The Grievers Read online

  In my mind, I was already tearing across the hall, rolling up my sleeves and breathing expletives as terrified fourteenyear-olds dove out of my way and hid behind trash cans and trophy cases to avoid the impending Armageddon. In my mind, I was swooping in on Frank from behind, grabbing him by the shoulder and spinning him around to face certain doom. In my mind, I was six inches taller than him and built like a lumberjack, and Frank was begging for mercy as I clutched the front of his shirt and cocked a fist mere inches from his trembling, terrified face.

  “Horse Feathers,” someone said.

  The voice came from behind, so I spun around, impotent fists balled at my side, to find a kid whose round cheeks glowed like the moon and whose shoulders were dusted with big flakes of yellow dandruff. When I scowled at him, he made the face I was making in the class picture—crossed eyes, puffy cheeks, and fish lips—only to reveal a mouthful of heavy-duty orthodontic hardware.

  “You’re doing Harpo Marx, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, feigning ennui. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “That’s pretty cool,” the kid said. “I thought I was the only Marx Brothers fan around here.”

  Whatever the hell he was talking about, he was the only person in the entire school who didn’t think I was an idiot. So I shook his hand when he offered it and assumed I was supposed to laugh when the bell rang for homeroom and he took off down the hall, stooped over like a walking question mark, knocking ash from an imaginary cigar, and singing, maybe to me, maybe to himself, maybe to the world at large, “Hello, I must be going. I cannot stay. I came to say I must be going. I’m glad I came, but just the same, I must be going!”

  The kid’s name was Neil Pogue. Twelve years later, he’d be the best man at my wedding. Nearly a year to the day after that, I’d get a call from Billy Chin’s mother informing me that her son had committed suicide. Outside of crying in Karen’s arms, telling Neil was the only thing I could think to do.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Whenever her mother asked what I was doing with myself that summer, Karen’s answer usually started with something vague about research for my dissertation, touched briefly on our house and how desperately it needed our attention, elided over my congenital laziness, and ended squarely on a lie that had me working part-time in a bank.

  The problem with Karen’s phrasing wasn’t so much the “working” part or the “part-time” part or even, surprisingly, the “bank” part. The problem was with the preposition. To say that I was working in a bank was a gross overstatement that implied a necktie, a sweater vest, air conditioning, and a working knowledge of the most basic laws of mathematics. To say that I was working at a bank might be a step closer to the truth, but only a small step that left far too much to the imagination. I might, for example, be mistaken for someone with the requisite training to carry a gun and prevent the occasional robbery. For that matter, I might also be mistaken for someone competent enough to push a broom or run a vacuum cleaner after everyone of consequence had gone home for the day. Plausible though all of these possibilities might have been for any other husband Karen’s mother could have imagined for her daughter, they were slightly above my pay grade. The real truth was that I worked in the general vicinity of a bank. Or, more accurately, on the bank’s front lawn.

  The bank itself was the weakest link in a regional chain that still bore the name of the town where the first branch opened in 1889. What this meant in practical terms was that their rates were never especially good and that their ATM fees were based on the premise that the average customer had a balance of more than twelve dollars at any given moment. The way I fit into all of this was that the chain wanted to bring in more customers without spending a whole lot of money, so they invested in a dozen or so giant dollar sign costumes and left the individual bank managers to fill them—the only qualifications being a complete lack of ambition and an ass-load of time to kill. Fortunately for me, I had both, plus a Master’s degree in English. My ace in the hole, however, was that the guy who hired me had graduated from Saint Leonard’s Academy seventeen years before I did. This fact alone brought my resume to the top of the pile and meant that countless teens and high school dropouts would have to seek employment elsewhere that summer.

