by Chris Lynch
Friday, as we were clearing out, Brother Percy stepped up to me. It occurred to me that he hadn’t forced a book on me for over twenty-four hours. I thought he’d quit. He looked tired.
“You nearly wore me out, Elvin,” he said. “I’ve been watching you. I’ve been studying you for clues.”
“That must have been a thrill,” I said, laughing. “I haven’t been doing anything.”
“Yes you have,” he said, giving me the smarty smile I thought I had killed three days ago. He marched past me to the back of the library, under the balcony, to the far corner, where he disappeared briefly into the shadows. Then he came back out, retraced his steps, stood before me, and held out the book. It was a skinny little paperback, Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson. I flipped through it, just to be polite.
“This isn’t poetry,” I said.
“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” he answered.
I ignored the book. It sat in my back pocket like the rest, until I went to bed. Then I saw it again when I stripped and it fell on the floor. It looked like a challenge this time. I picked it up and hit the bed, determined to give this last one a look if only to show Brother Percy that no matter how much he watched me, watched me watching, he didn’t know me.
I opened the book. When I read the name of the first chapter, “The Book of Grotesques,” in which the narrator talks about everybody he ever knew, about everybody in the world, as somehow deformed and wrong, I knew I was going to read more.
“Grotesques,” I thought. “I get it now. It’s not me after all. It’s everybody else.”
And when I saw the chapter “Mother,” I jumped ahead, for personal reasons. And when the boy said to his mother, “There isn’t any use. I don’t know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think,” I didn’t wonder anymore why I was reading this. I stayed up as long as I could that night, reading the story of the boy who did nothing but watch people and think. And who grew up while he did it.
I woke up Saturday morning with the book across my face. I lifted it and finished reading. Then I did my stuff, my run and all, in the quiet of the second-to-last morning. Saturday was a funky nowhere day. The breakup stuff was happening that night, and we were all going home tomorrow, but the day was free.
I went to the library, and it was nice to have it back to myself. I cleared my little space at the librarian’s desk, turned on that one dim desk lamp, and pulled out the pencil and paper.
“Last chance, Elvin. Sure you won’t come?” Frankie stood combing his long curly hair in the bathroom mirror, bouncing to some music I couldn’t hear. He was fired up. “It’s going to be the blowout of your life,” he said. “I know you don’t want to miss this.”
“I don’t think I’m ready yet for the blowout of my life,” I answered. “I figure I’ve got a couple of years left. You do it for me.”
“Okay, I will. Then next time, when I’m in charge, maybe you’ll come to the parties with me.” He patted my belly as he passed by me in the doorway. Then he was out. I watched him running to get where he was going.
We’d been told to skip Nightmeal and come directly to the library, so I met Mikie at his Cluster and we hiked on down together.
“Frankie’s gone already?” Mike asked.
“He is.”
That was the whole conversation. All Mike could do these days was shake his head about Frankie and his friends. I thought he was taking it all too seriously. Being too much Dad. But he couldn’t help that.
“Drink?” Brother Clarke urged us both as we came in. “Come on, now, you have to drink.” He gestured around the room where everybody apparently was drinking his espresso. He leaned closer. “It’s only decaf. And just for tonight, I’m allowing milk and sugar.”
We took our cups and pushed on into the party. And to my surprise it was a real party. The Arts Brothers had gotten together a nice spread, set up over a long conference table, of crustless sandwiches, tuna, turkey, ham and Swiss. Bowls with two kinds of olives. I hate olives, but they looked great. Brownies, lemonade, Coke, tortilla chips, salsa, guacamole, blue cheese dip. There was even a green salad and a potato salad. All the young artists were bent over the food table, working their plastic plates like palettes as they piled up. It was the first meal in three weeks that wasn’t some industrially produced unnatural form pressed out of the chopped and filled and reconstituted form of something that was once an actual foodstuff combined with many things that were not.
