Rats Saw God (24 page)

•   •   •

Adapting to Mr. Waters's methods wasn't easy. First of all, we didn't have desks, and with the chairs arranged in a circle, there was no back of the classroom where I could hide. He would ask us what we thought of a story. None of us knew the correct answer, so no one spoke. He had to wring responses from us.

“Tell us what you liked about
Lolita,
Goldfish,” or “Medea, how do you think the male characters came across in
The Color Purple
?”

We didn't really have a lively debate until Black and Proud insisted to the class that no white person in the world should have directed
The Color Purple,
an assertion to which several in the class took exception (including Dub, who maintained any woman, black
or
white, would have been more qualified than any man). The debate was heated. People spoke at the same time. Voices were raised. Class time disappeared. But Sky didn't stop us, nor did he jump in on a side. To him, this was education. It took some getting used to, all this talking, all this contending and justifying in class, having a teacher who eggs us on, tells us to join the fray, to take sides. On this day, it was boys against girls. The subject was James Joyce's
Dubliners.
The girls liked the short story “Eveline.” The boys, “Araby.”

“Sky.” Dub had been the first among us to risk calling him by his much-publicized nickname. He didn't even flinch. He acted like it was normal to call a teacher by something
other than Mr. or Mrs. “What is it about ‘Araby' that guys like? I mean, it's okay, but nothing happens. A boy goes to the store and decides not to buy a gift for a girl he thought he liked. ‘Eveline' is tragic. She sacrifices love for her family.”

Sky stretched his legs. His moccasined feet wound up in the middle of the circle. “What is it about ‘Araby' that boys like? I can only tell you why I like it.” Without looking at his book, he quoted. “‘My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.'”

Several of us nodded—that
was
it. And how strange that he should say he could only say what he liked about it. All of us had, in our ten or eleven years of schooling, been taught not to think or offer our opinions. The answers were there in the teacher's guide; our job was to memorize. After a few weeks, most of us adapted to Sky's techniques.

The books Sky assigned I read in my other classes, in the projection booth at the 'Plex, on the Varner couch with Dub doing the same next to me. I was even beating the astronaut to the breakfast table. I would be reading over a bowl of Trix when he marched down the stairs.

Grace's homecoming festivities came and went without any involvement from the former dadaists. Watching other groups working on floats in the parking lot, I caught myself missing the Whiteside barn.
Don't be stupid,
I told myself.
I have Dub now.
The two of us skipped the homecoming dance, but we celebrated our one-year anniversary by ditching school and driving to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Dub's aunt owned a cabin there, and Dub knew where the key was hidden. Dub insisted on going to school early and dropping off the paragraphs Sky
had assigned. We were supposed to convince him of the significance of our favorite childhood toy.

“Thanks for getting this to me. You have a safe trip. Oh, and congratulations. A year… that's long by high school standards.” I didn't figure he would try to stop us, but I was still impressed. Once, Writer had raised her hand and asked to go to the bathroom. Sky had said, “Who am I to stand in the way of Mother Nature?” From then on we just walked out of class whenever we needed to go. No one abused the freedom.

The drive to Lake Charles took three hours. We sang along to the
Saturday Night Fever
eight track Dub got me as an anniversary present. For the next two weeks we used the word
jive
unrepentantly and laughed at our inside joke. The cabin was more your garden variety, small-frame house than the rustic, likely-to-feature-taxidermy, gigantic-fireplace, and bear-rug sort. Still, it was right on the lake and there was no one else around. We made love four times that day. We pretended to be unhappily married to clueless spouses. The cabin was where we carried out our affair. Our pillow talk was the stuff of TV fiction.

“I'd leave him, but I couldn't do that to the kids,” Dub said.

“I knew the day I hired you as my secretary that one day you would be mine.”

“But what you didn't know was that I would move up the company so fast and you would end up working for me.” She pinned me. “Now perform before I fire you on a whim.”

Later I returned to the El C and grabbed Dub's anniversary present out of the glove box.

“Whatisit? Whatisit? Whatisit?” Dub said, rubbing her palms together. “Gimme.”

She ripped the purple foil wrapping off the small box and lifted its lid.

“Oh, my god, baby, I can't believe this.”

Inside were two pearl earrings. I had spent nearly six hundred dollars on them—all the money I saved during the summer. Dub's expression wasn't what I had counted on, though. Her poofy lips curled downward and her brows furrowed. It wasn't a so-happy-you're-sad expression. It was vanilla sad.

“Steve, you need to take these back. This is too much. I mean… we're just kids. This is the kind of gift people give on their tenth wedding anniversary.” She sympathetically handed the box back to me.

I was too embarrassed to return the earrings. Let's face it. Returning jewelry must be almost as humiliating as actually having it refused. What are you going to say: “They weren't her size” or “She loved me too much to take them”? One day she would accept the gift.

The earrings remained in my glove box. Everything was status quo with Dub; she just didn't want me spending all that money on her. She said she didn't need me to show her I loved her that way. There were other, more pleasurable, ways of expressing our love. We were experimenting with those regularly. We had a routine down in which I said good night, drove down the block, parked the car, and returned on foot to the doors of her bedroom. We'd set the alarm clock for the middle of the night, make love, and fall asleep in each
other's arms. The risks involved made me a wreck, but it was worth it.

It was on a morning after one of my late night sallies that I was awakened by the phone ringing.

“Is Alan York there?” asked the voice, obviously military, on the other end.

I thought about it. Normally he was gone by this time, but I hadn't been awakened by the garage door opener like usual.

“Let me check,” I said.

“He's supposed to be in a meeting right now.” The speaker was irritated.

I stumbled out into the hall in my underwear and approached the astronaut's door. I knocked a couple times, then opened it, yelling, “Telephone.” Instead of finding the crisply made bed I expected, I learned, unexpectedly, the old man had a libido. All I saw were four frantic arms reaching for whatever they could find, then a sheet flying up over blond hair.

“Steve. Close the door,” the astronaut commanded, but I was already well into that action.

I tried unsuccessfully to go back to sleep. I wanted to call Dub and share the Miracle of Briar Cove with her, but she probably wasn't awake yet.

I mulled over how embarrassed I'd been standing in that doorway. The more I thought about it, the more I resented the fact that I was the one who was rattled. Apparently it wasn't inappropriate for the astronaut to have female company upstairs. I put on some gym shorts, grabbed my
Slaughterhouse Five,
and bounced downstairs. I was buttering toast and pretending
to read when the astronaut entered the kitchen. I looked up from the book.

“I'd like to meet your little girlfriend sometime,” I said.

“Her name is Miss Darby, and you'll probably meet her in a few minutes if you continue to sit there grinning.”

“I think it's great that you're starting to take an interest in girls.”

The astronaut didn't have the time to stay and beat me—his meeting must have been terribly important—so I continued eating and listened to the sounds coming from upstairs. Miss Darby looked appropriately shamed when she eventually tiptoed down.

“Muffin?” I asked, holding up a bran one. I was required by all that teenagers hold dear to milk this.

“No… thank you, though,” she said. “This is pretty awkward.” I wasn't helping her. I widened my eyes, but said nothing. “We haven't been introduced. My name is Jacqueline. Jacqueline Darby. You must be Steve.”

“Uh-huh.”

She remained standing, and I didn't offer her a place to sit. She rocked back and forth from her heels to her toes. Like Mom, she was blond, and I had to admit, pretty. She was young, maybe mid-thirties. Figures. I returned my attention to my book.

“Oh, you're reading Vonnegut. God, I loved Vonnegut. I think I read
Slaughterhouse Five
when I was about your age,” Jacqueline said.

“Not too long ago, then?” I said without looking up.

Long pause. “So, you're not going to make this any
easier. That's okay. Can I at least use the phone?”

I pointed to the one on the wall. She walked over to it, and I listened as she asked for the number for the Checker Cab Company.

“Look, I can give you a ride somewhere. You don't need to call a cab.”

“Are you sure? I don't mind.”

I told her I was sure, and ran to throw on some jeans. I didn't have time to shower, so I just tied on a doo rag. I looked my pirate worst. Jacqueline lived on the Clear Lake side of Houston, which was a good thing because I was facing rush hour traffic into the city.

“Your father says you're very bright.”

So that was his spin control.
The boy wears earrings, dresses like a bum, can't catch a football, has a freak girlfriend… but he's sharp as a tack!
“How did the two of you meet?” I asked once we were on our way.

“My brother introduced us. He works with Alan.”

“I figured you met at his health club, or something.”

“Well, he certainly is in shape,” she volleyed. I guess I deserved it. She thumbed through my eight-track box. “I didn't know anybody still had a machine that played these. God, I think I owned about half of these on eight track. Maybe we
are
about the same age.”

“There are more in the glove box, if you want to pick one out,” I said, interested in seeing what she would choose.

She pulled Neil Young's
Rust Never Sleeps
out of the glove box, and when she did, a wrapped condom came fluttering out behind it, touching down on Jacqueline's lap.

“Alan said you had a serious girlfriend,” she said, stuffing the prophylactic back in the glove box.

Now I was the one who was embarrassed.

•   •   •

For weeks I braced for a summoning into the astronaut's study for a sex lecture. It would have been a short one: don't. When it didn't happen, I knew I owed Jackie big. The astronaut hadn't just blown this one off. If he had been apprised of the flying condom, I would have heard about it. As for Jacqueline, she was becoming a more permanent fixture around
mi casa
than me. As far as I could tell, Jacqueline wasn't spending the night anymore. This got me wondering. I mean, when do adults do it? Dating with a teenager in the house must suck. I posted my work schedule on the refrigerator, just to show the astronaut I cared—or rather, I knew.

Dub asked me about it on the phone.

“Can you imagine your father, you know, in the throes of passion?”

“It's hard for me to imagine the man without a tie.”

“Did you ever walk in on your mom and dad when you were little?”

“No. I know everyone else did. Or they heard their mom screaming and thought their dad was hurting her, or something. It's supposed to screw some kids up for years. But my parents had separate bedrooms as far back as I can remember. Jesus, the other day he came into my room and asked me if he looked okay.”

“What did you say?”

“I gave him the I'll-say-yes-to-get-you-out-of-my-room yes.”

“Good call.”

“What other choice did I have?”

•   •   •

Doug—pardon me—
Stallion
was wearing sunglasses in Sky's classroom, this after I had seen three or four freshmen that day wearing clenched-fist-logoed Grippe T-shirts. A pair of drumsticks emerged conspicuously out of his leather saddlebag, as if to say, worship me. There had been talk, repeated by Dub of all people, that SunDial Records, a Houston independent label, might be interested in signing the band. I could say with absolute certainty that Doug himself had started that rumor. Today he was fanning the fire by replacing his John Deere cap with a SunDial one.

Today's classroom battle centered on Sinéad O'Connor's shredding of the Pope's photo on
Saturday Night Live.
Three camps formed: Dub and Doug's argued that freedom of speech meant she could tear up anyone's photo, and that, furthermore, those who criticized her were fascists; Success, along with Black and Proud, asserted, mainly, that she was a bitch; my camp, which was limited in its membership to me, felt Sinéad was a prima donna for whimpering after catching all the heat. Sure, she had the right to tear up the photo, just as every viewer in Kansas had the right to call her a pretentious, grandstanding, calculating, misinformed moron.

Mere school bells couldn't stop the class from wrestling with the intricacies of the first amendment, but Sky blew his whistle sharply and made a time-out sign with his hands.

“Get out of here!” he shouted whimsically. “Cynic, can I see you after class?”

When the rest of the class was gone, Sky sat on his desk. Though his knees hinged at the edge, his feet reached the ground.