Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  “Another thing,” he said. “You think working-class kids like people who say ‘fuck’ to their fathers?”

  “As far as you know,” I said, performing for my memory of Khadijah, as if she were sitting in the backseat, listening, “maybe they do.” I got out of the car and slammed the door.

  I started up the hill. The engine growled. I turned and watched the Subaru sink away. When it finally slipped out of sight, I chased it. I swam with my arms, lifted my knees high. An insect flew into my mouth, and I ran even as I coughed and wiped my tongue. I wanted to throw my arms around my father’s neck and smell the sweat on him, fall asleep in the passenger seat as a crackly oldies station read the weather. I went full-sprint downhill. Soon I doubled over in pain. As mosquitoes swarmed, I paced on the grass.

  I renewed my resolve to fight my father by summoning Khadijah to mind again. Khadijah would have been able to see the truth: My father, an unfeeling person, had made a handicapped woman drag herself after his car. He had made her plant her hand in the road. He had left her with an important piece of paper torn in four, and a truckload of hippie furniture.

  On the other hand, could I expect to find Steven and Alexis in the spot where we’d left them, meditating on their circumstances, waiting for my help? If we did cross paths, what would happen? I imagined Steven’s red truck bearing down on me, Steven leaping from the driver’s seat and chasing me into the woods. Was it possible he might carry a rifle in his truck, like the rednecks who took out Peter Fonda at the end of Easy Rider? There was nothing to do but make for the dacha. My father would have to look for me there, eventually. I began to walk uphill.

  Soon, I passed the spot where we’d left Steven and Alexis. I could make out the loop where they’d turned around. In another half hour, I reached our driveway, and found the cabin half obscured by a Berkshire of furniture. Our couches and chairs had been dumped off the truck, onto the grass. The big red couch and the blue love seat with the polka dots were on the bottom, supporting the chairs, which made a latticework with their legs that stretched half as high as the cabin itself. Between the chair legs, the upper reaches glinted with glass squares; the framed conference posters reflected the sun. Steven and Alexis could have dumped it all in a ditch. But they’d given it back.

  I sat on the grass and waited. In ten minutes, the Subaru rolled up the driveway. My father slammed the door behind him and helped me up. I beamed involuntarily as I grasped his hand.

  “I must say I’m relieved,” he said. “I was worried you were going to return to find them burning it down.”

  “Where were you?” I asked, clapping him on the shoulder, to make sure he didn’t leave my side.

  “Got a seltzer and a coffee at a great old train-car diner down the road,” he said. “New England Monthly used to rave about it.” He put his hand on mine. “I’m glad we’re doing this together, Son.”

  As it grew dark, we dragged the furniture inside, so it wouldn’t molder in the dew and rain.

  “Don’t worry about making it pretty,” he said. He tossed a chair bouncer-style through the door. “Your mother’s never going to see the inside of this place again. And Nancy’s different from her, she doesn’t want me sweating the small shit while I make a life for myself as a creative person. I can’t tell you how important that is to me. It feels like I have access to oxygen for the first time since I started a family. It’s been a hard thing for me to be a parent, I’ve put so much aside, waiting for you and your sister to grow older. I’ve often thought that as soon as you’re both in college I’m going to get on a plane to the South of France, write in a stone cottage, come back every now and again to hang out in New York, be around Jews and black people.” He caught a moth in his hand and cast it out the window. “It’s for the best, Son. You’ll be fine seeing me on weekends for the next two years, won’t you? I hate to say ‘when I was your age,’ but when I was your age I was in boarding school, I saw my father less than that.”

  “As long as I have the amp,” I said, “I’m cool.”

  When we were done, the living room wasn’t the way it’d been before. The posters were stacked in a corner, but the UN letter was restored to its place next to the photo of the shirtless Havana street trombonist.

  My father stepped back and looked at the letter. “I like it battle-scarred,” he said. “We’re lucky glass is the only thing that got broken, buddy.”

  We coasted back down the hill. Salamanders fled before us, neon orange in our headlights.

  “I bet you’re hungry, young man.”

