Best Boy (6 page)

“Look,” Nate said after a while.

I continued not talking.

“Look,” he said again, “Todd.”

I kept eating silently.

“I get that you're upset.”

I didn't say anything.

“But don't do this.”

I continued saying nothing.

“Because pouting is only gonna boomerang back on you, promise.”

I kept eating.

“And piss off the people who are trying to help you.”

I stopped eating and looked at him.

“Like you?” I said.

He put down his fork and stared at me in surprise. “Whoa,” he said. Then he shook his head.

“I'm thinking it may be time to give you another little rehearsal of the facts, my brother,” he said. Then he made the same face he used to make when we were boys together in the backyard and he came with his friends John Latorta and Dave Mangell to torture me by pulling down my pants and pointing and laughing or spraying hair spray on my dingus to make it burn.

“What you need to be,” he said, “is a little bit grateful.”

I returned to eating.

“Grateful,” he said, “that there's a person in the world devoted to your care who, by the way, doesn't have to be but is anyway.”

I concentrated on my hamburger.

“Because this same person could easily, you know, leave you to the administrators and not check in at all, ever.”

The hamburger was made of warm meat.

“And just pay the bills and ignore you, like most siblings of villagers.”

It had little rippled pickles on it that I loved.

“Because that's what siblings do with villagers, mostly. They ignore them. But I can't do that with you. I wouldn't. You're my brother. End of discussion.” There was a silence. “Understand?”

I was still silent and chewing my burger when he changed the tone of his voice and said, “Todd?”

“Yes?”

“It's your birthday next week, isn't it?”

“Yes it is.” I said.

“Well I brought you a present,”

I love presents and immediately put my burger down and looked at him.

“Is it something to eat?” I asked.

He laughed and took a long drink of his beer. “As soon as you're done with lunch,” he said, “I'll show you.”

We finished eating while he talked lots and I didn't say much and then we got back into the car. He explained that the present was a glider ride and that we were going straight to the airport to do it. My autism comes with a special anxiety disorder that means I
react suboptimally to changes in the environment.
But the two times I've been on airplanes I've become extremely calm during flights and I like it. Nate knows I like it. He was excited as we arrived at the little airport and then got out of the rental car and stood a moment watching the big pencils of planes drawing lines in the air above the runways.

“We're gonna ride the wind like cowboys,” he said, “and not burn even a single watt-hour doing it.”

We went into the main building where we met Mel. Mel was
the pilot. He was old and very tall. He brought us out to the runway and all three of us went and sat in a kind of narrow canoe with wings. Another plane attached a rope to our plane and began pulling us forward. They rolled us bumping over the ground with little waves and wobbles and then we lifted off and were free. The plane tugging in front of us buzzed and the wind roared. Clouds that were moving high in the sky seemed to stoop down towards us as we rose.

“Is this cool,” Nate shouted from behind me, “or what?”

Finally the tow plane disengaged and went away, trailing the steel cable behind it like a sperm. Instantly our plane eased up and began to float. It floated and floated silently in space, drifting. The pilot twisted the wings in such a way that it stood sideways up in the air and made my stomach lurch and my brother laugh. After an hour of drifting across the sky like a seed, the plane spiraled down and landed. It was funny to go from the drifting feeling of space to the loud specific fact of being on planet earth again.

Where I lived.

I got out of the plane and my brother and I stood there. He shook the hand of the pilot, who clapped him on the shoulder and said short, loud bursts of words to him that I didn't listen to. I didn't listen because I knew what was happening. They were having a man-conversation. Nate had these all the time. They often involved slaps on the back and lots of exploding laughing sounds. Sometimes there were winks. Instead of watching I looked all the way back inside myself to the little house where I was born and grew up. I did this often when I was around Nate. I did this because houses absorb people who stay in them by eating and swallowing them and part of me was still living there. The soft singing sound of Momma's voice was still mov
ing around the rooms there. The soap smell of her arms was still hanging in the air.

Come here, house
, I said in my mind and I watched the house walk towards me like a person.

By now Nate had finished talking to the pilot and was looking at me. He was silent for a few seconds. I could see his face falling while in the distance behind him a tiny plane jerked off the ground into the air and kept rising.

“You're doing it again,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“I just took you on a glider ride for your birthday that was a hell of a lot of fun and costly too and you're doing it,” he said. “Don't do it.”

“Do what?”

He gave me a smile that made me stop remembering how much we used to hate each other as kids, and he said, “Doubting me. I can tell you are. Don't. You'll be coming home soon, Tuber. Just keep the faith.” Then he took me by the shoulders and brought his face close enough to mine so that I could see the pink hoop of his mouth and his swimming-pool-colored eyes.

“Have I ever been anywhere but in your corner?” he asked.

ELEVEN

M
IKE THE
A
PRON BEGAN BRINGING “SPECIAL
treats” by my house. He said it was part of our “new understanding,” though I wasn't sure exactly which understanding he was talking about. The first time he brought by Good & Plenty's, which I like because they have a crackling candy varnish over a soft licorice center. The next time he brought over a large chocolate bar. Raykene is supposed to monitor my diet because I love to eat so much that I can get fat. My meds “stimulate” appetite. Also, I have high blood levels of triglycerides which is a “congenital” condition. But no one noticed that I was beginning to eat lots of sweets and I wasn't going to tell them either.

He brought over colorful patches you iron onto your jeans. He brought over a plastic flute and a spider of metal that walked when you wound the key on its side. Often when he brought these things Tommy Doon would glare at him from where he was sitting watching television and sometimes he would even stomp into his room and slam the door behind him.

One day he came by with a big cardboard box and said, “Okay, stud, something real special this afternoon.”

