“Yeah,” she said. “Evan says he’s got this awesome kit, and that there’s a goldfish swimming around in the kettle drum.”
“Creepy-looking thing. It’s got these pouches on the sides of its mouth. I think Jojo feeds it LSD.”
She cracked a smile. “I gotta deal with Daddy Dearest. But thanks, Noah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
This time when she walked away, it was okay. This time I knew she’d be back.
Which was good, because there was more at stake than she knew.
She was a fighter.
I would need as much help as I could get to fight the Marr.
That much I remembered.
EVAN INSISTED ON STAYING OVER AT MY HOUSE that night. Usually I stayed at his place. The basement in his house was so much better. His sofa had this flower pattern and it didn’t smell like fungus. Mrs. Tillstrom had the white carpet shampooed every other week. Even his basement’s bathroom was better, with these fingertip towels and little soaps shaped like seashells. Then there were all the perks: the Atari, the Betamax, and the big-screen color TV.
But the night his dad stitched me up, he wanted to stay at my place. He’d only done it once before, and I was never going to forget it.
Two months after Dad’s accident, Evan busted open the door to my dark room, where I lay curled around a pillow with my face to the wall, and said, “Look, I heard your mom talking to the real estate agent. Your house isn’t selling. Everyone knows what happened. No one wants to buy the place.”
I told him he couldn’t be right, that we’d had tons of prospective buyers tromping through.
“Yeah, but I bet they spend most of their time in the basement, don’t they? They’re ghouls, man. Fucking ghouls.” He sat down next to me. “It’s time to face facts, Noah. Your mom’s taking the house off the market. We have to stay put. We have to get used to it.”
I turned my face from the wall and looked at him. Hard to believe he’d been there the day I tried to clean up what Dad had done. You wouldn’t know it to look at him. He looked like a normal thirteen-year-old kid. He had peach fuzz growing on his cheeks that he called a beard. He’d gotten his growth spurt and was so tall and gangly it looked like he was walking on stilts.
That day, when he helped me turn away from my bedroom wall, he said, “Come on, Noah. Time to watch crappy horror movies.”
He took me by the hand and led me downstairs, past the front door, and kept going down.
No. No no no. I didn’t want to go downstairs, because no matter how much everyone told me that Dad was gone, that he couldn’t hurt me anymore, I knew he was going to come back, and this time he would take me with him, the way he’d meant to.
Evan didn’t let go of me, and before I knew it I was running my toes through plush, orange shag carpet that hadn’t been there the month before, looking at walls that had been repainted a mustardy yellow, because there was no paint white enough to bleach what Dad had done.
“See?” Evan said, taking a couple of cans of Fresca from the fridge and popping them open. “It’s just a room now. You’re totally safe.”
I was still petrified, but Evan smiled his lopsided smile. He was working so hard at making things okay, I felt like I had to do something.
I’ll just pretend I’m all right, I thought. For Evan’s sake.
And I made the three steps across the carpet to take the Fresca.
I’m pretty sure that was why, on the day Sonia ripped the safety pin out of my nose, Ev wanted to spend the night in my crappy basement instead of his good one.
He had all the gewgaws. All I had was a black-and-white set with tinfoiled rabbit ears.
I suppose Evan didn’t care.
He just wanted to remind me how to be strong.
So Mom pulled out the plaid sofa, which had a really thin and gritty mattress inside. Ev unrolled our sleeping bags with the hunter’s plaid lining, and we settled in for a long night.
After watching me touch the packing on my face for about the thousandth time, Ev got fed up and said, “Come on, man. Both nostrils are still there. Dad says so. But I mean, wouldn’t that be cool if you’d lost your nose completely? Like, maybe if my dad tossed it into some bucket that he didn’t know was radioactive and it turned into a mutant and crawled out into the night, sniffing out hot babes to terrorize?” He made a fake B-movie scream and held up his hands in terror.
I mumbled something about there not being too many hot babes left in town to wreak havoc on, and he said, “Okay, then, it’ll have to terrorize Cleveland.”
