The Cloaca (2 page)

I take another look at the card. Maybe the picture is of Rance's first game ever, of his first time at bat. Maybe this is the first pitch, and he's swinging. You give all your dumb life to do this one thing, who are you not to swing? And right as he is here in this picture, there's no telling what will happen. He might swing and miss, or he might scalp that ball. Whatever happens, something will happen. That's what Rance has decided.

T-ball was as far as I played baseball. Hitting a T-ball is just about as easy as punching the air, but there were those kids I remember who just wouldn't or couldn't swing. The ball was elevated and still and unmistakably orange—basically in a choice position for them to be marvelous champions. But so many of those kids would just stand there, bat on their shoulder, not quite ready to swing. Not quite ready for anything to happen because of something they did. Not quite ready for everything to happen because of something they did.

To know that not long after this first swing Rance will screw up his leg and bring to a halt to everything he has been building is just a bit too big. And it's kind of amazing. That all of that is here in this card, this guy's whole life. So I tell the pile it's not for sale.

“Fuck you it's not for sale,” the pile yelps. There's just a glimmer of cry in his grown man snowman eyes. “Fuck you it's not for sale!”

A smile comes up like a burp, and I try to allay the thing by wrapping it up, by curling my bottom lip over my top, but the look you make trying to keep yourself from smiling is a million dollars worse than an actual smile. Red flowers bloom all over the pile's pear face until it's just one big field of crimson. Little angry toots of breath fart out of his dilated nostrils and he's wobbling and vibrating just so.

These men that crowd The Arena are basically boys, guarding the crap they have and conniving to steal the crap they want. Action figures and toy cars that they never got to have when they were the right age, memorabilia of athletes that did stuff that these men in a million years would never be able to do, comic books wrapped tight in their Mylar bags, never to be opened again. They bicker and they bitch, all squirrelly greed and mean loneliness. Sometimes I'll watch them milling and waddling around the rink and imagine their bellies as hatches that open up to reveal some petty, pouting child at the controls of a man. The world that these goons live in is so damned fragile, patched together mostly with opinion, so they're so extra careful and possessive of it. The world as they see it is this toy that they won't let anyone else handle because they're afraid it might be taken away from them, or get broken. I haven't heard the phrase “See with your eyes and not with your hands” so often since I can't even remember when.

The pile tries to collect his huffiness, arrange it into something big and threatening. His little claw looks like it's trying to grip air while his other hand keeps adjusting the hang of his shoulder bag. Some sort of panicked dew has settled onto his lip beard, making it glisten.

“I don't know what the hell your deal is, kid. I don't know what kind of shit you're trying to pull, but trust me, I'm not the guy you want to be pulling it with.” The pile sputters this out and all I can think of is shit being pulled on one of those machines like taffy.

“I'm not pulling any crap. There's no deal. The card's just not for sale.”

“Well why the hell isn't it?”

I take another look at the card, at the mid-swing of Rance Davis, of everything behind him and everything in front of him.

“Because I want it,” I tell the pile without looking at him. I don't know how much more I can stand to look at him. “I like this one.”

The pile opens his mouth a few times, like he's imitating someone talking. He stops gulping and puts his good hand into one of the boxes and takes out a wad of cards. “Well what about these ones? Huh? You like these ones? Are these ones for sale? Huh?”

“I don't know. I haven't had a look at those ones. Maybe they are.”

“Then have a look,” the pile says, and he winds up and chucks the wad of cards at me.

For an impossible instant, this wad of maybe a hundred or so cards about the thickness of a junior hamburger holds its shape in the air, coming at me like one complete block ready to hit my face like I hit it first. But right in front of me each card catches its own influence of air and they pull apart and go their separate ways. All the cards fall, and flutter, and spin, and swoop down, each of them with someone's whole life, some heavy moment, on it.

