A Hole in the Universe (21 page)

“How can he if he’s doing that? Because then everything’s a lie. Everything!”

“But he’s still your brother, right? No matter what he does, no matter what happens, right?” She touched his arm, leaving her hand there. “Right?” she whispered, turning in the seat. His hair was starting to recede. He had the softest blue eyes, especially now with so much hurt in them.

He nodded. “I just can’t believe he’d do something like that.”

“Don’t worry.” She squeezed his arm. “She’s just some dippy little thing. He’s not going to leave his family for someone like that. Dennis is like you. He’s got character, he wants stability in his life. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“I don’t know, maybe it can’t be.”

“Oh, Gordon. Don’t say that. You’re going to have a wonderful life. Everything’s just so new right now, that’s all.”

Across the way, a girl bounded down the tenement steps. She ran in front of the car and leaned down at Gordon’s window. “Guess what happened,” she said breathlessly. “Some guy tried to break into your house, but Thurman told Feaster, and him and Polie pulled him off your back porch. Polie beat the shit out of him.” Her eyes glowed with excitement as Gordon scrambled from the car toward his house. Delores and the girl followed him inside. “I seen you here before,” the girl said to her as Gordon turned on the lights. All the windows and doors were locked. “Yeah, right after he moved in,” the girl continued as Gordon returned to the living room. Everything seemed to be in order, but he had to check upstairs to be sure. Delores introduced herself as an old friend of Gordon’s. “That’s cool,” the girl said. “He’s a really nice guy. But not too many people come here. I can see right out my window there. That’s where I live. Right there.” She lifted the blinds and pointed.

“What’s your name?” Delores asked, fascinated and repelled by the rawness her full wet mouth seemed to convey.

“Jada Fossum, nice to meet you,” she said with a sure, hard grip. “Hey, Gordon,” she called as he came downstairs. “Next time you go out I’ll bring Leonardo over. He can guard the house for you.” She flopped onto the couch. “He’s a wicked good watchdog.”

“He is?” Delores said, and like Gordon remained standing, looking down at the sprawled girl.

“Christ, all he does is bark.” She laughed. When neither one replied, she sat forward. “Oh, you’re probably on a date, right?” She gave a lewd, crooked grin. “And you’re waiting for me to go, right?” She jumped up.

“Thank you, Jada. And thank you, too, Delores. It was good getting out,” he said, leading them to the door.

Delores found herself on the sidewalk with Jada Fossum while room by room the lights went out inside Gordon’s little house. A dog was barking from somewhere across the street.

“I like him. He’s so nice,” Jada said, batting mosquitoes away from her fuzzy curls that shone under the streetlight.

“Yes, he is, isn’t he.”

“Everybody’s scared of him, but I’m not.”

“Why are they scared?”

“He killed somebody once. A girl and a baby. You didn’t know that?”

“I guess I just forget sometimes.”

“Jesus, how can you forget that? My mother’s wicked scared of him. I’m not even supposed to be over here.”

“Gordon would never hurt you.” She opened her car door. “But you better get home. You don’t want to get in trouble with your mother.”

“I’m always in trouble with her!” the girl said, laughing. As she crossed the street, the barking grew frantic.

J
une had already told Thurman that the aisles didn’t need sweeping, but he ignored her. Headphones on, he swept his indolent way through the store. His grandmother might have made him come back to work, but she couldn’t make him like it. When Gordon thanked him for preventing a break-in Saturday night, his sour shrug made clear that he hadn’t done it to help Gordon. He had yet to do one thing June or Serena had asked. Gordon tried to avoid him as best he could. The boy was a powder keg, aching to be set off.

The store was empty. It had been raining since early morning, and only a few desperate customers had braved the downpour. He didn’t like days like this—too slow, too much time to think. The plate glass rattled with the sudden boom of thunder. He pressed in another floor tile. Seeing Dennis with Jilly the other night had thrown everything off-kilter. It was vital that the few people in his life stay the same, to be who he needed them to be. He felt betrayed. And foolish. He thought he had been moving ahead but now saw how stuck he was. He wouldn’t even answer the phone anymore. If it was Dennis, he didn’t know what to say, and if it was Delores, she would want to talk about it and he couldn’t.

