by Mark Slouka
“C’mon,” I said.
“C’mon, what?—All that readin’ you do, you’re probably goin’ to college.” He came back in, handed me a beer. “Fuck, I’d go. Anything’s better than this shit.”
“You could go.”
He laughed. “Get me out of the draft, right?” He took a drink, swallowed a belch: “Only way I’d get into fuckin’ college is if I broke in through a window.” He started talking along with the TV in a fake baritone: “Like sands through the hourglass … so are the Days of Our Lives. I can’t stand this shit.” He crawled over on his knees, switched the channel.
“My mom watches that crap,” I said.
“Yeah?” Little Gene stirred, started to cry, then fell back asleep. “Almost time for him to eat. Ours took off.”
“She just left?”
“Funny how that happens around here.”
“Where to?”
“Who the fuck knows? Not my mom anyway—his.” He was looking at the TV. “You ever think about takin’ off?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, seriously, one day just like walkin’ the fuck out. Not like, you know, Philly or somethin’, but different, like some place they talk a different language an’ everything.”
“Sure.”
“I think about it all the time.”
“You should go,” I said. “I mean, you know, when you’re ready.”
“Maybe I will.”
He stood up. “I gotta get his bottle.”
He grabbed the empties and walked into the kitchen. “Have to take my little guy along—can’t go anywhere without him. Who knows—maybe we could go out west, live off the land and shit.” I heard the refrigerator open. “Fuck, we’re outta milk.”
He came into the doorway. “Listen, you think your folks would have some milk?”
I WAS NERVOUS when I called—I’m not sure why, exactly. We’d had a few beers, but it wasn’t that. It was Ray, mostly: the coat, the walk, the broken tooth. I could see us showing up at the door, him carrying the baby. And what would he make of my parents, our house—the books, the quiet, the references to Max Brod or Camus, Versailles or Saigon—the whole thing seemed crazy.
I was relieved when I got my dad.
“Mosher residence?” he said, sounding unsure.
I explained, talking quickly. I was sorry, a friend, his baby brother, only a few minutes …
He didn’t understand. “And you say this person is a friend from school?” he said, speaking English, grinding on the r’s like he was getting up some phlegm. I could hear my mother in the background: “Wer ist es?”
“Only for a few minutes,” I said.
“Here? Now?” I heard her say.
“And you say you are where now? And who is this baby that …?”
I explained, again. “I see. One moment.” My mother’s voice disappeared as he put his hand over the phone. I knew what she was saying: Who was this so-called friend? They’d never heard of him. Did I think I could just call at any hour and …
He came back on. “Your mother says we have some milk,” he said.
I KNEW what would happen. They’d be outraged, appalled. Who was this hoodlum who talked like this, who dressed like a gangster? For his part, Ray would think they were stuck-up, fucked up, weird—worse, he’d think I’d been putting on some kind of act, that I was like them.
“Listen, we could just go over to Kobacker’s,” I said as we walked up the street in the dark.
A cold mist was falling, just enough to wet our faces. Ray was shushing the baby, patting him on the back, making little noises to distract him: “That’s right, little man, we’re gonna get you somethin’ to eat, yes we are.” He turned to me. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.
MORE THAN THEM it was him—like there was another person talking through his mouth saying “Thank you, ma’am” and “Yes, sir” and “What a nice house you have.” For a second, thinking he was laughing at them, I felt a confused flash of resentment. He was being polite.
My father met us in the hall holding his reading glasses. “Welcome, welcome. And your name is Raymond?”
“Yes, sir.” He shook his hand.
“Would you like me to take your coat, Raymond?”
I could see him looking at the pictures, the books.
My mother had taken Gene as soon as we came in. “And so this is the baby? Here, let me see—may I?”
Ray started to apologize for bothering them.
“No bother.” And she walked away with the baby cradled in her arms. When he looked at me, all I could do was shrug.
“So, people call me Ray,” he said to my father, who was standing in the closet, hanging up the coat.
“I’m sorry?”
“My name. People call me Ray.” The chipped tooth, the long greasy hair, the way he stood by the glassed-in bookcase, alert—he seemed charged, unstable, like a cyclone in a bottle. He scratched the back of his head, a long pink cut, half-healed and puckered, running from his wrist to a scabbed knuckle. “I’m only Raymond when I’m in trouble.”
My father smiled. “And you know Jon from the classes at the high school?”
“Lunch, mostly.”
“I see.”
Ray smiled. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure in eating I’ve got him beat.”
“Can this be true?”
“Absolutely.”
“You eat more than Jon?”
“It’s not even close.”
It was unreal: my father kidding around with Ray Cappicciano in the hall, my mother feeding Gene, swaying back and forth as if remembering a dance, saying, “You have to feel the milk with your elbow so it is not too warm for the baby.” I just stood there.
I watched her holding Gene on her hip, then cradle him again and work the nipple into his mouth. “There we go, that’s a good baby. Did we have something to eat?”
“We gave him some banana,” Ray said.
“Is this true?” she said to the baby. “Did we have some banana?” She moved the bottle to a better position. “What is the matter with you?” she snapped. “Did we raise you like this?”
