Best Boy (9 page)

“Doesn't matter,” she said. She looked at me and smiled mysteriously. “I got ways.”

“Ways?”

She didn't say anything and we kept walking. A year or so ago I'd told my brother about Risperdal making me feel thick inside.
He'd phoned to Payton to have them change me to another drug that is called Abilify. But Abilify wasn't on the list, they told him, so it would cost him 450 extra dollars a month for them to give it to me. After this Nate told me that he would think about it but he didn't mention it again. Maybe this is because he's an accountant and thinks “about money for a living.” I'd gotten used to the Risperdal but I didn't like it. But I couldn't imagine not taking it. I was supposed to take it. There wasn't anyone who didn't know I was supposed to take it. They all took it too.

“Ways?” I said again.

She didn't say anything but the eye caught mine and she smiled a little. We were walking up the concrete path to the front door of the Bingo Hall, moving slowly and steadily. I was watching our feet take steps together, attached at the end of very long legs. I was trying not to notice the hottish coldish feelings that were moving through me of wanting to be alone with Martine in a room. These feelings were especially strong in the back of my throat, which wanted to say words, and in my jaws that wanted to bite and chew. For the first time in years, there was a sudden gust of wind in my pants.

“I can teach you how to pretend,” she said.

“Pretend what?”

She opened the door to the Main Hall where the bingo was happening and a waiting wave of sound fell over us.

“Pretend to take the pills,” she said loudly.

“What?” I shouted, because I wasn't sure what I'd heard.

She winked and made round lips like someone blowing a smoke ring and gave a sound: “Whoooo!” But it was hard to hear because the room was deafening. People sat at long tables yelling and groaning. Some waved their arms, while the woman onstage cranked a wire basket that made a hammering of wooden balls
against the metal parts and another woman announced numbers and letters in a huge, microphoned voice from the ceiling.

We sat down next to each other at a table and I said, “Unh,” under my breath from the violence of the sounds in the air and the strange thing she had just told me about the pills and the feelings building in my throat and my pants. A staff gave us bingo cards and pencils. Bingo is easy. You just make an
x
in the box that they announce and if you get a row across the page they give you a prize of a small stuffed animal, a comb, a CD or a bar of soap.

As we began playing my eyes rested on Martine's face. It was from inside this face that she'd looked at me and also from where the words had come that moved my insides so pleasantly. A few minutes went by with me doing this while playing bingo. Then behind her face in the blur of the moving background I saw another face that I recognized. I tried keeping it in the background by hoping it would stay there but instead it came steadily forward out of the background and into clear light.

“Halooo!” said Mike the Apron. It was so loud in the hall we could pretend not to hear what he was saying. I pretended. He leaned forward and said more loudly, “Hello.”

Martine looked at him with her eye.

“My name's Mike,” he said.

But she didn't say anything.

“Your buddy Todd and me are friends,” he said.

“Hello,” she said tiredly.

“You close to a bingo, guy?” he said to me and came around so that he was looking over my shoulder and I felt the warm arm of his breath fall on my neck.

Then he crouched down so that he was the same level as me and into my ear he said, “You go, tiger.”

After that he stood back up, slapped me on the back which I hate and shouted, “Later, you two!” He shaped his mouth to say the word “baaa” but he might have only been burping. With a wink, he walked away.

We continued playing for a while without saying anything. From the high ceiling a strong light fell over the woman onstage who continued to turn the big wire basket. People kept yelling. Others slept. I know it's un-Christian to feel this way, but the thought that Martine didn't especially want to talk to Mike made me very happy. And for that and several other reasons I stayed happy for the rest of the night and went to bed happy and woke up happy too.

SIXTEEN

A
FEW DAYS LATER
I
SAW
G
RETA
D
EANE AS
I
WAS
coming home from work at the woodshop. I'd taken a shortcut across some fields and I saw her standing near the cows that she likes so much and spends time with. Payton has a small dairy farm but I never go work there because staff knows I'm mostly afraid of animals. I heard Raykene once describe Greta as one of “God's elect, as pure as rainwater.” The cows were on the other side of the fence from Greta and as I got closer I saw that she was talking to them. I came up alongside her and stood there.

