The Coward

by Jarred McGinnis

  The front door closed. I heard Patrick’s SUV working through its gears as he drove off.

  22

  I was thirteen, and the year or so of hating him had diminished Dad, but I had grown. I was already as tall as him, if still a lanky uncoordinated copy. The dusting of a moustache was shaved by techniques gleaned from commercials. With the new strength in my limbs and the invincibility of youth I tested him. I picked fights daily, silently glaring, clicking a pen, or drumming on the table after he begged me to be silent. We’d trade punches, me always getting the worst of it.

  ‘I’m staying at a friend’s house. Is that okay with you, Jack?’ I stepped close to his chair and knocked his Mickey Mouse glass over with my toe as I spoke. He didn’t notice.

  ‘Casanova was an asshole,’ he said, talking to the tv. ‘Any guy with money and bullshit can seduce a thousand girls. I seduced one woman, the same woman every night, a thousand times. That’s what makes a great lover.’

  ‘That’s poetry, Jack. Pour yourself another.’

  ‘Now, she’s dead. Fucking stolen.’

  ‘Now, she’s dead.’ I was determined not to be like him, even in grief. ‘She’s better off that way.’ I said it to insult him, not her.

  The alcohol burned from his eyes, now clear and hateful.

  He sprang up and slapped me. The stinging outline of his hand marked my cheek. He parried or ignored my pathetic windmill of punches. He pinned me against the wall. His forearm pressed against my neck. The thud had knocked the breath out of me and a few family photos from the wall. Anger steamed from him. My shirt slowly tore from his grip. He slapped me on the other cheek and put a finger in my face.

  ‘Even here, even in this house, there is a line you don’t cross.’ He dropped me. He went to pick up his glass, saw that it was knocked over and kicked it. The hard plastic clattered and bounced undamaged. He disappeared behind the slamming of his bedroom door.

  Near the house, a rusty railroad cut north–south through a pine forest. I followed the grey spine of ballast. Each outing I travelled farther, scratching my initials into the trees. The ‘friend’s house’ I told Dad that I was staying at was a campsite in my forest. At night, I made a fire, breathed the incense of smoke and earth until I felt a rare calm. I stared into the Milky Way and fought the terror of all those other planets, all those other worlds. I imagined myself being pulled up and away, spun from earth, to drift through the emptiness toward the spray of lights.

  It wasn’t long before I knew my way through that pine forest. A wilderness hemmed by suburbs, big enough to hold a few deer for rednecks to poach from truck cabs, but small enough for me to know that getting lost was for a day at most. Getting lost became the point.

  On the opposite side of the forest was a neighbourhood of fat white houses packed tight as teeth. I was following the fence and looking for an opened window or some other way to climb into one.

  Instead I found a doe-limbed girl. She had wild lying eyes and short black hair.

  The first time I saw Melissa she was with the first girl I would ever kiss. They were playing under a tree thick with pink flowers, a scene irresistible to my fourteen-year-old self. I was already falling in love daily with other girls with short black hair and thick eyeliner, girls with skater shorts and Band-Aid knees and girls who happened to be smiling when I caught their eye.

  Melissa had the other girl on her shoulders. Her bare feet curled into the small of Melissa’s back as she stretched to shake the flowers from the branches of the tree.

  They spotted me and stared.

  ‘Hey, boy, what are you looking at?’

  ‘You lost?’ her friend said.

  ‘Come here. What are you doing over there?’

  ‘You live out there? You homeless or something?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I lied, wanting to be obliging as much as I wanted to be intriguing. The attention of girls like them powered boys like me for months.

  ‘Stay there.’ They walked to the middle of the yard, whispering unnecessarily, watching me all the time.

  ‘Do you want us to feed you or something?’

  I climbed the tree and dropped into their yard. We introduced ourselves.

  ‘You don’t smell like you’re homeless,’ Melissa said as we walked into her house.

  They made me a sandwich, gave me Cheetos on a paper plate and asked me questions. ‘Where do you shower?’

  I sipped at their soda and made up answers. ‘Truck stops.’

