Emporium

by Adam Johnson

  I was a little jealous of Ralph, too. He had a certain condition that caused his skin to rise when you pressed on it. If you slapped his back, a few minutes later your hand would rise and appear. With your knuckle you could trace his bones underneath, and there they were. Or he would lie on the cool tile as we sorted, and we could both sit transfixed as triangles rose on his chest and stomach. Ralph couldn’t wear a belt or tie his shoes, but I wanted that, to be able to react to things that touched me funny. Sometimes Forst beat Ralph with a rope. I’d come riding up to his house on my Huffy and there he’d be, covered with running welts. Ralph would explain that it was because of the magazines or some other reasonable sounding offense, though it was always difficult to tell just how hard he’d been hit. Ralph could welt up from a Hula Hoop. Then again, Forst was the largest man I’d ever imagined, and I’d seen the way he’d swung that cooler.

  This was a time of great unknowns for me, and the absolute logic of Ralph’s home had me hooked. There were simply no mysteries allowed, and I fell in with that. It’s clear to me now that Forst’s tile palace was really placed in the one spot it couldn’t be seen from the road or the alley, and I can see the sadness and resentment of a man who built a monument to his daily, petty pilferings. I can see that there wasn’t enough of any one kind of tile to even cover a dishpan. But inside that rickety bin those tiles held me in awe by their simple mass and order, by the vision of a man who would recognize their latent, unseen value, who would build a house to protect them.

  I realize the women in those magazines were Filipino and not Mexican, as we’d thought. Once in a while one of their faces will come back to me, in their offset color and oversharp focus, and those forced smiles and folded bodies will erase where it was I was driving, make me overcook dinner. But in the sweltering heat of the tile palace it made sense that all Mexican women were ready to bend giggling over a bathtub, and we commented openly to that effect. On those hot Tucson summers it seemed only fitting that Ralph and I should both get beatings on a fairly regular basis, and we silently nodded that I’d just lucked out, not having a dad to give me mine. We often discussed in our scientific way the pros and cons of having a dad versus not having a dad, though we couldn’t see how clear it was that Forst wasn’t really Ralph’s father.

  What was a mystery was why some nights my mother would move me from the cool of my bed to the hot seats of her Monte Carlo, why we would drive and drive—the Oracle road, Baseline, Miracle Mile—without speaking, why it was the Mexican radio station, the one where we couldn’t understand the words, that she listened to. The Monte Carlo didn’t have air so you had to choose between wet vinyl and eye-cutting wind, and one night I woke suddenly, sweating, thinking of the pink heat lamp in our bathroom, something that always seemed ominous to me as it glowed and ticked above the toilet. There was dust crossing in our headlights. The road signs were in Spanish. I moaned in a way that always won response from her, but she only cracked my window with the power button on the console. “We’re from Michigan,” she told me. “We’ll get used to the heat.”

  “Is my dad in Michigan?”

  “No, honey.”

  “Is he in the navy?”

  She turned to me, surprise on her face. “Of course not. What’s gotten into you?”

  “I never been to Michigan,” I said.

  “Sure you have, honey. We were Wolverines.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “That’s where things got all mixed up, remember?” she said.

  “I never lived there.”

  She sighed. She lowered both our windows so the car roared inside, then powered them up tight. “I know what you mean,” she said, after a while.

  These were the conversations we had.

  My mother was a phlebotemist at the hospital, but once she passed her pathology lab technician exam, the rust-colored iodine stains on her fingers changed to the purple and blue of the enhancer oils from the microscopes. She no longer simply pulled blood. Now she came home smelling like xylene, bright-eyed about sputum cultures and cervical cysts, though she wouldn’t explain what words like ovarian meant.

