Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  Max wasn’t able to acknowledge anyone else’s right to have a conversation he didn’t dominate. With Max you listened to what he wanted to say or you left the room. I sometimes hung out in my bathroom if I wanted to read.

  Chapter 37

  One day I heard a motor-bike stop in our alley. I could see feet through the cellar window. One pair belonged to Max but I didn’t recognize the other ones. I was in the kitchen staring into the refrigerator, hoping an idea for supper would leap out, when the front door knocker clacked. A police car was idling in the alley, a uniformed officer at the door. A red motor-bike was parked in front of the squad car.

  The officer handed me a paper detailing ownership of a motor-bike. “He’s underage, ma’am. He can own a motor-bike but he can’t take it off your property. It’s a shame you don’t live out in the country. Lots of kids there drive around on trails they make.”

  I wondered if I looked as dumbfounded as I felt. “He owns a motor-bike? Since when?”

  The back door slammed. Max bounded into the living room. He answered me. “I bought it from a kid at school.”

  The officer tried to look stern but it was a losing battle. He was young and he clearly empathized with Max. “Just keep it in your own yard, Max. If you have any friends with a farm, maybe your mom would haul the bike in your van. It’ll fit.”

  The officer touched his hat in a salute. He left me with the feeling I was inadequate because I didn’t own a farm so my 14year-old son could ride his motor-bike around. I didn’t even know anyone who owned a farm.

  I remembered that summer as the motor-bike summer. Max had been saving all the money he earned for months. I never learned why the boy sold the bike. Max had all the proper papers, duly signed over to him. I felt pathetically grateful for this brief indication that Max was trying to follow the rules.

  We had a long backyard with a cement walkway that split at the garage. One strip went behind the three-car garage; the other went to the large cement area in front of the three doors. Max drove the bike back and forth. I stood at the back door watching. Each time he got to the place where the walk divided, he checked to see if I was watching. It was like the marble steps on Pine Street in Philadelphia all over again.

  I knew I was in trouble.

  Friends told me I should insist Max sell the bike. I know that made more sense for me. But I tried to consider it from Max’s point of view. He hadn’t had many successes. Owning a motorbike was a tangible one. His father agreed. He saw wanting wheels as a boy thing. He said it was hard on kids to have to live by rules that didn’t exist when he was Max’s age.

  The police officer had told Max the parameters. I had to help him stay within them. But I knew Max would test and retest the limits. I had to figure out a way to look out the back door hour after hour without going crazy from boredom. I got out a braided rug I had begun three years ago. It was about three feet by four feet. I worked on it in front of the French doors looking out at the backyard. I kept the overhead light on so I was instantly visible from anywhere in the yard.

  A woman whose garage opened into the alley was afraid she would inadvertently back into Max as he buzzed past her driveway. Or that was what she said. Other than during the long motorbike summer I never saw her. She was always polite but may have hated kids. If I left the dining room window, even for a few minutes, Max roared down the alley, wheeled around in the middle of Eighth Street and went back to the apron in front of our garage. When the woman saw him do this, she called the police.

  I suspected most of the officers empathized with Max. He was never cited, even though they were called a couple times a week. Max said a lot of them had Harleys and they talked about motorcycles. One of them had an Indian. Max was delighted when he showed up.

  The other kids bitterly resented the time I had to devote to Max in my effort to keep him out of the alley.

  One day Linda said, “Why’s Max the only one you care about? Why aren’t the rest of us important?”

  Each time I heard this, I felt the same frustration. What more could I do to let them know they were not only loved but appreciated for being themselves? Their feelings were certainly justified. I asked Seth if he felt the same way. He just looked at me as though I were a bit dim. “Of course. When he’s around, we might as well not be alive.”

  I decided to send Max to Boy Scout camp for an extra two weeks. The relief in the house for the month he was gone was wonderful but this brief taste of normalcy made it even harder to cope with him when he came home. He was like a dog that barked all the time. It took a while before I could get used to him being around and selectively tune him out.

  We joined a hunting and fishing club and hauled the bike up to it whenever possible. It wasn’t our property but it was private land so we got permission for Max to ride back and forth. Each time we went there, I hoped he would ride the bike inside the yard for a while but it didn’t work that way. If anything, the freedom to ride all over the fishing club whetted his appetite for the open road.

  By the end of September, the braided rug had grown to room size. I was running out of wool strips and I was afraid my hands would end up permanently curled into claws from bending the wool into neat braids.

  Then one day the motor-bike was gone. Max said he had sold it to a guy at school and made a profit. I complimented him on his savvy business sense and breathed a sigh of relief. I should have held my breath.

  Chapter 38

  One afternoon, not long after Max turned 15, I heard an unmistakable sound coming from his room. I grew up around guns. I knew exactly what a 22-caliber sounded like when a shell was ejected. I tore up the stairs and into his bedroom so fast that Max didn’t have time to hide. He was crouched, aiming out the window at something across the alley.

  “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME ARE YOU DOING WITH A GUN?” I shrieked with a combination of panic and frustration.

  He clutched the gun as though he held a priceless treasure and I was a marauding Mongol. “I thought you went to the grocery store.”

  “I DIDN’T ASK YOU WHERE YOU THOUGHT I WENT. I WANT TO KNOW WHERE YOU GOT THE GUN.”

  “I bought them from a guy at school. I used my motor-bike money for them. I don’t have bullets…”

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T HAVE BULLETS? I HEARD THE SHELL EJECTING.”

  “I’m just using blank shells I collected at the fishing club. They don’t hurt anyone. It’s just fun pretending to shoot at things.”

  My heart was banging so hard I was afraid it was going to give one more vicious thump and stop. It was sick of all the panicky alarms it had gone through helping me survive Max’s exploits.

  “WHAT IDIOT SOLD A 22-TO A 15-YEAR-OLD?”

  “You don’t have to shout at me.”

  “Yes, I do. Kids shouldn’t have rifles. Guns should be locked up in gun cabinets. Not stashed under beds.”

  He looked at his bed with a furtive expression. I had used the expression as a classic example of a stupid place to hide something but he took it literally. I suddenly remembered the earlier reference to ‘them’.

  “The other gun’s under the bed?”

  “What other gun? I don’t have another one.”

  At least Max felt the need to lie—he must have felt some qualms about the guns. Fortunately for me, he wasn’t very good at lying.

  “You said ‘them’ so I know there’s at least one other one.”

  I just looked at him and tried not to blink. I could see his mind working. He may have no ability to put himself inside another person’s mind but he did have a wonderful memory. From long experience he knew I usually discovered anything he wanted to keep hidden. He also knew I wouldn’t give up if I thought something was wrong. His desire to share his other gun with me overrode his hope he could fake me out. He flopped to the floor, felt under his bed, pulled out a pellet gun and handed it to me barrel-first. I flinched and automatically pushed the end of the rifle to one side. I was so conditioned by my father to move the barrel so it wa
sn’t aimed at me that I couldn’t stop it. I even did it when I knew the gun was a toy. The kids thought this was funny. I didn’t.

  “Did Dan see these?” I assumed he would have taken them to the neighborhood’s self-acclaimed gun expert and wannabe cowboy for approval. Max nodded.

  “What did he say?”

  Max beamed with pride. “He thought I got a good deal. The pellet gun isn’t anything special but the 22-is. They don’t make this model any more so it will just get more valuable each year.”

  Max had been obsessed with guns for as long as I could remember. One of his friends went shooting with his father. Max wanted to know why he and Pete couldn’t do the same. This required buying a gun. When Max wanted to do something, he harangued me or Pete non-stop. Pete had been in the Navy in the Pacific Theater during the war so he knew how to shoot but had seen what guns did up close and had no desire to own one. But he empathized with Max so one Saturday, he came home from downtown Wilmette with a 22-caliber Beretta pistol and a gun trap. The working theory was that the trap would be set up in the basement and the boys could shoot under supervision.

