Mad Boys (16 page)

We reached a river—big and twisty with hills often reaching right to the shore. I was impressed. It was the Ohio River, the Autodidact said, and we were close to our destination. Minutes later we left the green countryside for a gray-brown city, drab and run down as that bum who’d gotten shot on Dali Street. We’d arrived in Steeltown. Right off, I saw church steeples, so apparently Christianity was popular in this part of the U.S.A.

The Autodidact inched the Caddy and the trailer along a street which consisted mainly of boarded up storefronts. The place had a Western look, low, wood-frame buildings, the gables covered with rectangular fronts. That got me to thinking. How did I know that a town could have a Western look? I might have read about it someplace or absorbed some information via movies and TV, but from the way the idea popped into my head, natural as picking my nose with my right index finger, it was more likely that I’d actually been West at some point. The only building that appeared to have been renovated and which was thriving and which was open after five P.M. was a video store. I saw a woman in a white pantsuit, gigantic hairdo, and lipstick bright and red enough to stop a speeding drunk driver. I had a mind to sting her to see whether she was person or one of my demons.

We drove through the city along a narrow road that hugged the river bank. Soon we were out of the city, and for a few miles we passed warehouses and junk-car lots until we reached the hulk of a giant, industrial plant surrounded by a rusty, ten-foot high fence with barbed wire at the top. Inside was a behemoth of a building with no windows and huge smokestacks. The grounds were overgrown with briars and young trees. Grass grew in cracks in the empty parking lots. I didn’t see a soul.

“Steel mill—shut down,” said the Autodidact.

The scenery then went from ugly to beautiful. Just past the mill was a nice-looking southern mansion with pillars on the front and a big, spacious porch. Beside it was a barn.

“Nice place,” I said.

“Glad you like it,” the Autodidact said, pulling into the driveway. “It’s Sally’s family farm, tobacco plantation.”

“I don’t see any crops,” I said. I wanted a cigarette.

“She still calls it the farm, but actually no farming goes on. Sally’s against smoking, even though tobacco is the source of the family fortune.”

“I like the barn,” I said.

“They used to dry the tobacco in the barn.”

The rig eased to a stop in front of the house. The Autodidact’s shifting had improved. “Wait here,” he said.

The Autodidact stepped out of the car and approached the house. He never got there. A woman about fifty, with graying red hair, a face kind of pretty but her body on the heavy side, appeared from the porch. It was Sally. I recognized her from the picture in the Autodidact’s bedroom. She hesitated on the steps of the porch for a second and then ran to the Autodidact. He picked her off her feet which, given her size, was quite an accomplishment, and they hugged and kissed for maybe an entire minute. I felt squeamish, and was relieved when they finally let go. The Autodidact whispered something to Sally.

She turned her attention to my battered face, and said to the Autodidact, “Good, Lord, what have you done to him?”

“I never laid a hand on him. Tell her,” he said, as I stepped out of the car.

“I was attacked rescuing orphans from a mob of frothing drug addicts, and then. . . .” Before I could get up a head of steam with this story, the Autodidact cut me off.

“The truth. Tell Sally the truth.”

“He kidnapped me and tied me, but he didn’t touch me,” I pointed to my face. “My best friend did this to me back in New York.” And then I eyed the Autodidact, and I repeated, “He did kidnap me. That is the truth.”

The woman looked at the Autodidact.

“I’m afraid so,” he said.

We walked to the house and sat on the porch. I looked out at the land—fields, a screen of woods, the steel plant, the river, hills to our back and in the distance across the river. No other houses in sight.

“After all the letters we wrote, after all the books you’ve read over these years, you had to revert to type and abduct him.” Sally badgered the Autodidact so bad that I started to feel sorry for him.

“I couldn’t think of anything else to do. It was the only kind of action I thought to take under the circumstances. You have a better idea?” he said.

“You could have turned him over to the police.”

“Ultimately, that was my goal. I just wanted you to talk to him first. I’m a wanted man again, and he’s to blame. He’s . . . he’s. . . .” His face tightened as he struggled to rein in his rage.

“Settle down,” Sally said. “Did you question him?”

“No. I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid I might be violent with him. I don’t know if I can cope outside the American prison system. Prison is all I know.”

