Falling in Place (23 page)

“What do you mean, send her something?”

“You know that picture of her in the paper? My mother’s got it around. That picture of the bunch of them, at the sale? We can take one of these—”

Parker rolled off the bed, and let himself fall to the floor. “Uggggh,” he groaned. “They got me.” He stood up. “Come here,” Parker said. “Come on, I want to show you.”

When Parker opened his bedroom door, he always looked both ways down the hallway. He did it even when he knew that nobody else was home. “This way,” Parker said, and John Joel followed him. They ended up in Parker’s mother’s bedroom. By the bed there was a big table, and Parker started to shuffle through folded newspapers and letters she had opened and stuffed back in their envelopes, looking for the picture. “Look,” Parker said, when he found it. “Come on.” John Joel followed Parker again, back to his room. Parker closed the door. He took tape and scissors out of his desk drawer and sat on the floor. “Watch,” he said.

“What happens if your mother looks for that picture?”

“She doesn’t find it,” Parker said.

“But Parker—what if she notices it’s gone and Tiffy tells her she got something funny in the mail?”

“Fat chance. And even if it happened, all I’ve got to do is deny it. What do you think they’re going to do to me?”

Parker was lifting the top corner of his mattress. He held it up
and took out the fourth magazine from the top. It was
Animal Antics
, and with his eyes closed, Parker flipped it open to the picture of the monkey bending over to get the banana. The picture had been taken indoors; the banana was on wall-to-wall carpeting. Parker shook his head, then carefully ripped the page out of the magazine. He put the magazine back under the mattress before he did anything else. Then he went back to the spot on the floor where John Joel sat, where the scissors and tape were, and cut Tiffy’s head out of the newspaper picture. He positioned it over the monkey’s face and taped it down, using little pieces of tape. John Joel had to admit that it was funny. “Let’s get an envelope,” Parker said. He opened his door and looked both ways again. He went into the hallway and opened a drawer in a table and took an envelope and a stamp out. Then he went back into his bedroom, closed the door, folded the ape picture twice and put it neatly in the envelope. He printed her name, in big letters, across the envelope. Then he went out into the hallway again, to look up her address in the phone book. When it was finished, he said, “Let’s go mail it.”

“You’re gonna get in trouble, Parker,” John Joel said.

“Stick around and I’ll show you something,” Parker said.

Parker was taking another magazine out from under the mattress. It was a GI magazine, and he was tearing off the cover. A Marine, bayonet raised high, was yelling and beckoning troops forward, and behind him a soldier who had stepped on a land mine was being blown sideways, through smoke and flame. John Joel looked at the little soldier. He had a horrible expression on his face, and a blob of blood where his nose should be. John Joel studied the picture, as though the nose might be somewhere else. Then Parker cut out Louise’s face and put it over the face of the screaming Marine, her hair partly obscuring the helmet, and began to tear off small pieces of tape to fasten it in place.

“What do you think I’m going to do with that?” he asked Parker.

“It’s funny,” Parker said, laughing. “Imagine if your mother was a Marine. I should have used this one for Tiffy and the other one for your mother, maybe. This is nice of me, you know. This magazine cost me a buck and a half.”

“I thought you told me you lifted it.”

“Oh yeah?” Parker said. “If I said so, then I did. I forget which ones I bought and which ones I smuggled out. Stupid old baldie who runs the candy store, you could take money out of his cash register and he wouldn’t know it, I bet.”

The gray and white newspaper picture fit in with the gray-green helmet and almost looked as if it belonged there. For some reason, it embarrassed him to look at the picture.

“Here,” Parker said, pushing it toward him.

“I don’t want the thing,” he said half-heartedly.

“You don’t know what’s funny when you see it,” Parker said. “To tell you the truth, you probably wouldn’t get half of what’s going on in
Moonraker
. It’s got a big snake in it, and you’re even afraid of old garden snakes. You’re even afraid of those Fourth of July snakes.”

“I am not,” John Joel said.

“Maybe when Tiffy’s husband sees it, he’ll squeal,” Parker said. “I’m going out to mail this. Are you coming?”

“Why can’t you mail it later?”

“Come on,” Parker said. “When we come back, I’ll show you something.”

“Why can’t you show me now?”

Parker looked disgusted. He started picking things off the floor without saying anything. He put the magazine back under the mattress, and put the tape and scissors in his desk drawer. When he turned around, he didn’t look as disgusted. “Okay,” Parker said. “Are you going to tell everybody in the world I showed you this?”

“What for?” John Joel shrugged.

“Because you couldn’t wait to tell your mother that I burned the ticket stubs, and she told
my
mother.”

“She did not. You just told me this morning on the phone that
you
told her, and that she didn’t believe you, and that she wouldn’t give me the three bucks back.”

Parker smiled. “I was just testing,” he said, “but I’ll bet you told her, didn’t you?”

“What’s it to you? She didn’t tell
your
mother. She wouldn’t.”

“That illustrates what I was telling you before. That illustrates why Tiffy isn’t going to tell my mother what she got in the mail, and if she does, my mother’s not going to put two and two
together. Your mother knows about the diaphragm, doesn’t she, she even
knows
, and she’s not telling my mother.”

“She doesn’t like your mother.”

“She doesn’t like my mother because my mother’s a tennis pro, just about, and nobody but Marge Pendergast can keep up with her.”

“Talk about who loves their mother.”

“I don’t love her. I just said that she plays pro tennis.”

“You love her,” John Joel said.

“Get off,” Parker said, brushing something imaginary from his arm. He went to the door, opened it, and looked both ways. “Just keep your mouth shut about this,” he said.

“What’s this going to be?” John Joel said.

“Scared?” Parker said.

“What would I be scared of?” John Joel said.

Actually, he was a little scared. He thought the way Parker looked both ways before he came out of his room and crept around the empty house was scary—it was the way people moved in the old movies, when somebody really was hiding and was about to jump out at them. The house was like an old-movie house, too: There were big overstuffed chairs, and there was almost nothing modern around. It had been Parker’s grandmother’s house, and when she died, Parker’s family had moved in.

“This is probably going to be nothing,” John Joel said.

“Oh no, Mr. Bill, don’t go down those steps!” Parker squealed. As they went down, Parker was making sounds of explosions: “Pshew! Whew! Boom!”

The basement smelled like Raid. There was a hum from the sump pump behind the stairs that kept the basement from flooding. It was a creepy basement, full of things that looked like worms but weren’t. Nothing was down there but a washer and dryer and Parker’s father’s workroom. He followed Parker into that room. Above the work table there was a picture of Parker’s grandmother and grandfather, standing beside some hollyhocks. Both of them had on straw hats—hers was wide-brimmed, and part of a hollyhock had been tucked in the band—and they were holding hands and smiling into the camera. The picture was probably from long ago; it was probably taken before Parker was born. There was a
picture of three men in Army uniforms, with beer mugs raised—a picture all brown and white, with spots here and there on the picture, like little match flames. And there was a picture of Parker as a baby, sitting in his diapers, holding a toy rabbit. Parker wasn’t a fat baby. He looked nice when he was a baby.

“One of those guys is the guy who only had one ball,” Parker said, pointing to the picture of the three men in uniform. “This one of them married somebody who’s a famous dancer, and the one with one ball runs a bar in Santo Domingo, and that one’s my father.” There was a chain dangling from a fluorescent light above the table. Parker pulled the light on. It blinked a couple of times, and then the table was flooded with bright light. Parker pushed aside a hammer and a jar full of nails and screws and lifted two fishing tackle boxes from below the table onto the tabletop. He opened one and put aside several carefully folded wide ties with geometric patterns on them. Underneath the ties there was a pen that, when tilted, showed a tiny woman becoming naked.

“I’ve seen those,” John Joel said.

“Seen this?” Parker said. He turned the pen slowly, and from the other side a small naked man with his penis sticking out began to come toward the small naked woman, slowly and imprecisely, like someone floating in space when there’s no gravity. The penis touched the woman’s side. Parker smiled and put the pen back in the box.

“Look at this,” Parker said. He held out a little dish, or an ashtray, with a drawing on it of a huge woman, being sculpted out of stone by a man who was carving with his penis.

