Strangers at the Feast (14 page)

On Mother’s Day, things were fine. That was the first of each month, when the assistance checks came. But by week three, everyone was hungry and itching for a fix. Hubcaps, garden hoses, houseplants—the pipers would swipe anything.

It had been the twenty-first of November when someone put a knife to Grandma Rose’s back as she set down her groceries to unlock the door. Too indignant not to say her piece, she got a fist to her chin. When Kijo came home, she held a bag of ice cubes to her mouth, working fabric through her sewing machine with her free hand.

“Don’tchu be worrying,” she said. “You oughta see the fist.”

Beneath her bright sewing light her eyes looked sunken. She wore a short-sleeved housedress and her elbow, bending as she drew her fabric through the machine, seemed small and frail. His whole life his grandmother had intimidated him, and now she looked helpless.

“I shouldn’t have let this happen,” said Kijo.

“Are you God? You got ways of stopping evil in the world?”

But for days afterward Kijo heard her up all night in the kitchen, arranging spice jars, wiping down the refrigerator. She scrubbed the burners on the stove. She kept all the lights on, the cordless phone in the pocket of her robe.

He understood then that they never should have left Freedom Avenue, that everything had gone wrong since the move.

Kijo finished the room and was on his way to find Spider when a small wooden box caught his eye: beneath the glass lid he could see a red stone knife. The handle was carved with birds and antelope and deer. He slipped it into his back pocket.

He found Spider in a gold-colored bedroom half the size of a basketball court. Spider was splayed on the bed, velvet pillows under his head, a red blanket thrown over his legs. He tapped the remote control nervously against his thigh and stared at parade images on a flat-screen television mounted on the wall.

“Man, those floats are wack.”

“We’ve still got downstairs,” said Kijo.

“You said they’d be gone all day. Besides, look at the size of these rooms! We ain’t supplied for all this. You seen all this shiggity? They got a fireplace in the bathroom, Kij.”

Kijo touched the red blanket, edged with gold stitching. He wondered what a thing like that cost. He eyed the whole room: wooden dressers and tables so shiny they looked drenched in maple syrup. Brass knobs and handles. The ceiling was domed and painted with angels, like something he’d once seen in a museum. Everything there looked huge—like the furniture weighed a thousand pounds. Kijo thought about Grandma Rose’s theory of being medium. She’d always said if you had a nothing house with nothing in it, people could snatch it from you in between yawns. If you lived large and glitzy, someone would rob you. To survive in the world, you had to be medium.

Spider rubbed a pillow against his cheek. “It’d take five shovels to buy this pillow.”

If there was a decent snowfall, Kijo and Spider would get up early and throw shovels in the back of Uncle Clarence’s van. For ten bucks, they’d clear any driveway or sidewalk.

“Quit getting busy with the bedding, Spide.”

Spider tossed back the blanket, and something silver slipped from his pocket.

“See? Christmas came early. I asked Santa for the iPod Shuffle.”

“Leave it, Spide. We’re sending a message.” But Kijo remembered the stone knife in his pocket and pulled his shirt down to cover it.

“Message.” Spider moved his hands along an imaginary banner. “‘We’re
too stupid to seize a financial opportunity. Sincerely, Kijo Jackson.’”

No, Kijo knew what the message was. He was going to let them know that actions had consequences. Without retaliation, they’d try to step on you again.

Spider sniffled and wiped his nose with the wrist of his sweatshirt.

“What’s with your nose?” asked Kijo.

“The brothers in that group home can’t cover their mouths when they sneeze! The state oughta pay for my Robitussin.”

Spider’s eyes looked pink, and Kijo wondered if Spider was on the pipe. Sooner or later, everyone in Spider’s situation went to the pipe. He decided not to ask.

“Let’s get to work,” said Kijo.

DOUGLAS

Pot holders dangled from his sister’s hands; there was a smear of gravy on her cheek.

“Dinner’s running a bit later than planned, so I hope you can keep yourselves entertained.” Ginny marched over to a stereo that looked like it had last been tuned in to Watergate. She put on jazz, flung the pot holders into the corner, and collapsed against the sofa.

“Are you trying to roast an American bald eagle in there, Gin? Want Denise to look?”

