What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Corky’s Aunt Frances did all she could not to get into disagreements with neighbors. The quarrelsome Culligans next door, the Paynes, who were actually blood kin of hers, across the street and two doors over—not disciplining their younger son, that little bastard. She’d tried to get along with everybody. Even after Tim’s death when Sean so quickly turned sour, mean. And started to drink heavily.

  Corky parks his car in front of the sand-colored weatherworn brick house at 1043 Roosevelt where he’d lived from the age of eleven to the age of eighteen. Is he late? He isn’t. Yet the house looks accusing. On this balmy May afternoon, everybody in the neighborhood out, it’s shut up tighter than a drum: front door shut, and no screen door at all; window blinds drawn; nobody waiting for Corky on the front porch, as he’d expected Sean would be, reading the newspaper, sucking ale.

  The next wrong thing, the sky’s more evident than Corky remembers. It looks as if the city has chainsawed down diseased trees by the curb, just ugly stumps left. Elms? Oaks? Corky can see them in his mind’s eye, too fucking bad, Aunt Frances would be heartbroken loved those trees, and the ones in the back yard. Now everything’s too exposed, the house looks smaller, seedier, even the fresh caulking around the porch foundation looks cheesy. Like there’s a rent in the sky, raw light pouring through.

  Corky trots up to the front stoop to ring the doorbell, cheerful, whistling, anybody sees him arriving to visit his Uncle Sean he’s in a good mood for sure. Jerome Andrew Corcoran the City Councilman, used to live in this house. Note his spiffy clothes, his car.

  Except, does anybody who might be watching recognize Corky? The Culligans are long gone, ditto the Paynes. Next door at 1041 Roosevelt where a family named Hennessey lived while Corky was growing up, and two elderly Hennessey sisters lived alone together for years, there’s a stranger, a dumpy woman in a housedress and bedroom slippers, fussing over a squalling child on her front porch. An Appalachian look to the woman, Corky figures she’s from south Irish Hill below Dalkey where the poor whites, the ones everybody called white trash, lived. Must be the old-lady Hennesseys died, the property was sold and Sean never mentioned it to Corky.

  This woman is staring at Corky, almost slack-jawed. The Caddy must look good to her, considering the piece of shit parked in her driveway.

  “Uncle Sean?—hey, it’s me, Corky.” Like who the fuck else would it be?

  Corky uses the knocker on the door, three sharp raps, the old man’s half-deaf but won’t wear a hearing aid, refuses. And maybe the doorbell’s broken. “Uncle Sean?—hey.”

  It burns Corky’s ass, the old man keeping him waiting on purpose, for sure that’s what he’s doing. Mean old son of a bitch.

  Corky sees, close up, the brick looks grimy. You’d have to have it sandblasted to clean it, not worth the cost. And the stumpy front porch, dirty, in fact filthy, last year’s rotted leaves never swept away. Aunt Frances used to keep the porch tidy like any room of the house, wicker chairs and waterproof cushions, potted geraniums on the railings, all the women, the housewives, on Roosevelt took such care. The past few years, Sean hasn’t even bothered to put an aluminum lawn chair on the porch to sit on. Hardly uses the porch at all.

  Corky tries the doorknob but of course it’s locked. Goes to peer through the front windows but the blinds are drawn to the sills. He raps loudly on the glass. “Hey, you in there? Uncle Sean?”

  No answer. Corky tries the door knocker again. Fuck it, he’s getting scared. Just talked to Sean about a half hour ago but maybe something’s happened since?

  Old people living alone in Irish Hill are special targets for break-ins. Kids as young as twelve are crack addicts, need cash. Corky knows from his cousin Lois that the house has been broken into at least twice, there’ve been muggings, murders in the neighborhood, but Sean refuses to discuss it. Refuses to think of moving. Move where? he’d asked Corky last time they were together, baring his yellowed teeth in a sardonic smile. Up to Maiden Vale, with you?

  Corky must have looked so scared at the prospect, Sean burst into laughter.

  Corky descends the steps, sees the steps too have been newly repaired, freshly caulked, that’s a good sign. Though the asphalt driveway and the sidewalks are riddled with cracks, the scrubby front lawn is mottled crabgrass and dandelions. And dandelions in sunny profusion growing in the median between this property and the property next door.

  Corky calls over to the woman, who’s been staring at him all this while, “You seen my uncle Sean Corcoran anywhere around today? I’m supposed to meet him.”

  Both the woman and the kid stare at Corky like they’ve never seen anything like him. They’re pasty-faced, doughy-pale, bleached-looking blond hair and close-set ferret eyes. Every door and window in their house is wide open and there’s what looks like a yellow chenille bedspread hanging like a curtain through one of the porch windows, blowing in the wind. Corky sees the kid is actually two kids, the smaller no older than two, little boy bare-assed naked. The woman calls over what sounds like, “Ain’t seen him, no sir,” shaking her head vehemently and turning away.

  Hillbillies, for sure. Probably on welfare. Wonder what they paid for the house, or maybe do they rent. Yes, probably, they rent, big family with lots of kids, they’ll let the property go all to hell then blacks will buy it. Or, nobody will buy it, it’ll stand empty, be used by gangs as a crack house.

  Corky strolls up the driveway peering at the windows, can’t see a God-damned thing through the blinds, or whatever it is over the windows—along the side here it looks like sheets of plywood. The basement windows are thick with grime and there appear to be bars, boards nailed horizontally, across them. Can’t blame the old guy, protecting himself against break-ins, or trying to. Wonder does he have a burglar alarm yet, Corky tried to talk him into it, offered to pay for it but Sean refused, God knows why. At the back Corky sees the rear yard is scrubby and bright with dandelions like the front. Aunt Frances’ hollyhocks are still growing tall beside the garage, must be a kind of weed, like sunflowers. The little vegetable garden, Aunt Frances’ victory garden she called it, back by the fence—vanished as if it’d never been.

  She’d grown tomatoes, green beans, carrots, onions, that short bright yellow-orange crinkly flower, sharp-smelling, petunias?—marigolds? Encouraged Corky to plant seeds a few times too but nothing much came up for him but weeds. Once, clumsy asshole, he’d helped his aunt set tiny plants in the soil then turned around and stepped on some of them squashing them flat.

  Corky sees the old rotting wood fence has been replaced by a ten-foot chain-link fence with razor wire on top.

  That must’ve cost Sean. And you got to wonder, would it really keep those black kids out if they’re determined to break in.

  Corky ascends the steps of the small back porch, a wood porch, and pretty shaky; knocks at the door, rattles the knob. “Uncle Sean? Fuck it, open up! You know who this is.”

  Just Corky’s luck: now the danger from Thalia’s past, and he might have had a great time at the fund-raiser tonight, something’s happened to his uncle.

  Recalling that crude joke one of his drinking buddies once told Corky on their way into the Seneca House, pointing to some dog shit on the sidewalk asking did Corky know what that was? and when Corky said no he did not—“The luck of the Irish.”

  Truer words never spoken.

  Corky doesn’t know whether to be scared or angry. Should he hang around awhile, or try to call Sean; or call the cops. Or try to break in.

  About five minutes have passed since he first knocked on the front door. It’s just possible Sean has been in the bathroom, and hasn’t heard; he is deaf in one ear. Or he’s pissed off at Corky and pretending not to hear. Won’t be holding my breath.

  Corky returns to his car, calls his uncle’s number on the phone and this time there’s no answer. Which he’d expected.

  Now, next door, there’s a bare-chested skinny kid in his twenties with long straggly hair, biker’s leather pants, a can of beer in his hand,
plus the woman and two kids, staring over at Corky.

  Corky trots around to the rear of the house. The door’s shut tight and probably chain-locked. But there’s a window opening into a hall, and that hall into the kitchen; the window’s covered with a sheet of plywood so Corky can’t see in, but he remembers this rear hall has become filled with junk since Aunt Frances died, including stacks of newspapers. If he’s going to break in this is the most practical place! Nobody’s watching, so far as he can tell: the back yards of both neighboring houses are empty.

  The second time Corky Corcoran’s breaking in a relative’s place in a few days. What are the odds against such a thing, considering how, in all of his life up until now, he’s never been so desperate as to do such a thing before?

  So Corky tries the window. Pushing, grunting. It’s locked of course but the kind of lock not hard to break. If he was just strong enough, hasn’t been lifting his weights very regularly lately, muscles go quickly to fat if you stop. Arm, shoulder muscles. For a smallish man it’s crucial to keep fit: any chance, remove coat, a snug-fitting shirt, muscles defined. Women’s eyes shift, virtually light up—he’d swear he’s seen.

