by Jon Boilard
You are my life, she said. Don’t ever leave me again.
We went to her bed and hugged. She put her arms around me so I could see the train-track scars that made me queasy from where she especially liked to kill herself. Then I wasn’t really sleeping anymore and I heard her walking up and down the hall. She was off-kilter again and getting more so by the minute. I observed her discreetly with my one good eye and it was true she was a haunt already in her white T-shirt and her white legs and her arms and her white face.
In the morning I went to the cemetery on Stanislaus Street, which was like a park. There was a pond with a red bridge slicing it in half and cattails at one end. There were snapping turtles. I smashed bullfrogs with sticks. I sneaked up on them and hit them hard. I threw them into the air so they landed on the blacktop with a sound like a single wet clap. And when Tommy Zagrodnik and Rocky Morales showed up we played smear the queer. I spit bubblegum into Tommy’s hair and slapped him with both hands until his teeth bled, and Rocky told his grandmother, who was scared of me. She wouldn’t let them play with me anymore, so I chased ducks that were green and gray. I crawled up behind them pretending to be a soldier, keeping my head down to avoid imaginary barbed wire and make-believe sniper fire. I jumped to my feet with abusive whoops of chaos and they scrambled down the mud-slick bank and glided easily away from the danger that had become such a fundamental part of me.
After hitchhiking 116 and 91 to the Holyoke Mall, I looked at black-light posters and talked to the talking parrots near the wishing well. I took a penny from the water and closed my eyes. Then I returned the copper embodiment of hope to its original fluid jurisdiction, generating ripples outward as it penetrated the glassy surface, sinking side to side to the bottom like a falling feather. I didn’t know for sure if it worked like that but hoped it did; I’d wished my mother finally dead, but not in a hateful way. More for her than me. By her own account she was not well-suited among the living. Then I sat by the Orange Julius booth just to smell them. The girl behind the counter wore a paper hat and vest. She chopped oranges and strawberries and she crushed big bags of ice. She didn’t look at me, not one time, and I didn’t really blame her.
I stayed in the atrium too long because it was hot outside and the blue-uniformed security guard kept an eye on me. His face was dark and bumpy as a chestnut. He talked into his radio. He wore black boots and fingered his baton. He stopped watching me to help a woman with a baby, and I stole a candy bar from the drugstore and left with it stuffed inside my pants.
The front door opened again. You little bastard, she said. She broke everything in the kitchen all over the floor and made me watch. Plates. Glasses. Bowls. The blender. A vase. A jar where we used to keep colorful pasta when things weren’t that bad. The toaster right out of the wall. Then she hit me with her wrists, which hardly hurt anymore because she was shrinking so small. Smaller than me. Then she told me to get a broom and clean up the mess that I made. I swept it against a cardboard scrap and put it in the trash. She was tired because of what I had just put her through so I apologized. She swallowed blue pills with water. I watched The Wild Wild West. She covered her legs with a thin afghan and appeared to struggle mightily as it gobbled her up.
And I knew she didn’t stand a chance anymore.
Not in this life.
Then she woke up and looked at me and opened her mouth and the words came out.
Cut me, she said. Cut me in pieces and hide.
Then a muted sound that I sorted from the others and even the sound of my own beating heart, the distant yelps of a mange-coat coyote conspiring with the northeast wind, slicing the silence and signaling some ancient distress known to nature, purveying a vague call to arms.
NUTS
Aunt Rose told me she made a nice meatloaf. Come and eat, she said. It was the first of June, and Yaz and Fisk and the Boston Red Sox were on the radio. She lived in a green house on Oak Street in Indian Orchard. She told me I ate like Georgie Flynn from when she was a girl about my age. Aunt Rose was old and she let me stay up late so I could watch James Bond in The Man with the Golden Gun and dunk lemon-cream Girl Scout cookies in a big cup of cold milk.
The next day was hot. Aunt Rose told me she hated the heat. She sat in the kitchen with a fan from the five-and-dime blowing on her and a glass of what she liked to call iced tea. She talked into the yellow telephone, mostly about the godforsaken weather, and I listened for a while then went out on the back porch. Stanley Bailey next door was riding his lawn mower. It was green and he was fat and red, and he drove around the trees in his yard. He wouldn’t cut Aunt Rose’s grass because he thought she was nuts. You’re all nuts, he said.
