“Read this,” I said, turning back to Fat Bobby, pressing the Preacher book closer to him, like he might lose it. “It’ll change your life.”
“Okay,” he said uncertainly, eyeing the disturbing cover with confusion. Then his face, confused but still pleased at the prospect of what my dad’s ten dollars could get him, fell and slackened again, and I thought to myself, Oh great, what now? “Joey, I don’t think I can buy this.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, listening but turning back to the shelves at the same time, trying to decide if I wanted X-Men or Spiderman, or both. “You got ten dollars there, you can get whatever you want,” I said, then quickly added: “As long as it’s not that crap,” and pointed at the manga stuff.
“It’s my dad,” he said, and though he wasn’t blubbering or crying this time around, I could tell that the thoughts that led to that were stirring just below the surface. “I don’t think he’d let me read comics. He’d think it was sissy stuff, a waste of time. He’d probably throw them away.”
Having been raised on books, novels, and comics alike, the value of comics, both monetary and otherwise, fuel for a kid’s imagination, had been ingrained in me since time immemorial. The very idea of someone throwing away comics, discarding them as if they were merely cartoons on paper, horrified and angered me. It was an injustice I couldn’t allow.
“We’ll keep them at my house,” I said. The idea came to me spontaneously, right there, and I didn’t know where it came from but it felt right. “I’ll get you a separate box. You can come over and read them whenever you want.”
That shiny, beaming look erupted again on Fat Bobby’s face, that same joyous rapture that had sprung up when Dad had presented him with the $10 bill. It spoke of things too powerful for words, equal parts gratitude, appreciation, and something else altogether. It was as if Bobby were seeing things with new eyes, or maybe just seeing things that he’d never seen before. And it amazed him that things could be this way.
“You’d do that for me?”
He seemed not like a boy my age but a child years younger, looking up at someone they thought a hero. Someone almost worthy of worship. I think I must have felt how my dad felt earlier in the office, consoling this large, fat boy like he was still an infant.
It felt good to be held up this way by someone else.
It made you think, even if in vague and flitting spurts, of the person you could be, if only you had the courage to be a certain way all the time.
“Sure. No big deal.”
If possible, his smile grew even wider, like a fissure ripping a massive planet in two. That look of near worship again in his eyes—I felt high and mighty, but in a good way, not an uppity one.
I just hoped he wouldn’t build some sort of shrine to me in a closet at home.
That would be sort of queer.
“Thanks, Joey.” I shrugged as if it were nothing. He looked again at the comic in his hand. “Preacher huh? Are you sure?”
My mouth was open and I was about to say something, when a sound like music interrupted me. The music formed words and a shiver went through me tingling like electricity.
“I’d go with something Batman personally,” said the voice like music, and I thought, Oh, this is it. This is what an angel sounds like. I turned, and there she was, the girl from the break room. “Something by Frank Miller or Jeph Loeb,” she said, and my mind quaked with nerdy excitement, my dork sensors reaching overload.
No way in hell does she read comics, I thought.
No way does she know the writers and artists, I added.
I was in love, and I had no idea what to do next. I shuffled from one foot to the other. I crammed my hands into my pockets and pulled them out again. My face felt hot and I knew I was blushing, probably redder than the sun. I was scared, far more frightened standing there looking at her than I had been back at the stream with the three high school guys. This fear was somehow pleasant, though, and there was no other place I wanted to be.
“Hey, Tara,” Fat Bobby said nonchalantly, as if he knew her, and she said hi back as if she knew him, and I thought, Holy shit, they know each other. Then I was mad because Fat Bobby hadn’t told me this, and this was fucking important information. This was bigger than who shot Kennedy, if there were little gray men in Area 51, bigger than discovering that Atlantis wasn’t lost at all but bobbing around right inside your crapper.
I wanted to strangle him.
I wanted to look at her.
I wanted to run and hide.
