Rats Saw God (18 page)

This time Bill spoke. “Trey just organized things. He didn't actually shoot the movie. He didn't even know what was in it.”

Stokes turned his attention to Bill. “And you. I can recollect you playing ‘Jimmy Crack Corn' at Boy Scout camp. What was that crap you were playing up onstage? This Satan-smack-big-dumb-sex shit you kids watch on
Headbangers Ball
—someone explain it to me. I don't get it.”

He then turned his gaze on the rest of us, mentally opening
our respective discipline files. “I think what you fellas—and ladies—need is a little adult supervision. This club is hereby dissolved. Y'all can't participate in any school events until you find a faculty sponsor.

“Good luck, children,” he said as he shooed us out the door.

When he came to pick us up for the Pearl Jam concert, I realized why Sarah had kept Danny Rossow hidden prior to date night. He looked worse than I ever had. Where to begin? Ah, yes. He was a skinhead. He was huge—six-three, maybe six-four. His blue jean jacket must have been dragged the length of the Baja 500. The jacket covered a Dr. Dre T-shirt. A chain ran from his belt loop to his wallet. He sported a small opal in his pierced right nostril. He was as square-jawed as Sergeant Rock; no amount of shaving would have eliminated his five o'clock shadow. Though a junior like Sarah, he could have easily gotten away with patting me on the head and telling me to go outside and play. I vaguely remembered seeing him in the halls at school and being frightened. Currently, he was standing underneath a Peña print in our Southwestern-motifed living room, trying to make small talk with my mother.

“So, Danny, how is work down at the radio station?” Mom asked. Danny was such an inappropriate name for this creature. His friends (or victims) surely referred to him as Gor or Herk.

“They're cutting back on interns. Apparently we're taking up too many parking spaces, because we're certainly not a budget concern. I'll find out next week if I still have a job. I'm one of the newest, but they keep telling me I'm doing a great job, so we'll
see how it goes.” He sounded polite—pedantic even.

Sarah looked uneasy; she suggested we get a move on. Our foursome, Danny, Sarah, Mom, and I, moved as a group toward the door. As we exited, Mom snapped me back in by my wrist.

“You keep an eye out for your sister. Remember she's only sixteen.”

“You're wiggin', Cindy. He seemed all right. You could have gotten an Eddie Haskell—someone who compliments your furniture and sullies your daughter.” Only lately had I seen Mom in this protective mode. Of course, I hadn't been around for much of Sarah's dating history.

“Remember, you talked me into this.”

“Chill pill for Cindy?”

She punched me in the stomach, hard, but I saw it coming. We laughed. “You have a good time, too, boy.”

I rolled my eyes and headed out to join my sister and her date. I climbed in the back of Danny's parents' custom van, relieved Mom hadn't gotten a look at this rolling cathouse. Sarah asked me what Mom had said to me in private.

“She told me that Eddie Vedder was tolerable, but he was no Bono.”

Danny chuckled; Sarah sneered.

“So, Sis, is this our first-ever double date?”

“And last.”

I had planned on taking out my earrings when picking up Allison, but if Danny had the balls to pick up my sister with a rock pinned in his nose, by God, I could wear a couple hoops in my ears. I gave Danny the Taco Bell napkin with the map Allison had drawn to her house.

“Ugh,” Danny said, looking at the map. Then he whistled between his teeth.

“What's up?”

“Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore,” the San Diego native said. The ominousness of the brawny skinhead delivering this line was not lost on me. Stoplight by stoplight we traveled deeper into urban blightdom. Allison's house, when we found it, was at one time pink and stucco; now it was just stucco with flakes of pink making a futile effort at clinging to the dilapidated façade. The front lawn was small but recently mowed and trimmed. A small cracked sidewalk led to the front door. An all-night convenience store sat kitty-corner to Allison's, and outside it, two vagrants debated the ownership of a cardboard box. I could hear police sirens in two directions.

“Are you sure she wasn't putting you on, man?” Danny asked.

I just hopped out of the van. The thought had occurred to me as well. She dressed, after all, like she had just stepped out of a
Town & Country
ad. I knocked on the flimsy warped plywood of the hollow front door. The action hardly created a sound, but I feared putting my hand through the door if I knocked any harder.

“Coming,” I heard from inside. I recognized the voice as Allison's. When she opened the door I caught a glimpse of a bearded man in a terry cloth bathrobe staring blankly at what I had to assume was a television. Allison slipped through the opening and quickly pulled the door shut behind her. “Ready?” she said.

“Yeah.”

I introduced Allison to Danny and Sarah. It turned out that
Allison and Sarah had been in a required gym class together. They giggled, reminiscing about a square dance unit their instructor had introduced.

“Square dancing,” Sarah said, “has anything ever been named so perfectly?”

