Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  The rest of my appointments with Dr. Stump were cancelled. The next time I saw someone walking out of his office, it was the janitor pushing Dr. Stump’s desk out the door. The desk lay on its side, and the janitor cursed under his breath the whole time he pushed it. Watching him trying to fit the desk through the door reminded me of all those pegs I was given, and how Dr. Stump had started writing something as soon as I’d put that first round peg into a round hole. While he furiously scribbled away in his notebook, I pocketed three of the pegs, one for me and one each for my best friends, and when Dr. Stump finally looked up at me, I placed a square peg into the square hole and smiled at him, and he smiled back.

  Not long after Dr. Stump disappeared, my imaginary friends’ days were numbered. It was one of those Chicago winter days where the wind whips up snow that’s already on the ground, sending it into everyone’s faces and causing them to go blind. I was putting on the snowsuit that my mother had bought me at the Sear’s Outlet store near Midway Airport. I liked going to that part of the city because it looked like a ghost town with all of its old crumbling hotels, but my mother always insisted that I lock my doors. “Nothing but hoods around here,” she’d say. I knew she meant criminals, but I also thought she meant criminals who wore hoods, and so for years, whenever I saw someone wearing any kind of hood, I feared they were going to club me over the head and take whatever I had in my pockets. My snowsuit from Sears Outlet had been sewn all wrong, which was why it was so cheap. I could barely walk in it. The entire puffy attire twisted around me, strangling my body’s trunk, like an inflatable python.

  “I’m choking,” I gasped when I had put it on that snowy day. “I can’t breathe.”

  When my father saw me, he asked my mother why she didn’t buy him one, too.

  “How am I supposed to know what in God’s name you want me to buy you when you won’t even come along?” she asked.

  “I’m just saying,” my father said, but then he quit talking. He put on his thin jacket and stocking cap, but before he left, he said, “To hell with you people,” and walked out the door.

  “Maybe he needs an enema,” I offered.

  Mom looked down at me. “Maybe you do, if you keep complaining,” she said.

  I quit complaining. I wobbled outside and onto our front lawn. We lived in the smallest house on a street of mostly small houses. Across the street, however, sat a large, old house—the largest and oldest on the block—but it wasn’t a nice house. My father called it an eye-sore, and whenever my mother saw someone going into it or leaving she would say, “How can people live like that?” Wind sucked trash out of their lidless garbage cans and sent old Kleenex, newspapers, and hamburger wrappers orbiting their house like bewildered ghosts. The lawn was mostly dirt, and broken toys lay scattered about for years at a time. Though I was only seven, I was certain that the handlebars to a bicycle, minus the bike, had leaned against a cellar window since the day, cradled in my mother’s arms, my eyes had first come into focus. Each year the handlebars got rustier, serving no purpose to either man or machine. I finally asked my father about them one day.

  “What handlebars?” he asked.

  “Those ones there,” I said, pointing.

  “Never saw ’em before,” he said.

  The day my father told us all to go to hell, I decided to walk across my mysterious neighbor’s snow-dirt lawn and touch those handlebars. My mother and father had never told me I couldn’t go over onto their lawn and touch their stuff, so once I had set my mind to do it, I didn’t hesitate.

  While crossing the street, I saw my sister biking toward our house. Why she was riding her bike in the snow, I didn’t know. I paused respectfully to let her by, but Raymond told me to walk in front of her, so I did.

  “Hey, watch it, bub!” she yelled, swerving, almost falling. She biked up the slick driveway, disappearing into the garage that was too small for a car. Krogerly, who found everything funny, snickered into my ear.

  When I reached the first patch of snow and dirt, I pretended that I was stepping onto the moon. I was almost four years old when men landed on the moon, and I’d watched it on TV, sitting in a chair that rested on its back so that I could pretend that I was inside the capsule along with them. I’d had a glass of Tang within reach, and I chewed a chalky chocolate stick for nourishment. Moon food. Ever since then, I loved all things about the moon, and whenever the opportunity presented itself to me, I pretended that I was walking on the moon. I even tried to make myself light, walking on my toes and moving in slow-motion. And that’s what I was doing that day, stuffed into my misstitched snowsuit, wind blowing so hard I could barely keep my eyes open: I took unbearably slow steps, and each time a foot touched the ground, my arms floated up from my sides and then down again. Up! Then down. That’s when I noticed a boy, maybe three years older than me, staring at me from the open doorway. Next to him was a much older kid smoking. Why they had the door to their house open on a day as cold as this one was a mystery to me.

