Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  As the teenagers in front of us finished up, getting their last orders, the husband kept the phone cradled on his shoulder, pinned by his ear and chin. Ralph and I stepped up to order, but the moment I brought my thumbnail to the counter, the husband flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and then pulled down the shade.

  “What the hell?” Ralph said. Behind us came mutters, curses. Ralph said, “Anyone got the time?” No one gave Ralph the time. It was a question that didn’t need an answer. Someone answered Ralph by saying, “No kidding.”

  I biked to R & D’s the next day, but it was closed. I biked there every day for a week, but each day was the same. Then one day a realtor’s sign appeared on the corner. Six weeks later, a new business moved in, an insurance company, and they bricked up the hole where we used to order ice cream. It looked odd, though, because the bricks were a slightly different color. The counter with the hundreds of layers of paint was gone, too.

  In June, on the first hot day of the year, one week before eighth grade graduation, I walked inside the insurance company, and a blast of ice-cold air-conditioned air hit me. It felt so good that I wanted to sit down and stay there, but I couldn’t: the two girls who worked in the office were looking at me, eyes narrowed, as if I were a raccoon who’d wandered in looking for food. They were both young and pretty, and one of them was snapping a wad of gum. They were probably only a few years out of high school, not that much older than me, really. The shorter of the two, the one who wasn’t chewing gum, smiled and walked over to the counter where I stood.

  “Can I help you?”

  I’d never done anything like this before, walk into a place where I didn’t belong, and I suddenly felt that I’d made a mistake, but it was too late now. I said, “I was wondering if you know what happened to the ice cream place that was here.”

  The short girl turned to look at the gum snapper. They both shrugged and shook their heads, then the short one turned back to me. “No, I’m sorry. We don’t.” The one with the gum blew a huge bubble just then. It popped, then wilted, hanging out of her mouth like a shriveled tongue.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said.

  “Maybe,” the short one said, “we can interest you in some life insurance?” The other girl started to giggle but caught herself.

  “Nah,” I said. “I don’t think so.” But before I could turn to go, she had come around the counter to stop me. To my surprise, she wasn’t any taller than me. She took my arm and led me to the desks where she and her friend did their work.

  “Here,” she said and handed over a brochure. “Now, sit down.”

  The one with the gum said, “Tracy,” and then laughed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand.

  I looked through the brochure. It didn’t make a lot of sense. The best I could tell, I would have to pay a little bit of money each month while I was still alive, but when I died, someone else would hit the jackpot. I kept thinking that I was missing something, that maybe I was misreading it. I felt something touch my ankle, and when I reached down to brush it away, I saw the tip of the short girl’s shoe rubbing against me.

  “Well?” she said. “Can we offer you some insurance? Shall we write up a policy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I don’t get it. Why do I need insurance?”

  The girl chewing gum pulled up a chair and sat next to me. She leaned into me, whispering into my ear, “Because life is full of surprises.” The shorter girl leaned toward me, her palms resting on my knees, and said, “Because you never know what’s going to happen from one minute to the next.”

  18

  It was the last week of May with only five days of eighth grade to go when I saw Ralph at the opposite corner of the blacktop talking to a group of boys he normally never spoke to. Some of them, like Joey Rizzo and Pete Jones, were also in eighth grade, but others looked like they were in only third or fourth. One kid might even have been a first-grader.

  Ralph had always been able to command attention and fear from any of our classmates, especially those he usually ignored, so I wasn’t surprised to see a platoon of kids gathering around to hear what he had to say. But Ralph and I were friends, so why wasn’t I there with him? Why hadn’t he called me over?

  Ralph’s meetings weren’t the only odd thing happening. Our teachers had quit teaching us. It was as though they’d given up. And if that wasn’t enough, our principal smiled at us now instead of yelling while the janitor, an old man who normally did smile at us, had begun to glare and nod slowly whenever he passed us, as though silently letting us know, now that it was all coming to an end, that he was going to beat us up. Strangest of all, however, was that girls had started wearing tube-tops to school.

