Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  “You carry the bag,” Sammy told me. “It’s a great honor.”

  “This isn’t very much,” I told them, hefting the bag and thinking how it was maybe one meal and that was it.

  “Not to worry, shy girl,” Verbena said. And right there in the middle of the street she opened her maroon coat—inside, the pockets she’d sewn in were stuffed with tomatoes and packages of Oreo cookies and cheeses and a Danish ham, all from the grocery.

  “Miss tricky fingers,” Carlos said. And at the same time Sammy was brandishing his folded-up ten-dollar bill, which I could see in an instant was the exact same one there’d been all the to-do about back in the store.

  I practically fell down laughing right there. It was the first of at least a thousand trips I must’ve made with them over the next few years—food zaps, Carlos called them. Finally I think that ten-dollar bill just came apart, it’d been used so many times.

  THE ONE PERSON WHO COULD OUT-TALK SAMMY was Netta Abramowitz. He’d sit down with me and talk and talk, but with Netta he’d sit down and more often than not he was the one who got talked to. I’d hear her back in that so-called room they shared, which was just curtains around a bed, talking and talking to him in these fierce whispers, and not a word out of Sammy. Then after a while Sammy’d come trudging out into the front to find me, so he could get his turn to talk.

  At first I thought maybe Netta was his daughter, or even his granddaughter—she looked to be about Carlos’s age. But she wasn’t either of those things. She wasn’t any relation to Sammy at all. They were just two people who’d had a lot to say to each other over the years.

  Netta never really noticed I was around, I think; and anyway, the beginning of my stay with The Company was the tail end of hers. One of the only times she ever talked to me, because she wasn’t ever very talkative with anybody except Sammy, I was giving myself a little sponge bath at the kitchen sink. There wasn’t a shower or anything so fancy as that in the apartment. I had my shirt off and was washing my chest and under my arms, and Netta came in eating some kind of fish out of a little can. I say “some kind of fish,’’ but I know exactly what it was—cuttlefish, it’s called, which is like octopus and it comes in its own ink. There were cans and caps of it on a shelf in the kitchen. Stolen, I’m sure, like everything else around the place. I used to be fascinated by the thought of anybody eating something like that. I even sneaked a can of it one day, just to see what it was like—but I couldn’t stand it. It was like eating little pieces of tire. But it’s about all Netta ever ate.

  When she came into the kitchen that day I was washing, she just stood there watching me, in between bites. Like seeing me standing there at the sink with my shirt off made her remember something.

  “Carlos has no business,’’ she said.

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Just look at all this,” she said. “What does Carlos tell you?”

  “What do you mean, what does he tell me?”

  “About anything. About any of this.”

  “He doesn’t tell me much of anything,” I had to admit, “but then, nobody does.”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” she said, like she was suddenly putting her finger on something. “He doesn’t tell anybody. Nobody knows what’s going on. Ever.” She said it like she was furious. “He doesn’t even know what’s going on. It’s just like him—hoping if he doesn’t talk about it nobody’ll notice. But everybody notices anyway. All the time, everybody notices everything. Even you probably notice things.”

  I wanted to ask, What things? But I didn’t want to sound more in the dark than I was.

  “He thinks you can go back and salvage, and you can—but my God, not the way all this stuff has to be salvaged. There’re just too many pieces.”

  I couldn’t tell exactly what she was talking about. But it scared me a little—the way when you meet somebody and you think they’re just great, but then you hear somebody else saying these terrible things about them, and you get worried that maybe you’re wrong. You get this little knot in the pit of your stomach.

  “What do you expect?” she went on. “The man doesn’t know how to use a movie camera. He can’t even do a zoom without Seth. And if you’re expecting him to direct you—ask anybody who’s acted for him. You have to just completely ignore every single thing he says. If you’re crazy enough to wake up one day and find yourself in one of Carlos’s movies, all I can say is—you’re completely on your own. Not a clue. And besides, what’s this stuff about revolutionary movie-making? He watches other people’s movies and steals their ideas, and then he does the same thing. Only he does it so crudely everybody thinks he must’ve meant it to look like it does. I could’ve had a career without Carlos. I can tell you that right now.”

  I didn’t know. It could all be true, what with me not knowing anything about movies at all. I had to admit—what I’d seen that day when he was filming back in Owen didn’t look much like any movie I’d ever seen. It scared me to think maybe he was crazy after all, and I was just some dumb kid falling for a gimmick anybody else could see right through. Because I have to tell you—even though I went right on thinking Carlos was the greatest thing in the world, there were lots of times when I was pretty miserable that winter. Times when I’d wake up and not know where I was, or what I was up to. I’d lie there in bed in this total panic, not remembering. And then I’d remember and that’d almost be worse. To think how I couldn’t go back from wherever it was I’d got to now.

  But back to Netta—it was like this anti-Carlos talk was some speech she had to give me, and once she gave it to me, then, whatever happened, she’d given me some kind of fair warning. And that’s fine—that’s the way she was, the way she related to people. I remember that first time, after she’d gone on destroying Carlos for a while longer, she looked at me and said, “Do you really know what you’re getting into?”

  “I think so,” I told her. I felt like I had to stand up to her or she was going to take Carlos away from me with her talking, so I said, “I think I’m getting into what everybody else gets into.”

  “You make me want to weep,” she told me.

  “Save it,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”

  She studied her tin can of cuttlefish. “We all say that, don’t we?” I was feeling a little put out with her.

  “Do you say that?” I asked. She smiled at me, but I could tell she didn’t mean it.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t say that anymore.”

  She looked straight at me.

  “You’re so young,” she said. All of a sudden she sounded incredibly sad, and she just kept looking at me. She reached out with her free hand and touched my hair—only for a second. Then she looked away toward the floor. “I was just thinking,” she said. But she stopped and didn’t say anything more.

  One more thing about those cuttlefish. I’d been out shoplifting enough with The Company to know what food was brought home, and I knew we never brought home any cuttlefish. And as far as I could tell, Netta never left the apartment to go out shopping on her own. But the shelf was always full of cans. Then one day I figured it out—how it was Carlos who brought them for her. I heard him one night, restocking the shelf. I was sure that was what the sound was, and when he came to bed, I asked him. He looked at me like I’d surprised him, but then he just nodded, Yes, this harsh abrupt nod that said he didn’t want to talk about it.

  I knew that nod from Carlos, but I wasn’t letting go. “That’s so strange,” I told him. “We had this cat back home—it used to bring little dead mice around when you were asleep, and put them in your shoe, or under the covers with you. Like they were little presents.”

  I don’t know why that popped in my head, but it did, and I said it.

  “You’re so smart,” Carlos told me—and he started to lick my ear. If you want to drive me completely crazy that’s the one thing to do—get your tongue down in my ear.

  “Stop it,” I told him. “I’ll laugh. I’
ll get a stomachache.” But he kept it up. “I’ll piss on the bed,” I told him.

  “Promise?”

  “You’re gross,” I said. “Tell me about Netta.”

  “Why? You hit the nail on the head.”

  “What do you mean? What nail?”

  “About your cat. That’s exactly what it is.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Carlos laughed. “It’s a peace offering,” he said. Then he just lay back in the bed and laughed and laughed like somebody invisible was tickling him. It almost made me worry.

  “It’s been a long, long war,” he told me.

  “She doesn’t like you,” I said.

  “Personally speaking, she’s not so crazy about me, no.”

  “Then why’s she living in your apartment and everything?” Which was something I still hadn’t gotten quite used to—all these people camped out here like they owned the place.

  “It’s not my apartment,” Carlos said. “It’s The Company’s apartment. You know, share and share alike.”

  Carlos had this way of putting me in my place. At the moment, though, I was more interested in Netta than I was in the apartment. “Why doesn’t she like you?”

  “She’s seen through me,” Carlos said. “She’s used me up. I’ve used her up. It happens to people, you know.”

  Which I guess I had known, but still it came as a surprise. I wasn’t old enough to have thought about things like that yet.

  “She’s going to leave us,” Carlos went on. “She’ll be the next one to leave.”

  “There’ve been others?” It seemed to me like The Company must’ve been the way they were forever.

  “Lots,” Carlos said. “We’re the leftovers.” He smiled. “The ones who didn’t have any other place to go.”

  “But how do you know she’s leaving too?” I asked him—though from what she’d told me, it wasn’t too hard to guess.

  “I can tell these things,” he said. “It’ll take another month or two. But she knows she’s used us up, and she feels sad about that—but it’s the way it is. She’s been with us a very long time, since the beginning. We did some wonderful things with her.”

  That was what I remembered later—how Carlos said that, like she was some very accurate tool you could use where nothing else worked. But then he went on to say, and this just sort of stunned me, “You know, everybody’s been in love with her around here, in their time. Everybody.” And he left it like that.

  I’d think about it from time to time, even though we never talked about it again. I think Carlos wanted me to piece it together, and I think that’s finally what I did. Who knows? Maybe I’m all wrong about it—but what I think is, once upon a time, way back in the beginning of everything, when The Company was just getting started and a long time before Carlos ever took up with his first boy, Carlos and Netta were lovers. Maybe from when they were teenagers—I don’t know. But they understood all about each other. Then over the years lots of things happened, things I’d never know anything about, and they hadn’t been lovers for a long time. They’d gone their different directions, but here they still were. They were still working together because it was something they both believed in, even though they knew each other so well that a long time ago they’d lost faith in each other but not in what they were doing.

  Maybe I’m saying that not because it has anything to do with Netta and Carlos, but because it’s what I wish I’d been able to say about me and Carlos at some point in our lives together.

  Maybe none of what I’ve said here is fair to Netta. Carlos was right that she was the first to leave—by the middle of that winter she was gone, moved to an apartment in Jersey City, and she never came back the rest of the time I was with The Company. Sammy would take the train out to see her every once in a while, but he never talked about her, and since I never had more than that one conversation with her, I never asked. There was something about her, though, that made an impression on me—like she was standing in for all the things I never could know: about lots of things, but especially about Carlos. She’d starred in four or five of his most important movies, but by the time he was making Ur Carlos had lost interest in her, or used her up, or they were just making each other crazy over stupid little things. I don’t know. All I know is that about all she got to do in Ur was dig up some weeds off camera and put them in buckets, and you didn’t need to be a genius to do that. Even I could do that.

