by Mark Slouka
The bus stopped, the driver pulled the door release. Crows, a quick yell, a hard gust of cold. Someone toward the back had a radio, was flipping through stations: “In the news … the Dow Jones … President Johnson said … and then the familiar three-steps-up, three-steps-down opening of “Son of a Preacher Man” and she was off the bus, the doors closing behind her on that sweet, smoky voice: “the only boy …” It was something she could do. It wasn’t far. Maybe there was something wrong with the phone.
She had to ask directions once, stopping in at a gas station, glad for the warmth, then walked across the bridge with the river running high and cold and turned at the church. Four o’clock and almost dark. She knew the area. She’d just never been to his house.
She found it easily enough. It looked resentful somehow—forgotten. She’d always felt that he was ashamed of it, now she knew why: the caved-out railing, the stained shingles, the pile of rain-warped boards and chicken wire in the yard … there was a light in an upstairs window, another, smaller one, toward the back. A car was parked in the driveway. It had started snowing.
She didn’t hesitate when he opened the door, though it was obvious he was drunk. He stood there looking at her throat, his hands on either side of the door frame like he was trying to push down the house from inside. His mouth was slightly open. Was Ray in? she said. He swayed like the house had moved. She said it again. Was he home? Could she talk to him, please?
His eyes climbed up to her face, slowly, and something like a smile closed his mouth. Who wants to know? he said. You?
Ray hadn’t been to school all week, she said. She’d been worried. Some of his friends were worried.
His eyes, as if pulled by gravity, had dropped back to her throat, then went further. She’d been worried, she said, pulling her coat tighter around her, feeling the anger and something else growing inside of her. His eyes began their slow climb back. Well, isn’t that nice, he said, when they’d reached her chin.
“Please,” she said, “I …,” but he’d already pushed himself away from the frame and was walking into a small, half-bare living room. She could see a couch, a coffee table with bottles on it. A dog was lying against the wall on some kind of blanket.
“I’ll just see if he’s in,” she heard him say. He walked back and disappeared.
When she walked into the room the dog raised its head, then lay down again. She didn’t notice the puppies. She was thinking about the upstairs light, the porch, the door. The man—it had to be his father—came back with an open beer and sank down on the sofa. He’d been in the kitchen, she realized.
She tried again. “Can I talk to him, please?”
“What can I get you?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
He smiled, took a pull of his beer.
“Thank you anyway,” she said.
“A beer?”
“Really.”
He scratched his crotch like a man strumming a guitar. “Somethin’ harder?”
“No.”
“Whatever you want.”
“I just came to see if he’s OK.”
“What’s your name?” he said, and then: “He’ll be right down.”
She told him. “He knows I’m here?”
“That’s a pretty name,” he said. “Sure.”
“How does he know I’m here?”
He took another pull, looked at the dog, then around the room like he’d never noticed it before, then back. “You don’t have to be scared,” he said.
She hadn’t been. “You know, I really think I should go,” she said.
“I told you, he’ll be right down.”
“Really.”
“Really,” he repeated. His eyes started to close and he caught himself. “What can I get you?”
She hadn’t thought he could move that fast, didn’t quite believe that he had. He was between her and the door, still holding the bottle. He’d bumped into the table as he jumped up and the dog had growled from its place by the wall. He laughed. “Can you believe that—my fucking dog.”
She could feel her heart pounding against her coat. A voice far back in her head was telling her she was in trouble, but she only half-believed it. This wasn’t happening. She looked around for something to grab.
“You don’t want to go,” he said. He smiled, and the sadness of that smile told her how bad it was.
“I just know he’d like to see you happy,” he said.
“Karen?” she heard him say, and her knees almost buckled. She didn’t turn around.
“Well, if it isn’t my son.”
“Get the fuck away from the door,” Ray said.
“What did I tell you, huh?”
Nothing moved.
Ray stepped in front of her, tight, his body brushing her coat. “Get away from the door,” he said. He was holding a round, thick piece of wood as long as his arm. She didn’t know when she’d picked up the screwdriver.
“Well, aren’t you a pretty pair,” he said. “Sure.” He moved to the side. “Enough?”
“More.”
“Like that?”
“More.”
“Far as she goes.”
“I’m not asleep now,” Ray said.
He smiled. He was pushing his lips around in a circle with his finger, unaware, his eyes heavy like a child dropping off to sleep. When he smiled, the finger pushed the smile into a sneer, an idiot’s grin, a quick baring of teeth like he was snarling or showing them his gums, then a smile again.
“I’m not asleep now, am I?” Ray said.
The head wobbled and he caught himself. “You little fucker,” he said, smiling.
They walked toward the door, turning slowly like plants to the sun, then backed up the rest of the way. She felt behind her for the doorknob. She didn’t realize she was sweating till the cold air hit her back.
“It was nice meeting you,” he called. He was walking toward the kitchen, steadying himself along the back of the couch. “You two have fun.”
AND SO, pedaling away in empty air, we fell. We weren’t the first—it happens all the time.
