More Than It Hurts You

Darin Strauss

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848870031
• eBook ISBN: 9781782395430
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Will this hurt me...more than it hurts you? Josh and Dori Goldin are the perfect couple. And they have a perfect baby boy: he is eight months old, he has blue eyes and tawny hair, and no, he hasn't started to talk yet. And he doesn't react to his name. And he did lose consciousness recently. And coughed up blood... And then his heart stopped. For no obvious reason. But young children always scare their parents... Don't they? More Than It Hurts You is the compelling and devastating story of a seemingly perfect family spinning into crisis: a mother accused of harming her child, and a father shocked into realizing that the people he loves the most may be the people he should trust the least.

Contents

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Part II

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part III

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part IV

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Part V

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part VI

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Acknowledgments

About the Author

I

I trust you will recognize the disease.

—ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

1

WEEKDAYS, FIVE A.M., A BOWLING-PINNISH WOMAN FROM UNITED BAY-side Methodist rose on tiptoes to kiss every freed inmate at his shoulder, his neck if she could reach. She grinned according to the tenets of belief, and this melted her fear as the devils stepped off the prison bus and into her orbit. Many of them burped or spat on little Methodist Connie’s illdyed head.

She was aware of the presentation she made, the bad hair dye, the Abe Lincoln circles under her eyes; even these she loved as burdens of faith. “ ‘Accept, you woebegone who return!’ ” she said. “Corinthians nine sixteen!” (If she had been pretty once, slender and frisky, all that stuff belonged to that devil now, the past.)

For ex-cons, she was a hard first sight. Alone or in chorus, they found a lot to ridicule in this tired-looking woman who stood there open-armed and isolated as a scarecrow: the mole on her cheek from which gray feeler hairs shivered; her tight rayon pants; and the disdain she couldn’t keep off her face (it fanned in arrows across her forehead). But above all, once the men realized that this dumpy lady puckering up in front of a housing complex was to be their first after-jail kiss, their bitterness about their own shit-filled lives returned.

But then why, in the early morning’s sooty light, why did the reformed arsonist Javier Zabato crumple so gratefully in Connie’s dishrag embrace? It was such a surprise for Connie that she failed to recite her Protestant pep talk, Come unto Him, you shall be saved, now please repeat it?

This Javier Zabato, wobbled by emotion, stood six two and wore a Japan-flag bandana. It was Connie’s hug that kept him on his feet. He thought he’d walk off the bus to find nobody at all.

The guy owned zilch except the state’s standard bequest of four dollars and a MetroCard. But to have been set free in Queens where his life and machismo began, and to find some forgotten familiars of his past (sneaker-fruit dangling from telephone wires; the local perfume of damp pavement and sewer), and to catch sight of tiara-like Manhattan rising like freedom’s promise brought to glitter; and then to feel even this uninspiring lady’s breath warm his throat—well, goddamn if he didn’t feel like a lucky son of a bitch. Javier Zabato leaned into Connie, squeezing her for all she was worth. What a throne of joy Zabato saw all around in Jackson Avenue’s elevated train-tracks, which had once been his tree house, his summer camp. The corners and sidewalks had been his adolescence; the bars and strip clubs—where he’d tried to work up a little business—had been his cocked-up luck.

“Okay, mister,” Connie said, “that’s just a little mucho for me, okay?” She couldn’t help smelling Zabato’s cologne—Brut or Old Spice, maybe a whole bottle when he’d dressed in his cell—even when she breathed through her mouth. Connie: the target of about fifty vicious jokes every morning. In addition to being irritated, she felt ashamed of being irritated. “The most important hug is between you and the Almighty,” she said.

The sky to the east had a seashell look, opening out pink above white. And directly overhead was a darkness getting smaller, a melancholy dirge fading out slowly.

Connie started kissing Zabato’s shoulder with pep—she often imagined Mary Magdalene as having pep when she applied the ointment on Christ’s head. Now her mole whiskers bent like an ant’s elbowed antennae against the fringes of Zabato’s suede jacket. In Connie’s imagination, the next guy off the bus was always another only begotten carpenter, the son in the three-part holy equation. And Zabato was blocking her from making his acquaintance. The one she was looking for would be an untouched innocent, who nobody else would have eyes to notice. He’d be called the Lamb because His beard was soft and curly but not the gross crinkled way that real lambs sometimes looked, almost like they were made of gray old men’s pubic hair when she saw them on TV. In her mind, she knelt before His feet to whisper in the voice of altruism: “That ointment feels nice on your tootsies, I’ll bet.”

This was her vanity—even she saw that. Truth was, even the worst criminal off the bus was part of God the everlasting. All human devils were to be cautioned against, converted, resisted, soothed, censured, loved. Such knowledge girded her up; God was everywhere. Sometimes it was hard not to feel that if he was every-where, he wasn’t here as much.

Anyway, this guy Javier Zabato was a nutjob. Violence instigated his every action. He felt loyal to violence, cultivated it, and, unsure how to deal with any tenderness at all, he started crushing Connie in a terrible bear hug.

“Please . . .” Connie’s voice died into Zabato’s shoulder.

Almost handsome, Zabato, devil-goatee’d like Snoop Dogg, was a Gulf War I vet who’d spent nine years in jail with only five visitors. With Connie’s breasts smushing into his belly, his soul reached, briefly, a state of peace.

“No doubt,” he sighed, moved by an exquisite brutality not unlike his thug’s take on fucking. “Mmmm, no doubt, bitch,” he said and slammed Connie into the bus door.

Something electrical from the elevated tracks made a noise that began as a shhh and ended as a pterodactyl-screak.

Behind Zabato, fifty-three released cons waited in place, anxious men jostling into one another like trapped marbles. Most of them carried everything they owned in plastic trash bags. Their grumbling bespoke lives of dispossession and delayed satisfactions.

One of these released cons, a nasally sloucher, said: “M-move, partner.” This was Carl Jefferson, a writer of bad checks. He chewed on his sunken mouth, his voice and body having been desiccated by the New York State prison system.

“M-move your ass,” Jefferson said again. A tame guy, soft-shelled.

Someone else at the rear of the bus yelled out: “Y’all gonna fuck around up there and make me come up there?”

Zabato faced toward the inside of the bus now. Still squeezing, enjoying Connie’s gasps and perspiry smell. You fuckers keep talking, was the message of his closed-eyed smile. I don’t even hear it. The white sharps of his front teeth showed. Funny, he’d first thought to crush the religious lady as a quick joke. But if God Himself were to appear above the elevated tracks and demand in thunder that Zabato leave poor Connie alone, Zabato would have told God the same thing: to back the fuck up or he’d cut Him.

Behind Zabato, Carl Jefferson spoke again. His voice like a modest tap on the shoulder: “It ain’t a m-man on this bus want to wait here.” (Jefferson’s thick tongue always slopped over the letter m, pronouncing it as if each hump made a separate sound.)

Another released con’s voice came from deep inside the bus, comically high-pitched: “Aaah!”

Meanwhile Carl Jefferson, answering a reflex pang way back in his brain, opened his bag of personals for the sixteenth time (faux-switchblade comb, bible without its front cover, electric toothbrush minus batteries, huge old-style Walkman also minus batteries). Yes, everything he had was still here.

Outside the bus, the dawn was now a wraparound glow with no discernible source.

Cinching shut his property, Carl Jefferson puffed up to say: “It about to be some shit here, you don’t get to stepping.”

Carl’s nephew Martin was supposed to have gotten him a job at T.G.I. Friday’s, and Carl had defacto agreed to try it. But he’d been weighed down by that kind of bullshit all his life and who knew if his back would give out submitting to a little more?

As if against his will, Javier Zabato let Connie free. The former arsonist turned a smile. “Suck on my dick, all y’all!” he yelled—to Connie, Carl Jefferson, to everyone. He slapped at the bus’s folding door. With the ungraceful head-lurch peculiar to him—and a half-moaned “Bring it”—he took off running, past the red-brickface Bagels Unlimited of USA and its dumpy neighbor the Te-Amo Deli, past a boarded-up warehouse, a neon-lit twenty-four-hour Check Cashing that had a dismantled billboard’s skeleton on its roof. The former arsonist made it across the loci of little traffic islands where six streets curved into one toward the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.

“None of you ass-munches hit my door, got it?” said the bus driver.

Meanwhile, Connie hadn’t moved from her spot on the corner. She blinked like a plane-crash survivor.

“Through that work of grace,” she managed to recite, “Jesus’ sheep know their terrible burden of sin, and come unto Him. Through that work . . .” But her voice, not to mention her faith, had gotten frayed. Does the Lord in His wisdom, she wondered, really need all these devils?

Carl Jefferson said: “You not gonna be the first kiss I get in three m-m-motherfucking years,” and pushed right past her off the bus.

In forty minutes—though he’d promised his nephew he wouldn’t do it—he’d get drunk, and give all he owned to Masterpiece, a hooker in a straw cowboy hat who earned half her living from the daily Ginsberg State Penitentiary drop-off. Fast forward a few weeks and Carl Jefferson’s ambitions and promises will have vanished into another four-year lap at Ginsberg: a crappy nearby restaurant, a botched robbery, a citizen’s arrest. Fast forward a year and Carl Jefferson will be dead.

As for Bayside’s four-foot-eleven Weeble of piety—Connie stood there having just about salvaged her Christian smile when the astonishing hit. Another of what she called her “thwacks”: a glimpse, a brief suffusion of the divine spotted in some wretch’s stormy, passing face. Christ God’s inexplicable brightness in this one’s eye, or shadows forming a decisive cross over that one’s jacket: the mundane providing sacred harmonies. This stretch of Jackson Avenue was full of evidence that He had forsaken the world—grandfatherly bums asleep on the sidewalk, the very sad graffito mural of a murdered neighborhood girl with the painted eyes scratched out, and finally just the sewer covers, with their infernal steam—but even among these men in whom Christian ethics had no more resonance than a snowflake, her mind went all at once free from doubt and worry. Of course the divine spark glowed ex cathedra in every last criminal off the bus. Of course she took in a breath, an “oh” of wonder. She was succumbing to religious transport, she was dazed past speaking, hoping that the awesome Lord might grant her to see, just for a moment, a combined incandescence of all the souls she had saved, all that supershine, while in the meanwhile fifty released cons shouldered by her, most not even acknowledging she was there—though this morning seven of them did give her the finger—as they pushed their way into this Jackson Avenue that was more real than any of them had imagined.

Now the general murmur of tough guy talk, with its bits of automythology: “No pizzle gonna hold El Niño forever, adoquín. . . .”

“. . . the fuck out my way, bitch—we out.”

“Call me Niggertine—’cause I’m smokin’, and the Surgeon General say I’m dangerous to your health.”

Storefronts were protected behind ribbed-metal curtains that shut at night to look like old-fashioned washboards. (This dinky semblance of lockdown demoralized many released cons, undermining their belief in advancement.) Some cars parked along the street were makes they’d never seen, a Volkswagen Passat, the latest Kia Rio, that weird Plymouth Prowler: cars that, in the plump of their taillights, looked both gently futuristic and nostalgic. Bubblegum spit out long ago decorated the sidewalk as black lily pads.

In their first and last conversation, a sex offender told a racketeer: “Need me some motherfucking smokes.”

“Don’t, yo. That stuff’ll kill you.”

Another man said, over and again: “I don’t want to hurt nobody.” His swastika neck tattoo, scabbed knuckles, even the teeth of his sneer made this seem a very literal truth: hurting nobody was the last thing on his mind. He wanted to hurt everybody.

And there was one slouching middle-aged dude, apart from the others, who seemed to have trouble making his way.

Seventeenth off the bus, tall and plump in his Batman T-shirt and shorts, a man named Intelligent Muhammad—the once and future Charles Stokes, sixty-three, the bright spot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents