A Hole in the Universe

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “No!” she cried. “Absolutely not!”

  CHAPTER 5

  A booming drum pulse heralded the purple Navigator’s approaching splendor. The gilded hubcaps flashed in the damp morning light like spinning knives. The SUV stopped, and the sudden silence seemed amplified. Ronnie Feaster’s driver climbed down from his high perch in black, unlaced sneakers. He was a huge young man with ribbons of fat curled round the back of his shaved head. Large gold hoops dangled from both ears. Feaster glanced up at Gordon, who had just stepped onto his porch, and gave a brief salute. The side door of the SUV opened on a woman who clung to the frame with both hands. She peered down at the road as if from a dizzying precipice. “Come on! Get out!” the driver demanded. He grabbed for her, but she kicked and pushed him away. Feaster’s eyes held Gordon’s over the long brown cigarette he was lighting.

  “Leave me alone! Leave me the fuck alone!” the woman screamed through the early-morning quiet as the driver pulled her out.

  In the tenement across the way, the front door opened. The frizzy-haired girl ran wobbling down the steps on thick platform shoes laced up her skinny ankles.

  “Jada! Jada!” the woman bellowed.

  “You leave my mother alone, Polie!” the girl shouted. Her fists pummeled his beefy back as he dragged her mother out onto the street. The girl reared back and kicked him in the knee. Howling, he gave the woman a shove that sent her staggering into a heap. The girl was trying to pull her mother to her feet when he limped up and hit the back of her head so hard that she collapsed across her mother’s legs.

  Feaster flicked his cigarette out the window. He smiled at Gordon. The driver reached into the van and pulled out a short, knobby club.

  “Jada! Jada!” the woman wailed as he came closer. “Get up! Get off me!” she screamed. Raising herself, the girl swayed on her hands and knees. He lifted the club.

  Oh, my God! No, don’t! Don’t do that! Gordon’s mouth opened, but the words clotted in his throat. The driver jabbed the club into the girl’s side, knocking her over. He said something, then climbed back behind the wheel. The monstrous pulse beat vibrated as they drove away. A thin trickle of smoke rose from the gutter where the cigarette still burned.

  “Jada!” the woman pleaded as the girl hobbled up the walk and seized the railing. “You’re mad at me, aren’t you. I knew you’d be mad.”

  The girl dragged herself along the railing onto the porch.

  “Jada! Jada! Jada!” the woman bawled at the closing door, then plodded up the stairs in the reluctant tread of the chronically misunderstood.

  Gordon’s chest felt bruised as he began to breathe again. Brutality had been as pervasive in his life as the low hum of Fortley’s fluorescent glare, but what was this? What virulence had he just witnessed? And what mad absurdity had the other night been, terrorizing an old woman, sound asleep, in her own bed? . . . I’m pregnant. Please, please, don’t hurt me, Janine Walters had gasped into the lowering pillow. He closed his eyes, overwhelmed again by the vastness of his own impotence. Who was he to be shocked or offended? What right did he have to judge the crime of another?

  He started down the street, soon passing the same children he saw every day at this time. The oldest, Mike, dutifully gripped the hands of Jack and Tim, his younger brothers. Once around the corner, however, they began to wrestle, run, and tumble, grabbing one another’s hats, jumping in puddles, tackling one another so that before they had even reached the crossing guard they were disheveled and wild with freedom. Gordon usually enjoyed watching them, but this morning their voices rang shrill and mirthless.

  Thoughts of the girl filled him with the same degradation he’d felt when he first got to Fortley. Added to the weight of his own crime, everything there had come as a shock. It made him feel dirtier, more inhuman, unworthy of kindness, and utterly alone. Days could go by without a word from his lips. When he was forced to speak, his voice came as a whisper. Because he could not remove himself, the violence and torment had to be walled off from his consciousness. Night after night, men might scream or sob or even hurl their feces at passing guards. In that first year, a man was disemboweled in the shower, another set on fire while sedated in his infirmary bed, a boy, just a little older than Gordon, raped his first night there, but after a while the horror dulled. Menace droned on, but with the numbing monotony of distant battle or constant thunder. With his cell as sanctuary, it had little to do with him. Concentration and diligence became his barricades.

