Brewster (13 page)

I
DON’T KNOW
when we first started going down to Jimmy’s. Early. It seemed like he’d always been there at the bottom of the hill—the workshop, the office, the garage crammed against the woods. I don’t think he ever left. I’d see his light when I ran by in the winter, use it to see the ice ahead of me on the road. In the summer if you came by at six in the morning he’d walk out of the shop wiping his hands on his overalls and you’d tell him the problem and pop the hood and he wouldn’t even say anything, just start sniffing around like a doctor—touching, tapping, pulling on the belts, yanking a spark plug, then putting on his glasses and checking the gap. People would yak away, make stupid jokes, wonder about this or that. He’d ignore them. Every now and then somebody would say they remembered his father. “That so?” he’d say.

People wanted him to like them, maybe because they never knew what he thought. Of them. Men, mostly. Thin, wiry, the stubble coming in mostly white now, he might have been good-looking once except for a nose that looked like it had been stuck on at the last minute when the right one went missing. It seemed to pull everything toward itself, like a small planet. He was always messing with it, thinking, yanking on the holes as if his fingers were a ring and he was planning to lead himself away, and then he’d smile at something and suddenly, balanced out with the big teeth and the tight, sweaty hair that fit his head like a cap, the nose would find its place.

Ray and I would just hang around and watch him work. If it was after hours, whoever he had helping out would be gone and it would be just us and him and the radio and we’d get ourselves a Coke from the machine and sit on whatever there was to sit on where we wouldn’t be in the way and talk about whatever there was to talk about.

Or not. I never knew anyone more comfortable with not than Jimmy. He talked, or didn’t, like he stood: square as a milk carton, not leaning forward or away from you, just considering what was there ahead of him, seeing it for what it was. Reserving judgment. When something needed to be said, he said it. Mostly it didn’t.

“Tightened the belts,” he might say, and the other guy would be off like something rolling down a hill: The belts? Really? He hadn’t thought it was the belts. He’d talked to his neighbor who said it was the steering fluid—the belts, huh? He’d had ’em replaced not that long ago—that was the only reason he was sayin’, still, served him right listening to a guy with a ’67 Caddy. Probably never worked on a car a day in his life. That screeching sound—belts, huh?

“That’ll be twelve-fifty,” Jimmy would say.

I
N THE BEGINNING
we’d stop by his place because it was near the tracks, because there was nothing else around, because he’d have the kerosene heater going in the winter and we could stand around it, blocking the heat. After a while it just became a thing. He never asked. Sometimes five minutes would go by when pretty much all you’d hear was whatever the weather was doing outside, the clink of the tools when he threw them on the bench, maybe the sound of pages turning as we leafed through a magazine, passing it back and forth, and at some point we’d jump off the tires we’d been sitting on and say we probably had to get going and he’d say “OK.”

Over time it thawed. Slowly. Just enough.

“Read about your race in the paper,” he might say to me half an hour in, his head up inside some car, and I’d say, “Must have been a small paper,” and maybe he’d chuckle and that would be that. Mostly me and Ray would talk to each other—about running, about school, about the people we knew, about Muhammad Ali, who’d said he didn’t have nothin’ against them Vietcong and gone to jail—and he’d listen.

We’d heard there was a bank in the city now where you could put a card in a machine to take out money. “That right?” he’d say. We’d rattle on, pitching to ourselves. Every now and then he’d take a swing. Yeah, he’d read about Manson. Walkin’ on the moon—now that had to be somethin’. He knew four kids had gone over to Vietnam the past year—good kids—local kids. He didn’t know about the draft—supposed if it had to be, it had to be.

“But what if it doesn’t?” I said.

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Would you go?” Ray said.

He grunted, tightening something. “I did. Different.”

W
E TALKED
to make up for him. We’d say “How can you say that?” or “Don’t you think …?” and all you’d hear would be the sprocket wrench clicking and winding and then he’d step out from under the car and walk over to the bench and find what he needed and only then say, “Don’t see that it matters much either way,” or “Nobody else gonna live your life,” or “Sounds like he’s got a lot on his mind.” After a time, he knew most of what there was to know.

Not that he had any advice for us. A shrug, a shake of the head, the thumb and the forefinger working the inside of the nose, not with intent, just meditating, then a Jimmyism: “Couldn’t tell you,” “Hard to say,” “Hadn’t heard that.” If we’d come for enlightenment, we’d come to the wrong place. We didn’t care. That place—the smell of gasoline and hot weeds in the summer, the ’59 Playboy calendar curling up from the bottom (“Beautiful, but camera shy. / Jayne Mansfield, can we coax you / Into being Miss July?”)—was home to us.

