"The guy at the bookstore suggested this. I told him you wanted to be a writer and he said this book had just been published."
She stood up and leaned over my shoulder and flipped to the back of the book. "See, here all the writers talk about how they wrote the stories and how they got their ideas and stuff."
"Cool," I said. And I really thought it was. She was doing the best she could. I resolved to cut her some slack about Burt.
"And in the very back," she said, turning the pages for me, "you get all the addresses of the magazines that publish short stories, so you can send in your own work."
I looked over the book. I didn't know the names of any of the authors, but what did I know? I couldn't remember ever reading anything by somebody who was still alive.
"It's not an easy thing to be lonely," she said. "That's all. I hope you understand."
She shrugged, turned her palms up to the sky, and tried to smile.
"Lunch?" she said.
"Sure," I said.
SINCE I WAS HOME that afternoon, doing nothing, I went to Kolya's school and waited for him at the edge of the playground. I figured I could walk him home, give him one day without getting his ass kicked. When you're a boy, you figure out pretty quick that there's always going to be some asshole hanging around the schoolyard, waiting to kick your ass. I always had enemies, but most of them were too afraid of Nick to fuck with me. They hated me from a distance.
Kolya looked happy to see me. His shiner had gone down some, and he was looking fresh-faced and innocent again. His backpack looked absolutely huge on him, and I pictured him as a soldier back from a mission. He had red jelly all over his lips.
"Hey kid," I said. "How's school?"
"Beats a sharp stick in the butt," he said. It was another phrase Burt had taught him.
"Wipe your mouth," I said.
He moved his sleeve across his face. "It's Paczki Day. I ate six of them."
"God bless you," I said. "You're a miracle man."
We walked a couple of blocks, both of us quiet. I was trying to say something that was comforting or wise, because it didn't look to me like he'd had a good day. Because he was on Ritalin, sometimes I felt like he was depressed; but then, how can you tell if a twelve-year-old is depressed? With kids, sometimes they're probably just thinking about Spider Man or whatever, and you think they're contemplating the Apocalypse.
"Stop," he said. "Let's turn around."
"Why?" I said, but I was already looking down the block, where a gnarly, pissed-off-looking trio of kids were taking turns jumping off a fire hydrant.
"That's Larry DeSoto. And all of his buddies. Let's take another street."
I wouldn't let him turn around. "Let's walk right by them," I suggested. "They'll see you with your big brother and they won't say a thing."
The kids jumping off the fire hydrant saw us coming. They stopped their silly game and stared at us, then stood three across the sidewalk. "Hey, it's the pussy patrol," they said.
"It's queer Kolya!"
"Hey, assface."
"Hey, man, your brother picks his nose and eats it."
"Yeah, his butt too."
We were only about ten feet away from them. Kolya was just looking down at the sidewalk.
I guessed that the biggest kid, a fat kid way too hairy for junior high, was Larry. He was standing in the middle of the three kids. He had a caterpillar of peach fuzz on his upper lip.
Kolya wouldn't look at them, like a dog trying not to make eye contact with the alpha. He started whimpering a little and backing away. I grabbed Kolya by the arm and made him stop. "Don't cry," I said.
Then I took a step forward. I looked at Kolya and showed him my clenched fist, but he just stood there, hands limp at his sides.
I hit Larry first, three times in the face. His nose was bleeding all over the front of his jacket. The two other runts tried helping him at first, and I got them each with a good gut punch and knocked the wind out of them. When they got their wind back, they hightailed it home.
Larry DeSoto was still on his back. He looked much younger that way.
"Fucking pussy," I said, but I could barely say anything. I wheezed, then coughed up some phlegm and spit on the ground. Kolya thought he knew what I was doing and spit a wad of saliva at Larry's face. Then he got something in his brain, and started kicking Larry everywhere he could, the nuts, the shins, the ribs, and even the face.
I finally had to pick him up and carry him away. He would have kicked Larry's fat face all day long.
