"Piss" from The Flower Vendor's Daughter and Other Stories

This is a work of fiction, originally titled "Water Boys," and first in a collection of short stories titled The Flower Vendor's Daughter and Other Stories. "Piss" is a work in progress, still undergoing revision and  certainly the longest story in the collection.  It also appears first in the book. This story has been posted here to share a somewhat finished piece of work with readers who are interested in what I'm working on, but not to ask for any type of critique. Thanks for reading.

Piss

The story travels.  It blows like a sheet of loose newspaper, tumbling down sidewalks until it picks up speed and in a wind gust, it finds a telephone pole and pastes itself there.  For a day, the ones who learn it know a secret, their lips mouthing the words, and their heads shaking with uncertainty, as if asking, is this true?  Is something really and finally about to happen?  The rain comes then, gel like globs of it, and the street floods only slightly before the water filters through storm drains and down into the belly of New Haven.  In the downpour, the story disintegrates to scraps of tissue; you can see it running in a stream of pulp into the secret tunnels below the Green. 

  Later, in pieces, the story emerges all over the city, and no one can remember where it started.  Instead, it steams from manholes and is exhaled from Yale buildings made of marble, brick, and stone.  Skater punks on Broadway flick cigarette butts into the parking lot that once was a haunt for teenagers but has since been invaded by no loitering signs.  When they hear the story, they cut their eyes over to York Street and drop their voices to gravely whispers. Businessmen drinking Guatemalan coffee at Willoughby's brush the story off and open newspapers, thumbing through them until their fingers are black with ink.

            People like Wandering Bob preach it.  As he circles downtown each day, stopping to bum money for coffee or smokes, he spits and mutters about underground laboratories.  Eyeless experiment victims and green glowing organs.  He changes the story into his own story, as if he can blame something for his tweed pants and stained, so stained shirts, the group home, his wanderings. 

            Sometimes the story is new to someone, and then that person   never a Yale student   blurts out:

            "The Secret Society has Geronimo's brain?"

                                                                         

         People like Richie Duncan held memories loosely in time, so his childhood often floated unanchored in his mind.  As a teenager, although he knew the story of the brain, he couldn't remember where he first heard it.  Sometimes he thought Wandering Bob told him himself, but in other, more lucid times, he could remember leaning against a newspaper box on York and Elm while older boys pestered the flower cart vendors about the Apache.

            By the time he was fifteen, Richie knew the names of the Secret Society buildings. Cup and Ball, Wolf's Head, File and Claw, Manuscript, Scroll and Key, and the big one, Skull and Bones.  To some people Skull and Bones was a secret name for a boring, marble building across from the British Museum, but to Richie, it was the head of an organized maze of underground labs.  He knew somewhere, maybe on the sod too thick to be real grass on Cross Campus, or by the coliseum where the old train tracks ended suddenly as if the builders had abandoned the project, or along the side of the Green that was once a graveyard, somewhere there was an entrance to these labs.  He had dreams of shooting through caverns on some sort of subway, looking out at ghosts and large tanks that glowed with water.  He walked aimlessly sometimes, sure that the way to the tunnels would jump out at him.  It made sense that these labs were there, the same way other things in Richie’s life made sense while defying any rationale.

           Without even looking too hard, Richie had a way of finding other people's lost things. He saw a girl's notebooks stacked like shingles next to chunks of sheet rock on Howe Street, and when he looked through them, they ingrained lines of poetry in his head.  When a van went unattended with the side door spilling its guts of junk onto the street, he picked carefully through shards of window glass and brought home a collection of Playboys, a toolbox with a shiny silver ratchet, and a suede jacket with fringe.  He wore the coat sometimes for luck.

            Often, when he looked down at the pavement, he found wrinkled dollar bills skittering along like dead leaves.  Other pedestrians shook their heads then, as if wondering how they had missed the money themselves.  Against the wall in Richie's kitchen stood nine found umbrellas.  Once, when he was younger, his father grounded him for two weeks, demanding Richie explain where he'd been stealing from, but as the years went by, his parents began to believe him and took to asking him to help find things they misplaced.

            If the laws of karma made losing and finding equal in the end, then judging by the amount of things he had found and taken, Richie reasoned he would someday lose everything he owned to some sort of freak catastrophe.  But he still took the things he found and kept them around, content for the moment to collect luck in pieces.

            At school, the world seemed to narrow in around him, and he thought about the things he found when a gray feeling uncurled inside of him and he couldn't talk.  When he was called on in class, his knees shook and he came close to stuttering.  Sometimes at lunch he wanted to go to the snack bar, but that would require walking by a table of popular kids whose laughter he imagined was directed at his acid washed jeans.  He thought about saving his money to get a real haircut, instead of the choppy mess his father insisted upon giving him, but he always ended up spending his money on smokes or comic books. Sometimes when a certain group of kids laughed at him after class, usually a class in which he'd been called on, Richie had the urge to scream 'assholes!', but his voice always choked in his throat. There were always cigarette lighters to be found by the lockers, or snap pops in one of the stairwells.  He had six calculators that he kept hidden in his backpack.  Sometimes when a particular pretty girl pointedly ignored him, he laughed to himself about the change purse he'd found under her desk one sixth period.   After school, he often took the city bus downtown and hung out smoking cigarettes and looking at the ground as he walked. 

            Too insecure to refuse Wandering Bob’s requests, Richie was an easy target when Bob, his own circles overlapping Richie’s as they paced, needed a smoke.  Extending his pack of generic filters, Richie was subjected to all sorts of conspiracy theories, but the most consistent and lucid was always the story of the brain. So when a boy who could find things started thinking about a laboratory under the ground, he assumed he could get to it.

            He pried a manhole up with a pole.  It was mid May, and the campus lawn beat out silence.  Early summer muffled the town, the quietness unrolling in a thick carpet.  Stone buildings walled the courtyard off from the street.

