Tales of the Madman Underground (29 page)

“Thanks for the company. Good luck tonight, man.”

“Thanks, we gonna need it. Everybody says we gettin’ our butts kicked.” He squeezed my arm and went out the door in that funny, roll-and-bounce walk that jocks have.

Philbin got back, and I filled out the paperwork for the new job, officially punched in, laid out setups, and waited around for whatever was going to happen. Philbin got lost in an Indians game, and Mrs. P was out in the kitchen whistling and singing to herself and putting the pies together. A couple of junior high hoods came in, but since there was nothing free here, they couldn’t smoke, and I was watching too close for them to shoplift, they left.

The first movie let out and I served floats and shakes to a bunch of college couples, most of them trying to explain
Casablanca
to each other. It sounded like it wasn’t bad, but when half of the people are trying to explain all the terms they learned from film class and the other half are asking which side France was on, you don’t get much of a sense of what happens in the movie. Twenty minutes later, Philbin’s was empty again, but that was the biggest crowd it had seen in years.

I had kept up real good with what there was to do, and now I was looking at about an hour of getting paid for sitting. I wanted a story.

I was so lost about what was going on in
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
that I might as well try
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
If I found a way to like it, Gratz’s class wouldn’t be nearly so bad.

Well, I don’t know about liking it, but I sure read it. Way past where Gratz told us to stop.

Huck would have been a Madman, for sure, if he’d gone to our school, I can tell you that. His dad was a drunk who was beating him, and kidnapped him, and threatened to kill him, and everybody in that little town knew what was happening—the only people he could trust were other kids.

And not them very much. While Huck had all these problems, Tom Sawyer just wanted to play stupid games about being robbers and things—that was something us Madmen talked about all the time, the way kids getting raped or beaten were sitting in class next to kids whose biggest concern was what to wear for homecoming.

Anyway, like it or not,
Huckleberry Finn
had my attention. No risk at all that I’d think it was about happy queer hippies on a raft saying “nigger” a lot. I was
pissed
that there wasn’t any social services or child welfare to bust Pap Finn, and no therapy group for Huck to hang out with, and the Widow and the Judge were no use, either. Maybe there’d be more slavery or violence, even some sex, or something else cool later, but right now that book was like hearing a new Madman’s story at a therapy meeting.

Philbin turned out right: people’s noses did the selling. The second movie crowd was much bigger than the first. It was a nice night for early September, the heat of the day gone and the air moist but not really cold. A few girls and old ladies put on light sweaters and left them unbuttoned. The crowd came out of the theater and in that still, cool, wet air, the pies cooking grabbed ’em by the nose and pretty much threw them into the booths and up along the counter. Also Philbin had put a pile of burger and chopped onion on the back of the grill, just to get good smells going.

Despite my predictions, we even got a little postgame crowd. Two tables of band kids, the real nerdy first-in last-out kind that do the instrument check-in and lockup, wandered in because Pongo’s was closed, Pietro’s was occupied by the socials and the jocks and their girlfriends, and they’d heard that Philbin’s was going to be open.

I had forty-five crazy minutes waiting tables, then twenty minutes of hard labor busing and jocking the register. By the time I shoved the third load into the dishwasher, Mrs. P had plenty of pies cooling for tomorrow’s pie-and-cheese breakfast special.

Philbin clapped me on the shoulder, said he figured we’d do it again tomorrow night, and I slung up my books and went out the door, turning right to go up Courthouse Street, looking forward to hauling my butt home to bed.

“KARL.” I TURNED and Cheryl was standing there with Marti. “Karl, I—we need you—”

It took me, like, a quarter second to see what this had to be about. I felt sick and furious and like screaming. “Oh,
man
. Paul?”

“Yeah. Uh—I grabbed the bat from under my bed, so we won’t have to go by your house. But, um—you don’t have to—”

“Oh, fuckshit shit-eating motherfucking Jesus, Cheryl, of
course
I have to. Are you parked—”

“Around the corner on Shoemaker,” she said. “Marti’s coming, too, she got kind of caught up in this.”

“I feel like it’s my fault,” Marti said. “Paul was talking to his dad, right after the game, and I didn’t realize what kind of a talk it was.”

