Make Believe

by Joanna Scott

  He climbed onto the couch, lifted one knee from the crevice between the cushions, steadied himself against the back of the couch, and hissed. That’s how he’d always been able to stir Josie into motion. He’d hiss, she’d dash off, and he’d chase her. Sssss! But Josie did no more than flick her tail, causing the curtain to billow lightly. Bo reached forward and drew the curtain away so he could see the cat clearly. She refused to look at him, so he hissed again. She didn’t budge. Bo prodded her in the haunches with the knuckles of his fist, and Josie did what she’d never done before — she swiped her paw, treacherous claws extended, across the back of his hand, leaving fine pink lines that filled momentarily with tiny pearls of blood.

  Oh, after all Bo had been through — and now this! Betrayed by the creature that should have loved him most. It was an outrage worthy of a howl, so Bo indulged himself, shrieked until it felt like Josie was scratching inside his throat, then he pressed his face against his grandmother, who suddenly appeared and drew him into the tight circle of her arms. He sobbed in fury because not only had Josie betrayed him but Gran had no right trying to hush him up. He deserved to wake the whole world with his clamor and felt no remorse when Pop came limping down the stairs leaning heavily on the banister and wearing only his polka-dot boxers. Pop could run down the street naked for all Bo cared. His grandmother and grandfather had no right trying to calm him. They had no right stealing Josie’s love. They had no right to Josie or to Bo, and if Gran wanted to let Bo feel the warm pad of her skin against his body, if she wanted to coo softly in his ear while he cried, she could go ahead and waste her breath. Under no circumstances would Bo stop crying. He’d cry until nightfall. He’d cry for a year, for ten years, forever. He’d cry until he fell asleep.

  When he woke he was covered with a quilt, bathed in midday sunlight, and the bundle of fur tucked between the top of his head and the arm of the sofa was Josie, purring lightly as she dozed. Bo ran two fingers along the back of her neck. He had a vague taste of unhappiness in his mouth and then remembered all at once the important fact: everything would be all right. Another fact occurred to him: he was hungry, and Gran, it turned out, had left Pop in charge of Bo and a ham baking in the oven while she went on her own to the late-morning service at the Mount Olive Baptist Church.

  There was plenty to eat to tide Bo over until dinner was ready, bacon and pancakes, orange juice, chocolate milk, and along with the chocolate Easter eggs in Bo’s basket Pop gave him a bag of peanut M&M’s. When Miraja arrived she laughed at the chocolate ring around Bo’s lips, and her daddy, Uncle Danny, clamped his hand over her mouth, a reproach that was obviously meant in jest but that left Miraja huffing angrily in a corner. Soon the house was full of people Bo remembered knowing, though he couldn’t remember their names or why they mattered to him. And just when he was starting to miss Gran, she came home, catching Bo by the hand and drawing him through the crowd like a pull toy. While she peeled potatoes she went through the list of names all over again: Uncle Danny, Uncle Alcinder, Aunt Meredith, and the cousins Miraja, Jeffrey, Joseph, and others connected in some indistinct way, Taft, Johnny, P.J. — and last but not least, Bo. She included Bo’s name as though he were out there in the living room laughing with the others, throwing playing cards in the air and pushing Miraja onto the beanbag chair instead of sitting on the kitchen counter, kicking his legs against the cupboard doors, and listening to anything Gran had to tell.

  The rest of the day was all talk and food and poker in the background. Bo didn’t do much more than trade Gran’s lap for Pop’s, Pop’s lap for Gran’s, clambering back and forth while the grown-ups laughed and shouted and even slammed fists against the table in order to attract attention, though nothing of importance was said, as far as Bo could tell — no part of the conversation, even when it included such phrases as I sure as hell am … or Come see for yourself, led to any action, not until Uncle Alcinder finally announced that he had to get home and stood up from his chair and headed for the door.

  That was the first day of Bo’s future.

