August and then some

Epigraph

Datta: What have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

T. S. Eliot

Vengeance and hate, well, they’re both very bad emotions.

Kurt Vonnegut

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

June 28

Rain

June 28

July 5

July 6

Purple dress, red painting

Frostbite

July 12

Wherever they stood

July 13

An offering disguised

July 20

August 1

After the sound

August 8

Nothing left to do

August 8

The move

August 8

The plan

August 9

The buyer

August 9

Called it a game

August 9

The job

August 9

The job

August 10

The job

August 10

The job

August 15

The job

August 16

September 1

About the Author

Other Books by David Prete

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

June 28

Jake Terri Savage is awkward, I know. Mostly they call me JT—skips off the tongue right. No one calls me Terri. That was my grandmother. But right now an old lady’s name fits me because I’m hurtin like one. Even with this dolly there’s no easy way to lug an eighty-pound slab of slate down seventy blocks. I feel like a father lifting his deadweight kid out of bed, and with every step the kid’s insistence to sleep gets heavier. I got a system though. I hold the slate between my palms, balance it on the dolly, and take short steps until it starts falling to one side and the dolly kicks out. Then I stop, straighten it out, and start from scratch. That’s it—that’s the whole system. But hey, it’s getting me through the rush hour hoard of Upper East Side commuter motherfuckers. And even though this thing has the weight of an unearthed tombstone, I should make it to the East Village before dusk.

But this summer heat, man. After eight hours of working outside I’m glazed in the kind of New York summer sweat an air-conditioned store would turn to rock candy. I’ve been on a demolition job the past month breaking up an old lady’s Upper East Side patio. They would have hauled this piece away with the rest of the broken slate and concrete, but I swiped it for free furniture. Chipped edges aside, all four feet by four feet of it held up under construction. I got milk crates (whose misuse can lead to my prosecution) waiting on the floor of my studio. I’ll lay this on top and voilà: table. What my fine home decor lacks in price it makes up for in weight. I’m not gonna say this for the entire seventy blocks, but this thing is a pain in the dick to maneuver.

At 68th and Lex near Hunter College, summer students line up at a smoking halal meat truck for curried shish kebab. Flies zigzag around the garbage next to them casing grease-stained paper plates. Across the street, suits, slackers, and in-betweens file down the stairs of 6 Train entrance. They squint at the five-thirty something sun until they dip below the sun line into the station’s darkness, and their faces relax. Nobody, not even a fly, notices the gloveless guy rolling a huge chunk of slate down the street. But hey, invisible works for this cat. Shit—I can’t clench my hands. My fingers feel sculpted to this slate. I guess I could make it down those stairs without this stone slipping away from me and landing on an innocent New Yorker. But fuck it. I’m walking. For possibly twisted reasons, wheeling this thing home is now a quest.

What sucks about the city are things like this neon sign on 64th Street blinking about shoe repair. They come at me too fast to defend, and instead of ‘gum up your sole’ my head sees the dashboard in Nokey’s ’91 Volkswagen GTI—the burnt red glow of his dashboard. My sister in the back seat. I whiplash my head away from the neon sign to find a nice ass or something better.

Lex and 42nd, Grand Central. My shoulders and back burn, and thousands of people loop from their suburban homes, to their city jobs, from their city jobs to their suburban homes, a daily cycle that equals some of their life. I wonder what ordinary feels like. Or if it’s real.

In a coffee shop on 23rd and 2nd a woman looks out the window. I stop. Balance my slate on the dolly. She lifts a cup to her expressionless face, too deep in her head to notice me or the passing crowd, and stares through us like we’re water. Seems she’s picking through thoughts she’s yet to share over a table of friends and martinis. Thoughts she’s afraid will make her sound desperate or just weird. My sister Danielle’s face imposes itself over hers. Slit-like eyes seemingly impossible to see out of, pouty lips, and a potent sadness pinning down her smile. But these moments have the life expectancy of a flame in a bottle. Someone bumps this woman’s chair and startles her out of her head. She smiles at their apology then turns away. Now she sneaks a look around to see if anyone noticed the haze she was in. No. She’s safe. She fondles the button on her cuff, checks her watch, and takes another sip.

