The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  Corey said, “Forget it,” and went off to Harvard Square alone. At no point did Adrian mention that he had talked to Corey’s father at MIT.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Gregorio had Corey summoned to his office. An assistant showed Corey in and closed the door, closing him in with the principal and two other male teachers. Corey stood in front of the principal’s desk, wearing his newsboy hat, NFL jacket and loose-fit jeans. He had forgotten where his feet were and so he was standing slightly pigeon-toed. All three men were staring at him. He put his eyes down.

  “Hello, I guess,” he said, and took his hat off.

  “Hello, you guess,” a teacher said. “What are you supposed to be, a tough guy? Look at him. He gets in fights now.”

  “Okay,” Gregorio said. “We’re not here to make you feel misunderstood. If there’s a problem, you can tell us. Is there something going on?”

  “No.”

  “I let you take your course. Now Mrs. Clark is telling me you’re a disruption.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve heard worse than that,” one of the other men said. He had a face that went white-to-red in half a second when he was angry, a sharp nose, close-cropped orange hair, a strong voice, and a wedding ring. He was looking at Corey steadily as if he were a nail sticking out of the seat of a chair, which needed to be hammered down. “We ought to have security check his bag.”

  “I’d be up for checking his bag right now.”

  “How about it, Corey? You have any contraband on you?”

  “No.” He took his backpack off and the red-faced teacher unzipped it and went through it.

  “My daughter goes here. If I heard that somebody was selling drugs to her, do you know how upset I’d be?”

  “Here’s your bag back. Don’t forget your bio book. Wait a sec. Is there anything in here?” He flipped the textbook over and shook it. A piece of paper fell out: Corey’s notes on adenosine triphosphate, the energy currency of the cell.

  The red-faced teacher’s name was Edgars. He coached.

  Gregorio said, “We’ve got a proposition for you, Corey. You go with Mr. Edgars. You work with him, do what he says, go to the games, assist during practice. If he’s happy, we take you off probation. That’s if he takes you. It’s up to him. He’s no softy. But we want to see a change of heart here. What do you say?”

  “What happens if I don’t?”

  “You stay on probation the rest of the year.”

  “I’ll stay on probation.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Edgars said. “I don’t want him anyway.”

  14

  Dopamine Reward

  Instead of going to class, he went to the cafeteria, which was empty, and sat alone beneath the ranks of foreign flags hanging from the ceiling. Probation meant that he would remain in school but was on thin ice and would have to behave himself or risk further disciplinary action. He fit the page back in his notebook. ATP becomes ADP leaving you with one free phosphate. He resolved to fail everything. He was going to study nothing but one thing: his mother’s illness. No more math or English. Maybe they’d kick him out. Maybe they’d hold him back.

  At the end of second period, his peers started pouring down from upstairs and lining up to eat. The cafeteria gate went up. Kids rushed in to get to the burritos wrapped in foil.

  Through the window, he saw Molly outside in the sun, her long reddish-blonde hair hanging down her back. She was with a big guy dressed in a plaid shirt and slouchy blue jeans like a farm boy—a shot-putter on the track team, Corey thought. They were standing together in a haze of sunlight by the granite apple of knowledge, arms around each other’s waists.

  Corey went out and hailed them. “Are you cutting?”

  The shot-putter turned and squinted. He had reddish whiskers on his chin. Molly shook her head. Out of self-consciousness, perhaps, she didn’t give Corey the warmest welcome. After an awkward minute, he said, “See ya,” and went back inside the modern school with its dark glass windows.

  When school let out, he walked all the way to Houghs Neck. He drifted outside the Manet Tavern and wandered through the churchyard, looking at the setting sun.

  He was carrying a tire, which he had picked up on the roadside.

  Thinking he was alone, he put it against the fence of a baseball backstop and started hitting it.

  When a passerby came down the road, past Sacred Heart, in the dusk, he stopped, ashamed, and flung it in the woods as if he were practicing the discus.

  When the passerby was gone, he retrieved the tire and started hitting it again.

  Sometime later, he started walking again without any plan of going home—or anywhere. Misty night was rolling in from the ocean, suffused with the glow of streetlights on widely spaced masts—old masts of old ships. The blacktop road was empty. Dark trees mantled the town. The fog smelled metallic. His knuckles were white-hot and bleeding. He had a bruise, which moved like a button under his skin. The rubber had left black vulcanized streaks on his knuckles.

  As he was cutting through a gas station, a pickup truck shot by him and stopped. Corey recognized the Knaack Box in the back.

  “Tom?”

  “Get in,” Tom said. “I’ll give you a lift.”

  The truck smelled faintly like Egg McMuffin sandwich wrappers, McDonald’s coffee drying in a cup—food-on-Styrofoam smells—vanilla air freshener, and cigars.

  “Thanks for picking me up.”

  The truck began dinging.

  “Your door isn’t shut. Ya gotta shut it.”

  Corey reclosed his door. They were zipping into the fog, behind the lances of Tom’s headlights. The ball field blipped by. Something heavy, hard and sharp was in the footwell: a circular saw. The guard had slid up from the blade and a tooth was biting Corey’s ankle.

  “I haven’t seen you in forever. How you been?”

  “I’m at Home Depot the other day and this guy I know tells me there’s this kid dropping my name all over town who’s fucking off at work.”

  “That was me.”

  “I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said some kid is lying on his time card, giving people attitude. When he said it was you, I told him he had to be making a mistake.”

  “I’ve been fucking up.”

  “I heard about you and Dunbar. I said, that’s not the kid I know. What’s the story with you?”

  Corey shook his head.

  Tom made a series of right turns and they zoomed back the other way. They seemed to be driving out of the fog into civilization—although a temporarily uninhabited one. Their headlights picked out houses, then a playground. Here they actually saw a family—a mom in a Boston Red Sox hat, a dad with a Nerf football, two kids running for a pass on a black ball field. They sped by the statue of Christ in robes—young, pensive, bearded, longhaired. The Ford ate up the distance to the seawall, glowing in a snowy pool of streetlight, the bay flat and black beyond it.

  “You only got one reputation. Somebody trusts you,” Tom said, pulling up at Corey’s house.

  Corey looked out the window and wept. He dried his face.

  “I’ve been having trouble with my father.”

  “That’s too bad. What kinda trouble?”

  “He’s a punk. He disrespects me.”

  Tom remained silent.

  “He disrespects my mother.”

  “What do you mean, he disrespects her?”

  “He took her car and she fell.”

  “She fell?”

  “My mom has a disease. It’s called Lou Gehrig’s. She’s getting paralyzed, and she can’t drive, so she asked my piece-of-shit father to drive her, and what’s he do? He drops her at work and steals her car for a week. So she takes the T and falls, and when I step to him about it, the guy tells me I’m a piece of s
hit, I’m a little punk from Quincy. You think that’s right?”

  “No. I don’t understand why he’d do that. He shouldn’t do that. Some people are assholes. I didn’t know your mom was sick. Is she going to the doctor?”

  “Yes, she does.”

  “Is there anything they can do for her?”

  “Not really. Once you’ve got it, that’s it.”

  “What is it a disease of? Is it like some kind of cancer?”

  “It’s neurological. It starts in the brain and starts paralyzing all the nerves that go to your muscles so you can’t move, but you can still feel everything; you can still think; you can still see. You know everything that’s happening to you, and you get weaker and weaker until you can’t do anything. Right now she can’t pick anything up with her left hand. She’s having trouble walking. She’s got a cane. If somebody bumps her, they could knock her over, and here she is taking the T to work, because that scumbag won’t drive her.”

  “What’s your father’s problem? What is he, like your stepdad or something? You didn’t used to have him around the house, did you?”

