The breathy honking that comes from Jiselle might sound like weeping, but because she keeps sticking her tongue out and saying things like “Good one,” and “Joke’s up, bloke,” and finally, mysteriously, “Bung-o,” her dying cousin concludes it’s not weeping. And then her dying cousin is dead.
CHAPTER SUSAN
SUSAN
Free-floating three feet over the balcony, disembodied Susan is at once alarmed and relieved that Pedro is not there to greet her. The alarm soon dissipates, however, because disembodied Susan is looking at her disemSusaned body, at her head turned left-cheek-up, the cigarette she dropped at the start of the shaking burning her hair away, and it is gleefully a shame. Susan knows everything now. She knows, for instance, that while Jiselle, who has run inside to call for help, starts to cry, she is silently repeating, “She asked for the fag, I didn’t push it on her,” and, though she can’t seem to express it, or anything else, Susan knows for sure that nothing is inexpressible.
The hair on the head of the body burns away quickly to reveal a red mark Carla kissed atop a freckle just below Susan’s left ear.
“How I was pretty, isn’t it pretty to think so, how I was pretty to think so, says Susan, thinks Susan,” Susans Susan, Susaning.
THE EXTRA MILE
This wheezing heckle, this spluttering raspberry, this vile string of punchlines life. Funny? Sure. But also cruel. “Cruel,” you might retort, if you ever said anything, whoever you are, “but funny, too.” And I’d tell you the half-full/half-empty line doesn’t change the fact of the binary—that you either laugh a lot and feel a little bad, or laugh a little and feel a lot bad. What I ask is, where’s the solace? All I’ve got left is this pool and its sundeck and that gaggle of knucklehead schmendricks over there to hone my timing to a sharper brutality against the shrinking, alter-cocker bones of. Our wives are all dead and we sit around warping. We can’t remember what made them laugh. As know-nothing boys, we wooed them like naturals; as men, we killed them with… what? Not killed them. Failed to save them. They died of neglect and the world was destroyed and we stayed in Florida to learn irreverence. That’s the whole story, a long dirty joke.
It was time to play cards, so I went to our usual table by the deep end. Everyone appeared to be suffering from mouth pains. After we’d exchanged all our how’s your digestions, my friend Heimie Schwartz asked my friend Bill the Goy, “How often did you go the extra mile for your wife?””
“All the time,” Bill the Goy said. “Every single time.”
I pulled the deck from the box by the ashtray and dealt out a hand of rummy four ways. I neglected to shuffle first. I was in no mood to shuffle.
Our fourth, Clyde the Schlub, who, truth be known, is more of an acquaintance than he is a friend, was stirring Splenda into his mug of iced tea when Heimie put the question to him.
“Clyde,” Heimie said, “how often would you say you went the extra mile for your Christina?”
“Always,” said the Schlub. “Whenever I got the chance.”
We all knew I was next and that I would answer the same way as the Schlub and the Goy. We all knew Heimie had a different answer to the question than the rest of us and that he would offer up his different answer as soon as I gave mine. That is Heimie’s rhetorical method. That is how he stirs up a controversy under the umbrella by the pool on an otherwise uneventful afternoon of rummy or canasta, even sometimes cribbage: he creates the promise of consensus, then undermines all hope of consensus with his wild assertions. I do not resent Heimie’s thirst for controversy, and in fact think the day tends to get better when it’s quenched. However, to my taste, his method lasts a few beats too long. I think: Why redundancy? Why first ask all of us a question we have the same answer to when all you and we really want is for you to get to your wild and controversial assertion already?
I’d had enough of this method, so before he had the chance to ask me his question, I said, “What about you, Heimie? How often did you go the extra mile for Esther?”
At my interruption of the routine, the Goy placed his startled hand on the shoulder of the Schlub and the Schlub spilled a little tea on his cards and his shirt, but Heimie didn’t even flinch. He said, “That’s just what I wanted to ask you, Arthur.”
