The Dream Life of Astronauts (10 page)

Julian had poor initiative, didn't even seem interested in earning his Tenderfoot. He also had a nervous habit Leo found irritating: he scrunched his shoulders up and rolled his head around like he was rubbing the back of his skull against his neck. It wasn't exactly a shrug, but it looked like one, and he did it whenever he was tongue-tied or restless. Mention the Tenderfoot badge, and there went Julian, scrunch and rub.

Another hassle for Leo was dealing with Dan Messer. Dan—shaky and spindly—was the only person Leo had been able to find on Merritt Island who was interested in being assistant scoutmaster, and he was nice enough, but he was a bit of a wet-brain. As in, he came to the weekly meetings drunk. He hiccupped during the Pledge of Allegiance. “Bring your own personality and excitement to instructing the sessions,” the training manual said, but Dan didn't bring any of those things. At the close of the meeting one night, right in the middle of the Stelzel boy's clunky but earnest rendition of “Taps,” a flask bottle of Old Crow had fallen out of Dan's windbreaker. When he'd dropped by to see how Leo was doing in the days following the stroke, and had been trying to buck up Leo's spirits by saying they were robust for men their age, both of them just fifty, Leo had been astonished. He would have put Dan at sixty-five.

Mitch and Howie, as far as Leo knew, were still committed to the idea of Scouting and of one day becoming Eagle Scouts. But they took the pageantry of it all far less seriously than they had before his stroke. They used to sit like ironing boards in the backseat of the station wagon on Scout night. All the way to the meetings, they would barely say a word, but would check, over and over again, the hang of their sashes, the stitching of their badges. Now they rode like monkeys. They yanked on each other's neckerchiefs. They tried to throw each other's hats out the window. They tormented the Ferris boy, who did nothing to defend himself, just covered his face with his arms. When all this became intolerable, Leo would slam his foot down on the brake and throw gravel as he steered the station wagon to the side of the road. He would turn around in his seat and holler that they, Mitch and Howie, were going to get it; they were already going to get it, but if they didn't settle down and leave Julian alone, they were going to
really get it.
But next week, it would be the same thing all over again.

They were suspiciously quiet at the moment. Leo turned off their street and into the newer section of the neighborhood and peered at them in the rearview mirror. Both of them in uniform, hats on, neckerchiefs tied. Both of them tight-lipped and red-faced and wearing false mustaches. Where the mustaches came from, Leo had no idea. And, really, for obnoxious behavior, this was small-time. One on a scale of ten. But in another way this tiny infraction—false mustaches on the way to Scout night—was worse than if they were smart-mouthing and was exactly the kind of thing he felt certain he wouldn't have had to deal with if he hadn't had the stroke. There was no rationality to it, but since his brush with death, the smallest of annoyances had become intolerable. Already this evening he'd had to deal with Marie's berating him for having skipped both his last neurologist appointment and his physical therapy. Then had come the excusatory phone call from Dan Messer, saying he had some sort of flu and didn't feel well enough to make it to the meeting (Leo had recognized the familiar booze-scrape in his voice, like someone had shoved a shoehorn down his throat).

The windows were down. The air smelled of gardenias and cut grass. Another person might have felt glad to be alive, given the circumstances, but those false mustaches were eating at Leo. The boys wouldn't speak until he told them to knock it off, clean up their act, get those goddamn things off their upper lips, and it felt like his whole life was in their sticky little hands, his entire existence funneled into the moment when he finally gave in and started yelling.

And now here came the Ferris boy: out of uniform, bounding down his driveway as Leo made the turn.

Julian ran right up to the driver's door as Leo was coming to a stop and announced that he wasn't going to the meeting tonight.

What forces, Leo wondered, had aligned to take such a colossal crap on his day? But he had no one to pose such a question to—no one wanted to hear it. “Are you Jewish?”

“No,” Julian said, “I'm Catholic. But it's my birthday.”

One of the mustached devils snorted from the backseat.

“What's that got to do with anything?” Leo asked.

