Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  Chad took two steps forward and opened his mouth, as if to scold us, but nothing came out. He shut his eyes and shook his head, then stopped and looked at us again—crazed, this time—before throwing his arms into the air, turning around, and stomping toward the keg at the back of the room.

  The school year was winding down, and I hadn’t hung out with Ralph in over a month. Kelly and Unger had broken up, but Unger still came over to practice throwing his voice. Meanwhile, our air band was put indefinitely on hold.

  One night in the middle of May, with a tornado watch in progress, Unger and I sat in my room, and I watched him put on a show with my Mortimer Snerd doll. I had to admit, his new act was pure genius. Using his boombox, he played Rolling Stones songs, and while Mortimer Snerd lip-synched the lead vocals, Unger actually sang back-up. It was dizzying to watch. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much time he’d spent at home figuring out the logistics of it all.

  Every few minutes my father would bang on my bedroom door to upgrade us on the status of the approaching storm. “The watch is on until ten o’clock,” he said the first time. “That’s for all of Cook County.” Then an hour later: “It’s been upgraded to a warning now, guys. Eighty mile an hour winds. Hold on to your hats.”

  At first all we heard was the soft patter of rain, though not much later our lights started flickering while fists of hail pounded the house. Somewhere, a window shattered.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Sympathy For the Devil” was playing now, and Unger kept singing the “Oooooo Oooooooh” parts until an explosion nearby caused us both to jump.

  “One of those giant transformers must have blown up,” I said, though before I finished saying it, our lights shut off for good. “Great,” I said. Unger didn’t say anything. His battery-operated boombox chugged on, and Mick Jagger continued singing. It was my favorite part of the song, the part where Mick asks who killed the Kennedys, and so I closed my eyes. While Mick’s words rumbled through me, I felt a hand touch my knee, then Unger’s breath against my face, then his mouth against my mouth.

  I screamed.

  When Unger put his hand against my mouth to quiet me, I bit down, sinking my teeth into his knuckles, and then he screamed. My father bolted into the room with a high-powered flashlight, yelling, “What’s wrong? You guys all right? What happened?”

  “We’re all right,” I said. “Nothing happened.”

  My father swung the flashlight toward Unger. “Cut your hand?” he asked.

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m okay.”

  Dad said, “The two of you’d better quit screwing around then. This house is under siege. The basement’s flooding and a tree’s down out back. I sure as hell don’t need the two of you testing my patience tonight.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  Much to my horror, my mother insisted that Unger spend the night. She put him up in my bedroom, so I took the couch in the living room and wrapped myself in a quilt. I don’t know what time it was when I finally fell asleep, but I woke up the next morning to my father nudging me with his foot.

  “Don’t you know this kid?” he asked. He pointed his big toe at the TV.

  I was so tired I could barely make sense of where I was or what was going on, but when I finally did, I saw my father in his LA-Z-BOY, holding a bowl of cereal, still nudging me with his foot; my mother and sister, side-by-side, staring at the TV screen; and Unger, who blushed when I looked over at him.

  “I remember him from back when you were in Cub Scouts,” Dad said. “Isn’t that the same kid?”

  On TV was Wes Papadakis, and he was being interviewed by Walter Jacobson of Channel 2 news. The interview had been conducted late last night, and it was the hottest story on all the stations. Later I would hear the whole thing, how Wes had been sound asleep at the bottom of the reservoir when the storm hit, and how he had been there—as he had been there every night—waiting for the arrival of Styx. Apparently, he’d fallen asleep listening to Pieces of Eight when the first ball of hail cracked him on the head. Not much later, he noticed water pouring over the sides, filling the reservoir. The sides proved too muddy for climbing out, leaving him, as he saw it, with only one option: to ride the storm out. And that’s exactly what he did. Clutching his bicentennial inflatable mattress, and with all the city’s flooded streets draining toward him, Wes floated twenty, thirty, forty feet, until he reached the upper lip of the reservoir and, swept along by a heavy current, rode his raft down Rutherford Avenue, all the way home.

