Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  I decided to ask him about it that afternoon, real casual, no big deal, hey Rodney what happened to all your baseball cards? He was on the sofa in the living room, watching TV before dinner, and his eyes got all big when I asked him. Which could be interpreted as him feeling guilty about something, except that both the boys react this way whenever I talk to them, always look like they’re thinking about making a run for it. Rodney says, What do you mean, and I say, Come on, you know what I’m talking about, and he thinks for a minute, I can see him thinking up an answer, and then he tells me he sold the cards to get money for the jean jacket.

  And I say, We bought you a jean jacket.

  This was before, he says.

  Okay, I say, what happened to the money then? I don’t like talking to him like this. It reminds me of how my old man used to grill me, the way he’d poke one finger into the side of my neck and it would hurt like hell for three days afterward. But I’m not poking Rodney, and I’m not drunk. I know what’s going on here, and it’s my job to deal with it even if it makes me uncomfortable.

  Rodney doesn’t say anything.

  That must have been six, seven hundred dollars’ worth of cards, I say. The Yastrzemski rookie alone was worth at least fifty.

  Still he doesn’t speak, just sits there with the gears turning behind his eyes. His pupils are huge.

  So, I say. I’m trying to keep an even tone, but the truth is I’m a little irritated at his playing dumb, because he’s caught. He knows it, I know it, and I’m not one for games. Where’s the money.

  And I guess he can’t come up with any suitable lies, because he says, It’s my money. What I do with it is my business.

  At first this sets me off. I feel the old anger rising in me, it’s like I can hear it go POP in my head, and I clench my good left hand against it to give myself time to think. In a way he’s right—he bought the cards with money he earned, so any money he gets from selling the cards belongs to him. No argument there. My hand relaxes some. But as far as the not being my business thing. Well.

  I’m your father, kid, I tell him. Everything is my business.

  And then Rodney does something that catches me off-guard. I’m expecting he’ll just out with it now, he’s caught and cornered and there’s no way out, but instead he suddenly gets really angry and puffs himself up and starts yelling about how he’s not a little boy anymore and he needs independence and privacy and how do we expect him to be trustworthy if we don’t trust him. All the while as he’s saying this he’s walking away toward his room. And I’m so surprised that it’s not until he’s already slammed the door behind him that I realize: the whole thing was just a way for him to escape without having to answer my question. And it worked to a T.

  But if he thinks this is the end of it, he’s wrong. I know what’s going on here, and I’m not about to pretend otherwise. So tomorrow, during the time between shifts when I’d normally be sleeping, I’m going to pay a visit to the boy’s uncle.

  Junior

  Rodney left yesterday. Dad helped him pack his clothes and toothbrush and took him away. When I came home from school his bed was empty with the sheets and blankets all piled at the foot, just like he’d left them when he got up that morning. It will stay that way unless I make it. I’m not sure I want to make it, though. I look at the messy bed with the Red Sox logo on the sheets, then I try to picture it made up nice and neat, and I can’t decide which is worse. Two of his dresser drawers are still open, just sitting there open and empty. That whole side of the room, all of a sudden, is haunted. I almost cried last night. But then before I went to bed, I marked an X on the Red Sox calendar like I do every day, and I thought about how in 29 years and 274 days everything will be gone anyway and so what does it matter that Rodney is a drug addict.

  I think that way a lot. Except it’s not really thinking so much as hearing someone else’s voice in my head. Like last year when the baseball players went on strike and the season ended in June, I got really sad. But then the voice came in my head talking about how soon there will be no baseball at all, ever again. I know it’s strange. I don’t think it happens to anyone else. I went to the library and read through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the woman at the desk looked at me funny when I asked her to take it down off the stack for me) and found that schizophrenia probably is the closest thing to what happens with me. But it’s not exact. I always know what’s real and what isn’t. The voice doesn’t tell me to do bad things. It’s friendly and comforting and when I’m sad I listen to it. It doesn’t really make me feel better. Just bad in a different way. But it usually keeps me from crying.

  Ma and Dad don’t know that I know why Rodney’s gone. They think because I’m only seven I won’t understand, but I do. The teachers at school want to skip me ahead to tenth grade. While the rest of the class works their times tables I’m in the corner by myself doing calculus and reading Candide and sort of understanding it. So yes I know what’s going on with Rodney.

  I knew before anyone else did.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out. Rodney and I share a bedroom. I noticed plenty. He was pretty careless. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t rat him out, and he’s right, I wouldn’t. Or it’s possible he just got sloppy; according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, addicts make fewer efforts to hide drug use as their addictions worsen. Whatever the reason, he was careless around me. It was inevitable that I’d find things. He hid discarded pieces of aluminum foil in his pillowcase; when it started to look lumpy he’d empty it out. The trash can was always full of bloody tissues from his nosebleeds. I knew he’d started carrying a razor blade in his mouth because he showed it to me, and the callus that had formed between his cheek and gum. He said he kept the blade there for protection, which worried me at first, because what kind of trouble was he in that he needed to protect himself? But then I read about how razor blades are used to cut cocaine into powder and I realized he’d just been acting like a tough guy with the protection talk, trying to create an image of himself.

