by Chris Lynch
Bam.
Right in the side of the head. Ronny’s unfeasibly big fist with its twelve or thirteen gnarled and calloused knuckles crashes down on me, and I crash right down, on the step, on the sidewalk, on my ass. I feel splits in the structure of my skull, almost making that crackly splintering noise a tree makes when it falls.
But it’s only pain.
He stands over me, fists on his hips, lips pursed, growling. Despite what has happened he is somehow the one furious.
“You think you can come here and tell me there is something wrong in my own household, and that you are here to straighten it out?”
The left side of my head is a busy little airport of pain planes coming and going, fast and noisy and relentless. If it were balanced, even—if both sides of me felt the same—that would be better, but this is making me want to flop sideways and smother it all out.
“Yeah,” I say, perhaps out of sarcasm, or perhaps in an attempt to get him to put me out of my misery, “that’s what I think.”
He comes down the two slick concrete steps to the slick sidewalk, where I manage to kind of balance awkwardly on one hip and an elbow. He crouches, in his shiny gray shorts, crouches like a catcher, and what I catch is the scent of Satan in his crotch, a sulfuric ammonia eau de cologne that makes me say “Oh” and cover my nose the way I should probably be covering up my face against the beating coming my way.
“Do you know who I am?” he hisses.
I nod, keeping it simple in case it’s a trick question.
“Do you know who I work for?”
Now I see where he’s going, and he doesn’t work for the guy. He toadies. He’s a toad, even among toads, as his own daughter told me on many a shame-filled evening.
“Yes,” I say.
“Well, little rich boy, who, then? Who do I work for?”
I am not rich. Athletes and senators and guys with their own TV churches are rich. Granted, I don’t notice how much a shirt costs until the cashier asks for my card, so I’m not exactly hurting. But rich is a whole other category, I think.
“The One,” I say, and maybe it’s a mild concussion or the chloroform coming at me from between Ronny’s legs, but fear and pain and weakness are fading—I’m sure temporarily.
“The One Who Knows. That’s goddamn right, boy.”
“This is good,” I say. “I always wanted to ask somebody, an insider like yourself. What, exactly, is it, that he knows?”
“Ha-hah!” Maxine laughs from somewhere not too far off.
“Shut it, Maxine,” Ronny says as he grabs me hard by the collar in just that way that truly hard, mean, and dangerous people grab.
I will mock, and have mocked, Ronny’s intelligence. His hygiene, his style, his overall meaninglessness. But no one will ever hear me mock his toughness. He is the real kind of hard, brutal, vicious, and right now I could well do something that will make me smell as bad as him.
“Leave him alone,” Maxie says, and I realize she is in the doorway. I love Maxine.
“Go in the house,” he says, and while he is as serious and poisonous as ever, I am a little thrilled to hear a small something else in there, something that acknowledges Maxine’s something. The fact that she is not afraid of him? The fact that there is something of the vicious in her as well?
Whatever it is, I love-love it, and her.
“I’ll go in the house when you come with me,” she says.
He pauses, hangs on to my shirt. He inhales deeply, exhales with purpose, hot and hideous down into my face, and it’s like he can switch to extra noxious when he needs to, and it is as foul as hell indeed.
Finally he shoves me down, down-er, onto my back. “Watch yourself,” he says, and then snatches the sketch, the portrait my mother did, my gift for Junie to see whenever she does come home so she can see me again and she can laugh at me properly again and we can get right again, for good again.
“Hey, hey, don’t scrunch that,” I say as I see him scrunching it in his big ignorant paw.
He unsurprisingly ignores the command until he gets to the doorway and Maxie snaps “Don’t scrunch it” as he passes.
She comes down quickly, gives me a hand up, checks me out.
“You okay?” she says, whispery-tough-sweet. She didn’t see the punch, so probably figures he just shoved me playfully down the stairs or something.
“Yeah,” I say, checking myself to see how true that actually is. My balance feels good. Less than perfect. But good.
