by Pete Hautman
A piercing shriek echoes through the house, like the siren that goes off before the end of the world.
Mom says, “Where’s Mal?”
It’s a bad one.
Mal is in the backyard, banging his head on the fence. Dad tries to grab him, but Mal flails, arms and feet flying. Dad catches an elbow in the face, and his nose gushes blood. Mal is screaming so loud it hurts my ears, and his eyes are rolled up in his head so far all I can see is white. Mom comes running out with the rug. Mal kicks it away, then kicks me in the shin so hard I collapse in pain. Dad grabs him from behind and wraps his arms around Mal’s, and they fall to the grass, Mal on top. Mal slams his head back and hits Dad on the mouth, all the while kicking furiously. Mom is standing by helplessly with the rug while Bridgette, phone in hand, is yelling “Should I call nine-one-one?” I manage to grab Mal’s feet and hold them. Mal’s screams have gotten hoarse, as if his throat has shredded itself.
I hear Mr. Johnston’s voice from the other side of the fence. “Everything okay over there?”
“We’re fine,” I yell back, even though it’s light-years from the truth. I run back into the house for Mal’s headphones and sunglasses. When I get back outside, Mal’s screams have become a piteous, sobbing wail — it’s harder to listen to than the screams.
Suddenly Dad shouts in pain. Mal has sunk his teeth into his wrist. Dad yanks his arm free, and Mal gets loose; he’s on his feet running toward Bridgette. She yelps and drops her phone, spreading her arms out to catch him. Mal veers right and heads for the other side of the yard. He runs straight into the privacy fence. He hits it so hard, I half expect him to keep going, leaving a kid-shaped hole behind.
The fence holds. Mal bounces off it and lands on his back. Dad and I are running over to him, me with the headphones and glasses, Mom right behind us with the rug. But Mal doesn’t stay down. He jumps up and runs along the fence in a complete panic. I drop the headphones and glasses and cut him off at the back gate, hitting him like a tackle taking down a wide receiver. Mal hits the ground hard, and a second later I hear the labored squee, squee of him straining for breath.
“Breathe, Mal,” I hear myself say. “Breathe.”
Dad is there, and Mom with the rug. She spreads it on the grass.
Squee, squee . . .
Dad lifts Mal under the arms and pulls him over the rug while I go for the headphones.
Squee . . . Mal gasps and takes a full, shuddering breath. Mom pulls the short end of the rug over him while I clamp his headphones on him and turn on “Let It Go.”
“Should we roll him up?” Dad asks.
“Wait a minute,” I say. Mal’s forehead has a nasty scrape from when he hit the fence. His eyes are squeezed shut, his arms are rigid at his sides, and he’s breathing hard. I put my hands on his shoulders. “It’s okay, Mal,” I say. “It’s okay.”
“Okay,” he says.
“Do you want to be a burrito?”
He opens his eyes and looks straight up at the deep-blue evening sky.
“Okay.”
Gently, we roll him up in the rug. I find his sunglasses where I dropped them and put them on his face. Mal turns his head this way and that, looking at each of our faces, all of us kneeling around him as if he’s a miracle child in a manger. Arfie, who has been observing all this human drama from safely beneath the picnic table, ambles over and licks Mal’s face.
Mal smiles. His smile seems to radiate peace onto all of us, and for a moment I think that everything will be like it was at dinner, when nobody was mad at anybody and we were all happy together. And for a few seconds, it’s true.
Mom says, “Honey, let’s get you cleaned up.” She is talking to Dad, who is bleeding from his nose, his lip, and his wrist.
Dad nods. “David, will you stay with him? You too, Bridgette.”
“Okay,” Mal mutters sleepily. He is slipping into post-meltdown lethargy. Bridgette and I sit there without talking for what seems like a long time. I keep waiting for her to berate me for the Visa-bill thing, but she doesn’t. She just sits quietly on the lawn with me and Mal and Arfie. The sun is setting. The mosquitoes will be out soon. I hear our neighbor’s back door slam — Mr. Johnston has probably been watching through a crack in the fence: The Crazy Millers Show is much better than whatever’s on TV.