We stare at each other, the pile and me, like we can't believe that what just happened just happened. As if two other people were doing this, and we were just two guys that watched it. My eyes flit back to the pile's claw and whatever pause button got pushed gets pushed again to make things play. “You're cleaning that up,” I say, which I guess presses the pile's own play button, because his mouth opens to say something and his baby penis hand goes to readjust his bag, but before he can say anything, my mom does.

“Pickle!” she yells, and drops to her hands and knees to gather up the scattered cards. There may as well be hundred dollar bills all over the ground. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” she's mumbling.

What can anybody do but watch something like that? The pile and me set our differences aside like soldiers on Christmas and watch my mom scramble around on the ground. But then I get a glimpse down her shirt and that's enough of that.

“Mom,” I say. “Get up. Jesus.”

She wobbles onto one knee and reaches to the pile for help up. Her hand grabs at the empty air where a person without a deformed hand's hand would be. She looks up and she sees the claw, in all its shine and sheen, so she gets up just fine on her own. Up, she has that dizzy, frazzled look of someone just spun ceaselessly in a chair.

“So who wants to tell me what the fuck this is?” she says. I can smell on her the cigarettes she doesn't smoke anymore. “Pickle?”

“This is your kid?” the pile wants to know. “These are your cards? This is your table?”

Mom looks at the pile, and then at the mess of cards that she didn't even begin to clean up, and then at the pile's sweaty claw, and then at me, and she seems actually unsure of whether anything here is actually hers. “And you are?” she asks the pile, maybe to bide some time while she figures out who all this stuff belongs to exactly.

“I'm the guy your kid is trying to screw.”

“Pickle?”

“I didn't lay a hand on him, Mom, I swear,” I say, and though she doesn't, I can tell that my mom wants to smile at that one.

“Listen. Are these cards for sale or aren't they?”

“What? Of course they're for sale.”

“Then why won't this kid of yours sell me this card?”

“What card?”

“That one.” The pile makes a motion in my direction with his claw, to Rance Davis. “He says it's not for sale because he
likes
it.”

I shoot the pile one hell of a look, as if he's betrayed some confidence.

Mom takes the card and I let her take it. She looks it over, stares seriously at it, like someone staring at the engine of a broken down car they have no idea about, as if seriousness will fix the car.

“I don't get it,” she says. She turns to me. “What is there to like about it?” Like Sean, she's never taken a look at any of these cards but is so stupidly sure of their worth.

Not knowing what to say, I shrug my shoulders. With my face I do my best to explain about the card, about what's on there to like, but trying to say anything on purpose with your face is like trying to perform a song you hear in your head on an instrument you just barely know how to play.

It goes to show that you never know what anybody is ever thinking. But you can guess, if you know the person. For all I know, my mom isn't thinking about the card right now at all, but about whether or not this pile of human being uses his damp claw to pull his pud. But I don't think she's thinking that. It is probably only me who's thinking that. What I think she's thinking about, seeing the way her face gets full and soft from looking at however my face is looking, has to do with Sean. I bet dimes to dollars that she's suspecting that I don't want to sell the pile this card, or any of these cards, because they're Sean's. Like this is all I've got left of that bag of dicks, and so letting go of his cards would be letting go of him. I think that's the way that someone who watches too much TV's mind tends to work. So she nods at me, having gleaned all she's gleaned from whatever my face had to say. Like, “It's okay. I get it.” All I know is that whatever she gets, it can't be it.

My mom turns dramatically to the pile. “I'm sorry,” she says, with this weird, fluffy confidence. “The card,” she pauses, “is not for sale.”

“I'll give you one hundred dollars,” the pile says.

“One hundred dollars?” she asks.

“One hundred dollars,” the pile confirms.

She can't even afford me a piteous, I'm sorry look. “Okay,” my mom says.

