Brewster (8 page)

“Think so? You haven’t met the neighbors,” said the painter, who was scrunched up on the couch moving his toes around with his fingers like he had a cramp.

“We dig it,” said the woman from the kitchen.

“Anyway, it’s a beautiful place,” Tina said.

“Bug in every bloom, take my word for it.”

“Mostovsky’s pretty cool,” the woman called out. We could hear her talking to the rats: “Come here, sweetheart—you want an olive?”

Someone at the A&P had told her the baby looked like Moses in the Bullrushes, she said.

“Jesus.”

“No—Moses.”

“What did
you
say?”

“I said, ‘Moses ’n’ the Bullrushes’—didn’t they open for Hendrix at Monterey?”

The painter chuckled. “Hey, baby, you want to bring the papers?”

“Who’s driving?”

“You are.” He turned to us. “Sure you won’t partake?”

I shook my head.

“Sure, if it’s cool,” Tina said.

His wife came in and handed him a bag of weed and some papers.

“Anyway, all I was saying was, you know, it’s been tried before, no ties, no guilt”—he licked the joint and lit it—“and it hasn’t worked out so well. All those utopian communities in the nineteenth century—it always gets fucked up in the end.”

“So then how come you guys aren’t married?” Tina said.

He handed her the joint. “Marriage was invented by the church to control sex—everybody knows that.”

“See, that’s what I mean. All this shit that keeps us, like”—she passed it back—“tied down and miserable is changing, right? I mean, you guys are a perfect example of …”

“Muddling,” the woman called from the kitchen. “We’re a perfect example of muddling.”

He took a long toke. “Anyway, don’t get me wrong—I’m all for love. It’s just, you know, I don’t think it’s free.”

He started rummaging around in a pile of books. “Ever read Marcuse?” He tossed a paperback into the hammock. “It’s about how—fuck, what’s it about? It’s about how we’ve been, like, pacified by stuff.”

“Because affluence represses the need for liberation,” the woman called out.

“Right. Exactly. It’s like we’re living in a big room so full of shit we can’t even see that we
need
to be liberated.”

Tina took a hit and passed it back. “Sure, OK, but what’s that got to do with—”

“OK, so you ever see
Let’s Make a Deal
? Yeah, like on TV. So they give you a prize, some medium-sized piece of crap—let’s say a TV—and now you have to choose to, like, keep it, or trade it for something behind door number one—which the lovely Katie is pointing to—or door number two or whatever. If you guess right, you get to trade in your medium-sized piece of crap for a bigger one. If you guess wrong, OK, you get what’s called a Zonk—which could be a llama, or a lot of food, or a room full of old furniture—and everybody laughs. After the show of course you get to trade it in for bread.”

“We once met a guy who took the pig,” the woman said, coming in and taking the joint.

“You what?”

She took a hit, let it out. “We met a guy who took the pig. This huge sow. He’s …” They were all laughing by now, squeaking out “he took the pig,” and “zonked with a pig.” “He’s supposed to trade it in after the show for, like, I don’t know, whitewall tires or the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
or something—”

“It’s like Joseph McCarthy with hooves.”

“—and he says, like, fuck you, I want the pig. It’s staring out the bars of this little Green Acres pen like it’s tryin’ to figure out who to kill first but they have to give it to him ’cause it’s in the contract so they bring it down in the service elevator and throw it on the forklift to get it in his truck and he drives away.”

She walked back to the kitchen.

The artist wiped the tears out of his eyes. “Jesus. Anyway, the machine is like
Let’s Make a Deal
, man. It controls all the options. Want to know what matters? Pick a curtain. Want to figure out who you’re gonna be? Pick a box. Because that’s your choice: door number one or door number two. When the truth is, we’re surrounded by doors, when every breath we take is a door.”

Tina was sitting up in the hammock. “But that’s exactly why we have to, you know, get off the show or pick the pig or whatever—”

“Sure, yeah, I’m cool with that.”

“So—”

“All I’m sayin’ is it’s not
all
out there, OK, it’s not
all
the man—that people are pretty good at poisoning their minds all by themselves. That while you’re, like, fighting to get free from Big Daddy you can’t forget the little daddy in your head because he’s busy knocking together a cell with your name on it. It’s like, I don’t know, original sin or something, except God’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

The woman came into the room, wiping her hands on a rag. “We gotta split, Mike.” She looked at us. “Listen, you kids want to stay?”

T
HEY WERE GONE
in ten minutes. They didn’t care that we weren’t a couple, or that they’d just met us. It was cool either way, come or go, leave or stay, one of us or both. A quick, disorganized little whirlwind—“Yeah, it’s a drag we have to go into the city … Go, you can get dressed in the car … You want to bring the turtle, bring it”—and they had the rats in a cage and the cage in the car with the kids—the little girl walking up the hill naked dragging a long striped towel, the boy carrying a turtle ahead of himself like an offering—had flashed a quick peace sign through the window and split.

We just stood there in the quiet, listening to the car bumping down the dirt.

“I can’t believe they’d do that,” Tina said. “That’s just so cool.”

I could feel her there next to me—her hair, her sun-brown neck, the hollows below her hip bones just above her jeans. I could feel my stomach, tight against my belt.

She turned and started back down to the cabin. “What do you want to do? Man, I am
so
high.”

“I should probably take off,” I said. Something in me was shaking like those leaves you sometimes see spinning like crazy when nothing around them is moving. She was barefoot, stepping down carefully from rock to rock. When she swayed, reaching out to steady herself against a tree, her hip, like it had turned liquid, kept going till it brushed the bark.

I tried again: “It’s just that it’s late and all and—”

We’d reached the bottom. It was going to rain—the swallows were everywhere, flashing white, dipping, banking over the water.

“So what do we do now?” she said, turning to look at me.

I couldn’t speak. Somewhere in the woods, a thousand tiny frogs were screaming at once. A fat bumblebee, drunk on pollen, bumped twice into the screen over the window and buzzed away.

“You want to go skinny-dipping?”

“I—”

She took a step toward me, beaten, beautiful, the look on her face somewhere between a smile and a dare. “Would that cool you off, you think?”

“I don’t—”

“Is that what you want?” She reached behind her back, breathing through her mouth now, and the halter fell to the ground. “How about this—this what you want?” And she was in my arms, the heat of her coming through my t-shirt, her hips pressed against mine, her lips, her nose, the freckles on her cheek right there, right there. And she had me by the hand and was pulling me toward the door.

It was a blur, a haze—the tangled sheets, the way she moved, the smell of cedar and damp and her hair falling over my face—all of it unbelievable even as it was happening. She did everything—I didn’t even know I was naked and she was over me, her thighs pressed against my hips, and I felt her reach under and back, her breasts spreading against my chest, and suddenly I’d broken in, was sliding up into that clutching warmth, and I just lay there—too young, too scared, to know what to do, knowing this thing was happening, feeling her moving over me but terrified that nothing would happen, that something was wrong with me. And then I felt it: a stirring, a fullness rising up in me like a wall, irresistibly, shamefully, and she sat up, feeling it too now, slowing, then slowing some more, whispering “Come on, give it to me then,” and blind to the world now, desperate, I clawed higher and broke in her like a wave, then again, and again, and heard her laugh, surprised, then ride it down into stillness.

She was still moving, breathing hard, holding my face in her hands. “I guess it’s been a while, huh?” She pulled back, flushed, to look at my face, and stopped. “Oh, no, you’re kidding,” she said.

I couldn’t speak.

“Oh, my God,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth. “Baby, I had no idea that—”

I’d begun to get hard in her again. I was sixteen.

She kissed me deep. “What’s this?” she whispered. “We have more for Mama?”

She’d started moving again. She was looking right at me, one hand on my face, the other slipped down between us, vulnerable, beautiful. “What the fuck,” she said, her words spacing to the rise and fall like someone riding a horse, “might—as well—ring it in—right.”

I
SKIPPED THREE DAYS
in a row. The first afternoon she dropped me off a block from my house and I walked home in the rain and let myself in like I was coming home from school. I told my parents I’d be doing my homework at Frank’s. I was nervous they’d notice something, see the change in my face, my voice, my life. They didn’t. I found her where I’d left her, listening to the radio, her brown leg sticking out the car window. Later that night I called to say I’d be sleeping over at Frank’s house. They were fine with it.

