No Country: A Novel (56 page)

I stood next to Mom to get as far away as I could from him and his glass of whiskey, which he clutched in thick, root-like fingers. In the close botanical fug, he was speaking low, a growling generator spewing smoke. As much as I tried to block him out, his words were undoing me, bubbling up from that bitter stream, “loser, shithead, ungrateful, illiterate,” as if he were dictating my biography.

Moving to the window, I began to wipe at the pane, desperate to remind myself of the world outside, where Gillian and I lived, the lumberyard, Peter Foley’s whistling, carpentry, clean cold air. I did not know when I would ever have the opportunity to speak to Ma alone.

Mom went to the living room, and I followed her. The backs of her hands, resting on the doily on top of the television, were blue and disorderly, a wriggle of earthworms breaking surface. Her rings looked like some strange stone bait, shiny and sharp. Archie had trailed after us, a buffalo on the mudflat of the carpet, his baleful eyes watching. The coffee table held four small framed pictures, all of Sandy’s wedding. I urged my eyes away from them and smiled gamely into the cramped room with its sofa, hassock, bulging recliner, the defeated throw pillows.

Absently, Mom had taken out an enormous feathered hat from a closet and put it on, throwing her face into deep shade.
Was she losing it,
I worried, relieved when she, just as absentmindedly, reached up and took it off with both hands, holding it carefully, as if it were a full tureen of soup and set it down on the worn magazines
on the coffee table. My father looked on, unmoved by the bizarre ritual.

“One more plate,” whispered Mom escaping into the kitchen. Now it was Archie and me in the ring.

“How are you, Dad?” I said, sounding faint and diffident.

His teeth gleamed at me. “A nice question,” he said, the air slipping sibilantly between his teeth, “a nice question surely.”

“I’ll see if I can help Mom,” I muttered, panic rising in me as in a dream where you dreaded a wet basement, but your feet dipped into water at the very top of the staircase. The kitchen linoleum shimmered underfoot, reflecting the overhead fixture, a blurred sac of light that followed me like an eye every time I moved.

“Something I can do, Mom?” She kept wiping her dry hands in the towel she held, then put a number of cookies on a plate. “Have some,” she said.

I chewed on one. I knew these well. The anise-flecked Christmas cookies took me back to childhood. “Merry Christmas,” she said brightly.

“You mean Happy Thanksgiving?” I asked, bewildered by her mistake. After a wavering second of indecision, she righted herself. “Yes,” she said, smiling brightly, “have another cookie.” She had lost a tooth at the side of her mouth.

“You made them for Thanksgiving this year,” I said, trying to fill the silence. Her eyes blazed at me. “These are Christmas cookies,” she said sharply. I had no idea what we were arguing about. In walking up to their apartment, I had given up all rights to logic.

I looked at my fingers splayed on the kitchen counter, scabbed knuckles, nails bitten to the quick in the last few days, then fixed my eyes on the box of cereal propped in a corner, observing the letters on it begin to slip and slide, an obscene inky wriggle. I felt the gorge rise in me and turned away.

I watched Mom, my only protector, helpless, smelled the stale odor of age, saw the failing carpentry of her teeth, the pauses in her speech.

“I am so sorry, Mom,” I said to her as quietly as possible. “I’ve brought back something that belongs to you.” I felt I was a small boy again, back from school. She was holding out another cookie in her hand. Her eyes looked moist. “You went away, Billy,” she said, as if betraying a secret. “Why did you come back?”

“Mom,” I whispered, “Mom, did you miss me?”

I gave her the little cedar box, but she absently put it away in the sagging pocket of her apron without a glance. “Miss you?” she muttered vaguely. I reached over, wanting to touch her hand, but saw that minute flinch of her shoulder, the alarmed curling-up of her fingers.

“Mom—” I began, but she was looking away, raising her trembling veined hand, her back tense.

All this will make sense somehow, I told myself. Jerome, Gillian, my basement friends can’t all be wrong. I felt my head and chest burn with words, longing to tell her about my home with Gillian, the smoky church basement from where we emerged time and again baptized into hope. I wanted to tell her that it was all right, that I was fine, inspite of . . . well, inspite of everything. I had brought back her pendant. I had made her the little box with all my skill and love. I wanted her . . . to pay attention. But all I felt was her frailty, her fear, seeping into me in the close air.

