Hold It 'Til It Hurts Read online

  After his mother dropped a glass in the sink and stomped out of the kitchen and his father scampered after her, Troy spoke for the first time, in a hushed voice as if to avoid being overheard by the adults in the next room, barely moving his lips, squeezing the words out of one side of his mouth, so that if you stood on his other side, you wouldn’t even know he was asking, “How long they going to let us stay here?”

  Achilles shrugged. He was tired and overfull. “Not long, I hope,” he said, not yet understanding that months would pass before Troy would accept that they weren’t in a foster home. At that moment, confused, exhausted, queasy, Achilles wanted only sleep. He slipped down from the chair and made his way to his bedroom, where he climbed into bed, careful not to bounce or burp for fear he would barf. Behind him, he heard Troy’s yessirs and yes ma’ams. What a suck-up.

  A while later—or was it? He couldn’t tell anymore—his mom woke him again. “Hey honey, Troy is having waffles,” she explained as she led him to the kitchen.

  Whether Troy had been out of the booster seat since Achilles last saw him, he couldn’t tell. Troy sat before a plate of waffles, picking at them like a beaten boxer who refused to quit. Eyes fluttering, his chin would slump down to his chest and jerk aright whenever his fork clattered off the table. Achilles’s father would pick it up, wash it with soap and water, and press it gently back into Troy’s hand, like a gift. Achilles pushed the food around on his Justice League plate, sometimes revealing Aquaman, sometimes Batman, but never the Wonder Twins.

  “You tired, Troy?” asked Achilles’s father.

  Troy snapped awake. “No, I’m fine.” He stuck a piece of bacon in his mouth and slowly chewed.

  His father looked happy and chipper, his mother serious. It was like they had exchanged bodies in the last hour. His father exclaimed, “Six and eats like a horse. He’s a real Conroy. Let’s have cake!”

  Excited that the cake was to be again unveiled, Achilles said nothing about thinking that horses ate hay.

  His mother flung open the refrigerator door with such force it banged against the counter and the glass jars rattled on their shelves. She slapped the cake on the table.

  “Ann, please,” his father whispered.

  “Yes sirree! A knife.” She yanked open the cutlery drawer, and after a moment’s searching upended the drawer into the sink, picked out a knife, and tossed it on the table.

  His father, red-faced, stormed out of the kitchen. His mother followed a moment later, saying over her shoulder, “Have all the cake you want Achilles, sweetie. All the cake you want.”

  Achilles opened the cake box. He’d snuck a peak earlier, but hadn’t seen the whole thing. His name was spelled out in red letters with Happy Birthday in gold. Orange and blue frosting balloons clustered in the corners and a comet trailed by yellow stars underscored his name. The brightly colored decorations stood out against the white frosting. He hoped it was angel food, the best flavor ever! Troy grabbed the knife, wrapping his fingers around the tapered end of the blade, and waved it about like a conductor. Achilles, feeling heroic, leapt up and snatched it from Troy. The blade glistened. Rivulets of blood welled between Troy’s fingers and dripped onto the cake. Troy squeezed both of his hands into tighter fists, but still the blood ran, like he was growing Wolverine claws. His parents rushed in when Troy wailed. Their eyes traveled from Troy’s hand, by then bleeding so much that the corner of cake nearest him looked like red velvet, to the knife in Achilles’s hand. He saw the shock on their faces, the misunderstanding, but he couldn’t move.

  “It’s okay Keelies,” said his mother, inching around the table to Troy, going the long way and sidestepping the entire time, as if afraid to turn her back to Achilles. His father raised two hands in surrender, and calmly said, “Put the knife down, son.”

  The short wooden riveted handle and long steel blade felt so dense, so heavy, his entire arm and the knife one leaden elbow pipe, a rigid burden affixed by a cruel fate.

  “It’s okay son. We can talk about it. Put it down.”