Only once do I remember Jimmy going on—mostly he’d just let us work things out on our own. It was just before school started, not long after we’d come back from Yonkers. Late August, hot, but with something in the air—a feel, a smell—that told you summer was on its last legs and knew it.

Ray had been talking about some hippie who’d gotten himself beat up down in Ardsley in the park they had there by the freeway. Every time the kid got his ass knocked down, before he’d stand up again he’d take a comb out of his back pocket and run it through his hair.

“What for?” I said.

“Who knows?—probably a pacifist. Or a hairdresser. Anyway, this goes on a while—he’s not even tryin’ to defend himself. Every time he gets to his feet the other guy just whales on him. Couple a shots an’ his nose is all fucked up, he’s doin’ that thing you do with your mouth when you’ve lost some teeth, but it’s the same thing all over again—before he gets up he takes the comb out of his pocket, smoothes his hair real nice, feels the part, puts it back in his pocket, stands up … wham! After a while the other guy just gets disgusted and walks away.”

“Like in
Cool Hand Luke
,” I said.

“Different—Luke keeps swinging.”

“So what happens?”

“I told you—the guy walks away.”

“I mean with the one with the hair.”

“Nothin’. Just kneels there in the dirt for a while, droolin’ blood, then takes out his comb, does his thing, and leaves.”

“That’s nuts,” I said.

“Right? What’d ya think, Jimmy?”

Jimmy was standing by the bench with his glasses propped on the end of his nose, running his finger down the columns in a book. He flipped the page and started at the top. “About what?”

“About this kid lettin’ himself get the shit beaten out of him.”

Jimmy didn’t look up. “Stuff you’re doin’ to other people you’re mostly doin’ to yourself.” He flipped the page.

“You’re sayin’ this guy’s beatin’ his own ass, you mean.”

“Sure, that’s why he walks away,” I said. “He can’t take any more.”

Holding his finger to the page, Jimmy reached behind his ear, wrote something down, put the pencil back. “Could be. I was talkin’ about the other one.”

“The pacifist? How do you figure that?”

Jimmy was still looking through the book. “I don’t know. This kid thinks he’s teaching the other guy some kinda lesson, right? Well, maybe he is—but he’s also getting’ the crap beaten out of him.”

“So what’s he supposed to do?” I said.

“Tough call.” He wrote something else down, flipped the page, then lay a file across the open book and walked to the soda machine. “How’s your Mom doin’?”

“Comes and goes—you know.”

“She has some good days,” Ray said.

“In 1955,” I said.

“How ’bout your Dad?”

I shrugged. “Alright I guess.”

Jimmy put in a dime and a soda thumped down the chute. He popped it with the opener tied to the wall with a string and the bottle top clanked in the bottom of the can. “You want one? I don’t know why I don’t use the key—my machine.” He leaned back against the workbench. “I remember hearin’ about your brother,” he said.

“Long time ago,” I said.

He took a drink, pulled on his nose holes, looked at the car up on the lift. “I had a brother, died. I was what, fifteen I guess.”

He didn’t say anything else.

“You miss him?” Ray said.

Jimmy took a while. “I don’t know. Not that much.” He nodded. “He used to smack me around but he was older so my old man would take his shit out on him. Missed that.”

“So you were next in line?” Ray said.

“Didn’t stop till I was twenty.”

We stared at him. “Twenty?”

“Wasn’t like it was all the time.” He looked out the window. “Think I wanted him to see me. Instead of this thing he was hittin’.”

“So what happened?”

“Busted him with a hose.” He nodded to himself: “Saw me then.”

We just sat there listening to the crickets. A bullfrog started up somewhere in the distance.

“So it got better?” I said.

He tipped up his chin toward the back of the garage. “Came in one day an’ he’s face down in a sandwich like he’s lookin’ for somethin’. Got better after that.”

“Was me, I woulda left,” Ray said. “Not just keep comin’ back like this guy Owen he told me about. Just split, you know? Fuck him. Sorry,” he said, catching himself.

“This ain’t church,” Jimmy said.

“Just stop it, you know what I’m sayin’? Right there. No more me and you, no more tryin’ to figure it the fuck out—you want to beat my ass, come find me in California.”

Jimmy looked at him. “That what you’d do—you and that girl you keep talkin’ about?”

“Why not? Grow your own food an’ shit? California, you can get a place on the beach for almost nothin’.”

Jimmy was looking at him. “How you gonna get there?”

“Where? You mean—”

“You gonna walk?”