            The top rung of the ladder that descended into the tunnel sweated visibly, and Richie counted eight rungs before blackness swarmed up from the sewer floor.  He had no idea how deep the hole went, where it went, whether someone would come by and seal the cover back up, leave him crawling down tighter and tighter drainage pipes.  From somewhere he heard water dripping.  For the first time all year, he wanted badly not to be alone.  He imagined that somewhere down there, there were deep gorges filled with water, train tracks stretching over drowned bodies that floated up in the sewage, kidnapped children in cages.  When he dragged the manhole lid back, he told himself that it was not the right place.

            Often, while considering the tunnels, Richie’s imagination did not strike him as personal, but rather, as a dream landscape all townies navigated in a more overlapping subconscious.   

                                                             

On thick summer nights, all over town, the heat pricked not only Richie into dreaming, but a collection of sleepers all lifted from bed to shuffle slowly towards State Street.  If they noticed one another from their daily routines, they gave no notice, but walked bleary-eyed through the tunnels, blindly feeling their ways down corridors their waking selves denied existed.  The train tracks that had once run beneath the green were still there, and the sleepers could pull gauze-thin red tickets from pajama pockets or the waistbands of panties.  When the old 59 train roared down the tracks that by day were overgrown with weeds, but by night glistened, reflecting a slivered moon, the sleepers held their tickets out and stumbled aboard.  It was always a small diesel train, the kind some might remember from years back.

            And on these nights, the train would whistle, always more of a foghorn’s moan, before the doors slid shut around its passengers.  The train would charge forward, to the cutoff point on the tracks and beyond, through the tunnel doors by the coliseum that were usually bolted in place.  Streaking beneath the city then, they’d pass a junked jackhammer where long ago there were bodies of men, and they could almost discern white bones beneath the rusted metal as the scene blurred by, through the junkyard of eighteen wheelers, and west under George Street where the air sweated with the smell of salt water, Long Island sound splashing over the tracks.  Crabs, jelly-fish-like in their iridescence skittered by as the train would rattle through, with its one orb headlight casting on the water the shadows of thin-bodied drowned women.

            Down farther the 59 would turn, beneath the three churches where coffins sank more deeply beneath the green.  And farther still it rambled, through secret passages and into the bowels of campus.  Past a heart beating rose waves of light, gracing a pulsing set of white lungs, and beyond writing neon worms of intestines. 

            The train always slowed there, while the passengers clutched their seats before a moment before, realizing this was not their stop, they could relax because, with a burst of speed from its engine, the train propelled faster, roaring beneath downtown then, past children frozen in glass cages, birds whose wingspans could eclipse a man, and finally the mason cemetery with its headstones formed from shiny white teeth.  Only a gunmetal blur then, the train would accelerate back to the station, and the sleepers, having not seen the brain, would grow more disoriented.  It was there; they could sense it like a tumor they’d need an x-ray to find.

            Above ground, those still awake would note the tremor beneath them, and think vaguely of the constant shifting of plates, bedrock thousands of feet below.  Each voyage ended with the train screeching to a halt as the doors slid open, the sleepers de-boarding to follow invisible paths home.  In the morning, they would rise well-rested, realizing they’d pulled sheets over their heads despite the heat, most of them sure they had dreamt about water.   

This much Richie could figure, or at least imagine he saw in Wandering Bob’s darting eyes.

            On quiet days, Richie always seemed to be alone and walking.  Down streets that he realized suddenly had no one at their ends, and with no people around, he could imagine a step onto the next block would cement a passage into a wasteland of abandoned store fronts and throbbing neon signs.  He pictured himself looking through bakery windows at displays of sweet rolls and croissants, bagels and scones, and pushing through swinging doors to stuff his pockets with bread.  Still warm from the oven, those would be proof that the people in town had all disappeared suddenly.  He could walk right into the movies and see a film already in progress, R rated if he was lucky, and help himself to popcorn and Sour Patch Kids.  He'd take his time exiting Cutler's with too many CD's to carry home.

            Perhaps later he would see someone, maybe Leigh selling cemetery carnations on her rusted old bike, with playing cards clacking against the spokes as the wheels whirred, or Wandering Bob with a pack of fresh smokes from an abandoned Store 24.  They would eye one another across the green as refugees from another time, and later, walk as if snake charmed to where Cliff belted out a guitar solo in the middle of Elm Street.  This was something Richie had seen happen at night when everyone else had gone home, and he, having sneaked out of bed, could enjoy the night, but on certain Sundays it seemed possible that the town would open up to the late night hours at noon. He would smooth the napkin from a hot dog out in his hand as if it were a ticket he could present  farther down the block, when he would rest it in the hands of a statue and step into a silent town.  He imagined he'd be able to yell out loud into the street when everyone else had gone away.  Anything would be possible then.

            This sensation of possibility was the same feeling he often had before Friday confession at Saint Mary's, when he imagined walking into the confessional and kneeling down, whispering about murders with broken bottlenecks and telling the priest he had stolen children from their beds in ghettos.  His options would be endless if he could only make his life up.  Other times, when he stepped off the city bus, he imagined he could be anywhere, because for a moment he was that blank about which corner he was on.

            And it was there at the bus stop one Tuesday in September, when Richie, cutting classes for no reason at all,  jumped down the steps to watch F Scott become more than a mysterious blur in the high school hallway.  F was headed toward Richie, kicking through leaves as he walked.  He sported baggy dark jeans cinched with a belt and a flannel shirt that had faded to a muted version of the leaves he kicked.  A pair of aviator sunglasses reflected the bus-stop sign above his thin yet carefully manicured goatee.

            For a moment, Richie shook his head from the haze of the bus ride, before he realized that F too was ditching school. He hoped F wouldn't notice him.  He'd have to say something to F, and he wasn't sure if he could talk right then.  He didn't really know F, but he'd heard he got his nickname from people always saying, "Fucking Scott."

            "You got any smokes, man?" F asked.  Raising the glasses onto his forehead, he half-grinned at Richie, spitting on the sidewalk after he spoke.

            Richie surprised himself by answering quickly.  "You wanna get some?."

