After Eli (12 page)

O
ne of the things I like best about Jim Pilcher is that he doesn’t give a damn about my college plans.

There’s something about being my age — it’s like every adult around you has only one topic of conversation, and that’s your future. What you’re actually doing right now isn’t important. The only thing that’s important is what you’re going to be doing ten years from now. What they want to know is: Where are you going to go to college? What are you going to do with your life? How are you going to make a living?

And they hate it when you say: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

My future was pretty much all my dad talked about when he talked to me, and I could tell he thought my prospects were bleak. Every time we discussed it, I came away knowing he figured I’d be spending my life in the Fairfield Alarm Clock factory on the third shift, sticking on the minute hands. Or maybe lying under a plastic bag in the gutter, drinking cough syrup through a straw. “Exactly what do you plan to do with your life?” my dad would say. “How are you going to support yourself? This isn’t something you think about later, Daniel. This is something you think about now. If you don’t apply yourself and get your grades up over the next couple of years, you’re not going to have many options left. People who don’t know where they’re going, Daniel, are generally going nowhere. And you’re not a little kid anymore. It’s about time you stopped acting like one.”

“Yeah,” I would say.

“Yeah
what
?” my dad would say. “When Eli was your age, he’d already made a college list. He had ambitions. It’s the ambitious people that go places, Daniel, not the people who just sit on their butts, waiting for something to happen.”

“Yeah, look where Eli went,” I said.

“That’s enough of that lip, young man,” my dad said.

Walter says what I have with my dad is not a discussion. Walter says that a discussion is an informal debate between two or more people, which ours is not, due to my dad doing all the talking.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but what I did figure out that summer was that I really loved working at the blue-potato farm. Which surprised me, since I didn’t take the job because I was so into farms or blue potatoes. I just wanted out of remedial summer school. But it turned out to be what Walter calls serendipity, which is stumbling across something great when you’re not really looking for it.

The thing is, when you think about it, growing stuff is so cool. You start out in the spring with this puny seed the size of your pinky fingernail, and you put it in the ground and pour some water on it, and then all of a sudden you’ve got a million miles of vines and a bunch of pumpkins the size of beach balls. It’s like one of those magician acts where they make a train appear out of nothing.

It’s sort of fascinating when you think about it, why people like one thing and not another. I mean, why? Why do people like dogs more than cats or chocolate more than vanilla or art history more than chemistry?

And once you know what you like doing, why can’t you just go do it? How come if all you like is computers, you have to prove you’re good in American history and French before they’ll let you into college to do computer science? What they say is that you have to be well rounded, which doesn’t make much sense to me, seeing as there’s a planet of six billion of us. It seems to me if we all just did what we’re good at, the planet would average out to okay.

Anyway, Jim says I’m a natural with potatoes and also holistically connected to the earth, or at least I would be if I’d remember to keep my great big clown-foot sneakers out of his rhubarb, and Emma says I’ve got green thumbs.

But what Peter Reilly said that summer was that I’d lost my freaking mind.

I was still friends with Peter and the other guys, but I just didn’t seem to have much time for them anymore, what with the potatoes and Jim and Emma and hanging out with Isabelle and Walter. But the more I said I was busy, the more Peter got on my case. “Busy with
what
?” he said. “What do you have to be so freaking busy with?”

Then he told me how last Saturday, he’d gone over to Amanda’s house and they’d watched
Jaws 2
on DVD, the one where the shark eats a bunch of teenagers, and then they’d made out on the couch in the Turners’ rec room, and Peter found out that Amanda wears black lace bras.

Then he said, what about this weekend, doing something with him and Amanda and blue Yvonne? When I said I couldn’t, he got mad.

“What’s the
matter
with you, Anderson?” Peter said.

Then he told me to take my head out of my ass.

Then he hung up the phone.

For a long time Peter had been my best friend and the person I most wanted to be if I could be anybody except me. But I was changing, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, any more than you can stuff a butterfly back into a cocoon and say, “Hey, big mistake; go be a caterpillar again.”

One of Walter’s questions is: “Can a person step into the same river twice?”

The first time he asked it, we were sitting on the bank of Scrubgrass Creek, Walter and Isabelle and me, with our feet in the water. The twins were splashing around downstream, building a beaver dam, though not nearly as effectively as beavers.

I wasn’t paying as much attention to Walter as I should have been, due to thinking about how Isabelle had really beautiful feet. Neat and narrow, with these perfect little toes.

“Well, sure,” I said.

And I stepped into the creek twice.
Splash. Splash.

“Nothing to it,” I said.

“No, think about it,” Walter said.

So instantly I knew that I should have known better. When Walter asks a question,
Lost in Space
music should start playing in your head. You know, that movie with the robot that goes “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!”

Walter said, “The creek just keeps flowing along, so by the time you got your foot back in it, it was a whole different creek. The water you stepped in the first time is now somewhere down by the bridge. And everything about you is just a little bit changed too. You’ve got different air molecules in your lungs, and your blood is circulating, so now it’s all in different places, and you’ve gotten a little bit older.”

If that robot had had to deal with Walter, its head would have spun around and it would have had a software meltdown.

“Not older enough to count,” I said defensively. “Only like about two seconds.”

“All right,” Walter said. “Are you the same person now that you were five years ago?”

