by Jon Pineda
apology
Also by Jon Pineda
Memoir
Sleep in Me
Poetry
The Translator’s Diary
Birthmark
apology
a novel
Jon Pineda
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
© 2013, Text by Jon Pineda
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
(800) 520-6455
www.milkweed.org
Published 2013 by Milkweed Editions
Cover design and graphic by Brad Norr
Author photo by Amy Pineda
13 14 15 16 17 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Bush Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Foundation; the Dougherty Family Foundation; the Driscoll Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pineda, Jon, 1971–
Apology : a novel / Jon Pineda. — 1st ed.
p.cm.
ISBN 978-1-57131-892-3
I. Title.
PS3616.I565A85 2013
813'.6—dc23
2012027828
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Apology was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Edwards Brothers, Inc.
For Emma and Luke
. . . the sum of these events
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting beyond the account:
—A. R. Ammons, “Corsons Inlet”
apology
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Acknowledgments
one
Tom remembered having to take his red windbreaker. He and his friends had gone to the huge field by the edge of the neighborhood. It was perfect for a game of football. The grass still thick in patches looked like scattered green pillows. You had to climb over a chain-link fence to get there, or else brave the thicket rich with sumac and hornets and slip through a flap that had not been properly secured.
Jumping off the fence, Tom removed his jacket, slinging it. It was tough work climbing. He had broken a good sweat. He also knew his friends. In the game they would have grabbed at the stray hood to rip it from him, use it against him. He didn’t want them to have that advantage.
In the distance construction vehicles sat abandoned. Most were monstrous and rigid, rusted. Some yellow as teeth. His friends joked about going over there and seeing if any of those fools who operated them during the day had left the keys in the ignition. They could crank the engines. They could lift the shovel of the excavator, elevate the blunt shield of the bulldozer. “Let’s go tear it up,” one of them crowed. Another joined in, echoing until it became their chanting. Tom remembered laughing along. He was amazed these kids, most the same age as he was, would feel entitled to do so. Especially when none had dared go that far. Every one of the boys in the neighborhood knew the site was off limits.
Mario, a dumpy kid with a bowl cut, was pointing.
“Hey, Fino, isn’t that your sister?”
Tom’s twin had found the loose panel in the fence. She was standing over by his red windbreaker, which she lifted from the grass and held in her hand. She twirled it into a ball of fire. She called his full name—Thomas X. Serafino, Thomas X. Serafino!—and then that it was time for dinner and that he needed to come home. She was already acting like the bossy teacher she wanted to become.
Now his friends were laughing.
“Get out of here, Teagan,” he said.
She just stood there and waited for him. She even tapped her foot.
“Get out of my life!” he yelled.
He looked back at his friends, their collective smirk.
The brief disruption in the game gave one of them a chance to take the ball and beam it at anyone who wasn’t paying attention. When Tom stared back at Teagan, he took one in the head. The ball wobbled away.
Some of the others scrambled for it. Tom dove, but he wasn’t fast enough. Now Mario had it. Tom ran in circles to avoid him, the next hit. They all did. When he looked back at the fence, Tom saw the jacket suspended in air. Teagan had taken one of the sleeves and fished it through the fence’s lattice and tied it there like a giant ribbon. But Tom didn’t see her. Not at the far corner. Nor beyond the fence to the street leading back into their neighborhood.
He took another one in the head.
As Tom made his way home through the cooling darkness, the game still smeared against his skin, his throat itched with burning. He thought he would find his sister glowering at him, sitting obediently at the kitchen table, but it was his mother, Elinor, who met him at the door.
“Where were you two?” his mother said.
“Just playing ball,” he said.
His mother looked past him.
“Is Sissy coming?” she said.
She went to the end of the porch and stared down the street. As if his twin would suddenly appear, as if mere insistence could make it so.
It stayed put. There, in the throat of the pit. The last person to touch it had been a transient the foreman had picked out of a lineup at the local shopping center parking lot. The foreman called the man Shoe. He had come unprepared, with no steel-toed boots to his name.
Rather than sending him away altogether, the foreman ordered the man to the store with a loaned fifty-dollar bill. Shoe walked away from the site, trying not to drag his right foot behind him. When he came back, he could hear the others as he approached. Howling, though they were running their machinery full-on.
