by W. S. Penn
I held on to the penny like a token with which to pay the busfare I expected father to exact. It wasn’t that father was a cruel man; he was thorough. For example, if he sent me reeling backwards, heels over head, for spilling milk carelessly at the table, he would whack me a few extra times to be sure I got the point. Even if he was understanding, he would be so understanding that I’d begin to wish he’d beaten me instead. I could never tell where his sense of thoroughness would lead him. Someday, he would come home and find me in bed with a girl. Calmly, he’d send her home. Then he would sit down and explain to me the dangers of impregnating a girl at my age, and start to walk out. Some thought, some sense of incompletion would stop him, and he would come and knock the wind out of me.
In the terminal, father took hold of my left shoulder with his left hand. His hands were as big as Grandfather’s and I watched the right one warily, staying in close to him so he wouldn’t get full extension of his arm if he slugged me. When he put his right hand on my other shoulder, I expected to be lifted like a large Kachina and expelled through the nearest window.
“Hey,” he said. “You must be tired.”
I dropped the penny, let it jingle on the linoleum floor, left it like a hobo might paint “Kilroy was here” on a rock as a sign that I had been there. Like all signs we leave behind us in arriving and departing, the penny would probably be swept away by the broom of a janitor. Yet maybe, just maybe the penny found a corner where the broom didn’t reach easily and it is still there defending the dust that has gathered around it over the years.
On the drive home, father said, “Listen.” He was being quiet the way I have come to understand it is our nature to be quiet. There are so many things to say and so many ways to say them and have them heard that one seduces oneself into never beginning. If, by mistake, whether out of a sense of necessity or desire, one of us began, we ducked out of the sentence as quickly as possible.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” he said about five miles later. Even in the dark, in the reflection of the headlights, I could see the brown cast to the fog that was choking the angels of this city indiscriminately.
I waited. Except to lecture me, father had never spoken to me like this before. We had never just talked. I didn’t know then that we never would, although I had begun to suspect it; what I didn’t suspect was that father had noticed and would continue to notice that we never talked. Until he said, “After seventeen years, I still can’t talk to you,” I never imagined the possibilities of the pain it must have caused him.
Unlike father, mother was expansive. Bobby pins in her hair—she was trying to tighten the soft curls of her hair—she was standing like a sentinel on the back door steps waiting for me with her arms crossed. On the heels of her “you should not have run away from camp, you had us worried,” she added with her usual logic, “Your dog took sick, you weren’t here to care for him as you should have been and he got sick. We,” she went on, pausing only long enough to suck air into the top of her lungs, “had to take him to the vet’s and have him put to sleep.”
I refused to believe her. At first.
When I realized that she was telling the truth, sleep sounded good to me, if only because it would allow me to redream this dream or dream a new one. All I could do was stare. Clyde was no Lassie, but then Lassie was a transvestite and Clyde had been mine. I didn’t feel any of those feelings I was supposed to feel like pain or loss, only a tremendous absence as I remembered Clyde gamboling about over Custer’s grave in the backyard. I was still staring, still hoping to sleep, when mother came into my room in her quilted bathrobe and sat on the edge of my bed, her hands clenched in her lap, and tried her best to comfort me. Poor mother.
“He was sick,” Elanna said, scratching my head thoughtfully as I sat with her in the graveyard the next day. “It wasn’t very fair of father not to tell you. Mother always has to do the dirty work. Someday, you’ll understand.”
I confess it was mother who put on her fuzziest sweater, unbuttoned the top button, and, wearing a basic string of pearls, served father meatloaf by candlelight and talked him into letting me accept the gift of another puppy from friends of theirs. I confess it because, though I was not very comforted by Elanna, I was discomforted by Pamela, who, not long after, blurted out in the darkness of her closet, “I hate her.” An echo of what, unsurprisingly, she would say about pets. Pets, she’d decide, were things one should not become too attached to because, like mothers, they would one day have to be put to sleep.
