Sons of the 613

by Michael Rubens

  Out we go. I employ my standard half walk/half jog that I need to keep up with Josh on the sidewalk. I whine. He ignores.

  As we near an old movie theater I notice a girl leaning against the wall by the doors, smoking a cigarette and watching us approach. Josh doesn’t seem to see her. She’s about his age, I figure, and she seems vaguely amused, her eyebrows raised just slightly, a suggestion of a smile on her face. She’s wearing skinny black jeans and Chuck Taylors and a T-shirt with an illustration of a dancing girl on it and the words THE BEAT, and it all looks just right with her slim frame and pretty face and bright red hair, which falls in tight curls to her shoulders. I like her. I don’t know why.

  When we draw even with her, Josh stops dead and regards her in silence. I stop as well, waiting, not sure what’s going on. She returns his gaze and takes a drag from her cigarette.

  “I thought you quit,” he says finally.

  “I thought you left,” she says in response, smiling, and flicks the cigarette aside. Then she turns to me and smiles warmly.

  “You poor guy. Has it been terrible, being his little brother?”

  I stammer something, not sure what to say.

  “I thought so. Here, c’mon,” she says, offering me her elbow. “C’mon,” she says again when I hesitate, and so I link my arm with hers.

  “Let’s go shopping,” she says, and we walk arm in arm down the sidewalk, Josh following behind us. And that’s how I fell in love with Lesley McDougal.

  “Dude, where were you?!”

  “Danny, I’m sorry.”

  “You promised you were going to be there! We waited an hour!”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I called you, like, five times!”

  “I told you, Josh threw my cell phone in the creek.”

  “I e-mailed you!”

  “I didn’t have time to log on.”

  “Well, what the hell happened? What were you doing?”

  “Uh . . .”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE DETAILS

  MERIT BADGE: PRODUCT

  That night I lie awake in the tent, stroking my forearm where Lesley’s skin had touched mine. I can still feel the warmth of her arm. I’m wearing the shirt I was wearing today, and I pull it up and hold it to my face, inhaling the faint aroma of tobacco and her perfume.

  Patricia Morrison seems like a distant, foolish memory.

  On top of my long dresser in my room is a messy stack of new clothes: four pairs of jeans, eight new T-shirts that have bands like the Clash and the Ramones on the front, or doodles that Lesley called “design elements.” I also have a new belt, several three-packs of boxer-briefs, a pair of black high-tops, and boots that are sort of like combat boots “but really much more all-purpose and without all those racist skinhead connotations.” This last was from the salesperson at one of the stores, a guy Lesley seemed to be friends with.

  It’s safe to say I’d prefer to drink a large glass of warm mucus rather than have to shop for clothes. But I would happily spend the rest of my life shopping if I could do it with Lesley.

  “I’m Lesley,” she announced as she was escorting me down the sidewalk, “and I’ll be your stylist today. How great is that?”

  “Um . . . pretty great?”

  “Exactly. Are you mentally prepared to have your mind blown by sheer fun-ness?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Say, ‘I’m mentally prepared to have my mind blown by sheer fun-ness.’”

  “I’m mentally prepared to have my mind blown by sheer, uh . . .”

  “Fun-ness.”

  “Fun-ness.”

  “Right on. All right, here we are.”

  I won’t bore you with the play-by-play of the actual consumer experience. To me it all went by in a fuzzy, joyous blur. She led me into one store after another, laughing and joking as she loaded up my arms with clothes until they towered over my head. She was funny and wise and genuine and completely unintimidated by my brother, and she listened to what I said, as if it never dawned on her to notice how dumb and awkward and hideous and hopeless I am. And because she was somehow able to pretend that I’m actually worth talking to, I started to think that maybe I was, and I managed to put together real sentences with all the words in the right order and not make the usual fool of myself. The frog sang, or at least hummed quietly.

