The Trouble in Me (6 page)

Suzy Pryor was a friend of hers from two schools ago when we lived in Lauderhill and just by coincidence she was now living in the same Wilton Manors neighborhood we had moved into. They had been thrilled to discover each other again and were already planning out what activities they wanted to get involved with once school started. They were the type of girls who lived to organize clubs and run for class office. They were smart and energetic and had each other.

This would be my sixth new school in eight grades. I wasn't looking forward to another friendless year all over again. I guess you could say I didn't make real friends. I just hung around groups of kids and mimed being a friend. I'd silently laugh at their jokes, but I might just as well have been laughing into a mirror because I was the only one watching me.

I hadn't made any plans for school other than to show up on time and keep my mouth shut. In my last school I had been in the Latin club and the chess club. Maybe I'd do that again. They were easy clubs to join because they had so few members they didn't even reject the rejects. If you hung around enough you got your picture in the yearbook and pretended to be a part of something. I did. In the chess club photo I had stood with my arms high across my chest and head tilted forward in a pose that I thought would make me appear moody and troubled—as if I were someone artistically conflicted that you'd want to know. But when I saw the photo my pug face made me look like I was too mentally dim to speak Latin or play chess—and no one sought me out to get to know me better. I looked like the IQ equal of our pathetic club mascot—a three-foot-high brown Naugahyde pawn with a metal ruler stabbed into its ball-peen head and a flag taped to the ruler that read R
ULE THE WORLD ONE MOVE AT A TIME
.

I wished the expressions on my face matched up to my thoughts, but they rarely did. Only when I was in extreme physical pain did my face knot up and truly express extreme physical pain. Happiness looked like a square peg struggling to fit into a round hole. It was all mismatched. When it came to my heart I felt everything okay, but when I tried to express my feelings the words came out of me like invisible ink.

Before Karen left the house I said, “Tell Suzy I very much look forward to seeing her.”

I purposely spoke in a big, proper sentence because I had a crush on Suzy that had suddenly revived when I fantasized how she might possibly pull up in front of our house and rescue me in a white pickup truck and give me that flaming-hot kiss I wanted.

Karen stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “Let me give you some girlfriend advice,” she said, turning toward me. “You should pay more attention to girls whose Salvation Army missionary work is trying to save tragic boys like you. Being a reclamation project is the only chance you have of attracting a girl as immature as you are.”

“I'm
not
immature,” I said defensively.

“Remember the burning flags today? The ruined food? Your infatuation with your new half-naked skinny-legged friend? Remember that weighing the pros and cons of the world around you is a sign of maturity.”

“I got bored,” I said. “Most of life is boring. It's only what I'm thinking about between the boring parts that keeps me from killing myself.” This was true only because I wished it to be true.

“Please don't share any more of your perpetually self-involved thoughts,” she said. “Just clean up the kitchen and the outside mess so Mom doesn't make herself sick tomorrow by trying to disinfect the entire backyard with something that could hurt the baby. You know how obsessive she gets when it comes to germs.”

“Germans,” I mumbled.

She then went up the street to see Suzy. My eyes followed her until I imagined myself knocking on Suzy's door.

 

DEPTH CHARGE

After I cleaned the kitchen that evening I was thinking about Gary and the dog burial, so I opened the back door and stepped outside.

To the west the bright eyelashes of the sun garishly stretched across the sky for one final cameo, while to the east the pebbly clouds glowed like orange peels beneath those copper rays.

I balanced myself on Chief Osceola and watched the distant horizon until the blazing rind of the sun set with a final flash of green light. The sky turned gray as darkness rose from the ground like a creeping tide. Sounds became softer. Air became cooler.

I flicked on the yard lights and walked down toward the warm grill and dragged it over to its usual place by the Pagoda fence. Gary had returned and was still working. He was on his hands and knees and grunting with animal effort as he hard-packed the sandy dirt down on the grave with overhead strokes of the flat back of a shovel. A black standard poodle sat in the shade of a palm tree watching him work.

