Martin and John (13 page)

The taxi lurched forward like a time machine, momentum claimed my attention. We gathered speed recklessly until the car overflowed with it, and because it’s easy for me, I forgot everything except the street, which slapped at us like a swung belt. Then the car slammed into a hole and bucked out of it at an angle, and when the squeal of the tires had left my ears and we were again under control, I found myself clasping the boy’s arm. But as soon as I felt him between my fingers, so thin, so weak,
my grip softened, and then I was merely holding him, not holding on to him. A thought seized me: I wanted to protect him. I wanted to protect him because, though it’s easy to forget things, it’s also hard not to remember. I was remembering my mother: her thinness, her fragility, her weakness, and death. I would have remembered more, but he grabbed me, my hand: my right hand. He pulled it off his arm and held it, flipped it like a pancake. “What’s up?” he said, “what’s with your hand?” More memories flooded my brain, and they escaped through my mouth: “My father,” I said. “The sole of his boot.” The only answer I could give, as free of history as possible, it still contained a force that stunned me, propelled by the weight of everything I’d lost, and hinting, somehow, at things I had yet to gain.

He looked at me for a long time, and then he looked at my hand again, and then he looked at his own hand, which now held mine. It was pretty ruined. His, I mean. He leaned forward then, told the driver to stop. As soon as we had, he pulled me out. “Run,” he yelled, already backing away. The driver hopped out of the cab. “Hey, somebody got to pay for the ride,” he called, but the boy drowned him out. “Beat it, John!” he yelled. “Make tracks! Get lost!” At this, he took off. The taxi driver came around the car. I could see he wasn’t going to help me, that no one would help me. That’s when I started running. I tried to follow the boy’s directions: I tried to get lost. But though I easily lost my way in that long-ago city, the boy from Port Authority had stirred up something I would never escape: memory and emotion, and thoughts of people I could never possess. History.

I know now that the boy from Port Authority was the first man I ever loved, and the last person I ever trusted. I know now that it’s always been that way with me: I will love a man at the slightest sign of weakness, but I will never trust anyone, because trust makes you weak. For years I searched for him, around the Square, in Port Authority, and I always double-glanced at any thin sandy-haired boy I passed on the street, seeking, but never seeing, the scarred left eye. I thought I might see his picture in the paper, in a notice announcing his death. You could tell with him, not just from his hands, not just from his face or from the drop of blood that was melted into the blue of his eye, but from the way he held himself, just as my mother had. With people like that, it’s not a question of when they’ll die, but a question of how, and how soon. And though his eye haunts my stories—it most resembles a bull’s-eye, a target waiting for an arrow—and though I’ve seen hands on many people destroyed even more than his by track marks, still, what I feel most when I think about him are arms, so thin that the bones seem pliant. The arms encircle a stomach, trying to contain a destructive urge that will not be held back. What that was, for him, is easy to say: heroin. What it is for me—as it was for my mother—is harder to say, not because the answer is any less obvious, but because, after everything that’s happened, it makes no sense: love. And trust.

WHAT LANGUAGE DO you speak?

The words come from nowhere, in quiet neutral tones, and for a moment I’m confused. As I enter a small dirty office, the
breath of a wheezing air conditioner seeks out the hollow between my damp shirt and sweating back, filling the space with cold vapor. A pair of thin young lovers share each other’s laps on a vinyl couch. One of them, or perhaps the pink-dressed woman at the desk, has asked the question. “French,” the girl says now, giggling;
“Moi aussi,”
the boy replies, and then the lovers start to speak haltingly in a language from which I’m excluded. They glance in my direction, then return to the boy’s application in conspicuous silence. I take one from the fleshy hand of the woman at the desk, and in what seems like seconds, I have a job. As I leave the woman calls, “So, you got no trouble staying up nights?” and her laughter, and the hesitating laughter of the lovers, follows me into the evening heat.

