Interference & Other Stories (15 page)

But I'm way off track. There was this kid—I say kid, he was maybe twenty, T-shirt and jeans, a backpack—he comes out the store behind me, but he can't get the door open far because I'm standing there. So you know me—I'm even fatter now—I kind of squash myself against the wall till he gets out and pulls his backpack through. And then he sees the rain. So now there's two of us standing there.

And the kid is nervous. Rocking back and forth. I'm getting nervous too, you want to know the truth. We're right on top of each other and it's raining like all hell broke loose, and you know me, I'd never say nothing, but the kid don't smell too good. There's people in all the doorways and under all the awnings up and down across the street, but I can't hardly see them through the rain. Every once in a while there's a flash of lightning and the thunder is cracking and booming. Magnificent, it was.

Then it stops. Just like that. It must have kept on raining to the east—no, south, I guess. That line was still across the sky but it was farther off now, to my right, on the other side of the firehouse. And I tell you the rain shut off like that, like somebody'd turned off a goddamned spigot.

Right then, the kid asks do I have the time. Five thirty-five, I tell him.

“Shit!” he yells, and you know me, I jump, I don't like sudden noises, and he's gone.

There was a rainbow it turns out. Up in back of me where I couldn't see, but everybody across the street is shading their eyes and pointing up at it.

This car was coming around the curve there—you know where I mean, there by the bank—and the driver was kind of ducking down and looking up to see what everybody's pointing at, and by the time he saw the kid it was too late. He hit the brakes but the street was slick and the kid went down and the car slid over him and stopped.

I only ever heard things get that quiet once or twice before. The time the doctor give your mother and me your diagnosis, telling us the name for it and how rare it was and that the odds were you'd be gone before the year was out. And maybe again years later when I found your mother down the cellar by the washing machine. All you could hear was the goddamned windshield wipers screeching on the dry glass. I knew—everybody knew—the kid was dead.

They must have seen it from the firehouse ‘cause the EMTs come right away to pull him out. I heard one say it took his face right off. I never saw that though, thank God. I was already close to throwing up, I was so shook.

I could hardly talk to the cop. The TV crew was there and I tried to tell them about that line that moved across the sky, and how fast the rain stopped, and the rainbow, and how all them things come together, and how the kid asked for the time and ran out, and the car, and all the stuff I just told you, but then they didn't put me on. I watched that night, on the eleven o'clock. They had some other guy who saw it on. He was saying things like, “The gray vehicle entered the intersection from the southwest,” and “the pedestrian was crossing rapidly,” bullshit like that, and it made me angry. Like you could make some sense of a thing like that by telling it cold, with the heart ripped out of it.

When the news goes off, at midnight, they pick the winning number. How do I explain this? You never seen it. We never let you stay up that late. Theres this machine full of ping-pong balls with numbers on them popping around inside like crazy, like a popcorn popper. Then some young lady the money guys dress up in a slinky outfit opens a little gate and a ball pops up, and then another one, and then another till we got all seven numbers. Tommy, I tell you I sat there like it was a dream, one goddamned digit at a time, and I felt nothing. Anger, maybe. And disgust. Call me a fool but I don't want it, not no more. So here. To hell with it. Besides, it's yours. It's the goddamned family fortune.

D
uring that summer of 1960, when he was eleven, Gregory Kessler liked to go upstairs and sing into the window fan in his bedroom. He liked the funny way it made his voice sound and he imagined the words on the other side of the window, shredded into tiny pieces and blowing out over the neighborhood on the evening breeze. He pictured them like snow swirling across the street to Willy Hunsicker's house, second from the corner, where evenings Willy's mother would sit in an aluminum and canvas beach chair on the sidewalk with her stockings rolled down to her ankles, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper in the light from the streetlamp on the corner; or up the block on the breeze to Kenny and Neil Messinger's house with their father just waking to help put the younger kids to bed before he left for the Uptown Diner—“Breakfast 24 hrs”—and then the night shift at Eli Coal & Carbon. If the breeze were blowing just right, a few words might make it around the corner to where Margaret Fisher lived, where the roots of the horse chestnut tree heaved up the sidewalk so that walking by you were, for a moment, tall enough to see into her house. At school last year, in fifth grade, Gregory had been paired with Margaret for a procession on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and when she took his hand, he let himself feel all the things the songs on the radio, the songs he sang into the fan, were about.

