Greenville (2 page)

Did you close your window?

The boy looks up. The old man is using the end of his sleeve to rub something, dust or frost, off a gauge on the dash, and when he’s finished he squints at the gauge and then he says, You won’t be going into Slaussen’s tonight. He looks down at the boy and lets the big wheel go slack in his hands. Where you’re going
you’ll wish sacks of potatoes was all you had to haul around. Shit, boy, he says, that’s what you’ll be carting soon. Wheelbarrels full of—

The crunch of median gravel under the left front tire brings his attention back to the road. The steering wheel is as big as a pizza and twirls like one too, as the old man wrestles the truck onto the roadway.

Did you close your window?

The boy ignores him. The truck’s heater has been broken since before he can remember and it will make no difference if the vent window is open or closed. If they drive long enough the engine’s heat might pulse through the dash and if it does he will close the window, but at this point, despite the sack of clothes he has buried his hands in for warmth, he doesn’t believe they will be on the road very long. And besides, the pillowcase is tiny, almost empty. Only one change of clothes, even if none of them fit him. But at least they won’t hurt him, like Jimmy’s shoes.

Already the fog has thinned, skulking in the median as if afraid of the big truck, but no other cars are on the road; and as they drive the pain in the boy’s feet changes. The sharp pinching in his toes dissipates slightly, becomes a general ache he feels throughout his feet, less strong but more pervasive, and he is trying to decide if this is more or less bearable than the initial pinching when the old man veers toward the exit for Dix Hills.

The boy relaxes then. Even though he doesn’t know the names of these streets he knows the rhythms of the starts and stops and turns through them, can feel the rightness or wrongness of the truck’s movement in his belly—indeed, he’s been feeling it since his time in his mother’s. Both his parents are
employed at Pilgrim State Mental Hospital, and before the boy started school he stayed at the enormous hospital’s daycare facility, which he remembers as a place of lights so bright he could never find Jimmy and his sisters—Duke was already in school by then, and Lance wasn’t born until after the boy started going to Brentwood Elementary. Then, not long after he left daycare, the boy’s mother began sending him with the old man when he went to pick up his paycheck Friday afternoons, because most of the bars the old man frequents won’t let him bring the boy in with him and, during the winter at least, the old man doesn’t make the boy sit out in the truck for more than a half hour or two. And even though it is Saturday morning and the old man should have collected his paycheck yesterday, the boy isn’t all that troubled. He simply assumes they’re en route to another of the old man’s errands: helping the hospital’s dairyman unload crates of eggs onto the back of their truck, or taking out the kitchen trash, which just happens to contain a couple gunnysacks of potatoes or waxed cardboard boxes of broccoli still tightly packed in ice. He ignores the pillowcase in his hands, the glint in the old man’s eyes. The old man is twitchy but repetitive, he reminds himself—a broken record, Duke calls him, stuck in a groove. If his actions sometimes appear random, it is only the contained chaos of one marble clicking off another in the schoolyard, willy-nilly inside the tiny chalk circle but easily predictable within the broad scheme of things. Eventually everything will become clear, if not immediately then at some not-too-distant point.

The looming crooked edifice of the hospital is just visible in the distance when the old man eases the truck down a dark narrow alleyway, seemingly forgetting to brake until the nose of the
truck is inches from the sooty bricks of the alley’s terminal wall. Now the boy understands what’s going on. This is the Jew’s back door, and the old man comes here with almost the same regularity as he goes to the payroll office at the hospital a mile down the road. The boy only takes the time to loosen the laces on his boots before pressing his ear to the open window—his left ear, so he can turn and face the scene taking place at the back of the truck. Through the window he hears the old man’s muttered curses, the soft thud of his fist on the gray metal door.

Come on, come on, he growls, drag your lazy ass out of bed, come
on
!

This goes on for several minutes until finally there is a muffled voice from beyond the door.

All right, all right, enough with the pounding, all
right
!

The Jew is shaped liked a candy Easter egg stood up on end: oval on one side just like a regular egg but flat on the other. This morning his big stomach pushes his white shirt and black pants out of a bathrobe instead of the lab coat he normally wears, and in place of his black skullcap a handkerchief is draped over the bald wrinkles of his head. Both the handkerchief and the hand that holds it in place are as stained as the old man’s kitchen uniform.

Floyd, he says, getting the old man’s name wrong as he always does, we don’t normally see you this early. Not an emergency I hope.

This is the part the boy is fascinated by: the part where the old man fakes a cough. He must summon a breath for it, and when he does manage to force out a sputter it’s hardly louder than the wheeze of a punctured tire. His face contorts in pain and both his hands clutch not at his lungs but at his belly.

Ah jeez Doc, the old man says with ragged breath. I’m feeling pretty bad. What fascinates the boy is the fact that this both is and is not a lie.

A pity, a pity. And too early to see your physician I’m sure.

Still at the country club. The old man tries to soothe his grimace into a grin. Probably on the golf course right now.

The morning light barely penetrates the high-walled alley, but the Jew doesn’t bat an eye at this ill-timed delivery of the old man’s line.

No matter. We’ll send you home with something that’ll fix you right as rainbows.

He closes the door in the old man’s face, offering a brief glimpse of his white-cloaked back—from shoulders to heels as flat as a tabletop after the dishes have been cleared away. The old man stamps his feet impatiently but it’s only a few minutes before the Jew returns. The handkerchief flies off his head when he opens the door and he grabs for it with one doughy hand, misses, then lets the hand sit there as if embarrassed to be bareheaded in the presence of a customer. The boy thinks the Jew’s wrinkled skull is as ugly as a shrimp’s mottled front end—he’s seen those too, at Slaussen’s, thousands of them as gray and slimy as the ash pail when Duke takes a leak into it—and then, one hand still covering his head, the Jew holds out a small white bag weighed down by heavy round shapes.

I have taken the liberty of prescribing seven. Two tablespoons three times a day. They should see you through the week, but if they don’t.

He leaves the sentence unfinished.

The old man scrabbles through his pockets. The first
produces an empty bottle and the second produces another, but finally he finds a wad of bills and extracts some and gives them to the Jew. The Jew puts them in a pocket of his robe without counting them and hands the bag to the old man. The boy knows from Duke how greedy Jews are, but Duke has also told him that the old man is even more desperate than the Jew is greedy, and the Jew knows this too. The Jew knows that the old man will not shortchange him because then the old man will not be able to get his prescriptions renewed anymore. The boy knows all this in the same way his stomach knows the twists and turns of the streets that lead to this alley and his head knows the taste of all-butter French loaf. He knows that the bottles in the bag contain a cough medicine whose primary ingredient is corn syrup and whose active ingredient is turpenhydrate, an explosive word whose size and syllables slot it in the boy’s head somewhere between peroxide and nitroglycerin, and he knows too that it is the combination of these two ingredients, corn syrup and turpenhydrate, that makes the old man’s breath smell as sour as eggnog left on the counter overnight.

And your son. The boy sees the Jew’s eyes glance toward the cab. He is well I hope.

He’s fine, he’s fine. My boy’s fine.

Your firstborn, no? Your eldest?

The boy knows the Jew has seen Duke and Jimmy—his mother had sent both of them in turn to guard the old man’s paycheck—and now he knows the Jew is aware of this other thing as well, less the family secret than the family shame.

The old man turns and looks in the boy’s direction, but if he sees him his face doesn’t register it.

The boy’s fine. We’re going to see his uncle Upstate.

A trip to the country! the Jew calls out to the old man, already heading back to his side of the truck. A weekend adventure! All best wishes for a speedy recovery and safe return. Just before the old man climbs in the cab, the Jew makes a clucking sound with his tongue. Such a young man, he says, and then both truck and pharmacy doors slam closed at the same time.

The old man takes one of the bottles from the white bag and drinks it, and then he casts around the truck until his eyes light on the pillowcase filled with the boy’s brothers’ clothes. The finger that points to it wavers like the needle of a cheap compass, and the boy doesn’t hand it to him but instead pushes it across the seat. With the persistence of a chicken scratching for corn the old man attempts to separate one side of the open end of the pillowcase from another, scraping and clawing until a hooked finger manages to pull the sack open. The old man scrunches up the white bag as tight as it will go and then rolls the bag into Duke’s jeans and stuffs the jeans back into the sack and pushes it toward the boy. But the boy is still hearing the Jew’s last words.
Such a young man
. For a moment he’d thought the Jew was talking about him—he’d felt almost grown up. But as he watches the old man’s balding but babyish face, his purple tongue clamped between yellow dentures as he concentrates on his task, he realizes the Jew was referring to his father.

Guard this with your life. One of these breaks, it’ll be your head.

The boy holds the bag for a moment, then drops it to the floor of the truck and puts one of his feet on it. Even that small
pressure hurts his foot and, briefly, the boy thinks about smashing the old man’s medicine with the heel of Jimmy’s shoe. But the morning’s balance is already fragile, and he doesn’t want to risk sending it over the edge to someplace new. Someplace he has never been.

