Tales of the Madman Underground

by John Barnes

  Paul yammered on. Something about getting rescued always made him gabby. When it was just him and me and Cheryl, used to be we’d just sit here or on Cheryl’s car hood in some highway rest area or out at the tar pond, and Cheryl and me would listen to him just flow till dawn; he could talk up everything till it was all so much cooler than it really was. I was sorry this wouldn’t be one of those nights.

  He had finished telling Marti all about half a dozen other stories—well, officially telling Marti, and more like reperforming them for everyone else, but they were good stories and Paul did them well. If I’d had a little more energy and not been so pissed off at the little shit, I’d’ve been loving the stories, too. Sort of winding down for a breath, he asked, “So anybody got any idea what our new shrink is going to be like?”

  “It’s a woman,” Danny said. “I was in the office this morning and when Brean turned her back, I read everything on her desk. At least I think it’s a woman—Leslie is usually a woman, isn’t it? Doctor Leslie Schwinn, like the bicycle. Dibs on the first one to make a joke about sniffing her seat.”

  Everyone went yuck! and started beating on Danny, not hard, just having fun, but I could see the waitress moving our way, so I cued them all she was coming, and we straightened out and Bon and me did the talk-to-grown-ups and got it all cool again.

  I could never quite believe how straight-arrow Danny, who wouldn’t say “shit” without apologizing, made the grossest jokes of any of us.

  Anyway, once we settled back, Danny said, “And she’s out of one of those high-speed shrink programs, three years to a doctorate—that place down by Portsmouth, OSU-Hillbilly, whatever they call it. So she’ll probably be either one of those that knows the book and nothing else, or one of those old ones that went through those classes ignoring the book, because she had six grandchildren so that was all she needed to know, and now she just wants to help us youths live up to our potentials.”

  There was some discussion about whether trying to make us fit the book, or trying to help us with all that fucking wisdom and experience, was more obnoxious, before Paul concluded with, “I guess we’ll all see on Monday. Except for Karl, of course, who has his magic letter from dear old Gratz, and now carries messages for him.”

  “I think most of them already know,” I said, feeling dead and sick in my stomach.

  “Yeah, we all know,” Paul said.

  “I just don’t want to go to therapy anymore,” I said.

  “But what’s your excuse? Because your mommy is crazy and your daddy is dead?”

  There was the kind of silence you would get if someone threw a dead cat onto the table.

  At least I was wide awake now. I felt like hitting Paul and somehow I thought that was what he wanted me to do, so I knew I wouldn’t. And he knew my Psycho act, so it wasn’t like I could scare him, either. So I just said, “My mom has a lot of problems. She tries but she fucks up. She’s not my excuse for anything. I didn’t go to the principal’s office with you guys because I didn’t. I don’t want to be in therapy so I’m not going to be. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m still your friend. And leave my mother fucking out of this. Remember what I said to you in the hall.”

  “I have not forgotten.”

  People looked puzzled. Maybe word hadn’t gotten around that we’d had a fight.

  I just wanted him to back the fuck off my mom.

  We were still staring at each other, and everyone else was dead quiet, when Squid raised his shoulders and let them settle. “If Karl don’t want to go to therapy, that’s cool with me. I know he’s still my friend. Hell, he’s up here falling asleep in Denny’s because he had to come and take care of a friend.”

  “Nobody asked you to.” Paul looked at me, as if it had been me talking.

  Marti was looking at me really strange; Bonny and Danny were looking down at the table like they were playing imaginary chess with each other, and it was a tough spot in the game. I didn’t want to look at Cheryl.

  “I came out tonight,” I said. “That’s all. Seemed like the right thing to do. Anytime anyone needs me, you can ask. Probably I’ll be there.”

  “You were real there this morning in Gratz’s class, weren’t you?” Paul said. “So it looks to me like your get-out-of-therapy magic-bullet letter comes at a price, hunh?”

  “Um, look,” Cheryl said, “it’s pretty late, um, anyone need a ride home?”

  “I should get home,” I said. “I’m really tired.”

