"Goddamn it," I said.
"You want my gun?" Nick said.
"Nope."
"You want me to go in there with you?" he said.
"No. I'll handle it."
"What are you gonna do, kick his ass by yourself?"
"Sure," I said.
"Fuck that. You won't be able to, Mikey."
"Sure I will."
"Let me come in there with you," he said.
"Nick, mind your own fucking business, okay? I can handle this."
"Fine," he said. "I gotta get to work anyway. I said I'd cover an extra shift today. It's Paczki Day. We'll be busy."
I was left in the driveway, scared about going into my own house.
"THERE HE IS," Burt said. "We were worried about you around here."
There was nobody else in the room.
"Your mother's still sleeping," he whispered. "She had a bit too much to drink last night."
I stared at him and then shrugged.
"I guess we all did, eh?" he said.
"Not me," I said. I had a watery feeling in my gut. My arm muscles were starting to twitch from lack of sleep.
"Well, that's good," he said, "since you're not even twenty-one yet."
He was wearing gray sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt. His forearms were thick and long, like a couple of logs.
"What do you think, Michael? Is it time to wake up your mother?"
"I don't care," I said.
"How about your brother? When does he need to leave for school?"
"He's got time to sleep," I said. "I gotta make his lunch."
Burt put out his cigarette in a Coke can that was on the edge of the TV table. I was still standing near the foyer in my coat, holding my backpack.
"You plan to stay here a while?" Burt said. He was standing up now, and he walked over to me. He was big. There was no way I could take him on, not by myself, not when I was this tired.
I went into the kitchen and took out the bread and peanut butter, and started working on Kolya's lunch. Usually it was my mother who did it, but I was trying to prove a point—with Burt Nelson around, she was slipping. When she woke up and saw that I had made my brother's lunch, she'd understand that.
"You know," Burt said, "I don't know what people told you, but I didn't hit your mother last night. We were having a fight, and I just grabbed her to calm her down."
"I don't care what you guys do," I said.
"Somebody told me that you were driving around looking for me," Burt said.
"You're lucky we didn't find you," I said.
He grabbed my arm as I was spreading jelly on bread. "Look, you and your little friends stay out of this," he said. "I'm not here for trouble, but I'll take it on if it comes."
I was trying to figure out if he was scared of my friends and me, or if he really was ready to fight us head-to-head. A glorious image came to my mind, of my fist in Burt Nelson's face.
I went to hit him with my free hand. He blocked me, and twisted my arm behind my back, then started wrenching on it.
"Say uncle," he said.
My arm burned. My face was hot. "Fuck, fuck you, okay, okay, uncle," I said. I was hoping Nick would burst in the door. Nick with his brass knuckles or a ball-peen hammer or a giant logger's chain swinging in a circle around his head.
"Say, 'I love you Uncle Burt,'" he said.
I said it and he let go and nudged me into the counter.
"You are a fucking pussy," he said and went back to the chair in the living room.
I went to my room and got into bed. An hour later, my alarm went off. I heard my mother and Burt talking in the kitchen. I heard my brother asking where his shoes were. I remembered what had happened, and put my pillow over my face. I tried to fall back asleep, but the adrenaline was pumping again. My veins felt heavy and my bladder was ready to pop. I sat up in bed.
"Fucking pussy," I said. I got up and took a shower.
BURT WAS NEW TO the area. He'd moved to Westland—a few suburbs west of us—after taking a job selling some sort of auto parts to the industry. He wore a suit to work. He had the too big, menacing quality of a Texas farm boy, and in fact had played linebacker at Oklahoma State. He was almost sixty now, the age where ex-jocks, about to be sent out to pasture by their employers, start getting nostalgic for their days of hard drinking and knocking heads.
