I closed my eyes (which didn’t help because it was already darker than a tomb) held my breath, and listened.
“Hey, Scarface.”
Sarah Byrnes didn’t answer and we kept rolling along.
“Scarface!” Closer. Still we rolled. Then I felt us stop. “What’s in the box?”
“None of your stupid business,” Sarah Byrnes said. “It’s my science project. I’m taking it home.”
“Lemme see.”
“Get away from me.”
“Just lemme look in there. I wanna see your science project.”
“You wouldn’t know a science project from a box of fish guts,” Sarah Byrnes said. “I’m warning you, Dale Thornton, you better leave me alone.”
“Flame-able, huh?”
“See what I mean? It’s flammable,” she said, pronouncing it correctly.
“Either way. That means it starts on fire easy, right?”
“That means it explodes easy. You better not mess with it.”
I hear a click, then the sound of a stalled cigarette lighter. “Let’s see,” Dale said. “Let’s just see if it explodes.”
“You better stop that!”
“Know what I think, Scarface?”
“I don’t think you think.”
“I think if this thing really exploded it would look like when they blow up one of them whales that swims up on the beach sometimes. You know, like down in California? I think you got a big ol’ fat-ass whale in there.”
“That’s just what I’d expect you to think,” Sarah Byrnes said. “God, you’re just so stupid.”
“Oh yeah? Tell you what. I’m gonna just go ahead and light this thing. If what you got in there doesn’t come out all cooked up with an apple in his mouth, I’ll let you go.” I heard the lighter again, pictured myself as Box-O-Bar-B-Q, and was suddenly wailing and battering at the lid and sides like a box of cats headed for the river. Once free, my running escape lasted all of three steps.
That’s when I discovered Dale Thornton’s true reaction to humiliation.
It should have ended there, right? Unconsciousness. Threat of serious injury. No more Crispy Pork Rinds, right? Right?
Wrong.
“So we can put this bad boy to bed?” I said, nodding at a copy of the underground newspaper as I tore the cellophane from another package of Nutter Butter cookies, bought to soothe the pain pulsating through the left side of my face. Sarah Byrnes and I were holed up safely in my attic.
She shook her head defiantly. “No way. They turn up the heat on us, we turn up the heat on them.”
I said, “Great. We hurt their feelings, they hurt our faces. It’s a good thing we’re so smart, Sarah Byrnes.”
“What’s the matter with you, Eric? I thought you were tough. You get roughed up a little by some two-bit bully and you crumple. Don’t you know the price in human lives our forefathers paid for freedom of the press?” Then, more seriously, “Don’t you get it that words are the only way people like us can fight back?”
I extended the Nutter Butters toward her, but she batted them away. I said, “They died for it so we wouldn’t have to. Besides, our paper was supposed to be anonymous. It’s no good if it’s not. If they know who we are, anyone we write about can pound us into mush.”
Sarah Byrnes stared at the bare bulb above and to the right behind my head to let me know my words were falling on deaf ears.
“Listen, Sarah Byrnes,” I said. “It was a good idea. But it’s only good if we’re not getting killed.” I moved closer and touched her knee. “Man, I was scared. I thought Dale Thornton was going to really kill me. Toward the end I could hear him hitting me, but I quit feeling it. Like I was already part dead.”
“You learned a good lesson about pain,” she said back. “When you can’t take it anymore, your body stops feeling for you. That was just your body being your friend.”
“If my body were my friend, it would have run faster.”
“But you’re right,” Sarah Byrnes went on. “If they know who we are, it’s not good. They’ll just treat Crispy Pork Rinds the same way they treat us.” She scooted over and took the Nutter Butters out of my hand and said, “Listen, who’s the real enemy here?”
I felt my eye. The entire left side of my face was dark purple and sore and soft as a sack of dead birds. “That’s easy,” I said. “Look at your face, Sarah Byrnes, and then look at mine. Dale Thornton’s the enemy.”