  “I probably talked to him four times my whole life until this year. We never lived together. Then my mom gets sick and, boom, he just moves in and starts acting like a fucking psycho. He takes her car. He shows no concern for what he’s doing. He’s a burden in our house. He’s a fucking stranger.”

  “My father was a stranger.”

  “Did you hate him?”

  “I didn’t know him enough to hate him, Corey. He wasn’t around. I just got in a lot of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “We vandalized some guy’s warehouse one time—me and my brothers and my brothers’ friends.”

  They were silent.

  “I realize that nothing I’ve said is an excuse for fucking off.”

  For the moment, Tom seemed to have talked to his limit on the topic. “Don’t worry about it. Life goes on.”

  “I’m going to apologize to the guy I was working for.”

  “Who were you working for?”

  “Some guy named Blecic. We were renovating a house.”

  “Didja learn anything?”

  “A little drywalling with Dunbar.”

  “Drywall is good to know.”

  “They had me cut around some pipes. I learned to cut straight. Dunbar was always letting me do his work. It was good because I learned.”

  “There’s people ya gotta stay away from.”

  “I know now.”

  “I had a guy on my site who came in high. I took one look at him and said, ‘You’re going home.’ ”

  “I acted like a little punk. I’m not blaming anybody.”

  “The problem with guys like Dunbar is they get you in trouble. My brothers’ friends were like that. I was the youngest and they took off on me. The security guard who was guarding the warehouse grabbed me.”

  “Fair-weather friends.”

  “You lie down with—what is it? dogs?—ya get up with fleas.”

  “I’ve got a few fleas on me.”

  “Yeah. Get ’em off ya,” Tom said. “Put a flea collar on. Haha!”

  “How’s Molly? We’ve barely talked since I saw her play Duxbury.”

  “She’s been working hard. At the beginning of the season, her coach told her she was too slow. I think he saw her size and he had some kind of a hang-up about it. He made her do laps around the court or something. That’s what she told me. And he was supposedly always making comments about her weighing too much.”

  “What a jackass.”

  “He gave her, like, a complex at the start of the season. She was quiet after practice. So finally I asked her what was wrong and she told me. I told her, ‘Don’t worry about what he tells you. You know what you can do. Don’t let this guy get under your skin.’ So, she kinda went out there and showed him. She brought home this rope ladder thing and put it in the street in front of the house and did these foot-speed drills. Whatever the guy told her, she did it double. It paid off. He’s played her every game, and she’s been having a good season.”

  “God bless Molly! How did everything go with college? Did she get in?”

  “Yeah, UMass is taking her. The coach gave her a recommendation. They’re giving her an athletic scholarship.”

  “I’m happy!”

  “The thing about her is that she works hard.”

  “You’ve got reason to be proud. Like father like daughter.”

  “I gotta start making it to her games.”

  It was after eight and Tom rose early for work, so they parted. Corey climbed out of the Ford and marched up the steps of his mother’s house. The truck hooked a U-turn and zoomed away behind him. He went straight to his room and threw his newsboy hat in the closet and never wore it again.

  * * *

  —

  That weekend, he helped a pair of local guys fix up their backyard. The guys, who were putting in a fence, disagreed about when and how to put it together. They argued about everything, including what Corey should be doing. He dug out stones and moved them to the edge of the property while they argued. “You’re fine,” they told him, “he’s the problem,” pointing at each other. They bought him a Snapple and a sub both days and, on Sunday, paid him in cash, saying, “This is thanks to all your hard work and the goodness of our hearts.”

  First thing Monday, he took his money and his notebook and his mother’s car to school. The notebook contained his driving directions. As soon as the bell rang, he gassed the car at Hess and headed south on Yankee Division Highway.

