Northwest Corner (2 page)

Listen to me. These are the sorts of thoughts that too often come back while you’re spending thirty months in the hole. And after, too.
There’s violence in the air, even when nothing is happening. The idea of personal control is just a noble pipe dream. What comes at you feels bitterly, in the end, like some echo of what’s inside you. Like any vessel only more so, a place gets defined by what’s in it. A hive hums and buzzes. A fist is nothing without rage.

The glass doors open: in come the man and his boy. I pull the glove from my face and replace it on the shelf. Dust myself off, as it were. The boy trailing off his dad’s hip at four o’clock, but looking up into that trusted face and smiling. The guy turning back over his shoulder—a joke just passing between them, or a story, say, about soggy doughnuts, wafting in from the parking lot like a cool breeze in summer. Their outward physical details less interesting to me by comparison, though still notable: the dad’s big expensive watch, like a hunk of gold bullion clamped to his wrist, the boy’s pro-model Dodgers cap and special-edition Tony Hawk slide-ons. Upper-middle-class family, I’d say. He a rising associate in one of the investment boutiques in the recently developed Arenas business park or a tax lawyer taking a much-deserved post–April 15th day off; his boy, at ten or eleven a promising private-school student with an easy, winning personality, though perhaps too enamored of skate culture and the slackers down by the piers and so already being prophylactically primed by his parents for a future boarding spot at the exclusive Thacher School. Lacrosse, I decide, this kid’s going to learn lacrosse, as the father checks their progress at the front of the store, the better to assess the aisles of merchandise and the somewhat dubious prospects for service. He spots Derek stacking boxed volleyballs in aisle three. But a first lacrosse stick is serious business, and possibly Derek, who takes night classes in diagnostic massage at UCSB and is today wearing a purple sun visor backward, doesn’t look quite up to the task. So the man’s gaze turns ninety degrees—passing over Sandra, my boss’s fetching twenty-year-old niece, at the register—to land on me in aisle seven. I suppose that, ignorant of my résumé, he mistakenly considers me the safe bet for attentive shopping assistance in the store. And who can blame him? I am fifty years old, relatively
fit yet comfortably substantial. My red plastic SoCal Sports tag says
DWIGHT ARNO, MANAGER
in clear white letters. Under expected circumstances I would be a figure of rectitude and probity.

To which I can only add that I still want to be. I still remember what it feels like to be that man, and not a morning goes by that I don’t see his striving, confident image in the mirror of my thoughts. Which maybe is why, watching this father and son approach, caught in the glow of their radiant connection and prosperity, I can only stand in aisle seven, my mouth slack and my heart in lockdown. Still unable after all these years to relinquish my phantom grip on what I had and lost—a wife and son, whose health and happiness were my charge. I wore a suit to work and brought home year-end bonuses that make my current salary look like chump change. My young son and I used to walk into stores like this one and elicit from glove-sniffing, minor-league salesmen like me silent cries of want and memory. Because, for fuck’s sake, the goal of life must not be to lose it all, to cause other people grievous harm and suffering, to wholly give up one’s pride and respectability. To drop so low in the order of things that years later in an outpost far from home, clocking in for work and stepping forward to help a customer and his boy, you find yourself besieged by ghosts and mauled by a crippling need for atonement. When, let’s face it, all the good folks really want is a lacrosse stick.

SAM

A
GIRL SQUEEZES IN
next to him at the bar, orders two drinks. Afterward he won’t be able to say what the drinks were or anything about her except that her hair was brown and medium-long and he never asked her to be there.

Leaning into him, her right side against his left, she hooks a heel over the rung on his barstool.

“You guys win?”

He shakes his head.

“So, next year?”

A month from graduation, there’s no next year for him. “Yeah, I guess.”

“You know my boyfriend?”

She gives a name, kind of foreign, that he won’t remember till later. He just shakes his head again, not looking at her, but she presses closer anyway, her right breast indenting against his biceps.

“He got cut from the team freshman year. Don’t tell him I told you, okay? He’s watching us.”

