Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Action

MY FATHER WAS a suspicious man — and, as a widower, wounded, too. My mother died when I was ten, and he was overly concerned about my welfare. He showed it in the following way: he would take my chin and use it to lift my head and smell it, as though examining a melon for ripeness. He was checking for cigarette smoke, a girl’s perfume, the reek of the poolroom or a back alley, for the odor of disobedience. There was never anything. Even so, to test me, he’d say, “Where?” meaning, “Where have you been?”

He was thrifty in all ways, with money, with time; he always tore a stick of chewing gum in half and put the other half in his pocket for later. And he was thrifty in using the fewest possible words. If he wanted me to move out of the way he said, “Shift,” or if I asked for a favor he said, “Never.” He hated explanations.

Gruff with me but talkative with customers, he seemed to me to be two people. That did not surprise me. I was also two people, the obedient son stacking shoes at the foot of the stairs and, out of my father’s sight, someone else, I was not sure who, but certainly not the person he was used to.

All through high school I worked for him at the shoe store, hating every minute of it, like confinement. He claimed he needed me, but business was slow (“Slack”). I knew he had me there, tidying the store, sorting shoe sizes, to keep me out of trouble. His letterhead was printed Louis Lecomte and Son, which looked important, but the reality was my father dozing in one of the customers’ chairs upstairs and me in the basement stacking boxes.

My father’s worry about me made me think I was dangerous. I could hear the tremor in his voice when he called out, “Albert,” and if I didn’t reply, he’d call again, “Al!” then “Bertie!” with growing alarm — where was I? — until at last I said, “Yuh?” and he was calmed. Cruel of me to delay like that, but I was trapped. I missed all the school football games. I never joined a team myself because I couldn’t take time off to practice. My friends hung around Brigham’s after school, looking for action.

My father had succeeded. Sometimes I felt very young, other times like an old man; no action for me.

As a menial (no pay, just pocket money), I dusted the shoes on display, helped take inventory, or polished the Brannock Device, which was a metal clamp-like contraption for measuring feet — the width and length. I also ran errands.

I was on one today; the errands were the only freedom I had. But it was always the same trip — picking up a pair of shoes, sometimes two, from a warehouse in Boston, near South Station, on Atlantic Avenue.

Before I left, my father raised his hand and said, “No Eddie,” meaning, “Don’t associate with Eddie Springer,” whom he considered a bad influence. What I liked about Eddie was his saying, “I’m a wicked-bad influence.”

I took the electric car to Sullivan Square, climbing the stairs, waited on the platform in front of Spitting Is Forbidden, then rode the subway to South Station, and repeated the shoe size to the man at the warehouse counter. He did not greet me or even comment. He made out an invoice by hand, measured a length of string, and tied the box while I leaned on the counter.

A woman at a desk behind him smiled at me. “You look just like your father.”

I didn’t know what to say. My father was more than fifty years old. I could smell her perfume, like strong soap, and I imagined that her blond hair, too, had a fragrance. Seated, she seemed small, doll-like, but sure of herself.

The man said, “Ask your father why he only buys one pair at a time.”

The woman winked at me. She said, “His father only sells one pair at a time.”

“And when is he going to pay me what he owes me?”

“I’ll ask him.” The suggestion that my father might be tricky did not dismay me; it reassured me in my own weakness and made me admire him.

As I left, holding the box with a clip-on handle, a wooden cylinder with wire hooked through it, the woman said, “Don’t listen to Grumpy. Your father’s a great guy. Tell him Vie was asking for him. Violet.”

Maybe that was his other side, a ladies’ man and a traveler, a man of the world now down on his luck as a widower and the father of a sulky teenager. But if so, that did not make him forgiving. It made him more suspicious. He knew what a boy was capable of, and was overprotective. He was puritanical and hated any kind of foolery — loud music and loud talk, mentions of girls, of sunny frivolous places like California or Florida, any sort of indiscipline.

But that woman Vie knew something about my father that I didn’t, and this idea that he was concealing a part of his life made me dawdle in the errand, in my own concealment.

I cut through South Station and bought a jelly donut. The woman at the counter wearing a white apron and white cap lifted the donut with tongs from the tray and dropped it into a small bag.

“Ten cents,” she said, and I gave her the dime. As I stepped away, a man with a mean face leaned over and said, “Give me that.” He looked like a gargoyle, and his smell and his ugliness made him seem violent.