I did the same thing the next night, and the one after. Was it alright with Frank’s mother? Absolutely, I said. I knew they didn’t have the number, wouldn’t look it up. I’d left a note with Ray, asking him not to come by the house, that I’d explain.

Every morning she’d call me in sick: I was still down with something, she’d say, looking at me, mouthing the word “me.” I was running a fever, she said—my glands were swollen. She’d hang up the phone. “Well, really just the one,” she’d say, “but it’s
so
swollen—I don’t think you can go to school like this.” She’d have me out by then. “I better
not
be your mother,” she’d say.

It rained, off and on, the whole time. It didn’t matter. I built big smoky fires in the fireplace. We made tacos out of the stuff she bought in Putnam Lake by herself because we didn’t want to chance somebody seeing me. One day the sun came through for a while and she walked naked over the steaming grass and out on the dock and dove in and I watched her moving under the surface, ghostly, familiar, parting the water like she was squeezing through a row of narrow windows. I’d never felt so free. On the other side of the lake I could see a fisherman in a rowboat, his line snaking back and forth against the trees, but he was far away.

I have no idea what we talked about. Everything, I thought. We didn’t leave much undone. Whole afternoons would pass while we made love or lay in bed, the sky getting darker, and I remember sitting up while she read my palm, her fingernails tracing my lifeline which intersected with something else. It didn’t make much sense to me. I wasn’t really listening, anyway. I’d be a poet or a murderer, she decided finally, then whispered, “Hey, I’ve got something for you that I think you’ll like,” and slid down and took me in her mouth.

“I can’t believe I’m balling little Jon Mosher,” she said to me once as we lay together, her head tucked under my chin. She laughed, squeezed me around the ribs. “I didn’t mean it that way, baby—you’re fine—it’s just, you know, I’ve known you since you were a baby. I remember when your brother—” She stopped. “Oh, wow. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

She leaned up on an elbow. “I wasn’t …”

“Really,” I said, “it’s fine.”

It was almost dusk. “Do you remember him?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“He was a sweet kid.”

“I’ve heard.”

“You really don’t remember him? You have to remember something.”

I shook my head. “I mean, I was only four when it happened.”

She’d been running her fingers absentmindedly up and down my chest as we talked.

“Still, you’d think—” She stopped, looked up at me. “Oh, my God,” she said. She breathed out—her smile rueful, warm, suddenly protective: “You’re sixteen?”

I
WANTED TO GO
with her, I said. I meant it. I had no reason to stay. We’d had a great time, she said.

“I want to go with you,” I said.

“Where?”

“I don’t care. Anywhere.”

“Baby, I have no idea where I’m going.”

“Fine.”

She was pretty sure that was called kidnapping. She’d been planning to split, anyway, she said.

She didn’t laugh when I told her I loved her. She didn’t pat me on the head or patronize me or tell me she wasn’t into being exclusive with a sixteen-year-old kid. She didn’t make me feel bad for sitting there on the edge of the bed like some six-foot one-inch infant, wiping my eyes with my wrists, humiliated. She didn’t push me away any harder than she had to—she just left. She gave me a hug and told me I was a great kid and that we’d see each other again someday and then she put me in the car and dropped me off a block from my house and drove away.

And the way I learned to think of it, I’d had my three days. Though I’d miss out on all the grooviness the next summer, I’d had my share of the promise, of Richie Havens singing “Freedom” like a cry, like that rhythm could make it so, like he was John Henry up against the machine and he’d pound those strings till he died. I’d had a taste—this is what I told myself—and cut out just before the mud and the shit came down.

M
OST THINGS
didn’t change much—some did. Summer came and went, a heavy blanket you couldn’t get out from under. School ended and they killed Bobby Kennedy and then it was the Fourth and we were watching them turn the hose on the field where the fireworks had set the weeds on fire. I took long runs around the reservoirs in the mornings before the heat came on, slapping deer flies into my hair. The afternoons I spent in my dad’s store, the two of us working quietly, sorting, stacking, then walked over to Ray’s, sweating up that long hill as the light changed, then died, and the first soft thunder like bombs in the distance sounded in the still air.