  The knife bounced off the table and onto the floor, clattering and streaking blood. His father kicked the knife away, backhanded Achilles. A thud. The first blow surprised him. His father had never struck him before, so he sat stock-still until the next blow knocked him to the floor. The base of his skull and jaw rattled, and he instinctively ran his tongue across his teeth to see if they were all there. Tucking his chin tightly into his chest, he tried to cover his ribs with his elbows, but the blows came from everywhere. Covering his head, he was kicked in the side, and covering his sides left his face exposed to his father’s kicks, precise and snappy, cracking like a whip. One foot found his temple, another his stomach, and his breath rushed out in a whistle. Heaving, he scurried under the table and curled up to fight the contractions in his stomach.

  Like playing Rock’em Sock’em Robots, he flinches when struck, but he no longer feels it. His father’s waffle-soled brogans stomp back and forth, probing under the table, and behind them, his mother’s red espadrilles squeak as she shuffles to and fro, like she’s dancing, until suddenly they take flight, her legs dangling like willows until she wraps them around his father’s waist. Achilles hugs the pole supporting the table. The metal is cold on Achilles’s face, but he stays there, keeping his head away from the floor because he knows it’s dirty. His father pounds the table, the vibrations traveling down the pole and rattling Achilles’s head. Soon the metal is no longer cold against his face. He can’t see his mother’s shoes. His father must have taken off his belt because the buckle catches Achilles on the funny bone and he vomits, like a sissy. Someone yells, “Daddy, please. Daddy, please stop!”

  His father’s heavy breathing. His mother on her feet, her voice a knife. “You will leave now.” His father’s last kick, halfhearted. A brogan floats by Achilles’s head like a blind, angry animal. His father’s pronouncement: “I’ll not have that kind of violence in my house. I didn’t adopt a boy so he could attack my son, his brother, with a knife. Be a man, Achilles. Things change. Accept it. Be a man.” The front door creaks open and slams shut. Two steps down the porch, slipping on the gravel. The opposite of the scrape and two stomps that cast the day off when he comes home each evening.

  His mother, eyes swollen and bloodshot, sat Indian-style on the floor, something she always forbade Achilles to do because the floor had little germs with big teeth. She held her arms open to him, a gesture of forgiveness that made him cry, and cry he did, knowing, unable to explain, but knowing, that she took his sobs as an admission of guilt.

  “I didn’t mean it,” he sniffed.

  “I know.” She remained motionless, arms extended, until Achilles released the pole and crawled to her. She hugged him and helped him to his feet, sitting him on her lap. Troy sat in the corner, his hand wrapped in a towel, tears fanning down his face. Had Achilles heard Troy yell Daddy?

  Achilles pointed to the small puddle on the floor and his shirt and started weeping again in earnest. He could smell himself. “I made a mess.”

  “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

  His arm swathed in one of the white towels Achilles was forbidden to use lest he get them dirty, Troy held his hand like he was in class waiting to be called on. Seeing him fixate on the towel, his mom wiped Achilles’s face with her own shirt. “You can put your hand down now, Troy.”

  His mother hobbled from the table to the sink. She slipped out of her squeaky red shoes and kicked them, sending them tumbling loudly across the linoleum and onto the carpeted living room floor. Then, thinking better of it, she retrieved them and tossed them in the trashcan. Every so often, between wiping the table and floor, she’d run her hand down the side of Achilles’s face and tell him it was going to be all right or pull him in for a hug. She eventually led both boys to her bedroom to sleep curled beside her. But Achilles couldn’t rest and slipped from beneath his mother’s arm and out of the bed. He tiptoed to the door, looking back just before he left and catching Troy awak
e. Troy quickly shut his eyes and snuggled closer to Achilles’s mom. When certain that Troy would continue pretending to sleep, Achilles left.

  A third of it broken off, the edges crumbled, the frosting balloons flattened, his name smeared, the cake was in shambles. He pushed the third that was broken off against the rest, wet his finger, and ran it along the fissure where the frosting met. He tried replacing the balloons. All stayed, save one. He tried to reshape the crumbled end, but it kept tumbling back down. Thirteen years later, he will stand before the minaret that remained as the last monument to a bombed-out mosque, remember this moment, and realize that he had always been puzzled that it was so easy to destroy things and so hard to fix them, that even the biggest building could crumble like cake. He will temporarily feel less anxious about the war, about the future, believing that to have plumbed his younger self meant all mysteries would eventually unfold. Neverending darkness was how he’d later describe the feeling he had on his eighth birthday. It was the way he felt watching the night sky from inside a bombed-out building, thinking about how peaceful it would be if the sun never rose.

