Brewster: A Novel

by Mark Slouka

  In the end Ray and I watched it on TV with the puppies teething on our sneakers. Frank had told his parents he didn’t want to teach Sunday school anymore and they’d grounded him for vacation. Karen had gone with her parents to Pittsburgh. She called just before midnight and Ray talked to her as the ball went down. “Me, too,” he said. “Really,” and then “Yeah, he’s right here,” and handed me the phone and we clanked beer cans and I talked to her for a while as the year 1970 flashed quietly on the TV. It looked strange, almost unnatural, like everything could be different now. She wanted to know how Ray was doing and I said he was good, and then she said, How’re you doing? and I laughed and said I’m fine, everybody’s fine and she said, Really? and I said, Yeah—really truly. She’d had a bad dream the night before, she said—it was like all day she’d been carrying it around, and I said not to worry about it, it was just a dream. I never asked.

  We sat and watched the TV for a while. Ray’s dad wasn’t coming home that night and I hadn’t felt like sitting at the dinner table with mom and dad listening to Walter Cronkite tell me how it was. Anyway, in my house there were no new years.

  I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about that night. We messed around with the puppies for a while, piling them on top of each other, flipping them on their backs. Their fur had come in. One was brown like Wilma, one was black and the other three were in-between. At some point we heard sleet on the window, dry, like sand, like somebody was trying to get our attention.

  Maybe it was the beer but somehow we got onto Frank and from him to God and from God to what happened when you died. It was hard to think of people actually being gone, Ray said—you expected them to just be somewhere else, like on vacation. Like any day they could just pop up. And he told me about a farm they used to go to when he was a kid that had been run by an old lady with warts like pencil erasers on her cheeks named Mrs. Kelly. She’d been dead for years and the farm sold and gone, but some part of him still expected her to be where he’d seen her last, twisting the dirt balls off the lettuce or coming up from the root cellar. Even weirder, he expected it to be summer—a chilly morning, everything still wet. It was like she was fixed there—like in a snow globe.

  “Except summer,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s what heaven’s like,” he said. “Just being stuck in somebody else’s head.”

  I said I didn’t know.

  We thought about it for a while. The beer had slowed us down.

  He looked at the TV. We’d turned the sound off. You could hear the wind shaking the windows, rattling the walls. “Yeah, I don’t know, you know?—The way I figure, if nobody thinks about your ass after you’re gone, that’s pretty much it.”

  “Guess so,” I said.

  The sleet hissed against the glass.

  He shook his head. “Fuckin’ Tommy Grecco, man. Never liked that clown.”

  SOMETIMES, sitting on my bed in my room, I’d take my stopwatch and press the button just to watch that second hand fly. Imagining it, seeing it. Sometimes I’d be running lead-off, standing with five or six others in the miler’s half crouch, the lane narrowing like a dagger. A little unsteady, bumping shoulders—listening for the gun. Other times I’d be running anchor, waiting for the baton as the third man hit the straight, that mask of pain on his face, feeling the tickle of pee escaping into my jockstrap.

  I’d press the button, explode off the line, heart pounding, hands slippery with sweat, watching that needle sweeping with terrible swiftness around the face, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, fifty, a minute. Stop. Press again. All I thought about was time.

  The half-mile, a controlled sprint. If you didn’t have speed, you didn’t run it. Every race had something—the half-mile was special because it was right in the middle. You could be a quarter-miler, stepping up, and lose to a miler with speed who’d wear you down. You could be a miler coming down, trespassing, and get eaten up by the velocity of it.

  Time—what we could do with it, how we could make it add up at the end. A two-mile relay meant four runners running a half-mile apiece. If all four ran their half in two minutes—a bragging time in high school back then—it would make an eight-minute two-mile relay. Except that hardly anyone had four runners who could run a two-minute half. They might have one guy. Or two. Maybe. And then there was the question of where to put the star—at the start, in the hope that he could break it open, gain such a lead that the other teams would fold? Or at the end, as anchor, figuring that if all was lost and you were ten yards behind at the handoff, or twenty, he could somehow bring it home?

  Peter Michaelis, Mr. Time Tunnel, had run a 2:10 that December, hopeless except for the fact that North Adams’s fourth guy was only a second faster. Moore could pull a 2:04 on a good day, giving away another second to their third. The summer before, I’d slipped under 2:00 for the first time, which matched me up pretty well with their second-best. Kennedy was our answer. He’d run 1:57 flat, could do it again. Balger might have the power in the mile, but Kennedy had the speed.

  Numbers, split times—it was my obsession. We became a club, a unit, the four of us pushing each other, yelling to each other in the early dark as we came around the curve, the wind cutting through our sweats. When Peter ran 2:09 at an early indoor meet, stumbling around afterward like a cut puppet, you’d have thought we’d won gold in Mexico City what with all the hugging and back-slapping and Falvo yelling “Banzai!” from the sidelines. Moore lifted the poor kid clear off the ground. It seemed to matter then. It seemed to matter a lot.

  THE HOLIDAYS SLID BY like a stone over ice, leaving nothing much to remember. A couple of cloudless days so cold it hurt the inside of your nose to breathe, a couple more of wet snow when Karen left for Pittsburgh. At night you’d see the porches standing out like colored frames in the dark.

