All That Is Left Is All That Matters Page 4

  The world darkened suddenly. Quick little spatters of rain appeared on the windows. He watched them run, thin and flat. A woman with dyed-blond hair sat frowning at a book that she held in front of her face like a mirror. A teenage girl nodding to the tiny racket of her earphones suddenly said, “I know, I know, I know,” like somebody dreaming, hummed a three-note phrase and was silent. God, he’d never meant to stay here.

  “Yeah? Where you goin’ to go?” the old man had said to him once. “California? We still on that one? Let me ask you somethin’. What’re you gonna do for money?”

  They’d been over this—didn’t matter what he answered.

  “What, you think there’s people standin’ around sayin’, ‘Welcome to California, here’s your job?’ ”

  “No.”

  “That’s right ‘no,’ so why don’t you stop talkin’ outta your ass and hand me that spade?” He pulled a fist-sized lettuce and tossed it toward the bucket, where it hit the side with a dull, peppery whack and started hoeing again—slice, slice. “When you’re twenty-one you can go where you like. And you know what you’ll find?” The blade hit a rock with a dull clink. “You’ll find one place is pretty much the same as the other. You make it work or you don’t. You land where you land.” He looked up the row. “You call that weeded?”

  “Yeah, I do—whadda you call it?”

  It had slipped out before he knew it, but it was too late now and the blood was pounding in his ears like before a fight. He hated his father, that fat-pored nose, the crispy tufts of white hair growing out of the big brown shoulders, the way the skin on the muscles had squeezed together as if pinched by invisible fingers.

  “It’s weeded,” he’d said, trying to keep his voice steady.

  His father was looking at him. “So you’re a man, now? Is that it?” He outlined their small plot with the handle of the spade. “This isn’t good enough for you anymore?”

  “I just—”

  “Won’t say no to a second helping, though—long as somebody else does the work.”

  He could feel the tears of frustration coming. He wanted to smash his fist into that meaty, familiar face.

  “Let me tell you something. We had to make some hard choices, me and your mother. We did the best we could. When she got sick we . . .” His father looked away, his lower jaw thrust forward, his hair sticking up behind his ears. There was a smear of dirt high on his cheekbone, a bit of weed stuck to his sweating forehead. He looked like a clown, painting the air with a muddy spade. “We did the best we could,” he repeated, and then, as if remembering what he’d been saying—“so we could raise a little punk who doesn’t give a shit about anybody, am I right?—who just wants to wash his hands of it, who can’t even help his own father pick a few tomatoes to—”

  “Fuck your tomatoes,” he’d yelled, his voice breaking, and running down the row he’d kicked the weed bucket so hard it flew up spinning dirt and clods like a pinwheel before landing with a single clank in the neighbor’s yard.

  “Fuck your tomatoes.” What a great line that’d been. A long time ago now. Of course, it’d all had something to do with his mother’s passing the year before—the two of them goin’ at it all the time. He knew that. He remembered seeing his dad’s face blurring on the other side of the hospital bed—he was still “Dad” then—and feeling like he was looking at a trapped bird smashing itself against a small cage.

  Was it the last hug he’d gotten from him? Maybe. Didn’t matter.

  Twenty-three years. Jesus, but he could still see that bucket flyin’. It’d all unraveled after that.

  The woman with the book turned a page, moving her hand from right to left as if sliding open a small window. White Plains. North White Plains. How many more before he was done? Two thousand? Three? He was shuffling toward the exit, like game night at the Garden.

  When the doors opened, he stepped out. The old man’s house—his house, once—was a five-minute walk. He should probably take a look, now that it was his again.

  IT’D STOPPED RAINING. He stood for a while on the wet platform. Behind him, the train spoke and the doors closed. Funny how all those years going by here he’d never seen him. A young woman in a business suit walked up the stairs and over the crosswalk. He gave her a moment, then started up.

  It had started misting again, and by the time he got to the house and reached over and opened the front gate on the picket fence his face was wet. He wiped the grainy flakes of rust on his pants.

