THE FORTY-SEVENTH DAY . . .
(Tuesday, July 28, morning)
CÉCE:
I’m down in the
basement, looking at the bed. I spark a cigarette I bought loose
off some dude in the street. First puff, I throw up. I can’t even
smoke right.
Anthony called while
we were at work last night. He sounds happy on the machine, sort
of. When I replay the message, I hear he’s faking.
I don’t want him to
know about Mack.
(The next morning, Wednesday, July 29, the forty-eighth
day . . .)
I make myself as
pretty as I can be: not very. How somebody as beautiful as him ever
went out with me . . . I burn my fingers on the curling iron. The
last time I used it was right after I saw The
Outsiders for the first time, and I tried to make myself
look exactly like Cherry Valance, two and a half hours frying my
hair.
I raid Carmella’s
messy makeup cabinet. All this guck on my face, and still you can
see the bags under my eyes. Next I borrow a pair of Ma’s heels.
They’re too big, so I put bunched toilet paper in the
toes.
“Are you sure you
want to do this?” Ma says. Pink eyes, totally hungover, forty
looking sixty.
“Yep.”
“Then will you at
least let me come with you?”
“Nope.”
“At least let Vic
drive you. You said you would.”
“I said I’d think
about it.” I leave.
Two trains and a city
bus later, I’m at the gate with a bunch of women. They all smoke.
None smile. We avoid each other’s eyes. We’re waiting for the
shuttle to take us over the long skinny bridge to the island. Half
an hour later, it comes.
The bus chugs over to
Visitor Intake. “You’ll have to leave that stickpin in the
locker.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
Four hours after I
left the house, I’m in the waiting area. After another hour an
older corrections officer says, “Macario Morse can’t see you
today.”
“He can’t see me, or
he says he can’t see me?”
“Yes.”
“Which?”
“Miss—”
“I’ll tell you what,
sir. You go tell that sonuvabitch I’m not leaving until he gets his
ass down to see me.”
Folks
stare.
This guard has seen
it all and often. He pats my hand.
“Please,” I say. “I
have to see him.”
The guard speaks
softly into the phone. “Thanks.” He hangs up. “They’re gonna track
him down for you.”
“They don’t know
where he is?”
“They’ll find him,”
the guard says. “Where can he go, right?”
“Oh.
Right.”
The guard pours me a
cup of his thermos coffee. I hate coffee because it gives me a
headache. I drink it anyway. All the other women are there with
their men. They’re henpecking them. They’re loud. I swear I’m never
going to lose it like this with Mack. The last thing he needs is
for me to flip out on him. A baby cries.
This isn’t like the
movies, with the glass partitions and the old phone handsets. This
is an open room. Everybody sits around wobbly tables spaced far
apart, under lights that are too bright. Lots of guards in here.
They see everything, but they allow a good amount of contact
between visitors and prisoners. They patted us down and scanned us
with metal detector wands before they let us in. I remember
...
Mack and me at the shore with Boo, sunset. We’re watching
this old couple hunt the sand for gold, waving their metal detector
wands back and forth, back and forth . . .
I’m the only one
without somebody to visit. The guard lets me wait in his
office.
“Need a medic,” a
young guard calls to the guard in the office. The young guard has a
woman in cuffs. Her mouth is bleeding.
One woman says to
another, “I saw it. She kissed a razor blade into his
mouth.”
The girl kicks as
they drag her out. She’s pregnant. Her sweat suit is dirty. I’m
self-conscious about what I’m wearing now. Bright pink blouse and
pressed jeans I paid too much for. Ma’s shoes, fake leather but
looking fancy.
Dusty paper Christmas
decorations from last year or maybe years before spin over the loud
but feeble air conditioner. The heat makes me drowsy. I close my
eyes to escape back to our day at the amusement park. We’re . .
.
. . . on line for the Freefall, in the next-up box.
Cloudless sky, furious wind. The rain stopped fifteen minutes ago,
and the park is still pretty empty. We’re going to get our own car,
just him and me.
“You, me, a bunch of dogs,” he says. “In the country. A
little house. Nothing fancy but real clean. Quiet. No computer or
phones. Just us.”
“Perfect,” I say, “except we need a
TV.”
“The test. The one for the gifts and talents. You’re gonna
hit it out of the park.”
“We’ll see.”
“Now Céce, c’mon. What happens after that? You have to
move away?”
“No. I’d go to a different school, but here, in the city.
I’m not going anywhere.”
“But after that, you’re going to
college.”
“Maybe.”
“You better.”
“If I do, I’ll stay close to home and
day-hop.”
He looks away. “I just don’t want to embarrass you, you
know?” “Stop saying that.”
“I don’t want to hold you back,” he says. “You can have
anybody you want.”
“And I have you.”
The car comes. The padded safety bars creak as we pull
them down. We’re sitting there in the dock, waiting. The ride
attendant is on the phone. Something’s wrong. I’m starting to
squirm. Mack squeezes my hand, and I feel
better.
“They made me take this test,” he says. “A reading thing
on the computer. When one word was on the screen, I could figure it
out. But when you put two words next to each other, they would
shimmer.”
“Shimmer? Like—”
“They melt into each other. If I blink, they come together
again for a second, but then they start to shimmer all over again,
and I get a headache.”
“Okay, so you’re dyslexic. A lot of—”
“It’s not dyc-dyslexia. Doctor called it an unquafilied.
Wait. Can barely say it. Un, qualified. Neuro, logical. Processing
disorder. If somebody reads to me, I get the gist okay. And if I
dictate, I can make my way to communicate writing-wise, but who’s
ever gonna take the time to write down what I
say?”
“I will.”
