“No luck,” I said to Lion in the Jeepster. “Better go up to Sacred Heart.”
Nortie looked a lot better when we got up there. They didn’t think he had overdosed, but they pumped his stomach anyway, which is worse than getting beat up. I explained to the doctor why Nortie’s face looked like someone had kicked their way out from inside his head; he said he was required to notify Child Protective Services, but when I told him Nortie is eighteen, he said Nortie would have to take legal action if he wanted the law involved. I know Nortie well enough to know that will never happen, so I decided Nortie didn’t live with his mom and dad anymore and Jeff and Lion and I headed over to his place to get his stuff.
I was ready for anything when we got to the Wheelers’ house—I’ve seen Mr. Wheeler at his worst—but Lion and Jeff were so hot the only thing we really had to worry about was whether or not one or both of them would go semiconscious and trash the place. It was nearly midnight, but the living-room light was on, and when we knocked, Mrs. Wheeler answered in her bathrobe. Lion said, “We’re here to get Nortie’s things,” and she moved aside and let us in. Nortie’s dad met us in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and asked what the hell we thought we were doing. Lion said the same thing he’d said to Mrs. Wheeler and started to push past. I said before, Mr. Wheeler’s not a big guy, and it’s one thing for him to lose his temper and do Nortie or Mrs. Wheeler in, but quite another to take on someone with the size and temperament of Lion. And the real danger was with Jeff, who hadn’t said a word yet.
When Mr. Wheeler went to the phone, Jeff did say a word. “Calling the cops?” he asked. “Emergency is 911. Tell them to get over here so we can talk about assault charges. If they want to pick up the evidence on the way, Nortie’s up at Sacred Heart Emergency.” He started into Nortie’s room, then turned around in the doorway. “And tell them to hurry, because if you make the wrong move, there’ll be more assault charges.”
Nortie’s dad stopped dialing and placed the receiver back in the cradle. We went on into Nortie’s room to clean it out. Jeff dumped his clothes into two suitcases and a big box he found in the closet, while Lion started dismantling his stereo. I took his posters off the wall and picked up all the little knickknacks on the tops of the tables and dressers. When we had it all together and were ready to haul it out to the car, I looked up and there was good old Mr. Wheeler standing in the doorway with a pistol. Everything in me froze.
“You’re in my home,” he said. “You don’t break into a man’s home and start taking things.” Advantage, Mr. Wheeler. That changed the tenor of things. Jeff slowly set the box he had down on Nortie’s bed and showed his palms. Lion did the same. All I remember thinking was: that’s a gun. Guns put holes in things.
Mr. Wheeler kept it leveled. “You boys get out of here. Leave Nortie’s things where they are and get the hell out of my house.”
Mr. Wheeler turned to walk out of the room just as his wife came up behind him and saw the gun. She shrieked and went off into some other world. “No!” she screamed. “No! You’re not shooting anyone! You can beat me and you can lock me in the basement and you can do anything you want, but you’re not killing anyone! You’ll have to kill me first! You’re not shooting anyone! You’re not shooting anyone….”
At first Mr. Wheeler was taken aback, sort of stunned, but then he yelled at her to shut up. When she wouldn’t, he reached out and backhanded her with the hand that held the gun. She dropped to the floor and lay still.
A wave of nausea swept through me and I thought I’d throw up right there on the floor. I hated Mr. Wheeler’s guts and I wanted to kill him, but my fear of getting shot far outweighed my contempt for him, or my compassion for his wife, and I backed out. Lion and Jeff followed.
We got into the Jeepster shaking with fear and rage. Lion shoved it into gear and we roared down the block, took a hard right and headed up the arterial back to the hospital. About halfway there we started to pass a Union 76 station, and Lion swerved in. “Who’s got a quarter?” he said, and I flipped him one. He stepped into the phone booth by the curb and dialed Wheeler’s number. We crowded around him.
