The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  He learned Tom got up every morning at four, put the bandana on his head and drove out to work, the Knaack Box in the flatbed loaded with his tools—power saws, metal blades, hundreds of feet of mud-spattered extension cord, extra water in the summer.

  Sheet metal can be razor sharp and installers cut themselves when handling ductwork no matter how careful they try to be. More than once Tom had sliced his hands severely. But instead of getting stitches, he taped his cuts with duct tape and kept working. He had been cutting tin for twenty years, six, eight, sometimes ten hours a day—however long the job took—using nippers, the constant squeezing blades through metal building up his naturally big hands until they were unusually powerful.

  In his youth, Tom had been mean and rowdy. Once, pissing out a bladderful of Coors in the bathroom of a bar in Keene, New Hampshire, he had interpreted a look from the guy at the adjacent urinal as a homosexual advance. Tom had whacked him in the chin and knocked him out cold without breaking his stream. But now he was an older man and he hardly ever made a fist anymore except to wave at his young white-haired nephews as a joke.

  Ductwork is assembled in sections, which fit together like tin cans. If the craftsman doesn’t do his work with care, the sections won’t line up fair and square but will form an unsightly angle where they join, called a dogleg. Stand beneath Tom’s ductwork and you would see it running straight and even.

  There was a thoughtful quality to Tom’s speech, a need for correctness. It was a speaking style that popped up occasionally in Boston. But Tom had spent years out on the New Hampshire border; maybe that was where it came from. He gave you the letter of every syllable. He pointed at his ductwork in the ceiling of the job site and said, “It’s got to work perfect and look perfect,” enunciating each and every t.

  * * *

  —

  Soon after meeting Tom, Corey had met his daughter, Molly, who was a year ahead of him in school and had developed. He thought of her as “Molly of the long white limbs” and admired her greatly.

  He learned she was the woman of Tom’s house, the one who did the cooking and cleaning, not her father who, at most, threw his jeans on the washer jammed in the garage with his conduit. When she was a girl, having learned to microwave his dinners, the On-Cor chicken nibblers, she’d climb on Tom’s lap, pull his biker beard, pinch his nose and say, “You’re ugly!”

  He’d tell her to play nice and hold her. “How’d you get so mean?”

  “Because you’re stupid!”—and they’d fall asleep like that when she was a little girl.

  In school, she played volleyball, track, hockey, soccer, basketball. She had a strong, well-rounded body. Men told Tom she was a great athlete, and he said yes, she was, “but I have to keep my shotgun ready.”

  In junior high, Corey saw her go running by his house in tights on her statuesque legs, wearing a hooded sweatshirt in the winter, a sweatband holding back her hair, leading the way to adulthood.

  * * *

  —

  At the age of eleven or twelve, he had wanted to move to Houghs Neck to live near Molly and her dad. The Hibbards lived on Winthrop Street, which came from Manet Avenue, which came from Sea Street, which went inland and bent back towards the water like a spoon. “They’re just like us,” Corey told his mother. “It’s just the two of them.” People had left Tom and Molly too. Tom hung his head and slouched as if he didn’t think much of himself—his father had left him when he had been a boy in Lowell; Molly’s mother had left him also. Corey asked his mom if she’d ever consider marrying a man like Tom. Gloria said, “I don’t think so!” and gave a howl of unhappy laughter. “So we can’t move out there?” Corey said, disheartened.

  * * *

  —

  And so, in those days, to be near the Hibbards, Corey had gone out to Houghs Neck to play—behind the Church of the Sacred Heart—it had a weather-beaten statue of Christ—near a ball field, general store, and tavern.

  Two sunburned blond boys in long swaying shorts and plain old shirts from the bargain lot were dribbling a basketball in the playground. They flung it, hitting Corey in the chest. He flung it back and they let him join in shooting baskets. Their friends wheelied bikes in the street. When he knew how to ollie, they taught him to grind. They went to the general store for ices where the counter girl said “one sixty-nine” and thumped your change on the wooden board. She looked young and old alike, dead in the eye, the same as her big sister on the grill. Landscapers a year out of high school came in and got cheesesteaks.