“Okay. So you can get yourself home all right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Good,” she snaps. “Then go there and stay there this time.” She gives me a seeing-me-on-my-way slap to the back of the head that on most occasions would be almost fun but right now causes tears to spill down my face as I walk, weak and wobbly, away.
“I’ll call you,” she calls. I raise a hand of acknowledgment as I stagger on.
I am halfway home when my phone goes off. I stop, because to see the screen I must focus.
It’s Junie’s number.
“Hey,” I say, all excited, all stupid. “Hey-hey.”
“Come back here,” commands the awful growly-bear voice. Then he hangs up.
I stand in the middle of the sidewalk staring at the screen of my phone, like it’s going to give me advice or something. Maybe he’s going to punch the other side of my head, to balance me out. Maybe he’s going to tell me, finally, where June is. There is no figuring, but there is also no choice. I have to go back.
Somehow it seems my equilibrium is slightly worse on the trip back, but my pace still quickens.
No need to knock. He’s been watching for me.
“Get in,” Ronny says.
I follow as he leads me back once more to the breakfast bar. There he has spread out the portrait of me as the emperor. It feels really embarrassing now, with Ronny here. And he did scrunch it, the chin now looking like it has a wiry goatee.
“Why is that out?” I ask.
“Because it’s damn cute,” Maxine says.
“Please,” I say. “Please, don’t . . .”
“No, no,” Ronny says, tapping the portrait with his middle finger and looking like he is giving it serious contemplation. “It’s very good. It makes you look . . . like a real somebody. Who did this?”
“My mother.”
“Really?” he says, very impressed. He looks up from the sketch to stare at me, working out whether I am leveling with him or not. I’m pretty sure he thought all portraits were done in a booth machine at CVS or the carnival. “Really? Your mother?”
“Yeah, really. Is there any aspirin or something?”
Maxine pats my shoulder on her way past to get me something. Now my shoulder hurts.
“This is beautiful work. Your mother is very talented. Tell her I said so, and I want one.”
Maxine reenters the room, drops two tablets into my hand, and grabs me a glass with the remnants of somebody’s smoothie. Thank God we can assume it wasn’t Ronny’s.
“What are these?” I garble after the tablets are already in my mouth.
“Aspirin’s friends,” she says, motioning for me to get the smoothie down me. I comply.
“Thanks,” I say to her. Then “Thanks,” I say to the hulking source of the pain in the first place. “My mother is proud of her work. She’ll be pleased to hear the praise.”
“And the commission,” he reminds me.
“Right,” I say. “I’ll check with her, see if she’s got the time. . . . She’s really busy with—”
As I am talking, Ronny returns to studying the portrait but at the same time mimes a Call your mother gesture using his thumb and pinkie held to the side of his head like a phone. He could go whole days talking with his fingers, I think.
I pretend to call my mother, pretend to get her answering machine, pretend to leave an enthusiastic message about this wonderful commission she will be doing over my dead body or pieces thereof.
My head is swimm
ing, in a lot of senses. I want to have as little to do with Ronny Blue as possible, and I want my mother to have even less to do with him. Having any kind of business arrangement with him is a truly horrifying proposition. And yet, Mom will want to do it, I know. She is fearless and ambitious and loves portraiture regardless of the unseemliness of the character, and in fact she is collecting something of a rogues gallery of faces for some ultimate artistic purpose, and for that, Ronny Blue makes an obvious poster boy.
And I need to stay connected. To these people. To June.
And the other swim my head is doing is more of a treading water.
I am floating. There is no pain. There is no worry. There is the equilibrium issue still . . . but so what? Doesn’t seem to matter.
“I’m gonna take you home,” Maxie says, putting one hand on my back and the other gently under my elbow the way you do when you help an elderly person across the street.
“Really?” I say. “That’s nice of you.”
“Yeah,” she says, “well, I’m a nice kinda girl.”
• • •
“You know what I would like?” Maxie says, her hand around my waist as we make our way up the road. The sun is just starting to work an orange cigarette burn through the gray fabric of the clouds.