I can see them hurrying away from that house, her coat around him this time, holding him up. Like the couple in that painting, The Storm, except with no scarves or gauze or bullshit. She’s the one leading and it’s winter and this is another kind of storm altogether. It’s over, he’s saying. He’s not going back. It’s done.
Except they’re eighteen and it’s dark and it’s not. It’s twenty degrees out. I can see them hurrying down the hill to the store, Ray hugging himself in the cramped little aisle with the chips and the toilet paper while she gets the key and goes out to the bathroom and takes off her angora sweater and puts on her coat again and comes back and gives it to him and he pulls himself into it. They have to think, they have to go.
They try not to look at the clerk, who’s leaning sideways, watching them. Like they’ve done something wrong. Like either of them has ever done anything wrong.
“This ain’t no dressin’ room,” he calls out.
“Sorry,” she says.
“That’s right,” he says.
HE DOESN’T WANT the hospital, Ray says. They might call his old man—who knows where that could go? Anyway, it’s not that bad. They’re out, that’s all that matters. Let the bastard find him.
“OK if we just warm up a little?” she calls to the clerk. “Can I borrow your phone?” and he stares at them a long while, then points and she goes to the phone and buys them time. She’ll be out late, studying with a friend, maybe a movie later …
They have to go, but where? She tells him everything—that I’ve been sick, that she hasn’t been able to talk to me all week. What about her place?
“I can’t come to your house like this,” he says, standing there in his soaking sneakers and her yellow angora, coatless, bandaged, swollen.
It might be OK, she says. They’re cool, they might understand. She’d explain.
Explain what? he says. And even if
she could explain, they’d never let her go after that. I love you, he says. We’re leaving—soon, summer—all we gotta do is get through and we’re gone. I’m not gonna fuck that up.
I’d go anyway, she says. I don’t care.
He waits, biting his upper lip till he knows he can say it. I know you would, he says. But you do.
He looks ridiculous squeezed into that yellow sweater, like an action figure that’s been thrown around a lot.
Anyway, it’s just for a night or two, he says. I just gotta figure it out for a night or two—just till Jon’s on his feet.
She’d be the one to think of it. She’d gotten thirty dollars for her birthday—a grandmother and an uncle she never saw. She’d been saving it for a prom dress. She’d never wanted to go. It was just her mother kept telling her it was one of those things you’d remember.
And he’d ask her. Right there in the snacks aisle with the lights hitting off his bandages. Like a suitor in a fairy tale, the cooler buzzing in the background.
Would you’ve gone with me? he’d say.
Are you asking? she’d say.
I’m askin’.
Yes, she’d say. Anywhere.
I CAN SEE THEM walking those four miles to the El Dorado on Route 22, Ray’s head and arms sticking out of the garbage bag, rustling quietly. They’d take the tracks just in case, over the trestle bridge, then up to the long shore of the reservoir, walking carefully because stones and shadows change places in the dark and everything looks like something else. And he’d take off the bag in the parking lot and she’d pay for the room and the red-headed guy would keep looking back at the TV and they’d walk up the outside stairs in the cold and let themselves in and close the door.
And maybe they’d make love even though he couldn’t move much because they’d just made it through something and because they’d never had a place that was theirs before. And later that night she’d put her sweater back on and he’d take the thin blanket from the bed and wrap it around himself like a Hollywood Indian, then pull the garbage bag over it in the parking lot and walk her the three miles to Putnam Lake, because he’d insist, then back.
WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR that Friday he was wearing her father’s old sweatshirt and a winter hat with flaps like Elmer Fudd’s. She’d brought him food in plastic bags from the cafeteria. Mary had asked after him, listened as Karen told her what she could—then went to work.
“Oh, my God,” I said, when I saw his face.
“Heard you been sick,” he said.
“Ray, what the fuck happened?”
“Don’t worry about it. Listen, you think I can crash here for a while?”
I pushed open the door. My mother was walking by, dragging her chains.
“Hiya doin’, Mrs. Mosher?” he said, taking off the hat.
She stopped when she saw him. “You’re hurt,” she said.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Looks worse than it is.”
She nodded, turned to the stairs. Three steps up, she stopped. I could see her small, clenched back. When she turned, our eyes met for a second and she glanced away.
“Come in the house,” she said, looking at Ray.
“Really, I’m fine.”
“Please.” She paused, then said it again. “Please.” I could hear the shaking in her voice, like another person in the room we’d all agreed to ignore.
“Sit,” she said, when we got to the bathroom.
And she went to work, a kind of current trembling her lower lip like she was cold, carefully peeling back the bandages, cleaning the cuts, even, at one point, shaving along his cheekbone. “It hurts,” she’d say, wincing, and he’d shake his head and she’d take the cotton ball I had ready for her, then tell me where to find the little scissors, not like I should have known but just to tell me. When she pressed the cut on his temple closed with her fingers, I noticed how old her hands had grown. “Good,” she said when I put the tape across it. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d done anything together.
HE COULD STAY as long as he wanted, I told him after we’d gone up to my room; we’d done it before, it was no big deal.
“Could be for a while,” he said.