  The houses on Houghs Neck were built the same as Corey’s, a door in the middle, a room to sit behind the door, like, he thought, sitting in your low-roofed car with your elbow out the window, watching the wind blow in from the ocean when you were old enough to drive. A four-leaf clover hung from a knocker giving out a Warm Irish Welcome.

  Super Duty trucks barreled down Manet Avenue—huge, lifted, covered in rivets, union stickers, political statements, skulls and crossbones, and lights. They said Gagny Landscaping and Rock Island Lobster and Salt Life. In their trucks, the men had sideburns and beards without mustaches like Celtic fighting elves. And behind the wheels of their secondhand cars, the big women with their long straight reddish-gold hair sweeping down their broad shoulders faced into the sun, wearing black aerodynamic sunglasses like soldiers in Iraq.

  Corey would be balanced on a bubble of asphalt on his skateboard and a pickup truck would roar in and stop, the grill almost touching his face, a guy would leap out and say, “Hey, do me a favor and scream when I start driving so I don’t run you over,” and dart in for a sub.

  The mothers rounded the corner where the boys were hanging in the street—sharp-faced mothers with a bunch of girls in tow—vigorously, doggedly pushing their strollers, telling the girls, “We look for cars, then we cross the street. It’s safe. Okay, run.” The girls ran across the danger area. They had heavy feet and tan skin—they were already growing little bellies—their fathers black or Latino.

  “I want to play with you,” a girl in purple shorts said to a long-legged boy on his bike.

  “Play with me later. Go with your mom.”

  Skating with teenagers, Corey ran into a pack of nine-year-olds running wildly from house to house, who ambushed them with a Super Soaker.

  Corey knew women too, the dyed-haired mothers who ran the stores. “I’ve been up since before five. That’s my life. What can I get for ya?” He knew old men who, if you asked them what day it was, would look up at the blue sky and say, “It must be Sun Day.”

  When he skated down the Adams Shore, the houses on the east felt like the beach was hiding just behind them. It was. A powerboat was thrusting its bow over someone’s white fence. The blue sky dropped down between the houses, and the only thing below it, just out of sight, could be the water. In the lots behind the houses on the west—always the dark trees, which surrounded the marsh. In the backyards—tree houses, inflatable pools, a purple plastic princess house for a little girl.

  He saw a flag on a lawn that said Gather Friends Like Flowers.

  * * *

  —

  He would always remember the sight of Molly standing in front of her house in the summer light when he was a boy of thirteen and she was wearing cutoff shorts. The sun had been pouring down on the grass in the rutted yard, turning it verdant electric green. A beach blue sky soared overhead above the points of the treetops. Below the cliff and beyond the trees lay the sparkling ocean.

  Charcoal smoke suffused the air. Pickup trucks were parked all over, on the street and on the grass. Rock was playing on a radio—eighties hits—“Putting on the Ritz” and “Pink Cadillac” by the Pointer Sisters. Tom’s friends and family from New Hampshire were lounging around the yard, drinking Coors and Mike’s Hard Lemonade. A cousin manned the grill—so drunk he would laugh hysterically every time he had to ask somebody if they wanted cheese. Tom was standin
g with his feet planted apart, smoking a cigar. “It’s the kind of day when you don’t worry about anything. Didja get a beer? Have one.” At his back, Tom’s house—screen door, sagging porch, dirty white paint—was slouching forward, careless but solid, on stilts that held the roof up. A driftwood board covered a hole in the foundation. A ladder lay in the driveway. A child’s Lego box covered an upstairs window instead of a shade. Trees, canted over by storms, leaned like older brothers on the roof, casting down a medley of leafy shadows on the siding. Kids were running around with a plastic gun that fired strings of bubblegum, and aunts and grandmothers were sitting on lawn chairs discussing the affairs of a nineteen-year-old niece who was getting married to a boy in the National Guard.

