A Hole in the Universe Read online

  “Yes. Of course.” He’d worked everywhere, in the library, laundry, kitchen, dining room, infirmary. But mostly in the sign shop. “I was a good worker. I always worked really hard. I like working. I always did.”

  “Hmm.” She looked at her watch. “Well! I guess that about covers it. Unless there’s something you’d like to add.”

  “Just these, I guess.” He handed her the file. “They’re letters. They’re all from people I know. Well, people who know me. And who think I’m a good . . . worker.” He’d almost said “person.”

  She thanked him, put the file into hers. “So what we’ll do is go over everything and if something comes up, some position that’s compatible with your particular experience, Mr. Loomis, then we’ll certainly be in touch,” she recited with a dismissive smile as she and Mr. Brown got up. Gordon rose in a panic. He couldn’t very well go back to the car after such a short interview. The new suit. Dennis’s canceled patients. “Excuse me! Could I just tell you about the sign shop?”

  “The sign shop?” She glanced at Mr. Brown.

  The prison shop made street signs for cities and towns all over the state. He had been in charge of the enameling process, getting the heat to the right temperature, then baking the signs. Well, in a manner of speaking, baking them, he added in a thin voice. “I did it for almost ten years.”

  “Really? Well, that’s a long time.” She was at the door again. “Well, in any event, Mr. Loomis, thank you. Thank you for coming.”

  “But I don’t even want Human Resources!” he blurted before she could leave. “I’m much better with my hands. I mean, I’m quite conversant with the . . . the thing you make, the flashlight.” He had taken it apart and then assembled it countless times last night. “In fact, I . . . I . . .” Breathless, he couldn’t think. “I mean, actually making the flashlight, that’s what I’d rather do. But of course I’ll do a good job wherever I am. I just need a start. Someone to take a chance on me.” He felt sick, weak for sounding so frantic. She stepped back, as if from cornered vermin. “I’m sorry!” he said quickly. “I’m nervous. I shouldn’t be here. I’m not ready.”

  “You can always come back another time, Mr. Loomis.”

  “But that doesn’t mean you’ll hire me though, does it?” he asked quietly.

  “I didn’t say that!” Another step back.

  “No, I know! What I meant was, it’s my brother. He thinks this is all set, so if I say you said I could come back, then that’s what he’ll ask me. The same thing. But if I tell him, ‘No, they don’t want me’—that, he’ll understand.”

  “It’s not like this is anything personal, Loomis.” And in Brown’s growl Gordon felt the steel cold at his face, the warning in the guards’ hard eyes.

  “No,” Miss Jamison added. “It’s just a matter of no positions being available right now.”

  “Of course. Yes. I understand,” Gordon said. He stepped into the hallway, then turned suddenly and stuck out his hand. She cringed, gasping. They regarded each other with mutual horror. “I was just going to say thank you. I forgot to say that.” He felt like the same sideshow freak he’d been at the trial—the last time he’d had to convince someone he was a normal human being.

  All the way back, Dennis tried to contain his anger. He reminded himself of what Lisa kept saying: that Gordon shouldn’t be rushed; he would have to be coaxed from his numbness, eased into everyday life. But she hadn’t known Gordon as a kid. He’d always been like this: thickly, maddeningly stubborn, to the point of oafishness, always being picked on, never fighting back or protesting, never telling anyone or even taking a different route to school to avoid their taunts, instead just plodding along as if it weren’t really happening, as if he didn’t care. But from the next room his younger brother would hear him cry out in the middle of the night, “Don’t! Please don’t! Please don’t do that!” Don’t just stand there with your head down, their mother had told them both. Act like a loser and that’s how you’ll be treated. Look people right in the eye and tell them exactly who you are! Who’s that, Ma? Dennis would ask, not just to get her going, which it always did, but because it had really meant something. “The last name might be Loomis, but remember, up here you’re Teresa Pratt’s kid. And up here’s what counts,” she’d say, tapping her temple.

