by John McNally
“I guess so,” I said.
“My name’s Bob. Can you remember to tell that to Norm? Bob.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’m Jennifer’s brother,” Bob said.
“Jennifer O’Dell?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“So you must be Patty’s brother, too.” I glanced quickly around the room for catalogs. Bob kept his eyes on me, then squeezed the giant Tootsie Roll, as if it were my neck, until the lid popped off. He emptied it onto a card table. The best I could tell, there were three tens and a twenty, along with a note folded into a tight triangle, the kind we used in homeroom as footballs.
“Maybe I should go,” I said.
Bob put his hand out, as if he were a traffic cop, and said, “Not yet. Follow me.” We walked down a short and narrow hallway to a door at the far end of the trailer. When Bob opened the door, he motioned for me to join him inside the room.
It was dark, almost too dark to see, the only light coming from the room now behind us. Two women were resting in bed, and at first I wanted to laugh, because one of the women looked like she was wearing Wes Papadakis’s Creature From the Black Lagoon mask, and the thought of a grown woman lying in bed in the dark wearing a stupid rubber mask struck just the right chord in me tonight. Bob was trying to scare me, his very own Halloween prank, but I wasn’t falling for it. I started snickering when Bob flipped on the light and I saw her face. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. It kept drawing me in, like a pinwheel: eyes so puffy she could barely see out…lips cracked open and swollen…the zigzag of stitches along her nostril.
The other woman sitting on the bed was a girl my age, and when I realized who it was, that it was Patty O’Dell, I quit breathing. She was wearing a long white T-shirt that she kept pulling over her knees, trying to hide herself from me. I knew it was the wrong time to think about Patty posing in the catalog. I couldn’t help myself, though. But each time I got to the part where Patty would take off her socks, I would look over at her sister—I couldn’t not look—and the Patty of my imagination would dissolve into something dark and grainy.
When I finally gave up, I raised my hand and said, “Hi, Patty,” but Patty turned her head away from me and stared at the wall.
“How much did he bring?” Jennifer asked.
Bob huffed. “Fifty bucks,” he said.
The woman looked down at her hands.
“There’s a note, too,” Bob said. He unfolded the triangle and said, “Oh, this is classic. You’ll love this. He spelled your name wrong. He doesn’t even know how to spell your name. Hey. Big surprise. The man’s illiterate.” Bob laughed and shook his head. “Says here he’ll try to get you the rest of the money tomorrow.”
“Figures,” she said.
Bob crumpled the note and said, “So what should we tell Gene Simmons? We can’t keep an important man, a man of his stature, tied up all night.”
“Tell Norm it’s too late. He had his chance. That was the agreement. A thousand dollars or I’d call the police and file a complaint.”
Bob looked at me. “You got that?”
I nodded.
“Good,” Bob said. “Tell him to expect the police at his door in, oh, let’s say an hour, two at the most. Maybe that’ll teach him not to hit a woman.”
My clogs clopped hollowly against the asphalt all the way back to the car. The night was officially ruined. I might not have been able to hold infinity in my mind, but I sure knew the end of something when I saw it.
My stomach cramped up, as if it had been punctured, as if my body were somehow poisoning itself. I was angry at Norm, certainly, angry at Norm for beating up Jennifer, angry at Norm for driving us around and acting like it was nothing, a mistake, a mistake anyone could make…but I was also angry at Norm for how Patty had looked at me, then looked away, angry because I was close to something, I wasn’t sure what, but each time I got within reach, I looked over at Jennifer, I saw her face, and it all disappeared. Norm had ruined it for me, whatever it was. For that I wanted to hurt Norm myself, but the closer I got to him, the more unlikely that seemed. I was thirteen. Norm was twenty-five. What could I possibly do?
