B008J4PNHE EBOK

by Owen King

  “So, your dad’s a”—Gloria Wang-Petty grimaced and rubbed her fingers as if trying to get something off them; it was Tuesday, between periods—“like, actor person, and he’s coming on Friday?”

  “Yeah,” said Sam. He had gone to retrieve a juice box from his cubby, and when he turned around, Gloria was in his way, blocking him from the rest of the room. “He’s an actor.”

  “What’s that like?” asked Gloria, dark-eyed and intimidatingly tall in her yellow cowboy boots.

  Popular and intelligent, Gloria, like all the smart and well-liked girls, radiated not only competence but authority. Sam was afraid of her and also drawn to her. Her black bangs were teased into five spiky arcs. She smelled like banana hair spray.

  “I don’t know,” said Sam. He sensed that she wanted him to say that having Booth for a father was incredibly exciting, like having Christmas morning every day. Although he was willing to lie to escape the treacherous subject, he suspected that such a declaration would only prolong it.

  “You don’t know? He’s your father.”

  The smell of bananas was making Sam light-headed. He broke eye contact, glancing over the top of the cubbies at the poster of President George H. W. Bush shaking hands with an astronaut. “He has to work a lot.”

  “What kind of movies is he in? Has he ever been in a musical? I love musicals.”

  The awful, tantalizing posters in the closet came to mind. In one, Booth had pinwheels for eyes, and the people watching him were plainly in his control, enraptured, faces slack and openmouthed. What would a bunch of kids make of that? Sam himself wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s never been in a musical,” said Sam, carefully eliding the first question.

  “Does he know famous people?” asked Gloria.

  Sam recalled what his father had said at the museum. “He knows Orson Welles.”

  “Who is Orson Welles?” Her tone was doubtful, as if Orson Welles were a new kid who had just moved to Hasbrouck and made a splash by being talented at basketball or doing skateboard tricks.

  “He’s a famous director,” said Sam. The ground beneath his feet had steadied. “He directed and starred in Citizen Kane, the greatest movie ever made.”

  “I’ve never even heard of that movie,” said Gloria suspiciously.

  “Oh,” said Sam. “It’s about this guy—named Kane.” He chuckled for no reason and stabbed the juice box straw ineffectually at the small plastic-sealed aperture.

  “So what’s your dad going to do with us?”

  “I don’t know.” He tried to change the subject. “These straws never work.” In one hand, he raised the bent straw, and in the other, he held up his juice box.

  “I just hope your dad’s not stupid. I mean, no offense.” Gloria rolled her eyes up to inspect her five bangs and brought a hand up to smooth one. “Like, it was cool when Jessie’s dad froze stuff with the liquid ice, but it was super-retarded when what’s-his-name’s nurse mom made us stay late watching that video about shaking babies. And then we had to carry around the flour-sack babies all weekend? Duh, I’m not going to shake a baby, but this is a flour sack. If anything, I’m going to get my mom to turn that sucker into a batch of brownies.”

  Sam nodded eagerly, although he vividly recalled Gloria and the rest of the girls cooing over their flour-sack infants and bringing them back to school wearing hats. “Yeah. That was super-retarded.”

  Gloria abruptly reached out and plucked his juice box from his hands. She punched the straw through the hole at the top. “There. Hey, can I have a sip, Sam?” Gloria smiled and squinted at him. “I’m so thirsty.”

  In the four or five seconds that elapsed before he responded, a realization clicked into place as part of the mystery—Girls: what the heck?—was solved. It was what Sam wanted from them; that is, merely to be permitted to give them what they wanted, to please them, to get them to look at him the way Gloria was looking at him at that moment, like he might be worth something. (Simultaneously, his interest in the other chief aspect of the mystery—what girls might want from him or any male—was abruptly discarded for the next decade.) A bubbly feeling coursed through Sam, a wonderful shakiness that made him squeeze his hands to keep them from flopping around.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Go ahead. Have the whole thing.” He hoped she would ask him for something else, for anything.

  “Oh, thank you! You’re sweet.” Gloria took another little drink. “Remember: don’t let your dad do anything retarded! Make him be good, okay?”

