No, meow. Like a cat. She thought she was a cat.
Don’t they usually think they’re a king?
I said cat, didn’t I? She thought she was a cat.
In my experience they usually think they’re a king. Or something like that. Delusions of grandeur, ain’t that what they call it?
The boy’s parents’ voices scale the ladder as though a pair of cats themselves. They settle heavily on his chest next to the lighter weight of Gregory’s hand. Downstairs the pipes cough when his mother turns the faucet on, and then, when he hears the water run smooth, the boy presses his thighs together. Friday morning, eight A.M.: he has been awake for two hours—desperate to pee for a good forty-five minutes.
A cat, Ethel. She crawled out on the ledge like a cat. Stark naked of course. Meow, meow, kitty cats don’t wear no clothes, meow. Why it is the crazies have to get naked I’ll never know.
The water stops, a pan settles heavily on the stove.
Well, his mother says, and the boy can hear the self-lighting stove click for several seconds. Like she said. Cats don’t usually wear no clothes. The burner ignites in a quiet whoosh! and a whiff of gas floats up to the loft.
They don’t usually talk back either. Which is more than I can say for some people.
Since Duke left at the beginning of the week, Gregory has been sharing the bed with his older brothers, but this is the first time he didn’t sleep wedged in the crease between Lance and Jimmy. He was there on the edge of the outer mattress when the boy came in from Slaussen’s last night, and when he woke at milking time his brother’s arm had been slung over the boy’s torso, his elbow on the boy’s stomach and the slightly cupped fingers of his left hand on top of the boy’s chest. His mouth had hung open and his breath on the boy’s cheek had been wet and sweet—stale, but sweet too—and the boy had decided to stay in bed a while longer. No cows to milk after all. But he’d waited too long: the old man had stumbled in from the hospital just before seven, waking his mother, and now the boy is stuck in the loft until his mother goes to work and the old man passes out. Unless, of course, he’s willing to risk a confrontation this early. Which he’s not. Instead he tries to concentrate on the tiny weight of Gregory’s fingers, cupped over his heart like a stethoscope. Tries to ignore the heavier pressure in his bladder and ears. Down by his hips his fingers are curled into loose fists as if squeezing an imaginary pair of teats, and he tries to ignore that as well.
Born naked, his mother is saying now, as if that answers the old man’s question. An egg cracks against the side of a pan, sizzling as soon as the albumen strikes the hot metal, then a second joins it. They usually get naked when they think they’re a king too. Emperor’s new clothes, right?
A cat, Ethel. Jesus Christ, how many times do I have to say it? And besides, it was a girl. Girls can’t be kings.
Can’t be cats either.
A third egg cracks into the pan, and the sound of the percolator joins the cacophony. The boy doesn’t understand how his brothers and sisters can sleep through it. Doesn’t understand how he used to, before.
Anyway, the old man’s rasp cuts through all the other sounds. The orderlies can’t get her to come back in. They’re all like, Come on, Jeanie, come back where it’s safe, and this girl Jeanie’s all like Meow, meow, kitty cats like to crawl on ledges, meow. The old man screeches the last meow with particular relish.
I know what a cat sounds like, Lloyd.
Meow!
Lloyd—
Gregory turns in his sleep and the bed creaks beneath him. He turns away from the boy, his face searching for a cool spot on the pillow, then turns back toward him again. In the process his hand slides off the boy’s chest and wedges between his own skinny thighs, his cheek presses against the boy’s bare shoulder. If the boy looks down the tip of his nose he can just make out Gregory’s mouth, puckered open like the rim of a fishbowl between his plump cheeks. At two and a half, Gregory’s face is still baby fat, but his arms and legs are as skinny as an old man’s.
Don’t go waking them kids, Ethel. You’ll be cooking eggs for the next hour.
His mother’s spatula scrapes loudly over the surface of the pan.
Joanie and Edi can cook em breakfast if it comes to that, they’re old enough to take some responsibility around here. His mother snorts. Besides, it’s probably just your son, pretending to be asleep.
The boy can smell it now, her breakfast. Eggs and coffee. He hates the fact that the odor makes his mouth water, his stomach rumble. Hates it almost as much as the fact that when he gets downstairs he knows he’ll find nothing but a pan with a residue of dried egg on it.
What’s that? the old man says now. What’d Dale do?
He didn’t do nothing, his mother says. As per usual. Boy’s as useless as his father.
My boy, the old man says dreamily. My own boy.
His mother’s spatula scratches viciously at the pan.
Useless as tits on a bull.
My only boy.
That’s it Lloyd, his mother says, talk yourself to sleep.
I’ll go to sleep when I’m good and ready, the old man says, louder. I’m trying to tell a story here.
And I’m trying to enjoy a few minutes of peace and quiet before I have to head off to the loony bin, so hurry it up already.
The old man doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then:
What were you saying about Dale?
I didn’t say nothing about Dale, finish your story.
Whatever’s on the table jumps and rattles under the old man’s fist.
He’s not going to no military school, I’ll tell you that much. My son is not going to military school.
Nobody said nothing about military school, Lloyd, finish your goddamned story already.
Boy belongs with his family.
All right, all right. Where was I? Right. So I says to them, I says, Is that any way to call a cat? And they says back to me, Mr. Peck, Mrs. Bonnaducio is very obviously not a cat. And so I says, Yeah, but she don’t know that. And they’re all like, Mr. Peck, don’t you work in the kitchen? And I was like, Yes sir, I do work in the kitchen. I been working in the kitchen for fifteen years and I was a farmer before that, which is why I happen to know that if you want a cat to come you have to give it a saucer of milk. The old man chuckles. Yes sir, I said. If you want a cat to come, you have to give it a saucer of—
Finally! his mother’s voice cuts through the old man’s. I thought these eggs were never gonna cook. A plate settles on the table, and the boy hears her spatula scrape the contents of her pan onto it. A chair slides across the floor.
Pass me the salt, will you, Lloyd.
The salt shaker comes down heavily on the table. For a moment the only sound is his mother’s fork clinking rapidly against her plate. Then the old man’s voice:
She jumped.
The boy’s mother’s fork continues moving rhythmically over her plate.
Okay she didn’t jump. She fell.
Pass me the milk, Lloyd, the boy’s mother says, but only after taking several more bites.
The old man’s chair scrapes across the floor. The refrigerator opens, and when the milk bottle clunks on the table the boy has a sudden vision of them in his head, the milk bottle and the salt shaker, two clear glass containers filled with white and standing beside his mother’s white plate like a father and son at the racetrack, and then, when the old man speaks again, he has retreated to his bed. His voice comes from directly beneath the boy.
Okay she didn’t fall but she nearly did. She would have, if I hadn’t set out that saucer of milk.
Just happened to have a bottle with you? his mother calls across the house. That it, Lloyd? You just happened to be bringing a bottle of milk home to your family?
The boy hears the bed creak beneath the old man’s weight.
Well she wasn’t a real cat, Ethel. Why should I waste real milk? He speaks quietly, but both the boy and his mother hear him.
I know what kind of bottles you had on you, Lloyd. His mother’s plate lands in the sink so loudly the boy thinks she must have tossed it. And don’t think I won’t find em. I swear, sometimes I think I should be the patient at that hospital. I must be crazy, to stay married to a no-good drunk like you.
The bed creaks again.
That’s it, Lloyd. Go to bed now, now that I’m leaving. That’s it, stick your head under the pillow. Run and hide, Lloyd, just like you tried to hide your son. One of these days, Lloyd. One of these days you’re gonna drive me out on that ledge, and no saucer of milk is gonna get me back in. You hear that Lloyd? No saucer of milk is gonna fool me.
