by Mark Slouka
He picked up the box.
“Whaddya think, time to put away Dad’s good deeds—all those medals from the war?” he said.
IT WAS a good time, that winter, spring, most of that summer—the best we’d have. The four of us down by the frozen reservoir making big gurgling holes in the ice with rocks, listening to that hollow tock and chunk echo off into the dark. In the spring the lights from the cars disappeared and then it was hot and we’d stay out late, swimming, and I’d see Ray with his arm around her sitting on the bank, his t-shirt tan like brown, shoulder-length gloves. We’d horse around, throw each other in, lie in the grass and talk about what we were going to do. Ray had met Karen’s parents.
It’s the music that brings it back, brings it alive. Dylan and Creedence, the Beatles and the Stones. It would take us back down where cool water flows, Karen smiling, the three of us nodding to the beat, doing our best John Fogerty imitations, Ray stalking the embankment in his cutoffs, leaning back to play that invisible lick, then whipping forward, wet hair falling in his face—Let me remember things I don’t know. In July there would always be that one night when the air was warm as the water and the water like velvet and you’d swim out and dive and come up into the dark and a soft wave of fields and honeysuckle would wash over you and you’d say to yourself, because you could, because you were young, I could die right now and it wouldn’t matter. It would be years before I learned that the actual words weren’t things I don’t know, but things I love, but by then the barefoot girl dancing in the moonlight had moved on, and the right words seemed wrong.
It’s funny how we fit her into the things we used to do before, how the two of them being together didn’t matter as much as it should have—how easy she made it. She’d kid around with us, give us a hard time for being guys, for being gross, for making fart jokes when our trunks filled up with air, but somehow make it clear that Ray was Ray—separate, hers—and that it shouldn’t matter. And it wouldn’t, really. Or less, anyway. She’d talk to Frank about his sister, who we’d heard had lost the baby, who it didn’t look like was coming back, and he’d tell her things he couldn’t say to us.
You’d see them sitting next to each other on the cement block by the dam, arguing about Jesus. She used to go to church but she couldn’t do it anymore, she said. And Frank would tell her about Jesus’ love and being forgiven for your sins and she’d say she wasn’t sure what a sin was any more, and that love was fine but what did it say that in the whole Bible Jesus never laughed, or even smiled. And the two of them would sit there, their legs dangling over the side, actually listening to each other. She had that. She’d listen, and it would make you do the same.
It was the same with me and Leonard Cohen. I couldn’t stand him—that beatnik-poet thing annoyed me—and we’d go back and forth about him and about Candy and ecology and acid and Vietnam and Joni Mitchell and everything else but whether we agreed or not—and nobody could hold her own like she could—it didn’t matter. It was respect—I’ve never known it so uncluttered. Or call it generosity. You had your beliefs. She might think you were wrong—and say so—but you were you. Only when it came to cruelty did she draw the line—there she was immovable. It was wrong. It would always be wrong. Particularly when it was unnecessary, in which case it was unforgivable.
So of course I was in love with her, though if she knew, she didn’t show it. And after a while I could live with that. For a few weeks I went out with a girl, Abby Fisher, who had beautiful dark bangs that shone like wood in old houses and big, serious eyes and who always seemed to be trying to hear something whenever I put my hand up her shirt. It seemed to bother her that she couldn’t make it out, and sometimes it felt like it was just me and her breasts. She was nice enough. Karen said I should invite her out with us sometime, but we didn’t last long—I kept expecting her to say “You hear that? What is that?”—and I never did.
Anyway, it was good the way it was: the heat, the summer, the smell of Off! and beer, the black-eyed Susans in the weeds along the dam and the four of us diving to get away from the horseflies that came down from the farms, gray and long as the joint of your thumb—I didn’t want to change it, risk it. We were like that CSNY song, which didn’t make sense but kind of did: “… one person … two alone … three together … four …”—and for a while we were—“each other.” If confusion had its cost—if it was confusion—we didn’t know that then.
