Mr. Bones (16 page)

Nothing else happened until later in the morning. Tafel was summoned to Moses' container. He wasn't long. He was soon striding out, nose forward, carrying a rifle.

The work site was over a little hill, past the shade trees where Silsbee usually sat chatting with the Indians, among the welding torches and the masks and tanks.

Chivers said, “Crunch time.”

Within minutes we heard a gunshot, and after that, “No!” Back came Tafel, not angry but frightened and looking friendless and paler. Moses, at the entrance to his container, took the rifle from him and must have given an order, because Tafel said, “Yes, sir.”

When Silsbee appeared with hatred and sorrow on his face, carrying his dead dog in his arms, Tafel walked past him without a look. Moses called out to the cook boy, and Hong took the dog by the hind legs, the way you hold a dead chicken.

Without any orders, we completed our day's objective long before the bell sounded at five. In the evening we assembled in the mess container as usual, Moses leading the grace, and at the end of it saying how confident he was that we would finish ahead of schedule and there might be bonuses. But we'd have to be quicker in taking orders. He let this sink in, then he signaled to Hong.

“Let's eat.”

In the silence that followed, the stew was served. We ate without speaking, though a village dog began to bark. I wished it would stop, because it sounded triumphant, like mockery. I chewed the meat gratefully, and I smiled at Max Moses to show I wasn't paying attention to the barking. I was not surprised when he didn't smile back at me.

W
ATCHING THE BLACK
locomotive come chattering out of the tunnel, one-eyed, trailing smoke, its sharp chin forward, worrying back and forth on its seesawing side cranks, and looking lethal as it bore down on the solitary figure standing on the tracks at the level crossing, I turned the music up and said, “So long, dead ass.”

John Burkell was biting his necktie in fear. He murmured, “No,” into the wet stripes, as though I had asked a question.

Walter Herkis lifted his uncertain eyes to me, and now the music was so loud I just shrugged and made a face, meaning, “So what?”

“Okay, die,” Walter said, turning back to the train.

As Burkell chewed his tie, the train shoved the little figure along, toppling it sideways and off the table. And I felt a kind of joy, watching Walter's big confident hand on the transformer, now slowing the train.

“So long, dead ass!” Walter screeched. The other screech in the room was the phonograph, a 45 of Little Richard singing “Rip It Up.”

Walter's mother called out, “What's all that racket down there?”

“Nothing!” Walter looked at me for approval as he put another figure on the track, one of the toy pedestrians from the scale-model station. I was energized by the brainless clacking train and Little Richard, by Walter's high spirits, thrilled too by John Burkell's fear.

“Vito Quaglia would shit a brick if he knew you just killed him,” John said. “Even in fooling. He's psycho.”

“He's a banana man,” I said. “Who's next?”

“I hosey Ed Hankey,” Walter said.

“Hankey's a pissah. He can rotate on this.”

John stuffed his tie back into his mouth and looked around as though expecting to see big lisping Ed Hankey bulking at the back of Walter's basement behind the model train layout, the toy hill, the toy town, the level crossing, where the train was bearing down on the image of Ed Hankey. Walter pushed the transformer handle to Full Speed and the front wheels jumped, almost derailing the shivering train, until the plastic figure spun on its back into the plastic trees.

“‘And ball tonight,'” Walter said, with the song. “That bastard. Let's do the jocks.”

“I have to go home,” John said. His eyes, crusted with what he said was conjunctivitis, made him look sleepless and even more fearful. He slung his green book bag over his shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”

When he was gone, Walter smiled at me. “He's having conniptions.”

“Candy ass,” I said. “He's wicked scared.”

But even so, I knew that we were much the same, anxious pimply fourteen-year-olds gathered after school, taking refuge from the ball field and the bullies, safe in Walter Herkis's basement. Burkell chewed his tie, Walter bit his fingernails, I wore glasses and tried to rub the nearsightedness out of my eyes—my first year of glasses. We were miserable in much the same way, and misery made us friends. We hated school, every bit of it, the tough boys, the coy girls, the sarcastic teachers, the terror of the older students. The smell of the oiled wooden floors, the varnished desks, the urinal candy in the toilets. And the schoolwork itself—hated it most of all, because we were so good at it and made ourselves so conspicuous we pretended to have lapses of memory when we knew the right answers, Burkell in history, Walter in science, me in English, though I loved cooking chemicals in science, too. This infuriated the teachers, who seemed to know we were playing stupid. But it was dangerous to look bright.