“Oh, darling.” And then she put her arms around him, and he put his arms around her, and she cried, and he seemed to want to cry. It was disgusting.

I didn’t know what to make of all this, and I finally yelled, “Why am I your prisoner?”

“We have to release him, we have to trust in God and in the system and in ourselves. We have to tell the truth,” Sally said.

“All right,” said the Autodidact.

“Young man,” said Sally, “your father is dead. It’s believed he was murdered.”

RUN RABBIT DIE

Author Jack Kerouac didn’t live a life; he wrote a life. It’s logical to call fiction that derives from such a sensibility Virtual Realism. It’s the Virtual Realism captured in
On the Road
that accounts for Kerouac’s continuing appeal to young people, who themselves live virtual lives in which movies and television play as big a role in their lives as their experiences.
—From the Journal of Henri Scratch.

Sally sat me down in a chair that was too big for King Kong, let alone a skinny kid like me. Soon I learned more details of why the Autodidact had kidnapped me. After I’d run away from him, he’d called the town constable back in New Hampshire to report me as a runaway. The constable had told the Autodidact that he himself was wanted for questioning in the murder of Joe Webster and that he should turn himself in. The Autodidact hung up the phone and immediately called lawyer Sally. She made a few phone calls and got the story. A bill collector had found Father dead, his head bashed in. A couple of local people had seen me hanging around the Autodidact’s trailer. They remembered the vanity plate—“FREE.” Sally advised the Autodidact to turn himself in. But he didn’t do it. His criminal mind, dormant for all those years of book learning, came to life and took over his personality. He’d ditched his pickup truck, stolen the Cadillac from a long-term airport parking lot, and repainted the trailer. He’d tracked me down after reading my A-Y-G doodle on his notepad.

“Now, Web, I want you to tell me everything that happened leading up to the moment that you ran away from your father,” Sally said. Her lawyer’s way of talking, right at me, got my attention.

I explained everything just the way I remembered it.

“You believe that this Xiphi person murdered your father?” Sally said.

“He’s not a person, he’s my demon,” I said.

“It may have been an accident,” Sally said to the Autodidact.

The Autodidact pulled at the hair he didn’t have, and said, “Web doesn’t know for sure what happened. He can’t testify on my behalf. If he tells the police that Xiphi story, they’ll reason that he flipped out. They’ll still think I did it.”

Sally wanted to call the police, but the Autodidact convinced her to wait until he could come up with a plan. Sally said okay—for the time being.

She showed us around her house. The mansion reminded me of some of the New England places where Father and I delivered firewood, old and fancy, but the windows were bigger and more light poured through, and it was dirtier than big northern houses, so the place felt a little friendlier. Most of the house was closed off, because (as I found out later) Sally had no kin and because she didn’t normally live in the house but in a city, where her law office was located. She had inherited the farm and put it up for sale. So far, no takers. The location, beside the junked steel mill, kept the buyers away. The tour ended when she and the Autodidact took me to my room.

“Where’s the key?” the Autodidact said.

“I refuse to lock him in,” Sally said. “What if there’s a fire?”

“What if he escapes?”

“He’s no longer frightened. You’re not frightened, are you, Web?”

“No, Sally,” I said.

“No ma’am,” corrected the Autodidact.

“Yes, sir—no ma’am.”

Sally said to the Autodidact, “Are these titles your doing?”

“Is there anything wrong with showing respect?”

“John,” Sally said, gently as you’d put a worm on a hook, “children no longer refer to their elders as ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’.”

“Things are that bad?” said the Autodidact.

Sally turned to me. “Web, promise me you won’t run away.”

“I promise.”

“He promises,” the Autodidact said sarcastically.

“We must build some trust,” said Sally, then turned to me. “Promise me you won’t turn in John.”

“The Autodidact.”

“The what?” She turned to the Autodidact.

“It’s a long story,” said the Autodidact.

“And that thing around his neck, I suppose that’s a story, too.”

“You’ll have to ask him about that.”

“Web?”

“Mine.” I clutched my throat.

“The both of you are totally mad, you know that, don’t you?” Lawyer Sally didn’t wait for an answer. She said to me, “Promise me you’ll be good.”

In this case, I could see, “good” meant keeping my promises. Since good equaled bad, and since bad meant breaking my promises, I felt comfortable in telling a lie. “I promise,” I said. I liked Lawyer Sally a little bit, because in her own way she was sincere.

They left, and I was alone. I had my own bed and my own bathroom. It was like being back in the hospital, except that I didn’t have my own television.

That night when I lay down to go to sleep, I tried to think sweet thoughts about Father. It wasn’t easy, but I was making some headway, remembering that he had taught me the names and habits of trees, when Xiphi showed up. I didn’t see him too clearly in the darkness—he was just a silhouette sitting on the window sill—but I heard his voice clearly enough. “Now that Dirty Joe is out of the way, when you find your mother, you can have her all to yourself. Aren’t you glad I killed him?” I had to admit that I was.

A week rolled by. We were into high summer. I had a lot of time to myself, because the Autodidact and Sally were getting to know each other. That was how they put it: “We’re getting to know each other.” Were they doing it? You bet. They spent every night in the same bedroom with the door closed.

In the morning I’d sleep late, get up, wash, and eat and eat and eat, and watch an hour of television. Reception wasn’t very good, because the cable company didn’t reach this far into the hinterlands and Sally was too cheap to put in a satellite dish, but I didn’t care. I just used the TV for zentensity.

I spent most of the time in the fields or down by the river, hunting with a bow and arrow that I found in the barn. It had belonged to Sally’s brother, who had died in the Vietnam War. I shot arrows at birds. I never hit one. I shot arrows at fish. I never hit one. I shot arrows at rabbits. I never hit one. I’d scare them up, and they would streak across the field into the brush. When I was bored with hunting, I threw stones in the river, and I collected sticks and laid them on the narrow beach in designs that pleased my eye. Every hour or so, I’d take a break from whatever I was doing to walk in the ditch between the fence of the junked steel mill and the road; I’d look for cigarette butts. I almost always found two or three, enough for a smoke.

Sally was dead set against smoking. She wanted to make amends for her tobacco-growing family. I didn’t care one way or another what she believed. I was taking a vacation from caring. I just wanted to catch up on eating, sleeping, lazing around, playing, zentensing, and smoking.

Sally made a big deal of dinner. She insisted we eat together and “converse.” She said civilized people enjoyed civilized meals in a civilized atmosphere. Actually, though, about the only thing she could think of saying to me was, “Well, Web, how was your day?” I wasn’t interested in telling her, and I could see that she wasn’t really interested in hearing about it, so I’d say, “Nothing special.”

The Autodidact was better company. He’d tell me about books he’d read. “Web, gaze out at the river,” he said to me one time at dessert. So I stared out through the open French doors at the river valley. “Now I want you to imagine it in winter choked with ice floes. Picture in your mind a beautiful woman. She’s holding a baby. She’s being chased by men.” And he went on to tell me the story of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Naturally, in my own mind I was the baby, and Eliza was my mother, the Alien was the slave hunter, and the Autodidact was Uncle Tom. Later he made me read the book. It was pretty good. I realized that I was most like Topsy, the bad-mannered slave girl. Maybe I was part black with slaves for ancestors. Maybe that was why I was cursed. Or maybe I was part girl, and
that
was why I was cursed. I thought about Terry’s murdered brother/sister.

The Autodidact read the newspaper at the table, and if he found an item he liked he’d give us a report. For example: “Hey, listen to this. Somebody robbed Henri Scratch’s body from the grave.”

The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t put a face or a personality to it.

“Scratch? The critic who was murdered last week?” Sally said.

“He was more than a critic,” the Autodidact said. “He was a former priest and the founder of a cult. He did it all.”

“What happened to him?” Sally asked.

“The day after his body was laid to rest they found the casket, unearthed and empty.”

“A publicity stunt, I’ll bet,” said Sally.

The first week the Autodidact tried to work on his book about prison life, but it wasn’t going well; in fact, it wasn’t going at all. The second week the Autodidact quit on the book and started to bow-and-arrow hunt with me. At first, he wasn’t any better at shooting the bow than I was, but after a couple of days, he’d learned to aim that bow better than I ever did, and he could pull the string all the way back, so the arrows went Rambo fast.