“I used to stay with my aunt—my dad’s sister who’s not alive anymore—for a couple of weeks every summer. You know what my aunt used to do when she was mad at me?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “She told my cousin I used his bike or ate his candy bar or told some bad secret about him.”
“So?”
“So do you know why? Because it got us after each other. We tried to kill each other, and she could give us any punishment she wanted because there was a rule against fighting. My dad isn’t the only person in our family who treats people like shit. His whole family is like that.”
“So our enemy is your dad’s family?” I asked facetiously.
Sarah Byrnes rolled her eyes. “Humanity’s enemy is my dad’s family, but that’s not the point. Who told Dale Thornton you wrote Crispy Pork Rinds?”
“Mautz.”
“Who told you Crispy Pork Rinds was a piece of trash?”
“Mautz.” I was getting the idea.
“Bingo. He tells you it’s a piece of trash, but he uses the piece of trash to get the goods on Dale Thornton for the chewing tobacco. Dale gets punished at school for skipping, then probably gets hammered at home. Then Dale puts it to you after school because Mautz tells him who wrote the trash about him. Mautz sits back and lights a cigar. He’s got all the people he hates on different sides. Now. Who’s the enemy?”
It was my theory about how the police secretly like warring street gangs. “Mautz,” I said.
“Right.”
“So what do we do about it?”
Sarah Byrnes shook her head. “Boy, are you limited. I long for my intellectual equal and I get you. For twenty dollars in the Second World War category: Who fought on the side of right in World War II?” We had recently studied WWII in social studies.
“Easy,” I said. “The good old US of A.”
“Correct for twenty dollars. For forty dollars in the same category, who did the good old US of A fight against?”
“Germany and Japan. And Italy, I think.”
“Correct again for forty dollars. Now for Double Jeopardy, Final Jeopardy, and all the Daily Doubles on the board, who fought with the good old US of A?”
“England.”
“Who else?”
“Russia.”
“Right for a million dollars and the right to put out a dozen more issues of Crispy Pork Rinds. Russia. Until 1991 our very worst enemy in the world. The Evil Empire. Why do you think we were fighting on the same side as the commies in World War II?”
“Maybe they were different then. Maybe they weren’t commies. That was a long time ago.”
“Zooooooonk! Back to zero. Your consolation prize is three days and two lovely nights locked in a room with my dad. They were just the same. They fought on our side because we had a common enemy. If that common enemy won, Russia and the USA were hamburger. Now, Final, Final, No-More-Last-Chance Jeopardy. For all your money back and the chance to be my friend long enough to put out another issue, our new friend is going to be…”
“Oh, Jeez,” I said as the bulb above my head flashed bright.
“Close enough!”
I froze. We were going to make friends with Dale Thornton.
On their return from the R.V. show, Carver and my mother find a perfect indentation of my body in the couch, and I’m in it. I know it’s after midnight because there’s major skin all over the screen, in living color. Always the best on HBO.
Mom sees the woman in the flick touching herself in a full-length mirror and elbows Carver in the ribs. Carver is obviously embarrassed
—probably because of his uncertain position with me—but he needn’t be, because Mom has always been completely open about sexual stuff with me, so I don’t react like a lot of my friends would if they saw their moms getting itchy.
But I decide to make him squirm a little anyway. “I’ve got the safe sex video here, Mom. Want me to slip it in?”
The woman on the screen has turned from the mirror, approaching the guy on the bed, who looks to have the IQ of a cucumber. He also looks to have a cucumber. “I better get your blindfold,” Mom says. “Carver will call Child Protection Services on me for letting you watch this.”
Carver eeps out an embarrassed laugh and says, “What’s that number again?” It’s a feeble attempt.
“What happens behind my eyelids is a lot hotter than that,” I say.
Carver retires to the bathroom.
“When he comes out,” Mom whispers, “you can it, okay? No more. Carver’s a little modest for this family.”
“I know topless exotic dancers who are a little modest for this family,” I say. “Carver’s too modest for a Barry Manilow concert. God, Mom, get a life.”
We hear the toilet flush. “You get some manners,” she says, “or you’re going to be doing your own cooking and cleaning.”
