Meeks (4 page)

A short, fat bachelor, seeing them pass, bounced up from his bed and swung out into the hall. “Hey there, Brothers! Can I give you a hand?"

"We're good, thanks,” said Albert and took Ben's elbow, pulling him along quickly. “Hurry,” Albert whispered, “he's practicing."

"What's his thing?” asked Ben.

"To be the nicest guy ever,” said Albert snidely, and opened a door off the hall. “Here we are."

Ben stepped into a small white room, the grooves of the molding softened and deformed by a thousand white-paint repaintings; through the square window he noted the desolate window box.

"Toilet's down the hall, one per floor."

Ben noticed another door in the room, the brass knob bent, the white paint around the knob smudged darkly with fingerprints. “Closet?"

"No, no, no. Sorry—better leave that alone. It's another bachelor's room. Not ideal, I know, but under the circumstances . . ."

"He has to pass through my room?"

"Technically, yes. But he never goes anywhere, so I wouldn't worry too much. Finton—one of the old-timers. I think he moved in last summer and has hung on."

"There isn't another room open?"

"Nope. But you'll get used to it."

Ben surveyed his new room, Albert's footfall retreated down the hardwood hall. The standard-issue bachelor's things: the battered armoire, the writing desk, the wooden chair, the narrow bed, the water pitcher. Not standard: the disconcerting door. Ben struggled to open the lone window, and then gave up, resigned to the stuffiness of the room, the heat of the days to come.

He fished in the satchel for his honeybee cufflinks and set them side by side on the little desk. Symmetry was not the least pleasure. He unpacked the bundle of canvases and unrolled them on the bed. His paintbrushes and tins of pigment, which had been rolled into the canvases, he set aside. The canvases were stiff with the still-life paintings of his prewar days. He studied the old efforts with dismay: the beloved objects of his mind's eye deformed by his idiot hand. He despised them.

At the center of each painting was his father's military cap, somehow salvaged from the shipwreck; the gold, honeybee cufflinks he had inherited from his mother's father; and a bowl of fruit—apples or mangoes or clementines or bananas—whatever he could bring to mind, the fruit being the variable he had permitted himself, the thing that required him to close his eyes and draw upon a reservoir of private thought. He heard a floorboard creek behind the strange door and froze . . . silence.

Ben flipped one of the old paintings over on the desk and sat down to face the blank canvas. He arranged the cufflinks carefully on the brim of his father's military cap. He took a pencil from the satchel. He tried to enter the orchard of his mind—Lemons? Apples? Plums? He should start with something that made him feel capable. Apples? He closed his eyes. The pencil rested in his hand, and soon he was wandering aimlessly through his thoughts. He imagined strolling along the rows of fruit trees in a beautifully tailored pale suit. He could see the shapes of women hurrying down parallel rows, women hidden by the thick green branches of vague trees. Ben tried to part the veil of leaves to see them better. Soon he was in pursuit, ignoring the slow-growing fruit along the boughs, until his body interrupted him with some complaint, and he noticed the tree leaves rustling outside and the ivy pressing against the sealed window of his room, and something important, circling his thoughts, remained remote. He dropped the pencil on the canvas, disgusted with his incapacity—he must not put off all that must be done.

Ben stretched out on the hard, narrow bed. It was only his first day in the house—he could easily launch himself in the morning without shame. He rested his head against the faint bleach smell of his sleeve and fell asleep in the heat. He dreamed he was lying on his back in the park, his black suit fading to pale gray in the sun, his eyes open and staring as the shadows of men and women walking past brushed over him like the blades of a fan.

When he woke it was dark, and the windowpanes shook slightly in their frames, as a light wind preceded a summer rain. He could hear the rain start against the windowpanes. The hall light shone under his door, and he could hear footsteps in the hall, doors opening and closing. He could hear men's voices—low, loud, pedantic, jocular, earnest, threatening. Bachelors. Sporting, gregarious, capable bachelors! Ben turned to the wall and pressed his hands over his ears, making an oath to reform in the morning.

