“Sherman’s March to the Sea,” I said.
“There, now that’s something completely fascinating. How could a man who had once issued orders against any looting by soldiers suddenly turn around and completely ransack the South? Hmm? Presents an interesting study in character. So, you’ll read up on Sherman, find out what makes him tick, and hand me a report in September, and then you get to pass.”
“Okay,” I said, and then, because it seemed like he was looking for something more, “Thanks.”
“What I remember about your mother was that she knew all the dates. No one was better at the dates than her, but when it came to the story, with the details, she just couldn’t remember. Usually it’s the other way around.”
I nodded politely. I didn’t know what else to say to someone who had just told me a story about a person who wasn’t my mother who seemed to be backwards in history.
June
Everything glows in a sort of liquidy purple way, as if the entire world is just one big lava lamp. We are out on the lake under a purple sky and everything is impossibly calm and peaceful. There is no noise at all. It’s as if the lake is a mountain and the boat is at its highest peak. I can look down and see everything. I can see my mother in the kitchen of our house. I can see Mr. Berm drinking chocolate milk through a straw in the school cafeteria. I can see Andrea undressing to take a shower, and on her ass is a tattoo, a purple butterfly.
Willow says, “It’s so beautiful. We’re really in heaven.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask. When she doesn’t answer, I turn to Randy and ask, “What does she mean? I don’t understand. What does she mean?”
Then suddenly, the peace is disturbed by a thunderstorm. It begins without warning, drenching us as lightning flashes all around. Thunder booms.
“We need to get back to shore,” Tigue says.
“We can’t go back,” Willow says.
“Wait,” I say. “Wait, this isn’t how it was at all. This is all backwards.”
Then suddenly the speedboat is coming right at us. It’s going too fast. It keeps a straight line, never swerving. When I look, I have to squint through the purple fog to see who’s driving. It’s Ms. Shirley, but it’s also Midge. Somehow it’s both of them at the same time.
“It’s so peaceful,” Willow says, as the thunder roars around us and the speedboat races at us.
I don’t feel the crash or even see how it happened. Suddenly, I’m underwater and everything is purple and dark and I can’t see. I spin around trying to find which way is up. I’m flailing, panicking. Then I realize that I’m very, very deep and I need to go up a long way to reach the surface and I don’t know if I will have enough oxygen. I race like mad, and as I try to get to the top it’s as if something is pulling me down, trying to hold me back. I’m not even halfway there, but it’s too hard. I can’t make it. I’m frantic, but I seem to know I have no hope.
I jerked awake to find myself tangled in a knot of sheets. My heart pounded. Adrenaline raced through my body. The alarm clock read 2:12 a.m. Outside, I heard distant thunder and thought of the dream. Suddenly, I felt very cold, so I sat up and switched on my light. It wasn’t thunder at all, I realized, watching something fly into the screen. It was too small to be a bat and too loud to be a moth, even a big one. I got up and walked to the window, and there was Randy standing on the ground outside.
“Finally, Sleeping Beauty. I thought you would never wake up. Come on out.”
Randy stood beneath the glow of the moon in a pool of yellow cast by the bug light on my neighbor’s front porch. Maybe it was the light, or the fact that his jeans looked like they’d been left in the dryer too long, or the slightly tousled look of his hair—more probably, it was just because I am me—but the first thing I thought when I stepped outside was that Randy was undeniably gorgeous, and Randy, well, Randy just isn’t the sort of guy to inspire such thoughts in anyone.
I wanted very badly to not despise Randy Jenkins, but I didn’t know how. Randy just had this thing about him, or maybe I was too arrogant or unfair to him. I tried to remember a time when I’d had any real feelings for him, but I’m not sure that such a time ever existed.
“What’s up?” I asked. I didn’t let my voice rise much above a whisper. I stood on the front steps in a bleach-stained T-shirt and a pair of ratty boxer shorts.
“I want to buy you something,” Randy said.
“What?”
“I’ve got some money and I want to buy you something. What do you want?”
“I don’t know.” I really didn’t know. How was I supposed to know? It was 2:28 in the morning, and a part of me was pretty sure that this conversation wasn’t taking place at all.
“If you could have anything in the whole world, Scilla, what would it be?”
My sanity? My childhood? A fresh start?
“I want to travel back in time.”
“What?”
My voice was so low, he hadn’t heard it.
“Some ice cream. I could go for some ice cream.”
Randy drove us to the convenience store and bought me an entire half gallon of butterscotch ripple.
“What about you?” I asked. I sat in the passenger seat of his car, the tub of ice cream on my lap.
“I’m not hungry. It’s all for you.”
“I can’t eat this all. I’ll get sick.”
“We can throw out the rest. That’s what the rich do.”
I felt amazingly small. I stabbed the plastic spoon into the ice cream’s virgin surface. The spoon trembled as if it might snap in two, but managed to plunge into the milky sea.
I stared out at the night, which was punctured by the amber glow of the parking lot lights and the half-lit sign. My hands had become numb from holding the container. It sat on my lap, and the cold hurt my thighs. In a fleeting burst of clarity, the nightmare from which I’d just awoken flashed through my mind. I looked over at Randy. He was admiring me with a face that smiled, but eyes that didn’t.
“What?” he asked. I hadn’t said anything.
“Do you ever think about it?”
His lips made a half-hearted attempt at asking “what?” again, but he let it go. He already knew exactly what I was talking about.
“I don’t really want to talk about it right now,” he said. “I’m in kinda a good mood, and I don’t want to ruin it. Let’s talk about something else, okay?”
“So, what’s the source of your newfound wealth?” I asked.
“I got a job,” he said. He gave me a big grin, as if it was just the greatest news in the whole world.
“Oh, one of those.” I stared past him at the windows of the convenience store, which were made almost completely impenetrable by the plethora of signs plastered to them. I thought about last summer, which seemed to be a blur of endless days spent behind the register inhaling the store’s sour-milk air. I couldn’t imagine my summer job ever giving me cause to grin. “Where?” I asked.
“Romeo’s pizza.”
“Delivery guy?”
Randy nodded.
“So, you’re gonna be driving all over creation using your own car, getting paid a shitty hourly wage and getting piddling little tips. It’s a sucker job, Randy. Are you nuts?”
“Actually, the pay is pretty good,” Randy said, and he turned away from me to stare out the window at something more fascinating, his reflection maybe or a lost seagull pecking through a Dumpster.
It didn’t make much sense, Randy getting a job as a delivery guy. He was more qualified than that. The summer before, he had a job working in an office. Some friend of his father’s had helped him secure the position. He even had a real job there, wasn’t just a gopher. He messed around with computers or something like that. It paid better than anything I could ever dream of getting, and it sure as hell had to beat delivering pizzas. So, why the hell wasn’t he back there, or back in some other “real” job?
Knowing Randy, he’d probably done something to screw things
up. Maybe he had a fling with the boss’s daughter or got caught smoking pot in the men’s room.
Maybe there was another explanation all together. Maybe Randy was more upset than he let on, maybe he was really worried about the trial. A real job might have been more pressure than he could handle. Then again, maybe it was the events of last summer that had tainted him in the eyes of his previous employer.
The pizza gig wouldn’t last. I gave it two weeks tops. He would get sick of it, or maybe he would do the math and realize that he wasn’t even clearing minimum wage.
I looked down at my lap. I had made only a slight dent in the ice cream, but I didn’t think I could eat another bite without getting sick.
“Can you take me home now?” I asked. “I’m tired, and this ice cream is going to melt.”
“Yeah, sure,” Randy said.
He stopped at the end of my road and turned off the car. He put his hand on my thigh and started to lean over as if to kiss me. I pushed his hand away, and he was so surprised he nearly fell into the dashboard.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just want to go home.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not mad or anything. I’m just, tired.”
The Start of Summer
The first Saturday of summer, I awoke with a plan in my head. I walked into the kitchen, where my mother was highly engrossed in sorting out grocery store coupons. I stared at the top of her head as she bent over the table and noticed that her hair had begun to turn gray. This made me feel old.
“I need to borrow the car,” I said.
“The car? How about my car? And what the hell for?”
“To get a job?” I said.
I’d had my last final on Thursday and since then I’d been free, which meant my mother felt compelled to nag me about whether or not I intended to spend my entire summer goofing off.
“Fine,” she said. “You’ve got two hours. I need to go shopping later.”
My mom’s white-trash-special was a nominally red Chevy Corsica. Red by all accounts should be a bright shining color, the sort of thing that catches the attention of onlookers and state troopers, but my mom’s car is not this sort of red. Corvettes are red. Ferraris are red. The school janitor’s pickup truck is red. My mom’s car is the color of a T-shirt that had been washed too many times in generic laundry detergent. It’s not really red at all. It’s like the distant cousin of a supermodel who in a sense looks like her, but whose features aren’t arranged quite right so that instead of drop-dead gorgeous she’s undeniably ugly. My mom’s car is undeniably ugly, but most of the time it works.
That thing about getting a job was something short of the absolute truth. My grand plan for the day didn’t have much of anything to do with getting a job, but it did require the use of an automobile, and there wasn’t any way I was going to secure one without this slight lie. By the time I reached the traffic light, I realized it would be a good idea to really get a job unless I wanted to face a summer of endless nagging. Thus I found myself turning into the convenience store parking lot and, with dragging feet, going inside.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no Johnny at Johnny’s Quik Mart. The sad, trashy store is run by the gray-skinned, perpetually unhappy Gill Ecks.
“What do you want?” he asked when I disturbed him in his back-room office, only “asked” isn’t really the right word; it was more like a phlegm-choked growl.
“I want a job,” I said, just as I had for the past two years.
“Fine,” Ecks said, as if this was some sort of strange bartering. “But if you’re late or I catch you giving free stuff to your friends, you’re fired.” This too was the same thing he had said for the past two years. We were both, apparently, creatures of habit. “You start Monday. Seven o’clock.”
I nodded, and as I turned to leave I heard him utter something under his breath about ungrateful kids. He was a bastard, but he was a predictable bastard.
Mission accomplished. I got back in the car and seriously thought about driving home, or maybe using the hour and fifty minutes of car time I had left to swing by Willow’s, because I wasn’t even sure why I was doing this thing that had seemed like such a good idea when I woke up.
I would just drive. I would go where the road led, and I would make up my mind or not when I got there.
Twenty minutes later, after many twists and sharp curves of the country roads, the houses turned from bi-levels and pseudo-Colonials to mini-estates with circular driveways made out of things other than standard-issue blacktop and garages bigger than my house. The problem was, I could not remember entirely how to get to my intended destination. I had been there only once before, and that was nearly a year ago. I had a vague idea, though, and relied on what little instinct I had.
Suddenly, there it was, an enormous Tudor house flanked by ancient oak trees with a perfectly manicured front lawn. I wondered if the Mexican laborers who did their landscaping ever found cause to wonder at the great dichotomy that existed between them and the mysterious creatures who lived within the walls of this house.
Some unwritten code of ethics demanded that I park the car in the street. It would somehow be entirely inappropriate to park Mom’s white-trash-mobile on the paving stone driveway; maybe it would even cause some sort of violent chemical reaction, like mixing the wrong types of cleaning solvents together. I sat in the car for a while. I told myself that I was trying to tell whether anyone was home or not, but really I was just too nervous to get out. Now that I was here, my whole plan seemed completely absurd. What was any of this going to prove?
If I wasn’t going to get out, then I might as well leave, because sooner or later they were going to call the cops to come investigate the dirty car casing their place. That would only make my situation far worse than it already was. I stepped out of the car and walked with short hesitant steps up the long driveway.
The front door was massive. I didn’t remember it being this big before. Maybe we’d come in through a side door or some sort of servant’s entrance around back. What must it have been like to be a kid in this house where everything seemed so huge? Did the kids at school look at you in awe because you lived in a veritable castle? But of course, where Tigue went to school everyone lived in castles. The people around here paid vast amounts of money to send their kids to schools named after people and saints rather than towns.
I stared up at the massive door knocker and wondered if my arm would be strong enough to lift it, but then I noticed the tiny glowing button to the side of the door and pressed it, saving myself from some sort of horrible faux pas. Is it a show of extravagant wealth to put a two-hundred-dollar door knocker up that is never intended to be used?
I waited for what felt like a long time and didn’t hear anything on the other side of the door. Maybe no one was home. Maybe I could leave. I felt only a tad guilty about the relief that began to course through my veins. Then I heard the telltale click clack of locks being undone, and a second or two later, the door swung open.
A man in a pastel polo shirt and ridiculous plaid shorts opened the door. It was Mr. Anderson, Tigue’s father. I’d met him only once before, under less-than-ideal circumstances. At that time, what stuck out in my memory was the dirty look he gave me—slit eyes, frowning lips. I think if he knew he could get away with it, he might have beaten me to death and enjoyed every minute of it. Or at least that was the impression I got. Now, though, his face was utterly blank. His hair looked a bit out of place and his eyes blinked a little in the bright morning sunlight coming in through the door. He looked as if he had just woken up from a short nap, and it was clear that he didn’t recognize me and had no idea what I was doing there.
“Can I help you?” he asked. He glanced up at the road, where the Corsica sat marring the beautiful scenery. Perhaps he thought my car had a flat tire or had overheated, and he looked prepared to gallantly call his auto club.
“Is Tigue home?” I asked, in the steadiest voice I could manage.
T
hat’s when it happened. His face metamorphosed before my eyes. The blankness in his eyes turned to certain knowledge. The slight fleshiness in his cheeks turned suddenly hard. His lips turned downward into a grimace. Hate burst from his every pore and radiated toward my skin; it was as if someone had suddenly turned off the atmosphere and let deadly UV rays shoot down on me unhindered.
“No,” he said in a clipped voice. “He’s not home. Don’t come back here.” The door slammed in my face.
My initial feelings of shock and hurt wore off in a flash, and anger filled me. My gut reaction was to curse and scream at the closed door, at the house, at anyone who saw nothing wrong with treating another human being the way Mr. Anderson had treated me.
Fuck you! I wanted to shout. You’re nothing to me! Nothing at all!
But to Mr. Anderson, I was nothing, and he would not hesitate to call the police on me. In this town, at this house, the truth would be whatever Mr. Anderson said it was, and who knew what that would be? I didn’t need that just now. I walked back up the driveway with tears in my eyes that refused to come out. I drove home, ignoring the speed limits and the palatial homes that flew past the window. It had been a wasted morning, with nothing to show for my time but the same sucky job I’d held for the past two summers.
June
The summer’s heat crept up on our small, northwestern New Jersey town like puberty on an unsuspecting adolescent. The devil’s symbol, by some strange error in translation, became three H’s instead of three sixes on the weather report. Dampness clung to everything and everyone, reminding all that the earth and our bodies are mostly water, and how could we have ever forgotten?
I was stuck working behind the counter at my home away from home, only slightly relieved to be inside the air-conditioned, no-name, third-rate convenience store on a day like this instead of sitting inside in the dark in front of the window fan in my sweltering bedroom, but that didn’t stop me from counting down the hours until the day’s shift in hell drew to a close. Three left. That was when he walked in.
Ferocity Summer Page 4