On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Page 8

  The most common English word spoken in the nail salon was sorry. It was the one refrain for what it meant to work in the service of beauty. Again and again, I watched as manicurists, bowed over a hand or foot of a client, some young as seven, say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” when they had done nothing wrong. I have seen workers, you included, apologize dozens of times throughout a forty-five-minute manicure, hoping to gain warm traction that would lead to the ultimate goal, a tip—only to say sorry anyway when none was given.

  In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

  And yet it’s not only so in the nail salon, Ma. In those tobacco fields, too, we said it. “Lo siento,” Manny would utter as he walked across Mr. Buford’s field of vision. “Lo siento,” Rigo whispered as he reached to place a machete back on the wall where Buford sat ticking off numbers on a clipboard. “Lo siento,” I said to the boss after missing a day when Lan had another schizophrenic attack and had shoved all her clothes into the oven, saying she had to get rid of the “evidence.” “Lo siento,” we said when, one day, night arrived only to find the field half harvested, the tractor, its blown-out engine, sitting in the stilled dark. “Lo siento, señor,” each of us said as we walked past the truck with Buford inside blasting Hank Williams and staring at his withered crop, a palm-sized photo of Ronald Reagan taped to the dash. How the day after, we began work not with “Good morning” but with “Lo siento.” The phrase with its sound of a bootstep sinking, then lifted, from mud. The slick muck of it wetting our tongues as we apologized ourselves back to making our living. Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue.

  I think of those men who sweated, who joked and sang beside me in the endless tobacco. How George was one grand away, about two months of work, from buying his mother a house outside Guadalajara. How Brandon was going to send his sixteen-year-old daughter, Lucinda, to university in Mexico City to be a dentist, like she always wanted. How after one more season, Manny would be back by the seaside village in El Salvador, running his fingers over the scar on his mother’s collarbone where a tumor would’ve just been removed using the pay he received removing tobacco from the Connecticut soil. How he’d buy, with his remaining savings, a boat and try his luck fishing for marlins. Sorry, for these men, was a passport to remain.

  The day’s work done, my white tank top so stained with dirt and sweat, it was like I wore no shirt at all as I walked my bike out of the barn. Fingers sticky and raw over the handlebars, I plunged my silver Huffy forward, down the dust-blown street, past the vast and now empty distances where the crop once stood, the sun burning low above the tree line. And I heard them behind me, their voices distinct as channels on a radio. “¡Hasta mañana, Chinito!” “¡Adios, muchacho!” And I knew which men the voices belonged to. Without looking, I could tell Manny was waving, like he did each day, his three-and-a-half-fingered hand black against the last light.

  What I wanted to say to them, as I rode away, and also the next morning, all mornings, is what I want to say to you now: Sorry. Sorry that it would be so long before they would see their loved ones, that some might not make it back across the desert border alive, taken by dehydration and exposure or murdered by drug cartels or the right-wing crack militia in Texas and Arizona. Lo siento, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. Because by then my sorry had already changed into something else. It had become a portion of my own name—unutterable without fraudulence.

  Which is why, when the boy came to me one afternoon, the boy who would change what I knew of summer, how deep a season opens when you refuse to follow the days out of it, I said “Sorry.” The boy from whom I learned there was something even more brutal and total than work—want. That August, in the fields, it was he who came into my vision. Near day’s end, I felt another worker beside me but, caught in the rhythm of the harvest, couldn’t stop to consider him. We picked for about ten minutes, his presence intensifying on the periphery until he stepped in front of me as I reached to lift a wilted stalk. I looked up at him, a head taller, his finely boned face dirt-streaked under a metal army helmet, tipped slightly backward, as if he had just walked out from one of Lan’s stories and into my hour, somehow smiling.

  “Trevor,” he said, straightening up. “I’m Trevor.” I would know only later that he was Buford’s grandson, working the farm to get away from his vodka-soaked old man. And because I am your son, I said, “Sorry.” Because I am your son, my apology had become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.

  That first day after meeting him in the field, I found Trevor again in the barn. The dusked light had washed the interior with a bluish glow. Outside, the workers’ axes clinked against their belt straps as they climbed the dirt knoll back to their Airstreams by the edge of the wood. The air was cool, tinged with chlorophyll from the fresh-cut tobacco now suspended from the beams above us, some still dripping, making tiny dust swirls along the barn floor.

  I don’t know why I lingered at my bike, taking time checking the spokes. Trevor sat on a bench along the wall, chugging a neon-yellow Gatorade.

  There was something about the way he looked when lost in thought, his brow pinched under squinted eyes, giving his boyish face the harsh, hurt expression of someone watching his favorite dog being put down too soon. The way his mud-streaked and dusty edges juxtaposed against that rounded mouth and pert lips sealed into a flushed, feminine pout. Who are you, I thought to myself as I worked the brakes.

  What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place. The way he watched me back there in the field, when we worked briefly, side by side, our arms brushing against each other as the plants racked themselves in a green blur before me, his eyes lingering, then flitting away when I caught them. I was seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe, who, in elementary school, was sent to the fifteen-minute time-out in the corner only to be found two hours later, when everyone was long gone and Mrs. Harding, eating lunch at her desk, peered over her macaroni salad and gasped. “My god! My god, I forgot you were still here! What are you still doing here?”

  Trevor and I talked about the fields as the light slipped from the barn, how much more there was to be done, how the crop was for cigars exported to Africa and East Asia, where smoking was still popular and where anything that came from America still had an aura of promise to it. But truth was, Trevor said, the crop was low-grade, the burn bitter in the throat, sour.

  “This crop ain’t even legit,” he said. His voice echoed up the rafters. I peered over my shoulder, catching him. “Wormholes all over ’em. We got two good years, maybe three, and then—” He ran his hand, like a blade, over his Adam’s apple. “It’s a wrap.” He grew silent. I could feel his eyes as I returned to my bike. And I wanted it, for his gaze to fix me to the world I felt only halfway inside of.

  As I laid my chain on the fulcrum, I could hear the swooshing of the Gatorade in the bottle, then the bottle being set down on the bench. After a moment, he said, real quiet, “I fucking hate my dad.”

  Up until then I didn’t think a white boy could hate anything about his life. I wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. Because that’s what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them.

  “I hate my dad, too,” I said to my hands, now still
and dark with chain grease.

  When I turned around Trevor was smiling up at the ceiling. He saw me, hopped off the ledge, and walked over, the smile fading into something else as he pulled the army helmet over his eyes. The black Adidas logo on his white T-shirt shifted as he approached. I was a freshman that summer, and Trevor was already a junior. Although barely visible in the sun, here in the barn, and coming closer, his thin mustache deepened, a blondish streak dark with sweat. And above that, his eyes: their grey irises smattered with bits of brown and ember so that, looking at them, you could almost see, right behind you, something burning under an overcast sky. It seemed the boy was always looking at a plane wrecking itself midair. That’s what I saw that first day. And although I knew that nothing behind me was on fire, I turned back anyway and saw the coiled summer air, sputtering with heat, rise over the razed fields.

  * * *

  —

  The boy is six and wearing nothing but a pair of white underwear with Supermans patterned everywhere. You know this story. He has just finished crying and is now entering that state where his jaw shudders to calm itself shut. His snot-plastered nose, its salt on his lips, his tongue, he’s at home. His mother, you remember this, has locked him in the basement for wetting his bed again, the four or five Supermans near his crotch now soiled dark. She had dragged him out of bed by the arm, then down the stairs as he screamed, begged, “One more chance, Ma. One more chance.” The kind of basement no one goes down, all around him the dank scent of damp earth, rusted pipes choked with cobwebs, his own piss still wet down his leg, between his toes. He stands with one foot on the other, as if touching less of the basement meant he was less inside it. He closes his eyes. This is my superpower, he thinks: to make a dark even darker than what’s around me. He stops crying.

  * * *

  —

  Summer was almost gone as we sat on the toolshed roof by the field’s edge, but the heat had stayed, and our shirts clung to us like unmolted skins. The tin roof, touched all day by the heat, was still warm through my shorts. The sun, now waning, must still be stronger somewhere west, I thought, like in Ohio, golden yet for some boy I’ll never meet.

  I thought of that boy, how far from me he was and still American.

  The wind was cool and thick up the legs of my shorts.

  We were talking, as we did those days after work when we were too exhausted to head home just yet. We talked about his guns, of school, how he might drop out, how the Colt factory in Windsor might be hiring again now that the latest shooting spree was three months done and already old news, we talked of the next game out on Xbox, his old man, his old man’s drinking, we talked of sunflowers, how goofy they looked, like cartoons, Trevor said, but real. We talked about you, about your nightmares, your loosening mind, his face troubled as he listened, which made his pout more defined.

  A long silence. Then Trevor took out his cell phone, snapped a picture at the colors at the sky’s end, then put it back in his pocket without reviewing what he took. Our eyes met. He flashed an embarrassed smile, then looked away and started picking at a pimple on his chin.

  “Cleopatra,” he said after a while.

  “What?”

  “Cleopatra saw the same sunset. Ain’t that crazy? Like everybody who was ever alive only seen one sun.” He gestured to indicate the whole town, even though we were the only people there far as the eye could see. “No wonder people used to think it was god himself.”

  “Said who?”

  “People.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “Sometimes I wanna just go that way forever.” He pointed his chin beyond the sycamores. “Like just psssh.” I studied his arm propped behind him, the thin, flowing muscles, field-toned and burger-fed, shifting as he talked.

  I flung the last rind from the grapefruit I was peeling off the roof. What about our skeletons, I wanted to ask, how do we get away from them—but thought better of it. “It must suck to be the sun, though,” I said, handing him a pink half.

  He put the whole half in his mouth. “Hob bob?”

  “Finish chewing you animal.”

  He rolled back his eyes and bobbled his head playfully, as if possessed, the clear juice dripping down his chin, his neck, the indent under his Adam’s apple, no larger than a thumbprint, glistening. He swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. “How come?” he repeated, serious.