Around my mom, he was sweet and smooth; he spoke in a forced drawl and had clean fingernails. He was nothing like the men of Maple Rock had been. On Friday nights, he'd come over and make a big pot of chili and a pan of corn bread. He painted the living room one weekend, and fixed my mother's car for her when the water pump exploded. He went on business trips and brought her things like snow globes and silk scarves, airport gifts. Once when he'd been in Atlanta, he brought Kolya a Braves batting helmet and a tomahawk. The only thing he ever gave to me was a copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue that he said he had found on the plane.
Before long he began to sour, like old milk. His temper flared up more and more, over less and less. If he saw my mom talking to our new neighbor, a tall, dark Yemeni man who owned the Dairy Mart on the corner, he'd get jealous. "Why you talking to some Arab all the time?" he'd say. "You got a thing for men on camels? When I go on the road, does he sleep in your bed?"
When he got laid off, he started spending most of his time at our house, drinking beer and eating the food my mom was paying for and watching our only television sixteen hours a day. I found out then that he hadn't had a place of his own. His company had been putting him up at a Guest Quarters motel, and now that he was out of work, there he was, in the middle of our lives.
I know loneliness sends us into dark places. I know the day-to-day sadness most of us have to battle on a regular basis sometimes makes us be with people we normally wouldn't choose. I know all that now, but I didn't know it then. I just knew that my mother had disappointed me. In those years, she had a few boyfriends like Burt Nelson. I never stood up to any of them, and maybe that was not my role, maybe the son is not meant to defend the mother, maybe I am naive to believe that my mother even needed my protection. She was older and wiser than me, she'd been through some things. But a flame of failure still burned in my guts anytime somebody like Burt Nelson would walk through our door.
WHEN I CAME OUT OF the shower, my mother had made eggs and bacon, which she never did before Burt came to live with us. Now it was eggs and bacon every goddamn morning. She looked tired. She would run around filling up coffee cups and orange juice glasses like she was waiting tables in Mel's Diner. She was working as a receptionist for a security company, dispatching mall cops and monitoring a panel of burglar alarms.
Kolya was at the kitchen table, buttering toast. Burt was mashing on a banana like a gorilla. I got myself some coffee, the last of it. It was burned and tasted like ashes. I added cream and sugar. Burt said, "Drink it black, it puts hair on your chest."
My mother flipped the eggs.
"You hungry, Michael?" she said.
"Nope."
"Thanks for making your brother's lunch," she said.
I looked at Kolya. He still had a pretty good shiner from a fight he had gotten in at school a few days ago. He was a smart kid, knew all the state capitals, could do long division in his sleep, won the sixth-grade spelling bee. But he was getting in trouble all day long, every day.
"Your eye's looking better," I said.
"I know," Kolya said. "Burt showed me how to punch yesterday."
"He's got to learn to defend himself," Burt said. "Every boy needs to know how to throw a decent punch by the time he is twelve."
"I don't want you fighting, Kolya," my mother said, setting eggs and bacon on the table. She was in one of the three business suits she had charged at Winkleman's when she started this new job. She had bought three colors—red, black, and charcoal gray—that she could interchange a bit, so it looked like she had more clothes than she did. Today, she was in the red blazer and the black skirt. She looked pretty. She looked too c
lassy for a guy like Burt, who was sitting across from me in a flannel robe, his thinning hair smashed up on one side of his head.
"I could've taught you how to throw a punch," I said.
"He already knows how to punch like a girl," Burt said.
Kolya and Burt looked at each other and laughed.
"Burt," my mother said.
Burt shoveled eggs into his mouth, then folded a strip of bacon in on top of them. He really was a goddamn ape, in spite of those hairless, clean hands.
"Kolya," I said. "You want me to walk you to school?"
"Yeah," he said. "I'm almost done."
I went into my bedroom and got my backpack. I hadn't done all the reading I was supposed to do for class. I was a few weeks into my first semester. I was taking a few journalism courses, a literature class, and something called Great Films of American Cinema. It was supposed to be an easy class, but I was blowing it. The movies seemed destined to fuck me over. I was going to have to fight tooth and nail for a C minus. My first paper came back with a D on it, and the professor had written "Lacks sufficient understanding of film theory" on the back and nothing else.