“Hi, Todd,” she said, and then she pointed to a cow and in her voice that always went up at the end she said, “That's Eveline?”

“Hi,” I said. Because of Martine I'd begun looking at girls more carefully and I saw that Greta seemed different. She was wearing green stones in her earlobes and painted swirls around her eyes and the black wing of hair that cut across her forehead was polished shiny. Eveline the cow meanwhile stood looking at
us. Her jaw went regularly around in circles and stuff fell silently from her butt.

“What's up?” Greta said.

“Nothing special,” I said and then I suddenly added, “I was with Mike on Lawn Crew when he went to your house!”

Greta smiled at me happily and said, “Did you know Eveline was pregnant last year? She gave birth to a calf named Ezekiel?”

“Pregnant,” I said.

“She told me it was a hard delivery?” Greta said. “But she was very happy to have her baby?”

“She told you that?”

“Yes.”

“Mike said he was helping you with something.”

“Cows,” she said, “are sensitive to heat?”

“He said he might have to see you again.”

“But they don't sweat or even pant like dogs with their tongues out and they can only get rid of body heat by breathing?”

“What?” I said.

“Did you know that?” she asked.

I looked at her.

“Um, no,” I said.

“Gotta go.” She turned around to leave.

Greta Deane never said goodbye. I remembered that. I watched her walk away in her tall body that slowly got smaller in the distance and I wondered exactly which meds she was taking. Ever since I'd had the conversation with Martine I've been thinking lots about meds. I've been remembering something I forgot which was that in Six Winds I had a staff named Prashad who had a ponytail and called meds “potions.” He said he'd tried them all because he was curious. He said, “Todd, the human brain is a chemical factory and I believe in full employment.”

Prashad told me that he liked to imagine what the inventor of the specific medication looked like, based on the effects it had on him. He was sure that Valium was designed by somebody pale and quiet, who lived near the ocean and turned the calming noise of the sea into a pill that made the same thing happen to a living person. Ritalin was probably invented by a lady with buck teeth and frizzy hair. But Risperdal, he said, was clearly made by someone who was very fat and slow and liked nothing better than lying in bed while feeling the gigantic downward pressure of a weight on his head.

I turned to go, pressing my feet into the grass as I went home. Risperdal was one of several pills Martine took but it was the Risperdal that was crushing her head with its weight just like I was crushing the grass under my feet, smash. Scientists don't even know exactly why Risperdal works but they know it crushes heads wonderfully. Mr B says that it was discovered in 1953 in the European country of Belgium. He says it's what they call a
dopamine antagonist
. Dopamine is the gasoline your brain nerves run on and Risperdal eats this gasoline which means your brain moves slower when you take it. You shout less. You feel like you're sitting underwater in a chair while breathing comfortably.

Martine was taking a four-milligram Orally Disintegrating Tablet of Risperdal every morning and night. The pill came in a color called “coral” and was kept along with other pills in a locked cabinet in the Med Center. Because Martine was a newbie, she didn't have her pills sealed into a long roll of plastic like I did. Instead, every morning the psychiatric social worker or the nurse brought them to her and watched her take them. They had done this to me too for several years before they'd finally trusted me to take them on my own.

I left the fields and cut across the large lawn and then home.
As I entered the cottage Tommy Doon looked up from the television and said, “It's her, isn't it?”

“No, it's not,” I said.

“You didn't say ‘who' and that means I caught you,” he said and laughed out loud.

I struggled not to slam the door of my bedroom. Did he mean Martine? Did he mean Greta Deane? Who did he mean? A part of me was continuing to fill up with a kind of hate for Tommy Doon that made me want to do something bad. Instead of doing anything I took my meds and then listened to Englebert Humperdinck for several hours. I made dinner alone and fell asleep.

