Make Believe

by Joanna Scott

  “Except sometimes on the phone,” Paul went on. “The things customers are willing to say on the phone, you wouldn’t believe it. Face to face, they’re as polite as can be. But on the phone.”

  “You got to put —” Kamon said.

  “Paul!” interrupted Jeff.

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to check the settings on these brakes.”

  So Paul went to work on the computer to upload the data stream on the brakes, and Kamon finished greasing the front rod ends, then moved to the rear of the car, listening as he worked to a song by Blind Willie Johnson on the radio — “Jesus, make up my dying bed…” And while he squirted grease Kamon started thinking something like this: how much easier it would be to give up all his ambitions, drop out of school, and work for Paul full-time. If he kept working in the garage the rest of his life he’d be a good enough mechanic, nothing special. He’d earn good enough money, enough to support his family, and if Jenny went back to work they’d have more than enough, and maybe they’d have a few more babies and eventually they’d buy a house of their own, his folks would watch the babies so Jenny and Kamon could go out, catch a movie, go dancing, they’d have friends who wouldn’t hate them, they’d have fun, and the only pictures Kamon ever took would be the ones for Jenny to put in their albums to serve as a visible measure of time.

  “I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees, I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees…”

  “We’re low on grease,” Kamon called.

  “Use some of Jeff’s snot,” Darryl shouted back across the noise of the air compressor. “There’s plenty of it.”

  “Here’s a tip, Darryl,” said Paul, still tapping at the keyboard. “Jeff’s a champion wrestler.”

  “Phone!” Kamon called.

  “I got it,” Paul called back, stepping to the corner of the shop to pick up the phone.

  “Jeff, you’re making me hungry.”

  “Darryl, you’re so sick,” Kamon scoffed.

  “Anyone know what time it is?” Jeff asked.

  “Somewhere around five maybe,” Darryl answered.

  Memphis Minnie sang, “I’m a bad luck woman.” Kamon checked with Darryl, who said he could go ahead and lower the lift, then Darryl stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Jeff lowered the alignment rack, and Paul sat at the desk out front, checking the computer in the office for information about the gas pumps. Kamon lifted the edge of his gloves and pulled them inside out and off his hands, then held his dirty hands close to his face to breathe deeply that intoxicating smell of oil and gasoline and grease.

  Yeah, this would be a good enough life, he thought again. As good a life as any he could imagine.

  6:25 Kamon and Jenny ate sausage and pepper pizza and watched a reporter on the local news make a pitch for an animal shelter, asking viewers to consider adopting one or more of the dozens of cats taken from a filthy house on the south side, the owner a feeble, eighty-seven-year-old woman. Then at

  6:37 Jenny went to pee and Kamon began his homework, reading the assigned chapter about ionic bonds, the donation of electrons, the positive ion of sodium, the negative ion of chloride, the miracle of sodium chloride, the process of molecular dissociation. While he was reading Jenny tiptoed behind him and started to massage his shoulders, and Kamon would have given himself over to her if Taft hadn’t walked in right at

  7:00, ducking into the kitchen, snatching a piece of cold pizza from the table in front of Kamon’s textbook, muttering his end-of-the-day greeting, something like heya, or hey there, before sinking his teeth into the pizza and disappearing into his bedroom, leaving Jenny and Kamon alone again, though now Jenny had turned back to the television and with the remote changed the channel to a game show, which she and Kamon watched until

  7:15, when a commercial for Worthco Appliances came on and Jenny said about her stepdad, “I wish that asshole would drop dead,” and Kamon said, “Make peace with him — maybe he’ll give us a washing machine,” and Jenny said, “Yeah, right,” both of them watching in silence until

  7:30, and then Kamon continued with his homework and Jenny lay on the sofa and read a magazine. The basketball game started at

  9:00, so she and Kamon sat on the sofa together and Taft sat in his Taft-throne, a plump, ragged, pin-striped armchair he’d found on the street. They shouted at the television, cursed the referees, cheered on the players, and threw pillows across the room when someone missed a free throw, until

