Slot Machine (13 page)

“No. He wouldn’t not come. He can be jerky, but he’s always there, you know?”

“Ya. I know.”

We’d just about finished the first Cokes when we saw the van, the O’Van, angling across the compound. It wound around the road, hopped the rounded asphalt curb, and came heading our way over the grass. When it skidded to a stop about twenty feet away from us, Frankie was sitting sheepishly in the shotgun seat, on the side closer to us. Obie was driving. There was a lot of banging around and raunchy laughing in back.

“We’re really sorry, boys,” Obie said, leaning across Frankie to yell to us. “I know you wanted him, but we just couldn’t spare him tonight. But he did insist on coming back to tell you himself.”

Frankie hung his head out the window. Obie, behind him, couldn’t see Frank’s face. “Maybe tomorrow night,” Frank said. “Okay? I just can’t tonight.”

He had an apology on his face that just didn’t come out of his mouth.

Mikie and I simply nodded, as if there was any choice. Obie took that as a signal to hit the gas and peel away.

When they were good and gone, I went inside and got two more Cokes and two packs of Sno Balls. Then Mikie and I sat ourselves down on the porch. I told Mikie the story about Frank and the crossing guard. He told me the one about Frank and the school committeewoman. We got pretty sugared up and stupid after a while and toasted Frankie and laughed a lot at all the stories. But we didn’t laugh as much as we would have. We didn’t laugh as much as we had before.

We put most of the stuff back in the kitchen before we headed back to the Clusters.

“See,” I said just before we split up, “I told you Sno Balls wouldn’t be the same as Suzy Q’s.”

Since I’d slept all day, then gotten wired up with Mikie, sleeping all night was sort of a problem. Long after all the “Night, Knights,” and after the hard-core snorers kicked in, even after Duke stopped staring at me, finally keeled over on his side, and passed out, I was still awake. I lay in bed with the long red flashlight Thor had lent me, poring over the words of Rummy Macias.

I had started out a little ambitiously, zooming from the table of contents right to page 114 and the heading “Opponent on His Knees.” It just sounded so good. Like: Read this page and your life will all come together before morning.

Unfortunately, page 114 didn’t tell me how to get an opponent to his knees, only what to do with him once I’d gotten him there. Clearly, Rummy and I were ahead of ourselves here.

The next most exciting thing to me was the Whizzer Series of moves, beginning on page 89. Before I went to it, I closed the book and just stared at the darkened ceiling, playing it in my head. The Whizzer Series. Whizz. Whizz kid. Whizz-bang Bishop. I Whizz. See that Bishop kid out there, sure is a goddamn Whizzer, ain’t he? Whizzzzzz.

I liked it. I loved it, to tell the entire truth. I felt lighter already. I’d wear silver shoes.

I refused to open the book to page 89 and investigate the Whizzer Series any further. I would not pollute my imagination with reality.

The Trip Series, page 85, caught my eye. They allow tripping? If they allowed tripping, I reasoned, then this could certainly be an area I could specialize in. So I read.

As it turned out, Rummy’s tripping was a little more complicated than sticking out your foot when the other guy runs by. I read the whole section, but it didn’t turn out to be the beacon I had hoped for. These moves were as complicated as any of the others, involving hands, feet, balance, strength, and all that hooey. I got more discouraged.

I still couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t read anymore. I clicked off the flashlight, pulled on some clothes in the dark, and slipped outside.

I followed the route Mikie had showed me that morning. It was dark now, but the moon was strong again and the paths were fairly smooth. And halfway there, I had the grunts and slurs of the O’s to guide me.

I stepped very lightly as I approached the edge of their camp. The fire was almost dead, but they weren’t gathered around that anyway. They sat in tiers, on rocks and logs and sometimes on each other, like a miniature primitive temple as they prayed to the grainy silver glow on the screen. The
grrr
of the generator and the
tickey-tick
of the reels were all the soundtrack I could hear. Down in front center, almost like he was forced to stay in that spot, was Frankie. He was as big as half of them there, but kneeling and slumped, he looked very small.

The next flick started without fanfare. And as soon as it did, I was transfixed. I froze, puck-eyed, from the first frame.

It was a thing called
Barnyard Hijinks
, in which a woman did... things—there can’t be words, actual dictionary words with pronunciations and definitions, to label some of these acts. With animals. I didn’t recognize the backgrounds in the film, other than that it was a farm, but wherever this took place had to be a country with no laws. This one lady, and her lovely assistant, had several farm beasts working harder than any creature has labored since the invention of the mechanical tractor. I was sure there would have to be some special-effects trickery going on with some of those stunts, except the picture seemed to be made on somebody’s grandfather’s 16-millimeter hand crank.

When it got to be too much to bear, I turned from the screen back to Frankie. I noticed that two of the bigger guys flanked him, like guards. When Frank looked away from the screen, one of them pushed his face back into viewing position. The other grabbed his wrist and coaxed Frankie’s beer bottle back up to his lips. As he drank, somebody slapped him hard on the back. The movie was gross, but what Frankie was putting up with was a lot harder to look at.

I slithered back down the hill, feeling weak and a little sick in the belly. With all the roars of laughter, nobody heard me crunching through the woods. I slogged back to camp with the noise gradually shrinking away behind me.

I lay in bed more sleepless than before until, about an hour and a half later, Frankie came trudging through.

“So, how were the movies?” I whispered as he passed my bed.

He stopped. “All right,” he said. “A couple of them were great. A couple of them I didn’t like so much.” He said it, especially the last part, with a heavy tired voice. He forced a smile and went on to bed.

Big Mama Bishop,

Not
sure
? What do you mean, “Not sure”? You’re
not sure
if you can make it this weekend? No, Mother, I will
not
sit tight until you hear back whether Aunt Mamie can go with you to Presque Isle for the weekend. I don’t care what you say, I did so tell you it was
this
weekend. Just tell Aunt Mamie I’m sure Presque Isle has enough lonely police officers and lobster trappers to tide her over for the two days before you can get there.

Don’t toy with me, Mother. I’m not the frail lumpen lad you shoehorned onto that yellow bus a mere forty days and forty nights ago. I’m mean now, like,
Lord of the Flies
mean, because of what you did to me, so you better not fool around. Everybody here is afraid of me.

And this is put-up-or-shut-up time around here. This is when you have to produce hard evidence that you have actual parents and that you weren’t just left here on the grounds when the circus moved on to Providence. If your family does not show up, you’re put into a group informally known as “The Unloved,” who, legend has it, roam around like a pack of wild dingoes all weekend doing unspeakable things to themselves and others.

And I could well do it. Take me seriously, Mother. I’m learning new ruffian stuff every day. I have a book.

Elvin “Rummy Junior” Bishop

I
T’S NOT REALLY EVEN
a weekend anyhow. In fact, it’s not even twenty-four hours. The parents arrive around midday on Saturday and are broomed back out again before lunch on Sunday.

It was one of the few moments that felt like they made sense. Mikie and I were sitting in the parking lot just watching cars roll up. Just like we would have been doing at about this point any other summer at home.

“I bet your mother gets here before my mother,” I said.

“Hnn,” he said.

“I mean it, Mikie. What do you want to bet? I’ll bet you anything.”

“Cut it out, Elvin. I don’t want to make bets on my mother.”

“Fine, take another mother,” I said. “I’ll stack my mother up against any mother in the joint. Or any father. I bet she’s the last one to show up. I bet I’m going to be sitting here with the crickets and the coyotes while everyone else is inside watching the talent show tonight and eating popcorn.”

“She’ll be here before Frankie’s folks.”

“No fair.
Jesus
will make an appearance before Frankie’s folks do.”

As I spoke, through the gate and up the drive came Mike’s mother’s little red Dodge Omni.

“See?” I said. “You owe me all your sick vouchers. Who’s next? Who else wants to take on my mother? She’s going to kick some big booty all over this camp.”

Mike left me there ranting while he went to the car to greet his mother, Brenda. I could call her Brenda, because she always said I could. And that wasn’t the only un-motherlike thing about her. She was smaller than us and red-headed and went on dates with men and did not mention it when one of our voices cracked even though everyone else in the world thought it was so damn funny. I was probably as anxious to see her when she stepped out of the car as Mikie was. As I always am.

She got out of the driver’s side and hugged him, which I loved. I stood stupidly watching it for a few seconds.

Then I fell back down on the seat of my pants. Out of the passenger side popped—
my
mother.

I was cool. I got back up, walked super slowly to the Omni, and shook my mother’s hand.

“This a new car, Brenda?” I asked while still shaking my mother’s hand. Brenda waved me off, and Mom started laughing. She thinks every single thing I say is a laugh riot whether I intend it to be or not.

“Still at it, are we Elvin? I suppose you’re chewing up everybody’s slippers since I left you too.”

Brenda came over and gave me a hug.

“Good,” I said as she squeezed me to her. “
You
’ll take me home now, won’t you?”

“You putting on weight?” she asked, holding me at arm’s length.

“Yes, he is,” Mikie chipped in unsolicited.

I pointed at myself as I spoke. “I’m in an athletic
program
,” I enunciated. “I’m bulking up.”

“And
down
,” Mike said.

Mom came up beside me and put an arm over my shoulders for moral support. I tried to be cool to her without scaring her off.

“So I have added a few pounds since I’ve been here. But I tell you, it’s the training. Muscle weighs more than fat, you know.”

“Ya, but a whole lot of fat still weighs more than a medium amount of muscle,” Mike said.

“You look wonderful,” my mother said, squeezing me.

“Strapping,” Brenda said.

It worked. I felt wonderful and strapping, and gave Mikie a face that said so. Sometimes I think he gets a little jealous because I’m needier than him and the mothers mother me a little more out of instinct.

“Well, now that the size of my butt is out of the way,” I said, “should we show you around?”

Mikie offered his arm, and Brenda took it. Mom looked at me expectantly.

“I knew you’d come crawling back,” I said, hooking my arm for her like the little teapot short and stout.

“I always do, don’t I?” she said, taking it.

The tour was somehow even duller than I’d figured it would be. There’s the golf course, uh-huh uh-huh, there’s the gym. It was goofy and bizarre on top of that, to be passing all the other guys giving the same stiff pointless tour to their parents, all of us pointing out the various activity areas on the day when no activities were being held. Yup, there’s the baseball diamond, uh-huh uh-huh, there’s the pool they don’t let us swim in, uh-huh uh-huh.

The mothers were being polite about the whole thing, being dragged out three hours from home to be bored stupid. But after a while I couldn’t take it. Even though it was against the rules, I found myself stumbling over into the truth.

“There’s where the football coach made all the linemen run wind sprints after supper and I threw up baked beans into my nose. Couldn’t breath for twenty-four hours.”

“Oh, it never happened,” my mother said, punching me on the shoulder.

“Oh yes it
did
,” I said through gritted teeth as I punched her back. I thought I hit her hard. She laughed some more.

“And over there is where I woke up in the middle of the night,
in
that frog-infested stagnant pond,
in
my bed, which must have taken ten of them to move out there so carefully.”

“Stop, stop it, Elvin,” Mom protested. “You’re killing me.”

“I was only happy that there were those kindly eight million mosquitoes to roust me, or god knows what else that rabid, in-heat raccoon would have done to me next.”

“Mikie,” Brenda said, “did
any
of this actually happen to him?”

Mike shrugged. “I’ve totally lost track. Some of it seems to be confirmed by what I hear around camp, other stuff I don’t know. I really doubt the one about the peanut butter and the shaved opossum.”

“It
happened
,” I snapped. Then I turned to the mothers. “But I don’t want to talk about it.”

We walked down to the track-and-field area, where there was a sort of reception for the parents, with games and a light barbecue snack.

The barbecue was embarrassing. They set out a huge metal bowl full of corn bread made out of dust, a couple of buckets of apples that when you bit into them turned out to be apple sauce cleverly wrapped up in apple skins, and a rack of spare ribs that were only spare because they were left on the floor after some pig’s liposuction operation. You could have sailed a boat on the ocean of fat. Nobody ate any of it.

There was one popular item, however.

Right next to the two picnic tables covered in red and white checks were two big Rubbermaid trash barrels full of beer and ice. This, apparently, was for the fathers, because they lined up like they were going to communion as Brother Jackson, the official spirits dispenser,
ho-ho
ed them up. As each father—with his boy yanked to his side—shuffled up grinning and mumbled about the greatness of the school and the football team and the camp and the trees and god, Brother Jackson bowed a sort of benign grinning blessing and slapped a cold one into his hand.