  Even classy Christina, that first time she saw him without his coat, stroking his arms. Her eyes warm and assessing she’s got just a little more than, back in the Maiden Vale Library, she’d imagined she was getting. And Corky didn’t disappoint.

  Corky’s panting and losing patience about to break the God-damned window when the plywood sheet is dislodged and falls and he freezes staring at what’s inside no more than eighteen inches away on the other side of the dusty pane—“Sweet fucking Christ!”

  Unable to believe at first he’s seeing what he’s seeing.

  Three years ago Christmas, the time before last Corky visited his Uncle Sean, he’d drifted bored around the house looking for things that needed fixing; something useful beyond just helping the old guy guzzle the bottle of Johnnie Walker he’d brought, uncle and nephew sitting in front of the TV with nothing much to say to each other. There was plenty in the house that needed cleaning, straightening up, but that was women’s work not Corky’s. He’d screwed some kitchen shelves tighter, shored up a tilting water heater in the basement, strengthened some steps. A born carpenter and handyman like Tim Corcoran, happiest at such times. Whistle while you work. Then climbing excited to the attic to stare from the window, that view down Dalkey hill to the lake that’s imprinted so vivid in his memory he can see it sometimes not exactly meaning to, see it like it’s before him so he stood there for possibly ten minutes just looking, thinking of nothing but just looking, and then as thirty years before the lights on Dalkey were bright dipping steeply downhill and traffic on the Fillmore Expressway and beyond that Lake Erie vaporous and indistinct so you needed to know it was a lake, it was there. Always, it would be there.

  Then it came to Corky slowly, reluctantly he was hearing some scurrying sounds behind him in the dense clutter of the attic, smelling that unmistakable gamey-dirty smell of rodents. So rummaging about back beneath the eaves he discovered of all things to blow the mind, in this house his Aunt Frances once kept so scrupulously clean, a rat’s nest.

  “Sweet fucking Christ—!”

  As an owner of urban properties some of which might be designated substandard, Corky’d seen rats’ nests in the past but always at a reasonable distance, and always when there were workmen in his hire to clean them out. Never had Corky actually examined a rat’s nest up close squatting over the thing, appalled but admiring, and the more he looked the more admiring, for what an amazing thing this was: basketball-sized, finely and you could say lovingly woven, all these weird things together not just twine, string, rags, scraps of newspaper which you’d expect but here were feathers and glittering wire and Christmas tinsel and a half dozen buttons and bits of colored glass and plastic and part of a child’s rubber Donald Duck and a badly tarnished silver medal on a delicate chain and a pair of broken wire eyeglasses and, most amazing of all, the metallic-phosphorescent face of the Big Ben alarm clock he and Pete had had in their room.

  Corky was so absorbed in the nest, dragging it into the light to see it, he didn’t think how lucky he was the baby rats were gone from the nest for the mother rat would have attacked him for sure. Going for his bare hands and face.

  Never feel quite the same way about a rat again, once you see a nest like this. Poor buggers, Corky felt like a shit cleaning them out. But after all a rat’s a rat. It’s them or us.

  When Corky carried the nest downstairs to show to his uncle who was dozing in front of the TV, Sean sat up alert opening his eyes wide for the first time in Corky’s recent memory. And his eyes then filling with tears, and his hand finely trembling tugging the tarnished medal on its chain out of the dense-woven nest—a religious medal, the Holy Virgin Mary, once belonging to Frances Corcoran, long vanished.

  It’s with the same awe Corky examined the rat’s nest in the attic he’s staring at the double-barreled shotgun aimed at his head. The thing is on a stepladder, secured with twine, and twine looped around both triggers a hairsbreadth from being pulled if a heavy iron frying pan falls from the window ledge where it doesn’t seem to be balanced very securely. Corky was within seconds of getting his head blown off.

  Just then rushing cursing to the door his trousers but partway zipped there’s Sean Corcoran who unlatches the door, fumbles with the lock, and a chain too, then opens the door in a fury and glares at his nephew who’s gone dead-white in the face shaking so badly, his knees turned to water, he can’t immediately react. The old man is taller and thicker in the torso than Corky remembers, he’s flush-faced angry and his stubbly chin glinting harshly like steel filings embedded in the flesh—“You! What the hell are you doing jimmying this window? Are you crazy? Is this some kid’s game? God damn!” Sean Corcoran’s so disgusted, the color up in his face, red-lidded eyes like pulpy grapes gleaming with purpose, it’s like he’s actually enjoying this.