“Though a living bitch is better than a dead lion,” Grandfather said.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” I thought as I re-enacted Custer’s burial ceremony for Clyde and christened my new puppy Running Dog. Using the New Mathematics of plus and minus one, it seemed that I continually reached a sum of zero and even though zero was a cardinal number as well as an argument, it always came to nothing. So it wasn’t that Grandfather might have been wrong about bitches and lions, only that he may not have been right.
10.
Robert Parnell O’Connor always insisted on using his full name because Parnell was somebody to someone, once, or so he’d heard. It was difficult for an Irishman to feel as important in deprivation and suffering as Jews or Mexican immigrants, and the Parnell gave Rob the right to feel a little superior to Tommy A., who was condemned—or so Bernie, Robert and I believed—by his boring WASP blood to insignificance. So when early in the school year Rob disappeared from school with the suddenness of a whisper, we weren’t sure whether or not to be happy for him. Our teacher said he’d had a “tragic experience” with a voice that suggested the experience was his as well, and that made us even more curious about what it was.
Bernie Schneider and I wondered about it at recess and after school. Rather, I wondered aloud to Bernie, since he was unconcerned with events outside of himself. Well launched on his wanderings in search of Tammy, Bernie was interested in little else but keeping his head above water.
Tommy Anderson was the one who, with the hope of impressing Marily, brought the newspaper clipping to school the next day. The photograph showed the rubble of an apartment building, the tail section of a light plane sticking out from it as though the apartment had burst. Robert Parnell O’Connor Senior, newly remarried, had perished with his bride as the plane, under the cover of night, had crashed into their apartment.
The way the newspaper added it up, it was terrible and tragic. The way I added it up, using the New Math, was zero. Robert Parnell O’Connor had a father; he had lost that father. Zero. Robert had a new stepmother; she was dead. Zip, again. I tried a different formula: minus one father, Robert Parnell was plus one experience of suffering, and that still seemed to add up to nothing. True, Robert might put some distance between his sense of deprivation and Tommy’s, and lessen the distance between himself and the Jews and Mexicans around us. But how real would be the gain against Bernie? Robert had suffered a loss, but one can get over loss. One never gets over a want like Bernie’s which can’t ever be satisfied. At best, Robert would be up less than one; and even that bit would be taken away when Thanksgiving rolled around and Tommy revealed a secret that no one knew he had.
Before I got on the horn to Grandfather, I checked with my parents. They proved to be unfamiliar with the formulae of the New Math.
“Married,” mother said. “Serves him right for having his marriage annulled and marrying a doxy like her.” Mother led you to believe that Robert Senior’s death was the result of marriage. “That’s what can happen,” mother said.
Father said, “‘God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered.’” Less penetrable than mother’s answer, father’s saying made me realize that father’s gods had become the One God and thus, under the rules of the New Math, the sum of his experience was zero. Forsaking the old gods, he had bought a new one. Maybe mother’s sum was zero, too, since she had something against marriage and yet was married herself. I fled, dialing Grandfath
er even before I reached the cemetery.
“Chicken Little,” Grandfather said.
How right Grandfather was. I might have imagined the sky was falling, that year. It seemed that the brown sky was rejecting everything that ventured into it. Poor Robert Parnell O’Connor. Not long after he returned to school, prepared to consolidate the suffering he would tell us he had endured, a pilotless Navy fighter crash-landed on our playground.
Fortunately, most of the kids were in, or on their way in from recess, when I heard the incoming whistle. I looked behind me to see the fighter plane in the near distance, nosing out of the opacity of smog. I wasn’t sure it was going to hit the playground as I watched Little Eric what’s-his-name, alone on the playground. His job, given him in exchange for letting him play, was to bring out the equipment to recess and to collect it after the rest of us had run off to class, and he did it with fervor and pride. So there he was, struggling with the large duffel bag full of bats and balls, carrying it from base to base, setting it down and putting the base in it, and then hoisting it to his shoulder again to stagger on to the next base. At two hundred yards, he looked small as he spotted the incoming jet and fell back from it, ducking his head into the crook of his arm. “Exactly the way he’d field a hard-hit, one-hopper,” I thought, as I dropped to my knees.
