Brewster: A Novel

by Mark Slouka

  It was like that with everything. I’d walk past Aaron’s room and see my mother looking out his window with a folded blanket in her arms and I’d suddenly remember her laughing, throwing sheets of light over our heads, saying, “Where are the boys? Samuel, have you seen the boys?” Or I’d be sitting in the guidance office watching Marschner cup his hands in front of him on the desk, setting out my options like invisible bowls—“Well, what do you think you’d want to do?” And I wouldn’t know what to say.

  The war was part of it, coloring everything like a bad taste in your mouth. There was no one to talk to, really. For Karen it was simple. Vietnam was wrong. The only choice was resistance. With guys you’d start making jokes about joining the Nation of Islam. You’d start clowning, fucking around. Better than being bored to death, you’d say, shuffling your feet around in the cold like there was some law said you could say anything at all except what you were thinking—What did it mean to kill somebody? What did it mean to die? We were all standing on a conveyer belt gliding toward a cliff, smoking, laughing, and nobody wanted to be the first to say it.

  OF ALL OF US, John Kennedy was the only one who’d talk about it. He was thinking about quitting the team—with everything going on, he said, running just didn’t seem that important anymore. He’d gone to Woodstock, heard Country Joe and the Fish. What were we fightin’ for? It was a good question. I told him my SAT theory and he said that was it exactly: We didn’t have time to eliminate the wrong answers. The problem was if you were going to die—or live—it shouldn’t be for “all of the above.”

  “Seriously, what would you do if your number got called?” he asked me one afternoon as we walked around the track.

  I said I didn’t know.

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You talked to your folks about it?”

  I shook my head.

  He’d talked to his dad, he said. His dad still went down to the VFW twice a week. He agreed—Vietnam was a goddamn mess. Still, if your country called you … If John was called, he said, it would be the hardest day in his life but he’d understand and pray for him to come home safe.

  We were walking down the backstretch, the gusts flattening our sweats to our legs.

  “Your dad said that?” I said.

  “I mean, would you go to Canada?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I talked to Coach about it. Did I tell you that?”

  “What’d he say?”

  “You know how Coach is. He quoted some poem about how nations were invented so bullets would have the chests of men to sleep in or something.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Asked about college—said Villanova would probably give me a half-scholarship. I said how that’s great but it’s just me and my dad and he can’t really afford for me not to work right now so I was thinkin’ I might put it off for a year—plus he’s my dad and he served, so there’s that. I kept tryin’ to explain it’s not like I agree with it but, you know, it’s my country. Right or wrong, he says. That’s not what I’m sayin’, I said. An’ the beat goes on, he says.”

  “You know Coach,” I said.

  “Yeah. Anyway at some point I just say it. I don’t want to be a coward, I tell him, and he nods for a long time and then he says, ‘Look, I’m not going to tell you that word doesn’t mean anything because it does. I’m just saying look at who’s using it, and why. If somebody said you were a coward for not jumping off a cliff, would you do it?’ You did, I tell him. He was an idiot, he says. At least you can live with yourself, I say, and Coach just looks at me and smiles and shakes his head. He has a lot of work to do, he says.”

  We’d jogged into the backstretch again, leaning into the wind. We talked some more but I didn’t know what to tell him. The times they were a-changin’, but this was different. In the song the windows and walls we’d shake were somebody else’s. In Brewster half the walls were your own.

  IN CROSS-COUNTRY that fall we lost and lost again: McCann had graduated, leaving us with only three in the top ten—Kennedy, me and Moore, with one of the Time Tunnel kids a sorry fourth. It wasn’t pretty. Then Kennedy, who had always seemed untouchable to me—like Ray, except with feet—lost to a squeaky-voiced junior named Balger from North Salem, staggering across the line ten yards behind, his face contorted with pain. It threw me. It was like nothing would hold, nothing was sure—like the world was turning in your hands for its own reasons and you couldn’t hold it. The car? We were almost there, and all I could think of was what would I do if they got in it and drove away. It was supposed to be a good thing, a blow against the man, and it filled me with a loneliness I’d only known in dreams.

  That slipping feeling—it was like that with everything.

  ON SEPTEMBER 23rd I’d come home drunk. It was Aaron’s ­birthday—traditionally not a good day in our house.

  The night before, I’d come downstairs after my dad had gone to bed to find my mother sleeping with her head on her arms on the kitchen table. I hadn’t seen her like that for a long time. She looked old and sad—but she looked like my mother. It was like I hadn’t really looked at her in years. I could feel this thickness tightening my chest, my throat—and suddenly it all seemed so ridiculous, this thing we’d been doing—so unnecessary. We were both getting older. It didn’t matter who was right or wrong in the end. Somebody had to take the first step.

  Once I’d thought of it, it wouldn’t go away—like a dare I’d set myself. It began to seem less crazy. I’d leap that gap like the guy in that famous picture jumping from one cliff to the other. I’d do it for her. She was my mother, after all, and she was suffering. I’d rise above myself, like Gandhi. I could see myself walking into that kitchen, asking her forgiveness. I’d tell her I was sorry, that I’d been thinking of myself too much, that I loved her. I’d take her in my arms and say, “I’m here—I’m your son, too. We’re in this thing together.” I’d be a man about it. I’d bring a cake.

