Sweat

by Brady Golden

When she got back from apartment 201, Mom smelled like oranges, like the cleaning solvents she’d been working with all day. She fell onto the sofa, the one that each night I unfolded into a bed for Eli and me, that each morning I reassembled so that our living room looked a little bit less like a flop house. She’d taken off her blouse, and wore only her white undershirt and jeans. 

“Could you do dinner?” she said. “I’m exhausted.” 

I didn’t want to. With her gone, I’d had to watch Eli the whole day, and make his lunch. My own plans for the day had been shot. 

I didn’t say anything, but while I boiled the water for the pasta, I banged the pots and cupboard doors as loudly and as frequently as I could. 

“Did he wreck it?” I said. When she’d evicted the man in 201, Mom had predicted that he’d exact his revenge on the apartment. 

“No,” she said. “No, the place was immaculate. He even dusted the windowsills. Except . . .” 

She trailed off. She shut her eyes and reached for the television remote. Then I noticed the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the dampness of her hair, the dark, wet, u-shape on the chest of her shirt. She looked as though she’d just run a marathon. And yet there was something not quite right about it. Her perspiration reflected more light than it should have. 

And it looked thicker. 

The evening news popped on. She switched it to a sitcom rerun. 

“Except what?” I said. 

“Hm? Oh. Nothing. There was just this one stain in his bathtub.” She didn’t look at me as she spoke. Colors from the television screen danced on her eyes, on her shiny skin. “It’s big. I swear, I scrubbed at it for hours.” 

“For eight hours?” 

She didn’t answer, and I didn’t press the issue. 

After dinner, she drafted a classified ad for the empty apartment, and went to bed at nine o’clock, leaving me with the dishes and Eli once again. We played Battleship and fell asleep with our Return of the Jedi tape still running. 

*** 

Before she took the manager job at the Olive Tree apartment complex, Mom had done all sorts of messy, physically demanding work—waitress, bartender, housekeeper, stock clerk—and we were used to her dragging home odors more embarrassing than chemical cleaners. Sweat, French fry grease, even vomit, were all things my brother and I had learned to politely ignore. 

I was thirteen years old, my brother Eli ten. Along with our mother, we were on our own. Father had died in a car crash when I was Eli’s age, and we’d long since burned through his life insurance payout, and then some. Mom held down jobs the only way a single mother with only a high school education can: uncertainly. She bounced from crap service job to crap service job, and bounced us from crap Southern California town to crap Southern California town. To this day, I can’t name all the beach bum villages and inland empire sprawls that our migrations landed us in. 

I can say that the Olive Tree was in Santa Barbara. 

Mom had found the Olive Tree job in the classifieds. She had no experience in real estate or property management, but I could see why the building’s owner hired her. For all of the chaos in her life, Mom carried herself with air of competence. Even when things fell apart around her, she never gave any sign of the stress or panic she must have been feeling. Composed, her lips tight with determination, she would set about solving whatever latest crisis life and plopped in front of her. 

She had one pearl of wisdom that she delivered to me on multiple occasions: “When you have to deal with something that you just hate, when all you want to do is quit, picture a bowl of shit. A big, steaming bowl of it, with a spoon stuck right in. It’s not going anywhere. You have to eat it. And you can either stare at in, smell it, or you can get to work. Choke it down. Eventually, it’ll be gone.” 

It wasn’t as though the job required much in the way of expertise. All she had to do was collect the rent at the beginning of the month and deal with crises of the tenants. As far as bowls of shit went, she’d powered her way through larger. 

The primary advantage of the Olive Tree job was that we got to live in the manager’s apartment. It was a one-bedroom, unfortunately, but living on top of each other was nothing new. Before that, we’d been living in a trailer on the outskirts of the student part of town, where our neighbors threw parties most weekends and college-boy fistfights broke out more than any proud parent could possibly know. 

