Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  “So can you really do spells?” I asked her. I thought there might be some use for a spell or two to throw on Carlos.

  “Anybody can do spells,” she told me. “Making them work—that’s where the living’s at.”

  “So could you make them work?”

  “I used to help,” she said. “I used to stand around with the slop bucket when people came to be cured of lizards and such like that would get in their stomachs.”

  “People would really have lizards in their stomachs?”

  “That’s what they thought they had. So who’s to say they don’t, if getting rid of that lizard’s going to make them feel better. My daddy’d conjure that lizard out, and usually what’d happen was, they’d commence to vomiting. I was there with my slop bucket to catch it. Then I’d be out the door fast so I could throw that nasty stuff away.”

  “Was there ever a lizard in it?” I could never tell how much Verbena was playing with me.

  “Sometimes when I was already out the door, my daddy called me back. He’d say come on back here and let’s see that lizard that came on out of there.”

  “And would there be one?”

  “Sometimes there was a lizard in there,” Verbena said. “Sure there was a lizard sometimes. I remember it.” She smiled her smile that had three or four teeth in it—she always looked sly even when she was telling some kind of truth. She lifted her jimson cigarette to her lips and took a drag. She had these big costume jewelry rings on every one of her fingers.

  “Daddy was fighting off dirty work all the time,” she reminisced. “We had each one of the rooms in that house all papered with newspaper to keep busy the witches that were coming there.”

  “What’re you talking about, newspaper?” I asked. It was something I always thought black people did because they couldn’t afford regular wallpaper.

  “How’d you live so long?” Verbena asked me. “Anybody knowing the first thing about conjure can tell you—you put newspapers up on the walls, witches have to count every single letter up there before they can start their work. And if you can keep those witches counting till dawn, well then that’s all she wrote. Ain’t no more dirty work there. Same reason to wear a checkered shirt. My daddy was never without his checkered shirt, summer or winter—to keep them witches counting.”

  “Did you know any witches?”

  She laughed this big deep man’s laugh.

  “I knew some home girls who came pretty close, the way they kept crossing me.”

  It never made any sense to me how Verbena got from there to here, even when she told me.

  “It was around the year 1962,” she said. “I remember I was seventeen years old—I was sitting on the steps of Rasco Thomas’s store drinking this nice cold grape Nehi through a straw—I remember it exactly, how I was there with two other of my girlfriends, and there was Carlos, this thin white boy who’d come down from up North with a bunch of other college kids, all fired up about things. And they were trying to organize. Nobody I knew wanted to get organized, especially not by no fool white boy from up North. Here he was wearing this black shirt buttoned right up to the collar, and the sleeves rolled down even though it was the middle of the summer. He said he was looking for volunteers—he was asking us what we could do to help out with the cause, and I was being very haughty so I said, I can conjure the lizard right out of an ailing person’s belly. I remember he looked right at me and you know what he said? I just had to laugh. He was so serious. He said to me—Well, there’s a lizard stuck in the belly of this country of ours, and if you can conjure it out then why don’t you get down here and help me do it?”

  Verbena hooted, she still thought it was so funny. I felt sorry for Carlos there in his silly black shirt with the collar all buttoned up. “My girlfriends just laughed and laughed,” Verbena went on. “He was a talker, see, and he just won. He put me right down. You should’ve seen him—he was only maybe a year older than me, all goofy and dead serious, and wanting to stay up all night and talk about anything instead of going to sleep. He was afraid to go to sleep, he was afraid he was going to miss out on something.

  “And believe in stuff! I never saw anybody believe so much stuff as him. If he thought it was going to help to go conjuring some lizard out of America, then he was going to believe we could do it. He’d make me stay up all night with him trying to figure out how to do it.”

  “1962,” I said. “I was probably just being born right then. Probably that exact same night. It’s been a long time since then.”

  “It’s been a long hard time,” Verbena agreed. “Lots of things went wrong—got all twisted up.” She shook her head. “Sometimes it kills me,” she said, “just to think about.”

  “Do you think he’s…” I trailed off because I didn’t know exactly what it was I wanted to ask her. Still doing whatever he was doing, I guess is what I wanted to say. It was so strange to think of Carlos coming all that way to here from where he used to be—that goofy kid out of college.

  “Oh, he’s still conjuring,” she said. It wasn’t what I expected her to say. “He’s got his back right up against that wall, and he’s losing but he’s still fighting. He knows he’s losing but as long as he doesn’t stop fighting they can’t tear him apart.”

  I remember it scared me. I remember thinking about all those movies he’d made, like they were newspaper sheets pasted up on the wall.

  THERE’S SOMETHING I HAVEN’T BEEN TELLING about. Not that I’m superstitious, but every time I go to talk about this dream, something stops me. Ever since I started writing all this, it’s been shadowing me—or maybe I should say, it’s something I’ve brought out of the shadows by writing all this stuff. Some nights it’s the only dream I have; other nights I dream other dreams that happen around it but when I wake up I can only remember little pieces of those dreams, while this one’s so vivid it’s like something I’ve actually seen, and not a dream I had.

