A Changed Man (7 page)

“I’m always so relieved to hear that. Neither of my kids read. They’d watch TV nonstop if I let them—” What kind of mother is Bonnie? Complaining about her children for some Nazi’s entertainment? If something happens to Danny and Max, Bonnie will have deserved it.

Vincent says, “Are those them? Your kids?”

Bonnie spins toward the window. The boys are walking up the back steps. Her relief is so euphoric it works like a stiff drink, persuading her that she can get through anything. Max and Danny are safe. In the face of that blessing, who could worry about something so minor as introducing her kids to a guy who’s changing his life by coming to work with Brotherhood Watch?

W
HAT’S STRANGE IS THAT
D
ANNY
isn’t more surprised
to come home and find some geek leaning his nasty tattooed arms all over the kitchen table. It’s as if he’s been expecting it. In fact it hasn’t been that long since he and Max saw that
Chandler
show about the former skinhead working with the famous Nazi hunter in California. Danny remembers telling Max: Trust me, it won’t be long until Mom and Meyer get a Nazi of their own.

Now Danny gives his brother a look:
Did I call this, or what?
But Max has already left his body, vacated, as he tends to do in tricky family situations.

“Boys, this is Vincent Nolan. He’s come to work with Brotherhood Watch. He’ll be staying with us for a few days until he gets his own place.”

Danny says, “Mom, can I talk to you?” Six words practically guaranteed to make her start hyperventilating.

“In a minute, honey. Vincent, this is Max, that’s Danny. Danny, Vincent, Max, Vincent—” Mom comes up for air.

Max rolls his eyes at Danny. Does Max know what those tattoos mean? Danny’s often shocked by the gaps in his brother’s basic knowledge.

“Mom,” says Max. “Take a deep breath. Chill. Say it again.” It’s one of those annoying things Max says to Mom when she’s wound tight and ready to snap. And Mom
listens,
she obeys, she gets all girly and smiles, and repeats herself more slowly. Normally, Danny resents the inside jokes Max shares with their mother. What makes it even more annoying tonight is that Max is too young to know to skip the chintzy family humor in front of the guy with the death’s-head and the Waffen-SS bolts on his arms.

Obediently, Mom pauses, exhales. “Boys, Vincent Nolan, he’s come to work—”

“Hi,” says Danny, cutting it short.

“This is Danny,” says Mom. “Did I say that?”

Vincent Nolan acknowledges him with a nod that’s more like a spasm. Has Mom not noticed that her new friend is Timothy McVeigh’s clone? What the hell is Mom thinking? Inviting some demented tweaker to stay here until one night, high on crystal meth, he figures out that they’re Satanists and that God needs him to hack them up and stash them in the freezer. How ridiculous that Mom’s not concerned about bringing this maniac home when she worries about every little thing. Danny fears that obsessive worry is an inherited trait.

Danny and Max keep sneaking glances at the tattoos, until Mom catches them looking. “You guys should have been there. The most amazing thing happened. Meyer rolled up his sleeves and put his tattoo, you know, the numbers from the concentration camp, near Vincent’s, and it was so moving, seeing them like that together.”

“It was something,” the skinhead agrees.

The thought makes Danny want to puke. Meyer and Vincent’s tattoos. Tattoos in general gross him out, though his friend Chloe has an eyeball on her shoulder blade that winks when she twitches her back. Just this morning, in homeroom, Danny longed to reach out and touch it.

Danny doesn’t like Meyer. He’s one of those guys who don’t have kids and think that kids are a waste of time. He can never remember which one is Danny and which one is Max, but he fakes it as long as their mom is around. What grade are you in? How do you like school? Mainly, Danny doesn’t like how Mom does whatever Meyer tells her, how she’s always quoting the guy. Meyer says this, Meyer says that. Meyer could be David Koresh. The Jewish Charlie Manson. Danny blames it on the divorce. Mom needs to be deprogrammed.

Naturally, some part of him admires what Meyer does. Even Danny has to admit that Meyer is trying to do good in the world and make a positive difference. But whenever Danny tries to tell his friends what the foundation’s about—sending aid to global trouble spots, keeping tabs on hate groups at home, getting guys sprung from jail—it sounds like such a downer, he’s sorry he brought it up.

Mom says what Danny knew she’d say. “Where were you guys just now?”

“Does it matter?” asks Danny.

“Danny, sweetheart, I’ve told you. Don’t answer a question with a question.”

“All right. We were out.” Danny
wants
to answer, to make this easy on her. But it’s as if he’s possessed by a demon insisting that his independence and self-respect depend on giving her maximum attitude and minimum information.

