Under the Mercy Trees (14 page)

20

Martin

The day before Christmas eve, Martin got up late, as usual. Dennis had left the mail in a pile on the kitchen counter, with the power and gas and phone bills conspicuously displayed. Martin flipped through the stack. Collection notices and two new credit card offers from companies who hadn't researched his payment history. He saved them. The last envelope contained a check from Arnie for $1,028 for his last editing job. There wouldn't be any more checks. He folded the envelope and stuck it in his pocket.

Dennis's key fumbled in the lock. Martin let him in. Dennis mouth-breathed from the climb up the stairs and deposited plastic grocery bags on the kitchen counter. “Those stairs are going to kill me.”

Martin poked through the grocery bags and could tell it annoyed Dennis.

“I'm cooking an early Christmas dinner for some friends. I didn't really buy enough for you,” Dennis said.

“I'll eat out.”

Dennis looked relieved. He pressed the answering machine message button and began deleting messages from creditors, hitting the delete button again and again, with a look of distaste, as if crushing roaches. “I'm fed up, Martin. You're two months behind on the rent. What do you plan to do?”

“Things will pick up in January. Nobody hires this time of year.”

“How do you expect to find work when you spend all your time drunk or sleeping it off?”

The doorbell buzzed. Martin walked over and looked through the peephole. Their neighbor from 3B, Mrs. Shapiro, peered up at him. The peephole distorted her already long face. He opened the door. Mrs. Shapiro came up to his chest. She had dyed her hair an unlikely lioness color. Her wrinkled face was peeling from a recent sunburn.

“Martin, the mailman delivered this to my apartment by mistake.” She handed him a flat padded manila envelope. The return address was Leon Owenby, the handwriting the big stick letters of someone who rarely wrote anything. Leon had mailed it book rate, the cheapest available. Grease spots dotted the outside. It was postmarked October 1, a week before he disappeared.

“How long have you had this?” he said.

“It came while I was in Florida, visiting my daughter. I'm sorry, the girl getting my mail must not have noticed it was yours. I hope it's nothing important.”

“It's fine, Mrs. Shapiro. Thanks for bringing it over.”

“Not a problem. Hello, Dennis.” She waved at him from the door.

“Hello, Mrs. Shapiro, glad you're back,” Dennis said.

Mrs. Shapiro reached up and patted Martin's cheek. “Happy holidays, boys.” She turned to leave.

“You, too.” Martin closed the door and locked it behind her.

He opened the envelope, and Leon's smell put him right there in the room. Kerosene and cigar smoke. The shock of it made Martin sit down on the couch. He reached inside the envelope and pulled out what Leon had sent, recognizing it immediately by the worn cardboard cover and his mother's slender handwriting. It was her ledger, the book she used to keep account of her egg money and expenses. His mother was proud that she could read and write and cipher. Martin had assumed his father burned the ledger after she died. He opened it. The binding cracked. A flattened silverfish formed a fossil on the front page, but the book was in good condition. She had recorded her money, not the household's, income neat in one column and expenses in the next, starting in 1942 and going until she died, in 1954. He folded back yellowing paper and found the year he left for college, the ten dollars she sent him to buy a new shirt for his play.

Dennis looked over Martin's shoulder with interest. “Whose was it?” He reached down to touch it, and Martin moved the ledger away from him.

“My mother's.”

Dennis withdrew his stubby fingers. “I have at least two clients who would kill for something like that.”

Martin gently flipped the pages. He wanted an explanation but knew he would never have one. Leon wasn't a diarist. He wouldn't include even a note. Had he saved the ledger from their father's fire or come across it later? Had it meant something to him? Was their mother dear to Leon after all, this Esau brother of the fields?

In the back, another envelope. Martin took it out. The rusty clasp broke in his hand when he undid it. He gently shook the contents into his lap. Photographs. Small, square black-and-whites with white borders, stuck to each other in spots, all with the same June 1958 development date. He separated them carefully. They were mostly of one young woman. He didn't recognize her. Leon was a poor photographer, with no concept of lighting. The woman's face was in shadow in every picture. Only her teeth gleamed white in a smile. A button-down blouse with the tails tied above her navel showed her midriff. In some shots she stretched her pretty legs out like a pinup girl. There were a few photos of Leon, tall and smiling, as though he were getting away with something. The girl had been a better photographer than Leon. Martin gathered up the photographs to put back in their envelope. He wondered if Leon had meant to send them, or if he had forgotten they were tucked in the back of the ledger.

