The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  The almost-fight provided fodder for discussion for a while. The day went on, got boring. The two high school boys wanted to take the commuter rail home and they did. But Corey didn’t want to go home. He kept lifting weights long after everyone had left the basement. Between sets, he drank until he got dizzy-drunk. Upstairs, Dave and his friends were playing some version of hockey in the house. Dave came down to check on him, saw all his empties and said, “Are you hammered? I work out hammered all the time. It’s great so you don’t feel the pain.”

  The sun went down. They put their shirts back on and went out to the train tracks in the night and kept drinking. A new crew of guys, new strangers and friends, the train tracks and the gravel ground in the moonlight. The art of speaking when spoken to, but not too much. Not mouthy but not shy. One of Dave’s friends asked Corey where he lived, and Corey told him Quincy.

  “A lotta ginzos up by you?”

  “What’s that, Italian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My father’s Italian.”

  “Sorry!”

  “It’s okay. I’m not sure if I like him.”

  The guys loved that. “You’re not sure you like him!”

  “Yeah. He just started hanging around my house after sixteen years.”

  “I didn’t like my father,” the hairdresser said. “I told him he could suck my dick.”

  Corey got drunk enough to tell Dave “My mother’s dying” and clasp his hand. Dave said, “I gotta get this kid home.”

  But Anthony the hairdresser said, “Let him sleep on the couch.” Dave’s girlfriend was coming to see him. Whispered adult plans were in the works, cars and keys borrowed, strategies agreed on, a ten-dollar loan for a bottle of wine, a trip to the package store—a swirl of intrigues, all the more subtle to Corey because he was so staggeringly drunk. They walked him inside and he fell asleep on the couch in the TV-less room with the cable coiled on the floor like a root pulled out of the ground.

  At two in the morning, he woke up and saw Dave and another man standing toe-to-toe under the watery fluorescent light of the kitchen, slugging each other in the arms and chests—heavy, meaty, smacking, bruising bare-fisted blows that thudded through their feet into the floor. It wasn’t a real fight, but it was a rough and painful form of entertainment.

  A little later, Corey woke up again in Dave’s car, and Dave was driving him home. All around them, he saw a black forest, the car rushing under the trees, spotlighting with its headlights the white houses with their dead-looking windows—behind every mailbox and fence, the dead-black background. Dave scrupulously drove him to his door on Sea Street. The sight of his own house distressed him, a black box against the waving blue sea of the marsh.

  “Are you straight? Can you get inside? Okay, be good,” Dave said. “Don’t tell your mother I let you drink.” And he drove off.

  * * *

  —

  Late on Sunday morning, Corey stood in the doorway of his room and held his head.

  His mother looked up and asked if he was okay.

  He just had a headache.

  “Are you sure?”

  Were they alone? he asked.

  They were, she said. What did he want to ask her?

  He approached her with his eyes full of emotion. “Mom, were you planning to abort me?”

  “How could he have said anything?”

  “Mom, I’m sorry. It’s okay. I can put it in context. You didn’t know me. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “I never would have. Oh, Corey. I rue the day.”

  “Why is he even here?”

  “We need him, Corey. What are we going to do when I can’t work?”

  “He doesn’t do anything. We don’t need him.”

  “Maybe we don’t,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  In the afternoon, Corey and Gloria sat alone together and looked through a catalogue of prosthetics and assistive devices. He proposed getting her a knob for the wheel of the car, which he could have easily installed. But the stick shift would still be a problem. They thought of trading in her hatchback and getting an automatic, but in the end, they wouldn’t do that either.

  At three o’clock, he asked for his mother’s car keys. He wanted to change her oil. She sat inside reading on the futon while he worked outside. It was cold, the sky was blue and the wind was blowing. Leonard’s Mercury wasn’t there. Corey fetched a container for the dirty oil and a three-eighths wrench and a new Fram filter and set them on the ground. There was brine in the air. A brownish-green crab shell lay on the roadside, tangled up in seaweed.

  He popped his mother’s hood, unscrewed the engine cap, stuck his finger in the brass threaded hole, swept his finger in a circle and smelled the hot black oil. It soaked in and brought out the whorls of his fingerprints. He climbed under the car and fit the three-eighths wrench to the nut, gave it a twist, unscrewed it with his fingers—and the oil jumped out, a smooth, heavy, hot, dense liquid. It leaped across the back of his hand and poured into the receptacle.

  Standing, he stuck his hand inside the hot sharp-edged engine and tried to unscrew the old filter. The oil made his hand slip. He rubbed his hands with a rag and tried again, made a mighty effort, a moment of isometric tension, gritting his teeth, straining as hard as he could, angry, his arm in the car and his eyes staring at his house. But the heat had welded the metal screw threads. He had to use the filter wrench—a snarelike clamp. A quick mental review of which way he was turning—righty tighty, lefty loosey—and he took the filter off.

  He had three quarts of golden black thirty-weight oil. He stuck his finger in the clean oil and rubbed it around the rubber rim seal of the new Fram filter and attached it to the engine, twisting it tight, but not too tight, doing it with care. With a rag, he cleaned the nut and threaded it carefully back into the hole in the bottom of the engine case, plugging it, and tightened it with the three-eighths wrench, cautious of stripping it. Using a funnel, he poured the clean oil into the crankcase.

