Zero at the Bone Read online

  I wanted to jump up and down and tell them the paint they were spattered with was loaded with ketones and other chemicals that would burn white hot, but they all wandered past me, cheerful, saying, “How’s it going, Cray?” and things like that.

  At times like this, I felt my inexperience. This was the real world. Workers were used to this. A disaster could erupt, and they all accepted it. I was too new to stay calm, to saunter out through the sliding wooden door, peeling off a glove, looking around at the fire hoses kicking as the water pressure stiffened them, like all of this was an everyday affair.

  For a few minutes the hopper was the center of activity, fire helmets bending down over it, my dad on the roof in his short-sleeved blue shirt. The smoke turned into steam, a hose sprang a leak, fine spray fuming out from the socket where it joined the hydrant.

  The ax flashed. A gentle splintering sound reached the street.

  Water pattered down into the mill, and workers put down buckets and plastic tubs to catch the water and then gave up, putting tarps over the saws. The drops of water blistered the sawdust that covered everything like a coating of eraser crumbs. The workers were on overtime now, the few who were left, and I was going to be late for my meeting with Coach Jack unless I hurried.

  There was no smoke, only the scent of charcoal and the perfume of wet sawdust.

  My dad trotted out through the mill, gave a quick order to one of the workers, and then he was gone. He was the only one in a rush now. I ran to catch up with him and reached him just outside the huge, metal-ribbed boxcar. It’s easy to forget how big a railroad car is. In movies people jump up onto boxcars or roll out of them. I could not approach this warehouse on steel wheels without thinking how dangerous it would be to jump into one if it was traveling hard.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  My dad scrambled up into the car, and looked down at me. The interior of the car was stacked with lumber, and there was a forklift inside the boxcar. It was one of my favorite visions, the way one forklift would lift another into the interior of the rail car, one yellow machine cradling the other like a tractor that had given birth.

  “Tell Mom the shipment got here from Alabama and I have to unload.” He usually called her Fran here at the factory, even when he was talking to me, keeping our home life separate.

  I really had to talk to him. I had to say something, it didn’t matter what, and hear his answer.

  When people were cut at the factory, they didn’t howl or get angry. They made their way out into the office and asked Barbara for the first-aid kit. If the cut didn’t stop bleeding, Jesse drove them to the clinic. And even though the sign announced the number of days since the last accident, the accidents referred to were major accidents—a broken bone, the loss of something that wouldn’t grow back, like what had happened to Leo despite all precautions, or like what had happened when my dad had just bought the place from Mr. Ziff, when Ziff Furniture was famous for its children’s furniture and nothing else.

  I thought about it sometimes: I hoped I would never have to do what my dad did that time, running back into the factory for something that had just been cut off. I couldn’t help it: the fire had scared me. I needed a little reassurance.

  “Everything’s going to be all right?” I asked.

  “Sure.” It was one of my dad’s characteristic sures.

  Then he turned back and gave me a smile, looking down, and I could see the sudden shadows under his eyes. And I could see how guilty he suddenly felt, giving me a such curt response. “You did fine, Cray. Really good. Another couple of minutes and we would’ve had a five-alarm disaster on our hands.”

  That was what I had needed to hear. And I also needed to see him turn to the stack, the pale lumber stenciled GEORGIA PACIFIC in fuzzy blue lettering. He climbed into the seat and gunned the forklift, everything back to normal, the boxcar filling with bad air.

  3

  I was late getting the number 46 bus up Fruitvale to MacArthur, so I ran all the way. It’s a long run, but I needed it, letting each stride burn off some of the leftover tension. I was a little out of shape, and I got sweaty inside my clothes.

  Most people have jobs and they either like the job or they don’t. They get up, work, look forward to vacation. Both my parents have jobs they love, jobs they care about the way people care about gardens they plant from seeds in a packet.

  I already knew what Coach Jack was going to ask me, and I knew what my answer was going to be, in spite of the fact that crossing the football field gave me that wonderful feeling. The stripes every ten yards were faded, the chalk crumbled away, dirt and dead grass showing through.

  One of the school district gardeners had tried to make the sidelines more permanent, a long, straight line burned into the field with an herbicide. The grass died, but didn’t vanish, just turned a lurid orange color. It was the kind of thing nobody talked about, but I thought people would be glad when football began and the dead stripe was covered over by a thick chalk line. Something about the orange grass looked like science gone awry, like someone who tried a new dye on his hair and it came out all wrong.

  There was no way I was going to play football this year. Not the way things were. I had been a pretty good quarterback, the junior varsity team winning four in a row at the end of the season. I was proud of that.

  But a Skyline defensive back had nearly fractured my skull last year, and the varsity team had two fine quarterbacks. Coach Jack would extol the manly virtues of being third string, and tell me he needed a punter or another wide receiver. I liked football—and I hated it.

  Coach Jack had one of the few offices with an outside door. It was a metal door, heavy, something you’d expect in a bomb-proof bunker. I’m not weak, but I had to wrestle against the power of this barrier.

  Coach Jack had pictures all over his bulletin board. He is a private man; you can’t read his eyes. So, to compensate, he put up a permanent display in his office. You could tell things about him without having to ask. They were mostly black-and-white glossies, Coach Jack in a UCLA jersey, looking young and smiling. It was one of my dad’s rules: “Don’t smile too much; it makes you look nervous.”

  One picture showed a player upside down in midair next to another player who was in the air, too, right side up. This photo was going yellow, deep yellow, almost brown. Immanuel Jack takes a hit from Cal Bear Preston Harr. Immanuel Jack was hanging on to the ball. You couldn’t see his face, only his helmet, the interior all shadow, like there was no one inside. A big, full-color photo showed Coach Jack not smiling nearly so much in a Dallas Cowboys jersey.

  Coach Jack was listening to the radio, one of those fancy devices, shortwave, weather channel, AM/FM. He turned it off as soon I finished wrestling the door. Before I caught my breath, before I could even sit down among the piles of blank attendance forms, he said, “Merriman shot himself.”

  I knew what the words meant, but the actual, real-time meaning did not make any sense. I moved the attendance forms, put them neatly on the floor, and sat down. Bad news hits me like this—I have to do something to work off some of the shock.

  “My starting quarterback,” said Coach Jack. He added, quietly but definitely, “Bang.”

  I must have looked stupid. I hate that, when you don’t have time to get the right expression on your face.

  “Right in the foot with a twenty-two automatic,” said Coach Jack.

  “That’s awful,” I said. It was the kind of news I can’t take in all at once.

  “He’s lucky,” said Coach Jack.

  If invaders bombed and blew up the entire city of Oakland, destroying every dwelling, Coach Jack would say: We’re lucky. He would mean that it could have been worse, that it was a good thing more people weren’t killed. But Coach Jack’s concept of good luck is a little dry for most people.

  “A thirty-eight is no joke,” said Coach Jack. “Makes a big crater. A twenty-two pistol leaves just a little bitty hole.”

  I was still having trouble with
the news. “But he won’t be able to play quarterback this year.”

  Coach Jack gave me one of his classic looks: got it in one.

  “Because bullet wounds are more serious than people commonly realize,” I said, wanting him to know I had stayed awake for the California Police Officers Association film that rainy day early in my junior year. It bought me some time, making conversation.

  “Merriman will not play football this year,” said Coach Jack. Merriman as a quarterback was a work of art. The backup varsity quarterback was a guy named Allen Shelly. He was good. Not better than me, but so mean-spirited he willed things to happen. If Shelly threw a ball, receivers caught it out of fear of what Shelly would do to them if they dropped it.

  Coach Jack opened a drawer and pulled out an Oakland Unified School Sports Release form.

  “Shelly’s in trouble,” said Coach Jack, rolling the form up into a wand.

