Best Boy (2 page)

“I'm asking you again,” my father now said. “What did Andrew say?”

I rubbed my eyes. “He said he doesn't think so.”

The sides of his mouth turned down and he made the noise in his chest like a dog.

At dinner afterwards it wasn't that I stuck out my chin in a way that made him angry or dropped my food or poked at Momma or kicked under the table. It was that I started crying
and couldn't stop. The lightbulb made me do it. It was a white circle on the ceiling over us that made a buzzing insect sound which stung me in my nerves. Everything got worse when my brother Nate whispered the word “retard” at me across the table. This made me jerk my hand holding a dinner plate which flew for a second through the air and caused a loud, white starburst against the brick wall. Up jumped Daddy with a shout and dragged me upstairs to my bedroom by my collar. My body was still eating food in its mind even though my mouth was yelling things at him as he pulled my pants down and put me across his knee. I turned around yelling and looked at his face that was yanked towards its ears so that his yellow teeth were showing and his eyes were slits. It was his hating face. He made the dog sound in his chest. Then he started hitting.

But even when he wasn't hitting me with his hands he was hitting me with the way he looked or the words were leaving from his mouth that crossed the air and did the hitting for him. Every once in a while he would hit my brother Nate. Those were happy times. He would pull down Nate's pants the same way he did to me and then make wet smacking sounds against his bottom with the palm of his hand. Nate would cry while I put my hands between my knees and squeezed for joy. Then, as my father continued hitting, the warm feeling would begin in the pit of my stomach and rise slowly upwards from there.

FOUR

T
HE MORNING AFTER
T
OMMY
D
OON TRIED TO
give me volts I woke up and took my pills, like I always do. Every day I take Risperdal to make me calm, Lipitor to make me healthy, Paxil to make me happy, Lunesta at night to make me sleep, fish oil to soften my stool and a baby aspirin for my heart. They come in a bubble-packed roll, neatly arranged. The roll has the time and date marked on it in sections so I know just where to tear off the special piece containing all the meds for that part of the day.

The pills keep me always a little bit tired, but it's important that I take them because if not they might call a Dr. Strong. “Paging Dr. Strong,” they say over the PA system, when a villager is about to throw a tantrum and needs to be restrained by staff. “Dr. Strong on the double,” they say.

I filled a big glass with warm water and took the pills in a single swallow. Then because it was a Sunday morning and I had
a period of extended Free Time ahead of me, I sat and did what I'd been doing for several days now. I thought about the stick.

Stock.

Stalk.

Stork
.

The stick was a pointed stick that belonged to Mr. Deresiwicz, the custodian at Payton. He used it to spear through paper lying on the paths and grass. As I worked alongside him on Lawn Crew on certain afternoons, I was sure that if I had the stick, and didn't have to interrupt my walking to bend down but could simply whisk stuff off the ground and into a bag I had on my shoulder just like him, I'd be a person already on his way out of Payton and maybe one day live alone and even drive a car.

So I studied this stick, that was a pure pole with a point on it. Later the same afternoon, when Free Time was over and everyone was supposed to attend a talent show in the Main Hall, I walked across the empty campus to the woodworking workshop. There I found an old broomstick in a pile of wood. I used the special jigsaw with the skinny blade and the high humped back like a man praying and I cut the end off. Then I sawed the flat head of a nail off too, but quietly, and I gently hammered the nail into the stick and then filed the nail sharp again where it was flat from being hammered. This was a beautiful trash-spearing machine and I was happy at myself and I whistled as I cleaned up. When I was done I put the stick behind some bushes outside and went on to the talent show.

Except it turned out that it wasn't a talent show but a singalong. A singalong is held usually in the Main Hall whenever we want to greet new staff. The problem was that when I entered the Main Hall that evening and I saw who the new staff was, I immediately felt sick. He was seated at the center of a crowd of
people in the Main Hall and they had just started the welcome song. It's done to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and it goes like this:

Payton Living flies on high

Touch the earth and touch the sky

Walking tall and feeling joy

In the hearts of girls and boys

And today we welcome a new staff

Who will help us out to laugh

Then everyone applauds, cheering like it's the best, funniest thing they've ever heard. But usually during these songs I'm only mouthing the words because my mind is focused instead on the soda machine in the nearby alcove that is filled with clustering cool cans of Mountain Dew and Sprite and root beer. Sometimes, after events, Raykene will let me have one.

The new staff stood up. He had hair that was long in the back and short in the front. He had a moustache that drooped on either side like a picture of a Civil War general in a magazine. He waited until the singing was done and then he said, “Unh . . . this is the part where I talk a little, right? Okay, name's Mike Hinton and I'm from right down the road, in Gatesboro. The short version is high school and then what you call a non-starter phase at community college. Next up we got military service, which was two tours in Iraq, Twenty-first Cavalry, Second Battalion. Hardest thing I've ever done in this life and maybe the next one too and pulled a purple heart and a Bronze Star doing it. Anyway, after my service was over and I come back home thinking I'm done with
that
, I'm like,
Okay, Lord, where do I go from here?
”

People were nodding.

“So I began taking special ed classes,” Mike said, “which
opened my eyes, yessir it did. But pretty soon I got to feeling like I wanted to actually be doing something in the world rather than reading about it in a book. Friends, I wanted to be getting my feet wet and my hands dirty.”

He looked around and made a slow chewing motion like he was eating a piece of seriousness. “Bottom line,” he said, “it's really important for me to be here in this community of beautiful people, making a difference. And thank you for your faith in hiring me.” He smiled. “Ta-da! The end.”

People applauded as Mike Hinton looked slowly around the room, trying to fork his eyes individually into the faces of people in the crowd. But when he got to me instantly the bad feeling deepened in my gut like on the roller coaster when it shoots upwards so fast it leaves your stomach still hanging at the bottom. Underneath his moustache he was wearing my father's same yellow teeth and eyes and I started whimpering, unable to stop the bad remembering.

My Dad was dead but he was back again as a speaking person looking out of someone else's face. My whimpering grew louder and soon became an uncontrollable bawling in my mouth. Several of the staff started moving towards me but the face of Mike Hinton was shining at me like from a circle of light in the middle of the room. He looked like he knew exactly what I was thinking and he was angry about it. He looked like I'd just kicked dirt onto the white cake of his life.

Raykene took me gently by the arm and out of the room and led me back to my cottage. “Todd, shush, now,” she said. “You know how you get with new men staff, and how you were with Roy and Lebron. But you're gonna love Mike, honey, you really are. I've talked to him and our man is one of the good guys, like you.”

She made me brush my teeth and wash my face while she stood in the door of the bathroom of my house, watching. Afterwards she came close and bent over me and the warmth of the air around her body went into me in a calming way as she hugged me good night. I got into bed and turned on the bedside radio. The stripe of numbers glowed. “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers was playing. I can remember every song I've ever heard. I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard it. Momma was a piano teacher and I'd spent a million hours sitting listening as she moved her hands over the keyboard and notes flew into the air and then gradually filled me up.

“Good night, sugar,” Raykene said softly and shut the door. It was early to go to bed but staff made us do it if they thought we were getting nervous. Pre-sleep they called it. I did Pre-sleep while thinking that the way my parents died had nothing to do with how a switch on a wall threw light across a room but that it was still a kind of magic. It was a magic how they walked out of their clothes and bodies and simply disappeared. It was a magic how everything they owned suddenly lost its forward motion like a sailboat when the wind stops.

My Dad was gone. I'd seen the coffin. It was lowered on a kind of cloth band into the hole. Dirt fell with a rattle. “Unchained Melody” ended and “To Sir, with Love” began. Daddy wasn't coming back ever but I was nervous anyway. I knew that in one of the cottages nearby Mike was sitting wearing my father's expression on his face and making up something specially bad, just for me. I knew he was. I was sure of it. I started whimpering again, and stayed there lying in my bed until everyone had gone to sleep. Then I put my clothes back on and went outside. I walked across the dark campus till I found the stick again in
the bushes and I held it in my hand. I couldn't bear to push my mind back against anyone, but this wasn't my mind. It was a sharp stick that could fly through the air.

I had heard where Mike lived and I carried the stick to the bushes right near his cottage. Then I stayed there for a while, bent low over it, rocking and making the dog noise in my chest like my Dad with my eyes shut.

FIVE

E
VERYBODY THINKS THEY KNOW WHAT'S WRONG
with me, but they don't. They think I'm autistic, but they don't exactly know what that means either. A doctor named Eugene Bleuler made up the word “autism” in 1911 though it didn't get used on anybody until a long time later. The last name of Bleuler sounds like it might belong to a fat man who's bursting out of his clothes with a pop. But actually he was a Swiss doctor with a moustache who was good with words because he also made up the one “schizophrenia.” After Eugene Bleuler, no one thought about autism for a while because of being distracted by World Wars. But then starting in the 1940s, one person after another began explaining that they knew what autism was and you should let them tell you.

Not only do I sometimes read the paper, I also read the
Encyclopedia Britannica
too. No one knows that either, even though I have it under my bed. My Momma first brought me the Encyclopedia when I was twelve years old. I had just arrived at the
Clovis Center and she asked the director there to make a “special exception” and he said yes and so have all the other directors since. She used to bring me the
Britannica
yearbooks each year too until she died, Momma. Most people think the Encyclopedia is there to make me happy like a piece of blanket from childhood but I actually read it lots because the Encyclopedia has a voice that belongs to a man sitting in a room at a table who wants to calmly talk about every single thing in the world and it calms me to hear that. It calms me how he never gets angry or sick or makes the dog growl in his chest. It calms me that he only waits patiently for you to turn to the page so he can start talking again. I told Raykene about him and she laughed and said she was gonna call the
Britannica
Mr. B. Now whenever I ask her a question she doesn't know the answer to she says, “Whyn't you ask Mr. B?”

When I asked him, Mr. B said that the explaining about autism has gone on for a while and continued till today and still no one knows exactly what it is. He said this is true even though scientists are always having all sorts of what he calls
groundbreaking discoveries
about autism. He says they're doing a lot of tying of autism to things in the
environment
, when they're not doing groundbreaking. Meanwhile, there are the skulls. I like thinking about the skulls. They're kept in museums in places like Germany and France, and they're shiny because they've been painted with varnish by museum people to keep them from rotting in air which is called
oxidation
.

The skulls are from a period of long ago known as the
Neolithic
. Mr. B says that this was when groups of people first began having fun together, eight thousand years ago. He says they played string instruments, baked bread and kept pets. He says they did things with their hair to look good for each other.

The skulls have little holes cut in them. These holes are often square. Sometimes the cuts are perfect like the lines of a tic-tac-toe. They were probably made with a curved knife. Also the holes have
bone growth
around them which means the surgery was done on people who were still alive.

The question is, why? Why'd they do it? Who was the first person who said, “I know, I'll feel better when I cut a hole in my head”? No one knows the answer for sure, but Mr. B says that it's probably the first example ever in the whole world of someone being operated on by someone else to
let the crazy out
.

SIX

A
FTER MEETING
M
IKE
H
INTON FOR THE FIRST
time at the singalong I was nervous and I stayed that way. I carried it around with me like a fizzy drink I drank too much of fast, that was always about to make me burp. The pressure was inside me and pushing steady, even though I hoped it would go away. But it didn't go away, and then I met Mike again and it all got even worse.