by Chris Lynch
“I never seen ya work before, Mick. Ya do good. Fast and thorough. You’re good.”
I took it and nodded. I just wanted to go. Somehow I was always extra humiliated when he tried to be nice to me.
“Can I have some wine?” I blurted.
“Indeed?” he said, joking like to scold me. But really he seemed pleased. He started drawing a glass from an already tapped bottle.
“No, Dad, no. I don’t mean I want some now. I mean, can I have a bottle? For later.”
He deflated. “Why should I? Boy.”
“I got a date tonight. A nice date. A dinner thing.”
He smiled. He leered, actually, but I ignored that because I wanted something from him.
“What’s your best wine, Dad? Something classy, ’cause this is a really classy girl.”
“André. Cold duck. Pink.” He gave me a knowing wink. “Trust me on this. I am a saloon keeper, you know.” He said the phrase saloon keeper like it meant Sun God or something.
He was so full of pride, finally with his chance to share his brand of fatherly wisdom. He stuck an arm deep into the beer chest and pulled out a bottle. “Girls love the shit out of it,” he said. He pulled out a second bottle and stood it next to the first. “Take two. That’s twice as classy.”
I thanked him and held out some money as he fumbled around back there for a big enough bag.
“Get that out of here,” he said, pushing my hand away. I nodded, took my bag, and headed for the door.
“Where ya goin?” he said sadly. “Opening ain’t for twenty minutes yet, can’t ya stay, just with me? The whole damn joint all ours, for a while?”
It almost sounded nice, the way he said it. I wished it was for real. But then I remembered the drinking he’d already done. The niceness was an accident. And any minute, it would be gone.
“Sorry, Dad, I can’t. Have to get back and fix up my place for tonight.”
“Your place,” he mimicked me, nasty, because he had to pull me back down below him before I got away. That was just his way, that swing from sappy and nice to small and mean. It didn’t bother me much anymore though. “Go on then, go to your place, your little place. I’ll stay here, ’cause this here is My Place.”
As I quickly locked the door from the outside, three people crowded me, already lined up for opening time at His Place. Two skinny guys with sunglasses sandwiching an older lady in black eye makeup, like an outfielder in a day game.
I went to the store. I bought a little sample bottle of aspirin because I was getting a headache already. A Cornish game hen because I couldn’t find a real chicken small enough. Carrots, celery, green beans. I brought my stuff up to the girl at the register and mentioned what I was making. She sent me back for a can of chicken broth, a tiny box of Bell’s seasoning, pasta elbows, and chickpeas.
Back at home, I went to work. Plunked the bird into the broth mixed with water and set it on the hot plate. The pot I had was big for the plate, kind of like one of the fat Cormac brothers sitting on a bar stool. But I figured the heat would get up there eventually. After the chicken cooked for about an hour I added the chopped-up vegetables and the spice. I could smell it now, and it smelled warm and clingy, like stuff I’d sometimes whiff from downstairs in the Sullivans’ kitchen. I opened the two windows to let it out.
It made me sleepy, that homey smell, but I was jumpy. I lay down on the bed. My eyes kept springing open. I stared at the ceiling. I closed my eyes but only got more nervous. I got up and stirred the pot.
I fell asleep finally after walking from the bed to the pot and back for the third time. I had a short dream, like a quick-cut music video flashing black-and-white images of my father sleeping on the floor. I woke up disgusted, disappointed, tired, and shaking with nerves.
I went downstairs and took a shower, came back up, paced, stirred the pot, dumped in a half pound of pasta, sweated like an animal, took another shower.
I felt as if so much of my life, my new life, had come to depend on this date, and the pressure was withering me. I dressed in a gathering cloud of gloom, certain that I was going to speak nothing but babbles to Evelyn. I had to calm down or explode.
Slowly, yet desperately, I started the walk. Across the room, a mile or so. I pulled the chilled cold duck from the refrigerator.