 

And they called it puppy love.

Oh, I guess they'll never know

How a young heart really feels

And why I love her so.

 

Margaret was quiet and kept entirely to herself. Gregory was com-fortable with her shyness. He himself preferred solitude to hanging around with the only two guys in the neighborhood his age: Willy Hunsicker, who outweighed him by thirty pounds and had once sat on him and made him eat a worm, and Chris Messinger, who made him nervous because he was always burning stuff—model cars, toy soldiers, and once, his little sisters doll—dousing things with lighter fluid and putting a match to them.

In Margaret's case, Gregory understood, her shyness probably had to do with her being the new kid. All the others in the class had been together since kindergarten, while Margaret had only arrived at St. Polycarp's the year before. Introducing her on the first day of fourth grade, Sister Mary Patricia told the class that Margaret had lived in New York, New Jersey, and Delaware before moving to Pennsylvania. Margaret blushed deeply, slipped lower in her seat, and clasped her hands tightly on her desk. For a while the kids tried to include her, then they taunted her, and finally they left her alone.

Margaret's dad drove a Royal White laundry truck standing up, with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the cab so he could leap from his truck, one-two and, with a skip and a jump, ring the doorbells with a brown paper package in his hands. “Cleaner than clean,…” it said on the side of the truck, “fresher than fresh!” Tuesday mornings he came down Gregory's street, and sometimes in the summer Margaret was with him. Gregory'd arrange to be on the crumbling concrete steps of his house, filing and refiling his baseball cards by team, and within each team by batting average, or ERA for pitchers—each team a block with a rubber band around it. If Margaret was in the truck, he tried to jut out his jaw a bit and look serious, and if she noticed him, he gave her a little two-fingered John Wayne salute off his right eyebrow with just the slightest nod.

After the truck pulled away and stopped again farther up the street, Gregory would run up the stairs to his room to watch it from the window. Often his mother would poke her head in then to ask if he was okay and he would tell her that he was, sighing and rolling his eyes, or stretching the word “Ma-ahm” into two annoyed, derisive syllables.

“Well, if you're okay, I want you outside. It's too beautiful a day for you to be mooning around in your room, singing into the fan, for godsake.”

Gregory winced and blushed. He'd thought the singing was private. Besides, he hadn't been singing just then. How much else did his mother understand? His yearning for Margaret? The coded initials he'd written on his brown paper book covers, their initials intertwined: GMKF?

“Go find your brother. I swear I don't know what to do with you.”

Gregory's mother worked a half-shift of overtime on Tuesdays, eleven to three, at the linen mill, in addition to her regular forty hours. The boys' father, MIA in Korea, was presumed dead, and like any woman in her circumstance, she had no patience for hanging around doing nothing.

“Go! Go to the park. Go anywhere. Just get out of the house and go play for godsake!”

Gregory always knew where to find his brother Dougie in the summer. He and his friends would be by the river, on the bluff above the deep water where a thick braided rope hung from the branch of a huge honey locust. They'd be taking turns swinging out over the black water downstream from the rapids, letting go at the highest point, upward and out in a long, arced flight, accompanied by first a loud whoop and then a great splash. Then the rope would snake back to where the others fought to grab hold of it.

Most of the boys would twist and tumble through the air and try to end up tucked in a ball that made a dull
kaboom
and a tall column of water. Dougie, however, always managed to hit the water with a quick
rip
sound like a flat stone when it turns sideways and won't skip. That was even neater, and Dougie had offered to teach him, but Gregory was too scared—he looked down, heart pounding, and started shaking and backing away from the edge.

