Greenville (3 page)

Hey Dad. How old are you?

The old man doesn’t answer, but a moment later his foot taps out a rhythm. Da-da-DA-da, da-da-DA-da. He taps with his right foot, the foot on the gas pedal, and on the third DA the truck surges forward with a grunt.

Dad.

The old man turns. Twice he has had the boy pull a bottle of cough syrup from the pillowcase—as many times as they have stopped to gas up the truck—and the medicine has pinked his pallid cheeks. He examines the boy as if checking for something then turns back to the road.

My own boy. My own and oldest boy.

The boy repeats his question.

My oldest boy, the old man says, louder now. Not like that bastard. Not like that bastard Duke. The old man does something with the truck’s levers and pedals. The boy doesn’t feel any difference in the truck’s motion but the old man pats the dash with the flat of his hand. That’s a good girl, he says. That’s my baby. He sits up straighter. Not like that bastard Jimmy neither. Jimmy
Dundas
and Duke
Enlow
, he says, looking down at the boy. Jimmy Dundas and Duke Enlow and Dale
Peck
. Son of Lloyd
Peck
. My firstborn. My old and ownliest boy.

How old are you, Dad?

K-K-Katie, beautiful Katie, you’re the only g-g-girl that I adore!

The old man rocks the wheel like a cradle and the truck meanders from lane to lane until a horn blares from somewhere below the cab and a car appears from the right shoulder and speeds ahead of the truck, still honking.

When the moon shines over the cowshed, I’ll be waiting by the k-k-kitchen door!

How old were you when I was born?

Suddenly the old man turns to the boy, leaning so far over that the truck lists to the right. He makes a sucking noise on his dentures like a child with a lollipop and then, in a confidential insinuating voice, he says, I owe my troubles to a savage wife. He nods, sucks on his dentures, nods again. She’s a whore, son. Your mother is a whore.

The boy takes hold of the steering wheel, righting it, and as wheel and truck rotate to the left the old man does too, until he is sitting up again. But he is still staring at the boy.

They tell you to stay away from whores but they never tell you why. They screw like pros, that’s why. Your ma can screw with the best of em. That’s how they get you. That’s how she got me. She screwed me like a pro. She had two bastard children and a nose like Jimmy Durante and a better man than me wouldn’t’ve gone near her with a ten-inch pole, but she could swing pussy like a pro and I’m just a drunk and she got me fair and square. But I love my son. My firstborn son. Dale
Peck
. Firstborn son of Lloyd. I wouldn’t let no whore take you away from me, no sir I wouldn’t. Not again.

Up until the end the boy has been ignoring him. He has heard all of this before, either firsthand or secondhand. There is no place in their house that is more than a curtain away from any
other and his parents have had this conversation too many times to count. But neither of them has ever said this last thing. Neither has ever said Not again.

What do you mean, Dad?

The old man makes a face, mouths an Oops, turns back to the road.

Not again, Dad?

Pedals, lever, pedals again. Then:

I’m a drunk, son. You know I’m a drunk. But never let it be said I let some whore take away my oldest child. My firstborn son. Never let anyone tell you that.

Dad?

I’m forty-two, the old man says. I was twenty-nine when you were born. I was just out of high school.

Dad?

Suddenly the old man’s voice changes again. The strength is gone, replaced by a plaintive whine. I thought I told you to close your window. His hand on the boy’s head is not quite a slap. Come on, come on now, hurry it up.

The window has been closed for several hours, and the boy reaches instead for the pillowcase on the floor.

Come on, come on, I don’t got all day.

The boy hurries. Though he has never been afraid of the old man he has seen what happens to him when he doesn’t get his syrup, and he doesn’t want it to happen while the truck is in motion. He has to hold the wheel while the old man drinks bent down below the dashboard. He holds the wheel with his right hand and he watches not the road but the old man. Ten months later he will remember the old man’s pose when he sees a
week-old calf bend down on his forelegs and crane his neck up to drink from his mother’s udder. The sinking and rising at the same time, the blissful expression in the eyes. Mother’s milk, witch’s brew. He will beat the calf off with a stick and hook his mother to a milking machine where she belongs.