  Dennis called at dinnertime. He was telling Gordon that Mrs. Jukas’s call had come that morning in the middle of a difficult and excessively bloody extraction. It was an emergency, his receptionist had rushed in to tell him—something about an attack and his brother. The old woman told Dennis to come get his father’s ladder or else she’d call the Salvation Army to take it away. She couldn’t have it lying around out there anymore. Not after what had happened. Dennis had assured her he’d get the ladder out of there as soon as he possibly could.

  “So could you please go get it?” Dennis asked.

  “Now?” Gordon hungrily eyed the pork chops and spaghetti he had just put on the table.

  “Would you just run over, please? I’ve been home a half hour and she’s called me twice already,” Dennis said.

  He crimped tinfoil around the plate, then hurried next door and rang Mrs. Jukas’s bell. He waited, rang it again. She wasn’t coming and he was starving, so he went into her yard, where he found the ladder in a thicket of overgrown shrubs. He tried to pull it out, but it wouldn’t budge. Sidestepping his way into the dense bushes, he saw that the ladder was tied to the dripping spigot in a rung-woven network of knots and loops. He tried but couldn’t undo them, then remembered the box cutter in his back pocket. The blade sliced easily through the brittle rope.

  Above him, the back door creaked open. “I’ve been watching you. I know you’re down there, Gordon Loomis. Don’t think I don’t.”

  Shielding his face from the battering branches, he worked his way out and explained what he was doing. “But I had to cut some of the rope.” He reached in and slid the ladder free.

  “You cut it?”

  “With my cutter.” He held it up and she cringed from the screen. “I hope you don’t mind. I was just trying to get it out. I’m sorry. I guess I should’ve asked first,” he said as she continued to stare down at him. He gestured up at the plywood nailed to the window. “If you want, I could go up and measure for the glass. Might as well, now that the ladder’s out.”

  “No, thank you.” She shut the door.

  He lifted the heavy wooden ladder onto his shoulder and carried it into his garage. It gave him great pleasure to slide it over the rafters where his father had stored it.

  He had just sat down to eat when the phone rang. Dennis said Mrs. Jukas was very upset. She thought Dennis would be taking the ladder. She didn’t know it was just going to go into the garage right next door where anyone could still go get it to break into her house.

  “I locked the garage,” Gordon said.

  “That’s what I told her, but she says she’s calling the Salvation Army to come for it.”

  “No! That’s Dad’s ladder. You tell her I want it, I’m keeping it.” In the silence his voice faltered. “It was Dad’s.”

  “Jesus Christ, don’t you get it?”

  “Yes. I know. She’s scared.”

  “She’s scared all right. She’s scared of you.”

  Delores Dufault called the Dearborn store and left a message for Albert that she had to close early today because of a dentist’s appointment. She outlined her eyes in dusky blue, put on fresh lipstick and generous spritzes of Sweet Freesia, the cologne she’d always worn to Fortley. At four-fifteen she was steering a grocery cart through the Nash Street Market. She pushed it all the way back to the meat counter, moving slowly as she looked down each aisle. Gordon was in the farthest corner, arranging mounds of green and red grapes in the slanted case. Every time he reached forward, his shirt hik
ed up his bare back. His red apron ties dangled at his sides.

  In a smaller person, shyness often bestows obscurity, an easy invisibility. But with Gordon’s size it seemed to convey a brooding force, as contradictory as it was intimidating. In school she had understood his ducked head and averted eyes when he entered the classroom, then his quick cringing slide into the seat. Always big herself, she knew the misery, after some blunder, gaffe, wrong answer, or startling barrage of allergic sneezes, of wanting to disappear, to just shrivel up and die.

  Delores had managed to keep her Fortley visits a secret from her family until one day last year when Lisa Loomis had rushed Jimmy into the clinic with a bad reaction to a bee sting.

