Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  Ralph said, “You know why it didn’t hurt?”

  “Why?”

  “It knocked me out cold,” he said. “You know that tunnel of light everyone talks about? Let me tell you, pal, it’s true. I saw it. I kept walking deeper and deeper into this bright light, and then I started getting pulled back, away from it, and the next thing I knew, I was awake and in bed. It changed my life, Hank. No kidding. From that point on, I decided to be a different person.”

  “What kind of person was that?”

  He grinned and said, “A mean one.”

  Ralph walked away, and as he reached for the screen door, I said, “How old were you Ralph?”

  “Eight,” he said. He waved at me with the waffle iron, then disappeared into his house.

  I wasn’t feeling so good anymore. I held my gut and walked quickly along the dark streets. I was back in a part of town that made me queasy, an area my mother always told me to stay away from. When I was in the first grade, a high school boy was killed on this very street, clubbed to death with a baseball bat by one of his own classmates, a bully named Karl Elmazi. But the scary part of the story wasn’t that a guy had gotten beaten to death with a Louisville Slugger. It was that the bully had ten of his buddies with him, and none of them, not a single one, tried to stop the beating.

  For my mother, this was a powerful story with a good moral. “Pick your friends carefully,” she liked to say, especially after one of Ralph’s visits.

  The dome light was on inside Dad’s car when I got home, and Kelly was slouched in the driver’s seat, her palm cupped over the mirror on the door. I crept up on her, hoping to scare her, but I didn’t. In fact, she moved only her eyes, as if my being there constituted only the barest of movements.

  “You still depressed?” I asked.

  “After looking at you,” she said, “I’ve never been more depressed in my life.”

  “What’re you so depressed about, anyway?”

  She reached over to the ashtray and picked up a lit cigarette I hadn’t noticed. She said, “Everything and nothing. But I don’t expect you to understand that.”

  I nodded; I didn’t understand. It didn’t seem possible.

  I reached into the car and placed my palm on top of my sister’s head, just to feel it. I’d heard that ninety percent of a person’s body heat escapes out the top of their head, and this was what I felt: searing heat rising like a ghost from Kelly’s scalp.

  Kelly, ignoring my hand, snuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray.

  I took my hand away and said, “What’re you doing out here?”

  “Waiting for Mom,” she said, and this time I did understand. It was nearly midnight; Dad had been home only a short while. I could tell because the car’s engine was still ticking. “We’re going for a ride,” Kelly said. “She says she wants to talk to me about something important.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Good luck,” I said and made my way around the house, to the backyard. From a safe distance, I watched Mom and Dad through the sliding glass door. As usual, they were arguing. Tex came up behind me, his paws crunching the grass with each step. He was lugging a long, bent bone in his mouth, thin at one end, thick at the other.

  “Tex,” I said. “Holy smoke. What’s that?”

  Tex dropped the bone and jogged away, the way he’d been doing all week. I picked it up and held it close to my face to get a good view. It looked like a leg.

  I walked over to the pile of bones next to the gas grill, crouched, and spread them out before me.

  “Tex,” I said, but I was whispering. I was too close to the house, too close to the bug-light, the swarm of bugs, too close, it seemed, to everything. I made my way across the backyard, looking for Tex, listening. The yard was large, and I couldn’t see him or hear him. No doubt he was flat in the high grass, resting, listening to crickets, distant dogs, and the high power lines sizzling above us.

  My parents were still arguing, but they looked so small out here, this far away, that it was impossible to take them seriously. If only they could’ve seen themselves, they might actually have laughed. Instead, Dad pointed at Mom, and it looked as if he were saying, Sit! Give me a paw! And Mom, as though she’d read my mind or sensed what I had sensed, lifted her purse from the floor and left the house. A moment later, the car started. Dad stood alone in the kitchen while Mom revved the engine too hard, gunning it, trying to blow it up. When she finally let up on the gas, she backed out of the driveway, headlights spraying across our house before she aimed her car down the road that would eventually take her away from us for good.

  “Tex,” I said. But Tex wouldn’t answer.

