Everything Breaks (6 page)

“Interception!” Bud hollered, jerking his head back to show pure disgust at his team. Bud had seen this same play over and over again, so his reaction was not from mere surprise but rather from authentic, lasting shock that you had to respect. Almost instantly his mouth sagged open again and he went back to staring at the screen with no expression whatsoever except for a little dip of a frown in his thick, crazy eyebrows.

“So I called everyone on the student council and they agreed to buy some long-stemmed white roses for the funeral. Those of us who were closest to them will each carry a single white rose at the funeral, then at the end, we'll put them on the caskets as we file past as a gesture of . . . of—”

She broke off, sobbing, just as Bud's head flopped back against the headrest of the La-Z-Boy and he delivered a thundering prizewinner of a snore.

If Zero had been here, he would have been authentically impressed by that snore. Zero was democratic in his scientific enthusiasms. Outstanding body noises were worthy of his rapt attention just as much as geometric calculations were. He also adored stupid pet tricks, tornado-chasing, and kernoodling, catching giant catfish with your hand as bait.

“. . . a gesture of . . .”

I hung up. I'd lost track of whether Aimee had finished talking, just like I'd lost track with Mary Beth early that morning. Aimee had mentioned Zero's smile, I was pretty sure of that much, but why bring it up since it was history now? Farewell to that goofy, lopsided smile and much of the rest of Zero's sharp, off-center, interesting face.

Bud had the remote somewhere, so I stood and walked to the television and turned the power off. Then I went down to a crouch there with my back braced by the TV screen. I wanted to simply watch Bud eye to eye for a minute, even though it would mean accepting the especially intense pain that crouching like that brought with it.

In contrast to everything else, Bud was nothing but real. His knees gaped wide. He'd left his slippers beside the chair, and his thin brown socks had a hole over each big toe. Bristly hairs grew like some sort of crop from the backs of his hands and from out of his large, red ears. The same sort of hairs curled in two bunches just beneath his nose, bending slightly upward as though seeking the light.

I waited for the remote to fall from the spot where it was delicately balanced on the chair arm, near Bud's elbow. I was willing to bet the clatter of that wouldn't quite wake Bud but would jerk the most amazing snore yet from him, a real record breaker.

And then my heart started doing a dance in my chest and I knew I was about to do something I shouldn't do, ever. I held my breath and swiveled around to crouch facing the dark screen of the TV. I gazed at my own reflection, with sleeping Bud murky in the background. I touched my eyes with two fingers, then I drew a straight line across my lips through the dust on the screen. Then I began to raise myself from my crouch slowly, slowly until the very top of my head disappeared, then most of the top of my hair disappeared, then my forehead began to disappear, and then all of my head was gone to just above my eyebrows. Gone! Just
gone,
like the brain part of Zero was . . . just
gone,
all that smartness just shredded into nothingness like a used-up pencil eraser.

“You and me should go see them Chiefs play.”

I shot to my feet and whirled around. “Wow, Bud. You really scared me.” My heart was acting like it'd come right through my rib cage and bounce around on the carpet. Had he seen, heard? “Yeah, maybe, sometime. I better get to bed. School tomorrow.”

I tried to hurry out of the room, but my legs wouldn't do hurry. Some fledgling scabs had broken open when I'd crouched. If I wanted to move at all, it had to be in slow motion, one leg a few inches, the other a few inches.

“No time like the present. Now, this week. My treat. Hot dogs, the whole kaboodle.”

I glanced at him and saw something in his eyes, some spark of something, nearly hidden by his grizzled mess of white eyebrows. Something that made me think he
had
seen what I was doing when I'd mimicked dead Zero, seen it and understood why I'd done it. But how
could
he understand something so shameful and crazy?

“Maybe. G'night, Bud.” I felt like a spineless idiot. It wouldn't happen, going to a game, because neither of us could drive. He hadn't accepted the hard, cold fact that
he
couldn't drive and I couldn't begin to explain to him why
I
couldn't drive. I couldn't explain that to Bud or anybody else because I couldn't understand it myself.

