by Jon Pineda
I look back at the Gran Torino. It sits on warped gray cinder blocks. My cobbled-together dirt bike, what my father calls a rice burner, leans against the station wagon’s driver’s-side door and holds down flush one end of a blue tarp. Marianne Moore won’t leave my side now.
“Go on,” I say, but she stares at me like I’m crazy.
* * *
Behind the boathouse is an offshoot of the river. It’s more an inlet with things narrowing. It was once used as a put-in for boats, back when the town was filled with watermen and people who made their living fishing the spotted bottom of the sound. Dox used to joke that there was nothing left in the river to catch. We laughed; my father joined in until Dox needed to say, “Pearl, when your mother was a girl and visited here, she would—” but he quickly stopped himself.
I wanted someone to talk about her. “She would what?” I said.
“Nothing, honey,” Dox said. “Forget I brought it up.”
I grinned because I thought he was about to tell a joke.
“She would what, Dox?”
But no one would answer me.
* * *
A side of the back porch hangs near the water. I sit on the bowed railing and start plucking feathers off the duck. I’m dropping them. They eventually catch on the inlet’s film. I could burn the feathers off if I wanted, I suppose. It’s better this way. I smile at the thought of the boy. I can’t believe he actually came here to see me. Me.
I pull at the feathers like they’re petals on a flower.
MY FATHER SAUNTERS OUT BACK. He splits wood. It’s his peace offering. He gathers up a portion of the cord and carries the bundle inside to get the stove going. His feet must feel better. I’m glad for him.
I crouch near the spigot of the cistern and wash the rest of the clingy down from the duck’s rubbery body. Dox brings over an empty paint can filled with chicken of the woods he’s found, and I wash those, too. I comb flecks of dirt from the flame-colored fungus.
“You already fish out the heartache?” Dox says. That’s his word for buckshot.
I run my hand over the side of the bird that’s been punctured and dig my fingers in for the flattened metal bits. I can’t get to them, so Dox takes out his Old Timer pocketknife and runs it under water before performing fast surgery.
There aren’t many holes, and he comments on this, which means I was lucky to even hit the thing. But I’ll take it. It’s dinner for now.
AFTER OUR MEAL, DOX AND FRITTER commandeer the pickup. Father and son together again. They say there’s a stash of plywood they want to nab. I know my father’s thinking we could use it to fix the side of the house that’s sagging. I’d use the surplus for a second boat, since the one Dox keeps is really more river than wood. My vote, though, doesn’t count.
* * *
The stash is in a new lot, in one of the large housing developments closer to town. With it getting dark, Dox and Fritter feel like it’s either now or never. If they wait any longer, the sheets will be nailed up permanently.
“Then,” Fritter says, “it’ll be a bitch to take apart.”
* * *
Back when we first moved here, I was twelve and barely reached my father’s chin. We had lost our home by then. My mother had gone away that summer, and my father, shortly afterward, lost his tenure at the college. The few things we managed to salvage from our home we stuffed into the Gran Torino and hit the road. Marianne Moore, of course, was one of them.
* * *
Our arrival here was akin to a homecoming. Dox took one look at me and said, “I know you already.” He said he could see my mother before he could see me. All to say, if my father and I wanted, we should stay. I spent that same evening dancing on the pier.
I had even taken off my shirt like the others and grabbed at my smidge of a belly and hula-ed my way back and forth, accompanied by Dox’s drunken rendition of “Tiny Bubbles.” Dox and Fritter were three sheets to the wind, with my father at the helm of the invisible boat.
* * *
The men were whistling like bullets. They left holes in the air for me to fill. I danced within the torn space of their drunkenness. I didn’t care that I was topless. My tan chest was flat like a block of ice. The air was one warm breath belonging to another world.
It wanted to eat me up. I wanted it to eat me up.
“Enchantée,” my father crowed. He had not given up on learning French. I turned away from them all. My mother’s memory fell into a pile of shadows next to my shirt. I shook my chest for the river filled with slick bullheads and tricky moccasins. I held my arms out, all sacrificial-like, shaking every limb. The tips of my nipples, tiny as screws, felt stripped and flush against my skin.
* * *
It was in one of the motels where we stayed before coming to the boathouse. There was a small pool where I swam. I remember there was this elderly man, too. He came out to sit in a deck chair. He pretended to check his phone, but I knew he was filming me.
I doggie-paddled and put my face in the water. Sometimes I went under completely for the pennies I dropped. I collected them one by one. When I surfaced, the chlorine would sting my nose and I would cough. I played it up. I pretended I was younger than I was. I thought if he could see me this way, struggling and still a child, then maybe he’d stop what he was doing.
He never asked me if I was all right.
* * *
I kept staring up at the balcony. Marianne Moore barked. She was trying to get my father’s attention, but he was asleep in the room. If I’m being precise, he wasn’t asleep exactly. He was inebriated.
The elderly man wore a T-shirt that read WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA. I wondered if I reminded him of someone. Maybe I was a granddaughter who lived on the other side of the country, someone he rarely saw.