  Dad opened the sliding glass door and walked outside, and I took a step back. He was staring right at me, but he couldn’t see me. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and smacked the pack against his palm. I’d seen him do this thousands of times before, but only now did it register that here was a man smacking a pack of cigarettes into his palm, and I had no idea why.

  Dad stood on the back porch, exhausted, lighting a cigarette, the weight of everyone’s life crushing his head, this man I both knew and didn’t know—a dad’s dad, I thought and tried snickering, but I’d never snickered before and couldn’t do it now. Dad looked deeper into the backyard, searching for the sound he had heard, my half-snicker. He tried to see but couldn’t and gave up. He looked down. Leaning forward, he rested his hand on the gas grill for support. At first I thought he was fainting, collapsing from stress. A heart attack, I thought. A stroke. I was about to run toward him, to help him, then realized he wasn’t dying at all—not yet, at least—but looking down at the bones Tex had found. He eased himself onto his knees and began messing with them, arranging them the way you would a puzzle. Then he leaned back and studied what he’d done. I couldn’t see it, not really, but I knew that he was crying. There was something about his posture, and about the way he touched the bones and simply stared.

  He said something I couldn’t hear, and I stepped back further into darkness. I sensed Tex close by, behind me, and I stepped back again, but I fell this time, my leg suddenly deep inside a hole.

  Tex nudged my arm with his cold nose, his gesture of need. I pulled my leg from the hole and reached into the ground.

  “Dad,” I whispered, but Dad couldn’t hear me.

  Dad was sitting now, resting against the grill, moving his hand through the air. He was petting the ghost of a dog he’d once known, and all the way across the yard I was touching that same dog’s skull, still lodged in the earth. I tried to imagine the sorts of things firing inside Dad’s head, and so I looked at Tex, concentrating on the bones beyond his fur and skin, beyond the Tex I knew—the dog beneath the dog—but I couldn’t imagine anything at all. There was no dog beneath the dog. There was only Tex.

  When Dad finally looked up from the bones, he peered out into the dark of the backyard and called my name. “Hank? Is that you out there?” he asked. “Hank. What are you doing?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was already filling in the hole, clawing frantically, trying to cover the skull.

  “You okay?” he asked. “You hurt or something?”

  I flattened out, placing my head against the ground, remaining as still as possible.

  “They’re all against me, Hank,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Not you, too.” He took a long drag off his cigarette, and while smoke escaped his nose and mouth, momentarily blanketing his face, he shook his head, then stepped back into the nervous quiet of our house.

  5

  The Sheridan, at the corner of 79th and Harlem, was our nearest drive-in movie theater. It was a dusty parking lot with a few hundred metal posts poking up out of the gravel. Each post held a cast-iron speaker. At the center of the lot was a low-to-the-ground concrete bunker where concessions were sold and where the projectionist ran the movie. When my parents took me and Kelly to the Sheridan, we sometimes had to drive around to find a speaker that worked. My father, cursing each time one
wouldn’t click on, would eventually say, “I’ll try one more, and if that one doesn’t work, I’m getting a refund.” But the last one always worked, maybe because the odds were leaning in our favor with each bad speaker, or maybe because we would end up parking several rows behind everyone else and the speakers back there hadn’t been used much.

  When we first started going to The Sheridan, my parents owned a Rambler. My father didn’t like to run the heat during the movie—“We’ll burn up all our gas,” he’d say—so on cold nights we’d bring blankets and pile them up on top of us. Kelly would kick me under the blankets and then blame me for starting it.

  “Both of you better cut it out,” my father would say, “or this is the last thing we’ll ever do together as a family, you hear me?”

  The truth is, it was the only thing we ever did together besides live in the same house, but the threat always hinted to other, more interesting things, all of which would vanish if we didn’t cut it out. I wanted to ask if there were things that I was forgetting, but I knew that this question would set my father off. I was always setting one or the other of my parents off with questions I’d ask before I really thought them through.

  During our dozen years of going to the Sheridan, we saw probably fifty or sixty movies, but the ones I remembered best were Easy Rider, Planet of the Apes, The Chinese Connection, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Buster and Billie, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Walking Tall, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Enter the Dragon, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. The few times that I made the mistake of going with someone else’s parents, I saw The Love Bug and a movie called Gus about a mule that played football.

