Flesh and Blood (33 page)

Constantine rolled down his window. “Hey,” he said.

The boy looked at him, did not speak. He wasn't black. Indian, maybe. But dark.

“Hey,” Constantine said. “Shouldn't you be at home?”

The boy continued looking at him with mute incomprehension. Maybe he didn't speak English.

Constantine got out of his car. He walked across the street and stood before the boy.

“I'm talking to you,” he said. “Understand? Do you know what I'm saying?”

The boy nodded solemnly.

“Do you live around here?” Constantine asked.

The boy nodded again.

“Don't your parents want to know where you are?”

This time, the boy did not nod. He just sat, watching Constantine.

“Go home,” Constantine said. “It's late. It's cold out here.”

The boy didn't move. A peculiar spice, pepper mixed up with something that reminded Constantine of a wet dog, drifted through the air. From far away, he thought he could hear a snatch of that Negro music that wasn't music at all, just a bunch of guys shouting insults at white people while somebody banged a drum in the background.

“Go home,” he said again. The boy looked at him with puzzled kindness, as if Constantine was asking for an obscure favor the boy was willing but unable to grant.

Finally, Constantine got back into his car and started the engine. He put his face out through the open window and said, “I'll give you a ride home, if you want.”

The boy continued shivering, continued staring.

“All right, if that's the way you want it,” Constantine said.

He stepped on the accelerator and drove away. He wondered if he should call somebody, but decided against it. Who could know about people like this? Maybe they let their children run around all night, alone, without enough clothes on. Maybe that was one of those foreign traditions you needed to respect, the kind of thing Billy always carried on about. What did he call it? Something-centric. Don't be something-centric. Fine. When Constantine turned the corner he drove through a surge of music, those rhythmic Negro shouts, coming from a house that had been painted pink and brown, like a giant cake. At this distance he couldn't make out the words—probably telling other black guys to shoot cops, rape their wives, burn the whole world down. He was probably lucky the kid on the curb didn't pull out a gun and shoot him. He kept driving, out of the tract, out of the music, and he told himself he wouldn't go there at night anymore. When he got home he parked for a while in front of his own house, and found that he didn't feel like getting out of the car right away. He lit a last cigarette, sat in the car until he saw Magda, large and furious, pass by the bedroom window in her nightgown, carrying the German newspaper she insisted on subscribing to and eating what appeared to be a salami sandwich.

There was work and love, a kind of love. You ignored the little glitches.

And then there was Zoe. He couldn't let himself think too much about that.

He never asked how she got it. He didn't want to know. She looked okay, she didn't look any different, and half the time he almost forgot about it altogether. It wasn't always fatal. They were working on a cure. He did have her out to the house more often, and she was usually willing to come. To help with the garden, he said, and she hardly ever refused. He knew how much she missed a garden, stuck in the city like that. Sometimes she came out alone on the train, sometimes she brought the kid. What could you do about that? He wasn't bad, quiet, could entertain himself. Constantine wondered when he'd start listening to that murderous music, when he'd come home from school with a gun. He tried not to think too much about that, either. He and Zoe worked in the garden together all spring and summer and into the fall. It was a beautiful garden, sheltered behind a low grassy rise that fell away to the Atlantic. He'd had two tons of topsoil trucked in because you couldn't grow shit this close to the ocean. The garden thrived, partly because of the topsoil and partly because he sprayed it with chemical pesticides and fertilizers when Zoe wasn't around. She didn't approve of that, so why tell her? Let her believe the lettuce and beans and tomatoes were springing up all glossy and perfect because they were tended with love. It did something to him, working in the garden with her like that. It made him feel he'd done the right thing with his life. He had this garden for his sick daughter. He had this view of the ocean for her.

There was only one bad moment with Zoe, on an afternoon in September, when she picked a ripe tomato off one of the vines.