My mother called from the funny farm in Tewksbury, Fridays after supper. She asked if Aunt Rose was drunk. Are you being a good boy, she said. She told me it was a decent place but it wasn’t actually a farm. It had a pond and trees like a cemetery. And there were ducks. And she made a leather belt with my name on it. I asked if she was feeling better. My mother told me I could visit. I asked how long until she was normal again and she told me she didn’t know.
I handed the phone to Aunt Rose and she touched my head and told my mother I was a good boy. Then her lips got so thin her mouth looked like a deep razor cut on the wrist that moment before the blood surfaces. He’s my good boy, she said. Then she got quiet while my mother made the usual cruel accusations. Aunt Rose cried and rubbed her eyes and told me it was the pollen. Goddamn the hay fever, she said. She told me if the humidity didn’t kill her then the pollen sure would. She made iced tea in the pantry. She got the squat dark bottle of Canadian Mist down from the top shelf and sat on the step stool to catch her breath. She drank and said, Ahhhh. She said, That’s much better.
The setting sun was melting butter, a wide sky brushstroked mango backdropping split-level houses and storefronts and the solitary spire of St. Matthew’s Church. Then it got dark enough for streetlights and I threw crabapples from Aunt Rose’s tree into Stanley Bailey’s yard. I threw them by the handful. I could still smell the grass he cut. My arms itched from mosquitoes because Aunt Rose forgot to put bug spray on me. She called out the window for me to come inside and we had tapioca pudding that she burned so it formed a brown skin. I ate two bowlfuls. She fell asleep on the couch and snored and I turned the television loud and louder. The temperature was unforgiving even at night, a brutal and humid summer. Aunt Rose had the fan in the room with us and I aimed it at her. She didn’t wake up. I made her wig blow off.
Stanley Bailey told Aunt Rose I was throwing crabapples at his yard. I heard him from the window. Aunt Rose told him he was a sonofabitch and to get off her property. I’ll call the police. Ought to be ashamed. Picking on the boy. He left and she repeated my name again and again and I ran away to where Oak Street ended in a tree line. I chucked rocks at the shut-down Chapman Valve Company where Aunt Rose kept books for twenty-six years. It was a brick building that took up two square blocks. There was no more glass to break and there were boards where all the windows used to be. There was spray paint on the walls that plugged the Maniac Latin Hoods. I went home when the moon was white as a pillow and the shape of that thing on the bottom third of my thumb nail and Aunt Rose made me a toasted peanut butter and jam sandwich and chocolate-flavor milk. She told me she didn’t know what to do when I acted up like that. She told me I was going to give her a coronary. Is that what you want, she said.
I told my mother about running away. My mother asked what happened and I told her about the crabapples and she said Stanley Bailey has no balls. Put her on the phone.
I didn’t mean for Aunt Rose to get in trouble. Then we listened to the game. I drank ginger ale with ice cubes and a cherry. Aunt Rose let me use a crazy straw with a blue stripe. She told me she’d been to Fenway Park. She told me about the wall they called the Green Monster and the smell of French fries. Maybe we can take a Greyhound bus. We can get hot dogs and grape slushies, she said. She told me she’d buy me a cap. Something fun for once, she s
aid.
I drew pictures on the construction paper from Johnson’s Books that Aunt Rose kept by the phone. I used the Crayola set I got for my birthday. I drew pictures of Jim Rice hitting home runs and Rick Burleson number seven and Stanley Bailey with a penis and no balls. I drew a picture of my mother feeding a wire coat hanger through her strawberry-shaped heart. The Yankees won after ten innings and Aunt Rose let me go to bed without brushing my teeth. I slept in the room where Nana died, and the wind outside was surely her unsettled spirit lingering.
