Ted took another long draw on the Four Roses, nearly draining it, then positioned the towel about his waist.
“Okay, baby. Let her rip.” He sucked in his breath and held it.
Lorraine poured the alcohol, Ted crying out as it ran down his chest. She took a sewing needle from her basket, struck a match, and ran the flame along the shaft. She wiped the blackened metal with toilet paper soaked in alcohol and pulled a length of thick, black thread from a spool, biting through it with her front teeth.
“If we’re doing this,” Lorraine said, holding the needle to the light as she threaded the eye, “let’s get the big one done with.”
There were a of number divots and punctures in Ted’s chest. Most of these were superficial and had stopped bleeding on their own. But there were two or three gaping wounds cut into his left breast—one, a large, jagged flap gouged through the head of the bluebird tattooed over his heart. This wound cut across the nipple, and every movement of the muscle below prompted it to bleed.
“This ain’t no knife cut,” Lorraine said.
“Bottle cut,” Ted answered. “Clean, though.”
“Who …”
“Some Polack. Just go ahead on, babe.”
Lorraine pinched the flesh in one hand and aimed the needle at the middle of the cut.
“You set?”
“Don’t talk about it, Lorraine. Just do …”
Lorraine plunged the needle into one side of the cut and the point came out the other.
“Fuck!”
“You know I hate that word, Ted,” Lorraine said, pulling the needle the rest of the way through. When it caught on the needle’s eye, she gave it a sharp pull.
“Shit!” Ted fell back against the top of the toilet and banged his head against the wall.
“You alright?” Lorraine asked.
“Just sew the son of a bitch!” Ted drained the last of the bottle and dropped it in the trash.
Lorraine snugged together the edges of the flesh with the thread, made a knot, and drew it tight.
Ted looked at me, trying to smile, grimacing instead. “Hell, this ain’t nothing, is it ol’ Mutt.”
I shook my head.
“I ever tell you about how people come to lose their fur?”
I shook my head.
“Outside of you yanking it out by the roots.”
Lorraine put the needle through again.
“Man!” Ted shouted.
“You gotta hold still if you want me to do this.”
“I am. I am. Me and Mutt just needs us something to get our mind off things, don’t we, Mutt.”
“More of your b.s.”
“No, this is for true. I read it. One time, hunnerds a years ago, people had fur just like monkeys …”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lorraine said, re-threading the needle. “You’re so full of shit it’s coming out your ears.”
“Everybody had fur ‘til we started wearing clothes. Then all them pants and shirts rubbing back and forth all them hunnerds a years rubbed our hides down to the nubs.”
“Then how’s come we still got hair on our arms and legs and our you-know-wheres?” Lorraine asked.
“Them’s just the stubs. We keep wearing clothes, in another hunnerd years or so, everybody’ll be bald as butts all over.”
“Quit talking horseshit around Teddie. You want him going out and telling that kind of horseshit around people?”
“It was in goddamn Reader’s Digest!”
“Not likely, Ted.”
Ted and Lorraine argued between the times she put the needle through. Ted spoke with animation, waving his arms, jabbing the air with his finger, quoting sources. Lorraine refuted every word, demanding he hold still. They argued while Lorraine bandaged him with clean washcloths and dish towels.
Ted and I sat at the kitchen table while Lorraine cleaned the bathroom. Ted put on a pot of coffee and poured himself a cup. He poured half a cup for me, added condensed milk until it turned light brown, then dumped in an avalanche of sugar straight from the bowl. We drank coffee and listened to the radio while he smoked. Now and then he would say, “How you doing, Mutt?”
“Okay,” I would say.
Lorraine joined us after she finished in the bathroom. She scolded Ted for giving me coffee that late, but allowed me to finish my cup and gave me bread to dunk.
Ted and Lorraine talked for a long while. About jobs and money. About Marge and Leo and Trudy and people I did not know. After awhile, I lay my head on the table, and they spoke as if I were not present. They spoke loving words and bitter ones, saying things which caused them to laugh, things which made their chairs creak and screech away from the table. I lay there with my eyes closed, head resting on the cool Formica, listening to the rise and fall of their story blowing through my mind like voices on the radio.
Finally, Lorraine made up the living room chair that folded down into my bed. Ted carried me from the table and slipped me under the covers. He lay me on my back and kissed me on the lips.
“You ain’t faking, are you, Mutt?”
I squeezed my eyes tighter as he tickled my face and ran his fingers through my hair. He leaned close to my ear and kissed it.
“You take good care of your mom,” he whispered. “Big boys take good care of their moms.”
Ted and Lorraine went to bed. At first, there were whisperings and bed creakings, and, later, someone calling my name. I fell asleep to the sounds of hungry lips, recriminations, and the rhythmic groan of tired metal springs.
In the morning, I woke early and found Lorraine alone in her bed, sleeping deeply, on her belly, one arm hanging to the floor. Her hair was clumped and matted; she breathed through her mouth, lips parted over her teeth. She was naked above the waist, her hips tangled in sheets and bedspread. I put my face in front of her mouth and breathed her warm, stale breath.
She made a face, moaned, and turned away.
I went out to the kitchen and pulled up a chair to the counter. I climbed up and looked out the window at the flower bed. The moss rose had not opened, but its needled leaves were covered with dew, sparkling in the slanting morning sun.
Pushing the chair across the kitchen floor to the table, I lined up the cups from the night before and drank cold coffee in the warm light coming in through the window.
When I finished, I walked around the apartment and looked for signs of Ted. No clothes. No shoes. But there was a row of towels and washcloths drying along the edge of the tub. A splash of blood on the wall beside the medicine cabinet.
Ted and the oatmeal box were gone.
FIVE
Lorraine holds her Kleenex box under the lamp and inspects the hole where the tissues pull out.
“Dead,” she says, flipping the box in the direction of the waste basket. It glances off the rim and tumbles toward me.
I rise from the couch, stretch, and attempt to steady myself by touching my fingertips to the ceiling, but I list to the side, banging my shin against the coffee table, setting the ice bowl and the clutch of empty bottles clashing together.
Lorraine laughs and shakes her head.
“Hell of a shape,” she says.
I have been matching her bourbon, glass for glass, and I am unused to her relentless consumption. I stand for a moment, ears ringing, and wait for the walls to reorient themselves about my head. Bile rises in my throat, a flush of sweat beads at the back of my neck.
I bend down and pick up the empty Kleenex box, crushing it in my hands.
“Where do you put your Kleenex?” I ask.
She frowns up at me. “Hell of a shape, your own mother drinks you under the table.”
“The Kleenex?”
“Bathroom. Under the sink.” She snorts. “Better let me get it, Teddie. You fall and bust your butt, you’ll pay hell at work tomorrow.”
I wobble to the bathroom and squat before the cabinet beneath the sink. A layer of beige shows through the chips in the dingy yellow doors. A fat smudge of Avon and inky fingerprints is daubed abo
ut the cheap silver knobs, and, as I open the cabinet doors, the screws nearly tear from the water-warped plywood.
“Jesus!” I shout. “You tell the manager about these doors?”
“I been waitin’ for my son,” she replies. “My son what said the last time he was over, next time he’d bring his tools.”
I have nothing to say to this, and I curse under my breath as I poke through a heap of moldy rags, curler bags, and economy packs of Ex-Lax.
“You know the son I’m talkin’ about? My college professer son what never forgets his poor old mom—her whole damn place going to hell in a handbasket?”
I stick my head around the corner of the door.
“Not down here,” I say.
Lorraine sits back in her chair, face lined with concentration; she raises a bony finger, gnarled and swollen with arthritis, and taps the bridge of her glasses with a thick, yellow fingernail.
“Linen closet.” She looks over at me, her face crinkling into a smile of triumph.
My knees pop as I stand. Lorraine hears and laughs. I walk to the closet and find an unopened box of Kleenex lying on top of a pile of underwear and brassieres.
