Authors: Matt Sumell
Making Nice (3 page)
Outside in the driveway I caught my breath, smoked a cigarette, stomped on a disk of ice frozen into the upside-down lid of a green garbage can, shook. A few minutes later my sister came out with my jacket and asked if I was all right. I said I was and asked if my brother was all right. She said he had a pretty good cut on his head but seemed all right. For the first time in a long time I felt relief, like I had just fucked or cried or quit a job. It feels good to be punched in the face, to punch someone in the face. I walked over to the dock and stared at the boats for a while, then headed to the Mexican restaurant around the corner and drank Budweiser. Twenty minutes later my father showed up, said he followed my footprints in the snow. I asked him if he wanted to do a shot of something, anything. He said, “If I start drinkin’ now I won’t stop.” Just then my brother called my phone.
He said, “Hey man.”
I said, “Hey man.”
“Did you really stab me?”
“No.”
“Are you gonna do the dishes?”
“Yeah, I’ll do the dishes.”
“Cool.”
“Is Mom still alive?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
She died a week later. I got a job gutting houses.
I worked with an interesting guy who smoked things off tinfoil; he’d had a rough childhood and adulthood’s rough on everyone. We were ripping vinyl tiles out of a kitchen when he told me that a twenty-eight-year-old girl he knew was working at Lord & Taylor when her heart exploded. He told me just like that, plain, not angry at all. I told him that a fifteen-year-old from Bayport stepped in front of an LIRR train and let it run her down.
“I heard about that,” he said. “Dragged her body a mile.”
Also, two bicyclists were killed by one car on Sunrise Highway and a twenty-year-old died of a drug overdose a block from our house. Her daughter was three. Every year someone drowns in Lake Ronkonkoma and thousands of toads drown in swimming pools. A good friend’s kid brother got killed in Iraq, a really pretty girl I met in San Francisco went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up, and a guy I know didn’t have health insurance when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The restaurant he worked at was kind enough to have a fundraiser for him that grossed over eight thousand dollars. They gave him six hundred.
A few weeks later I went to lunch with my family, asked my sister how she was doing since Mom. She just looked at me and let her eyes water. I asked my dad the same question. He just pointed to my sister like, I feel like that. My brother shrugged. I told them that I was OK, which might’ve been true, that I’d help them if I knew how. The waitress came over, dressed in all black including the apron, called me “Ma’am, sir … ma’am.” I said, “Do I look like a lady to you?” She stammered an apology, said she hadn’t looked closely enough, which was strange because she was avoiding looking at me while she spoke. I didn’t eat much, just picked at my french fries and drank ice water while they ate and argued about the will, about the money. I didn’t know what I thought about the money except that I didn’t feel like arguing about it. We’re not a dessert family but we like black coffee. I was almost done with my cup when my sister said she went to the cemetery and ate some of the grass off our mother’s grave. My father reached for his wallet.
When we got home there was a baby bird in the driveway, lying there, featherless. It was tiny. Its skin was almost see-through. We were all just standing around it—looking. I said, “I’ll go get something to put it in,” and started toward the house. My father said maybe the best thing to do would be to back over it with the car.
In the middle of solving an equation on the board my eleventh-grade calculus teacher, Mr. McGar, dropped the chalk, which broke into pieces on the floor. He looked down at the pieces for a few seconds, then turned to the class, and said, “As a kid I used to catch bumblebees in a butterfly net. When I caught one I’d put it in an upside-down jar, then I’d slide a tissue soaked in alcohol underneath the rim of the jar, which would knock the bee unconscious. I would then very carefully tie a string around the bumblebee’s neck, and after a few minutes the bumblebee would wake up, and I would have him on a leash.” Then he walked over to the window and stared out past the parking lot filled with cars that looked alike.
So I studied math as an undergrad until I tried, using modus tollens, to prove to Kate Damon that she should date me. It didn’t work, and I realized that math would not get me what I wanted, so I dropped out and started drinking a lot of well whiskey in a bar around the corner from the apartment I would eventually be evicted from. Money ran out quickly, and more out of boredom than habit, I kept going to the ATM checking to see if a balance would somehow appear in my account. It never did, and so I learned a little green Spanish and spent hours doing finger puppetry for the ATM camera. I got pretty good at it.