“I guess there might be a cake and presents,” Julian said, scrunching the back of his skull against his neck. “My aunt and uncle are coming over. My parents want me to stay home.”

“We're voting tonight,” Leo said. “Halloween's in two weeks, and it's on Scout night. We're voting on whether or not we'll meet.”

Julian glanced into the backseat at Mitch and Howie. He didn't wave at them, didn't say hi, didn't even seem to notice their mustaches. “I guess I'd vote not to meet, if it's going to be Halloween.”

“No proxies,” Leo said and put the station wagon into reverse.

J
ulian's birthday haul included a new pair of roller skates (from his parents), a Daredevil T-shirt and a baseball cap with the Apollo-Soyuz logo (from his aunt and uncle), and a nickel-clad bicentennial dollar (from the old man who lived next door and who'd spent so much time talking about the coin as he showed it to Julian that Julian had wondered if he was ever going to give it up).

For several days following his birthday, it rained in the late afternoon—flat and heavy, knocking against the driveway and the sidewalk. On the third day, when he got home from school, he asked his mother if she would move her car out of the carport. She did and then dashed back into the house under the cover of an umbrella. For an hour or so, Julian skated in a circle around the empty carport, avoiding the oil stain in the middle and the curtain of water that fell on all three sides, listening to the rain batter the roof. But it wasn't much fun. There was barely enough room, and he wasn't that good of a skater yet.

Finally, almost a week after his birthday, the rain let up. He got home from school and changed out of his Divine Mercy uniform, pulling on a pair of shorts and his new T-shirt. He put the bicentennial coin into one of his pockets, adjusted the strap of his new baseball cap, and tugged it down onto his head. Then he carried his skates outside and laced them around his feet.

He stuck to the sidewalk. He watched for cracks and avoided palm kernels. It was sort of like swimming, in that he got a little braver each time, ventured further away from his house before turning around and wobbling back to the driveway. He fell twice, but his only damage was a bruised elbow and a bloodied knee. He imagined himself as an explorer on the banks of a river no one had ever traveled. Around the bend, where Letty Drive met Compton Street, were winged beasts with fangs secreting poison. He'd capture one, he decided, wrap it in a titanium net and keep it hidden from society until he'd trained it to recite the entire
Encyclopedia Britannica.
At which point he'd call together all the scientists of the world and make their jaws drop.

Then, suddenly, there
were
beasts coming toward him. He should have expected as much, though he'd never seen them on Compton Street before; their house was on the other side of the neighborhood. Like him, they had wheels—skateboards, in their case. They also had propulsion: the springer spaniels on leashes, galloping like a pair of Shetland ponies. The Burke brothers didn't even have their feet on the ground; they stood on their boards, arms stretched out in front of them, serpentining like water-skiers—until one of the dogs crossed in front of the other, Mitch yelled, “Go left! Go
left!
” and in a glorious moment of impact so slam-bang you could actually hear their bodies collide, the boys went down.

Let there be peace on Earth,
Julian thought, feeling giddy,
and let it begin with Howie's shattered limbs, and let it end with Mitch's head bursting open like a melon someone took a knife to and carved out just enough space for a stick of dynamite.

But the brothers were intact. Their boards had sailed off in different directions and yet they'd both managed to hang on to their leashes, and the dogs were already jumping around them spastically as the boys got to their feet and started fighting.

“That was the most boneheaded thing I've ever seen someone do!” Mitch said, shoving Howie away from him.

Howie fell back to the ground. “Snot-faced ball-licker,” he said, jumping up again and lurching toward Mitch.

“You don't know your left from your right,” Mitch said, shoving him back.

“Tits,” Howie said, stumbling but managing not to fall this time. “Tits.”

“Well, look who it is.”

Being on roller skates in the presence of the Burke brothers and not being a very good skater was poor planning, Julian realized. When he got himself turned around and started down the sidewalk, he felt like he was trudging through quicksand. He made it across three, four, five squares of cement before a hand grabbed the back of his shirt and the iron-on Daredevil logo pulled tight across his chest.

“Cross-your-heart bra thinks he's going somewhere,” Howie said.

