Tales of the Madman Underground (28 page)

Then we ran another lap without talking before he said, “I heard something else that was pretty rough, though.”

I nodded so he’d know I was listening. By now my heart and lungs had settled into that comfortable groove where I could run the rest of the day, and would have liked to. My shirt was drenched with sweat and my soggy gym shorts were sliding over my wet thighs; it must have been ninety degrees out, and the humidity was like a swimming pool. I paced Squid’s heavy-footed trot and waited.

Finally he shrugged and said, “I don’t think it’s fair.”

“What’s not?”

“Well, I guess Paul told them all you weren’t coming along because you had some deal with Gratz to get out of the therapy group and you didn’t want to be friends with them no more.”

I felt sick as shit, I can tell you that.

“I can tell you still want to be friends,” Squid said, kind of shy, like he was afraid I might snap at him.

“
Yeah!
Yeah, I do.”

“Maybe not with Paul right now, hunh?”

“I’ll get over it,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I meant that.

Squid shrugged, and the way he did it said it all: I still had at least one friend. “Paul’s a good guy, but sometimes he’s a mean little cock-sucking queer-bait, you know? You got to keep a balanced perspective.”

I made the mistake of looking sideways at Squid and seeing the twinkle in his eye. It’s hard to run well when you’re laughing. Then Coach Korviss trotted up beside us and pointed out that Squid was loafing and I was loafing for two, and we put on some speed, which meant Squid didn’t have air to talk and I was way out in front of him anyway.

I felt better. For the rest of gym I ran like a crazy bastard, and it made the shower feel like paradise.

I made a point of eating lunch with Larry. He had probably thought I was mad at him, or avoiding him, or something, these last few days. He explained all of
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
to me—twice I think. I acted like I was real interested and stuff. He seemed pathetically happy.

Paul was in senior honors gov, and today he was really “on,” as he called it, hassling Harry in a friendly way, sucking up and backing off, making old Harry think he was running a real discussion. I tried joining in and Paul acted like I’d pissed in his Cheerios, so I shut up and let Harry and Paul do their show while the rest of the class subsided into a doze.

It wasn’t being much of a day but I’d had worse. I figured if I took care of all my other friendships, and just did what I needed to do, I could get it down to aching about Paul maybe once every other breath.

I’d heard the booms of thunder all through French class. We were just doing convo practice and I spent the whole time flirting with Darla, who was being all bitchy and come-here come-here come-here get-away get-away get- away on me. Mr. Babbitt—Monsieur Babbitt, actually, you had to call everything by a French name, which is why I was Claude and Darla was Nathalie—made fun of me, and I tried to rise to the bait, but apparently I was just not doing what Darla wanted.

When we finally got out of class, the temperature had dropped like a brick, there was hail spatting across the parking lot, and the sky was as black as it had been that morning. It wasn’t going to last long—these storms never did—but for the moment it was cold, rainy, and nasty, and my house was closer to Philbin’s than the high school was. I sprinted to the bus, splashing through the icy puddles on the sidewalk.

“Hey, kiddo.” Jolene seemed kind of glum, for her, but glad to see me. “Your mom told you about her new guy?”

“I think so,” I said, “if it’s the same one it was this morning.”

She made a face. “
Nice
way to talk about your mom. She really loves you, you know, she talks about you all the time.”

“Yeah, well.”

I took a seat toward the back. Just before Jolene pulled out, Paul flopped into a seat way up toward the front, away from me, and stared out the window. I wondered how it felt to be him. He’d been working as hard as I had, apparently, on spending a year not in the Madman Underground. He’d lectured me like I was a bad little kid about it. Then half an hour later he’d kicked the whole idea away. I just didn’t get him at all.

His forehead was resting against the bus-window glass, so he must be getting that rattle-buzz in the skull. What I could see of his face—one closed eye and a slack lower lip—looked more dazed and tired than anything else.

Just before his stop, I came up behind him, risking having Jolene yell at me to sit down, and said, “Hey, Gratz is going to apologize Tuesday morning. No penalties for anyone. He wanted you to know the assignment is to read through Chapter Six by Monday, okay? He wanted me to tell you that.”