As I walk home from the interview, a car’s lights catch me from behind and cast my pale shadow long and wavering in front of me. As it speeds past, the driver leans out to yell, “Jesus, buddy, get out of town.” Then he’s gone, and I can’t help but wonder if it will be like this every time I walk home from the plant. Soon enough I’m back at our curtained dark house. Martin lies on the couch, sleeping. His chest expands and contracts, filling and then deflating his black T-shirt, which seems to become an empty sack each time he exhales. The ridge of his triceps casts a tiny shadow across the tanned skin of his right arm. His black jeans are loose on his body; inside them his legs bend at the knee, and his bare feet are shoved in the crack between the couch’s cushions as though
they’re cold. I’m afraid when I find him like this, afraid I’ll roll him over and he’ll dissolve like sugar in water, leaving his clothes empty, his body gone except for his feet, which burrow for warmth on a summer evening. He speaks suddenly, a half-mumbled greeting, his voice obscured in the space between his mouth and the back of the couch. To his back I say, “Did you sleep here all day?” He sits up, yawns, nods. Small lines crease his left cheek, and his black hair is matted like a coarse brush. I go to him and touch the red lines. “Bed face,” I say, smiling at him, but the lines smooth away at my touch, leaving his skin unwrinkled, a little paler. Realizing he’s not at work, I ask, “Why?” He smiles, telling me he got the night shift at Heller’s Warehouse, and asks me about Carmel. “I got the job,” I say. He kisses me, and tells me almost shyly that we’ll be working the same hours now. I put my hands under his shirt. “I don’t care about working,” I say. “We’ll have the same free time.” After kissing me again, he asks me if I’m tired. “A little,” I admit. He kisses me a third time, suggests we go to bed. I pull my hands from under his shirt. “First tell me about it again. Tell me what it’s like.” Just remember, he says, how he always says it: men everywhere. In their own bars, their own cafés, their own clubs. “Their own apartments?” I ask. Their own apartments, he says: hundreds of them, just like ours, but bigger sometimes, or smaller, and right next to everyone else’s, windows and curtains open, pictures on the wall. And the men hug and kiss and make love with whomever they choose, and when they go out they
display themselves, slicking back their hair and rolling up their sleeves to show off their arms, or no shirt at all, and tight jeans that show off everything else. They hold hands even, or at least link arms, they wear jewelry and they strut like peacocks, and there are hundreds of them, thousands, everywhere you look.

“And someday soon, we’ll live there,” I add. Without answering me, Martin gets up to go to the bedroom. Weariness seizes me as we climb into bed, and Martin’s face, I see, looks as haggard as I feel. Our hands seem to follow the path of least resistance and soon—without ever needing a condom—we are sticky and Martin is sleeping beside me, and the drone of the window water cooler fills my head as I lie next to him, awake. It sounds like a light rain shower. I stay in bed and listen to it, unable to sleep, and then I start to imagine that it
is
raining, that the green bedspread we lie on is a grassy hillside, and I imagine that the sweat and semen and saliva that soaks our bodies is really clean water. Beside me, Martin moans lightly in his sleep, and his hand reaches out, looking, I suppose, for mine. I watch his fumbling fingers for a moment, and then, almost reluctantly, I take them in my own.

THE FIRST NIGHT on the job, my uniform feels stiff on my skin, scratchy. The blue polyester seems washed out already; the yellow stripes running down the sides of my legs stand out
boldly, but the stitching that holds them in place is weak, and I can see that in a few weeks it will begin to fray. My feet drag in their thick-soled boots, and the hat I wear, with its gilt badge, is almost comic. This late, the only work being done at the plant is automated, and my walk through Carmel’s deserted streets is punctuated by the faint whirs and clicks of machines. At the end of the row of buildings I see the guardhouse. Barely larger than a phone booth, it’s illuminated by a streetlamp from without and overhead fluorescents within. It crowds up against the tall chain-link fence, and inside, a short person in blue jeans leans against a counter, sipping from a styrofoam cup held in both his hands.