He shakes no. “My handwriting is scratch. I type a word a
minute, it comes out wrong. Vic gives me a takeout, I say, ‘I don’t
need a ticket, just shout out the address,’ right? Every time I
apply for a job, I have to take the application home and get my old
man to fill it in. Yeah, I get by, but getting by don’t make
me—doesn’t make me a solid prospect for somebody like you. They
made me take the IQ again too, back when I was locked up. They had
to read it to me, modified this version they use for the blind, and
I had to talk it back. I came out room temperature on an August
afternoon.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“That’s how my counselor explained it. One hundred IQ.
Flat average, fifty percent on the nose.”
“You’re so not average. You’re
gifted.”
“Look, Céce, it’s like the dude who gave me the test said:
I have got to figure out how to build the little house that is Mack
Morse with the toolbox God gave me. I’d do better if I kept things
simple. Be a small farmer, grow one thing, tomatoes, sell ’em at street markets. That’s why I
get along better with dogs than people. Smartest dog is as smart as
a three-year-old kid. After three, kids start getting mean
anyway.”
The car jerks upward. The chain pulling us up
cli-cli-clicks. I’m getting
dizzy.
“They made me take Ritalin,” he yells over the clicking
noise, “but it freaked me out. I wasn’t me anymore, and I wasn’t
someone better, so I quit it. I’m never gonna get better, okay?
This is the way I’ll be for good.”
“Okay,” I yell back, over the
clicking.
“Okay what?”
“I’m totally okay with this, with us, the way we’ll be.
The way we are together.”
He shakes his head, looks over the rail. We’re really high
now, halfway up the tower. “I’m having a hard time figuring out
where I fit in is all,” he says.
“You fit in with me.”
He double-squeezes my hand—I love when he does that. “I’m
just saying, comes the time when you find somebody else, I don’t
want you to feel bad.”
“Now I’m feeling bad. I’m getting pissed. I don’t like you
thinking about yourself this way. Hey? I’ll never leave
you.”
The car stops. We’re at the top of the tower now. We’re
both breathing really fast. He’s looking at me, and he isn’t
turning away. “Just don’t tell anybody about it, all right? My
processing thing. Please?”
“This is forever, you and me. I promise.” Somebody fires a
gun next to my ear, and we’re dropping—
—dropping down into a sandbag trench. “I promise, Céce,”
Anthony says. “I promise I won’t die.” He reloads his rifle and
fires at a satellite.
Boo runs from me when I say “Stay.”
My grandfather comes home from his night shift.
Seventythree, and he still has to work. He drives a forklift. He
makes us breakfast and sings folksongs to us. He sings in the
shower too, when he isn’t honking to blow the forklift soot from
his nose. He dies there while we take turns yelling at him through
the door to stop using all the hot water.
Vic is all alone in his little apartment over the
restaurant, doing the crossword.
I’m taking the gifted and talented test. Three minutes
before time is up, I’m not even halfway into the first
section.
My mother sips beer at the kitchen table, staring into
nothingness.
Marcy cruises Facebook in a daze.
Mack and me are up on the roof, inside the hutch. We’re
lying back on his sleeping bag, looking through the hatchway for
satellites. The sun rises, peaks, falls. I want him to kiss me, to
crush me, but he won’t even look at me. I ask him if he wants me to
give him a blow job, and he rolls away. I’m alone now. The shadows
swell across the hutch walls like fastgrowing
bruises.
The shadows are long
on the visiting room floor. The room is empty. “Miss?” I’m
sweating. I’m looking at the wall clock. I’m seeing the time.
Still, I ask, “How long was I asleep?”
“You have to leave
now. The hours are over. You have to get that last bus. Call ahead
next time, okay? Give him some time to get ready.”
“Ready for
what?”
“Call first. You’ll
see.”
I hurry from the
parking lot, out onto the avenue. The bus is anywhere but here. The
cabs are gone with the visiting hours. So be it. I start walking.
Ka-klick ka-klick, my spikes—Ma’s—nail
the pavement. I’m tripping all over myself in these cheap heels.
The toilet paper jammed into the toes is flat now, and you can see
the shoes are two sizes too big. I look like an idiot, and I am.
I’m a fool. Weeds creep tall through fractured sidewalks. No one
plays ball or jumps rope or rides a bicycle or even strolls. The
streets are barren up here, except for a stray dog that reminds me
less of Boo and more of the one that bit me. It’s tracking me. I
cut through an industrial park where sad-eyed men whistle at me
from their tractor-trailers and double-flash their high
beams.
(Wednesday, July 29, afternoon)
MACK:
I almost go down to
see her. Twice. To tell her to go away. To be mean to her. To make
her hate me.
I can’t.
I can’t do anything
but hunker in my cot and remember . . .
. . . the Freefall.
We kiss just as we start to drop. She squeezes my hand so
hard she’s going to break bones. It hurts something beautiful.
She’s screaming and laughing, her eyes shut hard. But I can’t close
my eyes to blink even. I can’t stop looking at her like this. Her
hair flying, coppery bands. It was dark chestnut when I met her
back in June, but it’s lightened the littlest bit in all the sun
we’ve been having. I’m turned inside out after telling her my
secret. But she’ll never tell.
The Freefall whooshes to an almost stop. We slow sink the
rest of the way, maybe another twenty feet. She puts her hands
inside my shirt and draws little circles into my ribs with her
fingertips. I can’t stop looking at this beautiful girl. Her mom
made us wear sunblock, and it smells like
oranges.
We float toward where we have to get off the ride. The sun
flickers between the stanchions. When she gets out of the car, the
sun is low on her, and her shadow is long. Just one of those days,
you’re lucky if you get five of them in your life: middle of July
but low 70s, feels cooler with the north wind being so dry. Way up
there an airplane glints. She takes my hand, and we stitch fingers
and she kisses me . . .
The kid in the next
cot pukes on himself. The stink is worse in the heat. Has to be a
hundred ten in here. I’m greasy. I wake humped up and hard and to
the sound of the fellas laughing at me. Somebody throws a cup of
piss at me and runs off, and that just makes me miss her so
bad.
There’s a million
reasons I love her, but they all come down to one: She was good,
and she let me be around her, and when I was with her, I was good
too.
Come chow time, I’m
eating by myself at a table not too far from the guards. That kid
who was falling out of his chair, he comes up to me. “Anybody
sitting here?”
“You see anybody
sitting there?” I push my grub around with my spoon. You better
turn it in after chow or you get sent to solitary. I wouldn’t mind.
It would be quiet.
Dude sits. “Hot out.”
He’s got a bruise at his eye and a split lip.
“Fell down,
huh?”
“Don’t hurt
much.”
“I bet.” I almost ask
him what he did to land here, but then I don’t want to know. This
is dumb, but in my mind I have it that he’s the good brother of
that Bible story.
“Name’s
Boston.”
“Mack.”
We eat for a good
while, just spoons clinking on our plates, and then I say, “Why
they call you Boston? On account you hate the Yankees,
right?”
“I’m from
Boston.”
I poke at my peas.
“Boston a nice city?”
“Haven’t been in a
while. Moved when I was a kid. But yeah, it was nice.”
“I never been to
Vermont.”
“Boston is in
Massachusetts.”
“Like I
said.”
“Huh?”
“Ain’t Massachusetts
part of Vermont?” Back to saying ain’t.
No reason to keep trying to better the way I talk now.
“Massachusetts is
part of Massachusetts,” he says.
“You
sure?”
“Sorry.”
I know I’m right, but
I let it go. No need to embarrass the poor kid. “Nothing to be
sorry about.”
After a while he
says, “They got good pizza in Boston. They put pineapple on it over
there.”
“I’m still eating
here. You trying to make me sick?”
“You got to try it.
Serious. Off the hook.”
“That’s like putting
apples on a pizza.”
“I don’t think I
would like that,” he says.
“That’s what I’m
saying.”
That short guard with
the mustache, he’s watching me again. I make slit eyes at him, and
this time he doesn’t look away. He nods once, like hey, and now I
look away.
They let us outside
the tent for an hour to get the breeze that’s not here. Some play
hoop in the half-light of the dome’s shadow. I follow the jets into
the airport and try not to think about it all. Her. Boo. Larry. I’m
getting less mad at him each day that slows by, and more mad at me.
He must’ve had the sadness in him too, to do what he did. Where
does that come from, what we did?
Two kids shuffle
past, big one in front, little in back to hold up big’s jeans,
because we aren’t allowed to wear belts. They’re out of the glare
now, the two, and I see the little kid in back is Boston. The big
boy is Blue. I angle over. “You ain’t got to hold up his pants,” I
say.
“Yeah he do,” Blue
says.
I pull Boston away.
His hand leaves Blue’s pants, and they fall. Everybody laughs all
screechy. Except for Boston and Blue. Except for me.
The
hissing.
Blue’s boys circle up
on me and Boston. This other dude pinches Boston’s cheek. “Look at
that peach fuzz on him. Mold on fruit. Head looks like left-back
melon.”
“Hands behind your
backs,” comes deep and easy from behind me. The mustached guard
points one index finger at Blue, the other at me. “Put ten feet
between you.”
Blue nods in my
direction. “Punk made me drop my pants.”
“You were playing
slave master,” guard says. He points that Blue and his posse should
peel off left.
Boston breathes like
he’s got the asthma. I nudge him and we split to the
right.
“Hold up,” guard
says. Then, to Boston: “You all right?” Boston chews his
lips.
I catch myself
imitating his posture, slumped shoulders, wilted spine. I been him,
hitched up onto some bruiser’s pants and towed around like all
God’s lameness.
“Son, you don’t have
to hold up anybody’s pants but your own,” guard says. “Don’t do it
anymore. I’ll put in a word with the tent guards, make sure you’re
all right. Go wait by the desk, watch TV with the nice lady guard
there. I’ll be in shortly. Go on inside now. It’ll be all
right.”
Boston and me head
for the right-side entrance till I hear, “You, wait.” Good dog training voice on him, this
guard.
“What is your
interest in that boy?”
“I got no interest in
him,” I say.
“You’re watching out
for him. I see you.”
“That’s a
crime?”
“Hey, look me in the
eye. Now, why are you looking after that kid?”
I shrug. “Guess he
needs looking after.”
The guard nods. He
frowns, squints. “You know what’s going to happen to you if you
keep playing defender? You let me worry about Boston there. No harm
will come to him while I’m around.”
“And when you
ain’t?”
Guard nods. “Look,
watch out for yourself. No need to go looking for
trouble.”
“Not looking for
anything at all.”
“You’re looking to
get yourself a buck-fifty or worse if you keep messing with that
crew,” guard says. “For your information, a buck-fifty
is—”
“A hundrit fifty
stitch cut or in other words, half a smiley.” Hundrit. Sound like my old man. “Look, man, this ain’t
my first bid, all right? I ain’t afraid of nobody.”
“You should be. You
know who your biggest enemy is? You.” He jerks his chin like I
should move along now, and I do.
With school out, the
tent TVs run all day into night, different channels and loud. I
head to chapel. Guard escorts me down the long hall, past the men’s
jail. Dark green jumpers, they wear. Violent offenders. Those boys
got no problem tuning you up. I’ll be with them soon, when I turn
eighteen. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then.