            At Zachary's where Elm Street started going one way instead of two, Richie bought Marlboros while F lifted a bottle of cheap champagne.  They sneaked two glasses off a table at the diner on Chapel Street after asking to use the bathroom, and ran as a red faced waitress yelled for them to stop.

            "The cops will be after you!" she screamed.

            "Champagne?" Richie asked as they ran.

            "It was the first thing I grabbed.”

            Riche was surprised that he could keep up with F.  Even though they were in the same grade, F had a reputation as a bad kid who ran fast and won fights.

            "We're celebrating," F said.  "It's Wednesday, and we're not in school."

            "It's Tuesday, man," Richie yelled back.  "You want to hang out on the green?"

            "No way, I know a better place," F answered, and they bolted down Crown Street, stopping at a parking garage by the coliseum. 

            "You want to drink in a parking garage?"  Richie panted.

            "No, come on.  There's a road down there."

            "What?" Richie stopped to catch his breath at the garage entrance.

            "No one's ever down there.  Just some winos."

            Richie almost expected F to ditch him once they were clear of downtown   F was a loner   but he stood and waited.

            "Come on," F said.  "At least we won't have to sit in class with a bunch of pussies."

            F Scott popped the cork, and they took chugs from the glasses, pacing back and forth down the underground street before heading to a loading dock where trucks sometimes delivered things to the restaurants around town.  The smell of wet concrete mingled with piss, and dripping water echoed down dingy yellow corridors.  A lone patch of graffiti glared Latin Lords near the entrance.

            F shattered his glass against the wall and began swigging from the bottle, wiping his mouth on the sleeve.

            "Yeah, I know this guy Lou," he told Richie. "He had a job one year painting these walls. He says you used to be able to drive all the way to the Polish Club from here, but they walled it off a long time ago."

            The champagne warmed Richie’s face, like the times he'd sneaked beer from his mother's twelve packs.

            "Do these go under the college?" Richie ventured.  "There's supposed to be some kind of walking tunnels."

            "I never heard of anything like that."

            "Yeah sure," Richie said.  "You can go down there and see some really weird shit.  They got Geronimo's brain down there."  He hesitated, but F didn't laugh.

            "You want to check it out?" F asked instead.

            They killed the champagne, smashing the bottle on the ground and heading back through the garage and over to Cross Campus.  The world seemed wider with F there, as if Richie had room to yell out loud at any moment.  He kept quiet though, afraid that the feeling would go away if he spoke.  Everywhere, students walked with their back packs, looking straight ahead as if Richie and F weren't there at all.  Richie wondered if the barren time, in which he imagined looting the movie theater, would have all the students in it   they moved more like phantoms than people, ignoring him and F as the two of them pried the lid of the manhole up.

            For a moment, Richie expected the ground to be visible, but then he counted the same eight rungs.

            "Come on!" F said, and they were climbing down.

            Richie counted eighteen rungs before his feet hit the bottom.  He reached down to touch the floor with his hand, and sure enough, the ground was dry, no sewage.  They could stand easily, even F who was taller than Richie by four inches at least. 

            F lit his Zippo and Richie could see his face in the flame, and he realized the champagne was hitting him hard.  He was here, in the tunnel, the cement walls sweating beneath his hand.  He had always expected the tunnels to stink of shit, but now he could see that was not the case.  The air, fresher than that of his own basement, smelled of  rain evaporating where they stood. 

            "We're drinking down here from now on!"  F hollered.

            "Let's see where it goes," Richie whispered, rushing crazily ahead.

            They fumbled down the tunnel that was more like a corridor than a drainage pipe, both of them feeling the walls and groping ahead in the darkness.  Richie expected to see rooms of  experiments any minute, glass pipes bubbling with green liquid and thick ooze seeping down the sides of jars.  When they got to a door, he was sure there would be a lab on the other side.  He was panting by then.  F kicked open the door to the lab.

            Instead, they found themselves in a room with a lone table, and walls lined with hanging, black hooded capes that suspended from hooks in thin silhouettes.

           "What the fuck is this?" F asked.

            Richie counted twenty one capes on the cement walls.

            "Is this the fucking KKK?" F shouted.

            "Quiet, man," Richie whispered, and he was sure he was right about how F Scott got his nickname.

            Richie grabbed one of the sleeves, and raising it in front of his face, was surprised it smelled clean, no mildew or old closet odor.  They both pulled capes over their heads and stared through the eye slits.

            "Boo!" F yelled.

            They ran back through the tunnel, and for a moment, not remembering how long they'd actually walked, Richie was afraid someone had sealed up the manhole, but then he saw the bright circle of sky over head.  They clambered up in the capes, trying not to trip over the bottoms on the ladder, and emerging in the center of Cross Campus.

            Not bothering to reseal the manhole, they ran, and as they did, the students all around took notice, and a murmur rose up from the crowd.

            On the street, pedestrians fell silent as they approached, F screaming "Whoooo!" and Richie flapping the loose arms of the cape.  Richie noticed the street was busy with the after work crowd; people were all milling about.  And for a moment, before they ran faster, he felt like they were mere mirages, no longer really a part of that world, but having moved on to different terrain, where possibility was inevitable. 

      *

            People who remember seeing them that day think of nights when the town is peopled by shadows.  They think of a certain night each spring when men in black hoods emerge from side streets.  On these nights, doors are left open, and students lie awake listening through the traffic for the sound of specter-like hands creeping through black sleeves to tap their shoulders and enter them into a Secret Society.  Once chosen, they are led around campus until morning, and their figures shifting in and out of street lights.

            On tap nights, the rooms of the college shiver with silence, and all around town, that silence spreads.  Lovers in apartments jerk awake suddenly, and for an instant can't recognize one another.  Children dream about apparitions, pissing their beds in their sleep.  Single men wake up and down glasses of scotch before falling back into troubled sleep, and women lie uncomfortably on their backs until morning, sure that turning on their sides will bring intruders sneaking up behind them.  The flower cart vendors stir with dreams of guilt about the extension cords they sneak from the dormitories to their stands.  Somewhere in town, a single fire hydrant leaks and spreads dreams of rain and rides on rickety trains.  The people who are still awake and out jump at the sight of dark figures slinking around corners, and hurry home to bed, not knowing that no one is safe on tap night, not even in sleep.

