Best Boy (13 page)

TWENTY-ONE

T
HE SICKNESS GOT WORSE.
I
BEGAN TO SEE
strange wavering edges around things that were often blue. Even if there was a green in front of me like the forest as I walked through it there was also blue on the sides of my eyes. To feel better I told myself that I was being “doughty” which means brave like Lancelot and that I was doing this because it would make Martine like me. But it was hard to work in the woodshop and even harder to work in the Demont High School cafeteria because I had to excuse myself often to go to the bathroom where I'd wash my hands and feel like I had to vomit even though I mostly couldn't. Raykene thought I was nervous about Mike the Apron and told the other staff to be extra-careful with me and “pamper” me whenever possible.

Lancelot had gotten his name because he'd fought many fights with his lance. My own lance was still lying in the woods where I'd left it and I began going out often in the mornings
usually and touching the stick to remember that I was a person with a new Idea of going home to live with my family even if it hadn't happened yet. I was tired a lot but I still sometimes threw the stick-lance into trees as hard as I could. I liked throwing the lance. One morning when I returned from throwing it I saw a car parked in the driveway of the cottage. Inside the house I recognized Tommy's parents, who I'd met once before. They were very old and sitting at the kitchen table.

“Good morning, Todd,” said Tommy's mother. “Out for a morning walk?”

“Good morning,” I said.

“Agreed about the morning,” said his father, “but the afternoon's gonna be a helluva thing.”

“You mean hot, honey?” asked Mrs. Doon.

“Todd Aaron has got a secret plan to run away!” Tommy Doon said loudly. His mother looked at him. She had a big ball of hair on her head and a tiny triangular face and in the middle of that face was the red line of her lips. The lips opened.

“Tom-Toms, relax,” she said.

“It's true!” he shouted angrily.

“Why so upset?” His father shrugged his shoulders. “It might be true, it might not be true. Big diff. He comes, he goes. He'll end up back here no matter what. ‘Touch the earth and touch the sky,' right?”

The father looked at me. I was beginning to feel sick again and to try to feel better I began making my breakfast. I did this by removing the pouch of cereal from the cabinet, placing it in a bowl in the microwave and hitting the button across which a staff had taped the word “oatmeal.” The oven coughed and began to breathe loudly.

“It's not true, is it,” his father asked me, “about you running away on us?” He opened his mouth in laughter but no sound came out.

“No,” I said. When the bell rang I took the bowl with the steaming pouch in it very carefully out of the microwave. Then I got a spoon and put everything on a plastic tray to carry it into my bedroom. There was a Barry Manilow Gold Block on the radio that morning and I wanted to listen to it while I ate.

“You see?” said the father. “So, just relax son, okay? Besides, why would anyone leave this place? It's a paradise. He's got all his needs taken care of, food, entertainment and, by the way, a very nice young man as a new roommate.”

“Todd Aaron is ugly and he has a girlfriend!” Tommy Doon shouted. I ignored him and began slowly walking across the floor so I didn't drop the slippery plastic bowl off the tray like once happened and then I had to clean it up.

“You congratulating him, son?” said the father. “It sure sounds like that.”

“Honey, please,” said Mrs. Doon to her husband, “they said ‘redirect' instead of ‘engage,' remember?”

“Nooooo!” Tommy screamed. Then he started to cry. He was a fat bald person sitting in the chair in front of the television with the sound off and he was crying. His parents leaned towards him and each of them took hold of a different part of him while they yelled at each other in whispers. Tommy began to shout.

“He does have a girlfriend!” he yelled. “He has a girlfriend and it's not right!”

Back in my bedroom I turned on Barry Manilow as loud as I could. He was singing “Mandy.” I started eating oatmeal and the sounds of Barry's voice mixed pleasantly with the faint screams of Tommy Doon and the taste of the oatmeal in my
mouth and made me feel a little better. At a certain point there was a loud knocking on the door and because I wasn't using the headphones I could hear it. “Come in,” I said.

Raykene opened the door.

“Is that who I think it is?” she asked, pointing to my radio. I turned it down.

“Maybe.”

“Todd, honey, you crack me up. Listen, there's something important you should know which is that Mr. Rawson himself needs to talk to you. All right?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Rawson was the head of Payton International. He was an important person who wore a shirt and tie and moved quickly and spoke with a warm, focused voice and remembered lots of little details about you. I sometimes saw him giving speeches in front of large crowds of people during the Christmas pageant and staff always pointed him out on TV, even though I almost never watched. He'd also known my Mom when she worked as the “parental liaison” a long time ago.

An hour later Raykene came by again and got me and brought me to the Main Hall where Mr. Rawson was waiting in an office. He looked very serious as we came in. He was wearing the box of a blue suit and sitting on one corner of his desk.

“Good morning to you, Todd,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Rawson.”

He studied me for a second. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“I might wish we were meeting under slightly more relaxed circumstances, but we're not in control of that, I'm afraid. We have some serious business to discuss today, and I'd like to start at the beginning if that's okay.”

I said nothing.

“Tell me about your friendship with Mr. Hinton, or Mike, Todd. I know that things were a little rocky at the start.”

Mr. Rawson had always spoken to me as if I was high-functioning, which I liked. I said:

“Mike frightened me because he looked like my father so much that when he sometimes talked I thought it was my Dad, who's dead.”

Mr. Rawson nodded.

“Go on.”

“And then we worked together and he told me he was my friend.”

“Right,” said Mr. Rawson. “And what happened more recently?”

“He said he had to go to Peace Cottage because he had someone he was helping there.”

Mr. Rawson looked at Raykene, who frowned and shook her head. He said to me pleasantly, “Just hold that thought one second, Todd, will ya?” Then from his pocket he took out a small radio. He put it on the table between us, and said, “Could you repeat that again, and pronounce clearly?”

“Yes,” I said. “Mike said he had to leave the Lawn Crew while we were cutting grass and go to Peace Cottage because he had to help someone there. He said it was very important.”

“I should note that we're talking to long-term resident Todd Aaron, and the date today is August third,” said Mr. Rawson. “What did he ask you to do on these visits?”

“To continue working on the Lawn Crew by myself.”

“Cutting grass?”

“No, raking.”

“Did he ever say anything more specifically about what he was going to do at Peace Cottage?”

“I can't remember.”

“You can't remember.”

“No,” I said.

“Todd, let me put it to you another way. Did you ever see what was going on inside, with this treatment he spoke of?”

“Um, no.”

“I see. And is there anything else about Mike you'd like us to know?”

“I don't think so.”

“Nothing at all?”

I thought for a second.

“He bought a toy.”

Mr. Rawson looked confused. “A toy?”

“Yes, that he could fly.”

“A toy plane?”

“Yes, that had a camera on it that he could fly around and see things with.”

“Really?”

“He controlled it with a radio.”

“And by camera—you mean like a video camera?”

“I think so.”

“Dear Lord,” said Raykene.

“He called it his eyes in the sky,” I said.

Mr. Rawson's eyebrows mashed together in a single line. “Let me just get this straight, because it's important,” he said slowly. “You're saying that Mike Hinton had a mobile video camera on a kind of radio-controlled plane or something?”

“Yes,” I said.

Mr. Rawson shook his head and he and Raykene frowned at each other.

“And what was the last thing he said to you about Peace Cottage?” he asked.

“He said that the person he was helping there needed more tutoring.”

“Tutoring?” Mr. Rawson and Raykene looked at each other. “That's the word he used?”

“I think so.”

Mr. Rawson rubbed his eyes with a hand. He said, “I think that's enough for now. In the meantime, Todd, I need your word that if Mike Hinton tries to contact you in any way you'll tell us immediately. I'm giving you my personal cell phone number, Todd, which I never give anybody. That's how important this is, okay?”

“Yes.”

Then they said some things quickly to each other and after that Mr. Rawson handed me a piece of paper with his cell phone number and thanked me a lot and said I might have to repeat what I'd said in front of some other people in the future. Raykene left to do something and he shook my hand again and told me that I looked a lot like my Momma.

“And your mother was important to us here, Todd,” he said, “and made a difference in people's lives.”

Momma worked in “food activism.” She believed that nutrition was a “key overlooked sector” in the “institutional setting for the disabled.” She wanted to improve menus by assigning all foods to one of three groups: green, red or purple so that every day each villager “ate a rainbow.”

“Thank you,” I said to Mr. Rawson.

“You're welcome,” he said.

I said goodbye and left the office but when I began walking home I felt dizzy again and suddenly too tall and instead of going home I sat on a bench for a few minutes until I felt better. Then I decided to go into the woods to see the stick again. I didn't want to throw it, just see it and touch it and be back in the story of being a brave “old fox” with a secret plan to return home to his family. But when I parted the green pieces of the bushes what I saw made me very sad. The stick had been snapped in two. The wood where it was broken was still white and fresh which showed that someone had recently broken it and then put it back where it was.

For a moment I couldn't move but stayed perfectly still as the pain rose steadily upwards from my stomach and filled my eyes. When they spilled over, I began to cry.

I walked back home crying and was still crying as I opened the front door of the house and went inside. Tommy Doon was watching television and when he saw me he shouted happily:

“Todd Aaron crying! Todd Aaron crying!”

I went as fast as I could towards my room. I was just reaching the door when I heard him say loudly, “A note.”

I turned.

“What?”

“A note, crybaby,” he said again and made a pushing move with his chin. I saw an envelope sitting on a table.

“From who?” I asked.

“I don't know,” said Tommy. “It was here when I got back.” Then he slowly raised the volume of the television as loud as it would go while looking at me and smiling.

The note was in a regular envelope with my name written on it. I picked it up and took it into my room and opened it which meant tearing the envelope because it was sealed. Inside it was
a piece of paper with words written on it. The words were these: “Eyes in the sky see EVERYTHING. We had an agreement and you broke your promise. Time to start looking over your shoulder.”

I stared at the note and as I did I noticed that the letters were beginning to fade. I blinked to try to slow the fading down but they continued to grow dimmer and dimmer until finally the page was blank. I dropped the paper on the floor and stood very still in my room. More than anything else in the world at that moment I wanted to be away—away from coyote-people and schedules and the Day Program and most of all away from the campus of Payton LivingCenter. I wanted to travel through the air like a kite and land back in the crawl space beneath the kitchen stairs of my childhood house, crouching while people dropped their weight with thumps right above my head. I wanted to stand in the basement where the little windows crushed the light until it became so weak that you turned invisible.

Then Momma's voice came calling you upstairs for lamb chops and baked beans.

I stood there very still for another few minutes and then slowly I walked across the floor of the room until I got to the window. The glass of the window was warm with sunlight. I put my forehead against the warmth and looked out on the campus where people were walking and bending to tie their shoes and also making many small movements like clipping flowers or pulling out weeds or poking their hands into air as they had conversations with each other.

This wasn't my home. It pretended to be. It pretended with all its might that it was filled with people who were my family and also that it was the right place for me. But none of these things were true and they never would be. I wanted to take my
hand and shatter the window and the pretendingness into little bits. My real life was still going on somehow in the spaces of the house where I was born and the woods behind it. What I was seeing now out the window was a fake projection of a family like a movie on a sheet that they showed us once at a special needs summer camp.

Then the sheet was pulled away and we saw a couple of bored counselors sitting in the dark drinking beer.

PART
FOUR