His Illegal Self (2 page)

2

He forgot so much, but he remembered this, years later—it was a good seat, an armrest between them which the mother lifted so the boy could rest his face against her upper arm. When she had crammed her big pack between her legs she spelled out a tickly secret word onto his palm, her fingernails a natural seashell pink, her fingers brown.

I know what you wrote, he said.

I don’t think so.

He got the stuff from the back pocket of his shorts and found his chewed-up yellow pencil. He rested Cameron’s father’s business card on his knee and carefully wrote DILE on the back of it. When she had read it he returned everything to its place.

Wow. That’s a lot of stuff you carry.

My papers, he said.

I didn’t know boys had papers.

The boy could not think what he could say. They sat awhile. He looked up the aisle. He had never been on a Greyhound before and was pretty happy to see the toilet at the back.

You’re very tall, Dial, he said at last.

Tall for a girl. Not everybody’s cup of tea.

You’re my cup of tea, Dial.

She laughed suddenly loudly, putting her lovely hand across her mouth. He wished he could call her Mom.

You have lots of colors, Dial. The boy’s ears were burning. He did not know where all these words were coming from. Grandma would have been amazed to hear him talk so much.

The mother took a hank of her hair and pulled it over one eye like a mask, squinting through it, a field of wheat, every seed and stalk a slightly different color. She had a big nose and wide lips. She was very beautiful, everyone had always said so, but this was bigger than they said, better.

I’m a bitzer, she said.

What’s a bitzer, Dial?

Suddenly she kissed his cheek.

Bits of this and bits of that.

He was shy again, looked up the aisle. The windshield glass was starred with sunlight.

Dial was searching in the big hiking pack between her legs. She had lots of books down there, he saw them, candy too, some yellow socks.

How will Grandma find me?

The book she now removed had two dogs fighting on its cover, blood was everywhere, she was giving him a Hershey bar. The chocolate was soft and bendy. Thank you, he said. How will she find me, Dial?

She opened her strange book at the beginning. He noted with disapproval that she cracked its spine.

Grandma knew we were going to run away?

Uh-huh, she said, and turned a page.

He tasted the melted chocolate, considering this.

Is the chocolate nice? she asked at last.

Yes, Dial. Thank you. It’s my favorite.

She lowered the dog book to her lap. You’ll talk to her real soon, she said. We’ll phone her.

Where will we go?

You heard—Philly.

Apart from that.

It’s a surprise, sweetie. Don’t look so worried. It’s the best surprise you could ever have.

She went back to her book. He thought, If my grandma had known I was leaving she would have kissed me good-bye. Also—she would have made him take his own suitcase and promise to brush his teeth. So his grandma was against all this. A good sign, so he figured.

What sort of surprise? he asked. He could think of only one surprise he wanted. His heart was going fast again.

A really, really good one, she said, not looking up.

He asked was it a motel but he didn’t think it was, not for a second.

Better than that, she said. And turned a page.

He asked was it the beach but he didn’t think it was that either. The beach made her lower the book once more. Do you like to swim at Kenoza Lake?

You know about the lake?

Baby, you and I were there together.

No, he said, confused.

At Kenoza Lake.

But at Kenoza Lake he never had a mother. That was the biggest thing about it. It would always be summer, in his memory, the roadsides dense with goldenrod and the women from the village coming to steal the white hydrangeas just like their mothers stole before them. The geese would be heading up to Canada and the Boeings spinning their white contrails across the cold blue sky—loneliness and hope, expanding like paper flowers in water.

It was always summer, always chilled by fall, the mother’s absence everywhere in the air, in the maple leaves, for instance, lifting their silver undersides in the breeze which corrugated the surface of Kenoza Lake as his grandmother swam to and fro between the dock and a point in the middle of the lake where she could line up the middle chimney with the blinking amber light up on 52. Later he would wonder more about his missing grandfather and the Poison Dwarf who had once been Grandma’s friend, but that would be a different person who would ask those questions, all the old cells having died, been sloughed off, become dust in the New York City air.

He could swim too. He had the shoulders even then, but the lake water was slimy and viscous and it left a clammy feeling on his skin which the sun would not burn off. He never did ask but he was certain it was millions of little dead things and he thought of the wailing signals on the radio and lay on his stomach on the dock and his back became black and his stomach was pale and ghostly as a fish.

