Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

  When I turned the corner I caught sight of old Auggie Tabor beneath a wood-carved sign that read, “Bagelria.” Auggie licked his finger, dipped it in a balsa-wood barrel, brought it up sprinkled with tiny black seeds. I gave him time to suck himself clean before I called his name.

  “Hey, Fella,” he said. “How goes it? You’re not going to tell them about the poppy seeds, are you? I love these Jew doughnuts they got here but I’m keeping off the carbs.”

  “I’ve got your back.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “Talked to your daughter lately?”

  “Sure did. She had her cantaloupes taken out. They were leaking.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “No, it’s all fine. Listen, you know anything about computers?”

  “Little bit. Not much.”

  “Something’s wrong with mine. Won’t wake up. How’d you like to make twenty bucks?”

  AUGGIE DROVE US to his big rotted house on Drury Court. We crossed his dead lawn to the door.

  “Just a sec,” he said. A chipmunk carcass lay on the porch near the welcome mat. Auggie tugged a house key from its desiccated mouth.

  “Pretty damn clever, right?” he said. “Who needs those foam rocks?”

  The foyer was dark and stank of egg salad. Down a high narrow hallway a dog gate opened to a sunlit kitchen, a swirl of earth tones, old chrome. The only new appliance was the most impressive, a state-of-the-art Italian stove with a row of complicated-looking knobs for grilling and broiling and maybe transporting pork roasts to other star systems. A book lay sideways on a small shelf above it: The Lonely Gourmet: Fine Dining for Shut-Ins. A picture of his daughter Judy stood beside the book. She looked just as I remembered her, pale, scrawny, the eyes of a mystic, meaning’s penetrant. Another, smaller photo was slipped into the frame, a bikini babe with sun-streaked hair, high tan breasts like lacquered stones. She held the waist of a staid-looking man in terry cloth as they strolled along a shoreline.

  “It’s like I have two Judys,” said Auggie. “But both of them are still Judy. Neither visits.”

  “She was a good teacher,” I said.

  “Her mother was very proud of her. Come here, take a look at my machine.”

  Auggie’s computer sat on a butcher block near the kitchen window. I tapped the space bar and the monitor lit up.

  “Thanks a mil,” he said.

  “You didn’t need me for that,” I said.

  “No, you’ve been a big help. How about some osso buco? Shouldn’t take more than a few hours. We can talk. I can tell you about Normandy.”

  “That’s nice of you, Auggie. But I’ve got to get going.”

  “No, please, let me repay you.”

  “It’s okay, I’ve got to run.”

  “But I’ve got stuff to talk about!” said Auggie.

  He seemed pretty shaky, alums, this shut-away man with stuff to talk about. Maybe I saw myself in sixty years, and no memories of a catastrophic beach landing to keep me company.

  “Don’t you have a newsletter you can write to?” I said.

  “A newsletter?”

  “That’s how I do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Deal with it. The silence. The terrible silence under all the jabbering of the world.”

  “The terrible silence,” said Auggie. “That’s it. I hate the terrible silence.”

  “Write an update. Tell them what’s going on.”

  “Tell who? AARP?”

  “Do they have a newsletter?”

  “People bitching about prescription drugs.”

  “You have to be crafty.”

  “You mean slip the other stuff in there all sneaky?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “My newsletter won’t publish me. I write for the dead.”

  “The dead?”

  “Well, not the dead. The unborn, or the just born, or something. Anyway, you should give it a shot.”

  “Maybe I will. Maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do. You sure you don’t want to stick around for dinner?”

  “Better not.”

  “Good enough. I’ve got some writing to do. Take care. Sorry I dragged you out here, but I’m glad I did.”

  “Me, too, Auggie,” I said.

  IT WAS KIND of exhilarating to meet a kindred spirit, Catamounts. God knows how many latent Teabags are out in the world, their inner updaters untapped. It’s tragic, when you think about it. Here’s a man who keeps his house key in a dead rodent but never worked up the courage to share this safety tip with his fellow retirees. I pray he’s found it now. Maybe I’ve found my calling, too.