When Mr. Wheeler answered, Lion said, “Mr. Wheeler, this is Lion Serbousek. Don’t hang up.” Silence; but the line remained open. Lion said, “In thirty minutes we’re going to drive by your house to pick up Nortie’s stuff. If it’s not out in front, we’ll call the cops, and I swear to God we’ll make enough noise that even if they don’t arrest you, you’ll be all over the front page of tomorrow’s paper. They’ll call you a wife-beater and a child-abuser and your stock in this town won’t be worth dog crap.” Still silence; still the line remained open.
Jeff took the phone from Lion and said, “Let me talk to Mrs. Wheeler.” We were all relieved to hear her voice; I thought she was dead for sure.
Jeff said, “Mrs. Wheeler, we’re coming by to get Nortie’s stuff; your husband’s going to put it outside for us. We’re going to pick you up too.”
She was crying, but said, “No, I’m okay. I’ll be fine.”
Jeff shook his head. “No. If you’re not out front with Nortie’s stuff, I’m calling the cops. The only way you can keep all this quiet is to be there. If you don’t have a friend to stay with, we’ll take you to the Battered Women’s Shelter. My mom does volunteer work there; she can get you in.”
She protested again, but Jeff cut her off. “You come with us, or we call the cops.” He hung up.
Talk about up in the air. I had no idea whether Mr. Wheeler would comply or not, or if maybe he’d hole up in an upstairs room and pick us off as we came down the block. I knew for sure we could take Mrs. Wheeler anywhere we wanted and she’d be back home before we got three blocks away; but what the hell, sometimes even though you can’t change things, you need to make a statement.
We drove around awhile, then, when the half-hour had passed, turned onto Wheeler’s block. The dark silhouette of a pile of boxes shadowed the sidewalk, and Mrs. Wheeler sat on one of them, crying. The house was dark. We loaded everything and she gave us directions to a friend’s house. I walked her to the door and waited for someone to answer. Mrs. Wheeler had called ahead; her friend put an arm around her and they disappeared inside.
So that was the first night after Stotan Week. Funny: you walk down the street or through a shopping mall or a grocery store and look at people’s faces and wonder what their lives are like—at least, I think I’m not the only one who does that—and you can’t imagine some of the horror that goes on; but they just go on looking like everything’s okay. I mean, Nortie and his mom look like regular people most of the time. It must take a lot of courage to pull that off. It seems so crazy, yet it’s happening to regular people. I mean, a reasonably intelligent woman goes back to a man who beats her up two or three times a week—and beats her up bad. And she doesn’t go back just once; she goes back and goes back and goes back. And if someone told you a story about a kid who lost his brother to suicide just because the brother’s life was so horrible there was no other way out and that kid has the exact same life, you’d think he was absolutely off his nut not to haul his butt out of there first chance he got. And if you heard that he not only stayed, but lied and told stories to explain away cuts and bruises and lumps to protect the guy who was giving them to him, you’d just call the men in the Funny Truck. But that’s Nortie. And I know Nortie, and I know he’s not crazy. But I also know there’s something about human beings that I don’t get, and sometimes I feel like it’s the most important thing in the world to understand, and sometimes I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
CHAPTER 9
Still January 2
So now Nortie lives with me. He’s got Long John’s old room and somehow that seems appropriate. I picked him up from the hospital the next morning and took him to my place, where my mom took one look at his face and said, “I always thought your father was a little rough.” She nodded slowly. “You can stay here as long as you like.” She better be careful; this is
a pretty comfortable place. Nortie could be here till he’s thirty-five.
A couple of nights after he moved in, I think it was Christmas Eve, Nortie came into my room with that somber look that tells you he’s about to make things rough on himself again. He said, “You know, I broke the Athletic Code.”
I said, “I know. Forget it.”
“I don’t know if I can,” he said.
“I could beat it out of your head.”
There’s a clause in the Frost High School Athletic Code that says anyone using alcohol or non-prescriptive drugs when their sport is in season is automatically dropped from that sport for the remainder of the year.
“Extenuating circumstances,” I said. “Forget it. Nobody needs to know. This is your captain speaking.”
