“Na-ah. That’s Molly. Sarah’s her sister with the brown hair.”
Tony never plays with us. He’s either drawing his monsters or looking at baseball cards or reading the stack of Mad magazines from the Salvation Army. “I need a new Mike Schmidt. The corner is bent on this one.” Mom is gone during the day because she has to work on her Vestigation into the people Synanon is trying to hurt. She interviews people who were beaten up or yelled at or scared and puts it all into a book that she’s going to give to the government. Phil is home sometimes but he is busy trying to stop the nuclear plant called Diablo Canyon because nuclear plants kill people.
Tony says Mom doesn’t care what happens to us, that she took us from Synanon because she didn’t like Dad. She tries to hug him at night but he crosses his arms and turns away. He tells me stories about Dad carrying a sawed-off shotgun for ten years inside his trench coat, how when he was in prison everyone was afraid of him because he has a black belt in karate and a loud voice when he’s mad. “Dad was in charge of a lot of people in Synanon and that’s why Mom doesn’t like him,” he says. “Even Chuck listens to Dad because everyone knows he was the toughest guy there.” I try to picture Dad but there’s only the blurry image of the jeans and the moto-cycle, the face in the gold frame.
“Dad was in prison for years but it didn’t bother him because he knew how to take it. He and Uncle Pete would fight anybody and it didn’t matter how many there were.” I don’t know if the stories Tony tells me are true or not but I wish he didn’t know more about Dad than me. He talks like he lived with him every day even though I would see him sitting alone on the playground in Synanon. He would jump up off the ground with a great big smile when Dad came to visit us. “You’ll see, Dad’s going to take us out of here. You won’t need to worry about nothing because everyone’s afraid of Dad.” That sounds good because we’re tired of being in the garage all day hiding from the bad men.
Sometimes Tony goes out onto the street even though he’s not supposed to. He doesn’t care. Mom gets tired of fighting him so she lets him since he screams, “I hate you!” and she gets the look that goes on forever.
Tony is down the street and I am playing on the front porch and Mom is drinking coffee in the dining room under the yellow chandelier with her friend who has yellow teeth like Mom and big curly brown hair. Darla is gone with her mom and even though Tony gets to play on the street, I still have to stay on the front porch.
Phil pulls into the driveway in his orange van. He gets out and when he reaches in for the groceries, I see two men walk up behind him. The men have something on their faces, something like masks the color of skin that push their noses flat against their faces. Even in the masks you can tell they both have shaved heads which means they’re from Synanon.
They’re holding skinny black clubs that look like little baseball bats. One carries his low in his hand and the other taps his softly on the ground as they walk up behind Phil. At first I think maybe they’re playing a joke on him because I’ve heard people play dress up on Halloween even though we never did it in Synanon. Why else would they have those masks over their faces? Why else would they hide behind the orange camper van where Phil can’t see them?
Phil looks up at me and smiles when he gets out. Before I can say anything, one of the men runs up behind and hits him over the head. Phil falls onto the ground. It’s weird how he falls, like a stack of Lincoln Logs that’s been tipped over. His body folds into a weird shape with his legs sticking out under him.
I jump back and look around the doorway to see if anyone else saw it. I don’t know if I’m supposed to scream or run or yell but I don’t want the men to see me. The second man hits Phil’s legs, which seem to bounce around like rubber. One of his gray sneakers flies off. Phil puts his head between his arms with his face down and starts to scream.
His voice echoes into the street. It’s so quiet and all I can hear is “Heeeeeeelp! Heeeeeeelp!”
The men are saying something. I can’t make the words out but you can tell they’re angry. I close my eyes hard and hear the clubs hit Phil’s body between the screams. It sounds like something hitting meat. When I open my eyes and look around the column on the porch, Phil is looking straight at me from between his arms.
He looks sad, almost like he’s saying sorry. There’s blood on his forehead and a weird bend in his legs and I want to tell him there’s nothing for him to be sorry about.
I think as long as I stay still, I am invisible. I can disappear. How do I make myself smaller? Can I flap my ears and fly now? Will they see me?
Some of the kids from the block are watching from across the street. I see Tony standing there with them in a red sweatshirt from Goodwill. I wonder why nobody does anything. Phil goes quiet and one of the men puts his club on his shoulder and looks at them. “Do any of you know where Tony and Mikel are?” The words come out muffled through the mask which pushes his nose down in a funny way.
I see Tony freeze as the kids look from face to face, shaking their heads slowly, some staring at the men, some staring at the ground. I wonder if Tony can become invisible too. I close my eyes and try to give him the power. Don’t breathe. Don’t do anything.
“Anyone?!”
Nobody says a word. They probably don’t know our names.
Mrs. Morris comes running out to her porch, her brown hair big and wild. She tells the men she called the cops so they better leave. The men look around like they have all day then slowly turn to walk up the block. Mom and her friend run out to the porch. Soon an ambulance comes and takes Phil away while we all watch. He looks so skinny and helpless when they put him in the back.
After the ambulance leaves, Mom takes us back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in San Jose. Grandpa lets us in, whispering because it’s late. “I made the bed up for you and the boys. You can stay as long as you want.”
Mom puts us down and grabs onto him, burying her head in his shoulder, “I didn’t know, Dad. I didn’t know.”
“Shhh, shhh,” he pats her on the back lightly. “You’re okay now. That’s okay. That’s my girl.” She puts us to bed but I can’t sleep because I keep picturing the men in the masks. Every noise I hear outside, every creak of the house, every time my brother turns over in his sleep—I wonder if it’s the men with the clubs, if they followed us here and we’re next. I picture Phil on the ground, the way he fell over all at once.
Why were they so mad? What did we do wrong? Is Tony right about Mom? Is she angry at Dad for divorcing her so she stole us so he can’t see us? Are they mad at us for leaving?
When I wake up in the morning, the sheets are cold and wet and I know I’ve done a bad thing. I know Mom is sad and Grandpa always tells me she’s been through so much. I don’t want to get in trouble so I wait until Tony and Mom go to the living room and take the pee-soaked sheet to the garbage in the back outside the glass door. I know there’s a fresh sheet in the closet so I put it on the fold-out bed as quietly as I can before going to the kitchen for Dutch cheese and rolls.
We know the stories of the other people who left Synanon and the bad things that happened to them. We hear Mom talking about them all the time. One man was bitten by a rattlesnake that someone left in his mailbox. He nearly died from the bite. One man came home to find his dog hanging from a tree. Tony says he heard a story that the teenagers, the Punk Squad who were given to Synanon by the courts so they could get clean off drugs, were beaten by the Synanon people. They kept trying to escape but they couldn’t get away fast enough because they were so far from any cities or towns up in the Tomales Bay compound. Chuck bought a thousand rifles. He’s training the men he calls the Imperial Marines to defend Synanon at all costs. They look like soldiers with their shaved heads and big boots and matching denim overalls. There’s a trial from Mom’s Vestigation and that’s when the tapes come out, the tapes of the Old Man saying crazy things. He wants legs broken and ears cut off and put into jars. He wants a revolution.
Phil is in a coma
for a month. He has a cracked skull and broken bones and something called men-in-ji-tis in his head. We don’t visit because Mom is afraid the men from Synanon are watching.
I tell her, “I’m scared of the men, Mom.”
She says, “No you’re not. You’re happy because you’re with your mother now.” I keep trying to tell her I’m afraid and I’m having nightmares but she won’t listen. It’s like the words don’t exist once I say them.
She says, “You’re fine.” Then she says, “This has been really hard on me. You know it’s not easy to lose your husband and then also have to worry about losing your kids.”
I don’t know what to do because I feel something close up inside me, like a gasp that echoes up from a well. Like if she can’t hear my words then maybe they don’t exist and I can just hide up in the room in the clouds by myself. I tell myself again and again, You’re not scared. You’re happy now. You’re not scared. You’re happy now. So I try to pretend and I smile at her and I give her a hug because she’s been through so much and I know it’s my job.
