When Conrad lurched out of the pool and began trying to open his fourth Blatz, Ballhouse spoke up.
“Take it easy, Bunger. You’ve got all afternoon.” “You want money for beer, Ballhouse? Maybe you should make a run. Where’s the beer opener?”
“I mean, Donny’s parents live here, Bunger. You can’t just throw up all over the place and act like a wino.” “Eat shit, Billy. You’re a goddamn candy-ass. You don’t know about death.” Conrad walked over to where Ardmore and Leggett were sitting. He remembered having seen the beer opener there.
He put all his attention into getting two triangles punched into the top of his beer can. But then someone was shoving him. Ballhouse. “You can’t talk to me that way, Bunger. Apologize.”
“Sure, Billy. I’m sorry you’re a dipshit.”
Ardmore howled with delight, and Leggett burst into giggles. Ballhouse shook his head and gave up.
“Come on,” he called to Wadsworth and Buckingham. “Let’s go pick up some stuff.”
“Would you get me a half-pint?” put in Conrad.
“I’m sorry, Conrad.” The contempt on Ballhouse’s face was profound. “Girls don’t come in half-pints.” Pause. “I’m surprised Dee would have anything to do with a drunk like you.”
There was a whole fridge of beer, and the three remaining boys spent the rest of the afternoon working on it. At some point the Derby was on TV. Watching it, Conrad realized he was seeing double. It was time to leave. He and Ardmore decided to go to Sue Pohlboggen’s house.
“Can you drive?” asked Ardmore.
“Sure, Jim. I used to race these things in South Korea.” Conrad revved the VW’s engine to a chattering scream.
There was a long gravel driveway leading downhill from the Leggetts’ house to River Road. It felt like a crunchy sliding board. So that he wouldn’t have to use the brakes, Conrad began slaloming, swooping back and forth from left to right, faster and ... suddenly everything was wrong. The steering wheel
jerked like a living thing, the wheels locked sideways, Ardmore was yelling and—
A sound that Conrad felt, rather than heard, a sound and a brief moment of frenzied motion. His power.
Jerk-stop to blank. Black. The horn was blowing. The horn was stuck. He was in a barbed-wire fence and the car was wrapped around a black locust tree and Jim was lying still.
“Hey, Jim,” Conrad screamed. The horn wouldn’t stop. The bleat of that stuck horn was driving him nuts. “Jim, wake up!”
“Don’t get hysterical, Conrad.” Ardmore sat up and looked around. He hadn’t been thrown as far as Conrad had. “Let’s tear out the wires to the horn.”
They did that, and things got a little better. Some time passed. Conrad’s parents came, and they took him home. So that he wouldn’t have to face them, he went to bed early, but it took him a long time to go to sleep. It was the black space that bothered him the most, the black space when he’d been unconscious.
If I had died, thought Conrad,it would have been just like that ... except I wouldn’t have woken up. Dead black nothing with no time left.
He flinched away from that and began struggling to reconstruct the details of the accident, trying to fit it into some rational frame.
The tree had been on the right side of the road. The VW’s left front fender had hit the tree. Momentum made the car slew to the left, and Conrad had been thrown out of his door. He’d flown past the tree and landed in that barbed-wire fence.
The funny thing was that the tree had been blocking the path from the car to where Conrad had landed.
By all rights, Conrad should have sailed into the tree and broken his neck. He struggled to remember the details. How had he managed to miss the tree? The power. Somehow he hadlevitated his way around it . Yes.
Just as he was dropping off to sleep, Conrad realized he was floating above the mattress again. He flash-jerked, and jolted back down. All night he dreamed about the flame-people.
“You should thank God you’re alive,” his mother told him the next morning on their way to church.
“I don’t think God has anything to do with it,” said Conrad, trying to keep a quaver out of his voice. “I madesure to stay alive. Like a cat landing on its feet. I think maybe I have psychic powers, Mom. What does God have to do with it?”
“Plenty. God is everything, Conrad. God takes care of us in different ways. You should stop imagining that you’re so great, and thank Him for saving your life.”
“If He’s so wonderful, then He doesn’t need my thanks, does He?”
“No, God doesn’t need your thanks. Praying is something you do for your own self.”
“But what good is praying? There’s no afterlife. I saw yesterday. When I hit that fence, everything just got black. It wasn’t like dreaming or like being asleep. It was just black nothing. I think that must be what happens when you die, no matter what.Nothing. You don’t believe in heaven and hell, do you, Mom?”
“I think heaven and hell are right here in our own lives. And that’s enough. What happens after you die doesn’t matter.”
Conrad’s father took him for a walk after lunch.
“I’m sorry about the car, Pop. It’s practically totaled.”
“I don’t care about thecar , Conrad. I care aboutyou .”
When the Bungers had moved to Louisville, Conrad’s father had started calling himSausage . “Where’s my Sausage?” he might shout when he came home from work. That first Louisville summer had been hot, and old Caldwell had bought Conrad a giant wading pool. On Saturday, the two of them would soak in it, Conrad with the hose, and Pop with a long-necked bottle of Oertl’s beer. The old man’s amazing bulk took up most of the pool, but happy Conrad would splash in the empty spaces, yelling whatever popped into his head.
“I don’t care if you don’t go to church, Conrad,” his father was saying now. “You’re free to rebel and think whatever you want to. Butdon’t get yourself killed. If you’re too drunk to drive, then phone me up.”
“You’d get mad at me.”
“Conrad, I was a teenager, too. I got drunk and made trouble. But my father always told me,The main thing is don’t get killed. Call a cab if you have to.”
“Did you ever call a cab?”
“Once or twice. There was one morning when I woke up and I didn’t know where the car was. My father was waiting for me at the breakfast table. He was the kindest man, Conrad; I wish you could have met him. That morning he just looked up at me and said, ‘Well, son, let’s go find the car. What’s the last thing you remember?’ ” Mr. Bunger’s distant gaze wandered back to Conrad. “Don’t do this again, Conrad. Don’t get killed. All my and Mom’s relatives are dead. It would destroy us to lose you.”
“OK, Pop. It might not look that way, but even yesterday, I was careful not to get killed.” Conrad wondered if he should try to explain about his power ... oh, why bother, it would only sound like crazy bragging. “You really don’t care if I don’t believe in religion?”
“You wouldn’t be much of a person if you believed everything that grown-ups tell you, Conrad. It’s natural to rebel. But you’ve also got to learn to control yourself, instead of wrecking cars, and spouting this silly stuff that you wish the Russians would blow us up. You can’t just tear down. If you’re going to rebel, it’s up to you to find something better than what the grown-ups have.”
“I guess that makes sense,” said Conrad. This was not the time to say what he really thought, to say that nothing made sense at all and that it would be better for everyone to admit it. This was not the time to push his father any further. “I guess I should be grounded for wrecking the car?”
“Three weekends.”
“Counting this one?”
Chapter 6:
Friday, July 5, 1963 “You do know who Bo Diddley is, don’t you, Dee?” They were in Conrad’s mother’s car—repaired to the tune of $700—and on their way to a holiday-weekend rock and roll show at the State Fairgrounds.