She’s drunk—he sees it now. Her face so close her lips are misting his left ear. Faintly repulsed, but not meaning harm, just needing space, he gives her a tiny nudge with his shoulder—to shake her off.

Too hard: his soft touch unbalances her. As if the wasted strength that earlier coursed through his body has cruelly lingered, turning back to waste. Her heel catches the rung of his stool and with a low cry and a surprising heaviness she tumbles sideways into the black woman on her left.

He’s in the process of standing, about to apologize, when a hand
grabs his shirt from behind and jerks him violently backward: for a moment, eyes rolling wildly over the browned ceiling, he is airborne.

His spine slams the floor, the back of his skull thuds into ungiving wood.

Dazed, internal flares dilating his pupils, he comes to on his knees in the rank-smelling sawdust: his brain fogged like that mirror, past the bartender’s betrayed glare, which continues to serve down his own stunned reflection.

To his wonderment, a small clearing has formed around him. People staring from a safe distance, as if he still has teeth left to bite.

Stupidly he kneels there, pawing at the back of his head for blood.

The lugged sole of a boot splits his shoulder blades, catapulting him over the fallen stool into the bottom of the bar.

He lands on the UConn duffel, the aluminum bat crowbarring his chest—a blow so ferocious it’s like smelling salts, waking some older, vestigial pain. Rage rises in him like animal blood. And suddenly everything but what burns inside him is underwater-quiet. He doesn’t think; at last he just becomes. In one swift move he unzips the duffel, pulls out the bat, and, levitating to his feet, turns on his assailant—just another young buck like himself, and so beneath his pity—and drives the bat two-handed, with all the strength he’s ever wished for, into the guy’s stomach.

RUTH

P
ERCHED ON THE EDGE
of the bed in her underpants, ivory-colored bra dangling like a shot pheasant over the back of a chair, she slowly massages the ruinously expensive homeopathic cream into the notched side of her left breast.

The surgical wound has healed well enough, leaving the excised spoonful of private flesh invisible to the uninformed eye in sixty-three percent of all lighting situations (her estimate). In any case, at this point it’s the Hippocratic approach, not the awkward visuals, that she believes matters most. Her healer in New Milford—as opposed to her oncologist in New Haven, whose relationship with the nonscientific branches of medicine is at best dismissive and at worst insulting—explained that the most important benefits of the cream, which contains some rare Peruvian or Senegalese bark and is of unknown medical efficacy but certainly can’t hurt, might well come from its application, the simple yet mysterious possibilities of human tactility performed in a manner harmonious with the ancient Eastern wisdoms. An elderly Romanian with dark haunted eyes, the healer went on to suggest that perhaps this laying on of hands was something her husband could perform, would perhaps even relish doing on a nightly basis. (He claimed to have received anecdotal evidence to this effect from other patients.) And, sitting in his tranquil, pleasantly scented office with the fourteen potted plants, Ruth couldn’t muster the courage or spunk to disabuse him of this idea, to tell him that, despite or because of the havoc wreaked by her rebellious cells last winter, she had sent poor Norris packing
without informing him of her condition, and so would henceforth be establishing an unlicensed massage parlor of one.

Coming to the notch of missing flesh now, her fingers instinctively jump away, still refusing to acknowledge. She forces them back to the task at hand, to which they go reluctantly—showing, she guesses, that her mind is still strong enough to enforce its confused will. Nonetheless, the moment is disheartening. In the parlance of healing this is called spiritual, this not knowing whether something is going to kill you dead, this wool-over-the-eyes perplexity. And maybe it’s that. But, more than that, it’s simply a disgrace. At forty-seven, she has long accepted gravity’s attack on her better parts—she had great tits once, and the ass to go with them—but this cutting out of herself with a blade, this cold-blooded removal, however precise and necessary, is more than she can take. It makes her feel, unbearably and every day now, how little of her there was from the start.

The TV is on across the room, tuned to
Good Morning America:
a commercial for frozen pizza; another for hemorrhoid ointment. She is waiting with a certain embarrassing passivity for the preposterously jovial weatherman to come on and tell her where today in our great and hopeful nation there will be rain, and where there will be sun.

