Tales of the Madman Underground (47 page)

Something about the way he said
directly
made me feel just a little good down inside. I would have loved to see Dick and Coach “talk” to Neil
directly.
If I couldn’t do the job myself. I owed him a few for convincing my mother that I was Young Charlie Manson. But I’d like to see Neil after a couple men got
direct
on his worthless ass.

While I’d been thinking about that pleasant thought, Gratz had still been making sure I knew that I had to keep the money away from my mother. “It’s important for
both
of you, Karl.”

We were coming into the town now, and I said, “I’ll do like you say. Why are you making such a big deal about it?”

He ran a tanned hand through the perfect hair; it had too much Brylcreem in it to move, of course, but I guess it showed off the big biceps. Probably Mrs. Gratz had unconsciously trained him to do that. “Well,” he said, and then I realized he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell me. “When I get back, after Dick gets off at Philbin’s, Dick and me and Bill are going to go find your mother and have a long talk with her, one she probably won’t like. But it’s way overdue.”

“She’ll say it’s because you’re ucky ucky men who want to stop her being a free woman.”

“Well, maybe we are. Nonetheless we thought maybe we’d see if we could get her to dry out and take some control of her life. And she won’t do that unless she’s cut off from the benders with her asshole friends.”

Wow. First
shit
, now
asshole
. Coach Gratz was getting a real vocabulary.

“I guess she can run around and pretend she’s twenty, and give the finger to all us bad old men, all she wants, after you leave. She’s a grown-up, at least officially. We just don’t want her to screw up your life before you get out the door, and we don’t want to be the friends that stood around and did nothing while you got worked over like that. That was part of why I . . . well, shit.”

I looked down at the perfectly new-car clean carpet, wondering how many times he vacuumed and shampooed the inside of this big old boat. “Coach, if I could have all my years back to fourth grade as a do-over, I’d take it in a minute.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. Let me tell you something stupid and ugly about myself. Every single teacher in the school knew how tight the Madman Underground was, and how much you all pretended not to be a group. We’d talk about it in the lounge. And for years it just ate at me that you were in there—”

“Coach, they’re the friends I’ve got. And that’s who I am.”

“I
know
.
That’s
the thought that made me want to go buy a bottle: I looked at that letter I’d thrown away, lying in the wastebasket, and I just couldn’t stop thinking,
Karl can’t let a friend down, and they can’t let him down, and that’s really the way Karl is most Doug Shoemaker’s son
. The only people who were really helping my old friend’s son were all those crazy kids I despised. They were a lot better friends than I was. Maybe better people.

“So just as I walked into the meeting, stewing about all that, I found myself thinking, ‘I wish I had friends as good as Karl’s,’ and there was Dick, who I hadn’t talked to in years because of all that stuff they teach in my church about giving up the bad influences in your life . . . well. Here we are. About to commit financial fraud.” He turned into the parking lot for First Gist County Bank and Trust.

“Someday I wanna be a felon just like you, Uncle Al,” I said, and we both laughed like two stupid kids trying to get up their nerve to buy booze underage.

Counting all the money took more time than anything else. The forms were real simple to fill out. It finally came to $4,364.91, which was three dollars and twenty-four cents more than I thought it was but I didn’t figure I’d fight them about it. We set it up as a passbook savings account because it didn’t seem like a good idea to have checks around that Mom or one of her buds might try to forge. And the bank had early hours on Monday and Friday, late Friday hours, and Saturday morning hours, so one way and another I figured I’d be able to make it work. They even had a night depository so whenever a Madman with a car turned up at McDonald’s, I had a way to get money in there in the middle of the night.

We finished up at like five minutes to five, and Gratz told me he was buying and we were going to get sandwiches from the sub shop that catered to the college students, eat in the park, and talk things over some more. “Okay, as long as Mrs. Gratz won’t be on your case about missing dinner,” I said.

