Authors: Chris Lynch
“Takes time,” I muttered, slouching lower in the bed.
“Ya.” He laughed. “I hear changing your spots can be a pretty tricky operation.”
He had me beat. I lay there without answering.
“Who’s Felina?” Sully pressed.
“She’s my
mother
,” the cold voice growled from the doorway.
Sully stood frozen, staring.
Toy stared back. With his arms over his head, his hands gripping the door frame above, he looked all spread wide, staring
down
on Sully,
bearing
down on him. Like a meal. The hawk and the squirrel.
“Holy smokes,” I said, and leaped out of bed. My knees buckled and I got intensely dizzy, so I had to sit back down. Fell down, really, while the blood got back to all the needy places. “Oh god. Ouch. Oh god.”
Toy walked into the room. He walked right to Sully, getting in real close, aggressive close, uncomfortable close. Ready to talk, ready to listen to anything having to do with the last time they saw each other. He made it so that, with Toy’s chest in his face, Sully had to do
something.
Sully’s face turned red, his eyes turned down. “Glad to see you got away okay,” he mumbled.
“Ya, thanks a bunch,” Toy responded.
Sully left without a word.
When Sully left he grunted at something in the shadow of the hallway. Then Toy’s other surprise stepped into the room. Evelyn.
“Jesus, this is a damn party,” I said, excited and silly like a kid. “Where’ve you been, Toy?”
Toy was not at all excited or silly. “Where’ve
you
been?”
“The disabled list,” I joked, still failing to read the mood of the room. “Evelyn, love, I knew you’d come back to me.”
She shook her head and flared her nostrils in disgust as she looked me all over. “You know, you got a
boca loca,
boy. Every time I see you, you say something moronic to me.”
“I’m stupid with love,” I moaned.
“You’re stupid with
something
, that’s for sure.”
I laughed, feeling it was a compliment of some kind, then looked up to Toy for him to share it with me. Toy had this way of showing his expression even while hiding most of it under his hat. And he was showing me something angry now.
“So where you been?” I chirped. “You look good.”
“I was on a vacation.”
“Excellent. Where’d ya go?”
“None of your business.”
“Maybe we picked a bad time, Toy,” Evelyn said. “We’ll see him at school next week.”
Without thinking, I reached for my pills. Toy snatched the bottle out of my hand and read the label.
“What’s your problem?” Toy demanded.
I hate it when people ask me that. “Maybe she’s right,” I said. “Maybe you should go now.”
“Do you know that it smells in here?” He leaned down into my face. “It smells like a toilet. Are you aware of that?”
“Well, I wasn’t, but thank—”
“Jesus, Mick, are you sick? Where is everybody?” He stopped, reached down on the floor, and picked up a brown half-moon-shaped something. “Jesus Christ, is this a
hamburger?
Isn’t anyone taking care of you?”
“I’m not sick.” Suddenly I felt defensive, angry. “They’re all out working right now. Shoppin’, maybe. My mother brings me in food. The other night my father asked me, from the other side of the door, if I wanted him to wheel in the TV for a couple of hours. So you see I’m taken good care of, thank you very much.”
Maybe that was a good thing to tell him, because when I said it he stopped picking on me. He just sighed and slapped his thighs loudly with his hands.
“You really don’t look well, Mick,” Evelyn said, brushing past Toy. She came close and raised my chin with two fingers. She was so warm, not that she had any special feeling for me, but because she was one of those people who cannot ignore hurt things—even if she does try to make exceptions. She was so beautiful, she made me want to hurt myself.
“Can I have my pills back?” I said flatly to Toy.
He reached right over Evelyn and grabbed me. With his big hand he seized me by the neck, his thumb pressing on my jugular, two fingers squeezing, crackling the vertebrae in back. I let out a small scream.
“Toy, don’t!” Evelyn yelled. She grabbed at his arm and I saw her nails sink into the underside of his biceps, the part that should be soft but on Toy wasn’t. “You’re hurting him, Toy, stop it.”
She kept trying but he moved as if she weren’t even there, dragging us both down the hall. When we reached the bathroom he shoved me inside, flipped on the light, and jammed my face into the mirror.
“Look
at that garbage,” he said.