He had replaced almost all of the cracked tiles by the front doors. Working had always been the best therapy. He sat back on his heels. A few more to go. Little by little, one step at a time, that’s all it took to make things look better. These black and gray tiles matched the rest of the floor. Last week, he had found them down in the cellar in a soot-covered box. When he showed Neil, he was told not to bother, the new owner would probably gut the place and start over. But then after Neil’s letdown this morning, Gordon had taken to his knees, scraping and gluing. Maybe the next potential buyer wouldn’t be so quick to write the place off. His lower back ached, and the cuts in his hands stung from the acrid glue. He felt a little light-headed, and his stomach was growling. He hadn’t even stopped for lunch. His enthusiasm for these projects seemed to irritate Neil. It was the same reaction Dennis had whenever Gordon mentioned repairs around the house, the brass hooks he had screwed over the sink for dish towels instead of hanging them on the oven door the way his mother used to, the stops he had glued in their old maple bureau to make the drawers line up evenly, the shims he had painstakingly shaved from the handle of an old paint stirrer and then wedged under the hinges so that the coat-closet door would finally latch shut. Dennis had given him that same look in the lobby the other night, as if he still didn’t get it, did he.
Get what, though? That nothing was worth anything anymore? Not even people?

June and Serena were concerned about Neil. After two days of almost giddy happiness, he was curled up on his cot now in a migrainous fog, clutching a bottle of Fiorinal. The Realtor’s very first client had wanted to buy the Market. He was an intense young black man in a pale-blue suit that glowed under the fluorescent lights. He drove a silver Mercedes and owned two other grocery stores, in Haverhill and Lowell. His goal was a chain of stores catering to the ethnic makeup of their particular locales. He had returned last night with his accountant to look at the books. This morning the Realtor called to say the accountant had declared the books rigged and the store a financial sinkhole. The only way to make a go of the business would be to double its size, and no bank was going to make that kind of investment in this part of the city.

“That guy, the accountant, he’s from Dearborn. I mean, what the hell does he know about a place like this?” Serena said.

“All he needs to know.” June sighed as she popped open a Diet Coke. “Where the hell’s Thurman? Three times now I told him to bring the carts in.”

“Yeah, there’s only one left.”

“I’ll go get them,” Gordon called as he brushed glue on the back of the last tile. “I’m almost done.”

“No. You’ve got enough to do,” Serena said.

“Yeah, that’s Thurman’s job,” June said.

“I know, but I feel a little funny,” he said as he stood up. He needed some fresh air.

“Then go home! To get some rest, I mean,” June added uneasily.

“I know. I can barely keep my eyes open.” Serena yawned.

“It’s the rain,” June said.

It was the glue, but he was afraid to persist for fear they would think he was in some fume-crazed, murderous state.

“It’s like night out there, it’s so dark,” Serena said.

Suddenly, an ungodly wail filled the store. “What is that?” Gordon yelled, lurching toward the women. They shrank back, white-faced and gasping, while Thurman continued to push his broom toward them, singing to music only he could hear. Hand at her chest, June took off down the aisle. With a frantic tap on the boy’s shoulder, she ordered him outside to bring in the shopping carts.

“There’s nobody here,” he protested, lifting an earpiece.

“But there will be,” she said.

“So then I’ll get’em.”

“No, now!”

“It’s, like, pouring out there!”

“Go get the goddamn carts or I get Neil, whichever,” she wheezed.

“Yeah, right.” Thurman laughed, then replaced his earpiece and headed back up the aisle, singing in a high-pitched, scratchy voice.

“I’ll go. I don’t mind. I like the rain,” Gordon said, fumbling the torn store poncho over his head. The women’s eyes met:
He likes the rain—of course, deviant that he is.