“Out where?” Mom’s determined to drag out the Big Interrogation.

“Mom, we were playing basketball in the grade-school yard.”

“Thank you, Max,” says Mom. “Was that so hard?”

“Whatever,” Danny says.

“Anybody hungry?” says Mom.

“Starved,” Max says.

“I could eat,” says the Nazi.

“Sure. I guess,” Danny says. “No Chinese.”

“I was thinking Chinese,” Mom says.

“We had it last night,” Danny points out. The most irritating thing is that she’s so nervous she forgot. You’d think the guy was a visiting rock star. It’s how she acts around Meyer. Even though his mom and dad fought a lot before the divorce, at least they were comfortable with each other. Like normal screwed-up grown-ups.

“Then maybe we should go out…” Mom’s voice has that wispy tremble it gets when she can’t cope and makes Danny and Max decide.

They’re certainly not going out. Danny would rather starve to death than run into someone he knows. By second period tomorrow it will be all over school that Danny was having dinner with a skinhead. By lunch they’ll be saying the guy is Danny’s mom’s new boyfriend.

“Pizza,” says Max. “Call.”

“Sure,” says Danny. “Why not?”

“Will pizza be enough?”

“Fine with me,” the Nazi says.

“Simple!” Mom picks up the phone. “What about toppings? Anything you don’t eat?”

“Nuts,” says Vincent. “Any kind of nuts. I’m fatally allergic. I wind up in the hospital. I nearly died several times.”

“God,” says Mom. “How scary.”

Danny says, “I guess that kind of rules out the peanut-butter pizza.”

Suddenly, everyone’s staring at him. He should probably smile at Mom to show that he wasn’t making fun of the guest. But on the way to Mom’s face he gets sidelined by the hairy eyeball he’s getting from the Nazi, checking to see if he
is
making fun, because if he is, Vincent’s going to kick his ass. Is Mom picking up on this?

Obviously Danny is goofing on the guy. What did the moron
think
they would order? Macadamia pizza? And why do they need to know about his loser allergy problems? Vincent narrows his eyes. Whatever passes between him and Danny is silent, scary, and over in a second, at the end of which Vincent chooses to believe that Danny
is
making a joke, but not a joke about
him,
and he laughs, a jagged dog-bark that makes Max flinch.

Danny says, “Pepperoni,” his brother’s favorite. He hates pepperoni. So there’s usually a fight.

“Danny!” says Mom. “How generous of you! Danny hates pepperoni.” As if the guy needs to know. She orders two large pies, one with pepperoni, one with mushrooms and green pepper. “Fifteen, twenty minutes,” she says, first triumphant, then defeated as she wonders: What will they do until the pizza arrives?

Max saves the day. “Hey, Danny, want to watch TV?”

“Okay,” says Mom. “But come upstairs the minute I call. Don’t let the pizza get cold.” Usually, she goes insane when he and Max get home and head straight for the TV. Danny grabs Max and fake-shoves him down the stairs to Dad’s room.

They still call it Dad’s room even though it’s been years since Dad cleared out everything but the thirty-six-inch TV and a couple of beat-up couches. He couldn’t have found a better way to yank Mom’s chain. She despises the humongous TV. She never comes down to Dad’s room. But then, she never did. At the time, it had seemed normal. But later Danny wondered: Wouldn’t you think something was wrong if your husband came home from the office and spent every minute downstairs couch-potatoed in front of the tube? Once again, his mom worries about everything except the things she should worry about. Which is what Dad said once about Danny. So it gets confusing.

Everyone fights with their parents about how long they’re allowed to watch TV. But only Danny and Max get to fight about watching it in their dad’s old room, on a television so expensive that Mom can’t make herself throw it out.

Brain-dead Max imagines he’s getting the remote. “What’s on
Chandler
?” he says.

Danny grabs the changer. “The usual bogus shit.”

“Let’s just see,” pleads Max.

“Forget it, creep,” says Danny.

It’s strange how everyone watches
Chandler.
It’s really just a talk show, and Chandler is an annoying rich black dude who quit a million-dollar corporate law job to get real, get down with the street. Last year the network picked up his contract for
fifty
million dollars. So Chandler came out okay. His show is such a big hit that it runs during the dinner hour to compete with the news. They advertise it that way: The
good
news is on
Chandler.
It’s what all the mothers—except Danny’s—watch on those miniature TVs they set up in the kitchen for when they’re cooking. What’s doubly strange is how the kids in school talk about what they saw on
Chandler.
And it’s not just the teachers bringing it up. Maybe it’s because Chandler has shows that are actually interesting, especially if you happen to be so stoned that his guests seem smart.