  It’s the woods behind the trailer, back in Owen where all my dreams are. Night, and I’m alone in the trailer, I’m washing dishes and I look out the window: down where the woods start, about fifty feet from the back of the trailer, there’s this man. He’s just standing there, leaning against a tree. He’s waiting.

  When I look closer, I realize it’s a man’s body but not a man’s head. He’s wearing some kind of mask that makes his head twice as big as normal, like those mud masks you see in National Geographic that some tribe in Africa wears to scare away strangers—this big mud mask with huge eyes and a sad hole for a mouth. The color of the mask is chalky white and you somehow know if you touched that mask with your hand you’d leave fingerprints. The chalky white would rub off on your fingers.

  Only it’s not a mask. It’s his real head.

  Most of the time he’s wearing this rumpled brown suit. His hands are in his pockets. Sometimes he’s wearing a yellow shirt, and sometimes he’s bare-chested. There’re these white marks on his chest, like somebody drew lines where his ribs are.

  He doesn’t come any closer to the house than where he is, he just stands there. But he’s watching me.

  Sometimes I remember that crazy old man with the golf club, from back in New York. But it isn’t him. I don’t know who it is, and I don’t know what he wants—though in the dream I know I have something that’s his, it’s in the trailer somewhere and he wants it back. It’s something I found out in the woods and took home with me, but it was a long time ago and now I’ve forgotten what it was. I’d give it to him if I knew, but I don’t. So he just stands there.

  It’s some terrible disease that’s done this to his face, made it all white and bloated up and puffy. He’s come to show me what it’s done to him—somehow it’s because of that thing of his I have, that I don’t know what it is. And I’m afraid to look at myself in the mirror, because when I look at my hands they’re all chalky like his face is, and what if my face looks like his, a mask but it’s really my face?

  It’s so vivid, sometimes I wake up and I think th
ere must be a window to my cell where in the middle of the night I’ve actually gotten up to look out, and I’ve seen him waiting out there.

  I don’t know why I’ve been afraid to tell that dream. It’s just a dream, one more bad dream for somebody who’s always had bad dreams. They’re just part of the night for me. But I’ve never had a dream that kept leaving its mark on me, the way when you get chalk on your hand, everywhere you touch you leave fingerprints. Maybe I’m afraid that’s what I’ve been doing for the last ten years, leaving marks everywhere I touched, and now it’s coming back to haunt me.

  I MET MONICA IN THIS BAR EVERYBODY CALLED THE V Bar—it had some long Polish name nobody knew how to say, but it started with a V so that’s what everybody called it. Carlos and The Company never went there. Not for any reason, they just never did, which is probably why I was always there in those days—to get away from them for a while, to get some free space.

  It was one of those incredibly hot July days in the city when everything turns into an oven and you spend all your time trying to think how to get maybe one degree cooler than you are. Not that one degree cooler makes any difference when it’s ninety-seven degrees plus no breeze and the humidity’s wringing you out like a sweatrag. I grew up in Owen, Kentucky—I should know about hot summers. But there’s nothing like a hot summer in New York.

  I’d taken to dipping around midafternoon into the V Bar, where it was cool and dark, and I’d hang out way into the night playing the pinball machine and sort of keeping to myself. I liked it that nobody in that bar knew who I was or anything about me, and I didn’t tell anybody anything either. Not that I was going to walk up to some stranger and say, Do you know what I do? Do you know any strung-out kids I can take to see Carlos, so maybe he’ll put them in some movie of his and give them dope in exchange? I guess I preferred to keep my fun and business separate from each other. I guess by that point I wanted to have my own life in addition to The Company.

  Carlos was doing this series of shorts at the time, which he later put together into a longer movie called Atomic Pictographs. Basically it was a bunch of jerk-off footage of runaway kids, only Carlos as usual managed to take something dumb like that and turn it into something unforgettable by this process of tinting the film, which was complicated and you had to do it by hand—but it meant that not every detail in the movie was in black-and-white. Some things had this pale watercolor look to them—maybe a ray of sun or the tiles on the floor or a flower. And it kept changing, so you were sure that flower had been yellow a minute ago but now it was red, and then a minute later it’d be black-and-white. So you kept thinking you were going crazy imagining colors where really there hadn’t been anything there all along except black and white. Plus it was always little details you wouldn’t otherwise notice—and that was the real action of the movie, not the jerking off, which became just another part of the scenery.

  Carlos had found this abandoned Catholic church out in the South Bronx—one of those neighborhoods even the priests and nuns had to call it quits on. It was this great building, dark and cool inside, with pigeons in the rafters and big pools of water on the floor, and off the sides of the aisle there were these little chapels. Of course they didn’t have altars in them anymore—anything that could’ve been taken out of that church had been carried off a long time ago. But Verbena, with her totally amazing eye for that sort of thing, went and outfitted those chapels with flowers and candles and masks, so they looked like a cross between some voodoo shrine and a window at Macy’s. Carlos filmed boys jerking off like they were statues of saints—or maybe just department store mannequins—that’d come to life.