  And things had been going so well.

  The bell rang, and she said she’d see him later. Sam stayed where he was. He licked his dry lips.

  3.

  Allie’s café, the Coffee Shop, shared the bottom floor of what had been the Hasbrouck movie theater. You entered under the marquee—

  NOW PLAYING

  The Coffee Shop

  Starring Joe as “Coffee”

  —and the Coffee Shop occupied the entire former lobby area of the theater. The counter was arranged along the lines of the old concessions stand, and the bathrooms were vintage examples of mid–twentieth century plumbing, complete with a trough in the men’s bathroom. A few horseshoe-shaped plaster moldings clung to the walls, though they were tinted brown with age, their swirls gouged and chipped. Mismatched couches and café tables were arranged around the bare hardwood floor. The stairs to the second floor were cordoned off by yellow caution tape.

  As for the theater proper, it had become the offices and meeting hall of the SUNY-Hasbrouck Communist Students’ Association. They had their own entrance at the back of the theater, but Sam had peeked inside. Here again, the space’s former use was vaguely present. At the foot of the auditorium, there was a narrow, bare stage but no screen or curtain. A random selection of the original seats remained, two or three side by side in one place, a single by itself in another place, and so on. The impression conveyed by the cavernous room was of a mouth with the majority of the teeth pulled.

  The visible sediment of the previous institution beneath the newer one struck even a boy Sam’s age as telling. The town was like a piece of twice-used drawing paper, smudged and worn thin from repeated erasing.

  Hasbrouck had no industry to speak of, just the college with its tides of students, streaming in and streaming out. Hikers and climbers came for the mountains, but departed on Sunday afternoons. Whether a person was renting a couple of days of fresh air, or getting four years of college, ultimately, they were headed elsewhere. Meanwhile, Sam, Allie, and the dead Huguenots stayed on.

  It was depressing, honestly, the boy’s sense that his town once was a place to be—a place with an operating movie theater—as opposed to a place to leave, probably in favor of somewhere that did have a movie theater.

  His father was like all the others: he came and went.

  “Did you know that Booth is coming to my school, Tom?”

  On the eve of his father’s presentation, Sam was at the Coffee Shop, staging Nukies on the steps of Tom Ritts’s ladder. Sam liked Tom because, in a way, he was the opposite of Booth; Booth made everything big, whereas Tom made everything small. Allie liked him, too, not least because his tolerant nature was catnip for her love of teasing.

  “No, I didn’t. But that ought to be pretty decent,” said Tom. His upper body was in the lobby ceiling. He was changing the fittings on the ancient pipes above the counter area. These pipes—like the men’s room trough and the crumbling moldings, original to the theater—had recently started to drip cold water on people’s necks. “Your dad’s a real showman, Sam.” His voice was a tinny echo.

  “Yeah.” Sam squared up a Nukie who had her hands lifted, palms outward in the universal gesture for stop, with a bloodshot eye bulging from each palm. The boy flicked her with an index finger. The creature plunged to the floor below. “Ahhhhhh!” said Sam under his breath.

  “Did you say something?” asked Tom. “I couldn’t hear you.”

  “So wh
y do you like him?” asked Sam. “Booth, I mean.”

  It felt natural to speak freely with Tom, who was so nonchalant that it was extremely difficult to imagine him possessing the wherewithal to lie about anything or even shade the truth. Maybe it was a matter of supreme self-confidence, or maybe it was simplicity, but Tom was entirely out in front. The threadbare ankles of the older man’s blue jeans were at Sam’s eye level.

  “Why do I like your dad? That’s a heck of a question. But let me see,” said Tom.

  A young man in a tattered army jacket with sunglasses propped in his dreadlocks approached the counter. “Hey, little brother, you got any cinnamon?”

  Sam pointed to a short table in front of the roped-off stairs to the balcony. “Over there, Communist.”

  The young man grunted and shuffled away.

  There was the sound of metal tapping on metal in the ceiling. “You know, more than anything, Booth keeps me on my toes. He makes it fun. I bet that’s a big part of how come your mom loves him so much, too.”

  The appeal eluded Sam. “You like that?”

