Warp & Weft
New York
1
At sixteen, he’s thin. Five foot seven last time he checked, with bony birdlike legs and narrow shoulders. But the ribs, they’re embarrassing. Dominic Furtado has this mirror—it’s actually the largest shard of his parents’ fractured bedroom mirror, which he saved from the trash and carried back up with towels wrapped around his hands—and in its acuteness it’s a dagger of visual truth, a truth he sometimes thinks he can mitigate by turning his body in certain angles, lighting it with the fill of sideways sunshine. At high noon on the beach he’d look to be striped, down there, and even when he puffs out his chest and spreads his shoulders, to stretch the skin more tautly across the frame, he’s still never seen anyone with slats like this. So he regards this as almost a mild birth defect (admittedly a subtle one, like a mole, or a gap in the teeth), to be blamed on his mother’s prepartum love of cigarettes and highballs. Yeah, there’s a cracked Kodak black-and-white his mother keeps in the frame of the new mirror in the bedroom; in it, she’s dressed in black, smiling wickedly at the camera in black-red lips, cigarette in her pincer-like right hand and drink in her dangling left and her stomach round at the bottom of the frame—16 years ago, 1962. “We didn’t know then!” she says whenever he looks at that picture, which he always looks at sourly. The picture has stayed slotted in the mirror frame year after year, the evidence of his mother’s youthful beauty now curled on itself like a crabbed hand.
He’s wearing two T-shirts to cover the ribs and to effect a bulkiness. He dresses this way even on the hottest of days, as this one is, even this late in the afternoon. He can feel the sweat clinging and freeing down the small of his back as he marches across the scorched grass of Lafayette Park and toward the playground, with clenched fists, and resolute stride, to where Janice and her friends are, as they always are, swinging on the swing set and smoking cigarettes. Janice, who is fifteen, is sitting cross-legged, grinding the remnants of her Marlboro into the dirt, working it as if it were a challenge that right now keeps her from looking up and noticing Dominic’s approach. Two of her friends, maybe thirteen or fourteen, are on the swings, cigarettes clenched in their teeth as they lurch to get more height on their arcs. Dominic hangs his arms out from his body in a way meant to suggest a muscularity he doesn’t remotely possess, and he brings his chest up and out to cull the most out of his doubly T-shirted form. He inhales deeply, inflating himself like a balloon tiger. Janice has never quite said so, but he has nonetheless concluded that his thinness, combined with the unnatural way that certain bones and joints rise blade-like beneath the skin (like those compound fractures in the first-aid pamphlets they’d handed out at school), was the primary reason she has so steadfastly refused to be his girlfriend. Janice was the first to get tits and she’s been way out in front ever since. Her body has made things different for her, made it so guys will ignore her lesser qualities, and she knows it. Her eyes are lined with makeup in a way that makes him think of sex, every time, and her lips are done in a manner that the lipstick spreads out beyond the actual boundaries of her mouth. He can’t really say she’s pretty, in fact he sometimes thinks she’ll grow into a kind of hardened ugliness of the women he sees in too-tight pants, hanging on for dear life; but this is exactly why he believes he has a realistic shot here.
He stops a few feet away from her, and waits. She slowly looks up.
“It’s my birthday,” he says. He feels the need to say it, because no one else has, all day, and now the day is drawing in, and there’s only been trouble so far.
In the days leading up to this moment, Dominic hasn’t told his parents anything—even as he formed the plan; even as he skipped school on some days to make the long walk from mill to mill, filling out application forms; even as he let his schoolwork, which had always been good, dwindle and lapse. He had done these things with a certain strained confidence that this was in order. After all, his father had done exactly what he was now conspiring to do. He expected the old man should not have objected. So as he had slowly come to the table for supper last night, the eve of his sixteenth birthday, he was jittery with the excitement of his as-yet unannounced news.
His father sat solemnly at the table, slumped in the wheelchair. The old man breathed heavily through his nose, the hiss of inhalation and exhalation long and whistling. He had once been a thin man, sinewy from those long days at a hard job. But now, in his wheelchair he was ponderous, his gut wedged against the table and his upper arms fatly folded across his chest.
He looked at Dominic.
“What’s so funny?” he said.
Dominic let his grin die. “Nothing’s funny. Just something good.”
The old man didn’t ask. Dominic’s mother was in the kitchen, and through the door he could see her scooping mashed potatoes into a bowl.
“Come on, Ma, I got something to tell you,” he said.
“One more minute,” she said.
It felt strange, that Donald no longer sat at the table with them. Up until a few months ago, he and Dominic had shared a room, always more brothers than uncle and nephew. Donald just turned twenty, and Dominic wished Donald were here, to be at the table and hear the news.
His mother came in with the potatoes. The table had already been laid with beans and bread, a plate of papery slices of chicken, and glasses of water. His mother sat herself at the table and arranged a paper napkin on her lap.
“He says he’s happy about something,” his father said, as if an accusation.
