Monkey Island (2 page)

Clay didn't go to school in the morning and not for the rest of the week either.

During the days, he wandered along the hotel corridors and up and down the gray cement stairways. He was always cautious, on the lookout for older boys and girls, some of whom would take whatever you were carrying away from you, and even your clothes. From behind locked doors of rooms, he heard people talking or quarreling. He heard loud radios playing what his mother called “hammer music,” and sometimes children laughing and shouting or crying.

There was supposed to be a security man in the lobby, but he seldom showed up. Still, when Clay walked through there, he felt nervous. If the security man suddenly appeared, he'd ask Clay why he wasn't in school. He might call the police.

One morning he went to a park several blocks east. The only children in the play area were babies in strollers or carriages wheeled by their mothers, and there was nothing to do but watch them. A policeman came and stood behind the swings to smoke a cigarette. Clay left at once.

There was nothing to do on the street near the hotel either except watch the passing cars, or the people going in and out of the apartment house across the street. He wasn't worried about their noticing him. They never looked at the hotel. They didn't look at much except the dogs some of them led on leashes out to the sidewalk at dusk.

At night he didn't get under the blanket on his cot but slept beneath his mother's coat. He had eaten the bread, the bananas, and the doughnuts. Although he was hungry, he didn't open the can of soup and heat it up. The thought came to him that it was his mother who should do that, who should turn on the hot plate and open the can with the opener she had bought at the little hardware store around the corner. If he opened the can of soup, she wouldn't come back.

But he knew he had to eat, even though something peculiar had happened to his appetite. It was as if all the hunger he felt was only in his head, not in his stomach. On the third night he'd been alone, he opened the door a crack and waited for Mrs. Larkin, who lived in the next room with her backward son, Jacob, to put out her garbage in a black plastic bag. During the night, someone was supposed to collect the garbage people left outside their doors even though that was against the hotel rules. There was always enough left scattered along the corridor to sour the air.

He waited for what seemed an hour until he heard Mrs. Larkin drop the bag on the floor and lock her door. He tiptoed out and went to the bag and undid the thick, slippery knot. He found a few pieces of bread, a chicken wing that had a little meat left on it and which he ate with a slight shudder, and an apple with one bite taken from it. His mother had told him that Jacob didn't like anything but french fries, and Mrs. Larkin had to throw away most of the food she tried to persuade him to eat.

As Clay lay in bed, his hands gripping the coat, he knew something was bound to happen. Someone would come to the room, maybe two or three people. The school might send a truant officer. The woman his mother called Miss You-can't-fool-me would turn up from Social Services, or else the man from Missing Persons, who always wore a whole suit and who had visited them twice before in their old apartment, would step into the room, his mouth full of questions about Clay's father: Did Mr. Garrity drink? Take drugs? Had he been depressed? Was he unstable? Was Mrs. Garrity sure he wasn't living somewhere with another wife? His mother had said, as she gave the man a photograph of his father, “He's been out of work a long time.”

For as far back as Clay could recall, his father had gone to his office carrying a large leather portfolio that held layouts for the magazine where he was the art director. Not much art, his father often said. It was more like being a puzzle director, figuring out how the copy would fit around the advertising and the photographs. Then the magazine folded. That is, his father explained to him, it ran out of subscribers and money.

Mr. Garrity began to collect unemployment insurance and look for the same kind of job he had lost. But it seemed that many magazines were folding and many art directors were looking for work and not finding it. After a few months, he was hired by a house painter and painted apartments all over the city. Then the painter fell ill and went back to Greece, where he had come from, and where his family could help take care of him. Mr. Garrity sold ties for a few weeks in a men's clothing store and took his lunch to work in a paper bag to save money. But the manager of the store said Mr. Garrity wasn't friendly enough to customers and wasn't cut out to be a salesman.

He kept looking for work, any kind of work. And then one morning he said he couldn't go out their front door, he had to think, he had to figure out what had happened to his life.

Clay's mother was afraid of the doorbell ringing. It might be a bill collector or someone from the landlord's office. “Something has to be done,” she had said. His father had not looked up at her words but continued to stare at his shoes, which, Clay had noticed, were dusty and worn down at the heels.

One evening his mother came home an hour after the time when they usually sat down to supper. Her face was flushed as though she'd been running, and her voice, which was usually low and agreeable, was loud and sharp. She had gone to see an old school friend, she said. “You remember Maggie?” she asked. Mr. Garrity nodded, not looking interested. “She's made a lot of money designing sports clothes and she's loaned me—it's strictly a loan, Lawrence—enough money so I can enroll in a computer course and take care of things while I'm being trained. There are jobs out there, and I'm going to get one of them.”

Clay had been doing his homework on the kitchen table and, after a minute or two, he looked up at his mother and father because neither of them was saying a word. He saw a look pass between them that startled him. It was as if they had never met each other before. His father pressed himself back in the chair he was sitting in, drawing in his elbows and legs. His mother stood a few feet away, her face still red, one arm held out, her palm turned up as though she was offering him something.

His mother completed her course and found a job in a Wall Street office, where she worked what she called the graveyard shift, from eleven to seven in the morning. “All alone up there on the thirty-fifth floor with machines humming and clicking away,” she said. “I sort of like it.” When she came home, Clay was usually on his way to school, not the one he'd been going to since they'd had to move into the hotel.

The flush faded away from his mother's face, and her voice lost its sharpness. The rent was paid, and some early evenings the three of them even went out to supper at a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, where they had gone often when his father was still an art director. But something was different.

Whatever it was, it always began around suppertime. They would all be in the kitchen, his father looking down at the stove at something he'd cooked—he did most of the cooking now—and his mother might be at the sink, washing lettuce. Whatever it was didn't show itself in words. It was hidden somewhere in the hot silence.

