21
The Year of Joan
The Monday after his arrest, Corey stayed home from school and his mother stayed home from work. At seven thirty, the driver from The Ride honked outside. Corey went out in the gray cold morning and said, “She can’t make it today.” He tried to apologize. The driver put up a hand to stop him talking, as if to say he didn’t want to hear it, he had troubles too, jumped back in his car and drove away, grizzled, red-faced and bleary-eyed.
Back inside, Corey faced his mother. She finally admitted she was too weak to go to work at all.
“I just can’t do it,” she wept. He went to her side and embraced her.
But she blamed him for fighting with his father.
“Look what’s happened! When we needed him! You couldn’t keep your temper in check.”
He took his arm back.
“What can I do to fix things?”
“You could begin by calling him and telling him you’re sorry. That way at least maybe he’ll drop the charges.”
“I’m not calling him. If you wanted me to kill him, I’d kill him. But I’m not calling him.”
“Oh, give it a rest.”
“And another thing: I can tell you right now, I’m not going back to school.”
“Oh, God,” she said and began weeping again. “I curse my fate.”
For once, he watched her impassively. “No, it’s a good thing. I’m not going back. I feel much better making that decision.”
“You’re foolish.”
It was ten in the morning. The commuting hour was over, that brief time when cars streamed past on Sea Street, and now the silence of the shore reigned supreme, a near-total stillness. Within that stillness, one could subconsciously detect the presence of those people in neighboring houses who stayed home during the day, but they were a small population spread over a wide area, and their presence was like that of insects in an open field or crabs in the tide washing over a jetty. The vast space over the bay and rock-strewn beach gave forth a whispering sound, which surrounded their house, as if they were living in a conch shell.
Corey went to the kitchen and made coffee. When he returned, she was trying to put her reading glasses on and he helped her. He put the cup in her trembling hands, she took a sip and steam flamed up on her glasses.
“Do we have any money?”
“Not really.”
“Where are we on food and rent?”
“See for yourself.”
They looked at the laptop. She had the online banking page open.
“You are going to have to work. You’re going to get your wish.”
He got his spiral notebook, turned to a new page, and made a list of things to do. The first was check the cupboards in the kitchen. He shook a box of cereal to estimate the contents. He went to his room and checked his money drawer and counted up his dollar bills.
He had an idea. He called Tom. Voicemail picked up and Corey left a message.
“I might be on the way to figuring things out,” he told his mother.
He glanced in the mirror at the bruises on his face and wondered if Tom would be impressed. He took a shower, grim daylight filtering through the frog-covered shower curtain. He scrubbed his short hair and said, “I can do anything!”
He yanked his jeans on and, while waiting for the phone to ring, ate the last of their cereal with the last of their milk, sitting in the kitchenette, tapping his bare feet on the linoleum floor.
At 11:30, his cell phone rang and he snatched it up.
“Tom!”
“Hey, what’s up. I got your message. I couldn’t call you right away.”
“That’s fine—thank you for calling!”
“So, you’re looking for work?”
“Tom, I’m looking for work. I quit school; I’m totally available—twenty-four hours a day. I have to make a living for my mom; I’m gonna be our sole supporter. I’m ready to do anything, anything it takes. There won’t be any bullshit like before. That crap is in the past. I’m not going to lie to anybody. I’m a different person. If you give me a chance, you’ll see.”
“Well, I’d love to help ya, but I can’t hire anybody right now. It’s the middle of winter and this is our slow season. I’m having to send guys home as it is. But hold on a second. One of my guys was telling me there’s a local that’s hiring. Wait a minute. Hey, Joe! Come here for a minute. Who did you tell me was hiring? The caisson builders. They’re doing the bridge over by MIT, aren’t they? What are they, Local 151 or something? Corey, my guy says there’s a union over by you that’s hiring. They’re in Quincy, Local 133. I hear they just hired fifty new guys, and they’re hiring guys without any experience. They’re on Washington Street. Call over there today and see if you can put your name in. Those guys do pretty good. If you can get on with them, it’s union scale. They might start you as high as twenty an hour. I don’t know.”