I TOOK KOLYA OVER TO the doughnut shop so we could clean up in the bathroom and settle down a little before we saw Mom. It was almost four o'clock and the Paczki Day crowd had died way down. Nick was just getting off of work. He'd put in ten hours. He had six hours off and then he would come back for the night shift. He was hanging his apron up in the back hallway when we found him. I told him what had happened.
"Are you fucking nuts?" he said. "You beat up some kids? You'll go to jail for that. You're nineteen years old. You can't get away with that kind of shit."
"What was I supposed to do?"
"Not that," he said.
Just then two cops walked in the doughnut shop. I turned and hid my face.
"Relax," he said. "This is a doughnut shop. We get ten cops an hour."
One of the brothers came to the counter and waited on the cops.
Kolya laughed. "Can I get a doughnut?" he said.
"You already ate too many," I said.
"Let him have one," Nick said. "They have a calming effect, you know. You should have one too. They bring your blood pressure down."
"What the fuck is with you people?" I yelled. "Is everybody in this fucking neighborhood an idiot? They're just goddamn doughnuts."
One of the brothers called from the back room: "Nick, get your friends out of here if they can't talk like gentlemen."
BURT WAS ASLEEP on the couch and didn't move when we walked in the door. I tried to get a beer from the fridge, but old Burt had sucked the place dry.
I went down the hall and spent the evening in my room, looking out the front window every so often, half expecting the red-and-blue lights of a cop car to come shining and blinking into the driveway. But Larry DeSoto must not have thought to tell his parents that an adult had beat him up. He probably didn't know how old I was. Maybe he figured he had it coming. Anyway, the cops didn't show.
What I did that night, while waiting to be arrested, was read from my new book. In the table of contents, at the end of the list of stories, my mother had written in black ink: "To Be Announced" by Michael Smolij (Coming Soon!).
It was the kind of thing she liked to do, small gestures that made me see how much she believed in me, but that made it hard for me to be her son sometimes. She believed I was destined for great things, or at least destined for a better life, a different existence than the one she and my father had come up with in their time. That's just how mothers are with their sons, I guess, but I imagine some sons handle it better than others.
Eventually I drifted off to sleep in my clothes, on top of my covers, gut aching from doughnuts and coffee and worry. Later I woke to the sound of Burt Nelson yelling at my mother. I stayed in my room again. I didn't make him stop. Whether my mother needed me then or not, I don't know. I never gave myself a chance to find out.
In the end, my mother was right: about a week later, Burt Nelson would leave and he would not come back into our lives again, though I had nothing to do with that. I simply woke up one morning and found my mother cooking breakfast in her work clothes. She said, "Burt is gone and we won't have to deal with him anymore."
I nodded. Kolya shrugged.
The truth is, I had just sat back and waited Burt Nelson out. I still have a tendency to sit back and wait out the bad things that try and take over my life.
After a couple of weeks, I quit reading the new book my mother had bought for me, although I told her I had finished it. I said it was one of the finest books th
at I'd ever read. I said it had inspired me to write some of my own stories. In reality, I had just placed it on my shelf, where I forgot about it for a while. I was old enough to know a few things, and one of them was this: the best American short stories weren't written by people like me.
5. A Newcomer's Guide to Ann Arbor
THIS IS WHAT you do:
Because you say you hate Maple Rock, on Friday nights in the fall, when things are still crisp and fresh, you and your pals drive out to Ann Arbor and pretend you are college students there and meet the girls and drink their beer and go to their parties. Nick tells you how it's done.
First of all, don't dress like an asshole. If you come to a party in a slick Banana Republic shirt tucked into some shiny Kenneth Cole pants, good as you might look, they're going to think you're trying too hard. It's better to dress in Levi's, with some low-maintenance brown leather boots. Wear a tight and clean white T-shirt when the weather's warm, since, after all, you do have muscles—you lug boxes all day or pound nails for a living or lift weights in your mother's basement out of endless boredom.
Don't slouch. Walk tall. Wear tennis shoes. If a girl asks your major, don't fucking tell her you're taking classes at the community college back home. Say, "I'm undecided." If you think the girl is smart, say you're leaning toward English, or history. But if the person you're talking to seems dim and shallow—as so many of them will, despite Michigan's stellar academic reputation—go ahead and say you're majoring in business. Say you want to get into the B-School at Michigan.