  On the fifth and sixth and twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth day, it rained. On the eighth day Gran took Bo to the park to see the tulips with their yawning red and purple petals. On the night of the fourth day Bo had a dream about his mama, and he spent the whole next morning thinking that she would be coming to pick him up in the evening. On the twenty-first day he vomited after lunch, and Gran rushed him to the clinic. By the time they got back home four hours later Bo felt fine. On the fifteenth day Pop made up a song about a tree. Tree was the only word of the song. Tree tree tree, tree tree tree. He dared Bo to sing along, but Bo refused. On the twenty-second day Josie didn’t appear to eat her supper, and Bo wouldn’t go up to his own bed without her and finally fell asleep on the sofa. At about noon on the twenty-third day, Josie came back. On the thirtieth day Bo asked Gran for some milk, and Pop called from the living room, “You got your voice back, eh?” Bo kept his mouth shut until the thirty-third day, when Pop asked him if he wanted one of those plastic sand-and-water play sets advertised on television, and Bo said, “Yeah.” This time Pop didn’t question Bo about his long-lost voice, and by the thirty-seventh day Bo had forgotten his resolution to keep quiet and answered any question addressed to him.

  “Want to go up to the big lake, Bo?”

  “Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!”

  Idle May light dancing on the water. Fleas leaping across pockets of sand. Driftwood logs, the refuse from winter storms. Wishing stones. Blue forget-me-nots and lily of the valley blooming on the wooded slope. Mud and sand. So this was how it felt to be up to your ankles in liquid ice! Hop hop, bunny hop. What happened to London Bridge? And was it just a lie or was Bo really getting older? Surely Gran and Pop had always been as old as they were now, no older, no younger. Bo had known them for a long, long time, from way back when all the way to now, and they hadn’t changed at all. Neither had Bo himself. Josie had been a kitten once, that was true. But nothing else changed except by accident. Bunny hop hop bunny hop. When you’re really happy for the first time in a while there’s nothing else to do but take off all your clothes, so he slid his arms out of his T-shirt and struggled to free his head from the tight neck. “Help!” Gran helped lift the shirt off and went on to read Bo’s mind and help him out of his shorts and underpants, warning him not to go into the water over his knees.

  Here was his fine pisser that could spray in a glistening arc. Here was the skin on his arms raised in goose bumps, and the pink scar that made him special. There was the lake as wide as the sky, and the warm sun and the wisps of clouds. Here were the icy droplets rising when he clapped his hands against the surface of the water. There was the disappearing world.

  He was happy through the end of spring and into the summer. He stayed happy even when Gran and Pop sat in chairs on their porch drinking iced tea and blotting sweat from their foreheads, even when he ran smack into the gate leading to the side yard, even when Miraja threw a water balloon at him and it broke and soaked his shirt, even when the man named Taft called him stupid-shit and dropped a cigarette butt on the sidewalk in front of Bo and ordered Bo to spit on it to put it out. Taft could have ripped Bo’s head off his neck, so Bo did as he was told, got down on his hands and knees and spit on the cigarette until it stopped smoking. He didn’t understand why after he did exactly what Taft wanted him to do Taft called him stupidshit again and proclaimed him useless. So what? While Bo had crouched on the sidewalk he’d found a woolly bear caterpillar and had slipped it into his pocket. Later that day he set the caterpillar free beneath the porch, where no one would step on it.

  He dreamed that he stood still, his arms extended, and a swarm of honeybees blanketed him head to toe, but not a single one stung him.

  He was, amazingly, who he’d always been, even though Mama’s little had been dropped from his name, leaving just Hobo, alone and wonderfully alive.

  The weeks passed. Pop changed his tree song to a star song — star star star, star star star �
�� and made up a story about a little girl who fell from a star and landed on a trampoline over on Edgewood Street, bounced up over the trees, and landed with a thud on the sidewalk in front of Gran and Pop’s house on Sycamore. She smelled, Pop said, of cinnamon and sugar. He was describing the sound of her laugh when he heard the phone ring. A while later he heard the snap of plastic against plastic as Gran rammed the phone into its cradle. Pop called, “Erma?” Bo said, “She’s boiling like a pot of water.” Pop called Bo a little comedian and reminded him that when he made his first million in show business he must treat Gran and Pop to banana splits. Gran came in and began plucking toys from the floor of the dining room like they were dandelions gone to seed. “That was Jenny’s mom on the phone,” she said in an icy voice. “She’s passing along a hospital bill. Seems we’re gonna have to come up with eleven thousand dollars. That’s how much it costs to patch up a little boy. Now did Miz Marjory offer to help us out? What do you think? Did she offer to give us a dime?”

