by Susan Perabo
He didn’t want to grin, but he couldn’t help it. “Okay,” he said.
After paying the bill Laura said she wanted to stop in at Deep Discount Shoes to look for a pair of good winter boots. She had been wearing Sonny’s old boots all winter, she told Paul, and needed to buy a pair that actually fit her. Paul was surprised she’d managed to mention his father at all, even if it was in reference to footwear.
“I’m gonna look at CDs,” he said. “I’ll come over when I’m done.”
She eyed him warily, as if he might make a run for it (but for where? for what?) the moment he was out of her sight.
“Five minutes,” she said.
There were two goners loafing on the bench outside The Wall. Paul strolled casually over and lingered near them, picking pepperoni from his teeth with a minty toothpick, hoping they would notice him. They didn’t pay any attention. They were talking about a band called the Boat People that was going to be playing at a club in Lancaster the next week, trying to figure out how they were going to scrounge up enough cash to pay the cover. Finally one of them stopped talking mid-sentence and eyed Paul contemptuously.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” he growled. He was a cartoon of himself, Paul thought, everything about him an exaggeration of the expected. Six and a half feet tall, thick forearms, a nose that had clearly suffered. His head was covered by a thin coat of black hair; a silver hoop was snagged at the top of his left ear; on his shirt was a grotesque scarecrow, crucified on a cross, blood dripping from its straw hands.
“Nothin’,” Paul said, flicking his toothpick into the ashtray. “I’m Paul.”
“You want to suck my dick or something, Paul?”
“Um, no.”
“So what’re you staring at me for, fucko?”
Paul tried a little sneer, a smirk. He wished he’d planned ahead, practiced it first in front of a mirror, so he could see how it looked. “I’m a friend of Ian’s,” he said.
“Finch? You know Finch?” the other one said. Paul recognized him from the day at Neidermeyers’; this was Charlie, or Kevin, one of the boys who had been in the basement with Ian the night before the house collapsed. He wasn’t quite the cartoon the scarecrow guy was; he was short and a little pudgy in the gut, had hair like Ian’s, floppy over the forehead, but blond instead of black.
“We just got back from California,” Paul said. “Me and Ian.”
“Hey, you’re the fireman’s kid,” Pudgy said. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure Ian’s back?” Scarecrow asked. “Where’s he at?”
“I dunno. Around.”
Pudgy butted him in the shoulder with the heel of his hand. “Hey, you see him, you tell him Kevin’s lookin’ for him. Asshole owes me ten bucks.”
Scarecrow eyed Paul. “You got any money?”
Paul shook his head.
“Not even a buck? My little brother needs an operation, see. He’s got dick cancer and if he don’t get the operation they’re gonna have to cut off his dick.”
“There’s no dick cancer,” Kevin said.
“You wanna bet?” Scarecrow said, turning to him. “You wanna fuckin’ bet? I’ll bet you five thousand dollars there’s dick cancer, fucko.”
Paul left them to their dispute, went into the music store and picked out a CD. After a few minutes his mother wandered in. She was still bootless. Holding his thumb over the orange “parental advisory” label, he asked her for an advance on his allowance to buy the CD. She peered at it dubiously.
“The Boat People?” she said. “Who are they?”
“They’re like . . . folk rock,” Paul said.
“Is that back in?”
“Yeah. It’s like . . . new folk rock.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is this a California thing?”
“Kinda,” he said.
A few days later, on a Sunday afternoon, he found himself at the Finches’ again. He had intended only to pass by and see if Ian was by chance outside, maybe shoveling the driveway, he told himself, though this was something he knew Ian would never do unless a gun were held to his head, and probably not even then. Paul figured if Ian was outside it wasn’t really like going to see him; it was like bumping into him. But when he found the yard and the drive empty, he went up and knocked on the door. Ian’s mother answered. He hadn’t seen her since the night of the rescue and he almost didn’t recognize her. Without mascara running down her face she didn’t look half bad. Of course she hadn’t opened her mouth yet.