“Good boy,” Paul said.

“Fine,” I said. “I was supposed to tell you and I did, and fuck you very much. How did you know I’m going to be seeing Gratz instead of going to therapy?”

“I was waiting for you after class, yesterday morning, so I could explain what I told you
this
morning. Fuck, I almost ran in to ask if I could get that deal, too. But I knew it was Gratz, and sure enough, he was real Gratz this morning. Sucking up to him just wasn’t worth it no matter what. Not for
me
.”

He slung up his books and pushed past me through the bus door into the cold rain at the street corner. As we pulled away I watched him running through the icy silver-gray light, his shirt and pants sticking to him.

I rode the bus to the closest stop to my house, and ran. I don’t think I even felt the cold rain.

When I opened the door, Mom hollered, “Hey, Tiger, in here.”

In her room, she was packing her suitcase. “You’re not gonna believe this one, Tiger,” she said. “Not in a million bajillion years.”

“Try me.”

“That new guy in my life? He’s a college prof.”

“Somebody has to be.”

“That’s not what you’re not going to believe. So . . . it’s after Labor Day and the Erie Islands are cheap. We’re going to go check into a cabin up at Put-in-Bay. Tonight
and
tomorrow night.”

“Even raining like this?”

“The better excuse to stay in the bedroom all weekend,” she said. “Not that Bill needs much of an excuse. He is
so
into me, I can just feel that. You can shift for yourself, right?”

“I’ll manage.”

“We’ll be back Sunday afternoon and then he wants to visit with you and get to know you.” She looked at me with a big toothy smile and scared, wary eyes. “Can you . . . is this okay with you, Tiger Sweetie? For your old mom to . . . well, I guess I’m maybe serious about this one?”

“Mom, if he treats you good, I’ll be happy for you. Promise. What’s he teach?”

“English. Up at Saint Jerome College in Sandusky. He lives right up in Port Clinton, which is how he knew about the cheap cabins at Put-in-Bay. Oh, and they still have the carousel going, and the grapes are getting ripe, and the lake will be all around us and . . . it’s just going to be beautiful. Even if it rains we can do that silly romantic thing and walk along the shore in the rain, you know? I need something like this in my life so much.”

“Then I’m glad you’re getting to do this.”

“Really?” She looked so startled.

“No shit, Mom. Really no shit. I’d rather you were happy.”

“He’s coming by to pick me up in a little bit. And you’re sure you can—”

“I can do everything for myself I need to, Mom, you trained me, you should know.” That was a lie, but it was one she’d repeated so often she believed it; she was always impressing her friends by telling them that she’d taught me to cook, clean, sew on buttons, and so forth so that I wouldn’t be the kind of useless pain in the ass that my father had been.

“Mom,” I said, “I have to work tonight and a lot of the day tomorrow. Do you suppose you could loan me a key so I don’t have to leave the house unlocked?”

“Just leave the back door unlocked, sweetie. This is Lightsburg. You don’t have to worry about burglars. There’s nothing in this house worth stealing.”

There was actually just over four thousand dollars, but fuck my ass with a live rabid weasel if I was going to let her know
that
. “Okay.”

“You don’t need a key. We both live here.”

“All right, sorry, just asking.”

“But you asked because you worry about property and owning stuff and all that.” She sighed, sat down on the bed, and blew out a cloud of smoke; I think she was trying to look thoughtful. “You’re so obsessed with the material that you never think about the spiritual or the human, Karl. And I
know
you didn’t get that from me.” She took another drag on the cigarette, stubbed it out, and exhaled a stream of smoke. Then she really did look thoughtful. “I’m being all preachy, aren’t I, Tiger? And I promised Bill I wouldn’t be that way. He’s
so
different, Karl. So, so very different. He says I talk like I’m translated from a Red Chinese horoscope. Which I don’t think is very nice, I mean even Nixon doesn’t call them Red Chinese anymore, now that the Cold War is over. Things are getting
so
Aquarian, and what’s wrong with sounding like a horoscope? It just means I know what’s really going on. But Bill says he wants me to just calm down and hear some poetry and just sit, and just be, and that’s why he wants me to go with him to the cabin. Isn’t that
so
far-out?” She looked so tired and frantic, and all of a sudden I realized that she might be tired of the way she was living.

