The Boys of My Youth

by Jo Ann Beard

Yimmer the dog is missing. She spends most of her time shedding on the furniture, or balanced on her back legs at the end of her chain, barking at the house. Right now, the last time any of us can remember seeing her was hours ago, at lunch, when she coughed up part of a garter snake on the living room rug. My father is also missing, which has led the authorities — my mother and her girlfriend — to believe they are together.

  “It isn’t enough that he goes to the tavern in broad daylight,” my mother says to Helen. Her mouth is full of pins. “He’s got to advertise it to the neighbors.” Popular thinking places Yimmer at the crime scene, a white dog against a brown brick establishment, fodder for local dinner table discussion tonight.

  “If there’s a garter snake in this neighborhood, then I’m moving,” Helen tells her. They’re making sheers for Helen’s dining room, so she can open her drapes without the whole world looking in. They keep taking the pins out of their mouths in order to smoke, and then putting them back in. As soon as they get the hard part done they plan to switch from iced tea to beer.

  All three kids have been dispatched to find the dog on our own block, but I have come back early, due to the bogus nature of the mission. We all know where she is. I’m trying to get my parakeet to look at me. No matter where I stand, next to his cage, he turns around in a single hopping motion and looks the other way.

  “I think this bird is mad at me,” I say. He wants me to put my finger in there so he can peck it. The back door slams and the refrigerator opens.

  “Get out of there,” my mother says through her pins.

  Linda flops down on the sofa and opens her book, taking small bites off a radish. “She’s putting her fingers in the birdcage,” she tells my mother.

  “I forgot,” I say quickly.

  “Well, he’ll be happy to remind you,” my mother says.

  “Linda’s eating a radish without washing it,” I report.

  “I wish I had about eight more just like them,” my mother tells Helen. She goes to the back door and calls for Brad, very, very loudly, in a voice designed to scare all neighborhood children, then stops at the refrigerator and gets two cans of beer.

  It takes Brad a full ten minutes to report in, and when he does, it turns out he forgot his mission altogether and was making a campfire in the middle of the alley.

  “We’re rubbing the sticks together and then we’re going to cook things over it,” he tells my mother. His mouth is still vivid from lunch and he has his T-shirt on inside out. Helen is charmed by him and exclaims over the idea of a campfire in the alley. He glances at her. “Don’t worry,” he explains, “it’s all pretend.”

  What about the dog?

  “Huh?” he says.

  The tavern is several long blocks away. The girls are to get their shoes on and go over there with the leash and see if the dog is waiting outside. If she is, they are to put the leash on her and bring her home. If it turns out they can do that without fighting, then they won’t get beat to a pulp when they get back.

  Helen thinks this is funny and so does my mother.

  Two things we are never, under any circumstances, to do. Ride double on a bike and ride a bike on Nineteenth Avenue. Riding double means the person in control isn’t, and if she ever catches one of her kids doing it, that’s it for the bike; sold. Nineteenth Avenue is at the end of our street, a double-laned thoroughfare with no stoplights, lined with parked cars and carpeted with the pelts of squirrels and stray cats. We aren’t even allowed to cross it on foot.

  Linda’s bike is new and almost too tall for her. We wheel it behind the garage and I climb on the back fender. I’ve got the dog leash wrapped conveniently around my neck. She gets on and we wobble for a distance, recover momentarily, and then fall over.

  This time I sit on the handlebars, which is more comfortable, except Linda can’t see around my head and if I shift my weight we swerve harshly. We veer past the campfire crew, who are sitting on the ground holding long sticks over a pile of short sticks; Brad’s face is a blur of startlement, but he can be counted on to forget it as soon as we’ve crossed his line of vision. I’m balancing us by using my legs as rudders and keeping my head to the side so Linda can see where she’s going.

