Grayson's Knife

by Russell H Aborn

  “The old must make way for the young,” she says. “It is a natural law. The union movement’s overarching requirement is to make their values clear and set their priorities.”

  “Do you belong to a union?” Grayson asks.

  “No, not right now,” she says. “But I’m down with the movement.” She looks around the Burger King. “Where is the waiter? I could use a martini.” She looks sideways at Grayson, waiting for him to laugh, and he obliges her.

  It should have been easy to be pissed off at her, a rich kid, telling him how things work in a union, but he wasn’t. The casual way she spent six hundred bucks is daunting to a working stiff, but he’s dazzled by her smile; it feels like an invitation to a place he’s never been. She also has an edge, like she could be fun but dangerous. Certainly, she is not better looking than Catherine, but their looks are different. Catherine glows, Amy throws heat. Amy is sexy, sultry, distant. Hot is the perfect word.

  “So, you haven’t walked a picket line or participated in an outreach program?” she says.

  “What do you mean by outreach? Like, ‘Stay in school, kids. Brush your teeth twice a day,’ type of thing?”

  Amy says, “When I was at Brandeis doing my undergrad, there was an outreach program to the prisons. Each week, I’d drive to Walpole and tutor the prisoners, in reading, or math. One of my students was the president of a motorcycle club, Stan Belzer. He won early release by virtue of his efforts at rehabilitation. Thanks to our program.” She flashes a wide smile. “Isn’t that marvelous?”

  “Yeah. That’s great,” Grayson says.

  “We’re still in touch. He’s good to know.”

  “You know? The Dark Lords motorcycle club?” Hugh asks.

  Grayson nods.

  She considers him as she lights up and flourishes a small brown cigarillo, called a Swisher Sweet. She drags on her smoke without inhaling it into her lungs and blows it out with a puffing sound. She flicks the filter end of the cigarillo awkwardly, as if for the first time and she’d never seen it done before. All in all, she handles the cigarillo like it’s a prop.

  She starts up again, “Despite all the consciousness raising we’ve done, it’s nowhere near enough. It’s time to take more direct action. We tried to bring fairness to the workers. We played by the rules and within the system, and we failed. We see now it’s not possible, so we are about to begin an armed struggle, our aim is to bring about justice by toppling the despotic government.”

  “What? Like in Nicaragua or somewhere?” Grayson says.

  She grins. “No, no. The U.S. of A.”

  Hugh has his head down, facing the mound of fries he’s dumped on the thin waxy paper he unraveled to get to his cheeseburger. He examines the pile and extracts each French fry as if it were a game of pickup sticks.

  “Wow,” Grayson says. “I’m not ambitious, but I admire it in others.”

  It’s not unusual for some of his generation to discuss revolution, but it was difficult for him to take them seriously. The “revolutionaries” he knows, were by and large, at the better colleges and still living off their parents. But Amy is really into it, her face is all lit up, as if she were about to tell a great story.

  “You look skeptical,” she says.

  “With regard to your success, I have to say, I am, yes.”

  Grayson had gone to Boston State for half a year, and at the state schools, there are very few students that want the government overthrown, at least not until they graduate and find work. This other cohort, the student/revolutionaries, were usually close to flunking out and so throwing a riot, encouraging anarchy and leaving bodies in the street seems a better option than having to go get a fucking job.

  The people Grayson knows who work for a living never talk about a worker’s revolution; they usually talk about their kids, wives, husbands, sports, or maybe fishing. Once most guys had a decent job, one that paid enough to house and feed the family, cover the bills, save a couple of bucks, buy a carton of smokes and a case of beer every week, that is pretty much all they want out of work. Everyone knew the boss was a donkey; nobody expects the boss to be anything but a donkey. Of course, the company sucks. So what? Work usually sucks, too. That’s why they had to pay you to do it, and why they called it work. You considered yourself lucky if you didn’t hate the job. Life was not about what you did for a living, it was about who you lived for, as he’d recently discovered too late.

  A young guy wearing a Burger King two-toned smock that was cut like a Nehru Jacket, is mopping his way to their booth. He stops and reaches over to another table, takes a green, flat, metal ashtray from it and puts it in front of Amy, and then continues mopping his way up the aisle. She didn’t seem to notice him, drops her cigarillo on his clean floor and steps on it.

  “Did you play football, too?” she says. “Were you a line man like Hugh?”

  “No,” Hugh looks up from the fries. “No, no, hell no, he wasn’t a lineman and neither was I. He was a quarterback. I was a middle linebacker. Big difference. We saw linemen as cattle. A middle linebacker is like a quarterback, but on defense. A linebacker disrupts and destroys. You might say a linebacker ‘smashes the system.’” He smiles and raises his eyebrows. “He was a quarterback, and I was the opposite. The anti-quarterback.”

  “Quarterbacks throw the football at the other people, right?” Amy asks.

  “Not me,” Grayson says. “As a quarterback, I sat home watching The Three Stooges on Channel 38.”

  Amy puts on a puzzled look.

  “He got hurt in a car accident the summer before his senior year in high school, and couldn’t play anymore,” Hugh says. “But, yeah, a quarterback throws the ball. He’s the boss of the offense. He runs the play.”

  Grayson lights a smoke and pulls the ashtray over.

  She says, “In any case, the point I wanted to make is that the game is rigged but our generation is going to change things. Things are changing, you say, but I say, not fast enough.”

  “I didn’t say---”

  “You can make a stand, get involved in the quote actions and passions unquote of your time.”

  When she said ‘actions and passions, she’d held up both hands and made some kind of two fingered scratching movement in the air that Grayson has never seen before.

  “What’s that, with the fingers?” Grayson asks.

  “It means I’m quoting someone.”

  “It looks weird,” Grayson says. He hopes the gesture doesn’t catch on.

  Hugh says, “Amy, can you hop up, I have to find a phone and call the office for messages.”

  She gets up and Hugh walks by the teenager mopping the floor, and to a bank of phones at the sidewalk.

  Grayson watches him leave.

  She says, “Corinne said you were handsome and funny. I’m not looking for Mr. Right, I’m looking for someone who is fun to be with. I like a good time, smoke some weed, get naked and see what’s up. Hugh called and said you were free to date and were working in Boston today. He said we could meet up and figure out where you were and I could get a peek at you. I came up with the idea of following you into Kakas.”

  “I’m happy to meet you, but Catherine and I are just in a rough spot. We’re trying to work things out. Anyway, I’m not political, not at all. I don’t pay attention to that stuff. I hardly even know who’s running the show down in DC.”

  “The Evil One,” she says, with a happy grin.

  “I was exaggerating, for effect. I know its Nixon.”

  “Him, too,” she says.

  “I was just trying to make a point.”

  “Oh, well,” she says. “So politically we’re incompatible, and you’re hoping to get back with your girlfriend. We could always just fuck.”

  He feels his face heat up.

  “You’re blushing? My word. It’s 1973. Don’t be a prude. It’s bourgeois.”

  “I’m hardly a prude,” he says, sounding like a dink.

  “Why not just fuck,” she holds up a hand. “
Sorry, I don’t want your head to pop, why don’t you ball me until you get Kathy back?”

  “Catherine.” He pauses. “What do you want with me? A woman like you could be going out with some rich playboy, like Derek Sanderson, or Joe Namath.”

  “They don’t look like Che, you do. Che turns me on.”

  “Che? Che Mullins, from down the Wonder Bowl?” Grayson says.

  “You make jokes when you’re nervous,” she says. “Che was handsome, too, very sexy. And, his passion for the people was inspiring. He was a physician, brilliant, deep and complex, capable of holding two contradictory ideas, the mark of real intelligence. Che said, ‘The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.’ And, ‘A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine, motivated by hate.’ “

  “Oh, that Che. On the tee shirt, with the beret,” Grayson says.

  “Wouldn’t you have loved to meet him?”

  “Yeah, he sounds like a hot shit. His advisor should tell him lose the beret, wear a bowtie instead. The intellectuals go ape for bowties.”

  “He’s been dead since 1967,” she says. “Executed by fascist thugs in Bolivia.”

  Hugh comes back and Amy slides over on the seat. He swept the litter from where he’d been sitting to where he sits now. Preoccupied, he balls up the crinkly paper wrappers the burgers came in and stuffs them into the paper sack. He balls that up then jams the sack into his soda cup, on top of the remaining ice before snapping the plastic lid back on the cup.

  She says, “Aren’t you infuriated by the way the bastards send off the poor and working-class males to be killed in wars that benefit the fat cats? It’s no coincidence that those men most likely to challenge the system are the same men sent out to die.”

  Hugh says, “Like Paul, killed for the oil in Vietnam.”

  She says, “Hugh told me about your brother. How terrible.”

  Grayson, sitting by the sun heated window glass, is suddenly cold.

  “No, don’t, man. Don’t,” Grayson says. It’s one thing to play around, bullshitting about the world, being a smart-ass, trying to get a laugh from a good-looking woman, but leave Paul alone.

  “That’s just one of the ways the poor are exploited by the rich,” she says.

  “That’s undeniable. The poor are always getting exploited,” Hugh says, “One way or another. We exploit each other when there are no rich people around to do it for us.”

  Grayson stands up. “I have to go back to work.”

  “Sit down for five more minutes,” Hugh says.

  “Are you trying to get me fired?” Grayson asks.

  “What do you live by?” she asks. “Anything? What do you believe?”

  “I believe a Pall Mall and a can of Schlitz is a perfect breakfast.”

  Amy says, “Do you remember the ‘God is Dead’ issue in Time magazine from a few years ago? The cover was shown in Rosemary’s Baby?”

  Hugh looks at his brother and smiles, before turning to Amy.

  “Oh, yeah,” Hugh says. “My mother saw that issue in the dentist’s waiting room and yelled at him for having it out where people could see it.”

  She smiles.

  Hugh points at his brother. “He went straight up to the drug store and bought one.”

  “They wanted to sell magazines, and the provocation worked,” she says. “It always does. Only we don’t provoke to sell magazines.”

  “Good Friday, 1966,” Grayson says. “It said, ‘Is God Dead?’ Not ‘God is dead.’”

  “That’s not how I remember it. In any case,” Amy says, “The old God is dead. We need to replace the old God with a new god.”

  Hugh examines his fingernails.

  “One of our new gods is spectacle,” Amy says. “We need to capture the attention of the masses, to get them to take part in a worldwide worker’s revolution. Do you remember the Roxbury police station that got bombed in the summer of 1970? How about the break-in at the Newburyport Armory?”

  Listening to her is disorienting. What does she want? She has some kind of energy; her eyes sparkle and are full of life. She is having fun. Snatches of a song from one of The Old Man’s Sinatra albums plays in his head: Witchcraft. It struck him that she’d be likely to get away with just about anything.

  “You did those things?” Grayson says.

  “I’d have to be pretty stupid to admit it, and I’m not stupid. But, if we did, we’re not the only ones. The Times reported there were over 2,500 bomb explosions in the U.S. in an 18-month period in 1971 and 1972. Fact. Look it up.”

  Hugh says, “I didn’t realize that.”

  “Look it up. We’ve been busy,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye.

  Grayson gestures to Hugh. “Up. Let’s go. Amy, it was nice to meet you.”

  Her smile gone, she says, “The next time you come by to see Hugh, be sure to hit my buzzer.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The brothers are in Hugh’s car, on the way back to Grayson’s truck on Newbury Street.

  “What the hell is going on?” Grayson asks. “Who is that?”

  “She wanted to meet you. Just this morning you said Catherine’s gone and she won’t be coming back.”

  “Mind your own business. Besides, you two seemed pretty cozy.”

  Hugh says, “You think? Maybe a little.” He puts on a face that says he’s considering Grayson’s opinion. “We’re simpatico. I admire people like her for their passion for equality. She’s into the whole brotherhood of man thing.”

  Grayson says, “And blowing shit up. Be careful she’s not one of these rich kids, getting her kicks until her mother tells her it’s time to quit it and marry an investment banker. Meanwhile, regular slobs get hurt, because she’s out looking for cheap thrills. You better keep away from her.”

  Hugh says, “Me? You heard her, she’s all yours.”

  “Okay, I’ll say it again. Mind your own business.”

  “It would be cool, though, to be part of something big,” Hugh says. “Changing the world? That would be an adventure.”

  “I can’t even change myself. You know how many times I’ve tried to quit smoking? Told myself I’m going to jog twenty-five miles a week?” he says, leaving aside his multiple, unsuccessful attempts to manage or quit drinking.

  Hugh says, “Man! What do you want from your life? You want to be The Old Man? Drive a truck every day, wind up in AA, living on Social and a lousy $400 a month pension? Maybe you’re looking to carry on his legacy. I’m not.”

  “I should be like who, Al Capone? Fidel Castro? Abby Hoffman?”

  “I’m not going to live like everyone else,” Hugh says. “I refuse to be the goofball who works all day for an idiot boss, goes home to a fat wife and screaming kids, shovels some meatloaf down his neck, watches the Sox game with a six pack, goes to bed and gets up the next day and does it all over again. That’s what you want?”

  Grayson can’t answer that honestly, because he doesn’t know. Or he knew that what he wanted today was going to change when he woke up tomorrow and change again by the time he got into bed tomorrow night. He wanted to be Blackbeard The Pirate and St. Francis of Assisi. Some days he wanted to be Al Capone, and some days Elliott Ness. Grayson thinks the primary difference between him and his two-year old nephew was that one of them was toilet trained and the other wasn’t.

  “I don’t think that far ahead,” Grayson says.

  “Bull. You don’t have a plan for your life?”

  “My plan is to get up in the morning and see what happens,” Grayson says.

  “No, answer me. I’m serious.”

  “My plan is to keep my nose clean, at least as long as Ma’s still alive.”

  “You don’t have a dream?” Hugh says.

  “That’s different than a plan.”

  “What’s your dream?” Hugh says.

  “Drop dead. If I had one, I wouldn’t tell you. So you can twist it all around and make fun of me? No thanks.”

  “No, I want to know,” Hugh sa
ys. “Why would I laugh at it?”

  Grayson ignores him. Catherine had spent six years planning a dream life for them. It was a life he wanted most of the time and wanted to want all the time. Now she is gone, and now he did want it all the time. After a while they would say it to each other, back and forth, like it was the lyrics to a favorite song, or The Pledge of Allegiance or the roster of the 1967 Red Sox. He turns to look at his brother.

  “Marry Catherine,” Grayson says.

  “That’s all?”

  That wasn’t all, there was a lot more. They would have a house full of happy kids, and live down in Marshfield, near the beach. Grayson would make a beeline home from work, have a lively dinner with his family, then go watch the kid’s Little League games, or dance recital or school play. Summer Saturdays, he’d mow the lawn while they played in the yard, and at the end of the day he would read bedtime stories to them. For his part, he wanted to make love to Catherine every night, and fall asleep with her there. Wake up, go to work feeling good and do it all over again. Grayson loved each aspect of their story and his last contribution to the dream was that on Sunday mornings he would cook bacon and eggs for everyone. But the dream began with Catherine; she made him promise he’d rent a cottage down the Cape for their honeymoon, and they’d go back to it on their two-week vacation with the kids, to the exact same cottage, each and every year. Now he wanted it all, too, he was certain he did. He didn’t know if he was capable of it, though. There were too many yawning holes in him. Eventually she felt the same way.

  “That’s everything,” Grayson says.

  “Why don’t you have it already?”

  “I didn’t know that was what I wanted until I found out I couldn’t have it,” Grayson says.

  “You should have cut down on your drinking, at least. With or without her.”

  He looks over at Grayson, who says nothing.

  “Okay,” Hugh says. “So what’s the rest of it?”

  “Emma told me she’s seeing some guy from Braintree,” Grayson says.

  “You think it’s serious?”