Paul Silverman Stories

The machine said 160 over 120. The man, Henry, was with a girl who seemed more like some after-school burger flipper than a trained physician’s assistant. She gave him a death’s door look as she wrote the numbers in his file. The tattoo on her writing hand wriggled. Next, the assistant squeezed out one of those lying, tight-lipped smiles, and a bolt of fear raked across his chest. He could feel his heart go crazy in his rib cage. Banging against the bones, an animal trying to escape. He wished he hadn’t even made the appointment; he wasn’t sick when he’d walked in. An eternity after the assistant scurried away there were voices outside, then a rap on the door. The doctor entered, pulled the curtain aside and did his medical best to bring the BP down. Tried to chit-chat, change subjects, make him just sit there in the paper johnny, distract him with bullshit. Finally the doctor held his arm, raised it to heart level and strapped the cuff on again. The cuff, what a word. As though he were in the police station. “I got it down, Henry, but not down enough,” the doctor said, unstrapping him. “Next time you’re in a drug store, take it yourself. Do it a few times. Let me know. Your pulse is a hundred miles an hour. What are you afraid of?”

“I read about white coat syndrome.”

“That means you’re afraid of me.”

“Is that what it is – white coat syndrome? Maybe that’s all it is.”

“Why don’t you make an appointment with behavioral health, get relaxation tapes or something?” He consulted his manila folder. “This happened last year too. You could think yourself out of a small heart attack into a big heart attack.”

For the next few minutes the doctor pushed and prodded him in a perfunctory way and the appointment was over.

“The drug store. Do it Henry. And write it down.”

“What if I have drug store syndrome too?”

“Behavioral health. Why don’t you just walk up the stairs now and make an appointment.”

The doctor shook his hand and left Henry alone. Alone with the blood pressure machine, the wipes, the lubricants, and a waste basket in which to discard the paper costume on the way out. He dressed himself and, almost as fast as the doctor, left the grim little examination office, where every surface he had either touched or sat on had been ice cold.

He marched straight to the garage and sped away, remembering that they were visiting Dani’s mother tonight, a novel experience for him. But not for Dani, who was in her fifty eighth year of being her mother’s best friend. Henry expected to be good and bored, and he welcomed it after the doctor visit. Bored and double bored. All would be quiet in the rib cage.

---

Coming through the front door after work, Henry found Dani in a phone fest with her – and already cutting him no slack whatsoever. She threw dirty looks at him and apologized ad infinitum into the receiver. The good daughter begging forgiveness for her husband’s lateness, pledging they would run into the car immediately and be off.

She hung up in a burst of groveling and knotted her scarf, threw on her coat. She wouldn’t even let Henry run into the downstairs half-bath for a piss.

“If you paid a little attention you’d know she needs to eat early. Couldn’t you get home on time for once?”

“She doesn’t need to eat early. She demands to eat early.”

“She’s eighty six, Henry. Have a heart.”

After his day at the doctor’s she had to say that word. She just had to.

They charged into the breezeway, Dani pulling the sleeve of his coat.

“What were you talking about on the phone,” he asked, “the Chinese restaurant?”

“Yes we were. She’s bereft. Utterly bereft.”

It had been the biggest thing in her mother’s week, to hear Dani tell it.

All week long Estelle suffered the food in the elder’s dining hall. But on Saturdays she was set free. Of all her biddy clique only one of them had a car and was capable of operating it. Melvina, diabetic and eighty three. Her unit was three doors down from Estelle’s. Melvina had found the restaurant, it was called Canton Paradise, in a strip mall that was a good half hour’s drive. Canton Paradise really understood elderly people living in elderly housing on strictly fixed incomes. Saturday they designated senior budget buffet day, and the troughs of beef in oyster sauce, sweet and sour pork, egg rolls and shrimp fried rice came out – offered in limitless portions for an incomparable price. The “girls,” their walkers and canes stacked in the trunk, had been cramming themselves into Melvina’s one-owner Plymouth for months. These oriental Saturdays, rain or shine, took precedence over everything, even competed with funerals, Dani said – and she believed it, too. For sure, she was on the phone with her mother enough to know.

Henry felt the two of them had a home together. Somewhere in the ether-land of telephony. A secret mother/daughter garden, deep in a fiber optic cable, where they went every day.

And now there was no car and almost no Melvina.

---

Henry drove briskly. Not good enough for Dani. He came upon two yellow lights and each time stopped to wait for red. “Christ what a face. You look like you want to decapitate me,” he said. Finally he nosed the Lexus (GS300, not even 2000 miles old) into the approach road of the Fernsbrook Residences. Fernsbrook needed no sign to tell you it was a seniors-only complex; the sheer number of speed bumps said it. With each slowdown to cross a bump Dani fretted at her wristwatch. But Henry got a rebound of youthful confidence. Sixty is the new forty. That’s what the pot-holed parking lot said to him. He gazed around it - at the cars of the residents still possessing the faculties to operate cars. Cars old as the residents were, in car years. Gas guzzling tankers from the Detroit Golden Years. He passed Toronados and Malibus and New Yorkers, sagging fat-fendered over their little black puddles, afflicted by oil incontinence. Could these rattletraps even make it to Walgreens for their owners’ pills?

Among such cars his GS300 was a space ship. Red too, same color as Henry’s first Schwinn. Sixty is the new forty.

Henry dropped Dani off at the door and cruised the rows, hunting down a space. It was the only parking lot he had ever been in where non-handicap spaces were in the minority, and tonight Henry desperately wanted a non-handicap space. At the doctor’s he had felt like a near-corpse. But here at Fernsbrook he was a lad again. He found his space at the farthest end of the lot and was happy about the long walk. He had never broken a hip. He had thigh and calf muscles, and they worked. For the last twenty yards he broke into an aerobic trot. He burst into the lobby picturing a marathoner breaking a tape.

But then he was crossing onto the carpet. And this, somehow, slowed him to a crawl. Bluehairs and baldheads were everywhere. Lurking and looking him over. Doddering inexorably to the dining hall, moored to their droid-like oxygen canisters.

As he fell in with them, he told himself he’d think twice before booking another annual physical. What good was a checkup if the stress shortened your life span.

---

He found the two of them with their heads bent over the fruit cups, attacking the sodden peaches and grapes. But Dani put down her spoon and went after him, the bigger prey.

“Where were you?” She had that overseer look. About to send the bloodhounds.

“Just parking. Busy out there.” He summoned a voice even more syrupy than the appetizer and said, “ How are you, Estelle?”

The mother-in-law tilted the permed helmet and offered an ancient cheek gobbed in a paste of rouge. He pecked at it, hardly touching, but Estelle was no more interested in the kiss than he was. She turned back to the fruit puddle, exploring its components with her spoon. He sat down and ate his fruit cup at lightning speed, suddenly aware he had come under the impatient eye of a large high-school girl in uniform. Out of nowhere she had rolled up behind him with a steaming tureen-wagon, and she stood there swinging her ladle impatiently, like a cop with a nightstick. Through the cloud of steam, the girl reminded Henry of the physician’s assistant, and he felt his pulse slam and bolt. The instant he gulped the final grape she snatched his cup and tossed it into the bin. Then she presented him with the second course, a gray, scalding soup ladled so violently a dribble of it sloshed onto his pants leg. She was seventeen, maybe eighteen. He wondered what she told her friends about this place. If she thought about it, would she say he was a guest or a resident? Suddenly, Henry saw this question as the most important one on the face of the earth.

They served no wine at Fernsbrook. Too many liabilities, too many major meds going down. Henry wished the blood in his veins could be replaced with cabernet sauvignon. He swigged his iced tap water and felt the walls pushing towards him.

---

“Mother, tell Henry about Melvina. Henry?”

“I know about Melvina, Dani. How’s she doing, Estelle? Back on her feet yet?”

“Feet, yes. Back behind the wheel, no. Not ever, I think. You don’t know how lucky you two are.”

Tell Henry about Melvina. Why was Dani doing this? He had been told everything about Melvina and her car, ad nauseam. Green Yukon piloted by a rabid soccer mom just up and plowed into it, very nearly over it. Vehicle totaled; never to be replaced. Melvina now seeing the chiropractor indefinitely; amazed she’d escaped the undertaker.

“Tell Henry. Go on.”

He sat through it. Estelle’s recounting the crash, the police, the EMT’s. The spiderwebbed window. Melvina’s lacerations. “She could have been a goner. I could have been a goner too if I had been in the passenger seat. Our tickers have seen better days, you know. By God’s grace I was back in my unit watching Regis and Kathy Lee.”

“You’re a lucky one youself,” Henry said, but the martyred look on Estelle’s face only grew more pronounced. She picked at her salmon, pus-colored at the edges and overcooked, and said, “I hope you’re enjoying your dinner. It’s not what you’re used to, I’m sure.”

“No problems here,” Henry lied, shoveling in a chunk of the steamed-out fish. It was rank. “You can live to eat or you can eat to live. At your age – ours too – eating to live is better. It’s scientific fact.”

“Lucky is what you two have,” Estelle said. “Companionship. No matter how bad it gets you always have each other. You never have to go out alone. You have your wits about you, both of you do, and you should be thankful for it. Life changes faster than you think. It’s no fun when the only one you have to go walking with is a fat little oxygen tank.”

Dani’s face creased with alarm. “What about oxygen, mother? Do they want you to go on oxygen?”

Estelle shook her head – but slowly and reluctantly – visibily trying to keep the oxygen card in her hand.. Henry saw it all. Most galling was Dani, who let the blatant lie pass, and maintained a face of extreme daughterly concern.

Henry continued, attempting diplomacy. “Well, we’re on the same road you’re on. We’re just a little behind you.” Just hearing himself say this made him shudder.

Estelle put down her fork and stared, moon-eyed and beseeching, straight at her daughter. “Things change, don’t they? Sometimes they change faster than you think they will.”

“Don’t I know it,” Dani said. “I think Henry knows it too, even though you’d never catch him admitting it.”

Estelle made a clicking noise with her teeth, a noise that made Henry remember old Polident commercials. “You two aren’t spring chickens any more. You’re not an old sack of bones like me. But you’re getting up there.”

Henry winced and held out his hand, like a cop stopping traffic. He hated what he’d just heard, so much so he wanted to be temporarily deaf. But Dani’s eyes grew limpid with love. “That’s my mom,” she said. “She tells it like it is.”

The whole drift of the conversation made Henry’s skin crawl. And the panic and paranoia loosened his lips. He felt his mouth twist into a snarl. “Pretty soon we’ll be hitting the senior buffet at Canton Paradise,” he snapped. “Just like you.”

Estelle put down her fork. “Don’t say things like that - unless you mean it.” Her voice spiraled into a desolate quaver, not quite a sob but almost.

“Henry can be stupid sometimes, mother.” Then she hissed at him, “Stupid is the understatement of the year.”

But now that Henry was out on a limb there was no turning back, no way he could stop his mouth.

“Look at you two. Boo-hooing over bean sprouts. What crap. So what if there’s no more Canton Paradise? So what? Play cards on Saturday, do needlepoint.”

Estelle began to weep quietly into her salmon. Under the table Dani dug her nails into his thigh. Henry winced. But he went on.

“That chop suey stuff is in every mall in the country.They make the egg rolls in a central commissary – that’s what I hear. Why don’t you just get it delivered? We’ll pay for the cab – what do you say?”

She said nothing. Neither did Dani. The cold way she withdrew her fingers from his leg was even worse than her digging them in. He felt frozen by her silence. But still he couldn’t shut up.

“Well, what if Dani came down every Saturday. Now there’s your new Melvina. Better driver too. The two of you can eat General Gau’s Chicken till it’s coming out of your ears.”

Silence and more silence. Deeper and deeper. All Henry could hear was the chatter from the other tables. Shrill caws, brittle beaks, the cackling of an aviary where the birds were turning to dust.