  I was. I had never labored before; I could feel an unfamiliar hardening in my shoulders.

  We pulled into the lot behind the train-car diner after dinner rush. We took a booth in the back with a view of the waitress’s circuit: down the counter, back up the tables along the wall.

  She looked about five years older than I was, maybe a few more. The corners of moist dollar bills peeked from the pockets of her tight black jeans. Waves of dark brown hair were stuck to her cheeks with sweat. But her work was mostly over; the diner was empty. She leaned against the side of our booth as she flipped open her pad and took us in.

  “Give my boy here a cheeseburger and a chocolate milk shake, please,” my father said. He punched my arm and gave his head a solicitous tilt. “Am I right?”

  I nodded. I blushed and tucked my smile into my neck.

  The waitress laughed. “It’s your lucky day, young man.” She said it to me, but I knew her face was for him.

  “The kid did good,” my father said. “Moved the biggest pile of furniture I’ve ever seen.”

  “I bet he got some help from his pops.”

  “I’m used to it. For him it was a big first, doing a day’s work.”

  “Just how big was this pile of furniture?”

  “Let me see that pen for a second, will you?” She drew it slowly from the pocket of her apron and held it out like she was going to knight him with it. “Thank you,” he said, “you’re a peach.”

  She pressed her lower lip against the edge of her teeth. He took a napkin from the dispenser and drew an Egyptian pyramid. He drew a tiny stick figure next to it. “For a sense of the size of this thing,” he said.

  She looked around. “Let me see that.” She slid onto the vinyl seat beside him. “That’s a pretty significant pile of furniture, but I’d say the pile of dishes I brought out to people here about an hour ago was like this.” She snatched the napkin from him and drew a second pyramid, twice as large as his.

  “Now that I consider it, I forgot just how big that pile of furniture was,” he said. He drew the bottom of a pyramid so enormous only the corner of it fit on the napkin.

  “No fair.” She slapped at his hand. “Respect the rules, you’ve got to stay inside the napkin, man.”

  Their shoulders were touching. Arm slipped against arm. I saw two children pulling a blanket over their heads, making a fortress of darkness. They were hiding in a place where everything was believed. The warmth of it was something I could feel from the other side of the table. I knew I couldn’t make them come out, no matter what I said.

  Sick of watching them, I took off my sneakers and rubbed my bare feet together. I stared out the window. There was a rattling outside, barely audible. A red pickup bumped around the corner.

  As soon as the truck reached the black asphalt of the parking lot, it slowed to a crawl. There were familiar auras of rust around the wheels. I could make out Steven alone in the cab. He turned into the space next to the Subaru as a tall man in a hairnet and a cook’s apron walked out the back door of the train car. Steven jumped down from the cab and gave the cook a high five. Wild blond curls snuck out from under the hairnet, white in the evening sunlight. With the cook looking around to see if anyone was in the parking lot, Steven knelt beside the Subaru’s tires, out of sight.

  “Dad,” I said. I pointed. We could see the cook, and Steven’s truck. Steven stood, brushed dust off his jeans.

  My father cursed. The
waitress slid out of the booth and went behind the counter.

  My father pushed down on my shoulders. “You do not move,” he said.

  He jogged out the door, down the three concrete steps to the parking lot. He could have stayed inside, I thought, and called the police. That’s what Mom would have done. But he believed in giving these people a chance to hurt him. The way he went through war books—that was part of it.

  The door sighed shut behind him. The waitress and I were alone inside, watching. My father and Steven shouted a little while, before they reached for each other. Later, for professional reasons, I would spend a lot of time in bars, and realize in retrospect that this verbose buildup to fighting meant that both my father and Steven were inept brawlers. If one of them had been any good, he would have tried to be the first to pop the other in the face, no prelude. That or tackled the other guy, straddled him, punched his head. There would have been no throat clearing. But at the time I thought they were talking and shoving because conversation was a necessary part of the process, that they were working themselves into a godlike furor. My father twisted Steven’s shirt and yelled in his face undaunted. But the cook walked around my father and took one of his arms in both of his hands. Steven did the same with the other arm. They leaned him against the back of the Subaru, gripping him by the elbow and the shoulder on each side. My father writhed against the hood; they labored to hold him down, two hands on each of his arms.

