by John McNally
“What if he’s using the bathroom?” I asked.
“I don’t care,” Ralph said. “It’s tonight or never.”
“Thank God!” I said.
We were on the blacktop, waiting for the bell to ring. Ralph, glaring at Roark, ground his molars so hard, I thought I heard them squeak. When the bell rang—a noise that always made my heart clench—I started making my way toward the eighth grade line, moaning with each step.
“What’s your problem, Hank?”
“My mother pitched my old tennis shoes,” I said. “She thought they were getting ratty. So until I get some new ones, I have to wear these.” I pointed to the wingtips from Kinney shoes.
Ralph said, “Sure your grandmother didn’t leave those for you in her will?”
I shrugged. No one had said anything about a will. All Dad ever talked about these days was having to go over to Grandma’s trailer and, as he put it, sift through all her junk. Last night, after dinner, he lit a cigarette. Staring at the flame rising from his Bic, he said, “An accidental fire would make my life a hell of a lot easier. Accidental on purpose!” He sucked on his cigarette, coughed a few balls of smoke, then dropped the lighter next to his ashtray.
“Tonight,” Ralph said. He reached over and gently touched my ear, and I shivered.
Before meeting up with Ralph, my father took me over to Grandma’s trailer. The trailer was in a park across the street from Haunted Trails Miniature Golf Range, and from her bedroom window, you could see the looming head of Frankenstein, the bolts sticking out of either side of his neck. I’d been inside the trailer a few hundred times before, but I’d never noticed until today how small it was or how little she owned.
“Well, hell,” Dad said, peeking under the bed, then tipping the cedar chest up to see if anything was underneath. “This won’t take much time at all. Guess I won’t have to burn the place down after all.”
“There’s not much to burn,” I said. But when I opened the closet door, hundreds of pairs of shoes came tumbling out, an avalanche large enough to grip my ankles.
“Holy Mother!” Dad said.
There were slippers, white orthopedics, high-heeled shoes with straps, stilettos. There were clogs, sneakers, even snow boots. I’d never really thought much about shoes before, but looking at these, I sort of understood her fascination. It was no different than my own desire to save every issue of TV Guide. There were things you collected for no other reason than that you wanted to collect them. I couldn’t explain to anyone why I owned over two hundred issues of TV Guide. I just did.
On our way home, Dad said, “Your grandmother sort of lost her mind near the end. Went a little cuckoo.”
“I don’t think she was all that crazy,” I said.
Dad didn’t say anything until he’d stopped at a red light. Then he turned to me and said, “What do you know about crazy? Huh? You’ve never seen anything in your life except civilized behavior. Hell, we’re practically the Cleavers. Your mother’s June, I’m whatever-the-hell-the-dad’s-name-is, your sister’s Wally, and you’re the Beav. Did they have a dog? I can’t remember. Doesn’t make a difference for the point I’m making. But here’s my point…”
A car behind us started honking. The light had turned green a while ago, and now it was already turning yellow again.
“Okay, okay!” Dad said and punched the gas. We barely made it a block when a cop pulled us over and wrote my father a ticket for failing to yield.
“Have a nice day,” the cop said, swaggering back to his cruiser.
I waited until we were almost home before speaking again. “You were about to make a point,” I reminded him.
“What?” He seemed startled to discover that I was in the car with him.
“Before that guy honked his horn.”
My father looked up at the ticket pinned under the visor, then cut his eyes to me. “A point? What point? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hank.” He parked the car, snatched the ticket from the visor, and said, “Hold on to your hat, son. Here’s where it all hits the fan.”
I checked my watch. I was already late meeting Ralph. I walked behind Dad, but as soon as we stepped over the threshold, I turned around and walked back outside, shutting the door between us.
Ralph was waiting at a corner, jabbing the shattered sidewalk with a stick. All along the sidewalk were places where blunt instruments had slammed down, leaving cobweb patterns in the concrete, and I wondered if Ralph came out here at night with a ball-ping hammer and smashed the sidewalk himself.
