Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (11 page)

“Me neither.”

I became desperate and frantically groped for any excuse at all. “My dad took the car to Silsbee.”

“That’s a bum deal.”

“Yeah,” I mused, relieved I had finally found an answer to satisfy him. However, I nearly drowned in Coke as Darnell gunned the truck into second to take a curve sideways.

Suddenly a log truck loomed in front of us. Of all the hazards to be found on the dirt roads of Fred, log trucks ranked at the top of the list. Being paid by the trip, they came tearing down those turtleback roads with little regard for other traffic. Since they were considerably larger than anything else on the road, they commanded a grudging respect. Few things are more intimidating than rounding a corner on a bicycle to see several tons of fresh-cut timber bearing down on you, trailing a dusty cyclone. In those unfortunate cases where I encountered one, I would hit the ditch as if dodging mortar rounds and try to protect my face from the dust cloud that trailed any vehicle moving faster than five miles per hour.

Encountering a log truck in Darnell’s truck instead of on my bike wasn’t a source of consolation or confidence. My exclamation of dismay became a shower of Coke, which sprayed the dash and windshield. As gutsy as he was, even Darnell knew he was no match for a log truck, the undisputed monarchs of East Texas roads. He straightened out the wheels, and since we were already sideways in the road, we shot through the ditch, out of the path of the truck and into a field of corn, which choked our momentum to a halt. The log truck roared by like a Tyrannosaurus Rex in search of meatier prey.

“Did ya see that truck hoggin’ the road?” Darnell demanded. “The nerve of that guy!”

I sat speechless, an admittedly rare condition.

Darnell reached down to the ignition. “There oughta be a law against folks drivin’ like that!”

He started the truck, which had died when we cleared the ditch. I didn’t blame it. I had almost done the same thing myself. I opened the door and slid to the ground on shaky legs.

Darnell tossed his greasy hair from his eyes with a jerk of his head. “Hey, doll. Whatcha doin’?”

I stared back at him vacantly. “Look. I just remembered I’m going the other way. See you later.” I slammed the door.

Darnell ground the gears into reverse and shrugged. “OK, doll. It’s yer nickel.” He bounced the truck back on the road and barreled off, drowning out my cries about my bike in the back. Fortunately I was far enough off the road that I wasn’t enveloped in the cloud. However, I had a long walk ahead of me. I occupied my time by fashioning new names for Darnell Ray, the mildest of which was Darn ElRay.

CHAPTER TWELVE
The end of summer opened the door into high school and the beginning of my ongoing battle with the school librarian.

Fred was the first place I had ever lived where there was no library. (Not counting the library in the elementary school, which barely had enough books to bury a rotund misanthrope on a go-cart.) Nobody else seemed to feel the lack of a ready source of fresh reading material as keenly as I did. I was certain that M also would have been appalled. Every time I scanned the meager shelves I thought of M and our reading sessions in the attic, and the library began to feel like a lonely wasteland. I avoided it altogether and instead turned to buying books in used bookstores. However, the high school library afforded a greater selection.

Strangely enough, given my love of reading, I had an adversarial relationship with the school librarian, Miss Thermopolis. I viewed her as a manuscript miser, a hoarder of books who was loath to let even one volume escape the confines of her domain. Perhaps my perception was influenced by the fact that I kept trying to check out books by British authors, which were reserved for the senior reading list.

I would skim through the stacks for interesting titles. When I finally found one that sounded promising, I would take it to the desk only to discover that the author was British. One reason I read so much Ray Bradbury, besides the fact that he was an excellent writer, was because he wasn’t British, so I was allowed to check out his books.

I tried several times to check out
Animal Farm
, but George Orwell was British. (It wasn’t his fault. Unfortunately for me, that’s just where his parents lived when he was born.) Even when I buried it under other books, the gimlet-eyed librarian, jealously guarding her reading lists, would snatch it from the stack with a withered claw. Actually, although she was an old maid, she didn’t really have a withered claw. I just came to visualize her in terms of the Wicked Witch of the West, so all my interactions assumed Ozian flavors.

“You can’t check that out. You’re a freshman and this is a British author,” she would say for the bzillionth time. However, I heard a nasal screech say, “Oh, no, my little pretty. Thought you could sneak it by me, did you? Well you can just die of boredom. And that goes for your little dog too!”

But my determination could not be thwarted by a mere librarian. Or even an exalted librarian. I orchestrated a daring mission to appropriate
Animal Farm
from her evil clutches. Actually, all I did was sneak a look at the schedule, come in during her lunch hour, and check it out from a library assistant who was less assiduous in guarding the rights of senior class readers. I was feeling pretty cocky until I took the book to one-act-play auditions. I was in the process of regaling a fellow thespian with the tale of how I had finally outwitted Miss Thermopolis when his face assumed a strangely desperate expression. I followed his gaze over my shoulder to find the W. W. of the W. herself standing behind me, staring at the copy of
Animal Farm
on top of my books. I had forgotten that she was also the one-act-play director.

“Did you check that out?” I heard a “my sweet” echo in the cold gloom of the auditorium.

Realizing my mistake, I gulped and nodded slowly, “Yes, ma’am.” I longed for a bucket of water with which to melt her.

She peered at me through her trifocals. I was afraid she was going to blast me in a shower of sparks, or at least impound the book, but instead she said, “It’s not about animals, you know. It’s a political satire.”

“Yes, I know,” I replied, a bit miffed at the slight to my intelligence. I guess it wasn’t her fault. I was probably the first freshman from Fred to stalk Orwell so vigorously.