After a while, Bridgette says, “You know how I said it’s complicated? With Derek?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not. Actually, I broke up with him.”
“Good.”
“All he cares about is himself. And he has no sense of humor. At all.”
“You just figured that out?”
She gives me a sharp look.
“I never liked him much,” I say.
“Well, I did. Or at least I thought I did. But I think mostly the reason we stayed together as long as we did was because I hate being alone. You’ve got your friends, and you know everybody in town, and you have Mom and Dad and Mal. But I didn’t know anybody at Simpson, so when I started seeing Derek I sort of latched on, you know?”
“Maybe now you can latch on to somebody with a sense of humor.”
Bridgette smiles and looks down at Mal.
“I think first I have to figure out how to latch on to myself.”
Mom comes back outside. “How is he?”
“Sleeping.”
“Do you think we can unwrap him and carry him to his room? I want to take a look at that cut on his head.”
I ask Mal if he’s ready to be unburritoed, but he’s too deep in sleep to hear me. We unroll him slowly; then Mom picks him up in her arms like a baby. Mal weighs almost seventy pounds, but she lifts him easily. We take him upstairs and lay him on his bed. Mom gets her first-aid kit and cleans the scrape on his forehead. She smears on some ointment and puts a Band-Aid on it.
“Can you sit with him a while?” she asks me.
“I’ll stay with him,” Bridgette says.
Mom and I look at each other, surprised. I don’t think we realized until that moment how rare it was for Bridgette to spend time alone with Mal. She had always been so busy with school and her many extracurricular activities that Mal duty had always fallen to the rest of us.
“I’ll read to him,” Bridgette says. Mom likes us to read to Mal, even when he is sleeping. It doesn’t matter what it’s about; the point is to fill his ears with the sound of words. Bridgette picks a book from the shelf next to Mal’s bed, a picture book about a dog, one of Mal’s favorites. As we leave the room she opens the book and begins to read. “Five little puppies dug a hole under the fence . . .”
While Bridgette sits with Mal, I finish cleaning the kitchen. Mom and Dad are in their bedroom. The barely audible buzz of them talking is making my ears itch, because I know they’re talking about me, about what a thieving, lying wretch I’ve turned out to be. I wipe down the counters extra carefully. I may be a thieving, lying wretch, but at least they can’t accuse me of not performing this simple household chore.
When I’ve finished cleaning, I find a half-empty carton of vanilla Häagen-Dazs in the freezer. I stand at the sink and eat it slowly, letting the silky-smooth ice cream soothe me from the inside out. When I’m done I throw the carton in the trash. I leave the dirty spoon in the sink because I am not, after all, perfect.
Sleep? Not hardly.
I lie in bed with the lights out, listening to the sounds of my wounded family: the murmur of Bridgette reading to Mal, who is almost certainly asleep, and the fainter buzz of Mom and Dad in their bedroom downstairs, still talking. I wish I knew what they were saying, but then I’m glad I can’t. It’s bad enough that I can imagine it.
What on earth are we going to do with David?
Send him to military school, I guess. Clearly, he can’t be trusted.
Maybe we should send Mal away, too. Have him locked up in an asylum.
We could lock them both up in institutions. That would solve everything.
My thoughts shift to tomorrow. My whole li
fe for the past several weeks has been about getting ready for the Pigorino Bowl, and they won’t let me go. As guilty as I feel, that seems horribly unfair. I think about getting up in the morning and going down to breakfast and facing them, the looks in their eyes, the set of my father’s jaw, the cut on his lip, the look of betrayal and disappointment on Mom’s face.
Around midnight, I hear Bridgette closing Mal’s door softly, tiptoeing down the stairs. The sound of her car door shutting, the burble of the engine, the sound of tires on asphalt as she backs out of the driveway. I hear Mom and Dad talking again. How do they find so much to say?
Their low voices fade; I now hear only the rustling of leaves outside my window and the buzz of the refrigerator, and I remember something that happened a long time ago.
