Martin

by George A. Romero

  “Oh, good,” he replied happily. “Oh, that will be good. I never get letters.”

  “I know, Martin,” she said distractedly, checking her watch. “I know.”

  She reached out for his face but he recoiled slightly, unaccustomed to spontaneous human affection. Then he relaxed and let her touch him. She stroked his white, pasty skin and let her hand run lightly through his tousled hair.

  “The things . . . the things that Cuda believes about you . . . you know what I’m talking about?”

  He nodded, wanting her to continue to stroke him. It felt so good.

  “Those things . . . are . . . ,” she searched for the proper words, “those are old beliefs. This family has passed them on and passed them on. God knows what that’s done to you. Maybe that’s why you’re the way you are . . .”

  “Oh, no, I’ve always been this way,” Martin said innocently. “I’ve always had the sickness. They just think it’s magic. They think I’m a ghost.”

  Christina’s brow furrowed as she realized his total unawareness of his plight, and she felt a deep, heart-rending pity for the confused man-child. She fondled the back of his neck warmly.

  “Martin,” she said forthrightly. “I’m going to help you somehow. I’m going to talk to some people. You need help. Grandfather needs help. I can’t let this go on.” She looked deep into his eyes. A sense of confidence was overcoming her, and she felt that her decision to leave would not only benefit her life but the lives of Martin and Cuda as well.

  And Martin, too, felt a new, growing sense of pride inside of him. He had Mrs. Santini, and he was beginning to talk to other people, too. He could see a brighter future on the horizon for him in Braddock.

  “I think it’s better now,” he said selfassuredly. “I feel better. I have friends now.”

  Christina was surprised by this new demeanor. Gone was the shy, reticent young man she had first encountered. “At last, he’s joining the human race,” she thought with satisfaction.

  “I’ll let you know where I am,” she told him. “If you need me, you can call. Or you can even just come. I’ll pay for it. I’m going to help you, Martin.”

  “No,” he said sadly. “You’ll forget about me.”

  “No,” she shook her head. “No, I won’t. Why do you think I’ll forget you?”

  “Because you’re going away,” he explained with such simplistic wisdom that it stopped Christina in her tracks. “People go away so they can forget where they were.”

  “I won’t forget. I won’t forget,” she said as if convincing herself. “You’ll see. I’ll tell you where I am . . .”

  Feeling a great sadness well up inside her, Christina grabbed her suitcases and despite their weight rushed down the stairs. She deposited her suitcases near the front door and then returned to the kitchen entrance. Cuda was sitting at the table, preoccupied with eating his smoked fish. She watched his back as he sat still, stubbornly refusing to recognize her presence. He took a big bite out of the fish and then pulled a bone from his mouth, all the while moving with conspicuously slow gestures, as if taunting Christina with his disinterest. Christina took one last look at the stooped but still proud shoulders, turned on her heel, and walked quietly and quickly down the hallway toward her suitcases. Snatching them up, she charged out the door. Martin dashed to the landing window and watched as Arthur helped the girl with her suitcases. Then the husky laborer slammed the car trunk closed and moved his bulk behind the wheel. As he started the engine, Christina paused before getting in on the passenger side, and took one last look at the house that held many memories. She sighed a silent good-bye with mixed emotions.

  She seated herself in the car quickly and slammed the door shut. The old Chevrolet roared loudly down the deathly quiet old street, kicking up dust as it tore away.

  Christina sat staring straight ahead. “I hope I made the right decision,” she thought to herself as Arthur placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Anything will be better . . .” she speculated, as they drove toward the highway entrance.

  Martin watched the dust rise and settle for a long time after the car pulled away. He didn’t want to believe that she had left, but he could see the half-opened and overturned drawers that littered her empty room.

  “Martin,” called a familiar voice. Somehow the tone was less strident. “Will you finish your breakfast?” The sounds reverberated in the empty hallway, emphasizing the fact that the two men were now alone together. There would be no more light steps on the stairway in the evening calling Martin down to supper, no more sweet smell in the bathroom after she had finished dressing, no more good cooking smells and lovingly prepared meals. And no more friendly gestures and warm words.

