And then there were the horrible punishments.
At first, they started out kind of subtle. I was certain, however much the parents denied it, that other kids’ parents bought clothes and all kinds of stuff for them. After I started failing, the parents didn’t even buy Christmas presents. They said presents cheapened the spirituality of Christmas. The parents had never struck me as very spiritual people and their lies blew up when I, on Christmas Eve one year, watched wide-eyed as they exchanged presents. Birthdays also went uncelebrated, one age sliding smoothly into the next. I doubted the parents even remembered when my birthday was. The punishments roughened in texture, growing more brutal and physical. But I kept focusing on this one thing. This one thing was what had made me finally decide Racecar was one of the blobbiest people in the world. In other words, if I hated Racecar, if that was what I was feeling, then this was the reason why.
Ever since I turned ten, it had been my job to mow the lawn. The yard was easy to mow, being equal parts grass and dirt, but the family had had the same lawnmower for as long as I could remember and something new would go wrong with this lawnmower every year. Racecar obviously couldn’t mow the grass unless he could find a way to strap a blade under that chair and when the lawnmower developed all those special tricks you had to know to operate it the mother decided it just wasn’t ladies’ work and that I was plenty old enough to start mowing it myself.
The only thing Racecar had to do was show me how to start it and turn it off. The pull cord that had come connected to it had been ripped off, so the father improvised with a piece of thick yellow rope that was knotted at both ends. To start it, he had to wrap this rope around some cylindrical thing at the top of the engine and pull. It took him about ten more pulls than it had before the pull cord was dislocated. To turn it off, you had to take hold of these two naked wires and touch them to this hot part of the engine and keep them held there until the damn thing sputtered to a stop. This seemed kind of dangerous because the lawnmower didn’t have a gas cap and the strenuously bucking exercise of starting it caused gas to slosh everywhere and, when you touched those wires to that metal, there were usually some sparks. I waited for that lawnmower to turn me into an instant burn victim. Then I would creep people out even more with my baby pink, eyebrowless face.
I stood beside him, both of us looking down at the gimpish lawnmower, a grime-covered gas can sitting beside it. Racecar made me bend down and wrap the rope around the top of the engine and hand the end of the rope to him.
“Now all you gotta do is give it a yank.” He pulled violently up on the rope, his wheelchair shifting a little in the grass.
He pulled on the rope a few more times, getting more and more frustrated with each pull.
“Now you try it, you little ass. A growing boy should be able to do more than an old cripple.”
I always hated it when he called himself a cripple. It made him sound so much more innocent than he really was.
I wrapped the rope around the top of the engine and gave it a yank, my hands slick with sweat. My right hand slipped off the rope, the back of my hand smacking Racecar in the forehead. I burst out laughing. I’m not sure whether it was the accidental cuffing or the laughter, but Racecar was furious. He snatched the rope off the lawnmower, grunted, and smacked me on the arm with the knot at the end of the rope.
I accidentally shouted, “Fuck,” and he belted me again on the other arm. That was the worst pain I’d ever felt at that time in my life. The pain was red hot and lingering. I imagined it felt like being hit by a bullet. Racecar rolled back to the house. I silently wished the uneven yard would pitch him out of his wheelchair. I told myself if that happened I would hover over him, sadistically belting him with that rope until he was a giant welt. Then I would dance around him singing a song I’d invented for just an occasion called, “I Got Legs and You Don’t.”
“You’re on your own, you little shit, and you better have the whole fucking thing mowed before dark,” he called over his shoulder. To my disappointment, he made it to the house unpitched.
I managed to get the job done and, by the time I was finished, there was a giant purple knot painted on each of my arms. If it wasn’t for being able to rest them on the lawnmower’s handle, I don’t think I could’ve even kept them held up.
I didn’t know why that, of all things, had come to me on my day of escape and then I had an even crazier thought. I thought about that piece of shit lawnmower I’d never have to use again and that piece of rope, now blackened, that I always tied around the handle when I was finished and then I thought about that gas can and how the garage always smelled full of gas. I thought about what a dry day it was.
Then I had a truly awful idea. Sometimes thinking too much led me to those truly awful, ugly ideas.
The parents were already dead. I was already a murderer. Why should I give them the satisfaction of a decent burial? Why should any other blob think I was a murderer, that I hadn’t died right alongside them?
I was wrong when I thought I would never be going back to that house. I would go back this one last time, I told myself, and I wouldn’t even have to go inside.
I turned the wheelchair around and headed back home.
Chapter Eight
The Confession
Starting back home, and knowing full well what I planned to do, I decided I didn’t have the proper resources. I briefly thought about trying to use the sparks from the lawnmower but that would be noisy and there was the whole creepy burn victim thing. I would need matches or a lighter, any incendiary device would do, and I knew exactly where to go. I turned the wheelchair around. I started back the way I came, figuring that would kill more time. Right after I’d had the first ugly thought, another one blossomed, almost as bad as the first. Timing figured in heavily with the second idea. The parents would always be there but, after the second idea was fulfilled, I knew I would have to leave town. My work would be done. I’d only been out of the house for a couple hours and I was already starting to feel like a different person. My thoughts seemed clearer. From the usual low-grade whumming I never really noticed, another voice was making itself heard. Only it didn’t seem like a voice as much as it did a feeling, a tug, some form of direction.
