The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  He tried to get in the car, but it was locked. He stepped back and kicked the passenger-side window with four gradually harder front kicks until it popped like a lightbulb and rained down in a rattling waterfall of green glass. Far down the street, a man putting boards in the back of his pickup looked at him. Corey reached in and unlocked the car door. From a distance, he felt the witness watching. He looked inside the Mercury, made a half-hearted effort to break the rearview mirror, felt self-conscious and increasingly scared of the consequences of his actions and closed the door and went inside.

  He called a tow company to ask if they’d tow a car away from his house. They told him it would cost a hundred fifty dollars. “Never mind,” he said. The crime had made him shake a little. He hung up and called a locksmith and asked how much it would cost to get his house locks changed. The locksmith told Corey he could change the locks himself. A new Schlage, a medium-security lock, cost only thirty-five dollars.

  “God bless you,” Corey said.

  The Home Depot was in Quincy Adams. He was about to leave when he heard a knock on the door. It occurred to him that for the past several minutes, he had been hearing vehicles idling outside and the sound of voices talking. The door opened and a number of state troopers walked into the house.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Corey Goltz.”

  “Stay sitting. Is this your mother?”

  “What’s happening?” Gloria asked.

  “Are you his mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know your son was vandalizing property?”

  “Wait! Please listen. This is a more complicated situation,” Corey said.

  “Is that or is that not your car out there?”

  Corey started to stand up because he wanted to tell the policemen his mother was sick, but he wanted to take them aside to do it; he didn’t want to say it in front of her.

  “Don’t move,” they told him. “I’m handcuffing you for our own safety. I’m not placing you under arrest at this time.”

  “Thank you, officer. I just wanted to explain what’s going on here. My mom is innocent in all of this. Please be nice to her. That’s all I ask. Please be nice to her.”

  “He looks like he’s been in a fight,” one of the troopers said.

  “I fought at a mixed martial arts competition last night.”

  “Oh, how long you been doing that?”

  “Like, six months.”

  “Do you mind if we search his property, ma’am?”

  “Yes!” Gloria cried.

  “Is that his room? For our safety and yours, we just want to make sure we’re not going to find any drugs or weapons in the house.”

  The cops went into Corey’s room wearing rubber gloves and lifted up his mattress, opened his closet, looked in his tub of Gaspari protein powder in case he had contraband in it.

  The police radio sounded. “You’re a popular guy today,” one of the troopers told Corey. “We got two calls about you. We got a call that somebody was running around the house with a knife.”

  “That’s completely false. I came home this morning and found my biological father abusing my mother. She was knocked down on the floor and he was screaming at her. I threw him out of the house. My mom has a walker, officer. She was on the floor. He was screaming at her. I told him—I’ll be honest—I told him, ‘I’ll fucking kill you!’ This is just payback for that.”

  “He says you threatened him with a knife.”

  “I never went near him with a knife. I never even punched him. I never even touched him.”

  “He says you’ve got a drug problem.”

  “Me? I train all the time. I’ve spent the last eight weeks training for a fight. I live totally clean. I don’t do anything.”

  A team of paramedics from the fire department on Hancock Street came in. A paramedic in a navy uniform kneeled in front of Corey and put a blood pressure cuff on his arm and listened to his pulse.

  “Who’s the president?”

  “Of the United States?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Obama. Barack Obama.”

  “What day is it?”

  “It’s—it’s—sorry, I had to think about it. I was at the competition last night; today is Sunday.”

  “Do you know the date?”

  “It’s December. I went to Springfield on December seventh, so today is the eighth.”

  “Today’s actually the ninth.”

  “Oh, I was thinking of the weigh-in. The weigh-in was the day before the fight. Never mind.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Corey Goltz.”

  “Can you spell it?”

  He spelled his name. The paramedic ripped off the blood pressure cuff.

  “What are you doing this for?”

  “We want to make sure you’re not hyper.”

  The paramedics picked up their gear. They consulted with the troopers and left. Motors idled outside. The dusk was falling. The door kept opening and law enforcement personnel kept coming in in shiny leather boots. Corey, whose hands were cuffed behind his back, tried to sneak a look at his mother.

  “Hey, Mom. Hey.”

  She wouldn’t look at anything.

  The troopers had made a decision. They were going to take Corey in. Corey knew what they were going to do. He heard them discussing it in front of him. “Officer, if you take me away, nobody will be able to take care of my mother.”

  “We’ll call someone to take care of her.”

  “Please don’t do this.”

  “I’m placing you under arrest for vandalism and malicious mischief.”

  “Where are you taking him?” Gloria cried.

  “Bye, Mom. Mom, I’ll come back as soon as I can. It’ll be okay.”

  A policewoman wearing sky-blue rubber gloves said, “Someone will be called to take care of the house.” She walked out after Corey, the last person to leave. On her way out, she reached inside and turned off the light switch and pulled the door to, but not all the way, so that Gloria was left in a dark house with her door unlocked. The police could be heard lingering, talking in front of the house. And then, as an afterthought, an unseen hand yanked the door all the way shut.

