Bystanders

by Tara Laskowski

  “My dad pissed on the newspaper,” Jack said, swigging the rest of his shot without really meaning to. “So I said screw this.”

  Her eyes got wide, but she didn’t ask anything. He felt bad saying anything about it at all. The whole thing left a sour taste in him, and he regretted not leaving it behind like he’d told himself to in the car. That crazy laughter, right out of a horror movie, bouncing around those bare walls as Jack just turned and left like a scared child.

  Pussy. That had been his dad’s parting word for him.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “You know. Too bored to even kill myself.”

  Sophie turned to talk with her friend Dotty, who was an investigative reporter for the paper. They were scanning the bar, talking about guys. Sophie was laughing, but she seemed sad. He recognized the loneliness—it was something he was good at.

  He looked away from her and realized he was crammed in the middle of a group of people with no one to talk to. He lit a cigarette for something to do.

  The guys across from him leaned forward to tell their loud stories, and Jack had a sudden view across the bar to the back doors. He caught sight of a guy standing near them, hands in his pockets, surveying the room. He was short and stocky—when had the Treadway gotten bouncers?—but then the guy turned and something about his profile seemed familiar. Jack knew him, but he couldn’t place him. Then Shemanski sat up, laughing at something and blowing smoke into the air above, and Jack’s view was blocked.

  “The toads, that’s what they are,” Shemanski said. “Like little warty people, squatting in this filthy house.” He was talking about a murder he was covering—and by covering, that meant listening mostly to radio reports about the case and working his few contacts, since it was too dangerous for him to show up at the courthouse. Jack was trying to rejoin the conversation, but he felt very far away.

  “What?” he asked, trying to focus.

  “The family. They’re all nasty, curled into one another. I thought they were going to spit at someone. You might wonder how a son could kill his mother, but spend five minutes with these people and you get it.”

  “Family can be the most brutal to each other, man,” Jones said. “Feuds. Not surprising.”

  “It’s really not surprising,” Jack said, thinking of his dad. That dark trail of piss on the cold concrete. “And you can’t choose your family.”

  The booth broke up. Some of the guys went to play pool on the coin table. Sophie and Dotty had taken posts at the bar chatting up two guys in suits that looked like they worked at a waterbed store. Jack slid out to refill his drink. It took him a while to even get to the bar. He ordered another scotch and took it to the bathroom.

  Jack was washing his hands when he saw the bouncer-looking guy behind him in the mirror. The guy looked like a bull, his shoulders rounded forward like he was about to pounce. He knew him, that was for sure, but he still couldn’t figure out from where. One of the picketers? Jack felt uneasy, thought about his picture and the knife. About Dotty getting harassed while in line at the bank to cash her check. About the picketers blocking the entrance to the building with their umbrellas. And that eternal burning barrel outside, the flames licking the dark at night.

  Jack turned, dried his hands. The guy was blocking the door, and it wasn’t until Jack was almost on top of him that he took a small step to the side. Jack swore the guy jabbed his shoulder out at him as he passed. A warning? Or was Jack just being paranoid?

  Back in the bar, he ran into Shemanski. “Hey man, we’re heading out. Sophie’s guy showed up with some bunny, and she’s buggin’ out. You drove though, right?”

  Jack nodded, was about to ask him about the bull man, and then didn’t.

  Sophie was right behind Shemanski, staring at something. He followed her gaze to a couple sitting at the bar, and he recognized her boyfriend right away. The boyfriend leaned in, whispered in the woman’s ear, and took a suck on his cigarette.

  Sophie looked at Jack. She opened her mouth a little, forming an ‘o,’ but before she could say anything he reached out and grabbed her arm. “You ready to go?”

  The rain had picked up again. Shemanski, Sophie, and Jack gathered under the little awning outside the bar to say goodnight.

  “You all right to drive?” Shemanski was looking at him with crinkled eyebrows. “Too much of that shitty scotch?”

