Whitechurch Read online

He gathers it in, does his one well-rehearsed

  move,

  a quick three steps

  and two dribbles east-west across the lane, and up goes his hook shot.

  Doesn’t hit the net,

  the rim,

  the backboard.

  If it were possible to miss the ground,

  that shot would have.

  Pauly looks at me and I look at him and I smile my good-bye.

  I don’t see why people have to leave, he says.

  We don’t need that, you and me.

  It’s like the whole world

  happens to us right here, doesn’t it?

  I catch the hard throw and I throw the hard

  throw

  and he throws again harder still.

  I ratchet up.

  He ratchets up and up again.

  I don’t want to throw the ball this hard

  anymore.

  It is stinging my hands,

  and the last one very nearly broke

  through my grip and bashed me

  in the face.

  But I keep on, pushing up the speed.

  I don’t know, Paul. Maybe it’s not such a bad

  thing,

  even if it means friends,

  and well, friends,

  gotta split.

  What is a friend for, after

  all?

  Is it to make the bad parts of life

  feel a little better

  by smoothing them over?

  Or is it to help a person through

  the truth

  as painlessly as possible

  while still

  allowing it to be

  the truth?

  I want my friend to feel better,

  not worse.

  So why do I throw the ball as hard as I possibly

  can?

  He laughs as he catches it, and

  whips it back, harder.

  I rear back, more like a pitcher than a

  basketball player.

  As soon as it leaves my hand I know

  this is it, this is the one, this is the break-through ball that he cannot catch, and it is deadly

  face-high

  and I don’t know why I did it

  and I want to pull it back.

  I can even feel my body language,

  the way you do that when you throw something

  but you still need to control it as it flies.

  I’m pulling it,

  then steering it,

  past his head one way,

  then the other then over

  his head, but it will not listen

  and I am sick.

  As Pauly drops his hands to his sides.

  Not even attempting

  to catch it.

  Ducking it instead, at the last instant.

  Ping, ping, and ping over again

  as the ball bounces off away

  beyond Pauly.

  I must have my face all screwed up, because he

  is there,

  squatting on his haunches, laughing.

  He stands, runs down the ball, and returns. He smiles.

  Checks his watch.

  Gotta go, kid.

  Got a date.

  He acts like this is not important.

  I can’t allow it.

  I’m happy for you, Paul, I say calmly. Happy for me?

  How ’bout, for a change

  you be happy for you?

  He smiles more intensely,

  like to show me the way,

  of happy.

  Happy you be,

  light you see,

  when finally

  Oakley makes three.

  Pauly likes rhyme. Good for Pauly.

  No, thank you, I say more calmly,

  but not a lot more calmly.

  You want Lilly, he says. Bounces the ball once.

  No, I want the ball. Give me the ball.

  You want me, he says happily. Bounces the ball

  once.

  I want the ball.

  And Oakley makes three.

  No. I just

  want

  the ball. Paul.

  Give

  me

  the ball

  Paul.

  It’s my shot.

  Just Talkin’

  I’M NOT MY BROTHER’S keeper, I have to keep reminding myself. I’m barely my own. “I am so psyched,” Pauly says.

  “Cool,” I say.

  “Psyched,” he repeats. He keeps chattering his teeth together on purpose, making a castanet sound. But he repeatedly nods, nods at me, trying to force the same kind of enthusiasm out of both of us. As he speaks, as we ride in the open air in the bed of his truck, while Lilly drives alone in the cab, Pauly is holding my hand, and I am holding his.

  I do my part. “Psyched.”

  There is a pause. There is reality. I can read by the ripples spanning his forehead that my “psyched” sounded as unconvincing to him as it did to me.

  “I hope I don’t blow it, Oakley. I hope I don’t muck this up altogether. I can do that—as you well know. I can make a royal shit-hole mess out of things if I really try.”

  I hate to hear him talking like this. I mean, it is true enough. But I wonder if it might be less true if he wasn’t all the time suspicious of feeling good. “Stop it, Pauly. You’re not gonna blow—”

  “You know me, Oak.”