The two-level story apartment complex was built like a pink adobe castle. All of the units opened up on a small courtyard where few of the tenants spent much time. There was a kidney-shaped swimming pool that Mom cleaned every Monday morning. At its deepest, it only went up to my collar bone, and I was still two years shy of my growth-spurt at the time. It wasn’t heated, but that wasn’t a problem. After a morning in the sun, the water would be warm, just below body temperature. There was nothing refreshing or fun about wading in its tepidity. 

*** 

Mom hadn’t known what the man who lived in apartment 201 did for a living. He always seemed to be home, and, until that July, had always turned over his rent on time. The label on his mailbox said “H. Porter.” Years later, I learned from a private investigator that the H stood for Hugh, that he’d never married, and that lymphoma had won a three-year contest with him in 1999. 

That Summer, to Eli and me, Hugh Porter was just “The Ogre.” 

The nickname came about, not surprisingly, because of his size. Hugh Porter was a giant of a man, six-and-a-half feet tall at least. He was muscular, but in that round, undefined way that makes it impossible to tell where the muscle ends and the fat begins. A grey beard streaked with black covered his face. His receding hair was long and tied in a pony tail. Even on the hottest days, he wore black motorcycle jacket that was cracked and faded at the elbows. I thought it was strange, because The Ogre didn’t ride a motorcycle. He didn’t even own a car. Periodically, never more than once a week, I’d seen him sitting in the bus shelter across the street from the Olive Tree’s front gate, his knees up high due to the lowness of the bench. 

Eli openly admitted to being afraid of The Ogre. Mom and I kept our fear to ourselves. Beyond his Hell’s Angel appearance, there wasn’t much about the guy to be afraid of. He never made any noise, exchanged pleasantries with the neighbors that he passed in the courtyard, and kept to himself. And yet I could tell from the way Mom would hold her breath when he was near that the Ogre made her just as nervous as he did me. 

Maybe the biker look was enough. 

Then, in July, for the first time, he neglected to pay his rent. Mom mentioned it to me as she was logging the checks in her ledger before sending them along to the owner. 

“We might have to evict the Ogre,” she said. 

She’d overheard Eli use the nickname once, and she’d loved it. She dropped it at every opportunity. 

“We’ll have to lure him out of his lair,” I said. 

“We should use a goat,” she said. “Where do you get a goat?” 

“We could really use a knight,” I said. 

She smiled, but the skin around her eyes tightened. I’d made her think of Dad. Most things did. 

“I’ll give him a few extra days.” 

Those extra days turned into a week. One evening, the owner came by after dinner. I was out by the pool, pretending to read a comic book while I eavesdropped. 

“I can’t come down here for this kind of thing,” he said. “This is why I have a manager. It’s your job. Deal with it. If he won’t pay rent, throw him out and find somebody who will. That’s what you’re here for.” 

With her bowl of shit laid down before her, Mom settled in to eat it. She checked out a stack of landlord guides from the library and drafted the Ogre’s eviction notice. That night, she taped it to his front door. Two days after that, he was gone. He moved out in the middle of the night. From the living room sofa bed that Eli and I shared, I listened to the thuds and groans of moving furniture, to him clomping up and down the stairs. At five in the morning, I sneaked a peek out of our street-facing window and spotted a U-Haul van parked at the curb. 

*** 

For Christmas, I’d gotten Eli a pair of toy rifles that fired Nerf ping pong balls. If you didn’t have a crosswind or a need to hit anything in particular, you could launch them fifteen or twenty feet. Even if the balls didn’t shoot with much accuracy, getting hit by them stung enough to be fun. That Summer, Eli and I played a lot of Sniper, a game of my own creation. The rules were basically the same as hide-and-seek, except the hider tried to find a good vantage point from which he could shoot the seeker without being seen, and rather than ending with an “ollie-ollie-oxen-free,” Sniper ended when Eli and I were on top of each other, blasting at point blank range until Eli would cry and run for Mom. 

