by Jon Boilard
You eat Cheese Puffs and sniff model airplane glue on Danny Sternofski’s mom’s garage sale couch when she’s pulling third shift at the plastic shop. Sterno’s kid sister, who you felt up on the rocky bank of the railroad tracks after a dance, brings you meatball grinders and Jolt colas from Rogers and Brooks because you’re too twisted to ride the ten-speed bikes you stole from Eaglebrook. You watch Deputy Dawg and Batman and fall asleep, then wake up with a bloody nose. Then you get to third base with Mary Anne Baggs behind the grammar school utility shed during the Labor Day barbecue. She smells like coconut suntan oil.
You break the button off her Daisy Dukes.
She says, We’d better get back.
You drink keg beer from red plastic cups and watch the old Polacks dance, drunk on vodka tonics. You tell your brother about Mary Anne Baggs’ penny-colored nipples and pink nylon panties. You smoke a fatty walking home. Then you eat a whole sheet of chocolate chip cookies your mother had baked for her new boyfriend from the Shutesbury Rod and Gun Club. You piss in a two-liter plastic Coke bottle, pass out on the floor.
The farmer who owns the land around Red Rock has put up Keep Out signs because some college kid from Amherst drowned himself and his parents got a lawyer from Springfield and sued. You don’t keep out, though, and your brother says if the old coot comes down with his pepper gun you’d better be ready to swim to Stillwater Bridge. You smoke a fat one with Tony Waznieski by the rope swing and blow up Michelob bottles with firecrackers. Later the Big Wazoo, as you call him, lays a patch of rubber about two inches thick because he’s selling his 1970 Charger since he’s joining the Army. You cheer and watch the heat in translucent strip-of-bacon shapes coming off the blacktop of North River Road. You sit on towels in the backseat and kill a warm pint of Southern Comfort that Waz keeps in a speaker hole cut with a razor.
There’s a bonfire at Hoosac’s. You’re out of your tits when you hear about the crash. It sounds like your mom’s 1974 Comet. She’ll have a fit. She doesn’t even let your brother practice with her car because of the pickup he stole with Lester Little, but she’s over to the Seven O’s and he had an extra key made at Elder Lumber when she was napping. You ride by in the back of a police cruiser and blow chunks when you see it. You know right away he’s really toast this time.
It’s horseshoed around a hundred-year-old maple and the windshield ripples outward from where his head hit, like pond water disturbed by a stone. They use the Jaws of Life to pull him free and the torn metal roof is the mouth of some angry backwoods brute with sharp and misshapen silver teeth glinting and grinning, spitting your busted brother into the hands of men who cannot save him. The fat tires of the boxy refrigerator-white rescue vehicle hurry and crunch over shards of glass that are a million fallen stars and you wish on every one of them. Then sweaty men in muddy boots yell instructions at the driver of the yellow wrecker from Fisher’s Garage and as you pass they all look up, shake their heads, and say he never felt a thing.
At Cooley Dick in Hamp he’s gone but for a machine, and your mom is there with her stained apron and she looks at you like you put that tree there. Nobody says anything except her new boyfriend from the Rod and Gun who calls you a waste. The halls smell like Pine-Sol and those little plastic packs of grape jelly from the first-floor cafeteria. They unplug the machine the next day and everybody cries at the funeral. His hair is wrong and his clothes are wrong and one side of his face is a peach that has been dropped. You sit outside on the curb and swat at hungry horseflies and look at limousines. Then you sit in church. They bury your brother on Thayer Road across from Boron’s Market. They stick him in the ground two stones down from Robert Hawk Wilson and right across from Eugene Canning’s mother. Four old townies use straps and metal bars and globs of black machine grease to drop the handsome box into the fresh-dug dirt. The sun shivers in the sky like a reflection of itself in a slow-moving current.