“I asked you first, though, Heimie,” I said. “So you answer first.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m afraid that before I can answer your question, I’d have to ask you to clarify. I’d have to ask you not to take for granted that I take for granted that both you and I know what it is that the other one of us is talking about when that one of us inquires of the other about this extra mile and how often we went it for our wives. That is to say that I would have to ask you to first define the term extra mile.”
“You know what it means,” said the Goy. “Come on.”
“We all know what it means,” said the Schlub, licking some tea-drops off an ace of spades.
I said, “Go ahead, Heimie. Define it.”
“But I want first to know how you define it, Arthur.”
“But you had something in mind when you asked Bill and the Schlub over here.”
“Please don’t call me ‘the Schlub over here,’ Arthur,” said the Schlub.
“It’s a term of endearment,” I said. I said, “I call you ‘Schlub’? It means I am comfortable calling you ‘Schlub.’ It means we are acquainted, you and I.”
“Okay,” said the Schlub, sucking tea-dribble from the stain on his shirt. “But when you say ‘the Schlub over here,’ I feel like maybe I’m being a little bullied, belittled.”
“So don’t be such a tender-footed sissy,” I told him.
“You’re right,” said the Schlub. “You’re right.”
“It’s true,” I said. “So then what did you mean by extra mile, Heimie?”
“What did you think I meant, Bill?” Heimie said to the Goy.
“Don’t redirect my question to the Goy,” I said. “I’m asking you, Heimie.”
“I’m not too crazy for when you call me ‘the Goy,’” the Goy said.
“What is this?” I said. “Is this group therapy for whiners? You want to be the Schlub and he’ll be the Goy? You’re a pair of goyische schlubs, the both of you. Still, I suppose, if the Schlub over here agrees to it, we could pull a switcheroonie with the monikers—would you like that?”
“Forget it,” the Goy said. “Have it how you want it.”
“I’m trying my hardest,” I said. “Now answer the question you were asked. Establish us some mundanity so that Heimie can shock us in good faith with hot controversy.”
“What are you saying to me?” said the Goy.
Heimie said, “He means tell us what you think it means, extra mile.”
Unable to see clouds for the blockage of the umbrella, the Goy in his shyness studied pinstripes on cloth. “It means down there,” said the Goy.
“That is a very ambiguous answer,” I said.
“Down there… and the mouth,” added the Schlub.
“The mouth?” I said.
“The mouth and down there,” said the Schlub. “Add two and two, would you? We’re talking about our wives here, may they rest in peace.”
“We’re talking about an act!” said Heimie. “We’re talking about the extra mile! And I don’t know what you mean by down there. Do you know what he means, Arthur?”
“Only vaguely,” I said. “In my experience, there’s more than one down there.”
“There’s the one down there,” said the Goy, “and there’s the other down there. To put the mouth to the one is the extra mile. To put the mouth to the other is filthy and disgusting.”
“I agree,” said the Schlub.
“I disagree!” I said.
“I disagree!” said Heimie, looking a little farklempt. I’d stolen his fire. Or at the very least I’d stolen part of his fire. It was two-on-two now, and he’d expected one-on-three. He said, “And why filthy and disgusting?”
“Because waste comes fro
m the other,” said the Goy.
“Waste comes from everywhere!”
“But this kind of waste causes illness.”
“I was never ill by such waste,” said Heimie.
“Nor was I ever ill by it,” said I.
“This is filthy and disgusting,” said the Schlub.
“Do you eat shrimp?” I said. “The veritable cockroach of the ocean?”
“Yes,” said the Goy.
“Do you eat bacon?” said Heimie. “The meat of a beast who rolls in its own excrement?”
“I love bacon,” said the Schlub. “It’s salty.”
“These crazies,” Heimie said to me.
“Bacon and shrimp for them?” I said. “Indeed. Maybe even some bacon wrapped around a shrimp, but not the other down there, God forbid.”
“Shellfish and pork, Arthur?”
“Please, Heimie,” I said. “Shellfish and pork, but ass no thank you!”
What did they do, the Schlub and the Goy? They left. We didn’t try to stop them. We knew the Goy would return soon enough and, surely, to be rid of the Schlub was a blessing.
