The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  “What?”

  “That Marlon’s mother. Where they sell a stolen item by fencing, or is it on top of a fence? She was a fencer. She fenced.”

  Trisha turned her wrist inward and looked at her watch. “We should go home. I always give Mr. Hausmann his oats by eight.”

  “How would he know the time!”

  “It isn’t right his supper should wait because I wanted to watch a dumb boy play a game.”

  “But the sun is divine.”

  “So stay,” Trisha said.

  “No, I will go with you.”

  “Stay. You like to watch more than I do.”

  “Because you insist, I will go with you,” Miss Colt said.

  Trisha was a member of the parish, but Miss Colt was not anymore. She had joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses and always looked about warily on the el as if a priest might run her off. But it was a porous parish where people joined and left all the time as the borders of the surrounding neighborhoods shifted year to year. At present, white blocks extended to the east, black to the south and west, some Dominican and Mexican and some more mixed-up blocks to the north, with the parish and its basketball court in the middle like the paneled column of a merry-go-round.

  A young woman got out of an Impala that had stopped at the curb. One of Marlon’s gaggle of sisters, pointless to discern which one—Trisha’s jealousy extended even to them. They shared everything: clothes, apartment, the old Impala that Marlon washed and waxed weekly, and Marlon himself, who had been their common doll but now had found his God-given feet and wished to walk on his own, where and when he chose. Trisha understood; the sisters did not.

  A break in play.

  Miss Colt and Trisha climbed off the girders and went home.

  The Shirts passed among themselves a saltcellar, a knife, a brown paper lunch bag from which peaches were extracted. Somebody had connected several lengths of garden hose and found a working spigot in the settlement of brown brick apartment complexes that surrounded the court, the cinderblock walls of transmission shops, television repair, plumbing supply, rug cleaning, alleys no wider than a swinging door. The hose water came on. Each took his turn at the spout, swallowing heavily and aiming the current over his skull.

  After the game, the Impala and Marlon’s sister, wearing a sleeveless housedress, its pattern washed out, were still waiting at the curb as he departed the chain-link cage of the court. He approached her, shaking the sweat from the long hands, his long neck hanging down while she harangued him, smoking. They got in the car. The engine turned over and burbled and spat. It drove off through the twilight—

  Through the dense world. The auto exhaust and rust blowing off the el girders plastered with faded advertisements for milk on sale, enameled aluminum Bundt pans, ratchet sets. Puddles with mosquito larvae seahorsing in teeming hordes in the runoff from garbage piles. The euphoric dismay of car horns. A pretty woman in old clothes catching a breeze on the stoop, smoking and teasing out the knots from the hair of a five-year-old not exactly the same color as she was, both of them crinkle-eyed and sated from supper and bandy-legged on the steps, watching the street; one of the mothers who was still going to be sexy a few more years, one of the daughters with hair incomprehensible to the mother who’d borne her. Everywhere people coming out on the stoop while the breeze passed, the houses ovenlike inside. A girl wheeling a crippled and gasping old woman onto the stoop, then going in and coming out again with a wire-backed chair for herself and a bowl of ice chips and slipping them into the ancient invalid’s face, and the uncomprehending eyes alive for a second of pleasure, sucking ice, the cold itself a kind of sustenance. A boy who worked third shift, maintenance, maybe he was nineteen—a couple of years before, his ass would have been sunk in a rice paddy, born too late, lucky him—on the stoop now, the breeze all around, sitting with a pile of scrambled eggs and half-cooked onions in his lap, and coffee. His breakfast hour.

  People are standing on the stoops now. The boy stands up and keeps eating: even the steps are hot. The heat off the buildings just blazing. Better to stand up than sit on the sandstone so less of you is touching it. A lot of people outside standing up. You’d think there was a parade coming. You’d think something was about to happen. To be from here and not to have left when you had the chance, before you got entangled in human reproduction or some kind of decent work if you could find it is to say, I don’t need anything to happen. My brother, my mother, my car, my gang from school, their girlfriends, their boyfriends, their kids—what’s the matter with all that?

  Twilight.

