by John Barnes
Then they had another bottle of wine with dinner, and they were being all loud and silly as they tried to get Dad’s Sara Lee birthday cake out of the box and onto a plate so they could put candles on and everything. Big mistake. It went right over the plate, catching the far edge and flipping the plate up into the air, before landing upside down on the floor. The plate shattered next to it.
Mom and Dad started in yelling at each other about it, at the top of their lungs, the usual You-fucked-it-up/ No-you-fucked-it-up thing they did whenever anything went wrong. It went on for a while. I just sat at the table and thought about poor Dad not getting his cake, and how I had been looking forward to it, too, and it was all very sad.
But at least I had an idea to cheer Dad up—that Russian idea. I was sure it was a good idea because Mrs. Baker didn’t approve of it, and Dad didn’t approve of Mrs. Baker.
So Mom cleaned up the cake and the smashed plate, and then she made this thing with vanilla ice cream over Oreo cookies, and put candles on it. Dad blew out the candles and they had some more wine, and everything seemed better. Mom was sitting with her arm around him, and he was smiling and holding her hand.
“I learned something in school today that was really good,” I told Dad. “In Russia, they just put guys that holler and complain in jail. So they won’t bother anybody.”
Dad agreed that indeed, they did that, though he wondered why Mrs. Baker was telling little third graders about it and scaring the hell out of them for no good reason.
I explained that if we did that here, we could just take all the people that made the Council meetings take so long, because they were always hollering and objecting, and send them away to jail, the way that they did the mean old lady teacher in that dumb story about kids cutting up the flag.
“You dumb little shit,” Dad said. “You dumb, dumb little shit.”
“He doesn’t know any better!” Mom said.
“He damn well should, he goes to Council meetings, we’ve taught him—”
“How much can you teach a third grader about something like that?” Mom said, her voice tight, holding her breath a little; it was her please don’t voice, the one she used when he was about to start ranting and yelling, and sometimes it worked, sometimes he’d back off and say she was right.
But not tonight. “Karl, listen. Did you say anything about this to anyone else?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Actually I’d told Paul and Paul had said he thought we’d get in trouble for that idea. I didn’t want to tell on Paul and get him in trouble, too, and I really didn’t want to be in trouble for having told him.
Unfortunately Dad knew as well as I did that that was what I said whenever I was trying to think up a lie. “Did you talk about this to anyone else?”
“Doug, he’s a little boy, you can’t expect him—”
“Did. You. Tell. This. To. Anyone. Else?” He stared into my eyes, I think, though I couldn’t see through the tears welling up. “Dammit, Betty, if he said anything like that around Baker or her stupid husband or any of the Goldwater assholes or their asshole kids, they’re gonna be all over me at the next Council meeting, and I need to know!” He leaned across the table and shouted into my face. “Now did you say anything about it to anyone?”
I was blubbering now.
It always made Dad sick to see a boy cry. He said that all the time. He grabbed up the bottle from the table and went out to get drunk by himself on the back porch, like he did when he was really mad, muttering and swearing.
Mom’s arms folded around me and I buried my face in her sweater and cried. After a long while, when I’d settled down into sniffles and she’d been holding me and stroking my hair, she got it out of me that I’d talked about it with Paul, and no one else, and that Paul had thought it was a real stupid idea and I’d better keep it secret. “You should listen to Paul more often,” Mom said. She sounded really tired, but she kissed me on the forehead and hugged me really hard again. “And when your dad asks you something you should just tell him the truth. I have to talk to him for a few minutes, ’kay, Tiger? Would you like more ice cream treat? Yours got kind of spoiled for you.”
It was runny and the Oreos were soggy but getting seconds on dessert was a big deal, so I ate all of it and scraped the bowl pretty much down to the shine. I could hear Mom’s voice, soft and pleading, and Dad grouching and grumbling, and then after a while this long sigh from him. “I never could fight you about anything, Betty.”