When I asked how my radioactive nose would get to Cleveland, he said, “All alien invaders start in Cleveland. Everyone knows that.”
Except the ones that start in Portland and suck the life out of you little by little so at first you don’t even notice a piece of you has disappeared.
Ev took my silence to mean I was tired, so he turned over and pulled a giant turd-shaped bottle out of his messenger bag. He thought I didn’t see him taking out a huge handful of meds and swallowing them dry. When he turned back and saw me looking at him, he said, “Migraines, man. They’re a bitch.”
I reached over to the coffee table next to me and offered him dry Smurfberry Crunch cereal, ’cause that was good eatin’.
It was the kind of night we used to have, marathoning really bad horror movies. First we watched The Blob. Then Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and, since I insisted, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Which Ev said was “weird” and fell asleep in the middle of. His right lip flapped when he snored. I kept watching the movie.
Then I’m pretty sure I fell asleep too. Or not. I was getting the two confused these days.
All I knew was that when the movie was over, Bowie’s character turned to the screen and said, It’s okay to remember, Noah.
I told him to fuck off, that I was trying to sleep, which was hard enough now that the numbing was wearing off and the stitches in my nose were itching.
You’ll be okay, lad. There was no hitch in his voice. He was completely confident.
My last thought before my nose stopped itching and I sank into my sleeping bag was: Maybe he’s right. Maybe this time, if I do what he says, I’ll make it to the other side.
I dreamed about the second time my father left.
The first time, with the deer, I blamed Mom. She shouldn’t have talked back to him. Dad’s moods were bad, but the backlash was always worse. It would’ve been easier for her to clean out deer guts.
The second time he left, though, it was because of me.
I don’t remember what I did to piss him off. I think I probably tracked mud on the carpet. For that, he pushed me down the stairs. Twelve stitches, grade 2 concussion, which Dr. Tillstrom said was an impressive amount of damage, even for me.
It was bad enough that when we got back from Gresham Urgent Care, Mom packed a bag for Dad and kicked him out. Dad cried and said he was sorry and he could change, but she didn’t give. When he saw the pathetic drunk act wasn’t going to work on her, he called her a bitch and told her that he paid the bills, goddamn it, and he had every right to stay.
Cilla and I were in my room at the time, Cilla running her hands through my hair and humming “Space Oddity.” Mom had stationed her there to wake me up every half hour ’cause of the concussion. I woke up every so often to hear her sing about floating above the world.
She sang off-key and the words were lovely, but it wasn’t enough to drown out what was going on outside my bedroom.
The two of us heard every word of Mom and Dad’s fight. Especially when Mom threatened to call the police and show them what he’d done to my head.
Then the front door slammed and Mom ran through the house, locking everything, getting ready for a siege that wasn’t long in coming.
When Cilla and I woke up the next morning, Mom was in the kitchen, looking fifty years older than she had the night before. She was red-eyed and jittery, eating Folgers Crystals straight out of the can. She shook them into her mouth and got little
flakes all over her lipstick. “I’ve gotta go to the office. Do you want me to drop you at the bus stop?” It was 6:15. The bus didn’t come until 7:30.
When we didn’t answer, Mom looked at her watch and swore. “Goddamn. I don’t have time for this. Why can’t schools be more accommodating to single mothers?” She pointed a chipped nail at us. “Stay here until the last minute, do you understand? Don’t open the door for anyone. When you leave, leave together. If your dad shows up, keep him at a distance. Whatever you do, don’t let him touch you. Got it?”
I didn’t understand why we needed that particular warning. Of course we wouldn’t let him touch us.
“It’s okay, Mom. We’ll be fine,” Cilla said, and hummed as though everything was hunky-dory.
Mom kissed both of us on the forehead, took her briefcase, and walked off, mumbling, “Locksmith, attorney . . . Cilla! Lock the door behind me! I mean it. Use the dead bolt.”