  I ran, I listened to music, I sold some shoes in my dad’s store. We worked quietly, handing each other things; when we talked it was usually in code—shank and footbed, tongue and throat—one of us calling, “Can you get me a ten and a half double E in the Stacy Adams Ox black piping?” or suggesting, straight-faced, sitting next to each other on the fitting stools, that maybe old Mr. Hennessey might like to see the Florsheim Mods. I was surprised to see the respect my dad’s customers had for him—I’d never really noticed it. It was like he was some visiting ambassador selling shoes on a whim; he’d smile and offer the kids a lollipop out of the jar he kept by the register, and the parents, who’d been smacking the little brats a second ago, would beam like a lollipop was some old world rarity and say, “Isn’t that nice? Now what do you say to Mr. Mosher, honey?” and when they were leaving he’d say, “Lovely to see you again” and, “Thank you so much for coming” and see them to the door with a smile and a nod—almost a bow—and they’d try to do the same back.

  “Why do you always do that?” I asked him once.

  “It is the way I was raised,” he said. He was putting some shoes back in their boxes, checking the labels to get it right.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Of course. Ask.”

  “Do you like doing this?”

  He smiled at the penny loafer in his hand, then laid it next to its twin and covered it with tissue paper.

  “It is what it is,” he said. He put the lid on the box, then stacked it and stood up. “You have homework this weekend?”

  “Some, yeah.”

  He nodded. “Go. I can finish up.”

  AS OFTEN AS WE COULD that winter the three of us would go visit Frank—he was allowed to have visitors—watching our language, stepping carefully. Frank’s mother would always wipe her hands on her apron and apologize about everything like you were the Pope but if you said something wrong you’d see her wince and she’d stop talking. Frank’s dad was a short guy with little veins in his nose who always seemed pissed, like everything you said tried his patience. He’d set up a manger on the front lawn, a small wooden house with a wall missing, three Wise Men, a donkey, a horse, and a
bunch of plastic sheep. The Christ child, a doll with a tinfoil halo, lay in a wicker basket on real straw. The Three Wise Men were set up on the side, two of them standing, one on his knees like he’d been kicked. They didn’t look surprised or happy. They just looked blank. We said something to Mr. Krapinski about the manger, how it must have taken a lot of work, and he said, what if it did, Christ had died for our sins after all, and we agreed.

  That winter Karen gave me a copy of Albert Camus’s The Stranger which floored me when I read it though I only half understood it. “Mother died today, or, maybe, yesterday, I can’t be sure.” That’s how it started. It was about this Algerian guy who kills some Arab for no real reason. We kept talking about it, the two of us, trying to figure it out, but my feeling was there was nothing to figure out. This guy, Meursault, was who he was. He was like a sack that’s been filled up with certain things—just like all of us. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he killed somebody. And it didn’t matter to him. It was like some kind of natural law—sooner or later it would have its say.

  She was with Ray a lot so I didn’t see her much, but when I did, that’s what we talked about. How you stood things, or not. Like Hemingway, we said. He’d stood things as long as he could. Some things were so bad you couldn’t laugh at them. Others were so bad you had to—or shoot yourself, like he did. Or somebody else, like the guy in The Stranger did. The worst things, we agreed, were the things you couldn’t touch.

  THAT JANUARY 28TH I turned eighteen. I didn’t expect anything. We didn’t really celebrate birthdays at my house—a kiss and a shirt, maybe, or my mother might make Wiener Schnitzel for ­dinner—and that was ok with me. Mostly I’d just want to get through. We’d all put a brave face on it—my father would tell his joke about the old guy wanting to die in the Holy Land (“To die, OK, but to live here?”) and my mother would smile and shake her head—the three of us marching steadily on toward the Obsttorte, straining not to hurry, to say the right things, like people on a tour of a house they hate.

  That night, long after we were done, my dad knocked on my door and asked if I could talk. I thought he’d gone to bed; my mother had been asleep for hours. I moved some stuff over and he sat at my desk and asked if I was still thinking about traveling the next summer—that he thought it was a good idea, for a young man, travel. I said I didn’t know and he nodded and looked around my room and said, “I know that it is not always …,” and stopped, like he’d forgotten what he wanted to say.

  He reached behind his back and handed me a small box wrapped in blue wrapping paper with gold noisemakers all over it. I was just glad it didn’t say “Season’s Greetings.” That one I’d hidden in my closet where it lay ticking like the guy’s heart in the Poe story, waiting to bury me. I’d taken it out the night before after locking my door, terrified they’d hear the bolt sliding home in their sleep. What would they say if they found it there, hidden like a bookmark in the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica? How perfect that would be. The bastards had taken their first life, and now the son who’d taken their second was hiding their treasures in his closet. It was almost poetic.

  It was a watch.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Really, it’s—”

  “It is no-sink,” he said. Twenty-five years in this country, I thought.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “It is from both of us—your mother, too.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So, OK.” He patted my leg, then got up to go.

  “Thanks,” I said again, and he nodded and left.

