But I would—it might be my last chance to impart fatherly wisdom to my daughter, it might be one of her last memories of me. What to say? What gift of wisdom to leave her with?
“You know, Shelby, men are pricks. Don’t trust a one of them.”
“Us.”
“You?”
“No, you. It’s an us. Don’t trust any of us.”
“Oh yeah, right.”
She stared at me as if I had just pleaded guilty to an indictment I didn’t know had been handed down. “I’m going out tonight,” she said, her attention back to her phone, her thumb dancing on the keyboard like Baryshnikov. “I need money.”
“Who are you going out with?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Micki and Pam. We’re meeting up at Doug’s.”
“Who’s Doug?”
“Doug. Doug. I’ve only gone to school with him since fifth grade.”
“Oh, that Doug,” I said, still having no idea who Doug was. “Talk to your mom.”
“What, you left all your cash inside some G-string?”
“You know, Shelby, there’s more to do in Vegas than go to strip bars.”
“Like what?”
“Well, there’s an Applebee’s,” I said.
Shelby used to like my jokes, but all I got now was a stone face as she turned and headed back to the kitchen, her attention all the while on her phone.
I thought of going after her, of tossing her phone at a wall and wrapping her in my arms, telling her again that I loved her and this time making it stick. But from prior experience I knew that would only make things worse. Life with Shelby had become an emotional minefield, which left me doubting that I ever said or did the right thing. My life in microcosm. The only solution was time, waiting for her to grow out of whatever she had grown into, but time with Shelby was the one thing I no longer had.
I stood in the hallway, feeling helpless and hapless, and then beat my own retreat up the stairs. Seeing the way I looked in my daughter’s eyes made me feel like a clown in a costume. As soon as I hit my bedroom, the pants and T-shirt hit the hardwood floor. I took a moment in the shower to gather my thoughts. Back in the bedroom, my hair still soaked and a towel around my waist, I made a call.
“It’s Harry,” came a voice over the phone, rough hewn and salty, like an old piece of salt cod. “I’m not here now. Leave a message.”
“Harry?” I said.
“Just leave that there message.”
“Harry? Why are you pretending to be an answering machine?”
“Who’s this, Johnny?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Oh, Johnny. How you doing there, son? I don’t owe you nothing, do I?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t need to leave no message.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’ve been getting calls. You know.”
“How much do you owe?”
“Not too much. But the bastards have been threatening to take the Left Hook. Can you believe it?”
“But you own your boat outright.”
“Yes I do. Or I did. But remember when my engine went on the fritz?”
“You mean when it blew up.”
“And then I got those twin 120s.”
“I told you that was too much power.”
“Oh, Johnny, engines is like tits: there’s no such thing as too big or too many.”
“Three would be too many.”
“I knew a girl in Fresno once that—”
“Harry?”
“But I only got the two there, Johnny. And they were offering a sweet little loan. What was I going to say? No?”
“Exactly. That’s my new advice for anyone being offered a sweet little loan.”
“You’re going to put yourself out of business.”
“I’ve been out of business for a year. You busy tonight?”
“I got plans, sure. I’m getting drunk at Schooners with the Koreans.”
“That’s a surprise.”
“If something works, Johnny, stick with it, I always say.”
“Why don’t I join you there, say, about ten-ish?”
“No good. Too much running, I was never no good at running.”
“Not tennis, ten-ish. Ten o’clock. I need to talk to you. Remember that thing we worked out a couple years ago?”
“What thing?”
“That thing.”
“That thing?”
“Yeah.”
Pause. “What the hell’s happened to you?”
“Let’s just say I have creditors of my own. We’ll talk about it tonight at Schooners. And if we move, we’re going to have to move fast, all right?” I thought about the scare I had felt at the front door. “I think I may be going fishing tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“There’s no reason to wait.”
“Good thing I got them twins, then, isn’t it?”
“This goes through, I’ll clear up those calls for you, Harry.”
“I’d rather stick around and dodge the damn calls.”
“Me, too, but what are you going to do?”
I hung up and sat on my bed with that towel around my waist and let a wave of fear flow through me. It wasn’t going to work, I could feel it. I had a plan, and it might have been a pretty good plan, too, if it didn’t depend on Harry. But what other option did I have? This was the life I had chosen all those years ago in Pitchford, even if I hadn’t known it then. I sat on the bed a moment longer, my legs crossed, my body propped up with one arm as I stared at the paisley swirls on the bedcover. I loved those paisley swirls, their jaunty richness. How was it that a paisley pattern my wife had picked out at the Macy’s in Newport News could suddenly send tears to my eyes? And then I thought of Augie, lying dead in his own bed. Lucky bastard.
When I looked up, Shelby was staring at me from the doorway.
“Are you okay, Dad?” she said.
It took me a moment to snap back to the present, and my presence in the bedroom. “Yeah, sure,” I said. As I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, I added a false note of heartiness to my voice. “Good as gold.”
“You left these,” she said, raising my briefcase and the white hat into the air.
“Thanks, princess.”
