Stranger

  I didn’t react to this. I just let them do it. I just kind of blanked it out. It seemed to be happening to someone else, not me. They never hurt me physically much. If at all.

  Then it all changed.

  I remember heading home from school one day. I’d have been fourteen. I cut through the park, carrying files and books under my arm. As I passed by the swings Chunk and his posse were there. Chunk earned his name by the quantity of muscle that enfolded his arms and thighs. Muscles even seemed to bulge out of his shaved head. He was a big cheese on the school football team. He boxed, too. And his reputation as a nose-breaker spread far and wide. Once he thumped a bunch of kids who’d turned up at his door trick-or-treating on Halloween. School legend had it he busted their noses while shouting, “Is Halloween scary enough for you now? Is it?” Yeah, lovable guy, isn’t he? Now it was my turn.

  “If it isn’t Miss Valdiva,” he called.

  There were a few girls with him, as well as his old roughhouse buddies. They laughed this giddy laugh, egging him on.

  “What ya got there, faggot boy?”

  I carried on walking. The thing is, keep your head down when kids toss out a few experimental insults. If your local neighborhood bully realizes he’s getting under your skin and sees you reacting to his torments, then it only gives him that taste in his mouth for hurting you a little more. Be impassive as a block of wood. Don’t react. Don’t show pain.

  It works sometimes.

  Maybe not that day in December, though. Seeing the girls giggle and sort of get turned on by his insults, Chunk turned up the menace. “Don’t ignore me, Valdiva. Come here.”

  This time I stopped. He slipped easily into bad boy mode. He came up behind me and pulled my head back by my hair. “In a hurry to scrub your mommy’s back in the bathtub, queer boy?”

  “I’m going out tonight, Chunk.”

  “Ooohh . . .” Smirking, he looked back at his posse, who laughed and hooted, encouraging him to crank up the bad boy persona. “Oooh. You’re coming out, are you? It’s about time, faggot boy.”

  “I’m going out.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re coming out of the closet, aren’t you, Valdiva? Admit it. Say: ‘I’m a pervert and I’m coming prancing out of the closet tonight.’ Say it!”

  I didn’t let my impassive expression slip. “I’m going out. It’s my sister’s birthday. I’ve got—”

  “Did you hear that?” Chunk laughed. “Mr. Queer of the year loves his sister, too. Man, you’re a bigger fucking pervert than I thought.”

  He pulled my hair harder. I could hear a crackling sound as hair started to snap from my scalp.

  “Valdiva’s got to get home in time to share the tub with his sister.”

  I saw the girls giggling more. Their eyes glittered. Man, those juices were really starting to flow. They were getting high on Chunk roughing me up. Chunk swung me ’round to face a wall that came up to my chest, pushing me toward it so I’d be pinned face for-ward. He was hyperventilating. Psyching himself up to wade into my face with his fists. This was better than sex for him. A real gutsy one-on-one beating. All the time he was panting insults at me. Really getting him-self steamed up. “Little freak; little worm . . .”

  He pushed his face right against the side of mine, telling me how he was going to hurt me so badly my own mother would have to donate DNA so they could identify me. He was so close I could smell fried onions on his breath. From the corner of my eye I could see the black, clogged pores in his nose. A sheen of sweat glistened on his eyelids. He grunted like he was getting turned on. Then he really shoved me against the brick, pushing harder and harder, all the time grunting insults with that stinking onion breath of his that damn near choked me.

  It’s happened enough times since. But there was no sense of me having done anything. One second Chunk was crushing my belly against the wall so hard I couldn’t breathe.

  The next I heard the girls screaming, “Leave him, he’s had enough! Leave him, you bastard, you’re killing him!”

  I swear I don’t remember what I did. But the next thing I know, I’ve got Chunk’s shaved head in my hands and I’m bouncing it down against the wall. There’s blood everywhere. Chunk’s eyes were open, but they were dead-looking. And the strange thing is I felt no anger, no rage, no emotion, no nothing. And there was no physical effort on my part. None that I could sense. It was like bouncing a big beach ball onto the bricks.