“Is that you?” he asked, without turning toward me.

“Yes. Did you bury the greyhound?”

“It was only a Chinese crested,” he replied. “But it had the guts of a greyhound. Pound for pound, nobody packed more bark and bite in a body than little Baby Chairman Mao.”

“It seemed a lot bigger than a Chinese crested,” I remarked. “It looked to me like you and your dad were dragging something heavy, like the size of a Great Dane.”

Gary stood and carefully brushed the damp sand off his knees. Then he turned toward me as he locked his arms across the front of his unzipped jacket. His knuckles looked like a row of saddles linked across the scarred tops of his wide fists.

“I like you,” he said in a deliberately cold and emotionless tone. His white face could just as easily have been a coral head with eyes and a mouth scratched on it. “And I was just thinking today that we might even become good friends, but now when you question what I tell you it makes me think you don't know the correct rules on how to be my friend.”

That caught me by surprise. I thought we had just been very friendly, even friendlike, and the dog comment wasn't offensive. But maybe I was trying to be a friend too quickly, which was against his rules.

“I'm sorry,” I replied, and stepped back a pace. “I didn't realize a Chinese crested could be so big.”

“Well, now you know the facts,” he said with clipped authority. “So when I say something
is
what it
is
you don't have to question it—just take my word for it, especially when it comes to dogs, because I train them at the track, my sister grooms them, my mom's kind of a vet, and my dad bets on them. So we
know
dogs.”

From moving around so much with my family I had learned it was better to let strangers take the upper hand and say whatever they felt like saying—that way I could custom-fit my jigsawed answers to what they wanted to hear.

Most people liked people who agreed with them and I wanted to be liked, especially by Gary. I never had a friend like him and I could feel the panic in my gut that I had crossed him.

“How'd Chairman Mao die?” I asked, sounding more sympathetic than I was feeling.

“Rabies. We had to put him down. Chihuahua nipped his hind leg in the first round of a fight,” he replied. “Some of the dog owners don't pay to inoculate their street dogs. I guess they figure they won't live long enough to get rabies—but this one must have. Either that, or my sister bit him.”

“I have a sister, too,” I said, trying to shift the conversation to common ground.

“I already checked her out,” he replied without fanfare. “Not my type. One look and I could tell she's the kind of girl who wants to improve guys.”

“You got that right,” I said.

“I prefer girls who let guys improve them,” he continued.

“I think I could improve some girls,” I ventured.

He looked up at me for a moment and finally smiled at something I said.

“Are you the kind of guy who tries to pick up girls in study hall by helping them with their math homework?”

“English homework,” I said uneasily, hesitant to correct him, but to be honest, I was lousy at math. “I like to help, and girls like smart guys—especially book guys.”

“Did you see that girl in the white truck the other day?” he asked. He must have seen me watching. “Well, she doesn't drive a pickup for nothing. She drove down here from Alabama to have a little phys-ed study hall with me.”

“Alabama?” I repeated. “How'd you meet her?”

“She's my girlfriend. Leigh Dupont. Used to live in
your
house,” he said. “In your room,” he added pointedly, “and I could reach right through the window and touch her.”

That's where my bed was.

“But her family moved up there from here.” He adjusted the sagging waistband of his undershorts and spit to one side, then added, “To get her away from me after
some jilted neighbor told them a shitload of lies about me
.” He was speaking loudly while looking at the fenced-in house on the other side of ours, as if he wanted whoever lived there to hear him.

I didn't say anything to that other than to privately imagine Leigh Dupont in my room, reaching out toward me with both her slender arms.

“That's how I ended up back in juvie this spring,” he continued. “I wired a car and went up to see her and got popped.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“Not really,” he replied, and looked up at the stars. “An hour with her was worth a stretch in juvie.”

I was going to agree with him, but then I didn't know what a month in juvie meant or what an hour with a girl really meant besides trying to help one write complete sentences for a book report.

