Tales of the Madman Underground (33 page)

“I wish I remembered those times better.”

“I wish you did too. They were good times. The waffles got better later, but the times were the best they ever were.”

She checked to see if I was smiling, so I did, and she sort of smirked.

We plated up the two round, thick waffles—waffle on an oven-warmed plate, then strawberry syrup, then Reddi-wip, the way Dad always said was right, because that way the syrup didn’t defluff the Reddi-wip, and he claimed the Reddi-wip insulated the waffle and syrup and kept it all hot. He also said we had to take that first bite within half a minute of doctoring the waffle, to get the full effect.

The Road Runner theme came from the next room, so by common consent, we grabbed our plates and forks, I popped the Reddi-wip can back into the fridge. The door triggered the usual cat stampede, so that I felt like I was wading to the living room upstream through a river of cats.

Nonetheless, we were on the sofa and digging into the waffles well within the time limit. As Wile E. Coyote was setting up his first trap, something with an Acme Giant Hammer, Mom said, “See, the world played kind of a dirty trick on me, Tiger. Maybe on every woman my age. When I was ten, the last winter of World War Two, me and all my friends used to say all we really wanted was the five Bs, in the right order—bra, boyfriend, bridal shower, bungalow, baby.

“And then the next spring and summer, all these gorgeous boys—well, they looked like men to me—came home in uniforms, and it just seemed to me like, wow, the best hunting there will ever be, and I barely have boobs yet. So I hurried up, if you see what I mean. By the time I was twelve I was the boy-craziest little flirt you’ve ever seen, and by the time I graduated, so many boys wanted in my pants so bad that I was a
legend
, an absolute fucking
legend
.

“So there I was hopping the counter for Philbin, slinging burgers for the lunch crowd just like you did all summer, and in came this guy who’d stayed in the service a little longer, still had those hard young muscles even though he was a bit older. And he was the bookkeeper and sold jobs for a contractor here in town, and the day that he bought out the guy he worked for, he took me over to Vinville for dinner, and then back here to see
The Best Years of Our Lives
at the Oxford, and then since I wasn’t old enough to get into a bar, he drove us down to that beach along the Little Turtle River, and we drank beer and talked. At first I thought it was so weird, Doug kept going on about how much work he had lined up, and being able to afford a house, and what he had in the bank, until I suddenly realized he was proving he had enough to marry me. I realized that when he pulled out the engagement ring, and got down on his silly knees.” She leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Funny the things waffles bring to mind. Anyway, a deputy found us sleeping in the car at ten the next morning, and made me prove my age, and we went home hungover and laughing. Next thing I knew, here we all were, and he was running for mayor.”

“I never heard that version of it before.”

“I think it embarrassed Doug. I always told him it was a shame I was too hungover for practical jokes, or I’d have hidden my I.D. and told the deputy he’d kidnapped me from a convent school.” She sighed. “Anyway, that was the good part of the story. After that it was one long dirty trick. I was a real good wife to him, Tiger, you know that.”

“He always said so.”

“Well, except when he was ranting and screaming at me like a nut, but that came later. But by then I guess I was doing a lot of the screaming too. Was it really scary for you, Tiger?”

On the screen, Wile E. Coyote looked down, saw there was nothing under him, and waved bye-bye. “Sometimes,” I said. “When you sounded, I don’t know, like you were going to
hurt
each other. Most of the time it just made me really sad.”

“You loved us both, didn’t you? And now all that seems so weird to me because Doug and I were just so different. He was very Earth, you know, and I’m completely Water, and—”

“I guess that makes me Mud.”

“Don’t joke about important things, Karl, I don’t talk about them very often.”

We watched the TV for a while longer, and then I said, “I’m sorry if I sounded like I was making fun of you.” I took my last bite of waffle and waited. A bunch of kids on the screen were singing and dancing about chocolate milk. “Those were great waffles.”

I got up and carried the plates out to the kitchen. There were so few dirty dishes that it seemed like a good idea just to do a fast wash-rinse-stack.

“Sweetie, you don’t have to do that.” Mom was posing in the doorway with one hand up on the doorframe and the other arm wrapped over her head, holding a cigarette just above her ear. I was pretty sure I’d seen that pose in an ad someplace.

