Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  When I arrived home from school, Grandma was in the living room, sitting in the recliner, feet propped up. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, and I wondered if the police had gone to her house and confiscated all of them, leaving her barefoot.“Grams!” I yelled, but my father cut me off.

  “Don’t talk to her,” he said. “She’s grounded.”

  Grandma smiled at me, then shrugged. With her forefinger and thumb, she made like she was zipping her own mouth shut. For my benefit, she cocked her head at my father and rolled her eyes. My fear of her as a hardened criminal lessened at the greater fear that she had taken up mime.

  Dad said, “She’s unrepentant. She says it was an innocent mistake. Jesus Christ Almighty. My own mother, an unrepentant crook!”

  I found my sister in the backyard with Mom. They were both sitting on rusty lawn chairs. I said, “Grams is home.”

  Kelly said, “Better hammer your shoes to the floor.”

  I was about to tell her to take it easy on the old lady when I noticed that they were both drinking fruity, icy drinks, and that both my mom’s and my sister’s lips were bright red. “What are those?” I asked. “Slurpees?”

  Mom said, “Not quite. Just a little something to take the edge off.”

  Kelly extended her arm over her head, then wiggled her hand like she was shaking a maraca. “MargaRITA,” she said.

  “You’re drinking alcohol?” I asked.

  Mom said, “Oh, Hank, it’s just a margarita. It’s mostly ice.”

  “Well, then,” I said. “Can I have one?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re too young.”

  I looked inside, through the plate-glass window, and could see Dad pointing at Grandma, reprimanding her, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Grandma sat stock-still, staring straight ahead, looking like a taxidermied version of her own self. Then her eyes began to move, slowly tracking toward me. When she finally spotted me, she started to smile but stopped. I could tell that she was worried that I didn’t like her anymore, the way everyone else seemed not to like her anymore, so I smiled to reassure her that this wasn’t the case. For lack of anything better to do, I pretended that I was leaning against something, the way a mime would. Next, I acted like a heavy wind had swept through town, and it was all I could do to keep standing while walking into it. For my final routine, I pretended that I was trapped inside of a box, and that the box kept getting smaller and smaller. Grandma was laughing. My dad was in the middle of one of his tell-me-what-I’ve-done-to-make-you-screw-up-so-badly gestures when he turned and saw me outside pretending to be Marcel Marceau. The box that I was inside kept getting smaller and I kept trying to curl tighter and tighter, lying on my side now, pulling my legs up to my chest and starting to convulse, as if the box were crushing me.

  Mom turned, saw me, and yelled, “Oh my God, Hank’s having a seizure!”

  Kelly said, “Put a pencil in his mouth so he doesn’t bite his tongue off.”

  My father, though unable to hear either my mother or Kelly, lunged for the phone in the living room and started dialing.

  But it was Grandma I kept watching, and I felt in that moment that we were reading each other’s mind, and that she was the only person in this whole crazy family who’d ever really understood me.

  Ralph and I spent the weekend trailing Roark Pile. I wasn’t sure why I was trailing him with Ralph, except that I was bored and I’d never trailed anyone before. When you trail someone, you learn how dull people really are. I guess I thought we’d be following Roark onto construction sites and into hollowed-out mounds of dirt that no one else knew about, or that he’d have secret knocks for getting into unmarked storefronts, or that maybe he’d have a girlfriend from another school, a girl who reminded him, in some remotely hairy way, of his favorite Star Wars character, Chewbacca. But no: the Roark Pile of my imagination had nothing to do with the real Roark Pile. And what we already knew about Roark Pile from school—that he didn’t have any friends and that he was obsessed with Star Wars—was all that there was to know about him.

  “Man oh man,” I said. “This is one boring guy.”

  Ralph poked my shoulder with his forefinger and said, “Follow yourself around one day and see how interesting you are.”

  I wanted to ask Ralph at what point he had started taking Roark’s side, but I let it slide. Following someone all day long can make you crabby. After several hours of hiding behind a thorny bush across the street from Roark’s house, Ralph and I decided to call it a day.

  Ralph said, “Is your grandmother out of the clink?”

  “Dad sprung her yesterday,” I said.

  Ralph nodded. “She staying with you guys?”

  “Until we can figure out what to do with her,” I said.

  At the corner where Ralph and I were to go our separate ways, Ralph said, “Maybe you could set up a meet. You know, me, your grandmother, Kenny, Norm.”

  “Kenny and Norm?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Ralph said. “I told them about the old lady. The word genius came up ten times. I kept count. Of course, eight of those times Kenny and Norm were talking about themselves, but still…”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  “You’re a good egg,” Ralph said, but then he punched my arm so hard that if I really were an egg, I’d have splattered all over his fist.

  When I got home, Dad was sitting at the kitchen table with six crushed beer cans in front him and one sweaty can in his hand. Mom was curled on the couch, weeping. Kelly was staring blankly at a fuzzy TV show on the Spanish station.

  “Hey, where’s Uncle Fester and Cousin It?” I asked.

  “Somebody tell Hank,” Mom said.

  “What?”

  Kelly turned from the mustachioed bandito on TV and said, “Grandma’s dead.”

  “She’s dead?” I yelled. My first thought was that Dad had killed her, and I felt a strong urge to creep to the front door, then bolt for my life.

  “She had a heart attack,” Kelly said. “One minute she was eating oatmeal, the next she was dead. It was fast. Not entirely painless, but not too bad, I guess.”

  “Where’s she now?”

  “What, do you mean like heaven?” Kelly asked. “I guess that’s where she is, but I don’t know. I don’t think she went to confession after stealing all those shoes, so she might not be in heaven. She might be, you know, some other place. It’s hard to say. I guess we’d have to ask a priest.”

  I glared at Kelly before saying, “Where’s her body?”

  “Oh. An ambulance came and took her away.” She cocked an eyebrow and said, “Any more questions, Sherlock? I mean, we’re all a little broken up around here since we were the ones who were here when it happened.”

  I could tell that Kelly enjoyed having been here when Grandma keeled over. It made her one of the chosen ones. Later, she would probably cite this moment as one more piece of evidence of her superiority over me.

  “I guess I don’t have any more questions,” I said. “Nope, I guess that’s it for now.”

  The next time I saw Ralph, I told him about my grandmother. We were across the street from Roark Pile’s house, hiding behind a row of hedges.

  Ralph nodded gravely. “They got to her,” he said.

  “Who got to her?”

  “Shoe store managers,” he said.

  “Actually, it was a heart attack. She was pretty old.”

  Ralph laughed, shook his head. “Hank, Hank, Hank. Think about it. What are the odds? The old woman goes to the slammer, right? She gets out, but before she has a chance to get back to work, wham, she falls over dead. And you think that’s a coincidence? Hey, look,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “I was born the same day Kennedy was killed. I know about conspiracies. It’s in my blood.” He removed his arm and said, “When’s the funeral?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Ralph said, “When you find out, let me know. I’d lik
e to pay my respects to the old broad.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  Roark Pile emerged from his house, tugging on his Chewbacca T-shirt. He seemed especially bug-like today, walking with his shoulders hunched and his head down, seemingly without a direction in mind, as though feeling his way across town with a pair of antennas. We followed him for hours—past New Castle Park, where the power line towers buzzed so hard your teeth would start to zing; to Haunted Trails Miniature Golf Range, where, on the first hole, you had to putt the golfball between Frankenstein’s legs; to Dunkin’ Donuts, where I had once vomited across the counter. We ended up at the city reservoir, which was a bone-dry cavern alongside 87th street. Another boy was down there waiting for him. It was the first time, to my knowledge, that Roark had made contact with another human being his own age.

  “What are they doing?” Ralph said.

  I pulled out my father’s binoculars, a fancy pair with zoom that I controlled with my forefinger, only today I couldn’t seem to focus and zoom at the same time. I hadn’t used them much before except to zoom in on my sister’s face at close range and start screaming, causing her to yawn and say, “Puh-leaze.”

  “Look,” Ralph said. “They’re making an exchange of some kind. I bet he borrowed money from a loan shark.”

  “I can’t see,” I said, zooming in and out, trying to focus.

