I almost ruined it then. I almost bounced him, with a Get out of here and don’t come back, you sick fuck, but I didn’t have to. Because one of the dates, a blonde, answered for me. She laughed a fake laugh. “Oh, Jurgy. Who would want to hide from you?” There was fawning. There was nose wrinkling. There was hair twirling. Even Lizzie Kruk herself could take a lesson in skankiness from this jumpsuited, shoulder-padded fluff brain.
The girls laughed. Pfeffer laughed.
Little Pfeffer did not. He looked ashamed. He didn’t even open his mouth, but I knew that, even though he was ripped, that didn’t make him a big dumb jock.
I took Jurgen’s business card as though it were gold. “Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”
Ziggy was still sitting at our table at the front window, but I couldn’t get to him right away. That doughy woman, the mother of the girl Claire, grabbed me by the wrist and took a damp washcloth to my head.
“What did they say?” she whispered.
“They want a real server,” I said. “I’m sorry. I tried.”
And that woman wrapped me in her doughy embrace. I couldn’t help thinking of the phrase pig in a blanket. Which made me a pig, but I didn’t care. I loved the blanketing part.
“You’re a good boy. Would you please stay until they’re gone? I’d feel so much better. Order whatever you want. It’s on the house.”
“No need,” I said. Of course I’d stay. I would’ve done it anyway, because Jurgen Pfeffer reminded me so much of my father. No one should have to put up with that.
But then something happened that made the decision easier.
After Pfeffer’s comment about hiding a waitress in the back, I knew I shouldn’t look at the chrome doors that led to the kitchen, but I did anyway. There were two small rectangular windows toward the top. One moment nothing was there, then the next, Claire’s curly head popped up, and she waved at me. Hello or good-bye, I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. That wave, that smile, filled me with hope. I might be able to drive that clacking darkness back to hell after all.
It was like I had just made a second person reappear.
AFTER WE LEFT COFFEE INVASION, Ziggy saw me to my car, pounded the roof, and said, “Take care, Noah. I’ll see you soon.”
I still had questions for Ziggy, such as who he really was, and how the hell I was supposed to save the city from the evil brewing in the PfefferBrau Haus. But I realized I didn’t need to know everything all at once. There was something about Ziggy that went deeper than the perfect hair and the expensive suit. I trusted him.
He’d only said “Take care” to me once, but it was as though he was always taking care of me. First by finding my car that night Evan was so sick, then by helping me convince Jaime to come back to me, and tonight by saving me from the Marr—helping me name my enemy and showing me the next step to defeating it.
It was almost as though he were acting like a father. A good one.
Not that I’d know what that was like.
I hadn’t seen my own father in years.
Good riddance.
My dad was an alcoholic. Big deal, right? Most alcoholics I know get straight to it with Wild Turkey or Jim Beam. But not Dear Old Dad. His poison of choice was—you guessed it—PfefferBrau Porter. The kind Sherell Wexler was found in.
And man, did it take him a long time to get wasted on beer. But he managed it almost every night, and by the time he was thirty-five, he had the gut to prove it.
When he wasn’t at home knocking me around, he worked for the paper company. He had definite opinions about clear-cutting (“You like books, don’tcha? You can’t make omelets without breaking a few eggs”) and woodland species protected by the Forest Service (“Shoot all those damn spotted owls, let God sort ’em out”). And I agreed with all of them. Especially when he took off his John Deere cap and showed that full head of brindled hair, just like Pfeffer’s. That hair carried power.
I was too little to remember the first thing I did that pissed him off. But I do remember the look in his eye and the close-up of the fridge before he slammed my face into it.
I remember Mom cradling me in her lap as I cried. I remember her trying to calm me down, all the while telling me she couldn’t take me to a doctor because they’d ask questions. I remember her saying, “It’s not you, honey. Daddy’s just had a bad day at work, that’s all.”
All I understood was the hurt. I remember Dad calling up from the basement where he was drinking Pfeffer-Brau Porters, one after the other, watching a Trail Blazers game on the black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears and the faux wood paneling. “Shut him up, Eileen. Shut him up or I’ll shut him up.”