Clay tried to ignore it while he was eating supper. But he thought about it in school. “You're not paying attention, Clay,” his homeroom teacher said. “You're daydreaming.”

He wasn't daydreaming, he wanted to protest. He was thinking so hard his forehead ached.

One night loud voices from the living room woke him. His mother and father were fighting.

“How
can
we?” his father suddenly shouted. “I might never get work again except for piddling temporary jobs. Another baby? You're crazy!”

“It's too late now,” his mother cried out. “We'll have to find a way.”

Clay pulled the covers over his head, then reached out and pushed the pillow on top of the covers.

The next day, his father met him after school and took him to the zoo. It was rainy, and most of the animals had retreated into the sheltered areas of their cages. Only a tiger paced behind the bars, panting, its golden eyes passing over their faces as though they were stones, its great paws slapping the wet cement floor of its cage.

“I think the tiger hates being in there,” his father said.

“It gets fed,” Clay said.

“That's true. Just enough food so it will have the energy to pace.”

Clay did not feel his father was speaking to him; he might even have forgotten that Clay was there, standing next to him.

Clay's mother was put on an earlier shift for a week, so Mr. Garrity and Clay were alone in the kitchen in the evening. At first Clay felt relieved by a kind of calm silence between them as they both went about fixing their supper. But when his father didn't say a word while they were eating their hamburgers and baked potatoes, Clay made up a story about a lost dog following him home, because he wanted to hear a voice, even if it was just his own.

His father kept his head bowed over his plate. Was he listening? At last Clay said, “Daddy? Could you say something?”

His father stood up so quickly his chair fell to the floor with a bang. He came quickly to Clay's side and crouched down and put his arms around him tightly. Clay could barely breathe. “I'm sorry,” his father said over and over again.

Later, when he leaned down to kiss Clay goodnight before turning off the light on the table next to the bed, he took a five dollar bill from his jacket pocket and tucked it under the pillow. “That's for you to buy something nice tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe that ring puzzle you liked that we saw yesterday in the stationery store.”

Stationery store. Those were the last words he heard from his father. He was gone the next morning, and he didn't come back.

People came to the apartment—a colleague of his father's from the magazine that had folded; Maggie, his mother's rich friend; their next-door neighbors, a couple whom they hadn't seen much of since his father had lost his job; and finally the man from Missing Persons, who came twice.

His mother continued to go to work at night. She had to, she told Clay. You can't live in a place like this without money, she said.

She gave a key to the neighbor woman to look in on him during the night. Clay wondered if it was his father's key. Most mornings she managed to get home in time to make him breakfast. In school, he thought of her sleeping in the broad daylight while the cars honked on the street below their windows.

There was no word from his father. “Is he dead?” Clay asked one evening.

“I think he's looking for work,” his mother said. “I'm sure he's going to find a job so he can take care of us and … the new baby.” She glanced at him. “You don't look surprised,” she said.

“I heard you one night,” he said. “I heard about the baby.”

She looked away from him, her hands gripped in her lap. “I'm sorry you heard about it that way,” she said.

Not more than a few weeks after that conversation, his mother had to stop work. The doctor said she might lose the baby if she kept on the way she was going, working too hard and not getting enough sleep. During the days she went out, “to get help,” she told Clay. That's when he first heard about Social Services and aid for dependent mothers and minors. He was a minor because of his age.

He thought of himself as another kind of miner, one who went deep into dark, airless passages beneath mountains, searching for something.

Now he kept moving during daylight. He didn't think about much except making himself invisible so that the security guard, the teenagers who hung out in the corridors and stairwell, and the people who gathered in clumps in the lobby during the afternoons and evenings wouldn't notice him at all.

On the fifth night that his mother didn't return, he had just gotten the knot undone on Mrs. Larkin's plastic bag when she suddenly opened the door. He gasped.

“Take it easy,” Mrs. Larkin said. Clay glimpsed Jacob sitting on a bed, watching the screen of a small television set with the sound turned off, his feet turned out like a duck's feet.

“What's going on here?” Mrs. Larkin asked. She reached out and grabbed Clay's hand. “Where's your mother?”

He couldn't answer. His throat had closed up.

“I wondered who'd been going through my garbage,” she was saying. He realized from her voice that she wasn't going to be angry.

“She went away to look for my father,” he managed to say, but his words ran together and he wasn't sure, from watching her face, that she'd understood him. She was still holding his hand, but her grip loosened. He could have pulled away. For the moment, he didn't want to.

“Come on in,” she said. “I'm going to give you a bit of supper, late as it is, and you're going to tell me what's up.”

Jacob slowly turned his head to look at Clay. He was a grown-up man, but Clay knew that his body and head were only a costume. He didn't see or hear too well. He often moaned like a seal. But he could smile, and he smiled now at Clay and waved at him with one of his big lumpy hands that was like a work glove full of sand.

“That's right, Jacob,” Mrs. Larkin said. “Wave to him so's he'll know he's welcome.”

There was a real stove in the room, although it was very small, like a toy stove, and Mrs. Larkin towered over it. Soon she had filled a bowl with pea soup and put it on a little table, along with a spoon and two pieces of dark bread covered with margarine. She took a chair to the table and said to Clay, “Go to it.”

As he looked at the food, Clay was afraid he might shout with the hunger he suddenly felt and that had been, somehow, postponed until this very minute. He ate everything. When he'd finished, he looked up to see that Jacob had fallen over on his side and was moaning. Mrs. Larkin took hold of his shoulders and set him upright as though he was a big doll.

She turned to Clay. “Tell me,” she said.

“She didn't come back,” he said.