Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  “Okay, okay,” Dad said, dragging the reindeer, which I realized now were connected by wire, out of the house. “Hank,” he yelled to me. “Give me a hand here. I want to put these on the roof.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Of course I’m sure. It’s Christmas!”

  The next night my father came home empty-handed, but the night after that he showed up with a long, rectangular piece of sheet metal that was curled on one end and spray-painted red.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Whaddya mean, what’s that? It’s a sleigh. Haven’t you ever seen a sleigh before? Me and some of the guys at work, we were screwing off on our break when I spotted some scrap metal. Next thing I knew, we had ourselves a sleigh. Want to give it a whirl?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Want to watch your old man give it a whirl?” He smiled and waggled his eyebrows.

  I shrugged. We lived on a flat street on the southwest side of Chicago, and the only incline anywhere around would be the city’s empty reservoir. In winter, once it started snowing, the reservoir became the closest thing to a ski resort that we had, and although no one I knew owned skis, they used sheets of corrugated cardboard or metal garbage lids, anything that could be sat on, to slide down the slope. Chances were that I would see kids I knew there, and I didn’t want my father joining them with his curled-up piece of sheet metal.

  “What’s wrong with you people, anyway?” my father asked, smiling. “Where’s the holiday spirit?” He wagged his head. It was the look of a man who’d stepped off a plane only to find he’d taken the wrong flight. “Okay, give me a hand putting this on the roof behind the reindeer then. You can do that, can’t you?”

  Over the next week and a half, my father brought home all kinds of garbage he’d found at the side of the road or in a trash can or behind the factory where he worked: J-shaped plumbing pipes that he claimed looked like silver candy-canes; a couple of foot-high Troll dolls with pug noses and rainbow-colored hair that could double as Santa’s helpers; and a piece of chicken-wire that he bent to look more or less like a camel.

  “A camel?” I asked.

  “You know,” he said. “The Three Wise Guys? The Gift of the Rabbi? You know the story. They were sort of like the first Federal Express, only they used a camel instead of a truck.”

  “Have you been drinking?” Mom asked.

  Dad said, “It depends on what you mean by drinking.”

  Thursday night, after he’d come home from work and eaten dinner, Dad suggested that we search our neighbor’s trash to see what we could find. It was the night before garbage pick-up, and the streets would be lined with fresh trash.

  “You’d be surprised to see what people throw out,” he said.

  Mom said, “You’re not letting our son pick through other people’s garbage.”

  From another room, I heard Kelly say, “Gross,” and then she appeared, combat boots on. She pulled a pair of binoculars from behind her back, looked at me through them, and said, “No telling what kind of bacteria you’ll find. You better burn your clothes when you’re done, Hank.”

  Dad draped an arm over my shoulders and said, “We’re not going to be tearing into garbage sacks, if that’s what you girls think. We’re just going to see what they’ve left by the curb. The bigger items. Isn’t that right, Hank?”

  I nodded. It was easier to agree than to disagree, so I found myself agreeing to all kinds of things I really didn’t want to agree with.

  After leaving the house, and after the two of us settled into the pick-up’s ice-cold cab, Dad pulled a can of beer from his coat pocket. I’d always liked the sound it made when he popped one open. He said, “Women,” and took the first loud slurp.

  Unlike other dads I knew who bought plastic holders for their drinks, the kind that hung from inside their car-door window, my father used a roll of duct tape. The duct tape sat next to him on the seat, and he placed the can of beer inside the tape’s hole. It was heavy enough so that the drink wouldn’t slip around, and the can was a perfect fit—not too tight, not too loose. Using the roll of tape as a drink coaster was ingenious, really, and I wondered how a man who could think up something as brilliant as this could come up with some of the other harebrained ideas he had.

  When my father lifted the beer for another sip, I asked, “What if people don’t want us messing with their trash?”

  My father laughed. He set down the drink and dug into his shirt pocket for a cigarette. Cigarette smoke always burned my eyes, but whenever I mentioned this to my father, he’d tell me to crack a window. It was so cold tonight, though, that I needed to keep the window up to keep my teeth from chattering.

