The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  The military wasn’t right for him, she said. She’d dated Marines; she knew.

  “Joan, I’ve fought in the cage.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “I keep forgetting.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked, hurt.

  Joan said, “I just don’t think I trust you.”

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, he checked in with his recruiter, who told him that one of these Saturdays—soon—they were going to MEPS, the enlistment center, where Corey would officially enlist.

  “You ready?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Hooyah! Be ready!”

  Up till now, Corey had concealed the full nature of the legal and criminal matter that was hanging over his head, and the recruiter hadn’t asked him for anything more than a superficial account.

  Less than one week later, he heard about the lawsuit.

  It had been many months since he and Shay had spoken last. The April day on which the lawyer’s call came in was beautiful and bright. Corey was sitting in the sun on the stoop of a boarded-up storefront next to the Brother’s sub shop, having just bitten into a grilled chicken sub. It was midafternoon; he was done with work; this was dinner. It had been a day of sprinting and doing star jumps at the gym and carrying marble. He ate with his eyes fastened on the recruiting office, which he could make out above Walter Hannon Parkway. When he finished eating, he was going to take a shower and fall asleep in his sleeping bag listening to One Republic. His phone rang and he dripped tzatziki sauce on his boot toe putting down his sandwich to pull the Samsung from his jeans.

  “Corey, it’s Shay. How you doing?”

  “Good. How are you? It’s been a while!”

  “You’re good?”

  “I think I’m good. Is something wrong?”

  “What about your charges?”

  “Well, yeah, what about them. I guess I’m kind of in limbo. Nothing’s been happening that I know of. I ended up talking to the cops, and I feel like it kind of got us somewhere—a little bit—insofar as I told them my story and laid it all out there and—it’s not like they heard it and decided to charge me. So, you know—it’s not like they’re going after my father, which is what I think they should do, but at least they’re not going after me. At least not yet. So basically, I guess everything’s okay. Sort of.”

  “I see,” said Shay.

  “Oh, the lawyer you sent me to—I didn’t like him too much. He says I owe him two thousand dollars. Maybe that’s not good. But he was not in favor of me talking to the cops, which was why I fired him. I hope you’re not pissed about that. I just feel like he wasn’t really representing me, like he wasn’t on my side. I don’t think he even thought I was telling the truth, which kind of pissed me off. If anything, I’d just like somebody to believe me. You were the best lawyer. We trusted each other.”

  He noticed Shay’s silence and realized the man was waiting to tell him something.

  “I heard you’re being served.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You’re being sued.”

  “By who?”

  “You don’t know anything about this?”

  “No.”

  “The mother of the MIT student is filing a wrongful death suit against you, I heard.”

  “You mean Adrian Reinhardt who killed Molly Hibbard—his mother wants to sue me?”

  “I heard your father was helping her. My info’s a little vague. I thought you’d know more about it.”

  “I didn’t know anything about this. You’re telling me my father’s helping her?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “My father?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they’re going to sue me?”

  “Yes.”

  Corey laughed. “That makes perfect sense!” What better proof of his father’s strange, malignant nature? There was something astonishing about Leonard, it seemed to Corey, but the more he said about it the less anyone seemed to get it, including Shay, and he finally shut up.

  “I’m going to need a lawyer, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Would you be available for that?”

  “If you get served with papers, call me.”

  The call over, Corey got up and went to his parked car, intending to drive home. But instead of going anywhere, he sat frozen behind the wheel.

  Maybe, he was thinking, I could move without telling anyone so the process server can’t find me. I could move to the woods. Spring is coming—I’d have mud to deal with—marshy mud and ticks. Get Lyme disease and you sleep all the time. I wonder if it gets in your nervous system? It must. There’s insect repellant. What else? I could light a fire, put down a tarp, sleep in a hammock. But the ticks would come down the tree and up from the earth. You’d get the disease. If DDT works, maybe I could get by in a bag on the ground as long as I’m not in the brush. Then what? Hide the gear during the day and hike to work? Keep the car where? Are there woods in Weymouth? Yes, there are. There’s a state park. Well, it’s in Braintree. I’d live in the park—no, on a mountain—on rocks, away from underbrush and ticks. The Swingle Quarry. But then you’ve got skaters coming and finding your campsite and stealing your stuff. I don’t have anything I care about. What about washing? I know what cold water’s like. Because of my father, I’m going to wash in cold water? He’s going to make me live in the woods? How about the sea? There’s a boat problem: I don’t have a boat. So I’ll live in my car in the woods and lock my gear in the car and wash at the gym. But if I keep my job, they’ll find me. How about out of state? Rhode Island? As if they won’t look there. All I have to do is last until the Navy takes me. Then I’m out of here. Then he can’t touch me. Or maybe he can. What if the lawsuit gets me barred from enlisting?

  He had no idea about military policy and was afraid to ask his recruiter. He wished he could ask Joan, but after what she’d said, he couldn’t call her.