As if on cue, Dad walked back into the room. I could hear the roar of the toilet somewhere in the background. He was smiling, at my elbow, holding out a glass of whiskey before my unguarded face.

“Let’s drink to Sandy and her new baby in Scranton,” he ordered. I stared at the amber tilt and wink of the whiskey.

“Well?” snarled my father. The half-empty bottle sat on the counter. The old voices in my head had jolted awake. I willed them to be quiet, but could not help shivering as I glanced to see if he was wearing his belt.

“I . . . I’ll have s-some soda,” I faltered, sitting down.

“Whiskey and soda?” Archie Swint was looming over me. I felt his breath on me.

“Just soda,” I said.
This is his space, and he commands it still
. The old tomcat spraying his pungent piss. I tried to push the glass away, hoping Mom would come to my rescue. But it was he who reached out and cupped his hand around mine, the first time his flesh had touched mine. I went limp, the intervening years erased, unable to stir in this choking nightmare.

In a surprising tilt, he poured the whiskey into my mouth. Some of it dribbled on to my collar as I tried, too late, to clamp my lips. The terrible warmth down my gullet startled me.

“Don’t waste it,” he chortled gleefully, filling the glass again.

I coughed and choked, but when I looked up, there was the second glassful. “To the baby,” crowed my father. The world was tilting. I held on to the tabletop.

“That child won’t be a Swint,” he growled, “but what of it? Swint was just a name I chose.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him, sitting up, dumbfounded. This was news to me.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “how I chose Swint. But have another drink. He bent over me, his fingers curling down over mine around the heavy glass, its design pressing into my flesh.

“Swallow,” hissed my father, sipping his own with relish, “and I’ll tell you what exactly a Swint is.” My mother shrank back into the corner, her hands inside potholders like amputee stubs.

Who am I?
I drained my glass.
Tell me, tell me.
The sharp smell of whiskey clawed at the basement of my being, scratching and swatting something awake deep inside me. He reached out and poured another glass of whiskey. Full to the brim. I shook my head
no, nonono
, but there he was, one eye oozing goo, a gleam in the other one, his shrewd, goatish look making it clear what he thought of me: Scumbilly, Billy-swine.

“Where do we come from, Dad?” I pleaded with him, “we Swints?” I was reaching beyond him to ancestors I had never seen, dim shapes in my blood who would raise me up, above and beyond my father, but it was through him I had to reach out, I thought helplessly.

“Swints?” he said, turning his face about. A small ooze ran down one eye into a fissure on his cheek. “Fecked if I know. I could be part Eskimo,” he said.

“I had no name when they found me. Who knows where? They weren’t great note-takers those days. Packed me off to Boston, is all I was ever told, and that I’d been left in the streets . . .” His voice trailed off, then began again. “Some of the priests were always looking for nancy-boys. They’re the ones had it cozy. The meaty soups, yeah—woollen socks, even handkerchiefs. For those dainty pantywaists. I got my nose broke, learned to fight, knocked out teeth as needed. Not like you,” he jeered, swiveling toward me.

I looked down at my glass. He filled it.

“What about the name?” I persisted.

He ignored me. “Reckon I was fourteen when I lit out. Caught a train and sneaked off it at Rochester. When I climbed up the stairs, I saw this poster of a boxer pasted on a wall:
Archie Swint, King of the Ring
. Gloves held up, eyes that meant business. Mustache,
solid legs. I liked the name. Shit, I never heard anything more about him. Maybe he croaked. Who gives a squat.”

He drained his glass. “I got my first job in a car dealership. I was the doll-up man’s assistant. My job was to shine up the wheels, the bumpers, running boards, headlights. My boss did the body. Old Gordie Potts. Took a shine to me.” He chuckled at his own joke. “When they asked me my name I told them, ‘Archie Swint.’ That was that. Nobody else had heard of the damn King of the Ring but me.”

“But didn’t you have a name . . . at . . . at the . . . ?” I pleaded, not knowing how to name the place.

“
Orphanage,
you wimp. Having problems saying the word? Always were a softie. I don’t even know how many I’d been in by the time I was old enough to understand.”

“Maybe they knew the name which was really yours,” I pleaded.