  She knew everyone at the stores. She’d walk in and announce some variation of “Hey, [name of gay hipster clothing salesperson], this is my BFF Isaac, and he’s supercool and needs the clothes to match his inner coolness.”

  The very first store we went into, she leaned into the dressing room when I had my pants half off. I nearly collapsed into the corner, desperately trying to cover myself up, but she didn’t apologize or cover her eyes or react at all, except to say, “Nice legs. How are those pants working for you?” By the end of the day, I was changing with her in the dressing room with me, as if it was completely natural that an attractive nineteen-year-old girl I’d just met that day was seeing me in my underwear.

  “Two words for you,” she said at one point, looking at my white Hanes undies. “Boxer briefs.” So we got the boxer briefs.

  Things I learned about her: waitress right now, not going to college because she plans to move to Hollywood and become a stylist for movies and fashion shoots and TV. That’s the person who selects all the clothes for the stars to wear, and they have to have really good taste and know what they’re doing, and they can make really good money and it’s glamorous and cool.

  “Are you enjoying being my guinea pig?” she asked.

  “I love being your guinea pig.”

  Josh hung back, content to observe and make the occasional comment or just roll his eyes. Sometimes he’d disappear entirely for a stretch, reappearing at checkout time to put the clothes on my parents’ credit card.

  “Josh,” I said as I watched him ring up the first sale, “you sure this is okay?”

  “Nope,” he said, signing the receipt.

  A few times when I came out of the dressing room I saw Josh and Lesley talking quietly. Sometimes she seemed to be teasing him, or just listening intently. Once I saw her place her hand on his shoulder. Other times I’d catch her watching him, following him with her eyes, her expression wistful.

  I know, okay? I’m not an idiot. I might be in love with her, but she’s in love with him. But he’s not in love with her, and I don’t know why. Maybe he was at some time in the past.

  I pieced together that she works at the diner next to Jerry’s, near downtown Edina, the place where Josh used to be a line cook.

  “The first day I worked there we just started talking,” she said, “and we just kept going and ended up sitting in a park, talking until about two in the morning.”

  I tried to visualize my brother having that much to say to anyone.

  “So you guys have been . . . friends since then?”

  She nods. “Friends.”

  “Friends?”

  “Friends,” she repeated, in an and-now-we’re-done-with-this-subject tone of finality. “That shirt isn’t working for you. Next.”

  I followed her out of the dressing room. We were in a store with exposed brick walls and cool light fixtures. Josh was hunched in a modern-looking chair in the corner, his thoughts somewhere else.

  “I worry about him, you know,” said Lesley, looking over at him. “I worry about the decisions he makes.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, what he’s doing. I think it’s a bad choice.”

  I stared at her, not sure what she meant. Her expression changed.

  “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you.” She sighed and looked over at Josh again. “Josh . . .” she said, shaking her head.

  At one point we passed a jewelry shop, and Lesley gasped and said, “You know what? We should totally pierce your ear! Not here, though—I’ll do it.”

  “Um . . .” I said.

  “No,” said Josh.

/>   “Why not?” said Lesley. “He’d look supercute with an earring.”

  “I would?”

  “Supercute. You’re cute already, so you’d be supercute with an earring.”

  Let me be clear: No female who’s not my mother’s age has ever called me cute. It’s unimaginable to me that someone might see me in that way. I know she was probably just being kind, but I was flooded with a sensation I can hardly describe, a warm maple syrup combining love and joy and ecstasy, a feeling so euphoric that my eyes teared up and I had to turn from her to hide it.

  “We’re not piercing his ear,” Josh ruled.

  “Okay,” said Lesley. Then a moment later, when Josh wasn’t looking, she pulled me close and whispered, “Supercute. But if you do it, you have to promise to let me do it, okay? I’ll do it right.”

  “Okay,” I said, my face flushed.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  We reached the car and Josh opened the trunk, tossing in the bags of clothes. My heart sank, the euphoria ebbing away as I realized my time with Lesley was coming to an end. I started to stumble through a thank-you to her, my usual awkwardness returning to paralyze my tongue, when she interrupted: “Hold on, we’re not done yet. You still have to get your hair cut.”

