by Dale Peck
What, you couldn’t wait until you got home, eat with your family?
The boy doesn’t say anything.
Well then. Since you already had yours. She picks up an orange. We’ll say this one was Duke’s. The sharp nail on her thumb punches through the rind and peels off a section.
Jimmy, come get you an orange.
Jimmy doesn’t get up from the table.
Thanks Ma. Not hungry right now.
His mother pops a fragrant segment of fruit into her mouth.
Suit yourself. Now then, she says, pausing to spit a couple of seeds into her palm. Listen up. There’s gonna be some changes around here. With Duke gone. You’re gonna have to pull your own weight around here. No more sneaking in and out the upstairs window thinking I don’t hear you, thinking you can hand out your little oranges and bananas to your brothers and sisters to get them to do your chores and such. That stops right now.
The boy still doesn’t say anything. Just stands there and watches his mother rip his orange into pieces and devour it. He had been going to give them to his brothers and sisters, but not in exchange for doing his chores. But now the first orange is gone, just a few fragments of peel on the floor and a handful of seeds in his mother’s left hand, and the rest are piled up between her feet where she sits on the couch.
Additionally, she says, you’re gonna start going with Jimmy when he collects your father’s pay.
The boy turns and looks at Jimmy, who refuses to meet his gaze. He turns back to his mother.
But Ma—
The magazine catches him full on the side of the cheek. It’s not that he doesn’t see it coming—his mother is heavy and slow, and sitting down to boot—but he knows dodging will just lead to worse.
Don’t you sass me unless you want the real thing. She smacks the other cheek for good measure. Now. It don’t do no good for just one of you to go tramping through the Barrens trying to find that drunk. Maybe you’d like it if I sent one-a your sisters?
She points at him with the rolled-up tube. It is only inches from his face. So close he can smell the ink. And you might think he’d have to fight back the urge to hit her, or flee. But it’s the opposite. He is so rigid he thinks he will fall over—fall into the tunnel of her magazine and disappear into its well of words.
Good boy. Now get on out there and find him. Six oranges ain’t gonna feed seven kids no matter how you slice em.
Isn’t Dad working right now?
I called Billy, he said he never made it in. Now stop wasting time and get out there before he drinks up his whole paycheck. The boy continues to stand there, and his mother waves the magazine in front of his face. What, you want me to get the hose? What’re you waiting for?
The elm—the shade tree.
His mother half raises the magazine.
I swear to Christ Dale, don’t make me get off this couch.
The shade tree. It’s got a ribbon tied on it. There’s one on all the elms in the neighborhood. Do you know what they mean?
I don’t know nothing about no ribbons. Now get out of here, unless you want me to get the hose. Get!
As they leave Jimmy grabs an orange from the pile on the floor and eats it as they walk toward the Pine Barrens. He peels the rind back like a candy wrapper, exposing the globed top of the orange and biting into it, spraying juice on his cheeks and hands. The boy isn’t sure if the sucking noises he makes are meant to be lewd, or are simply greed, or hunger. The boy knows his parents think he dislikes his half brother, but they’re wrong. He dislikes only the fact that Jimmy wears his mother’s maiden name like a suit of armor, that he has never been strong enough to shirk off her favoritism nor smart enough to see that his beknighted status is an oppression, not just to the boy but to himself. On his own he is a happy-go-lucky sixteen-year-old in brand-new boots, and within a few blocks the two boys have settled into a silence that, if not exactly easy, is not strained either, punctuated only by Jimmy sucking on the orange and boisterously spitting his seeds into the street. Then:
You want half?
Jimmy is holding out the mangled remains of the orange, which is noticeably less than half.
No, thanks. I’ll eat later.
Suit yourself.
They pass another elm. In the falling light the ribbon tied around its trunk looks like a mourning band.
They got some kind of disease, Jimmy says then.
A disease?
Yeah. Dutcher’s disease, dutchie’s disease. Something like that. City’s gotta cut em all down to keep it from spreading.
