Making Nice (6 page)
Authors: Matt Sumell
* * *
The Bayard Cutting Arboretum sits on about seven-hundred acres and borders the west bank of the Connetquot River—the same river I learned boats on—and Jim and I drove around its perimeter three slow times on the white gravel roads that encircle it, Jim giving me the history of the place as we went. I don’t remember most of it, except that a large part of the park was destroyed by Hurricane Gloria in ’85, and that cleanup took more than two years. I was more interested in how he’d hurt his leg, and when I had the chance, I asked him.
“I used to work tugs in Jamaica Bay,” he said. “We were towing this sewage barge into the dumpsite there but it was overloaded, the barge, sat too low in the water and ran aground. The line snapped, and a rope movin’ like that can cut a man in half. I’m lucky I still got the thing.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-three. Now that dumpsite is the Riis public golf course.”
I was about to tell him how my father lost his leg in a motorcycle wreck when Jim suddenly remembered where and why we were driving.
“That tree there is one of the largest Sergeant’s weeping hemlocks in the world,” he said. “And that one there’s a weeping beech.” We drove like that for an hour or so, him pointing to this and that, that and this, the pinetum, the hollies, the lilacs. Then, without saying anything, he drove to the gate and made a left onto Montauk Highway and headed into East Islip for an early lunch at some strip-mall bagel joint, where I ordered a sandwich of some kind and handed the guy a ten-dollar bill.
“Outta ten?”
I just stared at him. Eventually he gave me my change and not long after that my sandwich, which was wrapped in that white wax paper with one of those toothpicks with the red cellophane wig thing sticking out of it. We headed back, parked the truck in the southwest corner of the park near a pond with a little man-made waterfall that fed into the river. We ate with the doors open and the radio on, and watched the mallards and Canadian geese, a few mute swans, some of them with their feathered asses in the air feeding on plants below the surface.
When we finished, Jim showed me where the orange push mower was and gave me a red gas can and sent me out to a giant lawn scattered with black oaks. I obsessed over the lines the mower left in the grass, and took some joy in the dark green–light green–dark green of it all. I kept the lines as straight as possible, and if they weren’t straight enough I’d go back over it a second time, sometimes a third. Around the black oak tree trunks I’d try for a perfect circle, three mower-widths thick. When I got tired I walked over to the bank of the river and envied the boats motoring by, then headed for a bench by the pond and watched the ducks and geese and swans for a few minutes. Eventually I got anxious about what Jim might say if he saw me there, so I got up, pushed the mower to the next section of lawn, and pulled the pull-cord.
* * *
The thing about juvenile traffic court is you just might get to hear a white woman tell the judge that she was riding her bicycle when she was hit in the face with a raw steak, which was thrown out the passenger-side window of a brown Chevrolet station wagon traveling in the opposite direction. The impact of the beef caused her to crash into the wooden golf clubs displayed outside Baker’s Antiques and, after righting herself, she climbed back onto her bicycle and resumed peddling east on Montauk to Hallmark Cards & Gifts, where she worked and where—here she paused and started rubber-chinning—she washed her face and telephoned the police. An anonymous someone had already reported the license plate, which led to the arrest of two seventeen year olds who I smoked a cigarette with on the courthouse steps prior to heading in. The conversation I’d had with them was unremarkable in every way, except that when I asked the taller one what he did for work, he said he owned a sixty-year-old retarded man. His buddy—who I nicknamed Hot Eye because one lens of his glasses was fogged up—told the judge he didn’t mean to hit the lady in the face with the raw steak, and the judge said “Baloney” with great authority.
Also unremarkable were the rest of the cases I heard that day, including my own. The police officer’s testimony was an awful bore, just facts, and after he was through I was offered the opportunity to say a few words in my defense. I said only one, quietly, and to my shoes: “Sorry.” The apology was met with silence, and when I finally had the courage to look up at the judge, he was blinking at me. Then he blinked at my father, who was standing beside me, and asked him if he’d like to say a few words on my behalf. Neither of us had expected this, and it was cause for alarm. My father has never been good with words—sometimes he isn’t even decent with them. It’s not uncommon for my father, when asked what he’d like, to struggle so violently with formulating a response that he fidgets and his eyebrows move around weirdly, eventually becoming so flustered that he bites down on his tongue and turns a little red before, finally, to everyone’s terrific relief, he manages to order the cheeseburger.