  A little clock chimed as Martin dragged himself down the stairs. In the kitchen, he joined the old man at the table. Cuda was still gnawing at his fish, as if the events of the past few minutes had no effect on him at all. He pulled the little bones of the fish skeleton out of his mouth delicately. Martin nibbled unenthusiastically at a cold muffin.

  “Well,” Cuda finally said into the heavy silence. The roar of the car was still ringing in Martin’s ears.

  “Well,” the old man said calmly, “no more of Christina’s cooking, you know. No more washing, cleaning.” The old man continued his eating and resisted returning the searching look in Martin’s eyes. He wiped his mouth on a napkin and took noisy sips from his strong coffee. Then he pulled a large lemon peel over his teeth, using the rind to brush away any food particles which clung to them.

  His movements were so casual and studied that Martin had to think twice about the fact of Christina’s leaving. He had never seen the old man have such control.

  “I haven’t enough money to have someone come in,” Cuda continued. “I will cook. The rest, you will learn to do.”

  After he finished cleaning his teeth, he wiped his hands once more on the napkin and finally peered into Martin’s questioning eyes. The old man glared at him as if he were facing off for a gunfight. A strange feeling came over Martin, and he felt a sudden coldness enter the room.

  “Better for us to be alone, anyway,” the old man pronounced harshly. “It will be much easier for us . . . being alone.”

  He gave Martin a long cold stare and then pushed himself away from the table. Picking up his dirty dishes, he walked over to the kitchen sink and placed them inside quietly. Peering over his shoulder, he took another long hard look at the young man and then started toward the hallway. Martin thought he noticed a particularly sadistic glint in the old man’s eye.

  • • •

  Martin was walking through town on his way to make the last delivery. He was thinking of his conversation with the radio man. “All you have to do is stay calm,” he had told him. “Things work out. No matter where you are. There’s always something you can find to do. Things are never as bad as they seem. People give up too easy.”

  On his way he wandered by the auto compactor, and Martin noticed that the machine was still busy devouring the wrecked cars. The plant moved forward, the hole created by Arthur’s leaving soon filled by another. His name was now just a memory to his co-workers who battled with time’s erosion of their ranks.

  On Commercial Street, Martin paused to watch a group of workmen boarding up a store. It joined the others on the block with their vacant windows and ransacked insides. The old men and women of the town trudged on regardless, scarred by too many departures and farewells to notice one more. The town struggled against extinction, but the struggle was in vain. It should have saved its energies for the last throes of death.

  But Martin didn’t focus on the negative aspects of his walk. He was too excited to think about bad things. He was on his way to see her.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” she said, a pouting smile on her face as she opened the door for him. “It’s so late.”

  “I brought yours last,” he told her tenderly. “Otherwise I couldn’t stay.”

  Mrs. Santini looked at him fo
ndly. She had no recollection of their last meeting’s unhappy parting. “How ’bout we go for a ride somewhere?” she asked him seductively, with a bump and grind of her hips.

  After she put the meat order into the refrigerator, they walked to the car, hand in hand, as if they were high-school sweethearts. Without further conversation, they drove to her favorite spot—a hill in the countryside. It overlooked a pumpkin field that lay fallow during the summer months. Beyond the field were a few of the farms which still produced for the city and which hadn’t been swallowed up by the encroaching suburbs. They parked the car by a footpath and trudged up the incline. Mrs. Santini had brought an old white chenille bedspread and shaken it out and laid it on the ground. They flopped down on it like two schoolchildren, all giggles and excitement. From their isolated love nest, they gazed through the summer foliage, but the smokestacks and the great ovens of an enormous steel complex crowded their view of the horizon. As they made love, a beautiful sunset of oranges and purples glinted through the pollution-filled haze.

  After they had finished, they sprawled out on the bedspread and took in the darkening sky. It was now streaked with red as the last dying light reflected off the smoke.

  “I wish you could just . . . shoot me up with something,” she mused. “Or take away a piece of my brain . . . something.”

  She rolled over on her stomach and looked funny to Martin with her skirt hiked up above her bare hips and her blouse unbuttoned. He just stared at her while he straightened his shirt and closed the fly on his pants. Sometimes their conversation didn’t make much sense to him at all. Sometimes he tried to sympathize with her sentiments but really couldn’t understand.

  “Too bad what you got ain’t catching,” she laughed. “That’d be great.” She was lost in her dreamworld. With Martin she could be anything she wanted, travel anywhere she wished. He was her key to oblivion.

  “Some people think it is catching,” Martin said to her, although this time his meaning was over her head. “In movies it’s catching.”

  She looked at him with a slightly puzzled expression. “Maybe he has just seen The Three Faces of Eve or some other film and thinks that insanity is catching,” she thought.

  “Well . . . on the off chance that it is,” she joked, “give it to me, baby. Do it!”

  She rolled over and opened her arms wide as if to invite him to infect her with whatever it was he had. He only looked down at her with a peculiar frown on his face as if he were finally becoming older and wiser than she. He remembered a snatch of conversation from his discussion with the radio man. “There’s a lot of people I could do it to if I wanted. I know a lot of people,” he had said confidentially, although his voice was being broadcast into hundreds of homes in the metropolitan area. “I know what they do. I’ve watched them a lot and I know what they do. I know when they’re alone. I could do it easy without gettin’ caught.”

  Mrs. Santini stretched toward him like a puma. She pulled him down on her with gusto, but Martin remained stiff, merely staring at her in pity. “It is such a shame,” he thought, as he observed this still young, attractive woman making a fool out of herself in front of him. It was as if everything was coming together for him, now. He was realizing things about himself and others that had never occurred to him prior to his sexual awakening. Extracting himself from her clutching arms, he indicated that he wanted to leave.

  This time as they drove back in silence, it wasn’t in anticipation, but as if a stone wall had been erected between them. Martin was deep in thought, contemplating all of the people he could do it to if he wanted.

  He focused on Mrs. Bellini, the complaining old hag who would grab her order from Tati Cuda with a snarl, always bitching about one thing or another. Usually the customers would greet Martin pleasantly and kibitz with him as he played solitaire in the corner, but she would always bother him and comment as she went by.

  “Martin, you’re lazy,” she would taunt in her screech-owl voice. “You’re a lazy boy. He’s lazy, Cuda,” she would call over her shoulder. “Make him work. People here work hard. Make him work hard.” As she wobbled out of the store, her varicose-veined legs sheathed in thick black stockings, Martin would jeer and make faces at her disappearing back.

  “There are even people I would like to do it to,” he thought to himself as Mrs. Santini turned onto the main road that would take them back to Braddock, “because they make me angry sometimes.”

  He recalled that one day he had followed Mrs. Bellini home. Just as she had left the store that day, Cuda happened to hand him a shopping bag for another delivery. He had hurried out the door so that he could follow the stooped old witch a discreet few steps behind. With her muttering and bad hearing, she wasn’t aware of the softly following footsteps.

  Another time, Martin was sitting outside on a Sunday while Cuda made another attempt to finish painting the house. He saw Mrs. Bellini trudging down the back alley, carrying a net shopping bag filled with a few things from the corner grocery store, which was open on weekends. Noticing that no one else was in sight, Martin emerged from the side of the house and started to follow her. Cuda was up on the ladder, busily engaged in mixing the paint for the trim, so he didn’t notice Martin stealing away. He trailed the old hag to another alleyway and tracked her as she moved swiftly through the dusky darkness. Martin’s soft footsteps echoed against the wall. The old woman paused and then quickly looked behind her as if some intuition had told her she was being followed. But Martin had instinctively ducked into the shadows and avoided detection.

  “I dunno . . .” he thought as Mrs. Santini’s car turned up his street, “I decided to let them go. I just decided to let them go.”

  Mrs. Santini stopped the car before the old house, and Martin hopped out with a slight nod good-bye. He could see that the woman was affected by his indifference, but he had other things to think about. He still liked her, but she was getting to be too much for him to handle.

  That night Martin sat on the swing on the back porch, his mind wandering aimlessly. Cuda had turned in early, and without Christina in the house, it was getting very lonely for Martin. He found solace on the back-porch swing, whose monotonous movement lulled him into a peaceful suspension.

  As the moonlight danced on his face, Martin peered down at his shaking hand. Suddenly his attention was drawn to the sound of an approaching motorcycle. He looked up and saw the young tough roaring by with a different young girl hanging onto the back of the bike. His helmet was tipped back precariously on his head, and he sipped from a can of beer while steering with the other hand.

  “Hey, loon-o. Whooo hoo, loon-o!” he taunted, showing off for his girl. They both laughed uproariously as he threw the empty beer can into Martin’s yard. Then he made a wide arc, turned into the alley, and parked the bike.

  Standing up, Martin walked into the yard and picked up the still dripping can.

  “Even the ones who are really mean to me all the time,” he remembered telling the radio man, “I just decided to let them go. It’s like I know them too well. It’s funny, we’re made funny,” he had said philosophically.

  In the blackness of the driveway, the cyclist chained up his bike while his girl stood nearby, hands on her hips, sneering at Martin. The spot was perfectly isolated, Martin thought as he moved into the dimness, still clutching the beer can as if it were an insult. “If only I had my serum,” he thought. But then he recalled he had told the radio man, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m getting pretty shaky. I’m really gettin’ shaky.”

  It was becoming a real problem and if he didn’t do something about it quickly, there was no telling what would happen. So far he had remained in control, but any day now something had to give.

  • • •

  As if by an unseen force, Martin had been impelled into the city the next day. He and Cuda had stopped communicating altogether since Christina left. It was as if they had tried to act civilly toward each other for her sake. With her departure their unadulter
ated hatred knew no bounds, and sometimes Martin wouldn’t even show up for work.

  Martin was lured to the supermarket where he had first seen Mrs. Quinn. Like an impotent lover, he returned to the spot where he had first been turned on, but none of the pretty women he saw had any effect on him. As if he were watching a beauty contest, they passed by, flashing their smiles, tossing their hair, wiggling their hips, but he remained impassive. It was fortunate for them.

  “And when I try to find somebody to do it to,” he thought, “I can’t decide. It’s like none of the ladies look pretty. I dunno.” He had told the same thing to the radio man, who had become sort of a father confessor to the disgruntled boy. He had found a sympathetic ear, and although the radio announcer thought the guy was totally off the wall, he listened and even sometimes offered advice.

  “I used to be able to decide fast,” Martin had told him. “I used to be able to find somebody really fast. None of the ladies look pretty or something. Maybe it’s just because I’m doing the sexy stuff without the blood now . . . doin’ it with an awake person. I dunno . . .”

  Growing bored with his sentinel duty by the supermarket, Martin wandered over to a five-and-ten-cent store near the market. He flipped through a porno magazine and watched the people who ambled in and out. Two heavily made-up prostitutes caught his eye. They were trying to put the make on a group of pimply-faced teenagers at the pinball machine. Gazing hungrily at the women, Martin tried to stop his shaking hands. They shuddered violently as he tried to replace the magazine on the rack. It fell to the floor.

  “I’ve got to do something,” he thought frantically. “I’ve got to pick somebody. I’m getting so shaky . . . I might make a mistake.”

  Later that night he told the radio man the same thing. The voice hadn’t taken him seriously enough.

  “A . . . mistake?”

  “I might make a mistake and get caught,” Martin told him in earnest.

  “Hear that, Nighttimers,” he chatted with his one-sided audience, “The Count is gettin’ thirsty, so watch out, Nighttimers. He might be in your neighborhood.”