Mick

by Chris Lynch

  “You’re a good boy, Michael, so I know you didn’t start it. I hope you got the better of it.”

  I shrugged.

  “Try a piece of raw red meat,” she said, turning back to hanging her bloomers in the breeze.

  “I’ll try a piece of red meat,” I echoed, already walking.

  “Boy’s earnin’ his stripes,” Caughey called from his window, from where he watches every move on the street, every day, instead of working. The drapes didn’t even part when he talked, just ruffled a little bit.

  “Who gotcha, the spooks? The ricans?” said the guy they call Southside as he drove his wheelchair right into my path. He was always doing that, springing out from behind his wooden fence to surprise people walking by his house, like a bridge troll. “Here, have a pull, tell me about it,” he said, shoving a forty-ounce, brown-paper-wrapped can at me. “Didja kick ’em in the balls? Kick ’em in the balls, is whatcha should do.”

  I did hear a few disapproving tongue clicks, indicating not everyone thought this was great. And just before I got home, I heard Mrs. Healy moan from her porch, as her husband leaned over his fence to get a gander at me, “The poor mother, she’s just the sweetest creature on god’s green earth. She don’t deserve any more o’ this.”

  “Ah, yer makin’ too much outta this,” her old man said. “Boy’s cuttin’ his teeth, establishin’ hisself. You’re the spittin’ image a yer brother, kid, more like that crazy damn Terry every day.” He laughed.

  He thought it was a compliment.

  Instinctively, as if I was smacking a mosquito, I lunged out and snatched him by his loose-skinned fifty-five-year-old throat.

  “Stop that!” Mrs. Healy screamed, tripping as she hurried down the stairs, falling to her knees. Mr. Healy tried to pry my hands off but I had a vise grip on him. I was pulling him by the neck over his five-foot chain-link fence.

  Mrs. Healy had gotten to her feet, her knees all scraped, and was slapping my arms. “Let him go! Stop it! Let him go!”

  Mr. Healy was running out of fight, going purple and struggling less, when I turned to look in his wife’s face. Then I heard her. Then I stopped.

  Mrs. Healy wrapped her arms around her husband, hugging him, holding him up. I leaned into him, pointing, the tip of my index finger touching the tip of his needly nose. “Go to hell!” I screamed. I turned to go and saw a circle had gathered around me to watch. My neighbors.

  I walked around the circle, sticking my finger in every face. “And go to hell. And go to hell. And go to hell,” I said, to all the people who hadn’t done anything to me. Southside. “Go to hell.” Fat, flowered-dress Mrs. McMillan. “Go to hell.” The impossibly ratlike, pointy-headed, wide-hipped, ten-year-old Mason triplets with their filthy freckled faces and too small clothes. “And you go to hell.”

  When I reached the steps of my own house, I dropped. I sat there on the bottom step, my legs stretched out into the sidewalk in front of me. The numbness from my head had spread, wending its way down and through me. I felt nothing everywhere. Did I just strangle somebody? Did a lifelong friend just crack my skull open?

  Where was Sully? Who was Sully? How come he pulled out just before me and Toy got whacked?

  Toy? Jesus, Toy. Did Toy make it?

  The questions just rolled around in all that empty space way up there in my head. I couldn’t answer them, couldn’t get near them, couldn’t hold one thought long enough to figure it out.

  When I was in first grade I was out sick the day they took the class picture. They took my photo separately when I got better. The print came back a month later, an eight-by-ten, and everyone got one. There was everybody in my class huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, stacked in three rows. And there was me, a cutout, a small oval with my gap-toothed, crew-cut face, floating toward the upper right-hand corner, above and apart from the rest. The oval floating head.

  That was exactly, exactly, how I felt here again.

  Suddenly, Terry was standing in front of me, leering, taking me in in all my wonder, knowing everything by now of course.

  “Fall down, little boy?” he chuckled.

  I lifted my head. “I did,” I said, almost as if this was a real conversation. “I fell in the forest, but nobody heard.”

  “Gee, that’s a shame,” he said, giving my head a little sideways shove as he passed me on the stairs.

