The War for Gloria: A Novel

by Atticus Lish

  Corey said hello, put out his hand and waited. Tom said, “Oh, you’re shaking hands—okay.” He reached up and shook Corey’s hand and didn’t break it.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Corey, it’s a hard thing…I’ll tell ya…the thing about Molly is, she was a good person. She was never mean to anyone.” Tom began talking about having had to identify his daughter’s body. “It’s something nobody should have to do. They told me it was her,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen her body for himself.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. You’ve got nothing to say sorry for. I know you went through your thing too.”

  Corey moved a flashlight off a chair and took a seat and leaned towards Tom to speak to him. As soon as he sat down, Tom got up and went to get a beer. He opened the bottle with his Leatherman. He began going through the mail on his kitchen counter, throwing letters aside.

  “This one’s from her school. They want to let me know she’s absent. That’s a good one.”

  He tossed it at the trash can.

  Corey got up and followed Tom to the kitchen. “Are the police going to do anything?”

  “They know who did it.”

  “Are they going to put him in jail?”

  Tom said nothing. He drank his beer off and walked back to the couch. Corey got out of his way. Tom’s whole body seemed to sneer—a brooding, massive statue of a man who didn’t speak.

  “Who are they saying did it?” Corey asked.

  “Some kid from MIT.”

  Corey watched as Tom pulled his toolbox over to the couch. It was unclear what he planned on fixing. He stirred his big hand in the tools and found a drywall knife and began to change the blade. He snapped in a new razor and screwed the handle back together.

  “Was it dull?”

  Molly’s father didn’t answer. The inside of the toolbox was reflective yellow, the outside black, nature’s warning colors, the same pattern as a Gila monster. He tested the knife, pushing the razor in and out with his thumb, and dropped it back in the ballistic yellow tray.

  Corey cleared his throat, “Tom, I need to tell you something. I think…I knew him.”

  “I heard he was a friend of yours.”

  “He wasn’t my friend.” Corey approached the older man. “Molly was my true friend,” he said. “You were.”

  Tom stood up and walked away. Corey stayed planted where he was, looking at the dirty carpet. He heard Tom in the bedroom. The floor creaked. A drawer slid in a wooden track in a chest of drawers.

  Night had fallen. The house was dark. Corey picked up the Maglite and clicked it on and off and wondered if he should leave. Something told him he should leave.

  Tom walked out of the bedroom in work clothes, boots and jeans, Harley-Davidson belt, Leatherman on his hip, the UMass sweatshirt on his chest, his hair undone. He snapped a woman’s elastic band around it and gave himself a ponytail on his way out the door. The Ford pickup vroomed to life in the garage. Corey went out to the garage with the heavy flashlight in his hands. The truck was idling.

  “Should I come?” Tom didn’t answer. Corey climbed aboard.

  Tom put the truck in reverse, hit the gas and shot them backwards, bouncing over the curb into the street; braked—they jolted to a stop—changed gears, and shot them forward. They drove over the hill and down Winthrop, splashing houses with their headlights. The wide truck seemed to fill the entire road yet somehow didn’t smash the rare car coming the other way, which slipped by like a skiff under the gunwale of a barge. Then they were flying through the open blackness of the seashore under amber lights set on high masts above the street.

  They stopped in Dorchester and bought a case of beer at a package store. Tom opened it in the parking lot and handed him a can.

  “To my daughter.”

  Corey thought they were going to drink together, but Tom poured his beer out, foaming on the asphalt, then crushed his can and picked it up and whipped it at a dumpster. The tiny discus disappeared into the night sky and somewhere distant clattered to the ground. He climbed back in the Ford and turned the engine on.

  “Coming?”

  Corey poured his own beer out and climbed in with Molly’s father.

  Now they were driving north on the highway, Tom drinking from another can.

  “She never asked me for anything. I wanted to see her make the most of herself. And then this reject comes along and kills her, this Adrian character, this friend of yours.”

  Corey said nothing. He shook his head. They were coming up on Boston. They drove into the concrete tunnel under Chinatown, lit up laser green, curving like an endoscopic view. The truck got sucked through arterial ducts and came out on Storrow Drive. Tom took the bridge across the River Charles and now they were in Cambridge with the CITGO sign in Kenmore Square behind them.

  They had started up Mass Ave. Corey saw the lights spreading their glow upward on the walls of the university’s Parthenon-like main building.

  “This is MIT.”

  “This place is a reject school.”

  “I could show you where he lives.”

  Tom didn’t answer. They were tearing past the campus to the bars and art supply stores and dance academies in Central Square. They passed the Middle East. Corey looked and saw the homeless people sitting on the granite planters outside the all-night CVS.

  Traffic pressure kept them going up Mass Ave. Tom blew a light. Now they were coming up on Harvard. They passed the brick wall around the college.

  The traffic slowed. They came to a stop a furlong from the square, facing the redbrick amphitheater of the T entrance, the illuminated shops, the crowds passing in front of lighted windows, the Coop with its crimson flag.

  “I hate driving here. It’s all one-ways.”

