A Pile of Crosses by ELJ Publications

A Pile of Crosses Story Collection by

Steven Ostrowski

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

for Susan, Ramona, Benjamin and Dev

CONTENTS I Break My First Heart Strange Girl A Way to Keep You Here The Precise Instant of Dusk Gesture Wish You Were Somewhere Snake Eyes No Sign A Pile of Crosses Willard Walking. Colors.

3 5 6 16 18 21 22 24 25 38 43

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment to the editors of the publications in which these stories or variations of these stories first appeared: 100-Word Story, Citron Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Flash Fiction Funny, an Anthology, Literary Orphans, Muse & Stone, Prose-Poem Project, Raritan and Sleet.

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I Break My First Heart Sixteen

will end badly when the waterfall-haired girl with fullmoon eyes announces early in the summer that she can do without me. For weeks, every gull-screeching morning, I’ll orbit Silver Lake like a broken-off hunk of planet in the shape of a slouched kid. (I’ll only cry on the weedy far side where nobody else goes but horny lovers). Nights, I’ll join my friends, the sleeveless and clueless aimless, smoke dope like a fiend, swill pissy beer and piss it back into the lake and ache for her with the four chords I can sort of play on my brother’s warped guitar. I’ll turn seventeen in cotton-thick August, and that night a girl, a pretty wisp, fifteen, all sugar and lips, will want me-God knows why. And she’ll get what she wants, a sullen man-boy, a practicing mute, a bowlegged sadsack with hair like an overturned basket of snakes. Maybe it’s the blank fantasy screen of my eyes, or my proximity to being eighteen, or my mumbled, self-myth-making lies: hitchhiked all the way to the Grand Canyon when I was 15; ran away from home for two months when I was 9 and lived under a train trestle with a homeless guy named Thomas Masque who was wanted for manslaughter. She’ll be willing to believe it. So, yeah, yeah, I’ll take her. For showing up, for being so stupidly happy, so easy to amuse (easy as sweat when we’d tangle and grope in the humid weeds). She’ll say to me one afternoon as we lay in the high grass, “I’m, like, obsessed with you. I like you so much I wish I had 3

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two hearts to feel it all.” I’ll have never heard words like that. I won’t respond. I’ll stand up and push my hands into my pockets, sniff the air for rain. Rain’s coming. Sure enough will arrive the drizzly night late in August when I’ll tell her I’m not into her anymore. It must seem to her to come out of absolute nowhere (though it was there all along, if she’d only looked). She’ll stare at the blur of my eyes, turn, walk away. I’ll hear her weeping and concentrate on nothing. A few nights later, in our woozy camp of misfits, I’ll play a song I’ve learned by careless design called “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” (“no, no, no it ain’t me, babe”) though I’ll struggle with the cruel change from G, which is pretty easy and sounds like energy and faith, to B minor, which requires everything of my clumsy fingers, and which is a chord full of heartbreak, a chord I’m certain I’ll never master.

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Strange Girl I wait on one foot near the road. A fox with guilty eyes steals by on the other side. I think about you, you, you. I wait on the other foot, like a boy hopeless for surprises. Overhead, the stars are creeping into place. If you drive by now, I’ll dive into your car and be a better companion than any trombone you ever made wail at a swollen planet. I will, I will. If you drive by, slow enough just this once, I will get myself in this time, I swear, and we’ll go to Harlem via New Orleans spinning like a lipstick-painted bullet, like a dream on speed. This is no infatuation. I know you’re a strange girl. And I know you mean it.

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A Way to Keep You Here From the attic window Luke gazed through the gap between the Craig’s house and the Locastro’s to where, beyond the tan, waving fields, the Bayonne Bridge sat huge and greyer than the Jersey sky. He thought about what it must have been like to build that bridge. He’d seen a picture once in the Advance, in the section called “Staten Island of Yesteryear,” of before it was connected, when it was two roads that ended like two pairs of arms stretching out to reach each other but not able to. Luke wondered if any of the workers died when they built it, because just the other day he’d read in the Advance that a couple of guys who were building some new bridge in Queens fell into a hundred tons of wet concrete and “perished.” That’s what the paper said: “perished.” They were doing their job and the next minute they were gone. It meant that when the bridge was finished, whenever the families of those guys would go across, they’d have to think about them being cemented down there forever. His mother had given Luke the Saturday morning chore of cleaning up the attic, but mostly he just pushed things around: boxes of Christmas balls and lights tangled up in tinsel; an iron milk crate filled with smelly blankets; a heavy mirror that was so cloudy you could hardly see yourself in it; dresses and suits with dust caked on the shoulders; his father’s old bowling ball.