Where, indeed.

The cream is gone, traceless. She takes her fingers away. And the breast remains, inert yet screaming. She’ll try not to count all the things it’s saying to her—the stage whispers and threats, the self-pitying beseechments and raging monologues—because they are hers. Somehow, without ever intending to, she’s become the mad ventriloquist of her own body.

She thinks about Sam. Who is hers, too. Who will bring her back to wholeness, if anyone can. So many times during their years together (which seem to her now the only years she can remember with any color), no matter what was happening to her personally,
this small victory or that massive mistake, just the thought of him, mother to son, was enough to situate her in his life rather than in her own, to grab her by the hair if necessary and yank her out of the self-regarding muck of her own existence and into the fertile, ever-changing garden of his.

In order to see him she’s had to imagine him. To imagine him she’s had to truly love him. To truly love him she’s had, by some alchemical extension, to love herself, the mother she can be.

SAM

T
HE SCREAM BELONGS TO THE GIRLFRIEND
. The barroom hums with shock.

On the sawdusted floor of O’Doul’s, a young man is slumped.

Sam feels the air around him contract. Whirling blindly, bat still in hand: people large and small scatter to safety.

A muffled groan draws him back to the room’s sickening center, where the body writhes on the floor.

“Nic,” the girlfriend begs, “stay down. Stay
down.
”

Sam opens his hand. The metal bat strikes the floor with a cracked bell’s dead echo. A second later, he feels his arm roughly grabbed, as behind him the bartender grunts, “And don’t you fucking move.”

Silently, with everything he has, Sam wills the hurt guy to get up.

“I called the cops,” someone shouts from the back.

With sudden urgency, groaning and huffing, the hurt guy forces himself to one knee. “No cops …”

“Nic, stay
down.
”

“No cops.”

“You crazy fucks.” The bartender again, in Sam’s ear. “You crazy, stupid fucks.”

With brutal effort, like a man trying to scale a shifting heap of garbage, the hurt guy claws himself almost upright. So threatening a few minutes ago, crouched and panting now, he will look no one in the face; his eyes are wounded pits of shame. A Chaplinesque wobble, three stumbling steps—then, clutching his stomach and gasping curses, he abruptly folds at the waist.

“Wait for the goddamn ambulance,” implores his girlfriend.

“Shut the fuck up.”

A wild arm flopped across her shoulders; the deadweight almost drags her down. Somehow, the entire room staring on mutely, they shuffle out of the bar like a single wounded animal and disappear into the night.

In O’Doul’s, awkwardness and confusion follow. With no body to point to, it is not entirely clear what has just happened.

From the floor nearby, the UConn duffel gapes at Sam like a judging eye, its letters glowing white.

There is still a narrow pathway, carved by violence, to the door. Another moment or two, he thinks, and it will close.

EMMA

W
HEN SHE THINKS BACK
to the beginning, she can’t remember meeting him. He is simply there, part of the general fabric, her brother’s schoolmate at the Sherman R. Lewis Public School in Wyndham Falls, two years older than her, kind of small for his age, with hair the color of sun streaming on a yellow-sand beach and white teeth that rarely see daylight. He plays the trumpet but not very well, despite the fact that his mother is the school’s music teacher. His talent on the trumpet never comes close to equaling Josh’s on the violin. Not that it has to, but later on, no fault of his own, there will be no getting away from the comparison. Sometimes she sees him waiting for the bus after school, always off by himself a little, carrying the instrument in its black padded case like some weary vacuum salesman. The difference being that he’s still just a little kid, not at the end of his life but at the beginning.

Then, in ’94, after a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer from Box Corner named Dwight Arno finally turns himself in to the police for the hit-and-run killing of her brother, the killer’s son—that boy in Josh’s school, Sam Arno, the loner, small of stature and shy to smile, the boy she’s never paid special attention to and can’t remember meeting—becomes, locally, a negative celebrity.

Think of the backside of a billboard along I-95, with its ugly scaffolding and hidden graffiti: if you happen to get a good look at it, you are by definition heading the wrong way into hostile, oncoming traffic.