Tales of the Madman Underground

by John Barnes

  “You’re welcome, Mom,” I said. The world was kind of spinning and I really wanted to get to bed.

  When she finally eased up her grip, I got up and brought in her suitcase, and started to steer her toward the shower. She started to complain that I was “doing all these Me-Big-Man-Fix-It Things, instead of listening to me, Tiger, that’s what a woman wants, you need to just listen, I need you to just listen.”

  “You need a shower and bed. You’ll feel better.”

  “You sound so adult-y. My little man. All grown up and wants me to get my bath and put my jammies on.”

  Eventually she disappeared into the bathroom with her robe and towel, and the water started to run, and I could hear her in there singing that “C’mon, People Now Smile on Your Brother” song, in her sharp head voice. She did that when she was starting to feel better, usually, so it was a good sign.

  I went upstairs to start getting ready for bed, myself. The door to my room was standing open, but my hiding places weren’t disturbed. There was a pile of catshit right in the center of my bed, and one throw rug piss-soaked, which I’d have to wash before I could go to bed.

  I wished I knew which cat it was that liked to shit on the bed. Grave Thirty-four in Cat Arlington was waiting.

  Hairball was rubbing up against my leg, and I looked down at him and said, “Listen, four cans of tuna, all for you. Just point him out to me, and don’t ever mention our conversation, how’s the deal sound?”

  Unfortunately the purring probably didn’t mean “yes.”

  I lugged my bedding down the stairs. Mom was still in the shower. Groggy as I was, I did one more stupid thing—there’s always enough time and energy for that. I forgot to change the settings on the washer to cold.

  Mom came out of the shower complaining that the water had started to get cold. Between her long shower and washing my bedclothes, I had used up all the hot water. I took a freezing cold shower—it was better than putting a body cruddy from a day’s work into my clean sheets—and then slept in two old sweatshirts on my bare bed, dozing and looking at Dad’s notes, until I heard the dryer stop at about three A.M. Between being actually clean and warm, and what the day had been like, I was asleep in an instant.

  PART FOUR

  (Saturday, September 8, 1973)

  19

  Love, Waffles, Capitalism, Scooby-Doo, and a Grave in the Rain

  I SAT UPRIGHT in bed like I’d had an electric shock, and sent poor old Hairball tumbling ass over teakettle. The slant of light in the room looked wrong. I grabbed my alarm clock. It wasn’t set; I thought I had but I must not have.

  Ten thirty. Holy fucking shit. I should already be at my second job of the day.

  I was breathing like I’d run six miles, rolling over, yanking on my pants, rehearsing in my mind all the apologies I would have to make to all the nice old ladies because I had missed one, would be late for the next, would have to make it up and that might mean the other two—

  As I yanked my pants up, I heard something, realized I’d been hearing it for a while, and pulled open the curtains of my bedroom window.

  It was raining, steady and heavy, a thick curtain of silvery water. MacReady Avenue was flooded three inches deep up at the corner with Grant Street. It must have been doing this for hours.

  The sky rumbled low and heavy; brief pale glows of lightning washed everything.

  I was saved. I didn’t deserve it at all, but I was saved.

  I put on a T-shirt and went down to the phone by the front door, and started calling. Even if it cleared up later, the ground would be much too soggy and wet for any of the jobs I had scheduled—turning a compost heap, changing over a bed and replanting it, turning a summer bed under, planting three fruit trees. I called them all up, and even Mrs. Planetari, the job I had missed, seemed surprised, since it was so obvious that I wouldn’t be doing any of the work today.

  I promised I’d find time to get the fall planting done during the next week, since the flowers and trees were already purchased and needed to get into the ground, and turn the beds and the compost heaps next Saturday. Maybe I could throw Squid and Tony some of the work.

  My customers all seemed to think it was noble that I didn’t work Sundays. The real reason was because I needed that time to work around the house and get some rest. Dad had kind of made me promise to do that for myself—not for God.

