Billy (29 page)

It is clear to her that Mother cannot go on. It is also clear that she must. "Come on, Momma, let's do it together."

Listlessly Mary joins in, barely lifting her voice, placing her hand on her son's chest.

He mocks them with his emptiness. "Oh, what's the use," Mary wails, "he doesn't hear a thing!"

"Momma, we have to! We have to try! Now come on!" Again they start.

"Oh, Momma, look!" An expression has replaced the emptiness. He stares up at them with the astonished eyes of a newborn baby.

"Let's
go,
Momma! He is looking at us, he sees us!"

Mary sings furiously now. "Where have you been, Billy boy, Billy boy—"

"Hey in there, I see you, yes I do, little brother dear, I see you!"

They are calling him, a chant: "Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy."

Sally chokes, clears her throat. She stops.

"I gotta have a Coke, I'm dying. You want a Coke, Momma?" She jabs at the nurse's button.

Mary remembers that he had such soft hair when he was a baby, like a blond cloud sitting on top of his head.

"I ww—mm!"

"Momma, Momma listen!"

"Mmm! Uhh!"

His voice, the lips hardly moving, but his voice!

"Billy! Billy! Billy!"

"Mmm! I—ww—"

Mary couldn't understand, she wanted to understand, she 
bore down on him, pressing her face into his narrow, sour little face. "What, Billy, Mommy is here, Mommy hears you!" 

"I want a Dr Pepper!"

Barton took his new plane out of the blue box. Oh, so beautiful! Attach the wheels! Attach the wings! Hook up the propeller to the rubber band! Put on the tail!

"No Barton, oh, no!"

"Oh, Barton, that
hurts!"

Instruction number fifteen: "Wind propeller one hundred and sixty turns to achieve maximum flight."

He ran up the tall hill. There were clouds piled in the west and sun blazing in the east. The breeze went right through him, it was so pure and he was so good!

"It's hot, Barton, it's so hot!"

"Doctor," Barton said carefully, "it hurts."

"Yes," the doctor replied, smiling, "it will, for a time."

"I want a Whopper with a large fries and a chocolate shake and a fried cherry pie for dessert."

"He still likes that yuck."

"We're gonna get him
just
what he likes, right, Billy?"

"Right, Mommy!"

While he waited for them to come back he read to his brothers. He read
The Lost World,
about finding the land of dinosaurs and the jungle drums beating out the warning, "We will kill you if we can, we will kill you if we can." He said to his brothers, "If only for one second we could go back to the Jurassic and see a real
Tyrannosaurus rex."
Then he asked, "I wonder if dinosaurs got gas?" Maybe going back to the Jurassic wasn't such a hot idea.

Seeing the Burger King bag reminded Billy of home, and for the first time he thought of Jerry and Amanda and all the kids and hanging out together trying to out-cool each other. He also recalled the fact that he was dead-bone broke. Since he obviously wasn't going to win the American Legion Short Story Contest, maybe he should become a pickpocket.

Then they opened the bags and he bit into the Whopper and it was like being home and all of a sudden he was really very glad.

After he was finished Sally produced a small white box of her own. "You try making this on a motel hotplate!" "Divinity!" She folded her arms. "Eat some. Go ahead, I dare you."

The wind was taking his plane higher and higher. At first he was glad, but when it became a tiny black dot he grew worried, then angry. "Come back," he cried, "come back!"

They belong to the wind, they can't come back.

He jumped, he waved his arms.

He heard the voices of the women they would never love, the wailing of their unborn children.

His head fell to one side. The light of other fires invaded his eyes. He was so terribly heavy!

The sky opened like the skin of a rotten fruit, and there came forth the furious legions.

32.

Mom and Dad came into Billy's room with Dr. Klass. Billy watched them walk right through his brothers like they weren't there. He didn't like it when they ignored his brothers. But he would not stand for it when they told him his brothers didn't exist. How dare they, the liars!

But he'd made a concession. He no longer talked to his brothers when the grown-ups were around. Only he and Sally could talk to them. Since they were his brothers, they were hers, too. They were brothers to all kids.

Dad still looked really weird with his huge bandage and the one eye made gigantic by the big lens they had to put in his glasses. Barton had cut a hole in his head. Billy wished he could see in the hole, but he didn't have the nerve to ask.

Right now his dad looked scared. He looked to his mother. She was scared, too.

Dr. Klass took him by the hand. It was OK, but it still made him feel creepy-crawly when they touched him. When the nurse bathed him he had to shut his eyes and sing real loud.

"Billy, we want you to know that Barton Royal died last night just after midnight."

That was OK. No it wasn't. He busted out crying, he just couldn't help it.

Dad rolled his goofy eye at Mom. She pushed past Dr. Klass and put her arms around Billy. Mom smelled so good, Billy liked her so much.

"This is good," Dr. Klass said, "he's unloading some stuff here."

"I missed the funeral!"

As Mommy hugged him he pulled his face away so he wouldn't touch her skin. He sure loved her, but she had skin like a salamander.

"The funeral is at two-thirty," Dr. Klass said, "but we have more important things to do than go to an old funeral. You and I are gonna write another play about Barton today."

"I'm gonna go to the funeral!"

"No, Billy."

"Yes I am, Mom! I have to!"

Dad talked, his voice low. "Billy, you're in the hospital. You aren't even near well yet. You have bandages all over your bottom and you—"

His brothers were all yelling and screaming. He had to go!

"I can go in my bandages. Don't you want me
ever
to get well?"

That shut them right up, as he had figured it would. Sally, who was sitting over by the window working a puzzle and not saying anything, gave him a wink. She knew all about why he had to go to the funeral.

