by Mark Slouka
“Yeah,” Ray said, and went up the stairs.
The cop stood there a while, tapping a pen on a pad, and again I was reminded of a cat, its eyes half-closed, tail twitching.
“I’m gonna give you some advice, though I don’t know why,” he said to Mr. Cappicciano. “Talk to your kid—I don’t want to have to come out here again.” He nodded toward the stairs. “Kid goes to school lookin’ like that, people are gonna jump to conclusions.”
“None of their fuckin’ business.”
“People like me.”
Mr. Cappicciano stared at him.
The cop smiled, except it wasn’t a smile. “Somethin’ I just say offend you?”
Mr. Cappicciano looked at me for a second, then shook his head.
“I’m sayin’ reel in your kid—it looks bad.” He turned to me. “Mosher, right? All right, why don’t we step outside for a few minutes, get some fresh air?”
“He got nothin’ to do with this,” Mr. Cappicciano said.
The cop shook his head, turned around. “You know why God gave us shoulders? So you can only get your head up your ass so far. Don’t push it.”
Mr. Cappicciano’s face had gone tight like somebody was pulling it from behind.
I looked at the cop. The cat had woken up. “What’s the matter, Cappicciano—miss the good old days? What’s it like not bein’ a cop anymore?”
I glanced over at the younger one. He was hunched slightly forward, watching them, his hand near his stick.
“Nothin’ to say?”
Mr. Cappicciano stared at him. You could see the skull under his skin.
“No? Nothin’? Let me explain somethin’ to you, ’case you had any doubts. Far as I’m concerned, ex is out—I don’t give a shit how many friends you got.”
“You can’t—”
“I can’t? What country you livin’ in?” He grinned and tapped the badge on his chest three times. “I can pretty much do whatever the fuck I want.” He paused. “But you know that.”
THEY’D JUST PULLED AWAY when Ray came out of the house. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Everything OK?”
“Didn’t feel like stickin’ around to find out. Fuck, it’s cold.”
We slowed down after we’d turned the corner.
“Where we goin’?” I said.
He stopped, turned his back to the wind, lit a cigarette.
“I don’t know. You have practice today?”
“What’re you—my coach now?”
“Sure, if I have to.” He looked at me, not smiling. “What?”
“Nothin’. What?”
“Look, I’m not gonna let you fuck this up. I’m serious.”
“Stop—”
“This is your year—you know that.”
“Knock it off.”
“You’re gonna take that Belcher kid apart.”
“C’mon—”
“C’mon what? What all the time?”
“Just—stop, OK? This guy’s four seconds off the state record.”
“So what?”
“So I don’t want to talk about it, OK?”
“Fine.”
We’d started walking again.
“We’re all gonna do somethin’ big this year. Karen’s gonna get into some great fuckin’ college, you’re gonna be goddamn state champ …”
“What about Frank?”
“Frank’s gonna stop playin’ with himself …”
“Think?”
“I don’t know—might be askin’ too much.”
“So what’re you gonna do?”
“Me? I’m gonna get the fuck outta here, that’s what I’m gonna do. Be like my whatcha call it, life’s work.” He smiled. “I can see it. Fifty years from now, some guy chippin’ it outta the rock: ‘Ray Cappicciano, RIP: Got the fuck outta Brewster.’ ”
“It’s not all bad,” I said.
“Think?—Everything good is leavin’.”
We walked across the elementary school parking lot, empty for the weekend, then along the classrooms. It was quiet out of the wind. Ray stopped to look at the windows, which were covered with brown turkeys and stick figures with black hats.
“Remember doin’ this shit?” he said.
“Sure.”
“That smell?”
“I remember the crayons.”
“Crayons, paints—all that shit. Those buckets of white paste they made us use …”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Weird. I mean, that was us, too.” He shook his head. “Nobody ever tells you stuff.”
“Maybe they don’t know.”
He walked to the next window like it was a museum. “Check out this dog, man—it’s like a potato with teeth.”
