Short Bus Hero (12 page)

14. Teratophobia
/ ter-ătˈ-ə-fōˈbē-ə / fear of monsters or deformed children

“I
s Stryker
Nash here?” Lois asks the smoky-smelling hag that serves as the In A Rush Auto receptionist/service writer. The hag points with her yellow skeletal finger out the plate glass window to her left. I see a tracheostomy in her near future. She’ll blow smoke through the hole to make her nieces and nephews laugh.

It won’t be funny.

Lois takes Ally’s hand and they walk outside to a dented mini-van, where Stryker stands with a young pregnant couple. Lois and Ally stop a few cars away to give the couple some privacy. Stryker glances their way and Ally lets out a little squeal. She is so excited. A new optimism lit her way when she was released from the hospital. She can’t believe her mom is letting her make some grown-up decisions of her own. Yes, she will buy the group home and set up a fund to pay staff, but she will also spend some money on something she loves just as much as her friends: wrestling.

The couple that Stryker has been trying to sell the van to walks off, deciding to talk things over privately. Stryker locks the vehicle’s doors as Lois and Ally approach. His unshaven face conveys a pissed-off bitterness that Lois has seen before, particularly in the eyes of vagrants she used to pass on her way to work. Ally thinks Stryker looks hot. No one ever said she had good taste.

“Hello, ladies,” Stryker says, playing the slick used car salesman role to the fullest. “What can I do for you on this fine day?” It has not been a fine day at all. Stryker moved to his broken-down old apartment in Braddock last week and this morning he woke to find that he had no hot water. It is not a fine day at all, it’s a shitty one.

“Are you Stryker Nash?” Lois asks, knowing that he is, but asking anyway, in the interest of being polite. She’s embarrassed for him, working at this dump of a car lot.

Stryker looks from her to Ally and back again, narrowing his eyes. “Do I know you from somewhere?” he asks. Ally covers her mouth with both hands and giggles. She thinks he remembers her from some wrestling match.

“I’m Lois Forman, and this is my daughter, Ally,” she says, offering her gloved hand. “Ally is your biggest fan.” Ally pulls at her own hair, trying to contain her excitement.

Stryker shakes their hands and turns into Johnny from
The Dead Zone
(why, yes, angels do read popular fiction, thank you very much). His mind flashes on the morning news show he’d seen weeks before. The retard who won the lottery. His mind flashes on some other memory, some other life.

“Hi. Yeah, I’m Stryker.” He takes off his mittens, produces a large bottle of hand sanitizer from his coat pocket and rubs a good amount all over his hands. He then puts the lotion away and puts his mittens back on. “You looking to buy a car?” He doesn’t want to give away the fact that he knows they won hundreds of millions. He’s thinking he’ll show them the ’07 Jaguar they just got in, maybe jack up the price a little before they read the sticker. Why wouldn’t they go to a good car dealer, though? One of the big guys who make TV commercials and stuff? Oh, well, who is he to judge?

“Listen,” Lois says, looking around the lot, “can we talk inside? It’s cold out here and we have something to ask you.”

“Um, sure, okay.” He leads them inside to his pathetic desk. He scrounges up two plastic chairs and places them on the side opposite his own and gestures for them to sit.

“So, what’s on your mind?” He pulls off his Steelers cap and peels off his coat.

“Well, Mr. Nash, like I said, Ally is a huge fan of yours.” Lois’s chair wobbles as she sits down. Stryker thinks of the mountain of dunning notices that wait for him in the dark, at “home.” He has trouble thinking of that hellhole as his home. It makes him want to puke.

“She doesn’t look all that big to me,” he says, taking a seat and winking. He’s glad that Craig is out to lunch. It’s bad enough that the old crone at the reception desk is giving him the stink eye.

“I wa-wa-wan-want to bring…bring you b-b-back into the ring,” Ally stammers, pulling her black and gold-striped scarf away from her mouth with a mittened hand.