For years, we had been having daily air raid practice. Ever since the Russians had delivered Sputnik into the infinite and curving regions of the universe, we had been taught to drop below our desks on our knees, making ourselves look more like snails than human beings, covering the exposed skin of our necks with our hands to protect us from flying glass. Watching the films of atomic explosions, Bernie and I felt silly. We knew that flying glass was hardly the problem. The heat rolling out at the base of the explosion like the dust storms of the thirties would cook us like escargot.
At last all that practice paid off for me as I dropped to my knees and the jet lodged itself in the asphalt field of the playground, erasing Eric in a screeching, tearing explosion.
Poor Robert Parnell O’Connor wept tears, brown and gritty from the smog, frustrated tears that eroded the plump curves of his Irish face and left it lined and ancient with grief. Every foot he had gained on the ladder of suffering was lost because of some kid whose last name no one cared to remember. Even the photographs of Eric’s wreckage in the newspapers were larger and placed more prominently than those of his father’s death.
When the sky wasn’t falling around us, we played Bombs Away in the wash, hauling stones up the railroad trestle and throwing them at the shack the hobos had built with the mission instinct of the Franciscan Friars. We switched to Bombs Away from Cowboys and Indians less because the game had become offensive to me, and more because Tommy A. was changing.
The rest of us had become somewhat obsessed with women (or, rather, obsessed with our own pudenda, we had begun to hope for and seek relief in the vision which hung like an island just beyond the powers of our swimming strokes). Tommy’s worm was turning a different way. Maybe it was Bernie’s wearing a breach cloth that caused Tommy’s worm to turn. To me, Bernie looked slightly ridiculous. As for Bernie, I dare say he only wished to be prepared if his Tammy accidentally manifested on a sunny Saturday afternoon. But Tommy pursued Bernie. When he found him, Tommy refused to shoot at him. Tommy almost broke down into tears when Bernie refused to be his prisoner, insisting that in Cowboys and Indians, the Indian was either dead or not—never was he taken prisoner.
I had refused to acknowledge Tommy’s strange behavior until one rainy afternoon when he and I were watching a Western on T.V. At one point, this large Indian buck bursts through the door of the settler’s cabin, accompanied by the frightened screams of the white women trapped inside, grabs one of the women by the hair and drags her out to his horse.
“Oh,” Tommy said, “I wish I could be like that.”
“Me, too,” I said, thinking it natural for all little boys to dream of being large and strong with caveman dreams of dragging women off to tents and caves and hotels on the coast of Mexico.
“She’s so lucky,” Tommy said. He put his hand on my wrist. “Don’t you think?”
“He’s the lucky one,” I said, looking him straight in the eyes.
Bombs Away was my idea, primarily as a way to divert attention from the closet Tommy was slowly opening. On Saturday or Sunday afternoons we could be found in the dried-up river bed, trying to destroy the hobo shack. Bernie spotted for us, managing to escape his dreams enough to say “two degrees right” or “up six,” the rest of the time indifferent to whether we hit the shack or not. Grown fat on white bread and peanut butter, I arced rocks at the tin roof glowing with the sun’s heat, competing in the size of the rocks. Tommy, having selected delicate, round rocks, lofted them through the air, more concerned with the curve described by the rocks than with any effect on the shack.
All things come to an end.
“Vanity,” father would say over and over. “All is vanity.”
But it wasn’t vanity or the awareness of it that stopped our game of Bombs Away. Possibly, it would have ended anyway, but one day there happened to be a hobo in the shack. The hobo also happened to be ten feet tall and black as mother’s toast. As I ran from him, concentrating not on the gray line of the horizon but on the invisible demarcation of the Nevada State Line, he sounded like a freight train, gaining on me as I flung my fat round body along the tracks. At last I stopped, winded, unable to recall when the sound of his running had ceased, and was vain enough to think I had outrun him. It was that vanity that led me back to the trestle when I realized that Bernie had not run with the rest of us and that he was most likely still sitting there saying “Up six degrees,” spotting for the artillery that had retreated without warning.
