Brass Read online

  —

  The next night, Gjonni, on duty for what must’ve been his twenty-seventh straight hour, argued with Bashkim in words that sounded like a Zeppelin record played backward. I never could understand who at the Ross was actually related to each other, since everybody called each other Cousin, except for Gjonni, the boss, who went by Uncle, and Yllka, his wife, who people were too afraid of to call anything but her proper name. But I knew Gjonni and Yllka were real family to Bashkim, because the three of them fought the hardest, and because Bashkim and Yllka, who the waitresses told me shared actual blood, had matching deep creases scored across their foreheads and mouths, Yllka’s just a little deeper set with middle age. She’d already gone home for the night, though, so this bout was strictly man-to-man.

  Gjonni said to me, “You can use our phone to call your mother. You don’t have to spend your money on the pay phone, princess.”

  Bashkim answered for me. “It’s late, xhaxha, this is when regular people sleep. It’s not busy. I will drive her home, I will come back.”

  Gjonni shook his head and spoke louder, talking so fast that I didn’t think even Bashkim could catch it all in his native tongue. But even though Gjonni’s voice overpowered Bashkim’s, apparently Bashkim still won, because a few seconds later he was unknotting the apron strings around his waist.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  He wadded the apron into a tight ball that tumbled apart when he threw it onto the counter behind him. Inside my intestines were doing the same, streaming into my legs like unspooled thread from a bobbin.

  Bashkim led me to a Fiero in the parking lot, a white coupe in fresh-off-the-lot condition even though Pontiac had booted that model from the assembly line years before. It was the kind of sports car that Franky and the rest of the auto-shop meatheads in my school used to drive, since it implied muscle and always needed to be worked on, but it apparently also appealed to Eastern Europeans who were pretending to be James Dean without ever having seen a James Dean movie. Bashkim thumbed at a scratch that didn’t exist before he unlocked the door for me.

  “This is what you’re saving for, huh?” he asked.

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “You know how to drive something like this?” His pointer and middle fingers wrapped over the stick shift, those two digits thick enough to span the entire eight ball that, naturally, was the shifter’s knob. Big thick fingers like that reminded me of the overfed amaretto-soaked shift bosses who always volunteered to play Santa at my mother’s Christmas parties back when the factories would spring for Christmas parties, but somehow on Bashkim they didn’t gross me out. They seemed right, like he needed strong hands for more than just fondling preadolescents after a fistful of rum balls.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Your father did not teach you?”

  “Last thing my father taught me how to drive had training wheels,” I said.

  “That’s reverse.”

  “What? Where’s reverse?” I asked, but he just wiggled the shifter somewhere else.

  I tried to pay attention to what his clutch foot and shifting arm were doing as he lurched forward and pulled out onto Wolcott Road, but mostly I fiddled with the radio, rolling the knob from the AM talk radio station it was set on through a half dozen FM classic rock stations, all of them playing songs more worn-out than classic. Bashkim pressed harder on the gas, and the engine revved into the same shrill pitch as the Billy Squier pumping through the speakers.

  “Aren’t you supposed to shift it?” I asked.

  “I know how to make this car move, ding-dong. You just pay attention.”

  The car was moving. Moving and bucking and growling like a rabid junkyard dog.

  “Okay. You have to take a left up here at Stillson,” I said, but he drove right past it and instead banged a last-minute right onto Long Hill, a road that lived up to its name, lined on both sides with woods dense enough to bury the victims of the kinds of things that took place in the neighborhood where Long Hill ended.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Bashkim shrugged. If he was taking me somewhere to slay me, I hoped the newspaper would get it right when my body was discovered and some local crime reporter had to come up with three hundred words about it: that I was happier to have died Bashkim’s victim than his nothing-at-all.

  Instead he pulled the car into the parking lot of an L-shaped warehouse tucked behind a gate of overgrown shrubbery and parked it nose-out at the farthest corner from the road. “Get in this seat,” he said. I moved my hand to open the door but he grabbed my wrist. “Just crawl over me.”

  I swung my leg over to the driver’s side and slid across his lap. He grasped my hips between his hands and held me on top of him for a few seconds. His lap was so warm a million tiny beads of sweat sprouted from my skin and I felt greasy and disgusting, exposed for what I was.

  He let go.

  “Tight squeeze,” he said.

  I nodded, pulled myself the rest of the way over to the driver’s side, and gripped the steering wheel tight while he settled into the passenger seat.

  “What are you doing, ding-dong?” he said. “You have to turn the car on if you want to drive it.”

  I turned the key in the ignition. The car turned over and retched and stalled out.

  “You have to push the clutch in to start it,” he said.

  I pressed the clutch down and tried again. The car turned over and the engine kept running this time.

  “Hey, I did it,” I said.

  “You have to move before you can say that.” He pulled my hand onto the shifter and draped his over it. “You start in this gear. Push in the gas a little bit and let out the clutch a little bit at the same time.”

  The car choked like an asthmatic and puttered out.

  “Little more gas,” he said. “Let the clutch out slow. Very slow.”

