Byzantium

by Ben Stroud

  The musicians changed songs. A slave reached over my shoulder and pulled apart my turtle shell. I hid my hand under the table and forced my mouth into a smile. I had served an empire that would last forever, I had become the son my father died wanting. There could be no regret.

  EAST TEXAS LUMBER

  BACK FROM LUNCH, I stood in the early June sun pulling two-by-sixes for somebody else’s load when Mike, the yard manager, came out of the office and yelled, “All right, Brian, I’ve got an easy one for you and Jimmy.”

  It took me half a moment to register what he was saying. My mind had nestled itself against the secret, moon-pale skin between the buttons of this shirt Angela sometimes wore at The Hangout, the church club over in the strip mall where the Safeway used to be. But as soon as I did I dropped the two-by-six midpull and said to Mike, “Let me kneel down before you. I swear I’ll get an idol with your face on it and give it flowers and pigeon blood every night.”

  Mike colored at that, being Baptist. Forty something at least, with a groomed black beard and sunglasses hanging from his neck by a neon-green band, he was the Prime Mover of the yard’s universe, spinning us into motion with his order sheets. My prayers must have climbed their way through the spheres and gotten to his ear. Ever since morning the minutes had crawled, and all I could think of was getting to quitting time and driving to The Hangout so I could pitch my woo Angela-ward.

  “Where’s Jimmy?” Mike said, clutching the order sheet to his chest. Jimmy popped up behind him, out of the main warehouse, where he must have been lazing in the door room. A great place for smoking, he told me once, but not for getting high, not with all those doors. Jimmy was a couple years older than me, taller, muscled, long hair straight and brown, with these little round spectacles like you see on timid townspeople in westerns. I’d been paired with him since I started at the lumberyard. After the tornado hit, they needed some extra people, and my dad was friends with a guy who went to Mike’s church. My first week, though, I managed to put a nail through my foot and drive over a stack of Sheetrock, and Jimmy was the only one willing to take me on. He was a general master of fuckuppery, but he’d worked at East Texas since he graduated from high school and he knew the yard. Those last were Mike’s exact words.

  His exact words now were, “Don’t screw it up.” The job was a shingle drop for two tornado houses. “Silver Linings to Greenhills and Chestnuts to Oak Ranch,” Mike told us. Jimmy snatched the order sheet from him, looked it over like maybe it was a trick, then beamed at me and told me to get in the truck. Mike gave us an “All right” and headed back to his air-conditioned holy of holies. We didn’t get good deliveries too often. We were always getting lost, and one time we’d scattered half our load on MLK when one of our straps came loose. But all the other guys were swamped.

  We parked on the cool cement floor of the shingle warehouse, and Arturo scooted over in his forklift, glanced at the order, and said, “Pinchay my asshole.” Jimmy sat there, grinning as he held his hair up in a ponytail and snapped a rubber band around it. Arturo was always shouting something obscene, and most of the guys laughed without even thinking about the translation.

  “Two drops,” Jimmy said to me, relishing it. “Tornado houses. And one of them in Longview.”

  I let myself sink into the truck’s plastic leather, listened idly as Arturo put our pallets together and shouted “Pinchay my asshole” some more. Shingles were already easy because we wouldn’t have to pull lumber for a load, and the Longview drop meant a good long time of getting paid for just riding around. I’d sail through the afternoon, almost nothing between me and quitting time, between me sitting here now and sitting next to Angela at The Hangout and offering to buy her a Mountain Dew.

  JIMMY DROVE US THROUGH DOWNTOWN, all cracked sidewalks and empty buildings and that line of tall oil derricks they lit up for Christmas, then over to Stone Road to skirt the tornado zone and come up along its backside.

  “You got any stops you want to make?” he asked after we passed the new car wash with its imported palm trees and inflated gorilla in an Uncle Sam hat. He’d said it was a right, on long deliveries, to work in some idling.

