We're All in This Together (9 page)

In front of the sporting goods store, a couple of shirtless teenagers were running an American flag up a leaning pole. One
kid—blade thin and ghastly pale—sat on the shoulders of another, who was bigger, tall and thick around the middle. The smaller
kid dragged on the halyard, but it was caught, the line knotted somehow in the toggle, and the flag stuck at half-mast. He
stopped pulling and paused, catching his breath. As he rested, the thin kid sort of slouched over the back of the big kid's
head, like a monkey. They both wore baggy camouflage dungarees.

A moment passed before I realized: Tolson and Sugar.

"Papa—" I started, but Gil put a hand on my arm.

He pressed a finger to his lips. "Shhh."

As we pulled away from the light, I saw Tolson, the thin kid, jerk up straight and pat Steven Sugar on the head. Sugar wheeled
around and took a step, as if he meant to chase us. Then he stopped short. He peered after us, and although the distance hooded
his eyes, I could feel them boring into me. Steven Sugar seemed larger than I remembered him from the previous school year,
lengthened somehow, drawn upward like the flag.

Perched on the back of his partner's shoulders, Tolson made a rifle from his naked arms and sighted us.

We swung into the bend and they were gone. They knew. They knew my grandfather. They knew us. Knew me. The realization was
like a baby's hand, suddenly squeezing my stomach with tiny fingers.

The Skylark dipped over the hill and the mall disappeared.

"I don't want to shoot anybody today, George," said Gil, under his breath. "This stuff is crazy. Your grandfather's not thinking
clearly. He thinks people are out to get him. He needs to relax. Forget about the Sunday
New York Times
and forget about Al Gore. None of it's worth it. Like the old Jew said, 'We're all just pawns in their game.' '•'

He pulled the car into the driveway. Papa mumbled in his sleep. I got out and fetched Gil's walker from the trunk, then held
his bony elbow as he doddered to his feet.

"All this stress over politics? Over a politician? Over Al Gore? Does that make sense to you, George?"

In the high noon light his bald head and his round, smooth face appeared as if they were carved from wax.

I shrugged.

Gil settled into his walker with a grunt of satisfaction. "Of course it doesn't. For heaven's sake—and I'd appreciate it if
we kept this between us—but a man of your grandfather's beliefs should be saying good riddance to Gore. Four years of Bush
and maybe people will have suffered enough to elect a man of real principle. Someone with a few more inches in the crotch
department if you get my drift."

He saw me scratch my head. Gil said, "Now, now. I didn't say the
N
word, George, don't worry. I didn't say Nader."

"You just did," I pointed out.

Gil put a finger to his nostril and winked.

When I started to see him to the sidewalk, he waved me off. "Go on and help your grandfather, George. I'll be fine. I just
want to go home and smoke a joint and take a nap. And maybe if I'm feeling ambitious, I'll try to screw my wife, but that's
it."

He scraped forward a couple of feet and stopped. His back was to me. "See anybody?" he asked.

I spun around, expecting to see Sugar right behind me, Tolson on his shoulders, scowling like a gargoyle. The street was empty
of traffic and the driveway of the house across the street unoccupied. The day was hot and still, broken only by the distant
wails from the public pool. Inside the Buick, Papa snorted in his sleep.

I exhaled. "No."

"Good." Gil started to fumble with something I couldn't see.

"Gil? Are you okay?"

He answered with a deep, hitching sigh. There was a trickle as he began to urinate onto the driveway. A yellow rivulet made
its way along a crack in the pavement.

I stood, slightly unnerved, not sure where to put my eyes. Any car that came along . . .

Gil seemed to read my thoughts. "At my age, George, when you get the feeling, you can't mess around. You have to whip it out."

"Yeah," I said, and reminded myself that he was dying. When you were dying, you could do anything you wanted, I guessed.

In the car, Papa slept on. I opened the door to wake him. He sat with his head back, mouth wide open, so that his breath came
in a wet rasp. His left hand trembled in his lap while his right rested peacefully on the butt of the IL-47. Maybe he was
dreaming sweetly of my grandmother; maybe he was dreaming of Steven Sugar, of the surprise that would be on the kid's face
when a paintball stung the back of his naked ear, the red paint stippling his hair like real blood; or maybe Papa was just
dreaming of old friends.

