Lawnboy (14 page)

Why did this seem to be one of the most difficult things to learn?

I turned off the TV. I walked to the bedroom and found my notebook in the night-table drawer. I drank in a breath and looked once about the room. I concentrated on its details, its rugs and books, its curtains and bedspread, taking a mental photograph. Then just as I was leaving, I spotted William’s flannel shirt, with its intricate plaids of tan, yellow, and forest green. I raised it to my face and breathed, naming in detail what I smelled: its resinous cotton, its suggestion of sweat once his Right Guard gave out, its piquant smoky odor, like pine, or roasted cypress chips.

I pushed my arms into its sleeves, vaguely comforted by its possibilities. The shirt would come to good use. I was going on a trip. It was chilly at night on the other side of the state, with temperatures expected to dip into the upper fifties.

Immediately I picked out my brother from the small crowd at the bus station. My heart shuddered. My toes curled inside my sneakers. His oblong forehead, his benign dolphiny smile, those long-lashed, yet lusterless eyes—all these features suggested that he was a younger, better-looking version of Sid, with more hair and less baggage in the stomach region.

We hugged each other at the curbside. He was bigger than I remembered, his body softer, wider, warmer. He smelled of deodorant, chewing gum. There were little creases around his mouth. We started laughing. He took my bag from me, then led me to a van parked beneath some nutrient-starved palms. He dressed exactly as I’d expected: khakis, chambray shirt, wire-rimmed aviators—practically the same uniform he’d always worn.

We stood at the back of the van. On its pitted bumper were two stickers: a radio station’s call letters in the shape of a guitar, and a purple sticker with chipped edges: PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS AND SENSELESS BEAUTY.

He grinned at me. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“It’s kind of weird.”

He blinked rapidly for a second, then calmed himself. He really did look a lot like our father.

“I mean, a good weird. Who’d’ve imagined this a few days ago?”

“I know,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

We slouched in the bucket seats. I stared through the fly specks on the windshield. I pressed the back of my scalp into the headrest, my bare legs sticking to the cool, damp leather. My head felt blasted. Throughout the bus ride, I’d churned with worry. I sat for hours and hours, staring at the truck farms and phosphate mines, digging for opening lines, most of which were of a highly adult nature, engineered to generate conversation. Meanwhile, the driver shouted out the names of each stop: Moore Haven, Port LaBelle, Lehigh Acres. Well, maybe we didn’t have anything to say to each other, but that seemed to be all right. He wasn’t making an issue of it.

The landscape shimmered and prismed in the sunlight. All around us vast stands of slash pine and swampland were knocked down and filled for new construction. Billboards everywhere announced splashy white houses on cul-de-sacs—The Pinnacle, The Brightness, Indigo Lakes, Pineapple Lakes—all of which ruptured the virgin terrain. Businesses serving the dwindling rural population foundered on the roadsides, their days already numbered: Beverage Barn, The Shellpile. A Christian campground: Don and Veda Shea’s Hallelujahland. It might have been the Gold Coast thirty years before. Florida, place of our birth, chewed up its marshes, sucked its aquifers dry until there was nothing left but a parched bed of limestone. Already it was a busted balloon, a bloated appendage at the end of the United States, a veritable Toledo, Ohio, with palms. A vessel of people’s myths, its image had nothing to do with its essential character—the turpentine state. Once that realization was assimilated on a wider level, the cities themselves would wither and burn, and the people would forsake them, moving on to ruin someplace else.

Still, I loved it more than any other place. Florida, oh Florida. Embodiment of wrecked dreams.

I couldn’t believe I was sitting next to my brother.

We sped down the Tamiami Trail in silence. He slowed. We passed a fence, a row of broken gaslights, turned right, signal ticking, at a stucco wall with missing letters. KIN CO E. The place looked deadened, vacant. Peter parked in a back alley. He stopped, got out of the car. He led me up a flight of open stairs before walking me down several long, long halls. I couldn’t take it all in. My sinuses filled, pounded, a stuffed duffel bag in the center of my head.

The place needed some work. The hall carpets, a dull turquoise, carried a complex union of scents: smoke, mildew, spilled fluids. Cracks spidered the length of the pink stucco walls as if the building were gently insisting upon the presence of the former mangrove swamp beneath it.

