by T. C. Boyle
I was chewing tunafish on rye, standing there in the middle of all that emptiness in my ridiculous pants and rumpled jacket. The building, like most institutions of higher and lower learning, was overheated, and in chasing half a dozen of my charges out the door I’d built up a sweat that threatened to break my hair loose of its mold. Without thinking, I slipped off the jacket and let it dangle from one hand; without thinking, I’d pulled a short-sleeved button-down shirt out of my closet that morning because all the others were dirty. That was the scene. That was the setup. “Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“I was just wondering—you ever read this book, The Man with the Golden Arm?”
“Nelson Algren?”
He nodded.
“No,” I said. “I’ve heard of it, though.”
He took a moment with this, then cocked his head back till it rolled on his shoulders and gave me a dead-on look. “He shoots up.”
“Who?”
“The guy in the book. All the time.” He was studying me, gauging how far he could go. “You know what that’s like?”
I played dumb.
“You don’t? You really don’t?”
I shrugged. Dodged his eyes.
There was a banging at the door behind us, hilarious faces there, then the beat of retreating footsteps. Robert moved back a pace, but he held me with his gaze. “Then what’s with the spots on your arms?”
I looked down at my arms as if I’d never seen them before, as if I’d been born without them and they’d been grafted on while I was napping. “Mosquito bites,” I said.
“In November? They must be some tough-ass mosquitoes.”
“Yeah,” I said, shifting the half-eaten sandwich from one hand to the other so I could cover up with the jacket, “yeah, they are.”
—
Mike liked the country. He’d grown up in the projects on the Lower East Side, always pressed in by concrete and blacktop, and now that he was in the wilds of northern Westchester he began to keep animals. There were two chickens in a rudely constructed pen and a white duck he’d hatched from the egg, all of which met their fate one bitter night when a fox—or more likely, a dog—sniffed them out. He had a goat too, chained to a tree from which it had stripped the bark to a height of six feet or more, its head against the palm of your hand exactly like a rock with hair on it, and when he thought about it he’d toss it half a bale of hay or a loaf of stale bread or even the cardboard containers the beer came in. Inside, he had a fifty-gallon aquarium with a pair of foot-long alligators huddled inside it under a heat lamp, and these he fed hamburger in the form of raw meatballs he’d work between his palms. Every once in a while someone would get stoned and expel a lungful of smoke into the aquarium to see what effect it would have on a pair of reptiles and the things would scrabble around against the glass enclosure, hissing.
I was there one night without Cole—he was meeting with his lawyer, I think; I remember he’d shaved his mustache and trimmed his hair about that time—and I parked out on the street so as to avoid suspicion and made my way over the stone wall and through the darkened woods to the indistinct rumble of live music, the pulse of Mike’s bass buoyed by the chink-chink of a high hat, an organ fill and cloudy vocals. My breath steamed around me. A sickle moon hung over the roof of the cottage and one of the cats shot along the base of the outer wall as I pushed through the door.
Everyone was gathered in the living room, JoJo and Suzie stretched out on the floor, Mike and his band, his new band, manning the instruments. I stood in the doorway a moment, feeling awkward. Nicky was on keyboards and a guy I’d met a few times—Skip—was doing the drumming. But there was a stranger, older, in his late twenties, with an out-of-date haircut and the flaccid beginnings of jowls, up at the mike singing lead and playing guitar. I leaned against the doorframe and listened, nodding my head to the beat, as they went through a version of “Rock and Roll Woman,” Mike stepping up to the microphone to blend his voice effortlessly with the new guy’s on the complex harmonies, and it wasn’t as if they were rehearsing at all. They could have been onstage playing the tune for the hundredth time. When the song finished, I ducked into the room, nodding to Mike and saying something inane like, “Sounding good, man.”
