August and Then Some, page 12
“What do your aunts and your cousins do in the DR?”
“They live in Santo Domingo, it’s the capital. They work together cooking for a big restaurant. You know, like a tourist restaurant. They say they get treated nice and that …” She breaks the hug. Stands up. Wipes her nose. “That table was digging into my back.”
On the street I pick up two sacks of rocks off the pile. I turn, carry them down eight stairs, into the brownstone. Up eight stairs, into the backyard, drop the sacks. Brian stands in the shade of the trees, his back against the brownstone wall.
“You’re making me look bad,” he says. It’s more than ninety-five degrees and he’s having a slow day. I’ve lapped him twice now.
“It’s all I have to live for.”
“Then you’re wasting your life.”
“Actually it’s already wasted and it wasn’t as bad as people say.”
“Oooh, a tongue that can clip a hedge. You get a nut last night?”
“Are you high?”
“No, Boss.” He army-salutes me.
“Then you should stop drinking.”
“I did once, but I became cranky and boring so I had to go back to it. Why you holding out on me?”
“I’m not.”
I turn, go down eight stairs into the brownstone. Brian follows me.
“You’re bullshitting a bullshit factory.”
“So we cancel each other out.”
“I don’t even get to know what she looks like?”
We go up eight stairs, onto the sidewalk.
“She’s just a friend.”
“AH HAAAAA. Does she know you don’t believe that?”
“I do believe it.” I pick up two more sacks.
“If you’re straight you don’t believe it, and you are straight.”
“Any chance of us baggin this conversation?”
“Sure, but first let me tell you something about women, Wedgie.”
“Somebody is always trying to tell me something about women.”
He pulls off his gloves and slaps them on the pile of rocks. “There’s only three kinds of men who can’t understand them: young men, old men, and middle-aged men.”
“That some kind of Irish proverb?”
“That’s a human proverb. Let’s take a break, Wedgie.”
“I wish you’d stop calling me that.”
“I know. Come on, it’s break time.” He cracks open his orange Gatorade.
“You go ahead. I’m good, I’m gonna keep going.”
“Really, stop. It’s more than ninety degrees and we got six hours left.”
“Really, I’m good.”
I go down eight stairs, into the brownstone. Up eight stairs, into the backyard. The sun stings my shoulders. I look at the hundreds of bags of stones lined up on the ground, standing upright like gravestones. They make a path across this back lot like the stones across the Bronx River.
I see my dad.
I see my old bathroom.
I see his face in the mirror. One of his palms is full of shaving cream, the other holds the can. I stand on the edge of the white bathtub, my hands on the sink for balance. From here I’m almost his height and can see my face in the mirror next to him.
“Putting shaving cream on is easy, you just gotta make sure to cover all the black.”
“Dad, I got no black. I only got a little fuzz.”
“No, I know, this is just to get in some practice for when your beard starts coming in. Here. Watch. I’m covering the black, I’m covering the black …” He raises his chin and checks his neck out in the mirror to make sure he has everything whited-out. “There. See? Now you.”
He shakes the can of shaving cream up and down, I hold out both my hands.
“You’re right-handed, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So you put a pile of this in your left hand so you can spread it with your right hand.” He fills up my palm. “Go head cover where there’s black. Or where you think there’s gonna be black.”
I rub the cream on my cheeks.
“You got it.”
It smells like pine trees and dish-washing detergent.
“Now look—when you’re doing the mustache part you can just cover your whole mouth.” He watches me do this. “Good. Now just wipe your finger across your lips like this. Got it?”
“That’s cool.”
“Ain’t it? OK, let me see. Look up. You’re looking good. Now the shaving part. You gotta shave it all even. You gotta make sure you’re putting the same pressure on the razor the whole time because if you don’t then you got an uneven shave and you look like what your mother calls a cavone. You know what that is? It’s a pig. You wanna press hard enough so you get a close shave but you don’t want to press too hard that you cut yourself. Watch me.”
He drags the razor across his face and the whiskers crackle under the blade. He maneuvers it with the kind of steadiness it takes to decorate a cake. I’ve never seen him move so slowly or touch anything so gentle. Nothing. Not his wife, not his food, not his kids. And still, he somehow manages to cut himself. Right where his jaw meets his neck he gives himself a nice little slice. The red mixes with the white and this pinkish liquid oozes down his neck. I don’t say anything for two reasons. First: I feel, as the apprentice, I should keep quiet until the teacher gets to the how-to-handle-cuts part of the lesson. Second and more honest reason: I want to see just how hard and long he’ll bleed.
“If you want a really close shave you go against the grain.” I nod like I hear but I’m preoccupied with his cut and when the hell he’s gonna notice it. A drop of blood falls into the sink. I hear the plop. How could this guy not even know he was bleeding? How could he just shave around something like it’s not even there? The blood keeps falling. How could you ignore it, you son of a bitch? Bleeding is bleeding, it hurts you fuckin asshole. Can’t you feel?
“Wedgie.”
“What?”
“Slow the fuck down, man.”
I’m standing on the sidewalk near the rock pile. “No, I’m good.”
“No, stop. Look at your hands.”
“What?”