“Don't worry about it,” Dougie told him. “You're still little. When you're bigger you'll do it.” Gregory always heard “when you're bigger” as a taunt, coming from his brother, a reminder that Dougie was four years older, stronger and more powerful. Then Dougie swung out on the rope, let go, and Gregory watched as he entered the water clean as a blade.

Sometimes when they were both home, when no other kids were around, it was the way it used to be. They might sit on the floor on the braided rug and play rummy or crazy-8s, or drag the old electric football game from the closet and plug it in, choosing all-star teams and giving the little two-dimensional players the names of their favorite pros according to position.

Lately though, Dougie was making it clear that he'd rather be with almost anybody but his little brother, maybe because he was often left in charge for short periods when his mother had to run some errand or another, and that always meant he had to stay home unless he wanted to take Gregory with him when he met up with his friends—and that was worse.

“Mom, that's not fair! Besides, he's not a baby. He can take care of himself!”

Gregory's hurt feelings on these occasions were offset by gratitude that his brother'd said he wasn't “a baby.” The trouble was that, other times, with his friends especially, that's what Dougie called him, “a baby.” For his own part, Gregory resented the fact that Dougie was the one who got new clothes, new toys, new sports equipment, while everything he had was something Dougie had grown out of.

Gregory went out through the back door and hopped on his bike to ride to the river. Why did his mother have to be like that? Couldn't she see he was practically a teenager? That eleven is a teen even if you don't say it that way? Sometimes he just wanted to stay in his room and think. About Margaret mostly. He liked to lie on his bed and imagine they were kissing; he would hug the pillow to his chest and press his thumb into his lips. Sometimes he nuzzled the soft blond hairs on his arm and imagined they were the downy gold at the nape of her neck. He let the songs play in his head. He longed for romance, heartbreak, heroism; he yearned to be grown up and in love.

 

Venus if you will

Please send a little girl for me to thrill.

A girl who wants my kisses and my arms

A girl with all the charms of you.

 

He cut across the abandoned lumberyard and parked his bike near the hole in the chain-link fence topped with rusty barbed wire and covered with honeysuckle, ragged and sweet. He could hear they were there. He liked the quality of sound of the place, the rumble of trucks on the bridge, the way the sheer rock face on the other side echoed their voices, on some days more than others. Just through the fence was a boulder on which he could climb and see his brother and the others for a moment, and then he was on the dirt path that switchbacked several times through the high weeds alive with grasshoppers and other chirring insects.

One of Dougie's friends, Kenny Messinger, saw him first. “Hey Doug. Doug. Check it out. Snotboy's here!”

Gregory tried to smile, as if this were a nickname, as if he were being welcomed. It was the usual crowd of Dougie's friends: Kenny; Kennys twin, Neil; Zack; and Sam, all boys he'd known his whole life, neighbors, but somehow strangers now. Like Dougie, they had no use for him. These days he felt ashamed in their presence. They called him birdboy for his bony chest and skinny legs. They had all “filled out” as his mother called it. Muscular and hairy, they punched each other hard, so you could hear fists thumping shoulders, their voices deep and loud.

A new sign at the end of the path read “SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK, Town of Norville, Dept, of Parks.” It replaced the weathered “NO SWIMMING” sign, covered with the carved initials of generations of teenaged boys, that had been there until this year.

As Gregory approached, Zack cut loose with his loudest Tarzan yell as he let go of the rope; his cry ended in a loud smack as he hit the water. The echo sounded like a slap. “Oooww, that hurt!” said Neil, shaking his head to the side to drain water from his ear. When Zack surfaced, they all taunted him.

“Oh man, instant sunburn!”

“Down in flames, man!”

“Hey, check and make sure your nuts are still there!”

“Offer it up for the souls in purgatory!”

Zack scrabbled up the rocks and exposed roots of the bluff to stand again on the packed earth. His face, chest, stomach and thighs were all a bright red. “What are you lookin' at, dick-lick?” He was speaking to Gregory. “Well?”