by Dale Peck
College is next year, Thin Michael said. We’re all seventeen. We’re seniors.
Seniors rule! Fat Michael called out, raising his fist. Yeah! He held his arm in the air for a moment, then let it fall to his lap.
Shut up, Michael, Todd said, and a took a drink. You fucking loser.
Both Todd and the boy they called Sony had faces like whippets mounted atop the dangerously thin bodies of hyperactive teenaged boys. Their arms were as knotted as a ship’s anchor rope, their chests as flat as the underside of a china platter save for a central channel that seemed impressed into the skin by a potter’s thumb. By contrast, Thin Michael’s limbs were more rounded, generous. His waist was delicate and soft as a kouros boy’s but his chest and arms had thickened with his burgeoning manhood. Speaking of which: Ellen couldn’t help but notice that when Thin Michael propped his legs on the railing a thick ripple appeared in his wetsuit, stretching from his crotch halfway to his knee. Ellen assumed it was an air pocket in the neoprene, or else the boy had a penis the size of a paper towel tube.
Ripples, unfortunately, were all Fat Michael seemed to have, from his double chin to the cleft sag of his chest to the parallel folds that ribbed his stomach. He sat back from the other boys, holding his beer in both hands and sipping at it so slowly that Ellen could almost hear him tallying the calories in his head and wondering why a Todd or Sony could guzzle theirs with impunity. Her pity must have shown itself on her face, because when Fat Michael’s eyes caught hers he directed at her a look of such disgust that she physically recoiled.
That fucking stinks, Fat Michael said, but before Ellen could apologize—what the hell have I got myself into, she thought—Fat Michael got up and walked to the railing. Smells like something died in your backyard.
The wind was coming in off the water, and Ellen smelled it too.
Oh, um, yes. I, um, noticed it before. Sorry.
Allow me, Thin Michael said.
What?
Before Ellen could stop him, Thin Michael had set his beer down and vaulted to the grass.
Hey, you really shouldn’t—
Wow, Thin Michael cut her off, it’s a lot worse down here. There was an odd gap between words and tone, as if Thin Michael wasn’t bothered by the smell at all, but looking forward to finding a particularly grisly corpse.
Ellen heaved herself off her chair. Though she’d only had three or four sips of beer, she felt oddly light-headed as she made her way to the deck railing.
You really shouldn’t be down there. You’ll damage the grass.
Thin Michael was crouching down, peering under the deck.
Hey, Sony. Gimme Fat Michael’s boogie board.
Aw, Michael, fuck you, dude, Fat Michael said. He tried to head off Sony as he went for his board but the lighter boy danced around him. He tossed the board to Todd first—just to make Fat Michael jump, Ellen thought—and then Todd tossed it to Thin Michael in the grass.
Look, Ellen said, squatting down to bring her face closer to Thin Michael’s. She pointed to the nearest sign. It’s family policy. No one on the grass.
Thin Michael was probing with the boogie board under the deck. His action reminded Ellen of a pizza man reaching deep into an oven with his paddle.
I . . . think . . . I . . . He gave the board a sharp snap. Got it!
Ellen sighed, stood up. When she turned around, she saw that the other three boys were looking not at Thin Michael but at her, and she crossed her arms over her chest. For some reason the image of the boys turning onto the Baldwins’ path came to her mind, and she had the feeling that they already knew what Thin Michael was going to pull out from under the porch.
He really shouldn’t be down there. He’ll damage the—She was going to say ecosystem, then changed her mind. Grass, she said again, shrugging.
Todd snickered.
Don’t think I didn’t hear that, Todd, Thin Michael said from behind Ellen.
When she turned she saw Thin Michael’s chest first, corded with the effort of holding Fat Michael’s boogie board level in front of him. Then she saw the cat on the end of the boogie board. Her first impression was that it was even skinnier than she’d imagined, but then she realized it was probably just rotted out. Hollow, and collapsing in on itself. There was the flea collar, pulled so deeply up and behind the jaw that Ellen thought the animal must’ve been hung by it, or perhaps swung round and round until its neck snapped.
Meow! Ellen heard right in her ear, and she turned to see that the three boys had crowded in close. It was Fat Michael who had meowed. That is one dead cat, he said with all the enthusiasm of a first-night moviegoer rating the slasher pic he’s just seen.
Ellen could just make out the cat food dish between Fat Michael’s shoulder and Sony’s. Oh god, she said, feeling like she was going to throw up. Just get rid of it, she said, not looking back at Thin Michael, not caring about the grass. Just, I don’t know, bury it or something. Make it go away.
