Mad Boys (22 page)

One time Ike and I were caught in a thunderstorm. The whole sky crackled with lightning, and then it rained hard enough to drown a school of tuna. Afterward I couldn’t start Pinto. Ike rode me home on ATV. We went back the next day. The points had dried out, and the machine started right up. Another time we killed a rattlesnake with sticks and rocks. (Ike’s idea.) We also climbed up the side of the mountain to an eagle’s nest. (My idea.) We didn’t kill any of the birds, just tickled their gullets. (My idea.) One more thing: I taught Ike to smoke.

The most interesting place Ike and I went (my idea) was government land where they had dropped the A-bomb. We went looking for trinitite, in hopes of selling some to the T. & L. Leahs. Ike said some of the farmers who lived near the bomb-drop had died of cancer from the radiation. We left the horse and the ATV behind some rocks and sneaked onto the property, going under the fence like badgers digging for a meal. The area wasn’t much different from the surrounding countryside. The bulldozed-over dirt had blended in with the desert, and we gave up any hope of finding any trinitite. Just when we were about to leave some glitter caught my eye. On the ground was a fist-sized chunk of green rock. Through it ran gold veins.

“Trinitite,” said Ike.

I held the stuff up to the light. Gold currents swirled inside the green.

“You hold it,” I said.

Ike took it. “You found it. Lucky stiff,” he said.

“We both found it,” I said.

“You’re a true friend,” Ike said.

Ike and I sat on a rock and, looking at the trinitite, tried to imagine the bomb going off, the bright flash of a short-lived sun, the great noise of the explosion, the terrible hot wind that followed. The awe I felt made me grateful to Ike. Without him, I’d be lonely and restless.

“I used to have a best friend,” I said. “His name was Royal Durocher, but I went my way, he went his. Now you’re my best friend.”

“We’re like brothers,” Ike said.

“We can’t be real brothers because we have different parents, but we could be blood brothers,” I said.

“What if you have AIDS?” Even when he was being romantic, Ike couldn’t help but be serious, too.

“What if
you
have AIDS?” I said.

“So what if I did?” he said.

“I’d still want to be your blood brother.” I jumped to my feet, so that I was standing on the face of Gravestone Rock.

Ike took the trinitite from my hand. “It’s got a jagged edge. I’ll cut you, you cut me,” he said.

I turned my hand over and offered it to him. He took it in his own hand.

“Double your fist and squeeze. I want to see where the veins are,” Ike said.

“You’re not going to cut a vein, are you?” I was alarmed.

“I want to see the veins so I
don’t
cut one, armadillo brain.”

I doubled my fist and squeezed. The veins bulged in my arm. He sliced me about an inch above the palm. It didn’t hurt much, but it made me feel creepy, like you feel when someone runs their nails down a blackboard. Blood trickled around the side of my arm and onto the dry, tan rock.

Ike handed me the rock and bunched his fist. I took it in my hand. Ike shut his eyes. The veins not only bulged in his arm, but in his neck. I could have ripped out his throat. I nicked his arm. Ike opened his eyes. We were eyeball to eyeball. “You have the strangest eyes, like the stuff in the trinitite,” he whispered.

“Radioactive,” I said, and croaked like a frog.

Ike took my arm and pressed my wound to his. It passed through my mind that he really did have AIDS. So be it, I thought.

With a voice like a preacher’s, Ike said, “I swear upon my blood that I will be your friend forever.”

“Ditto,” I said.

“You have to say the words.”

So I said the words, “I swear upon my blood that I will be your friend forever.”

We stood in the sun until the blood dried on our arms. When we pulled away, the wounds opened. And then we started back for home, feeling warm and full of joy and kind of bashful.

The T. & L. Leahs gave us each a hundred dollars for the trinitite under the condition that we didn’t tell anybody.

I could have spent all day every day in disorderly conduct in the desert with Ike, but he had chores to do and so did I. In fact, I only played part-time. I was working almost full-time with the Autodidact, who needed my help in fixing up Mrs. Clements’ place. The Autodidact spent most of the money he had saved up in his previous life as a convict book collector for improvements on the Clements’ desert homestead. The three-room shack had been falling apart for years. We installed a new, gas-fired heating system, a generator for electricity, roofing, insulation in the walls, and sheetrock over the crumbling plaster. We also built an addition on a concrete foundation. We hired some outside help for that job.