  I paid for my meal, and Cheryl’s and Squid’s, and the three of us left together; everyone else would be going home in Danny’s huge old Buick Riviera.

  We drove for a while, along the river, then out of the lights of the towns and into the dark roads between the cornfields, not taking the interstate because, I guess, Cheryl wasn’t in any hurry. Squid was pretty much asleep on my shoulder, muttering now and then. “What?” Cheryl said.

  “He just said ‘Tony and Junie’ a couple times. I think he’s asleep,” I said, softly. “Considering he played a football game earlier today, and I think he had some kind of fight with his old man, and he probably bagged groceries for a couple hours before I had dinner with him at Philbin’s—I guess he’s entitled to be tired.”

  “Yeah, he played both ways, Coach always does that when they’re really getting clobbered, puts him on defense too. I don’t know why.”

  I shrugged. “Because Squid plays just as hard when there’s no hope. Also because if that big Mexican kid gets hurt in a game that doesn’t matter, nobody will care.”

  “’Cause I ask to play a lot, and other guys don’t want to, but I do,” Squid said, into my shoulder. “It’s boring on the bench.” A second later he was snoring again.

  The car rolled along quietly; at least with the money Cheryl’s dad had married, she had a nice car, not like the beaters most of my friends had, or whatever POS I’d have been driving if I’d wanted to afford a car. We slid through the dark tunnel of the willows and cottonwoods along the river road like there was nothing else in the universe but dark, and us, and the headlights; Cheryl had CKLW, “Radio Free Ohio,” on, real soft, so I couldn’t tell what the song was, but at least it was music and it wasn’t country, and that was something.

  After a while Cheryl said, “Karl, you’re still my friend. And you were right there when Paul really needed you, and he’s being bitchy. I understand how much you just want a year of things being the way they’re supposed to be. Shit, when I get home the first thing I do is make sure my grandpa is not in my sister’s bed, or she’s not curled up someplace crying. And I’m a cheerleader, and popular, and all that crap. I feel like, god, I should only be worrying about cute boys, and what to wear, and college applications.”

  “You’re probably more normal than I’ll ever get to be,” I admitted.

  “Yeah. Right.” She turned onto Lightsburg Pike. We blazed through Republican Corners at about eighty, and I wondered about Rose Carson and her couch. Had old Browning, after all his sermons about how important your friends were, gotten around to calling her? Maybe when we took her couch back, I’d help him out, and offer to go outside to holler at the goddam ghouls while he nailed old Rose on the couch to test it out.

  “You have the strangest smile, Karl.”

  “Thinking about horrible things,” I said.

  We dropped Squid off at his house, and he sort of staggered up to the porch. I think he said something like “See you” but it could have been almost anything.

  As Cheryl pulled out, she asked, “Karl, if one of us needs help . . . will you be there?”

  “I was here tonight.”

  “I know. Karl, if Gratz tears into me on Tuesday morning . . .”

  “I don’t know. Fuck, I could have stood up to him. He’d still have given me that letter, I think. Because my dad was his AA sponsor, it’s like he wants to be my dad or something anyway, and besides I wasn’t even sure I wanted that letter by the time it happened. I don’t know why I didn’t go with you guys.” Then
I sighed and it just popped out. “I’d just had a big fight with Paul, actually. That’s why I was late to class, ’cause I was in the bathroom.”

  “Crying?”

  It was like mentioning it started me off again, my face getting all soggy and runny instantly, like a paper towel settling onto a puddle. “Shit, oh, shit.”

  She took a turn away from my house.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Out to the tar pond. You need to talk and it’s nicer out there than sitting in my car in your driveway.”

  The tar pond she was talking about was a couple of miles out of town. See, Lightsburg was rich once and could’ve joined OPEC, I guess could’ve been OPEC; Gist County produced some huge amount of oil. It’s all gone now, because it was all shallow and easy to take out of the ground. And where you have oil close to the surface, you have tar ponds, big puddles of tar that rain and ground seep collects on top of. It poisons the ground for maybe two hundred yards back of the pond, so the farmer usually just throws a low berm around the tar pond to keep it from flooding into his ditches, and grows Christmas trees or firewood there.

  The tar pond we all called “the tar pond” had a broad dirt beach around it where not much grew, just a few tall, spindly, ill-looking milkweeds. It was a favorite make-out spot, and sometimes a place to smoke a little dope, and all summer long it tended to have a lot of parties at it. You could just drive right up the farm road and over the berm, and park under the big clump of cottonwoods and pine trees, right by the tar pond itself.

  It was cold, and damp, and the moonlight shining on the rainbow oil slicks on the black water made it colder still. Even with her cheerleader jacket, Cheryl shivered and pressed against me. We had walked maybe a third of the way around the little quarter-acre pond, kicking beer bottles out of our way, watching the stars jiggle and dance in the drafty wet air around the pond.

  Finally she said, “Karl, you and me and Squid . . . we’re the ones everyone always counts on, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.” The stars really twinkled out here, like tumbling snowflakes sharp as steel between the branches and treetops. “Cheryl, I don’t really trust myself, anymore, either.”

  “So you’re saying we can’t count on you?” She must be tired, too, and worried.

  “Remember when Dennis died?”

  Paul’s big brother had been a big social and stuff in high school, the kid his father had wanted to have, a popular-guy athlete that Mr. Knauss was glad to have sitting next to him in the reelection brochure picture, not like his faggot son or his whore-baby daughter, as I’d heard him describe Kimmie more than once. Dennis was the only kid Mr. Knauss didn’t consider a “dud.”

  Dennis had shot himself during his freshman year of college, just three weeks after getting there. No note. No one knew why.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You and me drove all over hell with Paul while he cried, and then after he fell asleep, you and me sat up all night on the hood of this car, watching waves on Lake Erie. You mean, like, we share that, and we can trust each other?”

  “I just happened to think of it,” I admitted. “I don’t know that I really mean anything. Maybe just thinking about the tales the Madmen never tell, or the way that we only tell the stories about things that worked out okay.”

  “I’m worried about you,” she said, and took my arm, and rested her head with all that soft pretty hair against my shoulder. I could feel a boner stirring and I didn’t want to freak her out, I was one of her very few straight guy friends who hadn’t actually tried to fuck her. She was freaked about sex after the things her grandfather—and pretty much every boyfriend—had done to her.

  So of course she had to turn and hold me. I kind of kept my ass back and didn’t quite touch her down below, but it was close enough I could feel her warmth. “You’re really the best, Karl, you know that. I’m worried about what’s going to become of you. You put so much into taking care of everyone.”

  She rubbed the back of my neck, and her hair brushed my cheek. I didn’t know what to say or think. After a bit she took my hand and we walked back to her car.

  Just as we got close, someone loudly said “Shit!” and the lights came on in a car that had pulled up next to ours. I saw a bunch of thrashing around in the front seat and then they pulled out and zoomed away.

  Cheryl started to laugh. “Oh, Christ.”

  “Did you see who it was?”

  “Yeah, Stacy Hobbins. Her car, anyway, and that looked like a lot of blonde hair, so that’s who I assume it was. She’s been getting closer and closer to putting out for Steve for like two months. She has romantic notions, and she’s not letting him into the cookie jar till everything is just perfect. I’m afraid we just spoiled it for her, again, like something always does. She’s always complaining that it gets to be just the perfect moment and then something goes wrong. So she’ll be pissed at me all next week. And she’ll probably try to get you into a fight with Bret.”

  “I’ll tell him he can have you.”

  “Don’t you dare. I don’t want him to have me. Tell him you’re all mine and you’ll slam his nuts in a Bible if he ever looks at me again.”

  “Uh, I guess you don’t like him anymore?”

  “Two dates with him was three too many. He’s such a good Christian boy. Says grace before he starts trying to feel me up, wants it to be my fault that he’s horny. Danny says he’s a sneaky bastard too.”

  “Then why’d you go out with him in the first place?”