I had signed up to work on the school newspaper too, and had written exactly one article for it about the problem of Canada geese shitting all over the school grounds, mucking up the park and the soccer fields. The headline read LOOK WHAT'S HITTING THE FAN ON CAMPUS. My mother was so proud to see my byline that she hung the article on the fridge, and there it was every morning when I got out the milk.
KOLYA HADN'T COMBED his hair, and it was sticking up everywhere. I was trying to smooth it down for him as we walked to school.
"You don't want the girls to think you're an asshole," I said.
"I hate girls."
"You won't forever, but if they think of you as the kind of kid who doesn't comb his hair now, you'll never live it down," I said. "Once an asshole, always an asshole. Look at Burt."
"Burt can punch holes in the wall. He did it in the garage."
I hadn't known that the new hole in the garage had appeared courtesy of Burt's temper.
"Ah, that's an optical illusion," I said.
He nodded and picked his nose.
"Don't pick your nose, either," I said. "You should have your hat and gloves on anyway."
"You should," he said.
We were walking down the sidewalk, between mounds of blackened snow. Everything felt dusted with icy grit. Kolya, skinny and small as he was, must have been freezing. All I had on was a denim jacket and a black hooded sweatshirt and I was cold. My Carhartt had been stolen at the Black Lantern last week. I suspected Tom Slowinski had taken it back. At least Kolya was wearing his boots and a real winter coat.
"So who is this kid who hit you?" I said.
"Larry DeSoto," he said. "He's in eighth grade."
"Why is an eighth grader hitting you?"
"I told him to go fuck himself."
"Why did you say that?" I said. "Even Nick wouldn't say that kind of thing to a bigger guy."
That was a lie. That's exactly the kind of thing Nick would have done. Maybe Nick could have used a little of Kolya's Ritalin.
"He beat up my friend Jason," Kolya said. "Someone had to do something."
"Why you?"
"I don't know. I was mad."
"Be more careful," I said.
I didn't have much to say to him. I was getting too old to worry about a twelve-year-old kid all the time. He'd learn the lessons the way I did, except he wouldn't have Nick to bail him out all the time, the way I did all through school.
"You need to make friends with somebody bigger and meaner than you."
He shrugged. We were at the front door of the school. I remembered walking through the same front door when I was a kid, and I remembered how low my stomach would sink and how some days I could barely get up the long, gritty staircase without crying.
"Hey," I said. "Be good today."
"Okay," Kolya said. He kicked the bike racks and then gave me a big smile. "Another day in the old salt mines," he said.
"Where did you learn that?"
"Burt," he said.
"Fuck him. Don't say anything he says. Ever. Now get to class," I said. The bell started ringing.
"Oh, fuck," Kolya said and ran down the hall.
THEY HAD PUT KOLYA on Ritalin a year ago, when he'd first started having trouble in school. In the middle of a spelling test, he went to the window and threw his workbook down to the playground below. Another time, he bit a girl's knee. He used foul language like a prepubescent Richard Pryor, with skill and flawless timing. He broke into the milk machine. And once, during an assembly, he tried to set his own hair on fire with a lighter he had found during recess.
On Ritalin, he had trouble eating. He was listless and lifeless, and he spent a lot of his time sleeping in front of a blaring television, his smooth white face lit green by the glow of frantic, flashing cartoons.
One night Nick and I stole a few of Kolya's pills, smashed them up with a spoon, and snorted them off the kitchen table. We went for a walk, barefoot, and had the idea of walking across the Ambassador Bridge to Canada, almost twenty miles away. We never made it. A cop found us on Michigan Avenue and brought us home.
AFTER I DROPPED OFF KOLYA, I had twenty minutes to get to my class, but I was willing to be late. Something about the great films of American cinema didn't have me all juiced up that morning. I wandered over to the doughnut shop where Nick was already working his first shift. Tom was there, drinking coffee. He did construction work on the new developments out on the edges of Maple Rock. Everyone was saying all the construction would make our houses more valuable and clean up our streets.
