No Book but the World: A Novel (25 page)

“How you doing there, Buddy?” This was Dave, standing over him, breathing the smell of liquor against the back of his head. “Time to get going.” Dave rocked forward on his feet, stumbling against Fred’s stool, then straightened again. The girl’s fingers slid lower, worked into the crevice between Fred’s legs. Fred wondered if Dave saw it. Dave should see it. Then he could say
Hey!
if it wasn’t okay. He could say
Hey, that’s a little weird!
the way he did whenever Fred forgot and started bouncing his body or making sounds he didn’t realize he was making. Then Dave would just say in a bright friendly voice,
Hey!
or else more quietly but still friendly,
Hey, quit that, quit doing the bobble-head thing,
or
quit humming
, and Fred would quit.

“Ah . . .” said Fred. The girl’s hand grew heavier, massy and warm, and her fingers rippled against his thigh. He tried to see the girl’s face but she was turned away, talking to her friend with the mean eyes, as if she had no idea where her hand had gone or what it was doing, the fact that it was moving, kneading at his crotch and he felt like dough and the smell of yeast flooded his nose and made him sway on his stool. He shut his eyes.

He saw June in the kitchen, bent over the table, working a great mound of dough with the heels of both hands, a thin cloud of dust floating in the light above the table, pale flour stars, pale galaxies of flour dust revolving slowly about her.

He saw Neel coming upon him in the upstairs hall.
Like stars
, Neel said, understanding. Freddy just sitting with his arms loose at his sides, watching particles of dust in a slant of light, each tiny mote made gold as it passed through the shaft.
They’re like the stars and the planets revolving in the universe,
Neel said, squatting, and there without hurry they watched the galaxy ballet. Perhaps, said Neel, the dust in the air in the upstairs hall
was
another universe, every bit as complicated and populous and full of mysterious grandeur as their own. Freddy liked it when Neel spoke to him this way. The words he didn’t know had shapes and colors and he could taste them.
Populous
was white and puffed as popcorn.
Grandeur
was green velveteen, mossy on his tongue.

Perhaps, said Neel, one of those specks of dust was a planet like this one, with a little boy like Freddy on it. And to him, Freddy was a giant—so unimaginably large that he could not even be seen.
Imagine,
Neel said:
too big to be seen
.

Fred opened his eyes. There were the bottles, the anchoring rows of bottles behind the bar. He found it necessary to shift on the barstool, to give the star-girl’s hand more room, to give himself more room within the confines of his pants.

He looked at her again, at the back of her head all tufted with yellow. He did not think you could do the thing she was doing absentmindedly, or do it with your back turned, or while you were talking to someone else. But the star-girl didn’t seem to be paying him any attention. She was busy singing along with the song on the jukebox now, together with her friend, leaning her mouth toward the invisible microphone her friend was pretending to hold.

Fred let his eyes close again and pressed himself into the slow heat of her hand.

“Come on,” repeated Dave, “let’s go.” He gave Fred a poke between the shoulders.

“Ah-where?”

“Dude. Some address, I don’t know. Umberto’s friend.”

Fred had gone on road trips with friends of Dave’s before. They usually went in winter or when the weather was bad on the Cape and they knew they wouldn’t get any painting or roofing work. They would drive north to Maine or New Hampshire, or west to New York, and once all the way up to Canada. Always in a rattling car, radio stations coming in and out, noisy windshield wipers and Slim Jims and Combos from rest stops. Cold water in the gas station bathrooms, cigarette smoke in the houses and apartments, nights spent sleeping on somebody’s couch or floor or in the backseat. The car lighter forever getting pushed in and pulled out, its glowing orange spiral pressed to the ends of the cigarettes Dave and his friends smoked. Fred rode in back, where he’d crack a window when he started feeling sick and suck cold whistling air into his lungs until someone told him to shut it.

There was always a purpose to these trips, although Fred never usually understood exactly what. There was a destination they had to reach, something that had to get done once they arrived.
Going to see a girl
someone used to know, or to
get some papers signed
, or to
visit some property
or
check out the product
or
pick up a delivery
or
sell a pair of skis
. One time Umberto had been going to
buy a painting
. They drove all the way up to Lake Placid and the whole way there everyone kept mentioning the painting Umberto was going to buy, and then when they got there they met some people and went to a party and then to another party somewhere else and they all slept on the nubby orange carpet in someone’s basement, and then the next morning it was time to head back, and in all this time Fred never saw the painting.

