by John Brandon
Friday afternoon, when his detention was up, Toby exited the school and hiked into the February woods. He passed a clear-cut area pocked with piles of fill sand, a golf course whose construction had been halted years ago. Farther, there was a warehouse that seemed forgotten, that seemed to have been built by somebody who was now dead or had moved away. Statues of all sorts—gnomes, saints, water fowl—leaned against the warehouse’s outside walls as if pleading to be let inside.
Toby hiked on, switching from this trail to that, imagining how he’d lose someone if he were being chased. He noticed a new bird’s nest and climbed a low branch so he could look inside. Five pert eggs. They looked like toys, like decorations. Toby wished the mother bird would appear and run him off, pecking Toby’s eyes, but that wasn’t going to happen. These eggs were on their own and they’d run up against bad luck. Toby removed them one by one and slung them against the tree trunk. They didn’t shatter like he’d hoped, just left splotches and rolled to rest on the ground. A shiver of joy ran through Toby, then immediately he was disgusted with himself. No matter how many speeches he gave himself, he couldn’t keep himself in line. He was no match for his lesser urges. He was as much a junkie as those people who left empty gas cans and used rags all over the woods. He had about the same amount of purpose.
Toby lived with his uncle Neal on a few dozen acres in a concrete-block house. The property was lousy with sinkholes, but Uncle Neal said in a race between a sinkhole swallowing the house and nuclear destruction, he’d take the nukes. Toby entered the house and was enveloped by the familiar smell of fish sticks. Uncle Neal sat on a stool, clipping his nails. His hair was lopsided and his eyes watery. He always looked like he’d been shaken awake by a stranger.
“You’re like a dog,” he said to Toby. “Rattle your food bowl, you appear.”
Toby sat at the table and took out his math homework. He could’ve done it in Mr. Hibma’s detention, but Toby always made a point, when he was being disciplined, to stare at the nearest clock or out the nearest window. Toby did nothing in the bunker and he did nothing in detention, but the bunker was his nothing and detention was Mr. Hibma’s. Detention sapped him and the bunker built him up.
“I’m sick of eating,” Uncle Neal said. “Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, lunch, dinner.” He put on an oven mitt and took out the fish sticks. He divided them onto two plates and slid one of the plates to Toby.
“I have to work tomorrow.” Uncle Neal filled his mouth with steaming fish stick and swallowed after one chew, getting it over with. “It’s an all-day thing—semi-trailer of old fruit. Two brothers owned the company and they got in a fight and halted all shipments. Back in, like, the ’80s.”
As far as Toby could tell, Uncle Neal’s business was to clean things that nobody else would clean, from grimed old engines to abandoned slaughterhouses. Toby’s uncle, it was safe to say, was a pariah. He lived in a world of regret, if not remorse—about what, Toby couldn’t say. Toby’s uncle always joked about killing himself, and Toby had begun to suspect he wasn’t joking. He didn’t have much incentive to stay alive. Uncle Neal, like everyone else, believed Toby was a run-of-the-mill punk, another angst-ridden adolescent. He had no clue what Toby was capable of.
Another week of school had passed, more quizzes and study halls and, in the case of Mr. Hibma’s class, more games. Shelby wasn’t the new kid anymore, and she was grateful for that. She’d settled in and was more or less slipping through the days. People had their own problems. Shelby had been fooled about Florida, but that was okay. She wasn’t the first. She’d imagined a place that was warm and inviting and she’d gotten a place that was without seasons and sickeningly hot. She’d wanted palm trees and she’d gotten grizzly, low oaks. She’d wanted surfers instead of rednecks. She’d thought Florida would make her feel glamorous or something, and there was a region of Florida that might’ve done just that, but it wasn’t this part. It was okay, though. It was something different. It wasn’t the Midwest. It wasn’t a place where you could look around and plainly see, for miles, that nothing worthwhile was going on. Shelby would travel to better places when she was older, when she could chart her own course. She’d go to India and France. Shelby could see the mornings of her future, the foreign pink sunrises.
