He converted a broken floor lamp into a bona fide light-giver that also served as a hat-tree. He painstakingly perforated a cymbal – one cymbal – to turn it into a colander-cum-projector with which a person could drain canned vegetables, or give an impromptu planetarium show (by shining a flashlight through its underside). He made a colourful banner for the front porch out of scraps of old material and pieces of balsa wood daubed with model-airplane paint. He used a discarded drum for the base of a revolving chess platform, whose board he assembled from coping-sawed squares of white pine and red cedar. When he couldn’t find what he needed on The Pile, he extracted from it items to barter with local merchants for stuff he could use.
Renata, working toward her doctorate, encouraged Roger in these activities; she even ceded to him the decoration of the living room and the upstairs bedrooms, areas that many women fight to control, and they prospered by this arrangement. If anybody razzed them or expressed surprise, they offered a united front.
Renata: “A major victory in the war for female emancipation.”
Roger: “An expansion of the territories suitable for male exploration.”
Of course, few of their friends expressed surprise. Any surprise, given the well-established theoretical bases of gender equality, centred on the fact that they actually put into practice what Renata preached – even if, after the iron episode, she might have said that she too often wielded that instrument while Roger hung out at The Pile talking with his scavenger pals and assessing its contents.
Roger added to his acquaintances by hanging out there, though. He saw an oddly slow-moving Brad Hartsock put some nested TV trays on The Pile. He met a college cop, Douglas-Kenneth Smith, who anted up the well-oiled derailleur of a road bike. (Roger grabbed this, wiped it dry, and hung it in a closet as a bartering chip.) He talked baseball with a grandmother, Loretta Crider, whose nephew unloaded a sewing machine, and he foraged out a set of yellowing place mats (with inset pen-and-ink sketches of Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, etc.) that a high-school teacher, Ronald Curtis, had left on the Incredible Heap in a pretty aqua carton.
“You know why we call this place Fidelity Plaza?” Mr Curtis asked Roger.
“Because the couples here only screw around with their own spice?”
Mr Curtis scowled in consternation. “Their own what?”
“Their own spice – plural of spouse.”
“Ah, that’s very funny.” But Mr Curtis declined to smile.
“Then why is this place called Fidelity Plaza?” Roger lifted a hand. “Does it have anything to do with insurance?” He lowered his hand. “Forget that. I don’t have a clue.”
“It’s because everyone who lives here – or nearly everyone – is as faithful as Fido to caring for and worshipping The Pile.”
“Well, I guess it beats watching Wheel of Fortune.”
“I don’t know.” Mr Curtis at long last smiled. “I’ve always liked the pretty Letter Turner.”
“I prefer her sister Lana. Or did until Daddy said she made her last film the year I was born. And now poor Lana’s kaput.”
“I hope you and your sister enjoy the place mats.” And whistling the theme to The Andy Griffith Show, Mr Curtis slipped his hands into his pockets and walked poker-faced back to Building G.
One evening, after Roger had had another annoying tiff with his boss, he went out to The Pile to cool off. Renata was at the library, and he was grateful for the relative quiet near the pool and the Dumpsters.
Then Brad Hartsock sauntered over from Building M and stopped maybe twenty yards away. He held a furry doll wearing a red scarf around its neck and, under its hairy chin, an ebony breastplate like those worn by Roman legionaries in epic Biblical flicks – except, of course, for its size and colour. Also, the kid holding this figure – a gorilla doll? – looked different this afternoon. On his and Roger’s first meeting at the plaid Laz-E-Boy, Brad had appeared no more than fourteen, with a morose face and eyes of such opaque iciness that Roger had been mildly freaked and entirely convinced that the teen had an IQ lower than the average Atlanta temperature in February. Today, though, he looked older and smarter – his eyes boasted a fiery spark – but, in his hipshot stance out by the Dumpsters, no less spooky.
“Hey, Brad, what you got?”
Brad studied the object in his hands as if his wit had fled. Then he swallowed and his smarts flooded back.
“A singing and dancing ape that doesn’t do either anymore,” he said. “Why? You want this piece of crap?”
“No thanks. I’m holding out for a piccolo-playing orang-utan.”