                                                                        *

                                                                           

            People would wonder about Richie and F.  It made sense that they’d assume Richie was a bad kid like F, and that somehow the two loners had formed some sort of a pact based on isolation.  Kids from the high school tried to figure out where they went.  Some days they hung out at Cafe Dolores playing cards and smoking cigarettes, but other days they emerged in the late evening with red rimmed eyes.  Sometimes they bragged to younger boys that they'd been to New York all day watching XXX movies and jerking off at peep shows. Other times, they wouldn't say.

The truth was, F had troubles because his old man’s grocery business had gone bankrupt.  Richie had never entered the small apartment building where F lived with his bankrupt father, but there were always empty beer cans on the stoop, and the stairwell carpet reeked of smoke and mildew.  He suspected that the inside of F’s house would be different than his.  His house was just boring, while he imagined F’s being cluttered with old, useless things, grocery ledgers with cigarettes put out on top of them, wooden crates marked celery used as furniture, frozen tomato sauce scalding as F’s father thawed it on the stove.  Richie was curious about F’s apartment, but he never asked to go inside, never told him that he’d heard his father had lost his business unjustly.

           They had no reason to hang out in one of their houses anyway.   Richie and F Scott found secret places, parts of town where time seemed to have been busted open and its pieces dropped in random piles.  In the upstairs of a Howland's Department Store where the remains of a beauty parlor lay in shambles, the world turned to static as they sniffed paint thinner.  Dust from ripped up sheet rock turned chairs and walls that were once a bright pink to a chalky shade of mauve.  Heating helmets hung from crane like necks over vinyl cushioned chairs, and smashed out light bulbs stuck out around dirt streaked mirrors.  In this junkyard of salon products and crumbling walls, Richie and F held rags to their mouths and breathed.

            The turpentine sent a silver streak through Richie's brain, and around him, the old shelves seemed to flicker.  From down stairs roped off with chains and “Employees Only” signs, cash registers rang and shopping carts careened down aisles, loaded with polyester suits.  The store was having a going out of business sale. Richie crouched behind a series of filing cabinets, ready to bolt until the paint thinner spun him away from the sounds below, and white spots dotted his vision.

            "You know," he said when his mind cleared, "I think my mom used to get her hair done here when I was little."

            F leaned back against a floor length mirror, rubbing at his face.  Richie could see his reflection behind F in the mirror, as if he was a spectator watching him from far off.

            "You want to hear something weird?" F asked.

            It was spring by then, eight months since that first day they'd ditched school together, and Richie was used to hearing something weird from F.          

            "What?" he asked.

            "I don't know what I looked like when I was a little kid," F said, and coughed.

            Richie breathed what was left on the rag.  "What do you mean?"

            "I mean I can't picture myself as a little kid."

            Richie had two images of himself as a child: one from a photograph his mother had taken of him in a pumpkin patch, surrounded by future jack-o-lanterns, baby teeth more straight then his secondary set would ever be, and another, more constant image of a chubby face and long, unkempt hair.

            "Didn't your mom take pictures?" Richie asked.

            "Sure, but it don't matter."

            "You just can't picture anything?"

            "Well here's the thing.  I think of this other little kid when I try to think of myself.  Some kid that had the same raincoat as me."

            "That is weird," Richie said.  He tried to picture F as a little kid but couldn't.

            F soaked the rag from the paint thinner can.  "Yeah."

            "Maybe you can keep a picture of yourself in your wallet to look at," Richie said.

            But F was into the turpentine again and didn't seem to hear.

            Later, they walked downtown and smoked a joint behind one of the campus buildings. The sun was setting and for a while it seemed to Richie that the day would stay suspended in twilight forever.

            "It doesn't feel like it's going to get dark," he said.

            "It's just the weed," F said.

            They sat in silence, until the light slanting in through the trees dissolved into gray tinged air.

Far down High Street, Bob was accosting a group of women, gesturing with his arms before they hurried away.

            "You think we'll ever find that brain?" F asked.

            "Geronimo's?"

            "Yeah."

            "I don't know," Richie said.  He thought about the tunnels underground and the black capes they'd found.  He was starting to think it was just one of Wandering Bob's stories, like the theory that it didn’t matter who you voted for anymore because the Secret Societies elected all the presidents anyway. 

            "I mean," Richie said, "don't you think we would have found it?"

            "It's out there," F said.

            But Richie wasn't sure anymore.  Geronimo had been floating in and out of his consciousness.  Sometimes he pictured the brain underground as a clear image, but other times, that image dissolved as his dreams did when the day went on.  Often when he thought about the brain, he felt like he'd forgotten something that had made the story make sense.  He tried to think about how the brain had ended up there to begin with, but he couldn’t remember.   He wondered if the story would make less and less sense as he got older, but then he thought about Wandering Bob, who was close to sixty. 

            "Maybe people made it all up," he said to F, but saying that made him sad somehow, the way he'd felt when he realized he had stopped keeping track of what time the ice cream man drove by, or when saying dirty words no longer gave him a rush of adrenaline.

            F acted sure that the brain was there, but didn't seem to care about it.  "Those fuckers have it," was all he said and blew smoke into the fading light.

“They got to,” Richie said.

                                                            *

            The summer before their senior year, a murmur rose around town as places began to disappear.  At first they were only places Richie didn't care about:  the candy shop, the general store, restaurants he couldn't afford to go to and didn't have a girl to take to anyway.  Sometimes at the mention of one of the bankruptcies, F’s eyes would flash darkly, and Richie would picture F’s father, who he’d only seen once, taking out the trash in a wife-beater, hair like black spiders across his back.   F’s father’s father had started the grocery store as a vegetable cart in the Italian section, moving closer to downtown as Wooster Street got richer and richer.  But Richie didn’t know much more than that, and when he asked F about his father’s business, F would mutter something about his old man being a pussy for giving in so quickly.