The boy waits until his mother leaves and the old man’s muffled snores fill the house before he gets out of bed. He tucks the sheet around Gregory even though it’s hot and stuffy in the loft, and then he fixes the hanging sheet between the boys’ bed and the girls’. Now that Duke’s gone and Jimmy’s taken his place on the far side of the bed, it’s continually bunched up in the center of the rope, Edi’s head visible at one end, her feet at the other, like a magician’s assistant about to be sawed in half.
The old man managed to take off his shoes, the boy sees as he descends the ladder. He lies on his bed spread-eagled, his soiled kitchen whites only slightly lighter than his dark socks and only slightly darker than the pillow over his face. The quilts hang on their ropes on either side of the bed like the curtain at a puppet theater, and the boy draws them around the old man’s crooked limbs before heading first to the bathroom and then to the kitchen, where the coffeepot’s still on the table, still warm, an oaken cutting board beneath it as a trivet. A pair of flies mate on the lip of the open bottle of milk—the salt shaker’s right next to it, just as he’d imagined—and the chairs around the maple table have almost as many names as the family that sits in them: a one-armed Windsor at the far end, an armless at the near, in between a mixture of rickety ladderbacks with unraveling rush seats, uncomfortable straight-backed school chairs, and one kitchen stool, ostensibly Gregory’s, though all the children like to sit in its high seat and use their feet to open and close the hinged steps via which the stool is converted to a stepladder—a convenience the low-ceilinged house has no use for at all.
The boy adds some water to the coffeepot and puts it back on the stove, then sits on Gregory’s stool, holding a bowl of corn flakes in his hands and eating it while the coffee comes back to a boil. He’s halfway through his second cup when he hears tiptoeing in the loft above him. A giggle trickles out from behind pressed-together fingers. The boy keeps his head cocked as though looking down into his cup but peers up through his bangs at the loft. Lance and Gregory and Lois are lying on the floor in a row, only their eyes visible between the edge of the loft floor and the lowest rung of the guard rail. He stares at the guard rail a moment, a pale pine two-by-four, nearly white save for one whorled knot that glows out of it like the eye of a peacock feather. Since he’s come back from the farm he’s noticed things like that, the fact that the cutting board is made of oak, the kitchen table of maple, the guard rail pine. The names of all those chairs. It bothers him a little bit, the fact that his uncle’s and his parents’ houses are built from the same materials. But things seemed to fit together naturally Upstate, whereas here they are merely cobbled together, fastened roughly with half-hammered bent-over nails and waiting to break beneath your weight.
Gregory giggles, and Lois sshhes him loudly. The boy sips the last of his coffee, pretending to ignore the steady stream of giggles and whispers above him, then stands and takes his cup to the sink. Up above him his siblings press their faces to the floor like ostriches, the sleep-tangled tops of all three heads plainly visible. His mother’s plate is in the sink, a white disk eclipsing the black cast iron skillet in which she’d cooked her eggs, and the boy stares at them a moment, then suddenly grabs the wet rag and whirls. His shot catches Gregory on the top of his head, and his scream ignites Lois and Lance. Within a minute they’re running screaming around the loft, and then he’s up there with him, Gregory under one arm, Lois and Lance curled around his ankles like a pair of ball-and-chains, all three of them screaming and laughing at the top of their lungs.
Got me a sack-a feed here, the boy says out loud. Guess I’d better go feed the cows.
No, no! Lois screams. He’s not food, he’s a boy!
The boy drags his feet one after the other toward the edge of the loft. Them cows is pretty hungry, I bet. Liable to eat up a whole sack of feed.
No, I’m a boy! Gregory screams.
Yes sir, I’m gonna pour this sack-a feed into the trough, feed me some cows.
A boy! Gregory screams, I’m a boy, a boy!
The boy holds Gregory by his ankles over the edge of the loft and shakes him like he is dumping out a sack of food. Gregory’s arms flop over his head and then his undershirt rolls down as well, so that only his hands are visible beneath the hem, like a two-handled umbrella.
Daddy, help! Gregory screams through his laughter. Wake up, Daddy, Dale’s feeding me to the cows! Wake up! Help!
Jesus Christ, Dale, give it a rest already.
The boy looks over to see Jimmy propped on one elbow in bed.
It’s nine o’clock in the fucking morning, some of us are trying to sleep.
In his hands, Gregory is still twitching, even though the boy has stopped shaking him.
Jimmy, help! Dale’s feeding me to the cows, help!
Don’t you have to go to work? Jimmy says, then turns over and pulls the pillow over his face.
When the boy looks back at Gregory he realizes his little brother is wearing the pair of Lance’s drawers he took Upstate with him last year. Lance, all of whose clothes do time with one or two or three older brothers before coming to him, made a big show of reclaiming the drawers and then presenting them to Gregory, the first thing he’s handed down, the first thing Gregory has received. The youngest Peck has worn them every chance he’s gotten since then, even though they’re too big for his tiny waist and thin, thin legs. His ankles are no bigger than a cow’s teats, the boy thinks as he lifts him back over the top railing—a warped pine one-by-six riddled with knots and furzed here and there with strips of bark.
When the boy sets Gregory upright his brother continues to hold his shirt over his face like a lampshade. The boy can see the top of Gregory’s head over the inverted hem, but Gregory stares right into the white field in front of his eyes.
Play! Gregory says in a baby voice. No work! Yes play!
No, Jimmy’s right, the boy says. I gotta get ready to go.
Play! Lance says. He and Lois are still clinging to the boy’s ankles, and they shake him as though he were a coconut tree. Play!
Play! Lois echoes.
The boy tries to step free of them but they refuse to let go.
C’mon, guys, I gotta take a bath.
No bath, play! Lance says. Bath bad, play good!
In front of the boy, something is happening to Gregory’s undershirt: it seems to be spiraling down a drain like bath water. The boy realizes Gregory is chewing on his shirt.
Gregory, what are you doing?
Behind the shirt, Gregory makes a sucking noise.
I’m a baby cow, Dale, he says, his voice muffled by a mouthful of white cotton. He giggles. I’m sucking on my mother’s tit.
All at once the boy grabs the shirt and rips it off Gregory’s head and throws it to the floor.
Enough with the goddamned milk already. The word is calf, Gregory, and boy calves end up in the veal pens. And you’d better not let Dad hear you using language like that or you’ll be sucking on more than an undershirt.
Gregory stares at his brother with a stunned look on his face, not sure if they’re still playing. His naked arms are still standing straight up from his shoulders.
The boy rips his ankles from Lance’s grip, Lois’s.
Let go, I gotta take a bath. You guys can entertain each other for once.
His three siblings stare after him mutely as he heads out of the loft. He is halfway down the ladder when he sees Joanie lying on her stomach on her bed, looking at him.
You okay, Dale?
He pauses on the ladder, his head just above floor level. A miniature mountain range of dust swirls underneath the bed closest to him, his and his brothers’. Jimmy’s shoes are there as well—a brand-new pair, bought just before the boy’s return—and a single white sock.
Yeah, I’m fine. I gotta go to work, I’ll see you later.
The boy runs a few inches of cold water in the bath, telling himself it’s too hot to build a fire in the stove in the basement. But it’s too cold to sit in the water for more than a couple of minutes and he scrubs himself quickly and then tries to rub some warmth back into his limbs with a towel. By the time he’s finished he’s wet all over again, with sweat, and Joanie is in the kitchen pouring bowls of cereal for Lance and Lois and Gregory. Jimmy and Edi are still asleep upstairs, the old man snoring in his quilted-off bedroom.
The boy gives Joanie a little kiss on the forehead before he heads off to the market.
You’re prettier, he whispers.
Gregory, don’t you dare throw that cereal at Lance! Lance, what did I just tell Gregory! She looks up at the boy. What’d you say?
Nothing. I’ll see you later, sis.
Joanie squeezes his hand.
I’m glad you’re back, Dale.
The boy squeezes back, but doesn’t say anything.
At the market nothing is heavy enough. Nothing tires him out. Crates of Florida oranges and Long Island cabbages, jumbo cans of pineapples and peaches and peas. They’re so light he could juggle them. They don’t seem worth the trouble of moving from the truck to the storeroom, the storeroom to the floor. He can hardly believe people are willing to pay for them. There is nothing in the market with the real weight of a pair of milk pails, one in each hand, or a bale of hay as big as he is. Nothing that could possibly exhaust him, so that when he goes home he will be able to sleep through another night of his mother and the old man. Even though he pulls nine hours—he was only scheduled for four—he still feels he could run a half marathon. Not that that would do him any good. His mother has already told him he won’t be taking up that foolishness when school starts in the fall. The family needs his earnings from his job at the market and he won’t be taking time off for practice. His earnings today consist of a bag of oranges. Seven of them. Mr. Krakowski, the produce manager, knows that there are eight children in the Peck household, but he doesn’t know Duke has joined the marines. Sorry Dale, he says with a smirk when he pays him. Guess someone’s gonna have to share.
And now he cannot walk home slowly enough. For a year and a half he ran from one task to another on the farm, never enough time to get everything done in a day. Now he doesn’t know how to stretch out the minutes, the blocks. Before he knows it he is standing in front of his ridiculous house. In a street of identical single-story rectangles sided in asphalt shingles, the one-and-a-half story wooden octagon his family lives in juts out like a guard tower on the edge of a prison wall. The house had been Brentwood’s first school, years and years ago, before they built the modern brick building around the corner on First Street. It had been falling apart even before his family moved in, suffered from its middle-of-the-last-century construction: no electricity, no plumbing or gas, no interior walls. Just one room with eight sides, each a little bit shorter than a regular-sized couch. Over the years, in brief fits of sobriety, the old man had built the kitchen and bathroom wing, turned the attic into a loft for the kids, plumbed and wired it, even built the garage, and it occurs to the boy as he turns up the driveway that the old man must have some natural ability besides drunkenness. The materials he worked with were cheap and not particularly sturdy, but they’re still standing after more than a decade of hard use. The appliances work, and the fixtures. At some point the old man must have showed a lot of promise, the boy thinks, even as he gets ready to climb up the soft incline of the shade tree that has lain in front of the garage door ever since the old man cut it down five years ago. Five good-sized saplings have sprung up from the base of the tree. They ring the stump like candles stuck into the edge of a birthday cake, and even as the boy pushes them out of his way he remembers how one of the cedar fenceposts he’d planted with his uncle last year had sprouted up the same way. As soon as he saw them his uncle sheared off the saplings with a hatchet. Let it keep growing, he said, and it’d pull your whole fence down. The fencepost had put out seedlings all through summer and fall that his uncle had diligently excised until the frost set in, and the following spring—this spring, the boy reminds himself, just a couple months ago—it had admitted defeat. That’s what you want, his uncle had said. You don’t want it to grow. You just want it to be there.
The boy is climbing onto the slanted trunk when he sees a red plastic ribbon tied around one of the saplings, and even as he is fingering it he realizes he saw several such ribbons on his walk home. He looks over at the big tree in the Slovak’s yard next door, notes first that there is a ribbon tied around its water heater–sized trunk and then that it is an elm, and then he looks further up the block. Almost every yard has an elm in it, and every elm is belted by a bright red ribbon. The boy doesn’t know what they’re there for but he knows it can’t be good news.
The boy pushes the saplings aside, mounts the slanted trunk and works his way up the rough bark from branch to branch. About halfway up the trunk one of its branches lies alongside the window to the loft, and the boy, following Duke’s example, has often used it to sneak out at night, and sometimes, as now, to sneak in. But today he needn’t have bothered. Gregory and Lance are upstairs playing with a set of Lincoln Logs, and they scream when the boy crawls through the window, abandoning their tiny unroofed cabin to jump up and tackle him, almost tumbling him back out the window. The boy barely has time to set down his bag of oranges before they knock him to the floor, and he is lying beneath them pretending to be pinned when his mother’s voice cuts through the warped plywood the three boys are piled on.
All right, enough-a that nonsense. Get on down here.
She doesn’t say his name but she doesn’t have to.
We got him Ma! Gregory calls. We got him pinned!
I can hear that honey, but let him up now. He’s got work to do.
The boy kicks off his shoes before heading downstairs. He takes the bag of oranges with him, so he won’t have to come back up for it. The first person he sees is Jimmy, sitting at the kitchen table in Gregory’s stool. His mother is sprawled on the couch with a True Confessions in one hand, which she rolls up and points at the bag.
What do you got there?
The boy gives her the bag and she sits up and dumps it out on the floor, using her magazine like a shepherd’s staff to keep the oranges from straying too far, then counting them. She counts them twice, touching each orange with the tubed magazine as if she were conferring benediction or playing duck-duck-goose, then looks up at the boy.
What, you couldn’t wait until you got home, eat with your family?
The boy doesn’t say anything.
Well then. Since you already had yours. She picks up an orange. We’ll say this one was Duke’s. The sharp nail on her thumb punches through the rind and peels off a section.
Jimmy, come get you an orange.
Jimmy doesn’t get up from the table.
Thanks Ma. Not hungry right now.
His mother pops a fragrant segment of fruit into her mouth.
Suit yourself. Now then, she says, pausing to spit a couple of seeds into her palm. Listen up. There’s gonna be some changes around here. With Duke gone. You’re gonna have to pull your own weight around here. No more sneaking in and out the upstairs window thinking I don’t hear you, thinking you can hand out your little oranges and bananas to your brothers and sisters to get them to do your chores and such. That stops right now.
The boy still doesn’t say anything. Just stands there and watches his mother rip his orange into pieces and devour it. He had been going to give them to his brothers and sisters, but not in exchange for doing his chores. But now the first orange is gone, just a few fragments of peel on the floor and a handful of seeds in his mother’s left hand, and the rest are piled up between her feet where she sits on the couch.
Additionally, she says, you’re gonna start going with Jimmy when he collects your father’s pay.
The boy turns and looks at Jimmy, who refuses to meet his gaze. He turns back to his mother.
But Ma—
The magazine catches him full on the side of the cheek. It’s not that he doesn’t see it coming—his mother is heavy and slow, and sitting down to boot—but he knows dodging will just lead to worse.
Don’t you sass me unless you want the real thing. She smacks the other cheek for good measure. Now. It don’t do no good for just one of you to go tramping through the Barrens trying to find that drunk. Maybe you’d like it if I sent one-a your sisters?
She points at him with the rolled-up tube. It is only inches from his face. So close he can smell the ink. And you might think he’d have to fight back the urge to hit her, or flee. But it’s the opposite. He is so rigid he thinks he will fall over—fall into the tunnel of her magazine and disappear into its well of words.
Good boy. Now get on out there and find him. Six oranges ain’t gonna feed seven kids no matter how you slice em.
Isn’t Dad working right now?
I called Billy, he said he never made it in. Now stop wasting time and get out there before he drinks up his whole paycheck. The boy continues to stand there, and his mother waves the magazine in front of his face. What, you want me to get the hose? What’re you waiting for?
The elm—the shade tree.
His mother half raises the magazine.
I swear to Christ Dale, don’t make me get off this couch.
The shade tree. It’s got a ribbon tied on it. There’s one on all the elms in the neighborhood. Do you know what they mean?
I don’t know nothing about no ribbons. Now get out of here, unless you want me to get the hose. Get!
