A Hole in the Universe

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “No.”

  “Yeah, well, JumJum and me, we were close. Like that.” Feaster clasped his hands together. “Till he screwed up, and now it’s just me.” He smiled. “You need anything, big man, you let me know. I’m always around.” Just then a car screeched around the corner, music blaring and honking its horn. Feaster waved for them to slow down. “Busy place, huh? But cool. Everything’s cool. I make sure of that.”

  “My side’s tight.” Dennis tossed the rope over the roof of his Land Rover. Gordon slipped the end around his side of the ladder, then knotted it quickly. Mrs. Jukas watched from her window. “Happy, you old bitch?” Dennis said through a smile, and waved. When they were done, Gordon offered his brother a beer. He’d bought a six-pack of Harrington’s for him. Dennis came in for a minute but said to save the beer for another time. He had to get home. Father Hensile was going to be there. It was Lisa’s night to host PreCana class, and it wouldn’t do to have hubby dragging in late and half-crocked.

  “Hey, the place looks good.” Dennis sat on the couch. He clasped his hands behind his head and stretched out his legs. He asked about the condo. It was very nice, Gordon said.

  “Well, that’s good.” Dennis grinned. “So you’re interested.”

  “No.”

  “Jilly said you liked it, but you thought it was too expensive. Like I told her, I’m willing to help. You know that, right?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “No, I mean that’s not the point. This is fine. I’m fine here.”

  Dennis looked at him. “All right. I’m not supposed to say anything yet, but Lisa’s going to talk to her father about a job for you at the brewery. You’d make three, no, four times what you’re making at the Market.”

  “No!” Gordon said as the phone began to ring.

  “That’s probably Jilly,” Dennis said, getting up. “I told her I was stopping here.”

  Gordon listened as Dennis answered the phone. He didn’t want to look at any more condos, but he did want to see Jilly Cross again.

  “No! You’re not interrupting anything,” Dennis assured her. “Oh, that’s great. I bet he’d like that. Here, you ask him. He’s right here.” He handed Gordon the phone.

  “Hello?” Gordon’s smile faded. It wasn’t Jilly, it was Delores apologizing; she didn’t want to bother him with Dennis there. She sounded nervous. If he wanted, he could call her back after his brother left. No, that’s all right, he said, not wanting the burden of owing her a call. It somehow seemed safer talking to her with Dennis here. His brother looked on, smiling as Delores invited him to dinner Friday night.

  “Oh. Well. I don’t know. I don’t know if I can.” Sweat beaded his furrowed brow.

  Dennis shook his head in disbelief. If the problem was work, Delores was saying, he could come after. Later would be better for her anyway. She was doing inventory at the store. Mr. Smick wanted everything counted right down to the last paper clip. Her voice trembled. So later would be good.

  “Well, I’m not sure.” He turned, shading his eyes from Dennis’s frantic gestures.

  “What’re you doing?” Dennis paced around him and whispered. “Just say yes. Go! You want to be stuck here all the time?”

  “All right,” he said, wincing with her whoop of delight. That was great. Wonderful! That was just so wonderful, she was still saying when he hung up.

  “Yeah! Way to go, Gordo!” Dennis let loose a flurry of jabs at his arm the way he used to. “You gotta loosen up! You gotta get out there! You gotta let life happen, my man!”

  Astonished, he looked at his brother. The last thing on earth he’d ever do would be to let life happen.

  “And the same when Jilly calls.” Dennis shadowboxed around him, feinting jabs at his face, which he disliked as much now as when they were kids. “Trust her. She’s a great gal. And she likes you, so let her show you what’s out there in the world. What you been missing all this time.”

  CHAPTER 6

  After a long night’s shivering refusal to turn on the furnace, Gordon hurried to work through the early-morning chill. With his first bills had come the shock of how expensive everything was. As he scuffed through the litter of faded scratch tickets in front of the drugstore, he considered buying one, but five dollars was too much to spend for a few seconds of hope. He had asked for more hours, but Neil had said he couldn’t afford it.