  The waitress touched my elbow and pointed outside with her chin. I looked around to see what I could use. I took a serrated steak knife off a dirty plate on the counter. It looked funny in my hand; it made my wrist look even thinner than it was. She hoisted a coffeepot off the Bunn Pour-O-Matic. It was the decaf pot, with a smudged orange lip.

  “Take this.” She pushed it toward me across the counter. “It’ll hurt. It hurts my fingers all the time.”

  I put down the knife and picked up the coffeepot. My father didn’t want my help, but he was going to get it. As soon as I had the pot in my hand, I became aware that my body was carrying a white energy that purled in my lungs and brain and turned from fear to determination to fear and back and forth, like a kid was playing with a light switch. My arm trembled. The coffee sloshed as I walked out of the train car into the parking lot, not too fast, careful not to let any of the coffee spill over the lip and burn my fingers. Approaching these men at a steady pace with the coffeepot stable in my hand, I felt uncomfortably like a waitress.

  Steven and the cook let my dad go and backed away when they saw me coming with something in my hand. When Steven took in that it was a pot of decaf, he sneered with relief.

  “I’ll burn you,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?” my father called to Steven. “Beat a kid?”

  “I’m going to take that from you,” Steven said to me, “unless you pour it out.”

  “I’m not doing that.”

  Steven stepped forward, and reached for the pot. I walked backward, and drew the pot close to me, like a football, but Steven got both his hands on it, and we were twisting together, and then my hands were empty and Steven was emptying the pot onto the ground, calmly, as if pouring water on a rosebush.

  Three men had come out of the diner, and the one in front, who was shouting obscenities, looked like he might be the manager, a tan and wiry man in metallic math-nerd glasses. I could tell the dishwashers were dishwashers because they were only barely older than I was, one of them in a Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion T-shirt, the other in a Celtics jersey.

  The manager was still shouting something. There was Steven—he was jumping in his truck. He revved the engine. I scrambled to get out of his way, and then he was spitting gravel through the parking lot, spinning out onto the road.

  I looked down at myself to find I had some coffee splashed on my shirt. It didn’t seem like it was melting my skin. Apparently, a hot plate with an openmouthed pot didn’t maintain coffee at lethal temperatures, like the metal tanks at McDonald’s. I had envisioned the weapon in my hand as boiling pitch, like what you’d pour on a screaming Hun.

  Still: I had been in a fight. Khadijah, I thought, my love, my fellow soldier. See what have I become? I felt that Khadijah, if she had seen me, might have been overwhelmed by a desire to kiss me, because the smell of my sweat was mingled with Old Spice, and even without the Old Spice the smell was better than how it had been before—the sweat was earned.

  As we waited for the police, I leaned protectively against my father’s Subaru, which was immobilized, its rear tires slashed. My shirt clung to my chest. My triceps, which ached from wrestling with Steven for the pot, looked a little more like real triceps, distinguishable from the rest of my arms.

  I have been to war, my love. I mouthed the words as I watched the sunset spill red on the diner’s chrome. Maybe I only needed Khadijah to watch how I was changing, how I was becoming a man, for our bond to be sealed.

  • • •

  The police station in Worthington was not like Wattsbury’s. The room where my father was invited to make a phone call was never referred to as a conference room, and our exchange with the officers couldn’t have been termed a conference. But a progressive, Wattsburian spirit prevailed. The police told us that they would keep Steven off our property as long as we didn’t insist on lodging a criminal complaint; they felt pretty sure they could talk him out of lodging a complaint against us. It was true that my father had torn up his money order, and that I would have inflicted very mild burns upon him if he hadn’t seized the pot, but a young waitress had confessed that she was the one who had armed me, a minor, with coffee. (She was fired immediately.) It was Steven who had slashed our tires and instigated the conflict. As far as the town of Worthington was concerned, we only had to find a ride back to Wattsbury and call Triple A about the Subaru in the morning.

