by Adam Rapp
Then she downed her eggnog and went back to her room with the CDs I’d bought her.
To stay with the holiday theme, I should also tell you about this card I received from my dad today. It was a huge shock because of all the dramatic stuff that has happened between us. Most of it follows, trust me.
Anyway, it was a Christmas card and there was a big red Santa on the front and when I opened it, on the right side it said Have a Merry Christmas, Ho Ho Ho in green ink — it was part of the card. On the left side, in pencil, my dad wrote:
Steven,
I’m sorry about stuff.
I hope you’re doing okay.
Love,
Dad
He’s pretty much all alone in the house now, except for Aunt Ricky, who’s been staying there with him. I don’t think he’s gone back to work at the shop yet. It’s going on five months now. The last time we spoke, he was talking about selling the house and moving to Maryland. He said there was a job opportunity there with his old gypsum-board ceiling-slat business.
“A move might be good,” he said.
His voice sounded small and worn out.
When I hung up the phone in the Burnstone Grove common room, I felt really alien from him, like there’s just too much distance between us to get back to the way things used to be before my mom’s illness and the whole thing with Welton. That phone conversation happened like a month ago, and we haven’t spoken since. So the card was definitely a surprise.
Mrs. Leene thinks he’s still ashamed because he was so helpless in the face of my mom’s cancer.
“He’s probably still devastated,” she said. “It might take a very long time before he’s able to be the person you expect him to be.”
Person.
I said, “He’s like this big blob of meat.”
“You should give him a chance, Steve.”
The problem with Mrs. Leene is that she’s always right. When you think about it, I guess that’s not really such a bad thing. It must be hard to date a person like that, though, and I said as much to her this morning.
“It must be hard to date you,” I said.
“Why do you say that, Steven?” she asked.
“Because you’re like this genius.”
She laughed when I said that, and now I know she knows that I like her. But I won’t wander off the subject too much. Not just yet.
So what happened after my mom died was this:
In order for the shop to collect insurance, my dad had to press charges against me, which meant I had to appear in juvenile court.
Remember Welton’s brown slacks that I was telling you about before? Well, I own a pair of those too, and they came with a matching suit jacket. My mom found the polyester-blend suits on the clearance rack at J.C. Penney. Mine smelled like compact-car upholstery, and the first time I put it on, I was paranoid that it had some weird chemical relationship to heat, that if exposed to the sun, it would burst into flames or something.
So that’s what I wore in court: the brown suit with a pair of wingtip shoes, a white shirt, and a striped tie. I probably looked like some Young Republican.
The courthouse in downtown Foote is this old limestone building next to the library. I never imagined that I would have any reason to go into this building, and yet there I was.
Just over the steps there’s this huge American flag that they put up after 9/11. I guess they don’t have any plans of taking it down, even though Foote, Iowa, had absolutely nothing to do with that tragedy.
During the ride over, it was so quiet you could hear the keys jingling in the ignition. My dad was driving like he was lost on some forgotten country road. He kept making this face like he didn’t quite know where he was going.
We parked in front of the library, and as soon as we entered the courthouse, he slipped into the bathroom.
“Just a sec, okay?” he said, and sneaked away.
In the rotunda area, there were all of these huge old oil paintings of former American presidents. While I was checking out the Grover Cleveland portrait, this well-dressed woman with glasses approached me.
“Are you Steven?” she asked.
Her name was Lynette something-or-other and she was from Children’s Services. She was forty-ish, I’d guess, and sort of pretty in that no-makeup, lesbian way. She explained that she would sit with me during the hearing so I would feel supported.
“So are you like my lawyer?” I asked.
“Sort of,” she said. “The court assigned me to your case. But since you’ve already confessed to everything, I’m basically just a formality. But I’m happy to answer any questions if things get confusing in there. They’re actually waiting for us right now,” she said kindly.
Lynette then escorted me to the hearing room, which was this sort of blank white room with a big glossy wooden table. She sat next to me. There was a pitcher of water in the middle of the table with some Dixie cups.
On the other side of the table, my dad was huddling with his lawyer, this guy named Dave who had driven all the way from Cedar Rapids. I thought it was weird how he’d sneaked out of the bathroom when I wasn’t looking.
“Hi, Steven,” Dave said to me. I had met him at the shop once.
“Hey,” I said back.
He has a son who is Welton’s age. He’s apparently attending Drake University on an academic scholarship.
My dad was wearing his gray, moth-eaten suit and yellow tie again. For a second it felt like he and Dave were totally planning to kill me or something.
“Thirsty?” Lynette asked.
I nodded and she poured both of us Dixie cups of water. It wasn’t exactly cold and tasted chlorinated.
That’s when this bailiff guy entered the room with the judge. The bailiff was pretty weird-looking. He had a shaved head and wore these yellow safety glasses, like he’d just returned from a rigorous go of it at the Foote gun club or something. The judge was pretty old, at least sixty-something, and his black gown made him look like some sort of geriatric Halloween creature in drag.
The bailiff then asked everyone to rise and said a few insubstantial courtroom-type things and then, in this unbearably painful five-part move, the judge sat down at the head of the table.
