Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  “Okay, so this is going to be your room back here,” she said, leading us to the very end of the trailer, past a tiny bathroom with what looked like an operational toilet. By now I was certain there was more going on than Kyle and I had been told. It was all too weird, starting with Ed telling us where we would be eating, to my mom telling us in her matter-of-fact way how much we loved this place, to Carol referring to this little six-by-six-foot cubicle as “your room.”

  “So go ahead and get settled in, and when you’re done, you can come out and watch TV. I know your mom said it’s not allowed, but we just won’t tell her. Okay?”

  “Okay,” we agreed, dropping our bags and following her back out to the living room–office.

  “Aren’t you going to put your things away?” she asked, noticing that we were right behind her.

  “Our mom is coming to pick us up in the morning, so we would just have to pack everything back up,” I said, but at this point I wasn’t so convinced.

  “Oh?” She was obviously surprised.

  “Yeah, she’s coming back. Where’s the TV?” Kyle said, cutting to the chase.

  “Okay, here’s the TV, but you have to keep it on low because I have some work to do, and remember, don’t tell your mom. She was very clear about not letting you watch TV.”

  MOM CAME BACK the next morning as promised and found us back on the trampoline.

  “Hey, guys. How was your night? This place is really great, right? It just has a really, really good vibe, doesn’t it? I mean, Ed and Carol are really amazing people.”

  My brain was consumed with thoughts of backflips and jumping off trees, so I wasn’t really listening to her, just nodding when it seemed appropriate. But what was there to complain about when you had TVs and trampolines? I had to agree: it seemed like a great place.

  “Okay. So my plane is leaving Albuquerque in a few hours, so I’ve really got to get going. I’ll call you tonight when I get back to Philly.”

  The whole thing was too big for our little brains to comprehend. She might as well have been saying, “Have a good day at school, I’ll be back to pick you up at three.” She hugged us, walked back to the car, and drove away.

  We continued taking turns on the trampoline, and when we got hungry, we went back to the trailer and ate sandwiches. Then we jumped on the trampoline some more, ate dinner with Carol, watched TV, and went to bed. We went through the exact same routine the next day, neither of us commenting on the fact that our mom had just disappeared and left us on a deserted lot in New Mexico.

  I COULD HAVE LIVED with this routine of eating, sleeping, playing with Kyle, and not talking to anyone forever, but on Monday morning we were woken up at eight thirty and told to eat something now, or we would have to wait until lunch. I did my best to keep human interaction to a minimum, so without saying a word, we got up, made bowls of Cheerios, and were halfway through eating them, when Carol told us we had to go.

  “Can I finish my Cheerios?” Kyle asked her.

  “No. Sorry. It’s nine o’clock, you have to leave. You can come back at three.”

  “Can I just use the bathroom real quick?” I asked.

  “No. You can use one of the outhouses, though. At three you can come back and use this one.”

  I was no stranger to getting rushed out of the house, as my mom was always running late for everything, but I had never been rushed like this, for absolutely nothing. She ushered us out, closed the door, and just left us standing there on the little wood landing of the trailer. Still waking up, we watched as a few older kids ran toward the cinder-block building. And then dead silence, just as it had been over the weekend. What were we late for? Did we miss something? Was there somewhere we were supposed to be? What the hell just happened? Should we go to the building? I had a million questions. Kyle seemed equally confused, so I decided to knock on the door and ask Carol what was going on. There was no answer. I tried knocking again, and again we were answered by silence. I tried the doorknob out of curiosity and wasn’t at all surprised to find it locked. We just sat down on the stairs and waited. I had just traded my stairway in Philly for a new one in Santa Fe.

  We sat there for hours, not knowing what to do. Every so often some kids would come out of the cinder-block building, smoke cigarettes, and go back in. But aside from occasional glimpses from a few other kids off in the distance, nothing happened. At some point, maybe fifteen or twenty kids came out of the classroom and were standing around talking, but they were big scary kids. There was no way I was going to approach them for information. Eventually Ed walked by and said, “Hey, you guys want lunch?” We nodded our heads. “Well, you better get over to the cafeteria. You’ve got about five minutes. We stop serving food at one.”

  Kyle and I very tentatively walked over to the cafeteria. There were only a few people in there, as lunch was almost over. We grabbed a couple of paper bags off the counter and got the hell out of there. These kids seemed weird. They had long hair and wore sneakers with no laces and baseball hats with two long flaps coming off the back of them. I had never seen kids like these before. We got back to our steps at the trailer and found a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, a bag of chips, and a Capri Sun in our lunch bag. We ate in silence. Then we watched in silence.

  Two hours later the door to the trailer opened and we were allowed back in. Afraid of the outhouses, or anything past the stairs for that matter, we had been holding our bladders all day. After we used the bathroom, Carol informed us that dinner would be at six, and we could do whatever we wanted till then. We went to what was now undeniably our room and peeked through the blinds waiting for the last of the big kids to be picked up. Then we went to the trampoline and jumped up and down for a few hours until dinner.