  “What’re you supposed to be? A giant bird?” the older boy asked.

  “I’m an astronaut,” I said.

  “What’re you doin’ on our property?” he asked. I could tell someone older had taught him to ask this, the way my father had taught me to ask the cashier at White Hen Pantry for a carton of Lucky Strikes so that he, my father, could sit in the car and keep the engine running.

  “I wanna see those handlebars,” I told the boy.

  “What handlebars?”

  When I pointed, he walked all the way outside to take a look. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes. His bellybutton stuck out like the stem of a pumpkin, but it looked more fleshy, almost like someone’s finger, and I imagined a smaller kid inside him, trapped and sticking his pinkie out, trying to get someone’s attention. He peered around the corner of his own house. He shrugged at the sight of the handlebars.

  “You from around here?” he asked.

  I pointed at the house across the street, but the way he looked at it, there might as well have been nothing there at all.

  “Gotta name?” he asked.

  “Hank,” I said.

  “I’m George. And that’s my brother Pig,” he said, pointing. I wanted to ask him how he got the name Pig, but then I saw that Pig’s nose was weirdly flattened so that you could see directly inside his nostrils. From what I could tell, his nose was the only pig-like thing about him, but who knew? “Pig and I are watching TV,” George said. “Want to come in?”

  My parents had told me never to go anywhere with adults I didn’t know, but they never said anything about not going somewhere with other kids, so I climbed the stairs and followed George into his house. I could feel Raymond and Krogerly walking behind me, but they said nothing.

  “You want the door shut?” I asked. No one answered, so I left it wide open, as it had been.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell. On the one hand, I wanted to escape the smell, whatever it was; I wanted to run back outside, where the air smelled like air. On the other hand, the smell was so bad it fascinated me. It held me in place, and I couldn’t stop breathing it in; I couldn’t get enough of it.

  It was like the time my mother bought a carton of milk that had already gone bad and she made everyone take a whiff. “Does this smell bad to you?” she asked, passing it under our noses, and we each jerked quickly back, but then Kelly and I smelled it again and again. My father said, “Why the hell are you making us smell it if it’s bad?” but Mom didn’t answer. That’s how she was, always wanting us to smell bad things. “Come here,” she’d say to me or Kelly, “and smell these leftovers,” or “Smell these clothes. Do they smell funny?” When we drove through Argo, home of the eye-watering Argo Corn Starch factory, she would take a deep breath and make a tortured face: “Eww. Smell that,” she’d say, rolling down her window. I imagined my mother inside George and Pig’s house right now, taking a deep breath through her nose and squinting, forcing each of us to do the same.

  I unzipped my
snowsuit, and George motioned to a big padded chair. He said, “Sit down.” The chair was stained and had a hole in the center of its seat, and inside the hole was a sleeping cat. George said, “He’ll move when you start sitting down.” As soon as I started sitting down, the cat hissed, then jumped out of the hole.

  “Hi, Pig,” I said because Pig was staring at me, but Pig didn’t say anything.

  “He doesn’t like to talk,” George said. “Never mind him.” George turned toward the TV; the screen was full of static. “Who do you watch?” He picked up pliers and began twisting a plastic rod where there should have been a knob.

  I was going to tell him which TV shows I liked, but I felt Raymond pressing on my bladder, trying to force out of me this morning’s cup of hot chocolate. “I need to pee,” I said.

  “Up there,” George said, pointing to a staircase.

  I forced my butt out of the chair’s hole. If my butt had been bigger, it might not have been a problem, but as it was, I feared getting sucked into the hole if I stayed there any longer.