I stand before Lorraine’s recliner and offer the box; she grunts, pulls out a tissue. Waving me away, she coughs into it, then dabs at her lips with the satisfaction of someone who has just finished a good meal. The tissue disappears into her knobby fist.
“Good thing you ain’t workin’ days tomorrow,” she says.
“You think so?”
“Time for all dogs to be dead, and you don’t look so good.”
“I haven’t missed a day’s work in …”
“You never was afraid of a day’s work. I’ll give you that much.”
“Got it from you,” I say.
“That time your dad took your brick money?”
I nod.
A spasm of anger flickers across Lorraine’s face.
“Ain’t a thing nobody ever done to me—man, woman, or beast—ever pissed me off more’n that.”
She closes her eyes and allows her head to fall back against her pillows.
“‘cept maybe him knocking me up with your sister.”
“The day you came home from Doc Kreskie’s. The day he gave you the news. You raised some significant hell.”
She smiles. “Bet your butt, I raised hell.”
“Kicked the icebox so hard you broke the latch. Johnny upstairs thought somebody was killing us.”
Lorraine’s smile widens, and she begins to cough.
“I heard things come out of your mouth that day I never heard again until I went into the navy.”
She wags a finger at me. “Burned my butt. Him doing it. Me letting him.”
“He was pretty far gone, even then. Probably didn’t even know what he was …”
Lorraine shakes her head. “He knew.”
“I never held it against him. Taking the money.”
“I held it against the man ‘til the day he died. I’ll hate the son of a bitch every day he burns in hell.”
“See, that’s what I don’t understand. How can you say you hate someone that you obviously loved so much that …”
“Don’t you do it, Teddie! Don’t you start! I see you winding up. Don’t you wind up on me!”
“If you’d just listen for five seconds …”
“I heard enough of your horseshit to last me ten days after I’m dead. I told you a million times: when I love I love, when I hate I hate! Some bastard comes into my house, steals my kid’s work money, knocks me up higher’n a kite … Jesus Christ, Teddie!”
“You always told me it takes two to tango.”
“Not with that s.o.b. That s.o.b. could talk the pants off a nun. Big old bedroom eyes.”
“You cried until …”
“That was mad cry!” She grips the arms of her chair and begins to wheeze.
I raise both hands, palms outward. “Okay.”
“Why the hell you got to pick, pick, pick. Jesus H. Christ! Why the hell you got to pick a person half to death just beats the shit out of me.”
I wave my hands. “I’ll shut up. I’m shutting up right now.”
“That horseshit of yours is enough to drive a person off the deep end.”
Lorraine makes a face and flips a coaster at my head.
“I’d of strangled the son of a bitch, I got my hands on him. Here I was, just getting on my feet, working my butt to the bone, and he pulls that kind of shit. And, then, that night at the Blue Horizon. Marge and Trudy says: ‘Stay home, Lorraine, let Leo handle it’. But, no. Ol’ Lorraine’s got to go chargin’ in, both barrels loaded.”
Her eyes fill with tears.
“Jesus, Teddie. You want me to kiss the son of a bitch?”
“Sorry,” I say. “You’d think I’d learned by now to keep my mouth shut after we’ve had a few. I’m shutting up. See? I don’t know what gets into me.”
“Your goddamn dad. Your dad’s what gets into you.”
“Can’t blame everything on that poor son of a …”
“Pull your nose out of them books once in awhile, you’d quit thinking yourself to death.”
“I was just thinking that …”
“It’s all that thinking puts you on the pick.”
I sigh. “You’re right.”
“No wonder you can’t keep a woman.”
“I know.”
“You can’t pick a woman every five minutes.”
“I know.”
“That damn Marge.”
“Don’t blame Marge.”
“Her and her damn books.”
“You used to read to me all the time.”
“Not like Marge. I read normal. Damn Marge was book crazy. That’s when you and me went to hell in a handbasket.”
