Amp'd (17 page)

“Some young kid I used to know,” he says.

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing,” Dad replies. “Hey, I know what you'd rather see than a bunch of old pictures. Aaron, take him upstairs.”

“Right! I'll show him your sock drawer.”

“I liked you better in the hospital,” Dad mutters.

“Sure, life was easy then. Room service at the touch of a button, meals in bed, and if you didn't feel like getting up: bedpans. But the good times can't last forever.”

“I want to see the alligator!” Cancer Boy laughs while Dad glares at me.

“Of course! The alligator! This way,” I lead him up the stairs. “Do you have a dollar?”

“Yes?” he says tentatively.

“Well, hang on to it. Someday you may want to give it to a nice girl who dances for you.”

At the top of the stairs Ali is already splashing. He seems to know when visitors are coming and sometimes gets excited, although sometimes, as with Steve, he lies in wait to surprise them. His tail is thrashing like that of a happy dog, and I expect Cancer Boy to be scared but he's not. How do you scare a kid who faces the most terrifying thing anyone could face every day of his life?

“So fucking cool!”

“He
is
!” I agree. “And don't repeat that around your mom.”

“I'm not a fucking idiot! Can I pet him?”

“Here…” I take his little hand in mine and bring it back around the tail to stroke. Ali doesn't snap much, but why risk adding one-handedness to this already diminished boy?

“His skin is hard,” he notices.

“It is. You wouldn't think you'd want to make a purse out of it—or boots. Or underpants, for that matter.”

“They don't make alligator underpants!”

“Of course not. Alligators don't wear underpants.”

“They don't wear any pants!”

“Exactly. It's probably why they're not more popular.”

“Give him some of this,” Dad tramps into the bathroom with three slices of bologna, handing them directly to the boy.

Again, I gently take his hand in mine and dangle a slice over Ali's head … and Ali
SNAPS
at it, and I pull the kid back, and we both tumble to the floor. He's laughing hard but that could be the shock of losing fingers, so I count to make sure all his digits remain intact. As we get to our feet Dad leaves the room in a fairly transparent attempt at “plausible deniability” should he be called to testify about the maiming of this small boy by alligator. I toss the remaining two slices at Ali and he catches them midair, and Cancer Boy thinks this is the coolest fucking thing he's ever seen, and it just might be.

When it's time to leave he stands in the doorway long enough that it becomes obvious he hasn't accomplished whatever it is he came here to do.

“You can't leave yet,” I say, slamming the door behind him. “If you think feeding an alligator is exciting wait till you see Dad feed a live squirrel
with his bare hands
!”

Out in the yard the boy actually
is
fascinated as the tiny squirrel hops over to Dad, leans in, plucks the peanut like a pickpocket and races away.

“You do it!” he yelps.

“The last time I tried, it didn't go so well.”

With Dad's help, Cancer Boy does the peanut trick—Dad's fingers holding his fingers holding the peanut shell holding the peanut inside, an irresistible nesting doll treat the squirrel yanks to the safety of his tree. We sit a moment and I let the boy fill the silence.

“Would you come to my school for show-and-tell?”

Dad visibly blanches and for a moment, I think he might bolt for Fleischmann's or gasoline—perhaps both, first to get drunk and then set himself on fire—presuming as I do that the kid wants me to come show off my non-arm to his classmates.

“With your alligator,” the boy clarifies.

“I'm not sure I can do that,” I gently explain. “Bringing a live alligator around children probably isn't the safest thing, and I'm not a trained animal expert or anything. I'd have a hard time wrangling him with one arm—did I mention I only have one arm?” I wave my nub at him.

“I know that, dummy!” he laughs. “He could help,” he indicates Dad, who looks ready to bolt again.

“You're right; three arms are better than one, but not as good as two arms attached to a guy who knows what he's doing. Besides, it could be dangerous for Ali. What if someone shoots him for not wearing pants?”

