The Year We Left Home (42 page)

Alisa said, “Gabrielle Wyse was a revelation. The way she approached pigment. It made you reexamine every formalist assumption you had.”

“I’m going to have to take a look at her work. You’re going to have to tell me more about her. So what are you doing with yourself, back in the old hometown?”

“I run a little business. Comic books, video games. You could even call it a pop-culture art gallery.” This in the way of a joke, but the laughs weren’t coming. “Just something to keep me out of trouble.”

“We’re here,” Alisa said, pulling the car over to the curb. Other cars were already lining the street, and people were walking toward a house with the porch lights blazing. The three of them got out. Chip caught up with Elton and held him back for a moment of private conversation.

“Hey I don’t know if this is such a great idea, you know, it’s supposed to be your party.”

“What are you saying, you want your own party?”

“No, fool.” Alisa was already stalking away toward the house. Elton’s gaze tracked her. “Nice girl,” Chip said. “Very high style.”

“She makes videos. Sensitive art videos.” Elton took hold of Chip’s arm and steered him along. “Now don’t get all stupid on me. You take off now, I’ll wake up in the morning and think you were just a bad dream.”

“I’ll stay for a little while.” Chip thought he could walk back to his car if he had to. Or find a quiet corner, fall asleep under somebody’s bed.

The first thing that hit him walking in was the smoke, sweet sweet cigarette smoke. He let it ignite in his head. Whammo. There was probably some pot mixed in there too. The rooms were decked out in Christmas lights, big slashed-looking paintings, 1950s kitchen chairs, a sofa upholstered in orange vinyl and one in turquoise vinyl. Lamps made from industrial-looking metal cans. Horseshit music on the stereo. He bummed a cigarette from a kid in a little squashed-looking hat. In the kitchen he helped himself to beer from a cooler. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad party after all.

The place was crowded with kids leaning up against walls or draped over the vinyl sofas. Chip made a circuit of the rooms, wound up back in the kitchen by the cooler. The kids all had the same look of calculated goofiness, the art crowd. It didn’t look so hard to achieve. He could imagine Ferd, with a few years and a little wardrobe updating, fitting right in.

Elton came into the kitchen. “You having fun yet?” he asked. On each side of his face, a piece of hair had come loose from the ponytail. He’d taken off the leather jacket. Sweat stains were drooping beneath the armpits of his black shirt, like bats hanging upside down in a cave.

“Yeah, I’m great.” Chip watched Elton open the refrigerator, rummage around and come up with a can of Coke. “Coke?” he ventured.

“Oh yeah, man. Otherwise I turn into a drunk Indian. Not a good thing.”

“Where’s your girl?”

“Alisa? She operates on a higher intellectual plane than most people.”

“I’ll be right here if you need me for anything,” Chip said. If he started walking around, he might step on something he shouldn’t, like Godzilla squashing skyscrapers. The drinks and the smoke were making him balloon-headed.

After Elton left, he edged in on a group smoking by the back door and asked one of them for another cigarette. A blond girl wearing pink-framed glasses shook one out of her pack and he bummed a light too. They had the back door open and cold air was coming in like a fist, but that felt OK in the overheated room. Chip stood with the rest of them, smoke and frosty breath mingling.

He wasn’t paying attention to their talk at first. His hearing had a blotted quality, but the cigarettes were making his brain percolate. They were talking about the president. Nobody had won the election yet. They were still counting ballots and suing people. “We’re going to get fucking Bush,” one of the boys was saying, “and everything’s gonna go off the edge of the cliff.”

“They sent goon squads down to Florida to intimidate the county clerks.”

“Unreal.”

“Gore should grow a pair.”

“Yeah, don’t hold your breath.”

Chip felt his lungs beginning to squeeze and grind, and a cough rising to the surface, no way to stop it. An ugly wet hacking erupted
from him. It lasted a long time, and though he bent over in an attempt to make it more manageable, or at least keep it out of people’s faces, when he stopped and straightened up, they were all staring at him.

“Sorry,” he said, and then, because they were still staring, he said, “Which one’s Bush?”

A space of silence, then a boy said, “You’re kidding, right?”

