The Schwa Was Here

19. The Schwa Gets Radiation Therapy in a Room That Doesn’t Smell Too Good No Matter How Much It’s Disinfected

When he saw me approaching with Lexie, half an hour after I had left him in the road, I saw his shoulders sag.

“Why did you have to bring her here?” he said with nasty ac­cusation in his eyes. “I don’t feel bad enough about this al­ready? You had to tell her, too?”

“All I told her is that you’re sitting here like an idiot in the middle of road construction.”

“I don’t like being talked about in the third person,” said Lexie.

“You chose him,” he grumbled at her, “so why don’t you both just go.”

“Calvin Schwa, I am so sick of you feeling sorry for yourself,” Lexie said. “Stand up.”

“I’m comfortable where I am.”

“I said, ’STAND UP!”’

Lexie had a pretty commanding voice. It made him leap to his feet. I jumped, too.

“We’ve got a car waiting,” I told him. “You’re coming with us, and we’re not taking no for an answer.”

“What am I going to do when I get home?” he asked. “What do I tell my father about the money? Can’t I just stay here, close my eyes, and disappear?”

“You can’t because you won’t,” I said. “You won’t disappear, I mean. I don’t know what kind of cosmic weirdness the Schwa Effect is, but it can’t be terminal.”

“Prove it.”

“If you want proof, you have to come with us.”

Lexie turned her head slightly, angling an ear to me, as if she could catch my meaning if she could hear me better. What proof are you talking about? her body language asked me. I didn’t answer her with my voice or body, so she turned her at­tention back to the Schwa. Reaching toward the sound of his voice, she gently touched his face. He pulled away.

“Don’t touch me if you don’t mean it.”

A look of hurt, maybe even insult, fell across Lexie’s face. “I always mean it when I touch. It just may not mean what you think it does.” She reached forward again, touching him, and this time the Schwa allowed it. Cupping his face in both of her hands, she moved her thumbs across his cold, red cheeks. It was her way of looking him in the eye.

“Antsy is not your only friend. And you have never once slipped my mind.”

I could see the Schwa trying to blink away tears. I don’t know exactly what he felt at that moment, but I did know that he was done with sitting in the road, feeling sorry for himself.

“Come on, Calvin,” I said. “There’s someplace we need to go.”

“Where?”

I took a deep breath. It was time he had his own dose of trauma therapy.

“We’re paying a visit to the Night Butcher.”

“I’m not getting out of the car,” he told me when we pulled to a stop in the parking lot of Waldbaum’s supermarket.

“If you don’t get out, you’ll never know what happened.”

“Well, I’m getting out,” said Lexie, irritated that I had kept what little I knew from her. “Even if you don’t want to hear, Calvin, I do.”

In the end, he got out with us, and the three of us walked to the supermarket with the grave determination of my mother on double-coupon day.

We passed the checkers, who were complaining about the stock boys; we passed the stock boys, who were making jokes about the checkers; and we pushed our way into the room be­hind the meat counter without anyone noticing or caring that we were there.

Gunther was blasting the meat-cutting room with a steam hose to disinfect the stainless-steel instruments. It was a fright­ening noise to walk in on. A screeching hiss filled the air, which was stifling and humid. When he saw us, he stopped. He didn’t yell at me this time, or make accusations. He didn’t demand that we leave. He just studied us for a moment, the hose now silent in his hand.

“This is him, then? The friend?”

“This is him,” I answered.

“His name is Calvin,” Lexie added.

Gunther took a look at Lexie, opened his mouth as if to ask something stupid like, “This one is blind?,” but thought better of it. He put down his hose and pulled up a few chairs, the chair legs squeaking on the sweating tile floor. We all sat in si­lence, which was somehow worse than the awful hiss.

“You have to understand it was none of my business,” Gunther began. “None of my business at all. This is why I don’t speak sooner. Other people, they talk, talk, talk until words mean noth­ing. There is no truth.” He pointed to his chest. “I keep truth here. Not in other people’s ears. So you know what I say is true.”

The Schwa hung on his every word, clutching the edge of his chair just like Crawley did in the helicopter. Gunther didn’t speak again for a while. Maybe he wanted us to drag it out of him. Maybe he thought it was a game of twenty questions.

“Tell me what happened to my mother,” the Schwa said. It turns out all Gunther was waiting for was the proper invita­tion—and although he claimed that his memory wasn’t what it used to be, it didn’t stop him from remembering things with the detail of a police report.

