Читать книгу Alligator - Dima Alzayat - Страница 10

The summer Etan Patz disappeared, New York was burning something fierce. ‘It’s hotter than a hooker in hell,’ my father would say after a day’s work, his collar slack and soiled, his scalp like wet sandpaper.

For three months our mothers kept us indoors, wouldn’t let us out no-way-no-how, convinced that the man who’d snatched Etan was prowling the neighborhood for more. I imagined a lunatic in a sorcerer’s cap stirring a pot of boys with a broom handle, bending over and pinching their thighs to feel for tenderness. Wondered what we’d smell like in that pot. Probably something awful, all that Kool-Aid and Play-Doh, gym socks and rusted pennies, pooled together like that.

‘Let me out, woman,’ I’d demand each morning and duck in time to miss my mother’s palm swinging toward the back of my head. I hated her in those moments, my larger-than-life warden, wide and rubbery like an inflatable raft sheathed in floral cloth. Why I had to be kept from the swimming pool, baseball games and sugar cones balancing scoops of rainbow sherbet, I didn’t understand. She never budged, not once. Stayed like that too, the rest of her life, unyielding as a nail in cement, until we buried her. Even then, at the very end, she’d still go on about ‘Poor Etan.’

Only thing that kept me from grabbing a bedsheet and parachuting out the window that summer was Tommy Palansky. He’d moved into the apartment beneath ours and his mother wasn’t letting him out either. We’d spend every morning running up and down the stairs of our four-story building, the light filtering in through window panes thick with dust and falling across us in streaks of gray. We’d gather Legos, rubber balls, wadded newspaper, candles melted down to their stubs, old slippers – anything we could filch undetected. Then we’d position ourselves on the steps on either side of the stairwell and build military posts out of broken-down cardboard boxes and plastic tubs and declare War with our ragtag arsenal. My brother Ralph would stand in the doorway and watch, drooling all over himself and saying nothing.

‘Ben, let Ralph play with you,’ my mother would holler from the living room where she sat peeling potatoes or snipping green beans into a colander, the record player behind her always screeching nothing but Fairuz.

‘All he does is drool, Ma,’ I’d yell back. I’d hold real still then, listening for the creak of wooden baseboards beneath her swollen feet. Sometimes she’d leave me be a little longer but eventually she’d come, her weight pressing down on linoleum and thudding across the cement of the stairwell. She’d pinch my ear between fingers, plump and damp, and pull me so close I could make out the short black prickles sprouting from her chin.

‘His whole life people gonna look to us to see how they oughta treat him,’ she’d say. But the kid really did drool everywhere, spit that mixed and mingled with all the other fluids he leaked. Sweat and snot and saliva on his face and neck, t-shirts, every Tonka truck and green army man we owned. The heat made it worse. He’d wake up dry enough and by lunchtime he was like a sponge left in a bucket of dirty water.

Rubbing my ear, I’d take his hand and lead him to my post, prop him up on the front line and hand him artillery to launch at Tommy. He was good at taking orders from me when he was in the mood for it, I had to give him that. Would strike Tommy on the shoulder with empty shampoo bottles and right on the head with wooden blocks.

‘That’s not fair, there’s two of you now,’ Tommy would groan.

‘Pipe down. He’s like half a damn person,’ I’d say. Then Tommy would get bored and start crawling on all fours, hooting and roaring and pounding his chest like a mad gorilla or some other wild beast. He’d circle Ralph like that, coming close enough to sniff him and then retracting in disgust. Guess I couldn’t blame him. The kid smelled like pickled eggs most days. Ralph never would react. He’d just stare right ahead and you couldn’t be certain if he was actually seeing Tommy or even looking at him. I can’t say I felt bad for my brother then the way my mother did. Didn’t see any sense in feeling bad for someone who didn’t seem to mind.

