Blood Relations

by Chris Lynch

  “Ya, well, some things, actually. Like, can I decorate this room a little?”

  “No nails in the wall,” he said.

  “Tacks?”

  “No.”

  “Tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “Paint?”

  “Ummm... hell, no.”

  “Come on, Mr. Sullivan, I’ll do a nice job.”

  “I’m not buying anything.”

  “I’m buying.”

  “Well... it better be damn tasteful then, understand?”

  “Damn tasteful. Space heater?”

  “No.”

  “Hot plate?”

  “No.”

  “Girls?”

  He smiled broadly, answered without hesitation. “Certainly, just as soon as we get those balls of yours properly cleavered away, you can have as many as you like.”

  He watched me as I shifted side to side in my chair. He enjoyed it.

  “Anything else, Mick?”

  “One more thing. I’m going to pay.”

  “Pfffft,” he said, waving me off as he headed back toward the stairs. “Don’t give it a thought.” He turned, dripping mock sincerity. “It does my heart good just to know... that I’m driving your old man insane.”

  “No, Mr. Sullivan,” I said loud enough to stop him. “I need to do it, okay? For myself. I have a job, I can pay.”

  “Where’d you get a job?”

  I mumbled. “The O’Asis.”

  “The O—? Your parents’ joint?” He shook his head again. “Jesus Christ. I’m smelling you, Mick. Mind me now, I’m taking a good long sniff of you every time you come through that door.” It didn’t require a response. He pounded down the stairs alternately laughing and saying “Jesus Christ.” I sat there smiling. Nobody had ever smelled my breath before. Nobody had ever told me not to put beer in the fridge. In fact I couldn’t remember when anybody had ever told me not to do anything. It felt nice, that Mr. Sullivan bothered.

  I couldn’t wait to get a hot plate and girl up there.

  Disobedience was the one rush I’d never had before.

  Even going to work in the morning was kind of a little thrill. I felt like a man, walking the quiet street at five thirty, coming from my place, going to my job that would pay for everything. Every day now I owned a little more of myself.

  When the bus came close, opened up to take me in, I said hi to the driver, which seemed to shock him. I nodded as I passed each of the other four riders, gloomy and gray and mean as they were, on their way probably to jobs just as crappy as mine but not happy about it like me. It felt like a little club thing we shared silently, bumping along in the rattling filthy bus while most other people were still sleeping. I even said good-bye to the driver as I got off.

  I pulled my keys out of my pocket and stuck one in the lock. It was a big dead bolt, a lot of lock, and felt substantial turning in my hand, the tumblers rolling like an airplane propeller inside the door.

  I pushed it open, feeling a sense of my power and aloneness.

  I yanked the door shut again. There could not exist, anywhere, not in a zoo, not in a cat food factory, a smell as bad as this one. It smelled like my parents’ friends.

  I stood with my back pressed against the door, hard, as if the smell would try to break out and get me. It wouldn’t, of course. The smell was in there, and there it would stay. Just it and me.

  I had to do it. I threw open the door and rushed inside, as if I could get past it to a spot where it didn’t exist. No such. It followed me to the bar, embraced me. I leaned on the bar, closed my stinging eyes, and tried not to breathe. But I had to breathe. After a couple of minutes I worked out a system where I could breathe a few deep breaths, hold it for several seconds, then breathe again. I did this till I got used to the air.

  There was twenty dollars in an envelope with my name on it on the bar. There was a ham sandwich. There was also a list.

  CLEAN THE SHITTER

  MOP FLOORS—USE WAX

  SCRUB BEHIND BAR

  WASH GLASSES IN SINK

  Clean the shitter. I put my hands over my mouth. I knew right away there was no trick to get me around that one. I went to the broom room right next to the bathroom and got my rags and Tilex. For several seconds I stood in front of the bathroom door unable to move. I looked at the hanging wooden shingle that said GALS next to a copy of the old Coppertone ad of a dog ripping the bathing suit off a girl. It hung there like a picture on the door. I reached out and flipped it over. The other side of the shingle said MEN without any picture. They only had the one bathroom.

