The Violent Child Read online

  “Holy Christ, Rudy,” the iceman said. “Looka what the hell I got me.”

  He held me at arm’s length, inspecting me from head to foot while I huffed and kicked. He shook me like a doll. “You fucking with my truck, you little bastard?”

  The helper’s face appeared next to the iceman’s.

  “Speak of the devil,” the helper said. “Settle down, kid. Ain’t nobody going to hurt you.”

  I aimed a kick, but the iceman caught my ankle.

  “Feisty, ain’t he,” the helper said.

  “Ain’t nothing in that truck for you but trouble,” the iceman said. He locked one arm around my head and scrubbed my scalp with his knuckles. I wanted to cry out, but my face was buried in his side.

  “Goddamn Durbin kid,” the helper said, pulling me out of the iceman’s grasp.

  I took a big gulp of air and swung at the iceman’s head. The helper laughed.

  “Madder’n a wet hen, ain’t he?”

  The helper eased the iceman to one side and stood me on the truck’s running board.

  “You know better’n mess with Chuck’s truck. He told you kids he was going to beat your butts he catch you in his truck again. That what you out for? Put old Chuck on the prod?”

  When the helper turned to wink at the iceman, I bolted from the running board. But the iceman was ready, and he swooped me up by the seat of my pants.

  “Hold your britches on, Buster Brown.”

  “Will you take a look at that face?” the helper said. “Better watch yourself, Chuck. I think this here kid’s about to whip our ass. And if he don’t, his ma prob’ly will. That right, young blood? You going to sic that mean old mom of yours onto me and Chuck?”

  I felt I was about to cry, so I bared my teeth and growled.

  The men laughed.

  “We got us a real tough customer here,” the iceman said. “A real roughneck by the looks of it. Prob’ly the roughest little cob on the whole damn block. That right, kid? You a real roughneck?”

  The iceman put me back down on the running board, but continued to hold me by the throat. He knelt before me.

  “You Ted Durbin’s kid?” he asked.

  I looked down.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Teddie,” I said.

  “Teddie what?”

  “Durbin.”

  “Just like your daddy, huh?”

  “No,” I said, looking up.

  “Okay, Teddie.” The iceman fished a dime from his overalls and dropped it into my shirt pocket. I looked down into the pocket, then back to the stubble and creases of the iceman’s face. He rested huge fists on my shoulders.

  “I want you to tell your mom something for me.”

  I shrugged and looked away. He took my chin between his thumb and forefinger and forced me to meet his eyes.

  “You tell her that Chuck, the iceman, heard about the raw deal she got over at Inland, and she don’t got to pay for no ice ‘til she gets back on her feet. You tell her Chuck says.”

  I nodded and twisted away.

  “As I live and breathe,” the helper said. “Look who’s getting soft in their old age. Wouldn’t be looking for a little poon down the road, would you, Chuck?”

  “You know, Rudy,” the iceman said, “one of these days them alligator jaws of yours is going to overload your hummingbird ass.”

  The iceman sat next to me on the running board.

  “Now, you can do something for me, Teddie. You tell them other kids to keep the hell off my truck. You keep them kids off my truck while me and Rudy’s in the building, you got a dime coming every week. Alright?”

  I traced the outline of the dime hanging in the corner of my pocket.

  “I can’t Big Jeanette. My mom won’t let me.”

  “Okay. Everybody except this here Big Jeanette. I’ll take care of old Jeanette myself.”

  “You gonna bust her one?” I asked.

  “Prob’ly won’t come to that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Shake?”

  The iceman took my hand into his, and I tensed as it disappeared among the mass of scars and callouses. I was surprised by the tenderness of its grasp.

  “Behave yourself, young buck, or I’ll whip your butt ‘til it bleeds. Your mom’s got grief enough without you raising Cain.”

  He slapped me on the seat of my pants.

  “Go on. Get out of here.”

  I jumped from the truck and ran for the basement. Sliding under the railing, I dropped into the stairwell, and slammed my back against the concrete wall next to the door. I could hear the two men over the pounding in my chest.