  “Karl?” I hung up the phone as I turned; Mom was leaning out of the kitchen. She was wearing her ratty old pink bathrobe and slippers, which she usually only wore in the winter when it got really cold and windy and our poor old furnace couldn’t keep up. She grinned through her mop of gold-blonde hair. “Do I look fucking motherly, or what, Tiger?”

  “I kind of like it.”

  “You would, horrible boy. Look, I got up early and had a real attack of maternalism, and I cleaned the kitchen. And then I realized it was raining, so I went in and turned off your alarm, and let you get some sleep.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “It was, wasn’t it? Sometimes I’m so motherly I impress myself. Anyway, then I thought I’d like a clean kitchen, and now that I have the pleasure of my son’s company, I want to do something so motherly it will make us both puke, and make waffles.”

  Back when I was a little kid, before all the bad stuff started, waffles had been my favorite. For the last couple of years I’d had them now and then at Philbin’s or Pongo’s, and at home on my birthday and Christmas Day, maybe.

  Next thing I knew she was being all corny and stuff, fixing Belgian waffles. I grabbed an umbrella and pulled on rubbers over my sneakers, and ran up Grant Street to Lawsons to pick up Smucker’s Strawberry Syrup and Reddi-wip, so we had the works; I was soaked and freezing when I got back, but there was time for a fast hot shower before Mom finished the last of the first batch.

  By then the rain had picked up and gotten serious about soaking the ground. It was one of those nice steady gully-washers that makes everything grow like crazy; I figured I’d get some weeding work next weekend, too, and maybe a couple yards to cut, plenty of work for me, Squid, and Tony.

  We sat in the living room and ate those waffles—they were great, really, as good as they should be—and watched Scooby-Doo. Now and then a cat would act interested in Reddi-wip but Mom had leaned the broom up against the back of the couch and most of them were afraid of it, because it was her weapon of choice whenever she went batshit-crazy on them. Hairball sat next to my feet and looked at me mournfully, but knew me too well to make a move on my food.

  Mom cracked me up with some of her work gossip, and I told her about school and my friends, and we both skipped everything important: I didn’t say a thing about Paul, and she didn’t bring up Wonderful Bill, and we had a great old time there.

  She sighed, carried her plate out to the kitchen, and said, “Fire it up again? If you have one more waffle, I’m going to succumb to peer pressure and have another myself.”

  “Come on, kid, the first one’s free, and you don’t want to be chicken, and all the kids are doing it,” I said.

  “Eaah! Can’t hold out. Okay, two more waffles starting.”

  I didn’t figure this would be the long-awaited Saturday morning when Velma at last gave in to her obvious lust and jumped Daphne, so I left the TV on to entertain the cats, and went out to keep Mom company.

  She was leaning against the counter, looking semi-pensive. I let her have whatever thoughts, and just enjoyed feeling like I had my mom back. I knew it wouldn’t last, but a couple hours of total sanity, and a day off from work, was such a blessing I could’ve shit my pants.

  After a while she checked the waffle iron, and apparently didn’t see what she wanted to see yet, so she shrugged and leaned back up against the counter, and said, “There seems to be some kind of law about guys. The more regular-guy and John-Wayney straight- shootin’ square-dealers they are, the more they turn out to be ucky ucky sons of bitches you can’t trust.”

  “I’m sorry that this one
didn’t treat you better, Mom,” I said, because I wanted her to keep talking, since for once it wasn’t about drugs, UFOs, Nixon, or what was wrong with my father. “I know you liked this one.”

  “No he didn’t, and yes I did. He—I don’t know, Tiger, do you really want my love life with your waffles?”

  “Gotta be more interesting than Scooby-Doo, Mom.”

  “Well, at least my love life is more interesting than something.” She checked the waffle iron again, but I guess a watched waffle never browns. “Anyway, it’s just. It’s just. Um.” She sighed. “Okay, drop the big one on the boy right now, Beth. All right, I really did love Doug. Really. A lot.” She brushed her hair back over her ears. “But you know, if he hadn’t gotten sick, we’d probably be divorced by now, and I don’t know if I’d be like I am, but I wouldn’t be like I was. And I guess you and Doug would be living together as two swinging bachelors, hunh?”