  It comes back to Corky in a rush: Sean Corcoran looming over him giving him hell deserved or undeserved, the spit-edged words, the rising voice, the more emotional the more Irish-inflected.

  But Corky recovers, pissed as hell, too. Pushing past his jabbering uncle going to examine the shotgun—shotgun!—double-barreled twelve-gauge W. & C. Scott shotgun!—fixed by twine to the stepladder, and attached to the handle of the frying pan on the windowsill. It’s a Rube Goldberg contraption, Corky’s never seen anything like it. “What the fuck’s this gun here? Where’d you get a shotgun? Is this real? Real shells? Rigged to go off? Blow somebody’s head off?”

  Sean’s nudging Corky back from the stepladder like he could protect the gun, or prevent Corky from actually seeing it. He says, furious, “I’m asking you, you little pisspot: what the hell’re you doing breaking in this house?”

  “Look, I knocked! God damn it I knocked on every fucking door and window in this fucking house! And you didn’t answer! I was worried about you!”

  “God-damn fool doesn’t know his asshole from a hole in the ground! God damn!”

  “You knew I was coming for Christ’s sake—I just talked to you on the phone. Where the fuck were you?”

  “Get away from that gun! Get the hell out of here! I don’t need you poking your nose around here! I don’t need your pisspot charity!”

  “—I knocked! I telephoned from the car! I asked your hillbilly neighbors where the fuck you were! I was worried about you!”

  “You think I need you, any of you?—I don’t! This is my house, and this is my property, and anybody I don’t care the color of the bugger’s skin tries to break in here one more time I know how to protect myself.”

  “Uncle Sean, are you crazy? This is a deadly weapon! This is a murder weapon! Guys who’ve done things like this, killing some twelve-year-old black kid—they’re arrested for murder. It’s premeditated murder. You go on trial. You go to jail.”

  Sean laughs contemptuously, pulling at Corky’s arm as Corky shakes him off, “N
ot in this town you don’t. Not on this street, not in Irish Hill, you don’t, not for killing a nigger you don’t, oh no”—shaking his head so his neck-wattles shiver, “—oh no, my lad, you don’t.”

  “Uncle Sean, it’s fucking 1992 not 1942! You kill anybody black with a booby trap like this, you’re dead meat! It’s the law—you can only shoot in self-defense! This contraption—”

  “This is self-defense! Go on get the hell out of here, nobody’s asked your opinion, what’re you, you little pisspot”—this word hissing from Sean Corcoran’s spittled lips pisspot little pisspot how many times as a kid he’d been called this name, and not always in anger but sometimes with gruff-grudging manly affection, “—you’re a hot-shit lawyer or something? Eh? Go on!”

  “I’m telling you what’s so—it is the law. You can’t just blow somebody’s head off for breaking in a house. And why the fuck didn’t you answer the door? You knew I was coming for Christ’s sake why didn’t you answer the door?”

  “Because I was in the toilet! A man’s got a right to take a shit when he needs to in his own house don’t he!—without some Goddamned fool jimmying his window! Eh? Go on!”

  “I’m not going anywhere until I dismantle this crazy thing—”

  “I said, God damn your soul to hell, get away—”

  It happens like this: Corky pushes the old man, and the old man pushes back with a demented child’s flailing fury, uncle and nephew panting hot-breathed in each other’s contorted Corcoran face, Sean muttering now in a hurt aggrieved voice, “I said get out! Out! You think I need you? any of you?—oh no my lad, I don’t! Hot-shit ‘Jerome Andrew Corcoran’—showing up in this house once a year! Two years! Well, nobody wants your pisspot charity so get the hell out! I said—out!” snatching at Corky’s hands as, with more force, elbowing the hefty old bastard aside, Corky lunges for the shotgun but in so doing sets the stepladder wobbling, teetering and it begins to overturn taking up as in slow motion the slack of the twine so the heavy frying pan is tugged, then crashes from the sill to the floor and in the same instant quick as ten million trillion neutrinos speeding through the Earth’s body the shotgun explodes, both barrels blast, a deafening noise and the very air shaken as the dusty windowpane shatters into myriad glass-fragments flying outward along with much of the window frame.