  I clenched my teeth and went in with my Tilex blazing, spraying at everything, trying to kill whatever foul fungi lurked there. It was smaller than the broom room, just large enough for the toilet, the sink, and one body. It smelled like someone had just used it two minutes ago. There was a newspaper on the floor.

  Like a maniac I sprayed and wiped, sprayed and wiped, the sink, the green tile walls, the floor, the rim of the—

  I rushed out of there, to the bar, where I grabbed a glass and a nozzle and pulled myself a Coke. I drank it all down. Waited. I could do this. This would not beat me. I had to do this.

  Back into the bathroom, the courage of Coke sizzling in my belly. I scrubbed the rim of the—

  I vomited Coke on the floor I’d just cleaned.

  But I felt a little better. I cleaned up after myself. Then I cleaned that goddamn toilet.

  After a few minutes of sitting on the curb out front with another Coke, I went back in and did the other jobs. Washing the floor was easy, a cup of ammonia and a cup of wax dumped in the water, swabbing the dry wood floor, stacking and unstacking the chairs on top of the little square tables. The rhythm of the squish-squash across the floor was something I liked, and the ammonia in my sinuses was actually kind of a pleasant relief. I washed the eight glasses I found—luckily O’Asis people are the kind who don’t mind using the same glass over and over—and scrubbed behind the bar.

  The only thing after the bathroom was the floor behind the bar, sticky and chocolate brown from spills of Guinness. It smelled sweet like fruity garbage, and was so gummy I had to use a putty knife to lift it off the floor. When I stood up, the stuff coated my knees, as if I had been working in tar. Shame, Terry’s jeans were ruined.

  When I was done, I felt good. I felt great. I sat up at the bar, like the bartender, pulled myself another Coke, and ate my sandwich. It was dry and thick, like a small pad of paper between slices of bread, but I enjoyed it. And I couldn’t smell anything anymore.

  I wrote “Done” on the envelope and marched out the door, locking up.

  As I rode the bus to school, I felt powerful. I could do it. This would work. I kept playing with the money in my pocket. This was good money. Much better money than the bag of Terry’s bills sitting in the crawl space up in the Sullivans’ attic. I wanted to spend it, and I wanted to talk about it. About my job. Not about the shitter and all that, but about the idea of my job. And my place. I guess I wanted to talk about me.

  I wanted to talk about it with Evelyn Evelyn Evelyn.

  Evelyn.

  The bus from work brought me to school earlier than usual, so I waited. I paced in front of the building. Some kids started showing up, none of them Evelyn. I went in and hovered around the door to her class, but still nothing. I went back outside to pace in the warm sun.

  Everybody else came by. “So, how was first day of work?” Sully asked.

  “I cleaned the shitter,” I said proudly.

  “Super,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

  “Check it out,” I said, spreading the twenty-dollar bill wide like a flag.

  “That’s nice,” he said, truly impressed this time. “Cash every day?”

  “Cash every day,” I sang.

  “Comin’ in?”

  “Nah, I’m waiting for someone,” I said, sounding, I think, like an excited goof.

  “Goof,” he confirmed, walking in.

  “He
y,” Toy said as he walked right by me. I started fishing in my pocket for the bill, bouncing to tell him my story, but he kept on walking. I stooped to look up at his face as he brushed past, and he was gone, somewhere else, like he can be sometimes for no good reason. That’s when you leave him alone.

  I was getting angry by the time Ruben came slinking by.

  “Where is Evelyn?” I demanded, which was a stupid move because demanding at Ruben only made him less helpful.

  “Who?”

  “Evelyn, your sister. She’s never this late. Where is she?”

  “I ain’t got no sister Evelyn. I got a sister Magdalena.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Lena?”

  “Ya, Lena, all right? Where is she?”

  “She’s at home. She’s sick.”

  He disappeared into the school. As I stood on the wide steps alone, the bell clanged, like a fire alarm, to start classes. I felt all that energy I had run right out of me, down through my feet, down over the steps to the street as I trudged into the building.

