by Atticus Lish
He went into a long digression about the hospital, then said:
I don’t know why I couldn’t lift him.
She watched him try and speak.
I feel like I know I could have tried harder.
She handed him her napkin and he blew his nose.
Like I let him die.
He wiped his eyes and they filled again.
They talked until the day shift employees began coming in. A white girl in a hairnet came out and started turning over the chairs, and a Central American man old enough to be her father took a dustpan and swept up the ice cream cup and changed the trash. People could be seen walking in the darkness past the window. A black man in padded Delta Airlines coveralls and corrective glasses came in and bought an orange juice before heading to LaGuardia. The sky was getting lighter. They moved to a booth and he put his arm around her and she lay on him. The restaurant got busy and loud. Chinese mothers came in yelling in Teochow dialect to their children, carrying them on their backs the way mothers do in the third world.
She wanted a Shamrock Shake, and he bought one for her. He asked her how her job was going.
Anbu jiuban. It means you do the job like this: She imitated making a step with her foot, then another.
By the steps, she said. The tape she used to fix her shoes was coming out the heels.
He asked her if she wanted anything else, and she said no, she had more than enough already. She took a suck of her mint green shake and her cheeks hollowed and she smiled.
They were sitting under the No Loitering sign on the second floor where people came with their plastic bags to sit for hours and it smelled like BO. A young black junkie was sleeping with his mouth open in the corner, his yellow teeth showing. Pop music was playing softly. The bathroom door was token-operated, but the mechanism was broken, so you could use it.
Shangmian you zhengce, xiamian you duice. The leader has the policy, but the ones down below has another policy. The leader thinks he is in charge, but he only has two eyes. Two eye cannot watch twenty people.
If my boss yell at me, like this: and she demonstrated what she would do if she were yelled at: she put up a hand and deflected the force of the yell.
It make her very angry when I use this power so she can’t do nothing.
He couldn’t understand what anyone could be yelling at her about.
Any small thing. A sesame seed small thing. The small thread. Pull this thread, soon it’s the whole carpet come unwind.
There were many different ethnic groups in China and it was just a fact of life that they didn’t always get along. In my last job, the one where you met me, the boss was from Malaysia. In this job, Guangzhou, Hong Kong. The workers are from Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, Wenzhou, Fuzhou, Guangdong, Guangxi, many place. Mexico, Sinaloa. The men call me chiquita. Guatemalans. Those people that come on a long journey. Everyone needs this job so they will come here. Even the Arab. Even the terrorist.
A dark Indian-blooded Mexican man in slacks, a motorcycle jacket, dress shoes, and a red Yankees hat, sat with his daughters and wife at the next table. Outside across the street you could see the Footlocker sign next to Barone Pizzeria. Skinner sat with his boots planted on the gray tile floor, watching her dutifully.
Something bad had happened to her not long ago, she said. I believe my life is over, but somethings save me. Did he know? It is the end, I think. Instead it is the beginning.
You must keep on to your hope, for both of us, she told him, because maybe some good thing will happen.
29
JIMMY’S MOTHER DID NOT pick him up. He took the Greyhound bus from Krayville to the Manhattan Port Authority terminal with multiple stops on the way, a twenty-hour journey. There was some concern that he wouldn’t make it, that he would stop off somewhere and get sidetracked.
He showed up after eleven o’clock at night. Mrs. Murphy was still up in the kitchen, checking her cell phone for the time. Erin was reading the calorie information on a can of soup. The kitchen smelled like liver and onions that the father, Patrick, had cooked earlier. He had left the pan with water in it and the pan was in the sink. Gray things floated in the water. The father was not here.
Then Erin heard a sound and said, That’s him! and went to let him in. Jimmy, her brother, her mother’s son, entered the house: a stranger, smelling strange, smelling dirty, extremely weird and quiet, as if there were some great terrible thing contracting his vocal cords. He came in in clothes that he had last worn in the 90s. You heard Erin talking to him in the vestibule. The apartment door opened, Jimmy came in. Here he came—a large man walking behind Erin, carrying a cardboard box, like some kind of additional penance.
She’s gonna flip, Erin was saying. Look who’s here.
Mrs. Murphy held out her arms and said, Get over here. Jimmy put down his box on the floor and went over and bent down and hugged her. Hey, ma.
At the door, he didn’t presume that he would be allowed in. Apparently he thought it was possible that he might be turned away.
He took a seat at the kitchen table, and because he didn’t talk, his mother and half-sister debated what he could have, whether Fratelli’s was still open this late, and why they hadn’t ordered.
He’s not saying anything.
Please. The man just got here, Erin. He doesn’t have to say a thing.
I’ll take a cigarette.
Mrs. Murphy pushed her pack across the tabletop. There! she said, and he took one of the long women’s cigarettes and lit it. He smoked it by taking a quick hit and holding the cigarette cupped and hidden in his big hand.
That’s the most macho way any man has ever smoked a Slim, Erin remarked.