Near the Impala, I heard someone gagging, trying to catch his breath. I dashed around the car and found Ralph bent over, a pool of vomit next to a tire. Ralph’s door was open, and the dome light inside the car lit up half of Ralph’s face. Norm was slumped down in the driver’s seat, his hand drooped over the steering wheel, a cigarette smoldering between two fingers. The radio was on low. Ralph’s fingers clanked together, and I thought of Brutus, his knife plunging into Caesar, again and again.
“What did he do to you?” I whispered to Ralph. “Did he punch you in the stomach?”
“Who?” Ralph asked, still bent over, not looking at me.
“Norm,” I said.
Ralph peeked up now, fangs of vomit dripping from his chin. “Why would Norm punch me in the stomach?”
“You’re throwing up,” I said.
“I know. I ate too many Tootsie Rolls,” Ralph said. “Besides, it’s a Roman ritual. Eat ’til you puke. I wanted to see if I could do it. You should congratulate me.”
After Ralph cleaned himself off with handfuls of loose dirt and the inside of his cape, we slid back into the car. Ralph said, “The first vomitorium on the South Side of Chicago. People will travel from miles away to yak their brains out here.”
Norm revved the engine. He said, “So? What did she say?”
“She wants to talk to you,” I lied.
“Oh yeah?”
“She wants you to go home,” I said, thinking of the police at his door later tonight, knocking with their billy clubs. “She said she’ll be there in an hour,” I added.
“Really,” Norm said, sticking the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and pounding the steering wheel with his palm. “Well, what do you know about that? She’s forgiven me.”
“You bet,” I said.
Norm shook his head and put the car in reverse. Back on Harlem Avenue, he said, “So where do you boys want to go?”
“Home,” I said.
“Home it is!” Norm said. He said home as if it were an exotic place, like Liechtenstein or the Bermuda Triangle.
And so we drove in silence the first few miles. Then Norm said, “You think I should buy her some roses?”
“Nah,” I said. “No sense wasting your money.”
I could see Norm’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He was watching me, but I couldn’t tell if he knew that I was lying. At a stoplight he turned around and said, “Gene Simmons, huh?”
“Gene Simmons,” I said.
“From KISS,” Ralph added.
Norm said, “When I was in high school, I went to a costume party dressed as Jim Croce. I glued on this big hairy mustache and walked around with a cigar and sang ‘Operator.’ Chicks dug it.” He smiled nostalgically until people behind us started honking. The light had turned green. “All right!” he yelled. “I’m going already!”
Not far from the junior college, a pack of men and women wearing togas trudged along a sidewalk, hooting and raising bottles of liquor above their heads. “Whoa! Would you look at that,” Norm said.
Ralph cranked down the window for a better view. He said, “Stop the car.”
“What?”
“Stop the car, Norm. I need to join them.”
“Why?”
Ralph, peering out the window at the throng of bedsheets and olive-wreaths, said, “My people.”
“What people?” Norm asked.
“Romans!” Ralph got out of the car and yelled to the passing crowd: “Greetings!” He raised his hand with the butterknives in salutation, and the Romans went wild. They beckoned Ralph over, and Ralph loped across the street.
Norm shook his head. “He’s something else, ain’t he? Half the time I forget we’re related.”
I had turned back to Norm, but Norm was still watching Ralph, amazed. I studied Norm but found no clues, no t
race of what I was looking for, so I decided to ask him, to see what he’d say. “Why’d you do it?”
Norm’s eyes moved slowly from Ralph to me, focusing, his pupils growing, adjusting to the difference in light. His brow furrowed, and he looked like he really wanted to answer me, as if the reasons were somewhere on the tip of his tongue. Then he shook his head and said, “Hell, I don’t know. You lose control sometimes.” He rubbed his hand up over his hair in such a way that it stood on end, the way Ralph’s hair had stood on end this morning…a family gene, I suspected, a whole genealogy of screwed-up things inside him that he didn’t understand, would never understand…and I thought, Of course Norm doesn’t know. Of course. Not that the answer to my question was any comfort. Just the opposite, in fact.