  Ahead at the corner, his young neighbor Jada waited to cross. Remembering the incident in front of her house last week and not wanting to embarrass her, he pretended not to recognize her.

  “Assholes! You’re supposed to stop,” she muttered as cars whizzed by. “That’s it, I’m going.” She stepped off the curb.

  “Look out!” he said. “They’re still coming.”

  “What’re you, some kind of crossing guard?” she said over her shoulder.

  “There’s too many cars. It’s not safe yet.” Traffic still unnerved him.

  “Yeah, right.” She was trembling. An empty bookbag hung from her bony shoulder. She wasn’t wearing a sweater or jacket, just a thin T-shirt. Goose bumps covered her arms. “So can I go now?” she asked with the last car.

  He looked both ways. “Seems pretty clear now.”

  They crossed and she walked fast to keep pace. He glanced over, then looked again, startled by the incongruity, the strangeness, the hybrid confusion that was her exotic freckled face. Her tight curly hair was a pale rust color. Her green tilted eyes seemed almost lidless. She had a fine, hooked nose above a mouth so wide and full that it seemed to take up the lower half of her small face. Her skin was of indiscernible color, not white, brown, or yellow. Even her boyish, lanky stride seemed contradictory, wrong on so female a body, tall and skinny as it was.

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing.” He slowed down, wanting her to get ahead.

  “How come you keep looking at me, then?”

  “I was just wondering if you were on your way to school,” he said quickly, uneasily.

  “Well, yeah!” As proof she lifted the bookbag.

  “Which one do you go to?” He slowed even more, and so did she.

  “The Craig.”

  “Oh. Craig Junior High. I went there.” And hated it, he remembered.

  “It’s middle school.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Don’t know.” She shuddered in the sudden biting wind.

  “What grade’re you in?”

  “Sixth. Same as last year.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  There were boys walking behind them. He had run out of questions. The Market was still two blocks away, with the Craig a block on farther. When they came to the Shoe Fix Shop, a small white dog darted out from the alley and ran snapping at their heels.

  “You fucking mange! Get the fuck outta here!” The girl’s kick sent the dog yelping into the street.

  “Hey, what’d you do that for?” called one of the boys. They all wore jackets or sweatshirts under their sagging backpacks. “Yeah, Jada, you freak, what’re you doin’ kicking a little dog!” another yelled.

  Without a word or break in gait, she hoisted her middle finger up over her head and kept walking.

  “Freak! You freak!” they all jeered. “You crazy, fucking freak!”

  Her eyes narrowed and her mouth curled in a snarl, yet she seemed amused by their taunts, if not proud, as they ran by screaming.

  “Was that their dog?” Gordon asked.

  “No!” she sneered. “It’s Cootie’s. Plus, he’s not even a real dog.”

  “Looked real to me.”

  “Yeah, well, he lives in a box, all winter, him and Cootie—like, under the bridge! They even eat the same food.”

  “That’s not the dog’s fault, though, is it?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe Cootie’d have a whole better life if he wasn’t stuck with such a friggin’ loser dog.”

  Her logic made him laugh. �
��He could always give him away.”

  “Or kill him,” she added.

  He didn’t know what to say.

  “But the thing is, he can’t. They’re, like, stuck together. Like, like they got no choice, you know?” she said as they kept walking. “Fucking pathetic, huh?”

  “Who’s Cootie?”

  “The crazy one. He’s always smoking. He wears this, like, ski-hat thing. Even in the summer he does. And he stinks.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen him around.” Gordon stopped when they came to the Market. Cootie had been in the store the other day, trying to buy cigarettes with food stamps, but June made him leave. When he returned later with a bag of empty cans and bottles, she would redeem only a few, saying the rest were brands they didn’t carry. While she sorted through the bag, Cootie slipped four packs of Camels into his pocket. June called the police, who told the old man to stay out of the Market. If he didn’t, they would arrest him. Later that day someone dropped part of a cinder block from the loading dock onto the roof of June’s old car. She called the police again. They said they couldn’t do anything unless she could prove Cootie had done it.

  “Well, anyway.” Gordon stood by the door. “I’ve got to go work now.”