  Gloria sat in her position on the futon. The pillows her son had placed under her were hurting her back now. She was at an angle that made it difficult to stand. She couldn’t rock herself to her feet. Headlights glared through the blinds. They moved across her wall towing a train of blackness. The police had driven away. She couldn’t reach the lamp. Her fingers wouldn’t have been able to turn the switch anyway, which was the type you twist. She stopped trying to stand. She stopped crying out for someone to hear her. Her eyes adjusted to the shadow. She closed her eyes and breathed. She wanted to make a desperate move, to throw herself sideways because she was so uncomfortable. She breathed until she gained some control of this desire. It would have been unwise. She might fall on the floor. She felt for the cell phone at her side.

  The troopers took Corey to a military barracks—a decaying brick building on Furnace Brook Parkway. They photographed and fingerprinted him. A stern professional sergeant ran things—a big, gray-haired, permanently sunburned man. On the wall were pictures of wanted men and women; in the corner, the flag of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; overhead, the state police bulldog mascot—spiked collar, interlocking teeth, the gray-blue color of its hide the same as the troopers’ uniforms, the same as the gray on their two-tone navy-and-gray vehicles.

  They gave Corey a desk appearance ticket and temporary restraining order ordering him to stay at least one hundred feet away from Leonard Agoglia until such time as a judge ruled otherwise, and then they let him leave.

  He walked home on the Furnace Brook Parkway. To protect himself from the cars at night, he climbed ove
r the guardrail and walked in the woods. A gully ran through the trees. A stream ran in the bottom of the gully. The trees arched over the stream creating a tunnel, which traveled deep into the west, rising as it went, up into Quincy’s granite mountains. The marsh expanded to his right, picking up the lights from the shore. Beds of black grass gave way to water. He came out of the trees and smelled the sea.

  At home he was reunited with his mother. In her desperation while he was gone, she had overcome her pride and called Joan, to whom she hadn’t spoken in many years, and left a message. She didn’t know if she had gotten through.

  21

  The Year of Joan

  The Monday after his arrest, Corey stayed home from school and his mother stayed home from work. At seven thirty, the driver from The Ride honked outside. Corey went out in the gray cold morning and said, “She can’t make it today.” He tried to apologize. The driver put up a hand to stop him talking, as if to say he didn’t want to hear it, he had troubles too, jumped back in his car and drove away, grizzled, red-faced and bleary-eyed.

  Back inside, Corey faced his mother. She finally admitted she was too weak to go to work at all.

  “I just can’t do it,” she wept. He went to her side and embraced her.

  But she blamed him for fighting with his father.

  “Look what’s happened! When we needed him! You couldn’t keep your temper in check.”

  He took his arm back.

  “What can I do to fix things?”

  “You could begin by calling him and telling him you’re sorry. That way at least maybe he’ll drop the charges.”

  “I’m not calling him. If you wanted me to kill him, I’d kill him. But I’m not calling him.”

  “Oh, give it a rest.”

  “And another thing: I can tell you right now, I’m not going back to school.”

  “Oh, God,” she said and began weeping again. “I curse my fate.”

  For once, he watched her impassively. “No, it’s a good thing. I’m not going back. I feel much better making that decision.”

  “You’re foolish.”

  It was ten in the morning. The commuting hour was over, that brief time when cars streamed past on Sea Street, and now the silence of the shore reigned supreme, a near-total stillness. Within that stillness, one could subconsciously detect the presence of those people in neighboring houses who stayed home during the day, but they were a small population spread over a wide area, and their presence was like that of insects in an open field or crabs in the tide washing over a jetty. The vast space over the bay and rock-strewn beach gave forth a whispering sound, which surrounded their house, as if they were living in a conch shell.

  Corey went to the kitchen and made coffee. When he returned, she was trying to put her reading glasses on and he helped her. He put the cup in her trembling hands, she took a sip and steam flamed up on her glasses.

  “Do we have any money?”

  “Not really.”

  “Where are we on food and rent?”

  “See for yourself.”

  They looked at the laptop. She had the online banking page open.

  “You are going to have to work. You’re going to get your wish.”

  * * *

  —

  He got his spiral notebook, turned to a new page, and made a list of things to do. The first was check the cupboards in the kitchen. He shook a box of cereal to estimate the contents. He went to his room and checked his money drawer and counted up his dollar bills.

  He had an idea. He called Tom. Voicemail picked up and Corey left a message.

  “I might be on the way to figuring things out,” he told his mother.

  He glanced in the mirror at the bruises on his face and wondered if Tom would be impressed. He took a shower, grim daylight filtering through the frog-covered shower curtain. He scrubbed his short hair and said, “I can do anything!”

  He yanked his jeans on and, while waiting for the phone to ring, ate the last of their cereal with the last of their milk, sitting in the kitchenette, tapping his bare feet on the linoleum floor.

  At 11:30, his cell phone rang and he snatched it up.

  “Tom!”

