The End of Alice

by A M Homes

  He goes on. “Has it been a learning experience? I mean, you wouldn’t do it again, would you?”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, that’s good. And it’s a decent place? They don’t pick on you? There’s not a problem with the other men?”

  “No problem.”

  “I admire you. For toughing it out.” He blots his forehead with his handkerchief. “My reason for coming is that there were some boxes. They must have gone from your mother’s house to grandmother’s and then off to my father’s, and somehow they ended up with me. Anyway, we were cleaning out and came upon them, mostly things from your childhood, old clothes, mildewed books, rusty toys, a couple of your mother’s pie plates that you made into tambourines, that kind of thing. Long story short, they were in the basement, we thought about having a big garage sale but didn’t, and then a letter came from a new museum, the Museum of Criminal Culture?” he says, his voice going up on the end of the word culture, as though he’s checking to see if I’ve heard of it. “They’re opening in Cincinnati?” he says, again his voice rising, curling into a question mark.

  I shake my head. “So?”

  “Well, they wrote asking if we had anything of yours, and well, I wanted you to know. I didn’t want you to find out from someone else—that would be cruel. We sold your things. The curator himself came to pick up the boxes— very pleased with the haul. And, he assures me that they’ll be well cared for. And, should you ever be released, they’d love for you to come and tell them a bit about some of the items—you are up for parole or reconsideration or whatever it is very soon, aren’t you?”

  I nod.

  “Well, I just wanted you to know.”

  “Should I feel honored?” I ask, stalling, wondering if there’s a way get at what I really want to know—how much they got for me.

  “Up to you,” Burt says, standing. He takes his card out from his wallet and, unable to actually hand it to me, holds it pressed to the glass for a minute so that I might memorize it. “Keep in touch,” he says, stepping out of the booth.

  A fat old man has disturbed my day, coming to tell me that he has sold my childhood to a museum in Cincinnati.

  I stand, and despite all my metallica, my chain-link fencing, I am able to pick up the chair I’ve been sitting on and hurl it at the glass. Plexy, it bounces off, bounces back and hits me in the head. The guards are on me, tackling me from behind.

  Burt turns. “Good to see you,” he calls as they’re hauling me off. “And take care of yourself.”

  Unchained. Tossed into my cell. The door is locked.

  A while later Henry comes and whispers through the slot. “Do something for you? A tiny taste?”

  “Why not,” I say, succumbing after a lifetime of abstinence. “Just a taste.”

  He slips a packet of powder under the door and instructs me to rub it into my gums. I sleep like a baby.

  My yellow truck has gone to Cincinnati.

  FOUR

  Sorry for the silence. My parents made me go with them to ‘Washington for the long weekend. Would have written from there, but there wasn’t anything to say. We missed the cherry blossoms, I looked up Abe Lincoln’s nose—it’s chipped—they’re fixing it, paddle-boated around the Tidal Basin, went to National Archives for the Nixon tapes, bought you the enclosed.

  Inside the envelope is a vellum copy of the Declaration of Independence. Cruel child. For the first time I have the idea that she might be playing with me, but am quickly distracted by the uneven ink of a note scrawled at the bottom of the page.

  P.S. Got ’em! And I wasn’t even looking! Went to the store to get correct-its for the typewriter, and there they were. More soon!

  Hallelujah. She has found her man. He is with friends in the five-and-ten, piling bags of chips, comic books, and candy bars onto the cashier’s counter. She hides behind the rack of panty hose and takes him in—her man with his men.

  Her boy slips an extra and unpaid-for candy bar into his pocket and her knees weaken. She falls against the rack, knocking sandal-toes to the floor. The boys pay for their loot and leave.

  She follows them with the exactitude of a bloodhound. Outside, on the sidewalk, in the spotlight of late afternoon, they work hands, teeth, and jaws, tearing at the layers of foil and plastic that keep them from their prizes. Thinking herself a pro, a watcher extraordinaire, she walks right past them, ignoring them. She goes to the corner, and when the white-flashing man in motion beckons her across the street—walk, walk, walk—she crosses. On the other side, she positions herself near the bank, halfhidden by a leafy tree. From this vantage point, she can see it all, and no one would ever know, suspect, the nature of her interest.