  “Wild as a naked-ass jaybird,” the helper said. “Ain’t a kid in the whole damn place got the chance of a fart’n a wind-storm. Durbin ought to be castyrated. Let a boy go to seed like that. The son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah, but there ain’t no help for it,” the iceman answered. “World’s knee-deep in sons of bitches. You go castyrate the lot of ‘em, you’ll be up to your ass in balls before you hit Washington Boulevard.”

  “Ain’t it the truth? Damn, Chuck! Ain’t it the Goddamn truth!”

  Lorraine coughs. I realize that the room has grown quiet, that it has been some time since she has spoken. She is resting with her eyes closed, her head pressed against her pillow. She passes her hand around the edges of her scarf, tucking and patting.

  “It’s the same old thing your dad give me,” she says. “They don’t make ‘em like this no more. Pure Jap silk, if you believe Ted Durbin. You was just a kid. You don’t remember. Prob’ly heard me talking.”

  I stretch and sit back into the couch. I lace my fingers behind my head.

  “Poor old Toni scarf,” Lorraine says. “Can’t get the smell out of it. Used to soak it in baking soda water. But, I ain’t got time for the extras no more.”

  She coughs phlegm into a handful of Kleenex. She opens the tissue and inspects the pink secretions.

  “Can’t beat Trudy on a Toni,” she says. “Trudy’d Toni me up, and I’d be set for three weeks. Like a brand new Cad’lac with a full tank of gas. Good with her dukes, too. Rough old cob. From Arkansas or some damn place.”

  THREE

  Trudy and Lorraine were living just a few blocks from one another, but, because of shift work and man trouble, they never met until Trudy was demoted from fireman on the slag train to setting the crane cable that stacked the ingots onto flatcars. She was the last woman to lose her job to the men coming back from the war.

  “More power to them soldier boys,” Trudy said. “But we done our part back home. Wasn’t exactly sitting on our thumbs, was we? Twelve hour shifts and doubles. Seven days a week. Now, I got family to feed same as soldier boys, don’t I?”

  If Lorraine was fiery and petite, her tiny frame sometimes overwhelmed by the rigors of mill work, Trudy was sturdy and self-contained, able to perform as well as the hardiest man. Her soft Arkansas drawl would thicken in the presence of strangers, especially men, and, if pressed, she would look down and speak to her hands in short, disjointed monologues. Suddenly, she would look up into the stranger’s face with her brown, crazy eyes and smile a lopsided, tobacco-stained smile, laugh long and over-loud, and people would step back as if they had turned a corner and stumbled upon a downed power cable.

  Even Lorraine said she was intimidated the first time she met Trudy. “You could feel the strong of her, not counting how big she was. Kind of person you seen comin’, you just scooted over to the side and hoped she just kept rollin’ on through.”

  Trudy towered over Lorraine. Thick and muscular about the shoulders, strong through the thighs and buttocks. Trudy moved through a room with confident, clumping strides, swinging her hips, making a point to take up as much space as possible. If some whispered quizzical, hateful remarks behind her back, most had the good sense to put on a pleasant face whenever she drew near. Or at least to nod politely as they stepped around her formidable presence.

  Trudy’s foreman at the mill
was wise enough to avoid the issue of her slag train demotion until a letter arrived from the union. He underlined the words “returning veterans” on her copy and attached it to her timecard along with formal notice of her transfer.

  “Man union, man world,” Trudy sighed. “Ain’t it a mystery how the Lord gives a body the work and not the plumbing to keep it?”

  To everyone’s surprise, and relief, Trudy went to the ingot plant without further complaint. In the interest of maintaining harmony in the workplace, not to mention the safe passage of a fellow union brother to his new job, the foreman advised the man who took Trudy’s place on the slag train to call in sick his first week of work.

  Trudy met Lorraine soon after she began her new job at the ingot plant. Trudy said Lorraine looked like a little girl: barely five feet tall and ninety pounds, all bone and gristle from the mill and the hell Ted had given her. Lorraine was sitting on a slag heap eating lunch, sitting in the sun with her hard hat on her lap, leaning around a large cardboard box, engrossed in coaxing a rat to take a piece of apple she had speared on the tip of a welding rod. It was a bright spring day with good air blowing in from the lake. Lorraine had not yet cut her hair, and it trailed out behind her in black streamers, catching the sun, flashing like silver-sided fish swimming on blue sky.