  Of the two brothers, Gordon was most like his father, a shy, dull man, a cement worker for years until he injured his back pouring a foundation. When his father went on disability, Teresa’s uncle, Jimmy Pratt, a records clerk at City Hall, spoke to his buddy the mayor. One phone call, and the next day perky Teresa was a secretary at the high school. She couldn’t type, so they put her in charge of the copy machine, on which she printed out exams and study guides, reading them for typos and learning as much as she could about everything, preparing for the day opportunity knocked on her door. Education, she preached constantly—it was the surest road to success. But if their mother’s determination had fueled one son, it had had little effect on Gordon, who was just as awkward around people as their father. Dennis still remembered the time his mother was too sick to attend his basketball banquet. Without her effervescent shield, his father and brother never once left their seats at the farthest table in the corner for fear someone might speak to them.

  Dennis clicked on the door locks as he came off the highway. The minute he turned onto Nash Street, bleakness took hold, the gray net slipping over his eyes every time he came back. The neighborhood had never been much, but now it was a slum. Broken windows. Graffiti, the swaybacked, sinuous lettering, words that made no sense, it was everywhere. Here, the word cargo sprayed on the front door of the Langs’ big old Victorian on the corner. Once the nicest house in the neighborhood, it had been chopped up into tiny apartments. Ten mailboxes flanked the door, their ragged strips of masking tape bearing the latest tenants’ names. The house across from the Langs’ had stood empty for years before it caught fire last winter. A homeless man had kept himself and his dog warm by burning papers and wood scraps in a bathtub. Plywood covered the windows, and with the slightest wind the blue tarpaulin on the roof puffed up and down over charred rafters. A man wearing a glittering gold necklace stood on the corner, lighting a cigarette for a skinny girl with pale, frizzy hair.

  “Nice,” Dennis said, watching. She was no more than thirteen or fourteen.

  “Wait!” Gordon called, and Dennis hit the brake.

  The man’s hand slid to his pocket. He stared as the silver BMW slowed. “Go ahead, try it,” Dennis muttered, staring back.

  “What’d that sign say?” Gordon was trying to see out the rear window.

  “What sign?”

  “Back there. In the market.”

  “But you’ve got tons of food. For at least two weeks, anyway, Lisa said.” He backed up, stopping in front of the Nash Street Market. Crooked, curling signs in the dingy windows advertised the week’s specials. A square of red-lettered cardboard taped to the front door said HELP WANTED.

  “Okay,” Gordon said, turning back.

  “No,” Dennis groaned. “Don’t even think of it. You don’t want to do that. C’mon, Gordon. I mean, for chrissakes, it was just one interview. So maybe they did have security sitting in. I mean, what do they know about you? What does she know? You could be some screwball, some raving maniac, some kind of—”

  “Killer.” Gordon unknotted his tie.

  “But she doesn’t know what happened. The details. So naturally she’s a little tense. But what’re you going to do? You’re never going to go on another interview? Instead, you’re going to go what? Take up where you left off twenty-five years ago? Be a stock boy at the Nash Street again? What’re you gonna do, wrap chickens? Juggle melons? Stack fucking tampon boxes?” he shouted, already knowing by the set of his brother’s thick jaw that that was exactly what he wanted. Safety. A corner, a hole, some dark, out-of-the-way place to curl up in for the next twenty-five years. “Like Dad!” he exploded, then caught himself. “You know what I mean,” he said more soft
ly, then jabbed his brother’s arm as they neared the little white house, their childhood home. Dennis’s chest felt tight. Coming back here was a mistake, but Gordon had insisted. It was all he had, he said, the one thing he’d looked forward to all these years.

  “C’mon, Gordon, just give it a chance, will you? I know people. Lisa’s dad—I got all these contacts. I’m not going to let you down. You know I’m not!” He turned too fast into the narrow driveway, annoyed yet again with the hard bounce over the concrete berm, their father’s barrier against rainwater surging in from the street, even though the driveway was pitched higher than the road: his life’s energy squandered on petty projects, meaningless chores like his beloved rosebushes overrun now with weedy vines.

  “I know,” Gordon said before he got out.

  A curtain moved in the window of the house next door. Gordon looked away quickly, but Dennis waved. “Always on duty, the old bitch,” he said through a smile as Mrs. Jukas peered from the side of the curtain the way she used to when they were kids.

  “She must be lonely without Mr. Jukas. He was a nice man,” Gordon said.

