Killing Time in Crystal City (3 page)

ONCE THERE WAS JASPER

H
ow did you get this way?” Jasper asked me, about a week before the school year ended. Or the quarter year for me since I only moved after the April vacation. We were walking the six miles home from school, because it was a Thursday. We walked home Tuesdays and Thursdays. That was Jasper's idea because he said it made the weeks shorter.

I never felt it did any such thing. Nothing made the weeks shorter. But I walked with him every Tuesday and Thursday because if I didn't he would just walk on without me, and then where would I be?

Jasper was my friend. He was my best friend. As well as my second-, third-, and fourth-best friend.

Jasper was also genius at conceiving questions that served no purpose other than to drive me demented. “See, I know where this goes,” I said. “First, I'm expected to say, ‘What way?' Because then you get to tell me how screwed up I am before then going on to get me to list the reasons why. As if I agree with you in the first place, which I don't. But you can just forget about it, because I'm short-circuiting your whole plan by not asking what you mean by ‘this way.'”

It was a disused railway line, this long Tuesday-Thursday walk we took. Lots of overgrown grass. When he was bored, Jasper would make various train noises, and my favorite was the low and rhythmic
chunk-chunk
,
chunk-chunk
,
chunk-chunk
of the cars rolling over the seams in the track.

“Chunk-chunk,”
he said, then,
“chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk . . .”

“You can
chunk
-chunk all you want, but I'm not going to ask.”

“You sound ridiculous. The accent is on the second
chunk.
”

“I'm still not going to ask.”

“Of course you're not . . .
chunk-chunk
,
chunk-chunk . . .
because you know very well how you are.”

Sometimes they didn't even have to be questions and they would wind me up anyway.

“No, wise guy. Actually, I don't.”

“No? Okay, then, let me tell you. You're kind of paranoid. You're a doomsayer.”

“I'm not a doomsayer.”

“Oh yes. You are a sayer of doom. And self-pitying. You're Olympic-standard at making yourself out to be the victim in everything.”

“Stop picking on me.”

“Ha. Good one.”

“Good
what
? God, I hate it when you do this stuff to me. If I'm so awful, why do you even bother—”

“Did I say I was finished? There's more. Jeez, you are so rude. So, we'll add rudeness. And you're ungrateful. You refuse to recognize any of the privileges that you enjoy. . . .”

I ran ahead of him now, down the middle of the abandoned tracks, trying to escape the litany of sins that I could still hear rolling out in a train-chug of a cadence. Finally, I just lay down across the tracks like a suicide.

“Yes, that's right,” he said, approaching, not slowing, then stepping over me, “and you're a martyr.”

I got up, charged after him, then tackled him to the best of my limited ability, dragging him down to the ground by his backpack like a lone hyena trying to take physically superior prey.

“This cannot possibly all be true,” I said, more or less into the back of his head. “Or you wouldn't even be talking to me now.”

He turned enough to give me the side of his face. He smelled like almond paste.

“Maybe it's because you remind me of a big iguana I once had. He whipped me in the face with his tail when all I was trying to do was share a piece of my exquisitely ripe mango with him.”

“Hnnn,” I said, remaining right next to his cheek to give his comparison theory the complete half-second consideration it deserved. “I don't think it would be worth all my million flaws just to be reminded of your violent, scaly, childhood pet that probably didn't even exist.”

“He did exist, and I loved him. To be honest, I even kind of enjoyed the tail-slap. I tried to get him to do it again, but by then I think he was onto me.”

“Right,” I said in exasperation, shoving him down as I pushed off of him. I started down the tracks toward home again, and he scrambled up and ran alongside me again.

“You know the reason I put up with all that crap of yours, ya reptile?” he said. “It's because you are so funny.”

“I'm not. Even I don't find me amusing.”

“Well, that's that then, I'm out of explanations. Looks like all we're left with is, love is blind. Don't you hate being on the receiving end of a cliché?”

“What I hate is when I ask you to stop saying something and you continue saying it. Could you not say that again, please?”

He sighed loudly to produce a dramatic echo effect as we crossed under the short trestle bridge just before his route home veered to the left.

“I'll try, Kiki,” he said, splitting off and getting a safe few feet of distance away, “but I can't make any promises.”

“No, you clearly cannot,” I snapped. “Didn't I ask you—didn't I make you
promise
to stop that and call me by my given name?”

“That is your given name. I gave it to you,” he said, walking backward down his road to give me just that bit of extra taunt. “You were almost gonna be Clyde Lovelette, until I came across Kiki Vandeweghe, which is certainly more you. You have the soul of a Kiki. I know you're in there. We need to save you from this sad-sack Kevin and release the Kiki within!”

“No,” I said as he turned away and punched the air in some kind of freaky inexplicable triumph. “No, we don't.”

He punched the air again then, with both fists, laughing.

He so enjoyed himself, winding me up.

Jasper Jerk. Why would I miss a person like that? Why would I miss him even a little, never mind a lot?

OFF GRID

M
aybe I came for more than the name.

My uncle Sydney lives in Crystal City. And he loathes my father. He told me several times that if I ever got it in my head to run away, I was welcome to come to him in Crystal City. Though I am not running away exactly—I am moving on and moving up—I think it's reasonable to assume the invitation still applies.

Sydney belongs to that long and dishonorable tradition in families called the black sheep. Every family really should have one and if they don't have a suitable candidate within the organization, then they should do a search, because I figure everyone needs their black-sheep services at least sometime in their lives.

My time is right now.

I don't give him any advance notice of my arrival because I have no contact details other than a street address. As far as I know, nobody else has such details either. He may or may not use phones and computers and other electronic devices but since he's been referred to more than once in our house as Off-the-Grid-Syd, it's kind of assumed that he doesn't.

I still carry with me like a pirate's tiny treasure map the directions to his house that he drew up and gave to me in a Batman card as a thirteenth-birthday present. “Doesn't look like much right now,” he said with a wink, “but just you watch that sucker appreciate in value over the next few years.”

He looks like a prophet today, as I stand on the little porch of the house at the address that I found in only three and a quarter hours and through the kindness of a half-dozen strangers. Two of whom turned out to be the wrong kind of kind and every kind of strange.

I press the doorbell three times before deciding it is broken or disabled, and then I knock.

I haven't even lowered my knocking hand before he throws the door open wide to me.

“Kevin!” he says, rushing out to give me a lung-busting hug.

“I hope you don't mind, Uncle Sydney,” I gasp as he hugs out the last of my oxygen.

“Didn't I tell you? Huh? About that sucker appreciating in value? What are you now, seventeen?”

“Just last month,” I say.

“And I missed it.”

“That's okay.”

“What's with the arm?” he asks, and I hold it up for him to examine as he tugs me inside. “And who wrote ‘fuckwad' on it?”

•   •   •

“Your father. Did that?” Sydney asks, rather flabbergasted. He is referring to the injury beneath the cast, not Derek's defacement of it.

“My father. Yes.”

He stares at me a few more seconds, working it out, doesn't get too far.

“
Your
father? When we were kids, flies used to pull
his
wings
off.”

“Listen, Sydney, we had a fight, all right? And I didn't get the better of it. I'd really just rather leave it at that, okay?”

“Okay,” he says. “I have all I need to go on anyway. So, it's agreed, I'm going to kill your father for you.”

“What? When did we agree to that? No, Syd, please, that's not the kind of thing I'd want at all.”

“Really? Here, have another cookie.”

“Thanks, and really.”

“It wouldn't be any trouble. I've thought about killing that guy so many times over the years, the job would practically do itself. Pretty sure I have some plans drawn up somewhere.”

“Well, no. I appreciate the gesture, though. Anyway, I'm fairly certain just my being here would kill him.”

“Excellent point,” he says, and points to make his point. “So, he knows you're here.”

“Oh no, I just bolted, so he has no idea.”

Uncle Sydney starts drumming his fingers loudly on the Formica table between us. He swivels a little side to side in his chair. His whole place is done up like a diner.

“You're not giving me much here, Nephew.”

“Sorry, Sydney.”