  Across the street, the feral pack joyously jams fistfuls of fried, dried, potato, corn frizzle-drizzle doo into their pubescent—hence ever-hungry—chops, cramming the orifice with far more than it can possibly hold. Chunks, giant crumbs of half-chewed food, fall over them like hail, like snow—the phenomena of weather—lodging in the folds of their clothing, using the high absorbency of T-shirts to stain, to permanently mark them with this foul evidence, proof. The boys step backward as if repulsed slightly, then tilt forward, leaning over the tips of their Nikes, their Reeboks, making room for the foul matter, the remains, to fall free. They use the sidewalk as their napkin, their plate, their trough, their ground. They trade materials, passing cans and bottles of soda between them as if mixing the ingredients, preparing equal measures of some serious solvent, drinkable Drano—one part diet Coke, one part Mountain Dew, and a drip of Orange Crush. They swap items, taking a bite, a swig, a handful, and passing it on. They dig deeper into their brown bags and bring out the smaller, sweeter objects, cubes and flats of chocolate, with nuts, with Krispies, crackers, wafers sandwiched in between further layers of chocolate with caramel, with nougat, whipped tufts of fluff.

  The feast, the ravagement, the savage hoarding of the tribal reward, goes on until there is nothing left. The bags are empty, the last salty crumbs licked from the wrappers. Garbage, plastic and paper and aluminum foil, is collectively smushed, mushed, compacted in on itself, stuffed into a single brown bag, balled up, crushed, shaped, and formed until it is a bullet, a bomb, a basketball. And then the tall one, the one with the beak, fires it in a swift and daring shot toward the trash can on the corner. Hitting its mark with greater force than anticipated, the bag knocks the top layer of garbage out of the can and onto the sidewalk. Humiliation drives the tall one toward the can, toward community service. He takes a few hurried and embarrassed moments to straighten up the area as several of the town’s residents, who have seen the shot, have seen its failure, the sprayed garbage, walk around with their heads shaking and their glottals clucking. The other two members of the group, unable to support the beaked one in his failure, which they take to be their collective failure, stand to one side, shuffling their feet, the weight of mischance heavy on their shoulders.

  “Going home,” one finally says. “Almost dinner. Later, man.” They slap hands and shoulders, butt heads, and kick each other, ending their slapstick routines with long, loud, multisyllabic belches that turn heads up and down the block. “Wondrous,” they say, “Unbelievable,” and then they take off in different directions for the shelter of home.

  Ecstasy!

  Sometimes I wish she would just stop. Not with me; with them. Sometimes I am so frustrated, so bored, so annoyed at how easily she is taken in, turned on, how she unabashedly sucks up this juvenile grotesque. This is not true child’s play, it has none of the charm of that. The gluttonous, consumptive moods of these boys to men, their constant testing of the limits, how much one can take, is so baldly adolescent, so pathetically pubescent, that it sends me up the walls. How can she be so blind?

  I jot the shortest of postcards. Everything! Does not! Require an exclamation mark!

  She is not stupid (I hope). She should want more, she should want the very best. I want the best for her. But it is a telling picture, the portrait of her a
cross the street from them, her khaki shorts from last summer now snug in the derriere and in the thigh—she is, unfortunately, no longer just a girl, but also a woman, the body already dissolving from the tenderness of youth to the buttery bulk and sway, the free-flowing flesh of the fullest female. The notion of her crotch being heated, dampened, made warm and wet, by these boys disgusts me. I want it to require something more, something younger, something older, some greater mystery. I hate it when she is so damn obvious. Hate it to no end. I want to shake her, to slide my own gnarled, hairy, and arthritic five thick fingers between her legs and feel the heat, the high humidity, evaluate it for myself, and then bring her to her senses.

  Cursing her openly, I’d slide my hand up that sleeve of khaki, whilst grabbing the flesh of her face between my teeth. Finger-fucking her, I’d bite her cheek, piercing it. I’d give her a sizable piece of my mind. I can afford it. God, they are so annoying when they believe they can think for themselves.

