Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (7 page)

He nodded and picked his nose.

"Don't pick your nose, either," I said. "You should have your hat and gloves on anyway."

"You should," he said.

We were walking down the sidewalk, between mounds of blackened snow. Everything felt dusted with icy grit. Kolya, skinny and small as he was, must have been freezing. All I had on was a denim jacket and a black hooded sweatshirt and I was cold. My Carhartt had been stolen at the Black Lantern last week. I suspected Tom Slowinski had taken it back. At least Kolya was wearing his boots and a real winter coat.

"So who is this kid who hit you?" I said.

"Larry DeSoto," he said. "He's in eighth grade."

"Why is an eighth grader hitting you?"

"I told him to go fuck himself."

"Why did you say that?" I said. "Even Nick wouldn't say that kind of thing to a bigger guy."

That was a lie. That's exactly the kind of thing Nick would have done. Maybe Nick could have used a little of Kolya's Ritalin.

"He beat up my friend Jason," Kolya said. "Someone had to do something."

"Why you?"

"I don't know. I was mad."

"Be more careful," I said.

I didn't have much to say to him. I was getting too old to worry about a twelve-year-old kid all the time. He'd learn the lessons the way I did, except he wouldn't have Nick to bail him out all the time, the way I did all through school.

"You need to make friends with somebody bigger and meaner than you."

He shrugged. We were at the front door of the school. I remembered walking through the same front door when I was a kid, and I remembered how low my stomach would sink and how some days I could barely get up the long, gritty staircase without crying.

"Hey," I said. "Be good today."

"Okay," Kolya said. He kicked the bike racks and then gave me a big smile. "Another day in the old salt mines," he said.

"Where did you learn that?"

"Burt," he said.

"Fuck him. Don't say anything he says. Ever. Now get to class," I said. The bell started ringing.

"Oh, fuck," Kolya said and ran down the hall.

THEY HAD PUT KOLYA
on Ritalin a year ago, when he'd first started having trouble in school. In the middle of a spelling test, he went to the window and threw his workbook down to the playground below. Another time, he bit a girl's knee. He used foul language like a prepubescent Richard Pryor, with skill and flawless timing. He broke into the milk machine. And once, during an assembly, he tried to set his own hair on fire with a lighter he had found during recess.

On Ritalin, he had trouble eating. He was listless and lifeless, and he spent a lot of his time sleeping in front of a blaring television, his smooth white face lit green by the glow of frantic, flashing cartoons.

One night Nick and I stole a few of Kolya's pills, smashed them up with a spoon, and snorted them off the kitchen table. We went for a walk, barefoot, and had the idea of walking across the Ambassador Bridge to Canada, almost twenty miles away. We never made it. A cop found us on Michigan Avenue and brought us home.

AFTER I DROPPED OFF KOLYA
, I had twenty minutes to get to my class, but I was willing to be late. Something about the great films of American cinema didn't have me all juiced up that morning. I wandered over to the doughnut shop where Nick was already working his first shift. Tom was there, drinking coffee. He did construction work on the new developments out on the edges of Maple Rock. Everyone was saying all the construction would make our houses more valuable and clean up our streets.

"I hear you wussed out of a fight last night," Tom said.

"I did not," I said. "I was tired and drunk."

"What's a matter?" Tom said. "You forget to take your Midol?"

"Why is that funny?" I said to Nick. "Why is this asshole here trying to be funny?"

Nick set coffee and a jelly doughnut on the counter in front of me. He shrugged. "It's not funny," Nick said. "But Tom's a Polack. He doesn't know better."

Tom was actually three-quarters Ukrainian, but his paternal grandfather was Polish and so Tom ended up with a Polish last name. Nick and I never let him forget it.

The to-go counter was swamped. All three of the brothers—Ray, Mario, and Joey—were running around filling up bags and boxes with doughnuts. Ray whistled over at Nick. "Nick! Counter! Now!"

We watched Nick step up to the counter. Tom and I looked at each other and smiled. We had never seen anybody give Nick an order before.

"Why do people always say Polacks are dumb? We invented Paczki Day, didn't we?"

