Truants (4 page)
These were our teachers. We were kids and thought: ho hum, school. We never once paused and thought: ye gods! We’re being taught to be lopsided! But in retrospect, the policy at the Noble Canyon Home of “in loco parentis,” a legal and Latin term which Salmon applied to his every idiosyncracy, made a lot of sense: the local
and
crazy parents. But they were, as I’ve said, our formative years, and we weren’t
trying
to be judgmental.
**********
The Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls
Every night after work at the fair and after showering, Rawlins, Steele, and I would reconvene in the rec room, where the late late show would be on, say,
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
, with Edward G. Robinson rescuing his daughter in the final scene, and we would share our mail. That night, Steele got the confirmation of his job with the street department, so he was all set.
Rawlins opened a small packet, and began an intense study of a booklet he’d received:
I Spy Traffic Signals
. He was a member of the I-Spy Rangers, a club for elementary school kids designed to engender alertness in American citizens. Each page displayed a different traffic sign with a check box beside it. When Rawlins had checked the whole book, he would send it back for a badge. He’d already done
I Spy Dogs
and
I Spy Airplanes
, though he’d cheated generously on airplanes.
We also received another missive from Braniff, a kid my age, who had “walked” the year before. He’d split after being in the Home only a year, and from time to time we’d get these cards and letters, signed photographs of movie stars, junk, that Braniff intended to be testimonials to how great life was on the “outside.” This time there was no letter, just a page of Xerox paper with an indecipherable figure on it. Rawlins held it for a while, staring, and turning it around and upside down in the light.
“Jesus, I don’t know,” he finally said, handing it over to Steele and myself. I couldn’t make it out either. It looked like I don’t know what; it was only a few lines. Steele took it.
“What’d you get?” Rawlins asked me. “Money from your father!” He laughed. They’d heard me talk and offered me grief about my father all the time.
“Nothing. A note.” The T.V. was now doing the art deco static that would last until dawn when Captain Kangaroo would begin being gratuitously benevolent on channel twelve.
“Let’s have it.”
“No way.” It was an important letter.
Rawlins lunged at me for the letter, which was the way we exchanged things regularly, and I avoided his huge hands, tipping my chair over in the process. Every chair in the rec room had been on its back ninety times. Rawlins chased me for a minute, as was his custom, and then receded again to the couch.
I sat down in another chair. “It’s from my father.” He looked up from his traffic signs.
“No shit.”
“Nope. He wants me to come to California to finish school.”
“Come on!”
“He does!” I waved the letter. “And I’m going. Tomorrow.”
Rawlins grabbed again and nabbed it this time, and I hurled myself at him, ripping the envelope in half. When I elbowed him to the side of the head, he sat up disgustedly and slapped me in the face. It was a deliberate stroke and it bloodied my nose.
“Rawlins, you beast,” Steele intervened. “Give him back his letter. Come look at this.” Rawlins handed me the other half and I stuffed it all into my bloody shirt pocket.
Steele held up the Xerox sheet. “The bastard Braniff sat on the Xerox machine. He mooned us. Check it out.” After a second Rawlins began laughing and hitting the couch so that all the little insects jumped ship and ran into the other furniture. He was really laughing. Steele did not laugh. He made a tight face and shook his head.
“So you want to walk away and join Braniff in the world, eh?” Steele threw Braniff’s sheet on the floor, where Rawlins picked it up and resumed his laughing and pounding of furniture. “Looks like a whole lot of fun out there.”
Steele saw my eyes.
“Don’t do it,” he said.
I’d been bleeding and I did not care to respond to the delinquents in any way.
“Don’t do it, Collin. You can’t do it. You were twelve fucking years old. It’s over. It’s not that way anymore!” Steele came toward me but I backed to the hall.
“Okay!” he said. “Why? You’re crazy. Why would you walk with a year to go?”
“He’s my
father
, Steele.” And I went to wash my face, closing the debate on the affirmative, I thought.
**********
At 2:30 or 3:00
A.M.
, Steele would retrieve whatever booze he had squirreled away in his room, usually the cheap Scotch, and we’d have four or five drinks and make Rawlins tell us about his day. Steele would bait him, but it was only good for a while since Rawlins only caught about half of it. Once or twice since we’d been working at the fair, Rawlins would explode at Steele because of some blatant insult, like the nicknaming incident, and they’d have the chase for a while, which was mainly Steele tipping over chairs.
That was the purpose of the recreation room: chase scenes. Oh, also we’d sit and be cynical, as I’ve noted. Steele would smoke nine cigarettes, and exercise his rancor, saying, “Hey, Motor, have you ever considered having your testicles removed so that you can pursue a career in a boys’ choir?” Or he’d interpret the news for us, closing with the statement that with the world like that, we were better off in “prison.” Or the room was the scene of his atrocious rituals with the new kids. At Christmas, he’d direct our decorations of the tree, allowing us to use only the ornaments he’d made from water-soaked tampax dipped in sparkles. The undue pleasure he received from telling inquirers what the clever ornaments actually were, served as evidence to his deep abiding rudeness.
About four times a week, Steele’s girlfriend, Silli (Lillian was her real name), would sneak over from the girls’ dorm after the guard, Jerome, had fallen asleep. She was anorexic, which means starving to death, and pigeon-toed, but pretty in a wasted, blond kind of way. The first time Rawlins met her he asked what she had in her pockets. “My hip bones,” she said. Her malady stemmed, so said the staff psychologist, from “incestuous innuendo” her father had created in her “broken home.”
One of the first nights, Silli had told us the story of how her father had made them sleep three in a bed until she was twelve. Then her mother said it had to stop. When it did not stop, her mother went to Wickenburg to her parents’ guest house. Silli had lived with the goat then for a year and a half, when the agency moved in with school and neighbor reports along with a fat sheaf of eighty letters her mother had written. Her father disappeared, which is their tendency I guess. I kind of liked Silli; she had a face that was at once harsh and angular, yet her eyes were soft. It did bother me though that she acted too much like a person with nothing left to lose.
She’d bring a girlfriend for Rawlins. Silli would walk in, rocking her head in her pigeon way, and say, “Hey fellas! Hi, Steeley.” Her girlfriend, a different one each time, would scan the room warily. She’d eye Rawlins and then me, and this is when I would stand up and slip toward the door.
As I left the room, Steele would say snidely: “Good night, Collie, sleep tight, and don’t mess the sheets.” They’d laugh.
I wanted a girl. Badly. I used to stare out my window at the lights in the girls’ dorm across the yard imagining the nightgowns in the lamplight, bodies smoothly different from my own, and the yellow scent of perfume in the rooms. But it was better at that distance: the lights dimmed by the standard Home curtains, the girls safe from me, and me from them, in my cell.
Sometime later in the night, I’d hear Silli throwing up in our john. She always threw up, because she was the product of a broken home.
I didn’t feel like the product of anything, except perhaps the dictionary or
The Prisoner of Zenda
. Broken home. My home hadn’t been broken. It had been slightly burned and abused, but I had done that. And as I lay there in my bunk at night, listening to the petty thefts, assassinations, and heavy petting taking place around me, I regretted it all. I would do anything to make my father see I hadn’t meant it. Become a fireman, a truant officer.
In short: I missed him. There was one overwhelming theme in my pre-sleep mainline thinking: I was supposed to be somewhere else. I was displaced, misplaced, lost. We delinquents bantered and had fun, and hated it all, but we were supposed to be home. I could hear the anemic and broken Silli retching down the hall, and I just knew I should be with my father.
And now he had written a letter saying so.
I would leave tomorrow after work. Instead of joining the cheery Hall in the van I would mosey over to California and reclaim my own room in my father’s new home, and be the son I had been all along.
I turned in my bed when I heard Silli in the John the second time. Steele should have known not to give her Scotch, a girl who didn’t eat one meal a month.
**********
Daylight is the comedian that pokes little jokes in our midnight decisions. But as I awoke the next day, my room flat with the pre-noon Arizona daylight, which can be called broad daylight, I thought I might stick to my decision to break and stream to California.
In the summer, Rumkirk, the head of our dorm, let us sleep forever if it meant we missed meals, or what they called meals, because it meant saving a few bucks. It was just as well. After being up late as we always were, 10:30 or 11:00
A.M.
was not too early.
Munching a pilfered box of Captain Crunch, I went down to Steele’s room to get him up so that we could gather the log-sawing Rawlins and catch the van to work.
His room smelled like vomit again, which was pretty bad, but the worst part of it was that it was a smell I was beginning to associate with Silli. I shook Steele’s head up and down hard against the mattress. I’d learned the only way to arouse him. His eyes were coming loose.
“Easy! Easy!” His mouth cracked; his face was paste. “Ohhh. Ohh, man! Easy!” His features sealed again, and he went under. I bounced his head.
“Steele, come on. It’s time.”
“Yeah. Easy. Christ, take it easy. Do you want me to get the bends?” His hands came up and started working the face. “Ohhh. That you, Collin?”
I went and threw the water on Rawlins then, and he chased me down to the John, where I hid behind the door long enough for him to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror and his ablutions were begun.
This was the beginning of my final day at the Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls. It had an adrenal quality which ticked the right way in my expectant arms and heart.
I remembered the first. Seventh grade and not speaking a word for months, only nodding and shrugging, hoping silence would require my father to return and ask me a question, any question. All the casual mayhem in the upper grades. The high schoolers were giant criminals. As I grew they no longer were giants, except for Rawlins, but most were, by no choice, criminals. Meeting Steele in the early morning basketball games of ninth grade. He was so clearly a survivor, if an acidic one. Taking the I.Q. tests with all the sociologists. Mrs. Simmons and her flashing sympathy who taught me that talk, in fact, is cheap. She had a row of serious-looking books behind her head, books bound in serious centuries, books whose covers were gray and brown. The only red book was called
Introduction to Corrections
and she referred to it a lot, spreading the book on her desk between us as if it were an amulet bent on our mutual salvation. She never called me bad, though that was what I felt myself to be; she, in fact, never said anything quite as direct as that. She said there “was a gap between my knowledge through experience and my knowledge through reading.” She said I had a handicap in “engendering ideals.”
I sat in the schizophrenic features of her room, the “Smile!” poster, the bright plastic desk do-dads and all the serious books, and I thought: ‘She’s an adult and must know.’
She told me I had repressed anxiety and massive daydreaming. I could have told her that; perhaps I had. She let me thumb through the
Introduction to Corrections
. It was pretty good, with the pictures of the electric chair.
She must have had the same talk with Steele because he used some of the same words in the jokes late at night. Once when Steele was making his confession, relating all that Mrs. Simmons had told him he was, Rawlins made the mistake of telling all, too. He had part of it written down on a slip of paper he carried in his wallet.
He read the paper to us: “Expressive aphasia linked to motor-skill difficulty and fixed associations.” Steele studied the slip for a minute and then came up looking like Sherlock Holmes, waving his cigarette in three loops and saying, “In other words,
Motor
, you are, shall we say: dumb!” Then Rawlins chased Steele for a while in the kind of violent act needed to seal his new nickname. In three weeks, even I could use the name—force of habit—without any charge, and Rawlins answered to it as if he’d forgotten the source. Steele even embellished it with Psychomotor once in a while, and it seemed even funny to Rawlins, that big guy.
Everything Mrs. Simmons said was a promise. She had a whole vocabulary of promises. Everything was going to get better. I got older. From the limits of the fence across the dusty tennis courts, where I stood evenings in the spring of tenth grade, looking west at Cactus Mountain, I could see the little flickering of a raggy flag on top of the mountain. Every night I placed my fingers in the same chain links so that by June, when they’d get us summer jobs, the wire would be darkened by my grip. To the east, the highway lay a mile away; all the cars the same color and model, passing each other. At night, the lights of Phoenix stained the southern sky.
Noble Canyon; I’d had a million daydreams there, looking out through fences, and I’d received two letters from my father, and now: adios. I’d stood by the fence long enough; it was time for me to move into the picture. I could feel no sympathy for that younger boy who had walked through cinders after dinner, or any of those four years at a Home for Wayward Girls, Phoenix, Arizona 85069.