“Beautiful, isn't it?” she said. She crouched in the dirt, held it cupped in her palm, close to her breast, the way she'd hold a bird.

“You used to hate tomatoes,” Constantine said.

“I grew up.”

“Yeah. Hey, we've got a nice crop coming in here.” He knelt beside his daughter. She wore jeans that were too big for her and an old striped T-shirt with the sleeves raggedly cut away, just the kind of clothes he hated to see her in, but right then she looked beautiful, as if every second of her life, every condition in which he'd ever seen her, had been leading to this, Zoe kneeling pale and calm in this garden in September with the Atlantic rolling just beyond and a ripe tomato cupped in her hands. Constantine's little girl. The youngest, the unplanned one, the one he'd insisted on naming after his grandmother, where Mary would have named her Joan or Barbara. He reached out a finger, flicked a speck of dirt from her cheek. He felt how big his finger was, how rough against her skin.

“Lately I feel like I don't want to eat anything I didn't help grow myself,” she said. “The food in stores looks strange and, I don't know. Dangerous. You don't know
where
it's been.”

She laughed. She raised the tomato to her mouth, and Constantine had an urge to yell, 'Don't, it's poisoned.' Which was ridiculous. It was no more poisoned than most of what people ate, and probably less. But as he watched her bite into the tomato, a chill shot through his heart.

“Mmm,” she said. “This is one of the best tomatoes I've ever tasted.”

He was full of terror, an icy dread that swayed inside his chest like something swinging on a cord. He could have taken her in his arms, begged her forgiveness. Then he pulled himself together. Forgiveness for what? For loving her, for being the best father he knew how to be? Next spring, he'd rent a house at the beach, big enough for everybody. A vacation house, not just his and Magda's place, maybe up on Cape Cod. She could bring the kid, let him blow off a little steam.

“Try it,” she said. She held the tomato out to him, balanced on her thin white hand.

“Thanks, darling,” he said. He accepted the tomato from her. He took a ravenous bite.

1993/
Jamal lived in him. Ben thought about Jamal's eyes and lips, the dense crackle of his hair. When he thought about Jamal he was filled with an abject, weighted sensation like nothing he had known before, a hot wet ball of feeling, impenetrable, hissing with fear and hope and shame though the ball itself was not made of those emotions. It turned thickly inside his belly. It frightened him. It wasn't love, not what he'd imagined of love. It more closely resembled what he'd imagined as cancer, the cancer that got Mrs. Marshall next door, a ball of crazy cells that, as his mother said, had
eaten her up
. Like cancer it was him and not him. It ate him and replaced what it ate with more of itself.

1993/
Connie wanted Ben to do what she told him to. She stood on the dock, pretty and mean, netted with watery light, hands fisted on her hips. She had an athlete’s belief in discipline, the powers of orderly motion.

“Bring her about,” she shouted.

Alone in the boat, thirty feet from the dock, Ben could feel how it wanted to stutter and stall. How it wanted to fail. It had taken less than two days for him to understand the boat’s laziness, its bent toward a slumbering life spent nudging the dock. It needed to be bullied, it needed to be coaxed. It was a lapdog. He’d imagined wolfish strides over brilliant ink-blue water. Cleaving with one perfect claw.

“This thing’s a sow,” he called.

“Bring her
about,”
Connie answered. The Sunfish’s sail luffed, then filled, caught the light, and briefly Ben loved the boat for its modest but insistent little life. Even a lapdog had moments of animal certainty, a remorseless grace.

“Good,” Connie called. “Now tack over to the buoy.”

He tacked to the buoy, came about, tacked back again. He leaned over the calm water, working the boom. In a boat, he found that he knew what to do. He could almost feel what the boat needed. He had an instinct for sailing, an automatic intelligence about the ways canvas could answer wind.