As they leave Jimmy grabs an orange from the pile on the floor and eats it as they walk toward the Pine Barrens. He peels the rind back like a candy wrapper, exposing the globed top of the orange and biting into it, spraying juice on his cheeks and hands. The boy isn’t sure if the sucking noises he makes are meant to be lewd, or are simply greed, or hunger. The boy knows his parents think he dislikes his half brother, but they’re wrong. He dislikes only the fact that Jimmy wears his mother’s maiden name like a suit of armor, that he has never been strong enough to shirk off her favoritism nor smart enough to see that his beknighted status is an oppression, not just to the boy but to himself. On his own he is a happy-go-lucky sixteen-year-old in brand-new boots, and within a few blocks the two boys have settled into a silence that, if not exactly easy, is not strained either, punctuated only by Jimmy sucking on the orange and boisterously spitting his seeds into the street. Then:
You want half?
Jimmy is holding out the mangled remains of the orange, which is noticeably less than half.
No, thanks. I’ll eat later.
Suit yourself.
They pass another elm. In the falling light the ribbon tied around its trunk looks like a mourning band.
They got some kind of disease, Jimmy says then.
A disease?
Yeah. Dutcher’s disease, dutchie’s disease. Something like that. City’s gotta cut em all down to keep it from spreading.
For some reason the boy suddenly thinks of the cow that had died beneath his head from a piece of wire he’d failed to pick up from the field, and then he thinks of Dolly’s last calf, marked at birth for the veal pens. And then he thinks of Gregory.
Can’t they save em. Give em some kind of medicine?
Jimmy spits the last of his seeds into the street, drops the rind into the gutter. He wipes his cheeks with his hands and his hands on his pants and sticks his hands in his pockets.
Guess not. All they can do is cut em down to save the other trees. What was it like on that farm?
Jimmy’s voice changes when he changes the subject. There’s an edge there, but the boy can’t tell if it’s aggression or just nervousness. He looks over at his half brother, but Jimmy is looking down at his feet like he always does.
Why you wanna know?
Jimmy shrugs.
Just asking.
In answer the boy sticks his arm out and flexes his biceps.
It’s hard work day and night. The kind of work that makes a man of you.
He brings his bicep close to Jimmy’s face, as if forcing him to acknowledge the truth of what he says, or daring him to defy it. But all Jimmy does is shrug again.
Ma says farm life beats the man out of you. Says farming makes you a slave to the elements, and dairy farming makes you a slave to a cow to boot. A dairy farmer ain’t no more free than one of his cows, Ma says. That’s why she made your dad give up his farm and move down here.
The boy has a sudden vision of Flip Flack in the trailer behind the tractor, saying almost exactly the same thing—saying his mother had said almost exactly the same thing as the boy’s mother had. The image of Flip orating from his perch atop a pile of tarp-covered manure fills the boy’s brain in crystalline detail, almost at the same time as the realization that it is an invented image, as false as his mental picture of the dead cow he never looked at before he ran out of the hay barn that morning: Flip was behind him. He never turned around. He never saw him, just as he never saw the cow—an Ayrshire? a Holstein?—after it was dead. Then he says,
What’re you talking about? Ma didn’t even know Dad when he had his farm. It was gone by then.
Hey, I’m just repeating what she told me. She said she only married your dad because of you, but only on condition he give up farming. Jimmy shrugs yet again, his lack of interest in the boy’s father’s biography apparent. Anyway, it’s ancient history, right? Nothing to do with us. We weren’t there, right? Or not really anyway.
The boy muddles this as they walk on. He knows the first part of what Jimmy has said is true. His mother tells him as much every chance she gets—don’t you go thinking you’re any better than my sons, you’re a bastard just like they are—but the second part contradicts what his uncle told him. His uncle had said nothing about his mother’s demands, had said only that the old man drank their ancestral farm away, cow by cow, acre by acre. Renunciation not for love but for drink. If Jimmy had said this to him two weeks ago the boy would have dismissed it out of hand. But in his banishment he is less inclined to accept his uncle’s words as gospel. Still, what is he to do with the discrepancy?
And even as he thinks back to his time on the farm, all he remembers is hardship, struggle, a series of small failures. A life whose rhythms were indeed tailored to the ladies’ needs rather than their keepers’, as witnessed by the fact that the boy still wakes up at five in the morning, still gets antsy at the same time every evening. But no, he realizes, that’s not true. He wakes up a little later every day—today it was nearly six before he opened his eyes, as if proof that any habit, no matter how deeply ingrained, can be eroded by the same process of repetition that produced it. But he still feels that the problems he faced on the farm were smaller than the ones down here, simpler. Surmountable. The questions Upstate had answers—all of them except the last, that is, the choice put to him by his uncle and his mother—whereas the questions down here are not even questions, but conundrums, enigmas. For example, why did his mother marry the boy’s father, rather than Jimmy’s, or Duke’s? And why does she hold this fact against the boy, and not Joanie or Edi or Lois or Lance or Gregory? Of all my children, she has told him point-blank, you are the only one I regret. You are the only mistake. You are the cause of my lost freedom. He can understand why his uncle was hurt that the boy wanted to see his family again, but if his mother really does regret having him then why did she insist he come back? Certainly not for the occasional bag of oranges or apples.
By now they have reached the edge of the Pine Barrens, and the boy drops back to follow Jimmy into the scrub. All that grows here is the dwarf white pine that gives the Barrens its name, a tree stunted by thin sandy soil and twisted by the Atlantic winds. The occasional chokecherry is equally gnarled, and splotched with lichen and mold besides, and close to the ground is a tough sharp grass that will cut your ankles if you’re not careful. That’s all there is, besides the litter of brown and white paper, cellophane, empty beer and soda bottles. In the falling light the contorted shadows of the trees make the place even more inhospitable, and the fact that it is a state park seems like a bureaucratic irony. The pines are too short and sticky with pitch to climb, their needles too thin to provide substantial shade during the summer; the chokecherries won’t kill you if you eat them, but they will make you sick if you manage to keep them down. The only games the neighborhood children ever play here involve hiding, or violence, or death. The boy has been in it thousands of times before—taking the roundabout way to school, to work—but never on this errand. He knows about it, of course, not so much from Jimmy as from Duke, who never lost an opportunity to deride the boy’s drunken father. The Barrens abuts the back of the hospital grounds as well as two or three bars, and for the past few years it has been his older brothers’ summer task to find the old man where he has passed out on his way to or from one or another of these establishments, and lift whatever’s left of his paycheck from his pockets.
Don’t know why she sent us out so early.
Huh?
He don’t usually leave the bars till after dark. Says he feels safer looking for a foxhole when he knows nobody can see him.
You talk to him?
Sometimes. He’s woken up once or twice. Sometimes we have to follow him around too, until he finally passes out. Usually we keep outta sight, but if he sees us then we gotta go into the bars with him.
I hate going in them bars.
Jimmy shrugs.
You get used to it. Sometimes Duke even gets him to buy us drinks without him realizing.
You drink?
Don’t sound so shocked. I’m sixteen years—sshh!
Someone is crashing through the brush a ways ahead of them. As the boy peers through the shadows he sees they are closer to the hospital than he’d realized. Through the feathery curlicues of twisted pine limbs he can see the back of the dark building against the umber sky like a stage flat blocking out the light behind it.
Roll me over, in the clover—
It’s Dad all right, Jimmy whispers. Your dad, I mean. Damn. What?
He’s just leaving now. Unless he took something from the supply cabinet at work it’ll be a couple hours before he’s down.
Lay me down, roll me over and do it again!
The boy laughs quietly.
Does that sound like a sober man to you?
Jimmy shrugs.
I’m starving.
The boy nods. He’s hungry too.
Can’t we just ask him or something?
Jimmy makes a face at him.
We talking about the same Lloyd Peck? He’d sell you for a bottle, Dale, and don’t you forget it.
The boy’s stomach rumbles audibly. He wishes he’d thought to slip an orange into his pocket before surrendering the bag to his mother. To top it off the wind’s coming up as the sun goes down, and he is suddenly cold in his undershirt and bare feet. He is thinking he should have worn Donnie’s letter jacket when Jimmy hisses another sshh! The old man’s path has suddenly veered in their direction, and the boys duck behind a clump of chokecherries.
