Brewster: A Novel

by Mark Slouka

  I have a memory of my brother, I think, eating snow. And peeing on a worm. That’s it.

  IN BREWSTER there was no other side of the tracks; if there was, Ray would have lived there.

  Ray lived with his dad and his baby brother, Gene, who was fifteen years younger than him, in a small, dark brown house with a big American flag nailed vertically to the wall under the porch. Ray’s mom had left when he was nine—his stepmom, right after Gene was born. I could walk to his house in about ten minutes, and did, many times. The shingles had faded out in some places more than others and the stain had run in long drips you’d want to wipe off with your thumb but couldn’t because they were hard as rock. Where the railing sagged you could see the screws being yanked out of the floor boards and the roof had nails like teeth coming through because somebody had had a size too big and didn’t care. Inside, the ceiling always seemed lower than it should. That first year we’d sit around and little Gene, who we’d pick up after school from a woman named Carol, would crawl around and put things in his mouth and Ray would take them out.

  “Hey little guy, you want a beer stein?” he’d say when Gene crawled up to the cabinet where Mr. Cappicciano kept his collection. “Whaddya say? Want a beer?” And Gene, who’d somehow pulled himself up on his rashy little legs by grabbing onto a kind of step on the front of the cabinet, would fall on his diaper with a soft, crinkly poof and Ray would say “Nope, not ready. Gotta be able to stand up before you can fall down.” And he’d scoop him up and smell his ass, then hold him out in front of him like a heavy doll and scrunch up his face and Gene would smile like a senile old man.

  I asked Ray about his mother once. His real one. He showed me a postcard of a yellow motel under a blue sky with two cars parked out front. “The Silver Dollar Lodge” was written in white script across the top. I flipped it over. The postmark was from Reno, Nevada. “Thinking of you,” it said.

  He took the card back. “Just not that much, right?” He shrugged. “I had a picture but my old man threw it out.”

  “You ever miss her?” I said.

  “What’s to miss?” he said. “She left.”

  THERE’S NO REASON we should have been friends. I didn’t talk much. I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t good-looking or funny or tough. I was just tall enough that I didn’t get into fights; when I did, I generally lost. The cool kids just ignored me. I didn’t care. I read books. I wrote pissed-off poetry that I thought about showing to Mr. ­Wentzel who was teaching to avoid the draft and who walked around like he was demonstrating the effects of gravity on Jupiter—like the pull of the planet was just too much, man—but I never did. I did all right in school. I wasn’t stupid, just fucked up.

  For a while I thought that high school might change things for me; that I’d make friends, that the girls I tried not to look at who all seemed to be ripening at the same time wouldn’t see the fear in my heart. By sophomore year, I knew better. The girls would look at me, then whisper to each other and laugh. I’d have nothing to say. Calling attendance, the teachers would pause when they came to my name. Mosher?

  And they’d look at me over their green ledgers with their columns and squares, their pencil points waiting next to my name, and they might as well have been saying it out loud: “Silent?” Here. “Stubborn?” Here. “Difficult, troubled?” Here. I hated them all, hated them for their pinched-off little souls, their disgust with everything beautiful, and spent half my time trying to be what they wanted me to be—smiling at their stupid jokes, not correcting them when they said something wrong, working to be “normal,” to be noticed—then hating them all the more. God knows what they would have called it twenty years later. Anger Surplus Syndrome. The abbreviation would have fit.

  I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t go easy. About anything. Injustice burned in me like an ulcer and everything fed it: the sour little men and women who’d squirreled away just enough power to stick it to somebody else, who’d never been young, never laughed, whose every breath was a sneer—enthusiasm was a threat and they’d strangle it in its crib and hand you the body and smile, and the sooner you learned to bow your head and kiss their ass, the easier it would go for you. Only I couldn’t do it. Fool that I was, I thought the abuse of power went against the order of things.

