by Jon Boilard
Kayla boiled water for macaroni and cheese, chopped hot dogs, buttered slices of stale white bread. Walter’s mom served iceberg lettuce that was brown around the edges with a mayonnaise and ketchup dressing that I watched her mix with a fork. Then she brought our dinners on paper plates to the couch. Walter’s mom took a shower and said she was going to be late. It’s poker night, she said, so it could be a big tip night. I can’t afford to be late again. On her way out the door she jerked her thumb toward Walter and me and told Kayla, Stay away from the flunkies. I don’t want them two losers rubbing off on you, she said.
Walter nudged me in the ribs and I laughed out loud.
______
We drank vodka right from the bottle I took from my uncle who had temporary custody. Kayla smoked one of her mom’s cigarettes. Walter passed out again and Kayla told me she made an appointment with Nurse Harper for between study hall and History on Wednesday. The radio played a block of Def Leppard. She made a face when she put the bottle to her lips but tilted her head back and gargled the vodka like Listerine and eventually swallowed it. She went on to say that Nurse Harper was going to give her the results of a test. She told me that she already pissed on one from the pharmacy and it was positive. Kayla was leaning on her elbow and trying to find something in my face that was not there and I took a long snort so I could close my eyes. She cried and said my name to bring me back, but the wind outside was the familiar ghost of something long since dead. Rain came down in big drops that sounded to me like footsteps.
MOON OR HEAVEN
This was when my father died.
My grandmother sat on the porch. A foldout chair. A tall drink. A telescope on a three-legged stand. She watched tankers going to Boston. Hauling sugar. Automobiles. Coffee beans. Out past No Name Island. Way past. She sipped. The sun was unbreakable. My grandfather opened the screen door with his big toe and unfolded the umbrella so she wouldn’t cook. Doctor’s orders. Not too much sun. Not after the stroke in the basement that left her twitching in a puddle of herself by the washing machine. Concussion. Unconscious. Mrs. Sturtevant went down there with a load of whites and found her three hours later.
But drinking was all right. In moderation. He mixed them in the kitchen—vodka and cranberry, whiskey and ginger. He didn’t say a word to her and she didn’t acknowledge his efforts. He slipped back inside to watch baseball. She adjusted the telescope with her good hand and saw us making our way down the beach. Past the Levitt’s. The Magnolia Bath and Tennis Club where the rich teenagers went. The Mongeon’s volleyball net. We knew she was watching. It was understood. That’s all she had left.
Pan right. Pick target. Focus.
Seaweed on the beach was a collection of brown bodies and it smelled dead and rotten and we could hear fat horseflies around it black and mad and buzzing like wires. Beer bottles. Bottle rockets. A pair of sunglasses. We walked through it with no shoes and no shirts and chucked handfuls at each other and chased the clear-winged devils. There was a boulder at the west end that was our spaceship. At the foot of the rocky ring of the cove. Pricker bushes. Poison ivy. Private signs. The haunted house. Cunt Cave, where Cousin Dennis got his head stuck. The craft loomed out of the sand like a dream and we sat in the seats that seemed to have been carved for us by a god often negligent. It took us everywhere and anywhere. My father sat on top because he was the captain and said he could see the harbor. Lobster boats. Catamarans. Twenty-five-foot whalers. I sat below, on a ledge. I could see him. Lean. Freckled. Father strong.
Where are we going this time, I asked.
Mars, he said. Jupiter. The moon. Wherever, he said. It don’t matter. Jump out when the aliens get here.
We had traveled far. Light years. Solar systems. Galaxies. I told him to be sure and tell me when. An old Irish Setter named Ajax bounded around us snapping his frothy jaws at nothing. Or everything. Barking. Red dog collar. Tags like a little bell signaling his canine frenzy. Green-gray tennis ball. Then the captain told me to close my eyes and look at the moon. Shiny quarter dollar. Snow cone.
It’s getting closer, he said. We’re almost there.
I told him I could tell. I told him I wasn’t retarded. I closed my eyes just like he instructed and I could feel the earth behind me and the wind sounded like waves in the Atlantic Ocean and seagulls screaming for bloody chum.
Get ready to jump, he said.