Hurrying into the downpour, he was immediately calmed by the steady rain-beat on the visor. He took long, deep breaths, trying to clear his head and lungs as he struggled to push the carts through the rutted lot. He lined them up outside the front door, then headed down the street looking for more, sloshing through puddles. The few cars that drove by had their lights on. Their wheels sprayed up waves of water, drenching him. He took his time coming back with the rest of the carts. He was so wet now that it didn’t matter. He held his head back and let the rain sting his face. He pushed these carts into the others, then reached for the door. He froze. The eerie tableau through the blurred glass couldn’t be real. The rain streaming down the cloudy panes gave the fluorescent lights inside a pulsating, garish yellow glow. The man in the black ski mask and hooded sweatshirt pointed a gun at Serena as she hurried out of the office with two cash boxes in her arms. Huddled by her register, June held her tubes to her nose and stared out at Gordon. Thurman’s head bobbed along the back aisle in rhythmic oblivion. It was after three, so Leo had already gone home. With empty storefronts on either side as well as across the street, the nearest phone would be in the liquor store around the corner. By then it would be too late. He could run around back onto the loading dock to use the meat-room phone, then he remembered that door was always locked. Two more aisles to go and Thurman would be in sight of the gunman. Serena set the cash boxes on the counter. She started to back away, but the gunman spun around, screaming and gesturing with the gun. With each demand he sprang forward on one foot, then lurched back again to scream at June. Terrified, Serena seized a handful of plastic bags, most drifting to her feet as she tried to get one inside the other. She dumped the money from the drawers into the bag. June began to cry. A car was coming down the street. Gordon ran toward it waving his arms, but the horrified woman at the wheel veered into the oncoming lane, then sped away. The Market door flew open and the man ran outside. Gordon watched from the road with dirty water gushing past his feet.

“He’s got a gun! He just held us up!” Serena screamed from the doorway as the man sprinted down Nash Street, hugging the bag to his chest.

Gordon’s heavy, sodden sneakers splashed down the street, but once around the corner, the thief disappeared into the foggy rain. When he got back, three cruisers were in front of the Market, parked at the chaotic angles in which they’d arrived. Questioning Thurman was futile, though both women agreed that his sudden caterwaul of song had triggered the thief’s flight. Serena couldn’t stop shaking. June was hyperventilating. Her son was on his way to bring her home. This was the first holdup in which they’d actually seen a gun. Befuddled by pain and medication, Neil hunched in the front window, wearing a Red Sox cap and sunglasses over his light-sensitive eyes. “I was asleep,” he told silver-haired Detective Warren, who with his forearm kept shifting his belly into place. He asked the women to describe the thief’s voice. Shaky, they agreed. No accent. Not deep or high or soft.

“Scared,” Serena said, hugging herself. “Like if we didn’t do what he said, he’d just shoot. Like he couldn’t even help it.”

“So where were you again?” Detective Warren hefted his girth toward Gordon.

“Out there. Getting the carts.”

“For how long?”

“Five minutes. I’m not sure.”

“Five minutes. That’s a long time to be out in that.”

“Just about all the carts were out there. Some were even down the street.”

“So when you finally got them all collected, you were right there by the window.”

“Yes,” he said, the details already blurring through the curtain of jailhouse blindness.

“So you must’ve seen something. You were standing right by the window there.”

“I wasn’t really looking. I was trying to get the carts lined up.” June stared at him.

“So you didn’t see anything until when?”

“He ran out the door and Serena yelled. That’s when I started chasing him.”

Warren’s eyes were cold on his. The detective wet his thumb and flipped a page in his blue spiral pad. “According to Serena Rimsky, you were standing in the middle of the road waving your arms when she yelled at you.”

“Maybe. I might have been. I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
Admit it,
he thought as the detective stared at him.
Tell him the truth, that you weren’t thinking straight. That once again at the crucial moment you panicked.

You don’t know anything, kid, remember that.You were there, that’s all—you were just there:
Jackie McBride’s first rule for survival.

“How long you been out?” the detective asked in a low voice.

“Since May first.”

“You don’t remember me, do you.”

“I don’t know, sir. I’m not sure.”

“It was twenty-six years ago. I remember, my wife was pregnant. My daughter, that’s how old she is.” His thin wet smile said all the rest, though the steady overhead hum of the fluorescent tubes was the only sound anywhere.