Tales of the Madman Underground

by John Barnes

  “Even raining like this?”

  “The better excuse to stay in the bedroom all weekend,” she said. “Not that Bill needs much of an excuse. He is so into me, I can just feel that. You can shift for yourself, right?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “We’ll be back Sunday afternoon and then he wants to visit with you and get to know you.” She looked at me with a big toothy smile and scared, wary eyes. “Can you . . . is this okay with you, Tiger Sweetie? For your old mom to . . . well, I guess I’m maybe serious about this one?”

  “Mom, if he treats you good, I’ll be happy for you. Promise. What’s he teach?”

  “English. Up at Saint Jerome College in Sandusky. He lives right up in Port Clinton, which is how he knew about the cheap cabins at Put-in-Bay. Oh, and they still have the carousel going, and the grapes are getting ripe, and the lake will be all around us and . . . it’s just going to be beautiful. Even if it rains we can do that silly romantic thing and walk along the shore in the rain, you know? I need something like this in my life so much.”

  “Then I’m glad you’re getting to do this.”

  “Really?” She looked so startled.

  “No shit, Mom. Really no shit. I’d rather you were happy.”

  “He’s coming by to pick me up in a little bit. And you’re sure you can—”

  “I can do everything for myself I need to, Mom, you trained me, you should know.” That was a lie, but it was one she’d repeated so often she believed it; she was always impressing her friends by telling them that she’d taught me to cook, clean, sew on buttons, and so forth so that I wouldn’t be the kind of useless pain in the ass that my father had been.

  “Mom,” I said, “I have to work tonight and a lot of the day tomorrow. Do you suppose you could loan me a key so I don’t have to leave the house unlocked?”

  “Just leave the back door unlocked, sweetie. This is Lightsburg. You don’t have to worry about burglars. There’s nothing in this house worth stealing.”

  There was actually just over four thousand dollars, but fuck my ass with a live rabid weasel if I was going to let her know that. “Okay.”

  “You don’t need a key. We both live here.”

  “All right, sorry, just asking.”

  “But you asked because you worry about property and owning stuff and all that.” She sighed, sat down on the bed, and blew out a cloud of smoke; I think she was trying to look thoughtful. “You’re so obsessed with the material that you never think about the spiritual or the human, Karl. And I know you didn’t get that from me.” She took another drag on the cigarette, stubbed it out, and exhaled a stream of smoke. Then she really did look thoughtful. “I’m being all preachy, aren’t I, Tiger? And I promised Bill I wouldn’t be that way. He’s so different, Karl. So, so very different. He says I talk like I’m translated from a Red Chinese horoscope. Which I don’t think is very nice, I mean even Nixon doesn’t call them Red Chinese anymore, now that the Cold War is over. Things are getting so Aquarian, and what’s wrong with sounding like a horoscope? It just means I know what’s really going on. But Bill says he wants me to just calm down and hear some poetry and just sit, and just be, and that’s why he wants me to go with him to the cabin. Isn’t that so far-out?” She looked so tired and frantic, and all of a sudden I realized that she might be tired of the way she was living.

  I’d seen a lot of “something-betters” come and go, but for her sake I said, “Yeah, Mom, actually, it is pretty far-out. A weekend at the lake with a good guy would be really good for you.”

  She looked at me suspiciously. “You won’t mess this up for me?”

  “Mom, have I ever messed up your dates on purpose?”

  “I know, I know, I know. I’m really sorry, Tiger Sweetie, your old mom shouldn’t have said that.” She set her next cigarette down without lighting it, and came over to have me kiss her cheek. “You forgive Mom?”

  “Yeah.” I gave her a quick peck on her soft, dry cheek; she had extra powder and foundation on. I didn’t smell booze. She was putting jeans and sweaters, not nighties, into the suitcase. I was starting to like this new guy Bill a lot.

  By the time I got showered and changed for work, the storm had blown over and there was wet deep yellow sunlight pouring all over the street. I left Mom sitting in a lawn chair under the front porch awning with her suitcase beside her, smoking absentmindedly and trying not to look too nervous and eager. Just before I turned the corner onto Grant Street, she stood up and waved madly, shouting, “The stars shine on you because you are a special light to the universe!” I was glad old Wilson wasn’t outside to hear that.

