Tales of the Madman Underground

by John Barnes

  Holy fucking lucky Jesus. It had worked out okay. All she’d taken was that twenty. I went back upstairs almost cheerful.

  I realized that she had left my door open, so a fresh pile of catshit lay in the middle of my bed. I cleaned that up and went downstairs.

  I still missed that twenty, and I was still mad that I had to live like this. But I took a deep breath, and my back relaxed, and I stopped seeing the world down a blood-red tube. I rubbed my tear-streaked face.

  It occurred to me that accidents happened to Mom’s cats all the time. She wouldn’t take them to the vet because the vet used “chemicals and ucky ucky modern medicine”—and cost money. She wouldn’t get them spayed or neutered at the Gist County Humane Society because “kitties need to be free and the world needs lots of kitties and flowers and sunshine”—and because GCHS charged three bucks a cat, the price of a pitcher. She wouldn’t do anything to keep them from roaming. So since the cats had come into our lives—the same week, come to admit it, that I’d started drinking and she’d given up on being a mother, which I knew from the date of the first IOU in my book was May 17, 1970—I’d buried thirty-three of them, and maybe another ten had vanished.

  Didn’t seem like it would be such a bad idea to sort of select the next one I’d be burying, instead of leaving it to chance.

  It felt weird to think about it. The cats actually liked and trusted me more than they did Mom, because I didn’t lose it and scream and hit them, and sometimes I fed them. So I knew if I found the bedshitter, I’d have no problem taking him off somewhere to kill him. And Mom never could stand to look at the bodies, so all I’d have to do would be bring the bedshitter back quietly and just plant cat number thirty-four with all the others.

  And whatever I did would be quicker and gentler than a coon or a dog. Maybe I could just get Danny, who hunted birds every fall, to shoot the bedshitter out in a field; then it would look completely innocent.

  I wasn’t sure whether I was thinking about this because I wanted my bed clean, or because I wanted to get even with Mom for taking that twenty. Browning had been proud of me, and you should’ve seen how nice I soldered those joints.

  But come to admit it, it was my fault, too. I’d just left that twenty right there in my pants pockets with my pants out in plain sight, and I knew good and well that Mom went through the pockets of everything, all the time. She had my two little-kid sport coats, from back when we used to go to First United Methodist, hanging in the guest room closet—souvenirs or something—and last year I’d caught her going through their pockets, I guess looking for some long-forgotten offering envelope.

  So I should have hid that twenty, put it in a stash or changed it to the pocket of my fresh jeans. Losing it was completely my fault; thanks to me getting stupid and being in a hurry, Mom was sitting in Mister Peepers. Some guy in sales (big-lapelled suit, wide blue tie, big teeth yellowed by tobacco and coffee) was nodding and laughing that big uff uff uff laugh they do.

  She’d be telling him that Watergate was all just part of the plan, the Air Force had to get rid of Nixon because after Cambodia he’d become so infested with evil that his vibrations were keeping the saucer people from being able to land, and once they got him out of the White House, the saucer people could come down and establish universal peace. The sales guy would be nodding and talking about how interesting her ideas were, and what a strong smart independent woman she was, and looking at her breasts and trying to get up the nerve to put his hand on her leg.

  Yeah, I guess I did mostly want to find that cat and kill it to get some revenge on Mom, but that wouldn’t bring my twenty back. It would make my bed cleaner, of course, but I could do something about that right now.

  I went back upstairs, stripped the bed, and took my bedding down to wash. I was still pretty pissed off at Mom. I guess if I’d still been going to Alateen, Danny and Squid would’ve ridden my ass pretty hard about having enabled her.

  By the time I moved the bedclothes from the washer to the dryer, and changed into my McDorksuit, I had the trig and French done, and I had scribbled freedom into every blank where it seemed to fit for honors gov, and free enterprise into the rest.

  Christ, I wished I still had that twenty.