“The usual thing about embarrassing the family by being a drum major?” I said. “‘Prancing around in a faggot suit and you never even went out for football’?”

“Yeah.” Marti sounded close to crying. “At least I think so. I didn’t really hear. I didn’t see how upset he was at first. So after his father left, I went up to Paul to ask if he wanted to go to Pietro’s after the game, and he threw his baton at me and yelled at me not to pressure him.”

“You know that way Paul yells when he loses it,” Cheryl said. “I heard that so I ran over to see what was up, and he was halfway across the parking lot, and Marti was just kind of stunned.”

“I feel really stupid,” Marti said.

“Paul has a way of making people feel stupid,” I said, more bitterly than I wanted to. “I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. We’d better get moving.”

Cheryl turned and walked fast; I fell into step beside her, with Marti trailing along. Cheryl was ticking things off like she was working out last-minute plans for a formal dance, that super-organized part of her taking over. “Late start, he’s probably still in his uniform because some of the men who cruise up there like that. Besides he won’t have had any chance to change. We lost real bad, it was forty-two to three, so the guys from the team are going to be worse—”

“We’ll manage. Good thinking, having that bat already. So we’re ready to go, right?”

“Yeah, but it’s going to be
close
this time, Karl. I didn’t dare go without you and then you had to work so late—I was
worried
—”

Cheryl leaned over, as we walked, to rest her head on my shoulder. I didn’t put an arm around her or anything—she didn’t like to feel held. I could smell the clean scent of shampoo, and the sweat because she’d just cheered through a game, and the warm new wool and leather of her cheerleader jacket. The hard, compact weight of her head against my shoulder might as well have been the king touching me with a sword, because it always made me feel like a fucking knight in shining armor.

I said, “You know those guys are going to stop someplace that will take their fake IDs, first. Buying liquor, drinking it, and driving to Toledo will take a while.”

She lifted her head off my shoulder, obviously irritated. “I was figuring all that in already. It’s gonna be
close
. This is the latest start we’ve ever had, and we
lost
tonight, Karl, you know it’s always worse when we lose.”

“Fuck,” I said, because that was about all there was to say.

Her car was right at the corner of Shoemaker. She unlocked it and we got in. For this kind of trip I kind of automatically got shotgun; I tossed my books into the back and Marti set them to the side.

“Did you get anything to eat at Philbin’s?” Cheryl asked.

“Not recently.”

“There’s ham sandwiches in a bag by your feet. My step always packs for every game like I’m going to eat enough for five guys while I cheer. What a duh, you know? But I guess she means well and she’s trying to do
something
for me. Since she can’t keep her creepy dad away from me.”

She made another turn, onto Courthouse Street, and headed north.

The sandwich had a lot of mayo and pickle, and the ham was that stringy stuff they sold at delis, not lunch meat.
But
, like the lumberjack said,
good though
. “Bonny couldn’t come?”

“She was going out with Chip after the game, so she’d have heard, but maybe couldn’t get away. I was so worried that you wouldn’t get out of there soon enough that I was thinking of seeing if I could go to Pietro’s and get Squid.”

“He’d be good,” I agreed.

The last streetlights passed behind us, then the golden arches (I was glad not to be working there tonight), then the harsh bars of glare from the sodium lights over the interstate entrance. In a moment we were shooting across the flat land that stretched out to the low rows of trees on both sides, the horizon a range of lumpy glows from little towns, the sky dark fuzzy velvet with the brighter stars peeping through thin clouds.

Marti perched on the edge of the backseat, over the transmission hump, putting her head up between me and Cheryl. “Can you guys explain all this to me? I feel like I came in in the middle of the story.”

“Well, it’s sort of another tale of the Madman Underground,” I said, “maybe one of our most dramatic, or since it’s Paul, our most
melo
dramatic. Now and then, when he’s been fighting with his dad and is really strung out, Paul goes up on the gay stroll in Toledo. Usually it happens after Paul’s dad gets on his ass for not being all manly and stuff. Like whenever Paul gets a lot of attention, say when he has a big part in a play, or a solo in a choir concert, or when it’s a home game and he’s the drum major for the halftime show, Mr. Knauss catches Paul afterwards and tells him that he’s embarrassed the whole family by being Mister Big Public Screaming Faggot, and yells at Paul, and usually tells him to never come home and locks him out that night.”

