This Is Not the End

by Caleb Hildenbrandt

  “The noblest science, eh?” I say, nodding at the article, my tone of voice suggesting a long familiarity with a discipline that might entail casual danger and strenuous mental gymnastics.

  “Hm?”

  I hold up the piece, its top page swarming with contour plots illustrating the effective potential of a two-body system.

  “Oh, that was just something I was curious about after seeing an article in Scientific American. Do you like physics?”

  “Well--” I indicate the Rutherford poster.

  “Oh, that? I don’t buy that stuff. It’s just there to remind me not to be a bitch about my specialty.”

  “Really?” I look at the poster for clues that it’s been placed there in an attitude of irony, as if the placement of the thumbtacks or the slight slant of its orientation might indicate that the message is not to be taken at face value.

  “Well, yeah, Rutherford was a great man, but that statement is incredibly arrogant. I’d much rather be a Renaissance woman than an expert in anything. I can’t remember who it was, but there’s a quote: ‘Specialization is for insects.’”

  “Huh. Me too, I guess. I mean, I want to be an expert, too, but--”

  “Of course you do.” she said. “That’s why I hired you. Jason’s interested in having coffee again next month. You up for it?”

  Ron

  “Ron, would you read verses two through twelve, please?”

  “Um, okay. Uh, ‘And he opened his mouth, and taught them saying, blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Yeah, blessed are the hookers, and smokers, and pot heads--”

  “Ron!”

  “--and pornos--”

  “Ron! Please!”

  Ron was opening and closing his Bible like it was a bellows, rapidly flapping the pages, his head thrown back and rolling side to side.

  “Ron, I’ll ask you again to behave yourself. Tim, could you pick up?”

  “Sure. ‘And He opened His mouth, and taught them…”

  #

  Ron was a demon. We got out of PE for a few days when our class had its mandatory sex ed segment. The first day Ron raised his hand.

  “Uh, Mr. Brinkman, is that the same thing as jism?”

  “Yes, Ron, now--”

  “What about spooge?”

  “YES, Ron, it is, but semen is the preferred--”

  “What about cum?”

  “Ron! Yes! Now be quiet!”

  We were floored. Most of us had no idea where he was getting this, but we loved him for giving us new, illicit words. The guys snickered and the girls looked down at their desks, but some of them looked sideways at Ron.

  On the playground a cluster almost formed around him as he stood, head down, leaning against the wall of the cafeteria. We found ways to approach him and say a few things in passing, a comment here or there and a veiled angling for more info. We would walk across the asphalt as if to talk to someone on the other side, setting out for a straight course but midway through deforming our trajectories like we were comets tugged at by a dirty-blonde sun. He had positioned himself by the electricity meter, and one of us would swoop down and away, pausing for a few seconds, to be replaced by another. I was artless.

  “So, Ron, how come you know so much about this stuff?” No predicate was needed; it had been supplied by the anglers who came before me.

  “Read my dad’s old books.”

  He was chewing gum. There was a can of grape soda in his hand.

  I was transparent enough to walk away at this point, without greeting or farewell, and let the next inquiry come up behind me.

  #

  His mother dropped him off every Sunday at the church. Our paths in all things were parallel--same Sunday school class, same homeroom, same swimming lessons at the Y and Boy Scouts patrol--and neither of us ever missed. We and the teacher were the three constants in that Sunday school class, and over the course of a year we watched as project kids dragged in by evangelistic families came and went, and as future juvenile delinquents appeared a few times each year as their grandparents mustered enough authority to insist they come along. There were visiting cousins and the children of occasional-attenders, “C&E” kids who only came during Christmas and Easter. The church’s bus ministry brought in a rotating cast of do-rag-sporting twelve-year-olds and loose-pantsed sixteen-year-olds who still occupied the eighth grade, who sat in the back and smirked and were gone the next Sunday. The pastor went on leave that summer and his family went with him, and his son, who was in our class, missed two weeks. At times Ron and I were the only people there, in which case the teacher made a conscientious effort to split eye contact between the two of us as she talked about the succession of Old Testament judges and the law of the prophets. I wondered when Ashley would be back in class and whether my slacks were too short, and whether my socks were showing. I wondered about this jism, and about my soul. Ron sat and stared ahead at the teacher, and sometimes flipped furiously back and forth in his Bible, or someone else’s. The classroom had basket of mismatched Gideons and disintegrating copies of obscure translations, like Darby’s or Worldwide English; the collection grew as people involuntarily contributed by leaving their Bibles under pews or in the bathroom, and Ron, it appeared, kept a mental inventory of the pile, expressing suppressed delight when a new Jerusalem Bible or New American Standard Bible appeared at the top of the basket. Sometimes he would sing, under his breath: “Sunday morning, Brings the dawn in, It’s nothin’ at all…” Occasionally he would raise his hand.

  “Mrs. Rheims, what’s shittim wood?”

  “It’s a kind of wood, Ron. Is that where we’re reading?”

  “What kind of wood?”

