Brewster (3 page)

I
KNEW ABOUT HIM
long before we were friends. Ray Cappicciano. Ray Cap.

I can hear Copeland in the teachers’ room, the smoky dimple in the middle of that Petri dish of ignorance and cruelty and crap: “Cappicciano? Erratic. Unpredictable. Insane, basically. No impulse control. He’ll charm you one minute—he isn’t stupid, there’s
somethin’
goin’ on in there—shove you down the stairs the next. I’m tellin’ you, twenty to life before he’s thirty. Suspended? Sure, he holds the record. Old man’s an ex-cop—had to leave the force. Runs in the family. Bruises? You mean
this
week’s?”

And they’d all laugh and the women in their tight-across-the-ass knee-length skirts would take their stained cigarettes from between their cracked lips and lay them across their coffee cups and pick them up again and Copeland, encouraged, would do his ring announcer routine: “Ladies aaaand Gentlemen, welcome to the Fight of the Week. In this corner, wearing ripped jeans and a bad attitude, ‘Raging Bull-Shit Cappicciano.”

And he’d tell them about the time with Malatesta. “You’ll love this,” he’d say. “So you know Sal. He gets into this thing with the little punk for like, I dunno, the hundredth time for not having his homework, right? Asks him what his excuse is and the kid says his dog ate it. Seriously. So Sal loses his temper. He’s got that bow tie on, he’s got that one-room schoolhouse thing goin’. He’s gonna make him write it two hundred times—the dog ate my homework, the dog ate my homework, then sign it “Loser.”

The kid slams back to his seat. Half an hour later he walks up and hands over a piece of paper. Sal takes one look and throws a book at him but he’s already out the door. He’s drawn a picture—a good one, I’ve seen it—of a bulldog in a bow tie. Next to the dog is a bowl with the name Loser on it. Not bad, right? But here’s the weird part. There’s this pattern behind the pooch. You’re thinkin’ wallpaper, roses—wanna guess? Give up? Knuckles. He’s picked the scabs off his knuckles and pressed them into the paper, over and over.” And Copeland would press his fleshy fist into the air over the table, then lean back in his chair and spread his arms and throw one leg over the other to adjust his crotch. “OK?”

I don’t mean to say they all hated him—at least not early on. Some did, sure, and they grabbed every chance they had to cut the legs out from under him. As if he was a real threat. As if it was personal. As if he wasn’t sixteen, or seventeen. The rest were amused by him; he was the clown, the cut-up, the All-American delinquent with the reckless face and the chipped tooth who might not know much about algebra but who’d win the girl in the end and they’d turn a blind eye and shake their heads and kick him in the balls now and then just to keep things clear between them—that so long as he stayed more colorful than sullen and didn’t cause them extra work, everything would be fine. Hell, if it came down to it they’d take him over the bookworms with their snotty questions any day.

Mainly only the cafeteria ladies with the plastic bags on their heads, who nobody fucked with, were different. They’d always been decent to me. Mary—who even the teachers didn’t call Mary—who had big, gravy-speckled arms and no wrists and who always looked just one stupid question away from enraged—would take my tray from me and carefully spoon the macaroni and cheese on it herself instead of reaching through the metal shelves and slapping it down like with everyone else and say in that gravelly Dublin brogue, “All right, there you go,” or, “More?” and even, once, “You’ll ’ave to eat to keep up with all that studyin’ you’re doin’,” which coming from her was a benediction.

But if Mary and the others were human to me, they’d flat-out adopted Ray. They loved him. He could do no wrong. He’d josh around and fool with them, compliment them on their plastic head bags and ask if he could put one on and they’d roll their eyes and pretend to be annoyed, all the while glowing like schoolgirls, and he’d tell them to stay out of trouble, that he’d been hearing some things, and then he’d push his hair back and take his heaping tray and leave.

It was how we met, sort of. I’d been waiting in line, amazed and resentful, listening to him ask for more of this and less of that and “How about a little more crust there, Mary?” and “I don’t know, I gotta watch my figure,” and “No, I’m serious, apple crisp helps you think,” until, sick of waiting, I started toward the cashier. When he cut me off I just stared at him.

“Fuck
you
lookin’ at?” he said.

I shook my head. He turned back to the cashier.

“That’s a lot of apple crisp,” I said.