  And I hate it when he shifts it onto me. “No I don’t.”

  “Come on, don’t say that. You know me. You’re the one, the smart one, the clever one. The inside one. You gotta know me. Nobody else knows me. So if then you don’t know me it’s like, I don’t exist. Don’t scare me, Oak.”

  “I know you, Pauly. And I won’t scare you.”

  “Excellent. So tell me then why I do what I do so I can stop doing it.”

  “What did you do now, Paul?”

  He just shakes his head, squeezes my hand. He is awfully awfully strong, my Paul. “Just tell me the why bit, Oak, huh?”

  “I don’t know why, Pauly. That’s like a pyramids-of-Egypt question. Nobody knows where your thoughts come from, we all just stand back and go wow.”

  He likes that for a minute. Then he goes all quiet again. You know how, in roulette, you just keep waiting, and waiting for the wheel to come to a stop but it seems to just keep ticking off new numbers interminably … that’s what it can be like, on certain days, waiting for the defining Pauly moment.

  “This is the one, Oak. Today’s the day. This is it, you know.”

  “Is it?”

  “It is.”

  Lilly opens the small sliding window behind her head. “Do I know where I’m driving, or am just, driving?”

  Pauly doesn’t seem to have heard. He’s staring at the flying-by pine trees so intently, it’s as if le’s trying to count them all.

  “Just driving, I guess, Lil,” I say. “But it doesn’t matter, because this is it. Today is the day. It.”

  “Is it?” she asks brightly. “Is it it again today? Funny, the radio didn’t say anything about it this morning.”

  Pauly’s back in the conversation, and mad, which is fair. Then, he’s laughing, which is awfully good of him. “All right you guys, go on and zoo me. You’ll be crying though, when I hit one of these times. Maybe when you try and come see me after I’ve made it, I won’t even have security open the gate to let you in.”

  We all know what we’re doing, we just don’t know, except for Pauly, where. He got a painting gig for the two of us, through his uncle who is as of this month in the house restoration business. Next month he’ll be in the wholesale fish and sweat socks business, and probably so will we. Pauly is a huge student of Uncle Dizzy’s wheeler-dealerism. Every time we get near the guy, fame and fortune are close at hand.

  And Lilly is driving us for the simple but not so simple reason that Pauly likes to ask things of her. And Lilly likes to tell him yes.

  “Come up here in the cab wit
h me, you guys. I’m getting lonely.”

  “Too crowded,” Pauly says.

  “You could fit six of us up here, and a six-point buck.” She has to yell to be heard, as she faces the road ahead and talks to the boys behind her.

  “I am getting kind of cold, Paul,” I say.

  “You can go,” he answers. “I don’t mind. I like the wind on me, though, so I’m gonna stay for now. I don’t feel cold, Oak. Really, cold doesn’t bother me.”

  Pauly has never ever been sick in all the time I’ve known him, and I’ve known him as long as I’ve known me. I, on the other hand, catch every damn thing. He says I get sick for both of us. So he stays in the bed and I stay in the bed with him, and Lilly is a sport about doing the Dodge Ram chauffeur thing. And though he has given her no further instructions, she knows when she finds the house.

  “Holy hell,” Lilly blurts.

  How to describe it? Ramshackle, for a start. Slanted, for another. Porches sloping off the place. Scalloped and gabled, waterlogged clapboard which was last painted back when that shade of … red, I think … was one of the four colors available down at the general store. On the two sides of the house that you can see from the long driveway approach, I count twenty-two windows. There are maybe three that are the same, standard size, with the rest being a collection of elongations, octagons, oval portholes, and stained-glass peekaboos.

  There is a crew of five already setting up, dragging out drop cloths to protect the wild mad foliage close to the house, pulling ladders and tool buckets off the oversize pickup belonging to Diz. Lilly has stopped the truck a dozen yards short of the driveway’s end, and is staring.

  “If the ladders don’t tip the place right over, it’ll take you three months to paint this house.”