  11:15, when Taft offered to pay Kamon twenty dollars just to go out and get him some cigarettes, so Kamon put on Taft’s jacket and his own orange ski hat, kissed Jenny good-bye, and headed to the deli, thinking as he went that his cousin Taft was dumber than dumb and bullish enough so that Kamon didn’t feel badly about taking advantage of him, charging twenty dollars for an errand that would cost Kamon no more than fifteen minutes. Not a bad deal. But shit, he hadn’t expected it to be so cold, and as he walked away from the apartment house he pinched the collar of his coat closed and ducked his head against the wind, continuing at a pace just short of a jog, so at

  11:24:07 he had reached the corner of Buffalo Avenue and Raymond Street, and at

  11:24:12 the door to the deli on the next block opened and at

  11:24:15 Kamon saw the two figures hurtling down the sidewalk toward him. His first confused thought, having spent the last two hours watching basketball, was that he was witnessing a calculated play in some kind of game, with the boys instructed by a coach to run just as they were and at some point to pivot as they continued to run and look back at the deli, gesturing with their handguns at the door that was still in the process of easing shut on its springs. What they hadn’t planned on was this: by the time they had turned their heads in the direction they were sprinting, Kamon had already arrived on the scene and by his mere presence interrupted the smooth play, forcing the boy in front to sidestep to avoid him and causing the one behind to cross his right leg in front of his left and stumble, catch himself, then hit a patch of watery ice, so his left foot slid out from under him and he fell down hard on his ass in front of Kamon, who, still confused, reached out a hand for the boy in order to help him to his feet, and at

  11:24:23 recognized, or thought he recognized, between the scarf wound around the boy’s mouth and nose and the ski hat pulled low on his head, the eyes of someone he knew at school—what was his name? — someone who belonged to the mob of students who hated Kamon Gilbert, someone Kamon hadn’t bothered to distinguish as an individual, so now he couldn’t come up with a name, despite his sense of recognition. Who are you? Kamon wondered as he bent slightly at the waist, preparing to lift the boy by an elbow, since the boy hadn’t accepted his hand. Who are you? Feeling at once a sharp sensation of pity because the boy was obviously scared of Kamon, though Kamon meant no harm and wanted to reassure him, started to consider what he might say, perhaps introduce himself, though if Kamon recognized the boy, then the boy surely recognized Kamon, everyone at school knew Kamon, Kamon Gilbert this and Kamon Gilbert that, and in fact he looked at Kamon now with a glittery squint as if to beg Kamon not to recognize him, a look so amusing that Kamon drew in a shallow inhalation, the kind that usually precedes a chuckle, and he would have started to laugh if at

  11:24:45 he hadn’t become suddenly aware of a pain in the side of his back, only afterward hearing the sound of the first shot, as though time were moving in reverse and whatever had just happened was already starting to undo itself, the pain returning to the sound of the shot, the sound preceding the catch of breath, the inhalation preceding the pity Kamon felt for the boy who’d slipped on the ice, the boy slipping in front of him but going up instead of down, rising toward the bare branches of the maple tree in front of the Presbyterian church while Kamon fell between two parked cars. He heard a brief clatter that reminded him of himself as a boy shaking a fistful of polished stones his daddy had given him, felt a spasm of pain at the same time along with a new confusion, for the backward seq
uence had reversed itself again, but instead of moving forward, everything was happening at the same time, and the simultaneity seemed natural, as if life had always been this way — instants of multiple sensations, hearing and feeling and seeing the progression of an event within one moment, and within that same moment remembering with dreamy haziness, as Kamon did, that the two players running from the deli had been holding guns, realizing as he fell that he’d forgotten about the guns when he’d been moving to help the second player to his feet, but the gun must have been there somewhere, on the ground, inside the boy’s sleeve, somewhere, anywhere, yet the boy had been paralyzed with fear, so he couldn’t have had the nerve to pull a trigger. Which immediately brought to mind the capability of the forward player. Yeah, it was possible that the shots still being fired as he fell were coming from the forward player’s gun, a clatter of stones, pain within and without, the branches receding, the street rising up between two cars to smack him in the face at

