The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  “But I’m looking for the Red Line.”

  “That’s where I’m going. Get on.”

  She took a seat right near him.

  “I’ve never taken this train before.”

  “This is the oldest subway in the United States,” the operator said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m driving history.” He had a tattoo of a bird on his neck, his name was Andrew, and he had been working for the MBTA for eight years, working nights. Originally he was from Connecticut. Now he lived in Brockton.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Nah, Brockton’s too far out. I’m a city guy,” Andrew said.

  “Me too. I’m a city girl.”

  “Where do you stay at?”

  “Quincy. I’m not happy about it. I moved a while ago. For the wrong reasons.”

  “I know Quincy. Upper-class poor, lower-class rich.”

  “That’s a good description!”

  “That’s what I call it. Everybody up here is getting pushed down there, and everybody down there is getting pushed up here.” They were rolling by clumps of black trees, a nightscape in which it was impossible to make out any landmarks. “Gentrification, so-called. Prices are going out of control.”

  “Oh my God, they are.”

  “A dozen eggs used to be two seventy-five. Now it’s three forty-nine. That’s a high percentage increase. You see it with the consumer price index. Milk, eggs, staples.”

  “I used to go to Whole Foods, the one at Alewife? It’s like the original store; it was called Bread & Circus back then. This was back in 1997, to tell you how old I am! And you could eat natural, whole, healthy…food. Like you’re supposed to. And it wasn’t your whole paycheck. It wasn’t a gourmet grocery store like it is now.”

  “They know how to pick your dollars apart.”

  “They do!”

  Without warning, they pulled up at the terminal stop in Ashmont and her conversation ended.

  “Good luck, Andrew,” she told him as she dismounted. “Keep on enjoying history.”

  “Be safe.”

  “I’m Gloria, by the way.”

  “Be easy, Gloria.”

  At Ashmont, she had to wait for the inbound train to JFK before she could catch the outbound train to Quincy, and then she had to wait for another bus to take her out to Sea Street. She didn’t make it home till nine. Corey ran to the door when he heard her coming. The trip had exhausted her, and the next day there was still no sign of Leonard or her car. She took mass transit to work, and she had another fall and, this time, broke her cell phone and cut her chin.

  * * *

  —

  Leonard reappeared several days later, on a Friday, and returned their car. He and Gloria talked all evening as if nothing was amiss. Corey waited until after his mother was asleep. He closed her door and asked Leonard for a private word. Corey led him to the kitchen. The window, which Leonard habitually raised, was open, letting in chilling damp air. In the black outside, Corey saw a mass of moving reeds and heard them soughing in the wind. Knowing what he was about to say, he experienced physical fear symptoms. Their intensity surprised him. He felt his body shaking.

  “Basically,” he said to his father, “I wanted to talk to you about the car. About how you took it.”

  The fear—call it stage fright—eased once he had started talking. He said, “I value knowing you. I’m glad you’ve been coming to see us. I think my mother’s glad too—she’s been lonely. What she’s going through is lonely above all. We’re alone out here. But you took her car, and she fell. I was mad over that. I’m still mad—I’m actually shaking, and I thought it was because I was afraid of talking to you, but now I think it’s because I’m angry. I never told you how angry I was. But I want to get over it, so we can work together. You’re the one who told me that we want the same thing. So why would you disappear like that? There’re things I don’t understand about you—like how you live, these girlfriends, all this stuff. Or these things you’ve been telling me at your job. I mean, we need you, don’t get me wrong. I’m asking you for help. I don’t even care about your private life. I just want to see all of us pulling together to help my mother. That’s all I wanted to say. I’m done.”

  Leonard suggested they step outside.

  “I’ll get my coat.”

  They left the house. It was after midnight. Leonard began leading him down the shore road.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Let’s see what’s down here,” Leonard said, choosing their direction: towards a spit of land that jutted out into the water. The homes had boats in the yards, propellers sticking out from under tarps. Security lights shone on the shingled houses, the watercraft. The night sky was drizzling. Leonard walked him down a concrete staircase to the beach, among the stones and broken asphalt. The black seawater came up to the edge of where they were standing. The water was calm and lay in front of them like a parking lot with the light rain falling on it. The dull black surface raced away from their feet to various masses of black, which were islands, and merged with the night sky, which was full of clouds. Industrial lights smoldered in the misty distance of the half-urban landscape.

  “I never knew you liked the ocean.”

  “It’s great. Let’s go farther.”

  “I can’t see anything down here.”

  “I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I do. I’m coming. What are we going to do about my mom?”

  “There’s nothing anyone can do. We’re all living with a death sentence.”

  “I know, I know…I know she’s going to die. But we have to help her…face death. I mean, what are we going to do between here and there? What about her job?”

  “Massachusetts has disability for people who can’t work.”

  “She’s had trouble with that.”

  “She has trouble with everything.”

  “I don’t see it that way. She raised me by herself, Leonard.”

  “She’s a real success.”

  “Why do you hate her?”

  Leonard spun around and snatched Corey by the coat.

  “Hey, let’s get something straight: You don’t know anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know nothing. Nothing. About anything.”

