Tales of the Madman Underground

by John Barnes

  I wondered if she and I were still friends, didn’t like that thought, and went looking for something to talk about. Lucky I grew up in the Midwest, because I knew just what would restart the conversation.

  Blue-brown sky, already starting to silver and it wasn’t seven o’clock yet. “Hot one for sure,” I said.

  “Thank progress for air-conditioning, and God for nothing to do outside after this,” Browning agreed.

  We kept that one going about five minutes more, and then we got onto the Indians and why they stank this year, and the Oxford reopening, and the fact that neither of us had had a date in a while. Of course my while was the three months since Bonny dumped me, and his was the couple decades since Mrs. Browning had died.

  At least I knew if I ever got to his age, I’d still be able to talk to young people.

  Republican Corners had been an incorporated town fifty years before. You could still see some foundations in the vacant lots by the road. The old downtown, a block of boarded-up buildings, was still standing. But now there wasn’t even a post office, just a little grocery store with gas pumps out front. In one of the dozen or so inhabited houses that huddled around one side street, an old lady named Rose Carson had a sofa that needed re-covered. Browning had gone to high school with her; that was where he got a lot of his business, people he’d known in school. I figured that was probably how he’d gotten his first big break, when he re-covered Moses’s living room set.

  “Tom,” she said as he came in the door, “I can tell you’re getting old. You never used to have to bring along a handsome young assistant.”

  “I used to have a back like steel. Nowadays the doctor says I gotta watch it, so I need help to move a couch.”

  “Oh, he’s to help you with the couch. What’s he going to do while we’re upstairs?” She winked at me. Gross gross gross.

  “Don’t pick on my help, you shameless old hussy. Not when you got me around and I like it.”

  “Of course you do, you old poop. Or you would if you remembered what it meant.”

  They were both grinning like this was the funniest shit in the world, and went on into trading jokes about the sex lives of people who were mostly dead now. They’d talk about a time when some guy and girl got caught making out on the hayride, and then they’d suddenly be talking about how nice his funeral was, like fifty years later, or about how her family had had to put her away because she couldn’t take care of herself, and like that.

  I figured there wouldn’t be a quiz so I didn’t take notes. I just stood there, smiled nicely, and remembered that at what Browning paid me, so far this conversation had already bought me one more paperback at Philbin’s.

  They got into more usual old people conversation, too, grandkids and nieces and nephews and stuff. Then she smiled at me and said, “And might I ask, is this the next generation of Browning upholsters?”

  “Not a bit,” old Browning said, “this is the next Mayor Shoemaker. Doug’s boy. Takes after his dad, wants to go into the army. Where his ability to carry large heavy objects around without asking too many questions will come in real handy.”

  Rose Carson winked. “Well, Tom here’s the man to train you. He personally carried General Sherman’s sofa all the way from Atlanta to Savannah.”

  “Why, Rose, you—when you were a senior, I was a sophomore!”

  “For the third time!” Then they both got all sentimental and talked about how it was good to see each other again, and he promised that the two of them would have dinner soon.

  But they hadn’t seen each other in more than a year. I mean, how can you let a friend go for that long, especially when you only live like twenty minutes apart and neither of you has all that much to do in the evening anyway?

  What we found when we finally carried that couch out was nothing Browning hadn’t seen fifty million times before—figuring one pickup a week and that he’d been in business for a million years—but he overreacted just like it was the first time.

  All of Browning’s customers were really old because they were the only people with furniture nice enough to be worth fixing. People my mom’s age and younger just bought the Sears stuff that, when it starts looking shabby or something breaks, you either sell to a college student or pitch in the Dumpster.

  So when Browning and me made pickups and deliveries, it meant there was a hearse in front of some old person’s house. In a place like Republican Corners, everybody phoned the neighbors. So now pretty much the whole local population was hanging around on their porches and in the street, waiting to get a look at Mrs. Carson’s corpse.

  “Seddidown!” Browning grunted. I let the couch down and stepped back. I’d seen this show before.

  Browning stood up, smacked his palms across each other twice like he had sawdust on them, and stood at the edge of the porch, hollering and flapping his arms around like killer chickens were attacking his legs. “You can all go back inside and take your goddam kids with you, every goddam one of ’em, because you ain’t gettin’ to see no goddam body this morning! Rose is just fine just like she was yesterday and just like she’s gonna be for years to come, except she’s got this goddam problem that her goddam neighbors are all goddam ghouls!” He pretty much howled “ghouls” at them. Like a goddam dog with its goddam butt on goddam fire, you might say.

  “And we ain’t burying this couch either so you don’t plan to come and sponge off the reception like I’m sure you all goddam do every chance you get! A man ought to be able to conduct his goddam business without having every-goddam-body turn it into a goddam sideshow!”

  Same as always. Long pause while they stared, and talked to each other, and then some Einstein among them figured out that this meant no body to look at, and they all just kind of floated back in their front doors, their confused kids trailing after them. We carried that ratty old couch down to the hearse quick.

