Brewster: A Novel

by Mark Slouka

  Ray didn’t smile. “Why would I wanna do that?”

  “Inspirational pep talks, moral fiber, regular bowel movements—­the benefits are legion.”

  Ray scratched his ear, bored, waiting it out.

  “Might be an improvement on your current activities. I was going to say extracurricular, but it seemed redundant.”

  Ray looked away, and I understood why people were scared of him.

  Falvo was looking right at him. “No? Not interested? You could fight with your feet for a change.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  Falvo took the stopwatch out of his pocket, looked at it like he was checking the time. “Well, you know what Dorothy Parker said about horses and water.” He put the watch away, paused. “Let me tell you something, son—nobody fights for the reason they think.”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “Imagine my disappointment. Still, it’s true, you know.”

  “What?”

  “About it always being about something else. People, nations—interesting, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You done?”

  Falvo looked at him a second, then made a lazy sign of the cross in the air. “In nomine Patris, et filii, amen.”

  He turned to me. “As for you, my friend, you should beware of what you wish for.” He indicated Kennedy, loosening up alone on the backstretch. “You see that young man with the unnecessarily long hair and the red headband? He seems to think you belong in the first group, starting Monday. I’m inclined to agree with him.”

  He paused. “Trust me, it’s not a favor.”

  I RAN THE RACE that day—too long, too dreary, the hills killing my rhythm, the mud sucking my strength—hearing her voice, seeing her face, the piper of pain screaming in my ears, and I took his price and doubled it, then doubled it again and paid in full—in rage not at him, or her, or fate, but the muscles and tendons of those ahead of me—because it was easier. I had my weapon. I’d suffer my way to grace. I took Moore in the final two hundred, seeing Ray, the bandage white against his face, leaning in a blur of tears or sweat against the bleachers. I was coming up on McCann’s back when I ran out of rope. If I had nothing else, I had this. I had this.

  The following Monday I joined the first group, more nervous than I’d ever been before an actual race. A quick pat on the back from Kennedy, a nod from McCann, and we were lining up in front of Falvo standing on the bottom step of the bleachers in his raincoat saying, “Gentlemen, I’d like three dollars in quarters, please. I’d like them smooth, I’d like them shiny, and I’d like you to drop each one in my hand as you come through. On your marks?”

  I’d been running quarters in 68 seconds with a walk to recover and working hard. They went through the first in 64, moving to the outside to drop an invisible quarter in Falvo’s palm like everyone else, then slowed to a jog and went again. By the third I couldn’t talk, couldn’t keep my hand steady at the finish to drop the coin. “Sixty-three, five,” I heard Falvo say behind us, and then: “Mr. Kennedy, a dollar’s worth from Mr. Jefferson will do fine today.”

  Kennedy dropped back alongside me. “How we doin’?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I know you don’t like it, but coach knows what he’s doin’.”

  I nodded.

  “Andy, I’m gonna take this next one,” he said to McCann.

  He turned back to me. “Don’t worry—I’m gonna let you spend a little somethin’ before you’re done.”

  I nodded. It was all I could do. We were almost at the half and I still hadn’t pulled a full breath.

  “Just follow me. We’re gonna go smooth through the two twenty, then kick it up a notch—not a sprint, just a gear change.”

  I nodded.

  I’d watched it before—the easiness, the deceptive gliding flow of it, but I’d never understood it until I was behind him on the curve, tucked inside the slipstream of his body, stride matching stride. I’d never seen anyone move with such terrible economy, such balance, the arms, held high, powering that long reach like thought. I could hear him talking to me as we flew: “How we doin’—we doin’ OK? Remember: Keep it sweet, don’t press. When we hit the mark, just slip it into third—no change, nothin’ different, we’re just movin’ away from where we were. Ready?” And we were off, not so much sprinting as extending, unfolding, the rhythm shifting, tightening, and he was still talking to me as we came out of the curve into the straight, saying “Good, good, smooth, that’s it, don’t press, just keep it down—good,” and it wasn’t until I heard Falvo’s voice saying “fifty-eight, five, gentlemen, that’s a dollar’s worth” that I remembered seeing him swerve to the outside and neatly drop an invisible coin in Falvo’s outstretched hand.

  It carried me that fall, that winter. I could feel my body changing, altering, my stride extending. I could feel the muscles in my thighs slipping and clenching like ropes when I jogged up the stairs. I didn’t think about how much it meant—or how little. I had this. If I had nothing else, I had this.

  I EXPECTED TO SEE less of them now and I did. Or maybe I was just busy. Anyway it was only natural. I remember seeing them one afternoon on the far end of the football field by the woods—his coat, her hair, a steady rain turning to sleet—just standing there holding each other the way you see people at the airport, like they’d been told one of them had to leave.

  There was nothing you could say to that. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It reminded me of a cartoon I’d seen once—it might have been in MAD Magazine, I don’t know—of a guy who’s just been punched in the chest—the fist is just stuck inside him, his skin has closed around it—and he’s saying, “You didn’t punch me in the chest—I trapped your fist with my heart.”

  THEY WERE THERE, of course—the beauties and the thugs, the royalty and their serfs, acting out their parts those seven hundred days or so—but even though I can remember their faces, their names, it’s like they never existed, really, like even though they filled those years, flexing and posing, cringing, kicked, they were just holding up their end until they could drop the sneer, wink at the company and walk out the door. Become who they were—who they’d been all along. Only the desperate ones, who were playing for keeps, seem real to me now.

  I used to watch him sometimes, to see how he did it. How he managed it. I wanted to be like him, move like him. I wanted that James Dean cool. For a while I thought it was in the clothes, the hair, the timing: the cigarette tossed at exactly the right moment, the look, the nod. He had a gift for cutting away early. From everything. It took a while for me to understand it was who he was, what he did—cut it short, toss the butt, walk away—because nothing had lasted, nobody had stayed. Didn’t matter how strong it felt, the ledge would always crumble. So walk away. Just shrug and walk away.

  And he did. Until Gene was born. Gene changed things—forced him to stay. As did Karen. As did I, for a while.

  We were like three people pulling on a rope, dragging him back to who he’d been before he became who he was. Back to who he wanted to be.

  THE WINTER AFTER he met Karen was a good one for Ray, though he had to do more around the house because Mr. Cappicciano broke his arm and his jaw when he missed a step near the top of the staircase. Little Gene was still in Yonkers. Ray would hitch out twice a week to see him. He seemed more confident, less tired that winter. He stayed in school. He’d backed off the fighting, he said.

  Others hadn’t. Since the beginning of the school year, two buses of kids from Yonkers, all black, had started coming to Brewster. Nobody knew what they did with them during the day—they seemed to have separate classes. We’d see them in the cafeteria, clustered around one table listening to a transistor, nodding to the music, silver Afro picks stuck in their hair. Ignoring us. Nobody knew how to talk to them—not even the two black kids we had at Brewster. It’s like they were in an invisible room that went wherever they did. We could tap on the walls, yell shit at each other, make threatening gestu
res—but nobody could break through.

  That afternoon a few of us were stretching in the gym with the throwers after practice when the big metal door to the outside opened with a crash and a gust of wet air, and one of the bused kids walked in. It had been pouring all afternoon—the windows were dark with it. He was wearing what looked like a half-dozen sweatshirts, just one on top of the other, hood on hood, as if he thought that by piling them on he could keep from getting soaked. No more than five-six, five-seven, he looked like something drowned.

  “Hey, asshole, you want to shut the door?”

  It hadn’t been meant one way or the other—Trachosis hadn’t even looked over his shoulder. Even then it could have passed—Harry was just being Harry—except that someone whispered that it was one of the new kids, which made it sound like Harry should have kept his mouth shut, which changed things.

  “So the fuck what?”

  “So nothin’.”