  This time of year the light is a long time lingering. One particular affiliation of street rats, age twelve to fifteen, is dickering with somebody’s car on the street. Talk about hot—that’s your back on the Queens asphalt, August, under an engine that was running a few minutes ago. Their business is curbside oil change while you wait. They’ll even do the filter if you have a few minutes for one of them to sprint to the auto-parts store on Marion Boulevard. They have several boosted cases of Pennzoil 10W-40, and for draining, a discarded aluminum turkey roasting pan, and because people live here and watch, they will not dump your former oil down the storm drain, they will dump it a few blocks away in any unobserved patch of exposed earth—in the public cemetery (the one already full to capacity where the dead don’t mind) or in the needle park—or sometimes will dribble it in a barrel with gathered trash under the highway and set it on fire, watching the fire, and watching it, and watching in bottomless transfixion, with the ancient mind we carry around that knows the myths about fire to be true, a body could go into the fire and burn down and rise up again in a new shape, a truer shape; watching the flames, the flickering faces around the burning drum, the hundred thousand cars crawling the highway, until on the service road the signature orthogonal Crown Vic gaze of cop-car headlights approaches and they book the fuck out of there. This is cheaper fun than driving around, what with gas more expensive than champagne or cognac or some shit.

  It is possible to attract swirling bats by throwing a neon-bright tennis ball high into the air. And this is taking place up on the corner. A smart-dressed old colored lady hobbles by, and those wooing the bats pause while she passes and touch their baseball hats in deference to smart clothes on a weeknight, which may mean she’s headed to a wake, although in fact she’s only going to the Kingdom Hall for fellowship, and Kool-Aid, and pralines. And when she gets there, in the funky meeting room where the windows don’t open, and they sit around the table, heads bent to scripture, a brother reads through the whir of the dehumidifier that the Evil One controls the whole earth. But a sister testifies the son of God came to destroy the Devil’s work. And God has chosen Jesus Christ to rule the world. And they pass around the meeting table a crackling cellophane container, lined in dainty corrugated wax paper, of Lorna Doones and study how Satan’s rulership will end. The chains of their reading glasses droop, or they hold a magnifying glass to the page, pencils hovering, at a Formica-topped table where the Entenmann’s strudel box sits on a dish out of anyone’s convenient reach in the middle of the table like a baby about to be sacrificed to propitiate the false god Diabetes.

  What will the world be like after its evil ruler is removed?

  Whatever force that knows to light the streetlights has not yet turned them on. If you are watching the twilight and waiting for the streetlights because you are the mother, and the time of the coming on of the lights is the drop-dead latest time for your child to report back to the house, then it is possible something has gone perilously wrong with the administration of the city of New York insofar as surely the appointed hour has come, and still you are waiting in the darkening, while the careless receptacle of your life’s effort is hidden someplace among the alleys treating his life as though it has no value for anybody but him. A man is busting up an armchair in the alley, and with every blow of the hammer, cigarette ashes, cat hair, decades of human skin cells co
me flying about him in the light leaking from the window of the house adjacent. And newspapers somersault all down the street on account of a trash can dumped by nobody saw who. The houses having got still hotter and the people coming out in the dark, the stoops seeming darker when the cars sometimes pass with their headlights on, so why has the city not taken notice, the administration, the responsible parties? The whole street thick with life. How can you stand to stay inside? Here and there a transistor radio, not too loud, sort of a smooth pulsing, very discreet and continuous. People like to listen to music while the wind comes in. Merengue. Claude Debussy. Eartha Kitt. Or TV, keeping TV on in another room for the feeling of a window that looks through the wall on more deliberate lives, the way the people on TV pay more attention to what they’re doing than you have to pay attention to them and it makes you godlike in your lofty privilege, to listen to them frantically solve their crimes or to shut them off, and the way the familiar theme music lets you know where all this is happening and whether it’s sad or funny or innocent or retrospectful and heartsick about the old days when wood burned under the teapot and John-Boy hunted pheasant with the dog. Now the first of the mothers comes out to say to a football game in the street that when you can’t see the ball anymore, it’s time to come in. Then comes the countersuit: if they’re allowed to play a little longer, the boys and girls in the street, the streetlights will come on, and they’ll see the ball that way. This sort of temporizing will fail because it isn’t really to the dark itself that the mothers are referring. It is to the fact of the lights coming on. The way, in older places, church bells toll important hours. My children do not play in the street after the lights have come on; I was raised right. Somebody’s aerial has a motor attached at the base and can be seen to rotate like a Martian weapon of low-budget film slowly toward the TV signal of another city. A Phillies fan maybe, judging by the southwesterly inclination of the antenna. Not too much extra noise just now. The settling in of night like ecumenical holy time, like Thanksgiving dinner. Not a lot of background hustle. A woman carries a skillet of smoking grease onto the fire escape and leaves it on the grating. An armada of gulls high overhead going back toward the East River after a long day’s landside scavenge. These are commuter gulls that spend the nights on the water off Throggs Neck or farther out in the Sound.

  In the spillover light from a kitchen window, the veteran from Davenport in the Midwest, Tilly, bends and combs his keys. He plucks one and shakes out the jangling ring and inserts it in the door under the stoop, under the sandstone facade on which graffiti announce the affiliations of local youth.

  In the lock, he turns the key.

  There are girls up the street, Spanish girls who watch him from their stoops, watch him and others come and go, learn and trade the jobs and names and relations. A man who lives that way, alone that way, at least he ought to have a dog. None of them knows the first name. He has the initials D.E.T. stitched in red cursive on the tan shirts of the ice-cream warehouse where he works, and because of this job and his unyielding looks, some of the kids call him the Iceman. Most folks call him by the last name, the family name, a distinction reserved for those without family.

  He has opened the lock and gone in and closed the door behind him. He is on the inside for now.

  All the streetlights come on at once.

  7

  She called herself Sandy Colt, but the DPs all had changed their names. She wore squarish glasses with a bar across the bridge. Blocky shoes. She didn’t care about shoes. Trisha admired this indifference to fashion and would have liked to share it but could not yet; her soul was still coming into flower; she hoped soon to love only the best things: mercy, justice.

  From the middle of Miss Colt’s forearm to the adductor muscle that closed her large thumb over the palm there extended a scar (Trisha coveted it)—the result not of a failed suicide but of a successful escape nearly thwarted by concertina wire. Such escapes had made the woman both sympathetic to persons in flight, living out of doors, and able to see the profit that could be extracted from them. She seemed to forget nothing. The dates of battles and earthquakes; an appointment made six months earlier, in passing, on a bus. If you found a book of yours among the rest on her shelves, or amid the cliffs of printed matter that amounted to shelves along the flanks of her apartment, she made no pretense of having misunderstood you had wanted the book back. She was taking it. It was hers now. She had lived everywhere. She had survived.

  The country was still young enough to swallow whole lives, criminal or merely collapsed lives, and leave the changeful human animal, whatever money he might have, and his clothes. Such people as the men who used to pay fifty cents a night to sleep on her floor could live a long time undetected amid the polyglot streets here, in plain sight while underground, aging faster than their years. If the conditions in her would-be rooming house were known to have been squalid, her lodgers had fared no better once the Department of Health discovered her operation and made her evict them. Most now lived again on the street or under it.

  On one of these luckless souls, however, she had taken a grudging pity: Hausmann, who by the time the rest had decamped could no longer get to his feet, as she had once confided to Trisha. If the city inspectors should return—as they warned they might at any hour—and find a single other soul sleeping there, Miss Colt would be turned over to higher authorities. That Hausmann no longer had a cent to pay her mattered for nothing with these people. On the other hand, the fact that she could be persecuted for her righteousness in sheltering him made her the more likely, in her reading of scripture, to inherit the kingdom of heaven.

  Trisha sort of agreed—she felt a solidarity with anybody who risked herself for the sake of what was right—but nothing the old woman might have said could excuse her bewildering lack of domestic hygiene.

  “I disagree it smells bad,” Trisha said to Lizzy, her friend. “Old people can’t help the way their houses smell.”

  “Irrelevant whether she can help it,” Lizzy said. “I call a spade a spade.”

  “It smells like when we went to visit your cousin at New Paltz. Like the bathroom in the dorm. It doesn’t smell bad, it smells loud.”

  “I call a stink a stink.”

  “But she won’t let me clean anything. It isn’t fair to Mr. Hausmann, even if he’s a fugitive or whatever you think.”

  The two girls approached the caged blacktop where the boys were already shouting, moving around the court in the slithery way they did before the game began. The girls climbed the stairs of the el to see if Miss Colt was occupying the seat where she often took the afternoon sun, but the old woman was not there. She could only be off studying some doomsday brochure at the Kingdom Hall with the other heretics. And Marlon was not playing, so they continued to walk.

  Lizzy, adjusting the big flower she had been wearing ever since her father had taken her to Samoa on a business trip, said, “Once, Daddy and I were in a plane flying over the Rocky Mountains?”

  “Here we go,” Trisha said.

  “And it was night? Like totally black under the plane.”

  “Again with the mountains.”

  Lizzy blushed but continued. “And you could see the cities where the light was?”

  “How did you know you were over the mountains if it was so black?”

  “The pilot told us so on the intercom. And by the bathroom I saw the escape hatch? The big red handle it has? And I go to myself, Who’s to stop you from getting a parachute and dropping into the Rockies and starting all over on nuts and berries, and I don’t know, trapping and like that?”

  Trisha had wearied of this particular pipe dream. She raked her eyes jitteringly up the street. Marlon was nowhere to be seen. “So you think Mr. Hausmann jumped out of a plane?” Trisha asked.

  “After his own fashion, don’t you think?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Lizzy said, “Because either
he didn’t have anybody to stop him or he wasn’t afraid.”

  Lizzy had hardly any bust, and what she did have was not in balance yet, the one side with the other. Once, Trisha had admitted in confession that she enjoyed walking with Lizzy as much because she loved Lizzy as because Lizzy’s cockeyed bosom made her own look more attractive by comparison. Plus, boys must find Lizzy’s flower dumb. The priest had congratulated her and told her that to confess her sin against Lizzy this way was in fact to love Lizzy. The key was never to forget you were likely to let people down: one of the ways we loved people was by studying our wickedness toward them.

  On Miss Colt’s porch, Trisha retrieved a key from under the concrete gargoyle planter that overflowed with crabgrass and pizza parlor coupons and spent matches and a single bright dandelion that presided above on its stalk like the good deed in the naughty world. Lizzy plucked the weed-flower and ejected it into the yard. They went inside. For all Lizzy’s fun-making of Trisha’s stupid job, Lizzy seemed magnetized by Mr. Hausmann’s disgusting old body and on more than one afternoon had stood in the doorway of his secret compartment, dumbstruck while Trisha washed his hair or pared his nails. Mr. Hausmann only occasionally looked toward the doorway as if he recognized another person was there. Because Lizzy never spoke in his presence, she considered herself successfully hidden. She had cleverly refashioned the shyness that had overtaken her during the first months of high school into an alluring and sort of intimidating sexy stare, mute and unreadable, which she practiced around Mr. Hausmann and other men and boys, and which incensed Trisha because it made her have to do all the idiotic talking for the both of them, while Lizzy could stand there bewitching whoever he was with no work at all, as if her breasts matched.

  While Trisha was preparing the old man’s oatmeal in the room called the kitchen because the stove was in it, she spied, half buried in a bucket of clothespins, a box of Domino brown sugar, petrified for unknowable years. She scoured some on his oats. The two girls hovered over the old man to see if he would notice this adjustment in his regimen. His jaw slowly churned like a steer’s with his cud. The tongue clapped against the roof of the mouth. The eyes still closed, the orbs meandering beneath the lids. Lizzy adjusted the strap of her handbag on her shoulder, peering from behind Trisha’s head. The room smelled of Hausmann’s effluvia, of the oats, of dust, of Lizzy’s heady flower. Hausmann’s Adam’s apple rose. The oats could be heard squishily entering his gullet. The nostrils pulsated. Tears emerged from one closed eye. They streamed around the meager fat of the nostril.