  The late cruising and trips to the Indian drive-in stopped with the new night shift. Now she woke late and slow, drinking coffee in a pink silk robe with a gold tiger embroidered on back. It read TigerPak, 11th Sea Command above the tiger, and below, around its outstretched paw, Prowlin’ the 17th Parallel. When she’d turn away from me, that tiger could always catch my breath. The robe was something I couldn’t get a fix on. I assumed my father had given it to her, though there’d never been any mention of its source. But the image of her—sleepy, drinking coffee, with that tiger always guarding what was behind her—was what I balanced in my head as I did wheelies in the neighborhood until it was noon and I could head to Ralph’s.

  I was told my father looked like Kris Kristofferson—still does, around the eyes, my cousin claims—and that summer my mother took me to watch the movie Semi-Tough five times. The theaters were ice-cold, matinee-empty, and all the soda I wanted was mine. One time a huge man came into the open theater with a tub of popcorn and sat directly behind my mother. It was just the three of us, and I watched him over my shoulder as he ate fistfuls of popcorn with his mouth open. Kris Kristofferson had a woman’s neck cupped in his palm, and I could see how my mother’s blue fingers twisted the fine hair that curled under her ear. When the man finished his popcorn, he tore a large U in the rim of the tub, so it looked like he’d taken an oversized bite of that too. He turned the tub upside-down in his lap and slid his hand into the slot he’d made. We all watched the movie for a while. Then the man leaned forward and smelled my mother’s hair. His nose hovered right where my father’s tiger would have been. It was the scene with Kris and that woman in the hot tub, so I knew my mother’s eyes were closed.

  Ralph had had a girlfriend but she’d died. My girlfriend had moved to International Falls, a site I’d chosen because it was always the coldest in the nation on the weather reports, which from Arizona I imagined as a place where all you needed to know fell between the lines of a thermometer. By then, I’d also confused Michigan with Minnesota. The sole area of contention between Ralph and me was sex, and we fought like academics over the mechanics of how it worked. This was the reason we’d needed girlfriends: to back up our arguments with personal experience. It was the magazines that had sparked the debate, and it was in the magazines we looked for answers.

  Forst had an old camper parked in the middle of the backyard. It was the glossy, aluminum kind meant to be towed behind a pickup and on summer nights we practically lived in there, passing the flashlight, turning the pages, making our arguments. Ralph’s theory was this: the woman lay on her back and the man climbed on top of her, so they were face to face. That’s how the screwing would occur, he was sure, and he pointed to the sleepy, dreamy looks on these women’s faces. Why else would it happen in a bed? I was convinced it took the approach encouraged by the women on all fours. They had a way of swiveling their heads back to check on what was going on behind them that couldn’t be denied. In these looks it was practical necessity that I saw, and that appealed to me in a way that dreaminess and mystery never would. Plus there was the way Ralph’s German shepherd Hans would jump on your back if you were near the ground. Our views were irreconcilable on the entire matter, but Ralph had to give me that one.

  Ralph had a little sister who’d just made the leap from diapers to panties, and we often looked to her for answers. In the yard, we’d strip her and crouch low, gesturing with our hands as we made our arguments. I’d seen my mother inspect cultures in her lab once, and I copied that long, squinting gaze of hers. Ralph was more animated. There was a blue car his sister loved, and when we could get her to crawl after it, we’d follow in a strange, balled-leg walk while he pointed and nodded like a scientist observing a test probe for Mars.

  One day, we had her on her back, each holding a leg up in the air when Ralph’s mom came out the back door.
The first time I had ever met her, she hooked a thumb behind the elastic band of her velour shorts and pulled them down to the stubble of her pubic hair so she could show me her still-fresh hysterectomy scar. This was to demonstrate why I was to stay quiet in her house, make my own sandwiches, and not slam that damn ball against the carport. So I didn’t know what to expect when she came out back to see her daughter wishboned by Ralph and the neighbor boy.

  Ralph was pointing at the fleshy tuft of his sister’s genitals when he wheeled on his mom. “Can’t you see we’re doing an experiment?”

