Brewster (16 page)

R
AY AND I
started walking again that fall, not as much as we used to, but close. I don’t know where I found the energy. Sometimes on the weekends or if it wasn’t too late Frank would come with us, or Karen if she didn’t have work to do. All those miles we walked, I don’t remember much. Stay somewhere long enough, you don’t see it at all.

Mostly I remember the two of us pretending it was still summer, casting for bass off the spillway into the wind, our fingers too numb to flip the bail. The June before, Ray’d found a couple of spinning rods in the weeds that some drunks had left and the first time he felt that tap and his line started making those crazy figure eights you’d have thought he was ten. “Oh shit, oh shit—I got one,” he yelled, then jumped to his feet and started walking backward till the fish flopped in the weeds. It was a perch, I remember, black bars across its sides, fins edged with orange. They always were beautiful. I got a kick out of his excitement. The way he held it, you’d have thought it was made of glass—or gold.

We got into it pretty heavy, picking up tips from the old guys at the tackle shop, exploring along the shores of the reservoirs whenever Karen had something going on. It was an escape, like most things—we didn’t pretend it was anything else. We had some times, some laughs, climbing into the trees along the shore to get the lures others had broken off because we couldn’t afford a buck for a hula popper—even caught a few fish in the bargain. It was good. Makes sense we’d want to hold on to it.

It didn’t work. With the leaves down you could see the headlights from the traffic winding through the woods and the sky would be like it gets in winter and it just didn’t work. One weirdly warm day the four of us went back to the embankment like we used to, but the water was too cold to swim and the fish had stopped biting and we just sat around on the bank in our sweatshirts till we decided to leave. There was no point in pushing it, we said. You had to know when to let it go. There’d always be another summer.

The last time Ray and I went out to the reservoir casting for bass in the coves must have been around the 10
^th
because we talked about how we only had two weeks left of school before Christmas.

They didn’t do Christmas at his house anymore, Ray said. Used to be he and his old man would give each other something, and of course Gene when he was home—there’d always be something for him. He was thinking he might go out to Yonkers this year.

I told him that we used to have a tree and he was surprised because he’d never seen one at our house. Not often, I said. Once before Aaron died, another time when I was seven or eight. For a couple of years my dad had hung up lights on the bushes until he stopped.

“But you’re Jewish,” Ray said.

“We’re not really anything,” I said.

A cold fog was hanging over the reservoir. The water looked black. Ray reeled in and tucked the pole under his arm and blew on his fingers.

“These fish aren’t stupid, man. They’re probably all hangin’ out down there, sittin’ around their fish fires—”

Talking kept my teeth from chattering.

“—tails sticking out of their electric blankets, eating fondue …”

“What the fuck is fondue?”

“This cheese stuff you dip bread in—saw it in
Playboy
.”

“Shit, we should be using that—stick some fondue on a hook.”

“Or a good book.”

“That’s it—a big, fat book with a fishhook through it.”

He cast out. The lure made a little white circle in the water. “Fuck, you cold?”

“I was cold an hour ago,” I said.

A
FEW DAYS
before the end of school he came up to me in the hall. He was trying not to smile. I should come by the house, he said, he had something to show me.

She was lying in a corner of the living room on a blanket, five puppies the size of hamsters nosed up to her belly. Ray sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of her and Wilma thumped her tail twice on the boards without lifting her head. I’d never seen newborn puppies before.

“Can you believe this shit?” he said.

When he gently popped one off a nipple it started to mew like a kitten. He put it in my hand. It lay rocking back and forth in my palm, its tiny legs sticking out to the side.

“Amazing, right?”

“Unbelievable.”

He took it back and gave it the tip of his pinkie and it began to try to nurse. He smiled. “Not much comin’ outta there, little guy.”

I turned around.

He was leaning against the kitchen doorway, wearing only a pair of boxers. I was surprised how white his body was, the thick thighs, the neck wrinkled like some kind of animal hide, the tight gut with its broad stripe of hair, the reddened nipples. When he moved his weight I could see his dick shift under the cloth.

“Didn’t think we’d be seein’
you
again,” he said. “Now I know what it takes.”

Ray took the puppy back and pushed it up to Wilma’s belly, wiggling it back and forth like he was fitting a rubber pipe on a nozzle.

“How you doin’, Mr. Cappicciano?” I said.

“Somethin’, huh?” he said, nodding toward Wilma and the pups.