  That made me laugh like a crazy bastard. “Right, I’d be bringing home hippie chicks for him to hustle.”

  She opened the waffle iron up and dumped out two perfect waffles. “How do you know when they’re ready?” I asked.

  She grinned. “Ancient secret, Tiger Sweetie. You get married very young. You get a waffle iron as a wedding present and you have a husband that you think the sun rises on, and very shortly after a little boy that you think it rises and sets on, and they both love waffles. Then you make about ten thousand burned waffles—and about ten thousand half-raw ones—while your husband gamely eats them, and your little boy doesn’t care. Eventually you know what a goopity-gooey uncooked waffle looks like, and what a burned one looks like, and you stand by the waffle iron and when it’s been a little bit past raw, but before it’s burned, you pop it out. You just don’t remember all the crunchy carbon and half-raw batter I put on your plate when you were little. It’s like all the assassinations, everything looks fine as soon as none of the witnesses are talking.”

  “I wish I remembered those times better.”

  “I wish you did too. They were good times. The waffles got better later, but the times were the best they ever were.”

  She checked to see if I was smiling, so I did, and she sort of smirked.

  We plated up the two round, thick waffles—waffle on an oven-warmed plate, then strawberry syrup, then Reddi-wip, the way Dad always said was right, because that way the syrup didn’t defluff the Reddi-wip, and he claimed the Reddi-wip insulated the waffle and syrup and kept it all hot. He also said we had to take that first bite within half a minute of doctoring the waffle, to get the full effect.

  The Road Runner theme came from the next room, so by common consent, we grabbed our plates and forks, I popped the Reddi-wip can back into the fridge. The door triggered the usual cat stampede, so that I felt like I was wading to the living room upstream through a river of cats.

  Nonetheless, we were on the sofa and digging into the waffles well within the time limit. As Wile E. Coyote was setting up his first trap, something with an Acme Giant Hammer, Mom said, “See, the world played kind of a dirty trick on me, Tiger. Maybe on every woman my age. When I was ten, the last winter of World War Two, me and all my friends used to say all we really wanted was the five Bs, in the right order—bra, boyfriend, bridal shower, bungalow, baby.

  “And then the next spring and summer, all these gorgeous boys—well, they looked like men to me—came home in uniforms, and it just seemed to me like, wow, the best hunting there will ever be, and I barely have boobs yet. So I hurried up, if you see what I mean. By the time I was twelve I was the boy-craziest little flirt you’ve ever seen, and by the time I graduated, so many boys wanted in my pants so bad that I was a legend, an absolute fucking legend.

  “So there I was hopping the counter for Philbin, slinging burgers for the lunch crowd just like you did all summer, and in came this guy who’d stayed in the service a little longer, still had those hard young muscles even though he was a bit older. And he was the bookkeeper and sold jobs for a contractor here in town, and the day that he bought out the guy he worked for, he took me over to Vinville for dinner, and then back here to see The Best Years of Our Lives at the Oxford, and then since I wasn’t old enough to get into a bar, he drove us down to that beach along the Little Turtle River, and we drank beer and talked. At first I thought it was so weird, Doug kept going on about how much work he had lined up, and being able to afford a house, and what he had in the bank, until I suddenly realized he was proving he had enough to marry me. I realized that when he pulled out the engagement ring, and got down on his silly knees.” She leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Funny the things waffles bring to mind. Anyway, a deputy found us sleeping in the car at ten the next morning, and made me prove my age, and we went home hungover and laughing. Next thing I knew, here we all were, and he was running for mayor.”

  “I never heard that version of it before.”

  “I think it embarrassed Doug. I always told him it was a shame I was too hungover for practical jokes, or I’d have hidden my I.D. and told the deputy he’d kidnapped me from a convent school.” She sighed. “Anyway, that was the good part of the story. After that it was one long dirty trick. I was a real good wife to him, Tiger, you know that.”

  “He always said so.”