  The idea, as far as I could gather, was for me to march back and forth in front of the bank dressed in the giant dollar sign costume so passing motorists would know that there was money in the building behind me. The costume was made of polystyrene and corrugated plastic and was studded with green sequins that glittered in the sun. It wasn’t quite the size of a refrigerator box, but walking around in the thing was so awkward that it might as well have been. A little grate positioned just below eye-level let in light and air, and offered just enough peripheral vision to keep me from wandering off the lawn and into the path of oncoming traffic. Vents above my head and shoulders kept me from roasting alive as I marched along, hands poking out of the costume in white cotton gloves, one clutching a fistful of balloons, the other twitching in a half-hearted wave while my skinny legs wobbled back and forth and side to side in an effort to keep the whole bulky mess from toppling over.

  Adding insult to injury, I also had to wear green stockings and rubber boots along with everything else because, in the opinion of my immediate supervisor, it didn’t make sense for a dollar sign to be standing on the side of the road in bright white sneakers, particularly in June. Aesthetic concerns aside, the boots turned out to be a good idea because the lawn was always muddy, and it wasn’t uncommon for the sprinklers to come on while I was on the clock.

  My first day on the job, a tractor-trailer rumbled by, and the backdraft knocked me off my feet. I fell backwards onto the lawn and let go of my balloons and lay there for twenty minutes before anyone noticed my predicament. When a pair of tellers eventually came out of the bank to help me, they sighed audibly as their shoes squished across the muddy lawn.

  “Lean into the wake of the larger vehicles,” one of them said with an air of experience as they helped me onto my feet, “but know when to let up.”

  “And tie the balloons to your wrist,” the other said. “Otherwise you’ll keep losing them.”

  I tried to thank them for the advice, but they were behind me somewhere, and by the time I turned around, they were gone. Then the sprinklers came on, and I wondered what would happen if I tried to hitch a ride with the next tractor-trailer that came rumbling down the highway. The question, however, was rendered moot when I took two steps and slipped in the mud again. This chain of events established the pattern that carried me through the next few days, the only difference being that the tellers ignored me for exponentially longer stretches each time I fell over.

  On the morning after my conversation with Mrs. Chin, I managed to pace the lawn and wave at oncoming traffic for a good fifteen minutes before the sprinklers started spitting at me and I slipped once again on the slick, muddy lawn. By that time, the tellers had apparently agreed amongst themselves to pretend that I didn’t exist, so my only recourse was to set my balloons free, curl into a ball inside my big, boxy costume, and call Neil Pogue.

  “Hey,” I said into my cell phone when a chipper robot instructed me to leave a message after explaining that my best (and possibly only) friend was either unavailable or out of range. “It’s Charley. I’m trapped in a giant dollar sign. Call me.”

  IN THE damp, sweaty dark of my costume, I tried not to think about the black line of sutures running up and down Billy Chin’s wrist the last time I saw him. Instead, I tried to think of better times, but even the best were tinged with an aftertaste of teen angst and juvenile insecurity.

  We never talked much when we were freshmen, but in our sophomore year, Billy and I shared a dead cat named Fascia. We kept her in a plastic bag on the back shelf of the biology lab and laid her body out on a yellow rubber mat every Thursday to see what secrets her hardened innards might reveal. The lab smelled of bitter formaldehyde and the acrid stench of overripe teenage boys fresh from the basketb
all court. Under the stark industrial glare of the halogen light rods glowing above us, the musculature beneath Fascia’s skin took on a gray tint, and her eyes, sealed by rigor mortis, appeared to be squinting. Before we’d skinned her, Fascia was an orange tabby. Now she was a rubbery mass of bones and giblets in fuzzy white boots, an object lesson in how not to handle a scalpel.

  “Billy Chin is Schwartz’s lover,” Frank Dearborn sang in a girly falsetto to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” while his lab partner, Andrew Taylor, executed a herky-jerky moonwalk, swiveled his hips, and grabbed his crotch. “He’s just a boy who says that Schwartz is the one. But the cat is not their son.”

  If Frank had a single talent, it was playing Mad Libs with the pop charts. Per the unwritten rules of engagement at boys’ schools everywhere, however, he could only employ this talent for purposes of torment, and he frequently awarded himself bonus points for raising doubts about the sexual orientation of his victims or for painting them in the most xenophobic of palettes.

  “Hey, Chin!” Frank called from the lab table behind us. “I see your Schwartz is as big as mine.”

  His lab partner snorted, and I spun on my stool to give them both the stink eye.

  “I don’t get it,” Billy said, studying our stained lab manual before making an incision in our cat.

  “It’s a line from Spaceballs,” I said. “He’s implying that I’m your penis.”

  “Oy, gevalt, Schwartz! Don’t be disgusting. I’m saying that my dick is as big as you are.”

  “Whatever, Frank,” I said and made a jerk-off gesture with my fist.

  “Is there something you wanted to share with the class, Mr. Schwartz?” our teacher asked while my fist was still flying, mid-jerk, over my shoulder. His name was Phil Ennis, but we all called him Mr. Anus when he wasn’t within earshot.

  “No, Mr. Ennis,” I said. “I don’t have anything to share.”

  “Then perhaps you could walk us through today’s dissection.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, glancing at the lab manual in front of Billy. “I was just about to make an incision in our cat’s—”

  There were two cats on the page in front of me, each with a thick, black arrow pointing at the thing I was supposed to be cutting into. If I had looked closely, I probably would have noticed that one of the cats was a boy and that the other was a girl. But I didn’t look closely. In fact, I barely looked at all, proceeding instead under the assumption that each diagram was more or less the same and that the labels were interchangeable.

  “Your cat’s what, Mr. Schwartz?” Ennis prompted.

  “Our cat’s scrotal sack,” I said.

  “That’s very interesting,” Ennis said, shuffling to our station in his powder-blue lab coat. “Let’s all have a look, shall we?”

  Billy nudged me with his elbow and tried, subtly, to point out that Fascia was a female, but it was too late. Even if the laws of biology rendered my search absurd, the growing throng of snickering boys gathered around my lab station forced me to at least take a stab at finding Fascia’s scrotal sack. Fortunately for me, Billy had already done most of the dirty work of cutting away enough of the cat’s innards to reveal a smooth, pinkish organ that bore a reasonable resemblance to a sack.

  “Here we have the scrotal sack,” I said, my hands sheathed in white latex gloves, my eyes scanning the instructions for mutilating this particular piece of the cat as laid out in the lab manual. “So our next step is to make an incision to reveal the specimen’s testicles.”

  “Just so we’re on the same page, Mr. Schwartz, are you saying that you found the specimen’s scrotal sack inside its pelvic cavity?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “You don’t sound so sure of yourself, Mr. Schwartz.”

  “Of course I’m sure of myself,” I said, this time with feeling. “I found Fascia’s scrotal sack inside her pelvic cavity.”

  Everyone laughed except for Billy.

  “Then by all means, Mr. Schwartz, please continue.”

  Something small and lumpy shifted when I squeezed the organ. For a brief second, I imagined that a miracle had occurred and that, despite the odds, our cat had grown a pair of testicles in what was more than likely her uterus. But then I made a jagged incision, and a tiny, pinched face erupted from the glistening surface of the organ in question, appearing, despite being stillborn, to squint up at the sterile white lights of the biology lab.

  “Look at that,” Frank said. “Schwartz and Chin are parents.”

  Once again, everyone but Billy laughed until Ennis raised a hand for silence.

  “This certainly is an interesting turn of events, Mr. Schwartz,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes, Mr. Ennis. I would.”

  “Stop me at any point if I’m mistaken, Mr. Schwartz, but you purport to have been making an incision in your specimen’s scrotal sack, the function of which is to house and protect the testicles.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ennis.”

  “Yet when you made an incision in your specimen’s scrotal sack, we discovered not testicles but kittens. Don’t you find this the least bit curious, Mr. Schwartz?”

  “I do, Mr. Ennis.”

