The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (4 page)

When the skateboards are delivered they plaster them with Garbage Pail Kids and spend hours on their butts, luging down hills, braking with their heels—
burning heel rubber,
they call it—trudging back up to do it again. They carve great slalom curves in the asphalt, bracing themselves against the sound of the wheels on the concrete and the streaming wind. They are doing this for themselves, for the joy in it, for the concrete-streaking pleasure of it all, but who are they kidding? They want an audience, and at the bottom of every hill, they are looking for Jeremy. He is becoming part of their summer. In the driveway, they spend a weekend trying to unlock the secret of the ollie, which Jeremy can do but won’t explain, opting instead to rub his knowledge in their faces by ollie-ing anything available—curbs, footballs, tipped over garbage cans. One of the boys, the one who is related to Jeremy, watches Jeremy kick his board, sail over a patch of grass, and land in the street, and tells him that, for
that
maneuver, he gets the Dick Butkus Award. Jeremy eyeballs the two friends, sitting on their own useless skateboards, and says, that better be a
good
thing. They assure him it is. He’s three years older, and they want to love him the way they love each other, they want that to be allowed; they want him to love them, to need them, to show them everything he knows about everything because surely,
surely,
he knows. All Jeremy wants to talk about, though, are boners and how many girls he’s fingered, and how he’s going to bag-tag a pinup someday, just like the Boz, in that faggoty poster, hanging above the bed.

Jeremy, called home, ollies a football in the driveway, leaving in his wake a vapor trail of effortless superiority. The friends feel a relief in being alone again, or, at least, one of them does—unobserved, by themselves on their skateboards as the dimmer switch on the day is gradually lowered—but there’s also a new feeling of absence that bombards them atomically, nickels of doubt streaming invisibly sideways like a radio frequency. The sun is down, the streetlamps flicker on. But it is only the middle of summer, and an ocean of days stretches in front of them like an endless and gently whispered invitation, and they return to their hill to luge, strobe-lit, through the neighborhood.

T
hese are their moments of gathering. At the house in Laurelhurst, in the June heated nights, in the July afternoons, down in the basement where it just feels like night and a Ms. Pac-Man arcade game stands in the corner unmoving like a dim-lighted guardian, they give in with slack-jawed fervor to the movies they’re allowed to rent:
Ghostbusters, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Gremlins, Lost Boys, Goonies, Flight of the Navigator, White Fang, Explorers
. Is there anything they won’t watch? They repeat dialogue and collapse, laughing, into the wide recess of the L-shaped couch, the couch they eat on, the couch they spill soda on, the couch they fort up, the couch they sleep on, in their matching sleeping bags, heads almost touching so that even after it comes from upstairs that it’s time, finally, to
shut up
and
turn in,
they can still whisper those moments in the movie they’ll see again, in the morning, before it’s due at the video store. They’re building a common store of references; they’re building a language. Before
Godzilla 1985,
they watch a cartoon they cannot get enough of; it’s part of the movie, leading in on the VHS tape, a short animated feature called
Bambi Meets Godzilla
. It’s a minute long, maybe less. Bambi, munching grass, minding her business, stands in a field. Then, without warning, a gigantic, green, dinosaur-scaled foot
cavooms
down from the top of the screen. Crunch. No more Bambi. Afterward, the Godzilla foot wiggles its claws, as if to say, what can you do?

They rewind it, and watch it again. They rewind it, and show it to Jeremy.

They watch him the way they watch each other, trying to gauge his response, eager to see the laughter on his face the moment before it breaks. He loves it. The two friends, these boys, don’t think they’ve ever been so happy. I’ve got a movie, he says, after they’ve rewound and watched it three or four times. I’ve got a movie. Give me five dollars, and I’ll bring it over tomorrow. The friends look at each other. I know you have five dollars, Jeremy says to one of the boys. It’ll blow your mind. The money is handed over. Their minds are already blown.