For some reason the boy suddenly thinks of the cow that had died beneath his head from a piece of wire he’d failed to pick up from the field, and then he thinks of Dolly’s last calf, marked at birth for the veal pens. And then he thinks of Gregory.
Can’t they save em. Give em some kind of medicine?
Jimmy spits the last of his seeds into the street, drops the rind into the gutter. He wipes his cheeks with his hands and his hands on his pants and sticks his hands in his pockets.
Guess not. All they can do is cut em down to save the other trees. What was it like on that farm?
Jimmy’s voice changes when he changes the subject. There’s an edge there, but the boy can’t tell if it’s aggression or just nervousness. He looks over at his half brother, but Jimmy is looking down at his feet like he always does.
Why you wanna know?
Jimmy shrugs.
Just asking.
In answer the boy sticks his arm out and flexes his biceps.
It’s hard work day and night. The kind of work that makes a man of you.
He brings his bicep close to Jimmy’s face, as if forcing him to acknowledge the truth of what he says, or daring him to defy it. But all Jimmy does is shrug again.
Ma says farm life beats the man out of you. Says farming makes you a slave to the elements, and dairy farming makes you a slave to a cow to boot. A dairy farmer ain’t no more free than one of his cows, Ma says. That’s why she made your dad give up his farm and move down here.
The boy has a sudden vision of Flip Flack in the trailer behind the tractor, saying almost exactly the same thing—saying his mother had said almost exactly the same thing as the boy’s mother had. The image of Flip orating from his perch atop a pile of tarp-covered manure fills the boy’s brain in crystalline detail, almost at the same time as the realization that it is an invented image, as false as his mental picture of the dead cow he never looked at before he ran out of the hay barn that morning: Flip was behind him. He never turned around. He never saw him, just as he never saw the cow—an Ayrshire? a Holstein?—after it was dead. Then he says,
What’re you talking about? Ma didn’t even know Dad when he had his farm. It was gone by then.
Hey, I’m just repeating what she told me. She said she only married your dad because of you, but only on condition he give up farming. Jimmy shrugs yet again, his lack of interest in the boy’s father’s biography apparent. Anyway, it’s ancient history, right? Nothing to do with us. We weren’t there, right? Or not really anyway.
The boy muddles this as they walk on. He knows the first part of what Jimmy has said is true. His mother tells him as much every chance she gets—don’t you go thinking you’re any better than my sons, you’re a bastard just like they are—but the second part contradicts what his uncle told him. His uncle had said nothing about his mother’s demands, had said only that the old man drank their ancestral farm away, cow by cow, acre by acre. Renunciation not for love but for drink. If Jimmy had said this to him two weeks ago the boy would have dismissed it out of hand. But in his banishment he is less inclined to accept his uncle’s words as gospel. Still, what is he to do with the discrepancy?
And even as he thinks back to his time on the farm, all he remembers is hardship, struggle, a series of small failures. A life whose rhythms were indeed tailored to the ladies’ needs rather than their keepers’, as witnessed by the fact that the boy still wakes up at five in the morning,
still gets antsy at the same time every evening. But no, he realizes, that’s not true. He wakes up a little later every day—today it was nearly six before he opened his eyes, as if proof that any habit, no matter how deeply ingrained, can be eroded by the same process of repetition that produced it. But he still feels that the problems he faced on the farm were smaller than the ones down here, simpler. Surmountable. The questions Upstate had answers—all of them except the last, that is, the choice put to him by his uncle and his mother—whereas the questions down here are not even questions, but conundrums, enigmas. For example, why did his mother marry the boy’s father, rather than Jimmy’s, or Duke’s? And why does she hold this fact against the boy, and not Joanie or Edi or Lois or Lance or Gregory? Of all my children, she has told him point-blank, you are the only one I regret. You are the only mistake. You are the cause of my lost freedom. He can understand why his uncle was hurt that the boy wanted to see his family again, but if his mother really does regret having him then why did she insist he come back? Certainly not for the occasional bag of oranges or apples.
