by John Barnes
Bill stepped back and looked at the finished storm; it was really good as new now. “Well,” he said, “we’re delaying because we’re scared to death you’ll say no. But we have to tell you sooner or later. So here it is: when I got here after the eleven o’clock meeting, your mother had already had most of a six-pack from the fridge and was working the phone pretty hard to line up her evening. She’s definitely back to being buddies with Rose Nielsen, which is not necessarily a good thing, as you know. It bothered me to find this going on, and it bothered me a lot more that she kept demanding that I come along on the binge she was planning with her buddies, but what really upset me was that she wanted me to help look for one of your stashes of money, which she told me all about.” He took the cigar out of his mouth, tapped ash onto the grass, smeared it around with his foot, and kept his gaze on his foot. “So as I found out more and more about her taking that money, she said a lot of things that made me angry, or I got angry about things she said, anyway. She pounded down another couple of beers to show me I couldn’t stop her, and shouted at me, and I felt like shit but I stuck to what I was saying and kept it cool. So she stormed out and that was the last I saw of her. Didn’t know what else to do so I ended up going to the meeting, where I found these guys.”
He made himself look me in the eye and said, “After she left I snooped in your room. I knew a meticulous, systematic guy like you would be keeping some kind of record. I didn’t have to snoop much because it was right on the desk.”
“My IOU book? You read that?” I asked. It was like I was so stunned that I was getting things down to the smallest idea I could.
“Yeah. I’m a snoop, a spy, a rat, and a dick. But I did.”
“I left it out in plain sight ’cause I was always hoping Mom would read it,” I said. “It never worked.”
“Anyway, I didn’t understand why you didn’t have your money safe in a bank account, till Al Gratz explained to me about the adult cosigner rule here in Ohio. And Dick pointed out that either he or Gratz could cosign, just say they were your uncle, any bank outside Lightsburg. Nobody would ever check. Dick was pretty upset—”
“Shoot, Karl, I’m your sponsor. If you’d only told me—”
“You don’t have a car, Dick.” I still couldn’t quite get used to the idea that someone else knew, I mean besides my mother, and Neil, and her drunk asshole friends, I mean. Someone that wasn’t throwing it in my face, or telling me to stop thinking I was better than they were.
Someone that said they were going to try to do something.
That was the really hard idea to latch on to.
Dick shrugged. “I’d’ve found us both a ride, or gotten Philbin to take us over there, or something. It wouldn’t have been anything for me to take care of that for you, Karl.”
I could tell he was still hurt, and I didn’t know how to apologize for not asking for help.
Gratz cleared his throat; it was sort of his teacher-noise, same sound he used in class, or at school board meetings when he was going to straighten everyone out about the Youths of Today, or pretty much whenever he was about to lay down the law. “Dick, don’t take it personally, it isn’t that Karl didn’t trust you. Kids are that way, if they’re getting hurt bad. They think it’s their fault, they think it’s something wrong with them, they won’t tell anyone. It’s just how kids are.” His hands were dug into his hips and he was standing like a phys ed teacher about to lead calisthenics, and then suddenly he said, “Shit.”
Coach Gratz swearing. Okay, the world was ending.
“Shit,” he repeated. “Dick, I’m lecturing you like my hollering asshole self. All I should’ve said was you have to figure Karl’s a kid. Even if he’s a great one and even if he’s Doug’s kid.”
Dick smiled a little. “We need to get Karl moving if you’re going to get to the bank before it closes.”
“The bank?” I asked.
“Yep. You’re opening a bank account in Vinville. With ‘Uncle Al’—i.e., me—as your cosigner,” Gratz explained. “Get those cans of money down into my car and we’ll go right now, we just have time before they close.”
I stared at all three of them, just managed to squeak out a “thank you,” and ran to get the money cans. There were nineteen in all, from most rooms of the house, plus two outside behind removable stones in the exposed basement wall, plus the ones from the toolshed. I think they were a little surprised there were so many, but it took me almost no time to get them all into Gratz’s trunk. I could have grabbed them all twice as fast except I kept stopping to wipe my eyes.
It’s funny how Vinville is only eight miles from Lightsburg, along the cleverly named Vinville Road, but it might as well be another world. Vinville has the college, built on the slope of Gravel Ridge down toward the town, with old maples, oaks, ginkgos, and buckeyes on it, tended for a hundred years, and the red brick of the college buildings peeks out from between all those trees, making the whole thing look like a tiny slice of a movie college stuck in the middle of all those flat Ohio fields.
Lightsburg has more going for it if you think about money—the interstate ramp, more stores, the high school, and a couple little factories; in the old days it had Prentiss Petroleum. But Vinville can look like a little chunk of somewhere nice, picket fences and red bricks and all that, when the right light hits it.
Which the right light was doing right now. We were coming into Vinville from the west, with the sun at our backs, and maybe I was seeing it like the cavalry making it back to Fort Apache or some knight catching his first glimpse of Camelot, but it was also just great photographer’s light—this would have been a calendar shot, I can tell you that. The steeples and the Augelsmann Brothers department store glowed above the just-changing trees, fall colors swarming over the green, and behind them, the red brick college did a real good job of faking being like someplace out of A Separate Peace or every college movie ever made.
Gratz said, “We don’t want you to keep more than a couple of days of your cash earnings in the house, from now on. So try to make a deposit three times a week or so. If you can’t get a ride with a friend, ask me, or ask Dick and he’ll find you one. I kind of think he’d appreciate it if you asked him for some help, too. Tom Browning would do it for you, too, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. I didn’t know how to ask.” How do you say My mom is crazy and her friends are dangerous and they’re robbing me, when you figure the next thing it leads to is cops and family court and maybe not having a mom anymore? At least Gratz had understood that much, though he blamed it on being a kid, and I figured it just kind of went with moms and love and stuff.
“Anyway,” he said, never moving his eyes from the road, he was that kind of obsessive careful driver, “no matter what, keep your money here in your account. Not just so it doesn’t get stolen. We want to make sure your mom can’t get it to go on a bender, and we think if she doesn’t have those windfalls to rip through, a lot of her friends will drift away.”
“Like Neil?”
“Like Neil. Some of us would like to help him drift a little faster but I think Bill’s opposed to that, says it would alienate Beth if we talked to him directly.”
Something about the way he said directly made me feel just a little good down inside. I would have loved to see Dick and Coach “talk” to Neil directly. If I couldn’t do the job myself. I owed him a few for convincing my mother that I was Young Charlie Manson. But I’d like to see Neil after a couple men got direct on his worthless ass.
While I’d been thinking about that pleasant thought, Gratz had still been making sure I knew that I had to keep the money away from my mother. “It’s important for both of you, Karl.”
We were coming into the town now, and I said, “I’ll do like you say. Why are you making such a big deal about it?”
He ran a tanned hand through the perfect hair; it had too much Brylcreem in it to move, of course, but I guess it showed off the big biceps. Probably Mrs. Gratz had unconsciously trained him to do
that. “Well,” he said, and then I realized he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell me. “When I get back, after Dick gets off at Philbin’s, Dick and me and Bill are going to go find your mother and have a long talk with her, one she probably won’t like. But it’s way overdue.”
“She’ll say it’s because you’re ucky ucky men who want to stop her being a free woman.”
“Well, maybe we are. Nonetheless we thought maybe we’d see if we could get her to dry out and take some control of her life. And she won’t do that unless she’s cut off from the benders with her asshole friends.”
Wow. First shit, now asshole. Coach Gratz was getting a real vocabulary.
“I guess she can run around and pretend she’s twenty, and give the finger to all us bad old men, all she wants, after you leave. She’s a grown-up, at least officially. We just don’t want her to screw up your life before you get out the door, and we don’t want to be the friends that stood around and did nothing while you got worked over like that. That was part of why I . . . well, shit.”
I looked down at the perfectly new-car clean carpet, wondering how many times he vacuumed and shampooed the inside of this big old boat. “Coach, if I could have all my years back to fourth grade as a do-over, I’d take it in a minute.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. Let me tell you something stupid and ugly about myself. Every single teacher in the school knew how tight the Madman Underground was, and how much you all pretended not to be a group. We’d talk about it in the lounge. And for years it just ate at me that you were in there—”
“Coach, they’re the friends I’ve got. And that’s who I am.”
“I know. That’s the thought that made me want to go buy a bottle: I looked at that letter I’d thrown away, lying in the wastebasket, and I just couldn’t stop thinking, Karl can’t let a friend down, and they can’t let him down, and that’s really the way Karl is most Doug Shoemaker’s son. The only people who were really helping my old friend’s son were all those crazy kids I despised. They were a lot better friends than I was. Maybe better people.
“So just as I walked into the meeting, stewing about all that, I found myself thinking, ‘I wish I had friends as good as Karl’s,’ and there was Dick, who I hadn’t talked to in years because of all that stuff they teach in my church about giving up the bad influences in your life . . . well. Here we are. About to commit financial fraud.” He turned into the parking lot for First Gist County Bank and Trust.
“Someday I wanna be a felon just like you, Uncle Al,” I said, and we both laughed like two stupid kids trying to get up their nerve to buy booze underage.
Counting all the money took more time than anything else. The forms were real simple to fill out. It finally came to $4,364.91, which was three dollars and twenty-four cents more than I thought it was but I didn’t figure I’d fight them about it. We set it up as a passbook savings account because it didn’t seem like a good idea to have checks around that Mom or one of her buds might try to forge. And the bank had early hours on Monday and Friday, late Friday hours, and Saturday morning hours, so one way and another I figured I’d be able to make it work. They even had a night depository so whenever a Madman with a car turned up at McDonald’s, I had a way to get money in there in the middle of the night.
We finished up at like five minutes to five, and Gratz told me he was buying and we were going to get sandwiches from the sub shop that catered to the college students, eat in the park, and talk things over some more. “Okay, as long as Mrs. Gratz won’t be on your case about missing dinner,” I said.
“It’s a Monday night. She works late, so we both grab something early, and then later we watch Monday Night Football together and cook up hot dogs and popcorn, because we used to love to go to games together in college, and I suppose it will seem corny and silly to you, but we think it’s romantic.”
The guy at the counter handed us our sandwiches and we walked out into the late afternoon sun. “Actually you’re scaring me, Coach, because that sounds romantic.”
The park was one of those old-style Ohio town squares, the kind they plowed up and turned into streets in bigger cities years ago, where the four main roads converge but then they inset a four-block area with trees and sidewalks and no streets running through it. There were a fair number of old guys on benches sitting around trying to remember a story the other old guys hadn’t already heard, and college students trying to pretend they were studying instead of checking each other out, and little kids running around like nuts on the playground. It occurred to me that if I could get Paul and Marti to hang out with me, we ought to drag Marti over here because it was the kind of thing she’d describe as being so American she could just shit.
The sandwiches were good and I wolfed mine down. I noticed Gratz was actually a pretty fastidious type, and I suppose that went with keeping himself in perfect shape and so forth. It was very annoying to realize that I might be getting to like this particular rude hollering asshole, but I consoled myself that there would always be plenty more of them to hate.
When we’d finished and splashed some water on our faces from the old-style pump drinking fountain (sulfur water, so I was sort of damp and eggy-smelling around the face), Gratz said, “Well, we should get back, but there was one more thing I wanted to ask you about, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Uh, if it’s about Marti, I’d rather not.”
He laughed. “Oh, no, it’s not. I can see why you might be worried, but it’s not. No, I just figure I’ll try to be nice to Marti, and more important be fair around her, and she’ll probably never like me but we can both get through the year.”
Then a thought kind of hit me, and I said, “Coach, if there’s a way you could help her—as much as you’re helping me—do you suppose you and some of the other people in town could, you know, help?”
That one seemed to rock him back, but he thought for a bit and said, “I guess if we knew someone was in the kind of bad spot you’re in—and there was anything anybody could do—I guess we’d have to. Is Marti in some kind of trouble like that? Or one of the other Madmen?”
Now it was my turn to think. “I don’t know what to say just yet. I’d’ve been mad at any of the Madman Underground”—it still felt so weird to speak those words to Gratz—“if they’d narked on me and my situation. I would bet they’d feel the same. And anyway I think there probably are adults who know some of what’s happening to some of us, and aren’t doing anything, for one reason or another, good or bad. I don’t know.”
“Nobody can do anything if nobody talks.”
“Yeah, I know, Coach.” I looked at the people playing, walking, loafing, hurrying, or sauntering across the little park in front of us. How many terrible stories were there, just there in front of me, never to be spoken? “Uh, I guess I’m going to think for a little while. You know, when you gave me that letter, I thought you wanted me to stooge for you.”
“Maybe I did, though I wouldn’t have put it that bluntly.”
“Well, maybe I ought to be your informant. Or maybe I should keep people’s trust. Or maybe it’s kind of case by case.”
“Karl, how about . . .” He thought for a moment, and finally said, “Okay, how’s this? I promise that if you come to me with anyone’s story—no matter whose and no matter how tough it is—I will at least tell someone who would be able to do something about it. But I won’t push you, and you’ll have to tell me.”
“Deal, Coach.”
We sat there and, shit, like it or not, I was kind of comfortable with him. I turned over the Madmen in my mind; it was the old, old problem, would Squid be better off without the kids who depended on him? If people knew the truth about what Mr. Knauss did in his rages, and Paul and Kimmie were fostered out somewhere, taken away from the town where they at least had some friends and support . . . did I want to have that kind of power over my friends’ lives? Hadn’t I always had it anyway?
Finally, to stop my thoughts from circling
on forever, I asked, “Was that the ‘last thing’ you said you wanted to talk about?”
“No,” he said. “I—well, look, Karl, this is just something I’ve kind of noticed and wasn’t sure how to ask you about. You hear a lot about your dad, even now. He was a big guy in Lightsburg.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So how come you seem angry about him? I mean, is it one of those shrink things where you’re mad at him for deserting you and leaving you with your mother?”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “And for leaving my mother to get lost among all the hippie shitheads, there’s so much crap floating around in the world and he never let her think for herself enough to learn to sort it out. He told her to be a Democrat and a Methodist, so she was; now Neil tells her to be a pothead and Judy tells her to be a paranoid lunatic, so she is. And right now her best hope is that Bill will tell her to be a responsible grown-up; she won’t do it for herself. So I sure as shit know that Dad could’ve left her better able to take care of herself.”
“He could,” Gratz said, noncommittally.
I knew right then I had to either say “I won’t talk about it” or just lay it right out there in front of Gratz, so I could see it myself, and see if it changed anything.
It had been a long day. I was tired. This was easier than anything else: “Coach,” I said, “my parents were screwed-up people who drank together a lot. You probably know that the cops spiked the police report that time Dad got busted for drunk driving and pissed into the police car to make his point. Mom and Dad had drunk fights and drunk make-ups and drunk sex, and I was scared to death a lot of the time. They tucked me in when they were drunk, and I got myself cereal while they sat at the breakfast table holding their heads and groaning about their hangovers. They loved me and they fought each other and they did stupid things and, well, it was a lot like some of my friends’ houses, too, you know?
“And then Dad found out he was dying, and he finally put his act together, and those were the best years of my life—while he dried out, getting ready to die. So it kind of feels like . . .” I didn’t know what to say next, so I watched a young couple throwing a Frisbee back and forth, her trying to look ditzy and silly, him trying to look cool and athletic. She was succeeding.