B008J4PNHE EBOK (14 page)

“That’s not the thing.” Tom was altogether undeterred. “The thing is that Forrest had a great life and did a lot despite his limitations. He’s not every retard, Booth. Forrest’s just himself.”

While there was no question of Tom’s decency, he was no critic. If his
enthusiasm for
Forrest Gump
didn’t offer proof enough, his unshakable loyalty to Booth did.

The men’s relationship was of the kind that would be inconceivable except they had grown up together. If they had met each other after the age of, say, nine or ten, there was no way they could have been friends. They had absolutely nothing in common, as far as Sam could tell, except that they both liked movies, and they both were impressed by Booth. Tom’s attachment to Booth would have made him unbearable if he didn’t seem so helpless to it.

Sam had tried—more than once—to convince Tom that he shouldn’t let Booth sponge off him. The last time, the tall, balding contractor had run a hand over his freckled, sun-damaged head, and squinted at Sam as though they were sharing a private joke. “Well, buddy, what can I say? I love old Booth. He’s just bigger than everyone else, you know?”

“You like him because he’s fat?”

“No, no. I like him because he’s a good time, buddy. When Booth is around, he makes things happy.”

This explanation stymied Sam. His godfather was so unaffectedly genial that to argue with him felt petty.

What traditional paternal support and guidance he received as a young man had come primarily from his godfather. At Sam’s few misbegotten ventures into competitive sports, Tom was a lanky, arms-crossed fixture on the sidelines; and it was his godfather who had helped him glue together the thousand dementedly tiny pieces of a model of a P-51 Mustang. In high school Tom gave Sam his first job, helping out with his crew off the books. Once, the summer house they were renovating burned down overnight—a lightning strike. “Oh, sugar,” his godfather said when they pulled up the drive into sight of the charred pit that only yesterday had been a two-story cottage. He was no more taken aback than he would have been if his shoelace had snapped. “Looks like we’re back to Go.”

On Sam’s seventeenth birthday, it was Tom who handed him a packet of condoms.

The two had studied the small black rectangular box with the glitter-speckled neon script for several agonizing seconds. Tom cleared his throat. “There’re instructions, I think.”

Sam nodded.

“You’re basically going to want to just stretch it on over your dick,” his godfather had felt the need to clarify, and thank God, that was where they had left it.

It bore repeating: Tom was a good person, but he was no critic. Perhaps in light of his profession, even if he did grasp how broken the movie was, he might nonetheless have labored under the assumption that it could somehow be repaired, or that, like his ever spreading Sears kit house, might be improved by a few additions.

But he was a real audience, and he did seem to like it.

In the rave scene, right when Brunson screams at Roger, “Look at me!”—the addict’s eye is swollen from where the fraternity brother hit him, and he is wobbling on his feet—Sam risked a peek at his godfather. Tom’s eyes were shiny, and he was blinking rapidly.

Roger turns away from Brunson.

ROGER

I can’t talk to him when he’s like this.

Brunson blearily stumbles out of the frame, past Claire.

ROGER

(TO CLAIRE:)

Tell him I can’t talk to him when he’s like this.

She takes Roger’s hand and he gives her a spin. They dance in the direction of the departed Brunson, and go kicking through a pile of the clothes that is all that remains of their friend.

CLAIRE

Do you ever think it might have helped? If you’d talked to him?

Roger shakes his head. He doesn’t want to talk about Brunson.

They dance on.

Bald but for a half-halo of gray hair, face pecked and chiseled by forty years of outdoor labor, Tom sniffed. He smoothed his hands over the tails of his pilled flannel shirt. Sam patted him on the back.

 ■ ■ ■ 

“It’s good.” Tom gripped Sam’s wrist. His eyes were red-rimmed. “It’s really good. I liked it an awful lot, buddy. Growing up is a bitch no matter how you slice the thing, isn’t it?”

Sam shrugged and thanked him.

“Your mother would have been pleased. I hope you know that—”

“Lunch, lunch, lunch!” Sam swept his half sister off the floor, holding her up in the air, swinging her so she giggled.

 ■ ■ ■ 

At the campus cafeteria, they took a table that faced onto the quad. It was the week of freshman orientation: a few guys were throwing a yellow Frisbee around; a couple of girls were stringing paper cranes from the branches of a yellow willow.

“Was it a masterpiece, Tom?”