  “Yeah, nice man, always bird-dogging Mom.” He didn’t tell his brother, but after their mother died Mrs. Jukas had cornered him at the funeral home to say she hoped he wouldn’t be selling the house to Puerto Ricans now the way everyone else had done. It wasn’t his to sell, he’d said, enjoying the sour pucker of her mouth. His parents had left it to his brother.

  Even freshly painted with new blinds and curtains, the wallpaper borders, and Lisa’s delicate stenciling in the kitchen, it still looked the same. Tired, cramped, the kind of place you’d live in only because you had to. When Gordon had seen it last week, he had been amazed by the changes, the furniture, the big television on its laminate wooden stand, the cordless phone. Even the metal storm door, he had said, entering the kitchen, overwhelmed to think they’d bought all this for him to live here. Dennis had to explain that things seemed new only because he had never seen them before. Most of it had been bought by their parents after he went away. Went away, the euphemism, their code for imprisonment, for the wrenching turn their lives had taken. Gordon had gone away, taking along laughter and whatever good times there had been. Now they were gone and he was back.

  Gordon’s big feet thudded up the stairs. He can’t wait to get out of the suit and tie. What was that all about? Dennis wondered. Just a favor he had to do for me? Go through the motions, never being honest so people won’t get mad at him? So they can’t get too close? Dennis called up to remind him that Lisa was expecting him for dinner Friday night. “She wants to know if you’re bringing Delores,” he added.

  “It’ll be just me.”

  “But you said you were going to ask her!” When Dennis had run into Delores the other day, he’d mentioned dinner, foolishly saying that Gordon would call her.

  “I know, but I didn’t.”

  “So call her now. She’s dying to see you. She told me.”

  Looking down from the top step, Gordon shook his head. “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t feel like it.”

  “Jesus, she’s your friend! I mean, she’s been writing and going up there for how many years now?” Not much to look at, maybe, but she was exactly what his brother needed right now, a good woman and a good job. Gordon’s impassive stare was maddening. Goddamn sphinx, he should consider himself lucky Delores even cares. Lucky she’s so desperate. “You gotta call her, Gordon. It’s the least you can do.”

  “What time should I come?”

  “Anytime.” Dennis grinned with the rare concession. “We’ll probably eat at six-thirty or seven, but you know Lisa, the earlier the better!”

  CHAPTER 2

  As Gordon came down Nash Street, he wondered if the Dubbin family still owned the Market. He had been the same age as the Dubbin twins, Cynthia and Cornelius, though he’d hardly known them. They lived in Dearborn and seldom came into the store. He remembered their white-columned brick house from Sunday drives through Dearborn’s tree-lined streets while his mother pointed out her favorite houses. First on the route belonged to the Dubbins, whom she felt she knew because her son worked for them. Next came her doctor’s house, her principal’s, Mrs. Jukas’s sister-in-law’s, and others she had never met but had read about in the paper.

  Faded paint was peeling off the Nash Street Market sign. Warped green roof trim arched over the plate glass like an enormous eyebrow. A web of duct tape patched the shattered lower half of the exit door. Gordon pushed the door open, relieved it wasn’t automatic. He always had the feeling he had to hurry through before they swung back and hit him.

  The old smell of damp fruity dust seemed to grow right over him. He paused by the rusted office grate. One thing was different: the quiet, the strange emptiness for midmorning. No cashiers at the registers. Maybe it hadn’t opened yet. He froze; only his eyes moved. What if something had just happened, and here he was, a week out of Fortley, first on the scene? Who would ever believe him? He started for the door when he saw a tall man with long curly hair stacking pasta boxes at the end of an aisle.

  “Excuse me!” Gordon called with a weak wave. The man didn’t look up. Remembering Miss Jamison’s startled reaction, Gordon jammed both hands into his pockets and cleared his throat. “Umm, I don’t mean to bother you, but is the store closed?”

  The man looked back and snorted. “Well, whaddaya think, you’re in here, aren’t ya?”

  “Well, I know, but I didn’t see anyone, so I thought maybe I was too early or something.”

  The man edged back with Gordon’s approach.

