And when the Dalmeyers came for a lab tour with a school group they would approach him with their big confident underwater watches and say wow oh boy had they ever missed the boat in terms of him, sorry, they were so very sorry, what was this beaker for, how did this burner work, was it really true that he had built a whole entire T. rex from scratch and energized it by taming the miraculous power of cosmic thunder? And down in the basement the T. rex would rear up its ugly head and want to have a Dalmeyer snack, but using his special system of codes, pounding on a heat pipe a different number of times for each alphabet letter, he would tell the T. rex, No no no, don’t eat a single Dalmeyer, although why not lift Eric Dalmeyer up just for the fun of it on the tip of your tremendous green snout and give him a lesson in what kind of power those crushing jaws would have if he, Cody, pounded out on the heat pipe Kill Kill Kill.
Pedaling wildly now, he passed into the strange and dangerous zone of three consecutive Monte Vistas, and inside of each lived an old wop in a dago tee, and sometimes in the creepy trees there were menacing gorillas he took potshots at from bike-back, but not today, he was too busy with revenge to think about monkeys, and then he was out, into the light, coasting into a happier zone of forthright and elephantine Bueno Verdes that sat very honestly with the big open eyes that were their second-story windows, and in his mind as he passed he said hello HELLO to the two elephants and they in turn said to him in kind Dumbo voices hey Cody HEY CODY.
The block was shaped something like South America, and as he took the tight turn that was Cape Horn he looked across The Field to his small yellow house, which was neither Monte Vista nor Bueno Verde, but predated the subdivision and smelled like cat pee and hamburger blood and had recently been christened by Mom’s boyfriend Daryl, that dick, The House of FIRPO, FIRPO being the word Daryl used to describe anything he, Cody, did that was bad or dorky. Sometimes Mom and Daryl tried to pretend FIRPO was a lovey-dovey term by tousling his hair when they said it, but other times they gave him a poke or pinch and sometimes when they thought he couldn’t hear they whispered very darkly and meanly to each other FIRP attack in progress and he would go to his room and make the nosehole sound in his closet, after which they would come in and fine him a quarter for each nosehole sound they thought they had heard him make, which was often many, many more than he had actually really made.
Sometimes at night in his room Mom babied him by stroking his big wide head and saying he didn’t have to pay all the quarters he owed for making the nosehole sound, but other times she said if he didn’t knock it off and lose a few pounds how was he ever going to get a date in junior high, because who wanted to date a big chubby nosehole snorter, and then he couldn’t help it, it made him nervous to think of junior high, and he made the nosehole sound and she said, Very funny I hope you’re amusing your own self because you’re not amusing my ass one bit.
The Dalmeyer house now came into sight.
The Dalmeyer car was gone.
It was Go Time.
The decisive butt-kicking he was about to give the Dalmeyer hose would constitute the end of FIRPO in the world, and all, including Ma, would have to bow down before him, saying, Wow wow wow, do we ever stand corrected in terms of you, how could someone FIRPO hatch and execute such a daring manly plan?
The crowd was on its feet now, screaming his name, and he passed the chink’s house again, here was the driveway down which he must turn to cross the street to the Dalmeyers’, but then oh crap he was going too fast and missed it, and the announcers in the booth above the willow gasped in pleasure at his sudden decisive decision to swerve across the newly sodded lawn of the squatty-body’s house. His bike made a trough in the sod and went humpf over the curb, and as the white car struck him the boy and the bike flew together in a high comic arc across the street and struck the oak on the opposite side with such violence that the bike wrapped around the tree and the boy flew back into the street.
Arghh arghh Daryl will be pissed and say Cody why are you bleeding like a stuck pig you little shit. There was something red wrong with his Arroes. At Payless when they bought the Arroes, Mom said, If you squirm once more you’re gonna be facedown on this carpet with my hand whacking your big fat ass. Daryl will say, I buy you a good bike and what do you do, you ruin it. Ma will come up with a dish towel and start swiping at the blood and Daryl will say, Don’t ruin that dish towel, he made his bed let him sleep in it, I’ll hose him off in the yard, a little shivering won’t kill him, he did the crime let him do the time. Or Mom might throw a fit like the night he slipped and fell in the school play, and Ms. Phillips said, Tell your mother, Cody, how you came to slip and fall during the school play so that everyone in the auditorium was looking at you instead of Julia who was at that time speaking her most important line.
And Mom said: Cody are you deaf?
And Ms. Phillips said: He slipped because when I told him stay out of that mopped spot did he do it? No, he did not, he walked right through it on purpose and then down he went.
Which is exactly what he does at home, Mom said. Sometimes I think he’s wired wrong.
And Ms. Phillips said, Well, today, Cody, you learned a valuable lesson, which is if someone tells you don’t do something, don’t do it, because maybe that someone knows something you don’t from having lived a longer time than you.
And Daryl said, Or maybe he liked falling on his butt in front of all his friends.
Now a white-haired stickman with no shirt was bending over him, so skinny, touch touch touching him all over, like looking to see if he was wearing a bulletproof vest, doing some very nervous mouthbreathing, with a silver cross hanging down, and around his nipples were sprigs of white hair.
Oh boy, oh God, said the stickman. Say something, pal, can you talk?
And he tried to talk but nothing came, and tried to move but nothing moved.
Oh God, said the stickman, don’t go, pal, please say something, stay here with me now, we’ll get through this.
What crazy teeth. What a stickman. The stickman’s hands flipped around like nervous old-lady hands in movies where the river is rising and the men are away. What a Holy Roller. What a FIRPO. A Holy Roller FIRPO stickman with hairy nips and plus his breath smelled like coffee.
Listen, God loves you, said the stickman. You’re going, okay, I see you’re going, but look, please don’t go without knowing you are beautiful and loved. Okay? Do you hear me? You are good, do you know that? God loves you. God loves you. He sent His son to die for you.
Oh the freaking FIRPO, why couldn’t he just shut up? If the stickman thought he, Cody, was good, he must be FIRPO because he, Cody, wasn’t good, he was FIRPO, Mom had said so and Daryl had said so and even Mr. Dean in Science had told him to stop lying the time he tried to tell about seeing the falling star. The announcers in the booth above the willow began weeping as he sat on Mom’s lap and said he was very sorry for having been such a FIRPO son and Mom said, Oh thank you, thank you, Cody, for finally admitting it, that makes it nice, and her smile was so sweet he closed his eyes and felt a certain urge to sort of shake things out and oh Christ dance.
You are beautiful, beautiful, the stickman kept saying, long after the boy had stopped thrashing, God loves you, you are beautiful in His sight.
The Barber’s Unhappiness