  The guys in Chunk’s posse just stared in horror. It was the girls who were trying to do something. Screaming at me to stop. Trying to pull me back. And the strangest thing: I still had the books and files tucked neatly under one armpit. Like I was doing nothing more than bouncing a ball on a cold afternoon in December.

  Only this beach ball pumped living blood all over me and all over the wall in thick, juicy red squirts.

  Chunk had a head of solid bone. He was back at school after Christmas. The upside was he didn’t touch me, or even make eye contact again. The down side? There has to be one, doesn’t there? His mother and father were big shits in a lawyer’s practice. They might as well have nailed that assault charge to my head. They couldn’t have made it stick there any more tightly.

  I got probation as well as newspaper headlines with my photograph hollering loud and clear IS THIS THE MOST EVIL TEENAGER IN TOWN? Well , words to that effect. In a formal way, all nicely legal, I was thrown out of school. Neighbors and co-workers crucified my mother in that nice, civilized way responsible adults employ on former friends. They stopped talking to her. She was no longer invited for coffee. Some kids beat up my sister. She was seven years old. Other stuff, too. Dog turd smeared in the mailbox. The kid across the road fired his air gun at the kitchen window. Someone ran a screwdriver down the side of our car to achieve that nice customized scratched-to-hell look.

  You know the sort of thing, don’t you? Really neighborly stuff. Christ.

  And then there was the Halloween that followed the ruckus with Chunk. It wound up trick-or-treat night for us, all right, with OUT, OUT OUT! aerosoled across the garage door. Mom wept. I mean really wept: Her tears left big damp splotches on her sweater and her eyes were puffy and sore for days afterward.

  You think I’m angry? You bet I’m angry. She didn’t deserve that. Or the fact that the guy she was seeing dumped her because of all this. Yeah, but what’s new about this kind of crap? This stuff happens in every street. Every neighborhood. Every town. Happens damn well everywhere.

  I wound up writing about Chunk and all that shit because I was angry about what happened the day I delivered wood in the truck and Crowther tried to crack open my skull with a log I’d just taken the trouble to saw the day before.

  No. I’d set out to write everything properly. Everything with a beginning, a middle and an end. Instead, I found myself jumping ’round, describing stuff when I was fourteen, then going back to when Crowther battered me with the log. Like that pile of rocks I was building as a memorial to my mom and my sister, I intended this as a kind of memorial. A great pile of words in a book that would, somehow, all neatly fit together to tell you what happened and what it was like to live in a world that had gone head over tip.

  But to write a book? How do you start? When I sat down that night of the Crowther attack I began. There I was, in the cabin by the lake, trying to write the first line. The right-hand side of my face was a mess of reds and purples where the log had gone about making a big impression. A scab the size of a quarter clung to my forehead. One eye was closed. My neck ached like sin itself. But I was determined to crack this thing open.

  No words would come. Instead there were these brilliant images. They didn’t just sidle into my head, they crashed, exploded, BOOMED like bombs inside my mind. There was no order to them. I saw them as clearly as the day we saw it all on TV. When they took the White House and burned it to the ground. There were thousands of bread bandits running over the lawn. A guy with hair that somehow made me think of ice cream, all white and wavy, came out to talk
to them. The reporter said he was some senator who once helped those guys who were now trashing the place. He stood there with his hands outstretched like he was trying to halt a tidal wave. But the bread bandits just dove on him. They had no weapons, so they ripped him apart with their bare hands. One even tore off the senator’s scalp and tossed it into a tree. His white hair hung there from a branch in one piece. That image returns to me a lot.

  Here comes another memory bomb. Pow! It’s completely out of chronological order. Boom! Here’s the image exploding inside my head right now. I remember killing the first stranger. He turned up in town, totally normal-looking. But instinctively I knew he was lousy with Jumpy. I grabbed a wrench and, well, there I go again. Hitting you with this helter-skelter of images. Yes, I killed him. A guy with a thick black mustache. He had a mole on his left cheek like a brown thumb print. And he wore a leather belt with a dog’s head buckle. On his feet, neat shoes with a Cuban heel. And he had this red-checked shirt with a button badge that said SMILE. I’M A FRIEND. Yeah, it all comes back. Every detail.

