Best Boy (3 page)

“Hello, boys!” he yelled one morning, coming into the woodshop where we were making the famous wooden plates and bowls and salad tongs that people think of when they hear the words “Payton LivingCenter.”

Mike stood underneath the wall clock, wearing a rubber apron and grinning. From that moment on I would always think of him as Mike the Apron.

“How we doing today?” he yelled.

No one said anything.

“Guys,” a vocational staff named Joe said quietly, “some of
you here have already met Mike, who's the new broom here, and whose job is to sweep you malingerers into a crack crew.” Joe winked at Mike and laughed. “Now, I want you to be very nice to him, and answer him when he speaks to you.”

There was a silence.

“So how y'all doing today?” Mike said in a normal voice.

Larry, who was working alongside me, said, “Gool,” which wasn't “good” but was close. Roy said, “You bet!” with a great sound of specialness, even though it was the only thing he ever said. Jimmy Nickle only looked at him, his mouth open with the surprised look on his face he carried around. I said, “Fine,” but very softly.

“You dudes rock,” Mike the Apron said. But though the words looked friendly in the air, they didn't sound friendly in my ear at all.

After lunch that day, I had an hour of Free Time and decided I would use it to take a long walk in the woods. “Todd,” Raykene had once told me, “if you feel bad or think the volts are coming on, then you should just walk in the woods and scream and let it out.”

Payton is surrounded by thick woods. I took the Pismire Trail. It went past trees and in the far distance I could see houses that had people in them though I'd been told to stay away. The trail around me was open and wide at the beginning and then it got more narrow and crowded with the branches of trees. The blue of the sky always seemed a deeper, richer color when you were inside the forest, looking up.

After walking for ten minutes I was in a place where no one could hear and there were no houses nearby. Here I could have my thought that Mike the Apron was going to be a bad man who was going to belong to the exact same category of badness
as my father and that below his voice, no matter what he said or did, Mike the Apron was going to add more of this badness to my life every day.

I opened my mouth. Screams came out. These roughened my throat but I kept going. Stuff began pouring from my nose. My eyes were watering. The screams moved up into the air and mingled with air itself and were taken into the green dead rooms of the forest that went away from me at eye-level in every direction.

When I was done, I walked slowly back to Payton with a metal feeling in my lungs that made things quieter in my head. As I crossed the lawns I took a detour to the little white cottage of Mike the Apron. I stopped and parted the branches of the shrub to look at the stick again. As usual, I could feel my mind organize itself around the purpose of the stick. I could hear the whistling sound of it traveling through the air and then the hitting sound of it sticking into something.

I cut back across the lawn, opened the door of our cottage and marched through the living room where Tommy Doon was watching television. He began taking a long slow breath while getting ready to say something insulting but I ignored him and sat on the bed with my head filled with a funny new pressure. The pressure was because something had happened for the first time in many years and it made me confused and happy, it did. I'd just had an Idea.

PART
TWO

SEVEN

M
Y PARENTS SEEMED TO LIVE FOREVER, BUT
after they finally got very small and old and died, my younger brother Nate became my guardian. He lives with his wife and two sons in a house just up the street from the home we grew up in which is 744.7 miles east of Payton, beyond the mountains. I haven't been to the house but he's sent me pictures. It's a brick house with a big lawn. In one of the pictures, a dog is running in crazy circles on the grass. In another, a cat crouches, sneaking. If I look close, in the background I can see a sprinkler raising a claw of water. These photos are tacked over my bed.

But I've taken a pen and blacked out the faces of the animals. I can't explain why they frighten me so much but they do. Pets belong to the same category as typewriters that are filled with millipede arms which wave up and down to hit the paper and cash registers with drawers that open like laughing mouths with bills where their tongues should be and flashing numbers for eyes.