  “I’m cool.”

  Shemanski turned to Sophie. “You need a ride?” She looked quickly at Jack and he wondered if he should offer to drive her home. If that’s what she wanted. But before he could decide, Sophie nodded at Shemanski. “That would be great,” and the moment passed.

  “See you guys Monday.” Jack walked quickly across the parking lot as their laughter bounced off the asphalt and got dimmer. He was almost to his car when a shadow flickered across the parking space in front of him. He had barely enough time to register movement behind a large hedge lining the lot when he felt something heavy shove into his side. He heard the grunt of the words “fucking scab” and twisted on instinct. Whoever had lunged at him lost their balance and fell forward onto the roof of a parked car. The guy had been swinging a stack of newspapers—the heavy thing Jack had felt—and the pile burst open from their plastic band and scattered across the parking lot. The man rolled over and Jack recognized his face from the bar, those bullish shoulders rounded to charge again.

  “Who are you?” Jack yelled, but the guy came at him again, swinging a fist. Jack ducked again, but this time the guy grabbed him around the chest and they both skidded on the newspapers and fell into the hedge. Short, prickly branches cut into Jack’s face and arms as he tried to regain his balance. He rolled out, fell into the parking lot. The rain made it hard to see but the man was down again and Jack took that moment to kick him hard in the stomach.

  “What the fuck, man?” The guy gasped, curling into a ball.

  “You tell me what the fuck,” Jack said, kicking him again.

  “You know how many jobs you’re taking away from people?” he spat up at Jack. “I hope you all die.”

  A car’s headlights cut across the dimness. Jack looked up but all he could see were the raindrops pounding down in the light. Then the car swung around and stopped and Shemanski got out, running toward him.

  Shemanski pushed Jack away and grabbed the guy’s arm, pulling him up. For a moment, it looked like Shemanski was going to help the guy out, but as soon as bull man steadied on his feet, Shemanski pulled back and punched the guy in the jaw. “Asshole,” he yelled at him. Then he turned to Jack. “You all right?”

  Then Sophie was out of the car as well, in his face, looking at his cheek. “You got cut, I think. Let me see.”

  Jack shook them off. He could feel the blood pounding in his neck. “I’m fine, it’s fine.” He backed up, caught his breath. “Really.”

  Jack gathered up as many of the newspapers he could and threw them in his car. He could see they were tomorrow’s run, fresh off the press, with spray paint all over the front.

  “Do you want me to go inside and call the cops?” Sophie asked Shemanski.

  “No, Christ. Don’t do that.” Jack said.

  “Burn in hell. I don’t care what you do to me,” the bull man on the ground growled. “Go ahead. You’ve already ruined enough lives anyway. Why not one more?”

  “Shut up,” Shemanski said, kicking at him.

  Jack’s head was pounding. He backed up, gasped for air. The rain had let up into a mist, and the road looked like a slick river of oil. He snatched up the rest of the papers, hurling them into his back seat.

  “Jack, what are you doing? Jack?” Sophie put her hands on his arms, trying to get in front of him. “Please stop.”

  He shook his head. He walked past her and got into his car. Before he could start the ignition, Sophie had flung open the passenger door and slid inside
. He was too tired to argue, so he just peeled away with a loud screech.

  ***

  He was driving too fast, feeling impatient with every car he met on the highway.

  Fight back, fight dirty, Jack’s dad was fond of saying. When Jack was in the third grade and Thomas McCaskey was stealing his lunch, Jack’s dad tried to teach him how to fight. Keep your thumb outside your fist when you punch someone. Go for the balls or the eyes. Jack remembered fantasizing about stabbing McCaskey in the eyes, but when McCaskey came up behind him at recess and pushed him, skidding his elbows into the concrete, Jack did nothing. For weeks after, as his cuts healed, McCaskey would find ways to corner Jack, holding him down and scraping off the scabs until they bled again.