There were other times, of course, times when they wanted to be alone, times when other things—parents, work—got in the way. Who knows how many afternoons and nights there really were, how many times we really sat on that embankment watching the moon lift clear of the trees, so perfect it seemed to be daring us to laugh. Maybe it’s like with little kids, who you do something with twice and who remember it as a thousand. Take movies: I remember hitching down to Carmel with Frank a dozen times—the crickets and the heat on that open stretch along the lake, the dark of the theater until your eyes got used to it, the Good & Plenty I’d always get—but the only movie I can remember us seeing is Easy Rider the week Karen went with her family to the shore and Ray started living at our house again.
Who knows? Maybe Easy Rider was all there was, just Fonda and Hopper tooling across America, looking for that shotgun. Maybe there’d only been one winter day with the four of us stumbling along the shore and Frank shot-putting small boulders through the ice, and just one day in April when the sun was suddenly warm enough to risk getting in that water still dark with winter, and just one night with our bonfire on the embankment and the moths and the moon and the radio playing that corny Dusty Springfield song we had an excuse to listen to because we couldn’t pick up the alternative stations, Karen sitting there next to Ray with her arm around him, swaying back and forth, teasing, “The only boy who could ever reach me …” and I just multiplied them in my head to fill the seasons. If so, that’s OK—they were worth it.
IT MAKES SENSE that she didn’t understand, that the more time she spent with him, or with us—the four of us out by the reservoir or up in my room, listening to records—the more she’d start wondering. What doesn’t make sense is that we didn’t. She’d ask me sometimes—more often as things went on—and I’d tell her what I could. About Gene, who was still living in Yonkers that summer, about Ray’s parents. Of course he’d want her to meet his father, I’d say—it was just that his dad was kind of a rough guy. His mom? She’d split for Reno when Ray was nine—nothin’ in the contract said a mother had to love her kid. Ditto with his stepmom, five years later. No, Gene was great—we used to take care of him together sophomore year.
She didn’t get it, she said to me one time as we sat next to each other in the hall—how could a man just send off his three-year-old kid? It was complicated, I said. What was he like? she asked—Ray’s dad. Complicated, I said.
Complicated good or complicated bad?
Not so good, I said, but everybody had something.
We were supposed to be preparing a report on Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. People were turning in their textbooks, the windows were open—everything had that end-of-the-year feeling.
“Ray won’t talk to me about him,” she said.
“I don’t blame him.”
“That bad?”
“Look at it this way—when people yell ‘Kill the pigs,’ he’s the one they’re thinking about.”
She didn’t smile. “Why does he get into fights all the time?”
“Maybe it’s easier,” I said.
“You don’t fight. Frank doesn’t fight.”
“Ray’s got a temper,” I said. “Anyway, he’s stopped.”
“Because of me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Listen, we should probably do this thing.”
She shook her head, looked down at our assignment, read aloud: “ ‘There’s nothing so monstrous that people won’t believe it of themselves. Discuss.’ God, that’s such bullshit.”
“That what we’re gonna say?” I said.
&n
bsp; “Why not? Maybe we can talk about how he left out the word ‘some’—‘Nothing so monstrous that some people won’t believe it of themselves.’ Most people it’s the opposite.”
“You think?”
“You kidding?—Manson, Calley, Oswald, Sirhan, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek—”
“OK, OK.”
“—every Nazi that ever breathed, that general that Falvo keeps talking about—LeMay?”
“Half of ’em were crazy.”
“The point is you couldn’t get them to believe it.”
“Maybe we could go with that.” I scribbled it down. When I leaned forward the air felt cool against my shirt.
She went back to Ray. “Thing is, it just doesn’t seem like him. I mean, he’s not a fighter.”
I smiled. “You think so?”
“I do—don’t you?”
“I think Ray’s a lot of things.”
“Let me guess—you think he’s complicated.”
“I guess I do.”
“Like you?”
“Different.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” I said.
She paused. “Ray told me about your brother.”