  The tube-tops were the most disturbing change, not because I didn’t like them—I did—but because now I walked around all day thinking about nothing else. These thoughts lasted from seven-thirty in the morning, when I first arrived on the blacktop and saw Lisa Sadowski smooshed into her yellow tube-top, until the three o’clock bell rang, when I stood behind Gina Roush, whose ever-so-slight pudge bunched up where the tube-top squeezed the hardest. The tube-tops presented the girls I knew—girls I had known for eight years now—in an entirely new light. I saw how soon, very soon, they would be dating guys much older than me, guys with cars and jobs, guys with beards and gold chains.

  On Monday of that last week of classes, Mr. Lawrence—our Algebra teacher—kept shuffling off to the bathroom to smoke. Our class was held in one of the three mobile units outside, and there was one bathroom in each unit. He, too, had quit teaching, so when he wasn’t borrowing one of my issues of Mad magazine to read, he would lock himself inside the john for a cigarette break. Smoke would roll out from the vents, as though the mobile unit were on fire, and then the toilet would flush and Mr. Lawrence would appear, coughing and spraying the classroom with Lysol.

  Ralph wasn’t in my Algebra class. His status was such that he spent all day with a teacher none of us even knew. What sorts of things did Ralph do with his special teacher? Nobody dared to ask him.

  Lisa Sadowski, however, was in my Algebra class—she sat in front of me—and during those last few weeks, she wore her yellow tube-top every day, like a uniform.

  “Psssssst,” I said to Lisa that final Monday of eighth grade, after smoke started pouring through the bathroom vent. “Hey. What’re your plans for the summer?”

  Lisa turned to face me, looked me up and down, and said, “Do I know you?”

  “Ha-ha,” I said flatly.

  “No, really,” Lisa said. “Who are you?”

  For a moment, I was thinking that maybe she didn’t remember me, even though we had been in at least one class together every year since first grade, but then she poked me in the chest and said, “I’m going to spend it with you, Hank.”

  I smiled.

  “So you do remember me,” I said.

  Lisa leaned toward me. “I’ll always remember you, Hank,” she said dramatically and then laughed. “Always!”

  I tried not to look at her tube-top, but I couldn’t help it. It was like being told not to look at a solar eclipse, that it would burn holes through your retinas and cause you to go blind, but how could you not? I looked. Just a fast look down, but Lisa caught me, cocked an eyebrow, and then spun back around.

  Ralph scratched the few wispy whiskers on his chin when I approached him after school, and then his minions scattered like flies, as though scratching were a signal. Ralph yawned and said, “Hey, Hank.”

  “What’s new?” I asked.

  Ralph frowned and shook his head. “Same ol’, same ol’.”

  I was weak in my knees, knowing that Ralph was planning something without me, but I kept quiet. The harder I pressed Ralph, the more he’d pretend nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

  We started walking home now, just the two of us, like old times.

  “The teachers quit teaching,” I said. “What do you think about that?”

  “Probably taug
ht us everything they know,” Ralph said. “If we learn one more thing, we’d be smarter than them. They don’t want that to happen.”

  “I bet you’re right.”

  “I know I’m right,” Ralph said and punched my arm, hard. “But I’ve got a different arrangement than you do, so I don’t have that problem.”

  This was the first time Ralph had ever mentioned his own unique situation, so I decided to inch ahead.

  “Your teacher hasn’t stopped teaching yet?” I asked.

  “Nuh-uh,” Ralph said. “In fact, we passed the rest of you up three years ago.”

  “Really?” My impression was that Ralph had been assigned a special teacher because he’d failed two grades. The possibility that he was a genius who’d flunked those two years out of boredom had never crossed my mind. “Hey, have you noticed how many girls are wearing tube-tops?” I asked.

  “Tube socks?”

  “Tops. Tube-tops!”

  “What’s a tube-top?”

