by Chris Lynch
“Hey, ah, Elvis,” Alex said, “are you going to correct people as to your real name, or are you just going to change it officially so as not to bother anybody?”
“Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. It’s your name, for pete’s sake.”
“It’s Elvin, actually. Though it’s a common mistake, the Elvis thing.”
“Not the young Elvis, that’s for sure,” Swan said. “Maybe the old, crazy, fat, dead one. Though even he wasn’t all bald and scabby.”
“That is some mouth on that girl of yours, Mags. Nobody ever taught you any manners, Swan?” Alex said.
Swan was no more intimidated by him than she was by me. “Why are you here, anyway? Why don’t you go haunt one of your other families, you old spook? You old skin-headed zombie.”
Even before she said the zombie thing, I felt as if I were in The Mummy or something. Like I had stumbled into some old cave full of secrets and stories and spooky stuff I didn’t want to know about and wasn’t supposed to know about and would probably pay some awful price for knowing about. His other families? There were too many families popping up already, thanks. I didn’t want there to be any more.
“Elvis, you want to go see my stuff?” the boy said. “We can leave all them to have it out.”
“Hawk, I want you to stay,” Alex said, almost like pleading.
Hawk. There’s another one. How cool was that? What a cool family they must have been back when.
Maybe we were cool families back then. Maybe, before things all went all wrong, we were something great, this Bishop dynasty. Maybe maybe. Wish I knew. Wish I remembered. Wish it was, and still was.
Hawk laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh, you know?
“That’s very funny. Can you say that again? I want you to stay. That’s very funny.”
Alex did not say it again.
“Elvis, you coming to see my stuff?”
Hawk walked down the hall, and I looked to Alex. He nodded with a kind of a quarter of a smile. Maybe that was how much of him wanted me to go down the hall with Hawk, while the other three-quarters wanted us all in the same room.
When I got to the end of the hall to the open door, Hawk was waiting for me. Standing amidst his room and his possessions like it was a showroom where he was selling things, or a game show set where I could win any of these fabulous prizes.
This was his stuff.
“How do you like my stuff?” he asked.
There was something in the way he said the word stuff, with extra emphasis, that worried me.
“Nice stuff,” I said, shrugging.
“Ya, it is,” he said. “Good stuff. It’s my stuff.”
He brushed past me, jumped up to grab the chin-up bar mounted in his door frame. He chinned himself up. I counted. He did twenty of them. Then he dropped back down.
“Want to do some chin-ups?”
“Oh,” I said and as my mind scrambled through my vast back catalogue of physical excuses, I perked up at the realization of a real one. And a pretty cool-sounding one to boot. “Can’t.” I rubbed my left biceps and shoulder with my right hand, then did that sort of stretching motion that looks like you are trying to fly by using your elbows for wings, “I was working out... earlier already... muscles a little sore right now.” Okay, earlier was stretching things, but they were sore.
“Oh,” Hawk said, nodding in a completely skeptical, underimpressed way. “Well, then, want to see the rest of my stuff?” He slammed the door.
I had gotten a little too wrapped up in my own workout excuse because then I went back to rubbing my biceps, checking for signs of life, signs of life being pain, of course, like they always are.
And while my head was down and my response time was slow, Hawk decided to take the situation in hand.
That is, he decided to take me in hand. Or in arm.
He grabbed me right around the head and squeezed so hard I thought orange juice might come out.
“Hey,” I shouted.
“Here, come here, let me show you my stuff,” he said, dragging me by the head over to his large set of chrome hand weights stacked neatly on their own rack. “These are my dumbbells. Maybe you know each other, you have a lot in common. Dumbbells, this is Elvis; Elvis, these are the dumbbells.” As he said this, Hawk raised and lowered my head with a vicious jerking motion, like I was nodding violently to his weights.
“And over here,” he said, dragging me to the opposite corner of the room, “is SlamMan.” SlamMan was a human-shaped form of molded plastic and foam padding set on a wide base. He had a series of what looked like reflectors in his eyes, mouth, and at various spots on his upper body. “He is the greatest boxing trainer.”
Hawk continued to hold me firmly in the grip of one powerful arm while gesturing at SlamMan with his free hand. “When I press this button”—he pressed—“the lights blink in random sequence.” The lights all over SlamMan did begin to blink in a sequence that appeared to be random. With each blink there was an accompanying high-pitched beep, not unlike the one coming from me every couple of seconds. “Then I have to try and hit the targets. It’s great stuff. Say hi to SlamMan, Elvis.”
I myself was never much for those line-in-the-sand-type moments. I always figured, you start drawing those lines in that sand, then people are going to start crossing them and very likely make things uncomfortable on your side of the line. Whereas if you hadn’t drawn attention to your side by drawing that line in the first place, they probably wouldn’t even have bothered.
But even I had to have limits of some kind. Even I, with my highly practical view of what is and is not worth getting worked up about, had to acknowledge that there were some depths to which I must refuse to sink or else risk ever more imaginative levels of degradation farther down.
Against my own better judgment, I had to make this a line-in-the-sand moment.
“I will not be saying hi to SlamMan.”
The pause at this moment was more painful than the headlock. Even though he had added a kind of sand-papery grinding motion to it.
“Ouch,” I said, though I knew it was unlikely to change his opinion. My back was starting to hurt from being bent over. And leaned on.
“What has SlamMan ever done to you?” Hawk said in a big, sad voice, while SlamMan beeped innocently in the background.
“I see what you’re doing. You are going to try and make me talk about SlamMan like he’s an actual person, and make me look stupid anyway. Well, I’m not falling for it,” I said into his forearm.
“Good point,” Hawk said. “You don’t want to look stupid. Here, we’ll just work out with him then.” As he said that, he rushed me forward, ramming me hard into SlamMan’s well-toned abs. Then he rammed me again. Then again, and I was starting to see the pattern. I was following the sequence of flashing lights—and even adding some of my own—as Hawk mashed me again and again into the wall of SlamMan.
He was talking to me while he did this, while he smacked me silly, while I struggled lamely. He was talking, then kind of moaning, then kind of growling, then back to talking again. SlamMan kept beeping like a shy electro soundtrack to our own little gangster movie.
“So what are you, his kid now?” Hawk said. “You his kid? That’s great. That’s great.”
Every time he said something, he had to whack my head. It hurt more and more, and the humiliation of not being able to do anything about it was making me have the totally perverse and desperate reaction of praying that Alex would not come in and see this.
“Well, that’s just great,” Hawk said. “So you just take him, the two of you just take each other, and get the hell out of my house. Get out of my house. This is my house and this is my stuff, and nobody needs you here and nobody wants you here. I am the man here. Not you, not him. I am the man here.”
At the end of his program, SlamMan let out one last, long beep and held it for about five seconds. That was Hawk’s cue to stop the ramming and give me one last definitive heave-ho, sending me sa
iling headlong into SlamMan, hitting him, wobbling him, caroming off and continuing past, into the corner, into the wall, onto the floor.
I was stunned as much as anything. Not true. I was hurt more than anything, then embarrassed, then scared. But beyond that, as much as anything, I was stunned.
“All I wanted was to meet you,” I said as I slowly got to my feet.
“Ya? How would your ass like to meet my foot?”
It was right about here I lost faith in our ability to work this out.
“Well, my ass is very busy so it won’t be meeting any new body parts this week.” I walked across the room, past Hawk, who was heavy-breathing and alarmingly seeming to be getting still angrier. But he let me pass without further incident. My head, still new from the razor, felt red raw as I rubbed my hand over it.
“I mean it,” Hawk said as I opened the bedroom door. “If I see either one of you again, you’ll be sorry.”
“I believe you,” I said. “I’m already sorry.”
He rushed up and slammed the door behind me.
I walked the long hallway back toward the living room with something like dread filling me. All the time I was in playing with Hawk and his stuff, my mind was—understandably, I’d say—distracted from the main business of Alex and what he was doing in this place, with these people.
There was a deeply unsettling silence waiting like dead air as I reached the end of the hallway. Back at the other end, I heard SlamMan start to beep again, then Hawk banging on him with two ferocious fists. Or possibly one ferocious baseball bat.
I crept, like a burglar. Don’t know why. There was no need. Nobody was looking for me, or looking out for me, or especially concerned with me. But it was like I felt I could escape, like I could avoid something I didn’t want to encounter here, just as long as I was good and quiet.
Well I couldn’t. When I got to that spot where I had left them before, where the kitchen area turned into the living area because the bluish tartan turned into the reddish tartan, I found the scene. Not the scene I left, actually, but a warped and melted version of it more brutal and sad than the dance with Cousin Hawk.
Swan was nowhere to be seen. Mags the Lady was there, leaning with her back against the scabby Formica top of the kitchen counter, her arms folded tightly, and a snarl on her face that showed all her teeth all the way back to the joints of her jaws.
On the floor in front of her, spread on the bluish tartan floor in front of her, was Alex. He was on his haunches, back hunched, palms and face flat to the floor. You could hear nothing other than a sniff every couple of seconds.
Mags the Lady looked at me when I walked in. Her body remained planted as a tree, but her head turned, her neck flexing one side like a racehorse. She held that pose good and long, and just stared at me, stared like she needed to look through my eyes and read the fine print written on the back wall of the inside of my skull.
Then she turned away again.
“I don’t even care whether it is true or not,” she said to Alex’s back. “I don’t care. I will never care. The kids don’t care. Nobody cares; nobody will ever care. And nobody wants anything from you.”
He just laid there. Motionless, but for the sniffing.
Mags the Lady turned in her powerful, horsey style once more. “This is your one chance to take him out of here before the police do it, Elvis.”
She didn’t have to say it twice. I went right over to my uncle and lifted him up off the floor. He was damp and floppy and insubstantial as a bath towel. I kept one arm around him and steered him toward out. He didn’t struggle or complain or express anything at all. It was like she beat him up, and beat him badly.
“How can you people be so mean?” I said as we walked out the front door.
“Yes,” said Mags the Lady, “how can we? Do say hello to your mother for me, though.”
Then she shut the door crisply behind us.
12 Ouch
TOMORROW CAME, AS SO far it has always done. I didn’t expect to see Alex that day, or the day after that. The day after that, though, I allowed myself to think, maybe. Chump.
By Friday, I had no expectations. No expectations is a sound way to start any day, I think. And by Saturday, I was pretty well clean of any memory of any expectations.
She was sitting on the couch, sipping tea when I came down. She had mail in her lap.
My mother was wearing sweatpants. My world had no order at all anymore.
I sat down next to her.
“You planning to go on a daytime talk show today?” I said, eyeing up her outfit.
“I thought I’d be prepared,” she said coolly, “in case any called. You never know.”
I couldn’t help thinking this was not a legitimate explanation.
“My mother is wearing sweatpants,” I said more urgently.
She giggled. She liked it when seemingly small things unsettled me.
“Where is Uncle Alex?” I finally, finally asked.
She neatly slipped a letter at me out of the stack like she was dealing me a card. It was in a gray envelope, with overly proud lettering stamped on it. It was a sniffy-looking letter.
I picked it up. It was scented with French onion soup. Gourmet, but rank. Before I could make the effort of reading, she paraphrased for me.
“It’s from Alex. He says he died in a plane crash. Again.”
I didn’t say anything. I read the letter. The letter didn’t say anything either. Damn rotten letter.
She took a sip, and a sigh, and leaned in to me.
“I liked him,” I said after a very long wait.
I took her cup, and a sip.
“I know,” she said.
“I mean, what’s the deal, Ma? He comes here when I don’t want him. He hangs around when I don’t want him. Then, when he makes me want him, he’s gone.”