They came in and Dad sat down next to me, put his arm around me, and Dutch rubbed me, not hard, though I was a little scared because sometimes when he was real drunk he was rough. But this time he was gentle, like he was afraid he’d break me.
He said he was sorry he’d yelled at me. He made sure Mom had explained to me that putting people in jail for arguing was wrong and that it was bad that the Russians did it. Even if the people arguing were old booger-faces. And he asked if maybe I didn’t want to go to Council meetings anymore, since now they were so nasty and taking so long, but I said I still wanted to go.
That settled all the big questions, so Mom got me cleaned up and put to bed. I remember her hugging me extra hard and saying, “Your dad does love you, Tiger, and I know you love him, but try not to be like him, ’kay?”
12
Two Stooges Short of an Act
THINKING ABOUT ALL that now, riding in Browning’s hearse, I had about worked myself into hating the whole world. Old people in particular. Why couldn’t things just be wrong, and let it go at that? Lots of unfair stuff happened all the time. Lots of things that weren’t right happened. You could hear all about them in any therapy meeting.
But that was no excuse for all the hollering. We could all get along a lot better in life if people weren’t always standing up and hollering about this isn’t right, that isn’t right. You know what? Maybe it’s not right. But maybe nobody fucking wants to listen to you holler.
Why did they all think that all that standing-up-for-your-rights bullshit was a good thing? People who said my mom was plain old fucking batshit crazy, and a hippie communist, too, would turn right around and say, “But that Beth sure stands up for what she thinks is right,” like that was a good thing. Which makes no fucking sense at all if you think about it. Somebody’s not only wrong, but insists on yelling at you about it and not leaving you alone? And that makes it better? Shit.
My hands were squeezing each other in my lap like they did when I wanted to go punch something and make it be afraid of me.
Browning said, quietly, “When I was your age I used to promise myself that I wouldn’t ever, ever, ever turn into an old fart that lectures young guys about how to run their lives.”
“I was just promising myself the same thing.” My fingers were knotting around like spiders at an orgy.
Browning laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, and he kept right on laughing as we carried the couch in through the big back door of his workshop, and clapped me on the shoulder and said having me around did him good.
Browning added this trip to my tab—he only paid me once a month, but always the minute it was due, and in cash because he hated all those stupid laws and didn’t see any reason why either of us should be paying into Social Security since “I can goddam well work to support myself and you’re too young to worry about retiring and we’re the only two people that should goddam be involved, and you know they don’t save that money, Karl, they’re using it to pay off some old poop my age who was too lazy and dumb to save for his own retirement, and thinks he should live off working people now.”
I liked the way he put that. He never hollered about it, either. When I staged my Communist coup and took over and put all the people that hollered into concentration camps, maybe I’d put him in the extra-nice one for senior citizens, and give him a private room where he could jump Rose Carson.
Besides, unlike some past employers, Browning had never let my mother sweet-talk him into giving her my wages as an “a
dvance” for an “emergency.” I always figured that was the real reason Mom hated him; she was always saying he was a backward, stupid, old small-town bigot who hadn’t had a new idea in fifty years. Which he was, of course. But there were so many of those around Lightsburg that it was pretty strange that she hated Browning in particular.
Browning dropped me off four blocks from the high school—I had explained to him the year before that it looked pretty weird for me to arrive in a hearse. The streets and sidewalk were already warm in the sun, but in the shadows of the houses the thick lawns were all still soggy with dew, and water ran down the street signs and tree trunks.
I crossed the street to walk in the sun. A car horn honked. When I looked up, it was Marti. She rolled down her window and said, “Hey, little boy. Wanna come for a ride in my car? I have candy!”
There’s a rule or something that if a girl can crack you up, you have to do what she says. As soon as I had closed the door, Marti said, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about blowing up at you last night. I mean, no wonder I’ve never had any friends, hunh?”
