Torch (11 page)

During seventh period he walked through town, not caring who saw him or that he was supposed to be in study hall. It was Monday, the first day of the last week that he would have to drive his mother to Duluth for her radiation treatments. He’d driven her for the past two weeks, Monday through Friday, going home immediately after school instead of to the Midden Café to wash dishes. He walked past the café now and saw Marcy through the front windows, but she didn’t see him. He thought about going inside to say hi—it was Vern’s day off and Angie would be there too—but he didn’t, afraid of how they would act when they saw him. At school he was still fairly safe. Only a few people knew about his mom having cancer. The streets were empty, all the kids still in school. He wished he were going to work, though he usually went there with a mild dread, bracing himself for Vern’s bullying and blathering, and a monotonous night scrubbing pots. When he’d told Marcy and Angie about needing to take three weeks off, they cried and told him he could take four. He wouldn’t, though. He’d go back as soon as his mother’s radiation was done with and her cancer eradicated. He would work and save money. Money for June, when he graduated and could move to California and escape Midden, which he considered barely a town. The library was not a library, but a milk truck painted green and parked two days a week in the Universe Roller Rink lot. The mayor wasn’t a mayor, but Lars Finn, whose real job was at the feed store. The firefighters weren’t firefighters, but anyone who volunteered, guys with big guts and a lone woman named Margie. Even the clinic was a sham; no actual doctor worked there, though whoever did was referred to as a doctor anyway. Dr. Minnow, Dr. Glenn, Dr. Johansson, Dr. Wu—a string of ever-changing people who came to fulfill a requirement to become a nurse practitioner and in exchange got a break on their student loans. They were mostly women. One came to school and talked to them about birth. She told them about how, before the baby came out, a woman’s cervix dilated to ten centimeters, and then
she took a large protractor with a piece of chalk fitted into it and drew a perfect ten-centimeter circle on the board. It stayed for weeks, the circle itself, and then the ghost of the circle, still visible though it had been erased from the board.

Joshua recognized that his mother was not so unlike these women, so open about various things. She had told him all about sex already, about women’s bodies and men’s. She felt that it was important to know what she called “the facts of life.” She told him that she had lost her virginity at seventeen, and advised him against it until he was twenty-one. He did not tell her it was too late, that he’d been sixteen, with Tammy Horner. During this discussion he sat silently, looking anywhere but at his mother, and she told him to always use a condom no matter what urges he felt, because of AIDS, and then she gave him a box of condoms—handing it to him in its little paper bag with the receipt inside. He buried it in a drawer beneath his T-shirts.

On their drives to Duluth and back she’d asked him questions about Tammy Horner, whether he loved her still, whether he was interested in someone else. He hadn’t been alone with his mother for such extended amounts of time since he was little—before he’d started school, when Claire was away at school all day—but mostly they didn’t talk at all because his mother was too sick. On the drive home the first time they went, his mother had asked him to pull over so she could get out and vomit, holding on to the side of the car. He shut the engine off and got out, walked to the back of the car to see what he could do. “Leave me alone,” she’d said. “I don’t want you to see this.” And then when he stayed, watching her, she hollered, “Go!”

Within a few days she didn’t mind vomiting in front of him. She took a plastic milk jug in the car with her, with the top cut off but the handle still intact, to vomit into while he drove. They had dozens of these jugs around the place to use as scoops for the dog food, the corn for the chickens, oats for the horses. By then his mother had had to stop working at Len’s. He didn’t know what was next for her, and neither did she. “What we’re going to do is wait and see,” she’d say, wiping her mouth, forcing herself to drink another sip of Gatorade.

Despite the fact that the radiation made her sick, it would shrink the tumors that grew along her spine and ease her pain. The nurse named Benji had explained this on the first day they went. Before Benji radiated Teresa, he had shown them both around the radiation room.

“This is where it all happens,” he said, waving his hand. There was
a silver table and, hovering over it, a metal contraption that culminated in an arm that reached out with a dumb round eye, wide and conical like what Joshua imagined an elephant gun would look like. On one side of the room there was a wall that was not actually a wall, but rather a special kind of glass through which they could see the people in the waiting room, without being seen by them.