I’d seen a lot of “something-betters” come and go, but for her sake I said, “Yeah, Mom, actually, it
is
pretty far-out. A weekend at the lake with a good guy would be really good for you.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “You won’t mess this up for me?”

“Mom, have I
ever
messed up your dates on purpose?”

“I know, I know, I know. I’m really sorry, Tiger Sweetie, your old mom shouldn’t have said that.” She set her next cigarette down without lighting it, and came over to have me kiss her cheek. “You forgive Mom?”

“Yeah.” I gave her a quick peck on her soft, dry cheek; she had extra powder and foundation on. I didn’t smell booze. She was putting jeans and sweaters, not nighties, into the suitcase. I was starting to like this new guy Bill a lot.

By the time I got showered and changed for work, the storm had blown over and there was wet deep yellow sunlight pouring all over the street. I left Mom sitting in a lawn chair under the front porch awning with her suitcase beside her, smoking absentmindedly and trying not to look too nervous and eager. Just before I turned the corner onto Grant Street, she stood up and waved madly, shouting, “The stars shine on you because you are a special light to the universe!” I was glad old Wilson wasn’t outside to hear
that
.

 

 

Since I’d be working at Philbin’s anyway, I figured I might as well have dinner there and be sure I was early. I ate at the counter. Philbin was off getting some last-minute supplies, and Angie and Dick were coping with a bus crowd from the Trailways station.

Eventually Angie brought my burger and fries. While I was eating, something large moved onto the stool beside me. “Karl.”

“Squid! Uh, don’t you have a game tonight?”

“Don’t have to be there for another hour,” he said, “and it was getting nasty at home.”

“If I buy you dinner, are you gonna get all silly about it, or just let me do it?”

He smiled, which was always something to see, because he had big crooked horsey teeth, and it made his plain features absolutely hideous. “Aw, hell, Karl, I’m starving and was trying to figure out how to eat on what I got. But I wasn’t trying to hustle a meal—”

“Hey, Angie, feed this guy. Let me know when I have to rob another bank to keep it coming. And careful not to get between him and his dish.”

“Right on it,” she said. “Hey, Karl, you’re doing better, bud, he’s
much
prettier than your last date.”

Squid pretty much ordered the menu, and it started to flow out of the kitchen and into him. Even with a maw like that to shove it into, and paws like those to shove it in with, it took Squid a while. Now that Dick had two teenage appetites to feed, he was in heaven.

When Squid finished, he put his head down and muttered for a moment. I glanced his way.

“Oh, Mom always said it was stupid to give thanks before you got the thing, the time to thank was after you had it, so she said grace at the end of the meal. So I—well, you know.”

“Yeah. Every time I pick up a tool, I hear my dad’s voice.”

That pretty much killed the conversation, so I ordered coffee for both of us, and then we decided we needed dessert to give the coffee something to wash down.

After Angie set that up, Squid said, “Hey, so how’d the whole big uproar in Gratz’s class turn out, man?”

“I really don’t know,” I admitted. “I got my magic letter from Gratz, so no therapy for me if I don’t want to do it. Just gotta let Gratz be my pal. Paul is acting like this is some big betrayal and I guess I did chicken out—”

Squid rammed in a little more apple pie and chewed like he was thinking. “Naw,
you
didn’t chicken out. “

“I don’t know, Marti’s really gotten to be a friend these past couple days, and of course everybody else was all the old Madmen, and I sat there while Gratz ranted at them like a nut, and I didn’t get into it. What do you call that?”

“I don’t call it chickening out, because you were the one doin’ it. It surprised me when I heard about it, Karl, but you and me know about not running out on nobody. So whatever else it was, I call it a surprise. And that’s all.”

“I think Gratz was kind of surprised, too. Anyway, he’s going to apologize and stuff, and none of them will be in any trouble, and I guess it’ll all blow over, like most crap does.”

“Yeah, good.” He sighed. “Hey, thanks for the dinner—”