Mitch stepped in front of Julian and peered at him, taking stock of him—as if it were the Burke brothers, and not Julian, who'd discovered a new species. “Maybe he is,” Mitch said, his face glistening with sweat. A stench was coming off him that reminded Julian of cabbage. “Get the dogs.”

“We
got
the dogs,” Mitch said.

“Then get the boards, and make sure he doesn't escape.”

“Where are we going?”

“Painville,” Mitch said, his gaze fixed on Julian's.

“Where?” Howie asked.

“
Home,
asswipe. We're taking him home.”

The dogs pulled Mitch at a pace more trot than gallop. Julian pulled Howie, who hung on to the back of his shorts and rolled alongside him.

When they got to the house, Julian's heart sank at the sight of the empty carport, because it meant that no grown-ups were home. Carrying their skateboards under their arms, the brothers led him across the lawn, through the side gate, and into their backyard, where they turned the dogs loose and told Julian to stand against the toolshed.

They seemed undecided on the manner of execution. Howie suggested they pour Windex into Julian's ears, but Mitch wasn't interested in the idea. Then Howie said they could just “throw stuff at him until he dies,” and when Mitch asked what stuff, Howie said cumquats, grapefruits, potted geraniums. Julian knew they could throw fruit at him for about a month and it probably wouldn't kill him, but the potted geranium plants lining the patio looked heavy.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out the bicentennial coin and showed it to them.

“What the hell's that?” Mitch asked.

“It's a souvenir coin, but it's real money too. It's an actual dollar. I could buy my freedom.”

Mitch squinted at the coin, said, “Cool,” and took it from him. He tucked it into his own pocket and looked back at his brother. “We'd get into huge trouble if we broke all those geranium pots. I've got a better idea.”

By order of the good state of Florida, Mitch declared, the prisoner would be drawn and quartered. Specifically, by dogs.

This prompted some follow-up questions, since Howie didn't know what it meant to draw and quarter someone, and then, after it was explained to him, wanted to know how they'd quarter Julian with only two dogs.

“Don't worry about it,” Mitch said. “We'll catch him on the rebound.”

They dragged Julian away from the shed and told him to lie flat on his back on the ground. They tied one leash to his right ankle and the other to his left wrist. Then they hooked up the dogs. But the dogs wouldn't sit still, so they had to hold them, aim their heads away from Julian, tell them to
Sit!
over and over again and then, finally,
Go!
The dogs walked over to Julian and began to lick his face. One of them nudged the baseball cap off his head.

The brothers tried throwing tennis balls for the dogs to fetch. They tried holding the dogs' attention with pig ears and walking backward away from them. This worked in that each dog leaned as far as the leash would allow, stretching Julian crossways, but it was hardly a dismemberment. In fact, the execution was such a failure that Julian started to giggle—and immediately regretted it, for Mitch declared the dogs brain-damaged and told Howie to untie them, then squatted down and planted his knee on Julian's chest.

“Open your mouth,” he said.

Julian mashed his lips together.

“Open your mouth and eat this, or eat something worse.”

Julian couldn't see what Mitch had in his hand but knew the threat to make it worse was real. When he opened his mouth, Mitch shoved in one of the soggy pig ears. Julian clutched it with his teeth to keep it from touching the back of his throat while Mitch took hold of his arms and Howie his legs. His body lifted off the ground as the brothers strained in opposite directions.

And that was when Mrs. Burke, having finally come home from wherever she'd been, stepped out onto the porch, purse in hand, and gasped.

F
or a while after the stroke, Leo had tried an eye patch. He'd ordered it from an address he'd found in the back of a fishing magazine while waiting to get a haircut, and it had taken almost three weeks to arrive. Marie didn't like the patch. She said there was nothing wrong with his eye other than the tic (she called it “the tic”), and there was no reason to cover it up. Not that she knew what it was like, having a traumatized palpebral ligament. Not that she'd ever tried to carry on a conversation with herself, or the boys, or the Technicolor staff, and seen how even the most well-meaning person was drawn to the fluttering eye.