Stryker doesn’t know what to say. Is this real? No, can’t be. He looks around the office. The boss is on the phone, sweet-talking someone into something. The receptionist snaps her head to look away as his eyes fall on her. He can smell her cigarette smoke from across the space. It makes him sick. Someone had knocked over a plastic palm tree in the corner, near his desk—he’ll pick it up later. What is he doing in this fucking two-bit rip-off joint? He doesn’t belong here.

He doesn’t feel like he belongs anywhere.

Finally, he says: “What?”

He heard her all right, he just wants to hear her say it again, to make sure.

She repeats it.

They hadn’t been shitting on the news.

He can’t believe his fucking luck.

Not that I approve of that type of language.

* * *

Stryker shows up at the Forman house promptly at six twenty-nine. They’d invited him to dinner at six thirty. His punctuality impresses everyone—they expected such a big star to be fashionably late. Ally hovers at his elbow all evening, gazing into his scarred and rocky face. The attention makes him uncomfortable, but he’ll just have to suck it up, he supposes.

I sense a strange vibe leaking from his being, almost like…disgust? I don’t know. It’s something that flows from him like an oil spill. Ally seems happy, so maybe I’m just imagining it. Or, maybe it has something to do with the piles of junk all over the Formans’ house. Stryker doesn’t know quite what to make of the overwhelming amount of clutter. It’s not covering every square inch of the floor or anything, and there’s no moldy food or animal feces in sight, but it reminds him of a show he’d seen on A&E.

He tries hard to focus on the dinner conversation.

“So,” Kevin says, speaking everyone’s mind, as usual, “what’s it cost to start up a wrestling outfit?” He has elevated talking with a mouthful of food to an absolute art form. Bits of homemade biscuit spray from his lips, showering every surface within a twelve-inch radius of his churning mouth. Kevin hates wrestling. He thinks the millions of people who follow it are complete ass-hats. “It’s gotta be expensive, competing with Drake Murray and that whole freak show.”

Kevin jumps as Lois’s blunt loafer stabs him in the bony shin.

Stryker sets his fork on his plate and wipes biscuit debris from his cheek with a paper napkin. He tries not to make a show of it, but Ally laughs at his frown. He needs the bottle of hand sanitizer that he’d left in the car.

He looks around the table at the mismatched dishes and the stained table cloth. Everything in the house—from the threadbare chair cushions, to the handmade afghan, to the piles of junk, and the family themselves—radiates hominess and love and care. Stryker feels like an alien from a distant galaxy. He hides behind a vacuous smile.

“Did Ke-K-Kevin g-g-g—” Ally gets stuck and turns red. “Get you?” She laughs. “Hey, Kev-Kevin, say it, don’t…don’t spray it!” She sticks her own mashed potato-coated tongue out at her brother. Ugh. Their guest thinks of feeding time at the zoo. He tries to push the image away.

An unreadable thought resurfaces in Stryker’s head. Ally reminds him of something. Or someone.

Dammit, I wish I could see it.

Something about her makes him uneasy, that much is mud-clear.

Earl inhales a piece of chicken and starts coughing. Stryker grimaces, turning into a complete germophobe. He shields his mouth and nose with his napkin, wishing there were a sneeze guard protecting the table. Suddenly, everything around him feels dirty. Just like at work. And in his shitty apartment. His appetite abandons him, swept away on a sea spray of nutrient-rich saliva molecules.

“Well, starting up a wrestling organization isn’t cheap,” Stryker says, pushing his barely touched plate toward the center of the crowded table. “It may be a better idea to buy out one of the small regional operations, you know, one that already has its own whaddayacallit…uh, facilities and guys and everything.” Stryker never thought he’d serve as the most knowledgeable party in a business venture, if that’s what this is. He’s still a little fuzzy on the Formans’ intentions, but his own are becoming clearer.

Lois stands up and begins gathering everyone’s dishes. “How much would you say that would cost?” she asks, wrestling Kevin’s plate from his grabbing hand. He has an enormous appetite for such a thin person. Lois is so jealous of his turbo-charged metabolism.

“Um…”

A nasty filth-splattered red light bulb ignites somewhere behind Stryker’s eyes.

The notion to take complete advantage of these kind-hearted, ultra-rich rubes pounds him with the force of a falling oak. He stifles an evil chuckle as he mentally weighs his options. He’ll think more about it back at his new hovel, when he doesn’t have their trusting and hopeful sheep faces hanging over him. Being trained in the dubious art of selling used cars may serve him well after all, he thinks.

If Stryker had a cohort with which to converse at the Formans’ house, in that carny speak I told you about, they would no doubt express a desire to “burn the lot” and make a “circus jump” after sending Ally off to search in vain for the “key to the midway.”

Stryker is such a conflicted soul. Good and evil fight a continuous cage match somewhere inside his fat head. He is so tough to read for a young angel like me. Call it my goddamned immaturity.

“I don’t know. I’d have to do some research, I guess.” He flashes a well-practiced grin at Lois.

Ally disappears and returns with a framed photo. She thrusts it under Stryker’s nose. He pushes it a few inches away and the image swims into focus.

“Look,” Ally says. “It’s me and you at the…the match in Cin-Cin-Cincinna-Cincinnati last year.”

The photo shows a grinning Ally, eyes squeezed nearly shut, hugging Stryker’s washboard mid-section as he holds up his epic biceps for the adoring crowd to see. His lips are firmly planted on one of those over-inflated crooked arms in a shameless display of self-worship. He cannot recall that feeling of pride. He’s been beaten down since then.

“Remember that?” Ally asks, trying to read the guarded expression on his face from close-range. He feels her breath on his cheek and remembers some other event that I can’t quite see. The images in his mind have scribbled out faces, scrambled audio, blacked out text. It’s like reading a fucking censored letter to a maximum security prison inmate. So frustrating.

“Ally,” Lois says, walking along a goat path into the family room from the dining room, “that was a long time ago, and Stryker meets so many people…”

“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry, I don’t remember.”

Ally’s face falls. She steps over a pile of manila file folders, crammed with paper, and looks at the worn toes of her comfortable orthopedic shoes.

“But, hey,” he offers, “maybe we can take a new picture. How about that?”

Ally brightens and runs off to find her camera.

“She’s a great kid,” Stryker says to Lois as she lowers herself onto the sagging couch next to Earl. You’d think these people would at least spring for a decent sofa now that they’re rich. And, you know, maybe have Merry Maids come in once a week or something. Well, that’s what Stryker thinks.

“Yes, she is.” Lois looks directly into Stryker’s brown and bloodshot eyes. “She’s had a few problems since you left wrestling. It might sound kind of, I don’t know, excessive to you, but your getting fired sent her into a depression.”

Stryker snorts. “Yeah, it had that effect on me, too.” He grins.

Lois glances at the stairs, to make sure Ally isn’t coming down yet. Stacks of shoeboxes full of receipts and old greeting cards sit on the first three steps. A mound of dirty laundry occupies the fourth, fifth, and sixth. She’s embarrassed by her pack-rat behavior. Stryker must think she never cleans her house. And she doesn’t. She can never figure out where to start. Just thinking about it makes her cry. The few times they’d had guests over, Earl had somehow made the pathways through the rooms a little wider. She couldn’t bear to think of how he’d done it. She was too afraid to ask.

“Seriously, her doctor put her on medication. Which she tried to overdose on. I mean, she didn’t take enough to actually kill her for sure, but I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do. The doctor told me that the medicine carried a risk of suicidal ideation, but who takes that warning seriously? I mean, they all say that on the label.”

Stryker stares at the large four-dimensional mole on her neck. He thinks of Larry the Cable Guy’s fabled sister, Holy Moley.

“Her doctor also said,” Lois clears her throat and continues, “that when something traumatic happens in the life of a person with Down syndrome, it sets off a grief reaction. And the something traumatic can be something you and I would see as trivial, like the cancellation of a TV show, or getting a new teacher at school—”

“Or your favorite wrestler getting canned,” Kevin calls down the artificial corridor from the dining room, where he is still eating.

Stryker tries not to listen. The whole story is liable to make him soft. He chooses instead to play the slick celebrity, the carny “butcher.” He grins his car-pushing grin. The blacked out text of his memories spools out in ribbons and fills the space of his consciousness. “Thanks for sharing that with me. I know it must have been hard for you.”