  14

  In Their Backseats or at McDonald’s, the Madmen Sleep Tonight

  I GUESS IF there was really a low spot in my life it wasn’t so much when Dad died as when Mom threw that party. It was the start of booze and cats, and the point where I stopped being able to keep the house all the way nice. Also although by that time, my old Mom was mostly gone, replaced by Flying Saucer Lady, Beth with the Boots, or Neil’s Old Lady, somehow that party was like the wake for the mother I’d grown up with.

  I don’t exactly mean Mom threw a party because Dad was dead. It was more that because Dad was dead, Mom could throw the party.

  The date on the first IOU pasted into my account book is May 17, 1970. Eighth grade was about over, which was fine with me, since eighth grade stank. Actually that spring was when I’d just gotten comfortable enough with talking dirty to say eighth grade fucking stank.

  I came home from Sunday afternoon track practice and Mom was running around setting out cereal bowls of potato chips and Fritos, and big bowls of that sloppy red tomato sauce that you got in the El Paso cans. Although I’d just walked two miles home on a warm, sunny day, after running a few miles, there wasn’t going to be a shower because the bathtub was full of ice and bottles of beer.

  I’d slept over at Paul’s on Saturday night, the night before, too, sitting up with Paul and Dennis, watching Houlihan and Big Chuck, two dumb guys that showed stupid old movies and made fun of them. I had stayed to dinner after Mr. Knauss had taken us all into Columbus to see the Jets play—Dad and me were Mud Hen fans, but this was going to be the Jets’ last season in Columbus, and Mr. Knauss, a Jets fan forever, had grabbed up a lot of tickets and was always taking his kids’ friends along. Between the Jets, Houlihan and Big Chuck, and track, I hadn’t actually had a shower since Friday night.

  Looked like I was just really going to stink. I’d already learned not to argue about weird shit like a bathtub full of ice and beer.

  Mom already looked real different than she had when Dad was alive. Her hair wasn’t long yet, but instead of the ash-blonde pageboy, she now had an untidy mop of hooker-blonde yellow hair; she looked sort of like a dandelion smoking a cigarette.

  Just now she was in a tie-dyed halter top that she’d bought the week before, and a lot of clunky jewelry, and very low tight jeans. It was like she was going to a costume party as Darla.

  She had a cigarette burning in her mouth and she was sticking up posters she’s gotten from Judy—Hendrix and some old Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel posters, the kind that came inside the album cover, with these big gross fold lines. They looked shabby as all hell just stuck to the wall with thumbtacks.

  I went and got the level so that I could at least get all the posters straight, but she wouldn’t let me fix them. She said that worrying about them hanging straight was fascist. “Honestly, Karl, you’re more like Doug every day.” The way she said it, Dad’s name was something like “cocksucker” or “Nixon.”

  My eyes stung a little, I think because she was standing too close to me with the cigarette and kind of yelling, really, and all of a sudden she was holding me, hanging on to me, and saying, “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, Tiger Sweetie, that was such a mean thing to say to you. Sorry.”

  She didn’t hug me very often anymore, usually only in front of her new friends from the bar, to show off what a good mother she was. They were always telling me that Mom was a great mother and a fabulous woman and really coming into her own now . . . (after that “now,” I could hear them thinking . . . that your father is dead). They all thought she was a “super super lady.”

  This time there was no one around, but she hugged me anyway. “Tiger, I have to tell you about something and give you something.”

  Poor dumb stupid little eight
h-grade me, when she said she was going to “give me something,” I still thought she meant something good.

  She handed me a piece of typewriter paper, neatly lettered in her precise handwriting. I looked down and read, May 17, 1970. From Elizabeth (Beth) Shoemaker to Karl Shoemaker. I.O.U. $129.38.

  “It’s an IOU,” she explained. “I took the money out of your account yesterday, because the bank was open, and I needed to do the shopping on Saturday, while the liquor store was open, to get ready for tonight.”

  All I could think to ask was, “What’s tonight?”

  “Well, it’s kind of my coming out, my emergence, you know, as a free woman. It’s been seven months since your father made the transition, exactly seven, and seven is a very powerful number. So I wanted to do something about that and all, anyway. And then, too, it’s been two weeks since the terrible thing at Kent State with all those children killed. We just need somewhere to get together and talk and share some feelings, kind of create a safe space where we could talk about Kent State and Cambodia. And, well, besides, this is sort of my coming-out party, to celebrate really being who I am.”

