Knuckleheads (11 page)

That was the last time Benji hung out with us during recess. The next day he sat on a picnic table on the other side of the playground with Karen Watson. They didn’t hold hands, but they sat close to each other, legs touching. That’s when Adam got the idea I should go over to Eric’s house and co-write the script with him.

“But he already wrote it,” I said.

“He just wrote a treatment,” Adam said. “Plus, this way you can scout around and see if it’s bullshit about his uncle.”

I wondered why Adam couldn’t scout around Eric’s house. He was sneakier than I was. I wasn’t much of a sneak at all, which was probably why Captain America ranked so high on my list of heroes. He wasn’t sneaky either. Just tough. Full of heart. Full of integrity. Still, I wasn’t going to argue the point with Adam. If he thought I was the best man for the job, I would accept the mission.

I couldn’t help feeling a little pissed off a couple afternoons later, after school, when Eric led me into his house. It had to be a rare occurrence, his having a friend over, yet he seemed hardly excited. “Want a snack or something?” he said, as if offering in order to be polite, as if he actually preferred me to starve.

I expected the kitchen to be filled with Doritos, but I didn’t see a single bag, couldn’t detect a hint of the fake cheese scent. There were a dozen boxes of Malomars in a large closet though, which Eric called a pantry. “Take as many as you want,” Eric said.

I loved Malomars. I opened one of the boxes and took six. “That’s a lot,” Eric said. “Don’t take any more.”

We trooped down to the basement—Eric called it the playroom—which was finished and had a furry brown rug. I trembled to think what critters from Eric’s hair might have fallen into that rug and nestled there without ants to eat them, or Adam to scoop them up with sandwich bags. I sat in a leather recliner and pulled my feet off the floor. There were twenty or so plastic swords and several suits of fake armor scattered around and I wondered whom Eric played with in the playroom.

In a corner, beneath a poster of Daredevil mugging with his billy club as if he were about to crack somebody’s forehead, a large plastic bottle, nearly four feet tall, was more than half-filled with change. There had to be thousands of pennies and several hundred nickels, dimes, and quarters. “Damn,” I said. “How much money is that?”

“I don’t know,” Eric said. “My mom started it when I was little. Every time we go out, we come back and dump our change in there. She wants it to be my college fund.”

I realized I could beat Eric’s ass and steal it. It would be heavy to carry, but I’d gotten strong from all the back-flipping and air-punching. I could buy a lot of cool stuff with that money, maybe enough to impress Hilary Smith, or Tricia Foster. I was too afraid to do it though.

Maybe Daredevil scared me.

“What about your dad?” I said. “Does he put change in there too?”

“I don’t know anything about my father,” Eric said. “Not one thing.”

It occurred to me then that maybe his story about the pathetic grasshopper had been less about his standing off to the side of Adam, Benji, and me, pretending we liked him when we didn’t, and more about his having fake sword fights with his invisible father in his basement. “Who plays with all this stuff?” I asked.

“Mostly me. I pretend I’m different characters. I have some cousins in New Jersey. Sometimes they come here.”

I was quiet, watching him. Pitying, I guess. Who wants to play with people from New Jersey? Everyone has cousins there, though. That’s the kind of state it is. A lot of traffic on the parkway. Suddenly, Eric got excited, more animated than he’d been all afternoon. “Hey,” he said, gesturing at the swords and shields. “Do you want to –?”

There was no way I was going to play with Eric’s bullshit swords. “Maybe later,” I said. “Let’s work on the script and see how much time we have.”

We heard a noise upstairs, someone entering the house. “My mother,” Eric said.

She clattered around in the kitchen for a bit, putting bags of the missing Doritos into the pantry, I assumed. Then we heard her call downstairs. “Eric?”

“Down here,” he said. “In the playroom.”

Where else would we be? The boiler room? The kid disgusted me. His mom came down the stairs. Her heels made a knocking sound and from where I was sitting on the recliner, they were the first things I saw. Then legs. Muscular calves and the lower parts of thighs until they disappeared beneath the hem of a black business skirt. A thin waist was next, with a tucked-in blouse that tightened around breasts that looked like mountains.

I was in fifth grade. I knew nothing about breasts. Nothing about mountains. Still, even before her neck and face descended into view, I knew she was going to be more beautiful than Hilary Smith. A lot more beautiful.

Her hair was dark and thick like Eric’s, but not greasy. No dandruff. She was tall and athletic-looking, and she reminded me of Linda Carter, who played Wonder Woman on TV. Wonder Woman was a DC superhero, so Adam, Benji and I all had to agree she was a joke. But the truth was Wonder Woman was much less a joke than the Invisible Girl. We could see Wonder Woman. We watched her series every week. Her bracelets that were supposed to stop bullets, those were garbage, everybody knew that; but those immense legs thrust forward like
pow
, that low-cut golden bustier in your face like
bam
—all that skin—there was definitely something super-heroic going on when she stood tall in a dark alley, arms akimbo, daring evildoers to make their move.

Eric’s mother seemed startled to find someone beside her son in the playroom, but she recovered quickly and extended her hand. “I’m Eric’s mother,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

Her hand was warm, but not in a gross sweaty way, and I could think of nothing to say, and anyway Daredevil was glaring at me, so I didn’t say anything.

“This is Lawrence, from school,” Eric said. “He’s gonna be Captain America.”

Eric’s mother had nothing to say to that, didn’t smile, kind of half-glanced at me as if she didn’t really believe I had the stuff to be a crime-fighter with integrity. A crime-fighter with heart. Instead of talking more, she leaned down and kissed her son—twice—once on the disgusting nest of his hair, and then smack in the middle of the acne morass on his chin. Neither time did she flinch. It was as if nothing about her son disgusted her
at all
. She pulled a handful of change from her purse and dumped it in the big bottle. “Are you boys thirsty?” she said. “I’ll bring you down some sodas.”

But she never did, and that was the last I saw of her before I left the house. Eric and I forgot about the sodas too, once we began to work on the script. At first, we wrote separately, me on the recliner, he lying on his elbows on the disgusting rug. “Read aloud what you have so far,” he said after fifteen minutes.

I started in on one of my scenes with Captain America and the Red Skull going at it in a submarine, and read to the point where Cap throws his shield and severs one of the Skull’s arms. “Cool,” Eric said, in the same I’m-just-trying-to-be-polite way he offered me Malomars. “Check out what I got.”

The story that unfolded was riveting. Daredevil and Captain America were teamed up against Doctor Octopus, who’d already kidnapped Spiderman and drugged him into submission. Octopus proposes a trade. You can have Spiderman back, he says, if you both surrender. Spiderman, Dock Ock argues, saves more lives than both of you combined. He’s more powerful. I’ll let him walk free to do all that good work, save all those lives, as long as you two agree to be my prisoners.

It was a horrible equation. It made me wonder what I’d do if I had a choice to go out with either Hilary Smith or both Tricia Foster and Benji’s so-called girlfriend Karen Watson. In Eric’s version, Daredevil wants to make the deal but Captain America doesn’t. “I may not save as many people as Spidey,” Captain America says, “but I’m a national symbol. I stand for something.”

“I don’t know about this,” I said. “Captain America seems too scared, like he’s wimpy.”

“But that’s what makes it interesting,” Eric whined. “If the hero always does the right thing, it’s boring. If the hero always wins, it’s too predictable.”

I knew he was right. The note from Morris Balmer, Intern, which said “Not bad, Lawrence,” when I wrote about Cap floating half-dead on his shield, proved his theory. Still, did I really want to play a weasely Captain America?

“Listen,” I said, to change the subject. “Doctor Octopus seems like he’d be a really complicated costume with those titanium tentacles. I mean, we’re gonna have costumes, right? Like your uncle’s gonna hook us up with some really cool costumes?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so, if he likes the script. Yeah, sure we’ll have costumes. Not the Invisible Girl, of course.”

“Right, because she won’t need a costume.”

“Right, because no one will see her.”

Maybe it was the realization Eric actually was a better writer than I was that made me say what I said next. Maybe it was the recognition that Hilary Smith and the shit-brained teachers knew the truth.

I heard his mother clattering some more above us, and I wanted her to come down again, but I knew she wouldn’t.

“Maybe your uncle can give you, like, a sample or something,” I said. “Before the week’s over, just, like, part of a costume. Then you can use it as proof so Adam won’t kick your ass.”

Eric looked doubtful. I glanced at his plastic swords and made a slashing motion with my hand as if I were actually thinking about playing with him, actually thinking about pretending to be some kind of character. “I don’t know,” he said. “Yeah, okay, maybe.”

That maybe was all I needed.

“Eric says he’ll have part of a costume for us before the deadline,” I told Adam the next day. “That’s what he said the proof will be.”

“You’d better not be lying, Fuckbrain,” Adam said to Eric when he found him shadowboxing by the balance-beam.

“If you don’t have something to show us by Monday, you know what you’ll be eating,” he added, pointing to his Incredible Hulk lunchbox.

The weekend plowed by in relentless fashion, faster than I wanted it to, like that evil mutant The Juggernaut who busted through any wall in front of him and just kept moving. I wanted The Mighty Thor to ring the heavens with his hammer and create a storm violent enough to wash away the next week of school. I wanted Dr. Doom to poison the water supply to Eric’s house so he’d be out sick a few days and Adam would forget the whole thing, or at least decide who was next in the rankings to be threatened, even if that turned out to be me. I wanted Eric’s father to return triumphantly from where Mephisto had imprisoned him in an underground cave, wanted him to clutch his son in his burly arms and speed him away to California so we’d never see him again. I thought about Eric’s mom a lot too, especially after watching Wonder Woman on TV on Sunday night.

I stayed up late after that, doing push-ups in the family room until my arms felt like flag-poles.

Unfortunately, Eric showed up on Monday. Before he opened his backpack, he warned us. “Remember,” he said, “this is just a prototype. A model. It’s not what the real costume will look like.”

“It better be good, Fuckbrain,” Adam said.

It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

It was navy blue and in the shape of a ski mask, the kind bank-robbers wear, with two uneven cut-outs for eyes, except it wasn’t a ski mask. It was made from stretchable material, not wool. Some kind of nylon. Maybe it was two pantyhose knitted together. Two triangles, white ones, were sewn to the sides. They looked like mouse-ears. Stuck to the forehead region with a safety pin was a piece of a white pillowcase, cut into the shape of a star. “What is it?” I asked, but I already knew.

“Well, remember, it’s just a prototype,” Eric said, “but this is Captain America’s cowl.”

“This is such bullshit,” Adam said. “Captain America’s mask is light blue, like ocean blue, not navy blue. And he has wings on it, Fuckbrain, not panda ears.”

Later I would wonder why Eric chose my superhero to try and create a costume-part for, and not a Daredevil billy club for himself, or even a stretchable glove for Adam. Maybe it was because for five minutes I’d swung plastic swords with him in his playroom. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t betray him.

While Adam was bashing Eric’s head against the tennis court fence and prying open his mouth so he could force him to swallow the dandruff ball and accompanying dead ants, I didn’t think about any of that. All it would have taken to stop Adam was one spinning kick to his chest. A well-placed karate chop to the back of his head. Instead, I looked over to the picnic table where Benji was absorbed with Karen Watson and a few feet away, where Hilary Smith stood, staring.

I pictured Eric’s mother staying up late to sew the cowl—stitching maybe at the exact same time I was doing push-ups—how she must’ve grown too tired to do the star, how Eric was left to pin it on by himself. Maybe the pantyhose were hers. I decided that no matter what happened, I wanted that cowl. Wanted to press it between my fingertips. No matter what happened, I wanted, at least once, to wear that cowl on my face.

THE MYLAR MAN CLAWS THROUGH THE SAND. His fingers dig and tug bits of balloon and balloon-ribbon and I walk next to him because the Mylar Man is my brother and I love the Mylar Man. But more than that, I love his wife.

I’m a lousy brother. That’s not debatable. Yet, I’m walking next to the Mylar Man and most people are afraid of the Mylar Man because his back and shoulders have grown knotty and hunched from crouching and digging, and his fingertips are raw and dark and flaking. Only I call him the Mylar Man. No one else, except for his wife—except for Naomi—even talks to him. She calls him Warren, which is his name, and he calls himself Old Goat on his blog
The Human Factor
where he writes daily about the ravaging and pillaging of the environment. He lives in a slowly deteriorating house on a bluff on the southeast shore of Lake Michigan and he is not old, only forty-two.

Naomi’s younger, my age, just thirty-seven, and she owns the house. It’s been in her family for a hundred and nine years. Old Goat has no job and doesn’t do anything except flail against humanity on his keyboard for several thousand words a day, and walk four miles on the beach after dinner in quest of balloon remnants.