  So I sat there with my beat-up face, just gazing out the window not really knowing how to begin. Across the lake squatted the remains of Lewis. They say when you’re writing a book you shouldn’t use flashbacks. But what the hell? Here’s a flashback for you, because I can’t get it out of my head. I remember the first time I walked into Lewis. I saw burnt buildings; wrecked cars littering the streets; a dog starved down to its ribs turning over a human skull with its paw, searching for a mouthful of brain fresh enough to keep body and soul together. Like some ghost, I saw myself gliding through the shattered window of a KFC, where I found a box of ketchup packets. Was I hungry? Jesus Christ, I’d run out of belt holes. I had the waist of a starved wasp. That’s how hungry I was. Sitting there on a fallen cash register, I oooohhhed and aaaaaahed as I tore away the foil corner and squirted blob after blob of spicy red ketchup into my mouth. Shit. In my mind’s eye I can travel in time, too. I can see myself roaming the town, breaking into any garage that was still in one piece. At last I’d found a car with air in its tires and enough gas in the tank to drive back the fifty miles or so to pick up my mom and sister where they’d hidden in a church. Both were sick then, only I didn’t know how sick.

  With my forehead buzzing, the grazes stiffening my face into a mask, I pictured myself gliding back across the water to Lewis again. Past the cinema with its heap of human bones in the foyer. With spiders in the popcorn maker. Bats have colonized the projection room. Woolworth’s is burnt to the foundations. Wal-Mart survived as a structure, but it’s been cleaned of everything. Not a single can of beans, not a bottle of beer remains.

  I can glide through the deserted houses. There’s a mess of something in the bathtub where Grandma fell and broke her hip when the rumpus began. And no one came to pull her out. Some dogs ate babies before they starved. Swimming pools are slick with pond slime. And as for the local high school? Boy, oh, boy, there are tombs noisier than those classrooms now.

  I reeled my mind’s eye back in. I saw myself gliding past the ruined stores, across the road, through the ruined ferry station, down along the quay . . . faster, faster, faster . . . then I’m flying out across the water to Sullivan. It’s evening; townspeople quietly going about their business like they’ve always done. Mrs. Hatchard is giving a piano recital at Brown’s Hotel in the square. A bunch of kids are hurrying down Central Way to where the Millennium cinema sits in the center of town.

  Whoa! And there I am sitting in the cabin (well out of town, I should stress. Welluvva way from the good people of Sullivan). Still sitting there with a pencil in your hand, Valdiva? Still figuring out how to say it? Where to begin?

  Well . . . where do you begin, Valdiva?

  At the beginning, chirps the clever tyke that lives in the back of your head. The one always ready with the smart cracks that never help you one little bit. OK, wise guy. I’ll try at the beginning. Right at the beginning of what I remember. So, what is my earliest memory? Well, that one’s easy.

  My mom driving me to get my hair cut. I must have been three years old. And the last place I wanted to go was the barbershop. I hated it so much I’d scream the place down. I hated the way the barber would push my head forward, then backward, then sideways as he cut my hair. I hated the way he’d stare at my hair like there was a circus show taking place among the follicles More than anything, I hated the hair clippings that would creep down inside my shirt and prickle my skin, making me itch like crazy.

  “You’re going to get your hair cut whether you like it or not, young man.” That’s what my mother said for the tenth time. Normally, she was relaxed and fairly cheerful. Now her lips had pressed together into a hard line. She tugged the steering wheel hard. I was being a brat. Believe me, that irritated the hell out of her.

  Then I had one of those lessons in life that surprise you as a child. Adults don’t always get their own way. For no real reason the back wheel of the car fell off.