I thought about how different things were five years ago. How my mom was still teaching school and cooking and telling silly jokes, and I still had a big brother and my world had felt safe and steady.

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“Five years ago,” Isabelle said, “I wanted to be a wizard like in the Harry Potter books, and I was really upset that I was a Muggle. I collected heart-shaped stones and I wouldn’t eat anything orange and I had this favorite hat that I wore all the time. One of those knitted Peruvian hats. You know, with earflaps and the long braided things hanging down on either side.”

I thought how cute Isabelle would look in a hat with earflaps and long braided things hanging down on either side.

“I was definitely a whole different person then.”

She kicked her feet in the water, and the sun caught the spray where it splashed up and turned into lots of little silver beads.

“And that was the year the twins were four and they kept insisting they were robots and they ran around making
meep-meep
noises. They wanted a cookie.
Meep-meep.
They wanted juice.
Meep-meep.
And they couldn’t take baths because that would destroy their electronic insides. The only way my parents could get them to go to bed was by pretending to take their batteries out.”

“I think the twins are still exactly the same people,” I said.

Isabelle said, “The bar-code reader at the supermarket checkout in Fairfield goes
meep-meep.
The first time I heard it, I screeched. The sales clerk thought I was insane.”

Then the twins came splashing up, yelling and pointing because most of their beaver dam was not being in the same place twice, due to having suddenly washed down the creek and gone under the bridge.

What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but just keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today’s you isn’t the same as yesterday’s you and won’t be the same as tomorrow’s you.

But Walter also thinks that there’s a real perfect you that you’re always trying to get to, and the better you are at living your life, the closer you come to it.

Walter is looking to the future in which he will have evolved into the Perfect Geek.

But I have to say that since Eli died, I don’t have faith in the future the way I used to. I mean, how do you know you’ll have one? Which is one thing I like about Jim Pilcher. He knows how that feels.

Jim says that men make plans and the mice in the ceiling laugh. That’s an old Japanese saying that means that people can plan all they want, but unexpected things have a way of smashing those plans to smithereens. Then the mice giggle themselves sick. When Jim says it, he’s thinking about how he went off to college with his life plan all thought out, and how Melissa Murray from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and substance abuse shot it all to hell.

Emma says that what she thinks about plans is all in this story she got from her auntie Dell.

We were sitting on the back steps off Emma’s kitchen. Emma was wearing baggy denim shorts and one of Jim’s old T-shirts, and she had more freckles than ever from being out in the sun.

“Auntie Dell wasn’t really our aunt,” Emma said. “We all just called her that. She used to live down the street, and we’d go visit and sometimes we’d stay there overnight when my mom had a new boyfriend and didn’t want us around. Anyway, one day she was all hung down and sick looking, and we said, what’s wrong? And she said her daughter’s boy, who was seventeen, had just got hit by a truck and killed. A real bright boy, she said, and a hard worker. He might of gone somewhere, she said.

“Then she sat us down on her saggy couch and pointed a finger right at our noses and said, ‘So you girls listen good. If ever you think what you’re doing isn’t living, you get out of there fast. Because sooner or later there’s a truck comes down the road for every one of us.’”

Emma picked up the glass I’d had my black-carrot smoothie in, the remains of which looked like something that might have oozed out of the ground at Chernobyl.

“I don’t think she meant for me to drop out of school though.”

But that’s what I mean about the future. You can’t count on it. Because you never know how much of one you’re going to have.

In my Book of the Dead, there’s a Major General John Sedgwick, who fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War. At the Battle of Spotsylvania in Virginia, the Confederates were shooting at his troops and his men were all jumping back and ducking behind stuff and running for cover. General Sedgwick yelled that he was ashamed of them. He said they were in no danger. He said, “Why, they couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—” Those were his last words. Right then he dropped dead with a bullet through the eye.

L
et’s say you die and you go to heaven, and it turns out that you get to pick the best day in your life to live over again. What day would you pick? A birthday, a Christmas, a graduation day?

Walter wouldn’t tell me his pick, because he said all the relevant data were not available yet, which means that he is not as devoted to a life of the mind as he says he is, but still has hopes of someday meeting an attractive female person who is as smart and weird as he is. Jim said it was the day he harvested his first blue-potato crop. Emma said it was the day she found out she and Jim were going to have a baby.

But I’ll tell you what mine would be. Mine would be the pretty much perfect day I had with Isabelle.

Not that that’s fair to Isabelle, because it started with her having her heart broken by an e-mail from Simon Dewitt Paxton, the boyfriend who was spending the summer in France. By then it was the end of July, and I knew more than I really wanted to know about Simon Dewitt Paxton. From Isabelle I knew that he was six feet two inches tall and had elegant hands and that he played the oboe and was on the school fencing team. He came from a wealthy family on Long Island and was very distantly related to Theodore Roosevelt and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and he had an uncle who was a senator.

From the twins I knew that Isabelle had a picture of him on her bedside table, along with one of those little bud vases with a rose.

“She kisses it good night,” Jasper said. “Like this.”

He made a kissing face. Journey pretended to throw up on his feet.

“So what’s he like?” I said.

“He’s very polite,” Journey said. “He goes to one of those schools where you have to wear a jacket and a tie.”

“Isabelle’s friend Marnie thinks he might be gay,” Jasper said. “That means he might be homosexual. Do you know what homosexual is?”