Greenville

by Dale Peck

  A pity, a pity. And too early to see your physician I’m sure.

  Still at the country club. The old man tries to soothe his grimace into a grin. Probably on the golf course right now.

  The morning light barely penetrates the high-walled alley, but the Jew doesn’t bat an eye at this ill-timed delivery of the old man’s line.

  No matter. We’ll send you home with something that’ll fix you right as rainbows.

  He closes the door in the old man’s face, offering a brief glimpse of his white-cloaked back—from shoulders to heels as flat as a tabletop after the dishes have been cleared away. The old man stamps his feet impatiently but it’s only a few minutes before the Jew returns. The handkerchief flies off his head when he opens the door and he grabs for it with one doughy hand, misses, then lets the hand sit there as if embarrassed to be bareheaded in the presence of a customer. The boy thinks the Jew’s wrinkled skull is as ugly as a shrimp’s mottled front end—he’s seen those too, at Slaussen’s, thousands of them as gray and slimy as the ash pail when Duke takes a leak into it—and then, one hand still covering his head, the Jew holds out a small white bag weighed down by heavy round shapes.

  I have taken the liberty of prescribing seven. Two tablespoons three times a day. They should see you through the week, but if they don’t.

  He leaves the sentence unfinished.

  The old man scrabbles through his pockets. The first produces an empty bottle and the second produces another, but finally he finds a wad of bills and extracts some and gives them to the Jew. The Jew puts them in a pocket of his robe without counting them and hands the bag to the old man. The boy knows from Duke how greedy Jews are, but Duke has also told him that the old man is even more desperate than the Jew is greedy, and the Jew knows this too. The Jew knows that the old man will not shortchange him because then the old man will not be able to get his prescriptions renewed anymore. The boy knows all this in the same way his stomach knows the twists and turns of the streets that lead to this alley and his head knows the taste of all-butter French loaf. He knows that the bottles in the bag contain a cough medicine whose primary ingredient is corn syrup and whose active ingredient is turpenhydrate, an explosive word whose size and syllables slot it in the boy’s head somewhere between peroxide and nitroglycerin, and he knows too that it is the combination of these two ingredients, corn syrup and turpenhydrate, that makes the old man’s breath smell as sour as eggnog left on the counter overnight.

  And your son. The boy sees the Jew’s eyes glance toward the cab. He is well I hope.

  He’s fine, he’s fine. My boy’s fine.

  Your firstborn, no? Your eldest?

  The boy knows the Jew has seen Duke and Jimmy—his mother had sent both of them in turn to guard the old man’s paycheck—and now he knows the Jew is aware of this other thing as well, less the family secret than the family shame.

  The old man turns and looks in the boy’s direction, but if he sees him his face doesn’t register it.

  The boy’s fine. We’re going to see his uncle Upstate.

  A trip to the country! the Jew calls out to the old man, already heading back to his side of the truck. A weekend adventure! All best wishes for a speedy recovery and safe return. Just before the old man climbs in the cab, the Jew makes a clucking sound with his tongue. Such a young man, he says, and then both truck and pharmacy doors slam closed at the same time.

  The old man takes one of the bottles from the white bag and drinks it, and then he casts around the truck until his eyes light on the pillowcase filled with the boy’s brothers’ clothes. The finger that points to it wavers like the needle of a cheap compass, and the boy doesn’t hand it to him but instead pushes it across the seat. With the persistence of a chicken scratching for corn the old man attempts to separate one side of the open end of the pillowcase from another, scraping and clawing until a hooked finger manages to pull the sack open. The old man scrunches up the white bag as tight as it will go and then rolls the bag into Duke’s jeans and stuffs the jeans back into the sack and pushes it toward the boy. But the boy is still hearing the Jew’s last words. Such a young man. For a moment he’d thought the Jew was talking about him—he’d felt almost grown up. But as he watches the old man’s balding but babyish face, his purple tongue clamped between yellow dentures as he concentrates on his task, he realizes the Jew was referring to his father.

  Guard this with your life. One of these breaks, it’ll be your head.

  The boy holds the bag for a moment, then drops it to the floor of the truck and puts one of his feet on it. Even that small pressure hurts his foot and, briefly, the boy thinks about smashing the old man’s medicine with the heel of Jimmy’s shoe. But the morning’s balance is already fragile, and he doesn’t want to risk sending it over the edge to someplace new. Someplace he has never been.