  I tried it again. This time the car sneezed but kept rolling forward.

  “Now we’re going,” he said. “Let the clutch go all the way. Now go faster. No, keep steering, too, ding-dong. Just drive around the whole outside of the parking lot. Hear how the engine is so loud now? Now you have to go to the next gear. Here,” he said, and he guided my hand to second. “When the engine gets loud like that, you have to shift to a higher gear. There are five gears. You get to fifth gear on the highway only, usually. Here is too small to get higher than second, maybe third. You see, there’s a picture on the knob there of where the different gears are, but you can feel it. In between the gears you are in neutral. It’s the same as when you press the clutch, that’s neutral. Get it?”

  I nodded, even though I only kind of got it.

  “Good. Now pull out onto the street. Make sure you’re in first. Always start in first.”

  It wasn’t graceful, but I managed to do what he said. For the first few minutes, he had to direct every move that each of my limbs made: left leg over the clutch, now press down onto it, relax your right hand, now pull the shifter to the right, now push it to the left, slower now, faster now, all acting and reacting and going against instinct. My left hand had to steer the car alone, and my bicep ached after only a few minutes of guiding it without the help of power steering. Driving the Fiero was nothing like driving my mother’s LTD, which felt passive, like it was the road that was moving while I sat still. Bashkim navigated me through streets that I’d never driven down even though I’d spent my whole life in Waterbury.

  “This is so awesome,” I said, once I’d gotten used enough to the movements that Bashkim didn’t have to prompt them step by step.

  “Yes, and it will be more awesome when you can drive it over twenty-five miles per hour. Always it was my dream to have an American sports car.”

  I didn’t tell him that no American had ever dreamed of owning a Fiero, that at best they’d settled for it.

  “Now pull into that parking lot up there on the right,” he said, guiding me to another tucked-away warehouse. “Put the shifter in neutral
and turn the car off.”

  After a minute he still hadn’t given me the next direction, so I turned to him and asked silently for it. The glow from the nearest streetlamp barely lit the car, but even so, I could make out the lines around Bashkim’s eyes, radiating like the beams of a sun in a child’s drawing. He smiled, and it filled in the creases around his lips. Before that night I wondered how those lines had even gotten there, when I’d never once seen him smile.

  “Now come over here.” He patted his lap. “I want to teach you something else.”

  I obeyed. After all, he’d gotten me this far.

  —

  For weeks Bashkim and I dated in the front seat of that Fiero. He never let me drive it again, and I took that for another act of chivalry, that he wanted to chauffeur me around, because why would I want to take it for anything else?

  But eventually I started complaining about the stick shift leaving a dent in my lower back, and that I was starting to feel like one of those two-dollar whores we sometimes cruised past on Cherry Street on our way to the Burger King. Finally he caved one night, negotiated with Gjonni to work a single instead of a double, and drove us to the dozen-room Queen Anne he shared with two dozen other people. The house was like most of them at the top of Hillside Avenue, all clapboards and gables and places for Rapunzel to let down her hair, but nobody thought to call them mansions anymore, not since the brass executives who used to live there fled down to Georgia and the maids moved into the places they used to clean.

  “Like 90210, right?” Bashkim said.

  “Yeah, it’s, you know, big,” I said. And it was, only those epic ceilings you couldn’t reach even with a step stool just made extra room for all the sadness, all those lace curtains draped over foyer windows like widows’ veils. It was a house built for pipe tobacco that reeked instead of Marlboro Reds.

  “It needs soap and water,” Bashkim said, looking at the three women leaning against a banister. It was obvious they didn’t speak English, but they knew they were being accused of something, and they stared at me like I was the one who’d tattled. They scattered when we walked past but came back together when we closed the door to Bashkim’s room behind us. Even if I didn’t understand any of the words they used, I understood perfectly well what they were saying. Other than their outdated denim and the babushka that the oldest one among them wore, they were just the same as the girls back at Crosby High.

  “They don’t like me,” I said to Bashkim.

  “They don’t like nobody, not even their husbands,” he said.

  “Do you like me?”

  “I love you,” he said, and it was a good thing there was a doorframe to lean against, because hearing him say that almost took me down. Bashkim had misused words with me before, like blow work when he meant blow job, but then again, I had been promoted from car girlfriend to bedroom girlfriend, so I thought: Well, maybe he means it?

  So I said to him—whispered, really—“I love you, too,” and he answered in Albanian, a word I never learned the meaning of but now assume meant something along the lines of oops.

  There were tiny thumbtack holes all over the walls in Bashkim’s room, little scars where the snapshots of his wife had obviously been the day before. I probably should’ve chosen to think of it as courtesy that Bashkim had shoved them all into a drawer with his underwear and tube socks, but instead it made me feel like one of those two-dollar whores down on Cherry Street all over again, which even my skank stretch jeans with the lace panels up and down the legs didn’t make me do. Having something to hide made it seem like we were doing something wrong, when up until that point I was feeling like everything was pretty damn right.

  “What was up here?” I asked.

  “Up where?”

  “On the wall. What was hanging? All the holes. Looks like you had pictures tacked up.”

  “There is nothing,” he said and went back to work on me, which took so much effort on the air mattress that we finally just finished off on the floor.

  But once he was done, I went back to thinking about the pictures that should’ve been hanging. A lady in a babushka and no smile, like the lady outside Bashkim’s door. A lady dressed in gray even on her wedding day.

  “What’s the matter with you today?” Bashkim asked, after I passed on a cigarette and ignored him jabbing his thumb into my armpit. He flirted like a kindergartner, jabbing and poking and running away.

  “Nothing’s the matter,” I said.

  “Liar,” he said.

  “It’s just.”

  Another thumb in the pit. “Spit it out, dum-dum,” he said.

  “It’s just what’s the story with your wife?”

  “Ach,” Bashkim said. He swung around and pulled up his BVDs, but I grabbed on to his arm before he could put on his trousers. I planted my face into his back, which was hot and full of pimples that I had never noticed before.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.

  “I told you not to ask about my wife.”

  “We have to talk about it sometime,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m lying here naked in your room and you’re telling me that you love me and you’re going to have to leave me someday.”

  “I am not leaving anything ever anymore,” he said. He pulled away, but he dropped his pants back on the floor and sat down on the mattress, and we sat there looking at our own useless limbs.

  “Don’t worry about Agnes,” he said, finally. It was the first time he’d spoken her name aloud to me, and even though I was the one who brought it up, I wanted him to take it back.

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “I know how this is going to end.”

  “You don’t know nothing. She is not leaving Albania and I am not going back. What does that sound like to you?”

  “It doesn’t sound like anything. It sounds like exactly how things are right now.”

  “And that is not enough? You want more?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I did know: of course it wasn’t enough. I still needed a car and a ticket out of my mother’s house and an epic sort of love you can get tattooed across your forearm without thinking twice about it.

  “You want more?” he asked again, this time a little disgusted, and I was about to change my mind and tell him, No, of course not, this is all I need, because I was afraid that he would take even that away. But then he said, “She does not want more. She wants nothing,” and I saw that the disgust wasn’t directed at me, and I felt so much relief that I had to smile, even though I knew that wasn’t appropriate, like laughing at a funeral.

  “Sorry,” I said, but he wasn’t looking at me anyway. He was looking at the holes in the wall like he was trying to make a pattern out of them, a constellation or something, but he couldn’t read an astrology map any better than he could read English.

  “That place, everything it did to us, to our families. She would be happy to die there like our fathers. Born in a camp, a prison, and she wants me to die there. It’s sick. It’s not the way things should be.”

  “Camp?”

  “Yes, the camp, the labor camp,” he said, like the phrase was supposed to jog my memory, but to me camp was just a place where practicing Catholics sent their kids to study the saints and where they usually instead popped their cherries. Bashkim saw my blank face and shook his head like a special ed teacher talking to his most hopeless student. “The work camps, they were places where enemies of the state were sent. Disgusting places. You would not even want to raise animals in there.”

  “And your father was in one?”

  “My whole family. I was born in one,” he said. “It was home until I was fourteen.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  He shook his head. “There was no Jesus, no Allah. No god at all there.”

  The Albanians at the Ross, sometimes they talked about stuff like the Party and the Prisons, but I never really thought about what those words meant to them, because they were just line cooks an
d dishwashers, and every line cook and dishwasher I knew came from the kind of terrible third-world place that made Waterbury look like Daytona Beach or some other mystical paradise. I didn’t want those people to try to convince me that I really didn’t have it so bad here, the way my grandparents, fifty years after landing in Waterbury, still said things to me like You think cleaning a toilet is hard? Try living under the Bolsheviks. I didn’t want to think about how it was unfair that some people had it so much worse when I’d already committed to fixating on people who had it so much better. But Bashkim wasn’t just a line cook from a land that it seemed like Time invented for a cover story. He was the person who taught me to drive a stick and give a proper hand job and make everything taste better with feta cheese. He was the first person I knew who was willing to go thousands of miles to upgrade a crap life for a better one, when my own people seemed to have landed in Waterbury only to take the first offer that was handed to them. He was perfect, an inch shorter than I thought I would’ve liked, but with an extra few inches around the biceps. That was the wrong thing to be thinking at that moment, but I was thinking it anyway. It took both of my hands to circle one of his arms.

  “Why were you there?” I asked. “What did your father do?”

  His muscles grew stiffer under my palms, and he shrugged. “He owned cows,” he said.

  I waited for him to continue, and when he didn’t, I said, “And?”

  He looked at me. “And nothing. That is enough. He had cows that he didn’t report. He wanted to sell them, but the state found them and took the cows and took our property, and my parents were sent to dig in the fields.”

  “But that can’t be it,” I said. “You weren’t allowed to have cows?”

  “What do you mean, it can’t be it? Of course it’s it. You could not have anything that the Party didn’t want you to have. That meat was for Hoxha. Everything was for Hoxha. That is all there was. You were either friend or enemy of the Party.”

  “What’s Hoxha?”

  “Not what, who. A dictator. I would not even call him a man.”