And when we do talk about it, Mom says how difficult it was for her and I say yeah, that must have been hard because they looked so mean with those masks on.
She says, “But you weren’t even there.”
I have to remind her that I watched it from the porch, that Phil and I locked eyes, that the men asked for me and Tony, that Tony was with the kids across the street, that he was scared too.
I wonder if she’s right. If what’s real is the World of Synanon or the World According to Mom, which are different things. And they exist outside the castle in the clouds, the place where I’m safe behind the thick stone walls.
I don’t know if the fear is real or if I can just pretend to not feel it, to lock it up like in a bottle and put it on a shelf and, just like Mom, pretend it isn’t there.
She says, “Oh,” and I watch as her face fills with worry, like she’s left the stove on somewhere, like there’s something she can’t quite remember. She stares at the wall with her fist over her mouth, the way she does when she gets the look from the deep-russian.
“Right. Right. Well. This has all been very hard on me.”
I don’t have the words for the thing inside me, the blank white like ice at the bottom of my throat. I want her to tell it to me, to see it and help me name it. Do feelings exist if no one sees them? Did I imagine it? The feeling of not knowing, of wondering what is real, bounces around inside my chest. I don’t know what I’m supposed to call it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell people about Phil, about Synanon, about Dad, about Mom, about the fear and the sadness and the fact that I don’t know if it’s real because Mom won’t see it.
“Mom? Mom?”
“Yes, Goo.”
“Are we safe here?”
“I think so.”
“Because I’m scared.”
“No you’re not. You’re happy to be with your mother and away from that place that kept us apart.”
“But Phil almost died.”
She shakes her head. “This has been such a hard time on me. This too? On top of everything else?” She looks away and I am alone in the room again. After a minute she stares at me, “What, sweetie? What was it? But how would you know what happened? You weren’t even there.”
For months my dreams are of men in masks and broken bones, blood on the driveway and running away as fast as I can. I wake up to wet sheets and when Mom finds them, she tells me I need to stop wetting the bed like a little boy even though I never wet the bed before the bad men came. I try to replay the moment, what I could’ve done differently, how I should’ve fought them or made Mom move us or screamed to make them stop. Mom is small, fluttering around the big shoulders of the men, dodging the skinny clubs as they swing at my brother and me. There is no place that is safe from their reach, nowhere to go to get far enough away. They’re under the couch. They’re in the closet. And Dad, he is somewhere else, somewhere vague and fuzzy on his moto-cycle, riding down a highway, a blur, a glimpse of something I can’t quite see as I sit alone in that room in that house in the city where my mother went to change the world.
OREGON
“Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s lonely in the desert.”
“It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPE’RY, THE LITTLE PRINCE
CHAPTER 5
HE’S GOT THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS
The mountains between Oregon and California are the largest things I’ve ever seen. They jut out in rocky peaks all around us as we drive north in the dirty white Chevy Vega with the wooden doors. Something about it seems like the work of giants. The valley is a giant footprint, the lake is a giant handprint, the river was made by dragging something heavy and sharp across the land. I wonder how a boulder perched on a cliff over the freeway got there. I wonder if the boulder will fall as the Vega wheezes up the steep hill, if after thousands of years of watching and waiting, a simple gust of wind might be enough to send it tumbling down the hill to crush us or block the road so no one can ever follow.
I am in the backseat, eating a piece of beef jerky packed by Grandpa. No one knows where we are. Mom has made sure of that.
There are pine trees that rise up over the forest like spearheads jutting out of the earth. At one point, Mom says that we are about to cross the California border into Oregon and I’m glad the mountains are so tall because maybe it means it’ll be harder for anyone to get to us.