Paczki Day is a Detroit holiday that falls on the Tuesday before Lent. It meant that all the Catholics in Detroit would gorge themselves on jelly doughnuts. Polish immigrants brought the tradition to Detroit years ago. But eventually all the Catholics—the Irish, the Italians, the Ukrainians—picked up on it. When we were kids, we'd even get doughnuts in school.

"What's so smart about a holiday when all you do is eat doughnuts until you're sick? No, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, that's the stuff. That's a holiday to have before Lent. I just read about it."

"You read too much," Tom said.

"People around Detroit are too busy working shit jobs to have real Mardi Gras," I said. "They came up with all of this shit about doughnuts so they could celebrate Fat Tuesday on their way to work in the morning."

"Shut up," Tom said.

"Plus, it's too damn cold for a parade or anything here. I'm starting to think New Orleans is the place to go when I get out of here," I said.

"What's so great about it?"

"It's not here," I said.

"What do they do at Mardi Gras?" Tom asked. He picked up another doughnut and shoved half of it in his mouth.

"It's all about getting drunk. Chicks run around showing their tits. Everybody fucks everybody."

"That's not true," he said.

"How many fucking doughnuts you going to eat?" I said.

"I like them. They have a calming effect, you know. In hospitals, they give them to people with ulcers, or ladies about to give birth, or even people who have had strokes."

"You're not only a dumb Polack, Tom," I said, "you're the dumbest Polack who ever lived."

"Hey, Mikey, I know what you can give up for Lent," Tom said. "You can give up being such a fucking pussy."

And with that, he grabbed a fourth doughnut and walked out of the door.

PROFESSOR HOWARD
showed up for class with a box of jelly doughnuts and went off on how Paczki Day was such a hoot that he couldn't resist. He was originally from Manhattan, as he never failed to mention.

"Is anyone here from out of state?" he asked.

Where the fuck did he think he was? Yale? No hands went up. Then he asked how many of us knew about Paczki Day, and all of us raised our hands. He looked dismayed. He was set to teach us something about our history, and we already knew it. Most of us had doughnut grease sliding around in our guts.

So instead he gave a pop quiz that I failed because I had forgotten to attend the previous night's film screening.

I STOPPED BACK HOME
for lunch. My mother was there, but before I said anything I looked around the place for the gorilla. He was gone.

"You're done with class?" my mother said.

I nodded.

"Here," she said. "I called in sick today. Let me make you some lunch. You want a BLT? There's some bacon left from this morning."

"No, I don't feel like eating," I said.

"You're sick too?"

"Just tired."

"I got you a present today," she said. "Maybe that will cheer you up."

"Why?"

She said she knew how hard it'd been for me lately. She promised Burt would be going back to Alabama soon. She said that with men like Burt, you can't really kick them out. You have to let them leave on their own terms or they'll never really go away.

She slid a package wrapped in gold foil paper across the table.

I opened the package. It was a book.
The Best American Short Stories 1993.

"The guy at the bookstore suggested this. I told him you wanted to be a writer and he said this book had just been published."

She stood up and leaned over my shoulder and flipped to the back of the book. "See, here all the writers talk about how they wrote the stories and how they got their ideas and stuff."

"Cool," I said. And I really thought it was. She was doing the best she could. I resolved to cut her some slack about Burt.

"And in the very back," she said, turning the pages for me, "you get all the addresses of the magazines that publish short stories, so you can send in your own work."

I looked over the book. I didn't know the names of any of the authors, but what did I know? I couldn't remember ever reading anything by somebody who was still alive.

"It's not an easy thing to be lonely," she said. "That's all. I hope you understand."

She shrugged, turned her palms up to the sky, and tried to smile.

"Lunch?" she said.

"Sure," I said.

SINCE I WAS HOME
that afternoon, doing nothing, I went to Kolya's school and waited for him at the edge of the playground. I figured I could walk him home, give him one day without getting his ass kicked. When you're a boy, you figure out pretty quick that there's always going to be some asshole hanging around the schoolyard, waiting to kick your ass. I always had enemies, but most of them were too afraid of Nick to fuck with me. They hated me from a distance.