  “It’s a miracle,” my mother said, “that he’s alive.”

  Kelly, tears in her eyes, turned and asked if I had his phone number.

  “No, I don’t have his phone number,” I said. Until last night, Wes had been a mere shadow on the playground, a bit player at recess. Could his life really have changed that quickly?

  “They should give that kid a medal,” my father said.

  “A medal?” I asked.

  My father cocked his ear and turned his head slowly, pointing his chin at me. And what have you done lately? was what this look meant. Disgusted, my father finally turned away. “Hell,” he said. “They should at least give him a key to the city.”

  My mother agreed. “That’s the least they could do,” she said.

  I didn’t see Unger anymore that school year. For those last few weeks of May, I couldn’t shake the thought of Unger’s mouth against my mouth. Panicked, I called Lucy Bruno three times in three days, finally convincing her to go to Haunted Trails Miniature Golf Range with me, where, much to my own amazement, I chipped a fluorescent green golf ball off Frankenstein’s head. The manager promptly asked us to leave, I walked Lucy home, and we never spoke again. Whatever Lucy Bruno had thought of me before our date was now confirmed in spades by my recklessness with a golf club, by the threat I posed to society, and by the fact that I was far more amused by what I had done than anyone else at the golf range.

  On the last day of May, I stuck my Mortimer Snerd ventriloquist doll and a hacksaw into a grocery sack with the general plan of sawing off Mortimer’s head, and I walked to the reservoir where I intended to perform this act. Carefully, I made my way down the slope. I had never been down there before, but now, after everything that had happened with Wes, I wanted to see it.

  Styx, of course, had never shown up, and now that I was down here, I couldn’t imagine how it was going to happen anyway. There were no electrical outlets, the sides were too steep for people to sit, and the acoustics were awful. What had Wes been thinking? What had any of us been thinking?

  “HELLO,” I yelled for fun. “HOW ARE YOU?” I listened to my voice hit the wall and come back toward me. It bounced off another wall, then came back again. This continued for a while, my voice bouncing and creeping up behind me, to the side of me, or head-on, fainter and fainter, until it became a bunch of half-words and grunts, then nothing at all.

  “HELLO,” I yelled again. Someone from above yelled back, “HELLO,” and together our voices surrounded me, one voice answering the other, overlapping, mocking one another. I looked up. A cop was peering down at me. With his billy club, he motioned for me to climb out of the reservoir. After struggling up the incline to reach him, he said, “What’s in the bag?”

  “A ventriloquist doll and a hacksaw,” I said.

  He nodded. “You see this sign?” He tapped it with his club. NO TRESPASSING, it said.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never seen it before.”

  “It’s there for a reason,” he said. “Kid almost drowned a few weeks ago.”

  “Wes Papadakis,” I said.

  The cop looked at me, as if what I’d said made absolutely no sense to him. He said, “Got to start teaching you kids the meaning of laws. Got to start somewhere.”

  I guess I thought he was simply talking out loud because I was smiling when he read my rights to me, then pulled out his handcuffs. He asked me to set my bag down, and then he cuffed my hands behind my back. I was still smiling, but I was starti
ng to shiver now, too.

  “What’s so funny?” the cop asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Well,” the cop said, “I wouldn’t be smiling if I were you.”

  “I’m cold.”

  “It’s not cold out,” he said.

  “I’m freezing.”

  With his hand on top of my head, the cop guided me into the backseat of his cruiser. “You know what? All you kids are nuts.” He shut the door. After settling himself into the driver’s seat, he set my bag down beside him and said, “That kid who almost drowned? He was nuts, too. Kept saying he was down there waiting for sticks, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. Now look at him. A hero. You ask me, this whole city’s nuts.”