“I'll pay you a hundred dollars for the book,” Dennis said.

Martin held the ledger to his chest.

“You know you need the cash.”

“Fuck off, Dennis,” he said.

Dennis waved his hands, giving up.

When Dennis's first guest arrived around two o'clock, Martin put on his coat and left the building. He got a cheap meal at a Cuban dive between Fourteenth and Fifteenth streets, then ambled down Eighth Avenue. He had nothing to do. It was cold, but not impossibly so. He passed restaurants, shops, Korean vegetable stands. Vendors yelled, “Whaddelse, Whaddelse!” When he was new to New York he had felt battered by the rudeness, missing the soft southern “WhatmayIhepyouwith?”

He turned left onto Christopher Street, gauging how much walking he needed to do before he showed back up at the apartment. In his years in the city he had seen Christopher Street go from sleazy to campy to almost-but-not-quite chic. Just after Sheridan Square he passed the Stonewall Inn.

Stonewall. Whenever two or more gay men of a certain age gathered together in New York City, there would be a discussion of Stonewall. Where were you the night of the riot? Martin always kept his mouth shut because he had run.

*  *  *

He and Dennis were out with a friend of Dennis's that Martin didn't care for, a mouthy guy named Kyle, who favored bell-bottoms and tank tops and wore his hair too long. They weren't at the Stonewall Inn that night. Martin and Dennis were in their thirties. The Stonewall clientele made them feel old. Plus the Stonewall watered the Scotch. They spent the evening at another dive down the street, where the booze was less diluted. Martin drank while Kyle big-talked. Kyle had just been fired from a job for telling off the boss. He yammered on about how his First Amendment right to free speech had been violated. Martin stopped drinking long enough to tell him that the First Amendment only protected him from government action, not a private employer. Kyle might have punched him if a man hadn't rushed through the front door of the bar just then and announced, “They're raiding the Stonewall.”

Martin's first thought was,
Let's get out of here in case we're next
. The cops were known to raid several bars in one night, to convince the public they were doing something about the homosexual problem. You'd be in a bar and the lights would go on, warning you to stop touching your friend. Then the cops would come in. Martin had never been detained, but he dreaded it.

“Come on, man, let's go watch the fun,” Kyle said. Dennis got up to follow him.

“Let's just go home, Dennis,” Martin said.

“Oh, come on. They can't do anything to us.”

Martin tagged along behind Dennis and Kyle. The hot June air carried city smells, diesel exhaust and garbage waiting to be picked up, here and there a waft of food frying. When they got to the Stonewall, cops were leading the first arrests out. A tall, blond transvestite cursed and screamed at the policeman twisting her arm. A crowd had gathered. Kyle led them up to the front. Men farther back called the cops names from a safe distance. Then people starting tossing pocket change, harmlessly at first, the pennies jingling as they landed at the cops' feet.

“Bullshit,” Kyle said. The crowd was too limp-wristed for him. He reached in his pocket and started hurling change, hard, at the cops' heads. He caught one officer in the forehead and drew blood. The cop looked around to see where the projectile had come from. Kyle was out of change. He bent down and picked up a piece of cement that had crumbled from the curb and lobbed it at the police, hitting another officer on the shoulder. Guys around them started doing the same thing, picking up whatever they could find on the ground to throw.

Martin was ready to leave. He turned to Dennis, who was usually as risk averse as he was, but Dennis wore a look of absolute exhilaration. Other faces around them were the same. Something had let loose. Glass shattered as someone broke one of the Stonewall's upstairs windows. The cops who had been inside poured outside to attempt crowd control. A cop lifted his nightstick and caught the first bystander he came to in the side of the head. The man went down. The people near him surged forward.

Martin touched Dennis's elbow. “I'm going home.” He ducked through the crowd until he was free of bodies. The sounds of yelling and batons on bone receded. As he walked, fast, he met people heading toward the noise. “What's going on?” He didn't answer.