“Your father's not dead, he's not emotionally tormented by me, either . . .” He reaches across and snags the cookie package from in front of me. “And a whole pack of Pepperidge Farm Sausalitos. Is that all a whole pack of Pepperidge Farm Sausalitos buys a guy these days?”

He is having fun with me, but we both recognize the hot spots in his words just the same.

“He is emotionally tormented, Syd,” I say weakly.

He sighs, nods. “Yeah, he is. But he always was.”

I reach across and take the empty cookie pack back again, for no other reason than to seem less paralyzed than I feel.

“Can we not talk about him anymore?” I ask.

“Done,” he says with an emphatic nod. Then we stare across at one another for several seconds before done comes undone. “Would be nice to ruin his career, at least. Can't be too many child-beating high-school headmasters out there in full employment.”

“I'm not a child,” I say.

He raises his hands in surrender. “Fair enough, Kevin. Still, I'd think he would be considered a danger to a school full of students.”

“You know,” I say, rising from the table as if I had someplace to go, “if I believed that, I would do something. But the truth is that the only two people he's a danger to are me and him.”

“And his daughter and his wife, they don't count?”

There aren't enough Sausalitos in the world to make this hurt less.

“They don't count because they're gone, Syd. And because he never hurt them. Not physically.”

He nods sadly. “Why didn't you stay with them, Kev? You should've gotten away clean and left him to rot away from the inside. What were you thinking?”

This is not a hard question to answer, in the sense that I know what I was thinking. On the other hand, it's very hard to answer, out loud, because most people—starting with the one I'm talking to—will never, ever get the logic of my dealings with Dad. Some days I have trouble piecing the logic back together myself, so I understand.

Dad didn't ever hurt the girls physically, this is true. But he hurt them.

The first of his midlife crises made a big mess of things. But it wasn't Armageddon.

The second, after he had slowly, incrementally, carefully been let back into the bosom of our family, was the one that brought the walls down.

Mum and Alice were wounded and enraged to the point where it is not conceivable that they will ever reconcile with Dad. It was faith betrayed, and to be forgiven once, to be given a do-over on that, would seem to be something that would make a man count himself blessed.

And so my father counted his blessings, and he took that do-over . . . and he did it over, again, a year later.

He left the house, the family, the town. He got a new job at a new school just far enough away. Everybody got a do-over.

Until I undid my do-over.

“I couldn't leave him by himself. I had to go back. He needed somebody. He needed me. He's a lot better than that, Syd, better than it seems on the outside, and somebody had to stick with him.”

“Bullshit. He is what he is.”

“He is a wonderful guy, a wonderful dad . . . almost
all the time. I always thought I could help. And I always thought it was my job to do that. He needed me. I know nobody understood—”

“That's correct. I'm glad the girls got away from him anyway.”

Glad. It's not a word that occurs often around the subject of Dad.

“Yeah,” I say, failing to produce glad. “They saw red when I told them I was moving back with him. They were so livid, it was like when Mum threw him out, all over again. Screaming and breaking things, it got . . . fairly unpleasant. Things were said . . . some of them by me . . . It was bad. Is bad.”

“Well, that I am sorry about. But, I am very glad you're here,” he says, extra brightly for both of us. “I'm your whole family now.”

“Thanks,” I say. “That really does make me feel better. And it'll make me feel even more better if that's the end of that subject, okay?”

“Okay,” he says, “done.”

“Which way to the bathroom?”

He points, I start toward it, almost make it out of the room.

“Do your mother and sister know, Kevin? About the latest? I bet they'd agree with me about your father's job situation.”

I stop and spin back toward him.

“I wouldn't know, since I talk to them now about as often as I do you, and by the way, does the word ‘done' have a different meaning here in Crystal City?”

He laughs. “I think you'll find that pretty much everything does, Nephew.”

That sounds quite exciting to me at the moment.

“I'm going to look forward to that, Uncle.”

“I like your style, boy.”

“I'm glad. And right now, my style says ‘done' means ‘done.'”

“Done.”

I run to the bathroom before “done” can try to mean anything else.