  “Sure,” said Tom. “What’s not to like about feeling happy?”

  Sam spotted the fallen Nukie on the floor and stamped on it. He ground his heel around, trying to pulverize the poor freak.

  “When my son, your peer, Young Samuel here,” said the Booth of Sam’s mind, the full classroom arrayed before him, Gloria Wang-Petty in her seat in the left-hand corner of the front row, “was first handed to me by the nurse, he was enrobed in a kind of rough brown cloth, such as an extra will wear in a biblical production. He resembled a tiny leper. And he did not fuss, did not scream or cry. He just glared at me, fiercely glared.” There was a wave of laughter, laughter like monkeys screeching, but the Booth of Sam’s mind remained stern-faced. At last the laughter ceased. Booth cleared his throat. “It was,” he finished, “most disquieting,” and this sent them all roaring again. Gloria was in such a state that she was yanking on her bangs, hanging on to them for dear life.

  Sam took away his foot. The Nukie was dusty, twisted slightly, but intact.

  Allie passed by, carrying a couple of ceramic pitchers. “What’s the hold up?” she called to Tom. “You sure you know what you’re doing there, Ritts?”

  There was a grunt from the ceiling. “Oh, I know what I’m doing up here. It’s called ‘Not getting paid to fix your plumbing.’ ”

  Allie winked at her son. “Okay, Tom. You keep at it,” she said, and swept away with two fresh pitchers.

  “Mom?” Sam called after her, and was instantly relieved that she didn’t hear him and turn back, because for some reason he knew that if she did, he would break down in tears and beg her to keep Booth from coming, and probably tell her about the woman in the museum, too, about Sandra.

  Earlier that day, when Sam had stopped at home to drop off his backpack, the phone was ringing again. “Sammy? Is that you Sammy?”

  The contractor leaned out of the ceiling. Grease spotted his face and the blond of his receding crew cut. He wore a gap-toothed smile. “Hey, buddy, what’s with the long face? Why don’t you grab a wrench and get up here? I could use an extra hand tightening this gasket.”

  4.

  When his alarm rang at seven o’clock, the boy opened his eyes to stare up at the model P-51 Mustang that dangled from the ceiling. He wished it would strafe him where he lay. A couple of minutes passed fruitlessly—the fighter twisted lightly on its wire—and Sam threw his feet over the bed, planting them down on the cold wood.

  His father was in the kitchen. Booth, predictably, had arrived under the cover of darkness.

  Arrayed in a pair of voluminous black pajamas, he was frying bacon in a skillet and whistling the annoying little ditty he always whistled. Allie was at the table in her blue bathrobe, smiling and tapping her foot. Between them Sam sensed a casual, happy collusion, as if they had just won a game of doubles tennis.

  He paused in the entryway, petting the doorframe. His sleep had been unsettled, rattled by dreams of thunderous, indistinct questions. “I can’t understand you,” he remembered yelling over and over, walking in the house, on the street, in the Huguenot graveyard. The questions kept coming, though—maybe from the sky, maybe from the earth, he couldn’t tell, they seemed to be all around. The inflection told him that they were questions, but the words were bottomless and insensible.

  “What’s going on?” he asked his parents.

  “Breakfast,” said Allie. She blew him a kiss.

  “A delicious repast to fortify the young scholar!”

  At the stove, his father executed a shovel-and-flip with the skillet; strips of bacon tumbled through the air. Several landed in the pan, and several others on the floor, where they exploded into brown shrapnel on the tile. Allie dropped her forehead to the table with a knock and whooped.

  Booth set the skillet back on the burner and performed a mincing dance on the tips of his toes before executing a courtly bow, rolling out his right hand. “Madam. I give you: bacon.”

  Sam slid away from the doorframe.

  “Oh, stay, dear! Samuel, stay! There’s more than enough!” cried Booth after him. “The floor bacon can be mine!”

  “Never mind,” said the boy, retreating. “I’m not hungry.”

  The phone began to ring. “Oh, Christ,” said Allie, “it’s probably that breather again.”