After he got settled, he made this hand gesture that was obviously our cue to sit, so we all did so in unison — almost like we were in church or something.
The room smelled like bleach and furniture polish.
While Dave cataloged the list of damages to the shop, the judge kept staring at me and shaking his head. I noticed that his hands constantly trembled and he had to swallow a lot.
For some reason, Dave started to look really fake to me. Fake like wood. Fake like one of those Santas at the mall.
While he read down his list of damages to the store, my dad kept looking at me like he was sort of apologizing.
I even said, “What?” once, but he didn’t respond. Everyone at the table sort of held their breath until the old judge said, “Resume, please.”
The rest of the details of the hearing are sort of boring, so I won’t take you through it. The whole thing ended with my guilty plea and Lynette saying something about my honesty about coming forth during such a difficult time.
The bottom line is that instead of sending me off to live with the rapists and murderers at the Ethan Allen Home in Wasaw, Wisconsin, the judge said he was sympathetic because of my mom dying and all and he assigned a community service task instead. Before he let me go, he warned me that I was on the wrong path.
“You’re on the wrong path, Steven Nugent,” he said.
I looked at my dad again, who was sort of staring at his hands.
“It’s time you take a self-inventory and think about what you’ve done,” I heard the judge say.
I just sat there and nodded. Or at least I think I nodded.
“I don’t want to see you in here again, is that clear?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Then he sort of pulled at t
he loose flesh around these totally hound dog–looking jowls of his and he asked me if I had anything I wished to say.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Are you even a bit sorry for your actions, young man?” he asked.
“Yes,” I lied. “I’m sorry.”
“Perhaps you should tell your father that.”
My dad was still staring at his hands. The ceiling fan churned above us slowly.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said.
It was suddenly unbearably hot. My brown suit was totally strangling me.
At the steps to the courtroom, Lynette said goodbye to me and gave me her card, saying that I should give her a call if I ever needed anything. Then I said goodbye to Dave, and he and my dad hugged for what seemed like way too long, and then we got back in the Fairmont and drove home. I rolled my window down and let my arm hang down the side of the car.
“What should we have for dinner?” he asked after we went over the bridge.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not so hungry.”
“I was thinking about ordering Domino’s.”
For some reason the thought of eating pizza made me sick, so I didn’t respond.
When we got home, he went straight to bed and fell asleep in his clothes.
13.
So that night was a strange one. It felt like my body was starting to do things on its own, sort of without thought, kind of like my hands in Mary Mills’s kitchen, but now it was spreading everywhere.
I couldn’t sleep so I sat at my desk and smoked a few cigarettes. I tried some more Robitussin because I thought it would help me get drowsy, but it only made me feel edgier somehow.
So that’s when I decided to sneak into my dad’s room with the electric razor. It was probably around three A.M. or something. I had heard Welton come in a few hours earlier. I think he fell down in the kitchen. I was going to go downstairs and see if he was okay, but I got that creepy feeling that he was turning into Dantly again so I didn’t.
My dad had fallen asleep in his suit. His yellow tie was all wrapped around his neck. His knees were tucked into his chest; he was sleeping like a man who’d been beaten.
All types of random stuff had been strewn around my parents’ room. Stuff like T-shirts and church slacks and half-eaten TV dinners and strings to pajama bottoms and orphaned slippers and dirty socks and fallen curtains and a dented lampshade and like a dozen multicolored felt-tip pens and TV Guides and a few of my mom’s old nightgowns and this totally ominous-looking ball-peen hammer.
My dad’s dresser drawers were all open, too, as was his closet and window. It was like he’d been searching for some weird animal he had been hiding. Maybe like some furry little creature to replace my mom. A guinea pig or a gerbil or something of that nature.
What made it even worse were the mosquitoes. They were hovering near the middle of the ceiling by what seemed like the dozens. And it was obvious that they had feasted on my dad, as there were little bite marks all over his neck and hands.
He woke up just after I clicked the razor on, but I did manage to mow off a pretty decent chunk before he started choking me.
His hands were around my throat in this way that made me think that he had been fantasizing about choking me for a long time. The razor landed on the floor and continued buzzing, which was pretty annoying. With my feet I could feel his shoes under the covers. I could also feel that plate that I had stolen from Mary Mills’s house. What is he doing with all this stuff under the covers? I thought. He was like sleeping with it.
My dad smelled sort of like mustard, which was probably due to the fact that in the bed I also discovered a thing of Hellmann’s. I wanted to grab it and squirt it in his eyes, but I couldn’t reach it.
There was this scary moment in which I think part of me actually wanted my dad to kill me.
In this totally whispery voice, I even told him to.
“Do it, Dad,” I said. “It’s okay. Do it.”
I know that’s almost one-hundred percent Blue Groupery of me, but that’s honestly how I felt.
At some point I totally left my body. I was hovering near the ceiling with all the mosquitoes. Man, the me in my parents’ bed was in pretty bad shape. His face was so blue it was almost black. I thought about a lot of stuff in that moment. Things like finding fossils at the national forest when I was a kid. Things like using a metal detector for the first time. Things like skipping rocks on the Mississippi. All this stuff we used to do together when things were still okay.