Nate comes and sees me when he can. He always says “see you very soon” but then a long time goes by and everyone forgets and it's six months later. Other villagers have family who live nearby and come almost every weekend. They have mothers and fathers who arrive in cars filled with the shattering glass sounds of children laughing and also sometimes picnic baskets and gifts. These families have outdoor meals in the rinks of shade beneath the trees on the Payton lawns. They go with their villagers to the Craswick Zoo where you can wear glasses and a mask and a llama will spit at you for money. They take them out for ice cream and visit the Londale Arboretum where the flower smells are so strong everything you eat afterwards tastes like an iris including steaks or french fries or even a chocolate malted.

When Nate comes we always go to the big chrome Pilgrim Diner which is near Payton and order the same thing. He asks me questions about myself and tries his best to be interested in everything I have to say. One of the things we also do is make sure never to talk about how much we hated each other when we were boys. We pretend just like Mom always said that “at bottom the Aaron guys always pulled together.” Nate often has a drink like a gin and tonic in his hand as he says this and pushes the drink into the air at me in a kind of toast, even though I can't have alcohol because of my meds.

One of the specific things we don't talk about is April 13, 1968. That's the day I kicked Momma to the ground outside the ShopRite Supermarket in Taunton, New Jersey. I was eleven and attacking her from inside a case of terrible volts. The police came. People stood around with their mouths open in little scoops of darkness. Behind them big blue and red banners in the ShopRite windows announced a special on Starkist tuna at
half price. Nate sat in the car watching, and I think maybe he was smiling.

We don't talk about the next day either, when the bruises on Momma's face from my shoes were hidden under powder, and she stood with my brother and me in the parking lot of a doctor's office, brushing my coat with her hands, holding me by the pointy twists of the shoulders and whispering that I should be a brave boy and a good soldier. “This is nothing,” she said, pushing me forward with her hand in the middle of my back. “We'll be home in a jiffy, and then everything will be just like it was.”

The doctor we were going to see was Dr. Smolan. Before him there had been Dr. Shtayn, Dr. Perkins, Dr. Farber and Dr. Mays, along with many others. Some of the doctors prescribed meds. Some prescribed foods. Some prescribed things like hanging upside down from a bar or lying in very cold water for an hour a day or eating pounds of vitamins that were stacked in little rows of brown bottles in our fridge. But Momma didn't seem to mind. There was always a new doctor with new ideas and for each of them she made faces in the mirror, painted herself and put on high heels and nice clothes. Afterwards she'd lean forward to fiddle with me while her fingers rearranged pieces of my hair.

But after the visit to Dr. Smolan, everything changed. She stayed in her bedroom for two days. When she came out her voice was higher, and she began running around the house a lot saying things on the phone and having friends over often for “conferences.” In the afternoons sometimes she would take my face in her hands and look at me from up close while she covered me with her breath that smelled like bread. “You're my little piece of heaven, honeyfruit,” she said. “And you'll always be till the end of time.”

Everybody in the family seemed more nervous than usual, they yelled more at each other, and not long after I understood why. Because that morning Momma packed up my clothes and took me away from home to the very first of my many residential communities named the Astridge Foundation to “start your beautiful new life.” Nate and my father said goodbye while looking away. Momma kept muttering to herself, “My nerves are bad.” She drove there and almost had an accident on a curve, boom. But finally we were pulling up to a big pile of buildings in the distance with brick walls running around the edges that enclosed a park of grass and trees. Everywhere we looked people were standing wearing light-colored clothes with their bodies humped and bent and their faces squinting like they were staring into a bright light.

“We're here!” she said in a happy voice while she parked the car and got out.

I stayed inside. Through the windows I could see her making movements of her hands that I was supposed to come out. When I stepped finally from the car the grass and trees that were everywhere around me rose upwards in a single wave and I pressed myself onto my tiptoes to keep my head above the churning green water.

“Honey,” Momma said and put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me gently back down to the ground, “not now.”

Just then two young Down's girls walked by making noises and laughing. Momma began talking to me fast but I wasn't paying that much attention because I was watching the Down's girls instead. One was doing cartwheels in the grass and her skirt was falling over her and showing off her underpants which were very white in the sunlight.

I wanted to walk towards that whiteness and enter it like the
ocean. It would be calm there. I would always have enough to eat there too and my favorite music would be playing with no one ever lifting the tone arm off the record.

But then Momma was hugging me hard and then harder with the tears falling all over her face which was upset like a baby's. Soon after that she was standing back up again and turning to the doctor who had arrived wearing a white coat and a big smile. Momma and he spoke for a while. Then he said, “Mrs. Aaron, I'm of the strong opinion that fast is better.” Momma hugged me again making deep, thick sounds in her chest and got back into her car. It wasn't till she began to drive away that I realized something had just happened. The doctor no longer looked or sounded cheerful. He stared at me with a new expression on his face of a bored animal before turning and walking away. A staff named Tamara came up to me. She was very small and was wearing a T-shirt and white pants. She told me she was my personal counselor.

“I've seen a lot of them,” she said, smiling, “and that was a beautiful transition, Todd. I know you're going to love it here. Can you follow me to your room, please?”

Something bad had just happened I now understood, but I wasn't certain what. I started crying anyway. But Tamara did nothing at all and only stood there waiting for me to stop. Finally, I did.

“There,” she said. “See? That's not so bad, is it?

I didn't say anything.

“Come with me,” she said, and she took me by the hand. The Down's girls were still tumbling on the lawn and I tried sending my mind at their underpants but it didn't work. The dust that had stood up behind my Momma's car was falling through the air and I wanted to touch the dust with my hands and then put
those hands in my mouth. But Tamara was pulling me gently in a way that made me feel suddenly like I had to yawn and lie down, and because of that, I was able to forget about everything for one whole second, and in that second, it was clear I'd never go home again.

EIGHT

M
Y NEW
I
DEA IS THAT
I
LEAVE, 'BYE.
M
Y
I
DEA
is that I walk out of Payton and go home to live. I've never thought this before. After I was sent away to the Astridge Foundation, which was very bad and boring, there was Six Winds and the Clovis Center and Persimmon Farms and Nostrand Bramble and then Payton LivingCenter, all in a space of two years. Most of them were far away from towns and in the countryside. You could just walk out anytime you wanted. Every once in a while someone did. But not a Best Boy who was always perfectly behaved and always tried hard to do the very right thing.

My Idea is that I leave and go to visit my brother and maybe live in his house or in a tent in the woods down the hill behind the actual house where I was born. I could hitchhike or take a train or plane there and do a job of some kind, becoming a “productive citizen” which is what Raykene always calls me when she sees me working hard. I could spend time just like I used to
as a boy, sitting in the cone of shade under the big tree in the backyard, flipping a grass blade with a hand and waiting for someone to call me in for dinner. In the process, I would stay as far away as possible from Mike the Apron.

Why did he frighten me so much? Everything frightens me but Mike frightened me extra-special because his teeth and sour eyes reminded me of my Dad like no one had since his death. He scared me so much that I quickly began noticing things about him. I noticed that he wore baseball hats turned backwards, had a white T-shirt with a leather vest over it and around his neck several necklaces with pieces of bone and metal on them that made a very soft tinkling when he moved, like coins in your pocket. On his feet were pointy cowboy boots. In his pocket, a folding knife, along with a wallet that was attached by a chain to his pants. Maybe he was chewing something all the time. Maybe it was tobacco.

People look like animals. A woman can seem like a cat walking on its hind legs and men in business suits can have fangs and the cold eyes of something that kills for a living. Human voices are also filled with the sounds of animals coming up into them from below. Mike was a coyote. He was hairy like a coyote and sneaky like a coyote. He made a call like a coyote that was lonesome and sad and left you thinking maybe he was a nice person alone in the woods and crying out for company. But like a coyote he actually hunted in packs and tore holes in the sides of his prey with his teeth and drank their blood like cherry cola.