The Autodidact and I moved into the new wing. I had my own room. The Autodidact used his room for an office as well as a bedroom. As the months passed, it filled with books. The book man that had been in John LeFauve was also in Jim Clements. But there were differences, too. Where John LeFauve was suspicious and quick-tempered, Jim Clements was trusting and slow to anger. Mrs. Clements, believing the Autodidact had lost his memory, constructed a past for him by telling him all about the boyhood of her Jim. The more that the Autodidact acted like Jim Clements, the more he became Jim Clements. I rarely heard him talking about Sally or prison or his prison book. If any of those old memories cropped up in our private conversations, he’d act as if the events had happened to somebody else. Gradually, I began to think of myself as Web Clements, the son of Jim Clements.

I decorated my room with pictures of rattlesnakes, guns, motorcycles, and, especially, demons. Every time I’d see a picture of a demon or a devil in a magazine, I’d cut it out and tack it to my bulletin board. Good thing Mrs. Clements couldn’t see, or I would have had a lot of explaining to do. She was a Baptist, not only anti-devil, but anti-graven image. The Autodidact didn’t much like my collection, but he didn’t try to stop me. He just waited for me “to outgrow this phase in your development.” My posters included drooly monsters and devils with pointed beards, fiery eyes, yellow teeth, and tails. I searched for pictures that resembled my own demons—the Director, the Alien, the three-headed God, Xiphi, and Langdon. But I didn’t find any. Maybe someday I would be an artist, and I would draw them myself. I looked high and low for a poster that resembled the mother ship, but I couldn’t find one. The posters of spaceships were nothing but clever drawings of toys. The real mother ship was more complicated and serious. It was a home, an environment, a station, a meeting place, a departure point, a storage unit for thoughts, a locker for love, a theater for living—it was everything. No poster could do it justice.

The Autodidact and I never worked in silence. Even as we hammered nails and laid out sheetrock, he was teaching me. He made me read books, and he gave me quizzes. I read the books the Autodidact assigned, and I listened to him carry on, maybe remembering a quarter of what he actually said. The Autodidact taught me history, geography, and, of course, his favorite subject, literature, which he spoke in the drawn-out way of an autodidact,
litter-ah-churr
. He was getting me ready for school in the fall, which I wasn’t dreading nearly as much as I thought I would. I was actually looking forward to going. For one thing, I was gaining confidence that for a change I’d be able to sit still for more than thirty seconds. For another, I knew I’d meet kids my own age.

The Autodidact’s favorite story was called
On the Road
, by a Mister Langston Hughes. It’s about a homeless black man during the Great Depression. His name is Sargent, and he’s real tired and it’s snowing out. Sargent stops at a parsonage, but the minister sends him away. Desperate for a place to rest, Sargent breaks into the church. Police come, and then the most incredible thing happens. Sargent tears down the church, and Jesus Christ comes down off his cross and hits the road with the homeless man. Eventually Christ goes off on his own, and Sargent tries to hop a freight but it’s full of cops. Next thing you know, he wakes up in jail. He’d only imagined he’d wrecked that church.

The Autodidact reminded me that the original Jim Clements, like Sargent fifty years earlier, had been a homeless wanderer. It was sad that some things, such as poverty and homelessness and despair, don’t change, the Autodidact said. “The same old awful and amazing and asinine things that make us human, over and over again, that’s what
litter-a-churr
is about,” he said. I never thought too much of that explanation. I told the Autodidact I loved
On the Road
because it made my stomach do an up-see-daisy. He said when I got older I’d do most of my reading “between the lines.” That made no sense.

What the Autodidact didn’t say about
On the Road
, and what he didn’t have to say because we both knew it, was that it was important that I learn about black people. A line of descendants of Mrs. Clements had black African blood, and as the son of Jim Clements, I was presumed to be part black. The Autodidact said in reality he and I may actually have had some African blood in our veins. “Who knows where we come from? Nobody can trace it all the way back,” he said. I didn’t worry about being black or white. I worried about my green and gold eyes.