  What I didn’t know, until yesterday, is that when you’re an addict that means you have to go away. It was just like any other morning. I got up and took a bath and was dressed and ready for school before Rodney even got out of bed. I was eating Kix at the kitchen table when he came in with his eyes still half-closed, rubbing the back of his head where his long hair had snarled up. He had on the same jeans he wears every day, and the same black boots, and one of four T-shirts he wears in rotation—this was the Motörhead: Iron Fist shirt. Rodney tore the sleeves off it a couple months ago to show off the tufts of brown hair that have sprouted under his arms. I could have teased him about showing off his pit hair, but it’s not my way, besides which if I had teased him I would have gotten an Indian rug burn, or worse a Melvin, Rodney’s favorite torture to inflict on me—basically a wedgie, but in the front, which hurts more than the traditional back-wedgie. And even though Ma would make him pay big for hurting me, and even though the world is going to end soon, I don’t want a Melvin, and consequently I do not tease Rodney very often.

  When Rodney staggered out of the bathroom with his hair pulled back in a ponytail and his jean jacket on, as far as I knew he was heading to school like me. I guess I should have known something was going on, because Dad was at home instead of at the bakery. I was surprised, when I came downstairs, to see him sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and a cigarette going in the ashtray with a long barrel of ash dangling from the end. If I’d really been paying attention I would have noticed this, the cigarette in the ashtray, because the only time Dad’s cigarettes touch an ashtray is when he snuffs them out. Otherwise they’re in his mouth the whole time he’s smoking. He had something on his mind and had forgotten all about this cigarette, but for whatever reason I didn’t notice at the time. It was only after I came home from school and Ma sat me down and told me Dad had taken Rodney away for a while and we should go to church and pray for him that I put it all together.


  I go to church without complaining on Sundays because it makes Ma happy, and I participate in the process of first Communion for the same reason. But I don’t know what to think of it. Is the voice in my head God? If it’s the God I’ve been taught, the God of Christianity, then some things don’t add up. Like the comet—is it Armageddon? Can’t be. Not the Armageddon we read about in CCD. Because even though there is a reference in Revelation to “a great mountain, burning with fire . . . cast into the sea”—which sounds a lot like what the voice described to me—in the next chapter, after the great burning mountain, an army of 200 million men appears. According to what I’ve been told, there won’t be any men left after the comet hits, let alone 200 million. So someone somewhere has got their facts mixed up. And so far the voice has known a lot more about what’s going on in the world than Father Robideaux and Sister Bernadette and the others. All they talk about is mysterious ways, and the evidence of things unseen.

  Which is not to say I don’t like being at church. I do. Except for the part during Mass when we have to turn to the people around us and offer them blessings of peace. The men you shake their hands and the women you hug. If I’m unlucky enough to be sitting near one of the old French ladies with cat hair on their nylons they kiss my cheek and they usually don’t smell very good. I can feel the wet lipstick mark they leave behind. That I don’t like at all. But being in the church itself is pleasant, especially during weekdays when there are no services, like yesterday when I went in with Ma to pray for Rodney. It’s dark and cool and quiet and always smells faintly of the spicy smoke from the censers. The rows of pews are set in a semicircle, radiating out like spokes from the hub of the chancel. One of my favorite features is the ceiling, which rises on huge wooden beams from the outer edge of the church to its highest point directly over the pulpit. I read that this sort of design improves acoustics, and the way it rises gradually from where you enter to the point above the pulpit gives the sense that the energy of the congregation, or of even just a single person praying, is being gathered and channeled right up through the ceiling and into heaven. That’s what I was thinking about when I knelt in the pew next to my Ma. I thought about how I hope that Rodney will be okay, and I tried to channel those thoughts up to the high point of the ceiling and out to whoever might be listening. That’s the best I can do as far as praying. I hoped, too, that I would hear the voice again soon and maybe it could tell me what’s going to happen with Rodney. Whenever it tells me about the future, things always happen exactly the way they’re described. That’s how I know that what it says about the end of the world is true. That’s how I know how Dad lost his fingers, the prostitute and her baby and how they died. That’s how I knew for sure that Rodney was a drug addict. That’s how I know what Dad did to Uncle Rodney when he found out my brother Rodney was a drug addict. There are so many things I know but can’t say.

  When I was done focusing my thoughts up toward the ceiling I just sat there enjoying the half-light and the quiet of the church. After a while I got bored staring at the big statue of Jesus on the cross that hangs over the lectern, and I stole a glance at my ma. If she’d opened her eyes and seen me looking at her instead of praying she would have been mad, but she was praying too fervently to notice me. Normally when I look at my ma I see my ma. But at that moment she could have been a stranger. She had her eyes shut tight and her hands clasped together in one big fist under her chin, the beads of her rosary strung between her fingers. Her lips moved, and I could hear the whisper of her breath going in and out, but I couldn’t make out the words. She was repeating the same prayer. I concentrated on the cadence and recognized, after a couple of repetitions, that it was the Act of Contrition—“O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee”—over and over, quicker each time, and her chin began to tremble and tears seeped between her eyelids and moved down her cheeks. For that moment, in my mind, she became a stranger, just a frightened, pious woman come to church on a Wednesday afternoon to beg for deliverance. It was one of those moments when you see someone you know as if for the first time. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was one of the scariest moments in my life. And this time the voice offered nothing to help me feel bad in a different way, and I started to cry, too.