Corey started thanking him profusely. “Tom, I will never disrespect your name again. I’ll never embarrass you about knowing me. When things are better, we’ll have a beer and I’ll buy you a hundred rounds…”
“That’s fine,” Tom said. “I gotta go.”
Corey called the union and learned they were no longer hiring. He’d missed the last day while he was weighing in at Springfield.
He spent several more hours calling around to different construction companies until someone finally told him to get in touch with Labor Ready, a temporary employment agency for the construction trades. In the afternoon, he went to a dilapidated house in Quincy Center across from Family Dollar. The office had brown vinyl walls. There were giant posters setting out the labor law in minuscule fine print. Behind the counter, a white-haired woman was doing clerical work. An unshaven guy in construction jeans and boots—they were brand-new and hadn’t been worked in—was talking on the phone with his feet on a desk. Seeing Corey, he took the phone away from his ear.
“What’re you looking for? A little demo? We’ll hook you up. Go to our website and fill out the application. All our policies are there. Don’t show up drunk, don’t show up high. We need a clean driving record. Make sure you click the thing saying you’ve read it. Make sure you give us a working phone number. If I call you, answer your phone. Make sure your ringer’s on. What happened to your face?”
“I did a cage fight.”
“My boy does that. He’s like ten-and-oh. You heard of Bobby Shephard? You should check him out.”
“All right. I need a job.”
“Just keep your phone on. I get these guys bitching at me they didn’t get a call and their phones are off.”
He went back to his phone call.
“Wait a second,” Corey interrupted. “Just so I understand: I’m filling out an application; does that mean you’re hiring me, you’re not hiring me, you’re going to think about it—how does that work?”
“We just need your number so we can call you.”
“Can I fill it out here since I’m here now?”
“Hey, Mags.”
“What?”
“Can he fill out his application on your computer?”
“Can you kiss my ass?” the white-haired woman croaked. “I need my computer to work.”
“You’re gonna have to fill it out at home.”
He did. He got his first job almost immediately, but it was only for a day. He had to drive all the way to Medford, to a retail space that was being renovated—an old store being superseded by a Walgreens or CVS. The stock was gone; only the shelves were left. He and another teenager took them out and threw them in a dumpster. It echoed like a bronze drum when they dropped the metal shelves. A foreman, who worked for the general contractor, sat in his pickup, wearing a hunter’s ball cap, eating a rotisserie chicken while they worked. Christmas decorations hung above the street. The other teenager walked slowly back after each trip to the dumpster; Corey jogged, seeing his breath in the air.
“You must have benefits,” his workmate said.
Gloria had him move her to the wheelchair. He took the sheet off and helped her sit. He tilted her to ease the pressure on her spine and turned the chair so she was facing the sunlight in the window.
“Does that feel better?” he asked. “Is that, like, cheerful lighting with the sun?”
The neurologist was giving his mother L-Threonine, a white, crystalline amino acid that looked like cocaine, which she had to take with Robitussin. He drove to Walgreens to buy a case of Robitussin. Someone called the manager. They thought he was a tweaker robotripping. Corey explained it was part of a regimen to treat muscle cramping in ALS. The manager said he could buy one bottle at a time. Corey protested, “We’re going to go through that in a single day. Every time I drive out here burns gas.” The manager said he was lucky they weren’t calling the cops. Corey drove home with a single seven-ounce bottle of cough syrup.
He needed gas for the hatchback, but the bank account was under a hundred dollars.
He got home and his mother needed the bathroom. He took her one slow step at a time. Labor Ready called and asked if he was up for work right now. “Mom, can I leave you?” He told them he’d call back. He left a message with Dawn Gillespie—“I need help”—then left and ran to a demo job on Hancock Street, scooping up rubble.
He worked in his winter coat in a room lit by a halogen lamp, dust swirling in the light beam. The foreman signed his time sheet: four hours at eleven bucks an hour. He would submit his time on Friday and get paid the week that followed, which was Christmas.
The next day, he wasn’t working. He got his mother up and in the wheelchair and poured her coffee and set her up with her laptop in the sun and went out by himself on Shore Road with the cell phone in his hand and waited for a call, too stressed to see the sea, the expanse of saltwater that rolled against the beach. The pale sun was in the south. He was alone with the jetty. The frigid wind buffeted his ears.
In another month, he would have to go to court to answer Leonard’s charge.
He went home and got a call from Dawn. She went over their situation. A church, Quincy Reform, was paying a percentage of their rent. Disability paid certain medical costs but only after a complex reimbursement process. They received a check for $200 a month. Their food was partly subsidized. Corey was expected to work, but the state put a cap on how much he could make before he started losing benefits. He wasn’t anywhere near the cap. His mother had to make $700 a month.
“My mother can’t work at all.”
“The family needs to contribute seven hundred dollars a month.” If not, Gloria would go to a state-run home.
He called Labor Ready. The dispatcher said they might have night work for him; they didn’t know yet, try back later.
His mother said, “Son, I hate to bother you, but could you make me something to eat?” For that matter, Corey was hungry too. The refrigerator was empty. He was afraid to shop and afraid to drive. He dished up applesauce for them both and put the spoon in his mother’s hand while he made mac and cheese.
She needed him to take her to the bathroom. The door was too narrow for the wheelchair. She stood up and used him as a walker. Each step she took, he waited and he held her. He helped her turn for the toilet. He pulled down her sweatpants and lowered her to the seat. He waited while she went. They developed a procedure. He put toilet paper in her hand. She blotted herself. He helped push her hand between her legs while looking away. She had a distinct, non-male smell that came from her anatomy. He flushed for her, picked up her pants, and helped her walk back to her chair.
Labor Ready called back. They had the night work. He said, “Thank you, God!”
But they said, “Wait, you’re only seventeen. You can’t do it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Labor laws. You can’t work at night until you’re eighteen.”
Gloria told him to take her credit card and get them food. He drove to Star, grabbed groceries and hurried back. On the way, he stopped for gas. He swiped her card and put the nozzle in the tank and watched the numbers climbing up and up and up until the eight-gallon tank was full and the pump in his hand clunked off.
The undergraduates went on Christmas vacation. Leonard continued working at MIT, guarding buildings that had been left vacant by their absence. He spent several long night shifts in the marble-floored halls of the main building and several more doing rounds in a near-empty undergraduate dormitory. He sat at the desk, reading Dreams of a Final Theory by Weinberg, which talked about the origin and fate of the universe. Christmas passed like any other workday. He spoke to no one but the 7-Eleven guy from whom he bought coffee at the end of his shift, and then drove home in the early morning with the fresh light of a new day on the brick buildings of Cambridge, traces of frost on the asphalt. In Malden, he returned to the burrow of his house, slept and woke refreshed at nightfall, except for a few nightmares. Upon waking, he spent several hours reading, browsing the Internet. Then he fixed dinner: meat and sauce, a lot of onion and garlic. The loss of his best knives interfered with his cooking. He calculated the cost of what his son had taken from him. At nine thirty, he put on his uniform, packed his book in a plastic bag because his son had taken the good bag, the paramilitary bag that expressed so perfectly what he wanted to say about himself, got in the car and drove through working-class Malden towards the lights of Boston and the gleaming commercial and technological utopia of MIT. There, he ensconced himself at his post and passed another night.
Around midnight, he was in the main building and encountered Adrian coming down the Infinite Hallway. He’d come back to school early to avoid spending the vacation with his mother.
They went upstairs to a professor’s office—a windowless attic crammed with paperbound science journals on a half floor between the engineering and chemistry halls. The security guard and the student talked for several hours about families, mothers, women, the social meaning of Christmas and its hypocrisy. Adrian said that Christmas brought out the worst in people. He did most of the talking while Leonard sat with his feet on the professor’s desk and his two-way radio on the green felt blotter. Around two a.m., Leonard did reveal one thing: He said that, due to his son Corey’s violent, out-of-control nature, he, Leonard, had recently been forced to stop taking care of his mother, and that sooner or later, something would have to be done about it.
On a desolate day just after New Year’s, Corey was sitting on his bed, taking off his boots, having just returned from work. He had gotten a long-term job at a Target in a dying mall in Braintree, next to a Loews cinema with blacked-out windows and a Starship Enterprise–style roof, which cars could drive beneath. A red sun hung above the evergreens that fringed the colossal parking lot when he arrived at work in the mornings. He put up steel shelving in the northwest corner of the store with a gang of temp workers. They held the vertical rails; he worked his way up a ladder, banging the shelves in with a hammer.
