Brewster by Mark Slouka Page A

two at lunch; over time it built into something. I was fascinated by him. I wasn’t alone. With his long coat and his dancing brawler’s walk and his black hair which he was always raking back with his fingers, he drew people like something dangerous, unstable—an actual cheetah slouching down Main. He was crazy, people said, actually crazy. He’d walk through Harlem at night. He’d been sleeping with some woman from Carmel whose husband was in the mob. Jumped by three grown men, he’d fought back with a PVC pipe and a garbage can lid, put one in the hospital and walked away. The only reason he was still alive was that he wouldn’t hesitate and knew how to improvise.
    I couldn’t figure out why he was talking to me, why he sat at our table, why he asked me what I was reading. It had to be some kind of joke. I didn’t say much, waiting for the knife, expecting it.
    It never came. Ray never fucked with me, even when I deserved it. We talked about everything. He’d ask me things and I’d tell him what I knew or what I’d read and he’d listen like it was something he needed to hear. His voice was different when he was with me, with us— he was different. When we ran into others we understood we had to step back from the ring, let him be who he had to be, and sometimes, watching him walk into the arena, smiling, coiled, graceful as a ballet dancer who’d explode at a touch and gently lay your head down on the pavement, there’d be this sense of wonder that this other Ray, who moved like this, who everybody else knew, was him, too.
    I remember the day he asked me about Wilfred Owen. He’d been sitting with us a few weeks by then, had dropped the act, pretty much. It had become a routine with us: He’d walk over, sit down, eat. Now and then he’d ask me something about what I was reading—weirdly serious, like he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses. I could see the other kids looking over at us, trying to figure out what he was doing. He ignored them. It wasn’t all at once. Sometimes you’d still see him break off a piece of hamburger bun and dip it in whatever he was drinking—or we were drinking—mold it into a ball of dough, wait, pretending to be interested in whatever we were talking about—“Really? You sure?”—then shoot it with a short, sharp flick into someone’s cup or tray or hair without changing his expression or missing a beat—“I don’t know, sounds pretty far-fetched to me,” even as the screaming started—but more and more he seemed to actually want to hear about things.
    I told him. Owen was a poet, I said. He’d been fucked up in the war, in France.
    “Which war?” he said.
    “First.”
    “Pretty sure there was one before that.”
    “No, like first—”
    “Yeah, no, I know. Jesus.” He took a bite, pointed to the book with his chin. “So what’s that one called?”
    “You mean this one?”
    “Yeah, I don’t know, that one—the one you’re reading.”
    “It’s in Latin.”
    “What—you mean the whole poem?”
    “No, just the title. And one line. At the end. ”
    “What for?”
    “I don’t know. They used to do that.” I went back to reading.
    “So—what’s it called?”
    “Really?”
    “I wanna know.”
    “ Dulce et decorum est .”
    “The fuck does that mean?”
    I told him.
    “No shit. You talk Latin?”
    “It says here at the bottom.”
    He nodded. “So how’s it go?”
    “What, you want …?”
    “Sure, why not?”
    “I’m not going to—”
    “C’mon.”
    “No, fuck you, I’m not—”
    “C’mon, read the fuckin’ poem.”
    “I’m not going to—”
    “C’mon, quit dickin’ around an’ read the fuckin’ poem.” He looked at Frank. “Tell him to read the goddamn poem.”
    Frank shrugged.
    “C’mon, you pussy, it’s not like you have to get on the table and recite it for Christ’s sake.” He was tapping his plastic fork on the edge of the tray, enjoying himself.
    So I read the fuckin’ poem. “ Bent double, like old