  As he drove it began to rain. The highway traveled under red granite cliffs in the gray rain. A semi humming next to him sent up fountains from its tires. He passed a Speedway gas station and a sign South to Fall River. His wipers and turn signal thumped and clicked as he took the exit. The area had strip malls with lesser-known stores, and there was an incompletely built nature to the place—the pavement gave way to dirt and trees. He passed a sign for Slice of Greek Pizza and a knee-high New England stone wall, overhung by trees. The grass rose like rain falling upward from the earth.

  He drove into an office park of sheet-metal buildings and saw the sign for Mixed Martial Arts by a windowless shed. The parking lot was filled with pickup trucks carrying bikes and fishing poles in the back and bumper stickers saying Fighting’s Not a Crime and This Is Sparta.

  He parked, jumped over a puddle, and ran inside, wiping water off his head. The first thing that hit him was the smell of feet. The air was hot. There were grappling mats on the floor, Zebra mats on the walls, a row of heavy kicking bags, long as a person is tall, still subtly swinging. An uppercut bag like a plum bob. Title grappling gloves, Ringside boxing gloves, Team Aggression kicking shields, Everlast hand wraps, Fairtex shin pads spilling out of homemade wooden shelves. A squat rack, barbells, and kettlebells. A spit bucket covered in dried blood. An icebox with a sign: Water $1. Trophies on the counter, banners on the wall: UFC MGM Grand, Ericsson Globe Arena, Key Arena, Bell Centre, USF Sun Dome—with endorsements: Wild Wing, Sprawl, Lexani, Training Mask, Revgear, Venum, Headrush, Instaloan, TRX, Versaclimber, Torque, Dethrone Royalty, Alienware, Muscle Pharm, Kill It Clothing, Hayabusa, Jitz, Contract Killer, Pain Inc.

  There was a cage in the back of the room and several guys were lying sprawled around it with their backs against the mesh, sweat-drenched, in a state of exhaustion. Their skin was reddened, chafed and bruised. One had a healing black eye. Their knees and elbows and the bottoms of their feet were blackened by the dirty canvas. They sat in their fatigue, picking up water bottles between their boxing mitts and aiming the water into their mouths.

  Corey asked if he had come to the right place to train.

  “Yeah, but you gotta come back later. The regular class won’t start until—when does it start? Five?
Come back at five. Eddie should be here.”

  * * *

  —

  He went to the Slice of Greek to wait. The drizzle was keeping up outside. He got a slice of pizza. As he ate, he recalled that, when he had come home flush with optimism after talking to Tom, he’d encountered Leonard sitting on their futon, reading a yellow hardcover mathematics text in his fedora and boxer shorts. Corey had knocked on his mother’s bedroom door to ask if there was anything for him to eat. Behind him, Leonard had turned a page and said: “What’s the matter? You’re a big-time drug dealer. You can’t afford to buy yourself dinner?”

  What Corey hadn’t known was that, while he’d been talking to Tom, his mother had been talking to Leonard—about money. She’d somehow let slip she was out two hundred fifty dollars—the amount she’d lost bailing Corey out of his entanglement with Anthony the hairdresser. The whole story had come out about Corey’s abortive drug-dealing experiment. Leonard had said, “I’m not surprised.” Gloria hadn’t wanted to tell him, but now that she had, she hoped he would “step up,” as she put it, “and show Corey a little guidance.”

  “I’m supposed to help your son?”

  “Suit yourself, Leonard. He’s your son too,” Gloria had said, and gone to her room on her unsteady legs.

  Corey had heard the details of this exchange from his mother after the fact.

  At the time, when Leonard accosted him about paying for his own dinner, Corey had replied, “I don’t know what you heard, but I don’t want to talk to you about this.”

  Through the door, his mother said there was chicken for him in the freezer. Corey turned his back on his father and returned to the kitchen. He was microwaving a precooked chicken patty when Leonard appeared in the doorway, holding handcuffs.

  “Do you want to get arrested?”

  Corey backed away. “What are you doing?”

  “You’re going to be wearing these at the rate you’re going.”