Mrs. Clements did not like
On the Road
, because she thought it was anti-Christian. The Autodidact said, so what? And they argued. They debated politics, religion, and other things. But they never got spiteful. In fact, they often ended up agreeing and laughing when they disagreed. They often used phrases such as, “You might have something there.” And “good point.” And “I never thought about it that way before.” In other words, they weren’t much fun to listen to.

The Autodidact spent a lot of time with Mrs. Clements. They actually became like mother and son. Sometimes he complained, even whined if she got on his case, but no matter how he felt, he always surrendered to her wishes. When I saw them together, full of fun and love, I’d get an aching feeling for my own mother. I know it sounds like I was jealous/but I really wasn’t. I felt, I don’t know, left out.

Mrs. Clements was glad to tell the family history. After the army had finally conquered the Indians in the 1880s, her father’s unit had been disbanded, and he had worked for a rancher, his former commander, a Colonel Randolph, who had deeded him this small plot. Later, water had been found. Colonel Randolph tried to take back the land, but his scheme didn’t work. Eventually the old colonel died, and his son got radiation poisoning and also died. God was punishing the son for the sins of the father, Mrs. Clements said.

Mrs. Clements’ mother had been a hostess in a scab town outpost near a military base. She was an Oklahoma woman, sometimes exuberant and full of fun, other times sad and withdrawn. Her mother’s sadness was the one unsettlement of spirit in Mrs. Clements that she had never been able to calm.

She talked about her Jim as a boy. What was remarkable is that her true Jim had been a lot like her phoney Jim in his previous life as John LeFauve: wild and angry and impulsive, but smart, too, and now and then even studious. Mrs. Clements’ husband had died of pneumonia after taking young Jim sledding one snowy day in the Missouri Ozarks. After his father died, young Jim had become morose. That was when Mrs. Clements had moved back to New Mexico. She’d lived with her parents and her boy, who became more and more lonely and discontented. One day he disappeared. She opined that it was the guilt Jim had felt over his father’s death that had led him to run away from home. She stayed with her parents, taking care of them in their old age until they died. She never lost faith that her own Jim would come back, purified and strong, to take care of her in her old age. And so it had happened.

Mrs. Clements told stories about the Buffalo Soldiers that she’d heard from her father. About the black man who had trailed Comanches for five years after they’d stolen his bride, and how he’d rescued her from them, and how a year later he’d been killed in a fray with another band of Indians. Those family yarns gave the Autodidact an idea. He started spending time in the library in Carrizozo. He took trips up to Lincoln. He went on excursions to the university towns in Las Cruces and Albuquerque. The Autodidact started doing research on the Buffalo Soldiers. He hung around with county officials, college people, and black organizations out of El Paso and Albuquerque. In January, about the time John LeFauve’s money ran out, the Autodidact wangled a grant to write a book about the Buffalo Soldiers. We would have income for two years. Convict John LeFauve had found his destiny in bringing literary honor to the name of Jim Clements.

Every Sunday, we’d pile into the pickup and go to the Baptist church in Carrizozo. The Autodidact and Mrs. Clements rode in the front seat, I sat in the bed in the rear, picked my teeth, and watched the New Mexico sky. It was the bluest sky with the whitest clouds I had ever seen. At first the Autodidact was only trying to please Mrs. Clements by attending church, but as time went on he gradually reacquired the Christian faith that John LeFauve had in his own childhood, except instead of being a Catholic he was a Protestant. I tried praying to the Jesus part of the three-headed God, but it never worked. I didn’t believe, I didn’t disbelieve; I was in the white space between the lines in the Good Book.

I couldn’t understand why Jesus would want to have anything to do with people in general, let alone me. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to have more than a nodding acquaintance with Jesus. He didn’t seem like a bad man, just boring, pigheaded, and talky. I hoped Langdon, my guardian angel, would show up and explain to me where I’d gone wrong when I tried to think about God/Gods, but he never did. Xiphi, Satan’s dark angel, was also missing from my life. So, I didn’t get either side of the story. As for the Director, the Alien, and the mother ship, nothing—no messages, no visions or visitations, just dim memories of the ramp rising up into a busy, metal belly infested with aliens and their captives. I pretty much lived my life for the here and now.