Brewster: A Novel

by Mark Slouka

  He always seemed, if not glad to see me, exactly, then something like it. Like it mattered to him what I thought of him. Almost like he wanted my approval. It’s complicated. I knew what he was like.

  I’d come over some days and there’d be a cruiser parked by the curb and I’d hear them talking through the screen.

  “They’re fuckin’ everywhere now,” I’d hear somebody say. “Comin’ up from the Bronx, from Newark. Fuckin’ breedin’ like rabbits.”

  “Tell me about it. My sister and brother-in-law got a place down in Riverdale—three bedroom apartment, river view—”

  “No shit—river view?”

  “Fuckin’ beautiful. Families, kids … I used to love goin’ down there, right? Ball fields, tennis courts, you-name-it. So three years ago they have to let ’em in, some fair housing bullshit—”

  Somebody would fart.

  “Right?”

  “Same thing in the force,” I’d hear Mr. Cappicciano say.

  “Fuckin’ Coonville now—”

  “Queen of Commissioners could suck my cock, I wouldn’t go back.”

  “—garbage in the hallways, needles—they’re scared to let the kids out the door. Last time I was down there, I didn’t fuckin’ recognize it.”

  “And now he can’t sell, right?” said another voice.

  “Who’s he gonna sell to? It’s like back in Virginia. Fuckin’ nigger holla down there.”

  “I’d make that nigga holler,” Mr. Cappicciano said.

  Everybody laughed. “You did, fuckin’ A.”

  “That’s right, an’ look what happened to me? No, I’m tellin’ ya, I’m fuckin’ glad I’m out. You gotta deal with ’em runnin’ loose—least where I am we got ’em in a box.”

  And I’d knock on the door.

  “Fuck was that?” somebody would say.

  “Somebody at the door.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Who is it?” Mr. Cappicciano would yell, and I’d come in and say hello and the others would grunt and Mr. Cappicciano would say, “Upstairs,” and I’d walk through the quiet and up to Ray’s room.

  I was on the landing when I heard them that first time, though I could only hear pieces.

  “—Jewish,” I heard Mr. Cappicciano say.

  “—talks Kraut?”

  “—where they’re from. Before they fuckin’ killed ’em all.”

  Somebody said something I couldn’t make out, and somebody laughed.

  “Yeah, well, this one’s alright,” Mr. Cappicciano said. “Got a head on his shoulders, not like my moron—like to shove him back where he came from, know what I mean?” He belched. “Probably got a law against that too, now.”

  “Sounds like this one’s gonna be one a them Jew lawyers, why don’t you ask him?”

  “I’ll take a Jew lawyer over some guinea cocksucker outta Bayonne—these people’ll fuckin’ chew their leg off to survive.”

  “Chew your leg off’s more like it.”

  “Hey, fuck you, Mikey.”

  “What’s with you?”

  “What’s with me?”

  “Yeah, what’s with you. I mean, what the fuck?”

  “What’s with me? I’ll tell you what’s with me. Shit I seen in the service, what they did to those people? Un-fuckin’-believable.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “What’s my point? I’ll tell you what’s my point. Twenty years later, here they are, runnin’ the show. That’s what I’m sayin’, Mikey. This kid? Fuckin’ smart.”

  I LIKED HIS RESPECT. I did. I played up to it.

  I knew what he was, but it was like he was trapped in it, like he was looking for a door out of himself. And sometimes—in the way he’d look at me, like an animal staring out of a shrinking cage—I’d get the feeling I was that door. That he was hanging on to me somehow, asking me something. That he studied me, admired me, because I was something he’d never be. Truth is, if he hadn’t been who he was, it wouldn’t have meant as much.

  I knew it wasn’t easy on Ray, that he was embarrassed by him. Still, there were times, I think, when it made me feel like I had something over him, like maybe there was a reason why his old man noticed me, admired me, and the more he did, the more I believed it. He’d chuckle at my jokes, listen to what I said, nod. I had sense. We were different people, he seemed to be saying, but we agreed on things. It was about approval. And trust. And a strange kind of gratitude.

  I knew who he was. I must have.

  I came over one afternoon and didn’t see him at first because the TV was off. There was a storm coming up over the tracks and the room had that look like somebody pulling a hood over the world. He was just sitting there on the sofa in his boxers and a sleeveless undershirt. When I saw him I said how I hoped I hadn’t woken him up and he looked at me and said, “Well …” and then this look of terrible embarrassment came over his face and he sat up quickly, straight-backed, and threw up all over the coffee table. He looked at it for a moment, then got to his feet, almost tipping the table over, and walked out of the room.

  The door had barely closed behind him when Ray came in from the kitchen. He had a pink towel over his shoulder, a mop and a bucket. The bucket already had water in it. He didn’t say anything. He mopped up the mess on the floor, swept the table in two big swipes, tossed the bottles and the empties in the bucket along with the towel and walked out the back.

  I found him in the little fenced-in back yard, washing out the bucket with the hose.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He worked quickly, taking the lid off the trash and dumping the empties, hosing off his hands, rinsing the mop.

  “You want to go?” I said.

  He turned the bucket upside down, lay the towel over the propane tank. I’d never been in the back yard before. A rotting mattress stood propped against the fence next to a mattress-sized rectangle of yellow grass. A hammer lay on the back seat of a car somebody had pushed against the house like a sofa.

  He shook his head, looked around the yard.

  “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  AND SO WE’D TAKE OFF, didn’t matter where, running down those long summer days, the light drawing back into the trees as the night came on. Sometimes we’d walk down to the ball field, or up along the East Branch where you could see the trout like little torpedoes waiting in the shadows or out to Jimmy’s where he’d always have one up on the lift and talk to us while he worked—hot days maybe out to Frank’s or the reservoir for a swim, the shadows growing, the blue coming on. We had nowhere to be. Ray’s dad had farmed little Gene out to some relative in Yonkers—I wasn’t clear if it was a sister or an aunt—when Ray got a two-week job in construction; when it ended, Gene had stayed with the aunt. It fucked Ray up for a while. He missed his little guy, he said. He was going to hitch out to Yonkers to see him.

  He seemed quieter. I thought it was the summer, or some girl. Or being out of school. Sometimes we’d go half an hour or more, me and Frank just yakking away and Ray not saying a thing, just lying there in the grass by the reservoir listening, smoking. Frank talked a lot about California that summer. He’d read some article in Life or something—couldn’t get out of his head how beautiful it was.

  He was going to go, he said. In California you could get a little place on the beach for, like, nothing, grow your own food … And Ray, instead of saying you couldn’t get a kick in the balls for nothin’ never mind a house, would just sit there, listening, then toss the butt in the lake and dive in after it.

  Sometimes he’d just disappear for two, three days, even more. I’d walk up to the house after work and the car would be there but there’d be nobody home. Other times I’d find Mr. Cappicciano talking to his friends or banging away at something in the yard with his shirt open and he’d straighten up and take the cigarette out of his mouth and say, “How do I know? Not my fuckin’ problem, know what I mean?”

  OK, I’d say.

  “I don’t mean to yell at you, kid,�
� he’d say. “Look, why don’t you try back tomorrow—he’s bound to turn up eventually.”

  I’d start to go.

  “How’s school?” he’d say.

  “Good,” I’d say. He’d be leaning on some piece of lumber with one knee, a couple of nails sticking out of his mouth, the cigarette propped up across a pencil.

  “Still bringin’ home those A’s?” he’d say, pounding in a nail.

  “Some.”

  “Well keep it up,” he’d say, setting up another nail. “Make your parents proud someday.”

  I KNEW THE DRILL. Ray would show up the next day or the one after that with a fat lip or sore ribs like a tom that’s been under the porch for a week and he’d bullshit with Mary on the lunch line then let us drag the story out of him about the ride he’d caught down to the shore and the guys in the bar and what they’d said and what she’d looked like. We should come with him next time. “Sometimes you just gotta get the fuck out, know what I mean?”

  It was a good idea, we’d say.

