Deadline

  “Uh, as has been mentioned,” Lambeer says, “you live in a town of zero percent African-American inhabitants. Even if I were to change my mind and let you do it, where would you get your signatures?”

  “I’ll start with anyone who was around for the sixties,” I say. “That’s how a grassroots campaign takes root.”

  “Well, I’m not going to change my mind, so it’s moot.”

  “It’s moot, except I’m doing it anyway.”

  Sylvia Longley, of book-burning fame, says, “Stand up for this, Mr. Lambeer. Somebody in this school needs to have some sense.”

  Lambeer looks pleased. “I fully intend to stand up for it. Ben, do you realize that if you receive a failing grade on this project you could receive a failing grade for the course, costing you your diploma?”

  “I’m realizing it just this minute,” I say.

  “And you’re willing to do that. You have probably a three-point-seven grade average, are looking at a bright future, and you’d sacrifice it all to make this point?”

  “Naw,” I say. “I’d really only be sacrificing three months. I could take the course in summer school down in Boise or somewhere and hit the ground running in the fall.”

  Dallas says, “This Wolf kid is smarter than he looks.”

  Randy Dolven says, “He’d have to be.” Dolven’s comment isn’t mean-spirited. He disses everyone. Sooner, on the other hand, would move out of a town before allowing a street to be named after a black guy. I think I’ll campaign to make it his street.

  “I have decided, after reading Lies My Teacher Told Me—I love that title by the way—that we’re still an inherently bigoted country. Our history books are whitewashed of our racial history, particularly recent racial history. Did you know back then the director of the FBI actually undertook a smear campaign on Martin Luther King, Jr.? But I digress. This project is particularly current because Malcolm X learned acceptance after going to Mecca, which, like I said before, is right in the middle of all the nastiness today. It’s like ironic, or whatever. And there will be a lesson if I’m successful and a lesson if I’m not. We’ll all learn something.”

  “We may have our racial problems, but the United States of America is the freest country in the world, for every race. On what do you base your assumptions of racism?”

  “Living here,” I say. “Watching old news clips from New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit and then watching the Spike Lee HBO movie. Did you know they found dead bodies more than a year after Hurricane Katrina? No way that happens in, like, Beverly Hills, California. When the World Trade Center was bombed they combed through the rubble. It’s all we heard about. The President was at that site within days. We might not still have lynchings, but that doesn’t mean bigotry is gone.”

  “I picked up Loewen’s book since the last time you mentioned it,” Lambeer says, “and I hate to tell you it is decidedly left leaning.”

  “Perfect,” I say. “If I read it and our textbook and listen to you, I should land exactly in the middle. And if only half of what in there is true, we still have problems with racism.”

  “Plus, Katrina was a while ago,” Lambeer says, “and there are other circumstances that went with that. I don’t think you can call it racism or bigotry.”

  “Well, then,” I say, “what do you call Sooner Cowans walking out to the coin toss at the Timberline game and saying “How” while he raised his hand like some two-bit movie star cowboy?”

  Sooner is up like a flash. “That there was a joke, you little punk,” he says. “I didn’t know the brothers Injun was gonna take offense.”

  “Did you keep the ball they gave you?” I say, turning toward him. He’s coming but so is Cody; I’m safe. I turn back to Lambeer. “I rest my case.”

  Lambeer says, “I don’t think Mr. Cowans meant to be racist. I’ll admit if that happened it was a bit insensitive….”

  “That’s how racism works,” I say back. “You should read Malcolm X.” Sooner is stopped in his tracks, as is my brother, standing fast waiting for him to sit back down. “That’s how any bigotry works.”

  Sooner says, “You better watch your mouth, midget.”

  “Careful, Cowans,” I tell him. “You might piss off some midgets.”

  “You make a case, Mr. Wolf, even though it’s a flawed one,” Lambeer says. “I guess I’m not willing to let you throw your diploma away on stubbornness, so I’ll let you do the project. But I’ll cut it off in a heartbeat if I hear anything negative from the townspeople. Sooner, sit down.”