"I hear you wussed out of a fight last night," Tom said.
"I did not," I said. "I was tired and drunk."
"What's a matter?" Tom said. "You forget to take your Midol?"
"Why is that funny?" I said to Nick. "Why is this asshole here trying to be funny?"
Nick set coffee and a jelly doughnut on the counter in front of me. He shrugged. "It's not funny," Nick said. "But Tom's a Polack. He doesn't know better."
Tom was actually three-quarters Ukrainian, but his paternal grandfather was Polish and so Tom ended up with a Polish last name. Nick and I never let him forget it.
The to-go counter was swamped. All three of the brothers—Ray, Mario, and Joey—were running around filling up bags and boxes with doughnuts. Ray whistled over at Nick. "Nick! Counter! Now!"
We watched Nick step up to the counter. Tom and I looked at each other and smiled. We had never seen anybody give Nick an order before.
"Why do people always say Polacks are dumb? We invented Paczki Day, didn't we?"
Paczki Day is a Detroit holiday that falls on the Tuesday before Lent. It meant that all the Catholics in Detroit would gorge themselves on jelly doughnuts. Polish immigrants brought the tradition to Detroit years ago. But eventually all the Catholics—the Irish, the Italians, the Ukrainians—picked up on it. When we were kids, we'd even get doughnuts in school.
"What's so smart about a holiday when all you do is eat doughnuts until you're sick? No, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, that's the stuff. That's a holiday to have before Lent. I just read about it."
"You read too much," Tom said.
"People around Detroit are too busy working shit jobs to have real Mardi Gras," I said. "They came up with all of this shit about doughnuts so they could celebrate Fat Tuesday on their way to work in the morning."
"Shut up," Tom said.
"Plus, it's too damn cold for a parade or anything here. I'm starting to think New Orleans is the place to go when I get out of here," I said.
"What's so great about it?"
"It's not here," I said.
"What do they do at Mardi Gras?" Tom asked. He picked up another doughnut and shoved half of it in his mouth.
"It's all about getting drunk. Chicks run around showing their tits. Everybody fucks everybody."
"That's not t
rue," he said.
"How many fucking doughnuts you going to eat?" I said.
"I like them. They have a calming effect, you know. In hospitals, they give them to people with ulcers, or ladies about to give birth, or even people who have had strokes."
"You're not only a dumb Polack, Tom," I said, "you're the dumbest Polack who ever lived."
"Hey, Mikey, I know what you can give up for Lent," Tom said. "You can give up being such a fucking pussy."
And with that, he grabbed a fourth doughnut and walked out of the door.
PROFESSOR HOWARD showed up for class with a box of jelly doughnuts and went off on how Paczki Day was such a hoot that he couldn't resist. He was originally from Manhattan, as he never failed to mention.
"Is anyone here from out of state?" he asked.
Where the fuck did he think he was? Yale? No hands went up. Then he asked how many of us knew about Paczki Day, and all of us raised our hands. He looked dismayed. He was set to teach us something about our history, and we already knew it. Most of us had doughnut grease sliding around in our guts.
So instead he gave a pop quiz that I failed because I had forgotten to attend the previous night's film screening.
I STOPPED BACK HOME for lunch. My mother was there, but before I said anything I looked around the place for the gorilla. He was gone.
"You're done with class?" my mother said.
I nodded.
"Here," she said. "I called in sick today. Let me make you some lunch. You want a BLT? There's some bacon left from this morning."
"No, I don't feel like eating," I said.
"You're sick too?"
"Just tired."
"I got you a present today," she said. "Maybe that will cheer you up."
"Why?"
She said she knew how hard it'd been for me lately. She promised Burt would be going back to Alabama soon. She said that with men like Burt, you can't really kick them out. You have to let them leave on their own terms or they'll never really go away.
She slid a package wrapped in gold foil paper across the table.
I opened the package. It was a book. The Best American Short Stories 1993.
Please Don't Come Back from the Moon Page 5