When you see an old high-school girlfriend—Sonya Stecko, for example—don't talk to her about old times. Don't say, "Remember all the good times we had? Remember prom night?" Because she won't remember, okay? She's over it. It's ancient times, man, ancient times.
Even though you could probably handle yourself, stay out of fights. The guys who go to college in Ann Arbor don't know the damage you can do to a human skull, and they won't think twice about using a beer bottle or a banister on the back of your head. And even with your friends, you'll always be outnumbered. Chances are, deep down these college guys will have as much meanness and anger in their hearts as you do.
More rules, Nick says:
Only go into parties with strobe lights, dark dance floors, loud music. Nobody will notice a stranger at these parties, and people are usually drunker and more open to widening their social circles.
Split up. Don't show up all together, like some dork field trip from Maple Rock. Two to a party, that's the ideal for scoring chicks, but if you can only find one good open-door party, stagger your arrivals. Every twenty minutes, send two more inside.
Get a beer. Have something in your hand when conversation lags. When a woman asks you something you don't know how to answer, you can take a long drag off the bottle while you figure out something to say.
Avoid the obvious. If you go for the girl in the tight black dress, the stylishly cropped blond hair, and the unabashedly hard nipples, the college boys will watch you like a hawk all night. Even if she comes on to you, blow her off. People get protective of these women.
Learn to dance. Guys who go to college in places like Ann Arbor hate to dance, they cannot do it. The trick is simple: have confidence. Find a few moves you can do. Be funny and loose. Act like you don't give a shit, which you don't. You get a girl on the dance floor, moving a few inches from you, getting a shiny gloss of sweat on her neck, you're doing well. Make the girl laugh, and you're home free.
Above all, remember this: these girls in Ann Arbor know what they want. The ones that want it, want it just as bad as you. They'll get you more than you'll get them. You want a piece of ass, and sometimes so do they. The girls at the Black Lantern in Maple Rock make you think that you're the only human being on earth who wants nothing more than cheap sex. But you're not.
The girls in Ann Arbor won't do this to you. They also smell better than the women in Maple Rock. They wear scents like Grass or Clouds or Tranquility. They won't choke you with flower smells. Girls in Ann Arbor smell like wind and fire. Their tongues taste like earth and salt.
Do not, do fucking not, Nick says, under any circumstances, fall in love with a woman in Ann Arbor. Do not wake up in their sunny apartments the next morning, in their messy rooms full of books and black-and-white photography, in their warm narrow beds that smell of beer and salt and sweat, and say that you're in love. You're not in love. You're an outsider. You don't belong in love with this woman. Leave before she wakes up, even if you feel like you're making the biggest mistake of your life. She won't miss you.
"I should have known you'd turn this into something poetic and meaningful," Nick says. "But it's not, Mikey. Trust me, it's not."
6. The Boy with the Backward Chakra
TWO WEEKS INTO MY JOB, a little kid named Manny Holloway died on my watch. He was an asthmatic. I was sitting on the lifeguard stand, scanning the pool. It was ninety-five degrees and the pool was packed. We had three lifeguards out there. I was a little hungover, I guess. I'd stayed out too late the night before. I was dreamy. It happens up there on the guard stand, in the heat, the sun, the water gleaming, the sound of kids and the nearly naked bodies of women all around you. You think about things. I can't remember what had my attention at that moment, but all of a sudden, some woman was screaming. I looked over, and there was this pale little kid with white-blond hair and a purple face slumped over the side of the pool. He was wearing one orange water wing. People crowded around yelling, even though a tall, bald man was shouting, "Stand back! Don't panic! Give him air, give him air!"
