The Porcupine of Truth

by Bill Konigsberg

  “I’m sorry, by the way,” he says. It’s hard to believe how small he is. He’s like a speck of dirt walking away. A talking wisp. “Really. I’m the worst father in the world. I truly get that.”

  “They should have an award,” I call toward him. The words get caught in my dry throat.

  He closes the door softly behind him. I stand there in the kitchen for a long time, the bottles still in my hands. Is that what happens to a guy without a father? He drinks and becomes that? Is that going to happen to me?

  After a while, my mother comes through the back door and into the kitchen with groceries. “How’d your visit with your father go, honey?” she asks when she sees me standing there.

  Normally I like to make sure I don’t say anything to upset my mother, but my voice is quaking and I can’t quell my sarcasm. “Fantastic,” I say, exhibiting the two bottles. “It was like one of those holiday movies. We sat around the table and ate a turkey, and then we toasted marshmallows.”

  She puts the groceries down on the counter, then walks over to where I’m standing. She places her hand lightly on my shoulder. We are not a huggy people. “Are those your father’s?” she asks.

  Top ten stupid questions of all time, I think. But I don’t say that. I nod.

  She nods back, then removes her hand from my shoulder, then puts it back. “I truly hear underneath the sarcasm that you’re feeling pain, Carson. And I want you to know that I feel a lot of sadness as I think about how hard that must be for you.”

  “Yep, thanks,” I say, fighting the impulse to scream, I’M RIGHT HERE, MOM! STOP TRYING TO LOCATE ME! STOP ANALYZING ME!

  As I pour the contents of the bottles down the sink and she loads groceries into the cabinets and refrigerator, an image crosses my mind. It’s a mom and a young son, and the mom is, like, holding the son so close that he can’t breathe. She’s suffocating him. I watch the boy struggle to break free from his mom’s embrace.

  And I think, What’s the opposite of suffocation?

  I WAKE UP the next morning with the need to get the hell out of the house. Instead of wandering upstairs and scrounging for some breakfast, I find a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers.

  “Out for a run,” I say as I sweep past my mother, who is sitting alone in the kitchen, working on one of her many lists.

  “Have fun,” she says without looking up.

  I’m not much of a runner. I never do it at home. I think some people do it because it gives them the time to think, but in my life, I have a surplus of time to think.

  I stand under the pine tree in our front yard and stretch my legs a few times, then I jog across Rimrock Road and down Michigan Street. I turn right, and in the wide street ahead of me, there is absolutely no movement. I cannot recall ever seeing such stillness before.

  I run and run and run. I skip over weeds peeking through the cracks in the concrete. I pass fenced-in yards with old swing sets. The sun feels crisp on the back of my head, and I start to enjoy the burn I feel in my lungs. When I come to a T, I decide to turn left, even though I don’t know how long I’ll be able to go before I get tired. I don’t feel tired yet, and it’s probably been, what, a mile? Two? In the city, every twenty streets is a mile, pretty much. Here I have no clue.

  I’m running. Voluntarily. And nobody knows it but me.

  There are a lot of things people don’t know about me. There are a lot of things I never tell anyone. In my school, kids don’t tend to text or talk about real things. I mean, we talk about school stuff, or we talk about sports stuff, or we talk about stuff stuff, but nobody is really up for, you know, a text that says, So yesterday my alcoholic dad … It would be like, wtf, smh. Yolo.

  You only live once. Doesn’t that suck?

  I have a few friends I’ll probably text this summer, but so far we haven’t been in touch. It’s fine. We aren’t that close. I’m not that close to anyone, and I’m fine with it.

  And Mom. I love her and all, but the way she brings her work home with her and talks to me like a patient makes me feel like I’m visiting another planet. And I’m afraid of what it would do to her if I said half the things I think.

  So people don’t know a lot of what goes on in my head.

  One time last year, Kendra Salazar — one of the kids with whom I semi-hang out — convinced me to go to something called “gentle yoga” at this studio on Amsterdam Avenue. I went because Kendra is nice and pretty in a quirky way, and she described gentle yoga as basically napping in unusual positions. “You get these soft blocks, and you put one under your legs,” she said, “and you just, I don’t know. You just be.”