Ralph said, “Where were you? We’re supposed to be at the hardware store right now. My surveillance information leads me to believe that Roark will be there.”
“Surveillance information? What surveillance information?” I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of Ralph having the equipment to listen in on people. I knew he’d tap my phone in a heartbeat if he had the means to do it.
Ralph said, “I don’t want to give away all my tricks, but if you really want to know, I took a drinking glass and held the bottom of it up to their living room window last night, and then I stuck my ear to the mouth of the glass. I got all sorts of good stuff, including this business about going to the hardware store.” He winged the stick into the neighbor’s yard, causing a cat to yowl and run up a tree. He stood and brushed dirt from his already permanently stained pants.
Dellagado’s Hardware was all the way across town. For long stretches of the walk I didn’t think I was going to make it. My new shoes were chopping away at my ankles, and I cringed each time my foot hit the pavement. Though we got there before closing, the manager was already pushing the last of the marked-down lawnmowers back inside the store.
“You kids better hurry up if you want anything.”
Ralph saluted the man, then rolled his eyes at me.
Loitering in the row of pesticides, I asked, “Do you think Roark already left?”
Ralph picked up a box of weed killer and said, “Am I carrying a crystal ball? How should I know?” He set the weed killer down and reached for a can of wasp spray when the bell above the front door jingled and Roark lumbered inside with a man who looked creepily like what you’d imagine Roark to look like in thirty years.
“Is that his father?” I whispered.
“Gee, I don’t know,” Ralph said. “Here, let me get my crystal ball out again.” Then he gently smacked my face with a fly-swatter.
“Ouch! Sorry,” I said.
Roark’s father walked up to the manager, and the manager said, “What’s new in the world today, Roark?”
Ralph and I looked around for Roark Pile, but he had already abandoned his father.
The father said, “Same ol’, same ol’.”
“Oh, no,” Ralph said. “The old man’s name is Roark, too.”
“Two Roarks?” I said. “How is that even possible?”
Ralph and I didn’t have to say anything more. We both knew the truth: the men who had hired Ralph were after Roark’s father and not Roark. I was about to suggest we leave when Roark Jr. rounded the corner and nearly slammed into us. He froze but didn’t say a word. A sound came from his throat like he was having a heart attack, but then I realized that it was just Roark breathing. We were so close that I saw the intricate details of his ears. They were small and pink. The lobes were attached to his head instead of dangling, like mine or Ralph’s. I could even see the ear’s network of veins and the blue blood that shot through them. He must have sensed that I was looking at his ears, because he reached up and scratched one before turning and leaving us alone in the bug spray aisle.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. “Are you going to bite an ear off of each Roark?”
“Ugh. I don’t believe this.” And then, without so much as baring his teeth at either them, Ralph walked past the two Roarks and out of the store. I caught up to him.
I said, “I better call home for a ride. My shoes feel like they’re made out of razor blades.”
Ralph ignored me. H
e kept walking. When he finally stopped, he said, “If I’d known it was this Roark Pile, I’d never have agreed. I have age limits. I won’t bite off the ear of anyone eighteen years old or older. I mean, I’d love to bite the guy’s ear off, don’t get me wrong.”
“Can’t you make an exception?” I asked.
Ralph shook his head. “A man sets up rules, he has stick to them. If I make an exception today, what’s to stop me from biting off, say, your father’s ear. Or your mother’s, for that matter.”
I shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”
“That’s right.” Ralph sighed. “I don’t know. I was thinking of getting out of the business, anyway.” He took his price-list from his shirt pocket and said, “Here. Maybe you’ll want to take it over. The money’s good and the hours are flexible.”
“I don’t think anyone’s afraid of me,” I said.
Ralph said, “You’re right. People aren’t afraid of you. But once they know you’ve got this price-list, that’ll all change.”
“Thanks,” I said. I tucked it into my pants pocket. Ralph started walking away, but I couldn’t bring myself to follow, limping instead to the nearest phone so that I could beg my mom for a ride home.