  But I didn’t want the risk. I’d already measured the afternoon out in my head. Once we did our two drops and got back, it’d be four. That was a good hour to return from delivery, four. Too late to start a new job, we’d hang out eating Popsicles from the yard freezer, straightening boards and picking up scraps while the day’s last minutes wound down, no worrying about getting to The Hangout in time. When I shared my dream with Jimmy—leaving out any mention of Angela, since the last thing I wanted was his needling—he said, “I got to have my stops.”

  “What about this. We don’t fucknut around, Mike might give us some more good deliveries.”

  Jimmy leaned across the truck, let it glide between lanes as he reached his hand toward me. “Two stops. I’ll have us back by five. I swear.”

  A telephone pole loomed. “Jesus, fine.” I gave his hand a quick shake. “Two stops, back by five.” It was the best I could do.

  The thing is, the tornado had deus-ex-machinaed my life pretty well, and I was fighting to hold on to the improvements. First there was my job. The one I had before the lumberyard was at Whataburger, and I couldn’t go back there. The grease coated my skin like wax, and I’d been fired anyway for leaving some meat out. I’d sat around for months, taking classes part-time at the junior college, and my parents had given me an ultimatum. I had to be out by New Year’s and doing something useful, they said, so I’d decided to move to Dallas and go to the locksmith school there. My brain turned to fuzz whenever I thought too long about most things, but it’d be cool spending your day getting into other people’s houses and cars. Since the tornado came and I started at the lumberyard I’d saved up about a quarter of the money I needed.

  And second there was Angela. In high school I’d had only one real girlfriend. She was Church of Christ, and she kissed me with her lips closed and dumped me after a month because I kept putting my hand on her stomach and she thought I was trying to edge it somewhere else (I was). But Angela I’d already felt up once. Two weeks earlier she sat in the folding chair next to mine at The Hangout. The guy who ran The Hangout didn’t charge anything—he went to Grace Church and said it was his mission for the area youth, to give us someplace to go that wasn’t a cowboy bar or a random field where we might get up to who knew what. On Thursdays and Fridays the same Christian band always played, and that one night two weeks back when Angela sat next to me I caught her flipping off the singer while he was leading everybody in prayer. “He’s an idiot,” she said when she saw me. “He made fun of people at school and peed on my friend’s car.” I held her Mountain Dew for her when she went to the bathroom, and when the band took a break she told me she’d gone to high school at Pine Tree and that last year was her first year at SFA. “It sucked I missed the tornado,” she said. I told her I was out there every day, delivering wood and stuff to the houses. A light turned on in her eyes. She pushed her flat brown hair behind her ears and told me she was majoring in biology, wanted to do something with frogs. I said, “Frogs are cool,” and she started talking about going on a frog hunt with her science club in Davy Crockett National Forest. It was as if she’d unwrapped this hidden part of herself and was holding it out to me. I asked if she was dating anybody, offhanded-like, and she said no. So when she said she had to get home I walked her to her car. She opened her door and turned to look at me and that’s when I kissed her. After we did that for about a minute I slipped my hand up her shirt and kept it there until one of the Grace volunteers watching the parking lot started beelining our way. Angela pulled back and said she had to go but that she’d see me again.

  But the next night at The Hangout she ignored me and instead sat with this group of mission trippers from Jasper who’d come here to shovel in the tornado zone. A freckle-faced, lanky guy with gelled blond hair kept putting his arm around her, an
d she kept letting him. I couldn’t figure it out. When I got her by herself, she’d barely talked to me, and it was that way every time after until last night I spotted her alone at the cake and candy table. At first I froze but then I said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey.” She was holding her arm across the chest of her Scooby-Doo T-shirt, Scooby’s eyes blacked out with marker, as she scratched at the eczema on her other arm. I told her I liked what she had done to her shirt and she said, “He’s a dog, it’s stupid, the others could still be alive now but he’d be dead.” Then I said, “I haven’t talked to you in forever,” though it’d only been since last Friday, and she said, well, yeah, that sucked, and now she was headed back to Nacogdoches in two days for summer school. One of the Jasper mission trippers barked her name in this voice he did that made everyone laugh. She smiled at him and started leaning in that way people do when they want to leave you for somebody better. My jaw finally flopped open and “See you tomorrow?” tumbled out. She said, “Sure,” and stopped scratching long enough to hold her hand up in good-bye.