  “That’s when me and your dad was in the middle of our troubles,” Lorraine said. “I didn’t want nothing to do with nobody, especially at the mill, especially not some broad ugly as homemade sin walking up and making herself a general nuisance. But here comes Trudy, half a front tooth and man haircut, stomping up and scaring off the biggest damn rat I seen in all my years at Inland Steel. Back then we used to catch us rats and starve ‘em mean as snakes. Fight ‘em for money on midnights when the foreman wasn’t around. Here me and you didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, and I was going to make us some good money bettin’ that rat in the pit fights. Now this Trudy comes over, chasing off easy money. Teddie, I was so mad I could of spit nickels.”

  Trudy came uninvited to our apartment on Lorraine’s next weekend off.

  “Sorry about your mouse, Lorraine,” Trudy said, stepping into the kitchen. She put a canned ham and a ten-pound bag of potatoes on the kitchen table. “Stewart Dibble told me what you was up to. I was thinkin’ maybe we could take us a drive over to the docks. I seen some bad old boys under them piers. Rats so big the alley cats won’t even mess with ‘em. What if we was to catch you one of them big old wharf rats?”

  Lorraine turned up her nose and sniffed.

  “Ain’t no wharf rat God ever made could hold his own with no mean-ass mill rat.”

  “Toilet,” Lorraine says, as she pushes herself up from her chair. She steadies herself for a moment on her oxygen cart, then wheels it to the bathroom. There is the sound of metal clanging against porcelain and tires bumping against the wall. I hear her fuss with the toilet seat and slam it down with a bang.

  “Put the seat down when you’re done!” she yells. “Want your mom to break her damn neck?”

  She closes the door, pushes it tight, and locks it. I cup my hands around my mouth and shout toward the bathroom door.

  “If you wipe it more than once you’re playing with it!”

  Lorraine pounds on the wall.

  “If you’re not out of there in half an hour,” I shout, “I’m calling for the paramedics!”

  She kicks the door.

  “Hit the door once for paramedics, twice for Father Torelli!”

  I have listened to the stories of Trudy and Lorraine many times over the years. I have listened as the two women spoke to whiskey glasses, kitchen appliances, and bedroom ceilings, as the stories were told to me, around me, and in spite of me. I have watched their eyes spark with laughter and their fists clench in anger. I have listened as they looked into one another’s eyes, fashioning their tales for my benefit. I have heard the lie and the truth in tones of voices, in the things said and left unsaid. And, if I have allowed the women great latitude, leaving their sense of reality unchallenged, it is because I know that this was their way of shaping me. I do not hold them accountable for their carefully designed misrepresentations, for I believe that it was their intent, by gently texturing history, to influence my life toward a manhood less painful to me and to the women who would come to love me. But I suspect that in their hope of creating a man of better substance than they had known in their own lives, they overestimated the ability of words to modify reality. Underestimated the power of truth to confront it.

  I have since tried to convince Lorraine that, if a parent plays a role in the unfolding of a child’s character, it is a role whose power accumulates over time. That single events cannot account for the place life leaves us in the end.

  Lorraine will have none of this. She believes the sum of our lives has been irreparably damaged by that which occurred on a single winter’s night at the Blue Horizon Tavern. She has ordered what remains of our time together to accommodate this belief.

  We are equally stubborn. I tell her that her suffering has to do with what she believes about love, rather than what has befallen in its name. She tells me it has to do with the violent, sex-obsessed nature of young men. I say that she has been poisoned by her own misunderstanding of love’s fickle relationship to happiness. She says that I am full of shit.

  Lorraine balls a tissue in her fist and drops it into the wastebasket beside her chair. The basket is filled to overflowing with wadded tissues and dog-eared crossword puzzle magazines. Her latest tissue bounces off the pile and rolls onto the floor with the rest of the litter around the bottom of the basket. She closes her eyes and allows her head to fall back against the rest. She lifts her chin to the ceiling and grips the armrests of her chair, nostrils flaring, shoulders rocking slightly with each expansion of her chest.