  ‘Have you ever kissed a black girl?’ Melissa asked and pointed at her friend.

  My ears were hot coals. Luckily, her friend was more embarrassed.

  ‘She’s never kissed a white boy. She wants to know what it’s like.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Her friend slapped at Melissa’s shoulder and averted her eyes.

  Melissa positioned us like department-store mannequins. I didn’t dare move or speak, afraid that what was happening would end. She put her hands on our heads, playfully pushing us together. The girls’ closeness and the anticipation awoke every cell in the most ancient part of my boy’s brain.

  I kissed her, and in the closed-eye seconds I had no doubts, worries or guilt. I suddenly understood what I previously had felt as a vague pull of gravity. As soon as it was over, I wanted more and knew I would always want more.

  I looked at the girl. A wrap of cloth held her hair back and gave her a halo of curls. Her eyes flitted across my face.

  She whispered a shy, ‘Nice’. They giggled at me. Melissa, still close to us, interrogated our expressions. She was satisfied by what she found, or more likely by what she had orchestrated.

  ‘I think you like kissing black girls. A lot.’

  Her friend stayed embarrassed and pretended to watch tv while Melissa sat beside me and continued asking questions. After a while, her friend said they had to talk.

  Melissa looked annoyed as she followed her into the bedroom. When Melissa returned alone, she told me that I had to leave before her dad got home. I would find out later that there was no dad coming home.

  ‘Let me get your number,’ I said, my need greater than my insecurity.

  Melissa wrote it down and tore out the page. I wrote down mine.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. I’m not there any more. It’s a place I used to crash.’ I went to scratch out the number, but she took the notebook away, smiling.

  ‘Call me, yeah? We’ll hang out,’ Melissa said as we walked across her backyard.

  I hopped the fence and hiked back, not thinking about Dad at home and his sloppy pronouncements on love but wondering if it was possible for other people to tell that I was no longer a kissing virgin. I concentrated on the memory of the girl and Melissa watching us and wondered how long I should wait before I called the number.

  23

  The morning after the incident with the Coronas and Jack locking me out of the house, I was eating breakfast when I heard his bedroom door open and close.

  ‘You want some eggs and bacon?’ I shouted.

  The front door opened.

  ‘Morning, Jack,’ I called.

  The front door shut.

  ‘Well, fuck you too,’ I said to the empty house.

  I let Jack’s change jar decide what I did that day. By the grace of some quarters buried below layers of pennies, I went to the Filling Station for a coffee.

  ‘What’s in the box?’ I asked. Sarah was drawing on a cardboard box on the counter between us.

  ‘Some guy left it here literally five seconds ago. Said God wanted me to have it.’ She rotated the box. She had drawn a cartoon strongman complete with leopard unitard, thick belt around his waist and a dumbbell, its bars bending under the weight. Instead of a strongman head with twirled moustache and shaved head, his neck ended in a hole. In fat block letters, it read INCREDIBLE MISTER SHAKEY. I looked at her, trying to understand. She nodded toward the box. I pulled closer to look inside and a cat’s head squeezed from the hole. The Inc
redible Mister Shakey had the body of a strong man and the head of a grey cat.

  ‘The guy stood at the entrance and said, my dad was Santa and I am the Easter Bunny. He walked up to the counter, said God sent this, no need to sign for it. Before I could even respond, he went, Coffee Girl meet Mister Shakey, Mister Shakey, Coffee Girl, and he was gone. Now I own a cat named Mister Shakey apparently.’

  ‘The Easter Bunny didn’t get me anything.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. My brother is super allergic. There’s no way I can bring him home.’

  ‘I’ll take him,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘That would be amazing. I didn’t want to take him to a shelter. I just can’t bring him home. I’ll give you a ride. We can stop by a pet store. I’ll buy the cat food and litter and all that stuff.’

  I almost said yes. But I saw what would happen. We would go to the car. Sarah would stand behind me while I positioned these useless legs and gracelessly moved this body across from the chair to the car. The excruciating procedure repeated at the pet store and at the house. Every moment with nothing to talk about except the cat and the inevitable ‘What happened to you?’. The next day she would gossip with her co-workers about taking the wheelchair guy out to buy litter for the cat she pawned off on him.

