by Tadzio Koelb
On Sunday afternoons before the boy had been born Kunstler and his girl would sometimes put on nice clothes to walk arm in arm through Trenton, a man and a woman strolling with the others in the sunshine and stopping sometimes to sit on a bench, where she would rest her head on his shoulder and he would read the paper. No one passing could have found fault in Kunstler and his girl. He had never been unfaithful to her.
When the boxes were done he climbed back into the cab and took a drink from the plastic bottle. Right away he felt better: less hot, less confused. A solution was possible, even if it wasn’t clear yet exactly how to achieve it. Jimmy was waving at him in the side mirror. Kunstler turned away and drank again, a long, mind-clearing stream of gin, then slipped the bottle in the door pocket, climbed down again, and walked back to the lowered gate.
Jimmy was complaining. “You couldn’t have put the hand truck on the curb first, Abe? Now we have to heave this whole pile of stuff up the side.”
Kunstler said, “I guess we can do it without either of us dying,” but the curb was high and it was harder than he had expected. He had to lift from the street side, and as the truck finally jerked clear to the sidewalk, he jumped with a short cry of pain.
“What happened?”
“Shit,” said Kunstler. “My thumb got caught in the frame.” It was his bad hand. The crease around the nail was filling with blood and the skin was already changing color.
“Shit,” agreed Jimmy. “All right, let’s do this and while we’re in there we can see if they have any ice or something.”
Jimmy took the hand truck and Abe followed him down a brick and concrete alley to a metal delivery door covered in graffiti. Inside waited a couple of black men in coveralls with no shirts underneath. “Come on through,” one of them said, waving a gloved hand as if he were guiding a steamroller or a locomotive. The space was crowded, and to follow the customers inside meant navigating a dark goat path between ceiling-high columns of boxes. Several times Abe had to lean down to help Jimmy shift the truck sideways. He steadied himself on one of the columns.
“Careful,” Jimmy said to him. “Don’t, you know.”
“Don’t what?”
Jimmy whispered. “Don’t get blood on everything.” Abe saw it already covered his palm. He wiped his hand on his pants.
The hand truck got jammed again, and this time caught Abe’s foot when they shifted it. He started swearing. “What the hell do these people need all this fucking garbage for anyway?” he said.
Jimmy looked over at the customers. “Ignore him,” he said. “He’s thinks he’s joking, but his sense of humor hasn’t been the same since D-day. Shell shock, you know?”
Back out in the alley, Jimmy said, “You have blood all over your shirt.”
Kunstler looked down at it and shrugged. He said, “It had to go somewhere if it wasn’t supposed to end up on their precious floor. You didn’t ask.”
“Ask?”
“About the ice.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think they would be very interested in helping you. In case you’re wondering, it’s because you came off like an asshole. Maybe there’s a deli on the way where we can stop and get you something.” Jimmy pulled his bandana out and handed it to Abe. “Then we can be extra late, and I can get home just in time to leave for work tomorrow.”
“Fuck you,” said Abe, but he accepted the bandana and wrapped it around his thumb.
“Sure,” said Jimmy. “I know, man. Same to you,” but Kunstler was already heading quickly back to the truck. He had things to do. He had to manufacture a solution, and to do that he had to find the boy. Too much was at stake. All this other stuff was just a waste of time. Let the pain be a reminder, he thought.
“I just get nervous, I guess,” Art told Bets as they put sheets on the small folding bed in the stifling, dirty little back room. The sheets were old and clean, but wilted from the heat. The summer had turned everything soft: the tar in the streets, the buzzing of the thick, fat flies, people’s clothes, the stems of the flowers in the park, the viscous air. The world lay flat, everything was exhausted, beaten down by the humidity. Art noticed—because of course despite himself he was looking—that in the heat even Bets’ nipples were too lazy to get up from their soft beds under her tank top. The little room was especially hot, despite having been exposed like the others when Dion had gone on his mysterious, violent frenzy against the apartment’s doors, practically tearing them from the frames. “I think maybe I don’t like the idea of people seeing me when I’m asleep, when I’m not in control of myself, you know?” Art said, and rocking on her bare feet so her flowered skirt waved like a meadow Bets asked him, sweetly and joyously teasing and yet somehow also with real curiosity, “I guess what I want to know is, who’s in control of you asleep, if not you?” and to cover her smile let fall the parted curtain of dirty hair.
Bets would joke sometimes that he had followed her home from the park like a lost puppy, and in moments like this Art knew she wasn’t far wrong: he couldn’t tell her that at home an open door had forever been a fearful thing, a crack through which an ocean might have poured in to drown him. He was as ashamed as a whipped dog at how fully he accepted his family’s world, ashamed of the fact that something as small as turning a doorknob when his father was home scared him with a fear so lasting and deep that the unthinking part of him recoiled from Dion’s wounded wall, saw in the empty space a deviation from the natural order, a dangerous sacrilege.
He had learned the danger even before Uncle Jacks had been revealed in the open door to the landing, standing there in his factory blues as uncertainly as a stranger, breathing winter steam through his open mouth and looking down at Art—who was just a little kid then, maybe not even in school yet. He let him yell, “It’s Uncle Jacks!” before demanding and accepting Art’s tiny hand in his huge, cold fingers and walking down the narrow hallway with him, the child and the enormous man each somehow leading the other, Art in his socks taking the biggest sliding steps he could to where his mother waited for them in the kitchen. Her color drained as Jacks told her in his great, dull voice that something had happened, that there had been an accident, saying, “That’s the thing,” again and again like a prayer: “That’s the thing, and I came to tell you,” all the time holding Art’s hand in his own the way someone might carry a slip of crumbling paper he didn’t dare lose. He didn’t let go even when Art’s mother nodded, and started to cry, asking in a new voice, one that slipped somewhere deeper than was hers, “What kind of accident?” The way her face melted wet and red filled Art with terror, and he wanted to leave, to run and hide. He tried to pull away, but Jacks seemed not to notice, just held him, an immensity that exerted no real pressure but was still inescapable.
“He didn’t say a word to no one,” Jacks said. “That’s the thing, he just walked out, I guess. People heard a noise, but when they got to his machine, he wasn’t there. They went looking for him, you know, all the guys, they followed the…They tried to find him.”
Art wasn’t sure now how many days it had been before his father had shown up, finally, in the same way: he, too, standing in the open door as if for the first time, unfocused eyes that had never willingly rested on the boy but now worse. His gaze swam even past Art’s mother, who herself was so tired from her panicked waiting that she had almost ignored his pathetic knocking, whispering that she had thought it might be something else, mistaken it for an engine, maybe, backfiring and failing somewhere in the distance.
Art’s father was unsteady, dressed in another man’s oversized clothes, right arm wrapped in a huge club of off-white bandage from which his remaining fingers protruded like slug’s eyes, what they later found to be a child’s torn sweater tied around his neck as a scarf. He swayed for a moment as if about to tumble before at last shuffling through, Inez and Art trailing behind to the bedroom, where Abe pulled the curtains and lay on his bed in the dark and said with a downy voice almost as foreign as the coat he lay down in, “Don’t touch me. Don
’t you dare touch me,” then slept whimpering through a store of tablets he had carried home loose in the pocket of some other man’s pants. When one pill wore off, Art’s father would come awake with a start and a wordless, grinding noise of pain and reach into the pocket for another and chew it, clenching his eyes shut and rocking his cradled arm until at last he was dragged back into his furious medical slumber.
Art sometimes listened furtively from just outside his parents’ room, crouching at the threshold as if answering a dare and worrying the ridge of his harelip with an uneasy tongue, but the violence of his father’s movements, the tearing depth of his groans, would always scare him away. Even sitting with his mother in the kitchen or lying in the dark dust of safety under his bed, Art could hear his father agonizing, sometimes barking Don’t touch me through the tranquilized fear and pain at the shadowy emptiness, at the groping onlookers who didn’t exist, and then, when the pills had run out and he switched to booze, yelling for whiskey, which he drank in huge, overflowing gulps straight from the mouth of the bottle, his throat working like a piston, the liquid overflowing down his face and into his clothes. Each time Inez asked questions or mentioned doctors he responded with vicious threats.
Finally Jacks was summoned. He had of course been waiting faithfully and came at an eager trot, at last allowed to bring Abe’s suit and other belongings in the cardboard box to which they had been moved from a locker at the factory. Kunstler remained so long in the bathroom getting dressed that Jacks had to take Art down the stairs and behind the building to pee, the boy hiding in the tall weeds that grew around the rusted and buckled basement hatch, his urine steaming in the cold winter air. As they stood there in the garbage-strewn yard the big man had started talking with a burst, as if he had been waiting for someone to ask and understood finally that no one would, and so told the only person he could trust not to judge him for his gentle, aggravating simplicity. He talked down to Art’s back about the fingers that had been on the floor by Abe Kunstler’s machine, two wads of dead flesh in a pool of blood like goldfish spilled from their bowl. Immediately the trickle of urine had ceased and Art had stood frozen, still holding himself, trapped in his wide-legged stance, until Uncle Jacks had asked if he needed help with his fly and Art had numbly accepted. His father would never return to the factory, and his fingers, which Jacks had carefully and secretly buried in an old stuffing box, never left it. They were not mentioned any more than Art’s harelip, his mother’s quiet, compacted misery, his father’s hidden wound, and the other things—a list abstruse, hazy, variable—that only Art’s father could speak of, so that no answer could be made when he would grab Art’s face and complain in a blast of whiskey breath that despite all the money wasted on doctors, the child still had a mouth like a fish, or when he boasted of his suffering in the war. A leaden silence was closed on these things like a box lid, barred with fear and reprehension and his father’s endless anger. Even poor, huge Uncle Jacks feared it. “Don’t tell your old man,” he said to Art as they made their way over the broken concrete back around to the front door. “Don’t tell him about I buried them, I mean, the fingers. I think maybe he wouldn’t like it.”
Art reproduced the family rituals with all the perfect adaptability of a child. He did it naturally, efficiently, and without question, unthinkingly finding and closing doors of his own, hiding from his raging father in the hall closet’s shallow floating forest of coat belts with the funk of mothballs and shoes, or in the space at the bottom of the narrow kitchen cupboard, learning to pull it shut by the bent metal catch, careful to snatch his fingers away before the housing snapped to. In his bedroom he made a kind of door by hiding behind the sheets and blankets hanging from his bed. He would crawl along the cold floor with his toys for company and think of his father’s fingers in their dark lake of blood, and of the even, brown tarnish Uncle Jacks said it left behind on the concrete factory floor, a trail leading the aghast die men and managers through the building’s front doors before it sank tracelessly into the black depths of the asphalt outside.
So when Bets finally left the hot little room through the fearsome doorless gap in the wall, Art turned out the lamp and settled cautiously and guiltily under the just-made bed, wrestling out of his jeans only once he felt hidden. When he was high, he had the impression he was conscious of everything, a sensation that was both beautiful and alarming, like carrying the world in the back of your eyeballs, felt but invisible. Lying there he had a sense of the belly of the room as if seeing it from outside, cut open to expose the strange cluster of its entrails: the unpainted plasterwork on the walls, the one chair, the spare metal bed, and himself.
There was enough light from the hallway that after his eyes adjusted he could just make out above him the lattice of twisted wires and behind them the mattress, the straight lines of the ticking, the dark cloud-shaped stains. Below him the floorboards ran unevenly through the dust that shifted with the air and the heat of the room and floated in and out of his nostrils.
As he drifted towards sleep he thought about the body seen from under a bed in his parents’ room, the hard and ungenerous body of his father’s lover, his mother’s rival. He couldn’t remember any more why he had gone someplace where he knew from terrible experience he wasn’t supposed to be, only that he had thought he was alone in the apartment until he heard his father: the coughing and heavy drink-slow walk approaching from the living room, moving like a slow storm up the short hall. Art had curled in hiding at the farthest end of the bed’s protective canopy, and when the sounds entered the bedroom and were followed by the locking of the door he covered his face with his hands, as if they were a door that could shield him from discovery. Uncertain noises and whispered muttering reached him like a distant siren through the fear that throbbed and crackled in his ears. When he dared at last to peek he saw it, visible only an instant as it passed the barely parted curtain of hanging sheets and blankets: a pair of legs and hips and breasts scant where his mother was full and soft, the first naked body of his experience and therefore impressive, arousing, even as he feared and despised it. This was the sign of his father’s treachery, and it could not be unseen, though Art immediately covered his eyes again and tried to wish himself away, cowered through the passing of an unknowable time until he at last recognized the unlocking of the bedroom door. Even then his eyes stayed closed for the eternity that followed until he thought he heard his father’s shoes and the slamming of the front door. It was a while before his racing heart slowed enough to let him hear if silence was what followed.
Already as he scuttled nervously down the hallway to his own room, it was there, inescapable: an image he never wanted but carried with him, just as he carried with him the twist of his harelip and the sound of his own voice, one that would appear uninvited in his dreams, intruding amidst the faces and imagined bodies of the others that he desired, floating in reverberation through his fantasy of Dion and Bets. It crept into the memory of the time he had spied them through the doorless gap in their bedroom wall, Bets on top of Dion, her breasts caught in a thin blade of morning sunlight. That night beneath the cot his dream was stained even darker by the knowledge that Dion had his lottery number, and suddenly the three slipping bodies were joined in Art’s half-sleeping mind by the television’s terrifying, bloody images of the war.
* * *
·
Dion had become different. It was the lottery that changed him. It wasn’t surprising and still Art was surprised. He had somewhere within believed Dion to be as imperturbable, as absolute and as distant as the weather. He had always appeared unflinching in exactly the situations that Art found the most agonizing, even almost unbearable.
Now that ease was gone. The change had come slowly—so slowly that it would be hard to pick the moment it began, to say if it was days or even weeks before the lottery that he started to show signs of worry, as if he were receiving warnings from the future and decoding them hour by hour. Not even Bets had understood yet that it was the
draft on Dion’s mind the hot, oppressive evening that he had torn down the doors, working viciously, blindly, without explanation, leaving his bare arms and chest covered in scratches and cuts, small red accents in the olive skin. Bets protested only briefly over the door to the bathroom, but it came out anyway. While Dion raged through the apartment, Art and Bets lay on the floor of the kitchen, just the two of them, passing a joint and looking up at the pattern of light the streetlamps scattered through Bets’ jungle of ferns. Art said it reminded him of a time once when he had crawled into his parents’ bedroom at night and been misled by a confusing tangle of streetlight so faint it was depthless but still seemed to recede like the opening to a tunnel. The pattern was reflected from a tall mirror on the wall, so that the room turned in around itself, and he had become unsure of which way he was heading. Suddenly he was scared, and his actions grew hurried, and finally he tripped over something in the dark. His father had been furious at being woken up.
Bets said something, but Art didn’t hear; he had caught a glimpse in the pot smoke and that filigreed light of the stranger, the hard-breasted woman, the body that ran through his dreams. He heard again the sound, his father’s footsteps and wheezing breath, that had driven him under the empty bed in his parents’ room in the dark in case the old man found him searching the apartment for the comfort of his mother. Art wasn’t supposed to go in there, had been punished for it again and again, but still he had wanted her and so walked very quietly through the hallway blackness, careful not to stub his toes, with both hands held up to the passing wall in guidance until his fingers met the frame of his parents’ bedroom door. His own breath whistled in his ears like a wind, and on all fours now, he pushed the door to enter. The hinge softly complained. His head filled with a rush of blood and fear and he waited, heart convulsing so wildly it felt as if he might bounce. He didn’t dare move at all until the churning blood retreated.
