Rats Saw God (9 page)

It was Doug. His phone call awakened me. I had gone back to bed immediately after reading Sarah's letter. I looked at my clock and discovered it was four in the afternoon.

“What are you talking about?” I wedged the receiver between my pillow and exposed ear, enabling me to speak with minimal use of motor skills.

“Don't be coy with me, Lips,” Doug said.

“Who told you?”

“Who hasn't would be a better question… Rhonda's been telling everyone she sees.”

“Oh boy.”

“So I guess you'll be doing something with your girlfriend tonight?”

“That's not funny.” My girlfriend? I had hardly ever considered Rhonda, let alone considered her my girlfriend. I was suddenly grateful I had to be at work in an hour. “Come by the theater tonight. I'll get you into something.”

“That was on the agenda anyway. I'm going with Dub tonight.”

I jerked up and instantly wished I had taken my time. Champagne residue, stirred by the burst of kinetic energy, streamed through capillaries that had believed, in good faith, the evening's threat was over. Fresh pain in my temples and eye sockets knocked me back down to my pillow.

“Did you ask her out?” I asked.

“No, she called this morning. She asked me.”

I hung up, rolled over onto my stomach, and draped one arm over the side of the bed, brushing my fingers against the marine-cropped white carpet. I surveyed the knobbed and valleyed drywall on the starboard side of my room. I imagined driving an ant-sized jeep up and down the wall's moguls. The smaller I pictured myself, the easier I disappeared and the more at peace I felt. My uniform was hanging in my closet, and I knew, momentarily, I would need to shower, pull my arms and head through the appropriate holes, and leave; but I couldn't will my corpse from under the comforter. Immobility, on one hand, was symptomatic of a killer hangover, and on the other, my wrestling match with a virgin emotion. The only experience I'd had with jealousy was secondhand, though I knew, by virtue of literature, jealousy had driven men into the clergy, to murder, to the French Foreign Legion, to the arms of prostitutes.

The only sensation akin to what I was feeling now had occurred when I was twelve. Mom took Sarah and me to see
Phantom of the Opera
on Broadway. During intermission, Sarah and I waited with the absently milling throng in the
chandelier-lit red velvet and marble lobby while our mother went to score Cokes for us and white wine for herself. She returned incensed.

“Some boy grabbed my breasts as I was bringing our drinks back over.” I couldn't tell if my mom was going to cry or go ballistic. “He had the nerve to say, ‘Thank you, ma'am. The pleasure is mine.'”

I whipped my head about furiously, ready to bring the full force of my 105 pounds to bear on the miscreant.

I visualized strangling the unknown mother fondler, relishing each nanosecond it took to drain his life force. My fantasy came stocked with policemen trying vainly to pry me off the body. With my digits dug so deeply into the monster's eye sockets, the men in blue are forced to wait until I grow weak from hunger.

I was so wrapped up in my fantasy, I didn't notice the females of my tribe returning to their seats until Sarah yelled at me from ten yards ahead. My two-dimensional physique aided the body dodging required to catch up. When I'd made the family whole, Mom turned and faced us.

“There he is,” she said, more to Sarah than to me. She flashed her pupils into the top right corner of her eye sockets to indicate the perpetrator was over her shoulder. A group of four tuxedoed prep schoolers had set up camp in the middle of the aisle. Without asking, I knew the guilty party. He was the one holding court; the other three were merely orbiting their leering sun. I told myself I would be the black hole that swallowed his galaxy or the supernova that vaporized him instantly. But I couldn't act. My personal gravity prevented me.

However, Sarah, keeper of the family testosterone, acted in my stead. She approached the man/boy. Smiling up at him, she interrupted his lewdly conjectural discourse on the rich, mellowed savoriness of older women, seized and extended the waistline of his slacks, and slowly poured her Coke into the gap.

“The pleasure was mine,” she said to him.

Mortified security guards asked Sarah to leave, so Mom and I exited as well, though I'm certain my ten-year-old sister could have fended for herself on Broadway. As we stepped out of the theater and onto the street, Mom knelt down and held Sarah's elbows.

“Darling… that was the wrong boy.”

“That's okay, Mom,” Sarah said.

“They all have it coming.” The point of my story is this: I had experienced a branch of jealous rage before. With Mom, though, I'd felt protective; my turf had been invaded. It felt only remotely like what I was suffering now, splayed out in bed considering spying on Doug and Dub from the projection booth at the movie that night.

As it was a Sunday night, odds were good Desdemona and Cassio would be attending one of the seven o'clock features. Narrowing the possibilities was simple. I eliminated both buddy cop flicks, the teen slasher sequel, the Disney rere-leased animated classic, the
Saturday Night Live
spin-off (Doug and I had seen it twice already), and the latest Sharon Stone effort (management was particularly diligent in enforcing the R rating for this one). That left only the foreign coming-of-age story and a “magical romp” in which souls and bodies get
switched around, resulting in hilarity and fresh understanding.

I knew I would have no trouble spotting Doug, and he didn't disappoint me later that evening. With his blond hair and baseball cap he has a beaconlike quality even without his inherent hamminess. I spied him walking backward down the aisle of the foreign film auditorium, gazing up at the windowettes. When he identified my form behind the glass, he made a cavalier bow, bending low on his left leg while extending his right leg behind him. He held his John Deere cap in his right fist which crossed his body and extended his unbent left arm parallel to the ground. He then morphed quickly from musketeer to Klingon, standing and pounding his chest twice with his fist and saluting the projection booth with his entire hand. I scanned the area behind him for Dub. My heart felt like a transplanted organ trying desperately to appease the surrounding white blood cells. She wasn't behind him. Maybe she hadn't come. Maybe she'd called and told him she would wait for me to sow my wild oats. Maybe Doug is the bearer of glad tidings. Maybe…

Nope. There she was.

But I had to laugh at the roster of Doug's big date. Dub was already seated, and on either side of her were Rhonda and Missy. The three of them turned in their seats to give me mock parade waves with stiff hands and rotating wrists.

Feeling a bit like Lucky, the Lucky Charms spokes-leprechaun, I jigged from projector to projector clicking my heels together. My concerns, my petty jealousies, my hangover—all vanished. A knock on the metal door of my sanctum delayed my rendition of “Danny Boy.”

“Steve?” The voice registered as the door cracked open: It was Rhonda.

I had forgotten one little problem. “Uh, yeah,” I answered. Rhonda slunk all the way into the dimly lit booth and closed the door behind her.

“I wanted to see you, find out how you were feeling today. Doug said you sounded terrible. You had a lot to drink last night.” As she spoke, Rhonda moved closer to me. I turned away and fumbled with a reel, trying desperately to look involved in a crisis centering on this renegade cog. I sat up on one of the high projectionist's stools and considered improvising a call to Hollywood to lambast some imaginary reel factory schmuck.

“Yeah, I felt like hell all day. I mostly slept,” I said.

“Poor baby,” she said, moving up behind me and juicing my shoulder bone sockets. We continued that way silently for a rugged minute. I felt myself spinning to face her. Damn these rotating stools!

“Let me make you feel better,” she said, placing her knuckles on my thighs and leaning in for the Great Tongue Probe II. With her mouth millimeters away, I turned away. A lusty, yet quickly aborted, cheek kiss followed.

“You're really not supposed to be in here,” I said flatly.

“And you're really an asshole,” she said before huffing out.

•   •   •

As punishment for spurning her friend, Dub treated me like an immigrant from planet Dickhead. My orchestrated waves and nods were met blankly in the halls. My attempts at playing the fortune-teller game were snuffed with shushes and
head shaking. On Tuesday of homecoming week, Cassandra Holbrook, the frazzled chief architect of spirit week at Grace High, broke down in class and sobbed, “People don't understand! It's hard being popular!” I waited for Dub's sickle wit to hew her asunder, but she didn't even smirk. On Wednesday I wore a tie to school—a hideous, five-inch-wide expanse of liver-colored quilted polyester emblazoned with images of soulful-eyed Great Danes. I heightened the effect with a Masonic tie tack and chain. This attracted guffaws, stares, whistles, looks of contempt from Skate or Diers. From Dub I garnered the once-over a casting agent gives to “Man Hailing Cab #147.” On Friday I finally scored my first points of the week when I leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “Boy, I hope we win the big game tomorrow.”

She said nothing, but from behind I saw her shoulders vibrating. She was trying to keep from laughing. Rhonda had also avoided me like the JC Penney's Young Miss fall collection, but that neglect could continue ad infinitum for all I cared.

•   •   •

Trey Collier had arranged his three art classes sequentially so that only a lunch period interrupted his studies. With the permission of his guru, Mr. Harley, he spent the available three-and-a-half-hour stretch in the Whiteside barn, putting finishing touches on
Get Hammered.
Most of that time was spent gluing Life Savers on the overhanging cardboard eaves we had tacked along the bed part of the flatbed truck. Those of us with no artistic training were put in charge of organizing the candies by color. We knew we wanted the Life Savers to spell out “Grace Order of Dadaists say… ,” but there had
been lively tête-à-têtes about what the final word would be. Late on Thursday night Trey reached an executive decision, and, relying on the menu from his Chinese takeout, completed the slogan with the Chinese symbol for
pork.

Beverly as truck owner and Trey as chief designer earned the coveted
Get Hammered
driver and navigator positions. The rest of us would watch the parade together. On homecoming day, Doug moved through the lines of floats with all the arrogance of a jockey set to ride Secretariat. The sponsor of the student council used a bullhorn to tell the drivers to start their engines. As we were wishing Beverly and Trey luck, Tom Pittman approached Doug.

“What does that say?” he said, pointing at the Chinese word for
pork.
He was concerned, presumably, because we had used three times the number of Life Savers—and orange rather than lime ones at that—on the initials of our group's name. Hence, the slogan “Grace Order of Dadaists says Pork” read more like “GOD says X.”

Our leader answered without hesitation, “Beat the Mustangs.”

Within twenty minutes, the dozen remaining members of GOD had carved out a two-row-by-six-seat section of prime parade viewing turf in the football grandstands. Those who could separate me from Dub had successfully done so. I sat on the aisle in row two; she took the innermost seat of row one. Even Rhonda was willing to sit one seat closer to me, immediately to Dub's left. I had begun to lose faith in Sarah's letter. What if she had meant to write Rhonda's name and absentmindedly substituted Dub's?

Doug, sitting beside me, chin in hand, grunted.

“Can't they do any better than that?” he said, pointing to the first row where a full score of Skate or Diers were holding newspapers, upside down, in front of their faces in showy indifference to the parade beginning to take shape on the track before them. Though I was confident Doug harbored no regrets about the direction GOD had taken, part of him longed for the abject loathing Skate or Die inspired. He knew the satire we intended with
Get Hammered
would pass harmlessly over the heads of most of his peers.

As organizers of the parade, the student council was automatically given lead position, and I admit I was impressed, from a strictly aesthetic point of view, with their float. Given the demographics of the community who gravitated to student government, it was hardly surprising that they found it within their quasi-pontifical reach to obtain a genuine yacht. They had affixed a Styrofoam shell to the outside and painted it a mottled greenish brown, approximating the scabby, barnacled look of a pirate ship. A skull-and-crossbones-emblazoned sail hung from the mast, and a legion of blond, Soloflex-buffed pirates with eyepatches, bandannas, and stuffed parrots wired to their shoulders manned battle stations. The boat was skirted by a patch of ocean blue-painted plywood. A horse head (which, for me at least, evoked
The Godfather
more readily than our gridiron rivals) stuck out of the ersatz sea. As the float rounded the curve and came into full view of the student body, the band broke into “Bucs Fight.” The Buccaneer Babes began their synchronized Rockette routine in the stands, and the
cheerleaders kicked their heels backward and jabbed pompoms heavenward each time the band paused for a shouted chorus of “Bucs Fight! Bucs Fight! Yay, Bucs Fight!” The game jersey-clad football players slouched in folding chairs facing the student body on the inside of the track. The deities-in-waiting feigned aplomb, succeeding only in looking as bored as the Skate or Diers whose asses they were silently vowing to kick Monday at school.

Doug had drawn number 16 in the parade order lottery, which meant
Get Hammered
represented the midpoint of the parade. For a group that took special pride in its skepticism, we young GODs were certainly being blatantly unblasé waiting for our entry to arrive, sniping at the more garish efforts of our competitors (except for Lynnette, who apparently expected the Second Coming to occur on one of the passing flatbed trucks) and trying to top each other with the most fatuously generic cheer. Veg won that battle, based at least partially on the way his voice cracked and went falsetto when he stood during a lull between floats to howl with insane gusto, “Go, team!” Doug kept standing to bellow, “Pork!” Virginia and Zipper sat below me trying to decide who was the cutest of the mohawked Skate and Diers, a discussion that I yearned not to overhear.