The Fall of Never(70)

—tighter, tighter—

Behind the sofa, Josh Cavey slipped out of the living room and disappeared in the darkness, leaving the two alone. Mendes, in all his concentration, did not notice this either.



Carlos Mendes is ten years old again and trudging along a bustling sidewalk. On his back is a backpack filled with comic books and root beer, while his arms hug a brown paper sack busting with groceries. It is hot. A faded Yankees cap keeps his dark hair matted to his head—at ten, he wears the hat even if it reaches two hundred degrees—and salty tears of sweat burst from his forehead and temples. The sweat rolls down his face, stinging his eyes and tickling his neck.

He arrives at a cross-street and stands behind a large wedge of people huddled against the curb, waiting for the traffic to clear. He cannot see the traffic, cannot see past the thick thighs and thicker hips of a woman in a floral-printed dress just a foot in front of him. Arms aching, he shifts the grocery bag and daydreams about the root beer hanging from his back. Root beer is his favorite—at least for this summer.

A gap in the traffic sends the wedge of pedestrians scooting across the street. Carlos Mendes scoots with them, nearly riding the coattails of the zaftig brunette in the flowery dress. To his left he hears a man shout something about goddamn son-of-a-bitch cracks in the street. Somewhere up ahead he can hear someone—a policeman?—bleating a whistle.

Two minutes later and he is seated at the back of the uptown bus, bumping along through the stop-and-go traffic. With the shoulder of his T-shirt he wipes sweat from around his mouth and sits watching the traffic through the side window. Beside him on the empty seat is the bag of groceries and his backpack. As if struck by sublime intentions, he yanks the pack nearer to him, unzips the pouch, and produces a bottle of root beer and a bottle opener—what his brother Michael calls a “popper-topper,” even though Michael was older. He pops the cap, lets it drop to the floor of the bus, and guzzles half the bottle in only two or three chugs. The root beer has gotten a bit warm in the heat but it is still good.

The bus stops and a handful of passengers boards. All but one of the newcomers claim some of the empty seats close to the front of the bus. The one remaining passenger moves jerkily toward the rear of the bus. He is old and looks lost, Carlos thinks, the way his grandfather sometimes looks. He wears a long coat and a hat like the detectives wear on the covers of the murder mystery novels he sometimes reads when his mother has gone to bed, and he walks with a disjointed, almost painful confusion. Though he is looking directly at Carlos—or at the seat beside him—he continues to shuffle around as if still searching for something or someone. At one point, it almost appears the old man will stand for the entire trip. Then, without asking permission, the old man approaches the bench seat beside Carlos, bends awkwardly at the knees, and pushes Carlos’s bag toward Carlos. The man drops himself onto the seat. Suddenly afraid that the stranger has crushed his mother’s groceries, Carlos reaches over and slides both the grocery bag and backpack all the way onto his lap.

The old man turns a white, blotched and grizzled face in young Carlos’s direction. He neither smiles nor scowls—just stares him up and down, as if considering whether or not it would be appropriate to eat him.

“Ain’t right takin’ up two seats,” the man says, his eyes still on Carlos.

Not saying a word, Carlos turns away from the stranger and looks back out the window. A few kids have unscrewed the cap on a fire hydrant and are trying to fill up plastic water guns beneath the blast.

He is suddenly aware of a ghastly stink, like burning cabbage, and he jerks his head back around to see that the stranger has slid closer to him on the seat and is leaning down as if to speak with him.

“Be it okay,” the stranger says. “Harm ain’t done, not here, no sir. See? We just sittin’ t’gether, me an’ you, you an’ me.”

Carlos feels a hot lump of spit at the back of his throat. And of course his mind suddenly replays the barrage of precautions his mother has drilled into him since he could walk and talk—precautions about strangers in strange places, about not talking to such people, not even making eye contact if he could help it.

He turns again and looks out the window.

He feels the old man press his shoulder against his own. And he is trapped, right here on the bus, caught between the window and some smelly old strange man. He suddenly doesn’t want the rest of his root beer. And when the bus comes to the next stop he silently prays that the strange man will get off. But he doesn’t.

If he doesn’t get off at the next stop, he thinks, then I will.

The stink of cabbage is nearly suffocating him. For some crazy reason, he thinks of the time Michael and Juan pinned him to the kitchen floor and proceeded to stuff Michael’s sweaty gym socks into his mouth. They managed to get both socks in there too, before his mother came in and they both scattered like mice.

“Petey,” says the stranger.

Carlos doesn’t answer.

“What’s your name, boy?”

Carlos still doesn’t answer.

“Not nice to ignore someone when they’s talkin’ to you.”

“Carlos,” he stutters finally, feeling his entire body break out in a wave of perspiration. Looming large in his head is the image of his mother’s face, her heart broken, wracked with disappointment, as if he has just driven a spear through her chest.