“Yes, Mommy Dearest.”
CHAPTER 5
My mother is a writer. A real one, not just somebody with a manuscript in a desk drawer that she’ll finish someday when her kid finally gets arrested or goes to college. She writes a regular column in the local newspaper about women in sports and has had three articles published in Sports Illustrated. Two of them were space fillers, but one was a feature on a teenage girl who swam the English Channel. They sent her to the girl’s house in Southern California and even put her up in a motel with a telephone in the bathroom. I know, she called me from there.
Mom has always had primo word processing equipment, including the latest in laser printers so sophisticated they double as weapons guidance systems, which is why Sarah Byrnes and I were able to bring to our readers such a high-quality rag from the information underground. Mom taught me to use her fancy electronic gadgetry clear back in grade school when she encouraged me to keep a journal, but even though she taught me to hide it in the computer so even she couldn’t get to it without the code, I’m smarter than to put my thoughts about myself and others down in writing, where somebody might chance onto them and have me put to death.
Anyway, Sarah Byrnes and I had decided to lay off Dale Thornton for a while—at least until our wounds healed—and concentrate on an exposé about Mautz’s two-headed son, the outcome of his clandestine sexual foray with a group of particularly brutal aliens one night several years back when he was wigged out on cocaine. According to our meticulously researched story, whenever Mautz came up short on new ways to treat kids astonishingly, he consulted with Huey-Dewey (one name for each head), whom he kept locked in an earth cellar behind his house.
I was revising the part where Huey-Dewey got into an argument with itself regarding the relative value of humiliating a kid in front of the class versus the three-holed paddle, and began banging its heads together in violent confrontation, when my doorbell rang. I looked out the window to see whether I wanted to answer the door, and standing right there beside Sarah Byrnes, looking almost as if he had come above ground to live full-time, was Dale Thornton. Sarah Byrnes was bringing a future freeway sniper into my home.
Oh, God, I promise never to shoplift again or touch myself without my clothes on if you’ll please, just please let me live through this day.
I stared across our attic room at Dale Thornton, who, unlike Sarah Byrnes, had not refused my offer of Oreos and was, in fact, finishing up the package. Feeling invaded, I wondered if General Eisenhower let the Russians come to his house when he invited them to be on his side in World War II. If he did, I’ll bet Mamie—that was Ike’s wife—didn’t use the good silverware.
“So this is where you freakos hang out,” Dale said through a mouth full of dark brown crumbs and frosting. He was sunk into a bean-bag chair, scanning the room, gripping the sack of cookies as if it were a flotation device on the Titanic and the captain had just yelled, “Save the women and children first!” A home-crafted tattoo sporting BORN TO RASE HELL on a banner across a very poor excuse for a Harley-Davidson insignia graced his right forearm. He wore blue jeans, more hole than jean, and a black Twisted Sister T-shirt—the complementary pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve—which also showed serious signs of aging. His curly brown hair clung matted to his forehead, and my olfactory senses said without question it was closing in on the time of month when the Thorntons should consider emptying the moonshine out of the bathtub.
Sarah Byrnes followed Dale’s suspicious eyes around our attic hideaway. “Pretty nice, huh?” she said.
“Been in nicer.”
“Maybe till you heard the sirens coming,” Sarah Byrnes said, and I closed my eyes and held my breath. “I been by your place, Dale Thornton. You got a bunch of old wrecked cars in your yard, and I’d live in any one of them before I’d live in that house. And there’s gotta be a skinny old dog factory out back somewhere. I don’t care if you wanna live like a pig, nobody can help what their family’s like, but don’t you go saying, ‘Been in nicer’ like you live in some castle.”
“You guys invite me down here to polish off these cookies, or you got something you wanna talk about?”
I looked to Sarah Byrnes. This was her idea.
She said, “What happened when you got home the other night after school? Old Man Mautz call your dad and tell him about the chewing tobacco?”
“None a your damn business,” Dale snapped. “He didn’t do nothin’.”