  She let out the kind of staged, knowing laugh you see only in old movies anymore, as if she somehow recognized herself in this scenario of me and Ralph pulling the backpedaling feet of a restless girl. Then she looked at me hard, as if to say it was behavior like this—male, probing, dangerous from birth—that got her where she was today: in sweltering Arizona with a backyard full of dirty tile and kids like us. “I’m through,” she said. “Go see Forst if you want to know about babies.”

  “Babies?” Ralph said. “This is research.” He looked at me and mouthed babies?

  I shrugged. The baby thing I was still unsure of, but I knew it had to do with the glossy fist of a uterus I’d seen in one of my mother’s pathology books.

  We had no intention of talking to Forst about anything, but they were his magazines, and he became our next object of study. He was an ape of a man, the kind rarely seen these days: chest so large his ribs seemed barely to come round to meet, and even his belly—the oiler, he called it—paled underneath what his chest seemed to indicate was possible. But what bothered me was his belly button. It was an outie, and with all that weight behind it, it had swelled to a cone with a nub at the end that wiggled at you like bait.

  On days when he came home early, it was Bonanza that he watched, a huge tumbler of iced tea resting on the grayed mat of his chest hair, his yellowed feet up on the ottoman. Forst identified with the character of Hoss, though it was a troubling figure to him. He would direct our attention to the screen, pointing out Hoss’s deficiencies: his fat hands, the way his mouth always hung open, and of course, that stupid hat. “Why is he always smiling?” Forst asked us. “What the hell is he grinning about?”

  It was a question I took seriously, and I agreed with Forst that there was something to that Hoss, that the big cowboy must have a hidden interior. I was considering Forst in this same light when he turned from his show to me. “What the hell are you gawking at?”

  Forst was the kind of man to say Houston, all systems go before he farted, but I’d also once heard the fast slapping of his belt loops as went for leather in a hurry. Now he seemed serious.

  He stared at me. It felt like he could look right inside me, and I took a chance. I asked him if he had been in the navy.

  “Semper fidelis,” he answered. “Marines.”

  “What are navy men like?”

  “They screw each other.”

  I tried to model that in my head, avoiding Kris Kristofferson, whom I’d been picturing in a uniform for some time. “From the front or from the back?”

  Forst paused on this question. “From the back.”

  “It really works like that?”

  “Everybody gets screwed,” Forst said.

  About that time, I started watching my mother sleep.

  * * *

  Standing in the bedroom doorway, quietly eating my cereal, I would take her in: the skewed shape of her under fern-print sheets, the hair stuck to her face, the shine of her shoulders, rising and falling, an arm stretched across the empty space where my father would have been. At night I sometimes dreamed I could walk around and breathe underwater. I wondered what went through her mind as she slept off long nights at the lab, a place where she looked deep into people’s blood and tissue, gazed into tumors, trying to trace the history of cancer. I envied her for that ability, but I didn’t think she stopped to consider that people could miss a scoured lung or bad kidney, that in the hollow left behind, there was only emptiness, or worse, room for stranger things to grow. I didn’t think she ever watched me sleep, from my doorway, wondering what I was dreaming.

  Finally she caught me. I remember it was the week Ralph’s dog died. She sat up in bed and I saw her lab coat was still on. Patting the covers, she signaled for me to sit with her, but I didn’t want to. “Have it your way,” she said. “But I talked to your father last night.” She lit a cigarette, something else that had come with the shift change, while she paused to let that news sink in. “He wants to visit.”

  She’d used this one before. “When?”

  “Soon, baby. Think of it, all of us together again.”

  “All the Wolverines,” I said.

  “Don’t be like that. It will be good for you, having him around.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She was still unused to the smoke, and she fanned it from her face, leaning, trying to get away from it. “You’ll love him. He’s handsome,” she said and closed her eyes for a moment, like maybe she was picturing him.

  For some reason, I thought of that man in the movie theater just then.

  “What’s the point?” I said and went to eat my breakfast.

