King of the Mild Frontier (9 page)

In the morning, after trying it out on Candy, to rave reviews, I hauled that baby to school, giddy in the face of an exciting, if romantically regressed, day.

Bonnie Heavrin was always late to first period. She was slender, with long blond hair and freckles, already a varsity cheerleader. Bonnie had been the first girl in our class to get boobs, had always dated older guys. She could sing country-western
music like Patsy Cline, shrieked and grabbed on to you in scary movies, and had, for a very short time in her freshman year, run off to Florida with her boyfriend, who was about to be thrown in the county jail. After my undeniable rebuff at the Sadie Hawkins dance, I had decided Bonnie was my kind of girl.

As the bell rang, I removed the box from between the hard covers of my notebook, watching for Bonnie to make her late entrance. Five minutes later the door flew open, and as she made her customary apologies to the teacher, Mrs. Phelps, I removed the scab from the box like an artifact from the King Tut collection and placed it delicately atop her desktop. Mrs. Phelps accepted the apology as always and told Bonnie to sit down while class continued.

I stared at my book.

“What's this? What
is
this?” Out of the corner of my eye I watched as she gingerly touched it with a fingernail. “What is this? I've
seen
this.…” She glanced over at my elbow, bald and exposed for the first time in nearly two months, and screamed so high and shrill the hair on the back of the neck of every student in the classroom came to a stiff salute. She whisked the scab to the floor, jumped up, and tried to stomp it flat. I was on that floor in an instant, snatching at my treasure while dodging her heel, which
sent it scooting across the newly waxed floor like a hairy red-and-yellow beetle. I snagged it and closed it quickly into the box at the same moment I noticed a second set of heels—three-inch stiletto heels, one toe tapping. One had to look no farther to know whose feet were stuffed into those. I stood up, staring at Mrs. Phelps's extended hand.

“It's a science project,” I said.

“Give it to me.”

“Okay, but I gotta have it back for science.”

“Give it to me.”

“It's a ladybug that was exposed to radiation,” I said. “Be real careful with it.”

Bonnie was hyperventilating. “It's that scab from his arm,” she gasped. “He is
such
a pig.”

“I was going to ask if you wanted to be my lab partner,” I said to Bonnie. “This thing is an A for sure. I didn't know you'd get all queasy.”

Bonnie shuddered. “It's a scab, Mrs. Phelps. Look at it. It was on his arm.”

I already had an iffy relationship with Mrs. Phelps. Earlier in the year she had come into the classroom almost teary-eyed and announced that she had some very bad news. When someone in Cascade says they have some very bad news, particularly in that tone, you expect that someone has died, and it is
most likely someone you know. We sat in silent anticipation.

“Robert Frost died yesterday,” she said.

Before I could stop them, these words spilled out of my mouth: “Good, he can't write any more poems we have to read.”

The people sitting in front of me in my row dropped their heads to their desks to avoid Mrs. Phelps's hand coming down the aisle aimed directly at my head, and she hit my ear so hard I had to put my palm on the floor to keep from being knocked out of my desk. It was a gesture my mother had long ago perfected, used by her, also, to silence my savage tongue.

That night my father raised his hand, palm out, just as we were beginning to eat. “I have some bad news,” he said.

We looked up, waiting.

“Robert Frost died yesterday.”

“Oh, man,” I said. “Bummer.”

Mrs. Phelps glared at me now, then at the pink spot on my elbow. “If I open this box and find that horrid scab, Chris Crutcher, I'm going to expel you from this English class. You'll get an F and have to take it over next year with the class behind you. If it is indeed a ‘ladybug exposed to radiation,' take it to the science room, and I'll check with Mr. Payne at lunch. If, on the other hand, you say not one
more word about it as a science project but rather take it down to the janitor's room and have Otto throw it into the furnace, we'll go on with this day as if this unfortunate event never happened.”

Man. Two months in the making, and I was about to lose it after just one girl. I had a list….

“What you do next is going to have a huge effect on your scholastic future,” Mrs. Phelps said. “And you'd better do it quick.”

I watched the fancy box burst into flames as Otto the janitor flipped it into the fiery furnace, a humbling end for the original container of the trinket that should have brought hope to the civilized world. ESUS SAVES.

Otto didn't check the contents of the box, however, so the scab rode home in my front pocket. For years, late at night in the dark of my bedroom, you could see it perched on the headboard of my bed, in the protective greenish glow of Esus, a ghoulish monument to the mystery of elusive romance.

I WONDER IF MR. DICKERSON
would have beat out “The Star Spangled Banner” on Eddie Breidenbach's butt while we were killing time waiting for our parents to bring the cake and punch and popcorn balls to our second-grade Christmas party if he'd known Eddie would be dead before school started the next year.

Dickerson was the music teacher for the entire school, and he'd been making the rounds to the elementary classes all morning, playing a rhythm game. One student would pick a song and clap out the beat while the others guessed what it was. The person who guessed correctly got to clap the next song. It
was fun, but Eddie started having a little too much fun, guessing the titles to “dirty songs” he'd learned from his older brothers.

Dickerson was a huge man, with dark curly hair and a voice famous for echoing “Figaro…Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro” off the walls of the school halls. He was a great guy unless you got him mad, which almost anyone could do at any time. Clara Hutchins was clapping, and Eddie called out “I Love To Go Swimmin' with Bare Nekked Women” as his guess, and Dickerson called him over. The look on Dickerson's face wiped the smiles off ours. Eddie stayed put. Dickerson called him over again. Eddie said no. Dickerson said now. Eddie said, “Make me.” Dickerson did.

He bent Eddie over his knee, and Eddie tried to kick him, but Dickerson held his legs down with an elbow. Eddie's round face was flushed; the vein on his forehead stood out like a garden hose. “You better let me up,” he said.

“Okay, kids,” Dickerson said, “what's this one?” He began spanking out a song. We laughed and made some guesses, but Dickerson shook his head and spanked harder.

Eddie called Dickerson by his last name, minus the last five letters, and Dickerson's hands came down like drumsticks.

“I bet this is what you do to your fat wife,” Eddie yelled, embarrassed now beyond caring, and Dickerson hammered harder.

“She's so fat I bet she doesn't even feel it!” Eddie screamed.

We no longer laughed, suddenly struck with the thought of our own seven-year-old butts stretched across Dickerson's knee. “‘Oh, Say Can You See,'” Ron Nakatani yelled. “It's ‘Oh, Say Can You See'!”

“Which verse?” Dickerson yelled, hammering so hard now that Eddie's teeth rattled.

Eddie came from a large Catholic family, with siblings of both sexes both older and younger than he. I played at their house sometimes. They were among the last in town to get indoor plumbing. Eddie's dad, Otto, was the school janitor, which was a cool thing because it meant Eddie could get you into places in the school that a lot of other kids never saw, like the boiler room and the tiny shop where Otto sometimes fixed things for kids in what little spare time he had.

Eddie didn't tell his dad what happened at the Christmas party because the prevailing parental philosophy of the day was “If you get in trouble at school, you're in twice as much trouble at home.” Parents thought teachers were ordained. I remember after the party I told Eddie I bet he was pretty embarrassed. He said he was going to get even with Dickerson if it was the last thing he did. I told him I'd help him, because I wanted Eddie to be my friend so he could get me into the catacombs of the school, and I never liked “Figaro” anyway.

One day the following summer Eddie couldn't find anything to do. His buddies were all busy, and his sisters and their friends wanted to dress him up like a girl when he went to play with them. Otto was at the schoolhouse remodeling some small rooms just off the stage at the end of the gymnasium, so Eddie went up to hang out with him, maybe angry because there was no one to play with. Several sheets of Sheetrock were leaning against a wall in the gym, and Eddie must have kicked one of them, then turned and walked away. The piece he kicked had been standing nearly vertical, and it fell outward, caught him at the base of the neck, and snapped it. Eddie Breidenbach was dead at the age of seven. For a long time my untrained ear told me Eddie had been killed by sheep rock, and though I had
no
idea what that might look like or why sheep even needed it, I kept a close eye out for any.

When you're seven going on eight yourself,
dead
is a difficult concept to accommodate. Dead people were gone. They wouldn't be back. They were in Heaven, no matter where anyone said they would go while they were still alive, and they were walking around up there on streets paved with gold looking pretty much the same way they looked down here, only happier because God and Jesus and Esus were there.
We
should be happy for them, too. Only nobody
ever seemed that happy. Several months earlier, when my granddad Glen had died, no one had seemed happy at all. I rounded the corner to our block on my way home from school to see cars parked bumper to bumper along the rock ledge next to the dirt road that ran alongside of our house. Inside, my grandmother sat on our couch sobbing. I had never even seen her cry. My mother took my arm as I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and scooted me outside. She told me Glen had died, that I was to wait for my brother to come home and then stay outside and play with him. She had sent Candy to a baby-sitter.