The green leaves of Olzewski’s corn scratch the skin on your arms. After the corn comes the trees and the hill and then the river. The path to Red Rock is worn and narrow and your brother is behind you. Your shadows consolidate in the smoky dirt, like you aren’t two separate people anymore, like he’s becoming the strong blond part of you. The water is clear and rushing and three or four fish are facing upriver, sleepily feeding in the drift. You take off your T-shirts and jeans and boots and pile them behind a buttonball stump. An eddy chug-a-lugs. You’re under and you push downriver, past stones and licorice-quick eels, and then come up for air a few short strokes from the red rock. Sitting on top the sun dries your hair and deciduous leaves whisper secrets. Mapleseed helicopters soundlessly descend into calm pockets. Some strange daddy-long-legs panics and scampers, dances on the surface. Alone together one last time but for the echo of a carpenter’s hammer. You’re the one who’s going to notice it most, your brother says. In the distance, Mount Toby is orange and red and yellow, always most glorious just before dying.
NICE SLEEP
Sideways rain hit the aluminum sides of the double-wide like fistfuls of pebbles. The green couch was ripped. Water was boiling for tea. I heard it going over the sides of the red kettle and onto the electric burner. I put an old bag of Orange Pekoe and a cube of sugar in the one cup she hadn’t broken and burned my finger a bit on the black handle of the kettle, held it under the tap until it went away. We were out of milk. She didn’t want to be alone. I brought it to her like that, with a paper napkin and a spoon.
Go get my medicine you little shit, she said, and she told me which ones and I brought them and she tilted her head back to swallow each pill one at a time. Her room was dark. Her room smelled like fish. Now get away from me you little shit, she said. I went back to watch television.
It was four in the morning but I didn’t have to get up for school anymore. She didn’t let me go to school. She said if she let me out of her sight they’d take me away forever this time. She said she loved me more than life.
Go put some clothes on, she said. I woke up and she was standing there and she told me to get dressed. I’d been sleeping on the green couch, in my underpants and a sweater that smelled like the tire from the trunk of the Buick we used to live in. It was daytime now. The television was still on and she shut it off.
It was cold. I was cold. The trailer was cold because we didn’t pay for oil and Chet Templeton with the wooden leg who owned the White Birch Campgrounds shut off the generator, and I could see my breath. She was in the kitchenette when I was ready except for my shoes in my hand and she looked at me for a minute before she said anything. Then she spoke.
Get the fuck out, she said. Leave me alone. Get fucking lost and don’t ever come back. If it wasn’t for you, she said, I could drive a red sports car.
So I got Richard Peach from four trailers down and we went to look at the dogs. Malek was the auto mechanic and dogcatcher and Richard Peach said Malek would shoot dogs after ten days. And the crazies even sooner. He said he took them out back by the oil drums and put one right in their brains. Richard Peach said if he saw it once he saw it a million times. He said that they were better off dead anyhow because they didn’t have anything to live for. It was just a matter of putting them out of their misery. He said Malek did it for free because he took pleasure in it. All he did was charge for ammo. There was a fat black and grey Keeshond at the end of a greasy rope, and he barked and charged and his stomach moved from side to side just like pudding would. Salty foam boiled over his blue gums. We ran when Malek saw us. He came around the side of the garage with a shovel over his shoulder and a shotgun that was longer than me. He hollered, and we cut across the potato fields behind his place and walked when we got to the old drive-in movie theater. The ground was hard with frost. I shivered and Richard Peach said it was colder than a witch’s tit. He said we’d sure see some snow in a couple three weeks.
______
I didn’t get home until dark and after I knocked for a while she unlocked the door. How could you leave me alone like that, she said. S
he was on the green couch with a blanket and the telephone and a pink roll of toilet paper. She hit me on top of the head with the phone. You don’t even care, she said. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree after all.
I washed up for bed and she hit me in the face with both ends of the red flashlight we kept for emergencies until my left eye wouldn’t open. She told me to go to my room. Go to your room, you little shit.
I fell asleep and woke up and she was standing right there and it was dark. She told me that she couldn’t take it anymore and I had to go away. For good this time, she said. Life is hard enough without you.
Rain came down like curtains. If we don’t make rent we’re going to get evicted again, my mother said. We sat in the Buick in front of the Bloody Brook Bar on North Main. She tapped the gas three times and turned the ignition off fast so the engine wouldn’t diesel. She stared at the pine air freshener that dangled from the volume knob on the AM radio that didn’t work anymore. Then she looked at the door to the Bloody Brook. I hope there’s a man in there with some scratch, she said. Then she slapped me until her hand got tired. Stay put, little fucker, she said. Get in back and take a nap why don’t you.
She checked herself in the rearview, stretched the neck band of her T-shirt to rub an invisible film from her teeth, smoothed out her eyebrows with fingertips of spittle. She rolled the window down, opened the door with the outside handle, rolled the window up, got out and closed the door with the jut of her hip. She held a chamois over her head so her makeup wouldn’t run in the rain. Jukebox music poured out of the bar, filled me like oxygen.
______
We made rent and the next day the wind blew so hard they gave it a woman’s name and told us to stay indoors. Chet came around with plywood and plastic and ten-penny nails. He stood on an overturned bucket and used a hammer with a blue rubber handle. He leaned on his good leg, made a lot of noise, looked at me like I was something bad, then left. I slept on the green couch.
If I can’t have him then nobody can, my mother said. I kept my eyes shut. But I could feel her standing over me with something or somebody else, whispering. It was dark. It was cold. The night was howling, a sooty brute, and in the light of the storm her face looked like it was of the stuff they forged cutlery from. Have a nice sleep, boy, she said. But don’t expect to wake up.
BARNYARD
He had a scarecrow beard that seemed to grow from everywhere on his face and he moved across the yard real slow like some specter. Some straw-filled specter. He stepped over the rust-pocked chrome bumper of an old American car and made his way to the brown-boarded tobacco barn. The early morning mist wrapped itself around him like a vestment. Like an old robe. There were chickens and dogs and pigs in the yard and he spit yellow at them and they parted to let him pass.
A small squalid face pushed pale against the screen door and called out. He stopped and cursed and turned. Hell you want Chance, he said. A waist-high boy ran out of the house and jumped the three porch steps, his swiftspindle legs constantly moving until he caught up to the man. I want to help you, Dad, he said. The man put his hand in the boy’s hair and they went together to the barn. The boy was naked but for a tiny pair of unlaced work boots. He picked up a weeping willow stick and dragged it in the dirt at his side and waved it at the chickens and poked it at the dogs and pigs that swarmed around him. He made noises at them too and they licked and pecked and nudged him, the dirty boy, until he giggled, but it was empty of joy. Inside the barn was dark like a tomb and rats scurried along the rafters and wooden beams. There were cats, too, that killed the fat rats and hissed and hid in dark corners. The man set his son on an overturned grain barrel and told him to stay put. Stay you put now, boy, he said, and let me do this here.
He built his wife a handsome box because she didn’t like what was in the catalogs. He banged nails with a blue-handle hammer. He cut pine board with an angry triangle-tooth ripsaw. He smoothed it with decreasing grits of sandpaper. He finished it with linseed oil and lined it with crushed velvet. She wanted to die in her wedding dress. The boy remained, potbellied and quiet.
Chance hadn’t seen his mother in eighty days. She was sick and stayed in her room. She hacked blood into a white handkerchief or an old T-shirt. If you go near her then you’ll get it too, his father said. The boy listened, obeyed. He watched his father from his woody perch. The man worked on the stubby end of a cigar and put his right foot on a concrete block for support. The smoke rose up and around his face, carried bits of his warbled soul up into the abyss of ceiling beams and spider webs where it lingered. When he finished smoking the cigar he chewed it, rolled it across his lower lip, then spit it against the wall where it clung like a living thing.
They got flowers and cards and they placed her in the ground on a day that was rainy. They kept a clipping from the paper and a copy of the Lord’s prayer. The rain and the wind turned the umbrellas inside out and the whole thing didn’t take long because the limo was by the hour. It had a maroon interior and a minibar and a television screen that didn’t come on because that was extra. The driver had dandruff on the shoulders of his suitcoat. There was a plastic window between the front and back that slid open and closed. It wasn’t like being in a car at all or a pickup truck. It wasn’t bumpy or noisy or uncomfortable either. There was leg room for everybody and nobody had to sit up straight or lean their arm out the window. They went from the church to the graveyard and back to the church where they had left their vehicles.