I reflexively look down at her hand on my hip, then turn to her close-by face. I can just about feel the stupid of my smile as I say, “You know what I would like?”
“Yeah, I do. Well, you’re not getting that, so shut up.”
“Where’d you get those friends of the aspirin?”
“I got them from the friend of the pharmacist. Shush. What I want is for you to talk to your mom about doing a portrait.”
“Please, Maxie, don’t make my mom draw that awful man in a toga.”
“Not that fathead. My mother. Do you think you could talk to your ma about doing my ma? I think it would be friggin’ beautiful, I really do. And she deserves it.”
“She deserves something, that’s for sure. Hey, Maxie?”
“Yeah?”
“What about Junie?”
“What about her?”
“She’s gone, that’s what? She’s vanished, and nobody seems to be bothered about this but me.”
“First, she ain’t vanished. She’s just, someplace, I don’t know. Second, she’s tougher than Turkish Taffy, that kid. Nobody worries about Junie.”
“I worry about her.”
“That’s because you’re a big ol’ nancy boy and you’re in love with her.”
“I’m not . . . Never said I was in love with her.”
“Good,” she says, turning me manually around the corner to my street. “ ’Cause you’re dumped, remember?”
“Ah, she didn’t mean that. She was lying. Sweet Junie Blue Lies and Lyin’ O’Brien. That’s who we are. That’s what we do.”
Maxie stops as we reach the sidewalk in front of my house. She looks the place down and up, down to its rampant rosebushes creeping their way up the trellises, up to its yellow brick colonial square face with all the windows and the handsome surging gables. She is shaking her head in a kind of wonderment.
“She wasn’t lyin’, O’Brien. I’m sorry about that, but she meant it. However, if it makes you feel any better, I think she’s crazy.”
“You do?” I say, and feel a very stupid heart-flutter over this.
“Absolutely. I’d do you for the house alone.”
Flutter subsides.“It’s not that nice a house,” I say.
“Sure it is. It’s a nice house, you’re a nice guy, your mom is a nice artist, and your dad, whoever he is and whatever he does, is a superior piece of work to my shit-ass father. Can I take a rose home to my ma?”
My mother is crazy-protective of her garden, and especially her roses. She has yellow and bloodred and pink, and they look like she makes them up individually in her studio. I couldn’t possibly—
“Wait. Don’t pick,” Mom says from behind the first-floor window screen. “I’ll go get my pruning shears.”
“Mom!” I snap at her nosy little vapor trail.
• • •
“I think I should draw her with the roses all around her, in her hair, in the background,” Mom says, lost in her excited creative cloud as she arranges flowers at the kitchen sink.
“That would be friggin’ lovely,” Maxine says, sipping her Earl Grey tea.
“Friggin’ lovely,” Mom echoes, giggling. “How about I throw in some friggin’ baby’s breath as well?”
“Is she makin’ fun of me?” Maxine whispers, and in her flashing eye I see a small bolt of what makes her father scary.
“Absolutely, positively not,” I say, and as soon as I say it, I see the total opposite thing, the bright and open unguarded joy that makes her sister such nip to a cat like me.
“Breathe on it, baby,” Maxine says cheerily.
My mom is about as happy as she gets, doing this, and Maxine is clearly getting a lot for her money today, scoring a professional-quality bouquet for her mother as well as scheduling a sitting for her mother’s surely once-in-a-lifetime portrait.
This is pure contentment, then, right?
Right?
“He’s been mooning around the house ever since she dumped him,” Mom offers even though nobody anywhere asked.
“Okay, Mom. Thanks. Flowers ready to go yet?”
“It is sad,” Maxie says, kind of neutral. “Maybe it’ll work out. He’s a good boy.”
“He is,” Mom says almost urgently. “He’s a very good boy.”
“And I’m not just for Christmas,” I say, as long as they seem to think I’m a dog. Though if I were a dog, maybe Junie would be here right now, walking me.