VI

IT WAS A THRUMMING
kind of q
uiet at school the next day. The kind of intense and unnatural quiet it would be if we were all in a play and Mr. Heggleston had given us stage directions.
Now, people, your friends died suddenly and tragically this past weekend. Act stunned. Act disbelieving. Cloak yourselves in layers of disbelief and horror, all right, people?
All day kids and teachers came up to me and said things I couldn't quite comprehend but I knew were sympathetic, put a quick hand on my shoulder as we passed in the hall, met my eyes, then gave me a heavyhearted look, things like that.

My last girlfriend, Alyssa, toodled her fingers at me in algebra, then looked very stricken and drew a tear down her cheek with her fingernail. I sort of waited for her outside the door after class, and she came up and took my arm. “I tried to call you. Several people are trying to call you, Tucker, but your
phone
isn't working.”

It was an accusation. Alyssa is one of those people that feels not to have your phone always with you is criminal talk neglect. “I lost it,” I lied.

Alyssa and I were probably never that good as a couple. She always wanted to know what I was thinking and was always telling me what she was thinking, which was usually that I wasn't telling her what I was thinking. But now she put her hand on my cheek, stood on tiptoe, and gave me a quick, friendly kiss. That was nice.

“You
call
me.” She shoved me in the chest to bring home the urgency of that, then hurried on to her next class. If I called her, we'd only talk about why I hadn't called her before then, so I knew I wouldn't. Pain shot up my legs and I concentrated on it and let the hall surge move me along like a strong river current.

The cheerleaders gave out the armbands in a weepy, solemn way, and everyone wore theirs like a badge of something. Trapper Simkin, in his never-ending quest to be different, wore his around his leg, above his left knee, like a tourniquet. Aimee Stafleet wore a matching headband made from the same dull black cloth as the armbands.

After my third class, while I was at my locker staring at my stuff, our school counselor, Ms. Jazzmeyer, snuck up on me and clutched my shoulder. I whirled around to see her smiling sadly from beneath her short helmet of school-bus-colored hair.

“Tucker?” she said quietly, stroking my sleeve like it was a prize cat and not the ketchup-stained cuff of a track sweatshirt. I saw that her long fingernails were painted orange and black, the school colors, each one half and half.

“We're rounding up some really good people, grief counselors from Tulsa,” she whispered, still petting my arm. “You just hang in there, sweetheart. They'll be here in the morning and you'll be first on our list. Okay, darlin'?” She gave my shoulder another squeeze.

“Okay,” I answered, though I hadn't really comprehended a word she'd said. They'd hung in the air, those words, then crashed to the floor and splintered.

I saw my aching legs moving me down the halls the rest of the day, taking me to familiar places I would never have been able to find on my own. Occasionally I heard girls at their lockers talking in hushed voices about the upcoming funeral in much the same way they would have compared wardrobe notes before a basketball tournament.

“We'll all sit together and wear our armbands.”

“Is everybody going to wear black anything else? Black skirts?”

“Black jeans? Are jeans even okay?”

“Wear waterproof mascara so you can cry,” someone advised her friend in the exact same offhand way I myself had sometimes advised Trey to remember his sunglasses.
Wear your shades,
I was always telling him, because Trey kept them in the glove compartment of the Stang and usually forgot to take them out and put them on.
Sun'll be wicked at the game today. Better grab your shades.

At the end of last period, Mr. Halen came on the intercom and said that classes would be dismissed at one fifteen the next afternoon so that students who desired to could attend the funeral. He cleared his throat. “Um, that is, funerals.”

I mulled that over as I packed up my algebra book and followed my throbbing legs out the door. I couldn't decide. Did you say “funeral” or “funerals”? One service, three bodies. Did you say “desire” about something like going to see three kids buried?

Those vocabulary questions tricked off minor sparks in my brain as my legs led me to our neighborhood, but they didn't generate anything you could call actual thought.

Bud was sitting on the porch swing when I neared the house. He wasn't moving it, he was just sitting there straight and rigid like he always sits. A little slip of white skin showed above his socks and below the cuffs of his pants.

