Tumbledown (20 page)

“All right,” Jimmy said, “I’ll give you Boggs, Tartabull, and any Pirate of your choice—except Bobby Bonilla—for Andre Dawson.” Billy, for reasons no one understood, was a Pirates fan.

“Keep Boggs. I’ve got a rookie Boggs already, and I hate Boggs anyway—he’s bowlegged. I’ll take Tartabull and any two Pirates I don’t already have.”

“Boggs is a great hitter.”

“Two Pirates.”

“Not Bonilla.”

“I’ve got a Bonilla.”

“You’ve got a Bonilla with the White Sox.”

“Doesn’t matter. I
know
he’s a Pirate now, I don’t look at the uniform and think,
Gah, I wish he was a Pirate.
”

“I’ve got a Bonilla
with
the Pirates.”

Roadrunners lived on the property, despite the feral cats and the fat corgi, who was really two corgis, the first The Dog, who was put to sleep when Jimmy was six, and the second The Dog, who would survive Jimmy’s childhood and was still hobbling around when Jimmy left for college. The current The Dog leapt from the couch and ran, in its short-legged hopping fashion, after a roadrunner that neither Jimmy nor Billy had noticed. They laughed at the suddenness of The Dog’s departure and the comedy of its gallop and how, when it became clear the bird would escape, The Dog switched to a cat lounging in the shade of a palo verde, as if the cat had been his target all along and the roadrunner was merely a ruse or an unlikely partner. There was no better dog than a corgi and no better corgi than The Dog; on these facts, the boys agreed.

Pook watched without laughing. He had felt the dog tense beneath his hand and followed the dog’s gaze to the yard where the roadrunner was standing, its head turning from side to side, as if it were about to cross a busy street. The Dog leapt from the couch.

It’s after it. It’s not catching it. Trees’ dark blotches. Lines.

The secondary target scampered to the sycamore and up the side of the tree to a branch beyond The Dog’s reach, where it turned and stared, without hissing, amused at the attention of the barrel-shaped dog, whose short legs could push its snout within inches of the cat but no closer. Jimmy and Billy had given the feral cats names and tried, unsuccessfully, to tame them. Some had more than one name, as who could be sure with cats whether it was the same as the one they’d seen the day before? The cat in the tree was named Scooter and Lonesome and Thor and Fat Albert and Hunter and Andre Dawson. Giving each of the cats many names multiplied them, and the number of felines on the premises seemed to the boys enormous, and often they wondered how it was that the majority were always hidden. Such crafty animals. So much of the world was just lurking. It gave their lives a sense of theater, the secret audience of creatures no one—not even neuroscientists or space engineers—could understand.

When The Dog returned to the porch, the boys petted him elaborately, celebrating his failure.

“Good dog, The Dog,” Jimmy said.

“You weren’t even close,” Billy added enthusiastically. “You did good, though. Fine and dangly.”

The Dog let them salute him for several seconds and then returned to Pook on the couch.

“We should give Same Man a dog,” Billy said.

“That’s a great idea,” Jimmy agreed.

Pook understood what they were saying and got up from the couch. He was allowed to go inside any time he wanted, while Jimmy and Billy were supposed to wait at the door until May Candler evaluated their request to enter. Needing a drink of water would not get them in, as she set out a cooler filled with water and each had a plastic cup with his name on it. Needing to pee didn’t cut it, either, as she knew the boys routinely peed in the desert and in the grass and in the cistern and from the tree house. Snacks she put on a tray and set on the porch. Injuries required blood or unconsciousness.

Pook returned with the folder labeled
Same Man.
It was a comic book that the three of them were creating together. He placed the folder on the card table. Jimmy and Billy made up the story, and Pook drew the comic’s panels. “How was it possible,” Jimmy’s father, Frederick Candler, had wondered aloud, “that two artists could procreate and produce a child who cannot draw or paint or sculpt?” He was talking about Jimmy, who could not draw or paint or sculpt, and who came up with an answer for his father’s question. He imagined the streams of being flowing from his mother and father, combining into a single river that branched and branched again, and all those streams flowed through his sister, but for himself, one of the streams was blocked—he pictured a horizontal wheel as red as emergency vehicles and screwed down tight, and it was this stream that permitted drawing and painting and sculpting, and for his brother Pook, that particular stream was undammed but some unnameable others were blocked. “You’ve got that much right,” Frederick Candler said when Jimmy described his vision, “your brother’s damned all right.”

Jimmy planned to write comic books for a living, which Pook would illustrate. The problem was that Pook only drew himself, and how could you have a comic where all of the people looked the same? Jimmy had asked Billy about this, and he suggested that the main character could have a disease that gave him superpowers but it also made everyone look to him just like everyone else, and the comic book would display exactly what the hero saw. This was unquestionably a good idea, and Jimmy decided that he and Billy would write the comic together. They named their hero
Same Man
and a big part of Same Man’s job, given his problem, was to keep the good guys and the bad guys straight. Dating, too, was complicated, as he liked girls, even though they all looked like men and the men all looked like him.

“We’re going to have to get real psychological with this,” Jimmy said.

“What if the girl takes her clothes off?” Billy asked. “You can’t have a naked girl that looks like Pook.”

“People in comics keep their clothes on.”

“But
what if,
” Billy insisted.

“He only draws what he draws,” Jimmy said.

Billy shook his head sadly. “I feel sorry for Same Man.”

Jimmy concurred. He and Billy shared a strong interest in girls—specific girls from school and nonspecific females out there in the bright radioactive sunlight or in that feminine falling time of evening or hidden, like the cats, in the night, their numbers impossible to know. Girls in skirts. Girls in tight jeans. Girls in bathing suits. Girls walking in shoes with thick heels. Girls on one knee. Girls pointing. Girls turning. Girls making their hands into phones and waggling them at their faces. Girls stepping sideways. Girls making faces. Girls lowering their eyes. Girls backing into the ladies’ room. Girls covering their surprised mouths with their hands. Girls twisting in their desks as they raised their hands. Girls doing elaborate slapping, chanting routines. Girls dribbling a basketball. Girls in those funny shoes just the size of feet. Girls shading their eyes. Girls coming up from chairs with their backs arched. Girls with a skip in their stride. Girls snapping their fingers when they remembered. Girls with their arms raised and crossed, their fingers holding to their shoulders, and twisting at the waist.

DAY 3:

The boys returned to Same Man early the next morning, unable to recall how they’d lost track of the project the day before. They quickly settled on the images they needed, describing them in detail to Pook. While he drew the panels, they climbed to the sycamore tree house, which had three levels:
base camp,
where the massive lower limbs initially spread, maybe seven feet above the ground;
hideout,
several feet above base camp and out on the thick limb that also held the rope for their tire swing; and
lookout,
high on the main trunk, among a spread of thin arms, a height the boys felt in their lungs and in their arms and in their tingling testes.

They climbed the sycamore several times a day, working their own limbs feverishly, as if all the monuments they had to scale could be made literal and by reaching lookout they were becoming men. Base camp had a floor of lumber, constructed with the help of Jimmy’s parents and Pook (working from the ladder’s top rung) and even Violet, who sometimes climbed up there to read. The other perches were unofficial, and except for a single board they had nailed themselves at the hideout level, which served no purpose, and a single thick nail at the lookout level, around which they would hang the binoculars, there was no construction but nature’s spread of limbs.

One day from the high lookout perch, Jimmy had seen green leaves floating on the cistern’s watery ceiling, as tiny as fingernails. And that same evening, with Billy, after skimming and swimming the cistern, and lying in the grass and then climbing to the lookout, they saw Jimmy’s parents holding each other and kissing within the confines of the garden, a commonplace event, and yet his father had been painting shirtless that evening and his mother’s blouse was pulled by the embrace to reveal a naked slash of pale flesh below her neck, and Jimmy remembered this image the way an android might remember the first time he was plugged in. Sometimes he even dreamed it.