“The woman—your mother. She would come here all the time. Those were the days that I worked the swing shift usually. Four to midnight. Busy time. Always busy time. People rushing home from work. Dinners to make. So I always come early. Help out the day butcher. Half an hour, maybe an hour early. Your mother—I remember she came. I don’t remember her face. Isn’t that strange? I can’t remember her face.”

I looked to the Schwa to see how he would react. He didn’t flinch.

“I do remember that she was not a happy woman,” Gunther continued. “No joy in her eyes, or in her voice. The way she would reach for meat. It was as if just the reaching was a bur­den. As if to lift her arm took all the strength of her soul. I see many people like this, but few as unhappy as her.”

“Does this sound right, Calvin?” Lexie asked.

The Schwa shrugged. “I guess.”

“Go on,” I said. “Tell us about that day.”

“Ya, the day.” Gunther glanced at the door, to make sure no one would come in to disturb us. “The other butcher who worked here during the day—Oscar was his name—he hated his job. He was a third-generation butcher. In three generations the blood can thin. No passion. No love for the work.”

“He couldn’t stand the daily grind,” said Lexie. I snickered, but quickly shut myself up.

“I never trusted him,” Gunther continued. “He was unpre­dictable. How do you say . . . impulsive. He would say such things! He said he would someday slam a cleaver in the man­ager’s desk, and walk out. Or he would threaten to cut the meat into strange, unnatural shapes, just to confuse the customers. I would have to talk him out of such things. He spoke to me of travels he never took to places he wished to go. Alaska, the Florida Keys. Visit the Hopi Indians, kayak the Colorado River. All talk. He never went. Oscar spent his vacations at home alone, and the pressure, it would just build. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know when, but I knew it was only a matter of time until he snapped. Maybe, I thought, the cleaver would wind up in the manager’s head instead of his desk. Or maybe ... maybe something worse.”

“What does this have to do with my mother?” the Schwa asked impatiently.

“Very much to do with your mother,” Gunther said. “Because your mother was there when he finally snapped.” Gunther leaned forward, looking directly at the Schwa. It was like me and Lexie were no longer in the room.

“Actually,” Gunther said, “it was your mother who snapped first. I was right here in the back room when I heard it. This woman crying. Crying like someone had died. Crying like the world had come to an end. I don’t do well with crying women. I stayed back. Oscar was the emotional butcher—he was best with the emotional customers, so I let him talk to her.

“First he talked to her over the counter, trying to calm her down. Then he took her behind the counter and sat her down. I had to take over special orders while they talked. I could hear some of what they said. She felt like she was watching her own life from the outside, as if through a spyglass. So did he. Many times she thought she might end it all. So did he. But she never did ... because more than anything, she was afraid that no one would notice that she was gone.”

I could almost see the blood draining from the Schwa’s face. He was so pale now I thought he might pass out.

“I go back to fill a special order for lamb shanks. It was the Passover, you know. Never enough lamb shanks at the Passover. When I come back, Oscar has taken off his apron, and he hands it to me. ‛I’m going,’ he says. ‛But Oscar, still you have half an hour of duty,’ I tell him. ‛Busiest time. And the Pass­over!’ But he doesn’t care. ‛Tell the manager the beef stops here,’ he says. Then he takes your mother’s hand, pulls her out of the chair—maybe that same chair you sit in now. He pulls her up, and now she’s laughing instead of crying, and then they run out the back way, like two cuckoos in love. That’s the last anyone has ever seen of them.”

The Schwa stared at him, slack-jawed.

“There you have it,” Gunther said, crossing his legs in satis­faction. “Do you want me to tell it again?”

The Schwa’s head began to shake, but not in the normal con­trolled way. It kind of moved like one of those bobble-head dolls. “My mother ran away with the butcher?”

“It is more correct to say that he ran away with her . . . but yes, this is what happened.”

His head kept on hobbling. “My mother ran away with the BUTCHER?”

Gunther looked at me, as if I should explain why the Schwa kept repeating the question.

The Schwa was borderline ballistic. “What kind of sick per­son runs off with a butcher, and leaves her five-year-old kid in the frozen-food section?”

“These are questions I cannot answer,” Gunther said.

“The important thing,” I told him, “is that she didn’t disap­pear.”

“THIS IS WORSE!” he screamed so suddenly it made Gun­ther jump. “THIS IS WAY WORSE! THE BUTCHER?’

