Strays (3 page)

“Six years, nineteen placements. Do you believe that shit?”

“Whose fault was that?”

“Not me, Officer. I was in church and everybody there saw me.”

Astin comes all the way across the kitchen to grab me by the shoulders and shake me. “So Ted here’s the newbie. He probably doesn’t know about the dungeons.”

Now that it’s two against one, C.W.’s into it. “Yeah, and the guy with the chain saw.”

He’s playing along like he’s supposed to and I’m smiling like I’m supposed to, but I wish Astin would take his hands off me. For all I know, the two of them are in this together. He’ll hold me, and C.W. will do . . . I don’t know what, and I don’t want to know.

C.W. checks to see that it’s just the three of us. “Couple years ago this lady’s boyfriend was taking dirty pictures of this ten-year-old kid liked to be called X-Cess. These folks not like that, are they?”

I run some water and watch the suds float away. I ask, “How come nobody tells their social worker when that stuff happens?”

“Well, this guy said he’d hurt Sophia if X-Cess told. Anyway, it was just pictures. I heard of lots worse.”

Astin scrapes crumbs off the table with one hand and catches them in the other. “Pictures are bad enough, man, ’cause what happens after that is the kid is all bent. He starts acting out, and your Sophia doesn’t want that kind of trouble, so she calls downtown and sends old X-Cess back like he’s something out of a catalog that didn’t fit.”

I wonder if the word
trouble
was on my paperwork.

Just then Astin’s cell phone goes off.

“Hey, baby,” he says, and he melts into a chair. “What are you wearing?”

He is doing this for our benefit, C.W.’s and mine. I wonder why he needs to impress us. A real alpha male wouldn’t care.

“Guess what?” he says. Then he looks at C.W. and me. “There’s fresh meat over here. Yeah. Two of ’em.” Then he laughs.

Astin has amazing teeth. C.W.’s look okay, but mine are not so good. Once I wanted the sparkling smile and the girl in the convertible so bad that I brushed and flossed until I hurt my gums and had to go to a periodontist. Specialists are expensive, and when it was all over I owed my father two thousand three hundred and eight dollars.

He had a ledger with my name on it. Black and red ink, mostly red. After the funeral, when I was living in the house by myself, one of the last things I did before Ms. Ervin came to get me was to go into the study, get the ledger, and burn it.

About nine o’clock I find my toothbrush and walk across the hall. Wouldn’t you know I’d have to share a bathroom? Animals just go anywhere when nature calls.

When I finish and open the door, C.W. is standing there with a towel around his waist. His flip-flops are bright green. With his big, soft stomach and round face, he looks like Buddha on his way to the hot spring.

He says, “I was with Mrs. Rafter when you all were up here before gettin’ situated and she didn’t say nothin’ about no Little Noodle. How about you?”

I shake my head. “Bob just told me the rules.”

“This place don’t seem too bad to me. Does it seem bad to you?”

“I guess not.”

He slips one flip-flop off, then back on again. “School tomorrow, right?”

I just nod.

“Who’s your counselor?”

“Skinner.”

“Mine’s Yue.” He can’t help but grin. “Not you. Some Chinese dude.” This time, he takes off the other flip-flop. He pushes it around with his foot like a kid playing tugboat. “What grade are you?”

“Ten.”

“Me too. We eat lunch together for a while, all right? Last thing I want to do is end up all by myself at the retards’ table.” He checks his cell phone for the second time in two minutes. “I don’t know nobody. All my friends are in a whole other zip code.”

“Okay, I guess.”

“What’s up with this Astin guy? You think he’s big-timin’ us?”

“Probably.”

He glances down the empty hall, then leans in. “Lots of times the other kids are in on it, you know what I’m sayin’? They know how it is: maybe right off it’s ‘We’re-so-glad-to-have-you’ and then you drop a dish and they smack you upside the head. Or you wake up at midnight and there’s somebody standin’ by your bed with a candy bar. And they not gonna say ‘Watch out’ ’cause it happened to them and they want it to happen to you too.” He moves a step closer. “We get through tonight, we might be okay. Any kind of weird shit go down, you yell your ass off, all right? And the same for me.” He lets me walk away, then says, “Listen, Mrs. Rafter said your folks bought it. That’s hard.”