Soon Henry’s radar told him there was more to it than the cold shoulder. The two of them, they weren’t telling him something. The tension seized his bladder like a vice. In between the dismal salmon and the upcoming shortcake he hurried out of the wretched dining room and found a men’s room with a handicap sticker on the door. He pushed in, flooded the urinal and stayed an inordinate amount of time. Consoled, somehow, by the sense of being close to the handicap bar beside the seat.

Emerging at last, he fought his way back through the sea of feeding residents, squeezed past a walker draped with a pink cardigan and a shawl, and edged into his chair just as Estelle muttered something to Dani. Henry heard a snatch of it.

“Why not sign up tonight? The list gets longer every day.”

He tried to sound bright and unthreatening. “Sign up for what?”

The two of them gave each other very arch looks, soap-opera looks. Finally, Dani reached across, took his hand, and took Estelle’s hand too.

In a flash her silence evaporated and her eyes glinted.

“Henry, I’m blessed with good genes, and I believe you’re blessed too.”

What was she saying – and why was she saying it with a voice that seemed to be mimicking the lilting strings of a harp?

His wife went on, gently lecturing him – so gently, in that trilling harp voice – about taking the right steps now, and if they only did, they would have many wonderful years together. At one point she even used it, that wretched phrase: the golden years.

What was she doing - and why? Everybody else was saying sixty was the new forty. He had heard it just the other day – on a radio call-in show where the topic under discussion was arteries and veins, techniques for optimizing your cardio-vascular system.

“Do you look in the mirror, Henry, do you really look? I do.”

He pulled his gaze away from her and picked at an awful strawberry atop the shortcake, prodding and stabbing it into until it was a shapeless mass, and then he threw it in his mouth. The substance was so drenched in sugary goo it sludged its way down his esophagus like a sweet piece of sponge, then got stuck in a part of the pipe that made him gag and cough violently.

From somewhere in the large dining hall some sort of a health worker materialized. A real nurse, it seemed. She had the uniform, the white shoes, and a bag like a doctor. For a small woman she was surprisingly strong. Henry felt her put some kind of wrestling hold on him - just as the blob of fruit shook loose and went down his gullet. He gasped and hacked and found air. The nurse pushed her face at him and stared into his eyes, blowing bad breath at him. She wouldn’t leave until he took several swallows of water.

When she did, Dani started in at him again. In the same harp voice. The sound of it struck his ear the way a packet of saccharine strikes the tongue.

“I wanted to do it four years ago when you turned fifty five, but I know how you have this … boyish thing.”

If Dani wanted a fight in public, Henry was prepared to give her one. He felt his voice shake, and his hands too. He swore at her, raising his voice. He saw Estelle cringe and turn away. But Dani hardly batted an eye, and she kept her hand right on his hand. Firmly.

The strawberry blob may have cleared his windpipe, disappearing into the basin of his stomach. But now the animal was loose in Henry’s chest, and raging. It hurled itself around like a bull in a chute. His ribs ached and the air in the room seemed oddly thin.

Dani pushed ahead, not changing the pressure of her hand, not missing a beat. “I’m signing us up for a unit right here in Fernsbrook. It will take six months at least. And believe me, we won’t be the youngest couple living here. It’s time, Henry. I know these things. I’m your wife.”

All over a Chinese restaurant. He didn’t say this, but obsessed on it as he sat on the floor, which had begun to roll like a ship at sea. He wondered when and how he had arrived on the floor. He tried hard to remember leaving his seat.

For some reason his shirt was off and the small, strong nurse had returned. He looked up at her and at the ring of gawking bluehairs. All so parched, so withered. In the center Dani and Estelle clutching each other, like two old sisters. His brain wildly replayed one part of the radio call-in show, in which a doctor had pointed out that the entire earth had a circumference of only twenty six thousand miles, but the blood vessels within a single human being went on for as much as a hundred thousand miles.

So many miles to cover, Henry thought, as the nurse held his wrist and talked dramatically on a cell phone, barking instructions.

After all this time the father still thought of the old buckskin Indian woman. As he drove home in the late afternoon he thought back, for the thousandth time, to that way she’d prepared an orange for him, how she’d hacked the skin off with a large machete-like knife instead of peeling it, his way, his whole family’s way, with a small paring knife. It was a paradox: even if he spoke perfect Spanish, or she spoke perfect English, the different approaches to a mere orange still would have given them away as coming from opposite worlds.

The thought went nowhere, as did all such thoughts about the whys and wherefores. They were minutia – always. A pile of orange peels and an old Guatemalan peasant lady from eighteen years ago; and the pegged lateral in his mouth that he refused to cap, calling it his “logo.” They were minutia, and yet…He wiped his mind clean of them as he turned onto the private waterfront lane and nosed his silver Jaguar past the two grand oaks portaling his property. He was looking, as always, for his barometer. The dormered window at the far right corner – that was part of it. Were its curtains ebulliently open - or blackly, tightly drawn? He let the car windows glide down and he savored the salt air, his salt air rising from the strip of Atlantic Ocean that was in his hard-earned deed. The father, looking for the only barometer that mattered – looking for telltale signs of the son. Finally he reached the base – the base that was like a basin, a caldera - of the long, thickly landscaped driveway. He cornered around a rhododendron the size of a small hill and saw him at his afternoon practice – which meant today all was bright, all was well; settled and calm. And sure enough, the curtains in the boy’s window were open, open as joy itself. Without further concern the father piloted the car into one of the four bays of the granite garage. He emerged promptly and walked with his significant briefcase across a promenade of cobblestones and up two staircased, ivy-rampant terraces. This was the shortest route to the door of his home. He did all this so he could enter and get ready to leave again.

But before Jacob Kopens opened the towering mahogany door (I want a door that says I’m a door, he had told his architect), he paused and watched smiling as Manny, shirtless and sleek as a jungle cat - a real Jaguar from the deep, dangerous tropics - performed a little show under the netted hoop and backboard affixed to the stately garage – a show just for him. The son palmed the ball, feinted, weaved and spun in the air, completing a perfect layup, his feet so far off the ground his soaring body seemed to laugh at gravity; and this laugh was the image Jacob carried with him as he went through the weary machinations of undressing and dressing, untying and tying, all so he could grab a few minutes of athletics on his own, at his own level, down in his cave of mid-life contraptions.

The son had a stomach like a washboard, black, jutting brows and onyx eyes. He had skin the color of butterscotch in the winter and dark buckskin in the warm months. The father was paunchy, baldly rust-haired and pale as cheese. On the right upper quadrant of his mouth one of Jacob Kopens’ teeth was stunted. In the language of dentistry it was a pegged lateral, a dwarf tooth. He considered it a deformity and was glad Manny would never have to deal with such a tooth. Manny’s smile was a string of perfect pearls – as jewel-white as his eyes were jewel-black.

The mirror at the head of the treadmill was merciless. It taunted Jacob Kopens about his imperfections, all of them, from the moment he pushed the button and the track started to moan and grind under his leaden, laboring sneakers. The panel of digital numbers stared up at him, red as the corners of his own overworked eyes, revealing more than he cared to know. Thirty minutes ago he had stood at another red digital display, filling the tank of his car. Those numbers had moved so fast they were like energy itself, the mach speed of fuel surging into the system feeding the engine, making it new again. The treadmill numbers relating to his own body were the utter opposite, slow and stubborn as fat. At this rate, the numbers said, he could chug till doomsday and all his sweaty agony would melt not a millimeter of his sagging, swelling middle. He called his paunch his jockey – as though the paunch was a separate person who rode him day and night.

The three of them - Jacob, his tennis-honed wife Rachel and Manny - dressed for dinner and the concert, negotiated the staircases and the caldera of cobblestones, belted themselves in the Jaguar and set out for Boston. The traffic was kind and they were right on schedule when they entered the country club section of South Brookline. They swung into the most imposing Tudor on the street and Jacob escorted Rachel’s mother, Susan Applegard, into the back seat. To Jacob, her perfume smelled like Paris forty years ago – as if he had been able to afford Paris forty years ago. Susan pecked Manny’s cheek and teased him in that wry, spry way of hers, the way of the spunky widow whose life danced on a gleaming floor of municipal bonds. She thanked Manny for removing his corn rows, on this occasion, just for her. Why a boy who lived where he lived – on his own piece of ocean - would wear corn rows was a mystery to her. But then again, she said, mystery was what she loved. Without it, what a tomb the world would be.

This was an evening Rachel and Jacob had devised solely for Susan, a concert at Jordan Hall featuring Wallace and Nora Bennett, the pianist/composer and soprano. Manny had graciously agreed to come, as he always did when there was a Susan night. The Bennett repertoire was Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Brecht and Weill, Scott Joplin and Bobby Short, a tart buffet of aficionado pop and coy, insider cabaret tunes from before World War Two, which even seemed antique to Jacob Kopens. Songs for collectors, a kind of musical Depression Glass. What did it mean to Manny, with his corn rows and gangsta rap and basketball swagger? Why would someone who shot hoops as if he were in an MTV music video want to sit still with a thousand graybeards and endure the tinkling piano and the Gilbert and Sullivan voice of Nora Bennett trilling her precious “After the Ball is Over?”

The South End restaurant they chose – for proximity to Huntington Avenue and Jordan Hall, was one of the better Boston places. As always, before they reached their table Susan was intercepted and hugged by some notable, a State of Israel fundraiser thanking her too profusely. Stunning, just stunning… our Jewish Katherine Hepburn…

Although the linen was white and the flowers were fresh-cut, the restaurant was certainly no Taillevent or Arpege, the kinds of culinary temples where Susan and Rachel worshipped one or more times a year in their five decades of mother-daughter trips abroad. But at Bonnard’s the lobster bisque still set you back sixteen dollars and it was a mere appetizer. Such prices wouldn’t make Susan or Rachel bat an eye, but they still made Jacob Kopens – the man whose mother wouldn’t buy him a suit for his first job interview - blink hard and wonder if he was staring at a typographical error, even though he would never tell either his wife or mother-in-law what he was thinking.

The first spoonful of the bisque had an even more profound effect on Manny. He grimaced, touched his throat and set the spoon down. His eyes darted anxiously and he became stone silent. Jacob reached for his son’s arm and exchanged nervous glances with Rachel. He put his own spoon down and stopped talking. Without the deeper voices of Manny and Jacob, the chatter of Susan and Rachel soared and became squeaky and shrill, incessant as an aviary.

Jacob made the requisite excuses. Rachel nodded gravely and Susan called in her spunky voice for a new Kir Royale. The pale, pudgy father and the dark, wiry son pushed past the Bonnard’s maitre d’, burst into the open air and joined the swarm coursing every whichway on the big avenue.

“How is it?”

Manny winced. “This is the worst. It’s like I swallowed arsenic.”

“Maybe that’s their secret ingredient.”

The whitecoats with their barium scopes had given no answers. Not at Children’s; not at Mass General. One gastroenterological eminence even threw up his hands and confessed – in words that might have been spoken by Susan – “the abdomen, it’s a mystery.”

They found a convenience store and bought a box of Zantac. The lone clerk was an African man whose checkout station had signs warning of hidden cameras, holdup protection and no employee access to cash. From the old days, Jacob Kopens felt he was on familiar territory. He felt the urge to hide his wallet.

Back on Huntington Avenue, Jacob pointed to a stoop, one of the few not camped on by carnivals of people with boomboxes, but Manny said he’d prefer to walk. Walk and breathe and wait for the Zantac, even though Zantac did nothing. Not even by the handful, it did no more than M&Ms did, he said, and M&Ms tasted better.

Jacob touched Manny’s arm and felt him recoil.

He asked, “what are you feeling now?”

“I’m feeling a snake, a rattler, wound up inside my guts and biting my throat. I think the rattler is my guts.”