“Back to the buoy again,” Connie shouted. He came about, tacked easily back toward the buoy. He glanced at the dock, the jumble of gray-shingled houses, the pale crescent of bay beach. There was Jamal, on the beach, waiting his turn. Jamal stood on the sand, skinny in loose white jeans, his brown hands wrapped around the back of his neck. He looked out at the water, at Ben in the boat. Ben forced himself to think about the wind bellying the sail. He forced himself to think about Connie, getting ready to shout her next order.

Then it was Jamal’s turn. Ben stood on the dock, watching. Jamal had no talent for sailing, though even in his helplessness he had a dancer’s precision of movement, a defiant authority. The sail shuddered, lost the wind. Connie cupped her strong stubby hands around her mouth, hollered at Jamal to bring her about. In the boat, Jamal looked serene and doomed as a young prince. Sun ignited the smooth honey-colored muscles of his back, the black wire of his hair.

“Bring her
about”
Connie shouted. Jamal tried. When the line slipped out of his hands he smiled in the shy and knowing way he had. The whole world was funny, and touching, and odd.

“Your cousin doesn’t catch on as fast as you do,” Connie said.

“He’s just not as worried about doing what people tell him to,” Ben said.

“That’s a nice way of putting it.
Jamal.
Come
about.”

“He’ll do whatever he wants to do,” Ben told her.

“Not while I’m being paid good money to teach him how to sail.”

“Good luck,” Ben said.

After the lesson, as Connie was instructing Ben and Jamal about tying up the sail, their grandfather got out of his car and stood at the landward end of the dock, looking at the water and nodding as if the bay and the sky were turning out exactly as he’d intended them to. Ben left Connie and Jamal to finish tying up the sail, ran into the roil of his grandfather’s approval.

“So, are you turning into a sailor?” his grandfather asked.

Ben knew the answer. “I want to try a bigger boat,” he said.

“I’m sure you do.” His grandfather’s face clenched with pleasure. His grandfather’s face was fissured and creviced, eroded in spots and powerfully massed elsewhere. He seemed, at times, to be transcending the human and becoming geological. He carried with him a mountain’s sense of silent will and design, a life so old it’s been scoured clean. Granite smooth as a newly swept floor, no trees, just bright patches of moss anchored to the rock. In his grandfather’s presence Ben inhaled more deeply, as he would in mountain air.

“I know how to sail,” Ben said. “I already know how, and this Sunfish is a pig.”

The old man put a hand on Ben’s shoulder. His fingers were thick as rope. “Finish up your lessons,” he said. “Then we’ll see about a bigger boat.”

“I want to get out of the bay,” Ben said. “I want to get onto the ocean.”

“After two days of lessons.” His grandfather smiled, squeezed Ben’s shoulder. Wind picked up and then smoothed the steel-colored strands of his hair.

“I can do it,” Ben said.

“I believe you, buddy. You can do anything.”

Connie and Jamal, finished with the boat, came up the dock. Walking side by side, they looked complete/two beings so opposite they belonged together, the sturdy, dictatorial blond girl and the coffee-colored boy whose strength lay in silence and in never considering retreat. They looked like enemies whose battles had been going on so long they could no longer live apart.

“So, how’re they doing, Connie?” Grandpa called.

She hesitated, smiling. Ben realized that she disliked Jamal not for being an unpromising sailor but for being what he was. For being small and dark and unembarrassed.

“They’re doing fine, Mr. Stassos,” Connie said.

“This one here says he wants a bigger boat,” his grandfather said. He clapped Ben’s shoulder with the palm of his hand. “Thinks he knows how to sail already.”

Connie’s eyes deepened. A welter of pale freckles disappeared into the top of her bathing suit.

Ben told himself to want that. He thought of the stories he could tell Andrew and Trevor, at home.

“He’s got a knack for it,” Connie said.
^u
He could be a really good sailor.”

“I thought he would be. That’s part of why I dragged us all up here this summer. Time to get this boy out on the water.”