I don’t turn around. “Yeah, thanks.”

Astin went out after dinner, so he’ll probably come in late and make noise. He’ll want to make sure I know whose room this really is.

I spend about a minute fussing around with the things I brought. All seven of them. As far as anything weird going on in the night, I’m protected by lions now. They’ve taken over from my mother’s dogs and cats, the ones that used to sleep on my bed when there wasn’t any room on hers.

Finally I turn out the light. There’s this teacher, Mr. Parker, at my old grade school who goes to Japan every summer to meditate. And every fall he comes back and brags about how simple everything is: one pair of sandals, two robes, one towel. Well, now he’s got nothing on me.

I sat behind Penny Raybon in Mr. Parker’s class. She was the one who had that stupid party where I got in trouble.

We played dumb games until Penny’s parents left, then it was time for Seven Minutes of Heaven. Except the girls said I smelled like cat pee, so all I got to do was lead the lucky couples into the bedroom.

While I waited and watched the clock, I wandered around and looked in drawers and closets. They had so much stuff. I grabbed a letter opener and scratched my initials in their desk.

In the principal’s office the next day, I said I didn’t know why I did it. My mother walked to the window and cooed to some pigeons, and my father said to the Raybons, “I’ll pay for the desk and I’ll guarantee nothing like this will ever happen again.” I’m surprised he didn’t give them a discount coupon for a spaniel.

I didn’t even get detention, but Penny made sure nobody ever forgot.

The house shifts and creaks a little. I hear somebody on the stairs and the television set laughing at itself.

When Astin opens the door, light cuts across his part of the room. He’s still on his cell phone and acts like he’s alone. “I’m sorry, too,” he says, “but wasn’t it fun making up?” He doesn’t even bother to look at me. “For sure,” he says. “See you tomorrow. Me too. Yeah.”

I hear his boots drop and his shirt fly off. It’s like he’s undressing over the speed limit.

He walks over to his weights barefoot and does some exercises. He groans a little, huffing and puffing like the wolf in the three little pigs story, then drops his dumbbells on purpose.

“You awake, Teddy?”

“What do you think?”

“You ever work out?” he asks.

“No.”

“You should work out.”

“I hate athletes.”

“It’s not so you can play sports. It’s so you can get laid.”

I sit up in bed. “Oh, please.”

“Get up.”

“No.”

He strides toward my bed. “Don’t be a candy ass. C’mon.”

Oh, man. Here we go, I’ll bet. Just what C.W. said: Beat Up the New Guy. The funny thing is, I don’t much care. I just want to get it over with.

He hands me two shiny dumbbells. He presses my elbows into my sides. “Now curl those up toward your shoulders.”

I do it, but I’m thinking I’m pretty close to the door. I could drop these and run.

“Ten times.” He steps back and watches. “Good. Feel that?” He takes hold of my biceps.

I nod as I step away.

“This is low weight/high reps. Like eight times a day. Plus some shoulder stuff. And some lat work. You’re not gonna bulk up like Arnold. You’re gonna get lean and mean. Girls want something hard to hold on to beside your pecker.”

Maybe he’s not a goon, just a gym teacher. I put the weights down next to the others.

“Good for you, man. That’s where they belong. Use ’em whenever you want, but put ’em back. And don’t touch anything else. I’m fanatical about my stuff, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Stick to the program and in three months you’ll see the difference. It takes like thirty minutes a day and then you’re not ashamed to look in a mirror anymore.” He throws back the bright blue blanket, gets into bed, and turns out the light. His light. “Silk sheets,” he says. “You ever sleep on silk sheets?”

“No.”

“They don’t cost that much. You got any money?”

“Some.”

“Good. Let’s get you some silk sheets.”

So this is foster care — a top sergeant in a cowboy shirt, gallons of purple Kool-Aid, a sinister Noodle, and weight-lifting lessons in the middle of the night.