  “I tend to think it’s a compliment when a guy asks me out, and have a hard time saying no unless he’s an actual head case. You should keep that in mind in case you ever get desperate for a date.”

  I was so wiped out I didn’t even notice that that might be a hint. I half-fell into her passenger seat, and we didn’t say much on the five-minute drive back to my house.

  When we got there, all the lights were on. The lawn chair, and Mom’s suitcase were still on the porch, but Mom wasn’t. “Shit,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Mom was taking off with a guy for the weekend. That’s her suitcase. That means she got stood up. There’s gonna be a shitstorm waiting inside, one way or another.” I reached for the door handle, feeling a thousand years old.

  “Hey,” Cheryl said.

  “What?”

  “Turn this way.” I did and she hugged me real long and close. It made me feel all warm and supported and like my dick was going to explode, but at least at this angle I didn’t have to worry about Cheryl noticing.

  She kissed my cheek. “I hope you’re my friend, because I can’t help being yours. ’Night, Karl. Get some sleep, as soon as you can.”

  On the porch, Mom’s suitcase sat next to the lawn chair, surrounded by dozens of crushed-out cigarette butts. I was just thinking about what this might mean as Cheryl’s car pulled away behind me.

  When I went inside, Mom was just lying there, on the couch, hugging herself, still in the nice outfit she’d picked for going up to Put-in-Bay. The coffee table and floor around the couch had maybe ten or so empty beer bottles scattered around, and there was a very full ashtray in the middle of the coffee table as well. There were cats packed all around her like they were trying to keep her warm; they always seem to know when a person feels like crap and is going to hold still long enough to be a good place to nap.

  Mom looked up, pushed the thick bright-yellow hair out of her face, and reached for me with both arms. “Got a hug for your mom, Tiger?”

  “Sure, always.” Seemed to be my night for hugs. I sat down next to her, on the edge of the couch, and she shrugged off all those cats and curled around me like a python, wrapping her arms around my neck and pressing her face into my chest, her body under my arm, her legs pushing against my back. She hung on for a while; every time she’d go to talk, she’d start to sob, and stop and rub her face around on my chest again.

  Finally, her voice muffled by my shirt, her lips moving against my chest, she whispered, “Tiger
, I sat out on the porch till way, way, way after dark. I smoked all the cigarettes I had. I didn’t have a phone number for Bill or anything, couldn’t call to see what was going on. After a while it was really cold out there, and it was too dark for anyone to see me, so I just let go and cried, and cried, and cried. Isn’t that silly, Tiger?”

  “I don’t think so, Mom, not at all. You were hurt.”

  “I mean, isn’t it silly for your mom to be crying to you over some boy? It’s supposed to be the other way round, isn’t it?”

  “At least there’s someone for you to cry to,” I said, feeling practical and tired. “And anyway, you’d be even more upset if I was crying over some boy.” That made me think of Paul, which I didn’t want to do. “So did anything else happen? Have you just been crying here the whole time?”

  “Unh-hunh. No Bill. You can hear the phone ring all over the yard, I would have heard him if he’d called.” She was crying harder, and I squirmed a little to get more comfortable.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. You were hoping—”

  “I was so full of hope. And besides I told all my friends about this and now they’re going to ask how it went when I see them on Monday and I don’t know what I’ll tell them.” She sobbed again, and clung tighter to me. “I hate myself, Karl. I hate myself. I don’t know why I even thought a nice man would want to spend time with me.”

  “He’s not looking like such a nice man to me right now.” I was trying not to fall asleep.

  “So finally,” she said, “I came inside to wait, and got into some beer from the fridge, and have been lying here, crying and drinking ever since, with just the kitties for company. I tried turning on the TV now and then, but I was afraid that with it on, I might not hear the phone. Besides all the programs that were on tonight were sad, people dying of diseases or getting away with crimes or things like that, or those mean, mean hateful comedies. And I can’t watch the news, Tiger, you know me, I hate news, news is bullshit anyway. Thank you for coming home.”