When they were pretty sure he wasn’t, the girl with the pink glasses said, “He’s the Republican. Did you vote for him?”

“Vote . . . no, pretty sure I didn’t.” He was actually very sure. He’d never voted in his life.

“You know,” the same boy said, “if you don’t get involved in the political process, you don’t have any right to complain.” He had red hair and blotchy brown freckles. The kind of kid who makes a cute six-year-old, and it’s all downhill after that.

“I’m not complaining,” Chip said. He drew in more of the cigarette smoke to keep the cough where it belonged. “So, are all of you artists?”

“Yeah,” said Red. “Who are you?”

“Friend of Elton’s. Big Chief Thunderthud.” He turned to the girl in the glasses and tried out a smile. “What kind of an artist are you?”

“A photographer.”

“Great.” She wasn’t very pretty, and he’d hoped that would make her friendlier, but he guessed not. “What kinda pictures you take?”

“I’m cold,” she announced, and stomped off into the house.

“Yeah, I guess she is.”

At least that got a smirk out of Red and the other two sock monkeys and he would have liked another cigarette but crap he should have quit while he was ahead and anyway he didn’t want to be a total cigarette whore. He tilted the beer bottle to get at the last of it. “I like artists. Art.”

“Why’s that?”

He could hear the snot in the kid’s voice, not that he gave a shit what any of them thought. He’d only been running his mouth. Art art art. Woof woof woof. Still, he was glad when Elton wandered into the kitchen. “Elton, hey. Come tell us the story of your life. The artistic part.”

Elton shook his head. He looked glum, like maybe he’d just found out Alisa only liked girls. “Not much of a story. Fat kid starts taking pictures. I wanted this one little space I could control, this little square of the world. It gave me power when I didn’t have any. Made me feel less disenfranchised.”

“Disenwhat?”

“Not able to vote,” Red said, smirking again.

“You’re a clever guy,” Chip told him. “I can tell that just by looking at you.”

Elton said, “What’s the deal, Ray? Chill. You wanted to hear a story, right? I kept taking pictures. I spent more and more time and money on it. I started to think I might be good at it. That was this huge thought for me. I never thought I was very good at anything. Ask Ray here. He knew me when.” Elton gave him a solid nudge in the ribs.

“You were a pretty sorry fuck, yeah.” Chip nudged him back, had to grab a wall to keep his balance. Smooth.

Red and the sock monkeys finished their cigarettes and flicked the butts into the snow. “Fuckin freezing out there,” one of them said. They wandered away, following the noise of the party.

Chip pulled the door shut. “I don’t think I like them.”

“Yeah, the bigheaded boys. I see a lot of that kind.”

“What’s their problem?” Chip rubbed his arms, trying to warm them. He thought maybe he should eat something.

“Ah, I never went to college, so they either think I’m stupid, or maybe they’re stupid for wasting their time going to school when they could be living an actual life. Or both.”

“You make an excellent point.” There was a cupboard behind Chip; he opened it, extracted a box of Cheerios, and began eating them by the fistful.

“Plus they think I got everything handed to me because I’m an Indian. You know, affirmative action. What do you think, man, you remember any big privileges I got back in the day? You think guys named Jason and Brent are tragically, tragically getting the undeserved shitty end of the stick?”

“No,” Chip said, which he hoped was the right answer. He’d lost some of the thread of what Elton was saying, probably because he was being pissed off and sarcastic. It was a new side of the new Elton.

“Yeah, not so much. But you know something? Those guys are never going to do squat, because they have all the creativity of one of the four basic food groups. They might as well be dark green leafy vegetables or dairy products.”

“Wow.”

“The only people who have enough of a soul to
make
something with a soul are the ones on the outside looking in. You can’t be at home in the world and see what you need to see about it. Crap.” Elton pushed the hair away from his face. “Sorry. I get myself too worked up.”

“No, that’s OK.” He was looking in the refrigerator now. He found a pack of some kind of lunch meat in plastic wrap and set about trying to get at it. “I’m understanding you.” And he was, he did. Because this was his real tribe and always had been: the funky, the dispossessed, the out of it, the freaks and cripples. But he wasn’t any artist.