  “Not here, Erma.”

  “He belongs to us — that’s the way she sees it, and she don’t want anything to do with him.”

  Who was he? Who was she? Josie the cat was a she. Maybe Gran was confused. Bo wondered if she’d been on the phone with Giantman Taft. Only someone that big and mean could have riled her so.

  “Erma…”

  “Eleven thousand dollars. We’ll have to cash in a bond —”

  “Erma!”

  “You’d think maybe since she’s related she’d see fit to help us out with the cost of his medical —”

  “Stop it!”

  Pop was shouting. Gran was seething. Something had gone wrong, and happiness was just a story like any story Pop told, but this time Bo had mistaken the story for a fact. Star star star, tree tree tree. Or else everything would be all right. Yes, everything would be all right … see? Indeed, it took his grandparents just a few minutes to settle their differences and press on with the undeniably true story of happiness.

  The girl who fell from a star could make wishes come true — three wishes altogether. Bo wished he could fly. What else? He wished he could breathe underwater. What else? He wished for three more wishes. You little comedian, you! Wasn’t he too cute? Even when he picked his nose; even when he announced that he’d deposited a fine turd in the potty; even when he screamed in thrilling fury.

  But Gran kept falling into a temper, as Pop said, which made Bo realize that despite all that had happened he couldn’t name anyone he actually hated. Even the worst of them, Giantman Taft, had his good moods as well as his bad. But the strength of hatred was a source of power, apparently, for whenever Pop tried to talk Gran out of her temper, she snapped back in such a vigorous defense of herself that Pop could only grunt and shake his head. And Gran snapped more and more as the week wore on. She was mad at someone out there, a stranger living out beyond the neighborhood. Whomever she hated had started something that would culminate in a final bloody scene of terror. Bo dreamed of it one hot still night later in the week — he saw a wild man crash through the front door, grab Gran, and tear her head from her neck. Bo hid in the closet in his dream and watched through the keyhole but by then he could make out nothing beyond the explosion of red, no faces, no expressions, only the bursting cartoon blood, and he knew at once that the scene wasn’t real. Yet when he awoke he couldn’t shake his fear, and for this reason he respected Gran’s new temper, learned to avoid her when she was snapping and to keep quiet when she wanted to make her point to Pop by thumping her fist against the table. There was an enemy somewhere out there, an enemy no one was willing to name, and life was suddenly dangerous.

  So what? Bo jumped into the Park and Rec pool, jumped right through the loop of Uncle Danny’s arms, went under, kicked to the surface, and was greeted by applause. Thank you, thank you. A pigeon landed on his arm and ate crumbs from the palm of his hand. A billy goat at the petting zoo tried to eat the tail of his shirt. Bo picked a ripe tomato off the vine, and Gran laughed so hard drops of maple syrup fell from her eyes and left sticky lines on her cheeks. Pop ate barbecue potato chips straight from the bag. The kids in the neighborhood sat on the porch steps and ate Fudgsicles. Dogs fought in the street until Giantman Taft came along and kicked them both in the ribs and sent them howling. Pop told a story about a little girl who fell asleep in a pile of laundry and was sent to the cleaners. Gran said, “Tell him something he needs to know.” So Pop made up a story about a Mandingo boy captured and sold into slavery, where he was beaten with a whip by cruel overseers and forced to pick worms off cotton plants until he couldn’t take it any longer and ran away. He ran through the night, tore through brambles, swam across rivers, hid in trees, and finally reached freedom. Bo was too embarrassed to ask for the meaning of freedom — one of those words, he sensed, that he should have already known. So he made up his own meaning, which had to do with breaking the surface of the water after he’d put his head under for the first time. The cold water turned his red scar yellowish. Bo ate buttery popcorn. He rode a neighbor’s Newfoundland dog as though it were a horse. He went with Miraja and Aunt Meredith to see the trout in the hatchery, as many trout in a single tank, Miraja said on the way there, as there were stars in the sky. And every one of those fish seemed to be looking at Bo, searching his face for something. The dark gleam in the eye of a fish. Whom should Bo learn to hate?