  “To be or not to be?” It must have seemed like an interesting question. What to be. How to be who you had to be. I was sixteen, and I felt like someone had opened a door in my head—I understood this. I could hardly sit still. And so, forgetting I wasn’t actually supposed to be interested in Hamlet, I blurted out a question. Who knows what it was? Probably something inane about identity and truth and having to be who you were or not be at all. Farber was writing something on the board.

  “Just shut up, Mosher, you’re not here to ask questions,” he said, not turning around.

  “I just—”

  “Shut up.”

  It came out of nowhere, a quick slap to the face. A moment before we’d all been laughing.

  I just sat there, the blood pounding in my head. It was the tone—the actual anger in it. I’d seen Farber walking a Puerto Rican kid to the principal’s office, his hand like a meaty claw clamped on the back of the kid’s neck.

  “What’s the matter, you don’t know the answer?” It was out before I knew it.

  He turned around. The room was suddenly very quiet. “What did you say?”

  I could feel a small trickle of pee escape into my underwear. “I thought this was a school.” I’d started to shake.

  “I hear anybody ask for your opinion, smartass?”

  “I thought—”

  “Anybody ask for your opinion, smartass?”

  “I just—”

  “Anybody ask your opinion, smartass?”

  “No.”

  “No,” he mimicked in a mincing British accent. A few of the kids laughed. I wanted to drive the leg of my chair through his teeth.

  “Don’t you ever talk to me that way.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Ever.” He shifted his weight, letting me dangle. “You know what you are?”

  “I—”

  “A troublemaker, that’s what you are,” he said, his face swollen with rage and disgust. “One of those people always digging things up, turning everything around.” He paused. “What’s the matter, you gonna write to your congressman? You think this is some big injustice?” He leaned forward, whispered it like a secret: “Guess what—nobody cares what you think.”

  I UNDERSTAND why being hated can make you angry; I never figured out why it should make you feel ashamed.

  I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t know anybody, really, and I knew better than to mention it at home. My mother wouldn’t say anything, just sit there looking at her food with her head slightly to the side like it had insulted her, methodically impaling small pieces of potato. I’d listen to myself going on—in German, of course, which made everything even more ridiculous—all the time watching some other conversation passing over her face like small clouds on a windy day—a quick flinch in the cheek, the eyebrows slowly raised in a suffocated shrug, a smile like a spasm.

  “Obviously you did something to provoke this man,” she’d snap, talking to her plate, sick of it all, of me, which would be my father’s cue to jump in and say, “And even if you didn’t, what would you have us do—you think they’re not going to stand up for each other?”

  I started taking my tests in pen, so Farber couldn’t change my answers. It didn’t matter. He got me on the essays. He didn’t call on me the rest of the term, just looked right through me as I sat there with my hand up like I was invisible, then gave me a D in participation. I got an F in citizenship. I didn’t care. Fuck him.

  That fall I started writing down things I read in a blue spiral notebook I carried in my back pocket. On the inside cover I copied out a quote from Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.”

  I’d whisper it to myself walking down the ha
llway, sitting in class: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win. It was like a chant, a prayer. Christ, I was pathetic. I clung to it like a sapling in a cliff. I was no Gandhi, I had no idea what to make of myself: Half of me wanted to apologize to the world—the other half wanted to drive a stake through its heart. It didn’t matter: I loved the march of it, the promise of it: first this, then that. I was nobody—a sixteen-year-old at Brewster High School. What was I going to do, organize a Salt March to the five-and-ten? It didn’t matter. Nothing they said mattered. It could be done, it was inevitable. I’d make the world notice. My biggest fear was that I’d never make it past the first stage, that I’d suffocate inside my own skin, invisible, before the laughter had a chance to start.

  I KNEW ABOUT HIM long before we were friends. Ray Cappi­cciano. Ray Cap.

  I can hear Copeland in the teachers’ room, the smoky dimple in the middle of that Petri dish of ignorance and cruelty and crap: “Cappicciano? Erratic. Unpredictable. Insane, basically. No impulse control. He’ll charm you one minute—he isn’t stupid, there’s somethin’ goin’ on in there—shove you down the stairs the next. I’m tellin’ you, twenty to life before he’s thirty. Suspended? Sure, he holds the record. Old man’s an ex-cop—had to leave the force. Runs in the family. Bruises? You mean this week’s?”

  And they’d all laugh and the women in their tight-across-the-ass knee-length skirts would take their stained cigarettes from between their cracked lips and lay them across their coffee cups and pick them up again and Copeland, encouraged, would do his ring announcer routine: “Ladies aaaand Gentlemen, welcome to the Fight of the Week. In this corner, wearing ripped jeans and a bad attitude, ‘Raging Bull-Shit Cappicciano.”

  And he’d tell them about the time with Malatesta. “You’ll love this,” he’d say. “So you know Sal. He gets into this thing with the little punk for like, I dunno, the hundredth time for not having his homework, right? Asks him what his excuse is and the kid says his dog ate it. Seriously. So Sal loses his temper. He’s got that bow tie on, he’s got that one-room schoolhouse thing goin’. He’s gonna make him write it two hundred times—the dog ate my homework, the dog ate my homework, then sign it “Loser.”

  The kid slams back to his seat. Half an hour later he walks up and hands over a piece of paper. Sal takes one look and throws a book at him but he’s already out the door. He’s drawn a picture—a good one, I’ve seen it—of a bulldog in a bow tie. Next to the dog is a bowl with the name Loser on it. Not bad, right? But here’s the weird part. There’s this pattern behind the pooch. You’re thinkin’ wallpaper, roses—wanna guess? Give up? Knuckles. He’s picked the scabs off his knuckles and pressed them into the paper, over and over.” And Copeland would press his fleshy fist into the air over the table, then lean back in his chair and spread his arms and throw one leg over the other to adjust his crotch. “OK?”

  I don’t mean to say they all hated him—at least not early on. Some did, sure, and they grabbed every chance they had to cut the legs out from under him. As if he was a real threat. As if it was personal. As if he wasn’t sixteen, or seventeen. The rest were amused by him; he was the clown, the cut-up, the All-American delinquent with the reckless face and the chipped tooth who might not know much about algebra but who’d win the girl in the end and they’d turn a blind eye and shake their heads and kick him in the balls now and then just to keep things clear between them—that so long as he stayed more colorful than sullen and didn’t cause them extra work, everything would be fine. Hell, if it came down to it they’d take him over the bookworms with their snotty questions any day.

  Mainly only the cafeteria ladies with the plastic bags on their heads, who nobody fucked with, were different. They’d always been decent to me. Mary—who even the teachers didn’t call Mary—who had big, gravy-speckled arms and no wrists and who always looked just one stupid question away from enraged—would take my tray from me and carefully spoon the macaroni and cheese on it herself instead of reaching through the metal shelves and slapping it down like with everyone else and say in that gravelly Dublin brogue, “All right, there you go,” or, “More?” and even, once, “You’ll ’ave to eat to keep up with all that studyin’ you’re doin’,” which coming from her was a benediction.

  But if Mary and the others were human to me, they’d flat-out adopted Ray. They loved him. He could do no wrong. He’d josh around and fool with them, compliment them on their plastic head bags and ask if he could put one on and they’d roll their eyes and pretend to be annoyed, all the while glowing like schoolgirls, and he’d tell them to stay out of trouble, that he’d been hearing some things, and then he’d push his hair back and take his heaping tray and leave.

  It was how we met, sort of. I’d been waiting in line, amazed and resentful, listening to him ask for more of this and less of that and “How about a little more crust there, Mary?” and “I don’t know, I gotta watch my figure,” and “No, I’m serious, apple crisp helps you think,” until, sick of waiting, I started toward the cashier. When he cut me off I just stared at him.