And even though I didn’t really understand what was going on, I found a way to keep quiet. That time.
The times when I wouldn’t stop crying, Mom piled Cilla and me into the back of the Buick station wagon, which smelled of cherry air fresheners. She would drive us around and tell us stories about what Dad was like before he dropped out of high school. She talked about how charming he could be. She called him a real catch, but even then I knew she wasn’t trying to convince us.
By the time I got to grade school, we had a whole new set of problems. The main one being, how did we hide what Dad imprinted on my face, or on my arms? No one at school understood how I kept getting black eyes. Playing basketball, I said. Ran into backboards. Did a face-plant on my front drive.
The kids and the teachers might’ve understood me getting backhanded now and then. I could be a handful. I probably deserved it. But nobody would’ve ever understood this part: I liked the pain. It was a sign to me that, yeah, I’d fucked up, but it was all over now, right, son? Ready to start again?
Without that pain, and a mark I wore until it faded or the cast came off, I would’ve always been under someone’s boot heel, a fuckup without the possibility of parole, the kid who never did anything right.
Evan understood what was really going on, but he never said it to my face. I’d show up to school with a broken clavicle (skiing, I said, even though everyone knew I didn’t ski), and he’d say, “Let’s play at my house today, Noah.” And we’d get to his house and play Pong on his Atari, and then his mom with the butt-length brown hair would invite me to stay for dinner, which I always did. Then, if it wasn’t a school night, Ev and I would watch an old movie on his Betamax. It was always the kind of movie with a manageable scare, like The Blob or Creature from the Black Lagoon, where the threat was just some cheesy special effect—a guy in a diving suit, soft candle wax to stand in for dripping flesh.
If it was a school night, Evan’s dad, Dr. Tillstrom, would keep looking at his watch at the dinner table, and sometime over dessert (chocolate pudding, or tapioca with raspberry jam), he’d say, “I think we’re okay now, Noah.” Meaning: Your dad’s probably passed out in front of the Blazers game. It’s okay for you to sneak home.
• • •
And then came the night my dad ran away the first time. I was ten years old. Dad had just come back from a weekend hunting in the woods with the boys. He rarely came home with any trophies. His breath always smelled like beer.
But this trip was different. I’d heard his truck pull up in the drive and, instead of rushing out to greet him, I pulled the covers tighter over my head. Even then, I knew I was more likely to get Nice Dad if I waited until morning.
My parents were having a fight, and I closed my bedroom door to muffle the yelling.
They were in the basement. The screaming wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that it was my mom’s voice that was raised. Then Dad barked, “For god’s sake, Eileen, keep it down! You’ll wake the kids!”
“You knew! I told you when you brought the last one home I wouldn’t be carving up any animals!”
“Well, the rules have changed, princess. And if you want to stay with me, I suggest you change with them.”
“Not this time, Tray. Get that thing out of my driveway.”
“My driveway. I pay the bills.”
&nb
sp; “We both pay the bills.”
There was a silence. And in that silence, the door to our Jack and Jill bathroom creaked open and Cilla, thirteen years old, wearing a roller-disco pajama ensemble, came creeping in. I scooted to the far side of the bed. She climbed in next to me, wrapping me tightly, keeping me safe.
“What are they arguing about this time?” I whispered.
“I don’t know. But I don’t like it. It feels different.”
I didn’t need her to tell me. Even there in the dark, the two of us coiled up to hide from the world, the air felt taut, like a guitar string about to snap.
Dad started up again. “I don’t see what the problem is. You buy steak shrink-wrapped at the meat counter.”
“The difference is I don’t have to cut anything’s head off or scoop out its intestines.”
“What do you think sausage comes in, princess?”
“I’m not doing it, Tray.”
“Four fucking hours, Eileen. That’s how long I waited in the freezing cold in that stupid blind. I bagged it fair and square. That kill will feed us for a month.”
“I DON’T GIVE A CARE!”
