Settright Road

by Jon Boilard

  Don’t spend it all in one place, he says. Like he’s some kind of big shot all of a sudden. It’s always easier to be generous with somebody else’s dough, and I know he just wants to lose me so they can get romantic.

  I meet Ty in the alley next to Rogers and Brooks and he sells me a dime bag. As I’m about to hand him the cash, Jabber sneaks up behind him and cracks him on top of the head with a length of pipe, making a sickening hollow sound at the point of contact.

  What the fuck, I say.

  That’s exactly the kind of shit Jabber pulls sometimes. The kind of shit that’ll come back to haunt us because Ty’s older brother is a real old-school psycho, just out of Cedar Junction after a long stretch. Ty falls down unconscious and Jabber wants to hit him again but I make him stop so we don’t do a fucking murder. That would be some really serious shit.

  We just leave Ty there, a halo of black blood forming around his head.

  Did you fucking hear that, Jabber says.

  Back in the stretch limo Jabber is slamming his open hand on the dashboard trying to recreate the sound of the pipe hitting Ty’s skull, which is impossible because it was so perfect when it happened. He’s pretty amped up and so I roll a fat one quick to dial his adrenaline down; he can get out of control if I don’t watch out. We stop in a cornfield to get high. Then there’s a big bonfire at Hoosac’s. We scoop up a couple townie skanks. Jabber whales on Mary Zablonski in the backseat while the Blow Job Queen earns her nickname up front with me.

  Jabber calls Mary a whore once he’s finished with her.

  When he says whore he drags it out in a funny way so it rhymes with tour.

  You’re a dirty fucking whoooore, he says.

  I laugh my ass off, he zips his pants, and she cries. The Blow Job Queen comes to her friend’s defense but with a handle like that she doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Then we take them to the BP Diner in Whately for biscuits and gravy. Mary pays the tab. She comes from money, her father owns the plastics factory. Her family thinks they’re better than everybody. Then the Blow Job Queen puts quarters in the jukebox so I can listen to some Hank Junior. We dance around the place like assholes until Jimmy Duck emerges from the kitchen and tosses us out.

  Fuck that guy, Jabber says outside.

  Yeah, fuck the Duck, I say, trying to make him laugh.

  The main problem with Jabber is he doesn’t have an off switch.

  We’re standing in the parking lot. It rained some and there are puddles. The girls are shivering. I put my hands in my pockets. Jabber wants to go get the length of pipe from the trunk so he can teach Jimmy Duck a lesson too but I talk him down. It’s not worth it, I say. He probably called the cops already, I say. We’ll see him around town and he’ll get what’s coming. That kind of happy bullshit. People are watching us through the windows now. Jabber enjoys an audience. We pile into the limo and he squeals the tires and fishtails onto 5 and 10.

  Fuck those motherfucking Polacks, Jabber says.

  Mary smiles and sits right up against him like they’re an old married couple.

  Then I visit my mother over to the VFW. Tiny is there too, drinking brown booze for free and playing cards for coins with Robert Hawk Wilson and Boho. I eat a bowl of stale popcorn from the machine in the corner. Mom takes a cigarette break and sits down with me. She’s been working double shifts to pay off all the fines related to the domestic battery charge. She takes her shoes off and rubs her yellow blistered feet. The ashes build up on the end of her Marlboro. My mother looks at me and doesn’t say anything for a long time and that is never a good sign.

  Hey, shit for brains, she finally says.

  I try to think of what she might be pissed about.

  Just like your old man, she says. That’s supposed to be a hint but covers a lot of ground. I don’t know what she’s heard.

  You think I’m not gone to hear about all the wrong things you do, she says.

  I play dumb some more and stick a handful of that nasty popcorn in my mouth.

  That’s exactly how your father started and look where he ended up, she says, talking about prison, of course. After a few minutes she says, I’m sorry how things turned out, and sighs through a face full of smoke. How you turned out, she says. I did the best I could.

  What a lie. My mother is a fucking liar. Lying to herself and to me. But I don’t say anything. What the fuck I’m supposed to say to that. She means my father going away like he did. Me coming up without a role model, blah blah blah. All that silly nonsense. But I think I turned out just fine all things considered. I shrug and stare at the crumbs and burned kernels in my bowl. Lick the tip of my finger and dab at them, showing her that I’m bored out of my mind. Somebody at the bar calls her name and she tells him to fuck off and puts on her shoes. Stabs her cigarette into the overstuffed ashtray, asks me if I want any more popcorn.

  Jabber does a couple three funerals. Then he takes some Northfield Mount Herman kids to Interskate 91. He tells me he gets to keep the limo overnight because he has to make a run to Bradley Airport wicked early in the morning. We hop onto 116. Jabber looks straight ahead and keeps his can of beer down when a statie pulls up alongside us at a red light. I keep mine down too. The fat fucking no-neck trooper eyeballing us, sizing us up for sure.

  I smell bacon, I say.

  Jabber laughs at a joke that never gets old.

  The light turns green and the statie follows us close until around Bub’s Bar-B-Q. Then he accelerates with blue gumballs flashing and is long gone in a matter of seconds.

  We play a couple hands of poker with Richard Wickline and Chris Powers in the booth at the pharmacy. Alice brings us strawberry frappes and a bowl of French fries. Jabber wins two dollars and we leave it on the table and go next door to the packy. Big Ben sneaks us a twelver of tall boys out the back. He calls us the Future Fuckups of America. Jabber tells him to kiss our hairy asses. Then there are a couple nip-size bottles of Jack Daniel’s in the console bar in the white stretch. We drink those too. Jabber puts the AC on full blast and drives down Long Plain Road, on to Whately Road parallel to the Connecticut River that stinks and then he pulls off into some of Walter Sadoski’s corn that must be nine feet tall.

  We listen to Def Leppard singing “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and pound some beers.

  Jabber takes two more out of the cooler. These fuckers are going down good, he says. We sit there with the windows up and the engine idling, the AC, the loud music. What should we do now, Jabber says in between songs, then he gives me his goofy look that always makes me nervous.

  I tell him let’s ride into Hamp so we can make fun of the hippies and the homos.

  That snaps him out of it. All right, he says. He slaps the steering wheel with his open hand. What the fuck, he says. It’s something to do. Better than working for a living. He hits me on the arm and his knuckles are hard and flat from punching the heavy bag he keeps chained to a crossbeam in his father’s garage. When he can’t sleep at night he’ll jump rope and smack that thing for hours.

  Jabber revs the engine and follows FarmAll tractor tracks past row after row of corn. The river is a blue gash that keeps Stillwater from spilling down Sunsick Mountain and into the center of Bucktown. A couple busloads of Puerto Ricans from Holyoke and West Springfield are picking strawberries at Nourse Farms for $2.50 an hour. They wear white T-shirts wrapped around their heads or hanging from the backs of their pants. A few of them look at us and cough at the dirt the limo kicks up. They’ll wander into town on payday and we’ll have to fuck them up for taking away our summer jobs. Last year Jabber made two hundred bucks a week picking tobacco, it pisses him off just thinking about it. Fucking spics, he says. Then the back tires screech onto the blacktop and round brown flies spread their kamikaze guts on the windshield.

  Rich kids from New York and California come to Franklin County every autumn for the fancy schools. Millionaire parents wanting their babies safe and away from the dangers of big cities. That’s all fine and good, but it’s clear they look
down their noses at people like us.

  People who live here by default.

  We’re not real to them. We don’t seem to matter much. As though we’re fucking invisible.

  A couple girls are smoking cigarettes, sitting in the grass in front of the used record store.

  I can tell they’re not local. I can always tell.

  We pull up against the curb.

  Hey there, ladies, Jabber says.

  They look at us and each other and giggle. Jabber tells them to come for a ride. So just like that they climb in back and the pretty one asks right off what we have for them to drink.

  Jabber laughs and shifts into drive.

  Then the pretty one looks at me. How come you get this fancy car with a driver, she says.

  What a fucking retard.

  You somebody famous, she says.