“It’s not a secret,” I said.
“I can’t—I mean, there are some things you can’t even imagine.”
“Pretty much all of ’em.” I smiled. “Hey, maybe we could work that into our report somehow, whaddya think?”
She was looking at me. “I’m sorry, Jon. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“Long time ago,” I said.
THAT AUGUST 15TH she borrowed her dad’s car and we drove down to Yonkers—Ray had said he’d probably be hitching down and she said, why didn’t we all go? She’d never met Gene. Frank and I hadn’t seen him in over a year—it would get our minds off where we weren’t.
We didn’t know then how big it would be, who would be there. Nobody did. Anyway, it wasn’t really an option for us. It wasn’t just the twenty-four bucks—though the thought of spending twenty movie tickets for three days even if we’d had the money was hard to get around—it was everything: money, work, Karen’s parents and Frank’s, even mine. How could we have known they’d cave and let everybody in for free? Anyway, we were seventeen. We could no more say to our parents “Hey, man, we’re heading up to Woodstock for three or four days to get our soul free” than we could ask them for bread so we could score some acid.
So we went to Yonkers. It wasn’t far, less than an hour, just a poor-looking place with hot, twisty little roads and houses stacked tight like in Monopoly before you trade them in for a hotel. Some parts, with scraggly trees wilting in the heat and rows of small brick stores, made even Brewster look good. We got turned around and lost and wound up bumping over railroad tracks with weeds growing knee-high between the ties, then driving along chain-link fences protecting huge, cracking parking lots turning back into fields and factories with black stars where the windows used to be until we finally came to some run-down buildings with laundry hanging limp between the windows and people sitting on stoops in the shade.
Ray said it looked familiar, but he’d always hitched so he couldn’t be sure. He was riding shotgun, his hand out on the roof. Music from people’s radios came in on the hot air. You could hear people yelling to each other, kids screaming. Summer.
We were stopped at a light when he called out to a black guy wearing shades who was coming out of a store. “What the fuck, might as well ask,” he said.
The guy stopped, his head wobbling a little on his neck and looked around like he couldn’t figure out where the voice was coming from. It was only then we saw the bottle sticking out of the paper bag, the pants, the shoes flapping apart.
“Lock the doors,” Frank said.
“Hey, can you help us out?” Ray called, leaning out of the car. “Excuse me.”
He turned—in parts, like a driver making a three-point turn—then came toward us on that gently rolling boat. A big man in an open shirt.
“Sorry to bother you—can you help us out?”
Frank reached over and pushed down the lock buttons.
“Don’t do that,” Ray said.
“I’m not gonna sit here and—”
“Charles Street?” Ray said. “Any idea?” He’d turned around, pulled up the nobs. “I know it’s around here somewhere.”
He blocked the sun when he came up to the car, so close I could see the sweat gleaming in the hollows of his stomach muscles. He didn’t say anything. We could hear him breathing through his mouth.
“Charles Street?” Ray said again.
He swallowed, then set the bottle carefully on the sidewalk. He straightened up and leaned on the car.
“Charles Street,” he said, in a voice like Sidney Portier’s. “Well, you just all wrong here.”
“Yeah, I know,” Ray said.
He scratched his stomach. “Charles Street,” he said again, then pointed up the road. I’d never really seen a black man’s hands up close before. “Y’all go straight up here two, no, three lights, then right on Foster. Charles’ll be”—you could see him counting in his head—“your fourth on the right. That way you don’t have to go ’round ’cause it bein’ one-way.”
“Thanks,” Ray said.
The man leaned down, swaying slightly, and picked up the bottle.
“You folks have a nice day,” he said.
RAY’S AUNT, Suze, turned out to be his dad’s cousin, a blond woman with a kind, tired face and big red hands who walked like her knees had frozen or her shoes were made of iron. The house, small and wooden with a front lawn the size of a table, was crammed between split-levels with brick steps and short white railings. It smelled like Ajax and paint, and when the four of us piled into the small, hot living room with Suze and her grown son, Vinnie, and then little Gene came tearing in yelling Ray’s name, I felt like maybe we should keep it short.