* * *
On the pier, I kept at hula dancing. I smiled until I looked back to find my father’s face had dropped to mostly jowls. He regarded me through a squint. I thought he was trying to summon a yell, having to work himself up to do so. I held my arms out and kept at my shaking, pretending I was this happy, that I could be this child for him. Dox and Fritter were both conjuring Don Ho, goading me on, while my father sat off to the edge of us bewildered, as if he were a stranger that had simply happened upon our revelry. As if he had nothing to do with the creation of this girl before him.
SOME DAYS IT’S ONLY a few boiled eggs split four ways. Other days it’s a big dandelion salad and fried bullhead catfish netted fresh from the sound. Fritter builds traps for crayfish, too. We gather and gather, and still, it never seems like it’s enough.
* * *
I have to help Fritter set and empty the traps now because his legs sink the moment he takes the first step in the water. He’s gotten stuck more than once in the soft mud near the banks. Once we had to tie a rope around him and then tie the other end to the rear bumper of the pickup. Dox was crying the whole time because he thought my father was going to hit the gas and pull half of Fritter’s body off and leave the rest poking out of the mud.
* * *
Other days there’s simply no food. I’ve found you can eat the silence that grows inside a house. It gets so quiet I can hear everyone barely breathing, and that’s a feast, for sure.
* * *
I used to spy on Fritter until I realized all he ever did was paint the same thing over and over. Dox says Fritter is working on a mural, but the landscape has no faces or figures, none that I’ve been able to see. It’s just a solid wall of black paint rising in increments like a river from the buckled floor of his room.
Fritter takes an empty rifle cartridge, the long-range kind he used to shoot during his tours, and holds it flush with the wall. Above it he paints a thin black line. Each line is the exact length of the bullet casing. On his knees, he works his way from wall to wall.
I THINK OF SOMETHING MY mother once told me, when she was explaining a math problem. I didn’t know it then, but she was using Zeno’s dichotomy paradox as an example.
“Pearl, go to one end of the room and stand there.”
I did it.
“Okay,” my mother said as she walked to the opposite end, directly across from me. “I want you to try and reach me. But here’s the catch. You can only go half the distance toward me with each attempt. Make sense?”
“No.”
We both laughed.
“Come this way,” she said, like I was in the deep end of a pool again and trying to reach her at the edge. “Now stop there.”
I stood halfway from where I had just been. I studied the invisible line from where I was now to where she still was.
“Now go again.”
I immediately walked halfway closer and stopped. “I’m almost there.” I smiled.
“Almost. Go halfway from there.”
I did it and was so close. I wanted to jump into her arms. “I can almost reach you.”
“Right, but here’s where it gets tricky. You can only go half the distance each time.”
I looked down at my feet and shuffled them in place.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes.”
“What did I say?”
“You said I can only go half the distance.”
“Good.”
I stopped for a moment and studied her face. It was so serious, like she wanted to tell me something important.
“I’ll never reach you.”
She smiled. “Good girl. You’re right. You’ll never reach me.”
I WAS CARRYING ONE OF Fritter’s empty paint cans I had repurposed into a pail the first time I met Main Boy. He was standing in front a large FOR SALE sign in an open field not even a quarter mile from where we were staying. The pail was already half-filled with cattail roots, and I was going to boil them down until their middles softened, so I could put them in a stew for Dox with whatever Fritter and I yanked from the traps that day.
I crossed a gully grown over with pampas grass and followed a zigzagging line of pines. Wild onions would have been a nice accompaniment, but none were to be found. The trees eventually thinned near the edge of a fallow field. I remember spotting Main Boy where he was and thinking I was a safe distance, like I didn’t exist yet in his mind.
Main Boy remained planted in the middle of the field. He leaned against his glittery red golf cart. Once he saw me, though, he started waving and yelling to get my attention. I went from being invisible to something that could be touched. My heart shook like a fish in a net. Perhaps this is why I panicked and ran away. I didn’t feel like being gutted alive.
* * *
At one point, I dropped the pail and didn’t go back for it. Later, only when the field was empty and dark, I scavenged the FOR SALE sign. No one needed to be reminded the world could be bought.
* * *
I asked my father if the precise term for what we were was squatters. He laughed and said, “God no, Pearl, we’re all artists here.” Then he sat quietly for a moment. He later made the following amendment: “The truth is everyone is a squatter. It’s all borrowed. These bodies. Our names. We don’t give them back until we’ve fucked them up properly.” He nodded, as if this were the final word on the matter, as if he had done his parental duty.
* * *
Main Boy’s real name is Mason Boyd, but I can’t bring myself to call him that. He’s Main Boy. It’s meaningless. It fits him perfectly. He wanted to know if I lived nearby, and I shook my head and wouldn’t speak. I wanted him to think I was feral. He asked me if I was going to start high school in the fall, and I grunted, which made us both laugh. He pulled his golf cart alongside me as I picked dandelions, pulling them from their roots while saving their buttery-yellow heads.
He said that he was the president of a club that has a pretty big Web presence. That was supposed to mean something. They post lots of videos they’ve shot themselves. He said I should subscribe to it, as if I could. I told him no thanks. It is only pranking videos now, but they want to expand into videos that teach people how to survive in the wilderness. I ask him what wilderness is left, and he says plenty.