Slowly we drove on, though a block away, as the last goblin of the night floated past us, I couldn’t resist. I turned and looked out the back window again.
The Romans were holding Ralph aloft, over their heads, and chanting his name. Ralph, floating above them, looked so content, so pleased, you could almost be fooled into believing he was leading his people into Chicago, as Caesar had gone into Gaul, to bring us all, by way of murder and pillage, together as one people, one tribe.
7
The power company that serviced Chicago and its suburbs wanted to do something nice for the kids, so they constructed parks where their power line towers sat. Where I lived were three of these parks, each with a two-hoop basketball court, a swing-set, a merry-go-round, a slide, and a couple of giant cast-iron insects that sat atop industrial-sized springs, all of this in the shadows of wires, hundreds of them, strung from tower to tower like garland at Christmastime. Every few hours the power lines surged, and the buzzing, growing louder, was the sound I imagined a man in an electric chair heard as his own sour spirit detached from his body, the way a humongous Band-Aid would sound peeled from a really hairy leg.
I wasn’t much of an athlete, but I liked throwing my basketball around at New Castle Park, one of the three parks with the power line towers. Everyone I knew watched the Harlem Globetrotters on TV, and for a while it seemed that every kid in town owned a red, white, and blue basketball. At least once a day you’d see some poor kid trying to dribble a figure-eight between and around his legs. It was embarrassing to watch—their bulging-eyed concentration, their rigor mortus legs forming an upside-down U, the slippery ball flipped into the street, sometimes in front of a speeding car. My favorite Globetrotters were Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal, but I knew I’d never be able to do what they could do, and so I was satisfied with banging the basketball off the backboard, occasionally making a basket, all under the constant hum and crackle of the power lines. I threw that ball again and again, trying to empty my head of all thoughts. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded, draining away your own past and future, trying to exist in whatever moment you happened to be in—not a second before and not a second after. This was how I imagined insects spent their days. I had stared hard into the eyes of a fly once, wondering if it had ever, even for a second, thought about what it had done the day before. One time I stared at a grasshopper for thirty minutes, hoping for a sign, a look of reflection, but I wasn’t so sure that it even remembered what it was doing when I first began looking at it. One thing I learned was that it was difficult to not think about anything because thinking about not thinking was actually thinking about something. The idea of nothing fascinated me. I loved the idea of nothing because it didn’t seem possible. How could there ever be nothing? There couldn’t! And so I’d throw the ball, again and again, until I’d get a splitting headache trying to think of nothing but thinking about everything else instead. I always got a headache playing basketball, and I always took this as my sign to go home.
One November day, I saw Ralph trudging along New Castle Avenue, dragging a burlap bag behind him.
“What’s in there?” I yelled from the basketball court.
Ralph stopped, then looked up and around, into the air, as if he’d been hearing voices his entire life.
“Over here!” I said.
Ralph turned, saw me. He didn’t smile. He didn’t wave. He nodded, which was about as friendly of a greeting as a person could expect from Ralph, then he made his way over. His wallet was connected to a long, drooping chain that rattled when he walked, and he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood up. The bag slid up the curb, then bounced across the park’s grass.
He said, “What’re you doing? Playing basketball by yourself?”
“You want to play some Horse?” I asked.
“Horse?” He narrowed his eyes, as if the game that I had suggested involved one of us riding the other one around the basketball court. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I’d never seen Ralph in possession of any kind of sporting equipment. Since Ralph was two years older than the other eighth graders, the principal wouldn’t let him take gym class with us. I wasn’t even sure what he did during that period. He said, “You come here a lot? By yourself?”
“All the time,” I said.
Ralph nodded. He said, “My cousins, they know a guy who knows a guy who knows something about electricity. See these power lines? This guy, the one who knows this guy that my cousins know, he said that if you spent too much time around these things, you’ll end up sterile.”