“I don’t know—bus, maybe? Get a job, make some money—what?”

“Nothin’.”

“You don’t think I’d do it?”

Jimmy walked to a big metal cabinet and took a flashlight out of the top drawer. “C’mon,” he said.

We could hear the mosquitoes whining on the screen. A couple of moths were beating themselves against the bulb under the eave.

“Where’s he goin’?” I whispered. We could see the beam jumping across the lot to the back trees.

When we came up behind him he was playing the light over a blue Pontiac with a brown hood, its trunk buried so deep in the ivy it looked like it had grown out of the woods. “She’s been here a while,” he said. “LeMans—V-8. Two sixty.”

“Bucks?”

“Horses.”

“Nice.”

“Yours.”

In the quiet you could hear the mosquitoes coming to the light.

“You serious?” Ray said.

“Wouldn’t mind gettin’ it off the lot.”

“Jesus, Jimmy.”

“Needs work.”

The bullfrog had started up again. It reminded me of those noise boxes kids used to play with—like somebody was turning it upside down, over and over.

He popped the hood, shined the light over the engine. “I don’t know about California. Carmel, anyway.”

“Jesus.”

“—got nothin’ to do with it.”

“Thing is, I don’t really know about cars.”

Jimmy took a pull of his soda. “Yeah, me either.” He closed the hood. “You learn.” He looked at me. “You, too. Never know—this girl doesn’t work out, you two jokers can go together. Have some fun. Now get outta here, I got work to do.”

He raised his head. The smell of skunk was filling up the dark—rank and new.

“There’s one didn’t make it,” he said.

M
OST OF THE TIME
when something goes bad—a marriage, a war, a run of good luck—you don’t know it. It’s like in the cartoons, only less funny. You run off the cliff and just keep going—talking, listening to music, making plans, for years sometimes—except no announcer interrupts to say “Excuse me, collect call for Mr. Coyote” to make you notice and make us laugh. You just wake up and fall.

It was a beautiful September, stunned and perfect, like the world had been hit on the head: chill mornings, a warm mist over the cold grass, now and then a leaf dropping down like it was being lowered on a string, sparking in the sun, then going out. Maybe a single jay, laughing. For weeks the four of us talked about someday opening a book and record shop together, arguing about the details, drawing up lists—Where would it be? What kind of records?—like it was actually possible. Karen said we’d have to have places to sit, maybe coffee and tea.

We were walking down Foggintown Road one afternoon, talking about how we’d all have to get jobs first to pay for the furniture, when we came across the frogs. They were jumping across the road from one marsh to another just like it. Dozens of them, thick with cold. There wasn’t much traffic but a couple had gotten squashed anyway. You’d flip the live ones over like a piece of meat and they’d lie there, their white bellies breathing, then start kicking and turn themselves over with one arm and leap off—usually in the wrong direction. We were there a long time, slowing down the traffic, carrying them off to the side. Strange what makes you happy.

That was around the time my father started making me sandwiches for lunch. He didn’t say anything. I’d come downstairs in the dark and the sandwich would be lying on the counter like an aluminum torpedo, Italian bread stuffed with cold cuts and cheese and just about everything else. Every day something different. I didn’t know what had gotten into him. I took some shit for it at school, everybody leaning over like I was unwrapping the
Mona Lisa
, Frank humming that part from
2001: A Space Odyssey
where the monkey brains the other one with a rock, but the truth is they were good, so a couple of nights later when I saw him reading in his chair in the living room after my mother had gone to bed, I said thanks.

He closed the book on his finger. “It’s nothing—you need to eat.”

“Anyway, thanks—they’re good.”

“Pshh,” he said, waving it away.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I asked what he was reading. He told me—somebody I’d never heard of. I could see him in a room at the end of the world, under a small light, reading.

“Good?”

He thought about it. “Too finished. Everything is, how would you say …?”

“Say it in German.”

He shook his head. “Too closed, too …” He put the book down on his lap and pulled his hands apart as if tightening a giant shoelace.

“
Zu einfach,
” I said.

He nodded. “
Zu einfach
.
Genau.
” Exactly. He glanced around the room, at the shelves of books, the heavy blue curtains, the framed pictures on the mantel, then shrugged. “
Das Leben ist nicht einfach. Die Literatur, sollte, es auch nicht sein.
How would you say that?”

“Life isn’t simple. Literature shouldn’t be either.”

The clock kicked in, saving us.

“So …”

“You staying up?” I said.

He raised his book.

