by Vicki Grove
No one but Trey ever threw rocks against my window. No one.
I froze for maybe five seconds, completely froze, then I ordered my burning legs to move and I charged to that window and looked out, my fingers splayed against the glass. Was I longing for it to be Trey? Trey back from wherever? Ghostly Trey, skeletal and charred Trey? I could see our whole block of small houses, and there was nobody around. The trees in the yards of our subdivision are small and scrubby ones, and no one, not even a tiny child, could hide behind one of them. There was nothing out there.
But caught on the window ledge, still teetering, was one of Trey’s brown pebbles.
Breathe, I told myself. Breathe! Things were going black around the edges, but in the nick of time I grabbed a deep gulp of air, my head cleared a bit, and then, I saw it.
Near the McKees’ mailbox, almost directly across the street.
The dog. It was working at the ground with its tremendous forefeet, digging exactly where I myself had stood just yesterday afternoon when Trey had ordered me to drive. Then it stuck its middle head into the hole it had made and came up with a small bright green something in its mouth.
So there it was, in broad daylight. With its middle head it looked proudly up at me with that green thing in its mouth as though it expected some kind of reward. Meanwhile its left head was turned to gaze down Cottonwood Street in the direction of Best Buy. Its right head stared with great interest at the long string of something that looked like moldy sausage hanging out of one of the overflowing garbage cans in the McKees’ side yard.
I could see a dizzy sort of movement in its eyes that was those spooky spirals.
I pushed off from the window, then stumbled through my room, knocking over a chair, slip-sliding on clothes. I exploded out the door and into the hallway. I bounced stiff-legged down the stairs three at a time and staggered through the den.
Bud was snoring in his La-Z-Boy recliner, and when I passed, I yelled, “Bud, there’s something you gotta see, right across the street! Hurry!”
Gruff and grouchy Bud, who could be a better witness? People would believe him because he never bothered to lie. And if Bud saw no three-headed dog? “You’re crazy, kid,” Bud would say, and he’d be right. Either way, I had to know.
“Whassit? wha . . .?” Bud sat up, then pushed himself to a wobbly stand, disoriented but game. “Go ahead!” He waved a hand. “I’m right behind you.”
I jerked open the front door and ran across the porch, but I could already see that the dog was gone. I jumped the porch stairs and did a bouncing jog across the street. There wasn’t even a hole in the McKees’ yard to show where the mutt had been digging.
But when I got right to the spot where the dog had been, I saw Trey’s cheap little bright green Bic cigarette lighter lying in the brown grass. I grabbed it and stashed it in my pocket before it too could disappear, then I loped stiffly back to where Bud was framed in the open doorway of the house.
“There was a dog over there a minute ago,” I called to Bud.
Bud frowned. “So? What’s the big deal about a dog?”
“It looked a lot like our old Lab, Ringo.” Except for a few huge details.
We heard Janet’s muffler in the near distance and turned to watch the Taurus swaying slowly down the middle of the street.
“She left work awful early for a Sunday, even before the Baptist rush,” Bud observed.
The pain came surging back, worse than ever. It had taken a brief vacation while my brain used all its energy to try and figure out the deal with that dog. But now the red throbbing returned and I welcomed it, the only real thing I had now that everything else was disintegrating into senselessness.
I pushed my hand deep inside my pocket and gripped the lighter. “I don’t want the clinic messing with me,” I heard myself murmur darkly. “I need this pain.”
“I read you loud and clear, kid,” Bud totally shocked me by responding.
Janet maneuvered right over the curb and into the driveway. She gave us both a tired smile as she threw her shoulder against her door and got out.
“There are a couple sacks of groceries in the trunk, Tuck.” She bent to gather her purse and waitressing uniform. “Dad, I got you some of those breakfast biscuits you’ve been wanting.”
I took the keys from the ignition and walked back to the trunk.
“Janet, a man’s wounds are his own,” I heard Bud tell her. “This guy doesn’t want to go to the clinic, so don’t pester him about it and that’s that!”