Now, anyone that's spent any time being nine years old knows that in any instance of wheeling and dealing you have to see the money before letting someone put their claws on what you're selling. Because even if they do take off without paying you, you at least know that they've got the money to make it worth chasing them down and beating it out of them. Without seeing a nickel, my mom hands over Rance Davis. As soon as the pile has it clutched in his baby penises he brings the card up to his claw, as if to feed an animal he's got in a headlock, and tears the card in half and lets the halves flutter stupidly onto the ground with the rest of the mess he's made so far.

“Fuck you,” he says to my mom, pointing an erect baby penis at her.

“Fuck you,” he says to me, pegging me with the same baby boner.

“So fuck us both, then?” I ask.

The pile smiles at me, his mustache like an eyebrow over a sick yellow eye. “That's right.” We finally understand each other.

Giving his shoulder bag one final, absolute adjustment, the pile galumphs away.

All the other men in all their other fanny packs are staring at us. I'm looking at my mom, trying to decide whether or not I can hate her for the rest of my life because of this, if this one time is enough of a reason. Every last Sunday I come here with her, for her—not that I have anything better to do—and entertain this insane delusion of hers. All this for her, and she's ready to sell me out in an instant. People have hated people for less.

I guess because someone has to say something, my mom turns to me and, instead of “I'm sorry,” she makes a gross face and says, “Did you get a load of that asshole's little hand?”

“Yeah,” I agree. “It was disgusting.”

Like we'd rehearsed it before, we both, at the exact same time, screw up our faces and distort our left hands and make this guttural noise—like, “Grarrrrrrrrrr”—and this is going to go on to be a shared thing that we do whenever something's disgusting or unreasonable in life. We make the hand, do the noise, and know exactly where all that came from.

He came out onto his porch and there was some hippy mother changing her baby on his lawn. On a Hudson Bay blanket the mother was wiping and dabbing at the muddy rolls and creases of her little girl. A gust of wind whipped up leaves around the two, and it was like last night on TV. Some pear-shaped Spanish grandma had been crammed into this glass booth with money going nuts all around her. The grandma had grabbed at the bills, stuffing her clothes with money, this twisted look of desperation on her leathery face. She had looked so stupid. He couldn't tell if the point was to degrade the grandma, but he could tell that this grandma didn't care. When the wind in the booth was turned off all the money dropped and lay in a pile at her feet. All that money just right there, but not for her. She had gotten some, but not enough. Never enough. Not quite like money, brittle and wet leaves stuck to the felt of the hippy mother's dreadlocks and onto the swamp of the little girl.

“I'll just be a sec,” the hippy mother said when she saw him there on the porch. He took a sip from his mug and nodded, slid a hand into the pocket of his housecoat as a sign of being a-okay with things.

The hippy mother stood up with a bundle in her hand and walked to him. The baby writhed on the blanket like it was trying to crawl along the air.

“Hi,” the hippy mother said. She had one of those cute, tired, hippy-dippy faces that would have been ugly if she had tried to pretty it up with make-up, he thought.

“Morning,” he said.

The mother winced at the sun high above them and looked back at him, squinting still.

“Listen,” she said, “I'm sorry to do this, but I've got nowhere to toss this.” She held up the bundle. “I was wondering if you wouldn't mind taking it for me.”

“That's shit in there?” he asked, gesturing at the bundle with his mug.

“Pretty much.”

“I don't know why,” he said, “but I always think that babies have those things that birds have. Now, what are those things called?”

The hippy mother didn't know.

“You know. It's that thing that birds have where they do a combination of shitting and peeing so you can't tell what the hell it is that's coming out. Just a bunch of disgusting stuff that doesn't make any sense. It's called
something
, what they have. It's like ‘The Cloister,' only it's not. It's got
ache
in it somewhere I think.” He shut his eyes tight and gritted his teeth, trying to force the word to the surface. “And it's right there, too.”

“Fuck,” he said, popping open his eyes. “It's frustrating, huh? When you can't think of a word you know. It's like having one of those sneezes where you can't sneeze. Do you ever get those?”