  The gun trap looked as though it had been designed by a mad welder who fabricated it in his basement. It was so heavy, the car bounced up when it was lifted out of the trunk. Painted matte black, it looked ominous. Constructed from thick steel plates cleverly placed so they formed a baffle that bounced the bullet back into a trap, it worked exactly as promised, assuming the shooter was able to aim the gun well enough to hit the opening. But this wasn’t happening. After a ricocheted bullet almost took off my ear, I called a halt to using the cellar as a gun range with the promise we would bring the pistol and gun trap with us the following week when we took a camping trip out west.

  It was a long week. I spent a lot of time keeping track of the gun. It sat next to the alarm clock beside my bed at night.

  Finding a place where we could assume a deflected bullet wouldn’t take out a fellow camper was poor. Every mile of the way, Max nagged. “Can’t we stop? Can’t we stop? Look. There’s a field.” He refused to concede some stranger might take umbrage at us using his side yard as a shooting gallery.

  We finally found a place backed by a rise to prevent near misses from hitting an unseen person or cow. No dwellings, people or animals were visible. We were parked at the side of the road for an hour. Fortunately, few vehicles drove by. None stopped.

  Linda and I read and Andrea colored three pages in her coloring book. I had noticed the color she used reflected the emotional level at the moment. This was a red day. Pete, Max and Seth wrangled. I looked up each time their voices rose. Max kept trying to grab the gun, allegedly to show Seth or Pete how to hold it—aim it—anything he could think of to get the gun in his hand. He quivered each time he had to give the gun to one of the others. It struck me that he was behaving like a serious alcoholic eyeing the only bottle of gin in the area.

  Pete noted the intensity of Max’s obsessive need to control the gun. When they came back to the car, he made a point of positioning the gun under his car seat in front of a strut so he was the only who could reach it. Max’s fixation with the pistol grew with each road-side target practice. During the rest of the trip we made sure the gun was always in Pete’s possession. When we got back to Wilmette, we both agreed we were better off with no guns in the house. Pete got rid of it without telling Max why he had done it or even that the gun was gone. I was the one who had to explain when I caught Max rummaging through Pete’s drawers searching for what he thought of as his gun. Max was livid and assumed I had gotten rid of it without Pete’s knowledge. When he told Pete what I had done, Pete just shrugged and looked disgusted. He never explained he was the one who had actually gotten rid of it.

  Pete was furious when I told him that Max now had two rifles. He thought getting rid of the gun he bought had ended Max’s obsession.

  “Where the fuck did he get two guns?”

  I told him.

  “Where are they now?”

  “I took them over to Dan’s house. They’re locked in his gun cabinet. How do you want to deal with them? We can’t expect Dan to be responsible for them.”

  “They’re going in the lake.” His voice was hard.

  “What do you mean—in the lake?”

  “Just that.”

  “You can’t just throw them away. You have to respect…”

  “I can and I will.”

  Pete and I had an ethical split on the innate importance of respecting other people’s property regardless of their age or relationship. He felt he had the right to control everything his children owned and pitched their belongings without a qualm. I had been fighting a running battle with him about this infringement of their rights ever since Linda was born. To my knowledge he hadn’t disposed of any of my possessions yet.

  “Look, disposing of his guns without some discussion of what he…”

  He loomed over me and clenched his teeth so hard the muscles in his neck stood out. He was the only person I knew who could shout without raising his voice.

  “THERE WILL BE NO GUNS IN MY HOUSE. GOT THAT? I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY OF YOUR FAIRNESS SHIT. THIS IS MY HOUSE AND I MAKE ALL THE RULES.” He emphasized each word with his pointed index finger.

  I instinctively cringed. His slashing forefinger was dangerously close to my nose. I wondered if he realized his hand was in the shape kids used to imitate a gun. It was a gesture he used frequently when he was angry.

