The Invisibles (19 page)

I had only meant that there was perhaps a noticeable cycle in our experiments. My point was lost, in the gloom of the bathroom, on his single celebration bounce. He led me out into the hall, where we hung out next to a window with the view of the lot of gleaming student cars and waited for lunch to end and the football team to trash the senior bathroom, according to routine. As they roared past us into the brick-walled lavatory, none of them noticed us, except for the quarterback ex-boyfriend, that melancholy ad model whose diminishing power was to make you feel sorry for him. He moped at us, and we stared at him, invincible nobodies. As the daily riot started inside, Lionel and I headed for the doors to the gym hallway, for we were scheduled to be physically educated.

The first bang sounded just as we reached the end of the lockers. It was as if a big, steel pocket of air had burst, followed by
shouts in the bathroom, the sounds of boys directing one another in matters of first aid. We stopped. Someone shouted some nonsense about a gun, and girls began to scream from the bathroom down to our end of the corridor. The second explosion sent us all running out of the school, Lionel and me at the front of a teeming mob of panicked teenagers. He was trying very hard to laugh at what he had done, but like me he grew quiet once we stood behind the fearful, gossiping, overreacting crowd in the parking lot.

For some time he looked down at his Airwalks, and then, as if something had occurred to him, his face hardened like that of a guy going out to the firing squad. He took his cigarettes from his pocket and lighted one. There was nothing he could do, now that he had done what he had done. Suspicions about his involvement were only as natural to the principal and Mr. Clayborn, the keeper of volatile chemicals, as was their dislike of a kid who shaved his head and wore pictures of zombies on his shirts and who sneered at them with all the calculated ferocity of a fourteen-year-old. Lionel was who he was, and I admired him for it. He sighed and wearily smiled and looked over the crowd and the school like he owned both. He smoked an illicit cigarette on school grounds, knowing he would be lucky to finish it before they marched out to seize him. I looked across the heads of the crowd to the shining school doors, where there appeared, no mistake, Mr. Clayborn, who immediately saw me, the marker of Lionel's location.

Clayborn was not graceful in his apprehension of my friend. The cigarette fell to the blacktop and continued to burn, as its owner was dragged off by a nearly violent science teacher into the crowd of impressed students. I was surprised to be left standing alone, but the students were watching Lionel. It was as if I, the biggest freshman in the school, had somehow been overlooked.
I went in with the crowd when the fire trucks left and attended what was left of gym class. No one bothered to change for the few minutes left, and we were shooting around in our school clothes when the cops came into the gymnasium and asked Ms. Nagle which kid was me.

Expecting to be handcuffed for the first time in my life, I tell Mr. Clayborn and the principal that I am not responsible for the chemical mines. They confer, and Mr. Clayborn suggests that I wouldn't have known about these compounds. “He's not in the advanced class with Lionel. And I just don't think Francis would do something like this.”

To my disbelief and great guilt they believe me. My mom is willing to let them believe what they want to. She has her own plans for me. The principal sends the policemen away. I am told that as we speak Lionel is waiting to be taken to jail. The principal and Mr. Clayborn are oddly compassionate as they tell me this. They treat me like an old friend, and I squirm in my chair. From these men I expected nothing less than persecution and torture. For some reason they now view me with eager curiosity in their middle-aged faces.

From his perch on the desk, Mr. Clayborn says, “I know that you went along with him because you didn't want him to feel alone. I understand. He's a bright kid, and it must have hurt him to be wrong about a lot of things. Why was he so unhappy? Was it his family?”

Who can say? A fourteen-year-old boy, no matter how tall and physically mature, cannot. My mom is one person in the room who is aware of this.

“I'm going to take him home now,” she says. She's exhausted, and these men are crazy to her. At the door she tells them, “Lionel was his best friend.”

She's driven the cruiser and I sit shotgun, trying to see into the backseats of the police cars parked along the curb ahead of us for Lionel's bald head.

