Whitechurch

by Chris Lynch

  “Everybody all right here?” Wendell asks. Dad and Pauly are sitting on the sidewalk. Paul’s nose is bleeding and Dad is wiggling two front teeth. They nod. Wendell goes into Rosa’s Cantina.

  I walk over to them. “You all right?” I ask. Dad just looks down at the ground.

  “Did you see me?” Pauly asks, as if he’s just pulled off a triple somersault with a twist rather than putting his face in front of a fist. He is smiling nuttily.

  Gorgeously.

  Nothing you can do with the boy some days. He beams up at me, the blood from his nose pooling around his chin. I offer him a hand up. You got every guy in town fighting for your honor, bitch,” he says. “And yet you pick me.”

  “Shut up,” I say. Unfortunately he knows I don’t mean it.

  “Nobody calls my boyfriend ‘queen’ and gets way with it.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m feeling tough. Let’s go get a steak. Oakley, you wanna go get a steak? I got a few bucks—let’s go eat.”

  I look down at my dad, who is still sitting, fingering his teeth. They look brilliant. But they look like they’re stuck in the mouth of a mushy jack-o’-lantern about a month past Halloween. He stares down at the sidewalk.

  “You wanna come?” I say to him.

  He pauses. “Does he have to come?”

  I nod.

  “Maybe next time then,” he says.

  He’s not a bad guy, I swear.

  We leave him there.

  If any of this at all lowers Pauly’s elevated mood, he doesn’t show it.

  “We’ll get something to eat,” he chirps, still within hearing distance of Dad, “and then afterwards we’ll go someplace and I’ll hump ya.”

  “Jesus, Pauly.”

  “Fine then, you can hump me this time. But don’t get too used to it.”

  I have lost the impulse to tell him to shut up, and as we step into the diner we are on the same page.

  “‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’” we both say, pulling stares from every booth.

  Will

  “YOU GAVE YOURSELF A haircut.”

  “I did.” He isn’t embarrassed in the least. Even though the haircut not only looks like he did it himself, it also looks like he did it without aid of a mirror, and that instead of scissors he used a serrated knife.

  “Sit in the chair,” I bark. We are in my house. My house is an apartment. My apartment, which I share with my dad sometimes but not right now, is above a former coffee shop. It’s not a great apartment, but it smells pretty good. “I hate the smell up here,” Pauly says.

  “Get in the chair.”

  Now he’s laughing. He likes it when I get all upset and motherly.

  “Assuming I get in the chair, what is going to happen to me?”

  “What’s gonna happen is that you are going to get a halfway decent haircut so I won’t be even more embarrassed than usual to be seen with you on the street. And then, if we achieve that, then maybe we will take my dad’s VA check and cash it at the bank and just maybe, if you’re real convincing, you’ll be able to convince me why I should buy two train tickets.”

  He sits in the chair. I go rooting around in the odds-and-ends drawer, one down from the silverware drawer and one up from the dishrag and Drano drawer, looking for scissors. They are not particularly sharp, my all-purpose round-tipped scissors with the orange plastic grips and glue bits tracing up and down the blades. But I am certain I can make him look better than he does.

  I walk over and stand behind Paul and we both now look into the mirror, which is above the sink which for no apparent reason is right there in the front room by the window that looks out over Main Street.

  “I love that you love me like this,” Pauly says. Partly that’s a boring hairdresser joke, partly that’s Pauly saying whatever he can think of to get me off balance and partly it’s this thing where we are alone and in close proximity and well, it is just a thing with him.

  And just maybe he’s trying to divert my attention from what I’m seeing.

  It is not instantly noticeable, because of its location, but it is quite noticeable now, up close. Long and angry and just now fully clotted, the slash runs maybe three inches along Pauly’s hairline, tracing it perfectly from the right temple down the side of his head, stopping just before the ear. Doesn’t look like any incidental slip of the shears. Or rather it could have started out as that, and then the shearer neglected to stop carving.

