Chapter Thirty Two

Towards the end of her career as a living person, the Tail’s mother pronounced herself a goddess.  She did this in the kitchen, while he was eating a bowl of Fruit Loops.  He could remember looking up at her, with her wild eyes and her raven black hair, and being very afraid.  She was what they would have called “a dark beauty,” his mother, perhaps Indian or Middle Eastern, perhaps Italian or even African.  He and his father never spoke of her in later years, so there was no opportunity for learning more about her.  To speak of her was to cause pain.

She punctuated her statement by spitting blood across the kitchen floor.  Some of the droplets stained the canvas sneakers he was wearing, and he could see the larger droplets quiver as his mother bounded around the room, knocking a set of pans from the wall, and upsetting a container full of uncooked pasta.

The Tail’s father had quietly cleaned up the mess.  The boy had helped his father spread the towels over the linoleum floor.  As he tried to help his father, his mother just stood there in the kitchen doorway, gripping the walls tightly and trying not to collapse.  She had forgotten herself again.  She was somewhere else, somewhere beyond their reach.

He remembered these things in the quiet hours of the night, though he forgot them again when the sun rose, or when other worries distracted him.

        He was sitting on his bed, in his room.  It was a small bed beneath a window, and over the window was a torn blue curtain.  From one of the holes in the curtain, a beam of light directed his attention to the wall opposite, where the cream-colored paint was flaking away.  Next to his bed there was a dresser where he kept his clothes, and in front of him, underneath the place illuminated by the sunlight, there was a small bookshelf where he kept his tattered books.  His shoes were all over the carpeted floor, and in the corners of the room he had scribbled messages to himself, written in a code that he had devised, and that only he could decipher.  The messages were all about secrets that he had, and about memories that he didn’t want to remember.  The messages were perhaps for a future self, visiting that room many years afterward.  The messages would be his way of remembering things the way they had really been, and of bringing a future understanding to present and past events.

        At least he hoped he would understand.  It was too hard to think that the past would remain a mystery.  It was too hard to think that his mother, and his reasons for being, would elude him forever.

        In his hands he held the book he had chosen for their diorama/book report, one of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels where the reader decides the outcome of the story.  This one was about two boys traveling back in time to the Paleolithic.  The cover illustration showed the two boys in front of their time machine, and behind the time machine there crouched a saber-toothed tiger.  

He liked the historical setting of the story.  He liked the idea of time travel.  He wanted to go back to that time in the kitchen, years ago, and somehow stop his mother from going crazy and dying.  He wanted to undo her story.  He wanted to choose for her another adventure.

        At Mrs. Tyler’s instigation, the Remedy wound up being his partner for the semester project.  They had been told to make a diorama of a book of their choice, and the Remedy had let him pick.  He was actually growing bored of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels.  They were beginning to seem rather arbitrary.  But he hadn’t wanted to pick something too far above the Remedy’s reading level, which everyone knew was very low.

        Had he been allowed to complete the diorama by himself, he would have chosen one of the Edgar Allen Poe stories he had read in the library.  He liked all of the strange new words he found in Poe.  His mind went naturally to dark places, and to people in dire situations.  

Books were so easy for him to fall into, and reading was almost an afterthought.  He thought in stories, and the more difficult these stories were the better.  He had a bookshelf full of old, spineless books that no one else wanted, and he could have recounted the entirety of these books from memory.

        At ten o’clock he was going to leave his house, and walk over to the Remedy’s house.  Anxiety filled him at the thought.  Part of him felt flattered to be working with the Remedy, and part of him wanted to impress his classmate.  But he knew that this would not be an easy accomplishment, and he would have to be careful.

        The Remedy hated school.  This, like his reading level, was obvious to everyone.  The Remedy also hated Mrs. Tyler.  The Tail hated Mrs. Tyler too, but reading came quite naturally to him, and he didn’t know how not to succeed in class.  It was, for him, too easy to know all of the answers to all of the questions.  He remembered almost everything without effort.

        The Remedy was good at sports and fighting, and the Remedy always knew what their peers thought was cool.  The Tail was hopeless in gym class, and was unable to defend himself even against girls.  The Tail knew nothing of his classmates’ faddish clothes and toys, their lunchboxes with cartoon characters and shoes with pockets.  He knew that this marked him as decidedly uncool, but he had no way of altering this situation.  He was stuck in the front of the class, the star pupil, without any means of communication between himself and his classmates, his classmates who always regarded him with wary eyes, waiting for him to say something too learned for his age, or to expose his ignorance with regard to their childish mores.  And above all these classmates sat the Remedy, their athlete, their idol, their gatekeeper.