Bud never talked to Janet like that. Never. I stayed hidden behind the open lid of the trunk. Janet said nothing, and a couple of minutes later I saw Bud walking stiff-backed up the porch stairs in his usual proud and awkward way, putting all his weight on one foot at a time.
I finally hung both grocery sacks from my left wrist and slammed the trunk closed.
Janet was looking straight at me with tears in her eyes. “I just don’t want to take any chances with you, Tuck,” she said in a ragged whisper.
But that ship had sailed. All the chances had already been taken as of last night. She didn’t get that, but Bud did, from Korea.
I twisted my mouth into a reassuring smile. “My legs feel a hundred percent better. Once I showered, they turned out to be barely scratched.”
I went on inside with those groceries, thinking how I owed Bud a huge one.
The rest of Sunday afternoon I stayed up in my room, lying on the bed and flicking Trey’s lighter. I listened close in case more pebbles hit my window, but they didn’t.
One time I heard Bud and Janet arguing and drifted out to the hall to eavesdrop, thinking it would be about the clinic and my legs. It turned out to be about Bud, though. Apparently the eye test people weren’t the only ones giving him grief. His heart doctor wanted his driver’s license taken away from him as well.
“But Dad, you know that Dr. Hitchford said if you had another heart attack and lost consciousness, it would be tragic if you were behind the wheel and—”
“I get a sorta warning before I pass out, Janet! I’d have plenty of time to pull over! What’s Dr. Hitchford know about bum hearts anyhow, him barely forty years old?”
“Well, Dad, he is a cardiologist,” Janet said meekly. I went back to my room shaking my head, wishing there was some way I could trade places with Bud. He wanted to drive more than anything in the world, and the idea of driving made me sick to my stomach, as sick as when I’d bailed from Trey’s car and thrown up in the ditch. I would never drive again. That hadn’t been a hard decision, hadn’t even taken any actual thought. It was just a fact. Driving a car had slipped quietly and firmly all by itself onto the list of things I was never going to do, like eating live scorpions, or cutting off one of my ears, or sticking my hand into boiling tar.
After we ate that night, Janet went back to the restaurant to help close up. I was sitting in the den with Bud when the phone rang. It was Aimee, the cheerleader who’d dated Zero for a couple of weeks in September, then had dropped him flat and more or less broken his heart for about a day and a half.
“Tucker?” She was crying. “Listen, Zero gave me a white rose corsage for the dance last month, did . . . did you know that?”
“No.” She must have ordered Zero to buy her that. You had to tell Zero everything where the everyday world was concerned. His head was filled with velocities and angles and variable resistances. There was little room left for things like flowers.
I began watching Bud for something to do while Aimee talked. He was staring glassy-eyed at a really, really old VCR tape of a Monday night football game. The Chiefs were playing. Joe Montana was going long, long. . . .
“Pure white roses were . . . were our flowers, Tuck. One day in study hall Zero kicked the back of my chair twelve times, and I turned around to glare at him and he just smiled back that goofy smile nobody could resist. Then that afternoon this florist arrived at my house with a huge box of . . . of twelve white roses. That’s how we . . . started.”
>
I’d bet anything Aimee ordered Zero to buy her those twelve roses too, probably as a fine for kicking her chair. I’m also guessing he didn’t really think about there being the most beautiful girl in class in that chair when he got the urge to do a little resistance experiment using the back of the chair and the toe of his boot. I bet he was recording the amount of reverb each time he kicked, the number of centimeters his boot bounced back.
Zero’s smile was lopsidedly goofy, but it went with his flashing eyes and his flowing mess of wild hair. Had Aimee dated Zero on a dare from her girlfriends? We wondered. But then again, Zero’s confidence and his startling looks always seemed to work in his favor, at least at first. I wanta ride the sky like I was an eagle! Since he thought he could fly his skateboard down Hawk’s Slope, he probably could have. Since he thought he could date Aimee, he could, for a little while. How you do a tricky jump is you plot it out and think it, then right before you start, you don’t think it. You know?
