Now Is the Hour (11 page)

Gradually, slowly, Mom did seem to be coming back. She was up and about more and more anyway, so Sis and I didn't have to do so many of the house chores. Sometimes, I'd come home from school, and there would be the old familiar smell of cookies coming from the kitchen. A few times I can remember some fresh-cut flowers on the kitchen table. But I still couldn't find my mother's eyes, and there was something new about her, real differnt, a brittleness, as if she was a piano string strung too tight, and a finger coming down on a key a bit too hard could make her snap.

Adding to the troubles were the bills. With the new house and Dad's new '57 Buick and Mom's new piano, plus the new hi-fi, Mom had something new to worry about. How were we going to get all those goddamn bills paid?

All she did, I mean besides pray the rosary and go to Mass every morning and try and cook and clean, was sit at her new kitchen table, hair flying, her head buried in a mountain of pink slips, her new black horn-rimmed reading glasses down on the end of her nose, cussing a blue streak, her rough, red farm hands, her cut-to-the-quick fingernails pushing a pencil around on a piece of paper, her tiny Catholic numbers adding, subtracting, and dividing, always coming up with not enough.

With Mom like that, Sis and I tried to keep our distance. I don't know how Sis felt about it, but I didn't like it. Mom had always been the person who let me know who I was and how I felt. So keeping a distance was something I had to learn, and the lesson was a tough one. Our second Christmas in our new house, Uncle Pat gave me his Lionel train set. It was complete with everything — the tracks, the engine, boxcars, the red brick train station — everything except the transformer.

In Montgomery Ward, there was a beautiful transformer. It was shiny black and cost twenty-five dollars. The transformer had a dial for how fast you wanted the train to go and a red light that blinked on and off when the train came into the train station. I could curl my hands around the transformer and not touch my fingers.

Christmas Eve, when I looked down and saw the shiny black transformer in the Christmas lights under the Christmas tree, it was a miracle. Right off, I ran downstairs and hooked up the transformer. The red light went on, and when I turned the dial it was another miracle. The Lionel train started running. Round and around that train all
night. Going through the station, going through the tunnel in the mountain, stopping at the signal to pick up the mailbag. The red light blinking on and off was so cool.

Some things are just too good to be true. The day after Christmas, Mom changed her mind and took my transformer back to Montgomery Ward. She said the transformer cost too much, and with all our bills we couldn't afford it. Mom bought the little transformer, the tin one that cost ten dollars and didn't have a light, and you could see how it was screwed together. It fit in the palm of my hand.

Only a nine-year-old boy used to a new pair of Levi's every year for his birthday knows what it's like to suddenly have and then lose a Lionel train transformer. I had seen my mother hunched over the bills at the kitchen table enough times to understand the connection between those piles of paper and the fifteen dollars she'd just saved. I didn't like it, but I understood.

What happened soon after, though, was something that sent me reeling. I've told you how important dress-up was. It was something Sis and Mom and I used to do together when Dad wasn't around. With Mom a bit better, Dad had gone back out to the fields, and Sis and I again started visiting the steamer trunk. Mom didn't play with us anymore, but still it was fun being scintillatingly gorgeous.

One afternoon, I stayed home with a pretend headache from school. Mom was pushing the vacuum back and forth over the new turquoise carpet with the flowers, and just like that she shut off the vacuum. She looked up as if God were speaking. She made the sign of the cross. Then it was straight to the bedroom.

My knuckles against her mahogany bedroom door made a hollow sound. You go on and play, Mom said.

Mom? I said. Can I play dress-up?

If you play downstairs, Mom said.

It took me awhile to ask because none of us had ever said it.

What if Dad comes in? I asked.

He won't be in until supper, Mom said.

The green plaid dress buttoned up, the shiny black velvet hat with the flower brooch, the black high-heel shoes with the ankle strap. The rhinestone bracelet. The cameo necklace. The pleated green scarf tied around my neck. The red purse with the gold latch. The gold ring. The white gloves.

There I was standing inside the light of the trunk, in the perfect
outfit, and the light of the trunk was the whole world, the strange magic Wizard of Oz world, the world that smelled of Eiffel Tower.