I squeezed in next to Oskar, the mad paint mixer. “You know what color that is?” he asked me excitedly, pointing at one of the bowls of olives. “It’s olive,” he said, thrilled.
We sat on chairs, on floors, on stairs, as we took our food cookout style to wherever we liked. Mike followed me up the stairs, where we took the balcony, overlooking everybody else.
A sound came from somewhere. From a black rectangular tape recorder like the ones they use in the schools to go along with fifty-year-old slide shows on the building of the Grand Coulee Dam. What was coming out of it now, though, was music. It was awfully tinny, like the orchestra was playing through a megaphone, and it was some expired classical stuff to boot. But it was music. I realized that—besides the practice-room exercises with the library piano, which hardly counted—this was the first shred of music I’d heard since I’d been here. It was welcome. Boring, but most definitely welcome.
“Ah, The Magic Flute.” Brother Crudelle hummed, closing his eyes and conducting the imaginary orchestra. Maybe he could get them to play better.
“Ah,” everybody replied. But we were mostly just being nice.
Something hung from the light fixture in the middle of the room. It was the size of a big person, wrapped in a blanket, tied and hanging eight feet off the floor.
Artwork hung on a wall, draped in black cloth. One easel stood in the corner, another in the middle of the room. A long table, draped completely in black, had bumps poking up all over it.
How had they done all this in such a short time? I was in the library all day until just a couple of hours ago.
The first to present his project, while we were all still munching desert, was Oskar. With a dramatic swoosh he ripped the cover from his canvas, the one in the middle of the room. It was his group portrait of us. He stood next to it, beaming, checking us all out for our reactions. As if we hadn’t all seen it already. It was the same and only thing he’d worked on all week, on the lawn, in full view.
“But it’s so different now,” he said. “Look, there’s Brother Mattus, the big brown part, Brother Fox over there...”
“Ah” was the general reaction, and the theme of the evening. Oskar received his round of quiet golf-gallery applause graciously.
We moved, as one floating mass, on to the wall, where the drape was removed to reveal the three masks, decorated now with each artist/subject’s own version of himself. One guy had added a layer of clay in the form of a goalie mask to his face, topping that with black-painted scar stitches all over. The next had added a nose ring, war paint, and a white goat-beard three feet long. The last, Lennox, with the round face, had painted his a brilliant starch white, adding plum lipstick and a thin black line ringing each eye. Lennox, the other fat guy, who’d coached me into pinning him so that we could both be done with wrestling. Lennox, it turned out, was a beauty.
We took a break, ate some more, and started to like the music. The crazy art-glass kid couldn’t help himself, dug out some materials, and got to work on his stained-glass window.
“This is... nice,” Mikie said with awe and puzzlement.
“Who’d of thunk it?” I laughed.
Just then Paul Burman brushed by us. He and Mike had ignored each other the whole week. Burman, I think, still hated that Mikie had spent two weeks trying to make a basketball player out of him.
“Hey,” Mike said, grabbing Burman’s arm spontaneously. Burman turned and glared at him. I took a step back, waiting for the fight to come and blow up the whole deal, to ma
ke this slot a little more like the rest.
But silently Mikie led us over to the other easel, half hidden away in the corner. He pulled off the cloth and showed us his painting. It was of a basketball game. In the scene, a guard who looked something like Mike had just heaved an alley-oop pass to a nine-foot string bean who looked something like Burman, who was in the process of jamming it home.
They both burst out laughing. The string bean was totally naked, his privates flying every which way.
They didn’t say anything more about it. But the tension was all gone. They’d settled it their own way.
I wasn’t finished with it, though.
“This was very good for you, Mikie,” I prodded. “It’s kind of like, well, admitting you were wrong about something. This is good, this is good. Let’s keep going with this—”
“Let’s not,” Mikie said, and tried to spin away from me.
I grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “Come on now, let’s not lose our momentum. Say, ‘I was wrong to try to force Paul to be a basketball star.’”