“It’s a Monday night. She works late, so we both grab something early, and then later we watch
Monday Night Football
together and cook up hot dogs and popcorn, because we used to love to go to games together in college, and I suppose it will seem corny and silly to you, but
we
think it’s romantic.”

The guy at the counter handed us our sandwiches and we walked out into the late afternoon sun. “Actually you’re scaring me, Coach, because that
sounds
romantic.”

The park was one of those old-style Ohio town squares, the kind they plowed up and turned into streets in bigger cities years ago, where the four main roads converge but then they inset a four-block area with trees and sidewalks and no streets running through it. There were a fair number of old guys on benches sitting around trying to remember a story the other old guys hadn’t already heard, and college students trying to pretend they were studying instead of checking each other out, and little kids running around like nuts on the playground. It occurred to me that if I could get Paul and Marti to hang out with me, we ought to drag Marti over here because it was the kind of thing she’d describe as being so American she could just shit.

The sandwiches were good and I wolfed mine down. I noticed Gratz was actually a pretty fastidious type, and I suppose that went with keeping himself in perfect shape and so forth. It was very annoying to realize that I might be getting to like this particular rude hollering asshole, but I consoled myself that there would always be plenty more of them to hate.

When we’d finished and splashed some water on our faces from the old-style pump drinking fountain (sulfur water, so I was sort of damp and eggy-smelling around the face), Gratz said, “Well, we should get back, but there was one more thing I wanted to ask you about, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Uh, if it’s about Marti, I’d rather not.”

He laughed. “Oh, no, it’s not. I can see why you might be worried, but it’s not. No, I just figure I’ll try to be nice to Marti, and more important be fair around her, and she’ll probably never like me but we can both get through the year.”

Then a thought kind of hit me, and I said, “Coach, if there’s a way you could help her—as much as you’re helping me—do you suppose you and some of the other people in town could, you know, help?”

That one seemed to rock him back, but he thought for a bit and said, “I guess if we knew someone was in the kind of bad spot you’re in—and there was anything anybody could do—I guess we’d have to. Is Marti in some kind of trouble like that? Or one of the other Madmen?”

Now it was my turn to think. “I don’t know what to say just yet. I’d’ve been mad at any of the Madman Underground”—it still felt so weird to speak those words to Gratz—“if they’d narked on me and my situation. I would bet they’d feel the same. And anyway I think there probably are adults who know some of what’s happening to some of us, and aren’t doing anything, for one reason or another, good or bad. I don’t know.”

“Nobody can do anything if nobody talks.”

“Yeah, I know, Coach.” I looked at the people playing, walking, loafing, hurrying, or sauntering across the little park in front of us. How many terrible stories were there, just there in front of me, never to be spoken? “Uh, I guess I’m going to think for a little while. You know, when you gave me that letter, I thought you wanted me to stooge for you.”

“Maybe I did, though I wouldn’t have put it that bluntly.”

“Well, maybe I ought to be your informant. Or maybe I should keep people’s trust. Or maybe it’s kind of case by case.”

“Karl, how about . . .” He thought for a moment, and finally said, “Okay, how’s this? I promise that if you come to me with anyone’s story—no matter whose and no matter how tough it is—I will at least tell someone who would be able to do something about it. But I won’t push you, and you’ll have to tell me.”

“Deal, Coach.”

We sat there and, shit, like it or not, I was kind of comfortable with him. I turned over the Madmen in my mind; it was the old, old problem, would Squid be better off without the kids who depended on him? If people knew the truth about what Mr. Knauss did in his rages, and Paul and Kimmie were fostered out somewhere, taken away from the town where they at least had some friends and support . . . did I want to have that kind of power over my friends’ lives? Hadn’t I always had it anyway?

Finally, to stop my thoughts from circling on forever, I asked, “Was
that
the ‘last thing’ you said you wanted to talk about?”