  Pauly laughs. Not angry or mocking, but excited. Myself, I’m already hoping the ladders do tip the joint over. He turns to Lilly hopefully. “Don’t you think it’s really something though, Lil? I couldn’t wait for you to see it.”

  “Now I have. Pauly, come home,” Lilly says sadly, as if the condition of the house somehow reflects badly on him. “You don’t need this.”

  Paul hops over the side of the truck like a cowboy entering the corral. Lilly looks through the window at me. We exchange facial shrugs. Why should it be that one guy’s daffy enthusiasm should be able to overwhelm another guy’s solid common sense? I don’t know either, but it keeps happening. Maybe it’s the slugger theory, that even though he’s struck out twenty times in a row he still keeps swinging so hard he’s got to hit one a country mile. He’s got to, right? I hop over the side of the truck after him.

  Paul goes up to the driver’s window. From behind I can read his whole body, stretching, lengthening, striving, as he reaches himself in that window to kiss Lil. I’m staring, I know I’m staring, at the back of his head. Staring, so badly, I know, I know.

  A guy can love Lilly just by watching her love someone else.

  “See ya, Oak,” she says, as Paul pulls away from her and hurls himself toward the task at hand. “See ya then,” she repeats when, apparently, I haven’t received it all. And she points, at the back of our boy.

  Despite my slowness, I do understand. We understand. You can’t take an eye off him at a construction site, or near a cliff or a raging river. Or at a falling-down house where nobody’s living and he has access to ladders and tools and stuff.

  So sure, I understand. It’s my shift.

  “Pauly-o,” Uncle Diz yelps as we approach.

  “Dizzy!” Paul hollers back.

  This much is true right out of the chute: The rest of the crew doesn’t care for Pauly one bit. It takes a while to get to appreciate Pauly under the best of circumstances, and nobody here appears to have the time for it. For his part, Pauly appears not to notice.

  “Yo boys,” he says to the lot of them.

  The lot of them fail to respond. They go on hoisting ladders, dropping drop cloths, dumping tool buckets.

  We are late, too. We need to catch up. “What do you want us doing, Dizzy?” I ask.

  “I want you to come and get coffee and donuts with me.”

  “Maybe we should paint a little something first,” Pauly says. “I wanna work, Unc. I wanna show you what I can do, and work my way up through the ranks, so I can take over your job. But I figure it all starts right here, with the paint and the ladders and stuff.”

  Dizzy makes a show of looking at himself. He is wearing designer jeans. Creased. And a black cashmere sweater. “Why would you want to start there? Cheese, I know what you can do, kid. Come on with me.”

  Pauly looks at me and shrugs. He is full of mad energy and a desire to throw himself at the job, but he’s positively dying to get under his uncle’s wing. I nod, telling him it’s all right, and this sets him free. The two of them turn toward Dizzy’s Lincoln Town Car without saying anything else directly to me.

  The doors slam on the big boat Lincoln, and the wheels seem to start spinning the instant the engine cranks. They’re kicking up gravel and dust as Dizzy fishtails left then right toward Dunkin’ Donuts. I can hear the engine whine away in the distance as I stand there staring at the still-settling flume of driveway dirt.

  I don’t know a single person on the crew. I don’t know a thing about paint, or scrapers or ladders or drop cloths. I turn away from the vision of the rest of the world and focus on the proposed job at hand. I stare up and down. Attempt eye contact with each worker who crosses my line of vision, staring harder, looking dumber, craning my neck more with each very obvious snubbing of me. Nope, I won’t be making a bunch of new friends today.

  I can stare up at the house, though. Magnificent mess that it is. Sagging sloping Victorian whatsit with a madly steep-pitched roof, porches curling around everyplace, gables popping up all over like gophers from the ground. Silver maples on three sides hang close enough and touch the house in enough places that it looks like they’re doing the job of holding the joint up, rather than actually helping to bring it down.

