Best Boy (4 page)

Yesterday was the second time I was with him. We were taking a group trip to the Seabright Mall in the van. Normally a staff named Duane drives on this trip but I was already buckled into my seat when I saw Mike open the front door and get in.

“Everybody in a good mood?” he said as he started the van and the feeling of the motor came up through our legs.

No one said anything.

“No penalty for talking, folks,” he said. “And air is free.”

But still nobody said anything.

“Payton Living flies on high,” he sang, “touch the earth and touch the sky.”

Everyone stayed silent.

“Suit yourself,” he said and then drove out of the driveway and up to a stop sign. He turned in his seat, looked directly at me and said very slowly and loudly, “Ba-doing!”

We drove to the mall through a flat going-pastness that was filled with the houses of the people who lived there set back from the road. Some of these houses had little farms alongside them with tractors crawling up and down neatly planted fields of corn and wheat. Geese flew overhead. Horses stood still in the sunshine. It was a picture on a wall that people lived inside of. A little while later Mike pulled the van off the main road into the parking lot of the mall and began backing it up into a space with a look on his face of indigestion.

“This goddamn thing has an ass like my first wife,” he muttered under his breath. Then, when the van stopped moving, he said in a nice public voice:

“Okay, sports fans, file out nice and easy.”

All of us walked in single file like we'd been taught through the main door into the Seabright Mall. The air-conditioning roared a moment and we were inside. The ceilings went up very high. The air smelled of sugar and salted plastic. Girls were everywhere. They popped their gum like pistol shots or talked into their phones and screamed with laughter. Babies yelled.
Microphoned voices spoke loudly from the ceiling. People looked at us.

People had always looked and in just the same way. But now there were almost a dozen of us together and so the looking was different. It went on longer and always finished with a shake of the head or a fake smile. I had on shorts, sneakers and a T-shirt that was pleasingly tight on my belly. Dr. Vauncy the dentist had recently fixed my chipped front teeth from when I bit a rock in a dish of lentils and now I had a “million-dollar smile.” Next to me was Connie who I'd once touched the secret hair of in the dark. She was wearing sweatpants and her belly was bigger than mine.

Up and down all of us went until we had walked past almost every store in the mall. Sometimes Mike would let us stop to buy little things but I wasn't interested. For me it was enough to get off the Payton campus that I knew every brick of, every pebble and blade of grass, along with how it looked to see everything out of the corner of your eye or staring at it straight ahead.

It wasn't till I was sitting in the food court having an Orange Julius that I again remembered my Idea which I'd forgotten about for a whole hour. I smiled for so long I could feel the air-conditioning on my teeth.

Once the Orange Julius was finished, Mike led all of us to a nearby bookstore where he said he needed something and that we should all wait. I was a “champ” at waiting. When I waited, nothing had yet happened so everything could still be okay. Rocking helped. Rocking meant setting the waiting to a song in my head by moving forward and back on my feet and sometimes actually singing something that was really little groaning sounds of breathing or I made my “wheee” sound if I was excited and rocked and smiled with my eyes shut. “Are you a horse?” a staff asked me once when he saw me doing this.

But back in the mall another thing happened that made me think my Idea was a good Idea.

When I opened my eyes from rocking, I saw a whole bookcase in front of me filled with maps.

That knew exactly the roads that led to every single place.

I stopped rocking suddenly and concentrated on one of the signs in front of me.

“State and Local Maps,” it said. I pulled out several of these maps until I found the ones I wanted and then took them with me to find Mike who was looking at a big book with a naked woman on the cover that he shut with a crack as I came close.

“Painting,” he said to the air over my head.

“Can I have these?” I held up the maps and the change purse that was heavy with coins from work mostly at the Demont Memorial High School cafeteria.

“Well, lookie here,” said Mike. “He speaks without being asked a question. What's up?”

“Maps,” I said and made my special smile that used as few muscles as possible.

“Oh yeah? Planning on getting your driver's license anytime soon?”

Mike looked around to see if there was anyone there he could get to laugh with him. But there was no one there.

“No,” I said.

“Whatever, sure,” he muttered, turning away.

All the drive home I kept looking at the maps. When I got to my room I piled them in a special place on the dresser where Raykene insisted I keep a Bible. The maps had crisp edges. When I opened them for the first time they sprayed fresh papery air into my face. My parents loved to plan routes on maps by taking a soft-headed felt pen and drawing lines along places they
wanted to go. Momma packed sandwiches for those trips in wax paper that was the color of a brown cloud you could see pieces of food through. She wore shorts and a striped shirt. Daddy whistled happily. We were in the station wagon called an Olds 88 and driving down the highway to the Sandy Hook beach where the sun was a giant room you could sit in and watch the waves walking towards you and falling on their faces.

But that was a long time ago and now I was interested in another thing that maps could do which was much simpler: do what Daddy called, “Get the hell from Point A to Point B.”

I found the map that had both the town where Payton was and the town where I was born years ago and I got a pencil and drew a 744-mile line between the two, again and again. I began doing the same thing every day when I got home from work and soon I created a river of lead so slippery that my hand would start at my Payton apartment and then automatically slide partway across the country and back home.

NINE

O
NCE A WEEK WE HAVE A MEETING WITH OUR
Main to talk about “issues.” Raykene has been my Main for nearly six years, which is a record because Payton suffers from what one of Mr. B's yearbooks called
ruinously high turnover
which he says is
typical of many state-funded institutions for the developmentally disabled
. But Raykene has stayed on even though many other people have come and gone. She carries a special book for the weekly meeting that she takes notes in. At the most recent meeting that was held in a room off the Main Hall, she was late and rushed in and said:

“Just never enough minutes in a day! So how we doin', Todd?”

“Fine, I think.”