I don’t know what set Dad off, but it was probably the phrase “give a care,” which struck him as too stupid to be taken seriously. He went off on a laughing jag. He chortled like a Santa, only a mean one. It was a laugh that said, I own you. I own everything. Then there was the sound of a slap, and it didn’t sound hard enough to have come from Dad, who usually put more oomph behind his shots.
Oh shit, please tell me Mom didn’t fight back. But she had, because that mean-Santa laugh stopped, then there was a scuffle, a clunk, and the shrill note of a piano key sticking.
I closed my eyes. “She’s caught a corner,” I whispered. Cilla and I both knew what that looked like. Carpets weren’t so bad. A fridge straight-on wasn’t so bad. It was the sharp edges, like the ones on a coffee table or a piano, that did the most damage.
There was a wail, a sob that was more than a sob. The front door slammed. I heard a thud out on the front lawn, then Dad yelling, “I killed it, you can damn well clean it!”
Mom was on the front porch now, yelling, “I’m sorry! Come back! Please come back!”
Jesus Christ, let him go, I thought. And in that darkness, Cilla took a hand out from around me and ran it through my hair, her cool fingertips coaxing waves out of all that roughness, and it felt to me just like a backbeat.
She opened her mouth and began to sing. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night . . .” And it was so sweet and so soft, just the same line from that Beatles song over and over, nowhere near on-key, but the sound of her voice was enough. I was surrounded by sweet music. We were going to be okay.
The next morning when we woke up, Mom was sporting seven stitches on her left temple and there was a deer carcass on the front lawn. Dad had gone but left his kill. To prove a point, probably. He was always one for big, bloody gestures. But this was gruesome even for him.
I want to say that thing on the lawn didn’t look like a deer anymore, but it did. The antlers were magnificent. Prince Fucking Bambi. But the stillness was creepy. The thing’s eyes were open and glassy, and lower down was the worst: Its haunch was a bloody mess full of buckshot and exposed muscle. It looked like some really twisted Christmas decoration.
And here was the thing: Mom didn’t even seem to notice it. She drank her instant coffee, kissed us both good-bye, told us to have a good day at school, and drove off to work at her accounting firm. Cilla and I stared at the deer for a long time, then I told her to go too. She was shaking too hard. She was no help.
After she left, I tried to haul the thing off on my own, but it was so heavy I only got as far as the curb.
And that was the first time I called Evan and said, “I need help moving a body.”
It was spitting rain out.
Between the two of us slinging that thing in a picnic blanket, we managed to get up the cul-de-sac, even though after two seconds we were soaked, and blood (not ours) ran into the gutters. A bunch of living room curtains pulled back and faces stared at us from warm homes, but no one came out.
Working together, Evan and I made it to the Finkbeiners’, through their backyard, and into the ravine, where we found a patch of ground that wasn’t pitted with too many fir tree roots. We buried Prince Bambi. Evan cracked a joke about the whole experience turning him into a vegetarian, but we both knew he didn’t mean it. Nobody we knew was a vegetarian. Only sissies, which we definitely were not. Not that day, at least. We were fucking cavemen.
Finally, after an hour, we threw the last muddy shovelful of dirt on the mound and leaned back. Our hands were blistered from the shovels and we were soaked from the rain, our shoulders torqued from all the hoisting and dragging.
Only then, when the work was done, did I start crying. I couldn’t get over it, how one minute that royal thing would be browsing around some forest, nosing a piece of loose bark, and the next, dying a sudden and painful death. It seemed to me that I could feel its fear and pain and confusion. Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this?
Ev didn’t put his arm around me or anything like that. Just stood by my side, popping the blisters on his hands, the ones in the valley between his thumb and forefinger.
Finally I wiped my eyes and said, “Do you think it was quick?”
He stared at me then. Long and hard. Finally he said, “Noah, that deer didn’t even know he was a victim.”
I DIDN’T GET A CHANCE TO TALK TO EV the next day until personal finance. He sat behind me, munching chocolate-covered espresso beans (don’t ask me where he got them), and whispered, “What happened to your head?”
