Stay with Me

by Paul Griffin

  “You sure?”

  “Sorry.”

  I know I’m right, but I let it go. No need to embarrass the poor kid. “Nothing to be sorry about.”

  After a while he says, “They got good pizza in Boston. They put pineapple on it over there.”

  “I’m still eating here. You trying to make me sick?”

  “You got to try it. Serious. Off the hook.”

  “That’s like putting apples on a pizza.”

  “I don’t think I would like that,” he says.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  That short guard with the mustache, he’s watching me again. I make slit eyes at him, and this time he doesn’t look away. He nods once, like hey, and now I look away.

  They let us outside the tent for an hour to get the breeze that’s not here. Some play hoop in the half-light of the dome’s shadow. I follow the jets into the airport and try not to think about it all. Her. Boo. Larry. I’m getting less mad at him each day that slows by, and more mad at me. He must’ve had the sadness in him too, to do what he did. Where does that come from, what we did?

  Two kids shuffle past, big one in front, little in back to hold up big’s jeans, because we aren’t allowed to wear belts. They’re out of the glare now, the two, and I see the little kid in back is Boston. The big boy is Blue. I angle over. “You ain’t got to hold up his pants,” I say.

  “Yeah he do,” Blue says.

  I pull Boston away. His hand leaves Blue’s pants, and they fall. Everybody laughs all screechy. Except for Boston and Blue. Except for me.

  The hissing.

  Blue’s boys circle up on me and Boston. This other dude pinches Boston’s cheek. “Look at that peach fuzz on him. Mold on fruit. Head looks like left-back melon.”

  “Hands behind your backs,” comes deep and easy from behind me. The mustached guard points one index finger at Blue, the other at me. “Put ten feet between you.”

  Blue nods in my direction. “Punk made me drop my pants.”

  “You were playing slave master,” guard says. He points that Blue and his posse should peel off left.

  Boston breathes like he’s got the asthma. I nudge him and we split to the right.

  “Hold up,” guard says. Then, to Boston: “You all right?” Boston chews his lips.

  I catch myself imitating his posture, slumped shoulders, wilted spine. I been him, hitched up onto some bruiser’s pants and towed around like all God’s lameness.

  “Son, you don’t have to hold up anybody’s pants but your own,” guard says. “Don’t do it anymore. I’ll put in a word with the tent guards, make sure you’re all right. Go wait by the desk, watch TV with the nice lady guard there. I’ll be in shortly. Go on inside now. It’ll be all right.”

  Boston and me head for the right-side entrance till I hear, “You, wait.” Good dog training voice on him, this guard.

  “What is your interest in that boy?”

  “I got no interest in him,” I say.

  “You’re watching out for him. I see you.”

  “That’s a crime?”

  “Hey, look me in the eye. Now, why are you looking after that kid?”

  I shrug. “Guess he needs looking after.”

  The guard nods. He frowns, squints. “You know what’s going to happen to you if you keep playing defender? You let me worry about Boston there. No harm will come to him while I’m around.”

  “And when you ain’t?”

  Guard nods. “Look, watch out for yourself. No need to go looking for trouble.”

  “Not looking for anything at all.”

  “You’re looking to get yourself a buck-fifty or worse if you keep messing with that crew,” guard says. “For your information, a buck-fifty is—”

  “A hundrit fifty stitch cut or in other words, half a smiley.” Hundrit. Sound like my old man. “Look, man, this ain’t my first bid, all right? I ain’t afraid of nobody.”

  “You should be. You know who your biggest enemy is? You.” He jerks his chin like I should move along now, and I do.

  With school out, the tent TVs run all day into night, different channels and loud. I head to chapel. Guard escorts me down the long hall, past the men’s jail. Dark green jumpers, they wear. Violent offenders. Those boys got no problem tuning you up. I’ll be with them soon, when I turn eighteen. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then.