           Then one day, on the first weekend of September, Cafe Dolores shut down overnight.  It was the middle of a late summer heat wave, and telephone poles and mailboxes seemed to be melting into the street.  The paper threatened a black out because so many people were using air conditioners, and Richie had the uneasy feeling that if he walked for too long, he'd disappear into a black swirl of asphalt and heat.  He didn't have to walk much though. 

            F Scott was selling weed by then, and he had a white Buick Regal that roared around town.   F had a dealer named Lou, the same old guy who'd painted the tunnels years ago, and Richie knew he lived somewhere in the Italian section, down on Wooster Street where iron gates had been put up declaring the neighborhood 'Little Italy.'  Richie pictured Lou as some sort of tycoon who smoked Cuban cigars and wore thousand dollar suits. 

            "I'll take you over to meet him," F promised.  "Just wait until it's the right time.  He's funny like that."

            They were driving to Cafe Dolores where F usually sat and made eye contact with local kids before taking them out to the back of a parking lot to sell them dime bags and sometimes eighths.  Sometimes he’d wander down to the dormitories, selling students bags for rip off prices, bags of  weed cut with so much oregano only a fool would buy it.   Richie usually played chess or poker at the Dolores and tried not to give all his cigarettes to people who bummed.

            When they got to the coffee shop, the doors were closed, and a group of kids with a megaphone stood on the sidewalk.

            "Yale cannot get away with this!" a girl Richie recognized screamed.  She wore Egyptian like make up around her eyes in the Goth style most of the regulars flaunted.

            F parked the Buick, and they fought their way through the crowd.  People shook F's hand, knocking fists on top of fists and snapping a finger in his direction, and all around them the shouts became a chorus.

            "Yale raised their rent over night, on a Friday, so the courts were closed," Andre the out of work tattoo artist bellowed and raised a ‘Yale Should Not Bail’ sign towards the sky. "They were given twenty four hours to pay. The Dolores is done."

            "Just like that?" Richie asked.                                               

            "They're done," a skater repeated, twirling a pacifier on a shoelace at his side.

            The picketing went on all day, and F stood twitching at the curb.  Wandering Bob showed up in the early evening, and Richie supplied him with cigarettes despite himself.  A group of Yalies walked by, in their khaki pants and bent-brimmed baseball caps pulled over cleanly cut hair.  They passed the Dolores without looking at the mob, and noise rose from the crowd as they did so. 

            "We want our town back!" the megaphone girl yelled, her eye make-up streaking her cheeks in the heat.

            "You'd better watch out," Wandering Bob said.  "You make too much noise around here, they lock you up."

            "Who locks you up?" F asked.

            "Cops.  Yale cops.  They put you in the Yale psyche ward and charge you to get out. Happens."  Bob dropped his voice and his eyes darted across the crowd.  Richie thought about Geronimo’s brain then.  He couldn’t articulate it, but he got the feeling that everyone was forgetting that the brain and the labs had somehow caused this problem, as if without a certain piece to a puzzle, the whole scene of downtown would piece apart slowly, starting with the Dolores and continuing until they were all swallowed by something bigger than they were. 

            "Hey Bob," Richie said, "what did you used to say about the underground labs?"

            But Bob stared blankly at him, and Richie began to wonder if he'd made the whole idea of Geronimo up himself.  The heat was giving him a headache behind his eyes, and all around him, air conditioners wheezed.

            "No, come on, did you see anything or not?"  He reached for Bob's arm, but the old man snatched it back. 

            "Be cool man," F said to Richie.  "You know he's seen it.  Right Bob?"

            Richie waited for Bob to say something, believing the answer would come when the old man stopped chewing his lips.  He handed Bob a cigarette, and Bob lit if off the one in his hand.

            "They fuck everyone over around here," Bob muttered smoking more furiously than ever.

            "Well I say we fuck them back!" F Scott yelled.  He ripped his Red Sock’s cap off and raked at his hair.

            And people raised their fists into the air.  "Yeah!"  the crowd shouted.

            When the sun set, Richie and F filled yellow squirt guns with lukewarm water.  They had the kinds of guns that held a gallon each and could shoot jet like streams of water half a block's length.  In bathroom of a falafel place, Richie bent over the gun, angling his dick toward the opening and splashing himself as he released.  It was his piss after all; he’d know it before on his knuckles in the bathroom, or dripping down his leg.  It wouldn’t take long, and moreover, it would be worth it.      They tested the guns in back of the falafel place.  Richie fired at a dumpster and tears of dirt slid down its side.  They climbed into the Buick, and F pulled the brim of his baseball cap down low, over his forehead and his darting brown, almost black eyes.

            Richie stretched the mask's elastic string over his head.  It was a clear mask, the translucent kind with peach colored lips and blue eyelids, eyebrows that appeared penciled there; his face perspired instantly.

            "Let's go," F said, and revved the engine in a long, lawnmower like whirr. 

            Then they were speeding through the red light on Elm Street, around the corner and down Park.  Richie leaned out the window and shot the first of the victims, a flock of Yale girls in white T shirts with hair cut bluntly around their ears.  When he fired the water in a long, piss like stream, the girls screamed. Their voices hit the night air shrilly and somehow at the same pitch as giggles.

            They shot a bigger group and boys in khaki pants and ties   even at nine at night, ties   jumped back and hollered.

            "What was that?" a girl screamed, but F and Richie were already racing fast down to Church Street and taking the corner wide. 

            "Remember, no homeless people," F said.

            Richie switched guns and pumped, and they were circling again, coming up behind an even bigger gaggle of students, and to Richie the gun in his hand had been charged with lightning. He imagined in the morning the papers would say it had only been water, but in an hour, as they ordered sushi or whatever they ate in one of the nicer restaurants, it would be his piss they smelled on their jackets.

            "Remember," F said through his laughter, "only Yalies."