  Directly to Nineteenth Avenue and a right-hand swerve, out into the stream of Saturday afternoon cars. I bank my legs going around the turn and then am forced to retract them altogether, due to the close nature of the parked cars to my right and the whizzing cars to my left. Once my feet are settled on the front fender, I have to sit straight in order not to fall off, and once I sit straight, Linda can’t see. Wobbling begins to occur almost immediately, along with shouting. I’m trying to tell her where to steer and she’s trying to tell me she can’t. Somebody’s mother gets into the act by yelling at us out the window of a car going the other direction. Cars are honking and careening out around us, causing mayhem.

  Up ahead there’s a gap in the parked cars. A little street. I can’t tell if she plans to take it or not, but I’m going for it. I bank my legs again and the traffic arcs out around us; Linda tries to compensate by leaning in the other direction. She uses her forehead to butt me between the shoulder blades.

  No.

  Yes.

  Around the corner, clipping a parked car.

  Sewer grate. Here comes a sewer grate.

  Hard to describe how skinny my legs are, except to say that one of them fit perfectly down the sewer grate. I’m wearing the bike like a cape on my head and shoulders; Linda is in a heap with the wind knocked out of her. Her lips are moving but the sound is missing.

  My leg is in the sewer.

  One end of the handlebars is jammed into the grate and the front wheel, now curved like a potato chip, is pinning my head down. Six feet away, Nineteenth Avenue roars dynamically. Below the street, the air is cool and damp, like air-conditioning.

  MY LEG IS IN THE SEWER.

  Linda is up, making a bleating sound and circling her bike. Okay, she can’t believe this. This is a practically new bike. This bike is now ruined. If it isn’t ruined, you could’ve fooled her.

  MY LEG IS IN THE SEWER.

  She grabs the handlebar and tries to twist it out of the grate. When she lets go, my chin is pressed to the ground. I can now see the undercarriages of cars whizzing past, six feet away. The first one that decides to turn the corner will smash me like a garbage can lid. The direness of the situation dawns on both of us at the same moment. Linda steps discreetly onto the curb and starts walking backward.

  DON’T LEAVE ME HERE.

  “I’m not,” she says, and then turns and starts running. She stops at the end of the block and begins limping, holding her elbows, until she’s out of view.

  This is more of an alley than an actual street, and the houses look like nobody’s home. I try hollering as loud as I can, but Nineteenth Avenue drowns me out. Now my throat hurts. I’m going to be killed, and the only people I know in heaven are my grandfather and an old dog named Mike, who got hit by a car.

  Help! Help! Help!

  Nobody helps you when you need help. When your sister left you trapped in the sewer and your dad is at the tavern, drinking with the dog. Screaming doesn’t work but I can’t stop doing it. Nobody is helping me!

  Oh, wait. Here they come. My mother and Helen, walking briskly, Linda hanging back a few paces, nursing herself. Helen points and suddenly my mother breaks into a run. I’ve never seen her run before! She gets larger and larger, her mouth a stark gash across her face, until she’s just a pair of feet, the bike is wrenched out of the grate and thrown on the curb, I’m lifted, turned, and pulled. Up and out.

  Well. That was easier than it looked.

  Helen unwinds the leash from my neck, picks the gravel out of my shinbone, and tugs my shorts back around where they belong. She brushes the seat harder than she needs to, but I’m not in a position to say anything. My mother is sitting on the curb with her head on her knees, panting quietly and weeping.

  Linda is just arriving on the s
cene. “Well, that was a close one,” she says. “Just the kind of situation you read about, where a kid is riding her sister’s bike and gets too close to Nineteenth Avenue.” She’s talking directly to Helen. My mother looks up.

  “Get home,” she says.

  Linda is in for it.

  “The both of you,” she tells me.

  We try to wheel the bike but it won’t. Linda picks up the front end and I pick up the back end. At the end of the street we have to set it down for a second. My mother and Helen are still back there, sitting on the curb. My mother is talking and Helen is shaking her head.

  My sewer leg is still cool to the touch. We pick up the bike and carry it another half block before resting. My mother and Helen are a ways behind, walking slowly.

  “I think she’s laughing,” I tell Linda.

  She sets down her end, fiddles with her shoelace, looks backward under her armpit, and then picks up the bike again. We resume walking. “I think she’s crying.”