On the drive home he’d asked what was the painting of?

Dude, what?

Fred said,
The-ah painting you-ah, you-ah, went to buy. Like-ah, what-ah was it of?

Umberto said,
Your mom.

And everybody laughed. And it had been a joke. And Fred had known to smile.

The first few times Dave had to do a road trip after Fred started living with him, Fred stayed on the Cape by himself, but that hadn’t gone too well, even though Dave had gotten him all set up with Campbell’s and Chef Boyardee and Dinty Moore, things that would be easy to heat in a pot on the stove. The first time, Fred hadn’t realized the gas was on even though the burner wasn’t lit and when Dave came home he kept saying
Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, can’t you smell that?
running around opening all the windows and both doors, saying
Jesus Fuck, the whole place could have blown. Hell yeah, I’m mad
, he’d said when Fred asked if he was mad.

The other time Fred stayed on the Cape alone, Dave went out and got Hot Pockets and Easy Mac and frozen pizza and they made a plan that Fred would just use the microwave and not even touch the stove, but for some reason Fred got the feeling that the gas had been left on; he kept checking the knobs on the stove but still he was scared, he kept thinking of Dave saying the whole place could blow, and his body started shaking so bad he had to run out of the house and not go back inside without Dave, which meant he had spent two whole days out in the cold, walking around the empty town with no tourists, waiting for Dave to return; two whole nights in the backyard wrapped up in a drop cloth he found in the shed, shaking with cold. The third day some cops and EMTs came to Dave’s house and found him huddled on the gravel. They said they’d gotten a call from a neighbor and they talked to Fred and checked out the house and told him it was safe to go inside, but he still wouldn’t go in, so they wound up calling Dave, somehow they got his cell number—Fred didn’t know it—and Dave had to come back early from his trip.
Hell yeah, I’m mad
, he’d said again that second time.

After that Dave said it was easier for Fred to come along on these road trips. Sometimes Fred had to wait in the car, especially when they were meeting someone somebody had business with. Fred figured that was probably what was going to happen now in Perdu. They would leave this bar that his eyes and nose and ears had gotten used to, and get back in the car and drive to some house on a dark road or some apartment complex with spray paint on the doors, and then Dave and Umberto would go inside and Fred would have to wait in the car, and it would be for a long time, he was pretty sure, and without the radio to keep him company, because Dave didn’t keep the keys in the ignition anymore since that time Fred had gotten tired of waiting and taken the car for a drive.

“No,” said Fred.

“What?”

“I-ah, I’ll ah-stay.”

“You can’t stay,” Dave began, putting a hand on Fred’s shoulder, pulling at his arm. But Fred knew how to make himself heavy on the stool, and then he heard the star-girl say, “Aw, Dave, let him stay, he’s having fun,” and Umberto say, “C’mon,” looking at Dave with eyes flat as coins, jerking his head toward the door, and the star-girl say, “What’s the matter, you jealous? ’Cause you
know
I’ll take good care of him.” Then the mean-eyed girl turned out to be crying, and Umberto and the other girl were already walking toward the exit, Umberto with both hands on her bottom, and Dave was sighing and the star-girl was saying, “Go. You have your fun, let us have ours. He can crash at our place tonight.”

Dave said, “What do you want to do, Buddy? You sure you don’t want to come with me?”

“Ah,” said Fred. “Ah . . .”

“He’s fine,” said the star-girl. “Aren’t you, Sailor?” Flashing her dimple, removing her hand from between his legs.

“Ah . . .”

“Just go,” said the other girl, sniffing. Her hair hung over her face and she was playing with a straw wrapper. Dave hesitated. Suddenly she turned and shoved his chest with both hands, hoarsely shouting, “Fucking
leave
.”

Dave went.

•   •   •

T
HAT NIGHT
F
RED STAYED
with the star-girl. She said her name was Loreen Ferebee. Her bed was a mattress on the floor.

“When-ah, when are they coming back?” Fred asked when she turned out the light.

“Who?”

“Ah-Dave. And-ah Umberto.”

She whispered, “Fuck if I know, Sailor,” and climbed on top of him. Beginning to move, she whispered, “Fuck if I care.”

Later she rolled away, sat on the edge of the mattress and said, “Huh.” Shaking a cigarette out of its package, she looked at him sideways. “You ever been with a woman?”

That was one of those questions that might be a riddle, so he thought awhile, but he couldn’t figure it out. “Yeah.”