  My father puffed several times to get the cigarette going. He said, “Listen. Garbage is fair game. You throw it out, it’s no longer yours, pal. The United States has some of the best garbage in the world. You’re living in junk heaven and don’t ever forget it.”

  At first we stopped to examine only the big stuff, as promised, but when the big stuff wasn’t panning out, Dad made me untie garbage sacks while he used a flashlight and a tire iron to poke through them.

  “Good God,” he said. “The things people eat!”

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said. “Why don’t we go home?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Looks like a bad week for garbage. But don’t go thinking that’s a poor reflection of our fine country.”

  A block from our house, my father spotted three white beanbag chairs. They were next to a trashcan, piled one on top of the other. “Bingo!” he said.

  “They’re losing their beans,” I said. “They look sort of, I don’t know, deflated.”

  “Don’t you see what they look like, though?” he said.

  “What?”

  “It looks just like a freaking snowman!” he said. “You can’t see that?”

  “Not really,” I said. “No, I guess not.”

  “Use your imagination,” Dad said. “Don’t they teach you to use your imagination in school? A little paint for a face and it’ll look just like a snowman. And the great thing is, it won’t melt. All of our stupid neighbors will have to worry each and every time the sun comes out, but not us, no sir.”

  And so while my father revved the engine, I heaved each beanbag chair into the bed of the pick-up, where they looked, lying on their sides, more like a giant albino insect from a horror movie than a dozing snowman. A radioactive ant, I thought. The sort of thing that might push open our front door, shimmy inside, and eat our whole family alive.

  •

  Friday night, my father came home with a copy of the Southtown Economist and opened it up so that it covered the food Mom had put on the table. He said, “Look at this, ladies and germs.” Steam from a plate of chicken legs was starting to make the paper sag, but Dad just snapped the paper back into shape and said, “A contest for the best holiday decorations on the South Side!”

  Kelly said, “I can’t get to the rolls, Dad.”

  Mom, frowning, said, “Where’d you find that paper?”

  “Huh?”

  “The paper? Where’d you get it?”

  It was a good question; Dad never read the newspaper.

  “Lucky’s,” Dad said.

  Lucky’s was the neighborhood tavern, and this past year my father had earned enough points from all the beer he’d bought that the bartender presented him with a wooden stein with his name on it. I’d never seen it because the stein, according to my father, remained at Lucky’s on a shelf behind the bar along with all the other steins presented to those who earned the right. It was, Dad said, the highest honor Lucky’s bestowed upon its customers.

  “That paper’s probably filthy,” Mom said, “and now it’s touching the food we’re about to eat.”

  “Huh? Oh.” Dad raised the paper higher, but one of its corners curled over, as if trying to lick Dad’s plate.

  “Look,” he said. “The deadline’s next
Friday. The winner gets five hundred bones. Now, I don’t want to knock our good neighbors or anything”—here, my father snickered; he hated our neighbors—“but the way I see it, any frickin’ idiot can go to the Kmart and buy decorations.” He looked at me. “Am I right, Hank? Sure I am. But not everyone can turn nothing into something. Which is what we’re doing. The entry fee is only, let’s see…” He rattled the paper a few times, leaning over and squinting. “Ah, here it is. Twenty-five bucks.” He looked up and said, “Not a bad investment for a five hundred dollar payday. But me and Hank, we’ve got a hell of a lot of work to do before next Friday, don’t we?”

  I nodded.

  Dad reached over the table and cuffed my shoulder. “My little apprentice,” he said, then rolled up the dirty newspaper and swatted the top of my head with it.

  Early Saturday morning, before anyone else was awake, I looked out my bedroom window and saw Ralph standing in the middle of the street. He wasn’t wearing a coat. He was staring at our house, squinting and nodding, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Ralph lived in a shingled shotgun house with his mother, but since I’d never actually seen his mother, I sometimes wondered if he lived there alone, coming and going as he pleased. It was possible, I supposed. I wasn’t going to ask, though. I was too polite to ask. Politeness, I was realizing, was my downfall.