“Good! What are you happy about, Dominic?” his mother said.
“I’m happy about a decision I made.”
His mother had the frozen look of someone no longer sure she wanted to hear what was coming. His father’s mouth curled skeptically.
“Today was my last day of school,” Dominic said. “I’m going to work.…”
His father scowled. Any mention of money was something better left unsaid. His mother dropped her eyes, wishing she could suck the words back in. His father rubbed his hands up and down the wheelchair’s padded armrests.
“You’re being a dope,” he said to Dominic. “Where’s this gonna get you?”
“I want to work,” Dominic said, evenly. “I want things, and I’ll pay for them myself.”
“Yeah, I get it,” his father said. “I don’t need an anvil falling on my head.”
“I’m not trying to be an asshole here,” Dominic said.
“So it just comes natural to you?”
Dominic shut his mouth then.
“You like your food?” his father said. “The food I paid for?”
“Well, eat then,” his mother said. “Because no food is worth wasting when money is so tight.”
Dominic ate.
“Good, huh?” his father said. “You mother makes good stew.”
Dominic kept eating.
“Ah, shit, here he goes.” His father was shifting in the wheelchair. “The little boy’s gonna pout now. You gonna pout at work, too, little boy?”
His father now addressed no one in particular. “The pouty little boy thinks he’s gonna be a working man.”
Dominic shifted his attention to his mother. He watched until she met his eyes, and she quickly looked away, saying in so low a voice Dominic felt as if he was reading the words, “I’ll do the dishes.”
Dominic was looking at his food but could feel the heat of his father’s gaze. What his father called pouting Dominic preferred to view as a nonviolent protest, like Gandhi, on whom he’d written a report as one of his final academic acts before quitting school. He imagined his social studies teacher, holding the graded paper, wondering where he went: Dominic’s quitting school was not something he’d announced. He simply walked out of the building with everyone else, knowing he wouldn’t be back.
Dominic listened to his father’s growling bites and grunting mastication. After what seemed like a thousand years Dominic heard the creak of wheels and the rumble of floorboards, and he was alone.
He’s waiting for Janice to say something now. But she’s still working at that cigarette butt, mashing it down to nothing. He wants to get on to the important part, more than just that it’s his birthday. Janice sits in the dirt, no reaction. He wants her to realize everything is about to be different, but she issues only a barely discernible shrug.
“So it’s your birthday,” Janice finally says. “So?”
One of her friends, whose name he doesn’t know, snorts in derision. But that was to be expected.
Janice is still working the butt into the dirt, her fingertips dirty with the effort. Now she tosses the defeated stub away, and turns to him.
“Ya got any cigs?”
“I don’t smoke,” he says, as if he had to tell her that.
“Oh,” she says. “Yeah.”
“So what did you get for ya birthday?” she says.
“Nothing.”
“Ya getting your permit?” Janice likes getting rides.
“No. Nobody’s got a car I can drive.”
Janice turns to her girlfriend, the one who laughed at him. “Ya got a cig?”
The friend reaches into her pocket and comes up with a soft pack that she’s stolen from her mother’s bag, as usual. She tosses them onto the ground. They almost reach Janice.
“Hand me those?” Janice says to Dominic. Dominic moves his foot out and uses it to sweep the pack toward her.
“No more high school for me,” he says. He sees Janice’s eyebrow rise across an otherwise stolid mask of indifference. The swing squeaks and groans at the pivots. Her friend, whom Dominic is now guessing to be about twelve, speaks for her.
“What are you, too stupid?”
“I got a job. I’m going to work.”
“What kind of work are you gonna do?” the girl says. “You gonna work at McDonald’s or something?”
“No. I’m gonna work down at the mill. Down Chace Finishing.” He waits, because if there is any one reason he has made this decision, it is for the reaction he hopes will now come, but doesn’t. Janice takes another hit from the cigarette and closes her eyes as she blows out.
“What kind of work are you gonna do at the mill?” the girl on the swing says.
“Whatever they need for me to do.”
“So you’re just gonna stop going to school? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Dominic says.
It took three days of skipping school to get the job. At the first place, Arkwright, the secretary looked at him with a maternal sympathy and told him there just weren’t any jobs. At the second place, Joan Fabrics, the girl at the desk sat watching him fill out the forms and then asked him his age, more than once. “I swear to God I’m sixteen,” he said, even though he had no driver’s license and had no idea where his mother kept his birth certificate. The girl, maybe twenty herself, winked at him and said they’d call, but he knew they wouldn’t. At the third, an old security guard patted him on the shoulder and then watched him do the paperwork with sad eyes. It went on like that, and then late that Friday afternoon he walked into the office of Chace Finishing, where a girl named Cheryl handed him a clipboard, took the information into an office, and then came back and told him he was hired.
Janice says to her friends, “I’m going home.”
She gets up and brushes the dirt off the seat of her jeans, off an ass that other girls he knows don’t have yet. The two other girls get off the swings and begin to wander toward Eastern Avenue.