  “’Cause you never see yourself if you’re the sun. You don’t even know where you are in the sky.” I placed a wedge on my tongue, letting the acid sting the place where I’d bit the inside of my cheek all week for no reason.

  He looked at me thoughtfully, turned the idea in his head, his lips wet with juice.

  “Like you don’t even know if you’re round or square or even if you’re ugly or not,” I continued. I wanted it to sound important, urgent—but had no idea if I believed it. “Like you can only see what you do to the earth, the colors and stuff, but not who you are.” I glanced at him.

  He picked at a hole in his grass-stained white Vans. His nail scraped at the leather in the sneaker, the hole widening.

  I hadn’t noticed, until then, the crickets chirping. The day dimmed around us.

  Trevor said, “I think it sucks to be the sun ’cause he’s on fire.” I heard what I thought was another cricket, a closer one. The throb, a thudded beating. But Trevor, still sitting, legs spread, had let his penis, soft and pink, hang out from the pant leg of his shorts, and was now pissing. The stream rattled on the slanted metal roof before falling off the side, dribbling onto the dirt below. “And I’m putting out the fire,” he said, his lips curled in concentration.

  I turned away, but kept seeing him, not Trevor, but the boy in Ohio, the one who will soon be found by the hour I had just passed through, unscathed. Together, with nothing to say, we spat, one by one, the grapefruit seeds stored in our cheeks. They fell on the tin roof in big fat drops and blued as the sun sank fully behind the trees.

  * * *

  —

  One day, after overtime at the clock factory, the boy’s mother came home to a house littered with hundreds of toy soldiers, their curled plastic lives spread like debris across the kitchen tiles. The boy usually knew to clean up before she came home. But this day he was lost in the story he made of their bodies. The men were in the midst of saving a six-inch Mickey Mouse trapped in a prison made of black VHS tapes.

  When the door opened, the boy leapt to his feet but it was too late. Before he could make out his mother’s face, the backhand blasted the side of his head, followed by another, then more. A rain of it. A storm of mother. The boy’s grandmother, hearing the screams, rushed in and, as if by instinct, knelt on all fours over the boy, making a small and feeble house with her frame. Inside it, the boy curled into his clothes and waited for his mother to calm. Through his grandmother’s trembling arms, he noticed the videocassettes had toppled over. Mickey Mouse was free.

  * * *

  —

  A few days after the shed roof, the grapefruit, I found myself sitting shotgun in Trevor’s truck. He fished the Black & Mild from the chest pocket of his T-shirt, laid it gently across his kneecaps. Then he grabbed the box cutter from his other pocket and cut a lengthwise slit along the cigarillo before emptying its contents out the window. “Open the glove,” he said. “Yeah. No, under the insurance. Yeah, right there.”

  I grabbed the two dime bags, one half-filled with weed, the other with coke, and handed them to him. He opened the bag, placed the weed, already broken, into the gutted cigarillo till it filled. He threw the bag out the window, then opened the second bag, tipped the white grains over the row of weed. “Like snow-capped mountains!” he said, grinning. In his excitement, he let the second bag fall through his legs, to the floorboard. He licked the Black & Mild’s hem, sealing the slit until it stuck into a tight joint, then blew on the hem, waved the joint in front of him to dry. He marveled at it between his fing
ers before placing it between his lips and lighting. We sat there, passing it back and forth until my head felt thin and skull-less.

  After what seemed like hours, we ended up in the barn, somehow lying on the dusty floor. It must have been late—or at least dark enough to make the barn’s interior feel immense, like the hull of a beached ship.

  “Don’t be weird,” Trevor said, sitting up. He grabbed the WWII army helmet off the floor and put it back on, the one he was wearing the day I met him. I keep seeing that helmet—but this can’t be right. This boy, impossibly American and alive in the image of a dead soldier. It’s too neat, so clean a symbol I must have made it up. And even now, in all the pictures I looked through, I can’t find him wearing it. Yet here it is, tilted to hide Trevor’s eyes, making him seem anonymous and easy to look at. I studied him like a new word. His reddish lips stuck out from the helmet’s visor. The Adam’s apple, oddly small, a blip in a line drawn by a tired artist. It was dark enough for my eyes to swallow all of him without ever seeing him clearly. Like eating with the lights off—it still nourished even if you didn’t know where your body ends.

  “Don’t be weird.”

  “I wasn’t looking at you,” I said, diverting my gaze. “I was just thinking.”

  “Look. The radio’s working again.” He played with the knob on the handheld radio in his lap and the static intensified, then a robust and urgent voice poured into the space between us: Fourth down-and-goal with twenty-seven seconds to go and the Patriots line up for the snap . . .

  “Nice! We’re back in this.” He struck his palm with his fist, teeth clenched: a greyish flash under the helmet.

  He was looking up, visualizing the game, the field, his blue-and-grey Patriots. My eyes dilated, I took him in deeper, the pale sweep of his jaw, his throat, the thin adolescent cords rising along its length. His shirt was off because it was summer. Because it didn’t matter. There were two fingers of dirt on his collarbone from earlier that afternoon, when we planted the baby apple tree in Buford’s backyard.