The next morning Tommy Doon wasn't up yet when I made breakfast and I was still thinking about Greta Deane with the sliding voice and Martine who was crushed by pills. I slowly pulled my meds out and looked at them with a new curiosity as they sat in their little puffy clear compartments. They were given to me to “make you feel like yourself.” They were “part of your commitment to being the best villager you can be.” These were MY meds, alone in the whole world. They had my name on them in small typed letters. It was the Law that I take all of them and I did just that, swallowing them with a glass of water as usual and heading out the front door.

That morning I was going to the Demont cafeteria to work. As I walked towards the van I was surprised to see that Mike the Apron was at the wheel. That was strange because normally a staff named Heidi drives. The other thing that was strange was that there were already six people in the van and one of them was Martine, who was staring straight ahead like she didn't see me. I stopped at the entrance to the van, uncertain what to do.

“That's right,” Mike said. He was wearing big mirrored sunglasses that made him look like a fly. “In you go,” he said, smiling.

The only seat available was next to Martine. I took it. Mike slowly backed the van out of the parking space and then began driving forward as Martine sat on the bench next to me, saying nothing.

“Hi,” I said, but she made no response.

“Hi,” I said again, and this time she nodded just a tiny bit.

Meanwhile, we continued moving down the road. Mike was chatting with the girl in the front seat whose name was Clarissa. She was from England. She spoke in an English way. Normally I don't pay much attention to what's outside the windows because I've taken this drive ten thousand times, but having Martine seated next to me made me hugely interested in everything that was happening in the gas stations, pizzerias, tire stores, factory outlets, Chinese restaurants, rug showrooms and mini-markets we passed. Every person I saw out the window seemed to be waiting for something. I hadn't noticed this before. I hadn't noticed before how the clouds were suspended in the sky like fruit in Jell-O. I hadn't noticed how everywhere I turned things were getting ready to jump forward and become something else. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Martine's profile cutting the scenery like the prow of a boat.

“Um,” I said softly, so that Mike couldn't hear, “how are you?”

“The walls have ears,” she said, also softly, staring straight ahead.

“Dudes, everything okay back there?” Mike said to his windshield.

“Okay,” I said loudly as the van slowly rounded a turn and the tan brick buildings of the high school came into view. Immediately afterwards Mike pulled into the parking spot. When he
turned off the car, he picked up a clipboard with a piece of paper on it.

“Okay, let's see,” he said. “Higgins and Jones and Kosciuski to Custodial, Meyers and Bell to Physical Plant. Oh, and Martine and Todd, you wait here.”

The other people got slowly out of the van. When they were all out and walking on the paths towards the high school, Mike turned to us and smiled his special fake smile.

“Hello, guys,” he said.

Neither of us said anything.

“So are you wondering”—he looked at us while slowly bringing his two index fingers together and touching them—“why this for you two today?”

Still neither of us said anything. But Mike didn't seem to care. He said, “I thought that since you both are buddies and this is Martine's first day on the job, she should work alongside you, Todd. That okay?”

“Yes,” I said.

Mike grinned which was like a smile but smaller. “Somehow I had the feeling it would be. You'll be in the cafeteria kitchen today. So, off you go.”

Martine stepped out of the van first. I was about to follow her, when Mike shot his arm out and touched my forearm, which I don't like.

“Friends looking out for friends, if you know what I'm saying.” He pulled down his mirrored sunglasses and looked at me. The whites of his eyes were filled with exploded red lines. “Nothing's free, bud. Remember that. Including introductions to new arrivals.”

“Okay.”

I got out of the van and led Martine silently along the waving concrete path towards the heavy main door of the school. Soon we were walking down the corridors that were filled with glass cases of trophies and streaming blue and red ribbons. It was early in the day and the students rushed by us to get to classes. They made a roar like an indoor swimming pool. They were small but they dressed like adults. The girls wore lipstick and painted eyes. The boys had hats. On the wall the theme of the Fall Festival was
Africa!
Paper cutouts of animals lined the hallway. A hyena walked with a lion. A giraffe went upwards so that its neck bent at ninety degrees where the ceiling began.