But Jeremy doesn’t show up, tomorrow or the next day. Is he on vacation? they wonder aloud. Does he have summer school? Does he have other friends? They have his phone number, or at least, his parents’ phone number—they found it in the emergency book near the phone—but can’t bring themselves to call because they have no idea what they’d say. Weeks are passed in the driveway, kicking skateboards back and forth. These friends, the two young boys, are crestfallen at the rejection, and not even the Boz, not even butt-ball, not even the Ghostbusters, not even the release of a new edition of Garbage Pail Kids can mitigate the heartbreak, the disappointment, the fundamental
lameness
they feel. They sit on their skateboards for hours at a time, unmoving. One of them senses the end of something approaching, and waits desperately for the feeling to dissipate. The other seems uninterested in rescuing himself. What do you want to do? Nothing. I want to do nothing. Movies? Skateboards? Ms. Pac-Man? No. Bikes? one of them says, and regrets it immediately. What’s wrong with
you
guys? the mother asks at breakfast. Cereal is stirred into chocolate milk mush. The day holds no promise. We suck, one of the boys says. Don’t say
suck,
his mother says back. She turns to the other boy. Doesn’t your mother miss you?

She does. They separate. Back in his own familial orbit, three miles away in a house that is larger but contains no motorcycles, no pizza, no Boz poster, no television even, one of the boys feels hollowed-out, cheated. He’s been cleaved from his brother, from his almost-twin, from what he considers a better version of himself. At night, he lies on his bed, staring at old, night-glow constellations, stickers stuck permanently on his ceiling, which embarrass him now, and imagines everything he’s missing. His friend hasn’t called. And for reasons he can’t quite articulate but have to do with wanting to be wanted, with needing equilibrium, the new fear that maybe, just maybe, he will say the wrong thing, he doesn’t call his friend. And with every hour that passes, the distance between them begins to feel like space distance; within days, they are galaxies apart. By himself, he organizes his Garbage Pail Kids and his Seahawk trading cards. By himself in the bathroom, he examines the flash lines cut in his hair, now growing in, his body recovering itself. By himself, he becomes a storm-system of self-doubt, unsure of anything except that wherever he is, he is not where he needs to be. His father draws up a list of chores that need to be done if he’s just going to spend the rest of his summer sulking inside, so he goes outside and plays butt-ball for hours against his own garage, refusing to have any fun at all, relishing the picture of dejection he’s painting for anyone and everyone watching. The tennis ball bounces off the garage door and gets past him, rolling for half a block before disappearing down a rain gutter. This, the boy feels, is about as unendurable as anything he’s ever experienced.
What am I missing?
he thinks.
What is it?
His mother, a woman so kind that even he knows it, asks him why he doesn’t go down a few blocks, and see what Charles Todds, the son of her friend, is up to. Because, he says, Charles is a fag. And a rich dork. And fat. His mother stares at him in disbelief, and looks like she might cry.
And because,
he wants to add, but doesn’t, because his mom is already laying into him about the importance of kindness,
Charles doesn’t know anything about me
. His dad walks into the kitchen holding a sleeping bag, playing a hunch, and sees the boy and his mother locked in some sort of silent push-pull, and, because he is unsure of what, just what in the world has happened, he hoists the stuffed sack aloft like he’s trying to keep it dry while wading through a river. How about some camping? he says. It’s camping season. How does that sound? The boy knows he doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Camping it is.

Sticks, rocks, heat, dust, bugs. His parents insist on parking the car and hiking to a campground, where it’s less likely they’ll run into any beer drinkers or loud partyers, and after what feels like hours of death-marching they finally stop, in the middle of the woods, and pitch their REI family-size tent. They do, in fact, see no one else for three days. The days, unpunctuated, feel like weeks to the boy. What is he supposed to do, he thinks, stare at banana slugs all day? Climb a tree? His parents are happy reading, reveling in the isolation after having given up asking him
what’s wrong, what’s wrong with you these days?
The boy takes his army knife and saws branches into kindling for hours. He knows, with a certain sadness that manifests as anger, and feels like some sort of accelerated aging, that he’d do anything,
anything,
to get back to the house in Laurelhurst. Finally they pack it in. When he gets home, there’s a message on the machine from his friend, wondering if, when he comes back, he could come over. The boy is elated.