“Got my license for a quarter when I was fourteen years old and never had a bit of trouble on the highway,” he called to me. “Learned at home on my dad's old pickup truck, back when they knew how to make a truck. Just turning the steering wheel of that big black Ford gave you automatic muscles.”

“Hey, Bud,” I greeted him.

“That truck and me was one unit, indivisible. Nobody could stop me drivin' if I was still in that 1936 Ford truck.”

“Yeah, I know they wouldn't, Bud,” I solemnly agreed. My throat felt husky. “You remember Trey, don't you? He felt exactly like that about his car.”

You gotta see her, Graysten! Oh, dude, you have just gotta see her! I mean, she's rusting under a few other classic carcasses there at Handerley's Salvage, but you gotta imagine her with about a dozen coats of cherry red paint and a classic speaker system. I was born to restore this '67 Stang! It's my calling in life, you know?

“He was one of the boys in that crash, right?” I nodded and Bud nodded along. Then we both were quiet for a minute. “Well. I believe she made lemon pie for dinner,” he told me. It was his favorite. I appreciated him trying to cheer me up.

“I think I forgot to bring in vegetables this morning. Later, Bud.”

I went around to the backyard. When I ducked through the plastic flap of the hoop house, chilly condensation wet the back of my jeans, easing my legs a little. The light was milky as it often is inside the hoop house in late fall. The temperature was a good ten degrees warmer than outside, in the real world. I sat down cross-legged at the edge of the radishes, where for some reason the grass is always long and lush.

“Where
are
you, Trey?” I whispered, then I went quiet, listening.

The wind was rising and it sucked at the plastic. A grasshopper jettisoned himself from the arugula. It reminded me of Zero, the way it defied gravity with such ease. How could something so dynamic just suddenly go . . . still?

I lay back with my hands under my head. The thick, clear plastic had weathered now and was slightly yellowed. Through it I watched the invisible wind have its way with the limbs of the big cottonwood tree, making the wood groan, making the longest branches thrash and tangle like moody, irritable skeleton arms. Small twigs kept falling against the top of the hoop house in a rhythmic way, like a cadence, like . . .

Hey down there, Tucker Graysten, you innocent wonder, you!

I scrambled to my feet. Trey? I shot out of the hoop house and turned to scope the yard, but all I saw was evidence of the wind at work—leaves skittering, limbs groaning, little sticks falling on the hoop house like drumbeats.

At the edge of sleep I'd dreamed that I'd heard Trey call me, that's all it was. But something gray and sickening began gnawing its way into my mind. It had to do with Trey's tone of voice. He'd called me an innocent wonder three or four times a week for the last couple of months.

So why had he sounded so sarcastic when I'd dreamed of him saying it just now?

I slapped leaf clutter off me and went back toward the house, forgetting the vegetables a second time. I was partway through the kitchen door when I noticed Janet at the counter, barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt.

Her hair was down at her shoulders, but it had a dent halfway up from her work ponytail. She had the big plastic box she uses for tools open on the counter and was throwing stuff out and scolding it. “Why can't I
ever
find
any
thing in you?”

I took a step backward, but then I noticed something that stopped me from sneaking the rest of the way back outside. My mother's picture, on the kitchen table.

Janet whirled around. “Tucker, where'd
you
come from?” She pushed her hair from her eyes with her wrist and looked at me looking at the picture. “Now don't go giving me a hard time, Tucker, because I've had about enough of a hard time today, as I'm sure you have as well. I just got back from work and I'm in charge of the funeral dinner the restaurant is providing for the families tomorrow, so I've gotta be making calls to get contributions of pies and things for that. And so before I started my calls, I had five minutes to spare and I decided to re-hang your mother. I mean, she's been down at your eight-year-old level for far too long, and I left her there because when you're sitting and watching TV and so forth you are at the right level to glance over and see her. But right now, with all that's happened, you need to be able to walk into the living room and find her looking at you eye-to-eye again.”