“Coffee?” he asks as I push open the door and feel a gush of air-conditioned air. Every room of this plant, it seems, is climate-controlled. “No thanks.” “Take it,” he tells me. “You’ll need it. Nights are long out here.” He turns his face to me: I see cloudy blue eyes and fleshy cheeks that descend below his chin in deep runnels. His neck, though, is thin, making his face seem even fatter. “Maybe later,” I say, and turn to face the plant. It seems alive now, as if behind all those walls are people moving around again after stopping and hiding while I walked by. Turning back to the man, I say, “I don’t have much trouble staying awake.” “Sure,” he says, “suit yourself. Pot stays on all night.” He sets his cup down on loose papers stained with a hundred coffee rings and wipes his hands on the shirt stretching tightly over his stomach. Coming the two steps to me, he sticks out his hand. “I’m
Charlie,” he says, “Charlie Goertz. Well, kid, you got me for three days. Best get started now.” “Sure,” I say, and sigh quietly and quickly. If Charlie notices he doesn’t say anything.

“IT’S NOT AS big as it looks,” I tell Martin later the same day. “Nearly two miles around the fence, and on this side I can see our house as we do the walk.” Martin got home a half hour before me, but already he’d fallen asleep on the couch and I had to wake him. He’d only taken the time to change from his uniform into a gray T-shirt and brown jeans; the industrial white pants and shirt lie on the floor by the couch, abandoned like shed skin. When I brush Martin’s hair from his face the brown strands ripple like wheat. “Actually, I can only see the house on the third walk, since the first two times it’s dark out, and of course there aren’t any lights on in here. But it’s nice, you know, to be able to see this place from there.” I pause; beside me, Martin is quiet, maybe sleeping. “We go out three times a night,” I say. “Charlie walks fast for a man his age, barely using his flashlight at all. He knows the route from memory, he says, could do it in his sleep. Sometimes he thinks he does. He’s been there twenty-six years. Can you imagine that? Twenty-six years, and now they’re canning him. They’ll pension him off, I guess. Send him a paycheck until he dies.”

“But what will you do?” I’d asked him. “Oh, I don’t know. Same old thing, I guess.” He’d bent down then, picked up a pebble glinting in the beam of his flashlight, and threw it with
a baseball pitch toward the fence. “Same old thing?” I repeated. “You know, just walking around, watching what goes on about town.” I laughed a little at that. “In this town? You won’t be seeing very much.” “Not a big fan of peace and quiet, are you?” Charlie shot back. “You’d rather live somewhere where there was always muggings and shootings and other exciting things?” Charlie’s voice was almost scolding, as if I were a child, and I spat out the first thing that came to mind: “I’d rather live where it rains more than once every two months.” “There’s plenty of water under this earth, boy. Comfort yourself in that.” He referred to the aquifer, I know. It’s there, I’ve seen the things it does, like make the wheat grow when it seems instead that it should burst into flame in the dry heat. But usually it seems no more real than the shimmering mirage of water on asphalt. “They say it’s getting old, drying up,” I said. Charlie turned suddenly and thrust a hand in my face. With his other hand he clicked the flashlight on, momentarily blinding me. When my eyes focused again, the beam was trained directly on his hand, so closely that the fingers glowed red from the blood under the skin. His hand was nearly fleshless, pinched and cracked, the skin veined and flaky, the nails too shiny and rounded, and a touch of arthritis gave the fingers a clawlike appearance. “See these hands?” he said. “Look at ’em. Looks like they’re drying up, don’t it? But look close. You can see the blood underneath, can’t you? It’s still there, ain’t it? Still flowing?” Charlie clicked off the
flashlight, turned away. “We’re not drying up,” he said. “Just changing on the outside. Underneath we’re still the same.” He stalked ahead of me then with his old man’s gait: short quick steps, knees bent, shoulders rounded, no looking back.