I shrug. He leans back in the rocker and stares at me for a second, burning a red ring of humiliation around my neck.
Troy tells me Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ bathroom, that the spiny anteater is the only animal that doesn’t experience REM sleep, that two-thirds of the world’s eggplant is grown in New Jersey. I tell him I found a garter snake in the filter that looked a hell of a lot like last week’s lawnmower belt and that we’re running low on chlorine tablets. He puts a hand on my shoulder and thanks me for being responsible. His thumb thinks twice about touching my earlobe—the same one Drake went at with the tapioca spoon. Troy’s real eye is dulled by something he won’t mention, but his fake one looks like the circle of green vinyl pool when you’re down at the bottom looking up at the sun. A place where you go to be born or die. I feel an itching in my gut, like I’ve eaten fire ants for breakfast, so I go kick around the deflated ball for a while with the other boys and make sure to find the smallest kid and rub his face in the mud.
Drake’s got himself a new slingshot and a bunch of beads that look like the pie weights Mom used to use when she baked instead of boiled. He sits in the backyard before dinner and kills starlings.
“Did you know,” he says, “these birds aren’t even from America? The Chinese shipped ’em over here, Mickey. Them and the egg roll.”
He takes one down with a plump thud. It flutters a dying wing like Patricia Smurt flutters her tongue around a pencil in algebra class, the way Troy does his eyelashes when the sunscreen drips low.
“What does that tell you about going where you don’t belong?” Drake picks up the bird by its legs, shows me where his white marble cracked its gut, and launches it into Mrs. Pitkin’s yard with one high arc where it lands on her charcoal grill.
Dinner is served, I think.
Troy only touches me on the shoulder. You can tell his thumb thinks about the ear, but it’s too shy to try. I go through pool manuals and circle chutes and ladders with a furred-up ballpoint while he rattles off numbers that don’t mean crap. 293 ways to make change for a dollar. 119 grooves on the edge of a quarter. 345 pounds of pressure to crack a macadamia nut.
“And get this,” Troy says. “American Airlines saved forty thousand dollars in one year by eliminating one olive in each salad.”
“Who eats olives anyway?” I say. Then I feel Drake looking over my shoulder, even though he’s not around. “Queers. That’s who.”
Troy swallows hard and shuts his eyes like a bullfrog. He’s stored up lots of words for his neck to get that swollen. When he opens his eyes, the glass one looks sad as hell. Out the hazy green window, I can see three boys smacking a goat on the ass with the yellow Wiffle ball bat. It glows like a sword in the hot midday sun. I tear out a picture of the most expensive swimming pool slide, wad it up, and throw it at Troy who blinks only one of his eyes.
“Fuck,” I say.
Troy frowns, puts down his cards, leans out of his mildewed lawn chair to touch me on the shoulder. “Is something on your mind?” he says. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
I look sideways at his hand, splotchy, like he spilled bleach on it. I see his thumb think about my ear. I bolt from the screen house and head for the goat pen where I grab the black one by its stunted horns, two hard thumbs that jab up at heaven, and try to take it down.
Patricia Smurt starts showing up at the 7-Eleven at night. In just three weeks she’s gone big and soft in the top and rear, and when she leans on the windows of cars to talk to guys two years older, her miniskirt rides up to show the beginning of a backside that’s no longer my age. She pours vodka in her Slurpee, laughs like she’s being filmed.
Later, on the roof, I think about pinning her down, my knees on her shoulders, my crotch on the center rosebud of her bra, the one I can see when she bends down to pick up used lottery tickets. I’d like her to smack me, just once, so I’d know I was real. Then I’d like her to smack me again, to prove I’m a fake. I take a long drag off my Lucky, and I gaze in the dark to where the highway’s charcoal skid must be. I wonder if my dad is still there, trapped in time, looking down at his motorcycle and shaking his head. I bet he doesn’t even know he’s gone. I bet he just keeps looking at his motorcycle and shaking his head and wondering how he’s going to fix the mess it’s in, a scene rewound and replayed for eternity. I see him, hands on his hips, fuming and frustrated on the gravel shoulder looking up to the sky, then back toward the house to that tiny pinpoint on the roof, where my cigarette glows orange and I pretend he mistakes it for Mars. I raise my left hand off the shingles, my palm facing out toward him, and I think about waving him home, waving him on.
Drake’s taken down eleven starlings since he brought home the slingshot. I think of that poem, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. I’d like to make Drake eat what he kills. His eyes have changed, too. Now there are schools of mean minnows flashing around on black silt. He yells during Wheel. Calls Vanna a whore, calls Sajak a faggot. I take that as my sign to leave and go to the 7-Eleven where I sit by the newspaper stand with a cold root beer in my crotch and watch Patricia Smurt straddle the bicycle rack while she giggles to jocks and throws her hair around like a hooker. Nights, I keep dreaming that Patricia Smurt’s blue raspberry tongue shows up in the pool filter and Troy won’t let me keep it. I dream that Drake shoots Troy’s hand off my shoulder, then tosses it on Mrs. Pitkin’s grill.
Troy says he’s almost done studying. He knows that peanuts are an important ingredient in dynamite, that every child in Belgium is required by law to take harmonica lessons, and that the shortest complete sentence in the English language is I am.
“I am,” he says. “I am. The shortest darn sentence, Mickey. Isn’t that something? I am.”
I don’t say anything. I clean three leaves out of the filter and try to imagine them on Patricia Smurt in the Garden of Eden, but all I can see is Troy out the corner of my eye going through his flash cards like the nicest damn kid in school. I eat my lunch alone under a cottonwood. Something’s itching at my gut again. Like there were sparks in my sandwich. In the distance I can see Troy hunched over something in the grass. Probably looking for a four-leaf clover. I know I could crack off that wandering thumb of his with a snap and use it to hitchhike somewhere other than here.
The itching in my gut won’t go away. Lasts through a boiled dinner that I can’t eat. Gets worse when Drake takes down a red cardinal with one of his marbles and lays it on the lawn chair like a sunburned hand. I take off early for the 7-Eleven before Vanna can flip the first F of the night. Patricia Smurt’s already there, her tongue already baby blue. She gives me the time of day since the jocks have yet to show.
“What say, Mickey Mouse?” She pushes her straw over one perfect tooth.
“I dunno,” I say. “Gonna buy some smokes, I guess.”
“Oh yeah?” she says. “Why dontcha get yourself a Slurpee while you’re in there?”
“I don’t like them,” I say.
“I can make you like them,” she says.