  “What you want to go doing that to yourself for, Pauly?” I hear it come out, sadder than I mean it too.

  He pops up out of the chair. “You can be a real freak sometimes, you know that, Oakley? Know what, maybe you’re the dangerous one. Maybe I should be worried about you wielding a pair of scissors. Cutting myself …” He spins, walks three paces away from me, spins, walks three paces back. “You know, if you could make use of that kind of imagination you might actually make something of yourself.”

  He stares at me, I stare at him. He gets back in the chair.

  I find it easier to speak to his mirror reflection. “But you know, if I ever found out you were doing shit to yourself …”

  I don’t quite know how to finish that.

  He starts smirking in the mirror. “Yes? You’ll do what?”

  I suppose it is rather ludicrous. “I’ll kill ya,” I say, holding the scissors now like I’m going to stab him.

  “Oh ya, that’ll teach me.”

  We both laugh, more out of relief than anything.

  “Anyway,” he says, “even if you did have the strength, which you don’t, and the anger, which you don’t, you could never kill me. That would take an act of will.”

  He’s finished now, given me both barrels. This is a very big thing with Pauly, because it is what separates him from all the other creatures of the forest, particularly me. He’s not bigger or stronger or faster than most people. Or smarter or meaner or more creative.

  What it is about Pauly is, it’s about will.

  He will … Pauly will … Fill in the blank there and you’ve got a good chance Pauly will. He will do what most of us will not, and that, more than anything else, is what defines him. He has got the will, and will probably find the way.

  “Fine,” I sigh. “So I won’t kill you.”

  “Thanks, buddy. I probably won’t kill you either. Cut my hair?”

  “Ya.” I start clipping.

  He starts musing. A haircut will do that for a person. “Town’d be happy if you did kill me though.”

  “I don’t think even that would make this town happy.”

  “Never mind the town,” Pauly says, “you’d be happy.”

  “Oh ya, I’d be psyched.”

  “I’m not kidding, Oakley. You might not want to admit it, but I think sometimes you believe things would be a shitload easier on you if I would just be gone.”

  “Shut up, Pauly.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Shut up,” I yell, and as soon as I do I wonder why. “Pauly,” I say calmly, “You’re talking crap, okay? If that’s what you’re gonna do, then just keep quiet during the haircut.”

  He tries to comply. Lasts about twenty seconds.

  “Just concerned with the happiness of my friends,” he mutters.

  I take a big snip of hair from over one ear, check out the balance, and take a big snip off the other side.

  “Which is why we’re gonna go to Boston. To look after Lilly’s happiness.”

  I’m staring at the back of his head, wondering how he could have made such a mess of it. And I don’t mention all the little scissor-bite marks that make his neck look like it was attacked by Alfred Hitchcock’s birds.

  “Pauly, what’s this haircut, like a computer virus—the more you try and fix it the worse it gets?”

  “Can’t you just cut it without talking about it? Anyway, don’t you want to hear about Lilly’s happiness? It’s about Decision Weekend. She’s going down to the college. You know, they show them around, let th
em party for a couple of days, then the student decides to sign up. So Lilly’s already really decided she wants to go, but figures she’ll take the weekend trip anyhow, free vacation, plus she’ll get one last look around before committing.”

  “Are these your sideburns?” I ask. “They look like sideburns, but I don’t think they’re growing out of your face so much as just pulled down—”

  “They’re sideburns. Leave ’em.”

  “So we’ll all take the train together then. That’ll be a ball.”

  “Hell no,” Pauly says, like I’m the biggest fool. “She didn’t, like, invite us. Duh.”

  “So why are we going? Duh.”

  “To help.”

  “To h—? Pauly? Pauly, no.”

  “She needs protection. She’s a naive big ol’ country gal. She can’t be left—”

  “Yes she can.”

  “I see,” Pauly says, and bounces a hard and serious V-shaped frown off the mirror. “So you don’t really love her then.”

  “Christ, Paul. Spying. You’re spying on Lilly. This is not about Lilly’s happiness, it’s about your freakishness.”