  No matter how many times the old man does it the boy can never believe he will be able to back out of the alleyway. It’s as if all the benevolence providence denies him in every other area of his life is trapped in this brick-and-mortar gulch, and no matter how many medians or telephone poles or dogs the old man runs into or over he is always able to back the truck out of the Jew’s alley as easily as if he were parked on a conveyor belt. He doesn’t even turn around—does it all with mirrors—nor does he pause at the exit, and more than once cars have veered around the truck as it catapults from the alley’s blessed sanctum. But the roads are clear this morning, of cars and fog too, which seems to have burned off in the few minutes it took the old man to renew his prescription. The sun has cleared the horizon and ascends the convex surface of the sky and the boy turns and watches it through the warped glass of the cab’s rear window. If the boy tilts his head the irregularities in the glass distort the rising sun into a sliver, a pinhole, an orange portal with pulsating, beckoning edges, and he toys with the shape as the truck rattles toward the parkway, not turning around until, with a sickening lurch, the truck veers right when it should veer left. Although the boy doesn’t know his compass points—knows only that eastbound and westbound lanes lead toward home and away, that south shore and north shore mark the poles of a socioeconomic axis whose bottom end his family occupies—he does know that a right turn means they are heading beyond Dix Hills. He has never gone beyond Dix Hills before.

  Quickly, he faces forward in his seat. All he can think to do is chart their progress by the signs that dot the road, so that when the old man pulls onto a side street for his inevitable nap the boy will be able to tell him where they are when he wakes up, which way they came from and how to get back home. But even though the old man’s head nods every once in a while he doesn’t stop driving, and each road he turns onto seems bigger than the last. The Southern State to the Long Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway to the Clear View Expressway and the Clear View to the Throg’s Neck Something, the Throg’s Neck Bridge the boy sees when the road lifts off the ground and floats across an expanse of water, and after the Throg’s Neck comes the Cross Something or Other, the boy doesn’t see what they are crossing because by then the road is studded with signs, too many for him to read, too many for him to keep track of. Mother Mary Dolorosa Welcomes All, as does Riccio’s Italian Restaurant—Family Style! The Utopia Estates Promise A New Beginning and Kaufmann Bros. Storage Keeps Your Dreams Safe and the Maritime Academy Provides Hope For Tomorrow but right now the boy has no dreams and he has no hope because he’s lost track of their route, and at some point he’s lost his feet too, which have gone numb in their too-tight shoes. It is an empty yet heavy sensation, in its way much more compelling than the pain that had been there before, or the hunger gnawing at his gut. He had to work last night and so hasn’t eaten since lunch yesterday, but he is so used to being hungry that he almost doesn’t notice it, what with his feet and what’s going on outside the truck.

  Over the course of several hours the buildings have gotten bigger and more numerous but now they’re smaller again, thinning out until finally they’re s
o sparse they seem to mark the space between parcels of property rather than the other way around. Indeed, the land has an unfamiliar, unsettling sprawl here. On Long Island the water’s boundary is always palpable, even when it’s not visible—you can feel it in the horizon’s abrupt drop-off. But here the land stretches out in all directions, leaving the boy with the disturbing impression that they could keep driving forever. And then there are the mountains. The only mountains the boy has ever heard of are the ones the old man is always going on about, the mountains of his childhood. Those verdant slopes were green and crisscrossed by babbling brooks and sweet clean streams, and some quality of the old man’s words had always led the boy to picture them as curved and comely, nature’s pinup stretched on one hip across the horizon. Whereas these mounds are jagged as cookie dough: their leafless forests are as ugly as January Christmas trees heaped on the curb, their snowcaps ash colored. Even their massive rock faces seem smeared across them, like Lance’s cheeks after he eats a slice of chocolate cake. The combination of the land’s sprawl and the lumpy protrusions, in such stark contrast to the old man’s drunken rambles about his youth in the country, give the boy the idea that he is being driven into a past that isn’t as rosy as the old man would have him believe. For a long time the truck runs along an enormous river though, and the boy is fascinated by the two frozen shelves that stick out from either shore and the ice-chunked strip of ice-blue water between. The glacial shelves look like teeth to the boy, cartoon teeth breaking apart after biting on a rock hidden in blueberry pie, and the boy laughs quietly to himself when he imagines the river being fitted for dentures like the old man. A trip to the country, he reminds himself, attempting to relax again. A weekend adventure.

  Hey Dad. How old are you?

  The old man doesn’t answer, but a moment later his foot taps out a rhythm. Da-da-DA-da, da-da-DA-da. He taps with his right foot, the foot on the gas pedal, and on the third DA the truck surges forward with a grunt.

