B008J4PNHE EBOK (33 page)

When Booth was about to depart on his latest trip to California, he had swept Sam up in a bear hug and swung him around. “If you’re going to look at me as though I’ve murdered someone, Samuel, the least you could do is reveal the name of my victim!” As it was happening, Sam laughed in self-defense. That night, when his father was gone, he spent a long time in his bedroom with his face buried in a pillow, breathing fabric, and wishing he was tired enough to sleep so he didn’t have to go down to dinner and pretend to his mother that everything was normal.

Now all Sam could manage was “Regular people aren’t prepared for Booth.”

Allie said she didn’t believe there were any regular people. “It’s going to be fine. Your father understands that this is important. He’ll be on his best behavior.”

“You don’t know him like I know him.”

“That may be so.” She gave the boy a chuck behind the ear. “I guess you’ll just have to tough it out and hope for the best.”

They walked some more. Allie said that Tom was coming back that week to finish fixing the ceiling at the café, thank the heavens. Sam asked her if she’d mind adding a few girl touches—curlicues, sparkly glue, whatever came to mind—to a poster he was making for his social studies project on the Trail of Tears. She agreed to take a look.

“You don’t think he’ll do the leper story, do you?” Booth loved to tell people that Sam, as a newborn, resembled a little leper.

“No. I’m sure he won’t.” Allie touched Sam’s back, and he shrugged her hand off.

A black-and-white cat was crouched out in the middle of the road. Allie yelled at it to move. The cat stared at her the way cats stare at people. “You’ll get smushed,” she said, and threw a handful of gravel in its direction. The animal hissed and trotted off, disappeared into some bushes. “You’re welcome,” she called after it, “you stubborn idiot. No one gets smushed on my watch.”

At the marker for Henry James Elting, 1833–1845, Beloved Son and Brother, Sam took out two Nukies from his pocket and arrayed them on the stone top side by side. The first of these red creatures had two regular arms, plus a crooked little baby arm that ended in a claw, and droopy antennae. The other had a tail, bulging fists that looked like they could smash rock, a jaw shaped like a shovel blade, and a ragged bucket hat
jammed down on its head. Both figures stood hunched and frowning, a not uncommon expression among the jinxed species.

His mother looked on while Sam made a camera with his fingers and zoomed it in and out. “Your men are so depressing, kiddo.”

“They’ve had hard lives,” he said.

“Do you know how much I love you?” his mother asked.

“Sure.”

He inched to the left, gathering a few jumbled stones into the background of the frame of his finger camera. Sam instinctively sensed that the depth this added to the picture was valuable, that it spoke to how forbidding the landscape was for those few poor descendants of the human race who had lurched up from the toxic sludge of the twenty-second century.

“Do you know how much your father loves you?” Allie asked.

“Yeah.”

“Because the thing about your father is that he’s not like other fathers. He’s not like other husbands, either. And that can be difficult. We’ve talked about how difficult that can be, haven’t we? But what’s different about your father is also what’s good about him. I mean, you have to ask yourself, you know, what other fathers can order takeout with Animal’s voice? Right? I know you love it when Booth does that. Your dad is funny. What other fathers can juggle?

“And lots of men laugh at themselves, but not many like it when women laugh at them. Your father just loves it when people laugh, doesn’t he? I hope someday you understand how exceptional that is. What other fathers talk about books or have been to other countries or—” She did this occasionally, started talking to Sam about his father but ended up talking to herself, a goofy grin spreading across her face the way it never did unless the subject was Booth. It was the one time when he thought his mother seemed less than adult.

Sam meticulously tweaked the lens of his imaginary scope, widening and sharpening. When he was satisfied, he cleared his throat. “Quiet on the set!” (This was what Booth said right before he pressed the button on the camera timer and hurried around to stand beside them for family portraits.)

“Oh, sorry,” said Allie. She zipped her lips and flung away an invisible key.

Sam operated his invisible camera by turning an invisible crank, adding a faint, helicopter-like whirring noise to make it more realistic.

Allie stood aside in polite silence. A cold wind picked up. The Nukies trembled.

“Cut,” Sam said eventually.

“What was the scene about?” she asked.

“Ill tidings,” said Sam. He scooped up his toys. “They sense that something bad is about to happen.”

“Kiddo,” said Allie. “Ill tidings? Wait a sec. Didn’t they already live through the apocalypse? How much worse can it get?”

 ■ ■ ■ 

At home, his mother set a pot of water on the stove for tea and asked Sam to watch it while she was in the bathroom. A minute later, the phone rang.

“Hello?” Sam asked through a mouthful of American cheese.

There was a sniff, a small exhalation.

Sam gulped down the cheese. “Hello?” he asked again.

“Sammy? Is your daddy there? I’d like—”

Sam hung up.

Allie came back from the bathroom. “Who was that?”

He shook his head—
no idea
—and took another bite.

Among his fifth-grade peers, Sam believed that he placed squarely in the middle ground; he was not an athlete or a math whiz or a musical prodigy; he was not poor or handicapped or a malcontent; he had no enemies but no close friends, either; except for a Perfect Attendance certificate for the spring semester of third grade, he had avoided any kind of distinction whatsoever, and that was how Sam liked it. He preferred to be outside of things. Attention not only made him anxious, it interrupted his vantage, making him focus on how other people were reacting to him as opposed to letting him focus on how other people interacted. (Girls were of particular interest to Sam. Since at least the beginning of second grade, he had been turning a single multi-faceted question over in his mind: “Girls: what the heck?”)

It was evident, too, that the wrong kind of attention—the kind of attention that his father, so large and so different from anyone else, could all too easily draw—could ruin a kid. Sam had seen it.

There was poor Erica Wembley, who had blithely lain out bare-chested at the public swimming pool. Three years on from the blunder and people still called her Cheese Nips and threw Cheese Nips at her head when the teacher’s back was turned.

Ethan Evans had let slip that he had two mothers; Mark Goolsby admitted that his father was in jail for writing bad checks. They were Lesbo Kid and the Convict’s Son, respectively. There were others: the one who was caught stealing; the one who cried on the field trip to the apple orchard because he thought he’d lost his Buffalo Bills duffel bag; the new guy who took off his clothes after gym and actually showered in the shower in the locker room for the first time in known history.

It wasn’t the cruel nicknames attending these personal catastrophes that scared Sam the most—although the thought of being branded as something like Cheese Nips was lamentable—but the way they transformed someone. You felt sorry for Erica Wembley. You studied her profile, the way she held herself, as if there were a wall pressing against her back. When someone said, “Yo! Cheese Nips!,” it was almost possible to see the words hit her and bounce off onto the floor. But the abuse might not even be the worse of it. Sam could imagine bunching up his shoulders and dropping his head, pushing through. What would be truly awful would be the sympathy of bystanders like Sam himself, because no one who witnessed your perseverance would admire you. No matter how tall you walked, you’d only seem more pitiable. To be Booth’s son was confusing enough on its own terms. To be revealed as Booth’s son in the eyes of everyone else felt like an execution.

“So, your dad’s a”—Gloria Wang-Petty grimaced and rubbed her fingers as if trying to get something off them; it was Tuesday, between periods—“like, actor person, and he’s coming on Friday?”

“Yeah,” said Sam. He had gone to retrieve a juice box from his cubby, and when he turned around, Gloria was in his way, blocking him from the rest of the room. “He’s an actor.”

“What’s that like?” asked Gloria, dark-eyed and intimidatingly tall in her yellow cowboy boots.

Popular and intelligent, Gloria, like all the smart and well-liked girls,
radiated not only competence but authority. Sam was afraid of her and also drawn to her. Her black bangs were teased into five spiky arcs. She smelled like banana hair spray.

“I don’t know,” said Sam. He sensed that she wanted him to say that having Booth for a father was incredibly exciting, like having Christmas morning every day. Although he was willing to lie to escape the treacherous subject, he suspected that such a declaration would only prolong it.

“You don’t know? He’s your father.”

The smell of bananas was making Sam light-headed. He broke eye contact, glancing over the top of the cubbies at the poster of President George H. W. Bush shaking hands with an astronaut. “He has to work a lot.”

“What kind of movies is he in? Has he ever been in a musical? I love musicals.”

The awful, tantalizing posters in the closet came to mind. In one, Booth had pinwheels for eyes, and the people watching him were plainly in his control, enraptured, faces slack and openmouthed. What would a bunch of kids make of that? Sam himself wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“I’m pretty sure he’s never been in a musical,” said Sam, carefully eliding the first question.

“Does he know famous people?” asked Gloria.

Sam recalled what his father had said at the museum. “He knows Orson Welles.”

“Who is Orson Welles?” Her tone was doubtful, as if Orson Welles were a new kid who had just moved to Hasbrouck and made a splash by being talented at basketball or doing skateboard tricks.

“He’s a famous director,” said Sam. The ground beneath his feet had steadied. “He directed and starred in
Citizen Kane,
the greatest movie ever made.”

“I’ve never even heard of that movie,” said Gloria suspiciously.

“Oh,” said Sam. “It’s about this guy—named Kane.” He chuckled for no reason and stabbed the juice box straw ineffectually at the small plastic-sealed aperture.

“So what’s your dad going to do with us?”

“I don’t know.” He tried to change the subject. “These straws never work.” In one hand, he raised the bent straw, and in the other, he held up his juice box.

“I just hope your dad’s not stupid. I mean, no offense.” Gloria rolled her eyes up to inspect her five bangs and brought a hand up to smooth one. “Like, it was cool when Jessie’s dad froze stuff with the liquid ice, but it was super-retarded when what’s-his-name’s nurse mom made us stay late watching that video about shaking babies. And then we had to carry around the flour-sack babies all weekend? Duh, I’m not going to shake a baby, but this is a flour sack. If anything, I’m going to get my mom to turn that sucker into a batch of brownies.”

Sam nodded eagerly, although he vividly recalled Gloria and the rest of the girls cooing over their flour-sack infants and bringing them back to school wearing hats. “Yeah. That was super-retarded.”

Gloria abruptly reached out and plucked his juice box from his hands. She punched the straw through the hole at the top. “There. Hey, can I have a sip, Sam?” Gloria smiled and squinted at him. “I’m so thirsty.”

In the four or five seconds that elapsed before he responded, a realization clicked into place as part of the mystery—Girls: what the heck?—was solved. It was what Sam wanted from them; that is, merely to be permitted to give them what they wanted, to please them, to get them to look at him the way Gloria was looking at him at that moment, like he might be worth something. (Simultaneously, his interest in the other chief aspect of the mystery—what girls might want from him or any male—was abruptly discarded for the next decade.) A bubbly feeling coursed through Sam, a wonderful shakiness that made him squeeze his hands to keep them from flopping around.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Go ahead. Have the whole thing.” He hoped she would ask him for something else, for anything.

“Oh, thank you! You’re sweet.” Gloria took another little drink. “Remember: don’t let your dad do anything retarded! Make him be good, okay?”

And things had been going so well.

The bell rang, and she said she’d see him later. Sam stayed where he was. He licked his dry lips.

Allie’s café, the Coffee Shop, shared the bottom floor of what had been the Hasbrouck movie theater. You entered under the marquee—

NOW PLAYING

The Coffee Shop

Starring Joe as “Coffee”

—and the Coffee Shop occupied the entire former lobby area of the theater. The counter was arranged along the lines of the old concessions stand, and the bathrooms were vintage examples of mid–twentieth century plumbing, complete with a trough in the men’s bathroom. A few horseshoe-shaped plaster moldings clung to the walls, though they were tinted brown with age, their swirls gouged and chipped. Mismatched couches and café tables were arranged around the bare hardwood floor. The stairs to the second floor were cordoned off by yellow caution tape.

As for the theater proper, it had become the offices and meeting hall of the SUNY-Hasbrouck Communist Students’ Association. They had their own entrance at the back of the theater, but Sam had peeked inside. Here again, the space’s former use was vaguely present. At the foot of the auditorium, there was a narrow, bare stage but no screen or curtain. A random selection of the original seats remained, two or three side by side in one place, a single by itself in another place, and so on. The impression conveyed by the cavernous room was of a mouth with the majority of the teeth pulled.

The visible sediment of the previous institution beneath the newer one struck even a boy Sam’s age as telling. The town was like a piece of twice-used drawing paper, smudged and worn thin from repeated erasing.