His mother drops him off. His friend is upstairs, in his bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and when he stands with a
hey
there’s a mutual feeling of relief, of rightness, of completion, like a reflection meeting its source. It’s like that. But also, it’s not like that? The Land of Boz poster has been taken down. His friend’s haircut has been normalized. There is, at first, a strange formality to their interaction, as if years, rather than weeks, have passed. One of the boys looks at the other like a question mark, noticing his friend has closed a little, his face slightly different than he remembers, as if, in their time apart, his memory has played a small trick on him. This feeling hovers, just beyond recognition but threatening to take hold, until one of them tentatively unloads his pockets to produce three packs of unopened Garbage Pail Kids and then the uncertainty lifts the way it’s always lifted. It’s the middle of August, and the hot summer days are coming to a shimmering close, but there’s still time, now, to skateboard down the street, still time to rent a video, still time to call plays in the front yard, and cut matching streak lines in their hair with the closet clippers if that’s what it’ll take to erase whatever it is that has come between them. These two friends, they will never need anyone else. The gulf will be bridged. That’s what friends are, that’s what friends can do. They will be college roommates, twin terrors on the football field, playing not only defensive tackle but iron-manning it, switching off quarterback and wide-receiver duty, playing safety. Whatever this is, one of the friends thinks, there is time to figure it out. There is time to fix it. There is a lag-time between them now, though, a circuit delay, as if they have run two cans together with string and insist on speaking through those even though they are standing four feet apart. One of the boys wants to say to the other, what
happened,
you are not
you
(by which he means, you are not me), but can’t find the words to say it, and in fact thinks that maybe his friend knows something he doesn’t, and it’s this thought that he must put from his head.

Do the parents notice this? Do parents notice anything? Would they turn their head even if a planet, on a collision course, appeared suddenly above? Food is procured.
Godzilla 1985
is rented, the clerk, who is Jeremy’s age, giving them the eyebrows, like,
again?
Down into the cool basement, the cassette is slipped into the player. The cartoon, the opening credits, the enormous man-lizard sweeping fire across the city, the fleeing Japanese hordes. The voices are dubbed, and the words don’t match the shape of the mouth that is making them, the emotional inflection one assumes was originally there in the performance turned up to a flat yell. And it is when the atomically awakened monster is wading back into the Japanese sea that one friend turns to the other and says that Jeremy had been over, and he had brought his movie, and they had watched it while his parents were gone.

A feeling of complete desolation washes over one of the boys. In his mouth, he tastes, jealously, the tang of exclusion, the finality of the reveal. He feels this way because, secretly, he always knew this would happen. Jeremy isn’t his cousin. This is not his house, after all. His father doesn’t talk like a cigarette dispenser. His mother doesn’t take him on junk food supermarket sweeps. It was never his poster to pin up and take down. He’s
always
been a visitor, a home-peeper—a pervert frosting the glass. He’s known it without knowing it, and now he feels exposed. They are lying, the two of them, on the L-shaped couch. In the corner, Ms. Pac-Man silently, automatically, perpetually munches pixels. Without me? the boy wants to shout. You did that without me? But he doesn’t shout, because he doesn’t know how to shout at his friend. He doesn’t know, even if he wants to. What he wants is fifth grade again. What he wants is June. What he wants is matching BMX bikes. The basement is suddenly cold, the television now playing a blue screen that bathes everything in the room in an aquarium murk. Maybe he should be shouting at himself.

But he looks at his friend, who has stood up to walk across the carpet to the television. He looks at his friend, who is wearing sweatpants markered with the number 44. He watches as his friend pulls, from the video case for
Back to the Future,
a new video, which is not
Back to the Future,
slips it into the VHS machine, and turns the sound on the television all the way down. He watches as the movie begins, and his throat catches, and he looks at his friend, who is sitting cross-legged in front of the screen, not three feet away from the television, like he’s done this before. Both of them know what they are watching, neither of them know whether they should be watching it. You have to get close, one says to the other. The tang of jealousy disappears, and is replaced by something else. They watch the screen, unhearing, until one of them turns the volume up two bars, and the sound fills the basement. They know they are supposed to like this, they know they should be popping boners, readjusting their pants; they know they should be thrilled by what they are seeing, that it should drive them out of their minds, that they should want to see the whole movie but this is happening for neither of them. They are just boys. It’s been a summer of black eyes, of scabbed knees, of haircuts, and now it’s the summer neither of them are sure they’re ready for, the summer that comes from the television, a summer that feels like overreaching. Each feels the sensation of swimming alone for the first time, each feels the orbital pull of planet-collision. It’s Jeremy’s video. Do you want me to go first, or do you want to go first, one of the friends, the boy who lives in the house in Laurelhurst, says to the other.