  I tried to keep quiet but that only made it worse and I began to sob, like a baby. My mother heard me and opened her eyes. She leaned toward me until our shoulders were touching.

  “Don’t cry, babe,” she said. “Rodney will be okay.”

  Of course I was crying for her, not Rodney. But I couldn’t tell her that. It was just another thing I couldn’t say. I put my face in the rough knit of her sweater and breathed her perfume and the bitter smell of that morning’s coffee, and then she was my ma again.

  We sat like that for I don’t know how long, seconds or minutes or it could have even been half an hour, though it probably wasn’t that long because I would have noticed a difference in the angle of the sunlight coming through the stained glass. When the crying stopped our breathing slowed. I could hear my mother’s heartbeat through her ribs, and this gave me a strong sense of déjà vu that I could not place. But then suddenly she gripped me by the upper arms and shoved me back at arm’s length and held me there. Her fingers pressed into my biceps and her eyes, though still full of tears, were firm on mine. I had seen her this way with Rodney many times, but never with me.

  “Now you see what happens,” she said, “when you act like Rodney does. He’s proud, and that being proud has made us all sad. Him most of all. Do you understand, babe?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “If he lets go of his pride, Jesus will take care of him. But if not. He will be sad and sick for all of his life. There’s nothing any of us can do. We can pray for him, but that’s it.”

  “I understand, Ma.”

  She pulled me close again. “I know you do,” she said, hugging me. “You always have.”

  “Yes, Ma,” I tried to say, but she held my head against her chest and the words came out garbled. It felt like I was suffocating. I tried to pull my face away, to get a breath of the cool air inside the church, but she held tight and all I got, over and over, was my own hot moist recycled breath, trapped in the weave of her sweater.

  Rodney

  Uncle Rodney comes to the Adolescent Recovery Unit to see me today. First thing I say to him is what happened to your nose, because it’s all stitched up on both sides like it had to be sewed back on his face, but he says Nev ermind it doesn’t matter how it happened, I deserved it and anyway it’ll be fine, but really what’s important is how you’re doing, he says to me. It’s my fifth day at the Adolescent Recovery Unit and I’m not doing so good. I threw up during group the second night, and the muscles in my legs feel like someone’s been punching them. They hurt so bad I checked them to see if they were bruised even though I haven’t run into anything. The other night I got up and went to Phil the night nurse and told him how bad my legs hurt and he said there’s nothing I can do Rodney you’re not to have so much as an aspirin. And the next day Rosemary my caseworker said you’re old enough to hear this Rod, taking drugs is how you deal with every kind of pain and you need to learn how to accept and work through pain without the help of drugs. But having said that, she said, if it gets really unbearable we’ll see what we can do. Is it unbearable? she asked, and I had to shake my head no, because it’s really not and the idea here is total honesty and after five days of being locked in here and at night not sleeping because I’m so sick I just want to do whatever I have to to get out of this. The kids who are here for drinking get all the drugs they want because the counselors and nurses say alcohol withdrawal is the only kind that can kill you, so it has to be managed medically, is what they say. But the narco kids like me and Rheal Roy, the kid from Benton who’s hooked on heroin and sits in group with his head down and long things of snot hanging from his nose like he’s six instead of sixteen, we get nothing.

  I tell Uncle Rodney al
l this. We’re in the dayroom and he’s sitting on one of the plastic chairs they keep stacked against the wall and take down twice a day for group. The chairs get really uncomfortable after like five minutes but group lasts at least an hour, longer if there’s a new kid on the unit having his first group, and there usually is. Uncle Rodney doesn’t seem to notice how uncomfortable the chair is, though. He’s leaning forward toward me with his elbows on his knees, and while he listens he keeps touching his nose with the tips of his fingers like he’s checking to make sure it’s still there. It’s sort of the color of an old steak, and even though it’s stitched on it looks like it might just fall off onto the floor pretty much any minute now. If my nose looked like that I’d be touching it too.

  I’m glad Uncle Rodney’s here. I thought when he found out he’d be mad like my dad was, especially since he must have figured out that I’ve been pinching off his stash for years. But as I’m telling him about me spitting in the toilet at night and how Rheal’s whole body shakes all the time which makes the snot hanging from his nose swing around and stick to his cheeks, my voice goes up like a girl’s and it gets hard to breathe. But I try to hold it in because men don’t cry and Dad said if I’m going to get through this I’ve got to grow up and be a man. Uncle Rodney puts his hand on my arm and rubs it and tries to smile but has a hard time smiling because of the nose thing.

  Easy kiddo, he says. I know. Take it easy.

  And when he takes his hand away I notice that it’s shaking, and I wipe my eyes and look closer and see that both his hands are shaking and there’s sweat on his forehead and he’s licking his lips a lot. Also he’s got a paper bracelet like the one they put on my wrist when I got here.