  Bunch of pussies, he’d say.

  Really, we’d say, next time we would. We’d heard there’d been talks with the school superintendent about him. They were trying to have him suspended again. For good this time.

  His eyes would bug out—mock terrified. “Well, fuck me—that mean I’m not gonna get into Harvard?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Yeah, but what’re you gonna do?”

  “I’m gonna eat my lunch, that’s what I’m gonna do. Fuck do I know—maybe I’ll join the Army.”

  “What about your dad?” I asked once.

  He looked at me for a while, probing the inside of his swollen lip with his tongue: “Do me a favor, Jon,” he said, and it was one of the few times I heard him use my name: “Don’t worry about my dad.”

  I CAN HEAR IT NOW—I didn’t then. Or maybe I did and just didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask. I knew something was wrong long before that kid from the projects said what he did or Karen started asking, long before that January a year and a half later when we sat freezing in the middle of Bog Brook Reservoir in all that snow and he pulled up that perch and started to cry—but in my mind it’s like I didn’t know it until then. We borrowed the augur from Jimmy at the garage, carried it down the tracks, slipping around on the ties, then a quarter mile out into the middle of that huge, flat snowy field along with our poles and two folding chairs, dug the blade in and corkscrewed down through a foot of ice. It was one of the last things we did together, me working the augur, Ray on his knees in the snow, scooping out the slush with his hands, blowing on them, scooping some more. The sky that day was like an old gray blanket with the stuffing coming out in the west. The blade broke through into the water and I screwed it back up and Ray got out the last of the slush. It was beautiful, perfect, black as a bullet hole.

  And he pulled out a small yellow perch and unhooked it and slipped it back down the hole and began to cry, just sitting there on the chair with his face in his hands saying “Fuck, oh fuck,” his voice shaking like somebody looking at something he doesn’t really believe and knows he’ll never forget. And it was only then, I swear, that I felt it, that I saw the line that had looped around our legs, our arms, our throats, fed on our not-saying, our not-asking, stretching back through the seasons, the years, back to the time I first sensed it there in the cafeteria when he looked up at me and said, “Do me a favor, Jon.”

  That day I’d had no idea what I’d heard, or if I’d heard anything at all. Ray had come back from the shore. He’d had a thing with his old man. So what? I wasn’t really listening. It was early October. I was running cross-country that fall, not because I liked pounding up hills and over marshy golf courses for two and a half miles eating mud kicked up by the spikes of the runners in front of me but because I was good at it. In a three-team meet the week before, Brewster had pulled out an unexpected win mostly because of me.

  Cross-country meets were won on depth, something we didn’t have. Week after week it was the same thing. Kennedy would take first—nobody could touch him. McCann would come in somewhere in the top five. After that, except for a tight-skinned, nasty-looking farm kid named Brian Moore, who might sneak into the top ten, we had nobody. Which was where I came in. The week before, in twentieth place or so with a half-mile to go, I’d found myself, in a haze of pain, passing runners who seemed to be pushing through thicker air. I ran them down, one after the other, and was coming up on Moore’s skinny back when he crossed the line. We finished eighth and ninth. McCann came up and slapped my back as I staggered around, clutching my knees. “Banzai, Mosher,” Falvo yelled from the sidelines, doing his Japanese kamikaze. Kennedy was already in his sweats, talking to his dad, a friendly guy in a Teamster’s jacket who came to all our meets. “Way to go, Jon,” his dad called out.

  “Nice run,” Kennedy said.

  I repeated it to myself as I sorted boxes of men’s shoes in the storeroom, as I ate my liverwurst sandwich against the back wall in the sun, as I sat in biology learning about the double helix: Nice run. I’d fantasize about the races I’d run in the Armory that winter, how I’d come out of nowhere in the final lap, untouchable, how I’d put my hand out in front of my chest and part the tape the way I’d seen Kennedy do the season before—gently, like it didn’t matter. He’d notice the gesture, acknowledge it with a simple nod.

