by John Barnes
“It’s the way you think you are because you’ve been brainwashed and programmed and stuffed all full of angry energy by all these men in power. This is what so many men do to themselves. You think it’s just the way you are but you’re really just trying to prove you’re male. Why don’t you get out a little more, have some fun, maybe go out with somebody like that cheerleader girl again, or Cheryl with the big boobs, or that Darla, she’s pretty sexy. Men are always doing all these things to be men, and the only thing that can really make a man a man is a woman. That’s what Neil always says.”
“And Neil is the authority on being a man?”
“A woman knows, Karl, a woman is the only one who knows. He’s a lot more of a man than your father ever was. Being a man is about being what a woman really wants and needs.”
The one time I’d tried putting a real lock on my door, to keep out the beautiful free-spirited kitties, who I should be more like instead of always worrying about ucky ucky money, Neil had gone up, while I was at McDonald’s, and kicked the whole goddam door down, and then he and Mom had looked hard and found three of my cans. Luckily one of them I had just started and it didn’t have much in it. They had rushed off to a dealer and then the bar.
They were planning to go shopping and get a wedding dress and rings and a tux and so forth, too, but they’d drunk and smoked too much of my money before the stores opened the next day, and anyway it wasn’t enough, it just looked like a lot to them. It took me a week to put my room back together, and of course I wasn’t going to see the money again.
But the thing that pissed me off the most was that if Neil wanted to break into my room, all he had to do was take two little screws out of the hasp; he’d kicked down the door because he was too dumb to figure out how to use a screwdriver. Looked to me like I’d never be dumb enough to be a real man.
I thought about saying a lot of things, but I didn’t say them; maybe I wanted to keep the feeling of the waffles, and her talking like her old self, in my head for just a little longer. Maybe I was hoping she’d apologize like she sometimes did, when she said things that really hurt.
What happened instead was that she went to the kitchen for more coffee, and screamed. I ran out to see what was the matter and she was staring out the window over the sink, tears pouring down her face. I looked and saw something that looked like a bit of shredded blue rug out in the yard; then I realized it was blue-gray, and that it was Ocean, one of her prettiest cats.
She was whimpering. “He’s all in pieces. Oh, Karl. Oh, Karl. Oh, poor Ocean.”
“Oh, crap,” I said, and started pulling my rubbers on again.
It would have made sense to leave Ocean out there, of course, and bury him once the rain let up. He wasn’t going to be bothered. Or it might have made a certain amount of sense to go out, pick him up in a garbage bag, and bring him in to lie in state before going out to Cat Arlington. But Mom was wailing, and I thought I’d better get him out of sight as soon as possible, so I pulled on an old Boy Scout poncho I had, zipped up the rain hood, and went out there.
Most of the blood had washed away but there was no question, this was another cat pretty much ripped in half by that old coon, or maybe his twin brother. At a guess, he’d probably figured out that this backyard was a reliable source of fresh cat, and acquired a taste for it—raccoons’ll do that, they’ll eat anything, but if there’s something reliable, they’ll get to like it. Ocean had been pretty small and didn’t stand a chance.
I’d have to tell Wilson to hurry up about letting his buddies in the Coon Hunters’ Club know about our local cat-killer. It was one thing when he was getting one or two a year, but this was the second one this week and the fourth since May; he was rapidly overtaking cars as a leading cause of death.
It was messy in the rain and mud, but it didn’t take long; Ocean went into the fourth row, fourth grave, right next to Sunflower, and I tamped down the plug, put the sod over him, and figured the headstone could wait till it was dry enough for me to write on it easily.
Ocean had been pretty nice, actually. He’d been the one on Mom’s lap when I’d come home and she’d been crying over Wonderful Bill.
I went inside and said, “I’m sorry.”
She was still wiping her face, and I guess “I’m sorry” was the wrong thing to say, because she went into her bedroom and turned up Let It Bleed real loud on the stereo. Pretty soon the mingled smells of wet rug and litter pan were joined by pot smoke.
It kept raining, and it was pretty cold out, so we had all the windows closed, and that crappy old gravity furnace turned on. The smell was bad enough for me to notice, and there were drafts everywhere because the storm windows weren’t up yet. I grabbed a blanket and wrapped up in it in the couch to do the rest of my homework. After a while I was pretty much buried in cats; I wondered if they knew what had happened to Sunflower and Ocean, and were afraid, or maybe they were just cold and wanted company. Hairball got crawling-under-the-blanket privileges and sat in my crossed legs, purring so loud I could feel him through my bones.
After my homework, I read way ahead in Huckleberry Finn. I was in some danger of finishing it over the weekend. Now that Huck and Jim were on the river together, though, I could sure as hell see why Gratz kept telling people not to read it as happy hippies on a raft, because the idea of being out there like that, just me and a friend, taking care of ourselves—well, I about cried, come to admit it, when I realized they were bound to get caught.
No way you could do that in Ohio, though, at least not in Gist County. You could walk a lot faster than any of our rivers ran, and most of them were like the Little Turtle—six inches of water on top of four feet of mud. I had kind of a silly daydream about floating away with all the Madmen, it would have had to be a fucker of a big raft of course, and started laughing when I imagined that we’d come down by the gay part of the river, where steamboats stopped to pick up teenage boys turning tricks, and there would be Paul with his shirt open, in hip waders and a lot of gold chains.
“Good book?” Mom asked.
“The best,” I said, and held it up for her to see.
“Gratz just makes you read that one so he can intimidate all the black children, you know, because it has ‘nig ger’ on every page. What were you laughing at?”
“I was thinking about whether I would rather own a plantation,” I said, “so I could spend my days whipping slaves, or a steamboat, so I could run down rafts full of hippies.”
She shot me the finger and went out to the kitchen; in a few minutes she passed back into her bedroom with a pile of sandwiches and a couple of cans of beer. When I went out to grab my own lunch, later, I saw she’d squirted ketchup all over the wall and the counter, and figured she was back to being weird and angry. I cleaned it up, didn’t say anything, and warmed up some tomato soup. After a while she came out and started doing her UFO and astrology calculations, spreading books and papers all over the dining room table. She didn’t even say hi.
It was down to drizzle, and I had my AA meeting, so while Mom was engrossed, I put on my work boots, grabbed up my umbrella, and headed out to my meeting.
I kept my going to meetings semisecret from Mom—she knew I didn’t accept beer and wine from her anymore, and she knew I had some friends who had been Dad’s AA friends, because they’d say hi to me on the street, but she didn’t officially admit that she knew that I was spending time with the ucky ucky mean judgmental people who just want to tell everyone else what to do and never let anybody have any fun.
Besides, I didn’t really betray her—I had quit going to Alateen. Squid and Danny were always on me to go again, like I had for a while, but they expect you to talk about your parents’ drinking. I was going to be sober and all that but I wasn’t going to get other people involved with being sober. Kind of like the guys that would smoke but not deal. That was my ethical position and I was sticking to it like a coat of paint.
As I stepped off the porch, there, coming up the walk, was a guy who
just had to be Wonderful Bill, holding an umbrella in one hand. In the other he held a bundle of so many roses that I figured maybe Mom had won the Kentucky Derby. He had on a Greek fisherman’s cap, which I think the Greek government was exporting as fast as they could, trying to get them out of Greece because they made all their fishermen look stupid. His corduroy jacket (with elbow patches and big lapels) matched his corduroy pants (with big cuffs). He had hair the color of Saturday night bathwater in a big family, all curly and fro’d up to hide its thinness, a big droopy mustache, and huge puppy dog eyes. He looked like an English professor that wanted to be a folksinger, which is to say, a dork who wanted to be a bigger dork.
On the bright side, he had roses, not a bottle. Besides, the last few Wonderfuls before Bill had looked fresh out of jail.
I kind of sauntered, very big and planting my feet firmly, right up the middle of the walk, forcing him to get out of my way and dip his chukka boots in the mud. As I passed him, I said, “Mom’s suitcase is still packed,” because it was, and he called “Still?” after me, but I was on my way.
“Still?” Horseshit. Wonderful Bill was a big fat pure-grade lies-just-to-stay-in-practice phony, and if it hadn’t been my mother involved, I’d have thought it was pretty funny. He looked like all three of the male teachers at my school that were trying to be the cool teacher, and like the male librarian that was always hitting on the high school girls, except Wonderful Bill was probably older than my mom. Not only a clown—a clown trying to look like a younger clown, and not succeeding.
Strike one, fool.
And somehow he just happened to be carrying like six tons of roses, but he was going to pretend there was some mix-up between what night he was supposed to pick Mom up—like you could get confused about something like that, when you talked to her that morning, and somehow just happen to have a bunch of apology-stuff with you?
Strike two, bare-faced liar.
Either he didn’t even care enough to make it convincing, or he was too dumb to realize it wasn’t.
Sometime real soon I’d be seeing strike three, that magic moment when Mom had had enough of this one—from the looks of Wonderful Bill, it wouldn’t take long.
I could have stuck around to hurry the process up a bit, I guess, but I had a meeting to get to.
20
You Can’t Throw Away a Great Deal Like That
NOW THAT THE rain was down to nasty spitting drizzle, and I had my good boots and umbrella, it was even kind of nice out here, with some summer warmth still in the air. The gray, flat land stretched to the horizon, mirrored by low overhead nimbus, like I was walking between two endless gray planes. In the dimness, the streetlights came on, and most drivers turned on headlights. On the soft coat of water that blanketed everything, the bright reflections softened and smeared poor old workaday Lightsburg into a painting of a quaint small midwestern town, like what might hang on the wall of some rich guy who grew up somewhere else.
If you squinted real hard and didn’t let yourself look at the power plant stack to the right, or the freeway ramp you could just see to the left, then St. Iggy’s almost looked like one of those French impressionist pictures, except for the billboard advertising the Men’s Fellowship pancake supper.
As I got closer the resemblance to anything artistic faded fast. My AA meeting was in the basement of St. Iggy’s. I wasn’t going every day like I had been in June, but I made it to at least one a week, and sometimes I’d get to two or three. I secretly felt that everyone else had a cooler story than I did; they’d all done something really wild and gross while drunk, or gotten really sick, or something.
Me, I’d just pitched that bottle in the Dumpster after Mom’s unpleasant birthday, and skipped the whole “so I crawled through my own puke in the gutter” story. So I liked other people’s stories a lot—it was one of the best parts—but I hardly ever told mine.
St. Iggy’s was pretty much the place for AA meetings, that or private homes, because the Catholics didn’t have anything against smoking or coffee, and AA meetings were generally held in a blue cloud with everyone drinking a gallon of coffee. Dick always said it just showed that we were all addicts, and all we’d done was change what we were addicted to.
He and I sat together, directly opposite Norm, who was leading this meeting, a local auto sales guy that I didn’t know very well. Besides us there were seven other people, nobody I hadn’t seen before, and only two with good stories: Kim, a college girl who sometimes told about getting drunk and losing track of who was fucking her; and Don, a real old bum who had stories about being a hobo and his buddy getting killed on the tracks.
I knew it was real wrong and everything for me to enjoy hearing those stories, but I always did anyway.
So we sat there in the cloud of smoke—Dick and me were the only people not smoking—and everyone had a foam cup of hot coffee, and nobody talked.
After we had all refilled, Norm said, “Well, I guess we’re in reruns, but we ought to hear some testimony. Dick, would you mind telling us your story again?”
He got up and did the “I’m Dick and I’m an alcoholic” business you start off with, and then laid it out. Fifteen years ago, over in Joffrey, Indiana, he’d drunk himself out of a good job and a family, and now he had a couple kids who were almost grown and hated him and would never speak to him, and he cooked at Philbin’s, and he wished he had a do-over on life.
He went over how he had drunk and gambled the rent and the grocery money away, and passed out on a porch three doors from his own, and drove the car through a closed garage door, and so on. That was kind of lively.
He finished up a little teary-eyed because he was realizing next month would be his youngest daughter’s eighteenth birthday. She’d refused to see him in his visitation time for the past three years.
Then we heard Dorothy’s story about her little boy getting burned on the iron while she was passed out, and Herb’s about having driven his car into pretty much every ditch and tree in Gist County at one time or another, and Norm said he thought that would be enough, and reminded me it was my turn to lead next Saturday, and we prayed. On the way out, Dick asked me if I’d like to go to Pongo’s and have one of those general-purpose sponsor conversations.
I said sure, because Dick always bought—that guy was determined to feed me—and it beat the shit out of going home and being introduced to Wonderful Bill officially, since by now Mom had probably found a way to believe every lie he’d told her, and they’d be in the bedroom, where she would be forgiving him. While she was forgiving a guy, she usually moaned and yelled things that made me feel a little sick, loud enough so I think sometimes the neighbors heard.
I knew it was healthy and normal and she was an adult and all. She told me that all the time. But I just really didn’t like listening to it, if I could help it.
So I headed off to Pongo’s with Dick—walking, neither of us had a car—and on the way we talked about the fall coming on fast now, a good time of year, and that in a couple weeks Philbin’s would start opening at five A.M. every morning, for the hunting and the harvesting seasons, because hunters and combine crew wanted to get fed by six. Dick said, “That’s why I like to feed teenage boys, to stay in practice for fall. I wish hunting and combining went on for about six months. I get tired, and it’s hard to keep up, but it’s extra hours, and I think it’s what keeps Philbin from going broke every year. I’d hate to think about having some other boss; I may not make much but he treats me pretty good.”
“He’s one of the best bosses I’ve ever had.” I told Dick about how the postmovie thing had gone the night before, since he hadn’t been there. We chewed over that together some, and concluded that if the Ox could stay open, it would sure help Philbin’s, which had to be good for us.
Now the sun was out and it was late afternoon. The whole town seemed like it had been washed, all that white paint and red brick gleaming like in a movie, and the air was extra-crisp and clean, like fall was really coming. You’re sup
posed to tell your sponsor everything, but I wouldn’t have told Dick about Paul or any of the stuff that had happened last night, and especially not the whole big fucking mess with Gratz. That was Madman-only.
Pongo’s was deserted. We sat at the counter where we could goof with Darla, who liked to joke with Dick better than she did most customers.
Mostly I just told him about being tired and not getting enough sleep, and Dick told me I should get more sleep. I told him I knew that.
After making sure there was nothing big, new, or bad, Dick said, “Well, believe it or not, I have a date. Nice lady from over in Rossford is going to drive all the way down here to look me over and decide whether we ought to get to know each other—I answered her personal ad. I guess we’re having dinner at Pietro’s because I already ate here today, and if I ever take a date to Philbin’s, Karl, I want you to just kill me, right there and right then; make sure you wipe the cleaver for fingerprints and don’t forget to forge my handwriting on the suicide note.”
“Good luck,” I said. “Is she nice?”
“Well, based on three phone calls and five letters, yeah. Now I have to hope I’m nice.” He turned to Michelson, who was running his own cash register, and said, “How much to buy both these nice kids a dessert and give the attractive one enough time off so they can hang out for a while?”
Michelson laughed and said, “Great idea, Dick, five’ll do it—I won’t take a dime more,” and they set it up. With a friendly swat on my shoulder, Dick was on his way.
Darla and me took a booth way over in the corner, overlooking West Lock Creek. I filled her in about the Gratz assignment and added, “I’d never read it before, but you know, if he was going to Lightsburg High, Huck Finn would be a Madman like us—crazy dangerous father and all. If we weren’t reading it with Gratz, it might even be an okay book.”
“Yeah, I know, I read it a couple years ago. Trouble with Gratz is, even when he’s right I want to slap him.” She dug into her purse, found a cigarette, and lit up. I fought off the vision of a wrinkled, gray Darla coughing up goop-wads and gasping out, “Goddam doctors.”