  When Pete calmed down I tried to explain I didn’t want guns loose with what seemed to be a gun-obsessed teenager in the house but I felt that we should respect the guns’ intrinsic worth and their value to Max. Aside from being legally questionable, throwing them into the lake was like smacking Max in the face. “Why don’t we find a gun dealer, sell them and give Max the money.”

  Pete was too frustrated to listen to my point of view but was out of town for two weeks so nothing was done. Before he left, he said he had talked with Dan, who promised the guns would stay in the gun safe. I spent the two weeks researching where I could sell the guns without a legitimate bill of sale. A gun dealer in Wisconsin said he would buy the guns, no questions asked. He was clearly our best bet.

  Pete came home on Friday. He still wanted to throw the guns into the lake until I reminded him Lake Michigan was a freshwater lake and relatively shallow. The guns would theoretically be usable no matter how long they were underwater. I didn’t know any way to dump them far enough out in the lake so they couldn’t be recovered. There were no bridges across the lake and no accessible piers extending far enough into the lake so the water was deep enough so guns couldn’t be seen. I told him about the dealer in Wisconsin.

  We drove up to the gun dealer later that morning. The dealer took one look at us and pegged us as desperate parents. We probably weren’t the first gun dumpers.

  The maximum amount he would give us was $25. Pete gave Max the money. Max was furious. At me. I suppose I should have been flattered he thought I had this much power over Pete.

  Chapter 39

  The family car was a gravel-dinged VW bus that looked like it had been strafed by a bunch of trigger-happy guerrillas. Boy Scout camp grounds all seemed to be down long gravel roads. It was not your typical Wilmette faux wood-paneled station-wagon. Linda insisted I park a block away when I dropped her off or picked her up.

  Seth thought the ratty looking car was funny. He told his friends we got shot at a lot.

  Max didn’t seem to be aware the battered VW van was an anomaly in Wilmette.

  Our second car was a red Triumph convertible. It was fun to drive, started in the sub-zero temperature readings so common in Illinois but had the traction of a toboggan on ice and a pitifully inadequate heater.

  The north shore of Lake Michigan very rarely got the deep, lake effect snow that blanketed the south shore and Indiana. Our snowfall was rarely more than a few inches. Wilmette didn’t salt the streets and was slow to plow so everyone had studded snow tires. We didn’t put
them on the Triumph because we never drove it in the winter.

  Pete’s and my relationship had deteriorated to the point where it didn’t offer either of us much joy. I sometimes felt as if Pete and I spoke two different languages. I suspect he did too. Looking at our friends and neighbors, our marriage wasn’t unusual. The 1960s was an era of significant change. The idea that women might have individual rights began to ferment and bubble under the surface but in staid Wilmette the weight of tradition prevailed. There were cracks here and there but the women’s movement had no support to break through and be recognized, let alone supported.

  Pete and I rarely had anything that would be considered an outright argument. We didn’t have enough face-to-face conversation time to squander it on controversy. The bulk of our communication was through cryptic notes left on the kitchen counter. Once I decided that I was going to try to make the marriage work and followed Pete to Chicago, I didn’t know what else to do except to keep trying harder but I was losing heart. Pete dealt with our sagging relationship by suggesting we take a trip. It was expensive but cheaper than a divorce. So we went to Jamaica for a week. We come home suntanned, relatively rested and as ready to face another year of insanity as possible.

  When we walked into the house, we knew something bad had happened. No one said hello. Eyes showed too much white and had difficulty focussing. Ann looked like someone in the middle of a scary nightmare. They were sitting around the dining room table with clean plates. It was after seven in the evening. They usually ate at five.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Three voices answered. Max looked apprehensive and stayed mute. When we finally sorted through all the noise, we found out Max had gone joy riding in the Triumph and skidded off the ice covered road in the park by the lake. The police were called. They brought Max home. He was 15.