“He’s just got to finish in the Sunfish,” Connie said. “He’s got to log his hours, three more days. Then he can graduate to a faster boat.”

“This one never wants to wait,” his grandfather said. His grandfather swarmed with pride the way a tree swarms with bees. “Bigger and faster, that’s his motto.”

Jamal stood proud and quiet, semi-visible. He looked down at the dock, waiting for this to end and the next thing to happen. His eyes were his own. His shadow touched Ben’s.

The evening was cool and blue. Shards of cloud, sharp-edged and fragmentary, like pieces of something shattered, held the last orange light from the vanished sun and laid a shimmering slick of it on the tidal flats. Ben and Jamal walked barefoot among tangles of green-black kelp, rocks fat and fetid as sleeping walruses. In pools of trapped seawater, shadows of minnows darted under the rippled, orange-streaked surface.

“There are porpoises out here,” Jamal said.

“There aren’t.”

“They come in after the fishing boats. They jump around in the bay at night.”

“You’re crazy.”

^u
You
are.”

“This is too far north for porpoises.”

Jamal paused, considering. “I saw one last night,” he said. “I saw it jump out there.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Will is coming,” Jamal said.

“No he’s not. He was invited and he said no.”

“He changed his mind. I heard my mother talking to him on the phone.”

“Uncle Will gives me the creeps,” Ben said.

“Why?”

“He just does. Grandpa doesn’t like him, either.”

“He’s Grandpa’s son.”

“That doesn’t mean they have to like each other.”

“I like Will.”

“You like everybody.”

“Not everybody,” Jamal said.

Heat rose to Ben’s ears, a high buzz of blood.

“You like
me”
he said.

Jamal bent over and picked something out of the sand. “Look,” he said. He held up a little plastic head, hairless and eyeless, bleached white.

“Hey,” Ben said. Jamal always found things: animal bones, money, single playing cards, a thin gold bracelet. He just seemed to see them, to pluck them out of empty landscapes.

“A doll’s head,” Jamal said. The head was black-socketed, sedately smiling. Jamal held it up for Ben to see and then stooped and put it back, carefully, as if it needed to be returned precisely to where he’d found it. As if it was part of some huge, precarious purpose.

“Aren’t you going to keep it?” Ben asked.

“No. Why would I want to?”

“It’s probably old, it might be worth money.”

“I think it should stay here,” Jamal said. “I’d rather think of it in the bay.”

Ben picked up the doll’s head, put it in his pocket. “If you don’t want it, I’ll keep it,” he said.

“Sure. If you want it.”

The light turned violet. The clouds gave up their orange stain and blanched to silver. A minute before, it had been the last of the day; now it had begun to be night. Lights shone on the dock and in the windows of houses and on the boats moored out in deep water.

“We should go back,” Ben said.

“In a minute.”

He never obeyed. He did what he wanted to.

Ben threw stones that vanished in the dimness, sent back the sound of soft invisible splashes. A commotion of gulls flapped and fought over something they’d found, a dead fish or a juicy piece of garbage. The gulls beat the air violently. One flew straight up, too white against the sky, holding a ribbon of something toul in its beak.

“I think Will is coming tomorrow morning,” Jamal said.

“Fuck Uncle Will,” Ben said.

He would turn into himself. He would want a girl like Connie.

He touched the litde head in his pocket.

Back at the rented house the windows were steamed, the paneled walls orange in the lamplight. There were the smells of mildew and old cooking, of cold ashes in the fireplace. In the kitchen, Ben’s mother laughed and then Jamal’s mother laughed too.

“I can’t do it. It’s up to you.” Ben’s mother had had a drink or two. Ben’s father was at home, living his life of work. He didn’t mind the pleasures of others but considered pleasure too small for his own use.

“Okay. Here goes.” Jamal’s mother had AIDS but everybody treated her as if she was just herself, crazy and fragile, with a history of bad behavior.