He’s going to Jack’s first, Jimmy whispers. C’mon, let’s go.
The boy follows Jimmy. The sandy soil, strewn with pine needles, muffles their footsteps, but they have to watch out for fallen branches. The old man takes no such precautions. You would think he was hacking his way through the jungle with a machete.
Roll me o-o-o-ver, in the clo-o-o-ver—
He sings in a loud voice, exuberantly off-key. A voice full of self-mockery but also self-love. At some point the old man embraced his role as a drunk, and he plays the part with relish if not flair or originality, even when there’s no audience around. He can stumble in at three A.M. with the best of them, the boy thinks, miss chairs when he sits down, wet his pants in his sleep and point out the stain to his own children and laugh at the pathetic spectacle of himself. He starts singing Auld Lang Syne in the first week of December and doesn’t relinquish it until Valentine’s Day. You’d almost think he was Irish.
Jimmy stops suddenly, and the boy comes up hard on his heels.
Damn it Dale! Jimmy whispers. Watch out!
Why’d you stop?
The old man answers for him. In the quiet evening the boy hears the faint sound of urine striking the trunk of a tree.
Glass clinks against glass as the old man fishes in his pocket. The urine stream wavers as the old man fumbles with the top of his bottle—Oops, a little on the shoe, Lloyd, hee hee—and then he drinks and pees steadily.
There we go, my pretty pine tree. A little drink for you, and a little drink for me.
Jesus Christ, Jimmy says. Je-sus Christ.
When he has finished the old man stows himself and stumbles on and the boys follow him. The wet tree steams slightly in the falling temperature, and they give it wide berth.
When they reach the bar the old man stops at the edge of the forest to compose himself. It’s as if he knows they are watching: he pantomimes straightening a tie, slicking his hair back in a mirror, then sets off across the back parking lot with a casual but unsteady stride, as if he is just out for an evening stroll through a slalom course. There are a dozen cars in the bar’s back lot, the battered vehicles of men hiding from wives or creditors, and the old man pats the flecked chrome on the grille of an ancient enormous Packard with a coffin-shaped snout as though it were some shy Labrador come up to lick his hand. There is a clink when his hand strikes the grille, and it takes the boy a moment to realize it is the old man’s wedding ring.
Jimmy walks to a fallen pine and settles down on it. His actions have the air of familiarity, as if he has sat on this tree many times before. The tree is close to the bar’s dumpster, which exudes a stale odor of rust and beer.
What do we do now? the boy says.
We wait. You’re lucky. It looks like he got some syrup from work. They don’t usually let him stay more than an hour when he’s been hitting the syrup.
An hour!
Maybe an hour. Maybe two.
Two hours! I don’t believe it!
Jimmy shrugs.
He’s your dad.
The boy looks over at his half brother. He is sitting with his feet up on the trunk, his knees bent, untying and tying the laces of his new boots.
Do you ever—
Jimmy looks up at him sharply.
What?
The boy shakes his head.
Nothing.
Say it.
Do you ever … I mean, have you … asked Ma …
What? Jimmy is squinting in the dim light. His nose is thinner than ours, the boy thinks. It’s not a Peck nose. Not a Dundas nose either, for that matter. Come on, Dale, spit it out.
The boy shoves his hands in his pockets.
I was just wondering, you know, if you’d ever asked Ma. Who your dad was.
Jimmy squints into the boy’s face as if looking for a sign that he is making fun, one of his hands already balled into a fist. The two boys stare at each other for a long moment, and then Jimmy’s face drops and his hand relaxes. He peels a strip of gummy bark off the trunk he is sitting on, wads it up and throws it into the forest.
I don’t suppose it matters.
No, I guess not.
What’s that supposed to mean?
Nothing. I mean, what’s it matter, right?
Jimmy is rubbing his hands together to ball up the pitch that has stuck to them so he can pick it off. He rubs, and picks, and rubs, and picks.
She’s a fertile woman, our ma.
That’s for sure.
Thought she was done after Edi, but then she started up again with Lois.
And Lance. And Gregory.
Who knows how many more she’s got in her.
A car pulls into the parking lot then, and the boys sit in silence until its driver has gone into the bar. When the boy looks back at Jimmy, he is still picking at the pitch on his hands like a zoo monkey picking at flies.
You’re better off not knowing anyway. At least this way you can pretend he’s not a drunk.
Jimmy pinches at his hand.
Yeah, that’s probably true.
Hey, the boy says then. Hey, you wanna know something?
Jimmy continues to pick at his hands for a moment, then flings them away in disgust. He looks up at the boy.
What?
Did you know Dad, my dad was married before? Before he was married to Ma?
Jimmy peers at him, not quite disbelieving but definitely suspicious.
Think about it, the boy says. He was twenty-nine when I was born. Who waits till they’re twenty-nine to get married, have their first kid?
Or the other way around.
The two boys laugh. If nothing else, they’ll always have this in common.
Ma was nineteen when she had Duke, Jimmy says then. He looks up at the boy. But who cares, right? It’s not our, our … He struggles for a word. Not our responsibility, right? Not our problem. It don’t have nothing to do with us.
The boy looks at his half brother. He had been about to mention his namesake, but suddenly he can’t face the thought of Jimmy saying that that has nothing to do with him either. That it doesn’t affect him, doesn’t matter. Because even though weeks might pass between thoughts of the first Dale Peck, the boy still knows Jimmy’s wrong. He just doesn’t know why.
Yeah, right, he says to Jimmy. It’s just, you know, weird. To think that if things had worked out between Dad and his first wife, you know, we wouldn’t be here.
You wouldn’t, Jimmy says, his attention already drawn back to the pitch on his hands. What isn’t weird in this family?
It’s almost fully dark now. The boy can’t believe Jimmy can see anything on his hand. He is just picking at them for something to do. He picks at his hands and at his shoes and then again at his hands, and neither boy owns a watch, so they don’t know how much time has gone by when the old man emerges from the bar’s back door. A trickle of music announces his exit, and then a faint but cheerful See ya later Lloyd! and then the old man stumbles out into the parking lot. When the door slams closed behind him he stops suddenly, standing up straight and putting his hand to his chest as though he’s been shot, and then he relaxes and shuffles into the Barrens.
Close one, he says, and laughs quietly and pats himself on the shoulder.
The boys hide behind the dumpster until the old man has disappeared into the trees, then set out after him. Darkness and the need for silence slow them, and the boy can hear the old man’s crashing shambling progress grow farther away.
C’mon, hurry, he says to Jimmy. We’re losing him.
Relax, Dale. We’ll just wait and see which way he’s going and then head him off.
A branch snaps under the boy’s foot then. He feels it before he hears it, its springy resistance beneath his bare sole, and then the crack erupts into the dark forest like a little bomb, and when the sound fades the boy realizes the old man has stopped up ahead of them.
The boy peers through the darkness. The trees are all black spirals, like crazy straws sucking up tar, and visible only against the faint haze of emerging stars.
Who’s there?
The boy looks toward the voice. That stooped shadow, wavering slightly? Is that the old man, or just a squat pine shivering in the breeze? The boy can’t tell.
Vernon, the old man calls. That you?
The boy wants to ask who Vernon is but doesn’t risk speaking. But Jimmy seems to understand, and shrugs an I-don’t-know.
Vernon? the old man calls again. Come on, Vernon, don’t be sore. I was only joking back there.
A gust blows a few blades of grass over the boy’s foot like a spider’s delicate stalking, and the boy nearly jumps out of his skin. He suddenly realizes he is terrified and elated at the same time, though he has no idea why. He wants to scream and giggle both, but Jimmy has his finger over his lips.
Sshh.
Hello? the old man calls, and then: Jimmy? Is that you Jimmy? He laughs, Come on out, son, you don’t have to hide from your old man.