  “I mean, it just seems to be the two of us. And . . .” He took a deep breath. Sweat seeped into his eyes, making him blink.

  “And what?” The man glanced past him.

  “Well, I . . . could I . . . ,” he stammered. “I . . . I need to . . . well, you see, I came in to . . . Are you the manager?”

  “Christ! Another fucking holdup?” the man said, shaking his head. “Look, you don’t need the manager. The safe’s empty! They don’t even bother anymore. They just put enough in the registers to get started.” He pointed toward the office. “The register keys’re—”

  “No!” Gordon shouted. “This isn’t a holdup! I’m not going to rob you! I just . . .” He started to take his hands out of his pockets, then stopped with the shock on the man’s face. They’d been robbed before; the man might be armed. Gordon stared and kept talking. Knowing what to do in a precarious moment was second nature now. “I just want a job. I saw the sign. That’s why I came in. That’s why I’m here.” He tried to smile. His eyes stung from the sweat.

  “And that gun in there don’t mean nothing, right?”

  “No! No gun!” Gordon raised his arms. “See! Just hands, that’s all.”

  Eddie Chapman explained that he was the owner’s brother-in-law, as they walked to the rear of the store, past the meat counter into a sour-smelling storage area. One cashier was out sick, and the other was in the bathroom. He’d come in to help. “My wife’s brother,” he said with a rap on a black door. He shook his head, sighed, rapped again. “Neil! Hey, Neilie, you up?” he called, ear at the jamb. He lowered his voice. “His wife, she’s giving him one more shot at it. A week, she said, and then that’s it. Jesus Christ,” he muttered, and hit the door harder. “Neilie!”

  “What? What?” a thick voice growled.

  Eddie opened the door an inch wide. “There’s a guy here,” he called in. “He wants the job.”

  “Later.” A moan. “Yeah. Later.”

  “He’s big, Neil. Really big.”

  “Oh, oh, oh,” came a groan as the man on the narrow cot struggled to get up. “But no lights. Jesus Christ!” He shielded his eyes from the opening door. “What’s his name?”

  “What’s your name?” Eddie asked, then repeated it back.

  “Loomis,” the man echoed from the murky darkness. “Loomis,” he grunted, strai
ning to raise himself up on one elbow. The only light came from the half-opened door. He held out his hand. “Jesus Christ, Eddie, I can’t do this.” He fumbled through blankets on the cot, then turned back, wearing sunglasses. “So, what? You want the job?” He belched. “You wanna be part of the Nash Street Market family? You wanna be on my team? Cuz if you do, I gotta warn you, I’m a son of a bitch to work for, right, Eddie?” Neil laughed, and so Eddie did. “I’m a real ball buster. Oh, yes, I am. Eddie’ll tell you,” he murmured, groping his way back down onto the cot. “You tell him, Eddie! You be sure and tell him now!” He turned toward the wall in a tight curl.

  “So what should I do?” Eddie asked.

  “Whatever the hell you want to do, Eddie,” Neil Dubbin groaned.

  The HELP WANTED sign stayed in the window even though his first day on the job had begun. There were two registers open. At the first was June, a tiny gray-haired woman with a hacking cough. She was the fastest cashier but couldn’t bag groceries because of her emphysema. In the lulls between customers, she reached down and switched on her oxygen tank, then slipped the clear tubing over her head and adjusted the prongs in each nostril.

  Serena was at the next register. She was a tall, coarse-skinned woman with large teeth and tendrils of ivy tattooed up each finger of her right hand. A small silver hoop pierced her left nostril. She and June seemed in a constant state of annoyance with customers. So far they’d had little to say to their huge, clumsy bag boy who kept filling the bags until they were too heavy. The bottom of the last customer’s bag had ripped open, spilling cans all over the sidewalk out front.

  “Hey, Gordon,” Serena called as he double-bagged milk, juice, and cigarettes for a fat, bearded man in a dungaree jacket. “We’re running low on plastic.”

  “Bags. Out back,” June wheezed, then pushed a REGISTER CLOSED sign onto the belt.

  Gordon hurried through the meat-cutting room.

  “Whatever it is, tell ’em we’re out,” Leo, the butcher, called as he continued shrink-wrapping packages of ground beef.