The next morning at school, a long dark sedan rolled up alongside the playground, a tinted window crept down, and a man with dark sunglasses motioned Ralph over.
Ralph said, “Time to break the news.” He sauntered over to the car, crouched, and poked his head through the open window. I could see a lot of hand gesturing, but I couldn’t hear anything.
“So?” I asked when Ralph returned.
“They weren’t happy.”
“It was a misunderstanding,” I said. “I mean, how were you supposed to know there were two Roarks, right? What are the odds?”
“Actually,” Ralph said, “I spent their money.”
“They paid you up front?”
Ralph nodded.
“It’s only fifteen bucks,” I said. “Can’t your cousins loan you fifteen bucks?”
“The problem,” Ralph said, “is that they gave me a hundred.”
“A hundred?” I said. “For chawing off an ear?” I pulled out the list that Ralph had given to me. I was right: Ear chawed off. $15. One hundred dollars was for doing the big job. Murder. I looked back up at Ralph.
Ralph said, “They didn’t say exactly what they wanted, so I was going to mix it up a little, make it come out to a hundred bucks’ worth of service. You know, chew his ear off, then punch him forty-three times.”
“And you think that would have been okay with them?” I asked.
Ralph shrugged. “Probably not,” he said.
My feet continued to ache from the new shoes. In a spiral notebook I charted their metamorphosis, how they went from being baby soft feet to bloody stumps, from slightly toughened feet to bloody stumps again, from callused feet to bloody stumps again, and so on. The garbage can next to the washer and dryer was stuffed with bloody socks.
Mom said, “I thought you’d eventually break them in, but I guess that’s not going to happen. You’re costing me a fortune in new socks.”
And so, in the end, it wasn’t the pain so much as the cost that resulted from the pain that finally persuaded my mother to give me ten bucks for a new pair of sneakers. She was too embarrassed to go with me after our last adventure together, so one Saturday I limped all the way to Kinney Shoes by myself. Aisle after aisle, I picked up sneakers and tested their durability by bending them toe to heel. For fun, I imagined how much it would hurt if my foot were inside and someone were bending my foot the same way that I was bending the shoe. I was making the face of someone in excruciating pain when the big salesman from my last visit appeared behind me and said, “You want to give it a whirl? Try it on for size? See how it works for you?”
“Sure!” I said.
I tried on both shoes, walking up and down the aisles, first bouncing on my toes, then walking on my heels. I was about to tell the salesman that I’d take them when the front door opened and Roark Pile walked in with a woman who must’ve been his mother.
“What kind of dress shoe do you have in a size eight?” the woman asked the salesman, and it was like a fist jabbed square in my gut, hearing the same question my own mother had asked when we were looking at shoes for Grandma’s wake—and though it was possible that Roark and his mother were here for no other purpose than to buy shoes, I couldn’t help wondering if the men who had hired Ralph had contracted someone else to take care of the problem. Because of this, I really didn’t want to be in the same store with Roark and his mother. It didn’t seem right.
I was at the far end of an aisle, watching from the greatest distance possible. Roark began looking around, so I stepped out of sight, hiding behind a tall shelf of shoes.
The salesman said, “Let me round up a few choices,” and I heard his feet slapping the carpet, the slap getting louder and louder, until he was upon me. “How’re those sneakers working out?”
“They’re pretty nice,” I said. “Comfy.”
“It’s your lucky day,” he said. “They’re on sale. Nineteen ninety-nine.”
I nodded. I had only ten bucks, not a penny more.
“Genuine leather,” he added before heading for the back room to search for dress shoes.
I peeked around the corner. Roark was heading down my aisle. I walked one aisle over so that a tall shelf of shoes separated us. I could feel his presence, so I tried miming his moves, taking a step when I heard him take a step, moving slowly toward the exit while Roark moved slowly toward the stock room. It was like some kind of magnetic force pulling us together, and midway down the aisle I knew that he was directly opposite me, standing on the other side of that shelf. I tried not to breathe, hoping he wouldn’t know that I was there, but then I saw him looking at me through a cluster of perforated holes in the shelving unit, the way a fly looks at someone with its many eyes.