  They waited at a light, the big Ford idling.

  Corey said, “I can show you where he lives. His mother’s house is right down there on Mount Auburn.”

  When the light turned green, Tom hit the gas and hooked downhill, leaving the square, and turned up along the river.

  “It’s that way.”

  They accelerated. Corey saw Adrian’s house go by and said they’d passed it.

  They stopped at the edge of Belmont and drove back slowly.

  “That’s the house.”

  “The lights are out. No one’s there.”

  “Look over there, at the traffic island.” Far ahead up the road, Corey pointed at a figure in the trees.

  “Is that him?”

  “That’s somebody.”

  Tom cruised past.

  “That’s him.”

  “I see him. He’s hitting something.”

  “I know what he’s doing. He’s hitting a punching bag.”

  “He does it in the dark?”

  “Yeah. He does it at night.”

  “Are you sure that’s him?”

  “I know that’s him.”

  Tom hit the gas again and they were speeding up the road along the river, the white centerline disappearing under the hood. They took a turn and Corey fell against the door. Now they were racing back.

  A block from the traffic island, Tom pulled over, turned his lights off and started crawling forward, looking in the trees.

  The figure on the traffic island was tilting against a hanging, swinging object, which was swinging from a tree. It was too far to hear the impact of his fists, but he was hitting it. He and the object, the punching bag, swung together and apart like two pendulum-magnets in a physics experiment. Passing traffic caught the scene in their headlights. The forms went from black to color. The punching bag turned blue; the figure’s black fists appeared in red boxing gloves.

  “That’s him for certain,” Corey said.

  “What is he, a boxer?”

>   “Not even. He just hits that thing because he’s angry.”

  “What’s he angry at?”

  “His mother.”

  Tom looked over at him. “Let me see that.”

  Corey gave him the Maglite.

  “A cop hit me in the mouth with one of these when I was a kid.”

  “Why?”

  “I broke into a warehouse with my brothers.” Tom hefted the flashlight. It was filled with D-cell batteries and heavy as a club. “I’m not a nice boy.”

  The two of them fell silent. Tom put the flashlight aside. He opened another beer and drank. A streetlamp cast a gray light through the windshield, painting the shadow of the dreamcatcher across his face, a leather trampoline.

  “Do me a favor. It’s time for you to hop out.”

  “I can stay.”

  “You know how to get home from here?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got the T.”

  “Go home.”

  Corey got out.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “It’s fine. Go home.”

  “I’ll see you back in Quincy?”

  Tom leaned over and pulled his door shut from the inside, leaving Corey out on the street looking at the idling truck. Released by distant traffic lights, cars drove by them in waves.

  Tom touched the throttle and started rolling forward.

  Corey backed away.

  He jogged to Harvard Square and caught the Red Line to the city. After downtown Boston, the train went on, half-empty. A guy in a demo company shirt dominated one end of the car, standing with his foot on a seat, wearing his safety shades and flexing his arms from the overhead grab bar, as if he were about to do a chin-up, while Corey sat staring at the floor.

  When they got to Quincy, he walked out through the portcullis of the station into the open air. A bus was leaving and he caught it. They went downhill past his high school. When he disembarked, he smelled the ocean. He went inside his house and shut the door and put the light on and kept it on all night.

  * * *

  —

  Adrian untied the punching bag. It dropped to the ground on the tree’s roots. He picked up the heavy, tight canvas and leather sack of sand on his shoulder and began picking his way across the dead grass to his mother’s house.

  The white Ford broke from around the stand of trees and shot down the roadway. The distance between the pedestrian and the vehicle collapsed: one Mississippi. The long gleaming body of the truck hit the curb and bounced like a crocodile leaping over the sand bank into the water: two Mississippi. The pedestrian sensed something and turned. The truck touched Adrian’s body. At impact, the Everlast heavy bag jumped up and fell under the truck’s front tire, which ran over it. At the same time, glass and plastic and halogen dust exploded from one of the headlights and spilled across the pavement. When the truck touched Adrian, he flew up in the air, cartwheeling, elongated by centripetal force. His sweatclothes pulled away to the extremities giving a flash of exposed midsection. His body flipped three times, flung in such a way that the legs flew up and struck the head and arms. It went through an arc as high as a second-story window at its zenith and a horizontal distance of forty feet in three-quarters of a second. Weighing two hundred pounds, he had absorbed the momentum of a three-ton truck traveling fifty miles an hour. Being thirty times lighter, he flew away from it like a jack-in-the box. His body hit the wall of his mother’s house and dropped, falling into the path of the truck, which had kept coming. In the last instant of the crash, the vehicle struck Adrian a second time and buried him into the wall.