  “Roark Pile, gambling addict,” Ralph said. “No wonder they want me to bite his ear off. He probably owes money all over town. It’s finally making sense.”

  “Wait, wait,” I said, capturing Roark in my sights. “Okay, I got him.”

  Ralph said, “Well?”

  “They’re trading Star Wars cards,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. I bet,” Ralph said, unconvinced.

  “No, I can see them. It’s Star Wars trading cards.”

  Ralph said, “Why the hell are they meeting all the way down there then? And who’s that kid? Do we know him?”

  Across 87th street was a different school district, meaning that there were a dozen more grade schools and another high school, our rival high school, and it was possible that one of their kids had slipped across the border to make this exchange with Roark. I told my theory to Ralph.

  “I wish I had a high-powered rifle,” he said. “I’d shoot the cards right out of their hands. Scare ’em a little.”

  “So,” I said. “Are you going to bite off his ear or what?”

  “I don’t know,” Ralph said. “I mean, I guess so. I don’t have any good reason not to bite it off. Something’s not right.” He stood from his crouch and said, “I wish I knew what, though.”

  My mother took me to Robert Hall to buy a suit right off the rack, just as the commercial advertised. My last suit was from 1975, a sky-blue leisure deal that my mother had thought looked nice with a dark-blue turtleneck, but every time I put that turtleneck on, I thought that I was going to choke to death.

  “Ugh, I can’t breathe,” I’d say in a raspy voice through labored breaths. Kelly would roll her eyes, and Mom would say, “Hank, cut it out before someone decides to choke you for real.”

  Turtlenecks always jacked up my body temperature a notch or two, and my face and ears would turn dark red if I wore one for too long.

  Today, Mom pulled a dark-blue leisure suit off the rack and said, “Now, this would look nice with a light-blue turtleneck.”

  “No turtlenecks!” I yelled. “They CHOKE me! You don’t BELIEVE me, but they DO! They cut off the circulation to my HEAD and then I can’t BREATHE!”

  A few customers stopped what they were doing to stare at me. Other kids’ mothers looked disgusted that someone my age was whining.

  “Okay, okay,” Mom said. “Now, keep your voice down.”

  To quiet me, she pulled off the rack a three-piece forest-green suit and promptly located a matching tie. Suit in bag, we stopped next door at Kinney Shoes for a new pair of patent leather wingtips.

  “Hey,” I whispered to Mom. “Is this one of the places grandma knocked over?”

  “Shhhh,” she said. “Quiet.”

  Since Mom didn’t answer me, I had to assume that my guess was correct. When a large man burst through the saloon-style doors that separated the customers from the stock in back, I thought of Ralph’s conspiracy theory, how the shoe store managers were probably involved in Gramsie’s death.

  “I see we’re doing a little shopping today,” the big guy said. “A Robert Hall suit!” He nodded at the bag. “And what’s the occasion? You look a little young to be getting married!” He winked.

  “A death in the family,” my mother explained. “His grandmother.”

  “Oh. Oh, well, I’m very sorry,” the man said. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t know.”

  How COULD he know? I thought. Why would he say that he didn’t know unless he DID know? I said, “We think someone killed her.”

  “Hank!” Mom said.

  The salesman cocked his head and squinted at me, sizing up the situation. “Murder?” he asked.

  “Maybe you heard of her,” I said. “Ruth Boyd.” I waited. The man didn’t say anything, so I continued. “She got herself mixed up with some people she shouldn’t have.”

  Mom took hold of my elbow, squeezed it as hard as she could, and said, “Enough!” I was about to say more when my mother yanked my arm hard enough to put a dislocated shoulder back into place. With the salesman eyeing both of us now, my mother smiled bravely and said, “What kind of dress shoe do you have in a size eight?”

  That night, Ralph and I trailed Roark Pile again, but Roark spotted us and took off running.

  “I think he’s on to us,” Ralph said.

  “I don’t know why you don’t just bite his ear off,” I complained.