“Smartass,” Brad snarled, like an adult gang-banger. His torso had some bulk, as if he’d been working out, and his jaw showed reddish-brown stubble. In starched denims and a striped pullover, though, he was dressed like a grade-school preppy.
An evil imp made Roger say, “You seem a tad mature to be toting around an ape doll, Bradley me lad.”
“And you seem pretty friggin’ infantile for a grownup.”
My God, thought Roger, the boy has panache. He raised his hands in appreciative surrender. “Touché, kid: touché.”
“Besides, this thing’s Mama’s. My bastard daddy gave it to her. Now it’s broken. All I want to do is chunk it on The Pile and go home. Okay?”
“Sure. It’s a free townhouse complex – even freer if you can get somebody else to put up your rent.” He backed away from The Pile.
Brad shook his head as if Roger undermined his dream of a crap-free world, but shuffled up in his expensive gym shoes and set the ape doll on an unpainted particleboard nightstand that would certainly blow apart in a light wind. Then he turned and sashayed straight toward Building M.
Again, Roger couldn’t help it: he approached The Pile, scrutinized the twenty-inch gorilla from a squat, and at length snatched it off the nightstand. It was his, or his and Renata’s, for Renata would love it. She loved animals and funny effigies of animals, and the red scarf around this ape’s throat – along with the needle-like scarlet tongue in its rubbery mouth – would win her over faster than a loaf of fresh-baked Syrian bread.
And Renata did love it. She rocked it in her arms like an infant. She cuddled it to her neck on the sofa. She laid it beside her in her bed and took pains not to roll over on it during the night. “What a cutie,” she said a dozen times a day.
Because of its skin colour and quirky smile, she named it Andruw, after a favourite ballplayer, totally heedless of the fact that many people would think naming a gorilla doll after a black man racist. But she loved the ballplayer and thought his given name and its unusual spelling quite as endearing as his Mona Lisa smile.
Roger told her why she just couldn’t call the toy Andruw, and Renata said she would shorten the name to Andy. Roger said this dodge wouldn’t work because there’d once been a TV show, Amos and Andy, which many people now regarded as illustrative of racial attitudes best forgotten. Renata rolled her eyes, but, being an intelligent young woman, understood the strictures with which a monstrous past not of one’s own making could tint the present, and so gave in.
“I’ll call it Q.T.,” she said. “Who can argue with that?” She added that it would be fabulous, though, if Roger could restore its ability to sing and dance. As cute as she found it, “bringing it to life again” would greatly heighten its adorability.
“If it gets any more adorable,” Roger said, “I’ll jump under a train.”
Renata gave him an adorable up-yours grimace, and Roger got busy on the doll’s adorable innards, to see what miracles he could perform.
A day later, still working on the issue, he went out to the pool for some air and glimpsed Brad Hartsock perched on a patio chair with a poncho over his shoulders. (It had begun to get cool.) Brad gazed into the bland aqua ripples with such alarming world-weariness that he looked, well, about thirty, with a grown man’s five-o’clock shadow and violet circles under his eyes.
Briefly, Roger thought the person must be Brad’s
older brother, on a visit from out of town. However, Mrs Hartsock was nowhere near old enough to have given birth to this fellow, and maybe a trick of the autumn light had deceived Roger. Or maybe the guy was Mrs Hartsock’s younger brother or . . .
“Brad?” he said. “Brad, is that you?”
The figure in the chair turned a cold hard gaze on him. “Yeah, it’s me. Who’d you think it was, President Bush?”
“Nearly,” Roger said. “Sorry. I just thought you looked a little puny.”
“Seasonal allergies.” Brad flung back his poncho, disclosing a big aluminium can of malt liquor. “Plus this, I guess.”
“Your mama lets you drink?”
“Why you think I’m out here?” The voice belonged to Brad, as did the features – but the galoot at the pool was a worn near-future avatar of the young teen Roger had met on his first visit to The Pile.
“Do you think that’s a good—?”
“Hey, I’m self-medicating, all right?”
“Whatever.” Roger didn’t want to leave. True adults didn’t let teens drink, even if they looked like flea-bitten thirty-year-olds. “By the way, I took your mama’s gorilla off The Pile – it just sort of spoke to me.”