  Every night was a double feature. The first movie was always the one that everyone in the world wanted to see, but I liked going to the Sheridan for other reasons. For starters, I liked intermission. A black-and-white movie of a clown pointing to a ticking clock played on the screen to show how much time you had left to buy hot dogs. On those rare occasions when my father would give me money to get everyone a hot dog, I would walk by the projectionist’s booth and look at the man inside. It was the same man each time, an old guy with a pencil thin mustache, the kind of mustache Bud Abbott had, and he would always be smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine. One time I walked in front of the concession stand and jumped up with my arm in the air, and the shadow of my hand appeared on the screen, magnified to at least twelve feet high and three feet wide. When I got back to the car, I wanted to ask if anyone had seen my incredibly big hand, but my father was complaining about how little ice was in the cooler, and how his beer, sitting on top of everyone else’s drinks, was now too warm to enjoy. Kelly, sound asleep or pretending to be sound asleep, was nothing more than a lump under the covers. I handed over to my mother the hot dogs, each one slipped into a shiny aluminum bag so that they looked like miniature rocket ships.

  “If Kelly doesn’t wake up,” Dad said, “I’ll take her hot dog. She’ll never know, right?”

  The other thing that I liked about going to the Sheridan was the second movie because they were often about women in prison, and sometimes the women weren’t wearing any clothes. My parents liked to believe that I had fallen asleep by the time the movie had gotten to the racy parts, and I’d even go so far as to shut my eyes.

  “Are they asleep?” my father always asked at the appearance of the first half-dressed woman.

  My mother’d turn around and say, “Kelly’s asleep. I can’t tell about Hank. He’s still sitting up.” And then she’d call out to me in a heavy whisper: “Hank. Are you asleep? Hank. You’re not watching this, are you?”

  As soon as she turned back around, I’d open my eyes just a little so that they were narrow slits through which I could watch the movie. Usually, the movies were about women who’d gone bad, women who were in prison at the very beginning of the movie, or women who weren’t bad to begin with but who ended up bad in prison anyway. I imagined girls from my school—Mary Polaski or Peggy Petropulos—handcuffed and put together in a dark jail cell. I imagined myself as a prison guard, smacking my billy club against my palm, walking back and forth in front of their cell.

  No matter how hard I tried not to, I always fell asleep at some point during the movie, dreaming of girls from my class, all of them now in prison, and when I woke up, I was either slung over my father’s shoulder or I was already in my own bed, my body curled like a fist. Only once did I wake up during the movie itself, and my mom and dad were in the front seat kissing. I’d never seen them kiss like this, on the mouth, the way men and women kiss in movies. On the screen behind them was a woman who, having escaped from prison, was being chased by a pack of vicious dogs. I couldn’t actually see the face of the woman being chased because we were seeing everything through her eyes. The dogs were barking behind us, getting louder, catching up to us, while jagged tree branches scratched our arms and fallen tree trunks caused us to trip and stumble. My mother said to my father, “Okay, that’s enough,” and my father leaned back away from her. Without a word, he rolled down the window and returned the speaker to its hook. Then he started the car and backed out of our space.

  Was this what they did each time Kelly and I fell asleep at the drive-in? Did they kiss until my mother said they’d had enough?

  As Dad circled the parking lot, I could still hear the tinny barks and growls of angry dogs. I had to swivel in my seat to keep watching the movie, but as my father pulled out of the Sheridan and turned onto Harlem Avenue, the screen got smaller and smaller, until finally it all disappeared, leaving the four of us alone—me; my sister the lump; my mother picking up trash and stuffing it into a too-small bag; and my father behind the wheel. My father’s eyes kept darting up to the rearview mirror, and I imagined that the pack of dogs, having jumped from the screen, was following us, gaining on us, and that my father was doing what needed to be done to save us, but you could tell by the haunted look in his eyes that he feared he would fail.

  6

  Ralph ran a hand up and over his head, flattening his hair before some freak combination of wind and static electricity blew it straight up and into a real-life fright wig.