Elton said, “Look, I have to do a lap here. Circulate. Make nice. Then we can go, if you want. I’m done here, they already gave me the check.”

“Yeah?” He was mildly interested. “How much they pay you to come by and be a pet Indian?”

“I’m not telling.”

“That little, huh?”

Elton shook his head and walked off into the living room. From behind he looked a lot like the kid he’d been: round-shouldered, lumbering, intent on getting out of the line of fire.

Chip grabbed another beer to wash away the slightly sick-making taste of the lunch meat. It must have been hanging out in the fridge for a pretty long time. Then he followed Elton into the living room. The party was all revved up by now. It was a loud son of a bitch. The music was jacked all the way and the little art punks were all screeching away
at each other with their lungs practically hanging out at their elbows. He didn’t see Alisa. She must have taken off with somebody else who also liked her hair color.

The same shitty electronic music had been playing all along. It was making his brain itch. He walked over to the stereo and punched the
OFF
button.

“Hey!”

“What’s your deal, man?”

“Put something else on. This crap blows dead bears.”

“Hey, you don’t like it, you can leave.”

Elton intervened then. “Ah, can you cut my friend a little slack? He has this nervous disorder. On account of serving in Vietnam.”

That made them gawk at him. Chip put on his best cross-eyed psycho face, like he might snap and go into a jungle warfare flashback. Funny that with all his other brain farts, that never happened.

One of the girls held up a CD. “How about Indigo Girls? Very mellow.”

“Sure,” Chip said, because whatever it was would have to be an improvement. It turned out to be girls playing guitars. Fine.

“How do you guys know each other anyway?” This from Red, who you had to figure didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. How about a nice big cup of shut the fuck up, buddy?

“He used to sleep with my mom.”

Maybe it was just another sign of the party getting a little crazy.

“Dad,” Elton said, putting an arm around Chip’s shoulders. “It’s one of those Indian-ritual things. He adopted me.”

“Son,” Chip said, since he didn’t have much choice except to go along.

Nobody knew if they were supposed to be laughing. Chip said to Elton, “Where’s your damn camera. Somebody should take a picture of the family reunion.” His ears were doing that blotting thing again. He had to shout to hear himself.

“Assholes,” he thought he heard Red say, but it was also possible he’d said something like “Hamster cages.”

The guitar girls stopped singing, and the next minute the repulsive, throbbing music was back at full volume: CRUD CRUD CRUD CRUD CRUD.

He was across the room in three strides. The stereo was on some kind of bookcase and he upended the whole fucking thing in a waterfall of smashing and collapse. Then he got his hands on the stereo console, half lifting, half dragging it, trailing its tangle of wires. He got the front door open and then kicked it shut behind him. One of the speakers had made the trip too, like a tin can tied to a car’s bumper. He stood on the top step of the porch, balanced the load, then let it fly. It hit a couple of steps on the way down and landed, thud, on one end in the snow of the front yard.

The door behind him opened and he braced himself to throw a punch, but it was only Elton, his leather coat over one arm. The room behind him was full of commotion, then the door closed like a mouth. “Come on, man, we got to get out of here.”

“Waitaminnit.” Chip left the porch and gave the stereo a final kick as he passed it. In the fresh snow of the front yard, he picked a spot and began scuffing a path with both feet.

“What are you doing?”

“Making art.”

Elton watched him for a moment, then busted out laughing. “Give me an
F.
Give me a
U.
”

“Here, you want to help?”

Elton got his coat on and started in on the other side of the yard. Pretty soon there was a complete message spelled out in four-foot-high snow letters: FUCK YOU.

Chip said, “It needs something else.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s kind of plain. I want it to blink on and off in neon. Or, how about we piss on it?”

“Can we get the hell out of here before the cops come?”

“I don’t regard it as my best work. I just want to get that on the record.”

They ran to the corner and ducked behind a hedge to travel down a side street. The wind was vicious and the body heat they’d worked up was gone in an instant. Chip wanted to make some joke about them being outsiders, but he was too cold. Elton said, “I don’t believe you tore that shit up.”

“Music has always affected me powerfully.”

“You should probably be on some kind of medication, you know?”