Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt Page B

and pulled him up against my knees—his mouth stayed shut.”
    “This was in the living room,” Margaret said.
    “I have his watch. I took it off. I thought. What the fuck does it matter to you? Look at all this stuff of his I’ve got,” and she started opening his drawers—beer caps, rubbers, cans of spray paint. “Can you imagine,” she told the girls, “the bony rattle of the cans at night and Martin hollering for him to quit!”
    “You must have known this about my brother,” she said, “surely,” and she threw away a plastic bag, burnt matches, some kind of stuck-on candy.
    “Yes,” the girls said. “Yes and no.”
    “We knew him first from the yearbook. We guessed his long smile was to cover up his teeth. We thought we would like him, and we did.”
    “He found us names,” the girls told her—okay-sounding gang names from unflattering sources, from defects like moles or stutters.
    “Spider was mine,” a dark girl said. “Can you guess from where he got it?”
    But he was affectionate, the girls told her. He seemed hardest on himself—wedging his narrow body in any narrow space. He said he wasn’t smart.
    “You are!” the girls had told him. “You only have to learn how to work!”
    Margaret said, “I remember his crying. He woke me with his crying—how many times?”
    “Yes,” they said, yes to what she tossed before them: the pink and yellow bodies of the skin magazines,sticky tubes of jelly. “He only told us he was sad,” the girls said.
    “What for?” Margaret asked. “What was ever denied him?” Margaret said, looking past the girls to see if she could see his knotted chest and arms and shoulders in his furious abandon—shoving, shoving himself against a loose shape whose head knocked against the headboard of the bed. The noise! The noise! The old masturbator from next door, crying out, he couldn’t stand it, Margaret; he couldn’t stand this fucking boy!
    He was a boy.
    He woke with his hands between his legs.
    He cried out, “Is there anything to eat?” Doors slammed, or else he slunk past in his tired clothes. The light was afternoon light or later—and cool. All day he slept; skin flakes flew up when his sheets were tossed, also fingernails, hair—his hair was anywhere, as was the glass imprinted with his ghostly mouth.
    “All this talk about this boy,” she said to the girls, when he was just a boy, who lived, a brother with his sister and his sister’s husband—in odd arrangement—but who did not these days?

GIOVANNI AND GIOVANNA
    O h, that these fervent thoughts we have of our dead would sift into their spirit world and warm them with the truth of how they matter to us still, how they are missed. Dale I remember, shy man, large, embarrassed nose and ears, how I often knocked against him, waiting for a ride to wherever it was I was going then, a child, sleeping over, the sheets always cold and a terrible thirst. The dry part of going away, my mouth open to it in the back of Dale’s truck, faced forward: all that green air, until I was so dry and beaten—lashed by my own hair—I was exhausted and sad, sad to leave him. I said, “I want to stay with you.” I said this to him, sometimes lying. I thought, as children do, that I was necessary, that Dale’s life without me was just a run-down house and a wife named Ida.
    The pink of Ida’s candy pink gums and tail-fin glasses—Ida was ugly in ways even a young girl would notice—me five, six, seven when I stayed with Ida and Dale those times my mother couldn’t find her mother to do it. My glamorous mother, of course I would notice: Mother all high color and Ida, muddy hair and eyes—those preposterous pink gums. The way Ida sucked on her teeth after supper—after any meal— but Dale never seemed to mind. Dale, in his damp bib overalls and lace-up shoes, was happy to chew on a toothpick.
    The homely everyday about their lives!
    They are both dead now.
    I listen to your workmanlike exhausted sleep, the