Jacob remembered the wall of x-rays. The ghost-like coils hadn’t looked like a snake to him. He wanted to say something, but couldn’t, because it would make everything worse. He wanted to say the snake was Manny’s rage – his fury at him, Jacob, and at Rachel – for ripping him out of his world and pirating him away into theirs.

“You still want to walk?”

“If I stop walking I want to die.”

So they walked – beyond Huntington Avenue with its concert halls, and up and down the streets of the South End. In the old days, when Jacob was Manny’s age, he wouldn’t have even set foot on some of these streets. He did once, but then he had protection – pimp protection. Back then the South End restaurants would simmer collard greens and chitlings. Today they served caviar on toast points, and the old whorehouses with the bay windows were listed as historic townhouses, and people like Jacob and Rachel lived in them with their art collections and Gaggenau stoves.

Out of nowhere, Jacob remembered the name of the pimp. Moby Dick, they called him. Name of a white whale. Yet this Moby Dick had been black – black as the grand piano Wallace Bennett would be playing – very soon; Jacob checked his watch; Rachel and Susan would have left the restaurant and gone on to Jordan Hall. Dinner was over. The meal had been Zantac for Manny, and nothing for him. As if Jacob was hungry at all, as if he could be hungry at all with his son like this, his son who had a coiled snake biting his insides, his son who was the only person who wore corn rows in Manchester by the Sea; and who never ever felt pain when he was four feet off the ground jamming the orange hoop.

“Rich stuff doesn’t agree with you, right?”

“Rich stuff? We’re rich stuff. You mean I don’t agree with myself?”

“I mean the lobster bisque.” Jacob watched his son pitch forward, bending like a half-open jackknife.

He touched Manny’s back, but Manny shook off the hand.

“How is it now? Tell me.”

“I told you it’s the worst ever. I want to hurl but I can’t even do that. All I can do is walk.”

They reached the corner of Dartmouth Street, not unlike the corner where he had given himself over to Moby Dick. Handed him his ten and two, ten bucks for the girl, two for the room. He had been a virgin – a little younger than Manny was. It was the kind of story a father tells his son, at the right time and place, which was not now. Not now, not ever. It was a white boy’s story, white as the bowl into which the Bonnard’s waiter had ladled the bisque. Manny wasn’t white and he wasn’t black. He was as confusing as his name, Manuel, which Jacob and Rachel had chosen, feeling at the time it was perfect, so fair about everything. Manuel – was it the name of a Jewish boy who lived down a long driveway in New England? Was it the name of a Guatamalan boy from an impoverished orphanage, abandoned in the muck of a jungle road? It will be both, Jacob and Rachel had said, as they carried their new baby from the candle-lit hovel to the waiting car.

Right by the car was the old Indian woman, face like buckskin weathered a hundred years. She stood in the dust, her back twisted and bent, hacking off the skin of oranges and offering them to passing foreigners, the Europeans and Americans. It was a torrid day. Jacob took an orange from her pawing hand and replaced it with coins. She crossed herself and murmured something that was gibberish to Jacob. A nonsense language, Spanish yet not Spanish at all. But somehow the sound and the tone said to Jacob that she and the baby were connected… and to this day he believed in his heart that the old woman on the street was Manny’s blood grandmother.

As they straggled down Dartmouth Street, Jacob saw something pass across Manny’s face. An easing, a retreat of whatever it was that was eating his son alive. Manny stood straight again; he walked with the swagger he always had when there was a basketball in his hand.

“Tell me about the snake.” Jacob said. “Why a rattler?”

“I don’t know if it’s a rattler. Maybe it’s a python. Do we have to talk about this now?”

They reached the huge, darkened Neiman Marcus store on the corner of Dartmouth and Huntington. Jacob had been there before, and so had Manny. It was one of their places, a Rachel and Susan place. It came with the silver Jaguar and the deeded strip of ocean. But decades before it was a Neiman’s it was a crumbling red-brick hulk with bay windows and an occasional bare bulb in the hallways, not enough light to let you see more than a flicker of anything. Jacob remembered following Moby Dick up the creaky, dank stairs and through the murk. He remembered the curtains, and the voice of the woman, smooth and sweet as chocolate, as she undid his belt…

“Dad, we’re way late for the concert. Will Grandma be pissed?”

Pissed? Jacob wasn’t sure she had even noticed they were gone.

He hailed a cab. They reached their seats in Jordan Hall as the intermission ended, moments before Nora Bennett lifted her lily neck and Wallace Bennett struck the familiar chords, plunging the audience into rapt, reverent silence. Then Nora broke into her precious trill. After the ball is over, after the break of day…

When the printed program ended, the encore beggars rose and clapped wildly, keeping the Bennetts onstage so long Nora giddily pointed to her throat. Then Wallace pulled a pocket watch from his tuxedo and said something about the stage manager and exceeding the time allotted in the show’s permit. “It’s Boston, you know…”

Boston. Something about the way he said it – that tuxedoed voice – rattled Jacob like a falling chandelier. It told him what he wanted to do, had to do, and he was in a fervor about announcing it as the four of them left the car and sank into one of Susan’s glorious rooms for the last sip of the evening.

Manny was no tea lover, but he accepted the filigreed cup from Susan, and a biscotti too, and another.

“Sure you can handle that?”

“Hey, let it go, Dad, okay? What’s past is past.”

But it wasn’t past, and Jacob spent the next half hour looking for the right moment to say what he had to say. That he and Manny and Rachel would take the trip they should have taken years ago. Back to the dusty street and the heat, back to where they took the skin from oranges, machete-style. The tea he was drinking could have been opium for all the things he was feeling and seeing – seeing everything as it was and had to be - even the old buckskin woman herself, burnished and eternal, somehow fixed in exactly the same spot as she was nearly two decades ago. At that moment he wanted Manny right there with him, deep inside his mind, seeing what he was seeing, hearing what he was hearing - voices that were a world apart from Nora Bennett’s glassy warbling and Susan’s chandelier chatter. He would show Manny this world because it belonged to him, because to not do so would be robbery…

Jacob raised his hands in front of Susan’s chattering face. He made the movie-director’s cut sign, and had to restrain himself from actually saying the word cut.

“I want to propose a trip,” he said.

And Susan, Rachel – and Manny, too – stared at him, the way people in a shop stare when you’ve broken a teacup.

Rachel spoke first, her tone and look the picture of the wronged shopkeeper.

“Where have you been the last ten minutes? We’ve been planning a trip, Manny’s first trip to Paris. He’ll come when Mom and I go in the Spring. Right, Mom? Right, Manny?”

Manny sipped his tea and nibbled his biscotti. He seemed ecstatic. Susan poured him more tea and he gave her a wide, goofy smile. The look on his face told Jacob he’d better keep quiet.

The List was in a fat, vapid magazine for rich fucks. As far as my life is concerned it would have existed but not existed, like the falling tree in the forest you never see, if someone from my old place of employment hadn’t called and told me I was on it. “You’re on the List,” she said, “did you know?” At the time I was teetering between opening and deleting an email about bargains on powerful drugs. “What list?” I said. And this skinny woman, who used to book my travel, said, “The List, just the List, don’t you know?” I pictured her as I had known her - big Gucci sunglasses, day and night.

My dog, Gwendolyn, never heard of the List. Bent with sore bones, she creaked her way to the front door when she saw me get up from the computer. But I grabbed my coat and left her pleading on the threshold, holding in her poops. “Later,” I said, master to slave. “I’ll be back.”

It was a dirty November day, prematurely dark. The wind threw garbage and dead leaves at everything that moved, the ocean stank, and a bloated pus-ball of a cloud hung over everything - so black and bulging it looked ready to rain ink if a pigeon’s beak so much as pecked it. I steered my last remaining status symbol into the strip mall that had the 7-Eleven, went in and combed the magazine racks. I went at it like an animal foraging for food. But they didn’t have the one I wanted. Louisburg it was called, so said my old travel booker. Named for the arch-Brahmin part of Beacon Hill, with its billionaire brownstones. The publishers also did magazines about the Hamptons and Rodeo Drive. Why would a 7-Eleven customer in the shadow of the Revere Beach dogtrack, fifty feet from Revere’s last peep show, give a rat’s ass about Louisburg?

Back behind the wheel I had a little skiff of dread, not sure whether or not I’d saved all the day’s unopened spam. You never know.

The skinny woman’s name was Valerie, the best I ever had. She used to put me poolside in Santa Monica for the same price as a back-alley broom closet. Once she put me two doors down from Mike Tyson. There was a sunlit morning we shared the private, all-glass elevator coming up from the gym. Last I read, his manager was announcing a world tour where Tyson was going to fight girls.

They let me keep the car, their way of giving me the gold-watch kissoff. But gold ages better than sheet metal. I ride around on balding balloon tires, thick as four fat thighs, and the back seat stinks of Gwendolyn. Not all that long ago, Gwendolyn and I would run six miles on the beach together. She’d be flying, just like she used to fly at the dog track.

From the 7-Eleven strip mall I drove to Richdale, then on to CVS, Walgreens, Cumberland Farms, L’il Peach, Target, every last place I could think of that had a newsstand. Finally I put the whole North Shore behind me and drove through the tunnel into Boston, in search of neighborhoods that smacked of the Louisburg demographic. Gridlock and rush hour traffic slowed me to a crawl. I burned rubber squealing into any open patch of curb I could find: hydrants, fire zones, handicapped spaces. Finally, in the tony South End, I found four copies, and bought them all. While I was paying, the fat cloud broke and released a black torrent. I swaddled the four copies, pressed them to my chest like babies and flew back into the car.

I took off again, but the deluge had strangled the traffic even more. I was creeping down one of those South End streets that still had its bad blocks, its hulking rat mansions the sandblasters wanted no part of. Just ahead of me to the left was a single, street-level row of windows with a few human occupants – a dive diner, and I barreled in.

Over coffee I studied the List, all four columns of it, 96 names in all. Not numbered, not alphabetical. Mine was at the top of the fourth column, above some Wahlberg, not Mark, and after Affleck – yes, it said Ben. There was no copy explaining what the list was. There was no headline other than the words, the List. From the date on the cover I could see that Louisburg had been out a couple of weeks. For all I knew my hands held the last four copies. Who had the others? And who had seen the List – seen my name with Affleck and Wahlberg?

When I finally got home there was a new batch of spam, but no real e-mails. Not a voice on the phone either, not even Valerie checking back with me. Gwendolyn moaned, and finally I took her out to the unlit park, flashlight in hand. Gwendolyn squatted right next to the car, so bound up from waiting that when she finally squeezed something out it was thin as a string. Her bony ass shuddered in the flashlight beam, the hole straining like a mouth that had lost its voice. I stared at the beam and the hole and remembered how Valerie and I would joke before my trips. I remembered one day in particular. I was rushing by her desk and she waved me down and handed me an envelope, all without saying a word. In a flip way, I asked what was in it. Valerie peeked over her Gucci lenses and said, “ a one-way ticket to Armenia.” At the time, I laughed so hard the spit ran onto my chin.

Animal? Harsh I’d say, although Lefky did have what some might call animal ways. He broke a face or two – we all heard the stories. Jaws cracked, noses flattened. He was a soup-slurper, an onion-eater. He was my father.

Lefky’s favorite dish was a whole onion in one hand and half a loaf of torn bread in the other. He’d bite the onion as though it were an apple and dunk the bread in this bowl of meat-grease he called soup. The meat-grease would stick to his beard and Lefky’s dog, whatever alley mutt he’d have at the time, would feed from the beard.