She hadn’t looked up. For a second I thought she was angry at the baby, that she’d gone crazy.
“Ask—your—friend if he wants something to eat or drink.”
“You want something to eat or drink?” I said.
I saw him look at me, then at my mother. “No, I’m good,” he said slowly, seeing something. And standing there, awkward as a teen-aged baboon pretending to be a man, pretending to be tough, pretending, I felt a spasm of gratitude and shame.
“You’re quite sure?” my mother said. “Because it’s no problem. You’ll have to excuse my son’s manners.”
“I’m fine,” he said. He was looking at her, an angle to his voice, almost a smile. “We ate before.”
I think it wasn’t until then I realized how alone I’d been.
IT’S HARD TO CHANGE what you remember. In my head I can hear Falvo trying to talk to us about the Russians going into Czechoslovakia and somebody in the back of the class saying he’d check her slovakia, no problem, and one of the girls moaning “Oooh, baby, check it,” and Falvo kicking the kid out, and all that happening around the same time as Tina. And even though I know it wasn’t like that, that Tina was that April and the Russian invasion of check her slovakia almost four months later, I can’t unstick them. And maybe it doesn’t matter. Everything was crazy then, charged up. The fact that a stupid joke like that could actually get under my skin—Oooh, baby, check it!—that it could make me shift around in my chair to get myself loose, tells you everything you need to know.
That spring, grabbing something in my room on the way to school, I saw Mr. Perillo walk out of his house followed by his daughter, Tina. She was wearing bell-bottoms, a halter, some kind of yellow headband. They were arguing about something.
I liked looking at Tina. She was five years older than me, in college at New Paltz, and in summer I’d watch her lying on a towel
in the back yard smearing lotion on her stomach and I’d try to make things happen. I’d try until my legs were shaking but even though it felt good, nothing went anywhere. In fact, nothing had ever gone anywhere—not with Cleopatra, who I’d torn out of the magazine when Ray was in the bathroom, not with anybody. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Still, all those times watching her, trying, felt like some kind of connection between us. Sometimes I even imagined she knew I was there, was helping me out, flipping over on her stomach and letting the straps of her top fall to the towel just for me.
The windows were closed—I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Mr. Perillo had the car door open and was about to get in when he turned as if to say something and Tina spun into the car and fell to the driveway. I didn’t understand what had happened. I could see her lying on her side, the headband pulled down over her face. I was about to run outside when I saw Mr. Perillo get in the car and slam the door and pull out of the driveway. She was standing up, holding her face with both hands. By the time I realized he’d hit her in the face with the back of his fist, she was inside the house.
I just stood there. The whole thing—the smallness of the movement, the way she’d slammed into the roof of the car, the way she lay there like a dropped doll, her hair covering her face—it seemed acted, unreal. I’d never really seen what people could do to each other.
I didn’t know what to do. Should I call the cops? Would she want me to? We’d known the Perillos all my life. Mr. Perillo had cleaned our gutters after Aaron died. Mrs. Perillo had always been kind to me. I grabbed my books. I was walking down the steps with the idea of knocking on their door to see if she was OK when she ran out of the house carrying a backpack, threw it in through the open window of her car and got in. I slowed down. I didn’t want to embarrass her. Worse, she might think I was doing it for some other reason, using it somehow, that I was ridiculous, a kid.
It was too late to turn around, or hide behind the bushes. For a moment I thought of pretending I hadn’t seen her but she backed up right next to me. She was crying. She’d tied the bandanna over the side of her face but you could see the blue coming out around the edge. I’d never seen a face so broken.
“Hey,” I blurted. “I … are you OK?”
She looked up, surprised to see me there, then shook her head, her lips trembling like she was cold.
“You saw?” she said.
I nodded. I’d known her all my life.
She was shaking like someone freezing to death.
“I don’t … he didn’t mean to, he just …”
“It’s OK.” I took off my jacket and handed it to her through the window. “Here.”
She just sat there holding it, the tears running down her face.
“I can drive,” I said. “You want I can drive you to the hospital.”
She tried to smile and I could see her reach up and catch the edge of her grief. The shuddering start to slow.
“No. Thanks. I’m OK.”
“I could do it.”
“No, I know you could. I’m OK, really.” She cleared her right eye with her finger, her left with her thumb, then gave a small laugh. “So … how’s school?”
I shrugged.
She lit a cigarette, her hands shaking badly. “You’re, what, a junior now?”
“I’m—”
“Jesus, look at me.” She glanced up the street. “You goin’ to school? C’mon, get in.”
IT WAS ONE of those days in spring—warm, still, dripping—that remind you of what dirt and roots smell like. The trees were just leafing out. A week earlier the hill above the station had been bare except for the maples and here and there a willow, like some painter had touched a smear of green to the brown. We didn’t talk much. We took the old route down Brewster Hill Road and I watched her shift gears, holding her cigarette. She’d cut the base of her thumb and every few minutes she’d suck on it, steering with her right.
“How’s my eye look?”
“I can’t really see it.”
She pulled back the bandanna. “Be honest.”
“Not so great,” I said.
“I can’t see much out of it.”