  Nice and quiet in the chapel. You can sleep pretty good for an hour or so without anybody messing with you. Regular old room with one-piece chairs and a sagging shelf on the front wall where they hang a cross or don’t, depending on which religion is using the room. “God comes to people in different ways,” the chapel trusty says with a smile.

  “Yeah huh? Sometimes he don’t come at all.”

  (Two days later, Friday, July 31, morning of the fiftieth day . . . )

  The third time I go to chapel, Boston tags along. “Mind?”

  “If you got to pray, you got to pray,” I say.

  He does, boy. Knows all the prayers by heart. Holy roller. Sings fine too.

  “You got a gift there,” I say.

  “We all do.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “When I’m singing, I feel everything is right.”

  “I used to forget all the bad stuff when I was with my dogs sometimes. Training them. I don’t know why.”

  “You don’t need to know why,” he says. “You just got to know training dogs is your gift.”

  “I never went to school for it or anything.”

  “Don’t matter. Just trying to do it. That’s all that matters.”

  “Boston, man? You’re a little crazy.”

  “You know that song ‘Amazing Grace’?”

  “My moms told me a slave trader wrote that one.”

  “Nah, serious?” he says. “I guess it don’t matter anyhow.”

  “Sure it matters.”

  “Did he quit trading and ask God’s forgiveness before he died? Because that’s what the song is about. You can do bad stuff, but if you’re sorry, you’re square with God.”

  “Nah, nah, man. You can’t take back the bad stuff just because you don’t want to go to hell.”

  “You can’t take it back, and you still owe your debt to folks you wronged, and you pay it with a full heart, but being sorry for it helps you pay back that debt. I learned that in Bible study.”

  “I’m not one for churching music anyhow,” I say.

  “I’m-a teach it to you.”

  “Nah, it’s all right.”

  But he’s already into the singing of it. Long, slow notes.

  That night, after lights-out, I play the song in my mind to block out the snickering from the dudes around me, and I dream of Céce and Boo . . .

  We’re at the west side shore with Boo at sunset. An old man and old lady are scanning the low-tide silt with their electric wands. “They’re always here,” I say.

  “That’s us in sixty years,” she says.

  “Fine by me.” I scratch Boo’s neck, and she buries her head under my arm.

  (The next afternoon, Saturday, August 1, the fifty-first day . . .)

  I’m just getting to know him, and Boston gets released, of course. He gives me a paper scrap with his number on it. “That’s my moms’s house. For when you get out. You can come live with us. She’s a little mean, but she cooks pretty good.”

  “I’m not getting out anytime soon, man.”

  “I guess I knew that,” he says.

  He nods, I nod. “Well, good luck,” I say.

  “Yo Mack,” Boston says. “Thanks.”

  “You better get along now. That nosy guard’s waving you to the desk.”

  “Call me sometime,” he says. “I would like to know you’re doing all right.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me, tell you what.”

  “Call me just the same,” he says.

  “You bet.”

  We both know I’ll never call.

  Blue and his pals catcall a
s Boston goes, and then they turn to me like they haven’t eaten in a week and I’m the last chicken wing in the bucket.

  The guard who always watches me is off tonight. I go to the preacher’s sermon. As she leaves, I say, “Ma’am, if you happen to have an extra Bible on you, I would be grateful.”

  “Child, take mine,” she says.

  I hold it close to my heart, and as I turn I slip the little hardback book into my jeans where they bag.

  (The next morning, Sunday, August 2, the fifty-second day . . .)

  At breakfast I ask for extra pats of butter.

  “How many, baby?” says the woman who doles the food.

  “Many as you can spare, ma’am. You all bake the most delicious rolls. Man can survive on bread alone, if it’s yours.”

  “You’re too cute for your own good.” She loads me up.

  I’m eating. Blue and his gang sit at my table, real tight on me, shoulder to shoulder. Bad shine working their eyes, open too wide. “Need somebody to hold up my pants,” Blue says.

  I swing not at him but his boy. I slash across the inside of the elbow, where the blood is rich. Last night I rubbed the Bible cover on the cement floor and ground it down to a knife edge.