Back at the apartment, he waited. He thought Dennis would come to his senses and follow him home, but hours went by before he heard the locks rattle. He let in Dennis and Kyle and two other men he didn't know. Kyle's head was split open, but it hadn't shut him up. He was already rehashing his performance. “Did you see the look on that cop's face? I
pounded
him, man.” Dennis wet a dishcloth and put it on Kyle's wound, then he and the other guys hopped around the little kitchen, acting out what had happened. Finally, they ran out of stories. Dennis turned to Martin, so satisfied. “Martin, you should have stayed.”

*  *  *

Martin always ran.

He ran away from Willoby County at eighteen when his mother needed him. Ran away from Liza and never explained why. Wasn't around for Shane. Ran again when he turned down Hodge's offer and boarded a plane back to New York instead of staying until they found his brother's body. If just once he could stand his ground and do the right thing instead of scuttling away.

Ivy. The first person he let down. The sheriff deputy's arm hard in Martin's puny grip as Martin rode his back. Raw wood splintering along a bedroom doorframe. Ivy sitting in the dirt, her animal cries. His guilt again years later when Shane killed himself and he didn't feel the loss the way he had the first time. When did he lose his outrage? During what drunken blackout did he misplace it? Ivy's matron face was smooth now, scars, if she had them, on the inside.

The cold was getting to him. He pulled his collar up around his throat and headed home, stopping at a liquor store. Dennis's friends were still there when he got back. Dennis tensed up, afraid Martin would crash his party.

“I just need a glass.” Martin opened the cabinet.

Dennis's friend Byron sat at their small kitchen table with pillows propped behind his back, so emaciated from AIDS that it hurt him to lean his spine against the wooden chair. “How are you, Martin?” Byron's brown eyes were liquid, like a dog's. This would be his last Christmas.

“I'm good.” Martin didn't know what else to say. He carried his booze into his room and closed the door. He could hear them laughing and talking, and fought back childish thoughts that they were laughing at him.

His room was just big enough for a single bed, dresser, and a small desk for his computer. Leon's padded envelope, with the egg book, was on the desk where he'd left it earlier. He tossed it gently onto the bed. He poured a glass of Scotch, took his shoes off, and sat on the bed to take another look at the ledger. He lifted it to his nose, hoping for some scent of his mother, but smelled only mustiness. He looked through the book, carefully examining each page. When he didn't find anything, he did the old Bible trick, closing the ledger and then letting it fall open where it would, to reveal its secrets. It opened to a page filled with ordinary things, sugar purchased and jelly sold at the county fair.

His mother had used a book like this to teach him how to add and subtract, before he started school. She sat at the table, and he stood at her elbow. She pointed to numbers, seventy cents for eggs sold to a neighbor one week, eighty cents the next. “What does it add up to?”

The figures seemed huge to him.

“Now look.” She put her thumb over the zeroes in seventy and eighty. “If I cover up the aughts, what's seven and eight together?”

“Fifteen,” he said.

She took her thumb away. “Now put back the aught.”

He saw what she meant. “One hundred fifty.”

“That's it.” She turned to a clean page in her ledger and wrote out $7,000 and $8,000, then handed him her pencil. “Now cross out the aughts.”

He took the pencil and marked through the zeroes. “Fifteen. Fifteen thousand.”

“You've got it.” She reached an arm around him and pulled him in close for a hug.

“Mama.”

“What, son?”

“You're never going to sell that many eggs.”

Laughter trilled from her throat, tickling his ear.

*  *  *

It had to mean something that Leon had sent the ledger. Paper rustled in Martin's pocket. He took out the envelope containing his last check and fingered it. He remembered the cheap food at the Whelan Bojangles'. His remaining money would go a lot further in North Carolina than it would in New York City, especially if he supplemented it with free meals at his relatives' houses. He could mooch off them until they got tired of him, which was inevitable. If he went back, his brother and sisters couldn't say he was running away from his obligations, though his creditors might have other views. Dennis would be pissed about losing help with the rent, but Martin's help was sporadic at best. And he would no longer have to listen to the constant whispered body counts, who was infected and which Byron or Joe or Tom had died that week.