  Tonight was my last chance. I had to get back to the yard by five so I could be at The Hangout by six, waiting for Angela, ready to show her I was the one she wanted. That way it’d be me walking her to the parking lot when the time came, sneaking my hand up her shirt again, and seeing what happened next.

  “WELL, SHIT, I guess we’re late for our date,” Jimmy said when we got to the first drop, over on Greenhills. Roofers crowded the top of the pink-bricked ranch house like lizards on a rock. They were drinking Cokes and lying back, eyes hooded under ballcaps. We’d done a few shingle runs before, and the first time out Jimmy had told me about roofers. “Lowest of the low,” he’d said. “When a man can’t get a job doing anything else, he becomes a roofer.” Since then I’d always regarded roofers, and roofs, with a quiet disdain.

  The head roofer came over to the truck. After we’d driven across the ruined chain-link fence and parked on the grass we’d found him sitting under a crab-apple tree, the only thing in the backyard left standing. His skin was leathered and red, and he wore a dirty denim shirt and a chewed-up Lone Star Feed hat.

  “Twenty bucks and me and my partner’ll put these shingles on the roof,” Jimmy said, nodding at me when he said “partner.”

  “Done,” the head roofer said, and passed Jimmy a twenty and got back under his tree. He took a Marlboro from the pack in his shirt pocket and lit up.

  If the roofers didn’t give us the twenty bucks we unloaded the shingles on the ground, which sucked for them. They’d have to haul the bundles up one by one on a ladder. But with the truck backed just right we only had to lift them from the bed, which was already more than halfway up the side of your basic ranch house. After he pocketed the twenty and gave me a ten, Jimmy edged the truck against the house, and then we got out.

  “Go on up,” Jimmy said once we’d both climbed onto the bed.

  “You go up.” The few other times we’d done this I’d been the one stuck on the roof. If I wasn’t careful my foot could go through a soft spot, put me in a wheelchair for life if the roof was rotten enough. Mike had told me the stories himself.

  “You going to sling these shingles?” Jimmy asked.

  I couldn’t, of course—I was too weak. Each bundle was sixty pounds. Without a word I scrabbled up over the gutter, and once I was on the roof Jimmy started handing the shingles to me. He hoisted them like they were nothing while I waddled, bent-backed, as I carried them up and down the slope of the house and dropped them wherever the roofers pointed. They didn’t get up, just nodded and grunted. As I walked back to fetch the next bundle, my arms floated up in release and I’d look out at the mile-long tornado cut that ran through town, scabbed over here and there with fresh plywood and timber, dotted with trash piles and teams of volunteers in the neon-colored shirts donated by the TV station over in Tyler. Then I’d pick up the next bundle and forget about the tornado as I strained and breathed little breaths and prayed I wouldn’t make a fool of myself before I dumped the sucker. On the roof’s far slope, where the plywood hadn’t been replaced, it was harder to find the rafters, and my third trip over I missed one. My foot sank into the plywood—a soft spot, rotted to sponge. This was it. Thinking of Angela, the three minutes of her I’d had and all the minutes I wanted, I eased my weight to my other foot, still balanced on a rafter. The roofer watching me let out a guzzling laugh. I wobbled, then got myself clear, and once both feet were settled I tossed the shingles before the roofer could point. We only had a few bundles left and each trip back I eyed the divot and moved my feet in straight lines along the rafters I’d found. Soon we’d finished. The roofers began to cuss and rise. Before I got off the roof they already had the nail guns going, the bright new chestnut shingles spreading up from the eaves.

  WHEN THE TORNADO HAD COME, back in April, I was at the junior college, on the top floor of Pfaff Hall waiting for my history class. The siren we always heard on the second Wednesday of every month blared, and at first I thought it was an idiot cop pulling a prank. But then an announcement echoed down the cinder-block halls: a tornado had touched down and we had to get to the bottom floor, away from glass. A sudden giddiness rattled the air. The juco profs stationed themselves at spaced points and waved us forward, as if they’d trained for it, and at the end of the hall Franciosa James, who I’d shared a table with in fourth-grade homeroom, shouted, “Gonna motherfucking storm up in here.” People near him laughed. “I ain’t making no joke.”