I can do a dog, a rabbit, a lizard, an elephant, a hawk, and an eagle (there’s a difference in the thumbs). I can do a donkey, a squirrel, a cow, a cobra, a horse, and a pig. I also do a mouse and make him say
ee ee ee
and then I also do myself and he says, “What? I can’t hear you, Ma.”
Mom, my left hand, asks, “What’s wrong, Alby?”
My right hand goes, “It’s the little things, the little things, Ma. They’re relentless.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“I don’t know, Ma. I don’t know.”
Excuse me
, a voice behind me said.
I need to use the ATM.
I didn’t say anything, just stuffed my hands in my pants pockets and walked off thinking about what to do next.
What I did was mix a cup of cat food with a quarter-cup of applesauce, a TUMS smooth dissolve tablet ground to powder, a hard-boiled egg and water until it was the approximate consistency of cooked oatmeal. I did that because that’s what it said to do online. It also said online to cut the end of a straw to make a small scoop, to feed it every fourteen to twenty minutes from sunrise to sunset, that you should never put liquids directly into its mouth or it could drown, to keep it warm, and that despite your best efforts 90 to 95 percent will die, good luck. With luck like that, I didn’t name him at first. I didn’t think I could stand losing another thing with a name. When he lasted a week, I called him Gary.
Gary was, for the most part, at least to start off with, almost transparent. He looked like a dog’s heart with a bird’s head stuck on, a blob with a beak, and one time when I was leaning in real close to better see the veins pumping blood under his skin he woke up and bit me on the nose and started chirping like crazy. I shushed him and fed him till he stopped chirping like crazy and closed his eyes and went back to sleep. Then I just watched him breathe for a while, making sure he wasn’t dead.
One morning when I was making sure he wasn’t dead there was a knock on my bedroom door and my father popped his toupee-ed head in.
“Made you breakfast,” he said. “Steak and eggs.”
“We don’t have steak,” I said. “Or eggs. So I know you’re lying.”
“I did,” he insisted, but really he didn’t because what he’d actually made me was a chicken-and-cheese Hot Pocket that he thought was a steak-and-egg Hot Pocket, because for some reason he’d thrown out the boxes and Hot Pockets all look the same. None of that matters. What matters is that when my losing-his-mind father saw Gary’s setup on my desk, he told me I was losing mine.
Maybe I was. By this point I’d abandoned the laundry-lint-in-cereal-bowl nest because the lint was getting stuck in Gary’s pinfeathers, instead opting for crumpled hand towels in a small Easter basket suspended with string from the handle of a large Easter basket. For decor and scent’s sake I’d paper-clamped on some pinecones and twigs, then fastened a large oak leaf over the whole thing to shade him from the lamp. Finally, I bought a big wooden
G
from the local arts and crafts store and painted it the same green as a horsefly eye, then glued it to the handle of the big basket.
“What are you,” my father asked me, the sun coming through the window, lighting half his face, “crazy now?”
If I could go back I’d answer differently. I’d lie that I was fine, or make a joke, or tell him the truth: that I was just trying to get through it. That I was having a hard time. That—and I know how hollow and sentimental this sounds, how lame—I missed my mother in a way that felt anaerobic. I couldn’t get my air back; at one point I literally stuck my head out the car window and opened my mouth to force it in.
“What do you mean
now
?” I said.
It fell flat in front of us, like a stupid fact, and there was nothing left for him to do but hobble over to get a better look. After he got it he turned to better-look at me, and then he better-looked at Gary’s setup again.
“Listen,” I said, “he’s helpless and he needs me, and I got a thing in my heart for helpless things that need me, OK? So I’m gonna be here for him until he dies or grows into a goddamned falcon that flies around the neighborhood all day eating raccoons and dogs and little toddlers before he flies back to my forearm and takes shits. I already ordered the glove, dude—online—’cause Gary here is gonna terrorize all of Suffolk County, hunting mammals and butt-fucking seagulls.”
“Why you gotta talk like that?” he said. “You sound stupid.”