  I stand and pull the ball cap from the vest pocket of my jean jacket. There is a buzzing from the bourbon. I pull the cap down hard over my head and fumble with the buttons of my coat. Lorraine looks at me out of the corner of her eye.

  “Not home already?”

  “Just going to empty your baskets.”

  “Hell, leave ‘em. I clean mornings if I got my breath. I die in the meantime, they can kiss my royal red patootie.”

  “Only the good die young. I’d better do it while I’m here.”

  She smiles and coughs, “You used to could eat off my floors.”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Spic-and-span. All them years, you never come home to a dirty house.”

  “No complaints.”

  “Ain’t a sin to be poor, but there ain’t no excuse for dirty.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “You always had something on the table and a clean house.”

  “You don’t hear me complaining.”

  “‘Cept that one time I got sick.”

  “Sick doesn’t count.”

  “And that one time they hauled me off.”

  “Hauled off doesn’t count either.”

  Lorraine grunts and nods her head.

  I make the rounds of the kitchen, bathroom, and living room, gathering trash and pushing it down into the large can from the kitchen. When I have tied the top of the plastic sack, I tuck the can under one arm and carry it out to the long hallway that leads to the service door at the rear of the building.

  After the heat of Lorraine’s apartment, the hall is cold, and there is a draft. The light is poor, the once ornate fixtures have long since been stripped from the walls, a string of forty-watt bulbs has been stapled to the ceiling to replace them. Many of the bulbs are dark, all are bare, and there is no conduit for the lengths of wire joining the sockets. The wire is glopped, instead, with the same green paint that peels from the ceiling and walls, and there are a number of places along it where the insulation has frayed, the bare copper shining through. Dirty grey holes appear at intervals along the walls, knots of chicken wire gape where places have been punched or where large chunks have just gi
ven up and crumbled away. The tops of the baseboards are caked with years of grime and shedding plaster dust; beneath the trim, where the walls meet the ceiling, brown watermarks bloom like fanning rust, some reaching as far as the moldings that frame the doors.

  As I move down the empty hall, I follow the path which has been worn in the varnish; it is tacky with years of human residue. The hardwood is warped in many places, curled at the joists, and it sags and creaks as I pass before the rows of doors to either side. Many of these are splintered around the knobs and hinges, some are reinforced with thin sheets of unpainted plywood. None have been properly hung and wedges of light jut from the spaces where the bottoms should meet the floor. My boots make sticking noises as I pass, and the smells of cigarettes, fried meat, and steeping diapers flow out from under the doors along with the slanting light. Televisions blare, stereos thunder so loudly that the wood vibrates beneath my feet.

  When I reach the end of the hall, I kick open the battered steel service door and heave Lorraine’s trash in the direction of the overflowing dumpster. I return to her apartment and stick my head inside the door, dropping the empty can next to the couch.

  “Check my truck,” I say.

  Lorraine nods, but does not open her eyes.

  I walk out the front of the building and cross the street to my truck. I have parked it directly under a street light, both wheels of the passenger side resting on the sidewalk. I have paid two young black boys to guard it, and they are sitting on the front fender facing the street. They have placed a giant cassette player on the hood. The music is loud; the bass is turned so high that the speakers buzz, and all but the drums and anger are incomprehensible.

  The boys are about fourteen or fifteen, and they are laughing, passing marijuana and a can of Pepsi between them. Three girls have come, about the same age, but taller, heavier. The girls are dancing in the street, scissoring their strong thighs and whirling, bending at the waist and shaking their meaty rumps, backing toward the boys.

  I walk toward them, head down, hands in my pockets. The boys frown and turn down the music when they see me approach. The girls stop dancing and pull their coats close around them; they lean against the boys’ legs and make their faces hard. The boys watch my every move, their eyes glinting like dogs on point. The girls fold their arms across their breasts and glare from inside their masks, as if they are burning to say something sharp and hurtful.