  AND SO IT WENT. Every day we were kicked out at nine and allowed back in at three. Every day we ventured a little farther from the safety of Carol’s trailer, until eventually the three-acre dirt lot started feeling like home.

  It turned out that Kyle and I were the only kids who actually lived at the school. The place wasn’t set up for boarders, but some of the kids, having nowhere else to go, would hang out well beyond three. The only rule, it seemed, was that there were no rules. Anyone could do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. Aside from five other kids whose ages ranged from eleven to fourteen, all the other students were older and apparently there because they were too smart for public school. I couldn’t understand why anyone would go to class if they didn’t have to, but every day, twenty or so kids would show up and go straight to the classroom, and, except to smoke the occasional cigarette, wouldn’t come out until class was over at three. As I got more comfortable, I started to ask more questions.

  “So what’s up with all those kids who go to class?” I asked Ed one night.

  “This is a school. We have classes. What’s different is that we let the kids decide whether or not they want to go. We don’t make anyone do anything.”

  “Do you think I should go to class?” I asked.

  “I don’t think anything,” he said. “If you want to go to class, go to class. If you don’t want to go, don’t.”

  Unlike my mom, I couldn’t get a read on what he was really thinking. She had this way of saying the same kind of nonjudgmental things, but through tone of voice or some sort of psychic mind trick, she was telling you exactly what she thought. I thought I had become pretty good at figuring out what people were really thinking, no matter what was coming out of their mouths, but Ed really stumped me. I had to try a different tack.

  “Do you think it would be good if I went to class?” I tried.

  “I wouldn’t use the words good or bad. No matter what you do you’re always learning something.”

  This guy was really tough. It wasn’t as if he were uninterested or trying to blow me off—Ed could talk for hours—but I just felt like he wasn’t giving me a straight answer. I wanted to hear him say, “Yes, Oran, those are the good kids, the smart ones who are going to go on to
college and be productive citizens,” but he wouldn’t say it.

  “Listen,” he said, after giving it some thought. “On Monday, if you want to go to class, just go in and check it out. If you don’t like it, leave.”

  I checked it out. I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on in there. The blackboard was full of numbers, strange squiggles, and symbols I had never seen before, and they were talking about something called wormholes. I lasted all of ten minutes.

  MOM MAY HAVE left us on a dirt lot in New Mexico, but she was far from an absentee parent. We spoke on the phone almost every day, and somehow she managed to be just as controlling as she had been when we lived with her. It’s true we got to watch TV and eat whatever we wanted to, but we could never sound too happy on the phone because she would know in an instant that something was up.

  Kyle was a little more susceptible to her mind tricks than I was, so I was always nervous that he might let something slip. In a display of my own controlling behavior, I would listen in on their conversations and cue Kyle by means of facial expressions if he was heading into dangerous territory, or start frantically jumping up and down and waving my hands if he had gone too far. Of course he knew not to bring up anything about television or candy, but my mom was a smart one and had all sorts of ways to get Kyle to slip up.

  I was always the first to talk on the phone.

  “So, how is everything, Oran?”

  “Okay,” I would say without much enthusiasm.

  “Did you guys get your bikes in the mail?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” I always kept my voice monotone, but in fact the dirt bikes were a godsend.

  “So are you having more fun then? Making any friends?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh,” I grunted.

  “Okay, good. Is Kyle around?”

  “Yeah, hold on a second. Hey, Kyle, she wants to talk to you.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Shit, he sounded excited already. I tried frowning at him.

  “Yeah, we’re great. Yesterday I bought a rocket, and we blasted it off today, and it went like a hundred feet in the air.”

  I was jumping around like a maniac trying to get him to shut up, but I knew it was too late.

  I couldn’t hear her, but I knew what the next question would be. “Wow, honey, that sounds fun—where did you buy it?” I was just shaking my head and holding my finger up to my lips, but Kyle still couldn’t see where she was taking this.

  “I got it at the toy store.”

  “Where did you get the money?” And then he got it, and his excitement turned into a frown.

  “Uh. I…Uh…She wants to talk to you again.”

  I didn’t know how to get out of this one. I didn’t have enough time to think something up.

  “So, Oran. Where are you guys getting money from?”

  “Uh…well…the neighbors gave us some money to pull out the weeds from their yard,” I stammered.

  “Oh? Wow, those sound like cool neighbors. That’s really nice of them, but where are you really getting the money from?” she asked sarcastically.

  “Carol,” I said, folding. I didn’t even put up a real fight.

  “And how much money is Carol giving you guys?”

  “Um…”

  “It doesn’t matter whether you tell me or not because after I’m done talking to you, I’m going to talk to Carol, and it would be better if you told me than if I have to ask her.”

  “Fifteen bucks.”

  “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? So, that would be fifteen bucks a week?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. Kyle was giving me that “I’m sorry. Please don’t beat me up” look.

  “So, you must have a lot of money now, right?”

  “No.”

  “Is that because you have been spending it on candy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Oran, can you put Carol on the line now?”

  I ran back to the other room and used my finger to hang up the phone and make that clicking sound. Then I released the button and very carefully put my hand over the receiver and listened in.

