Thumbsucker (26 page)

Joel and I consumed the stack, hungry for color, for ads, for celebrities. Joel made me give him a sex-appeal quiz intended for young women: “Have you ever dressed entirely in red?” “Do you prefer cars with cloth or leather interiors?” Joel scored strangely high on the test. We read columns on dating and wedding etiquette and how to order wine. We lingered over the photos of the models, forgetting ourselves so completely that sun blisters developed on our backs.

The girl volunteered to spread lotion on us. “Guys who are into beauty have guts,” she said.

“We’re not really into beauty,” Joel said. “We’re bored.”

“They’re Mormons,” Steve Hanson said. “No media. Personally, I call that child abuse. Kids have a right to be part of the big show.”

Joel and I swam back to shore and started home. He ground his jaws and sulked and kicked small rocks. He snapped twigs and branches off the trees we passed.

“I can’t believe it—we’re missing the whole punk thing. Everything’s changing. Shirts are changing.
Styles
.”

“What does that have to do with you and me?”

“Justin, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you even
care
about the outside world? Isn’t there anything you
want
out there?”

“I’d have to think.”

“If you have to think, forget it.”

When we got home we went to dry our towels and found an empty square of lint where the dryer had stood. In the yard we found Audrey stringing up a line. She squeezed out the towels and hung them up with clothespins.

“Two is the number for Jew,” she said. “I solved it.”

“Where are my white shorts? They clean?” Joel asked.

“I’m doing the laundry by hand. It slows things down, hon.”

“It’s like we’re not even
Americans
,” Joel said.

Joel rebelled openly a few days later. He started wearing his designer clothes.

No one noticed at first. Mike was absorbed in a project
in the basement, building shelves for our stock of protein pellets. He looked happy, healthy, strong. His abstention from coffee and cigarettes and liquor had pinked up his complexion. His hair seemed thicker. Missing the punk thing seemed to me like a reasonable price to pay for his well-being.

I had a project, too. I had a talk to write. Every week the bishop picked three laymen to stand and speak to the congregation, and this week it was my turn. “How about an upbeat talk on thrift?” he said. “Mormons, you see, are people of the beehive. The beehive’s our symbol. Now, what are beehives for?”

“Honey?”

“They’re little factories. Nothing wasted. They’re symbols of efficiency. Of purpose.”

I’d made little progress on my talk; honeybees did not inspire me. They scrambled over one another’s bodies while carrying out dull, repetitive missions on behalf of a queen who barely noticed them.

Audrey, too, was preoccupied. Her interest in numerology had waned and been replaced by a fascination with angels. Mormon angels were not like other angels. They dressed in normal clothes and didn’t have wings. Their bodies were not translucent but solid, physical. In fact, they were indistinguishable from humans. According to Audrey, they wandered the earth like hitchhikers, seeking out faithful Mormons in distress.

“Sister Hutchinson’s car broke down in Utah. It overheated,” Audrey said. “There wasn’t a service station
for fifty miles. Then a man with a pail came walking down the road. He didn’t say a word, just filled her radiator, then turned and disappeared the way he’d come.”

As Audrey finished the story, Joel came in. He had on the jeans, the Sergio Valentes. “I’m going diving. Justin, want to come?”

I followed him out. “Those pants don’t even fit.”

“Tight’s the trend.”

“They look painful.”

“Sort of. It’s worth it.”

Joel’s dives that day were riskier than ever. He showed off to a group of girls by somersaulting backward off the cliff. He practiced spins and flips and cannonballs. Just when we were ready to go home, Steve Hanson came by with his radio and tape player and dared Joel to climb an overhanging pine tree and dive from one of its branches.

“What will you give me if I do?” Joel said.

“What do you want?”

“Your boombox.”

Steve agreed and Joel scrambled up the tree trunk. Pine needles and chunks of bark rained down. I yelled for Joel to jump from halfway up, but he had his eye on the top.

“Too high,” I called.

“Go for it,” Steve Hanson yelled. “I’ll throw in my set of Ted Nugent bootleg tapes.”

That made the difference. Joel shouted, pushed off,
and dove. He never cleared the tree, though. He’d miscalculated. He crashed down level by level through the branches, falling straight, then sideways, then straight again. Twigs cracked and snapped. Joel’s body did a cartwheel.

Steve Hanson laughed. The fall was taking forever. Joel landed all wrong, with one arm out. I heard the bone pop. A stripe of hairless, abraded scalp showed above one of his ears. He’d lost some fingernails.

Steve Hanson’s idea of emergency assistance was to stand there and warn me not to touch Joel’s neck. I ignored him, knelt down, and propped Joel’s head up.

“I get hyper, too, sometimes,” he said.

We loaded him into the beer-can-strewn backseat of Steve Hanson’s Barracuda. I rolled up the Valentes and tucked them under Joel’s head for a pillow. “You owe me, Steve,” Joel moaned. “I want those Nugent tapes.”

“Fucking born-agains.”

“Sticks and stones,” Joel said.

“Fucking Holy Rollers.”