  Since I’d be working at Philbin’s anyway, I figured I might as well have dinner there and be sure I was early. I ate at the counter. Philbin was off getting some last-minute supplies, and Angie and Dick were coping with a bus crowd from the Trailways station.

  Eventually Angie brought my burger and fries. While I was eating, something large moved onto the stool beside me. “Karl.”

  “Squid! Uh, don’t you have a game tonight?”

  “Don’t have to be there for another hour,” he said, “and it was getting nasty at home.”

  “If I buy you dinner, are you gonna get all silly about it, or just let me do it?”

  He smiled, which was always something to see, because he had big crooked horsey teeth, and it made his plain features absolutely hideous. “Aw, hell, Karl, I’m starving and was trying to figure out how to eat on what I got. But I wasn’t trying to hustle a meal—”

  “Hey, Angie, feed this guy. Let me know when I have to rob another bank to keep it coming. And careful not to get between him and his dish.”

  “Right on it,” she said. “Hey, Karl, you’re doing better, bud, he’s much prettier than your last date.”

  Squid pretty much ordered the menu, and it started to flow out of the kitchen and into him. Even with a maw like that to shove it into, and paws like those to shove it in with, it took Squid a while. Now that Dick had two teenage appetites to feed, he was in heaven.

  When Squid finished, he put his head down and muttered for a moment. I glanced his way.

  “Oh, Mom always said it was stupid to give thanks before you got the thing, the time to thank was after you had it, so she said grace at the end of the meal. So I—well, you know.”

  “Yeah. Every time I pick up a tool, I hear my dad’s voice.”

  That pretty much killed the conversation, so I ordered coffee for both of us, and then we decided we needed dessert to give the coffee something to wash down.

  After Angie set that up, Squid said, “Hey, so how’d the whole big uproar in Gratz’s class turn out, man?”

  “I really don’t know,” I admitted. “I got my magic letter from Gratz, so no therapy for me if I don’t want to do it. Just gotta let Gratz be my pal. Paul is acting like this is some big betrayal and I guess I did chicken out—”

  Squid rammed in a little more apple pie and chewed like he was thinking. “Naw, you didn’t chicken out. “

  “I don’t know, Marti’s really gotten to be a friend these past couple days, and of course everybody else was all the old Madmen, and I sat there while Gratz ranted at them like a nut, and I didn’t get into it. What do you call that?”

  “I don’t call it chickening out, because you were the one doin’ it. It surprised me when I heard about it, Karl, but you and me know about not running out on nobody. So whatever else it was, I call it a surprise. And that’s all.”

  “I think Gratz was kind of surprised, too. Anyway, he’s going to apologize and stuff, and none of them will be in any trouble, and I guess it’ll all blow over, like most crap does.”

  “Yeah, good.” He sighed. “Hey, thanks for the dinner—”

  “Thanks for the company. Good luck tonight, man.”

  “Thanks, we gonna need it. Everybody says we gettin’ our butts kicked.” He squeezed my arm and went out the door in that funny, roll-and-bounce walk that jocks have.

 
Philbin got back, and I filled out the paperwork for the new job, officially punched in, laid out setups, and waited around for whatever was going to happen. Philbin got lost in an Indians game, and Mrs. P was out in the kitchen whistling and singing to herself and putting the pies together. A couple of junior high hoods came in, but since there was nothing free here, they couldn’t smoke, and I was watching too close for them to shoplift, they left.

  The first movie let out and I served floats and shakes to a bunch of college couples, most of them trying to explain Casablanca to each other. It sounded like it wasn’t bad, but when half of the people are trying to explain all the terms they learned from film class and the other half are asking which side France was on, you don’t get much of a sense of what happens in the movie. Twenty minutes later, Philbin’s was empty again, but that was the biggest crowd it had seen in years.

  I had kept up real good with what there was to do, and now I was looking at about an hour of getting paid for sitting. I wanted a story.