“Why do you keep following me?” he whispered. “Everywhere I go,” Roark said, “you’re there.”
I wanted to explain, but to say anything in my defense would only prove Roark right: I had been following him. Maybe not today, but on all those days with Ralph, I’d trailed Roark’s every move. So I didn’t say anything. I tiptoed away, toward Mrs. Pile, toward the entrance, and the magnetic grip started to loosen. Each step became easier than the last.
Mrs. Pile had parked herself on a bench. As soon as I reached the door and turned to nod at her, the salesman came out of the stock room holding several shoe boxes. He froze when he saw me at the door, as if fearing he had lost a customer, but then he looked down at the new pair of gym shoes on my feet and realized what was about to happen. Roark was still looking through the perforated shelf, waiting for me to answer his question, not realizing that I was no longer there. Mrs. Pile was watching her own curious son, as if trying to figure out how he had become what he had become. The salesman, eyes narrowing, didn’t say or do anything. Nobody said or did anything, and I realized that whatever was going to happen next hinged on my next move.
“Roark!” I yelled, startling myself. Roark looked up, confused to see me now by the door. “Is that you?” I asked, smiling and looking around. Everything that happened next seemed beyond my control. I strode over to Roark, trapped him in a hug, and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Where’ve you been hiding? I haven’t seen you in ages!” As Roark tensed in my embrace, I peeked over my shoulder. The salesman had resumed delivering the new shoes to Mrs. Pile, and Mrs. Pile was staring at Roark and the friend she didn’t know he had. Clearly, I had made her day. Her son had friends! Who’d have guessed?
I turned back to Roark, patting his shoulder. I was about to let go when I felt him relax. His grip on me, however, tightened. I wanted to say something, a word of comfort, but when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I just stood there holding the poor kid. Was he crying? I wondered. I couldn’t tell. “Here, here,” I said, but it was more for myself than for Roark, because suddenly I w
as the one who felt like crying. I didn’t know why, either. For my grandmother? For Roark’s father? For standing in this shoe store, not knowing what would happen next? I really couldn’t have said. I patted Roark and listened for the telltale signs, the sniffles, the sobs, but the only sounds I could make out were Roark’s asthmatic breaths and my own thumping heart, as if one depended upon the other to keep the two of us alive.
4
Mom said she needed to talk to me—“this minute,” she said—that it was really important and couldn’t wait, but I said, “Not now.” I opened the sliding glass door, walked outside, and found my dog Tex, who’d spent this week digging up the backyard, holding a bone lengthwise in his mouth, his fourth one today. He dropped it onto a small, neat pile next to the grill. He licked my hand, and I pointed at his nose and said, Sit! Give me a paw! but he tilted his head, then ran away.
We had found Tex two weeks ago during a downpour, this wet dog the size and color of a meatloaf. He was lumbering across the expressway, his dark head hung low, too depressed by the rain and lightning to care about the cars and trucks speeding toward him. Dad pulled over and Mom opened her door, and together we lured him into our car and into our lives with the promise of a good home and table scraps.
“He smells like a dog,” my father had said. He snickered and called him a dog’s dog—a joke I didn’t get, though I liked how it sounded.
“Tex!” I yelled now, but Tex was busy in the backyard, digging where I couldn’t see him. Our house was small, our front lawn tiny, but the backyard stretched away forever—one of the few in the city that did so, but only because if you kept walking you’d run into a fence, and beyond that fence was an industrial park that nobody wanted to live near.
I sat on the crooked chaise lounge, just beyond the rim of the bug-light’s light, and I watched and listened to the moths and June Bugs and what-have-you touch down on the bulb, then flap crazily to get away from it. In the mornings I liked to walk outside barefoot and check the yellow bulb, see the wings glued to the glass, and touch what’s left of these bugs who wanted too much of a good thing.
