by Joanna Scott
ONE SUNDAY MORNING in June, in the year 2000, Lawrence Duroy walked with his two old greyhounds across the park that separates the reservoir from Culver Street. Fading lilacs perfumed the air. Yellow heads of dandelions dotted the grass. Thrown off balance by the tug of the two leashes, Lawrence slipped into a rut left behind by bicycle wheels but managed to keep himself from falling by planting the heel of his left sneaker in the mud. His yell halted the dogs, and they both gazed over their bony shoulders with mild impatience.
Lawrence glared back at the dogs. The smaller one returned to him and rubbed its long nose into the creased khaki behind his knee while the other squatted nearby and squeezed out its morning turds. Lawrence tugged on the leashes and tried to head toward the path leading up to the reservoir. But these two dogs, both of them used to losing on the racetrack, were habitually stubborn. They began rooting in the grass beside the tennis courts, pulling the leashes taut. Lawrence threw sticks to draw their attention, but they ignored him. He threatened punishment. He pleaded with them. Finally he indicated with a clucking sound that in his empty hand he held delicious treats—an old trick that never failed, and the dogs lurched stupidly after him up the hill.
The next person to cross the area was a jogger, a middle-aged man who was pleased with himself, for he’d made it up the slope and three times around the reservoir without stopping and had just descended at a spirited pace. Nearing the end of his run, he was thinking about how he couldn’t even imagine the feeling of getting old. A strict exercise regimen for twenty years had kept him youthful. He’d survived a prolonged separation and divorce, and now he was newly in love with a woman half his age. He pictured her waiting for him back at the apartment with a pot of coffee and fresh-baked muffins.
More than two hours later, a group of children raced at full speed toward the tennis courts. Their game had been organized by an eleven-year-old boy, who’d announced that tag would soon be an Olympic sport and it was never too early to begin training. A seven-year-old girl had bolted from the pack before her cousin finished counting. Whether or not she’d be disqualified remained to be seen. But she was fast, faster than anyone in her second-grade class, and one day she’d be the fastest runner in the world.
Her ten-year-old stepbrother trailed her, calling taunts at the pair of slower boys behind him, twelve-year-old twins who considered the game juvenile but at the last minute had decided to participate and with their example were demonstrating how to be way cool and agile at the same time. Next came a six-year-old boy, who was missing four of his upper front teeth. He grinned as he ran just to feel the air whistling into his mouth through the gap. The youngest of the group, a five-year-old girl, was at the tail of the fleeing pack, with the eleven-year-old, the organizer of the game and the one chosen to be It, so close behind her that when she stopped squealing she could hear his heavy breathing.
The seven-year-old girl who’d been in the lead, the girl who in the last year had changed her name to Cheeta, flew behind a lilac bush, jumped out, yelled, “Ha-ha!” at her cousin who was It, and ran away. Her cousin ducked behind another bush, made a wide circle, and surprised Cheeta with a roar. She screamed and in a flash was out of reach, so her cousin decided to head after the twins, who had stopped running altogether and were huddling by the tennis courts getting ready to light cigarettes, though they were the ones dubbed by their mothers in charge, the ones who would pay for the inevitable catastrophes that happened when this gang got together.
But what could go wrong in a game of tag? As long as everyone played by the rules, the game could go on forever. Cheeta sprang forward, leaping off the ball of her foot to gain momentum. She would have jumped as high as the radio towers at the top of the hill if the toe of her right sneaker hadn’t caught on a root that had suddenly popped out of the grass. She fell onto her knees. And then, just as quickly as she’d fallen, she scrambled upright and was about to bolt. First, though, she had to pause and examine the root.
The root, it turned out, wasn’t a root at all. It was a fine plastic walking stick, hooked into a handle at one end, that someone had accidentally dropped or intentionally thrown away, and now, finders keepers, it belonged to Cheeta.
“Got ya!” shouted her cousin, who appeared from nowhere and slapped Cheeta on the back, slapped her hard, harder than was fair in a game of tag. But Cheeta was armed. Cheeta had a cane as long as a gun, which she pointed at her cousin to scare him away. But he wasn’t even rattled, and in a quick offensive he leaped to the side, grabbed the cane by its rubber tip, and ran off, waving it above his head, hooting in victory.
In seconds the twins had cast away their cigarettes and set off after him, wanting whatever their cousin had. The ten-year-old joined the pursuit, and Cheeta charged after them, shouting that the stick was hers. She didn’t notice that when her six-year-old stepbrother tried to follow, he slipped on the wet grass.
“Yuck!” cried the boy. “Dog poo.”
“You gone down in dog poo mess!” announced his delighted little sister.
“Dumb shit,” said the boy.
“Don’t you call me that!” the girl commanded.
“I didn’t call you nothin’.”
“You did.”
“Did not.”
The girl started to cry. The boy started to cry. “Mama,” they wailed together, running toward the gravel path leading up the hill, each of them vowing to the wind to tell their mama what had happened. But when they finally made it up to the reservoir path where their mama and aunt were walking off the fat of their behinds, they found themselves caught up answering questions:
“Why you all alone? Where’d your cousins go?”
“They just ran away.”
“They ran away and left you?”
“Sure, they just left us all alone.”
Forgetting that they were mad at each other, the two children led the women back down to the lilac grove where they’d been abandoned. They found the big kids in a heap by the tennis courts, pounding and pulling in a terrible fight. When their mama found out that a plastic walking stick had caused all the trouble, she grabbed it from the hands of one of the twins and promised to use the stick to whack the butt of any child who wasn’t back at the car within ten seconds. “One,” she began to count as the children took off, calling, “Twothreefourfive...” behind them. With her sister, the mother dissolved in laughter and twirled the plastic cane like a baton before flinging it into the weeds.
THE RAIN STARTED TO FALL at dusk. At first it was a prickling rain—tiny drops like the snipped heads of needles falling from a dull gray sky. Then the cloud bed turned the green of old copper, and the rain stopped for an eerily still period, and the air became thick and damp, sucking the street noises into a vacuum of silence. At about nine the real deluge began, three inches of rain in an hour reported at the airport, the winds breaking branches and whipping apart power lines, the sky pulsing with lightning, bolts cracking trees in two right down the middle, thunder crashing like waves against stone cliffs.
On the reservoir hill rainwater collected in the gully of the path leading down to the field. Soon a full stream was flowing along the track used by joggers and mountain bikers, softening the dirt to a thin mud that bubbled out of the ruts and spread across the grass beside the tennis courts. Bushes crumpled beneath the flattening force of the wind. Twigs and refuse collected in swirling bunches. The rain fell through the night, turning the lilac field into a swamp. Birds clung to broken nests. Worms washed into the sewer. A huge branch snapped from a silver maple and landed on a tennis court, collapsing the net. And in a weedy patch at the base of the hill, not far from the path, the Lucite cane sank bit by bit into the melting earth until, by morning, it was completely buried.
WHEN CORKY’S CRAVING PARLOR at the corner of Monroe and Culver was still Sal’s Mini-Mart and Delite’s daughter Ta’quilla was three years from being born, two years before Abraham Groslik took his last walk across the park and one year before the city got to work buildin
g up the curbs and bricking the crosswalks, the two girls from East High discovered that Sal wasn’t easy anymore. “Blame the feds,” he said. “No ID, no sale.”
Oh, come on, Sal. They would give him ten dollars for a five-dollar six-pack. Fifteen dollars. Okay then, how about twenty dollars? They didn’t have twenty dollars between them, but if they did, would he sell them the beer? It’s Friday night, they reminded him. They knew what day of the week it was, though they hadn’t been to school since April. But Delite knew it was Friday because she’d seen the rabbi covering the temple’s bingo sign across the street. And Merry knew it was Friday thanks to the calendar behind Sal. It’s Friday, Sal, come on. They weren’t planning on getting drunk and running their car into a tree—they didn’t even have a car. All they wanted was beer to go with their pizza. But they’d spend the whole night thirsty thanks to Sal, who wouldn’t sell them the beer.
