Pins: A Novel (35 page)

22

Mrs. Khors didn’t look quite so perky.
 
She wore a loose sweater, jeans, two different-colored socks. “Oh, Joey. Um, look, I’m really–”

“Can I come in?”

“Um, well…All right.”

The house smelled like nothing. There were blank spots on the wall where he remembered some scribbly pictures. A few empty boxes sat forlornly along a wall. Was she moving? How could she abandon this place, the shrine where he and Dink had come together in a holy bond of goo and sweat?

“I was just actually, I had to wait for a very important phone call, so if you, well you may have to wait for a few…Um, can I get you something?”

Your son. “No, thank you.”

She mumbled, running her words together, not really talking to him, but to the sofa, the wall, the tube, anything nearby. She wouldn’t stop moving, so he didn’t sit down.

“I wanted to know how Di-Donnie was.”

“Donnie?” she said, pretending surprise. “Oh, Donnie’s fine. He’s doing his best. He…we’re trying to get the panel, or board, people, advisers, these sharp pointy-headed people with lots of forms, anyway, they’re saying maybe summer, or if he gets in another fight, three years. He’ll be visiting. I’m sure he’d like to see you. You know, I was just watching one of his favorite shows, the MTV one, with that poor boy who died.”

“Who?”

“Oh you know, that Cuban boy.”

“Oh. Right.” Pedro died?

“Um. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to–”

“What did…?”

“Oh, no, that’s okay, Joey. It’s okay.” She swooped toward him, gave him the shortest hug, too fast for him to even think about getting his arms around her.

Mrs. Khors seemed suddenly embarrassed by the display. Her eyes met his. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

Pedro died?

“They’re out now. My dad’s at work. Actually I was just selling raffle tickets for–”

“What is it?”

“Raffle tickets. For the Catholic League Raffle? We got prizes and you don’t have to be in the church to win? But the money goes for the victims of a drought in Zaire.” He was goaded into another of the sisters’ activities by his mother to ‘take his mind off his own problems.’

“Oh, I’d be happy to, Can you just wait one minute while I get my checkbook?”

“Sure.”

He stood, tying himself to the door, fending off the urge to just race up the stairs, into that room again, just to smell it or steal something.

Pedro died? He hadn’t even seen the show yet.

“So, how’s Donnie?”

“You haven’t talked to Don’s father? Is that–”

“Mrs. Khors, please, I just–”

She kept looking at him, or near him, waiting. She fished around in her purse, but at the mention of Donnie, her eyes were upon him. She must have been like his mother, medicated.

“I …Mrs. Khors, I was wondering …I just want to talk to him. Can you– Do you know if he got my letter?
 
I got the right address, but I never heard from him. You do have his, your, Mister Khors, I mean the address, right?”

Mrs. Khors sort of cocked her head, fished around on a table for something. She lit up a cigarette. “Maybe he needs to be on his own for a while.”

“Whaddayou mean? He’s in Passaic. How much more away do you–”

“He’s living with his father. He won’t be going to Little Falls anymore.”

“I know, but–”

“What I’m saying, Joey…” Let’s be friends before I scream at you, little boy. “This has been really hard for all of us…”

“I just wanna know he’s okay.”

“Sure.”

“Can you tell him?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.”

“I still think we should call your parents. Just let them know you’re okay.” She was already walking to a phone.

“No, I’ll go now.”

“Wait, I’m buying raffle tickets. Remember?”

“Oh.”

She stopped. “Joey, you have to understand something. I want him back, too. But everything’s different now. If it means he can’t go to school here, or anything else, I’m going to do it, because he is my son.”

“Yeah.”

“Now, who do I make this check out to?”

He traced the eleven blocks toward home. A lawn sprinkler darkened a wedge of sidewalk at his feet. Trees bloomed with lime buds. Birds sang. Everything was perfect.

23

The heater rumbled warm air through the grates. Then it stopped, as if finished breathing for the season.

He went to the bathroom, leaving the light off, took a last piss, then almost hit himself in the head when he opened the medicine cabinet. He took the aspirin bottle, careful not to let the white discs inside clatter.

