by Joe Hill
“Yeah,” said Eddie Prior, who suddenly appeared between Cameron and me. He planted his hand in the center of Cameron’s forehead and shoved. Cameron went down on his ass, hard, with a yelp. His glasses fell off and skidded away across a puddle of ice. “Don’t be a faggot. No one’s going to know. You’ll get it back.”
Then Eddie threw an arm over my shoulders and we were walking away together. He spoke out of the side of his mouth, as if we were two convicts in a movie talking in a prison yard about the big breakout.
“Lerner,” he said, referring to me by my last name. He called everyone by their last names. “Lemmie have that after you’re done with it. Due to unforeseen circumstances beyond my control, namely my mom’s boyfriend is a loudmouthed cunt, I had to get out of the house last night, and I wound up playing foosball with my cousin till all hours. Upshot: I didn’t get past answering the first two questions of this friggin thing.”
Although Eddie Prior pulled down Cs and Ds in everything except shop, and found his way to detention almost weekly, he was as charismatic in his own way as Cameron Hodges was in his. He seemed impossible to rattle, a trait which powerfully impressed others. Furthermore, he was so relentlessly good-humored, so game for fun, no one could stay mad at him. If a teacher told him to get out of class for making one ignorant remark or another, Eddie would raise his shoulders in a slow, who-can-figure-anything-in-this-crazy-old-world shrug, carefully collect his books, and slink out—shooting one last sly look at the other students in a way that always set off a chain-reaction of titters. The next morning, the same teacher who had kicked him out of class would be tossing a football around with him in the faculty parking lot, while the two bullshitted about the Celtics.
It seems to me the quality that separates the popular from the unpopular—the one and only quality that Eddie Prior and Cameron Hodges had in common—is a strong sense of self. Eddie knew who he was. He accepted himself. His failings had ceased to trouble him. Every word he spoke was a thoughtless, pure expression of his true personality. Whereas I had no clear picture of myself, and was always looking to others, watching them intently, both hoping and fearing that I would catch some clear sign of who they saw when they looked at me.
So in the next moment, as Eddie and I moved away from Cameron, I experienced the kind of abrupt, unlikely psychological shift that is the adolescent’s stock-in-trade. I had only just ripped Cameron’s test from his hands, desperate to find a way out of the trap I had made for myself, and more than a little horrified at what I was willing to do to save myself. Theoretically I was still desperate and horrified—but it delighted me to find myself reeling along with Ed Prior’s arm over my shoulders, as if we were lifelong friends coming out of the White Barrel Tavern at two in the morning. It gave me a delightful shock of surprise to hear him casually refer to his mother’s boyfriend as a loudmouthed cunt; it seemed as smooth a witticism as anything that had ever fallen out of the mouth of Steve Martin. What I did next, I would’ve thought impossible just five minutes before. I handed him Cameron’s exam.
“You already got two questions done? Take it. Doesn’t sound like you need it for long. I’ll look at it when you’re finished,” I said.
He grinned at me, and two deep comma-shaped dimples appeared in the baby fat of his cheeks. “How’d you get yourself into this fix, Lerner?”
“I forgot we had a take-home. I can’t pay attention in that class. Don’t you know Gwen Frasier?”
“Yeah. She’s a fuckin skag. What about her?”
“She’s a fuckin skag who doesn’t wear any panties,” I said. “She sits right next to me and she’s always opening and closing her legs. I got her one-eyed beaver staring me in the face half of class, how am I supposed to think about history?”
He boomed with laughter, in a voice so loud, people all over the lot stared. “She’s probably givin it some air to dry out her herpes sores. You want to watch out for her, partner.” And then he laughed some more, laughed until he was wiping at the water brimming in his eyes. I laughed too, something I never did easily, and I felt a shiver in the nerve endings. He had called me partner.