So I jumped and rolled like he taught me in the sand, throwing elbows and knees at the Martians or whoever and cried for help. Helpless. Small. I kept my eyes closed because I didn’t want to see them because he told me they were horrible. Hairy. Angry. Yellow-fanged.
I’ll save you, he said. He pulled them off me. The beasts. The bastards. Die, he yelled. Die you beasts. You bastards.
He killed two with a stick, drowned three in the sea, brained one with a brick. He told me so. I felt him there and smelled his breath. Southern Comfort and cigarettes. When I opened my eyes he was chasing the last one away. The beast was wild and orange-woolly and snapping at flies. My arm was bleeding. Tooth marks. Ripped skin. The captain rubbed mud on me that worked like medicine. I was almost a goner, he told me. Dead. Kicked the bucket. Passed away. Lucky for you I was around. He washed me in a salty eddy that swirled. Move it like this, he showed me. Like this, and he did it. You’re going to be all right, he told me. You’ll live to see another day.
He didn’t mention alone.
Scared.
Unprotected.
Abandoned.
My grandfather folded the umbrella, closed the tripod telescope. Propped it in the living room. Time to pack it in, he said. That’s all she wrote. Goodnight, Irene. He helped my grandmother stand up. Dusk settled on the horizon like dust on a windowsill. Thick. Clinging. Storm clouds formed a heavy blanket thrown over Magnolia. She clutched her drink against her breast in her good hand that worked like a claw. Thunder was a cherry bomb bursting beyond a charcoal haze. A zigzag of electricity whipsawed its way groundward. Crack. Snap. And another. She sobbed. Shivered. He was oblivious—how could he have known—and made her another drink. A nightcap. One for the road, he said. He helped her into bed. Don’t worry, he said. They’re good boys and always make it home. He waited up for what he thought would be both of us with the television lighting up his face in blue flashes. Archie Bunker. Mork and Mindy. M.A.S.H.
If the stroke hadn’t taken words from my grandmother she might’ve told him. Because I think she knew. I think she learned new ways of knowing once her sickness took over. This came to me later, too late. With her eye against the world, she had watched the green leaves of cattails scratch the skin on our arms. The path from the beach to the Swan Pond was worn and narrow. My father was disappearing. She checked focus. Maybe a smudge on the lense. Spittle. This is what she saw. Then the treeline obscured her view. We skinny dipped. Bare ass. Cool. Big kids smoking cigarettes across the way. Marlboro. Keeping an eye on us. Plotting. Maybe. An omen. A warning sign. But where will you end up, I said. The moon, he said. Or heaven. Wherever.
STAY WHERE YOU ARE
Snow falling was flakes of old paint and our room at the Hot L Warren was cold. This is no way to live, my mother said. Then she gave me food stamps to use for her medicine at the Frontier Pharmacy on Main Street and Sugarloaf.
Bobby Popovic, behind the counter with the spots on his face and the wet hair said, No way. Tell her forget it, he said. Not this time. Not anymore.
She waited outside in the tan 1962 Chevy Bel Air that had a busted driver-side headlight and rust patches that were eating away at the car like an apricoty cancer. The night was dark and cold and the moon was a perfect Carl Yaz pop fly from summer. She watched through the glass door that had a cowbell on the handle that would ring when it opened. Bobby Popovic handed it back to me all rolled up like I’d had it in my pocket. Go on and beat it, kid, he said.
But she was waiting outside. I was going to be in trouble. She really needed her medicine this time and I didn’t have to look because I knew she was watch
ing from the car, leaning over the steering wheel, drumming the dashboard with her press-on fingernails, breathing short puffs you could see like her spirit slow-leaking.