Nice and quiet in the
chapel. You can sleep pretty good for an hour or so without anybody
messing with you. Regular old room with one-piece chairs and a
sagging shelf on the front wall where they hang a cross or don’t,
depending on which religion is using the room. “God comes to people
in different ways,” the chapel trusty says with a
smile.
“Yeah huh? Sometimes
he don’t come at all.”
(Two days later, Friday, July 31, morning of the fiftieth
day . . . )
The third time I go
to chapel, Boston tags along. “Mind?”
“If you got to pray,
you got to pray,” I say.
He does, boy. Knows
all the prayers by heart. Holy roller. Sings fine too.
“You got a gift
there,” I say.
“We all
do.”
“Sure,” I
say.
“When I’m singing, I
feel everything is right.”
“I used to forget all
the bad stuff when I was with my dogs sometimes. Training them. I
don’t know why.”
“You don’t need to
know why,” he says. “You just got to know training dogs is your
gift.”
“I never went to
school for it or anything.”
“Don’t matter. Just
trying to do it. That’s all that matters.”
“Boston, man? You’re
a little crazy.”
“You know that song
‘Amazing Grace’?”
“My moms told me a
slave trader wrote that one.”
“Nah, serious?” he
says. “I guess it don’t matter anyhow.”
“Sure it
matters.”
“Did he quit trading
and ask God’s forgiveness before he died? Because that’s what the
song is about. You can do bad stuff, but if you’re sorry, you’re
square with God.”
“Nah, nah, man. You
can’t take back the bad stuff just because you don’t want to go to
hell.”
“You can’t take it
back, and you still owe your debt to folks you wronged, and you pay
it with a full heart, but being sorry for it helps you pay back
that debt. I learned that in Bible study.”
“I’m not one for
churching music anyhow,” I say.
“I’m-a teach it to
you.”
“Nah, it’s all
right.”
But he’s already into
the singing of it. Long, slow notes.
That night, after
lights-out, I play the song in my mind to block out the snickering
from the dudes around me, and I dream of Céce and Boo . .
.
We’re at the west side shore with Boo at sunset. An old
man and old lady are scanning the low-tide silt with their electric
wands. “They’re always here,” I say.
“That’s us in sixty years,” she says.
“Fine by me.” I scratch Boo’s neck, and she buries her
head under my arm.
(The next afternoon, Saturday, August 1, the fifty-first
day . . .)
I’m just getting to
know him, and Boston gets released, of course. He gives me a paper
scrap with his number on it. “That’s my moms’s house. For when you
get out. You can come live with us. She’s a little mean, but she
cooks pretty good.”
“I’m not getting out
anytime soon, man.”
“I guess I knew
that,” he says.
He nods, I nod.
“Well, good luck,” I say.
“Yo Mack,” Boston
says. “Thanks.”
“You better get along
now. That nosy guard’s waving you to the desk.”
“Call me sometime,”
he says. “I would like to know you’re doing all
right.”
“You don’t need to
worry about me, tell you what.”
“Call me just the
same,” he says.
“You
bet.”
We both know I’ll
never call.
Blue and his pals
catcall as Boston goes, and then they turn to me like they haven’t
eaten in a week and I’m the last chicken wing in the
bucket.
The guard who always
watches me is off tonight. I go to the preacher’s sermon. As she
leaves, I say, “Ma’am, if you happen to have an extra Bible on you,
I would be grateful.”
“Child, take mine,”
she says.
I hold it close to my
heart, and as I turn I slip the little hardback book into my jeans
where they bag.
(The next morning, Sunday, August 2, the fifty-second day
. . .)
At breakfast I ask
for extra pats of butter.
“How many, baby?”
says the woman who doles the food.
“Many as you can
spare, ma’am. You all bake the most delicious rolls. Man can
survive on bread alone, if it’s yours.”
“You’re too cute for
your own good.” She loads me up.
I’m eating. Blue and
his gang sit at my table, real tight on me, shoulder to shoulder.
Bad shine working their eyes, open too wide. “Need somebody to hold
up my pants,” Blue says.
I swing not at him
but his boy. I slash across the inside of the elbow, where the
blood is rich. Last night I rubbed the Bible cover on the cement
floor and ground it down to a knife edge.
For just a second,
Blue is stunned at the sight of so much blood, but a second is all
I need. I slam his head onto the edge of the table. It makes a
bock sound. I slam it down again, but
by now I only hear the hissing.
The others are trying
to snatch me, but my arms are slick with butter. They can’t stop
me. I can’t stop me.
The guards are on me
with the stun shield. I’m swallowing a wasp hive. A guard flattens
me. “You are one greasy child.”
A bright blink of
daylight whitens everything out. I’m losing myself even, in the
swirl of screaming guards, howling kids, flying food, trays
pounding tables, everything dimming, getting far, far
away.
Maybe Céce’s right.
Maybe I am smart after all. Smart about stuff like surviving
anyway, for whatever that’s worth. I’m going to solitary for sure
now, and I’ll be safe for a while. I wonder what the intake folks
did with that peace medal Tony gave me.
(Sunday, August 2, night)
CÉCE:
The Too is dead in
August. Vic gives us the night off. Ma braids, unbraids, and
rebraids my hair. We’re both not watching whatever’s on TV. She’s
regular Bud tonight, I’m hanging with my friend Sara Lee, I forget
how many slices, but I had to unbutton my shorts. I’m washing it
down with Slim-Fast. I have about a billion cans left over, because
I was all about getting myself a bangin’ new body for my supposed
boyfriend.
The test is in a few
days. I have my study guide in my lap. I’m not looking at it. I’m
not looking at anything really. I say what I’ve been thinking every
few minutes since he went away: “I don’t get it. What did I
do?”
Ma says what she’s
been saying: nothing. She pretends she isn’t about to cry. She
pretends to smile. The woman refuses to acknowledge the reality
that is perfectly obvious to me and everybody else I
know:
Everything.
