Venus Drive (6 page)

“Gremlin? What'd you do, anyway?”

Gary tells them about the cart guy, the tomato crate, the cop. He doesn't mention the cocaine.

“Hey,” says Junebug to the ranger, “Qualified Gremlin here threw down with a cop.”

“Well, he better not try any of that shit with me,” says the ranger. “I'll put my foot in his ass.”

They fold flyers until noon, break, fold again.

“What about the garbage?” says Gary, finally. “Shouldn't I go out into the park with one of those sticks?”

“Why, looking for a weapon?” says the ranger. She gives Gary a mop and points him to the toilet. The seats are gummed, the tiles caked with boot tracks.

“When it sparkles, you can go,” she says.

 

Gary sees the man with the leggings outside the bagel store.

“How're the teeth?” calls Gary.

“What?”

“The teeth?”

“Look,” says the man, moves in, as though about to show Gary his mouth. “I'm not
your
homeless. Got it, fucker?”

Gary goes up to his place for a clean shirt. When he comes back down the man is sitting on a grate, cinching a seabag.

“No hard feelings,” the man says.

Gary holds out a buck and the man waves him off.

“I have other offers on the table right now,” the man says.

The bus is packed going over the bridge. Gary presses his head on the tinted window. He stopped at the bank on the way to the bus. The gods of the machine have wearied of him. The buyers are off at their bungalows, yoga retreats. He will have to borrow some money from his mother again.

It's hot on the bus and everyone wears short sleeves except for Gary. He picks at the few tiny flecks of blood on his shirt with his fingernail.

Gary's mother hugs him at the door.

“You look like you got some sun today. Out with the kids?”

“Yeah.”

His mother hooks him on his arm's tender spot, guides him across the room. A group is gathered near the bay window, pouring whiskey.

“Boy, am I glad you came.” Today his mother has that almost dazed expression which, along with the featherings at her mouth, people take for mirth. “These people are drips. Put on any music you like.”

“I'm fine, Mom,” says Gary.

“Hey, there's Jacob Gelb,” says his mother. “Remember him?”

Gary looks at the man, tall and tan, easy with his body in casual silk. Gary has that flicker of thought that comes along with his mother's house: I wonder if I'll turn out like him when I grow up. But Gelb is a few years younger. Gary remembers once putting worms in his hair, or firing an air pellet at his nuts, something senseless and maybe not forgotten.

“A drink?” says Gary's mother.

“Just water.”

“Good for you.”

Gelb keeps a plastic cup aloft with his foot, his loafer. A woman sways down near him in a goalie pose, dangles her fingers out.

“Hey, Jake,” Gary calls. “Been watching the Cup? How about that Cameroon?”

Gelb looks up without missing a tap.

“Those guys are gone. Knocked out this morning, or last night, or whatever. My money's on the Netherlands. The Goudas.”

Gelb kicks the cup into the fire place, throws his arms up, mugs, mimes the frenzy of thousands.

“I'd trade it all in for one good run at goal,” says Gelb. “When I have to go to Europe for work I just order up food and watch the leagues.”

“So cosmopolitan,” says the woman. “Going to a foreign country to watch sports on TV.”

“I go to make money. I watch sports to clear my head.”

“Same here,” says Gary.

“You're Gary,” says the woman. “I'm Lorraine. I heard what happened to your friend. I'm sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“I've never heard your music, but people say it's really interesting.”

“Oh,” says Gary. “I'm not playing anymore, anyway.”

“What are you doing?”

“Working with kids. Disadvantaged.”

“Wow, that's great,” says Lorraine.

Gary tells her all about his little brothers Vernon and Junebug, their eventful day in the park, the nature walks, the craft hour. They talk for a while, mutual friends, traumas of youth. Lorraine writes Gary's number in a day book stuffed with business cards.

“I'm going to call you,” she says. “I want to call you.”

“That would be great,” says Gary.

A few days later she does. Gary is poking around for a vein. The vein is always right next to where you think it is. You have to dig hard. Work hard, dig hard. The blood dries in jagged curves around his arm, his wrist. Scutt's clip.

Lorraine leaves a long message with several numbers at the end of it. He is going to call her back, tell her he needs to go away for a while, get well, but his well-hoped hope is that she will wait for him. There is something special there between them. It's hard to see, but it's there. The proof that it's there is that you can't quite see it.

Now, crowd sounds.

Dutchmen kiss the pitch.

“Do you want to see it?” said my father.

“Okay,” I said.

“It's a beaut,” said my father. “You should see it.”

“Okay,” I said.

My father gathered up his gown.

“Look at that stitchwork.”

I looked at the bruises, the blood flecks, the sewn line of the cut.

“Look,” he said. “That's where they took them.”

“I'm looking,” I said.

 

My father got sick on our sofa for a while. Sick man's beard, slippers, ripped robe. Bad days, he slung my old beach bucket in his belt to puke in.

Most days were bad days.