  ‘That’s okay. I’m not far from here,’ I said. She asked if I was sure and I was sure.

  I struggled through the neighbourhood. With every push, the box threatened to tip from my lap. The cat peeked from its hole after a few rough jostles, but mostly it was still and silent.

  Jack’s car wasn’t in the driveway. I struggled through the yard and into the greenhouse. I opened the box and petted the velvet grey fur, which elicited a few chirps, but the cat remained asleep. I stared into the neighbour’s house. The couch where the pregnant wife and husband ate takeout and watched tv was empty. The curtains of the bedroom were pulled shut.

  A lifetime of bad decisions, like sneaking into houses, is a hard habit to kick. When I was a teenager, a psychologist told me that my breaking and entering was me looking for a perfect home, because of my own less-than-perfect one. The truth is I’m just nosy.

  I set the Incredible Mister Shakey down, still asleep in his box, and wheeled to the neighbour’s front door. Predictably, the key was under the mat.

  The house had too much furniture, seemingly untouched, like a show house. The art was all the same, plain black framed watercolours of famous landmarks: Mount Rushmore, the New York City skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Space Needle in Seattle. They looked like they came free with the furniture set. The dining room had place settings for six, complete with blue ceramic napkin holders. I went to the glass sliding door in the living room and looked out at Jack’s greenhouse just as the grey cat skulked around the corner and out of sight. The tv took up most of one wall. I thought about how he had held her round belly while she looked down at him. Two baby monitor receivers faced each other on the coffee table. I clicked one on and listened to the static. I didn’t know how to make things right with Jack. He was going to throw me out and I wouldn’t have blamed him. I should apologise to Patrick but I knew I wouldn’t. I wanted Sarah to hug me again and tell me ‘hang in there’. I wanted her to call me ‘kiddo’. I liked that. The static was soothing.

  I thought about how Melissa and I first met. She was my first love, my first heartbreak. She could have stayed that, but I had to ruin it. In the hospital, I had rolled around with the injustice that my accident and her death had happened when I was on the verge of making a change finally, no more fuck-ups, no more hurting people, no more running away. That was a lie and Melissa was dead because of that lie.

  I looked around the house and imagined the couple bringing home their baby boy. Both exhausted but strengthened by the hope for the bundle in their arms. Who knows, maybe this kid was as doomed as I was. Maybe dead moms and drunk dads don’t matter as much as we think. What was I doing in their house? I wasn’t on the verge of changing anything, that night with Melissa or now. The truth of that was a sucker-punch and one that I deserved.

  A car pulled into the driveway. I turned off the baby monitor and put it in my pocket without thinking. The glass sliding door out to the back patio had two steps. An impossibility. The car’s engine turned off.

  I pulled the sliding glass closed behind me. Two steps between me and an escape. Car doors slammed. Panic lit through me.

  I imagined my two legs working beneath me. Left foot effortlessly dropping to the first step. Right foot, second step. Done. Step by step leaving the neighbour’s yard and yet another mess I had made. Part of me thought it could be done. All I had to do was will it. I looked at my knees, expecting them to twitch to life. The locks turned. The front door opened. Voices heard.

  I considered getting out of the chair, scooting down the steps on my butt then pulling the chair after me. No, it would take too long. I balanced on my back wheels with the idea of hopping down.

  Two people, a man and a woman, were talking to each other, moving through the house. A jangle of car keys clattered into the bowl on the kitchen counter. Cooing sweet words from the woman.

  I gripped my wheels and prepared to ease myself down backward. As soon as my weight was over the first step, gravity won. My back and shoulders slammed against the cement. My head hit with a thud. More stunned than hurt, my knees pointed to the sky above. I rolled out and my legs clunked to the ground. I mewed ohs and owws.

  The woman passed the glass door holding a swaddle of blanket. She slid it open.

  ‘Hello. Do you need some help?’ she asked, then called behind her, ‘Honey, there’s a person, a wheelchair person, in our backyard. He’s hurt himself, I think.’

