Tales of the Madman Underground (7 page)

By that time it was steaming Midwest summer outside, but it was so nice to just have a mindless hour that I didn’t care. About halfway through the first lap, a familiar voice said, “So, you think you’ll have some work for me this fall? And maybe for Tony?”

“Squid, you know you’re always the first I bring in on a big job,” I said, “and Tony’s great too.” I glanced left at Squid Cabrillo and slowed a little; he was pretty much the right side of the line for our football team, but asking him to run distance was like asking an elephant to tap-dance.

His squashy nose ran all over his always-serious troll-face. You could cliff-dive from his single eyebrow, and his eyes were two olive pits set between his bulging cheeks. His big square jaw looked like he could take a bite out of a car bumper.

Next to Paul he might be my favorite Madman.

Squid didn’t get his ticket because he acted weird—he was a case of
something awful happened to him, we don’t want to think about it, put him in counseling.

When he was seven, his father had gone to the state pen at Mansfield for beating the living crap out of a nice old farmer, taking all the pay envelopes for the pickers, and going down to Columbus for a whiskey-and-whore-house spree. His mother had taken a job as janitor at Saint Matthew’s Lutheran here in town, to be close enough for visiting days, which Squid said she’d never missed while his old man was in. Also once a month, she had taken a homemade meal to the farmer and asked him to pray for the Cabrillo family.

The farmer said he forgave them and prayed for them and all, but it didn’t look like it had worked. Papa Cabrillo had gotten out of jail, divorced his wife, and taken up with a fat Kentucky chick fifteen years younger than him who’d been writing to him while he was in prison. Then Squid’s mom had killed herself when he was in eighth grade. Somehow old Cabrillo had gotten the house and moved in with his hot hillbilly honey. Laws and judges being stupid, they got custody of Squid and his younger brother Tony and sister Junie.

I’d seen the marks on Squid’s back in the gym class showers; I’d helped him out with a place for him and his two younger sibs to sleep; there had been a couple sacks of groceries I’d gotten for them—maybe more than a couple, come to admit it. But tempting as it was, I’d never ratted out old Cabrillo, because Squid made all us Madmen promise not to.

I guess maybe we could have. Officer Williams (one of those cops whose name just logically begins with “officer” the way some teachers are just always Mr. or Miss), the family-court cop here in town, seemed like a good enough guy. But none of us ever narked, because we knew it wouldn’t help. I mean, what was I going to do, have them take my mom away, lose our house, lose everything? What would Cheryl do if they arrested her grandfather and her parents threw her and Samantha out of the house?

And could anyone expect Squid to send his dad back to prison? I mean, yeah. He sure as shit deserved it. But it was his dad.

The sky was like a hot metal bowl overhead, and our shirts were all soaked, but it felt good to be moving and using the muscles just because I wanted to and not because I had to. Squid plodded along beside me and I kept the pace comfortable for him; if Coach wanted me to run faster, he could tell me to.

Halfway round the next lap, I asked, “So, you do the usual this summer?”

“Yeah. Worked my ass off, got some stuff for the kids, got some savings. Mostly picking tomatoes and detasseling corn, my cousin got me some of that, plus I kept the bagging groceries job at Kroger. It sucked and I hardly saw Tony and Junie at all but now I won’t
have
to do much more than some bagging to get through football season. But you know, more is always nice. So you think you’ll have any gardening you need help with?”

“I always do. I’ve got to turn compost under and build some beds for spring, bunch of places.”

“Hey, if you fellas have breath to talk, you ain’t working hard enough,” Coach Korviss said. “Pick it up, Esquibel. Karl, run with me a second.”

Squid
ooph
ed on ahead, and I waited for the question Korviss always asked me just once. “Karl, I know you have endurance and speed. It’s your senior year. Are you sure you don’t want to come out for cross-country this fall, and maybe for track in the spring?”

“It would be fun, Coach, but I work all the time.”

“I could talk to your mom.”

“She’s not the one making me work.”