I SEEM TO remember he never did get Cameron’s take-home back to me, and I wound up handing in my test completely blank anyway—on this point my memory is a little hazy. After that morning, though, I followed him around a lot. He liked to talk about his older brother, Wayne, who had spent four weeks of a three-month sentence in the juvenile detention hall, for the crime of firebombing someone’s Oldsmobile, and who had then busted out and was now living on the road. Eddie said Wayne called sometimes to brag on all the barhouse gash he was getting, and all the heads he was busting. He was vague about what his older brother was doing to get by, though. Helping on farms out in Illinois, Eddie said once. Boosting cars for Detroit niggers, he said another time.
We hung out a lot with a fifteen-year-old named Mindy Ackers, who babysat an infant in a basement apartment across the street from Eddie’s duplex. The place smelled of mold and urine, but we’d blow whole afternoons there, smoking cigarettes with her, and gambling on games of checkers, while the baby crawled around bare-assed under our feet. Other days, Eddie and I took the footpath through the woods behind Christobel Park, out to the concrete pedestrian overpass that ran above Route 111. Eddie always brought a brown paper bag full of garbage with him, heisted from the apartment where Mindy did her babysitting, a sack containing shit-filled diapers and sopping cartons of rancid Chinese. He dropped bombs of garbage at trucks passing below. Once, he aimed a diaper at an enormous semi with red flames airbrushed across the hood and steer horns fixed in the spot where the hood ornament belonged. The diaper burst on the passenger side of the windshield, and a splash of dill yellow diarrhea sprayed across the glass. The air brakes shrieked, smoke boiling off the tires. The driver yanked his air horn at us, a tremendous yelp of sound that caused my heart to surge in alarm. We grabbed each other, and ran laughing.
“Book it, fat ass, I think he’s coming after us!” Eddie shrieked, and I ran for the sheer excitement of running. I didn’t really think anyone would go to the trouble to get out of their truck and gallop after us, but it was a thrill to pretend.
Later, when we had slowed down, and were walking through Christobel Park, both of us gasping for breath, Eddie said, “There isn’t any form of human life more foul than truckers. I never met one that didn’t smell like a bucket of piss after a long haul.” I wasn’t completely surprised to learn later that Eddie’s mother’s boyfriend—the loudmouthed cunt—was himself a long-haul trucker.
Sometimes Ed came to my house, mostly to watch TV. We had good reception. He was curious about my brother, wanted to know all about whatever was wrong with him, was interested to see what he was working on in the basement. Eddie remembered seeing Morris knock over his griffin domino chain on TV, even though that had happened a couple years before. This was never said, but I think he was enraptured by the idea of knowing an idiot-savant. He would’ve been just as excited to meet my brother if he was a double-amputee, or a dwarf. Eddie wanted a little Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not in his life. In the end, people usually get a bit more of what they want than they can really handle, don’t they?
On one of his first visits to my house, we went down for a look at the latest incarnation of Morris’s fort. Morris had about forty boxes strapped together to make a network of tunnels laid out in the shape of a monstrous octopus, with eight long passageways winding back to an enormous central box that had once held a projection-screen television. It would’ve made sense to paint it so it looked like an octopus—a leering kraken—and indeed, several of the thick trunk-like “arms” had been painted a lime green, with red discs on them to indicate suction cups. But other arms were leftovers from older forts—one arm was built out of the remnants of the yellow submarine, another had been part of a rocketship design, and was white, with fins and lots of American flag decals. And the huge box at the center of the octopus was completely unpainted, but encased in a shell of chi
cken-wire mesh, which was shaped to look like a pair of lopsided horns. All the rest of the fortress had the appearance of a child’s homemade playset…spectacular looking, but just a playset nonetheless, something maybe Dad had helped to build. It was this last detail, the unexplained, unexplainable chicken-wire horns, that marked it out as the work of someone who was seriously bullshit crazy.
“Awesome,” Eddie said, standing at the bottom of the stairs and looking out upon it, but I could see by a certain dimming in his eyes that he wasn’t all that impressed, had been hoping for more.
I hated to see him let down, for any reason. If he wanted my brother to be a savant, so did I. I dropped to all fours, at one of the entrances. “You got to crawl in to get the full effect. They’re always cooler inside than they are outside.”
And without looking to see if he’d follow, I climbed in.
