Brewster: A Novel

by Mark Slouka

  BREWSTER

  A Novel

  Mark Slouka

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK | LONDON

  DEDICATION

  To my father, Zdenek Slouka, who was a runner once,

  and who finished his race the day after I finished this book.

  I didn’t believe a heart so big could ever stop.

  The baton has passed, Dad.

  May I run my time half as well.

  EPIGRAPH

  Awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.

  Milton

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  also by Mark Slouka

  THE FIRST TIME I saw him fight was right in front of the school, winter. It was before I knew him. I noticed him walking across the parking lot—that long coat, his hair tossing around in the wind—with some guy I’d never seen before following twenty feet behind and two others fanned back like wings on a jet. It was the way the three of them were walking—tight, fast, closing quickly. That and the fact that instead of speeding up he seemed to be deliberately slowing down, one hand in his pocket, the other still bringing the cigarette to his mouth. His head at that “too late” angle I didn’t know yet. And then he turned around as if to tie his shoe, the hair blowing over his face, tossed the butt and tackled the guy with such fury—low, head down—that the two of them were actually airborne before they crashed into the icy slush. And then one of the others was being pulled off his back and he’d shaken free and was walking away, ignoring the yelling, the threats, the small crowd gathered around the figure still lying on the ground. I watched him cut between the cars, walking easy, running a lazy finger along a fin, tapping a sideview mirror. At the edge of the parking lot he stopped, though there wasn’t any traffic. Like nothing had happened, like there was nothing behind him. And I saw his shoulders hunch and his head bend forward and realized he was lighting up.

  BREWSTER. It’s where I knew them all, Ray and Frank and Karen Dorsey and the rest. I can talk about it now. I can see the big brown hills, the reservoirs, the tracks. For some reason it’s always winter. When I try I can remember summer evenings with kids running through the tunnels of smoke from the barbeques and the parents yelling “If I catch you doin’ that one more time” like it’s a joke, but what I really see is winter: weeks-old crusts of ice covering the sidewalks and the yards, a gray, windy sky, smoke torn sideways from the brick chimneys. The houses were small and smelled like upholstered furniture and fingernail polish, and if there were old people in the house, upholstered furniture and garlic, and if there were babies, upholstered furniture and garlic and shit.

  I think I always hated the place. It’s one of the things Ray and I had in common—one of the biggest, maybe—and we played it over and over like a favorite record. Hate is a big deal when you’re sixteen. Of course it wasn’t really about Brewster. Brewster just made it easy to pretend it was.

  I didn’t know that then. I thought it was the place. On bad afternoons when the track was iced over or the sleet was sweeping down in sheets, Falvo would have us run intervals in the upstairs hallway of the high school, twenty-three of us in three groups of six and one of five pounding down the linoleum in waves, slowing into the curve by the science classrooms, stretching it out, then slowing again by the guidance office, then finishing up, three sets of ten with a slow jog back for recovery, and flying past the darkened classrooms I’d see the gray squares flashing by—rain, rain, rain—like empty slides in a projector, and think: Everything out there is Brewster, and turn up the pain as if I could run it all down, all of it—the town, the ice, the December dark. As if there was something to beat.

  For three years I carried around a picture I’d cut out of the paper of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal stand in Mexico City after the Olympic 200-meter final, heads bent, shoeless, gloved hands raised in protest. I used to take it out and look at it. I knew they were fucked. It didn’t matter. If anything, it made it better. They’d done it, they said, for all the people nobody said a prayer for.

  “Yeah?” Ray said when I showed him the picture. “So what? Somebody’s gonna say a prayer now?”

  I shrugged.

  “Somebody’s gonna give a shit because a couple of soul brothers took off their shoes in fuckin’ Mexico?”

  I put the picture away.

  “Lemme see it again,” he said, and I took it out and he looked at it for a while, then handed it back to me and I put it away. I knew what he meant. We could change the world, rearrange the world, but that’s not how it felt, ever. Not in Brewster. How it felt was like somebody twice as strong as you had their hand around your throat. You could choke or fight.

  WE DIDN’T HAVE A CAR. We walked. We walked like convicts testing an invisible fence. How far did we get those three years? If you could untie that knot, straighten it out, all the times we walked to school with the rain coming down the streets in ridges like a shell or out to Dykeman’s in the dark, slipping around on the ice pond where they actually used to get ice, grabbing on to the trunks of trees—how far would we have made it? St. Louis? Denver? Ray would just show up at my door, sometimes after school, sometimes at dusk, wearing that coat and I’d say “It’s rainin’,” and he’d say “I know it’s fuckin’ rainin’,” and I’d throw on a sweater and a sweatshirt and a jacket and close the door behind me.

  It was the winter after the summer of love, and it went on for a long time. It’s hard to describe. Things were changing, but we couldn’t feel it. The children of God came through in their sandals and ponchos—we’d see them hitching backward up Route 22 with the wind whipping their hair into their faces, adjusting their packs or their guitars—but they kept going. Woodstock may have been just across the river, but Brewster was a different world. It wasn’t interested in getting back to the garden. It had to resurface the driveway, it had to mow the fuckin’ lawn, it had to right one of the angels in front of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception Church whose 20-pound test had snapped, leaving it dangling from its heel, one arm out, one knee forward as if sprinting madly for the earth. No, we felt like a cog in something turning all right—the dead, unmoving cog at the center of things, the pivot point, the pin in the tie-dye pinwheel. Watching the colors blur just made it worse.

  We’d talk, or drink beer if we had some. Sometimes we’d just throw stuff into the East Branch, which always seemed to be running high with snow melt, or go up into the woods around the reservoir. The ice shelves along the river were thin as china. By the last year, thi
ngs weren’t good, but that didn’t keep us from walking—the wind marbling the empty frozen streets, the red-brick buildings shuttered on Main. It was all we had. He’d still knock on the door, then look away almost like he was embarrassed, and sometimes my mother would walk by and he’d say “Hiya doin’, Mrs. Mosher?” and she’d say “Hello, Raymond, how is your family? and he’d say, “OK if me and Jon go out?” and her mouth would tighten and she’d say “He can do what he wants,” and go up the stairs.

  He met Karen, or first saw her, anyway, the fall of our sophomore year, but I can’t tell you when it was we were walking down Doanesburg Road the night Rizzolo and his partner pulled up behind us—it was later, that’s all I know. Maybe a year. More.

  We were walking to Putnam Lake. He couldn’t knock on her door, Ray said; he just wanted to look at her house. I had nowhere else to go. It was dark, freezing, and we’d just passed over the little bridge down from Green Chimneys where they brought city kids to straighten them out when we heard the bleep of the siren. I’d never had a problem with the cops. With our hands in our pockets, hunched in our coats, I guess we must have looked like something. We weren’t.

  “Police,” said a voice over the loudspeaker, like there was any doubt about it, and then the cruiser pulled up next to us and a flashlight beam hit us in the face.

  “Where you think you’re goin’?” said the cop behind the flashlight. “Nothin’—Cappicciano’s kid,” he said into the car. He turned back to Ray and whistled softly. “Will you look at you. What’s a matter with you, you been leadin’ with your face again? Joe, take a look at this.” He played the flashlight under Ray’s hood. “Jesus, you look like one of them dogs with the black eyes.”

  “Buster Brown,” said the other cop.

  “What?”

  “The dog that sells the shoes.”

  The cop with the light turned to look at him. “You have to believe me when I tell you I don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about.” He turned back to Ray. “So you ever think, like, to duck might be a good idea?”

  “Yeah, OK,” Ray said.

  “Yeah, OK. So where’d you get the shiner?”

  “Danbury.”

  “Danbury. What is there, like a store?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me tell you somethin’, smartass—you’re gonna get yourself killed. You got a thick head for a punk, but these little spics can fight, an’ one of these days one of ’em ’s gonna cut himself a window in your chest the size of Puerto Rico.” He turned the light on me. “Who the hell’s this?”

  I told him.

  “What’re you doin’ with this moron?”

  The driver said something I couldn’t make out.

  “Yeah? Track star, huh? You gonna try out for football?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, you can run, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He doesn’t know,” said the driver.

  “Another genius.”

  He switched back to Ray. “Your father know about Danbury? How’s your father?”

  Ray didn’t say anything.

  “Well, you tell him I said hello. We said hello. It’s a goddamn crime what they did to him. OK.” He tapped twice on the hood. “Stay outta trouble, track star.” And the car pulled away.

  LATE AT NIGHT a place can look older. Walking down the hill into Putnam Lake with everything frozen and just the three streetlights, the flag hanging quiet in front of the firehouse, the war memorial on its pedestal where the road split, it felt like we’d walked back in time. Like it was the 1940s or something. Maybe that’s why I remember that night. Or maybe it’s because six miles each way was crazy even for us. Ray didn’t talk much after the cops left. I didn’t mind—I didn’t need to talk all the time.

  By the time we found the house a short way up from the lake, it was just after midnight. It was a big, light-colored house with a wide porch with quiet blue Christmas lights around it like a frame. The windows were dark. We just stood across the street and looked at it.

  “I always liked that house,” Ray said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I did a little dance to keep my feet from going numb.

  “She’s probably asleep.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out half a Snickers bar and unwrapped the end.

  “Sure?”

  “Go ahead, track star.”

  “Fuck you, I’m gonna try out for football.”

  He was still looking at the house, hugging himself in his coat. I could see his lip, like he’d stuffed a big grape under it, lifting his mouth into a comic book sneer. “Weird how things can change,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I wiped my nose but it didn’t do much.

  “I don’t know why she’s with me, you know?”

  “Me, either,” I said.