  The ceilings were lower upstairs than downstairs, making me feel taller, older. The rug had been worn down in places to the plywood underneath. Dust covered every imaginable surface so that the entire house looked furry. It was cold up there, too, as though all the windows were either open or broken. My teeth clacked together. A thin curtain inside one of the rooms blew around like a flag.

  “Who are you?” someone asked, and Raymond released a squirt of pee into my pants. Inside the room with the flag was a woman too large to fit through the room’s door. I’d never seen anyone that big before. She was four or five times the size of Dr. Stump. Krogerly wanted to say something, but I shushed him.

  Propped up in bed, the woman fanned herself. She was wearing what my mother called a housedress, the same soft fabric of my pajamas with snaps all the way down the front. At first I thought her eyes had been blackened, but when I stepped closer I saw that she was wearing blue eye-shadow.

  “I’m Hank,” I said.

  “You looking for something, Hank?”

  “The bathroom.”

  She pointed to a room inside her room. I didn’t want to get too close to her, though. I wasn’t sure why. She hadn’t yelled at me. She had even smiled, unless it had been a grimace from the effort it took to lift her sagging arm and point.

  “Thank you,” I said and waddled toward the room. I walked by her slowly, as if to show her that I wasn’t afraid of her. The bathroom, I realized, didn’t have a door. In fact, the space where the door had been was now twice as wide as a regular door. Instead of a door, there were two shower curtains you had to part to enter. I couldn’t use a bathroom that didn’t have a door—it wasn’t a choice, I just couldn’t—but I couldn’t turn around and leave, either, so I parted the curtains and stepped inside. I stood by the window and stared for a good long time at the husks of old bugs on the sill. There were tweezers on the sink, so I used them to pick up the shell of a June bug. I held it up to the light, turning it one way and then the other. I wasn’t sure why, but I felt like crying. Would this be me one day, the crisp and see-through shell of my former self being picked up by a giant, held to the light, and stared at? And would the giant himself want to cry?

  I put down the bug, but I held onto the tweezers.

  Take the tweezers, Raymond whispered. Take them.

  No, I thought.

  I flushed the toilet. Next to the tub sat an enema kit. My heart started pounding. The sight of the red rubber pillow with its long tail-like hose made me realize for the first time the possible danger I had put myself in.

  When I returned to the bedroom, the woman said, “You didn’t wash your hands, Hank.”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  I wondered how long she had been trapped inside her room. When my mother and father weren’t threatening me or Kelly with enemas, they threatened to ground us. Kelly explained to me once that if you were grounded you could never leave your room again, that you were under “lock and key,” as she put it. Had the large woman been grounded? Was she under lock and key? And if so, who had grounded her? George? Pig?

  I forced a smile and waved goodbye. I was certain I would never see this woman again. Ever. I had never seen her before, after all.

  Downstairs, I saw that the cat had crawled back inside the hole in the chair. Its eyes glowed at me from the dark cave.

  “Just sit down,” George said, “and the cat’ll move.” He said this as if he hadn’t already told me the exact same thing a few minutes ago.

  “You ever get an enema?” I asked.

  George took a long drag off his cigarette and flicked the ashes into a Coca-Cola can. Without moving his eyes from the TV, he said, “Yeah. And it ain’t pretty.”

  “I need to go,” I said.

  I must have expected some kind of goodbye because I was hurt when no one even looked my way.

  “See ya!” I yelled.

  George finally moved his eyes ever so slightly toward me, but just as fast they went back to the TV, where actors looked green and their voices were crunchy. Pig didn’t move at all. But it was Raymond and Krogerly who, hanging back and not looking at me, surprised me. Why were they staying?

  I zipped up my snowsuit and waddled away. Outside, I looked over my shoulder, but no one was following. I left the door wide open and waddled back across the street. When I turned around for one final look, I saw Kogerly sitting on the arm of the big padded chair that I had sat in while Raymond sat on the other arm. Raymond was staring down inside the hole at the cat. Normally I would have known what Raymond was thinking, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell what he was thinking now or what he was going to do next, and when Krogerly looked up and said something to George, I couldn’t hear what he’d said.

  I walked into my house, where sunlight streamed through the windows and heat poured out of every vent.