“Who’s your friend, Bobby?” she asked, looking at Bobby, and I thought to myself, trying to beam the message to her like I’d beamed messages to Bandit just a few minutes ago in Dad’s office: Don’t look at the fat boy! Look at me! Look at me for the love of God!
“This is Joey,” Fat Bobby said.
Then she was looking at me, holding her hand out for me to shake; and I thought, trying to beam the messages at her: Oh God! I’m gonna melt! Please don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!
Taking her hand I felt my face getting hotter, and I wondered if my head exploded and I sprayed chunks of myself all over her and her pretty dress, would she still talk to me? Would she have pity on a headless freak and let me hear her voice again?
“Hi,” I said, lamely, and her hand in mine was like worlds colliding, stars going supernova, and all sorts of stuff that I could analogize now, but back then it was a pleasant tingle through my whole body. A lightness in my head and thoughts that I didn’t want to ever end.
Smelling something like strawberries, I knew it wasn’t me, and it definitely wasn’t fat boy next to me, and I realized it was her. It was the shampoo she used on her bouncy, galaxy spiral hair. Or a perfume she dabbed on her neck like I’d seen my mom and sister do. Or it was just the smell of her.
Tara, I thought. The smell of Tara.
I wanted to lean over and smell that hair. I wanted that smell in my head, in my mind, and I wanted to lock it away in there where I could always get to it.
“Hi,” she said back, smiling, and I found myself looking at that smile, those lips, and thinking of touching them. I was looking at her mouth, still holding her hand, pumping it up and down, and I thought that if the Makeup Lady came around a third time I could turn to her and say: See, I really am retarded, and it would be true, painfully true.
Turned retarded by way of a girl.
That’s got to be a medical condition. I should look it up someday.
I know other guys have felt the same way before. We could start a support group. Sit in a circle, share our stories and have a good cry.
Bandit walked over to her, tail slapping side to side like a feather duster, and she dropped my hand. I held it outstretched there for a moment or two longer, dumb with shock at the loss of the contact. I stared daggers at Bandit, tried to send him some more telepathy.
“Oh! There’s that cute dog! There’s that silly dog!” She knelt and cooed to him again, just as she had back in the break room. Her skirt swished as she knelt, a sound like a whisper, a whisper directed at me. I found myself looking at the curve of her backside, and then quickly looking away when she turned again to face me. “What’s his name?”
I told her.
She said some more nonsense to my dog, this time using his name, and I cried out in my mind for her to say my name. You know my name! Say my name!
Then she did, and my heart nearly stopped.
“I like your dog, Joey.”
“Thanks,” I said, though I didn’t really know if that was something to say “thanks” about, and I could have kicked myself.
“Mr. Hayworth, that’s your dad?” she asked, and her quick change of subject startled me as easily as everything else about her. I nodded, wanted to say something, but my mouth felt glued shut, and then I thought of what I’d said so far and maybe that was a blessing in disguise. “He’s a nice guy. He treats everyone here really well. I mean, I’ve only met him today and all, but some people you can just
tell, you know?”
You got that right, I thought.
To her, I nodded.
Fat Bobby was shuffling about now, left out of the conversation, and I really didn’t care. Her words were for me; her eyes were for me. No one else.
“You like comics too?” she said, and I latched onto that single word, “too,” and what it implied, what it verified. That she liked comics, and that commonality between us was like some invisible bridge running from me to her, and I wanted for all I was worth to run across that bridge to her side of it.
“Yeah.” My voice trembled the slightest bit; I tried to consciously still it and, with my following words, it seemed to work. “I’ve been collecting them for years now. My dad got me into them. I have boxes and boxes of them. Some are really rare, that he gave to me from when he was a kid. I spend all my money on them. Books too, I love books. I love to read.”
Shut the hell up, you idiot, I told myself, and reapplied some of that glue to my jaws again, swearing I’d try not to speak anymore unless I absolutely had to. And even then to keep my responses to single words. Monosyllabic if possible.
“That’s cool,” she said.