  I was so lost about what was going on in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch that I might as well try The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If I found a way to like it, Gratz’s class wouldn’t be nearly so bad.

  Well, I don’t know about liking it, but I sure read it. Way past where Gratz told us to stop.

  Huck would have been a Madman, for sure, if he’d gone to our school, I can tell you that. His dad was a drunk who was beating him, and kidnapped him, and threatened to kill him, and everybody in that little town knew what was happening—the only people he could trust were other kids.

  And not them very much. While Huck had all these problems, Tom Sawyer just wanted to play stupid games about being robbers and things—that was something us Madmen talked about all the time, the way kids getting raped or beaten were sitting in class next to kids whose biggest concern was what to wear for homecoming.

  Anyway, like it or not, Huckleberry Finn had my attention. No risk at all that I’d think it was about happy queer hippies on a raft saying “nigger” a lot. I was pissed that there wasn’t any social services or child welfare to bust Pap Finn, and no therapy group for Huck to hang out with, and the Widow and the Judge were no use, either. Maybe there’d be more slavery or violence, even some sex, or something else cool later, but right now that book was like hearing a new Madman’s story at a therapy meeting.

  Philbin turned out right: people’s noses did the selling. The second movie crowd was much bigger than the first. It was a nice night for early September, the heat of the day gone and the air moist but not really cold. A few girls and old ladies put on light sweaters and left them unbuttoned. The crowd came out of the theater and in that still, cool, wet air, the pies cooking grabbed ’em by the nose and pretty much threw them into the booths and up along the counter. Also Philbin had put a pile of burger and chopped onion on the back of the grill, just to get good smells going.

  Despite my predictions, we even got a little postgame crowd. Two tables of band kids, the real nerdy first-in last-out kind that do the instrument check-in and lockup, wandered in because Pongo’s was closed, Pietro’s was occupied by the socials and the jocks and their girlfriends, and they’d heard that Philbin’s was going to be open.

  I had forty-five crazy minutes waiting tables, then twenty minutes of hard labor busing and jocking the register. By the time I shoved the third load into the dishwasher, Mrs. P had plenty of pies cooling for tomorrow’s pie-and-cheese breakfast special.

  Philbin clapped me on the shoulder, said he figured we’d do it again tomorrow night, and I slung up my books and went out the door, turning right to go up Courthouse Street, looking forward to hauling my butt home to bed.

  17

  Tonto Joins the All-Faggot Midnight Softball League

  “KARL.” I TURNED and Cheryl was standing there with Marti. “Karl, I—we need you—”

  It took me, like, a quarter second to see what this had to be about. I felt sick and furious and like screaming. “Oh, man. Paul?”

  “Yeah. Uh—I grabbed the bat from under my bed, so we won’t have to go by your house. But, um—you don’t have to—”

  “Oh, fuckshit shit-eating motherfucking Jesus, Cheryl, of course I have to. Are you parked—”

  “Around the corner on Shoemaker,” she said. “Marti’s coming, too, she got kind of caught up in this.”

  “I feel like it’s my fault,” Marti said. “Paul was talking to his dad, right after the game, and I didn’t realize what kind of a talk it was.”

  “The usual thing about embarrassing the family by being a drum major?” I said. “‘Prancing around in a faggot suit and you never even went out for football’?”

  “Yeah.” Marti sounded close to crying. “At least I think so. I didn’t really hear. I didn’t see how upset he was at first. So after his father left, I went up to Paul to ask if he wanted to go to Pietro’s after the game, and he threw his baton at me and yelled at me not to pressure him.”

  “You know that way Paul yells when he loses it,” Cheryl said. “I heard that so I ran over to see what was up, and he was halfway across the parking lot, and Marti was just kind of stunned.”

  “I feel really stupid,” Marti said.

  “Paul has a way of making people feel stupid,” I said, more bitterly than I wanted to. “I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. We’d better get moving.”