  It was advisable to run the engine for a minute. He got behind the wheel and started her car and listened to it run. The engine made a looping hum. He was convinced something had been done to it, that it had been damaged in some way.

  Where had it been driven?

  He drove to a garage and dumped the used oil in a steel drum, went home and gave her her keys back. “These are yours and yours alone,” he said. Did she want him to hold them for her? Did she want him to keep them safe?

  * * *

  —

  Leonard never offered to drive Gloria again. Nor did he leave. Instead, starting around the second week in February, he consolidated his presence in their house, staying with them every night, as if he truly lived there, exactly like a real member of their family. Now it was a family in which no one talked. The house rang with an inaudible dog whistle of tension. Gloria and Leonard pretended not to know each other. She would wait for Leonard to finish in the kitchen and then, without a word, go in and make her dinner.

  Corey stopped talking to Leonard completely. From now on when he saw his father, he put his earbuds in and listened to Theory of a Deadman with the volume cranked.

  Rather than going home and facing Leonard after school, Corey began wandering in town, looking to hang with Dunbar or his friends. There were a lot of them. Sometimes they met at a house in Quincy; other times Corey caught a ride to Weymouth. On workdays, he cleaved to Dunbar at Blecic’s job site, which meant they often absconded from the job together and submitted phony hours. Dave’s friends worked in factories, in warehouses as order pickers or forklift drivers, as sandwich makers or delivery drivers. Some were in jail. The paver was doing ninety days. Someone had pulled a knife on him at a party, so he had broken a bottle and used it as a weapon: “He was in a jam, so he jammed,” Dave said. The hairdresser, Anthony, said that sta
nding up for “The Cause” meant standing up for a fellow white boy if you were in jail with him. It was better to fight and lose than to be a punk or bitch.

  The guys at Dunbar’s house took off their shirts and put on hockey gloves and punched each other in the chest. Corey wrestled on the floor with a kid his size and lost. He crowded in with the guys and watched a video of a cage fight on Dunbar’s cell phone and, when one of the fighters caught a kick to the head and collapsed, joined the others hooting, “Aw shit! He got knocked the fuck out! He got merked!”

  In the ideal of standing up to anyone no matter what the consequences, Corey heard the echo of Joan, who had followed the same principle. He saw himself living up to her code of valor and winning her approval wherever she was.

  * * *

  —

  Gloria came home with a cane. Her doctor had made her understand she couldn’t drive. She was taking the T to work. She gave her car keys back to Corey.

  Tonight, she was in the kitchen, making wild rice for dinner; Corey was lingering at her side, the automotive key ring in his hand. The house was tensely silent, Leonard in the other room. She moved around unsteadily, her shoulders rounded, neck thrust forward, face downcast—an Albrecht Dürer face, the German draftsman and painter of the Middle Ages—all well-defined bones—thin nose, cheekbones, jaw, a healing cut under the point of her chin; her forehead swelling slightly, the sign of a mind holding on to things it was trying not to say.

  Her bad gait was plainly visible to Corey. Something was obviously wrong. A spasticity in her calves made her want to stand up on her toes. She was as unsteady as if she were walking on stilts; her knees didn’t bend. To open and shut the cupboard, turn the knobs of stove and sink, fill the pot with water, and so on, she was using her hands like hooks or mitts with bones in them. Corey was reminded of the plastic claw they used at Family Dollar to grasp a pack of toilet paper from an upper shelf—a clumsy device with scant leverage. She hadn’t told him what her commute was like, or what her job was like once she got to work, but he only had to look at her to guess.

  She had been holding a Charlie Card to the scanner with both hands, sometimes dropping it on the concrete floor of the station while people behind her said, “Just go through!” Bus drivers waited for her to climb their stairs with her cane hooked on her arm, her weak hands gripping the stainless aluminum handrails, arms shaking as she pulled herself up, and they waited while she got her card out and held it to the reader until it beeped, and they waited while she went back and looked for a seat—and everyone else was waiting too. And then the slow acceleration towards Fields Corner.

  He stood by his mother’s shoulder at the burner. There was a pat of butter floating on the boiling water, dissolving into a yellow skin. He offered to take the wooden spoon. She let him stir. The bubbling of the water and the stirring of the spoon masked the sound of their voices from reaching the other room. Corey began to talk.

  He said he wanted to drive her to work. She said that was out of the question; he’d have to miss school. He said he wanted to quit school and work full-time; he could support them. “You’re too young,” she said. He insisted that he wasn’t. She didn’t want that for him. He said he wanted it himself. He could support her and they could live alone.

  Gloria lowered her voice to say, “Corey, I don’t want you missing a single day of school because of this hateful disease.”

  “But what are we going to do?” he asked.

  “We’re going to have to get along with your father.”

