Mad Boys (10 page)

Ronnie slurped his own snot and laughed like a hyena.

“Don’t interrupt him,” said Aristotle to Ronnie, and then he turned to me and said very seriously, “You dreamed up this father, didn’t you?”

“I’ll say he dreamed it up. He’s a suck-shit liar,” said Chuck.

“If a person of great intelligence, such as myself, dreams hard enough, it comes true, and that’s no lie,” Aristotle said.

“What does this father-king look like?” Dunc asked me.

“Tall, dark, and handsome,” I said. “Strong and carries guns and several knives hidden in his sleeves and in his boots. Not that he needs them, because he’s good with his fists and his feet. He can even butt a man to death with his head.”

“Get serious,” said Chuck.

“Get real,” said Ronnie.

“Get bent,” said Dunc, and bumped me with his belly.

I asked Dunc if he wanted to fight me. He said, no; he admired me. He said I was such a good liar I might one day become a lawyer, which was what he wanted to be when he grew up, because lawyers had even more power than the Po.

“Suck my snot,” said Ronnie, and flipped a bunch of runny mucus at me. I spat on my finger and flipped the spit at him.

Everybody laughed like maniacs. Ten minutes later I was elected as a member of the Rats. The boys, even Dunc, took a solemn oath not to turn me in unless I betrayed them, in which case they’d torture and kill me. They issued me my own paint gun, with my own color—green.

During the next week, the Rats brought me junk food, gum, and cigarettes. The domain of the River Rats became my home. Terry always got things going. Usually he never said a word, just started doing something and the rest of us would follow. For example, Terry would start taking off his clothes, and everybody would know it was time to go swimming. Or he’d say, “Let’s get rich,” and we’d search for coins with Dunc’s metal detector. Or Terry would start us in playing Instant Death with our paint guns. Or tree climbing. Or fishing. We caught a lot of perch. I wanted to eat the fish, but the boys told me the river was polluted and if we ate the fish we would all end up looking like Freddy Kruger.

The other boys went home to bed at night, but I stayed at the tree house, sleeping in the dungeon. Now and then I would be attacked by mosquitoes. Otherwise, I didn’t have any problems with weather or animals, although I did worry that a snake might drop down from the tree and wrap its coils around me in a grim hug. Once in a while, some older boys would meander through at night, drinking beer and carrying on and even invading the tree house to party. I would scramble further up the tree and hide in the crotch of a branch. Nobody ever saw me, and the Rats never betrayed me and I never betrayed them.

After a while, I began to understand why the Rats were so close. They each had secret wounds. Terry’s father used to beat him up with a strap, and he also beat Terry’s mother. Part of the problem was Terry’s older brother. He had run away and had done something that shamed the family. He had branded his buns with the word “dad,” and mailed home a polaroid picture. Later, Terry had learned that his brother had taken up with a black sugar Daddy. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I knew this much: Terry hated black people and dreamed of killing them.

I often thought about this brother of Terry. Like me, he was a runaway. Like me, he was separated from his parents. Like me, he was polaroided. Unlike me, he had branded himself: I thought that was about the bravest, most brazen thing a boy could do. I wondered what kind of life he lived, what his future might be. I told Terry I wanted to meet this brother, for he seemed almost like my own brother. Terry said if the River Rats could get guns, they could kill the sugar daddy and rescue his brother, and then the brother could move in with me in the tree house. I asked Terry why he wouldn’t live with us, too. Terry said he wanted to run away, but he had to stay home and protect his mother from his father.

Ronnie’s problem was that his parents had divorced and his mother had remarried an idiot who had moved him and his sister to the ’burbs. His real father had moved to California in disgust, and Ronnie hadn’t seen him in two years. Ronnie had a motto for living: The world as reams of snot. You suck it in, blow it out, wipe it away for relief. You don’t like it, but you can stand it, and when it’s dry, you pick at it until the blood flows.

Chuck’s father had been sick for a number of years and had lost his job. His mother was an elementary school teacher and she was grouchy. The family had a lot of bills; the truth was they were poor. Chuck might have had it the worst of all the boys because, living in a ’burb neighborhood, his family was supposed to look well off. As far as Chuck was concerned, the faking around made for more misery than the poverty.