“Eat me, Steve.”

I sat by Joel’s sickbed, writing my beehive speech. I envied the Percocet pain pills he’d been prescribed. They mellowed his eyes. His broken arm, in a cast that smelled of glue, lay across his lap, as yet unwritten on. He’d said that he didn’t want people signing it because he thought pure white casts looked more distinguished.

Steve’s boombox sat on Joel’s nightstand, playing Ted Nugent, but the stunt Joel had pulled to earn it had been unnecessary. Mike had fallen out with his survival pals over his refusal to pitch in for an underground shelter they were building in the northern Minnesota iron range. He’d returned the TV to the living room, sold his generator, bought Audrey new Maytags, and sprung for a minivan to shuttle Joel back and forth from tournaments and tryouts. The crash Mike expected hadn’t come to pass and I could tell he was tired of waiting around for it.

The only reminder of our self-sufficiency push was Audrey’s laundry line, which she still used, agreeing with Mike that line-dried clothes smelled fresher. I watched through the window above Joel’s sickbed as she hung up his Valente’s with a clothespin next to his pink and yellow Izod polo shirts.

“You won,” I told Joel. “You stuck it out. Good job.”

“Is everyone else at church faking this like we did? Pretending the world’s going to end? It’s not, you know.”

“No, you’re probably right,” I said.

“You want one?” Joel held out a pain pill in his palm. “Just take it. God could care less. He isn’t watching.”

“You still believe in him?”

“I always have. That’s how I know we’re going to be okay.”

After six months of regular church attendance, of fasts and fund drives and hymns and scripture classes, Mike told me he needed a breather, a little holiday, and I agreed that I could use one, too. His plan was for us to drive to Canada—just the two of us, no Joel and Audrey—and fly two hundred miles in a floatplane out to the middle of Lake Nipigon, where we’d be dropped on an uninhabited island equipped with a two-bunk cabin and a motorboat. We’d fish for three days, alone, with no distractions, and cook our meals on a propane stove.
We’d talk. Though Mike let me know that the trip would be expensive, and that he’d paid a hefty surcharge for a Labor Day weekend reservation, he said he’d consider the money well spent if we could deepen our bond as father and son.

I didn’t know such a bond still linked us, and I wouldn’t have known how to deepen it if it had.

We left late at night, Mike’s favorite time to drive. Ignoring Mormon dietary rules, he stoked himself with black coffee and chewing tobacco. He said it was important to stay alert. Every few miles he rolled his window down and spat a mouthful of juice into the darkness. I played the AM radio. The news came on at the top of every hour, heralded by a burst of pounding music, and most of the stories had to do with politics, which Mike claimed to have an inside understanding of because he’d been attending Republican fund-raisers. In his view the country had been going downhill ever since Nixon had been hounded from office by the Kennedy-loving eastern elite.

“I need this trip,” Mike said. “I’m overdue. I don’t think it’s any secret what I’ve been going through.”

I didn’t know what he meant, and didn’t ask him. Mike’s life, from what I knew, was proceeding well. His business had finally taken off that summer, boosted by the health bar and the gym. The money had allowed Audrey to quit her job and paid for Joel to attend a St. Paul boarding school whose tennis team was regionally ranked.

“Becoming a saint was not my goal,” Mike said. “I did this for you, for the family. We needed structure.”

“I guess we did.”

“It’s gotten out of hand, though. I’m finally in a position to enjoy life, financially speaking, and now … I timed things wrong.”

Mike spat tobacco and faced out the window, not sharing what he was thinking. This didn’t bother me. What bothered me was his new desire to tell me things—to use our trip as a chance for big discussions that I wasn’t sure we needed to have.

We stopped for gas at the border. I cleaned the windshield. Mike came out of the station after paying and stood by the hood and unwrapped an Almond Joy bar. He offered me the first bite. I took a small one. We gazed at the stars, which were low and clear, and chewed. The smell of a nearby pulp mill soured the air.

“Remember this moment,” Mike said.

I promised I would.

“It might not come again.”

I nodded solemnly.

“I’ve been in a lot of pain. I guess I hide it. Maybe you think I’m asking for pity here.”

That’s just what I did think, but I knew not to say so. Mike’s pain was important to him—he wore it proudly—but something convinced him no one else could see it. He believed for some reason that he suffered in secret, when anyone could have told him he looked miserable.

“I miss my old coach,” he said. “I know you hated him.”

I wasn’t going to touch this.

“Some people hated him. Woody could be a terror, I admit it. Personally, I think I needed a terror.”

“Why was that?”

“I couldn’t get off square one. I needed a good swift kick to get me moving. Still, I can see why some people hated him.”

At the border post a uniformed official stood in a floodlit glass booth and asked Mike questions about the nature of our visit to Canada. Mike lied for some reason: “An illness in the family.” The guard played a flashlight over Mike’s driver’s license and handed it back with a nod and waved us on. Mosquitoes danced in our headlights. The car was quiet. I tried the radio but nothing came through. I tried it again farther on but nothing came through.