  She may be right. Either thing is possible.

  We stow the bike in the garage for our dad to look at once he sobers up. Tomorrow, or a week from tomorrow, hard to say. In the house, we divide up. I take a can of Pledge into the living room and start polishing the furniture; Linda runs dishwater and briskly begins dumping glasses and spoons into it. This place is a mess. My parakeet is asleep on his perch. I stick my finger through the bars and he’s on it in an instant, biting into my knuckle with his beak. The door slams and I race back to my Pledge and spray it dramatically on the coffee table, all around the plastic flower arrangement.

  Yimmer trots into the living room, leash trailing. She inspects the spot where she threw up earlier and then goes back into the kitchen for a long drink. My mother and Helen must have swung by the tavern on their way back. Well, that’s a relief; one of the boozehounds is home.

  The other one, lacking a leash, is always harder to retrieve.

  I’m reading a book called I Was Murdered, a mysterious ghost story about a lady who can’t rest until her killer is found. The cover has a picture of a typewriter, with two bloody hands typing the title on a piece of paper. I got it out of the neighbor’s trash, along with some comic books that I already read. I’m partial to ghost stories, but this is nothing like the ones at the school library, where the ghosts invariably turn out to be real people guarding buried treasure. This book has a severed head in a refrigerator and other goings-on that I’m way too young to read about. That’s the main reason I can’t stop.

  My sister is watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and putting on clear fingernail polish. She’s quote babysitting unquote while my parents are over at the tavern. She made Brad go to bed a half hour ago but we can still hear him up there, punching his inflatable clown, which hits the floor and bobs back up again repeatedly. Sometimes he steps on the clown’s head for a while to keep him down, and then there’s silence. We don’t care what he does, as long as he does it up there.

  My book has me terrified. I want a bottle of pop really bad but it’s in the refrigerator. I can picture it in there keeping a severed head company, blood dripping, pooling up on the Tupperware containers, seeping into the vegetable bin. My mother should watch me better and not let me read books like this, but if I do, my sister should go out to the refrigerator during a commercial and get my pop for me.

  “Are you kidding?” she says, insulted.

  This is grounds for a fight but before I can formulate my opening arguments, the sound of a key in the back door startles us both. Man from U.N.C.L.E. is followed by Mission Impossible is followed by Creature Feature. We’re supposed to be able to watch all of them before our parents come home. It’s getting so you can’t count on anything around here.

  My mother comes in and peruses the situation briefly, then listens at the stairs. Brad has fallen suddenly silent up there. I can tell by her face there won’t be any Creature Feature, and popcorn is out of the question. Linda is watching her show intently, looking neither left nor right. I put my book down and watch it, too.

  “This is a great show,” I say to the room.

  Out in the kitchen, my father is opening cupboards and getting spoons. When he opens the refrigerator there’s a long moment of silence and then he shuts it again. I guess there was no head in there. A minute later he appears with ice cream, a bowl for Linda, a bowl for me, and a giant mixing bowl of it for himself. He joins us for the last fifteen minutes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., acting very impressed when Illya Kuryakin shoots a guy using his ballpoint pen for a gun. Yimmer is sitting on his lap.

  “Is this the one where he has a telephone in his shoe?” he asks me.

  “Get Smart,” I tell him. This confuses him for a moment and then he understands, and nods. It’s been about two months since he’s had a drink. Every night he sits in here while we watch TV, reading his bird books and talking to us. At first we didn’t like it, but now we do.

  My mother is in the kitchen alone, chipping the polish off her nails and smoking. I put the ice cream dishes in the sink and drift toward the refrigerator, where my bottle of pop is waiting.

  “No you don’t,” she says curtly.

  Nothing is fair around here. I can’t decide whether to argue or not. The only light is coming from the living room, and she has her glasses off. Her eyes look weak and vulnerable, but her lips look like blades.

  “He embarrassed me to death tonight,” she says.

  Uh-oh. Why did I come out here; what was I thinking?