“What do you think Max would say to that?” he asked.
“Let’s do Max a favor and not present him with that dilemma.”
Nortie shook his head. “I don’t know, Walk. Max is tough on me, but he’s always been straight. I should be straight with him.”
It’s strange. As wild as we get sometimes, we’ve all tried hard not to break the Athletic Code. Sure, we have a few beers now and then, and I suppose a couple of us have tried grass, but never in season, and never to excess. If Max has taught us anything, he’s taught us that our bodies have to carry us around a long time and we damn well better take care of them. Besides that, whether you agree philosophically with everything in the Code or not, you agree in writing if you want to play the sport. Big lesson in responsibility there: screw up and you’re gone. Your choice. But here’s Nortie, who’s never had more than half a beer at one sitting and who trains like a man possessed, and I just don’t think the Athletic Code was directed at what had happened to him over those past few days.
“I bought street drugs,” he said, “and I took ’em. I at least need to tell Max.”
“Nortie, why do you always have to make things worse than they already are?” I said. “Think of it as something that would be a pain in the butt for Max to know. He doesn’t need to be bothered by something that isn’t going to happen again in a million years. God, you’re turning into an old lady.”
“I’m blessing you with the ability to go back in time,” Max said to Nortie two days later when he’d listened to Nortie’s sordid story. We sat in the living room of Max’s apartment drinking hot chocolate and eating Montana Christmas cookies. Max’s mom still loves him. “You’re going to travel back to the moment you got it in your pea brain to come tell me. And you’re going to decide not to.”
Nortie looked at him, then to me. I raised my eyebrows and shrugged as if to say, See, you little loon, what did I tell you?
Nortie looked back to Max, who is usually a stickler for rules and responsibility.
“Rules have a purpose,” Max said. “That particular rule is to make athletes think twice before getting into habits that are going to put them in a bad way. The nature of what happened to you had nothing to do with that. It would be pointless to punish you.” Max smiled. “And I don’t want to have to explain that to my colleagues, so you didn’t tell me. Drink your hot chocolate.”
Nortie seemed pretty happy with Max’s response—and surprised. The significant adults in Nortie’s life so far hadn’t exactly been understanding. In Nortie’s world there were “No excuses, sir” right before he got cuffed alongside the head. But he wasn’t really out to destroy his swimming career, and if Max said it was okay, it was okay.
We left Max’s and went back to my place to change into our sweats and run an eight-miler. The temperature outside was in the teens, so we added extra layers of sweats and dug out some old stocking caps and mittens. Two or three inches of new snow covered the ground, and the going was easy—no slipping and sliding like in the past two days, when the cold had turned the streets to an icy glare and it was all we could do to stay vertical. We ran two or three miles along High Drive, overlooking the Pullman highway, then cut down through the neighborhoods bordering Manito Park. The light snow clung to the trees in the park like frosting, and ours were the first and only footprints along several of the back streets. Kids slid down the hills in the park on plastic garbage bags, squealing and yelling as the snow packed harder and harder and the rides got faster and faster. If you were going to make a postcard of Spokane to entice your relatives in Yuma, Arizona, to the great Northwest, you’d have taken the picture for it right there in the park.
When we turned the corner at the far north end of the park, ready to head back for the house, I spotted Marty O’Brian’s pickup moving slowly along the edge of the street. At each house a rolled-up paper flew out the passenger’s window onto the porch. I cut a wide circle onto one of the lawns and picked one of them up and, sure enough, it was the latest edition of the Aryan Press. We picked up the pace a little to catch him, and when we got close I could see through the back window that John Dolan, the team shortstop and relief pitcher, was throwing the papers out as O’Brian slowed for each house. I got even with John’s window just as he fired a paper toward yet another lawn, caught it about a foot outside his window and winged it right back in, catching him hard on the side of the head. It took them both a second to realize what had happened, then O’Brian slammed on the brakes. The pickup slid several feet, almost out of control, before coming to a stop with the wheel against the curb. I put my elbows in through the window, resting my chin on my arms, with a big grin. “Marty!” I said. “What a surprise. I didn’t know you had a paper route. Making some extra Christmas money? Christmas is over.”