  My brother hasn’t said a word. He’s leaning against Nessa Milner’s desktop, just keepin’ the peace. Nessa Milner doesn’t seem to mind.

  Dallas raises her hand. “Mr. Lambeer, what would you say if I told you I thought I should never have to pay taxes to the United States Government?”

  “I’d say you had better plan to spend a good deal of your life behind bars, Ms. Suzuki. Why do you ask?”

  “Did you know that during World War Two my grandparents were given one day to get everything they could carry, then sent to a concentration camp in Arkansas?”

  “Those were called relocation centers, Ms. Suzuki. Not concentration camps.”

  “I know what the government called them, Mr. Lambeer,” and she says his title with the same pomposity he uses for hers, “and I learned right in this room that nuclear warheads are called Peacemakers and the relaxation of pollution restrictions is called the Clean Air Act. They were concentration camps.”

  Whoa! Dallas is using weapons she gathered right in this room to make a point I think Lambeer’s not going to like. Maybe I would love her even if she were a man.

  “And your point is…”

  “That my father got cheated out of a substantial inheritance, which probably cost him a college education and a job that would have allowed him to at least pay his child support, which I might use to go to college. My grandparents or my father or my uncle never received a penny in reparations. And if you’re African-American or Native American, well, where should I start? We don’t even admit our historical racism. How would you expect us to recognize current racism? I think we could all learn a lot from the responses Ben gets doing his project.”

  “First, Ms. Suzuki, I could take issue with your characterization of the relocation camps as racist. We were, after all, at war with the Japanese.”

  “My grandparents never set foot in Japan. All their ls and rs were in place.”

  “As I said, I’m allowing Mr. Wolf to go ahead with his project, as long as it doesn’t cause too much trouble.”

  To some degree, the idea of lobbying for Malcolm X Avenue was a joke, because I knew how far it would get up Lambeer’s nose and because I could have some fun learning local political process at the same time. I mean, I certainly don’t expect the good people of Trout, Idaho, to name a street after a street criminal turned activist turned wise man turned dead guy. But when Dallas was laying it on Lambeer this afternoon, there was passion behind her words. If I do this right, I can fuck with Lambeer and be Dallas Suzuki’s hero at the same time. It might get better than that, but not on this planet.

  Truth is, I use the Malcolm X factor as an excuse to see Rudy. I know all I need to know without the up close and personal history. But Rudy seems interested and it gets me into the garage, where I can kind of keep an eye on him. He didn’t have any effect on me at all until I came into my own dire straits, but here’s a guy everyone thinks is a throwaway, on the downhill slide of his life; a decent guy with a good mind who could exit so quietly no one but the Hall brothers would know he was gone. Doesn’t seem right.

  But when I get to the garage Rudy is seriously shit-faced. I mean embalmed. It’s like he’s been drinking steady since I last saw him, and he is not cordial. I’ve got my copy of Malcolm X in hand and underlined and he tries to rip it out of my hands, after I finally scream at him loud enough for him to let me in.

  “Gimme that goddam book!” he bellows. “Gimme that goddam thing!??
?

  “Rudy, what the hell?” I’m holding the book out of his reach, though I don’t have to worry about him actually getting it. He has to be seeing at least three. “What happened? You were clean.”

  “And fuckin’ sober,” he says. “Clean an’ fuckin’ sober. Tell you what, that ain’t all i’s cracked up to be. I don’ wan’ you comin’ round here no more. No more supplements, you hear? You stay away.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You wash your goddam cars durin’ the day and stay the hell away at night. I got work to do. I can’t be spendin’ my time on a buncha books that don’ mean shit. They’re ancient hishtory.”