  There, I’ve done it. I know I’ve done it before I’ve even finished.

  “Stop pouting, Paul.”

  “I’m not pouting.”

  “Jesus, we’re both looking straight into the same mirror. You’re pouting. Cut it out. You’re not the victim here, you’re the troublemaker.”

  “Troublemaker?”

  “Yes, you are winding up for a classic Pauly caper, and I think you should just leave it alone. Let her go, Paul.”

  And there, I’ve done it big time. Let her go. Kind of a theme, that one. She’s going, to college in the fall, to the world, away from Whitechurch, whether Pauly likes it or not. Whether I like it or not. Pauly most definitely does not. I, well, I like Lilly, and therefore I like what’s best for her. Whether I like it or not.

  Pauly will eventually come around to feeling the same way. He ain’t there yet, though. Not by a ways.

  “Let her go?” he asks coldly, giving me a chance to make up for the mistake.

  I decide not to make up for it. “Ya, Paul. Let her go.”

  “Request denied,” he says, turning his head from side to side to check out his new look. I’m not even finished yet, but who can tell? “I’m going to Boston.”

  I sigh. “Maybe I’ll just say no, then.” This means something because, for all his talk, Pauly doesn’t like to leave Whitechurch much. Doesn’t like to leave it without me at all. Lilly leaving Pauly, well that’s just sensible. Pauly leaving me? Unimaginable.

  “Fine,” he says, hostile cool. “It’s not like I would really make any trouble anyway, would I? Nothing much’ll happen.”

  There is a lot going on there in Pauly’s words. You don’t even need to know what he’s saying—and a lot of the time it’s impossible to know—to be worried.

  “Fine,” I say. “So I have to go, to keep an eye on you while you spy on Lilly.”

  “Now you’re getting into the spirit,” he says, hopping up out of the chair and brushing hairs all over my floor.

  One side of his hair looks better than before.

  Mr. Linsky, the bank manager, doesn’t give me a hard time about cashing Dad’s VA check. He never does. Mr. Linsky’s feeling—and it’s not something I have to guess at, since he comes right out and says it—is that I deserve whatever I can get. Doesn’t care much for my father, is what that means. Kind of a funny feeling, to like somebody who hates your own father, unless you yourself hate your own father which plenty of people do, but I don’t. Anyway, here’s kind of a decent thing: Sometimes I’ll cash the check, and when I count the money there’s ten or fifteen bucks more on top of what the check was supposed to be. He’s a good-enough guy.

  Today, though, I get just what’s in the check and no more. Well, a little more. In addition to the money, I get a watch-out-be-careful frown from Mr. Linsky, which is related to the company I keep. Giving me money is no problem for Mr. L. Pauly, on the other hand, can smile and be nice as can be and still get looked at as if he’s walked into the bank with a mask and a machine gun.

  Train station’s a little less of a weirdness. Train people don’t really seem to care what you’re doing as long as you use the train to get there.

  “Hello, Mary Martha,” I say, and Mary Martha, who loves the sound of her own name because she made it up herself, is thrilled to say hello back. Penelope is her real name. Kind of a judgment call as to whether she has actually improved things much there, but she appears to be a more friendly person since she buried Penelope, so I suppose it’s Whitechurch’s gain.

  “Boston,” she sighs as she punches out the tickets. “I love Boston. Such a romantic city. Such a smart city.”

  “Been lately?” Pauly asks her sweetly.

  She immediately looks down, at her fidgeting hands with the carefully painted burgundy fingernails. “No, never,” Mary Martha says. “Been to Lowell, though.”

  So.

  “You guys meeting Lilly?”

  “Why do you ask?” I ask.

  “Why do you ask?” Pauly asks, and asks in such a way as to wipe me out entirely. He is now the counter, collecting the tickets I paid for. He’s leaning close to Mary Martha.

  “’Cause she bought tickets on the same run, that’s all. Only natural to figure”—and here Mary Martha allows herself a dangerous little laugh—“that since you are her boyfriends, that you all’d be going together.”

