Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

“Et cetera, et cetera,” he drawls, flicking away my hand. “Are you coming with me this summer or not? I’ve got to start inquiring about a place.”

  “I’ll see if I can figure out a way,” I say, startling myself.

  “I’m sure you can. You seem to have an infinite talent for duplicity.”

  “It’s not infinite, believe me.”

  “Sure it’s not. Call me Monday.” He closes the car door—that prudent half-slam—and sprints over the stone wall, across the thawing soccer fields.

  Driving home, approaching the common in the center of town, I see a play of spinning red lights in the trees. When I get to the intersection in front of the old Unitarian church, there’s a whole scene going on there—cop cars, ambulances, unintelligible voices over megaphones, a few old women who have come out onto their front porches, shivering in nightgowns and robes. A cop is standing in the middle of the street with a huge flashlight, and when I slow down, he comes hustling over to me, swinging the flashlight like a billy club.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, rolling down the window. It’s Officer DeMarco, the one who picked up Brooks way back in September.

  “Nuthin’,” he snaps at me, his mouth full of gum. “Little accident, that’s all.” Past him, past the roadblock, I make out medics loading a stretcher into the ambulance. There are other cops there, shouting at the medics, harsh.

  “A car accident?” I ask.

  “Nah, just a little accident. You gotta get on now. Can’t go through this way. Gotta go back the long way on Great Lake.”

  “Is that person all right?”

  “Yanh, he’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry about it. Get home now.” DeMarco hustles off, the blockhead, flailing his big phallic flashlight.

  When I get home, to my dismay, my parents are up in front of the TV in the den. “Where the hell were you tonight?” my mother barks before I’m even in the room.

  “Some of the other guys at this Yale thing asked me if I wanted to go into Boston with them when it ended,” I say. (I prepared that one the minute I sped away from St. Banner.)

  “You’re selfish,” she says, getting up and snapping off the TV “Selfish, running around and having your fun. I just hope you’re not thinking of breaking your promise to your little sister tomorrow. On top of everything else, it’ll break her heart.” Then she stalks out of the room and up to bed.

  “What was that all about?” I turn to my father.

  “She’s just upset,” he says. “Your grandma went into the hospital again today with another heart attack, and it doesn’t look good this time. She’s all hooked up and she’s not talkin’ right. I think your mother wanted you to be here to baby-sit Joani, but instead she had to take her along to the hospital.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “How were you supposed to know?” my father says, getting up unceremoniously and putting his TV glasses back in their case. “Just make your mother happy tomorrow and make a nice day for your sister, okay?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “How was your Yale thing?”

  “It was okay. I met some cool people.”

  “That’s good.” I think I catch a kind of frown from him, but maybe it’s just me seeing things. “I’m pooped. ’Night,” he says, and lumbers out of the room.

  I aim the remote at the TV, turn it on, stare at it for a minute—it’s a televangelist—turn it off, and just sit. I think about my grandmother, all hooked up, and Brenda, knocked up, and me—completely fucked up. Then I think about Room 362, and what went down on that island of a bed in that dark room, the lights of the highway vigilant pinpricks outside, and I feel like if I sit here and think about it any longer the living room is going to get so hot they’re going to think there’s a fire going on downstairs. So, forgoing my coat, I slip outside through the back door and run around the house into the evergreen bushes that stand tall up against the dark dining room windows, and, freezing, I crouch down there like a crazy man, and unzip my pants and do what it takes until I’m no longer on the brink of conflagration. Then I zip up and stand there and wonder what I could possibly do to steady myself before I go back in the house, and, knee-jerk, I start to say a prayer—the Hail Mary, which my grandmother taught me when I was young, which always used to be my favorite prayer. But halfway through, I say to myself exactly what he would say to me—“Oh, please”—and I stop dead—“blessed art thou amongst women”—and creep back inside, taking care not to slam the door.

  * * *

  The next morning, Joani and I are downing cereal together before we take off for the fabric store when Phoebe calls.

  “My mother wants to know if you can come to an emergency meeting tonight, to represent youth—along with me,” she says.