  I wasn’t in on any of that, really. My job was to hang around Port Authority and nab runaway kids right when they got off the bus from New Jersey or wherever, and before they knew what hit them I’d have them over in the South Bronx. Most of the time they went along with it—they were too dazed to do anything else. Though every once in a while I’d get some kid who’d totally freak when we got out there and he saw what was up. Whenever that happened it was my job to take him out of the neighborhood and drop him somewhere. Anywhere.

  If you want me to say I feel bad about all that—I don’t. It didn’t do any harm, they were back in Manhattan in four hours with some cash in their pocket. Plus, all they did was jerk off—they weren’t going to get AIDS from jerking off in front of a camera. If most of them were going to get AIDS, it was probably from shooting up somewhere and not jerking off in some deserted Catholic church.

  But I was trying to tell you about Monica. It’s perfect, the way talking about her leads right back to Carlos and his movies—even though Carlos and Monica never once even laid eyes on each other, and in fact she’d never even heard of Carlos Reichart before she read about things in the newspaper. And he never in his life heard about her.

  I was playing pinball the way I always did, with a nice cold Rolling Rock set down there beside me to swig every once in a while—and suddenly there was this girl leaning over my shoulder to watch. I remember it completely: even though it was a hundred degrees outside, she was wearing a blue flannel shirt and tight jeans and cowboy boots. She had these high hard cheekbones, almost like there was Indian blood in her somewhere, though I don’t actually think there was, and she had this long very limp blonde hair that came down past her shoulders. You could say she was kind of tough-looking, more like a boy than a girl—but from the first instant I saw her, I liked that. There was something sassy about this girl who—except for her long white-blonde hair, and maybe even that too—looked like she could be a boy.

  She asked me, Was I was planning ever to get off the machine or did I usually play all day on a quarter? I don’t want to brag, because I know being good at pinball doesn’t mean a thing, but I have to say, I was a great pinball player. Always had been, from back in Owen when Wallace and I’d play the machines in that hole-in-the-wall arcade on Main Street. Wallace taught me all his tricks, and then I went and improved on them till I could play for hours on a single ball. Something in me’d go on automatic pilot when I got in front of a machine—my brain would completely turn off, and that automatic thing in me would just keep reacting like lightning to the little silver ball. Over the course of the spring and summer 1983 I must’ve upped the top score of that machine in the V Bar by about six million points.

  “You want to play?’’ I asked her, flipping the ball into one more tour of duty. “I’m done. I can get off anytime.’’ It really didn’t matter to me—I played all the time. So if somebody else wanted to use the machine, which in the V Bar wasn’t all that frequent, I never had any problem with that.

  “No, I don’t want to play,’’ she told me. It wasn’t unfriendly or anything. It was a statement of fact. “I’ve just been watching you to see how long you could keep going.”

  “A pretty long time,” I admitted.

  “You spend a lot of time at that machine?”

  “A pretty lot of time, yeah.”

  I wasn’t used to talking to somebody while I was playing, so I was getting a little annoyed. There’d been a couple of close calls since she came over, but I’d managed to save them. Not that I could go on doing that forever.

  “Well, I was watching you for a pretty long time,” she said. “My name’s Monica, by the way.”

  “Tony, and I got my hands full in case you hadn’t noticed.” The instant I said that, the ball that’d been going wild in the outfield suddenly shot right down the gulch and was gone.

  “Shit,” I said. Monica laughed. “So what’s funny?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I had a bet that if I talked to you I could get you to lose.”

  “Yeah? For how much?”

  “Twenty-five bucks.” She looked around. It was her turn to say, “Shit.”

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “They ran out on me. I can’t believe it—they just left.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who was going to pay me twenty-five dollars.”<
br />
  “Do you know who he was?”

  “I just met him. We were just talking, and he pointed you out.”

  “So we both lose,” I told her. “That’ll teach you.” Though I wondered who the guy could’ve been—if he knew me.

  “Nothing teaches me anything,” she said. She sort of gave her head this proud shake. “That’s why I’m still me. Hey, you want another beer? I’ll buy you another one. Sorry for wrecking your game.”

  “It’s not like it was my last chance or anything.”

  We sat in a booth and drank Rolling Rocks.

  “Where’re you from?” I asked her.

  “Guess,” she said.

  “I can’t guess. I’m no good at guessing anything.”

  “Well, then—Tennessee. And I think you are too.”

  It sort of took me by surprise that she said that.

  “Kentucky,” I told her.

  “Same thing. It’s nice to hear—you sound like home.”

  It was probably four years since I’d talked to somebody from Kentucky, or even Tennessee for that matter. It hadn’t ever occurred to me to miss the way people talked there, but now that she said it, she did sound familiar. She sort of brought things back.

  “So what’re you doing up here?” I asked her. I’d gotten it into my head that, except for people like me and Verbena, nobody got out of the South, especially not to end up in the alphabets.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” she said. “And I probably will. But if you want to know—I came here to be a singer.”

  “I thought people went to Nashville to do that.”

  “I can’t stand country music,” she told me. “All that whining and garbage. I want to be a rock star.”

  It made me laugh. She didn’t look much like a rock star.

  “So what’s funny? I’m down on my luck. It happens to everybody—it takes time, and then you get a break and after that you’re on your way.”