“Denise has her hummus to attend to.”

“Alert: Ginny’s at DEFCON two.”

Priya emerged from the kitchen and sat beside Ginny, who slid her arm tightly around the girl.

“This is why I never cook meat, Priya. It doesn’t
want
to be cooked.”

“I was wondering, Pop, if you maybe brought your telescope. I think Ginny’s lucky neighbors are watching the game and I thought maybe we could catch some that way.”

“Very funny,” said Ginny. “Weren’t you the one who was outraged about Janet Jackson’s boob a few years ago? Aren’t you afraid the game might sneak another bare boob at you?”

“Number one, that was the Super Bowl. Number two, I was outraged because it was
one
boob. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just a tease.”

“Oh, do you know who has box seats to the Super Bowl?” his
mother interjected. “Roddy Peterson. I saw his mother at the grocery store.”

“That’s great, Mom.”

“What ever happened to Roddy?” asked Ginny. “I always expected to see that guy on
America’s Most Wanted
.”

“Oh!” his mother exclaimed. “You didn’t hear?”

“More celebrity?” asked Douglas, getting up and collecting the paper scraps.

Roddy Peterson had been his best friend in middle school. Roddy lived three blocks away, and used to carry his lacrosse stick over before dinner so that they could get a game going in Douglas’s yard as the sun set. Roddy’s father had been in the oil business in Texas and died in a helicopter accident when Roddy was ten. Two years later, Roddy moved to Connecticut when his mother married an accountant, a pale, bald man he referred to as “The Calculator.”

As they entered high school, Roddy started getting called in for meetings with the principal. His grades were slipping. He cut class. He quit the lacrosse team, complaining about the rules and regulations; he said he felt boxed in, that the uniforms were stifling him.

“I don’t want a number on my back.”

Leaving school, Douglas would find Roddy in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, reading books on particle physics or game theory, smoking a pipe. Roddy’s father had smoked a pipe. Roddy said he wanted to start building things: circuit boards and machines.

“I wanna build a machine to take a girl’s bra off from across the room.”

“You’re high, dude.”

Which often he was. He had a cousin in Stamford who sold him marijuana. Roddy liked to drive down to Stamford, past the projects; buy his pot; then smoke up at the Westport train station, watching the Metro-North trains go by, the blur of pale, tired faces in the windows. Sometimes, late at night, as the express from New York City rushed
by, he pulled down his pants and let a golden arc of piss hit the side of the train.

“Look at all those fucking drones.”

“Hey, my dad’s one of those drones,” said Douglas.

“So is The Calculator. We can’t get like that, man. Working for the machine. We might as well cut our balls off.”

Roddy’s obsession with his testicles soon evolved into what he called his signature move. Roddy believed men were being taught to bury their animal nature. Sometimes, he told Douglas, he just had to let his testicles hang out. He said the air on his balls swinging free triggered a primitive feeling, a communion with his forefathers, his hunter-warrior ancestors. Only when his balls were breathing could he begin to think clearly. “It’s like my testicles are claustrophobic.” Roddy developed a trick of unzipping his pants, pulling out his balls, then buttoning the waist. He’d sit in chemistry lab, walk into a 7-Eleven, check out books from the public library, all with his bare balls dangling between the teeth of his zipper. Amazingly, no one ever noticed.

“They don’t notice because they don’t expect us to have balls anymore,” said Roddy. “They don’t think anything’s down there. Surprise, surprise, bureaucratic assholes”—he swung his hips, shouted at the sky—“these aren’t going away! You gotta try it, man.”

But Douglas had an awful vision of his mother and sister bailing him out of jail for indecent exposure. Or catching a glimpse. In fact, Ginny had once seen Roddy’s move.

“Jesuschristalmighty put those things away,” said Ginny, running into them in the Minimart parking lot when she was fifteen.

“My sister has eagle eyes,” explained Douglas.

“Your sister wants me.”

“Don’t make me get a BB gun,” said Ginny.

Douglas decided to make new friends. When Roddy came over to his house, it was at odd hours; he would rap on the windows after midnight.

“Someone’s going to think you’re a burglar. I’ve got a math test at nine tomorrow.”