  “Hey, what’s up. I got your message. I couldn’t call you right away.”

  “That’s fine—thank you for calling!”

  “So, you’re looking for work?”

  “Tom, I’m looking for work. I quit school; I’m totally available—twenty-four hours a day. I have to make a living for my mom; I’m gonna be our sole supporter. I’m ready to do anything, anything it takes. There won’t be any bullshit like before. That crap is in the past. I’m not going to lie to anybody. I’m a different person. If you give me a chance, you’ll see.”

  “Well, I’d love to help ya, but I can’t hire anybody right now. It’s the middle of winter and this is our slow season. I’m having to send guys home as it is. But hold on a second. One of my guys was telling me there’s a local that’s hiring. Wait a minute. Hey, Joe! Come here for a minute. Who did you tell me was hiring? The caisson builders. They’re doing the bridge over by MIT, aren’t they? What are they, Local 151 or something? Corey, my guy says there’s a union over by you that’s hiring. They’re in Quincy, Local 133. I hear they just hired fifty new guys, and they’re hiring guys without any experience. They’re on Washington Street. Call over there today and see if you can put your name in. Those guys do pretty good. If you can get on with them, it’s union scale. They might start you as high as twenty an hour. I don’t know.”

  Corey started thanking him profusely. “Tom, I will never disrespect your name again. I’ll never embarrass you about knowing me. When things are better, we’ll have a beer and I’ll buy you a hundred rounds…”

  “That’s fine,” Tom said. “I gotta go.”

  Corey called the union and learned they were no longer hiring. He’d missed the last day while he was weighing in at Springfield.

  He spent several more hours calling around to different construction companies until someone finally told him to get in touch with Labor Ready, a temporary employment agency for the construction trades. In the afternoon, he went to a dilapidated house in Quincy Center across from Family Dollar. The office had brown vinyl walls. There were giant posters setting out the labor law in minuscule fine print. Behind the counter, a white-haired woman was doing clerical work. An unshaven guy in construction jeans and boots—they were brand-new and hadn’t been worked in—was talking on the phone with his feet on a desk. Seeing Corey, he took the phone away from his ear.

  “What’re you looking for? A little demo? We’ll hook you up. Go to our website and fill out the application. All our policies are there. Don’t show up drunk, don’t show up high. We need a clean driving record. Make sure you click the thing saying you’ve read it. Make sure you give us a working phone number. If I call you, answer your phone. Make sure your ringer’s on. What happened to your face?”

  “I did a cage fight.”

  “My boy does that. He’s like ten-and-oh. You heard of Bobby Shephard? You should check him out.”

  “All right. I need a job.”

  “Just keep your phone on. I get these guys bitching at me they didn’t get a call and their phones are off.”

  He went back to his phone call.

  “Wait a second,” Corey interrupted. “Just so I understand: I’m filling out an application; does that mean you’re hiring me, you’re not hiring me, you’re going to think about it—how does that work?”

  “We just need your number so we can call you.”

  “Can I fill it out here since I’m here now?”

  “Hey, Mags.”

  “What?”

  “Can he fill out his application on your computer?”

  “Can you kiss my ass?” the white-haired woman croaked. “I need my computer to work.�
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  “You’re gonna have to fill it out at home.”

  He did. He got his first job almost immediately, but it was only for a day. He had to drive all the way to Medford, to a retail space that was being renovated—an old store being superseded by a Walgreens or CVS. The stock was gone; only the shelves were left. He and another teenager took them out and threw them in a dumpster. It echoed like a bronze drum when they dropped the metal shelves. A foreman, who worked for the general contractor, sat in his pickup, wearing a hunter’s ball cap, eating a rotisserie chicken while they worked. Christmas decorations hung above the street. The other teenager walked slowly back after each trip to the dumpster; Corey jogged, seeing his breath in the air.

  “You must have benefits,” his workmate said.

  * * *

  —

  Gloria had him move her to the wheelchair. He took the sheet off and helped her sit. He tilted her to ease the pressure on her spine and turned the chair so she was facing the sunlight in the window.

  “Does that feel better?” he asked. “Is that, like, cheerful lighting with the sun?”

  The neurologist was giving his mother L-Threonine, a white, crystalline amino acid that looked like cocaine, which she had to take with Robitussin. He drove to Walgreens to buy a case of Robitussin. Someone called the manager. They thought he was a tweaker robotripping. Corey explained it was part of a regimen to treat muscle cramping in ALS. The manager said he could buy one bottle at a time. Corey protested, “We’re going to go through that in a single day. Every time I drive out here burns gas.” The manager said he was lucky they weren’t calling the cops. Corey drove home with a single seven-ounce bottle of cough syrup.

  He needed gas for the hatchback, but the bank account was under a hundred dollars.

  He got home and his mother needed the bathroom. He took her one slow step at a time. Labor Ready called and asked if he was up for work right now. “Mom, can I leave you?” He told them he’d call back. He left a message with Dawn Gillespie—“I need help”—then left and ran to a demo job on Hancock Street, scooping up rubble.