The sunrise this morning, in Citrus County, had been the color of lima beans. It had been a color you might see under peeled-off paint. Shelby had stuffed one pocket of her army pants with bagels, and into the other pocket she’d slid a shallow, lidded bowl full of lox. Once she and her father and her little sister had boarded the boat and snapped the straps of their lifejackets, Shelby spread her brunch feast, complete with sliced tomato and capers and cream cheese. They’d rented a pontoon boat and planned to cruise the spring system of Citrus County until they saw a manatee. They’d been told they could swim with the manatees if they liked. Manatees had no natural defense other than size, and that very size got them stuck in canals at low tide and cut up by boat propellers. The man who rented the boats had explained all this from beneath the brim of a blue ball cap adorned with the words asshole! The man said Citrus County never got hit directly by a hurricane and, in his personal opinion, that’s why the manatees had chosen this spot.
Shelby’s father, a man with limp hair that parted and re-parted as the wind blew, a former boxer who spoke with an accent that could’ve come from anywhere, was always trying to expose his daughters to new things—new foods, new terrain, new ideas. He felt he had to be twice the parent, Shelby figured. And he was. Shelby did not feel deprived.
Shelby’s sister Kaley had brought along her book about Manny the Manatee. Immediately after breakfast, Kaley stowed the book under a seat, along with her precious watch that always read 3:12 and the rest of the orange juice. Kaley would soon turn four. She looked up at Shelby, displeased that Shelby had seen her stash spot. This was something Kaley did lately—hoarded. She wore, as always, socks but no shoes.
After Shelby had cleaned up the remains of the bagels and lox, her father puttering them out into the deep water, she took out her vocab words. She had the definitions memorized. This week the theme was bureaucracy. She wanted to go through the whole semester without missing one word of one definition.
”You’d like my word from yesterday,” her father said. “On my calendar at work: poshlust. It means bad art. It’s Russian, I think.”
Shelby folded the paper in her hands and slipped it into her pocket. “Mr. Hibma told us about that. Poshlost. We had that for a word. It means more than bad art. Means bad art that most smart people don’t know is bad.”
“Like what?”
“Mr. Hibma doesn’t give examples.”
“What do you mean?”
“He doesn’t feel he needs to prove his statements. He feels that examples are petty.”
“Well, his poshlost sounds like elitism to me.”
“Mr. Hibma wishes elitism would come back into style.”
“I met that guy,” Shelby’s father said. “He’s one of those cool pessimists.”
“Dad,” Kaley broke in. “Will the manatee bite me?”
“No, the manatee loves you.”
“Is he sleeping?”
“He might be.”
“Where are we going?” Shelby asked.
“Not a clue.”
Shelby’s father had steered them down a river which had rapidly tapered into a house-lined canal. They approached a cul-de-sac. Shelby’s father put the boat in reverse to avoid hitting a dock, then began to execute a three-point turn. The boat was unwieldy. An old man came out into his backyard in order to stare at Shelby’s father as his three-point turn became a five-point turn, a seven.
“Thanks for your concern,” Shelby’s father shouted.
The man wagged his head. “There’s a sign,” he squawked. “At the mouth of the canal.”
Shelby’s father righted the boat and they headed back out to the main confluence of springs, past moss-laden oaks and palm trees that grew out of the g
round sideways. They rounded a bend. The sun was out, warming the aluminum frame of the pontoon boat and the damp turf that covered the deck. Kaley, socks soaked, padded over and leaned on Shelby’s leg.
Shelby closed her eyes and let the breeze tumble over her. She knew her family was getting by in the way people like them got by. They were making it. They did things on the weekends. Their moods went with the weather. In Indiana there were proven methods for dealing with misfortune—certain types of foods and certain types of get-togethers and certain expressions. Here Shelby’s family was on its own, and that had been the whole point of coming here. There were things to do and they had to go find them and do them.