I climbed up into the rafters of the garage and tried to decide what it meant. I would have some rugged bouts with death, some involving people I loved and some involving people I barely knew or didn't know at all. But this wasn't one of those bouts. This one merely set me to wishing and wondering. I wished I could go inside and make my grandmother feel better. She hadn't gone to the Red Brick Church enough to know that Glen was in a Better Place. A saint guy named Peter would meet him at the Pearly Gates, which I guessed were on the fence around Heaven. The streets inside the fence would have gold pavement, which I thought was good but wasn't totally sure because my granddad always had grease on his boots, but on the other hand, a couple of
bricks off of that street would bring a guy about all the money he needed for the rest of his life according to my dad, who had once told me a solid gold brick would be worth enough to buy yourself a damn nice car with “a nice chunk of change” left over. I had the sense that Glen's greasy boots wouldn't get him into the same kind of trouble with God as they did with my grandmother. And since there was no disease in Heaven, he wouldn't have to eat milk toast all the time and have Sucaryl on his cereal because he had sugardi betees. But I didn't like the fact that it meant I would never see him again.

About a week after Eddie Breidenbach's funeral, I began having dreams about sledding with him. It was the middle of July, high eighties in the afternoons; but in the dream Summer's Hill was covered in three feet of snow, and we stood with other kids at the top with our red Flyer sleds. Eddie was without his sled and asked if we could ride double.

I said, “Sure. Hey, I thought you were dead.”

“I am,” he said.

“Where's your sled?”

“They don't got 'em in Heaven.”

“Is that where you live?”

“Yup.”

“What's it like?” I asked.

“You know. It's real nice and they got angels.”

“Like with wings and stuff?”

Eddie nodded. “You gonna take me down the hill?”

“Sure, you want top or bottom?” Some kids sat on the sled when they rode double, bigger older person behind, guiding with his feet, while the smaller younger one sat between his legs. But I only felt safe lying on my stomach with the other guy riding on his stomach on top of me. It was hard to breathe, but you could guide the sled better with your hands, and since the hill dumped onto a road that wasn't blocked off for sledders, you wanted to be able to swerve into the ditch pretty quick to avoid getting a permanent residence with Eddie Breidenbach. Eddie and I had been about the same size.

“You take the bottom,” he said. “I can't guide. I'm dead.” When we got down the hill, he said, “That was fun. You can't go sledding in Heaven. They don't got snow.”

I guessed it was pretty hard to sled on golden streets. We started back up the hill. “You ever see my granddad up there?”

“I don't think so.”

“His real name's Glen Morris.”

“Yeah, I know your granddad, but I never seen him.”

I asked him to look real careful next time, and if he came back I'd let him ride double on the sled again, but before he
could answer, my eyes blinked open to see the sky just over East Mountain turning pink and it was fifty degrees outside and the snow and Eddie melted away. As many times as I dreamed some variation of that dream, Eddie never guided the sled and he never remembered seeing my granddad.

When school resumed in the fall, Otto seemed exactly the same. He didn't talk much anyway, and he still fixed things around the school and fixed things for us kids down in his room. I started to tell him once about my dreams, but I was afraid I might make him sad, because even though people were supposed to be in a Better Place, most folks seemed to hurt at the emptiness.

It wasn't quite so bittersweet the next time I ran into the Reaper. I was eleven and had nearly perfected the art of throwing up at Little League games just before it was my turn to bat. Today, when someone uses the phrase “like a deer caught in the headlights,” I automatically translate it into “like Chris Crutcher caught staring at a high inside beanball.” The problem with playing Little League in Cascade, Idaho, was there weren't enough kids to play in age groups. Four teams, nine players on a team, ten if I was lucky, age range up to fourteen. Eleven-year-old Chris Crutcher wound up standing in the batter's box facing fourteen-year-old Jon Probst, later of slugfest fame, who had a
fastball as nasty as his temper and zero control. When one of the bigger kids would get a hit off Jon, he'd get even by scaring the next younger kid into outer space. Very few of the younger, smaller kids could hit at all, so we were supposed to rely on our small strike zones to get on base so the big kids could knock us in. That required a good eye and the capacity for quick evasive action, an art I perfected by dropping to the good earth before the ball actually left Jon's hand—because once it had, and I saw it coming, I inevitably froze until the last second when I turned my back, took the hit between the shoulder blades, and squalled like the bawlbaby I had become.