In Tompkins Square Park guys in billowy white clothes and dreads to their waists sit under the shade of trees in a drum circle, their bongos and djembes echoing through the whole park. You can’t help but feel like your legs are moving to their rhythm when you walk by. Next to them some guys practice Capoeira and make it look more like a dance than martial art. In a fenced-off area dogs headlock each other, and skid out on pee-soaked wood chips. A few NYU or FIT students sit on the ground balancing sketchpads on their knees trying to do the trees justice with charcoal and newsprint. On the north side guys play street hockey. In the playground little kids with sagging bathing suits run around under sprinklers. The last mustard sun rays of the day give everything more meaning and take away my ability to grasp it.

Me and my slate leave the park on Avenue B and turn down 9th Street. The only lot without a building is the community garden next to my apartment, which looks as woefully out of place as a shiny piano in a junkyard. I get a few doors down from my stoop and hear, “Don’t be calling me bitch. You think you my father?”

“How could I be your father, my shit ain’t in jail?”

These two. The lonely looking girl and the hybrid geek/thug boyfriend. I’ve seen them around the building, sitting on the stoop, her hands between his knees, smoking on the fire escape, his hand up the back of her shirt.

He goes, “You actin like I’m trying to make bank off you. I’m askin for like a couple dollars. Damn.” He lowers his voice. “You know your uncle got it.”

“No he don’t.”

He wears a tank under a Sammy Sosa Cubs jersey open so you can see the thick chains around his neck. “Ah-ight, forget it then. I ain’t asking you for nothin no more, ah-ight?”

“See why you gotta be actin like I don’t do shit for you?” she says.

“You don’t.”

“I sleep at your place when you want me to and I don’t when you don’t want me to.” He shrugs with no retort. “I got no money. You hearin me? No cuartos, papi.”

One time I saw her throw her sneaker off the third-floor fire escape and nail him right in the chest. He picked it up and started walking off. She climbed back in her window and a few seconds later busted through the front door and chased him down the block—not like he was running. She yanked the back of his sweatshirt then he flipped around and lifted all of maybe ninety pounds of her by her waist onto the hood of a parked car. She pounded on his shoulders with half-clenched fists until he grabbed them. Then she stared into him like the only thing that would calm her down was locked in his mouth, and he opened it for her.

Now he says, “I’m outta here. Like that I’m outta here.” He spreads his arms, raises his shoulders and backpedals. “You watching me go? Cause I’m going.”

She’s like, “Uh huh, uh huh.”

“Ah-ight,” he says as a final warning. “I’m out.”

He passes by me. “Fuck you lookin at?”

“I live here.”

“Then go live.” He keeps walking.

She yells, “It’s like that?” as more a threat than a question. “It’s like that?” He doesn’t stop. “Ah-ight go head. Go head.” And with every go head she seems to be asking him to come back. Until he’s around the corner and she stops yelling for him.

Now it’s just me, her, and my table. She sits on the steps to our apartment trying to shrink away from the scene she just caused: head almost between her legs, arms crossed at her stomach. I stand on the sidewalk making like I didn’t really hear anything and when it feels time I push my table over to the stoop, and lift it off the dolly that I kick near the garbage cans. I heave the slate up a stair at a time. She doesn’t move. When I get close enough I feel a sadness coming off her like heat. It’s wrapped its hands around her neck and pulls her whole body down toward the stoop. I ask her if she’s OK.

She takes her time deciding to answer me. Without lifting her head or eyes, she says, “You ever get tired?” I would not have put money on hearing that line.

I say, “It’s pretty much how I go through life.”

“That’s how I am. Fuckin tired.” She’s dropping most of the tough girl act she laid on her boyfriend; her melancholy now seeps through the cracks in her voice.

