by John Barnes
He finally said, “Far enough for today,” and made a pencil mark on his lecture notes so he’d know where to start the next day. “Paul, Cheryl, Karl (uh, Karl Shoemaker not Carl McGwinnick), Danny, Darla, and Marti, see me after class. It will just be a minute.”
That was annoying. Us Madmen didn’t associate with each other in public. We didn’t need some dumbass football player or one of the jackoff smart kids to come up to us and make bibby-bibby noises with his finger and lip. Even though it was the seventies and like half the people you saw in movies were seeing a therapist, it was cool in the movies, but not in real life. Kind of like being black—every cheap bastard in Oakwood watched Flip Wilson, but you should have fucking heard them when they thought a black family was going to move in.
We surrounded Gratz’s desk. Cheryl and Darla stood with arms wrapped around themselves, Paul looked at the floor, Danny leaned across Gratz’s desk and hung his head, as if to hide his face. Marti stood behind me.
Gratz pulled a letter from his stack of paper and waved it like a summons. “It says here that Doctor Marston suggested that all of you should continue on in therapy this year, except for you, Marti, but your old school doctor recommended it.
“Now, I know a lot of you kids hate therapy, and I don’t really like having six kids missing from class every other Monday. What I wanted to tell you all is that if you don’t want to go this year, I’m on your side. If you need me to write a letter or something, well, I’ll be happy to. Okay, that’s all.”
We turned and had to struggle out through a bunch of sophomores coming in for Gen Am Lit. When Paul and me had both had Gratz for that class, we had called it “Read Like a Man.” Last year, that had become the nickname among all the kids a year younger than us; we were hoping “Read Like a Man” would stick this year, too, and eventually be what everyone called it. This is the sort of thing legends are made of, at least in places like Lightsburg.
Cheryl and I had Hertz’s trig class next, over in the other wing, so we walked there together. “I can’t believe he did that,” Cheryl said. “Couldn’t he have just said ‘All the mental cases, please see me after class’?”
“Gratz,” I agreed, “absofuckinglutely pure Gratz.”
She made this growly, frustrated noise and shook out her thick mass of curly hair. It reminded me how pretty my friend was, and what a great body she had. Knowing how creeped out she’d be, I hated myself for noticing.
“So is Gratz the biggest asshole in Ohio or just in Lightsburg?” Danny asked, behind us.
We both laughed and Cheryl gave him five.
“I don’t know if I’d want to do the research, checking out every other asshole in Ohio,” I pointed out.
“Good point.” With Danny walking just behind us, I was reminded how big he was, and how tiny Cheryl was; it made me feel safe to have him standing over me and it made me feel like her protector to be standing next to her, and just then I didn’t give a shit that a normal guy wouldn’t be with the Madmen. Normal is still important, I’m still going to be normal, but normal isn’t everything. It was my new idea. I was going to stick to it like a fresh coat of paint; the old idea obviously was just the primer.
Mrs. Hertz wasn’t really a pushover. No math teacher can be because they can see your bullshit too easy. But she was nice, and she hated to say “you’re wrong,” and best of all, she was as heavy a smoker as my mother, so between classes she was always charging down to the teachers’ lounge to suck down those nasty skinny brown almost-cigars, and it usually made her a couple minutes late to class, so there was more socializing and less math in my life.
Which was good because Bonny was early to class, and I hadn’t really seen her all summer except to wave to. It had been kind of a relief when she’d dumped me last spring, but I still wanted to be friends. When school was out, we didn’t see much of each other because she worked as much as I did, maybe more.
Her parents had an import shop up in Toledo. They’d go on long trips to buy stuff for it, but the shop only made about enough to pay for those trips, plus to pay the help and keep the doors open, not much more. Now and then they’d get a jackpot, some guy would come in and buy up a lot of stuff, and then they’d give Bonny some serious money to keep the house going, maybe two or even three months’ worth of money, but that only happened maybe once a year.