  Pauly is more amused than I am. Outwardly, least.

  “You know, Mary,” he says, all sweet and intimate-like.

  “Martha,” she corrects.

  “You know, Martha—”

  “Mary Martha.”

  Pauly sighs loudly, but really he’s not bothered at all. In fact he could do this kind of thing endlessly. “Listen, Penelope,” he says in a voice that can best be described as juicy, “just, if you see Lilly, and if you want to be my friend …” He is so close to her, their noses may actually be touching. “Do me the favor of not telling Lilly we’re on this train, okay? It’s a surprise.” He takes the tickets, lingers in her face for a few seconds more.

  “Hey,” she snaps. There aren’t a lot of people in town who do that, who snap at Pauly. It catches his attention. He returns to the desk. “That’s not what you were gonna say to me.”

  There is a green wrought-iron bench with a splintery wooden seat, there next to the ticket counter. This feels like a good time for me to make use of it. I’m not sure what Pauly is up to, but it makes me uneasy and I’d just as soon bug out. The bench is not the most unpleasant spot in town, either, the old-style train platform outside the nice Victorian station house. Always breezy up here, and always smelling of the pines that densely surround it. Perfect for a little respite from the business of Paul.

  “Okay,” Pauly says, now that she has enticed him back into the conversation by being like him. “What I was saying, Mary Martha,”—he makes a proud and charming little nod to her at the feat of getting her names right—“is that I’ve been thinking about you lately. How there’s something different about you since you became Mary Martha …”

  Moving to the bench does me no good. I’m still within range, and I’m still pretty well hooked. I mean, he’s a pretty disturbing creature, more or less to the entire population of the town. But the thing is, people seem to be altogether ready to be taken by him, when it’s the one-to-one thing. Which, I suppose, explains me even more than it does anybody else. I’m his greatest friend, greatest supporter, greatest victim.

  “Funny, Mary Martha, but it was just on the way over here that me and Oakley were talking about this very thing”—he sounds warm, as if rekindling an old intimacy—“about how it might be cool to get to know you better, to maybe hang out some.”

  Of course we never discussed any such thing. But I half believe him myself.

  “Shut up,” Mary Martha says.

  Fair-enough response, I figure. B
ut then there is more under there. We all know it. That’s his gift, the underneath he seems to know for no good reason. Like lunatics, the way they can sense stuff. Even though Pauly’s not nuts.

  “Shut up,” she repeats. “You were not talking about me. Liar.” Mary Martha leans way far out over her safe little counter and stares straight down at me, Oakley, who for whatever reason has developed a sort of rep for telling the truth.

  “Hi, Mary Martha,” I say.

  Which seems to be enough for her. “Liar,” she says to him, in such a coy way that she really could have said any number of finer things.

  “Just two days,” Pauly says. “Think about it … think about it … Trains, y’know? Of course you know. Who knows better than you do what can happen to people on trains? They take you places even before you get there, don’t they? You see people coming and going all the time. Shit definitely happens to those folks, don’t you think, Mary Martha formerly known as Penelope?”

  Mary Martha has a rabbit look about her, as if she will bolt right from her little post right this second.

  “Pauly.” I reach over and tug on his shirt sleeve. “What are you doing, numbnuts? Lilly, remember? Lilly. Lilly, for crying out loud. What do you have to be doing this to Mary Martha for?”

  I think I have accomplished this much: I have stalled the process long enough for Mary Martha to regain her balance, if not her sanity.

  She waves him off. “Some of us work, you know.” Pause. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  He leans toward me and whispers. “We’re just playing with each other. She understands. I’m not really trying to make her go.” Then, with hardly a flicker of a channel change, he turns it on, on Mary Martha. “Girl, I am not crazy. I am a poet.”

  She wags a finger at him. “Wait a sec, I think I heard about this.”

  “Stand back,” Pauly says dramatically.

  Mary Martha #7

  Destination

  Desperation

  From her little