  For just a second, Blue is stunned at the sight of so much blood, but a second is all I need. I slam his head onto the edge of the table. It makes a bock sound. I slam it down again, but by now I only hear the hissing.

  The others are trying to snatch me, but my arms are slick with butter. They can’t stop me. I can’t stop me.

  The guards are on me with the stun shield. I’m swallowing a wasp hive. A guard flattens me. “You are one greasy child.”

  A bright blink of daylight whitens everything out. I’m losing myself even, in the swirl of screaming guards, howling kids, flying food, trays pounding tables, everything dimming, getting far, far away.

  Maybe Céce’s right. Maybe I am smart after all. Smart about stuff like surviving anyway, for whatever that’s worth. I’m going to solitary for sure now, and I’ll be safe for a while. I wonder what the intake folks did with that peace medal Tony gave me.

  (Sunday, August 2, night)

  CÉCE:

  The Too is dead in August. Vic gives us the night off. Ma braids, unbraids, and rebraids my hair. We’re both not watching whatever’s on TV. She’s regular Bud tonight, I’m hanging with my friend Sara Lee, I forget how many slices, but I had to unbutton my shorts. I’m washing it down with Slim-Fast. I have about a billion cans left over, because I was all about getting myself a bangin’ new body for my supposed boyfriend.

  The test is in a few days. I have my study guide in my lap. I’m not looking at it. I’m not looking at anything really. I say what I’ve been thinking every few minutes since he went away: “I don’t get it. What did I do?”

  Ma says what she’s been saying: nothing. She pretends she isn’t about to cry. She pretends to smile. The woman refuses to acknowledge the reality that is perfectly obvious to me and everybody else I know:

  Everything.

  Fucking.

  Sucks.

  “Bet he calls in the next five minutes.” She’s talking about Anthony. Sunday is our one shot at contact with him. Sometimes his sergeant gives them call time, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s 9:48 p.m. Lights-out for him is 10:00 p.m. He still doesn’t know about Mack. I should write him about it. No, I shouldn’t. Writing them takes longer than speaking them, these words I don’t want to hear myself say: Mack’s gone. He brutally ended the life of another human being. Yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but Mack didn’t hit him just once. He kept clubbing the victim after he was dead, according to all accounts.

  I’m trying to understand how he could do this, but I can’t. I say that I would have clawed Larry blind, but I wouldn’t have. If I was the one who found Boo, I would have just fainted. Am I that much of a coward?

  I think so. I know myself. Yes, I’m that much of a coward.

  We’re at the extremes, Mack and I. I’m forever running from conflict and he’s trapped in it. He’d warned me he could wreck someone, but I never could have pictured this. How can someone so destructive be so creative, the way he was with those dogs, with my Boo? That’s the real Mack. That’s the one I still can’t live without. I have to ask him what happened. I have to know what he was thinking. To help him not think that way anymore. I have to talk with him.

  Carmella rubs her temples as she stares at the phone. “Working my ESP,” she says. “The phone’s gonna ring right ... now. No, okay, wait, right ... now.”

  “Ma? The ESP? That’s my thing. You’re supposed to play the skeptic on that one. It’s the one time you’re actually negative about something. Let’s not lose that.”

  The war report comes on.

  “Change the channel,” Ma says.

  The TV reporter interviews a friend of one of the dead soldiers, a local boy. “Johnny was just cool, you know?” the friend says. “He was, like, the nicest dude I ever knew. He was just, I can’t believe he’s gone.” The reporter interviews the dead soldier’s mother. She looks beat-up.

  “Change it,” Ma says. “I’m begging.”

  The woman on TV says the last time she talked to her son was months ago when he sent her a heart candy on Valentine’s Day.

  “Céce Vaccuccia!” Ma says.

  “Can you not give me a heart attack?”

  “Change. The flippin’. Channel.”

  “Are you lame all of a sudden? The remote’s in your lap.”