  Updater facilitator.

  Out on Drury Court I followed the curve of the sidewalk, looked for Mavis to mark my way home. Some of these houses seemed familiar in the high heat. Maybe I’d haunted a few of them in this kind of shimmer when I was an itty-bitty toddler, pre-Tea, still uncategorized, uncasted. Get this, Catamounts: I have a snapshot of yours truly nude in a wading pool with Stacy Ryson. We’re nearly two and I’m pointing at her pooty. It’s like Hitler and Stalin back when they signed that pact. This picture was taken during a period of tense negotiation, too. Our parents were deciding whether to be friends. I guess the Miner clan couldn’t cut it.

  Now I passed a man on his lawn in a lawn chair. He drank beer from a foam beer holder. A child tottered in the grass near his feet.

  “Miner!” came a voice, and I turned back.

  The man was gone, the child chewing foam.

  “Miner!”

  The voice was coming from the house next door, a place I knew, its peeled shingles and chipped siding. The window where I’d watched Fontana in his harness was boarded up. Most of the others, too.

  “Miner, get over here!”

  The voice was coming from the rose bed, the transom behind it.

  “Come around, I’ll let you in.”

  I jumped the wooden gate, jogged around to the backyard, a thin patch of crabgrass bound by high pickets. A cellar door lurched open, knocked over grease-caked grill. Fontana’s head popped out of the dirt, shaggy, almost puppety, something you’d maybe pound with a mallet at a street fair.

  “Leave that shit,” he said.

  I let the grill lid fall to the grass.

  “Come down to the storm cellar.”

  It was really just a basement den. Damp carpet. Bumper pool. The sink in the kitchenette brimmed with dishes. Paperback books littered the floor, old pocket-sized editions, novels, social criticism from the early sixties. A hardback copy of Vegas, Baby propped the leg of a card table where the room dipped a bit. Fontana had ducttaped his Bat Masterson postcard to the wall. A rhinestone-studded bridle dangled from a hook beside it.

  Fontana wore a patchy beard, food stains on his polo shirt.

  “Beer?” he said, fetched us some Mexican lager from the refrigerator.

  “Hot as hell out there,” I said.

  “Dog days. We’ve got to savor them. Those last few weeks before school starts up again. Never gave a shit about the heat. I used to sit inside and read. Watch the tube. Listen to my records. It’s why I became a teacher. Summer break. Not that I’m lazy, though God knows I am. It’s the cycle. That sense of renewal. When you’re a kid you go through all those changes. Grown-ups don’t get that feeling.”

  Somehow while he’d spoken Fontana had finished his beer. He went back to the kitchen for another, a bag of pretzels, gestured for me to join him on the sofa. A pellet rifle stuck up from the cushions and he took a half-lotus position around it, gripped the barrel, his belly a giant white slug falling over his chinos. I sucked in my own slightly smaller slug.

  “I’m losing it, Miner,” he said.

  “Hollis?”

  “He’s been coming around. Parks across the street for hours at a time. Gets in the house somehow. He signed for a package. Opened it, too. A crewneck sweater I’d ordered. Left a note. ‘Loretta’s favorite color—corpse ecru.�
�� Is that supposed to be witty? I think what I’ll do is not go upstairs for a while. If he breaks in again I can lock myself down here.”

  “It’s no way to live,” I said.

  “Of course it is. It’s one of them. But I’m worried about Loretta.”

  “Is he stalking her?”

  “That term’s a bit simplistic, Miner. She says she hasn’t seen him. I don’t know what the story is. Probably there are threats, concessions. Periods of uneasy truce, ferocious coupling. I believe your generation calls them hate fucks.”

  “How are you figuring the generations?”

  “This is all conjecture, though. Loretta still comes here sometimes, but she won’t talk about Hollis. Bunker life is wreaking havoc on us. The last time we just touched, caressed. Really pretentious, like in those so-called erotic movies. No roping, no branding, nothing. A real bringdown.”

  “I don’t need the details,” I said. “Can’t you go to the police?”

  “Wish I could, but I’m a libertarian. Anyway, nobody’s really done anything yet. I can’t prove he broke in here. I guess I could get a handwriting specialist, but shit, I don’t know. Have you seen him around town?”

  “A while ago. He was talking about killing you.”

  “Thanks for warning me.”

  “I’ve been pretty busy.”

  “Do me a favor, go to Loretta’s. Tell her I need to see her.”

  “Why don’t you call her yourself?”

  “She won’t pick up her phone. She knows it’s me and she won’t pick it up.”

  “I’m familiar with the phenomenon.”

  “I don’t have a lot a blissful moments left in my blissful moments bank,” said Fontana. “I need Loretta. And I’ll deal with Hollis at some point. I’m not going to become a hermit down here. I’m not hiding. I’m just gathering my strength. Go to her, Miner.”

  “I will.”

  “And here.”

  Fontana slid his hand in the sofa, came up with a worn brass rod.

  “It’s her favorite bit,” he said. “She’ll know I sent you.”

  Now he snatched up the pellet rifle, swung the barrel around the room. He stopped at a long mirror leaning in the corner, drew a bead on his reflection.

  “You know then that it is not the reason that makes us happy or unhappy.”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  Fontana fired. The pellet hit with a click. The mirror splintered, held.

  THE BIT was a bulge in my pocket. I fondled the metal, pressed Loretta’s bell. Fontana had told me the way, another hump through the valley, my shirt sopped with sweat. I sniffed myself, smelled rotten batteries, garlic, veal. I’d done some free shots of sausage vodka courtesy of Victor, but that had been days ago. The evil, I guess it takes its sweet time leaving. I stood woozy now at the loveliest Jazz Lovely’s door, felt a sudden stab of guilt for that evening outside Fontana’s window. Doubtless she knew I’d seen her, tilling the carpet, flogging the mule, but then again I was the sweet and dumb one, wasn’t that what Hollis had said? Maybe my witness didn’t count. Maybe that stab wasn’t guilt, either. Maybe it was just my liver giving out.

  A boy in a baseball jersey came to the door, whitish hair, pale narrow jaw. Something in his features fetched up Will Paulsen for me. Years before Philly Douglas ever thought to hang brains in my face, Will lived on our block with his mother in a rented house. It had only been one summer, we’d hardly spoken, but I’d wave whenever he rode past, Will a wizard on his undersized ride. I’d watch him do his tailwhips, his barspins. Maybe he’d remembered this, my neighborly admiration, the day of his locker-room rescue, though Will had always been a friend to prey. When older kids tore down our street for some recreational torment he’d ride up, scatter them, ride off. He’d do it mostly with the scary twitch of his forearms, living freckled hammers. Nobody knew where he rode off to afterward. Probably into the fields behind the power plant. There were high weeds there for a hero to hide in, bury trinkets, make plans.

  “Yeah?” said the boy at the door.

  “Is your mother around?”

  “She’s taking a nap.”

  “Can you tell her there’s someone here named Teabag, or, actually, someone named Lewis Miner, with an urgent message for her from a close friend regarding recent and foreseeable events?”

  “I have deficit, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Can’t concentrate.”

  “Just tell her Teabag is here.”

  “Be right back.”

  I took a seat on the stoop, waited, watched a pair of squirrels square off in the yard around an acorn. They looked equally starved, but neither seemed willing to seize the nut. It was hard to get a handle on their motives. They were squirrels. Once my father found one loose in our basement. It did a panicky skitter under some metal shelves. Daddy Miner ordered me to stay back, stalked the animal with a billy bat.

  “It’s probably insane from rabies,” he said. “That’s why it came in here.”

  I wondered then if you had to be insane from rabies to want to enter our house.

  The boy returned to the door now, leaned out as though to check the position of the sun. His eyes, light-caught, were Will Paulsen’s eyes.

  “She said come in.”

  The boy led me to the living room, found his most recent mold in the carpet, lowered himself into it. He worked a tremendous corn chip into his mouth, unpaused his video game.

  “First-person shooter?” I said.

  “What?”

  “The game you’re playing.”

  “Yeah, shooter.”

  “Looks fun.”

  “It’s called Glory Hole. It’s about a guy who has to cap people with all these weapons. To save the free world. But the free world hates him because of something he didn’t do. But he doesn’t care, he’s still going to save it.”

  “Have you ever felt like capping people?”

  “We already talked about this at school. No, Mister, I don’t feel like capping people because I know the difference between fantasy and reality. This game is fantasy. Reality is I don’t want to talk to you because I’m playing this game.”

  “Copy that,” I said.

  “Teabag. Oh my god, look at you.”

  There she stood at the edge of the room, Loretta, principal lovely of the Holy Jazz Club Trinity. This may come as a shock, Catamounts, but she looked kind of drab here in her home, her home sweats, just another mommy with a ponytail, nothing like the Jazz Loretta of old, or even the one in Fontana’s window. What I mean is, with her pouched eyes, her flaky skin, she nearly looked like the rest of us. A trick of the lack of light, I guess.

  “Come into the dining room.”

  She’d put out some cookies, dry vermouth.

  “Sorry, it’s all I have.”

  “This is great.”

  “You’re sweet,” said Loretta.

  “What about dumb?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nice kid out there.”

  “My pride and joy. He’s been having some adjustment problems. I’m sorry if he was rude.”

  “Adjusting to what?”

  “Himself, I guess.”

  “It’s funny, he looks a lot like Will Paulsen. Do you remember Will?”

  Loretta looked startled, turned away.

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember him.”

  It took me a moment to suss it out, Catamounts. I’d just figured the kid resembled Will Paulsen because, well, there’s a finite gene pool here on Planet Earth and some kids do. Loretta wasn’t helping, either. She wore this faraway look as though she were conducting some kind of inner fire drill, evacuating the premises of herself in a quiet and orderly fashion.

  “Does Hollis know?” I whispered.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Does the boy know?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “I was never really close to Will,” I said.

  “Me, neither,” said Loretta
. “Except for a few weeks. We met at a wedding. Or met again. I’d always had a crush on him, since high school. But he was so off on his own, you know? I think I really loved him, though.”

  While she spoke her beauty seemed to rush forth to the surface of her suddenly, frazzled, flush, a late party guest.

  Gravy boat! Stay in the now!

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Yes, yeah. Anyway, it was terrible what happened to Will. That hit-and-run. Will was out walking, right? I guess the guy never saw him. But you don’t just drive off.”

  “If it happened that way,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It means what it means. Hollis was out driving that night. Came home with a crushed fender. Said it happened when he’d parked to get smokes. I didn’t know cars bled so much.”

  “You could have tipped off the police.”

  “The boy needed a male role model.”

  “Hollis?”

  “He was around. He knew about football. Clock management. The nickel package. The red zone. I try, but what the fuck do these things mean? Anyway, I was a kid myself. I was into Hollis for a lot of money. Pretty strung out too.”

  “There must have been an easier way.”

  “This was the easier way.”

  Things were getting a little odd, Catamounts, and I wondered whether I’d ever summon nerve enough to include Loretta’s story in my update. I’d never considered censoring myself before, but this was heavy-duty revelation. Modes of chicken-choking are one thing, Valley Cats, murder, deceit, mistaken patrimony, these belong to a darker realm. Or do they? (Note to Stacy: Perhaps this question could serve as an excellent icebreaker on the new Catamount Discussion Board!) Anyway, I worried I wasn’t up to the task, but as you can see, I conquered my fear. An update is an update. The things that happen, even if they didn’t happen, are the things that may or may not have happened.

  Does that make any sense?

  This will: When I took Fontana’s brass bit from my pocket, slid it across the table, Loretta laid her pale hand on it, her eyes gone moist, dreamy.