Brewster: A Novel

by Mark Slouka

  The Bishop Loughlin Games, the Cardinal Hayes Invitational, these were our Olympics, but nothing I saw there those three years came close to what I saw that first time.

  They may have been from Boys’ High—I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. What I remember is the attitude, the stance. The concentration, the focus, the four of them exchanging a few words at the beginning of each heat, then the lead-off climbing into the blocks. Fifty yards away you could feel it: black, ghetto, just off the subway in mismatched sweats, they didn’t own shit but by God they owned this. The mile relay. It was theirs. Six years in a row they’d beaten every team in the city: teams with money, teams with facilities, teams five times their size. Nobody else in any event had a record like it. Nobody even came close.

  When the mile relay final was announced, the great hall ­quieted, the transistors were turned down, the crowd—two, maybe three thousand—moved as close to the rail above the track as they could. I was jammed in with Frank, Falvo, the mustached kid from my group. Kennedy and McCann were a short way down, leaning over the rail. I could see the muscles in McCann’s face jumping like he was chewing something; when Kennedy looked up our eyes met over the backs of the others for a second and he nodded, barely seeing me, as if to say, “Here we go.”

  They said a few words, heads bent, then the lead-off walked to the blocks. Big Afro, bouncy stride, he was the last to take off his sweats. We watched him shake out the muscles in his legs, not looking at the others, then fold himself like a supple jackknife into the blocks, the neon-green baton between the palm and fore­finger of his right hand. Everything was critical, each leg a full-out quarter-mile sprint through the track’s flat, tight wooden curves where elbows flew and tangled legs regularly sent runners sprawling across the splinter-filled boards. The lead-off runners would keep their lane through the first curve, then break for the inside as best they could.

  “Runners, there will be two commands, then the gun.”

  The place was silent. Reverent. Substitute the smell of heat rub for incense and you’ve got it. On the opposite side of the bleachers a tiny voice was singing something from a radio someone hadn’t turned down enough.

  “Marks. Set.”

  He rose, balanced on the thumb and three fingers of his right hand.

  THREE THOUSAND RUNNERS jumped at the gun. I remember being hypnotized by the controlled fury of it, swept up in the brutal, beautiful momentum of it, and then he was down, hard, his head actually banging on the boards, the green baton ricocheting off the guard wall like a hockey puck and a groan of shock and disbelief went up from the stands. It was over. This was a mile relay. Another runner was lying on his back in the outer lane, stunned.

  I don’t think he ever thought of not going. We saw him roll, scrabble onto all fours, already searching for the baton, snatch it and go. A few people laughed, embarrassed for him: There was something almost clownish in his desperation; in the first few seconds, disoriented, he’d looked the wrong way as the baton skittered across the track behind him. Then a polite ripple of applause rose from the stands: It was the right move, the admirable move—the reigning champions making the most of the disaster, finishing in style. All the runners in that hall knew it was over. All except four.

  More than in him, alone an entire backstretch behind the pack, you could see it in the others: the second man already in position, tensed in a sprinter’s half crouch, his receiving arm out, willing the baton to him still forty yards away, his teammates screaming in his ears. They’d never considered lying down; what was possible had nothing to do with it.

  Nothing happened at first. He ran all alone, as if in a different race altogether. Thirty yards back in a relay usually decided by inches or feet, he gained six yards on the strongest sprinters in the city, handed off and fell to the track. By then it had begun: a growing roar like an approaching army, a thousand fists beating in unison on the metal signs that hung down from the rails circling the track. It didn’t matter that it couldn’t be.

  Turn, straight, turn—it was like the pack was a magnet drawing him slowly back to them, shrinking the gap. Six runners, spread out now, handed off like well-oiled machines; he passed the baton, ran into the arms of some man who held him up like a limp doll—he’d closed to under twenty and the hall was in pandemonium, roaring like a shell, pounding with a single pulse.