Dunc’s mother was a drinker and pill popper and she had been committed a couple of times to a mental hospital. Dunc didn’t like to talk about her; in fact, he couldn’t talk about her, because he got all choked up.

Aristotle had been adopted by some cousins after his parents and sister were killed in a car wreck. His guardians were old. They didn’t allow television in the house or video games or anything. They made him take piano lessons and go to church. They nagged him. They disapproved of the Rats. When school was in session, he had to sit up straight at meals and study two hours a night.

As for me, well, I was happy. Life with the Rats was so much more relaxing than life with Father. I hardly ever had morose thoughts. I didn’t forget about looking for my mother, but I didn’t know where to look. I was waiting for a clue. Meanwhile, I figured I might as well enjoy myself. I did exactly what I pleased, whenever I pleased, and there was always somebody to play with except after dark. At dusk, the boys would leave and I would lie down alone in the dungeon room.

It was only in those few minutes before I drifted off to sleep that I was at all uncertain about anything. A weakness would come over me. And a loneliness. I knew I was living on borrowed time. At any minute I’d be discovered and returned to Dirty Joe. At the same time, I missed him. Father may have had some bad points, but he was my father. Maybe if I’d been a better son, he would have been a better father. Maybe Mother could straighten all these problems out. Some day. These boys who watched over me in the day were gone now, gone to loved ones who watched over them. More or less. They had something I didn’t have and would never have—family—but I had something they didn’t have and likely, because of their families, would never have: freedom.

As the days went by, I became closest to Aristotle, the geek. He was all glasses and nose, very tall, as tall as most grown men, but he was thin and weak as a straw sheath. Aristotle and I had a secret which we had discovered in conversation after the other boys had been talking about doing it. Like myself, Aristotle didn’t like sex talk. He said sex was disgusting. Aristotle was such a pitiful wreck that he had nothing better to do with his life but think. Which was another reason I liked hanging around him. He called his thoughts “my great ideas.” He claimed they came from deep inside his mind.

I remember one particular discussion. The other boys were swimming, washing off the paint bullets, and I had just come in and gotten dressed. Aristotle refused to go in. He wasn’t very athletic and he couldn’t swim, and anyway he got embarrassed when he had to take his clothes off. We sat on a limb looking out at the river as we talked.

“See those rocks on the far side?” Aristotle said.

“Sure do.”

“They’re not rocks. They aren’t even real.”

“Are so real. I barked my shin on one of them,” I said.

“Nothing is real. Everything is made of atoms and molecules, nothing more than clumps of energy. Your blood only
looks
red. You only
think
you hurt. Rocks only
look
solid.”

“If a rock can’t be real, and it’s more solid than I am, then I can’t be real,” I said.

“That’s right. You’re not real. I’m not real. This conversation is not real.”

“Then, what is?”

“It—
it
is real.”

“What is it?”

“The great force.”

“The great farce,” I said.

“No, I’m serious. There’s a great force out there, a final force, and we are only thoughts in its brain.”

“You mean this force could accidentally forget, and I would just disappear.” I was thinking about my mother, Langdon, the planet Xi.

“You would cease to exist or even to have existed.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I have thought it out, and when I think something out, it’s true.”

“If we’re just thoughts in this being’s mind, then how can we have thoughts that it doesn’t have? How could a person think what he thinks if he’s not real?”

“Because we’ve taken over from it.”

I gave him a you-dummy look.

“It’s like a dream,” he said. “You don’t control your dreams. You don’t even remember them. They happen in your head without you thinking about them. They take over every night for a while. That’s what’s going on with Earth at this very moment. The characters in the dream are taking control of the dreamer, their creator. You know what I’m going to do when I grow up? I will take over the force completely. I will become the force myself.”

“Prove it.”

“Sometimes people’s dreams take over their personalities. Right?”

“They do?” I was getting wonderfully scared.