  “In front of everyone,” she continues. “Embarrassed. To death.”

  She looks pretty alive to me, but if the truth be known, I’ve been embarrassed by him myself. Slumped and staggering, or sleeping all night in the passenger seat of the car, parked in the driveway, because he can’t manage the back steps. Disappearing into the garage at odd times during the day, sipping from a sack and staring at the back of the house through the dark doorway, thinking no one can see him. We see him.

  “There we all are,” she says in a low voice. “Playing cards, trying to have fun, drinking a few cocktails, and he sits there for two hours drinking orange juice. Holier than thou; won’t even have a drink on a Saturday night when we’re at a tavern.”

  I think about this, standing on one foot. The dark kitchen, her cigarette going, the bitten-off words. It’s hard to know what expression to put on my face. From the living room comes the sound of a fuse burning and then a theme song starts up.

  “Mission Impossible is on,” I tell her. She turns back to her ashtray and I return to the sofa. Linda is explaining the gist of the show to my dad.

  “They all have different identities, and they have impossible missions,” she tells him.

  “I see,” he says agreeably. “All different identities and missions.”

  “Impossible ones,” she stresses.

  “They aren’t impossible, the people just think they are,” I explain.

  “They seem impossible, until the different-identity guys take over,” he clarifies. “Is that it?”

  We nod. He’s drinking a glass of milk.

  “Want me to get you a bottle of beer?” I ask him. Linda swivels her head around to stare at me but my dad keeps watching the television. After a minute he shakes his head no.

  I want to go back to my book and leave them to their show, my mother to her dark kitchen, but I can’t. My words are still hanging in the air of the living room, drowning out the TV. My dad is staring at Mission Impossible but he’s no longer watching it.

  Eventually, he shifts his weight and Yimmer stands up on his lap. She turns around and stares him in the face with her ears folded back and her tail going. He kisses her on the forehead, sets her on the floor, and stands up. Out to the kitchen. The refrigerator door opens, closes.

  Yimmer’s ears go up as she listens. Linda looks at me and I look at my book. Then the familiar, inevitable sound of a bottle being opened.

  There’s going to be a style show at school, something the PTA dreamed up. My mother
is sewing three matching outfits and we have to be in it. Every time I think about it I feel sick; the dress she’s making for me has the wrong kind of sleeves and she’s threatening to give me a permanent. The last time she gave me a permanent only one side of it took, and I looked like I had a bush stuck to my head.

  “You’re not going to be in a style show with stringy hair,” she tells me. She’s working on a little shirt for Brad made of the same material as my dress and Linda’s.

  “Why don’t you put puffy sleeves on him for a change?” I ask her. He’s in the kitchen, eating a post-dinner bowl of cornflakes.

  “No!” he calls out, alarmed.

  “If I hear another word about sleeves, you won’t be in a style show,” she says to me.

  “Sleeves,” I reply.

  Brad’s in the doorway with a dripping spoon. She shows him his shirt with its long sleeves attached. It’s getting cowboy fringe on the yoke. He goes back in the kitchen.

  Linda is doing her homework at the same big table where my mother is sewing. Neither of them is interested in talking to me. The pattern for our dresses shows a picture of two girls, a younger one with short curly hair and puffy sleeves, an older one with long swingy hair and a little cape.

  “You should make Linda wear this cape,” I say to my mother. Linda looks up.

  “You’ll both have the cape,” my mother says firmly.

  A cape! Oh my God.

  Linda starts poking herself in the head with the eraser on her pencil. She can’t do her math and she’s starting to get hysterical. My dad is the only one who can do math around here and we have no idea where he is. He didn’t show up for dinner again, and it’s a sore subject with my mother.

  “Let me see,” she tells Linda. This won’t work. My mother can always get the answers but she figures it out in her head instead of on the paper. They make us figure it out on the paper to keep our parents from doing it for us at night when we’re having hysterics.

  “That’s old math, Mother,” Linda says desperately. “Do it in new math.”

  “Oh, new math,” my mother says. “What a load of bullshit.” She goes back to her sewing.