  On the third leg something changed, some magic distance was crossed: the impossible had become conceivable. Thirteen yards, eleven, ten, and he passed the sixth man, handed off, and fell like the others. I hadn’t seen him. I’d been watching the anchor leg. In that sounding chamber—deafening, overwhelming—he was as still as a candle flame in a closed room. And I saw him receive the baton and go, a full eight yards down in fifth place, and he was like a scythe going through grass—gorgeous, ruthless—smooth as a razor cutting into the curves, passing the fourth, the third, out of the last turn edging into second, closing on the leader who seemed to be slowing, tying up because he had to, because by now it wasn’t up to him but the gods themselves, and then he threw himself through the tape.

  I’VE THOUGHT OF IT SINCE—more than once. And I’ve thought of Ray looking at my picture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos with their fists raised on the medal stand in Mexico City, saying, “Yeah? So what?” and I know he was right. So what? This was what they gave you—what they wanted you to have. Go ahead, boy, take it. It’s yours. Take your two-fifty chunk of metal on the purple ribbon and hang it in your room and grow old; you can have the salt shaker—the pepper shaker too—’cause I own the house, the block, your dime-a-dozen soul if you really want to know.

  What fools we were, spending ourselves on trinkets and symbols. We lost, all of us. And when we realized it, we took our love beads and our lyrics and sold them on the street.

  But I’m not the only one who remembers that race. It meant nothing. But it didn’t feel like that. For those three minutes and twenty seconds, as they handed off each to each in the heart of that roar and fell to the track, it felt like it mattered.

  IN MARCH OF 1968 I ran the mile in 4:52 on an indoor track at the New York City armory, which was decent for a sophomore. Things were changing for me. A few of the guys from the track team nodded to me in the hallway now. I’d met Ray. Frank and I hung out together. He was big into Jesus and the javelin, in that order, but didn’t really go on much. We’d talk about the team, or classes, or the teachers we hated, and then he’d eat and I’d go back to my book. That was pretty much it. The week I ran my mile, Lieutenant Calley and the boys from Charlie Company did what they did at My Lai. I didn’t know about it. Nobody did.

  People love to tell you afterward how they saw this and saw that. We didn’t see a thing. We heard about Vietnam, we heard about Newark, Detroit, other things—but it was like listening in on a party line: You’d hear voices talking over each other, a man chuckling over a joke, a sound like somebody crying—and then Rowan and Martin would yell “SOCK IT TO ME!” and that woman on the show would get knocked in the head with a giant hammer.

  The closer something is, the louder it sounds; hold a baseball to your nose, it’s big as the earth. It takes time for things to find their distance. We misheard pretty much everything, sang words for years that no one had ever written. We confused the large and the small, what mattered, what didn’t. There’s somethin’ happenin’ here, Stephen Stills sang and we all sang along, a bunch of blind men staring off in a dozen directions, waving our canes like batons.

  Even now I can’t say what it was, exactly, can’t separate the voices from the silence from the noise. “Plastics!” was part of it, and Bonnie and Clyde and “Up against the wall, motherfuckers” and two cats in the yard. Mr. Montourri was part of it, hitching up his office pants by the belt saying, “Yeah, I got a dream—pay off the goddamn mortgage, know what I’m sayin’?” and bell-bottoms and beads and Gina Falconnetti’s nipples rubbing against the fabric of that peasant blouse she liked to wear and we liked her wearing, and I’d be a liar if I
said that Gina’s nipples meant less to us than the Tet Offensive. We were sixteen.

  THAT SPRING, Ray’s dad got him a dog, a brown lab named Wilma, and sometimes after practice I’d walk over to the house and Ray’d be on the porch with little Gene and Wilma would be crapping in the yard and Mr. Cappicciano would have the hood up and he’d wave me over and stand back and wipe the grease off his hands and talk to me like I knew something about cars. I don’t know why. He had a tattoo of an apple with a knife in it on his arm and sometimes he’d get this look like a kid watching his goldfish being flushed down the toilet one by one, but for some reason he liked me.