Meanwhile, Bonny had to have money for groceries, clothes for her younger sister and two brothers, the house payment, and all that. She said her parents never asked her where she got it, didn’t even seem to be aware that most of the time when they were away they weren’t sending any money.
The shop paid straight into her parents’ account, which Bonny couldn’t take money out of, so if they didn’t send a check, like they usually didn’t, whatever money the shop made might as well have been on the moon.
She wasn’t going to nark on her parents, since that could mean the kids being taken away or even her parents being busted and doing jail time. So Bonny made the money, one way and another. And she was in the Madman Underground because now and then she’d throw a fit of temper or a crying jag in front of teachers. Bonny would never explain that the screaming and throwing things wasn’t “just for no reason” as teachers would say about her, but because she was getting by on a couple hours of sleep and worried sick about paying the mortgage and hadn’t heard from her folks in a month while they knocked around the south of France. She had at least a couple of those a month, so she got her ticket every year like the rest of us.
Except me, of course, Mr. Normal. Remember, this was my year to be normal. With friends, of course. In my guise as the normal member of the Madmen.
Bonny was a cheerleader because she did anything that would look good on those college apps—cheerleader, choir solos, Service Club, plus all the science clubs, math team, and chess team, but she wasn’t much of a conformist. Today she was looking sort of like Grace Slick or Ja nis Joplin after a three-year famine, in three layers of skirts and a vest with a lot of gold piping over a blouse that looked like the curtains from a funeral home, and enough bracelets for any six regular girls, and her red hair was spilling out of a purple scarf, like maybe she’d been thrown off the belly dancing squad for overdoing it.
“So,” I said, “still robbing thrift stores?”
She slapped my arm, not hard. “Ask me about my new job, Karl. Big hint, I can’t dress like this there. I have to wear a uniform.”
“Oh, my god, I’m being replaced. I knew Mayor Mc-Cheese was a treacherous bastard and he’d stab me in the back. Just watch out when you’re alone with Ronald McDonald—he likes to squeeze the meat and pat the buns.”
She snorted. “Actually it’s even grosser than mopping the McPiss off the McFloor in the McCrapper. Not the clown—the monkey.”
“Pongo’s?”
“Yeppers. They had a girl quit and Darla got me in before they even advertised it. Steady hours and it won’t conflict with choir or cheerleading. How’s that for cool?”
“Cool,” I agreed. “How many jobs you have right now?”
“Oh, cleaning out those offices downtown, handing out cigarette samples at the concerts in Toledo, the paper route, and this. So four. Where are we?”
“Still tied,” I said. “I have cleaning McDonald’s, selling ads for WUGH, helping Browning deliver couches, and my gardening and handyman racket. It’s a good thing school is such a joke or we’d be so fucked.”
Cheryl coughed.
Mrs. Hertz had come in behind me and heard that. Shit.
Danny and Bonny and Cheryl were all fighting down laughter, and so was Larry O’Grary, the weird sci-fi hippie freak kid that was hanging-out buds with me and Paul.
At least it was Hertz, so I wouldn’t be getting a ticket for this. She was cool and smart enough to know that hating school wasn’t crazy. Another reason to hope she didn’t blow out a lung before graduation.
She started right in where geometry had left off, without even a hi or a how was your summer,
and kept us busy. Okay with me, really—I got to spend like forty-five minutes being normal without having to think about being normal.
I know smart guys are supposed to hate gym class. I loved it and signed up for it every term. It beat the shit out of study hall, I can tell you that. I always seemed to have so much energy, and it felt good to burn it off and get to play with the other guys, it was usually a whole hour when nothing could bother me, and it came with a free hot shower that didn’t smell like a litter pan. That was another reason I was looking forward to Army Basic; gym all day, not much homework, and no after-school job.
Danny and me suited up fast in those silly “uniforms” they had for gym—a pair of purple shorts with a built-in jock that would only give you any support if you were hung like King Kong, and a sog-baggy yellow T-shirt with a picture of a wildcat on the front. Opinion was divided as to whether the Lightsburg Wildcat looked puzzled, drunk, or constipated.