Dominic walks after them, not really sure why. The younger girl looks over her shoulder, and then whispers something to Janice, and the three of them giggle.
Janice casts a quick glance backwards.
“So I guess I won’t have to worry about you bothering me at school anymore,” she says.
He sits under a tree watching the sky darken. It’s still cool at night, still mid-May, and even with the two T-shirts he jolts with a chill as night comes on. He isn’t going home, not for a while. He wants them to be asleep. It’s Sunday evening; tomorrow morning at seven o’clock he’ll punch in at the new job, and he doesn’t feel like arguing about it. He doesn’t even want to go there now. No way can he go back to school—Janice would never respect anything he did or said if he went back to school. He wonders if this is the last time he’ll ever see her. So he sits, shivering, waiting. He has no money. He thinks about how, with a job, he could go buy a Coke over at the Gas-Mart anytime he wanted, and how that would be good. School is a pain in the ass, even though he always kind of liked it. Janice would make him feel stupid if he showed back up.
And his parents. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He hopes they’ve gone to bed.
2
Machado is at the dark end of the warehouse floor, his thick fists clenching and unclenching. He’s begun to sweat, as he always does before he has to fight. It’s not a sign of fear, only readiness. He has rolled up the sleeves of his green workshirt, and hung his cap in the lunchroom. He’s been in a lot of fights over the twenty years here, and now, even now at the age of sixty, he doesn’t fear anyone and isn’t afraid of losing. He sweats, bathed in the firm knowledge that he is about to give out a beating.
Antonio Joao Machado has seen it all, seen every kind of dope and flunky and pothead float through this mill, this place he regards as his and his alone. It doesn’t particularly matter that he works in the loading dock, or that he makeslittle better than minimum wage, as he’s made all the time since he came here, or that this language that has surrounded him for those two decades has always confounded him.
His power here comes from the work, the lifting and shoving and pushing, and that power has never left him. At the other end of things, up in the offices, the money is the power. But his is a power that is the most elemental, his ability to take on any man in the place and be the one left standing. Since he came from the Azores, he’s been in dozens of fistfights, most often out by the sea wall behind the mill, where it overlooks the place where the river pours into Mount Hope Bay. If he had ever ended up on the ground, there’d be no claim.
The last time he’s been in a fight was a while back, three or four years, maybe. The man he’d fought had been carried bleeding to the floor of the warehouse, where it was reported to the foreman that this man had been hit by a dye drum falling off a three-high pallet.
This morning, Monday, he’s waiting for Kelley, because it’s come to this. Kelley has been pushing him for months, with his attitude and his laziness. Whether anyone else believes it, Machado sees it as his responsibility to be sure everyone pulls his weight. Foremen come and go, and are highly suspect themselves. Kelley simply needs to be dealt with.
Machado hears a noise, down the line. He pulls in a breath. But he sees, at the far end, that it’s only Levasseur, carrying a propane tank to mount on the forklift. Levasseur, thick and of middling age, grunts with the effort, not noticing Machado in the shadows. The grunts rise up into the rafters; Levasseur moves on; Machado relaxes now, if only a bit. It’s 7:20, already twenty minutes after punch-in and no Kelley, which is very much the problem. Machado has been waiting all weekend to set things straight.
Friday is what put Machado into this violent and righteous mood. Three trucks had come in after lunchtime, all needing to be unloaded before the three-thirty bell. The warehouse men had dripped and grunted through the afternoon, with its heat and closeness and the slackening feeling that it was Friday. Levasseur and Sheehan drove the forklifts and the others did the hand labor, rolling ammonia barrels out to the lip of the truck to be taken by the forks, stacking loose bags of dye powder onto pallets. Then, at some indeterminate point, in the midst of the furious work, someone spat out, Where the fuck is Kelley?, and after a while Machado again made note of Kelley’s absence. The foreman, Parry, was in the shipping office, his head bent over paperwork, not noticing. Barrels and boxes and bags, pulled and piled and stacked, sweat in rivers, the stink of them and of dye and of ammonia, and finally the bell for afternoon break—halfway home! They stood in the sound of their own breathing, deep and gasping, hands on hips, heads bowed. Machado said quietly, “I find Kelley,” and all of them—Carey, Levasseur, the other ones coming off the upper floors to help—they were all nodding, Yeah, as they shuffled toward the water cooler near Parry’s glassed-in office.
Machado began walking the lines. He was forsaking water for this search; he checked the dead ends and small pockets in the walls of pallets and boxes that changed into a never-soluble maze, small lairs where a man could hide. Machado found nothing, just cigarette butts and crumpled candy wrappers. He walked then to the time clock, to look at the cards. Touching another man’s card was a firing offense, so he tried to peer into the slot on the metal card rack that held Kelley’s card, trying to see if he had punched out early—another firing offense, this was what he was dealing with. Machado could not see through the thin slots, and as much as he wanted to he could not bring himself to touch that card, even just for a peek.