Meek

In the middle of the night, three men shook me awake. The park was cast in milky light, moonlight fused with the pale gold light from the old park lamps, the air was cool and clean. The men stood shoulder to shoulder. Behind them, clouds drifted like ghostly ships across a black and tranquil sea.

What do we have here?

A policeman, I said thickly, my brain larded with sleep. Officer Meeks!

The three men chuckled, then an awkward silence. They stood over me. I saw that one of the men had only a thumb and ring finger on his right hand. It seemed to me that they were hesitating, unsure of how to proceed now that the universe had granted them something so far in excess of their dreams: a policeman.

They stood around me, one shuffled his feet, another spat at the ground.

Officer Meeks, repeated one of the men, to amuse the others.

Yes, I said, pretending to be bored. But some part of me was glad that they were there. There's the kind of loneliness that's a genuine fortress, and there's the kind of loneliness that wants anyone—one never knows which kind one has until it's too late. The man missing the fingers knelt beside me and smacked me across the face, and I heard a soft thump, my head striking the base of the Captain's statue.

The smallest of the men carried a metal bucket and a paintbrush with a long wooden handle and black bristles. Crab-hand and the third man (he wore a dark, rumpled suit and said nothing) pinned me against the grass, their knees digging into my shoulders. Crab-hand's disconcerting grip took hold of wrist. I couldn't see the faces of the men as they leaned over me, blocking the moonlight, becoming silhouettes bearing strong smells, chemical and bodily. I struggled for the sake of theater, until I thought we were all satisfied, and then I stared into the black river of the air, watched clouds drifting like majestic ships overhead. The milky light dissipated again, and the air turned cold. I could hear the faint sound of the brush scraping along the coarse material of my coat. I pretended that a lioness was licking my lapels, my chest, and the length of my body with her great rough tongue. (A mother is not shamed by any part of her son.) I could feel the pressure of the brush on the most vulnerable parts of my body. I could hear the laughter of the men, and then the asthmatic hacking of the man in the dark suit. He wheezed and spat, and Crab-hand tightened his awkward grip painfully on my wrist. I watched the sky fill up again with soft, white light, siphoning through the treetops. The strong smell of the paint, acrid and chemical, made me feel faint.

After a while, I sensed that Crab-hand was kicking me in the side, and the other two men were laughing, until the third man launched another round of coughing, and we all watched in silence until he backed away and pulled himself together.

Remember your place, said Crab-hand and spat at my face.

Remember my place? I said as coolly as I could. (Simple repetition is usually one's best defense.)

Crab-hand raised his horrible hand to hit me again, but then we all heard voices and laughter, mirthless and bristling with violence, the sound of our brothers, the Brothers of Mercy. The criminals ran. I, for one, seemed to be paralyzed. I could neither sit up nor see clearly, and then the voices dissipated and disappeared, and I was alone again.

I'm an officer of the law! I shouted at nothing, and the wind blew hushingly through the leaves. Don't shush me, I said. I'm not a boy.

I reached out in the darkness, and I laid my hand over the lush little hillock where my mother lay. Bedge and I had buried her there once, and there she had stayed.

The next morning, I crossed the park to the police station. I had done my best to scrape the lewd paint from my trousers and my jacket, but the ghostly outline of what they had done was only more suggestive for having been distorted, and it turned heads. To anyone who smirked or commented, I shot back, I'll remind you that I am a policeman.

I waited patiently for Bedge in the front room of the station. He emerged from a back room drying his hands on a small white cloth. His jacket was off, and his sleeves were rolled past his elbows.

Meeks.

Bedge, I need to speak to you privately.

We're all your brothers, Bedge replied, in keeping with tradition, but he walked over and stood close so that I would not have to shout in front of the others.

I need a gun, I said.

Bedge shook his head disapprovingly and told me to follow. He walked behind his desk. I stood at attention before him. Things were becoming more regular by the second.

I need a gun, I said again.

You're upset—have you forgotten?

Forgotten what?

Today's your birthday.

Is
it? (What a pleasant surprise.)

You'd forgotten, said Bedge smiling fondly, and he opened his desk drawer and pulled out an apple, polishing it on his sleeve before handing it to me. I dug my teeth savagely into the apple, forgetting everything else. I was starving.