Handing over the bag, I held on to the shoebox and hurried out of the station as though I’d done something wrong. I went up State Street, walking fast, until I got to Milk Street. I had the sense that the man might be following me. I went into Goodspeed’s bookstore. The old woman at the desk said, “You can’t bring any parcels in here.”

Near the corner of Milk and Washington I stopped at a shop that sold knives and cameras. I knew the shop. There was always someone, usually two or three men, looking at the window display of knives — all sorts of hunting knives, wide blades, jagged blades, shiny, bone handles, bowie knives, Buck knives, Swiss Army knives — and in the adjoining window the cameras were set out, all sizes.

A grinning man in a long coat and glasses said, “Hey, look at that camera, how small it is. That one down there.”

Like a toy, a tiny camera, propped on a small box with a tiny red roll of film.

“You could get some swell pictures with that. Fit in the palm of your hand,” the man said. “Take it anywhere.”

I said, “I guess so. It’s really small. Maybe German.”

He put his face near mine as the man had done in South Station, demanding my donut. “I took some pictures of my roommate when he was bollocky.” The man was smiling horribly and making a face, and he dislodged his glasses. He pushed them back into place with his dirty thumb.

But I was backing away. I said, “That’s okay.”

“I could take a picture of you bollocky,” he said. “Wanna let me?”

“No thanks.”

“You’re probably too shy.”

“No. It’s not that. I just don’t want to.”

I walked quickly away into the sidewalk crowd and ducked past Raymond’s department store. I crossed Washington Street and hurried up Brewer, lingered in front of the joke shop, then to Tremont, up Park to the black soldiers memorial and Hooker’s statue, and down Beacon. Just as I approached Scollay Square, five black boys, big and small, came toward me, filling the sidewalk.

My heart was beating fast as I hurried through traffic to the other side of the street, and I kept walking until I got to the Old Howard theater. Ever since leaving the shoe warehouse I’d been escaping, and it seemed strange that, trying to avoid trouble, I’d found myself here. I had come here with Eddie Springer one Saturday six months before. I’d bumped into him on another errand.

Eddie knew the corners of Boston and all the shortcuts. He had shown me the knife shop and Raymond’s and the joke shop; my father had shown me the memorial to the black regiment and Hooker’s statue and the Union Oyster House. Between my father and Eddie, Boston had no secrets for me.

It was all exteriors, though. I never went into any stores. What was the point? I had no money, I was afraid of being confronted. But Eddie knew all the stores, and had even been inside the Old Howard and seen a burlesque show and repeated the jokes. A stripper said to a heckler, “Meet me in my dressing room. If I’m late, start without me,” which made Eddie laugh so hard he didn’t notice that I had not understood.

We had come this way in the winter, this same route, from South Station toward the Common, then via Scollay Square — a detour — and along Cambridge Street to the back slope of Beacon Hill.

When I realized that in this afternoon escape I was retracing that winter walk with Eddie, through the same streets, making the same stops, I felt safer. I knew that I could make my way onward to North Station and Sullivan Square to the electric cars, to bring the box of shoes back to my father.

Eddie was a hero to me for his being so confident and for knowing Boston, which was like knowing the world. He had a girlfriend. We’d stopped to see her. He’d introduced me to her — Paige.

As on that day with Eddie, I had nothing to do and nowhere to go on this summer afternoon of hot sidewalks and sharp smells and strangers, the air of the city thick with humidity under a heavy gray sky. It all stank pleasantly of wickedness, and if I’d known anything of sensuality I would have recognized it as sensual. But I was fifteen, small for my age, soon to enter my sophomore year of high school. Away from my house I was not sure who I was; it was as though I was walking the streets searching for a self.

Eddie was three years older than me, a neighbor who was kind to me because he knew my mother was dead. He smoked, he drank beer, he had this girlfriend Paige, and it seemed that the farther I walked down the back slope of Beacon Hill the more I resembled him. I remembered Paige: blond, small — her smallness made me bolder. She had blue eyes and a lovely smile and didn’t say much. Eddie claimed she was an Indian, from Veazie, Maine, on the river, and he said she was a dancer.

“You like her.”

“She’s action.” Saying that, he believed he’d told me everything.

I wished he were with me now. These days, when I was alone, I had no self, nothing to put forward, no idea that I dared express, no voice, nothing but the bravado I’d learned from Eddie, even his sayings. “Eyes like pinwheels,” he used to say. Or “She’s easy,” as he said of Paige. I had no self at all.

