Adam Johnson - Emporium

Forst had built a tile bin in the backyard out of old planking and sagged plywood, though to us it was a tile palace, with its long rows of shelves spilling with ceramics, great heaps of porcelain so high you had to climb over on all fours. Here we separated the tiles into mason’s boxes and old grout buckets as we sat on upturned caulking crates and discussed what a man could do with all that tile. It was clear this tile, smooth in our hands, was worth a great deal, and this was a lifetime’s worth, enough to wall a gymnasium, though in a hundred different colors. The tile palace was also the place Forst kept his magazines.

Here’s where the art came in. To separate tile by color — pink, tan, powder blue — was one thing, and separating by shape — rectangle, hexagram, star-and-diamond — was another, but we separated by kind as well: inner corners, coping edges, facing plates, running trim. No stack of tile was too small in our eyes, and on the back of a shelf alone might be set four, yellow, rectangular elbows. Once in a while, there would be a lone tile. I had a golden-speckled round tile that I carried in my back pocket all summer, and in its burnished finish I could nearly picture the family’s house where this tile matched, could almost imagine a house in which there were no odd pieces left over at all.

I was a little jealous of Ralph, too. He had a certain condition that caused his skin to rise when you pressed on it. If you slapped his back, a few minutes later your hand would rise and appear. With your knuckle you could trace his bones underneath, and there they were. Or he would lie on the cool tile as we sorted, and we could both sit transfixed as triangles rose on his chest and stomach. Ralph couldn’t wear a belt or tie his shoes, but I wanted that, to be able to react to things that touched me funny. Sometimes Forst beat Ralph with a rope. I’d come riding up to his house on my Huffy and there he’d be, covered with running welts. Ralph would explain that it was because of the magazines or some other reasonable sounding offense, though it was always difficult to tell just how hard he’d been hit. Ralph could welt up from a Hula Hoop. Then again, Forst was the largest man I’d ever imagined, and I’d seen the way he’d swung that cooler.

This was a time of great unknowns for me, and the absolute logic of Ralph’s home had me hooked. There were simply no mysteries allowed, and I fell in with that. It’s clear to me now that Forst’s tile palace was really placed in the one spot it couldn’t be seen from the road or the alley, and I can see the sadness and resentment of a man who built a monument to his daily, petty pilferings. I can see that there wasn’t enough of any one kind of tile to even cover a dishpan. But inside that rickety bin those tiles held me in awe by their simple mass and order, by the vision of a man who would recognize their latent, unseen value, who would build a house to protect them.

I realize the women in those magazines were Filipino and not Mexican, as we’d thought. Once in a while one of their faces will come back to me, in their offset color and oversharp focus, and those forced smiles and folded bodies will erase where it was I was driving, make me overcook dinner. But in the sweltering heat of the tile palace it made sense that all Mexican women were ready to bend giggling over a bathtub, and we commented openly to that effect. On those hot Tucson summers it seemed only fitting that Ralph and I should both get beatings on a fairly regular basis, and we silently nodded that I’d just lucked out, not having a dad to give me mine. We often discussed in our scientific way the pros and cons of having a dad versus not having a dad, though we couldn’t see how clear it was that Forst wasn’t really Ralph’s father.

What was a mystery was why some nights my mother would move me from the cool of my bed to the hot seats of her Monte Carlo, why we would drive and drive — the Oracle road, Baseline, Miracle Mile — without speaking, why it was the Mexican radio station, the one where we couldn’t understand the words, that she listened to. The Monte Carlo didn’t have air so you had to choose between wet vinyl and eye-cutting wind, and one night I woke suddenly, sweating, thinking of the pink heat lamp in our bathroom, something that always seemed ominous to me as it glowed and ticked above the toilet. There was dust crossing in our headlights. The road signs were in Spanish. I moaned in a way that always won response from her, but she only cracked my window with the power button on the console. “We’re from Michigan,” she told me. “We’ll get used to the heat.”

“Is my dad in Michigan?”

“No, honey.”

“Is he in the navy?”

She turned to me, surprise on her face. “Of course not. What’s gotten into you?”

“I never been to Michigan,” I said.

“Sure you have, honey. We were Wolverines.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“That’s where things got all mixed up, remember?” she said.

“I never lived there.”

She sighed. She lowered both our windows so the car roared inside, then powered them up tight. “I know what you mean,” she said, after a while.

These were the conversations we had.

My mother was a phlebotemist at the hospital, but once she passed her pathology lab technician exam, the rust-colored iodine stains on her fingers changed to the purple and blue of the enhancer oils from the microscopes. She no longer simply pulled blood. Now she came home smelling like xylene, bright-eyed about sputum cultures and cervical cysts, though she wouldn’t explain what words like ovarian meant.

The late cruising and trips to the Indian drive-in stopped with the new night shift. Now she woke late and slow, drinking coffee in a pink silk robe with a gold tiger embroidered on back. It read TigerPak, 11th Sea Command above the tiger, and below, around its outstretched paw, Prowlin’ the 17th Parallel . When she’d turn away from me, that tiger could always catch my breath. The robe was something I couldn’t get a fix on. I assumed my father had given it to her, though there’d never been any mention of its source. But the image of her — sleepy, drinking coffee, with that tiger always guarding what was behind her — was what I balanced in my head as I did wheelies in the neighborhood until it was noon and I could head to Ralph’s.

I was told my father looked like Kris Kristofferson — still does, around the eyes, my cousin claims — and that summer my mother took me to watch the movie Semi-Tough five times. The theaters were ice-cold, matinee-empty, and all the soda I wanted was mine. One time a huge man came into the open theater with a tub of popcorn and sat directly behind my mother. It was just the three of us, and I watched him over my shoulder as he ate fistfuls of popcorn with his mouth open. Kris Kristofferson had a woman’s neck cupped in his palm, and I could see how my mother’s blue fingers twisted the fine hair that curled under her ear. When the man finished his popcorn, he tore a large U in the rim of the tub, so it looked like he’d taken an oversized bite of that too. He turned the tub upside-down in his lap and slid his hand into the slot he’d made. We all watched the movie for a while. Then the man leaned forward and smelled my mother’s hair. His nose hovered right where my father’s tiger would have been. It was the scene with Kris and that woman in the hot tub, so I knew my mother’s eyes were closed.

Ralph had had a girlfriend but she’d died. My girlfriend had moved to International Falls, a site I’d chosen because it was always the coldest in the nation on the weather reports, which from Arizona I imagined as a place where all you needed to know fell between the lines of a thermometer. By then, I’d also confused Michigan with Minnesota. The sole area of contention between Ralph and me was sex, and we fought like academics over the mechanics of how it worked. This was the reason we’d needed girlfriends: to back up our arguments with personal experience. It was the magazines that had sparked the debate, and it was in the magazines we looked for answers.