What's Eating Gilbert Grape

by Peter Hedges

  “Can you believe it?” Amy says.

  “Lance is soooo cute,” Ellen says.

  “His head is soooo big,” Arnie says, trying to touch him through the TV.

  Lance interviews a few of the shocked neighbors. They express their dismay, their horror. “Such a lovely family, such good people.”

  Amy says, “Why does it always happen to the good people?”

  Lance speaks with the police chief. Everyone is shaken. Lance turns to the camera and says, “Rick, it’s impossible to describe the feeling here. The shock. I’m Lance Dodge in West Des Moines, reporting live.” He shakes his head as the announcer says, “This has been a special report. More at ten. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.”

  Momma turns the TV to mute. There’s a short silence where none of us know what to say.

  I look around the room at my sisters and mother and retard brother. I see the sagging floor, the wilting house. I smell the garbage in the kitchen, feel the dirt and dust in the carpet, the mildew of my clothes, and I understand wanting to erase this place, erase these people.

  Momma’s doughy head begins to shake, her fat hands make fists and she shouts, “Popcorn!”

  “Yes, Momma.”

  Amy goes to the kitchen. She pours the kernels into a pan and it sounds like little bullets. Arnie tries to stand on his head, while Ellen goes off for some time about the beauty, the humanness of Lance Dodge. Only Momma senses whatever is going on in me. “Gilbert, why would he do that? Why would a boy kill his family?”

  “Because. Because he…”

  “Because he hated them?”

  “Not hate. Because he thought…”

  “He must have hated them. Didn’t he know he had other options?”

  “I don’t know, Momma.”

  “He could have left by the same door your daddy did, couldn’t he? Not that I advocate that option, God knows. He also could have just walked out the door, walked away from it.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Yes but what?”

  “Maybe he didn’t feel that he could leave them.”

  “Well, he could’ve.”

  “Maybe he felt that they couldn’t manage without him. That he was integral to their uhm…”

  “To their what?” Momma lights a cigarette.

  “To their survival.”

  Momma laughs like “how absurd.” She hits the mute button and the sound returns to our TV. Ellen has gone upstairs to gab on the phone. Arnie waits with Amy for the popcorn to start popping. Momma changes channels, and I stand motionless.

  21

  “Gilbert, don’t go.”

  “Who said I was going anywhere?”

  “I can tell, Arnie can tell. You’re gonna go.” The bubbles from the bubble bath are in his hair and cover his face. “You’re goin’ down to Elvis. And just when we’re starting to have fun. Just when.” He holds his head under the water and stays down longer than ever before. When he pops up, his mouth sucks in air and he says, “This is better than Elvis.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yeah, the girls are watching Elvis. Ugh.”

  I’m sitting on the linoleum floor outside the tub. Every few minutes Arnie turns on the hot water to warm it back up. Tonight his entire collection of bath toys are floating in the water—the plastic speedboat, the sponge basketball set, his water goggles, which he never wears.

  “Gilbert.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I hate Elvis. I hate him.”

  “You don’t hate anybody. You don’t like him is what you mean to say.”

  “Nope.”

  “You shouldn’t hate anybody.”

  Arnie shakes his head in disagreement.

  “What did Elvis ever do to you? Huh? You can’t hate somebody who never hurt you.”

  Arnie points to where his left eye used to be.

  “Wow. Arnie. You remember that?”

  He nods.

  ***

  The day Elvis died was the same day that Arnie lost his left eye. It wasn’t like he misplaced it or anything. Momma was worried about Amy, who’d been locked for hours in her room, grieving and crying. So she sent my older brother, Larry, who was twenty, out for beer. Then, Janice, who was fifteen at the time, and Amy, who was twenty-two, and Larry spent the evening in the attic getting drunk. They played those annoying early Elvis songs and danced and made much too much noise. Meanwhile Ellen, Arnie, me, and Momma watched TV downstairs. Mamma sent Arnie up to borrow some cigarettes. The dart board was on the back of the attic door. Arnie opened it just as my older brother was throwing, and the dart stuck in Arnie’s eye, and Janice screamed out, “Bull’s-eye!” They were so drunk they found it funny.

  “It hit right here and it hurt. It hurrrrtttt.”

  “I bet it did.”

  “Ow. Ow.”

  “It doesn’t hurt anymore, though, does it?”

  “No.”

  Arnie’s eye was a goner and for a while he wore a patch that did not in any way make him look like a pirate.

  “They flashed the light the whole way,” he says.

  Momma arranged for an ambulance to drive her and Arnie to Iowa City, where there are specialists in that kind of thing. His proudest moment is that the ambulance driver flashed the light the entire length of the trip. They didn’t use the siren, Arnie told me once, not until he begged them. He said that people are nice to a one-eyed kid.

  The bubbles in Arnie’s bath are almost gone. I notice his stomach—how his belly is growing. The flab is beginning to roll over like ripples in a lake.

  “I was gone a long time,” Arnie says.

  He was there for about a week, which was way too long. I always thought he was pretty stupid and worthless, but I didn’t realize he was about the best thing going—till he lost his eye.

  When he came back, I remember telling him that it looked good as new. I said something to the effect that glass eyes are as good as real ones. Arnie told me that the eye was plastic, really, and that he wished it wasn’t plastic but rather a rubbery kind of superball-like thing so he could take it out and bounce it. “Oh well,” I remember saying, and Arnie said, “Oh well.”

  He stands up in the tub and demands a towel. I give him his, the one with a purple dinosaur on it, and he dries his hair. He climbs into his Superman pajamas. The red cape Velcros on the back, and before he can soar toward his bunk, I take a washcloth and say, “Close your eyes.” I try to wipe the remaining peanut butter off his chin. I press too hard and he tries to bite my hand. I say, “Stop that,” but he keeps trying to bite.

  Arnie flies downstairs and I hear Amy say, “Don’t block the TV,” and Momma says, “You know what, Arnie? I don’t ask much. I just want to see you turn eighteen. Is that too much to ask?”

  He won’t be answering that question. He’s never had the remotest interest in answers.

  I dry my hands off on a small towel. I head toward my room and lie down on my bed. Restless, I stand, go to my window and look out over our backyard. Since there’s been no rain, I haven’t had to mow in weeks. The bright side. Tonight there are crickets, the sound of neighbor kids playing hide and seek, and the beginnings of a new moon. In the middle of my backyard, a tiny light appears. How odd. The light glows for a second, fades out, then another light appears. My first thought is firefly. But this light starts out like a match, burning for a few seconds and then goes out. I press my face up to my window screen. I see the shape of a person dressed in black. I turn off the light in my room. This eerie sequence of match lit, match glow, match out continues. I creep down the stairs as Elvis sings “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.” I go out the door to the garage, find a flashlight in the dark, and slip into our backyard.

  “Hello?” I say. “Who’s there?” There is no sound. I walk the yard using the flashlight as my eyes. I go to where the light was glowing and look for used matches. No trace of anything. I cover the yard quick with the flashlight. Perhaps I was hallucinating. I turn
off the flashlight and sit on the swing.

  Larry hung the swing years ago. He used to push me real high.

  The night is so humid that my hair is beginning to curl. I wind myself up and let myself spin. The faster I turn, the louder I laugh. The spinning slows. I look at my house. As houses go—ours tries hard. I put my hands up under my T-shirt. I lightly run my fingers over my nipples. I lean back, my eyes close. I get a tingle. Even Beverly (with the birthmark) Ramp would do right now. I hear a giggle.

  I open my eyes and look around. “I heard that,” I say.

  I move over to where the tetherball set used to be. I listen but the only sound is crickets. Going toward our house, I almost bump into our peeling red picnic table. I look up and see a warm, glowy light coming from the giant tractor tire that serves as Arnie’s sandbox.

  Something very strange is happening in my backyard tonight.

  I walk toward the sandbox.

  Looking over the tire, I see a candle. Below the candle, a paper plate with a white plastic fork. On the plate, a slice of watermelon being devoured by an army of black ants. In the sand, written with a girl’s cursive, is this message:

  It’s the insides that count.

  Part Three

  22

  “So I was driving along, you know, thinking.”

  “Good for you.”

  “And,” Tucker continues, “I was wondering about those Burger Barn applications…”

  It’s the next morning. Tucker and I have been installing the wood support beams in the basement. He’s been speaking nonstop since arriving with his red toolbox.

  “…and how I might be able to get my hands on one of them. So I’m driving to the construction site when I see that girl walking. And get this! She was carrying this uhm oh God, it’s uhm an uh…”

  “Watermelon.”

  “Yes! And I pulled up to offer her…”

  “Tucker, please, I’ve heard the story.”

  “No, you hung up on me is what you did. You didn’t even begin to hear…”

  “Let’s talk about the girl later.”

  “You’re hanging up on me again, aren’t you? That’s what you’re doing right now.”

  “How can I hang up on you when we’re in the same room?” This seems to stump Tucker. “We’re supposed to be fixing the floor.” I say, “We’re trying to save the walrus upstairs.”

  Tucker covers his ears. “Jesus! Don’t talk about your mother that way! Your mother is a great woman.”

  I sit and clean the dirt from under my pinky finger.

  “You’re cruel!” he shouts.

  I want to say that to keep Momma from falling through is what’s cruel. Let her die if that’s what she wants. At least my father could make up his mind.

  “I’m gonna forget,” Tucker says, “that we’ve even had this discussion. Because? For me, things are looking up. Finally there’s been sunlight in my life. This girl rode in my truck! Sat on my seat cushions! I wanted to go up and down every street, honking at every house so the people in this town would see me and this girl together….”

  I find a bolt for the lower board while Tucker stops talking for a moment to tighten the C clamp that will secure the critical top section. This divine silence will more than likely be brief.

  Part of me wants to tell Tucker that I know the creature. I want him to know that she’s taken a bite out of me, too. I’m tempted to show him the slice of watermelon. For now, though, it remains hidden in a Ziploc bag under my bed. Last night I used our hose to wash the ants off. I dried the melon with my T-shirt. Using the same stick she did, I wrote “Eat me” in the sand over and over until her evil message about insides counting could not be made out.

  Ellen comes down the stairs smelling of suntan lotion. She carries two paper plates with ham sandwiches and potato chips and pickle on the side. “Food by Amy,” she says as she drops the plates on a bench in the corner. She rubs the back of her neck and half studies the boards and braces that will try to support Momma.

  “What do you think?” I ask, hoping that she’ll send a compliment Tucker’s way and silence the Becky tirade.

  “Hmmmm,” she purrs.

  “Is that all? Hmmmm? Is that all you have to say?”

  “No.”

  Tucker, up near the ceiling, straddling two lower boards, looks at Ellen, expectant.

  Ellen speaks. “She’s not what you guys think. She’s not so pretty really. That’s what Randi Stockdale from Motley says. She says that if the Miss Iowa pageant were held tomorrow, this ‘girl’ wouldn’t make quarterfinals even. And Randi would know, wouldn’t she? Yes, I think so. I urge you to spread the word, okay? She’s not so cute. Really, she’s not.” Ellen walks back to the washer and dryer. She finds her Dairy Dream uniform in a laundry basket and as she walks past us, she says, “There are pretty girls right here in Endora. Right under your noses.” She carries her uniform upstairs, holding it like it’s a baby.

  “You hungry?” I say.

  Tucker looks at me and says, “How’d she know?”

  “You can have my sandwich. I won’t be eating.”

  “Sure.” Tucker dives for the food. “Gilbert, your sister like just read our minds. Does this not amaze you?”

  “No.”

  “We were talking about the new girl and then she like appeared and somehow knew…”

  “Tucker,” I interrupt, “she was standing at the top of the stairs listening to us for the past ten minutes.”

  “Yeah? How do you know?”

  “I could smell her.”

  “Oh.”

  He begins to inhale both sandwiches. For a little guy he’s got quite an appetite. With his mouth full, he garbles, “You lie. You didn’t know she was listening.”

  “I can smell her lotion. I’m not kidding. Like right now, she’s listening right now.”

  “I wasn’t listening to you guys!” Ellen shouts down.

  Tucker looks confused. I simply laugh.

  ***

  It’s an hour later and we’re still tightening and screwing and bolting.

  “How much longer, you think?” I ask.

  “Depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “On how easily you satisfy.”

  “Oh, I satisfy very easily,” I say.

  “I know. That’s why you live as you do.”

  I’d be eternally grateful to my mother if she could fall through these support boards right now and crush Tucker in the process.

  “Your hair is getting stringy, Gilbert. The way you neglect the washing of your truck. Those rare times when you speak the words ‘Thank you.’ All of this points to my uhm…”

  “Conclusion.”

  “Conclusion, yes, that you’re not interested in being complete, being…”

  “Thorough.”

  “Huh?”

  “The word is thorough.”

  “I know! See, you don’t let me finish….”

  The phone rings upstairs. Please be for me.

  “Hold it, Tucker—hold that thought.”

  I can hear Amy walking toward the basement door. She opens it and calls down, “Gilbert.”

  “Don’t lose that thought, Tucker.”

  Upstairs Amy stands with a bowl of cookie batter in her arms. She says, “That was Sheriff Farrell on the phone. Arnie’s climbed the water tower.”

  I say, “I’ll get him,” because I’m always the one to get him. But before I start out, two of my fingers slip into the batter and I get a mouthful. Amy slaps my hand but I get it behind my teeth and smile.

  I’m going to let the screen door slam loudly so as to communicate to the women in my family that I am fed up with being the one who always has to get Arnie down from the water tower. I send the door flying, and as I bounce outside, I hear Amy say, “Don’t let the door…” but it slams before she can say “slam.”

  23

  It started last summer. Arnie found out he could scale the water tower and so now he does it every chan
ce he gets.

  When I arrive there, I find a small crowd staring up in awe. Arnie is hanging off the railing, dangling by his arms. Sheriff Farrell says, “You better get him, son. No way am I going up there.” I scream “Arnie!” and as he shakes his feet, one of his shoes falls to the ground. The water tower is tall and if he falls, then no more Arnie. I climb up the metal ladder on the side fast. The kid is giggling, having the time of his life. He’s never shown off like this before. It must be because the police lights are flashing.

  ***

  I get up to him.

  “Gilbert, they’re watching Arnie. They’re watching Arnie.”

  I say, “Course they are,” as I pull him to safety.

  We climb down.

  We’re halfway to the ground and I’m already out of breath; my jeans are full of sweat, and the crowd, for whatever reason, won’t go away.

  Sheriff Farrell waits, holding the shoe. When we touch down, I take it and put it on Arnie’s foot and tie the laces in a square knot.

  I say, “It’s okay now. I’ll get him home. It won’t happen again.”

  “Son, we hear this every time. And then a couple of days later here we are again.” Sheriff Farrell has a toothpick in his mouth and never has a toothpick looked so menacing.

  “I know, but this time I’m sure was the last time. Wasn’t it, buddy?” Arnie stares at his feet, his bottom lip pushed out. “Wasn’t it!” I squeeze his arm hard. Arnie doesn’t budge.

  “This is the ninth or tenth time. I got to take him in. You understand.”

  “What?”

  “We’ll take him to the station. We’ll fingerprint him. Lock him up for a bit. We told you, we told your sister the next time this happened, we’d have no choice. This is the next time, so don’t act surprised that this is happening.”