“You’re not wearing gloves, genius.”
“So what?” I snap at him.
“They’re gonna crack if you—”
“LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE.” Barehanded I grab two more sacks, turn, go down eight stairs into the brownstone. Up eight stairs into the backyard, drop the bags. I replay the sound of my voice in that last exchange and don’t feel right about it. Down eight stairs into the brownstone. Up eight stairs, on the sidewalk where Brian is holding his drink and staring at me through squinted eyes.
“All right,” I say. “I was being a prick just then.”
“It happens.” He finishes the last of his Gatorade. “You ready to take a break now?”
“Yeah.” We sit on the sidewalk, our backs against the building. Brian cracks open another Gatorade for me. I thank him.
I say, “Fridays?”
“What about them?”
“I pull half days because I go to counseling.”
“OK,” he says in a way that lets me know he’s open to hear more, but is not going to ask.
“Not last week. I played hooky. But I go.”
“I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why the hell are you doing this job?”
“What’s wrong with this job?”
“Nothing’s wrong with this job, but you seem like … Let’s put it this way: if you keep working the way you do you’re not long for it.”
“What way?”
“Oh, the way of someone who never takes a break and works double-time during one of the hottest days of summer on what looks like no sleep or a deep hangover or both.” He lets that much sink in. “Couple guys in my family worked themselves to death. But that’s not because they loved working so much. It’s because they hated everything else. But fuck me, I could be totally wrong. Am I?”
I shrug.
We sit in the heat for a while. I drink my drink.
“You think Starbucks is hiring?” I say.
“Always.”
“You got a pen?” Brian reaches into his back pocket and hands me a pencil. “Piece of paper, too?”
“What for?”
“I’d rather not write my phone number on your hand, because we’re not going steady yet. No offense.”
“None taken.” He looks through his wallet, pulls out a faded receipt that documented the purchase of something old and forgotten.
I write my number on it. “Here.”
He takes it back. Looks at me. I say, “In case I leave this job soon.”
He nods his head and puts the paper back in his wallet. “You know the one about the five frogs?”
“No.”
“Five frogs are sitting on a log—”
“Frogs or toads?”
“Either one.”
“Which?”
“It doesn’t matter. Five of them are sitting on—”
“I’m just trying to get a visual.”
“Frogs then.”
“You sure?”
“They’re green things with long tongues, OK? You’re ruining my timing, now shut the fuck up.”
“Go head.”
“Five frogs or toads are sitting on a log and four decide to jump off. How many are left?”
“One?”
“Five.”
“How you figure?”
“Because there’s a difference between deciding to jump and actually jumping.”
After the sound
About a week after I punctured my hand in Ricky’s office I was laying in my bed and heard my father’s car door slam. I checked the clock on my night table: 1.30 a.m. on a Tuesday. Then I heard him trip; the palms of his hands slapped the slate of the front stairs and I heard him yell, “Son of a bitch.” My mother creaking down the stairs is what got me out of bed.
When I came downstairs Mom was standing in the kitchen holding her robe closed at her neck. “Please, Jake, go back to sleep.” Which is what she always said when my father came home in a drunken or even sober rage, or when they were having a screaming match in the middle of the night and I poked my head out from the staircase and tried to watch: Go to sleep, Go up to your room, Get scarce, Leave so we can pretend you don’t see this … I always listened to her. Pretended to have gone back to sleep and stood with my face against my closed bedroom door recording their words and slaps on some permanent tape in my head. Yelling about bills and credit cards and drinking and dirty clothes and food and bullshit and something else entirely. Like an obedient little dog I’d listen until everything went quiet and my mother came up the stairs. Then I’d jump under my blankets, knowing the next morning we’d all play dumb about what happened. But that night I’d had it with the good pet routine and when she told me to go to sleep again, I stayed.
He was drunk and pissed off—pissed off because he had to leave his job, pissed off because he couldn’t walk straight anymore, pissed off at the side door for not staying still while he was trying to get the key in it—and if you’ve ever seen a raccoon on the side of the road just before they’re about to get squashed by someone’s tires, then you know what my mother looked like when he stumbled into the kitchen. She was too petrified to blink, hoping the two tons of drunken metal wasn’t going to slam into her.
“Pissin piece of crap door. I raised that thing from a peephole, now it’s making pretend it doesn’t know my key no more.” He teetered around the room, unable to bend his left leg, and grabbed for the oven to keep from toppling over. “And the stairs, they’re no better. I built that dumb stack of rocks. Jake, remember we cracked them up with sledgehammers and redid those bastards? You and me.” He made this long sweeping motion over his head like he was swinging a hammer. “Bang! Jake, you remember? Sure you do. I know what you remember.” He squinted his eyes at me. “And whudda the stairs do? Make advantage of the dark and try to trip me up. Schmuck bastard ingrates.” He got his balance on a chair and tried to look at our faces. “These are the jokes people. What’s the matter with yous? Did somebody die?”
“Night’s young,” I said.
Mom said, “Jake, don’t.”
“Plan on killing someone, Jake?”
I didn’t respond.