            They turned the corner, back tires skidding out for a moment before falling in line, and then, they were circling the green one more time. All around them the street lights dimmed as the city went into a brown out. The mask welded itself to Richie's face with a film of sweat.  He could picture himself in it, hanging out the window and shooting into the night, a nameless, faceless presence blurring down Elm Street, finally screaming, "Take that you assholes!"

            *         

                                                                                                                                              

            The story inevitably returns to water.  When people talk about the Secret Society, someone always brings up the fact that Skull and Bones runs up the highest water bill in New Haven.  Someone might mention George Street then, that it used to be submerged in ocean.  Those listening picture tanks blurring by through dirt streaked windows and hear the sound of rattling wheels, but it is more like an after image than a real memory and fades quickly.  Some people think of childhood tap nights when they awoke with their pajama legs wet, or about spring nights when they soak their sheets with sweat.  The town feels like a pool on those nights, as if they could float, unanchored in their dreams, into deep ravines or down canals, bumping into buildings they have never noticed before.  They talk about what would happen if the green flooded badly enough, that the bodies would somehow rise and float over to Grove Street where the headstones were moved years before.  Sometimes someone mentions the water boys, who went on a rampage one fall, soaking the town night after night, eventually tossing bucketfulls of toilet water from the Buick window.

            They disagree on how many times it really happened, but most people admit there was at least a two week run of drenchings.  They remember that  inevitably the boys misguessed sometimes, and splashed waiters on their way home from work, or street people standing next to carts of cans and bottles.  Those like the flower vendors, who watched closely, might remember the smell of piss and the exact number of nights, and know that soon after the water throwing, the one kid stopped stooping to pick up dropped money on the sidewalks.

            Maybe he stopped finding cash because of what they did in the Buick, or maybe it was the Buick that caused it to happen.  Not walking so much anymore, Richie lost the knack for finding change and dollars wherever he went.  He felt as if his identity had shape-shifted somehow, like the woman who recited Shakespeare for money on York and Broadway, her eyes rolling crazily as Lady Macbeth, so that she was Lady Macbeth when he passed her.  Somehow, by being refereed to as a ‘Water Boy’, Richie had been forced to exchange one role for another.

                                                                        *

          At first, he was convinced the sidewalks were mocking him.  After a week of not finding anything, Richie stalked change all the way from his house up to Broadway, down one of his luckier routes.  Tiny flakes of mica glittered ahead of him, and twice he mistook silver gum wrappers for dimes.  A bum asked him for money, and Richie surprised himself by announcing, "I don't find fucking shit anymore!" so loudly that the guy shrunk back onto the green.

            That day, Richie wandered into some of the less fancy restaurants and looked beneath tables, catching glares from customers as he scanned the floor under jackets they hung over their chairs. 

            Outside, the world whirred with people.  They hurried to cross streets before lights changed and rushed in and out of shops.  Two men pushed a cart loaded with boxes, and police on horseback barreled by.  A woman pulled the chains on her two dogs as they jumped at Richie. A clamour rose up from the place, and the street seemed to blur, as if all the people had taken up the space he needed to find things in.  Richie stormed up to Broadway to where F Scott leaned against his car.

            "You want to go for a ride?" F asked.

            "It's fucking unbelievable!" Richie said as they cruised around town.  "A week and no money."

            F had long ago exchanged his aviators for black-tinted Oakleys, and yanking them over his eyes, he pulled a bottle of pills from his pocket.

            "Maybe you just got to wait it out," F said.

            "Wait it out?  I never waited it out."

            "Look at me, I can't even move an ounce this week."

            "It's different," Richie muttered.

            F tossed some white pills into his mouth and offered the bottle to Richie, but Richie shook his head.  Speed sent a streak of white heat through his blood and made his head feel like it was going to burst but couldn't, like blue balls of the mind.

            "You know, I've been thinking," Richie said.  "Maybe it's karma."

            F shrugged. "How so?" 

            "Like maybe I'm being punished for shooting those people." They always referred to it as a series of real drive- bys.

            In the past two weeks, they'd only skipped one night when F drove around with a girl until morning.  Somehow, maybe because the weather had shifted from summer to fall, it seemed like they had been soaking people for much longer.

            "You give a fuck about that?" F asked.

            "I don't know.  I mean, why now?  The only difference is that we're throwing water at night."

            "Then we'll stop," F said. “I got shit to do anyway.”

            So the water nights stopped as abruptly as they'd started, but penniless streets continued to haunt Richie.  Sometimes instead of driving around all the time, Richie convinced F to go for long walks, but he never found so much as a lighter low on fluid and usually ended up high and drunk.

            Sometimes people called out, "Hey Water Boys!" as they roared by in the Buick, but Richie ignored the new name.  He was sure the shootings had changed his luck somehow.  When people yelled at them, F would spin the tires and send smoke and exhaust into the street.  Occasionally, when Richie climbed into the Buick, he’d find quarters wedged into the seat crack, but he knew F had put them there himself.

            "Nice try," he would say then.

            F would turn the music up loud and mutter something about karma, knocking on the dashboard after selling a bag.

                                                                        *

                                                                    

            Later, people would speculate on what happened to F Scott.  When Richie and F were out of high school, Richie got a job waiting tables.  He wasn't a good waiter, and on the night Lou died, he was afraid he was going to be fired for laziness.  His old man was already pestering him for rent money, as he called it.

            F showed up in the restaurant popping speed.  Richie was fighting his way through the Friday night crowd to the service bar when F grabbed the sleeve of his white waiter shirt.

            "You gotta get off work."  F's eyes were pure obsidian, so Richie could tell he'd been high for hours. 

            "You crazy, man?"  Richie asked.  "I got a full section."  He thumbed the money in his pocket.

            "Lou's dead," F said, chewing on his lips.

            "Shit," Richie said.  He had only ever met Lou twice.  "How?"

            F shrugged.  "Heart attack or something like that. He owes me almost two grand for this shit I was supposed to pick up tonight.  Fucking money up front."  F moved faster than time, so that Richie, behind on all his orders, wished he too could move that quickly.  He had five tables, and above the bar's clamor he could hear the cooks ringing their little bell.  Inside his head, a clock ticked and would not slow.