As it turned out, the new guy—his name was either Haze or Hayes, I never did get that straight—had played with Mike in a cover band the year before and then vanished from sight. Now he was back and they were rehearsing for a series of gigs at a club out on Route 202, where eventually they’d become the house band. I sat there on the floor with the girls and listened and felt transported—I wanted to get up and sing myself, ask them if they couldn’t use a saxophone to cut away from the guitar leads, but I couldn’t work up the nerve. Afterward, in the kitchen, when we were all stoned and riding high on the communion of the music, Haze launched into “Sunshine of My Love” on his acoustic guitar and I lost my inhibitions enough to try to blend my voice with his, with mixed results. But he kept on playing, and I kept on singing, till Mike went out to the living room and came back with the two alligators, one clutched in each hand, and began banging them together like tambourines, their legs scrambling at the air and tails flailing, the white miniature teeth fighting for purchase.
—
Then there was parent/teacher night. I got home from work and went straight to bed, and then, cruelly, had to get back up, put the tie on all over again and drive to school right in the middle of cocktail hour, or at the tail end of it anyway. I make a joke of it now, but I was tentative about the whole thing, afraid of the parents’ scrutiny, afraid I’d be exposed for the impostor I was. I pictured them grilling me about the rules of grammar or Shakespeare’s plays—the ones I hadn’t read—but the parents were as hopeless as their offspring. Precious few of them turned up, and those who did looked so intimidated by their surroundings I had the feeling they would have taken my word for practically anything. In one class—my fifth period—a single parent turned up. His son—an overweight, well-meaning kid mercilessly ragged by his classmates—was one of the few in the class who weren’t behavioral problems, but the father kept insisting that his son was a real hell-raiser, “just like his old man.” He sat patiently, work-hardened hands folded on the miniature desk, through my fumbling explanation of what I was trying to accomplish with this particular class and the lofty goals to which each and every student aspired and more drivel of a similar nature, before interrupting me to say, “He gives you a problem, you got my permission to just whack him one. All right? You get me?”
I was stuffing papers into my briefcase just after the final bell rang at 8:15, thinking to meet Cole at Chase’s as soon as I could change out of my prison clothes, when a woman in her thirties—a mother—appeared in the doorway. She looked as if she’d been drained of blood, parchment skin and a high sculpted bluff of bleached-blond hair gone dead under the dehumanizing wash of the overhead lights. “Mr. Caddis?” she said in a smoker’s rasp. “You got a minute?”
A minute? I didn’t have thirty seconds. I wanted nothing but to get out of there and get loose before I fell into my bed for a few hours of inadequate dreamless sleep and then found myself right here all over again. “I’m in a hurry,” I told her. “I have—well, an appointment.”
“I only want a minute.” There was something about her that looked vaguely familiar, something about the staring cola-colored eyes and the way her upper teeth pushed at her lip, that reminded me of somebody, somewhere—and then it came to me: Robert Rowe. “I’m Robert’s mother,” she said.
I didn’t say anything, just parked my right buttock on the nearest desk and waited for her to go on. Robert wasn’t in any of my classes, just homeroom. I wasn’t his teacher. He wasn’t my responsibility. The fat kid, yes. The black kid who flew around the room on the wings beating inside his brain chanting He’s white, he’s right for hours at a time, the six months’ pregnant girl whose head would have fallen o
ff if she stopped chewing gum for thirty seconds, yes and yes. But not Robert. Not Robert Rowe.
She was wearing a dirty white sweater, misbuttoned. A plaid skirt. Loafers. If I had been older, more attuned, more sympathetic, I would have seen that she was pretty, pretty still, and that she was desperately trying to communicate something to me, some nascent hope grown up out of the detritus of welfare checks and abandonment. “He looks up to you,” she said, her voice choked, as if suddenly she couldn’t breathe.
This took me by surprise. I didn’t know how to respond, so I threw it back at her, stalling a moment to assimilate what she was saying. “Me?” I said. “He looks up to me?”
Her eyes were pooling. She nodded.
“But why me? I’m not even his teacher.”
“Ever since his father left,” she began, but let that thought trail off as she struggled to summon a new one, the thought—the phrase—that would bring me around, that would touch me in the way she wanted to. “He talks about you all the time. He thinks you’re cool. That’s what he say, ‘Mr. Caddis is cool.’”