  A band of preadolescent kids was running over the hill and back, past the stop sign on which, the year before, Corey had stuck a sticker from the Fast Wheels Skateboard Shop, to the end of the street and beyond.

  A group of older male construction workers stood in a line, staring contentedly out at the street, saying nothing. Like Tom, these older guys wore their work clothes even to a cookout—bandanas and reflective lime-green shirts with witty slogans: “J. Clavella Rigging—We get it up in a hurry”; “Bay State Scaffolding—Topping off.” A few were in their fifties. Many were heavily tattooed, like bikers or ex-cons, their skin leathered by sun and work. You could see invisible responsibility hanging on them—payments for vehicles and homes, children and women. Steadied by weight, they were further restrained by a shared sense of the right way to act; they had to work with each other. There was no wildness; they were ships with ballasts and keels. When a truck gunned down Winthrop—Powers Heating—driving way too fast, one of these older guys yelled, “Slow down!” It honked and sped onward—driven by a Celtic fighting elf in Carhartt overalls with bushy sideburns. Tom’s buddy cocked his beer can, but didn’t throw it.

  But as for the young men at the cookout, aged sixteen to twenty, some unsettled need kept them apart. Restless, angry, glowing, strong and fit, a line of bone white at the napes of their necks from new haircuts, some were white, freckled, and thickset with big-boned chins, college wrestlers and volunteer firemen with the faces of Irish politicians and cops; others, equally forceful, and in some cases giant, had the olive skins of Italians. A range of young men of different sizes, all a bit tense. You heard them rumbling, deep voice-boxed with deep vocal folds in their throats—round tattoos on their biceps—crests, flags, American eagles—asking for a burger with nothing on it. “What can I say?” said a seventeen-year-old. “I’m a simple man.”

  The young women in shorts and high ponytails came out to them, bringing them hamburgers on paper plates. The men took the food and said thank you, and the young women, in groups of three, bore the plates away and went off laughing, their ponytails shaking behind them.

  The young women and men kept apart from each other; they ignored each other—or so you would think—and then suddenly you’d hear laughter out of nowhere, a voice raised in dramatic protest, and a girl would be arguing with a guy, challenging him. He’d throw a paper plate at her like a Frisbee and smirk. Or you’d see a girl sidle up to a couple of guys and pretend to talk with one of them, while fixing her hair. She’d lift her arms and redo her scrunchy and her shirt would lift above her silver belly stud. “What’s that?” a guy would ask. “Oh that?” she’d say, and explain it to him. Molly was at the center of several such conversations—stretching her back and looking casually up at the sky, seeming to forget the males and rediscover her girlfriends and go off with them again. They danced, did gymnastic moves on the lawn, and the young men forced themselves not to look, or made fun of whatever they saw, burying their deep yearning.

  Tom’s nephew had a toy called the Green Hulk Fist, a giant superhero fist bulging with knuckles and veins, made of heavy foam rubber, that you put on your hand like a glove. It took double-A batteries and made a crashing sound when you hit anything with it. He’d been hitting Corey in the legs for the last ten minutes, and Corey was telling him to hit him again. “I’m tweaked but I’m not dead. Come on!” The aunts and grandmas turned in their lawn chairs. “Give him another one, kid. What’d he say? He’s tweaked? Finish him off!”

  The kid hit him below the belt, nailing Corey square in the gonads—or so it seemed to the onlookers, who did sympathy flinches. Two men shouted out as if they were watching hockey and had seen a foul. One of the aunts yelled to the grill man, “I know you felt that, loverboy!”

  “Did he get him in the nads?”

  Corey swore he was basically fine. “It was off-center. I shifted.”

  From across the yard, Tom shook his head at him. “You’re weird. No you’re not. Just kidding. Yeah you are!”

  In the middle of being pummeled, Corey had been watching Molly with the older kids, thinking she’d never notice him. Miraculously—or maybe because her mind was in tune with her father’s—she turned to Corey and thrilled him by saying, “You boners are so lame.”

