Best Boy

For Joshua Gottlieb

 

PART
ONE

ONE

P
AYTON
L
IVING
C
ENTER WAS THE SIXTH PLACE IN
a row Momma had taken me but neither of us knew it was the one where I'd stay forever and ever.

“My darling manzipan, I'm just so sure you're going to be happy here,” she said that day with her red mouth that never stopped talking.

Then she started crying. It was raining. We were sitting in the parked car and I touched the glass of the window that was clear as air. Rain was exploding silently on the other side of it and this scared me.

“There's so many things I need to tell you and there's never enough time,” she said and then wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.

“Momma,” I said, “the rain.”

“Please listen to me very carefully,” she said. “Life has a song of happiness at the heart of it, but you can only hear that song if you work hard and are always a Best Boy and do exactly what
you are told. You'll love it here, and Daddy and I will come on Visiting Day and call you on the weekends, and there's just tons and tons to do.”

I said nothing.

“Do you hear me? Toddy?”

She was smiling with her teeth but the water was continuing to fall from her eyes and this confused me because the glass all around us was supposed to keep the water out. I made my upset face.

“Don't cry,” she said, making a sound in her throat. “Please don't.”

She shut her eyes and wiped them with the handkerchief again and said, “Remember this because it's very important. You are never alone in life. The happy song is always playing deep down if you listen hard enough. It's always playing
always
, dreamboat.”

“I don't wanna go!” I yelled.

She put her hands on my shoulders and slowly stuck her tongue out and pushed her eyes wide open while moving her head around once, fast, in a big circle. I was thirteen years old and I laughed.

“Who knows best?” she said and winked.

“You do.”

“And how do I know?”

“Because you're my Momma.”

“And how long will I know?”

“Forever and ever.”

“And how long is forever?”

“Just past eternity and turn left.”

She smiled and hugged me with the warm front of her body and I relaxed like I sometimes did when she did that. But then there was a clicking on the glass by my head. A man in a white
smock holding an umbrella over his head was tapping his ring on the window. He showed his teeth and crooked his finger at me to get out of the car and instantly I felt the volts getting ready to burst and sizzle in my head and I began to scream.

The rain that fell that day is now forty-one years old but whenever it rains it's like part of that rain is still falling, it is. “The tears of God,” Raykene sometimes calls the rain. Raykene is my favorite daystaff here at Payton. I have several daystaff but she is my Main which means she's the person I spend the most time with. Her skin is brown and her hair has a live-fibered feeling and she's very religious.

“You're doing the Lord's work,” she always says, when she sees me doing my chores. Or, “It's the Lord's work,” she says, when she reads something bad that happened to people in the paper. Sometimes she takes me to her megachurch where the Lord is so condensed that people faint and shout out loud at how much of the Lord there is. The preacher has a rich yelling voice and when the chorus sings it's like the bang of thunder that comes mixed with lightning.

Until recently, I was very happy at Payton, where I live with the other “villagers” in cottages with painted numbers on them arranged in a circle on a big plate of grass. Staff here called me the “old fox” and the “village elder.” They clapped me approvingly on the shoulder and said, “Todd, you're the Rock of Ages.” But then several things happened, and I stopped being happy. Then a few more weeks went by and I got even less happy. The unhappiness kept getting larger and larger till finally I was so unhappy that it was raining all the time in my head even in sunshine and wherever I looked all I saw were gray dots of water falling sideways across the view.

That was how I began to drown.

TWO

T
HE VILLAGERS HERE ARE DIVIDED INTO THE
Developmentals, like me, and the BI's, which stands for brain-injured, like my new roommate Tommy Doon. There used to be mostly only Developmentals here, but a man named Damian Lands who is the president of Payton International decided to increase the percentage of BI's. He said it would make Payton “far more respectful” of “the range of human diversity.”

He didn't say that it would make his company eligible for a lot more money from the government.

I know how to read, which not everybody knows because I don't talk much. As for my new roommate Tommy Doon, he arrived two weeks ago and I already dislike him lots. Also, I'm afraid of him. Staff explained to him that if I get too upset I'll suffer an attack of volts and he's been trying to make it happen ever since. He thinks it's funny. For example, earlier today during Free Time I was sitting in my room listening to music
when I heard him calling my name. I got up and walked into the living room of our cottage.

This is what happened next.

“Todd Aaron,” Tommy said loudly, not looking at me. Tommy hurt his brain in a car crash and is very fat. Also, he loves television and watches shows as much as possible.

I didn't answer, but converted walking into the living room into going to get my dinner. In the kitchen nook, the lighted box of the fridge is filled with sealed entrées the staff has bought. When I microwave them, the smell of heating plastic reminds me of the signs of the gas stations of my childhood: blue ovals, flying horses, yellow parallelograms.

