Thumbsucker (10 page)

“None of us win all the time. Get used to it.”

Another grunt.

“You disappoint me, Justin.”

After the prizes were handed out Mr. Geary drove me home. I rested my head against the passenger window as he reviewed my performance for the season. My strengths, he concluded, were drive, intensity, and an understanding of group dynamics. My weak points were glibness, resentment, sloth, and arrogance. Mr. Geary
became so absorbed in the critique that he let go of the steering wheel now and then, nearly driving us into a ditch while waving his hands and fluttering his fingers to illustrate my lack of discipline.

For almost an hour I sat there, taking it. To lose a gift I might never have known I had felt worse than not being gifted in the first place.

“I’m sorry if I sound cruel or blunt, but somebody’s going to tell you these things someday. You can’t just bob and weave your way through life. Fakes get found out. At bottom, the world is
fair
. A knack for ad-libs is a bonus. It’s no foundation. If it’s true that someday you’d like to be a commentator, what you need to develop are reasoned opinions, not clever tactics for winning brownie points.”

By this time we were parked in front of my house and the car had been idling for a while. I could have left at any time, but I was letting Mr. Geary finish. I’d decided to grant him his dramatic wrap-up speech, if only because I knew how good it felt. To know what you’re saying and know you’re saying it well, to speak with momentum and confidence and spirit, is no small pleasure, he’d taught me. It changes everything.

When Mr. Geary was done condemning me, he shook my hand and let me out of the car. We waved to each other and he rolled down his window.

“I forgot. I got your third-place medal for you.” He held it out for me. “To show your father. And don’t let
my little critique just now discourage you. There’s always next year.”

The medal went into my pocket. When Mike asked me how I’d done, I didn’t show it to him. Placing third was nothing to be ashamed of, and I was pretty sure that he’d be proud of me, but it would require a bit of explanation, and I was tired of hearing my own voice by then. Instead, I just told him I’d lost and saved my breath.

The speech team had been an experiment in concentrating on what came out of my mouth instead of what went into it. When the experiment failed I had a hole to fill, a hole I sometimes feared was larger than I was. I tried eating again, but the nausea from the venison years came back with a vengeance, so I turned to smoking. I liked it, but I hated the company. The smokers my age were a depressing gang. They came from broken families, dressed in black, and were always swearing idiotic pacts to kill a certain teacher, kill themselves, worship the
devil, bomb the school, or run away to St. Paul and form a rock band. Eventually, out of boredom and contempt, I drifted away from them.

I made a play to join the drinking crowd—anything for a habit I could share—but it wouldn’t have me because I didn’t play sports. This was just as well. Our town was dry, no bars or liquor stores, and the jocks’ drink of choice was 3.2 beer, a weak concoction that smelled like soapy water and tasted like the glue on envelopes. I had to drink a whole six-pack to catch a buzz, and even then I felt maddeningly alert.

My need for a painkiller was made more urgent by the fact that Mike and Audrey were fighting. One issue was who worked harder for less acknowledgment. Mike had paid Woody Wolff a thousand dollars to visit his store at the start of summer vacation and autograph shoes and balls. Over a hundred people showed up, but few of them purchased anything, having Wolff sign pieces of paper instead, and Mike accused Audrey of failing to sympathize with this great betrayal. Audrey, for her part, charged Mike with underestimating the thanklessness of the nursing profession.

The other issue between my parents was Joel, who’d fallen in with the rich kids on the hill. He’d demanded tennis and riding lessons, which Audrey had gone ahead and paid for out of her own earnings. Mike went ape. The night he found out he stayed awake till dawn piling up items in the living room—lamps and books and clothes and kitchen gadgets—which he sold at a garage
sale the following weekend. One by one, Audrey replaced the lost items with more expensive equivalents, and each time she brought one home Mike kicked a door or pounded a table. It was hell at home.

I decided that the answer was hard liquor. I approached the town drunk to find out what his source was. A hairy-nostriled old man named Willy Lindt, he lived on a houseboat whose windows were soaped over like the windows of the dirty bookstores I’d seen on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. He fished for crappies and smallmouth from the deck and took his low-life role seriously. He milked it. Three summers ago a movie production company had come to town—a costume drama about the pioneers—and Willy was cast as a drifter by the director. The only local to land a speaking part, he still wore his costume of canvas dungarees and spoke with the Swedish accent he’d been coached in.

Willy seemed pleased to have a visitor. I sat on a velveteen couch whose caved-in cushions made me feel inadequate and short as he scurried around with a broom and tidied up. He dumped his trash through a portal in the floor, where the river floated it away.

“I want to know how to get liquor,” I said.

“Steal it from your folks.”

“I can’t. They’d catch me. I’d get sent somewhere.”

Willy smiled. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I got sent to Pine Island Juvenile. I learned to play chess there. Mastered archery. Far and away the best year of my life.”

“What if I gave you money for vodka?”

“Don’t drink clear spirits. Don’t go down that road. They say they’re purer. They’re not. Drink rock and rye. The fruit in the bottle adds important nutrients.”

I fished in my jeans for the crumpled fives I’d stolen from Mike’s basement workshop. One reason for his despair about money might have been his inability to keep physical track of it; he rarely got through an entire checkbook before losing it down the seat crack of the car, and he littered the house with change and crumpled bills. When he came home from the store at night, he’d fling what was in his pockets on shelves and tables as if he were ridding himself of built-up poisons, not seeming to notice when his property vanished What disturbed him was spending money, buying things; misplacing money was just a part of life.

“You sure you want to go this route?” said Willy, counting the fives. I felt patronized, insulted. He’d done quite well as a drunk—he’d won a movie role.

“Buy me some booze or I’ll get it from Fred Hurley.” Fred was our other town drunk, Willy’s rival, younger and less picturesque by half, but possibly more authentic. Not an actor.

“You’ll get it from me,” said Willy. “I’m your guy. How much do you want?”

“Enough to knock me out.”

“This isn’t a suicide thing, I hope.”

“Just buy it.”

I came back three days later, as directed, and found
my connection unconscious on the couch. His head hung down over the edge and grazed the floor and the blood pooled in his face had turned it purple, swelling his lips into froggy blobs. I rifled cupboards and yanked out drawers, freeing clouds of midges and flying ants. I couldn’t find my vodka.

“Out. Get away!” I heard Willy shout behind me.

I turned, harassed by the insects in my face.

“It’s you,” Willy said. “I’m sorry.”

“Where’s my liquor?”

“Never give an alcoholic money, kid.”

I made him sit up, then searched his dungarees. He held his arms in the air and didn’t protest. But besides some empty food stamp booklets, all I found was his actor’s union card, laminated in plastic. What a fake.

I soon discovered that marijuana was easier to get. I followed a smell to the woods behind the Lions Park and found a group of older girls in tube tops passing a stone pipe and gossiping. They were comparing the size and shape of the school’s top athletes’ penises. When I joined the girls the next day the topic was “assne”—who had pimples on their butts. In return for a couple of hits off the pipe, I sold out half the boys’ locker room. It was something that I’d been waiting to do, I realized.

The girl I grew closest to was Donna Prine, a redhead with freckles the color of new pennies. She lived alone with her famous father, the only Shandstrom Falls celebrity
other than Willy Lindt. His twice-weekly column for the St. Paul paper was syndicated throughout the northern plains and took as its theme the decline of basic values. I wasn’t a fan of his politics, but I admired his wordplay. He called Hollywood actors “movie scars,” abortions “vacwombs,” politicians “kleptocrats,” and people on welfare “food tramps.” Due to his highly sensitive skin—the result, Donna said, of attending H-bomb tests during his 1950s army days—he seldom left the house. The one time I’d glimpsed him working in his yard, he’d worn a hooded sweatshirt and his face was smeared with white zinc oxide.