Finally, he found his way to the men’s room. That small chamber’s one lightbulb hung dimly on its frayed wire, and when Machado looked in he saw, beneath the battered door of the stall, the feet, splayed lazily in their work boots. Machado walked slowly to it, and when he pounded the door he heard the feet sliding in defensive contraction. Machado peered over the stall door. Kelley was sitting on the can, his pants up, the sports pages in his hand.
“Hey, what the fuck?” Kelley shouted.
Machado said nothing, but Kelley kept shouting.
“What’re you, a fuckin’ quiff or something?” Kelley wailed. “Tryin’ to see something?”
Machado drew a breath. “Get to work,” he said evenly.
Kelley was fortyish, a thin guy, and was like a lot of guys who would do the work for years and then realize, like they’re being let in on some new secret, that the work is unrelenting, the repetition unyielding. The realization would hit those kinds of guys like a slap. And then they would begin to start figuring out ways of avoiding the real work. The drivers tended to be that way, stretching two-hour runs into four-hour runs, but they had a skill, and maybe that gave them the right. Forty-year-old guys who walked into a bottom-wage job like this were just fuck-ups, for sure, and this place wasn’t a rest cure.
Kelley was standing in the stall now, looking over the door.
“Six guys’ work divided by five, no good,” Machado said.
“I’m in the fuckin shitter here,” Kelley said.
“Pants not down—you shitting your pants?” Machado said.
Kelley’s eyes had the look, angry but scared, pinwheeling.
“What, you want to see something, homo?”
Machado was drenched, his clothes soaked through from the work, but now Kelley’s forehead was beaded from the adrenaline.
“Back to work,” Machado said.
“Hey,” Kelley said, not letting it go. “Hey, fuck off. I’m going already.”
“Yeah,” Machado said. “You’re fuckin going.” When Kelley came out of the stall Machado marched him back to the loading bay like a prisoner of war, while the others stood staring in blank disgust. Kelley worked the rest of the afternoon, not that hard but enough to keep him out of trouble, and as they began to wait for the three-thirty shift bell to ring, they were still not done.
Parry came wandering out of the office, looking alarmed. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a cheap tie, and in the heat his armpits were circled in blooms of sweat. He smoothed his thick hand back over his bald head.
“Why aren’t you guys done?” he said. “I can’t pay overtime for this.”
They all kept working. Machado was shooting Kelley looks now, and when Kelley caught those fierce glances, he’d look away, seemingly vanquished.
When the short bell went off at three-twenty-five, there were three barrels left. The truck driver sat in the cab, running the engine, and Carey looked at the others and said, “You guys clock out. I’ll finish this up.” Machado nodded to him, owing him the favor some other day, and then fell into the line to the lunch room, where they picked up their thermoses and moved to the clock at the end of the warehouse. Kelley said nothing, and no one spoke to him. Carey would be done in ten minutes, Machado knew. But there was a sacrilege to a man working after the bell without pay, especially when another man had put him in that position. Machado fixed his eyes on the back of Kelley’s head, and kept his stare on him even as Kelley took out his card and leaned against the granite wall, waiting. Kelly took out a pack of cigarettes, flipping them in his hand. He glanced over and Machado narrowed his eyes.
“I swear this guy’s a fuckin homo,” Kelley said to no one in particular. “I swear to God because he’s been looking at me all fuckin day.”
Machado stepped closer. “You call me a homo?”
“All I know is, you keep looking at me.”
Machado smiled. “I tell you what: Monday morning I show you whether I’m a homo or not. You and me, we settle it, Monday morning, hey, tough guy?”
Kelley puffed his chest a bit. “Yeah, you old bastard, let’s see. We’ll fuckin see. We’ll see on Monday.” He snorted, amused.
The others were standing with their cards in hand, staring at the floor and smiling uncomfortable smiles. If Carey were there he might have said something, but he was not, and the moment hung like a bad smell. The bell rang and everyone rushed the clock.
The weekend was laden with thoughts of the fight he would have on Monday morning, and Machado moved slowly through Saturday and Sunday, rolling his shoulders and twisting his neck to unbind the muscles he would need. In front of the radio at the kitchen table, as he listened to the Red Sox, he found himself clenching and unclenching his fists, popping the fingers out, as if flicking water from them, trying to get them to feel right. In the shower, Sunday night, he let the hot water scald his shoulders and then stood in a towel and began throwing light punches, watching himself in the fogged mirror so that he was a phantom, a swamp creature roaring in the shroud. He let off a rattle of uppercuts, because all fights outside a boxing ring were close in and clenching, fights where you heard the other guy’s breath in your ears and could read it like the look in his eyes.