  “What, they’re so fuckin’ sensitive you can’t even tell them to shut the door?”

  “No, I—”

  “Hey?” Harry yelled across the gym. “Are you very sensitive? Did I hurt your feelings?”

  The kid didn’t answer. He’d yanked the door shut. We watched him walk to the water fountain, his sneakers slap-squelshing on the wooden floor.

  “Forget it, Harry,” somebody said.

  “What, fuck you, I’m not allowed to ask a question? Hey, you,” he yelled, laying down the sixteen-pound shot he liked to mess with and getting to his feet, “they talk where you people come from?”

  The quiet probably made it worse; normally everybody would have been bullshitting, laughing. As it was, nobody said a thing. We could hear the rain against the metal doors.

  The kid had bent down to the water fountain. He was still wearing his sweatshirts, his face almost invisible inside the hoods. At that point he still could have pulled the plug on it. A simple “sorry” when he first closed the door, a wave, a joke—anything would have done it. But he didn’t. Either he was deaf or he just didn’t feel like it that day. It was something new to us.

  “Hey, paisano, habla inglés?”

  The kid didn’t move, which was strange. Harry was a very big guy, 225, no fat—hard to miss. I’d seen him lift Chris McClement by the ankles with one hand, take the lid off a garbage can and drop him in.

  “Hello. Anybody inside all that shit?”

  It wasn’t until he was right there, maybe three feet away, that the kid turned and unloaded a mouthful of water in Harry’s face, then slowly moved a few steps back and waited.

  Everything stopped, like in freeze tag when somebody touches you and you can’t move. I can still see the room at that moment: the lights with the protective wire cages over them, the dark windows, the wooden floor with the kid’s footprints going across it, the group of us in dumb stretching positions on the mats. It was a big mouthful.

  I think if there had been another way, Harry would have taken it. Even if it had been just the two of them, he might have turned and walked away. He didn’t want this now. He wasn’t a bad guy. He had no choice. I saw his face when he turned to wipe the water off with his hand. He looked confused, panicked; he hadn’t known there’d be a test. Then he flicked the water and charged.

  It was only afterward, playing it over and over in our heads, that we were able to break it down into parts, understand what we saw. At the time it was just one movement, an explosion—the bullet going through the egg. A slight pivot and the left flicked out to the face, once, twice, snapping Harry’s head back, a hard right to the gut bent him forward, a knee to the face flipped him back. From the side he seemed to be bowing at terrible speed. We’d never seen anything like it.

  In the quiet you could hear the kid’s sneakers squelching across the floor, then the clank of the door handles.

  IT STARTED PROBLEMS. Nobody wanted to touch it, but that didn’t stop the talk from running. Hear what happened to Harry? Some nigger—the word would always come out with a little pause on the n like they were running up to it—some nigger broke his nose. Sucker-punched him.

  We’d fuck ’em up. It was always “we,” always “them.” Somebody’s mother had called the office. Somebody had called the cops. It didn’t matter that Harry didn’t want to talk about it, that he showed up at practice a couple of days later with a hill of tape over his nose, threw the shot and left, that the rest of us avoided it like we’d seen something unnatural, embarrassing—the rumor mill had started grinding. They were this, they were that. They’d been in juvenile detention homes, committed crimes. Some kid had been pulled off the bus with a gun.

  Nothing big happened. A few near–fist fights—“That’s right mutha-fucka, you just keep starin’ … Anywhere, anytime, asshole, hear what I’m sayin?”—and the thing settled into a low boil. The lid rattled but stayed on the pot.

  Ray moved through it all like the invisible man. A heaping cafeteria tray would float down the line, carried by a coat. He could give a shit. So Harry got a nose job from some kid who knew how to handle himself—so what?

  It wasn’t just that, Frank would say, bringing him up to speed. One of ’em had a gun.

  “Show me how to do this,” Ray would say, pushing his algebra book over to me.

  “Seriously,” Frank would say.

  “See, I don’t fuckin’ get that,” he’d say, watching me cancel factors.