Old buddies chalked him up to dead.

Cousins, clients, called the house to mourn the loss.

His firm sent my mother a cheese wedge, a condolence card, but my father was not dead, he was sick, in the kitchen, sipping broth from a china cup. I brought him a spoon.

“Hey,” he said, “did you check your people today? Check them every day. Be attentive. Unnatural swelling, that's what you're looking for.”

“Okay,” I said.

He laid his spoon down.

“I'm going to drink this soup from the cup,” he said. “But that doesn't mean you can.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Stop saying ‘okay,'” said my father. “Enliven your vocabulary.”

“I will,” I said.

 

Some days my father would dress, necktie, pressed shirt, take his coffee near the window. He'd do the jokes, the numbers, the eyeball-soaker, the sock-tucker, the suicidal Swede.

“What's for dinner, sweetheart? Asparagus? Ka-Boom!”

One morning he took his parka down from a hook, wheedled himself out over the walkway ice. He got his old Plymouth going. Dark exhaust gusted over the trunk and veiled it. Through the smoke I saw her, the neighbor's daughter, the Drury girl, come down Venus Drive. She walked our yard in a snow-colored quilt, bare calves popping out of boot fur, sleep knots in her hair. She walked towards us with her arms crossed, a vexed diva, shot white breath from her teeth.

“Nathalie's going to watch you while we're gone,” said my mother.

“A babysitter,” I said.

“No, you're too old for a babysitter. Just don't give her any trouble. Your father's not up for any trouble.”

“Okay,” I said.

My mother rubbed her knuckle on my spine. Our secret touch. The Drury girl slipped past us into our house, spotted my old bucket, held it up.

“Are you playing beach?” she said.

My father said I was his little helper but mostly I just hid. There he was, on the sofa, or in the fall-away chair. Sometimes, cartoon mornings, I found him sleeping with my bucket in his lap, a thin gruel on his chin. Once, his robe fallen open, I studied his wounds for a while. The stitches were gone, some of the hair grown back. The skin braided down to a wattle, a flap.

“What?” said my father, waking. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” said my father.

“I don't know,” I said.

“You know what the situation is, don't you? You understand this, right?”

“Yes.”

“Did you check your people today? Check your people, kid. What happens is they swell up on you. Sort of thrilling at first, but don't be fooled.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I was a fool,” said my father.

 

Days they drove away for his injections, Nathalie stayed here with me, lit joints, my father's stash, spun the stereo dial.

“Crap,” she said. “Tripe.”

She wore T-shirts with the names of bands in spatters of blood, or maybe her night gown if duty called before noon. She was skinny, beginning to be rounded in the same places as the women on TV, the ones I called up like flip cards lying on my belly in the dark. The blonde widow on the Florida yacht. The space lady with the thimble in her ear.

“Do you like music?” Nathalie said.

I showed her my only record, a collection of gunslinger ballads sung by a man in cowhide who looked like my Uncle Sy.

“You'll learn,” she said.

“Learn what?”

“How to dance and how to fuck. You want to dance?”

We danced, a tour of eras, tango, pogo, slide-and-dip.

“You're terrible,” she said. “You'll never make it.”

“Make what?” I said

“Good point,” she said, “but answer me this: What do you want to be when you have to be something?”

“An astronaut,” I said.

“Bullshit. Who taught you to say that?”

“President.”

“Crooks.”

“A rock star,” I said.

“That's more like it.”

Now we heard the door, saw my mother shove my father through it. He was weeping. He was wiping vomit from his beard with a dirty mitten.

 

Then it was a miracle week, a miracle month, a month from God. My father said he was on the mend. He got what my mother called his color back. My father said he was on the uptick, fit for light duty, maybe.

“I'm either getting better or I'm already dead.”

The bucket went back to the shed with the diggers and spades. Breakfast, he did the disappearing-lip trick, the joke about the Pope, the Jew, the parachute.

He hung back near the coffee pot and palmed his patched head.

“What are you doing these days?” said my father.

“Fractions.”

“I'm half the man I used to be,” he said, or maybe sang.

I found him later at the dining room table, his glasses low on his nose, papers, pens, strewn.

“I've missed a lot of homework,” he said.

I stood near him with my mother when the firm called with the news.

“Perfectly understandable,” he said into the receiver. “No, the package is generous.”

Done talking, he put the phone down, gently. He sighed, kicked a hole in the wall. He limped off to the fall-away chair and sat there, alive, destroyed.

He smoked a cigarette.

“May they all get cancer,” he said.

 

I checked myself in bed each night. I kneaded my people. I turned on my belly, burrowed down and in. Somewhere between the mattress and me was Nathalie, the Drury girl.

Sometimes I would see myself walking up Venus Drive, the dream version, the houses steeper, the birch boughs soft with moth rot. I'd eye the berm for what they took from my father, skinned and glimmering in the leaves.