Shelby breathed the mild stink of the weedy water and soon her mind wandered again to Toby, a boy in her geography class. He’d been her trivia partner this past week. Shelby felt tingly, thinking of him. Or maybe it was the sun. She understood that her attraction to Toby was clichéd. She was considered a good girl and he a bad boy. There was a reason why it was clichéd, a reason why girls like Shelby, through the years, had become infatuated with boys like Toby. Regular boys were boring. There wasn’t a way the regular boys could make her feel that she couldn’t feel on her own. And Toby had calves like little coconuts and long fingers and his hair and eyes were the flattest brown. He wasn’t in a clique. It seemed there was something about him you couldn’t know right away. Shelby wanted his hands on her. She wanted to smell his hair. She wanted him to give her goose bumps. There were a lot of things Shelby wanted to do and she was pretty sure she wanted to do them with Toby.
The movement of the boat jostled Shelby. The waterway was opening up, ripples turning to waves, saltwater fishing boats speeding this way and that. The pontoon boat rocked. A pelican flew low over their canopy, its wings bellowing against the air, its crusty pink eyes narrowed, and Kaley squeezed Shelby’s leg.
“That’s a channel marker,” Shelby’s father said. “We’re going out to the Gulf.”
He waited for a break in the traffic and pulled a struggling U-turn, the waves clapping against the bottom of the boat. The engine was doing everything it could.
Shelby heard familiar voices and turned to see a couple of popular girls from her school wearing bikinis, sprawled on the front of a gleaming white boat. The boat was anchored. They waved as Shelby passed. They were eating pineapple.
“I can’t thank you enough for not being slutty,” Shelby’s father told her. “Not that I’m counting my chickens. There’s time yet.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You’ve got character. You don’t try and impress people.”
“I’ll say ‘you’re welcome’ again and we can leave it at that.”
“Maybe I’m doing something right,” he said.
Shelby’s father drove the boat and patted Kaley’s head, guiding them past birdbathed back yards, past mangrove stands full of cranes. They ended up back near where they’d rented the boat and started off in yet another direction, down a wild-looking river shaded by vines. Kaley retrieved her book from under the seat and studied it.
Shelby was still thinking about the girls on the boat. She had chosen not to be one of them. In October her family had moved to Citrus County from Indiana and Shelby had immediately, halfway through her first day of school, been granted membership in the popular gaggle of girls. She was subjected to an onslaught of sleepovers, pool parties, and laps around the outlet mall. This lasted a month, at which time these girls could no longer deny that Shelby was uninterested in makeup, basketball players, the marital intrigues of celebrities, who would take whom to the dance. She didn’t like the same magazines they did, didn’t care to diet. She sometimes read books for pleasure.
Mr. Hibma assigned a family history project. He told the kids to choose one side of their families, whichever was less boring, and track it back as far as they could. They would present the history orally and wouldn’t hand anything in.
“Those librarians get paid the same as teachers do,” Mr. Hibma said. “Tell them to quit fiddling with paper clips and show you the genealogy section. And if you have to use the Internet for this, don’t let me know about it.”
Mr. Hibma went to his podium and began lecturing about assassination. He stayed broadly in the area of geography by informing the kids where certain assassinations had taken place, how the act of assassination had impacted different regions of the world.
“Assassination,” he said, “helps everyone know what side they’re on. It cuts through the shenanigans of voting and impeaching.”
Mr. Hibma let this statement sink in, then touched on general points about revolution. He wanted the kids to understand that in the United States capitalism had become so monstrous that even the idea of revolution could be marketed and sold. Protest against a corporation could be sold by that corporation. Artists and moralists could no longer make their own revolutions; they had to depend on the poor. The problem was that the poor weren’t poor. The poor had frozen pizza and cable TV and cigarettes. Hell, the poor had real pizza and DVDs and weed.