  “I thought that panel thing was two weeks from now.”

  “It is, but this is an emergency meeting.”

  “Why?”

  “You haven’t heard yet?”

  “Heard what?”

  “About last night?”

  “No!”

  “Oh, my God! Eric, last night, some kid—some teenager—some Hispanic guy from Leicester—was wandering around West Mendhem, around the common. I don’t know what the fuck he was doing, but the cops are saying of course he was here to steal cars or something—”

  “Oh, shit, I think I saw this,” I say.

  “Don’t say shit!” Joani screams with glee from the kitchen table.

  “And Eric, listen: some guys—some West Mendhem guys—beat the living shit out of him and left him on the common as good as dead. Can you believe this?”

  “Is he dead?”

  “He’s in the hospital, like, holding on by a thread. I just heard the latest update on the radio. They said, like, they jumped on his head with work boots. They totally smashed in his brain.”

  “Oh, shit. Do they know who did it?”

  “Don’t say shit!” Joani screams, louder.

  “No, they have no idea. Some old lady who lives on the common said all she saw through her window were these four white guys, like, pounding this thing on the ground and jumping all over him.”

  “I saw this last night, Feeb. I totally saw it. I was driving home by the common and I saw them putting this stretcher in an ambulance, and when I asked the cops what happened, they said there was just a little accident, and I should get the hell home.”

  “They’re totally complicit,” Phoebe sneers, then: “But that isn’t it, though. There’s, like, a riot going on in Leicester right now. All the people—the Hispanics, the Puerto Ricans, all the guys—they’re running around in the streets and overturning cars and setting fire to this whole neighborhood. You know, Essex Heights, where everybody makes packie runs, because they don’t card you? It’s totally going up in smoke. There are arson squads there and all these people are screaming that they’re sick of being persecuted in their own country, and that this kid—Jesús, I think his name is; how’s that for irony?—that he was a basketball star and a good kid and, like, a total hero—”

  “Why are they wrecking up their own neighborhood? Why haven’t they come into West Mendhem, if this is where it all happened?”

  “Eric!” Phoebe sounds appalled.

  “I mean, not that I want them to, but wouldn’t that be a more effective statement? Like a siege?”

  “I don’t know why they didn’t come here first, but there are Staties all over the place surrounding West Mendhem, and Mendhem, too, because those are the two places all the Leicester people said they were gonna hit next. You can’t even go in or out of West Mendhem without being stopped. And there are riot squads all over Leicester wearing these scary space-droid outfits. It’s on the news. Haven’t you turned on the TV this morning?”

  “No,” I say. I want to snap on the little TV on the kitchen table, but I’m afraid it’ll scare Joani, so I don’t. “I can’t believe this is happening. It’s so pointless.”

  “I told you this was coming,” Phoebe says sternly. “And y
ou know that reporter from the Leicester Tribune, the one that interviewed you for the essay contest?”

  “Patty Gerrucci?” I say, remembering the fake yuppie and how she annoyed the hell out of me with her second-rate Brenda Starr affectations.

  “Yeah, her. Well, this was just on the news. She drives with a photographer right into the riot neighborhood in Leicester to get the big scoop on the story—I’m sure she’s thinking Pulitzer, Pulitzer—and they see the car coming, and all these guys start screaming, ‘White bitch!’ and chasing after it, and Patty pulls into reverse and goes flying back down the street, driving for her life. Isn’t that a riot?” Phoebe’s laughing now.

  “Bad pun,” I say, but the image of Patty Gerrucci, dressed for success, fleeing the bloodthirsty masses does make me laugh. “So what’s gonna happen now?”

  “It’s insane. All these civil rights lawyers are on TV saying they’re gonna represent the family of this kid, this Jesús, and that this is going to be one of the biggest race cases of the past thirty years. Of course the state investigators are gonna launch a full search for the thugs—they’re gonna be all over the high school, talking to people—even though that fucking pig McElroy is saying he’s sure it couldn’t be any of the nice kids from WMHS, and they’re probably from Methuen or something. And of course, everyone they show on TV from West Mendhem is saying this is God’s justice for the whole Kerrie Lanouette thing, like it’s some kind of good karma. Can you believe this?”