Robert Rowe’s face rose up to hover before me in the seat of my unconscious, a compressed little nugget of a face, with the extruded teeth and Coca-Cola eyes of this woman, his mother, Mrs. Rowe. That was who she was, Mrs. Rowe, I reminded myself, and I seized on the proper form of address in that moment: “Mrs. Rowe, look, he’s a great kid, but I’m not, I mean—well, I’m not his teacher, you know that—”
The room smelled of adolescent fevers and anxieties, of socks worn too long, unwashed hair, jackets that had never seen the inside of a dry cleaner’s. There was a fading map of the United States on the back wall, chalkboards so old they’d faded to gray. The linoleum was cracked and peeled. The desks were a joke. Her voice was so soft I could barely hear her over the buzz of the fluorescent lights. “I know,” she said. “But he’s not . . . he’s getting F’s—D’s and F’s. I don’t know what to do with him. He won’t listen to me—he hasn’t listened to me in years.”
“Yeah,” I said, just to say something. He looked up to me, sure, but I had a date to meet Cole at Chase’s.
“Would you just, I don’t know, look out for him? Would you? That’s all I ask.”
—
I suppose there are several layers of irony here, not the least of which is that I wasn’t capable of looking out for myself, but I buried all that at the bar and when I saw Robert Rowe in homeroom the next morning, I felt nothing more than a vague irritation. He was wearing a tie-dyed shirt—starbursts of pink and yellow—under the parka and he’d begun to kink his hair out in the way I wore mine at night, but that had to be a coincidence, because to my knowledge he’d never seen me outside of school. It was possible, of course. Anything was possible. He could have seen me coming out of Chase’s or stopped in my car along South Street with Mike or Cole, looking to score. I kept my head down, working at my papers—the endless, hopeless, scrawled-over tests and assignments—but I felt his eyes on me the whole time. Then the bell rang and he was gone with the rest of them.
I was home early that evening, looking for sustenance—hoping to find my mother in the kitchen stirring something in a pot—because I was out of money till payday and Cole was lying low because his mother had found a bag of pot in his underwear drawer and I felt like taking a break from the cottage and music and dope. Just for the night. I figured I’d stay in, read a bit, get to bed early. My mother wasn’t there, though. She had a meeting. At school. One of the endless meetings she had to sit through, taking minutes in shorthand, while the school board debated yet another bond issue. I wondered about that and wondered about Jerry Reilly too.
My father was home. There was no other place he was likely to be—he’d given up going to the tavern or the diner or anyplace else. TV was his narcotic. And there he was, settled into his chair with a cocktail, watching Victory at Sea (his single favorite program, as if he couldn’t get enough of the war that had robbed him of his youth and personality), the dog, which had been young when I was in junior high myself, curled up stinking at his feet. We exchanged a few words—Where’s Mom? At a meeting. You going to eat? No. A sandwich? I’ll make you a sandwich? I said no.—and then I heated a can of soup and went upstairs with it. For a long while I lay on the floor with my head sandwiched between the speakers, playing records over and over, and then I drifted off.
It was late when I woke—past one—and when I went downstairs to use the toilet, my mother was just coming in the door. The old dog began slapping his tail on the carpet, too arthritic to get up; the lamp on the end table flicked on, dragging shadows out of the corners. “You just getting in?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, her voice hushed. She was in her work clothes: flocked dress, stockings and heels, a cloth coat, no gloves, though the weather had turned raw.
I stood there a moment, listening to the thwack of the dog’s tail, half-asleep, summoning the beat of an internal rhythm. I should have mounted the stairs, should have gone back to bed; instead, I said, “Late meeting?”
My mother had set her purse down on the little table inside the door reserved for the telephone. She was slipping out of her coat. “We went out for drinks afterward,” she said. “Some of us—me and Ruth, Larry Abrams, Ted Penny.”
“And Jerry? What about him—was he there?”
It took a moment, the coat flung over the banister, the dog settled back in his coil, the clank of the heat coming on noisy out of all proportion, and then she turned to me, hands on her hips, and said, “Yes, Jerry was there. And you know what—I’m glad he was.” A beat. She swayed slightly, or maybe that was my imagination. “You want to know why?”