  The man came up behind her. The woman bounced and patted the newborn at her shoulder. She looked worried, eager to protect her child, as if my stupidity was contagious.

  ‘He’s from the house next door. Jack’s son,’ the man said.

  ‘Can we help you?’ she asked as if I was hard of hearing. ‘Should we call the hospital?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘What do we do?’ She conferred with her husband.

  ‘Put him back in his chair, I guess.’ The man righted my wheelchair then stood over me, trying to decide the etiquette for lifting paraplegics to whom you haven’t been formally introduced. He put his hands under my armpits. We embraced as he struggled to put me back into my wheelchair. The man smelled nice. I couldn’t bear looking at either him or his wife with their baby. Back in the chair, I adjusted my legs. My ears were hot and flushed with embarrassment. Slicks of sweat slid from my armpits down my sides. The man pushed me through the grass back to my front door.

  ‘Are you sure you are going to be okay?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Sorry to trouble you,’ I said as I hurriedly pushed myself inside and shut the front door.

  Jack came home late that night. I was lying on the couch, pretending to read a book. Instead, I was thinking about Melissa and the night she died. The streetlights had cut hard shadows from the parked cars and buildings. Melissa’s motionless body lay in the road. Below her arm, another shadow or blood, I couldn’t tell. I tried to focus on when I had first met her. I saw her, young again, and her friend, the first girl I kissed, playing in her backyard. I wanted to replace the night she died with the thousand other nights we were together being stupid kids doing stupid kid stuff.

  ‘How was work?’ I asked.

  ‘It was good. Had a nice chat with the neighbour next door.’

  Oh shit. I still had the baby monitor in my pocket.

  ‘They got back from the hospital today. Their little girl was born a couple of days ago. Eight pounds. Margaret. Always liked that name.’

  ‘You want something to eat?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’m tired. You get up to anything today?’

  I thought about derailing the conversation by telling him about my new pet happily stalking squirrels in the backyard. I could also mention tha
t I used the last pennies in his coin jar to buy cat food after the incident with the neighbours. I decided that would only compound the problem.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘That’s a shame. It was a nice day to flop about on the neighbour’s patio, scare the hell out of the new parents next door. They had a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer. Do you want to explain yourself?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Fair enough, because I don’t want to hear it. Stop with the stupid shit.’

  ‘Stupid shit stopped.’ I looked away, fearing he might change his mind and insist on answers.

  ‘Good. Night night.’

  ‘Night night,’ I said. I wish I had said more to convince him that I did want to change. Jack’s advice from a long time ago flitted into my head: ‘Once is a mistake, twice is a decision.’

  24

  I climbed the tree and knocked on the back door of Melissa’s house. She opened it and hugged me as if we had known each other for years. We went to her room. Dolls and toys still clung to the corners pushed out by teenage concerns like clothes and posters of listless men in black.

  ‘I don’t want you as a boyfriend.’

  ‘I don’t want a girlfriend,’ I lied.

  ‘Fine. Let’s go see a movie.’

  I bought a ticket, went to the fire exit, and let her in. We hopped between films. We ate from boxes of popcorn left on seats. We explored the storage spaces behind ‘Employees Only’ doors. I thought about us making out while watching her face in flickering colours of the movie. She caught me staring, called me ‘freak’, and pushed my chin toward the screen. We left after the last show at midnight. We slept in her bed.

  She slept.

  I lay next to her and faced the ceiling. My attention burned upon the feel of her knee pressed against me.

  For months, we hung out every day. I never saw the girl I had kissed again. We stretched our legs in the petty crime teenagers call rebellion. We created missions like stealing houseplants from one neighbour’s porch to put on the porch of another. At Christmas, the nativity scene of the nearby church was changed to a carnal orgy of shepherds, wise men, sheep and Mary, surrounding a lawn jockey statue in his manger. We shoplifted for sport more than gain: an enormous watermelon from a grocery store, a single ski pole from a sport store or anything that was as absurd as it was difficult. We sneaked into the pools of luxury hotels and swam in our underwear. Each night’s adventure ended with a restless sleep beside her.