Floater

by Gary Brandner

Trudy McDowell smiled fondly at her son. “Don’t worry. Your father left the car for me so I can take the copy down myself.”

  She was a slim, intelligent woman who served as an anchor for his often erratic father. It was scary to Alec the way she sometimes seemed to read his mind.

  “Is Roman picking you up?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s nice.”

  She never commented one way or the other on Alec’s choice of friends, or anything else having to do with his private life. It was one of the reasons Alec loved his mother so very much. She bent down and kissed him lightly on the ear.

  “Have a good time, darling.”

  Her breast brushed against his arm as she straightened up, and Alec shivered. His mother was starting to turn gray, but she had retained a young, sexy body, which he found most disturbing.

  Roman Dixon rumbled up with the windows rolled down, naturally, and the 8-track blasting at brain-damage level. Alec smiled, tried to close his ear passages, and got into the Chevy next to Roman.

  With “Good Vibrations” booming from the four custom flush-mounted front and rear speakers, threatening to shatter the car’s windshield, Roman tooled happily out of the Meadow and on down to Main Street. There everybody who counted at Wolf River High was either cruising the street or strolling the sidewalk. Roman seemed oblivious to the danger of imminent deafness. The admiring looks he got from the kids and the sour expressions from the adults made the pain worthwhile.

  Main Street intersected with Elm at the bottom of the long gradual slope known locally as the Hill. The higher you went on the Hill, the higher was your position on the Wolf River social scale. At the very top stood the stone mansions of the Gotschke and Speith families, whose members had seldom been seen in Wolf River since the end of World War II. They preferred to live in places like Brown Deer or Evanston, but their names still brought respect in Wolf River.

  Just below the fabled Gotschkes and Speiths lived people like Ralph Hartman, the banker, and his family. In descending order were found the houses of the town’s top professionals, the landowners, and the leading merchants. Near the bottom were the police chief, management people from Allis Chalmers, and professors from the college.

  As Roman and Alec rolled up to the corner of Elm and Main, a cluster of girls idled outside Weisfield’s jewelry store, pretending to admire the window display of wrist-watches. At the approach of the gleaming Chevy they giggled and waved.

  Roman nudged Alec McDowell and said something.

  Alec shook his head and cupped a hand to his ear.

  Reluctantly Roman turned down the Beach Boys a few decibels. He pointed at the girls and said, “See anything you like?”

  “Looks like the same old stuff to me,” Alec said.

  “Yeah, but you notice some of them are really filling out? Check the tits on Claire Hennesey.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many of them you suppose got laid over the summer?”

  Alec looked over the group and practiced his inexpert Elvis lip curl. “Them?”

  “Sure. How many you think buried the old weenie?”

  “None, if I know Wolf River girls.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. They’re female. The chicks want it as much as we do, and nowadays they’re not afraid to ask for it.”

  “Nobody’s asked me this week,” Alec said.

  “You got to let ’em know you’re available. No shit. They all take the Pill now, so they don’t have to worry about getting knocked up. There’ll be plenty of pussy out there for a guy that knows how to get it.”

  Roman made the turn and headed up Elm between the rows of stately trees that gave the street its name. The houses near Main Street were well kept but modest. Up near the crest of the Hill where Lindy Grant lived, the houses were fifty years old and more — sturdy and sedate structures with gables and porches and leaded windows. The houses wore new paint, and the lush lawns were bordered by neat box hedges.

  On this first Saturday of the school year social distinctions were not as important as they would soon become again. Kids from the old families on the Hill mingled freely and happily with classmates from the Meadow, and even the Poles from the South Side, Wolf River’s oldest and poorest district. The cars were shined up, the sky was blue, the leaves just beginning to turn. The air was warm with a soft Indian summer breeze. Roman drove slowly, enjoying his sense of being young, healthy, and popular.

  • • •

  With the Beach Boys continuing to assault him from four speakers, Alec had some difficulty keeping the smile on his face. But he did. To him the California surfer sound was musical Pablum. If he was choosing the music, he’d have gone with Andre Kostelanetz, but that was a peculiarity he was not about to make public. The important thing was that if you were going to be Roman Dixon’s friend and ride in Roman’s car, you’d better listen to Roman’s music. You either liked it or you kept your mouth shut.

  As they headed up Elm Street, Alec leaned closer to the window so the other kids would be sure to see him. He knew a lot of them would kill to be riding up here in the school’s sharpest car with the football hero. There were some payoffs to listening to the windbag.

  Roman shifted down unnecessarily, rumbling the pipes. He stroked the floor stick lovingly, like it was his cock. He looked over, and Alec understood he was expected to comment.

  “You sure got this baby running sweet,” he said.

  “I came home a week early to tune her up before school started.”

  “How come you didn’t drive it down to Madison?” Much as he wanted to stay friends, Alec could not bring himself to refer to an automobile as “her.”

  “I was staying with my aunt and uncle, and they’ve only got room in their garage for one car, and I wasn’t about to leave this baby out in the weather.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Alec said. “Not with a paint job like this.”

  “Besides, you don’t need a car to score in that town. The women have their own. They want to go somewhere, they take you.”

  “No shit.”

  “Yeah. They’re really hungry for it. They’d hang around the construction site and watch us. You should have seen them lick their chops whenever we took off our shirts.”

  Alec widened his eyes. “Wow.”

  “Had to fight ’em off, practically.”

  “Wow.”

  “All they got for men in Madison is radicals and hippies from the university. Bunch of long-haired faggots. Women down there get a chance to see real men, they flip out.”

  I will not say “wow” one more time, Alec told himself.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “So how’d the summer go for you?” Roman asked, making little effort to sound interested.

  “Dull. I worked at the Chronicle with Dad, as usual.”

  “That what you gonna do? Work on a newspaper like your old man?”

  “I guess, after college. I haven’t thought too much about it.”

  “I know one thing I’m not going to do,” said Roman, “and that’s work in a factory. For one thing, factory work is a batch of shit, and for another, my old man would kill me.”

  “Your dad makes a good living.”

  “It’s still working in a factory. He comes home with grease on his clothes, and his fingernails are always black.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  Roman brightened. “Hey, maybe you’ll be a sports-writer and you can write about me.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a kick.”

  Not fucking likely, Alec thought. Once he was out of this shit town he would be somebody and be on his own and wouldn’t need to suck around with jocks. It was to his advantage now to be tight with the class hero — it got him invited to parties and it got him dates with girls who otherwise would have brushed him off. But pretending to agree with every simpleminded statement of the Star could be a giant pain. Someday he would love to tell Roman Dixon what a stupid prick he really was.

  But not
today.

  CHAPTER 5

  FRAZIER

  In one of the big old wood frame houses on lower Elm Street, in the first block off Main, Frazier Nunley lived with his mother and father. His father had bought the place at the end of World War II with his GI loan. That was when he and his wife planned a large family, before Orva Nunley discovered that Frazier was the only child she could ever have.

  The house was clearly too large for the three of them, but it would have been more expensive to move somewhere else than it was to keep it. During the summer they kept two of the upstairs bedrooms closed off. When the school year began, the extra rooms were rented out to students at Harvey College, the small liberal arts school at the edge of town.

  This year the new dorm had gone up out on the campus, so the two upstairs rooms were not in use. The extra income was missed, for although Ellis Nunley was head of the English Department at Harvey, his salary was not large.

  On this first Saturday of September, Frazier Nunley lay on the narrow bed in his upstairs room trying to keep his mind occupied by solving chess problems from a book his father had brought home. He enjoyed the intellectual challenge of the problems, but he never played the actual game. That was because there was simply no one in Wolf River good enough to play him.

  One quick glance at the board layout was all Frazier needed for the hypothetical problems. He usually worked on several in his mind at the same time. When they were difficult enough, Frazier found some satisfaction in solving them quickly and systematically. Today, however, the mental exercise gave him no pleasure.

  Through the window of his bedroom, even though it was tightly closed against drafts, he could hear the kids down on Main Street calling to each other, driving back and forth or strolling along the sidewalks. It was that way every Saturday of the school year, but especially the first. Frazier could lie here and listen to them talking and laughing and having a simpleminded good time.

  Sure it was simpleminded, and pointless, but they were having fun. In the life of Frazier Nunley, straight-A student, chess master, acknowledged class genius, there was precious little fun. He would have given a lot to be a part of the foolish revelry on Main Street today.

  At fourteen, Frazier was much younger than his senior classmates, to say nothing of being smarter. He had skipped three grades in elementary school but was still far ahead of the class in brain power. He could easily have passed the exams right now to get into Harvey. His father, in fact, was in favor of such a move. Frazier’s mother, however, thought her son should not be too far removed from the ordinary experiences of the young, and wanted him to have a reasonably normal senior year in high school.

  Normal my ass, thought Frazier. There was no way he would ever fit in. The other kids treated him with a certain respect for his mind, but he knew full well that privately they thought of him as the school nerd. Some, he knew, even thought he was queer, but in that they were dead wrong. Frazier Nunley’s loins surged with as many heterosexual yearnings as any of his classmates. He daily lamented his lack of a chance to prove it.

  Part of the problem was the way he looked. Forced to wear glasses since the first grade, his eyes were big and froggy behind the thick lenses. His body was lumpy and soft, bulging out like a girl at the hips. With his coarse, mud-colored hair and his pimply complexion, it was small wonder he had never had a real date.

  Then there were his allergies. Hardly a pollen or an animal existed that did not set Frazier to sniffling and sneezing. The windows in his house had to be kept tightly closed. He took pills to alleviate the reaction when he did go out, but he still went through a big box of Kleenex in the course of a school day.

  Frazier hated his body. He hated the way it looked, and he hated the way it was allergic to damn near everything. He could not blame heredity. His father was lean and wiry, a fraction under average height, but well proportioned and fiercely healthy. His mother was a tall, beautiful woman with the classic features of a Greek statue. No, for his physical flaws at least, Frazier had nobody to blame but himself — his fondness for candy bars and sweet soda, and his abhorrence of exercise. He was solely responsible for the way his body looked, but that didn’t make it any easier to carry around.