  He thought of his dad and his uncles again, those menacing laughs. He wanted to rip off their scabs, dig into their old scars. Show them how it felt.

  “Where did he get all those papers anyway?”

  He’d almost forgotten Sophie was there. “A rack? I don’t know why they keep putting them out.”

  She shook her head. He could see her eyes were shiny, but he didn’t know if she was crying or angry. “I just can’t believe this. They’re all monsters.”

  Monsters. His dad used to play a game with him when Jack was little—chasing him around his bedroom, hiding behind the door and popping out. “More monster, more monster,” Jack would beg, and his father would turn from reading the newspaper and contort his face, curving his hands into claws and roaring, much to Jack’s delight.

  Of course, he didn’t really remember any of this. It was a story his mom and dad liked to tell, one they all laughed at. There was another story, too, one they didn’t tell, one Jack never told either—a different kind of monster, his dad, this time when Jack was older and didn’t find it funny anymore. His father, waiting for him in the darkness of the porch to come home one night and jumping out to scare him. Leaving dead fish in his boots if Jack forgot to put them in the closet. Making Jack dig a three-foot hole in the middle of the backyard to bury the pack of cigarettes he’d found under his bed.

  Even before he realized where he was going, Jack had turned onto River Street, toward the suburbs. He traveled through the neighborhood he’d grown up in, each house in varying degrees of wear and tear, nearly every street dotted with a tiny beer garden for the locals, one of which his father might be sitting in right then, feet tucked under the stool.

  “Where are we going?” Sophie’s voice came quietly out of the dark.

  “Nowhere,” he answered. His parents’ house was dark like all the other houses on the block. As he thought, his father’s car was gone. Jack pulled up right in front.

  Fancy foreigners, think they know everything.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said to Sophie.

  “What are you doing?” she asked as he opened the back door and pulled out wads of newspapers, but the rain drove out anything else she said.

  He thought the wind might make his task more difficult, but as he lined his father’s yard with the newspaper pages, the rain took care of it. He was making a sort of patchwork quilt, piece by piece, across the front lawn. He imagined his father waking up the next morning to soggy pieces of newspaper caking the entire yard, and how that would feel, how that was like one giant pissing on something you care about. After a while, he became aware of Sophie behind him, and he tried to ignore her, not wanting her to try to talk him out of it. He knew how he must look. But then he turned and saw she had some stacks of her own, that she was helping him. “You’ll be soaked through at this rate,” she yelled over the rain. “I thought you could use some help.”

  He didn’t know how long it took. After a while it became a kind of game, he and Sophie working fast, even laughing as they backed into each other trying to cover all angles of the yard. Toward the end, the newspapers were beginning to dwindle, so they didn’t cover every inch of it, but almost. In the dark, the dogwood tree in the middle of the lawn looked like it was growing through a lumpy, gray sand trap, the pulp from the wet pages disintegrating.

  Back in the car, Sophie shook out her wet hair, spraying the windows. She shivered, turning the car’s heating vents toward her. “And I thought I was nuts,” she said, which made Jack laugh.

  “It’s my dad,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

  “Yeah. Pissing. Right on.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was chiding him, and he felt a rush of guilt. “It’s just, I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “Don’t worry, Jack,” she said, leaning in. “I get it. Now, can we go somewhere dry?”

  ***

  She didn’t want to go home. Neither did he, but it was either that or drive around all night in the rain. His place was damp again, and he switched on the heater and turned on the lights.

  “Sorry about this. Wasn’t expecting company,” he said, picking up an abandoned plate of egg sandwich from the night before.

  She laughed. “Do you actually live here, Jack?”

  “It’s only been a month. Give me a break.”

  “I’m just kidding.” She collapsed on his couch, hugging her knees to her chest.

  “Do you want a sweater or something?”

  She looked slightly dazed. “How about a shower? Do you mind?”