I thought of how Gil saw the world, rotten straight through, and until people were ready to start over again, a joint and
a nap were about the best you could get. My grandfather, on the other hand, saw life as a war, and if you didn't martial your
forces, if you didn't shoot first, they might start just by taking the Travel section of your Sunday
New York Times,
or spray-painting your property, or making you wear a yellow star, but in the end, they would take everything, then hand you
a shovel.

It seemed to me that the old men were both correct in their own way, that their points of view were parallel islands of inviolable
truth. My feet, spread very wide, were planted on each. I knew that no resistance could achieve what I wanted; but I also
knew that except for resistance, I had nothing at all.

I put a hand on my grandfather's shoulder and shook him until he opened his eyes.

Afterward, I killed an hour or so at the library crinkling through a summer of Sundays. I perused the Travel sections and
the Style sections of the Sunday
New York Times.
I wanted to understand why Steven Sugar had needed to take them. Sunlight fell through the bank of leaded windows by the reading
table, warming my left ear and gilding the colored front pages.

Here were far lands and beautiful sights; here were the new ways people were living and here were the announcements of marriage.
I followed the lines with my finger and studied the photographs of vistas and smiling faces, but the sunlight distracted me.
Outside, seated on a bench, a girl with red hair and a blue peasant blouse was alternately reading a paperback and using her
fingertip to apply layer upon layer of lip gloss. One of her bra straps hung loose around her white shoulder. I could make
out the shine of dampness at her throat.

My attention wandered between the newspaper and the girl, scanning the columns and tracking her finger as it lapped around
and around her mouth. Later, I would find myself able to remember only two articles, both—unsurprisingly—with a sexual content:
the first, a travel piece about Rhodes, and the second, a report on the culture of elderly swingers.

The travel article was by a professor who had visited the island of Rhodes after each of his four divorces. The professor
wrote that he felt an interminable sadness in the city, in the great abandoned keeps and twisty avenues of the Old Town. The
Crusaders had built this place and been vanquished without a fight. So, in his sadness, he took comfort in the failures of
other committed men. The professor liked to imagine that the last Knights of St. John had somehow been transformed into the
swarms of stray cats who haunted the cornices, licked ice cream off the cobblestones, and baked themselves on the rock walls
above the beach, in view of the nude sunbathers. If the Army of God could resign itself to such simple gratifications, the
professor wrote, he believed he could love again.

In the Style section I was enthralled—and not a little mortified—by a report on the challenges, and the dangers, faced by
aging swingers. Viagra didn't work for everyone, and for some it worked too well: men threw out their backs; one woman, her
skull cracked against a headboard, suffered a concussion and a lingering case of vertigo. "I'm not sure if I'm sexually aroused
or just obstinate," a retired stockbroker was quoted saying at one senior orgy. He was described as being seated on a piano
bench, wearing only black socks and garters. "No matter what, though," said the man. "It's nice to be among your peers. No
one here is going to be doing it standing up, that's for sure."

But I found myself drowsing between paragraphs, and stole glances at the red-haired girl on the grass, both of us distracted
by her mouth. I rested my head down on the union of a theater director and a bank vice-president, and traced a lazy fingertip
along the cool ridge of a leaded window.

The clap of the hand against glass snapped me straight. The legs of my chair scraped back with a shriek of protest. Steven
Sugar, cheeks flushed and eyes wide, stood on the other side of the window. Pressed flush against the glass, his meaty hand
was inches from my face.

He leaned forward until his nose touched the glass. I could see the scraggly black hairs poking from his chin and the tornados
of freckles under his eyes.

"Can you hear me?" he asked, his voice deadened but clear.

Yes, I mouthed.

"Speak up," said Sugar.

"Yes," I said.

"I've seen you driving around with the geezers. Old Man McGlaughlin, he's your grandfather, ain't he?"

"Uh-huh," I said.

"Tell him I didn't take his newspapers."