I walked over. “I like the tail,” I said.
He was still looking at the dog. “Listen, do me a favor—don’t tell Karen about the thing today, OK? With my old man. I don’t want to be puttin’ a lot of ideas in her head.”
“You sure? I mean, nothin’ happened.”
“No, I know. Still.”
He moved over to another window.
“What’d you tell ’em, anyway?”
“The cops? I don’t know, I told ’em what you told ’em.”
He nodded slowly, like it was something to get his mind around. “OK,” he said, and we headed off toward the Borden Bridge.
HE’D JUMPED from the weedy bank to a tire stuck in the mud when I asked him why he hadn’t told the cops about Danbury. He didn’t miss a beat. Wasn’t legit. If he told them about it, they’d close it down.
Made sense, I said.
He jumped back to the shore and we pushed up through the bushes decorated with trash from the spring floods, holding our arms up like boxers covering up. It was almost dark.
I’VE NEVER LIKED PARTIES, never been good in groups. All those voices talking at the same time. I came to a party early once and there were only eight or ten people there and it was fine but as each new person came in you had to talk a little louder, and because you were talking louder everybody else had to and soon everybody was yelling and you could hardly hear a thing.
That fall was like that—all these people screaming about college applications and the League of Nations and “Señor Mosher, hágame el favor de darme su libro,” and me in the middle not really hearing any of it. By the time Thanksgiving came around, the only thing I would have been thankful for was a little peace.
I didn’t find any. Now and then a voice, a line, would float up out of the racket and hang in the air where you could see it. That November I’d talked to my parents—we still ate dinner most nights, it wasn’t always crazy—and told them I was thinking about traveling around with some friends the next summer. My father wanted to know where we’d be going, how we’d pay for it.
“With that girl you’re always with?” my mother said.
“She’s not my girl,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
THAT WAS ONE. That “suit yourself” rose above the noise. It wasn’t much, but it made me furious and weak like a kick in the balls and I played it over and over in my head, turning it into speed, into pain, into fifteen 220s one after the other like a chain saw coming down, pushing Kennedy through the curves, making him earn it, forcing him to bring it out because he was the only one who could make me hurt anymore.
We trained together now, just the two of us. Moore would do what he could for the first few, then drop back to the second group. We didn’t talk much. We were all in. I’d think about it, plan for it. I’d go in hungry. If I ate anything after twelve o’clock, it would end up on the infield grass.
I never knew what drove him. Never asked. I accepted the beatings he gave me on that cinder track—and they were beatings, leaving me retching, staggering around—like a younger brother who’s proud to be noticed and knows he’s growing. He didn’t think he could take Balger alone, he told me one night as we jogged back past the science classrooms because the track had turned into a q
uarter mile of mud—the bastard was nationally ranked now. But we could beat North Salem and Balger in the two-mile relay.
How did he figure? I said. We were both working hard, talking between breaths. “Moore, OK,” I said, “but—we don’t have—anybody for fourth.”
“Kid—mustache,” he said.
“You’re kidding—Peter?”
“He’s comin’ up,” he said. “Their fourth is slow, too—Peter’s close—two, three seconds.”
We were approaching the line. Falvo stood to the side in the lab room doorway holding a stopwatch and a clipboard.
“Anyway doesn’t matter—if we spot ’em a few seconds. Ready?—I know what you can do.”
“Suit yourself” and “I know what you can do.” There were others that came through the blur of tests and papers, the ten-milers along the roads at dusk with the sweat freezing the ends of my hair into mats and some moron driving alongside offering me a ride because it looked like I was in a hurry, har-har, but those two stood out because they fed and fought each other in my skull: “Suit yourself” because I wasn’t worth talking to, because I was pathetic, because I wasn’t even man enough to admit what I felt, because no matter what I did I would never be what he could have been. “I know what you can do” because maybe there was something I could do, because it was my only answer, because if he’d lived I’d still be faster than him.
