by John Barnes
They always said it like it was something wrong. There is nothing wrong with having a defense if you’re attacked, I said, inside, where they couldn’t get on my tits, trying to make me say, “Oh, now I understand everything and I am all better Mister Shrink Sir and now I will live just like you think I should.”
Anyway, I could pretty much afford all the books, records, clothes, and meals out that I wanted, and still sock money away in my stashes. If I would’ve had a car I might’ve been able to do something about getting a bank account that Mom couldn’t get into—drive up to Toledo, with some adult I wanted to trust to never nark me out to Mom or take the money themselves, and have them cosign—but that’d mean narking out my own mother.
And the car itself would’ve been another problem. I’d need to put deposits in a couple times a week, and she’d notice I was going somewhere that often. Not to mention insurance, which was fucking murderous; probably it was cheaper to just hide money.
So I was always spending it, too, because I got to keep things I bought, any money I spent was money Mom didn’t, and she couldn’t take a book or a record or a restaurant meal away from me and go spend it down at Mister Peepers.
Once, she’d sold a bunch of my records at Officer McDoodle’s, but since I handled that ad account for WUGH, I kind of leveraged Judy hard, so she gave my records back to me. It was kind of a wash; she pushed Mom so hard to pay her back that Mom finally dug out one of my cans and gave that money to Judy. Mom still brought that up sometimes when she got mad, about how I had humiliated her, and “blackmailed” Judy, and how she didn’t think she should have to pay on that one IOU.
“Hey Karl,” Angie said. “One of those books really pissing you off?”
I was grinding my teeth and balling my fists tight enough for my nails to dig into the palms. “It’s like a muscle thing,” I said.
She came over and started rubbing my back. Not what I had in mind. Angie was okay for a twenty-three-year-old fat chick still living at home and working in the family business, I guess. But it reminded me of the way some guys are always offering back rubs to cute girls, and I didn’t like it when Angie just started to, not even asking.
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to keep my hands from shaking because the fury was getting worse and I didn’t want anyone to see. “Really it’s okay. It goes away by itself in like a minute.”
“Jesus,” she said, continuing to rub, “your back is in huge knots. Maybe we should just iron you.”
“Angie, don’t fondle the customers,” Philbin said. “Or at least fondle someone like Tom Browning, who will like it.”
She let her hands slide down my sides and let go of me. “He’s so old God calls him ‘sir.’” She went back to her seat.
“Exactly. When Karl’s that old, you can feel him up.”
“I was not feeling—”
“Angie.”
“Well, I wasn’t.” She went into the kitchen and started slamming stuff around, pretending to clean it. That was weird. But I was glad her father had stopped her. When I got those black rages, I was really afraid I might hurt someone.
“So how’s the school year look so far, Karl?”
“Okay, I suppose.” I made myself keep my voice real soft and offhand. “Harder than I wanted. Mom said I had to take the college prep track.”
“How’s Betty been?”
“She likes to be called Beth now.”
“Right, sorry, Beth. I forget because I knew her for so long before.”
If Philbin’d been like most of the old people in Lightsburg, he’d have had to point out that my parents met when she was hopping the counter and he came in for lunch for three months straight, but Philbin knew that I had heard that story all my life, and skipped straight to asking, “So, anyway, how’s she been?”
“She’s fine, you know, same old. Working in the real estate office, studying for her license, she’s got her things with her friends.”
He looked right into my eyes. Nice a guy as old Philbin usually was, he had some of that closed mind that Lightsburg turned out like soybeans and corn. I knew what he wanted to ask. Are you okay with the way she fucks around? Is she ever sober at night? Does she let Neil hit you? Should I call the cops about anything? I knew he wanted me to nark on Mom.
I gave him a slack face, hoping I looked like I was thinking about hitting him, afraid I looked like I was about to cry, probably just looking like I was real dumb.
