by Mark Slouka
“I’m sorry, man—that’s rough.”
We were quiet for a while.
“You’d have kicked that squirrel’s ass, though.”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said.
“Especially with the spikes.”
“I liked my chances.”
“What size—pin or half-inch?”
“Half-inch—I wasn’t fuckin’ around.”
“So what’d you do?”
“How do ya mean?”
“I mean, you know, after you figured it out.”
“No law against playing records—went back to the kitchen, made myself a sandwich. When my old man got home she had The Prince and the Pauper on.”
“The prince and the pauper?”
“We used to listen to that stuff.”
“What’d your dad do?”
“Same thing he always does. Put his shit down, asked me about my day, the two of us talkin’ like this, like we don’t want to bother her—nothin’. The thing is, she’s set up shop up there. Sometimes she doesn’t come down all night and it’s just me and my old man eatin’ dinner listening to Peter Rabbit.”
“That’s messed up,” he said.
“No shit. You try listening to Peter Rabbit.”
“Soon as I get home.”
A car went by and somebody yelled something I couldn’t make out.
I’D BEEN STANDING in the stairwell in the dark, listening to the needle click, when I realized she might open the door and find me there. I can’t explain the fear I felt at that moment; for some reason I suddenly imagined a stranger coming out of that room and opening his mouth and my mother’s voice coming out. I could hardly move—it was like my blood had gone thick. I’d almost made it to the bottom of the stairs, walking on the sides to keep the boards from creaking, when I heard her voice, gentle as a touch. “Guten Abend,” I heard her say, and then something I couldn’t make out.
“I see,” my dad said when I met him at the door. The music was on again, muffled by doors.
He washed his hands at the kitchen sink, shook them twice, then dried them on the dish towel.
We ate leftovers, sitting at the dinner table. Far above us a duck quacked, a midget answered. I watched him cut a slice of dumpling, his shirtsleeves folded neatly above his wrists. He chewed thoughtfully, his eyes moving from the woodcut over the dresser to the empty vase to the streetlight outside the window, then back again. “This is not so bad,” he said.
“No,” I said.
I saw his eyes stop at the vase, not seeing it, his knife and fork making a roof over his plate.
“You want to watch the news?” I said.
“That’s a good idea,” he said.
ABOVE US the rowhouses set into the hill stuck out against the sky. I saw a drifting spot of light—a firefly, I thought, though it didn’t make sense in September—then realized it was somebody sitting on their porch in the dark. I wondered what their life was like, if they could see us passing.
We walked on past where the rocks bulged out from the retaining wall. The warm smell of somebody’s garden, a quick hit of rot. The firefly glowed and fell.
“I’m goin’ to take the back way,” Frank said.
“See you at practice,” I said.
I was coming up Oak when I saw someone on the other side of the street just ahead of me. He was walking along the stone wall that climbed up the embankment but it was dark so I waited until he passed in front of a light from a window before I called his name.
He didn’t ask who it was, just turned, dropped the cigarette, ground it slowly under his shoe.
“S’up?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“Thought you were gone,” I said.
“Back.”
“Came by the house.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
“Have a good talk with my old man?”
“What?”
“Forget it.”
“Wait a minute, I don’t—”
“Forget it.”
“I don’t—”
“Just fuckin’ drop it, alright?”
“Fine.”
For a second I thought he was going to walk away but he just stood there and lit another cigarette.
“So how’s Jesus?” he said.
“How’d you know I—?”
“Your mom told me. Wanted to see if you wanted to hang out.”
“I don’t know—you know Frank. Usual shit.”
I couldn’t see it but I could hear it—a smile like a sigh. “Yeah.” He sounded tired suddenly, like a soldier sinking down into a foxhole. “I guess some people’s usual shit is just nastier than other people’s.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Sorry about—you know,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s OK,” I said.
“It’s been kind of fucked up lately.”
“OK.”
He nodded. “Listen, there’s some stuff goin’ on at the house—any chance I could crash at your place?”
I DON’T KNOW how late we stayed up that night. Late. It wouldn’t be the last time.
Nobody came downstairs. I figured they were asleep. Everything was quiet. Anyway, my parents never minded—they bought all his bullshit stories about having to fumigate the house and the aunt who didn’t have room and after a while he stopped bothering. It’s like they needed the noise, the distraction, the extra set of feet creaking the floorboards. Maybe we all did. He’d go downstairs sometimes and stand out on the front porch to have a cigarette, even when it was cold, and sometimes my father would walk out and hand him a jacket. Mom would be upstairs somewhere.
He slept on a mattress on my floor. We’d sit up late, listening to records, then turn off the light and go right on talking—about school, about girls, about life. I’d hear his voice coming out of the dark and I’d drift off and come back and he’d pause and I’d say, “Yeah, that’s fucked up,” because that covered pretty much everything.
It’s like he was hungry for it—to sit in a room just playing records, talking—like he’d never done it before. Sometimes we’d get silly—even for me—and I’d have to remind myself that this was Ray Cappicciano sitting against the wall leafing through a magazine with my stuffed gorilla behind him for a backrest, its paws draped over his shoulders, its huge dark feet propped up on either side of his hips. I don’t think I thought less of him for it. I understood it was important, that some part of him needed it. I even felt proud of having him there, a little tamed, not quite so dangerous now, like an actual leopard curled at the foot of the bed.