  Instead of going home, he started the hatchback and drove through Quincy heading north. He drove away leaving his sandwich on the stoop. He passed his mother’s rest home, crossed over the Neponset, went around the circle and up on 93—elevated, speeding, seeing the wide marshy coastline meeting the blue ocean and the white-covered boats in the corner of his eye. He barely saw the traffic on the road. He played a game of dodging shadows with his lower nervous system. The rest of him was looking out the top of his head, up through the car roof, at scenes in the sky, which only he could see.

  He was going to ask his father to drop the case. Or at least that was what he was going to tell people he had done.

  So be it, he thought, and drove into the tunnel under the city of Boston for the thousandth time, but probably the last time. So be it, he repeated.

  As he drove, he was imagining how to get his father down to the ground to rear-naked choke him. He watched the tunnel for the Storrow Drive exit while seeing he’d have to hit Leonard to drop him, and began thinking what to use—his fist or something heavier. A leftover piece of himself watched this thinking with disgust and despair. He knew if he was contemplating it this seriously and coldly there was something very wrong with him.

  The Storrow Drive exit demands a sharp, almost ninety-degree turn into the wall of the tunnel, which can feel slightly impossible to execute under the pressure of following traffic. He missed the exit.

  He told himself to wake up, you are doing something dangerous. Snap out of it and look alive.

  Fine, he thought. You missed MIT. You’ll have to get him in Malden. You’ll have to find him there. He let the pressure of traffic push him out of the tunnel and north over the bridge onto the fragment of land that was Somerville and Charlestown. Cambridge was in the west. Then he rose over Somerville on the Tobin Bridge and went down the arc, seeing water and sky, s
lum and industrial buildings between rivet-studded girders. Trucks dived with him down the rattling chute of the ironworks under the flashing girders, which sent the speeding driver through hypnotic bands of shadow and light.

  Find his house and wait for him and when he arrives, hold up your hands to show they are empty and say, “Father, I apologize. My heart bothers me. My conscience burns. That’s why I have come.”

  He still won’t let you approach. Tell him: “I’m depressed. I’m crushed. Everything I’ve wanted is gone, Father. Everything I’ve done has come to nothing. I was wrong. That is why I have come. I’ve come to beg your forgiveness. There was a time when you treated me as a son. Can you remember? Everything I’ve tried to build since then has collapsed on me for the eleventh time. I have sin on my head. I hate the sight of myself and the smell of myself. My soul is disaster. Everything I’ve done is disaster.”

  Leonard would let his guard down then and allow him to approach.

  “Will you let me inside, Father, as a token of your trust?”

  That is where he would draw back. The blitzkrieg would have to take place then and there on the street. The thing would be the uppercut, which he wouldn’t see if they were standing close together. It had worked so well that night in Central Square. It was better than a haymaker, which he’d see. He’d see the shoulder moving and he’d flinch.

  Corey was waiting for the light to change in Chelsea. The sign for Route 1A, which he planned to take to make his approach to Malden, was in front of him through the windshield; and he sat idling with all the other cars and thought:

  I’ve worked so hard at nothing. I’ve lived in my empty room in that bad-smelling rooming house and cut marble and thought I was doing something special because I went to a gym. What total triviality! You thought you were going to be a shaved-headed saint who controls his breathing. You have been wasting the world’s time. And he saw he was inferior to the occupants of all the other vehicles with whom he waited at the light. They were people coming home from work. They were not on their way to kill a parent.

  In its totality, he saw his plan was to deck his father, rear-naked choke him unconscious, cuff his hands with his own handcuffs, drive him back to Quincy and throw him off the Swingle Quarry.

  He pulled out of the traffic queue and off the road, stopping along a fence around a factory with smokestacks and a yellow gate. He wrestled out his phone, found the detective’s number and started calling. No one answered. He kept calling, calling and hanging up every time voicemail answered. He hit the Call button some sixty times. The afternoon became the evening. He hunched in the front seat, calling.

  Finally, someone answered. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Corey Goltz. Are you Detective Bellavia?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I kind of need to talk to you.”

  “Is this urgent?”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty urgent. I think I almost got in trouble.”

  “Okay…”

  “I got pretty upset. And I think I was going to do something that I shouldn’t do.”

  “Is this something that’s happening right now?”

  “Well, kind of.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Basically, I got very upset—I got some bad news—something that upset me—and I came out looking for my father. I drove out to MIT to look for him, but I missed the exit. And then I was like, I’ll go to Malden to look for him. But I pulled over.”

  “Okay, so answer me very carefully. Where are you right now?”

  “In Chelsea, I think. I’m in my car.”

  “Is anyone there with you?”

  “No. I’m by myself.”

  “Has anyone gotten hurt today?”

  “No.”

  “If I check with MIT right now, am I going to find out that something happened there?”