  “We’re, like, the new Birmingham or something,” I say, trying to be detached about the whole thing.

  “Yeah,” Phoebe muses, even though I’m not sure she gets the reference. “Anyway, you’ve gotta come with me to this thing tonight. My mother’s talking to the Hispanic churches in Leicester, trying to get some community people to show up, even though their English isn’t very good and all she knows is a little French from when she was at Simmons College twenty-five years ago. But anyway, you’ve gotta come. We’ll sit together up on the panel.”

  “What am I supposed to say? I’m not a fucking riot expert.”

  Joani whips around to me from her cereal. “You’re in deep doo-doo.”

  “Talk like a grown-up,” I say to her absent-mindedly. She calmly opens her mouth and shows me her masticated Frankenberries before turning back to the bowl.

  “Everyone knows you as the voice of youth now!” Phoebe says. “Just say that everyone’s blowing this all out of proportion, and that we’ve gotta find a way to get along, and stop the violence. I’m probably gonna read a passage from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or something. And god-jangle might show up, too, and we might sing some Spanish-language folk songs, if they can find any.”

  “That is so tacky,” I say.

  “No, it’s not!” she says, miffed. “We’re trying to find some common ground, here, Eric.”

  “What time is this thing at?” I ask. “I’ve gotta take out Joani, all the way to this fabric store in New Hampshire.”

  “Seven o’clock at the Unitarian church. It’s an open meeting. They’re announcing it on the TV and the radio. Meet me down in the lounge at five to seven so I can practice my reading on you.”

  “I don’t have to read my stupid essay again, do I? I’m so sick of that thing.”

  “No, just speak from your heart.”

  When we get off the phone, I tell Joani to sit tight for a minute, then I go into the den and turn on the TV. Phoebe’s right; on all three channels, they’ve interrupted the usual programming to risk their lives and report from Leicester. For the first time, I get really scared. It’s true, the place is a mess; you can see fire and black smoke rising out of the windows and roofs of those old dilapidated triple-decker tenement houses where my parents used to live, and you can see the chassis of cars belly-up in the street, and garbage strewn all over the filthy snowbanks. Big packs of Hispanic guys with bandannas and high-tops, even a few girls, are running up and down the streets, coming right up to the cameras (which are hand-held and swooping all over the place) and swearing and throwing bottles and rocks and stuff, blasting big boom boxes, screaming in English things like “The whities, we’re gonna come burn down ya nice houses and rape ya fucking daughters”—the TV censors are bleeping like crazy—and screaming things in Spanish that I can’t understand. Then they cut to the correspondents, who all seem at a remove from the action, with smoke billowing in the distance, like they’re reporting from Beirut, and they’re all earnest and grave, saying how they don’t see any imminent letup, because when the riot squad scares the kids out of one neighborhood, they just take off for another and start rioting all over again. About every five seconds, they say they haven’t seen racial violence like this since the busing crisis, and they say that people in the Mendhems should stay indoors, behind locked doors, and stay tuned.