  Tom’s foot had been jamming the accelerator to the floor since the development of the crash. When he hit the wall of Adrian’s mother’s house, he was going even faster than when he had hit the boy, about fifty-five miles an hour. The six-thousand-pound truck plowed through the home’s siding, which rolled up like a window shade. Foundation blocks exploded into rubble. The strangely shaped house caved in, and the roof dropped above the impact site. The vehicle hit the slab on which the raised floor was built and a pair of load-bearing beams, which took the impact and tore through the ceiling—like falling telephone poles—before the plaster, wiring, and insulation stopped them, entangling them. The entire house was knocked backwards, the internal wall cracked from floor to attic. The truck was decelerated from fifty-five miles an hour to rest in under a second. It transferred its momentum to the driver. Everything in the cockpit jumped into the air. The cup, the bone-handled knife, the dreamcatcher. Tom’s body leaped out of his seat, hit the windshield with his head, fell back into his seat, and bounced forward onto the steering wheel.

  Cambridge Fire Rescue found Adrian inside his mother’s walls. Large fuzzy pink curtains of fiberglass insulation obscured his body. A fireman moved them aside and found the MIT student bent backwards with his legs pinned by the F-150’s still-hot grill. His head was covered in plaster dust like a kabuki dancer’s. Pink strands of fiberglass stuck to his whiskers. The top of his skull had ruptured. An oval of bone was missing from above his hairline, and a pink bubblegum-colored tongue of meat had jumped from his head—like a frog shooting its tongue at a fly. The meat was his brain and it had intestinal coils.

  The rescuers lifted Tom out of his driver’s seat and laid his large-framed body on a stretcher. He was pronounced dead at the scene. They covered him with a white Tyvek sheet.

  * * *

  —

  Corey slept badly. In the morning, the sky was full of thick clouds, jockeying for position, as if a new order were being established in the heavens. He walked to the DB Mart. The bell rang when he went in. The paper was upside down; he saw the word deadly but missed the rest. He took a juice from the refrigerator. As he was paying, he caught a flash on the muted TV of an accident scene: a debris-littered sidewalk and police tape. It didn’t look like Cambridge, therefore he was reassured. He climbed the hill, sipping his pint of orange juice. The mass migration of people going to work was draining the town. Soon, the only people left in Quincy were mothers going to the store and workmen driving vans. At ten, he went to the sub shop and bought a sandwich from the Greeks who ran it. The daughter wore an elastic headband like Molly. The mother had blonde hair and a large nose and spoke with an accent. The sandwich was white-meat chicken grilled on an open fire, wrapped in hot pita bread. The news broke in loud on the TV above the drink cooler. That was when he heard “deadly crash in Cambridge that claimed two lives.” He put down his sandwich and picked up his phone to call Tom, and before he could push the button, he stopped himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. He wrapped the half-eaten chicken in the tinfoil and threw it out. Keeping his head down, he went outside. By the end of the day, he had heard the names, Hibbard and Reinhardt, confirming what he knew. After that, he heard the story over and over on the news for many days.

  * * *

  —

  The news came on the TV in the kitchen in Malden. The small television set was plugged into the toaster outlet. Leonard was sitting at his table eating crackers and some gravy he had cooked. With a spoon he dipped up minced garlic from a jar. The screen showed Adrian Reinhardt’s face. Leonard put the cracker in his mouth and chewed. He prepared another bite. The report went to commercial. He forked up an anchovy and ate it with a cracker while the advertisement for car insurance played.

  30

  A Loser Who Kills Others

  Sometimes it seemed that he had been locked indoors listening to the rain falling on the marsh outside his kitchen window for as long as he could remember. The oxygen machine in the corner. The suction machine squatting on the splintery wooden floor next to the black specter of the wheelchair. The bedroom smelled like his mother’s skin, which had turned waxy and soaplike in her endless state of suspended animation. The house had absorbed her smell. The years had been so long. The Tupperware out of which she had eaten her last meals was in the sink, still unwashe
d, the residue of yellow powder having dried and petrified and turned brown. The shore had always been raining. Raindrops clung to his windows. They atomized on his screens. The trees staggered wet and black on the roadside going uphill to town, past Albatross Lane, the asphalt wet and black. A gray light in the bathroom where she had fallen. The whole world through a plastic shower curtain, cloudy, filmy and mildewed. The rain kept dripping on his roof, working away at the timbers. The books all around absorbing the dreary twilight, too heavy to move, too many words, too much work to understand.

  His litter of clothes and possessions—the remains of his obsessions—ropes, pulleys, boxing gloves, the term paper on ALS somewhere in the drawer of a secondhand desk his mother had gotten for him when she was well—the gangster license plate, the newsboy hat in the closet with his skateboard, the eyebolt hanging half ripped out of his ceiling—there was shame and sorrow in every square foot of the house. He lay on the futon with a T-shirt over his face, the marsh seething in his head.

  When he couldn’t stay at home anymore, he began spending days away, wandering through Quincy, going for miles up and down along the shore, past the New England churches, below the granite cliffs, the old, dark brown terraced condominiums, the rocks wetted as if a giant had urinated on them after the rains—eating at convenience stores, drowning out his thoughts with music. Sometimes, he sat alone in Quincy Center by the T.

  One day, after Tom died, he saw Stacy Carracola getting off the train, wearing nurse’s scrubs. They looked away from each other by mutual accord.