I can see by his downcast face I've added another pearl to my perfect strand of recent disappointments, and I struggle for some way to make it right.

“How about instead I tell the class about my job as a fish counter?”

“What's that?”

“I count fish,” I say, instantly disappointing this kid again but recovering quickly. “Here, take a look.”

I Google
Acipenser pseudoboscis
on my phone and show him a picture of the blue paddle-snout sturgeon.

“It has no teeth and an extendable mouth for eating off the floor. And look at that snout! Is that one ugly motherfucking fish or what?”

“He's an ugly motherfucker!” he instantly agrees, and we have a date.

 

LESSONS

The school I attended as a boy is smaller than I remember it, especially inside, where I am booked, fingerprinted, and photographed like an accused pedophile and then allowed to mingle with the children. I stride into the classroom alone, nervous, despite having once commanded the dubious attention of high schoolers—10 percent of whom were stoned on something, 20 percent utterly disinterested in the forty-minute period between pokes at their cell phones, and another 20 percent as impervious to knowledge as lead is to x-rays; that's fully half of all students eliminated from a path of continued learning by the natural selection of the educational system. I write my name on the board and turn to face the undivided attention of wide-eyed wonder directed squarely at my nub.

But I'm not here to talk about me. Supplied with a pile of visual aids from Ick Ick (including the capper: a jar of perfectly preserved fertilized fish eggs meant to represent the continued future existence of a species), I'm going to tell them about the exciting world of fish counting. I rattle on about migration and spawning, rivers and dams, ecosystems and extinction. I tell them about the blue paddle-snout sturgeon, almost completely extirpated from the Wabash River, and present an enlarged rendering of one, which fails to draw their attention from my nub mostly because the clumsiness of handling it one-handed accentuates the thing they are most interested in. I can tell even the teacher is bored, smile fixed like plastic on his Mr. Potato Head face. Worse, Cancer Boy looks devastated. And he's suffered enough disappointment.

“All right, enough about fish. Let's talk about the elephant in the room.”

Now I can see I've totally confused them.

“There are elephants too?”

“No. Not in the river. No elephants.”

“But you have one in your room?”

“No! I don't; it's just an expression.”

“He has an alligator!” Cancer Boy announces gleefully. “It tried to bite me!”

His teacher appears alarmed, and I explain that yes, we keep an alligator, but no, it didn't really try to bite him, it was really after the bologna. Another little boy wants to know if the alligator and the elephant get along, and someone else follows that with a question about who would win a fight between an alligator and an elephant, and of course the elephant would stomp the alligator to death but what if the alligator bit the elephant first and knocked him down and then bit his face and wouldn't let go, followed by the skeptic who announces that
no way
do I have an alligator and an elephant at home.

“Forget the goddamn elephant!” I shout, and the teacher stands up from the back of the room and shouts,
Hey!
before I stop him, palm outraised like a traffic cop. “I got this! Taught for twelve years—it's okay, they're just curious … and they might learn something.”

He sinks back into his seat, and the questions come:
What happened to my arm? Did it hurt? What did they do with it after they cut if off? Could I have kept it if I wanted to, like, in a fish tank? How do I tie my shoes? Is it gross?
The teacher winces with every question and sinks lower in his chair with every answer, but Cancer Boy is beaming like he's found E.T. and brought him to show-and-tell, and by the time a boy asks,
Can we see it?
I know the capper isn't the promise of fish survival floating in formaldehyde but a real live amputated stump. The teacher tries to stop me, but he's too slow, and he rushes for help as the room erupts in shrieks of amazement mingled with horror, and one little boy throws up.

*   *   *

Cancer Boy and I are both in the office of the principal, who's trying his best to understand the relationship between us. It doesn't help that the kid starts his explanation with “We bared our butts!” and goes on to talk about how I took him to my bathroom to show him something in my tub.

“Just to be clear, what I showed him in my tub was an alligator,” I add the clarification that will keep me out of prison orange.

“His skin is hard!” Cancer Boy adds.