Kolya looked happy to see me. His shiner had gone down some, and he was looking fresh-faced and innocent again. His backpack looked absolutely huge on him, and I pictured him as a soldier back from a mission. He had red jelly all over his lips.

"Hey kid," I said. "How's school?"

"Beats a sharp stick in the butt," he said. It was another phrase Burt had taught him.

"Wipe your mouth," I said.

He moved his sleeve across his face. "It's Paczki Day. I ate six of them."

"God bless you," I said. "You're a miracle man."

We walked a couple of blocks, both of us quiet. I was trying to say something that was comforting or wise, because it didn't look to me like he'd had a good day. Because he was on Ritalin, sometimes I felt like he was depressed; but then, how can you tell if a twelve-year-old is depressed? With kids, sometimes they're probably just thinking about Spider Man or whatever, and you think they're contemplating the Apocalypse.

"Stop," he said. "Let's turn around."

"Why?" I said, but I was already looking down the block, where a gnarly, pissed-off-looking trio of kids were taking turns jumping off a fire hydrant.

"That's Larry DeSoto. And all of his buddies. Let's take another street."

I wouldn't let him turn around. "Let's walk right by them," I suggested. "They'll see you with your big brother and they won't say a thing."

The kids jumping off the fire hydrant saw us coming. They stopped their silly game and stared at us, then stood three across the sidewalk. "Hey, it's the pussy patrol," they said.

"It's queer Kolya!"

"Hey, assface."

"Hey, man, your brother picks his nose and eats it."

"Yeah, his butt too."

We were only about ten feet away from them. Kolya was just looking down at the sidewalk.

I guessed that the biggest kid, a fat kid way too hairy for junior high, was Larry. He was standing in the middle of the three kids. He had a caterpillar of peach fuzz on his upper lip.

Kolya wouldn't look at them, like a dog trying not to make eye contact with the alpha. He started whimpering a little and backing away. I grabbed Kolya by the arm and made him stop. "Don't cry," I said.

Then I took a step forward. I looked at Kolya and showed him my clenched fist, but he just stood there, hands limp at his sides.

I hit Larry first, three times in the face. His nose was bleeding all over the front of his jacket. The two other runts tried helping him at first, and I got them each with a good gut punch and knocked the wind out of them. When they got their wind back, they hightailed it home.

Larry DeSoto was still on his back. He looked much younger that way.

"Fucking pussy," I said, but I could barely say anything. I wheezed, then coughed up some phlegm and spit on the ground. Kolya thought he knew what I was doing and spit a wad of saliva at Larry's face. Then he got something in his brain, and started kicking Larry everywhere he could, the nuts, the shins, the ribs, and even the face.

I finally had to pick him up and carry him away. He would have kicked Larry's fat face all day long.

I TOOK KOLYA OVER TO
the doughnut shop so we could clean up in the bathroom and settle down a little before we saw Mom. It was almost four o'clock and the Paczki Day crowd had died way down. Nick was just getting off of work. He'd put in ten hours. He had six hours off and then he would come back for the night shift. He was hanging his apron up in the back hallway when we found him. I told him what had happened.

"Are you fucking nuts?" he said. "You beat up some kids? You'll go to jail for that. You're nineteen years old. You can't get away with that kind of shit."

"What was I supposed to do?"

"Not that," he said.

Just then two cops walked in the doughnut shop. I turned and hid my face.

"Relax," he said. "This is a doughnut shop. We get ten cops an hour."

One of the brothers came to the counter and waited on the cops.

Kolya laughed. "Can I get a doughnut?" he said.

"You already ate too many," I said.

"Let him have one," Nick said. "They have a calming effect, you know. You should have one too. They bring your blood pressure down."

"What the fuck is with you people?" I yelled. "Is everybody in this fucking neighborhood an idiot? They're just goddamn doughnuts."

One of the brothers called from the back room: "Nick, get your friends out of here if they can't talk like gentlemen."

BURT WAS ASLEEP
on the couch and didn't move when we walked in the door. I tried to get a beer from the fridge, but old Burt had sucked the place dry.