“Absolutely. That’s why people go psycho. The characters in their dreams come to life. Through my great powers of concentration, I plan to do the same thing, take over the headquarters of this force. It created me, I’m just a thought, but a thought is a powerful thing, and pretty soon the thought is going to assume command of the thinker. And then . . . and then . . . and then. . . .”

“What?” I yelled, exasperated.

“I’m going to become ruler of the solar system.”

“Wow,” I said softly.

“Admit it. You never heard ideas as great as my ideas.”

I had to agree.

Everything went along fine for a couple weeks. I was so busy playing guns, eating, talking, swimming, fishing that I had no time for time. I didn’t care what hour it was or what day or what week or what season.

One sunset after a perfect summer day, five of us, all but Dunc, were sitting on the river bank talking and fishing and smoking. I’d just finished eating. The boys always brought more food than I could eat, and we used the leftovers for bait. We all smoked like fiends except for Aristotle, who wouldn’t touch a cigarette because he was such a geek. We knew that cigarettes eventually killed a person, but none of us expected to live that long anyway. After we smoked we’d flick our butts into the river; we called it the Cigarso Sea. We weren’t talking about anything in particular, and the Rats were about to leave because they weren’t allowed to be out after dark, when Dunc showed up out of breath from running.

He’d been home, grounded for telling off his sister, when he’d heard something over his father’s scanner. There had been a murder on board a yacht at the River Marina, and the Po had made an arrest. It was the first murder in the suburb that the boys had ever heard about, and it had happened only a half mile downstream from the tree house. My mind began to fill with pictures of dead bodies—shot bodies, stabbed bodies, strangled bodies, poisoned bodies, smashed bodies, blown-up bodies. The boys were excited, but they were supposed to go home and get ready for bed. You’d think I’d want to do the same thing. Not so. I wanted to check out the murder scene. I wanted to see the body. I told the River Rats they were chicken. Ronnie turned to Terry, who said, “What do you think, fool?” That was the okay sign.

A minute later we were on our way to the marina. We walked through the brush and woods along the river bank, and by the time we reached the marina it was almost dark.

“I’m going to get killed when I get home,” Aristotle said.

“No loss to the world,” said Ronnie.

A couple of police cars were parked near a fancy cabin cruiser, and we could see figures moving to and fro. It wasn’t going to be easy to approach the scene of the crime, because the murder boat had already been cordoned off.

Looking around, we spotted a little dinghy tied to a wooden post in the water. Anchored out a ways was a sailing sloop, a forty-footer. Apparently, the people in the yacht had rowed in.

There wasn’t room for everybody in the boat, and the boys were arguing in whispers about who should go. Finally, Terry took over. He said, “Me and Web are going. Everybody else wait here.” Terry and I slipped into the dinghy and pushed off from shore. I heard a muted protest from Ronnie, and then all was silent as we started downstream and the boys receded in the darkness. The water smelled like dead fish and rotten weeds. There was a barely perceptible current, and I noticed now that the marina was built in a cove off the main channel of the river.

When we reached the murder craft, we saw a uniformed police officer and an inspector in civilian clothes. I knew he was an inspector because the water carried the voices of the men just as clear as can be.

“I’m going back to headquarters. Don’t let anybody on board until the lab people check for prints.”

“Okay, Inspector.”

“And, DeGraccio?”

“Yes, Inspector?”

“Stay out of the cabin where the murder was committed. We don’t want to disturb anything.”

“Yes, Inspector.”

The inspector left, got into his cruiser.

After he drove off DeGraccio said to nobody, “Fuck you, Inspector.”

Officer DeGraccio stationed himself at the narrow dock that led from the yacht onto the main wharf. A minute later I almost swallowed my tongue when a flash of light startled me. It was only a newspaper photographer taking pictures of the yacht. After he’d finished, he approached Officer DeGraccio. Terry and I took that opportunity to tie the dinghy to the boat ladder on the stern of the murder yacht and to climb on board. We crawled on our bellies, staying below the gunwales. Terry went first, and I was right behind.

“Can I get a few frames of the body?” I heard the photographer say.

“It’s up to the Inspector, and he ain’t here,” DeGraccio said.