“Three point one four: that’s the answer to everything.”

They crossed paths a few times during college, when they were both home for the holidays. They’d bring a six-pack out to the Westport station and watch the commuter trains go by, for old times’ sake.

“Your dad still working for the machine?”

“He’s now a senior sales manager for the machine. Fewer phone calls, more reports. I think he hates it.”

“That’ll make you old fast. I need to build things, conquer lands.”

But Roddy himself looked old, a bit ragged. He still needed to pull his balls out from time to time, in discreet locations, but the signature move no longer seemed funny to Douglas. Roddy was an adult; what if Roddy unzipped around small children? Wound up in jail?

The sight of Roddy grew depressing. When he heard Roddy had dropped out of college in his senior year, Douglas stopped returning his calls. Douglas had lined up a good job in Manhattan, his life was on track.

But a year out of college, Roddy showed up in New York; he called from a pay phone, asking for a place to crash.

He arrived at Douglas’s studio with an army backpack and began unpacking notebooks, binders, a tube of blueprints.

“I’ve got a once-in-a-lifetime proposition for you, dude. You are gonna be grateful you knew me back when.” He snapped open a binder and pulled out pages. “Ask me what this is?”

“A love poem.”

“This is a United States of America patent application. You see this sketchola? You need a beer to lubricate your mind for the sharpness of the thoughts I’m about to articulate?”

“Roddy, some of us have work in the morning.”

“Listen at your own peril, then. This is an inner plate and this is an outer plate and this, oh, I fucking love this, is a slidable drag unit. I am
offering you the chance to get in on this now, as partner. Because we are gonna storm the bathroom-lock industry.”

“This is a
bathroom
lock?”

“The
mother
of all bathroom locks. It won’t go slip-sliding around. Look at the latch unit!”

“Roddy, what do I know about bathroom locks? What do I know about patents? If the patent is any good—”

“It’s genius.”

“If it’s genius, sell it to a bathroom-lock company.”

“If you wanna make it big, you gotta be in on the manufacture.”

“There’s no way in hell you can raise money to get that going. Not to mention marketing a new product, one little lock, when there are probably bathroom-supply companies that already sell doors and locks and toilet-paper dispensers. People like one-stop shopping.”

“Doors and dispensers are a breeze.”

“Look, I don’t have the kind of money you’d need.”

“But this is our big break.” Roddy’s cheeks filled with air and slowly emptied. He stuffed his diagram back into his notebook, his notebook in his backpack. “I just have this gut feeling and it fucking breaks my heart we can’t do this together. I mean, you’re a cog in the wheel. Pretty soon you’re gonna be on that train to the burbs. You’re gonna end up like The Calculator, or like your dad, stargazing and depressed.”

Douglas got up to brush his teeth. “Don’t talk about my dad.”

Roddy stayed another two weeks, offering Douglas several more chances to fork over his entire savings, before going to stay with Bruce Fancher, another high school friend who was living in Philly; Roddy thought Bruce had killer financial instincts.

Three years passed before Douglas had any news about Roddy, and that was when he walked in one November day and his mother was waving a magazine called
Entrepreneur
with an article on Roddy.

Douglas had been right, at least, in suggesting Roddy sell the patent to a bathroom-supply manufacturer. Bruce had jumped on the
investment opportunity. And when Roddy used the $3.2 million he made on the sale of his patent to start a company called Roderick, which sold padlocks and dead bolts, he made Bruce VP of operations. When the company went public Roddy made over $100 million.

Douglas called to congratulate him, but Roddy’s mother explained she wasn’t allowed to give out his number. She’d pass along the message.

Eventually, Roddy sent a picture of himself standing before his personal jet, beside his wife and two children. No return address.

On the back he’d written: “Thanks for letting me crash with you.” He enclosed a certificate for one thousand shares of his company, and, without thinking, Douglas tore it up.

“Who’s that?” asked Denise when she saw him sitting at the kitchen counter staring at the photo.

“Some loser from down the street,” he said.

“A loser with a jet?”

ELEANOR

By two o’clock, Eleanor could see that everybody was punchy with hunger. She gave the children mints from her purse, reapplied her lipstick, and to help pass the time, asked Douglas if he had any new projects under way.