  At the police station, the cop uncuffed me and returned my bag before handing me off to a woman cop who sat at a desk, smoking a long, thin cigarette. “Identification?” she said.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “How old are you, honey?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Boy,” she said, “they get younger every day.” She stood up and said, “Hold your horses, okay?”

  I passed the time looking over some mug shots, until another cop, a bald one, lugged Ralph in, shoving him hard into a chair. Like me, Ralph was holding a grocery sack. The cop said, “Don’t do anything that would require us to shoot you. You got that?”

  Ralph shrugged.

  “I wouldn’t hesitate to use force,” the cop said, leaving the two of us alone.

  “Hey, Ralph,” I said. Ralph looked over, and I smiled at him. “They got me, too,” I said. I expected him to get up and come over, but he didn’t. Instead, he narrowed his eyes at me, as if I were a witness who’d been called in to point him out in a line-up.

  “I’m under arrest,” I said and laughed. “Do you believe that?” I shook my head, unable to believe it myself. “Hey! You shaved off your porkchop sideburns,” I said. “Why’d you do that?”

  Ralph touched his face, where one of the sideburns had been, as if he no longer remembered what had been there. “What’s in the bag?” he finally asked.

  “A ventriloquist doll and a hacksaw,” I said. “What’s in yours?”

  “My revenge list.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s right. I forgot about that.” I knew, of course, that my name had been added to Ralph’s revenge list—how could it not have been?—and the very thought of its being there gave me goosebumps. “So,” I said, changing subjects. “What’d they get you for?”

  “Skipped out on a restaurant without paying the bill.”

  My heart sped up. “El Matador?” I asked.

  “Nuh-uh. They never caught us for that one.” He grinned, pleased that we’d gotten away with it, and I relaxed. “Last week,” he said, “they nailed my cousins for selling fake Styx tickets. Styx’s management heard about what they were doing and they set up a sting operation.” He shook his head and said, “Norm and Kenny. They’re screwed.”

  Had Ralph forgotten he’d given one of the tickets to me? Had he known all along that it was a fake? I didn’t tell Ralph, but I still had the ticket; I kept it on display in my bedroom, sealed under the glass top of my dresser, between a stub for the only White Sox game I ever attended and a stolen ticket for a Pink Floyd concert that my parents wouldn’t drive me to.

  “What they nail you for?” Ralph asked.

  “Trespassing,” I said.

  Ralph snorted.

  “They caught me in the reservoir,” I said, “you know, where Wes Papadakis almost drowned.”

  Ralph nodded, then turned away. He crumpled shut the top of his grocery sack and waited for his officer to return. We both seemed to know that our friendship was winding down, and Ralph must have seen no point in prolonging the end of it. I feared deep down that in a few years our classmates would not only not remember the day Ralph had played his bongos in Mr. Mudjra’s class but that they would have a hard time remembering Ralph at all. He was old enough to drop out of school now, which I’m sure he was planning to do. I worried, too, that it would be only a matter of time before he moved through the town like a ghost, invisible even to those who had once known him.

  It was possible, though, that I was worried about my own self and not Ralph. Whatever any of us had done before, whatever accomplishments we’d achieved, it all paled by comparison to Wes Papadakis. Wes had become the South Side’s very own Noah. His journey out of the reservoir would be passed along to children for generations, as powerful as any Bible story—more powerful, since he was one of our own. No one would ever forget the morning they first saw Wes on TV, his raft blown up to look like the American flag. Rain pelting the umbrella above his head, lightning snapping in the distance, Wes looked directly into the cameras and into our homes, and he told us his story.

  The bald cop returned and said, “Looks like we’ll have to put the two of you in a holding cell until we get your parents on the horn. Come along now. Both of you.”

  Ralph and I walked side by side down the police corridor, trailing the cop. Our grocery sacks rubbed together, and when we passed the police station exit, Ralph looked out the glass door and into the sunlight, as if considering making a break for it. And I had decided in that instant that if Ralph bolted for the door, I would bolt with him. I was hoping he’d do it, too. Nothing before had ever seemed so real to me than that moment, waiting for Ralph’s decision. But Ralph suddenly faced ahead, setting his jaw in grim defeat, and I followed his lead. As always, I remained by Ralph’s side.

