Tales of the Madman Underground (2 page)

I was gripping that shovel so hard you’d think I’d bend it in half, and I made myself relax before I spilled any. I opened the back door and slung the shovelful under the trellis. People always wondered why our morning glories were so impressive.

At least there weren’t any dead cats this morning, and it didn’t look like anybody had lost a fight with a raccoon, skunk, or owl. I hadn’t seen BeautySong in a while, though, so maybe she’d run out of luck.

Ocean, Starlight, LoveJoy, and Tundra all padded past me, off to kill birds and raid garbage cans in the neighborhood, as I closed and locked the back door. I’d lost two minutes to getting into a rage about cats. Fuck. Normal guys did
not
do that.

One last check in the mirror. It was still me, Karl Shoemaker, Prospective Normal Guy. Normal normal normal. One like him on every street corner. Think normal thoughts, stop being a chickenshit, get moving.

Check on Mom, like always; you never knew what might be breaking and shaking, because she broke things and shook things the way cats have kittens. So I quietly opened the door to her room, slipped inside, and looked around. Trouble, definitely—Neil was there.

Shit.
Real
trouble. Whenever Mom went out at night she dressed like she’d gone to a costume party as a gypsy—big clunky black boots, baggy skirt in about twenty colors that looked like an old quilt, lots of fake gold and silver chains and loops, baggy shirt, bright head scarf. But this morning the junk jewelry lying on the nightstand and the clothes thrown around the room were new, and in the ashtray beside all the Kent butts, there were a couple roach clips with a not-smoked-down joint in each one.

This close to her paycheck, she could only have gotten the money one way.

I slipped back out, down the hall, glanced around, opened the closet door, lifted the carpet, flipped up the little take-out piece I’d made in the floor there, and sure fucking enough. The big Ragú jar there was empty except for a note that said “Tue. Sept. 4 1973. I.O.U. $226.00. Put it on my tab, Beth Shoemaker.”

I had a familiar numb, sick feeling as I pocketed the IOU. I’d paste it in my account book later. She’d just wiped out what I’d made last week selling radio ads, or what I’d made gardening in a month, or three McDonald’s paychecks. Figure it any way you liked, there were some days of my life I had worked for nothing, and sure as shit I was never getting them back, because Mom’s IOU wasn’t worth wiping your butt with.

“I had to do that, sweetie,” she said, behind me. I turned around. Her jaw was set forward; she was pout ing. In the early morning light her skin was pale and ashy, showing every fine wrinkle. She really needed to learn to wash her face before going to bed. The heavy electric-blue eye makeup looked like some kind of a disease, and her lips, crusted with pink lipstick, looked kind of sick and dead. She was wearing a Lightsburg Wildcats T-shirt, probably Neil’s, since it hit her about midthigh. “I really needed some freedom last night.” She looked away, her face disappearing behind her loose hanging hair. “I’ll pay you back when I get my real estate license, it’ll all come out of the first sale to pay you.”

Her thick, long, dyed-yellow hair was wet on one side where she’d drooled into it. “You slobbered on your hair again, Mom.”

She touched it, yelled, “Ucky ucky!” and ran into the bathroom to splash water into it and brush it out. Good. That would give me my minute to get out the door.

She was still yelling “Ucky ucky ucky!” in the bathroom as I grabbed up my books. She got that from back when she used to be a substitute teacher; she liked really little kids and kind of naturally got down on their level. I guess doing that “ucky ucky” thing every time she got spit all over her hair was cute, maybe the first few times she did that, back when I was in eighth grade, right after she started to grow it out and dye it. Most of the guys who came through seemed to think it was cute, anyway.

Dashing for the door, I plowed right into Neil, who was naked. His shoulder-length brown hair smelled like a fire in a rope factory, his rumpled beard brushed over his mound of chest hair, and he was kind of waddling toward the bathroom, looking like Primitive Man in the diorama at the Toledo museum; slumped like an ape, big jaw hanging half open, peering around like he was afraid someone would hit him but hoped someone would feed him.