By now they have reached the edge of the Pine Barrens, and the boy drops back to follow Jimmy into the scrub. All that grows here is the dwarf white pine that gives the Barrens its name, a tree stunted by thin sandy soil and twisted by the Atlantic winds. The occasional chokecherry is equally gnarled, and splotched with lichen and mold besides, and close to the ground is a tough sharp grass that will cut your ankles if you’re not careful. That’s all there is, besides the litter of brown and white paper, cellophane, empty beer and soda bottles. In the falling light the contorted shadows of the trees make the place even more inhospitable, and the fact that it is a state park seems like a bureaucratic irony. The pines are too short and sticky with pitch to climb, their needles too thin to provide substantial shade during the summer; the chokecherries won’t kill you if you eat them, but they will make you sick if you manage to keep them down. The only games the neighborhood children ever play here involve hiding, or violence, or death. The boy has been in it thousands of times before—taking the roundabout way to school, to work—but never on this errand. He knows about it, of course, not so much from Jimmy as from Duke, who never lost an opportunity to deride the boy’s drunken father. The Barrens abuts the back of the hospital grounds as well as two or three bars, and for the past few years it has been his older brothers’ summer task to find the old man where he has passed out on his way to or from one or another of these establishments, and lift whatever’s left of his paycheck from his pockets.
Don’t know why she sent us out so early.
Huh?
He don’t usually leave the bars till after dark. Says he feels safer looking for a foxhole when he knows nobody can see him.
You talk to him?
Sometimes. He’s woken up once or twice. Sometimes we have to follow him around too, until he finally passes out. Usually we keep outta sight, but if he sees us then we gotta go into the bars with him.
I hate going in them bars.
Jimmy shrugs.
You get used to it. Sometimes Duke even gets him to buy us drinks without him realizing.
You drink?
Don’t sound so shocked. I’m sixteen years—sshh!
Someone is crashing through the brush a ways ahead of them. As the boy peers through the shadows he sees they are closer to the hospital than he’d realized. Through the feathery curlicues of twisted pine limbs he can see the back of the dark building against the umber sky like a stage flat blocking out the light behind it.
Roll me over, in the clover—
It’s Dad all right, Jimmy whispers. Your dad, I mean. Damn. What?
He’s just leaving now. Unless he took something from the supply cabinet at work it’ll be a couple hours before he’s down.
Lay me down, roll me over and do it again!
The boy laughs quietly.
Does that sound like a sober man to you?
Jimmy shrugs.
I’m starving.
The boy nods. He’s hungry too.
Can’t we just ask him or something?
Jimmy makes a face at him.
We talking about the same Lloyd Peck? He’d sell you for a bottle, Dale, and don’t you forget it.
The boy’s stomach rumbles audibly. He wishes he’d thought to slip an orange into his pocket before surrendering the bag to his mother. To top it off the wind’s coming up as the sun goes down, and he is suddenly cold in his undershirt and bare feet. He is thinking he should have worn Donnie’s letter jacket when Jimmy hisses another sshh! The old man’s path has suddenly veered in their direction, and the boys duck behind a clump of chokecherries.
He’s going to Jack’s first, Jimmy whispers. C’mon, let’s go.
The boy follows Jimmy. The sandy soil, strewn with pine needles, muffles their footsteps, but they have to watch out for fallen branches. The old man takes no such precautions. You would think he was hacking his way through the jungle with a machete.
Roll me o-o-o-ver, in the clo-o-o-ver—
He sings in a loud voice, exuberantly off-key. A voice full of self-mockery but also self-love. At some point the old man embraced his role as a drunk, and he plays the part with relish if not flair or originality, even when there’s no audience around. He can stumble in at three A.M. with the best of them, the boy thinks, miss chairs when he sits down, wet his pants in his sleep and point out the stain to his own children and laugh at the pathetic spectacle of himself. He starts singing Auld Lang Syne in the first week of December and doesn’t relinquish it until Valentine’s Day. You’d almost think he was Irish.