  17

  Ralph and I had always called it Red’s, but its real name was R & D’s. We started calling it Red’s, I guess, because neither of us had bothered to look closely at the sign. Not that it made a difference, really. It was one of those places nobody knew by name, anyway. If they called it anything at all, they’d have called it “that ice cream joint on the corner of 79th and Narragansett” and left it at that.

  At least once a week during the spring of our eighth grade year, Ralph and I would agree to meet at Red’s. A husband and wife ran the place. The husband was there by himself all morning and for a good part of the afternoon, and then the wife came by later to help out with the nighttime rush. She brought her poodle and kept it in their car, a Ford LTD, with the windows rolled down part way. The dog usually stood on an armrest and watched everything going on. If it started to bark, the wife would poke her head out the service window and tell it to shush.

  The husband and wife were older than my parents, probably in their fifties. They never smiled; they never talked to each other. If I said “hello,” the husband would say, “What can I get you?” The wife didn’t help with anything but the ice cream. The husband took all of the orders, he fixed all of the hamburgers and hot dogs, and he dealt with all of the customer complaints. He always wore a white T-shirt tucked into dress pants; she wore a pink polyester dress that could have been a waitress’s uniform she’d taken from another business years ago. An old electric fan, spray-painted black, ran all the time, turning creakily one way and then back the other.

  Ralph and I went there only after it had gotten dark out. By then, the owner would have flipped on the yellow bulb where bugs of every kind met and hung out. That’s how it was there at night: swarms of customers in the parking lot, swarms of bugs in the air. There were always bugs I’d never seen before with extraordinarily long legs and flimsy, almost see-through bodies, or some kind of metallic-looking beetle, twice the size of any other beetle, with pincers that looked capable of chopping off a small child’s finger. The poodle in the car watched me watch the bugs, and whenever I’d look over at the poodle, it would let out a little whimper. Its breath steamed the glass, and tiny paw prints dotted the window’s bottom edge.

  One time, Ralph asked, “Why do you like this place?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t you like it?”

  Ralph didn’t answer.

  The counter outside, the one where I rested my money while peering through the sliding
screen door to watch the man inside make my hot fudge sundae, had been painted so many times that you could sink your thumbnail into it and watch it bubble up somewhere else. It reminded me of blisters I’d had, still full of goo. If my mother had been with me, she’d have ordered me not to touch it and then told me how many thousands of other people had touched it, and how many of those thousands were filthy. But since I always came alone or with Ralph, I couldn’t help it: I touched it. I pushed my thumbnail in and watched it bubble up. It was revolting, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter. Sometimes I’d tell myself that I wasn’t going to touch it and I’d try holding out as long as possible, but then, at the last second, as the husband finished up my sundae or turned to get my change, I’d dig my thumbnail all the way in, trying to pop through the paint, but leaving only a deep quarter-moon gouge instead.

  One particularly busy night, the husband was there working all by himself. The wife wasn’t back there with him. The car and the poodle weren’t in the parking lot, either. The husband was sweating, working like a madman in a laboratory, and when he did something that required only one hand, like making change, he’d dial the phone at the same time. You could tell by looking at him that whoever he had called wasn’t answering, that the other phone kept ringing and ringing. Twice he gave teenagers the wrong change, too little each time.

  “Where do you think she is?” I asked Ralph.

  “Who?”

  “His wife.”

  “His wife? What, you know these people personally? They’re family friends?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ralph sighed. He said, “How do you know they’re married?”

  I thought about it a minute; I didn’t know. I finally said, “They have a poodle.”

  “What poodle?”

  “The poodle they keep in the car.”

  “What car?”

  “The LTD,” I said. I pointed at the empty spot, but the fact that the spot was empty confirmed for Ralph that he was right.