He turned and looked at me—he seemed so much older to me then—deciding I guess if I was worth the trouble, then gave a small shrug.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. He paused. “So eat shit.” And he walked away.

He’d just come back from being suspended—something having to do with the back bleachers and some girl from Carmel. The halls were thick with rumors.

“Bullshit, it’s fuckin’ soaked under there,” I heard some guy say by the juniors’ lockers.

“You do it standin’ up, moron,” said the other.

T
HAT FALL
a thick-necked kid with big arms and acne on his neck sat across from me at lunch, ate, and left. We didn’t say anything. The table was half-empty. I’d gotten tired of sitting with kids who all seemed to have something to say to each other so I usually just read a book. The next day he was back. He put his tray down, stepped over the bench and ate, pushing his food around, first one way, then the other, then into a pile, all the time shoveling like it was work and he might as well get to it. He looked like Moose Mason from Archie Comics. When he was done he picked up his tray and left.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that he was sitting across from me every day because he was lonely. I didn’t mind. From a distance we probably looked like we could be friends. To make it easier for him I started sitting at the same table so it would look like his sitting there every day was about the table, not me, and when a girl from my English class who was fat thirty years before everybody else asked if she could sit with me at lunch one day, I said I needed to study because I didn’t want him to feel bad and so lost one of the few people I knew who would talk to me.

When he didn’t show up anyway I told myself I didn’t give a shit and left early. The next day he was back, the muscles twitching in his forearms, breaking the powdery buns into his chili.

It took three days to learn his name. “Sup, Frank?” some guy walking by with his tray said, and he gave a small nod, and then a few days later somebody yelled, “Hey, Krapinski, man, what did Jesus eat at the last lunch?” and he slowly raised his left arm without looking up or lifting his elbow off the table or missing a stab with the fork and gave him the finger. A week later he was gone. For a few days I looked around the cafeteria for him, then forgot about it.

T
HAT NOVEMBER,
Mr. Falvo, who taught American history, stopped me on my way out of class. It was my sophomore year. Falvo was a quick-moving, sharp-featured man with flat, razor-scraped cheeks, an Alfalfa cowlick and a shriveled right arm that looked like it belonged on an eight-year-old and felt—I knew because he insisted on shaking hands with it, hunching forward to make up the distance—exactly like a warm, dead fish. He’d gotten it in the war—Okinawa, they said.

Whatever else he was—and he was a lot of things—Étienne (Ed) Falvo was not a simple guy. First generation out of the Bronx, second out of Aosta, Italy, he was badgering, impatient, generous—hard to resist and hard to take. Everything about him seemed too much—too much curiosity, too much enthusiasm, too much energy—until you realized that you were looking at something like a happy man, a man condemned to love this world the way a father might love his convict son. Helplessly. Knowing better.

He was always talking, yelling, laughing, “NO, Barkus, by God you’re an embarrassment to idiots, promise me you won’t multiply except in math. NO! In the early eighteenth century, with the exception of the locals we hadn’t gotten around to yet, our great land west of the Alleghenies was about as empty as Jones’s head, and ‘Bleedin’ Kansas’ was NOT bleedin’ because it did not EXIST! Miss Mazzola—yes, that would be you, my dear—confirm my faith in your gender and tell me within half a century when ‘Bleedin’ Kansas’ was actually bleedin’. NO!” And he’d throw a piece of chalk at her head. “Washburn!”

The rest of the class had filed out. “I’m going to be late,” I said.

“How tall are you, Mosher?” he said. “How tall would you say?” He’d leaned back in his wooden teacher’s chair and put his black shoes on his desk. I’d spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of quick, chattering animal he reminded me of.

“I gotta go,” I said.

“How tall? Six? Six-one? Maybe one fifty-five? It’s not a test, Mosher, you can’t fail this one.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You know what I’m asking.”

“You’re asking me how tall I am.”

“Don’t be stupid, Mosher, it doesn’t suit you. I want you to try out for the track team. The brooding demeanor, the chip on your shoulder—you could be perfect.”

“I really …”

“Four o’clock, Mosher. Legs and balls are required, the brain is optional—may in fact be a hindrance. You’ve got the legs, we’ll see about the rest—I’m not expecting much.”

“I don’t really do sports,” I said.