“Sure is,” I said.

“Sure is,” he said, smiling like a man clawing his way out of a well, “sure is. Hey, but that reminds me, you’re such a stranger these days, I didn’t know when we’d see you again. Gimme a sec—I got somethin’ for ya.”

“What’s
that
about?” I whispered when he was out of the room.

Ray didn’t answer. He’d stood up as soon as he’d put the puppy back.

Mr. Cappicciano came back in the room holding a hand-sized box. It was wrapped in deep blue wrapping paper with a small, silver ribbon.

I just stood there.

“Now I know you Jews don’t celebrate Christmas—”

“You didn’t have to—” I began.

“—and I don’t really know about Hanukkah—”

“—Really, you—”

“—but I figured, you know, ‘Season’s Greetings’ is kinda everybody, right?”

“Sure, yeah, thank you,” I said, taking the package. The wrapping paper had tiny silver lettering on it that said “Season’s Greetings” over and over.

“Figured ‘Season’s Greetings’ might be all right.”

“Sure,” I said, “thank you.”

“So, fine—go ahead, open it.”

I glanced at Ray.

“Don’t look at him—he had fuck-all to do with it.”

I looked at the package.

“This is just from me to you—outta respect to you and your family.”

“You sure? I mean—”

“Go ahead.”

I started to pry under the scotch-taped flap like a girl.

“Go ahead. Plenty more where that came from,” he said.

Wrapped in tissue paper I found a velvety black cloth embroidered with a skull and the letters SS like silver lightning bolts.

I didn’t know what to say, how to act. He seemed sincere, sober—he wanted me to like it. I remember standing there, my face burning like I was embarrassed.

“I don’t … thank you,” I said.

“You’re not offended?”

“Me? No. Thank you, it’s …”

“I figured, you know, who better than you people to have it? Take a little of your own back.”

“Sure, no—thank you,” I said again.

He smiled, then turned to go back into the kitchen. “Give my regards to your parents. Oh, and Merry Christmas—or whatever.”

W
E TALKED THAT YEAR
about going down to Times Square, the four of us watching the ball drop. Or the hammer, maybe. Paul Grecco’s brother Tommy had come home dead for Christmas, and even though I hadn’t known him, just like I hadn’t known Jim Sinclair or Mark Gonzales’s older brother who we heard was learning how to use a fork again in some VA hospital in Virginia, it got to you anyway. Everywhere you looked there were pictures of sweaty reporters with helmets on their heads and GIs sliding stretchers into helicopters like they were feeding something. We wanted to be done with ’69.

In the end Ray and I watched it on TV with the puppies teething on our sneakers. Frank had told his parents he didn’t want to teach Sunday school anymore and they’d grounded him for vacation. Karen had gone with her parents to Pittsburgh. She called just before midnight and Ray talked to her as the ball went down. “Me, too,” he said. “Really,” and then “Yeah, he’s right here,” and handed me the phone and we clanked beer cans and I talked to her for a while as the year 1970 flashed quietly on the TV. It looked strange, almost unnatural, like everything could be different now. She wanted to know how Ray was doing and I said he was good, and then she said, How’re
you
doing? and I laughed and said I’m fine, everybody’s fine and she said, Really? and I said, Yeah—really truly. She’d had a bad dream the night before, she said—it was like all day she’d been carrying it around, and I said not to worry about it, it was just a dream. I never asked.

We sat and watched the TV for a while. Ray’s dad wasn’t coming home that night and I hadn’t felt like sitting at the dinner table with mom and dad listening to Walter Cronkite tell me how it was. Anyway, in my house there were no new years.

I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about that night. We messed around with the puppies for a while, piling them on top of each other, flipping them on their backs. Their fur had come in. One was brown like Wilma, one was black and the other three were in-between. At some point we heard sleet on the window, dry, like sand, like somebody was trying to get our attention.

Maybe it was the beer but somehow we got onto Frank and from him to God and from God to what happened when you died. It was hard to think of people actually being gone, Ray said—you expected them to just be somewhere else, like on vacation. Like any day they could just pop up. And he told me about a farm they used to go to when he was a kid that had been run by an old lady with warts like pencil erasers on her cheeks named Mrs. Kelly. She’d been dead for years and the farm sold and gone, but some part of him still expected her to be where he’d seen her last, twisting the dirt balls off the lettuce or coming up from the root cellar. Even weirder, he expected it to be summer—a chilly morning, everything still wet. It was like she was fixed there—like in a snow globe.