  Usually I didn’t bother with the seat belt but I put it on this time, I can tell you that. Browning was still good and mad. The old hearse had a three on the tree; he slapped it into gear, stood on the gas, and popped the clutch, sending us screaming backwards into the street. He had it floored for full quarter mile, and only upshifted to three when he took his foot off the gas. I think we laid rubber for most of it.

  The sun was full up now, the brown ring around the sky was narrow and far away along the horizon, and the cornfields and little strips of woods all around were almost pretty, like a calendar or something, in the deep-yellow light that filtered in through the humidity and dust.

  We shot down the narrow channel through the tall corn. “What really gets me, Karl, every single goddam time, is that I’m trying to get all those ghoul bastards off the street. I’m trying to make them ashamed of standing around, like goddam ghouls, hoping to get a look at a nice neighbor lady. They only want to look at her when she’s cold and stiff and she don’t even look like herself anymore. When she would’ve done anything in the world just to have somebody stop and ask how she was and set with her for half an hour. But nobody wants to do that. But for a chance to see her look like a shriveled wax dummy they’ll climb the hedge.

  “They goddam well should be ashamed.

  “But I can’t seem to make them ashamed, so instead I always cuss a blue streak so that the mothers will grab their little brats up and drag ’em off into the house. Only it doesn’t work anymore because nobody gives a damn if I cuss in front of their goddam kids!”

  It took me a sec to get that by “cussing a blue streak” he meant saying “goddam” a lot. It must be that in his day, goddam was kind of like fuckin’ was to me and my friends. I thought about suggesting that he try saying “fuckin’” instead of “goddam” but I didn’t think he’d take the suggestion real well.

  When I looked at him again, he was slowly turning his head on his scrawny old neck like a door hanging by one hinge and blowing in the breeze, still trying to work the anger out. “Karl, when you get old, the only thing you got left is your friends. Rose’n’me’
s the only people that remember some of that stuff we were joking about. Once there’s only one of us, which praise the Lord if he’s willing won’t be for a long time yet, it’ll be like all that stuff never happened. That’s what happened to my old aunt, she made it to a hundred and four years old with two old friends she’d been in school with, and then both of them died, and she was gone from pure loneliness in just a couple of months. It was like she wasn’t there anymore, ’cause there was no one to remind her, or treat her memories like they mattered. So if you don’t do anything else, you have to stick up for your friends.”

  He sped up to pass a tractor, the hearse’s old engine thundering as we swung wide. “Hell, I don’t even like this kind of thing, you know? Now I’ll be saying goddam for the rest of the goddam day, too. Probably say it in front of goddam Mrs. Henshaw when she comes in with her son to pick up that big old wrap-around-the-corner couch that she had me get the special leather for. I just know I’m gonna say here’s the goddam bill for the goddam couch, Mrs. Henshaw, and be careful your goddam clumsy son don’t drop it or drag it, or it will all be for nothing ’cause that goddam leather feels like goddam butter and goddam-well rips about as goddam easy. And them both such big churchies their turds have little halos.”

  Okay. He was finally funny. I laughed.

  “I’m an obnoxious old son of a bitch, ain’t I, Karl?”

  “I try never to argue with the boss.”

  He laughed like a goddam idiot. We didn’t say anything, either of us, for a few miles of crumbling asphalt and hazy cornfields.

  I never understood why grown-ups in general and old farts in particular were always willing to act weird. It was probably the only thing that Mom and Browning would agree about. They both believed in hollering and putting up a fight and standing up for stuff.

  It was one big load of crap, I can tell you that. Just because somebody thought something was wrong, everyone else would have to wait around, while Mister Big Ass Defender of Justice went off on his big ego trip. Even if it was embarrassing. Even if it made all your friends want to hide their heads because you were all yelling and mad and weird in public. Most of us don’t care and have jobs to do. Why couldn’t everyone just shut up and be normal?

  11

  I Was a Third-Grade Communist

  THE YEAR I was in third grade was the first time Dad ever lost an election, when he went for his fourth term as mayor, and it wasn’t going real well. By August he knew he didn’t have a chance this year, even though he’d always won in a landslide, in ’58, ’60, and ’62.

  Trying to stop the whole Oakbrook thing blew up in his face; the real estate bastards beat him down because if Oakbrook didn’t happen—or if they had to spend the money to do it as a regular part of Lightsburg—they’d all be broke, and so would a lot of people they’d conned into putting up money for it. So people were pissed. Dad had been a big guy that everyone liked, who paved streets, straightened out taxes, and rebuilt the park, but once he tried to say no to Oakbrook, all that stuff was just like it had never been.

  Paul’s father said it wasn’t personal, just that the real estate bastards had to get Dad out of the way. Both Dad and Mr. Knauss always said “real estate bastards” like it was one word.

  And then after Dad died, and Mom got busted for possession and couldn’t be a substitute teacher anymore, she ended up working at a real estate office. She always said that Cheap Bastard Acres had been a big mistake, too; when she got her license she was going to show people how you should do real estate, that there was a right way to do it that built homes and neighborhoods and didn’t rip people off. I don’t know why, but when she’d say that, I’d kind of believe she meant it, even though I knew you couldn’t trust her.