“Interception!” Bud hollered, jerking his head back to show pure disgust at his team. Bud had seen this same play over and over again, so his reaction was not from mere surprise but rather from authentic, lasting shock that you had to respect. Almost instantly his mouth sagged open again and he went back to staring at the screen with no expression whatsoever except for a little dip of a frown in his thick, crazy eyebrows.
“So I called everyone on the student council and they agreed to buy some long-stemmed white roses for the funeral. Those of us who were closest to them will each carry a single white rose at the funeral, then at the end, we’ll put them on the caskets as we file past as a gesture of . . . of—”
She broke off, sobbing, just as Bud’s head flopped back against the headrest of the La-Z-Boy and he delivered a thundering prizewinner of a snore.
If Zero had been here, he would have been authentically impressed by that snore. Zero was democratic in his scientific enthusiasms. Outstanding body noises were worthy of his rapt attention just as much as geometric calculations were. He also adored stupid pet tricks, tornado-chasing, and kernoodling, catching giant catfish with your hand as bait.
“. . . a gesture of . . .” I hung up. I’d lost track of whether Aimee had finished talking, just like I’d lost track with Mary Beth early that morning. Aimee had mentioned Zero’s smile, I was pretty sure of that much, but why bring it up since it was history now? Farewell to that goofy, lopsided smile and much of the rest of Zero’s sharp, off-center, interesting face.
Bud had the remote somewhere, so I stood and walked to the television and turned the power off. Then I went down to a crouch there with my back braced by the TV screen. I wanted to simply watch Bud eye to eye for a minute, even though it would mean accepting the especially intense pain that crouching like that brought with it.
In contrast to everything else, Bud was nothing but real. His knees gaped wide. He’d left his slippers beside the chair, and his thin brown socks had a hole over each big toe. Bristly hairs grew like some sort of crop from the backs of his hands and from out of his large, red ears. The same sort of hairs curled in two bunches just beneath his nose, bending slightly upward as though seeking the light.
I waited for the remote to fall from the spot where it was delicately balanced on the chair arm, near Bud’s elbow. I was willing to bet the clatter of that wouldn’t quite wake Bud but would jerk the most amazing snore yet from him, a real record breaker.
And then my heart started doing a dance in my chest and I knew I was about to do something I shouldn’t do, ever. I held my breath and swiveled around to crouch facing the dark screen of the TV. I gazed at my own reflection, with sleeping Bud murky in the background. I touched my eyes with two fingers, then I drew a straight line across my lips through the dust on the screen. Then I began to raise myself from my crouch slowly, slowly until the very top of my head disappeared, then most of the top of my hair disappeared, then my forehead began to disappear, and then all of my head was gone to just above my eyebrows. Gone! Just gone, like the brain part of Zero was . . . just gone, all that smartness just shredded into nothingness like a used-up pencil eraser.
“You and me should go see them Chiefs play.” I shot to my feet and whirled around. “Wow, Bud. You really scared me.” My heart was acting like it’d come right through my rib cage and bounce around on the carpet. Had he seen, heard? “Yeah, maybe, sometime. I better get to bed. School tomorrow.”
I tried to hurry out of the room, but my legs wouldn’t do hurry. Some fledgling scabs had broken open when I’d crouched. If I wanted to move at all, it had to be in slow motion, one leg a few inches, the other a few inches.
“No time like the present. Now, this week. My treat. Hot dogs, the whole kaboodle.”
I glanced at him and saw something in his eyes, some spark of something, nearly hidden by his grizzled mess of white eyebrows. Something that made me think he had seen what I was doing when I’d mimicked dead Zero, seen it and understood why I’d done it. But how could he understand something so shameful and crazy?
“Maybe. G’night, Bud.” I felt like a spineless idiot. It wouldn’t happen, going to a game, because neither of us could drive. He hadn’t accepted the hard, cold fact that he couldn’t drive and I couldn’t begin to explain to him why I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t explain that to Bud or anybody else because I couldn’t understand it myself.
