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by test

  "Bad luck moon, isn't it?" Jeb said. "Wasn't less-than-half bad news on guard duty?" I didn't talk. I pulled out a roach, not really enough to get stoned. I lit it, and we each took a couple of hits. "Two hurricanes and a major oil spill here in the last four years," Jeb said. "I figure this place is due something good."

  When we finished smoking, Jeb's legs were moving back and forth so fast the wood was shaking. "You're freezing, let's go back," I said.

  "No, let's stay. I don't feel like being in yet."

  We were quiet again a little while. I wanted to feel about my little brother the way I did when we were close, but what I felt instead were screws tightening in my head.

  Jeb ripped up a strip of rotten wood. "I've only seen you once since she died. You didn't come see us last time we visited Dad."

  "I was busy."

  "No you weren't. You were mad at me. What for?"

  "You really asking?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "Cause you act like you're Daddy's daddy. You act like you can make everything all right."

  "So? That's better than you. Here you are, a Vietnam vet, still calling our mother 'Momma.'"

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  Jeb stood and hugged himself. He spat into the water.

  "I try to make it easier for Dad," he said. "All I want is to make the hard times go faster."

  I stood. "Let's hit it."

  He touched my arm. I faced him.

  "Come on, Bob, let's talk. Who knows when we'll see each other again?"

  "Who knows? Maybe not even next Christmas."

  Jeb inhaled slowly and shot the air out through his nose just like when he was a kid. He raised his hands. "All right," he said. "I'm judgmental. I'll try harder I worry about Dad, though. You too. You're my big brother."

  I walked past him, stepped through the concrete and headed toward the houses. He matched my stride, but we didn't speak. Through the fog on the water, I saw a boat's red running lights, heard its horn.

  "Give me a cigarette," Jeb said. I lit two and gave him one. He pulled hard and blew the smoke upward the way I'd taught him when he'd asked me how to look tougher as a teenager He smiled."

  Asshole," I said.

  "You know, I get jealous of you and Dad when y'all tell war stories," he said. "Know what I mean?"

  "Yeah, you're fucked up."

  "No, really."

  "You were lucky. You've gotten great rolls," I said.

  "I have, but I still envy you. I know it's perverse. Your life is big. Sometimes I feel like my life's been cut and dried."

  "You just got some sense. Don't wish you didn't."

  Ahead, I saw a hulking Martian ship on legs. I stopped, a fist in my throat, then realized it was a water tank strung with lights. I blew into my hands.

  "I still dream about Mother almost every night," Jeb said. "The worst are when she's alive and young and then I wake up and she's not. You dream about her?" I nodded. "Tell me."

  I flicked my cigarette away and started walking again.

  "I had one where I was at a table with all these people," I said. "I kept hearing this piano music that nobody else was hearing, real pretty music. So finally I got up like I was going to the john and went to the room where it was coming from. It was Momma playing the piano. She winked at me and said, 'This is our secret, okay?'"

  "I never told you about my trip home after the funeral," Jeb said. "It was like she was sending all kinds of omens. Like she was saying, 'Look out, things are going to be different.'"

  "What kinds of omens?"

  "Nothing earth-shattering, it's just that they all happened that night. First,

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  a gas can wedged under our car. Then a dog about the size of a wolf, maybe it was a wolf, darted in our way so that I had to swerve onto the shoulder And then, this was the one, a blue meteorite fell across the road."

  "Really?"

  "Really. I'd never even seen a shooting star while I was driving. It was beautiful."

  Jeb stopped in front of his house and looked up at the sky, so filled with stars they seemed to be looking at us from just above the houses. I remembered when I was in basic training, Jeb had sent me a picture he drew. He was only ten and he'd crayoned two astronauts, one big and one small, on the moon. On their space suits he'd written our names.

  Jeb ground his cigarette on the sole of his shoe, making a tiny shower of sparks. He put his hands in his pockets. "When all that happened to me," he said, "when I saw that meteorite, I thought of you, Bob. I felt like I was you."

  "Sure you did."

  At the picture window, Daddy smiled and nodded, listening to Conlee. He pointed over us into the darkness.

  "I'm serious," Jeb said. "I felt like you."

  I shoved him and laughed. "You never felt that good."

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  The Wunderkind

  by Johnny Payne

  At one time, I considered myself a passable example of a type that seems to have found its peak of adulation on American soil, though its name is Germanwunderkind. Reflecting on it now from the vantage point of my nearly thirty years of age, when I can no longer claim to be a kind of any kind, I don't regret that season of conceit, nor do I lament its passing. Feeling our potential well up within us like foolish tears, or like a very German keg of lager begging to be tapped, is a satisfaction that doesn't need to find its objectification in any lasting performance in order to gratify fully. What is promise, after all, but exactly what it says?a pledge that finds its definition in the fact of being deferred. I remember watching with astonishment at a summer starlight concert while a child prodigy played a Bach partita with skill and insight far beyond his meager years, thrilling the audience the more as they tried to imagine how exponentially his talent would have improved ten summers from that date.

  I had the good fortune to hear this same prodigy six years later at a symphony hall, on the threshold of his adulthood. He had not, as so often happens with musical prodigies, reached a plateau of achievement by then, and, as his eyebrows attested, he actively searched out more complex interpretations of the pieces even as he played them. Yet, in the pauses between symphonic movements, a tinge of sadness could be heard in the rustling programs as his listeners clearly foresaw the competitions he would win, the recording contracts, the long succession of albums he would generate with the world's best orchestrasin other words, not gold to airy thinness beat, but solid gold. The prodigy had surpassed all predictions, and was about to become yet another productive adult. His aficionados mourned his passage even more than if he had died at a tender age.

  We're not, as we pretend, a nation of Benjamin Franklins, resolving to perform what we ought, and performing without fail what we resolve. We do function, without question, often with great efficiency, but I can never forget that functionthe f in the mathematical equation y = f(x)is simply the relation that allows us to plot on a graph the exciting and mysterious trajectory of, for example, a wunderkind's life. The mystique of that plotting is the intangible object of the mathematical equation. It is also the intangible object of our affections.

  I recall a conference, at which I was present, that took place between my

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  mother and a guidance counselor at one or another of the elementary schools I attended. Without mentioning specific numbers in my presence, the two of them were discussing my scores on an achievement test with a great deal of excitement. I didn't see those scores, nor did I ever dare to inquire about them (no more than I would have asked my parents to furnish a marriage license to prove the legitimacy of their ostensible marriage date), but I saw the effect they had on my mother.

  At that time in her own trajectory, she had trouble enough providing money for our weekly lunch tickets. Only infrequently could she attend parent-teacher conferences, as she was summoned to do in cryptic writing (meant to be deciphered by parents only) on the back of my report cards. Her prospects then were as thin as the hair beneath the brunette fall she'd begun to we
ar. But she'd taken a half day off work and come, wearing a mauve pantsuit she had bought on layaway at Mr. Lajhre's store but never worn, as if saving it for that occasion.

  My mother stared at the blue piece of paper containing my scores like someone who, on the eve of eviction, is handed a contract for an interest-free loan, payable at her leisure. Now and again in the past I had overheard her make remarks about my intelligence which she never intentionally let drop within my earshot and took care to couch in cryptograms similar to those on the report card, perhaps afraid of warping my already severely introverted personality even more. But the test scores seemed to put the matter in an entirely new realm, and my presence at the encounter was tolerated, even necessary They let me know, by circumspect signs, that I was destined to accomplish some great, though unspecified, mental feat. The prospect gratified me, and I was eager to lay my powers at my mother's service. I somehow took it in my head that she was formulating a plan for putting my aptitude to a practical and immediate task, such as hiring me out to Mr. Lajhre to do accounting without the use of paper, or take inventory at his clothing store by merely glancing around the storeroom, as a kind of idiot savant with a vocational bent. I even imagined I might possess psychic powers like those in the Edgar Cayce books on my mother's nightstand, and spent several weeks telepathically commanding our poodle to go to his water bowl (which sometimes worked) and trying to hold seances with my mother's dead brother Byrona saintlike figure she was compared to unfavorably by her own mother at every Christmas gatheringto see if he could shed some angelic light on his sister's grand design for me. Mostly, though, these pastimes (along with crossword puzzles) were minor mental exercises to sharpen my mind while I waited for my mother to make her intention clear.

  But the conference was never spoken of again, at least not until much later when it had acquired the harmless status of an anecdote. If my mother had plans for me, she never intimated them, not even in an indirect fashion. My parents, if anything, were moderate to a fault about inhibiting their children's free

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  choice. In my later forays into academic study (none of them requited with a degree), they seldom inquired about particulars and seemed to have trouble describing to their friends and relations exactly what I was up to. My knowledge of exotic languages, my monograph on shear geometry and my admittedly failed attempt to prove once and for all Fermat's Last Theorem, both published in (largely unread) scholarly reviews while I was still in high school, are all referred to as ''the things Stephen likes to do." When I developed a working model of a pentatonic synthesizer for analyzing urine tests via arrays of musical notes, my invention was met with a knowing smile by my family members, who have such an infinite and vague belief in my capabilities that if I discovered heavenly bodies more distant and luminous than quasars, they'd be as unsurprised as they would be proud.