That day, I was seeking. I preferred hiding, mostly because Eli didn’t understand the concept of the game well enough to hide anywhere that he could see me coming and get off a shot or two before I launched my assault. 

I was prowling through the courtyard, my rifle clutched to my chest like I’d seen in Platoon and Predator, when I spotted a neighbor sitting on her doorstep, holding a half-burned cigarette in her left hand. It was Tracy Gill, a college student I’d been lusting after all Summer. She wore a pair of baggy slacks and sweatshirt. Her lovely ringlets were tucked under a faded Oakland A’s cap. If she had to be a baseball fan, I wondered, why couldn’t she follow the Dodgers? 

Caught in the open, I froze. I didn’t know what to do. There was simply no way to look cool holding a bright pink and purple children’s toy, creeping around like a B-movie action hero. I couldn’t get away unseen. With the refusal on the part of my legs to heed any of the directions my brain was sending to them, it didn’t seem like I could get away at all. 

She smiled and waved me over. 

Face burning with embarrassment, stomach aching with anxiety, I sauntered over to where she sat. 

“What do you got there?” she said. 

I looked at the gun as though I’d only just noticed it. 

“Oh this? Just some toy. It’s my brother’s.” 

“Yeah?’ She stuck her cigarette between her lips and held out a hand. 

In the slickest, coolest gangster movies that I’d seen, smoking had never looked so glamorous. 

I handed it to her. She pointed it at me, closed one eye and peered down the barrel as though down a rifle sight. I put my hands in the pockets of my shorts and rocked back and forth on my feet. 

“Pretty cool,” she said. Then she popped the gun. A little yellow ball burst out of the end and bounced off my forehead. Tracy laughed, so I laughed, too. 

“I guess it is,” I said. 

Just then, Mom called to me. I turned to see her standing at the base of the staircase that led up to the second-floor apartments, to apartment 201. She wore a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves, and she was carrying a bucket packed with colorful plastic bottles of cleaning chemicals. 

“Where’s your brother?” she said. 

“He’s around,” I called back. 

“I just saw him,” Tracy said. 

Mom nodded and proceeded up the stairs. I watched her unlock the door to 201 and step inside. 

“I guess that guy moved out,” Tracy said. 

“Mom evicted him,” I said. 

“No shit?” 

I felt my coolness reaffirmed by her willingness to swear in front of me. 

“No shit,” I said. 

“What did he do?” 

“Didn’t pay rent.” 

“Is the apartment trashed?” she said. “I bet it is. That guy always gave me the creeps. I think he’s a rapist or something.” 

“I call him the Ogre.” 

“He is a fucking ogre.” She took a final drag off her stump of a cigarette, exhaled a plume of smoke, and ground the butt out on her doorstep. “It was good talking to you.” 

“Yeah, cool,” I said. 

She turned and opened her door. Behind it stood Eli, his gun raised at ready. I didn’t have time to react before he launched three consecutive shots at me. Like a klutz, like an idiot coward, I staggered back in surprise, tripped over my own feet, and landed on my ass. 

Tracy laughed and clapped. 

“Got him,” she cheered. “Right through the chest. Right through his heart.” 

“Right through the heart,” Eli agreed. 

*** 

Most of my free time that Summer, when I didn’t have to look after Eli (and sometimes when I should been), I spent with my eyes on the small grass lawn beside the swimming pool, the lawn right outside our kitchen window, because that’s where Tracy Gill spent her free time. She was a student at U.C. Santa Barbara who had stuck around for the Summer Session to pick up a few extra credits towards graduation. At thirteen, too young to share a single thing in common with her, too shy to attempt a conversation, I’d never been so in love. 

Every day before class, she’d unfold a beach towel on the lawn. In a red checkered bikini top and jean cutoff shorts, with a course book open in front of her, she’d lie in the sun all morning. For all the hours she spent out there, she never managed to tan. All Summer long, her skin remained that same icy shade. Her hair was short, black, and curled like Christmas ribbons. When she was on her stomach with her head propped up by a hand on her chin, the tight ringlets would hang down in front of her face, swaying and bobbing whenever she moved. 

I watched her from between the blinds in our kitchen window whenever I could. Each time, I swore that I’d keep my voyeurism romantic and pure, a love a poet could be proud of. It never lasted. I couldn’t look at her, at her skin, her cleavage, her freckled face, without developing the most painful and bursting of adolescent erections, and I’d have no choice but to escape to the bathroom to work it off. 

*** 

The same P.I. who discovered the Ogre’s real name helped me track down what remained of his earthly possessions. Hugh Porter’s niece and only living relative rented a storage locker in Santa Carmina Creek. The detective cut the padlock and stood guard for me while I rummaged through the one cardboard box labeled with Hugh’s name. 

Inside, I found a spiral-bound sketchbook. Its pages were thick, pulpy, and cream-colored. Much of the binding glue had given out, and when I picked up the book, folios slipped out. 

The Ogre drew like a ten-year-old, with no sense of perspective, shading, or proportion, but I had to give him credit for prolificacy. He’d filled the whole thing. There was the occasional pencil sketch of a coffee mug or flower vase, but most of the drawings were of bugs. 

The slithering kind. The wet kind. 

The slugs, snails, and worms that he’d drawn over and over again, on page after page, appeared in no etymology book, I knew. They were nightmarish, distortions of the real thing, and flipping through them, I felt a hard, hollow pit form in my stomach. 

There were books in the box, hardbacks the size of encyclopedia volumes. They bore no titles on their covers or spines, no identifying marks at all. The pages were yellowed and cracking. I lifted the top book off the pile and opened to a random point. 

Dense text ran from margin to gutter. I couldn’t read the strange characters, but I recognized them. I’d seen them once before, if only for a moment. Now, with more time, I examined them, willing them to explain themselves. 

Then an idea occurred to me, a suspicion that I now realized I’d always had in the form of feeling finally putting itself into words. 

What if this is how it had happened? What if all it had taken was prolonged exposure to this foreign writing? She couldn’t have understood the symbols any more than I did, but maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe she’d only needed to see them. They could have gotten into her through her eyes, gotten into her like germs. They could have infected her, made her sweat, make her stink like rotten oranges, made her– 

I slammed the book shut, hurled it back into its cardboard box, and staggered out of the storage unit. My mouth was dry. 

The P.I. asked if I’d found what I was looking for, and I nodded and thanked him, but I was barely there. All I could hear was my pounding heartbeat, the question screaming in my mind, Had I looked for too long? 

A sleepless week later, once I’d paid the PI and said goodbye to him for good, I drove back out to Santa Carmina Creek with a plastic container of gasoline in the back of my trunk. Under the cover of night, I burned the storage building to the ground. 

*** 

At dinnertime, Mom returned. One look at her and I knew that I had dinner duty again. 

The thick, shiny sweat coated her, drenched her clothes, slicked her hair to her scalp like mousse. Beneath its viscous layer, her skin looked white and tight. She had dark circles under her eyes. Her lips were cracked. 

“Are you okay, Mom?” I said. 

“I can’t get it out. The stain. I can’t get it out.” 

“You look sick.” 

“It’s coming, and I can’t get it out.” 

“Mom? What are you talking about?” 

When she looked at me, there was no recognition, just a surprised curiosity. She didn’t know what to make of me. 

I smelled the oranges again, but this time I knew it wasn’t Pine Sol. I’d been in her room that afternoon to gather her laundry. In there, the smell had been overwhelming, a tactile wall of odor that I’d collided into as I stepped through the doorway. Her room had smelled of oranges, certainly—tangy and sweet—but also dry, dusty, fungal, like an abandoned fruit bowl whose contents had all turned to grey ashy balls. The smell had tickled my throat, and I’d coughed. 

Eli got up off the sofa where he’d been reading one of my comic books. 

“Yuck,” he said. “You stink, Mom.” 

Her eyes snapped into focus and landed on my brother. Her pupils shrank to pinpoints. 

“That’s what I get? I spend the whole goddamn day working my ass off, and that’s what I get? I’m breaking my back so we can stay in this shithole, and you tell me I stink?” 

“No, Mom, I—” 

“Ungrateful shit!” 

She hit him, an open-handed swat to his temple. Eli stumbled backwards and landed on his ass. For a moment, he didn’t cry, just held his hand to the side of his face, blinking in confusion. She’d never hit either of us before, not so much as a spanking. For Mom, anger was sadness, anger was fatigue, something to be endured. Even when she was furious with us, she choked down her anger in the name of caring for us, of mothering us. 

Mom held a shocked hand to her mouth. 

“Oh my God. Oh my God.” 

Then Eli started to cry. 

“Oh my God,” she said again. “Oh my God, my baby, I’m so sorry, I don’t know—” 

She reached out for him, by Eli shrank back. She turned to me. 

“I don’t know why I did that. Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I’m just so tired. I’m so tired.” 

I sat beside my brother, let him press himself against me. Mom pleaded for forgiveness, but neither of us spoke. Eventually, she went to bed. 

*** 

The next morning, a middle-aged Chinese man came to look at apartment 201. He knocked on our door at two in the afternoon, while Eli was playing Mortal Kombat and I was watching Tracy read a Chemistry book on the lawn. Mom hadn’t come out of her room all morning, but I didn’t tell him that. I said she was out. 

He looked confused. 

“I have an appointment.” 

I decided to lie. 

“Oh, right. I forgot, sorry. She asked me to show you the apartment.” 

I went to the kitchen drawer where she kept the keys. There were two dozen in there, each labeled with its corresponding apartment number, but there was none for 201. It didn’t make sense. I thought about sneaking into Mom’s bedroom to see if she’d left them on her bedside table. Then I remembered the slap from the night before, knew that I’d fall apart if she ever hit me, and decided against it. 

From the doorway, I called to Tracy. She looked up at me from her textbook and smiled. Sunlight cast streaks across the dark lenses of her glasses. 

“I have to show an apartment,” I said. It sounded so mature, so responsible, and I milked every drop of casual coolness. “Could you keep an eye on Eli for ten minutes?” 

“Sure thing,” she called back. 

I told Eli to go outside where Tracy could see him. He whined that he was in the middle of a game. I insisted. A minute later, he sat beside her, and they were chatting like the oldest of friends. I felt a twinge of jealousy. 

Keyless, I led the prospective tenant through the courtyard and up the stairs, hoping for the best. 

I got lucky. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open. Sunlight spilled onto an oatmeal-colored carpet. I let the man go in first. He stepped into the shadows, and then looked at me expectantly. It took me a moment to realize what he wanted. Then I reached for the drawstring and pulled open the blinds. 

Mom had told the truth. It was spotless. No scuffs or nail holes marred the wall. The wall-to-wall carpet had that even quality that suggested a steam cleaner. The only indication that anyone had lived here recently was a rectangular indentation where his bed must have been (it was twin-sized, which struck me as odd for an adult, particularly one the size of The Ogre). 

Examining cupboards and appliances in the kitchenette, the man asked me about the rent, the utilities, the deposit, the lease. I wracked my brain for things I’d overheard my mother say at times. Some questions I managed to answer honestly. Some answers I made up. 

Then he said, “The bathroom?” 

I led him to the closed bathroom door and placed my hand on the knob. 

As I turned it, I heard the voice inside. The muttering. I recognized no words, but I did recognize the voice. 

But it was too late. The door was open. 

Mom had called the mark in the bathtub a “stain,” and in the most literal sense it was an accurate description, but “graffiti” probably described it better. 

The wall behind the combination bathtub-shower was a coffee-with-cream tile. Scrawled across it, in running black paint, were strange, unrecognizable drawings. They ran the width and height of the tile wall, in haphazard rows and columns, like— 

—like writing, I realized. It was sloppy and blunt, what a child would make with a dull crayon. And yet there was nothing innocent about the scrawl. I couldn’t say why, but I knew that the Ogre had penned the strange characters with fear, and anger, and hatred throbbing in his gut. 

I didn’t know what it said, but I knew how it felt. 

Mom was there, too, standing in the bathtub in her jeans and t-shirt and at least a gallon of the thick, transparent molasses that I’d taken for sweat a few days before. But it wasn’t sweat. It was some kind of lubricant, and she was secreting it by the bucketful. It ran down her face, her body, dripped off her fingers and splatted the porcelain tub, resounding like raindrops on a tin roof. 

The prospective tenant staggered back, knocking into the wall. 

She hissed. More colorless ooze poured out of her mouth and rolled down her chin. 

He turned and ran. I curled my hands into fists, squeezed them tight, and fought back the urge to follow. 

“Mom?” 

A trace of a smirk turned up the corner of her pale, swollen lips. 

“What happened to you?” 

Even as I spoke, I realized she was gone. The body standing in the bathtub was hers, but it was the Ogre’s parting gift to us that looked out of her eyes. Something had hollowed her out and taken up residence. It smelled like rotten oranges, it was wet, and it was malicious. 

She lunged. Slime splashed across the bathroom floor. 

*** 

Some nights, I wake up damp. 

With the nightmares that have never left me, this is nothing new. Since I broke into the storage locker, though, and flipped through the Ogre’s things, since I opened that book, though, the wetness on my skin has taken on a new significance. When I notice the sweat on my pillow, when I feel it trickling down the side of my face, I bolt for my bathroom mirror. In the sharp light, I examine each drop, each bead on my forehead, my neck. I wipe the sweat off with my hand, rub it between my fingers, but I don’t know what I’m looking for. I can’t seem to remember what natural, human perspiration feels like. Should it be warmer? Cooler? Viscous or thin? The possibility that what happened to Mom might happen to me has erased my sense memory of sweat. 

For her, it only took a few days, and more time than that has passed for me, but she spent days looking at those strange characters, whereas I spent only minutes. Maybe that affects the process. 

I have questions, and nowhere to go for answers. 

In the end, does it matter? If I change, I change. There’s nothing to be done. 

Mom killed four people and hospitalized six more before the police shot her to death at the end of a cul du sac a mile and a half from the Olive Tree. If and when my time comes, I wonder how many I’ll get. 

*** 

I took the stairs three at a time, practically falling down them in my panic. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tracy and Eli sitting together on the lawn as I charged through the open door, the one marked “Manager,” and slammed it closed. It took a moment to register that I’d left my younger brother and my older love out there. 

I went to the window and peeked through the blinds at Tracy as I’d done so many times before. She was standing up now, rising from her beach towel, her mouth hanging open in confusion. 

It only took seconds. 

Mom bolted down the staircase and crashed into Tracy like a rodeo bull. The blow lifted her off the ground and carried her back a yard, only a few feet from where Eli looked on, dumbstruck, about to cry. Mom grabbed Tracy by her curls, wrapped her dripping mouth around her throat, and bit shut. Blood arced. 

I wanted to tear myself away from the window, from the grizzly spectacle, to get outside and grab hold of Eli before Mom noticed him. I could pull him away, pull him inside, and we could go out the back window. I needed to save him. 

And then my opportunity passed. With blood and cartilage and slime pouring down her chin, Mom turned her eyes to her son, to her ten-year-old son, and reached for him with dripping hands. 

Crying, hating myself, I ran. 

I opened our back window and climbed out. My hands hit the sidewalk with a stinging slap. A second later, I was on my feet, running full bore, the clapping of my sneakers on the pavement echoing in the wide streets. 

 

About the Author

Brady Golden received his MFA from the University of San Francisco. Recently, his stories have appeared in Prick of the Spindle and at ducts.org. He currently lives in Oakland, California.

©2009 Brady Golden