“I’m sorry I got nuttin’ to offa youse,” she kept saying, her accent big as Brooklyn. “Vinnie, go on down to the sto-ah and get some bee-ah.”
We wouldn’t hear of it, we said. Besides, Frank could go. Anyway, we’d only be staying a minute. It was just that it’d been so long since we’d seen little Gene, and Karen had never met him.
Well here he was, Suze said, meanwhile looking at Vinnie and pushing the air in front of herself with both hands and mouthing the words “Go, go!” like we were blind and wouldn’t notice, “Growin’ like a Gene-bean not that it surprises me the way he eats, I keep sayin’ I need that goose with … sit, sit, here, make yourselves at home,” and then, to Vinnie, “Go! What? In the drawer.”
He disappeared into the kitchen and came out stuffing something in his pocket, a Mets cap on his head.
“You mind if I come with?” Frank said. He nodded toward the cap: “The Mets, huh? Tell me the truth—did you think they could take Baltimore?”
The screen slammed behind them.
“And some cold cuts,” Suze yelled after them.
“I want some co-cuts,” Gene yelled from the couch.
“Whaddya say?” Ray said, tickling him on the sofa.
“An’ Cheez Doodles.”
“An’ Cheez Doodles,” Suze yelled.
Ray pulled up Gene’s t-shirt and made a long flubbery mouth fart on his belly. “Whaddya say?”
“Pleeease.”
“We had a poop party for his second,” Suze said. “Filled some diapers with chocolate pudding—remember that? The kids loved that.”
“Sure,” Ray said.
“This kid from three over starts crying, ‘I wanna eat Gene’s poopy diapers,’ remember?”
Ray laughed.
She glanced out through the screen door. “You think he heard about the Cheez Doodles?”
“You have to let us help out,” Karen said.
“Please, you didn’t come all the way down here to buy your own lunch.” She was sitting on the edge of the kitchen chair, her knees together like a socialite. “So you’re
Ray’s girl?” she said, pushing a long strand of hair behind her ear.
Ray was showing Gene how he could take his thumb off and put it back on.
“I guess I am.”
Suze nodded, something unreadable in her face. “Well I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“And I’m pleased to make yours, ma’am.”
“And so polite,” she said to nobody in particular.
“Smart, too,” Ray said.
“Smart, too? A face like that an’ smart too? Well, it’s like I been sayin’, it’s about time you found yourself a nice girl.”
“Suze …”
“What?—I’m just sayin’.” Gene was holding Ray’s hand, turning it over. “Gene, sweetie, why don’t you show your brother that picture you made.”
WE STAYED FOR AN HOUR, maybe two. Frank and Vinnie came back with two six-packs and cold cuts and bread and we sat around the coffee table that was made of strips of wood-colored plastic and at some point Suze sent Vinnie back out for some Entenmann’s. She had a daughter, too, she said, older than Vinnie, both happy to help their mother, not like most kids these days you suffer for ’em they wipe their hands a’ you. She was sorry we couldn’t make her acquaintance.
We said we were too. A Good Humor truck came up the street, the jingle growing, turned, faded.
Gene was a good boy, she didn’t mind watching him for a while. The neighborhood was something else again. “Can you smell that?” she asked.
“What?” Frank said politely.
The breeze had been bringing in the hot smell of garbage for a while. There were three fans going. They didn’t help much.
“All I’m sayin’ is, two weeks they don’t take out the garbage. S’not the blacks, I got enough trouble, anyway I ain’t prejudice—it’s our own people. I tried talkin’ to ’em, I’m ashamed to repeat what they said to me. Was everything I could do to keep Vinnie from goin’ over there. Here, have some more.”
“You want I’ll go talk to ’em,” Ray said. Gene had fallen asleep, his head on a pillow on Ray’s lap.