Gradually, he started talking, his voice so rough and hoarse, it sounded as if his vocal cords were dragging on concrete. Whatever he had to say had nothing to do with ordinary life. It was about the way the rules on the Greyhound to the city were poorly thought out and unfairly applied. He had seen the authorities being made fools of in their bus stations by people selling sex and drugs.
Eventually, Erin left them, climbed upstairs softly on her big white legs.
He said yes to a beer with a trace of amusement, as if he found it quaint to be offered anything for free, even by his mother. He drank his beer with self-satisfaction as if he had won a prize while his mother carried on a conversation with him.
She thought he had smelled like alcohol when he had come in. He admitted he had snuck one on the bus. The guy next to me was an alcoholic. They put me next to him and he offered me my first beer in ten years. What was I gonna do?
An old look of recognition passed between mother and son.
Very late at night, he confessed to his mother, I feel like I’m not ready to be on the outside. She heard his confession and told him it would be all right. She told him what some old acquaintance had said about restarting life on the outside after a long time behind bars, that the fear passes.
The way everybody’s got cell phones now, he said. I never had that. The only people who had cell phones used to be drug dealers when I went away. So I guess that’s what I should of done. I might of done a few drugs, but I never sold them. If I’d of sold them like they said I done, I would a been better off. Fifteen-year-old niggers don’t have nothing to make them feel special no more.
All right, she said finally. They were going to bed, and she heaved herself up to standing, the table tilting and jolting under the pressure of her hand.
She told him he could go up to his old room.
Jimmy said he was thinking he could take the basement. His mother told him the basement was being rented to a tenant.
That’s an easy hustle. I wish I could get somebody to give me money like that.
He picked up his box and went up the narrow stairs to the disorderly interior of the upper house where his room had been. It was still there, with the blinds broken and the night showing through the window. They had left laundry hampers on his floor. He went into his closet, which had a sliding hol
low wood door with a metal cup inlaid in the wood as a handle. It had been knocked off the track and hung sideways. He found photographs of old friends, himself as a skinny teenager making a weird gesture with his arm, a gang sign, in 1992. His hard hat was back there with stickers on it. American flag. Irish clover. Zofo. He found an electric guitar with broken strings.
The posters were rolling off the walls. He shut the door and a poster rolled down, the back of the paper white and empty. Before hiding it, he opened up his prison box and looked inside: letters, cards, a copy of Outlaw Biker, a Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup, Psalms, a shaving mirror, a pair of prison-issue white boxer shorts issued by CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, a Capri Sun juice pack, an old Heavy Metal magazine, a red cowboy bandana.
Unable to sleep, he went downstairs and turned on the TV in the front room.
In the basement, Skinner heard the television and the sound of a heavy, unfamiliar individual moving over the floor.
He took a shower with all the shampoo bottles that belonged to each member of the household except for him. As a matter of habit, he spent very little time in the shower, barely getting wet—got in and got out and went back to his room and dressed immediately. He combed his hair carefully, looking at himself from all angles in the aluminum shaving mirror.
A shout from below:
Jimmy! Mom wants to know if you can come down here.
He went downstairs and let them make him eggs. While he was waiting for them to cook, his mother, instead of asking him what his plans were, asked him to take a look at the kitchen cabinet door, the hinge. Jimmy moved himself, he stood up from the table and moved his weight—of his body, the somber weight of his eyes, his wet beard from the shower, the weight of his damp white skin under his plaid shirt—across the room and looked at the hinge.
There’s nothing wrong with it.
Can you fix it?
He did not automatically say yes.
It’s just a screw, he said.
He would quote back to people all the responsibilities he had undertaken for them, including things they had never asked him to do, but nevertheless things he was doing or was soon to do for them—or things that he had to do for other members of the household or for someone else entirely, some other entity, such as the government—simply things that he would have to do—suggesting that he was trying to help everyone as fast as he could—not that he wouldn’t be happy to oblige—but if you could just wait your turn, because you weren’t just imposing on him, you were infringing on someone else’s rights. Jimmy had commitments to many people, you had to understand. He was just trying to be fair to everybody. Patrick’s truck: Jimmy alone would be perceptive enough to hear that there was a problem with the front wheel bearing. Bathroom tiles were another thing. No offense, but their house had not been that well-maintained in his absence. He wasn’t saying anything, but, his room, if he was supposed to live there, had turned into their laundry hamper. He had a small responsibility to himself to make it livable. The cupboard he would deal with when he had time.
He gave an understanding smile, because he got what was going on. No one was planning to compensate him for all the work he was planning to do. That was the way it was. That was fine. But there were some basic things he had to do for himself, and the State hadn’t given him money for clothes or toiletries. The State had kicked him out. And it was a little too soon for him to start thinking about hustles unless the idea was for him to get violated right away. So he needed twenty bucks to go to the store. He knew she had it. He would get his mother whatever she wanted while he was out there.