‘What do you think he thinks about?’ Tommy asked. I couldn’t guess what went through Ralph’s mind any more than I could name what was broken in the first place. I was three when he was born and my mother would say I spent a couple of years just waiting for him to get up and play. I’d try giving him my newest Hot Wheel, my best Transformer, even tucked a pillowcase into the back of his collar so we could make like superheroes and fly. But he never had a want for any of that. Sure enough he got up and learned some words but his eyes, they just didn’t move like ours. It was like we were nothing more than stagehands to him and he was waiting for the show to start.

By noon the stairwell would get too hot to bear and we’d escape to the basement, where walls of exposed brick escaped the sun’s reach and remained cool to the touch. Except for a few empty trunks and a lone chair there was nothing much else in the space. Sometimes our mothers would let us carry down a couple of fans and we’d set them up near opposing walls and position Ralph in the center. Then we’d veer and tilt around him like jet planes, spreading our arms and letting the breeze make its way through our thin t-shirts, drying our underarms and sending shivers down our spines.

Spent, we’d collapse onto the floor and talk about our dwindling summer in captivity and the approaching start of another nine months spent in classrooms that smelled like mildew and vinegar. ‘Is he ever gonna go to school?’ Tommy asked once about Ralph. I didn’t answer. My father had wanted Ralph to go to school, even tried enrolling him in special classes for a few weeks the year before. Then some kid scratched him up pretty bad, pressed a pencil with a broken tip into the soft flesh of his wrist and dragged it up and down his forearm until the skin broke. All that afternoon Ralph said nothing about it. Sat through the rest of his classes and dinner, even watched some Tom and Jerry with me. It wasn’t until she undressed him for a bath that my mother saw the carved skin, the dried blood flaking off like red ash. That’s when she put her foot down and said No more. She got approval to home-school him then, but not before she clomped down the stairs and the three blocks to the school and made every official cower or cry.

Without fail our basement conversations would soon turn to Poor Etan. Whole afternoons we spent imagining what happened to him. Six years old, same as Ralph, and he goes missing the first time he walks alone to the bus stop. How’s that for luck? We imagined him holed in a basement like ours, tied up and invisible to the world. Sometimes we’d really get into it and invent entire scenarios. We imagined him stoned to death and buried alive. Burned in a fire as an offering to some cult god, his screams growing in pitch as the flames surged upward. We imagined him skinned and hanging in one of the meat shops in Chinatown, like a rabbit waiting to be fried or baked for dinner. I could always picture it so perfectly. His photo was on the news each night and on the cover of my father’s paper each morning. I knew his face better than I knew anyone else’s, maybe even my own. Hair blond and long like a girl’s. Eyes wide-set and blue. A smile that cut into his cheeks and spread past his lips, a smirk to maybe say it was all a joke, that at any moment he’d reappear.

Sometimes we’d bring down some twine and take turns tying each other to the chair and pretend that one of us was Etan and the other the kidnapper. Ralph’d just drool and watch. Our weapons of combat would transform into torture devices and we’d pretend to slit each other’s throats and ply fingers off one by one while yelling things like, ‘Gimme all your dough,’ and, ‘Where’s the cash stash, punk?’ We knew a kidnapper wasn’t gonna ask for money – but we couldn’t quite figure what it was he would ask for, what it would be he was after, so we carried on like that. My mother found us once, after I’d tied Tommy good and tight to the chair and was threatening to zap him from here to Jupiter with my plastic gun if he didn’t tell me where he’d hidden the goods. She nearly tore us to crumbs but my father, who was just getting home and in no mood for a fight, said, ‘Salwa, they’re like caged ferrets. You gotta let them have a tumble every now and again.’ Still, she told Tommy’s mother and made me carry the fan upstairs. But by the end of that week we were back down there and at it again.