Every so often, Chandler gets it right, like that program with the high-school kids talking about global warming. Not the usual geeks you see on those shows. All the girls were hot
and
intelligent. The guys were guys you’d be friends with. But Danny’s not in the mood for
Chandler
right now. It’s creepy that when the skinhead was on
Chandler,
Danny predicted that Meyer and Mom would get a Nazi of their own.

Danny changes from the Cartoon Channel to MTV. Then he hits the mute button.

“Listen” he says. “Do you know who that guy upstairs
is?
”

“Duh,” Max says. “You and I watched that
Chandler
together.”

“Max, man, this is not some talk-show guest. Did you see the guy’s arm?”

“I’m not stupid,” Max says. “We read
Night
last semester, asshole. I hated it, remember. I had to write that cut-and-paste poem with phrases from the book.”

“I still can’t believe they made you read that. They should have made you do Anne Frank.”

Max says, “Plus, do you think I’m so retarded I don’t know where Mom works?”

“Sorry,” says Danny. “I’m not saying you’re retarded. It’s just weird, is all.”

“It
is
weird. Mom’s out of her fucking mind.”

“Language!” Danny imitates Mom.

As he turns toward the big screen, Max idly gives Danny the finger. The two boys fall silent, attempting to lip-read what the moderately hot Asian girl is saying through her tears.

“Put the sound on,” Max says.

“Bite me,” Danny replies.

The camera pulls back to show the Asian girl sitting by a pool, at night. It’s Key West. Danny’s seen this one before. Subhita has a drinking problem and has been arguing with the other girls in the house.

Max says, “Do you think we should call Dad? Should we tell him about this guy?”

This is what Danny means about the gaps in his brother’s information—for example, about who Dad is. Their father’s a jerk who went to live in Manhattan in a boring high-rise apartment with Lorraine, the widow of his dead partner, Jeffrey. Before she hooked up with Jeffrey, Lorraine was the wife of Jeffrey’s patient, who died of a heart attack, at fifty. Then Jeffrey died of a heart attack, at forty-nine. Once Danny overheard Mom calling Lorraine the Black Widow. Danny knew she was joking, but for a while he was scared. Dad is forty-eight. Dad is not a responsible grown-up you can ask for advice and help. Dragging Dad into this will only make everything worse.

Danny says, “How can Mom
do
this? Can you explain that one thing?”

Two girls’ faces fill the screen. Danny raises the sound. Amanda and Kirsten are agreeing that Subhita should put herself back in rehab.

“The guy’s got no place to stay,” Max says. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be here. Mom’s not going to leave him on the street. That’s not who Mom
is.
”

Trust genius Max to cut to the chase, though Danny can’t recall Mom saying, in so many words, that the guy was homeless. But that’s got to be the story. So it’s worse than Danny thought. He could be here for months.

“Mom’s just trying to be a good person,” says Max, the middle-school Dalai Lama. No wonder their mother loves Max more. Max is a better person than Danny. And so grown-up for his age.

“Brilliant,” says Danny. “That’s the most obvious thing about Mom. Now tell me something I don’t know.”

“Pizza’s here!” yells Mom.

Max runs upstairs. Let the others go first. Danny flips through the channels and stops, frozen by the freaked-out piglet face of Timothy McVeigh. What a coincidence. The guy’s separated-at-birth twin is upstairs scarfing down pizza.

Danny trudges up to the kitchen. Surprise! They’ve started without him.

“Danny,” says Mom. “Get a chair.”

Danny gets a chair from the living room and pulls up next to Max. Everyone’s eating off real plates. There are glasses, a carton of orange juice. Mom has made a salad.

“La-di-dah,” Danny says to the salad.

“Excuse me?” says Mom. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Danny says. “Talking to myself.”

His slice of pizza buckles, dumping the cheese in a greasy plop at the bottom of the box. He tears off a mouthful of soggy crust, chokes it down, then, just to see what will happen, says, “They’re delaying the McVeigh execution. They found three thousand pages of evidence the FBI forgot to turn over.”

“FBI slimeballs,” says Vincent. Danny can’t tell if Vincent knows that McVeigh looks just like him.

“I think it’s disgusting,” Mom says. “All that media frenzy, everyone so bloodthirsty, wanting to watch a human being die. It’s like the Roman Colosseum. They should sell beer and popcorn and kill the guy in Yankee Stadium. I’d feel better about that than having to hear all this stuff about ‘closure.’ At least it would be honest. I know he’s a murderer. I don’t approve of what he did, but still—”