  So I tried it, and it was about the most unpleasant hour of my life. Here is sixty seconds of Carson Smith’s brain on gentle yoga: Am I doing this right? Why is my breathing so loud? Why does the instructor keep telling us to breathe? If I forget to make myself breathe, will I die? What if I had a heart attack right now and I died and no one knew because I didn’t make a noise and then they didn’t find out and I was dead on the floor of the yoga studio and they had to do this big cover-up so no one thought gentle yoga was dangerous but it is? Kendra ran her hand through her hair earlier when she saw me. Does she like me? Why? What would she do if she knew the real me, the real Carson? Am I good or am I bad? What if I’m bad? Do people go to heaven if they are bad? Is there a heaven? What would that even be like? And are we that stupid that we think that there’s some God up there who is keeping track of our rights and wrongs like Santa Claus and making a list and checking it twice? But what if there is? It would totally suck to be this guy who thinks there’s no God and be all cocky about it all your life and then you die on the floor of a yoga studio one day and poof! You go up to heaven and they’re like, so, um, Mr. Smith, sorry to let you know this, but you know those televangelists you thought were so stupid? They were right, and while yes, you were mostly kind and good, you didn’t believe in God enough, so I’m going to click this lever…. No! No! Bam! Dude, you’re in hell. Hell is gentle yoga and quieting your brain for sixty seconds. God, I want some fried chicken right now. Give me fried chicken! Or give me death! Right here on the floor of gentle yoga!

  So yeah, I’m not really the Zen guy I could be, I guess.

  My legs start to get a little tired, so I turn right, back toward Rimrock Road. It’s a bit of an uphill climb, and I feel it in my lungs. Then I’m in the home stretch. I see Michigan Street, and I pump my arms to make up for my ready-to-give-out legs. I’m just a block away, and then I’m crossing the street and at the finish line of our house and I don’t know how far I’ve run but I know it feels incredible, the ache in my quads, the burn in my throat. This is running Carson, the new Carson, the —

  Falling Carson.

  My left foot flops into a crevice I don’t see, and I topple forward. My knee scrapes hard against the street, leaving a trickle of blood that looks like it could have come from a raw steak.

  “Are you okay, son?”

  I look up. A man with white hair is standing above me, and in my bleary state I think, God? But when he lowers his right hand to me and I see a wedding ring, I realize it probably isn’t God.

  He helps lift me to my feet, and once I’m standing, I reach down and feel my raw knee. It’s wet — very.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Just hanging out on the ground like usual.”

  When he laughs, his freckled cheeks rise, and I think back to yesterday in my dad’s room, the photo of the guy posing with my dad and grandparents. “That may be your story, but I’m not buying it. Sure looked like a fall to me. Was sitting right out there.” He points to the front porch of the house next door to ours.

  “Pastor guy neighbor,” I say, my mouth extremely dry.

  He nods. “I thought you might be Matthew and Renee’s boy,” he says, as a smile spreads across his very round face like marmalade on toast. “The last time I saw you, you were yay high.” He puts his hand low against his leg.

  “I think I saw your picture yesterday,” I say.
“On my dad’s wall. It was the first time I ever saw a picture of my grandfather.”

  He nods in that way that adults nod to let you know that the general topic is sad. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I’ll just —”

  But it’s too late. He old-man hobbles toward his house, so I shrug and follow him.

  His house smells like mothballs and pinecones. Like old people and comfort. He places a towel on the beige couch and sits me down, and then he hands me a glass of ice water that disappears in one gulp. He brings me a refill. I inhale the second glass of water, still trying to catch my breath.

  He walks away and comes back with a first aid kit. He dabs some alcohol on my knee, which stings so badly I have to close my eyes. When I open them, he’s covered the cut with ointment, and he is placing a bandage over it.

  “Thank you,” I say. “Really. Thanks. I better get going.”