Mina was pushing around roasted carrots on a plate.

“Yeah,” said Tom. “Pretty much. Buddy here knocked it out of the park.” He spoke through a mouthful of hamburger.

“There must have been something you didn’t like,” said Sam.

“No, I told you, it’s good,” said Tom.

Mina selected a carrot and raised it to the light, as if to assess its purity. “Tom wouldn’t lie, Sam. Tom’s not like that.”

“I know, hon.”

“If I was to criticize anything,” said Tom, “it’d be that I wished there’d been more of the guy that lives in the john. He cracked me up.”

“Poop. It’s the funniest.” Mina sighed languidly and stared out at the quad, wrist cocked so the carrot touched her chin. The girls decorating the willow, having exhausted their supply of cranes, had commenced hanging empty cigarette packs from the branches.

“Can I see?” Sam pulled over the folder of head shots that Mina had worked on during the film.

Across the forehead of the first actor, the sophomore brunette who had played Kira, Mina had written in red marker,
Crushed in a accident
. Sam flipped to the next head shot.
Shot in the brains over and over
was written on this one in green. The next actor, a smiling Olivia Das, was
labeled simply
Drowned.
He went through some more:
Ate to much and exploded. Real dragons burnt him to ashes. Strangers got her.

“This is terrific, Mina,” said Sam. “Can I keep these?”

“Okay. Whatever. I’m going to rest my eyes for a second.” She put her head on the table. She smiled at him. Her blue eyes fluttered shut inside the holes of her Zorro mask.

Sam slid the folder over to Tom. His sister’s breathing regulated as she fell into an abrupt sleep. He studied her—lips parted, cheeks flushed, mask slid crooked up her sweet, pale temple—and the floor behind her seemed to gape. Sam envisioned the chair tipping back, her rag-doll body tumbling into darkness, into drugs and madness and the hands of evil men. It was melodrama, he knew, but Mina was the only kid sister he had.

There was also the distinct possibility that Sandra was an even worse parent than Booth. North of forty now, her ambitions for a career in the arts long since lapsed, she was still walking dogs for a living, and her never especially sparkling attitude had become so assiduously bleak that a person who didn’t know her would probably assume that she was making a weird woe-is-me stab at humor. Sandra’s days of wrecking other people’s marriages were past. Now it was her time to roost, gargoylelike, paranoid and snappy, on the rubble of her union with Booth. Sam might have liked to take some petty satisfaction from his stepmother’s downturn, except that she was also his sister’s mother.

The last time Sam had spoken to her—he’d called to talk with his sister—Sandra had gleefully informed him that she had a growth on her forearm, and she figured that with her luck, it was pretty much a slam dunk it was cancer. “So tell Booth to get his party hat ready! I’m sure he’ll want to throw a big shindig and give everyone free money once the witch is dead.”

Among Sandra’s craziest notions was that Sam’s father was secretly rich. If this were true, it was a secret to Booth as well. Sam hadn’t seen the man in an unstained pair of trousers since the mid-nineties. “What the hell, Sandra. What if Mina’s listening on the other phone?”

Sandra puffed on whatever it was she was smoking, then smacked something—a fly, or perhaps some cheerful thought that had made the mistake of becoming corporeal in her presence—with what sounded like a magazine. “She’s gotta learn sometime.”

“Huh.” Tom straightened the photos into a neat pile.
Family curst,
said the one on top. “I’m not sure it’s any big deal. Kids like to press buttons.”

“You really think that’s all?”

“Yeah. Probably. But, if you’re really worried, maybe you should talk to your pop.”

“My pop.”

Tom ignored his godson’s tone and continued on cheerfully. “Old Booth’s going to get a kick out of the guy in the john. When are you going to show it to him?”

The younger man made an openhanded gesture—
someday
.

“You still on the outs with Booth?”

“The way you say it makes it sound like I’m mad because he didn’t say hi to me when we walked by each other at the mall.”

“I don’t mean for it to sound any way, buddy. I’m just asking.”

“Look. Booth was never around. He never kept his promises, and he screwed off with anything that moved, and his career is—it’s just the worst joke, you know. And he married Sandra, who you know very well is fucked up, and where’s that supposed to leave Mina, Tom?”

Tom smiled; his godfather’s front teeth were the color of weathered teak. “Your mom forgave him, buddy. Old Booth’s the only dad you’ve got. He’s not perfect, but he’s got his merits.”