“You seemed pretty happy with the kitchen being clean, thought I’d give you another few hours of it.” I slipped the waffle iron into the soapy water and scoured hard with the net brush. “Besides, this is my sneaky way to make waffles happen again.”

She hugged me from behind. “Well, all right, you always did love your waffles. And your friends and your parents . . . you’re a good kid, Tiger Sweetie. I know I don’t always let you know that, but you are.”

She was really in good-mother mode this morning. It never lasted but it was always kind of nice, like getting a short visit from the mother I remembered, although it always ripped out my heart.

Her hug, right now, still felt good.

I moved the waffle iron onto the counter, upside down on top of a dish towel, to drip dry. It was like neither of us knew what to say next, or what the other one was going to say. That was kind of new and weird. “So,” she said, “since you can’t be a slave of capitalism today, do you have time to catch the second cartoon on Road Runner?”

“I do,” I said. I poured us both some fresh coffee from the percolator, and we went back to the living room. It was something with Tweety Bird we’d seen ten thousand times before.

When the commercial started promoting a little plastic guy that threw stuff, Mom said, “My head is full of so much programming from when I was a girl.
Girls
get to be themselves, but as soon as you grow boobs,
bam
, you’re not yourself ever again. At least not till you’re an old lady. I’m hoping to be one of those really cool old ladies that no one can ever shut up that just tells everyone what she thinks and doesn’t let men decide for her whether it makes sense or not.” She grinned at me. “Don’t say, ‘You’re pretty far along already,’ or you’re dead, Tiger. But I have to admit, sometimes I’m just being free and myself and enjoying the day, and sometimes I do like upsetting all the old poops in suits.” She sighed. “And sometimes I just wish some big strong guy would ride in on a white horse and rescue me.”

“Would the horse get along with all the cats?”

“Good question.” She leaned and stretched. “I feel so good and so mellow this morning. If I could just always not care as much as I don’t care right now, everything would be okay. But I’ve spent so much time caring about stuff that doesn’t matter. First about getting a man, and then about being a good wife and mommy, and then about being groovy and not missing out on the Revolution. Lately I worry a lot about whether I’m still a fox or turning into an old stove, and whether any nice man will ever like me, and whether Neil is ever going to act like a real boyfriend.”

I wouldn’t’ve wasted any of
my
wondering-energy wondering whether Neil would ever act like a real mammal, myself, but it didn’t seem like a good time to say that.

“And it’s times like that I really miss Doug. He was always so certain and so serious about everything and he was a mean old fascist and he was way too hard on you and made you do all that manly-manly stuff, but at least I knew who I was and where I was.”

“I
like
doing all that manly stuff,” I said. “I like making things and fixing things and earning money, and if I had time I’d like to play sports. It’s just the way I am.”

“It’s the way you think you are because you’ve been brainwashed and programmed and stuffed all full of angry energy by all these men in power. This is what so many men do to themselves. You think it’s just the way you are but you’re really just trying to prove you’re male. Why don’t you get out a little more, have some fun, maybe go out with somebody like that cheerleader girl again, or Cheryl with the big boobs, or that Darla, she’s pretty sexy. Men are always doing all these things to be men, and the only thing that can really make a man a man is a woman. That’s what Neil always says.”

“And Neil is the authority on being a man?”

“A woman knows, Karl, a woman is the only one who knows. He’s a lot more of a man than your father ever was. Being a man is about being what a woman really wants and needs.”

The one time I’d tried putting a real lock on my door, to keep out the beautiful free-spirited kitties, who I should be more like instead of always worrying about ucky ucky money, Neil had gone up, while I was at McDonald’s, and kicked the whole goddam door down, and then he and Mom had looked hard and found three of my cans. Luckily one of them I had just started and it didn’t have much in it. They had rushed off to a dealer and then the bar.

They were planning to go shopping and get a wedding dress and rings and a tux and so forth, too, but they’d drunk and smoked too much of my money before the stores opened the next day, and anyway it wasn’t enough, it just looked like a lot to them. It took me a week to put my room back together, and of course I wasn’t going to see the money again.