  Dad.

  The old man turns. Twice he has had the boy pull a bottle of cough syrup from the pillowcase—as many times as they have stopped to gas up the truck—and the medicine has pinked his pallid cheeks. He examines the boy as if checking for something then turns back to the road.

  My own boy. My own and oldest boy.

  The boy repeats his question.

  My oldest boy, the old man says, louder now. Not like that bastard. Not like that bastard Duke. The old man does something with the truck’s levers and pedals. The boy doesn’t feel any difference in the truck’s motion but the old man pats the dash with the flat of his hand. That’s a good girl, he says. That’s my baby. He sits up straighter. Not like that bastard Jimmy neither. Jimmy Dundas and Duke Enlow, he says, looking down at the boy. Jimmy Dundas and Duke Enlow and Dale Peck. Son of Lloyd Peck. My firstborn. My old and ownliest boy.

  How old are you, Dad?

  K-K-Katie, beautiful Katie, you’re the only g-g-girl that I adore!

  The old man rocks the wheel like a cradle and the truck meanders from lane to lane until a horn blares from somewhere below the cab and a car appears from the right shoulder and speeds ahead of the truck, still honking.

  When the moon shines over the cowshed, I’ll be waiting by the k-k-kitchen door!

  How old were you when I was born?

  Suddenly the old man turns to the boy, leaning so far over that the truck lists to the right. He makes a sucking noise on his dentures like a child with a lollipop and then, in a confidential insinuating voice, he says, I owe my troubles to a savage wife. He nods, sucks on his dentures, nods again. She’s a whore, son. Your mother is a whore.

  The boy takes hold of the steering wheel, righting it, and as wheel and truck rotate to the left the old man does too, until he is sitting up again. But he is still staring at the boy.

  They tell you to stay away from whores but they never tell you why. They screw like pros, that’s why. Your ma can screw with the best of em. That’s how they get you. That’s how she got me. She screwed me like a pro. She had two bastard children and a nose like Jimmy Durante and a better man than me wouldn’t’ve gone near her with a ten-inch pole, but she could swing pussy like a pro and I’m just a drunk and she got me fair and square. But I love my son. My firstborn son. Dale Peck. Firstborn son of Lloyd. I wouldn’t let no whore take you away from me, no sir I wouldn’t. Not again.

  Up until the end the boy has been ignoring him. He has heard all of this before, either firsthand or secondhand. There is no place in their house that is more than a curtain away from any other and his parents have had this conversation too many times to count. But neither of them has ever said this last thing. Neither has ever said Not again.

  What do you mean, Dad?

  The old man makes a face, mouths an Oops, turns back to the road.

  Not again, Dad?

  Pedals, lever, pedals again. Then:

  I’m a drunk, son. You know I’m a drunk. But never let it be said I let some whore take away my oldest child. My firstborn son. Never let anyone tell you that.

  Dad?

  I’m forty-two, the old man says. I was twenty-nine when you were born. I was just out of high school.

  Dad?

  Suddenly the old man’s voice changes again. The strength is gone, replaced by a plaintive whine. I thought I told you to close your window. His hand on the boy’s head is not quite a slap. Come on, come on now, hurry it up.

  The window has been closed for several hours, and the boy reaches instead for the pillowcase on the floor.

  Come on, come on, I don’t got all day.

  The boy hurries. Though he has never been afraid of the old man he has seen what happens to him when he doesn’t get his syrup, and he doesn’t want it to happen while the truck is in motion. He has to hold the wheel while the old man drinks bent down below the dashboard. He holds the wheel with his right hand and he watches not the road but the old man. Ten months later he will remember the old man’s pose when he sees a week-old calf bend down on his forelegs and crane his neck up to drink from his mother’s udder. The sinking and rising at the same time, the blissful expression in the eyes. Mother’s milk, witch’s brew. He will beat the calf off with a stick and hook his mother to a milking machine where she belongs.

