Alice McDermott - After This

Mrs. Antonelli doubted very much that Jacob Keane would find the army to his liking. She looked up to see the eighth grader, a brazen thing, nearly six feet tall, who still lingered at the door with his shirttail out, hoping for another assignment from her to keep him from going back to class. She dismissed him and then sank into her chair. She put her glasses on and Sister Rose’s lovely handwriting-a perfection of the art, she always said-came clear to her again. She said a prayer: Let them find something easy for the poor kid to do. A desk job in Germany. Lifeguard duty at a base on Okinawa, as a neighbor’s boy had done. Amused to find how the world had turned since she was young-Germany and Okinawa now safe places for an American soldier.

But there was something unlucky about the boy. She would not have said tragic, just unlucky: his small stature, the awkward attempts at good manners, the apparently unsuccessful years at St. John’s, the draft. Getting sent to Vietnam would be of a piece with all that. And what opportunities for bad luck would he find over there? Mrs. Antonelli had no children of her own, and so felt herself more clear-eyed about such things. There were kids who were born with luck on their side and others who simply weren’t. It wasn’t about intelligence or good grades, not even necessarily about good looks (although there was luck in that, too). It was chance, plain and simple. Kids born lucky and kids who never got a break. It was fate, perhaps, although she supposed God came into it somewhere (she couldn’t say how, except, perhaps, that God had his favorites, too). She saw herself, some months from now, telling Sister Rose, who would not remember him, how Jacob Keane had come to her office not long ago, just before he went in, to pick up little Clare and take her to the dentist.

Two boys from St. Gabriel’s had already died in the war. Neither was memorable to her as a student, although she had attended both funerals, sitting behind the three eighth-grade classes who had filled up the back of the big round church, warming it a bit, for both boys had been buried on cold winter days. From where she sat, the flag-draped coffins and the stooped families in their dark clothes had seemed rather a long way away. Although she had heard one of the mothers say, simply enough, “My baby.”

Mrs. Antonelli touched her glasses to make sure they were still there, for Sister’s blue ink and fine letters had once more lost their clarity, and the steady yellow light briefly wavered. She looked up. The tall eighth grader was in her doorway again, his shirttail still out and his tie still crooked, a white attendance sheet from Sister Savior in his hand. His face and his hair, all his edges, a blur, through her tears. An angel himself, through her tears.

In the narrow alleyway beside the school, Jacob paused and then leaned down to whisper into his sister’s ear. “It was a fib,” he said.

He leaned down, out of the autumn blue sky, out of the cinder-block wall, out of nothingness (she would say later) and into awareness, into memory. His eyes were green and his lashes long and thick. There were marks on his face, freckles, lingering acne, nicks from his razor. There was the trace of a beard. He leaned down and put his lips to her ear and said, “It was a fib,” a buzz against the soft bones that made her raise her shoulder and giggle. Surely not her first memory of him-he had read to her when she was still in a crib, he had sat beside her on the stairs waiting to be called down on Christmas morning, at the dinner table he had spoken to her through his raised milk glass, the milk bubbling with his words until their father said, “Enough”-but surely this was her first clear memory of his face, leaning down to her out of the autumn sky.

There was no dentist appointment, he said. He had the car keys in his hand. He started walking again. He just wanted to take her for a ride, he said. She hurried to keep up. They were in the alleyway. On one side was the long cinder-block wall that separated the school property from the strip of stores and the parking lot next door. On the other, the low steps and wide glass doors of the gym. The alleyway itself was a magnet for lost mimeographed worksheets and loose-leaf paper, for candy wrappers and brown lunch bags and the yellowed wax bottles, many of them marred by teeth marks, that had once been filled with sweetened, brightly colored liquids, purchased from Krause’s store. There seemed to be a constant wind blowing along the ground here, full of sand and grit, and she felt she was racing through it, following him. He had the car keys in his hand and they jingled like a cowboy’s spurs as he led her around the cinder-block wall and into the parking lot next door, where he had left his car. He unlocked the door, opened it for her. “Hop in,” he said. There was a thin terry-cloth cover over the old leather seats. It seemed to be attached with rubber bands. It slid underneath her as she climbed in, but it was soft to the touch. He slammed the door, walked around the back of the car. He had parked under the single tree in the lot and a few leaves, yellow and gold and rust colored, had drifted onto the red hood and across the windshield. He got in the car, put the key in the ignition. “Let’s just drive around,” he said.

She said okay, although still she expected the drive to end at the dentist’s office-the eighth grader who had fetched her had said so, and so had Mrs. Walters when she called her to the front of the class. She could already smell the cinnamon and alcohol of the place. Hear the hateful sound of the drill. The office was in the basement of the dentist’s house. There was a long concrete stairwell, damp and steep, that went down to the door. The floor of the waiting room was black and white. There would be a shoe box full of charms and toy jewelry from which she could pick two when it was over.

Her brother put his arm across the seat and slowly backed out of his space. He drove first through the length of the narrow lot, past the candy store, the hardware store, the five-and-dime. “That’s where the ‘hoochie-koochie-koo’ man used to stand,” he said. He pointed to a row of shopping carts in a corner near the grocery store. “When I was your age,” he said. “He was just a crazy old man, always kind of drooling. If he got close enough to you, he’d pinch your cheek and say, ‘Hoochie-koochie-koo.’ ” He looked over his shoulder as he turned out of the lot. He was smaller than their father, but he had the same seriousness when he drove. “People said he was shell-shocked. From the war.” He made another turn, driving slowly, slower than she could walk. “I don’t know when he stopped being there.” He drove past the bowling alley and told her he’d been on a bowling team in eighth grade. He was so bad, he said, that he never broke a hundred. He said he used to sit there and pray, waiting for his turn. Just one spare, he used to say. Not even a strike. You don’t have to make me good, he used to tell God. “Just average.” He looked at her and laughed. She laughed, too, mostly because it was the middle of the morning and she was supposed to be in school and she wasn’t. She was sitting beside her brother in his car. He raised his arm and pointed and then quickly returned his hand to the steering wheel. “That’s where we used to go for our polio shots, when we were little. And then they changed it to those little sugar cubes.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I guess they worked,” he said. He looked at her. “I’ve never had polio, have you?”

She laughed, not exactly certain it was a joke. “No,” she said.

He put the turn signal on again and once more pulled out into the road. It was a familiar route, the one that led from the church or the school to home, but it was made strange and new by the fact that it was mid-morning and she should have been in school, by the fact that she was alone with her brother, in his car, and they were driving even more slowly than she could walk. They passed the playing field at the back of the school, beside the cemetery. Without a word, the two of them turned their heads to watch it go by. The grass was balding and the fence behind home plate was bent and torn. There was still something of summer’s dust over the whole thing although the leaves on the trees at the far end were yellow and red. They turned again, down another street, this one lined with houses like their own. Lawns and driveways and sidewalks. Jacob named the friends who lived in some of them-Louie, Kevin Malloy, Ted Fish. He told her a story about one Halloween. He turned again. Lori Ballinger’s house. Michael took her to the prom. Bobby Kent’s house. Bobby cried in sixth grade when people wouldn’t stop calling him Clark. He turned again. Now they were off the familiar route to church and school and she began to suspect once again that he was taking her to the dentist.