  The house looked like shit—darker, older, overgrown. The front gutter was missing, the fascia rotted and buckling, the south windows lost behind vines nobody’d bothered to cut back. He hadn’t brought the keys so he looked in through the dusty windows, then sat in the rocker and looked at the garden. Weeds had taken over, though a small pile of rotting stems by the shed showed where somebody had made a halfhearted effort to keep it up. They hadn’t gotten far. The lettuces had bolted, sending long purple spikes like candlesticks out of their loosened hearts. Giant cucumbers slept in the weeds. Against the fence a tomato plant, heavy with fruit, bent to the ground like a snare.

  “You’re a fucking mess,” he said out loud.

  It was still misting, though just to the north he could see rays of light cutting down between the clouds like in a religious painting. Somebody was coming up the cracked sidewalk. He started to duck down, then caught himself—it was his house. He watched as some old guy with silvery stubble on his head—Christ, was it Mr. Manetti?—walked in through the open gate, then up the overgrown walk. The old man stopped about twenty feet away. He nodded hello, then stood there with his hands deep in his pockets, looking at the house over his head. “Yours now?” he said at last.

  “Guess so,” he said.

  “Sorry about your dad.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Just come by to visit?”

  “Somethin’ like that.”

  Manetti nodded. “She could use some lookin’ after.”

  “She could. Not by me, though.”

  They were quiet for a few seconds.

  “Should at least take some of that fruit,” Manetti said. He lifted his chin toward the tomato plant. “Shame to let it rot.”

  He got up from the rocker. “You take it,” he said. He walked down the porch steps he’d always used to jump off of as a kid, then started down the cracking drive. “Or let it rot—I really don’t care.”

  HE’D COME HOME late after the scene in the garden, expecting a beating. When he walked in the old man was standing at the end of the hall with a washrag in his hands, his legs spread wide like he expected a wave to crash in over the living-room sofa. “Get washed up,” he’d said. “Dinner’s on the table.”

  So they ate. No grace. Some boiled beef, a few potatoes. Beans from the garden. On the table by the pushed-in chair, a wooden salad bowl filled with tomatoes.

  They didn’t talk. He watched him cut and spear the pieces of meat, then stab the fork into his mouth, his jaw working in small, angry circles, jabbing the next before the first was done. It had always made her crazy, the way he held the fork in his fist, hunched over his food as though worried somebody would try to take it away from him.

  It was quieter than usual. He listened to his old man’s knife and fork clashing like tiny swords, the knock of his glass on the wood. A car went by, then another. The clock on the wall hadn’t been wound. He looked at his plate, then across the room to the window, then back to his plate.

  He was half-done when the quiet from the other end of the table made him look up. His old man was looking at the table, his knife and fork like goalposts on either side of his plate. His head was tilted slightly to the side as if the table had just whispered something to him.

  “Forgot the gravy,” he said.

  He didn’t know what to say. His old man made the kind of sound a man makes when he realizes he’s fucked something up: a short push of air through the mouth and nose, half-annoyed, half-amused, as if shaking his head over h
is own stupidity. He tried not to look at him. When the sounds of eating didn’t begin, he glanced up. The goalposts were still standing. The old man was cleaning his teeth with his tongue, blinking rapidly, nodding slightly as though daring something on.

  He managed to escape in time, excusing himself, almost running into the kitchen with his plate so he wouldn’t have to see it. The swing-through doors flapped shut behind him. Two years later he’d left for good. Strange he’d end up living only a train stop away.

  HE TURNED, walked through the town, then left at the split. He’d walk it—why not? He never walked anywhere anymore. A new subdivision, King’s Cross Homes, was coming up on Mason Avenue: behind the chain link, two backhoes and an aluminum trailer sat in the mud next to the water-stained skeletons of five houses. Traffic whooshed by wetly. From a distance, the cars seemed to be trailing low, fuzzy clouds. A mile away he saw the Metro-North slipping along behind the trees. He could’ve been home half an hour ago. It was starting to rain again. He was surprised at how tired he was. When the road turned abruptly north, he climbed up a low, weedy embankment and set off across an L-shaped field. The scent of some kind of flower came to him in wet gusts, sickly sweet.