She went to push her way through the boys but as she did the strap of her swimsuit caught on something and jerked to the right. It didn’t come off but her breasts nearly fell out of the oversized cups. She thought she must have snagged it on the zipper pull of one of the boy’s wetsuits, but as she reached to unsnag herself she saw that it had in fact caught on Fat Michael’s finger.
Meow, Fat Michael said again.
She turned to run but Todd was there, his chest every bit as hard as it looked. It vibrated when she collided with him, but held firm. He pushed her backwards and then there were hands on both her arms propelling her faster. The railing caught her in the small of the back and then her legs were in the air over her head. She opened her mouth to scream but the ground was there faster and harder than she would have expected. It seemed as if the breath rushed out of her pores as well as her mouth, and she lay on the grass flat as a popped balloon. It was only when she smelled the cat that she realized she was breathing. She saw dark shapes falling out of the sky—the boys leaping after her, blurry black-and-white forms in their half-open wetsuits.
Let’s get her away from this stink, she heard Thin Michael say. It’s making me want to puke.
She felt her arms being lifted, her legs, but still couldn’t find the strength to struggle. The grass was simultaneously coarse and sharp against the small of her back and she could feel sand sifting into the seat of Paul’s sweatpants. She felt as if the weight of her body was cutting into the sand like a plow, imagined a channel opening in the dune where they dragged her, water rushing in where her body had ripped the grass out by its roots. The channel widening until the whole house floated away and all that was left behind were a few jagged promontories, the occasional book or bottle surfacing every few years like the sherds on her father’s desk.
She found her limbs then, began to thrash. A foot caught Todd in his mouth and she saw blood spray from his lips. When Thin Michael reached for her throat she caught the side of his hand in her teeth. A big round shadow loomed on her right side, collapsed on her stomach. Thin Michael’s hand flew from her mouth as Fat Michael’s knee drove into her gut.
Jesus Christ, Thin Michael said. Fucking hold her still, will you?
I want to go first, Fat Michael said. I saw her first.
Fuck you, Michael, Thin Michael said. I did all the work. This one’s mine.
Todd’s face was right over Ellen’s when she looked up, his snickering mouth full of blood. Then he and Sony pulled her arms away from her body while Thin Michael kicked her legs apart. The boys’ hands were hot and soft and wet on her arms, in contrast with the sand under them, which was dry, coarse, cold. Ellen wanted to apologize to the dune, to say that this wasn’t her fault, but she couldn’t catch her breath since Fat Michael had fallen into her. She could see him in the background, watching like he always did, and it was him she hated, the fat fuck.
In the space marked out by Thin Michael
and Todd and Sony’s heads she could see the sky. The clouds were thicker now, a gray that was closer to black than it was to white. No light pulsed through the clouds, but she wondered if her parents’ god were looking down through the gaps anyway. Did god distinguish between past and present and future, or was it all the same to him? A house, a hoodoo, a wilderness or a nation. She felt she must be invisible by now, but that he could still locate her by narrowing his gaze to the four signs marking the boundary between the manmade and natural worlds and zeroing in on the four boys until he’d interpolated her position. But what would he see? She felt she was nothing more than the space between them.
The boys’ voices were harsh as gulls fighting over a bit of carrion as they cheered Thin Michael on. She had read about moments like this, had been told that in order for these boys to do what they were doing they had to deny her personality, her humanity. Now she realized that that was just another denial. They knew exactly who she was, what they were doing to her. It was she who had to disengage if she wanted to survive. Had to tell herself that the body these boys had commandeered was no more her than the Popham Beach house was her family. But she didn’t believe that either. She didn’t have her parents’ faith, which is why it was the signs she’d worried about last night and the dunes she worried about now, why she looked to the sky for a sign that god existed but saw only her own gaze reflected back at her.
She heard a ripping sound but kept her eyes focused on the empty sky. The first time she’d seen crepuscular rays and thought of it as her father’s summer beam, the Baldwins were just getting in to Popham Beach. It had rained almost the whole drive from Worcester, the storm only letting up sometime after Yarmouth, after which the single layer of cloud had begun to break apart into thick sun-edged tufts like gold-fringed pillows. By the time the car turned off 18 onto the puddley two-track that led to the Baldwins’ house the clouds had pushed further apart and the sunlight beat down on the house in hard yellow bars. As she grew up, Ellen would come to see the light as softer, undulating like the bottom of a curtain or the ripple of flotsam on the beach or the sinewy lines of an Aalto vase, but that morning the light looked as hard as tent poles, and Ellen had thought her family’s little saltbox would surely collapse beneath its weight. She had always believed faith must be that heavy, the incredible burden of supporting something that refused to reveal itself until you died. She imagined that that’s what her parents were doing driving around America in their camper: not looking for miracles but looking for death, when what they should have been doing was looking out for her. But even as she thought that, her diaphragm spasmed, her gut contracted as if of its own accord, and all the air in her lungs rushed out in denial.