  Mom said, “Hank.” She was staring at my hands.

  “What?”

  “Where did you get those tweezers?”

  “Hunh?” I looked down. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I took them?”

  I handed them over to Mom, who examined them closely. She sniffed them. “These aren’t ours,” she said. “They probably have some kind of disease on them. There’s rust on the end. You could get tetanus, you know.”

  “What’s tetanus?” I asked.

  “It’s something you don’t want,” she said. She carried the tweezers over to the trash can, lifted the lid, and dropped them inside.

  I was so happy to be home, I started laughing. But there was something wrong, too, something I couldn’t put my finger on, and my stomach felt empty and weird, like someone was tugging on it from below.

  My father looked up from clipping his toenails. “Krogerly tell you a joke?”

  “No,” I said, because he hadn’t. I still had to pee, so I said, “I gotta use the bathroom.”

  “Well, you know where we keep the can,” my father said. He winked at me as I walked by and then he continued clipping his toenails. I heard him yelp, the way he always yelped whenever he cut a nail too short, and I heard my mother say, “For Pete’s sake, be careful.”

  I opened the bathroom door, and Kelly, who was brushing her teeth, screamed.

  “They’re gone,” I said.

  Kelly’s mouth was rimmed with foamy paste, like a rabid dog’s. She tried asking “Who?” but sputtered and coughed instead.

  “My friends,” I said.

  Kelly spit a blob of toothpaste and blood into the sink and said, “What friends? You don’t have any friends!”

  I teetered over in my snowsuit and hugged Kelly. Kelly stood stiffly at first but then relaxed. After a while, she even patted my shuddering shoulders. “There, there, little brother,” she whispered when she realized I wasn’t ever going to let go. “There, there.”

  11

  Ralph wanted me to meet him at Ford City Shopping Center. “The entrance to Peacock Alley,” he added. “Do you
think you can you do that? Can you handle it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why couldn’t I handle it?”

  We were waiting for the crossing guard, a kid nobody liked, to blow his whistle and wave us across. Snow was packed hard on the ground, as slick as ice, and the crossing guard looked fearful of moving, afraid he’d fall in front of everyone.

  “Just making sure,” Ralph said. “Don’t get all bent out of shape.”

  For Ralph, who was older and taller, the walk to Ford City was a cinch. It wasn’t so easy for me, who would be easy prey, but I wasn’t going to tell this to Ralph.

  Unexpectedly, before the crossing guard gave us the go-ahead, Ralph stepped into the street, grabbed hold of the rear bumper of a slowly moving car, and, knees bent, began to skeech home. Everyone, including the crossing guard, turned to watch. Ralph made it three whole blocks, longer than anyone we’d ever seen, before the driver slammed on the brakes, jumped out, and yelled at him. After regaining his balance, Ralph waved at the man, then took off running down a side-street. I had meant to ask him a few more details about the trip to Ford City, but it was too late. Ralph, in a mere matter of seconds, was already long gone.

  Even when it wasn’t skull-numbingly cold outside, walking to Ford City was dicey. Part of the way you followed a fence that separated you from several factories. Attack dogs—Dobermans and Rottweilers—bared their teeth and trailed you from their side of the fence, growling the whole way. Eventually, you’d cross over into another grade school’s territory, where kids would crouch between hedges for the sole purpose of jumping those who weren’t from around there. To make matters worse, high school boys and girls were always walking to and from Ford City, and sometimes this meant having to cross all four busy lanes of State Street to avoid running into a group of infamous bullies who hadn’t had their day’s fill of pummeling. If all of this wasn’t enough, you still had to cross Cicero Avenue, an eight-lane road that separated Ford City from my neighborhood, and you had to dodge traffic to get from one side to the other. Sometimes the traffic was so bad you’d end up stranded on the ridged island, fearful that two semis heading in opposite directions might crush you. There were dozens of factories up and down Cicero, and semis sped by all day long. I’d like to think that arriving at Ford City was like stepping into Oz or some other promised land, but in truth it presented a whole new batch of problems, namely that the teenagers here were even tougher and that the landscape of concrete and asphalt was more brutal.