  The truth was, he’d hardly recognized him at first. One of the guys who ran the place led him to the casket, then took two steps back and stood there with his hands folded over his crotch like he was waiting for a compliment or expecting to be kicked. There was nothing to say. There he was. He looked smaller. They’d flattened down the peak of hair on his forehead, trapped the strands in back between his head and the white satin pillow. There was a neat bandage on his thumb, which was funny in its way: No bandage for this motherfucker.

  You land where you land. Yeah, well.

  Under the trees, thick with vines, the rain seemed to stop. He crossed an overgrown little meadow, raising his hands to keep them away from the waist-high nettle, then hurried, chin tucked against the rain, into the woods. He’d lost the path somewhere. It didn’t matter. Ten minutes in either direction was a road.

  He was following a narrow trail that turned like a stream bed around trees whose roots reached through the banks when he heard her cry out—just the word “No” followed by a short, abrupt “amah.” He stopped, unsure of what he’d heard, then heard it again, followed this time by a man’s voice, high and breaking: “You . . . fucking . . . bitch. How long you gonna lie to me?”

  He hurried awkwardly around the turn in the trail and there they were, in the middle of a sunken clearing barely twice the size of a living room. For a moment the scene—her sobbing on the ground, her arms around her head, him standing over her, one leg on either side of her body, breathing like a spent runner—seemed unreal, like maybe they were rehearsing for something. Then the man, whose shirt had been partly pulled off his shoulder, reached down and dragged her up by the back of her jean jacket. The jacket hiked up over her neck, hunching her shoulders and sticking her arms out like a scarecrow’s. Her skirt had pulled up in the back. She tried to get her feet under her but they crossed and stumbled.

  “Tell me,” the man yelled, his voice breaking. “Tell me—get up! Tell me!”

  Her voice came from behind him, blurred. “Andy. I swear.”

  “I said get up.”

  “Please, I . . .”

  “Lie to me? You gonna lie some more?” Holding her up the man raised his left hand over his right shoulder, as though pointing at something, then brought it sharp and hard across her face.

  It was only after he’d yelled something and the man had stumbled, spinning around, that he realized he was drunk and noticed the bottle a few feet away in the weeds. The girl looked up from the ground, the side of her face smeared and raw. Her mouth was bleeding. Absurdly, she reached behind herself to pull down her skirt. Neither one of them was over twenty-five.

  The young man smiled at him. “Get the fuck outta here. This is none a’ your business.”

  “What’re you doin’?” he said, trying to stall for time—until what, he wondered?

  “This is none a’ your fucking business, old man.”

  “What’re you doing?” he said again, stupidly. He had nothing. No rocks. Nothing in his pockets. A few sticks lay on the wet ground—too short, too brittle.

  “Please . . .” he heard her say.

  “Shut up!” the man screamed. Then, to him: “I said get the fuck out of here.”

  Suddenly she was scrabbling on all fours, sobbing, twisting out of her jacket as the man grabbed for her.

  Before he realized what was happening she was cowering behind him. “Please,” he heard her say. “Please.”

  For a moment the man seemed confused. “Angela, I—” he began, and then rage changed his face as though an invisible hand had passed over it. “I told you to get the fuck out of here,” he said.

  “I’m just tryin’ to help out,” he said. He could feel her behind him, holding his sleeves like a shield.

  “This is none of your fucking business.”

  “Listen, just . . .”

  “I said get the fuck outta here.” The man scooped up the empty bottle.

  There was nowhere to go. For some reason he thought of his clothes. He wasn’t dressed for this. The man was holding the bottle loose like a knife. Behind them was the waist-high bank. There was nowhere to go.

  “Wait,” he said. He felt a small bump and knew she’d backed up against the dirt. “Wait—”

  “I swear to God I’ll kill you.”

  “Is that what you want?” he said suddenly.

  The man was still moving toward him, holding the bottle out from his body.

  “Look at me. What would you win? I’m old enough to be your father.”