“It’s closing up.”
She shook her head, then laughed. “This is so fucked—sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not a kid anymore.”
She turned to look at me. “No, I guess not.”
We lined up with the other cars. “Jesus,” she said, looking at the buildings, “I can’t believe this place is still here.”
“Me either.”
“I bet.”
“Well, thanks for the ride,” I said.
She nodded. “Hang in there—it just gets weirder.”
“Great,” I said. I yanked at the door.
“It sticks—you have to pull it in.”
“You goin’ back to New Paltz?”
I turned around when she didn’t answer.
“I’m not goin’ back,” she said quietly.
“What do you mean? Don’t you have to—”
“I’m not goin’ back. I’m leavin’. For good.”
“Jesus, where?”
She laughed. “God, you’re so uptight—I don’t know where, someplace else. What’s the difference? I heard about this commune up in Vermont where they’re not all about rules, where they share everything—maybe I’ll try that. Anyway, you don’t need to hear about my shit, you’ve got a life to—”
“I don’t have anything,” I said.
“Oh, c’mon, sure you—”
“Really,” I said.
She glanced over at me, then out through the windshield.
“It can seem like that sometimes.”
“It is like that.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s just so fucked sometimes.” She smiled. “You want to know why he hit me? Because of Martin Luther King. Should have kept his mouth shut, he wouldn’t’ve gotten shot. I say how can you say that and he starts yelling it’s his house he paid for it he can say what he wants and if I don’t like it I’m free to leave. King was just a nigger with a collar and an attitude, a Communist, a liar—he’s surprised nobody shot him sooner, so I say, ‘What are you afraid of, Daddy?’ and he walks out the door. ‘What are you afraid of,’ I say, because I’m still tryin’ to talk to him—‘you afraid I’m gonna sleep with a black man? Is that it?’ And you know what he says to me? I mean, I’m his little girl, I used to ride around on his shoulders, and you know what he says to me? He turns around and looks at me like he actually hates me, like he’s gonna cry or something—and says, ‘I’d rather see you dead.’ I mean, I just couldn’t believe it—I couldn’t believe he’d say that to me. The next second it’s all crazy and he’s screamin’, ‘Get back in the house, get back in the goddamn house’ and I’m saying, because now I want to hurt him like he’s hurt me, ‘What’s the difference, Daddy, men are men, it’s my body, I can ball who I want,’ and that’s when he hits me.”
She was still looking out the window. “It’s always like this, you know?—What they did to Martin, what they’re doin’ in Vietnam. It’s their answer—killing. My dad’s no different—if it scares you, hit it. Even if it’s your daughter.”
A light mist of rain—as if somebody was standing on the roof with a spray bottle—came over the windshield, then stopped. The other cars had gone.
She turned to look at me. “You’re late for school, Jon Mosher.”
“I don’t care,” I said. I was looking at the strand of hair she’d caught behind her ear, the two small freckles on her cheek, the blue-gray mound of her right eye.
“Thanks for letting me—”
“Nobody should hit you,” I said.
“Sure, but until people—”
“No, I mean you.”
I could see her hesitate—surprised, confused. “Thank you, I … Shit, we’re about to get busted.” A man was walking up from the school. “Shit, shit—quick, get your head down.” She started the
car, put it in gear. Around the side of my book bag I could see him speed up, then break into a jog, his head to the side, trying to see who was in the car.
“Hey, you! This is school property.”
“Shit! He’s gonna cut us off.”
“Go over the grass.”
She laughed. “Hold on.” We bumped up and over the grassy divider and out on the road. “Did he see you?”
“No way.”
“That was like Steve McQueen or somethin’.”
I’d had too much coffee that morning—my stomach felt shaky. We drove on, not saying anything, the quiet thickening between us. I could feel the muscles in my legs tensing, bracing against the floorboards like they wanted to break through.
She checked the rearview, not looking at me. “Listen, I don’t, you know, have to be anywhere. You want to take a walk or something?”
IT WAS THE BARN below the spillway that made us notice it. We must have seen it a thousand times before: an old-fashioned dirt road with a grassy strip running down the middle. She loved barns. Did I know where the road went? I said it went around Lost Lake. She knew that—she meant had I ever been? “I’ve been driving past that road all my life,” she said.
“It’s private,” I said.
“C’mon,” she said.
We parked up along Fairfield Drive and walked down the shoulder, already thick with poison ivy, then turned in past the barn—huge, red, sagging under the oaks. A mailbox said S. Colby. Across from the barn on an overgrown lawn stood an old white house. Where the lawn narrowed, a weedy cut led to the lake. Somebody had set up a half-dozen rowboats on sawhorses.
“I don’t know that we should be doing this,” I said.
“C’mon—what’s the worst that can happen? We’ll say we’re lost. It’s called Lost Lake, right?”
“I don’t know.”
She didn’t turn around, just reached back.
Before I could think, she was holding me by the hand, pulling me along like it was a kind of joke, like she had to drag me, but there was something in her voice—a little forced, a little nervous—that was like falling into warm water. I could feel the heat of her palm, her fingers wrapped around mine, slipping, tightening.