  “Well then, you did have a big day for yourself, didn’t you?” my nurse said with a little smirk.

  I had just explained to her what I knew about why I was there in the hospital with a concussion and a cracked sinus. It got harder for me to detail it, the further I got into the story, because things kept getting fuzzier. I remember little after seeing Terry on the porch. I think my father brought me in, yelling about what I did to the neighbors. That was the big thing, for the nurse—how I got myself all smashed up and choked a guy in completely isolated incidents on the same afternoon.

  “Have they got you on Ritalin yet?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll mention it to your doctor,” she said, winking.

  “Thank you.” I closed the bad eye so the good one could focus on her as she left. I was still trying to work it out when the nurse disappeared out the door and was replaced by...

  I rubbed my eye.

  She was replaced by...

  I took the pills the nurse left me.

  Evelyn. The Evelyn. My Evelyn. Heartless Devilyn Evelyn.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” I said.

  “I might be,” she answered. “Might be a hallucination. A medication thing. Or a conk-in-the-head thing. I wouldn’t trust it if I were you.”

  “I won’t,” I said. I rolled over, pulled up the covers, and pretended to ignore her even though my blood was gushing so hard I was afraid it would come out all my seams. Thirty seconds into it, I sprang up in the bed, exhaling as if I were breaching from under the sea.

  She remained motionless, leaning in the doorway, wearing a baseball cap. The blackness of her hair, the shiny satin of it, lay against the shock-white doorjamb, softening the room. “I heard the details,” she said. “I also heard a rumor you’re maybe not such an ass.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t say I believe it. Just that I heard I should come see for myself. So far I’m not seeing anything convincing.”

  “You’ve been talking to Toy. Is he all right? How is he? Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Did you see the guy or didn’t you?”

  “No,” she said, and stopped. She was going to make me work for this. She was going to make me be nice.

  “Please,” I said more respectfully. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Toy just called me up—which was strange to begin with, because he doesn’t do that—and asked me to come and have a look at you. Explained a little about the mission you were on when you prostrated yourself on my sidewalk, and then he said good-bye because the pay phone was clicking and he was out of change and after he hung up the operator was going to call him back and he was going to have to walk away with it ringing at him and he hated that.”

  “So where was he?”

  “I don’t know. He wasn’t in school today, either. But he said to tell you hi. He’s a weird guy. I like him a lot.”

  “He is,” I echoed, looking away from Evelyn to stare out my window at the other half of the sterile hospital building across the way. “And I do too.”

  The two of us sort of hung there silently for a while. I continued to stare out across the courtyard, looking hard to see if there was another me way over in one of the matching windows of the other wing, staring back to see me seeing him seeing me. I never did believe in that parallel universe business, but at the moment, I don’t know, it felt like it was there. Like I was out there, over there, or at least like part of me was.

  “Look, I have to be going,” Evelyn said, simultaneously bringing me back into
the room and wrenching my heart. It dawned on me that I was blowing it, the grand, heroic, lying-in-the-hospital moment that girls are supposed to be crazy for. I wanted to get her to stay but in lieu of words I hyperventilated.

  “You really were coming to my house, huh?” Her head was tilted way over to the side, still in disbelief.

  I nodded proudly, dumbly.

  “That’s awfully sweet. Stupid and completely divorced from reality, but sweet anyway,” she said, and reached into the bag slung over her shoulder. She pulled out two flowers. “I brought you a present, like you’re supposed to when you visit somebody in the hospital. I brought this one, the lily, in case you were dead when I got here. And the yellow carnation in case you were better.” She looked me over for a few seconds. Sighed a breathy sigh of indecision. “Here, take ’em both.”

  She placed the flowers on my chest, in front of my folded hands. Just like I really was a dead guy. She patted my hand and told me she’d see me around.