  Sometimes Frazier hated his mind, too. He would have liked to struggle along with the other kids over the problems that he sailed through using a fraction of his brain. At least in that he could be one of them. Sure, being a genius made school easier, but it also made him different. To be different in adolescence was to be shunned.

  But much as Frazier enjoyed an occasional wallow in self-pity, he recognized it for what it was and snapped himself out of it when he figured he’d had enough. Now, with the laughter of his classmates still ringing outside, he wiped the chess problems out of his mind and filled it with a happier image, one he often summoned when he was depressed: Lindy Grant.

  Lovely, laughing, popular, unattainable Lindy Grant. Last spring she had replaced Natalie Wood in Frazier’s sex fantasies. Seeing Lindy in his mind was not quite as satisfying as covertly watching the real article in class, but it was better than nothing.

  During the long summer, while Lindy was out of town, Frazier had filled the tedious hours with vivid, sensual mental pictures of her. Lindy, he had decided, was absolutely the most beautiful, most desirable creature he had ever seen. The first glimpse of her last week after the summer’s drought had hit him like a punch to the stomach. She was in two of his classes. Unfortunately, her desk was located some distance from his in both classes, but at least she was in a position where he could get a good look at her.

  Frazier lay on the bed and let the vision of Lindy Grant fill his mind. He slid a hand down inside his jockey shorts and felt his erection grow. He began a slow, purposeful stroking.

  “Frazier, what are you doing?”

  His mother was a loving, well-meaning woman, but she seemed to have some sixth sense that enabled her to intrude on Frazier’s most private moments. He snatched his hand away as though she could see through the wooden door.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “I have a new record of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne. It’s by Alicia de Larrocha. Would you like to listen with me?”

  Orva Nunley was an accomplished musician herself, who once seriously considered a concert career. Wolf River, however, offered little opportunity for serious music. She loved her husband dearly, but Ellis was strictly a literary man with a tin ear. So she relied on her gifted son as someone to share her music with.

  Frazier loved and understood his mother’s music, and usually enjoyed their sessions together. But right at this minute, he would rather be left alone.

  “I’ll be down in a little while,” he said.

  “All right, dear,” his mother said.

  She never pressured him, never urged him to undertake anything he did not want to. Nor did his father. They were both a little in awe of the genius child they had produced.

  Frazier lay back on the bed and drew in a series of deep breaths. He closed his eyes and imagined a blue dot directly in front of his forehead. The dot expanded into a window that irised open like a camera shutter. As he relaxed, the aperture grew larger. On the other side lay a soft blue sky with cottony clumps of white clouds. Frazier could hear tender, seductive sounds — the sighing of a gentle breeze, a girl’s laughter. He focused his concentration on the spectral window, shutting out all external stimuli. Then, slowly, gently, he floated up and through the opening into the outside world.

  This was Frazier Nunley’s secret. No one — not his talented and loving mother, not his fond but preoccupied father, certainly not his classmates, knew what he could do. And Frazier was not about to tell anyone. They had reasons enough to laugh behind his back without thinking he was a certified wacko.

  The marvelous power had come about almost by accident, and Frazier himself was much surprised at the discovery.

  It had happened the first time three years ago, when Frazier was eleven. He was in bed, sick with the f
lu. Frazier always caught whatever form of flu was “going around.” He lay on his back dreamily watching a spider spin a web at the junction of two walls and his bedroom ceiling. Such a beautiful construction for the single deadly purpose of entrapping an unwary fly. In Frazier’s feverish mind the spider took on a mystical significance. The great Builder and Destroyer.

  He followed its labors intently as each delicate strand of the web was spun out and attached at precisely the right spot to another strand. A work of art with a lethal intent. The construction was a miraculous and wonderful thing to watch, all the more so because Frazier knew it would not last out the day. No fly, even had one found its way into the Nunley house, would be ensnared there. His mother, for all her appreciation of the arts, would see the spiderweb only as something unclean, to be swept away. It would not long escape her eye, and that would be the end of both the web and its creator.

  In his half-dozing, dreamlike state, Frazier urged the spider on. It became crucial that he see the web to its completion before the cataclysmic broom swept it away.

  With every fiber of his concentration zeroed in on the tiny insect, Frazier became gradually aware of a change in his perspective, along with a pleasant floating sensation. The pain and fever of his illness drained away. Up and up he rose, silently, gently, like a helium-filled balloon, until he was right there with the industrious spider. He found he could examine at microscopic range the dainty filaments of the web, glistening with the sticky secretion that would ensnare the unwary fly.

  His hearing, too, was unnaturally acute. As the spider moved delicately along the strands of the web, apparently unaware of his presence, it made soft, harplike twanging sounds. The sensation was exhilarating beyond anything in his limited experience.

  The real shock came when his vision swiveled to survey the rest of the room from his new vantage point. There below on the bed lay Frazier Nunley. The detested pudgy body was awake, but unseeing and unfeeling. The pimply face was flushed and shining with perspiration. The eyes were closed. A beatific smile lay on the lips.