Do Not Pass Go (3 page)

There were a lot of good things about Charley Aafedt, but the thing Deet liked best about his dad was the way he could say something nice in a joking way. When someone pays you a compliment, it can be an awkward moment. You're not sure they really mean it, maybe it sounds a little phony or stiff. Dad wouldn't say seriously, “You did a good job cleaning the truck.”
He'd make some joke like, “I'm going to get fat because Deet does all the work around here,” and then they'd all laugh at the idea of Dad getting fat, but they'd know Deet was being praised.

Deet put all the pictures of Mom and Dad and himself in one pile and then he started on the pictures of the girls.

There were lots of Jam, because they'd had a new camera then. Mom had written “Jamima Mae Aafedt” on the back of every one, with the date, and how much she weighed at the time, “6 pounds ½ oz.,” and exactly how old she was, like “3 months and 21 days.” Like it was important, that half an ounce, three weeks instead of four. Proud mother.

Deet had been delighted when Jam was born, had hovered over her crib by the hour, letting her hold his finger in her tiny fist. There was a picture of him looking proud as punch, holding her in his lap. Jam's diaper was loose at the legs, and after the shutter had clicked she'd peed all over him.

Deet found the yellowish Polaroid picture the hospital had taken of P. J. when she was born. She looked
wrinkled and crabby. Her tiny hospital bracelet was stapled to the corner. Patty Jane Aafedt. He riffled through the box, wondering if there was a bracelet for him or Jam as well, but there wasn't.

There were a lot fewer pictures of P. J. than there were of Jam. He hoped that wouldn't make P. J. feel bad.

Deet thought raising children was a very serious thing, and he wished his mom and dad were more systematic about it, and a little more careful about stuff like not taking enough pictures of the last baby. Or shots. When he read in the paper about the importance of inoculations and the shots needed for school, he asked his mom about P. J.'s and Jam's. She'd looked startled, that little line between her eyebrows.

“I know I have their shot records somewhere. I'll look for them and see if they're up-to-date.” But of course she didn't do it until the last minute, after the school had sent out a couple of notices.

Dentist appointments and checkups, meetings with the teachers. Deet was always driving himself crazy trying to make sure his folks took care of those things.
Some jobs he'd just taken over for himself, like reading to the girls. He read to them every night, because he had heard that it was very important for their intellectual development.

Deet frowned at his stacks of photos and decided that he'd group them by years, not people. That would make more sense, and then you couldn't tell that P. J.'s stack was the smallest.

In a big manila envelope were more wedding pictures, snapshots. Deet in a little suit, squatting on the grass, eating a piece of cake from a plate at his feet. Grandma and Grandpa sitting stiffly at a table with balloons over it. It was hard to believe they'd even gone to the wedding, since Grandpa and Dad were not on good terms. Not that Dad ever said anything bad about Grandpa, but Grandpa had plenty to say about Dad. Deet thought Grandpa was the reason his Dad had that sad face.

Grandma and Grandpa had been a lot younger-looking in the wedding pictures. For sure that was the last time Grandpa'd ever been dressed up.

There were pictures of Bingo and Dan and Willy
all dressed up too. They looked completely wrong out of their overalls. Something about the wrists, the way they were holding their arms. How come some people could dress up and you didn't pay any attention, but with others, it was like they were wearing a Halloween costume or something?

Deet put all the pictures of old cars and trucks together and wrapped a rubber band around them. It was a big stack. Dad had taken pictures of all the cars and trucks he'd ever had, like they were people, both sides, front and back angles.

Deet put the sorted stacks of photos back in the box. Maybe he'd get an album this weekend and put them in it before someone spilled Kool-Aid on them again.

Deet was the first one to be
picked up on the west side run, so the bus was empty when he got on, except for Mindy, the bus driver.

Mindy had been driving that route since Deet was in kindergarten. She was a heavy, unpleasant woman in her forties or so who had one of those jutting bulldog jaws and a down-turned mouth, but she always grunted a greeting of sorts when he got on, more than she did for the other kids. He always sat in the front seat, behind her. It wasn't that he wanted her conversation, he wanted to avoid the rest of the kids, who'd sprawl over the seats and yell all the way to the school. Deet jammed his fists in his pockets and burrowed his chin into the collar of his parka. The bus hadn't warmed up yet.

Nelly's stop was next. He lived in a trailer in the
middle of his dad's junkyard. There was a big homemade sign propped up in front of the trailer:
NELSON'S BOUTIQUE
. Nelly's mom had done that. She thought it was pretty funny.

Wrecked cars were strewn everywhere, behind a sagging fence, which was supposed to screen the cars from the road but didn't. Deet had been looking at that junkyard all his life, but he never saw it without a sort of mental shudder. If he'd had to live there he was sure he would have slit his own throat by now.

His own yard was bad enough. Dad had an old car in the back, a junker he was going to fix up and sell when he got around to it, and other stuff was scattered by the front porch: nylon-strap lawn chairs, wooden boxes, P. J.'s tricycle without a front wheel—almost buried in snow now, piles of lumber, and a stack of pallets, which Dad collected anywhere he could, on the theory that they'd be very useful someday.

When Deet went off to kindergarten, his mom used to ask him to bring kids home to play. Deet never wanted to bring anyone home from school, partly because there wasn't anybody in kindergarten
he wanted to spend any more time with and partly because his house embarrassed him, even when he was in kindergarten. It didn't look anything like the houses in his Jan and Jerry reading books.

The house started out being an ordinary log cabin, which Dad had built the first summer he and Mom were married. That summer they'd all lived in the backyard in a tiny camper, one of those shells that fit on the back of a pickup, until the cabin was finished. The camper was still there, behind the house, in the willows.

After the girls were born, Dad had thrown up a frame addition on the side of the cabin that kind of spoiled the look of the cabin, and besides, he'd never gotten around to painting the addition. Deet was glad you couldn't see their house from the road where the bus stopped.

The bus stopped for Nelly, who was waiting by his driveway, on time for a change, shifting from foot to foot to stay warm. His arms were stiff at his sides, fists sucked up in his sleeves, just like a little kid. He threw himself down in the seat next to Deet, spikes of his hair standing on end in spite of the junk he'd smeared on it to make it
lie down, his nylon GI surplus parka crackling from the cold. He threw a look of despair at Deet.

“Did you get your math done?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?” Nelly squeaked. He was right in the middle of a voice change. “You always get your math finished.”

“We're not having math today, remember? We're having that assembly. So I saved it until tonight.”

Nelly rolled his eyes with relief. “Man, I forgot about that. Saved again.”

Deet and Nelly had been in the same class since kindergarten, and Nelly always seemed to be hustling to keep up, treading water. It was because he wasn't organized, Deet thought. His notebooks were a scramble of papers, never clipped into the binder, falling out, and even his shirts weren't buttoned the right way, but started off on the wrong button.

Deet and Nelly were the only ones who lived off the main road. The rest of the kids who rode the bus lived in the fancy houses along the ridge, where everyone had a view of the valley and the mountains in the
distance. Each house was better than the last one, and each yard was like a picture in a magazine. None of the kids who lived in those houses had their shirts buttoned wrong.

Deet's locker at school was right next to his homeroom. He usually put his stuff in his locker, took his homework to Mr. Hodges's room, and then took his library book to read until first period. He hoped no one would talk to him. He didn't like to talk. Small talk, people said. Making small talk. How are you? How's it going? What's up? There was nothing sensible to be said to those questions. Nonquestions.

His mom kept on urging him to make friends, but Dad said Deet was a loner, that's all there was to it. Deet didn't know if he was a loner or not. It was just that there were no other kids who were interested in the things he was interested in.

And he wasn't interested in what they were interested in. He just didn't get what sports were all about. Chasing a ball seemed silly enough, but even sillier was the way people took games so seriously.

Most of the new movies seemed to have car crashes or some idiotic guy, some action hero, and the new music bewildered him. He liked tunes you could hum, actually. He liked old stuff. Old movies, old music, like the big bands he heard on the radio once in a while. And books.

When he went to the library, there was no telling what he'd come home with. Last week he'd gotten a book on weaving, of all things, one on ancient armor, and two books by John Steinbeck, whom he'd just discovered in Mr. Hodges's class. (The book on weaving he got because he'd read in
National Geographic
that the Vikings had made their sails of wool, and the threads that went one way were made with the undercoat of a special sheep and the threads that went the other way were made with the top coat. So he wondered what other interesting things there might be to learn about weaving.)

The thing about books was that someone, somewhere, had written them, and so people somewhere must be reading them. Even the ones he took from the library had due dates stamped in the back, which
showed that someone in town was reading them. So why did he never meet anyone who read things like that, or talked about them, or wrote them? And why didn't anyone ever talk the way they did in books?

Deet was just different, that's all. He'd always been different from everyone he knew, and he guessed he always would be. The thing was not to let people know how different he was if he could help it. The best way to do that was to keep his mouth shut.

Deet was frowning over his book when Nelly took the seat next to him in the back row of homeroom. Nelly tipped his chair back on its back legs so it leaned against the wall, clasped his hands behind his head, and watched while the front rows filled up with their classmates. Nelly didn't hang out with anyone any more than Deet did, but he was always very interested in what everyone else did and pointed out this and that to Deet, who never paid any attention.

Nelly suddenly tipped his chair forward to rest on four legs and looked urgently at Deet.

“Would you take the second bus and help me with those equations? I just can't get it, no matter what.”

Deet started to nod an okay, but then he remembered.

“Jeez, I'm sorry, Nelly, but I got to go over to my Grandpa's right after school.”

Nelly mimed desperation, banging his head on his desk. Deet had to laugh.

“Why don't you call me tonight, Nell, and I'll talk you through it, okay?” Nelly looked dubious about the efficiency of this method, but he agreed.

Deet had been helping Nelly for years, and not just Nelly. Teachers often asked Deet to help someone out, someone who'd been absent, or someone who was floundering. He supposed it was because his notes were always neat and complete, because he didn't think he was any good at explaining stuff. He didn't think he had the patience to teach anybody anything.

Sometimes it seemed to Deet that he was surrounded by people who couldn't organize or plan, and sooner or later they always managed to catch him up in their mess.

At sixth period Mr. Hodges handed back their quotations notebooks. He'd written comments on all of Deet's
pages, and at the bottom of the last one he'd written: “Your writing shows logical and coherent thought, which gives me hope for the future of humanity!” Deet pinched his lips together so that his face wouldn't show how pleased he was.

On the bus ride to Grandpa's house he tilted his book toward the streetlights so he could mark all the quotations he wanted to write about for the next week's homework. He found one he liked right away.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

—GEORGE ORWELL

Did Grandpa and Grandma have the faces they deserved? What other kinds of faces could they have? Grandma's face was soft and doughy. It just didn't have anything in it at all. Maybe that's how Grandma was. Not up to much. Grandpa was the opposite. His face was rock hard, and there weren't many wrinkles, no smile lines around his eyes or mouth because he didn't smile, or even frown.