An Ocean in Iowa (21 page)

He locked his arms above his head for a second, long enough to make it officially count, and then he let them drop. But the weights didn’t bounce the way they did on television.

“There,” Andrew said, plopping down in one of his matching bean-bag chairs in the game room. “I lifted your weight.”

Then Andrew had Scotty try. And Scotty positioned himself under the bench, and he gripped the barbell, pressed his feet to the ground, and using every ounce of strength, all his muscles past and present, he tried to lift the barbell.

But it wouldn’t budge.

***

The only condition Andrew gave Scotty was the following: “Tell your sisters what you saw, especially the one with boobs.”

So at dinner Scotty recounted the experience of Andrew Crow’s basement. He couldn’t remember all of the toys, so he said, “Every toy.”

“Every toy?” the Judge asked. “I find that hard to believe.”

“You must be exaggerating, Scotty,” Claire said.

“No,” he said. “You should see it.”

Claire explained that the last place she’d ever be caught would be in Andrew Crow’s basement.

“But he’s got everything.”

Maggie blurted out, “I think Scotty’s exaggerating.”

“We’ll have to believe him, though,” Claire said, “because I’m not going down there.”

“Scotty,” the Judge warned, “if you’re always exaggerating, no one will believe you.”

(6)

Scotty had a dream that recurred. In it he was being chased (he didn’t know who or why), but he knew enough to hide. He ran into a room full of mummies. He wrapped himself up. The people chasing him went around unwrapping each mummy, and in each one they found nothing, only dust. Every mummy was unwrapped except for the one where Scotty hid. The people started to unwrap it; they peeled away the strips of fabric, pulling and pulling until all the cloth was removed—but Scotty was gone. He had vanished. And he didn’t know where he went.

This is when Scotty always woke up.

(7)

Once on
Captain Kangaroo
, Mr. Green Jeans explained the difference between a good neighbor and a bad neighbor. Mr. Green Jeans’s major point: Good neighbors are courteous and kind.

When Scotty stood on the Crows’ front porch, he expected to be greeted more kindly. But Andrew looked disappointed when he saw who stood at the door.

“Oh, it’s you.”

Scotty reminded himself, Good neighbors are courteous and kind.

Andrew barked, “What do you want?”

Scotty didn’t understand how a boy could suddenly be an entirely different person. Only days earlier, he got a tour of the basement. Andrew had been
nice
. Now he didn’t even want to talk, and Scotty had to shout to be heard through the glass door.

“What was that?”

Scotty shouted again, “You said you…!”

Mrs. Crow walked up behind Andrew and said, “Andrew, invite your little friend inside.”

Little, Scotty thought. I’m not little. I’m seven.

Andrew didn’t want company. But Scotty knew that when Andrew realized what Scotty had brought him, they’d be best friends.

Andrew reluctantly let him step into the vestibule. The house smelled of freshly fried bacon.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Andrew said back. “Scotty won’t be staying long.” Then in a whisper, “What do you want?”

“You said you wanted to meet girls?”

“Yes,” Andrew said, suddenly interested.

“Well, pick a hand.”

Andrew said, “Get lost, Scotty.”

“Pick a hand.”

Andrew wanted no part of it. “Good-bye.”

Scotty brought his
Bonanza
lunch pail from behind his back.

Andrew smirked. “I’m not hungry.”

Scotty smiled because he had fooled Andrew Crow. He wanted to shout, “There isn’t food in my lunch pail!”

“Don’t want you boys making a mess,” Mrs. Crow said as she passed by on her way up the stairs.

“Okay, Mom!” an exasperated Andrew called after her.
Then he squeezed his face into a pursed expression and said in a high-pitched nagging way, “Don’t want you making a mess.”

Scotty laughed.

Andrew grabbed the
Bonanza
lunch pail and headed toward the basement stairs, calling back, “You got to take off your shoes.” Scotty’s socks pulled half way off as he struggled to get out of his shoes. Then he ran after Andrew.

Downstairs, Scotty found Andrew had already opened the
Bonanza
lunch pail. Two Barbies were stuffed inside, along with a Skipper and a Francie.

Scotty couldn’t help but smile.

Staring at the mangle of plastic bodies below him, Andrew kept his same blank expression. He reached down, picked up each doll by her hair, and let them dangle from one hand as if they were carrots.

