by Matt Sumell
“He’s not a fuckin’ plant,” he said. “He’s a musician. His first name is Herb.”
“Avore. Herb Avore.”
He shook his head. “Stupid.”
When the water started boiling I poured it into my coffee cup, added a tea bag, watched the brown billow and went to the fridge for half-and-half.
“Mae and Nathaniel, five letters.”
“Wests,” I said. “What happened to your face?”
“I fell off my bike.”
It made sense as far as explanations go. This was summer, festival season on Long Island—Lobsterfest, Clamfest, Oysterfest, some Indian powwow thing, and an antique boat show—and in order to avoid driving drunk he had taken to riding my sister’s bike to some of these, drinking till he was asked or made to leave, then trying to pedal home.
“That your breakfast?”
He flashed me some kind of look and stuffed a whole cookie into his mouth and began chewing it in what I think was supposed to be an aggressive manner. He resembled a giant, unhappy five year old, and it unsettled me.
“I tried to eat a hard-boiled egg,” he said, “but the shell wouldn’t come off easy.”
“Want me to get you somethin’ from the deli?”
“No,” he said to a spot on the floor near my feet.
“Thinkin’ about mopping?”
“No.”
“Jealous I have ten toes?”
“No.”
“Are you smart?”
He stuffed another cookie in his mouth and stood up and stalked off to finish his crossword in front of the big television. I gave the back of his head the middle finger, rinsed a few dishes in the sink, and placed them in the dishwasher. Then I raided his pills. He’d somehow managed to convince an idiot at the VA that he had ADHD, when really he was just depressed after the chemo killed my mother, which for some reason I imagine is like little tiny nuclear bombs going off inside you till you’re dead and then some. Maybe moths can hear the explosions.
* * *
To be fair, the Ritalin did help him get out of bed and through his day, but the way me and my siblings saw it, side effects included anxiety, irritability, patriotism, one night in the Sayville Modern Diner he asked, “What’s broccoli?” and another night he ate two Beef Merlot Lean Cuisines and a loaf of pumpernickel bread, then threatened to commit suicide with the butter knife. My brother had, the week before, returned to graduate school, so it was left to me to wrestle the butter knife from him, and we fell to the kitchen floor and knocked over Sparkles’s water dish and rolled around in the puddle for a while, which had swollen-up dog-food crumbs in it and smelled. After she got bored with watching from the doorway, my sister walked over and yanked his artificial leg off and ran out of the house with it. This stunned him, and he quit struggling long enough for me to make a proposal:
“Stop being an asshole.”
“No.”
I thought about that, then counterproposed to get his leg for him if he promised not to try to kill himself again. He thought about that, then agreed and added, “Now get the fuck off me.”
“Promise first.”
“I fuckin’ promise!”
“You fuckin’ promise what?”
“I fuckin’ promise not to try to kill myself!”
“Good!” I said. “It fuckin’ pleases me to hear you say that, Dad!”
Then I rolled off him onto my back, and together the two of us lay there in the puddle staring up at the dead bug silhouettes in the fluorescent lights trying to catch our breath. Eventually I hit him lightly on the chest with the back of my open hand. Eventually he reached across himself and shook it.
The batteries in the orange flashlight were dead, so I went to the battery drawer and spent a minute putting in and taking out dead batteries. Eventually I found a combination that worked, but barely, and as soon as I got outside the light went dim and died, so I shook it a little before throwing it at a tree. When it hit the trunk it flashed bright for half a second, then fell to the ground where I left it. Then I walked a lap around the outside of the house in the dark.
Halfway into lap two I spotted my sister across the street at the end of the dock, staring down into the brown water of the Connetquot River, while I walked out to the end of the dock and stood next to her and didn’t say anything, just stared down into the brown water of the Connetquot River. She didn’t say anything either. I patted my pockets and found my cigarettes, patted them again and found my lighter, lit two and handed her one. Neither of us said anything. We just smoked and stared down into the brown water of the Connetquot River, while I wondered if turtles can get hepatitis. Clams can—Isabella Rossellini did a PSA-thing about it once, I saw the billboard for it on the westbound platform of the Babylon train station. Standing there on the end of the dock with my sister I suddenly felt very tired.