“That’s not necessary,” Paul said, laughing.
“No, no, no, Paul,” I lectured. “Michael has a problem, and you are what they call an enabler. You must stop making it easier for him. He needs to do this.”
“Shut up, El,” Mikie said, this time breaking cleanly away.
“Okay, Mike,” I called. “We’ll try again later. Meanwhile, try to keep expressing yourself through your art. And practice when nobody’s listening: ‘I was wrong. I made a mistake. I don’t know everything. ...’” I was enjoying myself thoroughly, though nobody was listening anymore. I stopped only when the exhibit resumed.
Brother Fox pulled back the cover on the table to expose Eugene’s crude clay model of hands. Gigantic hands like his, sprouting up out of a flat base, turned upward with fingers spread, like you would do if you were examining your own hands for whatever reason. They were set in front of a chair so that we could all take turns sitting in position, trying on Eugene’s massive mitts.
“Oh my god,” Oskar said as he got his perspective on owning hands like those. “Gene, man, how do you scratch your balls without ripping them right off?”
Eugene cuffed him but clearly liked the attention. We were still laughing when we shifted down to the glass guy’s orange cut-glass sunburst. It was beautiful like an explosion, and dangerous like one, as he’d spent hours and hours snapping and cracking the tiny glass rays around the edges so that they were so jagged and edgy that nobody but him could touch it without getting their hands sliced up into angel hair.
“I got a artwork for you boys!” the first deep yell came from outside.
“Yo, Mary, wanna see a sculpture?” the second one called.
“Oh, not this,” Brother Percy sighed.
Eggs smashed rapid fire, like fat raindrops, on all the windows, all around the building. Then there were more laughs.
“Ignore it. It will blow over,” Brother Mattus said. “Let’s move on.”
“Let’s,” Brother Percy said.
I looked around to see what the other guys felt, the guys who, unlike the Arts Brothers, had not seen it all before. Their bodies had all sort of shrunk, shriveled, as if they were hoping to suck into new turtle shells till it, please god, blew over. Except Oskar who, that’s right, had seen this once before during his first freshman tour. He had his face pressed to the window, staring out numbly at them.
“We’re comin’, boys, whatchu gonna do?” the voice, Obie’s voice, called. Then the voices started moving. Like hyenas, they screeched and circled the building, each one getting louder, pushing the others crazier, out of control.
“Somebody’ll stop it,” I said, trying to fool myself calm. The library was the most remote building in the compound, other than the unused seminarians’ quarters, but still, wouldn’t this be seen and heard across the campus? “These guys’ll be caught.”
Mikie looked at me stupid. “El, I’ve only been here a few days, but even I know better than that. The only people who are bothered by all this are in here.”
“Maybe we should catch ’em,” Eugene growled. He was pacing, his great big head and hands purple.
“Whoa, how ’bout another brownie, Eugene?” I asked. He ignored me.
“It’ll pass. It always does,” Brother Crudelle said nervously. He hurried to turn over the tape, which had snapped to a stop.
“Must be twenty or thirty of them this year,” Oskar said from the window. The words were hardly out of his mouth before he added, “Shit,” and hit the floor.
Crash, and conk, it shattered the window and bounced off the top of his head. It was a baseball.
“That’s it!” Eugene screamed, and beat it for the door.
“Yaaa,” Lennox yelled, and followed. Then Burman. Then Mikie. Then all the meek and feeble artsies, most moaning, “Oh my god,” or hyperventilating words, like “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”
“We’re all gonna die,” I added, as I found myself outside.
“No we’re not,” Oskar said, wearing the baseball lump on his forehead like a miner’s beacon.
The whole pack of them—O’s, sub-O’s, and O wanna-bes—were well on their way by the time we got out there. They were running back up the hill, with a couple of our guys fanned out in a halfhearted chase. Except for Eugene. Eugene powered like a freight train, caught up to the last one, and felled him like a lion grabbing a zebra. As he finished the tackle hard and pushed the guy’s face into the turf, I ran up to see. Everybody else had stopped chasing, but none of the tough guys came back to help this one.