  I had no idea what to say.

  Then for just a second she was almost her old self. “Tiger, I didn’t have the money. I can give you some out of—well, not my next paycheck, but the paycheck after that, and then it shouldn’t be long before I’ve paid it all back. I’m sorry, I know it’s your money, sweetie, but I need this party. You know you never spend your money on anything, it’s not like you’ll miss it before I pay it back.”

  I just stood there, so confused I wanted to slap myself. My pathetic little savings account had been home to my birthday money; my first paycheck from my paper route, because Dad made a big point about what a great thing it was to save the first money you ever earned; some snow-shoveling money I had left over; some garden-spad ing and yard-work money, which I’d just started to get about a month ago; and a couple school prizes. I felt like I remembered every deposit there had ever been, and the much less frequent withdrawals.

  It was childish of me to feel that it wouldn’t be the same when she put the money back, like a little kid worrying about having the exact same dollar bill Grandpa gave him.

  The faces weren’t new to me. I had met most of Mom’s bar crowd before. In Lightsburg, everyone knew everyone, and she’d been bringing some of them around the house a lot. The main thing I noticed was that all of them, men and women, had hair past their shoulders. (Dad had worn a crew cut all his life.)

  They spilled a lot of wine and beer on the wall-to-wall shag carpeting, and for a while I tried to get it cleaned up quick with paper towels, but Mom told me not to, that I was embarrassing her, and handed me a beer and told me I could try my first one. I guess I was supposed to feel like a man and stuff. It didn’t taste like much of anything. Even later on, when I was drinking all the time, I never liked beer much.

  Then Neil showed me how to do boilermakers, and he made me do two to “make sure the little guy gets it right.” Whiskey was definitely better than beer, at least by comparison, not much worse than cough syrup.

  I didn’t have much body weight then, and I’d had a bunch of drinks in less than an hour. So I was real drunk, which at least made the time pass faster; I sat on one end of the couch and watched a lady I didn’t know set down her cigarette onto the carpet and grind it out with her boot heel. I wished all these people would go home and that Mom would come back from the bedroom, where she’d gone with Neil.

  Judy sat beside me and asked me how I was doing and about school and shit, and she seemed to think everything I said was really funny. She wandered away and I watched people get drunker and smoke pot.

  I sort of understood why they drank, though, because with the drinks in me, it all went by faster and didn’t hurt as much to watch those people make a mess.

  Next morning I woke up on the couch. Everyone was gone except Neil, who was in the bedroom with my mother. I felt like I had been poisoned: head aching, sick to my stomach, sore in every muscle. I puked in the toilet, which helped, except that I realized I might have been the most accurate but I sure hadn’t been first. I was the first one to flush, though. I wanted a shower or bath but the tub was full of empties and cigarette butts and mostly-melted ice.

  I started picking up empties and putting them in the box to take back to the store, dumping ashtrays in the trash, piling glasses in soapy water in the sink for washing, the usual after-party stuff I realize now, but at the time it was new to me. Red wine splashes and cigarette burns were everywhere in the beige shag carpet. A year ago, when Dad and me had put it in, he’d been so fussy about getting it lined up right—too sick to do it himself but watching me all the time, making me try again when I didn’t get it right.

  Mom had stood by telling him not to pick on me, I was only a boy and all this didn’t matter, while I scuttled around getting the pad underneath just so, and then measuring and cutting and placing. But Dad had told me when it was all over that I’d done a good job, and even Mom had said that after a while, when she forgot to be mad at him about “making” me do it.

  The doorbell rang, and I found Judy on the front porch, a big cardboard box at her feet. “Hey, little guy, how was your first drunk?” she asked.

  “I’m kinda sick.”

  “You just need practice.” She lifted the cardboard box and carried it into the house, setting it down in the middle of the living room rug. Mom, wearing just an old T-shirt of Dad’s, and Neil, wearing sweatpants, a hair-covered beer gut, and a vacant expression, were staggering out of the bedroom. “Morning, sleepyheads!” Judy said. “Look what I have for everyone!”