  “I guess we should go. Fuck, it’s cold.”

  “I think we should stay here. Stare at the house some more.”

  And we started the long walk back, along Putnam Lake like a flat white field in the dark, past the war memorial and the firehouse, then Lost Lake, curved and still behind the trees, and it was almost two when I let myself in the back door. I’d go in late to school—nobody would care.

  THE STORY IS that my parents moved to Brewster in 1956, when I was three, because my father wanted to open a shoe store and the rent was cheaper than in White Plains. It made sense. Brewster wasn’t much: small wooden houses with dark yards, a train station, a river—no more or less than most places—but it was cheap. It had some things. A bank. Basic services. Folks from the city stopped in Brewster on the way to nicer places in the Berkshires. There were big reservoirs in the woods that the city had put in for its water supply, and out on Route 22, past the Elk’s Club, there was an A&P with a conveyer belt that took your groceries in a metal cart with your number out to the curb. When I was a kid I’d spin the metal rollers with my hand.

  Sam’s Shoes was on Main across from Bob’s Diner. Everybody knew Sam. He and Vera had come from Germany where it seemed they’d had a hard time of it during the war. Sam was Jewish but he knew shoes.

  They were there for sixteen years. They’d meant to move on—to a bigger town with a park and a library, maybe even to the city—but when I was four my brother Aaron, who had blond hair after my mother’s father, plugged in a lamp he’d found on the street and died. It happens. I was playing in the living room when I heard my father screaming and a few seconds later, my mother. I’d passed Aaron on the stairs a few minutes before, carrying something up. “Shhh,” he said. I never saw him again.

  I could have said something. I didn’t. And anything I said after that didn’t really matter much. The things you don’t say you can’t take back.

  And that was that. We didn’t talk about him. I remember walking by his room and seeing his bed, his shelf, the punching-bag dinosaur in the corner, the toys on his desk—all quiet like in an aquarium—and thinking he’d be coming home from school.

  I think now they just broke. People break, just like anything else. They’d lost everything once, now they’d lost it again. And they broke. No more to it.

  I’m not making any claim to anything. You read worse stories in the paper every day.

  NOTHING CHANGED—and everything did. My father went back to work because the store was there—because somebody had to go. We ate at the same table, I watched the same shows. Every morning for fourteen years my mother went into my brother’s room and pulled the curtains, then closed them at night. Once a week she dusted and vacuumed. She didn’t talk to me much. It was like something inside her had frozen. When I was little and couldn’t sleep I’d come downstairs to find my father in the leather chair looking over the top of some book by Stifter or Büchner or Musil as if he was confused by something he’d read. My mother would be sitting at the kitchen table in front of a closed magazine, and she’d push herself up with her arms and make me some warm milk.

 
; I was four when he died, so I don’t remember much. I remember going into his room and taking a toy and my mother grabbing the hair on the back of my head and slapping my face three times, not back and forth but the same side, then bursting into tears. And I remember standing in our yard watching Mr. Perillo reaching down into the gutters and throwing big flapping handfuls of wet leaves off our roof and my father pleading in that accent like Colonel Klink’s in Hogan’s Heroes, “Really, Tony, you do not haff to do zat,” and Mr. Perillo not even looking at him, saying, “Forget about it, Sam, almost done.”

  When I was five or six the neighbors had a block party on the Fourth like every year. The cops blocked off the street and there were hanging paper lanterns and kids running everywhere and people laughing from the porches or standing around in groups in the shadows so all you could see was their light-colored shirts or pants. It was hot and sticky and if you looked into the backyards you could see the fireflies sparking up in the weeds. The air smelled like smoke and grass and burning meat. I found my father sitting on the top step of the Montourris’ porch in his dress shirt and slacks and I sat down next to him between the paper plates and the half-filled Dixie cups and even though it was dark, I remember watching yellow jackets moving in the beer like something trying to wake up.

  “The wood is still warm,” he said, putting his hand on the boards next to him, and then he didn’t say anything more until I heard a kind of hissing sound and realized he was crying. He’d taken his glasses off and he was holding his nose with his right hand like he wanted to hide it and his shoulders were jerking up and down. I didn’t know what to do. His left hand was just lying next to him on the porch, palm up, so I put my hand in it but nothing happened—it was like it had fallen asleep—and after a while I took my hand back.

  Sometimes it felt like there’d been some kind of mistake, like I was the one who’d died and nobody wanted to admit it. Mostly I didn’t know what to do.

  I HAVE ONLY ONE MEMORY from before. I remember walking around the ball field, the grass like a carpet under the water, and seeing small, dark fish, probably perch, shooting through the backstop fence. The East Branch had flooded. My father was there, and so was Aaron. There were clouds all around us and the bleachers had water up to the first seat and we walked around the bases with our pants rolled up looking for the white squares under the water and the fish running away from us looked like somebody pushing his finger up against the surface. My father threw me on his shoulders; he seemed big then.