“Again, we're talking about an alligator,” I insist. “We met in the hospital. I was being treated for an infection. I'm not sure what's wrong with the boy. He seems perfectly fine to me; I think he may be faking something to get out of homework.”

“I have cancer!” he shouts gleefully.

“And you were there for your…” Following the usual hesitation, the principal says, “Arm.”

“Actually, it's the absence of the arm that's mostly been the problem.”

“So you came here for show-and-tell,” the principal tries to understand. “Which is something we don't do here. But I guess another in a series of concessions has been made for our special case.”

Cancer Boy looks at the floor.

“Don't embarrass him,” I snap, and Cancer Boy looks up at me, grinning again, and he turns his grin on the principal and suddenly we're tag-team wrestlers with our opponent on the ropes, and no one is tagging out.

“You swore in front of the children,” the principal accuses me.

“I did no such thing.”

“The teacher insists you said”—he reads—“‘the goddamn elephant.'”

Cancer Boy howls his approval.

“You call that swearing? In that case, now both of us did. Whatever the punishment, let's face it together.”

“There's the added serious infraction of exposing yourself in front of the children,” he adds, a poorly worded and inaccurate account of events—also badly timed, as Cancer Boy's mother, called from home, enters at just that moment.

Cancer Boy rushes to hug her and when he lets go long enough to say, “Mom, you missed the coolest fucking thing
ever,
” I wish I had two hands to cover my face.

*   *   *

Stripped of my visitor's credential I can't help but ask, “Will this go on my permanent record?” before being escorted from the building by a security lug who definitely falls into the bottom 50 percent of former students whose dismal future is now. In the parking lot, the slamming of a car door catches my attention and I turn to see Cancer Boy, still grinning, in the front seat as his mom crosses the distance between us.

“I don't know what to say,” she states flatly, still somewhat cowed by my handicap.

“Understandable. This isn't a scenario one imagines or plans for.” She stares at me—Oliver Twist with an empty bowl, wanting more. “If it helps, I'm sorry. Did you even know he came to my house?”

“I only found out because at a bat mitzvah yesterday, when the little thirteen-year-old girl got up to dance? He tried to give her a dollar. I found out then.”

I wince. A quick, stupid joke I never thought would register. But the kid is smart.

“He's very impressionable,” she says as if I'd spoken aloud. “And I might have made things worse, because then he wouldn't tell me why he went to your house. I had no idea you were coming here today.”

Behind her, Cancer Boy makes the kind of goofy faces you'd expect a normal eleven-year-old boy to make behind the back of a scolding grown-up. Mom sees me looking past her but by the time she turns, he's staring blankly straight ahead and, with expert comic timing, he resumes face making when she returns her attention to me.

“You understand, he's gone through a terrible time.”

“I can't begin to understand. But yes, I'm aware it must be terrible.”

“The worst part, believe it or not? All the attention. It took me a very long time to grasp … he doesn't want the awkwardness of his friends passed down by their parents, the special treatment by teachers, the pitying stares of the neighbors. An athlete I never heard of came to the house, and people tried to raise money to send him to Disney World. He hates all of it. Little boys just want to be like other little boys.” She wipes away a forming tear and quickly composes herself. “He just wants to be normal instead of goddamn special.”

“That, I understand.”

Prompted, she can't help but steal a glance at my arm, giving me a chance to make eye contact with her son, who's pulling his mouth wide with both hands. Something else I can't do.

“What happened in there … all the attention was off him for a change.”

“I was definitely the main attraction, yes.”

“He was even allowed to get into trouble, which hasn't happened in a long time. I was starting to worry he could burn the school to the ground and get away with it.” I'm sure he can't hear us, but enough time has passed for the fleeting attention span of a boy to revert his face-making self back into another bored kid waiting in a car. “So I'm grateful that he had one afternoon where he feels normal again. But as a parent, I have to say”—she shakes her head—“he probably shouldn't be around you. I'll tell him to leave you alone.”