  We were standing at the far edge of the blacktop at Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School, as far away from the recess monitor as we could get. In addition to being a foot taller than the rest of us, Ralph was starting to sprout sprigs of whiskers along his cheeks and chin, scaring the girls and prompting the principal, Mr. Santoro, to drop into our homeroom unexpectedly and deliver speeches about personal hygiene.

  “Boys,” Mr. Santoro would say. “Some of you are starting to look like hoodlums.” Though he addressed his insult to all the boys, everyone knew he meant Ralph.

  Today, Ralph pulled a fat Sears catalog out of a grocery sack, shook it at me, and said, “Get a load of this.” The catalog was fatter than it should have been, as if someone had dropped it into a swamp and then pulled its bloated carcass out a few days later.

  “I don’t think they sell that stuff anymore,” I said. “That’s a 1974 catalog, Ralph.”

  “Quiet,” Ralph said. He licked two fingers, smearing photos and words each time he touched a page to turn it. “I’ll show you Patty O’Dell.”

  “You found it?” I said. “That’s it?”

  Ralph nodded.

  Rumor was that Patty O’Dell had modeled panties for Sears when she was seven or eight, and for the past two years Ralph had diligently pursued the rumor. If there existed somewhere on this planet a photo of Patty O’Dell in nothing but her panties, Ralph was going to find it.

  “Here she is,” Ralph said. Reluctantly, he surrendered the mildewed catalog. “Careful with it,” he said.

  Ralph stood beside me, arms crossed, guarding his treasure. His hair still stood on end, as if he had stuck the very fingers he had licked into a live socket. I looked down at the photo, then peeked up at Ralph, but he just nodded for me to keep my eyes on the catalog.

  I had no idea why Ralph and I were friends. I was
a B+ student, a model citizen. Ralph already had a criminal record, a string of shoplifting charges all along Chicago’s southwest side. He kept mug shots of himself in his wallet. The first time I met Ralph, he had walked up to me and asked if he could bum a smoke. That was four years ago. I was nine. I didn’t smoke, but I didn’t tell Ralph that. I said, “Sorry. Smoked the last one at recess.”

  The photo in the catalog was, in fact, of a girl wearing only panties. She was holding each of her shoulders so that her arms criss-crossed over her chest, and though I saw a vague resemblance, the girl in the photo was not Patty O’Dell. Not even close. After two years of fruitless searching, Ralph was starting to get desperate.

  “That’s not her,” I said.

  “Of course it’s her,” he said.

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  “Give it to me.” Ralph snatched the catalog out of my hands.

  “Ralph. Get real. All you need to do is look at Patty, then look at the girl in the photo. They look nothing alike.”

  Ralph and I scanned the blacktop, searching for Patty O’Dell. It was Halloween, and I couldn’t help myself: I looked instead for girls dressed like cats. All year I would dream about the girls who came to school as cats…Mary Pulaski zipped up inside of a one-piece cat costume, purring, meowing, licking her paws while her stiff, curled tail vibrated behind her with each step she took. Or Gina Morales, actually down on all fours, crawling along the scuffed tile floor of our classroom: up one aisle, down the next, brushing against our legs and letting us pet her. The very thought of it now gave my heart pause. It stole my breath. But only the younger kids dressed up anymore, and all I could find on the blacktop today were Darth Vaders and Chewbaccas, C-3POs and R2-D2s. The occasional Snoopy.

  The seventh and eighth graders were already tired of Halloween, tired of shenanigans, slouching and yawning, waiting for the day to come to an end. Among us, only Wes Papadakis wore a costume, a full-head rubber Creature From the Black Lagoon mask, suctioned to his face. Next to him was Pete Elmazi, who wore his dad’s Vietnam army jacket every day to school, no matter the season. There was Fred Lesniewski, who stood alone, an outcast for winning the Science Fair eight years in a row, since everyone knew his father worked at Argonne National Laboratory—where the white deer of genetic experiments loped behind a hurricane-wire fence, and where tomatoes grew to be the size of pumpkins—and that it was Fred’s father (and not Fred) who was responsible for such award-winning projects as “How to Split an Atom in Your Own Kitchen” and “The Zero Gravity Chamber: Step Inside!”