She sighed and dropped into a chair at the table. “I don't know why I think anything'll be a five-minute job when everything in this house is just held together with spit and bubble gum.” She put her hands on her forehead and pushed back her hair as she looked down at the picture. “I'm so sorry, Cynthia Anne,” she said quietly.

Her face had that pink and blotchy look of someone who's been crying off and on for a long time. It hit me then that everyone who came into the restaurant today or yesterday had probably asked her about the bonfire and the whole rest of the thing.

“Tucker?” She straightened her shoulders and looked up at me. “Since the families are coming to the restaurant straight from the service I have to miss the funerals to supervise the cooking and organizing. But honey, I talked to your principal and he says some kids from your class will be sitting together. One of them will meet you at the door so you won't even have to walk in alone.”

I focused on the red pain and walked across to the sink, then edged sideways a step and peered into her box of tangled tools. “What'd you want out of here?” I stirred it.

“Oh, glue,” she said in a dull, hopeless voice. “But don't think it'll be so easy. I've got ten kinds of glue in there. Mucilage, monkey glue, rubber cement, Elmer's Wood Glue, Elmer's School Glue, at least three bottles of that from different times I bought it for you in Cub Scouts, though it's probably dried up. I've got superglue and amazing superglue and tacky glue. And besides that I'm gonna need the right kind of little vise grips to hold this until it sets, and I've got six or seven kinds of those.”

I closed my eyes while my back was still to her and gritted my teeth to contain the pain in my legs enough to turn around and walk casually out of the kitchen without her commenting on it.

“Tucker, what do you think is so easy about taking care of you and Bud?” she suddenly said sharply. “One so pigheaded and the other so silent?”

This came out of nowhere. I stirred the tools around again to look busy. The loud clock there on the wall clicked off every second.

“Oh, just go back out and get me some broccoli,” she finally said. “And don't worry, I'll go work on my call list for the dinner in the other room so you won't have to try not to walk like you're walking.” She stomped out.

I got the broccoli and some radishes and chard, rinsed them in the kitchen, then found some glue in Janet's box, fixed the picture frame, and clamped it. I went upstairs then to work on algebra until dinner, but I ended up pulling my desk chair over to the window instead so I could just slump in it and stare at Trey's rock.
Hey down there, Tucker Graysten, you innocent wonder, you . . .
I grimaced. Why had Trey sounded so . . . unfriendly? Why had I dreamed him like that unless wherever he was, he . . . was?

We ate dinner, then I hurried back to my room and took Trey's green Bic from my pocket. It was dark by then, but I didn't turn on the light. I could see the whiteness of the outside window ledge and the scrap of shadow on it that was the pebble.

I sat in the chair and held the Bic out in front of me, close to the window.

“Trey, I'm only going to do this once,” I whispered. “If you're mad at me or . . . or
blame
me or something, your lighter will light on the fourth click.” My hand was shaking, so I gripped my wrist with my other hand—click, click, click, click, click, click,
fwoom
! Seven times.

“Okay, Trey, I'm only going to do
this
once. Your lighter will light on the sixth click if you are
not
mad at me.” I opened the lighter—click, click, click,
fwoom
!

I saw a flicker of movement in the window glass. My blood went icy, but when I turned to look closely, I saw it was just Bud's reflection. He'd come upstairs and was standing planted in the hallway between our rooms, looking in at me.

I turned my head. “G'night, Bud,” I murmured, trying to steady my heartbeat.

“Yeah.” He raised an arm and dropped it. “Listen, there'll always be questions in your mind, I remember that from Korea, how it tears your gut not to know this and that. You wanta ask them, but you don't have a way. Anyhow, why should the dead know so much about it, huh? If my Mary knew answers, she woulda told me by now why she left ahead of me.” He raised an arm again and this time turned and went into his room.

I closed my door, then went back and slumped in the chair again, staring out.

Hey down there, you innocent wonder, you . . .
The cold and sarcastic tone of his voice, how his eyes had to be hooded and hard. Trey was accusing me of something.