I didn’t move from the black-speckled Formica countertop that came up to my chin, terribly aware that the only thing between me and her rage was the stretch of cigarette-scarred carpet that flanked the stools that lined the soda fountain. And the slightest indication of failure on my part would bring her in here for one of her scenes. So I didn’t move a muscle and the world around me stayed oblivious to my predicament. The smell of black coffee was so strong it triggered my other senses too. Kielbasa from Pekarski’s off 116 in Conway sizzled on the grill. Dutch Syska smoked a Swisher Sweet and ate a cheeseburger with pickled onions. The radio near the frappe machine played a polka from the station in Northampton. Fat Mike squirted ketchup onto steak-cut French fries one at a time. Moe Sadoski spit Beechnut chewing tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup and played cards by himself in the booth that was supposed to be for two or more. The toaster popped a couple slices of rye for Bubba Hubboch’s BLT. Pat Bismo under her chemical-blue beehive shook a can of Reddi-Wip with one hand and with the other poured a hot chocolate for Joey Hostrop, who drove the snow plow during storms. Then the red and white can hissed its final sweet kiss and Pat tossed it into the trash can near the cash register.
Billy, the owner, came from around back where I could hear It’s a Wonderful Life on the television, and he had on a big white shirt with short sleeves and big white buttons. He folded his furry arms across his belly, the back of them spotted with chalky barnacles that he picked at. His glasses dangled from his neck on a chain and had dandruff on the lenses. He held Bobby Popovic by the elbow and looked over at me and smiled but not nice. They spoke so that I could not hear them and he smiled at me again.
What you got there, Buster. Let me have a look, he said, and so I handed it to him all rolled up like I had it. He looked at it and squinted. Hmm, he said, putting eyes on me. That should be all right this time.
Bobby Popovic said, You crazy bastard, and he walked away mad.
Billy said he’d be right back and disappeared behind the shelves. He was humming Little Drummer Boy and I could only see part of his big white shirt so I took a Hershey’s bar that would give me a cavity from a box on the counter and put it in the front of my pants. He came back around and handed me a paper bag and he fixed his glasses so that he was looking over the top of them at me. He smiled like before. His stare was milky, a pair of cat’s-eye marbles. Tell her be careful and not too many at once, he said. He put a finger to his lips. Now shhhh, he said. You best not tell anybody, he said. He called me Buster again. This is the last time, he said.
She ate some right away in the car. Then at our room in the Hot L she told me I was her little man and she ate more medicine. She put all of them into her hand and she put all of them into her mouth.
That’s better, she said. You’re my little helper.
She washed them down with Cutty Sark from the green bottle with the yellow label and the pirate ship. She kept it in the bathtub. She put her head back. She drank some more and there was some on her chin in a white spot when she finished and I cleaned her up with a towel we’d stolen when we tried to live at the Howard Johnson’s off the 91 rotary in Greenfield.
That’s better, she said.
My mother rested her hand in my hair. She told me to put Fleetwood Mac on the record player. Then she was sleeping and I sat on the floor in the hall where the heat used to come through a vent. I ate the Hershey’s bar that I stole from the drugstore. The act of chewing was hard and nutty and unfamiliar, and the heat wasn’t coming through the vent because it never did anymore. She called out my name and then said something else. She did not open her eyes.
You were such my little helper, she said in a whisper. Little man. Medicine man.
Then she made an arcing motion with her arm like she was wiping away all the stars and from the dirty window overlooking the dead-end alley between the Hot L and the tannery the sky was a flat and empty black canvas but for a thumbprint smudge that had replaced the moon.
In the morning the record player was still going even though the music was finished. The needle ticked loudly like the second hand on a grandfather clock, only sporadic and full of static. Outside a northeast wind was a howling cold ghost that surrounded me. I closed my eyes against it and the sun and the glare from the snowbanks Joey Hostrop had sculpted from behind the wheel of his silver Ford F-250 all night long. And I told them from the payphone in front of Leo’s TV on South Main that she was still sleeping. What kind of medicine, they said. I read it to them from the label on the little brown container and it took me three times to say it before I said it just right and they knew what it was. They asked me my name and said, Stay where you are.
WATCH OUT, TOWNIE BOY
Jabber has the limo. He picks me up at six and we get chocolate frappes from the pharmacy to throw at the fags in Northampton. I tell him about my mother and he laughs so hard he craps himself a little bit. He pulls over onto the shoulder. We’re not downtown yet but there’s a kid with blue hair at the bus stop. Jabber rolls up slow and I stick my head out the window as though to ask for directions and the kid with blue hair comes closer and I smash my chocolate frappe point blank on his face, the container and everything. It scares him and he’s about to cry and Jabber guns the engine and we take off yelling all matter of redneck shit. I watch the kid getting smaller in my side mirror, cleaning up, probably actually crying now. Funny as hell to me, to us.