“Now and then,” Cheryl said, quietly but perfectly clearly, “one of these blow-ups happens right after Mr. Knauss has gotten caught somewhere, with someone, that he wasn’t supposed to be. I always wonder if he’s ever seen Paul out on the stroll.”

I hadn’t planned on clueing Marti in to
that
quite so fast, but what the hell, she had a date with Paul the next night, and maybe she should know; she was bound to know soon, anyway, Paul was such a blabbermouth. But I still wanted to get off the subject, so I went on as if Cheryl hadn’t said anything. “Most of the time when that happens, Paul comes and crashes at McDonald’s with me like you did, or one of the other places I told you about.

“But sometimes, he goes up to the interstate entrance, flags down a trucker or a traveling salesman or just some homo, and gives the guy a little action to get a ride up to the stroll in Toledo. Usually by the end of the first night, some older guy takes him home for a few days. It’s the main way he gets new clothes. Paul says he’s not really queer or anything but you can take his word or not on that, I guess. I think that stuff is pretty gross and when I picture him doing it, I kind of want to puke. But that is what he does.”

“And you guys are going up there to make him stop?”

Cheryl sighed. “Well, no. If he was just turning tricks and finding older guys to take care of him, we wouldn’t like it but we wouldn’t interfere. But two years ago some guys on the team were driving around trying to find the stroll and they found the gay part of it. We were doing
Charley’s Aunt
in the Drama Club and Paul did Babbs, which is a guy who wears a dress, and he had a fight with his dad and because of that didn’t go to the cast party on closing night. So he was up there in Toledo, hustling men, and those football players saw him and beat him half to death, and bragged it up to the whole school.
And they got away with it
.”

“You sound pretty pissed.”

Cheryl sped up. “Shit. Mostly we all feel like such
losers
. Even a guy as brainy as Danny feels that way. But Paul’s so talented—sings, draws, acts—everything!—he’s just
beautiful
. And those assholes got away with it, beat him so bad his hands were swollen up and he couldn’t play the piano or draw, he was too stiff to dance or twirl—it just makes me sick. Because they hate—”

“Cheryl,” I said, “we’re doing ninety, and we can’t afford the time to talk to a statie right now.”

“Sorry.” The little reflectors on the road-edge markers stopped coming at us quite so fast.

“So what do you guys do?”

“Cheryl hears things,” I said, “because, excuse my saying it, she’s a social, or at least the other socials think she is. There’s always some dumbass trying to impress a popular girl by telling her he’s going to beat up that goddam makes-you-sick queer. So Cheryl and me go find Paul—usually it doesn’t take long because if he’s not right out on the street working, within a few minutes he’ll be dropped off again. He listens to Cheryl more than he will to anyone else—uh, because he has had a crush on her forever—”

Cheryl sighed, loudly.

“Well, it’s true, and I thought I’d have to explain why he’ll get in the car with you—”

“Not the best way to explain it to someone who is turning into his girlfriend, Karl.”

“It’s okay,” Marti said. “Really. Haven’t even had the first date yet.” I could hear a little puckish smile, and she said, “I’d already figured out Cheryl had kind of a crush on
him.
”

“Yeah,” Cheryl said. “It would never work.”

I was looking back at Marti, and her eyebrow couldn’t have cocked any louder if she’d screamed
Why?
, but instead she asked, “So what happens when Cheryl talks to him?”

“He follows her back to the car—usually after some dramatics—and we bring him back and crash him out somewhere. It works good as long as we get there before the big monkeys do.”

“So the bat is in case you get there second?”

Cheryl shrugged. The tires sang on the pavement as we rolled into a patch of deeper darkness, so that Cheryl and I were lit by the dashboard glow, and all that showed of Marti was a vague cloudy glow of hair, and the glint of her glasses frames and braces, like the ghost of Palmer Eldritch in that book.