I was a big fourteen-year-old, clumsy, broad-shouldered, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds…but still a kid, not an adult, with a kid’s proportions and a kid’s flexibility, able to squeeze my way through even the narrowest tunnel. But I didn’t usually make a habit out of climbing through Morris’s forts. I had discovered early on, scrambling through one of his first designs, that I didn’t like being in them much, had a touch of claustrophobia inside me. Now, though, with Eddie following behind me, I heaved myself in, as if worming around inside one of Morris’s cardboard hideouts was my idea of high good times.
I climbed through one linked snaking tunnel after another. In one of the boxes there was a cardboard shelf with a jelly jar on it; flies buzzed inside of it, bumping softly and a little frantically against the glass. The close acoustics of the box amplified and distorted the sound of them, so at times the buzzing almost seemed to be inside my own head. I studied them for a moment, frowning, a little disturbed by the sight of them—was Morris going to let them die in there?—then crawled on. I wormed through a wide passageway in which the walls had been covered with glow-in-the-dark stars and moons and Cheshire cats—a whole neon galaxy swarmed around me. The walls themselves had been painted black, and at first I couldn’t see them. For one brief, sickening instant, I had an impression that there weren’t any walls at all, as if I were crawling through empty space on some narrow invisible ramp, nothing above me or below me for who knew how far; and if I went off the ramp there would be nothing to stop my fall. I could still hear the flies buzzing in their jelly jar, although I had left them somewhere far behind me. I was dizzy, I reached out with one hand, and my fingertips pressed against the side of the box. Like that, the impression of crawling through gaping empty space passed, although I still felt a little swimmy in the head. The next box was the smallest and darkest of them all, and as I was squeezing through it, my back brushed a series of small tin bells hanging from the ceiling. The sound of their soft, tinny clashing startled me so badly I almost shrieked.
But I could see a circular opening ahead, looking into a space lit by drifting pastel lights. I pulled myself into it.
The box at the center of Morris’s cardboard kraken was roomy enough to provide shelter for a family of five and their dog. A battery-operated lava lamp bubbled in one corner, red globs of plasma rising and sinking through viscous amber fluid. Morris had papered the inside of the enormous box with silver foil Christmas wrap. Sparks and filaments of light raced here and there in trembling waves, sheets of gold and raspberry and lime, crashing into each other and vanishing. It was as if in the course of my long crawl to the center of the fort, I had gradually been shrinking, until at last I was no larger than a field mouse, and had arrived in a little room suspended inside a disco ball. The sight gave me a weak shiver of wonder. My temples throbbed dully, the strange, wandering lights beginning to bother my eyes.
I hadn’t seen Morris since getting home, had assumed he was out with our mother on an errand. But he was waiting there in the large central box, sitting on his knees with his back to me. To one side of him was a comic book and a pair of scissors. He had cut the back cover off and inserted it into a white cardboard frame, and now he was sticking it to the wall with pieces of Scotch tape. He heard me enter, and glanced back at me, but didn’t say hello, and returned straightaway to hanging his picture.
I heard scuffling noises in the passageway behind me, and slid to one side to make room. An instant later Eddie poked his head through the circular hatch and peered up into the foil-lined box. His face was flushed and he was grinning in that way that made dimples in his cheeks.
“Holy shit,” Eddie said. “Look at this place. I want to bang a chick in here.”
He pulled himself the rest of the way out of the tunnel, and sat on his knees.
“Bitchin fort,” Eddie said to Morris’s back. “I would’ve killed to have a fort like this when I was your age.” Ignoring the fact that at eleven, Morris was actually too old to be playing in cardboard forts himself.
Morris didn’t reply. Eddie shot me a sideways look and I shrugged. Eddie cast his gaze around, taking it all in, mouth hanging open in an expression of obvious pleasure, while a storm of brilliant lights, gold and silver, billowed silently around us.
“Crawling in here was wild,” Eddie went on. “What’d you think of the tunnel that was lined with black fur? I felt like when I got to the end I was going to pop out of a gorilla’s snatch.”
I laughed, but gave him a questioning, puzzled look. I didn’t remember a fur-lined tunnel—and he had, after all, been right behind me, had followed the same path I followed.
