The Short History of a Prince (37 page)

“What is it, Dad?” Walter said, his head back, squinting down at his father in the style of Mrs. Gamble. If only he had her glasses as a prop.

“You should take a peek,” Susan said. “It’s sort of incredible. It looks like the work of one of those artists.”

He turned and stared at her straight on, in the manner he had recently begun to cultivate. It was phenomenal, that in a McCloud family inquisition, the first of its kind, she felt free to interject. “One of those artists?”

“Oh, you know. I can’t ever think of the names.”

“I’m supposed to shinny up the post, hoist myself over the downspouts, and
peek
at her roof?” He batted his eyes and held up his spotless palms for her to see.

She didn’t know who he was anymore; he’d fooled her, changed his costume in the middle of the scene. It had made her go quiet. “You can see it out the bathroom window,” she said into her soup. The rest of them, his relatives, were looking at him with a blankness that he was sure he would later find either pitiful or hilarious.

“I’ll take a peek, then, one peek.” He pushed his chair away from the table and trotted, happily, as a peeker would, up the back stairs. In the bathroom he crossed himself because Mitch would think it funny. He filled his lungs with air, and as he tanked up he pictured Mrs. Gamble coming at him with her frying pan and a hot slab of organic liver. When he could hold no more, he opened his mouth as wide as it went, shut his eyes and let the scream out in one long blast.

“Walter! Walter, what is it?” his mother cried from below.

“The carport!” he shrieked. “Oh, my God, the caaaaarport!”

He did not return to his lunch. He went up to the attic, climbed out the window in broad daylight, smoked a joint and surveyed his fiefdom. Once he’d had a good night’s sleep he might consider decorating everyone’s roof in the neighborhood. He’d learn the methods of a serial killer and operate in a similar fashion. He’d get Billy Wexler to help him. Old Billy boy would be in seventh heaven. They’d clamber along limbs in the trees at perilous heights, dropping balloons on the garages up and down the alley.

He went to bed midafternoon and slept until the next morning. When he woke up and saw that it was day again he felt sure that no one had bothered to check his breathing in the night, to see if he was alive. He was fairly certain that he’d folded his own clothes on the chair and put the glass of orange juice on his bedside table. There was nothing equal to the exhaustion that came at the end of a long sleep, the stiff joints, the cloudy head, the sensation of fur growing on one’s teeth. At breakfast neither his mother nor his father mentioned the carport or his absence from the supper table. Mitch called while the Sunday coffee cake was being cut, and Walter stretched the cord to its limit and took the phone around the corner into the bathroom.

“News?” Mitch said.

“I think there’s going to be a reaction. I think today something’s going to happen.”

“Come over, then,” Mitch said, and he hung up.

“I’ll do that, I’ll come right now,” Walter said into the silence of the receiver.

He didn’t tell his mother he was leaving and he didn’t take the time to find his hat. He ran the ten blocks to Mitch’s, and when he got there he gently pushed open the front door and crept up to his friend’s
bedroom. Mitch was in his Nordic pose, sitting on his bed, leaning over his wastebasket, as if he were in the galley of a Viking ship, rowing. His infection had gone into his head and he was alternately spitting into the metal wastebasket and blowing his nose.

“Mitch,” Walter blurted, “I’m so glad to see—”

“Are we in trouble?”

“No. No, not yet. But she figured it out, she’s got to have her suspicions. She came into our house yesterday—do you understand? Into our house. Over the threshold. She came into enemy territory and she was not carrying a white flag. She was clearing her throat a hundred miles a minute, she was going for blood, I swear—”

“For Christ’s sake, would you just tell me what happened? Did she report us to the police? Because if this goes on my record my mother will shoot me. I won’t be able to get car insurance, and I might not get the money I need to go to New York this summer.”

Poor Mitch! Walter thought. What they’d done wasn’t so bad, in relation to the average juvenile crime, if you didn’t count the fact that it was Mrs. Gamble’s property. Mitch was scared to death by his mother, by the woman who had all of her bets on her big blond show boy.

“We might have gotten ourselves screwed, is what I’m saying. I don’t know how I’m going to get the paint off my jacket, and I don’t have another one I can wear.” Mitch spit a hunk of mucus into the wastebasket.

Walter could hear Mrs. Anderson down the hall and he backed up and leaned against the door, as if the weight of his body could keep her away, keep her out. That his friend was frightened thrilled Walter. “I won’t tell on you,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t rat on you, Mitch. If they get me I won’t tell. You know I wouldn’t.” The wastebasket filled with tissues and the slurry of Mitch’s spit was between them like a moat, but Walter reached across anyway. He hadn’t seen Mitch in four days and he was grateful for the chance to let his hand rest in the sweaty palm for just a minute, before it was withdrawn.

In the weeks that followed they waited for discovery. They wondered if Mrs. Gamble knew who was responsible. Did she know and decide
not to press charges? They discussed it on the way to ballet class, talking into the wind out of the corners of their mouths, looking straight ahead, as if they were private eyes. They talked about themselves in the third person. Logically, Walter said, the vandals had to act from the McClouds’ attic roof. Someone could have done it from the Gambles’ roof, but surely the Missus had ruled out her own. It could have been a helicopter hovering soundlessly over the carport, Mitch said, a UFO, little green men. They were so obvious, Walter thought, wafting along the street in the fog and odor of the hash they smoked every day starting after breakfast, and through half the evening. There seemed to them no place to go anymore, and so they wandered down the alleys before school and at night, after class. They sat in the cold against a garage door or in the dirt of some dark alcove, and if Mitch was in the mood he’d clutch Walter and kiss him. It looked from a distance like a staged mugging, Mitch holding Walter by the collar, Walter floundering in the grasp, trying to maneuver his hands up out of the welter of their bodies to touch Mitch’s face.