“Todd Aaron leave the room now,” Tommy said in his loud, dead voice.

“Please don't say that,” I said politely. The entrées are labeled with Magic Marker according to the days of the week and I slid a Fried Chicken Friday into the microwave.

“Todd Aaron is
ordered
to leave the room now,” Tommy Doon said, and turned up the volume and kept his hand on the channel-changing button of the remote control so that the frames of the television crashed into one another noisily. He looked over to see how close I was to getting volts.

“No,” I said, in a slightly louder voice that was still kind of soft. I can't bear to push my mind back against anybody, at any time, ever.

“If Todd Aaron does not leave the room now,” he said, “then Tommy Doon will scream in his ear as loud as he can.”

To keep the volts in, I thought I might have to bite myself again. Biting my hand has always calmed me. The therapist here calls it “self-soothing.” My palm has a big red saddle of scar tissue from biting, and my hand was suddenly trembling with
wanting to be in my mouth. But before I could do anything else the microwave rang, and I opened the door of the little house of the oven and the light went on magically above my steaming food, and I relaxed.

“Okay,” I said to Tommy Doon and walked slowly back to my bedroom carrying my food with me.

Dinner bubbled in a plastic boat. I ate it slowly at my desk, looking out the window where I could see other villagers walking by, returning from work. All of us villagers work at Payton. Work is “a holy thing,” says Raykene. It's the “basis of our dignity in life,” she says. My own jobs vary day-to-day and some of them I like and some I don't. My vocational manager whose name is Dave assigns me a job each morning. These are either on the Lawn Crew or Woodshopping or my favorite which is called Working the Line at a local high school cafeteria. The name of the high school is Demont Memorial. The noon school bell there has a noise like a heart attack. Then the dining room fills with students making a thunder-sound of excitement as trays slap on tables with booms and silverware chatters and laughs as it falls on plastic. All the sounds seem so much louder than they should be that it can make me afraid the volts will come, even if it's calming to “dish up” what the students ask me with a long-handled spoon or stab with a long fork at the hotdogs that float in hot water like doodies.

“Latest research,” I heard Tommy Doon say loudly to me from the other room, “shows that you're a jerk.”

I finished my dinner of fried chicken while continuing to look out the window. Then I scraped the hardened bits with a spoon, carried it back into the living room while doing “tunnel eyes” like I'd been taught as a way to ignore Tommy, and washed the dish out before throwing away the plastic container
in the blue bin for recyclables. As I walked back to my room I didn't know that something even worse than Tommy was already heading towards me from the future. I knew only that I was feeling suddenly anxious and I wasn't sure why. I entered my room and did what I often do when I'm feeling anxious. I went over to my dresser and I reached forward to the individual framed photographs of my parents and I turned the photo of my father to the wall.

THREE

A
LWAYS, HE WAS HITTING ME.
H
E DID THIS WITH
his belt or the cold meat of his hand, sweeping it through the air while he made his frozen face of tiredness. Then it struck. You spilled your soup your milk your oatmeal your beans, he said. Don't talk stupid and You make me sick, he said. Stop making that face and You made your mother cry again you little shit and Put your tongue back in your mouth NOW, he said.

The hitting itself usually took place soon after he came home from work. Dinnertime and I heard the car cough in the driveway. The slam of the front door went through the air. Then he was on the stairs, coming up. His feet stabbed the wood with bangs. He said something to Momma and went and sat in the lounge chair of his “study” that was filled with books and a smell of darkness. The drink was in a brown bottle by the side of the chair. The bottle rose in his hand. It attached itself to his mouth and his eyes shut while his throat made elevator movements. After he took the bottle away he blinked his eyes in surprise.

“What's up, Tex?” he said.

“Momma said it's time for dinner.”

“Huh.” The bottle rose again. He blinked his eyes again as he took it away.

“What did Andrew say today?”

Andrew was my counselor at the special needs daycamp. He'd recently told my parents that I was too “difficult” to attend summer camp any longer. I had gone to this camp every day for a week in the groaning yellow bus. The camp was held in a swim club where lawns with curling slides dropped you into a large pool of blue water filled with speeding bits of light. We sang songs together and played shuffleboard with long forks. We pasted sticks into walking shapes. Two days before, my parents and I had had a meeting with Andrew. They asked him to “reconsider his decision.” They told him they would give me a “real talking-to” and that I would be a “solid little citizen from here on and listen to everything you say.” Momma made sad noises in her throat between the words as she spoke them and she rocked a little bit while talking. Also she did White Fingers from holding her pocketbook so hard she pressed out the blood. I sat in a chair and watched my hands chasing each other while Andrew told them he wanted to talk to me about it just the two of us the next day.