“Naah.” He gestured dismissively. “They knew nothing about me, so they made one up. I figured I’d name myself. Why the hell not?”

“But a name’s important,” I grumbled.

“A rose by any other name smells as shit?” He barked with laughter, pleased with himself. He stood up to pour another drink.

“Oh Archie,” said my mother, “I’ve forgotten the cranberry sauce.”

Archie Swint turned and smacked her. It was exactly halfway between a slap and a hard pat; that was the baffling part. He always knew how to confuse us.

She turned away quickly and leaned over the open oven, as if she were checking it. She must not have remembered to turn it on, for no heat emanated from it. I could see her shoulders quivering.
I rose to my feet. But Archie was already standing over her, head swiveled sideways at me, daring me to move. With one hand he reached for her buttock and cupped it, his fingers working into the fold of her crotch. She jerked upright, her face damp and startled. He wrapped her in his other arm and swung her close. “Oh, love, is that you?” she squawked in panic.

A shudder of revulsion shook me.

“I’ll get the cranberry sauce,” I said, rushing out, “so I’ll take your car, Mom,” and picked up my gloves and the keys from the bowl on the small table at the top of the stairs. I needed to get away from the groping reach of Archie Swint. I needed to throw up in peace. “Get me some canned peaches,” he called out from above. “Canned peaches!”

The Ford crap Pinto bucked uneasily under me. It had been a while since I had driven a stick shift. I lurched along until, after a block or two, it got easier. I kept thinking of taking my gloves off to drive, but the thought that Gillian had given them to me—in another, simpler life—made me keep them on. My protection, my talisman. I drove carefully, for I expected some deer to leap into my path, but none did.

The supermarket was closed, its parking lot deserted, and all the other shops around it tight shut. Sitting in the car, my shoulders hurting, I felt a bleakness I had no strength to resist. I started the car and it lurched forward, then rolled on as if by itself.

A misty rain began to fall. I had no idea how long I had been in the car, which had no clock, and I needed none; Gillian woke me in the morning and told me when to leave for work; at work, my foreman Peter Foley told me when to take my lunch and my breaks and when to go home. He wrote down my overtime hours as needed. When I got home, we were in our own universe, where
all my time was ours, in that room with the hope chest at the foot of the bed.

But here, and now, a strange twilight had given way to a stranger night. I was lost. As I turned a corner, the car fishtailed over thick wet leaves so that it careened across the double line, but I righted it with effort. The trees on both sides leaned into each other, so that I felt I was driving under arched wickerwork. The headlights picked out odd objects, a discarded mailbox, the remnants of a deer run over long ago. A doll, its vacant eyes staring from the middle of the road, made me swerve in sudden terror. Then I saw a building, tiny lights twinkling all over it. I brought my car to a crunchy, pebbly stop and stood before it, shaking with cold and indecision in the bleak drizzle.

I walked in and asked for my friend Jack, straight up, as I slumped at the bar, clutching its polished wood as if it was the side of a storm-tossed ship. There was a large silent TV screen above the bar. On it drifted huge and improbable animals, floating above a mute city of lost and pointing children in a pantomime of joy. Jack and Djinn held me up and muttered into my ears in turn. I was back in my world of whispers.

I stood hugging the car, for my planet spun. Man, it was beautiful, and the road undulated like a wave in the ocean, and the soil below me rose and fell. The surge underfoot rolled far away, followed by another, but now I knew how to ride it. It was the gentlest, the friendliest of billows, and I chuckled with the pleasure of riding the next crest, carried by the purring oceanic creature under me. Water beaded the window, but I had forgotten how to use the wipers. Through the thousand beads, I could see bright stars ahead and above me. Some were big red stars, which sometimes, magically, turned green for my particular delight,
transforming into incandescent fruits hung like orbs in the sky above.

I closed my eyes for just a moment and was startled by the crashing of branches all about me and a thud. The tide underneath had passed me and left me stranded. I had hit my face on a circular object in front of me.

Blood poured from my forehead. I picked wads of tissue from the box beside me and dabbed my face, wiping the blood from my eyes. I could hear something loose inside my head rattling like a dried pea. I tried the door, but it would not give. I pushed at the other door, which opened suddenly, tumbling me out. The cold air made a plume of my breath.