  11:24:52 as the boy he’d been trying to help scrambled to his feet and ran away after his teammate, the two players resuming the game that Kamon had interrupted, maybe just practice for the real thing, the important game scheduled for Saturday. You couldn’t blame them, really, Kamon had gotten in their way, though you couldn’t blame Kamon, he hadn’t done anything wrong, he couldn’t think of a single thing he’d ever done wrong in his whole life, so at

  11:25:03 he asked himself, how did I come to be here? The last thing he remembered was the impulse to laugh, but already he’d forgotten what was so funny and felt a residual smile disappear from his face, like a fly taking off after picking up a crumb, leaving behind the itch, which Kamon would have scratched if he could have figured out how to get his hand to his mouth. He’d had a hand once, yeah, and he’d extended the hand to a boy who’d fallen on the sidewalk. But how could that be? Had he extended the hand to himself, left his body in order to lift his body to his feet? Where was he now? Outside with the pain or inside with the night? It was so dark inside, close to midnight, he figured, and he’d done just as his ma expected: What do you do when you leave the room, Kamon?

  11:25:08 Turn off the light, so the room was the color of the grease overflowing from a ball joint, and somewhere in the lightless corner Darryl was laughing at his own bad joke, maybe the joke that had almost spurred Kamon to laughter himself, whatever it was, something that had to do with Jenny. Kamon couldn’t feel her but he could feel how he wanted her to hold him, to warm him with her electric warmth, for wouldn’t you know that when pain leaves the body it transforms into cold, drawing snow from the sky, brittle flakes moistening his cheeks, he would have brushed them away but he had misplaced his hands somewhere between his home and the deli, yeah, he’d been going to the deli, he remembered that much, to the deli for a carton of cigarettes, he’d made a deal with his cousin Taft and would earn twenty dollars for this errand. Go ahead, push Kamon around all you wanted, you owed him twenty dollars, twenty fucking dollars, now if someone would please find his hands

  11:25:17 he’d get up and finish what he’d started, a life beginning with the clatter of stones, a fistful of polished stones and the bark of a magnolia scraping his arm as he climbed, the dribble of a basketball, the echo of voices in windowless hallways, the endless waiting, a beer and a red hot smothered with onions, sodium chloride, contact paper, the shock of a mouse bouncing against his palm, the pop of a lightbulb, a darkroom, the pissing, the shitting, busting his balls over white pussy, a squirrel caught under the wheels of a moving car, food stamps in an old woman’s purse, lemonade, cigarettes, music, magic tricks, and always the waiting, Jenny waiting for him to come home while Kamon waited in line for the Jack Rabbit and looked forward to the next ride, though the last time he’d coasted straight into a wall and ended up flat as a fruit roll. He’d have to pinch his skin and pull himself into a solid shape, Jenny would expect as much, but he discovered only then that he had lost his stuffing, there was nothing to hold his body in place, he couldn’t even stand up, he would never stand up, he would never find his hands again,

  11:25:18 he would never be himself. He felt now what might be called panic but was a feeling too peculiarly Kamon’s to be attached to a word and have sensible meaning. The recognition that he would no longer be who he’d been, even as he was still close enough to himself to understand this, produced a change in the pattern of his thinking, a change that felt palpably real, developing as it did from the experience of loss, understanding as it happened that exactly when 11:25:18 became

  11:25:19 the wafer of glass upon which his mind rested shattered, and thought burst from its reservoir like floodwater, traveling through the hollow package of his body in pursuit of the pain,

  11:25:20 draining out of him onto the curb, so if he had been able to open his eyes he would have seen the last shreds of his comprehension lying in a wet pool of blood, insoluble thoughts, thoughts that only Kamon Gilbert could have thought, past thoughts and all the potential thoughts that would have come to him over a lifetime, leaving behind a brain as hollow as the body, knowing nothing about what had happened to him or how it had happened, unable to postulate what would become of the boys who had done this to him, boys who would live into their old age, each of them spending time in jail for other crimes but not for this, and who, by murdering Kamon Gilbert, had deprived him of the one wish he would have wished for, if he’d had a chance:

  11:25:21

  PART FIVE

  Imagine yourself looking up from the bottom of Hadley Lake at the frozen surface. It is raining, and the rain on ice makes the sound of cards being shuffled. From below, the surface is milky white, but gradually the ice grows transparent as the rain washes away the peaks of frozen snow. You can see a layer of murky water accumulating above the ice, and above that, coils of mist dance in the wind. Eventually it stops raining, and for a couple of days cold sunlight turns the thin layer of ice an iron color streaked with rust, the ice thickens, and a storm covers the ice with snow. Below the ice the water is gelatinous, lightless, silent.

  Then the rain returns and works upon the ice like wind upon stone, grinding, eroding, breaking the solid mass into separate islands that shrink over the course of a few days. And then at the end of a warm afternoon the lake is fully liquid once again, dimpled with foam, sloshing and spilling around you.

  Now imagine you are a four-year-old boy, and through him see the sun rising over the lake. Listen to the silence of water and then the sharp creak of wood and clank of metal against metal. Listen to Eddie Gantz curse when he jams his thumb against the oarlock. Imagine you can see vanilla mist rising from the lake, the sun an orange bulb behind the screen of leafless willows, Eddie pushing off from the dock with an oar, Eddie rowing. Listen to the slap of wood against water, Eddie coughing, the peeping call of a blue-winged teal flying overhead, the sharp intake of breath as Eddie rows. Notice the tips of unfurled lilies poking just above the surface and the clump of bulrushes. Keep listening to the slap of wood against water, wood against water, metal grinding against wood, Eddie’s grunts, the rattle of rod and line, the sound of waiting, the silence of water. Imagine you can feel the liquid glove of cold with Bo when he dips his hand into the dark water. Hear the sudden fish splash and Eddie’s muttering pleasure as he reels in the line. See the glimmering scales of the fish, the hook lodged in the wall of the fish’s mouth. Listen to the slight ripping sound as Eddie pulls out the hook. Watch as Eddie throws the fish back into the water.

  Fish splash.

  Rattle of rod and line.

  The silence of water.

  Now imagine that it is night and you can hear the muffled snap of floorboards, as though the house, along with its occupants, were settling into sleep. Imagine you can see the moonshine on the windowsill in Bo’s room, the faint outline of the bureau, the various shapes of the frames holding photos of his mother, the shadowy heap of blankets gathered into a bundle in his arms.

  Imagine you are dreaming his dreams.

  Marge named
herself Grandma but she gave that up after a few days. Eddie only called himself Eddie. They called Bo Michael, his middle name, if they called him anything at all.

  Eddie said, “Marge, we’re out of syrup. The boy needs syrup, don’t you, Michael? Do you like pancakes? Do you ever answer when someone asks you a question?”

  So Marge replied, “Here’s more syrup, Eddie. Here’s plenty of syrup. Shall I cut up your pancake, Michael? Go on and eat, we believe in eating a hearty breakfast in this house, don’t we, Ann?”

  “I gotta go to school. See you, Bo.”

  “Michael, call him Michael.”

  “He’s used to being called Bo, aren’t you, Bo? Ho-bo-bo. Mind if I kiss you on the cheek?”

  “No.”

  “See you in a while, crocodile Bo.”

  Bye-bye.

  “Bye-bye, Bodeebodeebo.”

  “It’s not so bad here, is it, Michael? This is the home where your mama grew up, and you’re going to grow up here, too. You can be happy here. We want you to tell us whenever you’re not happy. Now why don’t you take a bite of the great big pancake Eddie made for you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s all you can say? No? I made it special for you. A perfect pancake. How about cereal then? Scrambled eggs. How about some ice cream? Yeah, you’d like some ice cream for breakfast, I can tell. All right, you can have it, you can have anything you want in this house.”

  “Eddie, don’t go overboard…”

  “What? He deserves some special treats for a while, all he’s been through.”

  “I suppose … but kids —”