mouth full, he mumbled, “Huh?”

  Lewis put down his fork. “Been a long old day, hey?”

  “Yeh.”

  “You alright?”

  He didn’t look up, grunted.

  “Yeah, we went down to the hole, Dad,” Toby said, jumping in. “You know, the swimming hole, and me and Mellie had a real good time. No one bugged us. Not even Clayton. No one even tried to steal my trunks, and Mellie didn’t need to even save me—.”

  “Shut it, Toad!”

  Lewis cleared his throat. “That’s good, Toby. You had a good time too, Melvin?”

  “Look. I just wants to eat. Alright?”

  “Eat, then,” Lewis said, picking up his fork. “Eat, for God’s sakes.”

  Lewis didn’t speak again, decided against rehashing the events of the afternoon. It was stupid trying to talk to Melvin when he would barely respond. Besides, he had probably already forgotten about their fight. Kids were like that. Forgetting things in a blink. So Lewis bent his head, watched his hands doing what was normal, healthy. What was right. Holding a fork, tines grappling with a mushy potato, lifting it to his silent mouth.

  AS THEY ATE together as a family, Toby never so much as glanced at the fourth empty chair. He never noticed his brother’s elbows on the table, or the mound of stringy meat lingering in his cheek. He was not aware his father’s vision contained no color, was strictly black and white. Everything was normal to Toby. His father was his teacher. His brother, Toby’s fierce protector. His little world was exactly as it should be. Toby smiled wide, and with his tongue pressed a soft carrot out through the spaces between his teeth. Heart beating with the excitement of making Melvin laugh.

  LIGHTS OFF, DOOR clicked shut, Toby climbed onto a chair and leapt onto the bed. Scampered over the quilt, and dove underneath the sheets to safety. Complete darkness in the room, and Toby reached his foot down between the cool sheets, felt another foot trespassing onto his side of the bed. He ran his sole over it, felt the hard toes, sharp nails, bones of the ankle.

  “Get your foot over, Mellie.”

  “What foot?”

  “Your foot.” Toby knocked it with his heel. “Keep it over on your side.”

  “My feet is over here.”

  Toes reaching out again, prodding the icy limb. Pinched it with his big toe. No ouch.

  “Stop that.” Toby nudged it again.

  “Shut up, Toad. I’m sleeping.”

  Then a notion spread through Toby’s mind, that there was another foot in the bed. A dead foot. Belonging to no one.

  Attaching to nothing. Exploring toes stroking the extra foot once more. Sharp nails. Rough sole. He could picture it perfectly. An animal foot, claws and coarse hairs and patches of gray-green skin.

  “That’s not your foot? I idn’t touching you right now?” Poke, poke.

  Irritated. “Will you shut up? I’m not nowhere near you.”

  Toby screamed, tore off the covers, ripped open the curtains.

  Moonlight illuminating the contents behind the sheets. Two feet. Tracing them up the legs. Clearly belonging to his brother. He scowled when he saw the pure joy pulling the muscles of Melvin’s face, heard the laughter bursting forth. Melvin’s arms and legs assaulting the air, body bouncing, like a roach flipped on its back.

  “Gotcha!” Melvin cried when he settled down. “Gotcha good.”

  “YOU GOT ME,” Eli whispered into the darkness. “Got me good.” He was lying in bed, staring at his wife who was breathing softly beside him. He could smell her breath, sour and empty, and he knew she hadn’t eaten. He reached out and touched the scarf still covering her head, expected her to flinch even in her sleep.

  She hadn’t wanted much. A few weeks with her sister. But when he came home and found the strange car in the driveway, discovered his wife had purchased the rusty heap with her own few dollars, and intended to drive there, take the ferry, something snapped inside Eli. All he could imagine was her leaving, full of joy, riding in her own car. A sense of permanence stuck him in the throat, and he recalled his wife and her sister dancing at the Legion. Holding hands, swaying their hips, tossing back their heads and laughing. Then, when he saw her that afternoon, head like a plaster of black mud, ring of ink across her forehead, dirty rubber gloves over her hands, he realized she was dying her hair. And his suspicions were confirmed. She wasn’t running off to Cape Breton for a simple visit. She was going there to remember who she was.

  He destroyed it. Got into his truck and rammed the teacup of a car into the cement wall. Smash. Slam the gears. Reverse. Slam the gears. Drive. Slam the gears. Over and over until all that remained was concave doors, folded hood, smashed glass. Destroyed her chance to ride off in style. When he stepped back into the porch, heart filled with a curious calm, she was gone. Stained rubber gloves crumbled on the kitchen floor.

  Eli would be the first to admit he didn’t know much about women. How to keep them. Eli’s father rarely spoke, used nods and grunts and smacks and shaking fists to get his points across.

  The advice he gave Eli was concise. “My son, you’re either a farmer or a pussy—you can’t be both. You can run your farm, or you can trot around letting the farm run you. That goes for your woman, too. If you ever gets one. And with an ugly mug like that, I got my doubts. But, if something dumb enough ever crawls into your bed, you remember this. Women is no better than those animals on your farm. Only they wears clothes. When you wants ’em too, that is.” Thin grin.

  His wife took a deep breath and rolled away from him. Maybe she wasn’t even asleep, Eli couldn’t guess, found it difficult to think. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been sober in this bed. Tonight, his backside and legs were shaking, but he knew what they were trying to do. Trying to get him to sit up. Stand. Walk downstairs and crack open the bottle he had left on the table. His hands shook too. Fiercely. He could hear his rough fingertips scratching the cotton sheets.

  He thought of Lewis Trench, then, swaying inside his kitchen. Eli wondered what that felt like, for Lewis to be so close to someone he hated. Eli couldn’t fathom what Lewis Trench had said to his wife. What he had said to make the woman turn around and come home.

  But then again, maybe it wasn’t Lewis at all.

  More likely, she came home for the boy.

  20

  IN THE BACKYARD of the farmhouse, Garrett Glass squeezed into one of the old swings, leaned his cheek against the chains. He could taste rust from the warm metal, like blood on his tongue. Pressing his bare foot against the hardened clay, he swung gently, and examined the curving woods bordering the yard. Years had passed since he’d ventured down that path. His path. And now, with all the leafy growth and unkempt grass, he doubted if he could even find it.

  Closing his eyes, he listene
d to the creaking of the swing frame as he pushed himself back and forth. So easy to remember those carefree days when he was young. When he was in possession of something perfect and beautiful. Something he had actually created. It had all started with a gift, meant for his mother, but stolen by Garrett. He had just turned eleven years old.

  He could recall the very day he had sat on a stool near the kitchen counter, puppy eyes moving between his mother, as she pounded the life out of a mound of sticky dough, and the wrapped gift pushed back into a corner. This gift was not a birthday present, but the one shred of proof that Christmas had come and gone in the world. Other than an evening church service, they did nothing to celebrate—no tree, no shaped sugar cookies, no tasteless orange hidden inside the thin toe of his sock. “’Tis only a godforsaken reason to drink,” his mother had said. “And he don’t need more of those.”

  Last day of school for the year, and the gift appeared on the counter. Garrett was hopeful that perhaps it just might be for him. But on Christmas morning, when he placed a cold palm on the top of the box, his mother snapped, “Do that got your name scrawled across it?”

  Of course it didn’t. “I was just wondering is all,” he said now as his mother lifted and slammed the bread on the countertop. Head cocked, eyes wide. “Jesus would want to know, Mom.” He blinked sweetly. “He’d want to know what present Aunt Sally sent for his birthday.”

