Mr. Was (6 page)

The road was different, too. The road I recalled was paved, not a rutted, dirt track. I decided to head down the hill, since it was easier than going up. I'd only taken a few steps when I heard a voice.

“Hey, kid.”

I stopped and looked around, then saw a figure standing on the other side of the narrow road.

I said, “Who, me?” From his size and the sound of the voice I knew he wasn't an adult, but that only made me a little less scared.

“Yeah. Who d'ya think I'm talking to? Joe Louis?”

“Who's Joe Louis?” I asked.

“The colored boxer. What're you, a dummy?”

I gritted my teeth at that, but let it pass. He stepped forward into the moonlight, showing me a long face with a wide mouth. A strange-looking floppy cap rested atop a pair of large ears. His flannel shirt was rolled up at the sleeves, a pair of baggy bib overalls patched at both knees hung from narrow shoulders. Both hands were buried in his pockets. He was a few inches taller than me, but I guessed him to be about the same age.

“How come I never seen you around?” he said. “You live around here?”

I pointed back at Boggs's End.

He raised his eyebrows, then laughed. “Yeah, sure. Ain't nobody lived there in years, not since the Boggses disappeared.”

The Boggses? Boggs was the name of the man who had built the house.

“I bet you run away from someplace, didn't you? I ran away a couple times. One time got all the way to Minneapolis. Where'd you run away from?”

I didn't want to explain, so I just shrugged.

He said, “Well, I guess that's your business. You want to stay in the old Boggs place, I ain't gonna tell nobody. Listen, you hungry?”

“A little.”

“Andie and me, we're going to grab some apples off old man Henderson's place. You want to come?”

I said, “Sure. Who's Andie?”

“Kid, you don't know anything, do you?”

“My name's not kid. It's Jack.”

“Okay, then. Jack. Let's go, Jack.” He started up the road.

I let him get a few yards away, then followed. What else was I going to do? I called after him, “So what's your name?”

He said something over his shoulder. It sounded like “Bud.”

I caught up to him. “You say Bud?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Scud. They call me Scud.”

“You mean like the missile? Like they were shooting off in Iraq?”

He said, “Rack? What rack?”

I said, “What're you, a dummy?”

He turned toward me, his eyes narrow and his lips pulled back against his teeth. I thought he was going to punch me. We glared at each other for about three seconds. Suddenly his face relaxed and his mouth turned up into a smile.

“Maybe we're both dummies,” he said. “What do you say we call it square?”

I nodded and unclenched my fists.

A new voice came out of the night. “Hey, come on, aren't you guys gonna have a fight? Come on, Scuddy-poo. He don't look so big.”

I made out the shape of someone sitting on a fence rail, a few yards off the road.

Scud said, “We were just fooling around, Andie. And don't call me that.”

Andie hopped off the rail and walked toward us. Dressed like Scud in overalls and flannels, Andie had a long, lanky body, narrow wrists, and an impish, freckled face. It took me a few seconds to figure out that Andie was a girl.

She said, “What's that he's wearin', Scud-doodle? What kind of shoes are those? They're really
strange!”

Scud hadn't paid much attention to my clothes before, but now he frowned at my Nikes.

“He's got writing all over his shirt,” she said. “What's 'Bears'?”

I'd had about enough. I said, “That's a pretty stupid question.”

I never saw it coming. Who'd've thought a girl could move so fast? Her sharp fist caught me right in the belly. I staggered back, bent double, trying to catch my breath.

Scud laughed. “Hey, leave him alone, Andie. He don't have any other stuff. He's a runaway. Prob'ly stole off somebody's clothesline. C'mon, let's go.”

“Just a second,” Andie said. “You okay, Jack-o?”

“My name's Jack,” I gasped.

She put a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, I'm sorry I walloped you. You shouldn't a called me stupid.”

I stood up straight and looked into her face. I couldn't see what color her eyes were in the moonlight, but they were big and they were looking right at me.

