Neil Serven
Each room of the steak house had a different name: Dodge City, Carson City, Sioux City, Santa Fe. At the entrance to each, a hand-carved sign with a made-up population. When your number was called, you had to pay attention to where they sent you, because the place was enormous. The aluminum cows on the lawn out front were always being vandalized or stolen; this was a well-known thing even back home, where it made the TV news. You could see, from the windows of the waiting porch, the seams where the heads had been welded back onto their bodies. The neon cactus stood sixty-eight feet high. On the place mats, a picture of a cow carved up by dotted lines, with enough space in the margins to doodle. You and your brothers could get jumbo bacon cheeseburgers here and they would leave the meat red in the center for you, and your parents could get their rib eyes and French onion soup, even though iceberg salads, in bowls the size of troughs, were automatic with your meal. The dining rooms all had themes. Dodge City had murals with Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. Carson City had Kit Carson. You knew who these people were because the little plaques told you.
***
This was back when you could smoke in restaurants. The ashtray was amber glass, heavy enough to cave in your skull, and probably once had a phone number at the bottom but it had worn off. Your mother kept her Winston Light 100s in a maroon leather case that snapped shut, with a little pocket for the lighter. Utica was halfway between home and Niagara Falls. A five-day trip shortened to four because funds were drying up. Highway signs and trailers with curtains in the windows and buffalos and cacti painted on the sides, license plates from as far away as Saskatchewan. Your parents were able to get a room for a discount rate at the same Best Western you stayed in on the way there, and the pinball machine still showed you as having the second-place high score even though your brother Jason had hit your hand on purpose when you were toggling in your initials so they came out as SAA. Dad was spending his days at home now, on what they called disability. Which made you picture him in a hospital bed, full body cast, his legs hung in slings. Instead of the reality: woodworking shows on public television and grease fires in the kitchen and wooden-ship models that were month-long projects taking up the entire dining table so the family had to eat in the living room. Sewer workers needed to be able to climb ladders, duck under pipes. They’re afraid I’m going to clog up the works, he said. You and Jason looked at each other. When your mother turned her head, Jason mouthed the words: lazy fuck. You mouthed back: I know. On your left, Ryan had reached the bottom of his root beer before his burger came.
***
At Niagara Falls you all stayed in one room: you and Jason and Ryan crammed into a double, and Ryan so hopped up on soda you and Jason were certain he’d piss the sheets. The motel had a pool with a slide and shuffleboard and an ice machine that you could hear clunking outside the door. You got channels you didn’t get at home, so even if it rained you could watch cartoons, and if your parents wanted to go out by themselves somewhere you could switch to HBO, where sometimes they showed tits. You ate breakfast at the same place each morning, with little jellies for your toast, the same waitresses flirting with you and your brothers. They would ask Jason how he got the shiner, and he would smile ruefully until they poured your parents’ coffee and went away. The three of you cleaned up in the Boardwalk arcade. Ryan, to the kid’s credit, figured out there was a groove in the lane of the rightmost Skee-Ball machine that could be exploited. You popped in five dollars of your own quarters and came away with enough tickets for an off-brand Walkman.
***
How was it that little shit Finch put it, during football tryouts last year? I seriously have to know. Did your parents have to fuck through a garden hose to make you? Because I’m having a hard time visualizing the acrobatics, as we say. You asked him later how the paint in the end zone tasted. Someone else asked if the family van had its front seats ripped out. That person ended up on his back in a mud puddle until the kid’s little bitch friends came and pulled you off him. Coach had to pull you aside and let you know you weren’t going to play shit if you couldn’t get that temper under control. Your mother put it more diplomatically: The thing you gotta understand is, people will gawk. They don’t have anything better going on and they hate themselves, and they see us not feeling sorry for ourselves, right? And if they say something we just ignore ‘em and show ‘em there’s more of us to love. Even little Ryan, going on nine, doing everything right according to what the doctor said and still you could see him starting to round out. It’s in our genes, your mother said. It’s spilling out of our jeans, your father said.
***
The smartest thing you did that week was help the girl next to you fasten her life jacket on the Maid of the Mist. She was a little older than you, maybe fifteen. Your hand brushed against her back, and you could feel her bra strap through her T-shirt. Then she wheeled you around and fastened yours. Then you did the next smartest thing you could do: you introduced yourself, asked her name, kept her talking like you were a pro. You found out her name was Robin, her family lived in Cincinnati, and they were staying in the Stardust Motel, same as you. Room Sixteen. She went to a school that started with an E or a U and made it sound like you should have heard of it, so you acted like you did. She had a brother in the same grade as you. It rained into your faces. You smelled the moss from the rocks mixed with the lake mist and her hair, and it was exquisite.
***
At the Daredevil Museum, they had an exhibit of all the contraptions people had used over the years for going over the Falls. You’d get arrested if you tried nowadays, they said, but every few years or so some wacko would come up with the cockamamie idea that humans were meant to fly and try to construct some feat of engineering prowess toward that end. Most of them were barrels of some kind tricked out to look like rocket ships, lined with material that was supposed to cushion the blow. One guy made a giant rubber ball that was meant to bounce off the rocks when it hit the bottom. It worked, and he survived. And some of them were set up to allow photos. So there was your mother struggling with her Instamatic with the blue flash bar that you had to attach, begging Ryan to hop in the seat for a picture, and the kid resisting because he knew he’d have trouble fitting into the thing. You even offered: Ma, we’ll just stand in front of it. But even outnumbered, she persisted. And then Ryan finally gave up and climbed up the two little stairs, swung his legs into the cockpit or whatever you’d call it, until the cables creaked and the whole thing started to droop. Then a lady with a walkie-talkie appeared out of nowhere, pointing to a sign: maximum capacity 150 lbs./68 kgs. Miniature golf was fun but more of the same. With five of you in your party and Ryan dawdling along and your mother trying to putt with a cigarette in her mouth—ashes leaving burn marks in the Astroturf—and her purse dangling from her shoulder, as though if she put the thing down for a second it would walk away, insisting on taking all six of her allotted shots, because what was the rush, you all were here to enjoy yourselves. But it was hard not to notice the line behind you backing up like cars in the drive-through. You heard the sighs over the babble of the water feature.