“Hi, sweetie,” she said. “Ian’s in his room. I don’t know what he’s doing in there. Doing what he always does, I suppose, although what that is is anybody’s guess.”
“Thanks,” Paul said, scooting past her.
Kally Finch was lying on the floor of the living room reading Seventeen magazine. There was a black cat sitting on her back, methodically grooming itself.
“Hey,” she said, throwing Paul a fleeting glance.
“Hi,” he said. He stopped, not wanting to be impolite.
She looked up. “What?”
“Nothin’. Just hi.”
She wiggled her shoulders and the cat hopped off her back. “I heard about your fight,” she said.
His heart shuddered. She couldn’t know, could she, what had been said about her? That it had been her, first, before Ian, that he had been moved to defend?
“What about it?” he asked casually.
“Nothin’. Just about it.” Now she eyed him suspiciously. “Was there really a whirl tub in you guys’ hotel room?”
He smiled, relieved. “Yeah.”
“Did it whirl?”
“Not really,” he said. “More bubbled than whirled, I guess.”
“Ian said it whirled,” she said. She snorted, looked back to her magazine. “I knew he was lying.”
“Well, it kinda whirled,” Paul said.
“Whatever,” she said.
Paul walked toward the back of the Finch house, in the direction where he assumed Ian’s room would be. He hadn’t been anywhere but the living room before, but Ian’s door — despite the fact all the doors were closed — was easy enough to find.
GO AWAY, read a hand-printed sign on the door.
Paul grinned, then knocked.
“Read the sign!” shouted a voice from inside.
“It’s Paul.”
There was a complex series of locks being unlocked, then Ian opened the door.
“You’re a very, very bad boy,” he said, although Paul thought he didn’t seem especially surprised to see him. “Does Mommy know you’re here?”
Paul unzipped his backpack and took out the Boat People CD. “I got this for you,” he said, holding it out. “You like ’em, right?”
Ian looked at it, nodded appreciatively. “Yeah, they’re cool. You steal it or buy it?”
“Stole it,” Paul said. “From The Wall.”
“Bullshit,” Ian said. “They got like twenty alarms there.”
“Musta been broken,” Paul said. He took a step into Ian’s room. On the walls were posters of bands he’d never heard of — Furious George, The Grubs, Three Blind Mimes — plus a tattered map of the world and a giant photo of the mushroom cloud billowing over Hiroshima. The room was much neater than he would have imagined. There were a few magazines piled on the floor beside the bed and an overflowing ashtray in the middle of the floor. On the desk was a banged-up CD player and several stacks of CDs.
Ian went and flopped down on his bed, which was covered by a fleece leopard-skin blanket. There was a book open on the pillow and he shoved it to the floor.
“Whatcha reading?” Paul asked.
“Treasure Island. For about the twentieth time.”
“I didn’t know you read.”
“Just that one,” Ian said. “And a couple others, maybe.”
“I bet you’re smart,” Paul said. “You might be really smart and not even know it.”
“What’re you, my mother?”
“I j
ust —”
There was a knock on the door. Ian raised his eyebrows as he rolled off his bed. “Your mommy?”
“I don’t think so,” Paul stuttered, suddenly horrified by the possibility that his mother had actually developed some kind of crisis radar system, had already tracked him here, would never let him out of the house again.
Ian opened the door. Mrs. Finch was standing there with a bright smile. “You boys want some snacks?”
“No, Mom, we don’t want snacks,” Ian said. “Stop bothering us, okay?” He closed the door in her face and flopped down on the bed again.
“You’re a dick to your mom,” Paul said.
“Shut up,” Ian said. “Or leave.”
Paul stood. “I just wanted to bring that CD by anyway. Those guys’re playing in Lancaster next week.”
“What do you know about that? Got some secret life?”
“Your friends told me,” Paul said. “I talked to ’em at the mall the other night. They said —”
“Hold on.” Ian held up his hand. “You talked to them? What, like a conversation?”
Paul shrugged. “Kinda. Kevin said to tell you he was lookin’ for you. He said you owed him ten bucks.”