Bedge was silent for a moment before adding, I remember that your mother always gave you apples on your birthday.

Then I had to stop chewing and could only shake my head, the pulp of the half-chewed apple lodged in my throat. I craned my neck and stared into the rafters of the police station, trying desperately to master the wave of grief that was trying to swallow my brain.

Yes, I finally managed. She knew how much I loved apples.

A rookie who was filing papers in the cabinet behind Bedge's desk said, Son of the apple woman loves apples, but Bedge silenced him with a wave of his hand. This wasn't the first time I'd heard my mother identified as such, and as always, my mind was seized by a beautiful, mercantile vision of my mother, energetic and upright beside a portable stove in the park, her thick, dark hair filling with the steam of apples cooking in one of our two copper pots—everyone loves a steamed apple filled with butter and brown sugar, and I could see my mother consoling the inconsolable, young and old, in the steam of crisp, sweet apples each fall.

We're waiting for a new shipment of guns, said Bedge, pulling me from my daydream. Maybe next summer we can get you a gun.

Can I use yours until then?

Certainly not, said Bedge and tapped his holstered pistol lightly with his thumb. A nervous habit, very in the ordinary, but a gesture nonetheless that filled me with some trepidation. He said, Why don't you file a formal request now, and that way, we can issue you a gun as soon as they come in.

Good, I said, I formally request a firearm immediately. I watched his restless fingers drumming the side of his pistol. Bedge sighed heavily again, reached into his desk drawer, and withdrew a stack of forms. Interdepartmental Requisition Form 7898, he said. I forgot the nervous hand and holstered gun instantly.

But I'm a police officer, I said incredulously.

We spend our lives filling out forms, Meeks. Bedge settled into an old wooden office chair with metal wheels. He rolled to a filing cabinet against the wall and kicked it with the toe of his boot. To a policeman, he said, anything not written never happened.

I tried to settle into this new arrangement of the facts, to remove all emotional signals from the surface of my face. Bedge, I said, I am an officer of the law, and I was attacked.

Why didn't you say so? Who attacked you?

A coughing man, a man with a crab's hand, a man in a dirty suit. A wave of cold-hearted rookie laughter passed through the station.

Have a seat, said Bedge, and pointed to one of the simple, wheelless wooden chairs scattered throughout the station. I pulled over a chair and sat across from him.

What happened, Meeks?

I need a gun.

Bedge pounded the desk with his fist. The rookies in the station froze like sweet-faced deer in a glen. Bedge folded the requisition forms, creasing them with angry precision, and shoved them into my pocket. Bring these back when they're done.

I don't have a pen, I said.

Of course you don't, said Bedge, and fished one out of his desk drawer. He sat emphatically back in his rolling chair and kicked off from the corner of his desk, crossing the front room of the station with an uneven series of clicks.

Ben

Ben stood naked in his unbearably hot little room and poured drinking water from the pitcher over his head. The bathroom down the hall had been overrun, men hunched two deep over a single aluminum sink, scrubbing their faces, soaping their greasy forelocks, grabbing for handfuls of ice-cold water. A broad-backed man shaved in a sheet of polished aluminum, dragging the blade along his chin. His reflection glared at Ben, who had retreated immediately to his room. Now he was using his pillowcase as a scrubcloth, and he washed himself furtively, nervously, watching Finton's door. He had dunked his underwear and his socks in the water pitcher when he woke in the middle of the night and had laid them out to dry. They had only grown warm and fetid in the humid little room, and he pulled on the damp underwear with disgust, and he put on the thin, black suit, and he forced his damp socks onto his feet and into his boots. He glanced out over the street now filling up with bachelors. Stirred by Ben's breath, a fly buzzed, zigzagged frantically against the glass, then fell black and plump into the corner of the window.

Ben headed downstairs, pushing self-consciously through the hall, already crowded with fit young men in pale suits. They were so much younger than he remembered bachelors being, so much taller, louder, better looking.

He was relieved when he saw Albert in the living room; he was studying his beard in the broken mirror over the mantel.