I protest!
With a start, Thin Michael stopped his thrusting.
What’d she say?
The other boys looked at him strangely.
She didn’t say nothing, Fat Michael said. Hurry up, it’s getting late.
Thin Michael looked down at Ellen’s face. She was staring up at the sky, her eyes as open and empty as her mouth. A foot away from her head he saw an empty bottle.
Maybe we should gag her, he said. If she keeps yelling someone might hear.
Whatever, Fat Michael said. Just hurry it up, I gotta be home for dinner.
Thin Michael propped himself on his right arm, reached with his left for the bottle half submerged in sand. The base of it was too wide to fit in Ellen’s mouth so he flipped it, aimed the bottle’s open mouth at hers. When he hesitated a few drops of liquid dribbled onto Ellen’s chin.
C’mon, Todd said. Just pop it in there like a cork.
Make her suck that bottle like it was your dick, Sony said, and Todd said, Good one! and they high-fived each other.
Fat Michael raised a hand to get in on the action but when Todd and Sony left him hanging he let it fall instead on the back of the bottle in Thin Michael’s hand. It missed Ellen’s lips, teeth, slid past tongue and uvula until it lodged against her epiglottis. Spittle came out around the edges of the bottle and then mucus spurted from Ellen’s nose in yellowish streaks and then Ellen’s body bucked up and down.
Oh yeah, she’s gagging on it! Todd said.
Fucking gag on it, bitch! Sony said.
When she’d settled down Thin Michael resumed his work, and it was only when he went to switch places with Fat Michael that he noticed something was wrong. Ellen’s limbs seemed as stringy and empty as the cat’s. He tried to pull the bottle from her mouth but it wouldn’t come. He shook it with both hands but Ellen’s head only flopped on the end of it like a fish on a hook, and when he dropped her back to the ground the bottle stuck straight up like a buoy. She’s fine, right? Thin Michael said, backing away. She’s fine, Fat Michael said, not caring about getting his turn. Better than she’s ever been. It wasn’t until a few hours after the boys left that the stretched skin of Ellen’s cheeks began to slacken and the seal broke and the bottle fell back to the grass. Her mouth remained open though, distended in silence, and that evening, when it rained, it filled with a tiny pool of the same acidic drops that had, over the past quarter century, eroded the name from the bottle beside her head. In the trial against the boys it would be labeled “People’s Exhibit A: Bottle (Original Contents Unknown).”
Abusus non tollit USUM: abuse does not remove use. In keeping with the Ashkenazi tradition of Nathan Miller’s family, his son with Lucy Watkins, born on the Ides of March in the year 2012, was named Michael, after her brother, who was killed in the final days of American military activity in Iraq. Si vis pacem, para bellum. If it’s peace you want, prepare for war.
—2010
IX.
I cut a piece from time once, when I was very young. Finger scissors, laser sight, and for some reason it was crucial to stick my tongue out like my father when he measured pipe. When I squeezed carelessly I felt something bend around my fingers like glossy paper resisting dull scissors, but when I concentrated, when I stiffened my index and middle fingers and moved them up and down in the same plane, I heard a sound like Jell-O sucking free from a mold and a hole opened up in the air, not so much black as blank, a void. My skin vacuumed itself to my bones as a giant hand squeezed the air from my lungs, and when the air cleared, all that was left was the cobwebby feel of a transparent sheet draped over my fingers. But no, not a sheet: a moment, four or five seconds long, just over half that in width. Ten, maybe fifteen seconds I could do anything with. I could step inside Leonardo’s studio, say, and watch him paint the Mona Lisa’s smile, or cut the brake line on Hitler’s father’s car, or slip into my mother’s hospital room to tell her goodbye. For years I carried that moment on me, waiting for something to tell me now, now is the time to use it, and this, this is the thing to use it for. But nothing ever presented itself. Which is to say, a thousand things presented themselves, but none of them seemed worth sacrificing the others for. Sometimes the possibility of choice means more than something you can hold in your hands. And so, after a lifetime of false starts and backward glances, I’ve decided to surrender it to whomever chance delivers this. What I mean is, I wrote this note on it, but I wrote it on the back. All you have to do is turn the page.