  “Seriously.”

  “Who says?”

  “Who says what?”

  “Who says he had a gun?”

  “Everybody. The cops took it off him.”

  “You can just do that?” he’d say to me.

  “Sure.”

  “Seriously,” Frank would say. “There’s gonna be a war.”

  And Ray would look up like he was hearing him for the first time and just look at him a while.

  “You’re an idiot,” he’d say. “Seriously. Now can you shut the fuck up so I can learn this shit?” And he’d turn to me: “Do it again, slow.”

  Fine, Frank would say, but people were sayin’ that Champbell was gonna bring in his old man’s gun.

  And Ray wouldn’t even look up. Maybe they could just cancel each other out, like in math.

  HE’D TALK TO ME about Karen: what she’d said, how she’d looked—it never occurred to him. I was his friend. It was a whole new thing, he’d say. And he’d have this look on his face that would have been ridiculous on anybody else—like he was looking at himself in a mirror, changed, and liked what he saw, and didn’t quite believe it.

  We didn’t either. It felt like a betrayal of some kind, like he was turning his back on us, on who he was. It was like in Cool Hand Luke, when Paul Newman, his mind finally right, starts sucking up to the bosses—we kept expecting him to grab the shotgun and jump in the truck.

  Maybe he’d changed, Ray said. Where did it say he had to fight every moron in Putnam County? Let somebody else take out the garbage for a while. He’d gone to talk to O’Reilly, who’d said he could come back and shoot a little pool. It felt good being back.

  We didn’t buy it, we said, and told each other stories to prove it. Ray was Ray, Frank said, leaning toward us over the cafeteria table. He’d been in the locker room when Champbell and Copeland and Jonas had started up their usual shit. Who knew what they were thinking—maybe they’d heard he’d gone soft.

  I smiled in anticipation.

  “Anyway, I’m there, McCann, a couple of others,” Frank said. “We figure maybe ten seconds before the deodorant and the bottles and shit start flying, but nothing happens. I mean, Champbell’s just slingin’ it—really personal shit—and Ray’s just standin’ there like in Billy Jack when they pour the flour on the kids’ heads, just dum, da-dum, da-dum, tie your shoes, tuck in your shirt. Champbell doesn’t know what to do. Calls him a faggot, punches a locker, say’s he’s gonna fuck him up and Ray picks up his shit and just walks right up to him. Doesn’t say a thing. He’s right in his face, his coat over his shoulder—wide open.
‘Go ahead, fuck me up,’ he says. He turns his head for him. ‘C’mon, right here.’ ”

  “Jesus.”

  “Just humiliating. Champbell doesn’t know what to do, so he goes like, ‘Why don’t you put your books down, you pussy,’ so Ray lays his stuff down on the bench and puts his hands in his pockets and says, ‘OK? So go ahead—hit me. C’mon, what’re you waitin’ for?’ and when Champbell still doesn’t do anything he nods, picks up his shit and leaves.”

  Frank grinned. “Am I right? I mean, you know Champbell. That’s gotta be crazier than anything I’ve seen our boy do.”

  We agreed with each other, reassured. No, you could sing along with the Mamas and the Papas all you liked—the world would bring you in line soon enough. It was all around you. Forget “be who you want to be”—you’d be who you were.

  BREWSTER HILL ROAD. It might have been December because the leaves had been down a while and you could see things in the woods that you’d forgotten were there: a rusted junker that had been there longer than the small trees that had grown up around it, an old house you’d swear you’d never seen before. It was after practice. We were trudging home. Ray was going on about Karen. He’d been takin’ it slow, he said, trying not to fuck it up. They’d gone for a walk down the tracks all the way to Jimmy’s and back. She’d walked across the trestle with him.

  Somebody had taken the front wheels off—it was resting on its engine like something brought to its knees.

  “You know how freaky it is,” he was saying, “especially in winter when you can’t really move that fast. I mean, you’re listenin’ all the time.”