They
poisoned me.
What?
They
poisoned me. The doctors at the hospital.
David
switched on his bedside lamp. His big brother Neil, muscular and pale, was
walking a tight circle at the foot of the bed.
Who
poisoned you?
I
told you. The doctors. They gave me some pills that were poison.
Which
doctors? You went to the hospital?
Yeah.
I didn't feel well.
The
clock said it was two am, and Neil was scaring the shit out of David, who was
supposed to have been alone in the house—their parents were in Florida and Neil
had his own place out on Long Island. Also, David was still high from the bowl
he had smoked before bed.
Neil.
I don't understand.
I
told you. I was sick. The doctors gave me pills and I threw them away.
What
pills? Where are they?
In
the garbage. In the small bathroom.
David
got out of bed and went past his brother and down the hall and through the
kitchen to the half-bathroom off the den. He glimpsed himself in the mirror, a
worried-looking seventeen-year-old with giant pupils. The pills were in the
garbage can. He didn’t recognize the name of the drug on the label.
He
found Neil in the kitchen. He had on a sleeveless t-shirt with Japanese writing
and black parachute pants, and he smelled funky, as if he'd been wearing the
same clothes for days. His hair was all fucked up too.
I
told you. I don’t want those pills.
David
put them in his pocket of his sweatpants. He watched Neil pacing until he
realized it was cold in here. Their parents had put some kind of lock on the
thermostat for the bedrooms. They had also taken their car keys, so if David wanted
to go somewhere he had to call a buddy. But they had forgotten to do something
about the thermostat off the kitchen.
David
turned up the heat and then checked the fridge. No
groceries had magically appeared in the night. He poured his brother the last
of the Tropicana.
Sit down, he said.
Neil did as he was told and drank
down the juice and sat panting. David rinsed the glass at the sink and filled
it with water. Neil drank it, more slowly this time.
David was at a loss. He couldn’t
call their parents because Mel had had a heart attack two years ago and he wasn’t
supposed to be upset in any way. He could take Neil back to the
hospital in Neil's car but that didn't seem like a great idea either. He could
call his friend Jared and ask for help but even though Jared was cool he had a
big mouth.
Do you want something to eat? I
think there’s frozen mac and cheese.
Neil shook his head.
Okay, Neil. Let's just sit here for
a while.
David woke up again at eleven,
hungry, wanting toast and coffee. As he stretched in his bed, he felt something
in his pocket—the pill bottle. He remembered Neil and he was scared again.
Neil was in his old bedroom
downstairs. The air smelled thick.
Neil.
What?
Are you okay?
Neil screamed it: let me fucking
sleep.
David flinched. Then he closed the door as quietly as he
could and went upstairs. He stepped onto the porch into the cold and took a hit
from his bowl. He was used to his parents screaming at him, not Neil.
Back
inside, he made toast with the last of the bread, which presented another
problem: he needed groceries. Maybe he could take Neil's car to ShopRite? But he
was afraid to ask Neil for anything. And the fifteen bucks remaining from the
seventy-five his father had left for incidentals—that wouldn't go far. And then
David felt like an idiot for having spent most of the money, on weed, at the
diner with Jared, at Waldenbooks.
He sat there thinking, but he
already knew the answer. Reluctantly, knowing he was creating more problems for
himself, he called the condo.
Hello.
You have reached the Florida residence of Mel and Helene Bergmann. If you'd
like to send a fax press star eight. That’s star, eight. To leave a message
just wait for the signal.
David
sighed. A normal person, if they got a lot of faxes, would put in a dedicated
line. But Mel didn't get a lot of faxes. He barely got any phone calls. The one
time David had accompanied his parents to Florida, the phone had rung twice.
One call was to remind Mel to pay his club dues. The second was a wrong number.
So clearly Mel wanted to be seen as the kind of person who received a lot of
faxes. What the fuck was that?
David
left a message.
After finishing college upstate,
Neil had moved back to his basement room and gone to work in their father’s
business. The expectation was that he’d take it over one day. But Neil showed
little enthusiasm for the work, meaning no enthusiasm whatsoever. David had
overheard his father grumbling about it: Neil screwed up orders, he was awkward
with the customers.