One night Lefky came up the four rotting flights with a parrot. Tatteh, we said, using our Yiddish, can we teach it to speak? That’s the name we called him at home, never Lefky, the name you know from the posters, the ones that show him lifting the front of a beer wagon or applying his feared Russian bearhug. We were in the kitchen with the beat-up linoleum, the mousetraps, and the meat-grease bubbling on the stove. The mutt barked sharply at the parrot and never stopped, not for years, so many years, and the parrot found peace in only one place, the curl of Lefky’s fist. There he perched for as long as Lefky would let him, content at last. Even in its cage the parrot was terrorized. He would cringe in the upper corners as the dog menaced him, leaping and pawing.

This went on and on.

Tatteh, we said, why won’t the parrot speak words? The bird wouldn’t, would not say a single human word. He would only bark. Bark exactly like the mutt barked at him and flap away in terror when the mutt came after him, barking all the while. The chase lasted until past midnight, when Lefky turned in and the dog crept under the bed, right beneath him.

Finally, for its own good, Lefky decided to give the barking parrot away. The mutt he would never give up. He’d sooner give up one of us, we believed.

On the appointed day he had me come along with him. We carried the bird in its cage to the docks, where Lefky handed the cage to a deck hand on the old ferry, the heavy ferry that shuttled the harbor before they built the long, deep tunnel. Even in the open air, the man reeked of smoke. He shook hands and smeared fresh coal dust onto Lefky’s already-blackened sleeve. As the ferry pulled away we turned from the frothing stern, and the parrot cried out. But this time there was no bark. It was a single word the parrot spoke, screaming it again and again. He bent towards us and pushed his beak through the cage wires, crying Tatteh as we made our way down the wharf. Both of us tossed glances over our shoulders, then we turned our backs on him for good. He cried Tatteh until the wake of the ferry separated us forever, and the word swirled into the din of the gulls.

When Philly told his niece about the Stride Rite x-ray machine she got that aha look in her eyes.

It was the rays, she said. That’s what chewed your voice.

Philly wasn’t so sure it was the rays or the machine or anything at the Stride Rite store that chewed his voice. But Ally was all bubbles about sharpening his footwear wardrobe, every time they met. She was a professional and used a professional term: she called it upgrading.

On his last trip east she dragged him into the Puma store and Nike Town and even the Prada store. Once when she came out on America West with a girlfriend she even dragged him off the strip into the cavernous Caesar’s mall, the one with the tourist hordes circling the Roman statues on steroids, and tried to put him in Campers. Those were the shoes that Philly thought looked like bad imitations of old-time sneakers.

The rays, huh, yes, well … you never know, do you. Philly said this in his eeriest gravel voice, his white-guy voice that was Louis Armstrong if you cut a deep gash in the Louis Armstrong record.

It was the voice he just woke up with one day, he said, too many years ago to count.

I guess I’m just a Florsheim guy, Philly said, I am what I am from the ground up.

Philly was a Florsheim guy as was his father before him. Wingtips and oxfords, blacks and oxbloods. Leather soles thick as planks and hard as sidewalks.

They look like bricks on your feet, Ally said. She looked so cute in her orange sneaks. Clydes, she said, though when he quizzed her she hadn’t a clue who the original Clyde was, or even what NBA team he used to play for.

Bricks on your feet isn’t such a bad idea, Philly said, and he was thinking hard about all the ground you cover just being you and what you could tell your niece and what you really shouldn’t.

So he kept to the subject of shoe brands, something Ally could dwell on since she was a fashionista - a word he had learned from cable TV- and not just a fashionista but an associate at Saks shoes in Copley Place. He cabbed in from Logan and took her for lunch at the big Cheesecake Factory on Huntington just up from Symphony Hall - where the last thing she’d let herself eat was the cheesecake – and asked her if she’d heard of Buster Brown. It was the only make he’d ever worn except for those baby Stride Rites and, of course, Florsheim.

Long ago, he said, Buster Brown was the boys’ Florsheim.

Buster Brown, he lives in a shoe. That’s my dog Tighe. He lives there too.

While eating his cheesecake he sang the jingle. But, as usual, any singing he did came out like Louis Armstrong with strep.

The waitress, who was delivering new chai to Ally, suggested he clear his throat.

There’s nothing to clear, Philly said.

It’s his voice, Ally said. They made it that way at the Stride Rite store. They used to stick kids’ feet in these x-ray machines, just to get the sizes. They’d go to jail for that today.

The waitress looked at Ally as though she were a candidate for the daft house. She grabbed the old chai glass and moved off into the lunch crowd.

Hogans, said Ally, watching the waitress’s ankle-backs as she hightailed away. Now how can a waitress in the Cheesecake Factory afford Hogans? I have to save up for them, and I get the Saks discount.

She nibbled the last strands of her seaweed salad.

Philly’s ears were still blocked from the flight into Logan and he thought Ally’d said Hoagies. He thought of the Hoagies his old man used to make. Yay long and enough onions to burn your heart for a week.

You had to have the heart of a cop to eat one of those things, his old man used to say. He’d say it as he shook vinegar on the Hoagies. Enough to scour away the tattoos that ran up both arms of McGuirk, that old Navy line cook of his. McGuirk the Papist, in truth, made better, crispier gribenes than Philly’s mother. And his jellied cow’s foot killed her jellied cow’s foot, no contest at all.

With that sweet voice of yours you won’t be working in the deli, you’ll be a cantor some day, his mother used to tell Philly. So she enrolled him in Hebrew School with hopes for Hebrew Teachers College. Then she took him to the Stride Rite store for new Buster Browns. The x-ray machine had jazzy stripes and swirls. It was about the size of a juke box, with two holes in the bottom where the salesman had Philly put his feet. They all looked into the viewing compartment on top and saw his foot bones, glowing green.

There were no rad restrictions in those days. Who knew what setting they had on the machine?

Before flying back for his blackjack shift at The Aladdin, Philly bought Ally some Hogans and some Jimmy Choos as well, just because she looked so cute in them. He peeled off five hundred. They asked for three hundred more.

You could have been a cantor, Ally said, twisting to check her ankle-backs in the shoe department mirror. All my aunts say so, she said.

On one ankle, just to the right side, was a tiny tattoo of a rose. Philly smiled, thinking back.

What’s to complain about? Philly said this as he finished peeling off the century notes. He said it in a voice that could slice cheesecake and shred the plate it was on too. But Ally loved that voice. It spoke of the flames shooting out of the man-made volcano in front of the Mirage. It had the echo of the waiter’s blowtorch igniting the Cherries Jubilee at Spago’s in the Caesar’s Palace mall. It told Ally she had bigger fish to fry than the sales floor at Saks, Boston.

Another day of eternity at the Bullseye. Gary charged into the mall and pushed through the smeared glass door into the front office, where the day’s respondents were shoveling heaps of knockoff Cremora into their styrofoam cups of free watery coffee. He did his best to convey an investigative poker face as he rushed by them. But even the temp at the desk knew he was late and sneered. Technically, the respondents weren’t supposed to lay eyes upon
the interviewer until they entered the room with the mirror. The boss wasn’t around. If he had been, he would have pounded his fist at Gary and threatened to wipe “Executive” off the face of his business card.

Gary vowed to get the boss. Not now, but some day, some way.

Among the responsibilities his boss categorized as executive was helping make sure the facility looked professional, so clients wouldn’t think they were in a pig sty. No time for that today. Gary had to whizz something awful. He dashed into the small washroom reserved for interviewers and clients. The wastebasket was overflowing with yesterday’s balled up paper towels and the cracked tile floor around the toilet looked like it had been pissed on more than the bowl.

Gary zipped up, ran his fingertips under the cold water, stepped out and gave the high sign to the temp, indicating she could send in the first victim. The temp stomped over and hissed that his panel of women shoppers, dragooned out of the mall with the promise of free gift certificates, had been waiting so long they were threatening violence. “Chill,” he declared, and shut a door in her face as he stepped into his mirrored cube, where he confronted yet another overflowing wastebasket. But he was onstage now and pretended the crap wasn’t even there. With eight or nine bigwigs watching on the other side of the glass his every move had to be crisp and clean. It was the code of the profession. The itch in his nose - and the booger too, if there was one - would have to wait.

Gary logged on to his computer, opened the questionnaire and cued up the commercials in his tape machine, three-quarter inch for clarity. The door opened and in walked respondent number one. She could barely fit in the cube. Her dress, black with yellow sunflowers, looked big enough to cover the waiting room couch. This may have surprised the crowd behind the mirror, but not Gary. Today’s subject, after all, was women’s fashion. Whenever it was, you could lay odds the Consumer Bullseye screeners would manage to round up enough five-hundred pounders to fill a corral. These, the bio sheets always claimed, were “typical apparel shoppers.”

He plunged into his “process” without so much as a handshake, a hello or a smile. He merely stood up and pointed to the ass-worn office chair placed strategically close to the corner of his table desk. Once the respondent had squeezed in, he pushed the black, saucer-shaped table mike to a spot where they could easily share it - like an ashtray - and began talking verbatim off the type displayed on the screen of his monitor. That was the idea - pure and total objectivity. No ad-libbed pleasantries or spontaneous editorializing. Everything Gary said from beginning to end was right off the script of his questionnaire. A speech made to an audience of one. This technique also cut eye contact to a minimum. All the better from the perspective of scientific neutrality.

“Good morning,” he began, reading aloud in a pleasant, scientifically neutral voice. “Thanks for joining us today. We’re sure you will find the next thirty minutes both interesting and enjoyable. In just a moment you’ll be seeing some television advertising. I’m actually going to show you two commercials which are part of the same campaign. As you watch, please keep in mind what the advertising would look like if you were watching it at home on television. Please keep both commercials in mind during our interview.”

Gary reached over to his right and pushed the play button. “And now,” he said, raising his reading voice slightly, “here are the commercials.”

He played the two spots. They sucked. Low-rent actresses playing moms and secretaries, bragging to their friends about the awesome bargains they found at the chain store. The chain store was called The Runway. Why any woman would want her fashion image to be associated with a runway was lost on Gary.

He shut the tape player off, turned back to his terminal and scrolled to the next paragraph. This was the one he loved to read, annunciating like an automaton. “In terms of the way they went about presenting their message, how clear and understandable were the commercials? Would you say very clear and easy to understand… Somewhat clear and easy to understand … Somewhat unclear or hard to understand … Very unclear or hard to understand?”

The only response that issued from the gigantic sunflower dress was labored breathing, the sounds of a major mental struggle. Gary kept his eyes neutrally glued to the screen. Still, he couldn’t miss seeing the king-size bosom, like a pair of fluffy pillows in raucous sunflower pillowslips, pour onto the desk and push against the table mike. He thought about how that must have sounded to the group behind the mirror. He hoped they had the volume on high.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the woman peering at his screen.

“Shall I repeat the question?” he asked.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll take the first one.”

Gary marked the answer - the highest possible mark - and went on. “Now, please tell me what happened to you as you watched…”

But she stopped him in mid sentence - suddenly agitated. “Why can’t they just show the clothes? Why do they need all that stupid talk? Talk talk talk. I have no idea what they were talking about. Do you?”

Gary met this outburst with smooth scientific neutrality. He knew exactly what to say. The words were there - spelled out for him right on the screen. “Now please tell me how believable are the women in these commercials. Very believable… Somewhat believable… Somewhat unbelievable…”

The approach worked. The woman settled back, her eyes as opaque as the one-way mirror. When she said nothing he asked, once again, if she wanted him to repeat the question.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll take the first one.”

He wrapped up the interview and got ready for the next victim, expecting 747 number two. What he got instead was the exact opposite. A stick figure with sad eyes and frosted hair. A fashion waif – for once, the screeners had found someone who actually was right for the subject being researched. She in fact did have the physique of models you see on the runway - long, bony limbs and zero body fat - although her hair came straight out of Nails ‘n Tresses in the mall. Gary thought of Audrey Hepburn kidnapped by the Grand Old Opry.
Without thinking about it, he broke the professional code. He stood up. He extended a somewhat courtly greeting, helping her into the well-warmed chair. The pink skirt sat well above her skinny knees, creating a thigh shot that was rare in the J.C. Penney mall. Gary’s inner voice scolded him for making more eye contact than was scientifically appropriate. Behind the mirror, the research police could get very pissed. The boss might hear about it later. If the cheeses were assholes, they could even pull the job.