When we were feeling really daring we’d creep down to the ground floor, a small open space that housed abandoned bicycles and the door to the outside. I’d drag Ralph along so he couldn’t tell on us and Tommy would twist the metal latch and pull the door, thick and hulking, and we would stick our heads out one by one into the humid air. Soon enough we began daring each other to step out onto the pavement, to walk to the corner where the Guatemalan man sold fresh fruit and cigarettes, and eventually, to sprint full speed around the entire block once if not twice. Even now, more than thirty years later, I can remember the way the warm air filled me as I ran, how it surged and swirled in my lungs. I must have passed the fruit stand then and taken a right, ran past Earl’s Drugs and Stuff and the video store, turned right again and rushed past Didi’s Donuts, the hotdog cart and the laundromat. That must have happened but I couldn’t tell you at the time what I was passing, the streets feeling new and foreign even though I’d walked them all the years of my life, had known nothing but their shapes and colors. Instead, I glimpsed the curves of lips and angles of noses, the arches of brows and lines of grimaces. A bald man with a diamond ear stud leaned on a shuttered shop, a suit in a fedora brushed my arm as he passed, another wearing nothing but shorts and sneakers bounced a basketball as he went. I ran fast enough so I didn’t look at any one of them directly, couldn’t tell you the colors of their eyes, but knew that they could look toward me, could see me if they wanted. As I rounded the final corner, I’d erupt into something of a frenzy, a current coursing through my veins, leaving me feeling at once fearless, like I could do anything, and relieved that I wouldn’t because someone was expecting me to return.

I can’t say exactly when it was that Ralph went missing. I just know it was the week before we started school and the sun was low enough to turn everything orange.

Tommy’s parents had gone to visit a relative in Queens and my mother had offered to watch him until after dinner. I never invited my school friends home in those days and a sleepover was unthinkable. The one time I did have someone over, this kid Joey, Ralph drooled all over the Chinese checkers Joey’d brought with him and during dinner, kept his mouth clamped tight while my mother tried to feed him steamed carrots and rice. By the end of the meal, his face was covered in orange pulp and Joey was staring at him like he was a zoo exhibit. The next day the entire class was talking about it.

Sure, Tommy wasn’t especially keen on Ralph always hanging around, but he knew Ralph, knew what being his brother meant and didn’t mean, what it said and didn’t say. When I found out Tommy would be eating with us, I begged my mother to cook something normal. It was 1979 and exotic-sounding dishes with names like South Sea Beef and Chicken Tahitian were all the rage – culinary experiments that ended with my father sweating just trying to keep them down and Ralph spitting half-chewed chunks onto his plate until she caved and made him a hotdog.

That night though, she’d agreed to Spaghetti Bolognese and the smell of crushed garlic and simmering tomato sauce wafted down to Tommy and me as we stood on the ground level of the building, bent over with hands on knees, panting. We’d already run around the block three times each while Ralph sat and played with his plastic trucks.

‘Come on, Ben. Just let him go once,’ Tommy said, still gasping for air.

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m bored just doing the same old thing.’

I shrugged. ‘We could play Legos.’

‘Oh, come on. He wants to go, don’t you, Ralph?’ Tommy looked to Ralph who had picked up a truck that was down to its last wheel, was flicking the wheel with his finger to make it spin.

‘It’s almost dinnertime,’ I said. ‘Anyway, he won’t do it.’

‘Sure he will, he’ll do anything you say if you’re the one to say it.’

Ralph glanced up to me just then and I remember searching for something in that look, for a twitch or a well-timed blink. Anything. But on it went, that endless gaping stare.

‘See?’ Tommy said. ‘He’s just waiting for you to say it.’

I stood there for what must have been no more than a minute but it felt like all of time was stretched before me, pulled like Silly Putty in all directions at once. My ears burned and I knew my face would follow. I remember wishing he would just say something, that he’d open his mouth and a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ would make its way out of his garbled brain. I’d heard him speak before, knew he could. But the one time I needed him to, he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Instead he sat silent and watching and I felt my insides grow hot, like someone had lit a match in my stomach and left it.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Ralph, run around the block one time.’ Tommy let out a small yelp and pulled open the heavy door. Ralph slowly rose and walked toward it, never breaking my gaze as he moved. I hoped then that he would just turn around and run up the stairs instead, decide to watch television or cling to my mother’s skirt as she cooked, anything. See, I’d say, I told you he wouldn’t do it.