I’d think about it when I ran, feed on that mix of shame and rage, draw on it like a straw. I’d run him down like a wounded deer. I’d run him down as easily as sleeping. I’d chase him till his heart burst like a popped balloon and kids sucked bubbles out of the rags and popped those too, and I’d do it, gliding away like air, just to see the look on her face.
What a perfect noise those two made in my head. Even now it’s amazing to think I managed to do anything at all those few months, to answer questions about Ezra Pound’s black branch and the nitrogen cycle and what kind of corrective cookie I’d recommend for those fallen arches as if all the time a storm wasn’t raging in my skull. Only Ray and Karen understood, Karen because she could hear what you were saying even when you weren’t, because she could see exactly how fucked up you were and care for you anyway, Ray because he had his own storm, twice as black and twice as loud, and recognized the look.
It’s why we were friends. I’d disappeared the day my brother died. He dreamed of nothing more.
RAY AND I started walking again that fall, not as much as we used to, but close. I don’t know where I found the energy. Sometimes on the weekends or if it wasn’t too late Frank would come with us, or Karen if she didn’t have work to do. All those miles we walked, I don’t remember much. Stay somewhere long enough, you don’t see it at all.
Mostly I remember the two of us pretending it was still summer, casting for bass off the spillway into the wind, our fingers too numb to flip the bail. The June before, Ray’d found a couple of spinning rods in the weeds that some drunks had left and the first time he felt that tap and his line started making those crazy figure eights you’d have thought he was ten. “Oh shit, oh shit—I got one,” he yelled, then jumped to his feet and started walking backward till the fish flopped in the weeds. It was a perch, I remember, black bars across its sides, fins edged with orange. They always were beautiful. I got a kick out of his excitement. The way he held it, you’d have thought it was made of glass—or gold.
We got into it pretty heavy, picking up tips from the old guys at the tackle shop, exploring along the shores of the reservoirs whenever Karen had something going on. It was an escape, like most things—we didn’t pretend it was anything else. We had some times, some laughs, climbing into the trees along the shore to get the lures others had broken off because we couldn’t afford a buck for a hula popper—even caught a few fish in the bargain. It was good. Makes sense we’d want to hold on to it.
It didn’t work. With the leaves down you could see the headlights from the traffic winding through the woods and the sky would be like it gets in winter and it just didn’t work. One weirdly warm day the four of us went back to the embankment like we used to, but the water was too cold to swim and the fish had stopped biting and we just sat around on the bank in our sweatshirts till we decided to leave. There was no point in pushing it, we said. You had to know when to let it go. There’d always be another summer.
The last time Ray and I went out to the reservoir casting for bass in the coves must have been around the 10th because we talked about how we only had two weeks left of school before Christmas.
They didn’t do Christmas at his house anymore, Ray said. Used to be he and his old man would give each other something, and of course Gene when he was home—there’d always be something for him. He was thinking he might go out to Yonkers this year.
I told him that we used to have a tree and he was surprised because he’d never seen one at our house. Not often, I said. Once before Aaron died, another time when I was seven or eight. For a couple of years my dad had hung up lights on the bushes until he stopped.
“But you’re Jewish,” Ray said.
“We’re not really anything,” I said.
A cold fog was hanging over the reservoir. The water looked black. Ray reeled in and tucked the pole under his arm and blew on his fingers.
“These fish aren’t stupid, man. They’re probably all hangin’ out down there, sittin’ around their fish fires—”
Talking kept my teeth from chattering.
“—tails sticking out of their electric blankets, eating fondue …”
“What the fuck is fondue?”
“This cheese stuff you dip bread in—saw it in Playboy.”
“Shit, we should be using that—stick some fondue on a hook.”
“Or a good book.”
“That’s it—a big, fat book with a fishhook through it.”
He cast out. The lure made a little white circle in the water. “Fuck, you cold?”