All weekend, Ana wandered by him giving quizzical looks. She could tell something was up, but she had learned a long time ago not to ask. Work was a place to which he went and returned, went and returned, home with an empty lunchbox and a Friday paycheck and sometimes a welt on the eye or a loosened tooth that would make him chew his dinner sideways for a month or two. He had made only a few mentions of some of the men he spent his days with—he had mentioned a Carey, maybe ten years ago, and then Carey again three or four years later. When he said, quietly a few weeks before, that his friend Carey had troubles at home, she thought, Carey is still there, and that after all those years they must be friends, although she could paint no picture in her mind’s eye of what Carey must look like, or the sound of his voice.
Her own husband was a man who seemed, in these twenty years since they had come as refugees at mid-life from the Azores, to have broadened and solidified, and to have become a man of fewer words, humbled by the language he could not speak well and she chose not to speak at all. He spoke beautifully in Portuguese, like a patrician, but he had nonetheless seemed to dismiss language of any kind and communicated in simian grunts and burning glares. He frightened her sometimes—she wasn’t frightened of him but frightened instead that he was a good man who had become something else beyond her view. To her he was a quiet and deferent man who shoveled in his dinner, opened a beer, and took pleasure in listening to baseball on the radio. He had stopped going to church years back, and their daughter was grown and married. If she could have described her household it was one of quiet, quiet but not silence, and she had become quieter herself. She watched her husband clenching and unclenching his fists and she didn’t ask.
Machado awakened in the dark and listened to the traffic. A bakery truck announced itself with keening brakes and left as remembrance the faint smell of fresh bread. Someone, far off, ground his starter on and on, trying to turn over an aged engine, a chain of prayer beseeching ignition. A bicycle went by, the metallic thunk of the pedal against a loosened chainguard, the squeak of rusted gears.
He sat up in the bed. His back hurt as it always did in the morning now. He went to the parlor, shutting the bedroom door as he went. He shook out his hands and they felt good. He clenched his right fist and pounded it into his open left palm, stinging it, and he plodded around the living room swinging wildly until he felt the drops on his forehead. His chest was tight. He stood still and let the sweat abate, then sat in the good chair. It was just past four in the morning. He folded his hands in his lap, closed his eyes, and worked to make himself feel murderous.
Are you awake? she said. He opened his eyes.
Yes.
You can’t sleep?
No.
Can I fix you something?
Yes. Thank you. That would be quite nice.
She went into the kitchen and he closed his eyes again, but he followed the sounds—the cracking of the shells, the whisking in the bowl, the searing of eggs hitting the hot frying pan, and the clicking of the spatula tending to them. The smell filled the place. He opened his eyes and saw her standing in the doorway to the kitchen, looking at him. The room was suddenly bright with daybreak.
He said, The eggs will burn if you don’t get back to them. She went away, and he breathed in deeply through his nose, then stood up, ready to eat.
As she put the dirty dishes in the sink, Ana looked out the window and watched him, walking to work in the copper morning light, his lunchbox in hand. She watched him put the lunchbox to his chest, his two arms across it, and how he swung his shoulders left, then right, then left again, a motion that reminded her of the way she would have, as a young mother, rocked her child in her arms to sleep, except his motion was quicker, jerking and powerful, and while in all these years she had never presumed to inquire about his world of men of which she was not a part, she knew he was going to fight. She knew that if he wasn’t too old for it, he was getting there. And she knew that if he was getting there, he would never acknowledge that. She knew that a day could come when he would come home broken, not just beaten but broken by it, and she decided at that moment she was not going to wait for that moment to happen. Ana watched her husband, an old man, going down the street on his way to fight someone, and she decided that she was going to save him.
Machado stands in the dark end of the warehouse floor, waiting. He hears the footsteps, coming to him, and he begins to bounce on the balls of his feet, the way boxers do. The footsteps grow nearer; he hangs his arms and curls his fingers in, tightening; the footsteps come around the stacks and Machado blows out air and steps into it.
But it’s Carey.
“What the hell are you doing, man?” Carey says. “Trying to scare the piss out of me?”
Machado’s heart is pounding so hard he can hear the rush in his ears like a washing machine. He goes flat on his feet and lets his fingers slack open.
“Where’s Kelley?” Machado demands.
“Kelley? Shit, man, Kelley quit. He gave his notice a week ago. You didn’t know that?” Carey laughs now, understanding.
Machado can feel his face burning red and he thinks about them all smiling at the time clock. His heart bangs away inside. It’s begun to almost hurt. Then he notices someone behind Carey. A kid, looking a little scared and a little pissed off, a kid with a scowl Machado doesn’t care for.
“This is the new guy,” Carey says. “This is Dominic. Why don’t you show him what to do?”
Machado is breathing hard, fighting the impulse to gasp for air. “Okay. Carey, I’ll show him. Later.”
Carey shrugs. “Whatever, man.” He turns to Dominic. “So grab a broom and sweep out the parking lot.”
Dominic winces. “That parking lot?”
“So you’re getting paid,” Carey says. “What do you care?”
Machado takes it in. This Dominic, he’s a skinny bastard. He looks like he’s about thirteen. Machado lets off a wheeze of amusement.