She wore a laminated name tag around her neck, dangling from a cord, and I thought: That’s cool, that name. Tara. Tara. Tara. I stared at her name tag and repeated her name in my head like a mantra. After a time, I realized it might look like I was staring at her boobs and, thinking that, I actually did, my eyes drifting to the swells there, pushing out against the fabric of her dress like little mountains. I sent out another quick and urgent prayer to God, told Him I forgave Him for not answering my last prayer, swapping mine and Bandit’s bodies. This time what I wanted was a lot easier: just miniaturize me and give me some mountain climbing lessons.
By an enormous feat of determination and willpower, I turned my eyes back to her face, hoping she hadn’t noticed where my gaze had wavered to and, if she had, hopefully she was too polite to say anything. I hoped for the latter, but readied myself for a fist to the face or a can full of Mace to the eyes for being a perv.
She was still smiling, one side of her mouth turned upward, slightly crooked; something I decided right then and there was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. She kept talking without missing a beat, and for that I silently thanked her.
“Maybe someday I can take a look at your comics,” she said.
I shuffled from foot to foot again, hands in my pockets, wanting to stop, knowing I looked like some sort of gimp. My head turned this way and that as I looked everywhere, anywhere but at her, as if following the path of a kamikaze fly buzzing through the air.
“Sure,” I said.
When? is what I wanted to say.
Where do you live?
What’s your number?
You want mine?
All valid options I could have added, but I couldn’t. Literally, I couldn’t. It was as if those thoughts were stopped by some sort of brick wall, and the words lost in the ether like smoke in a breeze.
“Well,” she said, and the way she said it I knew our current encounter was winding down, and I cursed the universe for its cruelty, “I really should get back to work. I’m sure I’ll see you around, your dad working here and all.”
She made a little dance of a motion, like a pirouette, with a twirl of her skirt, and started to walk away. I wanted to reach out and snag her, pull her back to me like a planet pulling its moon. Down the aisle she glided, moving further away, taking my heart with her, and still I couldn’t say anything, not even when she gave a half turn in my direction and gave me a little wave and another one of her crooked little smiles. I tried to wave back, but my hands crammed in the bottomless pits of my pockets snagged there, me pulling frantically to free them.
In that torturous moment I thought she’d walk out of sight and I’d have to wait some unknowable span of time to see her again, but the fat boy saved me. The fat kid who’d been nearly naked in a stream that same day, crying pitifully as he was used for target practice by a bunch of assholes. He, whom I would forever remember as Fat Bobby, whom I would always remember with an uncertain mix of fondness and disgust, called out to the girl who had stolen my young boy’s heart, and saved me.
“I guess we’ll see you at the fair next week?” he called after her, and Tara stopped, kind of hop-skip-dancing backwards for a moment. With a nod of her head and a one-word reply of “Yeah!” muted like a whisper across the distance between us, she turned a corner and was gone.
In the days that followed, morning to evening, light or dark, awake and in my dreams, there was one thing that came back to me again and again. Consisting of two words, those words played over again and again in my head like a song on a playback loop. My heart thudded jackhammer-like against my breastbone, a prisoner pounding against his cage, as I dwelt on the thing in my mind.
The fair.
3.
The first trucks began to arrive that Saturday, and Fat Bobby and I watched as the massive diesels pulled into the park at the center of town. I brought Bandit with us, as Dad had told me to and as I would have done anyway, and he lay at my feet while Fat Bobby and I straddled the log-post fence that surrounded the park like it was a huge corral.
Large canvas tents and tarps billowed up and high, supported by their wire- and pole-frame skeletons, like the humps of ancient creatures. Game booths and food stands were constructed also, crews of shirtless and sweat-shiny big men pounding away with hammers and shouting out orders to each other. Glass-cased popcorn machines and the spinning skewers of hot dog vendors; Whomp-a-Mole machines and BB gun shooting ranges; a merry-go-round spinning slowly, hypnotically, on a test run; and the large, imposing monolith of the Ferris wheel, standing tall against the backdrop of the clear summer sky like the monument of some lost civilization—each, in turn, unveiled upon the land like an invocation.