•   •   •

Uncle Sydney's house is very small, and the second bedroom is his office. But it's a nice little spot with a window overlooking a dusty Little League baseball field, a chain-link cage of an asphalt tennis/basketball court beyond it, and a section of slow narrow waterway beyond that. The couch, being covered in some kind of vinyl leatherette material like practically everything else in the place, needs a lot of sheet, pillow, and blanket help to achieve true comfortability, but we do eventually get it there.

And once I lay my head down, I crash, plummeting through all layers of consciousness and unconsciousness to the point where my uncle's knocking on my forehead like a door thirteen hours later still sounds like he's eight feet away and rapping on the actual door.

“Wow,” I say, lying flat and staring up at him as he continues knocking just for kicks.

“Yeah, wow. Guess you needed a little nap there.”

“It was great. Could you stop the knocking now?”

“Sure,” he says, straightening up and walking away. “Meet me in the kitchen, breakfast is ready.”

“Oh, that's really thoughtful, but I usually don't eat till—”

“Most important meal of the day, Kev. So get your ass out here, unless you want to look like that for the rest of your life.”

He shuts the door behind him with a pop.

Thanks for that, Syd. I must be clashing with his décor.

The breakfast that awaits me is a steak so big it has to have been made from more than one cow. It's covered in sautéed onions and mushrooms and sitting on a bed of raw spinach, with an honor guard of bright red plum tomatoes all around the periphery. Just breathing the air of this kitchen makes me satisfied and stronger.

“Well, you're not gonna get the color back in your face just by looking at it, Kevin. Sit, boy, eat.”

“This
is
a color,” I say, pointing at my face, “and it is
my
color.” I sit.

“Yeah, well there
is
a cure for it, and
this
is it,” he says, taking a seat across from me with an identical plate of abundance. “And never mind the color, what's with the texture? Looks like you had skin grafts or something.”

“Jesus, you're a kind uncle. I had some acne a while back, okay? Doctor said stress probably had a lot to do with it.”

“I don't doubt it. But what did he treat it with, paint stripper?”

I feel like the muscles at the back of my neck have just given up entirely. My head falls forward, I am staring at the edge of the table right in front of me, and I have no desire to ever look anywhere else again.

How is a guy supposed to outrun everything, including his own face?

Next thing I sense is that my stealthy uncle—he is quiet like a cat burglar when he wants to be—has come around the table, circled behind me, and has his cheek pressed alongside my cheek.

“I'm sorry, Kevin. I was just playing with you. I never had any kids or zits. So I'm kind of an oaf with some things. I'll get better.”

His kindness helps, and I feel like raising my head. But I don't, not until he pulls away from me and I am left with the sensation on my skin, the scent in my nostrils.

My dad. Every element of that moment for me was crawling with his brother, my father, right down to the opening “I'm sorry, Kevin,” which prefaced so many repairs, so many recoveries.

He retakes his seat across from me, points his steak knife at my steak, and I think I get his point.

I start eating, though I cannot envision ever finishing.

“What I should have said,” he says, “is that I never had a kid, until now.”

I have to smile at his gesture, a cube of beef suspended on the tines of the fork in front of my lips.

“That's a damn nice thing to say.”

“Well, I damn mean it, dammit.”

“Okay, but this is only temporary until I get myself oriented. I will not be bothering you for long.”

“Well, there ya go, I was just about to tell you the exact same thing.” He laughs heartily, though we both understand that he means every syllable, as I believe he means every syllable of everything he says. Chowing down is how we seal the deal.

I make the appropriate moans of approval as I chew—as much as I even need to—the first buttery bite of beef. “Fantastic, Uncle Sydney, no kidding.”

“That pleases me greatly,” he says.

“There's no way I could eat all this food, though.”

He is chewing, so he holds up a hold-on finger till he's ready. Then, he's ready.

“There is a way. And you will find it.”

“But it's massive.”

“There's a big T-bone in there somewhere, so it's really not as much meat as it looks like. In this place, we get our protein, our fresh fruit and vegetables to the tune of at least eight portions a day, seeds, nuts, whole grains, plenty of hydration. Gimme a few days and I'll turn you into the man somebody else couldn't manage in seventeen years. Not certain how much I can do for that complexion, but we'll start by cutting out sugar and see where we go from there.”