Allison wore a green mock turtleneck and a Gap vest. It wasn't quite the Viper Room, but it wasn't
The 700 Club
either. Allison and I occupied the two captain's chairs immediately behind Danny and Sarah. We picked up the remaining half of our eightsome at the home of Sarah's best friend, Lindsay Thompson. They crammed themselves on the bench seat in the back of the van, and we left San Diego on the two-hour drive to the Forum.

•   •   •

In my dream, I was graduating from Grace High School. The ceremony was taking place in the Astrodome, but someone had forgotten to turn on the air-conditioning. My blue gown had gone purple in the pools of sweat on my chest and arms. Beads of sweat from my forehead dripped down and into my eyes. Dub sat next to me, oblivious to the heat and my hand gripping hers. No matter how hard I squeezed her hand, I couldn't get her to face me. I dug my fingernails into the back of her hand, creating bloody quarter moons—still nothing. I screamed her name, but she didn't hear me. No one did. The procession of graduates continued across the stage.

I woke with Allison's hair in my mouth. We were sharing a pillow in the crevice between the two double beds of an Anaheim Ramada Inn room. Though I couldn't see them, I knew my sister and Danny were on one of the two beds above us. From my vantage point, I could see a pyramid of Coors cans that had been
constructed on the dresser. I reflexively searched for hangover symptoms before remembering that I hadn't been drinking. Allison and I had lingered down by the pool talking while Sarah and her friends partied in the room. We talked about career goals, hers mostly. I don't exactly know what mine are. She wants to be some kind of an engineer, either electrical or chemical, that choice being one of the few decisions she's yet to make. She said that growing up she'd planned to be a lawyer, but that now she wanted to start making money—lots of money—right out of college, not after three additional years of law school. We kissed last night by the pool when we ran out of things to say.

I raised myself up on my elbow and brushed Allison's hair from her face. I kissed her lips. She woke up and kissed me back.

Dub's sister, Sylvia, was a freshman at Rice, but she was often home. Sylvia had a dorm room—Rice requires its freshmen to live on campus—but her potluck roommate, flush with the freedom of college life and only recently paroled from a fundamentalist upbringing, liked towing home the occasional stray man. When she did, Sylvia returned to Clear Lake to sleep. She returned this evening to find Dub and me in some sort of late-round Twister lock, smooching in front of MTV.

“Great,” Sylvia said, startling us by plunking her purse down on the coffee table. “I leave my roommate and Mr. Goodbar only to find my sister auditioning for work as a contortionist.”

Dub French-kissed me once more to make what I was
sure was an immature point, then spoke to her sister. “We were just talking—”

“I see,” said Sylvia, channel-surfing without our permission.

“—about who would make a good sponsor for GOD. Stokes dissolved us until we find one. We got in some trouble today.”

Sylvia flipped to
Saturday Night Live.

“You oughta ask Sky—Mr. Waters,” answered Sylvia, uninterested in what kind of trouble we might have gotten into. “He's the best teacher at Grace. That's not saying much, really, but Sky's great. He treats you like there may be more going on inside you than, say, deciding what to wear to a deb ball. I don't know if he would do it, though. I don't think he's big into the Grace clubs and organizations scene. You should have Missy ask him though. He's particularly fond of girls.”

“His name's really Sky?” I asked.

“I think they started calling him that when he first started teaching. His students in the eighties called him Skywaters, after Luke Skywalker. They said that he used the Force to determine grades. They couldn't figure out how else he did it. He never graded their assignments.”

Sylvia plopped down on the couch with the finality of one who would move no more to escape the passion of others. I told Dub I ought to take off.

“Don't leave because of me, Steve,” Sylvia said unconvincingly.

I stood to go. Dub got up as well. She stuffed her hands in my back pockets and pressed her ear against my back.

“Slut,” Sylvia said.

“Jealous,” Dub shot back.

I put on my heavy trench coat. This would be my last day in the near-freezing Houston December. I was flying out to San Diego for two weeks with my mother. For the first time since my parents' split, I wasn't anxious to see her, unsure as I was about my ability to function without Dub. Dub wore only a T-shirt and sweatpants, but she burrowed into the expanse of my coat and walked barefoot out to my car with me. She pressed me into the door of the El C, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed me—the perfect image of a World War II–era taxi dancer smooching a lonely sailor down at the USO. There was something I had been wanting to tell her.

“I love you,” I said.

“You love this car.”

“That's different.”

“We'll see.”

Toby the Party and I were in the same economics class together. This meant little, as T. P. rarely bothered to show, though he was here today in body if not spirit. We were supposed to be working on a graph showing the difference between the debt and the deficit, but I saw Toby's toe tapping and then noticed the wire leading from his book bag on the floor to small earplug headphones. He was listening to his Walkman.

I finished my graph early and decided to help out Toby with my free time. When I looked across the aisle, though, Toby was shuddering. I knew this epileptic kid in junior high who shook
like this right before he went into a fit. I grabbed Toby's shoulder.