  “Ralph,” I said after stepping outside, bundled up in my snorkel parka, the hood pulled up and unrolled so that it funneled out from my face at least a foot, narrowing into a small porthole and ending in a wreath of fake fur. “Is everything okay?” I asked through the hood’s long tunnel.

  “What?”

  “IS EVERYTHING OKAY?” I yelled.

  Ralph nodded.

  I realized that I was standing next to the beanbag snowman, but I pretended not to notice it. I expected Ralph to ask what was happening to our house, but he didn’t say a word. He lumbered quietly toward me, but his eyes were busy recording everything my father and I had done. A slight wind whispered past, and three dangling candy canes made out of plumbing pipes banged over my head. My father brought home red book-binding tape from work, and he wrapped the tape around each pipe to create the swirls and make them look more like candy canes, but they still looked like plumbing supplies.

  Ralph said, “I’m broke, Hank. Dead broke. And then last night I saw some Christmas carolers going door-to-door and I had an idea.”

  I cringed. I always feared Ralph’s ideas. I pictured myself, Ralph, and Ralph’s two creepy older cousins, Kenny and Norm, knocking on people’s doors and singing “Jingle Bells” for money. I didn’t want any part of it.

  “Look,” I said. “I can’t really sing, Ralph. I’m sort of tone deaf, if you want to know the truth.”

  Ralph said, “What are you talking about? We’re not singing. Are you crazy?”

  “Good,” I said. I rolled back the tunneled hood so that I could see and hear Ralph better.

  Ralph said, “Actually, I was wondering if you wanted to help me jump them so we could take their money.”

  “You want me to help you mug the Christmas carolers?” I asked.

  Ralph shrugged. “Mug. Jump. Whatever.”

  “Do people give money to them?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” Ralph said. “Tips and whatnot. Plus, they probably have a little spending money of their own. You know, for juice or candy bars.”

  I wasn’t going to help Ralph mug Christmas carolers, but when I asked how old they were, Ralph perked up. “Fourth graders,” he said. “Fifth grade, tops. I promise. Now, the way I see it, we’ll be outnumbered—there’s got to be at least six of them—but two of them are chicks, and all of them are at least three years younger than you and five years younger than me.”

  Going door-to-door and shouting “Jingle Bells” off-key suddenly didn’t sound so bad after all. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  Ralph said, “Yeah, well, maybe you’re right. I guess six of them could do some damage to us, especially if they’re carrying weapons.”

  “Weapons? What kind of weapons would a bunch of carolers have?”

  “I don’t know,” Ralph said. “Could be anything. Steak knives, corkscrews, ice picks. Kids these days’ll turn anything into a weapon.” He sighed and shook his head. He seemed to be reconsidering the plan.

  Relieved, I leaned against the beanbag snowman, which I realized was a mistake. Ralph’s eyes had followed my elbow, stopping at the snowman’s head. He reached out and, using his fingernail, scraped the face my father had painted yesterday after a late night at Lucky’s. The paint was too thick in places, dripping at the corners of the snowman’s eyes and mouth, causing it to look like a beanbag version of Alice Cooper. After chipping off some of the thicker clumps of paint, Ralph tucked his hands into his pockets.

  I said, “Dad’s entering the house in a Christmas decoration contest. The winner gets five hundred bucks.”

  Ralph, frowning and nodding, said, “So that’s what’s going on here.”

  “What did you think was going on?” I asked, acting offended.

  “No, no,” Ralph said. “I can see it now.” He was walking backwards so as to take in the whole house at once. He said, “It looks like something Picasso would do.”

  Only last week we’d taken a school field trip to the Chicago Art Institute downtown to see the Picasso exhibit, but everyone was bored out of their skulls and no one really paid much attention. The next day at school, our art teacher said, “You should be ashamed of yourselves. All of you. You were looking at the work of a genius, but what did you care? You were bored, right?” and I made the mistake of nodding.