“No,” he said. “I—well, look, Karl, this is just something I’ve kind of noticed and wasn’t sure how to ask you about. You hear a lot about your dad, even now. He was a big guy in Lightsburg.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So how come you seem angry about him? I mean, is it one of those shrink things where you’re mad at him for deserting you and leaving you with your mother?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “And for leaving my mother to get lost among all the hippie shitheads, there’s so much crap floating around in the world and he never let her think for herself enough to learn to sort it out. He told her to be a Democrat and a Methodist, so she was; now Neil tells her to be a pothead and Judy tells her to be a paranoid lunatic, so she is. And right now her best hope is that Bill will tell her to be a responsible grown-up; she won’t do it for herself. So I sure as shit know that Dad could’ve left her better able to take care of herself.”

“He could,” Gratz said, noncommittally.

I knew right then I had to either say “I won’t talk about it” or just lay it right out there in front of Gratz, so I could see it myself, and see if it changed anything.

It had been a long day. I was tired. This was easier than anything else: “Coach,” I said, “my parents were screwed-up people who drank together a lot. You probably know that the cops spiked the police report that time Dad got busted for drunk driving and pissed into the police car to make his point. Mom and Dad had drunk fights and drunk make-ups and drunk sex, and I was scared to death a lot of the time. They tucked me in when they were drunk, and I got myself cereal while they sat at the breakfast table holding their heads and groaning about their hangovers. They loved me and they fought each other and they did stupid things and, well, it was a lot like some of my friends’ houses, too, you know?

“And then Dad found out he was dying, and he finally put his act together, and those were the best years of my life—while he dried out, getting ready to die. So it kind of feels like . . .” I didn’t know what to say next, so I watched a young couple throwing a Frisbee back and forth, her trying to look ditzy and silly, him trying to look cool and athletic. She was succeeding.

Finally, still with no idea of the right way to say it, I said, “Well, while he was dying, I was around Dad all the time. He showed me how to fix everything around the house, how to rebuild a chimney and spade a garden and rehang a door and all that stuff he’d been good at once, and was good at again now that he wasn’t drinking. We’d do stuff all day and he’d add it to that list that—the list that used to be on my wall, and then we’d sit and watch old stupid movies together. He used to do that when he was drunk with Mom, but now he did it with me.

“He was dying, but life was better than it had ever been. I loved that. But after a while I knew it wasn’t for me; a lot of ways, I realized, it didn’t have much to do with me except I was his son and he needed to prove to himself he could be a good father. He wasn’t doing it for anyone but himself, Coach. He had just decided to die sober. He was a proud old bastard, under all the aw-shucks routine he did when he was running for office, he was proud as all shit. So he didn’t get sober to spend the time with me. He could have done that anytime. But he didn’t do it for me. I wasn’t worth it.”

“He loved you,” Gratz said. “He liked being around you. I
know
that.”

“Yeah, I do too, but that wasn’t why he got sober.”

Gratz sighed. “Karl, I ought to get on your case right now.” He made a sour little smile and I could tell he was trying to lighten the mood but didn’t feel like it. “This is a lot worse than thinking Huck Finn and Jim are two queers on a raft.”

I made myself smile, knowing he meant well.

Then he shrugged and said, “No one can get sober except for themselves. That’s what we’ll be trying to tell your mother tonight. She has to do it because
she’s
worth it. Not for you, though God knows she owes you the moon and the stars after all you’ve been through. Not for Bill, though I think the crazy guy really is in love with her and she’s what he’s wanted all his life, and I don’t understand that, either. If she’s going to get it together, she has to be the one to do it, just because she’d rather have it together than not. Nothing else will work, Karl, you know that. And it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you and want the best for you. And it doesn’t mean your dad didn’t.”

“That’s what my friends try to tell me all the time in therapy group,” I admitted. “Cheryl is always saying to remember Dad liked my company and
did
spend all that time with me. Squid tells me how lucky I was to have a great dad for that long. One night for like four hours Darla kept telling me that it didn’t matter whether he got sober and then realized he loved me, or he realized he loved me and then got sober, she said either way my dad loved me and I ought to hang on to that with both hands.”