“Where is it?” I said.
“I threw it in the bushes,” she said, then turned and pointed.
I followed the tip of her finger out with my eyes and, squinting, was just able to make out a foot with a black sneaker on it protruding from the top of one of the shrubs bordering the property.
The two of us turned and stared down into the water again, and after what seemed like a long time, I crushed my cigarette out on the bottom of an upside-down bucket placed over one of the rotting pilings of the dock and said, “Poor turtles,” but more mumbled than pronounced, like, “Prtrtles.” Then I patted my sister’s shoulder awkwardly, retrieved the leg out of the bush, and headed into the house with it under my arm like a gift.
My father was at the kitchen table reading a days-old newspaper, stuffing handfuls of croutons into his face. When he saw me he wiped his left hand down his denim shirt twice, then reached out for the leg like, Gimme. I handed it to him, and he immediately started picking small branches and bits of shrub out of the stump socket and dropping them on the floor, then turned the whole thing upside down and shook it. When satisfied, he placed the leg on the floor in front of him, rolled up his pants leg to just above the knee, pushed his stump into the stump socket with both hands, then stood up and shifted his weight from right to left to right again, like a junior high school dancer. Then he bent down and pulled the neoprene stump sleeve up over the knee, rolled his pants leg down, sat back in the chair, and resumed reading the days-old newspaper. I told him I was going to bed.
He turned to look at the stove clock. “It’s only eight thirty,” he said.
I didn’t answer him, just wiped a piece of swollen-up dog food off his shoulder and went upstairs to my room and fell asleep and didn’t get up till three the next day. My sister was packing.
* * *
A festival or two later I came home around ten or eleven to find a running pickup truck in front of the house, the taillights tinting the exhaust red, tinting the bushes and the mailbox red, the guy struggling to unload my sister’s bicycle from the back of the truck red. I parked and hurried over to help, and as I got closer I saw that my father was also in the back of the truck, on his back, tugging at the front wheel. When he noticed me there he yelled, “Hey kid!” then just lay there smiling and blinking, like he was genuinely happy to see me.
“Hey Dad,” I said. That’s all it took. Something in my voice must have betrayed some sense of disappointment, or concern, or just wasn’t enthusiastic enough, because the smile slowly came off his face and his eyes went vague and unfocused, as if he just at that moment remembered something unpleasant. He turned and looked out over the lawn.
“You gotta leave me here,” he said. “Just fuckin’ leave me here.”
A week later, I did.
* * *
I’d probably eaten four or five Ritalin and snorted another off a paperback with a rolled-up oil-change receipt, plus I’d downed a lukewarm cup of burnt gas station coffee a few miles back, so my heart felt like it might bust right out of my chest and float there over the steering wheel all shiny-style like Jesus’s or Mary’s or Whoever’s that was by the time I
pulled into the rest stop—one of those generic-looking ones, a sand-colored single-story with the men’s room on one side and the women’s on the other, the vending machines in the middle, a picnic table or two off to the right. I had to go so bad I power-walked up the path and was unzipped and dick out five feet from the men’s-room door. Once inside I saw that both urinals were stopped up with paper towels so I hobbled then hopped into the first of two stalls and saw what looked like a murder scene only browner and with spinach. I hopped into the handicapped stall and fired at will, shuffled my way closer and was peeing and staring at the ceiling and then at the wall and then at the toilet and then at the floor and then at a grasshopper on the floor to the right. At first I’d just given the grasshopper a quick look, but then I gave it another because it seemed, in its absolute stillness, to be staring at me.
I thought of a painting in the hallway outside my brother’s and my childhood bedroom of two cartoonish kids with oversized heads and big eyes that, whenever I worked up the courage to look at them, seemed to be looking at me. The grasshopper’s effect was similar. I didn’t like it.