Something happens to Jimmy when the old man calls to him. Longing and rage seem to compete in his body. His hands curl into tight fists, but his bottom lip trembles and sticks out as if he is going to cry. For the second time that day the boy thinks of his namesake, the first Dale Peck. Does he too long to hear the word son from a father’s mouth? Does he long to hear it, and kill the man who says it?
Jimmy’s breath is so loud through his nose that the boy thinks the old man must hear him for sure.
Hello? the old man calls one more time, and then a moment later he resumes walking. All righty then, he calls as he stumbles and crashes his way through the underbrush. Come and get me if you want me.
The stooped shadow was a pine after all. The old man was several feet to the left.
It takes a long moment for Jimmy to relax and then they follow the old man for a few minutes more and then Jimmy hisses, Damn!
What?
He’s heading toward Carl’s. He must be on a real bender. We’re gonna be out here all night. Be lucky if we get anything off him at all. He pauses, looking over at the boy. It’s hard to tell with just the stars and low moon for illumination, but the boy thinks Jimmy is looking at him with pity. Ma’s gonna whip you for sure.
Where does the idea come from? The boy can’t say. It is just there, as fully formed as a slide projector image appearing on the blank wall of his mind.
You still carry around that penknife?
What? Yeah, why?
Give it to me, the boy says. And take your arms out of your sleeves.
Wha—
Up ahead the old man’s voice reaches them, faint and warbling.
Oh my darling, oh my darling—
Just do it, the boy says. And hurry it up, unless you want to be out here all night.
Who knows why Jimmy complies? The conviction in the boy’s voice or the constriction of his new shoes, or the way the old man had spoken to him as if he were almost his son? He digs the little knife from his pocket and hands it over, then slips his arms out of the sleeves of his undershirt, the white fabric bunching around his neck and narrow shoulders like a scarf.
Bend down.
Dale—
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine!
C’mon hurry, he’s getting away.
Jimmy bends and the boy pulls his undershirt up over his brother’s face the way Gregory had done earlier in the day. He uses the long tail to knot it snugly in place, then puckers a little piece of fabric out over Jimmy’s right eye and saws it off with the penknife, then repeats the procedure on the left. Throughout the surgery Jimmy stands slightly stooped, the way he does when his mother cuts his hair in the kitchen, and it’s only when the boy has cut the second eyehole that Jimmy stands up and blinks several times as if he is just waking up. His father was taller than mine, the boy thinks, looking up into his half brother’s covered face.
This is a bad idea, Jimmy says then, but there is lust in his voice too. A bad, bad idea.
The boy does his own shirt quickly. It is hard to knot the shirt over his head with his eyes covered and the knife in one hand, but eventually he does it. The shirt is like a veil. No, like a caul: translucent but not transparent. It actually seems lighter in there than it is outside, as if—yes. As if his face is submerged in milk.
Quickly, jaggedly, he cuts eye holes in the stomach of his shirt. He looks at his half brother through them. Shirtless. Hooded. Knows that he is looking at a mirror of himself. Jimmy’s skinny stomach is moving in and out rapidly, his breath ballooning the shirt over his mouth with every exhale. The boys pant in unison for a moment, as though they have already done it. The knife in the boy’s hand is slippery and wet as if already coated with the old man’s blood.
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine!
They seem to know not to speak, so instead they scream, their hyas! and whoops! and hi-yees! gradually melding into the Indian battle cry favored by suburban kids all over the nation.
Woo-boo-boo-boo-boo-boo-boo-boo,woo-boo-boo-boo-boo-boo-boo-boo!
They tear through the Barrens, scaly branches lashing at their bare chests with a pain that is luxurious, energizing, liberating. The boy imagines blood streaking down his chest and ribs, painting him like a true redskin. The fallen tree he leaps is the body of his brother brave, murdered by the white man ahead. He will avenge this and a thousand other misdeeds. He will right the wrongs of history.
The boys scream and run and whoop and holler their way toward the old man. They go faster as they get closer, their voices disintegrate into an unintelligible garble of high-pitched syllables. The boy is far ahead of Jimmy but he doesn’t think about his form, about the placement of his feet or the rhythm of his breath. He isn’t running a race, he is running from Vinnie Grasso and Bruce St. John and Robert Sampson, he is running after Julia Miller. He doesn’t think about leaving Jimmy behind but rather about closing in on the old man, closing in for the kill. His arms fly out from his sides as though he were trying to beat back a swarm of bees, the knife still tight in his right hand, its exposed blade slicing through the air.
When he comes upon the old man it is as if he has grown three feet taller in his rage. The old man is a little thing that barely comes up to his waist, appearing suddenly out of the ground, arms upraised, mouth open, lips moving in frantic but silent supplication. The boy has time to realize the old man is kneeling just before crashing into him and rolling across a small clearing. In the night’s one act of benevolence, the knife flies from his hand and disappears into the dark white sand.
The boy sits up, blind for a moment, dizzy, then adjusts the shirt over his face. He suddenly realizes the old man is screaming.
Mercy! Have mercy on an old man! Mercy, mercy!
The boy scrambles to his hands and knees. For a moment he thinks he is going to be sick and his head drops, but then the nausea passes and he looks up again. The old man is on all fours staring at him, his mouth quivering but silent. His gaze is so seeing that the boy thinks he must be able to look through the shroud covering his face. Then:
Please, the old man whispers. Please, I beg of you.
He reaches one hand out and open in front of him. It shakes in the air, the fingers spasming and twitching.
I’m just a drunk. A drunk who can’t even make a fist to defend himself. Please. I beg of you. Have mercy.
And then Jimmy crashes through the trees. His foot carries the weight and speed of his sixteen years behind it. It catches the old man in the ribs and stretches him out on the sand. Immediately Jimmy is kicking him in the legs, the ass, the kidneys, his voice still screaming out of his mouth in a garble of hate and rage, and at the sight the boy finds himself running toward the old man on his hands and knees like a dog toward a downed deer. Still on his knees, he plants himself beside the old man and pummels his face. The old man curls himself into a ball, his face buried in his hands, his voice a constant stream of Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!
And suddenly they do stop, the boy kneeling and panting at the old man’s head, Jimmy standing and panting at the base of the old man’s spine. They have not hit him particularly hard, or long. The old man is still conscious. He remains curled up with his face in his hands, his voice subsiding into a thin wordless mewl.
Down at the other end of him, Jimmy bends slightly, rests his hands on his knees. The boy too is suddenly exhausted. His rage is gone, even the memory of it fading. The old man looks so small on the ground, smaller than Lance or even Gregory, and the boy wants to do nothing so much as lie down beside him and sleep.
Jimmy comes down on one knee heavily, flips open the old man’s jacket, reaches for the wallet in the inner pocket. There is a bottle there as well, and he throws it into the trees before taking the money from the wallet and replacing it in the old man’s pocket, and then he folds the old man’s jacket closed again, as if closing up his chest after surgery. He sits back on his heels. The shirt over his face is stuck there by sweat, taking on the shape of the skull beneath the skin. The money is a thin sheaf of bills in his right hand, and the boy stares at it in incomprehension. Is this what they were after?
He is still staring at the money when it, and Jimmy’s hand, floats upward. Why is it floating? The boy’s mind cannot process even the simplest information: it takes him several seconds to realize Jimmy is pointing at him with the hand that holds the money, several more to realize why: the shirt over his head has come unknotted, exposing the right side of his face. It is at that moment he realizes that the old man is not in fact whimpering wordlessly
My own boy. My own and oldest boy. My one and only boy.
Holding the shirt in place with his left hand, the boy stumbles up and out of the clearing, Jimmy hard on his heels. They run without direction until suddenly they burst out of the Barrens onto a street—Sixth, the boy sees when they reach the first corner. There are no streetlights and only a few houses, so the street is nearly as dark as the forest. The boys tear off their shirts and stuff them into a trashcan in front of one of the houses. For a moment they look at each other’s uncovered faces as Adam and Eve must have looked at each other after eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and then they make their way home.