Scotty wanted to protest, “Don’t pull their hair,” but before he could even speak, Andrew let them drop onto the shag carpet.

“
Real
girls, stupid—I want
real girls
.”

Andrew stripped the first Barbie of her metallic blouse. He ran his finger over Barbie’s bare chest. “See,” Andrew said, “there should be nipples here.”

“Oh,” Scotty said.

Andrew pulled off Barbie’s plastic go-go boots and then yanked off her Leatherette skirt. He pointed to the space between her legs and said, “Real girls have a hole here. Real girls have a patch of hair.”

Scotty looked surprised.

“You don’t believe me?”

Before Scotty could say he believed, Andrew said, “Your sister has got to have hair there. Your sister with the boobs.”

Scotty knew Andrew meant Claire. Scotty at least knew that much.

“Have you seen it?”

“What?”

“Her patch of hair?”

Scotty said, “Yeah.”

“Bull,” Andrew Crow said. Then he disappeared into the back corner of the basement. Following, Scotty entered the dark room. Andrew moved his arms about searching for the dangling string. Finding it, he pulled hard and the naked bulb snapped on, causing Scotty to squint.

Andrew moved to his tool bench and yanked open a drawer that was full of different-size nails. He pulled out another that held nuts and bolts. “Where is it?” he said to himself, opening and closing other drawers, frantically searching for something.

Scotty knew to keep his distance when Andrew was mad. He wandered over to the train set. He noticed all the new construction the town had undergone in the days since he’d last seen it. The Styrofoam mountain had been painted green; more miniature people had been placed about the train track area; and plastic trees, bushes, and other shrubbery had been planted.

Soon Andrew Crow would have his own little town. He would no longer be God’s gift, as Claire called him. He’d be God.

But, at the moment, Andrew was an unhappy God, dumping out drawers, slamming tools on the tool bench.

Scotty moved back into the main basement room to check on Barbie. Lying naked and mangled in the shag carpet, her legs splayed and her arms out of whack, Scotty thought, She
must be cold. He was contemplating what to use as a makeshift blanket when Andrew said, “Bingo!”

Scotty turned to see what Andrew had found, expecting it to be unusual, something he’d never seen before, for Andrew always seemed to have some toy or object no other kid had.

But Andrew held out a corkscrew.

Scotty knew about the corkscrew. It was exactly the kind Joan had had at her studio, perfect for opening bottles of wine.

“Wah-lah,” Andrew said, pushing past Scotty and heading toward Barbie. He knelt down and bent Barbie’s rubber legs like a wishbone.

“Hold her down,” Andrew said.

Scotty pressed on Barbie’s arms, which stretched above her head. Barbie had real eyelashes and rooted hair, bendable legs. “She was part real,” Scotty wanted to say.

Andrew jabbed the tip of the corkscrew between Barbie’s legs, leaving a divot. Then he began to slowly turn the corkscrew, twisting up shards of Barbie’s pink plastic flesh.

Scotty imagined Barbie shrieking.

Andrew twisted and twisted until he’d dug out a hole. “There,” he said. “That’s more like it.”

Andrew stripped the other Barbie. He drilled an identical hole. Francie and Skipper were punctured, too, even though Skipper was harder to penetrate, for she was smaller and had the twist-and-turn waist.

When he was finished, Andrew stretched out on the carpet and stared at the corkboard ceiling. Andrew was bored with the Barbies—he didn’t even bother to dress them. He stood up, stretched, and returned to the back room, saying, “I’m going to pump some iron.”

Scotty dressed the dolls and stuffed them back into his lunch
pail. Later he would have to find a way to sneak back into Maggie’s room and put them back in their proper place.

From the basement as he heard the grunts of Andrew Crow bench-pressing, Scotty sat waiting, hoping Andrew would talk with him. Say something. Say something about anything. Scotty didn’t care what.

(8)

“After the year we’ve had, I’ve decided it’s what we deserve.” The Judge had gathered his children around the dining room table. They stared speechless at pictures of the various shapes: rectangular, circular, kidney shaped.

“It’s a present for the whole family….”

“A swimming pool?” Scotty said in disbelief.

“Yes,” the Judge said.