"We'll have our own funeral, Billy," Dr. Klass said. He was a nice guy, but he could dork out at a moment's notice. He had just dorked out.

Billy knew how to shut him up. "Gee, I'll make the gravestone and we can use a real coffin," he said like he was all excited about it. "I know they have coffins in hospitals for when people die."

"Ah—"

He looked up at Mom and Dad. "I've gotta go. It's real important to me."

His father bowed his head, then came down on the bed with him and Mom. They held each other's hands.

"I'll navigate," Sally said.

It was a long drive to Anaheim, and they had to start out right away. Mom drove, Dad sat beside her. Billy lay with his head in Sally's lap. Although she claimed she was finding lice and cooties and stuff, he knew she was just rubbing his head.

Billy had never been to a graveyard before. When they got there all kinds of reporters came thundering up yelling ques
tions. Ever since he had seen himself on TV in just his underpants Billy didn't like those jerks.

It wasn't a very good graveyard, he decided. The headstones were mostly small. Here and there somebody had left a few withered flowers in a bottle. When the wind blew, sand swept the stones like dry rain.

Barton's grave site was the only active spot in the whole enormous place. There were three folding chairs, a couple of men in white T-shirts with shovels in their hands, another man in a frayed black suit.

There was also a woman, as Billy had hoped there would be. His brothers had been worried she wouldn't come. He could feel their relief.

The woman sat very still on one of the folding chairs, her brows knitted in the merciless sun. All the time as Billy and his family were coming closer, she watched them.

By the time they had arrived she was staring down at her own feet. She stood. "Make it quick, please, Reverend," she said. Her voice sounded so much like Barton's it made Billy want to vomit.

The man opened a paperback of the Bible and read in a nervous voice: "In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves—"

"Two verses after," the woman snapped. She blinked her eyes. "Where I marked."

The Reverend cleared his throat. "Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish . . ."

Billy heard his brothers repeating in the air, "and the grasshoppers shall be a burden, and desire shall fail. .." He joined his living voice to their dead ones: "because man goeth to his long home ..." which was all he remembered.

Barton's mother clutched her hands together, looking straight at him. She looked sad, but also scared.

Dad raised his head. Billy saw the pride that had come into his face, and was glad. "Or ever the silver cord be loosed," Dad and Mom said together, "or the golden bowl be broken—"

They stopped, silenced by the power of the same deep feelings that had compelled Billy to bring them here in the first place.

Barton's mother spoke in tiny words. "Then shall the dust— the dust—" Her composure was broken by the most desperate grief.

She covered her face and shook.

The coffin was lowered by a machine with an angry, screaming whine. Billy watched it drop into the dark hole and with it his life with Barton, and the dim life before. He had come here seeking an ending. He asked his heart, 'Do I hate Barton?' and heard a silence that let him raise his eyes from the grave.

Barton's mother recovered herself enough to throw a clod of soil into the hole. Billy heard it rattle on the coffin.

Now it was time to perform his mission. His brothers gathered around him. They were excited. He had taken them on a big adventure. He dug in his pocket and pulled out the fourteen construction paper notes. On each he had written a name. One by one he dropped them into the grave. Sally, who had helped him make them, said his brothers' names with him.

"Chuck."

"Danny."

"Jack."

"Timmy."

"Andy."

Dad added his voice.

"Ezra."

Mom did, too. Their chant was ragged because only he and Sally knew the names by heart.

"Liam."

"Unknown Child Number One."

"Unknown Child Number Two."

The sweating preacher and the two workers joined their voices.

"Unknown Child Number Three."

"Unknown Child Number Four."

"Unknown Child Number Five."

Mrs. Royal started to do it, too.

"No," Billy said. "Not you."

She nodded her head. She whispered, "No."

"Unknown Child Number Six."

"Unknown Child Number Seven."

Billy stopped. He looked to Barton's mother. He had a last note, which he handed to her.

When she saw what it said she gasped as if stabbed.

"Read it aloud," he told her.

She shook her head. Her eyes were closed tight.

"Read it," one of the workers said.

She muttered something. Then she cleared her throat. "Billy."

"OK." Billy nodded at the grave.

"I want to keep it," she said in a quavering voice.

"Throw it in!"

Billy watched it flutter down, twirling round and round and round, until it hit the side of the coffin and slid into the dark.

A crow rose from a tree, wheeled screaming over the party, and strove for the sky on its black wings. Billy looked from the cheap, gray coffin in its hole up to the raucous, flapping creature in the sky.

"I'm ready to go," he said to his parents.

His father took his hand. In the rough coolness of his fingers Billy felt the future, he and Sally growing up, Mom and Dad getting old and dying. The thought did not upset him. On the contrary, it filled him with a joy that seemed deeper than his own soul, as if it entered him not only from his father's trembling hand, but from the whole contents of the world.

When they got into the car together, Billy was fascinated by details for the first time since his passion. He noticed the way the radio worked and the fact that it had no cassette player. He noticed that there was a climate control as well as a cruise control. He noticed the hole where the cigarette lighter was supposed to be—and wondered what would happen if he put his finger in.

As they pulled away from the curb Billy looked back. Mrs. Royal remained at the grave. She stood watching them leave, her body as narrow as a stake. One hand came up, hesitating, tentative, as if to wave. But she did not wave. Instead her fingers touched her cheek, trembled against the empty skin.

He closed his eyes, listening to the kind old hum of the tires.

By the time they turned onto the highway the day had 
reached its moment of high sun. Everywhere the shadows were in retreat. Sally started to sing: