Exes

by Max Winter

  At some grayish point before dawn I got out of bed and drank my coffee on the patio in a snow hat and parka. At the pond’s rim, the geese were still asleep, their necks tucked into their round gray bodies. They looked like rocks smoothed by years and years of falling water. I watched them stir awake, their black necks rising. At some point I heard Carlos microwave bacon in the kitchen and then leave to go catch his bus. How many servings of pork should a kid his age eat a week? Six? Seven? Did it matter where his ancestors were from?

  Once the geese were up and doing their thing, I went back into the house, put on my tie and sweater-vest, and drove down to that Quaker school to try and square things away for Carlos. Probably should’ve given the kid a lift, but I didn’t want to be a goddamned chauffeur.

  I’d read enough books to know that you got to start at the top, so I’d made an appointment with the headmaster, who wore a suit and tie but told me to call him Ned. His office smelled like Christmas cookies and shaving cream, and he called me Henry, but I didn’t correct him. What the hell is it with Quakers and first names? I told Ned that Carlos was real keen on fencing all of a sudden and wanted to graduate on time. He said something about citizenship, and apologies being an integral part of their school culture. I told him sorry wasn’t a word in this kid’s vocabulary and tried to make a point about how he grew up, but it was no use. Truth be told, I didn’t know enough about Central Falls these days or Colombia at any point, let alone Carlos, to make that particular point. So Ned told me that if Carlos didn’t apologize to the athletic director, he would have to make up his credits over summer break, and even then he might not graduate on time and could possibly lose his scholarship. I had originally thought the kid was being a pain in the ass about all this, but I was starting to come around to his way of thinking.

  “Well, it would seem we’re at an impasse,” Ned said.

  “What the hell is it with you fucking Quakers anyway? For a bunch of people who won’t fight wars and send kids home early on Wednesday and sit around having meetings all weekend long, you’re stubborn as hell.”

  “Henry, I would appreciate it if you lowered your voice and checked your language. This is not a loading dock, and I’m not a Quaker.”

  “And that’s another goddamned thing. You think that just because you use someone’s first name, you’re being democratic. Well I got news for you, Ned, democracy is something you earn.” And I walked out of his office. Looked like Carlos was gonna have to spend next year taking boiler room Civics in some Central Falls shithole. I never was much of a diplomat.

  I broke the news to Carlos over a supper of hot dogs and sauerkraut—the only meal I could really manage, apart from Cup-a-Soups. “Well, looks like you’re gonna need to take gym over the summer. I talked to that Dubberford character, but got nowhere. Might as well’ve tried reasoning with a box of threepenny nails.”

  Carlos shrugged. “I don’t like him either.”

  “I can see where you’re coming from. He’s a real ham-and-egger.”

  Carlos nodded and took a big bite of hot dog. We sat there for a while, eating and not talking. Carlos chewed with his mouth open but was decent company just the same. I topped off his coffee without him even asking, like they do at the restaurants I like, and then did the same for myself. I had the fan on low to clear out some of the smoke—burned the dogs a little—and the ceiling made a gritty noise as the blades turned slow and wobbly. I got up and walked over to the icebox and pulled out a couple ’Gansetts and cracked them open for Carlos and me. “A man can’t have too many beverages,” I said, and went on to alternate cold, foamy pulls of beer with sips of hot black coffee. Carlos did the same. What the hell, I thought, it’s not like I fixed the kid a highball. “What the hell,” I said after a while. Carlos nodded, and his glasses slipped down his nose. Turned out he had normal-size eyes under there.

  Later that evening I was sitting on the patio eating mixed nuts and looking at sliding-door night glare when Carlos came up behind me. “What is it?” I said to his reflection.

  “I’ve got an idea, about the geese.”

  “Yeah?” I turned around.

  “I saw a show, and it gave me an idea.”

  My heart pinched. The valve, I think. I took a deep breath.

  “Let’s hear it,” I said, and he handed me this sketch, which I’ve kept.

  We waited until Sunday to try it out. The inside of his box smelled like onions and something else. Eraser crumbs. I had covered up the SlepCo logo with electrical tape. “They can’t read,” Carlos said. “You don’t know that,” I said. “These shitheads are going to bury us all.” I crouched and stuck my left arm—sheathed in what had once been the right leg of Liza’s best black nylons—through a hole cut in the top of the box. The paint that Carlos smeared at the stocking’s ankle felt damp and sticky against my wrist, but we both felt the white dewlap really sold it. I used my right arm to steady myself because my knees have been bone on bone since Nixon went to China. (Hockey takes its toll.) At first I could just make out patches of light and dark through the slit Carlos had cut for me, but my eyes soon adjusted. Carlos snuck in behind me, sliding his arms out the armholes he had made in the sides of the box and into the gray satin nightgown wings he had stapled there. He gave the wings a quick flap, and the box rose around us.

  “Knock it off, willya, kid?” I whispered through clenched teeth, clamping down on the snow goose call we bought at Wal-Mart. They don’t make Canada goose calls, but a honk’s a honk in my book.

  Carlos’s Junior Engineers belt buckle dug into my tailbone as we walked toward the pond, and I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. Smelled like sleep and breakfast. We weren’t twelve paces from the patio, and I’d already broken a sweat. Carlos kept catching the heels of my shoes, stepping them flat and almost off.

  “Give me some room,” I said.

  Carlos pulled away a hair and flapped those satin wings some more. Damp, cool air rose into the box, and I tried not to lose my footing in the slick muck of the sloping pond bank. This goddamn getup better work, I thought.

  The geese massed in a tear shape along the pond. The ladies encircled the goslings and the bulls encircled the ladies. The goslings were the color of dead dandelions and cheeped as we approached. The bulls looked up at us, this crouching, four-legged Frankenstein goose with silvery wings, and backed away with confused little honks.

  “Stop here, Carlos.” I stuck my free hand into what probably wasn’t mud. Then I swooped my black-stockinged arm swiftly down and slowly up again. Slapped that hand bill open and shut and open and shut again and blew hard into my goose call. There was a still moment. They stared at us. One of the bigger bulls took a few steps toward me and started to open his wings and straighten his neck, so I lashed out my arm like a snake and Carlos flapped the wings stiffly. The lead bull scooted back to the circle’s edge. They were still and quiet again.

  “Okay, show ’em the other pond,” Carlos whispered over my shoulder. Then he gave the satiny wings a slow and no doubt dramatic flapping. The oily cardboard walls expanded and contracted around us while he flapped. I straightened up and blew into the call—a long, determined honk. The geese moved slowly back toward the pond, never taking their eyes off us. I craned my gooseneck arm to the left, toward the road and away from my property. They followed my hand with their beady little eyes. I jerked my arm repeatedly in this direction, watching them snap their necks in sympathy. “Now!” Carlos said. He flapped the wings, and we both turned away from the pond and carefully climbed its bank toward the road. Behind us I could hear wings flapping and the mucky sucking of webbed footsteps and eventually throaty clucks and honks. They were following us up the hill and across the road to Bank of America. Behind me, Carlos laughed somewhere deep in his belly. I clenched my teeth down onto the lip of that snow goose call. Carlos flapped those great gray satin wings again, and the box lifted, and cool air rushed up my back, sore and slicked with sweat, chilling me. The w
ind picked up, and Carlos held on to the box, pulled it down. I could hear the geese falling in behind us. My heart turned inside out, changed shape. I could feel it all slipping away, the world turning white as ash. I stumbled. The edges of what was in front of me vanished. Carlos leaned in. “You see?” Carlos said, stopping and turning us around. “Look!”

  I shook the color back into my head. The geese lowered their necks against the wind and waited. We turned the box back toward Bank of America’s pond, dimpling silver in the wind. The geese huddled, waiting. I blew the call again. Their honks and clucks turned to murmurs, then silence. An empty semi shuddered down the road. Then a honking K-car, piled to the roof with newspapers. The wind shifted, and the geese tucked goslings, still yellow in spots, into their wings. They held their ground. They settled in.

  (. . . . . .)

  . . . some nut had driven into it: Upon impact, the rocks Phyllis had sunk into the sidewalk to protect her house, the next time, bent into a ramp, sending Eli’s Volare through her parlor ceiling and into the master bath. “Don’t tell my mother,” Eli said after EMTs extracted him from the wreck. “She’s Jewish.” He died seconds later.

  . . . where Roger Williams first landed: Many assume that the roughly Moshassuck River–bordering Roger Williams National Memorial marks the spot where my father’s ninth great-grandfather “What cheered” Providence into being.* But Williams actually landed at Slate Rock on the Seekonk River. Of course the rock in question was, way back in 1877, mistakenly dynamited by city workers excavating the area for artifacts of historical interest.

  *It couldn’t have helped that, in the 1970s, the walls and booths of the McDonald’s nearest to the Moshassuck depicted Roger Williams and his indigenous hosts in various states of discovery, cooperation, and thanksgiving.* This same establishment would later become infamous for selling illicit drugs over its counter—Mob pot mostly, but also stepped-on coke. The code phrase was “Remember when Grimace used to be a bad guy x years ago?” To which the cashier would respond by slipping into your bag an eight ball of whatever break you felt you deserved that day—indicated by x—and ringing you up for anywhere between six and three dozen imaginary Big Macs and any number of apple pies. When the cops busted them in the mid-’80s, their franchise was promptly revoked. The building sat empty for mere weeks—an empty McDonald’s is still a McDonald’s—before being demolished and replaced by Brown’s Copy Center, which was itself replaced by its Job Lab some twenty years later.

  *The last time I can remember Eli, our sister, and me all sitting alone together for any length of time was at a booth in this very McDonald’s. We were then seven, thirteen, and eleven years old. Our folks were somewhere—Cuddyhunk? Dead already? Had we not been told yet?—so our neighbors Dot and Tod Mortenson had dropped us off on their way to the movies. We ate, looked at the murals, talked about what College Hill must’ve looked like back in those days, and before long got around to whatever became of the Narragansetts. Libby said we killed them all, and I said, “Nuh-uh, one came to school and told us stories.” And she said, “That wasn’t a real Indian.” So I said, “Was too. He had a pipe and a drum and pants made out of animals he respected.” And she said, “Adults pretend to be all kinds of things they’re not,” and looked away, which was my cue to knock it off unless I wanted a temple flick or baby hair pull, which I didn’t. We ate in silence for a while until Eli knocked over the orange soda that only Libby knew to be uncarbonated. I used too many napkins to sop it up and also spilled some salt. Libby told me I wasn’t helping and got back in line to refill Eli’s drink. I continued making a slurry of whole milk and tallow-fried fries inside my mouth—too young at this point to identify, let alone mind, the havoc lactose wreaked on my guts—and watched Libby stand there, blowing straight blond hair from her face and shifting her weight from one tanned, Tretorned foot to the other. Libby always did know when she was being looked at, and she knew how to make something as simple as waiting for something look like an ordeal. Then Eli said, “Sometimes I just want to kill myself.”

  I stopped chewing.

  “Sometimes I just feel like I don’t want to be where I am.”

  I swallowed, and it hurt going down. Eli’s breath smelled upset even from across the booth, and so did mine, probably, but you can’t smell your own. And for the first time that I could remember, I wanted to touch my brother, to just put my hand on his head and brush his short blond hair against the growth because it might feel nice for both of us, so I reached for him. But bent like that, at the waist—already bigger then than it should have been—my throat tightened and turned inside out, and I vomited across the table—fries and milk that still tasted like fries and milk but also bile. Eli exploded into tears, and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over again until Libby came stomping back and by the fat of my arm dragged me out front, where I sat while, inside, she did her best to calm Eli down. I sat stock-still until an old guy in a white T-shirt burst through the door, kicked two pigeons into flight, and threw his coffee at the sun. It hung in the sky for what felt like forever. “I’m sorry,” I said to him, and he said, “You’re just like everyone else,” and I nodded. He ran after a city bus, and I hoped he’d catch it even though it felt as if the part of me that hoped for things had just left my body to chase that rattling bus along with him, like a helpful, hopeful, misunderstood ghost. From somewhere far off came the sound of Styrofoam and coffee exploding against windshield glass, the squeal of tires and brakes, and swerving, honking, and curse words, and then nothing but the louder-than-you-ever-realize drone of a hot, mad city, but also the sounds I couldn’t hear and wanted to: Eli crying and Libby hushing and shushing him and telling him everything was going to be all right. And through it all, there I sat, all alone on a brick-faced wall, not moving an inch, but saying sorry to and for everyone as though they could hear me and as though any of it would help. When I was done, I kept still and waited for Dot and Tod, and the inevitable series of irritated honks.*

  *What did they go see, the Mortensons? The Conversation? No, that would have been at the Showcase, not the Columbus. F Is for Fake? Not a broad enough release. Lancelot du Lac? Same problem. Murder on the Orient Express? Another mall picture. The Parallax View? Young Frankenstein? Mall, also. What? The Phantom of Liberty? A Woman Under the Influence? No, and no. Even if the Mortensons were still alive, they likely wouldn’t remember. Yet another thing that shouldn’t bother me.*

  *But it’s something I could know for sure. What I don’t know feels like an absorbed twin. I have dense bones and can write different things with both hands at the same time. Now if I could just figure out the exact date.*

  *All through school they told us that good students use what they know to figure out what they don’t, but I’m beginning to wonder if they didn’t have it exactly backwards.*

  *My first night out of prison, I took my father’s metal detector over to India Point Park, at the mouth of the Seekonk, hoping to find some old coins or rings or who knows what. Maybe even the flight hat and plugged-up starter pistol Eli buried there when he was six. I rarely visited India Point during park hours, and I figured that by detecting at night, I could avoid the sneering looks of trike-stroller joggers, dog parents, undergrads on dates on swings. Or those of people who thought they knew all about me. People forget that above all else, a voyeur prizes his own anonymity—something in short supply in a town like Providence, where everyone knows everyone else’s shit. Even people you’ve never met think they know you. But bums were fine.

  After about an hour of metal detection, I’d found only a couple nickels, a key to nothing, effectively, and a rebus cap from a beer quart that I still keep in my back pocket—it bites me in the ass from time to time—and of which I still can’t make heads or tails:

  I was about to call it a night when two strangers approached from the left. From where I stood, in the dark—the moon was a toenail clipping and there was my myopia—I couldn’t see their faces. But
whoever they were, they were themselves, which was all that really mattered, and I couldn’t and can’t and shouldn’t make up anything about them. One stranger wore a black knit hat despite the Indian-summery murk, and the other had hair matted into a hat no one in his right mind would put on his head. They smelled like wine and fire. I swept my detector coil back and forth across the turf in little Turkish moons, trying not to look like I was ignoring them, which I wasn’t. Eye contact is hard for me.

  “Fuck is that?” asked the actually hatless one.

  I swept my crescents, telling myself they were only talking to each other.

  “You—what the fuck is that!”

  “It’s a metal detector,” I said to the ground. “I’m detecting metal.”

  “Man,” Hatless said, leaning in and poking me in the chest with a finger as hard as rebar. His breath was bitter. “What the fuck is your problem?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Watchcap, slugging his friend in the arm, like a friend, but also for real. “It’s his hobby.”