Ultimately, in my efforts to satisfy an insatiable appetite for literature, I swallowed the bitter pill that began its diabolical work in my vitals—the seed of skepticism that splintered my foundation even more soundly than the AM radio.

Deep within the bowels of the stacks perched on edge between shelves in a back corner, I unearthed an ancient copy of
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories
by Mark Twain. It was fifty years old and looked as if it had not been touched in almost that long. It had lain dormant for half a century, as virulent as the day it had been penned at the turn of the century. In my efforts to read everything by my namesake—a quest inspired by M on the historic day he met the Creature and preserved me from destruction by mail truck—I thought I had exhausted the meager resources of the school library. This book wasn’t even listed in the card catalog.

I carried it to the desk with barely suppressed exhilaration. The W. W. of the W. seemed to sense my mood. She scrutinized the book suspiciously but was forced to allow me to check it out. Twain was undeniably not British. I repaired to the Fortress, half expecting flying monkeys to appear and confiscate the book. Getting as comfortable as I could, I settled in for a good read to the strains of “Sympathy for the Devil” mixed with much static and “Poke Salad Annie.” The book opened tamely enough with the jumping frog story that I had read many times in literature anthologies for school. As it progressed, however, it became darker and more disturbing, until I at last came to the title story.

It was about a kid and his companions in the sixteenth century who met an angel named Satan. No, not the
Satan
, but his nephew, who was named for his famous uncle before he became the black sheep of the celestial family, as it were. The angel dazzled the kids with miracles, such as animating the clay figures they had made, but then dismayed them by “murdering” the miniscule creatures with careless ease as if he were killing an ant. The boys, and I, became more bewildered as the angel conferred a confusing mixture of blessings on villagers that resulted sometimes in wealth and happiness, sometimes in imprisonment and death. By the time I got to the last chapter I had become suspicious that this Satan was more than a namesake—he was the genuine article, incognito. I expected the last chapter to unmask the impostor for who he was and have him banished to his rightful reward in the place prepared for him. Instead, he told the boy that there is no God and that life is only a bad dream. The final page of the book left me aghast:

“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons, ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .”
“You perceive,
now
, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.”
“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a
thought
— a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

I turned the page to see an empty blankness. I flung the book from me as if it had burned my hands; it tumbled through the branches to the ground. We were a long way from Tom Sawyer now! I was ill-prepared for such vitriol from such a powerful writer. For all my devouring of his works, I knew nothing of his mercurial life, which had been filled with pain and had ended in solitude and bitterness. And, of course, I had never read any philosophy or apologetics, which would have enabled me to see the fallacies rampant in this tirade.

Despite the warmth of the afternoon, I shuddered as if a chill finger had traced a line down my backbone. What if it were all true? Dad, Mom, Heidi, Hannah, all nothing more than a dream? Did I dream Pauline Jordan? How could I have invented in my own mind something as foreign to me as Fred, Texas?

But then again, I was also just a part of the vagrant, useless thought. Something else was thinking it. What could that be? And how can an object of a thought be able to think about itself and the thinker? Trying to follow that paradox made my head feel like it was full of cotton wool. I abandoned the attempt, retrieved the book, and secured it in the ammunition case, sealing it as if it were toxic waste. When I got the overdue notice, I dipped into my
Grit
proceeds to pay the fine. For reasons unknown even to myself, I couldn’t part with the book. I kept it hidden in the Fortress of Solitude, stashed in the ammo case with Pauline’s Bible, like a worm hidden in the apple, or a snake lurking in the garden.

The disturbing thoughts plagued me in moments of doubt and weakness, but I didn’t speak of them to anyone. Certainly not to Dad. I felt as if I had already committed some kind of blasphemy just by reading the book. Not to Mom, Heidi, or Hannah. It wasn’t the kind of conversations we had. Not even to Old MacDonald, my Sunday school teacher, since I was now in high school. How would it look if the preacher’s kid started questioning the existence of God and everybody else in the room? I could only imagine what would happen if that got back to the deacons.

Not that Old MacDonald ever raised such weighty questions on Sunday mornings, which were typically exercises in tedium and self-amusement. There was a reassuring ritual to the Sunday school classes that Mac and Peggy taught. We typically self-segregated according to gender, goofing around until we were called to order with a perfunctory prayer, our lesson booklets and Bibles in our laps as we sat in the metal folding chairs. The beginning of the lesson consisted of a text read by some hapless designee, followed by a skit read from the booklet by cast members selected at random by Peggy. The theme of the lesson firmly established by these two didactic devices, the gender segregation was reinforced by the girls and boys separating to opposite ends of the room, a collapsible divider snapped firmly into place.

In the private sessions, we took turns reading verses of the Scripture and paragraphs of the accompanying commentary printed in the booklet. Questions followed, read by Mac and answered under compulsion by various laconic teenage boys. Sarcasm and non sequitur, offered sparingly by the PK, served to lighten the ennui. For the PK, at least.

Peggy may have led a much more stimulating experience behind the vinyl partition, but the venue simply didn’t lend itself to Mac’s personality. In spite of the torture we occasionally visited on him, we gave him an
E
for effort (does anybody know what that means?) because he made up for it in the various extracurricular events that were the real substance behind the show. These included swimming trips to Honey Island, fishing trips to Uncle Herbert’s camp house on the Neches River, and cookouts at the MacDonald family farm.

Mac and Peggy poured their hearts and lives into our frantic, confused, and often miserable teenage existences, celebrating with our infrequent victories and commiserating with our too frequent failures. They seemed to actually care about the outcome of those things that were so monumental to us but inconsequential to most of those around us, sometimes even to our families. It was as if they infused significance into our lives when we felt woefully insignificant.