Tales of the Madman Underground

by John Barnes

  Now here’s the real good part—Emerson knew perfectly well we were bullshitting him. But remember Mrs. Emerson was the cheerleading advisor, and she’d spent a lot of time taking care of Cheryl, who was one of her pets.

  In fact Mrs. Emerson had given those assholes so many demerits for hassling Cheryl that Mrs. Brean stopped taking demerits from her about them—Brean is buddies with Bobby Harris’s mother and she came up with some crap about how it’s not fair to report every single time someone does something, and how Mrs. Emerson was just being mean to poor Bobby and Scott and out to get them. Which, I mean, shouldn’t a teacher be out to get kids like that? You know, like wolves killing the weak and the sick for the good of the species?

  Anyway, Emerson wasn’t totally stupid, despite all appearances. He knew that alibi was way too good. He knew that the Madmen look out for each other and that Cheryl was a Madman. For that matter he knew Harris and Tierden weren’t smart enough to make a story like that up and nobody could be dumb enough to mistake someone else for Squid and Danny.

  I mean, trust it, Emerson knew the truth.

  But we had set it up so he could pretend he believed us. That’s why he got that beautiful big weird smile, and he was still smirking up a smirk-storm when he gave Harris and Tierden three-day suspensions for making a false complaint, staggered so they wouldn’t have each other to hang out with.

  I shrugged and gestured at the now-dry window. “Anyway, like a week after that, Bobby Harris figured out ‘wa ter go splash, Karl have to work more.’ They’re so proud of that. And they do other petty nasty shit, sometimes, too, to Paul, but they sure leave Cheryl alone. The weirdest thing is now they try to make out like they didn’t get hurt or it was all their idea or something. Like they think we played a really funny joke on them, you know? So weird. Like they’ll come over to Paul and me, or Danny and Squid, at Pietro’s Pizza and tease us about it like it was something that we’d be sensitive about. Danny says if he has to do it again he’s going to make them kiss each other and take Polaroids and tape those up around the school.”

  She laughed. “So that’s what the Madmen do? Protect each other like that?”

  “No. I wish it was. Usually we can’t do a fucking thing for each other, come to admit it. We’re a little group of mental-case high school students, not the fuckin’ X-Men, you know? But we know each others’ stories, and we do try to watch each other’s backs, when we can.”

  “And now I’m in the club.”

  “Unless you ask Gratz to help you stay out of it, or nobody gives you your ticket. Listen, I have to hang around till time to clock out. That’s like another hour. Usually I’d do homework, but I got that done earlier, so I was going to just sit and read; don’t let me keep you if you need to get home.”

  “I need not to get home, since our moms are out drinking together. I don’t know about yours, but when mine gets home, it’s going to get real ugly.”

  “Hang out as long as you like. The book isn’t that good. You got a story?”

  “Not really. Or just one and it’s really long and pointless and I hate it. Will you pretend to listen and sympathize?”

  I leaned back and settled in with some cold fries and a little thing of ketchup on my lap. “Pretending to listen and sympathize is my fucking specialty.”

  Marti had lived a lot of weird places, New Mexico and Washington State and Nevada, usually far away from people, because her dad’s work was with “all this wild dangerous atomic shit. And wherever they have a cluster of real smart guys, way out in the desert, they have a genius school, because smart people have smart kids, and I got shipped from one genius school to another, over and over, because Dad has no patience, so as soon as I got nongenius scores, he’d move me again.”

  Her father had lost some big job with the AEC, and was going to be a physics prof at Plantagenet College. “He was some kind of a big hero, because there was some report he wouldn’t put his name on, and they pressured him, and it turned out he was right and they were wrong. It would have been a big deal except that every single interesting detail is classified. Like every other thing that’s any good about my father, I hear rumors about it but I don’t get to see it at home.”

  Marti’s mother had been a sixteen-year-old high school dropout waitress with big boobs (resulting in more tips) going out with a twenty-three-year old who had already finished his Ph.D. in physics (resulting in all those weird jobs) when she’d gotten pregnant (resulting in Marti). “Anyway, after I had that nervous breakdown in May—not like a ‘nervous breakdown’ nervous breakdown, I just cried all the time and couldn’t get out of bed for three days—the shrink made Dad agree to let me live somewhere for a while and just be a normal kid.”

  She’d never been anywhere long enough to have many friends, and her father hadn’t really approved of her having the few she sometimes had. She’d gotten locked out a lot but had always spent the night sleeping in her car or at a diner. She couldn’t remember a single interesting thing that had ever happened to her.

  She looked up at the clock. “Jesus—time for you to clock out. That’s a lot of listening to me babble.”

  “It beats going home,” I said.

  “Same here. Better than listening to them fight about her drinking and screwing around, him breaking stuff and screwing around, and my grades. Oh, and flying saucers.”

  “I get the flying saucers, too.”

  “Yeah, my father is so much of a skeptic and a don’t-believe-nonsense guy that Mother takes up flying saucers and quartz crystals and levitation and dowsing and all that just to irritate him.”

  “I’m afraid our mothers are going to get along just fine.” I made a last quick check, and locked the door. We walked across the parking lot to her car. It had still been warm when we had arrived, the air thick with moisture like being wrapped in a blanket, but now it was after midnight and a chill had taken the damp air. We both shivered.

  “You can’t think of anything that might be making Paul avoid you?” she asked. “Any reason why he wouldn’t want to talk to you, or maybe just wouldn’t want to be seen with you?”

  “That’s the weirdest thing of all,” I said, “there’s one thing I can think of but it makes no sense unless he’s telepathic. Can I tell you something I can’t tell anyone else?”

  “Sure, if you trust me.”

  We got into her car, and she started it and put the heater on. “Well,” I said, “you know the stuff I told you about the Madman Underground. But there’s something I have to do.” I took a deep breath and just blurted out everything about Operation Be Fucking Normal. I explained about Dad and AA and “one day at a time,” and finally I said, “so that’s what I’m trying to do, be normal, one day at a time. So far I’ve got one day.”

  “So that’s why you said that keeping friends is hard. What a jackass.” Marti pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Maybe I’m just weird but I don’t think you should throw away great friends just to sit around all year singing I’m-normal-I’m-normal-I’m-normal to yourself. Your friends are not like a . . . a hairstyle or something.”

  I felt small, petty, and creepy.

  She put the car in gear. “I’m getting mad. But I said I’d give you a ride home. And I like to keep my word.” She whipped the car out of the parking lot fast enough to pull me against the door. We said nothing. It seemed like a breath later that we were in front of my house, the brakes screeching loud enough that I figured she’d wake up old Wilson. She said, “I’m sorry. I’ve only known you a few hours. I really don’t have any right to judge you.”

  “I’d still like to be friends.”

  “Am I suitable as a friend for a normal guy?” She didn’t look at me. “See you in school tomorrow.”

  “See you in school.”

  I got out of her car, and the instant that I closed the door she pulled away slow and soft, riding the clutch up into first, not one of her jackrabbit clutch-popping take-offs this time.

  Of course Mom wasn’
t home yet—it was almost an hour till closing time. I tried the back door and it was locked.

  I went around front, looked to make sure nobody saw (I didn’t want anyone narking me out to Mom), and went in through the window I’d left unlatched. I carefully closed and latched it behind me, in case she came home in one of her paranoid investigative moods.

  All the stashes were safe and my door had held.

  I undressed into the washer, threw in detergent, made sure it was set for cold, started it.

  I treated myself to using up all the hot water, scouring off the smell of burger grease and disinfectant till the shower turned cold.

  Tired as I was, I couldn’t fall right asleep. I turned on the desk lamp and pointed it at Dad’s task list, pinned to my wall. As always, before I got to the third page, I sank into deep sleep.

  PART TWO

  (Thursday, September 6, 1973)

  10

  Cussing a Blue Streak Does Not Work on Goddam Ghoul Bastards

  MY ALARM WENT off at 5:30—I had work at Thos. Browning Upholster, so I needed to be up. I groaned and pushed myself up off the mattress before sweet sleep could drag me back down, dressed quick, and trotted down the stairs.