  “We’re in First Samuel, Ron. There’s no wood like that here.”

  “But what kind of wood is shittim wood? Jeeze, God really likes this stuff.”

  “That’s enough, Ronald.” Mrs. Rheims half-closed her eyes.

  “He keeps saying to build all this stuff out of shittim wood.”

  “Thank you, Ron. Now, David came to Ahimelech because…”

  Everybody who had a Bible began to surreptitiously flip to the concordance. Ron spent the rest of class finding passages with “pisseth” in them, and showing them to me with a confidential look that seemed to say “Eh? Good, right?”

  #

  However bad Ron was, his sister was worse. Her tantrums were legendary among the church mothers, and most of us had seen at least one of these one-woman brawls. We all knew Ron and his sister were taking meds, although rumors of what they were taking, and what they were taking it for, ranged widely. Even Ron thought Laura was crazy; he told us she was out of control, a terror. He regaled us with stories of massive blowouts and epic scenes at school and the grocery store. There were crises at the community swimming pool and fights that nearly ended in hospitalization during craft classes. He told us more. There were stories about his dad and how he left, about things his mom had done, about the goings-on in his household. The stories had a strange, surreal feel to them, with Ron’s logic appearing disjointed or entirely absent. There was often no flow to the stories, no orderly sequence of events; they were an undirected parade of outrageous images and characters. The people in Ron’s stories--almost always limited to himself and the members of his own family--acted without motivation or consequence. There was no lead-up to his sister’s purchase of three hundred plush animals; they were simply there, filling the living room. There was no reason for a lengthy (and hilarious) speech by his mother on the evils of his father; it simply occurred, isolated in time. He once explained to me that he had drawn a crucifixion scene for art class at school, but it wasn’t suitable for female viewing: Jesus was nude, as were the criminals on either side. This, Ron assured me, was historically accurate, every Bible illustration and stained-glass window I had seen up until this time notwithstanding. I doubted his aut
hority on matters of Biblical illustration; one time I caught him drawing ridiculous schlongs on the Apostle Paul and various Roman soldiers in a picture Bible, and a stain on the robe of a fallen Saint Stephen.

  We were both Boy Scouts, Ron and I. Our parents thought it would be good for us, and while we never commiserated per se, we were friends to the extent that neither of us knew anyone else in the patrol. When we went camping, we shared a tent. Ron prayed at night, lying in his sleeping bag with his butt in the air, caterpillar-style, face turned to the side and lips protruding. They were ritualized prayers, following a formula, yet still highly specific to the events of the day, litanies of sins and requests for others--usually for others to shape up and stop bothering Ron. He was a terror to the scoutmasters, who mostly left him alone except to tell him to quiet down or watch his language. When he refused to go on a hike with the rest of the patrol, though, sitting himself down in protest by the embers of the campfire and kindling the tip of the twig he held in his hands to flame, the scoutmasters insisted, making remarks later among themselves that they couldn’t have him burning the forest down while they were away. He chased squirrels and threw sticks in the pathside creek that flowed in and out of view. Occasionally he ran ahead and disappeared from our sight, into the leaves, to be followed by cries--every time--from the scoutmasters, telling him to come back. But the scoutmasters never moved from their positions at the head and rear of the line of scouts, and Ron would eventually reappear and resume walking with, and around, the group. Occasionally he would burst out singing that he was heading to the wild country, to Alaska, where he belonged, and everyone would yell for him to shut up.

  It was Scouts that brought Ron to my dad’s attention. He had heard of Ron and seen him a little, at church and at school, but it was because of scouting that we started giving Ron rides home. His mother would drop him off at the weekly meetings, and my dad would pick us up, after it was dark (dark even in the summer), and we would make the long drive through country roads, past the edge of town, through a rich subdivision full of giant houses and sprawling lawns, to the woods, where a ranch-style house sat under live oaks and Spanish moss. Ron, according to himself, was scared of his own house. It was haunted, and a corpse of a black man lay under the foundations. He had once seen in the window the face of a rapist in the news. The golf course was near by. Rich people played there, people like his dad, who hadn’t left them anything when he went away (except the refrigerator, the lawn mower, and 23 volumes of Readers’ Digest condensed novels. No motivation, no consequence.). His dad was a lawyer, his dad was in Nevada and he (Ron) had watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas last night. His dad had called once and Ron had told him that his (Ron’s) mom had cancer and his sister had the flu. Suddenly he stared singing, to us now, softly, in the car, about a cat in a cradle, and a little blue boy who Ron urged to blow his horn.

  I had once had a book that contained, along with other nursery rhymes, a poem about Little Boy Blue. It was one of those books for infants, with cardboard pages designed to withstand drool and spastic, grabbing arm movements, and it had, at some point in my early childhood, disappeared in a box of items for the Goodwill, or younger cousins, or the curb. But the picture of Boy Blue, fuzzy with memory, and with the end of the story forgotten, had stayed with me, and I had tried, at various points growing up, to get a parent to tell me the rest of his story. They didn’t know what book I was talking about. They had forgotten the book. There was a nursery rhyme, they said, but when they recited it, it was too short. There had been more about the boy, I knew, and I never found out what it was.

  When we dropped off Ron my dad waited, the engine idling, until he had gone up the driveway and through the front door, unlocking it with a key he carried on a dog-tag style chain around his neck.

  #

  I remember his mother vividly, if not clearly, much as if I had formed my entire conception of her from Ron’s stories. She had spent some time in the Army, and she attempted to control her children with a military discipline, which, by its very nature and hers, could only be sustained in short bursts, which resulted in Ron and Laura being farmed out as much as possible--keeping busy with Scouts and afterschool activities. Ron learned to swim each summer, and every winter participated in a Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, but he never went away to camp (except the weekend Boy Scout camping trips), or to visit relatives. They had no family, Ron told me, except for some crazy distant cousins out West. They stayed at home with their mother, who one imagined had given up smoking for the kids’ sake but was forever longing and irritable because of it. She stayed at Sunday school a few times instead of dropping Ron off, to see what went on there, and did the same once or twice for Scouts. She would sit in the back row, in a folding metal chair, with her purse and a canvas bag, an orange rape whistle on a lanyard around her neck, along with a large pen and her glasses. I knew she was nearsighted, but she still wore the glasses on a chain, like they were only for reading, as if she didn’t need to put them on again to drive or see across a room.

  I watched them after the Scouts meeting, because their van’s battery had died--Laura had left the interior lights on--ON PURPOSE, her mother shouted at her--and they were standing around while she tried to fix it. She reminded the kids that they were disabled, and medicated, and had to try extra hard to be good because of it. She told them the deck was stacked against them--by way of motivation, I suppose, to make them go to a good college and stay away from bad influences. When my dad saw their car trouble he offered her a jump, and when that didn’t work he drove them all home. In the car Ron dominated the lack of conversation from the middle of the back seat, filling the void with lines from movies spoken a propos of nothing and with no explanation afterwards of the significance of that particular quote. When he mentioned his dad, his mother told him to shut up. When he revealed an intricate scam he had devised for tricking the CEOs of Hasbro, via the return policy on Furbies, his mother told him to not end up like his dad. “Oh, yeah.” Ron had said, and been quiet for a few seconds.

  One year both my mother and Ron’s forced us to go to Vacation Bible School. Ron and I saw each other in the halls, but were never in the same class. But we ate lunch together, which consisted of snack size pretzels and potato chips, with Hawaiian punch, doubtless in an attempt to pacify the greatest possible number of children, as perceived by the organizers of Vacation Bible School. It went on for a week, and by the end I felt sick. I said as much, as we ate, and Ron agreed, voicing a yearning for some broccoli. He insisted they ate nothing but vegetables at home, except his sister, who demanded gummi bears. And his mother drank vodka. I didn’t believe it, because Ron was the kind of guy who would have his soda confiscated by scoutmasters after he drank three on the bus ride up to the campsite and was revealed to have seven more in his backpack. “She mixes Peter Paul and Marys,” he told me.

  #

  I lost touch with Ron after he changed schools during his sophomore year. He stayed in the area, but I only heard bits and pieces--we never bumped into each other or tried to meet up. I wondered if I would one day see him on the news--if his army-boot wearing mother had ever lost it and driven the family van into the swimming pool at the rich country club near their house, or if she had been arrested for torching city hall, or driving out to Nevada in hopes of castrating their father. I hoped Ron had done well, though. Of all the project kids and twelve-year-old gangster-posers that got dragged through or lured into that Sunday school classroom, none of them compared to Ron and his family.

  But last year, Ron held an estate sale. Mom and Sis had boarded the van--the same van, with the unreliable battery--in the middle of the night and had taken off, and they hadn’t come back. It was the night of Ron’s high school graduation, and he would, I found out later, be attending a college in the next state come fall. Planning to raise some funds, and betting no one would ever come back to claim the stuff, Ron had a yard sale. From the depths
of the house spewed every thing imaginable. His sister’s three hundred plush animals were there, along with several real stuffed animals, a lion and an antelope among them. There were three refrigerators, twenty years’ worth of Better Homes and Gardens, and--I am not making this up--a model UFO, twelve feet across with a single seat behind the lovingly crafted dash. There was an antique German wall clock and a bathtub. There was a set of billiard cues, but no balls or table. There was a record player, and a pile of records.

  I came because Ron had advertised in every paper in the town--there were only two--and on nearly every telephone pole. There were flyers on the bulletin boards of every public building, and I’d found flyers in the trays at the local McDonald’s--he had been industrious, everything short of a spot on the radio.

  I picked up some records from the pile. Simon and Garfunkle, Harry Chapin--Ron walked up behind me.

  “Yeah, those were my dad’s. A buck for the whole lot, okay?”

  “These were your dad’s?”

  “Yeah. Every last one. Never listened to ’em.”

  I took them.

  “Good luck, Ron.”

  “Thanks.”

  I never listened to them either.

  The Appreciative Life