The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  Due to his perfectionism, Tom said, he had fired a lot of guys. One day he had fired a weightlifter, a steroid head. “He was a bad electrician. He came back to the site looking for me. People said he had a gun.”

  Nothing had happened; the cops had taken care of it.

  They were heading down the Adams Shore.

  “Last fall, when Molly was about to go away,” Tom continued, “we went to Walmart to get her stuff for school and we ran into this other guy I’d fired. He’s this dirtbag who does meth. He was with his wife. He didn’t see me, but she did. She goes, ‘There’s the asshole who fired you.’ I thought we were going to throw down right there. I went to sporting goods and got a baseball bat and put it in our cart. Molly’s like, ‘Maybe you ought to calm down, Dad.’ ”

  They passed the DB Mart. The ocean appeared. A minute later, they were pulling up in front of Corey’s house on Sea Street.

  Corey reached across the cab and shook Tom’s hand.

  “Thank you. It was great seeing what you do.”

  “I know you’ll find something. You’re a smart kid.”

  “I can try the union again.”

  “Something always turns up, usually. You just gotta be at the right place at the right time.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “Molly was taking business administration for a while. She wanted to start a business for me, so she could run it. She thinks if I’m not stressed out I won’t drink.”

  Tom sat still a minute longer.

  Of his daughter, he said, “Ya know, there’s all kinds of extras you gotta deal with, even with the scholarship. I never went to college, so I didn’t know what they were gonna be. Fortunately, they’ve given me a bump, so I can pay for whatever she needs. I tell her, ‘You do what you gotta do and we’ll work it out. The money’ll be there for you. I guarantee it.’ ” He struck his t on this last word.

  * * *

  —

  They climbed out of the truck. The sun was in the high blue sky over the ocean. Joan was sitting on Corey’s steps in her white jeans, smoking a cigarette.

  “Joan, this is Tom. He’s like my uncle around here. Tom, this is Joan. She’s like my aunt.”

  On hearing his name, Tom, who had been drifting towards the beach, made a show of redirecting his body’s momentum and changing course for Joan.

  “Hi,” Tom said. “I’m his neighbor.”

  Joan stood up, tiny by comparison with him, and said, “How do you do?”

  She stood erect and put her shoulders back and smiled under her black bangs. Tom looked away at the ocean and held his car keys.

  “Working on a Sunday?”

  “I’ve been showing him around my job site.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a construction worker. We got a couple of plants we’re working on over in Norwood. Corey wanted to see what we were doing. I do the ventilation. Heating and air-conditioning. They call me a tin knocker.”

  “You get a lot of work making everything green nowadays?”

  “You mean, environmentally friendly? Yeah, that’s not what we do, usually. There are guys who do that. Like retrofitting. We’re more like a new construction company, so when we build something, it’s already up to what the government wants.”

  Joan cocked a hip and took a smacking puff off her cigarette.

  “The politicians probably have all the technology already, am I right? Every time they start talking about global warming, I keep waiting for them to do something. I thought we were gonna have solar-powered cars by now. I thought I’d be flying one of them fighter planes from Star Wars. Right? They probably have those, I bet. They’re probably keeping them so they can go fuck up ISIS and not tell anyone.”

  “They’ve got technology they don’t tell us about.”

  “They better. It’s getting crazy out there.”

  “The question is, are the liberals going to let us use it? Not to get into a…” Tom looked at Joan. She looked back at him and laughed. He put his hands up. “I mean, I dunno what your politics are. His mom is probably pretty liberal. I don’t want to start World War Three.”

  “Nah, I’m all about defending ourselves. We’ve got to.”

  Corey went inside to check on his mother. Tom and Joan stayed outside talking. Through the window, he heard her say she was from Oakland. She’d seen James Hetfield of Metallica in the early eighties when he’d been barely older than a kid. Hetfield had just been getting started, but he’d been wild and it had been something to see him rock.

  Mother’s Day had passed. No card this year. It seemed better not to commemorate it. It was the second anniversary of Gloria’s diagnosis, the beginning of the third year of her disease. Her physical therapist told her to get a lanolin sheepskin. Now Gloria spent her days in the black thronelike chair, wearing soft white pajamas, the sheepskin underneath her to reduce friction on her skin.

  The social worker paid a visit at the end of May. Dawn sat on the futon with her folder and her purse. She wore a sleeveless turtleneck. Her spotted arms had meat on them. She saw the wheelchair’s Mafia Boss license plate. “Good!” she said. “You’re decorating. You’re making it your own.”

  “That was my son’s idea. He’s at that age.”

  A nurse arrived while Dawn was there. She had come from Beth Israel to give Corey’s mother passive range-of-motion exercise. She put Gloria on her back and lifted her legs one at a time. In shorts and sneakers, Gloria resembled a football player lying on his back on the sidelines getting his legs stretched by an assistant coach before going on the field.