“This is what I really wanted to show you,” Parker said. He put the things back and opened the other box. In that box there were more ties, some letters and a small black gun. Parker took them out, put them aside, and took out a cardboard box. Inside there was a piece of cardboard that unfolded into the shape of a penis, a narrow black scarf with tiny mothholes in it (Parker held it over his eyes for a second), and a folded piece of paper with a picture of a vagina, pink and brown, about three feet high. “Better than pin the tail on the donkey,” Parker said. Parker chuckled. He zoomed the cardboard penis against the vagina. “It’s not his stuff,” Parker said. “It’s my grandfather’s.” Parker began refolding the piece of paper. “He’s never going to tell me this stuff is here,
I bet,” Parker said. He put the two boxes back under the table and pushed the hammer and the jar of screws back into place. “He goes into the boxes. I wet a hair and put it up against that box,” Parker said, pulling the chain to turn the light off. “And the hair was gone.”

“How do you know that when your spit dried, the hair didn’t fall off?”

“Because I did it three times,” Parker said. He turned around and showed his teeth, like Jaws. Walking behind him, John Joel saw Parker’s head, in profile, and his hands raised again, holding the imaginary cable that his teeth would snap. Parker’s head fell forward and snapped straight. John Joel kept walking.

“Well,” John Joel said, “I’ve got to get home, I guess.”

“What for?” Parker said.

“Because my mother’s working today and she told me to take the chicken out of the freezer at two o’clock.”

“All you’ve got to do is say you forgot.”

“Nah,” John Joel said. “I guess I’ll go do it. You want to come over?”

“There’s nothing to do at your house.”

“What are you going to do here?”

“Read my magazines. I got a new one I haven’t read yet. It’s called
Tons of Fun
. About fatsos.”

“You’ve started laughing at yourself?” John Joel said.

“I laugh at myself,” Parker said. “If I didn’t want to be fat, I wouldn’t be fat. I like to look this way. It drives my father crazy.”

“My father, too.”

“So?” Parker said. “Then it’s worth it.”

“I don’t have to be fat either,” John Joel said. He had never really thought of that before. “Want to see
Tons of Fun?”

“Nah. I’ve got to go.”

“Why doesn’t your sister take the chicken out?”

“Because she’s always over at Angela’s.”

“So call her and make her go home and do it.”

“She wouldn’t.”

“She’s a douchebag,” Parker said.

“A what?”

“Get out of here,” Parker said. Parker flopped on his bed.

“What’s a douchebag?” Parker said. “Get out of here.” He started to laugh.

“Are we going into New York later on, or what?”

“Get out of here,” Parker laughed. “Throw me that box of graham crackers on the floor where you’re standing.”

John Joel picked up the box and threw it to Parker, meaning to hit him. The box hit the side of the bed and fell to the floor.

“I could fix your sister,” Parker said. “Your sister really needs fixing.”

Walking home, John Joel remembered the time when Parker had had poison ivy, the way it had gotten in his ears, the way the swelling had nearly closed his eyes, the sores that were partly inside and partly outside his nostrils; and how he had gone up the stairs, talking to Parker’s mother, and how she had opened the door and there was Parker in the bed, painted with some white stuff that almost covered his body, lying there just staring into the room, though there were only slits where his eyes should be. He was holding a glass of lemonade that Parker’s mother had given him. Parker had not said hello. He had not tried to cover himself, even though he was naked. John Joel had stood there and wondered if what he was seeing on the bed was some huge swollen mummy of Parker, if Parker hadn’t really disappeared, and this was what was left. He had been afraid to get too close to him. He had tried to get Parker to say something, but he wouldn’t. The whiteness of Parker, the way he had looked on the bed, was like those plaster people at the museum; and thinking about the museum reminded him that Parker had gotten his way: Parker had seen the show and done him out of being reimbursed. Parker wasn’t really his friend, and he had always known that. He had been surprised, himself, that when Parker called he had been happy. He had been even more surprised that he had gone over there, and that he had stayed so long. Sometimes he thought that Parker could read his mind. That was part of the reason he had gone: Because whatever he had said to him, Parker would have known what he was really thinking. He would have known that he was glad to hear from him. He would have known, the way he had known that he had told his mother about Parker burning the ticket stubs.