The Trouble in Me (9 page)

After a few deep breaths I straightened up and felt even stronger. I soaked a towel with rubbing alcohol and scrubbed my sticky chest until the alcohol seeped into each thin wound like the cleansing tongue of a flame. I closed my eyes and mutely tensed all my muscles until the pain faded away or I got used to it.

Either way I felt I earned a trophy moment of self-control. If I ever wanted to be like Gary I had to learn that the language of pain was silence.

On my way back to my room my sister opened her bedroom door. I quickly held my bloody shirt to my chest.

“What were you doing in the bathroom for so long?” she asked, and reached out and snatched the shirt from my hands.

She stared at my chest. “Did you do this to yourself?” she whispered harshly.

I nodded. I didn't want to wake my parents.

“To yourself?” she asked again.

I nodded.

“Well, you better look in the mirror,” she advised. “And I don't mean the
mirror
in the bathroom. Whatever you are doing to yourself is wrong, and if you are doing this because of Gary, then I'm warning you that you'll become as sick as he is.”

I remained silent and pushed past her. I was
sick
of being myself. Talking about what I wanted would never get me what I wanted. I quickly slipped into my bedroom and locked the door.

I had been thinking that all my memories were a loud noise holding me back from my great future with Gary. That had to stop. If silence made me empty inside, then Gary's words would fill me. That made sense, so I gathered up my class notebooks and all the school projects and photographs and teacher notes and class awards and childish drawings and art collages that I had saved as if they were the essential bits of reflective squares that blazed around inside my mind like a spinning mirror ball lighting up my entire childish past. All that early work was eager to define me, to tag along like a pathetically babyish younger twin, but it all had to go because it wasn't invited where I was going. Every piece of my past was a betrayal because it was about the kid I no longer was.

I moved quickly. I filled up a pillowcase with all my stuff, and with that pillowcase over my shoulder, I went into the garage and got another can of lighter fluid and marched to the backyard. I dumped some of my things out onto the ashes of the last grill fire. Then I reached into that pillowcase and pulled out all my personal journals—they had to be the corpses on the top of the funeral pyre. They had to burn first. I hadn't written much in them, but I knew what I had written was true, which was why I feared them. They were a plea to remain as I was, to be myself and trust the fire of my own voice, but all I wanted to do was escape myself.

I flipped open the hand-sized front cover on one of my black writing books and saw my signature in fountain-pen script on the inside. A teacher once told me your own name written with your own hand is an engraved portrait, and in that ink script my name locked letters like a fortress gate that had been hammered out of wrought iron. Inside the journal each scribbled letter and word on the paper was louder and stronger than these new thoughts reshaping me into Gary's double.

I knew if I read deeper into the journals I would never escape my old self. My written words held truths about me that I didn't want to hear. Those journal sentences were stacked up like old stone fences, word upon word, from hand to pen, from the top of the page to the bottom. There was no getting around those heavily written words that came straight from my heart and were unpassable to any stranger. And I knew that if I read one sentence of my journal it would tell me to be true to myself—it would beg me to be my own man and it would turn me away from Gary and buck me off his train. But I had lost faith in myself, and without faith I hadn't the courage to reach out and turn the journal page and read beyond my fancied-up name on the endpaper.

Quickly I began to spray the pages with the oily lighter fluid. I didn't start out to hate myself, but I couldn't burn those pages unless I worked myself into a frenzy of circling around the grill and squirting more and more fire-starter onto the paper, which soaked it up as I soaked up the suspense of my own destruction. This was the only way I knew how to give up on myself, and with a lighted match held like a pen in my hand I stabbed the paper and my name disappeared.
Poof!

The small front door of my journal burst into flames. The curling pages went up like witches' skirts burning at the stake with their twitchy madhouse laughter, but soon the flames robbed their chatter of oxygen and choked them down to a crackle. The white pages of paper flags waved their surrender to the blaze, but the merciless flames took no prisoners and blackened them. The cardboard journal bindings turned as brown as rolled cigars and the sentences blew away in cloudy rings of smoke. As my books burned, a fresh book opened within me—one to be scripted and polished by Gary.

I kept squirting on more and more lighter fluid until what written life I had placed onto those pages had burned down to silent ashes. Pictures blistered, and cards, stamps, newspaper clippings, tickets, bookmarks—all of it crumbled to smoldering cinders, and soon nothing remained of the arson but metal binders, paper clips, and blackened staples. It was very satisfying.

Yesterday when I climbed onto Gary's train I was riding along as swiftly and dangerously as he was. Then I realized I was just some scrap cargo on his back. But not anymore. Now I was only silence. And from silence I could shape myself into any word I wanted, and I wanted that word to be
Gary
.

 

INCOMING FIRE

For two days I didn't see Gary. I kept looking for him every chance I had. I went outside and washed and polished the Rambler. I cleaned the inside and scrubbed the wheels and all the time I listened for his voice, or his shoes scraping across the asphalt, but heard nothing. I constantly took out the trash and looked toward his house. I did the laundry for my mom so I could pin it up to dry on our backyard clothesline. To kill time I stood on our back porch and held an empty glass up to my mouth as if I were drinking. Secretly I was looking through the bottom of the glass as if it were a telescope. But I didn't spy him. Instead the round emptiness of the glass was like my own blank face spying on me. I closed my eyes. Where was he? Without him I was drifting back to my old pathetic Popeye self.

To buck myself up I imagined setting fires. I took out a box of matches I'd been carrying around in my back pocket. I opened the small drawer and plucked one out. I struck it on the box side. It flared up. The smell of sulfur burned the inside of my nose. I loved that smell and imagined holding the match to a handful of hay and setting Rome on fire. Burned it to the ground. I lit another and London went up in smoke. Then Tokyo. Chicago. Boston. San Francisco. Each match was another disaster. Washington. Atlanta. New York City. When I ran out of matches I was thirsty.