Fucking.
Sucks.
“Bet he calls in the
next five minutes.” She’s talking about Anthony. Sunday is our one
shot at contact with him. Sometimes his sergeant gives them call
time, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s 9:48 p.m. Lights-out for him is
10:00 p.m. He still doesn’t know about Mack. I should write him
about it. No, I shouldn’t. Writing them takes longer than speaking
them, these words I don’t want to hear myself say: Mack’s gone. He
brutally ended the life of another human being. Yes, there were
extenuating circumstances, but Mack didn’t hit him just once. He
kept clubbing the victim after he was dead, according to all
accounts.
I’m trying to
understand how he could do this, but I can’t. I say that I would
have clawed Larry blind, but I wouldn’t have. If I was the one who
found Boo, I would have just fainted. Am I that much of a
coward?
I think so. I know
myself. Yes, I’m that much of a coward.
We’re at the
extremes, Mack and I. I’m forever running from conflict and he’s
trapped in it. He’d warned me he could wreck someone, but I never
could have pictured this. How can someone so destructive be so
creative, the way he was with those dogs, with my Boo? That’s the
real Mack. That’s the one I still can’t live without. I have to ask
him what happened. I have to know what he was thinking. To help him
not think that way anymore. I have to talk with him.
Carmella rubs her
temples as she stares at the phone. “Working my ESP,” she says.
“The phone’s gonna ring right ... now.
No, okay, wait, right ... now.”
“Ma? The ESP? That’s
my thing. You’re supposed to play the
skeptic on that one. It’s the one time you’re actually negative
about something. Let’s not lose that.”
The war report comes
on.
“Change the channel,”
Ma says.
The TV reporter
interviews a friend of one of the dead soldiers, a local boy.
“Johnny was just cool, you know?” the
friend says. “He was, like, the nicest dude I
ever knew. He was just, I can’t believe he’s gone.” The
reporter interviews the dead soldier’s mother. She looks
beat-up.
“Change it,” Ma says.
“I’m begging.”
The woman on TV says
the last time she talked to her son was months ago when he sent her
a heart candy on Valentine’s Day.
“Céce Vaccuccia!” Ma
says.
“Can you not give me
a heart attack?”
“Change. The
flippin’. Channel.”
“Are you lame all of
a sudden? The remote’s in your lap.”
Her hands go to her
mouth, her eyes widen. She points to the TV.
Dog food
commercial.
I grab the remote and
kill the TV. Ma rubs my back. She’s bawling too, except she looks
pretty when she cries. “Let’s go to the shelter tomorrow,” she
says. “We’ll get one that looks just like her.”
“Never.” I shake her
off and head upstairs to study, but all I can think about is this:
Why, when I went again Friday to visit him, did he refuse to see
me?
I lie back on my bed,
slip my hand into my shorts, close my eyes and remember
...
No.
It just makes it
worse. This sense of absence, a fast-forming cave. I can’t believe
he told me he loved me. Looked me in the eye, said it over and
over. Worse, I can’t believe I never got the chance to say it
back.
We never knew each
other. Not really. Not deeply.
But we did. We
did.
“Hey,” Ma says. She
looks twice as drunk as she was ten minutes ago, holding on to the
door frame to keep herself on her feet.
“Carmella, could you
knock?”
“You gonna go visit
him again?”
“Should
I?”
She scratches her
head. “I don’t know. I mean, maybe he’s ready now.”
“Ready for
what?”
“I keep trying to . .
.” She’s falling asleep on her feet.
“Ma.”
“Trying to figure out
why he won’t see you. He’s ashamed? What else could it be? I mean,
he’s a good boy. He wouldn’t just, you know—”
“Fuck me then forget
me?”
She gulps. She fakes
that smile. “He would never do that to my baby.” She slides down
the door frame and dozes. “Just gonna rest here for a secuh . .
.”
I help her to
bed.
“Howya doin’,
babe?”
“Can’t remember ever
feeling more awesome, Ma.”
Heinous snoring.
Chain saw on a pipe. I take off her crappy worn-out waitress shoes
and study her ruined feet, ruined arches blown out after
twenty-five years of serving people. My feet will be exactly like
this when I’m her age.
I call Marcy, pour my
heart out. “Is that all I was to him, a
drill-and-ditch?”
“Céce, do you think my makeup makes my eyes look a little
too close together?”
“I don’t know what
happened. He was so cool, so nice, so compassionate.”
“Oh Cheech, you sweet,
slightly-chubby-but-only-in-thetotally-cutest-way fool. That’s how
they all act, in the
beginning.”
“Then how are we
supposed to know, you know, Marce? What should we be looking for in
a man?”
“I want somebody who’s exactly like me, but with a
penis.”
(The next afternoon, Monday, August 3, the fifty-third day
. . .)
He’s been coming
every day, the guy who used to sell drugs to Mack in the alley
behind the Too. He waits for Mack for a minute, and then he goes.
Today will be different. Today I’m waiting in the alley. The dude
sees me, holds up.
“Hey,” I
say.
He doesn’t say
anything. Close up, his smiley scars are thicker than I
thought.
“Dog Man’s locked
up,” I say.
He nods,
frowns.
“I’ll have whatever
he was having.” I’m holding out a ten. Of course, as soon as he
pulls a bag, I am so out of here. If I’m going to prison, it’s to
visit Mack. Except I’m probably not going to visit Mack
anymore.
The guy pulls a bag.
I step back, but he’s too quick with the hand slap. In half a
second, he’s got the ten and he’s on his way, leaving me with the
bag in my hand.
Cashews, no salt. The
airplane snack size the bodega down the street sells for a quarter.
I rip open the bag, and guess what’s in there.
