Men with Boxes
22nd Annual Tamarack Award
Fiction By Eric Braun
Photo by Darrell Eager (Photo Illustration)
(page 4 of 4)
“A turd?”
“From the boulevard.”
“And ate it?”
“Washed all that down with a half gallon of milk. And I held my mouth shut with my hands as long as I could, as long as I could. My eyes were watering, my jaw was shaking, and then I puked for, like, 45 minutes.”
“Well, yeah.”
“I thought I was gonna die,” Donnie said. “Do you know what I mean?”
Robert nodded, then changed his mind. “No, what?”
“I held a lighter under my testicle until I passed out. And I took a glass candle stick and laid my finger against the back of that chair and whacked it—as hard as I could.” He gestured toward Robert’s seatback, his eyes level and hard, his lips tight.
For the first time in months, Robert untensed his muscles. His breath came a little easier. He thought he had learned something profound, and he wanted to say something about that, something just as profound, something about pain and its place in the universe, and evolution, and love. But it was hard to find the words.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Robert said, “It’s okay, Donnie.” But he knew it wasn’t true, and so did Donnie, so he came back two days later, a Sunday after church. He told him the story of how he met Vicki: They’d flirted in the library of their southern Minnesota college. She was a history major. She’d acted embarrassed, hiding her face behind a book because she was smiling so much, and it made Robert feel good, that smile, because it was such a real thing, and it was for him. On another visit he told Donnie about Evan’s birth, how the nurse had bathed the baby, and helped Robert change him, and taught Vicki how to feed him. And after the accident, when he went to the hospital—he talked about that, too—how a nurse had given Robert Evan’s little tennis shoes in a plastic bag. Robert told other things, confessions, indignities, and through the winter his words collected in the room and grew heavy. Soon Donnie began to speak, too. Not about Evan, but still. He and Robert swapped stories about jumping off the train trestle, the two of them bouncing the racquetball back and forth. They were healing. And then last week, Donnie’s father stood in the middle of the front doorway with his feet directly below his shoulders and shook his head.
“But I thought this was what you wanted,” Robert said, his stocking cap in his hand.
Donnie’s father didn’t move. His thick beard spread almost to his eyes.
“I thought this was good.”
“Robert—”
“Please,” Robert said. “We’re friends.”
“He’s only a boy,” the man said. He uncrossed his arms, but only to reach for the handle and shut the door, and Robert saw that he was weeping suddenly, and he saw that all his visits had been for himself and not for Donnie at all.
THE BUS LEFT downtown, then the city limits altogether, humming along a six-lane divided road into a suburb, where they pulled to an intersection big enough for jetliners. Someone in a white apron carried a bag of trash from the back of a chain restaurant to a dumpster. White breaths puffed out from his mouth. “Do you have any kids?” Robert asked.
“Look,” the salesman replied, “would you mind—you know….” He gestured to the empty seats with his fat hand.
“Oh,” Robert said.
“I’m sorry about your job and everything, but, it’s just, there’s so much room. And we’ve got these bastard boxes.”
Robert hoisted his box onto the seatback and stood.
“I’m sorry,” the salesman said.
“Don’t worry about me.”
Here is the story Robert would have told Donnie last week, if Donnie’s father hadn’t stopped him: After he met Vicki that first time, he went back to the library every night, trying to find her again. He always checked the table next to the huge dictionary, where they had talked, and then he filed systematically between the shelves on all three floors, until after two weeks he saw her. She had wavy, black hair. When he sat across from her, she lifted her dark lashes from her book. He said he’d been looking for her a long time, and she laughed. “Well hello, Magellan,” she said. And she smiled again in that way she had before, like smiling was all there was, and inside Robert the idea cracked open that he mattered.
The salesman pulled the cord. The bus rolled to the curb so he could leave, and after the doors squeaked shut behind him, Robert was alone. He waited. At the next stop, a person with a box did not get on. At the stop after that, when a person with a box did not get on, he imagined one did. He imagined many of them: a bus so full of box people they stood with their boxes under their arms, holding onto the rail with their free hands. They shared the parts of their stories it was possible for them to share. They shared snacks. Someone had a thermos of coffee. Robert split his sandwich. This is a true story, they told each other. They agreed to meet on the same bus tomorrow. They decided not to get off this bus at all. They hoped the driver would keep going.
Finally, Robert stepped off. Squinting against the sun and the sun reflected in the snow, he shouldered his box and began to walk. His breath dampened his scarf, and there was no sidewalk, so he walked in the gutter, shuffling through the slush, feeling for ice patches, feeling his way home.
