Mrs Trout thought Mr Trout’s attitude a touch laissez faire even for West Virginia, but was hesitant to take Wayne to the doctor without his say-so. Besides, her concern for Wayne was more for the neighbours’ sakes than his, worrying as she did that the impression he made on them would in some way reflect badly on her. Once Wayne was in school, however, the matter was taken out of their hands and placed in those of a professional.
It was at the start of Wayne’s second year that the headmaster called the Trouts to his office and shared his concerns. Their son, he said, was falling behind: his reading and math skills were substandard and his pencil grip was poor; he struggled to draw pictures and write words and was always the last to hand in work. He didn’t concentrate and was easily distracted, was floundering in Phys Ed and had problems banging a drum; he…
‘I’m not saying Wayne’s simple, Mr & Mrs Trout, but it does appear that your son has some unusual difficulties. I think it’s important we get to the root of these as soon as possible and so, with your permission, I’d like to send him to an educational psychologist.’
Although reluctant to put their son in the hands of a shrink the Trouts agreed to the headmaster’s suggestion and after several meetings with Wayne and a barrage of tests, the educational psychologist made his diagnosis. Wayne Trout, he decided, was suffering from dyspraxia.
He met with the Trouts the following week and chose his words carefully, words he believed the odd-looking couple sitting opposite him would understand.
‘He’s got clumsy kid syndrome,’ he said, coming straight to the point.
Mr Trout was about to ask for his money back when the psychologist continued. ‘There’s a part of the brain called the cerebellum, and this is the brain’s skill centre. If the cerebellum malfunctions it transmits inaccurate messages to the body. While the brain is expecting the body to do one thing the body thinks the brain is asking it to do something different. It’s a classic case of miscommunication – a bit like a Chinese whisper.’
‘So it’s a foreign disease, then?’ Mr Trout ventured.
‘Of course it’s not a foreign disease!’ the psychologist unintentionally snapped. ‘It’s neither foreign nor a disease. It’s an innate disorder.’
Mr Trout tried again: ‘So what you’re saying is that Wayne’s ate something and not digested it properly.’
‘No, no, no, Mr Trout! What Wayne has is a condition, a condition peculiar to him and one he was born with. It has nothing to do with food!’
‘It’s nothing we’ve done, then?’ Mrs Trout asked, relieved that the psychologist had made no mention of tobacco.
The psychologist shook his head and Mrs Trout rasped a sigh of relief.
‘Is it something the boy will grow out of?’ Mr Trout asked.
‘No, I’m afraid Wayne’s stuck with the condition, Mr Trout, and it’s a condition he’ll have to get used to. It’s not the end of the world but his world will have limitations. He won’t be able to drive a car, for example, or play a musical instrument, and I think it’s probably best if you keep him away from firearms for as long as possible.’
‘But he could work at the racetrack if he wanted to?’ Mr Trout suggested.
‘If he wanted to I’m sure he could,’ the psychologist replied, wondering why anyone with a modicum of ambition would want to work there. ‘Your son isn’t stupid, you know.’
And so Wayne’s life went on as abnormal and became more peculiar still when his father died and his mother remarried.
Wayne’s father, whose ambition was less than a modicum, worked at the Charles Town racetrack, though no one, including Mrs Trout – who had more reason to know than most – had any real idea of what he did there. Mr Trout was a taciturn man and kept himself and his affairs to himself, and even if St Peter had asked his reasons for crossing the track during a race, he too would have been told by Mr Trout that it was his business to know and no one else’s – Saint or no Saint. The half-empty bottle of Jim Beam that fell from his pocket at the time of impact, however, was explanation enough for the coroner.