Then the bed collapsed and it was over.
I’d forgotten how strong my dad was. He played football in high school — middle linebacker, actually — but you would never have known it looking at him. He was also in the Marines for a while. But he looked so thin and tired anymore, always falling asleep in his La-Z-Boy, half-eaten bowls of cereal at his feet, his little potbelly sneaking over his pajama bottoms, his bald shins.
After we were thoroughly off the bed and panting like zoo creatures, my dad reached over and turned off the razor.
“She wouldn’t let me wash her hair anymore,” he said, trying to catch his wind. Man, his breath was so mustardy it almost made me sick. “No more washing . . .” he added, trailing off.
Then he cried on the floor for like ten minutes, and I just sat there next to him holding my neck and panting. My Adam’s apple felt like it had been pulled out and replaced by a nine-volt battery or something.
I took the razor from him and stood. My legs felt weak and rubbery. I had to use the dresser to keep my balance.
The picture of the clown with balloons in its cheeks had fallen off the wall. It was upside-down now and its frown was a weird, ghoulish smile.
After I walked out of the room, I took the razor into the bathroom and shaved my head. I don’t expect you to understand why I did that; God knows I still don’t. Like I said, things were just happening by themselves.
I started buzzing everything off in front, just above my forehead. Then I moved around to the sides and sort of did a lot of guesswork in the back.
I never realized how big my ears were. It made me uglier than I already was, but I didn’t care.
The other day the Blue Grouper Jimmy Smallhorn said that your ears and the tip of your nose are the only things that keep growing when you get old. Maybe when I get old, I’ll have these total elephant ears and it will be cool to the younger generation.
When I was through shaving my head, I ran cold water over my skull.
That felt pretty good, I must say.
14.
The following morning, I started my community service assignment.
What I had to do was paint a brick wall. It was about thirty feet long and fifteen feet high. It faced the river, and someone had spray-painted FUCK ON THE INTERNET in five-foot red letters across the middle.
My community service supervisor, who I will describe in greater detail in just a minute, told me that the city was leasing out the wall for advertising space. Apparently, in the near future some casino boat would travel up and down the Mississippi all day. The wall would make for good marketing, so FUCK ON THE INTERNET had to get covered up before the owners of the building could start showing the wall to potential advertisers.
I guess it was all part of this citywide effort to clean up the riverfront area. In the past few years, it’s gotten pretty sketchy, with vandalism and these fake Caucasian gangs acting all rap video.
My supervisor supplied me with the paint and a pack of rollers. He and a few friends who I never saw had erected scaffolding so I could reach the top of the wall.
When I arrived at the work site, it was already around eighty-five degrees and the Mississippi smelled heinous. Dragonflies were darting here and there, and mosquitoes were pretty much omnipresent.
The supervisor guy was wearing a red tank top and Bermuda shorts. He was pretty pasty — even pastier than me — and his fat arms were wet from the humidity.
I was wearing a pair of Welton
’s carpenter jeans and this long-sleeved T-shirt featuring a picture of a squirrel with human testicles. Apparently Dantly had paid some computer specialist from the nursing home to download the image off the Internet and then he and Welton had T-shirts made at some copy shop in Foote.
The reason I was wearing that particular shirt is that in general I can’t stand wearing short sleeves. I don’t care how hot it gets. Having bare arms makes me feel like I’m trapped in the locker room with a bunch of hairy jocks or something.
My community service supervisor looked at me and went, “You the Nugent boy?”
I nodded.
“Steve, right?” he offered politely.
I nodded again.
“Jerry Willems,” he said, extending his hand. We shook. My guess is that he was around fifty years old. For some reason he sort of reminded me of a gym coach. Maybe it’s because he wore a referee’s whistle around his neck, which he never used. It sort of made me paranoid that at any moment he might blow into it and make me drop to the ground to do pushups or burpees or something. In general, I would describe him as being abundantly fleshy.
I palmed my skull a few times, which was turning into a pretty cool new habit, I must say. It was cold and sort of leathery-feeling.
“So here’s what’s what,” he said. “You’ll work for three hours and then we’ll take a lunch break, come back, and work another three. The whole thing’s gotta be blue. If you work hard, you should be able to get it done. Paint’s mixed up and ready to stick. She might take more than one coat, so you best get to it.”
He was a pretty stern guy, definitely not to be messed with.
Before I started painting, I walked over to the bag I’d packed that morning. It was my dad’s old Marine Corps bag. Inside it were a few pairs of underwear, some T-shirts, a thing of Old Spice deodorant, a tube of toothpaste and my toothbrush, my Discman and headphones, a few packs of double-A batteries, two fresh bottles of Robitussin that I’d stolen from Welton’s room, three packs of Camel Lights (also stolen from Welton’s room), four or five of my favorite CDs, and a black permanent marker. To tell you the truth, I have no idea why I packed a black permanent marker. At the time it just seemed like one of those things you would need.