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After a while Luke came downstairs. His mother was standing on the front porch in her pajamas. It was cold, the middle of March, and it looked like rain, maybe even snow. “Done, Ma.” “Okay.” She was watching the number three bus spew black smoke as it came down the street. It stopped at the yellow line in front of the Whitehead’s house. She leaned out to see who got off. Nobody they knew. She said to Luke, “Richie up yet?” “I don’t think so.” “‘Course not.” Still looking at the street, she said, “You’re the only one I got, Luke. Only one who’s any good. Fifteen years old and he sleeps ‘till noon. What could he do that makes him so tired?” “Ma,” Luke said, “Joni didn’t come home again?” “No, the good-for-nothing. I’m going to lambast her this time. Believe me.” Luke could say to her, makes no difference to Joni what you say, but he would never say that. Richie would. Richie would say anything about Joni, even if it hurt their mother’s feelings. But Luke couldn’t say a lot of the things he knew about his sister. “Go straighten up the back yard, Luke. Get rid of all the junk in the junk pile. I’m sick of looking at that mess.” “But, ma, I’m supposed to play football over by the expressway at 12. We’re playing the eighth graders. I’m playing wide receiver.” 7

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“After you clean up that pile. Go. You got time yet.” The grass in the yard grew in clumps—nothing like the carpet of grass of a football field. There were big patches where it was all dirt. Tall, scratchy hedges separated their yard from the Drambowski’s and the O’Hanlon’s on the sides, and in the back De Petro had built a ten foot high wall out of concrete cinderblocks. He put it up last summer, right after he had a pool put in. The wall looked like one of those buildings on Richmond Terrace that they started to build but never finished. It was good for bouncing a ball off of, but it made you think of a prison. The junk was piled up in a back corner of the yard. Nobody’d done anything with it in years, except add new junk to it. It started after Luke’s father died. Planks, sheet metal, parts of go-carts and wagons, pipes, cracked baseball bats, rakes, shovels, rugs, milk crates, pieces that fell out of refrigerators and washing machines. Luke pulled a square of rusty sheet metal the size of a door off the top and dragged it through the yard and along the side of the house to the front. His plan was that he’d move the pile to the front for now and then after the game he’d dump it all down in the fields. He let go of the sheet and noticed a yellow and black Volkswagen Beetle—it looked more like a tired bee than a beetle—parked across the street. He could see Joni sitting in the passenger seat, and a guy at the wheel and another one in the back. He felt relieved to see his sister, because whenever she didn’t come home he couldn’t help thinking that maybe she was dead from an overdose or a murder or a rape. But almost right away his relief turned to nervousness. Everything about his sister made him nervous. All three of them in the car were talking at the same time. One of the guys, the driver, had long hair and a beard and one of those floppy 8

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leather hippy hats. The other one looked a lot older, like thirty, and he had long hair too, except there wasn’t any on top. The bearded guy’s head nodded in Luke’s direction and Joni turned. Luke pretended he was straightening out the wedge of sheet metal. He went back into the yard. To get rid of all this junk, Luke realized, would take a week. It was a stupid idea to let it collect all these years, but now it seemed a stupid idea to bother to get rid of it. He began to search for the next logical item to drag away when Joni and the bearded guy walked into the yard. “Hey, Luke. How’s it going’?” “Hi, J. Going okay.” She looked all right. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot and she didn’t slur her words. Actually, she looked pretty. Her long thick hair was all brushed out neat, not scraggly like she sometimes let it get. Really, she was always pretty. She just didn’t act like she was pretty, at least not in the way the pretty girls in Luke’s school acted, which was like they knew they were. Joni acted like she had no idea what she looked like. “This is Roger,” she said. She sort of bowed as she said it. Roger nodded. “What’s up, my man?” “Nothing.” “I know exactly what you mean,” Roger said, nodding. “Hey, Luke,” Joni said, “listen to me for a second, okay? Me and Roger and this other guy, Glen, we’re taking off for San Francisco. You believe it? Palm trees. Golden Gate Park. Free concerts right in 9

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the middle of the street. The Dead. The Airplane. We’re driving across the whole country. The thing is, we need a little more money, you know, for tolls and shit,” –she talked faster as she went on— “so I’m going down the basement and borrowing some of that emergency money ma keeps in the coal bin. Because in a way this is an emergency. But don’t worry, I won’t take it all. Just enough to get started. All I want you to do is don’t tell her until tomorrow, okay? ‘Cause if you tell her today, she’ll have the pigs after us for sure. By tomorrow we’ll be too far gone for anybody to find us. I’m going to send it all back, I swear, so it ain’t like I’m stealing it. If I was, I wouldn’t be telling you, right? Okay? So I’m going in to say hi to her and tell her I need something down in the basement...” “Hey, wait up, wait up,” Roger said. “Let’s let him go get the money. This way your ma don’t suspect nothing. You go in and say hi, start up a little conversation with her, you know, tell her you’re going out for a while. Tell her you’ll be home later. Meanwhile he heads down the basement and gets the bread.” “I ain’t stealing her money,” Luke said. mouth.