  Mom was snoring on the living room couch, still wearing her clingy top, baggy hippie-chick long skirt, and Go-Get-Laids—her favorite black leather high-heeled boots. They had huge clunky heels, lots of silver fittings that didn’t do anything, and complicated lacing that didn’t undo, and they had cost around half a mortgage payment.

  She had fallen in love with them in the shoe store window up in Toledo. She’d taken one look and said— this is how she explained it to me—“They are so perfectly me, Karl. Elegant and sassy, strong and assertive, daring to be all-woman in a man’s world.” (I noticed later that that was exactly what it said in the magazine ads for the boots.) “I had to have them. When you see something that is all you, you’ve got to have it, it’s like a sign that you’re meant to have this thing, to be really you.” And then she kind of winked and smiled and said, “Especially when it’s a perfect pair of Go-Get-Laids.” (That part wasn’t in the ad.)

  She was trying to explain why she’d stolen one of my cash cans to get them. I was pretty upset, though I wasn’t going to let her see that—she’d just yell at me, and maybe do something else to spite me. What would be the point? Those boots were about three weeks off my life, but it was gone, you know? No good making it worse by yelling.

  Afterwards, she said she was sorry; we agreed it would count as part of what I got her for Christmas (although all by themselves those boots had cost more than I was planning to spend).

  I never saw those boots on her without feeling angry and weird. They really were her trademark: all the guys who hung out at Mister Peepers called her “Beth with the boots.”

  Mom was face down, head turned to the side, snoring with a sound like a just-unclogged toilet drain, but louder. All the authorities say you only snore when you sleep on your back, but Mom was never one to comply with authority. Softandgentle, Prettyangel, Ocean, and Starbeauty lay beside her in a furry row. One booted foot rested on the floor next to the little wad of her underwear. Her long skirt was bunched about halfway up her pasty white thighs.

  The front door was unlocked, but the TV and stereo were still there. I’d want to check later to make sure my stashes were still all okay. And she hadn’t puked. Really, the morning could’ve been a lot worse.

  She groaned. “Karl?”

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “Time’s it?”

  “Quarter till six, Mom, I got a couch pickup this morning.”

  “That old bastard doesn’t pay you enough. And my old bastard left. Men. Bastards.”

  She curled up toward the couch back, erasing the crease where the cats had been sleeping. They flumped to the floor and stalked off, twitching their tails in a parade of indignation.

  I went into her bedroom, grabbed the coverlet off the bed, and put it over her. I decided she’d be more comfortable without the boots and pulled those off her as well. She whimpered a little and snuggled into the coverlet. “I’m going to move the clock out here,” I said, “and set it for eight thirty.”

  “’kay.” She made a little snork noise, squirming. “Tiger?”

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  “You’re okay. You’re really an okay kid.” She fell back asleep.

  The dim light erased most of the lines on her skin, and smoothed out the dark roots around her part. She was, still, really, kind of pretty. She pouted like a three-year-old who isn’t getting her way but isn’t sure what her way would be. Except for the hair, she still looked like her class-of-’52 yearbook picture.

  Dad always said that when he first saw her after he came back from the service, he knew he’d marry her or nobody. “I’d thought I’d never fall in love, but it turned out I was gonna do it once,” he’d add, and if she was in reach he’d mess her hair a little or run a hand down her back. She’d tell him he was corny and he’d tell her “but you like that.”

  Last summer, Paul and me had been watching this old Western on TV and that line about “it turned out I was gonna do it once” was in it; John fuck-me-senseless-with-a-flagpole Wayne said it. I wondered whether my dad was so corny he came up with it, too, or he was so corny that when he saw that movie, and heard that line, he slapped it into his favorite story. Anyway it always embarrassed Mom, and it always made her smile. Maybe she never saw that movie.

  Looking at the pale tumble of hair around Mom’s face, and the sad little girl expression as she slept, I could sort of see what Dad must’ve seen.