  School took an eternity that day, but I got through it by playing over and over in my head the story of my independence as I’d sing it to Evelyn.

  Ringing and ringing on Evelyn’s doorbell. The monster dog barked from the backyard. I barked back at him.

  “What are you, mental?” Evelyn snarled, throwing open her door. Her hair stood a foot out from her head in every direction. She tied a giant yellow shoelace around the waist of her frayed plaid flannel bathrobe and yanked the lace tight, angrylike. She was greenish pale, like a kiwifruit.

  “You look so beautiful,” I slobbered.

  “I’m lying down here, Mick. Home sick, tú sabes?”

  It would not matter what she said to me. I puffed up, folded my hands formally, and let them hang in front of my crotch.

  “I am a man of means now, Evelyn, independent. So I’ve come to ask you for a proper date.” I shut up and waited.

  “Let me smell your breath.” She broke down and smiled a little.

  “Jesus,” I said, “what’s with the smelling my breath lately? It’s getting real popular.” It pissed me off, this suggestion that I’d have to keep being suspected for the old shit.

  I rushed up, aggressively, and blew in her face. “Good enough?”

  She winced. “Well no, it still isn’t honeysuckle. But it’s a good healthy stink.”

  “So it’s a date then.”

  “Slow down now. What are we talking about, like, a real date where you spend money and treat me right, stuff like that?”

  “Exactly,” I yelled. It sounded even greater when she described it.

  “Not interested.”

  “What?” I started hyperventilating. “Whaddya mean? I just want to... I only mean... what I’m trying to say...”

  “Hold it,” she laughed. “Take it slowly now, speak clearly, that’s the boy.”

  I took a deep breath. “I want you to come and see my place. It’s not a big deal or anything, but... it’s nice. And I’m fixing it up to be nicer. And it’s mine. I want to show it to you, that’s all. I’ll cook for you. You know, dinner. I’ll cook you dinner, at my place.”

  “Well,” she said, “you make quite a compelling pitch, I’ll say that. My head is turned.”

  It sure sounded good, but I wasn’t taking any chances. “Um, ‘Head is turned,’ that would be a yes. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Grinning like a monkey I backed down the stairs. Evelyn shook her head at me, but looked pleased all the same.

  “What’s gotten into you?” she asked.

  I pointed at her. “I have looked into the future, and my future is you.”

  She winced, like something hurt her. Maybe her sickness. “I don’t know, maybe you should go take another look,” she said.

  I was shaking my head no when I backed into Ruben coming up the stairs.

  “Yo, chico,” he said. “Get outta here. We don’t need no freakin’ cyclopedias.”

  Table for One

  “IS THERE A TABLE around here I can use, Sul?”

  “So she’s actually coming up here?”

  “Actually.”

  He bent over to look under the bed he was sitting on, and dragged a folding card table out. He flipped it open.

  “Great,” I said. “Check it out.”

  Like a magician I swirled the tablecloth around my body, flapped it in the air, and brought it down over the table. The cloth was cream color, with a little lace trim all around the edges and so many perfectly circular wine or grape-juice glass stains that it looked like a pattern. It was also about eight times the size of the tabletop, and hung on the floor all around. It cost a dollar at the thrift shop. I set down two tall twenty-five-cent wineglasses at either end, mismatched dishes, stainless steel service for two, and two candle-holders shaped like the Bunker Hill monument that were so sharp looking I forked over two bucks for them. I stuck in the black candles, stood back, and admired.

  “We can fold the tablecloth smaller,” he said, stroking his chin.

  “Sure,” I said, “sure, we can do that,” all nervous like I needed his approval. I was happy he was finally coming around to support me in this.

  He pointed at the wineglasses and looked at me with eyebrows raised. “For vino?” he asked.

  “Well, ya, I thought, maybe...”

  He made the tsk-tsk noise, but went on. “Servin’ sandwiches, Mick?”

  A big smile overtook my face. I pulled out my big score, the four-dollar commercial hot plate big enough to warm a whole pizza. I held it up by its ancient, unraveling, cloth-covered cord.