  He looks up at me. “Sit. Stay a while. I could use the company.” He sticks a chubby, lily-white hand in my face. “John. John Logan.”

  I don’t really want to stay. I mean, he seems like a perfectly nice guy, but he’s at least fifty years older than me, and there’s this whole drama with my dad that I don’t want to get any closer to. But his hand is there, so I shake it.

  “Carson,” I say, and then I remember that he’s known my name ever since I was “yay high.”

  “Your mother told me she was concerned you wouldn’t find things to do this summer. I told her I’d be happy if you took care of my lawn, and she said you wouldn’t know the first thing about what to do with it.”

  My first thought is that I’m a little surprised she mentioned me at all. The second is that in terms of lawns, she’s right. I have no idea what lawn care consists of, in the same way I don’t know exactly how eggs happen. The honest-to-God truth is I have no idea how many holes a chicken has, how some eggs have chickens in them and some not. I think growing up in the city makes you not question some of these basic things. “If you need any computer stuff done, maybe I could help,” I say.

  He smiles. “I haven’t quite caught up with the computers,” he says.

  It gets quiet, and again I am struck by how silent Montana is. You stop talking, and instead of a general buzz you get nothing.

  “So what was my grandfather like?” I ask to fill the quiet.

  He crosses his legs. “Good man,” he says. “He was funny. Very, very funny.”

  “Nice,” I say. And then I flash on what my dad said yesterday, that his dad was an alcoholic too. Yeah, good man, I think.

  He nods. “I worked with him for many years.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “He was a choir director.”

  “Um, okay. Where?”

  “At my church.”

  “Do you think maybe he’s still —” I can’t finish the sentence, because there’s really no right way to ask the question. Alive? Out there?

  He seems to get that. “I truly don’t know. A tragedy, really. For all of us.”

  I nod, because obviously it has been hard. I mean, I vaguely remember Grandma Phyllis. She wore dangly turquoise earrings, and when we went to her house she always had those soft white mint candies with the pink stripes. I got a stomachache eating them once, and I’ve never liked them since. My mom has told me stories about her over the years, and it’s pretty clear she was an unhappy lady. And my dad, well. Forget about it. “I’m sure,” I say.

  The pastor nods. “He was my closest friend.”

  I worry that he might be about to get emotional, so I look away, and I say, “He sounds great.” A pause.

  “So you work at a church?”

  “You could come down, if you want. Rimrock United Methodist. It’s just down the road. I’ve been the pastor there for forty-one years.”

  So I’m Methodist, I think, and the thought means absolutely nothing to me. I know it’s a brand of Christianity, but that’s about it. “I will,” I say, lying. I stand up. “This was really nice of you. Thanks a lot.”

  “I hope you’ll stop by for a chat once in a while. You seem like a very nice young man.”

  “I will do that,” I say, lying again. “Absolutely.”

  He looks at me like he’s waiting for me to say more. I think back to yesterday, and my dad saying something about tuna fish. “You’re the one who brings my dad food?”

  He nods and smiles. He probably gets a lot of crap from my dad, and now here I am, running off as soon as he invites me to church.

  “Thanks,” I say, trying to sound nicer than my dad probably does.

  He nods again.

  “Thanks,” I repeat out of sheer awkwardness, and then I duck out the front door and head to our place.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I’m in the shower when my phone rings. I hurry out and it’s a strange 406 number I’ve never seen before. I dry my hands as quickly as I can and pick up.

  “Hello?”

  A female voice says, “So you’re on a bus, and if you slow down to under twenty miles per hour, you’ll die.”

  My face flushes. Aisha. She’s calling. Me.

  “Oh no,” I say. “This is an unfortunate turn of events.”

  “What do you do?” Aisha asks, her voice dead serious.

  “Am I in Billings, or New York?”

  “Let’s say Billings.”

  “Do I ever have a shot at going back to New York?”

  “Let’s say no.”

  “I slow down.”

  She laughs. “True ’nuf. Hey. You up for buying me a cup of coffee?”

  “I could do that. In a few hours?”