  As I moved the clock to the coffee table, it showed I was only five minutes late. Piece-a-cake. I made back three of the five in a headlong charge through grooming, moving the McDorksuit to the dryer, and catshit patrol. Now if I ran all the way to Courthouse Street, which I enjoyed anyway, I could be right on time.

  I slowed as I crossed Courthouse—almost no cars moving yet, just the few people who had to work early. On that block of Shoemaker Avenue, the peeling storefront that read THOS. BROWNING, UPHOLSTER, was the only one not yet boarded up.

  Like always, Browning was already out in front of his store, a paper cup of coffee from McDonald’s in one gnarled hand, his suit coat draped over his other arm, leaning on the old hearse he used for deliveries. His sludge-gray hair was plastered down with some kind of goop or other, and his hat was on the hood of the hearse beside him. He was wearing his Thursday clip-on tie, the red one of his five flaccid, food-stained clip-ons. His Sunday tie was a real bow tie, blue and red, real ratty and old, and only for church. There was a Saturday clip-on tie but no Monday clip-on tie because he didn’t have the shop doors open Mondays, just worked in the back, he said so he could concentrate.

  For fifty-some years Browning had been an upholster. He would threaten to “whack you one upside your empty head with the old mallet” for saying “upholsterer,” because “a poet makes poetry but you don’t call him a poeter.” I thought about asking what about a carpenter but I was afraid he’d have an answer.

  “Mister Shoemaker,” he said, which was always what he said when he first saw me. After that he would call me Karl like everyone else did. “Just a pickup today, no delivery. ’Fraid it’s a long ways out of town—all the way out to Republican Corners—so we’ll get you to school on time, but not with much time to spare.”

  “That’s fine, Mister Browning.”

  “Good, good. I don’t want to interfere with your education, Karl. It’s important.”

  Since there was no delivery, there was nothing to carry out of the shop, and we just got into the old hearse. Browning said practically all upholsters did pickups and deliveries in used hearses, because used hearses were cheap, had wide back doors that opened all the way, and came with tackle for handling big, heavy objects.

  I could dig that it was practical and cheap. Like me, you know. I still wished he’d just put some cash into fixing up an old bread van or something. Or at
least repainted that old hearse some color other than black, and maybe put THOS. BROWN, UPHOLSTER in big letters on it.

  We got into the car and he handed me a McDonald’s coffee, cream-two-sugars, like I liked it. This was probably my favorite job: good money, in cash so I didn’t have to pay Social Security; the hours worked real good for me; and most of all Browning was considerate, like he wanted me to like the job and stick around. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Eahh. Life’s busy but I’ll live. There’s plenty of work, I’m staying up with school, all that.”

  “Getting out any, got any friends?”

  “Oh, I get some time off, Mister Browning, really. I’m friends with a lot of people.”

  “That’s good. You’re going to need friends later. Shoemaker is a big name in this town. You remind me a lot of your dad. He carried couches for me back before the war, you know, and did about half an apprenticeship.”

  “Yeah, well.” The tall corn whirred by. Browning reminded me that Dad had worked for him in 1941 every so often; I never knew what to say about it. “Uh, I’m planning to join the army, even though it’s got my mom really freaked.”

  “It would,” he said. “Well, hell, when you come back to settle, that time in the service will look good to the voters.”

  That old hearse didn’t have much acceleration but it had quite a top speed and Browning liked to drive at it. I kind of enjoyed the way the old motor would roar and that feeling of barreling along barely in control. Besides, if I got killed I was already in a hearse.

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to live here,” I said.

  “Your old man was real sure of that, himself. Sometimes the Lord has other plans.”

  Now, that was a conversation killer.

  “Yeah, well.” Might as well put a stake in it.

  We shot on down the crumbly pavement ribbon between the fields that stretched right out to the fencerows on the horizon, and the sun climbed up and got brighter and smaller. The heavy-duty shocks on the old hearse could handle all those bumps, lines, and cracks that webbed the asphalt, but they wanted us to know they were working hard, so there was a constant, quick whuppa-thud whuppa-thud from the road. In a race between Browning and Marti, she’d have him in a drag, but over distance I wasn’t so sure.