            "I gotta get into his house before anyone searches it," F said.  "You coming?" 

            Richie had to drag F over to the hall were the restrooms were while a waitress rushed by and shot them both a dirty look.

            "Are you crazy?"  Richie asked.  "Isn't it in the bank?"

            "Fuck that.  He buries it all in potted plants."

            "Potted plants?" Richie asked, but getting no answer, counted the money he’d made.  “Give me an hour.”

            When he picked his drinks up, he caught the bartender's attention, slapping a twenty down on the bar.  "Get this man whatever he wants on me," he said, gesturing frantically to F.

            Richie collected from his last tables and re stocked the kitchen, but F must have slipped out when Richie’s twenty ran out.  Still in his waiter uniform, Richie took off on his bike towards Lou's house, expecting to see F, dressed somehow all in black then, lurking in the bushes with a razor to slice a square from Lou's window.  The lights in the neighboring houses were out, and a lone street light shone beacon like from downtown.  When he was sure F wasn't there, Richie peddled around town a few times and then headed home.

            F didn't answer his phone all night, but he was there the next day in the restaurant parking lot when Richie’s lunch shift started.  Still freaked out on speed from the night before, F wore a wife beater and a pair the black workout pants in gangbanger style.  Two thick gold chains Richie had never seen weighed heavily around his neck, and his face, with two black circled eyes, appeared coated with wax as he leaned against one of the cook's cars.

            Richie held his waiter shirt over his shoulder, balancing his bicycle with one foot.  

            "I gotta get out of town," F said.  "You want to take the train to the city with me?"

            "What are you wearing?" Richie asked.

            F pumped his chest up, flexing what muscles he’d kept over the years. "I'm going to jail if they catch me.  I don't want to get fucked with there."

            "Jail?  What’d you do man?” Richie didn’t expect an answer.  F was obviously crashing hard, almost inarticulate.  “I’d take that shit off.”

            “I gotta go.  You got any weed?”        

            “There’s a roach in the ashtray at my place. My folks don’t care if you stay in my room.  Just try and hang there."

            "Meet me there, I gotta go," F yelled and started to run out of the parking lot, not bothering to glance back, the speed and fear like demons pursuing him.

            Richie had seen F on a long high before and knew he would have to wear himself down. He shook his head.  "Two thirty!" he yelled after F.

            But when lunch ended, Richie’s mother had seen no sign of F.  Bit by bit, he learned the pieces.  F Scott had tried breaking into Lou's house the night before while Richie got rid of his tables, and jimmying the back door open, F set off the alarm.  Panicking at the sound of sirens, F tore out of Little Italy like hell on fire, Buick tires squealing for miles.  Or Richie imagined.  The car was found wrecked and smoking by the train tracks.  F took off running when the car crashed and hid out until morning when he'd gone and seen Richie in the parking lot.

            Sometime during the lunch shift, F had sneaked back to Lou's house, and the cops who were waiting there told him not to move.  He ran anyway, charging frantically to State Street, in the direction of the train station, and as the cops gained on him, he turned into the tunnel by the coliseum, the one for eighteen wheelers where they'd drunk champagne years before and the smell of wet concrete mingled with an even riper piss.  F raced, propelled jet like into deeper, darker tunnel places, along train tracks and through unlit corridors.  Falling asbestos tore at his eyes as the feet of cops pounded behind him.  The police report said he disappeared there, but Richie could figure.

            Sprinting deep into the belly of New Haven, F hit salt water under George Street, and stopping to raise a wet hand to his mouth, he tasted the Sound.  He kept running until his lungs ripped at him, sure that he would reach the outside somewhere along the coast, and catch a ferry to Long Island.  With the cops far behind him then, F saw the drop, and as if stepping from one frame in a reel of film to the next, he catapulted over the edge with his mouth frozen in a silent scream.

            Richie could figure anyway.  When they never found the body, Richie walked the tunnels at night, but the usual gates were closed.  The cops were sure F had never come out, and even more sure that there was no way into the old parts of the tunnels.  Sometimes Richie told people F was in Jamacia, hiding out in a hammock with a group of whores, operating a chain of jack shacks in Canada, or sneaking around in attics and old warehouses in Brooklyn or Queens.  But F never contacted him, and as months went by, Richie grew sure he was dead. Wandering Bob told Richie that F was underground in a tank somewhere, with a third eye growing on his forehead and tentacles extending where his arms had been, but Richie didn’t believe those stories anymore.  They were just things Wandering Bob said because there was no explanation, and no explanation carved a hollow spot in the world where anything could fit in and become one of Bob’s stories.   Richie told people that somehow, F had been chased into the darkness, through one of the gates that was normally closed, and he had fallen down one of the drops.

           Sometimes when scanning the newspapers, he tried to think about what specifically had happened to F.  But the fact was, there was no real story, nothing that made sense.  F’s father had no ideas later.  Richie had seen him at the church one Sunday soon after F disappeared and, terrified that the man was planning to hold a requiem, approached him.  F’s father crossed his thick arms in front of his chest, and chewing a toothpick in his mouth, said in an accent more Italian than Richie had expected, that he too just didn’t know.  As months went by the not knowing bothered him, and at night Richie would lie awake wondering.  He’d think about F’s father sometimes, and wish he’d asked the man for a picture of F as a child, sensing somehow that seeing the beginning of the story would somehow bring him closer to the end.  He only thought that sometimes though, and whenever he passed the apartment on Goffe Street where F had lived, he never stopped and asked for such a thing.   On the bad nights he wondered if a picture of F would indeed force it to all make sense, because his disappearance had taken F Scott so far out of any context that Richie couldn’t really figure what had happened.  He had to drink vodka or smoke weed then and fall into a heavy , thoughtless sleep.

