Your parents stay up nights arguing and throwing things. It goes on for weeks and weeks. They get angrier. You get sicker. That makes them even angrier. Then, when you finally wake up and realize it’s not some movie—it’s for real—you get angry. But you still have to do your homework and pick up your clothes.
And if you have parents like mine, they don’t trust the doctors because those same doctors are part of the corporate machine tied to the big bad pharmaceutical companies. Who are all in league with the government with a capital G. So el parentos refuse the advice and talk to lesser-known gurus, who live in the Andes Mountains or the Yucatán, about natural remedies and you end up eating boysenberries pureed with rare duck eggs.
Leukemia sucks.
But I’m getting way ahead of myself. And Holden will be ticked if I leave out the parts about him. And the funny parts. He’s the one who made me see that books without funny parts aren’t real. Because real life has funny parts, even when people are being lousy to each other or bad things are happening. If my English 9 teacher were critiquing what I’ve written so far, I can just hear what Stratford-Mains would say. I know, I know. Stratford-Mains sounds like a British village in an old black-and-white movie, but we called her Stepford-Hanes because her makeup was so perfect and she wore skirts with stockings every day. She was the only teacher in the whole middle school who didn’t wear pants. Great legs, like she could be the model in an ad for Hanes pantyhose.
If she were editing this, she’d say it needed more showing, less telling. I’ll try harder, but I have to get out the basics. It’s easier just to tell some stuff up front. And eventually I’ll get to the whole truth, like that I-am-not-a-criminal Nixon, a very odd man we studied ad nauseam in American History. Twisted.
When Dad yells for me, I unhook from the Discman. Even with the back-to-the-earth mindset my parents have drilled into me, I’m allowed to have semimodern technology for music. It’s like an exception to Mom’s phobia about microwave radiation and the new generation of brain-dead video-game junkies. It’s more the music she accepts than the plug-in entertainment. Through the open slats of the window’s plastic louvers I can see stripes of torso in Dad’s Jefferson Airplane T-shirt. They had their music. We have ours. A whole new meaning to fair trade.
He’s outside on the deck scanning the horizon as if we were halfway to the Panama Canal instead of sandbar-sitting in a creek off the Rappahannock River. We’re actually living down the street from our last rental house. Only not, because we’re on a floating houseboat.
I’m on my knees, working at locating my cargo shorts under the bunk. Today I feel pretty good, only a little dizzy. If I’m not careful, sitting up too fast brings up breakfast. The boat rocking doesn’t help. Unfortunately it’s not the kind of thing I can tell my parents when they’re already so over the edge about The Disease.
The Rappahannock is a crazy river, not as wide here as it is downstream past the power lines. Usually we tie up at the dock of friends of my parents who lost their boat in the last hurricane. By mooring in Hoskins Creek we’re protected from the north wind, where most of the bad weather comes from. Just out of sight of the Route 360 bridge. The bridge is also the transition point. It straddles the place in the river where the salt water runs out and the freshwater starts.
In the middle here the river current is deceptively sluggish. You can’t see it until you’re in it. If you don’t watch yourself, you can end up in Urbanna—heck, in England—but at least the salt water would keep you up. Hunger’s what would kill you.
Here’s what bugs me about some of the kids I go to school with. And about some grown-ups, too. Amazing to me that they live here their whole lives and are never curious enough to wonder where the water goes or to look at a map and see that it feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and then the Atlantic Ocean. Personally I think that connection to the rest of the world is pretty important. I always figured I’d be like Admiral Byrd and find a new place to explore. That would be my contribution.
Mack and I used to plan where we’d start, exotic places like Algeria and Tahiti. We made lists of what we’d take. We even practiced smoke signals and starting fires with stones. I was a little kid then and didn’t know they’d already found all the places in the world. What dorks we were. But it’s turned out to be okay. It used to depress me, but now…it’s no big deal, because I won’t have time.
Below the bridge, across from the mouth of the creek, the northern shoreline is an almost uninterrupted green. Washed-out, but green. No houses because it’s a protected wildlife sanctuary. By federal law. The green makes a clear demarcation from the brown river. If you squint in the summertime while you’re lying on the beach or on a float, you can pretend the jungles are inching closer. Like in Apocalypse Now. It’s a game Mack invented years ago, even better since we moved to the houseboat. He loves those kinds of psychological twists. That boy is intense.
Mack is my best friend since Joe left for college. Before then we were just buddies who spent time together. You can’t always do stuff with your big brother, even if he is your best friend. And little brothers are a total pain. Mack has one too: Roger (alias the Dweeb).
When Mack and I started elementary school, my family was living in a rented house on Jeanette Drive. It was tucked into a clearing on the same road as the defunct Hoskins Creek Marina. Defunct. Isn’t that a great word? It sounds exactly like what it is. Someday Nick can say that about me in his political speeches when he’s saving the world. My D-funct brother, may he rest in peace. Dead family members earn you a lot of sympathy if you’re in the public eye. Look at the Kennedys.
The Petrianos live on a dead-end dirt road behind Dollar Inn Motel on Route 17, same house they’ve always been in. Mack’s father runs the school-bus garage for the county. Mr. Petriano is one of the most boring guys I’ve ever met, hands down. I mean, he’s okay as someone else’s father, but he hardly ever talks, and when he does, it’s just reminders of things Mrs. Petriano has already said. Pick up your room. Church is at ten today. Your turn to clear the table. No wonder Mack is such a wild man. He has to train hard not to turn into his dad.
Mack is funny and a cutup and has a hundred ideas a minute. Every once in a while he gets a little off-kilter, like an HO scale train taking the curve too fast. He comes up with the oddest ideas. It’s like he doesn’t want to slow down to think them through. That’s one reason we’re a good team. Usually he’ll listen to me, and I am not a thrill seeker.
He used to walk to our old house all the time. Probably to get away from his dad’s rewind button. It would kill me if my father was like that and didn’t have any opinions of his own. Since we moved to the houseboat, Mack kayaks over from the public boat ramp in an old, beat-up two-man kayak his father found at the dump. They leave it in the reeds and no one bothers it. Typical Essex County.
That’s one okay thing about Mr. Petriano. He’s a junk fanatic. He finds the best stuff at the landfill. He’s like a bloodhound for it. I’ve walked with him and Mack by piles of debris and it’s the most amazing thing. You can pass a mound of metal and wood that’s all broken and bent, nothing worth looking at, much less carrying away. But Mr. Petriano stops and tilts his head kinda sideways. He shoves the pile one way or the other with his foot. Mack’s usually talking a mile a minute, so he doesn’t even twig that it’s happening. But once Mr. Petriano bends down and reaches into the pile, even Mack stops talking. He knows something incredible is going to come busting out at the end of Mr. Petriano’s arm. A BB gun, a perfectly good chain saw, a VCR that only needs a new plug—that’s the kind of stuff Mr. P finds.