We didn’t hang around the house much because his dad’s hours had been cut back. I’d come over some days and Mr. Cappicciano’d be sitting on the couch in the heat staring at the TV like he wasn’t seeing it at all, a can of beer in his hand and I’d say, “How you doin’, Mr. Cappicciano?” and he’d turn his head slowly from the TV and look at me for a few seconds like he didn’t know who I was, and then something would click in his eyes and he’d nod.

He always seemed, if not glad to see me, exactly, then something like it. Like it mattered to him what I thought of him. Almost like he wanted my approval. It’s complicated. I knew what he was like.

I’d come over some days and there’d be a cruiser parked by the curb and I’d hear them talking through the screen.

“They’re fuckin’ everywhere now,” I’d hear somebody say. “Comin’ up from the Bronx, from Newark. Fuckin’ breedin’ like rabbits.”

“Tell me about it. My sister and brother-in-law got a place down in Riverdale—three bedroom apartment, river view—”

“No shit—river view?”

“Fuckin’ beautiful. Families, kids … I used to love goin’ down there, right? Ball fields, tennis courts, you-name-it. So three years ago they have to let ’em in, some fair housing bullshit—”

Somebody would fart.

“Right?”

“Same thing in the force,” I’d hear Mr. Cappicciano say.

“Fuckin’ Coonville now—”

“Queen of Commissioners could suck my cock, I wouldn’t go back.”

“—garbage in the hallways, needles—they’re scared to let the kids out the door. Last time I was down there, I didn’t fuckin’ recognize it.”

“And now he can’t sell, right?” said another voice.

“Who’s he gonna sell to? It’s like back in Virginia. Fuckin’ nigger holla down there.”

“I’d make that nigga holler,” Mr. Cappicciano said.

Everybody laughed. “You did, fuckin’ A.”

“That’s right, an’ look what happened to me? No, I’m tellin’ ya, I’m fuckin’ glad I’m out. You gotta deal with ’em runnin’ loose—least where I am we got ’em in a box.”

And I’d knock on the door.

“Fuck was that?” somebody would say.

“Somebody at the door.”

“Jesus.”

“Who is it?” Mr. Cappicciano would yell, and I’d come in and say hello and the others would grunt and Mr. Cappicciano would say, “Upstairs,” and I’d walk through the quiet and up to Ray’s room.

I was on the landing when I heard them that first time, though I could only hear pieces.

“—Jewish,” I heard Mr. Cappicciano say.

“—talks Kraut?”

“—where they’re from. Before they fuckin’ killed ’em all.”

Somebody said something I couldn’t make out, and somebody laughed.

“Yeah, well, this one’s alright,” Mr. Cappicciano said. “Got a head on his shoulders, not like my moron—like to shove
him
back where he came from, know what I mean?” He belched. “Probably got a law against that too, now.”

“Sounds like this one’s gonna be one a them Jew lawyers, why don’t you ask him?”

“I’ll take a Jew lawyer over some guinea cocksucker outta Bayonne—these people’ll fuckin’ chew their leg off to survive.”

“Chew
your
leg off’s more like it.”

“Hey, fuck you, Mikey.”

“What’s with you?”

“What’s with me?”

“Yeah, what’s with you. I mean, what the fuck?”

“What’s with me? I’ll tell you what’s with me. Shit I seen in the service, what they did to those people? Un-fuckin’-believable.”

“So what’s your point?”

“What’s my point? I’ll tell you what’s my point. Twenty years later, here they are, runnin’ the show. That’s what I’m sayin’, Mikey. This kid? Fuckin’ smart.”

I
LIKED HIS RESPECT.
I did. I played up to it.

I knew what he was, but it was like he was trapped in it, like he was looking for a door out of himself. And sometimes—in the way he’d look at me, like an animal staring out of a shrinking cage—I’d get the feeling I was that door. That he was hanging on to me somehow, asking me something. That he studied me, admired me, because I was something he’d never be. Truth is, if he hadn’t been who he was, it wouldn’t have meant as much.