  “You got sense,” he’d say, tossing the rag and taking the beer off the battery block with two fingers like he didn’t want to get the can dirty. And I’d stand there, apprentice little man that I was, concentrating on something I knew nothing about, pretending I hadn’t heard what he’d said, wasn’t pleased.

  I’d help him with things, hand him stuff. “C’mere, I want to show you somethin’,” he’d say when I came around, “you’ll get a kick out of this.” And he’d stab the cigarette in his mouth, his sleeve rolled high up his veiny arm, and jam his oil-slick hand deep down, his face to the side like an Indian listening to the rails, and loosen the belt. “Come over here—no, here, see that?”

  “Sure,” I’d say.

  “People don’t understand,” he’d say, the cigarette nodding between his lips. “It’s all parts. You got the part, you got the whole thing. See that?”

  “Sure,” I’d say.

  “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.” And he’d grunt pulling his hand out, turning it this way and that, working it free. “Tight as a ten-year-old,” he’d say, and I wouldn’t smile or laugh, just give a little puff of air through my nose to show I’d heard, appreciated it, because that’s what men did, and he’d turn to the porch: “You gonna get me that goddamn beer or what?” and Ray would pick up little Gene and go get him a beer.

  IT WAS A LONG TIME comin’ and I was twenty years gone before I began to see there was no difference between the big and the small, the close and the far, that the times had been playing themselves out in us—Newark and us, Vietnam and us—that in Brewster just like everywhere else you could choke or fight, but by then it was too late.

  Stop, children, what’s that sound? Even if we’d stopped, we wouldn’t have heard a thing.

  I CAN SEE IT NOW. At the time it was different. Maybe it was me. Back then the roots of why things happened always seemed deeper than I could go. It was as if half of my heart could feel, could close my throat over a line in a movie, a song, anything—while the other half was as dead as a pit in a peach.

  Take my parents. I knew they’d barely made it out of Germany, that they’d escaped the worst by sheer luck and bribery, that they’d slipped sideways through the closing door with a suitcase apiece and started again. I knew my father’s brother, Klaus, had disappeared into Sachsenhausen, that my mother’s sister, late for a train, had simply vanished from the earth. But sitting in History watching Night and Fog, sick to my stomach, I didn’t connect it to them, to me, and when Moira Rivken belched and ran out of the room with her hand over her mouth, I understood but I didn’t, really. I felt for her of course—I figured it was about her parents, or ­relatives—but what had happened to mine didn’t have anything to do with me because that was how they wanted it.

  Whenever I asked about the war, and I did, more than once, it was as if I wasn’t even in the room. “Your father died for them at the Somme and they turned on us like dogs,” my mother would say to my father, as though he didn’t know, and my father would sit there staring at the carpet. They’d suffered—I could never understand. It was the same with Aaron. They’d lost their firstborn, an unthinkable thing. How could they explain it to me? It was like watching somebody making dinner while blood pours from their sleeve.

  We were watching a Walt Disney special about tigers one night when I was little when my mother started to cry. This happened. You weren’t supposed to do anything.

  “It’s alright,” my father said after a while. And then: “Do you want me to turn it off?”

  My mother just sat there, sobbing into her hands.

  “I know,” my father said. “I know.” He kept saying it: I know, I know. He went over to the couch and put his arm around her and she started to cough—a forced, fake-sounding cough like she was choking.

  On the TV a kid my age was running across a kitchen floor with muddy shoes.

  My father said he’d make a cup of tea, then looked at me and quietly shook his head, telling me something.

  I didn’t know what to do. On the TV a tiger was walking along a broken wall.

  When I touched her hair she flinched away like I’d stuck her with a pin.

  I remember bursting out crying, more with surprise than anything else, and my father rushing back in yelling, “What happened? What on earth?” as my mother ran past him and up the stairs. We heard the door slam. I was maybe five, six.