  We went to an actual salon, the kind of place that smells like flowers and doesn’t have a candy-cane barber’s pole. Josh has a simple approach to his hair: He just gives himself a buzzcut with my parents’ ancient hair clippers. He seemed uncomfortable in the salon, hovering over the hairstylist’s shoulder as the stylist turned my head this way and that, fussing as he planned his strategy.

  The hairstylist’s name was apparently Tao, and all I can say is, he was exactly what you would expect at that sort of salon. Both he and Lesley agreed that my hair was (a) luscious and (b) thick, and Tao informed me that (c) it also had wonderful root structure. Josh made faces.

  “Just don’t make him look too . . . you know,” he said to Tao.

  “Gay?” said Tao.

  “Right,” said Josh.

  In the end the volume of my semi-Jewfro was reduced by about two-thirds or more. Lying in my sleeping bag, I run my fingers over the hair on the back and sides, which is now very short, and then over the spiky terrain on top, the result of the Product that Tao rubbed in as a final touch. According to Tao and Lesley, Product is very important, and there is now an expensive tube of the stuff in the bathroom. Josh made his grimace/sneer face when Tao was smearing the stuff around the crown of my head, but Lesley told me to use Product, so I’ll use Product.

  I fall asleep still smelling perfume and cigarettes, and dream of Lesley.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE MINOTAUR

  “Isaac! Wake up!”

  I open my eyes and sit up, confused and dull headed. I’m still in the tent. It’s dark. My Lesley-scented shirt is still in my hand.

  “Wake up!” repeats Josh, and my eyes are seared by the painful stab of a flashlight beam. I twist away, squinting, holding my hands up to block the light.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Time to get going!”

  I stumble along after him. We cut through the Olsens’ yard, the Johnsons’, the Patricks’, the Schwartzes’, the erratic line of the creek to our left. The moon is bright enough that we don’t need the flashlight. I check my watch. It’s 2:43 a.m.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He picks up the pace, jogging now, and I run to keep up with him, running through the backyards, dodging the dark shapes of trees, passing silhouettes of swing sets and jungle gyms and volleyball nets and lawn furniture, our footsteps nearly silent on the grass, then clomping loudly over the narrow wooden footbridge behind the Schwartzes’, the creek gurgling beneath us. A patch of trees, a field, another backyard, people whose names I don’t remember, a security light blinking on as we pass, our shadows sweeping hard-edged against the lawn. Everything like a dream. I look at my hands, because they say you can’t look at your hands when you’re dreaming. I wonder if this is what it’s like to be stoned. I say, because nothing is real and it doesn’t matter, “Who was that girl at the bar?”

  “Just some girl.”

  “Why did you leave school?”

  “I needed a break.”

  “What’s your decision? What did Lesley mean?”

  “What?”

  “She said you’re doing something.”

  “She talks too much. She didn’t mean anything.”

  “You’re going back to school?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who is the girl at the bar?”

  “Just some girl. Come on,” he says, and I race to follow.

  I’m not very happy with our destination.

  “Josh,” I whisper, “there’s three dogs in there.”

  “Really? He used to always have four. Oops—there’s the fourth.”

  He indicates the fourth dog, which has come meandering lazily around the corner from the side of the house to join its pals in the fenced-in backyard.

  “Rottweilers, man,” says Josh. “Those are mean-ass dogs. Smart, too.”

  “Josh, those things weigh more than I do,” I hiss.

  “Oh, yeah, easily,” says Josh, speaking low. “They’d eat you and probably not even notice it. Plus, Nystrom’s got the shotgun.”

  “What?!”

  “Shhh!!”