______
Aunt Rose gave me the funnies from the Springfield Union. She put her glasses on and told me about sports. And there was a summer storm coming down the valley. We were getting rain. Cats and dogs, she said. She knew the day before because her knees hurt. She told me not to get old. She told me arthritis would be the death of her, and I asked her when my mother was going to get discharged, and she took a long sip of her drink and told me she didn’t know. Your mother’s awful sick. She needs help. Aunt Rose did the crossword puzzle and I watched some wrongful god’s tears in puddles on Oak Street. Drops fat as planets descended like the end of the world.
Then I counted my heartbeats between thunder and lightning. One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three…
I counted it getting closer. My mother didn’t call. Aunt Rose told me to take a bath because somebody was coming. She cut my hair with black-handle scissors she kept on the kitchen table. She told me my mother wouldn’t mind. Oh, she’ll never even know, she said. The lady’s name was Miss McGee and she told me I had a lawyer. She asked questions. Aunt Rose talked for a while and I wanted to go outside. It’s not because your mother doesn’t love you, she said. It’s not your fault, she said. Miss McGee drank a glass of tap water. I could hear the ice cubes go pop, pop, pop. Now we need to find a place for you to live, she said. She had a clipboard.
Aunt Rose showed her the pictures I made. She told Miss McGee she was too old for all this. She told me she was sorry. My poor boy. Miss McGee told Aunt Rose they would determine the most suitable situation. Another ice cube from her drink popped. I told her I didn’t want to go anywhere else. Then I stood up and walked outside and they followed me and I stopped right at the edge of Stanley Bailey’s yard. There was a break in the storm and he was cleaning his gutters from a tall aluminum ladder and he was fat and red, and he looked at me like I was nuts.
I WON’T WEAR BLACK
Red is my big brother and can kick anybody’s ass. They call him that because that’s the color his face turns when he’s mad. We’re sitting on the hood of our mother’s brown Ford Pinto in front of the apartment building where we live with mostly niggers and spics. The sun is hot and the metal of the car is hot too. There’s a public pool across the street but we’re not allowed anymore because I pushed Matthew Ackerman into the deep end so we all could watch him drown.
Red is smoking a cigarette and he won’t let me have any because I’m too young. He’s only a year older, and he stole them from the store on the corner of Parker Street and Walnut. He also lifted a liter of Coke, and it’s ice cold. I drink it too fast and so it looks like I’m crying.
Gary Foster comes over to fuck with us and Red puts the cigarette out in his eye. Gary cries for real and runs home to tell his fat fucking parents. Red laughs out loud and I do too. That was my last goddamn cigarette, he says, trying to sound crazy like Uncle Quick. Then our mother sticks her head out the window and sees us. She twists up her face like a mask. You little cocksuckers, she says. Inside the apartment she comes at us hard with hands and elbows. My brother protects me until my mother gets tired and stops, leans against the doorframe, coughs and says she can’t take it anymore. She’s going to put us on a Greyhound to our father, that no good sonofabitch.
I hope it crashes into a mountain, she says.
I won’t go to your funeral.
I won’t even wear black.
FLUNKY
I sniffed model airplane glue with Walter while his mom waited tables at HoJo’s. His kid sister smelled like soap. She said she was sick and stayed home from school. I gave her money from my uncle’s wallet so she’d ride to the center of town on her bike with the basket to get us a family-size bag of ranch-flavored Doritos and two one-liter bottles of Pepsi. Mighty Mouse was flying over cartoon skyscrapers. We watched him on the black-and-white television that had rolled-up aluminum foil as an antenna. A train went by on the tracks right outside the house and from the couch we saw it pass in dark kitchen-window-size squares. When the cabinets stopped rattling Walter said, Fifteen cars. When we couldn’t even hear it anymore because it already went under the dry bridge past Elder Lumber I told him I counted seventeen. He said he hated that I always had to have the last word. He punched me in the shoulder and said I always had to be right. A fat black fly tried to escape through the screen part of the side door. It buzzed and bounced against the cat-scratched screen, buzzed and bounced trying like hell to get out.
The yellow telephone erupted like a fire drill. It was on the chipped pink tile floor of the bathroom, where Walter’s mom talked in a hushed whiskey voice from the edge of the clawfoot tub between cigarette drags, late at night when she thought everybody was asleep. I rubbed my eyes and my head where it hurt from the glue hangover and Walter woke up too.
Don’t answer it, he said. It’s probably the school.
Then my nose started to bleed and I filled my nostrils with Kleenex. From the big-numbered clock hanging crooked from a nail on the wall I could see it was the beginning of fourth period. We’d left right after homeroom, walked across the parking lot and past the weed-cracked tennis courts and through the softball field and the old Dwire Lot to the house that Walter’s mom rented. Walter’s kid sister, a year behind us, was in eighth grade and she had good marks and blue ribbons from 4-H and a fancy letter from the board of education saying she could spell better than anybody in Franklin County. Walter’s mom called Kayla her last hope.
I heard Kayla put the kickstand down on her bike and take hold of the plastic bag from Rogers and Brooks. I heard her come in, the side door banging inside the frame as she jiggled it shut all the way. Walter went into his bedroom and came back with a pack of EZ-Wider and the Sucrets tin where he kept the dope he bought from Jimmy Warfield’s father. He told Kayla to get lost, go do homework, and he licked his index fingers and thumbs and rolled a fat one in his lap. We took a few hits and ate the Doritos and I drank my Pepsi. Batman and Robin were on the television. The fly was bouncing off the screen door again and the plastic clock was ticking and the wind outside was brushing a weeping willow branch against the vinyl siding of the house. The telephone rang four and a half times. We’ve got to get out of here, somebody on the television said. Walter was breathing through his nose and making snoring sounds and when I looked at him the ends of his fingers were Dorito orange and all around his mouth was Dorito orange and the plastic one-liter Pepsi bottle was unopened between his legs.
I heard Kayla in her room with the door mostly shut listening to Bryan Adams on Walter’s old boom box and turning the pages of a magazine. I pushed the door open with my big toe and the rusty hinge creaked. She was lying face down on her bed that looked like a little girl’s bed. She was wearing somebody’s old Calvin Kleins from the hand-me-down store in Northampton and a three-quarter sleeve REO Speedwagon concert T-shirt. I told her that she smelled like Dove soap and she let me come in and sit on the bed with her. We made out and I took her shirt and bra off and dropped them on the sticky hardwood floor. Then she stood up and locked her door and took her jeans and panties off. She told me I made her feel beautiful and grown up and somehow unconnected to anything. I said some other things that I knew she wanted to hear and after a short while she took my clothes off.
Make sure you take it out this time, she said.
The greenish paint was flaking off the plaster walls of her room. Dark spots of mildew on the south one that faced out over the front yard. We smoked some old Marlboro lights she got from the
dresser in her mom’s room and she said her mom would kill her if she found out. She said her mom put too much pressure on her to be perfect. She told me I was lucky not to have anybody to tell me what to do and I told her more lies about my feelings and shit to hush her up, and blew smoke rings that drifted up to the bowl of the dead-moth-filled ceiling light. I listened to the wind outside go around the house and from her window I watched it make mini tornadoes of raked maple leaves in the yard and dirt and driveway. The rain came straight down and then the wind turned it sideways for a while. Oh fuck, the windows, Kayla said, and put her jeans and shirt on and pushed her underwear under the bed with her foot. She closed her window against the rain and I heard her going through all the rooms, closing windows while I got dressed.
______
Walter woke up and looked at me. Where the hell’d you go to, he said.
I told him it was raining. There was a game show on the television. Walter told his kid sister to leave the window in the living room open because we wanted to fire up another doobie. She looked right at me, flipped me the bird, went into her room, and slammed the door.
What’s up her ass, Walter said.
I shrugged.
We took a couple hits and tried to blow the smoke toward the window so his mom wouldn’t smell it when she got home. We didn’t know any answers to the game show questions but there was only one other channel and it didn’t come in during rain.
The one good headlight lit the room up for a few seconds when Walter’s mom turned into the driveway from Stage Road. Her car hiccupped and sputtered as she killed the engine. I heard Kayla spray Lysol and open her bedroom door a few inches. Walter’s mom came in holding a Recorder over her head and a paper bag against her hip. Cats and dogs out there, she said.