  In his room, Achilles propped two pillows against the wall and spread a blanket across the top. Sleeping in his pillow fort, he felt certain he wouldn’t be disturbed anymore that night.

  The next morning, his father placed Achilles and Troy side by side on the corduroy couch, their legs dangling, and sat on the ottoman facing them. “Things are going to be better for both of you.” Troy nodded. Achilles mumbled, “Okay.”

  His father leaned forward so his hair fell across his eyes, curled his bottom lip up, and blew, making his white forelocks tickle the air like smoke. “What’s happening?” he asked anxiously. “What’s happening?”

  It had been dark the first time his father did that trick, and Achilles had thought he was on fire. Achilles was supposed to say, You’re burning up, Daddy. First he had to share his cake with Troy, now this. He looked down at his feet. Troy was wearing his red Superman socks.

  His father tried again, curling his lips and blowing, but this time he poked Achilles in the ribs, and Achilles couldn’t help laughing, even though it hurt a little to do so because his sides were still sore, and when his father chucked his chin and hugged him, his memories of the night before faded, the way landmarks dwindled in the rearview mirror, sometimes receding so swiftly he flinched and wondered if they had ever really been there at all.

  “Things are going to be better than they’ve ever been before,” said his father. “Troy, you have the home you deserve. Achilles, you finally have the brother you need.”

  They nodded obediently. His mother cruised by, her purposeful gait becoming a limp when she thought herself out of sight. She wore the same look as the night before, a mix of guilt and embarrassment.

  His mother said they never had to be alone. His father said brothers had to stick together. Troy wanted to join the Cub Scouts, Achilles joined the Boy Scouts. Troy wanted to play T-ball, Achilles played Little League. Troy wanted to take judo, his mom made Achilles go too (though Achilles eventually switched to karate because it provided more opportunities to kick people). They didn’t stick together; they were stuck. The ice cream and waffles had only been the beginning. That night, his parents did switch bodies, his father chipper, his mother suddenly somber. If their father went anywhere with Troy, even for a quick smoke and fire run—to fill up the tank and buy cigarettes—Achilles’s mom made them wait for Achilles. By the time they were in high school, Achilles was a wind-up doll. Troy wanted to learn guitar. Achilles signed up without being asked. Troy wanted to run cross-country. Achilles went shopping for new shoes. Troy wanted to join the military, go Airborne, jump out of perfectly good airplanes. Next thing Achilles knew, he was dodging bullets and shitting sand and there was Troy, always smiling, always with the sun and the wind to his back. Troy, the one everyone thought older and wiser because he was taller. Troy, always raising Cain. Troy, not, as promised, always warm and friendly, but damned near tireless.

  PART 2

  LATE FALL 2004

  CHAPTER 8

  “BRING A FRIEND TO THE SCREENING,” SAID INES. “YOU’LL SEE MY NEW Orleans.” Did she think he needed medical attention? She said she wanted to thank him for his help over the past couple of weeks, but upon hearing screening, Achilles thought triglycerides, blood pressure cuffs, lipid tests. He imagined helping Mabel and Dudley—Ines’s two longtime volunteers—escort the old and infirm to a mobile medical clinic and knew Wages wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon doing that. Good thing Achilles agreed, because a couple days later he and Ines were on the St. Charles streetcar entering an area of town previously known to him by name only—Uptown.