But he did. He walked through the door and took the five steps down to the sidewalk, squinting his eyes to adjust to the light. And then I knew it was actually happening, that Ralph was gonna run around the block alone, be outside alone for the first time, and I just wanted it to be over. ‘Run fast, Ralph. Around the block, okay?’ I called. ‘Just fast and around the block.’ But he was no longer looking at me, had turned his eyes to sky and sidewalk.

He had just taken off toward the fruit stand, his arms stiff at his sides but his stride certain in its direction, when I heard my mother bellow my name from upstairs. Tommy shook his head, signaling me to ignore her. But again she called, louder this time and I knew she’d come barreling down those stairs, her legs thick and bowed like a charging bull’s, if I didn’t answer. I stood in the doorway and called to Ralph, but already he was at the corner and had escaped the reach of my voice. Again, my name left my mother’s lips and echoed in my ears. Tommy was now pushing me toward the stairs, knowing we’d both be punished something awful if we were found out.

I took the steps two at a time and found her bent over the television. ‘I wanna move it to the kitchen, Ben. Tired of all this walking back and forth.’ If she had looked at my face for even an instant she would’ve known right then and there what I’d done but she was struggling to get a firm hold of the thing. ‘Come on, try to get the other side.’ It was heavy, that television, the kind built into a wooden console as if it didn’t have a right to exist alone, had to be disguised as a piece of familiar furniture first. It was too cumbersome to pick up but impossible to push. Our difference in size didn’t help either. Even after getting it up, we had to put it down and re-lift every few steps. The sweat stood on her brow and her dress clung to her like cling film. I would’ve felt sorry for her if I wasn’t so worried about the trouble I’d be in if she knew. While we took a break to catch our breaths she asked after Ralph and I told her he was on the stairs with Tommy. I pretended I knew that for certain. Wanted to believe I knew that for certain. Enough time had passed.

When we’d finally moved the damn thing into the kitchen, just as she raised her head and turned her eyes to meet mine, I made for the door. ‘Fetch Ralph and Tommy and come back up here. That’s enough for one day.’ I left without answering, nearly fell twice running, slipped and slid down the last few stairs. When I got to the ground floor, the big door was shut. I stood there a moment, confused, even turned around and looked back at the staircase, somehow expecting to find Tommy and Ralph standing there, waiting. But I was alone.

I pulled open the door and though I’d not been gone all of maybe fifteen minutes, already the light was changing – the way it seems to grow brighter right before it turns purple and disappears altogether. To my right a couple stood, arguing. The man was calling the woman names that to this day I don’t like to repeat and she was swinging at him as he cursed. The man started to turn toward me so I glanced past him toward the fruit stand where a mother paid for a bag of mango slices for her daughter, lit a cigarette for herself. I turned my head in the other direction but aside from a mangy cat rummaging through the trash, the sidewalk was empty. Taxis and cars honked at one another on the street, their headlights coming on pair by pair as the light faded. My chest felt tight and flat, like the whole of the sky was pressing down on it, like I was no more than God’s rolling board.

I stepped out onto the pavement and heard the door slam behind me before I realized that I had no way back in without buzzing my mother. The arguing couple were walking away now and the mother and daughter were crossing the street. I scanned the sidewalk in both directions two, three times and just started running toward the stand, rounded the corner and picked up speed. Everywhere I looked, my eyes sought Ralph, tried to remember what color shirt he was wearing, whether it was blue or green, the one with Batman or the Joker. I began to feel faint and sick like when you eat too much or not enough, like I was full and empty all at the same time.

I ran until I realized I’d circled the block three times and each time I saw new faces and the same faces but with something new about them. A scarred cheek, crooked teeth, sunburned skin. I looked them directly in the eyes, searched for some clue as to where Tommy and Ralph had gone, of who had seen them, who had taken them.

