I ran to my mother and pressed my face into her belly, feeling the soft, comforting silk of her slip, smelling her sweet smell. My whole head felt swollen and pulpy, like a turnip. My voice had turned into a cracked donkey bray. I closed my eyes tightly.
“What are you talking about, licking him? He’s purple! If you’ve hurt him, Carl…”
“He started to cry when he saw me coming, for Christ’s sake.”
The voices were coming from high above me, like amplified declarations from mountaintops.
“There’s a car coming,” he said. “Go inside, Rita.”
“Come on, love,” my mother said. “Smile for mummy. Big smile.” She pushed me away from her stomach and wiped tears from under my eyes. Have you ever had your mother wipe your tears away? About that the hack poets are right. It’s one of life’s great experiences, right up there with your first ball game and your first wet dream. “There, honey, there. Daddy didn’t mean to be cross.”
“That was Sam Castinguay and his wife,” my father said. “Now you’ve given that motor-mouth something to talk about. I hope-”
“Come on, Charlie,” she said, taking my hand. “We’ll have chocolate. In my sewing room.”
“The hell you will,” Dad said curtly. I looked back at him. His fists were clenched angrily as he stood in front of the one window he had saved. “He’ll just puke it up when I whale the tar out of him.”
“You’ll whale no tar out of anyone,” she said. “You’ve scared him half to death already…”
Then he was over to her, not minding her slip anymore, or Sam and his wife. He grabbed her shoulder and pointed to the jagged kitchen storm window. “Look! Look! He did that, and now you want to give him chocolate! He’s no baby anymore, Rita, it’s time for you to stop giving him the tit!”
I cringed against her hip, and she wrenched her shoulder away. White fingermarks stood out on her flesh for a moment and then filled in red.
“Go inside,” she said calmly. “You’re being quite foolish, Carl.”
“I’m going to-”
“Don’t tell me what you’ll do!” she shouted suddenly, advancing on him. He flinched away instinctively. “Go inside! You’ve done enough damage! Go inside! Go find some of your friends and have drinks! Go anywhere! But… get out of my sight!”
“Punishment,” he said deliberately. “Did anyone teach you that word in college, or were they too busy filling you full of that liberal bullshit? Next time, he may break something more valuable than a few storm windows. A few times after that, he may break your heart. Wanton destruction-”
“Get out!” she screamed.
I began to cry again, and shrank away from them both. For a moment I stood between, tottering, and then my mother gathered me up. It’s all right, honey, she was saying, but I was watching my father, who had turned and was stomping away like a surly little boy. It wasn’t until then, until I had seen with what practiced and dreadful ease he had been banished, that I began to dare to hate him back.
While my mother and I were having cocoa in her sewing room, I told her how Dad had thrown me on the ground. I told her Dad had lied.
It made me feel quite wonderful and strong.
CHAPTER 17
“What happened then?” Susan Brooks asked breathlessly.
“Not much,” I said. “It blew over.” Now that it was out, I found myself mildly surprised that it had stuck in my throat so long. I once knew a kid, Herk Orville, who ate a mouse. I dared him, and he swallowed it. Raw. It was just a small fieldmouse, and it didn’t look hurt at all when we found it; maybe it had just died of old age. Anyway, Herk’s mom was out hanging clothes, and she just happened to look over at us, sitting in the dirt by the back step. She looked just in time to see the mouse going down Herk’s throat, headfirst.
She screamed-what a fright it can give you when a grown-up screams!-and ran over and put her finger down Herk’s throat. Herk threw up the mouse, the hamburger he’d eaten for lunch, and some pasty glop that looked like tomato soup. He was just starting to ask his mother what was going on when she threw up. And there, in all that puke, that old dead mouse didn’t look bad at all. It sure looked better than the rest of the stuff. The moral seemed to be that puking up your past when the present is even worse makes some of the vomitus look nearly tasty. I started to tell them that, and then decided it would only revolt them-like the story of the Cherokee Nose Job.
“Dad was in the doghouse for a few days. That was all. No divorce. No big thing.”
Carol Granger started to say something, and that was when Ted stood up. His face was pale as cheese except for two burning patches of red, one above each cheekbone. He was grinning. Did I tell you he wore his hair in a duck’s ass cut? Grease, out of style, not cool. But Ted got away with it. In that click of a second when he stood up, he looked like the ghost of James Dean come to get me, and my heart quailed.
“I’m going to take that gun away from you now, tin shit,” he said, grinning. His teeth were white and even.
I had to fight hard to keep my voice steady, but I think I did pretty well. “Sit down, Ted.”
Ted didn’t move forward, but I could see how badly he wanted to. “That makes me sick, you know it? Trying to blame something like this on your folks.”
“Did I say I was trying to-?”
“Shut up!” he said in a rising, strident voice. “You killed two people!”
“How really observant of you to notice,” I said.
He made a horrible rippling movement with his hands, holding them at waist level, and I knew that in his mind he had just grabbed me and eaten me.
“Put that down, Charlie,” he said, grinning. “Just put that gun down and fight me fair.”
“Why did you quit the football team, Ted?” I asked amiably. It was very hard to sound amiable, but it worked. He looked stunned, suddenly unsure, as if no one but the stolidly predictable coach had ever dared ask him that. He looked as if he had suddenly become aware of the fact that he was the only one standing. It was akin to the look a fellow gets when he realizes his zipper is down, and is trying to think of a nice unobtrusive way to get it back up-so it will look like an act of God.
“Never mind that,” he said. “Put down that gun.” It sounded melodramatic as hell. Phony. He knew it.
“Afraid for your balls? Your ever-loving sack? Was that it?”
Irma Bates gasped. Sylvia, however, was watching with a certain predatory interest.
“You…” He sat down suddenly in his seat, and somebody chuckled in the back of the room. I’ve always wondered exactly who that was. Dick Keene? Harmon Jackson?
But I saw their faces. And what I saw surprised me. You might even say it shocked me. Because there was pleasure there. There had been a showdown, a verbal shootout, you might say, and I had won. But why did that make them happy? Like those maddening pictures you sometimes see in the Sunday paper- “Why are these people laughing? Turn to page 41.” Only, there was no page for me to turn to.
And it’s important to know, you know. I’ve thought and thought, racked whatever brains I have left, and I don’t know. Maybe it was only Ted himself, handsome and brave, full of the same natural machismo that keeps the wars well-attended. Simple jealousy, then. The need to see everyone at the same level, gargling in the same rat-race choir, to paraphrase Dylan. Take offyour mask, Ted, and sit down with the rest of us regular guys.
Ted was still staring at me, and I knew well enough that he was unbroken. Only, next time he might not be so direct. Maybe next time he would try me on the flank.
Maybe it’s just mob spirit. Jump on the individual.
But I didn’t believe that then, and I don’t believe it now, although it would explain much. No, the subtle shift from Ted’s end of the seesaw to mine could not be dismissed as some mass grunt of emotion. A mob always wipes out the strange one, the sport, the mutant. That was me, not Ted. Ted was the exact opposite of those things. He was a boy you would have been proud to have down in the rumpus room with your daughter. No, it was in Ted, not in them. It had to be in Ted. I began to feel strange tentacles of excitement in my belly-the way a butterfly collector must feel when he thinks he has just seen a new species fluttering in yon bushes.