“Yeah,” I said, “people keep telling me that, but people also keep being pieces a shit that are wrong. So let me tell you something else that’ll sound stupid: right now, Gary’s stem cells are generating rods and cones for better night vision that he’ll use to bite people’s dicks off in the dark. Dudes’ dicks are in danger, Dad. And if you don’t think so, you can get right the fuck out of my bedroom!”
He said “Calm down” like he meant it, then “Sure they are” like he didn’t, then “How’s he doing?” like he did again.
“Great,” I said. “He can already pick his head up like it’s nothing. Watch.”
The two of us scooched closer to the Easter baskets and I scooped some food-mush onto the straw and stuck it near his bird-face. “Demo time, bro. Hup-hup. Eat this for strength!” But Gary didn’t move at all, not even when I tapped his beak with it.
“You sure he’s alive?” my father asked.
“Yeah I’m sure he’s alive,” I said, offended and straw-pointing. “If you look right here you can see he’s breathing. He’s probably just dreaming of things to rape. He’s a freak, this one. A real pervert.”
“Christ,” my father said. And with that he headed for the door, then stopped and without turning around added, “Come down when you’re hungry.”
“I’m hungry right now,” I said. “For breakfast and revenge.”
He shook his head and said one word—“Stupid”—then ducked out and lumbered down the stairs, his hand sliding along the iron railing a beat behind each footfall—step, slide, step, slide—which I only knew because I could hear it. I made sure Gary was still breathing again before putting a clean washcloth over him and tucking him in, then joined my father in the kitchen, where we huddled holding lukewarm Hot Pockets over paper towels, not speaking to each other. I can’t say about his, but my head was filled with birds. Hawky ones. Killers.
* * *
Even though I had no way of knowing exactly how old Gary was when we found him, I convinced myself that his feathers had started coming in three days ahead of schedule. I was as idiotically proud as all those bragging parents I despise when Baby learns to flip itself over or eat bananas or whatever. Anything he did—and some things he didn’t—I took as a sign of progress. How much he ate or didn’t, slept or didn’t, chirped or didn’t were all reason for celebration and praise. So the sight of him popping his head up over the wicker of his basket and looking around the desk one white-bright morning filled me with such joy I leapt out of bed, knocking over a stool. Yes! I thought, fists pumping.
Yes!!!
“Let me give you the tour, bro,” I said to him. “That’s my fuckin’ stapler right there, vintage, and those are some pencils in a jar. But you don’t even need to worry about that. You only need to worry about three things: how to fly, how to hunt, and how to fuck.” I clapped and pointed at him. “Also how to communicate with your birdie friends and bite dudes’ dicks off in the dark, so that’s five things. Better get to work.” And that’s when I started playing him YouTube videos of eagles throwing goats off cliffs and falcons swooping down to eat snakes. One morning I was showing him a clip of a dolphin with a boner raping a snorkeler, and Gary cocked his head at it, hopped out of his basket-nest onto the desk, and shit next to my bottle of wood glue.
“Pay attention,” I said. “This is important.”
* * *
Around eleven my sister called through the door that I’d received a package. I told her to come in. “It’s probably a dowry from some girls that want to get pregnant by me. I read somewhere that putting egg whites up pussies helps sperm swim—works like a luge.”
She craned her head to read the return address. “No, it’s from falcon gloves dot com.”
“Even better,” I said, taking it from her. “Now get the hell outta here. Gary and I have a lot of training to do today.”
“What kind of training?”
“Well,” I said, “Gary’s going through puberty right now, and it won’t be long before he’s enjoying the fruits of adulthood: flying around, eating berries, making Asian people wear surgical masks—you know. We’re just finishing up our morning video tutorials, and then we’re going on a field trip to the front lawn. Gary here needs to learn to take care of himself in the wild, so I’m gonna let him hop around the grass for a while.”
She poked Gary’s basket with her index finger so it swung like a cradle. “That’s it?”
“No. I might put him on a tree branch, too. I don’t know yet.”
“Cool,” she said, poking his basket again. “I wanna help.”
I looked at her face trying to gauge her sincerity but got distracted by the tiny blond hairs running the length of her jaw.