Best Boy (14 page)

TWENTY-TWO

E
VER SINCE
I
HAD MY
I
DEA AND BOUGHT MAPS AT
the mall I've been thinking about roads and also about what goes up and down roads which is mainly cars. Daddy loved cars and he bought new ones as much as possible. Cars were rooms with people in them that traveled fast and were called
Biscayne
and
Nova
,
Riviera
and
Corvair
,
Bonneville
and
Torino.
Their insides were of cool blue leather to sit in like swimming pools. They had panels of dangerous stalks and nobs on their dashboards and skins on their bodies painted fiery colors that made me afraid to touch them.

We took one to the beach once where my parents lay on the sand ignoring the folding waves and the sun and said to each other, “Isn't this lovely?” before they fell asleep. We drove one up into the cool air in the mountains to “admire the view your father was so thoughtful to take us to.”

Because cars didn't walk but rolled is why they needed roads to get anywhere. The whole world rolled from one place to
another on endless wheels. The oldest picture of a wheel was found near the Elbe River in Germany. Today there are two million miles of roads in America for rolling on. Most of them are covered with asphalt. Asphalt is everywhere. It's
a semi-solid petroleum product
that lives in the earth and was originally used as glue by Native Americans.

But the really interesting thing about roads is this: They are all connected. Every single one.

After I read Mike's note I waited until it was late that same evening and I set out walking on the roads that would carry me all the way home along a single path. I had been planning to leave sometime soon but now everything was sped up and it was time to go. The campus was already asleep for the night with everyone in their beds weighed down by meds. I knew where I was heading or at least the general direction and I'd packed a plastic bag with a can of tuna fish and one of “chunked chicken.” Each of these had metal tabs on them you pulled to open with a hiss. Also I packed some water, a sheet and a protein bar. I wasn't going to walk all the way home. Roads were for rolling so maybe I'd catch a ride in a car by hitchhiking or I'd get as close as I could and then call my brother to come get me in his car. Everyone had cars. The important thing was to be going away from Payton and getting nearer to where I was born. I wanted to smell the green air that used to rise from the lawn behind our house in the evening, and run thumping up the staircase that forever had the plaster archer shooting at it from the living room. I wanted to hear the piano make the music again that was a little bit like a car because you sat in it while it took you away somewhere.

I needed to tell my parents that maybe I forgave them for pushing me out of the house like I was something that smelled bad and had begun to rot.

Or maybe not.

I slipped out the back door of the cottage. The woods began after a stretch of lawn. The stars were out although not really. The stars are always “out” but water in the air overhead sometimes thickens into clouds and blocks the view. The moon shone, though that's not really true either. The moon simply reflects light from the sun towards the earth.

I began crying as I crossed the lawn. I began crying because nothing is what it seems in life including the sky overhead and I was leaving the only place that called itself home, even though it wasn't. Soon I was on a path in the woods. There were many paths winding through the woods around Payton and I'd walked on lots of them. On a few of them I'd also screamed. But the one I was on now led directly to one of the roads. I continued walking and after the tears stopped it was just me doing something I'd never done before on my own two feet, and only a few times in a car or a school bus or an airplane which was this: going home.

The night was very quiet as I moved forward in the dark. I knew that things were sitting on branches around me and watching me as they breathed. I knew that they were burrowing beneath me and feeling my footsteps through the vibrations in the dirt. This was the woods, what it did. I kept walking until I came out of the woods and into a neighborhood which was just houses coming down a small mountain to the road like they'd ridden a landslide. I continued past them and fields opened up again. I wanted to get far enough away so that no one could ever find me and I kept going past more houses with lights going off inside them and more fields until my body remembered that it needed sleep and became very heavy. Finally I stopped at another field that had trees on it and was very quiet.

Above me the sky was almost perfectly clear. The moon was out. A single eyebrow of cloud drifted across its face. I pushed down the grass with my shoes and put the sheet down and lay on it. One of the few times Daddy seemed calm and happy was when he was looking through a telescope at the night sky. Then the cheerful sound came into his voice as he talked about how the night above us that sometimes seemed empty was actually filled with busy intersections of flaming stars and planets. They breathed in space to make light. They crossed vast distances and never crashed. I continued staring at the sky while remembering him saying these things in a slow, calm voice until the earth pushed up into me from below in a way that made me feel I could shut my eyes, and did.

I slept badly but didn't have nightmares for the first time since I'd stopped taking the Risperdal. When I opened my eyes the next morning the little light in the sky made me feel like I was lying on the floor of a big room. A car coughed in the distance. Smoke pushed up out the chimney of a house. I sat up and ate something and looked at my map. Anxiety came back into my head like a swarm of bees but I tried to ignore it and continued staring at the map instead. The road I was on crossed the map as a heavy black stripe but a country road ran alongside it that looked thin enough to sew with. It was about a mile away and would have very few people on it, which was good. I got up and started in that direction.

“These Boots are Made for Walkin',” Nancy Sinatra sang on October 8, 1977, in the Willaway Mall in Darby, New York. Dad and I were in a store called Spencer's Gifts. The salesgirl was looking at me like she was afraid of me. I'd been eating lipstick again. Lipstick smelled like an ice-cream sundae and I always forgot it wasn't and tried eating it again when I saw it.

But that was a long time ago, and even though Nancy Sinatra was probably still singing her song about boots somewhere, now I was a Best Boy on a mission heading home and instead of boots I was wearing sneakers called Converse on my feet. I continued walking as the song faded from my mind and the day began warming which calmed the anxiety-bees a little. Eventually I came to a town called Easter.

You could tell Easter was a town because the houses were closer together. These houses were mostly small and gray. Rusted pickup trucks were parked in their driveways and there was a washing machine on the front lawn of one house. Another had the motor of a car sitting in the middle of the driveway like it had fallen out of the sky and no one had the strength to put it back where it belonged.

Soon I passed a small gas station. The owner was opening the front door of the little building with a key. On his truck was a bumper sticker that said “Gun Control Means Good Aim.” He had a beard and was wearing overalls. He stopped what he was doing and gave me a look. I raised my right hand as in a greeting or hello.

But the man only kept giving me the look and frowned.

The whole town only took a minute to walk through. It had a sign saying “Video Vault.” It had a sign saying “Mike's Bar.” It had a post office sign but the post office was closed. I wasn't rolling but walking but the roads poured me smoothly along anyway.

The next house I passed had the same look as all the other houses but in this house there were children sitting quietly on the front stoop. I was thinking maybe to offer them a piece of food from my pack when their mother opened the front door with a bang and looked at me with an angry look before she swept the children inside and then slammed the door. A moment later I
heard the rattle of the lock. Not long after she looked at me from a window with a phone in her hand.

I began to sweat. It trickled a little down my neck and then along my ribs. It was only partly the rising sun. The woman made me nervous. It also made me nervous that a dog had walked up behind me and was now walking alongside me while it turned its head again and again to keep looking at me. To try to feel better I remembered the people who loved me. In order of feeling there was my Momma first who was like the sun I turned towards and then Raykene who touched me with her hands while she put a room around me with her voice along with Dave who was a nice man even if he was always asking me to do things with a cold feeling of instruction in his words. Then there was my brother.

Aside from them, who else?

I was out of the town by now and looked up from the question and saw the telephone wires running alongside the road. Telephone wires ran alongside most roads. They were a highway for voices. If you got close enough you could hear the humming of the voices as they rushed along with important messages such as,
I need
,
I want
,
I'm afraid
, and
Please give me that root beer as soon as possible
.

On the wires near me were birds sitting in little groups. I was continuing to walk while staring into the distance when I heard a voice.

“Todd,” it said.

“Yes,” said my own mouth, before I could think of what or how to respond.

“It's a long way to where you're going.”

I looked around but there was no one anywhere.

“It's me,” said the voice.

Again I looked hard for it.

“Up here,” it said.

I held my hand over my eyes to look upwards. Then I saw the bird. It was tucking its tail into the wind a little bit and was black-colored. On the curving wire it swung to and fro in the breeze.

“Flying is like thinking,” it said.

I dropped my bag on the ground which made my spine feel long and I straightened up. I pulled my fingers through my hair to straighten it and my thoughts at the same time.

I looked up again.

“What you got in the bag?” asked the bird in my head.

“I have . . . food,” I said.

“Great!” said the bird.

Slowly I looked around me to make sure that there was no one behind a rock who was “funning” me and making the sounds of animals with their throats.

“No,” said the bird, “it's me, all right.”

“What?” I asked, because I didn't know what else to say.

“I'm starving,” said the bird.

When I looked at the bird it had a ring of bright, busy air around it. The bird said, “Seeds and nuts, buddy.”

I dug in the bag with my hand and then found what was left of the protein bar in it and peeled back its wrapper before setting it carefully on the road in front of me.

“Bingo,” said the bird and swooped down from the wire and walked around the bar a moment like it was studying it. “Things are looking up,” it said, and then with its beak it began tapping holes in the bar and lifting its head to swallow the pecked pieces.

After a few seconds, the bird turned its head sideways.

“Grable, New York?” it asked.

“Yes,” I said out loud. “But how did you know where I was going?”

“Because animals know everything. That's the big difference.”

“The big difference?” I asked.

“Between us and you.”

“What?” I said again.

“It'll come to you,” said the bird as it continued pecking busily while the colors flexed on its neck. “In the meantime, remember this.” It stopped pecking for a second. Its body was live with energy. Its tiny ribs were contracting and expanding and its head was swiveling. Birds were never still.

“Home is in your head,” it said.

I was still standing there thinking about what the bird had said when the large whopping sounds of a helicopter came directly up out of the valley and I had just enough time to run under a thick tree and crouch there while it passed nearly overhead. On the bottom of it was written the word “Sheriff.” When the sound died away I stayed crouched where I was. I was frightened and didn't move for a long time. Eventually I got back on the road. The bird and the helicopter were gone but now everything was frightening me a lot and the anxiety was making a roaring sound in my head.

“I'm not scared,” I said out loud to the bird, but I was.

TWENTY-THREE

T
HE MISTAKE HAPPENED LATER THAT DAY AFTER
I'd finished my food and water. The mistake was to enter a “convenience” store to buy something to eat with the five-dollar bill my father had given me many years ago that I'd always kept as a souvenir even though I never liked thinking about him if I didn't have to. The convenience store was a small building of whitish brick. When I opened the front door, almost immediately it was too bright to see inside. Then the brightness passed away into the distance and I could see aisles and a cashier behind a glass partition with two ceiling fans that were turning slowly.

I'd never been in a store by myself before. But now I was in a store and I was suddenly feeling too tall again and the sickness in my stomach was beginning. At Payton staff always told me to “fight anxiety” by imagining I was breathing a long breath through a tube that began at my heels and popped out the top of my head. “Pop the cork,” they always used to say.

But even though I breathed and popped the cork the store
attacked me with fluorescent lights buzzing down from the ceiling along with people's shoes that scuffed on the floor and there was also the squeak of hinges and the sizzle of frankfurters and the cracking splat of mustard from the dispenser as a boy in a denim jacket said, “You shitting me?” which is disgusting, to a girl who was biting her nails.