  I am aware of staring. Not particularly concerned, but aware. I must appear to be either a potential buyer in the first browsy stages of shopping or one of those end-of-the-rope fog-eyed lunatics come back to chat up the old childhood homestead.

  The whine of the car, reverse order. Getting stronger, cornering into the driveway, kicking up more rocks as the blacktop turns to dirt. All heads turn now, mine included.

  The Lincoln stops about ten feet before me.

  Pauly emerges, walks purposefully toward me. He takes me by the hand. Second time today, he’s taking me by the hand.

  “Right,” I say quietly as he pulls me into the car. “You’re gonna close me outside the mansion gate when you get rich, but you can’t even make one trip to the coffee shop without me.”

  I am expecting a snappy retort. Instead he treats it like a real conversation.

  “I was never really gonna lock you out.” He gives the hand a squeeze.

  Dunkin’ Donuts. Dunkies, to players like us. Pauly and Dizzy are yakking up a storm, scheming, planning, concocting get-rich-quick schemes. Get richer quick I suppose it is for Dizzy. Get anything for Pauly.

  I can’t get in there with them. I like money fine, at least I like it a lot better than having none. It’s the scheming, the planning and the concocting part that I just don’t seem to be able to warm up to. That’s one of the million and five ways Pauly and me are opposite. I honestly don’t think Pauly cares at all whether he ends up with a dime when it’s over or not, but the plotting and trickster stuff? He could live there and be happy, or something like happy anyhow. We could make a perfect team, with him conniving his way to wealth, then giving it all to me.

  And the thing is, I think he would.

  Dizzy, though, apparently likes both ends of that particular stick, the having of money and the grubby acquiring of it.

  “You with me, Pauly?” Diz keeps saying. “You with me on this?”

  Pauly is with him. Nodding madly. Speechless with grubby d
esire.

  Diz reaches across the table and shoves a twenty into my hand. “Do us a favor, kid, get ten large coffees, black. And a dozen donuts, mix ’em up.”

  I stare at the twenty. Okay then, so I’m not invited.

  They really are a good work crew, I must say. Seems like half the house has been completely scraped down by the time we return. The dusty barn-red paint that was once clinging desperately to spongy clapboards is now coating the ground all around the house like a carpet, like a snow flurry in hell. The natural color of the wood siding, streaked with the red, looks almost better than a full coat of paint would. But there is a lot of rot.

  “Gonna take a lot of work, replacing so many clapboards,” I say to nobody in particular as I hand out the coffees.

  Various disgusted splutters of laughter come back to me from the crew.

  “Where’d you get this rube, Pauly?” Dizzy asks, and claps me fondly on the back. “I buy ’em to sell ’em, kid. I’m not interested in making the thing livable, just sellable. I don’t worry what’s under the paint.”

  I look to Pauly, who’s got that look on his face like he’s busy taking mental notes. The wrong notes, I fear.

  We haven’t done much more than look the place over, shift tools and ladders from one spot to another, and listen to Dizzy wisdom by the time the boss declares lunch break. It is obvious now we are here mainly to be his audience. Again he wants us to go with him, but this time we’re staying.

  Pauly follows his uncle to the car. “I really want to show you, Dizzy, what I got. So what I figure is I’ll be your foreman while you’re away,” Pauly says. “Making sure everything’s proceeding—being like, you, in your absence. So why don’t you gimme the phone, the keys to the house … and these shades.” He reaches out and takes the sunglasses, which are hanging on a chain around Dizzy’s neck. Dizzy gives it all up good-naturedly.

  “Okay,” he says, “go on and show me then.”

  As Dizzy roars away in the car, the crew silently goes back to business. It is like Pauly and I are not even there. We head for the front door. Pauly puts on the glasses and starts dialing the phone with his thumb, like a pro. He’s got his other arm slung like an anaconda across my shoulders.

  He refuses to remove his arm from me as he unlocks the door. So I kind of lurch forward and down, as his key hand pulls close to the cracking oak door. Forehead to the big beveled window that takes up a third of the door, I see me right up close.