Scintillatingly gorgeous.

I didn't hear the other world, the world we live in every day, coming down the basement steps.

In all my days, I don't think I've ever been so terrified.

It was Ott Lattig. Dad's tall, skinny usher friend from church. He was yelling. Ott Lattig's face was red, and he was yelling. He kicked the steamer trunk, and the steamer trunk went crashing over. He pulled the red purse from my hands, pulled the gloves off my hands, the gold ring. Yelling and yelling, Ott Lattig slapped the black velvet hat off my head, Ott Lattig put his hands around my neck, pulled at the green scarf, pushed me back, pulled at the Peter Pan collar, ripped the green plaid dress open, tore the buttons off.

I tried to hide behind the fallen steamer trunk. The straps of the black shoes were caught around my ankles.

Then Mom was standing there. With these same two eyes, I looked up and there was my mother, and she didn't have a migraine, and she had her eyebrows on, and her Orange Exotica lipstick, and her almond-shaped hazel eyes were all green, no gold at all staring down at me.

I mean, how old was I? No more than nine.

Then Mom says — you won't believe this, but my mother turns to Ott Lattig, and she says — Thanks, Ott, she says. See how my son plays. His father is so ashamed of him.

Shame.

That's the word all right.

Fuck. Who are these people?

Not long after the Ott Lattig incident, one day when Dad was out in the field, I went down into the furnace room alone. I did not open the steamer trunk. I pulled the old coal stool over, climbed the rungs of the stool, stood on the stool, and reached up and took the fishing pole down.

The fishing pole was wood and had tiny loops on it where the fishing line went through. The reel was green. The handle, where you turned, was green. There was never any fishing line in the reel.

The way the reel felt in my hands, how the reel sounded when I turned it, the feel of the wood in my hands.

Sis had a new Brownie Instamatic. At first, Sis wouldn't take the photo. She didn't want a photo of her little brother. Sis was turning into somebody I didn't know. I had to give her a dollar.

I'm standing in front of the new house, right next to the blue spruce. Squinting into the sun. I am holding Dad's fishing pole the way a soldier holds his rifle on his shoulder.

That fishing pole meant I had a father, and that I was his son.

And you can bet your life, that's the photo that went into my backpack next to Theresa's painting, which I brought along into the world with me.

School was no refuge. I was big for my age, a head taller than anybody else in class. It was hard sitting in my desk because my legs were so long. Another thing I could do was run. Running was important because being good at it meant I could outrun Scardino. It was always Scardino and his thugs, Vern Breck and Michael Muley, chasing me all over the playground. They couldn't catch me, but there was three of them and only one of me and sooner or later it was me down on the ground under a Scardino pile.

Exasperated. I could spell
exasperated
but couldn't do anything about it. No matter what I did, I always turned out the loser. I prayed and prayed, but there just wasn't any help. It was the universe, I guessed, conspiring. You'd think Sis would've helped me out after all we'd been through. But as Sis got older in the sixth and seventh grades, most of the time she didn't want anything to do with me. Insult to injury, sometimes Sis let Scardino carry her books to the bus stop at Pocatello High School.

It wasn't just me that Scardino tortured, though. Really, he had the whole class over a barrel. One time he stuck Stephanie Smith's ponytail in the inkwell. Another time he came to class with an inked-in tattoo on his hand and his hair slicked back in a duck's ass. Sister Teetha flipped because the tattoo was a tattoo of the Pochugas, a gang in LA. Sister Teetha scrubbed the ink off Scardino's hand herself, then combed his hair down straight. The rest of arithmetic she spent lecturing to the class. That day she said something to the class that's always stuck with me. She said, I may be an old nun, but I'm not stupid. Don't think I don't know what every new hairdo and trinket bracelet and ink tattoo means. I know what's going on inside those young bodies of yours.

The reason why I remember Sister Teetha saying that was the look on Scardino's face. The look that he knew what she was talking about. Of course, I didn't have a clue. But I didn't let on. I just put a smirk on my face the way Scardino had on his.