  “What’s a tube-top?” I repeated. “Are you kidding me? What’s a tube-top?”

  “Oh, hey,” Ralph said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’m starting a club. You’re welcome to join, but I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

  So, this was it. A club!

  “How would I know if I’m interested or not,” I said, “if I don’t know anything about it?”

  “Good point,” Ralph said. I waited for him to tell me more, but he didn’t. He knew he had me on the hook. He could toy with me now, reeling me closer or flinging me out to sea. “Tube-tops,” he said. “You mean those things the girls are wearing?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Wasn’t someone in your class wearing a yellow one?” he asked. “What’s her name?”

  “Lisa,” I said, nodding enthusiastically. “Yup.”

  “And the teachers aren’t teaching anymore?”

  “Mr. Lawrence goes to the bathroom and smokes every couple of minutes,” I said.

  “It’s anarchy,” Ralph said. “Just as I predicted to the boys.”

  “I guess,” I said. I shrugged. I didn’t know what anarchy was.

  Ralph said, “You’ve heard of Skylab, right?”

  I collected postage stamps and was in possession of a mint condition Skylab stamp from 1974. For a while, stamp collecting took over my life. I owned a dozen stockbooks, thousands of stamp hinges for stamps I hadn’t yet found, four different magnifying glasses, and a pair of stamp tongs that were actually my sister Kelly’s tweezers for plucking her eyebrows. Of all the stamps I owned, from countries all around the world, the ten-cent Skylab postage stamp was my favorite.

  I told none of this to Ralph, though. I merely grunted and nodded.

  “Well, it’s coming back to earth,” Ralph said, “and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

  And then he told me how Skylab might hit a major city and set the entire place on fire, burning it the way Chicago had burned a hundred years earlier, or how it might just kill a family after they’d sat down to eat macaroni and cheese, or how it might hit the earth so hard it would knock us off our axis, causing dramatic changes to the weather. The polar caps might even melt, he told me.

  “And then you know what would happen?” Ralph asked.

  I shook my head. I had no idea.

  Ralph leaned in close. “The end of life as we know it.”

  “So, this group,” I said. “Are you protesters?”

  “Nuh-uh,” Ralph said. “Scavengers. I heard about this newspaper—I can’t tell you which one—that’ll offer ten thousand big ones for a piece of Skylab when it crashes to earth. I’ll pay five hundred bucks to whoever finds it.”

  “And you keep the rest?”

  Ralph shrugged. “I know which newspaper has the dough, and I’ve got the means to get the piece there.” He smiled and said, “I knew you wouldn’t be interested.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Count me out.”

  “I’m also teaching them survival skills,” he said. “You ever read Lord of the Flies?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot,” Ralph said. “Your teachers quit teaching. Anyway, I had to read it. It’s got some great survival tips in there.”

  “Survival tips?” I said. “Lord of the Flies? Really?”

  We had reached Ralph’s street. Ralph, walking backwards but still talking, said, “Don’t come to me when a solar panel smashes through your parents’ roof. Insurance won’t pay for it. I already checked.”

  “You’ve got all the angles covered, don’t you?”

  “All of them!” Ralph said, tipping an imaginary hat to me and then turning around just in time to step over a child on a Big Wheel.

  When I got home, I looked up “anarchy.” A state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority. I looked at other words on the page, like “anamnesis.” A remembering, especially of a supposed life before this life. Or “anan.” Eh? What? What is it? The longer I studied the dictionary, the more I realized that my teachers hadn’t taught me anything. I hadn’t even seen most of the words in there, let alone known how to pronounce them or what they meant.

  As the week wound down, I had a harder and harder time imagining my years of grade school coming to an end. It must have been how prisoners felt when they were about to be set free. Even though I hadn’t even graduated yet from eighth grade, I bought a T-shirt with an iron-on decal. “Class of 1983,” it read, optimistically. I wanted everyone to know that I was already thinking about my release from high school. I wanted people to see me and think, Now, that’s a kid with his eye on the future!