  She softened, he could see it in her eyebrows. The slightest lift. He could do that, soften her, especially when he played the Jesus card. And he was careful not to use that trick too often. “I suppose it won’t do no harm,” she replied. “Been cluttering up the room long enough.” Cleaning her hands on her apron, she hauled the box out from its corner, blew dust and flour off the top, found the scissors in a drawer, severed the ribbon.

  “What is it?” he breathed as she carefully removed the paper.

  “Pfft.” She frowned. “A camera. Packets of film. Bloody waste-of-a-dollar gadget, if you asks me.” She shoved it back into the box, coiled the ribbon, the folded wrap, and poked that in too. “Like I needs a camera. All kinds of family snapshots to be taking. Wants a hole in my head more than I wants that.” “Maybe she was trying to be friends.”

  “I allows. Slapping me in the face is more like it. That’s just her way, it is. Giving herself something to say. ‘Oh, I sent my sister a camera for Christmas. Lovely little contraption. And do you know what she sent me? Not even a card. Poor thing. Hard times.’” Mocking tone. “Well, ’tis always hard times, Garrett. Always. Day in and day out. Some people won’t never have it easy no matter what they does.”

  “Are you going to heave it out?”

  “Just as well.”

  Garrett chewed his bottom lip. “That’s waste, Mom.”

  “Waste, you says? Waste was sending it to me in the first place.” But she clipped in her slippers out into the hallway, creaked open the closet door, tossed it up into a dark mass of forgotten junk. “Rot up there, for all I cares,” she said to the box. Turning back to Garrett, “And that’s the final word on that.”

  Garrett went to his bedroom and closed the door. The air inside the tiny space was frosty, and he crouched near the single narrow window, picked away the ice that grew up over the glass. He had to have that camera. It was his birthday soon, and he had not pissed in his bed in four months. Did he not deserve some sort of present?

  He crept to the top of the stairs, spied on his mother through the painted spindles. She gathered the dough in a tight ball, plopped it into a bowl. Slapped it hard, then drew her hand back, and slapped it again. Every time he saw her make bread, she did the same thing, and he wondered if there was some purpose to it. A sound like skin striking skin, and if the dough had been living, it surely would sting. She bundled the bowl in a towel, then a blanket, and she balanced the works on the edge of his stepfather’s chair near the stove. Then she left the kitchen, down the hallway, past that closet, into another room, and quietly closed the door.

  Garrett did not breathe as he descended the stairs, placing his feet on boards that did not creak. Into the kitchen now, he drew a deep lungful of the yeasty air, and then lifted a chair over the wooden floor, tiptoed out into the hallway. Inch by inch he edged the closet door open, and then slid the chair in amongst the worn shoes. Standing on the chair, he reached, stretched, leaned forward, until he could just touch the box. Scratched at it with his nails. It shifted, and he managed to grip it with the fleshy pads on his fingertips, haul it down from its intended grave.

  Door quietly closed, chair returned, and he slunk up to his bedroom, placed the gray shoe-box-sized package on his floor. White writing inside an orange rectangle. Polaroid Land Camera. With a flash. “Sixty seconds from snap to print,” he whispered. Lifted the lid on the box, removed the body, black and silver, weighty. Studied the pamphlet, finger with a ragged nail moving underneath every single word. His first photo was an attempt at a self portrait, and he laid the black square of film on the floor, turned around, peeked, turned around, peeked. Nothing but a black hole, spray of light. Second attempt. Something emerging. Nostrils, oversized teeth, smear of hair the color of yolk. Next effort, a picture. Clear and recognizable. He plucked it up off his floor, ran his fingers over his own image, then placed his fingers on his chest, felt the vibration of his pumping heart.

