Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

All right, she said finally. They were going to bed, and she heaved herself up to standing, the table tilting and jolting under the pressure of her hand.

She told him he could go up to his old room.

Jimmy said he was thinking he could take the basement. His mother told him the basement was being rented to a tenant.

That’s an easy hustle. I wish I could get somebody to give me money like that.

He picked up his box and went up the narrow stairs to the disorderly interior of the upper house where his room had been. It was still there, with the blinds broken and the night showing through the window. They had left laundry hampers on his floor. He went into his closet, which had a sliding hollow wood door with a metal cup inlaid in the wood as a handle. It had been knocked off the track and hung sideways. He found photographs of old friends, himself as a skinny teenager making a weird gesture with his arm, a gang sign, in 1992. His hard hat was back there with stickers on it. American flag. Irish clover. Zofo. He found an electric guitar with broken strings.

The posters were rolling off the walls. He shut the door and a poster rolled down, the back of the paper white and empty. Before hiding it, he opened up his prison box and looked inside: letters, cards, a copy of Outlaw Biker, a Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup, Psalms, a shaving mirror, a pair of prison-issue white boxer shorts issued by CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, a Capri Sun juice pack, an old Heavy Metal magazine, a red cowboy bandana.

Unable to sleep, he went downstairs and turned on the TV in the front room.

In the basement, Skinner heard the television and the sound of a heavy, unfamiliar individual moving over the floor.

He took a shower with all the shampoo bottles that belonged to each member of the household except for him. As a matter of habit, he spent very little time in the shower, barely getting wet — got in and got out and went back to his room and dressed immediately. He combed his hair carefully, looking at himself from all angles in the aluminum shaving mirror.

A shout from below:

Jimmy! Mom wants to know if you can come down here.

He went downstairs and let them make him eggs. While he was waiting for them to cook, his mother, instead of asking him what his plans were, asked him to take a look at the kitchen cabinet door, the hinge. Jimmy moved himself, he stood up from the table and moved his weight — of his body, the somber weight of his eyes, his wet beard from the shower, the weight of his damp white skin under his plaid shirt — across the room and looked at the hinge.

There’s nothing wrong with it.

Can you fix it?

He did not automatically say yes.

It’s just a screw, he said.

He would quote back to people all the responsibilities he had undertaken for them, including things they had never asked him to do, but nevertheless things he was doing or was soon to do for them — or things that he had to do for other members of the household or for someone else entirely, some other entity, such as the government — simply things that he would have to do — suggesting that he was trying to help everyone as fast as he could — not that he wouldn’t be happy to oblige — but if you could just wait your turn, because you weren’t just imposing on him, you were infringing on someone else’s rights. Jimmy had commitments to many people, you had to understand. He was just trying to be fair to everybody. Patrick’s truck: Jimmy alone would be perceptive enough to hear that there was a problem with the front wheel bearing. Bathroom tiles were another thing. No offense, but their house had not been that well-maintained in his absence. He wasn’t saying anything, but, his room, if he was supposed to live there, had turned into their laundry hamper. He had a small responsibility to himself to make it livable. The cupboard he would deal with when he had time.

He gave an understanding smile, because he got what was going on. No one was planning to compensate him for all the work he was planning to do. That was the way it was. That was fine. But there were some basic things he had to do for himself, and the State hadn’t given him money for clothes or toiletries. The State had kicked him out. And it was a little too soon for him to start thinking about hustles unless the idea was for him to get violated right away. So he needed twenty bucks to go to the store. He knew she had it. He would get his mother whatever she wanted while he was out there.

When he was gone, Mrs. Murphy said, He’s got to get back in the union. They’d take him back. They have their own rules that they go by. They don’t base it on the conviction. What he did did not go that far to the point that he’s out for good. He has a shot, if he wants it. He’s got two options: either the union or he works with Patrick. Patrick, I don’t really see. The way things are, he don’t have enough work for the two of them, not every day. With Patrick, it’s now you see it, now you don’t. I see a problem there, with the up and down. Jim needs the routine every day that they gave him in the union. The other men were good for him when they were on the dig. He made every shift on that. You know, he told me, ma, I was there every shift. My whole life I would disappear. I know, I says, I remember. He used to hide when Patrick called him. He used to pretend he was out of the house when he was here the whole time. He cut school, which would be nothing new in this family. The middle of the day, I’d hear a sound — he was in the basement. Didn’t you hear us calling? I says. He says, Yeah, but ma, I don’t want to go with him, with Patrick.

I says, you know he’s gonna beat the shit out of you. No, he won’t this time. So, now I’m gonna get a prize fight in my kitchen. Patrick beat the shit out of him.

On the dig, he made every shift. Once he went in the trailer and put his belt on, that was it, that was what it took for him. He never violated that. He went to work, back here to Feeney’s, then right back here. They had their fun, but there was a limit. He always knew what it was, he said. He knew he had to be ready for the next shift, so he used to stop himself. He’s got to find that limit again.

In the evening, Jimmy came back and there was no mention of the money or what he had done. He sat in the front room on one of the couches watching the TV. I’m gonna get cable for you, he told his mother. In prison, they had watched cooking shows, celebrity reality TV, reality TV in which a house was built and you saw the craft and skill, the whole thing coming together like a puzzle. He had loved those.

Oh here. He set a carton of Slims on the kitchen table — an entire carton — which cost far more than the twenty dollars she had given him.

You trying to kill me? she said, chuckling. I need to hide these from myself. She turned herself around in her chair in stages and sought a drawer to hide the cigarettes in.

I WENT IN JAIL, she whispered.

You? What for?

I’m illegal alien in this country. She watched him. You don’t know?

No. You never told me.

I am. No visa. No paper.

And you got arrested for that?

Yes.

How’d you get here?

I smuggle across the border.

The border of what?

Mexico. First I come to Mexico from Southeast Asia and then I take a truck.

She told him her journey had led to Archer, down south, and then the other east coast cities. In Connecticut, the police had arrested her coming out of a store to buy some things for dinner, some soda.

How long did they give you?

Three months.

Shit.

Yes. But that’s the problem, they don’t tell me. I don’t know it’s going to be three month. Nobody tells me when I can get out, so I don’t know nothing. Some people says I can be a year there, some says it can be longer.