Waylaid (11 page)

Two days later, on Christmas Eve, I unwrapped a present from my mother and father — a pack of six men's crew socks that my big feet could grow into. My present from Santa Claus, which bore the same tag and handwriting as the present from my parents, was a Mattel Electronics hand-held football game.

I gave my mother the biggest box of turtle chocolates they had at the supermarket. I gave my father an Indestrukt rubber mallet so he wouldn't leave impressions of the hammer head in the wood anymore. He'd already split a few door frames with his rusty metal hammer. They both knew I didn't have an allowance and that I'd taken money from the cash drawer in the office to buy the presents. But they smiled and said thanks. Was that love?

That vacation, my father wanted to watch some big football games on television, so I couldn't play Atari. I ended up taking a nine-volt battery from his calculator and hooking it up to the little football game I'd gotten from Cheap Chinese Claus. I knew the game was marked down because I saw the store circular in the Sunday newspaper. Mattel Electronics Football 2 had just been released, and the original Mattel Electronics Football units were slashed down to $2.99. They were less than half the price of the cheapest Atari cartridges, which were what I'd really wanted.

Playing the football game was like watching little radioactive fleas jumping five yards at a time. The flea carrying the ball glowed brighter than the others. After playing for half an hour, you'd see gray after-images of all those dots jumping around when you looked up at the ceiling. This must be what it's like to be high, I thought. I switched the game off and went to my room to read more letters to Velvet.

The following Sunday, there was a small item in the paper about a trial where a girl said she'd been gang-raped in one of our rooms. My parents were mentioned as the proprietors of the hotel who had testified for the defense.

BING! BING! BING! It was about seven in the morning on December 29th. I walked into the office and was taken aback by the number of people waiting at the counter. First, I noticed the man with the badge. Then the absurdly fat man and woman. The tubby kid, Mitchell Cone, was someone I already knew. He had about two years and a hundred pounds on me, although we were in the same grade. Despite Mitchell's rep as a bully, he was looking pale and weak now. Nothing close to skinny, though.

The man with the badge leaned his elbows on the counter.

“Are your parents around? Mommy and Daddy home?” he asked, looking down at me. I looked at his badge, which read, “SHERIFF.” I was wearing my gray sweatpants and my feet were bare. A tattered plaid shirt that I'd grown accustomed to wearing to bed hung on my shoulders.

“Do you need a room?” I asked, looking the sheriff in the eyes and sitting on the barstool. I placed my hands on my side of the counter and straightened up. It was obvious that I was familiar with working the desk. The sheriff coughed and hooked a thumb into his belt.

“These people have been evicted from their property. Do you have any efficiency rooms?”

“We have rooms with two burning hotplates and a small refrigerator. We don't provide any cooking ware or utensils,” I said.

“They've got pots and pans, so that's all right,” he said. “Now folks, let's get your stuff out of my car.”

Mr. Cone filled out the registration card. He was wearing a grimy blue winter coat.

“How long will you be staying?” I asked.

“I don't know. Could be a few months. Do you have a discount for month to month?”

“No, $60 a week is as low as I can go.” He grimaced, but paid for the first two weeks. I marked it down in the books.

Everything the Cone family owned fit into three plastic garbage bags. A high heel poked out of one of the bags. An electric plug tore a hole out of another. I gave Mr. Cone the key to Room 8 and watched the fatsos waddle out of the office. Room ate. Now that was funny. I smirked, and Mitchell turned his head and caught it.

“I guess we'll be taking the bus together, Mitchell,” I said. Some color came back into his face as he flipped me off.

Mitchell and I found ourselves together by default; neither of us had any friends around. The kids I knew from school said their parents wouldn't drive them over to the hotel, which was isolated from the good residential neighborhoods by the four-lane interstate. The concrete bunker and chain link fence on the divider made the interstate look like the Berlin Wall.

Mitchell didn't have any friends because at one time or another, he'd beaten up half of the school — all the boys. He even hung out with the intermediate school burnouts.