“Long as it takes,” I said, and he nodded quickly and blinked and looked at the carpet. He had that look that people have when they’re holding on, chin out like he was feeling a sore tooth. It came out as a whisper. “I’m sorry, man,” he said.
It took me a while. “Your dad?” I said.
He looked past me into the living room, shook his head.
“Stay as long as you want,” I said.
He waited till he could talk. “I don’t want your mom and dad to know, OK?”
He stayed a week. Barely.
HE HAD NO CHOICE, really. He had no clothes, no stuff, no schoolbooks—everything was back at the house. He had to go back.
It had all come out—bits, pieces, like a loosening drain.
It hadn’t always been bad, he said—you got used to things. He could take him when he was awake—hold his own, anyway. Thing was, lately he’d started coming after him when he was asleep. Sometimes he’d be sorry after.
He didn’t know why. Most nights the booze helped because he’d just drink till he passed out. Most nights. Then there’d be a bad one and it would be like somebody had pressed a button under the couch. Something would set him off—could be anything, anything at all—and he couldn’t stop.
Why didn’t he go to somebody? I said. Tell somebody?
Where do you go when your old man’s a cop? You saw it yourself.
Hit him? Fuck, yes, he’d hit him back—more than once. It didn’t make things better, didn’t make ’em worse. He’d clocked him in the jaw with a lamp, broken his arm. Nothing changed.
One time, lying on the carpet in his room, crying, he told him he’d tell somebody, the cops, somebody.
“I’m pretty fucked-up, just hanging on ’cause you don’t wanna black out. ‘I’m gonna fuckin’ tell somebody,’ I’m mumblin’, ‘I’m gonna fuckin’ tell somebody.’ I can see him standin’ over me. He’s got the drawers of my dresser open and he’s pissin’ all over my stuff. ‘Go ahead, call the cops you little fuck,’ he says. ‘Oh, wait a sec.’ ”
He’d get into fights to cover it up, he said, figuring if everybody thought he got into fights, because he did, they wouldn’t ask. His old man knew how to hurt you without it showin’—it was his job. Problem was, when he drank, he’d miss—or get carried away.
We were sitting in my room listening to the Stones turned low, which doesn’t work. Ray had spread out my sleeping bag in the usual place along the wall, set up the milk crate with a t-shirt over the top to keep his things from falling through the holes.
You got used to stuff, he said. It’d been worse when Gene was around. He’d see it starting—could be baby food on the wall, whatever—and get in the way.
“That was a cool thing to do,” I said.
“Yeah, pretty fuckin’ heroic. They’re gonna have a show about me—any day now.”
“Seriously,” I said.
“Doesn’t count when it’s your brother,” he said. He couldn’t split so long as Gene had been in the house, but ever since he’d gone to live with Suze in Yonkers, things had been different. Cleaner. And now they were both out of the house. He was gonna swing by and pick him up on his way out of town, he said. He had it all worked out. He’d stop at the Red Rooster. He’d have a burger and a shake waiting on the back seat.
I asked about Yonkers.
Suze knew. Enough, anyway. She’d be good with it.
We listened to Jagger doing his bad-boy thing.
“Under my thumb,” he said, like he’d never heard the words before, then nodded, blinked, and looked at my poster of Marty Liquori gliding through the tape. “Motherfucker’s gonna be under my thumb, this time.”
He wanted to know if Frank and I would come to the house with him to get his stuff. We could go when his old man was at work, he said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Just to get my shit,” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
It wasn’t a laugh, or even a smile; just a quick outbreath of air, amused, dismissive, disgusted—like when you’re looking at your own hand cut open on a can.
“What?”
“I don’t know. It’s just—”
“What?”
He shook his head, and for a second I could see what he’d looked like as a kid.
“What?” I said.
“He’s supposed to be my dad, you know?” he said.
WE ATE DINNER that night, the four of us, like we were a real family on TV—subdued, serious, trying to understand this new crisis. My mother brought out the plates, all business. When Ray tried to say it was good, she waved it away: “It’s not important.”
“And these boys who attacked you,” my father said, his jaw set—“they have been arrested?”
He didn’t know them, Ray said. Didn’t know their names. Nothing the police could do.
“But why would they do this?” my mother said.
He couldn’t say. There was this girl he’d been talking to down in the village, Ray said. Maybe that was it.
“You should eat,” my mother said.
“And this happened where?” my father said.
“What?”
“This attack—it happened where?”
“The ice pond,” Ray said, “out by Dykeman’s.”
“Do you go to this place?” my father said, looking at me.
I shook my head.
“You must be careful with these thugs,” my father said. “Both of you. People are capable of anything.”
“This we know well,” my mother said.
“Anything.”
“Let him eat, Samuel,” my mother said.
My father looked down at his plate, then cut a piece of meat but didn’t bring it to his mouth.
“And your father, what does he think of this?”
“He’ll be back next week. He’s on a job. I talked to him on the phone—I mean, he’s worried, but you know, what’s he gonna do?”
“Your father’s away for a week?” my mother said, confused. “Who is looking after your little brother?”