All the Old Haunts (10 page)

I didn’t used to be fat. Not any summer before. Somehow I have done the trick, of becoming both fat and hollow. I am emptier and larger than I have ever been, vast on the outside, vast on the inside and could there possibly be a solution to such a problem? You could maybe hear an echo, if you put an ear to my belly while I swallow something.

Not that you would want to do that. I can’t think of anybody now who would want to do that.

Showering makes me sweaty, and eating makes me hungry. Seeing people makes me lonely.

The grass itself makes a sound, though it may be just whatever buggy wildlife we have going on in there. I am grateful for them though. They keep a buggy watch on me and I can’t even see them and I don’t understand their language. A perfect relationship.

And I wear a hat. An old, old, old, wool Red Sox cap from the sixties or fifties.

Last summer, and the summers before, I cut the grass on Wednesdays. I loved it. I was never alone. I wore shorts. Sometimes I wore no shirt. And without fail, one of them would come out, with an iced tea, or a lime rickey, or even with a homemade slush. That’s when I fell in love with sweating, and when a Dixie cup of lemon slush could be so satisfying that I had to be reminded to eat something solid during the woozy afternoons. I loved to sweat, doing the lawn, and it even smelled lemon some days. I got mad if there was a little breeze to take it away from me.

That’s not a problem now. I stop the breeze dead, when I leave my house.

The blimpy summer clouds, trees, birds, and running waters everywhere in all directions, stop dead, when I step out the door.

I stand there and wait, as if it will change. As if this is going to suddenly reverse itself and become last summer or the one before or the one before. As if things the way they are are going to return to things the way they were just for me.

I know they won’t. But I stop and wait anyway.

Not really by choice, to be honest.

I can’t move, as nothing else can. The rotation of the earth itself stops when I come out to mow the lawn on Wednesday.

The horror of this. Of the stillness on top of emptiness. Of the silent, dry, heartless heat. It seizes me and holds me there. Until it is done with me. And I drag on.

Nothing moves, and I am desperate desperate to fill everything with sound and motion, sweat and heartbeat. Things that go with Wednesday and sunshine and July.

A crow lands in the middle of the street, unbothered by anything. He walks six steps toward me. Sounds like he has big shoes on.

I rip the mower engine into action, tearing the fabric of the day in half, sending the crow away to another world.

It was the signal, once upon a way back when. I could not be alone when the lawn mower was running. Like a siren, the sound of the brash little two-stroke engine screamed too clearly to be ignored and within minutes I had company.

I loved that.

Never had any actual help. I’d have somebody, though. Sitting on the curb, lying on the strip of grass I had just finished trimming. Talking, uselessly, into the incessance of the noise so that there was no actual exchange of words.

I loved that.

I hear it now, though. And I hear it now. Words and words, and words I can hear in the engine’s tired, sad desperate call.

Tired sad desperate. The machine hardly seems up to the job anymore. The lawn seems larger than it once was. It seems to go on and on ahead of us, and some Wednesdays it can feel like we’ll never make it, over the whole expanse, through the heat, back into the garage, into the house.

But we do. I finish, we finish, the job is finished, and I look it over.

I’m not as good at it as I once was. Used to be like a marine’s haircut when I was done, but now it’s patchy, ragged, and dirty looking. The blades probably need sharpening.

I take off my cap, wipe my other hand in a sweep, back over my oily forehead, my ropey matted hair. I look left, at a better lawn next door, look right at a better lawn next door. I don’t come outside, anymore, when they cut theirs either. They’re doing okay just the same.

Just the same.

I make as much noise as I can wrestling the mower back into the garage, wrestling the half-rusted garage door closed, stomping my lumpy tired self up the splintery steps and into the kitchen again.

And then all is quiet once more. A day this hot usually brings the buzzy cicada call out of the tree sometime around three o’clock. I wonder, sometimes, if he’s the same cicada from last summer and the other summers before that, because he is awfully reliable in just that same way. I like to think that he’s the same one. I like to think there’s that much.

Two long hours till three o’clock.