He ran beside me for like half a lap before he finally said, “Well, your life is your life. We’d love to have you. And I know you’d enjoy it. Give it a day or two and then get back to me next week if you change your mind, all right? Only time I’ll ask this year, I don’t want to pressure you. Now show me what you can do, will you? Put on some speed.”

So I opened up and ran hard the rest of the time, and it was good and brainless and mind-clearing, even if my uniform did end up soaked so that I’d have to take it home to wash right away. That conversation with Korviss, I don’t know why, gave me some incentive. I lapped a couple guys from his cross-country team, put some pressure on his miler, and finished with a two-lap kick of running like a flat-out crazy bastard just to see if I could keep it going that long.

I didn’t bother thinking about how I felt about Coach asking me. I just didn’t do extracurriculars. Stuff happened at my house, sometimes, and if it conflicted with the extracurricular, I’d have to let someone down.

Besides, Korviss didn’t pay you to run.

He was right, though, it could’ve been fun, spending time every day just running. I kind of wished life was different, but it wasn’t.

In the showers, Squid said, “Hey, you still got that night shift job at McDonald’s, right?”

“Right.” There was a fresh mark on his back, probably the buckle. “Anytime you need a place for you or the kids to sleep, door’s always open.”

“I just always like to know,” Squid said.

THEY CALLED ME Psycho after I killed the rabbit in seventh grade, and that’s actually the worst thing I ever did, but it was also how me and Squid got to be friends. If there was anything good about it, it was all Squid; I brought the disease, he brought the cure.

See, seventh grade was pretty bad.

The summer between sixth and seventh, as I was getting all psyched up for junior high, Dad had me out with him on a lot of jobs, kind of learning how to work, and paying me a little bit. So I was there to see it when Dad kept getting tired and he couldn’t hire enough help to make up the difference, and paying so much more in wages instead of doing the work himself, so his contracting business was going all to shit. Then one soggy hot August day he passed out on a roof, slid down, and fell into Mrs. Caron’s yard.

I was scared, I can tell you that, but Mrs. Caron called an ambulance, and Mom met us at the emergency room. I could smell that she’d had some wine; the last year or so she’d been doing that when no one was home. But it was still a relief when she hugged me, and when we went in to see where Dad was sitting up, with an IV in his arm, and getting a stern lecture from the nurse about drinking enough water in hot weather.

But before they let him go, the doctor got interested in the way Dad was coughing, and did some tests, and they found lung cancer.

By November, he was puking a lot from all that stuff they did to him, and losing hair, and looked a million years old. He could still sit next to me on the couch down in the basement, and we’d sit and watch old movies together, usually two per night, but he’d fall asleep on my shoulder, not the other way round.

He couldn’t come out to see me play seventh grade football; it was too far for him to walk, he’d lost his license from too many DUIs, and Mom wouldn’t drive him, she said it was too much bother and besides I only got in for maybe one or two plays a game. Whenever I came home, I seemed to be interrupting a fight; a lot of it was because Dad had quit drinking but she was making up for him, and whenever he wanted her to drive him someplace, it would turn into a major battle.

Anyway, I guess it was okay that Dad didn’t actually see me play. There really wasn’t much to see. I was a scrawny fast guy—didn’t really get my growth till a couple years later when I’d been doing heavy work for a while. Little fast runts like me were only useful for real long passes, and we didn’t have a QB who could throw for shit. Coach sent me in exactly five times in three games, and Al never passed on any of those plays anyway.

Really, I never even knew if he
could
throw. But I did know for sure that Al could punch ribs like a son of a bitch.

He was a mean dumb bastard, only the quarterback because he got his growth early and he could run with a bunch of seventh graders hanging on to him like baby possums. I think he knew in the depths of his ape-brain that as soon as the other boys’ bodies caught up he’d be nowhere, and it made him mean, or meaner anyway, while he still had the chance to beat on other kids.

So Al would beat the hell out of me. And all the time, Squid, his then-best buddy, would be standing right beside him, saying, “Come on, make him cry so we can go talk to the pussy.” “The pussy” meaning Cheryl, who was Al’s then-girlfriend.