“What did you do in Las Vegas, Daddy?”
“Nothing much. Just business.”
“Okay,” she said, but there was something in her face, something different than her default hostility, something frightened.
I glanced down at the towel to make sure I was covered.
“I’ll just put them here.” She put the hat on the bureau, placed the briefcase beside it, gingerly, as if it contained a bomb, and turned to leave the room.
“While I was in Vegas, I said good-bye to a friend.”
She turned around again. “Where’s he going?”
“He died.”
“Was he a good friend?”
“The best I ever had,” I said.
“Did we know him?”
“No. He never came and visited us here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll go now.”
“Okay,” I said. “How much money do you need for tonight?”
“I’m fine, Dad. Don’t worry about it.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad.”
When she left I sat there a moment longer. I wanted to slip under these paisley covers, to put my head beneath a pillow and disappear into sleep, to Rip Van Winkle it and wake up when everything had passed. But it wasn’t going to pass. I needed to keep my cover, for one day more; I needed it to look like everything was normal in my normal suburban life, for one day more. I had been pretending for so long now, what was one day more? So I resisted the urge to hide and instead rose from the bed and put on my usual—khaki shorts, golf shirt, shiny brown loafers—stuck the horrid white hat safely in the briefcase, hid the briefca
se in the basement, and went off to see my son fail miserably at Little League.
And the whole time I dressed and drove I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had let my life spiral so out of control. There is always a moment when the course is set, always a moment after which the journey toward disaster is as inevitable as death or laundry. When I looked back, I realized maybe I was wrong to always blame my father, maybe I should have blamed my dog.
11. Spirals
THEY SAY DEREK Grubbins k-killed a man,” said Ben, when I still was only ten and my life had not yet developed its malignant complications. The Derek Grubbins of whom Ben spoke with quiet awe was Tony Grubbins’s mysterious older brother.
“Only one?” said Augie.
“At least one,” said Ben. “Maybe five. But this one he killed by sticking a fork in the guy’s neck. Blood spurted out in f-four different directions.”
“That sounds like the pork roast my mom made last week,” said Augie.
Augie, Ben, and I were sprawled on the front steps of my house, idly flipping baseball cards but really just passing time so we wouldn’t miss the show. And it promised to be a doozy.
This was only a few months into my new life and already I was looking like a full-fledged Pitchford brat: plaid shorts and white T-shirt and high-top Keds bought at the Sears on Easton Road, my hair buzzed quick and neat at Fred’s Barbershop, right next to Milt’s Five-and-Dime. If you had walked down Henrietta Road you wouldn’t have been able to pick me out of the crowd slapping wildly at the puck. The country-club kid had morphed, on the outside at least. But even though I now lived in Pitchford, and looked like I lived in Pitchford, I still didn’t belong in Pitchford.
I was a spy behind enemy lines, watching everything I said and did, so as not to be caught out for what I really was.
And what was I, really? An outsider, thank God. It was the one thing that made everything else bearable, which was good, because it was looking more and more like we were here for the long haul.
My mother had roused herself to take a refresher typing course and then find a secretarial job at some machine shop in Horsham. She was drinking less and cooking better—she couldn’t have been cooking any worse—and with her new salary our family life had lost its sense of abject doom. My mother was settling into our rental house, settling into her job, settling into the couch in front of the television at night with her glass of comfort, settling into the pale un-Willing leftover her life was becoming. As for me, I was hanging out with Augie and Ben.
I don’t quite know how we became a gang of three, but in the weeks that followed my sad entrance into Pitchford, as I kept my distance from the rest of the neighborhood, first Augie started keeping me company, and then Ben joined in. I suppose each of us was an outsider in his own way and that was what drew us together. I was a filet-mignon boy in an olive-loaf suburb, Ben was the big black kid in a mostly white neighborhood, and Augie was just your average kicked-out-of-Catholic-school troublemaker. If you wanted to smoke, Augie would sell you the cigarettes he stole from his mom. If you wanted to stare slack-jawed at naked women—and, really, who didn’t?—Augie would sell you time with the Playboys he slipped from his father’s workbench in the garage. Later he would graduate to selling concert tickets and pornographic videos and drugs, yeah, but even in those early days he was the supplier of our darkest dreams and as such was always on the periphery. We were, all three of us, on the periphery. All we had was each other.
“They say Derek Grubbins buried two b-bodies in the crawl space of his house,” said Ben as he flipped another card and placed it on the pile.
“Only two?” said Augie.
“One was his older brother. One day he was hanging around, then there was a f-fight, and the next day he was gone.”
“Didn’t he join the army?” I said as I flipped a card.
“They said he joined the army,” said Augie. “But have you ever seen him hanging around in his uniform?”
“No,” I said.
“There you go, bub,” said Augie, turning over a card of his own.
“What about the other body?” I said.
“No one knows who the other one is,” said Ben, “but every night Derek goes down to the crawl space and spits on the graves.”
Augie hacked up a loogie and spat it onto the scraggly lawn next to the steps.
“Funny,” I said.
Tony Grubbins’s mother had died years ago and his father had been killed in a construction accident just the year before, when a steel beam shifted unexpectedly at a job site, smashing flat his chest. The accident had left Tony in the care of his older brother, Derek, who had moved back into the Grubbins house to take care of his sibling. Derek, a member of the notorious Devil Rams Motorcycle Club, was a bearded madman who roared onto and off of Henrietta Road on his chopped-up Harley, scaring little squirrels and potbellied war vets at the same time. And each afternoon, right about that time, as he barreled home from work, he inspected his lawn before parking in the driveway and stomping up the cement stairs to his front door.
“And the things I heard about them D-Devil Rams,” said Ben. He flipped a card and took the entire pile with a bright smile. “Evil things.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Like how if you just look at one of them wrong they tie you in chains and drag you on the street behind their b-bikes until your skin peels off.”
“Ouch,” said Augie.
“How d-do you think you’ll look, J.J., without any skin?”
“Lay off him, you pantywaist,” said Augie. “J.J. took a stand. He’s not going to let himself get pushed around for the rest of his life. Right, bub?”
“Right,” I said.
“He’s standing up for himself, just like I told him to.”
“That’s the mistake right there,” said Ben, shaking his head. “Never listen to Augie. He’s what my mom calls an instigator. You should have forgotten all about it. It can’t end good.”
“Maybe not,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach, knowing he was right, “but you didn’t get a football thrown in your face.”
This whole thing started in a chaotic netherworld of violence and mayhem, where all civil rules are suspended and the law of the jungle is the law of the land. I’m talking now of grade-school recess. At Pitchford Elementary, recess was a madhouse. Kids played snap the rope, when the only thing snapping was bones. Kids played six inches, pounding each other relentlessly on the shoulder until tears flowed. Kickball was a sadist’s dream, where any advance from base to base invited a big red welt on the jaw. And football was always tackle and always merciless.
Unused to such savagery at my private school, I determined early on to avoid it all. While pandemonium broke out about me, fights and chases, squeals of pain, I sat on the swing, hoping to be ignored until the bell rang and I could retreat to the relative safety of the classroom. And that’s exactly where I was, on the swing, minding my own damn business, when I looked up and saw a football whizzing through the air, coming right at me.
I decided to duck, but before my mind could send the message to my body the ball hit me smack in the face.
Knocked too senseless to actually cry, I simply fell backward off the swing. The earth spun like a top, my cheek felt like I had been stung by a swarm of wasps, a sob of bitter indignation rose up my throat. And then I saw Tony Grubbins standing over me, grinning down as he spun in his hand the football he had retrieved from the ground. Behind him, in his usual position, was the skinny kid with the round glasses, the pilot fish, Richie Diffendale.
“I told you to keep your dog off my lawn,” said Tony Grubbins.
“He told you, Frenchy,” said Richie Diffendale.
“My brother saw a little pile of your crap,” said Tony, “and almost put my head through a wall.”
“How do you know it was my dog?” I said, my voice thin with whine.
“A little pile of French dog crap, that’s what it was. You’re the only weenie with a dog that smal
l. And Richie said he saw your rat nosing our lawn.”
“And I did, too,” said Richie.
“Your dog does it again, it will be more than a football in your face, Frenchy. You’ll catch my fist and you’ll be missing teeth.”
I waited until he strode back to the game, with Richie Diffendale following, looking back every other step and sneering at me, before I climbed slowly to my feet. I was still rubbing my cheek, fighting the tears, when Augie sidled up to me.
“I warned you not to let your dog near his lawn, bub,” said Augie.
“How is everyone so sure it was my dog?”
“Are you saying it wasn’t?”
“No.”
“You look like a chipmunk with half a case of the mumps. You learn your lesson yet?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Atta boy.”
This wasn’t only the second time I had been humiliated by Tony Grubbins. He had begun to take an especial interest in me in our street games, checking me hard into parked cars at every opportunity, throwing the pimple ball at my head in stickball, touching me into a broken heap in two-hand touch. Now, Tony was indeed a brutal bully, and I wasn’t the only kid to feel his wrath, but I suspected even then that his special distaste for me might have been well earned. He sensed all along the way I felt about him, and his friends, and his neighborhood, the way I felt slyly superior, yes, like a Frenchman. I was prideful and arrogant, I thought I was better than Pitchford, and in truth, if I were in his place I would have checked me extra hard into a parked Buick, too. But even so, for me Tony Grubbins had become an emblem of all the indignities imposed upon me by my new home.
Which was why I had led my dog to purposely crap on his lawn at every opportunity. And why three days after the football met my face I spent the day picking through the neighborhood with a bag and a small plastic sand shovel, following any dog I saw roaming around, leashed or not. I needed a pile large enough, and with pieces thick enough, that there could be no thought it came from my little Rex. I found a nice-sized pile, shoveled it into the bag, and kept looking. Later, in a quiet moment when Tony Grubbins was inside and Ben and Augie played lookouts on either end of street, I emptied the bag smack on the Grubbins lawn.
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