I hadn’t looked in a mirror in a while. Not since the weekend, probably. Not on purpose though—it just wasn’t something I did very often.
My eye sockets were deep and black, my skin was blotchy, off-white, and chalky. My hair stood straight up in the air on the left side and in front, and lay pasted to my head everywhere else. It was all matted together in lumps and shiny with oil. My teeth were dark.
“Hot damn, I look like Keith Richards,” I said, snarling and bobbing my head at myself.
“Fool,” Toy snapped. “The right response is supposed to be ‘Oh my
god
, I look like Keith Richards.’ It’s not really a good thing.”
“Would you lighten up for once,” I said, turning away from the mirror.
“You big spoiled baby,” he said, blocking me from leaving the bathroom. “I finally realize, you have no problems that you don’t make up all by yourself.” He hesitated, his lips pulling in tighter, harder, as he struggled for words. He looked straight up at the ceiling, then back toward Evelyn, as if she could make it come out clearer. Suddenly his face whipped back around to me. “You have no right,” he finally said quietly. “No right. You have no business. You have everything.” He let me go and shoved me backward at the same time. “You make me sick.” With that, Toy stomped down the hall and out of my house.
I was thinking about what he said, agreeing with him, but at the same time missing the pills he’d just taken away. As I headed to the kitchen for an eye-opener, I bumped into Evelyn. She had
stayed
. My heart started beating again.
“He’s so intense,” I said, shrugging.
She folded her arms. “I think it’s your self-pity, self-absorption, self-flagellation, self-mutilation, all that self-stuff that Toy can’t relate to.”
“Huh?”
“Grow up.”
“Oh. I get it.” Not that I actually did. “Where was he all that time, Evelyn?”
She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know. He doesn’t say.” Evelyn started walking down the hall toward the door, and I followed her.
“He certainly came back with a stick up his ass,” I said.
She shook her head. “What is it like for you, to live every moment entirely beside the point?”
“You like me, I know it.”
“Good-bye,
Boca Loca
,” she said.
“Wait,” I said as she started down the stairs. Suddenly none of it seemed funny anymore. I was very nearly alone. “Could you stay with me for a while?”
“No. I have to go to school.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s right, I forgot. I’ll be going. Next week, I’ll be going again.” I was mumbling by the end of it, backing away from the door, thinking already about the refrigerator.
“Don’t do what you’re thinking about,” she said, shooting her arm straight out from the shoulder and pointing at me. As if she knew exactly. It gave me a shudder. She sat down on the top step, and I came out to join her.
“I only have a couple of minutes, then I really have to go.”
“I know. That’s okay.”
“He seems to really like you. Toy, that is. For some reason.”
“I like that. I mean, even if he’s yelling at me and calling me garbage, there’s something I like about it.”
Evelyn nodded, looking out at the street.
“How about you... Evelyn?” I asked as timidly as I could without snuffling around her ankles. “Could
you
? Do you think? Like me?”
She squared around to look at me. My heart sank as I saw my rotten face reflected back at me again, in her black eyes.
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, anything’s possible. But I don’t think so.”
She stood up, started down the stairs again. I remained slumped on the step, head dropped, staring into my crotch, staring at the same cutoff denims and same yellow-white T-shirt I’d been wearing since... when?
“Maybe,” she called back, snapping me right out of it, “I could take another look.
Maybe
, you could bathe.
Maybe
, you could get some vitamin A into yourself.
Maybe
, you could detoxify by the time school’s out this afternoon...”
I jumped up and called, much too loud to be cool at all, “Maybe.”
As she slinked that confident, slinky walk down the street, I grabbed my head with both hands. The jump had done the screwy thing to my circulation again, making me teeter. And I smiled so hard my dead face muscles ripped me with a sensational pain.
I showered with lavender soap, my mother’s Jean Nate shower splash, and dandruff shampoo that felt like battery acid seeping into my scalp. I worked a big gob of some spermy hair conditioner through my hair, clipped my curling, doglike toenails, and baby powdered all my problem areas. I even shaved, even though I was a couple of weeks shy of needing to, just so she could see and smell the effort of the blood on my neck and the lime Edge gel in the air.
Two hours before school was out, I was ready, sweating, thirsty, my stomach all flippy. I sat, nibbled saltines, sipped ginger ale, changed my shirt twice, watched
Green Acres
,
The Beverly Hillbillies
, and
Andy Griffith
.