But giving her a close inspection did get one thing off his mind. Beauty-wise, this was no Audrey Hepburn. This wasn’t even her third cousin.

“Good morning,” he said, reading right off the prompter on his terminal. “Thanks for joining us today. We’re sure you will find the next thirty minutes both interesting and enjoyable. In just a moment you’ll be seeing some television advertising. I’m actually going to show you two commercials which are part of the same campaign. As you watch, please keep in mind what the advertising would look like if you were watching it at home on television. Please keep both commercials in mind during our interview.”

Once again, the Runway spots played verbosely on the screen above. Gary sensed an opening when no eyes were on him, and he coyly tucked his head in and down and away from the mirror. In this hunchback posture he whipped out a business card and deftly employed the corner to dig at his molars. The dried carrot from the veggie bagel - a plague since breakfast at Donut D’Lite - was out in two seconds.

At the conclusion of the interview the respondent did something straight out of a horny fantasy. She slipped Gary a folded-up scrap of paper as she stood up and walked away. The respondent then executed a cool little wiggle to mark her disappearance into the universe. The tight pink skirt lingered in his field of vision, like the afterburn of a flashbulb. He was still squinting as respondent number three waddled in.

He stuffed the wad of paper in his brown pants and waded through interviews with four more “typical apparel shoppers.” Then the client had him do three more. The agony refused to end. And if he wanted to dine on the house, waiting for him in the grungy kitchenette was a plate of microwaved lasagna not fit to be served at a zoo.

Finally, they let him go and he shot into the client rest room for another pent-up whizz. Back of the one-way mirror, they must have been swigging beer with their fake Twizzlers. Oceans of it. He stood in the tide of piss and litter and unwrapped his message. All it had was a scribbled phone number and a smiley face, both in ballpoint. For a smiley face it was weird. Something about it was sorrowful.

Gary had an hour break before the evening interviews. He put on his scientific poker face, barreled through the waiting room and exited to the mall. Instantly he flipped open his phone. But before he could punch in her number he felt her on his elbow, clawing like a small bird with her pink, pointy nails.

“Didn’t you even see me? I was sitting right there. You just blew by.”

By the time they got to Master Wok in the food court, Gary had found out the basics. Her name was Nancy Crumm. Her occupation was in the entertainment and catering fields. “You can’t really call it one or the other,” she said, not exactly in an upbeat way. “I’ve got my feet in both.”

“What about the other body parts?” Gary joked. And the sad eyes got even sadder.

She had had a big former life with the airlines. At one point she even flew transoceanic. A year on the crew to Dublin, two to Sydney. But when her mom died she deplaned for good. To take care of her dad, who could still drive the streets with a handicapped plate, but required a live-in at home. “That says it about me,” she said. “I play out and live in.”

Gary dipped his wedge of Crab Rangoon into the sweet and sour sauce. “I can see you up in First Class serving the martinis,” he said, remembering her wiggling exit from his cube. “You move well in small spaces.” Nancy accepted this without comment, pushed aside the fried rice and dug into the veggie delight. For her, digging in meant spearing a bean sprout. Gary shoveled a mound of pork, rice and shrimp into his face and wondered if she was anorexic.
But not for long. His hour was up.

Back at Consumer Bullseye, the temp from Hell had more salt to throw in his wounds. She produced an envelope. Some brownnose had organized a collection for the boss’s birthday next week. The temp snickered that at Gary’s level he was expected to kick in ten dollars. “Minimum,” she said. “Executives can afford more - and he knows it.” After kicking in the ten Gary had to run and smoke weed in the car to cool his blood pressure. He smoked and fumed. Consumer Bullseye sucked to the nines. It had more kiss-ass workers than anywhere else on earth.

---

The very next day. Early. The two-seater and four-seater tables in front of Sbarros were just starting to fill up. Gary snagged a four-seater, put a foot up on one of the plastic chairs and scribbled on the white space of a tomato-stained National Enquirer. He didn’t mind waiting for her. Anything, anything, that got him out of the cube.He made two columns, death and life. The boss he put under death, definitely, because the boss was a death person. The boss would stick it up anyone’s ass, utterly unconcerned about consequences. You could have a gun in his ear. He’d still can you and call your mother a fuckhole to boot. Himself he put under life. Gary was a life person because he was living life as though death would never come, wasting all his time in the shittiest of shit jobs, as though time went on forever. Nancy he started to put down under life, but he stopped mid-way. He couldn’t pin her down, not yet.

The perfume index today was even higher than yesterday. He smelled her before he saw her. She made her entrance in stick figure fishnets, grabbing the eyeballs of the kids wiping tables and stacking trays. She was the queen in her food court.

He took time watching the black seams as she wiggle-walked back with her tray of rabbit food. But not for love or money could he push a piece of pizza down Nancy’s thin throat. Not with a steam shovel. She had her no-cal dressing on the side and ate her shredded lettuce out from under the onions and the black olives. But she seemed to like it when he gorged on the fat and cheese. The more he tossed down the merrier. Her sad eyes gleamed with victory as he inhaled the pepperoni disks.

Then they smoked and she let him commit verbal mayhem on the boss.

“The maggot-assed swillbucket. I hope he dies on his birthday.”

Gary assumed she was agreeing with him as she puffed away in sad silence, rat-tat-tatting her pink fingernails on the food court table.

But he soon learned Nancy Crumm was only diligently doing her night job. Being entrepreneurial. Adding and subtracting. Gary’s announcing he had been held up for a $10 kitty contribution – and that the whole Consumer Bullseye work force had been similarly mugged – this had Nancy’s abacus clicking.

“How much do you think is in the kitty?” she asked, lighting up number three with her pink Bic.

He did the math in his head. Sizing up the fat wallets of the financial guys, the salesmen. Guess-timating the thin wallets of the screeners, the other interviewers, the backroom clericals. With the brownnose factor jacking everything, there could be a good grand and a half in the envelope.

“Let me tell you what I do,” she said, taking a long, dreary drag. “The good news is it gives Dad a chance to get out of the house. He always drives me. I wouldn’t feel safe with anyone else.”

For a full ten minutes Gary stayed quiet and listened, all ears. Then he marched out into the teeming midway aisle of the mall on his new mission, determined not to screw this one up. He had some selling to do, but he could do it. When the lights came on and they surprised the boss there’d be the usual cake and candles. But there’d also be the world’s boniest stripper dancing in his fat lap.

---

Two days before the big bash Gary was in Gentlemen’s Wearhouse, picking out a new brown party suit. It was executive all the way - from collar to cuff. The cell rang just as the tailor started to pin him. It was the temp from Hell giving him the all-clear on Nancy.At the stoplight, he put it in reverse when he meant to go forward. That was the first mistake. Then he forgot to duck when the pissed-off shit in the bruised Lexus threw the big right hand. All over a ding Gary put in his chrome no larger than a quarter.

Returning to the mall, Gary saw his punched eye staring back at him, reflected on the big glass door. Definitely not party pretty; and he heard about it later from the new gang of clients behind the one-way mirror. They were back there in the safe, anonymous darkness, snarfing the knockoff M&Ms, lusting for insights about biodegradable garbage bags. They had the gall to bitch that his shiner was a distraction for the respondents, a variable that could invalidate the whole garbage bag survey. The way they ranted and raved he was sure they would run to the boss.

Having the face of a Cyclops was a tough break, but it couldn’t change the boss’s birthdate. The big night came and he crawled into Nancy’s dad’s ancient Toronado like a beaten, blackeyed dog. She had invited him to come along because he was “such a special friend.” Normally she allowed no one in the car on worknights but her dad.

“To do this I have to be relaxed,” she said. “Dad doesn’t threaten me. And you don’t either.”

Gary didn’t know whether that was good news or bad. Nancy’s father was over eighty and deaf as a post. The two men were up front. The back seat served as Nancy’s dressing room. He was aware of her primping and spraying as they rode, and the Dad straddling the line, keeping a bald Toronado tire in each of the two lanes.

“What do you have on?” he asked. He pictured her surrounded by pasties, strings, straps. Lots of stuff to unhook.

“Just a coat. And shoes.”

“That’s it?” He glanced nervously at the father. The father didn’t bat an eye.

“That’s it,” she said. “My act is about the element of surprise.”

They pulled up at a traffic light, sandwiched between eighteen-wheelers. For the horny guys up in the cabs there was a box seat view.

“Does your father know where he’s going?”

“He knows where the mall is, if that’s what you mean.” A burst of perfume fogged the windows. Or else it was her body heat.

But in the right circumstances - and this was it - a handicapped plate can be a big help. Gary had a much shorter distance to cover escorting a butt-naked lady through the hordes converging for Twenty Percent Madness Night. The truth was, in her long purple fake fur she looked like just another soccer mom - who just happened to have gone insane and colorblind at Frugal Fannie’s.

The Dad was an old pro at the chauffeur role. He didn’t even make an attempt to get out and come along. Gary glanced back with his good eye just as they hit the sidewalk. The Dad’s head was back and his nose was in the air.

Gary wondered if he should go back and crack a window. The Dad was bony just like his daughter. But his skin was ancient. In that nose-up position he seemed like one of those frozen men they pull out after ten thousand years.

“He okay?”

“Long as I bring him back a jelly doughnut. Just let him hibernate. He loves sleeping in parking lots.”

Gary had done his homework. Now it was time for the test. As he had arranged it, there was a wall-to-wall crowd of employees in the biggest of the mirrored rooms, the one Consumer Bullseye used exclusively for large focus groups. While Nancy hid in his cube, Gary herded the crowd out of the room into the dark space behind the one way mirror.

Word came from a scout with a walkie talkie phone that the boss was on his way down, moving fast. The come-on they’d used was a bogus Budweiser project – testing urban imagery with Latinos - as if Budweiser would ever come to a dumpster like Consumer Bullseye. The e-mail told the boss it was rumored one of the Busch sons would show up, a kid Busch they were grooming to take over Mexico.

Everything went according to plan. The workers behind the mirror stood still as stone and held their breath, watching as the boss bulled into the fully lit, empty focus room. His face fell when he found no one there. No Busch, not even a research grunt low on the Anheuser totem pole.

The boss sat down scowling and fidgeted with his watch. As the seconds ticked you could see he wanted to find someone and shoot them for wasting his time. He picked up a yellow pencil and snapped it in two. When he began to look truly homicidal Gary hit the switch and unleashed Nancy’s personal CD. It was the kind of gooey rug you hear under late night porn or at the dentist’s office. But it perked the boss up, and he looked straight at the door. As the tenor sax made a particularly raunchy squeal the door flew open and in she came, a whirling dervish in purple fake fur. Then the fur hit the floor and released bedlam. They all poured in from the back and screamed Happy Birthday just as Nancy pounced on his lap.

“You did meet a Busch,” someone shouted. “It’s just spelled different.”

Gary swam with the crowd into the focus room and got as close to the action as he could. Too close. A stripper was one thing in a strip club, where there were beams of blue and red light to cover the hairy moles and ass pimples. But office lighting was something else. It made Nancy look like some deranged rape victim, all bones and veins and goosebumps. The only undressed person in a room of normal-looking white collar workers - of both genders. Even her scraggly crotch hair looked anorexic, and her arms and legs were the pale bluish gray of frozen turkey wings.

Gary wanted to throw his suit jacket over her hollow shoulderblades and rush her back to the car.

As it turned out, it would have been better if the boss had blown his top and fired Gary on the spot. Just canned him in front of everyone for orchestrating lewdness in the workplace. He would have gone out like a hero, flipping the bird at Bigdome with both hands.