Eugene had his massive fist raised and was about to drop it when the pleading started. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I mean it, I’m sorry,” Frank said.
I grabbed Eugene’s fist with both hands. It was like holding a bumpy cantaloupe. “He kind of belongs to me,” I said, embarrassed.
“You should think about picking your friends more carefully, Elvin,” Eugene growled, giving Frankie’s head a hard shove before getting off him and marching away.
“I’m sorry, El. I’m sorry,” Frank said, his speech a little fuzzy. He was saying it now not because he didn’t want to get smacked, but because he was sorry. “It wasn’t my idea. I’ll stop them myself if they try it again. I didn’t even—”
Frank had looked past me toward where Mikie was coming to investigate. He wouldn’t let Dad see him now, so he bolted, back up the hill.
Mikie and I watched the last of the retreat. All of them ran as easily uphill as if it was downhill. All of them athletic. All of them strong and fast and tough and brave. All of them The Chosen.
They were wearing sunglasses and ski hats, a couple with hoods. But it didn’t really matter.
Mikie pulled up beside me. “Frankie almost bought it that time,” he said grimly.
“Come on, come on,” Brother Clarke said to each of us as we marched back in the door. “Drink? Drink, sure, there you go. Don’t let it spoil a fine time.”
“Ya,” big Brother Mattus said, circulating among us now, handing to each one a big stick. Some of us got broom handles, the janitor push-broom kind with the metal screw-in tip. Others got those old long-handled devices with the hook on the end for opening and closing tall windows. “Ya, we’re not going to let them spoil our fine time, are we?” He took his own pole and smacked it loudly against the hardwood floor.
Once again I looked at the faces all around me, trying to feel what I was supposed to feel. I decided I was feeling the correct feeling because the uneasiness inside me was splashed across every other face as well. What were we going to do, hunt them down?
“Yessirree,” Brother Fox announced, marching to the center of the room. “He who laughs last... Right?”
“Right!” the Brothers chimed together, while the students sat in chilled silence. Who were these Rambo guys all of a sudden?
Brother Percy let out a knowing low chuckle as he swept up the broken glass by the window. He was always doing that, actin
g as if he knew stuff. It bothered me sometimes. It bothered me now.
“What do they have at their party up there?” Brother Fox shouted. “Okay, so they have beer. Well we have...” He reached up and yanked a string that was like a light switch, unveiling—“... a piñata.”
The Art Brothers had gotten together to build it, and it was professional. Papier-mâchèd, bigger than life size. It had angel’s wings, and an angelic expression looking heavenward. And it had Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles, shoulder pads, a baseball cap on backward. With one hand it was leaning on a baseball bat, with the other it was grabbing its crotch.
It was a dead ringer for Brother Jackson.
There was a lot of energy let out in that room then. Probably more than that library had seen in a hundred years put together. You could get close to the Jackson piñata only if you were willing to risk getting your own dome cracked. A risk almost everyone was willing to take.
Me, I felt no need. With every hard whack across one of Jackson’s vital parts, I felt a warm central surge—like swallowing a cocoa-soaked Chips Ahoy without having to chew it. So I watched.
“You liked the book,” Brother Percy said, sneaking up beside me.
I looked at him suspiciously, then let myself smile. “Is that okay, just to sit and watch, to look at people and think? I mean, is that an okay way to be?”
“Does it feel okay?” he asked.
I turned to watch the piñata beating, got another little thrill from it. “It does. It feels okay.”
“Then it probably is,” he said.
Then Eugene did it—he ripped that Jackson right in half with a chop. Out of him fell art supplies—watercolors, tubes of acrylic paint, small sketch pads, brushes, bricks of modeling clay.
“Thank you, Brother Jackson, mother of art,” Brother Fox called out.
“Wouldn’t it kill him?” Brother Percy responded.