  I tell her I’m going to be famous someday. I tell her my daddy set up a trust fund. I tell her Jabber is my bodyguard and he knows karate and he has a black belt and always packs heat. I tell her I’m at UMass studying to be an astronaut—just taking up space. Jabber laughs and adjusts the rearview mirror and the girls look at each other and giggle some more. They know I’m full of shit but they play along. It’s make-believe time. They know we’ll say anything to get into their panties and we know they’re slumming and everybody wants the same thing in the end.

  Jabber buys a couple four-packs of wine coolers at Watroba’s. The pretty one rides shotgun and I stay in back with the other one who looks better up close. She smells nice too. She doesn’t smell like any girl I’ve ever known. I tell her so and she says I’m sweet. Her name is Abby and they’re freshmen at Smith College. It’s starting to get dark and Jabber drives to the maze, a network of tall hedges with dead ends and turnarounds. It’s a well-known make-out spot. We park the car. I know the course by heart but don’t admit it and Abby holds my leather belt so I don’t lose her. We get to the middle and she lets me kiss her and she tastes like cherry-flavor Lifesavers. We sit under the orange moon and touch each other outside our clothes a little bit and she asks me if I really go to UMass. I confess that I’m not even old enough yet and she tells me I sure seem old enough. I ask what she means by that and she says I have an old spirit.

  She says it with a certain amount of reverence.

  She says some people get old before their time because of what they experience at an early age. It could be anger or pain or frustration. The deep feeling that they have been wronged in some horrible fashion. It could be that they truly were abused or neglected when they were children, in a vulnerable state. So what happens is they basically skip past their childhood. She calls these people Old Souls. It sounds like she’s reciting something you can learn in a book. It sounds clinical.

  She doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. Not really. Not yet.

  I tell her maybe that’s true about what happens. And that if it doesn’t fucking kill you, well, you know the rest.

  She giggles but not the same as before. She senses that something has suddenly changed in me. That I can’t swallow my anger down like a bitter pill any longer.

  Her pretty friend calls out but I know Jabber will keep her busy and they won’t interrupt me. Fat black crickets chirp like sentries protecting us. Then she grabs onto my wrist when I’m messing with the small white buttons of her blouse and she tells me that I have all that oldness but also the impatient hands of a high school boy. Abby or whatever her real name is wants to keep on talking but I’m all done talking. I hold her arms together behind her head with my left hand. She says she doesn’t want to do it, but that’s a fucking lie. And I’m tired of all the lies.

  DAMN THE WIND

  Gramps said it was a hurricane. We used candles that were in pickle jars and almost smelled like purple grapes. We used a transistor radio, and the ocean was loud and white and came into the yard of the house on Raymond Street. The wind was a rowdy bully too. It whooped and knocked down trees and telephone wires and pushed white sailboats onto their sides in Kettle Cove, smashed them on the rocks along the beach in front of the Bath and Tennis Club where the rich kids went. Gramps let me take a flashlight to bed because my owl nightlight didn’t work from the storm. He told me the flashlight was for emergencies, and he told me my mother had a screw loose. That’s why they’ve got her locked up, he said. They should throw away the fucking key, he said. You shouldn’t listen to any of her nonsense, he said.

  I listened to the wind, and the unbreakable rain that was popcorn on my window. To the ocean that sounded like gunfire. I didn’t sleep for fear of it and all the rest. Gramps didn’t sleep either for his own private reasons and in the morning his eyeballs were maraschino cherries floating in grenadine and he used an iron garden rake to knock wires off the roof. The alcoholic watched from the porch. She always watched everything. She wore a blue raincoat and a blue rain hat. She had a whiskey bitter in her good hand. Be careful, she said. Careful careful careful. He ignored her and slapped at the wires that were fat and patient snakes.

