and her hair, except for a few strands that rose and fell with
static, tucked down inside it. She said one sharp, “Ralph,” as if she
needed to get his attention. Michael looked down at her and then
looked back over her shoulder. Her legs were bare from the hem of her
parka to the tops of her construction boots. Michael looked back just
in time to see her open her coat and say, “Lady Godiva.”
Beside him, Bean said, “Mother of Mercy.” The bright orange
lining of her parka set off her pale body like neon. Through the veil of
her hair there were her small, conical breasts and the shadows of her
nipples, the teardrop-shaped navel carved into her stomach, the tender
fuzz of pubic hair. In the mirror above the bar he could see all around
her a dozen pale, openmouthed faces, like seraphim and cherubim in
parkas and half-assed Halloween costumes, surrounding a Madonna.
Ralph bowed his head and moved his mustache from side to side,
laughing. And then he reached into the plastic pumpkin and pulled
out a Milky Way. He handed it to her. As she slipped the candy bar
into her pocket, Ralph put his hand beneath her ear, lifting her hair as
she stepped up on the bar rail to move toward him. Bean was now
doing a backbend to see her lovely bare legs rising out of the muddy
construction boots, her white, dimpled behind under the hem of the
khaki parka, and if the low-grade moan that filled the air wasn’t from
him, it was from half a dozen guys in the immediate vicinity, like a
muffled howl.
When they broke apart, Ralph casually pulled two beers from the
cooler. “You mind?” he asked Michael, as if he were just running out
to use the john. Michael said, “I don’t mind.” Caroline, meantime, had
bowed her head and let her hair fall over her face. Ralph went around
the bar, bottles in hand, and Caroline, now holding her coat tightly
closed, turned to meet him.
Because Bean was there Michael asked him if he wanted to help
out, but he downed his beer and said he was already helping, he was
on the decorating committee and did his own Groucho thing with
his eyebrows under the bandanna, and then moved back into the
crowd.
Chris volunteered instead. He was wearing a sombrero and serape he’d brought home from last year’s spring break and he was
repeating halfhearted lines from Cheech and Chong that cracked up a
group of girls reaching for their beers. Michael had known Chris since
freshman year and it had seemed to him since then that the bulk of his
emotional effort had always gone into staying faithful to his girlfriend
back in Yonkers. He wasn’t always good at it—there were too many
opportunities in the dorms—and his every misstep was followed by
hours of banging his head against the cinder-block walls. He hated
himself, he loved his girlfriend. He wanted to be faithful. He wanted to
get laid. He was breaking up with her. He was marrying her. Now that
he was, finally, officially, engaged, he had adopted this jokey, old-fart
way of dealing with the women at school. A class-clown kind of thing
that struck Michael as terribly sad, the way he shook his shoulders and
wiggled his broad backside under the serape, the way they laughed at
him and then let their eyes skip over to somebody else.
When Michael looked toward the door, he saw Beverly come in
with her own crowd. She was wearing one of those plastic headbands
with bobbing alien eyes. Then he heard the door in the back room
slam open and a few seconds later Bean was backing a coffin into the
bar. He was shouting “Move!” in his dumb-jock way and people were
laughing. A couple of other guys were pallbearers and Terry held the
far end, bumping it into the doorjamb, the jukebox, the edge of the
pool table. Some people ran ahead to grab some chairs and place them
in the middle of the room. It was a gray metallic coffin and at first
Michael thought it was something they had made in shop. He even
turned to Chris to say, “What’s this, an IA project?” But Chris shook
his head. “None of those guys is industrial arts,” he said.
Michael turned back as they were struggling to get the chairs
under the thing. It wasn’t a gray coffin but black. It was the dirt that
made it seem paler.
“They dug that fucking thing up,” Chris said into his ear.
It was wild. Bean, the impresario in his earring and bandanna and
long coat, made a big deal of opening the lid, then shutting it, then
spinning around to ask, “You want to see? Who wants to see?”
Terry was leaning against one of the tables, hugging himself and
laughing. He might have been shivering.
Finally, Bean snapped back the upper half of the lid—flashing
white satin—girls screamed as the thing rocked on the chairs,
threatening to topple, empty. Now a kind of relieved hysteria took
over the room and people began coming to the bar, shaking their
heads. Crazy ass, they were saying. Bean was saying he’d found the
thing in the basement. He was telling everybody it was where Ralph
“really sleeps.”
Terry was white-faced, swaying a little, definitely trembling. With
a sudden lurch, he headed toward the bathroom. Michael saw him
touch the corner of the coffin as he passed by.
Other people were touching it too, rubbing the dirt, playing with
the lid. It had lent its own odor even to the smoky room, something
earthy and sharply unnatural at the same time. Beverly came to the bar
for a beer and as he handed it to her she said, “Do you think this is
funny?” She was smiling a little, as if ready to agree whether Michael
said yes or no. He said no, he didn’t think it was funny.
She sipped her beer, looked at the thing over her shoulder. He still
wasn’t sure he liked her eyebrows, or the super-short hair, but he liked
her eyes and her throat and the shape of her head. He liked the
lightness of her, on top of him. The stretch of her spine in the dark.
“You want to go?” he said. And she said, “Yeah.”
He told Chris he was leaving and Chris looked at Beverly, the
sombrero pushed back on his head, and said, “Vaya con Dios.”
After the rowdy wedding in Yonkers that June, there would be his
annual backyard barbecues—famous for the Gennie Cream Ale he
served long after any of them still wanted to drink it. There would be
his three kids, one with problems, his tacky affair with another teacher
which almost cost him everything, and then didn’t. There’d be the
quick cancer at forty-two and the heft of his own coffin as they got him
down the steps of his church. The party later, in his backyard once
again, where they decided that if they weren’t the middle children
born at mid-century to middle-class parents and sent from middling,
mid-island high schools to mediocre colleges all across the state, they
were close enough.
Michael walked around the bar and took the girl’s hand. It was
soft and cold and she pulled back for just a minute as she turned to
put down her beer. He recalled that he also liked the way he could feel
her bones, rib bones, hip bones, the small bones of her fingers through
the smooth skin.
There was a heavy smell of upstate winter in the air—the smell of
frozen mud, low clouds, heating oil. There was the faint spill of red
neon light on Damien’s narrow steps. They walked through it. He put
his arm around her. The alien eyes bobbed in his face. “Dogs,” she
said, looking past him. He turned. There were four or five
neighborhood dogs along the side of Damien’s back door, where he
kept his garbage cans. Michael heard their low growling before he
could distinguish what it was they were pulling at. At first he thought
it was a dummy, a Halloween dummy from someone’s front porch.
They were dragging it a bit, tearing at it. But then he saw that it was
too solid and too stiff, no newspaper stuffing, and a pale hand showed
beneath a dark sleeve. He wore a suit jacket and pants and a white
shirt, no shoes, just like they say. The hair was thin and gray and long
enough to catch on the hard mud beneath its
head. As they moved closer, they saw there was still flesh on the face,
the nose, the chin, the sockets for the eyes, but in the dark it looked
more like carved bone. A mutt with wiry haunches was tugging at
something that turned out to be the man’s tie, slowly, in jerky stops
and starts, the way dogs do, pulling the body into the dim yard.
She said, “Oh, God,” but she was so skinny it didn’t take any
effort at all to turn her away with his elbow and hip, back toward the
sidewalk and his car. Under his arm, he could feel the tremor in her
shoulders. He could see it in the movement of the bobbing eyes.
“Assholes,” was all he said.
He didn’t turn on a single light in his room. They made love and
then slept and then began to hear his housemates staggering in, talk
and laughter, a waft of dope and then popcorn. It would be the same
next year. At one point, Chris opened Michael’s door for a second and
then quickly turned away, shutting it. A few minutes later, they heard
Jim Croce through the walls.
On the wall beside them were the glowing marks of the pictures
she had drawn on Friday. In long sweeping strokes of chalk she had
sketched a kind of Eden, tall stalks of grass and leafy flowers and,
scattered among them, the figures of men and women—long thighs
and bellies, penises, breasts, arms—all entangled, or pressed together,
faces indicated only by a nose or an eye or a lock of hair. Some of it
had rubbed off already, or had already faded, but there was enough to
see what she had aimed for: something, he thought, between pretty
and crude, between a cartoon and a vision. Something you could
dismiss as a joke as readily as you could claim it as the precise
illustration of everything you wanted.
They were lying side by side, naked in the dark, and the old
house, as it did every night, was steadily growing colder. The drawings
made him think of the satyrs and nymphs on Chris’s dope box, and
then of Caroline opening her parka for Ralph, that motley crew
of cherubim and seraphim all around her. Hail, Holy Queen. Mother of
Mercy. Our life, our sweetness and our hope.
He thought how even after you’d disentangled yourself from
everything else, the words stayed with you:
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we
send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn
then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after
this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb .. .
Words you could dismiss as a joke as readily as you could claim
them as the precise definition of everything you wanted.
Sleepless, he raised his head to look at the clock. There was a
flashlight on his bed table. Shades of his brother. He picked it up and
turned it on.
He told her, the light on the ceiling, his hand on her thigh, that
he’d have to get up at 5:45 to get to school. Get up and shower and
put on the old student-teacher costume, cords and dress shirt and tie.
He told her he could take her home now or in the morning. “On my
way out,” he said, “to face the inbreeds.”
She only stirred and then slowly climbed over him, spread herself
over him, no weight at all.
M
ARY KEANE
looked for signs of grace, good fortune, or simple
evenhandedness but found none. Tony Persichetti in church this
morning, home again anyway, from wherever it was he had
disappeared to, but looking like an overly made-up prodigal son, what
with the wild hair and the beard and the thin hunched frame beneath
his camouflage coat and gray T-shirt. His father beside him—the bulk
of those arms still there but the hair gray and thinned, the shoulders
stooped. Another boy from the parish who’d returned unscathed, but
then died in a car wreck last month at 3 a.m. on the Montauk
Highway—going well over a hundred miles an hour was what the
rumors said, drugs, alcohol, even suicide the rumors said. (There had
been a broken engagement.) An article in the
Long Island Press
about a
father lost in the South Pacific in ’44 and a son, a navy pilot, three
years lost in the prison camps of North Vietnam. There were the
Krafts down the street—Larry no more than thirteen when the knot