  “You don’t have kittens hiding in your scrotal sack, do you, Mr. Schwartz?”

  “No, Mr. Ennis. I don’t.”

  “And, to the best of your knowledge, Mr. Schwartz, your testicles don’t, by any chance, bear a likeness to kittens, do they?”

  “No, Mr. Ennis. My testicles don’t look like kittens.”

  “Then how, Mr. Schwartz, do you explain the mysterious appearance of kittens in your specimen’s scrotal sack?”

  “Magic?” I said.

  Ennis lowered his hand and turned his attention to Billy.

  “Do you have anything to say about this strange turn of events, Mr. Chin?”

  “It’s a uterus,” Billy said, looking at his shoes. “The specimen was female.”

  “Very interesting, Mr. Chin. Does your lab partner know the difference between males and females?”

  “I don’t know,” Billy croaked.

  “Indeed,” Ennis said as the snickers hissing through the lab exploded into laughter. “One certainly wonders.”

  Ennis turned away, and a sea of pimply faces parted before him.

  “Sorry,” Billy whispered.

  “Forget about it,” I said.

  “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Just forget about it, okay?”

  I put down the scalpel, and Billy picked it up to finish the work I’d begun. He freed one dead kitten and then another from Fascia’s hardened uterus. He laid them both on the yellow rubber mat next to their mother. A third was about to follow when Frank Dearborn cleared his throat and hummed the opening bars of “Billie Jean.”

  THROUGH NO fault of my own, my cell phone played the theme from The Jeffersons every time I received an incoming call, so when Neil got back to me, the sweaty silence of my big, boxy costume was broken by the sound of a gospel choir singing about moving on up to the East Side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky.

  “I won’t even ask,” Neil said when I answered.

  “No, I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Trapped in a dollar sign?”

  “You said you wouldn’t ask.”

  “Some of us have to work for a living, you know.”

  “You say that as if I took this job for shits and giggles.”

  “Knowing you? I thought you were lined up to teach summer school.”

  “Too much grading,” I said. “I have a dissertation to write.”

  “And how’s that coming along?”

  “This isn’t about my dissertation,” I said. “This is about your best friend being trapped in the tomblike darkness of a giant polystyrene dollar sign. Are you going to help me or not?”

  “I’m at work,” Neil said.

  “You work for the government,” I told him. “Which means you work for the people, which means you work for me.
”

  “You’re being a dick. Are you aware of that?”

  Neil had a point, but I had to keep pushing. The idea was to get him to meet me for lunch so I could tell him about Billy. My original plan had been to tell him over the phone, but every time I tried to call, I lost my nerve. Even now, the talking, witty, charming part of my brain was painting over Billy’s suicide with layers and layers of thick, meaningless chatter. As if by not mentioning it, I could hold his death at bay. As if by refusing to say the words, I could keep Billy alive forever. Yes, Neil knew that Billy was gone, but he didn’t know how our friend had died. That much information was my own private burden, at least as far as the two of us were concerned. Saying the words, relating the details and making them real, would force us into new territory. Given the chance, Neil and I could talk for hours and never say anything, but Billy’s suicide took that option off the table.

  “I’m asking for your help,” I said. “If that makes me a dick, then I guess I’m a dick.”

  “I’m not saying you’re a dick,” Neil said. “I’m saying you’re being a dick. There’s a difference.”

  “So you’ll help me?”

  There was a long pause, and as the wheels of Irish-Catholic guilt turned in Neil’s head, I told him where I was working and the easiest way to get there.

  “That’s a half-hour away,” he protested, though we both knew how the conversation would end.

  “Twenty minutes if you make the lights,” I said.

  “Can’t you call Dwayne?”

  “He’s on duty,” I said. “Either that or asleep. Besides, his solution would be to blast me out of this thing with his service revolver.”

  “What about Sullivan? Or Anthony Gambacorta? Why can’t you bother one of them for a change?”