I'd first met Mitchell at the start of the previous year when I was at the water fountain. He'd body-slammed into me, knocking my head around like a pinball stuck between rubber bumpers. Ready to kick some ass, I yanked my head out and shook off my hair. The first thing I saw was what looked like a teenager with a beer belly.

“Fucking Charlie Chan, don't you even know how to get a drink? You need a pair of chopsticks or something?” Mitchell was a half foot taller and a foot wider than me. His dark brown hair drooped down in tangled strands over his eyes and ears. Two of his scabby fists were already raised to my face.

I kicked his shins, but that didn't do anything, and I ended up on the hallway floor. He spat at my feet before turning and walking away. The school soccer trophies in the case next to me never looked taller.

Mitchell might have killed somebody if he'd attended school regularly, but he only showed up two or three times a week. When he was in school, he was constantly shuttled from classroom to guidance counselor to the principal's office. More than a few times, he'd walk straight out the school's front door, just to save a few steps.

After my first brush with him, I Krazy-Glued the combination dial of his locker, but I was never rewarded with seeing him pound away at the metal door. Maybe he didn't even use his locker.

This year, Mitchell was supposed to be in my class, but he hadn't made it in since school began. On the first day, Mr. Hendrickson flipped through the attendance cards, assigned seats, noted faces. When Mitchell's name was called, feet shuffled nervously with the realization that he'd been left behind again, and that he would be sitting amongst us.

Mitchell had been marked absent, but he was assigned a desk at the end of a row. The boy seated to the left of Mitchell's desk squirmed in his chair every morning, anticipating the imminent arrival of pain. But Mitchell didn't come in late that day, or any other.

Eavesdropping from the living room into the hotel office and piecing together what my mother told me later, I managed to get the story. Mitchell's father had told my mother all about his lousy luck and his lousy kid, trying to wrangle a lower room rate with his sob story. Of course he didn't get one.

Mitchell's father used to work for a home-building company further up the shore. His specialty was hammering deck planks together and waterproofing the wood. Business was good once, but had fallen off after medical waste had started washing up. The company told him they'd call when they had work. He wasn't cut off completely, but the $25 a week the company paid him to stay home wasn't going to cover the rent, much less the installments on the car he'd bought to commute to the job he no longer had.

He stayed at home with his wife, eating and watching TV and trying to stay off the phone. They wondered what Mitchell was learning in school, but were afraid to ask. Mitchell got grouchy whenever they brought it up.

The phone was the first thing that was cut off. Then the gas. They fell half a year behind in the rent. They never answered the door anymore. Then, just as summer began, they came home from a movie and found a notice from the bank saying that they were going to repossess the car. They threw everything into the trunk and drove their Duster south to his mother-in-law's place in Nashville.

After a while, Mitchell's father managed to find a job with another home builder. Mitchell was bored living in a town with nothing to do, so he begged his father to take him to work that first day. Mitchell stayed inside the new house as his father hammered out planks for the porch and pool deck. A vandal at heart, Mitchell was caught kicking out the spokes of a wooden staircase on the second floor by the couple visiting their future home. Both Mitchell and his father were thrown off the property that same first day of work. They hadn't even made it to lunch break.

Mitchell's grandmother eventually got fed up with the freeloaders on her living-room floor. She woke them up early one Friday morning and told them they had to go after breakfast. Then she made some pancakes. The Cones came back to Jersey and called up the sheriff to get their stuff back from the house. But the bank had already repossessed all the furniture and sold it off.

The school-bus stop was at the end of the hotel's driveway, right at the edge of the interstate. Cars on both sides had to stop when the school bus flashed its lights and picked us up. That pissed the commuters off. I tried to board the bus as quickly as possible, because I didn't want the drivers to gawk too long at the poor Chinese kid who lived at the shabby hotel. We owned the place, but standing out in front like that, I looked like I belonged in one of the rooms. Son of a whore. Poor Amerasian refugee. Little beggar boy by the highway.

I liked the winter better because I could pull down the hood of my winter jacket and tighten the drawstrings, making my face disappear. Only my nose would show.

On the first day back to school after Christmas, I was waiting at the stop, pulling my hood loose so I could make it tighter. My lips were bleeding where the skin had dried and cracked. I drew a layer of Chap Stick over my lips and smacked them.