Whenever I thought about Al’s then-life, and his now-job at a tire store and the now-wife he’d had to marry last year, I’d get a smile that nobody wanted to see.

But even if it turned out all right later, back in seventh grade, there was nothing I could do to save my ribs. I couldn’t quit the team. It was a big deal to Dad. He saved the stories from the
Lightsburg Lighthouse
—they did a “preseason” about us, a story about each game, and a “postseason,” where Coach Stuckey mentioned me in a list of about ten guys he was expecting more from next year. Dad put yellow Hi-Liter on my name; that and the honor roll were the only times I appeared in the paper while he was alive.

I’d come home from practice and go downstairs to sit on the couch with him, or he’d be doing some fix-up on the house and teach me how to do it, and he’d want to know what all I did in practice, and—well, I couldn’t quit. And I couldn’t really tell him, “Oh, Coach said I’m a fast runner, he always says that, and then Al beat on me in the locker room, here, look at the bruises up the side of my ribs.”

Because for one thing my stupid old man would have said to fight back, and what was I gonna say,
well, I used to try, but he just knocks my hands out of the way and keeps on pounding?

I knew Dad. He would tell me to keep trying. I mean I know it’s good to keep trying and all, but sometimes, like when you just get pounded twice as hard for twice as long, you have to do what works instead of what’s good.

I guess I could have told Coach Stuckey, but I didn’t want to be a nark and a crybaby. I’d have to go away to the State Home for Terminal Pussies with a big
P
tattooed on my forehead. Besides, who the hell were they going to believe, the popular QB, or skinny little Shoemaker whose dad used to be mayor before being the town drunk? Al’s dad, who was at every game cheering like a nut, or a spooky ghost like my dad, a dying bundle of sticks and scraggly hair?

I knew where I was on the ladder. And where Al was.

Anyway, so I’d walk home, sometimes crying all the way from the beating I’d gotten, and then wash my face and tell Dad how much I loved football and how well I was doing at practice. That was the fall of seventh grade.

I don’t remember exactly what tipped me over. Maybe I just thought my ribs were fucking sore enough. So one Sunday Al was riding his brand-new ten-speed over to see Cheryl—he was always bragging on how he was feeling her up all the time—and I stepped out from behind a bush with a ball bat and spoked his bike, and he went over the handlebars, and as he stood up, I swung the bat real hard at him, and clipped his right elbow. (I couldn’t do anything right. I
wanted
his ribs).

They said I chipped the bone, so he didn’t play that fourth game. Neither did I, of course, because good old
Al
had
no
problem with narking on
me
.

Everyone kept saying I was lucky I didn’t break his spine or rupture his kidneys (I always thought he was luckier) and was all sympathetic for him, and nobody ever did give a shit that Paul and me and Larry had spent months being bruised and afraid. Pain only matters when it happens to someone important.

Instead of hitting him a lot more like I planned to, when I saw him holding his arm and yelling like a baby, I ran away.

If I’d left it at whacking Al’s elbow and destroying his bike wheel, I guess people would’ve understood eventually. Or if Al’s mommy had called the cops as soon as he came home and tattled, instead of rushing off to the emergency room and waiting for X-rays and shit, I might have gotten busted before I did anything else. But nobody stopped me, especially not me, and what I did next, well, I fucking made
myself
sick.

That night, I went into Squid’s backyard, pulled down the chicken wire enclosure, grabbed his pet rabbit, cut its throat with a box knife before it knew what was happening, then tore it up with garden shears—it didn’t come apart as much or as easy as I planned, so I just kind of opened up a couple big rips in it. Then I left it in the yard for stray dogs and cats to tear up some more, and for him to find in the morning.

Squid cried in school for like a week and the social girls were all over him—they all thought it was so cute how he wuvved his bunny wunny, and him such a big strong football player too. I think I probably got him laid.

I got six days of in-school suspension for hitting Al with the bat, which they could prove. And that was well worth it.

I didn’t draw any penalty for the rabbit, because the cops said
could’ve been a dog did it
, but Williams watched me real hard because he found out Squid had been in on beating me up—Al told him. Like I said, Al was a fucking nark.