Ben’s grandfather and Magda sat watching the news in the living room, in the salt-dampened bamboo chairs upholstered in orange starfish and shells the mottled yellow-green of limes. Magda filled her chair, filled her dress, which crawled with thumbnail-sized yellow butterflies. The television showed a fire somewhere. Animals were dying. A horse ran, blazing, through a neighborhood of neat prosperous houses. Magda scowled, interested.

“Hello, guys,” their grandfather said. “We were wondering where you were.”

“Some fool with a match,” Magda said to the television. “Some idiot, and look. They should shoot him when they catch him.”

Magda believed in shooting people who were careless. She believed in protecting animals, who could not make mistakes because they lived in a state of inspired ignorance. Ben still loved Magda but had come to fear her, too. She’d begun treating him with more than her usual suspicion.

“Shooting’s too good,” his grandfather said. “They should set him on fire.”

Magda nodded. She and Grandfather sat in a frowning ecstasy of judgment. On television a column of smoke rose, gray and yellow as a bruise, bearing the souls of dead animals.

“Hey,” his mother called from the kitchen. “Is that the boys?”

“Yeah, Mom,” Ben called. His voice sounded fine. Probably.

He went to the kitchen, stood in the doorway. “Hi, honey,” his mother said. She kissed him, while Aunt Zoe slid a lobster into the pot.

“Murder,” Ben said.

“I know,” Aunt Zoe answered. “But it’s the food chain, what can I say? Nature isn’t pretty.” She wore black jeans, a shirt with the purple face of Chairman Mao. Ben’s mother had on a white blouse, plaid shorts. The gin and tonic in her hand rang softly with ice.

She smoothed his hair, put out a soft phosphorescence of perfume and gin, a low hum of interest in him. Ben imagined that she started every day counting, silently counted all day long, starting from one. She was calm because she knew the number of every minute.

“Have a nice walk?” she asked.

“It was okay. The tide’s all the way out, you can go way past the dock.”

“I can smell it on you,” she said, sniffing his hair. “The salt.”

She had all the beauty in the room. Outside of her it was just this old kitchen, scarred salmon-colored Formica and pine cabinets with big black whorls and knots, like someone had put cigars out on the wood. Outside of her it was just Aunt Zoe, sick and crazy, skin white and patchy as a plaster saint’s, tossing lobsters into boiling water.

Jamal came and stood beside Ben.

“Hello, Jamal,” Ben’s mother said.

Jamal nodded, smiled shyly, as if they’d just met.

“Jamal is a vegetarian,” Aunt Zoe said.

“We know that, honey,” Ben’s mother said.

“I was a vegetarian, too,” Aunt Zoe said. “For fifteen years. And then one day I walked into a McDonald’s and had a Quarter Pounder. Just like that.”

“I know,” Jamal said. He stood in his coiled way, as if he were gathering himself up, getting ready to leap. He was himself, neither masculine nor feminine. He was Jamal, brave and unconcerned, quiet, with living eyes and spirals of heavy black hair.

‘I’ll make the salad,” Ben’s mother said. She kissed Ben’s forehead. She went and broke a head of lettuce with her hands.

“I went deeper and deeper into it,” Aunt Zoe said. “I got so I couldn’t stand the idea of ripping carrots out of the ground, or pulling tomatoes off a vine, or cutting wheat. It seemed like even vegetable life had some kind of consciousness. Like a tomato plant suffered. I got so that I’d only eat things that had fallen off on their own. Windfall fruit, nuts. My diet got tinier and tinier. I couldn’t slap mosquitoes or swat flies. Then one day I walked into that McDonald’s, almost without thinking, and ordered a Quarter Pounder. It made me sick. But the next day I went and had another one. And that was the beginning of my downfall.”

“A Quarter Pounder has, like, seventy grams of fat in it,” Ben said.

“Well, fat is part of life, I guess,” Aunt Zoe said. “Death and fat and, you know. All kinds of things.”