Peter worked a key into a lock, then flipped on a switch. The room was about as big as the old space William had offered me in his den. A skyscraper collapsed inside me. I forced a look of gratitude in my eyes.

“Well, what do you think?”

“Great,”
I said too loudly.

He lifted his brows, then clenched them. “Do you want to take a shower? Would you like some towels?”

I slapped my back pocket for the whereabouts of my wallet, a paranoid gesture for which I was famous. Once I felt it, I dropped down upon the bed. “No, thank you. Do you mind if I just sit here for a while? I need to be still.”

“You’re hungry, I guess.”

I wasn’t. I bit into my lip, harder than I thought, until my eyetooth pierced the skin. I winced. He sat down upon the arm-chair across from me, then tilted his head. His eyes glowed behind his glasses. I ran my tongue back and forth across the puncture, my mouth tasting of zinc.

“Are you sure this is all right?”

“You’re so nice to do this.” I looked carefully at the room for the very first time, its wood floors, its perfect rows of laminated shelves. I leaned backward, propping my weight with my elbows. I pulled up my feet on the bed. “You did all this work yourself?”

He nodded, then told me how he’d gone about remodeling the room, an intricate, laborious process. About two minutes into the tale, I began picking out random words, phrases. I breathed deeply through my mouth, holding it, telling myself
deep, deep, deep, deep,
until my heart slowed, until my nostrils opened up, my face relaxing. I could smile again. My cheeks felt hot. For all he knew, nothing was happening inside my head.

Silence. Then footsteps down the hall. I drew my arms tighter to my ribs. “Who’s that?” I said.

A man in a white T-shirt, cutoffs, and combat boots appeared in the doorway. “Well, look who it is,” he said with a sly, gritty whisper.

Abruptly, my brother stood, almost losing his balance.

The man offered me a dark, veined hand with oddly thick fingers. “Hector Ybarra.”

“I’m Evan,” I faltered.

A pinch in my back, a chill. We held each other’s gaze longer than was exactly comfortable. There was something about his voice: arrogance, authority. A certain “fuck-you” quality. Yet his eyes hazed with a funny, self-deprecating glint. I stared at the exquisite curve of his deep pink lips, their fullness, his dark, nearly black skin. Was my brother watching? My throat tightened, then burned.
Shit.

His T-shirt was imprinted with the logo STAR BOY IN FLAMES.

“Hector’s my assistant,” Peter said. “You’ll be working with him, so you better get used to his jokes.”

I couldn’t lift my head. “Oh really?”

“Yes, really,” Hector mimicked.

“Are you done for the day?” Peter asked, creasing his forehead.

“More or less,” mumbled Hector.

Peter turned to me. “You have no idea how much we need you right now. Things’re a mess.”

“How come?” I said.

“All our staff just quit.”

“Oh boy,” I said. And all at once I knew we were sunk.

“Well, the RoadStar lured them all away. People who’d been here for five years. Bigger money, day care, benefits … I mean, I wouldn’t say no if I were in their shoes.”

I tried to look at Hector but couldn’t. Why was he staring at me like that? His gaze felt fraught, heavy on my head like a hand.

“And of course the worst situation happens when we’re least equipped to deal with it. A bus full of senior citizens, get this, thirty widows, breaks down by the bridge and they’re all tearful and shrill. We’re filled up, but it’s not good. They want extra towels and hot coffee, and before we know it, they’ve broken both ice machines and practically blown out the switch-board by calling home to Bountiful so many times. By the time they left we actually put a NO VACANCY sign in the office window and slept for two days straight. I didn’t even get up to drink or pee.”

My brother’s eyes went glassy. He clearly enjoyed talking about the struggle as it were a soccer game. He was more like my father than he knew.

“So is this what I’m supposed to expect?” I said.

“Not all the time. But I just wanted to let you know. You never know what could happen.” He grinned again, revealing a darkened eyetooth. Root canal.

“Welcome to Planet Hell,” said Hector.

“Hey—” said Peter.

“God’s Little Acre, God’s Little Asshole—”

“Now
stop,
” Peter chortled. Forced, I thought. Nervous.

Hector shrugged his left shoulder. He blew out some air through his lips. “It’s good to meet you,” he said with a smile. He squinted a bit, raising his chin, showing off the squarish nugget of his Adam’s apple. “Welcome, my friend. You’re in for a big adventure.”