“Sterile?” I said. I suspected that the look I was giving him was the same look that he’d given me at the suggestion of Horse. I knew that being sterile meant that I would never have kids and I knew roughly what part of my body it had to do with, but I wasn’t sure about the specifics. How, for instance, could something that didn’t even touch me make me sterile?
“Who’s this guy?” I asked.
“He’s some guy who knows a guy who knows my cousins.”
“And he’s an expert on electricity?”
“So I’ve been told,” Ralph said.
We stood there a moment without saying a word. The power lines sizzled above. I looked down at Ralph’s burlap bag—a gunny sack, my mother would have called it. There was a lump in it about the size and shape of a small animal, like a possum.
Ralph said, “I better not stand here long. I normally don’t even walk on this street.”
“Afraid of getting sterile?” I asked.
I expected Ralph to laugh or at least smile, but he didn’t. He nodded. “Don’t want to risk it,” he said.
Ralph, heading back to the street, dragged the lump behind him. I was about to yell out to him, to ask again what was in his sack, but a sharp pain tore through my head, causing me to drop the basketball. The ball bounced once, twice, a third time, each bounce closer together than the last, until it was vibrating against the ground, then dying and rolling toward the fence. To stop thinking about the searing pain inside my head, I tried imagining what was inside Ralph’s sack. A cat? A bucket’s worth of sand? A couple of meatloafs? I shut my eyes and concentrated hard, harder than I had ever concentrated in my life, and while the power lines started to surge, its buzz growing so loud I was afraid that the towers themselves were going to burst into flames, an image of what was in the sack finally came to me: a baby, my baby, and Ralph, like some ghost from the future, rattling chains but spooked by his own sad mission, had come to show me what would never be.
8
One week before Christmas in December of 1969, when I was four years old, the Santa Trailer finally arrived at the Scottsdale Shopping Plaza. Three weeks late, it sat parked alongside the curb outside Goldblatt’s Department Store. Back then, the sky was always grey around Christmastime, the clouds heavy and low, expectant with snow. But that Sunday morning was particularly dark as Mom drove us down Cicero Avenue, the clouds swirling, almost black. I was in the passenger seat, unbelted and pressing my face against the cold glass so that my nose looked smashed—and then I saw it: a banged-up mobile home with Santa’s gigantic smiling face painted on the side of it.
I was five years old. I screamed as loud as I could and yelled, “Santa!”
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br /> Mom swerved, as though Santa had appeared in front of us, and we hit the median doing fifty. The front tire blew out, and Mom almost sideswiped a semi while trying to move three lanes to the right. She pulled into the parking lot of a competing department store across the street, where there was no Santa trailer.
After she had safely parked the car, Mom sat with her head on the steering wheel. It felt strange sitting there in silence and watching Mom. I wondered what she was going to do next. I was starting to think that the reason she was slumped forward was because her back was broken, so I reached out and poked her hard with my forefinger.
“Not now, Hank,” she said. “I’m trying to settle my nerves.”
Mom spent about as much time settling her nerves as I spent playing with my Hot Wheels. I didn’t really know what “settling nerves” meant except that I wasn’t supposed to bother her while they were being settled.
Our breath had fogged up the windows, so I started drawing Santa Claus with my finger on the glass. When I was done, I was surprised by how much it actually looked like him. Normally, whenever I tried drawing something with my crayons, the pictures ended up looking nothing like what I was trying to draw. A cat looked like a four-legged animal with the head of a man wearing a long mustache. My houses looked like boxes that had been left out in the rain, drooping to one side, seconds away from collapsing.
“I need to call your father,” Mom said. “Zip up your coat.”
“I don’t want to go,” I said.
“Hank,” she said, her voice low, almost a growl. But then she did something she almost never did. She gave up. “Okay. Fine. Wait here. Keep the doors locked.”
“My door is locked,” I said. “See?”
“Well, keep it that way,” she said. “And don’t touch the keys in the ignition. I’m leaving the car running. You’ll freeze to death otherwise.” She pointed to the stick shift. “Don’t touch this, you hear?”