But Neil was a solid
brother. He took David to the library, to the Jersey shore. He taught David how
to drive stick. After college though, he got weird. He bought a set of weights and
the intensity of his workouts—ninety-minute lifting sessions followed by
eight-mile runs—seemed unhealthy. He adopted a New Wave rockabilly look, sleeveless
t-shirts, ankle boots, parachute pants with superfluous zippers. He wore his
hair slicked back with one painstakingly maintained Superman curl.
Neil talked about becoming
an actor, and when they watched Star Trek reruns, he repeated the lines
in different ways, trying them out. (Live long and prosper. Live long and
prosper.) After a few months, he mercifully stopped with the acting and tried standup
comedy. Once David had some friends over, including a girl he liked. Neil had
insisted on trying out his routine on them. He’d produced a microphone and a
little amplifier and did his bit in the den: I think MacGyver would suck at a
birthday party. It would be time to cut the cake and he'd be like, Wait I have
dental floss and a paper clip. Somebody else would be like, Dude we have a cake
knife.
David's friends laughed
politely, but the girl winced at the volume. When he tried to kiss her later
that night, she said she just wanted to be friends.
Neil bombed a few times around
Rockland County—the clubs had names like The Chuckle Bucket and Giggletown—and
started talking about pickle booths.
David had said, Pickle
what?
Neil said, A booth at a
flea market where you sell pickles. You can make fifty thousand a year.
Intense conversations followed
between Neil and their father, conversations that excluded David, which was fine
because David didn't know anything about business and wasn't interested in
learning. He did know fifty thousand a year was about a thousand a week, and you
could buy a pickle for what, a quarter? Which meant Neil would have to sell a
lot of fucking pickles.
Mel, however, thought it
was a good idea, or a good enough idea, and he lent Neil the money, and Neil
found a flea market lacking a pickle booth on Long Island. He got an apartment,
and he didn't visit much because he worked crazy hours.
David liked his brother,
no doubt about it. But he was more at ease without Neil in the house. Now that
Mel had sold the business, his parents weren't around much either. So David could
watch what he wanted, read without interruption, have friends over without fear
of embarrassment. And the winter break—even without cash or a car—promised to be
a delicious week of liberty and marijuana, until Neil showed up claiming he’d
been poisoned.
After leaving the message, David
thought, Fuck it, and put on his coat and stepped out to the deck to finish the
bowl. The day was very cold and clear, and the backyard was a solid field of
snow right up to the woods. It was undeniably pretty, and with a burst of relief
David remembered the mac and cheese in the freezer.
When he got back inside,
Neil was on the kitchen phone.
Okay, Neil was saying,
looking at his feet. Okay.
He pushed the receiver
at David. Dad wants to talk to you.
Here’s what’s going to
happen, Mel said. Neal is going to the doctor. You are going to break down his
booth.
What do you mean break
down his booth?
I mean break down his
booth. Take his car, get the stock, and bring it to the house.
When am I supposed to do
this?
You got something better
to do?
David’s mother got on
the phone.
Should we come home? Maybe
we should come home.
David didn’t know how to
respond. He wanted them to come home, and he wanted them to stay away. Also he was
high as fuck. His mother's voice sounded distant and compressed, as if it were
coming through an old-timey radio.
He said, Okay, I’m
hanging up now. I have to go to Long Island.
But he was too high to drive, so
he didn’t go until the next morning, the last Friday of his vacation, driving Neil's
four-speed Tercel, which smelled like vinegar. He drove down the Palisades Parkway
and across the George Washington Bridge to the Cross Bronx Expressway to the
Cross Island Parkway to the Long Island Expressway to Sunrise Highway, the other
drivers honking in rage or accelerating with psychotic aggression.
David
stalled the Tercel twice, almost drove through a red light. It was a source of
embarrassment, his lack of experience behind the wheel. His parents rarely allowed
him the use of their cars, and David couldn't get a job to save up for one
because there was no public transportation in their part of the county.
David
had said, If I find a job will you drive me to me work?
Mel
said, You can ride your bike.
