The Parallel Apartments (27 page)

Travis grabbed the back wheel by the spokes.

“Lift.”

They lifted. Travis guided the back tire and placed it carefully and precisely on the very edge of the merry-go-round, like a needle on a record.

“Okay, good. Now get on.”

For an instant, Murphy thought he meant
on the bike,
but Travis got on it instead. He started it, and let it idle.

“Get on!”

Quince and Murphy climbed onto the merry-go-round.

“Okay, now get across from one another, near the edge. And get rid of the fucking rackets. You're gonna need both hands.”

Travis slowly opened the throttle. The wheel spun on the diamond-plate steel of the merry-go-round, stripping off a little of what was left of the old blood-clot-colored paint.

“Murph, give the dirt a little push with your foot,” said Travis. “A liiiittle push.”

Murphy did.

“Now pull your foot back in before it goes under the wheel.”

The merry-go-round started to slowly turn. Travis sweated and squinted, concentrating on keeping the rear tire straight and in even contact with the edge of the floor.

They picked up speed. Pitchfork-shaped systems of veins in Travis's hands bulged as he held the bike steady, staring over his shoulder at the rear tire.

“Hold on,” said Travis, in yet another tone Murphy had never heard before, this one pitched at a note harmonic to the whine of the bike and conveying what Murphy decided was radical sincerity.

They were going almost as fast as Quince and Murphy could go under their own power. Soon they were going as fast as they had ever gone. Faster.

Murphy shut his eyes. He had been holding a bar by his hands, but now he had the crooks of his arms and knees around it. It felt like he was being sucked into a Boeing engine. Surely his knees and elbows would give out, his limbs torn away, his torso with its quartet of blood-squirting stumps flung a hundred yards into the scrub oak, where he would bleed to death, face up, and vultures would eat the eyeballs out of his head. Everyone knew that carrion birds ate the eyes first.

Faster. The bike's engine rose from a buzz to a hiss.

Then, a jolt and a scream. Murphy opened his eyes for an instant. Quince was gone.

Another jolt. Murphy's legs and arms opened out straight like switchblades, and then he was in space, an object in a chute of simple momentum.

He hit the ground, bounced back up with fresh topspin, and tumbled end over end like a baton. He finally came to rest by the warped slide that he'd poured Orange Crush down earlier in the day. He looked up into the sky. A cloud shaped a little like Oscar the Grouch floated by. Somebody was crying. Murphy recognized Quince's peculiar bawly gulps. No minibike engine hissing. A sudden stinging in one eye. Blood, from a split across the bridge of his nose.

Travis's head suddenly obscured Oscar.

“Got both you gays today.”

He waved Quince's blue shorts in Murphy's face. Then he pulled Murphy's shorts off, lifting him momentarily off the ground. One of his Hush Puppies came off. He lay still.

“These smell like piss,” said Travis, holding Murphy's many-pocketed tennis shorts by a single belt loop. “You
still wet
the bed, you weenie?”

Travis kicked him in the armpit, then disappeared.

Oscar had re-formed into a regular old cloud. Presently Travis's minibike could be heard. The buzz of the engine diminished as he drove off into the mesquite. Then silence again. Even Quince had stopped crying.

He waited for the cloud to change into something. Anything. A telephone, a Lucky Charm, a pineapple, a guillotine blade to chop off his head. But it didn't. It just stayed a regular old cloud, scudding peacefully off toward San Antonio.

* * *

When Murphy got home on his last day of second grade, he went directly to the kitchen and ate half a package of Pecan Sandies. Then he went downstairs to watch
Little House on the Prairie
with Granny.

“Do they get paid?” said Murphy.

“Who?” said Granny, who was sitting in a blue nightgown at the end of the divan with her feet tucked under her, drinking white sherry, smoking Vantages, and writing proofs in set theory.

“Those kids. On TV.”

Thunder rumbled, far away and to the west, where thunder always first sounded in Austin.

“Acting is a job, so they probably get paid. Don't know what, though.”

“Like a hundred dollars a day?”

“Maybe. Do you want to be an actor? You'd make a lot of friends.”

“No way. Friends are gay.”

“What about Quince?”

“Quince is gay. He's not my friend.”

“He used to be,” said Granny. “What happened?”

Hanging out with Quince had always been fraught with risk, reaching its piquancy with the merry-go-round incident. Murphy turned his back on him after that, and hadn't encountered Travis since. Each day without a debagging emboldened Murphy, and he looked forward to the day he would get Travis back. Murphy thought he would kill him if he could, and he watched for opportunities. He daydreamed about pushing Travis into a hole that went all the way to the Earth's molten core. He imagined hijacking a steamroller from a construction site and flattening Travis's whole house, with Travis inside. He imagined disabling the brakes on Travis's minibike and watching him helplessly run a stop sign and get mulched by a speeding cement mixer. He imagined setting him on fire.

Thunder again, closer, sharper. Lightning strobed the TV room.

“But you do want to become an actor?”

“No. I just wanted to know what they make.”

“Do you want to direct?”

“What? Direct what?”

“Never mind. What
do
you want to be?”

“Nothing. I don't want anything. I don't like anything. I don't hate anything. Just nothing.”

“Don't profess mathematics.”

“Don't worry.”

“Your I-am-Mr.-Spock-with-no-emotions tomfoolery is beginning to rankle me, young man.”

The New Zoo Revue
ended and a baloney commercial came on. Murphy hated ads. He liked
The Brady Bunch,
though, which came on next.

“Can you think of nothing?” said Murphy.

“No way to know,” said Granny.

Granny always said stuff like that. It made Murphy want to pick up her stupid gold-leaf side table and hit her with it.

“Why?”

“I'll explain when you're older.”

“I don't
feel
anything. So why can't I think about not thinking about anything?”

