Best Boy (10 page)

Mostly the students didn't look at us because they were used to us. Versions of us had been coming here from Payton LivingCenter for many years. As we walked Martine turned towards me and said:

“Not only do the walls have ears—”

“What?” I said.

“They have eyes and noses!”

“What?” I said again.

She smiled and said, “Tereze has been giving me the beam.”

“Um,” I said.

“I mean watching me when I take my pills. Like a hawk. But it's too late because I'm already off the Rasperdoll.”

She stopped what she was doing which was turning a corner and looked at me with the eye which was open especially wide.

“You get me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You want in? I can show you how.”

Did I want in? Did I want to stop taking the drug that was making me feel like I was being personally pulled to the ground
by someone and was always asleep in my body? The problem as usual was the Law. It leaned against you like a tall building of rules. It could fall on you at any moment.

“I don't know,” I said.

She made a face and started walking again.

We got to the end of the hall and entered the swinging metal doors of the kitchen. I pushed forward and when the door opened the first thing I saw was Louise across the room mixing something in a big aluminum bowl. She looked up and a smile came across her face and she said:

“Hey, you!”

Louise was a big roundish woman with short gray hair who had worked in the kitchen of Demont for many years. After my first week there she had said, “You ever got any problem with anybody out there in the cafeteria, you just send them to me.” Then she hooked her thumb towards her chest.

“Who's your girlfriend?” she now asked.

“This is Martine.”

“Well, hi, Martine. You look like a secret agent or something with that eye of yours. But I bet you been told that a hundred times.”

Martine stared at the floor.

“Not too talkative, I see, but that's okay, as long as you know how to chop.”

Martine still said nothing.

“You guys got a big pile of potatoes to get through, and carrots too. Todd, I'll let you show Miss Martine the ropes, if you don't mind.”

“That's fine.”

Martine stood there, not moving and staring at the floor.

“Come with me,” I said, and took her to the clothes closet in a
smaller room off the cafeteria kitchen that had some lockers in it and a shower. I liked that she didn't know what to do and I did.

“These are the aprons!” I said loudly, and while she was looking at them I said in a less loud voice, “Maybe I can think about it.”

“What?”

“Stopping taking the Risperdal.”

“Good. Do you wanna know how to fake taking them?”

“Maybe.”

My feelings pushed out of me towards Martine as strongly as the Law pushed back.

“Double good,” she said. “We'll meet later and I'll show you what to do.”

I was so happy at the idea of meeting her later that I closed my eyes without knowing it.

“Now put the apron on me,” she said. When I opened my eyes again I saw that she'd stuck her hands straight up in the air like someone surrendering in a war and was waiting and smiling.

“Okay,” I said, in a soft voice that sounded strange to me. I hooked the strings around her hands and then let the whole thing settle over her like a snowfall that went easily down over her body even though it was suddenly being blown sideways by a hard, invisible gust of wind.

SEVENTEEN

M
Y BROTHER CALLED FOR HIS WEEKLY CALL
last night, and wanted to talk about how “stressed out” he was at work, but I wanted to talk about my Idea. I wanted to talk about coming home for an extended visit that maybe turned into forever and, as part of that, bringing Martine with me. I was now thinking about Martine constantly. But before I could talk about any of it, my brother said, “Oh, and how's it going with the new guy?”

“Which guy?”

“Mike, you said his name was?”

I could hear his sons yelling in the background.

“I know,” he said, “I was supposed to call your people about him but I haven't gotten around to it yet. But that's 'cause I've been crazy busy with this huge impact study. Plus, I was thinking, Toddster, that your stuff would blow over soon. It usually does. So did it?”

“Nate?”

“Yes?”

“Can I come home?”

“Ah, Christ,” my brother said quietly after a pause.

“What?” I asked.

“Again? I mean, really, after everything we've talked about?”

“But I wanna come home.”

“I know you do.” He took a long drink that filled the phone with clinking ice. “My knowing isn't the problem. The problem is that you wake up every day and you think,
What can the world do for me today?
That's the problem. But the world is full of people jammed with stuff to do in their lives, Tubes, stuff that is incredibly busy and important to their families, even if it doesn't seem real to you. The question is, why am I even telling you this?”

“So when
can
I come home?”

“My point, exactly.”

“Soon?” I said.

My brother sighed. “You're in the very best place in the world for you. You know that Mom busted her butt to get you there. That's the first thing to remember. The second thing is do
not
fuck it up, okay?”

Sometimes after he would spray my dingus with hair spray he'd stand around watching with his friends as the heat of the burning made me cry from the pain. They'd be laughing until I started crying. Then they'd stop laughing and look at me in surprise.

Now he sighed again into the phone and in a different, happier tone of voice, he said, “God, I love the dusk. Remember how we used to sit on the back deck when we were kids just
before supper, with the light changing in the backyard and the darkness kinda coming out of the woods and everything getting all spooky and mysterious for a few minutes? I think if I was a poet I'd have written about it.”

“No,” I said.

He never got punished for hurting me, not once. Not when he put rocks in my bed or teased me till I got volts. Not when he did a wedgie and pulled my underwear till it hurt or once swung a bat and cracked me with it in the head at the Goldsteins' Fourth of July picnic. Nothing ever happened to him except that he stayed and I left. Small, chunky sounds came out of the phone. He was chewing ice. “How about,” he said, “the way Dad in the warm months would pour himself a stiff one and head out to the deck of the house, like clockwork, every day at six, and never miss a day?”

“Um,” I said.

“God, he loved that backyard deck!”

“The deck,” I said.

The deck was attached to the house. The house was in the town of Grable where we lived, on top of a hill that looked out on other houses sitting repeatingly on shelves in the same hill below us.

“That deck,” my brother said, “was his own little piece of paradise.”

“Right,” I said. I was getting ready to ask him about coming home again. I had to ask him. It was important that I ask him. The problem would be the “incident.” I knew it would. Maybe it was time to think again about the “incident.” Maybe it was time to think about it again from beginning to end. According to Nate the incident had changed everything. The incident had happened when Nate, Beth and the kids had flown out to
Payton for the very first time to see me, just before our parents began to die.

“I miss him so much,” he said softly.

“I know,” I said into the phone while I watched him and his wife walk towards me out of memory that day, crossing the Payton lawn to my cottage. Behind them ran two little boys who were fighting loudly. I had never met his wife before then. She was tall and thin and wore a long dress that hung straight down from her shoulders like clothes off a hanger. From that dress a thin arm shot out. I shook it.

“Hello, Beth,” I said to her.

“Hi!” she said loudly, and then I shook the tiny hands of his two sons. After that we got into the car and drove directly to a restaurant about ten minutes from Payton called Bob's Cabin. This was a big modern restaurant built onto the original old tiny cabin that once held miners. On the day we went there it was filled mainly with old people eating quietly. We sat down and I quickly ordered the special of the day which was the fried chicken platter. But first I made sure there was no peanut oil used in the frying by asking the waitress. I'm allergic not only to sesame seeds but also to nuts which if I eat them can cause someone to have to stab me with an EpiPen to keep me from going into anaphylactic shock that closes the throat.

“Nate was right,” Beth said, nodding after the waitress left, “you run a pretty tight ship, Todd.”

“Thank you,” I said.

After that Beth kept trying to look into my eyes while she talked which I don't like. She was moving her mouth a lot but she was down the table from me and her voice kept getting a little bit lost in the restaurant sounds. I watched and listened and after a while it became clear that she was talking about her
children. She was saying they had incredible appetites. She was saying they were talented at tai chi and soccer and math and painting and that their teachers loved them.

“Four gold stars in a row had never happened before,” Beth was saying when a waiter brought our food and I stopped trying to listen and started eating. The name of my platter was the Cluck Tower. It had many pieces of chicken piled on a dome of french fries. At a certain point during the meal my brother left the table to go to the bathroom and Beth leaned forward and said, “You gotta forgive us for talking your ear off today, Todd. It's just excitement, is what it is. Nate is so proud of what you've accomplished and it means a lot to him to have you here. You know what? It means a lot to me too. Family is family, right?”

“Family,” I said.

“I'm curious,” she said quickly, “about your downtime at your, you know, place you're at. So, like, what do you do when you're not working?”

“I listen to records,” I said.

“Records?” she said and clapped her hands together. “God, I haven't heard that term for years. Do you have a turntable? Or do you mean CDs?”

“And sometimes the oldies station,” I said.

Her cell phone rang. The reason I know is because she made a face and began digging in her purse. We had been sitting at the restaurant table so long that many of the old people had left and younger people had replaced them and the noise of talking had become much louder. I hadn't heard the ringing over the sound.

Beth glanced at her phone and said, “This is a very important call.” Then she stared at me for a short moment like she was trying to see something in my eyes.

“Todd, can I count on you for just one second,” she said, “to
keep an eye on the boys? I'll be literally less than a minute. I wouldn't ask, but it's a business call I've been waiting for all week. All I need is one minute, okay?”

Beth would later say that I said, “Yes.” But all I really said was, “What?”

She held the cell phone to her ear and got up from the table and walked fast away from the loud dining room while holding an arm out in the air in front of her to hear better.

“My God, really?” I heard her yell as she left the room.

I continued eating my fried chicken. The boys were named Steven and Cam. They were eight and seven. Steven, the older one, was trying to teach Cam that you could shoot the paper end of a straw by blowing into it. I finished two chicken drumsticks fast and then turned my attention to the fries. They were crisp but still hot and floury inside, just the way I liked them. Suddenly a loud noise came through the air and I looked up.

Out the window I could see that the boys had run onto Eagle Avenue. I could also see that a car had swerved to avoid them and smashed into another car that was parked along the curb. A large cloud of steam rushed into the air above one of the cars.

I returned to eating the french fries in a special way where I first nibbled the crusts off and then mashed the rest of the softer parts into a paste.

A burst of shouting from outside the window made me look up again. The steam had cleared and the boys were still standing on the street while people ran towards them from every direction. One of the boys had something on his face. Suddenly Beth appeared in the window. She was also running. I reached for the ketchup and squirted it on my plate. I love to blend the potatoes and ketchup together and I was doing that when I heard Beth again, but now much more loudly. She was no longer outside but
back at the entrance to the dining room. There were stains on her white shirt. Her mouth was open and her chest was heaving like she was trying to breathe. Finally she got her breath and when she did she began to scream.

The screaming caused other people who were eating to stop with their forks and knives in the air. As the screaming went on my brother ran into the dining room carrying Cam in his arms while Steven ran behind him holding his pants leg and looking scared. Cam's face was striped with blood and he was screaming like his mother, but higher. My brother's eyes were very wide and in a loud, strange voice he yelled to the whole room, “He was cut by flying glass but everything is okay!”

Beth's screaming had just been sounds but now it became words as she faced me. The first word was,“What!” This was followed by, “The fuck is wrong with you?”

Her arm was pointing at me and her chest was still heaving. I had been holding my spoon of potato-and-ketchup paste in the air while she yelled. When she stopped yelling I put it in my mouth.

“That's just not right,” I heard a woman say.

My brother announced to the restaurant, “So sorry for the intrusion, folks. The EMT has been called. Please return to your meals.” Then to Beth in a lower, more normal voice he said, “I'll say it again. You left
him
in charge?”