Small black ants were almost everywhere. Some he killed for no good reason.

He looked up at Dial. She had huge dark eyes, like an actress on a billboard in Times Square. He would have swum with her any day he could.

Would you like to go to a beach? she asked him now.

But this wasn’t what he wanted.

Will we stay in a motel?

She looked at him with wonder. You outrageous little creature, she said. We’re just going to a sort of scuzzy house. We’ll probably be sleeping on the floor.

Maybe there’s TV, he said. None of this was what he really meant. It was his upbringing, to “not say.”

A lot better than TV, she said.

That’s where the surprise is, Dial? In the scuzzy house?

Yes, Jay.

He was so happy he thought he might be sick. He snuggled into her then, his head resting against her generous breasts, and she stroked his head, the part low on the neck where all the short hairs are.

Maybe I can guess what the surprise is, he said after a while. In the scuzzy house.

You know I won’t tell you if you do.

He did not need to say. He knew what it was exactly. Just as Cameron had foretold. His real life was just starting. He was going to see his dad.

3

Except for one single photograph, the boy had never seen his dad, not even on TV. There had been no television permitted in Grandma’s house on Kenoza Lake, so after he had helped light the fires in fall the boy picked among the high musty shelves of paperbacks—some words as plain as pebbles, many more that held their secrets like the crunchy bodies of wasps or grasshoppers. He could read some, as he liked to say. Upstairs there was a proper library with a sliding ladder and heavy books containing engravings of fish and elk and small flowers with German names which made him sad. On the big torn sofas where he peered into these treasures, there was likely to be an abandoned Kipling or Rider Haggard or Robert Louis Stevenson which his grandma would continue with at dusk. In this silky water-stained room with its slatted squinting views across the lake, there was a big glowing valve radio which played only static and a wailing oscillating electric cry, some deep and secret sadness he imagined coming from beneath the choppy water slapping at the dock below.

Down in the city, at the Belvedere, there was a pink GE portable TV which always sat on the marble kitchen countertop; once, when he thought his grandma was napping, he plugged it in. This was the only time she hurt him, twisting his arm and holding his chin so he could not escape her eyes. She spit, she was so crazy—he must not watch TV.

Not ever.

Her given reason was as tangled as old nylon line, snagged with hooks and spinners and white oxidized lead weights, but the true reason he was not allowed to watch was straight and short and he learned it from Gladys the Haitian maid—you don’t be getting yourself upset seeing your mommy and daddy in the hands of the po-lees. You never do forget a thing like that.

Cameron Fox was the son of the art dealers in 5D. He had been expelled from Groton on account of the hair he would not cut, maybe something else as well. Grandma paid Cameron to be a babysitter. She had no idea.

It was in Cameron’s room the boy saw the poster of Che Guevara and learned who he was and why he had no mother and father. Not even Gladys was going to tell him this stuff. After his mother and the Dobbs Street Cell had robbed the bank in Bronxville, a judge had given Che to the permanent care of his grandma. That’s what Cameron said. You got a right to know, man. Cameron was sixteen. He said, Your grandpa threw a Buddha out the D line window. A fucking Buddha, man. He’s a cool old guy. I smelled him smoking weed out on the stairs. Do you get to hang out with him?

No chance. No way. The one time they found Grandpa and the Poison Dwarf at Sixty-second Street, the boy and his grandma went to the Carlyle.

Cameron told the boy he was a political prisoner locked up at Kenoza Lake. His grandma made him play ludo which was a game from, like, a century before. Cameron gave him a full-page picture of his father from
Life.
Cameron read him the caption. Beyond your command. His dad was cool looking, with wild fair hair. He held his fingers in a V.

He looks like you, said Cameron Fox. You should get this framed, he said. Your father is a great American.

But the boy left 5D by the Clorox stairs and before he entered his grandma’s kitchen he folded up his father very carefully and kept him in his pocket. That was the beginning of his papers more or less.

In the boy’s pocket there were clear bits and mysteries. Cameron would sometimes try to explain but then he would stop and say, That’s too theoretical right now. Or: You would have to know more words. Cameron was six feet tall with a long straight nose and a long chin and an eye which was just a little to one side. He read to Che from
Steppenwolf
until they both got bored with it, but he would not let him watch TV either. He said television was the devil. They played poker for pennies. Cameron put on Country Joe and the Fish and he sat in ski socks before the electric radiator, spreading the skin condition that he hoped would save him from Vietnam.