“I was just telling him outside that I think Junie was crazy, dumping him.”
Jeez, Maxine, stop there. Don’t say the thing about the house.
“I love your house, by the way,” she says, slipping me a deadly smile.
“Thank you,” Mom says. “It feels a bit vacant some days, and with this one maybe leaving soon. Might be time to downsize.”
“I’ll move in,” Maxie says.
“Aren’t you sweet,” Mom says, handing the flowers over as if Maxine just won Miss Universe. Which I believe she could—as long as Junie weren’t a contestant. Which she’d never be because of how she feels about it. One of her stated goals in life is to vomit on a reigning Miss Universe.
“Well, then,” Mom says as we see Maxie to the door. “You check with your mother about the dates, and we’ll get things going. I’ll want her to come for a few sittings, as it’s much more serious than when I dash off those silly trifles of my son.”
“Oh, my father wants one of those trifles of himself, as a matter of fact.”
“Well,” Mom says, sincerely breathless now. “I guess your family is going to keep me well occupied in the near future. This is going to be sweet.”
Occupied, oh yes. Sweet? Maybe sweet-and-sour.
Maxine bounces down the steps and across the lawn—which Mom graciously overlooks—clutching her flowers and whistling.
“She whistles,” Mom says, taking both my hands in hers after the door closes. “Isn’t that marvelous? Hardly anybody whistles anymore.”
Three
I’m walking on the beach with my father. It’s Sunday. We do this frequently on Sundays. We don’t have a whole lot of interaction on the other six days because he works lunatic hours (at the job he describes as “cloning money in my lab—theoretically”), but doing that seems to make him really happy, which makes him a pretty pleasant guy, which makes our Sundays something to look forward to. I don’t need tax or investment advice or life insurance, and so I don’t have anything tangible he could be after, so I can only conclude that the warmth and humor he shows me on the beach on Sundays has something to do with me and him and us, which fills me with something nice. I wonder how different it is for people who do have something he wants.
We don’t go to church like Mom does. We a
re each other’s Sunday service.
Sunday is sacred.
“So, your mother tells me you’re really at it lately,” he says, staring down a seagull that is after his fried clam necks.
“At what?”
“You know, the ol’ sock puppet. Up in your room.”
“Jesus, Dad, what is it with you two? I am fine. I am normal.”
“Calm down, Son. Nobody said it wasn’t normal. Hell, when I was your age, I left a snail trail of Vaseline from—”
“Dad, stop!”
He’s shaking his head and laughing, either at my discomfort or at the memory of his demented adolescent self.
“Wait,” he gasps. “You haven’t even heard the part about when the frenzies got so bad once I accidentally grabbed the Vicks VapoRub instead of—”
I snatch the little bucket of clams out of his hand and sling the whole thing up toward the seagull, who dives onto the contents and is joined within seconds by all his shrieking pals.
My father stares forlornly as they devour his Sunday snack. It’s the only day he allows himself fried food.
“Your mother’s right,” he says. “You are extremely tense.”
All you can do in these situations is sigh. So I sigh at him.
“You were right, though,” he continues. “If a guy is going to eat deep fried one day a week, then the damn clams should at least have bellies. That was an embarrassment, and I’m frankly surprised the seagulls don’t just send them back. The seagulls around here have no self-respect.”
The low-self-esteem seagulls have made short work of the embarrassing clams and are now pursuing us up the beach for more, screaming and diving at us. Suddenly I feel, and hear, the telltale plap of getting dumped on.
Dad, unscathed as usual, looks at my newly decorated shoulder and puts a bit more space between us.
“I guess they are sending them back, in a way, huh?”
“Good one, Dad,” I say. Then my eyes can no longer resist the glow of the shiny white excrescence that is beaconing like the military shoulder bling of a dictator-general. “Jeez,” I say, looking at it, “what, did they all collaborate on this thing?”
“Either that or a Pegasus just flew over. C’mon, kid, I’ll buy you a new T-shirt. And some proper clams.”