  “You know what my old man thinks about that.”

  “You gonna rat?”

  “No, this could be fun. I never seen my old man actually off a guy before. Only heard him talk about it. But you can’t really cook nothin’ on that, can you?”

  “I think I can make a soup. A real one I mean, with big pieces of meat and cut-up vegetables and all that.”

  He nodded at me, nodded, nodded, looked over my table setup. “Mick, you can’t serve soup on flat plates. It’ll run over the sides. Then it’ll roll off the table, through the floor, onto my father’s dome, and he’ll come up here, see you have alcohol, a hot plate, a babe and that you’re doing witchcraft, and he’ll shoot you down dead like a dog. So flat plates won’t do.”

  “Shut up, I know that. They didn’t have any down at the thrifty. I’ll get some.”

  Sully put up his hands. “Okay, I didn’t mean to insult your stuff. Really, Mick, I think this is real nice. Come Saturday, I think she’s yours.”

  “Don’t be smutty,” I said. “But really, you think so?” I practically jumped, as if Sully had promised me something.

  “I don’t see how she can resist.”

  Sully slipped away down the stairs, and in a minute he was back. Or at least his hand was. He reached up through the bannister and slipped two soup bowls sideways between the rails. “We never have soup downstairs. But don’t break them just the same.”

  “Thanks,” I said and got no reply.

  I found my father sleeping on the floor behind the O’Asis bar.

  “Dad, you make it kind of hard for me to do my job, with you lying there in the gunk I have to scrape up.”

  He groaned, pushed himself up, and started explaining as if it was no big deal. He seemed to believe it too.

  “I slept there before, y’know, it’s no big deal.”

  I dropped to my knees to start scrubbing. His big head fell into his small hands. Then he popped up again.

  “Hey, get me something, Mick.”

  He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t think about it much before spinning around and pouring a double Wild Turkey. I did it all in one motion, slick as any full-time bartender. I brought it out to him, then listened to the rest of the story from scrubbing position on the floor behind the bar.

  “Well no, I take that back,” he said, as he slammed the heavy glass down on th
e tabletop. “I never slept there before. I slept there, and I slept over there.” I figured he was pointing around the room, but it didn’t matter enough to either of us for me to stand up and look. “But I never slept there, behind the bar before.” There was a certain amount of pride in his words. “You know why, Mick? Because it wasn’t mine before. Now, when I want to, I get to sleep behind my bar.” He thumped himself twenty times hard on the sternum as he said it.

  “And at least now,” he said, “when I wake up, I’m already to work.” He laughed robustly at his own joke before adding, “And your mother will get over it. She always comes around.”

  “That’s great, Dad,” I said.

  He practically climbed the bar over me to reach the bottle. He grabbed it and disappeared again.

  Since it was a Saturday, the place was extra messy, and it took longer to clean. I had to work fast. My father was gracious enough to stay clear as he watched me work. When I came from behind the bar to start the floor, he moved to the opposite side of the room. When I reached that side, he moved to a stool at the bar. Wherever he went he took his bottle and glass with him. It wasn’t real drinking, though, not nighttime-style drinking. It was recovery, hair-of-the-dog drinking, which he believed in wholeheartedly. This type of drinking he’d stop by opening time, and not have another until dinner usually. And except for the smell of his breath and pores, and the cheeriness, the average person could not tell that he’d had a drop.

  Just before I got to the bathroom swab, Dad went in. A little while later he came out, and I went in.

  I came staggering back out and collapsed at a table. He brought me a Coke there, served it at my table like I’d done for him. “Sorry about that.” He shrugged.

  “Not a problem,” I said, downing the Coke and finishing my filthy disgusting job.

  I put everything away in the closet, approached the bar. “Gotta get paid, Dad,” I said, very businesslike.

  “Course ya do, course ya do,” he said, fumbling at the cash register. He was still at that bottle, longer than I figured he would be. He pressed buttons all over the register, swore at it, slapped it, and it opened. Stuck his hand in like a bear snagging a fish out of a stream, whirled, and pushed the money on me. It was forty dollars.