  The old man wipes his mouth when he finishes the bottle, and then he licks the back of his hand. The boy knows there is no use talking to the old man right after he has had his drink, but the stale sugary smell of the open bottle has reminded him of his own hunger. He puts his hands in his pockets and then on through, roots around in the hollow lining of his jacket to see if there is any food left. Last winter the old man had brought the big kids, Duke, Jimmy, Dale, Joanie, and Edi, on a field trip to the hospital’s kitchen, where he’d instructed them to stuff the sleeves of their coats with any vegetable they could fit down them—it took Edi a week to shake all the papery garlic shavings out of her coat, and the smell lingered for months afterward. When the boy got the job at Slaussen’s he’d done the old man one better, he thought, by having Joanie slit open the seams of his pockets so he could conceal his own contraband inside his jacket lining. He passes over the staples in favor of apples, bananas, whatever citrus fruit comes off the truck from Florida, but by the time he gets in at eleven from his after-school shift he is usually so tired he goes to bed immediately, and his brothers and sisters take the fruit while he’s asleep—everyone except Duke, who refused to go along with the old man’s plan at the hospital, and who won’t eat the boy’s food either. Today he finds only three grapes rolling around in his jacket lining. He knows that Joanie will have saved something for him, but Joanie is at home with the rest of his sisters and brothers.

  The boy rolls a grape between thumb and forefinger, warming it up like a marble before he shoots it.

  What did you mean just now, Dad? Not again?

  The old man purses his lips and shakes his head. Uh-uh, he says through clenched teeth and closed lips, nnhh-nnhh, and then he opens them. I want y
ou to mind your Uncle Wallace. Your Uncle Wallace is my brother and a good man. A better man than I am. I want you to mind what he says.

  Dad?

  She was going to send you to military school. But I said no. I said not my firstborn son. I said she could send one of her bastard children to military school but not the firstborn son of Lloyd Peck could she send to military school. No sir. Not again.

  The boy doesn’t know what military school is, although he has heard the term used by his parents and has ridden past the gate to the LaSalle Military Academy on Sunrise Highway more than once. He goes to Brentwood Elementary, or at least he does on those days when he isn’t suspended for betting on marbles in the schoolyard or getting beat up by boys who call his mother a whore and spit on his shoes. He is small for his age, the tiny son of a tiny man, and he doesn’t know who his Uncle Wallace is though he has heard that name too. He is almost thirteen years old and he is not afraid of anything except the unknown, but he knows so little that in order to keep from being terrified all the time he has long since ceased believing in anything except what’s in front of him, and right now what’s in front of him is a cracked dashboard and a dirty windshield and an empty narrow road, gray, lined by shallow ditches, and disappearing over a hill the boy has to will himself to believe is not a cliff. He eats the three grapes, pretending each is an all-butter French loaf, and he spits the seeds on the floor one by one, and although he doesn’t aim each seed still manages to ding off an empty apothecary bottle. When a burp bursts from the old man’s mouth the boy sees it as a ball of flame, but what it burns up he’s not sure. He looks at the blackened leather above the old man’s head and then he closes his eyes as if they’ve been stung by smoke.

  I’m forty-two years old, son. I’m a young man. But I’m old enough to be your father.

  He must fall asleep then because when he opens his eyes the truck is stopped and the old man is not in the cab. He assumes they’ve stopped for gas until he sees a gnarled branch above the windshield like a jab of brown lightning and he sits up. To his right a row of leafless trees stretches up the side of a hill and to his left there is a white house, small and rectangular, its tiny second-story windows the shape of dominoes laid on their sides. Before he gets out of the cab he grabs the pillowcase containing his brothers’ clothes and the old man’s medicine, and the first thing he does is fall flat on his face because he can’t feel his feet. Still half asleep, he sits on the crust of snow that covers the ground like stale cake frosting and takes off Jimmy’s shoes. The ground is cold and hard beneath his bottom but the bottoms of his feet feel nothing at all, and, teetering, rudderless, he stands up and floats around the truck in his socks, the pillowcase less ballast than slack sail hanging down his back. A pitted two-track driveway runs around the house and up the hill toward a pair of barns and a tall round building that the boy recognizes instinctively as a silo even though it reminds him of a castle tower. At the foot of the silo he sees the old man talking to another man. Like the old man, this stranger is short and thin and has only half a dozen strands of hair slicked flat to his skull, but unlike the old man he stands absolutely still, one hand holding a pitchfork lightly but firmly, tines down, and a cap on the ground between the two men, bottom up like a busker’s. The only thing that moves is his head, which shakes every once in a while, back and forth: no. The old man’s legs are wobbling and his arms are flapping in the air, and as he wobbles toward them the boy is reminded of a seagull he saw once in the bay. The seagull’s legs were trapped in a fishing net, and every time it flapped its wings its orange legs would lift out of the water trailing weed-draped mesh. Over and over the bird’s legs had shaken like the old man’s with its efforts to free itself but each time, exhausted, it splashed down again.