  It didn’t take much, did it? I smiled up at her like a baby, felt something warm and spikey expanding through my chest near where she touched me. Barely touched me. When she’d left, I quickly turned to try to catch a glimpse, a peek of the other guy just like me who, I was feeling sure now, was over there, staring out his window. I wanted to see how he looked now. But I couldn’t find him, so I turned back and grabbed the hand mirror off the wheeled tray table beside the bed. I was going to see this, this happiness thing, at its peak, to see what it looked like.

  That’s not what it’s supposed to look like, I know that much, I thought as I looked at my face. The part that’s supposed to be flattened out, between my nose and my cheekbone, was all swelled up, as if my nose were not growing out of a regular contoured face but just stuck onto a big bumpy round surface like Mr. Potato Head’s nose. My eye was half shut, the inside glistening with healthy shiny new blood, the outside black. A big letter C of slashes curved around from over my eyebrow, down along the side of my face, and hooking back in under the cheek. It did not, to me, look at all like me. I could not take my eyes off of it.

  I buzzed the nurse. “My head’s really hurting me bad now,” I said. Then I looked back down and watched myself, or whoever’s face that was, talk to her. “Could you get me something? I really need something.” I felt very sorry for the wreck I watched in there. I would definitely have given him something.

  “Well, you aren’t due for anything for another three hours. All I can give you in the meantime is a couple of Valium. You want them?”

  “I want them,” I said. I watched my face say it, and with every syllable, with every second, that face seemed further away from me, seemed less me. It wasn’t the first time I’d looked in a mirror and hadn’t recognized myself. But it was the first time I wasn’t sure the feeling would go away.

  I didn’t look at the nurse as she placed the tiny pills in my hand. There was something like a numbness, and like a supersensitivity in my palm at the same time as her nails lightly scratched it. The other painkillers were actually working just fine. She left. I took the Valium, sat back against the propped pillows, and stared some more.

  “One punch,” I marveled. “All this from one punch. Is my face that soft?”

  “You’re too damn soft for this,” my father said as he wrestled with the steering wheel. Terry let him have the truck to pick me up. I’d been released, after thirty-six hours and one visitor, with a bottle of pills and instructions not to operate heavy machinery, drink alcohol, or blow my nose.

  “You’re not the man your brother is, Mick, so maybe this fightin’ stuff all the time ain’t for you.”

  “Maybe it ain’t, Dad,” I said, smiling out the passenger window. “’Cause I sure ain’t the man my brother is.”

  “And I promised old Healy you’d apologize for stranglin’ him, so you will. I explained to everybody that you was mental from gettin’ beat up, so while you still ain’t none too popular with the neighbors, nobody’s pressin’ charges.”

  It was true that I was mental. It was also true that I was sorry for choking old Healy—but only because it made me look even more like Terry. But it was also true that if Healy told me today that I was just like Terry I’d probably choke him again.

  “Okay, thank you,” I said, because right now I simply wanted to get along. I was humming along fine. My painkillers were killing my pains. I’d just had a little vacation from everybody. And I was under medical orders to do nothing but lie on my back for the rest of the week. I wasn’t happy, exactly, but I wasn’t not happy either, which was good.

  It was supper time when we got home. I popped a pill before walking in. Already seated at the table were Ma, Terry... and Sully. In the middle of it all was a meatloaf that I could tell from the doorway was about eighty-five percent Bell’s meatloaf mix, with a lit candle in the middle of it.

  “Welcome home, sweetheart,” Ma said, a little teary, a little tipsy.

  “How come you didn’t come and see me?” I asked before taking another step inside. I hadn’t planned that question, didn’t realize it was even in there inside me. It just blipped out when I laid eyes on her.

  “Well... well, your father had to work late... and early... and I couldn’t get anybody to take me... the visiting hours over at that crazy hospital... I tried, god, did I try to get over there. ...”

  “Okay,” I said. She only leaves the house when my father takes her. I blew out my candle, got instantly dizzy, and slumped into my seat.

  Terry got up, took the keys from Dad, and left. He was only waiting for his truck.

  Dad sat down with his rack of beers, and helped himself to six or seven slabs of loaf and a big ladleful of water-logged diced carrots, all perfect little orange squares. Ma served me, but I didn’t look down at the food. She served Sul, and he dug right in. He hadn’t even spoken to me yet, the rat. I watched him chomp his first few bites. He could feel me watching him, I knew.