  The nurse turned her on her side and rubbed lotion on her back. She moved her to the chair and tilted it into a deep reclining position and hovered her hands over Gloria’s face and body without touching her. There was total silence in the house. She was directing prana at the patient. The nurse was a burly woman with an accent—a Jew from the Ukraine. What she was doing made Gloria fall asleep.

  Dawn finished shuffling papers and tapping the screen of her BlackBerry. She gathered up her things, her purse and folder. As she was leaving, she said, “I left some paperwork for her when she wakes up.” The nurse turned on the social worker and put a finger to her lips.

  The nurse had covered Gloria with a blanket, which hung down, hiding the chair, so she appeared to be floating horizontally with nothing under her, as in a magic trick. Corey began to ask a question and the powerful nurse silenced him as well.

  He tiptoed up and whispered, “What technique do you use? Is it a form of yoga?”

  “It’s like that,” she said.

  The Ukrainian visited his mother periodically for a while. Then, for reasons he didn’t understand, she stopped coming. She had a rare skill. Every time she came, she soothed his mother enough to let her sleep.

  He went to one more court appearance before the summer. Shay had managed to convince the court how sick his mother was. The judge continued the case until the fall. When they met again, Corey would likely get a conditional discharge. Shay explained what that meant in the courthouse lobby: Stay out of trouble and the charge would go away.

  “Go home, take care of your mother, go to the gym. Just don’t break any more car windows. Stay away from your father.”

  Adrian was sitting in the Mercury in his kneepads, his smell filling the car. They drove north out of the city, traveling over the water on the high iron bridge and exiting in Chelsea. They drove by docks and down an industrial road: train tracks, a power plant behind a concrete wall, power lines and capacitors. The road curved. Long low factory buildings, a meat-processing plant, refineries, diesel trucks. No skyline. A sign that said Topless. A cocktail glass with a woman in it. A concrete pillbox with no windows called King Arthur’s Lounge. The establishment was Mafia-run, Leonard said. “You’re going to like this.” Adrian rubbed his hands. They parked
in a car-filled lot surrounded by a rusted fence, corrugated sheet metal, dumpsters. The wind bore the scent of fuel oil. A beat came through the walls.

  Inside, the club was drenched in red light. A fat white guy on a stage in the back of the room was rapping: “Get up on the mothafuckin’ floor!” They paid the cover. A young girl with big breasts in a pink see-through nightie took Adrian’s money.

  “How are you tonight?” he asked.

  She deadpan-stared at him.

  “Do you not like talking to customers?”

  “Do yourself a favor, go sit down.”

  “There’s a part of the brain that controls anger, the cingulate gyrus. Yours could be getting too much stimulation.”

  “Get out of my face.” She made a hand-twirling gesture as if she were pulling something out of her hair.

  The bouncer had tanned Mediterranean arms, an anchor tattooed below his elbow, and wore pleated gray slacks and dress shoes. His wet hair had comb tracks in it. He asked the girl, “Everything cool?” She made a hand-chopping gesture and walked away.

  Leonard and Adrian sat at the bar. Women were pole dancing on a stage behind the liquor bottles. Others were climbing on the bar itself, crawling from one customer to the next, squatting in front of them. The bartender was wearing a black brassiere.

  A dancer stopped in front of Leonard. “Hey, what’s up.”

  “The sky.”

  “Haha! That’s funny.”

  Leonard held out a dollar to her and put it on the bar. She leaned over him and put her breasts in his hands while staring down at him.

  “Hahaha!” She laughed. “You like that, huh?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can see you do.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Oh yeah, baby.”

  He slid his hand up her leg to her crotch. She let him feel her.

  “Turn around. Wink your ass at me.”

  “Haha! You’re crazy in the head.” She turned on her hands and knees on the bar. “Is it winking?” She looked over her shoulder.

  “You did it.”

  “See? I can make it do anything I want.”

  He held her hand. “Would you like to take a ride with me after the show?”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Take a ride with my young friend here.”

  “He’s with you?”

  “Take a ride with us, and we’ll get you something nice.”

  “What’ll you get me?”

  “A party.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t just go somewhere with you if I don’t know you.”

  She moved over to Adrian. “Your friend is sweet. He’s so nice! Are you nice too?”

  Adrian said, “I’m the mean one.”

  Since he made no move to touch her or tip her, she forgot him and cat-crawled down to the next group of patrons and performed for them. They were enthusiastic. She saddled her legs over one man’s shoulders and he began to perform oral sex on her right there in the bar, while she smiled down at the top of his head and made eyes at other people in the bar’s mirrored walls. When she smiled, wrinkles stretched from her jaw to her ear. She was missing a tooth.

  Everyone watched silently, solemnly, in the loud music. The black-bras-wearing bartender watched. A spectator in the crowd stuck his tongue between two fingers and wiggled his tongue.

  The man continued performing oral sex on the dancer. The dancer clapped and pointed her leg at the ceiling.

  Adrian said, “I can’t believe he’s doing that.”