  “My friend works here. Thurman Dominguez. He hates it, but his grandmother, she said if he quits, that’s it, he’s out. And nobody else wants him.”

  “That’s too bad. He’s so young.” Gordon wasn’t surprised. The boy smoldered with anger.

  “Not that young. Sixteen, I think. ’Least that’s what he says. His mother moved to New York just to get away from him. Nice mother, huh?”

  “I better go in.” He started to open the door.

  “That old bitch still work here?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with the things.” She poked two fingers into her nostrils. “The tubes.”

  “Yes, June. She’s still here.”

  “Fucking bitch. She, like, kicked me out for life.” Jada shaded her eyes to peer through the glass. “I don’t see her.”

  “She’s probably out back. Well, I better get inside and get started.”

  “Hey!” she called before he could leave. “Do me a favor, will ya?”

  “What?”

  “Will you let me know when the bitch dies? Because of her I gotta go all the way down the Shop and Save every time I need friggin’ milk or something.”

  “Well, just tell me, then. I can get it for you. I live right across the street.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Her ropy mouth quivered with a faint smile. “You know JumJum?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “He’s there, too.” She grinned. “At the Fort. You probably heard of him, though, huh?”

  “Yes, I did hear that name,” he said stiffly. “Just the other day, as a matter of fact.” He looked at his watch. “You better get going or you’re going to be late.”

  “What’d you hear about him?” She watched him closely.

  “Well, what you just said. That he was there.”

  “He offed somebody, too.” She looked around and leaned closer. “He blew this guy’s brains out all over his girlfriend’s brand-new Celica. But that’s not why. He’s there for something else. Dealing, but that’s not the real reason.”

  “I better go.”

  “Yeah, well, see ya.” She held out her hand and shook his, her grip hard as a man’s.

  “You better check your pockets, see what’s missing,” Serena called when he came inside.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know who she is, don’t you?”

  “She’s my neighbor. She lives across the street.”

  “The Fossums aren’t neighbors!” Serena scoffed. “They don’t move in or anything. They, like, infest the place and then you can’t get rid of ’em.”

  Gordon had never worked so hard as in these last few days. According to the women, each new bout of sobriety forced Neil Dubbin to even higher, steeper peaks of ambition, so vast was his trail of broken promises. His pledge to turn the Market into a first-rate business had few believers in his family, but at least his creditors were extending him three more months of their patience. To Gordon had fallen the verminous task of tearing out the rotting cabinets to make way for new storage. Neil tried to help in between the violent headaches that drove him, nauseated and squinting, to his sour room, where darkness was his only antidote, other than alcohol. He had just reemerged and now sat on an overturned crate, shoulders hunched, wincing with every hammer strike. Again, Gordon offered to stop.

  “No, keep going. Please. I need you to do this. It’s too important,” he insisted. Neil’s surest skill was entrusting others with his well-being. He needed not just their help, but their loyalty and affection in a way that validated their self-importance. And maybe he genuinely did; Gordon couldn’t be sure, not when his own natural distrust of people blotted out such nuances. He had known other men like Neil, irresistibly bitter men whose sins seem more affliction than failings. Even Neil’s eager fascination with other people’s pain made them think he truly cared about their troubles.

  “You’re pretty good at this,” Neil said. “Is this the kind of thing they teach you there?”

  “I used to help my father a lot,” Gordon said quietly.

  “Just the opposite of me and my dad. They never wanted me wasting my time around here. I think I was supposed to be a big-time accountant or lawyer or something, I forget. But thank God they never sold the farm!” he declared with a bitter sweep of his arm. “Where the hell would I be without it?”

  Gordon kept tapping the crowbar, to drive it deeper behind the cabinet frame.

  “Just so you’ll know,” Neil continued. “I haven’t said anything. I mean, about you, back then. I haven’t told anyone.”

  Shoulder braced to the wall, Gordon wrenched the heavy bar back and forth. A persuader, his father used to call it. A persuader. They didn’t know. Not yet. In a way it would be a relief to get it over with.

