by Nan Byrne
I was ten years old when my mother died. She had a funny kind of disease, a lip cancer that grew out of control and couldn’t be treated. She had suffered and I had forgotten about this, as time went on. Cancer and pain are two big things that no one wants to remember, but then I did remember much later and the memory took up all of my thoughts. Sometimes I thought about cancer when I was crossing the street, or brushing my teeth. Other times it just repeated on me at odd times like bad food and I would find myself singing a sad little song out of the blue. Generally bad memories do their do their best to stay hidden, because really what good are they on an average day? How can they help you move along? But something happened that made me remember and it was a Brooklyn boy who set it in motion.
This boy was from Flatbush and he took a car that didn’t belong to him, and he was arrested and got out in a few days. Then he took another car that didn’t belong to him, this one was a Volvo, but it wasn’t much fun. So, he decided not to steal cars any more, but he still wanted to have fun. This night he went to an insurance office where he had seen a light in the window and a young girl working late. He knocked on the door and stood in the shadows.
“Gary?” I asked the shadow that was a fifteen-year-old boy. “Chewie is that you?” I said as I opened the door.
This one, not the two friends I had expected, knocked me down and in a minute dragged me inside. He was a smart kid, not so smart that he locked the door, but crafty with a street knowledge and a good sense of how to have fun.
Inside, this boy pushed up my blouse, and put a hand on my breast.
“Please don’t hurt me.” I said.
“There is no way this isn’t going to hurt,” the boy said to himself, and he laughed as he put a knife to my throat.
I think God makes bad things happen for a reason, but sometimes those reasons are hard to understand. I had been told this by someone when I was a child.
My best friend, Chewie and I tested this theory when we were kids, about a week after my mother died. We rode the train to Jamaica station and stood on the platform.
“There’s one,” said Chewie.
She was pointing to a stranger who tripped on the stairs. He was wearing an overcoat, not a regular commuter, but a man with a square head, round shoulders, and afflictions. Someone who knew about reasons.
“”Hey kid, are you pointing at me?” The man asked.
“Yes,” Chewie said.
“Do you always point at people like that?”
“Only when I’m trying to figure something out.”
“You can’t figure out much by pointing.”
“There are all kinds of ways.”
“What are you trying to figure out?”
“About bad things. Why they happen to good people.”
“Well, why do you think?
“I don’t know,” Chewie said to the stranger, “it has something to do with a God’s plan, am I right?”
“Do you think that’s true?” The stranger said to me.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “My mother just died, and I don’t have any answers.”
“Hey kid, I’m sorry. I thought this was all hypothetical, but I’d be glad to tell you, if you want to know,” the man said. Then he tilted his head and squinted like there was a bright light in his eyes, and continued. “Why bad things happen, I mean.”
“Okay-dokey,” I said to the guy because I was a kid.
“Take a good look at me, ” the man said staring at his hands like he’d never seen them before, “I’m the worst kind of rat— terrible husband, a bad father and I’m still walking around. You know why?”
We didn’t know, but he told us.
“God is a lunatic,” he said. “A psycho. He makes bad things happen for no reason at all. He knocks people off— good people, bad people. He does it for kicks.”
“God isn’t a serial killer,” I said, walking away.
“Believe what you want,” the man called out angrily when he saw I wasn’t listening. “You’ll find out when you grow up.”
All those years I was scared into thinking that what that guy said might be true, but the boy from Flatbush helped me understand why bad things happen and what God has to do with it. I learned this not by what the boy did to me, but by something Chewie said.
The boy from Flatbush was one of five brothers all of whom were criminals. One brother raised chickens as a sideline. There was nothing to it, except blood and eggs. Chickens like to peck each other’s eyes out— it was how they lived, and died, I guess. The boy from Flatbush was in no hurry. He told me lots of stories— brother stories, chicken fighting stories, pecking out eye stories, things I’m going to do to you before you die stories.
They were all pretty much the same.
I wasn’t going anywhere. I was trapped on the floor looking into an unrepentant talking jaw, and there was the bad teeth. They were as rotten and dark as a decaying castle.
And there was the knife, every second promising never.
All this time I was thinking of Chewie walking with me to school—this is when we were kids—years ago. We used to walk holding hands, two girls from the same neighborhood. Every day, down the sidewalk, past the pines on Oak Street until we got to the Oasis Bakery where a sweaty Italian woman with fur on her arms squatted in front of an oven. “No,” she always said to us. “I have no bread for sale, not even for the Queen of Sheba.” She wore an apron covering her chest and this made her bossy. “Anisette cookies is all I bake, ” she told us as she lowered a cookie tray to the counter.
The walk to school was frothy and calm. Hectic times would come later, but back then I remember mornings that were as pink and sweet as birthday cake. We munched big anisette cookies, we rounded a corner, and Chewie was in charge, leading me by the hand. She led me into the middle of a busy street. The fumes of rushing traffic tickled my nose like an irritating breeze. Car horns honked like fussing ducks, and brakes played violin solos on broken strings.
“Close your eyes,” Chewie said.
In the insurance office the words were pretty much the same. “Close your eyes, bitch,” is what the boy from Flatbush said.
I closed my eyes.
“What do you do in a situation like this?” Chewie asked.
“Hold on to your hand?”
“That won’t work.”
“It has to work,” I said. I tightened my flesh into hers, felt her blood slip through mine, pierced by our friendship something that would last— until some glorious and common hour.
“There’s only one thing to do.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” the boy from Flatbush said.
“Open your eyes,” Chewie whispered.
I knew she was right. You can’t make yourself die before you are dead. Like edges of rainy sky, brilliant, but gray we must hold on to the light until the storm swallows us whole.
I opened my eyes.
And finally I knew.
We have no control over who lives or who dies only the stories we tell.
And then I let go.
‡‡
NAN BYRNE lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn not far from Paulie G’s slice shop where she currently runs a vintage clothing shop in her small apartment. The author of two books, her latest poetry chapbook, Wonder City is from Plan B Press. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines including Michigan Quarterly Review, Fiction Southeast, Seattle Review, Cherry Tree, and other places. She is an associate fiction editor at the Maine Review.
Union Spring Literary Review 