The men stood around smoking cigarettes and talking to the limo driver, who smoked too. They admired the limo. The women waited by the cars and pickup trucks and smoked and talked about the flower arrangements that the rain, which had let up for a minute but was forecast through the weekend, would ruin. The men undid their ties and unbuttoned their shirts, and the women stood easier in bare feet than in the dress shoes they now held in their hands. Then the limo was gone because the driver was on the clock and the church was filling up for another service for somebody else who went and died. And the pastor who did most everything, even emptied the trash and fixed the toilet, asked them to please remove the cars and pickup trucks from the parking lot. He shook their hands and passed around a shiny silver flask. Chance’s father crouched down so he was eye level with his son.
Go with Tanti for a little while, he said. I just need to be alone.
Tanti smelled like Maker’s Mark. She took her teeth out at night and put them in a drinking glass. Around the house she wore big pink slippers that she called her puppies. Tanti was a Bruins fan. She said Bobby Orr should be the mayor. She watched hockey on her black-and-white television. She listened to games on the radio at the kitchen table. Tanti was retired from the town and lived in a shack on a hill all by herself. She caused a scene at Wolfie’s last Thanksgiving and Chance’s father went to wait in his pickup in the parking lot. She had a bathtub but not a shower and she let him stay in there for as long as he wanted. She had a hundred Hummel figurines that she warned him away from because they were going to be worth a lot of money someday. He broke the head off a porcelain boy with a sheep and she used crazy glue to stick it back on. Tanti always read the newspaper to see who else had died.
She kept Kleenex rolled up in the sleeve of her shirt. She had a friend named Mr. Kenny who worked for Lipton and gave her Cup-a-Soup by the case. He had a son named Dougie Kenny who Chance shot with a water pistol because he was retarded. Tanti told Chance to leave him alone because he couldn’t help the way he was. She told him to stay off the old firehouse roof next door. She told him to stop throwing rocks at cars on Parker Street. She told him to be home before dark. She gave him money to go to the candy store across the park, where he got a grape-flavor lollipop. She gave him money to go to the five and dime on Bernie Avenue so he wouldn’t steal toys anymore. Tanti didn’t know how to drive a car. She wore a wig that was blonde. She said Bing Crosby was her favorite. She danced drunk around the living room and sang songs from Bobby Vinton until she got tired. Then she went
to sleep on the hardwood floor.
The wind was blowing awful bad in the barnyard. I was used to her being dead but it was different without the boy. Everything was dried up now. It didn’t matter. Our mulberry was black and skinny and grabbing at me with a million twistjointed arms. I sat with my feet planted in Sugarloaf Street and a Peterbilt had business at the pickle shop. It downshifted on the railroad tracks and dropped heads of cabbage into the street that bounced and rolled around like heads of cabbage do. I smelled them and the fresh-cut pulpwood from the lumberyard across the river. Then I locked myself in the cellar with a stack of Playboys and a 1.75-liter bottle of Gordon’s and a small-caliber handgun. I kept all that stashed in a hole in the sheetrock. I asked God why and waited for an answer, listened to the high-pitched hum of the fridge that stored last year’s venison, and put my cheek to the cement that was colder than a froze-over pond.
CUT ME IN PIECES
AND HIDE
The sky outside my window was wide and white. Birds flew from a strange summer fog, passed before me and smacked into the silence again. My mother was disappearing. She told me I was a bastard. She hit me with the vacuum cleaner. When she stopped I got up from the floor and ran away. I went to the waterfall near Bardwell’s Ferry that everybody called the fork. I stayed until a cool moon illuminated the valley and I knew she had gone into her room to die a little more.
Then I knocked on her window until she unlocked the front door and studied me like a barn cat crazed with hunger. Get your ass in here, she said. Her hybrid meds were cocktailing to strike a chemical balance in her perpetually seesaw brain. Her faraway eyes focused on an imprecise point over my left shoulder. She told me she called the police switchboard because she thought maybe I got hit by a car or stuck in the swamp or taken away by a man with bad skin in a white panel truck. She always imposed her recurring nightmares on me. She meant to protect me.