I knew it wasn’t easy on Ray, that he was embarrassed by him. Still, there were times, I think, when it made me feel like I had something over him, like maybe there was a reason why his old man noticed me, admired me, and the more he did, the more I believed it. He’d chuckle at my jokes, listen to what I said, nod. I had sense. We were different people, he seemed to be saying, but we agreed on things. It was about approval. And trust. And a strange kind of gratitude.

I knew who he was. I must have.

I came over one afternoon and didn’t see him at first because the TV was off. There was a storm coming up over the tracks and the room had that look like somebody pulling a hood over the world. He was just sitting there on the sofa in his boxers and a sleeveless undershirt. When I saw him I said how I hoped I hadn’t woken him up and he looked at me and said, “Well …” and then this look of terrible embarrassment came over his face and he sat up quickly, straight-backed, and threw up all over the coffee table. He looked at it for a moment, then got to his feet, almost tipping the table over, and walked out of the room.

The door had barely closed behind him when Ray came in from the kitchen. He had a pink towel over his shoulder, a mop and a bucket. The bucket already had water in it. He didn’t say anything. He mopped up the mess on the floor, swept the table in two big swipes, tossed the bottles and the empties in the bucket along with the towel and walked out the back.

I found him in the little fenced-in back yard, washing out the bucket with the hose.

“Sorry,” I said.

He worked quickly, taking the lid off the trash and dumping the empties, hosing off his hands, rinsing the mop.

“You want to go?” I said.

He turned the bucket upside down, lay the towel over the propane tank. I’d never been in the back yard before. A rotting mattress stood propped against the fence next to a mattress-sized rectangle of yellow grass. A hammer lay on the back seat of a car somebody had pushed against the house like a sofa.

He shook his head, looked around the yard.

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

A
ND SO WE’D TAKE OFF,
didn’t matter where, running down those long summer days, the light drawing back into the trees as the night came on. Sometimes we’d walk down to the ball field, or up along the East Branch where you could see the trout like little torpedoes waiting in the shadows or out to Jimmy’s where he’d always have one up on the lift and talk to us while he worked—hot days maybe out to Frank’s or the reservoir for a swim, the shadows growing, the blue coming on. We had nowhere to be. Ray’s dad had farmed little Gene out to some relative in Yonkers—I wasn’t clear if it was a sister or an aunt—when Ray got a two-week job in construction; when it ended, Gene had stayed with the aunt. It fucked Ray up for a while. He missed his little guy, he said. He was going to hitch out to Yonkers to see him.

He seemed quieter. I thought it was the summer, or some girl. Or being out of school. Sometimes we’d go half an hour or more, me and Frank just yakking away and Ray not saying a thing, just lying there in the grass by the reservoir listening, smoking. Frank talked a lot about California that summer. He’d read some article in
Life
or something—couldn’t get out of his head how beautiful it was.

He was going to go, he said. In California you could get a little place on the beach for, like, nothing, grow your own food … And Ray, instead of saying you couldn’t get a kick in the balls for nothin’ never mind a house, would just sit there, listening, then toss the butt in the lake and dive in after it.

Sometimes he’d just disappear for two, three days, even more. I’d walk up to the house after work and the car would be there but there’d be nobody home. Other times I’d find Mr. Cappicciano talking to his friends or banging away at something in the yard with his shirt open and he’d straighten up and take the cigarette out of his mouth and say, “How do I know? Not my fuckin’ problem, know what I mean?”

OK, I’d say.

“I don’t mean to yell at you, kid,” he’d say. “Look, why don’t you try back tomorrow—he’s bound to turn up eventually.”

I’d start to go.

“How’s school?” he’d say.

“Good,” I’d say. He’d be leaning on some piece of lumber with one knee, a couple of nails sticking out of his mouth, the cigarette propped up across a pencil.

“Still bringin’ home those A’s?” he’d say, pounding in a nail.

“Some.”

“Well keep it up,” he’d say, setting up another nail. “Make your parents proud someday.”