There was something in her voice that should have warned me off, but I was awake now, and instead of going back upstairs to bed I just stood there in the dim arc of light the lamp cast on the floor and shrugged my shoulders. She lifted her purse from the telephone stand and I saw that there was something else there, a metal case the size of the two-tiered deluxe box of candy I gave her for Christmas each year. It was a tape recorder, and she bent a moment to fit the plug in the socket next to the phone outlet. Then she straightened up and gave me that look again—the admonitory look, searing and sharp. “I want you to listen to something,” she said. “Something a friend of Jerry’s—he works for the Peterskill police department, he’s a detective—thought you ought to hear.”
I froze. There was no time to think, no time to fabricate a story, no time to wriggle or plead, because my own voice was coming at me out of the miniature speaker. Hey, I was saying, you coming over or what? It’s like past nine already and everybody’s waiting—
There was music in the background, cranked loud—“Spinning Wheel,” the tune of that fall, and we were all intoxicated by David Clayton Thomas and the incisiveness of those punched-up horns—and my mind ran through the calendar of the past week, Friday or Saturday at the cottage in the woods, Cole running late, the usual party in progress . . .
Yeah, sure, I heard Cole respond. He was at his mother’s—it was his mother’s birthday. Just as soon as I can get out of here.
Okay, man, I said. Catch you later, right?
That was it. Nothing incriminating, but incrimination wasn’t the point of the exercise. It took me a moment, and then I thought of Haze, his sudden appearance in our midst, the glad-handing and the parceling out of the cool, and then I understood why he’d come to us—the term “infiltrated” soared up out of nowhere—and just who had put him up to it. I couldn’t think of what to say.
My mother could, though. She clicked off the tape with a punch of her index finger. “My friend said if you knew what was good for you, you’d stay clear of that place for a while. For good.” We stood five feet apart. There was no embrace—we weren’t an embracing family—no pat on the back, no gesture of any kind. Just the two of us standing there in the half-dark. When she spoke finally her voice was muted. “Do you unde
rstand what I’m telling you?”
—
As soon as I got out of work the next day I changed my clothes and went straight to the cottage. It was raining steadily, a cold gray rain that drooled from the branches of the trees and braided in the gutters. Cole’s Bug was parked on the street as I drove up, but I didn’t park beside him—I drove another half mile on and parked on a side street, a cul-de-sac where nobody would see the car. Then I put my head down and walked up the road in the rain, veering off into the woods the minute I saw a car turn into the street. I remember how bleak everything looked, the summer’s trash revealed at the feet of the denuded trees, the weeds bowed and frost-burned, leaves clinging to my boots as if the ground were made of paste. My heart was pounding. It was a condition we called paranoia when we were smoking, the unreasoning feeling that something or somebody is about to pounce, that the world has become intractably dangerous and your own vulnerability has been flagged. But no, this wasn’t paranoia: the threat was real.
The hair was wet to my scalp and my jacket all but ruined by the time I pushed through the front door. The house was quiet, no music bleeding through the speakers, no murmur of voices or tread of footsteps. There was the soft fading scratch of one of the cats in the litter pan in the kitchen, and that was it, nothing, silence absolute. I stood in the entryway a moment, trying to scrape the mud and leaves from my boots, but it was hopeless, so finally I just stepped out of them in my stocking feet and left them there at the door. I suppose that was why Suzie and Cole didn’t hear me coming—I hadn’t meant to creep up on them, hadn’t meant anything except to somehow come round to tell them what I knew, what I’d learned, warning them, sparing them, and as I say my heart was going and I was risking everything myself just to be there, just to be present—and when I stepped into the living room they gave me a shock. They were naked, their clothes flung down beside them, rolling on a blanket in sexual play—or the prelude to it. I suppose it doesn’t really matter at this juncture to say that I’d found her attractive—she was the pretty one, always that—or that I felt all along that she’d favored me over Cole or Nicky or any of the others? That didn’t matter. That had nothing to do with it. I’d come with a warning, and I had to deliver it.