  “I mean, what’s the point? You know what I mean, they’ll just get all worked up. The girls, I mean. They’ll start thinking weird things, you know, like . . . like . . . maybe they can’t be alone back here with you or something. But then how long can you keep a secret like that? It must’ve been hell, huh, just a kid and being locked up all that time? I never could’ve done it. I would’ve checked out my first night there—broken glass, sheets, something. You ever try anything like that?”

  The crowbar fell to the floor. Grunting, Gordon pulled as hard as he could.

  “You must’ve thought of it, though, huh? You must’ve.” Neil’s harsh breathing scratched at the silence. “Hey, I saw you get picked up the other day. Pretty lady. You must be making up for a lot of lost time, huh? I mean, twenty-five years! Jesus Christ, what does a big, healthy guy like you do? You gotta have something more than a warm hand, right?”

  The rank dust of food-fouled wood exploded into the air as the cabinet gave way.

  “You probably did what you had to do, right? Well, anyway, I haven’t said anything to anybody.” Neil sighed. “I just wanted you to know that.”

  It was Friday, and Gordon was on his way home from work, still hoping Jilly Cross might call. In his bag there was an angel food cake, a pint of strawberries, and a can of real whipped cream for dessert tonight. He was surprised to be looking forward to dinner at Delores’s. He was tired of his own pathetic attempts at cooking. Nothing ever came out right. Last night’s steak had been so dry and tough, he’d had to cut it into slivers to chew it.

  The phone was ringing as he unlocked the door. “Hello! Hello!” he shouted into the dial tone. Reading from Jilly’s business card, he dialed the first three numbers, then hung up. It didn’t seem right, asking to see condos he would never buy. But if she called him—well, that was different.

  He waited by the phone a moment more in case it rang again. When it didn’t he went down the narrow wooden stairs into the cellar. He stripped off his soiled, sweaty
clothes and put them into the washing machine so they’d be clean for tomorrow. It hadn’t occurred to him he needed more clothes until June asked the other day if that blue sweatshirt and pants were all he had.

  He was lathering his arms in the shower now and trying to remember the last time he had actually bought clothes in a store. Vague images rose through the steam: his elbows banging into tiny dressing-room walls as he hurried to undress before the curtain parted, then crouching from the gash of light as his mother handed in a shirt with sleeves inches short of his wrists and pants with cuffs she would tear out and then hem in her long, clumsy stitches. The first woman in her family not to do piecework in the mills, she had been proud of her ineptitude with needle and thread.

  He put on the chinos and yellow shirt Dennis had gotten for him to wear home from Fortley. As he sat on the edge of the bed, tying his shoes, he could see down into Mrs. Jukas’s backyard. In the full swell of late-afternoon sun, the trees seemed even thicker with leaves than this morning and the grass darker in the deepening shadows. The only trees through Fortley’s windows had all been distant, the land cut close, allowing no shrub or stump of growth for a man’s concealment.

  Neil Dubbin had asked, but the truth was Gordon had never considered suicide as a way out. The most vital elements had died inside, died before he got there. After a while he stopped noticing the horizon’s lethal scroll of razor wire. The letters and visits he initially yearned for soon became cruel reminders of a lost world. His father’s trembling head and stroke-frozen face seemed only further proof of his crime. In a way, he had been glad when his father finally died, glad for his father, relieved for himself and his mother, who seemed happier, less burdened. From then on, her letters brightened with details of Dennis’s busy life or her trips with friends, and then her pride in Lisa, who was exactly the kind of girl a mother would want for her only son, one letter so guilelessly confided. But he knew what she meant. He understood. It was all part of the price.

  The phone rang and he grabbed it on the first ring. A breeze lifted the curtain as the room filled with Jilly Cross’s voice. She apologized for not calling sooner. The condo had gone under agreement, but another had come on the market this afternoon. It was perfect, just the right size, still in Collerton, which she knew he preferred, but in a much better neighborhood—and, she added, still in his price range. “I thought of you immediately!” she said, and he grinned. “Can you see it tonight? I’ve got to make a few more calls and then I could pick you up.”