“They already took him away,” my mom says, as she starts the engine and puts the car into motion. The school is five stories, orange brick, looking down on a broad lawn with four black walnut trees and, across the highway, fallow soybean fields. Once, the sheer size of the building in the middle of this nothingness shocked me, as it does again now. I want to never go back. I want to run away or kill myself. I want an unimaginable fate to lie in store for me at home. As we get farther away from the school, driving in silence, these things become less and less likely.

When we've gone a mile or so she switches on the radio and sings along with some band of whiners from the sixties. Her voice is soft and harsh, but she can bellow when she feels like it. Great, I think, sing me to death. I have a sour mouth. I realize that I know this song. I've sung it before, with my mom, on the road. She turns to me, slowly saying the words as though to remind me of what they are, though she knows that I do. It's not okay to laugh, even though she's teasing me. What am I going to do? Pout? I give it up, lie back in my seat, and sing along.

That afternoon I don't know what to do with myself, and I sit on my front porch smoking cigarettes and checking to make sure my mom isn't moving around downstairs. I'm not in trouble, just brought home early, cautioned. I'm sitting on the flagstone front porch, paranoid, Camel to my lips, when Brooke pulls into the driveway.

She is glassy-eyed and grimacing, more unhappy than I've seen her. I worry she's abandoned Lionel and gone back to her quarterback ex-boyfriend. She mentions none of this, just says that she
wants me to come with her out to our spot. On the way she bitches about how stupid it was of Lionel to try to kill her quarterback ex-boyfriend (for this is how she interprets his act) and then to get caught doing it.

“What's he trying to do?” she asks. “Punish me by taking all the men out of my life?” She is through with men, she says; she will become a born-again virgin and live in France as a nun.

We weave fast through the stripped trees, and I look out for rangers and hope against a second encounter with the authorities in a single day. Not soon enough we are parked, and she is slamming out of the car, cussing out the gray disturbance in the sky, telling Fritz the crazy and now startled fisherman that he can go fuck himself too, and then running down the leaf-covered trail to the boulder, with me jogging in pursuit.

She stands at the edge of the pond and utters a valedictory to love and life as she knows it, and reaches into her purse and brings out Lionel's pipe, wrapped in tissue. She has it ready to smoke, and preserved this way, packaged, rubber-banded tight. “I've decided to kill the baby,” she tells me, theatrical and self-pitying.

Of course, she's been trying to kill the baby since I met her.

“Oh for the love of Pete, don't stand there!” she shouts at me in disbelief. “Come take this thing away from me.”

I do this, look at the packed bowl, a real winner, and put it in my pocket. Later I'll trash it. Crystal-form cocaine is not something I want to be smoking by myself.

Brooke sniffs and dangles a crushed pack of cigarettes. “These, too.”

I store these with the drugs.

“Anything else you'd like to give me?” I ask.

Brooke surrenders a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels. She sighs and cocks her head at me, dainty but for her protuberant belly
under her gray peacoat. She's out of tears and anger, and I can see that she's done what she's come here to do. I guess she's making a lot of quick adjustments now that Lionel's in trouble. In irony I offer her my arm. She takes it, and we walk this way to the clearing, to her car.

Fritz is standing at the end of the dock, his pole beside his mucky galoshes. He's got this big painter turtle in his hands.

Brooke stops. “What is it?” she asks.

“Ach,” says Fritz, holding his rod to the dock with a galosh. He's biting down on his fishing line, keeping it taut so the turtle's head stays out of its shell. Its neck fully extended, the turtle frantically paws the air.

The line falls out of his teeth, and Fritz roars at the turtle, “What are you doing awake?” The turtle's head goes into its shell, and Fritz's throat catches like he's going to get upset.

I go over and take the line, and standing over the old man's uneasy breathing, I sort of pull the turtle's head out of its shell with the line. The poor animal's wrinkly neck is taut and it hisses at me, but Fritz says not to worry, I won't break it.

“I'm going to go, Wheeler. I'm going to leave you here.” Brooke pouts on her way to the driver's side. I wave okay and stand closer to Fritz to help him get the hook out of the poor turtle's beak. It upsets Brooke that I do not chase her, and she sits a moment in her car, watching us, furious and prettier that way, in black eyeliner.