When Evelyn walked up to the house, I sat on the front steps shining dully like a pearl.
She laughed out loud.
“I’m goin’ in the house, dammit,” I said.
“No, no, no,” she said, grabbing my hand and putting my little fire right out. “I didn’t mean to make fun. I think this is nice. You do smell like about twelve different things, but each and every one of them is better than what you smelled like before. Truly, I’m moved.”
Truly or not, I bought it. “Where should we go?” I asked.
“The museum.”
“The museum? You’re taking
me
, to the
museum
?”
“Well, I’m not
taking
you anywhere. I’m going to the museum, and you seem to want to go someplace with me, so there we are. You don’t have to go.”
“No, I want to, I want to. I was there before. Eighth-grade field trip. Had a swell time. It was colorful, I remember.”
“Ah, yes,” she said, smirking, “that’s the place.”
The museum looked like a neat clean prison, with its tall slitlike barred windows, concrete everywhere, flat roof where there might be armed guards planted on all corners. High above the main entrance hung a massive banner with pictures of round cupids flying over a sign that read
THE AGE OF RUBENS
. The cupids were shooting arrows downward, and my eyes followed, down to where the arrows would land, down to the broad front lawn of the grounds, where they would lodge if they were real arrows, which they weren’t, and if the cupids were real, which they weren’t, into the back of the crying Indian who lives there on the lawn on his horse. I pass that Indian a couple of thousand times a year and I look at it maybe ten. Because it does something to me and I don’t like what it does to me. He has a full headdress on and it’s falling down his back as he stares straight up at the sky. His hands are pointing straight down at his sides, his palms facing us on the street. He might be crying, which is why I call him the crying Indian. He might be screaming. He might be laughing, but he doesn’t feel like a laughing statue. He might just be soaking up the rain, or the snow that lies on his naked arms so much of the year and makes me feel stung frozen and hollowed out just to look at him.
The Indian stood there when the big banner said
RENOIR
. He stood there when it said
DEGAS
. And when it said
GOYA,
and
THE SECRETS OF THE EGYPTIANS
, and
EAKINS
, and
THE WATERCOLORS
. But I never had even a little bit of interest in walking past the crying Indian to go see any of it.
I wasn’t aware that I had stopped walking. “You going home, you staying there, or you coming in?” Evelyn asked.
It’s different when you’re an eighth-grade kid, though, isn’t it? Everybody was stupid and ignorant then, so it wasn’t a problem.
But it was a problem now. I couldn’t go in there now, with Evelyn, and have her see. She belonged in there. I belonged out on the lawn with the Indian.
“To tell you the truth, Evelyn,” I said, “I don’t really go for angels that much.”
“Cherubs,” she said. “They’re called cherubs.”
Exactly, I thought.
“Right,” I said. “But I’m starting to feel a little run down. Still recovering, you know.”
“Oh,” she said. “You going to be all right?”
“Sure, it’s just, I just don’t want to hold you back.”
Evelyn nodded, I nodded. She went her way, inside. I went back my way. I spent a few minutes with the Indian before going home.
At least she got me to bathe.
Chris Lynch (b. 1962) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of seven children. His father, Edward J. Lynch, was a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus and trolley driver, and his mother, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom. Lynch’s father passed away in 1967, when Lynch was just five years old. Along with her children, Dorothy was left with an old, black Rambler American car and no driver’s license. She eventually got her license, and raised her children as a single mother.
Lynch grew up in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, and recalls his childhood ambitions to become a hockey player (magically, without learning to ice skate properly), president of the United States, and/or a “rock and roll god.” He attended Catholic Memorial School in West Roxbury, before heading off to Boston University, neglecting to first earn his high school diploma. He later transferred to Suffolk University, where he majored in journalism, and eventually received an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. Before becoming a writer, Lynch worked as a furniture mover, truck driver, house painter, and proofreader. He began writing fiction around 1989, and his first book,
Shadow Boxer
, was published in 1993. “I could not have a more perfect job for me than writer,” he says. “Other than not managing to voluntarily read a work of fiction until I was at university, this gig and I were made for each other. One might say I was a reluctant reader, which surely informs my work still.”