An ad for a set of Mahalia Jackson records ended and
The Brady Bunch
came on. Ooh, the one where Bobby turns out to be a pool shark.

“You're numb?”

And she always talked right when a show started. He fought fury.

“My show's on.”

A snap of thunder and a bright bolt, only half a second apart. The wind picked up, and it became dark.

“I hope the damn lights—”

Another explosive crash and bolt, and the power went out.

“—don't go down.”

“Oh no,” said Murphy.

“Dammit,” said Granny. “Murphy Lee, go get the flashlight out of my bureau. Top drawer.”

Murphy'd been through all Granny's drawers a million times; he knew where the flashlight was. There were also empty pill bottles, full pill bottles, loose pills, a long, combination-locked wooden box that Murphy knew held Grampoppy's Korean War bayonet, a yellowing, vaguely sticky plastic bag of loose bullets and a dog tag, and a heavy rectangular magnifying glass with a slanted handle.

The flashlight was yellow plastic and held two D batteries. Murphy
switched it on. A trembling yellow blip appeared on the ceiling.

Murphy pointed the feeble beam right into his left eyeball. It didn't hurt at all, and he could see fine afterward.

“Batteries are almost dead!” shouted Murphy.

“Dammit,” came the opinion from downstairs.

Murphy shook the flashlight. He tapped it on the drawer. He unscrewed the end and rotated the batteries; all without improvement.

He picked up the magnifying glass and shone the light through it at the wall. As he approached the wall, an interesting effect: the light concentrated into a little bright dot. Granny would be able to see her equations at least. He could hold the magnifying glass and she could hold her pencil and the flashlight.

He put the magnifying glass in his pocket. He touched the wall where the dot was; it was warm.

The power snapped back on. Murphy went downstairs and showed Granny his discovery.

“And the sun'll start a fire,” she said. “Why, Murphy, you look excited. Excitement is a feeling.”

That summer Murphy carried his magnifying glass with him everywhere.

In the driveway he ignited the corners of books of matches and watched them jump as the flame reached the ranks of match-heads, lasered holes in Granny's stork bridge cards, vaporized ants and doodlebugs, exploded a fluorescent light bulb, heated up a ball bearing, and then burned his fingers trying to pick it up. He set an Excedrin on fire. He stuck a circle of Q-tips a foot across in the grass in the backyard, lit them like little torches, then put a toad in the fire jail. He burned an excellent likeness of Count Chocula on a plywood wall of a house that had been under construction and then abandoned more than a year before. In the mornings he would steam away the dew on the pomegranate-tree leaves, and in the afternoons he'd burn the leaves.

One scorching afternoon he found the neighbor's cat Styx asleep in the ivy behind Granny's house. With a stealth Styx himself would have admired, Murphy slowly snuck up and lit one of Styx's whiskers, which smoked and sparked and curled like a bomb fuse in a
Tom and Jerry
cartoon. Styx leaped and twisted and scratched at his face, then ran away, head low, tail flat
down and straight. The perfume of the burn was delicious, but Murphy told himself not to enjoy it.

“This isn't fun, this isn't work. It's just time passing.”

He looked at his watch, a Timex with a little rectangle that read the day and date, which Granny had given him as a Christmas present. It was August 9, 2:27:14 p.m. In an hour and a half it would be the hottest time of the day on the hottest day of the year so far.

Murphy sat in the yard and burned dollar signs into rotten pecans while he waited for four o'clock.

Travis raced by on his bike. It wasn't his dirt bike—he'd outgrown that—it was a real bike, a street bike. A Kawasaki 150. It was a nice bike. A week earlier, when Murphy had been in the yard melting army-men heads, Travis had raced past, a girl sitting behind him, holding him around the waist, head on his shoulder, eyes closed, barefoot, white threads from her cutoff jeans blowing straight back, chain grease on her shin, a rib-cage-shaped shadow of sweat on the back of her T-shirt. Travis had given Murphy the finger as he went by.

But today Travis appeared not to notice him.

At 3:54 Murphy walked the two blocks to the Waelders' house.

Through the picture window Murphy could see the top of Travis's stupid head about a yard away from their TV, which was airing an episode of
Mighty Mouse,
one of the old black-and-white kind that don't make any sense.

Parked in front of the garage door was the Kawasaki. With a few gulps and a deep breath sucked through the gap of his overbite, Murphy suppressed his excitement. He walked past the Waelders', then quickly cut through the Muñozs' yard into the alley, where he crouched down next to a dented trash can that smelled like a dead dog, and waited.

He couldn't see into the TV room any longer, but Mighty Mouse's sloppy alto came through just fine. The sweat from the crooks of his knees ran down his calves, washing away the dirt and leaving clean, branching channels that eventually soaked into the tops of his sports socks. A similar dynamic was in action on his arms and forehead. The skin under his watchband itched. The handle of his magnifying glass was almost too hot to hold. Thirsty. He would've sizzled a hole in his own fingernail if he thought it would somehow produce a can of icy RC Cola.

3:59:34

Murphy detected the faint musical signature of a Nestea commercial. Just before it ended, the volume spiked—Travis's show was about to come on.
The Brady Bunch.
It was the only thing they had in common.

Murphy snuck halfway back through the Muñozs' yard, then crawled under the hurricane fence corroded with morning glories that separated their yard from the Waelders'. He stood up. The sun slapped at the back of his neck as he looked down at the black shadow he cast over Travis's three-week-old Kawasaki.

…the youngest one in curls…

Murphy crouched down on the concrete driveway. He held out his magnifying glass, which immediately produced an immaculate seed of a sun on the sidewall of the Kawasaki's rear tire. Soon, the beautifully organic fougère of oxidizing rubber forced Murphy to have to restrain a sigh and a smile.