He left me alone while I looked through that rickety wire rack of paperbacks. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted a good story, or something that it would impress Larry to say I was reading. I settled on a Philip Dick novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, because it had a pretty cool cover and besides I always felt like Philip K. Dick, at least he had some idea about what the world was really like—full of hidden trapdoors with tanks of shit under them. People said it was because he took a shitload of drugs but I think he took the drugs because he knew what was going on, not vice versa. I couldn’t always understand his books, but come to admit it, that was another way they were like real life.
Philbin’s Drug Store was really dead that day. I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch for twenty minutes and no one came through the door until Dick, who cooked there.
I don’t mean Philip K. Dick cooked there. It was Dick Larren, a nice old guy, forty or so, my AA sponsor.
(Though holy shit it would’ve been cool if Philip K. Dick had been cooking there, I can tell you that. The Young Republicans, which was a group of middle-aged ladies—definitely not super super ladies—had coffee together there on Wednesday mornings, and I’d’ve loved to see what would happen after Philip K. Dick fixed them up with some extra special apple pie.)
Dick came over to say hi; that was okay, talking to your sponsor is a good thing to do. “Hey, are you feeling okay? Or is it a depressing book?”
“I’m a teenager. I live to read depressing stuff.”
“Yeah, I remember that. Wait’ll you hit your mid-twenties and find out smiling is okay again. But you’re okay?”
“Hey, are you my sponsor or my mother?”
He blinked for a second, but then just smiled. “Well, sponsor is more than enough work for me. And I know what you eat like, so I’m glad I’m not buying the groceries. Anyway, you always know where I am if you need to talk. One day at a time, Karl.”
“Betcha. Really, I’m just kind of tired, is all.”
“Okay. Not a problem. Just making sure you’re okay.”
Really feeling better, I smiled. “Nothing worse than the usual.”
From the first days I’d started coming here for meals, long before I’d started going to AA, Dick had been slipping me extra food. He lived alone, in a big apartment over a furniture store downtown; he had it fixed up nicer than a lot of people’s houses—very clean, and actually decorated rather than just furnished. When AA met there, the coffee and the sandwiches would always be way better than average. It would have been fine with me if we met there every time, but Dick said it always took forever to get the stink of the cigarettes out of his drapes and rugs, and you can’t ask people not to smoke at AA, you really can’t.
When he wasn’t working he dressed neat and fussy, so there were rumors he was a homo. I was pretty sure he wasn’t.
After two more chapters, I had to admit to myself that I pretty much didn’t get Three Stigmata, though it seemed very cool. I decided I’d finish it anyway. The Indians lost and Philbin and me talked some about that, just enough to establish that we were friends again. Philbin was about as nice a shop owner as you’re going to find in a little Ohio town—nicer, actually, most of them are fat hollering self-satisfied flag-waving assholes for Jesus, not to mention their bad qualities. I hadn’t meant to get so close to a quarrel with him; just sometimes, when people got nosy about Mom, I got pissy.
I pulled out my homework. The math was all review so I took about ten minutes to do that. Then I filled out Harry Weaver’s standard twice-a-week wor
ksheet; he had transcribed some sentences from the book onto a mimeograph page, leaving a blank, and your job was to replace the blank with the word. Every other blank, the word was freedom. Pretty silly that we had gov at all; if you were going to vote and stuff, you’d learn all this, and till you wanted to, why learn it? I mean nobody learns the rules to poker until it’s time to play, do they?
Then I looked over the chem. So far that was all stuff I remembered from eighth-grade science. The French worksheet was all review from last year, too. Coach Gratz had said not to start reading Huckleberry Finn till he put the magic mojo on us, so I didn’t look at it.
Now it was 4:30 P.M. Dick was thumping around in the back getting ready for the old couples that came in to eat dinner here. The water he splashed on the grill to test the temperature made a little phit!-sput-sputter. I grabbed a pad off the counter and scribbled “CB/dlux—cof—apl—choc S,” wrote my stool number at the top, and clipped it to Dick’s turntable.