Instead, the boss did the exact opposite. He not only loved it all, he lapped it up like a horny pig. He even made Nancy climb on him for an encore after they ate the cake. Gary’s esteemed associates roared and stamped their feet.

The boss wasn’t one to forget a good time. That night Gary went home with Nancy’s father, and Nancy went home with the boss. She paid an obligatory visit to the car (minus the jelly doughnut) to wake the duffer up and explain things. But it wasn’t necessary. As far as he was concerned, Gary was the front seat passenger on both the arrival and departure legs, therefore all was normal. As before, he drove on command, and somehow found his way.

But something unsettled Gary even more than being jilted and left to ride home with a driver who was as dessicated as a fossil in a rock. After Nancy lap-danced the boss he gave her one of his business cards, and even wrote something on it. Whatever he wrote was compelling enough to bring a sneaky grin to her face – and a good five minutes of huddling, cuddling and conspiring, just the two of them.

The upshot came soon enough. After a particularly grueling day in front of the all-seeing mirror – a day in which he succumbed and publicly chased an inner ear itch with a pencil eraser - Gary was summoned by the temp from Hell. She sent him on high to the boss’s private chambers. As he ascended the carpeted steps, so spotlessly blue, he sniffed a familiar scent, thick as swamp flowers. At the top stood two fishnetted stick legs, also familiar.

“This way,” said Nancy, her voice a sharp icicle that stabbed him where it hurt. Without another word she led him into the kahuna’s domain, and she stayed and watched as Gary writhed on the hot coals of demotion. “You want that word ‘executive’ back, you earn it,” the cheese proclaimed.

As the months went by, Nancy rose through the ranks and became office manager. She worked upstairs, the only other executive besides Mr. Shit himself to have a corner window. She still wore the fishnets once in a while. But in general, she began to wear ever more prim black outfits, and her once-pink nails turned a severe blackish red. She issued a fusillade of humiliating memos about tidiness and proper executive behavior. Whenever the client bathroom was a little grungy Gary was sure to get a stinging e-mail from either her or the boss, or both.

Occasionally, without even letting him know, Nancy and the boss would join the clients behind the one-way mirror. They would watch Gary’s every move and later attack his behavior.

There wasn’t a thing he could do about it, either. The simple fact was, they were on one side of the mirror, the side with the glass you could see through, and he was on the other. The side that relentlessly glared.

It was more proof of how death people always have the advantage.

The Jewish year was 5702, but in Boston it was still mostly 1963. Shavuot was the day Herschel Kohn, Philly’s father, had picked to hit the Revere Beach white way with McGuirk, his cook. After copious clams and ale and fan dancers he elected to get the word Bunny, furled in circus letters around a grinning rabbit, tattoed on his pastrami-carving arm. Bunny was what they’d called Philly’s mother at Dorchester High. But after they broke the glass and she joined the Hadassah board she wanted to be Bertha and only Bertha. And, even more than that, she wanted her first-born son to attend Hebrew Teachers College and become a cantor – that’s how beautiful a voice Philly had. Beautiful from the day he was born.

Now we can’t be buried together, Bertha screamed at Herschel. They won’t sell us a plot. Forty years old, he defiles his flesh. And I was in temple– with the kid.

Philly listened in on the screaming and wished he had been out of temple and off in Revere with his old man and McGuirk.

From that day on, Herschel was never again seen at a family gathering wearing a short-sleeved shirt. But all the same, word of the tattoo leaked out and reached Philly’s doctor uncle, Mitchell Schromstein, the big ear, nose and throat man. On the occasion of Dr. Schromstein’s daughter’s wedding, Herschel rented a nice tux and kept his cufflinks on. Still, every time he crossed the dance floor to the Schromstein table the doctor put his nose so high in the air Herschel could see right up the nostrils. To the brain pan. Herschel swore it was true. On my honor as a Jew, Philly overheard him say to Bertha, I poured him a glass of slivovitz, and he wouldn’t drink with me.

You defiled your flesh, that’s why, was his mother’s snarling answer. He’s a doctor, he knows. You can’t hide it from him with a tux.

Philly next saw his doctor uncle at his own Bar Mitzvah, when he was just starting to develop his tonsillitis. His voice was still sweet as a flute – a flute played in Heaven - even though it smarted every time he went up high and attempted vibrato.

After the service Dr. Schromstein hunted him down. He had the look of a warden or a truant officer or a fierce prophet. He buttonholed Philly in the vestry and put an arm on his shoulder.

You did well up there, he said, you’ve learned your alephs and gimmels. But your father… that thing on his arm is as a big as a yarmulke.

He paused and said no more, but the way he rolled his eyes said that doctors do indeed have X-ray vision – and the way his nose rose said even more: If you need a Jewish father, a real one, talk to me. You have my love, you have my pity.

Philly would never forget how the doctor uncle put his proboscis in the air and swept out of the vestry, like an avenging angel taking off for heaven on high.

Not a week after his Bar Mitzvah, Philly was back in the deli, bussing tables in spite of the pain. On either side of his Adam’s Apple were two balloons, and each time he swallowed it was like battery acid going down.

He watched Foley the cop barrel up to the counter. It was the slow part of the afternoon. His old man was behind the glass, wiping down the slicing machine and the steamtable. He had on his short-sleeved whites, and his Bunny tattoo shimmied on the thick part of his arm as he worked the ammonia onto the stainless steel with the cloth.

Philly’s tonsils were raging and the old man was depressed – for reasons that had nothing to do with tonsils. He was in a mood to murder Kindelman’s, the bakery that baked his rolls. For Herschel, it was a dark day if the rolls came in too big. This day they had sent over ten dozen, each and every one bloated like a football.

Fill up a roll that size with meat and I’m in the poorhouse, the old man said. The rule was 3.5 ounces per Hoagie, but not as determined by anything as scientific as a meat scale. Your fingers had to be the scale, and if they were off by the merest smidge, the old man would attack.

You’re killing me, he would say.

When the rolls had come in, Herschel held one up as though he were displaying a genetic monster. He sliced the roll, picked up 3.5 ounces of cold cuts and slipped them in the pocket. The roll swallowed the cold cuts and still looked empty. Philly looked at the roll and felt it was the approximate size of one of his tonsils.

Even as cops go, Foley was big. And notorious for his side business, which worked as follows:

He would wait in hiding at the side of a stop sign. When drivers ran the sign he’d bag them and conduct an on-the-spot trial. The fine was two bucks cash, direct from the driver’s billfold to Foley’s. Therefore the world knew him as Two-Buck Foley.

Two-Buck Foley had a tried and true way of protecting his profit margins. He never paid for what he ate, never even offered. His diet was as predictable as a rhino’s. He subsisted on Hoagies, morning, noon and night.

Philly watched Herschel drop the cloth and stiffen as Foley leaned over the counter and pointed to the biggest of the bloated rolls. That one, he said, and stuff it.

The old man said nothing. His fingers picked up 3.5 ounces, no more and no less. They were incapable of doing otherwise. Once again the roll swallowed the cold cuts and looked as empty as it had in the Kindelman’s box. He threw in a heavy fistful of onions and lettuce, making sure some hunks and leaves protruded. Vinegar was cheap, and the old man squirted on so much it could have cut all the grease on the six glass panels of the counter. Then he plated the sandwich, set a quarter-pickle to the side of it and presented it to Foley on a brown tray.

Coffee with that? Cream?

Foley’s left hand curled into a ham-fist, while his right gripped the black nightstick hitched to his hip. What are you trying to pull? If I wanted a roll I would have asked for a roll. I want a Hoagie, not a roll. Now stuff it – with meat – or you can stuff your victualer’s license.

Philly watched the old man and Foley lock eyeballs, an encounter he had never seen before. What Foley wanted Foley got – it was the house rule. But never before had a roll of such gigantic proportions been part of the picture, and this time the old man was different. He reached to take the roll back but his fingers froze. They froze so long Philly thought Foley was going to rap them with his nightstick.

Finally the old man spoke, but whatever had come over him made it impossible for him to merely speak. He roared.

Eat your graft or get out of my store, he said. You’re nothing but a goddam cop.

Of all the days of Philly’s life, this was the day he was proudest of the old man. No nightstick came out and no mayhem ensued. Foley merely pointed to the coffee urn and said two hits of the creamer. Then he took his tray and sat down, the way a lion sits down when the lion tamer tells him to. For a few minutes at least, Philly was able to forget his swollen throat, because his chest was swollen with admiration.

That night, his mother made him say aahh and told him it was only a matter of time. Time being the dwindling number of days before she gave him over to her brother to scalpel the two bulging masses out of his neck. Even McGuirk said he should do it when Philly couldn’t swallow McGuirk’s flanken with chrain, which was another dish of his that beat Bertha’s official Jewish version silly. Look at you, said the old gravy wrangler from the carrier S.S. Wasp, palpating Philly’s brow as though he were checking in on a roast. You’re red as blood. That fever could melt your brain.

Those were the days when Dr.Schromstein was slicing as many tonsils as Herschel was slicing corned briskets. When he wasn’t operating – on Saturdays, of course – he was binding his tattoo-free arms in phylacteries and presiding over the holiness of his home.

One evening Philly heard his mother say the words “family discount” into the phone, and the very next day, at near dawn, she hustled him off on a trolley odyssey that ended at a small, dreary hospital high on a hill, at the bottom of which was a row of pawn shops and human beings asleep on the littered sidewalk.

No sooner did Philly, in his shiny Buster Browns, set foot in the ward than he was accosted by an orderly, a real County Clare carrot-top, pushing an empty wheelchair.

Let’s go, sonny, the orderly said. Dr. Schromstein’s ready for you. Sit and I’ll take you in.

Bertha flapped her arms. Shouldn’t he change out of his clothes? Doesn’t he get a johnny?

No time for that, said the orderly. Let him just sit. He’ll be fine.

Not even his shoes?

He’ll be fine.

Moments later, in full street clothes and tied shoes, Philly rolled into a grim room that smelled like a germicide factory. His uncle, as usual, had a skullcap on his head, only this time it was the same grayish green as the rest of his outfit.

He stood right in front of the wheelchair and leaned over with that avenging angel look of his, same as that day in the vestry.

I hope your father didn’t give you pig grease yesterday, he said. It will make you sick when you wake up.

Philly felt the rage roll over him, straight up from the soles of his shoes. But what could he say? In a flash his uncle cupped something over his nose and mouth - a wet, acrid rag in a wire cone, and it quickly began to suffocate him.

Let me hear you count to thirty, the gray-green skullcap said. But Philly was too enraged, and too busy trying to breathe. He pushed to stand up, but strong hands from somewhere pushed him back into the wheelchair.

Philly and Buster Brown responded together – and hard.

With the shoe of his right foot he unleashed the kick of his life, straight into the two balls of the man who was not only insulting his old man, but attempting to murder him in a hospital.

Whatever the outcome, Philly knew he had struck paydirt. The last sound he heard, just as the black ocean rose to swallow him, was Dr. Schromstein’s sharp shriek, followed by a long, bellowing howl.

Everyone knew having your tonsils out was no fun, and they had made no bones about giving Philly their bleak opinions. When you wake up, you’ll swear some janitor poured plumber’s lye down your throat, was the way Herschel had put it.

Bad as it was swallowing, it was even worse when Philly broke through the black bog of ether, fought off the tangled bedsheets and tried to speak. The rasp raised the hairs on his mother’s back.

Eat ice cream, she said, slamming his teeth with a tin spoon of cold vanilla. Tomorrow you’ll sound better. You’ll see.

In the corner was the carrot-top orderly, rolling out the wheel chair, his orange eyebrows cocked in an odd way.

Next day, if anything, Philly sounded even worse. Eat lime jello, said Bertha, ramming his incisors with a tin spoon of green slime, and don’t talk all day. The carrot-top orderly, shaking his head, scuttled off with the bed pan.