She sat down with a big loud sound of rustling and then she breathed for a few seconds, in and out.

“Whoo.” She fanned herself with a hand. “Lemme catch my breath.”

I looked out the window at where the world was, and, beyond
the mountains, the home where I had my very first memory of people leaning in over my crib and smiling in a way that showed their long, curving teeth and cold animal eyes.

“That's better,” she said. “Now let's talk about things.”

“Things,” I said.

“From where I'm standing you seem a little bit worked up these days.”

“I do?”

“Yes, and I got a good idea as to why that is. Do you?”

Before I could catch myself, I could feel parts of my face fall.

“Exactly,” she said, looking at me. “You're an open book, Todd. From the moment you first saw this guy you were in fight-or-flight mode. I thought it was gonna blow over but that doesn't seem to be happening. Look, I'm not saying he's gonna be your best friend, but help me here, please. What is it about the man that makes you so nervous?”

“I don't know,” I said. This wasn't exactly true.

“Well,” she said, staring at me. “I'm thinking we better move on this.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Do you know what I'm thinking of?” she asked. I could feel the tiny heat of her eyes on my face.

“Annie Applin!” I said loudly.

She laughed a little bit, and said, “I'm-a call right now and set it up.”

Annie Applin was the campus psychologist who always spoke in a low, calm voice that sounded like she'd made it fresh that morning, just for you. Mike the Apron and I met in her office the very next day. It was a quiet office. The way the sun leaned in from outer space to fall through the windows made it feel even
quieter. The only sound was the noise of the ocean coming from a small radio on the floor.

“Good morning, guys,” Annie said and smiled as she put down a Payton LivingCenter mug of coffee. Despite her calm voice she had a cap of fire-colored red hair on her head and smoldering red freckles on her face and even though I liked her she frightened me because I thought she could “go off ” like a firecracker or volcano at any moment. “We're here, guys, to have a friendly chat and continue letting the two of you get acquainted,” she said.

“Roger that,” said Mike the Apron.

“Yes,” I said and looked away from her dangerous hot freckles and stared at the floor. I wanted to talk as little as possible for the same reason I didn't want to talk too much to Raykene: because if I started talking I might by accident mention my Idea. And my Idea was becoming more important every day. As Annie began to ask me questions, I answered her by saying that everything was fine and I had no problems with anybody. When she asked what “fine” meant I said nothing. When she asked me who anybody was, I continued looking at the floor.

Then it was Mike the Apron's turn. I looked up in time to see his eyes bouncing back and forth very quickly between Annie and me over his big moustache. I don't like looking people in the eye because it feels like they're touching my nerves with their actual fingers so I lowered my glance.

“Todd's being polite but we know the truth,” I heard him say. “I'm only here a couple-three weeks and I already got the man convinced I'm Saddam Hussein!”

Then he laughed his coyote laugh while strings of something whipped around inside his chest.

“Truth is,” he said, after he stopped laughing, “my man is a
straight shooter. That's the first thing. Also, he's got an actual brain on him and thinks for himself.”

I looked up and saw him giving me a special dead smile in which he raised his upper lip while the rest of his face didn't move. “You think I didn't know?” he said.

Then he turned to Annie and said, “I knew. Todd's got a whole life going on hidden in his head. But do I freak him out? Yes, I do. That was kinda obvious from that first night. But he's gotta understand I ain't no Valda-mort. I'm thinking maybe we should try a little working together, do some vocational stuff and see if that builds some bridges.” He paused. “You know?”

Annie was nodding.

“Building bridges,” she said, “is always a net positive.”

They continued talking but I had stopped listening. I was thinking of the films I'd seen of coyotes. I was thinking of how they walked kind of always like they were sneaking. They dropped their heads with their grinning mouths and they creeped forward. They were all always coming up behind something that wasn't expecting it and biting down hard.

I was surprised at a certain point to see Mike standing in front of me holding out his hand while in the background I heard Annie saying, “Affirmative behavioral support is the thing, Mike. We'll reconvene in two weeks.”

“Fine,” Mike said to her, and then he turned to me. “We agree on the plan to pull together?” he said. I held my own hand out in front of me, even though I had no idea what our plan was and I never liked shaking hands.

“Okay,” I said, while I watched my hand go up and down like something caught in the belt of a machine.

“There, see?” said Annie Applin. She was smiling and reaching for her coffee mug as we left the room. “You guys are gonna have a blast, I just know it.”

Two days later, when Mike the Apron showed up at our front door first thing in the morning, I found out what our plan was. It was that we work together experimentally on the Lawn Crew, and that we begin that day by clearing grass behind the septic tank. It was going to be a “bonding experience,” he said, and some “quality time for us dudes.” After he said these things while standing just inside my cottage he let his mouth fall open in a way that made me uncomfortable. I went to change my clothes.

Most people don't like working on the Lawn Crew and I don't either. You get hot and dirty and bits of grass enter itchingly all over your clothes and travel also up your nose and into your ears. Plus, using the tool called a “scythe” is dangerous. Many things scare me but scythes belong to a special category of scaring power. You hold the long curved blade by the two wooden handles and swing it back and forth intersectingly at the bottom of the grass as you cut it. You get a rhythm going and it can feel good in your arms but the blade is extra-sharp and is also very long. It's what the Grim Reaper carries, who brings Death. In the woodshop they no longer use power tools after Jimmy Hoffman cut two fingers off with a band saw and his parents sued. But they haven't figured out that the long, hooking blade of the scythe is just as happy to take away parts of you.

I followed Mike out the house and towards the long weeds behind the septic tank. Mike was very friendly at first as we started cutting. He called me his “little man,” even though I'm taller than he is, and he told me that he knew some “bitching
life lessons” he wanted to give me about “how the world works.” Then his phone rang and he stopped talking and walked a little bit away and took the call.