The kid stares back and finally says, “What the hell are you laughing at?”
“Dom,” Carey quickly says. “Come with me. Machado can show you some things later.”
They walk on. The kid glances over his shoulder a last time but signals no fear. Machado is alone again in the shadows, trying hard to breathe.
3
So Dominic is sweeping, not exactly his idea of work. When he started off, an hour ago, he was working furiously. But he’s quickly fallen back to a more sustainable pace, creating tall turbulent lines of sand across the open asphalt. He is flushed with sweat. Within half an hour of starting, he could sense the rising blisters on the soft inner curve of his palm. This job is no worse than any other, he supposes, and the pay is the same. But still, he has come here to do the kind of work that’s going on inside, and he feels as-yet-unengaged. He wonders who these other men are, what they are like, whether they will be his friends the way his father used to talk about the men he’d worked with over the years. Those men he recalls from his childhood, showing up at his house and drinking beer in the parlor and patting him on the head with roughened hands. This hasn’t happened in a long while. But from time to time he sees one of them, on the street or in a shop, or passing by in a car; while they wouldn’t know him now, Dominic still knows them, knows their names and still thinks of them almost as uncles, if only long-lost uncles.
He has swept without pause, letting the blister swell and then burst, the sting of it part of the roughening he expects of his own hands. He has organized the job into quadrants and estimates he can finish it by day’s end. He needs to look into what to do with the sand he’s collected. He has no watch, nor is in sight of any of the clock towers from downtown, which lies up the hill above the river. But the sun arcs over him, growing meaner, and he expects someone will come out from the shade of the warehouse to get him.
The day has gone differently than he’s expected. He showed up at the mill office as he had been told, and the same secretary had him fill out payroll sheets and workman’s comp forms, and when he was sure he’d get put to work he was told instead to sit and wait to meet the big boss, the mill manager, because everybody met the big boss on the first day. And the big boss was big. When Dominic came through the doorway the man greeting him seemed more substantial than the oak desk he stood behind. He said, “Pat Harrigan” and he nearly crushed Dominic’s hand as he shook it, a handshake aimed at proving something.
“So you think you got the stuff to work in this place?” Harrigan said, like he was picking a fight. Dominic had expected different.
“I got the stuff,” Dominic said softly.
“You need to, if you’re going to get by around here.”
“I do,” Dominic said.
Harrigan walked him down the stairway to the warehouse floor at the bottom, and dished him to Parry, who had grunted in surprise and led him onto the floor, where Parry dished him to Carey, who took him down by the loading dock, trying to dish him to Machado. Nobody seemed to know what to do with him.
Well into the afternoon, as the sun begins angling in over the roof of the mill and the shadows now commence their subtle lengthening, Dominic looks up from his interminable sweeping. Some people have begun leaving the building. A group of women, talking softly, form a column out past the watchman’s shack and toward the street. Dominic notices, too, that cars have appeared along the curb, although the last time he looked they had not been there.
He’s organized his sweepings into a dozen foot-high mounds of sand, which stand out from the black asphalt like portable anthills. He’s still waiting to be told what to do, but it’s late in the day. Behind the women come men, swinging empty lunch boxes in their hands, and he notices that several of these men are people he thinks he saw inside the warehouse. The cars parked along the fence are now gloved in shadow, and their owners come around to get them. Others wander out onto the sidewalk that borders the lot, walking it. One of these is Carey, and he notices Dominic. “Hey, dummy, the day’s over,” Carey shouts. “Get punched out before you get yourself fired.”
With his broom clenched in his right hand like a javelin, Dominic is sprinting for the door. Through it, he finds the place noiseless; he drops the broom and the clatter seems obscene. His eyes adjust slowly, and he stumbles around, trying to see: A forklift sits out on the open floor as if abandoned suddenly, a pallet on its tines like an untaken bite of food. At the time clock, Dominic’s is the only card in the “In” rack. The punch of the clock echoes through the building. He picks the broom up and leans it against the chain-link partition, grabs his jacket and bursts out toward the light.
Outside, an idling procession of old cars sits backed up toward the hill, and he can see men climbing the steep streets a quarter-mile distant. The bus he’s hoped to catch has already pulled out, full of women from the mill, and he realizes that he’ll be waiting alone for the next one. Crouched with his back against the wrought-iron fence that borders the mill grounds, he feels the dull ache of his shoulders, the sharp sting of his blisters, and the lightness in his head from too many hours in the sun.
The bus doesn’t come for a long time. He waits long enough to realize he could have walked halfway home already, but he’s too tired. Finally it appears, a distant apparition, a foreshortened box that hisses and spews as if grudgingly meeting him. Downtown, he transfers to a more crowded bus, full of kids coming home from the high school. He recognizes a few but isn’t sure they recognize him. Or, he thinks, they might not realize he is no longer one of them. He wears the grime of his workday like a proud uniform. The bus heads up toward the Flint.