The first time we walked up the stairs he pointed to Aaron’s room and mouthed the question and I nodded and said, “Yeah,” and he said, “That can’t be easy,” and I said, “Yeah.”
It’s been years. I still hear his voice, talking to me out of the dark. It was as close to having a brother as I’ll ever get.
THAT WAS THE FALL that Karen came and changed everything.
It’s hard to explain about her. It’s like trying to describe the smell of fresh-cut grass on those evenings in June when everything stands out from everything else, when the shadows moving up the trees are as sharp as the leaves that made them. You can compare it to something else, you can break it down into parts and hope they add up, but really it’s about how it makes you feel.
That’s the way it was with her. She was beautiful, sure, but it wasn’t that alone—other girls had the hair, the face, the parts. It wasn’t just the way she moved, kind of loose and laughing and natural, her arm trailing her body when she turned, or the way she’d suddenly duck and twirl away like a little girl for no reason at all. It wasn’t even how smart she was, though she understood things, put them together the right way, better than anyone I ever knew. It wasn’t any of these things—or maybe all of them plus something that made them different, that made them her.
It was the life in her. The courage you felt in her. It was the way she’d look a
t you—straight, compassionate, listening—actually seeing you. It’s hard to explain. When she looked at you, you liked yourself better. You stood up straighter. Whatever act you had, disappeared. It’s ridiculous, I know, she was a sixteen-year-old kid from Hartford, but it was like a current. An honesty current. You could feel it. And you’d know—as if somebody had cracked open your chest and shined a light in on your heart and said, calmly, matter-of-factly: “Look, see what you’ve got here? And here?”—that you had something to give, strength you hadn’t known you had, and that if she ever took your side there wouldn’t be anything in this world you couldn’t put down.
It should have been so easy to ridicule: another High School Romance, the delinquent and the debutante, darkness and light, the hair-trigger brawler bleeding in the mud and the girl who sees the heart in him. It wasn’t. It’s not just that she was tougher than any of us, or that Ray didn’t always fit his part; the truth is, he’d fit it well enough before her, and for all I know it was only knowing him that made her who she was.
No, it was the two of them together. To see it was to feel it. To be forced to acknowledge it, like light, or hunger. So what if they looked the part, black hair and blond, olive skin and pale, if they seemed to have been shaped to complete each other: his body, like hers, slim, loose, but charged, pent, meant to hurt, not heal—it didn’t matter. The more evidence you piled up, the less it seemed to weigh. To see them holding each other, her body worked into his, her head tucked against his chest, her hair like a sheet of light cut by the sleeve of his coat, was to understand that some things simply were what they were—intended, inevitable—that they might end someday like everything else but that while they were here we couldn’t deny them.
I SAW HER FIRST, fell in love with her first. There was always something there. She came into English class looking like the hippie cheerleader she should have been—the jeans, the face, the long blond hair tucked behind her ears—and promptly got into an argument over a poem we were reading. It was the second week of October. I don’t remember who the poem was by. It was about loss, she said.
Leventis had been pulling teeth, like always—I was pretty much the only one who ever spoke. When her hand went up right after I’d said something you could see the surprise on his face. “Yes …?”
“Why can’t it be about death in this life, like he said?” she said. “I mean, isn’t forgetting a kind of death?”
Leventis was amused. “Well, you’re certainly hitting the ground running on your first day. Perhaps after you’ve had a chance to—”
“I’ve read it.”
And they were off. Some of the students rolled their eyes, others slumped down in their chairs. She didn’t seem to care or notice.
Certainly, yes, forgetting could be a metaphor for death, Leventis tried to argue, but surely the third line of the second stanza suggested physical death. The poet was looking back from the afterlife, having gained a certain perspective on …
Why did it have to be one or the other? Memory … She didn’t give an inch. Leventis sat down on the edge of his desk, pulled out all his guns, more charmed than annoyed. Ten minutes later they called it a draw.
I was walking down the hall when she came up next to me. “So you ever read Neruda?”
“What?”
She smiled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to jump you like that. It’s Jon, right?”
“Yeah, no, it’s fine,” I said.
“It’s just that you seemed to like poetry.”
“It’s OK,” I said.
“It’s OK?”
“No, it’s, you know—I like it.”
She laughed, dropped her voice like Dick Butkus. “Poetry? Well I don’t know, Bob—I like football. I mean, I’ve read some poetry, mostly by accident—”
“I don’t like football,” I said.
“Say it: I like poetry.”
“I don’t—”
“I won’t tell a soul, I swear.”
“It’s not—”
“C’mon. You can give somebody a bloody nose right after.”
“I like poetry.”
“See? Was that so bad?”
“Pretty bad,” I said.
“How about, ‘I’m a guy and I like poetry?’ What do you think—too much?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“That’s OK, keep breathing—deep in, deep out. We’ll try again tomorrow. Build up more slowly.”