  Cheryl turned and walked fast; I fell into step beside her, with Marti trailing along. Cheryl was ticking things off like she was working out last-minute plans for a formal dance, that super-organized part of her taking over. “Late start, he’s probably still in his uniform because some of the men who cruise up there like that. Besides he won’t have had any chance to change. We lost real bad, it was forty-two to three, so the guys from the team are going to be worse—”

  “We’ll manage. Good thinking, having that bat already. So we’re ready to go, right?”

  “Yeah, but it’s going to be close this time, Karl. I didn’t dare go without you and then you had to work so late—I was worried—”

  Cheryl leaned over, as we walked, to rest her head on my shoulder. I didn’t put an arm around her or anything—she didn’t like to feel held. I could smell the clean scent of shampoo, and the sweat because she’d just cheered through a game, and the warm new wool and leather of her cheerleader jacket. The hard, compact weight of her head against my shoulder might as well have been the king touching me with a sword, because it always made me feel like a fucking knight in shining armor.

  I said, “You know those guys are going to stop someplace that will take their fake IDs, first. Buying liquor, drinking it, and driving to Toledo will take a while.”

  She lifted her head off my shoulder, obviously irritated. “I was figuring all that in already. It’s gonna be close. This is the latest start we’ve ever had, and we lost tonight, Karl, you know it’s always worse when we lose.”

  “Fuck,” I said, because that was about all there was to say.

  Her car was right at the corner of Shoemaker. She unlocked it and we got in. For this kind of trip I kind of automatically got shotgun; I tossed my books into the back and Marti set them to the side.

  “Did you get anything to eat at Philbin’s?” Cheryl asked.

  “Not recently.”

  “There’s ham sandwiches in a bag by your feet. My step always packs for every game like I’m going to eat enough for five guys while I cheer. What a duh, you know? But I guess she means well and she’s trying to do something for me. Since she can’t keep her creepy dad away from me.”

  She made another turn, onto Courthouse Street, and headed north.

  The sandwich had a lot of mayo and pickle, and the ham was that stringy stuff they sold at delis, not lunch meat. But, like the lumberjack said, good though. “Bonny couldn’t come?”

  “She was going out with Chip after the game, so she’d have heard, but maybe couldn’t get away. I was so worried that you wouldn’t get out of there soon enough that I was thi
nking of seeing if I could go to Pietro’s and get Squid.”

  “He’d be good,” I agreed.

  The last streetlights passed behind us, then the golden arches (I was glad not to be working there tonight), then the harsh bars of glare from the sodium lights over the interstate entrance. In a moment we were shooting across the flat land that stretched out to the low rows of trees on both sides, the horizon a range of lumpy glows from little towns, the sky dark fuzzy velvet with the brighter stars peeping through thin clouds.

  Marti perched on the edge of the backseat, over the transmission hump, putting her head up between me and Cheryl. “Can you guys explain all this to me? I feel like I came in in the middle of the story.”

  “Well, it’s sort of another tale of the Madman Underground,” I said, “maybe one of our most dramatic, or since it’s Paul, our most melodramatic. Now and then, when he’s been fighting with his dad and is really strung out, Paul goes up on the gay stroll in Toledo. Usually it happens after Paul’s dad gets on his ass for not being all manly and stuff. Like whenever Paul gets a lot of attention, say when he has a big part in a play, or a solo in a choir concert, or when it’s a home game and he’s the drum major for the halftime show, Mr. Knauss catches Paul afterwards and tells him that he’s embarrassed the whole family by being Mister Big Public Screaming Faggot, and yells at Paul, and usually tells him to never come home and locks him out that night.”

  “Now and then,” Cheryl said, quietly but perfectly clearly, “one of these blow-ups happens right after Mr. Knauss has gotten caught somewhere, with someone, that he wasn’t supposed to be. I always wonder if he’s ever seen Paul out on the stroll.”

  I hadn’t planned on clueing Marti in to that quite so fast, but what the hell, she had a date with Paul the next night, and maybe she should know; she was bound to know soon, anyway, Paul was such a blabbermouth. But I still wanted to get off the subject, so I went on as if Cheryl hadn’t said anything. “Most of the time when that happens, Paul comes and crashes at McDonald’s with me like you did, or one of the other places I told you about.