Slumped into the window with a heavyset woman’s broad slab of arm pressing in from the aisle seat, he fights sleep, but without success. He is sodden with fatigue and warmed by the sun and he cannot pull himself out of the tiredness enshrouding him. He gives himself over to a flickering vision: a time, long before, when he was the child waiting for a bus to pull up, the bus carrying his father. Sitting on the hot sidewalk, legs crossed, he watched down the long line of traffic for its approach, the belch of smoke rising and dissipating, coming within blocks of him, the anticipation nearly unbearable as it stopped to let off riders as it idled at a red light at the nearest intersection. Then it was upon him, and he was in its shadow, and the doors pulled back, and his father filled that door and then leapt onto the street.
He startles, awake now. The bus is empty, parked; the driver has come back to get him.
“Hey. Time to get off. End of the line.”
Dominic silently rises to his feet.
“You shouldn’t stay up late school nights,” the driver says.
“I work,” Dominic says. “Down the mill. Chace.”
“Oh. Where do you live?”
“Fruit Street.”
“That’s way back. If I were heading back in, I’d let you ride. But this is my last run.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dominic said. “I’m not in a hurry.”
He stands woozily collecting himself as the bus roars toward Eastern Avenue, headed for the bus yard. Then he turns back toward the route he’s just ridden, the long stretch of houses and storefronts that fall out before him in tight compression, his neighborhood. The sun is still strong, although in his mind the day is already complete. There will only be the passing of time until he gets back in tomorrow. He wonders how long it will be before he knows the place, its rules and rituals. In time, he’ll fall in as one of them. He feels the hardness of the light cutting through his drowsiness, and begins walking home.
4
On his afternoon journey home, Carey moves quickly, but he has no sense of rushing. His pace has become tightly calibrated over ten years of making this same walk, heading to the South End, to his apartment, to his wife. Through seniority and through friendships, he’s afforded a good spot in the line at the time clock. He never punches out later than 3:31; he never stops to talk; he always enters his home at five minutes after four. Always. He never drives his car to work; it’s a 1964 Dodge Polara and it’s pushing 140,000 miles. He keeps it parked in the alley behind the tenement, covered with a tarp. Saturdays, he unshrouds it and Joyce takes it to do groceries and errands. Weeks can pass without him needing this car. Sundays, he raises the hood and looks for things to take care of.
The walk home is a necessary chasm between the day of the mill and the day that is his. Early summer afternoons like this are the best: the midday heat that he likes is still strong, but there’s a promise of clear nighttime skies. It’s nearly June, a time of anticipation for him; the mill’s softball team begins their season in a week. He’s the player-manager, and he comes to this impending season with an excitement that surprised him. Five years they’ve had this team, and in the past three they’ve come achingly close to the championship of the Industrial Slo-Pitch League, the cream of the mill leagues as far as he’s concerned, even though others might disagree. They have some good players, including himself, although he never played in organized ball as a kid, just stickball and catches. He thought he was a boxer back then, coming up through the chain of gym bouts and CYO tournaments. It lasted until he was nineteen, four years out of high school. It was only later that he rediscovered the pleasure of a caught ball, of the vibrationless power that came with perfect contact of the bat on a pitch. He’s a pinch hitter who chokes up on the stick and makes the most of his size. What he needs is big hitters, long-ball guys, but he has none. He’ll make do again on the assortment of guys he’s had before. And in these last few days before the season he’s thinking of how he can shuffle his team for a good run at the title.
He’s going to be home soon. Joyce counts on his punctuality, less a sign of courtesy as of deeply ingrained habit. She sits in the kitchen drinking hot tea; the heat is brutal and as she drinks the tea her forehead is sweaty, as she is also ingrained with habit and this is what she does, drink tea at three-thirty. She thinks about how he is on foot now, clocked out, and she knows he’s thinking about the softball team.
She examines her own fingers, clutching the chipped handle of the cup. She notes the boniness of the hands, their pointedness and elongation, and how her wrist tenses at the effort of picking up the half-empty cup, her strength even less than the meager strength she’s always possessed. She smoothes her dress across her thighs and likewise notes the thinness there, below the distended abdomen. The apartment is hot, close; the windows have been wide open for two days but it feels as if there’s no air at all. And this in May, which makes her dread the oncoming summer.
The water is boiling for the spaghetti and the kitchen air hangs heavier with the steam. She listens to the bubbling water. Some of it leaps from the pot and scorches across the burner. A few more minutes.
He comes up the hill and passes Corky Row, the undemarcated nine-block neighborhood where he grew up. Three streets by three, triple-deckers packed in, and a shamble of the Ancient Order of Hibernians Fraternal Hall fronting them. He once aspired to be a member of such fraternal lodges, but no longer. The dues are five a month, higher in some places, and he can’t make a case.