  “What else is new,” I said, a nonquestion.

  “He got arrested again,” said Coach Jack.

  “Shelly has one of those complicated lives,” I said.

  “Charges got dropped, because the store owner had a heart attack. But Shelly’s family decided enough is enough.” All this with little pauses between phrases, the release form rolled so tight it was a blank white shaft.

  I was supposed to say something, make conversation at this point, but I didn’t speak.

  “He’s not coming back,” said Coach Jack, and he gave this statement a certain weight. “He moved to L.A. to be with his dad.”

  “Long Beach,” I said. Shelly had spent summers and Christmas down there and had bragged about breaking someone’s arm in a fight on Lakewood.

  Coach Jack smiled. This was so rare that I marveled at how different it made him look, suddenly handsome. Older-looking because of all the strange wrinkles around his eyes, but handsome. “So you are now starting quarterback. If you want it.”

  I had so much feeling I couldn’t even look at him. It wasn’t a question of want. I enjoyed almost everything about football, and the chance to spend the fall of my senior year playing a dream position made it hard for me to sit still. I stood and looked out Coach Jack’s tiny, metal-mesh window. I set aside my fear of the game. Fear was nothing compared with this opportunity. I had expected the coach to offer me a backup assignment, something easy to pass up.

  The window had been washed recently, one little wedge of scum at the bottom the squeegee had missed. This time of year the sun stayed long into the evening, and a man and a dog were racing. The dog had the man beat easily, but he was holding back, letting the man stay even with him, for the sport of it.

  “It’s something to think about,” I said. I didn’t like the prospect of getting a brain bruise, but only a pure coward would pass up a chance like this.

  After my concussion my mom had shut herself in the upstairs bathroom and cried, stuffing her head in a towel or a pillow so I couldn’t hear it. But I could. I sat there on the sofa with an ice pack on my neck watching an old Humphrey Bogart movie with my dad, but I could hear every sob she made, all the way inside me.

  “That’s what I want you to do,” said Coach Jack. “I want you to think.”

  It was the way my parents felt that stopped me from agreeing right there in the office. My dad never wept, but he had been told to sit up with me and make sure I didn’t throw up or fall asleep. He stayed up with me until three o’clock in the morning, even though Mr. Ziff was paying one of his rare visits to his former factory the very next day.

  Coach Jack got up, putting the form on the desk, where it stayed rolled up, rocking for a while before it was still. He stood looking at a special picture on the bulletin board, one I didn’t like to pay attention to. “I can’t put pressure on you,” said Coach Jack. “I think that would be wrong.”

  The photo he was looking at was of a car completely smashed, ripped in half, bits of car everywhere. Was Coach Jack being sneaky-smart, letting me know he knew about injuries and pain? Or was he being flat-out fair?

  “How long do I have before I decide?”

  My sister Anita said that football players put on a big show of being cartoon characters, animated creatures who can’t be hurt. Anita would sit on the sofa next to me and watch a football game sometimes and smile when I cheered a spectacular pass. She would come back into the room from a phone call saying, “What’s the score now?” trying to share the excitement. But Ping-Pong was her game. She and I would set up the green table in the backyard and play for hours. Sometimes Anita’s serve wasn’t very good, but once she warmed up, she knew how to put spin into the ball. The two of us would play far into the dusk, laughing, unable to see the ball but playing anyway, we could anticipate each other’s game so well.

  Coach Jack looked right at the wreck that had stopped his career, like the photo had nothing to do with him.

  “Besides,” he said, “your parents will have to sign the release form.”

  The permission form, he meant—the one indicating that it was all right for me to play a sport where players got a fifteen-yard unnecessary roughness penalty for tearing off an opponent’s head.

  “You have a special talent, Cray. You know what it is.”