“And here's the rest of the jocks,” Walter said, dropping six small figures onto the tracks as he pushed the handle of the transformer once again, and the speeding train plowed into them, scattering them.

The music had stopped. I swung the arm of the phonograph and set the needle onto the edge of the record.

“Burkell's chickenshit,” Walter said, picking up another figure. “Here's Evelyn. Your girlfriend.”

“She's not my girlfriend.”

But the music and the sound of the train drowned out my words as the locomotive sent Evelyn Frisch off the tracks.

“Don't make me come down there,” Walter's mother yelled. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing!” Walter called out. “Did you finish the book?”

“Yeah,” I said. It was the homework,
The Human Comedy
by William Saroyan.

“I don't get it,” Walter said.

“It's junk,” I said, and Walter looked shocked. “Homer's a banana man.”

We were eighth-graders at Miller Baldwin Junior High. Walter was new to the school, someone the others had never seen before, a Seventh-day Adventist. He was depantsed the first day at recess, and cried. Then they knuckle-punched his arm with noogies. He was mocked for being tall and, his first day, for knowing the answers in science. He liked me because I didn't mock him. He wore his pants so high you could see the tops of his white ankle socks. I was his only friend. We hiked in the Fells most Saturdays, we built fires at the Sheepfold. I liked him because he had more comic books than Burkell, and Elvis records, and a ham radio. And a whole big table of model trains that he ran with a transformer lever he worked with his thumb.

After he knocked some more figures down, he played “Rip It Up” again. I sat on his stool and touched the transformer.

“It's hot.”

“Because it's a transformer, shit-for-brains,” he said. “It's the coil. The coil heats up from the molecules that are backed up by the wire density.”

I squinted at his precise explanation.

“It's the resistance of the eddy current in the coil, because it's stepping down from AC to DC at a lower current. Ask Hoolie.”

Mr. Hoolie was our science teacher, someone we exasperated by pretending not to know the right answers. I was impressed that Walter used the terms so easily: “voltage,” “molecules,” and “wire density.” The idea that electricity was reduced by flowing through tight coils of hot wires was something new to me.

We were unhappy, restless, lonely boys, and this wet afternoon in October was typical, taking refuge in the stinks and sparks of science. Walter was hunched over the transformer. He then disconnected the wires from the side of the track and lifted them, making a bright arc.

“Spark gap,” he said, smiling at the thread of smoke. “Now there's no one else left. Just us.”

“You wish.”

 

Almost the first person I saw the next day was Vito Quaglia, and remembering how we had run him over with Walter's train, I began to smile.

“The fuck you lookin' at, four eyes, you fucken pineapple.”

“Nothing,” I said, and tried not to show my fear.

Quaglia was a skinny yellow-faced boy given to casual violence—not strong but reckless and slow-witted, usually open-mouthed, with a chipped front tooth that gave him a fang. He wore his shirt unbuttoned, a dirty T-shirt under it. His wild hair made him look fierce. He was always in trouble and had nothing to lose by more trouble. Though he was failing in most classes, Quaglia excelled as a soccer player—fast, a ruthless kicker—and as a result was popular with some of the teachers. His friends were either almost as tough as he was or else his fearful flatterers.

“Pineapple was making a face at you,” Angie Frezza said.

“You make one more face at me and I'll put my foot so far up your
culo
you'll have to open your mouth for me to take my shoe off.”

Frezza laughed at this and then said, “
Mannaggia,
look at the knockers on her, Vito,” offering him a picture torn from a magazine.

Quaglia opened his mouth wider, as though to see the picture better, showing his chipped tooth.

“Where's your fairy banana man friend?”

Though I was hot and anxious, I pretended not to hear, made myself small, and slipped away as he looked closer at Frezza's picture of a woman in a tight sweater.

He meant Walter, who was bullied because he was new, because he was weak, and especially because the word got out that he went to church on Saturdays. “Your wacky religion”—he couldn't go to soccer games on Saturdays. Everything about him was noticed: he couldn't eat meat, didn't drink Coca-Cola because of the caffeine, couldn't go to dances; he was a little too tall, and his clothes didn't fit. His ears turned red and he went breathless and silent when he was bullied, suffering it, his ears reddening even more, and hadn't fought back when he was depantsed.

“Quaglia hocked a louie at me in the corridor,” Walter whispered in English class. “At the bubbler.”

“He's a pissah,” I said. “Tell him to rotate.”

Vito and Frezza always sat at the back of the class.

Mr. Purcell said, “Jay, do you wish to share your thoughts with the class?”

“No, sir.”

“Then sit up straight and pay attention.” He was holding a book. “Has anyone finished the book?”

He meant
The Human Comedy.
I did not raise my hand. I simply sat, breathing through my nose. It wasn't that I hadn't liked the book; I knew the book was bad. I could not have said that of the previous book,
Silas Marner,
but this one was unbelievable, sketchy, sentimental, and written like a lesson. I knew the fault was with the book and not with me.

My certainty that it wasn't good made my head hot, as though I had been told a lie. I could have written an essay on why I didn't like it. Instead, all of us had to write about why it was good. That was another reason I hated school, finding it unfair. But my disliking the book was a secret that also made me feel powerful, superior to school, but also out of place, like an outlaw. I believed in Little Richard more than I believed in Homer Macauley.

“Do you have something to say, Jay?”

“The teacher calls Joe Terranova a wop in chapter twelve,” I said.

Quaglia slammed his loose desktop and said, “
Mannaggia!
”

“Quiet,” Mr. Purcell said. “But the teacher was reprimanded for it. And what did the principal say?”

I had said enough. I had only wanted to shock the class by using the word “wop.” I shrugged, as though I didn't know.

Mr. Purcell was holding the book open. “He said, ‘This is America, and the only foreigners here are those who forget this is America.'”

“And go to church on Saturday,” Vito said in a harsh whisper.

In science, the next class, Mr. Hoolie showed us a large glass ball filled with water.

“I'm taking for granted that you read the assigned pages,” he said, attaching a rubber tube to the glass ball. “This will show us two things. What two things? Anyone?”

“Air displacement,” Corny Kelleher said.

Mr. Hoolie took up a piece of chalk and wrote
Air displacement
on the blackboard.

“And?”

The answer was lung capacity. But I merely sat, squinting.

“It was in your homework,” Mr. Hoolie said.

“Air temperature?” Kelleher said.

“Lung capacity,” Mr. Hoolie said, and wrote the words on the blackboard. “Who's first? Evelyn?”

We watched as Mr. Hoolie inserted a mouthpiece into the rubber tube, and then as Evelyn Frisch took the tube in her dainty fingers and placed it between her lips, there were murmurs from the back of the room.

“Settle down, people,” Mr. Hoolie said. “Go ahead, Evelyn. Blow as hard as you can.”

Vito muttered something, making his friends laugh.

“Mr. Quaglia, one more word from you and you'll be seeing me after school.”

Evelyn had finished. The water in the glass ball had slipped down. Then it was Walter's turn. He did it, reddening from the effort, and gasped when he was done. The class laughed, and even Mr. Hoolie smiled.

Next Ed Hankey took the tube and blew, and the water level dropped sharply. He bowed to the class, making them laugh, then sat behind me and flicked my ear with his finger.

“Beat that, banana man,” he said into his hand, and the class bell rang.

“Homework,” Mr. Hoolie said. “The principles of the light bulb, chapter five.”

Walter was hit by a spitball in history class. The teacher, Mr. Gagliano, was asking about the Louisiana Purchase, the previous night's homework, and called on Walter, who was wiping the back of his head where the spitball had hit.

“Can you tell us about the Louisiana Purchase?”