  Ralph said, “How’d you like it if somebody hired me to bite your ear off? Now, let’s say they hired me for all the wrong reasons. It seems to me that a little investigative work might save you your ear, right? And that’s all fine and dandy if it’s your ear I’ve been hired to bite off, isn’t it? But not if it’s someone else’s. No! You want me to bite a guy’s ear off without doing any legwork. Who knows what chain reaction I’ll set off if I bite somebody’s ear off for the wrong reason? Jesus, Hank, your head’s so thick I’m surprised it’s not in a laboratory being weighed even as we speak.”

  Ralph was wearing an old turtleneck that had been eaten by moths. I hadn’t meant to set him off, so I decided to change the subject. “I can’t wear turtlenecks. They choke me.”

  “Choke you?” he said. “What, like this?” He reached out and grabbed my neck, and although he was only joking, he choked me for a good five seconds before letting go. He snickered and, mocking me, said, “They choke me! You know what? If I had a little spare time, I’d bring a lawsuit against the school and make a case that you should’ve failed two grades, not me.”

  I could tell that this business of biting off Roark Pile’s ear was troubling Ralph, and that this was why he was snapping at me. I decided not to take any of it personally, but I also didn’t want to get choked again, so I said, “I better go, Ralph. People are still grieving back home.”

  Ralph nodded. “Yeah, well,” he said. “It’s not like Roark Pile’s ear is going anywhere, now is it?”

  “Apparently not,” I said.

  Grandma’s wake was held at Vitiriti and Sons Funeral Parlor. I’d never seen a dead person before and I was secretly looking forward to it until I actually saw my own grandmother in the casket. I couldn’t help myself. I burst out crying.

  My sister, Kelly, came up to me and whispered, “Geez, Hank, are you okay?”

  My shoulders shuddered, and I couldn’t catch my breath. My crying reached the point that it didn’t seem to have anything to do with Grandma anymore. I was feeling lightheaded, the way I felt lightheaded around gasoline pumps, and like those dizzying moments at the Standard Oil with my dad or mom, when I’d suck in the fumes as fast as I could, I started to enjoy the act of crying, the giddy way it mad
e me feel, and I wasn’t sure I could make myself stop crying even if I wanted to.

  My mother came over and said, “Oh, my poor Hank,” and hugged me until her blouse was soaking wet from tears.

  My father eventually stomped over and said, “You’re scaring everyone, Hank. Go outside and get some fresh air.” He nudged me away from the casket.

  Outside, in the dark funeral home parking lot, I found Ralph and his cousins, Norm and Kenny. Norm was wearing a tuxedo T-shirt. Kenny was wearing a powder-blue tux he must not have returned after his senior prom five years ago. Ralph was wearing the same moth-eaten turtleneck he’d worn yesterday.

  “Hey, hey! Look at you,” Norm said, tugging at my new suit and sniggering. “Somebody die?” Kenny punched him, and Norm said, “Oh yeah. Sorry.”

  Ralph said, “You forgot to tell me about the wake, Hank. I had to look it up in the newspaper.”

  I hadn’t told him on purpose, but I acted surprised. “I didn’t tell you?”

  Ralph leaned toward me and said, “Hey, you been crying or what?”

  “Nah,” I said. “I’m allergic to perfume.”

  Ralph said, “You look like a blowfish. Doesn’t he look like a blowfish?”

  “He looks like a blowfish,” Norm said.

  Kenny nodded. “He looks like a blowfish.”

  I needed to change the subject, so I asked Ralph if he’d bitten off Roark’s ear yet.

  “Soon,” Ralph said. “Tomorrow, maybe.” He nodded, as if imagining the crucial moment that his teeth would sink into the lobe. He said, “You going back inside?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Okay,” Ralph said, “I guess it’s time for us to pay our respects then.”

  Kenny and Norm nodded solemnly. Ralph slapped me on the back. Kenny pinched my cheek. Norm trapped me in a bear hug and said, “Don’t ever forget her, man.” He smelled like beer and Italian sausage. For a second I thought Norm had fallen asleep on my shoulder, but then he stood, straightened his tuxedo T-shirt, and said, “All right, dudes, let’s do it.”

  •

  The next morning at school, Ralph said, “I’m biting Roark’s ear off tonight, six o’clock, no matter where he is or what he’s doing.”