  “Loomis . . . Loomis . . . My sister Delores knew a Loomis once.” Her sister Karen, the triage nurse, had pretended to struggle for the connection, when everyone of a certain age knew exactly who the Loomises were. There had been only one Loomis family in town, and the trial had been covered by all the Boston papers. Jerry Cox’s father had been an all-American football player, and until that unthinkable night, Jerry had been on a similar track. The papers had even printed variations of Gordon’s hated nickname: Gloomis. The Gloom. Gloomer. Loomer. The stories had depicted a dramatic contrast between Gloomis and the handsome, sandy-haired Jerry Cox, who had made the mistake of trying to be kind to the class creep.

  “Oh! So you must be Delores Dufault’s sister,” Lisa had said in her easy way. “Delores is great. She always manages to make our trips to Fortley seem like fun.”

  With that revelation, the four Dufault sisters had descended upon Delores the very next morning. What was wrong with her? My God, hadn’t she read enough Dear Abby letters to know what happened to women who got mixed up with prisoners? Was she that lonely? If she had that much time on her hands, then why not spend some of it with her nieces and nephews instead of trying to impress Lisa Harrington with what a good sport she was?

  “I hope you’re not going to be seeing him now that he’s home,” Karen had said just the other day when she called. She’d heard that Gordon Loomis was back living in the old house on Clover Street and working at the Nash Street Market.

  “Maybe. I don’t know,” Delores had answered, hurt that she had to find out from her sister where he worked. She neglected to say she had already seen him, not to allay her sister’s fears, but because of her own regret at dropping in on him like that. And now, wasn’t this the very same thing? My God, what was she turning into, a stalker? She didn’t even have food in the cart. He would know she was here to see him. That stricken look would darken his eyes, and once again she would feel so desperate and pitiful.

  “You looking for a special cut, miss?” A droopy-eyed man leaned out from the meat-cutting room, his apron stiff with blood.

  “No. No, thank you.” She hurried back the way she’d come.

  “Delores!” a voice called when she was almost at the front door. Gordon. She turned, grinning, only to see Neil Dubbin atop a ladder, removing stained tiles from the ceiling. “Hey, how’ve you been?” he asked, climbing down quickly.

  They knew each other from the Chamber of Commerce. At the last meeting he’d sidled up, whispering how they’d better stick together. There weren’t many of them left in Collerton. Many what? White faces, he’d said.

  He was telling her how the roof leak kept triggering the alarms. “One of these times the cops just aren’t gonna come.” His brown-spotted hands trembled, and his hair was a lank, yellowish gray. They were all aging, but his seemed like decay. “And then what happens?” He sighed. “I mean with all the crap that goes on around here. I used to park my car out back, you know, leave the prime spots for customers,” he said, pointing to the narrow front lot. “But no sir, not anymore. Now I’m right out there. Right by the door.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Yeah, well, my customers don’t have cars anyway.” He laughed. “If they did, they’d go shop someplace cheaper. Same as your place, right? It’s like this captive clientele we got.” He leaned closer. “They don’t get no choice cuz they got no choice.” He laughed.

  “Well, anyway,” she said as she moved toward the door. She thought she’d seen Gordon’s approaching reflection in the plate glass.

  “Last month I had two break-ins and one holdup, this stupid junkie shaking so much he dropped his food stamp ID card trying to shove the bills into his pocket.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” She took another step. “I read about that.”

  “But not anymore. Cuz now I got the best security of all.” He held his hand to his mouth. “You remember Gloomis, don’t you?”

  It was Delores Dufault. Gordon froze halfway down the coffee and baking aisle. She was talking to Neil. He turned, then hurried into the back room, where he busied himself moving pallets so he could mop the floor.

  “This one’s out on Lowell Road.” Jilly Cross handed him the listing sheet. Gordon had agreed to look at the condos only to pacify Dennis. The ladder incident had escalated. Mrs. Jukas had called Dennis three times, demanding it be removed from Gordon’s garage. Dennis kept assuring her he had spoken to his brother and it would be taken care of. This morning an Attorney Martin had called Dennis at his office to say that his client, Mrs. Elsbeth Jukas, wanted her ladder back. She claimed the ladder had left her property under false pretenses, that Dennis had led her to believe it would be going to his house, not next door into the hands of a convicted murderer. Dennis canceled his last two appointments and drove over to Gordon’s and pleaded with him to let the Salvation Army take it away, but he refused. Their father’s ladder was not going to end up with strangers.