        Ten o’ clock arrived, and he said goodbye to his father as he left the house.  His father was reading something that looked like a dictionary, and his father’s thoughts were far away.  The boy was carrying his backpack, and inside the backpack were the book, a shoebox, and some scraps of paper he had collected.  He opened the front door with its peeling paint and felt the sun on his face.  The warmth felt good after the cool gloom of the house.

        Most of the house he lived in was hidden behind unkempt shrubbery, but those viewing it from the street would have seen a large picture window in the front, and a high peaked roof above this picture window.  The house was smaller than its neighbors, and had been painted brown long ago, with a darker brown trim around the windows.  The front door was to the right of the picture window, and there was a sign upon the door that said “No Soliciting.”  A stone walkway led from the front door to a set of concrete stairs, and these stairs led down from the front yard to the sidewalk.

        Their house was small but comfortable.  It was quietly falling apart.  His father had purchased it with the insurance settlement after his mother’s death, and it was in one of the nicer parts of town.  The neighbors were all friendly, and they spent their days talking about weather, or about traffic, or about politics that few of them really understood.

        He walked down the front steps from the neglected yard onto the sidewalk in front of his house.  The Remedy’s house was closer to their school, on the other side of 80^th, and not far from the local butcher.  On one occasion he had secretly followed the Remedy home, curious to know where the other boy lived, and what he might be doing after school.  The Tail had crouched behind a parked Toyota as several other boys arrived in the Remedy’s wake, and the Tail had watched as the group of boys had walked back to their school, the Remedy holding a basketball.

The Tail began walking.  He could have walked for miles in every direction and never left the suburbs.  He lived in a world of single family dwellings, well-maintained streets, and sidewalks leading to carefully controlled intersections.  Had he wished it, he could have spent hours walking north through those suburbs, and in so doing come very close to Canada.

        From the steps he took a right up to 3^rd Avenue, and from there turned left across the street that passed in front of his house.  Green trees waved from yards at either side, and the roads were all strangely empty.  It was six more blocks to the Remedy’s house, and five more blocks before he slipped beneath the shadow of their school.  As he walked, he thought of things that he and the Remedy might talk about, and also of things that he should avoid saying.  He didn’t want to mention his mother.  He didn’t want to say too much about his father.  He would pretend to have other friends, at other schools, whom the Remedy wasn’t acquainted with.  He would suppress any mention of his stranger hobbies.

Past the butcher’s shop he found the Remedy’s house.  It sat within a large, well-tended front yard, with a wooden fence extending around the back half of the yard.  It was white with a large porch in the front, and there was a quaint latticework around the edges of the porch.  There were lawn chairs and a recently filled wading pool in the front yard, and in the porch there was a nice bench, next to several tables where magazines had been discarded.

        He crept onto the Remedy’s porch, pressing the doorbell with a sense of fearful urgency.  Did his classmate have brothers?  Did the Remedy’s mother drink?  Had anyone in his classmate’s family ever gone insane and spit blood across the kitchen floor?

        He waited for a long time, fumbling with a keychain linked to his backpack zipper.  It was a keychain from Yellowstone National Park, and Yellowstone was the last place his mother and father had taken him together.  So many memories.  It was easy to grow confused by them.

        And then the Remedy was opening the door, and some of the Tail’s speculations passed into the realm of fact.  The Remedy had a father and mother.  The Remedy had a mother who was not insane.  Their house was big and well appointed.  They were happy.  They didn’t think about the past.  The past didn’t weigh them down.  

It then occurred to him that he was finally there, in the other boy’s house, and that they would work together on the semester project, and that they would talk, and that maybe they could learn to be friends.  He so wanted to learn how to be somebody’s friend.  He thought that he could do it if he tried.

        “Here we are,” said the Remedy without ceremony.  “You want a Coke or something?”

        “No,” he stammered, “I’m fine.”

        “OK,” said the Remedy.  “I guess we can take our stuff into the back yard.  I have this new RoboLord.  You want to see?”