Claire and Maggie were excited, too. Images of the summer began to form in everyone’s mind. Maggie pictured boys and more boys; Claire imagined swimming at night; Scotty dreamt of buying the submarine advertised in the back of DC Comics, a submarine that cost all of $9.95. He ran to his room and studied the ad. A periscope. Two people can fit in it. Amazing. He would live underwater, only surfacing for lunches of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Word spread.

During recess Cindy McCameron, whose family had a pool, asked, “You getting a slide
and
a diving board or just a diving board?”

Scotty shrugged because the specific decisions hadn’t yet been made.

“We got both,” Cindy reminded Scotty.

“I know,” Scotty said. Other kids asked questions. Scotty felt his popularity about to increase. Was he crazy, or were more kids sitting with him at lunch, was he getting chosen earlier when sides were picked for kickball and other team games?

Even Andrew Crow was talking to him again.

“Hey, Ocean, I hear you’re getting a pool.”

“Yep,” Scotty replied to Andrew as they each stood in their respective backyards. Scotty had been standing outside trying to imagine how it would look, the pool, and where all the dug-up grass and dirt would go.

“Do you even know how to swim?” Andrew asked.

“Yeah,” Scotty said.

“Your sisters gonna go skinny-dipping?”

“Yeah.” Scotty thought, What is skinny-dipping?

“You gonna let me go swimming?”

***

Scotty answered the phone.

“Hey, little love.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“What are you doing?”

“Picking out a pool.”

“You’re what?”

“Picking out a pool. Dad’s buying us a pool.”

“Really.”

“Yep. With a diving board, everything. Big tractor’s gonna dig a hole in our backyard. Go swimming whenever we want. Building it for summer.”

Joan paused to regroup. She realized what the Judge was doing, but she continued with the reason for her call anyway. “Your dad and I had a talk. Did he tell you?”

“No.”

“I was thinking you could come to Iowa City with me for the summer. My apartment is small, but it’s roomy enough for two.”

“The summer?”

“Yes. Your dad said that it would be up to you.”

Scotty paused. “I don’t know.”

“You think about it. We could have fun.”

“Mom, the pool could be lots of shapes. There are so many shapes.”

“You think about it.”

Nothing was said as Scotty switched the receiver to his other ear.

“I changed ears.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh.”

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“You wanna talk to somebody else?”

(9)

As Scotty Ocean and Tom Conway walked home, the sky above them was dark with rain clouds.

Minutes earlier, just before the bell rang, Mrs. Boyden had presented each student with May baskets—little paper drinking cups with jelly beans and candy corn. It was the first day of May. Scotty hadn’t touched any of his candy. He was too busy
listening to Tom retell something he’d heard his father, the sergeant, say.

“They would… uhm… tape it, the grenade… on the hands of the gook kids… and send them back to their people… and when the parents untaped the hands… boom… blown to bits.”

“Ow,” said Scotty.

“What do you mean, ‘ow’?”

“It would hurt, ow.”

“It’s the way we’re gonna win the war. They are the enemy, dummy. Don’t you get it?”

Scotty didn’t understand. He imagined hands taped with activated grenades. He wondered, What if you got an itch? In that situation, how does a kid scratch himself?

At the top of the Ashworth Road, Tom heard the yelling first. Scotty was deep in thought. But when he saw Tom sprint ahead, he knew he better do the same. Glancing back, he saw that Bob Fowler and other fourth graders were speeding toward them on their bikes. They ran together for a time, but when Tom Conway headed toward the construction site, Scotty split off. He hid behind the Lallys’ air conditioner where he attempted to emulate the stillness of a rabbit, and for a moment he was Mingo, the Indian from the Daniel Boone show. He realized he would be found eventually. So he dropped into the basement window well, even though it was full of dead leaves and cobwebs. A snake could be sleeping under all the muck, he thought. Or a nasty spider. But better a snake or spider than Bob Fowler and his friends. Scotty burrowed under the leaves. He heard the boys’ feet on the grass; he heard them calling to each other; he heard them getting closer. So he took off, climbing a
chain-link fence, running past the Grodts’ plaster birdbath. As nearly as he could tell, no one was following.

Two boys saw Scotty as he ran between the Keith’s house and the Hoyts’ and they took off after him. But Scotty turned onto his street, crouched by the side of the Lattimers’ house, and sprinted for the bushes, crawling deep into them where he found his spot, safe again.