  With the wooden seats, manually operated curtain, wheeled popcorn machine, marble floor, and gilded marquee, it was like no theater he’d seen before. The feature starred an Icelandic band singing in a make-believe language, and included interviews with several eccentrically attired, dour musicians with thick accents. The film ended with one of their music videos. In it, a boy dressed like a soldier and carrying a drum marched across somber tidal flats, traversed black shale dunes, scaled ragged gorges, and hiked through tawny fields of waist-high grasses, picking up other kids along the way until a troop of them followed him, clinging to his heels like ticks, the whole gaggle in costumes. Some wore bear masks, some rabbit ears. Trailing the group was a little boy in a nutcracker outfit like the one Troy wore every Christmas, between the ages of six and nine. He surrendered it only after the pants ripped in half, but he cried about it and wore the hat for two more years. At the end of the video, the drummer boy led a charge up a steep, grassy hill that gradually tapered into a narrow spur. The audience could see that the promontory ended at a bluff hundreds of feet above the sea. The kids could not.

  Knowing it was silly to worry about a video, Achilles nevertheless found himself looking away, and noticed the other audience members were rapt. He wanted to yell, to ask if they thought this brave. Ines, who had been wringing her fingers, started clapping. The drummer boy had gone over the edge. The other kids followed, flinging themselves from the cliff and flying into space, blue and wide. They took air for water, fanning legs and arms like swimmers, banking to the beckoning clouds, the winds teasing their hair, at ease in the palm of the sky. The boy in the nutcracker suit hesitated at the edge. Finally he stepped off the cliff into the ether. The camera cut back to the flying drummer boy, and the video ended without revealing what happened to the child in the nutcracker suit. Achilles tried to recall the final, swift image. Had he kicked at the air? Looked down? Floundered? Frustrated, Achilles didn’t applaud when the lights came on.

  Achilles’s motto was Look both ways before crossing a one-way street. While waiting at a crosswalk, stand on the side of the light pole opposite the flow of traffic. Avoid crowded elevators. Back into parking spaces. At traffic stops, maintain a distance of half a vehicle from the car ahead. Drive with one hand on the seatbelt button. Never wear open-toed shoes, in case you need to run or fight. Always wear a belt because it quadruples as a tourniquet or maul or lariat or garrote.

  The list exhausted and frightened him. This fear was heightened by the presence of Ines and her smile, and her tall, good-looking friend who stood beside them in the theater lobby, and all the fine-looking, smiling people crowded around them, blissfully unaware of what price the rest of the world paid for their conveniences. Sharp creases, wind-resistant hair, perfect makeup, gold bangles. Hushed tones, subdued nods, polite laughter. They all looked so happy. The polished wood floors, the colossal chandelier suspended from gilded chains, the etched box-office glass. Even the building looked happy, as if the ticket was worth more than the price of admission.

  Running through his list, Achilles doubted he would ever be happy because he couldn’t stop holding his breath. Even that was cynicism. He couldn’t stop thinking about what he was thinking about without being cynical about it. The army taught him to hope for the best but expect the worst. Yet
how he yearned to join those kids.

  Looking at him, Ines’s smile flattened, then rebounded, her own eyes starting to glisten. She placed one hand on each side of his face and gently drew her thumbs under his eyes. The overhead lamps reflected in the wells of tears along her bottom lids, making her eyes bright and lively bowls of light, framed by thick eyelashes long as pine needles, brown at the base and blonde at the tip. He’d thought them light brown, but they were amber irises, brass in the center and honey around the edges, speckled with pearl and peach and his reflection, really just the outline of his face, set in shadow by the chandelier glowing behind his head like he was on fire.

  After the screening, they went to lunch with Ines’s tall friend Margaret, who reminded Achilles of someone he knew long ago. She sighed frequently as if awaiting a train long overdue, and had a tiny, upturned nose much too small for her long face. Her skin was deep brown, and her large teeth perfect. She stood very straight, back and neck in one long, unyielding line. Ines and Margaret met with a gasp and an “Ooh girl” in the theater lobby, supposedly surprised by their good fortune. Achilles thought it extremely unfair that he would have to take the friend test before they’d even had sex.

  They ate at Minette’s, a small restaurant in the French Quarter. Along one side of the dining room ran a bar behind which men in black rubber aprons told jokes while serving beer and oysters, shucked just that minute, to the patrons lucky enough to sit there. Ines chose a table next to the window. While they waited to order, Margaret mentioned how much she liked the movie, as well as the videos that played before and after it.