“It's okay,” I said. I still couldn't believe that this girl had just knocked the wind out of me.

“You want to come with us?”

I nodded.

About half a mile up the road, the woods opened into a field on the right side. I saw a small, run-down house. A dozen or so small apple trees grew in rows near the back.

Scud said in a low voice, “Keep an eye out, Jack. If he hears us he'll let that dog of his out on us.”

“Dog?” I didn't like strange dogs. “What sort of dog?”

“Big,” said Scud. “Like a horse.”

We eased our way across the ditch and into the orchard. The tree limbs sagged with apples. Scud started right in pulling them off and stuffing them into his shirt. Andie did the same. I grabbed one apple in each hand. My T-shirt wasn't tucked in, so I couldn't put the apples inside it. How many apples were we supposed to be stealing? I turned to ask Scud when suddenly he wound up and hurled an apple at the side of the house. It hit with a bang, exploding into apple bits.

Andie let out a yelp and took off running. Scud laughed and threw another apple. I heard a door open and a howl that turned my insides into jelly. Now Scud was running, too. A black shape—big, like Scud said—rounded the corner of the house with another howl. I took off, bounding across the ditch and into the woods, branches slapping across my face, my heart pounding like a jackhammer. I ran until I couldn't run anymore. Finally I whacked my shin on a log or something and tumbled exhausted into a patch of ferns; I had no idea where I was. I could only hear the air rasping in and out of my lungs. I expected the dog to pounce on me at any second.

Slowly, I got my wind back. The sound of my breathing was replaced by the buzzing of insects. I felt a mosquito on my neck, slapped it, slapped another one that was trying to get into my left ear. I got back to my feet and began to trudge back through the woods, my knee throbbing. I don't know how
long I walked, but eventually a road appeared before me. I was about to step out of the trees when I heard an engine. Thinking it might be old man Henderson and his dog, I lay low. Yellow headlights appeared, and a noisy, beat-up antique pickup truck chugged past. I waited until it had disappeared, then went running down the dirt road, hoping to find Scud so I could punch his face in. If I found Andie first, I might even punch her.

The moon had dropped low in the sky, and it was harder to see.

I found Boggs's End before I found Scud or Andie. I had come out of the woods onto the driveway and mistaken it for the road.

I have to explain something here. During the hour or so I'd spent with Scud and Andie, I hadn't thought at all about Boggs's End, or the door, or the fact that in the real world—if that's what it was—snow lay three feet deep over the land. I'd forgotten all of that.

Actually, it wasn't so much that I'd
forgotten,
it was that I had somehow misplaced it in my mind. Seeing Boggs's End standing dark and dim in the fading moonlight brought it all back in a rush.

I wanted to go back.

But would the door work in both directions? Would passing back through that doorway return me to the Memory I remembered?

T
he door worked both ways. The next morning I woke up to a silent house. I lay staring up at the yellow ceiling, at a strand of cobweb hanging above me.

I asked myself, Is it real?

I remembered climbing the dusty staircase, and the way the fertile scent of summer air gave way to the dry sterility of Boggs's End in winter. I remembered climbing into bed, my mind buzzing with recent memories. I did not remember falling asleep.

My shin hurt.

I pushed aside the covers and found myself still dressed in my jeans and my Chicago Bears T-shirt. An apple, red streaked with gold, perched on the nightstand. I picked it up, felt its roundness, took a bite. Sweet, tart juices flooded my mouth.

It had been real, all right.

Mom was sitting in the kitchen staring down at her empty coffee cup. I poured myself some grapefruit juice and sat down across from her.

“Are we having breakfast?” I asked.

She moved her shoulders up and down about a
tenth of an inch. “Make yourself some toast, Jack.” A big bruise on her left cheek, another one on her chin.

“Where's Dad?”

“He went back home last night.”

“You guys had a big fight, huh?”

“I could make you some eggs, I suppose.”

“That's okay. He must've really beat the crap out of you.”