  At the little metal table where the white office phone waited for us, my father backed his metal chair against the wall. He leaned his head against a bulletin board and dialed a number from memory.

  “Give me a little space, all right?” His eyes softened. “Won’t you, Son?”

  I left the room and wandered down the hallway, to the holding cell. I took the bars in my hands. While my father murmured into the phone, I studied the metal bench that ran alongside the wall, the chrome toilet. These were the state’s tools for accommodating citizens who were helpless against themselves. A cage was not a place you would ever put my father, a great cat.

  After about five minutes, he came out to the lobby. “It’ll be two hours,” he said to the officers. “A friend of mine is on her way.”

  • • •

  We had long exhausted the game of Twenty Questions by the time Nancy arrived. I had seen my father kiss her, but now, for the first time, I saw the two of them embrace. He collected her in his big arms, her small, rigid body much the same as Khadijah’s, her avian eyes and nose Khadijah’s too, and soon they were sitting at the table near the phone, his head on her shoulder. These cheating old people had what Khadijah and I rightfully deserved.

  “Poor baby,” Nancy said. She kissed my father’s hair. “My poor churl.”

  “I don’t have any money,” he said as she ran a hand down his sideburn through his beard. When she was with him, holding him, he was unashamed to say it. “What am I going to do?”

  “We’ll figure something out, dummy.” She made a dismissive motion with one hand while she continued to pet him with the other, a coordinated movement I thought of as maternal. “You just had a run-in with some bad people, that’s all.” Bad people. The clarity with which a neocon could navigate the world! My mother would never have said “bad people.” She never would have allowed herself the certainty that the people were bad. Nancy’s face, as she cooed the words into his ear, was self-assured. My father closed his eyes.

  The Dads left the station with their arms around each other’s shoulders, a battered pair of defectors. I followed, hoping that Khadijah waited for me in Nancy’s car,
although I knew it was unlikely. Before we reached the parking lot, the Dads stopped on the paved walk and allowed themselves a luxurious kiss. They performed it in part for me, I think, and for any officers watching from inside. They were having a rite of their own.

  April was all but upon us. A lukewarm wind shook pine needles onto the windshields of the cruisers. I could hear them skitter on metal and asphalt, scouring away at winter.

  “You didn’t bring Khadijah, by any chance, did you, Nancy?” I asked. It was the first substantial sentence that had ever passed between us.

  “You think she’s hiding under the car, Josh?” She laughed. “Khadijah is studying, dear. Or at least she’d better be. She and I will have a dire conversation if I return to find her final Wattsbury French paper unfinished. She lobbied quite hard to come with me, actually. But I would have been a lax mother to say yes, I’m afraid.”

  “Elle ne vient pas, c’est ça?” my father asked. “L’histoire de la débâcle âllemande?” He was cheering up.

  “Non, c’est Wattsbury Regional, mon frère, Afrique du nord. L’histoire du colonialisme et du racisme.”

  They kissed again, in the parking lot, the gorgon of money vanquished by culture. I knew they were healing each other by speaking French, reminding each other of what they had and who they were. They were going to build a life on their romance. I thought of Nancy barring Khadijah from the car, Khadijah, who’d only wanted to hang out with me after I’d been in a fight, and I despised the Dads. Perhaps that was the useful trick I learned from what happened with Khadijah: the ability to despise them.

  I reflected on the deafening musical equipment I was going to spend my father’s money on. Someday, I thought, I will live in a tour bus, with only my girlfriend. I will walk and talk and dress differently from my father. I will walk and talk and dress in such a way that, as with Kurt Cobain, you take a look at me and think, orphan.

  And the girl in the tour bus was the girl who’d torn off her scrunchie, who’d cast her burgundy-trimmed Esprits to the wind. Who sat beneath an oak with a manual for politically motivated crime. She’ll be an activist, I thought, but sometimes she’ll take time off and come with me, and distribute political flyers to the people who come to my shows, bring them into a movement.