Deadline
I said before, I feel like I love her. I don’t know what that means for sure, but it feels that way. Not sexual—well, sexual, too—but that’s not where the feeling comes from. Hey-Soos is right. I don’t know if he’s—I’m—right about her not telling anyone else, but most of what he says turns out to be true. If it’s right that I’m the only person she’s told, that’s a lot of trust. I wonder how she knew I wouldn’t freak out. Now I have to decide whether or not to tell her the truth about me. I watch her chest rise and fall to her breathing, and almost choke, thinking about it. It would bring great relief to talk to someone in the real world, but I do not want people treating me like I’m dying. Nobody. I want to make this year my life: a regular life where people treat you regular. It seems like I have a right to ask for that. I drift again.
“Twice in one night?”
“Slow week. You think you love her.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m too young to know what love really is.”
“Really?”
“That’s, you know, what people say.”
“And people really know what they’re talking about, right?”
“Well, whoever they are, they have a point. I mean, what does somebody like me know about love?”
“There isn’t an entity in the universe that does not know about love,” Hey-Soos says. “You may be mixing it up with sexual desire, or with some need to make love exclusive of all other people.”
“Man, you’re working me too hard.”
“I’m going to give you one free,” he says. “Love, in the universal sense, is unconditional acceptance. In the individual sense, the one-on-one sense, try this: we can say we love each other if my life is better because you’re in it and your life is better because I’m in it. The intensity of the love is weighed by how much better.”
“But what about when you think, you know, you love someone but you have, like, really intense sexual feelings about someone else.”
“Don’t change the subject. We’re talking about love.”
I start to ask what’s the difference but Hey-Soos raises his hands and shoves her in reverse and—
I am lying in Dallas Suzuki’s bed in the early-morning darkness, listening to her easy breathing, knowing full well my life is better because she’s in it and wondering if the same will be true if I figure out how in hell I’m going to tell her the truth about myself.
Ten
“You wear that to bed?” Dad asks, nodding at my burgundy tux. It’s late Sunday morning and we’re at the breakfast table. Cody is still in bed and Mom is crashed in the bedroom.
I smile. The tux is still perfectly pressed; clearly I did not wear it to bed. Dad is practicing facetiousness. Actually he’s not practicing; he’s been good at it for quite a while. He takes my plate to the stove and piles on scrambled eggs and bacon.
“I paid a lot of money to rent this,” I say. “Wanted my money’s worth.”
“It seems you didn’t come home last night.”
I look down at the tux. “It does seem like that.”
“Your mother was going to stay up and have a talk with you.”
I cringe at the thought. That would have been a long talk.
“The last thing she said before she cashed it in was that I should have it with you.”
“The talk? Is it the one she wanted you to have with Cody when he was fourteen?”
He scratches his chin and smiles. “That’s the one.”
I laugh. “You’re in the clear. I had it with Cody.”
“She’s worried…”
“That I’m going to get a girl pregnant and throw away my chances for a long, lustrous career as a jockey?”
I pick at my food. Eggs and bacon are not part of my preferred diet, but I don’t necessarily want Dad to know that. I’ll make myself some oatmeal later. I pretend to eat as I lay out the stats from the Planned Parenthood website. Rote. I can’t bring any surprises into my own life that will have lasting effect, ’cause I won’t be lasting, but I’m not about to complicate Dallas’s life, either. “I’ll spare you the gory details, Dad, but anybody who doesn’t use protection is an unconscious dick. And if it helps, the protection I used last night was abstinence.”
“’Nuff said,” he says, looking relieved. My dad does a pretty good job with Cody and me when it comes to problem solving, but he does not address the sexual or the emotional with great confidence.
And like I said, I didn’t do anything last night with Dallas that could relegate us to a single-wide trailer for the next thirty years. But I don’t care. I’m hooked and wherever it goes I’m going with it. I can close my eyes in the privacy of my room and go back to that first night with her any time I get a hankerin’. I look at Mom’s closed bedroom door. “Are you leaving next year after we’re gone?”
Dad looks at me like I’m speaking Russian.
“You know, when we’re off to college.”
“Yeah, I know when you’re off to college. Listen Ben, it may not look like your mother and I have much together, and compared to some folks we probably don’t. But there was a time, and twenty years ago I made a deal. I’ll admit it would have been hard to wrap my imagination around the worse in for better or worse, but I made a deal. I don’t shoot a horse with a broken leg and I don’t turn my back when someone I care about gets sick. Your mother’s sick.”
“I just meant I wouldn’t blame you. I mean, sometimes I remember a whole different person when we were little. You could talk to her. She had fun. It’s like you can’t connect with her anymore. If somebody asked me what my mother’s like, I wouldn’t know what to say, other than she’s going a hundred or she’s parked.”
“Son, do you know what it must feel like to live inside her body? Inside her head?” He shakes his head. “No, I made a deal, Ben.” And the conversation is closed.
That’s one reason I don’t tell him. He made a deal about me, too.