Mr. Hibma could drone for twenty minutes without thinking about what he was saying. There was nothing to do but observe the kids. It was like watching monkeys at the zoo—the scratching, the gnawing, the use of simple tools. One of the kiss-ass girls stared at Vince, the gum kid. Vince stared over at Shelby. Shelby stared at the back of Toby. Toby stared down at the pages of a book about, it seemed, track and field, reading about, it appeared, pole vault.
“Pole vault?” Mr. Hibma asked, interrupting himself.
Toby looked up.
“I didn’t know they did pole vault in middle school.”
“If you want to do it they have to let you. Those two huge girls that failed can throw the shot and the discus further than any of the guys, and I can’t run fast without someone chasing me, so I chose pole vault.”
“They can throw farther,” Mr. Hibma said.
“It’s not even close.”
“No, I mean you said further, but that’s for intangible distances. For measurable distances it’s farther.”
“Okay.”
“Would you like to read that book later or would you like detention?”
“I have to read this now,” Toby said.
“We could schedule your detentions in advance. We could get a calendar with humorous pictures of puppies and fill it in from now till the end of the year.”
Toby didn’t answer.
“Where was I?” said Mr. Hibma. “I was about to tell you that the most rebellious thing a youngster can do is sit outdoors and listen to the birds. Sitting indoors in detention is about the least.”
Mr. Hibma, without warning, walked out of the classroom. He did this now and again to shake the kids up, to force them to deal with freedom. Sometimes he returned in thirty seconds and sometimes he stayed gone the rest of the period.
He strolled to the end of the hall, to the big windows. Live oaks. Mockingbirds. A hill, or at least what passed for a hill in Florida. Mr. Hibma watched the groundskeeper for a time, jealous. The guy sat on that grazing tractor, letting his thoughts find him, watching the uncut section of lawn agreeably dwindle. Spread a little mulch. Eat a sandwich.
Mr. Hibma went to the lounge. He chugged someone’s soda. Because it made Mrs. Conner angry, he used the ladies’ restroom. He pissed on the seat and buried the bottle of hand soap at the bottom of the trash. He looked into the mirror and said aloud, “I am twenty-nine years old. I am a middle school teacher. I live in Northwest Central Florida. I inherited money from an old Hungarian man I picked up groceries for. I had a couple lengthy talks with him and sometimes walked his dog.” Mr. Hibma cleared his throat. He looked at himself resolutely. “Sir, you spent one third of an inheritance on whores.”
He came out of the bathroom. The tick of the clock had an echo. In three minutes the bell would ring and the lounge would fill with teachers. They would brag about how they’d dealt with their problem students. They would brag about what they’d said t
o pushy parents, brag about their students’ test scores. They would brag about their weekends, about their houses and spouses and whatever else was handy to brag about.
When Toby got home from school he found Uncle Neal in the kitchen, shoving jars and small appliances around on the countertop. He went ahead and asked his uncle what was wrong.
“Stupid nail clippers are lost. Somebody ate them or somebody stole them.” Uncle Neal stared at Toby in a way that was meant to convey fraying tolerance. “And we’re out of freaking ketchup,” he said. “You used the last of it.”
It had been a long time since Toby had been scared of his uncle. This was a guy who’d never given Toby a gift, even at Christmas, who used to ground him for speaking too many words in a day, who used to slap him in the back of the head if he had a nightmare and woke Uncle Neal up. It hadn’t taken Toby long to grow numb to his uncle’s harassment, and it hadn’t taken long after that for his uncle to get bored with harassing Toby. He still gave Toby shit, but nothing like before. Somewhere in there Uncle Neal had stopped drinking and had taken up smoking things. The guy was pathetic and Toby had to live under his roof for the foreseeable future. Toby had found that the best way to keep his uncle out of his business was to come around once a day and let him bitch, even if all he had to bitch about were clippers and condiments. As long as Toby came around, Uncle Neal didn’t go looking for him.