***
On the last night, after you all returned from an early dinner, your parents left you in the room with your brothers while they went to go hear Tony DeLuca at the lounge. They even cleaned up nicely—your mother in a floral dress, your father slimmed down in a dinner jacket. The lobby had a poster of Tony sitting at a piano, open shirt collar, the light twinkling off the black lacquer and his very white teeth. Jason commandeered the remote, searching for tits on cable. From the open window you could hear the rattle of the ice machine over the whirr of highway traffic. The game room wasn’t as good as the one in Utica, but the vending machine had Mr. Pibb, which you couldn’t get where you lived. No way was it the same as Dr. Pepper. You told Jason and Ryan you were stepping out for a moment, but they had found soft-core pay dirt and weren’t about to tear their eyes away. Your room was Number Three, on the first level, near the manager’s office. The line of rooms ended at Twelve and then continued upstairs. You scoped out the vending machines, bought a Mr. Pibb. You looked at the cars and wondered which one belonged to Robin’s family. Then you remembered her saying she was from Cincinnati, so you looked down the row for Ohio plates. There were Ontarios and Quebecs and Pennsylvanias and New Jerseys, and even a Louisiana, and the only Ohio was this maroon Plymouth Volare with a luggage rack on the roof and fenders sharpened out by rust. On the back window: Ursuline puts the LOVE in Tennis!, on a green sticker. You looked up at the doors on the second level, their pleasing rainbow rhythm—red, green, yellow, blue, red—and saw the light on in Number Sixteen, the air conditioner rattling in the window. You walked past the cars, along the shuffleboard court, around the pool—still open as it wasn’t completely dark, the motor of the filter humming. On the other side of the pool, where the tennis court was lit, you could hear the thock of a ball being hit, the ringing of the chain-link fence. Robin was playing by herself, hitting balls against the fence. You had never played, but you could see skill in her movements, her ability to surround the ball with her squared shoulders and anticipate the rebound with her feet before the ricochet. You liked the way her ponytail danced as she bounced on her feet. When a ball finally skipped past her, it rolled all the way to the fence where you were standing. Hey. Hi. It’s Shane. From the boat the other day? Oh, right. Hey. I didn’t recognize you without the raincoat. You’re really good. Thanks. We start up again in the fall. They say sophomores never make varsity, but I think they’re just scared. Want to hit a few with me? Holding out your hands, the soda can in your left, as though you were broke: I don’t have a racket. You can use my dad’s. Wait here. And you turned out to be awful at tennis, hitting the ball all over the place so badly it was impossible for Robin to return most of them, or whiffing completely so you had to chase the ball down in the corners of the court. But she was patient and laughed, and did that thing girls do when they laugh with their hands over their mouths, even when you didn’t listen to her advice to set your feet. The lights came on as darkness fell. You were used to these kinds of things being ruined by your brothers showing up and taking over. You were sweating and out of breath. Your shirt clung to your back and you stunk, and somehow she didn’t.
***
Your parents still hadn’t returned to the room. Ryan was asleep in his clothes with his mouth open and a comic book across his chest, and Jason sprawled the other way, facing the TV. You grabbed your last clean clothes from your suitcase and made your way to the bathroom. Were you gonna introduce us to your friend? Her name is Robin. Oh, excuse me. And how do we know Robin? And you realized in the moment that it would be better to say nothing and let him stew. Even as he told you not to use up the all the hot water while you rubbed one out in the shower.
***
At the steak house, after each of you polished off your meals, you somehow had room for dessert. Then, walking back out through the late-dinner crowd waiting for their tables, you heard someone say: Jesus, think there’s any left for us? And the man’s family, or whoever he was with, laughed. And another person, the seal having been broken, started to hum “Baby Elephant Walk.” You knew the tune because the merry-go-round at Niagara Falls played it. The important thing was not to turn around, not break your stride. Which you didn’t, until you noticed that Ryan was looking over his shoulder and Jason wasn’t behind you anymore. Jason was approaching six feet at the age of thirteen. Dumb on the page, but you didn’t need to tell him shit twice, and he knew useful things you didn’t know yourself, like how to fight. Kid could move the way fat kids weren’t supposed to move. It was all about keeping the body low, like a dart: the way you knew he had been trained in the weak-side blitz, to leave his base and throw himself forward. You didn’t know if he had the right guy. It didn’t matter. By then Ryan had run ahead to catch up with your parents and Jason was straddling the poor fucker on the floor, raining down real blows. A lady shrieked in your face, all mascara and tobacco and teeth: Do something, for Christ’s sake! People gawked behind you. Someone said, Goddamn animals! You could hear your father running up behind them: Jason, my god, Jason! Shane, grab him! Grab him! Someone said, That how you raise your boy, sir? It was hot on the waiting porch. Jason’s center of gravity was low, and his shirt, already sweaty, kept slipping from your grasp. You thought about Robin. You thought about Skee-ball and miniature golf and football, all of the things you were good at, as you waited for your father to emerge through the crowd.
#
Neil Serven lives and works as a dictionary editor in western Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Washington Square, Atticus Review, Cobalt, and elsewhere. He can be found online at neilserven.com.