He stood up and his chair flew out behind him, hitting a stainless-steel table that rang out like a bell. “I hate her! I hate her guts! I hate her hate her hate her!”

Gunther stood and backed away. “Maybe I go finish clean­ing.” Since emotional customers weren’t his thing, he disap­peared into the meat locker to hide.

Now it wasn’t just the Schwa’s head that was shaking, it was his whole body. His fists were clenched and quivering, turning white as his face turned red.

“She left me there, and I thought ... I thought it was my fault.”

“Calvin, it’s all right!” said Lexie.

“No, it’s not! It’s never going to be all right! How could it ever be? How could you even say that?”

And suddenly I began to wonder if maybe knowing the truth was the worst thing for him. Maybe I had made the mother of all mistakes, letting him find out. Which is worse, the friend who keeps the truth secret, or the friend that spills the beans? As Gunther would say, “These are questions I cannot answer.” Anyway, I didn’t want to think about those questions just then. I knew I’d think about them after I got home, and stay up all night thinking about what a moron I was, and maybe I oughta be made of Pisher Plastic myself, for all the sense I have.

Lexie clasped the Schwa’s hands, trying to comfort him, and he just broke down like the five-year-old he once was in that shopping cart. “I hate her,” he wailed, but his wails were grow­ing softer. “I hate her ...”

I put my hand on his shoulder, and squeezed until I felt his shaking begin to fade. “Welcome to the visible world,” I told him, gently. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

We barely spoke once we got back into the car, and although the silence was miserable and uncomfortable, breaking it was harder than you might think. We had the driver drop the Schwa off first, then Lexie, then me, leaving me lots of quality time with myself in the backseat to feel lousy about the whole thing. How could I live with myself if I totally ruined the Schwa’s life? What kind of person did that make me? Why did I have to put myself smack in the middle of all of this?

My parents, whose favorite line whenever I showed up late was, “We were about to call the police,” had called the police. When Lexie’s driver pulled up to my house, there was an NYPD cruiser out front, its lights spinning, sending kaleido­scope flashes around the street, where neighbors all peered out from behind their blinds. Great, I thought. The perfect way to end this night. I thanked the driver, then took a deep breath and strode into the house, hoping to come up with something clever to say. But no brilliance introduced itself at the time, so I just walked in, playing clueless, and said, “What’s going on?”

The look of despair on my parents’ faces was not replaced by fury when they saw me. I wondered why. A cop stood with them between the foyer and the living room. The cop didn’t start to wrap everything up when he saw me, either. I won­dered about this, too, and began to get that vague, uneasy feel­ing that maybe they hadn’t called the police. Maybe the police came on their own. Then it began to dawn on me that maybe this had nothing to do with me. Suddenly I started to feel my throat begin to tighten, and my skin begin to get hot and squirmy.

“It’s Frankie ...” Mom said.

I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know. Suddenly I was seeing all the things my mother imagines when one of us is late. I saw Frankie lying in a ditch, I saw him splattered over Nos8trand Avenue, I saw him stabbed in an alley. But my parents weren’t offering information, so I had to ask.

“What happened to Frankie?”

My parents just looked to each other rather than telling me, so the policeman spoke up instead. “Your brother’s been ar­rested for drunk driving.”

I let out a gust of air, just then realizing that I hadn’t been breathing.

“He wasn’t actually driving,” added Mom, talking more to the cop than to me. “He backed the car into a duck pond.”

“That’s driving,” the cop reminded her.

I wanted to tell them that it was impossible—that Frankie didn’t drink—I mean, he was the good brother, the A student, the perfect son. That’s what I wanted to say, but my brain got locked on “stupid,” and I said, “Where’s there a duck pond in Brooklyn?”

“Is he going to prison?” Christina asked. “Do we have to talk to him through glass?”

“It’s his first offense,” Dad said. “He’ll lose his license for a year, and have to do community service. That’s what they gave me when I was his age.”

I did a major double take. “You? You mean you got arrested for drunk driving? You never drink and drive!”

“Exactly,” Dad said.

Then my mother looked at me, suddenly realizing something. “Where were you? Why are you coming home so late?”

So they hadn’t even noticed I was gone. But that was okay. I could live without being the center of attention. I didn’t need my face on a billboard, or on a mug shot. And it occurred to me that going unnoticed sometimes meant that you were trusted to do the right thing.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told them. “You go take care of Frankie.”