She shrugged and smoked. “You got nice equipment, I’ll give you that.” She smoked a little longer, then stubbed it out and went to sleep.

In the morning the sky was no color, and rain was tapping against the box fan that sat in the window. He was lying on a mattress on the floor. The star-girl was asleep beside him. He couldn’t remember her name. He knew she told him the night before, but it always took him a while to remember a new person’s name. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do, if anyone would be mad if he got up and walked around or left, so he lay there and waited. He had to pee, but he held it. He looked around from where he lay. On a dresser across from the bed there were glasses and bottles and an ashtray and a framed picture of a boy with dark hair and big front teeth. There was a TV on the floor, and a chair, and everywhere else all over the room clothes slumped in piles like exhausted children. He turned and watched the star-girl sleep. He saw she was older than he’d realized in the bar, not really a girl. And her hair was no longer star-like. It lay squashed against her head, limp and dark at the roots. And it didn’t smell like raisin cookies. Just smoke.

B
ESIDES WHAT HE WAS WEARING,
this is what he’d brought with him from the Cape, all zipped into his orange knapsack:

• extra pair of underpants
  
• extra shirt
  
• extra pair of socks
  
• toothbrush
  
• toothpaste
  
• razor
  
• The Little Prince
  
• seventeen single-serve packets of grape jelly and eleven single-serve packets of strawberry jelly and two single-serve packets of syrup collected from diners
  
• Neel’s pocketknife with the toothpick missing
  
• June’s map of St. Lawrence, Criterion and Franklin counties
  

He didn’t bring extra pants or deodorant, because he’d forgotten to, and he didn’t bring the rest of his clothes or any of his other things like the box that held the letters June had written him when she was still alive, and the rest of her maps, and the pictures of their family, June and Neel and Ava and Fred, at Batter Hollow where he had grown up. He didn’t pack any of these things because he hadn’t known he wasn’t going to return to the Cape. If he’d known he wasn’t going back he would have brought them, and also the notebook where he wrote down important things, for instance important telephone numbers, for instance Dave’s and Ava’s.

But it turned out not to matter what he’d packed and what he’d forgotten, because he didn’t have any of it, because the orange knapsack was still in the backseat of Dave’s car, and Dave and Umberto didn’t come back the morning after they left the bar, and they didn’t come back all the next day. Or the next night, either. During this time it rained steadily and Fred stayed inside the apartment with the star-girl (
What’s your-ah, name again? Oh my God, for the hundredth time, Loreen Ferebee, want me to write it down?
) and the other girl, the one with the bruise-colored eyes. Her name was Tonya or Tee and she spent a lot of time walking loudly around the apartment, her bare heels banging the floor, sending shivers through the wood.

The long, narrow apartment was on the ground floor of a house that backed up on the mill river. It was dim inside, the air gray and almost grainy, and it smelled like mice and like milk that has turned. It was split unevenly into two rooms: a big one with a mini-kitchen and a beanbag chair and a bed and a table with folding chairs and a TV, and a small one with a dresser and a TV and a mattress on the floor. The small one was where Loreen slept. Each room had one window. The big room’s window looked out the front, onto a street of attached houses. The small room’s window looked onto a row of metal garbage cans chained to an aluminum fence. Through the links in the fence you could see the narrow river, and the window fan blew in a breeze that smelled like boiled cabbage and feet. When Fred said, “Pee-yoo,” and pinched his nose, Loreen said, “Paper mill. They shut it a few years back, but the river still stinks.”

Even though the apartment had only two rooms, Tonya or Tee paced it like she was waiting for something to happen. Like she was waiting for someone to burst through the door. Fred had the feeling if someone did she’d punch them in the face. She passed back and forth through the skinny archway that connected the rooms. This archway had no door, only bare hinges and long strings of red plastic beads hanging down, and every time she passed through it, the beads would spatter and rattle. Every now and then Tonya or Tee would take a rest and sit down, only to spring up suddenly and start pacing again. “That
bitch
,” she would say, suddenly backhanding the beads and appearing in Loreen’s room. Or else she would say, “That
ass
hole.”

“I know,” Loreen would answer calmly. “She is a bitch.” Sitting on the floor like she liked to do, with her eyes closed and knees pressed out like butterfly wings, the bottoms of her bare feet touching. She’d take in a long, slow breath and let out a long, slow breath, as if nothing mattered. Nothing in the world. Her hands palm-up on her knees. “He is an asshole.”

The first time they had this exchange, Fred thought it was a joke so he said, “Ha ha.” But Tonya or Tee whipped around and glared at him and he could see it wasn’t a joke. He swung his gaze away and bobbed his head: little bounces, very fast, so the rainy window danced on the wall. Then—he was relieved—the crack of her heels on the floor as she spun herself around again; the clamor and crash of beads as she propelled herself back into the larger room. Fred began to hunch his shoulders near his ears whenever she veered close, whenever she said, “I can’t believe they
did
that!” the “did” so sharp he saw it snagging, ripping her throat. He tried not to look directly at her. Once he did by accident and she caught him. Her heavy lids drooped even lower, and her eyes were like the holes of guns. “What is. Your fuck. Ing problem. Retard.”

He ducked his head, clasped his hands. His heart thudded and his breath went shallow.
Here is the church, here is the steeple
, he told himself, hearing June’s voice, seeing June’s hands as he put his own two pointers together and made them into the steeple, until at last Tonya or Tee moved away again.

Once she punched the wall behind him. Once she threw an ashtray in his general direction and the contents went flying, the bent stubs of cigarettes skittering across the floor, the ashes ghosting up into the air and then settling back down, coating Fred’s tongue, stinging Fred’s eyes.

“Take a chill,” Loreen said when that happened, and this time her voice did not have a nothing-matters lilt. It was flat and hard. She had been painting her toenails and now she looked up and pointed the tiny brush at Tonya or Tee, and a blue vein like a river on a map stood out on her neck.

For a moment everything froze: the girls, the TV, the rain outside, the blades of the window fan. Fred tried to stay frozen, too, to hide in the stillness, but an invisible siren was blaring closer and closer until it was right inside his head and he could not help clapping his hands over his ears.

Then Tonya or Tee yanked a raincoat off the back of a folding chair. “Fine. But he’s not staying,” she said, jerking her chin toward Fred. “I want him gone. And if those assholes don’t show up with my shit by tomorrow, you’re paying me back.” And she pushed out into the noisy downpour, letting the door swing shut with a smack.

When she came back hours later she was holding a sopping paper bag and clown spikes blackened the skin under her eyes. It was dark by then and Fred cowered because she’d said he had to be gone and he was not gone. But she didn’t say anything about finding him there. She didn’t even look at him. She just climbed onto the mattress where Loreen and Fred were watching TV and she put her head on Loreen’s shoulder. “How can he fucking like that bitch,” she said, tipping the bottle whose lip poked from the top of the bag and drinking. “How can he fucking like her better than me.”

“Shh,” said Loreen, without taking her eyes off the TV. She put one arm around Tonya or Tee and with the other hand took the paper bag and tipped it toward her own mouth.

Fred inched away to the far corner of the mattress, where, leaning against the wall, he wrapped his arms around his drawn-up knees. He watched the huddled girls and the cold blue light of the TV flickering over them like rain and he felt something but he didn’t know what. Like a metal machine was cranking inside his chest, its handle turning and turning and he couldn’t make it stop.

•   •   •

T
HE WHOLE TIME
he was at their apartment, this is what Fred did:

• eat cereal
  
• watch TV
  
• sleep
  
• watch the drips collect along a seam near where the ceiling met the wall and then drop down onto a rolled-up towel that Loreen had put under it
  
• try to tell if the drops were falling in any pattern he could measure by counting the seconds between them
  
• decide that they were not
  
• try not to look at Tonya or Tee
  
• look out the front window and try to see Dave’s car
  
• count how many cars drove by in an hour: 23
  

On the second morning Fred again woke first. For a long time he just lay there, not moving, like he had the day before. He looked at the box fan and the dresser and the glasses and the clothes and the framed picture of the boy and now they were all a little familiar. He did an experiment of lying very still, almost frozen, to see if time would speed up and then maybe the next time he moved Dave would already be walking in the door, coming to take him back to the Cape.

He lay as motionless as possible but time didn’t speed up. Maybe because he still had to breathe, and his heart beat no matter what.

The sky was no color again this morning but the rain had stopped and the window fan blew warm, sour-smelling air around the room. Then remembering what had happened the night before, he slid his thumb into his mouth.