Marty flashed me the famous middle digit and Dolan threw the paper back at my head. I let it bounce off, and seriously considered reaching into the cab and feeding him the remaining papers. Dolan must have had an instinctive reaction to my hitting him with the paper. He wouldn’t take me on. I said, “Dolan, you’re not big or mean enough to have done that. I accept your apology.” He didn’t say anything.
O’Brian is another story. He and I have been on a collision course since Junior High. He said, “Get your elbows off my pickup, Dupree.”
I ignored him. “This why you were so interested in Constitutional rights the day this garbage showed up at school?” I asked. “You’re skating on pretty thin ice, O’Brain.” It pisses him off when I call him O’Brain.
Marty started the pickup again and shoved it in gear. “Mind your own business, Dupree,” he said, “and get off my pickup.”
After the bikers in the Red Rooster and Nortie’s armed father, O’Brian didn’t seem scary. “Tell you what, Marty. I don’t know why you’re delivering these—I find it difficult to believe that even you are dumb enough to believe what’s in them—but if I see one more of them fly out the window of this here pickup, I’m going to break out all your windows.”
O’Brian sneered. “You think you’re pretty hot stuff with all that karate crap, don’t you, Dupree? Well, you don’t scare me, man. One of these days you and me are going to see what’s what.”
“We’ll see right now if you throw out one more of those papers,” I said.
“Yeah, well, we’re done delivering for today anyway, but one of these days…”
I said, “It probably won’t be the biggest mistake of your life, O’Brain, but it’ll be your biggest one this year.”
He laughed. “You talk good,” he said, then leaned forward and looked past me to Nortie, who was standing on the sidewalk. “Hey, Wheeler. Nice shiner you got there. Somebody finally tell your daddy you been sweet on a little jungle bunny?”
I shot over Dolan to grab him, but couldn’t quite reach him, and he hit the gas, laughing and slapping me away. Even I’m smart enough not to get caught half in and half out of a moving vehicle, so I pushed myself back and slid to the ground; but I was plenty pissed. I swore I’d get even with O’Brian in a big way, but he just laughed more and fishtailed away. I made a quick snowball and fired at his rear window, but the snow was too cold and light, and it disintegrated in thin air.
“
How’d he know you’d get your butt kicked if he told your old man about Milika?” I asked.
“Remember the day those papers showed up at school?”
I said I remembered.
“Well, the reason I didn’t come out and raise hell with you guys is because I see them all the time. My dad gets them. I think he pays dues to those people. I didn’t come out because I was embarrassed. Anyway, if O’Brian’s delivering them, my dad probably knows him.”
We turned onto the arterial that runs back up to High Drive. “Well,” I said, “Max is probably right. If we raise a stink, it only makes them look like they have a point. When I finally get a chance to beat what few brains O’Brian has to putty, I should think of a different reason.”
We ran up the arterial in silence, really putting on the pressure through the incline, subscribing to the age-old coaching adage that if it hurts, it must be good for you.
When we reached the top of the arterial and leveled off back onto High Drive, Nortie took a deep breath and blew out hard. “Could I ask you a question?” he gasped.
“Shoot.”
“You sleep with Devnee?”
“You can ask,” I said. “I won’t promise an answer.”
“Bad question?”
“It’s a great question,” I said. “It’s just none of your business. Why do you want to know?”
“Milika wants to sleep with me,” he said.
I started to laugh, which is not a good thing when you’re out of breath. “All right!” I said. “I bet you won’t get much sleep, though.”
“I don’t get any sleep just thinking about it,” he said. “Promise you won’t tell if I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“I’m scared to do it.” He shook his head. “I keep thinking up excuses not to, but I’m running out.”
I said, “Well, I don’t have any ready-made excuses for not sleeping with your girlfriend, but I’ll tell you something that might help.”