I remembered Paige clearly. She had a broad, blankish face, but kindly eyes. She listened and responded with her eyes. Her smallness made her seem girlish, but she was older than Eddie and much older than me, twenty-something. She seemed strong — experienced and sure of herself. She had no airs, she was friendly, though she didn’t say much.

“She’s action” was a sly way of describing her — something unspoken. But when I’d been with her I felt I was in the presence of an adult who liked me. She had treated me as an equal and had not mentioned that she was eight or ten years older. I think that Eddie took me to meet her to introduce me to a life remote from mine and to show me what a man of the world he was. Being with him, I felt that I was learning how to be a man of the world.

I liked the idea that she looked demure and patient — solid and reassuring, small and close to the ground, the ideal of motherhood. But deep down she was wild, her other self hidden, to be awakened by Eddie, who described her howling when he made love to her.

“She knows a few tricks,” he said. “And so do I.”

Paige lived alone in a basement on the other side of Beacon Hill, not an apartment but one large room, the kitchen at the back wall, a double bed to the right, some heavily upholstered chairs near the front door.

On this late-summer afternoon, crossing town, carrying my box of shoes, I walked slowly downhill, looking for her door. But I didn’t want to knock, nor was I sure which door was hers, because on that side of the hill the houses were so much alike. I walked down the opposite side of the street, glancing across, and saw that some of the basement doors were open. Encouraged by the open doors, I crossed the street, and when I passed her house I saw Paige inside, framed by the doorway, standing at an ironing board, shaking water onto a red cloth and then running her iron over it.

“Hi.”

With the bright daylight behind me as I peered down, my face must have been darkened, because she looked uncertain, even a bit worried. She lifted her iron, holding it like a weapon.

Instead of saying my name, I said, “Eddie’s friend. Al.”

Still holding the iron, she angled her body a bit to see me sideways, away from the light, and then said, “You! Come on in!” and laughed in a gasping sort of way, as if in relief.

I walked down the short flight of stairs to the basement room and sat in one of the upholstered chairs, exactly where I had sat on that winter day six months before when I’d come with Eddie.

“I hope it’s okay,” I said, because she had seemed worried when she’d first looked at me.

“It’s nice to see you,” she said, and returned to her ironing — and I could tell from the smoothness of her movements that she meant what she said. She pushed the iron without effort across the red cloth, and with her free hand she folded the cloth in half and ironed its fold, giving it a crease, then deftly folded it again.

“I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I said. This explanation gave me pleasure, because it wasn’t true, yet sounded plausible, even suave.

Paige smiled, clapping her iron down, and I suspected she didn’t believe me. She said, “There’s not much going on in this part of the world.”

“I was headed to North Station.”

She seemed to guess that it was a lame excuse — she was literal-minded and truthful in the way of a person with no small talk. She said, “How about a drink?”

“I’m all set.”

“There’s some lemonade in the fridge — help yourself,” she said, tossing her head, loosening her hair.

I felt it was beyond me to find the lemonade and a glass and pour myself a drink. Eddie would have known. It occurred to me that I was out of my depth and that, had she not been ironing in the open doorway, I might not have approached her. Without a word, she went to the refrigerator and poured me a glass of lemonade.

To fill the silence, I said, “I haven’t seen Eddie lately.”

She bowed her head and went on ironing.

“He changed schools. I guess he wasn’t too happy in Maine.” She still said nothing. “I’d like to go there sometime.” She nodded. “Like Eddie says, cold in the winter, and the summer’s only a few days in July.”

She worked the red cloth into a tighter square and pressed it with the heel of her hand before applying the iron.

“And I don’t belong there. My mother said once, ‘Just because a cat has kittens inside an oven doesn’t make them biscuits.’” She didn’t react. I now felt sure I’d raised the wrong subject. I said, “But my mother’s dead.”

This roused her. She looked pained. She said, “I’m really sorry. Please have some more lemonade?”

I showed her my glass was half full. I said, “How’s the dancing?”

“It’s okay,” she said, and in the tone I’d used, “The dancing.”

“Whereabouts do you do it?”

“You know the High Bar?”

“Not sure.”

“Combat Zone,” she said, frowning.

“Never been to the High Bar.”

“You’ve got to be twenty-one,” she said. She was about to say more, but folded the red cloth again instead. “It’s kind of a rough place.”

“I’d like to see you there.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “You’re better off somewhere else. Like get a good education.”