He reached out and rubbed my head with his hand, which was probably as much cleaning as that hand would get today. “Hey, little dude. You oughta stick around. Your mommy got some money. Betcha she takes us to breakfast.”

He’d thought that was fucking hilarious for years, pretending like he didn’t know where she got it. Sometimes he’d helped her look for my stashes.

“I gotta get to school, Neil.” I slapped his hand up off my head.

“School’s bullshit,” he said as I opened the door, and “Hey, what’s with the little dude?” as I closed it behind me.

I was almost as tall as he was, and in better shape from work (something he wouldn’t know much about), but I was sure as
shit
not as heavy.

Off my schedule. Shit, right in the first twenty minutes. Now I’d have to hurry, no slack in my timing.

It was a nice, bright summer day, no trace of fall yet. I had to catch the early bus, and make it look like an accident, so I could just accidentally miss seeing Paul Knauss.

Paul and me had been best friends since we shared a playpen—our dads had been best friends for like five years before we were born. We were like two pieces of the same guy; I got the muscles and the common sense, he got the talent and the face. I told Paul that once, and like right then, not even a second for a breath, he said, “How do you know we’re not two parts of the same ugly, puny, untalented dork?”

See, he could always crack me up. And we’d been through more shit together than an old plumber’s snake. So I wasn’t mad at him or anything—I just needed to duck him for a few weeks, and get people to stop saying KarlandPaul like it was one word, and disconnect myself from his weirdness, since being
un
weird was critical for Operation Be Fucking Normal.

Paul and me had always been on the same bus since the first day of kindergarten, so to make ducking him look like an accident was going to be tricky. Usually we’d be at the stop just
after
the early bus, on purpose, to goof some till the on-time bus came. Today I needed it to look like I accidentally took the early bus.

I glanced down at my watch—I had been walking slower than I meant to. Three blocks to cover,
now.
I ran down the street, sunlight flashing in and out of my eyes as I passed through the deep morning shadows of the big old trees. The early bus was at my stop, the last kid just getting on, so I started a serious kick, finishing in a blaze along its bright yellow side and jumping up onto the black rubber steps, landing tiptoe and rocked forward.

So much for looking like I caught it by accident.

Jolene Weber, the driver, was one of the ladies that got drunk with my mom. She grinned at me. “Made it, kiddo,” she said. “Two more steps and you’d’ve been hanging from the back windows on the way to school.”

“Yeah, well.” That’s what you said, in Lightsburg, when you were supposed to say something and couldn’t think of anything.

She swung the steel handle that thumped the door closed and hollered, “Everybody hang on, I’m peelin’ out.”

In the aisle, the guy in front of me turned partway around.

It was Paul. I was surprised to see him but I figured, oh, well, hitches in the plan were bound to happen, I couldn’t very well dodge him clear till Halloween, and come to admit it, I didn’t really want to. I’d have to sit with him.

But Paul stared at me like I’d just gotten off a flying saucer, and sat in the first open seat, next to one of those invisible sophomore girls that fill up the halls in school.

Plenty of double seats open, just a couple steps further back. I went and sat in the nearest open double, two rows behind Paul, watching the back of his head.

Paul and me’d been friends since before we could talk. We’d been in the Madman Underground ever since we’d gotten our first tickets in the first week of fourth grade.

I guess up until just a few years before Paul and me went into it, there wasn’t much mental health care in schools, which explained everything about the older generation, if you asked me, which is probably why nobody asked me.

When I asked Dad why I had to go to a shrink, back in fourth grade, he told me Mr. Knauss, Paul’s dad, had worked really hard to get school psychologists into the budget, which was good enough for me right there. Then he leaned forward and looked me right in the eye and added, “Karl, we are finally advanced enough to admit some kids need help, and provide it for them.” (Which told me I was one of those kids.)