The foreman yelled, “Shoe, get in there,” and threw him a shovel as an afterthought. Earlier, the crew had ripped through a power cable the utility locator missed marking. They were fortunate it wasn’t live. The prints indicated hints of buried structure. The foreman didn’t want to take any more chances. They would have to hand-dig this section.
It hadn’t occurred to the foreman to ask Shoe if he understood. They just needed someone to find the top of the conduit, or, if it was another direct buried cable, then its black plenum sheath. They were already so deep, it couldn’t be down much farther, if it was even there at all.
How unnecessary it had been for this young man to slide down the gray clay wall, breaking in the new boots with slick smearing. The foreman pointed at the deepest spot and nudged the air downward, which meant dig, and Shoe slipped the shovel head into the already broken muck and began, though there was nowhere to go with it. He didn’t know if he could sling it above him and not hit anyone.
They were behind s
chedule.
It was taking too long.
“Oh, just get the hell out of there,” the foreman said to the stooped figure.
Shoe had been this person most of his life. The intended recipient of a cussword, a dredger of malcontent. And now Shoe did not hesitate. He thrust the shovel head in at an angle, prepared to dig more if the man suddenly changed his mind.
The man did not change his mind. Nor did he reach down to help pull Shoe up. It was too slippery, too much sludge for his tasseled loafers. The tool was left there, abandoned in place, and Shoe crawled out, sliding, pulling himself up with all of his might as the few standing around offered him only their ridicule.
That evening, with the sounds of her brother and his friends taunting each other in the nearby field, Teagan walked among the machinery at the construction site. At each vehicle she stopped to inspect the sinuous, exposed hoses connected to what seemed more an open brain than an engine.
There was the unfamiliar smell of diesel. It grafted to her excitement, of having wandered here alone. Cautiously, she stepped between tracks in the matted clay. The tracks now resembled stamped sections of gray Play-Doh, as if the earth had first been rolled out smooth by the workers and then tamped down with metal templates, industrial-sized cookie cutters. The spaced teeth of a backhoe. The track belt fit snug around a bulldozer’s wheels. Some fragments of dirt and clay had dried and crumbled at the edges of each one.
Then the machines were a herd of huge animals sleeping.
Near the farthest end of the site, Teagan found a deep hole. At first, it looked like a well. Something from one of the children’s books she liked to read. Except there were no walled stones encircling the opening. No small shingled roof with a bucket hanging from coiled rope.
It was already getting late, she knew, but with the vehicles quietly sleeping she could at least peer down into the pit. It would be something to boast about to her twin brother. She was sure neither he nor any of his friends had been brave enough to explore the site alone.
Tommy wasn’t the boss of her, she thought, even though she could hear his voice plain as day now, telling her she needed to get out of there—not just his life, as he had said it so rudely in front of the others, but here as well.
This entire place that was growing darker by the second.
She gulped the cool air and leaned over to take another look.
Her foot began to slip on the edge.
She recovered. She didn’t hear bits of falling dirt. No sound of splashing water. She laughed to herself. She was fast, faster than her brother. Yes. It didn’t matter that she had almost slipped down into it. She would take precaution and back way up this time, as far back as possible. She would brace her foot against the bulldozer’s track as if it were a starting block.
As she readied herself, she felt it, a blow to the head.
“Owww,” she yelled and looked around, but saw only a shadow darting out of view. She found the football and held it up. Etched on the side was the name Mario, her brother’s stupid friend she couldn’t stand.
“I have this. It’s mine now,” she said.
“You wish,” came a voice from the other side of the bulldozer.
“You wish.”
“No, you wish.”
The voice went back and forth with her this way.
She held the ball with both hands, like she had watched Tommy do countless times as he tore through a bundle of boys on the field, but instead of grunting and making noise in the fray, she stepped slowly, as if replaying a memory of her brother, except that she was her brother now and could turn easily to gain yardage, galloping in slow motion toward the others, who weren’t there. She went around one side of the bulldozer and saw him from behind, crouched and hiding. She lifted the ball and threw it at his head.
“Shit,” Mario said, throwing a hand up and rubbing behind his ear.
She laughed and ran away as he scrambled for the ball and then took off after her. They wove around the machinery. When they rounded the excavator, Teagan frantically grabbed onto one of the wheels. “Base, Mario!” she yelled. “Base!”
“Nice try, but there’s no base,” the boy said.
She screamed, frightened and gleeful.
He fired the ball in a perfect spiral. She managed to dodge it. After she was clear of it, she realized she should have grabbed it out of the air and chased after him. She could hear Tommy in her head coaching her, telling her she had just as much right to get it and pelt him good. She didn’t know where the ball had gone. She didn’t know where the boy had gone either, but she suspected he had the ball again.
There was more tiptoeing around. She wanted to say she was done. All she had wanted to do to begin with was jump across the well and be done with it. That he had stopped her from doing so made her angry, especially now that there had been a slight break in the attack. A reprieve to consider her options. She thought about it and decided she was done with him and even said so, but the boy only laughed, and when he did, she saw that he had somehow climbed up on top of the bulldozer and was looming over her, his arm cocked back.
“You can’t jump that pit,” he said, pointing in front of them.
“I was about to,” she said.
She could hear Tommy telling her to run away.
“There’s no way,” the boy said. “I couldn’t even do it.”
“So,” she said. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Then do it,” he said.
“I don’t feel like it now.”
“Because you can’t.”
“You wish.”
“You wish.”
“I could jump that thing with my eyes closed,” she said.
There was a part of her that believed it, too. She had taken ballet on and off over the last few years, when her parents had extra money for the lessons, and she had been told she was a natural. If only you had started her out sooner, she remembered hearing the instructor tell her mother.
“You’re a joke,” the boy said.
He had not brought down his arm, and the ball in silhouette looked for a moment like another head that had grown out of his shoulder. Teagan shuddered.
“Come on then,” he said. “We don’t have all day.”
“For what?” she said.
“Try to jump over it,” he said.
She laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” he said.
“Because I know what you’re gonna do.”
Now the boy was the one laughing. “I won’t,” he added.
“I know you will. The moment I jump, you’re gonna throw it at me.”
“I’m telling you I won’t.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Yeah, right nothing.”
She looked at him, trying to gauge his expression, but she could see only the faint outline of his face and, beside it, the shadowy second head that had grown more ominous in the evening light.
“Don’t be a pussy,” he said.
“I’m not a pussy,” she said.
“Yes, you are.”
She looked at the well and then at him high atop the bulldozer, and she nodded but didn’t say anything. She walked nonchalantly back to where she had been to begin with, before he had shown up and hit her with the ball. She placed her shoes against the belt track and leaned forward, placing her fingertips onto the tamped dirt.
She took a breath and held it.
She could feel her heart beating wildly now. Not for this boy or for the dare or for the well itself. She remembered the time she was in ballet class, and the parents had been told they could come into the studio and observe. Against the mirrored walls, the parents sat on the floor with their shoes off, looking oddly out of place, while the young girls stood at one end of the room preparing to run and leap, one by one, over an imaginary puddle on the floor. Teagan had been singled out by the instructor to demonstrate.
She herself wanted to be an instructor one day. A teacher of some sort. But her heart had be
en tearing through itself at that moment, and she did not dare look at her mother or her father, and definitely not at Tommy. She was fearful of losing any concentration she had.
With all that she could summon, she’d sprinted elegantly as she had been taught and first lifted her right leg straight and pushed with the back left up to where, like a pair of scissors opening, she cut her figure into the air.
She told herself she could do that again.
Not the form so much as the sheer leap itself. She could do it easily, and so without any more thought, she pushed hard and took off toward the well that wasn’t a well. It was just a hole in the ground. It would be easy to jump. It would not crumble on the other side where her foot would come down. His laughter chased after her, but she didn’t care now. She was going to do it, she knew.
She leapt free, but once in the air, she felt something graze by her. It threw her off. Just briefly. She was too surprised to scream. Her front foot landed at the edge, which then collapsed.
She thought she could hear someone calling her name up above, but it wasn’t her name exactly. It was crying that was meant to be her name. Everything smelled wet, and above it, the sound of someone hurt, a sadness falling on top of her.
When she closed her eyes, she could hear it and when she opened her eyes, expecting to hear it again, it ceased, as did the square of the sky, and her head, wet as the smell of wetness, began to warm and then burn. Everything she knew became ashes in her mouth. For the rest of her life she would be able to taste the hint of this day but its memory would have long vanished like a failed fuse.
By the time Shoe made it home to his brother’s after work, the others had already eaten and cleaned the dishes and gone about the rest of their night. His nieces were in their bedrooms finishing their homework, and Paul was in the garage trying to fix the edger Mario had taken apart with the intention to reassemble but never did. The boy had only left it a mess.