  This attitude used to vex me a great deal, and it's only recently that I've begun to understand that for my mother, a wonder-child was not so much a child who performed wonders as a child she could wonder about. On my eighth birthday, the one that included a swimming party at the Castlewood pool, she set aside one particular gift to be unwrapped last. As I tore away the paper, I was keenly aware of her, cross-legged as a devotee of the Buddha, zinc oxide on her perpetually peeling nose, as she watched me through her sunglasses like a lifeguard trying to keep in sight someone too far out in the deep water. The present turned out to be a hardback, Brains Benton and the Mystery of the Painted Dragon. The uncracked spine revealed she'd bought the book without even a peek inside at the details of the mystery. Though it revolved around a painted ceramic dragon inscrutable as the Orientals themselves were reputed to be, and which seventh-grade science whiz Brains analyzed in the secret laboratory of his secret clubhouse, the mystery turned out less mysteriously than my mother might have hoped: fake Chinese art, buried in the earth next to the construction site of the new gymnasium to give the painted dragons a patina so they could be sold on the black market as priceless smuggled goods. Brains and I solved the mystery with a makeshift amateur carbon dating kit and plain common sense, but we wisely kept the method of solution between ourselves and the police. When I finished the final chapter, I intuitively gave my mother an inscrutable Oriental look, one that seemed to content her, and said nothing futher about the matter.

  But on other occasions, I tried in vain to resist my prescribed role, which, if it were written as a Brains Benton Mystery might be titled The Curse of the Hyperactive Mind, a curse made more grotesque and dragonlike by the randomness with which the investigator's mind (and not the criminal's) grasps for objects to vent itself on. My mother's failure either to voice or relinquish her expectations prohibited me either from giving my intellectual aspirations too directed a form, or from abandoning them altogether In protest, I once let all my curricular and extracurricular activities languish for months except trading

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  and reading thousands of comic books, and the untidy stacks of them, like the dusty, rutted columns of a mausoleum, made my room begin to look like a probable setting for Tales from Beyond the Crypt. A little later in life, I took a twenty-three-day hooky hiatus (or rather a hookah hiatus) from junior high, so my friends and I could spend our mornings smoking Jamaican grass out of a bong, and our afternoons smashing the burned-out neon tubes we found in dumpsters; playing chicken with shopping carts; and shooting bottle rockets into oncoming traffic from behind a stone wall.

  When I grew weary of these mindless activities, I tried the opposite tack of ordering out of a magazine the entire set of leatherette-bound Harvard Classics, the first volume for forty-nine cents, the second and third on approval, and the rest shipped en masse. If I couldn't make it as a bona fide bonehead, I resolved to map out a specific and efficient program for becoming a Great Mind, a philosopher maybe, by reading Great Books. I calculated that one book per week would provide me with a solid classical education in less than six months. All I remember of that project is that reading Dante's Inferno coincided with a series of bedwetting episodes, and that shortly after I received the en masse shipment, I also got a form letter telling me that the company distributing the Harvard Classics was in some sort of legal difficulty, so I could keep the books without further payment. This form letter should have elated me, but my superstitious mind took it as an ill omen that I should discontinue reading the books, that my presumption in knowing too aggressively would, as a form of hubris (a word I'd gleaned from Oedipus the King), result in fresh calamities for all us Mileses. After that day I only read those particular books haphazardly and in snatches, as a kind of esoteric encyclopedia, fondling the green leatherette and the gold leaf, and began to think of the experience mainly as having gotten a good deal on a complete matching set of something even more durable than the luggage I'd won the previous year selling greeting cards door-to-door for my school.

  Sometimes, in one of the fits of sulky self-indulgence I have yet to outgrow, I would silently wish for my parents to compel me to attend a special summer campa place I imagined as a kind of selective Alcatraz for the most recalcitrant child-geniuses, where the children's own tyrannical and flamboyant little personalities would be taken firmly in hand, and they would be forced on little sleep and thin rations to play the violin for eight to ten hours a day, solve quadratic equations rejected from college textbooks on the grounds of their excessive difficulty, and draw up blueprints that would make the summer prison even more escape-proof when we inmates returned the following year. Part of this fantasy always involved my purposeful inclusion of a flaw in the blueprint, a means of escape too subtle to be detected as such by any captor not absolutely attuned to the workings of my mind.

  I punished on occasion my own family's inattention to my workings by such means as making incomprehensible remarks at the table. After a supper

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  of fried salmon croquettes and rehydrated au gratin potatoes, when we sat together in a rare moment of satiated silence, I
would turn to my mother and, in a French rendered perfect by the brevity of my question, I'd ask Et alors? with a look of expectancy, as if we were a Tolstoyan family of princes and princesses accustomed to switching casually back and forth between our native tongue and French as we planned our after-dinner sleigh ride through the bois. Remarks like these were sure to nettle my mother, dead on her feet and acutely sensitive to social slightsincluding in-house onesand she would then accuse me of acting like a little snob (how much more cutting the diminutive made her reproach!). Her other derogatory term for me first came into use when I was arrested for stealing outdoor Christmas light bulbs off the bushes of houses in an adjacent neighborhood. When I was returned from the police station, long of hair and long of face, sullen and enveloped in my Army surplus jacket, she told me I was a hoodlum. If she never let me know just what a wunderkind was supposed to do, she made it perfectly clear that snob and hoodlum defined the outer limits of his behavior I walked a line (as fine and as elementary a part of my education as the one dividing numerator from denominator) between indulging in the exotic and making too familiar with it at home, and a similar line between inscrutability and sullenness.