The boy looked out for TV but never saw too much. Once or twice they were in a diner with TV but Grandma made them turn it off. She was a force. She said so.

So when Dial and Jay came into the Philadelphia Greyhound station, it was a big deal to see the black-and-white TV, high up in the corner of the waiting room. The 76ers were losing to Chicago. Old men were watching. They groaned. They spit. Goddamn. The boy stared also, waiting for the show to change to maybe Rowan and Martin, some other thing he’d heard of, Say good night, Dick. He was excited when the mother went out to find a telephone.

Don’t talk to anyone, she said, OK?

OK, he said. He stared at the blue devil, knowing something wonderful would happen next.

The Bulls fouled three times before the mother came back.

What next? he asked, noticing she had gotten sad. She crouched in front of him.

We’ll stay in a hotel, she said. How about that?

You said we were going to a scuzzy house, he said.

Plans have changed, she said, getting all busy with a cigarette.

With room service? He was acting excited, but he was very frightened now, by her smell, by the way she did that thing—kind of hiding her emotions in the smoke.

I can’t afford room service, she said, and wasted her cigarette beneath her heel.

In the corner of his eye he could see cartoons. That was nothing to him now.

Are you listening to me, Jay?

There’s no one else, he said. He meant, Who else could he listen to, but she understood something else and hugged him to her tightly.

What’s wrong?

I like you, Jay. Her eyes had gone all watery.

I like you, Dial, he said, but he did not want to follow her outside into the dark and shadow, beside tall buses pouring their waste into the pizza parlors. When they were walking upstairs he imagined they were going somewhere bad.

What is this?

A hotel, baby.

Not like the motel in Middletown, New York, where they stayed in the snowstorm, not the Carlyle, that’s for sure. He was gutted as a largemouth bass. Something had gone wrong.

They had to climb the stairs to find the foyer. The desk was quilted with red leather. Behind it sat a woman hooked up to a tank of gas. She took fifteen dollars in her fat ringed hand—no bath, no playing instruments of any kind. Then they walked along green corridors with long tubes of light above, and the sounds of TVs applauding from the rooms. Dial’s face was green in the hallway, then dark and shrunken inside the room. There were lace curtains, a red neon
CHECKS CASHED.
A single bed with a TV near the ceiling.

Not yet, she said, seeing where his attention was.

You promised.

I promised, yes. We can lie in bed and watch TV, but you must wait until I come back.

Where are you going now?

I have to do some more stuff, about the secret.

Is the secret OK?

Yes, it’s OK.

Then can I come?

Baby, if you come it won’t be a secret. I won’t be long.

She was kneeling. Looking at him. Pale. Way too close.

Just stay here, she said. Don’t let anyone inside.

And she kissed and hugged him way too hard.

After the key turned in the lock he stood beneath the television. The screen was dusty, spotted. Someone had run a finger down it.

He sat on the bed and watched the door awhile. The bedspread was pale blue and kind of crinkly, nasty. Once someone walked past. Then they came back the other way. He stayed away from the window but he could see the red wash of the
CHECKS CASHED
sign.

Dial had left her backpack on a chair. Its mouth was tied up with a piece of cord but you could still see some stuff inside—her book and a box of something small and bright like candy. That was what he went for, naturally, fishing it out with just two fingers. UNO is one of the world’s most popular family card games—he read this—with rules easy enough for kids, but challenges and excitement for all ages. He dropped the Uno back inside the pack, thinking she did not know her son.

The TV was beyond his reach.

He dragged across a chair and sat on it, still looking up. He could see the small red button.
POWER.

A woman in high heels clattered down the hallways, laughing, crying maybe. He climbed up on the chair and pushed the button.

He was real close as the picture got called up from the tube, gathering itself and puffing out until it almost tore his eyes.

He saw the picture, did not understand who was sending it—there he was, him, Che Selkirk, at Kenoza Lake, New York, holding up a largemouth bass and squinting. The sound was roaring. Everything was gold and bleeding orange at the edges. He turned it off, and heard it suck back in the tube.

Something very bad had happened. He did not know what it could be.