I have lunch, two Underwood deviled ham sandwiches and a big bag of Doritos nacho-cheese-flavored tortilla chips and a two-liter bottle of A&W root beer. And then I have a Creamsicle, and a nap, which is perhaps not quite a nap, based on all the visions and stutters, the three interruptions for the uncomfortable small dabble of saliva that I cannot stem from oozing out the corner of my sloppy slack damn mouth.

So really, I don’t know if I’d call it a proper nap, because I have been too aware, for too much of the time. And what possible good is a nap if you’re stuck being aware anyway.

Except that I jump up, woozy and blind-spotted, when I realize my cicada friend is way through his song before I am able to appreciate it and I stagger, scramble to the window, to watch the very spot, off about fifty yards away and forty feet up, where I have imagined he has his little stage set up.

But show’s over, just when I get there.

It is so quiet, standing where I’m standing. It is so frightening, the hollow whoosh that goes with the removal. The removal of what was happening but now isn’t. The removal of the song, that wasn’t there and then was there and then wasn’t once more. The removal of that measly straggle-end of something nice that I could have had, did have for a time, and then had ripped away leaving not even an echo. It’s worse. Lonelier, sadder, deeper, than the silence that was here before the song. The one left after hurts so much more than the one that never was.

Space, and silence, silence and space, I didn’t hate them, last summer and the summers before.

I should have taken a summer job. I should have gone away with the family.

Watch the house? The house is watching
me.

It’s nobody’s fault. Nobody owes anybody an apology. Seven more hours until it gets dark. So much time and space needs filling.

I sleep through too much of it. If I slept through less of the daylight, I could sleep through more of the night. That would be better, I think, that would be better.

The song I wake to this time, the song outside my window this time, is the song they sing most nights.

It is nearly nine, nearly dark, and while I have ducked most of the horrors of the silent empty day, I have emerged bang-on into the horrors of the night.

It’s nobody’s fault. Nobody owes anybody an apology for this. It’s the roll of the mean cold old dice, and nothing else. She me he, reading left to right. He me she going the other way. I am the bologna of a very unfortunate sandwich, with our houses lined up just like this, but once upon a time last summer and the summers before I was the beneficiary of wonders, for the same reason.

I could smell her perfume from my bedroom window. I could hear the
flap flop
of his ugly old-man sandals as I lay on my bed, any old hot June July August day. Nobody ever had to call me down. It was spooky beautiful, how few words we ever had to use, June July August.

Now of course, I hear the words. I hear the hush of them, the respect and the pity and the kindness they show me and that bores into my great rare round belly like a corkscrew.

And I go to the window. I stop, two feet back, the spot I have worked out well. Where I can see, mostly, but cannot be seen, mostly.

I am sweating, but this is not unusual. Breathing doesn’t feel so good. I try and control it, but I feel something coming, something getting away from me. I have to back away, leave the window, go to my pillow.

Sounds like a rusted hinge, on a very small door, when I exhale into the pillow. But it’s out now, that thing that’s in me and needs release now and again. And that should be that.

Back at the window, I am in time. To see him with his hands on her hips. To see her with her hands on his neck.

Movies, I think I hear. Ice cream, I think I hear, before they pivot and go, before each slides a hand into the back pocket of the other.

We saw a lot of movies. We ate a lot of ice cream.

I remember when she pulled her fist way up the sleeve of her fuzzy-trimmed pink parka. I remember when I looked inside and she bopped me on the nose. I remember she gave me her bag of Fritos.

I remember our long hike in the Blue Hills, my blisters, and his piggybacking me.

I remember all our hands in all our pockets. I can feel it.

They are almost out of sight now.

It is so empty, and so quiet again, and so hot.

Hottest summer ever, I think.

I can’t see them anymore. So they probably can’t hear. So probably it’s safe.

“Bye.”

I wish I hadn’t slept so much today. Now it is night and it is hot and dark and it is so quiet and I am so wide-awake and my god I am so hungry I don’t believe it will be filled if I try all night long.

It’s nobody’s fault. Nobody owes anybody any apologies.