“So how often did you go the extra mile, then?” Heimie said to me.
“Which one?”
“Both,” he said.
I told him the truth. I said, “Rarely the one and never the other.”
“Same here,” said Heimie. “It’s regrettable.”
“We should’ve done more,” I said.
FINCH
The fifty-third day in a row we hung out, me and Franco got all these grilled cheese sandwiches at Theo’s BaconBurgerDog from Jin-Woo Kim, who people call “Gino” cause we’re not in Korea or are in Chicago or people are lazy or two of those reasons. Gino’s dad Sun’s the owner of Theo’s, and summer afternoons, he leaves Gino alone there. We went in at three, when the place was the deadest, and Franco said we wanted a grilled cheese sandwich. Right as soon as Gino started making them, though, Franco told him on second thought to make that three sandwiches, so Gino started making a third one too, except then what Franco said was what he’d meant was three apiece, and Gino stopped moving. He was over by the fryer, facing away from us, his hand on the scoop dug into the butter tub.
“What,” Franco told him.
Gino got back to work. Grabbed bread and cheese from the rack on the counter.
“For to go,” Franco said. He lit up a cigarette.
I passed him an ashtray. A bunch were stacked up on the garbage cans behind us.
“Thanks, yo,” he said. “Hey, check this ashtray. Gino’s dad stole.”
That was probably true—all the ashtrays at Theo’s were Burger King ashtrays, the chintzy aluminum kind with crimped edges—and it’s not like I was really that tight with Gino, but we sometimes hung out when no one else was available, and I used to have some classes with him up till last year when we started the seventh and they tracked me into gifted, so I didn’t want to stand there and trash-talk his dad, but you can’t ignore Franco, so I had to do something, so I made a lippy face with my mouth and I shrugged.
Franco shrugged back.
Gino kept cooking. When the sandwiches were finished, he waxpaper-wrapped them, then stacked them in a bag and brought the bag to the register. He said, “Thirteen fifty.”
“Nah,” said Franco. “We don’t have to pay today.”
“You do,” Gino said.
Franco took the bag. “Today it’s on the house,” he said.
“It’s not!” said Gino. “Pay me. Come on.” But what could he do? Franco was sixteen and Gino was my age, plus Franco was big—not tall, but big, and not big like me, but like muscled in a way I bet girls probably talked about. Almost like a man. His mustache wrapped around his chin and wasn’t wispy.
He drummed his shaved skull a few times with his fingers, which looked like “I’m thinking, I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” then took a frosted cookie from the cookie-tree display and crushed it in his hand inside of the wrapper. He undid the wrapper and dumped out the crumbs, grabbed another cookie, and told Gino, “What.”
“Fine,” Gino said. There were tears in his eyes. We were ripping him off in his own dad’s joint. He gave me this look.
Franco flipped me the cookie.
I stuck it in my pocket, mouthing the words, “I’ll pay you back soon.” I don’t know if Gino saw, but I meant what I mouthed.
On our way back to the alley in back of his ma’s, Franco told me, “See? It’s all in the voice. That’s how you get stuff. Speaking with conviction. Makes you convincing. ‘Grilled cheese on the house, dog! Grilled cheese on the house!’ and dude’s like, ‘Fine, Franco. Fine, man. Good.’”
“I don’t think you convinced him, though.”
“What you sayin, nigga?”
“I think you scared him cause your size,” I said. “And how you crushed that cookie and then grabbed another one like you’d crush that one, too.”
“No,” Franco said. “The cookie was whatsitcalled—the cookie was fleece—not fleece, it was flair. It was just a decoration—for my conviction. I got this grilled cheese sandwich with my voice. I did it with my words. And it’s a valuable lesson in life, my man, that words get you more than fists get you sometimes if you’ve gotta use the one or the other of them. Feel me?” Saying that last part, he tapped on his temple, which reminded me of a punchline—shot in the temple—and I got so hot to tell the whole joke, I forgot to tell Franco I was telling a joke.