"Okay," I said.

Steven Sugar flared his nostrils, nodded to himself. He took a step back, still glaring at me.

Then, suddenly, he jumped forward, smearing his face up against the glass and knocking off his square-billed camouflage hat.
"Tell your grandfather I will burn down his motherfucking house if he doesn't leave me alone."

Tolson, the lieutenant, appeared over Sugar's shoulder. He sneered and rapped a knuckle on the window. "Maybe we'll burn down
your house, bitch."

"I will make him my own private Vietnam," said Steven Sugar. "You got that, kid? I will make you all my very own private fucking
Vietnam."

I said I had it.

"Hey, bitch. Bitch, you've got black all over you," said Tolson and patted his cheek.

They turned and walked to where their bikes leaned against a tree. Sugar spun around, shot a thick finger at me, and then
climbed on his bike. They rode across the park to the street and disappeared into traffic.

In the bathroom I splashed water on my face, and scrubbed the newspaper ink off my cheek.

I paused on the front steps of the library, blinking at the high, late-afternoon sun. My skin prickled at the sudden change
in heat and humidity from the cool, dry confines of the library. I still wasn't quite awake. The encounter with Steven Sugar
and his lieutenant had a fuzzy, dreamlike quality in my mind, although I knew it had been real.

I put a hand over my eyes and scanned the park to see if they were waiting for me. I remembered asking Papa what I was, and
how he had said I was his "henchman." In Mafia movies, when there was a gangland war, the dons often sent each other's dead
henchman back and forth like letters. I imagined Tolson sitting on Sugar's shoulders and running my corpse up the flagpole
in front of the sporting goods store.

The park was empty, though; even the red-haired girl with the lips was gone.

"Hey, you! Hey, sexy!"

The voice came from behind me and I took an involuntary step forward, the sole of my sneaker slipping on the slick marble.
I teetered for a moment, about to fall face first. She grabbed my shoulder and I threw out my hand. I caught hold of something
small and spongy and cloth covered, and steadied myself.

The red-haired girl cleared her throat, laughed.

I removed my hand from where it clutched her breast. Heat spilled across my face.

"You surprised me," I said. "I reached out."

"Yes, you did," she said.

For something to say, I blinked several times at the space over her right shoulder.

"I'm Myrna Carp," said the red-haired girl and stuck her hand out. "And you must be George." She was eighteen or nineteen,
I figured.

We shook. She had damp little hands.

"George," she said again, and shook her head and giggled. I halfway expected her to whip out a stick, throw it, and tell me
to fetch. I probably would have.

Myrna had a crooked way of smiling, like she was one up on you before you even talked. Of course, Myrna Carp was one up on
me; she already knew my name.

"How—?"

"—I worked for Planned Parenthood second semester. I was your mother's intern. Emma's got a photo of you right on her desk,
you know? Of you in your Little League uniform? Number twenty-five? Tri-City Auto Parts? Very sharp, my friend."

"Hey, you know, that photo's a couple of years old," I said.

Myrna leaned back slightly and gave me a look of open appraisal. Then she smiled at me with her funny jagged smile, as if
she had determined that I was a charming, but very fake diamond.

"I can see that. You're much taller in real life. And you didn't have sideburns then, right?"

To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time someone had deemed to call the wispy curls at my temples sideburns.

"Anyway, I just recognized you, and, man, George, did you know that your mom is fucking awesome?"

"Yeah," I said, swallowing down the lump in my throat. "Sure."

"Your mom wrote me the most kick-ass recommendation, which is probably the only reason I got into Vassar. She also talked
my frigging mother into letting me get on the pill, which is probably the only reason I didn't have to kill anybody senior
year of high school.

"Your mom is my dogg." Myrna Carp laughed and ran a hand back through her red hair. "My dogg. Jesus, listen to me, huh?"

Something in my face made her rewind. "Well, I'm sure it's a little different for you. Being as she's your mom and all." There
was an expectant pause. The library doors hissed open as a man bustled out with an armload of books, and a gust of air-conditioning
washed over me.

"Did I just tell you that your mother helped me get on the pill?" I nodded.