  THE NEXT DAY, Karen returned from Pittsburgh and Christmas break was pretty much wrapped. A day later Frank was released from house arrest straight into school. He still wasn’t teaching ­Sunday school, he said. He had a right. He was gonna come to California with us, he said.

  ONE THING I’M SURE, you can’t tell about love, or the lack of it, except from the outside, from the way two people look at each other, from the things they do. It’s like the way you can tell about a house, about the people in it, whether they’re happy, from the way it looks from the street: A small pot of marigolds, a couple of chairs in the shade, tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

  I could tell what they had. I could tell by the way he’d wrapped her up in that big coat of his that day in the rain, like he was a magician who could make them both disappear, by the way she’d walk next to him, or look at him when he talked to other people, that look saying, “This man is mine and I like how he is—how he moves, how he laughs—and he knows it and it’s the two of us from here on, for everything.” It was easy, unforced—walking down the hall, she’d touch his elbow with a finger and he’d turn like a ship; she’d sigh and he’d look up. Sometimes at lunch, or in the library, you’d catch them looking at each other, a kind of calm in their eyes like after a smile, or before it, and know they were talking.

  She loved him—what more is there to say? There were times I’d look at them and feel something in my chest and throat, an ache that made it harder to breathe, but I was OK with it. I can say that now. I was OK with it. I didn’t know it then, but I loved them both. Who’s to say which one of them more?

  It was the pot of flowers, the chairs in the shade. I knew they’d get married someday, have kids, that they’d have their shit just like everybody else but that she’d be looking at him the same way when he was eighty and I was OK with it. Some people can’t deal with love, can’t admit that the thing they wanted once, the thing they’d finally managed to convince themselves doesn’t exist, is real and true and right in front of them. So they sneer at it, make it small. I wasn’t one of them. I could see it for what it was. What I couldn’t see was how deep that kind of love could run, how reckless it could be.

  Maybe it had something to do with them being eighteen. At thirty you see options—or invent them. At eighteen it’s all or nothing.

  THE SUNDAY BEFORE, walking home from Ray’s, I’d felt a tickling in my throat like there was something there I couldn’t swallow. By dinner I was throwing up in the upstairs toilet. For five days, that whole week, I was down and out, feverish, hacking—too sick to wonder why nobody had called or come by to see how I was doing. My mother brought me soup, took it away, checked the thermometer, left. I was older now. All I could think about was the Cardinal Hayes meet coming up at the Armory. February 2nd was supposed to be our first real test.

  Karen called but I never got her messages—not one. Sweating through my sheets, I’d hear the phone ringing downstairs, my mother answering.

  I asked her about it later. How could you not tell me she called? I said. It’s not right, I said.

  She was making out the bills on the kitchen table. “I have other things to think about.”

  “I’d tell you,” I said.

  She wrote a return address on an envelope, flipped it over. “Anything else?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  She moistened the flap with a yellow sponge, sealed it, tore open another with her thumb. I was glad I couldn’t remember a time when she’d loved me.

  After a while I went back upstairs.

  That week I had the same dream twice. I was flying around a tilting indoor track in the near-dark, leading the pack, when I felt confusion rising in me like nausea. It was completely silent. A huge, empty hall. I had to keep going. I had to. Even though there was nobody there—no timers, no tape, not a soul who would see or know—I couldn’t stop. I raced on—curve, straight, curve. Like there was someone behind me. Like it mattered.

  I wrenched awake both times and just lay there breathing through my mouth, understanding where I was now, listening to my heart.

  WHEN NEITHER OF US showed up at school that Monday ­morning, she waited through first period, then went to the attendance office. Mrs. Santoro looked in the ledger. I was out with the flu, she said. She turned the page. Nothing about Ray. No surprise there.

  At lunch she asked Frank, who hadn’t heard anything. He tried to make her feel bette
r. “You know Ray,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “He’s probably plannin’ something. I mean, look out there. If I had somewhere else to be, I wouldn’t be here either.”

  When he hadn’t called by dinner, she tried to call me. I was sick, my mother told her. Sleeping. When she called Frank, he told her to call Ray. Don’t worry about his old man, he said. Ray’ll understand it’s ’cause you were worried. So she called. There was no one home.

  Tuesday was the same—no Ray, no answer. She called me from the guidance office. I still slept, like Snow White after the apple. She walked through her day, bell to bell, gym to lunch, trying to come up with a story to explain it all. In English she missed an entire conversation and couldn’t answer when Mrs. Schrot called on her. She had to apologize. She was distracted, she said. This was her senior year, Schrot said. What could possibly be more important? She didn’t know, she said.

  That evening she couldn’t work, imagining cars split around trees, fights—seeing Ray broken on the steering wheel, staring face-up in the ring. She thought about talking to her parents but didn’t. Not yet. They were cool, but next summer was still tricky. He’d disappeared? Fights? What was this about?

  She made it to Wednesday afternoon. It had snowed the night before, looked like it might again. A sky like steel—the smears of smoke from the houses going straight up. It was cold enough to snow. There’d been no answer. She’d thought about borrowing the car to come see me, had called from school. I was sleeping, my mother said. Perhaps she’d like to call back some other time.