Coach Korviss was an okay guy. Even though he was the gym teacher, he was a lot less of a coach than Gratz. “All right,” he said, “obviously we’re all here to get a work-out every day, so we’re starting out today running, just to see what kind of shape you’re all in.”
By that time it was steaming Midwest summer outside, but it was so nice to just have a mindless hour that I didn’t care. About halfway through the first lap, a familiar voice said, “So, you think you’ll have some work for me this fall? And maybe for Tony?”
“Squid, you know you’re always the first I bring in on a big job,” I said, “and Tony’s great too.” I glanced left at Squid Cabrillo and slowed a little; he was pretty much the right side of the line for our football team, but asking him to run distance was like asking an elephant to tap-dance.
His squashy nose ran all over his always-serious troll-face. You could cliff-dive from his single eyebrow, and his eyes were two olive pits set between his bulging cheeks. His big square jaw looked like he could take a bite out of a car bumper.
Next to Paul he might be my favorite Madman.
Squid didn’t get his ticket because he acted weird—he was a case of something awful happened to him, we don’t want to think about it, put him in counseling.
When he was seven, his father had gone to the state pen at Mansfield for beating the living crap out of a nice old farmer, taking all the pay envelopes for the pickers, and going down to Columbus for a whiskey-and-whore-house spree. His mother had taken a job as janitor at Saint Matthew’s Lutheran here in town, to be close enough for visiting days, which Squid said she’d never missed while his old man was in. Also once a month, she had taken a homemade meal to the farmer and asked him to pray for the Cabrillo family.
The farmer said he forgave them and prayed for them and all, but it didn’t look like it had worked. Papa Cabrillo had gotten out of jail, divorced his wife, and taken up with a fat Kentucky chick fifteen years younger than him who’d been writing to him while he was in prison. Then Squid’s mom had killed herself when he was in eighth grade. Somehow old Cabrillo had gotten the house and moved in with his hot hillbilly honey. Laws and judges being stupid, they got custody of Squid and his younger brother Tony and sister Junie.
I’d seen the marks on Squid’s back in the gym class showers; I’d helped him out with a place for him and his two younger sibs to sleep; there had been a couple sacks of groceries I’d gotten for them—maybe more than a couple, come to admit it. But tempting as it was, I’d never ratted out old Cabrillo, because Squid made all us Madmen promise not to.
I guess maybe we could have. Officer Williams (one of those cops whose name just logically begins with “officer” the way some teachers are just always Mr. or Miss), the family-court cop here in town, seemed like a good enough guy. But none of us ever narked, because we knew it wouldn’t help. I mean, what was I going to do, have them take my mom away, lose our house, lose everything? What would Cheryl do if they arrested her grandfather and her parents threw her and Samantha out of the house?
And could anyone expect Squid to send his dad back to prison? I mean, yeah. He sure as shit deserved it. But it was his dad.
The sky was like a hot metal bowl overhead, and our shirts were all soaked, but it felt good to be moving and using the muscles just because I wanted to and not because I had to. Squid plodded along beside me and I kept the pace comfortable for him; if Coach wanted me to run faster, he could tell me to.
Halfway round the next lap, I asked, “So, you do the usual this summer?”
“Yeah. Worked my ass off, got some stuff for the kids, got some savings. Mostly picking tomatoes and detasseling corn, my cousin got me some of that, plus I kept the bagging groceries job at Kroger. It sucked and I hardly saw Tony and Junie at all but now I won’t have to do much more than some bagging to get through football season. But you know, more is always nice. So you think you’ll have any gardening you need help with?”
“I always do. I’ve got to turn compost under and build some beds for spring, bunch of places.”
“Hey, if you fellas have breath to talk, you ain’t working hard enough,” Coach Korviss said. “Pick it up, Esquibel. Karl, run with me a second.”
Squid oophed on ahead, and I waited for the question Korviss always asked me just once. “Karl, I know you have endurance and speed. It’s your senior year. Are you sure you don’t want to come out for cross-country this fall, and maybe for track in the spring?”