“Shake it off and go to first,” my coach would yell, embarrassed at my writhing in the dirt like a stomped-on garter snake. But I was a far-reaching thinker and knew if I were hurt badly enough, my stint as a target for the vengeful Jon Probst for that day was over. On one such day Coach disgustedly sent me home, but what seemed like a reprieve turned out to be the beginning of a nightmarish summer: C.C. vs. the Very Grim Reaper.

My parents stayed at the game, probably as disgusted as my coach by my less-than-manly behavior, and once I stumbled out of sight of the spectators, I dashed home to spend the last few innings in solitude, scouring the house for my dad's
old
Playboys
and sneaking through my brother's storage closet to retrieve baseball cards I was sure he'd stolen from me. God, I loved solitude.

The newest issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
lay on the coffee table. I loved the
Saturday Evening Post:
the Norman Rockwell covers, the filler cartoons at the bottoms of many pages, sometimes even the articles. I always opened the magazine to the middle, about where I thought the cartoons began. On this day, there were no cartoons on that page, only the two-by-three picture of a six-year-old boy.

On the title page was a black-and-white picture of a vacant lot on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The article said a college student driving back from a weekend visit had noticed a refrigerator box in the lot, one he didn't remember seeing before. He stopped and found the body of a naked six-year-old boy, frozen in the winter temperatures. The caption under the boy said the picture was postmortem. I found the word in the dictionary. It meant the picture was taken after the boy was dead. Somebody cut this little boy's hair, the article said. Somebody bathed him and trimmed his nails. Does anyone out there know who he is? There were no faces on milk cartons back then, no “Have You Seen This Child?” ads in magazines and newspapers. I stared at the boy's face, the eyes unfocused, a small patch of skin
peeling from his lower lip. They didn't know how long he'd been dead; his body wouldn't have decomposed in those temperatures. Back to the picture. Short blond hair, a cowlick in front; eyes a little slanted. Flat. Dead.

That evening I showed the picture to my brother. “I thought you were hurt,” he said. “Shouldn't you be in the hospital or something?”

“Yeah, but look at this picture. I mean, do you know what postmortem is? They took this picture after this kid was dead.”

“Yeah, I know what postmortem is. There should be a picture like that of you right now, after the way you were rolling in the dirt like you'd been shot. Man, why do you have to act like you're being crucified every time you get hurt a little?”

“Okay, I won't do that anymore. But look at this picture.”

I showed it to my parents. My mom could tell how much it bothered me. My dad probably could, too, but he didn't like that it bothered me so much, so in his perception, it didn't.

I showed it to my sister and explained to her that the kid was dead. She said, “Oh, no, sir.”

Sometime after midnight, I crept into John's room and
asked if I could sleep with him. He was groggy enough to let me in bed for about fifteen minutes, but then woke up enough to kick me out onto the floor. “Jeez, you little weirdo, go back to your room.” No chance. I hadn't been in bed with my parents since I was five or six, but I crept downstairs to request asylum. That was my last decent night's sleep indoors that summer.

A stack of
Saturday Evening Posts
dating back to 1936 stood in our basement storage room. It wasn't a complete set—several issues from the war years were missing—but my mother collected as many as she could. It didn't take her long to discover I was stalking the Philadelphia kid, so instead of putting it with the rest, she hid it. Every day I'd find it. Every day she'd ask if I'd been looking at it, and every day I'd lie and say no, then she'd hide it somewhere else, and in the first hours of the following morning, when she'd gone to the service station to do some of my dad's light bookkeeping, I'd ransack the house until I found it, then sit on the couch and stare at those eyes that were so obviously not staring back. I'd read the article again. I'd touch the picture. Then I'd put it back almost exactly as I'd found it, but not quite, because sometime in the evening my mom would accuse me of looking at it again. Why did I want to torture myself like that? she'd ask. Why not just let it go?