In her sleep, Mina hiccupped.

“You know, Allie would have loved that movie. Loved it. You know that, don’t you? Your mom was tough, but she’d have cried her eyes out.”

Sam had no response to that. He’d never been able to predict his mother’s reactions to films—and that was as far as he was willing to let his thoughts go on the subject.

For a few minutes, they didn’t talk. Tom ate. Sam sipped his drink. The girls outside were hanging condoms on the tree. The wrinkled latex glistened in the sun. One of the girls rushed at the other and tried to wipe her spermicide-coated fingers on her friend’s face. They laughed and grappled.

His godfather wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “You need some cash for all this?”

Sam told him not to worry. He would put their lunch on Brooks’s meal card. Too many drugs or not enough, Sam couldn’t say, but lately,
the AD never seemed to stop moving. He jittered from place to place, picking things up, putting them down, opening drawers, closing drawers, all the while enveloped in a reeking sulfurous bubble, the result of who knew how many struck match tips. Maybe it was the toll of all the hours he spent bowed over the editing machine, slashing at film. But Brooks had told Sam that he might as well have the meal card; he was too busy to eat, the AD said, and anyway, it ruined his appetite, the cameras watching him chew.

 ■ ■ ■ 

When Tom deposited Mina in the backseat of the taxi to take them to the train station, she woke up and stared at Sam from behind the eyeholes of her mask. “I’ll call you,” he said. “In the meantime, try not to fixate so much on death and tragedy. You’re a kid, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

His sister yawned. “I had a dream about you.”

“Yeah?” He picked a lock of sweaty blond hair from her forehead, tucked it behind her ear.

“You put a dynamite stick in your ear, and all of your hair caught on fire.” To help him visualize this, Mina wiggled her fingers over the surface of her scalp. “But you were, like, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay! Everyone relax, I’m okay.’ I could tell you were just lying to make us feel better.”

“Dreams are funny,” said Sam. “Hey, don’t ever put dynamite in your ear.”

The cabdriver cleared his throat.

Mina didn’t pay him any mind. “Oh! Oh! Dad’s going to take me to Paris. We’re going to raise hell. You should come with us, Sam.”

“Maybe I will,” he said, and felt sad, and thought, That son of a bitch.

Her look was disappointed. “I bet you won’t.”

Sam gave the roof of the car a slap. “I love you.” He kissed his sister and stepped back. “Safe trip.” He nodded to his godfather. “Tom.”

As the car pulled away, Tom leaned over Mina to yell, “It was a damn decent movie, buddy! Makes you think, you know?”

The taxi turned onto the college’s main drive and continued out the gate.

“My first review,” said Sam.

 ■ ■ ■ 

The cafeteria had closed—it was late in the afternoon, past four—and Sam had to bang on the door until a line cook appeared to let him inside.

Brooks’s meal card was on the table where he’d forgotten it. Sam pocketed the card. Out the window he saw the two girls seated on the grass beneath the tree. The paper cranes twisted lightly on their strings, and the plastic wrap of the cigarette packs shimmered. The condoms hung like dead withered things but glowed from within, a hearth orange. It was a magic tree. Sam wished he had a camera; he’d have liked to capture it on film.

A couple of raps on the glass caught the girls’ attention.

One was a pudgy brunette with her temples sheared to the skin, and the other was a tall redhead with bangs in her eyes. They both wore the expressions of the deeply baked, blissful and staggered. They grinned at Sam from the opposite side of the Plexiglas.
I like your tree,
he mouthed.

The brunette threw her arms around her friend and giggled into the redhead’s neck. Meanwhile, the redhead pursed her lips and placed a greasy finger to the window glass to draw a simple question in spermicide:
WHY?

He held up his finger,
Wait,
and went outside to explain.

In truth, it wasn’t that much fun. For normal people—that is, for the vast majority who are not possessed with balletic flexibility—sex works better and makes far more sense in even numbers. Odd-numbered sex is a math problem. Everyone is calculating where to be, measuring distances, dividing resources, and inevitably, ending up with fractions. The effort to keep all the parties involved is likely to go well beyond pleasant frustration to end in discomfort and/or confusion. At some stage in the evening’s exercises, for example, Sam bit a thigh only to realize that he was actually biting his own arm, gone numb beneath the weight of one of the girls.