But somehow, without the slightest hesitation or twitch at all my father looked at the judge and said, “Yeah your honor—uhhhhhh, I dunno … he’s a kid, he took a hairy, you know? He’s … gets good grades.”
I watched the judge watch my father, and I could tell that he was somewhat confounded by what this man had just said to him. Then he shook his head, suspended my license, sentenced me to five hundred hours of community service, gaveled his gavel, and recommended I seek out a therapist.
“It’s perfectly normal,” my mother said later that night as she wiped the dinner table with a dirty blue dish sponge. “Everyone needs help sometimes.” But I refused therapy, and would continue to until a few years after she died, when a different judge in a different state didn’t give me the option.
* * *
I woke up around eight thirty the next morning, and even though we were running late my mother took me to the Oakdale Deli, bought me a BLT and a soda for lunch, a coffee for right then. I was nervous about being late, but when we got there a note was scotch-taped to the office door.
Al,
Mow.
—Jim
I mowed. Around noon I got hungry, and I sat on that bench by that pond and watched the ducks and geese and swans again, then figured I’d cut them a break and broke off the corners of my sandwich. They raced to eat what little there was, and I spoke words of encouragement to the less aggressive ones, made a game of trying to get them their share until a swan swam over and chased them away. I gave it the finger, then walked back to the mower and continued staining my sneakers green.
The next day I saw the same note on Jim’s door, did the same thing. I saw the same note all week, did the same thing all week, except I started buying an extra roll for twenty-five cents to feed the ducks and geese, and made a game of not feeding the swans. Soon enough I was buying two rolls. Then I got a new note.
A—
Keep mowing.
—J.
I kept mowing, kept watching the boats on the river, kept feeding the fowl at lunch, was at my bench with a sandwich when I heard quacking and honking, wings moving. I looked up and watched some mallards half-fly, half-run on top of the water and splash back down. Their webbed-feet footprints rippled out in concentric circles on the surface of the pond, and I followed them back to where they started, where I saw one duck bobbing back and forth with no head. Like, its head was missing. I stood up at the water’s edge to see if I wasn’t seeing it correctly, but I was—its head was gone. I walked around the pond to get a closer look, then returned to my bench and fed the ducks and geese and even the swans.
A few days later Jim pulled up in his truck, beeped the horn, and asked me how it was going.
“Good,” I said. “Where you been?”
“My office,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Got it.” Then I told him about the headless duck. He stared at my nose for a second, then smiled, said it was probably an alligator snapping turtle.
“They’re like dinosaurs, these things. They get big—up to a hundred pounds big—and they sit there, half buried in the mud, with their mouths open. There’s this little lure thing that hangs off their tongues, and if anything gets close to it, like, for example, a feeding duck with its little duck ass in the air, it’ll bite its head clean off and—
bloop
—up floats the duck.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s something.”
“No it isn’t,” he said, easing off the brake, slowly pulling away.
For my brother’s twenty-fourth birthday I bought him a little plastic horsey doll that came with a little plastic orange comb so you could little-plastic-orange-comb its mane and tail and shiny coat, but before I could mail it to him my grandmother peeled the medicinal transdermal patch off her body and ate it. It put her in the emergency room followed by six weeks’ recovery in Bay Shore’s Petite Fleur Nursing Home, so I arranged for some time off from the marina I was working at and drove the ten hours north to my parents’ house, but my mother forgot to leave the key under the rock in the garden, which was never really a garden as much as it was a rock and a frog in a top hat lawn ornament hanging out in some weeds. Across the way, on the other side of the cement path that curved between the driveway and the back door, near a bush that had somehow survived decades of laundry water that shot out of a yellowing PVC pipe sticking out of a half-buried basement window, was a small, grayed square of warped plywood with a broken red brick on top of it. Underneath that were some earthworms and pill bugs and a stubbed-out cigarette filter.