  Now that’s my first memory. Sitting behind my mother as she drove the car. We’re both watching this wheel go rolling down the road. And it’s going faster than us and keeps on rolling into the distance. My mother looked shocked at first, but then, as she stopped the car (which must have been throwing up sparks and smoke from the rear axle as it plowed the blacktop), she started to laugh. She laughed like a loon. I laughed, too, as that wheel carried serenely on. Rolling clean across the state as far as I knew.

  There! That was my first memory. Now it’s easier to write what comes next. And how everything fell apart. And how I come to be sitting here with the blood of strangers still dried to the laces of my shoes. You couldn’t tell knots from blood clots.

  Five

  There was a Valdiva in the theater the night Abraham Lincoln got shot. My grandparents tell the story that Morton Valdiva helped carry the blood-soaked president out of the theater box. It seems Morton Valdiva had served as a ship’s surgeon. So he tears off a great chunk of his own shirt as a dressing and tries to stop the president bleeding out there and then onto the theater rug. But Lincoln’s people didn’t know old Mort Valdiva and dragged him away, thinking this stranger might cause Lincoln more harm. My grandparents insist that my ancestor could have saved Lincoln’s life if only they’d let him do his job.

  OK, so it’s a family legend. But once, a long time ago, I was shown a cotton shirt that had been framed like a picture under glass. If it had once been white it had now turned deep gray. Sure enough, there’s a strip torn out that Morton Valdiva had planned to use to plug the bullet wound and maybe save the great man’s life. What’s more, there’s a stain down the shirtfront that Grandpa said (in the awed tones of a believer showing me a piece of the True Cross) was the blood of Lincoln.

  Every family has its own legends. You’ll have your own. That your ancestors were on the Mayflower, that they’re blood descendants of Pocahontas or that they shook Neil Armstrong by the hand the day before he blasted off into space, or that they were dancing in the streets of Berlin the night the Wall came down.

  To bring the Valdiva story more up-to-date, my mother and father met at college. He neglected his studies in favor of DJ-ing on student radio. He got good at it, too. A local station hired him for the late-night slot, playing soft rock ballads. But he made that show his own. Like a prospector he panned the import bins at local record stores, or made on-air pleas for kids to send in tapes of their own music. Soon he was what they called a cult figure. Soft rock oldies went out the window. Within weeks he had the raunchiest, most cutting edge music show in the state. Teenagers stayed home just to hear him play this great new music. A bigger station poached him. He married my mom. A year later MTV called. Great things awaited my dad. But then he died. I’d have been eighteen months old.

  You know, nature can play tricks. For no real reason people are born with harelips, or a finger short of the regulation ten pack, or with birthmarks like a strawberry on their chin. Nature monkeyed around with the electrical signals t
hat regulated the rhythm of my father’s heart. One evening my father went to bed, a healthy twenty-four-year-old man. Sometime in the night a blob of neurons sent a message to the nerves that control the heartbeat. OK, guys, time to pull the plug on this one.

  As simple as that. His heart stopped. He never woke up in the morning. This may sound cold on my part, but I can’t get sentimental about my dad. He sounded like a great guy and all. Only I never knew him. Later, when I was around eight or so, I started thinking about him a lot. I couldn’t remember a face or the sound of his voice. I was a baby when he died, for Chrissakes. If I did try hard to remember him I heard music in my head; a powerful music that went soaring upward; in my imagination I’d see a shadow that sort of filled the room. For a while I’d imagine this was my father returning as my guardian angel.

  Well, things moved on. My mother went on to enjoy other relationships with men, but nothing lasting. One of these resulted in the birth of my sister. I never associated her as the daughter of another man. He’d moved on, never to be seen again. Nor did I kid myself that this was a virgin birth.

  Chelle was noisy as hell. I have to say that. For a long time I wasn’t bowled over with sharing a house with a sister. But within a few years we learnt to get on well together. And so we grew up—Mom, Chelle and me in a small house in a small New Jersey town. Mom worked long, loooong hours for a marketing company. Cash tended to be on the scant side. The cars we owned always had a nice rust bloom running ’round the wheel arches. Life ran to normal enough schedules—school, vacations, Christmas, birthdays. Nothing earthquaking. Apart from the Chunk episode that I mentioned a while back.