“Didn’t think so. Hey, how come no one left a light on for me? Huh? What? I have a few drinks—which by the way there’s nothing wrong with because I don’t have to get up in the morning now that I got nowhere to run to—and I’m not worthy to have a light left on for? What gives?” He looked my mother in her eyes. “Let’s see what you got in there? Judgment. That’s right. Look at you looking at the bad man. Am I a bad man?”
“She didn’t say anything to you, Dad.”
“Hey. I raised you from a fucking peephole too, so don’t wise off to me. I’ll rip you off your hinges.”
I got the gist of the metaphor. I said, “I’m not wising—”
“Shut it.”
My mother looked at me like shutting it was the best thing to do. So I did. She said, “I’m going to go to sleep now,” and started to move.
“No, come here, let me look at you.” He hobbled over to her and put a hand on each side of her face.
Mom tried to squirm out of his grip. “Let me go to sleep.”
He stopped her. “Cut it out. I just wanna look at you.”
“Dad, let her go.”
“Shut up for a second, Jake. I just want to look at her. Look at me.”
Mom kept squirming.
“See that? She can’t look at me.” He stumbled back, holding onto her face and the rest of her body followed.
“Stop it,” she said, and grabbed both his wrists.
“Look at me.”
“I want to sleep.”
“No one sleeps till you look at me.”
“Mom.”
“OK, I’m looking at you.” She tilted her head up to his eyes that were a foot higher than hers. “See, I’m looking.”
He looked back, smiled and said, “I am a bad man.” There was silence. “Right?” Mom shook her head. “Yes I am. Come on, say it. Say what I am. Tell me how bad I am.”
“I don’t know what you are.”
“Yes you do.” Right then he slid his hands off her face like he was finished with the interrogation. She took one step back from him. He said, “Bad dog,” and shook his head.
He threw one short fast jab right in her breastbone below her throat. It made a thud like someone serving a deflated volleyball. Her ribs caved in around his fist like they were made of rubber. She fell back and tried to grab the kitchen table, but her nails just slid off it and she went right to the linoleum. I shoved Dad in his chest and he backpedaled into the counter, bounced off it, then came at me. This time I pushed him in his face. I accidentally squished my thumb in his eye socket and that’s what stopped him. “Fuck it.” He put his hand over his eye and staggered out of the kitchen toward the basement stairs.
From the floor Mom held a forearm above her head and her eyelids blinked a mile a minute because she thought another hit was coming. I knelt down and grabbed her arm to lift her up, but she swatted my hands away. She stayed down, breathing heavy with one hand on her chest where she’d been hit. We both looked down and at the same time noticed her robe had come undone. She pulled it back together.
“Let me help you up.”
“Why didn’t you go to sleep?” Like it was my fault.
She crawled on her hands and knees to the sink, then used the counter to pull herself up. She turned the cold water on, collected it in her palms and threw it on her face. She leaned on the edge of the sink with all her weight on her elbows and just hung there for a while, let the water drip off her chin and tried to catch her breath. She walked to the freezer, her posture like a weeping willow tree, and got out some ice, put it in a plastic bag and held it to her chest. When the cold hit her tender ribs she sucked air in fast through clenched teeth.
We heard my dad stumbling down the basement stairs moaning in a language that was slightly left of English.
“You OK, Ma?”
“How do I look, Jake?”
She looked bruised, old, underweight, and done.
Silence would be next. Three or more long days of it as she retreated into her bedroom, not even coming out for meals. My father would sleep on the couch and no one would talk to anyone. You couldn’t do a thing about the quiet that followed violence. I left her there in the kitchen so she could get on with it, and crept downstairs, to do what, I wasn’t sure.
He sat on his workbench. One dim, bare light bulb dangling on a cord over him, a bottle of scotch in one hand and a hammer in the other. I didn’t know what I was dealing with—whether he knew what he was doing or saying or if he was in a black-out or what. And I had no idea why he was holding that hammer, so I laid back a little. “That bottle from your private stock?”
“I got em stashed all over the county.” He held it up and took a sip. “Go head, Jake, read me the riot act.” His words were all glued together.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“The speech. The one you give to people when they messed you up. Starts off like, ‘I’m telling you this for your own good.’ Or ‘You’re a fuck up, here’s why you’re a fuck up, so from today until always you need to stop fucking up or I’m outta here.’ I already know I fucked up, and I already know she’s outta here. I’m not stupid on top of everything.”
“You’re sloshed. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t know shit about life. Your ass, your brains, and your dick are all pointing in different directions. She don’t look at you like she does me. Judges me. Every day. And for what?”
“Why don’t you tell me for what?”
“For nothing.”
“No, no. For something. She does it for something. Tell me what for.”
He held up his bottle. “For this. Because I turned out like my father. On a lone continent with his homemade wine. Terrifying, aren’t I? You think I’m messed up, you should have seen him. Lucky you didn’t. So if you gotta know, that’s why she’s leavin.” Then he pointed to his leg with the hammer. “And for this. She’s runnin. I can feel it. It’s easy to …” He coughed, took a huge sip. “It’s easy to run from a guy who can’t. And I’ll fuckin kill the guy who comes near her when she does. I show you what.” He put down his hammer and pulled out a box.