“That way Mom can keep an eye on you,” Benji said, swatting Joshua’s shoulder. “To make sure you’re not flirting with the girls.”

He looked out into the waiting room and didn’t see any girls. He saw a number of gray-haired people who wore brightly colored coats and ratty boots made of rubber and fake fur, and a woman with a cast on one foot, rocking a baby in a plastic carrier with the other.

His mother came up beside him and tapped on the glass. “Yoo-hoo,” she called, testing it out, to see if she could get anyone’s attention, but nobody moved or looked.

“I guess I’m safe,” she said, and laughed.

“
Very
,” Benji said, handing her a gown.

In the waiting room, Joshua sat near a tank of fish, then stood to gaze into it, feeling that his mother was watching his every move. From this side, the wall of glass was pure black. He pressed his face in close, making a tunnel around his eyes with his hands to block out the light of the waiting room.

“Did you see me looking in?” he asked her when they were driving home.

“Oh—did you? No. I wasn’t turned in that direction most of the time. What could you see?”

“Nothing.”

They drove in silence for a while. This was day one, several minutes before his mother would have to tell him to stop the car so she could vomit into the ditch. He could sense that she was waning as she rested her head back against the seat.

“So, did it hurt—the radiation?”

“No. Radiation doesn’t hurt, honey, it’s just … I don’t know … like powerful rays of light.”

“What did it feel like when it was shooting in?” he asked.

She thought about it for a few moments, fanning her face with her gloves.

“Nothing.”

• • •

When he saw all the buses driving through town to line up at the school, he blended in with the kids streaming into the parking lot, to avoid being noticed, and got into his truck. Before he started the engine, he saw R.J. walking toward him. He waved, and R.J. got in.

“You’re so fucking busted,” he said. “Spacey saw you leave. She was standing right by the window when you took off.”

“I don’t care,” Joshua said. “What are you doing now?”

“Nothing.”

When they pulled up to R.J.’s house, Joshua got out too.

“Don’t you have to go to Duluth?” R.J. asked, and blushed. He couldn’t even allude to Joshua’s mother being sick without blushing.

“Pretty soon.”

Inside, R.J.’s mother, Vivian, was sitting on the floor with her elbows propped on the coffee table, rolling joints. A pile of them was stacked neatly like logs inside a tin container. “My boys! How are my boys?” she asked.

“Fine,” Joshua said, sitting down in a chair near the stereo. R.J. went into the kitchen and came back holding a tube of cookie dough he’d sliced open, gouging out chunks to eat with the blade of a knife.

“You want some?” he asked, holding a slab of dough out to Joshua, who took it and ate it in one big bite.

“You want some, Mom?” R.J. asked, turning to Vivian.

“That’s why you’re so fucking fat,” she said. Her hair was parted in the middle, shoulder-length, feathered into brown sheets on each side of her head.

She finished rolling a joint, then lit it up, inhaled, and handed it to Joshua. He was high already—he and R.J. had smoked on the drive from school—but he took a couple hits anyway and passed the joint to R.J., who passed it back to his mother without smoking.

“This is good stuff,” she said, smoke coming out of her mouth. “Bender’s special batch.” She gave it back to Joshua. “I’m all done.”

“Me too,” he said.

“You can keep it,” Vivian said, sprawled back on the couch. Her fingernails were freshly painted red, so long they curved in toward her palms at the ends. “My little gift to you.”

Joshua gently tamped the burning end out in an ashtray that sat on the arm of his chair. He tucked the rest of the joint in his coat pocket.

“So did R.J. tell you about our little plan?” she asked Joshua.

“It’s not our plan,” R.J. said. “I told you I’d think about it.” He held the tube of dough in his lap, sitting in a chair that was the twin to Joshua’s, an itchy brown plaid.

“Bender and I thought we’d let you sell to your friends and whatnot. Dime bags and loose joints. Whatever they want.” She lit a cigarette and sat back, smoking and gazing intently, but dreamily, at Joshua. “We figured you two could use the money, with graduating and all, and our place wouldn’t be like Grand Central Station. It’s making me fucking paranoid, you know? All the people coming in and out. And half of them are your friends anyway.”