Walter supposed that what they were doing could be called Making Love. They had their routine. At Mitch’s bidding, Walter fished down into Mitch’s pants, and through Walter’s attentions the former Mouse King managed to keep quiet, writhing against the metal garage door or the trunk of a tree. Mitch sometimes gave a grunt or two. It could be said, Walter thought, that there was satisfaction in Walter’s giving and Mitch’s taking, and in addition there was regularity. He wondered if it was greedy to ask for more than satisfaction and regularity, or if perhaps love itself had been falsely advertised. Maybe there was nothing better than routine, nothing better than coming down the alley after class, side by side, each, for his part, anticipating the moment. Mitch usually pushed Walter to the shelter of a fenced walkway next to a garage, drew him to the ground and jerked Walter’s hands into place. Quickly, quickly, Walter did the job, and then Mitch would zip up and they’d sit, as if they were strangers in a bus terminal, waiting for their ride to Albert Lea, Sioux Falls and beyond, far into the plains, to Murdo and Kadoka.

A squad car came down the alley one night, when they were sitting cross-legged against a bank of empty garbage cans. They didn’t know it was the police until the car turned on its beam, lighting the
alley, framing them at the center of the circle. They were caught in the spot; they could feel their own eyes gone red.

The officer stuck his head out the window. “Come ’ere,” he ordered.

Walter popped right up and went to the car.

“Open the bag.”

He handed the cop the small brown sack full of the bananas his mother had asked him to buy at the Stop and Go. The policeman looked inside, removed the bananas and turned them over. “What are you up to, huh?” he asked, when he could find nothing illegal or delinquent in a bunch of green bananas.

“Right now, you mean?”

“Yeah, I mean right now.”

Walter shrugged. They had been jacking each other off. That night Mitch had at last rubbed himself against Walter’s pecker, flesh against flesh, and he’d also had the courtesy to finish the job by hand. It was the first time Mitch had touched him, and even though he went too fast and applied too much pressure where a little gentleness might have served, Walter wanted to scream with gratitude. He had banged up his mouth, kissing Mitch’s head and face as the glory built. But what was left him when they closed up shop were bruised lips and sticky underwear. As soon as they were done it unaccountably felt like nothing. Somewhat in the same vein, it was disappointing to vandalize property and get absolutely no feedback. Maybe it just wasn’t that interesting to be a desperado unless there was a chase involved and maybe it was the funniest thing that when a person finally was allowed in, allowed to love the dream boy, it sometimes, now and then, when you thought about it, ended up being far more lonely than sitting by yourself out in the gray night.

The officer handed Walter the bag of bananas. “Get yourselves home and away from trouble,” he ordered.

“That’s a good idea,” Walter said, turning to Mitch to see if he concurred. “Definitely. Thanks, Officer. So, ah, well, good night, then. You take care of yourself too. I imagine it can get chilly, and well, forlorn on your beat—”

Mitch pushed Walter and made him trip. When the car had disappeared around the corner he said, “When will you ever learn to
shut up, McCloud? I’ll cram my dick down your throat one of these days, plug it permanently.” The thought of such a thing made Walter woozy with desire. “Could we do that now?” he asked, choking on his own saliva. Mitch took off down the alley, and Walter soon fell behind, chasing from lamppost to lamppost, running after the flickering shadow.

On the morning of Valentine’s Day in Otten, Walter had still been in bed at six o’clock. He was stuck, trying to imagine honoring the holiday in an appropriate way. His alarm had gone off twice while he imagined coming down the aisle after a bishop and a cantor, in the trail of the smoky incense. He was trying to think what he was commemorating. For an instant “I’m Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” obscured the cantor’s Latin verse. “Maybe I should call in sick,” he said out loud. Surely he was ill. Living in Otten had done it to him. He was damned to an eternity of high school, damned to the hellfire that was teaching youngsters against their will to listen to the word.

He sat up, and as if he were his own student, he said, “Look. The draft didn’t claim you. That’s number one. Number two, you didn’t die at seventeen or at thirty-five.” It was old-fashioned, a Victorian heroine thing to do, to count a person’s blessings, but he supposed there was a certain stylishness in not being able to get beyond Number Two.

He got out of bed, put on his denim shirt, and his special
Great Expectations
tie, covered with the head of Charles Dickens right side up and upside down. His classes didn’t like the book and it was proving impossible to woo them to it. The tie probably wasn’t going to help any. Most of the students had no clue that there was pleasure to be found in observing character. They seemed to be afraid to look around themselves and find a world every bit as amusing, ridiculous and unjust as Dickens’s London; they wanted to see no farther than the range of their own teenage selves.

Walter thought of Susan while he ate his toast, and he wondered if Lester had sent her a florid box of Valentine chocolates. Just the
thing for a dancer who weighs 108 pounds. The star-crossed lovers were still corresponding, Susan reported, writing letters that she said just about broke her heart. For special occasions Susan’s husband, Gary, usually gave her books that he got from publishers for free. His cheapness irritated her, even though she claimed to appreciate the luxury of a hardcover book. For just a minute, Walter let himself imagine life in Otten with Susan living next door, or across town. Walter didn’t know what she’d do in retirement, but she’d said she had no interest in opening a neighborhood dancing school. She was not going to turn into Mrs. Kenton. She could get a library science degree, become the director at the Otten Memorial Library. She could beef up the popular collection with obscure literary novels. They’d have coffee together at Lee’s before her morning aerobics class and they’d make private jokes that dated back to ballet school. She’d assist him when he had a show to direct, she’d choreograph the dance numbers and all the girls would be in awe of her, of Mr. McCloud’s associate.