  My yellow truck is lost. I am suspicious, thinking that perhaps my grandmother has stolen it, jealous.

  “Where is my truck?”

  “Who knows,” my grandmother says.

  “I can’t find it.”

  “That’s what happens when you drive all over town; maybe your little meter maid knows where it is.”

  “I want my truck.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “When’s Mama coming home?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  My yellow truck has gone to Cincinnati. When I am released, sprung from this rat trap, I’ll visit that museum and tell them the story of how my grandmother kept it hidden from me, kept it for weeks parked in the back of her closet.

  Had I not been so distracted, diverted, I think by now I should have been a congressman, an inventor, or at least a novelist. If I could have contained my feeling, if I could have channeled my libido into my career—although I suppose I did that in a sense—if I could have given myself a more familiar and well-accepted career, as many wonderful men have done, if I could have guided my prick instead of having been guided by it, I could have been a leader of men, a molder of morals. Who do you think gives us missiles and fighter planes? Frigates? Certainly not some fur-trapped pussy, that much is clear—they have no interest. Cock and balls, that’s what it’s all about, everyone knows. Why don’t the candidates just go ahead and drop their shorts so we can see for ourselves what they’ve got, who’s the bigger, better man. Elect big dick, he’s calm, he’s collected, he’s the winner all around. You know it. But because we can’t see it, because we’re so gullible, the shrively dick always wins. Why? Because he fights, he overcompensates, he competes because it all means so damn much to him.

  War is a circle jerk.

  It pisses me off that they can have so much and I have to starve.

  It’s surprising, I write back, how much we have in common.

  Again, she has found them, the sweaty threesome in which her mark is buried. They are in the luncheonette, en booth. He is protected, bounded by his mascots, his sycophants, his small cadre—one with a nose so large it can hardly accommodate his even larger, thick-framed glasses; the other so rotund, front and back, that there is a gap, one or two inches of unbearably white, Crisco-soft lard, between the bottom of his T-shirt and the top of his pants. And he, in the middle, average in every way but, surrounded by such freakage, seeming to her like a demigod.

  He notices nothing outside of himself, the entirety of his focus is internally directed. His oblivion may be his greatest attribute.

  Thoroughly spaced.

  Ten times in fifteen minutes he loses his place in the conversation. With all the frequency and regularity of breathing, he says, “Huh?” and his friends willingly fill in the blanks. Far from stupid—according to her—but forever catching up, he radiates the preoccupation of a boy for whom history holds great things.

  She sits at the far end of the counter, hunched over a plate of cottage cheese and cling peaches, watching them in their booth, mesmerized by the consumption, which so far she has counted as four plates of french fries, two club sandwiches, four Cokes, and three milk shakes. When the last drops of spit/milky chocolate shake are sucked up through the straws with great fanfare and gurgle, the silence that follows is almost instantly filled with the by now trademark series of ragged bellowy belches that echo through the establishment. The boys smile and rub their stomachs, proud of their gastronomic gluttony and the resonance of the displaced gases. Upon encouragement from the owners the threesome pay their check and leave.

  The tennis racket belonging to our boy remains in the booth. Shaking her head, the waitress plucks it from the corner, and before she turns around, it is snatched from her hand.

  “I’ll catch him,” my girl says. She races out of the restaurant and, looking right and left, spies the three down the block, window-shopping the music store. “Hey,” she calls, “hey,” hurrying happily toward them in what is almost a childlike skip, waving the racket as though it were a flag. “Your racket, your racket.” Finally he catches on, looking at her as she extends the racket (and herself) toward him, thrusting the ball-beater back into his possession. “Oh, yeah,” he says, taking it from her with one hand and rubbing his chest with the other, his expression that of someone performing a complicated trick, a sophisticated display of coordination. And in the rubbing, he seems for a second to give his own left tit a tiny tweak. “I forgot.”