“Except summer,” I said.

“Maybe that’s what heaven’s like,” he said. “Just being stuck in somebody else’s head.”

I said I didn’t know.

We thought about it for a while. The beer had slowed us down.

He looked at the TV. We’d turned the sound off. You could hear the wind shaking the windows, rattling the walls. “Yeah, I don’t know, you know?—The way I figure, if nobody thinks about your ass after you’re gone, that’s pretty much it.”

“Guess so,” I said.

The sleet hissed against the glass.

He shook his head. “Fuckin’ Tommy Grecco, man. Never liked that clown.”

S
OMETIMES,
sitting on my bed in my room, I’d take my stopwatch and press the button just to watch that second hand fly. Imagining it, seeing it. Sometimes I’d be running lead-off, standing with five or six others in the miler’s half crouch, the lane narrowing like a dagger. A little unsteady, bumping shoulders—listening for the gun. Other times I’d be running anchor, waiting for the baton as the third man hit the straight, that mask of pain on his face, feeling the tickle of pee escaping into my jockstrap.

I’d press the button, explode off the line, heart pounding, hands slippery with sweat, watching that needle sweeping with terrible swiftness around the face, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, fifty, a minute. Stop. Press again. All I thought about was time.

The half-mile, a controlled sprint. If you didn’t have speed, you didn’t run it. Every race had something—the half-mile was special because it was right in the middle. You could be a quarter-miler, stepping up, and lose to a miler with speed who’d wear you down. You could be a miler coming down, trespassing, and get eaten up by the velocity of it.

Time—what we could do with it, how we could make it add up at the end. A two-mile relay meant four runners running a half-mile apiece. If all four ran their half in two minutes—a bragging time in high school back then—it would make an eight-minute two-mile relay. Except that hardly anyone had four runners who could run a two-minute half. They might have one guy. Or two. Maybe. And then there was the question of where to put the star—at the start, in the hope that he could break it open, gain such a lead that the other teams would fold? Or at the end, as anchor, figuring that if all was lost and you were ten yards behind at the handoff, or twenty, he could somehow bring it home?

Peter Michaelis, Mr. Time Tunnel, had run a 2:10 that December, hopeless except for the fact that North Adams’s fourth guy was only a second faster. Moore could pull a 2:04 on a good day, giving away another second to their third. The summer before, I’d slipped under 2:00 for the first time, which matched me up pretty well with their second-best. Kennedy was our answer. He’d run 1:57 flat, could do it again. Balger might have the power in the mile, but Kennedy had the speed.

Numbers, split times—it was my obsession. We became a club, a unit, the four of us pushing each other, yelling to each other in the early dark as we came around the curve, the wind cutting through our sweats. When Peter ran 2:09 at an early indoor meet, stumbling around afterward like a cut puppet, you’d have thought we’d won gold in Mexico City what with all the hugging and back-slapping and Falvo yelling “Banzai!” from the sidelines. Moore lifted the poor kid clear off the ground. It seemed to matter then. It seemed to matter a lot.

T
HE HOLIDAYS SLID BY
like a stone over ice, leaving nothing much to remember. A couple of cloudless days so cold it hurt the inside of your nose to breathe, a couple more of wet snow when Karen left for Pittsburgh. At night you’d see the porches standing out like colored frames in the dark.

I ran, I listened to music, I sold some shoes in my dad’s store. We worked quietly, handing each other things; when we talked it was usually in code—shank and footbed, tongue and throat—one of us calling, “Can you get me a ten and a half double E in the Stacy Adams Ox black piping?” or suggesting, straight-faced, sitting next to each other on the fitting stools, that maybe old Mr. Hennessey might like to see the Florsheim Mods. I was surprised to see the respect my dad’s customers had for him—I’d never really noticed it. It was like he was some visiting ambassador selling shoes on a whim; he’d smile and offer the kids a lollipop out of the jar he kept by the register, and the parents, who’d been smacking the little brats a second ago, would beam like a lollipop was some old world rarity and say, “Isn’t that nice? Now what do you say to Mr. Mosher, honey?” and when they were leaving he’d say, “Lovely to see you again” and, “Thank you so much for coming” and see them to the door with a smile and a nod—almost a bow—and they’d try to do the same back.