When he was gone, Mrs. Murphy said, He’s got to get back in the union. They’d take him back. They have their own rules that they go by. They don’t base it on the conviction. What he did did not go that far to the point that he’s out for good. He has a shot, if he wants it. He’s got two options: either the union or he works with Patrick. Patrick, I don’t really see. The way things are, he don’t have enough work for the two of them, not every day. With Patrick, it’s now you see it, now you don’t. I see a problem there, with the up and down. Jim needs the routine every day that they gave him in the union. The other men were good for him when they were on the dig. He made every shift on that. You know, he told me, ma, I was there every shift. My whole life I would disappear. I know, I says, I remember. He used to hide when Patrick called him. He used to pretend he was out of the house when he was here the whole time. He cut school, which would be nothing new in this family. The middle of the day, I’d hear a sound—he was in the basement. Didn’t you hear us calling? I says. He says, Yeah, but ma, I don’t want to go with him, with Patrick.
I says, you know he’s gonna beat the shit out of you. No, he won’t this time. So, now I’m gonna get a prize fight in my kitchen. Patrick beat the shit out of him.
On the dig, he made every shift. Once he went in the trailer and put his belt on, that was it, that was what it took for him. He never violated that. He went to work, back here to Feeney’s, then right back here. They had their fun, but there was a limit. He always knew what it was, he said. He knew he had to be ready for the next shift, so he used to stop himself. He’s got to find that limit again.
In the evening, Jimmy came back and there was no mention of the money or what he had done. He sat in the front room on one of the couches watching the TV. I’m gonna get cable for you, he told his mother. In prison, they had watched cooking shows, celebrity reality TV, reality TV in which a house was built and you saw the craft and skill, the whole thing coming together like a puzzle. He had loved those.
Oh here. He set a carton of Slims on the kitchen table—an entire carton—which cost far more than the twenty dollars she had given him.
You trying to kill me? she said, chuckling. I need to hide these from myself. She turned herself around in her chair in stages and sought a drawer to hide the cigarettes in.
30
I WENT IN JAIL, she whispered.
You? What for?
I’m illegal alien in this country. She watched him. You don’t know?
No. You never told me.
I am. No visa. No paper.
And you got arrested for that?
Yes.
How’d you get here?
I smuggle across the border.
The border of what?
Mexico. First I come to Mexico from Southeast Asia and then I take a truck.
She told him her journey had led to Archer, down south, and then the other east coast cities. In Connecticut, the police had arrested her coming out of a store to buy some things for dinner, some soda.
How long did they give you?
Three months.
Shit.
Yes. But that’s the problem, they don’t tell me. I don’t know it’s going to be three month. Nobody tells me when I can get out, so I don’t know nothing. Some people says I can be a year there, some says it can be longer.
They didn’t tell you?
No, I just sit in jail waiting, and I don’t know anything.
Now he was appalled. You got fucking stop-lossed! That’s the most fucked-up thing to do to someone…
She agreed. And she had a hard time with being closed-in. I think it make me lose my mind, so I am afraid of these police. Really that’s why I come to Queens, because so many foreign people is here, I think the cops can’t look for us.
What would happen if you got stopped by the cops? You’d go back?
I don’t know. Maybe something bad for me.
What’s the worst they could do?
I go to jail or deport back to China.
Can you do anything about it?
I don’t know. Maybe I can go to a lawyer, apply asylum. I think before 9/11 it’s easier than now.
Do they know you’re Muslim? Do the cops know?
No. I don’t think they know. Not too many people know what’s Uighur people. I just think no matter any kind of people, to stay in the U.S. it’s not easy right now.
So wha
t’s that mean, you just gotta live not knowing what’s gonna happen to you?
I think so. She sighed. She raised her hands palm up and slapped them down on her thighs. Nothing I can do.
Skinner looked distraught. At her suggestion, they went outside in the lovely white-gold spring sunshine and wandered among the houses on 40th Road, where it seemed to both of them that it was an ordinary day and that their fears were exaggerated. But when they went back to his basement later and the golden light was cut by shadows, Skinner got very upset and wouldn’t speak. After she coaxed him repeatedly to tell her what was wrong, he said, I’ve got to stop fucking up. I can’t let you get deported.
He recalled a checkpoint on the road to Syria. Refugees from Baghdad were coming north in an attempt to flee the civil war. By political arrangement, Iraqi policemen controlled the checkpoint with American soldiers in a supporting role. In practice, this meant that the Iraqi police, who had been infiltrated by various mafias, could do whatever they wanted. Some GIs complained the policemen were levying exorbitant tolls on anyone not in the Zafir tribe. Others said they were turning Shiite Muslims back, mockingly telling them to go back to their villages where they would be killed by Sunni death squads.
Skinner witnessed an Iraqi policeman pull a girl over to the roadside and interrogate her, going through her bag, demanding to know why she was traveling alone. She was very young, maybe twelve years old. Her family had been killed in Baghdad. A GI told the man to give her a break. The Iraqi insisted that she wasn’t allowed to travel without a husband.
The Iraqi took her by the hand and led her away from the road where the land dipped down into a hidden wadi. Down in the maze of brown hills were a series of abandoned open-roofed buildings that were sometimes used as a latrine.