After the death of her husband Mrs Trout went to work at one of the town’s diners whose clientele on any given day of the week was unlikely to have a full set of teeth between them. She served plates of fried chicken, pork chops and catfish during working hours and, once her shift was over, the occasional plate of herself. She met these paramours for the first time in the bar area of the diner and usually for the second time when she woke up beside them the next morning. Most of these encounters were no more than one night stands, but they allowed Mrs Trout to feel wanted and good about herself. It was a form of self-medication, an under-the-counter antidote to the loneliness of single parenthood in a one-horse town. What she really hoped for from these encounters, though, was a husband, and six years after the death of Mr Trout she found one.
Unusually for Mrs Trout she met her second husband in a tattoo parlour. She’d gone there to deliver an order of fried chicken and mashed potato to its owner and found him in the middle of a heated conversation with a man complaining about the image of Marilyn Monroe the tattooist had recently inked on his arm. ‘It looks nothing like her!’ he kept telling him. ‘It looks more like Hillary Clinton!’
The tattooist turned to Mrs Trout for an unbiased opinion. She brushed the hair from her forehead and looked at the image. ‘It’s Mrs Clinton,’ she said. ‘And it looks like she’s having a bad day, too.’
She then held out her hand to the good-looking man she’d never seen before and introduced herself. ‘Hi, I’m Merlene Trout,’ she said. ‘I work at the diner across the street.’ The man took her hand and smiled. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Merlene,’ he said. ‘My name’s Howie Pillsbury and I make bird tables.’ It was love at first sight and an infatuation that cost the tattooist a refund of seventy-five dollars.
Howie was a widower, the father of four girls and a recent incomer to Charles Town. His wife had committed suicide and he’d moved the family from Keyser to spare both him and his daughters the gossip and innuendo surrounding her death. He lived on the outskirts of town in a large sprawling house bequeathed to him by his grandmother, and it was here that the Trout and Pillsbury families planned to live after he and Merlene tied the knot. But then the uninsured house burnt down and both families were forced to repair to the Trout family home.
Even though both Trout daughters had by now left home – Millie to Washington and Etta to rehab – the three-bedroom house still proved too small for the combined family, and it was then that Howie hit upon the idea of building a tree house in the backyard. ‘It’s no different from building a bird table,’ he told Merlene. ‘It’ll just take more wood, is all.’
Wayne watched as the tree house took shape, wondering what kinds of big birds Howie was hoping to attract to the garden. He didn’t like his stepfather, didn’t appreciate his shouting or the cuffs to the head he gave him if he spilled milk or made a mess at the table. And he called him stupid, too, kept telling him he was a clumsy ox. He didn’t talk that way to his own daughters: he never called them idiots. What hurt Wayne most, though, was that his mother never stuck up for him but always took Howie’s side; told him how Howie was her last chance at happiness and warned him against ruining things for her. And on top of everything else he didn’t even have his own room anymore but had to sleep on the couch in the lounge and be up in the morning before anyone else in the house made it out of bed.
The day came when the tree house was finished. Merlene filled a suitcase with Wayne’s clothes, gathered his bedding and took them to the base of the tree. Howie then hauled them up the ladder and dumped them on the floor of the tree house. Husband and wife then returned to the house, poured themselves a large celebratory drink and waited for Wayne to return from school.
‘From now on you’re living up there,’ Howie Pillsbury told Wayne. ‘You can shower in the house and eat meals with us but that’
s the sum of it. You got me, kid? Man descended from the trees and now you’re going back up one. It’s what’s called evolution.’
Wayne was flabbergasted by both the news and the apostasy. ‘But… but Mama,’ he stammered, ‘I thought you said we was Creationists?’
‘Not anymore we’re not,’ Mrs Trout snapped. ‘Now get up that damned tree!’
And so for the next five years, and from the age of twelve, Wayne lived in a tree, reading and doing his homework by flashlight and sleeping in the house only on the coldest of winter nights. Fortunately for Wayne he grew to like his new home, especially after Howie built a slide to make his return to the ground less hazardous, and the tree house became his sanctum. No one bothered him here and the arguments in the house went on without him. Occasionally, and against the rules, Kevin, his oldest and probably only friend, would also spend the night in the tree.