  “All right. Jesus.”

  “Don’t you Jesus me. Who the fuck are you? Some kid, some punk kid—from Quincy. Some little fucking idiot from Quincy, Mass.”

  “All right. All right already. I didn’t mean to anger you.” Corey pretended to laugh. The sight of the nearest houses, which looked empty in the night, filled him with abandonment.

  “A dummy. So shut the fuck up. You want to learn from me? You want to get close to me? Lesson number one: Shut the fuck up.”

  * * *

  —

  Corey spent the rest of the night in his bedroom with the door locked and his arm over his face. At three in the morning, he heard his mother use the toilet through his wall. Sometime later, he heard the click of the living room lamp going off and the futon settling when Leonard put down his book and went to sleep. At dawn, Corey opened his bedroom door and emerged already fully dressed in coat and jeans. The living room was steeping in the dirty gray light of another day. Carrying his boots, he crept through the house in sock feet, past Leonard’s sleeping form, and went outside.

  It was six a.m. and the beach was dead and gray. He tied his boots looking at the spot where his father had yelled at him the night before, on the other side of the concrete barrier which was supposed to keep the sea from drowning the road in a storm.

  On his way uphill, over the rooftops, he saw the sky going from bluish gray to a pale copper color out on the horizon. He bought an egg sandwich at the DB Mart and waited in the parking lot until it was time for work. Pickup trucks came and went. The doorbell chimed and
people came out of the store with coffees. The day got warmer and the ocean chill dropped away. A gold light spread over the asphalt. A white F-150 drove by, but it wasn’t Tom. At seven, he went down the side street, lined by trees, to the job site, all the branches having turned gold on one side and gray on the other in the strong horizontal light from the east.

  There was a thirty-yard dumpster in front of the house and plaster-dust-covered guys were carrying Rubbermaid trash cans up from the basement, full of broken wood and drywall. They walked into the dumpster, dropped their loads of debris and walked out, smoke billowing from their barrels. Hardly anyone else was there.

  Corey asked if they needed him. They lent him a pair of leather gloves. He went down into the basement. There was a tiny window letting in warm white sunlight. He tried to lift a barrel that had been loaded with fragments of a demolished wall.

  “That one’s a monster. You’re not gonna get that one. Take less. Don’t blow your back out.”

  Carrying an armload of wood and plaster trash, he dropped a wedge of sheetrock on the basement stairs and an already fully burdened guy running up behind him caught it and put it on his own pile without breaking stride. They went out into the daylight, nails poking through their sweatshirts, and dumped their armloads in the dumpster.

  At nine o’clock they rested. The smell of marijuana reached them.

  “Smell that?” one guy said. He went off to check it out. Corey and the other guy stayed behind. It was silent in the sun. In the lull in work, Corey’s depression grew.

  The first guy came back. “It’s some dude blazing out by the porta-shitters.”

  They ambled back to the basement, and Corey followed.

  He asked if they’d seen the boss.

  “I don’t think he’s here.”

  Corey said he wanted to look for the boss.

  The guys shrugged.

  Corey went around the site looking for Blecic’s truck. He encountered Dave Dunbar coming towards him from the port-a-johns.

  “Hey. You seen Blecic?”

  “Not me, chief.” Dunbar got in his subcompact Nissan.

  “Where you going?”

  “The hardware store.”

  “Come on, man,” said Corey. “You can tell me. I’m cool.”

  “I’m breakin’ out, kid. Gonna set it off. The boss ain’t here. He doesn’t know what’s going on. His head’s up his ass. I’ve been putting sixty hours on my time; I worked like twenty last week. We’re all doing it.” He started his car. “What’s up, dude? You wanna jump in? Come on.”

  Corey got in with Dunbar and they drove away.

  * * *

  —

  They drove around Quincy picking up other passengers—two kids from high school and a local man, a hairstylist. At midday they were burning down the Southern Artery. Corey was sitting in the back with the boys in the now-crowded Nissan. The hairstylist sat up front with Dunbar. Dunbar drove bending forward with his head over the steering wheel, looking out the windshield at the traffic converging on him from all sides—converging on him as, simultaneously, he stepped on the gas even harder and shot out ahead of it. And the car swooped forward—and then he had to downshift, engine braking—because there was a slow guy rattling along ahead of him, a pickup in the center lane with PVC and copper pipes sticking out the back over the tailgate like lances. The boys in his backseat, knees and shoulders squished together, rocked forward. Dunbar darted sideways, changing lanes, then crawled past the Chevy, the driver a stolid forward-looking shadow wearing a baseball cap above them, passive-aggressively accelerating at long last now that they were going to pass him.

  They drove on, the windshield filled with blue sky and sun, an ad for Jordan Marsh on the radio—Dunbar punching the radio off, driving with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, feeling his pockets, hitting the glove box open, digging for a lighter, and the man, Anthony, giving him one while all the boys in the back asked each other, “You got a lighter?” and had to admit they didn’t have one: “Not me. Sorry. I don’t smoke.”

  “I bet you smoke dicks,” Anthony the hairstylist said.

  Dave torched his cigarette, smoke filled the speeding car and the boys pretended they didn’t mind it.