  The next afternoon I bought the cake. After that I bought a six-pack from Jerry-who-looks-the-other-way and took it to the ballpark down by the river. It was overgrown. I drank the beer sitting on the bleachers, the cake in its white box next to me. I don’t know why I bought the beer. The usual reasons, probably. The cake didn’t seem crazy. It seemed noble, necessary. Even right. We’d celebrate together. It would be like those scenes in the movies when everyone suddenly understands a character’s strengths. I sat there until it was almost dark. When I couldn’t see the trees against the sky any more, I left.

  For some reason I expected to find her in the kitchen again but it didn’t matter—it gave me a chance to take the cake out and put in the yellow candles I’d bought to go with it. I thought for a while about whether I should do five, which he’d been when he died, or nineteen, which he’d be now if he hadn’t. I decided on nineteen. The extra one for good luck seemed wrong.

  It took a while but I got them all lit, then started up the stairs. I could walk fine. It was OK that Dad wasn’t home yet—this would be just between the two of us. By the time he came home we’d be talking. I imagined the look on her face, her sudden understanding that the time had come, that enough was enough, that her other son, grown now, had taken the first step, jumped the gap. I would do that for her—show her how much I loved her. There would be tears, I knew that—but there was no way around it. I walked up the stairs, concentrating on not stumbling. After all this time, all this anger, we’d make it right—for all of us, including my brother. I had to concentrate because there were tears in my eyes.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  The tone of her voice didn’t stop me—how could I expect her to know what I’d planned?

  “Mommy?” I said.

  I’d thought about that. I hadn’t called her Mommy in years. It would tell her I was willing to go back, start over. I put on the expression I’d practiced in the downstairs bathroom—loving, open, mature. “Mommy?”

 
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a look of such horror as when she opened the door to that dark landing and saw me, the cake, those nineteen gently flickering candles.

  “It’s me,” I said, stupidly, with what I thought was a brave smile. “It’s for—” And I stopped.

  “Why would you do this?” she whispered.

  “I want—”

  “Why?”

  “I just—”

  “You counted them?” She looked at me, appalled, as if her heart were actually breaking.

  “I just—”

  “You’re cruel—there’s no other explanation.”

  “No, no, I meant—”

  “I have a cruel son.” She smiled at me, full of hate. It was her battle smile—the smile she’d walk into hell with. “So this is what I have left—I see.”

  I stood there holding that cake like I was room service making an eccentric delivery. I could see the guy in the photograph, hanging over the gap. I was still trying to smile. I didn’t understand what had happened.

  She leaned closer to see my face over the flames, and thinking she would catch her hair on fire, I stepped back.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “No, I—”

  She shook her head, her voice so small it seemed emptied of everything, like the last air escaping a balloon: “My God, what a life.”

  “Mommy,” I said, like a child in the snow holding up his hands for his mittens.

  “That you could do this.”

  “No, I—”

  “Deliberately do this to me.”

  “I’m your goddamn son,” I said. “Why do you—?”

  “You’re not my son.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because it’s how I feel.”

  I just stared at her. “I’m glad he’s dead,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, and went back into Aaron’s room and closed the door.

  I left the cake on the hallway dresser where I found it the next morning, spotted with dime-sized circles of wax like ringworm.

  BY MID-SEPTEMBER it was as if the summer—the nights we’d spent up on the embankment or listening to records in my room, our trip out to Yonkers, the four of us making plans—was something we’d left behind, like we’d been forced into a car and were watching it grow smaller behind us. We had no choice but to keep going.

  That October I started applying to schools. Sitting at the kitchen table, late, I’d hear the chair creak in the living room and my father would come up behind me with his book closed on his finger, pat me on the shoulder and walk back. College was the answer, everyone said; it would keep you out of the draft. I was thinking more “out of the house.” Karen had applied all over, to schools I’d barely heard of: Wellesley, Barnard, Radcliffe. She’d told her parents that she and Ray might take off the next summer. Maybe I could come along, she said. Frank was thinking about junior college.

  Ray and I worked on the car, scrounging parts all the way out to Trenton. This was his shot, Ray said. Jimmy said it was comin’ along, that Ray had a feel for it—that we both did. He said there were some parts would take time to find, but we might get it done by Thanksgiving—Christmas at the outside.

  MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE OF EVERYTHING ELSE, because we could feel things suddenly changing, that we decided to do Halloween that year. Be kids for a night. It makes sense. I forget who I was. Frank was the Hulk, I think. Ray was a pirate, which is always cheap. Karen was Glinda the Good Witch of the North with a cardboard crown and a plastic wand with a tin foil star at the end. We did Prospect and some of the smaller streets around it, schools of little devils and ghosts and Snow Whites crowding through the gates and tripping over the curbs, splitting around us like we were boulders in a stream. “Now make a wish,” I remember Karen saying in Glinda’s weird voice, “then tap your sneakers three times.” And she’d whack me on the head with the star: “One—two—three!”