I had my mom's car that day, so I drove over to the hospital after I talked to the cops and everybody else. It had been a few hours by then, but the boy's mother was still there. She was a young woman, not much older than me, I thought. Later I found out she was thirty-three. She was wearing a black bathing suit and yellow flip-flops and had a hospital blanket wrapped around her. A couple of other women were with her, and some kids were off in the corner of the waiting room, playing. I was wearing my Burton Farms uniform, a too-tight royal blue polo shirt with white shorts. I still had my whistle around my neck. I looked like an idiot, like an extra from some bad 1970s summer-camp film. I sat alone along a wall. I could tell just by looking at the women that the kid was dead. They alternated between bouts of crying and long silences, where they just sat, holding their three heads together, like they were all joined by their skulls.
It didn't seem right that this grieving mother should be sitting there in a bathing suit and blanket. I got up and went to the nurse at the admitting desk. I said, "Can't you get me some scrubs?"
"For what?" she said.
"For that poor woman over there. Her kid is dead."
"I know," she said.
"Well, get her some fucking clothes, please. It's not right."
"Look," said the nurse. But then she didn't say anything else. She just picked up the phone, dialed three numbers, mumbled something, and looked at me. In about three minutes, an orderly brought me some green scrubs.
I walked over to the mother and stood in front of her. The other women were rounding up their kids.
"I'm very sorry," I said. I handed her the scrubs. She stood, dropped her blanket, and slid on the green pants, then pulled the shirt over her head. Then she sat back down and wrapped the blanket around herself again.
"Do you want me to call a priest or something?" I said. I don't know why I said that. I never had been in the immediate aftershock of death before. It seemed like the kind of thing to do. I figured Father Mack, my mother's friend, would come down and talk to her. He was probably at our house right now anyway, whipping up a pasta salad or cleaning out the garage.
"No," she said. "I'm not a Christian."
"A rabbi?"
"No, I'm not religious," she said.
I nodded. It was pretty fucking bold, I thought, not to be religious when your kid has just died. I wanted to say something else, who knows what, but a hospital staff member came throug
h the double doors of the ER and ushered her away.
I sat down where she had been sitting. The two women who had been with her came back over with their kids. They were both blond, and they looked like sisters.
"Are you here for her now?" they asked. "If you are, we'll be going. We're so sorry about everything. We barely know her. We just felt somebody should be here."
"I am here now," I said. "I'll stick around."
They seem relieved to be rid of everything. Clutching their children, they raced out the automatic doors.
I waited for more than an hour at the hospital until the kid's mother came out to the waiting area again. She was still wearing the scrubs and holding the blanket around herself. She seemed surprised to see me.
"Your friends left," I said.
"I don't even know them," she said. "They're just mothers."
"Should we call someone?" I asked.
"Who?" she said.
I hadn't expected her to answer like that.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"It's not your fault. I had my eyes on him the whole time, and then I lost him. He was my responsibility."
She started to cry.
"I was the lifeguard," I said.
She looked down and shook her head vigorously, as if to disagree.
I WAS ALMOST twenty-three. I'd spent the year taking more classes at the community college, another journalism course and a literature class. I had written a few more dumb pieces for the student newspaper—TUITION RATES TO INCREASE, STRAY CAT BECOMES BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT MASCOT, BOB SEGER VISITS CAMPUS—and my mother had them up on the fridge along with Kolya's Three-Legged Race Champion certificate from Field Day.
I was still one semester shy of an associate's degree. My record was spotty and I had dropped a lot of classes. Still, although I hadn't told anybody this, a week before I started the lifeguard job, I'd driven to Ann Arbor to meet with somebody in the admissions office. Her name was Janice and she seemed to be about my age. She was dressed in a Michigan T-shirt and a khaki skirt, and had short blond hair cut into a bob. She kept tucking her hair behind her left ear as she talked. She spoke very fast and her legs were very tan. I wondered how she got so tan in that little cubicle. She had just graduated from Michigan herself, and recommended the school highly. I had expected somebody older, somebody in a smart business suit, behind a big desk in a plush office, but Janice was sitting in a small cubicle at a desk piled high with manila folders. For some reason, the casualness of the office made me more nervous than ever. I was wearing my only suit, despite the heat. Janice kept referring to me as a nontraditional student. She assured me that the university could accommodate my needs.
Please Don't Come Back from the Moon Page 6