“That right?” Sarah Byrnes challenged. “That why you didn’t show up to school for three days and why you wore that stupid-lookin’ turtleneck sweater for three days?”
“My brother gimme that sweater, Scarface!”
“Doesn’t mean you have to wear it.”
Just offer him a deal, I pleaded in my head, unable for the life of me to understand why Sarah Byrnes wanted to stir him up. Someone could get hurt, and I was farthest from the door.
“So what did your daddy do? Really.”
“Same thing your daddy woulda done.” He nodded toward me. “Or Fat Boy’s. He kicked my ass. Whaddaya care?”
“Just wondered.”
I started to tell Dale I didn’t have a dad and my mom has never raised a hand in violence toward me, if you don’t count when I was three and peed down the heat register during a week-long seige of below-zero weather, but I thought better. If Dale Thornton has a need to believe I get a regular ass-kicking, think away, Dale Thornton. I have recuperative work to do before I mess with you again.
“So I got places to go,” Dale said. “I don’t got all day to sit around and talk to a couple of freakos. What do you guys want? Got anything else to eat?”
Out of self-preservation, I went behind the dusty overstuffed couch at the far end of the attic, returning with a giant bag of corn chips. “Yeah!” Dale said, tearing them out of my hand before I could sit down, scattering perfectly good and unbroken chips across the hardwood floor. “Damn. They make these bags so you can’t hardly get ’em open.”
“The point is,” Sarah Byrnes said as Dale stuffed his face with my corn chips, “that Mautz singed Eric’s butt for producing a paper he said was trash, but he used the information in it to singe your butt. And speaking of butts, who do you think got the biggest bang out of you kicking Eric’s?”
“Me?” Dale said, smiling, nodding toward me, salty crumbs sticking to his lower lip and chin.
Sarah Byrnes shook her head. “Couldn’t have been much of a big deal for you, unless you’re the biggest wus since Mr. Rogers.” She cast a semidisgusted look at me. “You could’ve got a better fight out of Norman Nickerson. Mautz, that’s who really got off on it. He got Eric good and didn’t have to lift a finger because he had a goon do it for him.” r />
Dale achieved a passable imitation of thinking. “Maybe you’re right,” he said finally. “So what?”
“So we want to keep printing the paper and we don’t want to get killed doing it. We have a deal to make with you.”
“Make it.”
“You protect us, and your name is never seen in Crispy Pork Rinds again, unless it’s for receiving a Congressional Medal of Honor. You can be on the staff. Every week we’ll let you pick one thing to write about and we’ll do all the grunt work. It’ll be like you’re literate.”
Dale didn’t pick up on the last comment, but the rest must have sounded good, though he didn’t make any promises. Sarah Byrnes said after he was gone that we were free to go right on pleading the Fifth and cranking out our weekly rag.
It is nearly impossible for me to admit to people, be they friend or foe, what is important to me. A counselor friend of Mom’s once said that’s merely a function of adolescence—that teenagers are into separating from our parents and others in authority in order to establish our independence. To do that effectively we have to believe ourselves as immortal and are therefore incapable of facing our emotional truths.
Well, let me make something perfectly clear (as Richard Nixon says on those old news clips about the Watergate scandal, right before he’s about to fill the room with fog) I am not immortal. I’ve spent more than ten hours in the psych ward with Sarah Byrnes—really and truly the toughest person in our solar system—and I’ll tell you what, if life can shoot Sarah Byrnes out of the sky, it can nail me blindfolded.
In truth, the only reason I don’t allow people up close and personal with my emotional self is that I hate to be embarrassed. I can’t afford it. I spent years being embarrassed because I was fat and clumsy and afraid. I wanted to be tough like Sarah Byrnes, to stand straight and tall, oblivious to my gut eclipsing my belt buckle, and say, “Up yours!” But I was paralyzed, so I developed this pretty credible comedy act—I’m the I-Don’t-Care-Kid—which is what I assume most other kids do. But I’m not stupid; I believe there is important shit to be dealt with.