He
was referring to the Schwinn in the garage, which lacked tires and brakes. David
ran through the steps in his head: fix up the bike, then ride around looking
for a job, then ride to and from the job, even in shitty weather. No thanks.
He
felt trapped and confused whenever he tried to think through this stuff. Then
he’d wonder if there was something intrinsically wrong with him, some missing
gene that would explain why there was never quite enough food around, why he
had to mooch a ride to the library.
Sunrise Highway was
lined by cut-rate furniture stores, fast-food drive-throughs, an old house
turned into a porno shop. He was starting to think he'd made a wrong turn when
he saw a long plain concrete building that said FLEA MARKET above the entrance.
A desultory string of holiday lights framed the doors.
He parked and ran inside
to take a piss in a cavernous bathroom that wasn't so much dirty as neglected,
the tiles yellowed with age and the urinals from some bygone era of plumbing. When
he came out, not many people were around, he guessed because it was the quiet
days after Christmas. He saw high ceilings of mottled tile, fluorescent
lighting, jewelry counters, a sneaker booth, t-shirts you could get lettering
printed on: SAYVILLE JV FOOTBALL ROCKS. MINDY LOVES PAOLO.
Who was Mindy? Who was Paolo?
Had their love survived?
The pickle booth was in
a distant corner across from a plumbing supply booth and a jewelry counter. NEIL'S
PICKLES the sign said. The booth was covered on three sides by blue tarps stretched
between struts, the struts locked to rings set into the floor. David opened the
locks with the keys Neil had given him, rolled up the tarps. And here was
Neil's domain. One industrial metal shelving unit populated by jars of
Ba-tampte sauerkraut and borscht. Four barrels of pickles labeled sour, half-sour,
sweet, and dill. A shelf of plastic takeout containers, and a
sign in Neil's crimped handwriting, YES! WE HAVE HORSERADISH, as if that were
the burning question in everyone’s minds.
David's specific instructions
were to load up the stock and get the booth deposit back from the manager,
three hundred dollars, then sell the struts to said manager, one hundred
dollars. Under no circumstances was David to give away the struts for free or
allow them to be stolen by the assistant manager, a guy called Lewis, who had a
reputation for taking whatever wasn’t nailed down.
David was looking over
the booth, considering the best way to get moving on all these pickles and
pickle-related materials, when a youngish lady came by with a small child. She
asked for a gallon of half-sour, and David sold it to her while the child
watched in mute fascination.
Come back soon, David called
after them, and then felt stupid.
He took an armful of
jars and walked them to the car and put them in the hatchback. Vendors watched
as he passed. When he returned from the third trip, an old white guy with neatly
combed gray hair and a flannel shirt was at the booth.
Are you the brother?
Yes.
The man said nothing.
Sorry, David said. Who
are you?
I'm the manager.
Okay.
They looked at each
other.
You’re supposed to give
me the deposit, David said.
The manager nodded, and
he took a thick roll of cash from his pocket, actually an astonishing roll.
Before handing over a bill he crinkled it between thumb and forefinger,
presumably to avoid passing an extra hundred. It made the whole business last
much longer than it should have. Finally the manager got on a walkie-talkie and
a moment later a younger white man, shortish and kind of fat, appeared with a big
hand truck. He wore a Jets cap and a multicolored hoodie.
Both the manager and the
other guy watched David as he lay the hand truck down and moved the handle so
it could be used as a cart.
Had to show your brother
how to do that, the guy said.
I guess I'm the hand
truck expert of the family, David said.
Meanwhile he was
thinking: Assholes. The end of the pickle booth was a show for them, a way of passing
the slow days between Christmas and New Year's. Just as it was for the vendors watching
David push cartloads to the parking lot.
When he had all the jars
in the hatchback, he folded up the tarps and lay the struts atop the pile in a
neat bundle. Then he started filling containers with pickles and brine, dutifully
marking the lids with their appropriate level of sourness or dillness. He was
at it for an hour when he realized he was famished, and he sure didn't want any
pickles. He found the food court, or the row of booths beneath a sign that read
FOOD COURT. He got two slices and a Coke.
After eating, he wasn't
ready to face the pickles again, so he asked the pizza girl if they had coffee.