VI
It was a thrumming kind of quiet at school the next day. The kind of intense and unnatural quiet it would be if we were all in a play and Mr. Heggleston had given us stage directions. Now, people, your friends died suddenly and tragically this past weekend. Act stunned. Act disbelieving. Cloak yourselves in layers of disbelief and horror, all right, people? All day kids and teachers came up to me and said things I couldn’t quite comprehend but I knew were sympathetic, put a quick hand on my shoulder as we passed in the hall, met my eyes, then gave me a heavyhearted look, things like that.
My last girlfriend, Alyssa, toodled her fingers at me in algebra, then looked very stricken and drew a tear down her cheek with her fingernail. I sort of waited for her outside the door after class, and she came up and took my arm. “I tried to call you. Several people are trying to call you, Tucker, but your phone isn’t working.”
It was an accusation. Alyssa is one of those people that feels not to have your phone always with you is criminal talk neglect. “I lost it,” I lied. Alyssa and I were probably never that good as a couple. She always wanted to know what I was thinking and was always telling me what she was thinking, which was usually that I wasn’t telling her what I was thinking. But now she put her hand on my cheek, stood on tiptoe, and gave me a quick, friendly kiss. That was nice.
“You call me.” She shoved me in the chest to bring home the urgency of that, then hurried on to her next class. If I called her, we’d only talk about why I hadn’t called her before then, so I knew I wouldn’t. Pain shot up my legs and I concentrated on it and let the hall surge move me along like a strong river current.
The cheerleaders gave out the armbands in a weepy, solemn way, and everyone wore theirs like a badge of something. Trapper Simkin, in his never-ending quest to be different, wore his around his leg, above his left knee, like a tourniquet. Aimee Stafleet wore a matching headband made from the same dull black cloth as the armbands.
After my third class, while I was at my locker staring at my stuff, our school counselor, Ms. Jazzmeyer, snuck up on me and clutched my shoulder. I whirled around to see her smiling sadly from beneath her short helmet of school-bus-colored hair.
“Tucker?” she said quietly, stroking my sleeve like it was a prize cat and not the ketchup-stained cuff of a track sweatshirt. I saw that her long fingernails were painted orange and black, the school colors, each one half and half.
“We’re rounding up some really good people, grief counselors from Tulsa,” she whispered, still petting my arm. “You just hang in there, sweetheart. They’ll be here in the morning and you’ll be first on our list. Okay, da
rlin’?” She gave my shoulder another squeeze.
“Okay,” I answered, though I hadn’t really comprehended a word she’d said. They’d hung in the air, those words, then crashed to the floor and splintered.
I saw my aching legs moving me down the halls the rest of the day, taking me to familiar places I would never have been able to find on my own. Occasionally I heard girls at their lockers talking in hushed voices about the upcoming funeral in much the same way they would have compared wardrobe notes before a basketball tournament.
“We’ll all sit together and wear our armbands.” “Is everybody going to wear black anything else? Black skirts?”
“Black jeans? Are jeans even okay?”
“Wear waterproof mascara so you can cry,” someone advised her friend in the exact same offhand way I myself had sometimes advised Trey to remember his sunglasses. Wear your shades, I was always telling him, because Trey kept them in the glove compartment of the Stang and usually forgot to take them out and put them on. Sun’ll be wicked at the game today. Better grab your shades.
At the end of last period, Mr. Halen came on the intercom and said that classes would be dismissed at one fifteen the next afternoon so that students who desired to could attend the funeral. He cleared his throat. “Um, that is, funerals.”
I mulled that over as I packed up my algebra book and followed my throbbing legs out the door. I couldn’t decide. Did you say “funeral” or “funerals”? One service, three bodies. Did you say “desire” about something like going to see three kids buried?
Those vocabulary questions tricked off minor sparks in my brain as my legs led me to our neighborhood, but they didn’t generate anything you could call actual thought.
Bud was sitting on the porch swing when I neared the house. He wasn’t moving it, he was just sitting there straight and rigid like he always sits. A little slip of white skin showed above his socks and below the cuffs of his pants.