  “Well, except when he was ranting and screaming at me like a nut, but that came later. But by then I guess I was doing a lot of the screaming too. Was it really scary for you, Tiger?”

  On the screen, Wile E. Coyote looked down, saw there was nothing under him, and waved bye-bye. “Sometimes,” I said. “When you sounded, I don’t know, like you were going to hurt each other. Most of the time it just made me really sad.”

  “You loved us both, didn’t you? And now all that seems so weird to me because Doug and I were just so different. He was very Earth, you know, and I’m completely Water, and—”

  “I guess that makes me Mud.”

  “Don’t joke about important things, Karl, I don’t talk about them very often.”

  We watched the TV for a while longer, and then I said, “I’m sorry if I sounded like I was making fun of you.” I took my last bite of waffle and waited. A bunch of kids on the screen were singing and dancing about chocolate milk. “Those were great waffles.”

  I got up and carried the plates out to the kitchen. There were so few dirty dishes that it seemed like a good idea just to do a fast wash-rinse-stack.

  “Sweetie, you don’t have to do that.” Mom was posing in the doorway with one hand up on the doorframe and the other arm wrapped over her head, holding a cigarette just above her ear. I was pretty sure I’d seen that pose in an ad someplace.

  “You seemed pretty happy with the kitchen being clean, thought I’d give you another few hours of it.” I slipped the waffle iron into the soapy water and scoured hard with the net brush. “Besides, this is my sneaky way to make waffles happen again.”

  She hugged me from behind. “Well, all right, you always did love your waffles. And your friends and your parents . . . you’re a good kid, Tiger Sweetie. I know I don’t always let you know that, but you are.”

  She was really in good-mother mode this morning. It never lasted but it was always kind of nice, like getting a short visit from the mother I remembered, although it always ripped out my heart.

  Her hug, right now, still felt good.

  I moved the waffle iron onto the counter, upside down on top of a dish towel, to drip dry. It was like neither of us knew what to say next, or what the other one was going to say. That was kind of new and weird. “So,” she said, “since you can’t be a slave of capitalism today, do you have time to catch the second cartoon on Road Runner?”

  “I do,” I said. I poured us both some fresh coffee from the percolator, and we went back to the living room. It was something with Tweety Bird we’d seen ten thousand times before.

  When the commercial started promoting a little plastic guy that threw stuff, Mom said, “My head is full of so much programming from when I was a g
irl. Girls get to be themselves, but as soon as you grow boobs, bam, you’re not yourself ever again. At least not till you’re an old lady. I’m hoping to be one of those really cool old ladies that no one can ever shut up that just tells everyone what she thinks and doesn’t let men decide for her whether it makes sense or not.” She grinned at me. “Don’t say, ‘You’re pretty far along already,’ or you’re dead, Tiger. But I have to admit, sometimes I’m just being free and myself and enjoying the day, and sometimes I do like upsetting all the old poops in suits.” She sighed. “And sometimes I just wish some big strong guy would ride in on a white horse and rescue me.”

  “Would the horse get along with all the cats?”

  “Good question.” She leaned and stretched. “I feel so good and so mellow this morning. If I could just always not care as much as I don’t care right now, everything would be okay. But I’ve spent so much time caring about stuff that doesn’t matter. First about getting a man, and then about being a good wife and mommy, and then about being groovy and not missing out on the Revolution. Lately I worry a lot about whether I’m still a fox or turning into an old stove, and whether any nice man will ever like me, and whether Neil is ever going to act like a real boyfriend.”

  I wouldn’t’ve wasted any of my wondering-energy wondering whether Neil would ever act like a real mammal, myself, but it didn’t seem like a good time to say that.

  “And it’s times like that I really miss Doug. He was always so certain and so serious about everything and he was a mean old fascist and he was way too hard on you and made you do all that manly-manly stuff, but at least I knew who I was and where I was.”

  “I like doing all that manly stuff,” I said. “I like making things and fixing things and earning money, and if I had time I’d like to play sports. It’s just the way I am.”