Stick (5 page)

“Ricky                  Dostal's              father called me,” Dad said.

He hit Bosten again, not hard to hurt him, it was just a prod—something like you'd do to a horse, maybe—just his way of making sure we both knew the title of the story Dad was about to tell us.

Bosten tightened his arms on the chair, like he was hugging it, like he loved that chair so much. He wasn't about to try to move.

“Four     hundred      dollars!” Dad swung the slashing belt across Bosten again.

This time, he wasn't just trying to get our attention.

“That's what he wants me to pay him for the emergency room. Four hundred goddamned dollars!”

Then he hit Bosten across the back of his head.

I heard my brother cry out.

But it was soft, buried in the cushion of Dad's smoking chair.

I                    heard                  it                          anyway.

Mom's hand twisted. Like she was telling me I better not think about turning my face away.

“You think you're tough? Beating up a goddamned fourteen-year-old? How do you think I can afford to pay four hundred dollars?”

I didn't wish he would stop.

I knew how stupid wishing was.

Mom's hand dug tighter into my hair with each angry word from Dad's mouth. Dad grabbed the bottom of Bosten's shirt and pulled it up, baring my brother's pale and bony back. Then Dad slid both hands through Bosten's belt and jerked his blue jeans all the way down past his knees. I was terrified and embarrassed for my brother.

These things happened all the time, though.

It's just how the McClellan family did things, and me and Bosten never wondered if, maybe, there wasn't some other way out there for getting family things done.

Everyone was like this, right?

Then Dad began beating Bosten, dutifully cutting red slashes into the flesh across my brother's back and butt.

I tried shutting it out, but with each
whack
of the belt I felt electricity cutting across my own spine. I closed my eyes and swore at myself that I wouldn't cry, but I called myself an ugly bastard because it was all my fault that Bosten was being beaten.

I opened my eyes when Mom jerked my head.

My father hit him with the belt over and over, and Bosten took it, whimpering, shivering at times, until Dad, out of breath, finally stopped.

Mom's grip loosened.

Dad looked at me. I thought I'd be next, but his eyes fell away from me like I wasn't there at all. He casually fed his belt back through the loops on his slacks and picked up the pack of cigarettes from the floor where Bosten had knocked it down.

Bosten lay there, stretched across the chair, shaking. He wasn't crying. I knew Bosten wouldn't ever cry in front of Dad and Mom.

He'd do it later.

Mom let go of my hair and Dad lit a cigarette, and then dropped the pack, again, onto the floor beside his chair. He hooked his fingers into Bosten's collar and stood him up. I was thankful that Bosten's shirt fell down and covered his nakedness and the bloody marks on his backside. I hoped, somehow, that the softness of the flannel made my brother not hurt so much.

Bosten tried pulling up his jeans, but my father wouldn't allow him to bend forward. He walked Bosten, manacled by his lowered pants, out of the living room and into the hallway. I knew what would happen next. Same as always. Bosten would get locked inside the spare bedroom—I called it Saint Fillan's room, I will tell you why—no lights, no nothing, not even any clothes; just a galvanized bucket to use for a toilet and a cot with one sheet. This would usually last for two days, sometimes more. It happened to me as often as it happened to him.

Everyone raised kids this way.

And Dad stopped before they'd gone too far down the hall.

      “Say

                   good night, Bosten.”

My brother whispered,

“Good night.”

It was like a game, but it wasn't fun and there was no chance of winning.

Maybe a minute later, I stood there not knowing what to do, a door slammed shut down the hallway.

I stole away.

When I was at the top of the basement stairs, Mom called out,

“Good night,

Stick.”

It was a game.

I didn't answer her.

“GODDAMNIT,             I               SAID

‘GOOD NIGHT, STICK'!”

I tried to close myself inside my room.

It was a game.

Footsteps on the stairs.

Dad.

“Didn't you                                              hear your mother? Get your              ugly ass up there and say good night!”

He grabbed my hair and pulled me upstairs to the living room.

To say good night.

It was a game, and it always went like this.

*   *   *

There was a pipe that ran down
a corner of my wall; a drain from upstairs to the septic tank for gray water. It descended along the concrete walls of the basement in the same corner where I kept my bed.

If I pressed my only ear to it at night, when the house was quiet, sometimes I could hear things from upstairs.

And with my head pressed like that into the pipe as I lay in my bed, I could hear nothing else.

The sounds would get into my head and there was no way they could ever get out.

I would lie there,

the top of my head resting against the rough concrete,

so I could

listen

to the upstairs.

I kept my eyes on the small window above my bed.

It was a perfect rectangle—golden—I'd measured it; and it sat

right at ground level.

In spring I could look up and see how the grass grew.

It was like being buried, and still able to watch and

listen

to the living world.

I heard Bosten crying

upstairs.

It sounded like coughing at first,

but I know my brother.

I kept a sixteen-penny nail

on the floor beneath the bedframe.

I tapped             

on the pipe for Bosten

and sometimes

I believed he heard me.

*   *   *

Robert Beckett always smelled like urine.

It was the clearest memory I had from my first days at school.

They put me in the mentally retarded class for two years until I started talking.

The first time I spoke, I told Robert Beckett to stop pissing on himself, and he did. We became friends after that.

*   *   *

I liked the mentally retarded kids.
One ear was enough for them.

In third grade they put me in with the normal kids. In third grade

they

put me in with

the normal kids.