H
E WAS RIGHT,
life wasn’t simple. Parts of it were—a frog scratching its head like a dog, the clean, heavy weight of a bolt in your hand, certain songs—and you’d try to hold on to these but you couldn’t hold on for long. Things would get complicated, and the more you thought about them, the more complicated they got. It was like the SAT. That October a few dozen of us had taken it in the school cafeteria. Work quickly but carefully, they told us. Eliminate wrong answers. If you can eliminate more than two, guess.

Eliminate wrong answers. When it came to my life, I couldn’t seem to eliminate anything. Karen tried to talk me through it, joking around, moving her hands around my head like it was a crystal ball, saying, “I can see it, it’s getting clearer—he’s about to speak!”—but I put her off. I could tell she and Ray had been sleeping together. I just could.
Work quickly but carefully
: ‘Cruelty is to pain as love is to blank’: (a) suffering, (b) joy, (c) shame, (d) fear.
If you can eliminate more than two, guess.

It was like that with everything. I’d walk past Aaron’s room and see my mother looking out his window with a folded blanket in her arms and I’d suddenly remember her laughing, throwing sheets of light over our heads, saying, “Where are the boys? Samuel, have you seen the boys?” Or I’d be sitting in the guidance office watching Marschner cup his hands in front of him on the desk, setting out my options like invisible bowls—“Well, what do you
think
you’d want to do?” And I wouldn’t know what to say.

The war was part of it, coloring everything like a bad taste in your mouth. There was no one to talk to, really. For Karen it was simple. Vietnam was wrong. The only choice was resistance. With guys you’d start making jokes about joining the Nation of Islam. You’d start clowning, fucking around. Better than being bored to death, you’d say, shuffling your feet around in the cold like there was some law said you could say anything at all except what you were thinking—What did it mean to kill somebody? What did it mean to die? We were all standing on a conveyer belt gliding toward a cliff, smoking, laughing, and nobody wanted to be the first to say it.

O
F ALL OF US,
John Kennedy was the only one who’d talk about it. He was thinking about quitting the team—with everything going on, he said, running just didn’t seem that important anymore. He’d gone to Woodstock, heard Country Joe and the Fish. What were we fightin’ for? It was a good question. I told him my SAT theory and he said that was it exactly: We didn’t have time to eliminate the wrong answers. The problem was if you were going to die—or live—it shouldn’t be for “
all of the above
.”

“Seriously, what would
you
do if your number got called?” he asked me one afternoon as we walked around the track.

I said I didn’t know.

“Really?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You talked to your folks about it?”

I shook my head.

He’d talked to his dad, he said. His dad still went down to the VFW twice a week. He agreed—Vietnam was a goddamn mess. Still, if your country called you … If John was called, he said, it would be the hardest day in his life but he’d understand and pray for him to come home safe.

We were walking down the backstretch, the gusts flattening our sweats to our legs.

“Your dad said that?” I said.

“I mean, would
you
go to Canada?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I talked to Coach about it. Did I tell you that?”

“What’d he say?”

“You know how Coach is. He quoted some poem about how nations were invented so bullets would have the chests of men to sleep in or something.”

“That’s it?”

“Asked about college—said Villanova would probably give me a half-scholarship. I said how that’s great but it’s just me and my dad and he can’t really afford for me not to work right now so I was thinkin’ I might put it off for a year—plus he’s my dad and
he
served, so there’s that. I kept tryin’ to explain it’s not like I agree with it but, you know, it’s my country. Right or wrong, he says. That’s not what I’m sayin’, I said. An’ the beat goes on, he says.”

“You know Coach,” I said.

“Yeah. Anyway at some point I just say it. I don’t want to be a coward, I tell him, and he nods for a long time and then he says, ‘Look, I’m not going to tell you that word doesn’t mean anything because it does. I’m just saying look at who’s using it, and why. If somebody said you were a coward for not jumping off a cliff, would you do it?’ You did, I tell him. He was an idiot, he says. At least you can live with yourself, I say, and Coach just looks at me and smiles and shakes his head. He has a lot of work to do, he says.”

We’d jogged into the backstretch again, leaning into the wind. We talked some more but I didn’t know what to tell him. The times they were a-changin’, but this was different. In the song the windows and walls we’d shake were somebody else’s
.
In Brewster half the walls were your own.

I
N CROSS-COUNTRY
that fall we lost and lost again: McCann had graduated, leaving us with only three in the top ten—Kennedy, me and Moore, with one of the Time Tunnel kids a sorry fourth. It wasn’t pretty. Then Kennedy, who had always seemed untouchable to me—like Ray, except with feet—lost to a squeaky-voiced junior named Balger from North Salem, staggering across the line ten yards behind, his face contorted with pain. It threw me. It was like nothing would hold, nothing was sure—like the world was turning in your hands for its own reasons and you couldn’t hold it. The car? We were almost there, and all I could think of was what would I do if they got in it and drove away. It was supposed to be a good thing, a blow against the man, and it filled me with a loneliness I’d only known in dreams.

That slipping feeling—it was like that with everything.

O
N SEPTEMBER
23
^rd
I’d come home drunk. It was Aaron’s birthday—traditionally not a good day in our house.

The night before, I’d come downstairs after my dad had gone to bed to find my mother sleeping with her head on her arms on the kitchen table. I hadn’t seen her like that for a long time. She looked old and sad—but she looked like my mother. It was like I hadn’t really looked at her in years. I could feel this thickness tightening my chest, my throat—and suddenly it all seemed so ridiculous, this thing we’d been doing—so unnecessary. We were both getting older. It didn’t matter who was right or wrong in the end. Somebody had to take the first step.

Once I’d thought of it, it wouldn’t go away—like a dare I’d set myself. It began to seem less crazy. I’d leap that gap like the guy in that famous picture jumping from one cliff to the other. I’d do it for her. She was my mother, after all, and she was suffering. I’d rise above myself, like Gandhi. I could see myself walking into that kitchen, asking her forgiveness. I’d tell her I was sorry, that I’d been thinking of myself too much, that I loved her. I’d take her in my arms and say, “I’m here—I’m your son, too. We’re in this thing together.” I’d be a man about it. I’d bring a cake.

The next afternoon I bought the cake. After that I bought a six-pack from Jerry-who-looks-the-other-way and took it to the ballpark down by the river. It was overgrown. I drank the beer sitting on the bleachers, the cake in its white box next to me. I don’t know why I bought the beer. The usual reasons, probably. The cake didn’t seem crazy. It seemed noble, necessary. Even right. We’d celebrate together. It would be like those scenes in the movies when everyone suddenly understands a character’s strengths. I sat there until it was almost dark. When I couldn’t see the trees against the sky any more, I left.

For some reason I expected to find her in the kitchen again but it didn’t matter—it gave me a chance to take the cake out and put in the yellow candles I’d bought to go with it. I thought for a while about whether I should do five, which he’d been when he died, or nineteen, which he’d be now if he hadn’t. I decided on nineteen. The extra one for good luck seemed wrong.

It took a while but I got them all lit, then started up the stairs. I could walk fine. It was OK that Dad wasn’t home yet—this would be just between the two of us. By the time he came home we’d be talking. I imagined the look on her face, her sudden understanding that the time had come, that enough was enough, that her
other
son, grown now, had taken the first step, jumped the gap. I would do that for her—show her how much I loved her. There would be tears, I knew that—but there was no way around it. I walked up the stairs, concentrating on not stumbling. After all this time, all this anger, we’d make it right—for all of us, including my brother. I had to concentrate because there were tears in my eyes.

“What do you want?” she said.

The tone of her voice didn’t stop me—how could I expect her to know what I’d planned?

“Mommy?” I said.

I’d thought about that. I hadn’t called her Mommy in years. It would tell her I was willing to go back, start over. I put on the expression I’d practiced in the downstairs bathroom—loving, open, mature. “Mommy?”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a look of such horror as when she opened the door to that dark landing and saw me, the cake, those nineteen gently flickering candles.

“It’s me,” I said, stupidly, with what I thought was a brave smile. “It’s for—” And I stopped.

“Why would you do this?” she whispered.

“I want—”

“Why?”

“I just—”

“You counted them?” She looked at me, appalled, as if her heart were actually breaking.

“I just—”

“You’re cruel—there’s no other explanation.”

“No, no, I meant—”

“I have a cruel son.” She smiled at me, full of hate. It was her battle smile—the smile she’d walk into hell with. “So this is what I have left—I see.”

I stood there holding that cake like I was room service making an eccentric delivery. I could see the guy in the photograph, hanging over the gap. I was still trying to smile. I didn’t understand what had happened.

She leaned closer to see my face over the flames, and thinking she would catch her hair on fire, I stepped back.

“You’re drunk.”

“No, I—”

She shook her head, her voice so small it seemed emptied of everything, like the last air escaping a balloon: “My God, what a life.”

“Mommy,” I said, like a child in the snow holding up his hands for his mittens.

“That you could do this.”

“No, I—”

“Deliberately do this to me.”

“I’m your goddamn son,” I said. “Why do you—?”