On my fourth time around, the fruit vendor had started to pack up his goods and nodded to me as I passed. With each step I took, what light remained seemed to scatter even faster, eager to leave the world or at least my part of it, and I became less afraid of what my mother would do to me and more frightened for Ralph and what the sorcerer would do to him. I remember wishing that something big would happen, like a tornado or an earthquake, just so it would be bigger than what was happening then. The only thought that kept me from screaming right there on the sidewalk was that I had to keep running. That, and I knew Tommy had to be with him, that Tommy would follow that sorcerer to his dungeon and save Ralph, and Etan too. He’d free them and tie up the sorcerer in their place.

Thirty minutes later, I sat on the kitchen floor, huddled in a corner while police officers went in and out of the apartment, their radios buzzing with codes only they understood. My father had gone out with a search group scouring the neighborhood on foot. Tommy’s parents had returned; his mother stood in the hallway outside our apartment screaming at the cops to go find her son while his father sat in our kitchen with his head in his hands.

Over and over the same police officer kept asking me to repeat the story, how I’d left Tommy and Ralph on the ground floor, that maybe we had opened the door to let in air, that maybe we had taken turns going outside for just a few minutes at a time. The questions kept coming – the same ones with the words rearranged, until my mother turned to the officer and said Stop. But even then she wouldn’t look me in the eye. That’s how I remember my mother to this day, though she’d live another twenty years before dying from too many cigarettes. She kept pressing the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other, pressed so hard I thought she’d push a hole right through. She stopped only to hold up a picture of Ralph the cops had asked to see. ‘No, he’s not blond. It was the light in the photo studio. Made everything look different,’ she kept repeating.

Neighbors showed up in turn at our door offering to pray with us and though I never knew my mother to miss a Sunday mass, she told them they’d be more useful walking the streets, searching. But I prayed anyway. Jumbled together Hail Marys and Our Fathers, promised to give Ralph my toys, to never want another thing again if only he’d appear. At some point, a cop asked me to come down to the landing, to show him exactly where we were playing, to describe who stood where and when. I looked to my mother and though she nodded, still her eyes refused mine.

A few cops stood on the ground level of the building, the door now wide open. I could make out a news truck and reporters, more cops and neighbors. A woman in a red blazer noticed me then and rushed toward the building. The cops quickly filled the doorway and stood between us. Still, I could see her peering over their shoulders as others joined her – a mass of shifting microphones and cameras and voices. The officers ordered them to step away from the door and pulled me back but not before I heard one of them ask if I’d witnessed the disappearance.

When the cops found Ralph tied up in the basement, my mother let out a cry so loud and terrible, a long howl that waned into a low moan. They walked in on Tommy holding the plastic gun and Ralph’s head welted where Tommy’d struck him with it. Ralph sat shirtless in that chair, his arms and legs bound, his Fantastic Four tee gagging his mouth. Dried tears ran in streaks down his neck and his pants were soaked, the stench of piss filling the room. When the cops led him through the door of our apartment and into my mother’s arms, he turned to me for no more than an instant and though his eyes neither twitched nor blinked, I understood them.

I don’t know what became of Tommy. His parents moved out the next day and the apartment stayed empty for months. That night, my mother bathed Ralph for nearly an hour while my father stood in the doorway and watched over them both without speaking. I sat in the hallway, waiting, until my father turned to me and said it was time for bed.

I lay in the darkness and looked across at Ralph’s bed, wondered what Etan’s bed looked like, empty like that, night after night. I waited for what felt like hours and crept out of bed and down the hallway. My parents’ bedroom door was open and I could see my father asleep in his work shirt. In the kitchen, the spaghetti sat on the table, untouched. I found my mother in the living room, Ralph wrapped in a towel and asleep on her lap. I sat next to her and for a long time I couldn’t be sure if she was awake or asleep, her breaths low and far in between, her eyes difficult to see in the darkness. Then, at around dawn, when the shadows in the room began to shift and I could make out her face and she could make out mine, she pulled me toward her.