Brad toasted him with the malt-liquor can. “May it bring you true happiness.” He chug-a-lugged for a good fifteen seconds, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gazed back down into the water – dismissively, Roger thought.
The gorilla, as Roger soon learned without even Googling “Gorilla Dolls” on his P.C., sang a novelty number called “The Macarena” to the tinny-sounding band in its back. It moved its rubbery lips, showed its pointed red tongue, and swayed its apish hips like a mutant hula-dancer.
When Renata returned from the library that evening, Roger took the toy to her, set it on their kitchen table, and flipped its switch. Q.T. did his thing, loudly and repeatedly. Renata laughed aloud. She knew the gestures that went with the dance (even though Q.T. clearly didn’t) and performed them for Roger several times in a row.
“My God, what a cheesy routine,” Roger said, switching Q.T. off.
“Thank yew, thank yew.” Renata curtsied to him and to make-believe spectators elsewhere in the room. “What a terrific gift.” She tickled Roger’s chin and mockingly rubbed his upper arms.
“Thank Edie Hartsock, the gas-company secretary over in 13-M. The ape was hers before I rescued him from The Pile.”
“I certainly will.” Renata stopped rubbing her brother’s arms. “But what if she gets jealous? What if she wants it back, now that it works again?”
“Losers, weepers,” Roger said. “Finders, keepers.”
But then a series of events turned Renata’s appreciation of Q.T. into something like distaste. Roger hit the doll’s switch so often that soon even he had learned the hip movements and hand gestures that enlivened Q.T.’s ditty. A better than average dancer, he kept hitting the switch, triggering the tinny music, Q.T.’s pelvic swivels, and his own pseudo-Latin moves, which he busted in the kitchen, the dining room, and Renata’s room as she struggled to study.
“Stop it!” she shouted, covering her ears. “Have you gone bazooka?” This was a facetious Maharis family term for berserk.
“You bet – totally bazooka. Forgive me. It’s just so damned addictive.”
“For a while it was funny. Now it’s annoying. So, for God’s sake, stop.”
“I will. I promise. I’ll stop.”
But he couldn’t. He’d stop briefly, to watch a TV programme or fix a meal, but then the contagiousness of Q.T.’s act would call to him, and he’d turn the toy on again and jig about the townhouse, upstairs and down, extending his arms, crossing them, clutching his head, and doing every other move dictated by the song’s choreographic protocols. Even when the music ran down and the ape ceased gyrating, Roger kept singing, kept doing his manic St Vitus dance. He had become the Irksome Dervish of Building D.
“Stop it!” Renata cried. “Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT!”
“Yes. You’re right. I’ll stop.”
He did stop, for a while, but then he started again. Renata screamed “Arrrrrrgh!” (as he’d never heard her scream before), trotted downstairs with an old walking stick, and poked its tip into his bellybutton.
“Put Q.T. back on The Pile, Roger! Put him back out on The Pile!”
“A decent soul would dump him where nobody else could get him.”
Renata twisted the stick. “Give it to me,” she said. “Now.” Roger passed her the ape. “Good. Now we’re going to give it back to Mrs Hartsock. She might never have had Brad toss it on The Pile if it hadn’t stopped working.”
“Maybe he started doing what I’ve been doing.”
“Only a baboon” – Renata started over – “Only a buffoon would do what you’ve been doing. Come on. We will take it back.” They each grabbed sweaters and met at the door. “I’ll carry it, bro’ – I, myself, not you.”
“Come in,” Edie Hartsock called out in a gravelly voice.
They entered the townhouse’s smoky lower floor. Renata waved off offers of an orange soda and a mint-flavoured cigarette and thrust the doll into Mrs Hartsock’s arms while explaining that Roger had repaired it and that it only seemed right to give it back to her now that it worked again.
“I don’t want it,” Mrs Hartsock said.
“But—” Renata began.
“From almost the get-go it gave me the willies. I was glad when it wore out.”
“But—”
“And I hate its stupid song. My ex gave it to me as a gag, if not as a torment.”