Cilla followed her downstairs and did what she asked, then came back up to the living room. I leaned over the back of the sofa and watched Mom, briefcase in hand, taking out her car keys.
And then he was there. He caught her wrist and swung her around, pinning her to the driver’s door. I still don’t know where he came from.
Cilla caught her breath. “Check the dead bolt, Noah,” she said.
“What about Mom? She’s alone out there.”
“We have to trust her,” Cilla said. “She’s going to have to handle him eventually. If it gets bad we’ll call Idiot Willy. You know their phone number, right?”
I did. Crock and I had been riding bikes, skateboarding, and playing with our garden hoses since we were two years old. His phone number was stitched into my skull.
I made a move for the phone. “Not yet,” Cilla said, putting a hand on my arm. “Wait.”
We couldn’t hear much of what Dad said since the window was closed. I heard please. I heard I’m sorry. I heard baby. But his eyes said I’m not done with you yet. If you take me in now, you’ll pay. If you wait to take me back, you’ll pay even more.
Dad deserved a fucking Oscar for the performance he put on that morning. It was all for the neighbors. He was trying to look like the victim, and he was beginning to pull it off. Around the cul-de-sac, window curtains pulled back. Housewives in foamy pink curlers rubbed their eyes and stared at my mother as if to say, Let him in already so we can get back to sleep.
Cilla stood looking out the window, still wearing her football jersey nightshirt, a box of Froot Loops held loosely at her side.
“You don’t think she’ll fall for it this time, do you?” I said.
“Hope not,” Cilla said, which wasn’t nearly reassuring enough. Then she started humming again, which is how I knew we were in trouble.
The scene in the driveway seemed to go on forever, Mom cornered, Dad trying to appear the wronged spouse.
The box of cereal in Cilla’s hand started to shake, even though if you looked at Cilla’s face she seemed frozen as a statue. My sister was terrified. If Mom let Dad in the door, we had no chance. After he was done bashing us, we’d spend the rest of our lives bringing him beer and tacos from Taco Bell when he demanded them (nine tacos, three for a dollar, seven for him, two for us). Who knows? We might wind up stuffing his next kill.
We might be his next kill.
Now Mom leaned on the rear door of her car, trying to hide the fact that she was crying, which I didn’t understand. Crying was a good thing. It might work in her favor in the cul-de-sac of public opinion.
Cilla shook her head. “I don’t like the way this is going. We’re in for a real shitstorm,” she said. “Get your clothes on. When it looks like he’s coming in, go out the back door. Run to Evan’s. Stay there until I call you.”
I ran down the hall and put on a pair of grungy jeans, a T-shirt, and my Members Only jacket. I was ready to run. When I came back into the living room, Cilla was standing where I had left her, looking out the front window, humming louder than ever.
And seeing her there, in her raggedy nightshirt, her hair ratted, I realized: She may act like a know-it-all, but she’s just a kid like me.
Most kids can’t point to an exact moment when they grow up, but I can, and that was it.
Run out the back, Cilla said. What a cowardly thing to do. All my life I’d let them try to protect me. Why should I be the one who escaped? Why couldn’t Mom and Cilla escape too? For as long as I could remember, they’d done their best to protect me from Dad.
I knew what I had to do.
It was my turn.
I went down to the basement to the stuffed head of the red-tailed deer that was hanging above the bar. It was Dad’s first kill, and Mom complained about it not because it was gross but because he’d paid the taxidermist with money she’d saved for Cilla’s braces.
It was a disgusting thing, that deer head, with marble eyes and mangy neck fur. It always gave me the creeps because the expensive taxidermist couldn’t even make it look half alive.
I ripped that red-tailed deer off the wall, went upstairs to the living room, and threw open the window.
Cilla’s eyes popped, seeing me struggle with the stupid head.
“Make sure we’re locked down,” I said.
She went to check on the back door, and reinforced the sliding glass with a dowel. We were barricaded inside.
I called down to Mom, “Get in the car. Leave now.”