Kevin was one of only two constants in Wayne’s early life. From the day they were first seated together in a classroom arranged by alphabetical order, the two friends became inseparable and Wayne, Kevin Trull’s shadow. It was an unlikely friendship, but one that worked.
Kevin was big for his age and strong, but had no interest in sport and even less for learning. He yearned to be dumb and envied Wayne his natural inabilities. He liked the way his friend bumped into people and tripped over things, admired the messy schoolwork he handed in and his capacity to ruin team games. And in return for these distractions he rewarded Wayne with his protection, happy to beat the crap out of any classmate who taunted him in his presence.
The teachers despaired of Kevin as much as they tried to understand Wayne. He came from a good family – his father was a dentist and his mother a motel receptionist – yet seemed intent on living life at the fringe, aiming for the dirt and arriving there face down. And they worried that he might lead Wayne astray and take him down with him – which, in effect, was what he eventually did.
The other and more stable of the two constants in Wayne’s life was the Baptist Church which, unlike Kevin, tended to be against glue sniffing.
It was Mrs Trout who’d insisted the family attend services every Sunday, but after her marriage to Howie and the drinking started, it was only Wayne who attended. Wayne liked the time he spent with God and looked on Him as a pal. He liked it that He was cut and dried about things and didn’t expect people to think too much. Life for Wayne was always easier when he didn’t have to think about things.
Wayne took his relationship with God seriously and didn’t confine it to Sunday services. He prayed to God in his tree house, on the bus to school and occasionally during lessons. Mostly he prayed for others. He prayed that his mother would stop drinking and divorce Howie, that Kevin would stop sniffing glue and do his homework and that his younger sister, Etta, would kick her addiction to the prescription drugs she bought at the Charles Town Casino. Sometimes, though, he would pray for himself: pray that someday he’d be able to drive a car. And then, most everything he prayed for – apart from him driving a car – did come to pass. His mother was pulled over for drunk driving, Howie was sent to prison and Kevin was born again.
His mother and Howie had been driving home from a bar when a tree – as Merlene described the incident – stepped into the road without looking. When the officer doubted her story Howie, who’d been throwing up on the grass verge at the time, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and said that if his wife said it happened that way then it fucking happened that way. He then slugged the policeman on the chin.
Howie was sentenced to a year in prison and Merlene to a stretch in rehab, where she met and reacquainted herself with her youngest daughter, back there by popular demand. Howie’s four daughters were sent to live with their aunt, the sister of their deceased mother, while Wayne, once the police had located his whereabouts in the backyard, was taken from the tree and into care, eventually being fostered by a family known to him from church.
It appeared that things for Wayne were on the up, but then Kevin stopped sniffing glue and events were set in motion that made it impossible for either of them to remain in Charles Town. Kevin, who against all odds graduated from High School, joined the Marines while Wayne, denied this avenue of escape by virtue of his dyspraxia, went to live with his oldest sister, Millie, in the Glover Park neighbourhood of Washington.
Of the two friends it was Wayne who’d been most traumatised by the incident, and it was during the time he lived with Millie that the voices started – about nine of them so far as he could make out. He visited a doctor who prescribed medications that kept him on an even keel, but a part of his mind had gone AWOL and there was no telling when, or if, it would return. And then Millie was knocked down and killed by an emergency ambulance on its way back to the depot and once again the Social Services stepped into what passed for Wayne’s life.
Although Wayne was old enough to live by himself, the Social Services judged him incapable of doing so. Neither, though, did they consider him a person requiring full-time institutionalisation. His surviving family in Charles Town, usually the first port of call in such circumstances, proved eminently unsuitable: his mother was an alcoholic, his sister a drug addict and his stepfather a man who’d made him live in a tree for five years. In the hope of salvaging as much of Wayne’s independence as possible they referred him to a halfway house in the neighbourhood already familiar to him. With a little help from others, they reasoned, and the occasional push in the right direction, he had every chance of making it on the outside.