  He peed in his bed. He tried to cry for help in his dream but couldn’t make a sound. He pulled Josie’s tail, daring her to scratch him again, but she just flicked her tail loose and scampered off. He chased the pigeons. He climbed out of the grocery cart while Gran was selecting a carton of eggs from the shelf. “I hate eggs!” he screamed, pleased to remember that he did hate something after all. He tried to catch the first leaves as they fell. He kissed the maple syrup on Gran’s cheek. He grew older by the hour but remained, in everyone’s estimation, too cute for words. He turned his face up, yawned as wide as he could, and took a big bite out of the sky.

  Eddie Gantz bought a hot dog and Pepsi from a vendor in front of the federal building and sat on a bench to eat. With an extra napkin he wiped the sweat from his face. He chewed slowly, thoughtfully. He’d been coming up to the city for the past three days to serve as a juror on a civil trial, a whiplash case. Eddie Gantz was an opinionated man, he wouldn’t deny it, and if anyone bothered to ask him his opinion about this trial he’d tell him that it was a plain waste of taxpayer dollars. Consider that the plaintiff offered as proof of her extreme pain and suffering a myopic doctor who threw Valium at her without performing any tests, and the defense countered with an eyewitness who testified that the defendant couldn’t have been traveling at more than eight miles per hour at the time of the accident. A minor fender bender that left the plaintiff incapacitated for three months? A bump in a traffic jam that made it impossible for the woman, a housewife already on disability for chronic depression, to pop a frozen dinner into the microwave? How absurd! The lengths people will go for money!

  Eddie tore a piece off his hot dog bun and threw it into a clutch of filthy pigeons, then watched the flurry of competition that followed, just as he’d watched the trial, fascinated by the contradictions in testimony, the distortions, the self-pity, the moral blindness. He had never been able to fathom moral blindness. The sinner who commits a sin with full awareness — now this he could understand, for morality makes itself known with sharp contrasts. Yet there were criminals who refused to recognize their culpability, sinners who considered themselves saints, individuals who lied under oath, women who believed they had the right to take the life of their unborn child. It was the role of belief that puzzled Eddie so. Such people managed to convince themselves that night was day and wrong was right, and they couldn’t be budged, no matter how obvious their error of judgment. In the name of choice, women had gone so far as to insist that they should be allowed to have a viable baby’s brains sucked out of its skull so it wouldn’t be born alive. And just last Sunday a fellow usher at Eddie’s ch
urch had passed along a copy of a magazine article in which the author set out to explain the increasing practice of infanticide among American mothers and came damn close to declaring the atrocity a necessary evolutionary development and therefore worthy of judicial leniency!

  It was this kind of thinking that aroused in Eddie a deeply private panic, never to be spoken of or revealed in any way. You wouldn’t have seen any change in the attentive expression on his face as he sat on the bench and watched the traffic on the street. His sharp blue eyes followed a police car turning right on red at the intersection. His jaw remained set, his lips closed in a straight, earnest line. The skin of his cheeks had a red hue, not from too much drinking but from chronic eczema. He kept his white hair, what was left of it, cropped close to his scalp so from a distance he appeared entirely bald. And though he carried thirty pounds more than an average man his height, he looked fit, like a professional football coach or a retired military officer, certainly not like a man in danger of losing his sanity. But this was how he felt sometimes. The idiocy of civilized people shook him to the core — not because he considered himself superior but because he appreciated the innate intelligence of the common man. He was common. Born into a family of dairy farmers in Herkimer County, educated at a community college, living in a fine little cape with a view of Hadley Lake, managing an appliance store, taking care of his wife. He was sixty-seven years old — he’d had plenty of time to choose wrong over right, plenty of time to commit a crime or to politic for Satan. But with a little guidance from his church and the experience of his parents’ common goodness to remember, he had found it easy to lead a life of steady virtue. Why wasn’t it easy for everyone else? Why wasn’t it easy for the woman — a common woman, a black woman, a Christian — sitting in a state supreme court on the fourth floor of the federal building to distinguish between right and wrong?