“I was cold an hour ago,” I said.
A FEW DAYS before the end of school he came up to me in the hall. He was trying not to smile. I should come by the house, he said, he had something to show me.
She was lying in a corner of the living room on a blanket, five puppies the size of hamsters nosed up to her belly. Ray sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of her and Wilma thumped her tail twice on the boards without lifting her head. I’d never seen newborn puppies before.
“Can you believe this shit?” he said.
When he gently popped one off a nipple it started to mew like a kitten. He put it in my hand. It lay rocking back and forth in my palm, its tiny legs sticking out to the side.
“Amazing, right?”
“Unbelievable.”
He took it back and gave it the tip of his pinkie and it began to try to nurse. He smiled. “Not much comin’ outta there, little guy.”
I turned around.
He was leaning against the kitchen doorway, wearing only a pair of boxers. I was surprised how white his body was, the thick thighs, the neck wrinkled like some kind of animal hide, the tight gut with its broad stripe of hair, the reddened nipples. When he moved his weight I could see his dick shift under the cloth.
“Didn’t think we’d be seein’ you again,” he said. “Now I know what it takes.”
Ray took the puppy back and pushed it up to Wilma’s belly, wiggling it back and forth like he was fitting a rubber pipe on a nozzle.
“How you doin’, Mr. Cappicciano?” I said.
“Somethin’, huh?” he said, nodding toward Wilma and the pups.
“Sure is,” I said.
“Sure is,” he said, smiling like a man clawing his way out of a well, “sure is. Hey, but that reminds me, you’re such a stranger these days, I didn’t know when we’d see you again. Gimme a sec—I got somethin’ for ya.”
“What’s that about?” I whispered when he was out of the room.
Ray didn’t answer. He’d stood up as soon as he’d put the puppy back.
Mr. Cap
picciano came back in the room holding a hand-sized box. It was wrapped in deep blue wrapping paper with a small, silver ribbon.
I just stood there.
“Now I know you Jews don’t celebrate Christmas—”
“You didn’t have to—” I began.
“—and I don’t really know about Hanukkah—”
“—Really, you—”
“—but I figured, you know, ‘Season’s Greetings’ is kinda everybody, right?”
“Sure, yeah, thank you,” I said, taking the package. The wrapping paper had tiny silver lettering on it that said “Season’s Greetings” over and over.
“Figured ‘Season’s Greetings’ might be all right.”
“Sure,” I said, “thank you.”
“So, fine—go ahead, open it.”
I glanced at Ray.
“Don’t look at him—he had fuck-all to do with it.”
I looked at the package.
“This is just from me to you—outta respect to you and your family.”
“You sure? I mean—”
“Go ahead.”
I started to pry under the scotch-taped flap like a girl.
“Go ahead. Plenty more where that came from,” he said.
Wrapped in tissue paper I found a velvety black cloth embroidered with a skull and the letters SS like silver lightning bolts.
I didn’t know what to say, how to act. He seemed sincere, sober—he wanted me to like it. I remember standing there, my face burning like I was embarrassed.
“I don’t … thank you,” I said.
“You’re not offended?”
“Me? No. Thank you, it’s …”
“I figured, you know, who better than you people to have it? Take a little of your own back.”
“Sure, no—thank you,” I said again.
He smiled, then turned to go back into the kitchen. “Give my regards to your parents. Oh, and Merry Christmas—or whatever.”
WE TALKED THAT YEAR about going down to Times Square, the four of us watching the ball drop. Or the hammer, maybe. Paul Grecco’s brother Tommy had come home dead for Christmas, and even though I hadn’t known him, just like I hadn’t known Jim Sinclair or Mark Gonzales’s older brother who we heard was learning how to use a fork again in some VA hospital in Virginia, it got to you anyway. Everywhere you looked there were pictures of sweaty reporters with helmets on their heads and GIs sliding stretchers into helicopters like they were feeding something. We wanted to be done with ’69.