“They’re not our friends,” R.J. said, holding up the remote, trying to turn the TV on. He banged it on his chair and then it worked.

“Well, they’re your
peers
. They’re people you know.” She flicked the ash from her cigarette. “What do you think, Josh?”

“I think it sounds cool,” he said, looking tentatively at R.J. “If we keep it low-key.”

“Completely,” said Vivian. “No way would we be anything but low-key. Everything is totally mellow. It’s not on the level of dealing. It’s on the level of just having mellow connections with people and you guys making some extra cash.”

“I don’t need any cash,” R.J. said.

Vivian looked at him for a while, then crushed her cigarette out. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how I don’t need cash,” he said quietly. He turned the TV off.

“You don’t need cash, my ass. Who you think’s gonna buy the food you stuff into your big fat face? Huh? You think it’s gonna be me for the rest of your life? Well I got news for you, porky pie. I got news the day you turn eighteen.”

R.J. stood up. “I got news for you the day I turn eighteen too,” he yelled as he went back into the kitchen.

“What’s that?” she asked tauntingly, smiling at Joshua. “I’m just
dying
to hear your news,” she yelled, then fell onto her side on the couch laughing.

Joshua stood up and stared at a newspaper flyer that sat on the floor, advertising the things on sale at Red Owl—Granny Smith apples, an economy pack of paper towels.

“I gotta go,” he said. Then hollered, “I gotta take off, R.J.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said, walking back into the living room.

Joshua didn’t want R.J. to come but was afraid to say anything that would get him in trouble with Vivian again. “Okay,” he said, and they left.

He dropped R.J. off at the bowling alley, where he would play pinball and then walk down the street to the Midden Café, where he would play Ms. Pac Man. He did this almost every night.

Once he was alone in his truck, Joshua drove away slowly, convincing himself that he had time. Plenty of it. A full half-hour before he and his mom technically needed to be on their way to Duluth. His house was a twenty-minute drive from town when the roads were good. He told himself these things, watching the clock that he’d glued to the dash of his truck, but a strange panic rose in him anyway. Why had he wasted his time after school? Why hadn’t he come home during seventh hour instead of walking around town? He became aware of the fact that he missed his mother, ached for her in his gut. The thought that maybe when he arrived at home his mother would be dead entered his mind and would not leave. He tried to make himself relax by imagining her doing what she was most likely doing now: lying on the couch, storing up her energy for the trip to Duluth. He imagined himself walking in the door and taking her hand. He imagined her saying what she said every day to him when he got home: “How was school?”

“Good,” he’d say, like he always did.

But when he walked in the door his mother was alive and well and standing in the kitchen drinking a glass of water. He didn’t go to her and take her hand.

“How was school?” she asked.

“Good,” he said, standing in the door, keeping his voice flat and disinterested. “Are you ready to go?”

She was dressed in a manner that she called “funky” or sometimes “all hipped out,” in an outfit that embarrassed and repulsed him: cowboy boots and grape-colored tights, a black miniskirt and a slim lilac sweater that ended at her waist but had a cascade of yarn tassels that came down almost to the edge of her skirt. Her legs in the tights looked bony and taut, like those of an adolescent girl.

“Well, I had a pretty good day myself. I raked the stalls. I’m not so nauseous. I think it’s thanks to the weekend being off radiation.” She wore lipstick the color of rust; the rest of her face was bare, which made
the rust of her lips even more striking, her eyes more blue. She put her hat on, another funky thing, velvet leopard print, a get-well gift from her friend Linea.

“I’ll be in the car,” he said.

“Wait, hon. I’m coming right now.”

Spy and Tanner wagged their tails, pushing up to Teresa as she put her coat on. “Oh, you think you’re going with us, don’t you?” she said in her baby voice, bending to let them lick her face. “You’re saying, ‘We want to go too!’ You’re saying, ‘Where are Mommy and Joshie going?’ Aren’t you? Oh, yes you are.”

“Mom, they’re not saying anything, okay? They’re dogs.”

“Spy thinks that Joshie is grumpy today,” she said in a baby pout voice.

“Don’t call me Joshie,” he said savagely. “I told you. Don’t ever call me that again.”