                                                                        *

            In the thin hours before daybreak, the 59 idles at the platform.  The bleary-eyed shuffle on board, finding their seats by sixth sense.  The train moans five times and still hesitates.  A few miles away, a young man lies, glued down by a long drunk and sweating vodka into his sheets.  The umbrellas of previous years have been packed away; the money has all been spent.  The train allows one last groan.  Dawn will be breaking soon, and the train has to go.  In the bedroom of his parent’s apartment, the beginning of a dream enters the young man’s head but dissipates like engine exhaust.  It wanders to the place for the lost dreams of drunks where a mouth swallows an ashtray of butts; a screen door slams, sending clouds of gnats to die on a porch.  The smell of lavender wrestles the stink of chickens.  A flying dream, triggered by a long bender, soars over chunks of ice, and a naked woman steps in front of a speeding car.  The young man’s vision of his missing friend blends in; ragged wife-beaters float in a puddle of gold.  The train senses the dream’s departure, and its cars sigh as they take off down the tracks, leaving almost despite themselves in the knowledge that sometime soon, even he will dream.

                                                                        *

            Around town, they talk sometimes about the water boy whose friend disappeared, how he used to walk home with baseball sized lumps of change in his pockets.  Those kids giving out Free Food Not Bombs on the green know about him. 

            One asks the other, "Hey whatever happened to that kid?  You know, the one who saw  Geronimo's brain?"

            His friend ladles carrot soup into a container.  "That's not what happened.  He just cracked up.  I see him on Wooster sometimes, you know, 'Little Italy.'"

            "I'd crack up if I saw that brain.  Poor kid."

            "Kid?  He's like older than us."

            But somehow, people picture Richie younger, with a bad haircut, picking up money where it fell and bugging the flower cart vendors for stories about Yale.  They picture him shooting streams of water from the window of F Scott's car, or emerging at Cafe Dolores out of nowhere.

            No one remembers seeing him at K’s Lounge one night, hunched into his jacket on the student side as Peg the waitress shuffled by with pitchers of beer, and he stared through the smoke stained partition to the bar, over to where old men sat like statues, only moving to raise glasses of scotch to parched lips.  Her name   the girl he’d picked up   was Laura.  She was a Sophomore at Yale with thick dark hair and eyelashes, but her ripped jeans and Ramones T-shirt had pegged her as deceivingly un-Yalie like.  After learning her situation, Richie continued hitting her out of some sense of irony.  He felt like cutting off the whole exchange, but felt some obligatory attempt at intimacy.

            She was saying something about the debate team.

            "Hey," he interrupted, "do you know anything about the Secret Society?"

            She looked around for a moment and then laughed, as if realizing she was taking something too seriously, and then her posture seemed to relax.

            "I'm not in it," she whispered.  "But I know all about it."

            "Oh yeah?"  He leaned in closer.  "What's it like?"

            "They have a lot of parties.  Dinners."

            "And what do they do?"

            "They drink beer and eat dinner."  She wrinkled her nose at him.

            "I mean, do they do anything illegal?  Like experiments?"

            She gave him a long, bored look, a look that symbolized all the reasons he didn't want to ever lay eyes on her again, a look that clearly stated he was silly and a dreamer and not part of some world she been born with a ticket into. 

            "Don't be stupid," she said.  "It's more like a big slumber party."

            He realized she'd hurt his feelings.  He stopped paying attention to her then and thought about F for the first time that day.  For all his talk about fucking them back, F had never picked up a Yale chick.  “They puke once you get three drinks in them,” he’d said.

         Richie  excused himself after that and headed down Chapel Street.  For the first time in a while, he found himself looking at the ground as he went, keeping to his old habit of scanning quarters and bills.  He ended up rambling over to Little Italy and past Lou's house.  The lights were on in the front room, and people moved by the window in front of white walls, like in the movies he and F had seen once on the Lower East Side, films that were shown on the side of a building so that car drivers slowed down, only catching an instant of image before rushing on.  Richie kept walking, thinking that the people in Lou's house would go to bed soon but in his mind would stay frozen in the living room all night.  F, having been gone just over a year,  was frozen that way for him in the restaurant parking lot, gold chains strangling his neck, but that image hardly mattered in regard to the mystery that came after.

            Along the side of Libby's Ice Cream, two Goth girls swung double-dutch ropes in the street.

            "You want to jump in?" one of them asked.

            "Please?"  the other one said.  They wore the usual spiked collars beneath cropped, inky hair and looked about fourteen, girls who would’ve been playing checkers or tarot at the Dolores six years ago.

            "Don't know how," Richie answered.  For a moment, he felt like mourning his childhood, as if his life had failed him because he had never learned how to skip between two blurring ropes. He shook his head and walked back downtown across campus.  On instinct, he cut across the green.

            Cliff was there with this guitar, and Leigh the flower lady was with him, leaning against one of the rails and listening to his solo.  The two of them seemed frozen for a moment, their silhouettes all that mattered in the flickering street light, and Richie thought about the quiet walks he had gone on before meeting F Scott and remembered the feeling that the town could end up barren.  Cliff and Leigh looked like subjects in a photograph from that world of endless possibility he’d imagined once, a photograph that would send an electric current through him if he touched it at all.

            He trudged through Cross Campus and passed one of the nameless buildings he’d seen a thousand times before.  There, in front of one of the iron-barred basement windows, a yellow bulb glowed.  Richie crept closer and, crouching down, brought his face to the window bars until the iron chilled him.  His heart pounded in his chest; for a moment he thought he’d see F Scott, smoking cigarettes in handcuffs, his face unshaven and beaten.  The room was empty though.  The light snapped off.

            It wasn’t quite late enough for the campus to be empty.  Two teenagers with skateboards idled as they smoked, and in an archway, a man ate fried chicken from a box.  The campus cops were waiting with their flashing lights, ready to spend them spinning when the wind carried the shriek up over the city, hurling it over the green until it bounced from the campus walls.  Richie’s  shouts kept coming until a small crowd gathered, always the same roar reverberating in the night.

            “I saw it, Motherfuckers!”

copyright 2013 Tara Jill Ciccarone