Lorraine pulls two tissues and holds them to her eyes.
“Books up the ying-yang! ‘Get your education, Teddie,’ she says. Like a goddamn broken record. ‘Get your education, that’s the one thing they can’t never take away from you.’ Jesus! The woman got your mind goin’ ten ways to Sunday, and it ain’t quit since.”
Lorraine rattles the ice at the bottom of her glass.
“Women don’t want picking,” she says, pounding the glass so hard on the TV tray that her jowls wag with each beat.
“They want loving,” I sigh.
“No shit, Dick Tracy.”
As I turn away from her and head to the kitchen for another bottle, she expends the last of her energy directing a final volley at my retreating back.
“Mr. Love-butt! Men thinks loving’s all between the legs. Women needs real loving!”
I look over my shoulder and see that she holds her glass straight out from her shoulder, indicating that I should refill it. But the glass trembles in her hand, and, in a moment, her arm begins to sag. She is exhausted, and, after another drink or two, if I shut my mouth, she will sleep.
I am disappointed that we have failed, once again, to find a place to rest within our history. But, sometimes, like tonight, I feel we come close to crossing over. That, if she will but survive a bit longer, our friction might yet wear us smooth.
I crack the seal on a half-pint.
For the first time in many years, and violating her own injunction against doing so, Lorraine has spoken the words, ‘Blue Horizon’. I have said things which hit too near the mark and, to protect herself, she threatens to call down the lightnings of a familial storm so potent that even I have no wish to clarify, examine, or understand.
I am unable to believe, as does Lorraine, that a single person or event, no matter how poignant, has the power to ruin us forever. I attempt to live in accordance with the advice Trudy once gave me when I was fighting with another boy in the alley. I was getting the worst of it, and I ran to where Trudy sat at the head of the stairs leading down to Lorraine’s apartment. Tears burned in my eyes, and I wanted to throw myself into Lorraine’s arms and let loose an angry, self-pitying torrent. But, Trudy was sitting me so
that Lorraine could sleep, and she prevented me from going to her. Before she sent me back to the fray to finish what I had started, Trudy whispered in my ear.
“A bloody nose ain’t never killed nobody, Teddie. Quit your cryin’ and get back in there. You don’t never want to let ‘em see you cryin’. You don’t never want to give the bastards the satisfaction.”
With Trudy watching, I returned to the fight and, after a while, had the victory. The boy finally ran away, his knuckles bruised and bleeding, his hands so painful he could no longer make fists.
SIX
Marge and I sat in her living room, reading together on her couch. She was holding me on her lap, pressing her soft, old woman’s breasts into my back, resting her chin on top of my head as we read aloud from the book I held open before us. It was a book Lorraine had given me for my birthday. A story about pigs, farmers, and wizards.
A magic wand had bounced from the cart of a passing wizard, causing pigs in the fields along the road to grow the size of horses, their skins to turn from light pink to an array of primary colors. With the change in color, the texture of the pigs’ skins transformed from the glossy smoothness of the page to an appliqué of some fuzzy material which bristled outward. I was enthralled as I passed my fingers over the pigs’ backs and bellies; I pointed to each word beneath the pictures as Marge and I read aloud.
The language in the story was simple, and Marge and I read syllable by syllable, stretching the vowels, exaggerating the consonants. We had read the book so many times that portions of the pigs were worn smooth; I had memorized every word, pretending I could read.
That afternoon, we read the book twice before Marge rose and turned out the end table lamp. When she attempted to lay me down on the couch for a nap, I pushed her hands away and sat up with a bounce.
“Ain’t tired,” I said. “More pigs.”
Marge pressed me back down, slipped a small pillow under my head, pulled the Afghan from the back of the couch, and drew it over me.
“Half a nap,” Marge said.
“How many minutes?” I twisted my head to see the clock above the radio.
“Twenty. You don’t have to close your eyes.”
“What does the big hand get to?”
“When the big hand gets to three.”
The Violent Child Page 6