No corkscrew, damn. No corkscrew, damn. I got a steak knife, stabbed the bottle in the head, twisted the knife, rocked it, churned it, until the cork was sliced and ground up, some pieces pulling up when I extracted the knife, more of them floating in the wine.
Just a glass.
Just a glass.
I should not be worried. This is better. This is fine.
I stirred the soup.
And I’m a good cook.
I have a job. I am a man. I don’t need anything, and that is a good thing.
When I checked again, the pasta elbows were swelled to the size of copper plumbing joints. I turned the hot plate down to low. It smelled wonderful.
Good thing there was a second bottle of duck.
I stood weaving on Evelyn’s porch. Three pokes of my finger, and I hit the doorbell. I giggled. That was when the door opened.
Evelyn stood in the doorway in a long, electric blue sort of peasant dress, with ruffles on the shoulders and a whole village of people embroidered all the way around the hem. Her hair was pulled back in a long tight braid. She looked for the first time defenseless and soft and hopeful.
For about three seconds. The broad white smile she brought to the door fell away as she sized me up.
“You’re drunk?” she asked. “You come to me drunk?”
“Nah,” I said shaking my head desperately. “No, I’m not. I had... I had... I had a wine.” I shrugged.
“You had a wine,” she said, nodding slowly. “You had a wine, eh, Mick? Look at me, dammit.” She yanked at her skirt. “How often do you think I do this nonsense, huh?”
I started to answer.
“I had hope, here, Mick. I had hope for this, hope for you. I don’t do this, you understand?” She stepped out onto the porch, and ripped my face with a loud, ringing slap.
“You come to me drunk? What do you think, I’m some kind of puta here? That you can do this? Get out of here.”
By the time she hit me, I was glad she hit me.
“Go ahead,” I said quietly. “Hit me again if you want to.”
“No. You’ll probably like it.” She still seemed totally amazed at something that never amazed anyone before—me showing up gassed. “Who do you think you are?”
It was like she was a cop asking to see my driver’s license, when I knew I’d been driving without one. I scrambled, but I had nothing to show her.
“I don’t know. Evelyn. I don’t know who I am at all. I need to be told. Like, before, before, I had an identity. The identity sucked, but at least I had one. To not have one... it’s like a weird little hell thing. Now I’m up there in my place, you know, and, like, there’s nothing. I don’t hear nothing, don’t see nothing, don’t feel nothing that reminds me who I am. I don’t even have a mirror up there ’cause I’m half afraid I’ll look in it and not see anything. I need to be told.”
She stood with her hands on her hips. I saw, briefly, in her smart, gentle face, a softening. I knew she understood. Then she stiffened.
“You looking for sympathy here? There is ninguno. Go.”
She stomped inside and slammed the door.
The desperation in me was so real it felt like I’d swallowed something live and it was clawing around in my belly.
I knocked. The mail slot opened.
“Go home and sleep, Mick.” The mail slot closed.
I knocked again, my hand half open, the way drunks do. “I don’t want to go back there alone, Evelyn. I need help.”
She opened the door one more time, leaned on the door frame like she was suddenly very tired. “You certainly do,” she said. “But I’m sorry, Mick, I just can’t be taking care of you. We all have our own stuff, you
know? You’re not a whole person. You’ve got to get right.”
“I’ll be better.” I sounded like such a simp, I even surprised myself. “This won’t happen again. It wasn’t my fault...”
She put up her hands. “Stop that now, I’m embarrassed just listening to you. You are responsible for yourself, that much I know. As long as you want to believe somebody else is responsible, you’re going to be useless. You really want my advice, I say go on back home. Not to Sully’s, but to your real home. You think you’re not them, and that’s your problem.”
She had me on the ropes now, and she just wouldn’t let me fall down. I was good and beaten.
“That’s bullshit,” I snapped, effectively ending the conversation.
“Good luck, Mick,” she said before closing the door for good. “I really mean that.” It hurt all the more because she really did mean it.
I stood in the dark outside my parents’ house, staring at it. The second bottle of cold duck filled my belly and my head and my bones. But it hadn’t put me down, put me away like it was supposed to. So I came back out and stood staring in the dark, rolling my tongue in and out and in and out, trying to shake the tiny flecks of cork off it.
All the lights were off. I shuffled up the front steps, stood for a while more in front of the door. Finally I stuck my key in. It jammed. The lock didn’t turn. I pulled the key out, turned it over, and tried again. Nothing. Then I noticed, the lock was new.
“I changed it,” Terry hissed, right in my ear.
My terror came out in tears rolling down the creases alongside my nose.
“Kill me, Terry. Go ahead. ’Cause if it was me, if I get the chance, I’m gonna kill you.”
He spun me around by the shoulders to face him.
“You’re drunker den me,” he said, beaming.
“Well, do something,” I said.
“Good to see ya back in the old form, Mickey.”
“Shut up and take your shot.”
It didn’t matter what I said. He had his script ready.
“By the way, great move, pissing in my Bushmills, Mick. I been waitin’ ta see ya so I could tell ya: That’s just what I woulda done. When I saw that, I knew you was gonna be all right. Hear me? That’s just what I woulda done.”
I closed my eyes. “Hit me, asshole. Kill me.”
He laughed. “If I blow on ya, you’ll fall down.”
“So blow me,” I said.
He reached over me, stuck his key in the shiny new lock, and opened the door. Like a doorman, he gestured toward the inside and said, “Comin’ in, Mick?”
“No way,” I muttered. “Came to kill your ass. If you don’t kill me first.”
“Ain’t gonna,” he said. “I’m feelin’ magfuckinnanimous tonight. And, I got new hope for ya, boy. I’m givin’ ya time. You’ll be back wit us, I know it. And when you come, I’ll take ya.”
He smiled at me, the sickest snaggle-tooth victory grin.
“Sure you won’t come in?” he asked.
I shook my head dumbly, but as defiantly as I could manage.
Terry went in the house, used the phone, went to the refrigerator, and came out with two beers. I took one. “I’d walk ya home, buddy, but your new landlord keeps promisin’ ta accidentally blow my brains out if I’m near his house in the dark. Y’understand.”
When the cab came, Terry put me in it. He gave the driver the Sullivans’ address and he paid him with his own money. Then he leaned in and gave me a filthy, stinko kiss on the forehead.
“See, ain’t I nice?” he asked before telling the driver to take off.
Hermit Crab
I HAD JUST a little bit of a dream, of being in the woods with the Scouts, me and Sully, and Baba was there even, back when people still called him Ryan because he wasn’t yet teenage wasteland, and he was eating the legs off a live frog he caught with a long homemade frog sticker. Campfire was burning, crackling loud and broken up with the occasional little explosion of a pinecone. There was no other sound at all, and it was soothing, warming my whole front until I turned myself around and warmed my whole back, and that strange forceful fire sound making me feel bigger inside. We stood around, kids all of us, just kids, smiling at the fire and leaning too close so that our already red faces got cracky with the dry heat, which was okay enough. Even Baba, who was still Ryan.
And there wasn’t another sound but that fire sound, no dopey guitar or camping songs, no fart contests, no big hog-little hog jokes. Fire sound alone.
Until the blast of a whooshing tornado noise ripped through it.
I jumped up in bed, stood there on my knees, watching Mr. Sullivan working the small kitchen fire extinguisher. The last of the yellow flame lapped up the wall behind the hot plate before finally it was all squirted out.
I knew that I had done something horrible, that I had left the stupid soup on all night and had set a fire in the place where they took me in.
Mr. Sullivan threw the extinguisher down on the floor with a crash, then stood staring at me with his hands on his hips. He didn’t talk right off, just stood, and stared, melting me hotter and quicker than if he’d let the flame get me.
“Should have let the flame get you,” he growled. “You’re lucky I have a nose like a damn dog.”
He looked massive, much bigger than ever before, his mustache bushier and whiter over his fire-reddened face. I shook, could see myself shaking, as I waited for the beating.
It was five minutes. He stared at me. I shook and I shook. I tried to stop it, to get hold of myself, but it got worse, more noticeable until the whole bed was trembling in the corners of my eyes. I was petrified to turn away, so he just burned that stare into me. He looked like a thing carved out of stone. His big chest didn’t move with breathing, his eyes didn’t water, his obscene pointed Adam’s apple didn’t hitch once. It was a beating, what he did to me with his presence.
Then he was done. “You want to ask me if I’m surprised?” he asked coldly.
“I don’t, Mr. Sullivan.”
“I’m afraid you’re just genetically wired to be a waste, Mick. I suppose it ain’t your fault, but...” He walked out banging two giant fists together hard, leaving me with the mess, the smoke, and the chemical stench of the snuffed fire, and with myself.
I fell right over on my nose as soon as he was gone, toppled right off the side of the bed and didn’t have the strength to raise my hands to shield my face. I lay there flat-faced for a second, thought about it all, then banged my forehead on the floor on purpose. I did it again. I did it again and again and again and again.
Then I packed my stuff, as much as I could get into one bag, and slithered out. No one else in the house was up yet. I didn’t know where Mr. Sullivan was, which made me run all the way down the stairs and out the door.
I stopped running when I was a block away. On my way to where? I was still chewing crumbs of cork and gummy soup as I thought about my whereabouts. Nowhere. Where was my home? On my back, like a hermit crab. In the pack with a few pairs of Terry’s pants and the last of the stolen money, also from Terry. I had stopped running, but still walked briskly. No reason for that. I stopped, sat on the curb.
“I ain’t genetically wired for nothin’,” I said. I winced when I recalled having a beer with Terry the night before. “Bullshit, bullshit. I don’t have nothing to do with them, they have nothing to do with me...” I opened the pack and started pulling the clothes out, flinging pants here, shirts there, all over the deserted street. Then the money. Terry’s one-dollar bills, crumpled into wads like baseballs, thrown as far as I could. I tipped the bag upside down, laughed hard as the last of everything fell to the ground and I threw the bag too.
“I’m free, I’m clean. I’m the freest guy in the goddamn world.” I sat on the curb to watch the bills blow around. “Everybody wishes they were me now. The free guy, they’ll call me.” I put my elbows on my knees, there on the curb, and my face in my hands.
There wasn’t much wind. Only one car w
ent by. The money really didn’t blow. The clothes certainly didn’t go anywhere. It was all still there in front of me when I lifted my face out of the little puddle I’d made in my palms.
I went into the street and picked up my bag. I moved around like a pathetic little old man as I collected everything back up again.
Standing outside Toy’s house later that Sunday morning, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I had used up every other option. Maybe this time he’d take me on a permanent road trip far, far away from here.
I didn’t want to ring the bell, so I threw pebbles. Four throws, two hits, no answer. Three more hits, no answer. One big clank, thought I cracked the window, thought about running.
Felina appeared in the window. Of course I hit the wrong window. I started backing away, mouthing, “Sorry, sorry,” and bowing like a servant as I did.
She didn’t respond in any way. She just kept staring, expressionless. First I thought she was angry, but then I didn’t think so. I stopped backing off. I stared back. I supposed I was quite a sight by then, but it couldn’t have been all that interesting to her. She had me locked with her eyes. She held up a hand for me to wait.
I met her at the door. She was wearing red cutoff sweatpants and a thin white muscle T-shirt with straps instead of sleeves.
“Toy’s not here,” she said.
“Oh. Road trip, right?” I said, trying, and failing, not to stare at her. A small morning breeze blew by, and she folded her arms.
“Carlo’s not here, either,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you up. This is really stupid of me. I don’t know what I’m doing lately.”
“You’re limping again. Like last time.”
I had to smile, because that felt good—the connection to before, the idea that she noticed something about me. I looked down at my legs, bounced on them, leaning on the left, then the right. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“The psychic limp, I mean. You always come dragging into this port.”
“Ya,” I said, holding the dopey smile. “I seem to, huh? Well, you did tell me, that other time, that I should come back again.”
