Rats Saw God (2 page)

“I want you to write a paper.”

“How long does it have to be?”

“One hundred pages—”

“Excuse me?”

“That's one hundred
typewritten
pages. You do have a choice. Summer school would probably be easier.”

“You don't want a paper; you want a novel.”

“You get to choose the topic,” DeMouy continued. “It can be fiction or nonfiction, an action adventure, a tale of teen angst and neglected cries for help. Though I would suggest you choose a topic you know something about.”

“Who's going to grade this? If it's Mrs. Croslin, it can be a grocery list as long as I punctuate it correctly.”

“You'll turn pages in to me, five to ten at a time,” DeMouy said.

“Are you sure you're qualified? I mean, did all those years spent probing the teen mind leave any room for a true appreciation of literature?”

“I can manage. My first six years out of college I taught English. Now, I've never worked with a prodigy before, so you'll excuse me if I occasionally fail to grasp some of your especially esoteric passages.”

Mrs. Martin, the school's human pumpkin of an attendance secretary, marched in without knocking. I could hear
her panty hose–encased thighs rub together as she moved past me to hand a note to DeMouy. Through the open door I could see Sarah. Now if the principal were at all fearful of me, the bad seed, he should have been doubly so of Sarah. Ranked number one in her class and the first junior to be elected student council president, my sister wasn't satisfied with the ritual duties and perks her office bestowed upon her. Under her leadership, the student council no longer hung spirit posters or sold M&M's to pay for homecoming decorations. Earlier in the year she organized a walkout to call attention to the asbestos-laden dust being stirred up by the contractors who were charged with removing the offending tiles. Sixty percent of the student body didn't return after lunch. CNN even did a forty-five-second piece on it that included a fifteen-second soundbite from Sarah. That particular episode resulted in a call from the astronaut warning her that prestigious colleges didn't accept radicals. I think he was embarrassed because they identified her as his daughter.

Sarah spotted me in DeMouy's office and rolled her eyes. She rubbed one extended index finger across the other. Everything the astronaut wanted in his son had been inherited by his daughter, but the old man was too dumb to notice it. If another York were destined to walk on the moon, it was Sarah, not me.

“You'll be the only one who'll read it?” I asked DeMouy. My quick return to the subject at hand, I realized, was a potentially ruinous deviation from thrust-and-parry protocol involved in negotiations with adults.

“Promise,” he assured.

“I'll think about it,” I said coolly, picking myself up out of the chair and heading for the door.

“Steve.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Don't think about it for too long. It's a limited time offer.”

•   •   •

No one was around when I arrived home after school. This was the norm. Sis was out harassing school board members… something about vegetarian lunches in the cafeteria. Mother could have been anywhere in the hemisphere. Her marriage three years ago to a pilot for Delta had been a nonstop honeymoon. The fact that she married a commercial pilot impressed me as Mom's ultimate slap in the astronaut's face. I mean, talk about a giant leap down the scale of aeronautic nobility just to make a point. But month after month of weekend trips to Aspen or Acapulco had convinced Sarah and me there was more to her choosing this new husband, this “Chuck,” than simply the revenge factor. I was lucky. I had only been constant witness to the past five months of the union. Sarah said during the first year she couldn't go anywhere with them—let alone have friends over—for fear the two would play tongue hockey in front of everyone.

I have always been, with the exception of students who failed a grade, the oldest in my class by at least a month. That may help explain, in part, why I'm so anxious to get out of high school. I'm nearly two years older than Sarah, though she's only one grade behind me. See, the astronaut thought I needed to be held back so that I would be more competitive in sports. Had I any interest in sports, I might be grateful;
but as it stands, it will take me an extra year to get on with my life. Besides, I've hardly “filled out,” as adults say of teen girls who get their breasts and boys whose arms, legs, and torso gain definition and sprout hair. Au contraire…
sleek, lean, rangy
all describe
this
physique, that is if you're kind.
Skinny, bony, scrawny, gawky
will work if you're not. Other than my pronounced lack of heft, I'm pretty nondescript: five-eleven, longish wavy brown hair, acne declining, wispy traces of headbanger mustache long since shaved off.

I'm “gifted.” I know this because I was tested in junior high. Twelve of us so designated were isolated in separate classes, taught Latin phrases, allowed to use expensive telescopes, taken on field trips to ballets, and labeled complete geeks by our classmates. I'm sure the mental picture I'm creating is quite flattering: “Property of the Borg” T-shirt, overstuffed book bag. Am I close? I admit I've never been the dream date of anyone's homeroom, but it's not like I was the leading object of ridicule.

My ears are pierced, both of them. This in itself can be offered as explanation for the astronaut's failure to put up a fight when I moved west. The first earring was a bit trendy, I admit, but in constantly looking for ways to exist outside the mainstream, I was quick to take Dub up on her offer to complete the set, which she did one night with a leather stitching needle, two ice cubes, a potato, and bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There are those males who merely fill ear holes with tiny stones hardly big enough to offend a marine. Not me. Most days I wear big hoops. When I combine the look with a doo rag, I'm a regular pirate.

I grabbed a sleeve of Lorna Doones from the pantry and made my way upstairs to my room. Switching on the Macintosh I had received for my thirteenth birthday in lieu of the CD player I had requested, I sat down at my desk. Ninety minutes later I was staring at the fireworks screen saver that kicks in after five minutes of inactivity.

My one explosion of insanely brilliant creativity came in the form of a title for a story about a young bohemian relishing his first taste of life on the highway.