I was about Mal’s age. Dad was taking me to a Triple-A Baseball game in Des Moines — the Iowa Cubs versus the Memphis Redbirds. I’d never been to a ball game before, and this was a whole day with my dad, hot dogs, baseball, the big city — I was beyond excited. We were halfway there when he got a call on his phone. He talked for a few minutes to some guy named Frank; then he hung up and sighed.
“Change of plans, David. I’m sorry.”
Instead of going to Principal Park, we drove to a big warehouse in West Des Moines where we picked up a refrigerator part in a long cardboard box. From there, we headed back into the city.
“One of my clients, PackMor, has an emergency situation,” Dad explained. “One of their cooling units broke down, and they’ve got six thousand pounds of beef about to go bad. I need to get this part over to them pronto.”
“I thought you just sold stuff,” I said. “How come you have to deliver it, too?”
“Well, we have a little problem with our drivers, David. They won’t cross the picket line.”
“What’s a picket line?”
Dad explained that the meat-packers were on strike because they weren’t being paid enough. The truck drivers, in support of the meat-packers, were refusing to make deliveries to PackMor.
“The meat-packers have a point,” Dad said. “PackMor has been stonewalling them for years, and they’ve finally had enough. But I have my job to consider, and PackMor is one of my biggest customers. Don’t worry; we’ll still be able to catch the last few innings.”
PackMor was a huge collection of cinder-block and steel-sided buildings surrounded by a chain-link fence. Several dozen men and women carrying signs were clustered near the front. As we pulled up to the gate, the protestors waved signs at us saying things like ON STRIKE, and UNFAIR!, and HONEST WORK DEMANDS HONEST PAY. Some of them were shouting at us. One guy banged his sign on the hood of our car; another guy pulled him away. Dad kept his eyes straight ahead the whole time. A man came out of the building and opened the gate. We drove through. We took the refrigerator part inside and Dad installed it. It only took about twenty minutes. I hadn’t even known he could do that kind of work.
“I was a repair technician before I got into sales,” he told me.
“Those people with the signs, they all work here?”
“Some of them are from the union.” He looked around to make sure nobody was listening. “The strikers are good people. I feel terrible about crossing their picket line.”
“Then why do it?”
He sighed. “David . . . this company is like a lot of other companies. It’s run by people who are sometimes selfish and greedy. They think they have to be that way to make a profit, and if they don’t make a profit, they don’t stay in business and those strikers don’t have a job. But sometimes the owners get a little too selfish and greedy — I think that’s what happened here.”
“So you think the strikers are in the right?”
“Essentially, yes. But if I hadn’t brought this part through the picket line, there would have been a lot of wasted meat, and the company would have taken a big loss. Not to mention I would have lost a client.” He wiped grease off his hands with a rag. “Sometimes you just have to do the wrong thing for the right reason.”
We made it to the ballpark in time for the sixth inning. I ate three trays of onion rings. The Iowa Cubs lost.
It’s one o’clock in the morning, and I’m still not sleepy. I turn on the light and send a couple of quick texts to HeyMan and Cyn, then fire up my laptop and start typing.
Dear Mom and Dad,
First thing is I’m sorry for everything. I know I messed up. And you’re probably going to get even madder because I’m on my way to Des Moines for the contest. I’m sorry.
I’m sorry for yelling at you and making Mal have a meltdown and I’m really sorry he bit you, Dad. I’m sorry about the $2,000. I know it’s not about the money, but the only way I know to pay you back is to win the Pigorino Bowl.
Mal wants me to go. I’ve been practicing with him all month and he gets that what I’m doing is important and I’ve taught him to eat two new things since you left, Mom. He can go places now without freaking, and I think he really is going to talk any day now, just like you want.
So I’m going to the contest and after I get back you can lock me in my room or just never talk to me again but no matter if I win or not I will pay you back and I promise I will never do anything like this again for the rest of my life even if I spend it in a dungeon.