Early October
I’m feeling more and more like I need to hold Lambeer’s feet to the fire. I’ve figured out that if you’re a teacher you can say anything about any damn thing you want, and if no one challenges you, it becomes fact. Now this puts me behind the curve a ways, but the more I put Malcolm X’s perspectives alongside the information in Lies My Teacher Told Me, the brasher a student I become. Like I said earlier, according to Loewen, what you read in any American history textbook is pretty much 130 to 150 percent bullshit. They get the names right and they know the War of 1812 started in 1812, but the stuff they leave out turns almost any high school history book into an eight-hundred-page infomercial for the good ol’ U. S. of A. As was said about Andrew Jackson’s policies, “To the victor belong the spoils,” which among other things means those in power get to write history. It isn’t much of a jump to believe that spills over into our U.S. government textbooks.
So I figure I owe it to myself and to my classmates, who have never failed to join me in my relentless quest to keep Lambeer off-topic, to bring my newfound knowledge into the learning factory.
“Mr. Wolf the Lesser,” Lambeer says at the opening bell, “you said you would choose your term project by today. Are you ready?”
“Yes, Your Honor, I am,” I say back.
“And your project will be…”
“To follow the prescribed local political process and get the city council to name a street after Malcolm X.”
“What?”
“To follow the prescribed—”
“I heard you, Mr. Wolf. I’m afraid that won’t do. At the very least Malcolm X belongs in a history class, and I’m hard pressed to say he belongs there.”
“Au contraire,” I say. “It will have to do. I’ve already started the wheels rolling. I can’t stop them. It’s bigger than both of us, sir.”
That gets a few laughs. Sooner says, “Jesus, Wolf. You see any black dudes in this school?”
For maybe the first or second time in his life, Sooner Cowans has a point. But so do I. “Nope, I do not see any bl
ack dudes or dudettes. But there are streets in every town in this country named after white heroes that have nothing but black or Latino or Asian folks on them, and we don’t think a thing about that. I’m simply making a modest push for equality, which my textbook tells me is also the goal of our government. That makes it current and definitely about government and therefore appropriate for this class.”
Dallas says, “Right on, Little Wolf.”
Cody lightly bangs his forehead on his desktop.
Lambeer says, “Mr. Wolf, are you doing this to get attention?”
“The only way I’ll get attention is if you don’t let me do it,” I say back. “Except for the people who are working together, I’ll bet there aren’t three kids in here who could tell you what any other kid’s project is. Shoot, I don’t even know what Cody’s doing.”
That gives Lambeer pause. He may be the Bill O’Reilly of social studies teachers, but, unlike with O’Reilly, if you make sense you can usually get a break. “It sounds pretty frivolous,” he says, “but I’ll give it some consideration.”
“So how come we didn’t study Malcolm X in history?” It’s two days later and I’ve had time to read a little more of Loewen’s book and a little more Malcolm X and become even more indignant about my education.
“I’d like to discuss this with you, Mr. Wolf,” Lambeer says, “but as I said, this is current events and Malcolm X has been dead around forty years.”
Sooner says, “Jesus, Wolf, give it a rest. Go see the movie.”
“Matter of fact, I did see the movie. Denzel Washington was Malcolm. Wonder why he didn’t win the Oscar for it.”
Lambeer says, “Are you saying it was because he was black?”
“Geez,” I say, “I never thought of that.”
“I’m going to put this to sleep, Mr. Wolf. I went back through my last year’s U.S. history notes and as a matter of fact I did mention Mr. X in two lectures. There are limits to what you can cover in the short period of two semesters. Now if that didn’t meet your standards, I’m sorry, but we must move on. And I have to tell you, I’ve decided to put your Malcolm X street-naming project out of range. The truth is, the school has a levy to pass this year and if you’re canvassing for something that frivolous, we could lose that levy. So select another project.”
“You’re going to sabotage my education for a few bucks?” I say with exaggerated disbelief. “Does Idaho have an ACLU?”
“ACLU is in California, you dip-shit,” Sooner says.
Dallas says, “That’s UCLA, Sooner. Every state has an ACLU.”
“Well, pardon me,” Sooner says back. I am single-handedly driving this class out of control.
Lambeer raises his hand high, supposedly a signal for all to fall silent. “That’s enough! Now let’s get this class back on track.”
But I have been armed by James Loewen. “Did you know that when it came to the indigenous populations of the West Indies and Haiti, Christopher Columbus had about the same sensibilities as Adolf Hitler? How come you didn’t teach us that in U.S. history?”
“Mr. Wolf, I’ll say it one more time. This class is about United States government and current events. If you took issue with my history curriculum you should have said it back then.”
I’m on a roll. “Okay, then how come you haven’t told us about the Native American influence on the ideas put forth in the Constitution, and particularly on the Bill of Rights?”
Dolven says, “Jesus, Wolf, did you whack your head against the goalposts when you dove for that catch?”
I spend the last half hour of class in enforced silence.
“Which of our quiet tree-lined streets did you have pegged for Malcolm X Avenue, little big bro,” Cody says in the lunchroom, “before your noble project was quashed?”