I continued staring back at the grasshopper, and it continued staring at me, like in a staring contest or showdown, and after a while I said to it, “Shoo, dude.” But it didn’t shoo, and it didn’t “scram” or “get the fuck outta here” either—it just stared. Finally I stomped my right foot at it and it catapulted itself directly into the toilet bowl, where it began paddling around at panicked random, circles and Xs, ovals and figure eights.
My one experience with near-drowning is that it’s uncomfortable. Also, I lifeguarded at a small inground pool at a home for mentally disabled people back in the early nineties, and there was a guy there named Joe Pepe who liked vacuum cleaners so much that all the nurse’s aides cut vacuum cleaner ads out of the paper and gave them to him as a reward for behaving himself, one of the many things he had no talent for. I once saw him sneak up behind a fellow patient and try to strangle him with a piece of yarn. I don’t remember too much else about him except that he looked exactly how a person with Down syndrome and glasses looks like, and that every day, as soon as I showed up for work, he’d tell me he fucked my mom. I’d tell him that he didn’t, and he’d tell me that yeah, he did, last night, she loved it, and I’d insist that he didn’t, and he’d insist that he did so, and so on. This would continue until I grew tired of the argument and quit, after which he’d make some kind of celebratory noise, then jump and spin and stag-leap his way out of the room. Ballet, but graceless.
What Joe Pepe didn’t do though, not ever, at least not while I worked there, was go in the pool. So one day after he started in with the mom stuff I said to him, “I’m sure she enjoyed it, Joe. Why don’t you come swim in the pool and we’ll talk about it.” His face scrunched up. “Awww, what’s the matter, Joe,” I said. “You’re not scared to come into the pool, are you, Joe?” He clenched his fists and spun around two times. “Not you, Joe,” I said. “No way. That couldn’t be the case, because my mom wouldn’t fuck anybody that’s scared to go in the pool. She told me so on my thirteenth birthday. She said, ‘Happy birthday, Alby, here’s your present. It’s a card, and in it you’ll find five dollars for every year of your life, for a total of ffffffffffffffff— sixty-five dollars. I love you very much, and I am very proud of you. You are growing up so fast now, and I just want you to know that I will never fuck anyone who can’t swim. Not ever. It’s unattractive, and probly means they’re a fuckin’ moron.’ So, Joe, if you really want me to believe that you fucked my mom last night, you’re gonna have to prove to me that you can swim. You up for it?”
He sniffled, then wiped his nose then his eye with his wrist. “No!” he yelled. “No no no no no no!”
“Well why not, Joe?”
“I don’t wanna,” he said.
“Well why don’t you wanna?”
“’Cause I almost drownded once,” he said. “It hurt!”
* * *
I pissed around the grasshopper as best I could and pinched off as soon as possible. Then I stood there, over it, watching it struggle up the side of the bowl, slip back in and rest. Over and over: Struggle, slip, rest. Struggle, slip, rest. Struggle.
I looked around a little for something to fish him out with and, finding nothing, I simply reached in and scooped him up with my right hand and carried him outside, where I put him on the ground near a bush and nudged him with my index finger. Then—and I may have imagined this but I don’t think so—he kinda shook himself dry, like a dog, and jumped one small time. I nudged him again till he made a bigger jump.
Afterward, as I was washing my hands, I guessed that it must’ve been confused, that I’d startled it, that it had made a mistake. But then I considered the possibility. Of course, I don’t really believe an insect has the mental capacity to suffer the kind of anguish one has to in order to want to kill oneself, but certainly there’s nothing too unreasonable in wondering if things could be so bad for a grasshopper. Two steps toward the paper towel dispenser and I was pretty sure the answer to that question, no matter the animal, is yes.
TESTY
I
Walking wasn’t easy with fat legs and a big head; I was three years old and did the best I could. I made it into the kitchen and there, on the floor, was a little baby in a little baby carrier, and my mother’s feet were there, and another woman’s feet, too. There were often new moms’ feet around because mine was a Lamaze instructor and her students liked to come back and show off what came out of them. I waddled over and started petting the little baby on its fat little baby arm, and my mother praised me for making nice. The baby also seemed to enjoy my making nice to it—it cooed and gurgled and showed me its gums—and I continued petting it until my mother and this woman went back to their conversation above me, at the table. Then I started pinching the baby. It got quiet and screwed its face a little. I pinched harder, and when I was most successful its head started to shake in a way that seemed involuntary. Not that much about babies is voluntary, so maybe it’d be better to say that the head shake had something to do with the pain I succeeded in causing it. I dug my nails in—thumb and index—put marks all over its arms and legs like . Still, the baby did not cry. I can’t know what I would have done if I were stronger or if I were alone with it, but as it was I just dug my nails in deeper, pinched harder, twisted further, and then finally this baby opened its toothless mouth and let out a whimper, then a wail, and I was proud.
1. The author’s attitude toward babies is one of
A) objective indifference.
B) violent anger.
C) strong disapproval.
D) qualified regret.
2. The author suggests that traditional views of human morality are flawed because they
A) do not allow for differences in age and gender.
B) do not account for change in an individual.
C) fail to arrive at definitive answers.
D) are depressing.
3. With which of the following statements would the author be most likely to agree?
A) Women are great.
B) Women’s feet are great.
C) Women are often proud of things they shouldn’t be proud of.
D) Politeness is a part of good behavior.
E) It depends.
II
There was a traveling animal show in the middle of the Sun Vet Mall. One part was a chicken-wire petting zoo with goats and piglets and hay—I liked the piglets—another was a pony ride, which, according to the black marker written on a white paper plate and scotch-taped to the fence, cost five tickets. The man standing at the gate verified that: “Five tickets.” My mother poked around in her coat pockets and pulled out a used tea bag from the one on the right—my brother and myself and the man didn’t know what to make of that—then put it back in her pocket and pulled her lady wallet out of the left one. She snapped it open and took out a five-dollar bill, then four singles, the three of us watching her pushing coins and
cards and receipts around with her index finger, digging now, and then Wah-lah! she said, pulling out another single. I looked at my brother and nodded.
She stood there tidying the six bills, the fiver either on the very bottom or the very top, uncrinkling them with a game of tug-of-war that her right hand always lost. Then, like it had only just occurred to her, which it might have but I don’t think so, she asked the man if she could skip the ticket thing and just pay him the ten dollars in cash. He said no, he needed the tickets. I was nervous then about what my mother’s reaction would be, but she said OK, and we walked over to the ticket table, a tiny square with a tiny lady sitting behind it. My mother smiled and handed her the ten dollars cash, and the little lady sitting behind it tore ten tickets off the red roll, all of them still connected like paper sausages. My mother took them and said thank-you, counted and tore, handed my brother and me each a string of five. As we walked back toward the gate and the man beside it, I looked at my half of the red tickets, and each of them had TICKET printed on it and a number. I was excited.
My brother went first, and he sat on the pony while it walked. And then it was my turn, and I sat on the pony while it walked. Afterward, we agreed that it was the best thing we’d ever done, and my mom said, Woo! and clapped as we headed in the direction of a small crowd.
Curious what they were crowding around, we squeezed through to the front, where there was a tiger lying there not moving except to breathe and occasionally lick the metal bars of its otherwise red cage. It was emaciated and missing patches of hair, and if I’m remembering correctly it didn’t have any ears, like maybe it had scratched them off. We stood there, in the crowd, all of us fewer than a dozen, all of us staring at it. Just when my mother tugged on my shirtsleeve, meaning it was time to leave, the tiger slowly stood, arched its back in a stretch, and yawned. Everybody seemed to enjoy that, seeing the inside of its mouth, its tongue and its teeth. When it finished yawning, the tiger walked in a slow circle, its shoulder blades pushing up so high with each step I thought they might pop through its back. Then it stopped walking, lifted its tail, and showed everyone its tigery asshole, and from somewhere just below that, shot out piss directly at my brother’s gawking face. It smelled like white rice and pine trees, and later he told me it didn’t taste as bad as you might think.