  Noticing the tit through the T-shirt, she smiles and wishes to tweak it herself with her two front teeth. He notices nothing about her. To him she is an object of little interest. Too old, too ready and able to wonder aloud what his mother would say if she knew he’d left the racket behind—What’s the matter with you? Don’t you take anything seriously? You would if you had to work for it. He looks at his shoes, bracing himself for her verbal assault. Because the moment is unanticipated, because her action, her fast-forwarding of the process, has caught her unawares, she is without words. She fumbles, blushes, averts her eyes, and seems much more like a little girl, a dainty doe, than the brazen hussy we know her to be. The picture of her so unsure—so drunkenly filled with the destabilizing flush of adrenaline and whore-moans—warms my heart. And it is possible that this rickety path, this rocky start, only helped her. Had she been cooler, more calculated, she might have come off as distant, unapproachable, a bitch. But here, like this, she is, for the moment, no better, no worse, no less than he.

  “Maybe we should play,” she says. “I was on the team in high school, but I’m really out of practice.”

  Head hunkered down, still stupidly waiting for the strike, he glances at her, eyes rolling up and around like loose eggs.

  “I’d pay you for your time. Five dollars an hour? Think about it,” she says, not at all knowing what she is doing, with no idea of what will come next, pushing forward only because she is desperate not to leave empty-handed—she must realize some profit, some tangible progress, from this encounter. Unwilling to let the moment fade, she pulls a pen from her pocket—the habit of keeping a writing utensil handy comes from college, but the point of having paper, too, has thus far escaped her. “Here’s my number,” she says, taking his limp hand and scrawling the details on the soft flesh of his palm.

  “Should I give you mine?” he asks. She nods and prepares to tattoo his numbers onto her skin—even though she already knows them, having found the family name first on the mailbox at the end of the drive and then in the phone book. It’s so easy to spy when no one thinks you’re looking.

  He closes his eyes as if to conjure a photographic replica of the seven digits that phone home—that ring the bell, that fetch the maid, who finds the boy and tells him that someone, somewhere, wishes to speak with him. There, on the street, she feels she can see through the boy. Through his thin white T-shirt, she begins to examine him, the occasional holes in the cotton like guiding points, reference marks. Taking a step back to sharpen her focus, she breaks him down into sections that
can be reviewed, called back again and again at will. She divides him up as though there’s too much of him, as though he can’t be filed whole.

  Shoulders, out from the neck in an even line across the top of the torso, a T square of knobby bone protrusions, prehistoric finds marking the development of man. The torso itself is still reed thin, the pecs barely rounded; she suspects his nipples are like flat, pale dimes, and near the hips there is the faintest ring of baby fat about to stretch into a man’s wide rope of muscle. He is twelve and a half and on the verge, ripe. His chin is smooth and clean, cheeks barely fuzzed, and his hair falls in odd locks down to his eyebrows, which are coming in nicely, firm and steady. His eyes are green and slightly unfocused.

  “What’s your name?” she asks. Until now, this has never mattered, and even now it only gives title to something. It’s the decorative and crowning touch, like the little plastic clown heads a baker’s assistant sticks on cupcakes. In situations like this when you finally have the name, you have the heart, the soul. Without ever touching, she is exploring him, feeling things, seeing how he will lie against her, gauging his weight, the sharpness of his bones.

  “Matthew,” he says. “Matthew,” he repeats, as if to be sure he’s gotten it right.

  So many virginities to lose.

  FIVE

  Prison. Clayton comes, in a strangely good mood. Mostly his countenance is that of a miserable soul, someone so sorry that he can hardly walk or talk. Now, he comes smiling—behind him, Henry hovers in the doorway. They are both smiling, smelling of sweet smoke, stoned.

  Henry sees me working and laughs. “A regular writer,” he says. “Fiction or non? Memoir? Am I in it?”

  “Crossed out,” I say, and he goes off down the hall calling, “Caps for sale, caps for sale.”

  Clayton fills the room, his muscles swollen, heated from his hours with the weights, his shoulders, back, and neck hard and hot—and more than anyone has a right to ask for. He smiles, face breaking into the thin lines that define his dimples, his this and that. I see the Princeton boy, the glamour-puss. I smile back.