My brother mocks me. The only paved street in Trout is Main Street and it’s only paved because it’s the single state highway connecting north and south Idaho. The temperatures in this place get so cold then warm up so quickly that we get serious frost heaves, where the moisture beneath the road freezes, then turns to oozing mud pushing up through in the springtime. We call the big ones jelly rolls, and when they start to show in the spring, little kids go out and bounce on them to soften them up even more. There are urban myths—or maybe rural myths—of kids getting sucked into the mud and going down like a bad guy in the quicksand of an old Tarzan movie. At any rate, if you were to pave those streets, the frost heaves would only buckle the pavement and cost the taxpayers more money than a school levy. My Malcolm X Avenue would not exactly be a quiet suburban tree-lined street.
“I was just making a point,” I tell my brother now. “We live in a country where racism and divisiveness and ignorance and fear rule the day. It’s so bad, there are things that happened four hundred years ago they’re afraid to tell us about today. Just because we live in Podunk, Idaho, where it’s easy not to pay any attention to all that, doesn’t mean we’re not going to get confronted with it when we get out in the world.”
“Man, who have you been talking to? What you need to pay attention to is getting behind the quarterback who’s taking us to State. Wipe your mind clear of your lofty thoughts, my older, smaller, cerebral sib, and pay attention to what matters. You’ll have plenty of time for social work when the season’s over.”
“You’re right,” I say, but I’m thinking I don’t have plenty of time for anything.
There’s an envelope with my name on it taped to Marla’s door when I arrive after practice for my appointment, next to a typed notice declaring all appointments canceled for the week. Someone will be in touch by phone or e-mail. I open the note.
Ben,
I’m sorry, I can’t do this. I thought I could but I can’t. My favorite professor at the university said he gets his best piece of therapeutic information every time he boards an airplane. The flight attendant says if the oxygen mask drops down, be sure to put on your own before helping anyone with theirs. I’m afraid I haven’t put mine on. It hurts too much to talk to you. It’s not your fault.
Marla
That’s a different way of looking at the oxygen mask dropping. Dang! Too many issues for a therapist! That should come with an award. It also sucks. I’m assuming the someone who will be in touch will be a new therapist, which I don’t like much. I was just breaking Marla in, and she wasn’t scary to talk to. It was nice having someone besides Hey-Soos, who I still suspicion is Ben Wolf in a bathrobe, to talk with. I shouldn’t have teased her so much. I feel sorry, I feel bad, and just a little pissed. I thought if you graduated from therapy school, you had that shit down.
What the hell, maybe I don’t need therapy. I mean, who knows more about me than me? Hey-Soos, maybe, but who real? What I need is to get on with things. I need to rattle some cages. That’s why football feels so good, I think. I can make people listen. I don’t try to make somebody walk away hurt from a hit by me. I just want them to know I need to be dealt with.
“Tell me all you know about Malcolm X.”
“I’m depending on my memory,” Rudy says. “Not good.”
“He made the pilgrimage to Mecca, right? Is that, like, the same Islam we’re dealing with today? Guys beheading people and shit?”
“You can’t judge Islam by those people any more than you can judge Christians by abortion clinic bombers or white separatists. Love turns to hate at the fringes of any belief system.” Rudy sounds like a college prof. I don’t see the half-empty bottle inside a paper sack on the tool bench these days. He’s almost cleaned up, there’s a whiff of Old Spice, and I’ve noticed the supplements dwindling. He’s like a whole new resource in my war for an education, plus he was a priest. What more could you ask for when you’re on your way out? I mean, Catholic priests are supposed to have a line to the Big Guy, straight through the Pope. That doesn’t jibe with Hey-Soos’s grasp of things, but nothing wrong with getting divergent views.
“So what about guys who bomb abortion clinics?” I ask him. “Catholics are
big-time against abortion.”
“Guys who bomb abortion clinics are murderers,” he says, “and I’m not a priest anymore, or even a Catholic. Even when I was, I thought guys who bomb abortion clinics are murderers.”
“How come you left the church?” I’ve asked it before.
He shakes his head. “Don’t go there. I’ve told you before—”
I raise my hands in surrender. “I got it,” I say. “I just get interested in stuff. So were you thinking of following Malcolm X?”
“No, I wasn’t thinking of following Malcolm X, and he certainly wouldn’t have invited me to. I just got interested in his perspectives when I read Haley’s book. I was questioning, and I liked the way he questioned.”
That’s what I’m into. Questioning. It’s how you learn. Even when you don’t get the answers, you get the heat to find them. Right now my heat is turned on high.
“Like I said before,” Rudy says, “it’s all about differences. Something about humans really doesn’t like them, when they are the very thing we should embrace. If someone’s different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that’s God telling you to take a closer look. If you’re scared or mad, that’s about you, not about the person who scares or angers you.” He looks at his watch. “Don’t you have a curfew?”
“Yeah.”
“What time?”
“Ten.”
“You’re past it. Get out of here.”
“Coach doesn’t really enforce it.”
“Get out of here anyway. I’m tired. And you ask too many questions.”
Rudy doesn’t want to get out of practice being the town drunk, even when he isn’t drinking. He is one interesting guy.
Eleven
“How come you haven’t pushed me to get treatment?”