“Don't talk like that.” Her eyes were wet. “He didn't mean to do it. I made him angry. He feels bad.”

“Are we going back home?”

She picked up her coffee cup, swirled the dregs, set it back down.

“What would we do here in Memory, Jack? How would we live?”

I didn't have an answer for that. She peered closely at my scratched-up face.

“What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” I said.

Before we left, while Mom was loading up the car, I slogged through the snow to the south side of Boggs's End to look for the door. The vines I remembered were gone, though I could see brown and leafless fragments clinging to the clapboard in places. Instead of vines, there was a snow-covered thicket of some sort. I couldn't see the door. I pushed aside the tangled foliage to get a closer look.

There was definitely no door.

Instead, its squat shape was defined by a patch of siding that did not quite match the original clapboard.

We arrived home in Skokie late. On our answering machine there was a message from a hospital. It turned out that Dad had passed out on the freeway, driven his Cadillac onto the median, across two lanes of opposing traffic, and rolled it in the far ditch. The car was totaled, but Dad survived with only two broken ribs, a mild concussion, a hangover, and an order to appear in court.

After she got over her hysteria, Mom said it was maybe a good thing.

She was almost right.

He was in the hospital for three days. When he got out, on the advice of his lawyer, he started going to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at St. Stephen's. The way things changed at home was amazing. It was like he'd become a completely different person. He made it to work every day. He came home every night. We started playing tennis together, and he put up a basketball hoop over the garage. He had lost his driver's license for six months, but when he got it back he bought a Jeep and we went on a fishing trip up in Wisconsin.

Sure, they still had arguments, but they never lasted long. Their fights were about
things,
not about each other. Whatever it was, they would work it out and nobody got hit.

Strangely enough, Dad's new personality seemed to rub off on me. I felt more positive about things, and it seemed to help how I did in school. I started high school thinking that it was going to be really hard, but it wasn't hard at all. I kind of liked it.

The subject of my grandfather Skoro's house rarely came up. The few days we had spent there represented something bad for all of us. I wished Mom would just sell it, but she wouldn't discuss it. She had a job at the mall working at one of the department stores, so she was able to pay the property taxes by herself. Mom would drive up there once every couple months to make sure it hadn't blown over or anything. Dad made it a point not to ride her about it. I think he still felt guilty about his drinking and beating her up. He called it her pet house, but he seemed to tolerate it well enough.

I thought about the door at times, but as the months and years passed the memories seemed more like a dream. Boggs's End could rot away, and that was fine with me. I never wanted to see the place again.

We had two good years.

Sometimes I sit and try to figure out which was the best day of my life. I haven't had a lot of good ones, but some of the best must have been during those years in Skokie when Dad was staying sober. Other times I wonder which was the worst day of my life. There are a lot of choices there, on account of a lot of really rotten things have happened to me, but I keep
remembering one day in April, 1995. I was finishing up the tenth grade then, and it seemed like I was growing about an inch a week. I was as tall as Dad, almost as wide in the shoulders, and I could hold my own when we played one-on-one basketball out by the garage. I remember thinking that when he got home from work that day I'd challenge him to a game. I was thinking I might even beat him this time.

But when I opened the door he was home already, sitting on the couch, sort of tilted to the side. At first I thought he was sick.

Then I saw the bottle of vodka propped between his knees.

He was so loaded he could hardly talk. I helped him stand up, and got him upstairs into bed. I went back downstairs and poured out the rest of the vodka. There wasn't much left in the bottle. It smelled like lemons and rubbing alcohol. After that I sat watching TV, the sound turned up loud so I couldn't hear his drunken snores. I don't remember a thing I watched.

When Mom got home I didn't even have to tell her what had happened. She saw the empty bottle by the sink and her face collapsed. I couldn't stand to be there so I went out and wandered up and down the streets of Skokie until long after dark trying to fix my mind on something good. But when the best thing that happens to you all day is that at least your dad got too drunk to beat up your mom, then you know your life sucks. Mostly, that's what I thought about.