the speed at which i travel (chapter thirty eight)
My only real friend in Elysium, Iowa was Peter Porlucas; he was Italian, but he wasn’t, cause he was adopted.
His mom was a one-woman assembly line of food feeding us cheese-laden, breaded dishes bathed in olive oil with names I couldn’t begin to pronounce let alone spell. Tastes so different from anything I’d ever put in my mouth I was never quite sure they were supposed to be eaten. She wore old clothes. Not old like she’s worn them a lot, but old like in not from this century. She had hair in places that I’d always seen bare and there was something around her eyes, a Mediterranean depth, that belied any Midwest roots. Her ankles were as big as my father’s. But she had an olive beauty that you could make out just below the surface.
Pete’s Dad was stout and had a Boston accent, despite being from Missouri. He always sat by the TV with a pipe and nodded at Peter and me as we’d go in and out of the house; he’d tap his pipe loudly on the rim of his rocks glass if we forgot to shut the door behind us.
Peter had reddish hair and freckles, with a rabbit’s overbite and the build of someone who tried hard to be athletic, despite all that nature had held back. You could see it. In Peter’s body the things he tried hard to be, they reached out like arms grasping for something perpetually out of reach. It earned him the nickname “Little Italy.”
Pete taught me how to masturbate, behind an old barn, and I pretended I didn’t know. We plowed through the arcana of boyhood archetypes together and he made me promise we’d always stick together and maybe never let the outside world get to us. We were both outcasts— me by choice… sort of, and he by defiance of his will. He tried so hard to fit in that it made the chances of such a thing hopeless.
I’m not sure if he settled for me or if there was some kind of magnetics that brought us together. Either way, he would shed tears in front of me; about his brother who beat up on him, about his height, about everything that he kept inside. He’d always end these confessionals by pretending it was all in jest. But there was a spark of knowing in his eyes, a silent pact he was making with me.
When we were at school, though, and the kid’s would get bored and start picking on him, he’d turn on me. Every time.
“Hey, I saw Indiana taking a bath with his mom.”
Things that had no basis in fact, but would do the trick in re-routing the attention and ridicule from himself for a few minutes. For my part, I would take it in stride, either letting it wash over me, or in braver moments, murmuring back to the biggest kid who would ask me in a mocking bellow so that everyone could here, “Is it true, you take baths with your mom?”
“No.” I remember answering one day, after my father had disappeared, “It was your mom.”
All that got me was sent me to the nurse’s and then to Dr. Handler’s for stitches. Nothing good ever came out of it.
Peter would never disclose to the others any real confession I made to him. The ones he’d let loose were from out of nowhere. I guessed they were parts of his own life, things he was embarrassed about. Like he wanted to exorcise them, get ‘em out there in a masked confession. Whenever we were alone, though, we’d never discuss it— why he’d turn on me and make up those lies. Partly because I think both of us knew why but didn’t know what that meant. And the words were a little too ripe not to just swallow.
One day we were playing war in the woods behind his house with his father’s old army gear. It’d just rained the day before and everything was mushy except the air, which was crisp. I had captured him and was standing over his body, his arms pinned under my feet. He kept saying I could wear the gear next, but it would always be “five more minutes.” I held in my hands the hard, metal helmet he’d been wearing and we looked at each other. It was a dull, brown green and I held it over him, examining it like a spoil of war, as he looked up at me from the ground. I caught his eye and both by accident and on purpose I let go. The hard stained helmet came down on his face catching his buck-rabbit teeth and making a clink that echoed like a bee-bee gun hitting a bell. I watched the sound escape through the branches above like a bird fleeing. He let out a loud “Ahhhhhh” that rose in volume, as he got up and felt his lips. They were bleeding. I was frozen with shock, not quite believing what I had just done.
“I didn’t do that” is the first thing I said.
When he took his hands away from his mouth, I could see that both of his front teeth had been chipped.
“My mom’s gonna fucking kill you,” he lisped.
I watched a speck of blood fly out, as he spoke, and land on my soiled, white t-shirt. In between the dots of mud it almost blended in. And I thought to myself maybe no one will notice.
By the time they found the cancer in his stomach, it was the size of a baseball. He spent four weeks at the hospital up in Iowa City and then died. It was the day after our eighth grade graduation party, where I kissed Sally Potter behind Ed Nance’s Gazebo. I never visited him in the hospital, except once. It wasn’t ‘cause I was scared or angry or ‘cause I didn’t love him. Things were just moving in their own direction and I didn’t know I had a choice. Or maybe I didn’t want to know.
I saw his mom. She came to our graduation and wailed a few times like the women in those spaghetti westerns or The Godfather would. Dressed in black and huddled in the midst of consoling arms. Her olive was just a dull green now.
I avoided her the whole time, like I had when she’d come to our house offering to take me to the hospital so I could see Peter. I was always gone or hiding when she came. My mom never pressured me. Maybe because my father. Maybe for some other reason I don’t understand.
I was coming out of the bathroom after the service; everyone had left. I was staying back to help clean up in exchange for a missing P.E. credit I’d needed for graduation. She was there waiting. No one else was there in the gym where our ceremony had been. The silence ricocheted off the walls like the sound of basketballs dribbling. I was cemented to the ground with the bathroom door swinging behind me.
I wondered where all the women were that had been consoling her, propping her up. It hadn’t seemed that she could stand on her own before. She’d looked like a black cloud being carried along. Now she stood squat, suspended by those ankles, girders propping up a leaning tower. And I wondered if it was evolutionary biology that gave her those ankles knowing she would one day have to support herself under a weight that normal anatomy would never have allowed. She broke what seemed to be an infinite silence.
“He loved you. Gary. He loved you.” Her voice sounded like someone trying to play an old record covered in dust.
I wish I could have cried, broken down right there and held her, or at least have her hold me. But I was silent. I couldn’t even move. After what felt like minutes, she left me standing there. And I continued to stand there for another half-hour, unmoving, unblinking, until my mother came in looking for me.
“Gary? I’ve been waiting outside for twenty minutes.”
“I’ll walk, Mom. Just go.”
As I watched her leave I thought of how he’d turned on me. Those moments on the playground. I wondered if somehow some part of him knew we’d need this balance. But it didn’t really seem like balance. And I don’t even know what any of that even means. It just seemed like air; something that was definitely there but that I couldn’t see.