I walked a counterclockwise lap around the outside of the house and found a Styrofoam cooler on the porch with no key in it, and a dirty white sock in the bushes near the driveway with no key in it, and the key was not in the barbeque either, or the mailbox or newspaper box, or the bird feeder hanging cracked and crooked from the white-and-brown branch of the dying birch slanting outside the hall window. The key was also not in the gutter on the southwest corner of the house stopped up with at least five falls’ worth of oak leaves and pine needles, or under the potted daisy outside the garage. I lit a cigarette, covered my left eye with my left hand, and called my mother a dick. Then I busted out a screen and clambered through the open kitchen window.
My belt buckle was a problem for me, and in trying to work it over the window ledge I bumped a ceramic figurine of a little boy with abnormally large eyes holding a
MOMMIES ARE #
1 sign that I’d bought for her at the Idle Hour Elementary School fair in the fourth or fifth grade, and its head broke off when it hit the counter. Sparkles came bounding into the room and, when I was finally inside and upright, I squatted down to pet her. She hopped up on her hind legs to lick my face, then pushed off and spun and pointed her asshole at me. When I hesitated a second, she eye-contacted me over her shoulder like
C’mon already
, so I pet and scratched around her asshole, saying, “Hi, girl, OK, girl, OK…” until her back legs buckled and the right one started flailing around involuntarily, her toenails tapping the tile in a bell curve of sound—slow, fast, slow.
I stood and got her a doggie treat out of the drawer, which I think she swallowed whole, then she stayed staring up at me, hoping for another.
“Sparkles,” I said, “I love you, but I can’t give you any more snacks. You’re too fuckin’ fat. Keep it up and you’re gonna get diabetes, dude, and then your life will be fuckin’ snackless, and what kind of life is a snackless life? Next thing you know they’re amputating your legs off, and then you’re a baby walrus for real, only you suck at swimming and would probly drown in your own water bowl. Probly have to strap you to a skateboard with bungee cords and drag your fat self to the vet. Dude’ll take one look and be like, ‘Guess she has a gland problem?’ And I’ll be like, ‘No, a snack problem.’ And he’ll be like, ‘Oh, well how about this snack?’ And you know what that snack is, Sparkles? A syringeful of poison. Then you’re fuckin’ dead, dude. Forever. There’s no snacks when you’re dead. So do us both a favor—scram.”
After a short standoff, she licked my pant leg.
So I gave her another treat because I’m a sucker for dogs, and when she finished with that one she tried for a third, and I gave her a third because I’m a sucker for dogs multiple times. I almost gave her a fourth, but instead I blew smoke in her face and she blinked and twitched and turned and sauntered away, every now and again casting glances back at me over her shoulder until she was under the table, where she lay down and closed her eyes to dream of food in black-and-white. I put the cigarette out in the sink and opened another window.
On the kitchen table was a note from my mother that hoped my drive was good and if I was hungry there were cold cuts in the fridge and don’t smoke in the house and she saw Gloria Estefan at Jones Beach last weekend and it was a great show. She would be home from work around five and she couldn’t wait to see me and the doctors found cancer in Grandma’s kidney, don’t worry, XOXO. I lit another cigarette. It was 3:32.
By 4:16 I had eaten all the cold cuts and bacon and some pizza bagels and pierogies and a strawberry fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt and felt a little sick, so I lay down on the couch in the den and turned on the TV to a show about a lady judge whose veins popped out of her forehead while she yelled. I watched thinking she wouldn’t be so mean if there wasn’t a big black bailiff standing there with a gun and a club protecting her—three minutes of that and I was overcome with restlessness. Somewhere along the way I’d become incapable of relaxing, of allowing my body to be still, of rest. It isn’t that I have more energy than I know what to do with, because I don’t. It’s that my body is uncomfortable. It’s not pain, necessarily, but an antsy annoyance of the muscles and—when still—I become excruciatingly aware of just how uncomfortable I am. Then I have to move. I get up and pace around, shake my hand like I just touched something too hot, fidget, tap a table or countertop. I take long walks.