ROADS SCHOLAR

A novel by Steve York

After that, little came to me. I tried to imagine my first night driving off into nowhere. Who would I meet? What would they look like? More important, what rudely formed yet priceless gems of wisdom would pass from these people of the earth to the wing-footed young traveler? I struggled with several opening sentences. I immediately deleted, with one exception, each attempt. Though it pains me to do this, I'll offer one passage describing the “feel of the highway” that I saved for the comic-first-efforts preface to the posthumously issued
Collected Works of Steve York.

He had been down roads to nowhere and alleys of sin. He had taken the high road and seen the light at the end of the tunnel, but only one stretch of pavement beckoned without respite—the one leading away from home.

Another thirty minutes passed.

Needing inspiration, I opened the dictionary, determined to begin my story with whatever word my finger landed on. I flipped to the middle and stabbed a page.

Oviparous: adj. Producing eggs that hatch outside the body.

Definitely time to give up. Reaching behind my Mac to switch it off, I remembered what DeMouy said before I left his office: Write about what I know. I've been told that a hundred times before. Sky said I needed to tattoo it to my right hand, so I would remember it every time I picked up a pen. “Science fiction,” he would say, “is the only genre open to you imaginationalists”—a term he used to define the school of writing he said I was pioneering. If anyone knew I wouldn't have the stomach to write about spacemen, it was Sky.

Luke “Sky” Waters was the teacher of the creative writing elective I took the year before in Houston. In a way, Sky was more responsible than the astronaut for my relocation to California. He was Dub's teacher, too.

Sky had also maintained that all “true” writers had had their hearts broken. According to Sky's definition, I could become a writer now. My heart had been run through frappe, puree, and liquefy on a love blender. Dub had seen to that. Maybe I did have a topic capable of delivering me from summer school. I hoped DeMouy would appreciate what I was about to do. In order to bypass summer school, I was set to open wounds that had never really healed.

I began to type.

When Mom and the astronaut called Sarah and me into our Cocoa Beach, Florida (see
I Dream of Jeannie
), dining room to tell us they were getting a divorce, I admit I was shocked. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but the warning signs had been such a part of the status quo. I don't remember them ever being affectionate. Fights were a rarity, though had Mom gotten her way, I'm sure there would have been more. Peace prevailed outwardly because the astronaut was concerned about public appearances and would concede anything to avoid a confrontation in front of strangers. From my bedroom, I once eavesdropped on a battle royale. By pressing my ear to the air duct, I could hear them arguing about my future in Little League baseball. Mom fought hard to get me out of a third season of humiliation. The astronaut thought the experience would teach me important lessons about “stick-to-itiveness,” teamwork, and self-confidence.

“Alan,” she yelled at him, “you can't turn him into you.”

But his mind was made up, and the two hadn't exactly set up their marriage as a democracy. I spent my third and final year of Little League alternating between right field (the least skill-intensive position and frequent spaz-repository) and the bench. Hearing Bobby Patton, our shortstop and cleanup hitter, beg the coach to bench me in an important game taught me volumes about self-confidence and teamwork.

Sarah, twelve at the time of the divorce conference, patted her father on the back (Mom actually did all the speaking. Alan was there to simulate a united front), and
told him everything would work out for the best. I don't understand why her empathy was wasted on that barely animate statue.

The astronaut and I moved to Houston a few weeks after the divorce was final, but only forty-eight hours before my first day of high school. Houston was home base of NASA, and I had lived there before, back when he was still reveling in the celebrity he scored for doing the slow-motion moon hop, but I was too young to remember much about it. Besides, learning about Houston proper would have done little to prepare me for life in the tony suburb of Clear Lake, where we actually settled.

Most of the children of NASA lived in the area. The only black kid at Grace High was the son of one of the space shuttle pilots. Ours was a world of sports cars, designer clothes, fifteen-acre malls, million-dollar homes, cruising Westheimer on weekends, Galveston beach homes, and private tennis coaches.

•   •   •

My freshman year came and went, as freshman years tend to do, like a half-assed nightmare whose chief horror was endless, brain-rotting boredom rather than the expected
Blackboard Jungle
scenes in which brutal, leather-jacketed seniors would smash me against my locker and terrorize me:

 

“Hey, Rocco, I smell somethin' bad. Waddya think it is?”

“I dunno, Paulie, dead fish maybe?”

“Nah, dis fish ain't dead—but he's gonna be!”

 

Nope. Nothing that exciting. I almost wish there had been.

Grace High School, “Home of the Buccaneers,” dwarfed the junior high I'd attended the year before in Cocoa Beach. The school, only eight years old, still shined: no graffiti, no evidence of wear and tear. Freshmen were herded to the large gym to pick up schedules. Inside, booths had been constructed by every group conceivable, from the mundane (student council, glee club, future teachers) to the exotic (fantasy war gamers, Russian club, falconry club). There must have been fifty organizations there competing for freshman patronage.

The biggest relief upon receiving my schedule was knowing I would no longer be skimmed into special “think tank” classes. Nope, there it was in carbon—regular English, algebra, biology, etc. I'd be just one of the white, upper-middle class, spoiled, straight-toothed, Mazda Miata–driving wannabes. I'd fit right in.

As I made my way back through the throng (I had to begin searching for the English complex) I spotted perhaps the strangest of group structures—plywood supported by clumsily nailed two-by-fours arcing upward in nearly a 90-degree angle resembling an elongated U. At a table in front of this calamity of carpentry sat a refugee from a 1970s southern rock band—long straight blond hair, bangs hanging in front of his eyes, blue jean jacket, plain white T-shirt (not the designer Gap variety—the actual three-to-a-pack classic). He was, I noted with some surprise, reading. His book was called
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Zen
and the Art of Woodworking
would have been a wiser selection, I thought.