He tossed his boot to the floor. It landed by his hammer and a cheap new leather tool belt from Home Depot. The bruises on his face were fading. He took his sweatshirt off. His stomach muscles had lost their definition. His hair had grown and there was stubble on his chin. He unfolded his time sheet and laid it on the other time sheets, which he kept pressed like flowers in the notebook he had used for martial arts.
He straightened up and listened: There was someone knocking on their door. He went out barefoot through the cold-floored living room, where his mother was sitting in her wheelchair, reading an article on the laptop in her reading glasses.
He opened the door—and found himself looking at Joan.
She had arrived at their moment of greatest jeopardy. It didn’t seem real. Corey hadn’t seen her since his elementary school days. She looked great.
“I do karate,” she said. She was wearing white jeans and a bomber jacket. They hugged. She said, “I’m afraid to come inside. I don’t know if your mom wants to see me.”
“Of course she does. Mom, look who’s here!”
Joan put her arms around Gloria, who started crying.
It was only at this point, by overhearing the two women talking, that Corey learned his mother had called Joan.
“Could I use your bathroom?”
She came back with her eyes red but dry. Corey asked if he could get her something. She looked in their freezer to see if they had any vodka. When they were in private, she hugged Corey with her whole body pressed against him, which confused him because he liked it.
Gloria didn’t want Joan to stay, but Corey said they needed help—he needed help. When he asked if Joan would stay, she said, “Sure,” just like that.
She’d just gotten kicked out of another house—and another relationship (don’t ask)—but that wasn’t why she was here. “I’ve got a lot of love in my heart for your mother. It breaks my heart to see her in there. She was always my good girl, my blondie. I would’ve thought with all the grievous things I’ve done, the risks I’ve taken, that it would be me like that, dying young.”
Corey made up the futon, but Joan spent the entire night in Gloria’s bedroom, talking. In the morning, Corey got up and made coffee for everyone. He hung up the mandala once again where it belonged.
Joan’s return ushered in a period of new hope. There was love and humor, as there hadn’t been with Leonard. Joan was a joker. She brought relief. She was the ally they’d always needed—good and loyal.
She had a job with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, vacuuming out the vehicles for the next customer. She went to her job in the city and slept with them at night. Corey temped for Labor Ready. They split the groceries and set the house up so Gloria could survive alone, each day leaving her a prepared meal that she could open by herself. Corey wrapped tape around the handle of a fork like a prison shiv so she could hold it.
With two women in the house, Corey sensed vortexes of emotion he didn’t understand. Hidden turbines spin like a stack of washing machines under every wave traveling across the ocean to the shore: Thus were the currents of love between Gloria and Joan. Sometimes, Corey was sure he felt rancor in the air, only to see them talking like old friends. He was often confused.
By the same token, when Joan first arrived, Corey felt a strong attraction to her—a burst of lust, programmed into him in early childhood—and he was sure it was reciprocated; he could hardly sleep the first night she spent in the house, and he imagined a hundred times running into her coming out of the shower. But after she had lived with them a few days, he noticed a reserved and businesslike tone in her voice when she spoke to him and a brusqueness that warned him to not even fantasize about her, that to do so would be as unthinkable and perverse as it would be to proposition his own mother, and in such moments he felt appalled that he had ever lusted after her and mortally afraid of being found out.
One day, Joan asked him what his mother thought of acupuncture. Corey said it was a scam. “Oh yeah,” Joan said, “I get that. Send nine-ninety-five. I’d be the type to give away my life savings. But, on the other hand, what if—ya know? Isn’t that how the Egyptians healed wounds, with mold?”
Weren’t there things they only knew about in China? People scammed, but where there was smoke there was also fire, and under every little come-up was a secret that even the scammers themselves were unaware of because all they saw was twenty dollars. It took the wise bloods, the stubborn old women whose periods had stopped, to restore the wisdom. Had he ever thought of that?
Corey didn’t know.
“You’re like, ‘What’s she talking about?’ It’s ’cause you’re a guy.”
For Corey, the month passed in a state of engagement, as things do when they are new.