He looked at Joni’s

“No?” Roger said. “This is the last fuckin’ time you’re probably ever going to see your sister in your whole life and you ain’t willing’ to help her out? Nice brother.” Luke’s eyes lifted to Joni’s. “It ain’t going to be for a long time, Luke. California’s a long ways away. You never know what can happen, you know? So can you help me this one last time.” His head shook no, but he asked her, “How much you taking?” “Like fifty.” 10

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Joni could make her eyes go so big. They were light blue, almost not blue at all, almost clear, like the color was missing. “Wait in the car,” she told Roger. “How’s ma’s mood?” From the basement he could hear the screaming. “What the hell kind of life are you living, Victoria? Good God in heaven.” “None of your b.i. business, ma. Leave me alone, will you?” “Oh, I’ll leave you alone. You’re not leaving this house for a month, you hear me? For a month.” Luke climbed up into the coal bin. The bin walls were soot-black, and it was always damp in there. You could still smell coal even though they didn’t use it anymore since they got the oil burner. Luke opened the big metal box in the corner and there was his father, black and white, staring up at him. Smiling. Young, like an old-fashioned movie star. Luke stared at the picture for a while and then put it aside. The envelope lay on top of some other, bigger envelopes. In pencil, in his mother’s handwriting, it said EMERGANCY. There were seven ten-dollar bills. Luke counted them four times, slowly, feeling each bill, making sure no bills stuck together. The screaming upstairs had died away. He could hear the floor creak when someone walked across the room every few seconds. He put the money in his pocket and put the envelope back in the box, and the picture on top of the envelope. He closed the box. Joni was alone in the living room. “Where is she?” Luke said. 11

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“She’s...shh, here she comes.” Luke’s mother brought a cup of hot tea into the room and handed it to Joni. Joni took a sip. “You want some tea, Luke?” his mother said. She seemed a lot calmer, but it seemed like right underneath the calmness was something a lot more shaky. “Hey, listen ma,” Joni said, putting the tea cup down on the floor. “I got to go. I’ll be back in an hour. I promise after that I’ll stay home. Okay? Uh, Luke, could you come out to the car for a minute? My friend wanted to ask you something about sports.” “What are you talking about?” Luke’s mother said. Her eyes fastclicked from Joni to Luke to Joni again. “Where are you going? Victoria Mary, where in God’s name do you think you’re going now?” “I told you, ma. I’ll be right back. It’s Saturday afternoon. What do you want me to do, sit around here and play cards with you?” “What about helping Luke clear out that junk pile? What about homework?” “Don’t have any homework. Tomorrow I’ll help Luke, okay? Promise. Come on with me for a minute, Luke.” Luke followed Joni out the door and across the street. “Wait ‘till I get in the car and then hand it to me real quick,” Joni said out of the side of her mouth. “She’s probably watching. If she asks, just tell her you gave me a piece of gum.”

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It occurred to him that if Joni had no money, the guys probably wouldn’t even want her. Joni slid into the passenger seat and rolled down the window. “Okay. Hurry.” “There wasn’t anything in there,” Luke said. “Just that picture of daddy. She must’ve spent it already.” “What? What? Shit. You’re kidding me?” “I swear, Vic. There’s not a cent in there right now.” “I bet Richie stole it, the prick,” Joni said. “Are you sure? You looked all over?” “I checked all around. The envelope’s still there, but there’s no money in it. Go down and look for yourself if you don’t believe me.” “Now wait a minute here.” The older guy in the back seat leaned up. “You mean you ain’t got nothing to kick in?” Joni’s face grew blotchy red. “I thought she had some…” “All right,” the guy said from the back. “We’ll damn sure figure out a way you’ll earn your keep. Let’s get the hell out of here.” “Hey, wait. Vic,” Luke said. “Why don’t you stick around here? I got the new Stones album. You can have it if you want.” Joni made a face. The guy named Roger said, “So how the hell do we get off this goddamn island?” 13