Roger noticed that the plaid Laz-E-Boy had emerged into visibility (of a limited kind, anyway) from the drifting cigarette smoke. Brad lay in this chair, whose footrest he had extended and whose arms he clutched like an astronaut enduring a rocky launch. But what most disturbed Roger was the fact that several large manikins, marionettes, or dolls either stood about the room or hung from pieces of wire from the ceiling. He made out an evil-looking Howdy Doody, a lifelike Creature from the Black Lagoon, and a less adept facsimile of Godzilla. Other simulacra haunted the corners and the stairwell so that 13-M now seemed a bizarre conflation of a menagerie and Madame Tussaud’s.
As for Brad, he dully ogled his visitors through eyeballs that appeared pollen-dusted. His bottom lip hung down, and strands of hair on his balding pate rose and fell in the updraft of a heating vent on the floor. Tonight, as opposed to Roger’s last encounter with him at The Pile, he looked not only ill but also middle-aged – forty-five, at the very least. He’d lost weight and taken on wrinkles, and his skin had the sallow cast of a man long pent in a damp basement.
“Brad?” Roger said. “Brad, is that you?”
“Yeah,” Brad drawled mockingly. “Who’d you think I was, Beyoncé?”
“Those are powerful allergies you’re fighting,” Roger said. He wanted to point out that Mrs Hartsock shouldn’t smoke around him, but how could he in her own outré place? Besides, she ought to know that.
“Allergies?” Mrs Hartsock said. “Is that what he told you?”
“Yes ma’am, he did.”
“Oh, Bradley.” Then: “Oh, no. You see, he’s got this condition.”
“What condition?” Renata gazed about the townhouse in evident discomfort and perplexity. Roger could see that she thought Halloween much too far away to justify such freaky décor now.
Edie Hartsock said in an annoyed-sounding stage whisper, “I really don’t like to talk about it in front of him.”
“Why?” Brad whined. “Because I’m fourteen and look forty? Or do I look even older tonight?”
“Fourteen?” Renata said. “How can this person be fourteen?”
“It’s really fast, his condition,” Mrs Hartsock said.
“What condition?” Renata asked again, almost demanding.
“Progeria,” Brad said from the Laz-E-Boy. “I got progeria.”
Roger pondered this. The only case of progeria he’d ever heard about – in a bo
ok about bad shit happening to good people which his father had made him tackle when their mother died of breast cancer – occurred in a kid who’d begun looking like a little old man at three and who died at – well, at fourteen.
Brad’s progeria, if that’s what this was, had started at fourteen and was moving a lot faster than the disease of the kid in the book, as if to make up for lost time. It seemed impossible, but Roger had learned from his mama’s death that “impossible” crap could drop on you like a grand piano at any time and then resound smashingly in your head and your kicked-asunder life forever.
“This is a pretty weird sort of progeria, isn’t it?” Roger asked Mrs. Hartsock. “I mean, if weirdness has degrees.” (The Hartsocks’ townhouse suggested that it had many degrees.)
“Yeah,” Brad said weakly. “My doctor calls it an allelomorphic progeria, a sort of one-gene-off kind.”
Renata stared at Brad Hartsock. “He’s a very smart fourteen.”
“But I look forty,” Brad said. “Or is it fifty? Mama, is it fifty? Or is it like” – his adult voice poignantly broke – “maybe even six-tee?”
“You look twenty-five, Brad: a handsome twenty-five.”
“Right,” Brad said, but he visibly relaxed.
“What can we do?” Renata asked. “To help, I mean.”
“Maybe a little entertainment,” Roger said. He took the ape doll from Renata and switched it on: “The Macarena” blared into the room, and both he and the doll began hip-swivelling. Brad screamed. Mrs Hartsock grabbed the doll away from Roger and fumbled to switch it off.
“Brad can’t abide it anymore,” she said, not unkindly. “I can’t either.”
“Nor can I,” Renata said, giving Roger a look. “I’m sorry – so sorry.”
“Well, you could put the obnoxious thing back on The Pile for me.”
“Yes, Mrs Hartsock. We’ll do it tonight.”
“Edie,” Brad’s mother said. “Call me Edie.” They had bonded over their disgust with Roger’s asininity and their concern for Mrs Hartsock’s dying son.
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