“My friend is in love with that girl,” I tell Fritz.

Fritz says, “That girl is a bitch. Eiskalt. Your friend is a scheisse.”

I don't argue with people who are insane or old. It turns out I can hold the turtle's mouth open with a key as the old fisherman pulls the hook from the upper part of its beak, chipping it, but getting it out of there. The car starts and kicks up gravel. Fritz and I look over, and Brooke is staring straight at me, a second before she drives out of my childhood. There's an understanding of this
between the three of us, before it slips out to a place beyond words, and she squeals her tires.

“There we are,” says Fritz, “good as new. Almost.”

I step away, and he releases the turtle into the cold autumn water.

From that moment I know Brooke won't come to my house again by herself. As it will turn out, she will never return to the house where I stay the next four years with my mother. Lionel will be released from the Child Study Institute when he is eighteen, and we will not resume our friendship. By then Brooke will have a daughter and be married to her disfigured quarterback ex-boyfriend. Lionel will swear off terrorism and go live in some mountains somewhere to write poems for kids. Sad local Christians will put him in their newspaper, and I'll read the article about his struggles and poverty and his vision of peace-loving kids. An hour later I won't be able to recall any of it verbatim.

I will hear of Brooke's divorce in another city, and after I have forgotten about it, I will come into the watery state of the present moment, being twenty-three years old, a door-to-door book salesman passing through Missouri. I am the weirdo on the doorstep, the ogre in the trenchcoat, leather attaché in hand, preposterous, quoting Faust to housewives.

“A man is being made,” I tell them, accept their rejections, and traipse away across their dry autumn yards.

At a house in the suburbs, Brooke answers the door, older, sturdier. An attractive woman with a serious life, or at least she dresses this way. We share surprise, silence, and nervous laughter. We find we are happy to see one another. Each of us is happy to see how well the other has survived. There is an offer of coffee in the wood-paneled dining room. An introduction to the little girl spying on us from the kitchen doorway. Auburn pigtails a mess,
the emcee of the great room. Through the passageway I see there are toys scattered across the white carpet — the plastic castle and the pretend-beach of naked, sunbathing dolls, beside the many pages of blue construction paper that Brooke explains make up the broad and deep Pacific Ocean.

I think it for an instant only, but Brooke perceives my flinch. Our chatter fails as the daughter she once forsook for two months comes into the room, sensing something wrong, and wants to sit on her mother's lap. She is too big for this and sits there blocking Brooke's mouth, furious at my intrusion, shoulders hunched up beneath her tiny ears.

I want to tell Brooke what Lionel once advised me, that when you remember something you're not proud of, it's best to think of the outcome as inevitable. It helps to pass the memory, he said. Instead I finish my coffee. Brooke sees me to the front door without the pretense of a smile, and we resume being the people we tell ourselves we are.

The Mississippi swells up and covers the town and the surrounding forest, devastating all visible creation. Hundreds of egrets fly north; there is no counting the dead. The steeple of St. Francis of Assisi marks the submerged churchyard of obelisks, crosses, and angels. Broken boats and tables drift under convulsing clouds stitched up with lightning. There will be no going back from this deluge, no recovery of the lost civilization, no afterward. With his thoughts clear now, when actions matter, Daniel Gauthier pilots the auto ferry across churning brown currents, collecting survivors. His gray hair blows, and the waters drown his shouts as he pulls families from rooftops, men and women clinging to furniture, a girl shivering at the top of a pine. Townsfolk crowd the concrete deck, facing the horizon, straining for a glimpse of solid earth.

A knocking at the window wakes him from his recurrent dream. At first he's disappointed, a dried-up mansion of the past, an aging man who fits the ruts of his empty bed. His words jumble when he sees the dark face in the pane, then converge in a groan as he recognizes the profile and frown of Sheriff Charlie Boudreaux. Unable to comprehend why his onetime friend has trampled his peonies at 2:32 in the morning, he lifts the window and blinks several times, in the place of a what-the-hell kind of question.

The sheriff eases out of the flower bed, whispering, “Come out here, Daniel. First you better look in on that boy.”