I
F YOU’VE NEVER THOUGHT
about it, then you’ve never thought. That’s how I look at it, Nicky. And it’s not as if this was the first time I ever thought it, either, so this is nothing special, right, and there’s no reason to make it out to be anything special. It’s happened before, it’s happening again, and then it will stop.

Stop it, Nick. I want you to stop it.

Nick lays there in the casket, maybe a foot in front of my face. They thought it would be appropriate to have him wearing his junior varsity baseball jacket over his shirt and tie, to remind us how vital and active and playful he was. Silver satin, with an embroidered red knight on horseback. His hair too is like satin, long and black against the shiny billowing white bath of silk lining that fills the casket like bubbles.

So it’s all slick in there, and makes no sound, causes no friction, draws nobody’s notice, when Nick wants to shift his shoulders, or turn his head a bit, or quake. Just for me.

I can do what I have to do, Nicky. I can do my part in this. I can carry you out. If only you’ll stop it.

The first time was when my old man died. He moved. I know he moved. He moved when I was kneeling there up so close to him while he was being so dead, being so gone, but still—and how was I supposed to figure this, at six years old—but still being so very much my dad.

But that was different. He moved because I made him move, by wanting it so bad. And he moved because he owed it to me, the bastard. The least he could do. I was only little. He had no right.

Tipped his head, though, tipped it just oh so little a bit so I could see it, me his boy, and nobody else. Somethin’ special, kid, just between you and me. Our little secret. And a version of a wink to go along with it. A reverse wink, where he cracked open the one eye just a slit while the other stayed closed like it was supposed to be when a guy was in a casket surrounded by silk.

It was nice. It was just ours. He owed me that. I liked that he didn’t show anybody else, not even my mom. But that was why they had to take it away from me. My fat uncle coming up behind and lifting me by the shoulders because, I don’t know, maybe I did stay too long and maybe I did make some sounds, but so what. I had a right. And it wasn’t enough anyhow, and I would have gotten more, I would have got him sitting all the way up and smiling at me even with sewed lips if they didn’t pull me away. Because I wanted it just that bad. And he owed me.

Which was what made that different, Nick. You don’t owe me anything, so I wish you’d just stop it.

And like when my Aunt Rita moved her finger. That was different, too, because she had to have that ring on that finger. That ring that belonged to Granma, and was the only thing my mom wanted when she died because Granma promised it would always be Ma’s. But Rita had to have it, and when she died she had to take it with her and she was killing my mom at the same time, that stupid ring, Granma’s ring, glistening up from that same kind of casket as my dad’s only with the purple satin.

She knew, of course, because dead people know. Rita knew what I was thinking when it was my turn and I was kneeling there and I was wondering when would be the perfect right time. Rita had gotten fat lately, so I was wondering what it was going to take, but I was going to chew the finger off if I had to but she was not taking my mom’s ring into the hole with her.

Which of course was when she wiggled the finger. Nothing else had to happen, did it. That was enough, to make my spine trill, my hands go numb on the mini-altar rail. Her hands were folded just like that across her stomach, the ring caught the light above and sparkled right at me as she lifted just that ring finger as if to dare me, sonofabitch boy, just you try and take this ring.

So what I think I know is, you get the movement when something’s not right. When something’s not right, things can’t be finished. Even the dead know that. Especially the dead know that.

But you don’t realize until you provoke them, do you? Unless you make them come out of it for you, you don’t know that when you come to the wake for the show, when you scoot up close for your look, for your sniff.

You don’t know, that you are their show.

Tell me Nicky, now that you know. Doesn’t everybody think what I’m thinking? Doesn’t everybody think they see it move, but we don’t tell each other? Isn’t this okay that I think this?

I’m a pallbearer for Nick. Which is not right. A fourteen-year-old guy shouldn’t be a pallbearer for anybody, and nobody should be a pallbearer for a fourteen-year-old guy. But here we are, the two of us.

Nick was my cousin and we were friends. Not best friends, not closest cousins, but cousin plus friend plus fourteen equals I’m here. Boy pallbearer. The others are all men. I’m here to remind people that Nick was a boy, as if they might have forgotten him already.