I would start back the way I came, branching off near the house so I could go by the park and see Drifter Ken. I felt like I had to say bye to him. It seemed like he was one of the only people who’d ever been nice to me and I figured he was sure to have matches or a lighter. Something for the job.
On the way there, I thoroughly enjoyed the wheelchair. For a relatively lazy person like myself, it sure beat the hell out of walking. I just rolled right along in the crisp air and looked up at that blue sky and those nice old houses and if my head and neck weren’t so sore I could have thrashed around and had a great time thinking my thoughts. When you’re tall and gangly, sometimes you have to concentrate on walking. The wheelchair allowed me to listen to that new feeling, going where it told me to go. Until the discovery of the wheelchair, skipping had been my favorite mode of transportation because, when I skipped, I didn’t have time to think any thoughts at all and, most of the time, that was best. And, realistically, that would have been impossibly far to skip.
A few cars rolled past real slow. I could tell the people inside were staring at me. Hell, I would have stared too. It’s not every day you see someone, hideous under regular circumstances, with horns on his head. Like the horns drew attention to all the rotten fuckness below. I imagined them edging their holy cars over to the other side of the road because the horns said I was evil and they didn’t want anything to do with evil and rottenness. I was probably lucky it wasn’t the time of day when the cruel high schoolers were out cruising around. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to just go ahead and take the stupid things off. It was like there was something inside of me that wanted to be punished. I just kept my head down, trying not to make any eye contact.
When I first got to the park, I stayed behind
the hedges. A cop was talking to Drifter Ken. Even though Drifter Ken didn’t normally talk about his problems, I’d heard him complain about the cops on a few occasions.
“The cops in this here town. Shit. I’m just an ol man who likes to sit down on this here ol bench with compulsive regguhlarity and they always wanna give me shit about it.”
Drifter Ken was amazing. If it weren’t for that something inside of me, that feeling or calling or whatever, that thing that yelled at me and told me I had to get out of Milltown, I could have seen myself living with Drifter Ken. Well, the living part was kind of in question, since I wasn’t sure if he had a house or not. There was just something so unblobbish about him I knew we’d get along fine. Of course, there was always the possibility he would think I was a blob.
As I sat in my chair watching him talk to that cop, I could tell he was making the cop break up. I heard the cop laughing all the way over there in the bushes and, before walking away, he gave Drifter Ken a pat on the arm as if to say, “You keep em laughing, Drifter Ken.”
The cop got in his car and started up toward the school. I was far enough off the road to where he wouldn’t notice me. I didn’t even really stop to think I could be the person the cop was looking for. That would be one of the worst things in the world, a major setback, that cop dragging me back into the school. He would smile at Pearlbottom. A secret smile that said they were both members in the society of keeping kids’ lives joyless and free of fun. “I found a little piece of trash for yuh,” he’d say. “Didn’t know whether to take him here or straight back to hell.” No, I figured I was pretty safe. Who was going to harass a crippled boy, anyway?
I waited for him to vanish out of sight and pulled around the hedgerow, wheeling toward Drifter Ken. I could tell he didn’t know who the hell I was when he first saw me coming. He looked hard and squinted those huge eyes. His top lip raised up and I could see those teeth getting bigger and bigger as I pulled closer to him. I was sure Drifter Ken dreaded new kids coming around the park. That was just someone else to go home and tell warped malicious lies about him.
Finally he recognized me.
“Hey hey, Wally Black! How’s my favorite eighth grader?”
“I’m okay. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m doin all right, I guess. If the fuckin cops’d get off my back I’d be doin a helluva lot better. Why don’t you tell me somethin to brighten up my day. School done started. You got time today, ain’t ya?”
“A little, yeah,” I said.
“Well, shoot then.”
I did have the time, sure, but I didn’t really have a joke in my head. I improvised with the first thing I could think of.
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Beats.”
“Beats who?”
“Beats just forgot his name.”
Drifter Ken cracked up. “Now,” he said, “that was pretty good, a real classic, but the next time you say it, I think it’s s’posed to be, ‘Beats me, I just forgot my name.’”
“How could someone forget their own name?”
“Beats me.”
We both laughed at that, Drifter Ken reaching down and poking me on the shoulder. That’s what he always did when he got to laughing—reached right down and gave me a good jab. For some reason, that always made me laugh harder. This time it kind of hurt.
“Say, you gotta setta wheels.”
“Yeah.”
“You get paralyzed or somethin.”
“No, just a little sore.”
“Oh yeah, what happened?”
I really hadn’t expected to have to explain what happened to anybody. I kind of fell silent for a while, searching for the answers to that question. I wanted to just give him a summary, tell him a few things. He probably wasn’t interested in hearing all of it. But the more I tried to assemble a few logical events, the more they came apart, making little sense.