  Franciosa’s words were the true signal. Low-grade panic kicked through me, and I fought my way toward the stairs, weaving around others. Just before the stairwell, though, I got blocked by three girls whose tank-topped, salon-toasted skin I’d contemplated all semester. They held each other as they walked, the one in the middle bawling. Temporarily forfeiting my panic, I reached out to put a hand on her. With everything upended, who knew what might happen? But a guy in a camo shirt elbowed himself between us. The bulk of his thick, broad body muffled what I’d started saying to the girl, about it being okay, and I had to listen to him show off. He said he’d walk right now over to the Show Room for a shot if he could get some company, and one of the girls chuckled. I gave up and downstairs I sat an extra length from the nearest person. Death, I meet thee alone, I said to myself, thinking it was from a poem in high school. I didn’t really believe I was going to die, I just liked the charge of it, like everyone else.

  A giant girl in shiny basketball shorts, curly hair sweat-plastered to her head, stared at her cell phone as texts came in and called out to everyone that the tornado had crossed Dudley Road. Then the power went out and the bawling girl screamed. In school they’d told us a tornado was supposed to sound like a freight train, but I didn’t hear anything. We all sat there in silence, except the guy in the camo shirt, who for no reason burst out laughing a couple of times, maniacal. Twenty minutes later a janitor came in and said we could get up, the tornado was gone. It had veered just after Dudley and sliced through another part of town.

  For a moment disappointment seeped through the hall, then we rallied. Everyone tried their cell phones, but the tower must have been down, so we filed out of the building and while some went to their cars I settled in with the rest—the three girls among them—who walked under the now-calm sky to look for destruction. We headed east, where the janitor and sweaty-haired girl’s reports had last placed the tornado, and at Henderson Boulevard we found a police barricade already put up. A hushed crowd had gathered along it, bristling with arms that wheeled about at the whims of greedy, pointing fingers. Across from the barricade the doughnut shop had folded in on itself, its refrigerator of milks tilting out what remained of the front door, the cartons spoiling in the sun. I could only muster a whispered “Holy shit” as I marveled.

  Half a block up the famous barbecue place had vanished into a pile, its blue vans picked up and sprinkled across the street. Paramedics were there, ministering to people with cuts. Beyond, in th
e neighborhood that spread from behind the strip of restaurants, splintery twists of wood curled up out of the ground, the remains of trees, and the houses looked like knocked-out drunks, windows empty and black, bits of everything vomited everywhere, glass, mail, china, pictures, stuffed animals, appliances large and small. A police cruiser was parked at the head of the street, lights flashing, and at some of the houses people had come into their yards. It was like looking at zoo animals in their habitats. Beside me a knot of men estimated death counts. Ten, twenty. One fevered guy in a green Subway shirt said it’d be a hundred at least. Some police had stopped in for footlong tunas, and that’s what he’d heard, a hundred, and then he’d clocked out and left to come see. The number jittered through me. I looked around for the three girls, hoping I could be the one to tell them, but they were off who knew where.

  As it happened, by the end of the day the count had dropped to one, a ninety-year-old man, Earl Vancey, who hardly anybody knew. Didn’t go to any church, sat by himself each morning at the Circle Café, same coffee and oatmeal, same denim shirt. When the tornado came he’d crouched in his bathtub and the wall above him had fallen in. Everyone said they were relieved it was only the one, a blessing, especially with him being so old. But now the president and the governor wouldn’t come, and there’d be no movie stars or other famous people to escort through the wreckage. We were lucky to make the scroll on the bottom of the twenty-four-hour news. Still, the destruction was enough to attract Baptist men’s clubs, who roved the tornado site wielding chain saws, and mission groups with their crates of bottled water and sacks of donated clothes. It was enough to get me this job and Angela in my arms.