Six months later, Philly’s throat was fully healed, as far as pain was concerned. He could have eaten a porcupine. But when he spoke – or, worse, sang – the sound was no different than the moment he came out of the operation.

Bertha wrung her hands. Herschel shrugged.

If I can’t be a cantor, Philly said, why Hebrew Teachers College? What’s the point?

Then came the day he was hauling a sack of onions up from the cellar. McGuirk shot out a tattooed arm, straight as a railroad crossing gate. He asked, do you remember your orderly in the ward, and was his hair the color of Orange Crush?

Turned out the carrot-top was McGuirk’s cousin Mulvihill.

From Mulvihill, who didn’t miss a trick at the decrepit and nearly condemnable Powder Hill Hospital, McGuirk learned what Dr.Schromstein had done as payback for the shod foot uncorked on his groin.

He snipped something from your voice box, sonny, McGuirk said. Your warbling days are over. Kiss them goodbye.

For the next three years, Philly and McGuirk drew closer. In the dead hour before the dinner rush they played blackjack, and McGuirk spun tales of the west, where he had been an Aladdin line cook. He taught Philly the blackjack language, phrases like spit in the ocean and through the goalposts.

After high school, Philly kissed Boston goodbye too and never looked back, except for the occasional family visit when he got the right package out of Vegas. He had a new life, in which he could never be a cantor. But then again, in his old life he never could have made Hoagies for Frankie S., or been a regular ranch guest of Wayne.

Newton that is.

Right after the first pothole Robert’s showers began to change. He showered less and he stopped using any soap. The soap bar stayed in his dish, round and smooth as it was the day it came out of the package. After a couple of weeks it was twice as big as the bar in his wife’s dish, and it was only a matter of time before she came at him.

“What’s the deal, Robert? This is unacceptable.”

He was dripping wet, stupidly aware that Caitlin had been standing right outside the glass shower door looking at him. For how long he didn’t know. Perhaps since the very moment he stepped in.

“Unacceptable? I’m not following you.”

She had opened the bathroom window, perhaps to cleanse the place of him. Her onslaught, coupled with the rush of brisk air, threw a shiver over his back. He reached around her, grabbed a big towel and covered himself.

“It’s unacceptable when someone acts deranged.”

“At least you said acts.”

“I’m not so sure that’s what I meant. This behavior is deranged.”

He didn’t say what entered his mind at that moment, because he was afraid to.

If you want to see really deranged you should have seen me the other day at the car dealer’s.

But maybe he didn’t have to say it, maybe Caitlin already sniffed something was up. She had the nose for it, she knew who she had married – and she certainly took enough opportunity to remind him of it. Who could blame her? For years there had been Feeney, with his wallet badge, beer face and holster bulge – not the worst of them by any means - and then there had been Caitlin. Justice has its ways.

She had to get to school early – some appointment with the guidance counselors – but the argument wasn’t over by any means. She would nail him later in the corridors of his home, much as he pictured her nailing one of the punks she taught, or attempted to teach.

“You expect me to sleep next to you. You expect me to put my…”

That was after pothole number two, which came in the third soapless week. He could almost see her Freudian wheels turn. She was developing theories about him. Caitlin taught American history, but her minor had been in psychology.

“I know what it is. It’s the dirt. You feel it creeping over you, don’t you?”

“I’m due halfway across the country by noon. Do we have to solve this now?”

“We haven’t solved it for fourteen years. Now it’s seeping out of you, like effluent.”

“What do you mean we? You never lived in a cage. They never slammed you against a stone wall and rammed a…”

“I’m the one who took the chance – on you. I bet my whole life, my children’s lives…”

“Our children. I was around for that, I still am, and I pay my way too. Unless I can’t count, I pay their way too.”

“Don’t shove your paycheck at me. I make one too.”

His hands were like ice as he wrapped them around the suitcase handle. But he wanted to stand up to her, even if he had to stage-play it.

“Then don’t shove your face at me. Like a guard,” he said. “I don’t like guards…”

“I know what you want, Robert. You want me to wash your mouth out with soap and water. Wash the dirt out. Well I won’t. I’m your wife, Robert. I’m not your mother.”

Then she told him that her “guidance counselor” appointment had really been with the school psychologist, her friend and confidante, and that it was so totally clear he was “overdue” for therapy. “Therapy or else,” Caitlin found the nerve to say, screaming and hounding him out the door, embarrassing him in front of the car service driver.

He hated car-service vehicles, with their stale decanters and squishy, fishtailing rear ends. To Robert a limo was not a luxury but a necessity. After two flats in a month he didn’t trust his own car, shiny and new and ultra-tech – his gift to himself for beating all the company numbers - not in the winter, not when he really had to be somewhere on time. When they went to skimpy, low-profile tires they must have written off Greater Boston, where the winter roads were like pothole landmines.

“All I do all day long is put on new Michelins and Continentals,” said Darrell Sitka, the service rep they gave him at the Benz dealership when the first rep left and went over to BMW. “Believe me, it isn’t you or your driving. Everybody’s blowing out once or twice. But it’s a good thing you bought the tire insurance. Short money, that’s what this tire insurance is. Short money.”

It was hard to listen, or act like he was listening. The first day Robert walked through the showroom and stared at Darrell through the glass office door he nearly crashed into it, forgetting there was any glass at all. On the desk was a paperweight, and there was no mistaking the name on it. It was one of those squares of chrome honoring the employee of the month, the name embossed in big type.

His time in the juvenile stir had taught Robert to strike first and fast, even when your opponent was bigger. And in this case, fatter. Darrell Sitka was built like a sofa, thick-framed and florid. He bulged and sagged and looked like he sat on his ass all the time. The air around him had the gagging reek of onions and on the desk was the oily wax paper from one eaten sub sandwich and its unwrapped mate.

“It wasn’t just the tire,” Darrell Sitka said, studying the paperwork through glasses set halfway down his potato nose. “You needed a new rim too. It had a chunk ripped out of it like a torn paper plate. You must have hit that pothole like a rocket.”

“You’re Daniel Sitka’s brother, aren’t you. Do you know who I am?”

Darrell Sitka kept his eyes glued to the yellow invoice sheet. With a finger that was bratwurst-thick he tapped the keyboard of his terminal. “You want to see the rim? I had them save it in the shop.”

Robert stood over him, small and tight as a squeezed trigger. There was a row of car keys on hooks. He could grab one and punch with the little blade, like a shiv. “Do you know who…?”

“You’re my customer,” Sitka said, finally looking up at him. “If you want another rep instead of me I can ask.”

“You’ve got the same goddam face.”

“I said do you want to see the rim?”

The sourness came into Robert’s mouth from deep in his gullet. It came as though the sourness had a life of its own, a will. The taste of soil that was black and wet. Sharp pebbles, worms, grass. He put his hand to his mouth. He wanted to spit it all out in Darrell’s face.

Darrell stood up, big as a barge. The blood beat in Robert’s temples and he found himself sizing up the span from his shod foot to Darrell’s crotch.

“Mind if I get by. Why don’t you sit down and relax. It’s a rim, not a limb. You’re too worked up.”

“Where are you going?”

Sitka stood there, neither inching forward or back, a hair’s distance from colliding with Robert.

“To the shop, to get the evidence. It’s customer service, you want that, don’t you? I’m serving you. Now let me by.”

He came back with the rim and held it under Robert’s nose, pointing out the deep gash in the edge, holding forth on the dynamics of road stress. Robert cut him off, grabbed the invoice and walked away. He had to piss so bad he practically ran to the restroom. Afterwards he hit the soap dispenser as usual, two times, two squirts. The instant the soap slicked the palm of his hand the vomit came up his gullet. He couldn’t rinse the gob off fast enough, and whether it baffled him or not made no difference. Getting the ivory goo off his skin, every last trace of it, was all that mattered. He felt like a man turning into a werewolf. Then when the soap was eradicated and obliterated – rubbed away so hard his skin was red and sore – then he felt like Robert again.

---

Caitlin had her weapons, her ways to throw everything back at him. She changed character on him and kept a dirty house.When the dust-mounds became bizarre and he complained, she jumped on her pulpit. “You like it? Now you know how your body feels – to me.”“No one notices but you.”

“You think they don’t. They all work for you. They’re afraid to say.”

Then she switched tactics and played the lust card.

“Will you join me – in the tub?”

Robert ran out of the bathroom. Ran like a chicken from the bar of Dove his wife held in her hand.

---

“Danny’ll get you. You called his little sister a whore, and he’ll get you.”It was July, two weeks into summer vacation. No school till after Labor Day, the tail end of the baseball season. Robert leaned on the window sill and listened to the horseflies make that angry zooming sound, little fighter planes on the attack. He stared out the screen through the fire escape grates, down at the wide, ragged lot steaming in the sun, the weed-blades soaked and bent from a thunderous cloudburst that hadn’t cooled the air one degree. Across the lot was a fortress of blunt brick buildings studded with fire escapes exactly like his own. On the second building from the left a cellar door opened and out poured a ragtag platoon, seven in all, one of them toting a boombox that grew louder as they shuffled deeper into the weeds.“Danny’ll get you. You can’t stay inside all summer. If it isn’t today it’s a week from today. Danny never forgets. For what you said about her, his sister …he’ll make you bleed like a pig.”

Robert squinted into the window screen. One of the Sitka twins was at the head of the pack, a mitt tucked under his arm. On the outside, the bastards were so identical Robert – and everyone else – still had trouble telling them apart. You had to be close enough to see the moles, the blackheads on the noses. Or hear them talk. But Daniel was colder and wilder; in a game he’d slide at you and cut with his big legs – or throw at your head. This Sitka was Daniel and not Darrell, Robert was pretty sure of it. The mitt he carried, that was Daniels’s yellow leather. Darrell’s was saddle color, a russet.

As Robert began to move, he went through the possibilities. Mouth full of blood, punched-out eyes, the kick in the balls that took your breath away. These things, they came and they went. But you could stare at the grates on the fire escape for fifty years and they’d only stare back at you. Whore, whore, whore. The word was there on every step of the staircase, waiting to taunt and punish him. Wishing he had zipped his lip. But he kept going – down the stairs, out the cellar door, out into the weeds. He hadn’t even meant anything. It was just a moment, it was just a word, she was just a girl, it was the fucking summertime.

“Hey, kid…”

Daniel didn’t even run at him. Rhino charging a deer. He just stood there wagging his fat finger. He stood there - like King Kong - right in the center of the part they called “the field,” where they threw and caught, where the weeds were shorter and the ground was studded with rocks. Even at this distance he threw a big shadow, and Robert didn’t break stride, walked right into it.

“I take care of my sister, kid.”

Why the kid thing? Daniel knew Robert’s name. He’d said his name for years. Since goddam kindergarten.

Robert wondered how it would start – with a punch or a kick? Where it would come – high or low? He wondered if it would break his nose. There were six others there in the field, his friends. Shuffling and gloating, smelling blood, he could sense it. His friends.

“I didn’t mean what I said. I just said it. I’m sorry…”

“You will be sorry, kid. You will be…”

“You weren’t there. You only heard…I’m sorry…”

Daniel’s fat hand shot out and locked on his collar. Robert heard cloth rip. He blinked and winced. He braced for the thunderbolt.

“Show me how sorry, kid. Show me.”

Daniel yanked his neck with one hand and pushed with the other. Robert wound up on his knees in the dirt.

“Now you be the whore, kid.”

He unbuttoned down below and stuck the thing right in Robert’s face, pushed it against his lips.

Robert had a split-second where his mind said no, never. But in the next split-second the no, never was gone, and Robert opened his mouth, just opened it.

The moment his mouth tasted Daniel’s skin, the thing pushing its head between his teeth and tongue, Daniel pulled it out and stuffed it back. Then Daniel reached down and slapped him across the mouth. The slap cut like a scythe, went through Robert’s whole body and down to his toes. Even the weeds seemed to shake.

Daniel turned to the shufflers, the friends, and pointed down at Robert.

“The whore, there she is, you saw it.”

A few of them cackled. Robert saw it in mime, like a silent movie. He couldn’t hear it, couldn’t even hear the boombox. His ears thundered with the slap.

“Every whore gets paid, kid. So here’s your pay.”

He leaned on Robert’s neck, threw his whole weight into his arm, pushed down until Robert’s face was in the dirt.

“Now eat, kid. Eat your pay.”

Daniel grabbed a clump of the stuff, a handful chocked with grass and rubble and earth slime. He slammed it into Robert’s teeth. “Eat it, chew it. Let me see it go down your throat.”

Except for the slap, Daniel never hit him, never hit him once. He knelt there, making Robert eat dirt until he started to puke it back up. Then Daniel stood up, turned, kicked more dirt into his face and moved off – slowly, taking his sweet time, letting the scene sink in with the herd.

At that moment Robert was one living, breathing being. But his right arm became another – a separate creature driven by its own motives, pursuing its own goals. His right arm shot out, swiveled like a reptile, found a fist-size rock and stiffened around it.

None of them had ever let Robert pitch, even for kicks. He never expected it. No speed-ball, no stuff. He was small, he was no thrower.

But the right arm on this day belonged to another Robert, he could feel him, swelling and flexing, bigger and more savage than he himself was or could ever be. This was a Robert who dwelled deep in the earth, far beneath the puddle where his vomit seeped into the soil and fed the worms.

From somewhere outside his head he watched the underground Robert stand, cock the arm and release the rock. It flew at a velocity that was unthinkable – on a straight-line course that was just there in the air, pre-existing, the way a railroad track is just there in the ground. The track ran from the fingers of the throwing hand to the back of Daniel’s skull. There the rock crash-landed – with such force it would soon be noted and named. Exhibit A.

When the police came it was Daniel’s face they pulled out of the dirt.

But Robert wasn’t there. In the commotion he got away and ran to his building. And from the window he peered through the dark steel rods of the fire escape, watching the blue lights and glinting badges . He watched the mother and the sister too, kneeling and pawing at the body on the ground, slathering their spit and tears over the face.

The twin Darrell loomed over them, pacing and stalking, like a new Daniel risen from the weeds.

---

Flights like this made Robert understand why they called it The Redeye. The plane bumped and slapped all the way in from San Diego, like a flat-bottomed boat in a confused sea. Sleep never came; booze only made him jumpier. When they had downed three vodkas apiece, his seat-mate, his own sales guy, poked a finger in his face and said, “this might get me fired, but I’m telling you anyway. You smell like a goat.”After San Diego the walk through the Logan Airport dawn was a trek through some stretch of Antarctica. He finally found his Benz, disguised as an ice-mound on the exposed upper deck of the garage. He battered the windshield with a scraper until there was a hole to see out of and he swung out for the office, squinting to read the signs, which changed every time the Massport bastards re-did a terminal. Passing Suffolk Downs a billboard caught his eye, his red eye. When his gaze went up his left front wheel went down, way down, with a loud whack followed by a hiss and a tinny wobble. Robert stomped the brake, watched a long tanker-truck whoosh by and swerved for the sidelines, a thin shoulder of ice-hard ground and road litter. The Benz climbed the shoulder and sagged forward like a crippled drafthorse.

As he grabbed for his briefcase, Robert saw his own face flit through the mirror, saw the mat of hair Caitlin said could become a bug’s nest from the stoppage of shampoo. He tore through his phone numbers, checked his watch, started to phone Benz Central - their so-called concierge service - but didn’t finish. There was a better idea, it just meant killing time – he thought of the phrase just that way, killing time – and he got a dirty, evil rise out of saying it to himself. The reps all started early, picking up phones by seven - to get the metal beasts herded into the shop and the loaners out on the road before the normal workday began. He knew just whose ass to stick this up – it would be no one but Darrell. He left voice mails for his secretary and a few others, poked the hazard button hard, like it was the eye of an enemy, and trudged off in the cold to find coffee. A joint called Three Yolks came up first.

The coffee was weak but fresh and the omelette looked like the cook had used a shovel for a spatula. Robert made it and the fries and the toast last for fifty minutes, and then the dealership operator answered and put him through.

Darrell went into his gruff service-friendly thing.“Why in hell did you wait for me? You didn’t have to wait, you didn’t even have to dial a phone. You just press the i-button on the console, any time, day or night.”

“I could have changed it myself too.”

“We don’t want owners changing tires. You didn’t buy a Benz for that.”

“Well what do you plan to do for me? Time is money. At my rate, you owe me more than a tire, a lot more.”

Dead air, cell static. Robert thought either the call had fuzzed out or Darrell was calling a tow on another line.

“You there?” He said it twice.

“Yes I’m here. But in fifteen I’ll be there. It’s the fastest I can do.”

“You mean the tow truck…”

“I mean me.”

Darrell had taken him by surprise. Complete surprise.

“You?”

“I’m doing my job. I want to see things for myself.”

---

They met on the ice-cold shoulder. Robert stepped out of the dead Benz, pulling the black leather jacket around him and zipping it high. Darrell parked his C-class baby Benz and came out in some lumpy thermal parka, a Sears take on L.L. Bean. The coat put on twenty pounds he didn’t need.“Your car?”

“No, yours. It’s a loaner. You drive this, I drive yours back to the shop.”

“Whoopty doo. I get to drive a C-class. I paid for an E-class. This is shit.”

“Can I open your trunk?”

Robert didn’t particularly want the bratwurst fingers touching his things, even when gloved. But he went ahead and popped the trunk, lifting the handle himself – slowly and gravely – finishing the move with a head-shake to signify disgust. Darrell plunged his hands in, fishing around for the tool kit, checking the jack, then unbolting everything and pulling it out – all except the spare, that toy tire, the rubber donut that makes you look like a three-wheeled fool going down the road.

“So what’s this, a demotion - you’re doing the gorilla work now?”

Darrell said nothing. He set the jack on the ground by the flat and stood up, avoiding Robert’s eyes, looking beyond him, up and down the highway. Robert bit his lip, holding back the tirade he could hear in his own head – the whole litany beginning with the appointments he had to kill, the day blown to shit, the sleepless flight, the lemon of a car…

“Well, show me where it is.”

“Show you what?”

“The hole you hit.”

“What are you going to do, fill it?”

Robert expected to hear him give it again – the let-me-do-my-job speech. But Darrell did nothing except look – up and away - at a plane climbing out of Logan.

“You won’t find any potholes up there. Try looking there, right down there – you see it?” He pointed, and kept pointing as he walked the frigid roadside back towards the hole, Darrell hulking over his outstretched arm. Finally Darrell picked up on it, the crater over in the passing lane. He stopped and stared. He lifted the fogged spectacles off his nose, wiped them, then stared even harder.

“Big damn hole, you’re right. Deeper than the tire, I’m sure. Kaboom.”

“That’s right. Tell them in fucking Stuttgart. Kaboom.”

“Was it dark when you hit it?”

“No, it wasn’t dark. The sun was up. Just up.”

“So why didn’t you see it?”

“What are you saying to me?”

Darrell paused and let out a long heave of breath, a fat-guy sound. It hit the cold and it plumed steam.

“I’m saying to you that with these cars you’ve got to keep your eyes on the road. In these conditions, it’s the only real defense you have. It’s you and the steering wheel.”

Robert remembered the billboard, the instant of distraction, the way it had yanked his eyes up and to the right. Suddenly the blood beat in his temples, going at him like two hammers. “What the fuck are you telling me – that it’s my fault?”

And Darrell turned his back on him, just like that. He plodded back towards the trunk. Not answering, not saying shit.

He didn’t speak until he was right in front of the trunk. Then all he said was, “let’s get that spare out.”

He said it over his shoulder, the larded shoulder in the lumpy parka. And it was the shoulder and the idiot comment that did it – that and the old taste of dirt spreading over the tongue. It all hit like a combination punch and tripped Robert’s last remaining wire.

He had a flash-thought of mayhem, an urge to brain Darrell with the thing back on the desk, the chrome paperweight embossed with Darrell’s employee-of-the-month achievements. That changed to an impulse to club the base of Darrell’s fat neck with the jack. But in the end what Robert did was lift nothing but his own feet. He sprang up like a monkey and grabbed the big head from the rear, knocking off the glasses and locking his arms, TV-wrestler style, around Darrell’s ears. Darrell shook his shoulders and twisted his torso to no avail – Robert clung like a crazed ape that had swooped down from a tree. And he felt that way too, but strangely weightless, his victim big as a steer, and quickly the whole thing turned into steer wrestling. Working the headlock, Robert got the neck to bend. With his left fist he began shooting punches into the potato nose. Darrell bucked his hips and, after flailing and slapping, mainly at the air, tried to curl a one-arm bearhug around Robert’s ribcage.

The bearhug gained pressure and Robert had the sense of a boulder rolling onto his ribs, squeezing the oxygen out of him. He tried to punch faster, fist drilling all over the cranium, but he knew he was moving in slow-motion, not even punching but tapping and dabbing. Then the bearhug broke, inexplicably went slack, and Darrell went onto his knees, gasping and shaking all over.

Out of his throat he managed to burble two words, “I give,” and Robert let him go. Feeling anything but victorious, merely lucky. And nervous about the traffic whizzing by.

He stood over Darrell, panting. “Now you can change my tire. Now.”

But Darrell didn’t budge from his knees, except to shudder. There was a new tone in the gasping face, an eerie presence that was gray-blue, but not like skin color. More the absence of it.

“What is it? What’s the matter with you?”

Darrell raised his right hand off the ground and slapped his chest. “Give me a minute, for Christ’s sake.” The words came out in single-syllable spurts, punctuated by more gasping.

“What is it? Should I call someone? Do you have pills?” Robert looked around wildly for blue lights. And he realized he wanted to see blue lights just as much as he did not want to see them.

“Give me a minute, for Christ’s sake.”

A minute passed, and more minutes. Darrell not budging, his paws and feet planted on the cold ground.

Robert thought of an animal in the slaughterhouse, bleating for its life.

“Let me help you up. I’ll call 911.” He flipped his phone but Darrell shook his head and pumped out a sound that said no – a grunt that said it better than the word itself. Then he staggered to his feet and pulled a brown pharmacy bottle out of his pants.

“Give me those,” Robert said. He pushed and twisted the cap off. “I have water in the car.”

He didn’t say he was sorry, but it crossed his mind – just as Darrell handed him back the bottle of Aquafina.

---

“You don’t love me. You love your own dirt.”And with that, Caitlin took the kids away for the last six weeks of the summer. Took them to such a remote Pacific Northwest outpost it might as well have been Siberia – not reachable without killing two-thirds of a work week. Robert worked, paced the empty rooms and started dating the laptop. Eventually he reached a dark corner of Craigslist, where he found a woman willing to do what Caitlin said she would not do – for a certain wallet size, of course. The bar of Ivory she shoved in his mouth made him gag and spit as planned, but in the end all he saw in the chipped bathroom mirror of her tract house was the face of a rabid man, foaming like a dog. When she made him kneel – as scripted – his eyes got stuck on the large hole in her absurd black stockings, on the exposed thigh-skin all veins and goosepimples. He wondered what was making her so cold on a broiling summer day, and he wound up throwing her extra money and escaping to a sports bar a quarter hour before his time was up. Then he went home and stayed home.

The landscape crew stopped coming – Caitlin must have let the contract run out. Robert stopped showering altogether, only swiped at himself now and then with a damp washcloth. On weekends he sat upstairs and stared through the screen at the long green expanse, the carpet of good Kentucky bluegrass. It was no match for the weeds. They grew wild and strong and obliterated it.