One night I went with Donna in her Skylark to buy an ounce of pot. She blindfolded me before we left, wrapping my eyes in a sheer black nylon stocking fragrant with sweat and soap and baby oil. I inhaled deeply as we drove along. “Are you getting off on that?” said Donna. She took my left hand and sucked the middle finger, then guided it knuckle by knuckle through her zipper. “Just touch, don’t look,” she said. “That’s my rule, okay?”

“Why can’t I look?”

“I’m saving myself.”

“For who?”

“The area’s changing. New guys are moving in. Richer, more experienced. More eligible.”

When Donna untied my blindfold we were parked in front of a lopsided white farmhouse whose windows were covered with sheets of plastic. The place was a
dump like many local farms, surrounded by weedy fields and rusting implements. Government programs paid farmers not to plant, so they’d taken to selling things instead: Amway detergent, gizmos that boosted gas mileage, knickknacks made of weathered wood. And drugs.

“Be cool,” Donna said as she knocked on the screen door. “And don’t make a fuss if he pulls the baby stunt.”

The dealer, whom Donna called “Munch,” was tall and in his twenties, with moles on his eyelids the size of pencil erasers. He led us to a makeshift table fashioned from a door raised up on cinder blocks. He cleaned the pot with a putty knife. A Nazareth album, turned down low, warbled from the stereo and I noticed that the floor was out of true. Getting my money out, I dropped a quarter, and it rolled forever, out of sight.

“Hey, Grit!” Munch yelled. “Get down here! Customers!”

“Grit’s Munch’s girlfriend,” said Donna. “They have a son.” She seemed to be preparing me for something.

A young woman appeared at the foot of the stairs. Her breasts hung out of the sides of a black halter top and her jeans rode high and tight against her crotch. In her arms was a baby whose head lolled, unsupported. Its face was grim and pinched and vaguely mummified, like something that had been buried and dug up.

“Duncan’s a weed freak, too,” said Munch. “Kid Cannabis.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Likes to feed his head.”

The girl laid the baby down beside the pot and went into the kitchen. Munch tickled the infant’s bare stomach. It didn’t react. He scratched under its chin. It didn’t twitch. The baby’s stoniness seemed to be the point.

The girl returned with a large cardboard carton and opened the lid and set the baby inside it. She closed the lid and sat down next to Donna as Munch flicked a Zippo and lit a joint he’d rolled. The joint sparked and sizzled as Munch inhaled, choking back a heroic load of smoke. He leaned across the table over the box and blew out his hit through a hole punched in the cardboard.

Smoke leaked out through the lid. I heard dull thumping sounds. The box moved a couple of inches across the table.

“Imagine what he must think in there,” Munch said. “It’s Disneyland in a box. It’s Disney
World
.”

I looked at Donna, stunned, wondering how many times she’d seen this horror and how she’d managed to harden herself to it. She dropped her eyes and folded her hands and sighed. I wanted to go, but I also wanted the pot. Maybe smoking enough of it would help me forget buying it.

“Babies are naturally high,” the girlfriend said. She steadied the box as it rattled toward the table edge. “It’s because they don’t have language yet. They’re pure. They think in pictures.”

“Of what?” Munch said.

“Of animals.”

“That’s a guess.”

“It’s what I like to think. It makes me feel good.”

Munch blew more smoke in the box and it stood still. The girl untucked the lid. She lifted out the baby by its armpits and held it so we could look. Its skin was gray, its toes and fingers curled up tight like paws. Oddly, the kid didn’t seem to have a belly button, only a sort of bumpy reddish smudge.

“Watch now, here’s the amazing part,” said Munch. The girlfriend sat the baby in an armchair and started untangling a power cord running to a pair of headphones. She seated the headphones on the baby’s skull and crossed to the stereo and turned a knob. Instantly, the baby started kicking. An eerie bugling sound escaped its throat, followed by a clamor of grunts and squawks in which I heard crowing roosters, rooting pigs, a whole excited barnyard.