  I don’t have time for this. I walk over to the workbench and wrap my fingers around an almost drained bottle of Jack Daniels and sling it across the room where it pops like a rifle shot. Then I go to the drawers where he used to keep his stash to find out what he has left. I yell “Bullshit!” each time I fling one. Six bottles: six bull-shits. Rudy is screaming at me, calling me every name in the book, trying to get to me, but I’m dancing around the room ahead of him, firing those babies at the wall and letting him know that next time I come down here to save his drunken ass, he’d better be ready to have it saved. By the time I’m finished he’s on the floor crying like a baby, begging me to stop, which is where he passes out.

  Rudy’s a pretty good-sized guy and I’m not what you’d call a heavy lifter, but I get him across the room to his cot, head on the pillow, boots off, and cover him with his blanket. I won’t stay all night, but I’ll get back before he can get to the liquor store, and before business hours, and get this shit unraveled.

  Fucking Rudy. I’m exhausted. At home my mother’s bedroom door is closed, and Dad is asleep on the couch. The drapes are wide open and a full moon pours light through the picture window, casting the room in a kind of blue calm. It’s a fake calm, though. I sit in Dad’s easy chair, staring at his chest moving up and down easily in sleep. Once in a while, if he thinks Mom might pull out of it, he sleeps here so he can hear her. Fucking Rudy. I want to walk over to my mother’s room and kick the door in and jerk her out of that stupid bed and tell her to get her shit together. Man, I wish I’d never told Marla I was dying. Then I’d still have a therapist and maybe I could find out where in hell I ever got the idea I had to save every unsavable wretch I come across, starting with my mother and ending with fucking Rudy. In a couple of days, just to keep Doc Wagner at arm’s length, I’ve agreed to go see the new therapist, some guy named Alex Wells, who has taken over for Marla. It would be nice if he’s a good one.

  I lie back in the chair and stare at the moon and try to get my heart rate down, then look over at Dad again, wondering if there was ever a time when he felt about my mother the way I do about Dallas. I drift off, hoping he did.

  “So much for Rudy McCoy.”

  “You mean because he’s in the bag again?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Way in the bag.”

  “You might want to be a little more patient. Things aren’t always as they seem. The universe works in strange and mysterious ways.”

  “So I’ve heard. Actually, I always thought the strange and mysterious ways argument was just a cop-out.”

  “The way most people interpret it, it is. All it really means is there’s a lot in the universe that humans don’t understand. But the truth doesn’t need to be known, or believed, to be true.”

  Add that line to the evidence that Hey-Soos and I are not one and the same.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Hey-Soos says before I can once again bring his origins into question.

  “What do you think about my Malcolm X Avenue idea?”

  “Do you know who Don Quixote is?”

  I say I do.

  “Then I think it’s a great idea. I’m behind you all the way, but just so you know what I think your chances are, I won’t plug that street into my GPS system.”

  I don’t bother to ask him why a guy with his seeming connections would need a GPS system. “One more thing.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Is there any way around telling people what’s happening to me? Like Dallas and my brother at least?”

  “Go back and remember why you made that decision in the first place.”

  “I already told you. I did it because I want to live a normal life.”

  “And I said…”

  “‘You’re dying. What’s normal about that?’”

  He raises his holy eyebrows. “If you don’t want to take my word for it, maybe you should take it up with your new counselor.”

  Fifteen

  In the morning I let myself into the Halls Garage about six-thirty, which is pretty easy because I left the door unlocked when I dragged Rudy to bed last night. I’m expecting him to be an asshole of the highest degree, but I played a full football season with Sooner Cowans and I’m still ambulatory, so it takes a lot to scare me.

  He is in the exact same position I left him and if his snoring didn’t sound like he’s clear-cutting the last stand of yellow pine in the county, I might think he’s dead. What the hell, I shake him. He grunts and turns over so I shake him again. He waves his arms as if I’m a giant mosquito and says something very unpriestlike. I shake him again.

  He looks at me, through me, really, then I see in his eyes what I can only describe as terror. He shoves me away and sits up.

  “Jesus, Rudy. What’s the matter with you?”

  He stands and staggers a few steps across the greasy concrete floor, runs his hands over his face. “You can’t come here anymore.”