I broke down and told him everything. I realized I’d been dying to tell somebody, probably because I didn’t think anybody would actually ask. I broke down a lot, like when I had the crying jags at school sometimes and Pearlbottom would drag me out into the hall. But usually when I broke down, I never told anybody anything. I could never find the right words. This time felt a lot different. I found myself becoming fluid, I wanted to make him see everything that happened and then I thought that wouldn’t make a lot of sense either if I couldn’t also make him feel what I was feeling at the time. Sometimes it felt like I carried this giant weight around. Sometimes I visualized like a giant rock or cement block. Other times, it felt like a huge sad wave of melancholy. Whatever it was, it inevitably came down on me, crushing me into innumerable pieces, that feeling of yellow-purple soulhurt emerging from the rubble. That feeling had loosed itself on me as I stood there talking away.
Drifter Ken listened to everything, towering above me and sucking away on those Camels. Throughout me telling him this, he became my audience. I realized a little bit of what Bobby DeHaven must have felt, except mine was just an audience of one. I guess, in a way, Drifter Ken had always been my audience but, before, with the jokes, I always felt like I was trying to entertain him. Not only that, but the jokes were always something somebody else had made up or some fuckness like that.
When I got finished, I stopped and waited for what Drifter Ken would say.
He was silent for a moment and then he said, “Well, that Mary Lou’s a real cocktease. And that Bucky Swarth, well, he sounds like he’s got some real weight problems. And sometimes people with weight problems get real mean and hateful. You know what to say to him if he gives you any more shit? You say, ‘I bet your tits is bigger’n Mary Lou’s.’ That oughtta make him real mad. Someone’s gonna beat the shit outta you like that, you gotta get smart and fight back with your tongue. If they’re gonna do it anyway, you might as well give em a reason to do it.”
Drifter Ken always gave me the best advice. When most people gave me advice, it was just a polite way of telling me what to do. I always got mad when someone tried to tell me what to do and then I’d make damn sure not to do what they asked me. This usually, in turn, made them mad for not listening to them. People only told me what to do so their lives would be easier, anyway. It never made me mad when Drifter Ken gave me advice.
“I’m real sorry about tradin that sucker for nothin.”
“Aw, that’s okay, I can get you another sucker. Besides, it doesn’t sound like it weren’t for nothin. You gotta quick feel of that snatch didn’t ya?”
I didn’t know what he meant. Given a few moments, I’m sure I could have figured it out. I’d just never heard it called that before.
“Her privates, boy. You gotta quick feela them didn’t ya?”
In my crying jag I must have told him every little detail. I thought I’d left that part out. I nodded.
“Then it weren’t for nothin. You remember what that felt like and I’ll tell you this now: the woman’s snatch is a powerful thing. You’ll feel its power for the rest of your life. Shit, a sucker. You should be lucky all you lost was a sucker. I’ve lost a house and two kids to the power of that fuckin thing.”
I imagined one of those women on the television spreading her legs and sucking objects into that patch of hair. Only, it hadn’t felt like there was much hair on Mary Lou’s.
“You say those horns is some kind of punishment?”
I nodded.
“You think your mom’d get mad if I take em off?” Then he paused, chuckled, and said, “I guess that doesn’t matter much now, does it?”
“Guess not,” I said.
“Well, where ya goin?”
“I don’t know. I have to leave Milltown. I think I’m gonna try and go see my Uncle Skad over in the Tar District. After that, I’m not really sure. I gotta get out of Milltown.”
Drifter Ken smiled. “Ah, the Tar District.” Then he became serious. “You be careful in those parts. We’ll be sorry to see ya go round here. But a man’s gotta do w
hatta man’s gotta do.”
Yeah, fuck it, I thought.
“So why don’t you let me take those foolish things off?”
He reached under my chin and I could smell his hands. They smelled like one of the mother’s ashtrays. Smelling ashtrays had been a hobby of mine a few years before. Like a lot of other things about myself it was something I couldn’t really explain. It was merely another frivolous desire in a life of necessity.
The skin got pinched up in the buckle as his giant fingers unfastened it.
“Here we go,” he said and pulled the strap through the buckle. Then, “Holy shit.”
“What?”
He reached out and slapped at the left horn. His hand made a dull sound like whap and I felt my scalp twitch, the horn tugging against it.
“What?” I repeated, fearing the worst.
“Hate to tell you this, but it looks like them horns might just be stayin on a little longer.”
I broke down and started crying again. At that moment, I really did feel like a demon. A giant horned demon. If it wasn’t the strap holding those things on, then I figured it must be some other force. I reached up and felt the sides of my head. My worst fear had come true. The straps were nowhere to be felt. They had vanished. Simply disintegrated. I was sure that had to mean I was evil. It had to be some kind of punishment from God or something. That made the evil a little more meaningful. I mean, I’d been called evil by all sorts of people but I just kind of dismissed it. This felt like God had finally ordained me as a certifiable demon.
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