  “Because it’s such a fucking precious heirloom, right?” Dennis shouted, and Gordon went silent. Dennis apologized. All right, then, he conceded. He’d keep the ladder at his house and drive it over to Collerton whenever Gordon needed it. “For the sake of peace, all right?” Dennis said.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Gordon said. “I mean, why should we both be inconvenienced? Especially you.”

  “Jesus Christ! You want her calling the parole office, is that what you want?”

  What Gordon didn’t want was Dennis mad at him, so the ladder would go to Dennis’s and now a Realtor was showing him a condominium he had no intention of buying.

  “It’s expensive,” Gordon told her. Too expensive to even hold the listing sheet. It kept sliding off the dashboard. He held it down with one finger as they rode along.

  “Not really.” She turned onto a road lined with identical brick buildings with small wrought-iron balconies. “Not when you consider today’s market.”

  Today’s market. Gordon glanced at his watch. He hadn’t eaten yet. He wasn’t used to being hungry. He couldn’t seem to follow what she was saying. Every day for twenty-five years he had eaten at the exact same times. His stomach was growling. He pressed his knees together, clearing his throat and coughing to cover the gassy rumbling. Dennis had said not to be nervous, that she was very nice, and she was—easy to talk to, no pressure. Just sit back and let her do her thing, Dennis had said. That’s all he wanted, he’d said, just to have Gordon see what was out there. He kept glancing at her. She was beautiful, long blond wavy hair. Everything about her was delicate: her turned-up nose, her perfect white teeth, her slender fingers on the wheel, her pink nails glistening in the light. She stopped the car, and he realized he hadn’t felt carsick once.

  “Here we are. Building sixteen. Dennis said to show you everything. Both ends of the spectrum,” she said on their way inside.

  “Which is how I do it anyway. At this point in the process you’re being educated.” In the closeness of the elevator, she smelled of flowers. Tiny white flowers. Her head didn’t reach his shoulder.

  She unlocked the door. Her voice echoing through the empty unit made her seem smaller. The kitchen was not only big enough for a table, she was saying, it even had room in the corner for a good-size wine rack. Or an office niche.

  He wasn’t sure wh
at that meant.

  “Do you have a computer?” she asked.

  “No. No, I don’t. But I learned. They had classes. I mean, I know how to use one,” he added, relieved when she didn’t ask where. She didn’t seem the least bit nervous. If she did know who he was, it didn’t seem to bother her.

  The long living room was as big as the entire first floor in his house. He kept wanting to tell her that so she’d laugh, but he hated to interrupt. Her voice was so soft, he had to bend and tilt his head to hear her. She had a wonderful laugh, surprisingly strong and rich for such a small woman. He had made her laugh before, trying to fit into her little sports car. To demonstrate the spaciousness of the walk-in closet, she extended both arms and turned without touching the metal-gridded shelving. “Almost big enough to sleep in. Well, maybe for some people. Not for you,” she added, laughing.

  Actually it was, he realized. His cell had been about that size.

  On the way back, she told him about an even nicer complex she would show him next time. It had a clubhouse with an Olympic-size pool he’d love.

  “I don’t swim!” He laughed and wasn’t sure why, other than this lightness he was feeling.

  “You don’t know how?” She pulled in front of his house.

  “No, I know how! I just . . . never do it much.”

  The purple Navigator cruised down the street with its brilliant hubcaps and booming bass. It stopped in the middle of the road. Gordon said good-bye and quickly got out of the car. He didn’t want her to see anything as ugly as the incident last week. Feaster got out and lowered his sunglasses with a sly smile as she drove by. “Hey, big man, that’s nice. That is really nice,” Feaster called as he swaggered over. “Hey, I just found out. You used to be from around here. But a long time ago, right?”

  Gordon nodded.

  Feaster lowered his glasses again. “You know Jacinto? JumJum, he’s at the Fort.”