He turned thirty-five over the past winter, but he still feels he is in his waning youth. The lack of children has a lot to do with this. He and Joyce anticipated children for a long time, but each year has passed without change in their situation. He understands, too, that years are catching up with him, that he isn’t a boy anymore, and that thinking of himself in this way—of excusing the state of their existence by acting as if they’re still newlyweds, making their way along—isn’t getting him anywhere. But there are only so many places he can rise to; he has created for himself a low roof of expectations that suddenly seem to loom close by his head. This talk about him being foreman, a job he wouldn’t turn down, builds that sense of things. But so far he’s only heard that rumor from Machado, and he suspects it’s more the old man’s wishful thinking than anything else. They still work for Parry, and Parry doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Carey is still a man with a bottom-rung warehouse job.
Yes, he could be foreman. That raise in pay might buy him a newer car, but who needs a newer car? This walk—winter and summer, snow and sun—has become a necessary part of his cycle of existence. But again, doubt intrudes: that a grown man should walk like this, lunch box in hand, as if he were a kid? Walking, he is one of the truly poor. He is on the wide sidewalk by Kennedy Park now, traffic flowing by him, and he suddenly feels alone and conspicuous.
Nearing the softball field, he fixes his thoughts again on his team. The lineups run through his head like a song, and the field seems strange to him in the full sunlight. It’s really his on those summer dusks, as the sun drops across the bay and the humidity turns to fog and softens the edges of the scene. He thinks of that, and of standing in his place in the gap at shortstop, and he feels better.
She goes to the window and reaches out to feel the laundry on the line, the hand of the cloth still wet on her fingertips, the humidity of the day abiding in the softball pants he’ll want to put on when he gets home. The dampness will upset him, but he won’t complain. He never has, even before she became ill, and you don’t complain to a sick woman. But she’s been married to him for sixteen years, and she knows, in the visceral reading of his eyes and the turn of the corner of his mouth, what bothers him and what does not.
He’d be approaching Kennedy Park by now, she knows; at that moment she thinks she hears the far-off crackle of heat lightning, so slight she has to think whether it’s real. But it is, portending the hot summer she knows is to come. The lower thunder follows like emphasis, little enough that a closed window could keep it out, smacking up against the glass.
He hears the faint snap of heat lightning and wonders if the laundry is going to get rained on, before she gets it off the line. She might be resting, one of the chain of naps she seems to need now, naps that drive her to the bed and down onto the pillow, not pain now but exhaustion, deep and encompassing, gravity multiplied, pulling her down.
She dumps the spaghetti into the colander and the steam hits her face. She shakes out the water and slops the spaghetti into the bowl. She puts that in a smaller bowl and she carries them to the table. Knife, fork, spoon. Bread, butter, salt, pepper, paper napkin. She lets out a breath. A beer in the refrigerator. She can feel that he is only blocks away, maybe on this block. She looks again at the table. All is as it should be. She goes to the bedroom and shuts the door behind her.
Home. He climbs the dark passage of the back staircase. The Vieiras downstairs are going to have linguica: the smell fills the place. He’ll be seeing Mr. Vieira from the kitchen window, coming from his own job, carrying a bag of Portuguese bread, an act connected to the smell of the spices. Carey is all of a sudden hungry, thinking about it. At the back door of his own place, he takes off his work boots and leaves them against the wall, toes tilted upward at the curled edges of the linoleum. He slips the key in and turns the lock slowly, and then opens the door even more slowly. The kitchen is overheated, the sun crossing from the window and reflecting off the whiteness of the cupboards, the steam of cooking still hanging; the curtains over the sink puffed stationary in a steady breeze, the way birds hang motionless in the push of sea air.
Carey calls out softly. “Joyce?”
No answer. He puts his lunch box on the drainboard by the sink, takes a bottle of Rolling Rock out of the refrigerator, and sits down at the kitchen table. The bedroom door is half-closed, not invitation but polite warning. In the last few months he has come to know when she needs him, and when to let her be. He doesn’t like thinking too much about what’s going on; if he were a thinker he wouldn’t be unloading trucks down at the bays of Chace Finishing. He hasn’t yet mentioned any of this to anybody at the warehouse. He respects the etiquette. The question, “How’s the wife?” has only one appropriate answer—“Good.” People don’t want to hear if things are otherwise, and you can’t much blame them. Everybody has problems of their own.
He sits at the table and he listens. A child cries out on the street, and he hears someone older talking to the child. He gleans a siren, far off. Cars whoosh by. But in the half-hour it takes to slowly empty his beer bottle, he doesn’t hear his wife. Sleeping, again. Full of regret, he realizes he’s glad. He gets up to dish himself some of the spaghetti.
In the bedroom she lies on the macramé spread, lying very very still, not wanting him to hear her through the half-opened door. She listens to the clicking and the squeak of knife and fork on plate, the quick machinations of a quickly taken meal. Then footsteps, and the sound of him rinsing the dishes. Eventually, the clomp of footsteps down the back stairs. Gone. She is released.
5