  We’re lying in the brush at the top of a rise that looks down on Mr. Nystrom’s yard. This was our destination. The house looks like it was plucked from some other, very different community and deposited in Edina—a low, one-story ranch, the paint peeling on the back wall, shingles missing from the roof, the gutter pulling away from the roofline like someone had tried to hang from it. A harsh flood lamp illuminates the yard, which is mostly dirt with a few patchy areas of crabgrass—except right in the middle, where there’s a ring of low, ragged bushes surrounding a circular planter, on which is perched a statuette of a naked cherub playing a harp. From here it looks to be about a foot tall.

  “So there it is,” says Josh. “That’s the challenge. You figure out a way to get in there, remove the statue, and bring it home.”

  “Now?”

  “No, you’ve got until Mom and Dad get back. Consider that the central challenge of the Quest. That’s the Minotaur you have to slay.”

  “Josh, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “The central challenge, Isaac. You can’t consider yourself a success until you’ve achieved that goal.”

  As we watch, the fourth dog comes and sniffs at the bushes, then urinates on them. Two of the other dogs are sprawled out, apparently asleep. The third is sitting, looking out beyond the chicken-wire fence into the night, occasionally opening his massive mouth to pant. He doesn’t look smart. He looks blank and stupid, even for a dog, a mindless machine designed to reduce statuette thieves into a pile of dog turds.

  “There’s no way,” I whisper.

  “Sure there is,” says Josh. “I personally stole that statue, like, five times, and the first time I was younger than you are now.”

  I examine the yard. I am now very much awake, my earlier dreamlike reverie completely gone. Now we’re just sitting in the woods in the middle of the night, sticks poking me in the ribs, and looking at the dogs that will be eating me.

  “How am I supposed to get in there?”

  “Wait till the dogs are asleep or inside, grab the statue—”

  “And carry it back over the fence? While I’m climbing?”

  “No, first you throw it over the fence.”

  “Throw it? I don’t even know if I can lift it!”

  “Look, figure it out. That’s the challenge.”

  “It’s stealing!”

  “It’s borrowing. You’ll deliver it right back to him.”

  “Josh, what’s the point?”

  “The point? The point is being a man, Isaac. Conquering your fear, facing danger,
dominating the powers of nature—”

  “Getting eaten by a dog . . .”

  “Look. It’s supposed to be dangerous. That’s the whole idea. I’d rather have you fight a bull or break a horse or hunt a frigging lion or kill a Minotaur. But what we’ve got is this—four fat-ass rottweilers crapping in some crazy guy’s yard. That’s what you’ve got to beat. This isn’t defeating the Xbox, Isaac. Or winning the stupid game you play with Dad, the guess-why-the-dude-is-sick game.”

  “It’s called differential diagnosis, Josh, and Dad says I’m pretty good—”

  “‘Dad says I’m pretty good at it,’” he says, mocking me. “Who gives a shit? This is real. The central challenge, Isaac. The key to the whole thing.”

  “Josh, that old guy is crazy. Everyone knows that. You ride by his house on your bike and he’ll scream at you. Even if I do get past the dogs, he’ll kill me.”

  “Nah. Dogs’ll get you first. AWOOOOO!!!”

  I jump at the unexpected noise as Josh throws his head back and howls. The dogs are instantly up, converging into a boiling, four-headed knot of muscular black fur and flashing teeth as they bark and snap blindly in our direction. Josh is already up and running off, and I follow his cackling voice through the woods, heart pounding, picturing those dogs surging over the fence and pursuing us under the night sky.

  “Josh, please, not again.”

  “What, you didn’t have fun yesterday?”

  “Josh, I can’t—would you turn down the music?—I can’t miss two days of school in a row!”

  “Sure you can. I did it all the time. Hey, look—cows!”

  “You do understand that I have to go to school?”

  “This is a different kind of school. C’mon, buddy, move it!” He honks his horn at a slow-moving truck. The truck changes lanes to let us pass.

  “Is Lesley going to be there?”

  “No.” He steps on the gas, and I’m jammed back in my seat as we accelerate past the truck. “This is going to be a little different from yesterday.”