 

The Drury girl was drying her hair. She'd showered. I'd stood outside the door. She'd caught me, beckoned me in, let me watch her slide her jeans on underneath her bath towel. Now we sat on the sofa with our dilemmas, my fractions, her dangerous men.

“Fuck it,” she said. “I don't care what my father says, I'm really into Keith Puruzzi.”

“What does your father say?”

“Fuck my father. Which I'm sure would be swell by him. Mr. Eyeball. What a prick. Oh fuck, I shouldn't talk like this.”

“You always do,” I said.

“I know I do. How's your dad? Not so good, right?”

“He's on the uptick.”

“The what?

“The mend.”

“They took his thing off, right?”

“I don't know.”

“You've seen it, right?”

“Not…no…” I said.

“Your old man,” she said, “he hid his pot on me.”

 

Then it was still winter. The miracles worked in slow reverse. Wine into water into walkway ice. They were pumping him with what he called the hard stuff. He wore a watchman's cap and we gathered his hair from the sofa, the sink. My mother bought him a bigger bucket. It looked industrial.

“Don't worry,” he told me, “I'll be dead soon, but not before I've ascertained whether you've cleaned your room. So don't think you can just wait it out.”

“Please, God, stop that,” said my mother.

“Stop what?” said my father. “Who are you talking to?”

I played with my Tonka dump truck. It was their gift to me for not wanting anything, for behaving, being quiet, remote. I was too old for it. I was remote anyway.

My father heaved. Sour sheets of air rushed out.

 

The Drury girl said we could make a surprise for my mother and father. They were due home in an hour. She dug around in her bag.

“Strip,” she said.

The Drury girl had a rubber stamp, an ink pad sunk in tin. She inked the stamp and took my arm, laid the cut rubber on it. “John A. Drury,” it read. “Notary Public.”

She said for me to shut my eyes.

“Why are we doing this?” I said.

“You want to be a rock star, right? This is it. The show of shows.”

“This is it?”

We rehearsed for a while.

“Wait,” she said. “One more thing.”

Now she reached down and took me in her fingers, twisted it a little, let it spring back of its own accord. She cupped her hand under, pinched, stretched, pressed the stamp in, let the flap pop back.

“Now you're perfect,” she said. “Look.”

She spun me to the mirror. I was measled in her father's ink.

We heard the Plymouth in the street.

“Hide,” said the Drury girl. “Don't do it until I call your name.”

I hid behind the fall-away chair. I listened for noises I knew, galoshes, boots, the slash and saw of winter nylon. Here came the voice of him, the old voice, from before the stitches, the bucket, the braid. It carried over the frozen world. My mother's voice stabbed at his pauses. These old rhythms of them, the tilt of happy talk.

They stood at the threshold, flushed, bundled things.

“Good news!” my mother said.

“Hold your horses,” said my father. “They're not positive. They have to run more tests. But things are looking up.”

“More than up,” said my mother. “More than up.”

“We'll see,” said my father, and laughed. “But, yeah, sure, maybe. Why not? Now where's the little beast? Where is he? I want to see my boy. I'm going to take him somewhere. You hear that? We're going to do something fun. Soon. You hear me? Where is he?”

I kept my crouch.

“Wait,” said the Drury girl, “I know where he is.”

The room filled with violins, static, saxophones, more static, more violins. There was a burst now, a hissing, gouts of feedback, guitar.

I eeled out from behind the chair, hips rolling, arms up, all of me thrown forward with whatever idea I had now of dancing. It was the Drury girl's steps and more, some lewd concourse of the blowzy slides my mother favored and the neatened twirls of bandstand teens. I shook my ass at them, shook my inked ass at my mother, my father, and then, with some kind of stricken pivot, I flippered my tiny dick. It was dreamlike only in that I felt seized with secret logic. Time moved in the real, my body bucked in it, all these parts of me pocked with the public seal of our good neighbor. The Drury girl receded, as though stunned by consequence, easing toward flight. My mother wore her school-play face. I could sense annihilation underneath. My finale was confected from the Tonka toy. Thrusting upward, I held the truck out, glided my balls over the painted bed.

“Look!” I said to my father. “These are my people! Are you looking? Are you looking?”

“Stop!” my father shouted, almost the cry of a bullied child. He bolted from the room.

I felled myself, with theater, head down, arms out, the vaudevillian's good-night wings.

The room got quiet. The Drury girl was gone.

My mother's galoshes, rimed, wet, leaked on the carpet.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, now.”

We could hear my father moving with steady violence in the kitchen.

“We know that wasn't you,” said my mother. “Was that you?”

“Who?” I said.

 

My father lived and I lived. We live still. Later, years later, my mother died. I have her galoshes, with my bucket, in a box somewhere.

The Drury girl, we heard, got work at the town plaza. Sometimes I'd watch her run our strip of yard to the street, to a car revving there, to a boy at rest in his Naugahyde bounty, that great godly twitch of electric guitar when she opened his door, her roaring off from all that was lived here or near us.