Chapter 14
jack
When Jack had left home and jumped on that first freight train, it had been the beginning of summer, a year after he’d graduated from high school.
He’d worked in his dad’s store for years, an old-time smoke-and-candy shop on Rising Sun Avenue.
It was like any other shop of that sort, a narrow, grimly lit place with only two aisles, a gasping freezer in the back that looked like it had once stored dead body parts, and a continual smell of burnt ash.
It was hanging on by ragged fingernails, relying mostly on neighborhood foot traffic.
His mom worked in the back, doing a bit of accounting for the shops along that street: the Asian fusion restaurant, the catering shop, the street ministry, the childcare place. She was constantly smoking Virginia Slims and talking on her iPhone to her friends.
She brought in enough money that Jack’s dad didn’t care how much she talked.
Just that the books were straight and nobody came complaining.
Jack’s brothers, Danny and Evan, worked in the shop, too, when they weren’t hanging out with their friends around the high school, looking to score with the girls there, even though they were years too old.
Jack never cared for high school girls—not while he was in school with them, and not after he graduated. Not even the really cute, smart ones who were on the fast track for Bryn Mawr, or so they said.
Nobody had to tell him that those girls were too good for him, even though they were nice to him and laughed at his jokes when they came into the shop for candy and gum. Why they would take the bus or get a ride all the way from the high school to the shop, he could never fathom.
He knew not to tell his dad the truth about those girls: He’d seen two of them kissing at the bus stop, under the trees.
His dad would have thrown them out of the shop and then set the neighborhood buzzing with the news that they were a pair of lesbos. That’s what he called girls like them, lesbos. Jack had to look it up, using the online dictionary in the library.
Lesbos was an island filled with old Greek women reciting poetry and falling in love with each other. It was the opposite, he figured, of being gay, another term his dad liked to fling about.
Jack had known what that meant years before, when a pair of young men had been lingering outside the shop. They’d probably been waiting to go into the Asian fusion place next door and had been holding hands and kissing. Quick pecks, mouth to mouth, little smiles on their faces and in their eyes.
Jack’s dad, seeing this, had roared and stomped outside to give them a piece of his mind. Shoving had started. The police were called, and with three cop cars lining Rising Sun Avenue, all the shop owners had come out to stare and trade gossip and take pictures.
His dad had been angry to begin with, that was true. But he was steaming when the two gay guys weren’t arrested and he, Ben Foxley, got written up for verbal abuse.
Jack, in all innocence, had asked, “What do you care that they were on the street? A lot of people hang out waiting for the bus. Maybe they would have come in and bought something.”
Surely that was the most important thing, right? Building a good relationship with potential customers? At least Jack had thought so.
Ben had disagreed, and when the owner of the fusion place, a nice man named Mr. Bao, who offered them leftovers from his buffet at half price and who always smelled pleasantly like ginger, came over to check on Jack, Ben had gone chest to chest with him and made threats, and the police were called again, twice in one day.
After that, Mr. Bao didn’t offer them leftovers anymore, and Ben started drinking extra hard. And coming after Jack, pointing the finger at him for calling the police, though Jack hadn’t done that and didn’t know who had.
Then came the other accusations: Why was Jack so worried about a couple of fags on the sidewalk? Was Jack like them?
Jack had protested that no, he wasn’t, and then, without a lick of sense, asked, “What’s it to you?”
Ben, who had probably polished off a half pint of whiskey from his own shelves before Jack had even come home from school that day, had landed a couple of smacks to the back of Jack’s head and shouted threats as to what would happen if Jack was late to work again.
That’s when Jack had stood up for himself. And for the two gay guys whose names he didn’t know. And for Mr. Bao, who couldn’t be blamed for never saying hi to him anymore.
Jack missed those spring rolls something awful, and the way Mr. Bao’s place was always so clean and smelled so good. He could still smell the ginger in the air, and the fish oil, and he dreaded going into the smoke shop after school each day.
Before that, Jack had loved working in the shop. High school held no draw for him, not sports, or band, or art, or theater, or whatever. Those kids were losers. The whole thing was a waste of time. His grades were fine, but he could never find his place in that world.