  That week I sorted a lot of tile. I wasn’t supposed to be at Ralph’s too early, and I remember Forst coming out in his bikini briefs, his hand shielding the bright morning light, to find me in his tile bin. I sat sorting on top of a stack of boxes, and it scared me to be near eye level with him. Once in a while one of the tiles would cut you, so I had a finger in my mouth as we looked at each other. I couldn’t explain what I was doing there and I didn’t try. Shuffling tiles into bins just made sense to me. They were something to hold. They had weight and purpose. I could see my reflection in some of them. Forst squinted at me for a long time, and then he seemed to understand something and went back inside. We didn’t even speak.

  Ralph was a little leery of my enthusiasm, but to us things had always been clear: the tiles needed sorting, and the solution was to dive in and get to work. The task was impossible on the surface, but you could picture a day when all the tiles had found their homes, and this knowledge carried us through long stretches of sorting where we didn’t speak, where there were only the soft clicks and chinks of subtle progress. At home, there was no preparation for my father. No one vacuumed or cleaned the guest towels. No one whistled the Wolverine fight song. No one found the magazines I looked at, red under the hot bath lamp, as I sweated and stared into the eyes of women who seemed to know the primitive math I was working on their bodies. There was no hiding of a robe for a man who may or may not have prowled the seventeenth parallel.

  When I rode up on Saturday morning, Ralph stood staring at his dog Hans, dead of unknown causes in the mud behind the house. There was a water spigot on the side of the tile palace that dripped, and here was where the dog liked to dig and wallow. To keep him from burrowing under the tile bin, Forst always threw the cracked tiles in the hole, and this is where Hans was, sprawled on the broken shards, tongue in the mud. I approached and we stood silent for what seemed a great while.

  “Dang,” Ralph eventually said and marched off to get Forst.

  Hans’s coat was a little past charcoal, near black where his fur was soaked, and lying there, mouth open, gums graying, he looked lost and thirsty.

  Ralph came back with Forst, who asked “what the hell?” of nobody in particular, and stood in shorts and socks sucking his fingers. I think he’d been eating barbecue potato chips. He licked the palm of his hand with several long strokes, and then nudged Hans with his toes. Next he kneeled down in the mud and used his thumb to open Hans’s eye. “Shit,” he said and hooked the dog’s upper canine with his finger, swiveling its snout up, the throat falling open, so Forst could look inside. We leaned in close. He sniffed the dog’s mouth but gave no reaction.

  Forst then touched the dog’s stomach delicately, tenderly almost, before putting his ear to Hans’s belly, his other arm
cautioning us to be still. I held my breath.

  After a while he turned to us, and Forst, on his knees, stared straight in Ralph’s eyes. “Did I teach you to care for that dog?” He pointed down but none of us looked.

  Forst got up and shuffled through the yard in his socks, pausing to search here or there in the grass with his toes, and I was pretty sure he was looking for a piece of rope. Ralph crossed his arms and squeezed his shoulders while we watched, but Forst only kicked around the yard for a while before disappearing.

  It gave me the creeps to see Forst like that, and I didn’t know what to think. Ralph dropped his arms to his sides after Forst left, and the handprints on his shoulders made it look like he was being held, the way someone steadies you before they kiss you or punch you good. I felt held too, that day, that summer, but I had no such outward way to show it.

  Forst returned with a short, hooked-blade linoleum knife and simply opened Hans up. The sawing motion jarred the dog in quick convulsions, briefly animating it. Suddenly, whole volumes of seething, blind worms poured milky pink from Hans’s belly. We all stepped back and watched them writhe.

  “Jesus,” Forst said.

  “Dang,” Ralph said.

  But I said nothing. It was a moment of swirling clarity for me, and I wished I could see the inner workings of all things so plainly, that someone would touch and listen, dig even, for all the strange things I felt growing inside me. I had to sit down. Through the sliding glass door I could make out Ralph’s mother standing alone, observing us from the dark of the house. She looked on us as strangers, like she was already trying to find a way to put this behind her as she watched her husband wipe a knife on his sock. Looking at her, I considered the possibility it was a submarine my father was really on, and I hoped he wore a similar face every time he surfaced on the other side of the world.