That’s the short version. C.W. and I walk there together. It’s not far, maybe ten blocks. All the neighborhood dogs come out because it’s fun to bark at kids. But when they see me, they stop. I tell them, “It’s okay; go on and enjoy yourselves.”

Closer to school, the scene is a lot like the one at Santa Mira: a van with a hundred KROQ stickers, somebody trying to patch out in his mother’s old Toyota and a VW with Stonehenge-size speakers. The only thing missing is Scott McIntyre in his Mustang with a Slushee he bought just to throw at me.

One or two kids dribble out of every front door and join up with another dozen. They spill into the street, then rush downhill — a river of hoodies, sneaks, jean jackets, and backpacks.

All around C.W. and me, people shout at each other using the secret code they learned from MTV. “Hey, bay!” “You come through later, okay?”

I didn’t talk to my classmates much, mostly grown-ups like my parents and teachers and people who came into the pet shop. I don’t think many patrons wanted to hear me say, “Why you buggin’, bustah? You know I’m down with yo pooch.”

But all the noise does remind me to keep my voice as deep as I can. Not that my voice is high. Not very high, anyway.

C.W. and I make our way to King/Chavez High, Land of the Colored Martyrs. We walk between two murals — MLK all pained but optimistic, and Cesar Chavez all noble and determined.

“I hate the first day,” C.W. says. “You make one mistake and that’s it, man. For the rest of your life you’re the guy who farted in gym or the poor fuck who fell down goin’ up the stairs. Jail is easier. In jail the first thing you do is find some punk, kick his ass, and that’s that.”

“When were you in jail?”

“I wasn’t, but I know guys who were.” He looks me up and down. “Why’d you wear those stupid pants? You gonna be the guy in the stupid pants forever, you know that, don’t you?”

“These are old, but they’re Ralph Lauren cords, okay?”

“Now you’re fuckin’ gay. Get away from me.”

We stand in the quadrangle and turn the map in my orientation packet upside down, then right side up, then upside down again. C.W. hails a couple of guys who are wearing the same Kobe tank top he is, but — believe it or not — bigger. All three of them have on yellow work shoes like the bulldogs who run steam shovels in cartoons.

“Where’s the administration building?” C.W. asks.

They fool around with their shades. They look at me, then at each other. One leans north, the other south. Then they stagger off, laughing.

“A hundred brothers to choose from,” C.W. says, “and I get a couple of wankstas.”

My parents wouldn’t know what to make of King/Chavez. It’s too much like downtown Los Angeles: graffiti, trash, drug dealers, criminals around every corner. My mother couldn’t get over this story about some woman in New York named Kitty who was beaten and raped while people — neighbors, some of them — watched and didn’t do anything.

Just then a scuffle breaks out twenty yards away, and nobody pays any attention. At Santa Mira High somebody would have yelled, “Fight! Fight!” Not here.

C.W. points to the kid on the ground. “Maybe he knows where the fuckin’ administration building is.”

I ask a couple of skateboarders. But young ones, not the really scary kind who stick up 7-Elevens on their way to empty somebody’s pool.

They size me up. The one with porcupine hair and an eye Bic-ed on his wrist answers, “Bungalow with the A on it about two over from here.”

“You transfer in?” asks his friend, who’s got music coming out of him from who-knows-where.

I nod.

“Well, don’t leave your luggage unattended.”

They crack up and roll away, already buzzed on something at seven forty-five in the morning.

I look down at my feet. Sometimes I get this feeling about the ground I’m standing on. About what it knows. All the things it’s seen and been through. And it’s still here, anyway.

That always makes me feel a little better. There were horses and wagons once. People worked hard and were nice. If somebody’s parents died, the nearest neighbors took him in.

Ms. Ervin said she would fax things over and she did, so we okay some paperwork, fill out some more, and then find the counseling center, which is enormous. Rows and rows of orange chairs — the plastic, easy-to-keep-clean kind for the bleeders and the weepers. Doors all around like some nightmare version of
Let’s Make a Deal.
Every now and then, one of the doors opens and a counselor with a manila folder in his or her hand butchers the next name.