Gloria sat propped up in bed with pillows. Joan was sitting with her in the dusk. Through the window blinds, a small orange sun slipped below the rim of the world. The land was black, the sky was purple. The room was gray, as if filled with seawater. The women were alone. Both had been crying off and on. Joan was wearing jeans, which were tight on her. She sat with her knees bent, her thick brown arms on her knees, and the meaty part of her pudenda outlined in tight denim. She rubbed her wet eyes and nose and shook her coarse mop of black hair. Her breasts were still full; she needed a bra. Next to her, Gloria lay sallow and deflated, her blonde hair gone gray. Her skull was childlike and small. Her narrow, Northern European nose and sharp cheekbones and hard triangular jaw showed clearly under her vanishing flesh. Her thin hands lay on her belly like a Knight Templar in a coffin. Unconsciously gesturing, she raised them with effort, like a ninety-year-old, and let them settle again. Usually she was matter-of-fact and war-weary from her disease, but when a wave of grief hit her, her face contorted and her eyes squeezed shut as if she were about to cough up chunks of her heart. Then the wave passed. She was settling now. Her eyes were closed. She had turned, as much as her paralyzed body was able, into Joan, who gathered her in. Now Joan sat with Gloria’s head in her lap, cradling her in the position of the Pietà. Lines of tears were drying on Gloria’s yellowed cheekbones. Her eyes were closed and her face was bizarrely calm as if she had taken morphine.
“I feel like this is all a great comeuppance.”
“Sshh. Hey.”
“Thank you for holding me, Joan.”
“He’s worse than a bum. He’s a creep. You’re better off without him.”
“I know that’s how Corey feels as well.”
“There’s no excuse. I’ve seen a lot of men who’ve had harder lives who haven’t turned out like that. I know this one kid from the projects. He has no teeth, because they don’t get good medical care. But he’s the nicest kid. And to top it off, he’s got MS. He never had any breaks. He’s from Southie. So you’re gonna tell me people from East Boston have such a harder life?”
“He hasn’t done anything with himself, and neither have I.”
“Yeah, you have.”
“He could have done more.”
“Poor him.”
“Don’t worry, I’m done worrying about his tragedy. I’ve got my own grief.”
“You know, I never thought he was such a genius. I just think he has an ego.”
“The ego is the great enemy. I wish I could let go of my fear.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You’re an angel for being here.”
“No, I’m not. More like a devil.”
“I’m sorry for hurting you.”
“No, Gloria, don’t. Hey, blondie. Hey. I’d been dumped before.”
“Joan, I’m such a fool.”
“Your son’s probably worried I’m gonna dyke out with you.”
The two of them laughed and blew their noses.
“I’m not gonna say it didn’t hurt. For years, I looked for somebody to replace you, Gloria my darling.”
“Oh, Joan.”
“One time, I was dating this dude, and the whole time I was scheming on his ex-girlfriend.”
“Sounds like trouble.”
“It was. He got jealous and threatened her with a gun. So I said, ‘If you’re gonna be a fuckin’ animal, I’m gonna go.’ So I said sayonara and got the fuck out of there. And I was imagining if I was like a super-cool dude in the movies, I’d be like, ‘Hey, there’s room in my car,’ and she’d jump in with me. But my car had all my shit in it and there wasn’t room for anyone else, so I never got to say that. So I left, and I drove away crying, because I was imagining them having super-hot sex when I was gone. I’m crying and turned on and jealous. And I got so mad I thought about driving back there.”
“Only you, Joanie.”
“I know, right?”
Two days before his court date, when he got home from Target, Corey found out his father had come to the house while he was at work. Gloria had told Leonard to stay out, he had tried to come in anyway, and Joan had blocked him at the door.
“He was surprised as hell to see me,” Joan said. “He was all like, ‘I should have known.’ I’m like, ‘Known what? That Gloria’s got friends besides a creep like you?’ Then he gets all crafty: ‘Joan, you know me from the old days. Let’s handle this like two adults’—blazzy, blazzy, blah. I’m like, ‘If you know me, then you know I’ll never let you in.’ When I wouldn’t let him in, he was fuckin’ ripshit. What’d you take from him anyway?”
“His pots and pans and knives. I threw them in the marsh.”