  ■ ■ ■

  A few minutes later, on the porch, Sam informed his mother that it was probably time for him to wait at the foot of their driveway for the bus by himself. He said it almost exactly that way: “You know, I think it’s probably time I waited by myself, Mom.” The gesture wasn’t intended petulantly, wasn’t intended toward Allie at all. It just seemed, in the face of that afternoon’s hopeless appointment, like it was time for him to stand by himself. Sam actually felt brave.

  “You’re probably right,” said Allie, and stuck his lunch money, two dollars rolled in a tube, into the chest pocket of his spring jacket. She hugged him tightly, her long hair brushing over his eyes, and let go. The screen door groaned shut, and the front door followed with a click.

  He was immediately sorry, wanting another moment with her. Tears stung his eyes and his nose. He felt stupid for being so upset. The wind blew through his coat. It was gray. The road bent past the Huguenot graveyard. From inside, he heard the muffled sound of his mother’s record player coming alive with the light, tumbling intro to a Scott Joplin rag. “There it is, Zelda,” came Booth’s approving voice carrying clearly outside, “there’s the one I like.”

  Sam closed his eyes and stepped.

  ■ ■ ■

  Because Career Day Presentations always took place at final period, he had the rest of the day to brood on his fate.

  At lunch Sam disconsolately spooned gravy onto a Nukie he had never liked. “Noooo,” he whispered, “whywhywhywhy!” The Nukie had the lower body of a worm and the upper body of a nerd.

  Mark Goolsby, a sallow, blinking boy, sat across the cafeteria table, eating his cheese sandwich. “That Nukie’s really suffering, isn’t he?” observed Goolsby.

  The two boys were not friends but occasional project partners, both decent, reserved students. A connection based on their fathers—Mark’s the check-fraud ex-con, Sam’s Booth—had not resolved, but Sam thought there might be something there.

  “He had it coming.” Sam spooned more gravy onto the figure, which from the worm up happened to bear a likeness to Mark Goolsby—glasses, short-sleeve button-down, tight haircut. Goolsby’s mother, a homeopath (whatever that was), was the afternoon’s other presenter.

  Boot heels clicked on the cafeteria linoleum. An angular shadow fell across the table. Gloria Wang-Petty leaned over to tear a handful of napkins from the dispenser in the middle of the boys’ table. “We’re all out at my table,” she explained.

  “Cool,” said Mark.

  “Mark, did you tell your mother about my nut allergy?” asked Gloria.

  “’Course,” said Mark. />
  Mrs. Goolsby was bringing cookies. As far as Sam was concerned, in relation to whatever it was that Booth was planning, this added insult to injury. Cookies were stacking the deck.

  “Thanks, Conwict!” Gloria poked Mark in the shoulder. (For involved reasons related to a raucous viewing of a BBC version of Great Expectations in the previous year’s Advanced English class, and the thick accents employed by some of the actors, Mark’s nickname was no longer the Convict’s Son, but just Conwict.)

  “Anything to be of service,” said Goolsby, who (wisely, in Sam’s view) had given up actively protesting his nickname and switched to a program of faintly snide remarks.

  She turned to Sam. “Hey, Sam.”

  “Hey, Gloria.”

  “I’m excited about your dad. I was thinking, and you know, I’ve never met an actor!”

  Sam nodded.

  Gloria hesitated. “There’s a—” She was looking in the direction of Sam’s mashed potatoes. The Nukie’s nerd head protruded slightly, like a pink pebble.

  “It’s a guy,” said Sam, who knew he ought to be embarrassed but was too depressed.

  “Oh,” said Gloria, and shrugged before managing to drum up another smile for him. “Thanks again.”

  When the bell rang, Sam picked up his Nukie and stuck it in his mouth. He walked to class imagining himself walking to class—being filmed, that is, by a camera on rails, gliding alongside him, because that was how he felt, as though he were being sucked effortlessly forward by gravity, his path preordained—while alternately gnawing and sucking on plastic.

  ■ ■ ■

  Mark’s mother was first. As the cookies circulated, Ms. Goolsby held up a leafing twig. “Would you believe that there’s more healing power in this sprig of lilac than in one whole bottle of heart pills?” She waved the twig. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” She waved the twig some more.