  Ur was Netta’s last movie with The Company, and I don’t know what ever happened to her after she left, whether she went on to be a star somewhere else or not, because I never heard anything more about her—which at least is something nobody’ll ever be able to say about me.

  YOU KNOW THE WAY LOGS AND TRASH’LL CLOG UP under a bridge pier, and one day for no reason it’s too much, and the whole thing gives way?

  Carlos had come home late from Brooklyn that night. I was lying in bed, feeling all agitated—it was the way I got sometimes, for no reason I could figure out. Those were the nights I’d take to doing nightcaps from the Canadian Club, waiting desperately for Carlos and trying not to get too drunk and pass out, but also bored to death and fighting off the urge to jerk off I was so bored, and lonesome, and I’d read every comic book in the apartment ten times.

  Carlos always said he could tell if I jerked off during the day, because when I did, then there wasn’t as much come when I came at night, and Carlos liked lots of come. So I was always trying to save myself.

  We were sitting crosslegged facing each other on the mattress in our so-called bedroom, and I remember wondering whether he ever got to craving me during the day till he couldn’t stand it. Even though he said so, somehow, deep down, I was afraid he didn’t.

  “So was it a good day?” he asked. It was what he always wanted to know when he got home—it was important to him that the days be good days. That’s when I’d usually tell him where I’d gone, what I’d done. But that day, I hadn’t gone out. It was too cold, and I told him so.

  “I stayed home,” I told him. “Sammy talked to me. I ate a can of mushroom soup.”

  He looked in my eyes and grinned. “Are you all drunk again?” I couldn’t ever tell when he was kidding me.

  “Nope,” I told him. “I only had two or three drinks. I had a nightcap waiting for you,” I said. “I had two or three.”

  “Nightcaps—that’s fine. It’s heavy drinking I’m worried about.”

  “No heavy drinking,” I told him. “Heavy sex.”

  “Heavy sex,” he said. “You working-class boys are all the same.”

  “At least I’m not the one on welfare,” I said. Because Carlos had figured out some way so he’d been getting welfare checks for years and that was what we were living on, at least sort of.

  “Yeah,” he said, “and I’m not the one who sat on my butt doing caps all day.”

  “It’s work,” I told him. “My elbow’s sore. Actually, I did go out.”

  He pretended like he was all surprised. “Oh you did?” he said. “So what’s his name? How much did you charge him?”

  I didn’t like it much when he talked that way. It made me wonder whether he secretly meant what he was saying. Sometimes I wanted him to want me to stay around the apartment waiting for him, and not to be out there running all over the place.

  He grabbed both my wrists and pushed me back on the bed.

  “I went to the library,” I told him. I don’t know why I said it. I hadn’t really been to the library that day, though, like I’ve told you. I’d been there a lot before. But for some reason I’d never told Carlos about the library, and how it was the library that’d started me going everywhere else. The library was my secret.

  He was straddling me, pinning me down, but he let me go and put both his hands to his head. “The library?” he said. “The library?” He thought it was hilarious, which I didn’t see any reason he should.

  “You never told me you had this other life,” he said. He was still sitting on top of me so
I couldn’t get up. “But it’s good,” he said. “A boy should go to the library. Read books.”

  “Cut it out,” I told him. “It’s not what you think. There’s this book, this picture book with pictures of the town where Sammy grew up, and people like you and me, and the things that happened to them there, the church full of pillow feathers and the shit carriers, some of them just little children, and the kid who keeps looking out from the page at me, the kid with his little sister and them both begging in the streets for some food, maybe some bread baked out of brick dust and potato peels.” All that stuff came pouring out of me in one long breath. Pent-up stuff from deep down inside me, which I hadn’t realized I’d been thinking about as much as I must’ve. “There they were living their lives and thinking nothing could happen to them, and then all of a sudden it did happen. And here we are thinking we’re safe from all that and everything, but who are we to be safe? I mean, who do we think we are to be safe?”

  That outburst pretty much took Carlos off-guard, like when somebody starts telling what you think’s going to be a joke and then it turns dead serious. I don’t think he knew just then whether to laugh or be worried about me.

  “You’ve been talking to Sammy,” he said.

  “Who else am I supposed to talk to?” I said. “You’re never here. And yeah, I’ve been talking to Sammy. No—change that—Sammy’s been talking to me. He’s been driving me crazy with his talk, and then those pictures in the book—it could be you or me or anybody they did that to.”

  He rubbed my shoulders. “Tony,” he said, “you’re a really exceptional guy and I mean that, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about the Jews,” I told him. “I’m talking about Sammy and all that. If we woke up and they decided to do that to us, what would we be able to do? They’d just do it.”

  “Who’s us?” Carlos asked. I looked up at him where he was still straddling my chest—it was an odd position to have a conversation in.