They have walked all four blocks and are turning the corner onto Second before either speaks. Then Jimmy says,
What’ll we tell Ma? About the shirts?
Tell her we got in a fight. Tell her I ripped yours.
She’ll whip you sure.
She’ll whip me anyway.
But it is later than they thought: their house is dark, and the boys climb up the fallen elm and sneak in through the loft window. Before they do, the boy pulls the ribbon off the elm sapling and stuffs it in his pocket. Upstairs, he and Jimmy pull off their pants and pull on fresh undershirts and climb onto opposite sides of the bed. Lance and Gregory sleep in the center of the bed, Lance already slipping into the crease between the mattresses, Gregory’s arm thrown over him in a proximate transfer of affection. The boy and Jimmy lie down and turn their backs to each other.
The boy doesn’t know what time it is when his mother’s voice awakens him. Eyes still closed, he flinches, warding off a blow that doesn’t come. When she speaks again, he realizes she is downstairs.
If you just wait a moment, officer. I’ll get him.
When he opens his eyes he sees that it is still dark. He looks at the window across the room as he listens to his mother’s heavy tread on the floor below him. The ladder rattles against the side of the loft, then creaks as she puts her foot on the rung. He could push it down before she got up here, but she would just stand it up again. He could probably make it out the window too, but then what? He is in his drawers, the police are downstairs. Even if he didn’t dress, just grabbed Duke’s cutoff pants and bolted out the window, they would beat him to the base of the dead but still condemned elm tree—twice tried, twice convicted and sentenced to death. And so he just lies there, listening to his mother mount the ladder behind him. The back of his head is only a few feet from the ladder and he imagines he feels her breath on the top of his head when her face clears the floor. But it is just her hand. Her finger, which she jabs into the crown of his skull. She hisses,
Get up!
He turns and looks at her. She is in her nightgown, her brown hair thick and curly and wild around her face, the gray strands catching the light from downstairs and glinting as though sparks were being generated by the malevolence of her mood. Nothing tempers the loathing in her face. Her nose is wrinkled, her lips curled back as though assaulted by a noxious odor. Her finger reaches out again and pokes him right between the eyes as though he were a dead mouse on the bed.
Hurry it up. The officers don’t have all night.
By the time he dresses and gets downstairs she has taken her place on the couch. Two police officers stand just inside the closed door, thick and shapeless in their dark uniforms. There is an impatient expression on the face of the taller one, a bored look on the shorter, but there is something else on both their faces as well. A look of distaste, and something else. The policemen stand as close to the room’s exit as possible, their hands in their pockets and their eyes focused determinedly on their shoes.
The policemen aren’t unfamiliar to the boy—they have brought the old man home on more than one occasion—but for some reason he has never been able to remember their names. Even now, approaching them as slowly as possible in the tiny room, he reads their nametags and the names there disappear from his brain as if wiped away with an eraser. Then a sound distracts him, and he looks over and sees the old man curled in a corner of the room, half concealed by the couch and muttering to himself. He could be cowering or just sleeping. Both are possible. Both have happened before.
I’m sorry to keep you waiting, officers, his mother says then. But I thought the boy should see this. Let it be a lesson to him.
The officers look at his mother and then they look at the boy and then they look at their feet again, and the boy realizes the expression on their faces is shame.
I’m worried, you know, his mother continues. He’s been a thorn in my side since the day he was born. Disobedient. A troublemaker. Getting held back in school.
Once—the boy starts.
You shut up! His mother’s finger, the finger that had just awakened him, shoots straight out from her shoulder at the end of her arm. It flies across the room and pierces his throat, stealing his voice.
You see what I mean? she says, lowering her arm. The boy has to learn his place or he’s going to turn out just like his father. She settles back on the couch. Don’t let me keep you from doing your duty, officers.
The policemen stand by the door a moment longer. The taller one shifts his weight from foot to foot. Then the shorter one shakes his head and says under his breath,
Criminy. Lloyd! he says then, louder. Lloyd, c’mon. Wake up.
The old man waves a hand at the offending noise as though it were a fly tickling his ear, or a cat, or a child.
Lloyd, the shorter policeman says, starting across the room. C’mon now. Time to wake up.
The old man is waving his hand again when the shorter policeman grabs it and turns him roughly onto his back. His face, the boy sees, is puffy and red, his left eye slightly swollen and purple.
Let’s go, Lloyd. We been here long enough as it is.
The boy looks over at his mother then. She is staring at him with a look of deep and abiding satisfaction on her face.
Don’t be looking at me, she says. Look at your father. Look at what’s in store for you.
But the boy isn’t looking at her. He is looking at the pile of orange peels between her slippered feet. It looks as though she ate the whole bag. When his mother sees where he is looking she kicks the peels beneath the couch.
The boy figures out what’s going on just as the shorter policeman grabs the old man by the lapels and pulls him into a sitting position. They have dragged him home and roughed him up before, threatened to lock him up if they find him sleeping in the Barrens or on someone’s front lawn one more time, and in the past his mother has screamed at them to stop. But tonight, the boy realizes, tonight his mother has asked them not to stop but to wait. Wait until she could get the old man’s eldest son out of bed. Not so they could arrest him for beating up his own father, but so he could watch the policemen do it too.
Still holding him by the lapels, the shorter policeman administers a couple of slaps to the old man’s face.
How many times, Lloyd? How many times are we gonna have to go through this? This routine’s getting old, Lloyd, how many times are we gonna have to go through it?
The old man makes a face and twists his head back and forth like a baby refusing food. His eyes and mouth are pinched tightly shut.
The shorter policeman smacks him again. Huh, Lloyd? Answer me, how many times are we gonna have to drag your ass in off the streets?
Sleepy, the old man says then, still trying to twist his face away from the shorter policeman’s blows without opening his eyes. Just lemme sleep.
That’s what I’m saying, Lloyd. Why can’t you sleep in your own bed instead of making us pick you up off the streets and drag your sorry ass back here week after week? We’re tired of it, Lloyd. We got better things to do with our time. Open your goddamn eyes when I’m talking to you, Lloyd!
The shorter policeman administers a particularly vicious smack and the old man’s eyes open. He stares up into the face of the shorter policeman with wide uncomprehending eyes. On the couch, the boy’s mother sits back and pulls one of the cushions into her lap. She is staring at the boy and it seems to him that she is fighting to keep a smile off her face.
What’s this? the shorter policeman is saying now. Looks like you got a bit of a shiner coming on here. Looks like someone got to you before we did. Huh, Lloyd, someone get to you before we did?
The old man blinks, swallows, but doesn’t say anything.
What’s that, Lloyd? the shorter policeman says. I didn’t catch that. Got in a brawl with one-a your bar buddies? Or maybe someone dished out a bit of street justice, Lloyd? Someone else as sick of your drunk bullshit as we are? Huh, Lloyd? When the old man still doesn’t say anything the shorter policeman shakes him by the lapels. Answer me, Lloyd. He presses his finger into the swelling around the old man’s eye. He pushes his finger right into the bruise as though it were a rotten apple. Huh?
Mercy! the old man screams then. Mercy, please, have mercy! He flails out of the shorter policeman’s grip and crawls away from him along the wall. Mercy, please! I beg of you!
For a moment it looks as if the shorter policeman is going to let him go. The old man crawls a few feet and the policeman watches him go with his hands on his hips. But then, almost casually, he begins walking along behind him.
Mercy, Lloyd? the shorter policeman says. We’ll show you some mercy. As soon as you start acting like a man. When are you gonna start acting like a man, Lloyd?
The shorter policeman ambles along beside the old man as though he were out for a Sunday stroll. When, occasionally, he kicks the old man in the hip or ribs, it is as if he is returning a stray soccer ball to boys on a field.