“Also the wind-chimes,” Eddie said.
“They were bells,” I corrected.
“Oh, were they?”
Morris finished hanging his picture and, without speaking to us, crawled to a triangular exit. Before he went through, though, he looked back at us one last time. When he spoke, he spoke to me: “Don’t follow me this way. Go back the way you came.” Then: “This way won’t do what it’s supposed to. I need to work on it some more. It isn’t right yet.”
With that, he ducked through the hatch and disappeared.
I looked at Eddie, to offer an apology, was preparing a statement along the lines of, Sorry my brother’s such an absolute fruitcake. But Eddie had crawled around me and was studying the picture Morris had hung on the wall. It showed a family of Sea Monkeys, standing together in a close group—nude, pot-bellied creatures with waving flesh-colored antennae and human faces.
“Look,” Eddie said. “He hung up a picture of his real family.”
I laughed. Eddie wasn’t much in the personal ethics department, but it was never any trouble for him to make me laugh.
I WAS ON my way out of the house—it was a Friday, in the first couple weeks of February—when Eddie called and said not to come to his place, but to meet me on the footbridge over 111. Something in his tone, a hoarseness, a strained quality, caught my attention. Nothing he said was out of the ordinary, but sometimes his voice seemed about to crack, and I had an impression of him struggling to clamp down on a surge of unhappiness.
The footbridge was a twenty-minute hike from my house, down Christobel Avenue, through the park, and then up the nature trail into the woods. The nature trail was a groomed path of crushed blue stones, which climbed the rising hills under bare stands of birch and moose maple. In about a third of a mile the path came out onto the footbridge. Eddie was leaning over the railing, watching the cars in the eastbound lane rush by below.
He didn’t look at me as I came towards him. Lined on the belly-high wall in front of him were three crumbly bricks, and just as I came up beside him, he nudged one off. I felt an instant of nervous shock, but the brick fell onto the back end of an eighteen-wheeler rolling by below, without damaging anything. The truck was hauling a trailer loaded with steel pipes. The brick hit the top pipe with a clash and a bang, then tumbled down the side of the pile, setting off a series of tuneful clangs and ringing gongs, a hammer thrown at the metal tubes of some enormous pipe organ. Eddie opened his mouth in his broad, homely, impossibly likable grin, sho
wing the gaps in his teeth. He glanced at me, to see if I appreciated the unexpected musicality produced by his latest truck bombing. That was when I saw his left eye. It was surrounded by a ring of bruised flesh, ugly purple, with faint highlights of yellow.
When I spoke, I barely recognized my voice as my own. My tone was winded and faint. “What happened?”
“Lookit,” he said, and dug a Polaroid out of the pocket of his jacket. He was grinning still, but when he passed the picture to me he wouldn’t meet my gaze. “Feast your eyes.” It was as if I hadn’t said anything.
The picture showed two fingers, belonging to a girl, her fingernails painted a creamy silver. They were pressing into a triangle of red-and-black striped fabric, caught in the cleft of skin between her legs. I could see her thighs at the edges of the photo, blurred, too-pale flesh.
“I beat Ackers ten games in a row,” he said. “We bet if she lost the tenth game she had to take a picture of herself fingerin her clit. She went in the bedroom so I didn’t actually see her take the picture. But she wants to go again sometime and try and win the photo back. If I beat her another ten games in a row I’m going to make her finger herself right in front of me.”
I turned, so that we were standing side-by-side, leaning against the railing, facing oncoming traffic. I gazed blankly at the photo for another moment, not thinking much of anything, unsure how to act, what to say. Mindy Ackers was a plain girl with frizzy red hair, devastating acne and a throbbing crush on Eddie. If she lost the next ten games of checkers to him, it would be on purpose.
At the moment, though, what she had or hadn’t done to entertain him was a lot less interesting than how Eddie had wound up with that freshly minted shiner on his left eye…a thing, apparently, he didn’t want to discuss.
“Fuckin wild,” I said, finally, and set the photo on the cement wall below the railing. Without thinking, I put my hand down on one of the bricks.
