Before Ms. Hannum could call my name Benny said, “That he’s not crazy.”
“Very good, Benjamin,” said Ms. Hannum.
I said, “If you cut me off one more time I will knock you the fuck out!”
Everyone froze. Ms. Hannum’s jaw hung slack. Dead leaves rattled outside the window.
“Mister Zinn. I, for one, am shocked by your vulgar tongue.” Beside me, Benny snickered at her choice of words. “Apologize to Mr. Silver this instant.”
“Me? He’s the one who didn’t raise his hand. What about protocol?”
“Broken protocol is no cause for profanity. Apologize.”
“It’s okay, Ms. H. Ollie’s a little on edge today,” said Benny. “Speaking of protocol, I have a question of my own.”
She gripped the bridge of her nose. “Proceed.”
“The guy put the body parts ‘under the floorboards.’ Wouldn’t the cops have smelled something?”
Ms. Hannum sighed. “The police arrived very shortly thereafter.”
“Okay, fine. But let’s say he managed to keep it together for the interview. He still would’ve had to live with the smell for a while. Why didn’t he just bury him? And how, in eighteen-whatever-year-this-was, did he get all those body parts from the tub to the living room without leaving a trail of blood? It’s not like he had trash bags or a plastic tarp.”
“Mr. Silver, literature needn’t always be taken literally.”
Ms. Hannum turned to erase the chalkboard, which was when the police cruisers arrived out on Chickering Road with much fanfare, shattering any plans she might have had for the rest of the period. We craned our necks to see over the windowsill from our seats, until finally she said, “Go,” and we dashed to the windows.
The cops surrounded the building, backs to the wall, guns drawn, beacons blazing atop the cruisers. One of them kicked in the door and they raced up the stairs. Now that he was on the verge of capture, I wanted Mickey Thurston to burst from the third-floor window and leap to a power line and swing safely into a convertible and outrun the cops all the way to the border. I didn’t care about the money. I now realized that we were more like the greedy NFL owners than the underpaid gladiators on the field. Mickey was the real hero here, stealing from the fat-cat bankers, and Benny and I had to go and rat out Robin Hood just so we could buy more Star Wars figures than we’d ever need in three lifetimes. We were wrong, I mouthed to him, and he squinted at me, misunderstanding, but when we turned back to the window, the cops came out of the building empty-handed, scratching their heads.
The following Friday night, Benny and I were in my living room watching TV, my mother squeaking her highlighter over the pages of her anatomy textbook, when the sliding glass door flew open.
“Weekend’s here! Who wants to go out for pizza?”
My father rarely entered rooms quietly. He preferred to burst into them as if streamers and balloons followed closely behind.
My father’s car was a 1973 Saab Sonett, a weirdly esoteric limited-edition car. By the early ’80s it had acquired a cult status among its owners — and its owners alone, one of those clubs that absolutely no one but its members even remotely give a shit about. His Sonett was a very singular shade of red-orange, three parts ketchup to one mustard, and that, coupled with its peculiar nose-heavy contour, didn’t so much turn the heads as furrow the brows of pedestrians, as if the car’s presence suddenly made people question what country they were in. The point is that my father’s two-seater would never accommodate the four of us — though this isn’t really the point, is it? I’ve gotten so far off point with board games and bank robbers and human anatomy and Star Wars and the body under Poe’s floorboards, a shield I’ve erected to block the thing I’ve been trying so hard not to look at directly this entire time — so he climbed behind the wheel of my mother’s car, a brand-new Oldsmobile Delta 88, and she and Benny and I piled in. Gone are the days, I’m afraid, when a plating line manager and his nursing student wife could get a loan for a brand-new sedan, gleaming white, with a plush velour interior. As far as I was concerned, it was the stretch limo of a country music star.
I should have seen what was coming when we pulled up in front of King’s Pizza.
“King’s?” I said. “We always go to Star Pizza.”
My parents exchanged a look I could not decipher.
Inside, we gazed up at a menu that was nearly identical to Star’s and yet all wrong and foreign-seeming, like my father’s Saab. He mused, loudly, to the guy behind the counter, “Thought I saw a FOR RENT sign outside. You got a recent vacancy upstairs?”
The guy shrugged. “I just work here. I don’t own the building.”
At dinner my father managed to drop the words bank, rob, escape, and even fugitive into our conversation. As we awaited the falling ax, my father chomped joyously on pizza crust, loving every minute of it.
Afterward, back in the car, he said, “Anyone feel like swinging by... Shoemaker’s?”
Before I could answer, Benny said “I do!”
Goddamn him. What did he care, anyway? A lecture from somebody else’s parents was meaningless, irrelevant as a Belgian tax schedule. My father dragged us all down there to witness an obvious burlesque of his being very interested in a black-and-white photo of the actor Mark Hamill, encased in bandages. Naturally, they had never stocked nor heard of such an item.
“Oh, really?” He turned around to face Benny and me while my mother leafed through the latest issue of Wonder Woman. “What do you two have to say for yourselves?”
“Sorry,” we said in unison, and he led us back out to the car. Statistically speaking, it was more likely that our mysterious bandaged man was a race-car driver, or a boxer, or a fighter pilot, or any number of other possibilities, rather than one specific bank robber on the lam. But we believed what we believed. We manufactured certainty out of thin air and headlines and wishful thinking. My father thought he could teach us a lesson, something about deception, about how you weren’t supposed to lie to people in order to get something you wanted. Especially your family. But we didn’t learn not to lie; we learned where our lies had met resistance. We got better at it. And that night we drove away from Shoemaker’s, safely contained in the Oldsmobile’s interior of cornflower blue.
Like a shuttled roll of microfilm, thirty years would scroll past with shocking speed and have their way with all of us, leaving rapidly growing masses in my father’s lungs.
On the same coffee table beside the same couch, I set the same board game down between my father and me, the one with the colored pegs and the plastic shield and the guesswork. Twelve moves to get it right. It’s not enough. You could have a thousand moves and still get it wrong.
An oxygen tank helps my father breathe. My mother naps in the bedroom, exhausted, her professional expertise now called upon at great length in the home. Clear plastic tubes loop over each ear. The periodic aerosol burst of the tank keeping the oxygen saturation in his lungs above a specific threshold. The rhythmically identical coughs lighting up his chest from the inside.
“This time I’m code-maker,” I say.
“Fine.” He coughs and says, “Let me ask you something. Remember that house?”
“What house?”