“Aw Jesus, man. What were you doing talking to them? You crazy?”
Paul sat down backwards on Ian’s desk chair, rested his elbows on the back of it. “I just kinda bumped into them. Outside The Wall.”
“Kevin,” he said. “Fucking Kevin. That guy’s had his head up his butt since first grade. Don’t talk to him, okay?”
“Now who’s acting like a mom?”
Ian blushed. “I’m just saying —”
“The other guy asked me if I wanted to suck his dick.”
Ian shook his head. “Shit . . . that’s Leo. Big bastard, right? Yeah, that’s how he says hello. Jesus, those idiots.”
“I thought those guys were your friends.”
Ian lit a cigarette, expelled an exasperated cloud. “My friends, yeah. You wanna know something? I was in that goddamn basement with your dad for six hours and by the time we came up I was tighter with him than I’d ever been with Kevin or Leo or any of those assholes. Wha’dya think of that?”
“You miss him?”
“Nah,” Ian said quickly. “You?”
“Nah,” Paul said, matching lie for lie in an unspoken agreement of necessary denial. He nodded at Ian’s foot, which lay at an unnatural angle on the bedspread. “You get the real one yet?”
“Couple weeks,” Ian said. “And hey, you know what this one nurse told me? She said in a few years they’re gonna have legs you can just think into moving, almost like it was your real leg. Like if you just think about wiggling your toe, the fake toe’ll know to wiggle. You believe that shit?”
“Like Luke Skywalker’s hand,” Paul said.
“Right,” Ian said. “But was that computers or the Force?”
“I don’t remember,” Paul said. “Maybe both.”
They lapsed into silence. Ian smoked; Paul picked at some dried paint on the back of the desk chair. He wanted to talk to Ian but he couldn’t really think of anything to talk about. He remembered what it had felt like to hang out with Carson and Joe, before he’d gone to L.A., how they’d all lounge around in Carson’s basement talking about classes and teachers and other kids in their class, about football and comics and Nintendo and the shows they watched on TV. There was a shared history, an unending supply of topics they had in common, most trivial, a few of consequence. With Ian, chatting about dumb stuff felt awkward. With Ian, the only thing they really had in common was too big for small talk.
Ian lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the one he’d just finished. “I been thinking about my tattoo,” he said.
Paul perked up. “Yeah? Thinking about it how?”
He shrugged. “I think I want something cooler than what I got. I’m thinking I might do some work on it.”
“Wha’dya mean?”
“I don’t know, play around with it or something, get some cool picture outa what’s already there. I made some drawings.”
He leaned over and snatched a thick notebook from the other side of his bed. “First I thought of this.” He held up the page for Paul to see.
“It’s just boxes,” Paul said.
“Yeah, but it could be like a window. And maybe there could be stuff inside it, you know, weird faces or something.”
“I guess,” Paul said, unconvinced.
Ian turned the page. “I like this one better anyway,” he said, holding it up.
“Huh,” Paul said, noncommittally.
“Snakes,” he said. “They’re cool, yeah?”
“They’re okay,” Paul said. “But it kinda still looks like . . . like it did before, just made out of snakes. What else you got?”
“Stupid stuff.” He flipped over to the next page, held it up.
“What is that?”
“A horse.” Ian grinned, embarrassed. “I know. Shit, I don’t even like horses. I was runnin’ out of ideas. It’s a bitch making something into something else, you know, once it’s already there? Your options are kinda limited.”
“Can’t you just get it erased? Can’t you get it burned off or something?”
“Sure, if I want a butt-ugly scar for the rest of my life.” He flipped back to the snakes, cocked his head to look at them from different angles. “Maybe if we make ’em loopier,” he said. “I wanna try it out on the real thing, see what it’d really look like, but I can’t do it myself. You give me a hand?”
“I don’t know how to do tattoos,” Paul said. “It’s dangerous, right?”
Ian rolled his eyes. “I don’t want you to give me a real tattoo, dimmo. I just want you to draw on it, see what you can do, see if you can do something cool with these snakes. You can draw, right? You can do everything. Then if you do something I like I can go someplace and get it done up for real.”