  * * *

  —

  They were in the house alone, in separate quadrants of the house; Corey was in his room. One minute, the house was silent; the next, he heard a crash. He started running for the kitchen before he even knew what he had heard. His mother’s scream was preceded by a time delay. She must have been drawing breath. The scream began hitting his ears when he was halfway between his bedroom and the kitchen. Everything was knocked over—a table, a chair, a carton of orange juice lying sideways, silverware, a glass, his mother. She was bare-legged wearing shorts, the kind of shorts she wore to exercise. Her mouth was open and her eyes were squeezed shut in the attitude of someone who had fallen from a great height, far higher than anything in this room, and broken her back.

  He dropped down and cupped her head. “Are you okay? What’s broken?” He couldn’t understand her she was crying so hard. “I hit my head,” she sobbed. He held her head. “Mom Mom Mom.” Her back was soaked in orange juice.

  “I tried to jump!” she screamed in anguish. “I tried to jump one last time.”

  12

  Punk Kid from Quincy

  The first sign of a change in Corey’s personality was that he started getting in almost-fights in school. His physiology teacher was a white-haired New England woman with a pageboy haircut who showed no loss of vigor due to age. At the start of the semester in her introduction to the course, she had told them they would be writing a ten-page thesis. Corey had been sitting in the front row. Behind him, he heard people groan. “Oh, don’t start whining!” the woman shouted. “That’s nothing! When I got my degree, I had to write several one-hundred-twenty-page papers.”

  Corey looked behind him and did a fast room scan. There was a girl in a knit sweater and leggings who grabbed his attention. She was bending sideways to whisper to her friend and was laughing at something behind her hand. Her shoulder, crossed by the white silk band of her bra strap, showed through the holes in her sweater, and he thought, Oh no, that makes it hard to concentrate!

  But in the back of the room, there was a group of kids—a group of guys and girls—who were going to be mocking everything.

  The teacher was wearing khaki pants, a teal fleece, and hiking sneakers in brown and green. She had her glasses on Croakies around her neck. With her glasses off, she had small eyes that she held on you fixedly while blinking and talking at the same time. Her eyelids would close over her eyes in mid word and open again and she’d still be staring in the same place. But she never looked at Corey. She seemed to prefer the back of the room, even though they’d been making fun of her. At the front of the room, on her desk, there was a computer showing a changing rainbow screensaver.

  She said they would cover the cell, the mitochondria—oh goody, her favorite!—the skeletal system, the muscular system, the nervous system, respiration, digestion, and reproduction. “I will expect maturity,” she said. “If anyone can’t handle talking about reproduction, they can leave now. We will deal with this subject respectfully. People think the female system is complicated. They don’t know what they’re talking about. The male system, as you will learn, is much more complicated. It’s a wonder it works at all.”

  Someone sniggered. Corey turned around and looked at the source of the laughter. At the very back of the room, there was a lanky girl sitting with the V of her crotch conspicuously thrust forward, glaring directly at him, and by her side there was a guy, her friend, playing with his hat, adjusting it so that it perched on top of his head like a royal cushion, and you could tell that, in his mind, what he was doing with that hat was more important to him than anything else that was likely to happen anywhere on earth all day. And they were shooting looks to a network of associates and sympathizers who sat all around the room.

  “Let’s let her talk,” Corey said.

  “What?”

  “Let the teacher talk.”

  “Let the teacher talk?”

  The teacher told Corey to turn around. “I can fight my own battles, thank you very much.”

  Since then, Corey had sat in class every day with his head turned solemnly forward, taking notes in his ninety-nine-cent notebook, but aware of the sideshow going on behind him. Some weeks had gone by. Now it was mid-February, and the students had to announce what they were going to write their thesis papers on. When it was Corey’s turn, he said “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis”—the f
irst time he’d ever said those words in school.

  “What?” said the hat kid.

  The teacher explained that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was a rare disease similar to MS. Corey heard someone make a retarded sound.

  So, after class, Corey found his own friends and told them that he was having trouble with a kid who had called his mother a gimp. Corey was still relatively well liked. Pete Lucantonio, Kevin Darby, Stacy Carracola, and Josh Eammons all told Corey that he should fight him.

  His new enemy, the kid with the backwards hat, came over through the crowd, taking off his backpack as he came. All of them, Corey, his enemy, his friends—they all shoved out through the fire door onto the concrete pad at the back of the school where there was the open sky and the endless weeds like cornstalks and Faxon Field. Pete held the door and looked out for teachers. “He’s gonna kick your ass.” The kid, whose name was Brendan, didn’t seem eager to fight. Corey just stood there.

  “Ha!” Pete said, slapping Corey’s shoulder. “You chumped him.” The combatants shook hands.

  But the glaring girl told Corey, “You didn’t really do anything.”

  * * *

  —

  One day a short time later, still in February, he was in Quincy Center hanging out after school. A bunch of high school kids were sitting under the bus shelter, smoking cigarettes. As he watched them, a short androgynous freckle-faced person in long shorts and a sideways hat came speed-walking out of the veterans park, grabbed her crotch with one hand, grabbed the bill of her hat with the other, pointed at them with two fingers, and shouted, “Yo, if youse disrespect me again, I’ll knock your fuckin’ teeth out.”

  She speed-marched away.

  “What was that?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it was a girl.”

  Corey went up to them and told them, “She’s more of a man than any of you.”