Then there was the afternoon after civics class I got a note from Scardino. It landed on my desk right next to the inkwell. After civics was over, and before reading class and Ichabod Crane, I slowly unfolded the note.

Meet me after class by the lilac bush in front of the school. I've got a question for you about your sister. Scardino.

After the three o'clock bell, after I got my coat and lunch pail out of the cloakroom, I walked outside to the front of the school. Scardino was standing by the lilac with Vern Breck and Michael Muley. When I saw the three of them standing there like that, I almost turned around and ran. But I kept walking. Tried to put an expression on my face that didn't look scared and walked right up to them.

Scardino's face could be a lot of ways. I got so I could read him almost as good as I could read my mother. I'd had years of practice. Something usually was going on just underneath the way he smiled. The way he was smiling that day wasn't good.

Hey, Klueless, Scardino said.

Over the years, Klusener had become Kluse, which became Klueless.

Then Breck and Muley said hey too.

My heart was pounding in my ears.

Hey, I said.

The three of them stood there not saying anything. Just lilac smell. Then Breck slugged Scardino on the arm, and pretty soon they were all pushing one another around. I tried to make like I was having fun too. So far none of them had hit me.

Your sister, Scardino said.

Vern Breck and Michael Muley were really laughing, so hard it got Scardino laughing too. Finally, Scardino blurted it out: Does your sister have pussy hair?

Believe it or not, I know a little about honor among men. I'd never experienced that kind of honor firsthand. Still, at that moment, I knew I should somehow defend the virtue of my sister. I wanted to smash their faces in. But what was the use. They were three, they were
Scardino, Breck, and Muley, and they were indestructible, and I was only me. Plus my sis let
him
carry her books. My hands were fists, but my fists were like Russell's, a baby's fists, and the only thing I could do was throw a big baby tantrum. So I didn't do anything.

I may not have been able to hold my own at school, but I was older and bigger and Dad thought it was high time I started pulling my own weight on the farm. Thus began our new father-son relationship, he the boss, me free labor. To keep the bill collectors at bay, Dad had expanded the farm into a bigger operation, so now we had a herd of Hereford heifers on top of the milk cows and all the crops. There was plenty of work for his new hand. I didn't mind it so much, though. With Mom's eyes still gone, and Sis preoccupied with high school and boyfriends, doing chores was a way to escape. As long as I didn't have to work with Dad, I got along just fine. I even started staying out after chores were done. What kept me out were the secret places I'd started to think of as my own.

I had differnt secret places for differnt purposes, differnt moods, differnt activities.

When I needed to feel safe, I went to the loft of the barn. Something about being on the loft floor looking up at the roof way up there made me feel like a big old pair of hands had me cupped inside. Night wind made the barn a mysterious place. Creaks and groans, cat yowls, little animals scurrying. Moonlight on the yellow straw, the quick, white flash of the dove's wing. The stars through the holes in the roof. A lick of warm wind against the back of my neck, and everything that was ordinary turned to magic.

There were other places.

When I just wanted to get away from it all, there was on top of the railroad cars. Three boxcars in a row. When you sat up top on the boxcars, on the wood walkway, especially at sunset, and if there was wind, which usually there was wind, if you squinted your eyes and moved your body like it was on a train, from up there on top of the railroad cars you could see just about everything. The Ganges River. The Vatican. The Eiffel Tower. The Golden Gate Bridge. The Chrysler Building. The Via Dolorosa. Mount Kilimanjaro. Castles in Spain. Faraway places with strange-sounding names. Sometimes all of them, one right after another after another, in the same evening.

The grain elevator was the circus. I'd go there when I wanted to make a spectacle of myself. The grain elevator set out just behind the spud cellar and was shaped like a big teeter-totter with the one end that attached to the tractor heavier than the other. At the high end, the grain elevator was the height of me four times over.

What you did was you'd crawl up the flanges of the grain elevator. When you got to the middle of the grain elevator, you'd be sitting right above the wheel, which was the fulcrum point. Each step you took out farther from there was a step into midair, really, because halfway between the fulcrum point and the grain elevator's top end the elevator started to go down with the weight of you.