  Meanwhile, Ralph’s group tripled in size. There were even girls in the group now, including a pudgy-kneed first-grader whose eyes, like a kitten’s, barely focused on whatever she stared at. The entire time Ralph talked, he made wild hand gestures, and more than once I saw him reprimand a child for not paying close enough attention.

  Normally, a recess monitor would have broken up the meeting and escorted Ralph to our principal’s office to explain his suspicious behavior, but even the recess monitor didn’t care what we did anymore. She sat on the hood of her Gran Torino and ate Ding Dongs from a box while one kid pulled another kid’s hair.

  Ralph was right. Everything was up for grabs now. I was looking directly in the face of anarchy, and it was as ugly as Ralph predicted.

  I escorted a small boy who’d wet his pants into the school. I delivered him to the front desk of the main office, where Mrs. Lurch, who normally smiled at me and asked about my mother, was busy filing her nails and reading a copy of Man, Myth, & Magic. On the cover was some kind of man-beast. “The most unusual magazine ever published,” it proclaimed at the bottom of the cover.

  I took the boy back outside and told him to go home.

  “Go on,” I said. When he hesitated, I said, “Come back when you’ve got clean clothes on. You’re not going to get in trouble. Nobody cares anymore,” I said.

  The boy ran away, and I never saw him again.

  I wasn’t sure how to spend my school days anymore. By Tuesday, we could go to whatever classes we wanted, so long as we were still in school. The brightest and most promising students were now sitting in the same room with delinquents who farted at will and, using one finger and a nostril, played Boston’s entire album on the nose harp. Some students spent the whole day in gym class throwing a medicine ball at each other while the teacher slept on an exercise mat on the gymnasium stage.

  My science teacher, Mr. Gerke, showed the John Wayne movie The Quiet Man in his class. I wasn’t sure why he chose that particular movie—maybe it was the only feature length sixteen-millimeter movie the school owned—but he put a sign on the door announcing that the movie would begin at one p.m. As it turned out, I was one of only two students who showed up. Lisa Sadowski was the other.

  At first we sat at desks, the way we normally would have, but then we moved to the floor at the back of the room, up against th
e cabinet that held the beakers and test tubes. Lisa kept scooting closer and closer to me. Light from the projector’s lamp shot out from the seams, intermittently illuminating Lisa and her tube-top. There were goosepimples all along the skin that her tube-top didn’t cover up, and I wanted to run my finger across them, every one of them, but I was afraid to touch her.

  “I’m sleepy,” Lisa said when she finally slid right up next to me. She lay down, resting her head in my lap. “Do you mind?” she asked, looking up at me.

  “No,” I said. “No, no.”

  She smiled and then turned her head, facing the movie again. When John Wayne kissed Maureen O’Hara in a rainy, windblown cemetery, Lisa nuzzled closer, and I couldn’t resist: I rested my hand on the soft, prickly flesh below her tube-top and left it there until Mr. Gerke flipped on the lights and, wiping tears from his eyes, said, “Damn fine movie, kids. Damn fine.”

  •

  On my way home, I noticed how many people littered. Scattered along the ground were crumpled bags and straws and Kayo cans and rubber gloves. Two cars had apparently crashed into each other, because in the middle of the intersection was a mound of broken glass. But why didn’t anyone pick it up?

  Anarchy had arrived, and not just at school. It was spreading across the entire city like a rash.

  On Wednesday, students I didn’t recognize at all sat in our classrooms and played cards. Were these kids from other schools? Were they someone’s cousins from Tennessee or Mississippi?

  On Thursday, very few students showed up and those that did were reprimanded by Mr. Gerke.

  “I don’t want to have to babysit you,” he said. “Why don’t you go home, like the rest of your friends?”

  One kid, Jimmy Gonzalez, gathered his belongings and left the room without saying a word. The remaining four of us, unable to do something wrong even when we were told it was okay, sat with our eyes averted, afraid Mr. Gerke would yell at us if we looked at him.