Do Not Pass Go (2 page)

Or:

The world is beautiful, but it has a disease called man.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

That was a good one. Pollution and killing all the animals off, and all that.

Deet's dad rattled out from under the Mercedes. It was almost closing time. Deet put his books and notebook back in his book bag and pulled on his parka.

Dad wiped his oily hands on a rag and then jerked his head at Deet.

“Come and look at this.”

Deet had a pretty good idea what was coming. It was Wednesday, and that was the day the Snap-On tool guy came by with his truck to sell mechanics new tools. Dad couldn't resist them.

Deet looked at Bingo, who was still working in the next bay, sweat beaded on his fat face. Bingo winked at him, so Deet knew he was right.

Dad pulled open the top drawer of his toolbox and put the tools he'd been using back inside. The toolbox was as oily as everything else in the shop, and tools were piled higgledy-piggledy on the top of the chest. Deet wanted to wipe down every tool with gasoline and shine them up, clean out every drawer and line the
bottoms with clean paper, line up all the tools in neat rows. He hated disorder and mess.

Taped on the open top lid of the box was a curling picture of Deet's mom, taken a few years back, when she was all dressed up.

When she got all dolled up, she looked so happy with herself. She'd do a little twirl on her high heels, earrings swinging. “How do I look?” His little sisters would be radiant with admiration, and Dad would look almost as tickled. But the way his mom dressed made Deet uncomfortable.

Dad pulled out a bottom drawer and took out a very big drive ratchet. “Three-quarter inch,” he said. “Feel how heavy that is.” Deet hefted the ratchet, watching Dad's face. It wasn't anything he'd want to drop on his foot, that was for sure.

“How much?” asked Deet.

“Seventy-five.”

“Jeez.”

“Don't tell Mom!” Dad looked about eight years old for a second, his long blond hair falling into his eyes. Deet couldn't help but smile at him.

They were both like that, his folks. They spend money on things they didn't need and sometimes didn't have enough left to buy what they did need. Whenever they got really broke, his folks would go out and buy something big. Like that red Corvette they'd had that didn't have enough room for all of them without squeezing up.

And it wasn't just money, it was planning and organization that got messed up. Things that needed doing on time, like getting the furnace cleaned, or the snow cleared off the roof. Warnings were never followed. Film was left in the glove compartment to fry, videocassettes were left on top of the television to de-magnetize, the kitchen filled with smoke because greasy spills were not immediately wiped off the bottom of the oven.

Deet could tell when something was going to go wrong, could tell when the money was going awry, when things had been done just too carelessly, when fixing was needed, or attention paid to details. He could tell, but there wasn't a thing he could do about it because he was only a kid.

Sometimes Deet felt like he was the only grown-up in the house.

Deet was rereading the quota
tion essays he'd written the night before for English class, eating his oatmeal kind of sideways so he wouldn't spill on his notebook, trying to imagine what Mr. Hodges would write about his comments.

The best thing about Mr. Hodges was that if you handed in your homework before first period, he'd have it corrected for you by English class at sixth period. And he didn't just write “good,” or “needs more thought” at the top of the page. Mr. Hodges would write a lot, sometimes half a page. It was like having a great conversation with him.

The second best thing about Mr. Hodges was that he never made you talk in class if you didn't want to. Deet didn't like to talk in class.

And another good thing was that if you did extra
stuff for class Mr. Hodges was glad, not upset like some teachers because it meant more to correct. Deet had done four quotations instead of two, and he felt like he could have done dozens more, it was so much fun.

He'd done the man is a disease quotation and a good one by Mark Twain:

Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

(Out loud: Oh, Mrs. Jones, what a wonderful dress. To herself: My god, that woman's dresses are awful. I'm so glad
my
mother raised me to have taste.)

Jam and P. J. were having breakfast too, and the Formica tabletop was crowded with milk cartons and boxes of horrible cereal, Cocoa Puffs and Fruit Loops. Deet made himself oatmeal every morning, because he didn't approve of cold cereal.

Deet was into Good Food, and he despaired when his mother didn't seem to take such things seriously. She gave the girls potato chips for snacks and juice
that wasn't too percent juice. Too much candy, too. He brought home printouts from his health class and made a few pointed comments, but that was all he could do. Both Mom and Dad were so agreeable, so uncritical, that it seemed wrong to find fault with them.

Once he'd complained to his mom about the
National Enquirer
s she bought at the supermarket. (Teenager gives birth to a chicken. Elvis's molecules found on Mars.)

“That stuff isn't true, you know,” he'd said severely.

She had thrown a quick look at him, a small furrow between her eyes. “Well, they wouldn't print it if it wasn't true, would they?” She'd quit buying the
Enquirer
, though, and then Deet felt guilty that he'd spoiled something for her. It was like the time he'd tried to explain to her the difference between lie and lay, which she didn't use correctly. Now she hesitated and looked at him every time she used them. He didn't correct her English anymore.

P. J. was examining the cereal box in front of her through a haze of blond uncombed hair. “I can read this box!”

“Read it, then,” said Jam.

“Fruit Loops,” said P. J.

Jam opened her mouth to protest that that wasn't reading when Deet threw her a look. “That's good, Peej. You'll be reading the whole box at the end of the year,” he said.

“
I
can read the whole box,” said Jam.

“Well, I hope so. You're in the third grade.”

Deet's mom scurried around the little kitchen in her pink bathrobe, her curls bobbing, packing the girls' lunches. Deet had made his the night before, as he always did. He never did things at the last minute if he could help it.

He took his bowl to the sink and rinsed it.

Jam suddenly put down her spoon and let out a wail.

“Mom, I forgot, I'm supposed to bring a picture for our family posters! A picture of our whole family!”

Mom stopped in her tracks and looked at Jam with consternation. “Today? Isn't that sort of short notice?”

“Well, she told us about it last week,” Jam confessed, looking a little ashamed. Jam was inclined to be as disorganized as Mom and Dad.

“Oh, lord. Deet, will you please get out the box of pictures and find one for her?”

Deet made his world-weary face. “Come on.”

He found the beat-up old shoe box full of snapshots on the bookshelf under a pile of Dad's car magazines and Mom's hairstyling magazines. He dumped the pictures out on the carpet and got on his knees to sort them out. Someone had spilled something red and sticky, like Kool-Aid, on the box lid, and some of the pictures were stuck together.

“Someday I have to put those in an album,” his mom said as she passed through the living room. Deet smiled up at her, but he knew perfectly well that putting things in albums was not something his mom would ever do.

Jam and P. J. picked up this photo and that, squealing over pictures of themselves in diapers or with spaghetti smeared all over their faces.

Deet flipped through the pictures quickly, looking for the family picture they'd taken at Christmas, like they did every year. He and P. J. and Jam and Mom would all sit on the couch, and Dad would set the timer
on the camera and then make a dash for the couch before the flash went off. In every picture Dad was a little blurred. Deet found the one he was looking for and gave it to Jam.

“Here. And take good care of it. I don't think we have another one. And next time, don't save your homework till the last minute.”

Jam made a yah-yah face at him, and she and P. J. ran off to get dressed. Deet picked up the snapshots from the rug and stuffed them into the box. He had a while before the school bus came, so he got a wet paper towel and wiped the sticky stuff off the stuck-together photos. No serious damage.

He took the box into his room to sort.

Deet's room was in perfect order, his bedspread taut, his books organized logically, fiction on one shelf, nonfiction on the other. His thesaurus and dictionary lay on his desk, corners squared together, and neat lists were pinned precisely on the bulletin board, completed items crossed off with a ruled red line.

A map of the known universe was over his bed. Deet had had it laminated and had pinned a little sign on
the solar system: You are here. Over the dresser was a history time line poster.

He could hear the rumpus from the girls' room as his mom got them ready for school.

“Patty Jane, you have to wear these pants today because the red ones are in the wash and it's too cold to wear a dress today.”

“I hate these pants.”

“Well, wear them anyway.”

“Jam, go brush your teeth before you get that sweater on. You always get toothpaste splatters all over your clothes.” P. J.'s belly laugh at this. “And P. J., put your inhaler in your pocket! Don't forget it today.”

He turned on his cassette player to drown out their chatter. He'd been playing the same cassette for a week, because he was trying to learn by heart the words to “Alice's Restaurant,” which he thought was very funny. He'd had to quit playing it in the living room, because P. J. started to learn it by heart as well, and he didn't think anyone would think “Alice's Restaurant” was suitable for a six-year-old. (“Mother stabbers! Father stabbers! Kill, kill, kill!”)

Deet kept the volume low because Dad was still asleep. Dad had worked two jobs for a while now, trying to make a little extra, trying to catch up on the bills.

After he got off at the garage, he'd rush home to eat his dinner, then go to work driving a wrecker truck for an all-night wrecker service. He'd get home after midnight and be off to work again at eight the next morning. Deet was sure that he'd get tired with a killer schedule like that, but Dad seemed to have energy to burn. The bad thing was that the girls hardly got to see him except at dinner and on Sundays, when he didn't work, and except for dinner Deet saw him during the week only if he went to the garage after school.

Deet took some rubber bands from his desk drawer and started to make orderly piles of pictures on his bed. There was one picture of Mom with Deet when he was a baby. She was smiling joyfully at the camera, holding him on her hip. He was wearing only a diaper. He wondered who'd taken it. Deet turned it over to see if the date was on it. “Patty and Deet,” she'd written. That was all. Patty was kind of a bubble-headed name,
and she looked like a bubble-headed sort of girl in the picture. Nothing like a mother, that's for sure.

She'd come up north from the Midwest to get a job on the pipeline. She didn't have any folks. They'd been old when she was born and had died before she finished high school. Deet wished there was a picture of them, but his mom hadn't brought anything with her when she came north. Not even her memories, it seemed like, because she never talked about her life growing up. She got pregnant with Deet when she was just nineteen. She'd never told Deet who his father was, and he'd never asked. Not asking seemed like the courteous thing to do, and he wasn't very curious anyway.

It must have been pretty hard on her, all alone with a baby coming. But she told Deet she was happy to have him, because having a baby meant she had someone to love. He knew she wasn't just saying it to make him feel good, because he knew she was like that. All heart.

There was a blurry picture of the pipeline camp, taken from pretty far away. On the back she'd written “Dietrich,” the name of the camp. That's where Deet got his name, though no one ever called him Dietrich.

There were two copies of Mom and Dad's wedding picture. They looked young, like kids, really. Mom looked like a model or something, with her stacked-up hairdo, and Dad was smiling so hard you could see the gap where his tooth was missing on the side.

Mom met Dad when Deet was still a baby, and he was a really nice guy. Deet had never seen him mad. He was tall and rangy with a sad kind of face. You look just like your dad, people told Deet, which was strange when they weren't even related, and because Deet had dark hair and dark eyes. Deet figured it was probably just that they used the same gestures, the kind of thing you pick up from living with someone. He picked up his last year's school picture and studied it. Maybe it was because he had kind of a sad face too.