  It felt good walking in the misty rain between the hanging skeletons and the spooks made out of hats with sheets hung over them, making fun of the people who opened the doors. It had been warm, so the pumpkins had softened and sagged, making them scarier. We got a couple of pounds of candy even though we were older because people didn’t want to risk pissing us off, then went to my room and ate it, listening to Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, which Karen had brought from home. She’d memorized half of Glinda’s lines, which should have been annoying, but wasn’t. “You always had the power to go back to Kansas,” she’d say, and lying on the floor of my room on my elbow, I’d smile and give her the finger and she’d do that horrible Glinda laugh and say, “You have no power here! Be gone, before somebody drops a house on you, too!” and we’d hear Dylan singing in that stoned-duck voice of his about how she breaks just like a little girl and she’d smile and say, “Don’t bet on it.”

  It was a good Halloween. The rain started to come down and we could hear it drumming on the gutter and we sang “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” changing Memphis to Brewster, and I remember looking around at one point and thinking if I could just stay in this room, in this moment, I’d never want anything else, just the four of us lying around stuffing Milky Ways and candy corn and Sugar Daddys, laughing, talking about what we’d do next summer and how we’d always be friends. No more.

  They left after one. It had stopped raining, but a mist was falling thick enough to make your face wet. Some people had forgotten to blow their pumpkins out and looking up the block you’d see spots of flame like pinholes in construction paper. Karen said she’d drop Frank at his house. I asked Ray if he wanted to crash in my room. He said he might as well head back, see if the place was still standing—check if anybody was feeding Wilma.

  We were standing around the car when an exhausted clown and a guy in an Elvis mask came out of the dark walking down the middle of the shiny street and we said something about how it was the King and who was the other one supposed to be—­Richard Nixon? and they said, “How’s it goin’?” A little ways back a third guy in a frilled jacket with a plastic guitar over his shoulder had stopped to light a cigarette under the streetlight. “Who’re you?” Ray said, “the Lone Ranger?” and the guy grinned and leaned the plastic guitar against his stomach, then pulled on a giant Afro wig he’d tucked under his belt like a scalp. “Jimi Hendrix, man,” he said, then did a couple of silent licks on the guitar and we laughed and they walked on.

  A PERFECT NIGHT, in some ways, the rain getting louder between songs, the four of us together—right down to white Jimmy with his frilled jacket and plastic guitar. Nobody wanted to be the first to say it was late. We talked about how we’d never be like our parents with all their sadness and bullshit—how we’d make it count.

  It was three days later we heard that a woman in Poughkeepsie had hung herself along Route 55. She’d been there for two days, quietly creaking in the rain, but nobody had realized it until the decorations were being cut down for another year.

  WE WERE SITTING by the lockers that morning when he came striding down the hall like nothing had happened, like everything was cool. Like his eye wasn’t shut and he didn’t have a stained bandage above his ear and a corner of his lip wasn’t raised off his teeth.

  She saw him before I did, was up on her feet before I knew what was going on. He held her for a long time, petting her hair. “Hey, hey, hey, c’mon—it’s OK, it’s OK,” he kept saying. “Guy just got a little lucky, is all.”

  She pulled back to look at him, touched his face with her fingertips like she was afraid he’d break. “Oh, my God, Ray,” she said.

  “It’s fine, it’s nothin’.” He tried to smile at me over her shoulder. “Little late for Halloween, right?” he said.

  “What the fuck happened, Ray?” I said.

  “Nothin’ happened. Laced me in the second round, that’s all.”

  “They didn’t stop it?”

  “This ain’t the Garden we’re talkin’ about.”

 
People had begun to gather around.

  “Fuck, what happened to you, man?”

  “Hey, Chris, get over here—look at this!”

  “Bad day, huh?”

  He ignored them. “Looks a lot worse than it is, baby. Just got away from me a little, that’s all.”

  “A little?” Karen said. “You call this a little? Ray, I don’t—”

  “Just wanted to pick up some bucks, help with the car.” He held a cloth to his lip, tried to smile. “How the fuck was I supposed to know he was eight and one? Make that nine and one.”

  “Danbury?” I said.

  A couple of the bused kids walked by, looked, kept walking.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  I saw him look over my shoulder. Farber, who was on duty that morning, was standing a few feet behind me. He had his head to the side like he was studying something confusing. “Again?” he said.

  “What do you want?” Ray said, his words slurred by the lip.

  “What do I want?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do I want?”

  “I’m just standin’ here—I’m not makin’ any trouble.”

  “I would think it’s about what you want.”

  “We’re not doing anything wrong, we’re just—” Karen began.

  “Not your concern, honey.”

  “Actually, it is my concern.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, I think it is my concern.”

  “Hey, hold on, wait, wait,” Ray said. He pulled some small folded papers out of his pocket. “Look, I got a note—two notes. From the nurse, an’ another one from home.” He saw the look on my face and looked away, pushing his hair back off his face. “OK? C’mon.”