Love,
David
I sleep a little bit after that, but I’m awake by the time the first glimmer of light appears in the sky. I put on my pizza T-shirt and sneak downstairs. I leave the letter on the kitchen table, let myself out, and head over to HeyMan’s.
The 4-H bus is insane. Cyn and Hay and I are crammed into one seat at the very back, with me in the corner. The rest of the bus is jam-packed with farm kids from Vacaville, Halibut, and Blue Prairie. Nearly all of them have brought lunch boxes with them, and half of them are already eating. The air is thick with the smell of salami and sauerkraut. Jooky Garafalo holds the world record for sauerkraut — six pounds in twelve minutes. He can keep that record, as far as I’m concerned.
Most of the kids know each other from 4-H meetings. Everybody is talking and yelling and laughing and munching at the same time. Halfway there, somebody starts singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer.” To my surprise, Cyn joins in, then HeyMan starts singing too. I put my hands over my ears and scrunch down in the seat. I have to stay focused.
. . . Ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall,
ninety-six bottles of beer.
If one of those bottles should happen to fall,
ninety-five bottles of beer on the wall.
Ninety-five bottles of beer . . .
I try to block out the noise and the sauerkraut smell and the guilt I’m feeling for disobeying my parents. I imagine myself eating pizza, a torrent of crust and sauce and cheese flowing into my mouth and down my throat. I think of what Derek told me: You are a tube. A three-hole donut. I take a breath through my mouth, my lungs fill with sauerkraut-infused oxygen. A wave of nausea passes over me. I groan.
“Are you okay?” Cyn asks.
“How much farther?” I ask.
“Probably another fifty verses.”
“Who eats sauerkraut for breakfast?”
“That would be Will Meyer. I think he’s doing it to be funny.”
“I am not amused.”
. . . Eighty-nine bottles of beer on the wall,
eighty-nine bottles of beer. . . .
Cyn resumes singing. By the time they get to sixty-five bottles of beer on the wall the sauerkraut smell is mostly gone. Either that or I’m used to it. It’s still a long ride. By the time the bus pulls up to the fairgrounds’ main gate only six bottles of beer remain on the wall.
The Iowa State Fair is one of the biggest in the country. They get a million visitors a year — people come from all over the state to gawk at the biggest hog. They watch the tractor-pull, the outhouse-race, and the rubber-chicken-throwing contest. They come for the food: corn dogs, elephant ears, kettle corn, and an assortment of even stranger foods lik
e Zombie Cones, chicken-fried bacon, and fried peanut butter and jelly on a stick. I am not kidding.
We pile off the bus and head for the admissions kiosk to buy tickets. HeyMan thinks I should pay for him and Cyn.
“We’re your investors,” he argues.
“So invest another twelve bucks. I’ve only got twenty left, and I haven’t even bought anything yet.”
“You’re gonna be eating all that pizza. What do you need to buy?”
“Maybe one of those hats.” I point at a guy wearing a tall yellow hat printed like a cob of corn.
“You wear that and somebody’s liable to take a bite out of you.”
“Whatever. You still have to buy your own tickets.”
“Cheapskate.”
We each buy our own ticket and push through the turnstiles into the fairgrounds.
“We have lots of time before the contest,” Cyn says. “What are you guys going to do?”
“Eat,” HeyMan says. “Are you hungry?”
“Not at the moment,” Cyn says. She’s looking at her phone. “I have a list. I want to see the fine-arts show, I want to check out the textile exhibit, and of course I have to see the chickens. The chickens are the best.”
“Chickens sound good,” HeyMan says. “Fried or baked?”
Cyn swats him on the arm.
“What else?” I ask her.
“The Butter Cow,” she says.
Of course. The Butter Cow. I forgot about that. I’d been to the state fair several times, but not for the past few years. With Bridgette in school and Mal being Mal, taking David to the state fair wasn’t high on my parents’ priority list. But the few times we did go, we’d always gone to see the Butter Cow.
“Let’s do the cow first,” I say.
The Butter Cow is an almost full-size sculpture of a cow made of butter. It’s located in the Agriculture Building in a refrigerated display case. It is spectacular.