I had hopped the counter here, off and on, usually whenever Angie took classes at the community college, ever since the summer after eighth grade, so Philbin had long ago told me to just grab a pad and scribble an order, and if I was in a hurry or they were busy, just ring it up on the register when I finished.
Like always, Dick way overloaded my plate. My cheeseburger came with about a triple load of fries, the slice of apple pie was like half a pie, and somehow or other not only was the shake all the way to the top of the glass, but the can was brim-full too, which seemed to defy both the Law of Conservation of Matter and the Law of the Five-Pound Bag.
I ate it all and read another few pages of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. More and more confusing, but still very, very cool.
By now it was happy hour at Mister Peepers, a safe time for a fly-through of the house. I needed to change my shirt, get my McDorksuit together, and grab a shower before going out again. I was shoving homework and notebooks into my old Boy Scout pack when Philbin put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Ask me about a possible job.”
“You got any possible customers?”
“Fair question, bub. You know that this weekend they’re going to reopen the Ox? You must’ve noticed all the fixing up going on next door.”
The Oxford Theater had closed when I was in sixth grade, after a long time when they just ran second-run movies and kiddy matinees. Lightsburg hadn’t had a movie theater since.
“Unh hunh. And so?”
“So the new owners happen to eat lunch here a lot. It’s a young married couple, Todd and Mary Urlenstein. They’re English profs over at Plantagenet College. They have decided to bring culture to the benighted masses of Lightsburg.”
“Aren’t they going to show movies?”
“Oh, no. Not from what they tell me. They are going to show films. If anyone shows a movie in there, they will wash the screen afterwards. They are going to make it a re-per-tor-y ci-ne-ma.”
“Foreign movies?”
“Foreign movies, and old movies that are supposed to be classics, and I kinda suspect, now and then, artsy dirty movies, which is what will make any actual money, if any actual money gets made. If they can square it with the churchies.”
“Good luck on that. How long you figure they’ll be open?”
“Well, I’ve done lots of talking with Todd. He comes in here for lunch and coffee while he frets over how they’re fixing it up. I know they’re undercapitalized. I’d guess that they probably have four months of mortgage payments for that place in the bank, but operating costs’re gonna get’em before then. Movies cost money, you know, even old ones and foreign ones. On the other hand there isn’t much to do in this town, and the nearest competing ‘repertory cinema’—Christ I can’t do that phony accent he puts on when he says that—is up in Toledo.” He stared up at the ceiling a second; Philbin usually seemed to find the God of Business Analysis in an old spot of water damage just above the cash register. “Figure, hmm, they’ll get some draw from Gist County, anyway—college kids from Vinville, at least the artsy ones and the students who need to suck up to their profs, and probably some people from Delos, Arthur, and Lincoln Bridge.
“Plus one good thing, Mary’s picking the movies, and she’s smart enough to start off with some popular oldies. Just a weekend double feature till about Christmas, and then add a Wednesday-Thursday show if that goes. Anyway, this Friday night they open with Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, which are good movies but you can see them on TV a couple times a year if you hop around the channels a little and you don’t mind big scenes getting interrupted with hemorrhoid commercials.”
“Hunh. Friday is the football season opener and a home game,” I pointed out. “They’ll get all three Lights-burgers that wish they were artistic, plus their own students and friends from Vinville.”
“ ’Fraid so. But, anyway, here’s the thought I have. For the few months they’ll be open, they will have a crowd getting out around ten thirty on weekend nights, when the only thing open in town is Pietro’s, which is on the other side of town, and the Dairy Queen, where the grill closes at nine. Michelson, that owns that Pongo’s Monkey Burger, has already told me he ain’t gonna change his hours. Now, if people coming out of the theater smell some burgers grilling and maybe some fresh pie baking . . . you see?”