  Something stuttered in the man’s eyes.

  “Why’re you so angry?”

  To his amazement the man’s eyebrows gathered and his chin stuck out as though he was confused about something yet determined to think it through. He glanced quickly to the left, raised the bottle, then lowered it. He blinked once, then again—and began to cry. “You don’t understand,” he said. He waved the bottle vaguely. “You don’t understand. I just—” He put his fingers to the bridge of his nose like a man who’s been working too hard. “Oh, fuck,” he said, then started to laugh, the sobs shaking his body. “Oh, fuck.”

  “Danny?” he heard the woman whisper, letting go of his sleeves.

  “Listen, if you want you can come with . . .” he began, but she shook her head.

  He watched her cross the clearing and awkwardly put her arms around the man as he crouched on his heels in the dirt.

  After a second he walked over and touched the man’s shoulder.

  “Time to go home, son,” he said.

  Russian Mammoths

  I THINK IT WAS THE BUDDHISTS WHO DIVIDED life into four parts, reserving the last—after the kids, after the stuff—for enlightenment. The search for it. Who said you have to walk out on the road with just a bowl and a blanket. Throw yourself before the world’s mercy. Imagine it. To the end of your days. The bite of smoke in the wind, the small rain on your bald head.

  No wheedling, no bargaining with “revenant, white-faced death,” as Horace put it, no advertising your memories in the pennysaver like so many commemorative beer steins—nothing. Close up, pull out. Leave it where it stands. God knows it has its appeal. But the stuff sticks. And the stuff that sticks to the stuff sticks. And the smell of a childhood drawer can bring me to tears. And there are times since she went, I’ll be honest, when loss is the only language I hear.

  Everything’s taken from us anyway. Without mercy. To give it away is like saying you quit just before you’re fired.

  I’D HAVE TO say I didn’t know the little girl, really. Or her mother, for that matter. Just one of the Ecuadorian kids—six, seven, eight years old—waiting by the fence for the bus every morning. Climbing up on the low wall, holding on to the pickets. I tried some of my idiot’s Spanish on them—Estos son mis flores—te gusta?— until I re
alized they were just shy. Nice kids. For years now every April I put in a row of Russian Mammoths along the fence, thinking that even after they’d moved on and the world had done its work they might still remember flowers three times their height. Waiting for the bus, the white fence in the still, hot sun, and flowers three times their height.

  They must have been doing well to afford dance lessons. It was the new place, across from Borden’s Bridge. Driving by sometimes I’d see the little ones through the big front windows, taking turns. They had just closed the door behind them when Eduardo Machado took his. Or missed it, I guess you could say. Minutes later, up on Prospect Street, I heard the sirens. I was pulling up the vines, piling the tomato stakes in the grass. It’s something I enjoy: Exposing the dirt to the sky again, that peppery smell, like a bit of August, released; the indulgence of small regrets. Under the tangles the old fruit had left stains of tomato seeds on the dirt and bits of orange skin, parchment dry.

  It doesn’t add up to much, really. They’d watch me weed sometimes, or transplant beans from the pots. When I had it to give I’d give them a bit of cilantro or basil to smell, their brown hands, like sea anemones, reaching through the fence, or show them how to pinch the suckers off the tomatoes. Sometimes they’d be interested; sometimes not. In September I’d bend the sunflowers down, clear the rubbery pollen off with my thumb and let them scrape the seeds into their palms, and every year the veterans, shoving up to the front, would show the newcomers how to pry them out of their shiny black ranks and crack out the tiny white tongues of meat. I’d always deadhead the Mammoths at night because they don’t fall like flowers but topple and crash, and walking down the line once, lopping off the two-pound heads with the shears, I saw them watching me.

  This fall I made myself carve some pumpkins, figuring it was time. I did a good job. Tragedy and Comedy, with fangs. I can see them both from where I sit, pulling in their cheeks, collapsing on the warm wood of the porch. Funny how we try to scare ourselves with the claws, the fangs . . . You want to frighten yourself, carve something you love, then watch what happens.