  He would only waste one packet of film on himself, he decided. Photographed his hand, his foot, the side of his knee with his leg bent. When he squinted at that last one, it very much resembled a flattened corduroy backside, and before he could contain it, an unholy idea spewed out of a dark corner, flooded his mind. Jack-in-the-box. He tried to shake the thought away, but it would not be contained no matter how hard he stuffed it down, the clasp on this mental lid was broken. He pressed his ear against his door, held his breath, and listened. No sound, only the barely audible clink of hard snow tapping his window. What would his stepfather say? He’ll never find out. But what if he do? He won’t never know. Promise me that. I promise, me, now stop bugging, and just do it. He unbuttoned his trousers, let them fall to the floor. Placed the camera on the family Bible, stepped as far away as possible. Reached, one snap of the back. Waited until the film slid out. Zzzz. Turning. One snap of the front. Quickly dressed, and there they were. Blurry, but he knew what was captured. Those parts of himself that were meant to be covered, only to be handled with a washcloth coated in lye soap. Touching led to blindness and betraying hair sprouting from obvious places. Worse than that, the whole works was apt to fall off in his hand.

  Garrett moved closer to the window, to study his handiwork in the natural light, and noticed a flash of deep red moving across the snow. Swiping vapor from the glass, he could see his stepfather with an armload of wood, edging ever closer to the house. Even though he was still a good distance away, panic squeezed Garrett’s airways, and he hauled on his trousers, tore all the photos to tiny shreds, poked the evidence down into the cracks between his floorboards. Willed the mice to make off with them. Camera stuffed into the box, torn packaging, remaining film, slid to the farthest corner underneath his bed. Hurried down to the front door, hauled on coat, woolen hat and mitts, ran to meet his stepfather before the old man came to meet him.

  FOR WHAT SEEMED like eons, he managed to ignore the temptation that slept in a shoebox underneath his bed. But when he awoke to the sound of dripping, snow rotting and trickling away, and he saw a bird clinging to a still-dormant twig, he knew spring had come. He also knew spring sometimes carried fever as warm fought with cold, and he could already identify the flush rising up in certain parts of his body. Fever worked its way into his muscles, and he did not choose to remove the camera from its hiding spot. He was simply unable to resist as his knees bent, his arms reached, and his fingers clasped. After tucking the camera inside a cloth satchel, he stuffed his coat pocket with stolen pieces of molasses taffy, all wrapped in waxy paper. On his walk, he organized the words of an enticing invitation, left the phrase waiting patiently insid
e his voice box. Up on the old road, the new sun shone down upon him, and he turned towards the wooded area where youngsters played on Saturdays. Hoping to find the one.

  Within a short time, Garrett met an eight-year-old named Cecil Taylor. He was a pudgy and placid boy, whose mouth always hung open just a crack. And even though the days were getting warmer, he still wore a steel gray coat with a ring of matted fur around the hood. Cecil had no mother or father, and would soon be moving to the city, to a home for unwanted boys. A place where someone would love him properly, they said, help him grow into a man. But Cecil didn’t care about love, he told Garrett. Love didn’t fill a youngster up. Food was what he was after, and plenty of it.

  The boys met on Saturday afternoons in an abandoned ice-fishing hut that someone had hauled up onto the side of Stark Pond. Garrett brought whatever he could find, leftover heels of bread, slices of cold pork, a half-eaten cherry square. Sometimes he’d even manage a thermos of hot tea. One day, Garrett told Cecil his secret. That he liked taking pictures, and he opened his satchel, showed off the stolen camera. Let Cecil touch it. Click the red button several times. “Whoa, whoa. Careful, buddy.” In hushed tones, Garrett confided to Cecil that he was working on a project. Something significant. “Huh?” Something momentous. “Huh?” Some big thing. “Oh.” A map of the entire body. “Oh, yeah. Maps is good.”

  School finished, and Cecil was leaving Knife’s Point the next morning. When they met in the fishing shack, Garrett asked, “You got any money?”

  “Nope.”

  “Young man can’t be going on a trip without a few cents in his pocket.”

  “What?”

  “Should always have a dollar in your wallet.”

  Cecil shook his head as plowed through a two-inch slab of still-warm oatmeal bread. “I don got no wallet.”