I said, “How do you know Abe Lincoln was a Jew?”
“Lincoln was a white, you big fatso,” said Franco.
So I didn’t say the punchline cause being called a fatso got me too depressed. It was mean for him to call me it, jokey-voiced or not, but I think that sometimes Franco didn’t know when he was mean. He might have known then, though, and felt bad about it too, cause when we got back to the alley he was above-average nice to me for almost five minutes. He gave me a grilled cheese and got his bike, an old Yamaha two-stroke, out of the garage.
He said, “I got something to show you, yo.”
Hearing us, Franco III started growling. I hated that Franco III. She was a dalmatian-bull mix and Franco’d trained her to kill on command. It was against the law to have a dog that would kill on command. It was like having a killing machine where you just flipped a switch and someone got killed. You had to make the command secret so that if anyone wanted to find out if your dog was a machine, they couldn’t. You had to make it weird, too, so that nobody’d say it by accident in front of the dog. The secret kill-command for Franco III was “Nasal spray.” I only ever saw her get told it once—on the twenty-second day in a row me and Franco hung out—but once was enough and I’ll never forget it. Franco’d brought her the bones from a full slab of ribs and she was lying on her stomach in the middle of the yard like a nice normal dog, gnawing and crunching and happy to be there. I wanted to even pet her a little. Then Franco told her “Nasal spray,” and all the sudden it was like there was nothing else in the world to do but kill me. She was chained to the fence so she couldn’t reach me, but I thought she’d pull the posts right out of the ground. She tried to kill me for at least five minutes till Franco said “Scout”—the secret stop-kill command—and then, just like that, she flopped on her stomach and chewed the bones again.
I finished my grilled cheese—completely delicious, Gino used so much butter—and Franco, on his motorcycle, held out the bag like “Go ahead and have another,” but then when I reached for it, he pulled it back away and I felt even worse because I got no willpower and now I was reminded. I was supposed to be eating 2,000 calories a day. Before I went to Franco’s that day, I already ate 1,570, and then the grilled cheese, and then there’d be dinner, which was gonna be steak because my dad, who’s a pilot, was coming home from Asia.
Franco III clanged her chain around and barked. Franco lobbed her a grilled cheese. She caught it in her sloppy pink mouth and tore it up. I watched through the diamond-shaped spaces of the fence.
Franco said to me, “For real, now. Do this no-hands.” And I took a step back and he tossed up a grilled cheese medium-high for me to catch in my mouth. I missed it, though. I’m not good at catching. It bounced off my chin and landed in some gravel, but that was no big deal, even though I knew the three-second rule was bull, cause waxpaper blocks out dirt and germs. Before I was able to pick it back up, though, Franco jumped off his bike and ground it around under one of his Jordans, which completely tore the paper. I told him he ruined it. He said he had something to show me so whatever. He only ever had two things to show me. One of the things was the trick where someone goes, “I got something to show you,” and then they give you a charleyhorse. This thing was the other thing. He started the motorcycle up and revved it. The engine was loud like all the other times.
“You hear that?” Franco said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Around then’s when this fake-red-haired guy came out the gangway side of Franco’s house. No one ever went out the front door of Franco’s house. I don’t know why. This guy came out the gangway side like everyone else. He was probably sixty years old and was really skinny. He wore that light kind of shades you could kind of see eyes through, eyes that kind-of-seeing made you feel like… what? Like you got caught at something scuzzy.
The guy tapped a cigarette out of a softpack, turned into the alley, and walked right up to Franco. He said, “Got a light?”
Franco said, “No. Get the fuck away from us.”
The guy made a laughing noise and showed us his palms, then he kept on walking, out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. Before crossing the street, he raised his hands to the sides of his head and patted, like to make sure his pasted-down hair was still in place.
“Why’d you tell him you don’t got a light and fuck off?” I said.
“I don’t like him,” said Franco.
“Why not, though?” I said.
“I don’t know. Why? You think he’s alright?”
“No,” I said. “I think he’s a sleaze. But what was he doing in your house, though, the sleaze?”