Slot Machine (21 page)

The sun from a high window shot down through it and shattered into shafts and shadows of those four colors plus four more and four more. He blew lightly on it and it tinkled nicely, but the music was half what the light show was. He turned to me, allowing himself the faintest smile.

“What do you see?” he asked.

I was absolutely certain.

“I see fifty pairs of hands, made of ice, flying straight down wiggling their fingers, trying to reach something and touch it.”

He looked away from me, back up at his thing. Then he looked back at me again. “That’s right,” he said, and went off to hang it from the sash of that window.

“Drink?” Brother Clarke called out.

I hadn’t even noticed when he came in. “No, thanks,” I said. The glass kid didn’t answer, just dug out his soldering iron from a fishing-tackle box of art supplies and went to work on a lead frame for a window he was making.

Since not much else was happening yet, I sat at a corner table and read some of my book so that I’d have something to say to Brother Percy. I read the introduction about Emily Dickinson and how she never, ever left home and how she didn’t want to see anybody or make new friends or, basically, do anything. I
hated
it. I shut the book when I got to the first two lines of the first example:

The Soul selects her own Society—

Then—Shuts the Door—

“Ready to work?” Brother Percy said, sneaking up from behind and clapping me on the shoulder.

“Here,” I said, shoving the book back into his hands. “I hate poetry. And I’m
not
nuts.”

“Mercurial, that’s good. You’ve got the temperament...”

I was about to yell at him to get away when there was a loud smack against the window nearest us. We both turned to look.

“What was that?” I asked.

He pointed casually at the substance running down the pane. “An egg,” he sighed. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll learn to ignore it.”

“Faggots,” a gravelly voice called from outside. A second egg hit, and another on the next window. Then the sound of several people running away.

“So you don’t care for Emily Dickinson?” Brother Percy asked, right back to business.

“Huh?” I was still staring up at the window.

“You want a new book.”

“Um, ya. That doesn’t bother you?” I said, pointing up at the egged window bubbling in the sun.

“Of course it bothers me. If I could do anything about it, I would. But since I couldn’t do anything about it last year or the year before or the year before, I figure it’s best to just go on with our work.”

“Well couldn’t you at least tell somebody? So they know?”

“Tell somebody? Like whom?”

“I don’t know. Like, the boss. Brother Jackson.”

Brother Percy covered his laugh with his hand. Then he turned out to the room at large, where all the other artist Brothers were busy ignoring the eggs and trying to teach their students to do likewise. “Hey,” Brother Percy called out, “Elvin wants to know why we just don’t go tell Brother Jackson what happened.”

They all laughed together, a nasty angry laugh that wasn’t aimed at me exactly, but at the situation.

“Good idea, Elvin,” Brother Mattus, the Santa Claus, bellowed. “But you better run and catch him right now before he washes his hands.”

It was scary, the way the Brothers all laughed together at that.

“Fine,” Brother Percy said, returning to the subject and finally seeming to get a little agitated with me. He snatched the book up.

I snatched the book back. Frankie was right: I was getting weird. “I’ll just hold on to it until you find another one for me.”

“Deal,” Brother Percy said, and he went back to browsing the stacks.

I felt guilty. He was trying so hard. I just had no poetry in me, and no interest. But I tried, to make him feel better. I opened the book to the middle and read some more.

I winced, shut the book again. “You’re no Rummy Macias, Emily,” I said. “God, I
hate
poetry.”

“Then quit it,” Mikie said.

I looked up and he was standing there.

“You made it sound so good,” he said, grinning.

The rest of the week was fun, with me and Mikie finally together again, and for the most part it was quiet. I brought him around to show him the ropes of watching other artists work. But that wasn’t good enough. He wanted to do stuff. So he did. He painted a little. He sculpted a clay dog modeled after the late Freckles, his old Scottie. He remembered enough of his piano lessons to nudge Brother Crudelle off the stool and play for a while. He drank Brother Clarke’s espresso, which made Brother Clarke very happy. He did a little of this and a little of that, and as usual he was pretty good at everything although not great at any one thing. And as usual he was a hit and everyone liked him and he fit like a glove.

But not as usual, I wasn’t jealous of him. He had a good time, and I had a good time watching him do it. Just like I had a good time watching all the other artists do their thing.

Brother Percy kept bringing me books and I kept rejecting them. It got kind of fun for both of us. I am no poet.

We kept getting egged. We kept getting screamed at and laughed at, and usually the windows looked like there was some kind of grotesque storm going on outside even though it was sunny every day. It was all supposed to be just a joke.

By the end of the week, people had settled down to their final projects, to be unveiled at the party Saturday night. Thursday and Friday were the quietest, with groups broken off into corners to do their hush-hush work. I was the only one who was allowed to look at everybody’s work. They guarded it all jealously from each other, but they all let me see.

Friday, as we were clearing out, Brother Percy stepped up to me. It occurred to me that he hadn’t forced a book on me for over twenty-four hours. I thought he’d quit. He looked tired.

“You nearly wore me out, Elvin,” he said. “I’ve been watching you. I’ve been studying you for clues.”

“That must have been a thrill,” I said, laughing. “I haven’t been doing
anything
.”

“Yes you have,” he said, giving me the smarty smile I thought I had killed three days ago. He marched past me to the back of the library, under the balcony, to the far corner, where he disappeared briefly into the shadows. Then he came back out, retraced his steps, stood before me, and held out the book. It was a skinny little paperback,
Winesburg, Ohio
, by Sherwood Anderson. I flipped through it, just to be polite.

“This isn’t poetry,” I said.

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” he answered.

I ignored the book. It sat in my back pocket like the rest, until I went to bed. Then I saw it again when I stripped and it fell on the floor. It looked like a challenge this time. I picked it up and hit the bed, determined to give this last one a look if only to show Brother Percy that no matter how much he watched me, watched me watching, he didn’t know me.

I opened the book. When I read the name of the first chapter, “The Book of Grotesques,” in which the narrator talks about everybody he ever knew, about everybody in the world, as somehow deformed and wrong, I knew I was going to read more.

“Grotesques,” I thought. “I get it now. It’s not me after all. It’s everybody else.”

And when I saw the chapter “Mother,” I jumped ahead, for personal reasons. And when the boy said to his mother, “There isn’t any use. I don’t know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think,” I didn’t wonder anymore why I was reading this. I stayed up as long as I could that night, reading the story of the boy who did nothing but watch people and think. And who grew up while he did it.

I woke up Saturday morning with the book across my face. I lifted it and finished reading. Then I did my stuff, my run and all, in the quiet of the second-to-last morning. Saturday was a funky nowhere day. The breakup stuff was happening that night, and we were all going home tomorrow, but the day was free.

I went to the library, and it was nice to have it back to myself. I cleared my little space at the librarian’s desk, turned on that one dim desk lamp, and pulled out the pencil and paper.

“Last chance, Elvin. Sure you won’t come?” Frankie stood combing his long curly hair in the bathroom mirror, bouncing to some music I couldn’t hear. He was fired up. “It’s going to be the blowout of your life,” he said. “I know you don’t want to miss this.”

“I don’t think I’m ready yet for the blowout of my life,” I answered. “I figure I’ve got a couple of years left. You do it for me.”

“Okay, I will. Then next time, when I’m in charge, maybe you’ll come to the parties with me.” He patted my belly as he passed by me in the doorway. Then he was out. I watched him running to get where he was going.

We’d been told to skip Nightmeal and come directly to the library, so I met Mikie at his Cluster and we hiked on down together.

“Frankie’s gone already?” Mike asked.

“He is.”

That was the whole conversation. All Mike could do these days was shake his head about Frankie and his friends. I thought he was taking it all too seriously. Being too much Dad. But he couldn’t help that.

“Drink?” Brother Clarke urged us both as we came in. “Come on, now, you have to drink.” He gestured around the room where everybody apparently was drinking his espresso. He leaned closer. “It’s only decaf. And just for tonight, I’m allowing milk and sugar.”

We took our cups and pushed on into the party. And to my surprise it was a real party. The Arts Brothers had gotten together a nice spread, set up over a long conference table, of crustless sandwiches, tuna, turkey, ham and Swiss. Bowls with two kinds of olives. I hate olives, but they looked great. Brownies, lemonade, Coke, tortilla chips, salsa, guacamole, blue cheese dip. There was even a green salad and a potato salad. All the young artists were bent over the food table, working their plastic plates like palettes as they piled up. It was the first meal in three weeks that wasn’t some industrially produced unnatural form pressed out of the chopped and filled and reconstituted form of something that was once an actual foodstuff combined with many things that were not.

I squeezed in next to Oskar, the mad paint mixer. “You know what color that is?” he asked me excitedly, pointing at one of the bowls of olives. “It’s
olive
,” he said, thrilled.

We sat on chairs, on floors, on stairs, as we took our food cookout style to wherever we liked. Mike followed me up the stairs, where we took the balcony, overlooking everybody else.

A sound came from somewhere. From a black rectangular tape recorder like the ones they use in the schools to go along with fifty-year-old slide shows on the building of the Grand Coulee Dam. What was coming out of it now, though, was music. It was awfully tinny, like the orchestra was playing through a megaphone, and it was some expired classical stuff to boot. But it was music. I realized that—besides the practice-room exercises with the library piano, which
hardly
counted—this was the first shred of music I’d heard since I’d been here. It was welcome. Boring, but most definitely welcome.

“Ah,
The Magic Flute
.” Brother Crudelle hummed, closing his eyes and conducting the imaginary orchestra. Maybe he could get them to play better.

“Ah,” everybody replied. But we were mostly just being nice.

Something hung from the light fixture in the middle of the room. It was the size of a big person, wrapped in a blanket, tied and hanging eight feet off the floor.

Artwork hung on a wall, draped in black cloth. One easel stood in the corner, another in the middle of the room. A long table, draped completely in black, had bumps poking up all over it.

How had they done all this in such a short time? I was in the library all day until just a couple of hours ago.

The first to present his project, while we were all still munching desert, was Oskar. With a dramatic
swoosh
he ripped the cover from his canvas, the one in the middle of the room. It was his group portrait of us. He stood next to it, beaming, checking us all out for our reactions. As if we hadn’t all seen it already. It was the same and only thing he’d worked on all week, on the lawn, in full view.

“But it’s
so
different now,” he said. “Look, there’s Brother Mattus, the big brown part, Brother Fox over there...”

“Ah” was the general reaction, and the theme of the evening. Oskar received his round of quiet golf-gallery applause graciously.

We moved, as one floating mass, on to the wall, where the drape was removed to reveal the three masks, decorated now with each artist/subject’s own version of himself. One guy had added a layer of clay in the form of a goalie mask to his face, topping that with black-painted scar stitches all over. The next had added a nose ring, war paint, and a white goat-beard three feet long. The last, Lennox, with the round face, had painted his a brilliant starch white, adding plum lipstick and a thin black line ringing each eye. Lennox, the other fat guy, who’d coached me into pinning him so that we could both be done with wrestling. Lennox, it turned out, was a beauty.

We took a break, ate some more, and started to like the music. The crazy art-glass kid couldn’t help himself, dug out some materials, and got to work on his stained-glass window.

“This is...
nice
,” Mikie said with awe and puzzlement.

“Who’d of thunk it?” I laughed.

Just then Paul Burman brushed by us. He and Mike had ignored each other the whole week. Burman, I think, still hated that Mikie had spent two weeks trying to make a basketball player out of him.

“Hey,” Mike said, grabbing Burman’s arm spontaneously. Burman turned and glared at him. I took a step back, waiting for the fight to come and blow up the whole deal, to make this slot a little more like the rest.

But silently Mikie led us over to the other easel, half hidden away in the corner. He pulled off the cloth and showed us his painting. It was of a basketball game. In the scene, a guard who looked something like Mike had just heaved an alley-oop pass to a nine-foot string bean who looked something like Burman, who was in the process of jamming it home.