“You’re pretty cool,” I said.
“Really cool, or just cool for a titless genius?”
“I told you before, those assholes meant for you to hear that.”
“You know, when someone hurts my feelings, somehow it does not comfort me to know that it was deliberate.” She went around a corner with a squeal of tires. “On the other hand, knowing that someone else thinks they are assholes helps a great deal.”
“I think that’s some kind of rule for the universe.”
“Probably. I’m good at figuring out rules for the universe. My dad figures out the rules for manipulating protons, I figure out the rules for manipulating morons.”
Okay, come to admit it, if I had to do what Marti said every time she cracked me up, I was pretty much going to be her slave forever. “Listen,” I said, “I work at McDonald’s Sunday night through Thursday night. Any time you want to avoid going home, knock on the glass, I’ll let you in. I like to hear you talk.”
“Thank you. I like to hear me talk, too.”
“You’re on some kind of weird streak this morning,” I said, “or I’m just laughing at everything.”
“Well, laughing at everything is probably a good idea, considering what everything is like. Want me to be serious for a second?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
We slowed down to join the long line of cars that formed a sort of constipated caterpillar hunching into the parking lot. She glanced at me. “I got done being mad at you for not being a perfect friend, and then over being mad at myself for expecting you to be, about fifteen minutes after I got home; I get mad real big and real fast but I come down quick, too, you know? Anyway, I started to think, and, um—your little plan won’t work.”
“My little plan—”
“To go normal. In the first place, maybe I’m wrong and you’re a turd, but you seem like a pretty decent guy. I don’t think you have it in you to really cut off all your old friends, and I don’t think you’re going to like being normal. Here’s a whole line of cars full of kids; how many of them are normal? Most of them, right, by definition? And if you threw a rock down the line what would be your chance of hitting a happy person?”
“Okay, I see your point.”
“Yeah, but I want to explain it some more, till you’re pretty much falling asleep. Seriously, your idea won’t work. You’re trying to do three things that won’t go together—be normal, be happy, and keep your friends. I don’t even think your odds are that good for two out of three.
“So I’m not worried about your plan to go all normal on us. Even if you manage to avoid therapy. The plan won’t work, you can’t stay normal for ten minutes on a bet, and you won’t fool every single teacher all the way to Thanksgiving.
“Not to mention that your scheme is morally grody.
“But based on knowing you one entire day, I can tell you’re way too stubborn to be talked out of trying. So go ahead, try, and when it all collapses, you’ll find out I’m the horrible kind of person that will drop by McDonald’s every night you’re there for the rest of the school year, just to say ‘nyeah-nyeah-nyeah, told you so!’”
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged, afraid she was right and afraid to say it. “I guess I’ll enjoy the company. I just wish I knew what’s up with Paul.”
We were cruising along our third aisle of marked, paved parking, and Marti asked, “Jesus, aren’t there any parking spaces in this county?”
“The school board doesn’t really approve of kids driving. Unless you get here really early, pretty much all the parking is in Crater Field.” I pointed the direction.
“And I bet it wasn’t named after somebody named Crater.” She turned toward the unpaved, pitted, and rutted back lot. “That’s going to kill my shocks,” she said as the LTD rocked like a boat in a storm.
As we got out of the car, I realized, belatedly, that showing up at school in Marti’s car was more embarrassing than arriving in a hearse. But hey, normal guys didn’t worry about things like that, right?
As we approached the big main doors, Harris and Tierden were out front, practicing their smoking skills, and they started making hooting noises as we walked into the school.
“Funny, it’s fall. Shouldn’t the invertebrates be getting ready to hibernate?” I asked Marti, making sure I was loud enough to be heard.
“Only the fit ones. The rest need to perish miserably for the good of the species.”
Harris must not have caught it, and ran a couple of steps after us, saying, “What? What?” before Scott stuck out one of his long skinny monkey-arms and dragged his pudgy buddy back.
I held the door for Marti. Holding doors for girls was one of those things Dad taught me by hitting the back of my head. To cover the fact that I was doing it, I kept talking. “You cracked a joke they didn’t get. They’ll probably forgive you, like, never. Just in case you had your eye on either of them.”
“Only for the specimen jar.” We were going up the main steps. She held out her hand and we traded fives. “Let me know if you ever need anybody to leave a pound of nails in that puddle.”
Without thinking about it, I had followed one of Dad’s commandments: If anyone tries to embarrass you about anything you do, hold your head up and do it more. He might have been proud of me. Anyway, Marti was still my friend. Maybe today wouldn’t completely stink.
Gratz spent half the hour on waste-of-time announcements, reading all of them and taking a minute to comment on each one. Sometimes I thought it would be cool to do extracurriculars, play a sport or something, but once you heard the long catalog of all the stuff at the start of the school year—well, I wouldn’t say not if you paid me but I’d sure as shit say only if you paid me. Science Fair entries were due by November (so get going on that atom smasher now). Show Choir auditions were Friday (don’t just be a social, be a singing social). Tryouts for Barefoot in the Park were Monday afternoon (you, too, can be in Paul’s supporting cast). The debate team needed members (and penises). And like all that, on and on.
Darla kept tweaking Mr. Babbitt’s ears and adjusting him and whispering that he was a naughty bunny and this was important, bunnies should listen to the announcements, just quiet enough so that Gratz would have had to ask her what she was saying or doing, and just loud enough to make him a little antsy and nervous; he kept glancing at her like he wanted to ask her to stop but would feel too ridiculous if he did.
It was the thing I liked best about Darla. Well, second best if you counted her big tits. Or was that third best? Anyway, he kept blabbing, she kept talking to the bunny, he got more and more nervous, and I got closer and closer to completely cracking up.
I glanced at Paul, sharing the joke, the way we always did. He jerked his head away like something bit his nose. I looked down at the floor and wished I was dead.
Gratz rambled on through the Future Homewreckers bake sale to buy a new oven, cracking jokes about
how if you bought something, you could bring it back and they’d bake it for you. About half the kids in the room laughed, so the percentage of real pathetic loser yummy-yummy-yes-yes-we-love-to-lick-brown-wads-out-of-your-butt-Coach Gratz suck-ups was about average, for a Gratz class.
“All right, now that all of that is out of the way, let’s get you started on our first serious project of the term. I’m going to teach you how to read Huckleberry Finn. Now, the first thing you have to learn, is how not to read Huckleberry Finn.” Then he launched into a tirade.
That was how his classes mostly went; he could lay down a half-hour riff on any of his stock subjects, in his sleep—if he didn’t yell so much he could have done it in my sleep, which I’d have appreciated.
You only needed to take enough notes so that you’d remember to agree with him on the test. And if it looked like he was gonna go into detail and say stuff he’d then want to test us on, we would just ask him about prayer in the schools (for), drugs (against), Vietnam (for), or Nixon (against), and he’d rant away the rest of the time.
He started off by telling us that there were three wrong ways to read Huckleberry Finn, and we were going to talk about two of them today. The first way, he said, was the Hollywood way. The movies had made out Huck and Jim to be “just all-American boys on a road trip on a raft, like Easy Rider but on the river and without the drugs.” (Easy Rider was like, years ago, seventh grade or so. I bet it was all cool and groovy when he first used that.)
“But! But! But!” Gratz emphasized, thumping the podium on each but. I wished I could smile at Paul and get a smile back. When we were taking “Read Like a Man” from Gratz, we used to count the number of but!-but!-but!s in a lecture; there were never fewer than three, and one time there were fourteen. Paul said Gratz was trying to tell us where it hurt, and I said he was telling us what he really wanted out of life.
But, but . . . but. I didn’t look at Paul. It was so not the same I wanted to cry.