Adam Johnson - Emporium

Forst had an old camper parked in the middle of the backyard. It was the glossy, aluminum kind meant to be towed behind a pickup and on summer nights we practically lived in there, passing the flashlight, turning the pages, making our arguments. Ralph’s theory was this: the woman lay on her back and the man climbed on top of her, so they were face to face. That’s how the screwing would occur, he was sure, and he pointed to the sleepy, dreamy looks on these women’s faces. Why else would it happen in a bed? I was convinced it took the approach encouraged by the women on all fours. They had a way of swiveling their heads back to check on what was going on behind them that couldn’t be denied. In these looks it was practical necessity that I saw, and that appealed to me in a way that dreaminess and mystery never would. Plus there was the way Ralph’s German shepherd Hans would jump on your back if you were near the ground. Our views were irreconcilable on the entire matter, but Ralph had to give me that one.

Ralph had a little sister who’d just made the leap from diapers to panties, and we often looked to her for answers. In the yard, we’d strip her and crouch low, gesturing with our hands as we made our arguments. I’d seen my mother inspect cultures in her lab once, and I copied that long, squinting gaze of hers. Ralph was more animated. There was a blue car his sister loved, and when we could get her to crawl after it, we’d follow in a strange, balled-leg walk while he pointed and nodded like a scientist observing a test probe for Mars.

One day, we had her on her back, each holding a leg up in the air when Ralph’s mom came out the back door. The first time I had ever met her, she hooked a thumb behind the elastic band of her velour shorts and pulled them down to the stubble of her pubic hair so she could show me her still-fresh hysterectomy scar. This was to demonstrate why I was to stay quiet in her house, make my own sandwiches, and not slam that damn ball against the carport. So I didn’t know what to expect when she came out back to see her daughter wishboned by Ralph and the neighbor boy.

Ralph was pointing at the fleshy tuft of his sister’s genitals when he wheeled on his mom. “Can’t you see we’re doing an experiment?”

She let out the kind of staged, knowing laugh you see only in old movies anymore, as if she somehow recognized herself in this scenario of me and Ralph pulling the backpedaling feet of a restless girl. Then she looked at me hard, as if to say it was behavior like this — male, probing, dangerous from birth — that got her where she was today: in sweltering Arizona with a backyard full of dirty tile and kids like us. “I’m through,” she said. “Go see Forst if you want to know about babies.”

“Babies?” Ralph said. “This is research.” He looked at me and mouthed babies?

I shrugged. The baby thing I was still unsure of, but I knew it had to do with the glossy fist of a uterus I’d seen in one of my mother’s pathology books.

We had no intention of talking to Forst about anything, but they were his magazines, and he became our next object of study. He was an ape of a man, the kind rarely seen these days: chest so large his ribs seemed barely to come round to meet, and even his belly — the oiler, he called it — paled underneath what his chest seemed to indicate was possible. But what bothered me was his belly button. It was an outie, and with all that weight behind it, it had swelled to a cone with a nub at the end that wiggled at you like bait.

On days when he came home early, it was Bonanza that he watched, a huge tumbler of iced tea resting on the grayed mat of his chest hair, his yellowed feet up on the ottoman. Forst identified with the character of Hoss, though it was a troubling figure to him. He would direct our attention to the screen, pointing out Hoss’s deficiencies: his fat hands, the way his mouth always hung open, and of course, that stupid hat. “Why is he always smiling?” Forst asked us. “What the hell is he grinning about?”

It was a question I took seriously, and I agreed with Forst that there was something to that Hoss, that the big cowboy must have a hidden interior. I was considering Forst in this same light when he turned from his show to me. “What the hell are you gawking at?”

Forst was the kind of man to say Houston, all systems go before he farted, but I’d also once heard the fast slapping of his belt loops as went for leather in a hurry. Now he seemed serious.

He stared at me. It felt like he could look right inside me, and I took a chance. I asked him if he had been in the navy.

“Semper fidelis,” he answered. “Marines.”

“What are navy men like?”

“They screw each other.”

I tried to model that in my head, avoiding Kris Kristofferson, whom I’d been picturing in a uniform for some time. “From the front or from the back?”

Forst paused on this question. “From the back.”

“It really works like that?”

“Everybody gets screwed,” Forst said.

About that time, I started watching my mother sleep.

* * *

Standing in the bedroom doorway, quietly eating my cereal, I would take her in: the skewed shape of her under fern-print sheets, the hair stuck to her face, the shine of her shoulders, rising and falling, an arm stretched across the empty space where my father would have been. At night I sometimes dreamed I could walk around and breathe underwater. I wondered what went through her mind as she slept off long nights at the lab, a place where she looked deep into people’s blood and tissue, gazed into tumors, trying to trace the history of cancer. I envied her for that ability, but I didn’t think she stopped to consider that people could miss a scoured lung or bad kidney, that in the hollow left behind, there was only emptiness, or worse, room for stranger things to grow. I didn’t think she ever watched me sleep, from my doorway, wondering what I was dreaming.

Finally she caught me. I remember it was the week Ralph’s dog died. She sat up in bed and I saw her lab coat was still on. Patting the covers, she signaled for me to sit with her, but I didn’t want to. “Have it your way,” she said. “But I talked to your father last night.” She lit a cigarette, something else that had come with the shift change, while she paused to let that news sink in. “He wants to visit.”

She’d used this one before. “When?”

“Soon, baby. Think of it, all of us together again.”

“All the Wolverines,” I said.

“Don’t be like that. It will be good for you, having him around.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She was still unused to the smoke, and she fanned it from her face, leaning, trying to get away from it. “You’ll love him. He’s handsome,” she said and closed her eyes for a moment, like maybe she was picturing him.

For some reason, I thought of that man in the movie theater just then.

“What’s the point?” I said and went to eat my breakfast.

That week I sorted a lot of tile. I wasn’t supposed to be at Ralph’s too early, and I remember Forst coming out in his bikini briefs, his hand shielding the bright morning light, to find me in his tile bin. I sat sorting on top of a stack of boxes, and it scared me to be near eye level with him. Once in a while one of the tiles would cut you, so I had a finger in my mouth as we looked at each other. I couldn’t explain what I was doing there and I didn’t try. Shuffling tiles into bins just made sense to me. They were something to hold. They had weight and purpose. I could see my reflection in some of them. Forst squinted at me for a long time, and then he seemed to understand something and went back inside. We didn’t even speak.