  “How youse mad dogs doing?”

  Good, they all said.

  He willed the car forward, ooching it, imparting it momentum as if it were a becalmed sailing craft instead of a speeding missile on the highway, exited and shot through an intersection, looking both ways, the traffic on either side closing like shark’s jaws that just missed him as he squirted out ahead of it—through the ubiquitous landscape of Greater Boston: a CVS on one corner, a sub shop on the other, and if you looked far enough in the distance, a church spire sticking up over the houses. He was six feet tall, Irish but olive-skinned, had his hair cut high and tight—like he was entering the Army, though he never would; he loved smoking weed too much and he wouldn’t have wanted to leave his town, or his friends, or his girlfriend, or his job, even though he said they all sucked, which was why he got hammered. And he jammed the accelerator and sped them down a lane of clapboard houses, and parked. And all the guys, all these young, growing males, uncramped themselves and climbed out of Dave’s tiny car.

  They went into the house. There was a carpet and a kitchenette and a couch facing a bare white wall with an outline, a reverse shadow, a lighter rectangle where the TV had once been, and the cable coming out of the wall with nothing attached to it, just the silver connector and that tiny poking wire. A few other older guys were there with their hats on backwards, and the boys were on their guard. They shook hands all around. One of the men, a tall fellow in a faded sweatshirt, loose around his red wrists, and carpenter’s jeans with a loop for a hammer, had an edge. When Corey introduced himself, the guy said, “You said hello to me already.”

  “No, not me. That was him.”

  “Yeah you did. It was you.”

  A battered metal toolbox rested at his feet in battered leather boots, glints of steel toe caps showing through the worn-out leather, the steel battered and bent too. He was drinking a beer from a case of beer on the kitchen counter and spreading waves of approach-me-at-your-peril.

  But Dave went through the house, pulling off his shirt as he went, and went up to him bare-chested and clasped his hand and grabbed a beer of his own. He made sure all the boys got beers. He had a Bud Man tattooed on his olive chest, in garish blue and red.

  Dave grabbed the radio and ran down the stairs, the music descending with him—Journey, Aerosmith, Foreigner—the guys following him down, and the boys trooping after the guys. Down they went into the basement: a room like the one they’d just left only smaller, more confined, no natural light, and no carpet or couch: a concrete floor, load-bearing pillars, a breaker box cocooned in spiderwebs, and a weight bench in the center of the space. A pile of rusted iron weights in unusual denominations—no doubt culled from some antique powerlifting gym hidden somewhere strange and forgotten like in a church basement when it was being gutted to make way for a more modern facility.

  Dave set the tunes on the sill of a bricked-over window, Boston singing “More Than a Feeling.” The guys arrived with six-packs under their arms and set them down, clinking, on the basement floor.

  The hairdresser, Anthony, took off his parka and revealed a set of enormous blotchy red-tanned arms. He had black curly hair and wore a black silky jersey and heavy, shiny, black, satiny tracksuit trousers and big white Jordans and a gold chain. He put on a thick leather weightlifting belt and a pair of black leather fingerless gloves with Velcro straps and mesh backs. He spent a long time putting his gloves on, adjusting and readjusting them. He was unlikable but immensely strong. He lay down under the barbell and pumped it up and down as a warm-up—twenty times with no sign of fatigue. Then Dave changed places with him, took a swig of his beer, hit himself in the chest, on the Bud
Man tattoo, and could barely lift it.

  The men lifted weights and drank in the basement for several hours. The hairdresser got mad at something one of the boys said, and got up off the bench red-faced and shouted, “I’ve taken shits bigger than you!” He walked slowly out of the room with his swollen red bulbous inflamed-looking arms out to his sides. When he was gone, Dave said, “That’s what ’roids’ll do to you,” and a mood of approval went through the room. The boys looked at each other with vindication. The carpenter, lounging on a broken lawn chair, drinking his tenth beer, cracked the barest smile, and sank back into scowling at his raw red hands.

  The boys got on the bar when it was their turn. “Youse can do whatever you want,” said Dave. “I work different body parts every day. You got your shoulders, your arms, don’t forget your trapezius—they’re over here—do your shrugs. Your farmer’s carry. Ask Anthony. He’s the expert—if he isn’t being a hard-on. He does his body parts six days a week. He spends one whole day on shoulders.”

  “He’s a fucking weightlifting pussy,” the carpenter said.

  Anthony stalked back into the basement, and now he put nearly all the weight they had on the bar, and pressed it up and down three times, his body almost bursting—held in by the wide leather weight belt strapped around his waist—a human torpedo arched on the bench.

  “Keep talking,” he said, breathing hard. “Spoken like a drunk.”

  “Come to my job. See if you could do my job. Let me see you try paving. And I will keep talking. All you can do is drink wheatgrass.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Fairy wheatgrass.”

  The hairdresser made a lunge at the carpenter, who dived up out of his chair. The fight got broken up with a lot of pushing and shouting. The carpenter put his finger in the hairdresser’s face and said, “I’ll kill you”—but then he slammed his way upstairs and took his toolbox and jumped in his truck and left.