  I assumed that Ralph, who had failed two grades, would have been even more bored than the rest of us, but apparently this wasn’t the case.

  “Picasso?” I said. “You think so?”

  “Absolutely,” Ralph said. “Your father’s a genius.”

  “My father?” I said. “A genius?”

  Ralph nodded. He said, “But don’t expect the judges of the contest to recognize that. That’s the whole deal with being a genius. No one realizes you’re one until you’re dead.”

  I turned around and looked at the house. I wasn’t sure that I saw what Ralph saw, but then I wasn’t sure what the big deal was about Picasso, either, so what did I know?

  Ralph said, “Listen. About the mugging. If you change your mind…”

  “I don’t think I’ll be changing my mind,” I said.

  “You never know,” Ralph said. “All I’m saying is, if you decide that you do want to jump a bunch of little kids who can’t sing worth crap, come and get me.”

  It was getting colder out, so I rolled the snorkel parka hood out again and yelled, “WILL DO!”

  The week before Christmas I asked my art teacher, Mrs. Richards, if I could borrow one of her books about Picasso. She eyed me suspiciously but then she looked anyway, digging through a pile of brushes, crepe paper, chunks of plaster and globs of clay until she found the book. “I expect this to be returned to me in the condition I’m giving it to you,” she said.

  That entire week, I had a hard time staying awake in school. I normally had problems staying awake, but this week I couldn’t keep my eyes open because I was up until at least midnight every night helping my father.

  Dad brought home sheets of plywood from work—“They’ll never miss it!”—but since we didn’t own the appropriate tools for doing fancy edge-work, like curlicues, everything we made looked as though it had been attacked by a drunk man swinging an ax. But this, I was starting to realize, was part of Dad’s genius.

  “There!” he said. “Now, why don’t we paint a holiday message on one of these. Not your usual holiday message. Something original.”

  I said, “What about ‘Happy Christmas and Merry New Year’?”

  Dad narrowed his eyes at me. He could tell that there was something wrong with what I’d said, but what I’d said wasn’t so different from the o
riginal that he couldn’t immediately tell what was different about it. A dozen empty Schlitz cans sat along a saw horse. Artists, I’d read in the Picasso book, were tortured by demons, and they often sought the company of alcohol and other substances. This explained why Dad had earned the beer stein at Lucky’s. He was a tortured artist.

  “No, no,” Dad finally said at the suggestion of my holiday greeting. “Here. Hand me the spray-paint.”

  Before I could offer another suggestion, Dad started shaking the can.

  “Tell me, kiddo,” he said after he’d stopped shaking. “What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Argo.”

  Argo was two towns northwest, our football arch rival and home to Argo Corn Starch factory. On a day with only the slightest of breezes, the wind picked up the stench and carried it from town to town, causing those who didn’t live with the corn starch smell on a daily basis to gag and run inside. It was the sort of smell that lodged itself into your nose and stayed there for days.

  “It stinks,” I said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “Exactly.” He ruffled my hair, then started spraying. He sprayed so close to the board that the first letter looked like a blazing sun of hot tar, but then he backed up and tried again. “What do you think?” he said when he’d finished. In large block letters, the sign read: JINGLE BELLS, ARGO SMELLS!

  “You sure you want to put this outside?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” Dad said. “What this shows is town pride. That’s always good for a few extra votes.”

  “Okay,” I said. I helped Dad drag the enormous sheet of jagged-edged plywood out to the curb, and we leaned it against the mailbox.

  Dad stood in the street to take a look. “That aughta do ’er,” he said.

  I imagined whole books written about my father and his art, each book including a chapter about his son, Hank, and how he was the only one in the entire Boyd family who understood the old man, and how much that had meant to the genius on his deathbed.

  The next night, Dad said, “What have I been thinking? We keep checking the garbage in our own neighborhood when what we should be doing is checking out the hoity-toity neighborhoods.”