Cashews.
I follow Cashew Man.
He walks fast. If he notices me, he doesn’t care I’m tailing him.
He jogs into the bodega, and a minute later he’s back out with a
plastic bag filled with what?
I follow him downhill
to the highway. He lives beneath the overpass in a refrigerator
box. He empties his bag.
Half a dozen cans of
cat food. He pulls the Purina tabs, and the cats come to him on a
run. Cashew Man pets the cats and laughs their names.
1. a. Mack Morse isn’t a liar.
2. b. Mack Morse told me he loves me.
3. c. Therefore, Mack Morse loves me.
(Monday, August 3, night)
MACK:
Solitary confinement
is eight long by five wide. I thought that would’ve been plenty.
Tiny toilet bowl, cold water sink the size of a tissue box, steel
shelf for a bed. Nothing to do in here but sit and think about how
stupid I am.
They have cameras. I
was just taking off my T-shirt because it was hot, but they took it
anyway. My socks and sneaker laces too. Put me in paper slippers.
Thin plastic mattress has mesh weaved into it so you can’t rip the
cover into strips.
If you do figure out
a noose, you kneel on the bed, loop one end around your neck, the
other around your feet.
Tighten the line
against your spine and knot it. Tuck your fists into your waistband
so you can’t pull them out in case you get scared and change your
mind—and you will, I figure. All that’s left is you pitch yourself
forward headfirst into that narrow slot of concrete between the bed
and the wall.
“Lights-out,” one
guard says to another. Dark so pure it’s either endless emptiness
or filled with every wicked thing. Panting on the back of my neck?
How many hours have passed? Or are we into days now?
In that darkness, a
flicker:
She goes tiptoe to hit me with a surprise kiss. Her hands
on my chest. She pulls back to look at me and smile. Her teeth
aren’t perfect, and that just makes them more perfect. Crooked with
a little space between the front two. Yeah.
(The next morning, Tuesday, August 4, the fifty-fourth day
. . .)
The lights come on.
They give me five minutes for my eyes to adjust.
The assistant warden
sits outside the cell. Ex-military for sure. Straight back. He
talks through the barred slot. “You’re going to kill somebody
someday.”
“I already killed
somebody.”
“Somebody else then,”
he says.
“Maybe I will,
then.”
“Big-time gangbanger,
huh? Gonna get the T-drop tat, big man?”
You ink it on the
outside corner of your eye, a teardrop, black Bic pen cooked with a
smuggled lighter. Means you killed a man. I don’t want any black
tears.
“What do I do with
you?” the AW says. “Look at me. You’re special.”
“Hell you talking
about?”
“Sergeant Washington
told me you looked after that boy.”
“He that short guard
with the thin mustache?”
“You see my problem
here, right?” AW says. “I can’t keep you in the tent and I can’t
keep you in isolation more than sixty days. After a sixty bid the
outside monitors file for you to be remanded to the tent, and you
have to go back once that happens. They think you need to
socialize.”
“’Magine
that.”
“Macario?”
“What, man?”
“I don’t know what to
do with you.”
“You ain’t got to do
nothing with me. Whatever happens, happens.”
The warden scratches
his goatee. “You get yourself right, you could be something
incredible. You could be useful. Hey, look at me when I talk to
you.”
“Warden, maybe you
ain’t heard, I’m about to bid two-five to life. I am done.”
“Son?” he says.
“Think about what we can do with you. I need ideas. I hate waste.”
He leaves, and I’m like, that dude is serious crazy.
They give me an hour
break from solitary each day. The swelter won’t die, new records
day and night. Sergeant Washington leads me toward the exercise
field, baked dirt circling brown weeds, mowed scattershot. We halt
in the tent shade. He gives me a piece of Juicy Fruit. A guard
giving a prisoner gum or anything else is illegal. He’s got another
thing coming if he thinks he’s getting anything back from me. He
studies his fingernails, trimmed, clean. “I put you at fifteen.
That about right?”
“Be sixteen
soon.”
“Happens to
fifteen-year-olds.”
“If they ain’t killed
first.” The sweetness in this gum, man. I’m almost someplace else
for a few seconds ...
Me and Céce sharing Bazooka.
No. Can’t think about
her out here or anywhere. I have decided: She has no place on this
island, not even in my mind.
Washington studies
the guard tower. “I’m fifty-two. On the job here twenty-seven
years.”
“All
right?”
“You tell anybody I
gave you gum, I’m done. I’m three years from pension and a
timeshare on the water.”
“Then why you give me
the gum?”
“Why you
think?”
“You’re bored,” I
say.
“Yeah?”
“You a lonely old
man, got nobody else to talk to.”
“You have me all
figured out, huh?”
“You’re an easy
read.”
“That right?” he
says.
“Regret that you give
me the gum now, huh?”
“Not at all.” He nods
toward the exercise field. “Let’s move.”
We sit the bleachers.
They’re griddle hot. I look out to the bay. “Bet it’s cooler out on
the water,” I say.
“It’s cooler anywhere
else. You hang tough now, son.”
I study this guard.
What’s he want from me?
Behind me: yipping. A
German shepherd on the other side of the chain-link
fence.
“Where’d that little
fella come from?” I say.
“Seems more like a
wolf, you ask me. K-9 training facility.”
“Seeing Eye
dogs?”
“Police,” he
says.
“Didn’t know they did
that here. Who trains them?”
“Who do you
think?”
“Yeah, huh? How you
get that gig?”
“Behaving,” he
says.
The dog barks at me,
switches his tail.
“Mind I say
hello?”
“He looks like he
wants to eat you.”
I crouch to meet the
dog at eye level. I put my fingers through the chain link to stroke
the underside of the dog’s muzzle. The dog licks my
fingers.