“Now get outta here, girls, go on. And hold the door for ol’ Abe while you’re at it.”
But Delite didn’t hold the door for no Jew man. Delite was no slave girl.
“Whoa, wait a sec. What did you call Abe?”
“I didn’t call him nothing.”
“You sure did call him something. You better say sorry for that something.”
Abe just stood there blinking against the store’s strong lights. He hadn’t heard Delite’s slur and wasn’t quite sure what was happening or why. He’d spent another lazy day in his apartment reading the newspaper. Now all he wanted was orange juice. He was determined to get the carton juice. Sal kept putting the bottled juice on discount, and Abe kept falling for the trick. That’s a real entrepreneur who can sell you juice in a bottle when you prefer juice in a carton. Abe intended to ignore all signs advertising sales. But first he had to remedy the situation of the angry girl.
“Hello,” he said, blinking.
The girl stared at him. Abe watched as comprehension slowly lit her face.
“You stop condescendin’ me!” she said.
What did she mean, condescendin’ her? And why for God’s sake was she flicking open that sharp little blade? Abe noticed specks of rust on the metal and tried to remember when he’d last had a tetanus shot. He wondered if the girl could be mollified with a dollar. He wondered what her friend was thinking.
One girl was angry. The other was scared. “Girl,” the scared friend asked, “what you doin’?”
“Let’s talk about this,” said Abe, who used to be known for saying inappropriate things to his friends, when he still had friends, before they all died one after the other of heart failure and stroke and pneumonia. He knew that he was awkward and that with each passing year he was getting awkwarder. Or was it more awkward? No matter what he’d heard and read along the way, when old age hit him he wasn’t prepared. Old age is a crime against humanity, he thought.
“I done with talkin’,” said Delite, clearly borrowing her dialogue from television. That was sad, too—the hours young people spent in front of the television these days.
“Delite, let’s go,” said her scared friend.
“Sal, we gettin’ that beer. Merry, get that beer. We takin’ it and walkin’ out.”
“Let’s just go.”
“Shut your mouth, pisshead.”
The way girls talked to girls. The lives they lived. Their hopelessness. Abe figured the angry girl could tell a lot of sad stories, though she wasn’t yet sixteen. Or was she?
“How old are you?” he asked. He knew from the girl’s expression that it was a stupid question, unworthy of a reply. She could only roll her eyes at Abe’s stupidity. She had beautiful eyes with shapely lids dusted with pollen, yet Abe could guess that she didn’t know how beautiful she was.
“I wonder if anyone has ever told you you’re beautiful,” he said. He meant it only as a compliment. So why did the girl stamp her foot as though she were flattening a sand castle and say with icy sophistication, “I declare, I hate this white man”?
Why did she hate him? Why did the good Lord extend the capacity for hatred to beautiful young girls? Why wasn’t tomorrow yesterday? These were a few of the many questions that deserved to be asked. But Abe knew better than to try to interview a girl who was holding an open switchblade in her hand. Despite his reluctance to leave the situation unresolved, he didn’t have a choice. “All right, then. Good day.”
But you didn’t just up and “good day” Delite when the day wasn’t near good. The day had been flawed by the issue of disrespect. It all went wrong as soon as Abe walked through the door.
“Dirty ol’ man callin’ me beautiful without even knowin’ me.”
Did he have to know her to know the kind of girl she was? Luckily, he didn’t ask this question. Instead, he asked the scared friend if she liked Sal’s ice cream. He assumed that the question conveyed his obvious intention—he would buy an ice cream cup for both the girls. He thought it a generous offer, and he was surprised by the girl’s expression of bewilderment. “You’re looking at me,” Abe said with a gentle smile, “like I’m from another planet.” The comment felt appropriately self-deprecating and helped to put him at ease, despite the confusion and danger. He decided to continue along the same line. “Like I don’t speak English.” He knew he could be amusing. If he put his mind to it, he could steal the show. The amateur actor in him took possession. “I’m a speaking English, ain’t I?” He tapped his cane against the edge of the door for emphasis. A glance at his reflection in the glass assured him that he was as funny as he thought he was. “Ain’t I?”
“You,” said the angry girl. “You.” She couldn’t find a predicate to attach to the pronoun. She couldn’t think of anything to say, so instead she used the knife in her hand to communicate her disgust, thrusting it up until the tip dented the grizzled cushion under ol’ Abe’s chin.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Ouch is just the beginnin’,” she said.
“Oh, Delite, we’re in trouble now,” said her friend.
“I tell you who’s in trouble.”
“I say we’re in trouble.”
Even at that moment, when the experience of being in the world was magnified by the possibility of an abrupt end, Abe wanted to smile once more at the girls. And to think that the angry girl was so absorbed in her anger she remained unaware of the scowling man in uniform who had appeared behind her like a shadow when a light comes on.
“Drop the weapon,” ordered the officer.
Outside in the summer dusk, a car moved slowly along the avenue toward the intersection ahead. Inside, Abe heard for the first time since he’d entered the store the sportscaster on Sal’s radio. He became aware of a rotten smell, the smell of frozen fried fish thawing in the sun. He thought about the castor oil his mother used to serve him in a metal thimble. For a moment he pitied himself, or pitied with cold detachment the individual named Abraham who had survived eighty-two years of indignities. But in the next moment he was remembering the pleasures of lovemaking. He thought about his wife, who’d died in 1989. He thought about how he was prepared to admit that despite the hundreds of times he’d wished himself dead so he could be with her in heaven, he felt lucky to be alive.
Here he was in time—an old man who’d come to Sal’s to spend a portion of his Social Security on carton orange juice. What, he asked himself, was meant to happen next? Abe reasoned that he should take the time to think of words that might change the outcome. But the desire to do something immediately was overwhelming, and though he sensed it was a mistake, he couldn’t stop himself from knocking the girl’s arm away with the handle of his cane in a single brisk motion, which caused the scared girl to scream, the angry girl to stumble, and the officer to pull his finger back against the trigger.
YOU WATCH A MOVIE ON TV, you want the guarantee that by the end it adds up to something. But this worthless movie—Raymond made the mistake of watching the whole thing, wasting the two hours he should have spent finishing his paper on Thomas Jefferson.
It was too bad
that Raymond had to think about Thomas Jefferson. All he wanted from the future was to become a rich lawyer and spend his time suing his neighbors for negligence and fraud. He had a plan. It was too bad that his plan involved a little education.
But let me tell you about this movie, Raymond wrote in an e mail to his girlfriend, Clarisse, who lived in Buffalo.
Theres this teacher accused of downloading child porno stuff and tho the charges thrown out in court hes fired from his job and then he cant land another job teaching he cant even get jack in another state and then he tries to make a living at the mall but he freaks after lacing up 27 pairs of sneakers for some idiot who cant decide what to buy he just up and quits and then he ends up washing dishes somewhere but the manager hears that this faggot has a thing about kids and thats it the guy is out of work again and now he cant even bring himself to go looking for another job anyway it turns out its easier to collect a check from social services and when its used up he sits on street corners and begs he does ok by begging but he spends the money on booze so thats his life he begs all day and gets drunk all night he doesnt wash he doesnt pick up the phone he doesn’t even have a phone and thats the end.
Raymond didn’t add, It was one of those movies with some sneaky truth in it. He didn’t admit that the story got him thinking about what mattered. He didn’t say that all he wanted in life was Clarisse. He didn’t want to work the graveyard shift at the grocery store on East Henrietta plus finish the essay on Thomas Jefferson so he could get his high school equivalence and apply to college. He didn’t even want to go to college. He wanted to get on the bus and go to Buffalo and spend the rest of his life with Clarisse. As long as they were together, everything else would work out.
Fingers idling against the keyboard. Desk awash in the white light from his screen. Baby, he wanted to write, we got to be together.