Huh, Lloyd? When are you gonna start acting like a man? Take care of your wife, set a good example for your children? Huh, Lloyd, how long do they have to wait?
When he kicks the old man, the old man bounces off the wall and keeps on crawling. His jacket, split along its back middle seam, falls open around his torso like a pair of broken wings. His left shoe is missing, and a dirty gray sock hangs off his foot like a half-shed skin. Mercy, he says, but quietly, quietly. Have mercy, please.
And of course the room is an eight-sided circle: the old man crawls along, the shorter policeman kicking him occasionally, his head hanging below his shoulders, and when he bumps into a corner he turns to the right and keeps on crawling back to where he started. The boy is in the center of the room, and he turns slowly, following the old man’s progress with his whole body. Around the kitchen table, behind the bed, and so on to the front door, where he bumps into the motionless legs of the taller policeman. For a moment he seems almost to be sniffing at them like a dog, and then he sits back on his heels and stretches his arms up toward the taller policeman’s face.
Mercy, my good sir! I beg of you, show a poor man some mercy!
The taller policeman takes a step back from the old man, then stares down at him with his lips parted in a grimace, his head shaking back and forth. The old man’s arms waver asynchronously, like the antennas of a grasshopper, and even as he sits there with his hands upraised a dark stain spreads out over his crotch and down the legs of his pants.
Mercy, sir, he pleads quietly. I beg of you.
The taller policeman licks his lips as though he has eaten something foul. Inside his pockets his hands are clenching and unclenching. The old man’s urine trickles to the floor audibly.
Aw, Jesus Christ, the taller policeman says. C’mon, Sal, let’s get the hell outta here before I throw up.
My own boy, the old man says as the taller policeman steps back and pulls open the door. His hands are still upraised, his urine a blotchy-winged butterfly staining the legs of his pants. My only boy. Thank you for your mercy.
The shorter policeman steps around the old man and heads out the door. Before he goes he says, Next time it’ll be the lockup Lloyd. But his heart’s gone out of it. He nods goodnight to the boy’s mother and pulls the door closed behind him when he leaves.
The old man sits on his haunches for a moment, and then all at once he folds over, his torso on his knees and his arms stretched forward as if he is prostrating himself before his god. His face is in the puddle of his own urine, and his voice emerges wet and muffled beneath his flesh.
My own, my one and only boy.
The boy just stares at him. He does not know what he feels. He is so overwhelmed by emotions he feels numb, but then suddenly one thought emerges clearly:
He wishes he had never left the farm.
Isn’t it funny, he thinks, how when he was on the farm he missed Long Island, and now that he’s on Long Island he misses the farm? Isn’t it funny?
The first blow is hot and wet. As if she has sprayed lighter fluid on him and lit it at the same time. The next catches him in the palm of his hand when he turns to ward off the blow. The metal coupling at the end of the hose bites deeply into the palm, and, despite himself, he screams. He turns then, protecting as much of his soft parts as possible, offering up instead the broad plain of his back.
Good for nothing sonofabitch. Goddamn worthless piece of Upstate trash. I never should-a married you! I should-a lived on the streets and raised my three orphans in the gutter rather than subject them to you! Goddamn you Lloyd! Goddamn you for ever and ever!
She is beating at him with one hand and ripping at his undershirt with the other, and because she is so close to him she can only catch him with the root of the hose and so it doesn’t really hurt. But then her fingernails dig so deeply into the fabric of the shirt that they rip right through, and she pulls it up and over his head. When the white fabric covers his face the boy suddenly screams.
I’m sorry Dad! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!
The hose whistles through the air, comes down on his back again and again.
You’ll pay, you goddamn sonofabitch, you’ll pay for what you’ve done to me and my children!
I’m sorry Dad. I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry!
Again and again the hose comes down on his back. Again and again the boy calls out, begging for forgiveness.
I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!
Then, all at once, it stops.
The boy remains bent over his knees for a moment, then lets himself fall over to one side. His arms are still upraised, the undershirt still over his face. Through the opening at what should be the bottom of the shirt he can see his father, asleep on his side. Then a shadow darkens the shirt.
Take a good look, she says. Take a good long look at your future.
He doesn’t move until the lights go out and he hears her settling into bed, and then all he does is pull the shirt off his face. He waits until his mother’s snores penetrate the thin screen of quilts before standing slowly, his back so sore that he cannot straighten completely. He stands there for a moment, his back hunched, fighting back a wave of nausea. His mouth stretches open as dry heaves seize his body, nearly knocking him over, and the old man lies on the floor in front of him with his hands pressed between his wet thighs, looking for all the world like something the boy has retched up.
When the nausea passes the boy eases outside. The ocean air is wet and cold on his stomach, but his back is burning, burning with a heat so intense he wants to cry out. But the heat is also familiar somehow. It is the heat of the cow he killed, the boy thinks, come back to remind him of all the reasons he couldn’t stay on the farm.
He looks around for a moment, wondering where to go, then heads toward the garage. He has to duck under the fallen elm to get to the side door. His father had built the garage in an industrious week five years ago. He had avoided his cough syrup and limited himself to occasional shots of whiskey in coffee throughout the process, working every morning after he got home from work and keeping at it well into the night. On the night he finished though, he had gone out to celebrate, and when he got home in the wee hours of the morning he announced his presence with an axe. The family had awakened to the sound of the old man chopping down the elm tree that grew in the front yard. One by one they had stumbled out to see what was going on. It was a precautionary measure, the old man said, to keep it from falling on the garage. His mother was afraid it was going to fall on the house, but what can you say to a drunken man with an axe? Duke was the only one of them who might have been big enough to do anything, and Duke just laughed and laughed. The rest of them had stood there and watched the old man chop until, with a crack like a thunderbolt, the tree had gone down. For a drunk the old man had pretty good aim: one branch took out a window, another knocked a hole the size of a man’s fist in the roof, but that was the extent of the damage. The tree fell directly in front of the garage door, and there it stayed. Forever.
Inside the garage, the only light comes through the solid and broken panes of glass in the door. It takes a while until the boy’s eyes adjust to the gloom, and then he walks to the car that has been trapped in the garage ever since it was built. He cracks open the driver’s side door and leans across the seat and pulls from the glove compartment one of the three bottles of the old man’s cough syrup he hid there when he got back from the farm. He uses the bottle as the old man had used the axe, except the boy breaks out the remaining panes of glass in the garage door. There are eight left. As many children as there are in the family, if you still count Duke. The boy smashes the panes one by one, pausing until the echoes of one pane of glass falling to the ground have faded before going on to the next, half expecting someone to come out and stop him, or for the bottle in his hand to break. But no one comes and the bottle doesn’t break and after he has knocked out the eight panes of glass he throws the bottle on the earthen floor of the garage, but it only bounces a couple of times and rolls against the wall opposite the garage door.
The boy stares at it a moment. It gleams in the light, as benign as a tiny spool of wire. But the boy knows what even one piece of wire can do, so he walks over and picks the bottle up. It only takes a moment for his hand to remember what his brain has forgotten. The shape of it, the heft. The warmth against his palm. The bottle is wet in his hands and at first he thinks it has come open but then he realizes it’s his blood. His hand is bleeding, though whether it was cut by his mother’s hose or by one of the panes of glass he doesn’t know.
It’s the blood he’s after, at first. His own blood. He licks it first from his hand and then from the bottle itself, and as he licks it he cannot stop himself from thinking again that the bottle is like an udder in his fingers, eager, insistent, desperate to be drained. Even before he unscrews the lid he is aware that it is milking time. Dawn’s early light glimmers through the broken panes of the garage door as his hands do what they have been trained to do at this hour, twisting open the bottle and bringing it to his lips and holding it there until it is drained. The boy burps when he finishes. His breath comes out of his mouth in a ball of fire, and finally, finally burns away the world.