I lean the slate against the door, wipe a chalky hand on the thigh of my pants, then once across my chest. I hold it out above her head. She sees it coming out the corner of her eye and doesn’t flinch, so I lower it the rest of the way. Her hair is slicked back in an off-center part that breaks her head into two uneven sections. The surface is shiny black, and hard like plastic. When I touch her her eyelids beat fast time for a second then close. She drops her head further, tightens her arms around her stomach, and presses her knees together like she’s trying to suffocate something. I run my palm back to her ponytail then let go. I grab my table again and ask if she’ll be all right.

She makes a hissing sound through the corner of her lips telling me I’m stupid for thinking she’ll be otherwise.

I tell her I’ll see her around and lift my slate.

“What you doin with that thing?” she says, still looking down at the stoop.

At risk of cutting our strange connection short I say, “Long story.”

“Ah-ight,” she tells me, accepting that as the entire answer.

“I’m JT.”

“Wus up.”

That’s all we offer each other.

She keeps looking at the steps, I keep looking at the top of her head.

“Who are you?”

“Stephanie.”

I nod. “By the way, the Cubs suck.”

She forces a laugh through her nose.

I lift the keys from my pocket, balance the slab with one hand, and unlock the door with the other. I slide into the lobby as the door slams behind me and wipes out the last moment of this scrunched-up girl.

Now I got five flights above me. This might be the hard part. First floor I go step by step: eighty pounds, eighty pounds, and eighty pounds to the top. In the second floor hall I hear a woman in her apartment talking to her dogs like they can hold a conversation in perfect English. “No, Jasper. I don’t know why he hung up on her. Why can’t you let the show happen in its own time? Look at your sister, she’s not making a racket. I’m not trying to compare you to her, but she knows how to behave.” I wonder if her dogs understand the concept of borderline personalities.

I look up the third-floor staircase, testosterone myself up, lift the slate maybe a foot off the ground, and run up about ten, twelve stairs without stopping. I crash it on the top step and my momentum tips it over. It smacks against the wall and echoes through the entire building. I should probably go back to the one-step-at-a-time method.

Ralphie, the super—and the guy Stephanie lives with who I’m pretty sure is her uncle—opens his door to see what’s up. “What you do?”

“Sorry Ralphie, I’m just getting this to my apartment.”

“Whas dat?”

“It’s, uh … it’s gonna be a table?”

He squints in confusion. “Ah ha.” Ralphie’s all of five-foot nothing, but muscularly compact, energetic, with eyes as playful and vicious as a terrier’s. He shoots Spanish/English blend out of his mouth like a Chinese waiter yelling short orders to a cook. He’s the reason I even have this apartment.

It went like this: I moved down to Manhattan from Yonkers—more like trickled down here intending to be homeless. I’d just got the job working for the landscaping company by using a fake address—easy enough since they don’t mail our checks, we pick them up at the office. I’d been sleeping in Tompkins Square Park, showering after work with the hose behind the company’s office. I wasn’t in the best of shape, but at least I wasn’t shooting heroin. So, one night, mid-autumn, this guy I knew from the park—nineteen, from Philly, discs in his earlobes, we used to shave each other’s heads—was walking with this other guy who was nodding out on his own feet. The Philly guy was telling him to fight through it, to use his will, but the guy’s will gave out and he collapsed. Philly called me over and asked if I would help carry the guy to the hospital. After a few blocks of hauling the guy I realized I smelled as much like a dog run as both of them, and that I had zero desire to someday be the one getting carried to a hospital. I helped Philly get the guy close enough to the emergency room door then let him do the rest. On my walk back to the park I thought, winter’s coming, my hair looks like shit, I own two shirts—this whole thing isn’t really me. So I started looking for a place to live. One day after combing the streets for for rent signs I wound up resting on Ralphie’s stoop. I jumped when he opened the door behind me with a broom in his hand. “You no sit here,” he said. I got up and apologized. He started sweeping.

“You don’t have any apartments in there, do you?”

“No,” he said. “We got nothing here.”

“I have a job,” I said, in case that was the issue.

“Good,” was all he said.

“I don’t have a place to stay yet, you know? I just moved here, you know?”

“I know.”

“So I’m looking, if you know anything.”

“Where you live before?”

“My parents.”

He nodded his head and kept sweeping.

“I used to be an auto mechanic. So maybe, you know, I could help you out around the apartment.”

“Nobody has cars.” Which made a lot of sense.

“But now I’m a landscaper.”

That one we both laughed at, realizing there were as many shrubs around the building as there were cars.

Because he took in Stephanie who was probably living in some shit family situation, because desperation was probably shooting out of my voice in every direction, and because Ralphie is a good guy, he decided to tell me an apartment was opening up soon.

“…this guy, he miss his rent for seven times. He leave here this month. You go down to the office, and fill the application. The guys: you tell them you know Ralphie. And then you see.”

“That would be so great. Where’s the office?”

Turns out that deadbeat’s lease wasn’t up for another year-and-change, and they didn’t have plans to renovate. So between the letter from my boss, Frank—who I fuckin love for being cool enough to say I made a lot more money than I actually did—and Ralphie’s recommendation, I got in.

I think Ralphie likes me; he sees me leave for work every morning and knows I wasn’t lying about the job, but I understand why he’s keeping an eye on me. I’m still a shaved-headed wildcard kid who dresses like a derelict.

Now he watches me closely as I lift the slate from the wall and stand it upright. It starts to fall toward me; I brace it. Ralphie pulls off his baseball cap, which has probably been on his head for a decade now, and with his palm, smoothes back his already matted gray hair.

“You need help?”

“No, it’s OK, I got it.”

Two little kids pop their heads out of the door behind him. A girl with her finger in her mouth and a miniature boy version of Ralphie, hat and all. All three of them watch as I pick up the slate and lay it on my foot. In unison they all cringe.

“You want no help?” Ralphie asks again.

“No, I’m good.”

“You loco, you know? Crazy.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to see the full-sized picture.”

“Be careful, OK? Don’t hurt nothing.”

“I won’t.”

He turns to the kids, “Ivamos.” They scurry back inside.

My studio is part of a railroad apartment that was broken into smaller spaces. It has exposed brick on one wall, and a curtain—not a door—separating the bathroom from the rest. I get a laugh out of the wood floors. Lay a marble anywhere and in ten seconds it rolls to the south-east corner. There’s more paint on this radiator than there was in my mother’s Yonkers apartment. So many coats on the walls I think the place has lost a few square feet since it was built. A futon lies against the side wall. No frame, just a mattress with a sheet that’s got little holes worn through it where my toenails rub while I’m on my stomach. Next to the bed are two cardboard boxes. One’s got my clothes in it and the other is filled with books and paperwork—things I’m using to get my GED. There’s also an alarm clock I never have to use.

All by itself on the floor is a black spiral notebook. I write in it sometimes about things that I’d rather not get started on right now.

The milk crates are waiting for me. I guide the slate down onto them and step back for a better look. It’s … it’s a table. Dark. About a foot off the ground, covering more of the apartment than it felt like it would. I sit on the floor facing it and cross my legs. It’s perfect eating height that way. I stand up and look at it like it’s supposed to do something.

I’m hungry.

Out the front door Stephanie’s gone from the stoop. I walk across Tompkins Square Park. Low sunlight stretches tree shadows over benches and heavily pierced and tattooed squatters who set up beds in the grass. With dreads past their shoulders, they huddle behind a cardboard sign that says they need money for their dog, who also has dreads.

I sit on a bench hoping to get tired. I say no to people who ask me if I got a light. Make split-second eye contact with a few dozen people who walk by then watch them go their way. I stay put until streetlights come on, and memories of living here creep back in. My apartment isn’t great shakes, but it beats this park, and this park, as a transition to sanctuary, beat the shit out of Yonkers.

A guy and girl who may or may not have another place to sleep tonight walk by me with their arms latched like the safety pins that hold their pants together. I see Nokey putting his hand on my sister. I wonder if he hadn’t done that would anything else have even happened. I get off the bench, head to my apartment, and try to leave that thought in the park.

Rain

Yonkers is bookended by two strips of water—the Hudson River and the Bronx River—and if you stay in the middle of the city long enough, which I definitely did, you can actually feel them pulling you from both sides, wanting to take you down south past the boroughs of New York City into the Atlantic. The waters start to feel like tarmac, runways for take-off. And if you give over to the pull, let the river take you, you get a ticket to Europe and beyond. I’ve seen this done. Somebody’s brother or sister from the neighborhood just took off downstream and we never heard from them again. In some places, to gain legend status, all you have to do is leave.

The Hudson River, the bigger of the two, belongs to the downtown crowd. From their apartment windows they see the sun dip behind it, watch cargo ships and sail boats leave wakes in it, and hear trains run parallel to it before it dumps commuters onto their front lawns farther up-county.

The Bronx River, which is two blocks from my dad’s house—which until last summer was also my house—belongs to the city’s northerners. We rode our bikes on the footpath next to it when we were little and drank beer on its banks when we were a little bigger. Some nights, Nokey and me used to lay down on the damp dirt that lines it, tell stunningly and embarrassingly stupid teenage jokes, and look for faces in the stars. At night if we drank enough beer and the breeze hit just right, the tree branches looked like they were rotating, cutting spirals upward into the dotted sky. So we stayed put, let our backs get muddy wet, and fell into the sky with the help of nature and alcohol.

After a few days of rain the water would get higher, faster, and the ripples louder—I could hear them two blocks and two stories away from inside my dad’s house. And let me tell you straight up: that was a tempting sound to hear trying to fall asleep in a house I had every desire to leave.

If you wanna get away from Yonkers by riding the Hudson River it’s pretty much a straight run to the Atlantic. But if you’re taking the Bronx River you’ll have to be a strong swimmer.

You gotta cross the Westchester County line into The Bronx and swim past Hunt’s Point and the Bronx Terminal Market, where they plunk the rotten produce in the water. Past that the Bronx River becomes the Harlem or East River where if you catch a stray current you can crash into Riker’s Island or get sucked into Flushing Bay and spend the rest of your days lapping at the shore near LaGuardia Airport. But if you drift west a bit, you wind up kissing Manhattan at East Harlem which, like some first kisses, feels smooth, promising and lasts for about ten minutes, then you slide down to Hell Gate somewhere near 96th Street. Clear that and you still might get snagged by Brooklyn’s Red Hook, a piece of land that sticks out like a dockworker’s tool; it can keep you flapping there like a soggy piece of toilet paper. After the Hook you’re at the place where the East and Hudson Rivers become one. There you have to dodge the anchors of the Verrazano Bridge and make sure you don’t get thrown into the dead end of Jamaica Bay.

Understand—we didn’t swim in the Bronx River. The geese didn’t even go for a dip. They only came to shit. Sometimes you couldn’t tell if it was a big piece of water with a little shit in it or a big piece of shit with a little water in it. But there was a highlight. About a half mile south of my dad’s house the river stretches fifty feet wide, and a wooden footbridge connects the banks. Fifteen feet below the bridge is a waterfall—if we can call it a waterfall. The water crashes from about a foot and a half up. And give me a break, this is Yonkers I’m talking about, not Canada or South America, we run a deficit in the claim-to-fame department, so I’m calling the little shittin thing a falls. Thank you.

In the hot season the sun stayed around longer and the clothes came off quicker. I don’t think the girls in the neighborhood knew they’d been helping me mark time by stripping down to their bathing suits. Their bodies differentiated the identical school years. Between sixth and seventh grade Colleen Burke grew boobs and Lanie Raniolo started shaving her legs. Between ninth and tenth grade Katie Ryan’s thighs got big and Julie DiMatteo started lifting weights.

Below the footbridge, just past the base of the falls, rocks scatter like grey turtle shells spaced so that someone with long enough legs, like my sister, could step from bank to bank without getting their feet wet. But Dani didn’t usually cross the river. Mostly she hopped herself to the middle, sat down and hugged her knees to her chest while the rest of us got drunk and loud, while couples sat with their legs dangled over the side of the bridge, backs to chests. The water split apart at the back of Dani’s stone island and came together again at her toes, swirling up a little force field around her.