I try to find the
sergeant’s eyes in his outline blocking out the sun.
“Sir?”
“You can call me
Wash.”
I nod and get back to
petting the dog.
“What was it then,
what you were going to say?”
“Forget.”
“When it comes back
to you then,” he says.
The dog rolls over
for a belly scratch, but I can’t squeeze my hand through the chain
link. I remember what I wanted to say, but by now the time to say
it has passed.
The radio blips. Wash
draws it from his belt, nice and easy, clicks, “Go
ahead.”
“Your friend there has a visitor.”
(Tuesday, August 4, dinner shift)
CÉCE:
I’m late for work.
The bus from the visitor center got a flat, then I missed the city
bus, had to hoof it to the train, which promptly stopped in the
tunnel for forty-five minutes. I slip in semi-petrified dog crap
just outside the Too, take off my sneaker, and hobble into the
restaurant. I thought August was supposed to be slow. We’re
slammed.
Marcy: “Why you
wearing only one shoe?”
Me: “Did Cashew Man
come today?”
Marcy:
“Nope.”
Me: “Figured. Where’s
my ten bucks?”
Marcy: “In my
pocket.”
Me: “Can you take the
money out of your pocket and put it in
my hand?”
Ma: “Did he come
down?”
Me:
“Noper.”
Ma slams her tray to
the bar counter. “That sonuvabitch.”
Me: “Easy
Ma.”
Ma: “No. He can’t
treat my baby that way.”
Marcy:
“Right?”
Ma: “I’ve been biting
my tongue, hoping he’d come around, but this isn’t right, what he’s
doing to you.”
Marcy: “What he
did to her too.”
Ma: “I mean, okay,
the first time you visit it’s a surprise, he’s freaked out, you can
sort of understand. The second time you
go, though? Well, maybe he was really
sick. But three times? Not even a word with you, half a stinking
minute to thank you for going to that god-awful place to see
him?”
Marcy: “Go,
Mella.”
Ma: “Who the flip
does he think he is?”
Marcy:
“Punk-ass.”
Ma: “We all reached
out to him.”
Marcy, eyeing me:
“Some more than others.”
Ma: “And he can’t
muster the decency to come down and at least say
hello?”
Marcy: “Or
good-bye?”
Ma: “You were a
virgin, for Christ’s
sake!”
Total. Silence. In
the restaurant. Everybody is gawking at me.
I nod, hop into the
bathroom, sit on the toilet with my shitty shoe and lament
existence, not just mine but everybody’s. I don’t know one person
I’d rather be, and I don’t want to be me anymore either. I’m
beginning to think about it: death by cheesecake.
Ma comes into the
stall, arms folded. She paces in the tiny two-foot space. She taps
her foot. “Time to move on, babe.”
“I can’t. I’ll die if I don’t see him
again.”
“You won’t
die. He was the first guy you slept
with. I know it feels like he was the love of your life, but it
always feels that way, with every guy you’re with.”
“We told each other
things,” I say, pointing my poop sneaker at her. “We shared our
secrets. We trusted each other with the
most important things in our lives.”
Ma rolls her eyes.
“You gotta put him out of your mind, Céce.”
“Ma, what are you
doing? I need your fake optimism right now. I need you to advocate
his point of view. If you quit on him?
You who catch cockroaches with yogurt containers and set them free
in the garden? If you give up on Mack, then I’m done.”
“Then you’re
done.”
“Mom, please, why
won’t he see me?”
“I don’t know, okay?
Men are weird, Céce. They would be so much easier to understand if
they were like women.”
“Come with me next
time. Get on the phone with him and make him come
down.”
“I can’t make him do
that,” she says.
“Please. It hurts so
bad. Tell me what I need to do to make him see me.”
“I don’t know what you should do.” Total girl-spin scenario:
My crying gets her crying, last thing I need. “Your brother
too.”
“What’d he do now?”
“He can’t call me?”
she says.
“He can’t if his
sergeant won’t let him.”
“I need to hear
him.”
“You’re hearing from
him. He’s sending you postcards every other day.”
“That’s not the same
thing. I need to hear him. I need to
hear his voice.”
Marcy leans into the
bathroom. “Um, Vaccuccia women, we have thirty hungry tables out
there, I have twenty-nine brain cells. A little help?” She does a
double take on her reflection and puts down her tray to fix her
hair.
(The next day, Wednesday, August 5, morning of the
fifty-fifth day . . .)
“You have your
pencils?” Vic says. He’s cooking me breakfast.
I have no appetite.
What I do have is a tension headache. Mack was supposed to be here to massage my
shoulders, to chill me out. That was the plan.
“I have my
pencils.”
“How
many?”
“Sixty-two
thousand.”
“They’re number two?
They have to be number two.”
I show him. He nods.
“Puissant,” he says.
“Potent,” I
say.
Vic smiles and raises
his eyebrows and taps his temple. “See?” he says.
“See?”
I wink and nod and
tap my temple. Have not a clue what
he’s talking about.
I walk to the test.
Mack was supposed to walk with
me.
I whale on the
multiple choice. I’m buying Vic a new Vic-mobile. Every single word
he quizzed me on is on this thing. I finish fifteen minutes
early.
They hand out the
blue books. The proctor writes on the board: PLEASE TELL US ABOUT
ONE OF YOUR GIFTS AND/OR TALENTS AND GOALS.
They list the essay
subject on the website. They even tell you to prepare your answer.
Why can’t we just bring it
in?
My essay is supposed
to be about being other-centric—my gift. Vic practically wrote it for me. I cried the
first time I read it. I had no idea I was such a wonderful person.