“Why do you always do that?” I asked him once.

“It is the way I was raised,” he said. He was putting some shoes back in their boxes, checking the labels to get it right.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Of course. Ask.”

“Do you like doing this?”

He smiled at the penny loafer in his hand, then laid it next to its twin and covered it with tissue paper.

“It is what it is,” he said. He put the lid on the box, then stacked it and stood up. “You have homework this weekend?”

“Some, yeah.”

He nodded. “Go. I can finish up.”

A
S OFTEN AS WE COULD
that winter the three of us would go visit Frank—he was allowed to have visitors—watching our language, stepping carefully. Frank’s mother would always wipe her hands on her apron and apologize about everything like you were the Pope but if you said something wrong you’d see her wince and she’d stop talking. Frank’s dad was a short guy with little veins in his nose who always seemed pissed, like everything you said tried his patience. He’d set up a manger on the front lawn, a small wooden house with a wall missing, three Wise Men, a donkey, a horse, and a bunch of plastic sheep. The Christ child, a doll with a tinfoil halo, lay in a wicker basket on real straw. The Three Wise Men were set up on the side, two of them standing, one on his knees like he’d been kicked. They didn’t look surprised or happy. They just looked blank. We said something to Mr. Krapinski about the manger, how it must have taken a lot of work, and he said, what if it did, Christ had died for our sins after all, and we agreed.

That winter Karen gave me a copy of Albert Camus’s
The Stranger
which floored me when I read it though I only half understood it. “Mother died today, or, maybe, yesterday, I can’t be sure.” That’s how it started. It was about this Algerian guy who kills some Arab for no real reason. We kept talking about it, the two of us, trying to figure it out, but my feeling was there was nothing to figure out. This guy, Meursault, was who he was. He was like a sack that’s been filled up with certain things—just like all of us. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he killed somebody. And it didn’t matter to him. It was like some kind of natural law—sooner or later it would have its say.

She was with Ray a lot so I didn’t see her much, but when I did, that’s what we talked about. How you stood things, or not. Like Hemingway, we said. He’d stood things as long as he could. Some things were so bad you couldn’t laugh at them. Others were so bad you had to—or shoot yourself, like he did. Or somebody else, like the guy in
The Stranger
did. The worst things, we agreed, were the things you couldn’t touch.

T
HAT JANUARY
28
^TH
I turned eighteen. I didn’t expect anything. We didn’t really celebrate birthdays at my house—a kiss and a shirt, maybe, or my mother might make
Wiener Schnitzel
for dinner—and that was ok with me. Mostly I’d just want to get through. We’d all put a brave face on it—my father would tell his joke about the old guy wanting to die in the Holy Land (“To die, OK, but to live here?”) and my mother would smile and shake her head—the three of us marching steadily on toward the Obsttorte, straining not to hurry, to say the right things, like people on a tour of a house they hate.

That night, long after we were done, my dad knocked on my door and asked if I could talk. I thought he’d gone to bed; my mother had been asleep for hours. I moved some stuff over and he sat at my desk and asked if I was still thinking about traveling the next summer—that he thought it was a good idea, for a young man, travel. I said I didn’t know and he nodded and looked around my room and said, “I know that it is not always …,” and stopped, like he’d forgotten what he wanted to say.

He reached behind his back and handed me a small box wrapped in blue wrapping paper with gold noisemakers all over it. I was just glad it didn’t say “Season’s Greetings.”
That
one I’d hidden in my closet where it lay ticking like the guy’s heart in the Poe story, waiting to bury me. I’d taken it out the night before after locking my door, terrified they’d hear the bolt sliding home in their sleep. What would they say if they found it there, hidden like a bookmark in the first volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
? How perfect that would be. The bastards had taken their first life, and now the son who’d taken their second was hiding their treasures in his closet. It was almost poetic.

It was a watch.

“Thanks,” I said. “Really, it’s—”

“It is no-sink,” he said. Twenty-five years in this country, I thought.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It is from both of us—your mother, too.”

I didn’t say anything.

“So, OK.” He patted my leg, then got up to go.

“Thanks,” I said again, and he nodded and left.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
Karen returned from Pittsburgh and Christmas break was pretty much wrapped. A day later Frank was released from house arrest straight into school. He still wasn’t teaching Sunday school, he said. He had a right. He was gonna come to California with us, he said.