  “Carol, I thought I made it very clear that the fifteen dollars a week was for expenses only, and not to be given to the kids. That money was to go to soap, toothpaste, laundry, and maybe a movie if they were good.” She was using her stern voice, which was somewhere between talking and yelling.

  “Oh. I must have gotten confused. Yes. Now I remember that conversation. Okay, I won’t give them any more money,” she said in the most gracious voice she could muster.

  “Carol, I just want you to be aware that even though I’m going through some heavy stuff right now and am unable to be with Oran and Kyle, they’re still my kids and I decide what’s best for them.” Mom was getting icy now.

  “Of course,” Carol said. I could picture her rolling her eyes. “I would never question that you know how best to raise your kids.”

  “Okay, so we understand each other then?” Mom asked.

  “I understand absolutely.”

  I didn’t beat Kyle up. I just shook my head and didn’t talk to him for a while. Without our allowance, it was back to stealing candy from the ampm or I should say stealing more from the ampm. I had found that stuffing my pants full of candy looked way less suspicious if I at least bought one thing. On Monday morning, as Carol ushered us out of the trailer, she handed us fifteen dollars each. Nothing in her expression hinted that she was doing anything wrong. We were astonished.

  OTHER THAN JUMPING on the trampoline, there just wasn’t a whole lot going on at the school, which eventually led to trouble. The older kids who had begrudgingly let us hang around them, for the small cost of letting them play practical jokes on us, were not a good influence. They taught us how to throw rocks at cars and steal golf carts from the course down the road and showed us where they hid their stash of porno magazines underneath a floorboard in the clubhouse they had built. Worst of all was our introduction to white music. There was an eight-track cassette player in the clubhouse and a tape collection consisting of the J. Geils Band, Journey, Foreigner, Loverboy, and Toto. It made me long for Wednesday nights, which was when we got to go to the roller-skating rink. I could not wait for my once-a-week chance to hear Michael Jackson, the Gap Band, and Miami Sound Machine.

  On the rare occasion when I found myself alone, I would sneak into the clubhouse, sit on the floor where no one could see me through the windows, and study those porn magazines with a passion and interest I had never experienced before. In the presence of anyone else, though, I would feign complete disinterest.

  “Hey, Oran, did you check these ones out? Holy shit, those are nice tits,” John or Matt or Mike would say.

  I knew that picture better than anyone, but I would just say, “No, haven’t seen those,” and go back to reading my Conan comic book, or whatever else was lying around.

  “Jesus Christ, are you fucking gay or something? Hey, Mike, I think Oran might be a homosexual.”

  “Lay off, Matt. He’s seven years old. He doesn’t even know what a boner is.”

  “I don’t know. I think he might be a fag.”

  I tried to defend myself. “Okay, okay…those are nice tits, now shut the fuck up. I’m trying to read.”

  The older guys also taught us to swear. I didn’t understand why this always made them laugh so hard, but I guess it was funny hearing an eight-year-old whose voice hadn’t changed telling a group of teenagers to shut the fuck up. I put up with these guys mainly because I had no choice. I was ill-prepared for just how cruel kids could be, and as a result I was the perfect target for their practical jokes.

  At lunch one day Matt said, “Hey, Oran, you like pickles, right? My mom keeps packing these pickles in my lunch even though she knows I don’t like them. Here, you want it?”

  “Sure, I love pickles. Thanks, Matt.” I didn’t hesitate for a second before putting the small green thing resembling a pickle in my mouth. Within seconds I was running around in circles cursing up a storm
and everyone was laughing at me. “Fuck, shit, fuck…what the fuck? Goddamn motherfuckers.” My mouth was burning up, my face was red, I had snot pouring out of my nose, and a waterfall of tears was running down my face. I ran to the sink and started guzzling water, but it wasn’t helping.

  “Fucking goddamned assholes!” I yelled, which made everyone laugh even harder. “Piece of shit cocksuckers!” I added. There was nothing I could do to stop the burning, or keep them from laughing at me. They had given me a jalapeño. Finally after three hours or so the burning disappeared, but I was determined to never talk to them again. It only lasted a few days. By the time it had gone through my system, and my ass had stopped burning every time I took a shit, I had forgotten all about it.

  I also found out how cruel I could be.

  Kyle had missed the whole jalapeño fiasco, so I decided to try the joke on him, but it didn’t quite work out the same. He just cried for three hours while the teachers fed him milk and bread. No one laughed this time. Instead I got those looks that say more than words could ever convey. “How could you do this to your six-year-old brother? What kind of monster are you?” It was true. Watching Kyle cry like that really did make me feel like a monster.

  That night’s conversation with Mom was the worst. I watched and listened in horror as Kyle stared at me with hate-filled eyes, recounting the jalapeño incident to Mom until he broke down sobbing again. Without saying a word he held out the phone to me.

  “Oran?” She only used my real name when she was pissed.

  “Uh-huh,” I grunted.

  “How could you do such a thing? Kyle is six years old. What were you thinking?”

  “I dunno,” I said.

  “That is not a good enough answer. I want you to think about it right now, and tell me what you were thinking.”

  “I dunno,” I repeated.