  Her hands go to her mouth, her eyes widen. She points to the TV.

  Dog food commercial.

  I grab the remote and kill the TV. Ma rubs my back. She’s bawling too, except she looks pretty when she cries. “Let’s go to the shelter tomorrow,” she says. “We’ll get one that looks just like her.”

  “Never.” I shake her off and head upstairs to study, but all I can think about is this: Why, when I went again Friday to visit him, did he refuse to see me?

  I lie back on my bed, slip my hand into my shorts, close my eyes and remember ...

  No.

  It just makes it worse. This sense of absence, a fast-forming cave. I can’t believe he told me he loved me. Looked me in the eye, said it over and over. Worse, I can’t believe I never got the chance to say it back.

  We never knew each other. Not really. Not deeply.

  But we did. We did.

  “Hey,” Ma says. She looks twice as drunk as she was ten minutes ago, holding on to the door frame to keep herself on her feet.

  “Carmella, could you knock?”

  “You gonna go visit him again?”

  “Should I?”

  She scratches her head. “I don’t know. I mean, maybe he’s ready now.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “I keep trying to . . .” She’s falling asleep on her feet.

  “Ma.”

  “Trying to figure out why he won’t see you. He’s ashamed? What else could it be? I mean, he’s a good boy. He wouldn’t just, you know—”

  “Fuck me then forget me?”

  She gulps. She fakes that smile. “He would never do that to my baby.” She slides down the door frame and dozes. “Just gonna rest here for a secuh . . .”

  I help her to bed.

  “Howya doin’, babe?”

  “Can’t remember ever feeling more awesome, Ma.”

  Heinous snoring. Chain saw on a pipe. I take off her crappy worn-out waitress shoes and study her ruined feet, ruined arches blown out after twenty-five years of serving people. My feet will be exactly like this when I’m her age.

  I call Marcy, pour my heart out. “Is that all I was to him, a drill-and-ditch?”

  “Céce, do you think my makeup makes my eyes look a little too close together?”

  “I don’t know what happened. He was so cool, so nice, so compassionate.”

  “Oh Cheech, you sweet, slightly-chubby-but-only-in-thetotally-cutest-way fool. That’s how they all act, in the beginning.”r />
  “Then how are we supposed to know, you know, Marce? What should we be looking for in a man?”

  “I want somebody who’s exactly like me, but with a penis.”

  (The next afternoon, Monday, August 3, the fifty-third day . . .)

  He’s been coming every day, the guy who used to sell drugs to Mack in the alley behind the Too. He waits for Mack for a minute, and then he goes. Today will be different. Today I’m waiting in the alley. The dude sees me, holds up.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He doesn’t say anything. Close up, his smiley scars are thicker than I thought.

  “Dog Man’s locked up,” I say.

  He nods, frowns.

  “I’ll have whatever he was having.” I’m holding out a ten. Of course, as soon as he pulls a bag, I am so out of here. If I’m going to prison, it’s to visit Mack. Except I’m probably not going to visit Mack anymore.

  The guy pulls a bag. I step back, but he’s too quick with the hand slap. In half a second, he’s got the ten and he’s on his way, leaving me with the bag in my hand.

  Cashews, no salt. The airplane snack size the bodega down the street sells for a quarter. I rip open the bag, and guess what’s in there.

  Cashews.

  I follow Cashew Man. He walks fast. If he notices me, he doesn’t care I’m tailing him. He jogs into the bodega, and a minute later he’s back out with a plastic bag filled with what?

  I follow him downhill to the highway. He lives beneath the overpass in a refrigerator box. He empties his bag.

  Half a dozen cans of cat food. He pulls the Purina tabs, and the cats come to him on a run. Cashew Man pets the cats and laughs their names.

  1. a. Mack Morse isn’t a liar.

  2. b. Mack Morse told me he loves me.

  3. c. Therefore, Mack Morse loves me.

  (Monday, August 3, night)

  MACK: