Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to walk together?”

  “Yeah.”

  Exiting the gym, we go up the main path toward the dorm. Empty sentences, totally empty sentences, are said. “Labile” is a word I found in the Barron’s for a test I’ve already taken and done poorly on.

  “How were your grades?” I force myself to ask. His try at a beard is upsetting for all possible reasons.

  “Pretty good. 3.6-something. I have to get above a 3.2 to keep my scholarship.” I listen to this lazy genius toss out his accomplishments. “How were yours?”

  “Really good, actually. I didn’t calculate the, you know, three-point value, but all Bs, definitely. Needless to say.”

  “That’s good.”

  This is the only place in the area where you can feel crowded by buildings: you’re in between Memorial and Finch, the student union and the clock tower and the cafeteria and the health center and Petrusse and the career center and Grunwald. I don’t have any reason to say anything, I’m going to wait to see what he has to say.

  I have little psychic room for Linus’s grandmother, I can’t imagine her dying of anything other or less than heart problems, of a massive heart attack, a tidal force of pressure that knocked her onto the ground and swiftly pushed her life out from her body like an unwelcome tenant. Why should it be any less painful than that? Why should he have to suffer less?

  Back in October or November, when we were leaving the cafeteria, Linus said to me, “Most people aren’t good at doing what they say they’ll do. I’ve met a lot of people like that. But you’re not like that.”

  Now, in McCloskey’s afternoon shadow, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I woke up one day, like two weeks from now, and felt different, and felt like my body naturally wanted to be bigger? Like it was the natural thing to put on three or four pounds? And then I told Hargraves I wanted to wrestle 133 now? And we had to wrestle off for 133? Wouldn’t that be funny?”

  I say yes or something. My kneecap tingles, warbles up like a nose just before the sneeze arrives.

  He holds the door for me. “How’s your family?” I say.

  “O.K. You know?” he says.

  I nod, go ahead of him up the stairs. Our footsteps make noise. I hold the door for him.

  “Hold on one second,” he says. “I have something I want to show you.”

  “O.K.”

  I follow him down to the end of the hallway to his room. He opens his door and goes inside, but he only leaves the door open a little bit. It’s wide enough that I can see the lights are off, but I can’t see what he’s doing. No noise comes out, no rustling. Thirty seconds pass this way. I’m about to ask him what’s going on when his face appears in the dark door crack and he says, “Never mind,” and I reach out my hand. “Hey—” but he’s closing the door, hard, and it slams right on my middle finger. I don’t scream or at least I don’t remember or think I do. Linus says, “Are you all right?” and I hold my hand to my chest and walk bent over toward the bathroom, where I stumble into one of the stalls and shut the door. Blood feels like it’s spraying out of the end of my finger. I’m making this coping hissing sound through my teeth. I ride the waves of pain for however long it takes. Pretty soon I’m able to have thoughts. If there is a heaven, would my grandma look up from Thomas Mann to find his grandma standing there, to talk over our differences while looking down on us from the clouds, or would they purposely avoid each other? On the toilet I can’t tell if I hate Linus or if he’s fucking with me. He might’ve turned eighteen over Christmas. At first I worry that he’s going to come find me, and then it becomes clear he’s not and that seems strange until I understand that it’s not strange anymore. I get up and lock myself in my room.

  I hope for the odd circumstances to align so that I will need to wrestle Linus. I don’t care if he’s beating people in practice two weight classes up. I don’t care. I’m hoping for an excuse to take my good shot at him.

  I wake up, find a folded piece of paper under my door. It says:

  I think we have some things we should talk about don’t you think so? If your not ready to talk about them I understand but I’ll be on the couches around 2 or something if your ready to talk about shit.

  Everyone gets to take it easy since there’s the double dual tomorrow. There’s a lot of talking and listening. “Wrestle for each other! You’re wrestling not just for yourself, but for every other guy in this room!” I keep biking, try to prevent Mary Beth’s theoretical disapproval, which is the best I’ve got for now, so I keep the blinders on.

  At two thirty I go to my meeting with Mrs. Caple at McKnight. I sit down on the other side of her desk, which has scrambled papers and a mug of tea. The lights are off, except for a dusty lamp that gives off yellow light. I smile at her and she smiles back with her fifty percent smile. We try anyway.

  “How’s your break been?”

  “It’s been good, thank you. How’s yours?”

  “Very nice. Have you been keeping up practice?”

  I don’t tell her about the Silas sketches, but I say, “Yes.”

  “Good. I have your portfolio here.” She hands it to me across the desk, looks at me through some mysterious prism, possibly pitying. I set it down next to her mug. “When I was first taking art classes,” she says, “I had a sketchbook just like that one there. Then one night I spilled pizza sauce all over it. I’m not sure I really ever got over that. So take good care of it!”

  I can tell she’s waiting for me to request an assessment of my drawings, but I’m not going to do that. It’s clear we’re reaching the end of what we have to talk about together.

  “How did you like the class?” she says. She takes a drink of tea.

  “I feel like I understand art pretty good now. Like I can really see it.”

  “That’s wonderful, Stephen,” she says. “Do you see the art in what you’ve done here?” She pats the pad with her fingers, but I don’t need to look, I know what they are.

  “No, there isn’t any art in those.”

  She winces.

  “Mrs. Caple, can I ask you a question?”

  “O.K.”

  “The student of yours, Mary Beth, what do you think of her artwork?”

  You can tell you’re dealing with a bona fide adult because they don’t look away when you put them on the spot. Mrs. Caple probably would’ve been a good wrestler, because she stares right back at me. “Why are you asking me that?”

  “Surely we both know the answer to this question.”

  There’s only one moment of hesitation, as if the weighing of honesty had an exact time measurement. “I thought she was promising last semester. Is. Is promising. I was excited for her to take the class again, but her work this semester stalled out. I’m not sure why. Sometimes that type of thing can happen, you know. You burn out, get tired, anything. Sometimes it just happens like that, and sometimes it doesn’t matter anyway for the students with talent.” She tips the mug back, finishes the tea. “I have to go. I have to meet my husband.”

  I take my portfolio. “Thank you, Mrs. Caple. I’m glad I took your class. Both semesters.”

  “I looked at those drawings a lot.” She points to the portfolio under my arm. “I’m not exactly sure why.”

  I start to say thank you, “Th—,” but don’t, because I’m not sure what she means.

  “I think maybe because … I felt like there’s sort of a significant amount of effort in those. You did a great job trying.”

  I nod my head like a Depression-era gentleman and take my B portfolio out the door with me.

  I head around the side of Mooney and figure out where the earrings likely landed out her window, digging my hands into the snow. It doesn’t take too long to find them.

  I wake up in the middle of the night. It’s impossible to get a full night’s sleep before a meet, even if you’re not wrestling. You can’t untrain yourself, the body will kick you out of your dreams. Two more hours until we have to be at the va
ns. My boner stands straight up like a flagpole saluting the president. With no hands, with only the power of my mind, I wiggle it like a TV antenna.

  In regard to the fingernail it becomes a question of whether the fingernail will fall off or not.

  Early in the morning, I dial her number. She picks up before the second ring.

  “Hello.”

  “Did I wake you up?” I say stupidly.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me neither. You must think I’m desperate.”

  “I think you are and aren’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you miss me, I know you’re lonely. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? I knew it as soon as the phone rang. That’s why I picked up. The phone’s on my desk. But I also know if I didn’t pick up, it wouldn’t make much difference in the long run.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Would it?”

  “Well.”

  “You’d still go right on at practices and matches and Kenosha and so on.” And so on. Before Mary Beth, there was no and so on.

  “It’s way more complicated than that. I’m rehabbing every day. Fink is cockblocking me … I can’t get anyone … to listen.” I sputter out, leaving out the earrings, leaving out so much. Talking to Mary Beth has a way of making clear what’s unimportant. “How are you so sure?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems like nothing gets too disrupted. Nothing big gets disrupted much. If you want it bad enough.” The thing about her is there’s sadness, except it’s only nearby in the same woods as her, she never lets it get too close.