  A blow struck a wooden surface loudly. They turned: The bouncer had a nightstick—he had struck something. He was making a furious cut-it-off gesture and was shaking his head and pointing: “There’s cops right outside at the fuckin’ Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  The bartender put her hand on the bar and slapped it to get the dancer’s attention.

  “Ya gotta stop.”

  The dancer took her legs off the man’s shoulders.

  The bouncer came over to the man, who had long sideburns, and told him, “No more.”

  Adrian looked at Leonard. “You did great with her. You almost got her in your car.”

  “Can you believe she lets strange men put their filthy hands on her?”

  “I wish I understood why she was letting us touch her. You only gave her a dollar. It can’t be the money. Or is it? I wish I could understand what makes a woman do that. Why is she willing to let you feel her up for a dollar, and another woman, I could take her out for a twenty-dollar date, and she wouldn’t even think of letting me look at her naked? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “She’s on something.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course she is. Look how happy she is. That’s drug-induced. Drugs change everything with a person.”

  “Why does she need drugs? Imagine being able to walk into a bar and have strangers buying you drinks all night!”

  “That’s the way it is for women.”

  “Maybe I can train myself to not want more than this,” Adrian said, looking at the nude women standing above the men on the bar. “Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll be satisfied with this.”

  “You can have more than this. This is just the beginning.”

  The bartender approached and Adrian and Leonard stopped talking as she collected the money off the bar into a child’s plastic bucket, the kind that comes with a shovel.

  * * *

  —

  Later, long past midnight, they were sitting in the Mercury somewhere on the shore, the engine idling, the two of them staring out the windshield. The headlights seemed defeated by the darkness as if they were deep in the ocean, looking out a porthole, seeing nothing but flecks of plankton.

  Leonard asked if he’d enjoyed his lap dance. Adrian said it had made him feel so much better. He was pleased. The evening had been a success. Not all his evenings had been so grand. He cleared his throat and employed his nasal voice to say, “I told you how I got the clap, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did. It’s dirty in there. What were you thinking?”

  “It’s one of those things I had to learn.” Adrian cleared his throat. “I guess my father wasn’t the best friend to me. That’s why it’s so great I’ve met you.”

  In June, Corey got on a major construction project in the North End, thanks to Tom. It was going to be a high-rise. The pay was union scale, which meant Corey was starting at eighteen an hour. Tom would not accept a thank-you, just told him to make the most of it.

  He got up early and drove into the city and parked at Haymarket. Guys were there already, trucks parked on the sidewalk, traffic cones on their hoods, pulling tools out. One took off Corey’s hard hat and showed him how to adjust the band. The union men were simply looking for the chance to build something; they were poor; they had to pay for trucks and tools and buy their gas. It wasn’t a way to get rich.

  They lined up for an OSHA-enforced warm-up session. In boots and hard hats, they did stretches—tricep, hamstring. When it came to the splits, most could barely get their legs 30 degrees apart. They had to do the standing quad stretch. Guys were losing their balance, their butt cracks showing. The sun was up. It was warm and going to be hot. A breeze chased through the site, carrying the smell of coffee and bread from the North End. The site was in the middle of the street and the roads split around it going towards Charlestown. The city came to an end here and the road went around a corner and on the other side of the corner there were more sites. The whole area was under development. You could see the ant farm of high-rise construction next to the TD Garden and the Zakim Bridge, men in hard hats moving on precast concrete floors, vertical framing, flyouts, a welder producing a smoking blue-white light.

  For the first
week, he spent most days shoveling dirt in a wheelbarrow and running it over a bridge of boards, which bent under him. He plugged in the lifts at night. He met a woman on the crew from Roxbury, who had a gold nose stud and drove a Bobcat. “I show and prove,” she said. She was another Joan—racially mixed, confident and well adjusted.

  His first day, the heavy wheelbarrow flipped him off his feet, and he got thrown head over heels—exactly as if he’d been tossed with a judo throw. He landed on the concrete slab, his hard hat flew off, the wheelbarrow flipped and dumped out its mountain of dirt. He set it upright, shoveled the dirt back in, and carried on. No one laughed; everyone was working. The summer was coming, he loved the job and the men. The pay was a godsend. His mother thanked him.

  Joan said, “I like him in his tool belt. I bet he gets the girls going. Hey, I think you dropped a nail. Why don’tcha bend over and pick it up there, blondie.” She began calling Corey “The Workin’ Man.”

  * * *

  —

  After his first check cleared, he went to Stop & Shop and bought spaghetti, ground meat, tomato paste and vegetables. Joan made a big pot of spaghetti and meat sauce and they all ate a feast together, gathered around Gloria in her chair. For each bite, Corey wound the spaghetti on his mother’s fork and fed her.

  He came straight home from work in the afternoons, bringing the vigor of the construction site home with him. He got his mother up and out of her chair. He helped her go outside. She went for a short walk, one step at a time, with her walker. She went to the seawall and looked out at the beach, covered in smooth stones, wearing big sunglasses.