But like Paul’s dad always added, this was still Ohio, the Cheap Bastard State, so they got the cheapest shrinks they could get—either fresh out of grad school or just up from a first job at a prison. First thing shrinks did when they got into the Lightsburg schools was start mailing out résumés to bigger school systems or real clinics, and they’d get hired away from Lightsburg pretty fast. Our therapy group went through like three to seven of them a year.

The school system didn’t exactly know what to do with the shrinks, either. Teachers had a list of who got out of class to go to group therapy, and you got sent off to it on the same period and day every other week, the same way the kids who talked funny went to speech.

Now here’s what was plain old wall-to-wall stupid: the
teachers
—
not
a shrink,
not
the kids,
nobody
who knew jack shit—the
teachers
decided who went to group therapy. Or sometimes the guidance counselors, which was not any better, since all our guidance counselors were coaches who were too stupid to teach. Which meant you got your ticket either because they knew your life was full of real bad shit, like Paul, or because the teacher caught you doing something weird, like me. And once you were in, they put a note in your file that said you were in therapy, and all your teachers saw that file.

They might as well have tattooed CRAZY on your forehead. The next year every teacher would be watching you for the first weird thing you did—and has there ever been a kid who never does anything an adult considers weird?

First thing you did, bing-o, back into therapy. They kept our same therapy groups together year after year, so almost always the newest person in the room was the shrink. Get one ticket once and it was good for free tickets every year afterwards.

Teachers have
no
sense of perspective. The first time I got a ticket it was in fourth grade, because Mrs. Daggett was reading a story and I got a crying jag like I did sometimes.

Stories
nailed
me. I was one of those kids that has to know how a movie comes out before I could see it. I couldn’t handle suspense, not even a little. And if I
did
know how it came out, and it wasn’t happy, that was even worse.

Mrs. Daggett was reading us “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” the part right before the end when the paper doll blows into the fire. I started to cry because I knew we were coming up on the part where they would find the tin heart in the ashes, and just knowing that was coming was too much for me.

When that happened at home, Mom or Dad would just go out to the kitchen, fix themselves a drink, and wait till I’d stop. Then if they remembered, they’d come back and finish the story. No big deal. But Mrs. Daggett didn’t know me, and she was one of those pushy people that just have to try and help, so she put her arm around me.

That got me crying so hard I couldn’t breathe, let alone explain. So I was making these weird hiccup noises and my face got all purple. Daggett called in the school nurse.

That was that, I got my ticket. The next week I was excused from class and started going with Paul to group therapy.

Paul had been going since the start of school that year. He got
his
ticket because everybody in Lightsburg knew about what had happened over the summer. His mom was going to take a picture of the kids just before going to church, so she had Paul and his big brother Dennis and little sister Kimmie lined up in front of the house. She had one of those old kind of cameras where you look down into it instead of through it, and you walk back and forth to get things right in the picture.

So she was down at the foot of the front yard, in the grass between the sidewalk and the street, trying to get it perfect, and she stepped one more step back without looking, and her high heel slipped over the curb and she fell over backwards in front of a speeding car.

The driver was some high school girl. Her family only lived in town that one year. People said they just weren’t Lightsburg people; I guess it was a shame that Mrs. Knauss didn’t get killed by a real local.

The tire went right over her neck, and she died that second. For years people in town said she didn’t have time to suffer. I think everyone always has time to suffer.

So I got my first ticket because I did something crazy, and Paul’s first ticket was because something awful happened so he was supposed to be crazy. Same story with all the other Madmen—once we got our first ones, from then on we got them because we’d had them before. We were gonna be in the Madman Underground till death or graduation.

But it couldn’t be absofuckinglutely impossible to not get the ticket, because now and then a kid was only there for a year and then left the group.

I was going to try being normal, starting today. Who knew what might follow? A social life. People off my case. A non-Madman girlfriend. The road was wide open, so I was pedal-to-the-metal-and-let-her-roar flooring it towards being more normal than anybody.

Still, I wondered what Paul’s problem was. Okay, so I wanted to avoid him. That didn’t mean
I
wanted to be avoided.