That was friendly. It reassured me, because I felt that I was getting to know her better, and something more might happen, and it excited me because I didn’t know what.

She was a solid presence, standing with her legs apart in her loose shorts, one hand smoothing and folding the red piece of cloth that was growing smaller with each fold, the heavy iron in her other hand. Wisps of her hair framed her damp face. I was not used to seeing a woman dressed like this, almost undressed, in her own house, and that excited me too.

“So where did you learn to dance?” I asked.

She smiled again, shook her head. “It’s pretty easy,” she said. “The guys don’t come there for the dancing.”

As we talked, my eyes were drawn to her bed, which was neatly made, with plump pillows and a teddy bear propped up against them, and on the side table a book. I could easily read the gold lettering on the spine, because it was a title I knew, The New Testament. That confused me. It didn’t fit with the image that Eddie had given me, She’s action. I saw us in the bed, doing — what? I’d never been in bed with a woman before.

“Darn,” she said.

The spell broke briefly, but the way she put down her iron and fussed, hiking up her untucked blouse, looking uncertain, made her seem sexy again.

“I’m out of starch.”

As she spoke, a shadow moved across her face, filling the doorway.

“Just thought I’d stop in.” The slow way the man descended the stairs emphasized his bulk, as though he was climbing down a ladder, testing each step before taking another. But when he got to the bottom step — and I stood, my nervousness making me self-consciously polite — I saw that he was not much taller than I was, but twice as heavy.

“Vic.”

He went over and chucked Paige under the chin. She jerked her face away as if she expected to be slapped. “You behaving yourself?”

“Have a coffee.”

“I’ll have what he’s having.”

“Lemonade,” Paige said. “It’s in the fridge. In a pitcher. I have to get some starch. I’ll be right back.”

“I should go,” I said.

“I won’t be a minute.”

“Don’t go,” Vic said at the refrigerator, pouring himself a glass of lemonade.

Then Paige was out the door and up the stairs.

I sat down. Vic sat in the chair next to me, but only breathed, sighed, didn’t say anything. A sound came from my throat — a nervous noise, a whicker of anxiety, Heh-heh.

“Heh-heh,” Vic said, the exact sound, and he stared at me. His face was mean and misshapen, with full lips. He was hunched forward in the chair, looking fatter, and I could hear his breathing, like gas escaping. He said, “I know who you are. You’re Eddie.”

“No. I’m not Eddie.” My voice was high and terrified, and the way I said it seemed to convince him that I was lying.

To calm myself, or maybe to show him I was calm, I raised my glass to my mouth, As I began to drink, he leaned over and punched me in the side of my face, cracking the edge of the glass against my teeth and jarring my head. I drunkenly set the glass on a side table and tasted blood and moved unsteadily to the stairs, just as Paige came down.

“I have to go.”

“What did you do?” she said angrily to Vic, but she knew.

“You heard him. He has to go.”

I hurried away, blind, stumbling downhill. I was so stunned by being hit in the face I could not think, and my head was ringing, my jaw hurt, and yet I felt glad to be away, and happy when I saw I was not being chased. My mouth was full of foul-tasting saliva but I did not spit until I got to the bottom of the hill, and then I bent over and spat blood. I had a tenderness on my tongue where my teeth, or the glass, had been forced against it by his punching me.

Passing a pizza parlor, I saw my reflection in the window and was surprised to see myself as normal: no one would have guessed I’d been hit in the face. But I looked so young, so pale, with spiky hair and a rumpled shirt.

That was how I looked. Inside I was sick, and the wound in my mouth, the taste of blood, made me afraid. I ran, feeling skinny and breathless, to North Station, pushed my token into the slot, and hurried onto the train.

It was at Sullivan Square, as the train drew in, that I remembered the shoes. I’d left them at Paige’s apartment when I’d run, after Vic hit me. And I’d been so afraid I hadn’t thought of them until now. On the electric car I tried to think of an excuse. The truth was awful, impossible, unrepeatable.

As soon as my father saw me entering the store, he said, “Shoes?” in his economical way, not wasting words on me. But it struck me that he was his other self, the one the woman had described, the good guy. He seemed, as I thought this, that he was summing me up too.

“I lost them. I was on the train and looked down and they weren’t there.”

“What else?”—meaning, And what other things happened to you?

“Nothing.”

He lifted my chin. The wound in my mouth hurt from his tugging my head. He leaned over and, sniffing my hair, he knew everything.

“Sure.”