It was Free Time and I'd been lying in my room listening to Neil Diamond on the oldies station. I love Neil Diamond even more than I love Neil Sedaka. When I saw Mike at the entrance to my room I felt something move in the back of my throat. I turned the volume down and looked at him. He said:

“See this box?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, it's gonna change the equation.”

I had no idea what he was talking about but since Mike was still pretending we were becoming really good, special friends I said the following:

“Okay.”

“Yeah,” said Mike, “you wanna c'mon outside for a little bit, I'll show you.”

I didn't want to go, but I made myself get out of bed. Together we walked out the door past Tommy Doon who stared at us. I followed Mike to a field behind some buildings while he said quietly, “So, bro to bro, you did so good on Lawn Crew we're gonna do it again together soon.”

“The Lawn Crew?” I asked.

“Just like last time,” he said, and then he put the box down on the ground and out of it removed several pieces of plastic that he fitted together into something like a big flashlight with four propellers on its four corners. He put it on the ground and stood up.

“Ain't it amazing,” he said, “what you can get online nowadays?”

“What is that?” I asked.

“Folks call it different things,” he said, and from the same box
he took something like a radio, with dials and sticks on it, and an antenna. He moved a stick and pressed a button.

“I call it the future,” he said and winked as the little toy made a sneezing sound and the four propellers began to spin. This scared me and I jumped backwards which made Mike say, “Hold on, Sheriff!” Then as I stood there the propellers blurred and began whining and the plane shot straight up into the sky like something falling away in reverse, and vanished into the sun.

“What's really cool,” said Mike the Apron, “is how the sucker has pinpoint control.”

He fiddled with the sticks and the plane fell out of the sky, braked to a stop in the air right in front of us, and then shot away in a flat line towards the trees.

“Feeling
goo
d
!” Mike the Apron shouted. “And get this.”

Out of the box he pulled a little screen and angled it towards me. The screen showed two fingers on a pool table. The plane made another long curve through the sky and the two fingers suddenly became him and me standing on the wide, spreading green field, looking up with our mouths open.

“A camera?” I said.

“A for effort, bud.” Mike winked, and then moved the sticks again as the plane flipped in the air and the screen abruptly filled with the blue of sky. “But not just any camera. This little thing is nearly a drone. I can do almost anything with it. I can hover. I can zoom, I can pan and wide-angle. We're talking military-grade toys for boys.”

“Why,” I said, “do you have this?”

“Because you can't ever know too much about the people you live with.” He gave a laugh while the strings whipped around in his chest.

“You wanna try?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Suit yourself.”

He continued pushing the plane around the sky while I turned and walked away from Mike the Apron and went home. I wanted to sit in my room and listen to “Sweet Caroline” on my headphones and wait for the next thing to happen. I wanted to spend more time thinking about my Idea and how I could pull my home to me across hundreds of miles of space and wake up in my childhood bedroom again. I was almost back to my cottage when I heard a buzzing in the air by my head. I turned around to look and saw the Mike's toy plane sitting in the air right behind me with the metal eye of its tiny camera pointed at my face. A nerve of sight stretched all the way from that plane to the coyote-brain and yellow teeth of Mike the Apron and this thought made my stomach cold. But just then the plane kind of waggled its wings and shot away.

I went into the house feeling nervous and saw that Tommy Doon was inside my bedroom. When he heard me he backed out fast and gave a big shout like he was pretending to have hurt himself. But I understood what he'd been doing. He'd been snooping. He'd been looking for evidence in the case he'd been making against me from the moment we first met.

TWELVE

R
AYKENE ALWAYS SAYS THAT HATING OTHER PEOPLE
is “deeply un-Christian” and that it's “never in your best interest.” Another staff named Chuck once said to me, “Hate binds you more to the other person than anything else in life.” I was hoping not to have to complain about Tommy Doon to staff because I never like complaining. But maybe it was time to talk to someone about Tommy Doon because I was beginning to hate him a little. I'd had many different roommates over the years but Tommy Doon was different from the start.

He wasn't like Johnny Thewig who was very thin and nervous and hugged me hard each morning and cried, “You are the one!” He wasn't like Brandon Aronowicz who smiled all the time except when he began crying hard because he saw a color he didn't like or a car with a human face on it, or Tom Nassar who whispered to himself a lot and would only look at you through a camera which he carried around with him, or Steve Mothergill who always kept both of his hands in his hair
and would only take one out at meals to eat and then put it back again. Tommy Doon arrived in this cottage a few weeks ago and the main thing that was special about him was that from the moment he stepped through the front door he was sure I was trying to do as little as possible in life and would cheat whenever I could.

He was sure of this even though we have a chore sheet on the wall by the refrigerator in the cottage and a Magic Marker on a string and each day we check off things like cleaning the sink and emptying the trash and I do mine every day without complaining. But Tommy Doon who sits in his chair watching television as much as possible and flicking his eyes around the room nervously from his brain injury is convinced I spend too much time in my own room listening to the radio instead of salting Comet onto a sponge and scrubbing the sink which I don't like to do because it makes my lungs hurt from the bleach, or squirting Windex (lemon-scented) onto a rag and wiping the front windows of the house. All Tommy is supposed to do is mop the floors and broom the entryway. He's also supposed to beat the runner on the floor in the backyard once a week but he usually doesn't do any of it even though he checks the boxes on the sheet.

The main thing that Tommy does is watch me. He watches me very carefully. He watches to see when I'm feeling bad so that he can gloat and maybe make a lie up and tell on me. What he wants most of all is that I don't do well in life. I'm not exactly sure why this is. Tommy Doon is what Mr B calls
an implacable foe
.