  Gramps didn’t talk to the alcoholic because he was mad about the wind and the rain and the ocean coming into the yard. He was mad about the maple trees that were sideways in front of the house. The trees are dead, he said. God and the trees are dead. I had on a rubber coat and the alcoholic buttoned it up to my neck. The wind pushed sand and rain against me and I could hear the sharp shards of them on my coat and feel them on my face and legs like a million bee stings. I waved at the alcoholic up on the porch and she waved her drink at me. She had her free hand on the collar of her blue raincoat and she shrugged and shivered. Then she watched Gramps. She took a drink. Before the stroke in the basement that Gramps called a stroke of bad luck, she liked to say she loved me to death. Now all she could muster was Love love love.

  Gramps was big and wet. He finally got the wires off the roof. Watch out, he said. For Christ sakes watch out, he told me. He put the garden rake in the shed where he kept the riding lawn mower and his tools. I followed him around but he didn’t talk to me because he cursed at the wind and the rain. Goddamn the wind, he said. Goddamn rain. Your mother is filling everybody’s head with shit, he said. I never touched her. Not like that, he said. You believe me, don’t you.

  The ocean was not white anymore. It was not in the yard anymore. Pieces of sailboats were everywhere. Lobster traps were busted, misshapen. Neighbors in ponchos and teenagers with surfboards stood on the cement wall like curious birds and looked up at the sky that was a black bruise from the flat part of an open hand. Waves ominous and rolling. Seagulls floated on chunks of wood and old unhitched buoys with identification numbers burned onto them.

  Gramps smelled like gasoline and skunk cabbage and he cut the trees in the yard with a chainsaw from the shed. He wore glasses to keep the yellow dust out of his eyes. He wore waxy plugs to keep the noise out of his ears. There was a cigarette stuck in his face where his mouth was so thin it looked like it was nothing but a tear in his flesh. I followed him. I put my fingers in my ears and slammed my eyes shut. He told me to get back. For Christ sakes get back, he said. You’re just like your goddamn mother. She never heeded me either.

  The chainsaw was a screaming yellow devil in his hands. The alcoholic was on the porch with the tripod telescope to look at the tugboats and the tankers going into port. Careful, she said. Careful careful careful. Gramps didn’t pay her any mind and he cut the trees with the chainsaw and I put my fingers in my ears. The alcoholic put her fingers in her ears too and she placed her drink on the railing to do it. Then she finished it and shrunk specter-like into the dark doorway.

  After dinner the lights worked and the television worked and Gramps said the hurricane went up the coast. He said that the other cape would get hit pretty hard too. Come over here, boy, he said. He wasn’t mad anymore and I sat in his lap. He let me hold his tall can of beer and it was cold. He drank it from a mug he ran under the tap and stored in the icebox. The alcoholic looked outside toward Lexington Avenue and the beau
ty parlor and made a clicking noise with her tongue and said, Storm storm storm. Then they fell asleep in their chairs with the television.

  My nightlight that was an owl worked again too. It was orange and it had black eyes and it leered with a black clown mouth. I got under my blanket where it was dark and warm and maybe safe but there was some sand from the storm on my sheets and it scratched me. Then Gramps came into my room because I heard him on the floor. And the hinges of the door squeaked like the significant sobs of summer crickets that crunched like nuts when you walked on them. Don’t be afraid now, boy, Gramps said. It’s nothing but a little squall, he said. Then he shuddered like a busted Coke machine and put his fat face in mine and it was so red I thought it was going to pop.

  MAIN STREET INCIDENT

  Fog fell like a dead dog on Jonesy. He was standing in front of the Hot L waiting for anybody to sneak him in so he could shoot some stick. I tapped my horn and he looked up and then got into my 1967 Mustang. We parked in the alley between the twenty-four-hour coin-operated laundry and Boron’s Market and drank a couple long-neck Budweiser beers I had on ice in a five-gallon pail in the backseat. He showed me how his hands and forearms and neck were brown and sticky from picking tobacco all day down to Smiaroski’s farm. He said it was nigger work and that old man Smiaroski was a senile prick. Then we scrapped with a couple yahoos who came out of the bar shoving each other around and across Main Street, right into my brand-new paint job. Candy-apple red. I only broke an empty bottle on the one and he took off running, but Jonesy really snapped and knocked the other dude’s teeth out against the cement curb.

  Can you believe that shit, I said.