Dad released her to look up at me. That was all she needed in order to weasel away from his grip and into the Datsun, slamming the door behind her. She backed up without looking and peeled out like an Indy 500 driver.
When she was gone, I pitched that mangy trophy out the window, hoping the antlers would catch Dad in the eye. They didn’t. The head landed in the hydrangeas underneath the window.
“What do you think you’re doing, Noah?” Dad called, not even trying to sound reasonable now.
I ignored him, because I wasn’t done. If Mom wasn’t strong enough to get this asshole out of our lives, I had to be.
I went into their bedroom and threw his Dickies coveralls and flannel shirts out the window, one by one. Then I went to the laundry basket and upended the whole thing on his head. It gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to see that some of his BVD undies had skid marks on them and all the neighbors could see them.
In the basement I found and threw out:
1. A twenty-four-pack of PfefferBrau Porter;
2. A calendar that came from some auto insurance company that showed topless girls on Harleys;
3. All his crappy seventies albums, like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Don McLean, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
It gave me great pleasure to wing all these out the window, Frisbee style. The Santana album brained him, somersaulted, then rolled to a halt in the street behind him. He picked it up from the middle of the road and pulled the record out of the sleeve, only to have it shatter into a million pieces of vinyl around his feet.
Cilla was beside me again. “I hope that wasn’t what I think it was,” she said, but she was smiling.
I smirked. “Hell yeah.”
Without taking her eyes off my father, she said to me, “God, you’re stupid, nimrod,” as she ruffled my hair.
Dad lunged for the front door.
Cilla and I took a step backward, away from the window. “Everything locked?” I said.
Cilla nodded. “Locked. Doweled. Latched. Dead-bolted. Won’t keep him from shooting out a window, though.”
Dad’s gun rack with the guns was on the back of his pickup. I had no idea where that was, but he had to have gotten here somehow.
Cilla and I hugged each other and cowered in a corner while Dad pounded on the door. “Open this door, you goddamn freaks!”
Then the pounding stopped.
Cilla and I got up from our crouch and dared to look.
Across the street, Idiot Willy had come out on his front porch wearing a ratty old terry cloth robe that barely covered his old-school law enf
orcement officer doughnut gut. He was sitting on the woven-plastic porch swing, surrounded by a dozen red, white, and blue birdhouses. I don’t know why Crock’s mom liked them, since none of those things ever held any actual birds.
Willy had a shotgun on his lap and he was quietly cleaning it. He sat there, and as the swing creaked back and forth, he cleaned his gun, sanding it to nothing, sighting things through the view finder, looking for all the world like that was what people normally did at 6:45 in the morning on their front porch.
Even though everything about the setup over there was tacky—the birdhouses, the cheap porch swing, Idiot Willy’s ratty old robe—I’d never been so impressed with anyone in my whole life.
Dad stared up at me through the window, knowing his show had failed. No one believed he was Mr. Wronged Husband and Father.
To this day I don’t know which of us should get credit for the save—Idiot Willy or me.
But I know who Dad blamed.
He stood in the driveway below us, surrounded by his dirty underwear, his cheap beer, his stuffed red-tailed deer that no longer had a tail.
“You little punk,” he said. I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. It was the best compliment I’d ever gotten in my life. He didn’t know that punk was a new kind of music. He just thought I was an asshole.
So I did exactly what I shouldn’t have done.
I laughed. I may have pointed too, at him and his dirty underwear and the Harley calendar. Now everyone knew what he was about.
Dad gathered up his stuff the best he could and skulked off to wherever he’d left his truck. He left shards and rags of his life on the front lawn.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Noah,” Cilla said when he was gone. “He’ll find a way to get back at us. But you know what? I’m glad you did.” She ruffled my hair, then trotted off to her room, humming “Heroes” by David Bowie.
I’d done it. For the first time in my life, I’d stood up to my father.
I closed my eyes and savored the moment—because I knew it wouldn’t last.
Cilla was right. Dad would feel like I’d cheated him out of something.
The Rise and Fall of the Gallivanters Page 9