  “How about now?” she says, and silently I pump my fist five times.

  Sweat drips from my eyelids as I walk into Off the Leaf, the nearest coffee shop to my house and the place where Aisha and I agreed to meet. I never thought I’d miss the noisy subway, but that was before a hot, last-day-of-June, late-afternoon, two-mile walk through Billings in which I saw not a soul. I’m going to need at least a bike to make this summer work.

  Everything inside the coffeehouse is crisp, bright, hospital clean, and huge. You could place a regulation basketball court in here. It’s the antithesis of a hip New York café.

  Also quiet. Unlike most coffee shops I’ve been in, there’s no music playing. Consequently, I can hear very clearly the four beer-bellied guys by the door bellowing about the Broncos, and the two middle-aged ladies in orange sweat suits reclining on a dangerously low pink vinyl couch. I glance around and there’s Aisha, positioned next to a metal-framed fireplace, waving wildly at me as if she’s trying to land a plane. I salute her and mouth, “Want a latte?” She nods her head enthusiastically.

  One of the perks of being dragged to Billings against my will is that my mother gave me a bribe: my own credit card to use, for all expenses “that seem reasonable.” I’ve never had unlimited fundage before, but I guess Mom thinks I’m a responsible kid who won’t, you know, go buy a Jet Ski or something. She is not exactly made of money, but I’m pretty sure that so long as I don’t go crazy, I can do what I want this summer and it’ll be courtesy of the Bank of Mom.

  “Whut can I git for ya?” asks the guy behind the counter. He looks like no barista I’ve seen in New York, ever. His belt buckle is bigger than my head, his hair is buzzed to within a centimeter of his scalp, and he has the confident swagger of a deeply unpleasant person.

  “I’ll take me two of them there lattes,” I say, and he nods his thick-necked head in a way that makes it unclear whether he thinks I’m making fun of him or not. He takes my card and gives me a cowboy smile, which I return, and then I wait while the other barista, an alt-looking girl with black lipstick, makes the drinks.

  I’m hanging out with Aisha, I think while I wait, allowing the words to swim around my brain. No big deal. I’m cool like that. I am a dude who hangs with girls who look like models.

  My mom the therapist calls these affirmations. I call them lies, but whatever. T
here’s no turning back now. I’m going to make this work.

  The Hollywood studio that created this ultramodern café and put it next to a place that appears to be named Casino Grand Liquor has filled it with random pieces that don’t make sense. Aisha is sitting in one of four comfy-looking leather chairs next to the fireplace, and they’ve put a shiny piano right up against one of the chairs, so that a pianist would have to fight anyone sitting in that chair for elbow space while playing. There are flat-screened TVs all set to Fox News, and a bunch of beanbag chairs strewn around as if this was hipster heaven.

  It is not hipster heaven.

  The lattes are taking awhile, so I walk over to Aisha, who pats the chair next to her facing the fireplace. A fire is burning, despite the fact that it is a Wednesday afternoon, the first day of July, and I am sweating like a pig. Aisha is wearing the same tank top she was wearing on Monday at the zoo. Not that I’m complaining; she looks unreal in it.

  “You have any good misinformation for me?” I ask, attempting to air out my shirt a little.

  “This place is really happening, for one.”

  “I expect Kanye West to come in here any second,” I say back, and then the girl calls my name and I go get our drinks.

  The drinks are sitting on the counter, and I’m about to take them when a meaty hand whisks one and then the other away.

  “I think those are mine,” I say, but the same guy who took my order seems not to be listening. He pours the contents of the coffee cups into the sink.

  “Um, excuse me?”

  He does not look up. He walks back to the front counter as if he needs to take another order. There is no one there.

  “Are you kidding me?” I say, thinking about the eight dollars, tip included, I just spent for nothing. The alt-looking girl offers me a quiet look of sympathy.

  I look back at Aisha. “He just poured our drinks out and is now ignoring me,” I say, loud enough so that everyone will know. The orange sweat-suited women either pretend not to hear, or they don’t. The football-talking guys are oblivious, as football-talking guys tend to be.