by J. Warren
That night, I lay awake for hours, again, nervous and waiting. The hand didn’t return. I couldn’t resist, though, and touched myself in a similar way. When my whole body burned and my legs seized, my mind exploded outward, then plummeted back to me. I thought I’d hurt myself, broken something inside me. I was afraid, though relaxed. I crept down the hall and cleaned myself up. Dr. Bledsoe told me that imitation is a quite normal way to begin touching yourself. He asked me who I thought it was who had fondled me that night. To this day, I don’t know. Every night, though, until the day I met Susan, that hand beckoned and I welcomed the touch to my skin. Every night, I was thirteen, again, asleep on a couch in Mobile, Alabama, stirring awake to someone else’s fingertips.
“Attention, ladies and gentlemen,” the flight attendant’s droning brought me back from that other place I had been in. I was hot, confused, and my head felt full of cotton balls. She continued by telling us that we were in approach, what local time was, what the local weather was like, and asking us to return out seats to the proper positions. I did as I was told, and reset my watch. She said that we’d lose an hour, but somehow, I felt like I’d lost much more.
SIX
Airports are awful. The landing was bad, too. At one point, I swear we were only on one wheel. Even the flight attendant looked nervous. I just knew we were going to go over, but we didn’t. I felt like disaster was just barely averted. Getting off the plane, my legs were rubber. The mother with the twin boys was just behind me, and trying to hide the jitter in her voice, too, I could tell.
I managed to find my luggage. It didn’t really hit me that I was home until I walked out of the doors into the cold air. Home always smells like home, no matter how long you’ve been away, I guess. Outside I hailed a cab. He tried to hide his smile when I told him how far. Even at a fifteen percent tip, he’d have a good day. I got my stuff into the trunk, then settled into the corner of the back seat and slept a bit. I felt exhausted, so it wasn’t any trouble to drift off. I wondered if Olympic athletes felt like this after their event was over.
I dreamed of an empty bicycle rolling down the sidewalk. It was my old neighborhood, and I followed the bike for hours, it seemed. The dream made distance confusing, but it was very far. The bike never wobbled or even swerved; it was like someone was on it, and I just couldn’t see them. The bike went past Kevin O’Mally as he’d been in the sixth grade; bull necked and with a barely enough fuzz on his head to qualify as having any. I remember running faster to avoid any trouble he might give me.
The bike eventually slowed down and then came to a stop in front of Mr. McPherson’s house. I put my hand on the seat, and the bike slumped against me. Mr. McPherson was out on the lawn. I moved closer to him and the bike disappeared. He was trimming weeds away from the bushes in front of the big bay window they had. I said hello and he looked up, smiling.
He said, “Randy?” to me and I woke up. The taxi rattled around me. Cold air seeped in from where the window wasn’t snug with the frame. In the driver’s seat, the driver was humming something. His ID badge swung from his rearview. His name was ‘Ed’.
“How much farther?” I asked him.
“You been asleep about two hours. We’ll be at city limits in maybe another twenty minutes,” Ed said, “You are paying cash, right?”
I nodded and then remembered he couldn’t see me nod. “Yes,” I said and put my head back against the door. I tried to cram myself back into the corner. I looked over my clothes. My mother would have a fit that I went on an airplane in jeans and with no sport coat. She was that kind of person.
“Rough flight?” Ed asked.
“Yeah, I hate flying.”
“Just between me you and the wall? I do, too. Butcha can’t get anywhere anymore by car. Everything’s so spread out.”
“Yeah,” I said, to be friendly.
“You from out this way, or on business?”
“My parents live here,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, paused, then asked, “You hear about that set of bones they found out here?”
“No,” I lied.
“Yesterday’s paper says they think they might belong to a little boy, maybe. Found ‘em over near Eukiah. Was in all the papers.” I closed my eyes and felt like someone had hit me in the stomach. After a while, when I didn’t say anything, Ed said, “They don’t know for sure, though.” He went back to driving. I dozed some more.
I thought about the first day I’d worked at the Y. They had me sweeping the halls. I didn’t mind, but my arm got really tired. I switched off. Working back and forth like that, I made my way down the hall and then to the smaller offshoots leading to the locker room and pool. I went back to the main room they’d shown me so I could put the broom away and that was when I met Mr. Roger.
I opened the door and he was sitting at the round table in the middle of the room. He was watching something on the television. I couldn’t see what it was, but it was in black and white. As I opened the door, he looked over from the screen almost lazily. He was smoking. The patch on the left of his dull gray jacket said ‘Roger’. I’m not sure, but I think that Mr. Roger was the first adult I’d ever seen smoke. That’s the kind of town we lived in.
“Shut the door,” was all he said, then looked back at the television screen. I stepped in and then shut the door behind me. I didn’t move any further into the room. I stared at him. He turned from the screen after a moment, when the commercial came on. He inhaled from the cigarette, then exhaled, his eyes squinty. “You got a name?”
“Mike,” I answered before I could think.
“Mike, huh?” he said. I knew it was one of those times when something sounded like a question but wasn’t, so I didn’t answer. “You the new kid they told me about, Mike?” I nodded. He barked a short laugh, then stubbed out his cigarette. “Well, come here, boy. I’m not going to bite you.”
I stepped closer to him. He was wearing the grey overalls that I would come to think of as his skin. I never saw him without them on. I walked to the edge of the table. His eyes never left mine. I felt like I was supposed to say something, but I didn’t know what. “Step around here,” he said and I inched around until he and I were face to face. He smelled like soap, and I felt sad. I wanted to look away from his eyes, but something told me I shouldn’t.
“I’ve seen you here. In the boxing class, weren’t you?”
He had me dead to rights. “Yes, sir.”
He nodded to himself as if I’d just answered a bigger question. “Let me see your hands,” he said, gesturing toward them with his own. I didn’t think I wanted him to touch me, so I didn’t move. He reached forward and grabbed them, holding my wrists. He inspected each set of knuckles, then turned them over and looked again. Then he stretched my arms out to full length. “Not a bad reach. Good knuckles; square. Why aren’t you in boxing anymore?” I shrugged. He let my hands drop.
“I don’t mind the help, boy, but you should be in boxing.” He paused as if he was waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t know what, so I didn’t. “Your father okay with you not being in the boxing class? He know you’re working with me?” He was like some sort of superhero. He knew all my secrets. I looked away.
“I see.” He reached into the pocket just over his heart and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He tapped them against his palm, then pulled one out. He set it between his lips, then put the pack away. He reached into the other pocket and pulled out a lighter, the whole time the cigarette dangled from his mouth. I felt like it was going to fall at any minute. He cupped one hand forward, the lighter just behind, and with a click, the cigarette lit. It was like magic. I couldn’t look away. His eyes were on the end of the cigarette the whole time. He clicked the lighter closed, put it down on the desk with a ‘thunk’. The metal was dull and heavy. He puffed twice, the smoke coming out the sides of his mouth, before he reached for the cigarette, taking it away from his lips. He held it with all five fingertips.
“Well, look here,” he said, p
ointing at me with his index finger, the cigarette pointed at the floor. “I won’t lie to your father. I don’t lie to anyone, not for anyone, do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He nodded again. “If your father comes up here, I’m going to tell him that his boy dropped out of boxing class to push a broom around. I don’t know why you did it, and it ain’t none of my business, understand?” he said. I let out a small breath of relief. I thought he’d figured that part out, too.
He put the cigarette back, puffed twice more out the sides of his mouth, then pulled it out again. “Get a piece of paper and a ruler from the front desk,” he said and I almost ran to do it. I didn’t realize until that moment I wanted him to like me. I wanted him to be proud of me. I wanted to show him that I was a good worker.
I came back, setting the ruler and the paper in front of him like an offering. He immediately took out a small pencil, like the kind I’d seen at bowling alleys. He drew seven perfectly straight lines from one edge to the other. He looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then drew five straight down. On the far edge he wrote the days of the week. His handwriting was precise, tiny. It almost looked like he’d typed the words. In the top boxes of the five columns, he wrote ‘sweep halls’, ‘vacuum front carpet’ and a few other odds and ends type jobs.
“Every day you come here, you come to this room first. You get this list out. You do the things in this order, understand?” he asked. I nodded. “After each job is done, you’ll put an ‘x’ next to it, in the box. At the end of the day, you and me will go around and I’ll check. I’ll initial behind you. Got it?” I nodded. “Now, go take this list to the girl at the desk and ask her to make twenty copies for you, and ask her nicely if you can have a folder.”
I’d never had an adult talk to me like that. I did exactly what he asked me to do because he wasn’t using a pet name for me. In a limited way, he wasn’t talking down to me. He was treating me like I’d seen adults treat each other. I was his worker.
He never treated me as a kid, either. He just knew how to talk to me, I guess. Dr. Bledsoe says I transplanted him for my own dad in some ways. I felt bad when he said it, but he said it was normal and necessary. Mr. Roger became my hero, and I idolized him in ways I could never idolize my father, he said. Mr. Roger went along behind me every day, like he said he would, and checked each thing in order. When he found it done, he grunted and made a small checkmark beside my ‘x’. If it wasn’t done quite as he wanted it to be, he just motioned and then spoke one or two quick sentences. There was no yelling. Somehow, he knew exactly what I’d done and how to make it more like what he wanted. He’d gesture that the way I was holding the brush for the hallway bricks wasn’t right, or he’d make a motion of how to get the mop into the corners further. At the end of the list, he initialed it, handed it to me, and then went back to his own work. There were no words or pats on the back, yet I preferred this. Somehow, I knew that his silence meant more than a thousand ‘good jobs’ from anyone else. I worked hard to make sure everything was done exactly right. I even started to go behind myself and double check things before getting him to check my work. I wanted to be someone he thought of as good.
Even though he came into my life abruptly, and left it so suddenly, he seemed to have always been there. I still think of him whenever I’m thinking of how to behave in a situation. How he was the one who taught me to tie a tie, how he was the one who noticed the bad rash after the first time I tried to shave. He took over where my father disappeared. It was Mr. Roger
“Coming up on your street,” the cabbie said, and I sat up. We turned onto my road, and up ahead I could see my father’s truck in the driveway. The light was on in the front room. I looked at my watch. Just after eight o’clock.
I looked at the meter and took out cash. When the car pulled to a stop, I handed it through the small window. “Keep it,” I said and he said ‘thanks’. I stepped out and heard the trunk click. I pulled out my suitcase and re-shouldered my backpack. As I closed the trunk, I saw the front room curtains swish. The door would open in a moment, and it would start. I breathed in, then breathed out. The taxi made a turn in the driveway that used to be Mrs. Garraty’s, and then drove away. I stepped forward just as I heard the first deadbolt on the front door turn.
SEVEN
Of course, my mother was the one who opened the front door. I had figured as much. I knew he wouldn’t get up from the television. I had wondered if it would be my mother or father that came out first. I wondered if it was him, would he hug me or not. I suspected not. When I was little, he hugged me a lot, but that stopped a long time ago.
My father was not a gentle man. Some people believe that a boy needs that, I guess. He was never loud or hard with my sisters, but with me it was different. Dr. Bledsoe tells me that my father was abusive with me. I don’t know that that’s true. He wasn’t always. We used to sing to each other on car rides. Something did change, though. He became cruel, mean.
The moment I most remember that change was when he beat the dog. We had a dog that year. My sister Katy had whined all year about getting a dog, and finally my father had given in. She hadn’t wanted a puppy, though. She wanted a dog from the pound. She’d recently gotten to be close with a girl whose parents were members of a few of what my father came to call ‘terrorist organizations’. Mary Thomas was the little girl’s name, and Katy was like her shadow for months; one could not be someplace without the other immediately behind. I think they met at the school’s attempt to have a chess team. When it crumbled, Mary Thomas and Katy stayed friends.
My sister soon after began to beg to stay the night with Mary Thomas’ family. My dad didn’t mind, but my mother was very unsure of it. Katy was still young to her, whereas I saw her as three years older than me, and a virtual adult for all the freedom she had. Eventually, my mother consented, after a well placed phone call from Mary Thomas’ mother. Of course, my father had to take the call and then act as mouthpiece for my mother. He said that she was repotting an Easter Lilly, and her hands were too dirty to hold the phone. Undoubtedly, Mary Thomas’ mother was an avid green thumb, and she invited my mother over to see her Petunias. My mother never went, but Katy was able to go and stay with them overnight. Overnight turned into all weekend. In the space of six months or so, she was hardly returning.
When she would return, though, she and my father would have yelling matches. Sarah and I would were always sensitive to when Katy might return. The minute we saw her walking back toward our house, or heard the winding down of Mary Thomas’ mom’s ancient Toyota, we scrambled. Most of the time, we went for the back yard, but sometimes the attic. The goal was to get as far away as we could as fast as possible.
The screaming was because Katy would come home filled with her new view of the world. Later, I found out that Mary Thomas’ parents were avid members of Greenpeace and a few other similar organizations. Katy was continuously accusing my father either directly, or indirectly, as a part of ‘his generation’, of destroying the world. We didn’t know it at the time, but Katy and Mary Thomas were lovers, as well. This all came out much later.
My father, in an attempt to placate Katy, did get the dog. It was a mutt, and my father would always proclaim what he figured was the dog’s kind, saying things like “That dog is huge. I bet there’s bull Mastiff in there” or “That dog has no fear of water at all; his daddy must have been a Golden Retriever”. My father named the dog “Brutus” and was quite proud of the name. My sister named him “Wolf”. My mother simply called him ‘the dog’. For a time, we all enjoyed the dog, even my mother, though you’d have had to pay close attention to see it.
Katy, though, would only come home long enough to feed it each day, and perhaps (if she was waiting to be picked up by Mary Thomas) to play a few half-hearted games of fetch with it. For Sarah and I, though, the dog was a constant companion on our treks through the fields. Sarah and I brushed him, bathed him. It was Sarah with her kind hand that taught him to sit, t
o stay, to roll over. None of the rest of us could get him to do these things. His love for Sarah was like most people’s: singular and non-transferable.
None of us, to this day, really understand what happened to dad that summer, though. This was just before the Randy’s disappearance. Mom had taken to sleeping a lot and dad spent quite a bit of time out of the house. He would come home smelling funny and slurring his words. He started to yell at me for things he said I didn’t remember to do around the house. I once asked Sarah after one bout of yelling if she’d heard him tell me to take the garbage to the street and she said “No, it’s Tuesday. Garbage doesn’t come ‘till Thursday.” I still felt bad, though, for letting him down. Dr. Bledsoe said “You internalized your father’s own feelings of inadequacy.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I nodded as though I did.
If he was home when Katy came home, the fights were bad. The screaming seemed to follow me, no matter how far away I got. Brutus got very upset, too. He would scratch at the back door to get in. He did that whenever dad was yelling at me, too, but for some reason I always thought it was worse when he did it while dad was yelling at Katy. I tried to stop him, which only sent him further into fits. He scratched up my arms a lot. Later, after the yelling had died down, and I was waiting on the back porch for dad to go up to bed, Brutus would lick my arms where he’d cut them up. I’d let him, saying “I’m sorry, too.”
On that day, though, I couldn’t hold him back. The door was somehow not completely closed. Katy had come home and my father asked her where she’d been. I heard his slurry voice through the back door and I knew what was coming. I started walking away, thinking Brutus would follow me. After a time, I noticed he hadn’t, and when my father started to yell at Katy, and she started to yell back, I turned just in time to see the dog hit the door with his front paws. It was almost like he knew it would give. He ran in and before I could get there, had gotten between my father and my sister. I skidded to a stop just as Brutus lunged at my dad, teeth gleaming. To be honest, I don’t think he actually meant to bite my father. It didn’t seem like he had leapt far enough for that. I think it was just one of those things dogs do to show they mean business. In my dreams, sometimes, I see that moment in slow motion.