  “No. Nothing happened. Like I said, I didn’t go there. I was thinking about going there. I was going to go and do something physical to my father. But I missed my turn. And I’m sitting here talking to you, and I’m calming down.”

  “So you’re giving me your word of honor as a gentleman that your father is okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t do anything to him?”

  “No. I didn’t do anything. I haven’t even talked to him.”

  “And nobody else is hurt?”

  “Nobody else is hurt. I swear. All I did was I got upset and I called you. It helps me to talk to you. I’m all better.”

  “Glad you’re better. Remind me, what kind of car you driving?”

  “It’s a red Toyota Tercel. This is not an emergency anymore. You don’t need to come and arrest me.”

  “I’m not going to arrest you if you didn’t do anything. But if you did something, you have to tell me.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I was upset because I found out my father is bringing a lawsuit against me. He’s supposedly teamed up with Adrian’s mother, and they’re suing me for the wrongful death of her son. And I’m like, these are the people who killed Molly, and I just went off.”

  “Well, if you didn’t do anything, we’re okay here.”

  “Look, Detective, I don’t know if you can see your phone, but I called you like sixty times. I just feel like I need someone to talk to. It would make a difference in me not throwing my life away. I’d really give anything if I could buy you a cup of coffee. I don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

  Detective Bellavia said he could meet him at a gas station in Revere.

  Corey took Eastern Avenue half a mile north and hooked into a Sunoco. He recognized a man in a belted leather jacket getting out of a black car outside the police station on Revere Beach. The detective came across the boulevard on foot and greeted him.

  “Everything still okay?”

  “Yes. Everything’s okay. Thank you for seeing me.”

  “I was ready for a coffee. Want to grab one?”

  “Can I pay for you?”

  “No. I got it.”

  The detective led them into the Sunoco. Each of them made a coffee and paid for it himself. They met back outside and had their coffees standing a few feet apart, looking out at the boulevard.

  “I called you sixty times. I feel silly about this whole thing. I’m not a weirdo.”

  “You’re signed up with the Navy, right? How’s that going?”

  “Supposedly that’s going to happen. As long as my father doesn’t fuck my life up.”

  “If anything, you’re going to fuck your life up.”

  “I just lost my head.”

  “Can’t do that. Guys who do that wind up in serious trouble.”

  “You got me back on track.”

  “If you do something stupid, there will be consequences. You’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  “But what about my father?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s getting away with a lot.”

  “And what are you? Judge, jury and executioner? How do you know what he’s getting away with?”

  “He’s not in jail. He’s not dead.”

  “Is that what’s going to be enough for you? If another man is dead?”

  “My mother’s dead. Molly’s dead.”

  “How about Adrian? Is he dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about Molly’s father? Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re walking around.”

  “I know. And I worry about being a bad person.”

  “Then don’t be a bad person.”

  “I’m contaminated.”

  “By what?”

  “By the fact that I’m alive and they’re not.”

  “All the more reason to do the right thing.”

  “I want to do the right thing
. But it’s going to land me in jail if I go and smash somebody.”

  “That’s not what I’m telling you to do.”

  “Don’t I have a debt to people? Shouldn’t I step up and do something if the law’s not doing anything about it?”

  “You don’t know what the law’s doing. I’m the law. Ask me. You think I’m sleeping on this? There’s no statute of limitations on murder. If I find something out, whoever it is is going to get caught. It could be him. It could be you. It could be twenty years from now.”

  “Good. That’s all I want.”

  “That’s the way it is.”

  “So what do I do? Just go ahead and live my life and not worry about it?”

  “Go ahead and live your life.”

  “Should I join the Navy?”

  “Join the Navy.”

  “I don’t know anymore. Should I?”

  “Did you sign the contract?”

  “Yeah, but should I go through with it?”

  “You made a commitment, didn’t you?”

  “I know, but maybe I was wrong.”

  “Yeah. Well. Then don’t. It’s your life. But you made a commitment.”

  “I’m just confused. Job, school, take revenge on Leonard—I just don’t know what to do.”

  “Keep your nose clean. Don’t be an idiot. Pay your taxes. That’s life.”

  “I guess I might wind up going to war.”

  “You might. I mean, I’m not telling you to go. I wish I hadn’t done it. It’s horrible. I lost men over there no older than you. Not one drop of their blood was worth the medals I received.”

  “So should I not go?”

  “All I can tell you is there are some guys who find out it’s right for them. I don’t know who you are. And maybe you don’t know who you are until you get over there and see.”

  34

  Leonard Agoglia

  The threatened lawsuit did not come that spring. Nor did any other legal sanction. As he waited for his recruiter to take him to MEPS, the new rumor Corey heard was that Adrian’s mother was in Mount Auburn Hospital, her cancer having come out of remission. One day, heading to an installation job in Belmont, a marble countertop and backsplash bungee-corded in the back of the van, he drove by Adrian’s mother’s house. It had been repaired, and he wondered if she was alive and living in it or had followed her son into the grave.