  It’s something I don’t like to talk about, and it isn’t simply that I can run or throw: I’m not a bad person. But people trust me in ways I don’t ask for. The last four games of jayvee football we played in terrible rain, three of the games away games, nine people in the stands, nobody caring what a bunch of sophomores and juniors did on a muddy field. And I felt the strangest joy. We could win. Even on that last, blown play, offensive linemen swimming in muck, I knew the game was ours and all I had to do was run down the field all the way for a score.

  And I did. Coach Jack had a picture of it, right there next to a faded bell schedule from last year: me staggering into the end zone with the ball, even though I was out on my feet, unconscious, the same as dead but stumbling forward for six points.

  He took out a tack and put the tack in again, right in the same hole in the corner of the picture.

  4

  Our dishwasher leaves little specks on the dishes, dried-on white freckles. I scraped a rice scab off a fork with my thumbnail as I told Mom about the fire.

  “I wondered what this was,” she said at last, picking a black fleck from my hair. She held it up on her forefinger. “The world’s smallest charcoal briquette,” she said. “Perfect for a flea’s barbecue.” She wiped it carefully on the corner of a napkin.

  I was a little embarrassed. I would take a shower after dinner. “Dad’s paying a crew time and a half to unload the boxcar.”

  “Derrick loves it.” She called him by his first name like this when she wanted to hold him up to the light mentally, turn him around like a fascinating specimen. Sometimes she looked different when she talked about him, a soft look in her eyes. “Forklifts, fire engines.”

  “A spark probably got sucked up the ventilator,” I said.

  I had a plate in front of me, lasagna covered with Saran Wrap, the hot food fogging the plastic. Anita said the microwave probably permeated the food with toxins from the plastic.

  Mom was eating broccoli and French dressing, dipping the broccoli florets into the dressing, rolling them around, and chewing them slowly. She had lost thirty pounds over the last few months, although she still had dimples in her elbows when she put them on the table.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re thinking about doing research on my head.”

  “Just wondering if you have any more black specks in your hair.” She got up and opened the refrigerator, pouring some sparkling water into her Betty Boop glass. Anita and I had shared the price of a Swiss-made Betty Boop wristwatch on one of Mom’s birthdays. The watch was water-resistant to one hundred feet, but Mom kept it on her dresser next to the photo of her parents.

  “Where’s Anita?” I asked. What I meant was, Let’s not ta
lk about my head. But I knew my mother didn’t want to take the news about the fire seriously. The time my grandfather was in the hospital with pneumonia my mother had cold sweats and a headache, the worst migraine of her life.

  “She has that new job,” Mom said.

  “I thought she was baby-sitting with Kyle,” I said. This was a little snotty of me because it was my theory that Anita took baby-sitting jobs so she could grope in the dark with Kyle while the toddlers lay deep in dreamland. I knew all about her new job, checking inventory for an office supply company, working evenings, correcting the mistakes the day people made.

  “Kyle called,” Mom said.

  “Wonderful.”

  Mom looked at me. She does a lot of talking with her eyes. “We had a nice chat.”

  “This couldn’t have been Kyle you talked to,” I said.

  She gave me a lift of one eyebrow. I had the Saran Wrap off the plate, and it turned out I was hungry.

  “Dad was afraid we were packing some of the nightstands wet,” I said.

  “That’s not a very good idea,” she said.

  “He had Jesse break open a couple of cartons before the truck came, and they looked okay.” Most of them looked okay. One had a weird little wrinkle from being packed in a carton too soon. That item would have to be sanded and refinished. One of the men in the shipping department had a problem, and Dad kept him employed because he felt responsible for the man’s family.

  “You like that, don’t you?” Mom said. “You’re going to be talking about board feet and drawer pulls, just like Dad.”

  My mother worked almost entirely at home, drawing pictures of fossil bones. She had an office upstairs all to herself. She had a magnifying glass on a crook-neck stand, and sat with a pair of tweezers and a fossil jaw or a tooth or skull and turned it over, nudging it with the tweezers, all the while her other hand was busy sketching front, back, and overhead views.