  “I work here. I can come any time I want.”

  “You need to stay away from me,” he says. “It was a mistake to get sober. A bigger one to start talking to you.”

  “Hey, what’d I do?”

  “Will you just get out of here?”

  “No!”

  He glares at me for a long moment, then sighs. “I guess this is the only way.” There is this…desperation in his eyes. “Sit down.”

  I sit.

  He takes a deep breath. “I’m a child molester,” he says, at which time I stop breathing.

  He leans his elbows on the workbench, drops his face into his hands. “That’s why I joined the priesthood.”

  “So you could get to kids?” My mind is spinning.

  “Jesus, no. So I’d stay away from kids. I was…You sure you want to hear this?”

  I’m not, but I say I am.

  “If I’m going to tell this I have to tell it all. I can’t have you running out of here before I get it said.”

  I want to run out now, but I’m as fascinated as I am repulsed. I see Dallas and her uncle. I don’t see them really; I’ve never seen her uncle, but you know what I mean. “Go ahead.”

  “I was in my twenties when I realized I was fascinated with young boys. I tried everything to make it not true: drank, used drugs, went out with as many pretty girls as would go out with me. Only every time I tried to have sex, it…it just didn’t work, and I was thinking about kids. Boys.

  “I made a couple of lame suicide attempts, none of which could have killed me, then I found myself hanging around schools and parks. Scary stuff. I grew up Catholic so I started going to church every Sunday, sitting in the empty church for hours at a time on week-nights, praying to God to help me. And I thought He did. I walked out of the church late one night, knowing my only escape was to give myself over to Him. I pledged to enroll in seminary and become a priest. I figured if I stayed as close to God as I could, He’d keep me safe.”

  I’ve read way too many newspapers to think this is going to turn out well, but I am speechless. I have this awful feeling in the back of my throat, and yet, he’s Rudy. I mean, I’m not scared of Rudy.

  “Only God was nowhere to be found. Kids were there.” He shakes his head slowly as his voice cracks. “Sometimes I wonder if I lied to myself, did it on purpose, like you said, to get closer to them. I was an altar boy once, though nothing happened to me.”

>   “You were never molested?” I’ve heard that most molesters usually were molested as kids.

  “I was molested, but not in the church. In fact it was my priest who got me help. That’s another story. I’ll tell you that one if you survive this one. At any rate, things were fine for a long time. I was ordained and eventually placed in a small diocese in northern Michigan, pretty close to where I grew up. I did everything by the book. The town loved me. I had fantasies, of course, but I said them out loud to God and every day I asked Him to watch over me. And it seemed as if He did. “Keep telling me,” He said, “and I’ll keep you safe.”

  Rudy looks toward the corner of the ceiling, but way past the corner if you see his eyes. Way past and back in time. “Then there was Donny Blankenship. Great kid. Good little athlete. His parents brought him to me when he was eleven because they wanted him to experience being an altar boy, like his father. The Blankenships were my friends. They had me to dinner; I played golf with them. I was almost a part of their family.” Rudy seems to be talking to himself now, barely aware I’m here.

  “The moment they brought him to me, I was aware of the attraction. I should have said no, made some excuse, but I brought him in. Classic grooming. I prayed and prayed. God kept telling me it was okay, that I had thoughts but it was my behavior that counted. Keep praying and don’t worry. Only it wasn’t God talking at all. It was Rudy McCoy, setting, baiting the trap. I groomed Danny and I groomed myself.

  “And then one day he came to see me in my office, completely down. His girlfriend had chosen someone else, and he was devastated. Thirteen years old. First girlfriend. He needed comfort and I gave it to him, and I gave him more. He was confused and I told him all the right lies, how he was special, maybe it was a good thing his girlfriend had left, and how God wanted him to help a good priest find his way; that the church expected special things from special people. My God, I was making it up as I went, and he was vulnerable and young and confused and scared. The perfect victim.”