Probation (20 page)

That’s fine, I say, and excuse myself to take a nap. I want to sleep until dinner, through dinner if I can get away with it.

The nap doesn’t refresh me. After dinner, I collapse, staring at the television as the Braves lose to the Phillies in an early season series while Bobby snores in his lounge chair. I can barely keep my eyes open. It’s all of ten o’clock and I’m exhausted. I head off to bed.

I strip to my underwear and crawl between the sheets. Bobby’s wife hasn’t bothered with fresh linen. I worry I’m sleeping on his side of the bed. He’s in for a big surprise when he comes home, maybe a little tipsy, Mandy on his fingertips, if, in fact, he comes home at all. I haven’t slept in this room, a stuffy dormer, right below the roof beams, for twenty-five years. The old mattress is full of peaks and valleys. It’s probably the same bed where I slept as a boy. Bobby always had a double, even as a kid, a place for my aunt to exile Uncle Buster when he drank too much beer and farted in bed and tried to take a poke at her. Maybe that explains why she never liked me. When I was here, she had nowhere to send him and had to endure his dick.

The door opens and JR lowers himself on the bed. One shoe drops, then the other. The bed shifts as he shucks off his jeans and pulls off his socks. My muscles stiffen, resisting gravity when the bed sags as he lies down. He smells like soap and pizza, no trace of beer or Mandy. He yawns and his elbow grazes my back when he reaches up to scratch his head. Then he flops to his side, shaking the bed, and is asleep in a minute.

I grip the edge of the mattress, determined no part of my body will touch any part of his. But, in his sleep, he drops his hand on my waist. What next? Is he going to start stroking my ribs while he dreams of Mandy? It takes me hours to fall asleep.

He’s up and gone before I wake. It’s nearly eleven, an unconscionable time to rise on a farm. I pull on my pants and shoes and guiltily make my way to the kitchen, hoping to find some dregs in the coffeepot.

My mother is working at the kitchen table. Her perky wig contrasts with her exhausted face. She soldiers on cheerfully, rolling the dough and cutting it into perfect squares. My aunt stands behind her, hovering, playing backfield, ready to catch her if she collapses. She thinks she is being discreet and my mother is careful not to let her irritation show. My mother and I know a tornado couldn’t bring her down, let alone a little chronic fatigue. She’s been up since dawn. The tomatoes on the stove have already cooked down to a thick sauce. The Calhouns will have one more Ravioli Easter. It’s my mother’s contribution to the family reunion. Up here in the hills, pizza chains with guaranteed thirty-minute delivery and Al Pacino in
The Godfather
are the sum and substance of things Italian. The Calhouns wait each year for their homemade pasta.

My mother insists on brewing a fresh pot of coffee for me. My aunt grudgingly pulls the can of Maxwell House from the refrigerator and carefully spoons out just enough for a two-cup pot. I’ve won a small victory and don’t bother to suppress a smug smile. My mother stuffs and folds and pinches the corners of her ravioli while the coffee perks in the background. She looks up and sees me staring at her. She smiles, letting me know she appreciates what drudgery this weekend is for me, promising that, in a day, it will be over. Her smile is an apology, not asked for, unearned. Why she loves me so much I will never understand. If I don’t leave the kitchen I might start to cry.

I want to go back to sleep, to crawl back into bed and not leave the room until Sunday evening. The day ahead, or what’s left of it, stretches and yawns, mocking me with its leisurely pace. The coffee does the job. I have to shit. It’s inevitable.

I’d hoped to get through the weekend without the need to take a crap in this tiny bathroom. It’s an add-on, its walls nothing more than drywall partitions. The family still goes to the outhouse for privacy when the weather is warm. There’s one advantage to sleeping late. At least I’m not spurting while foot traffic passes outside the door. While I’m at it, I might as well shower and shave. The water is tepid and keeps me from lingering. I wrap a towel around my waist and walk back to the bedroom, surprising JR. He slaps shut the book he’s holding between his legs and self-consciously covers the title with his broad hand.

He smiles and tries to act nonchalant, telling me I can have the room to myself, now that he’s found what he was looking for. Mildly intrigued by the kid’s odd behavior, I scan the paperbacks on the shelf by the bed. Nothing out the ordinary for a seventeen-year-old boy, certainly not anything that raises any red flags.
Franny and Zooey
.
Stranger in a Strange Land
and
Dune. Silas Marner
and
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(neither spine creased, required reading, no doubt), the mandatory Tolkien and Orwell. A bottom-of-the-line Taylor acoustic is propped in the corner. There’s a chord book with leaves of loose sheet music. Some pretty hip stuff. Old Velvet Underground songs—“Sweet Jane,” “Head Held High.” A stack of printed e-mail messages slips out of the book.

Jesus H. Christ! Holy shit!

I’ve stumbled across the mother lode. I read them once, then again, letting it sink in. It’s hard, no, impossible, to believe the clean-cut kid I just shared a bed with has a secret identity as WrestlerJoc2071. Bobby’s son is maintaining a heavy correspondence with some unsavory characters. Mongoloids, probably, who can’t string a coherent English sentence together, but who demonstrate a definite affinity for constructing pithy screen names trumpeting physical attributes and sexual predilections.

Leantight8.

NCbtm4U.

JOBuddy.

NCtop4U.

Sukitall.

Once I get over the shock, I feel almost giddy discovering another aberration in the family tree. A little twinge of guilt for invading his privacy doesn’t keep me from reading his e-mails. WrestlerJoc2071 tries hard to go mano a mano with the hardcore sexualists, peppering his talk with descriptions of throbbing cocks and quivering assholes. But his phrases have a tentative cadence that reveals his tender, young heart. He’s naïve enough to believe the love and acceptance he’s seeking can be found in this miasma of pornography pecked onto a screen by sticky, dirty fingers. The object of his affection calls himself OnMiKnees4U. They’re embarking on a romance, one so deep and real and full of promise and undying devotion they actually share their names, their first ones at least.

Dear Cary,

Thanks for the pic. I hope you aren’t too disappointed by mine. Some people tell me I’m handsome, but I don’t believe it. If I had seen your pic first, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to send mine. I hope you will still write back now that you know what I look like.

I can’t believe we found each other online. I can’t believe that in only five months I will be at Chapel Hill too. I know there’s so many things you can teach me. I am reading the book you suggested. It kind of scares me. But I like it very much.

And I love you very much.

Robert

Robert? He’s already begun his double life, taking a new name. But then again, who really expected him to go through life answering to JR, called that only to distinguish him from his father?

And this Cary? Why do I expect it isn’t a real name? Why do I suspect JR is fated to spend many lonely evenings in September, wandering the streets of the campus, looking up at windows and wondering if the boy sitting, reading, writing, staring at a computer screen, is the Cary who disappeared into cyberspace without a last name or address or telephone number?

I rifle through the papers looking for the picture of Cary. But JR hasn’t printed it. It’s safe in his program file, secured by his password. What would it mean anyway? The face in the picture probably doesn’t even belong to “Cary.” JR is too young, too trusting, to even imagine such duplicity.

Who is this predator? Some ancient, overweight tenured faculty troll, belching after indulging in rich meals and glasses of port, sublimating his sexual frustrations? Some scrawny graduate student in Birkenstocks with clove cigarettes on his breath and an ass that smells like macrobiotic rice? Whoever this creature is, he’s putting JR at risk, laying the foundation for a lifetime of heartaches.

And what the hell was JR doing in that notorious toilet at the mall? Did he have an agenda more sinister than taking a piss and washing his hands? I have to find him and warn him. He’s starting down the wrong road, one that could lead to a dead end on the interstate on a sticky summer night, to arrest and probation (if he’s lucky).

Neither my mother nor his knows where he is. Bobby’s wife looks out the window and says his car is gone.

“He’ll be back, probably with that girlfriend of his. Wait till you see her, hard as nails and looks like she’s been around the block a few times. Bobby has a fit every time he brings her around. But I tell him to calm down. JR’s at that age that it would only throw gasoline on the flame if we started bitching about her. Let it go and it’ll die out. Hope I’m right or Bobby’s gonna put me six feet under.” She laughs.

I ought to tell her not to bother measuring the shroud, but keep my mouth shut.

He’s back home in time for dinner, the notorious Mandy in tow. She doesn’t disappoint the low expectations of her. The leather jacket must be a second skin. Again, she refuses to take it off despite, or maybe because of, Bobby’s wife’s many gentle suggestions and Bobby’s very apparent irritation. Me, I’m feeling a little sympathy for Mandy, much to my surprise. Each little grunt, each shrug of her shoulders, each toss of her stringy hair betrays the feelings of inadequacy stirred by the big, beautiful boy sitting next to her. He’s unfailingly polite despite his juvenile delinquent gear and engages my mother in conversation almost to the point of flirting with her. He tells Mandy to just wait until tomorrow, she’s never tasted anything like Aunt Ruth’s ravioli. Bobby almost chokes on the unexpected invitation.

Mandy has heard my mother is very sick and manages a smile in her direction. You have lovely eyes, my mother says, finding the silver lining in every cloud. Thank you. Mandy blushes, immediately turning to JR to see if he agrees.

I’ve seen that look a thousand times before on Alice, abashed by compliments on her hair, her skin, her waist, her dress. Like Mandy, she’d look to me, seeking confirmation by the only one who really mattered, the only one who seemed oblivious to her wonders and mysteries. I’ve seen that same expectation in her eyes, never giving up hope that, suddenly, the scales would fall from my own and I would see her as the world saw her.

But JR’s attention is fully on me. He wants me to join them tonight. They’re going to the movies. A “chick flick,” he says, rolling his eyes, thinking Mandy can’t see him. She tells him the name of the movie. They’re all the same, he says.

“It’s Julia Roberts,” Mandy says. “She’s really beautiful.”

Even Bobby’s interest is piqued by Julia Roberts. Everyone at the table has an opinion about her eyes, her lips, her hair, her body, and, of course, her smile. I wait for JR’s turn, curious to hear his remarks.

“She can’t act her way out of a paper bag,” he says.

I laugh, agreeing.

“Then you gotta come,” he pleads. “Misery loves company.”

Once again Mandy must accept the inevitable. She’s counting the hours until I leave and she has JR to herself again. She hasn’t given up yet. Someday soon she’s going to prod him beyond soul kisses and titty squeezing. She’s going to get her hands on that thing in his pants and put it inside her. But time’s running out. Only a few months until he disappears. She’s desperate, knowing he’ll never return except for the occasional holiday, which she’ll spend sitting by a phone that never rings.

I take him up on the offer. Why not? The alternative is another night listening to Bobby snore in front of the television, sprawled in his Barcalounger, erection rising in his pants, dreaming of Julia Roberts.

Good old Julia works her movie magic and cracks the crust of Mandy’s heavy makeup. She’s sobbing by the time the credits roll, the prince having swept Julia to his Manhattan penthouse where they live happily ever after. JR feigns studied indifference but his eyes are a little red when the lights go up. I barely remember anything about the movie. I’d expected Mandy to sit between us, but JR stepped aside, letting her in the aisle first, leaving him and me knee to knee the entire two hours.

A whirlwind had raced through my mind as Julia cavorted across the screen. What should I say to him? How would I even broach the subject? I could tell him about myself, not the disgusting, dirty details, just enough to highlight my mistakes, warning him about paths not to take. We could talk about love. I could assure him a sweet and gentle soul awaits him. I could tell him not to throw himself away, not to let himself get bitter and callous and unable to trust love when it finally appears. I would promise him it will happen. If not for me, at least for him.

And that’s why, when the lights go up, my eyes are red too.

Mandy’s pimples need feeding. Over another plate of french fries, she quizzes JR about his reaction to every twist and turn in the plot of the movie, seeking the passionate soul she knows he’s hiding behind his placid demeanor. JR is distracted, lost in his own fantasies of Prince Charming. He insists on picking up the tab tonight. After all, I bought lunch.

Without thinking, I say…

“Thanks, Robert.”

I might have just handed him the crown jewels of Russia. He beams, ecstatic. A look of absolute delight lights up his face. He knows I understand him, at what level he’s not sure, but I know he is Robert now, that JR will be left behind for good when he finally escapes Watauga County.

We never have that soul-to-soul chat. This is Watauga County, after all, not a Julia Roberts movie. I wait in the car while he walks Mandy to her door and gives her a chaste kiss on the cheek. We listen to the car radio as we drive home. He can’t wait to get to Chapel Hill and hear
real
radio. WXYC is totally cool. The disc jockey plays an oldie we both love. “Kiss Me on the Bus.” I tell him I saw the band years ago; they played at a roller rink in Raleigh and got so drunk they fell off the stage. They’re his all-time favorite group, he says; he wishes he could have seen them.