I thought no one would notice. I deliberately hadn’t spiked my mohawk, hoping the green in my hair would hide the green and purple in my skin from where I’d landed on the speed bump escaping the Marr behind Cinema 21.
But of course he knew I was injured. He always knew.
“Mosh pit accident,” I said.
“Gentlemen. We’ve talked about this,” Mr. Eizenzimmer said to us from the front of the class, where he was droning on about entering checks in your register before writing the actual check. “If I hear one more disruption from you I’ll have to put you on different sides of the room.” We never paid attention to Mr. Eizenzimmer because he never did more than threaten. Plus he had a face like a ferret and wore the same brown cords every day.
So as soon as his back was turned, Evan slipped me some of his espresso beans. He probably thought they’d help my head. An instant later he lobbed me a note on ruled paper, with tabs still on the edges from where it had been ripped out of a notebook. It read: Don’t freak. Sonia wants to pull out.
Great. I suppose I couldn’t blame her, but now that I’d seen the Marr, I knew what was at stake. If we didn’t do anything, it was probably only a matter of time before she became just another face in its black abyss.
I started scribbling a note back to Ev, but before I got a couple of words down, he lobbed another one in my lap. Don’t even think about it. I’ll talk to Sonia. You start composing.
That day, while Ev worked on the Old Girls, Crock was looking for a practice space. The three of us caught up in the stairwell behind the speech classroom after school. We usually hung out there because nobody ever used it. Hidden in plain sight and all that.
Crock was carrying a flip pad and had a pencil behind his ear. I hadn’t seen this version of Crock in months—the one who wasn’t barfing in my car or picking up leather-skinned divorcées.
“Can’t practice in my garage,” he said. “I asked. Idiot Willy is like your sister—he sleeps during the day. And he has a gun. We can’t do it at Sonia’s, because it will disrupt her mother’s Bridge Club routine, and we can’t do it at Jaime’s or Ev’s, because their parents think you’re a bad influence.”
I tried not to take it personally, especially since they used to have me over all the time.
“It’s the mohawk, Noa
h. That’s all it is. About the hair.”
But he was trying too hard. There was some other, newer reason they didn’t want Evan hanging out with me anymore, but I didn’t have time to worry about that now.
I nodded. Fair enough.
“What about the band room here at school?” Evan asked.
“Tried that,” Crock said. “Turns out the band geeks need it. They’re rehearsing some shit about princesses. Supposed to be funny.”
I knew what he was talking about because we’d all seen the posters in the music wing. Once Upon a Mattress. The spring musical. So what if it was funny. We still needed a rehearsal space. So Crock and Ev and I did what we always did when we didn’t know what to do.
We went record shopping.
Like a lot of places in Portland, Jojo’s Records had a former life as something grand, maybe a ballroom. The ceiling was so tall it might as well have been in space, and there were all these curlicued things painted right on it: fat cherubs and shepherdesses and stuff like that. There was a huge water stain above Soundtracks, which sometimes dripped big fat drops of rain mixed with sewage from the plumbing upstairs. Evan said it wasn’t much of a loss. He said that even if there was a flood and it took out the whole Soundtracks section along with Country Western, no one would cry any tears. Except maybe the Country Western people. But they cried over everything, so it didn’t count.
Of course, since it was Jojo’s, the walls up to those gods and cherubs and shepherdesses were papered with rock posters. The Pretenders, the Rolling Stones, the Clash, the Who, the Beatles. Bowie was there too, in his different incarnations: Aladdin Sane with that blindingly red hair and red lightning bolt on his face, the Thin White Duke looking cruel and sexy, the Scary Monster smoking a cigarette in a Harlequin getup.
And then there was my incarnation of Bowie—the suave guy in the expensive suits with the bright yellow hair. There were Bowie bumper stickers, Bowie bobble-heads, Bowie stand-ups. I didn’t blame Jojo for all the swag. Bowie was big. Jojo had to make money.
The Rise and Fall of the Gallivanters Page 6
