Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (6 page)

"You don't have a gun."

"I do. I carry one now, for work."

"What kind?"

"A .38 Special."

What did I know about handguns. I shrugged. "That's a good one?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "it's more than enough to do the job."

Nick worked the night shift at a doughnut shop on Michigan Avenue. On his nights off, he had trouble sleeping and I often got stuck staying up with him. The doughnut place was in a rough stretch of city, and sitting behind a cash register all night would have made anyone a little skittish. A lot of night clerks around Detroit carried guns, I guessed. Three Brothers Donutz was nestled between a topless bar and an abandoned pharmacy known as The Shop, where a three-hundred-pound ghost-pale man named Dough, whose father was the retired pharmacist who once owned the building, sold drugs each night from midnight to dawn.

"Have you ever used it?"

"Not yet," he said. "But just wait until some asshole tries to rob me."

We rolled our way through the city. It was almost light out, and the idea of finding Burt Nelson started to seem a little insane. If he'd been willing to punch my mother, a slight woman with a soft voice, he'd have no trouble taking a two-by-four or baseball bat to my head.

"Do you want to go home?" I said.

"What?" Nick said.

"Do you want to go home? I'm tired."

"You asshole!" Nick said.

"What?"

"You asshole. Some fuckhead just punched your mother and you want to go home and get some beauty sleep?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Man, you're such a wuss. You're a fuckhead."

I know it,
I almost said.
Take me home.

Instead, I said, "Well, we won't find him now. Let's just go and get him later."

He pulled in front of the doughnut shop. I had registered for a few classes at the community college that winter, and had to be in class by eight.

"Let me pick up something at The Shop first," Nick said.

I wanted to wait outside, but that was no safer in the long run than going inside.

Plywood covered all the windows and the front door of The Shop. You entered through the back door, between two Dumpsters. The place was lit by a single bulb that hung from a busted light fixture above the counter. All around the store were dust-covered shelves and abandoned inventory. Dough was behind the register, all big and fat and white. He had a gun in a holster under his fat white arm. He didn't care what you took from the shelves if you were a paying customer. He liked to joke that he was carrying on the family business.

Sometimes Dough actually rang up your order, gave you the total, and exchanged small talk while he made change. It was like Mayberry gone haywire. You expected Floyd the Barber to be shooting up in the corner, or Barney Fife to come in tripping his balls off.

"Well, if it isn't Tweedledick and Tweedleprick," Dough said. He prided himself on making up nicknames. Last week, we'd been Licky and Dicky. His repertoire of insults lacked variety; they always were variations on a dick theme.

I let Nick go and buy his weed or whatever he was after, and wandered around the dark dusty aisles. I slipped some nail clippers into my pocket, and a pack of Q^tips. I liked the idea of all that free stuff, and couldn't help taking something every time I visited. I was amazed that there was anything left on the shelves at all, but I imagined most junkies didn't get excited about free zit cream or callus cushions.

WHEN WE PULLED INTO
my driveway, I put my backpack together. Then I heard Nick say, "Well, look who it is. Right under our noses."

I looked up and saw Burt Nelson in the middle of the living room. He was in my dad's old chair, sipping from a mug and smoking a cigarette.

"Goddamn it," I said.

"You want my gun?" Nick said.

"Nope."

"You want me to go in there with you?" he said.

"No. I'll handle it."

"What are you gonna do, kick his ass by yourself?"

"Sure," I said.

"Fuck that. You won't be able to, Mikey."

"Sure I will."

"Let me come in there with you," he said.

"Nick, mind your
own
fucking business, okay? I can handle this."

"Fine," he said. "I gotta get to work anyway. I said I'd cover an extra shift today. It's Paczki Day. We'll be busy."

I was left in the driveway, scared about going into my own house.

"
THERE HE IS
," Burt said. "We were worried about you around here."

There was nobody else in the room.

"Your mother's still sleeping," he whispered. "She had a bit too much to drink last night."

I stared at him and then shrugged.

"I guess we all did, eh?" he said.