  The meal went on in perfect, typical, blissful silence until I broke it up.

  “Please excuse us,” I said, kicking out my chair and pulling Sully, still chewing, up out of his.

  “Oh, you don’t like it,” my mother pouted.

  “No, I like it just fine,” I said. “It’s just, you know how it is, that fine hospital food’s got me spoiled.”

  She nodded, relieved, humming her agreement with her mouth full. “Ummmm, ahh, that’s true. I had such a Salisbury steak the time I had the kidney stone out...”

  Sully wasn’t too happy, because he was hungry. But I’d make it up to him. I pulled a couple of beers from my father and headed off to my room. There I shoved a can into his hand, put some ancient, spacey Pink Floyd on the stereo, and whipped out my medicine.

  “Meds?” Sully said, wide-eyed and stupefied. “They sent you home with a whole bottle? Didn’t give them to your father? They left you to self-medicate?”

  I didn’t quite see the joke. “Ya, so what’s so amazing about that?”

  He laughed, pulled back. “Nothing. I just thought of something funny, that’s all. Has nothing to do with you.”

  “Good. Here,” I said, and stuck two pills in his hand.

  He looked in his hand, looked at me. I ate my pills and swallowed long on my beer. Pink Floyd swirled all around the room.

  “I feel funny,” Sully said. “This is weird, doing this kinda shit at home, with the old Mom and Pop gumming away on the meatloaf one room away.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So, it feels creepy, that’s all. It’s like inviting your parents to a circle jerk. I mean, it kinda spoils the atmosphere, y’know?”

  “Hell, what are you talkin’ about, you never did no circle jerkin’,” I said.

  Sully was indignant. “Sure I did. It was with the Boy Scouts. We were at a jamboree with this scoutmaster who was in the seminary over at St. John’s, and he’s playin’ his guitar, and we’re all sittin’ around the fire and he breaks into a round of ‘If you’re happy and you know it, pull your whang
—’”

  “You did not, you lying sack,” I cut in.

  “Okay, I didn’t. But I thought about it. And when I think about it and add my folks to the scene... brrrr... well, it’s totally blown, all right?” He stuck the pills back into my hand. “Here, knock yourself out.”

  I stashed them back in the bottle. We both polished off our beers, and when I heard my parents leave for the O’Asis, I went and got us more. We sat at the kitchen table.

  “Sully, what happened to Toy?” I asked in a way that let him know I wasn’t playing.

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging.

  “Did you know they were gonna be waiting for us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What the hell does that mean, you don’t know?”

  “I knew the when, all right. And I told you guys that. Your brother told me, and Augie told me, and Baba told me—they’re all tellin’ me at the same time, get the picture?—they told me when it might be a good time not to be with you guys. And then I risked my life tellin’ you and Toy. But you wanted to be brave.”

  Sully could say the word brave in a way that made you ashamed of it.

  “Coward.” I grabbed his beer away from him. “I ain’t drinkin’ with you.”

  He grabbed it back. “Bullshit. I was still there, wasn’t I? Right up to the last minute. I was ready to hang in there. You don’t know, Mick, I was standin’ there, tryin’ to be cool, hopin’ they were just bluffin’ and that they wouldn’t do it, but all the time, I was pissin’ myself. You know, that brave shit ain’t my bag.”

  I got cooler yet. “So then, where were you?”

  “Well... then, then Toy started with all that secrecy jazz, y’know, the Spanish. I didn’t know he was no Spaniel. You didn’t neither, don’t lie. And then, y’know, I didn’t know what to think. I was thinkin’, Well, who the hell is this guy, anyway? I don’t know jack shit about him. He’s hidin’ stuff from us and... who the hell knows what’s up with him? So I was pissed, maybe I’m not exactly sure why, but I was. And I figured, screw this, I ain’t gettin’ my head caved in for him. What would I have been fightin’ for, if I hung in there?”