  * * *

  —

  That afternoon, after finishing up at Star, Corey skated out to the Neck alone. Between the Manet Bar and the general store, there was an island with a patch of green and a planting of two or three trees, which happened to be pines. A woman lurched out of the bar, meandered to the island, threw her purse down and started gathering up pinecones. She had a ton of black hair, she was wearing a turquoise and silver necklace and turquoise and silver wrist bands and rings, and a tank top. She had her sunglasses on top of her head, but they were falling off every time she bent down. She was very tan, she was about fifty, and she had a big, well-structured face.

  Corey put his foot down and skidded to a stop and asked what she was doing.

  “I’m picking up pinecones. I’m an artist. I use them. I do all kinds of things with them. Big ones, little ones. You gotta check the bottoms.

  “They’re so good. If you have a slice wound—which I’ve had—you can use the resin to hold your skin together. Look—see what I mean?” She made a white line down her tan forearm with her thumbnail, then clutched him by the wrist and made a line with her nail down his arm while he watched her. “A slice.” Then she rubbed his arm in circles with her fingertips while staring in his face. “It heals it.

  “I’ve been working my ass off,” she continued, “for thirty days straight. I’m an industrial cleaner. In those big-ass fuckin’ tower-ass buildings—who do you think cleans those? It’s my first day off in thirty days. That’s why my breath smells like alcohol—excuse me. I don’t like my job. I can’t even look out the window—of those big fuckin’ buildings, are you kidding? It makes me want to throw up. The height does! I wanna get out of it. If I can just make money from my art!”

  “Well, take it easy.”

  “Oh, I will! Don’t worry.” She turned away and began picking up pinecones again. He started to drop his wheels but turned back. Her purse was lying on the ground. “Make sure you don’t forget it,” he told her.

  “There it is!” She lunged for her purse and picked it up. She felt for her glasses on her head, took them off, shook her great black hair, and put them back on like a tiara in her magnificent hair.

  “You dropped your money,” Corey said.

  “Where?” she shouted.

  Corey pointed it out to her lying in the grass.

  “Oh, aren’t you a sweetie!” She staggered over and picked it up—a folded five-dollar bill—and put it in her big bra, while eyeing him. “I’m gonna put it in my boob. You’re too young, I know. That’s where ya gotta keep your money in the city. I keep all my money there.” She poked her breasts. “I call ’em Savings and Loan. My husband used to laugh his ass off when I said that.” She sidled up to Corey.

  “You remember that.”

  “I will.”

  She grabbed his arm.

  “I know you will. You’ll remember me the rest of your life.”


  She let him go. He lingered, but she had turned away. “Goodbye, honey,” she said, and he skated obediently back to the mainland.

  * * *

  —

  A little while after putting Tom’s beer in his truck, Corey got a text from a carpenter named Darragh who said he could use him on a roofing job, putting in an attic and a dormer. Corey wrote back that he was ready to work and had his own hammer. The carpenter replied that, based on the fact that Tom had recommended him, “I’m shore your all set.”

  4

  Dark Green Leaves

  The last time Gloria had spoken to Leonard was in the fall, before her diagnosis.

  After some thought, one night in June, she placed a call to him. The phone rang and was answered. She heard him say her name.

  “I’m the woman you met when I was young and dumb. You put a baby in me. It’s the same old Gloria, and I’m terminally ill. I thought you should know. Laugh. And how are you?”

  Later, she would be unable to remember his reply. He must have expressed concern, a quiet request for further information. Whatever he said, it was something smoothly forgettable. At least he had picked up and was listening. It was all she had wanted. The floor was hers. She caught him up.

  “I spent all winter going to these stupid doctors hearing I had a pinched nerve. And then it’s this dreadful thing. If I could have the time back, I wouldn’t even have gone to them. There’s nothing they can do about it anyway. Just when you think you know everything, here comes this thing. And I spent all that time wondering if I should write a book. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t. Corey’s fine. He took it like this little champ. We did something right. I know you’ve never bonded—I’m just being honest. Because I care about you, Leonard. Yes, I care about everyone now. That’s what it’s teaching me. And I want you to love him.