Mom keeps saying how much better Oregon will be. How safe it is. How clean. That you can breathe there because there are fewer people and cars and less smog and trees everywhere. She tells us she has a new job at the state mental hospital in Salem, that we’ll have enough money for food and clothes and a place to live because “everything in Oregon costs less than California so you don’t have to kill yourself just to eat and pay the rent.”
Her new job is helping men getting out of prison to not do drugs. She’s an expert at that since that’s what happened to Dad.
She knows all about addiction which is a disease you get in the brain and also in the heart. Whole families get it too and you don’t just get over it by stopping the drugs. Everyone in the family has it whether they are the ones using the drugs or not. You have to have a higher power and go to meetings and say prayers and admit you’re powerless. Mom knows this because that’s all anyone talked about in Synanon and even before that she read so many books at Berkeley.
I don’t understand how I could have a disease when I’m only five years old. Also we weren’t part of a family at the School like an orphanage and the smell of Grandma’s Dutch makes me sick to my stomach.
I don’t think Dad needed any of this. He’s tough and everyone in Synanon said how funny he was and how much he helped them. “Your dad is one funny sumbitch,” people were always saying. “And he saved my ass. No one’s seen more life than your dad and so you couldn’t bullshit with him. You can’t con a con man.”
Mom gets sad if we talk about Dad and you can’t talk to her when her face goes blank and her eyes go far away and she’s in the deep-russian.
I think maybe sadness runs in families too and since we’re in the same family, we feel her sadness too. We share it like our Dutch cheeks and corn-silk hair. We know that Dad is somewhere else in the world and I wonder if he’s laughing right now or helping someone not be a Dope Fiend or riding his motorcycle on a different highway while we’re here in this car in the mountains with Mom going to some place called Oregon.
I remember how I used to sit in Bonnie’s lap during story time every night. I know she wasn’t a mom because everyone told me a mom is someone who gives you birth and she didn’t do that. Also Mom tells me I will always be hers and that’s what a mom is. But still I miss Bonnie because she used to hug me and play little games and take me out on days when she wasn’t even working in the School. She worked the Cube, which meant she worked for a week t
hen was off for a week, and she’d even come in on her days off to take me hiking or read me a story before bed.
Bonnie says she wanted to be a teacher but then when she got to Synanon they told her they had a school and she knew that’s where she belonged, with the kids. Everyone had different jobs. Dad ran the auto shop. Some people cooked food, some cleaned up, some even sold things like pens and cups to businesses with their name printed right on the pen.
I was in the Orange Room with all the other little kids and Tony was in the Green Room with the bigger kids and Bonnie is always there in my memory. I can’t remember a time she wasn’t sitting by me in the Commons, where we ate lunch, or playing hot hands with me on the playground. Is that a mom? Someone who you can’t ever remember not loving you?
When the parents came to visit, someone would always say, “Here come the Headsuckers. Be careful you don’t give those kids pointy heads!” We didn’t know what that meant, but one day Clubby told me not to listen because it was just Chuck being mean and it’s good for parents to want to hug and kiss their kids even if Chuck thinks it’s bad.
Mom says Chuck wanted to make “a new type of person who didn’t need parents and could just rely on themselves,” and that’s why we couldn’t see our parents, so we could become these new people. I don’t feel new. I think we’re just normal and I miss Bonnie and I don’t want to have to hide on the other side of these mountains.
Mom has one friend in Salem, a woman who helped her get the job helping prisoners not be Dope Fiends. The woman is the only person in the world who knows where we are. That way we’re safe. Mom says when we get there, we’ll make new friends too and that life is going to be different in Oregon. It’s going to be the Three Musketeers—Mom and Tony and me—versus the whole world. We are going to be happy now and she deserves it after what she’s been through. Synanon just went crazy when they started to force the men to have those vast-ectomies and started beating everyone up so she decided to leave and even though Phil got beaten up and even though we’re hiding in this car hundreds of miles away, it’s easy to imagine because anything seems possible when you’re up in the mountains surrounded by trees and rivers and endless skies so we start singing songs:
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