Fucking blue-haired faggot, Jabber says. He really has it in for the gays for some reason.
When we get by the church, he lets me drive so he can do one.
I see an older guy with tight jeans and a tight white alligator shirt with the collar flipped up and Jabber likes him right away for target practice. I stop at the red curb in front of a bar on Main Street called Fitzgerald’s. Jabber whistles like he would at a cute girl and the guy comes over and Jabber gets him good. Standing still, the guy looks as though he’s a melting statue at some wax museum, chocolate frappe dripping off his face in thin sheets. He starts hollering motherfucker this and motherfucker that, shaking his puny little fist, flipping us the bird.
We decide to hightail it since he’s making a scene.
The last thing either one of us needs is another brush with the cops.
Then the guy is in the rearview mirror, standing bowlegged in the middle of the street, furious, a bunch of his gay buddies pouring out of the bar to find out what happened to him.
It’s fucking hilarious.
Jabber laughs so hard he cries.
It’s almost embarrassing.
I almost feel bad.
Fucking tight-jeans-wearing faggot, Jabber says.
Then he has to get the limo back to Griswald’s Funeral Home because somebody died. He drops me at the Hot L, where I live upstairs in an apartment with my mother; she calls it a shit hole. She slings beers most evenings downstairs at the bar. But not tonight. Tonight she’s in jail for stabbing her boyfriend in the neck with a busted Old Crow bottle. I smoke her cigarettes and watch television. There is a trail of blood from the kitchenette to the front door where I guess Tiny made his escape. He’s over to Cooley Dick now. My mother barely missed an artery.
I call the hospital and he tells me he’s okay, relatively speaking. All things considered, he says.
I laugh.
A cunt hair to the left and I’d be a goner, he says.
Jesus.
Your fucking mom, he says.
I agree in principle and we share a laugh. He’s a good shit in my book. He’s been dating my mom for three months and although we started off a little shaky we’ve become real chums. He sells cars over to Cherry’s Used Auto in Ashfield and even promised to buy me a winter beater in November, when I’m old enough to drive. I don’t know that he’ll stay true especially if my mother gives him the oxygen, so I hope they can work things out at least u
ntil I turn sixteen and a half. He tells me they’re going to release him in the morning and then he’ll go to the bank and raise bail to get my mom out of Greenfield Correctional.
That’s the kind of dude he is, that’ll spring for a crazy broad after she cuts his jugular.
I sleep in my mother’s bed and the next day Jabber hauls a group of preppy kids to the roller skating rink at the new shopping mall in Hadley and then we swing by Whitmore’s for some beer. I have a fake ID. Richard Blake comes out from around back, where he lifts weights constantly. There’s rumors he’s on the juice and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. The guy is a fucking monster. His radio is blasting Bon Jovi singing “Dead or Alive.” He grunts and nods his head, gets me a suitcase of Bud from the walk-in fridge. We drink and drive around Amherst and try to chase down some UMass pussy but those bitches are too stuck-up. Jabber almost went to college on a football scholarship but his knee blew out and he didn’t have the grades. Mom tells me I should think about the Army for when I get out of high school but that’s two years away.
Two years is like forever.
A lot can happen in two fucking years.
My mom tells me crazy skips a generation so I don’t have anything to worry about. Out of the blue she says it, those are her exact words. Tiny spits whiskey through his nose and into his hand when he laughs at her statement, which feels to me like some sort of confession or apology.
Tiny has a big swath of gauze taped to the side of his neck, and he’s given up trying to shave around it, he’s given up trying to change the dressing daily. We’re sitting at a high round table in the Bloody Brook Bar. All the regulars are in there at that hour. Everybody is teasing my mother and calling her Jackie the Ripper and she’s taking it in stride, but Tiny turns red from embarrassment. I’m trying to bum a couple bucks off my mom so I can score some weed from Ty Mayfield. She’s out of her tits so it won’t be hard. I’m patient and listen to a drunken story or two. She goes to the shitter and Tiny digs in her purse, hands me a fistful of her tip money.