One reason why I liked talking to Philbin, he was always looking for some way that the drugstore could make money and grow. That kind of stuff was way more interesting than school crap that you talked about with teachers, or “say, fella, how’s your football team doin’?” that regular town people would try and make conversation with, and way-way-way more interesting than flying saucers and astrology and Nixon, like Mom and the super super ladies talked about.
It was kind of funny—and a shame, though, since I did really like to hear about business and making money and stuff—that in the whole town, the guy who talked about business best was a doomed loser.
Philbin thought real good about what might make money, or lose it, for anybody else’s business, but he managed to never quite see that his own shop was stuck behind the eight ball. If it had been anyone else’s he’d have laid it out, neat and clean as an isosceles triangle of pie on a plate with a sphere of ice cream beside it, but instead he was always trying to think of the magic formula to turn his dusty old dump of a drugstore into a gold mine. Somehow whenever he thought about his own place, he stopped seeing the FOR SALE signs and boarded-up stores around it, and failed to notice that he had empty seats at the height of his lunch rush.
But I wasn’t going to point that out. I just said, “So you’d need someone on counter this Friday and Saturday?”
“Yeah, weekend nights for as long as the Oxford stays open. I’ll cook, Mrs. P will bake. That will put us ahead on homemade desserts for Monday lunch when we always need a lot and usually have to switch to storeboughts, so it won’t be a total loss even if no one comes in. But I’ll need someone on the front, and Angie has taken up with a drug-crazed hippie biker—”
“Pop, he just has a motorcycle!”
“—and will want her weekend evenings free. Now—”
“He has a good job. At a bank.”
“I’m sure he’s just casing the joint. Karl, I’m not going to pretend it’s all that promising. I don’t know how long the job will last, and it would just be Friday and Saturday nights, waiter’s minimum plus tips, and you know, like your dad used to say, Lightsburg is the Buckle on the Cheap Bastard Belt; I swear we have the chintziest tippers on the planet. But all that said, the Oxford should last till Thanksgiving even if it doesn’t work out, and I’m guessing we’ll get some decent trade some nights, so at least you’d make some extra gift money for Christmas or something, eh?”
“Well, yeah, I’d be very interested. Show up Friday at—”
“Say six P.M. Got to do the tax paperwork and all, maybe get you outfitted with a spiffy new apron or something.”
“Will do.” We shook on it.
7
Shoemaker’s Kid
I ALWAYS LIKED that time of day, when people were shutting up their shops, putting the town to bed for the night, going home to do normal stuff with their normal families. I wondered if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air? Sometimes I got so pissed off at how easy the normal people had it that I just wanted to walk down the street shaking them and screaming into their squishy self-satisfied faces.
In those first few weeks of school, still really summer, it stayed hot till past six. The radiated heat from the redbrick walls could practically give you a sunburn, and the cloudless sky was more gray than blue, as if the heat had baked the color right out of it.
Mom and me and all those fucking cats lived on MacReady Avenue, in what Dad had said was gonna be their starter place back before I was born. Turned out it was his finisher place, too.
MacReady was like every other street in that part of town. The houses, once all Norman Rockwell-y frames and shingles and clapboards, were now your basic Do It Yourself Duct Tape White Trash Shithole, with all kinds of new cheap crappy stuff stuck on—white aluminum siding, rusty iron wire fences on green steel posts, big glider davenports from Sears to replace the porch swing, sheet metal sheds out back with the doors never put on.
I’d been trying to keep our house up. Dad had left me a list, month by month and week by week, when to do all the stuff he’d shown me how to do. I couldn’t always keep up with it, between Mom and the cats. I knew it would all fall to shit the minute I left for the army. Still, mostly, I kept it up. Nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d just turn on my desk lamp, point it at the wall, and read that list to myself till I knew where I was in the world again.
As I trotted up our front walk, a voice wheezed from next door. “Karl, your place don’t look too bad.” It was Wilson, this real old guy with no teeth who liked to watch me work while he sat out on his porch, smoked Camels, drank animal beer, and talked to anybody passing by.