“This is America, Mosher—don’t put that in writing.” He lowered his voice. “In any case, foot racing is not a sport. Gladiatorial combat with the mace and the trident was not a sport. The Sun Dance of the Plains Indians was not a sport. Foot racing is a conviction, a calling. You think Geronimo would have joined the basketball team? You think Thomas Jefferson would be doing layups? No! Jefferson would have been a miler!”

He’d been scribbling something with his left hand while he talked, and now he handed me a folded note.

“For your next inquisitor. By the way, that last paper wasn’t entirely hopeless though I’m still considering what grade to give it, and yes, in case you’re wondering, it’s completely unethical for me to blackmail you this way so if you tell anyone I’ll be forced, as the tape recording says to that constipated-looking blond man in
Mission Impossible
, to disavow all knowledge of your existence.” He grinned. “Dismissed, Mosher.”

I
WAS ALREADY WALKING HOME
that afternoon when I turned around. I don’t know why. Half the things we do we do by accident.

I found them in the old gym that always smelled of sweat and wood and heat rub, an unimpressive-looking group of twenty or thirty whose faces I vaguely recognized from the hallways and the parking lot, stretching in a loose circle around a guy with long brown hair and a red headband. To the left, carefully lacing up his sneakers, was the kid from lunch—Frank. Nobody noticed me. They were bullshitting quietly, reaching for their toes or bicycling in the air, and I was about to leave when Falvo rushed in carrying a boxful of gray sweat pants and a clipboard which he held pinned to his chest with his shriveled right hand.

“Mr. Jefferson,” he called, “I see you’ve abandoned your principles and listened to the voice of reason. Shoe size?”

I told him.

“Back room. Pick a pair. And put these on.” A few faces looked over lazily, not smiling.

I
HAD NO IDEA
I was going to do what I did. Looking back, I can see the two roads dividing like in the poem but I never stopped, never considered, never looked back. I just went—and it was like opening something. Kids these days cut themselves. My way was better, but it was the same thing.

He stood propping the metal door, the stopwatch in his good hand—
Let’s go, gentlemen, let’
s go, Mr. Jefferson,
and we jogged out into the wind which smelled like mud, across the football field and up a small rise to the dirt track. This was a time trial, he said—a one-mile time trial, four laps—not a race. It was meant to give an idea of where we stood, no more.

We’d gathered around the middle of the long side of the track, just ten or twelve of us, including three others who seemed new like me, jogging back and forth in the wind, loosening up. The rest, including Frank, had walked over to the other side of the field.

Falvo took me aside. “Warmed up? How’re the shoes?”

“Fine.” In the distance I could see kids walking toward the parking lot. The sun stabbed out from under the clouds, glancing off the windshields.

He raised his voice over the wind. “All right, I want you all to stay contained, stay smooth. I don’t want to see anybody draining the well today—that means you, Mr. McCann.” A tall, tough-looking kid with red hair and a tight face smiled like a gunslinger.

He turned to me. “I don’t want you doing anything stupid, Mosher. Some of these boys have been at it for a while. Don’t think about them, think about yourself.”

I shrugged.

“Pace yourself. Let them do what they do. They’ll be about thirty yards ahead after the first lap. Don’t worry about them. Go out slow, feel your way, then bring it home as best you can. OK?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Remember, it’s a time trial. Not a race.”

T
HERE WAS NO GUN.
We lined up in the gusty wind, Falvo standing in the soggy infield in his dress shoes holding his clipboard like a small high table against his chest with his left hand and his stopwatch in his right and then he barked, “Runners … marks? Go!”

They didn’t run, they flowed—the kid in the headband, the redheaded kid, and two or three others in particular—with a quiet, aggressive, sustained power that looked like nothing but felt like murder and I was with them and then halfway through the third turn they were moving away smooth as water and I could hear them talking among themselves, joking,
Bullshit—Lisa Arrone? I swear to God, she just reaches in and I’m—
and I was slowing, burning, leaning back like there was a rope around my neck. “Too fast, Mosher, too fast,” I heard Falvo yelling, and his ax-sharp face came out of nowhere looking almost frantic and then it was gone and there was just the sound of my breathing and the crunch of my sneakers slapping the dirt. The group, still in a tight cluster, wasn’t all that far ahead of me.