  My father just stood there. “She’s upset,” he said, then started wiping at my face with his handkerchief which smelled like tobacco and spit. “Do you want to finish watching the show?” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  FOR A WHILE when I was in fourth grade I had to go talk to the school psychologist during gym class—I forget her name. She reminded me of those folding rulers you used to see—tall, straight, angles and elbows. She wore men’s glasses and very red lipstick and great square stiff dresses that looked like they belonged on a large doll, and once, when she got up from her chair, I saw a long, thin stripe of black hair going up the middle of her white calf.

  Who knows what she talked to me about? Coping skills, probably, or whatever they called them then. The importance of Communicating My Feelings. Some things don’t change. They’d sent me there because a few weeks before, watching Scotty Steinberg tease our class guinea pig with a carrot, then knock it on the snout, I’d tapped him on the shoulder, waited till he turned around, then punched him in the stomach. I’d never hit anybody before. I was surprised how easy it was. My fist just sank in like he was pudding and then he bent over and started making weird barking noises and ran into the bathroom at the back of the class and locked himself in. I wasn’t sorry.

  It wasn’t Scotty. Or the guinea pig. It was the way she wouldn’t look at me some days when she gave me my lunch in the morning, or the way she suddenly wouldn’t answer when I asked her something—when dinner would be, or what we were having. Like I’d done something. Like I’d been bad.

  Some days I’d wake up and the house would feel empty like somebody had taken all the furniture out and I’d find her in bed, crying, and I’d try to talk to her to see what was wrong but she wouldn’t tell me and later when I was older I’d make her scrambled eggs and she’d give me a note for school: “Please excuse Jon. He was sick.” And things would be OK. And then the next day or the one after that I’d come home from school and she’d walk right by me in the hall and when I asked what was wrong she’d say in that angry, I-don’t-want-to-talk-to-you voice, “Nothing’s wrong. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sometimes she’d keep it up for days, not answering. Other times she’d lock herself in the bedroom. Every now and then you’d hear her come out, walk to the bathroom, slam the door.

  It wasn’t much—I’m just saying how things were. My father didn’t figure into it—he went to work, he came back. He read, he slept. He didn’t get mad at me. He didn’t do anything except sell shoes. For a while in seventh grade I tried to talk to him about things because I’d seen a show in which the dad was kind of quiet but cool underneath and I thought it might be the same with him. It wasn’t. I had to think about my schoolwork, he’d tell me. Someday I’d understand how important it was. He didn’t say when.

  When I was ten I woke from a deep fever to find my mother slumped over in a chair next to my bed, sleeping, her hands neatly folded on an open book. I’d been sick for days, and Dr. Rusoff h
ad been over again the night before. He’d given me two injections in the shoulder, felt my throat and my armpits with his soft, hairy hands, and then he and my parents had talked for a long time in the hall.

  I watched her sleeping—a strand of hair had come down over her face and her mouth was open—and then the book fell off her lap. When she saw I was awake we just looked at each other for what felt like a long time and then she leaned forward and brushed the hair back from my forehead. “I should tell your father,” she said, and then she smiled—an emptied-out, nothing-left-to-give smile—and for just a moment it was me and her. A few days later, when things went back to the way they were, I began to wonder if I’d imagined it. After a while I hoped I had. It would make it easier.

  When I was thirteen or so I came home and she’d turned the switch off—that’s how I thought of it. She was sitting up straight at the dining room table, doing the bills. And maybe because I’d had a bad day at school or because I was older now or because earlier that week she’d put a note in my lunch bag saying she hoped I’d have a nice day I asked what was the matter.

  She didn’t look up, didn’t answer. I could see her mouth—that way it got, pulled tight, the wrinkles bunching up into her lips. She looked from one paper to another, then back.

  “What’s the matter?” To my surprise I could feel the tears rush under my eyelids as if they’d been waiting there, shamefully close to the surface. “Mommy?”

  “I’m busy.” It was that tone—slow, quiet, seething. Determined to stay calm even though she was being pushed, tested.

  I started to put down my books. I could feel myself shaking.

  “What did I do?”

  She didn’t look up.

  “Mommy, what did I do?”