Sometimes he thought maybe he was spent because he had been sexual too early, just as he reached puberty: he was not quite twelve years old when two crazy girlfriends of his crazy older sister took him down to an abandoned boathouse on the Erie Canal and showed him how to play doctor and probe every facet and fold of their wild-blooming bodies and they’d do magical things to him with their tongues and soon enough they would be trysting in all manners like the hobo couples they sometimes spied on in the reeds. When his mother overheard him tell his friends what the three of them were doing she banned the older girls from visiting his sister and threatened to drag them to the police station, but even back then Hector could not imagine any better initiation, Jeanne and Jenny and him playing with one another with the same pure delight as if they were at the big carnival fair in Herkimer, where, naturally, they’d done fanciful stuff, too, high up in the Ferris wheel gondola.
In Ilion, people would tell him he ought to be a film actor, and during World War II a local committee asked him to model for a war-bonds poster that would feature a handsome family, he being the boy bursting with pride as he gazed up at his uniformed older brother. For the poster the artist had to render him a bit more wholesome than he was, recasting the set of his eyes and diminishing his full mouth in a mold less shadowed and sexualized. The poster went out all across the country and was seen locally as well, though in Ilion it was perhaps unnecessary, for the town had already been awarded the “T Flag” from the Treasury office in Washington for having one of the highest participation rates of war-bond buying in the country; its sons would enlist in the services in record measures as well, returning home maimed or dead in corresponding proportions, a mostly uncomplicated point of pride in the city that was the birthplace of Remington Arms, manufacturer of the famed Berthier, Enfield, and Springfield rifles, carried on killing fields from the Marne to Iwo Jima. History is made by what is made in Ilion, Hector’s father used to croon darkly, most all of Hector’s uncles and cousins either in the employ of the company or bearing its arms into battle, or both. Hector turned sixteen a week before Hiroshima was leveled and like most of his friends he was ready to take the bus to Albany where no one knew them and enlist, of course by lying about his age. He’d had to wait until a place called Korea erupted in war five years later to take his turn.
Certain grown women were always asking him if he would do some yard work or painting for them, and when he was a sophomore in high school he took to the forlorn beds of young wives in the neighborhood whose husbands were away in the Pacific. Of course, given the smallness of his neighborhood, of his town, he well knew the young men, a few of whom would never return. Among those was James Cahill, a Navy lieutenant, who had been an all-county halfback and track star and the youngest floor boss ever at Remington Arms, his wife, Patricia, of the ebony tresses and the hueless glowing skin the one who, that fateful night, shamefully and miserably wept after she and Hector finally coupled. But she had not let him leave right afterward, instead reaching down while she was straddling him and tightly squeezing the weary root of him to sustain another congress until she was almost faint with soreness. She had uttered his name as though he were harming her and he tried to twist away but she held him down by pressing on his shoulders with all her weight. When she finally released her grip, he was unsure if she had come but he let himself go in a violent, near-blinding acceleration that he would rarely achieve afterward, that hot push behind the eyes.
He now wondered if he could have that same push with Dora, but, really, what would he do if he ever felt so vibrantly alive again? Maybe it would be better to count himself as among the creeping, living dead. His worry now was whether Dora might suddenly be inspired beyond his ability to please her; he imagined her now padding about the two dim rooms of his existence in her pale, florid nakedness and thinking that he was not such a dreadful sort at all, certainly sufferable, even suitable, a man with whom she might do things other than drink and share a tumble in the bed. Of course he was not a suitable man, and if in the past he never bothered to alert the relevant parties of said truth, he thought he should do so for Dora, in case she was similarly mistaken.
He had been around enough places like Smitty’s to know that a woman of Dora’s age and station had perhaps one remaining chance at a generally undamaging union. No one at Smitty’s was any use, but maybe someone would walk in one night by accident and save her, a traveling salesman, a retired cop or firefighter. Even (and, maybe, best) another woman. Or perhaps Dora had no chance, being already lost, a scenario in which he would thus serve as none other than the precipitating element in her life’s final downdraft.
He made his way east on Whiteman Street and then walked the half-block south on Lemoine Avenue to where he worked, a small two-story Korean mini-mall wedged between Lemoine and Palisade avenues. Hector was the night and weekend custodian of the property, and more often than not he did the work of the day custodian as well, given that the day custodian-his boss, Jung-only periodically showed up.
This morning he found Jung as he sometimes did on Sundays, the thin, deeply tanned man curled up in the ratty vinyl love seat in the ground-floor custodian’s office, snoring loudly with a mesh golf cap pulled down over his eyes. Hector could smell the familiar stale reek of Jung’s busy night, the sugary charcoal of Korean barbecue and the funky gas of his sleep breath sharply perfumed by garlic and Marlboros and Chivas Regal. An empty bottle of the whiskey lay on its side on the floor. Today was unusual only because Jung was still wearing golf clothes, wearing even his black-and-white saddle golf shoes, tufts of grass and dried mud stuck in constellations about the spikes.
As Hector changed into coveralls, Jung grunted, eyeing him, rooting around in his trousers to scratch and rearrange. He let out a sharp fart before turning over and going back to sleep. He was already snoring when Hector opened the janitor’s closet where he kept the tools of his trade. The man was a lower god of indolence. Hector noisily hefted the heavy commercial vacuum (Jung didn’t stir) and rode up the elevator to the second floor. It was just after nine in the morning and the place was empty of activity save in the Korean restaurant on the mezzanine, which was open twenty-four hours; a lone diner spooned methodically at a half-dozen small plates of vegetables and a stoneware casserole of steaming soup. A waitress sat two tables away, robotically folding utensils within cloth napkins. When she looked up and saw him, her body relaxed and she smiled, waving him in. Hector suddenly realized he hadn’t eaten-not since yesterday’s lunch-but he wasn’t hungry yet and made a gesture to her to say that he would work first.
He set himself to vacuuming, pushing the machine back and forth on the mezzanine where the carpeting wasn’t frayed and could get caught up. In most spots it was worn down to the webbing; one could see the poured-concrete floor beneath it. The mall itself was similarly decrepit, the linoleum overlay by the entrance scratched and buckling, and the central elevator rickety-sounding and dangerously temperamental, its doors sometimes opening just before reaching the right level. The entire inside was painted in cheap off-white paint, save for the ceiling above the central open well, which was a slightly different shade of the old color, somewhat duller, where the painters couldn’t (or hadn’t bothered trying to) reach. The owner didn’t care if the place was in presentable, or even half-presentable, shape, as the tenants clearly valued most the modest rents. Nor did the poor condition of the building seem to dissuade the steady foot traffic of the Koreans and Chinese and the few non-Asians who shopped there and ate at the restaurants. Despite the state of the mall, most of the goods in the shops weren’t inexpensive, certainly nothing Hector could ever afford-knockoff designer clothing and shoes and home and car audio equipment with brand names he didn’t recognize. There was also a hair salon, an Asian video store, a toy shop, a bakery, a copy shop, a dentist who was also an acupuncturist, and a tae kwon do studio, as well as the karaoke bar and the restaurant.