During the night Loreen had climbed on top of him again. This time she had whispered instructions and placed his hands where she wanted them to be, and moved his hands the way she wanted them to move, and one time, surprising him with her quick strength, she rolled both their bodies over together so she was under him. She showed him what she wanted him to do and doing it was not hard but it made him breathe loudly and it also loosed up other noises from his throat, which made her whisper, “Shh . . . be quiet . . . come on, shut up . . . you’ll wake her . . .” and he tried to be quiet both because he didn’t like the noises he was making and because he didn’t want Tonya or Tee to wake up. When the noises came out of him anyway, Loreen had pressed her small hand over his mouth and her fingers were like chicken bones, and he had the thought of sucking the meat off them, like the wings in the bar that had been covered with not-too-spicy orange sauce, and he thought of Dave, how Dave had come up behind his barstool and lurched forward and rocked back and said,
You sure you don’t want to come?

You sure?
Had he been sure? Who knew. Sure or not, he hadn’t come. He’d stayed in the bar with the girls and gone home with the girls and Dave hadn’t come back and now he was here on this mattress on the floor in this sour-smelling apartment in this town with the blue thread running through it on the map and without his orange knapsack and Neel had a word for that:
consequences
.
Let him live,
Neel’s voice came thundering into his head, as if he were here somewhere nearby,
with the consequences of his actions
.

And if he doesn’t understand? If he doesn’t get what those consequences will be?
That was June. Her voice coming from the next room. Because now he is Freddy, with the moon in his window and his thumb in his mouth, drinking in the sounds that sift through the wall between his bedroom and his parents’, and if he doesn’t understand exactly what they are saying, he does know how to listen for clues that they are talking about him. And it gives him a flutter when he hears his own name:
Freddy
, says June—so they
are
talking about him. He rocks himself from side to side and slurps at his wrinkled thumb, listening for all the
he
s and
him
s that follow, each one sending a little gush of heat through his body. He is in two places at once! Here in his small captain’s bed in the darkness, and also in their mouths on the other side of the wall. He is in their conversation, cupped by their voices, cradled at the center of their thoughts.

Nature teaches all children what suffering and pain are.
Neel again.
If we let it. Give him the opportunity to experience the consequences and he will learn.

What if he doesn’t?
June
. What if he can’t?

Risks are inseparable from life.

Stop quoting at me, Neel. I’m trying to have a conversation. With you, not a dead philosopher. Who managed to be very certain of his hypothetical children. What is it? “School them in hardship—”

School them
to
hardship. Actually, “School them to the hardships they will one day have to endure. Harden their bodies to the changes of seasons, climates, and elements, as well as to hunger, thirst, and fatigue; dip them in the waters of the Styx.”

The Styx, Neel. Do you hear yourself? He’s not your experiment, your test case. He’s your son.

And Freddy, swaddled in blue shadow and watery moonlight, tucks his thumb neater into the warm purse of his mouth and sucks and drifts, content to float away on the raft of those words:
he’s your son
.

But there is too much drift. Dave has drifted away, in his rattling old car, along with Fred’s orange knapsack, and
The Little Prince
, and June’s maps and Neel’s pocketknife and all the single-serve packets of jelly and syrup, and he hasn’t come back, and that is called consequences, and
Hey Sailor, where’d you go?
this was consequences, too: Loreen putting her hand on his cheek now and making it so his face looked back at her; Loreen rising up, arching forward and rocking back, pressing her small fingers against his mouth, pushing his lips hard against his teeth, slipping her fingers between his lips and inside his teeth for him to suck and taste and they weren’t like chicken wings but like his thumb, salty and then wet and slick and faintly sweet with his own saliva; Loreen whispering
shh
even as her own breathing became raspier, and then she let out a little string of moans and their sounds spilled loose together; and their slippery skin slid between them; and the warm paper-mill-smelling air blew in through the window, with bits of wetness getting sucked between the fan blades so a spray of sliced-up rain speckled his back, until there came between them a shuddery collision in the windy dark hot small room.

After a minute she sat up and lit a cigarette.

That’s more like it, Sailor.
Blowing out the match
. That’s what I’m talking about.

•   •   •

O
N THIS SECOND MORNING,
he lay there sucking his thumb while all the pieces of the night washed over him, and then all the pieces of the day before and the night before that and the day before that and of June’s yellow face and Neel’s pocketknife and the bar with its bottle skyline and the lost jelly and syrup and maps and dust motes and the tiny wet stars of rain prickling his back. Finally he had to move, to pee, and he got up and did. At the far end of the front room, he saw the bed where Tonya or Tee slept was empty. He was relieved. She must have gone out again in the night. He helped himself to some Cap’n Crunch, which he could do because it was the second morning and he knew where it was kept and also that he was allowed to have some. The milk carton had been put back in the fridge empty.