Inthirdgradetheyputmeinwiththenormalkids.

Normal kids in third grade do not like

boys

without that hole.

*   *   *

I was no good

in most things, but especially bad in math.

*   *   *

Bosten and I were walking in the woods
one day and he announced, “Stick, I did the math. Did you ever think about why there are no pictures from Mom and Dad's wedding? She was pregnant with me, that's why!” And he laughed. “I did the math. It was May when they got married. The announcement is in the scrapbook, just two pages before my birth certificate. August was only three months later.

Ha-ha!

What do you think of that, Sticker?”

I didn't know what to think. At least he was born whole.

EMILY

In the morning,
I tried to sneak out while they were having cigarettes and coffee.

Mom stopped me.

“Stark                            McClellan.”   She said, “You are     not leaving this house looking like that.”

And I knew what
that
meant.

Dad glared at me. “You look like a                                  goddamned bum.”

I stopped at the top of the basement stairs. Mom came out of the kitchen, holding her backwards cigarette in one hand and the electric hair clippers in the other. A green extension cord dragged behind her.

“Take  your shirt and undershirt  off and

go get the broom.”

I hated when she gave me haircuts.

*   *   *

I stood,
stripped to the waist on the front porch, listening to the sound that came around that one side: the insect buzzing of the clippers, fascinated at how Mom could smoke a cigarette without using her hands at all; one hand held my head steady, while the other swept the teeth of the clippers up, up, up—mowing from the bottom of my neck, around that one ear, and over the dead spot on the right side of my skull.

I liked the way the blades nipped at my neck. But it was freezing cold outside, and I shook.

“Stay             still.”

Everything itched. My hair fell in spiny tufts over my chest and shoulders and found its way inside the waist of my jeans and down my legs. My arms locked tense against the tickling and the cold and the morning. I tried to blow the bits of needle hair from the end of my nose.

“Why        can't             you stay still?”

Mom was getting angry.

“Sorry.”

She switched off the clippers. “There. Clean this up.”

I made a broom of my fingers and tried to get as much hair as possible off my skin before slipping on my undershirt and tucking in my shirt.

There were rules about how we boys could dress at my house.

Dad made them:

We could never have hair longer than half an inch.

We always had to have our shirts tucked in before we left the house, too, and we had to wear white T-shirts under them.

Always.

We were never allowed to go outside wearing just T-shirts, like other boys did.

Dad said that was disrespectful, like walking around in public in our underwear, which also always had to be no other color but white.

And we never had pajamas, no matter how cold it got.

Dad said the boys don't wear pajamas to bed in his family.

*   *   *

Bosten and I never even once
thought about the rules.

They were just rules.

“And you have to    eat some breakfast before you can go anywhere.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

I'd sweep every last bit of the hair from the porch, and then clean out the bristles on the broom, too, before I could come back inside the house.

I rubbed my hand across my head. The nubs of my hair felt like coarse velvet. I liked that feeling, how I could hear the friction of my hand on the inside of my head. I traced my fingers over the spot where a normal boy would have an ear. That touch made a sound, too. Inside my head.

I hated my ugliness.

I looked at the door. Then I crept across the wet lawn and stood outside the window on the spare room. If they caught me here, they'd beat me.

Why wouldn't they?

I would expect them to.

I tapped with one finger.

Bosten peeked out from the edge of the dark curtain. He winked at me, and I winked back.

“Those bombs last night. They were really cool, Bosten.”

I could tell by the squint in his eye that he smiled. He nodded his head.

I went back inside and made myself a bowl of Cheerios.

That morning, I went to Emily Lohman's house.

The Lohmans lived on the other side of the road from us, but it was a long walk through the woods to get there. I'd have to squeeze through a barbed-wire fence and cross a cow pasture where Emily's family kept two calves; and then follow the shore of their pond for a quarter mile before her house even came into view.

“Stick!

Good             morning!”

Mrs. Lohman swung the door open, smiling.

I thought she was the nicest person in the world, but not as pretty as Paul Buckley's mom. I untied my shoes and slipped them off on the porch. They were wet from the walk.

And I took Bosten's cap off my head and hung it on a brass coatrack when I stepped inside.

The house smelled like pancakes and flowers.

“Emily! Your          friend's           here!” Mrs. Lohman called out into the vastness of the house.

I liked the way it sounded when she called me Emily's
friend.

Mr. Lohman sat at the kitchen table, wearing a stained T-shirt and pajama bottoms. He had glasses on his face, but his eyes smiled when he noticed me standing on the cool linoleum of their kitchen floor. He was reading the paper from Kingston, folded in one hand, with a glass of juice in the other. A big plate smeared with syrup and leftover crumbs had been pushed away from him toward the center of the table.

“Looks like someone          got himself a haircut,” Mr. Lohman said. “You're lookin' overly handsome for a Saturday morning, with  

                                                     your shirt all tucked in

and everything.”

I could feel my face turning red.

“Dora, fix this boy a plate.”

They always fed me. I'd been coming over to their house ever since third grade.

Mr. and Mrs. Lohman never seemed to notice that something was wrong with me.

*   *   *

Emily didn't have any
brothers or sisters.

Maybe that was why Mr. Lohman didn't have the same rules as Dad. And if you ever really could eat enough to explode and die, I would gladly do it on Mrs. Lohman's pancakes. So by the time Emily came down from her room and sat next to me at the table, I already had syrup all over my face.