“I saw that your dad drives a Rambler—you got an extra key?” he asked. “Or does that piece of junk even need a key—maybe you just kick it in the ass in the morning and it farts right up?”

I wished Gary would hot-wire Dad's Rambler and take it away for good. It was embarrassing to be seen in it. Dad now worked as a traveling salesman for a concrete firm and his new company car had a gray-and-tan concrete I-beam logo with C
USTOM
C
ONCRETE
painted down both sides along with a bright red phone number. Still, I was afraid to give Gary the key.

“If you get me the key I could make a copy so he wouldn't think you did it,” he suggested slyly. “I'd be doing him a favor if that piece of crap ended up burned and dumped in the Everglades.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But it's the only car we have and my mom's pregnant, and he travels for work…”

He sighed impatiently. “Then I'll return it without one little itsy-bitsy scratch,” he said. “He'd never know a thing. I'd drive up at night. See my girl. Have some fun. Drive back here before your dad wakes up.”

“Doesn't it take about ten hours just to drive up to Alabama?” I asked, knowing it did.

“Not the way I drive,” he said. “I used to race cars. Mini-roadsters on dirt tracks. I got a room full of trophies. You should see them someday.”

“Yeah, I'd like to,” I said, and was still nervous he was going to ask about my dad's car key again.

“Maybe we could take turns driving the Rambler,” he suggested. “And I could give you some professional racing tips on how to outwit the cops.”

I didn't even have my learner's permit yet.

Then as I hesitated he suddenly shifted gears. “Hey, my dad's gone, my mom's dead asleep, and your parents are out. Let's have a pool party.” He clapped his hands together and smiled.

There was no fighting that wide smile. It was like a double broadside of cannons turning toward your starboard side, and just as convincing.

“Sure,” I replied eagerly—anything to get away from the car talk.

“I know a great game,” he said with enthusiasm. “They should add it to the Tokyo Olympics. I'm always inventing the Pagoda Olympic Games of the Future, and this one is called Tojo Depth Charge. I've been thinking about it all afternoon—that fire you started whetted my appetite for a little mayhem.”

“I'm good with fire,” I said with confidence.

“As far as I know it's your best quality,” he confirmed. “You were like Thor at his forge over there. That grill fire was so hot I thought you were going to mold that steel spatula into a Viking branding iron and use it to burn a war oath to Odin on yourself.”

I grinned. “Yeah,” I said. “I thought about it.”

“What part of the body?” he asked.

“Undecided,” I said, because it seemed better to be vague.

“Remember, tender skin scars the brightest,” he advised, “like the neck, or the inside of the thigh, or higher up. But for now come over in fifteen minutes. Get your swim trunks on. I'll tell my little brother, Frankie, to get ready, too. You'll like him. I call him ‘the Cross and the Switchblade' because he carves all the fancy little dog coffins and crosses for our pet cemetery. My sister's home, but she's doing a leopard-spot color treatment and perm job on a poodle tonight. We have a pet grooming business in the garage. Mostly we just do celebrity pets. This poodle belongs to the owner of Big Daddy's Liquors.” He pointed over his shoulder to his garage. “If you want,” he said, “she can cut your hair to make you look like a celebrity ferret. She's a pro.”

“Does she do yours?”

“I do it myself,” he said. “Without a mirror. Comes out different each time. Girls
love
inconsistency—keeps 'em guessin'.”

“Yeah,” I said, running my hand over my taut cadet hair like I was petting a bottle brush. “I need a cut.”

“I'll fix you up with my sister,” he insisted. “She'll make you look more like Sailor Jerry instead of that Junior Popeye hair you got now—that is, unless you want all your girlfriends to look like Olive Oyl.”

“Who's Sailor Jerry?” I asked.

“Greatest tattoo artist in the world,” he replied. “I'm saving up to have my whole back done in a ‘Love Thy Neighbor' design—it's a skull made out of a straight razor, brass knuckles, and a blackjack, all dripping in blood.”