  “Fuck you lookin’ at?” he said.

  I shook my head. He turned back to the cashier.

  “That’s a lot of apple crisp,” I said.

  He turned and looked at me—he seemed so much older to me then—deciding I guess if I was worth the trouble, then gave a small shrug.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. He paused. “So eat shit.” And he walked away.

  He’d just come back from being suspended—something having to do with the back bleachers and some girl from Carmel. The halls were thick with rumors.

  “Bullshit, it’s fuckin’ soaked under there,” I heard some guy say by the juniors’ lockers.

  “You do it standin’ up, moron,” said the other.

  THAT FALL a thick-necked kid with big arms and acne on his neck sat across from me at lunch, ate, and left. We didn’t say anything. The table was half-empty. I’d gotten tired of sitting with kids who all seemed to have something to say to each other so I usually just read a book. The next day he was back. He put his tray down, stepped over the bench and ate, pushing his food around, first one way, then the other, then into a pile, all the time shoveling like it was work and he might as well get to it. He looked like Moose Mason from Archie Comics. When he was done he picked up his tray and left.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out that he was sitting across from me every day because he was lonely. I didn’t mind. From a distance we probably looked like we could be friends. To make it easier for him I started sitting at the same table so it would look like his sitting there every day was about the table, not me, and when a girl from my English class who was fat thirty years before everybody else asked if she could sit with me at lunch one day, I said I needed to study because I didn’t want him to feel bad and so lost one of the few people I knew who would talk to me.

  When he didn’t show up anyway I told myself I didn’t give a shit and left early. The next day he was back, the muscles twitching in his forearms, breaking the powdery buns into his chili.

  It took three days to learn his name. “Sup, Frank?” some guy walking by with his tray said, and he gave a small nod, and then a few days later somebody yelled, “Hey, Krapinski, man, what did Jesus eat at the last lunch?” and he slowly raised his left arm without looking up or lifting his elbow off the table or missing a stab with the fork and gave him the finger. A week later he was gone. For a few days I looked around the cafeteria for him, then forgot about it.

  THAT NOVEMBER, Mr. Falvo, who taught American history, stopped me on my way out of class. It was my sophomore year. Falvo was a quick-moving, sharp-featured man with flat, razor-scraped cheeks, an Alfalfa cowlick and a shriveled right arm that looked like it belonged on an eight-year-old and felt—I knew because he insisted on shaking hands with it, hunching forward to make up the distance—exactly like a warm, dead fish. He’d gotten it in the war—Okinawa, they said.

  Whatever else
he was—and he was a lot of things—Étienne (Ed) Falvo was not a simple guy. First generation out of the Bronx, second out of Aosta, Italy, he was badgering, impatient, ­generous—hard to resist and hard to take. Everything about him seemed too much—too much curiosity, too much enthusiasm, too much energy—until you realized that you were looking at something like a happy man, a man condemned to love this world the way a father might love his convict son. Helplessly. Knowing better.

  He was always talking, yelling, laughing, “NO, Barkus, by God you’re an embarrassment to idiots, promise me you won’t multiply except in math. NO! In the early eighteenth century, with the exception of the locals we hadn’t gotten around to yet, our great land west of the Alleghenies was about as empty as Jones’s head, and ‘Bleedin’ Kansas’ was NOT bleedin’ because it did not EXIST! Miss Mazzola—­yes, that would be you, my dear—­confirm my faith in your gender and tell me within half a century when ‘Bleedin’ Kansas’ was actually bleedin’. NO!” And he’d throw a piece of chalk at her head. “Washburn!”

  The rest of the class had filed out. “I’m going to be late,” I said.

  “How tall are you, Mosher?” he said. “How tall would you say?” He’d leaned back in his wooden teacher’s chair and put his black shoes on his desk. I’d spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of quick, chattering animal he reminded me of.