  Anyway, getting back to third grade, before I was a Madman and before Paul’s mom was killed, and everything, even before Dad got sick, I wanted to be around Dad all the time. I always begged to go to the council meetings with him, where I’d sit in the back and color or do the little bit of homework I had. I just liked hearing his voice; ever since kindergarten it had been a pleasant drone while he ran through all the stuff that needed to get done and asked who was doing it, and people said they had it or there was a committee for it.

  But 1964 was real different. Meetings always ran way too late, so by the time we got out the DQ was closed and we couldn’t get ice cream on the way home, or sit out on the porch with Mom while I finished my cone and they smoked and talked.

  These old guys would stand up and call Dad a dictator, a tyrant, and a Communist, and yell about how stuff wasn’t fair or right, or something was or wasn’t in the Constitution, and how Dad was trying to control everything and run everything, just to keep them from getting rich.

  Last summer, trying to keep Mr. Knauss from getting on Paul and Kimmie’s case, I had told Mr. Knauss I’d never really understood what it was all about back then. He shrugged and said, “You were eight, Karl, of course you didn’t. What it came down to was they wanted big houses on big lots for the Toledo bedroom market. And to make the costs come out low, so they could promise the investors big profits, they needed to leave out costs like sewer hookups, sidewalk easements, street repairs, all the stuff that makes a place comfortable to live. That was all. It didn’t really matter because once the places were built and sold, Gist County went after them anyway, so they get worse services for about the same money, and anyway if you’ve got to work in Toledo, you might as well live there—the houses aren’t any cheaper out here, and there’s not much difference between a view of a warehouse and a view of a soybean field. So it was really all for nothing.”

  The funny thing was, even then, before I had any idea what it was all about, somehow I knew they were making a mess of Dad’s life (and Mr. Knauss’s, and mine) for flat nothing. Every Tuesday night the meeting would go way over time and I’d end up going home slung over Dad’s shoulder, half-asleep. Sometimes he’d meet some voter on the street, explain he was going home from Council, say that he thought they’d done some good things for the town that night (even if it was just all yelling, he’d say that), and then explain that “this is Karl, my sack of potatoes, and I’d better get him home to bed.”

  When we got home, he’d just kind of hand me to Mom and she’d more stuff me into bed than tuck me, then go to bed herself. She didn’t want to hear about it and he wanted to talk out his fury, so Dad would go to the bar and talk politics with his cronies. That’s what Mom called them; I think I was in about sixth grade before I realized that being a crony wasn’t a job like being an assistant.

  That September, Vietnam was just really getting going. The old farts that were picking on Dad were all for Goldwater and Dad was the city chairman for Johnson. Before then I just knew that good guys rooted for the Indians, voted Democratic, and went to United Methodist. I wasn’t sure whether it was Republicans, Tiger fans, or Catholics who were the real source of evil in the world.

  But early in third grade I realized it must be Republicans. Everyone was yelling at Dad and writing awful things about him in the paper; what Mom was calling the “Goldwater asshole/cheap bastard axis” was in full swing. I liked the way that when she’d say that, or Dad would, they’d start shushing each other because I wasn’t supposed to hear them say bad words, and then they’d get laughing so hard they had to hang on to each other. That was pretty cool.

  So sometime in September, Mrs. Baker, the third-grade teacher, who was a Goldwater asshole herself and married to one of the town’s leading cheap bastards, tried to tell us about how bad the Russians were and all. My dad said she was putting her politics in her classroom, where it didn’t belong, because she was a crazy old lady who wanted to take Grandpa’s Social Security away and go to war in Vietnam.

  One story hour, Mrs. Baker read us this story about how a bunch of kids were saying the Pledge of Allegiance and their new teacher made them cut up the flag and not pray, and I guess the teacher was Russian. And maybe we were supposed to feel sorry for the old teacher w
ho got taken away at the beginning of the story, because she was a mean old lady like Mrs. Baker.

  I thought it was a dumb story with no fighting or danger. Years later when we had U.S. History from Harry we read it again, and I found out what it was about, which was pretty much beyond me when I was eight; it was supposed to warn us that all us kids were all so dumb that we’d fall right into line for the first Communist teacher that walked into the classroom. Like anyone ever believed or did what any teacher told us.

  Anyway, at the time it was just a dumb story, and after Mrs. Baker read it to us, she started talking about how the way the Communists ran Russia, if people stood up and disagreed and yelled about how something was wrong, the police took them away and they were never seen again.

  Now that was interesting. (It was also not lost on me that they took mean old teachers like Baker away and shot them.) I thought about that all day. If we had that here in Lightsburg, and put those real estate bastards and Goldwater assholes in jail, meetings could be over in no time. The DQ would still be open, I could walk home with Dad instead of going home slung over his shoulder, and we’d never have to hear from those old hollering booger-faces again.

  And it was kind of the perfect day for the idea, because it was Dad’s birthday. Also, Dad had lined up a couple contracting jobs for January, after he would stop being mayor, so he’d be able to restart his business and not have to take some clerk job in Toledo. So it was a celebration. They had a bottle of wine before dinner (they let me have some mixed with 7-Up; I’d rather have had plain 7-Up but it was a big deal to them).