  She opened the box and turned it gently on its side, and eight kittens came tumbling out. Mom sat down to play with them on the living room floor, and Judy joined her, and the two of them talked baby talk for the next hour or so. With no idea that the kittens would be staying, and turning into cats, and breeding, I thought they were cute, myself.

  After he realized Mom and Judy weren’t going to give him more dope or have sex with him, Neil left. I washed some dishes to have a clean bowl, but when Mom saw me getting out the box of Cheerios, she said she had some money left over so she took Judy and me out for pizza to celebrate her party, her coming out, and her new kittens. It was my money, but I couldn’t see a way to ask her to at least give back what she hadn’t spent, so I went along. The pizza tasted like shit and the waiter asked me why I wasn’t in school.

  Later that day when I was putting laundry together—as long as I’d missed school and track practice I might as well see if I could get the house clean, I thought—I found the IOU in my pants pocket. I pinned the IOU on the bulletin board in my room.

  I don’t know if Mom ever saw it or took any hint from it. By Christmastime, there was a column of IOUs down one side of the bulletin board, mostly from when she’d borrowed yard-work or paper-route money, and another one from the second time she’d cleaned out my savings account. She hadn’t asked that time, either.

  That was for her Halloween party. On the first of November I saw the electric bill in the mail, opened it, and saw she hadn’t paid for two months, though I’d given her money for it. So I took some money I’d just gotten for turning over a compost pile, put it in a coffee can, and stuck it into the space behind the World Book in the bookcase Dad had built.

  About a week before Christmas, I had a couple spare dollars and was getting a paperback in Philbin’s when I noticed a little stack of account books. I bought myself one.

  That night, stapling the IOUs in next to where I’d recorded them, I decided she owed me for the account book ($0.87 with tax), too, and wrote that in as an entry: December 17, 1970. For some reason I remember trying to be real quiet with the stapler, so Mom wouldn’t hear me.

  For some reason tonight while I was cleaning out McDonald’s, I kept thinking about that first party, which always got me what Mom called “all full of angry energy,” so I burned that energy on work and got done even
faster than usual. I was done with everything but the window forty minutes before Harris and Tierden were due to hit the puddle—to my deep disgust, I even rechecked all my homework and reviewed all the reading; it made me feel like a suck-up buttlicker, but I was going to be prepared in class tomorrow.

  At least I had The Three Stigmata along, so I read that in the back until the pathetic chungk-splutch! hit the window—it hadn’t rained in days, and the puddle was nearly empty. I went out, hosed the walk and washed the window, and called that good.

  They’d been half an hour early. Times must be dull everywhere. Still a long while to clock-out.

  With a start, I woke up and sat upright. The clock said twenty minutes till clock-out—

  Thumping on the window.

  My first thought was that it was Bobby Harris being a jackass and I needed to wake up just a tiny bit more and go outside and kick his pathetic squishy pink pudge boy frog-face down his throat and out his ass. I sat up and saw Marti. I must’ve looked like a real duh with my hair all cowlicky and mouth hanging open, but she wasn’t laughing.

  I opened the door; the parking lot smelled like an open grave, the first breath of cold sludgy Ohio fall.

  “I know it’s close to time for you to leave but I need a friend real bad.” She didn’t look at me when she said that.

  “Come in, goddammit, of course,” I said. “I just woke up, fell asleep over my goddam book.” Goddammit, I thought, I am sounding just like goddam Browning.

  “I know, I woke you up.”

  “I didn’t even realize that was what woke me. Food, coffee, anything? I still haven’t thrown anything out.”

  “Yes, please, everything.” She sat down at the table where my book was, slumped forward, hands knotting in front of her knees. Her nail polish was all scragged up, and she’d chewed a couple of nails enough to make them bleed. “I’m locked out till Mother gets home, and it was way too damp and cold to sleep in the car, and . . . aw, shit, Karl, I need company.” She rubbed her wet face on the back of her hand; I gave her some napkins.