  Then they cut to the kid’s family. His full name is Jesús Antonio de la Costa, age seventeen, a senior and starting center for the basketball team at the derelict Leicester High School. He also loved Lionel Richie and home ec class, they tell us, and might have had an athletic scholarship to Villanova. And they’re all standing out on their broken-down front porch in the middle of the cold, about half a dozen weeping women backed by about fourteen screaming, weeping kids and two very old men. His mother, a tanklike woman in a housecleaning shift with a large, pliant face that looks oddly like my own grandmother’s, says in very broken English that he was a good boy, that ever since her husband died he was the man of the house and he looked after his grandma and his uncles and aunts, and his six younger siblings and his eight cousins, and he cooked them all rice and beans and fish and chicken because she was away at night cleaning offices. And that she had nothing against white people, we’re all God’s children, but it wasn’t right that four punks should beat him up just because he was out taking a walk under the stars. He liked to leave the house at night and walk, she said, and talk to God about his future, and what he should do, because the house was cramped and he said he needed the quiet and the cold to talk to God, even though he could never stand the cold in Massachusetts, where he had lived since they moved from Puerto Rico—no, not San Juan, the country—when he was eight. And that the doctors said it didn’t look good, he had suffered massive—oh, what’s the English? “Brain damage”? That’s it—his brain was squashed, and his soul was probably already going up, and up. And she held up a picture of him in a frame, and the camera pulled in close, and it was murky, but I could see that he was skinny, with a thin pencil mustache, wearing one of those horrible skinny leather ties, and he obviously hadn’t had braces—and his mother and all his aunts begin echoing each other in Spanish, and English: “Yes, that is correct. Up, and up. That’s why his name is Jesús”—and all of a sudden, I’m crying, and I feel like only half of it is for him.

  Joani comes in with a milk mustache and I snap off the TV, pretending I’ve got some lint in my eyes. I wipe the milk residue off her mouth with my sleeve, and say, “Get your coat.”

  Outside, it’s a warm, sunny day again, but I can see a kind of gray haze hanging over Leicester to the north. “What’s that?” Joani wants to know as we get into the hatchback and she starts fiddling with the radio dials to find hit radio, and I say, “It’s probably from the old factories.”

  Phoebe’s right again; when we get to the intersection, there’s a whole blockade of state police cars, and one of the cops is walking up to cars—traffic seems to be backed up for a mile—and interviewing the passengers at the window before he lets them pass.

  “What’s going on?” Joani asks.

  “Maybe there was an accident or something.”

  “I hope they let us through. We gotta get to the fabric store before it closes.”

  “Joani, it’s eleven o’clock in the morning! We have the whole day.”

  “Mark my words,” she says, imitating our mother.

  I roll down the window of the car when the cop approaches us. He asks us where we’re going, and I tell him we’re gettin
g on Route 28 to go to the fabric store so my sister can buy fabric to make a spring dress. He asks us where we’re from, and I say West Mendhem, and when I ask him why it matters, he just tells me not to make any trouble, and to get onto the highway immediately instead of taking the junction ramp a few miles into South Leicester.

  “You know what’s goin’ on, don’t you?” he asks me reprovingly.

  “Yeah,” I say quietly, not wanting to stir Joani, and he lets us pass. A few yards up ahead, I pass a tableau: a family, a Latin-looking family, on the side of the road: mother, father, three kids, all with sleds, probably heading to Haggard’s Hill in West Mendhem (it’s a national preservation zone, or whatever), and a cop has encouraged them out of their rusty gold-colored, seventies-looking Maverick and asked them to show identification. I peek around at the faces in the cars around me, chalky white faces, and everyone looks grim and taut with anxiety and disgust.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Joani asks, craning back to look at the family on the road.

  “I said, I guess there was some sort of accident.”

  In a moment, we’re on the highway, and I’m glad to be speeding away to New Hampshire, away from the smoke and the bottlenecked streets. In the fabric store, Joani is a whirligig, flipping through the little notebook she brought with her that contains dimensions and other stuff I don’t understand, virtually running from bolt to bolt, asking me what I think of this fabric and that fabric, and I keep saying, “That’s pretty,” without even hearing myself, because I’m trying to sort out all these other images in my head. It’s the image of Jesús Antonio de la Costa walking the streets of West Mendhem late at night, and of me hugging the curves of roads outcountry going to places I shouldn’t go, and him, of course him, doing just the same in his gleaming white shirts, and all three of us just walking casualties waiting to happen—

  “Joani, would you shut up for a second?”

  She looks up at me, stunned, as if I’d slapped her, and before I realize that I spoke out of nowhere, before I can say I’m sorry, I was distracted, I watch her face contort into that awful silent grimace—like toddlers right after they’ve fallen flat on their face, that horrible stunned sliver of silence—and then she wails like a siren and starts bawling at the top of her lungs.