I was in the kitchen when he knocked on our front door. I could tell by the metal sound that it had to be the rings on his hand.

“I'll get it!” I hollered. When I opened the door he surprised me. He was dressed in a pair of khaki slacks and a white T-shirt and new Converse sneakers. He appeared more like me just as I tried to appear more like him.

But no matter how he dressed he was still Gary. “Hey, Sailor Jack,” he said, and tugged a slender mother-of-pearl penknife from his pocket. “Can I use your phone?”

“Is yours broken?” I asked.

“I hate it when people ask me questions,” he snapped back, and flicked open the blade. “But I'll tell you because it's funny. I racked up about a thousand dollars in phone calls talking to Leigh in Alabama and my dad can't pay the bill, so our phone is dead.”

“You mean your girlfriend who drives the pickup?” I asked.

“Nicest girl in the world,” he said, and ran his free hand back through his hair. “Never say anything bad about her,” he advised, pointing the blade at me. “She's my savior and soon we're going to get married.”

“My sister bakes really great cakes,” I said. “You could hire her for the wedding. She could bake a cake that looks like your bride's truck on a highway.”

“Or,” he suggested as he peeled the curves of dirt from under his fingernails, “she could bake a cake of me making a phone call from your kitchen.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“I'll call her collect,” he replied, nudging me. “I swear. Your parents won't know.”

“My dad is probably up and he's a freak about phone charges.”

“It's a collect call!” Gary said, and snapped the knife blade back into the handle. “It won't cost him a penny.” He dropped his head into his hands. “I feel a bad mood coming over me,” he said in a distant voice, and lifted his right shoe, cocking it back like a nervous horse about to kick.

“Sorry,” I said again. “When my parents leave you can do it.”

“Forget it,” he said, annoyed, and turned his face away as he quietly cursed over his shoulder.

When he suddenly turned back his mood seemed to have changed.

“Well, I got a more important favor to ask you anyway,” he said, sounding upbeat.

“If I can do it I will,” I said, relieved by the sudden shift in his mood.

“My probation officer is coming for an important house visit today—which is the reason I'm kind of dressed like you—and I was wondering if you could come over and be my friend, like, a new nice friend. Not like my old juvie friends, who can be a little too criminal.”

“Yeah,” I said enthusiastically. “I can be your new friend.”

“Good,” he replied, “and you won't be sorry. I only have a couple weeks left on probation, and my officer said I need to start hanging out with the type of people that make me a better person—like you.”

“Me?” I said, and pointed to myself.

I didn't say it out loud, but my plan was that hanging around him would make me sort of a shadier person. Something more like his old friends.

“You do know right from wrong?” he asked. “It's an essential skill for the job.”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course I know right from wrong.”

“Then you got the job!” he said cheerfully, and clapped his hands together. “You won't regret it. In fact, you can almost consider it a lifetime position.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Just what I was looking for.”

At exactly the correct time I walked over to the Pagoda house. I was wearing an “after-church outfit,” as my mom would have called it: brown slacks, a yellow tucked-in shirt, and penny loafers with dark socks.

I had my chess set with me and adjusted the box under one arm so I could ring their cracked plastic doorbell.

As soon as Gary jerked the front door open and I timidly stepped over the threshold, he slipped behind me and grabbed the back of my neck and bulled me headfirst down the hall and into a bathroom, where he shoved me up against a narrow wall between the box shower and stained toilet. He kicked the door closed behind us.

I crossed my arms over the chess set and held it flat against my belly as if it might shield me from a gut punch.

He seemed angry for no reason I could tell.

“What's wrong?” I asked, afraid even to say that much. I didn't dare say anything about him being in a bad
mood
. I'd already seen how that word always set him on fire.

He reached out and clamped his hand onto my chin and lined our eyes up. “I've just let you into my house, which means we are breaking new ground here,” he said intensely. “I normally don't let people in, so this makes me nervous. But we don't have much time before the probation officer comes—now let's get our stories straight about our new neighborly friendship.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll say anything you want.”

“I like you, Sailor Jack, and I don't mind looking out for you, but don't cross me, because one word out of place and that dick can send me back to juvie. I'm close to the finish line with my probation, and I don't want to go all the way back to square one and have to shit in a bucket and eat cold grits and turnip greens three times a day.”

“I'd never cross you,” I said to him. “I've got your back.”

And then I said what I had really been eager to say. “Count on me. I'm your right-hand man.”

He smiled. “You are a lot of amusing things to me, but you are
not
my right-hand man,” he said directly. “You are my shield against going back to juvie. In other words, you are not going to watch my back because you are my
face
. So, Mr. Face,” he asked, “you ever been punched in the face?”

“No,” I said, and quickly turned my cheek to one side. I knew what was coming.

“Look me in the eyes,” he ordered, and lowered his hand to grip around my neck. “It won't hurt as much as you think.”

The moment I straightened my chin out his fist hit me squarely on the mouth and my head snapped back against the wall. Stuff fell over in the shower and slid around out of sight.

“What do you taste?” he asked.

I licked my lip. “Blood,” I replied.

“Good,” he said. “But don't think of it as blood. It's vitamins. Blood is what makes you a man. And I need a man like you to be a good influence on me. You make me a better person in the eyes of my probation officer. You are the innocent Sea Cadet mask I get to wear. In other words, in the eyes of my probation officer you are going to make sure I know all my
rights
from all my
wrongs
.”

“What's in it for me?” I asked.

“A question like that is very disappointing,” he said in a slow, menacing way. “It makes me think you don't understand our relationship. So let's make this clear once and for all.
You
”—and he drove his finger into my chest—“get to be next to me. That's the gift I'm giving you in return. You got that?”