Jimmy stops suddenly, and the boy comes up hard on his heels.
Damn it Dale! Jimmy whispers. Watch out!
Why’d you stop?
The old man answers for him. In the quiet evening the boy hears the faint sound of urine striking the trunk of a tree.
Glass clinks against glass as the old man fishes in his pocket. The urine stream wavers as the old man fumbles with the top of his bottle—Oops, a little on the shoe, Lloyd, hee hee—and then he drinks and pees steadily.
There we go, my pretty pine tree. A little drink for you, and a little drink for me.
Jesus Christ, Jimmy says. Je-sus Christ.
When he has finished the old man stows himself and stumbles on and the boys follow him. The wet tree steams slightly in the falling temperature, and they give it wide berth.
When they reach the bar the old man stops at the edge of the forest to compose himself. It’s as if he knows they are watching: he pantomimes straightening a tie, slicking his hair back in a mirror, then sets off across the back parking lot with a casual but unsteady stride, as if he is just out for an evening stroll through a slalom course. There are a dozen cars in the bar’s back lot, the battered vehicles of men hiding from wives or creditors, and the old man pats the flecked chrome on the grille of an ancient enormous Packard with a coffin-shaped snout as though it were some shy Labrador come up to lick his hand. There is a clink when his hand strikes the grille, and it takes the boy a moment to realize it is the old man’s wedding ring.
Jimmy walks to a fallen pine and settles down on it. His actions have the air of familiarity, as if he has sat on this tree many times before. The tree is close to the bar’s dumpster, which exudes a stale odor of rust and beer.
What do we do now? the boy says.
We wait. You’re lucky. It looks like he got some syrup from work. They don’t usually let him stay more than an hour when he’s been hitting the syrup.
An hour!
Maybe an hour. Maybe two.
Two hours! I don’t believe it!
Jimmy shrugs.
He’s your dad.
The boy looks over at his half brother. He is sitting with his feet up on the trunk, his knees bent, untying and tying the laces of his new boots.
Do you ever—
Jimmy looks up at him sharply.
What?
The boy shakes his head.
Say it.
Do you ever … I mean, have you … asked Ma …
What? Jimmy is squinting in the dim light. His nose is thinner than ours, the boy thinks. It’s not a Peck nose. Not a Dundas nose either, for that matter. Come on, Dale, spit it out.
The boy shoves his hands in his pockets.
I was just wondering, you know, if you’d ever asked Ma. Who your dad was.
Jimmy squints into the boy’s face as if looking for a sign that he is making fun, one of his hands already balled into a fist. The two boys stare at each other for a long moment, and then Jimmy’s face drops and his hand relaxes. He peels a strip of gummy bark off the trunk he is sitting on, wads it up and throws it into the forest.
I don’t suppose it matters.
No, I guess not.
What’s that supposed to mean?
Nothing. I mean, what’s it matter, right?
Jimmy is rubbing his hands together to ball up the pitch that has stuck to them so he can pick it off. He rubs, and picks, and rubs, and picks.
She’s a fertile woman, our ma.
The boy laughs.
That’s for sure.
Thought she was done after Edi, but then she started up again with Lois.
And Lance. And Gregory.
Who knows how many more she’s got in her.
A car pulls into the parking lot then, and the boys sit in silence until its driver has gone into the bar. When the boy looks back at Jimmy, he is still picking at the pitch on his hands like a zoo monkey picking at flies.
You’re better off not knowing anyway. At least this way you can pretend he’s not a drunk.
Jimmy pinches at his hand.
Yeah, that’s probably true.
Hey, the boy says then. Hey, you wanna know something?
Jimmy continues to pick at his hands for a moment, then flings them away in disgust. He looks up at the boy.
What?
Did you know Dad, my dad was married before? Before he was married to Ma?
Jimmy peers at him, not quite disbelieving but definitely suspicious.
Think about it, the boy says. He was twenty-nine when I was born. Who waits till they’re twenty-nine to get married, have their first kid?