She was a rock chick, the coolness of her spiky hair and eyeliner undermined by
the winking Italian chef on her apron.
Coffee? No, we don’t
have coffee. This is a pizza place.
David said, You know
that occasionally pizza places sell coffee. That this is within the realm of
human possibility.
She looked at him. What?
Nothing. Do you know
where I can get coffee?
She pointed to a lunch
counter kind of booth where he bought a coffee and sat down at a cheap plastic
chair that bent beneath him. Someone had left a newspaper on the table. He read
the comics and Ann Landers, which featured a passionate plea for advice on the
proper way toilet paper should go on the holder, with the end over or under the
roll. It was strange how small disagreements created giant emotions: in tenth
grade Richard Yarnell had almost wept with rage when David insisted that the
best Rush album was not 2112 but A Farewell to Kings. Their friendship
had never been the same.
When David got back to
the booth, it looked weird, naked somehow.
The struts were gone.
His father was going to
kill him.
No, Mel wouldn't kill
him. He would just see it as further confirmation of his uselessness. He would
bring it up repeatedly while David seethed with shame.
Neil was a consideration
too. What was wrong with these people, these nickel-and-dimers, who tried to
fuck someone over when he was down?
David had to ask around
until he found the guy in a darkened back office listening to talk radio. It
was the sloppy-looking man who had brought the cart. He was eating a pickle.
I’m guessing you're Lewis.
Yeah, the guy said,
wiping his mouth. You done with the hand truck?
Give me the struts.
What struts?
Dude. Just give them to
me.
Your brother said I
could have them.
You're kidding right?
That's what he said.
Should I call your boss?
Or the cops?
With a shrug Lewis got
up and David followed him to a door at the furthest end of the flea market, a
janitor's closet with an industrial sink, cleansers and mops, and in a corner, the
struts.
I’ll give you twenty
bucks for them, Lewis said.
I’ll take a hundred. I
won't charge you for the pickle.
Lewis said nothing so
David gathered up the struts and then walked back across the vast building cradling
these coveted slim poles, thinking, Assholes, assholes. At the booth, he packed
up the last of the pickles and dumped out the leftover brine in that janitor's
closet and put the barrels in the dumpster. He was sweeping the floor when the jewelry
guy from across the way came over. He had feathered hair and a mustache.
Is your brother having
trouble? I don't mean to pry.
David looked away.
Maybe, he said. Probably.
I’m sorry. You tell him
I wish him well, okay? I'm Mario.
Okay. Thanks, Mario.
They shook hands, and as
the guy walked away, David noted the gun at Mario's waist, a holstered .38.
David was ready to get
the fuck out of this place. But he still had the struts to deal with. He
figured that the manager would come back eventually, and he also guessed that
the manager would make him wait. So he got another cup of coffee and stood
around, wishing he’d brought a book. He wouldn’t mind a quick toke as well, but
he’d left his pot at home, figuring rightly it was better to deal with this
shit with a clear head.
Twenty minutes later,
the manager returned.
I’ll give you fifty for
the struts, he said.
David was sweating. He
asked himself, What would Mel do? The answer: Mel would respond with a number above
the price he wanted. Which in this case was a hundred.
I’ll take a hundred
fifty, David said.
I can do sixty.
I know what these things
are worth, David said.
Okay, seventy-five.
One hundred twenty-five,
said David.
We'll split the
difference, said the manager. One hundred.
Mel had a shitfit when David said
he got fifty bucks for the struts—yelling through the phone, I told you not to
let them fuck you over—and it hurt, but not as much as David had thought it
would, because he had the other fifty in his pocket. Which turned out to be
more than enough for new inner tubes and a basic set of bike tools. He took
cash from Neil’s wallet for groceries and his Tercel to the library for books
on bike repair.
He
skipped New Year's Eve at Jared’s house to work on the Schwinn and keep an eye
on Neil. Their parents, by phone, had found some psychiatrist who gave Neil new
pills that kept him in a state of sleepy indifference. David gently reminded his
brother to eat and shower. He didn’t mind looking after Neil. He did ask
himself, a bunch of times, why he had to go through all this alone, but he was
no longer waiting for someone, anyone, to explain it to him.
Gordon Haber