The old man wipes his mouth when he finishes the bottle, and then he licks the back of his hand. The boy knows there is no use talking to the old man right after he has had his drink, but the stale sugary smell of the open bottle has reminded him of his own hunger. He puts his hands in his pockets and then on through, roots around in the hollow lining of his jacket to see if there is any food left. Last winter the old man had brought the big kids, Duke, Jimmy, Dale, Joanie, and Edi, on a field trip to the hospital’s kitchen, where he’d instructed them to stuff the sleeves of their coats with any vegetable they could fit down them—it took Edi a week to shake all the papery garlic shavings out of her coat, and the smell lingered for months afterward. When the boy got the job at Slaussen’s he’d done the old man one better, he thought, by having Joanie slit open the seams of his pockets so he could conceal his own contraband inside his jacket lining. He passes over the staples in favor of apples, bananas, whatever citrus fruit comes off the truck from Florida, but by the time he gets in at eleven from his after-school shift he is usually so tired he goes to bed immediately, and his brothers and sisters take the fruit while he’s asleep—everyone except Duke, who refused to go along with the old man’s plan at the hospital, and who won’t eat the boy’s food either. Today he finds only three grapes rolling around in his jacket lining. He knows that Joanie will have saved something
for him, but Joanie is at home with the rest of his sisters and brothers.

The boy rolls a grape between thumb and forefinger, warming it up like a marble before he shoots it.

What did you mean just now, Dad? Not again?

The old man purses his lips and shakes his head. Uh-uh, he says through clenched teeth and closed lips,
nnhh-nnhh
, and then he opens them. I want you to mind your Uncle Wallace. Your Uncle Wallace is my brother and a good man. A better man than I am. I want you to mind what he says.

Dad?

She was going to send you to military school. But I said no. I said not my firstborn son. I said she could send one of her bastard children to military school but not the firstborn son of Lloyd Peck could she send to military school. No sir.
Not again
.

The boy doesn’t know what military school is, although he has heard the term used by his parents and has ridden past the gate to the LaSalle Military Academy on Sunrise Highway more than once. He goes to Brentwood Elementary, or at least he does on those days when he isn’t suspended for betting on marbles in the schoolyard or getting beat up by boys who call his mother a whore and spit on his shoes. He is small for his age, the tiny son of a tiny man, and he doesn’t know who his Uncle Wallace is though he has heard that name too. He is almost thirteen years old and he is not afraid of anything except the unknown, but he knows so little that in order to keep from being terrified all the time he has long since ceased believing in anything except what’s in front of him, and right now what’s in front of him is a cracked dashboard and a dirty windshield and an empty narrow road,
gray, lined by shallow ditches, and disappearing over a hill the boy has to will himself to believe is not a cliff. He eats the three grapes, pretending each is an all-butter French loaf, and he spits the seeds on the floor one by one, and although he doesn’t aim each seed still manages to ding off an empty apothecary bottle. When a burp bursts from the old man’s mouth the boy sees it as a ball of flame, but what it burns up he’s not sure. He looks at the blackened leather above the old man’s head and then he closes his eyes as if they’ve been stung by smoke.

I’m forty-two years old, son. I’m a young man. But I’m old enough to be your father.

He must fall asleep then because when he opens his eyes the truck is stopped and the old man is not in the cab. He assumes they’ve stopped for gas until he sees a gnarled branch above the windshield like a jab of brown lightning and he sits up. To his right a row of leafless trees stretches up the side of a hill and to his left there is a white house, small and rectangular, its tiny second-story windows the shape of dominoes laid on their sides. Before he gets out of the cab he grabs the pillowcase containing his brothers’ clothes and the old man’s medicine, and the first thing he does is fall flat on his face because he can’t feel his feet. Still half asleep, he sits on the crust of snow that covers the ground like stale cake frosting and takes off Jimmy’s shoes. The ground is cold and hard beneath his bottom but the bottoms of his feet feel nothing at all, and, teetering, rudderless, he stands up and floats around the truck in his socks, the pillowcase less ballast than slack sail hanging down his back. A pitted two-track driveway runs around the house and up the hill toward a pair of barns and a tall round building that the boy recognizes instinctively as a silo
even though it reminds him of a castle tower. At the foot of the silo he sees the old man talking to another man. Like the old man, this stranger is short and thin and has only half a dozen strands of hair slicked flat to his skull, but unlike the old man he stands absolutely still, one hand holding a pitchfork lightly but firmly, tines down, and a cap on the ground between the two men, bottom up like a busker’s. The only thing that moves is his head, which shakes every once in a while, back and forth: no. The old man’s legs are wobbling and his arms are flapping in the air, and as he wobbles toward them the boy is reminded of a seagull he saw once in the bay. The seagull’s legs were trapped in a fishing net, and every time it flapped its wings its orange legs would lift out of the water trailing weed-draped mesh. Over and over the bird’s legs had shaken like the old man’s with its efforts to free itself but each time, exhausted, it splashed down again.