I
KNEW THE DRILL.
Ray would show up the next day or the one after that with a fat lip or sore ribs like a tom that’s been under the porch for a week and he’d bullshit with Mary on the lunch line then let us drag the story out of him about the ride he’d caught down to the shore and the guys in the bar and what they’d said and what she’d looked like. We should come with him next time. “Sometimes you just gotta get the fuck out, know what I mean?”

It was a good idea, we’d say.

Bunch of pussies, he’d say.

Really, we’d say, next time we would. We’d heard there’d been talks with the school superintendent about him. They were trying to have him suspended again. For good this time.

His eyes would bug out—mock terrified. “Well, fuck me—that mean I’m not gonna get into Harvard?”

“Seriously.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah, but what’re you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna eat my lunch, that’s what I’m gonna do. Fuck do I know—maybe I’ll join the Army.”

“What about your dad?” I asked once.

He looked at me for a while, probing the inside of his swollen lip with his tongue: “Do me a favor, Jon,” he said, and it was one of the few times I heard him use my name: “Don’t worry about my dad.”

I
CAN HEAR IT NOW
—I didn’t then. Or maybe I did and just didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask. I knew something was wrong long before that kid from the projects said what he did or Karen started asking, long before that January a year and a half later when we sat freezing in the middle of Bog Brook Reservoir in all that snow and he pulled up that perch and started to cry—but in my mind it’s like I didn’t know it until then. We borrowed the augur from Jimmy at the garage, carried it down the tracks, slipping around on the ties, then a quarter mile out into the middle of that huge, flat snowy field along with our poles and two folding chairs, dug the blade in and corkscrewed down through a foot of ice. It was one of the last things we did together, me working the augur, Ray on his knees in the snow, scooping out the slush with his hands, blowing on them, scooping some more. The sky that day was like an old gray blanket with the stuffing coming out in the west. The blade broke through into the water and I screwed it back up and Ray got out the last of the slush. It was beautiful, perfect, black as a bullet hole.

And he pulled out a small yellow perch and unhooked it and slipped it back down the hole and began to cry, just sitting there on the chair with his face in his hands saying “Fuck, oh fuck,” his voice shaking like somebody looking at something he doesn’t really believe and knows he’ll never forget. And it was only then, I swear, that I felt it, that I saw the line that had looped around our legs, our arms, our throats, fed on our not-saying, our not-asking, stretching back through the seasons, the years, back to the time I first sensed it there in the cafeteria when he looked up at me and said, “Do me a favor, Jon.”

That day I’d had no idea what I’d heard, or if I’d heard anything at all. Ray had come back from the shore. He’d had a thing with his old man. So what? I wasn’t really listening. It was early October. I was running cross-country that fall, not because I liked pounding up hills and over marshy golf courses for two and a half miles eating mud kicked up by the spikes of the runners in front of me but because I was good at it. In a three-team meet the week before, Brewster had pulled out an unexpected win mostly because of me.

Cross-country meets were won on depth, something we didn’t have. Week after week it was the same thing. Kennedy would take first—nobody could touch him. McCann would come in somewhere in the top five. After that, except for a tight-skinned, nasty-looking farm kid named Brian Moore, who might sneak into the top ten, we had nobody. Which was where I came in. The week before, in twentieth place or so with a half-mile to go, I’d found myself, in a haze of pain, passing runners who seemed to be pushing through thicker air. I ran them down, one after the other, and was coming up on Moore’s skinny back when he crossed the line. We finished eighth and ninth. McCann came up and slapped my back as I staggered around, clutching my knees. “Banzai, Mosher,” Falvo yelled from the sidelines, doing his Japanese kamikaze. Kennedy was already in his sweats, talking to his dad, a friendly guy in a Teamster’s jacket who came to all our meets. “Way to go, Jon,” his dad called out.

“Nice run,” Kennedy said.

I repeated it to myself as I sorted boxes of men’s shoes in the storeroom, as I ate my liverwurst sandwich against the back wall in the sun, as I sat in biology learning about the double helix: Nice run. I’d fantasize about the races I’d run in the Armory that winter, how I’d come out of nowhere in the final lap, untouchable, how I’d put my hand out in front of my chest and part the tape the way I’d seen Kennedy do the season before—gently, like it didn’t matter. He’d notice the gesture, acknowledge it with a simple nod.