"Not me," I said. I had a watery feeling in my gut. My arm muscles were starting to twitch from lack of sleep.

"Well, that's good," he said, "since you're not even twenty-one yet."

He was wearing gray sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt. His forearms were thick and long, like a couple of logs.

"What do you think, Michael? Is it time to wake up your mother?"

"I don't care," I said.

"How about your brother? When does he need to leave for school?"

"He's got time to sleep," I said. "I gotta make his lunch."

Burt put out his cigarette in a Coke can that was on the edge of the TV table. I was still standing near the foyer in my coat, holding my backpack.

"You plan to stay here a while?" Burt said. He was standing up now, and he walked over to me. He was big. There was no way I could take him on, not by myself, not when I was this tired.

I went into the kitchen and took out the bread and peanut butter, and started working on Kolya's lunch. Usually it was my mother who did it, but I was trying to prove a point—with Burt Nelson around, she was slipping. When she woke up and saw that I had made my brother's lunch, she'd understand that.

"You know," Burt said, "I don't know what people told you, but I didn't hit your mother last night. We were having a fight, and I just grabbed her to calm her down."

"I don't care what you guys do," I said.

"Somebody told me that you were driving around looking for me," Burt said.

"You're lucky we didn't find you," I said.

He grabbed my arm as I was spreading jelly on bread. "Look, you and your little friends stay out of this," he said. "I'm not here for trouble, but I'll take it on if it comes."

I was trying to figure out if he was scared of my friends and me, or if he really was ready to fight us head-to-head. A glorious image came to my mind, of my fist in Burt Nelson's face.

I went to hit him with my free hand. He blocked me, and twisted my arm behind my back, then started wrenching on it.

"Say uncle," he said.

My arm burned. My face was hot. "Fuck, fuck you, okay, okay, uncle," I said. I was hoping Nick would burst in the door. Nick with his brass knuckles or a ball-peen hammer or a giant logger's chain swinging in a circle around his head.

"Say, 'I love you Uncle Burt,'" he said.

I said it and he let go and nudged me into the counter.

"You are a fucking pussy," he said and went back to the chair in the living room.

I went to my room and got into bed. An hour later, my alarm went off. I heard my mother and Burt talking in the kitchen. I heard my brother asking where his shoes were. I remembered what had happened, and put my pillow over my face. I tried to fall back asleep, but the adrenaline was pumping again. My veins felt heavy and my bladder was ready to pop. I sat up in bed.

"Fucking pussy," I said. I got up and took a shower.

BURT WAS NEW TO
the area. He'd moved to Westland—a few suburbs west of us—after taking a job selling some sort of auto parts to the industry. He wore a suit to work. He had the too big, menacing quality of a Texas farm boy, and in fact had played linebacker at Oklahoma State. He was almost sixty now, the age where ex-jocks, about to be sent out to pasture by their employers, start getting nostalgic for their days of hard drinking and knocking heads.

Around my mom, he was sweet and smooth; he spoke in a forced drawl and had clean fingernails. He was nothing like the men of Maple Rock had been. On Friday nights, he'd come over and make a big pot of chili and a pan of corn bread. He painted the living room one weekend, and fixed my mother's car for her when the water pump exploded. He went on business trips and brought her things like snow globes and silk scarves, airport gifts. Once when he'd been in Atlanta, he brought Kolya a Braves batting helmet and a tomahawk. The only thing he ever gave to me was a copy of the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue that he said he had found on the plane.

Before long he began to sour, like old milk. His temper flared up more and more, over less and less. If he saw my mom talking to our new neighbor, a tall, dark Yemeni man who owned the Dairy Mart on the corner, he'd get jealous. "Why you talking to some Arab all the time?" he'd say. "You got a thing for men on camels? When I go on the road, does he sleep in your bed?"

When he got laid off, he started spending most of his time at our house, drinking beer and eating the food my mom was paying for and watching our only television sixteen hours a day. I found out then that he hadn't had a place of his own. His company had been putting him up at a Guest Quarters motel, and now that he was out of work, there he was, in the middle of our lives.

I know loneliness sends us into dark places. I know the day-to-day sadness most of us have to battle on a regular basis sometimes makes us be with people we normally wouldn't choose. I know all that now, but I didn't know it then. I just knew that my mother had disappointed me. In those years, she had a few boyfriends like Burt Nelson. I never stood up to any of them, and maybe that was not my role, maybe the son is not meant to defend the mother, maybe I am naive to believe that my mother even needed my protection. She was older and wiser than me, she'd been through some things. But a flame of failure still burned in my guts anytime somebody like Burt Nelson would walk through our door.

WHEN I CAME OUT OF
the shower, my mother had made eggs and bacon, which she never did before Burt came to live with us. Now it was eggs and bacon every goddamn morning. She looked tired. She would run around filling up coffee cups and orange juice glasses like she was waiting tables in Mel's Diner. She was working as a receptionist for a security company, dispatching mall cops and monitoring a panel of burglar alarms.

Kolya was at the kitchen table, buttering toast. Burt was mashing on a banana like a gorilla. I got myself some coffee, the last of it. It was burned and tasted like ashes. I added cream and sugar. Burt said, "Drink it black, it puts hair on your chest."

My mother flipped the eggs.

"You hungry, Michael?" she said.

"Nope."

"Thanks for making your brother's lunch," she said.

I looked at Kolya. He still had a pretty good shiner from a fight he had gotten in at school a few days ago. He was a smart kid, knew all the state capitals, could do long division in his sleep, won the sixth-grade spelling bee. But he was getting in trouble all day long, every day.

"Your eye's looking better," I said.

"I know," Kolya said. "Burt showed me how to punch yesterday."

"He's got to learn to defend himself," Burt said. "Every boy needs to know how to throw a decent punch by the time he is twelve."

"I don't want you fighting, Kolya," my mother said, setting eggs and bacon on the table. She was in one of the three business suits she had charged at Winkleman's when she started this new job. She had bought three colors—red, black, and charcoal gray—that she could interchange a bit, so it looked like she had more clothes than she did. Today, she was in the red blazer and the black skirt. She looked pretty. She looked too classy for a guy like Burt, who was sitting across from me in a flannel robe, his thinning hair smashed up on one side of his head.

"I could've taught you how to throw a punch," I said.

"He already knows how to punch like a girl," Burt said.

Kolya and Burt looked at each other and laughed.

"Burt," my mother said.

Burt shoveled eggs into his mouth, then folded a strip of bacon in on top of them. He really was a goddamn ape, in spite of those hairless, clean hands.

"Kolya," I said. "You want me to walk you to school?"

"Yeah," he said. "I'm almost done."

I went into my bedroom and got my backpack. I hadn't done all the reading I was supposed to do for class. I was a few weeks into my first semester. I was taking a few journalism courses, a literature class, and something called
Great Films of American Cinema.
It was supposed to be an easy class, but I was blowing it. The movies seemed destined to fuck me over. I was going to have to fight tooth and nail for a C minus. My first paper came back with a D on it, and the professor had written "Lacks sufficient understanding of film theory" on the back and nothing else.

I had signed up to work on the school newspaper too, and had written exactly one article for it about the problem of Canada geese shitting all over the school grounds, mucking up the park and the soccer fields. The headline read
LOOK WHAT'S HITTING THE FAN ON CAMPUS
. My mother was so proud to see my byline that she hung the article on the fridge, and there it was every morning when I got out the milk.

KOLYA HADN'T COMBED
his hair, and it was sticking up everywhere. I was trying to smooth it down for him as we walked to school.

"You don't want the girls to think you're an asshole," I said.

"I hate girls."

"You won't forever, but if they think of you as the kind of kid who doesn't comb his hair now, you'll never live it down," I said. "Once an asshole, always an asshole. Look at Burt."

"Burt can punch holes in the wall. He did it in the garage."

I hadn't known that the new hole in the garage had appeared courtesy of Burt's temper.

"Ah, that's an optical illusion," I said.