It was in the hideout a year earlier that Jimmy spied his father and brother emerging from a dented Ford Maverick, parked not in their long drive but on the street, and driven by a young woman with blond ringlets (he had the binoculars), whose head projected through the driver-side window to watch them walk away, her lips moving without (he could tell) making a sound while she watched Jimmy’s father or Jimmy’s brother walk away from her.
Pook has a girlfriend,
Jimmy thought, knowing it could not be true and yet holding tight to the thought, unable to take the leap to the most reasonable approximation of the real—that this pretty girl in a dinged white car loved his father and her infatuation had been encouraged or even provoked by his father, that she was likely a college student, a painter, one of his father’s protégés, his lover.
My
how that mouth of hers had taken on so many shapes, and this active mouth, too, would return to him from time to time for the remainder of his life, and he would not understand why he was unable to take his eyes away from the woman whose mouth had roused the memory.

The trees in the yard held the light the way his father had held his mother, and Jimmy understood, without the interference of words, that he wanted to hold a girl in just that manner, a girl whose mouth was like the mouth of the girl in the dented Maverick. And later, during that summer, after his brother killed himself, Jimmy would recall that embrace, which was no longer associated in his mind with his parents, and that girl’s mouth, which was the same mouth and the same girl sticking her head out of the same car window but she was no longer looking at his father or his brother, and he would realize this about Pook: he almost never had to deal with the interference of words.

And still later, an autumn afternoon when Jimmy was sixteen and up in the sycamore with his first serious girlfriend, whose flowered blouse hung on a branch beside her white bra, and whose tiny skirt would slip from the gray boards and drift like a giant leaf to the leaf-strewn ground, he would see a cat sleeping in the shade of a ruined wall and the bent knees of what had to be his dead brother watching the sleeping cat, and as he pulled free of the girl to ejaculate on the soft skin of her tummy, his eyes would close and the image would be lost, and when he opened his eyes, even the cat was gone.

“Fished,” Pook said, by which he meant
Finished.
He stood beneath them at the trunk of the sycamore. They made their way down to him.

Before looking at the new drawings, they reread the comic from the beginning. The first panel showed Same Man—before he was a superhero—in a baseball uniform, standing in the outfield, eating a flauta as a baseball flew past him. The next panel showed him in a hospital bed, sweating, sick with a high fever from eating too many flautas. The next panel was all words. Jimmy had the best penmanship, and he did the word panels.

YOU LOOK BETTER,

THE NURSE SAID,

HOW ARE YOU FEELING?

A panel showed Same Man looking up at a nurse in a white dress who looked exactly like Same Man.

OH NO!

SAME MAN THINKS,

EVERYBODY LOOKS

THE SAME!

Same Man’s dog, which looked a lot like The Dog, they named R. Budd Dwyer, after Frederick Candler’s favorite politician, the Pennsylvania state treasurer who, this past January, had held a press conference to say that he was innocent of the kickback charges of which he had been convicted and then pulled out a gun and stuck it in his mouth and killed himself on camera. It took three panels of words to explain who the dog was named after, and then the dog vanished from the comic because it had no superpowers.

Jimmy and Billy had had a lot of trouble deciding what powers the illness had given Same Man. Flying was the best, but too many superheroes already flew. The same went for running fast and seeing through things. They decided to give him a powerful sense of smell. He could sniff out bad guys like a dog, but he could also smell lies and schemes and tricks and shady deals.

“I’m not sure being a good smeller is enough to call him a superhero,” Jimmy said.

“How ’bout also he’s real strong?” Billy said. “And wears a costume?”

THIS IS HOW THE WORLD

REALLY LOOKED TO HIM.

They argued about whether he could remember people from before he was sick.

HE COULD REMEMBER

BEFORE HE WAS SICK,

BUT THE MEMORIES

ALL LOOKED LIKE THIS.

Pook’s drawings for the comic book—he did them in colored pencil—shared something more substantial than style, which neither Jimmy nor Billy could name.

“Like if you could eat them,” Billy said, “they’d all taste from the same food group.”

“Mangoes,” Jimmy said, agreeing, and they decided on a name for Same Man’s nemesis.

MANGO FORTITUDE

WAS NAMED BY

HIS MOTHER,

MRS FORTITUDE.

-

SHE NAMED HIM

MANGO AFTER HER