  No, Ray was a good guy, a friend of mine, but I wasn’t about to go chasing after his ass down to the shore, or sit around on his porch waiting for him to get home, or waste my time trying to figure out his particular deal with his old man. I had my own life. Everybody had their shit. Frank’s sister had disappeared. My mom was going nuts. We didn’t have to go looking for problems.

  WE’D BEEN SITTING on the railing over the East Branch one evening in August when Frank told me about it. How his sister had gotten knocked up, then refused to tell them who the father was. How his parents had thrown her out of the house, thinking to scare some sense into her, only to find out she’d had money saved and had gotten on a bus for God knows where. It had been a month and they hadn’t heard a thing. I had no idea how fucked up it was in his house right now. Nobody talked about it.

  “Sounds familiar,” I said.

  “Serious.”

  “Me, too.”

  He broke off a piece of stick and threw it in the current. “It’s like, I don’t know—I don’t even know what. Like they took a pair of scissors and just cut her out, you know?” He started working his shoulder in small circles. “My Dad actually went through the house and took down every picture with her in it, which was basically all of ’em. We came home from school and there were all these spaces on the wall. Megan went nuts.”

  “How’s the shoulder doin’?” I said.

  “Good. Should be able to throw tomorrow.”

  I nodded. “So what’d he do with ’em?”

  “I don’t know—stuck ’em in a box, burned ’em, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It’s just I don’t get it, you know? I mean, Jesus is all about forgiveness, right?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “I mean, I know you’re not into it and all, but that’s what Jesus is all about. I mean, that’s the whole point—forgiveness. He forgave us our sins”—he slapped at a mosquito, then flicked it off his arm with his finger—“so we’re supposed to forgive others. It’s not like he said, you know, ‘Forgive everybody except your own family.’ ”

  “Maybe it’s easier that way.”

  “Easy’s not supposed to be part of it either.”

  I slapped at my face. “Lots of things aren’t supposed to be parts of things—but they are, you know?”

  “Maybe, but then they shouldn’t say they’re not.”

  “Sure.”

  The light was going fast. I watched the current, pulled endlessly from beneath us. A short way down, where it kept bulging over something, the water looked like syrup about to boil.

  “I mea
n, my folks went to talk to Father Donnelly after—”

  “Who?”

  “Our priest, good guy, known us all our lives—’cause, you know, Mom’s all messed up, Dad’s not talkin’. They want to know what’s the right thing to do, right?”

  “OK.”

  “So he tells ’em”—he slapped himself—“we should probably get outta here. So he tells ’em, basically, to put her behind them, that she’s slipped from the path of righteousness and only she can save her soul and they’ve been blessed with two other children—to concentrate on that. To cast her from their hearts.”

  The mosquitoes were coming in thicker now. It was almost dark. The water had turned to ink.

  “I’m gettin’ eaten up,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  We got off the rail and started walking back to town in the near-dark—there were no lights on Sodom Road.

  “He said that?” I said.

  “I mean, that’s crazy, right?”

  “Crazy’s goin’ around, what can I tell you?”

  “Mom?”

  I shrugged. “So listen to this. I come home from practice last week and nobody’s home, right? It’s around seven—the house is dark. I’m taking off my shoes when I hear this guy’s voice comin’ from upstairs—this fucked-up, high-pitched voice, almost like a kid’s. Scares the crap out of me. I’m halfway up the stairs holding my spikes in my hand when the voice starts goin’ up and there’s this sound like somebody knocking on a coconut and suddenly I’m listening to Squirrel Nutkin—don’t laugh—I’m listening to Squirrel Nutkin singin’, ‘I’ve got a tail, I’ve got a tail, I hold it high as a sail … ’ Mom’s in Aaron’s room, playin’ these little kids’ records we used to listen to before he fuckin’ killed himself.”

  “Weird.”

  “Think?”

  “Gotta admit, though, it’s kinda funny too—in its way.”

  “Yeah, no, I know.”

  “More weird than funny, I guess.”

  “I mean, she hasn’t listened to these things in twelve years. It’s like she’s been savin’ them up—like a last piece of birthday cake or something.”