  When she was in the bathroom, he changed into a dry shirt and went into the kitchen to pop an aspirin. His head was pounding. It felt like years since he’d been at the party talking to his mother and aunt. His hands were stained with newspaper ink, and though he washed them with dish soap, they still looked purple.

  Something was bothering him about it all. The glee he’d felt back there on the lawn, getting even, was fading and now, instead of his dad, he kept seeing his mom waking up in the morning and looking outside to find what he’d done. Casualties of war, his uncles would probably say.

  And here was Sophie in his apartment, in his shower. What did that mean? He didn’t want it to be complicated. He was tired of complicated. All he wanted to do was nuzzle his face in her hair and lie down on the couch with her, a warm body. He wanted to sleep for a very long time.

  She came out of the bathroom then, wrapped in his bathrobe and combing out her hair. She grinned at him. “My word, I could use a drink after all that. Got anything good?”

  Jack didn’t feel like drinking anymore, but he poured them both scotches and sat across from her. Sophie took a sip, closing her eyes and leaning back. Her neck looked very white. “God that felt good.”

  “The shower?”

  She giggled. “No, silly. I mean, yes, that, too.” She wiggled her toes into the space between the cushions. “After all the shit these jerks put us through….” She didn’t finish her thought.

  “I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been hit by a cement mixer.”

  “Oh, you poor thing.” She got up and settled down next to Jack, rested her glass on his knee, and smiled up at him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even ask how you were.” She gently touched his face, pressed hers close to his. “Are you still bleeding?”

  His soap smelled good on her, and the warmth of her skin made him even more tired. “I’ll live.”

  “Fuck that guy.”

  “Yeah, fuck him,” Jack said, grinning.

  “I hope Shemanski killed him.” She took a sip and held her glass up high. “Fuck my boyfriend, too.”

  Jack nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “That girl he was with—did you see her? Wonder how much he paid her, anyway. God, I hate him.” She tipped back the rest of her glass, fired up now, drinking too fast.

  “I never liked him myself.”

  She smirked, got up, and poured herself another scotch. “Of course you didn’t.” She kneeled next to the television. “You mind?” she asked, and then flicked it on, turning to the late show. She settled back down next to Jack and lay her head down in his lap.r />
  Jack hesitated, put his hand on her shoulder. She burrowed closer, murmuring, then turned up to look at him. “Fuck your dad, worst of all.”

  “Whoa,” Jack said. “Worst of all?”

  “Yeah, worst of all. What kind of dad does that to his own son? And after all you’ve done? All you’ve accomplished? He should be proud of you.” Her words were clipped. “Worst of all.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, I do. He should be bragging to people about you, not pissing on you. Fuck him.” She’d turned back to the TV, her voice quieter but still angry. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out he sent that guy to the bar tonight.”

  “My dad wouldn’t do that.”

  “You never know what people will do, Jack.” She yawned. They sat in silence for a long time while on the television some comedian cracked jokes about things that Jack didn’t find very funny. After awhile, Jack looked down and saw Sophie had fallen asleep, the light from the TV flickering dark shadows across her face.

  He shifted out from under her. It hadn’t been that comfortable anyway. During the next commercial, he got up from the couch. Sophie stirred, looked up at him, and smiled. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be right back,” he whispered.

  “Soon,” she murmured and turned on her side. He wondered what she would think when she heard his front door close. If she heard it at all.

  ***

  When Jack got to his parents’ house, the papers were thoroughly wet, some already dissolving into something else. Jack started from the beginning, picking up the pages as best he could, shoving them into a plastic bag from his car. Jack sneezed and felt a tired ache run through his body. He was coming down with something, all the damn rain and dampness. He imagined what he must look like for any of the neighbors who happened to glance out their windows to see him, all bent over and tired, coughing, out of breath. Cold. The same way he’d imagined his dad raking it all up tomorrow morning.

  What Jack could never tell his dad, even now: What it is, is: when the dirty deed is done, you still have to look at yourself in the mirror.