* * *
He and his friends think the world is going to get to a point where it will simply fall apart, where we won’t have all the amenities we’re used to. I smile at the word amenities. I ask him what their club is called, but he says it doesn’t have an official name. Because it doesn’t have an official name, I tell him they should call themselves Flies. He doesn’t like that idea. He doesn’t think it would look good on a T-shirt.
* * *
All boys are flies at some point in their lives. Even my father, even sweet Dox, though I don’t hold it against either of them. Boys can’t help being flies, just like some girls can’t help pulling off their wings so the flies will spend their lives scurrying in circles.
* * *
Flies because they talk a lot of shit and love it, especially Main Boy. He might be the biggest prankster of them all. Flies because in the dictionary my father owns, a group of flies is called a business. I wish I were making that up. I should refer to their club as a business, but that wouldn’t be precise. They are flies. Their business is talking shit and shooting things, though not necessarily in that order.
* * *
Mostly in the evenings, the flies go out and riddle road signs with buckshot, with shotguns they borrow from polished walnut-and-stained-glass gun cases. The flies talk about going over there, like it’s a real place. They should meet Fritter. That would be something. They yammer on about how many they would shoot. They can’t wait to leave this town. It’s like they’re on a crash course they think they’re going to survive. Their voices stick together and build into something that’s just a larger pile of stank. Fritter could set them straight, I bet, if only he’d allow himself to say more.
* * *
Up before my father and the others, I went for a walk near the state road. Around the bottoms of old fence posts were shredded labels of High Life. The glass was scattered like seed. The flies say it’s all a joke, but then say they want to be ready for an attack, like it’s all coming here, to our little speck of the world. It makes me sad, the way they go on. The world doesn’t care about us as much as we think it does.
“Target practice now, so it won’t be practice later,” the flies say.
“Okeydokey,” I tell Main Boy.
* * *
When I hear this kind of talk, I feel like I’m eavesdropping on their magenta-haired fathers who take heart medicine. Or to those that pass on it so their mistresses can feed them blue diamond-shaped pills. When the flies boast, there’s even that same hesitation, like they’re trying to swallow it all down.
“COME ON, PEARL,” Main Boy says.
“Where are we going?”
“Come get lost with us.”
He wants me to hang out, to go to at least one meeting. He says I can help them make more videos. I could be Wendy in this Lost Boys act of theirs.
“Come on,” Main Boy says. “They’re gonna love you.”
“Who’s going to love me?”
“Everyone.”
I don’t care about that. I don’t care about that at all.
He gives me a thumbs-up, like he can read my mind, too.
“What?”
He doesn’t answer.
He tries to reach out. I brush his hand away, but he keeps at it until he rests his thumb against my bottom lip. He must think I’m stupid. If I were wild, his thumb would be gone by now.
“You could be pretty hot, if you wanted,” he says. “Just saying.”
I lean back. He keeps his fist pressed in the air, like there’s a thick wall of glass between us. I see his lips moving, but I can’t make out what he’s saying. I feel like making a fist so I can break this fucking glass.
* * *
Evenings I trace the horizon with my fingertip. It’s just a line where the river and the sky meet. Beyond this river is the sound, and beyond the sound is the ocean. Everything is barely holding on to the n
ext thing. That’s what I really want to tell Main Boy. Everything is barely holding on.
* * *
Mostly there’s only quiet out here, even when Dox is noodling on the cigar-box guitar, his slide fashioned out of a sliced wine bottleneck. He keeps at a song until he stops. He sometimes finishes what he starts, and sometimes he doesn’t. It’s an unspoken rule.
My mother used to say that poems were never finished, that they were only abandoned. I like to take some things my mother said and flip them on their head. For instance, I think all abandoned things are poems. In this way, if this place where we live together is truly abandoned, then we are living inside a poem.
* * *
My father says I’m fifteen going on fifty.
MAIN BOY HAS A BRIGHT red plumber’s wrench he uses like a gavel. He bangs the side of his golf cart, rattles one of the metal poles that holds up the glittery roof. Some of the shotguns in the back jostle.
“Order,” he says. “Order!”
We’re in a shed the groundskeeper emptied out so they could play pretend.
The flies, all tall white boys in buttoned-up polos and khaki jogger pants, are poking each other in the ribs. I feel like I’m behind the scenes of some high-end clothing-catalog shoot where the models are taking a quick break. I wish they’d all just shut up and hold their poses again. I like them better when they don’t talk, when I don’t know what’s in their heads.
* * *
Main Boy goes through the names of the other flies—Clint, Reese, Everett, Wythe—and in response every one of them shouts, “Here!”—except for Wythe, who whispers through a permanent smirk, “Present,” and that garners a laugh.
If they were in a lineup, I wouldn’t be able to pick them out, except for Main Boy and Wythe. Main Boy has tangled towhead hair. Dox is right. Main Boy does look like a young Andy Warhol. Wythe has the same clothes-hanger body, but his hair is shaved into a black crew cut, a thick smudge of ink.