But the thing that pissed me off the most was that if Neil wanted to break into my room, all he had to do was take two little screws out of the hasp; he’d kicked down the door because he was too dumb to figure out how to use a screwdriver. Looked to me like I’d never be dumb enough to be a real man.

I thought about saying a lot of things, but I didn’t say them; maybe I wanted to keep the feeling of the waffles, and her talking like her old self, in my head for just a little longer. Maybe I was hoping she’d apologize like she sometimes did, when she said things that really hurt.

What happened instead was that she went to the kitchen for more coffee, and screamed. I ran out to see what was the matter and she was staring out the window over the sink, tears pouring down her face. I looked and saw something that looked like a bit of shredded blue rug out in the yard; then I realized it was blue-gray, and that it was Ocean, one of her prettiest cats.

She was whimpering. “He’s all in pieces. Oh, Karl. Oh, Karl. Oh, poor Ocean.”

“Oh, crap,” I said, and started pulling my rubbers on again.

It would have made sense to leave Ocean out there, of course, and bury him once the rain let up. He wasn’t going to be bothered. Or it might have made a certain amount of sense to go out, pick him up in a garbage bag, and bring him in to lie in state before going out to Cat Arlington. But Mom was wailing, and I thought I’d better get him out of sight as soon as possible, so I pulled on an old Boy Scout poncho I had, zipped up the rain hood, and went out there.

Most of the blood had washed away but there was no question, this was another cat pretty much ripped in half by that old coon, or maybe his twin brother. At a guess, he’d probably figured out that this backyard was a reliable source of fresh cat, and acquired a taste for it—raccoons’ll do that, they’ll eat anything, but if there’s something reliable, they’ll get to like it. Ocean had been pretty small and didn’t stand a chance.

I’d have to tell Wilson to hurry up about letting his buddies in the Coon Hunters’ Club know about our local cat-killer. It was one thing when he was getting one or two a year, but this was the second one this week and the fourth since May; he was rapidly overtaking cars as a leading cause of death.

It was messy in the rain and mud, but it didn’t take long; Ocean went into the fourth row, fourth grave, right next to Sunflower, and I tamped down the plug, put the sod over him, and figured the headstone could wait till it was dry enough for me to write on it easily.

Ocean had been pretty nice, actually. He’d been the one on Mom’s lap when I’d come home and she’d been crying over Wonderful Bill.

I went inside and said, “I’m sorry.”

She was still wiping her face, and I guess “I’m sorry” was the wrong thing to say, because she went into her bedroom and turned up
Let It Bleed
real loud on the stereo. Pretty soon the mingled smells of wet rug and litter pan were joined by pot smoke.

It kept raining, and it was pretty cold out, so we had all the windows closed, and that crappy old gravity furnace turned on. The smell was bad enough for me to notice, and there were drafts everywhere because the storm windows weren’t up yet. I grabbed a blanket and wrapped up in it in the couch to do the rest of my homework. After a while I was pretty much buried in cats; I wondered if they knew what had happened to Sunflower and Ocean, and were afraid, or maybe they were just cold and wanted company. Hairball got crawling-under-the-blanket privileges and sat in my crossed legs, purring so loud I could feel him through my bones.

After my homework, I read way ahead in
Huckleberry Finn.
I was in some danger of finishing it over the weekend. Now that Huck and Jim were on the river together, though, I could sure as hell see why Gratz kept telling people not to read it as happy hippies on a raft, because the idea of being out there like that, just me and a friend, taking care of ourselves—well, I about cried, come to admit it, when I realized they were bound to get caught.

No way you could do that in Ohio, though, at least not in Gist County. You could walk a lot faster than any of our rivers ran, and most of them were like the Little Turtle—six inches of water on top of four feet of mud. I had kind of a silly daydream about floating away with all the Madmen, it would have had to be a fucker of a big raft of course, and started laughing when I imagined that we’d come down by the gay part of the river, where steamboats stopped to pick up teenage boys turning tricks, and there would be Paul with his shirt open, in hip waders and a lot of gold chains.