Criss Cross (5 page)

A
t least the windows were open. Even so, the odor was thick and pungent. Debbie experimented with different methods of breathing. Nose only. Mouth only. Hand casually over nose. Nose casually over right shoulder, hunk of hair used casually as an air filter. She was looking for ways to inhale that would not make her want to gag. She tried pulling her T-shirt up over her nose. Probably the smell was something you could get used to. She was used to her dad’s cigarettes, but Lenny’s chewing tobacco had a sour, heavy mintiness suggestive of putting your nose in the armpit of someone who had applied scented deodorant after already having sweated.

Every now and then he leaned out of the window and spit.

“That stuff stinks,” said Phil. “How can you stand having it in your mouth?”

“I like it,” said Lenny.

He did like it, sort of. He was going to like it, once he got used to it. It had startled him, at first, to have the flavor inside his own mouth, but it was the taste of the smell of his father, and his father’s friends. It was strange to him, but it was also friendly.

Debbie, between Lenny and Phil, breathed shallowly the aromas of laundered cotton and her own skin and scrutinized her bare feet, up on the dashboard. She had put decals on her toenails that afternoon, but she thought she might take them off later. They were the last set left in the package, and they weren’t very good. All the good ones were used up. From any farther than six inches, these were just irregular black squiggles with some blurry blobs of purple and blue. It looked like she had banged her toes one at a time with a hammer. Lenny looked at them, too. He couldn’t make out what they were. Dragonflies? Skull and crossbones?

“What are those on your toes?” he asked. “Are they supposed to be grapes?”

The lump in his cheek caused him to speak a little less clearly, as if he had a lump of something wedged between his gum and his cheek. Which he did.

“Fish,” Debbie said to the inside of her T-shirt. “Tropical fish.”

“Maybe you should just chew gum,” suggested Phil. “Since when do you dip snuff, anyway?”

“The guy I work for over at the garage asked me if I wanted a pinch,” said Lenny. “So I decided to try it.

“I like it,” he said again. He was sticking to his story.

The garage where Lenny swept up a few hours a week, emptied trash, helped out, was run by a friend of his dad’s. Sometimes Jerry let him do easy jobs, like changing oil and spark plugs. He could have done quite a bit more; he knew how. It seemed to Lenny as if he had always known how. Or could figure it out, if he didn’t.

That’s how he saw himself. Debbie and Phil saw him that way, too. They also saw another Lenny, though, inseparable from the current Lenny, the mechanical whiz dirt-bike Lenny. They saw the Lenny of their childhood. The bookworm Lenny.

The fable of Lenny was that when he was younger, he read encyclopedias for fun….

His mother, Edie, brought them home one at a time from the A&P. They were a promotional item, a new volume each week for $1.49 with a $20.00 purchase. She had already brought home a complete set of china this way, as well as stainless-steel flatware and Pyrex baking dishes.

The encyclopedias were handsomely bound in brown leatherette and embossed with black and gold lettering. They came with a wooden shelf that held the entire set. Edie put them back on Lenny’s dresser to get them out of her way.

Lenny watched as the shelf filled up with the elegant-looking books. And one day he pulled one out and opened it, to take a look. It was the ? volume. He opened it in the middle, to a page about birds and how they fly. The page was composed entirely of diagrams, with short captions to explain them. Not too unlike the comics in the paper that were his main reading material up until then.

Lenny didn’t know yet that he had a mind that was interested in and quick to understand how things worked.

He looked for a while at the drawings without making any particular mental effort. Then, in his brain, the drawings converged briefly into a three-dimensional animated model of a bird, complete with the effect of its shape on the movement of air around its body. It was an unusual physical sensation, like a glowing or buzzing, to have this happening inside his head. His head felt, not larger, but as if everything else in there had backed up against the walls to make room for this display. It was interesting. He let it happen for some minutes, then flipped back and forth through the pages to see what else was in there.

When Edie came looking for him, she found him on the floor of his room, sitting in that funny way he had, with his legs forming a
W,
his round, blond Polish head bent over a picture of some kind printed in color on a clear plastic page. It seemed to be about blood and veins. Yuck, thought Edie. She didn’t like being reminded that people had insides.

Lenny looked up with a happy grin.

“What are you doing?” she asked him. She could see what he was doing; what she wanted to know was, why was he doing it?

“Reading,” he said. “About how blood gets pumped around our bodies. Look at this picture.”

“No thanks,” said Edie. “I just ate.”

“Is it okay if I read these?” asked Lenny.

“Sure,” she said. “As long as you put them back in the right order when you’re done.” She believed that saying yes should always be accompanied by a condition, or a warning. Or both.

“And don’t sit with your legs like that,” she said. “You’ll get arthritis.”

Reading the encyclopedias became one of Lenny’s favorite pastimes. He liked playing ball, too, or tag, or riding bikes. But he wasn’t that good at throwing or running or balancing. What he really liked was explaining to Debbie and Phil and whoever else was around how if you were way out somewhere in space, the Big Dipper wouldn’t look like the Big Dipper at all, because the stars weren’t really next to each other, it just looked that way from earth. He did it with tennis balls and golf balls and wiffle balls. He put them all around the yard, on the picnic table and the clothes pole and down on the ground, then made them sit in the one spot, the “earth spot,” where the balls formed the Dipper.

He spent hours examining the individual pieces of gravel in the driveway to identify them.

He looked at leaves and feathers and bugs through a magnifying glass. Everyone thought he would be a scientist or something brainy.

“How come you know so many things,” his mother asked him, “and you don’t get better grades?”

Lenny didn’t know. He shrugged his shoulders.

“School is boring,” he said.

It wasn’t exactly what he meant. But it was close.

It was his father, Leon, who went down to the basement one day after work to take a shower and found Lenny sitting on the floor in a jumble of parts, with a screwdriver in his hand. He had taken apart an old vacuum cleaner.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Leon asked him. “Put that back together.”

He just said it. He didn’t really expect Lenny to put it back together. The amazing thing was that Lenny did. Even more amazing, when Lenny flipped the switch, the vacuum cleaner, which hadn’t worked for years, roared to life. Leon stared.

“Who showed you how to do that?” asked Leon. “Did you just figure it out yourself?”

“I read about it,” said Lenny. “In a book. About small motor repair.”

“Same difference,” said Leon. “I could look at that book and it would look like Greek to me.”