He grabbed a black Magic Marker from the floor, tossed it to Paul, then peeled off his T-shirt. Paul stood behind him, uncapped the marker and set it carefully on the lines on Ian’s back. That’s what they were, just lines, and Paul was suddenly struck by their simplicity, remembering how all those people had cowered at Disney, just because of some intersecting lines, some arbitrary shape. Weird, he thought, how something so simple could be so wicked.
“Do the snakes,” Ian said, lighting a cigarette. “Try that.”
“I don’t like the snakes so much,” Paul said, scrunching his nose to ward off the smoke that drifted from Ian’s lips and directly into his face. “I’m thinking.”
“Do the snakes, man. The snakes are cool. Make ’em loopy.”
Paul started drawing. He set his left hand on Ian’s shoulder to keep him still and drew with his right. Ian’s back was smooth and the marker shiny. It wasn’t like drawing on paper at all; it was soft, there was some give to it, like making lines in the sand: SOS; HELP; THERE ARE PEOPLE DOWN HERE.
“Whatcha doin’? You’re doing something retarded, aren’t you?”
“You’ll see.”
Paul finished, lifted the marker from Ian’s back. What he’d come up with was pretty rough, but he liked it better than anything Ian had done. They went into the bathroom and Ian looked over his shoulder into the mirror at this:
“Hey,” he said. “That ain’t half bad.”
“Somebody else could do it better probably,” Paul said. “A real tattoo guy. It’s just an idea.”
“I like it,” Ian said. “ ’Cept it’s got that line sticking off to nowhere. Doesn’t make any sense. Gotta do something with that.”
Paul put the marker to his back again, added this:
“Yeah,” Ian said. “There you go.”
“You got your snake.”
Ian turned, nodded. “Well,” he said. “It’s an improvement anyways.” He tossed his cigarette into the toilet. “Hey, you should go home. Your mom, right, she’ll kick my ass if she finds out you’re here.”
“I don�
��t wanna go home,” Paul said quickly. He hadn’t exactly been aware of thinking it, but now it seemed truer than anything anyone had said in a long time. So what if he and Ian didn’t have much to talk about? So what if they sat in Ian’s room, for hours even, without saying a word? Did that mean they didn’t belong together? Did that mean they couldn’t really be friends?
“What’s wrong with home? You got a nice place over there.”
Paul shrugged. “I just . . . just kinda like hangin’ with you.”
Ian was silent. He turned the marker over and over in his hand. Like Sonny, Paul thought. Turning and turning and turning, hoping the words would come.
“Well, yeah,” Ian finally said, scratching his stubble. “Yeah, I can see that. But you shouldn’t hang with me. You shouldn’t come back here anymore. I’m a bad influence, right?” He paused. “Go on home, jocko. I got shit to do anyway.”
“You do not,” Paul said. “You’re full of crap.”
“Paul,” Ian said. “Go home.”
Chapter Nine A week passed. The weather turned. It happens in Pennsylvania; you can always count on a few glorious days late in February to fool you, to hint at spring before winter comes roaring back for its final blast. But fool you it does, every year, no matter how many times you’ve promised yourself you won’t be taken in by it again. Winter is through, your body tells you, despite the calendar. You have prevailed. The sun blazes against the snow, the temperature reaches into the low sixties, and the town sheds its winter coats like skins. High school kids, their nakedness stifled for months, immediately don shorts and tank tops. Paul and his classmates wear sweatshirts, jeans, and soggy sneakers, splash giddily through slush puddles, nostalgic for weather like this as if it and their very happiness have been absent for years. Shopkeepers open their doors. Schools open their windows. Firemen sit in front of the fire station on lawn chairs. Mothers and sons unroll hoses in driveways and wash cars, dirty from salt and snow.
“No spraying,” Laura said, handing Paul the nozzle. “I’ve seen how you and your father wash the car. We’ll have none of that, mister.”
He grinned. “We’ll see.”