No matter how many times the old man does it the boy can never believe he will be able to back out of the alleyway. It’s as if all the benevolence providence denies him in every other area of his life is trapped in this brick-and-mortar gulch, and no matter how many medians or telephone poles or dogs the old man runs into or over he is always able to back the truck out of the Jew’s alley as easily as if he were parked on a conveyor belt. He doesn’t even turn around—does it all with mirrors—nor does he pause at the exit, and more than once cars have veered around the truck as it catapults from the alley’s blessed sanctum. But the roads are clear this morning, of cars and fog too, which seems to have burned off in the few minutes it took the old man to renew his prescription. The sun has cleared the horizon and ascends the convex surface of the sky and the boy turns and watches it through the warped glass of the cab’s rear window. If the boy tilts his head the irregularities in the glass distort the rising sun into a sliver, a pinhole, an orange portal with pulsating, beckoning edges, and he toys with the shape as the truck rattles toward the parkway, not turning around until, with a sickening lurch, the truck veers right when it should veer left. Although the boy doesn’t know his compass points—knows only that eastbound and westbound lanes lead toward home and away, that south shore and north shore mark the poles of a socioeconomic axis whose bottom end his family occupies—he does
know that a right turn means they are heading beyond Dix Hills. He has never gone beyond Dix Hills before.

Quickly, he faces forward in his seat. All he can think to do is chart their progress by the signs that dot the road, so that when the old man pulls onto a side street for his inevitable nap the boy will be able to tell him where they are when he wakes up, which way they came from and how to get back home. But even though the old man’s head nods every once in a while he doesn’t stop driving, and each road he turns onto seems bigger than the last. The Southern State to the Long Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway to the Clear View Expressway and the Clear View to the Throg’s Neck Something, the Throg’s Neck Bridge the boy sees when the road lifts off the ground and floats across an expanse of water, and after the Throg’s Neck comes the Cross Something or Other, the boy doesn’t see what they are crossing because by then the road is studded with signs, too many for him to read, too many for him to keep track of. Mother Mary Dolorosa Welcomes All, as does Riccio’s Italian Restaurant—Family Style! The Utopia Estates Promise A New Beginning and Kaufmann Bros. Storage Keeps Your Dreams Safe and the Maritime Academy Provides Hope For Tomorrow but right now the boy has no dreams and he has no hope because he’s lost track of their route, and at some point he’s lost his feet too, which have gone numb in their too-tight shoes. It is an empty yet heavy sensation, in its way much more compelling than the pain that had been there before, or the hunger gnawing at his gut. He had to work last night and so hasn’t eaten since lunch yesterday, but he is so used to being hungry that he almost doesn’t notice it, what with his feet and what’s going on outside the truck.

Over the course of several hours the buildings have gotten bigger and more numerous but now they’re smaller again, thinning out until finally they’re so sparse they seem to mark the space between parcels of property rather than the other way around. Indeed, the land has an unfamiliar, unsettling sprawl here. On Long Island the water’s boundary is always palpable, even when it’s not visible—you can feel it in the horizon’s abrupt drop-off. But here the land stretches out in all directions, leaving the boy with the disturbing impression that they could keep driving forever. And then there are the mountains. The only mountains the boy has ever heard of are the ones the old man is always going on about, the mountains of his childhood. Those verdant slopes were green and crisscrossed by babbling brooks and sweet clean streams, and some quality of the old man’s words had always led the boy to picture them as curved and comely, nature’s pinup stretched on one hip across the horizon. Whereas these mounds are jagged as cookie dough: their leafless forests are as ugly as January Christmas trees heaped on the curb, their snowcaps ash colored. Even their massive rock faces seem smeared across them, like Lance’s cheeks after he eats a slice of chocolate cake. The combination of the land’s sprawl and the lumpy protrusions, in such stark contrast to the old man’s drunken rambles about his youth in the country, give the boy the idea that he is being driven into a past that isn’t as rosy as the old man would have him believe. For a long time the truck runs along an enormous river though, and the boy is fascinated by the two frozen shelves that stick out from either shore and the ice-chunked strip of ice-blue water between. The glacial shelves look like teeth to the boy, cartoon teeth breaking apart after biting on
a rock hidden in blueberry pie, and the boy laughs quietly to himself when he imagines the river being fitted for dentures like the old man. A trip to the country, he reminds himself, attempting to relax again. A weekend adventure.