The hobo was hulking over Bernie, shaking his shoulders, saying, “Lissen. You tell your buddies they come ‘round here again I’sell cut their little hands off.” When he let go of Bernie and raised his fist, I thought he was going to strike him.
Picking up a rock the size of one of Tommy’s, I threw it at him. “Let him alone you shiftless nigger,” I shouted. As swift as a coiled snake, he was on me, holding me aloft with one huge fist and shaking me like a rattle.
“What’d you call me, boy?”
Fear bred a modicum of defiance. “A lazy Negro,” I said.
He spat on the ground. “No, boy. Nah. You called me a shiftless nigger,” he said. The strange thing was that he didn’t seem angry. More amused. “Didn’t you?”
I started to say I hadn’t meant it.
“Didn’t you?” He shook me hard, his black eyes staring straight through my skull the way Grandfather would have stared if I had used that word around him. “Didn’t you, boy?”
“Yes,” I said.
He dropped me on my feet and I turned to run, but he grabbed my shoulder and my will to run vanished in the largeness of his grip. “Now lissen,” he said. “I want you boys to call some things to mind next time we run into each other. One is,” he looked at Bernie, “you were foreminded ‘bout hanging around here. You tell your mates that, hear? T’other is that nigger ain’t a color but a state of mind. Plenty niggers all colors in this world an’ next time we meet you call to mind that I ain’t one.” He released my shoulder. “Now git.”
“Come on Bernie,” I said, regaining part of my composure. To the hobo I said, “Let us not meet again this year.”
He laughed a laugh full of teeth. I’d never seen so many teeth. “What’d you say?”
“Let us not meet …”
“I heard you.” Laughing, he spat at the ground again.
He hit my shoe. He shouldn’t have done that. That’s what I told myself as I furiously cut a hole in the lid of a mayonnaise jar. A rag, a packet of cigarettes, the jar three quarters full of gasoline from the can father kept for the lawn mower. He should not have spit on Grandfather’s words. Fed with that notion, I managed to keep my fury alive until the night. Spit on Grandfather, wil
l you? I thought as I ran from the empty shack, the cigarette fuse smoldering, not waiting for the explosion but intent on reaching my street, my father’s house, before the explosion and flames alarmed the fire department and the police. Spit on …, I thought, in bed again, my heart outracing the locomotive I could hear in the distance. Had I been able, I would have stopped the fuse. I would have made the night into a bad dream, even before I heard what Grandfather would have said.
“Gibbon,” Grandfather would have scolded. “Bannock scouts.”
It was the second time in my life I had done something I couldn’t tell Grandfather. I would remember it always because it was the first time I heard and knew the words Grandfather would have said, if I had given him the pain of knowing what I had done. Never again would I want to hear the story of Gibbon’s men sneaking up on the Nez Perce encampment and slaughtering women and babies in a surprise dawn raid. I lost twenty pounds of sleepless fat over the next few months, realizing that I was worse than Gibbon’s Bannock scouts.
CHAPTER THREE
11.
Without consulting us, father has decided to migrate north, climbing the map of California to escape the smog that hid Los Angeles from the light of the sun. Pamela and Elanna have been packed off to an event called Summer Round-Up, from whence they would return to our new home in Palo Alto. I have been assigned the role of companion, keeping mother company on the long drive north after the moving van has pulled away from the house.
Soon enough my brain feels as though it’s sweating from the stifling heat in the car and I lean my head back against the hot vinyl seat covers, closing my eyes and trying to ignore mother’s driving—her steering, rather. Mother doesn’t drive. She hunches forward over the wheel, punching the buttons on the box set into the dashboard, making the automatic transmission shift without rhyme or reason, screaming in second or lugging along in high gear, as she negotiates the curves and grades called, as she’s told me ten times if she’s told me once, The Grapevine. Mother knows the names of things, but her names say little about the things themselves.