She squeezed my shoulder. “That, in a nutshell, is men, Elvin Bishop.”
“Well, I’ll never be one, I can promise you that.” I took another sip of tea. I could sense Grog out there on the periphery, waiting for that delectable tea bag.
“Okay,” she said, and looked at me with that look. I wondered where she ever got her complete understanding of everything. I marveled at it, and I feared it. And if I thought about it too hard, I could probably work out how she acquired it, so I wouldn’t be thinking about it too hard.
“Or maybe it’s you,” I said. “This appears to be the third time you have lost a full-grown Bishop.”
First she made a startled face. Then she made like she was counting on her fingers. “You know, I think you’re right. I must be bad for their health.”
Sometimes even our jokes made me nervous.
“Should I be worried?” I asked, inviting her motherly reassurance.
“Probably,” she said.
And because she was my mother and not yours, that was reassurance.
“Ah well,” I said. “What’re you gonna do?”
She shrugged. “Go to the gym? Start taking care of ourselves?”
“Sure. We can go to the gym. I was thinking I wanted to do more of that. Exercise. Watch my appetites. Watch my sugar. Maybe get a little tougher. Keep healthy heart and toes and stuff. You do have to take care of yourself, you know?”
“You do. You have to take care of yourself.”
And if you take care of yourself, what do you get? Do you get to keep your toes and your physique and your family? Do you get golden curls and great posture and unlimited love and adoration?
I never saw my mother in sweatpants before that morning.
I never saw Mikie eat a vegetable.
I never saw Frankie wash his hands in a public bathroom. Though he may have just forgotten by the time he finished with everything else.
I never once saw my dog take a drink of water beyond what she squeezed out of teabags.
I handed Ma back her cup and stood to look at myself in the mirror opposite over the mantle. It was an ancient thing, that mirror, sideways oval, smoke
y and chipped with age, bordered in a kind of vine-carved frame with twelve coats of cream paint on it. Ma popped up next to me. We looked like a weird 1880s prairie couple.
I could swear my neck already looked a little bigger, and my face a little smaller. I was bald, and my head had small cuts on it. I thought I could make out the beginnings of creases in my forehead. A completely different guy from a couple of weeks ago. Who was that guy?
“You know,” Ma said with a big, satisfied smile, “you never change.”
I gave her a nice smile right back. “I know. And why would I want to? By the way, Mags the Lady says hi,” I said.
The old prairie couple just stared at us.
“Holy smokes,” she said. Said it beautifully, I thought.
“Right, Mother, we’re going to the gym,” I said, heading upstairs to get my gear.
My gear. I still had to shake my head.
But you have to try, don’t you. You have to take care of yourself, even if taking care of yourself is not what you’re wired for, because you do have something to say about it all.
And because it probably matters to somebody. You never know.
Take care of yourself, then.
A Biography of Chris Lynch
Chris Lynch (b. 1962) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of seven children. His father, Edward J. Lynch, was a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus and trolley driver, and his mother, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom. Lynch’s father passed away in 1967, when Lynch was just five years old. Along with her children, Dorothy was left with an old, black Rambler American car and no driver’s license. She eventually got her license, and raised her children as a single mother.
Lynch grew up in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, and recalls his childhood ambitions to become a hockey player (magically, without learning to ice skate properly), president of the United States, and/or a “rock and roll god.” He attended Catholic Memorial School in West Roxbury, before heading off to Boston University, neglecting to first earn his high school diploma. He later transferred to Suffolk University, where he majored in journalism, and eventually received an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. Before becoming a writer, Lynch worked as a furniture mover, truck driver, house painter, and proofreader. He began writing fiction around 1989, and his first book, Shadow Boxer, was published in 1993. “I could not have a more perfect job for me than writer,” he says. “Other than not managing to voluntarily read a work of fiction until I was at university, this gig and I were made for each other. One might say I was a reluctant reader, which surely informs my work still.”