He left. Some residue was suspended in the air, an explosion of sorts, a storm of fine particles. Ten seconds later, I still felt his presence in the room.

Peter stood. “So if you need anything, don’t be afraid to let me know. I’ll be just down the hall.”

“Sure.” I reached down to unlace my hightops. “Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“I really appreciate this. Thank you for being my brother.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” he answered. “We’re going to get a lot accomplished.”

Accomplished,
I thought. I lay down on the floor as Peter left the room. My pulse started racing, but the worst part was over. Anything might have happened. He could have mouthed off about me. I could have mouthed off about him. It was all so civil and pleasant and sweet. Listening to them knocking about the floor below me, I had a very distinct impression that it was going to be all right, and even if this weren’t true, there was Hector, whose very presence reminded me that I wasn’t alone.

***

Once, I couldn’t stop looking at him. I loved nothing more than the bristles on his face, the depth of his voice. I crouched in the upstairs hallway where I knew he couldn’t see me, peering through a crack in the door. He stepped out of the shower stall, his wet hair splayed across his scalp. A pang in my gut. A smell—stale ice? iron?—wafted through the room. In truth, he was the first boy I’d ever fallen in love with. (His dusky eyes, his shoulders.) I think he must have known this on some level, for soon he was pulling back from me, detaching himself from the family, entrenched in his daydreams and silences.

I’d wanted to be him. I’d wanted to be him more than myself, though I didn’t admit it. I kept my hair the same scrappy length, combing it across the cowlick whether it stuck there or not. I wore the same painter’s cap, the same chambray shirts, the same wire-rimmed glasses, though my eyes were near perfect. I copied the arcs and slants of his penmanship; I imitated the hard supple bounce of his stride. Once I even practiced talking like him, opening up my vowels, digging my teeth into the consonants as if I’d been the progeny of some speech therapist and not the second son of Sid and Ursula Sarshik, born July 12th, 1973, on the burnt fairway of an abandoned golf course, somewhere south of Coral Gables.

A stormy August morning. Peter exits the downstairs bedroom and I plant myself before the mirror, holding his damp towel to my face, breathing in his rich, fluvial smell. I reach for his shaving cream, then lather my jaw, imagining it hatched with stubble. I stop, thunderstruck. I start spraying my nose, brows, forehead, ears. Warpaint, a mask. And—
boom
—it happens: my legs grow lush with hair, my muscles rumble, my penis thickens like a chain. I can knock down buildings with my voice, I can soar past rockets in the firmament. I close my eyes and take myself deeper. I am wise, responsible, brilliant, and funny. I can make you laugh. I can speak long fluid thoughts before television cameras, in the pool of burning light, without stuttering or unease. I know things. I tell you the square root of 1,738, all 8 names of Saturn’s moons, the total air mileage between Jakarta and Buenos Aires and Las Vegas. Even when I trip or fuck up or do something patently wrong, you smile and think I am charming.

When I opened my eyes I was only myself again.

Then I became him: our roles shifted. I started doing well in school. I loved hunkering down in my quiet corner of the library, devoting my attention to my work while things fell apart at home. If I was good enough, smart enough, I could bring my parents—the whole lot of us—back together. They were talking again. A start, at least. Science-fair ribbons, perfect report cards.

“Evan,” Ursula said one day. “All A’s. This is amazing, terrific.”

I stood before her in the kitchen, satisfaction beating in my face. Peter walked past us, winded, in his green nylon shorts.

“Did you see this?” Ursula said to him.

“Who ate the Oreos?” He hunted through the pantry shelves.

“Peter. Your brother just came home with all A’s. Aren’t you excited for him?”

“Great,” he said dully, then lurched out of the room.

Something changed after that. A quiet tension hummed between us. Once, pretending I was asleep, I heard him come into my sunshot room. Midday, the hour after lunch. Our parents were at the store. He stood beside my bed, twirling the mobile above my head with his fingertips. He spun it so fast that I was afraid it would fall down, crashing on my forehead. Would he kill me? Cooling shadows swept across my face. I loved the fact that he wouldn’t leave, spinning the thing until he expected me to give in to him. Still, I refused to open my eyes.