  “You mean like everything works out in the end?”

  “Yeah, a lot of things do work out.”

  I try my luck. “What about us?”

  She’s silent for a long time. I can hear some sort of scratching coming through the phone, in the room with her, on her desk, under her lamp, under her hand. “Do you know how many times I’ve thought about coming back there?”

  “Ten?”

  “How many times have you thought about coming here?”

  “More than ten.”

  “That’s a lot. Is it as many as Kenosha?”

  “It’s hard not to think about you when I think about Kenosha.”

  “I know you’re bad at lying, but are you lying?”

  “No.”

  The scratching stops. “I knew you weren’t.”

  “I’m going to miss the vans if I don’t go. I think we should meet.”

  “You shouldn’t miss the vans.”

  “I said I think we should meet.”

  “I heard you. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “It’s a sixteen-hour drive between us.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I’m busy all the time. I barely have time to think. You have practice.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “We knew each other for a few weeks and had one or maybe two dates. Probably one real one.”

  “I will get there so fast. Whenever you want me to get there, I will get there.”

  Her pause indicates that the logistics and whether it’s a good idea are both beside the point. “On my drive here I stopped at a diner just past Winona. Route 61. It’ll take you a little more than eight hours. Do you have a car?”

  “I can get a car. I’ll be there.”

  “It’s called Two Spoons.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I get to the vans an hour early and walk around the parking lot, thinking of this season as a glass bottle, a discrete object stuck in my hands. Petrusse’s oldest exhibit was a permanent installation from a Romanian who placed bottles on thirty-foot-tall pedestals, where nothing was really stopping them from falling off, and it was Mary Beth’s least favorite in the museum. I’m watching the brief shapes my breath fumes make.

  Crookston, Minnesota, is three hours east, and only about four hundred miles from Winona. Far past Konstantin and Johnson Lake, I look out the window for the northernmost barn I stripped paint from for money. Outside Northwood, I spot it in the distance. I did it with Morris, the neighbor boy my grandma pitied, who was at least twenty-three. I remember Morris driving us the hour north in his truck, talking to me about battles of the French Revolution. We got to the place and he took his shirt off and lay in the grass, taking huffs of paint thinner while I did the job, scraping to the bottom of ten layers applied on an eighty-year-old barn. The barn is red now. There are at least fifty more that have had my hands on them, but this is the farthest one up.

  When we cross the Minnesota state line, we drive by a bowling alley called The Icon that promises it’s the only bowling alley in the USA that straddles two states.

  I am the last person out of the van. They don’t even let me carry any bags. We are not far from Winona. All you’d have to do is follow the highway down. That’s all you’d have to do.

  A talk is had in the visitors’ locker room, where I stand at the periphery with my hands in my pockets and have a daydream that goes like this: I become a Man of the River, a Riverman, pulling out walleyes from the waters with some fucking straw in my mouth, telling the Minnesota kids ghost stories in exchange for their moms’ cherry pies. How long would the river be able to bear my shame, and so forth?

  I make the hallway’s acquaintance. I drag my face along its windows, which provide a direct view of the Long John Silver’s on the other side of the road. Three cars wait in the drive-thru. I reach the end of the one hallway, so I turn a corner and there’s a man and woman talking there. “Meetin’ in the hallway!” I shout to them, and they immediately stop speaking.

  With my middle finger off the ground, I do so many push-ups that I end up facedown on the floor of the locker room, panting and going down the road to sleep. At the end of this road, I find vole skulls in pulled-apart owl pellets, I find the secret of the experiment. I wake up six centuries later with a checkerboard smushed on my cheek, but I am still the same person. They all come in, one by one. The person most identifiable as a bucket of fish chum is Sherman Moody. The person most like a sad detective is Slim John Carpenter. The person most like a ditch digger in the Old West is Clark Lowe. The person most like someone else you’ve met, many times before, is Reuben Crest. The person most likely to die of ass cancer is Coach Eerik. The person most identifiable as a run-over stray cat is Coach Lee. The person most likely to be sucked into the quicksand of rubbing and rerubbing his eyes is Tom Raiskin. The person most likely to stop and watch a parade is Jerry Raiskin. The person most likely to die because of thrombosis is Coach Whiting. The person most identifiable as a bird that flies away when you get close rather than a bird that opens its mouth meanly is Ellis Pendergraph. The person most identifiable as the moss on a rock is Coach Farrow. The person most likely to offend women, over and over his whole life, by asking them how long until the baby is due is Whitey Williams. The person most identifiable as a madman barely held within his sanity as if in a leaking cage and liable to split free and head out over the enlightened terrain in a bursting fever is Paul Kryger. The person most likely to fall down an open manhole is Young William. The person most identifiable as something in a lab dish you know you shouldn’t look at is Lyle Gervin. The person most likely to be happy is Ucher. The person least likely to kill his father is Harry Pfaff. The person most likely to stop trying, to quit altogether when it stops making sense is Coach Hargraves. The person most like a monument the marauders would destroy first is Linus Arrington. The person most likely to keep one vow but break another is Stephen Florida. The person most likely to get a rare disease native to the jungles of Brazil is Elder William. The person most likely to eat with dirty utensils is Simon Fjelstad. The person most likely to particularly enjoy the taste of an animal with multiple stomachs is Coach Fink. The person most liable to panic about the phone call with the blood-test results is Fat Henry. The one most likely to write poems to a person who doesn’t exist is Nate Mayfield.

  If I
had legal access to a car, I would leave right now and drive to Winona. I don’t care that I’d be a day early. The only thing stopping me from doing it is the law … then I get an idea, a wonderful idea, which I stow away in my mind’s pocket, to think about later.

  While admiring the smudges left on the window from my visage, I spot a cat in the Long John Silver’s parking lot. I head outside, cross the street. The cat hides in the bushes as I put my hood up and enter the restaurant. Inside, the counter girl watches me pick through the trash. “Hey,” she says sadly. “Hey, come on, please.” I get a barely touched fish breast out of there and start peeling off the bread. The cat is suspicious. It’s some kind of black-and-white mutt cat with a tumorous body. I sit down in the parking lot and coax it out by putting some fish on the ground. It doesn’t eat too fast, it lets me sit there and watch it. “That’s a nice friend.” Cars go by in the drive-thru while I break the whole fish up. For years, I would see my grandma’s cat and wonder how it was able to stand all these days with nothing to do. Eventually I realized, while watching the cat turn its ears and listen and watch out the window and clean itself five times a day, that attention was its own kind of existence. The cat knew everything that was going on in my grandma’s house. The rest of the time it spent mashing its forehead into plastic bags and sleeping.

  I’m starting to think that I haven’t missed the lesson but that there never was a lesson to begin with.

  Late that night, I walk up to Silas’s house and find that the idiot left the keys in the ignition. I enter the vehicle and violate the sixth amendment and gas it out of his driveway before he emerges from his house and sees that it’s me behind the wheel. I don’t have time to rethink anything. It’s only after I’m nearing the state border three hours later that I remember Silas never ran out bleary-eyed in his long johns, how strange it is that I got away so easily.

  There is little traffic until the sun starts to fluff the sky. Spiders hang above me and I have to glance off the road every few minutes to make sure they don’t descend and succeed. Would I jeopardize my reinstatement for a chance to rendezvous with Mary Beth? Yes, the answer is I would. One time when she was at class and I did the laundry, I saw our underwear touching in the hamper and I got a boner just seeing that. And I remember I would’ve done anything to make it work with Tiff, to prolong her affections, and I specifically remember losing to Ben Demeke because I closed my eyes on a lazy shot while thinking about her, because I couldn’t think of anything else, her face was like a goddamn blindfold. I make great time, and it is to my great pleasure that there is one other car in the Two Spoons lot. I know it’s hers before I even cut the engine. I look in the rearview and tuck in my nose hairs.