Someone stood in the hall.

“What are you doing?” Mike appeared in his Gargoyles pajamas, groggy from sleep.

“Nothin’. Go back to bed.”

We always kiss goodbye.

He must have been too tired to react. As Joey’s lips brushed his cheek, Mike just blinked and blinked.

Joseph watched him pad back down the hall, look back once before retreating to his room. He returned to his own room, quietly pushed his desk chair to his closet door, fished high up for the drawings, took them down from their hiding place.

His varsity jacket fell silently off the hangar. He slipped it on.

He knelt. Deep inside his gym bag, he felt for the rustle of the plastic compress. In the kitchen, he found some matches, then stuffed them and the bottle of aspirin in a coat pocket. He pushed the stool to the cabinet where his father had hidden the whiskey bottle, took that down. He took a gulp, gasping at the burn, then poured water into the bottle. He took the remaining Valiums at the sink, stuffed them in his mouth, washing them down with the whiskey, water, stuffed the bottle in his pocket.

He opened the back door slowly. A rush of cold air swept into the kitchen. A spring storm bit with tiny drops of half-rain, sleet. Then he was awash in it, stepping down off the porch, out into the purplish glowing night.

“Shit,” he muttered, already blurry from the first gulp of whiskey.

 
Creeping through receding piles of shoveled road snow, mucky lawns, his poisons rattled in his pockets, sloshed in his gut.

Where to? Purgatory, maybe, the blue-skinned beauty queen in
Beetlejuice,
the nun’s explanation, waiting on the Dean’s bench, forever.

The Valiums were beginning to blur synapse function, Joey’s ability to adjust his cassette player’s earplugs. He decided singing along to AUURGH, then thought, as his limbs grew queasy, that the music in hell would probably be lousy.

He felt drunk, only less liquid, as if he were thickening inside.

The woods closed in. Occasionally, a branch lashed his neck or face.

He stumbled around a small pile of rocks where some kids had made a fire. He gulped aspirin while guzzling watered-down whiskey. It still burned his throat, but he had to eat them all.
 
That was what he had to do. His chest rumbled with hiccups. He grabbed a bit of puddled water, lapping it off his hand, the grit of rotten leaves, earth mixed in.

He had trouble pushing the rocks up to make a better windbreak. He lit the drawings on the fourth try, but they sputtered out. He tossed some sticks, poured whiskey on it, and the paper whooshed into a little ball of flame, flying up. One sheet, half-eaten by flames, rode up a few feet like a kite, lighting him, warming him for a tiny moment. He found the knife, stabbed the cold compress bag, sucked the fluid out.
 
It was bitter, burned like road salt or how he imagined antifreeze would taste. He managed to gulp down one blast of it, but had to toss the bag aside, coughing. He remembered the punch line of a joke about a Lambrusco on the Rocks, except he forgot the rocks.

His limbs grew numb as he stumbled in the mucky earth. What he had known so deeply, his own body, all its sensations, drifted away. His head grew cloudy. He fell down, then lay, a cluster of soggy leaves under his head.

Stars hovered through the trees, distant, unseeing eyes. He felt his heart, which he’d fed on passionate moments, falling away as the thud in his ears grew slower, then turned to ringing.

Somebody was calling his name. He felt himself floating, sinking at the same time. The trees’ arms covered the sky like a spidery canopy. Bits of charred paper and black flakes floated up to meet them.

A gurgling interrupted his expected epiphany.

“Wait a fuckin’ minute.”

The gurgling found a partner, multiplied, shifted upward, demanded exit.

El Vomito Grande.

24

“A priest and a nun are in the desert on a camel.”

Joseph was telling the joke, trying to make a rather hunky dude from Cedar Grove laugh as they sat on the mat in cross-legged groups. The dude snubbed him, so he feigned fascination with a small feather, from a pigeon, perhaps, that had fallen the gym rafters. He stuck it in his sock.

He was still getting over the embarrassment of not only having failed to kill himself the previous weekend, but trudged home, keeping the whole thing a secret until the bottle was found missing. He’d cried. It didn’t take much, he was so hung over. He said he’d drunk some and tossed the rest, which was true, in a sense.