The old man and the stranger are still a good twenty yards away when the old man turns and reels toward the boy. His legs and arms make motions like the spokes of a rimless wheel, and he is shouting,

I won’t let her send him away! Not my boy! Not my firstborn son!
Not again!

He jerks right past the boy without seeming to see him, his doddering gait half step and half slide on the slick grade, and it seems pure chance that one of his flailing hands catches hold of the door handle, a veritable miracle that he is able to crack it open. The shotgun sound is like an echo of itself in the quiet air, and the boy whips his head from side to side as if he can find the original source. He is in the back of the house now. From this angle he sees that it is actually L-shaped. He can’t see the
farmhouse across the street, the mountain twenty miles to the south. He sees only a bulbous clump of gray-green evergreens and the tin-domed silo and the two barns and a patch of leafless woods at the top of the hill and then a big field studded with black-and-white and butter-brown cows. When the truck coughs into life one of the cows looks up from whatever thin strands it is pulling from the ground, looks first at the truck and then at the boy and then drops its head again and roots around for more grass—green grass, the boy can see, even from this distance. It is the middle of January and thin streaks of snow paint zebra stripes on soil hard as a city sidewalk, but the grass that grows from that soil is still green, and by the time the boy turns back to the truck it has backed out of the driveway, narrowly missing what looks like a fencepost with some kind of placard mounted atop it. The truck would have gone into the ditch on the far side of the road had there not been a tree there. Instead something glass breaks, a taillight that is not already broken perhaps, and when the old man shifts into first the boy hears first the transmission’s grind and then the glass as it falls onto the road. The truck goes so slowly that had he wanted to the boy could have run after it, could probably have caught it even, even with his numb feet. But he just stands there swaying, watching the truck recede as if one of them, the truck or the boy, is on an ice floe borne away from the shore by a half-frozen current. By the time the truck disappears over the hill the stranger has walked down from the barns and walked on by. There is smoke coming from a chimney on the left wall of the house and the stranger’s pitchfork makes a metallic ping each time it strikes the frozen ground.

Feeling floods into the boy’s feet then, as if a pot of pasta
water had tipped off the stove and spilled over them. He reels, bites back a cry of pain; catches his breath and catches his balance.

Uncle Wallace? he says to the thin brown back retreating down the hill.

The stranger doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn around.

Get my hat, Dale, he says. At the door he pauses to look the boy up and down, and then he shakes his head one more time. In the failing light his scalp looks white and cold.

Don’t forget your shoes, he says, and walks into the house.

It is as dark as it can get now, and cold. It’s not like the sun’s gone down. It’s like the light has frozen in space on its way here, leaving the boy trapped on the frozen plain of this unfamiliar bed.

This was your cousin Edith’s bed.

It seemed to him that his uncle’s wife, Bessie—Aunt Bessie—had fussed over the sheets. She’d stretched them taut across the mattress, smoothed out the wrinkles with her palm as though he weren’t going to pull them back five minutes after she finished. She worked in silence after that one line though, until the boy realized it was his turn to say something.

I have a sister—

His voice cracked and squeaked into the little slope-ceilinged room. There is a slope to the loft’s ceiling as well, on Long Island, but nothing like this steep pitch, which comes to within a couple of feet of the floor on one side of the room. He’d had to duck down to cross to the other side of the bed from Aunt Bessie.