He made me look nicer and more pathetic than a missionary nun with
late-stage cancer. I have it memorized. It’s supposed to be 500
words, max. I wrote it ten times for practice. The last three times
it was 491 words. Basically Vic used waiting tables as a metaphor
for life: service with a smile. Hard work. Making people happy,
reaching out to your fellow human beings with warmth and all that
crap. It’s the kind of essay that if you lie sincerely enough, it
makes up for slightly better than good-but-not-great grades, and
you get into a better school than you deserve. I start to write it,
but something happens. I cross out what I wrote, and I
write:
Mack is beautiful trouble. The time we went to Cindi
Nappi’s party, we were waiting for the train. This junkie was
totally out of it, stepping the edge of the platform like a
tightrope walker. Everybody screamed when he walked right off the
platform. He hit the track pit hard, but he must have been really
spun out, because he got right back up and into his tightrope act,
on the track rail this time, the one right next to the rail that
will electrocute you.
This other guy hopped down into the tracks. I turned to
Mack to say That dude’s psycho. But
Mack wasn’t there. The psycho who hopped into the tracks was
Mack.
He tapped the junkie’s shoulder. The man turned. He stared
at Mack with strange eyes, somehow stunned and jaded at once. Mack
was talking to him. The dude listened and nodded. Mack pointed to a
spot between the rails. The dude stepped off the track rail to
where Mack pointed. The weirdest thing? The dude was laughing
quietly.
People helped Mack pull the junkie out. When Mack hopped
back up to the platform, everybody clapped. Mack dropped his head
to hide from them. He seemed mad. He grabbed my hand, and we
hurried up the steps. I said, “What about the train?” He said,
“Let’s take the bus.” I started to tell him he was a hero, but he
cut me off. “Don’t tell anybody about this,
okay?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
And then Mack said, “Talking about stuff like that ruins
it.”
We sat in the back of the bus and kissed so hard I got
dizzy because I kept forgetting to breathe. I couldn’t stand it
when his lips weren’t touching mine. All I could think was that
someday one of us would die first, and I hoped it was me, because
how do you keep going without a man like that in your life? Ma
wants me to move on? To what?
I know he still loves me. I know he’s a good
person.
I’m going there again. I’ll keep going until he comes down
to see me. I’ll call him first. I’ll keep calling until he comes to
the phone. I can wait for him. By the time I’m thirty, maybe he’ll
be out. Or if it’s a twenty-five-year sentence, I’ll be Ma’s age.
I’ll work hard and save money and buy us that nice little house he
wanted. Everything will be ready for us by the time he gets out.
Everybody tells me I can’t think this way. Marcy gives me another
month before I’m with some other guy. She says once you have sex,
you have to keep getting it. But I can’t imagine being with anybody
else. Ever. I’m supposed to be with Mack. I feel
it, and I have ESP.
I count the words:
477. Nice. I rip the essay in half and toss it out the window into
the hot wind with the rest of the test I spent the last year
studying for, and I am so out of here.
Ma will be not at all
surprised but extremely thrilled to hear Anthony is number one in
his platoon. She will be very pissed that his special privileges
limit him to twenty minutes of Skype time at 8:00 p.m., smack in
the middle of Carmella Vaccuccia’s Wednesday night
shift.
“You don’t need it anyway,” Anthony
says.
“You’re right, Ant.
C-team status in Ultimate Frisbee Club and a year and a half of
Brownies in a hand-me-down uniform—I’m sure to get into
Princeton.”
“Two pieces of advice: Take it again in the fall. Don’t
throw it out the window. Done. How’s Mack?”
I rehearsed the lie
in the mirror until I actually believed it: He’s just great, I’m just great,
everything is just great. “Well, Ant,
Mack is just . . .”
“What happened? Cheech, we have seventeen
minutes.”
I tell
him.
He’s motionless, eyes
downcast, stays like this for maybe a full minute. He clears his
throat and nods. “It’s gonna be
okay.”
“It’s not.”
“First things first: He loves you.”
“You’re an
idiot.”
“I’m a guy. He’s trying to make it easier for
you.”
“And this is so
easy.”
“All he wants is for you to be happy. If he sees you, it
just prolongs the inevitable.”
“That we can’t be
together.”
“Yes.”
“No. I reject
that.”
“How do you think he feels, Cheech? He knows how long it
takes you to get there, what you have to go through to get inside.
To be inside, seeing him struggling. I
wouldn’t want you or Ma to go through that for
me.”
“But you would at
least come down to tell us that.”
“I hope I would, but I’m not looking at being locked up
for the next two decades.”
“Ma’s gonna flip when
she finds out you’re taking his side.”
“No sides here. I’m dying for the both of you. Seriously,
it sucks. Look, I’m not telling you to stop going. I don’t think
he’ll sit with you, but you have to do what you’re doing until the
sting fades, you know?”
“Ant, I know that
down deep you’re probably furious at him—”
“In no way.”
“Well, I just want
you to know he never hurt me.”
“Of course he didn’t.”
“I don’t want you to
feel bad about setting us up.”
“I don’t.”
“You could feel a
little bad, asshole!”
“I think this’ll be a defining moment for you. You just
have to go through it, kid. When you’re ready to stop hurting,
you’ll move on. But that won’t change the fact that you’ll always
have a part of him with you. He made a terrible mistake, but he is
an exceptional human being. He’s a good person. I know you know
that. You were lucky to spend time with him. And he was lucky to
know you. That doesn’t go away. It’s okay to keep loving him. Hey,
Céce, it’s never easy, but it’s always great.”
“What
is?”
I hear somebody on
his end yell, “Vaccuccia, twelve
minutes.”
“Cheech, hang in, kid. And tell Ma I love her like a crazy
person.”
“We still have twelve
minutes.”
“I gotta call Mack.” The Skype window boinks, and he’s gone.