A large lumpy figure in a denim jacket shuffled down to the bus stop. Mitchell wasn't carrying anything. No book bag, no books, no lunch. He wasn't even wearing mittens. His bare hands flexed at his sides as if he were squeezing the cold out of them. Mitchell's hair hung in oily, shaggy layers. When he got close enough, he said, “Did I just see you put on some lipstick, you little faggot?”

“It was Chap Stick.”

“Yeah, I know that, chinkie. I was just joking. I'm trying to lighten up the mood around here. It's embarrass

ing enough that I gotta wait here with you.”

“Don't you need a notebook?”

“The fuck for? If it's already in the book, why should I write it down again? Doesn't make any fucking sense.” He unzipped his jacket, reached in, and pulled out a dented cigarette. Mitchell stuck it in his mouth and his hands dove into his coat pockets like fat gophers jumping back into their holes. “Fuff!” he groaned as the cigarette wiggled in his mouth.

Mitchell yanked out the cigarette. “You gotta match?” he asked me. I shook my head. “Course not, fucking chinkie,” he muttered, shoving the cigarette into his back pants pocket.

The bus stopped with a groan and the door swung open.

“Brainiacs first,” said Mitchell, sweeping his arms to the door. I was a brainiac because I hadn't been left back. I stepped up and worked my way down the aisle over feet, book bags, and trombones. Boys hunched over their bleeping electronic sports games, and girls read Seventeen together. I wondered if Mitchell was going to sit with me behind the hump seat — the one just above the rear wheel. If you sat in the two rows behind it, you were cool. But you had to be tough. If there was someone sitting in my back seat, I'd pull them out by the neck of their coat. Maybe Mitchell would pull me out.

I heard the driver yelling. I stopped in the aisle and turned around.

“Get off my bus!” Mrs. Krackowski yelled at Mitchell. She knew Mitchell because he'd beaten up her son Matt, who was a year younger than me. She stood at the top of the boarding steps, arms jutting out in sharp angles from her rounded body.

“I'm going to school!” Mitchell yelled back.

“Is this your stop? Where's your bus pass?”

“I don't have a pass! I just moved back two days ago!”

“You don't have a pass, you don't get on my bus! Now get off!” She roared like a well-fed furnace, blowing Mitchell back onto the hotel's driveway. She hopped back into the driver's seat and slammed the doors shut.

“Fuck you, fat, ugly bitch!” Mitchell yelled. You could hear him with the doors and all the windows shut. He gave a double bird as we pulled away.

I felt a little bad for him. Mitchell was just trying to go to school. Granted, his record spoke for itself, but he never got a chance to set it straight. He'd already had a pretty shitty life. And now he was living at our hotel, something no kid deserved, no matter how bad they were.

The next day, Mitchell was back at the bus stop with a yellow bus pass that was already crumpled and creased like a brown paper bag over a whisky flask.

“That fucking bitch-fuck, the pass didn't come in the mail until yesterday. I should sue her for keeping me outta school.” He lit up a cigarette and flicked the match away. It was even colder than the day before. My breath was as thick as his smoke in the air. We didn't say anything for a while, just stood there watching my breath and his smoke.

“What grade are you going to be in?” I asked.

“I don't know. I don't how many years they're going to leave me back, now.” Mitchell's shoulders rose up and down like ocean waves in a storm as he laughed. “I don't even know what grade I'm supposed to be.”

“Where's your lunch?” I asked.

“They sent me a slip for that, too. They give me lunch.” He was one of the kids taking the cheese and mustard sandwiches handed out by the janitor's office. On Fridays, they got apples, too.

When the bus came, Mitchell held his arm out. “Let me get on first,” he said. He slipped the bus pass between his fingers so the middle one stuck out in front.

“Here's my pass, Krackowski!” he shouted at her. Then he waved it to the rest of the kids on the bus. They roared with laughter. Mitchell Cone was back. Mrs. Krackowski stomped her foot and yelled for him to take a seat. She nearly took my leg off when she slammed the bus door shut.