So when Coach Cleshun, then Raul Klein, called, and he said that he wanted to finally get back into something other than being miserable, his parents practically shoved him out the door. A wrestling clinic. Go. Live a little.

Joseph was trying to repolish the tiny bits of social skills he still had by telling the joke. He didn’t get to finish it. A coach for the local school led them in warm-ups.

The great wrestler held a clinic and boys from many schools had come to a gymnasium on a Saturday morning for that day-long clinic. It would give all the boys an edge, they were told.

The great wrestler had won awards, trophies, medals. Coaches and parents sat back on the bleachers, watched as he showed the boys moves they had never tried, or been allowed to try. Wrestling season was over, but wrestling season, in a sense, is never over.

Troy, Raul and a few other boys Joseph knew by face or weight, but not name, squatted in a circle and watched as the great wrestler grabbed and pushed and shoved and kicked the boys in various ways that had made him a champion and left the boys rubbing parts of their bodies in slight yet inspirational pain. He showed them the way of wrestling outside polite competition. This was the way it was. This was what it took to be a champion.

In the midst of his teaching, he occasionally let slip a few comments that did, at first, merely give the coaches and parents a shrug of bemused smirks. The great wrestler, to be honest, had a dirty mouth.

This did not shock Joseph. He was dealing with the hunky dude totally snubbing him. There was a bit of turf action going on.

When the great wrestler broke them up to do drills, they kept it light. Raul Klein partnered with Joseph. Raul had continued his athletic endeavors on the track team. He’d tried to get Joseph to join so they would have something new in common, become closer friends, maybe new best friends. Joseph shrugged it off. “I don’t like running.”

Raul let it slide. It was an off day all around.

The great wrestler, at a late hour in the long day of practicing fireman’s carries and bow-and-arrows and Russian arm bars, found himself at a loss for words to describe the swift hopping motion that was required to accomplish a certain move.
 

As he showed it, he made mention of how this swiftness should be accomplished, “like a, like a fairy, like a little fairy.”

He smirked. Many of the boys smirked. A few chuckled.

That they didn’t even know who they were laughing at brought him to his feet.

Ingoring it would have been easier for stronger boys. They laugh along.

Joseph, however, felt his blood drop, as if someone had pressed the elevator button, punched him, put a bag over his head, pressed DOWN. He realized that yes, he had heard that from the great wrestler and yes, it was an insult and yes, it was his right to be offended.

It is difficult to say when the exact moment of Joseph’s resolve to die for Anthony came about.
 
It was certainly a cumulative vision, but this moment should suffice.

It occurred on a Saturday, in a suburban area, in a school gymnasium among a few dozen bright-eyed boys and a few older men. The boys were shown the various positions for the man on the bottom, the arms and legs moving like a clock with extra limbs. Here is the hour of defense, the hour of our victory, the hour of our death.

When Joseph failed to respond to yet another joke of questionable taste, the great wrestler singled him out and asked him if he was bored.

“No.”

“No what?”

“No. I’m not bored.”

“Come here.”

It occurred on a Saturday, when Joseph chose a happy death.

He was invited with a single finger to assist in showing a move. He was told not to resist. For a fifteen-year-old boy to resist, or by being in the wrong place and resisting, particularly under a man with a fifty-pound, twenty-year, two-hundred-fifty-pin advantage, was to risk serious injury.

“What?”

“Did you want to volunteer?”

“You asked for a fairy.”

“Joe. Don’t,” Raul muttered.

The circle of boys fell back slightly, some suppressing bursts of astonishment, disgust, bewilderment.

Raul dropped his head, covered his face.

On his way through the cluster of parting legs, and eventually, with his back to the mat, his neck suddenly in a very wrong position, the boy looked up.

Perched high on the girders of the gymnasium ceiling, crouched like a thoughtful monkey, in a white singlet and whiter wrestling shoes, His pristine wings fluttering, His skin blue as a dolphin, His holy power ready to defend the only member of His faith, Saint Anthony of Totowa prepared to swoop down.