“Can’t wait,” I said.
And she was gone.
We talked again the next day, and the day after that. How could I have not misunderstood? In my world there was no room for a girl to just say what she said and have it mean no more than that. To walk up to a guy, to laugh, to be herself, and have it be that alone.
No, I fell for her for all the right reasons. There was nothing to get past with her. She was exactly who she was—not uncomplicated, just herself—and it made you feel like you could be, too. That you had permission. In two days I felt like I could talk to her about anything. She didn’t run hot and cold, smile at me one day, ignore me the next.
All the right reasons. All but one.
RAY WAS GONE those first three days, so it had time to set. When he came back he came back hurt, a big bandage on his right temple, another on his neck. A basement club in the Bronx, he said. Ten-dollar pay-in. He’d picked up a quick fifty.
He seemed worn down, sleepy—quieter than usual. He’d been out to see Gene, he said. The little guy was doin’ good—pretty much out of diapers, babbling up a storm. He was OK with him being there. For now, anyway.
He looked at his tray. “I can’t fuckin’ eat this. You want some of this?”
I shook my head. I was thinking about how she’d looked at me when I’d walked into class that morning. Frank reached over and took the milk.
“Get this—I’m Way now,” Ray said. He felt the bandage with his fingers. “That’s what he calls me.”
“Like Elmer Fudd,” Frank said.
“Every time he sees me it’s ‘Hi, Way’ this an’ ‘Hi, Way’ that.”
“Wascally wabbit,” Frank said. “Go womp and fwowick in the fowest.”
Ray lay his head on his arms. “Figure if I get dead I’ll be like ‘No Way.’”
“No Fuckin’ Way,” Frank said.
“Or Sub Way,” I said.
For a second he was gone somewhere. “Or maybe Free Way, who knows?”
I laughed. “Could be. Maybe you could—”
I saw him raise his head, then slowly push his hair off the bandage with his right hand. The look on his face was like a surprised wince.
I knew before I turned around.
WE NEVER KNEW how they actually met, only that it was impossible that they wouldn’t. Or what they’d have to talk about. Everything, it turned out.
It says a lot about her that even after I realized I was wrong I didn’t feel stupid. She’d made her choice—no explanations, no apologies. She continued to talk with me, with Frank, with everyone else exactly the way she had before and expected the same. The few girls who couldn’t handle it she just ignored.
She asked me if I had time to talk with her the day after they met. That guy, the dark-haired one—his name was Ray, right? What was he like? We were walking next to each other down the hallway to the gym. I remember thinking how I could never feel self-conscious walking next to her.
I told her the truth. Ray? He was my friend. A good guy. Angry, maybe.
He had that look, she said. She’d heard he was a fighter, a bully. He scared her a little.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know what the opposite of a bully is, but whatever it is—Ray’s that.”
She looked at me. “You like him.”
I shrugged.
“OK,” she said.
WHAT I DIDN’T TELL HER, because I didn’t want to risk the respect she might have for me—because I wanted to take something away from this—was that Ray had already talked to me about her. I’d known it was ov
er for me. I had nothing to lose by telling her what I did. By being a friend.
He’d found me up by the track. It was one of those October days—still, waiting, sharp with the cidery smell of things dying. I watched him walk up from the school, that easy, fighter’s stride—unmistakable. I had a pretty good idea what he wanted to talk to me about.
I’d never seen him nervous before.
They’d talked a little in the hall, he said—just a smile, a few words. He didn’t know what to do. She was smart—what would she ever want with him?
You’re not dumb, I said.
“I have to talk to her,” he said. “You get that, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He looked up the track like there was something there, the wind blowing his hair around, the small white scar through his upper lip showing in the sunlight. I didn’t say anything. I already knew what I was going to do—in a strange kind of way, it gave me the upper hand.
“Listen, it’s just that, you know, she’s in your class … I mean, you’re my friend and all.” He looked at me. “You OK with this?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Sure?”
“Why not?” I said.
“I keep thinkin’ about her.” He shook his head. “Listen to me, I sound like a fuckin’ idiot.”
“Nothin’ new.”
He blinked but let it go. “It’s just—it’s like I can hear her voice even when she’s not around.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I have to try.”
“So, OK.”
“OK,” he said. “Listen … thanks.” He looked up. “What’s goin’ on, you have a meet?” The Carmel High school bus had pulled into the upper parking lot.
I nodded.
“Shit, I didn’t realize.”
The rest of the team had begun to straggle out, dressed in their good sweats and hoods.
“Maybe I’ll hang around, watch you kick some Carmel bootie.”
I nodded.
He looked at me. “You OK?”
“Sure,” I said. Falvo was walking toward us with his pointy shoes and his cowlick, carrying his little arm across his chest as if in an invisible sling—enthusiastic as death. “Mr. Jefferson”—it was the same old schtick—“are we ready to remind these people they’re just a vowel away from toffee-colored candies that stick in your teeth? That’s a rhetorical question. Mr. Cappicciano, we seem to be seeing a lot of you lately. Thinking of joining up?”