“It would be fun, Coach, but I work all the time.”
“I could talk to your mom.”
“She’s not the one making me work.”
He ran beside me for like half a lap before he finally said, “Well, your life is your life. We’d love to have you. And I know you’d enjoy it. Give it a day or two and then get back to me next week if you change your mind, all right? Only time I’ll ask this year, I don’t want to pressure you. Now show me what you can do, will you? Put on some speed.”
So I opened up and ran hard the rest of the time, and it was good and brainless and mind-clearing, even if my uniform did end up soaked so that I’d have to take it home to wash right away. That conversation with Korviss, I don’t know why, gave me some incentive. I lapped a couple guys from his cross-country team, put some pressure on his miler, and finished with a two-lap kick of running like a flat-out crazy bastard just to see if I could keep it going that long.
I didn’t bother thinking about how I felt about Coach asking me. I just didn’t do extracurriculars. Stuff happened at my house, sometimes, and if it conflicted with the extracurricular, I’d have to let someone down.
Besides, Korviss didn’t pay you to run.
He was right, though, it could’ve been fun, spending time every day just running. I kind of wished life was different, but it wasn’t.
In the showers, Squid said, “Hey, you still got that night shift job at McDonald’s, right?”
“Right.” There was a fresh mark on his back, probably the buckle. “Anytime you need a place for you or the kids to sleep, door’s always open.”
“I just always like to know,” Squid said.
4
How to Get Your Very Own Madman Nickname
THEY CALLED ME Psycho after I killed the rabbit in seventh grade, and that’s actually the worst thing I ever did, but it was also how me and Squid got to be friends. If there was anything good about it, it was all Squid; I brought the disease, he brought the cure.
See, seventh grade was pretty bad.
The summer between sixth and seventh, as I was getting all psyched up for junior high, Dad had me out with him on a lot of jobs, kind of learning how to work, and paying me a little bit. So I was there to see it when Dad kept getting tired and he couldn’t hire enough help to make up the difference, and paying so much more in wages instead of doing the work himself, so his contracting business was going all to shit. Then one soggy hot August day he passed out on a roof, slid down, and fell into Mrs. Caron’s yard.
I was scared, I can tell you that, but Mrs. Caron called an ambulance
, and Mom met us at the emergency room. I could smell that she’d had some wine; the last year or so she’d been doing that when no one was home. But it was still a relief when she hugged me, and when we went in to see where Dad was sitting up, with an IV in his arm, and getting a stern lecture from the nurse about drinking enough water in hot weather.
But before they let him go, the doctor got interested in the way Dad was coughing, and did some tests, and they found lung cancer.
By November, he was puking a lot from all that stuff they did to him, and losing hair, and looked a million years old. He could still sit next to me on the couch down in the basement, and we’d sit and watch old movies together, usually two per night, but he’d fall asleep on my shoulder, not the other way round.
He couldn’t come out to see me play seventh grade football; it was too far for him to walk, he’d lost his license from too many DUIs, and Mom wouldn’t drive him, she said it was too much bother and besides I only got in for maybe one or two plays a game. Whenever I came home, I seemed to be interrupting a fight; a lot of it was because Dad had quit drinking but she was making up for him, and whenever he wanted her to drive him someplace, it would turn into a major battle.
Anyway, I guess it was okay that Dad didn’t actually see me play. There really wasn’t much to see. I was a scrawny fast guy—didn’t really get my growth till a couple years later when I’d been doing heavy work for a while. Little fast runts like me were only useful for real long passes, and we didn’t have a QB who could throw for shit. Coach sent me in exactly five times in three games, and Al never passed on any of those plays anyway.
Really, I never even knew if he could throw. But I did know for sure that Al could punch ribs like a son of a bitch.
He was a mean dumb bastard, only the quarterback because he got his growth early and he could run with a bunch of seventh graders hanging on to him like baby possums. I think he knew in the depths of his ape-brain that as soon as the other boys’ bodies caught up he’d be nowhere, and it made him mean, or meaner anyway, while he still had the chance to beat on other kids.