“Whatever it was, he wants it back pretty bad. You sure it wasn’t a diamond?”
“No! I wouldn’t steal from him.”
“I wouldn’t care if you pawned it down the block.”
“I don’t want anything of his. If he had a diamond, I wouldn’t take it. All I wanted was a little justice for him throwing my mother on the floor. I tore up his uniforms. His handcuffs, his cop-stick-thing, his little cop bag—I threw all that shit out, plus his skillet, his fancy cooking knives. And I busted his car window and his glasses.”
Joan remarked that this sounded like quite a lot of property.
There were different penalties under the law for property crimes, based on the value of the things involved.
“I won’t be facing a felony, will I?”
“Probably not. I’m sure they’d let you plead it down.”
On the morning of January 27, Corey reported to the Francis X. Bellotti courthouse. A handful of people were milling around the front steps. They were about the same people who hung around the T. An armed officer opened the door and told them to form a line. The line moved inside slowly, through a metal detector. They all went into the same courtroom.
The judge arrived, a rigidly decent woman in her fifties with glasses and a Boston accent, and the court began its day’s work. Corey showed his desk appearance ticket to a clerk, who told him to wait for his attorney.
Almost that same second, a man in a tan suit came in, looked around and asked, “Are you Corey Goltz? I’m Shay. I’m your defender.” He wore a red tie, his top button was undone, he had a sharp Adam’s apple, and he was carrying a briefcase. All of his curly sandy hair grew on the top of his head, as if his head were a flowerpot and his hair was the plant life coming out the top.
As Corey would discover, Shay was a hardworking, cocky but nice young jock who, over the course of his association with him, would mention going to the gym in every conversation they had; he was either going to or coming from—or regretting having missed—the gym that day. His sports had been basketball, baseball and hockey. For Corey, he would attain the same status as an Eddie. He was extremely diligent. Eventually, he would visit Corey’s home and become a true ally after meeting Gloria and seeing her condition. He would try to file a counterclaim against Leonard for domestic abuse.
Today, Corey’s name was called within minutes of Shay’s arrival. They went to the front of the courtroom. Corey stood next to his new attorney. The judge wanted time to consider the case. They agreed on a date with the prosecutor, and Shay led the way out. He walked fast, hauling his briefcase, one shoulder before the other, as if he were lugging a bag of hockey equipment to the rink.
Outside on the steps, Corey asked where he’d gone to college.
“I went to Suffolk.”
“Is law school hard?”
“Pretty hard. I didn’t sleep for two months.” Shay had worked his way through school, at the paint department at Lowe’s and tending bar in the city near the Wang Center.
“I hear bartenders do well with girls.”
“There’s some truth to that. Some girls do like a bartender,” the lawyer said. “So, the judge just continued the case. That means you’re going to be back here on the eighth…”
“You’re not that much older than me,” Corey interrupted.
“Ten years.”
“It just seems like you got a really good start in life.”
“Not that good. My family lost our house when I was ten. I wanted to play hockey, but I had to work. We didn’t have groceries until me and my brothers started buying them. It sucked.”
“Where are you from?”
“Dorchester.”
“We used to live on Washington Street. Was there a lot of shady shit?”
“My best friend robbed a liquor store.”
“But you got out of there. You showed a lot of discipline.”
“When things are tough, you confront them. Maybe it’s where I’m from, but I’ve always been that way.”
“I don’t want to be in this situation, here in court. I never want you to have to see me again—professionally—as much as I like you! I want to just get to work and make something of myself.”
“You’re all right, Corey. I’ll tell that to the DA. This is what we’re telling them: This was a first offense, you’ve learned your lesson, and you need to be at home taking care of your mom.”
“But it’s true!” Corey insisted. “We don’t have to make it up.”
Shay was just waiting for him to finish talking. He said, “See you later, buddy.” He stuck out his hand at Corey and Corey shook it. He went home.
At home, he thought of the courtroom. It was airy and white-walled. The high windows let in the winter sky. You saw treetops, rooftops, snow. The furnishings—the judge’s podium, the corral, the wooden pews where people waited to be called, the massive tables for the prosecutor and the defendant with fat lathed columnar legs—were in good repair, made of blond wood. He had almost enjoyed court, the atmosphere of civilization—tradition, common sense, the slight flavor of scholarship, of college in the background. He admired Shay.
After court, he drove to the academy. The sky above the highway looked like the Arctic Ocean seen from underneath by a diver looking for a gap in the ice. When he arrived, he found the parking lot full of trucks. Inside, the gym was hot. He unzipped his coat—his work coat, covered in dust, a nail hole in the sleeve. Training was in full swing: twenty students paired up on the mat, grappling silently, seized in suspended animation, I-push-you-pull, cancelling each other out, moving slowly with one limb, trying to solve a leverage puzzle. A focus of concentration like a library. The sound of breathing. Occasionally, a scramble would break out and two guys would roll around each other and wind up in a new position, one man now pinning the other. The bottom player’s stomach rising up and down in his rash guard, breathing, gathering strength. Hoping to defend, but in a worse position. The beginning of a slow relentless end, unless he escaped. They squeezed each other and sweat poured out of their black rash guards like sponges.
Eddie was going around from one set of trainees to the next, giving instruction. He saw Corey and didn’t speak to him. “Make sure you stay tight. Take away all the air,” he told one of his students, a burly, pockmarked guy with the bruised-looking eyes of a person of Mediterranean ancestry, who looked as if he had been jolted by an unforgettable vision of evil.
Corey waited till the end of class and went over to shake Eddie’s hand.
“You take a break?”
“I should have called. I’m sorry. I had some stuff going on.”
“You back now?”
“Not exactly. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Eddie didn’t give him a private audience. Corey found it hard to discuss his personal situation with others listening. He said he had “some legal shit.” Eddie didn’t look impressed.
“Thanks for understanding,” Corey said.
Eddie turned away in the middle of their final handshake to talk to someone else.
Corey hung around a few minutes longer watching the guys roll, then got back in his car and drove away.
“It’s over for me,” he told Joan when he was back in Quincy. “This is my fight now—” looking at Gloria in her wheelchair.
“Hanging up your guns.”
“There’s no time for it. You can’t do it halfway. If you’re not training every day and you go in there and meet somebody who is, something bad is going to happen.”
“I guess that’s how it is for you. For me, it was different. I didn’t have a cage. You couldn’t tell when it was gonna jump off. I had to be ready all the time.”
“You can’t be your best like that.”
“No, you can’t. I fought a girl when I had the flu. Congestion. I couldn’t breathe.”
“She jump you?”
“She called me out. I said, ‘Bitch, I ain’t afraid a you!’ I was scared out my damn mind. She was big.”
“What was she mad about?”
“Her boyfriend was talking to me. She called me a chink. I said, ‘Bitch, I’m gonna—a-chew!’ I sneezed my ass off. I lost. But I gave her a bloody nose. If I get in a fight, I always try to make ’em bleed.”
In the mornings, he got up at four to go to a new assignment, in South Boston—on the harbor. He set up his mother’s coffee, Robitussin, L-Threonine, orange juice and protein. It would precipitate and be clumped on the surface of the juice by the time she drank it. He put it in the fridge, turned off the kitchen light, took his tool belt, sandwich, a book to read on his break, and left. Through the wall of his mother’s bedroom, he heard the thump of Joan’s heel in the tub as she was showering. He hurried to the hatchback and drove into the city. Soon, before he was fully awake—and before the sun was up—he was standing in a bare white room that smelled like plaster, under a blazing fluorescent light. A supervisor was telling him to take a portable drill and install a mirror in the restroom down the hall of what was to be an office.
In the afternoons, he enjoyed the great reward of construction work: the early liberation that goes with the early start—and he drove home with his time sheet signed and saw his mother. The now-empty glass, rimed by a silt of protein, waited on her wheelchair’s tray top. He set it in the kitchen sink. She was listening to NPR on her laptop, wearing a loose South Asian dress.
On Super Bowl Sunday, he saw Molly at the Half Door. She had a sort-of boyfriend with her, another large individual like her shot-putter from the year before. Corey watched the big game with them. The Patriots won. He told her about his fight. She knew that he had quit school and was working. When he headed home, a homeless drunk guy camping out in the Bank of America ATM across from Acapulcos raised his hand from the floor and gave him the thumb’s-up.