“It sure is something, isn’t it?” Fat Bobby asked, downing the last of the soda he’d filched from my house. One corner of a plastic bag stuck out of the breast pocket of his shirt like it was playing peek-a-boo, the sandwich that had been in it, of my mom’s making, long gone.
“It sure is,” I said with genuine awe, the sounds and sights of the fair coming together like the sounds of a dream long lost slowly coming back.
“This will be the first year I’ve got to go in a long time,” Fat Bobby said. “My mom used to take me. But it’s not really the kind of thing my dad likes to do.”
Knowing full well this might be a road I didn’t want to go down, that such a topic could quickly dispel the glory of the day, I went ahead and asked the question that was on my mind anyway.
“Used to? Where’s your mom now?”
The momentary silence before Fat Bobby’s answer confirmed for me that we were about to turn down Depression Road, followed by a hard left down Misery Lane.
“She died a couple years ago. Car accident. Dad was driving.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and so said nothing. Which may have been the best course of action because, in a few minutes, we were lost in the chorus of the fair’s construction again. It was a balm of sorts watching those men work their magic, the tents and rides going up, as if the landscape of a forlorn past were being patched over by something better.
As afternoon stepped aside for evening, the sky going from blue to red to bruise purple, we turned away from the fairgrounds. The clanging and banging of its assembly, its growth, its becoming, had a rhythm almost a heartbeat, and there was a sadness to our stride as we moved along: a drag of the legs, a slump of shoulders.
Along the highway, in the deepening night, we walked, and at some point on the long road, we waved to each other and parted; the unspoken desire for the fair between us and the wait for it almost unbearable. Ghost dog by my side, I watched my friend blend into the night and, on the dark road, I continued home.
I was several yards from the turnoff on the highway to our street, when the sound of an engine coming closer rumbled behind me. Stepping
further onto the shoulder just for safety, as I had for a half dozen cars before it, I waited for the vehicle to pass on by.
It didn’t pass.
Pulling up alongside me, a sleek black Mustang slowed to a crawl, almost like a shadow rolling, a part of the night detached, matching my stride. The electric hum of the windows rolling down was loud in the night. Inside, Mr. Smirk, Mr. Pudge, and Mr. Pimple Planet—Dillon, Max, and Stu—looked out. Clouds of smoke billowed out of the car, drifting up into the night like dragon’s breath.
Bandit let out that monstrous growl he’d made back at the stream not so long ago. I knelt to clutch his collar and gave him a bit of a tug, letting him know to stay by me as we walked.
Dillon was at the wheel, but he didn’t watch the road. He stared out at me.
The other two were in the backseat, watching me as well.
“Out past your bedtime?” Dillon asked. He had traded his suede jacket for a black leather one and, in the black car in the black night, the effect was disconcerting. He almost seemed like only a head and hands, pale and floating there in the shadow car. “It’s dangerous to be out alone this time of night.” He looked briefly away from me, out through the windshield at the moon above, like he was confirming the hour. “Bad things can happen at night.”
I tried to remember the things I’d told Fat Bobby a few days ago at the stream in the woods. Not to be afraid. Not to take shit. But home, so near, had never seemed so far away.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to control the tremor in my voice, “like getting your nuts bit off.”
I looked at Dillon in the driver’s seat to gauge his reaction, and I felt I’d scored at least a point when I saw a tick of anxiety as he looked down at Bandit. Probably imagining his unmentionables being torn and chewed like a frankfurter and beans. But to his credit, and my growing unease, it was only the slightest of distractions, and then he was looking squarely at me again.
“The brave little man with his dog,” he said, and I watched as one of his floating phantom hands left the steering wheel and reached into a pocket of his leather jacket. My first thought, the Southern Californian in me, cried out Gun! Gun! Run! Hit the ground! But even as these thoughts fired across my synapses, my muscles tensing to run or hit the ground, Dillon’s hand came back out and it wasn’t a gun he held.
If You Go Down to the Woods Page 4