The shop was the answer. Interesting people came into the shop.
Old guys with yellowed, folded bills to exchange for their bundle of three stogies.
Mothers with babies on their hips picking up an overpriced quart of milk to keep from having to make a trip to the supermarket.
Kids from the local elementary school even made trips to the shop for candy and sodas.
He knew his neighborhood pretty well, the loop of a little less than four miles that was his world. Home, school, shop, home. That was it. All he needed.
He was well known there, enough so that he wore long sleeves to hide the bruises on his arms, took to wearing a bandanna around his neck to hide the purple marks left by his dad’s fingers.
Or thin cotton turtlenecks he picked up for fifty cents at the basement charity sales over at Bethel Mar.
Anything to keep the truth from coming out.
Because if it had, Ben would have accused Jack of telling people what he shouldn’t.
One day, before the first snow in November, the year before he left home, Jack had tucked his newest acquisitions, two dark blue turtlenecks, under his arm and wandered up Robbins Street and then over to Devereaux Avenue, just to get some fresh air and walk off the throb in his head and along his jaw from the most recent beating.
His dad’s drinking was getting worse, and accusations of whatever Ben could come up with that Jack had done wrong were coming from nowhere, and at odd intervals.
He discovered the train station on that walk.
Of course he’d known that the station existed, but since his world was his neighborhood, he’d never had reason to take the train anywhere.
He climbed the cement steps and went over the bridge and sat on the platform, as if he had some place to go.
He didn’t, but it gave him a breather before he headed home.
The trees were bare, early frost having taken all the leaves, and then someone with a blower had gotten rid of the evidence, so the platform was bare cement, with benches under metal overhangs. An old brick building stood locked up, since most passengers would probably buy their tickets online.
Up the steps came a young man in a long blue coat made of fine wool. He wore thin leather shoes and carried a briefcase that looked shiny and expensive.
Around his neck was a bright red scarf, finely woven. He walked right by where Jack was sitting with his paltry plastic bag full of used turtlenecks.
He was beautiful. He had penny-gold hair and vivid blue eyes, and his mouth looked made out of raspberry sugar.
He spared only a glance at Jack before going to stand a few yards off, well back from the platform.
He held his briefcase in one hand, resting against his knee, and tapped his toe, waiting for the train.
When the train arrived, it swirled the young man’s hair around, a halo of bobbing curls, and before the young man stepped onto the train, he winked at Jack with all the confidence of a hero about to embark on a quest.
Then the door shut behind him and the train departed the station, and Jack was left with his mouth hanging open and a pattering urgency in his heart, as if he’d discovered something crucial but didn’t know how to define it.
It was more difficult to stay under his dad’s radar when all his brain wanted to do was go over the event, taking it apart as though he were unwinding threads from a densely knitted blanket.
He made himself keep busy and interacted with the girls who came into the shop, even the Bryn Mawr–bound ones with their beautiful skin and perfect teeth and ladylike airs, cashmere sweaters and glossy hair.
None of those girls could hold a candle to the young man from Lawndale Station, and on Jack’s third date with the girl in the pink dress—he never could remember her name—she slapped him away playfully and said, “I’d be more convinced to go all the way with you if you’d stop staring at the guy throwing the pizzas. ”
They’d been at Salerno’s, down the street from the shop, and maybe, Jack didn’t know, he’d made sure to meet the girl right out front, so his dad could see. So his mom could see, and his brothers, if they happened to be there.
The girl was a casual, unserious girl, not Bryn Mawr material at all. More like the kind who’d end up working at the small local grocery store on the downtown block of Rising Sun Avenue. His dad had seen her, and now here she was, accusing him of staring at the guy throwing pizzas.
The guy throwing pizzas could have given platform guy a run for his money.
He was old-stock Italian, with dark, lush hair and glittering brown eyes. He wore tight blue jeans, now dusted with flour, and had a tattoo of a bluebird on his arm that Jack could see where the guy had rolled up his white T-shirt sleeves to his shoulders.