The neighbourhood was Glover Park, an area of small businesses and restaurants about half a mile north of Georgetown, and home to the Washington National Cathedral and the Russian Embassy. The housing was a mixture of apartment buildings and row houses, and the halfway house, run by a non-profit organisation, was located midway along 37th St.
During the day the house was staffed by carers who supervised the daily drug regimens of the guests and provided them with hot meals. Wayne shared the 1930s row house with four other men, each as battered by life as he was. Occasionally he sat in the lounge with them, but mostly he preferred to spend time alone, watching television in his room or eaves-dropping on the conversations in his head.
Most of Wayne’s weekly social security cheque went towards his board and lodging and he liked to supplement his meagre spending money by doing odd jobs in the surrounding neighbourhoods. His best paying job, and the one he enjoyed most, was delivering the Current, but he also earned money delivering mail shots advertising restaurants and other local services. Occasionally, and usually on a Saturday, he collected aluminium cans from the streets, and the Saturday he chanced upon Larry in Volta Park was one such day. By then he’d been rooting through trash cans and street dumpsters for almost two hours and still only managed to gather eleven cans.
Wayne Trout’s day hadn’t got off to the best of starts.
‘Hey, Professor, how you doing?’
‘I’m doing fine, thank you, Wayne. I was hoping I’d bump into you,’ Larry said.
‘What were you and the big man conversating about?’
Although Larry had hoped to ease into the question of Wayne’s English a little further down the line, he decided that this was as good a time as any.
‘Well, we weren’t actually conversating about anything, Wayne. We were conversing. There’s no such word as conversating.’
‘I think you’re wrong there, Professor. I’ve been using that word my whole life and not once has someone argumented with me about it. People in Charles Town use it all the time.’
Larry thought it best not to argument with Wayne over this particular word, and instead decided to broaden the subject. ‘They might well have done, Wayne, but you’re not living in Charles Town now. You’re living in Washington and people here speak differently. If you spoke more like them you’d fit in better and, who knows, maybe someone might give you a full-time job. And I could help you
, Wayne: I could teach you how to speak grammatically.’
Wayne scratched his head. ‘I cain’t believe I don’t speak right, Professor. I’ve got a High School diploma and they don’t just hand them things out. Besides, I think God wants me to talk this way. I think it’s part of His plan.’
‘I’m sure God wouldn’t mind if you spoke grammatically, Wayne. He lets other people talk that way,’ Larry replied.
‘But I ain’t other people, Professor. I’m damaged. God’s made me special and He wants me to be this way. If I go changing He might not like me no more.’
Larry found it hard to argue with Wayne’s illogic. ‘Well, maybe you could pray to Him about it and see what He says. Tell Him that Larry MacCabe has your best interests at heart and that he’s an emeritus professor of Georgetown University.’
‘I guess I could do that,’ Wayne said. ‘And I could talk to Kevin, too, and see what he says on the matter. I cain’t see Kevin liking it, though.’
‘That’s that friend of yours, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, he’s my best friend, Professor. Knowed him since I was five. He don’t like Washington much. And he don’t like the big man you were conversating with either. Blames him for his troubles.’
‘You mean Tank?’ Larry asked. ‘What’s Tank done to him?’
‘It’s not my place to tell, Professor. Kevin don’t like it if I talk about him behind his back.’
‘Well, Tank’s always been very nice to me, Wayne. In fact, he’s just given me this pamphlet on the King David Hotel. It’s supposed to be the grandest hotel in Jerusalem. I’m going there in October.’
‘Gee, you’re going all the way to the Holy Land? That’s where I want to go. What you going to pray about when you get there?’
‘I’m not going there to pray, Wayne. I’ve been asked to deliver a paper.’
‘I don’t know nothing about airfares, Professor, but wouldn’t it be cheaper if you just mailed it? It makes sense for me to deliver the Current because I live locally, but I cain’t see them ever asking me to go all the way to another country to push it through someone’s letter box.’
Larry & the Dog People Page 15
