Mad Boys (7 page)

Royal would send us his lists. He called this information “referrals” and the victims “clients.” Father picked right up on this way of talking. “Web,” he’d say, his voice full of importance, “we have a referral from young Durocher. The clients are on vacation in Bermuda.”

I remember one particular burglary. The clients lived in a year-round house on Spofford Lake, one of the many lakes in southwestern New Hampshire. It was a big house surrounded by smaller, seasonal cottages empty at this time of the year. During the day, a few ice fishermen sat by their tip-ups but at night the lake was deserted. The clients, a family of five, were visiting Disney World.

As per our usual procedure, Father dropped me off nearby with a pair of wire cutters, a flashlight, and a hand-held walkie-talkie radio, and drove away. No wind tonight. The air felt almost warm. Bob houses frozen in the ice from the last thaw looked cozy. I had an urge to haul one of these tiny buildings to the lake’s island. Set up a camp. Live like a hermit. Build outdoor fires. Howl at the moon. I howled anyway. The sound came back full of grief. I wanted to tell the speaker to take it easy and look at the moon. So I looked up at the moon. A spy prod from the mother ship twinkled like a star.

I’d almost reached the client’s place when a roaring sound startled me. The lake was making ice. A crack ran between my feet loud as thunder. The three-headed God was clearing His/Her/Their throat(s).

The dock had been pulled in on the beach, and I climbed on top of it for a better look at the house. I spotted the telephone line and cut it. I ran back on the ice, seeking protection in a vacant bob house. If the police came, it would mean there was a burglar alarm in the house. No police, no burglar alarm. I called Father on the walkie-talkie. We conversed in code.

“If the blue fish are biting, we’ll eat them for supper,” Father said. (Translation: If the police come, walk to the end of the lake and meet me in front of the restaurant.)

“Yo, Tarzan.” (Translation: Yes, Father.)

Half an hour later, I called again. “The fish aren’t biting,” I said. (Translation: No police, and therefore no activated burglar alarm.)

Ten minutes later, Father arrived in his pickup. He parked it on the road in front of the house. It was a risk, but not a big one. According to Royal’s informants, the lake road had almost no traffic in the middle of the night, and the police were not scheduled to make a round for another couple of hours.

Father smashed a window, and we went in. Father didn’t bother to use his flashlight. He just snapped on the house lights.

“I’m going up in the bedrooms,” Father said. “Remember our plan in case the cops come.”

If the police showed up, I was to pretend that I was a runaway and that I had hidden in this house and freaked out and called Father, who had come after me. If there was any damage, I was to take the blame.

I could hear Father ransacking the upstairs rooms. Father was not a quiet burglar. He talked to himself, and he almost always found some reason to get angry with the clients. They were too middle class, or too rich, or their tastes were uptight. This particular night, he was in a bad mood. I knew if he didn’t find the guns right away, he’d take it out on this poor house.

I started making a mental inventory, and decided I liked the people who lived here. They favored solid wood furniture. They hung paintings on the walls, and they were neat. I found letters smelling of perfume. A daughter in college had written home. She seemed to like her parents. “Dear mom and dad, it’s warm on campus, and sometimes I can hear the monkeys at the zoo from the dorm room. But I miss the lake—the water here is sooo scummy; I even miss you getting after me about my hair. . . .” From the way the parents kept her letters, wrapped in rubber bands and neatly filed, I guessed they liked her, too. I put the letters back real careful and thought about writing a letter of my own. “Dear Mother, I am no longer an it. I am me, dark and on the skinny side, and, like you, full of personality (Father says) and wanting to make it all up to you for whatever I did that made you unhappy. Or maybe Father lied to me about you. If so, forgive me for doubting you. Yours truly, your son, Web.” I never actually wrote the letter. I got too choked up just thinking about it. I found some boy toys—dump trucks, a Storm’n’ Norm’n doll, Lincoln logs. I never damaged or stole toys. In fact, I never stole anything for myself, and I never enjoyed stealing from strangers.

Downstairs, in a den with sliding glass doors that opened toward the shore of the lake, I found a setup for an electric train. I pushed a lever, and the train started to move. It passed through covered bridges spanning rivers, went up grades, went through mountain tunnels, entered a little village with a church, a library, a school, some stores and houses, stopped at a station, and took on passengers. A feeling of rapture came over me, then died away, like the morning dew under the gun of the sun.

A minute later I was jarred by a roaring sound even louder than the lake making ice.

I ran upstairs. Father stood grinning in the bedroom with his chain saw. He had carved open a locked oak roll-top desk in an office off the master bedroom; he’d found two pistols in the desk, plus a rifle and a shotgun in a case. The pistols were stuffed in his pants, and we should have beat it out of there, but Father was enjoying himself. He spent the next couple of minutes sawing his way through the dresser bureau, some paintings on the wall, and the wall itself. He shut the saw off, laughed, sang “Twilight of Destruction,” and danced all the way to the pickup truck.

The day after the burglary we celebrated, meeting Royal in a crowded shopping-plaza parking lot. Father gave him the guns, and Royal gave Father an envelope with some money. Royal talked to me in the A-Y-G language, and that, as always, got Father angry, which was the whole point. Royal’s attitude toward grownups was, maygake thaygem sayguffayger.

Father raced off to Miranda’s Bar, and Royal and I drove around in his limo. We did a lot of talking. Actually, I did most of the talking. Royal liked to listen to my dreams and fantasies.

“You want to hear the one about the three-headed God?” I said.

“I know that one cold. Tell me some more about the guy with the head of a man and the body of a snake.”

“The Alien,” I said.

“That’s the one.”

So, I did. I rambled on about the Alien, The Director, Langdon and the counter-earth, Xi—everything.

“You know what your main quality is?” Royal said.

“I’m loyal,” I said.

“No, your main quality is you’re an entertaining nut case.”

Afterward Royal dropped me off at the bar where Father was drinking. Royal said to Father, “Hey, Dirty Joe, I got a joke for you. A horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’
” But Father’s sense of humor had deteriorated, and he didn’t laugh. Royal left, and I ate some Slim-Jims and potato chips for supper while Father had another beer. Then he drove me home. This was scarier than burglarizing the house. Father was not a good drunken driver.

The good times ended when Royal said his work was done in New Hampshire and it was time for him to take his wares to the big city and make a profit. When father picked up the last envelope of cash, I asked Royal where he’d be staying. He said, “Saygouth Braygonx, Naygew Yaygork. Laygook faygor ayga-aygy-aygee, Daygalaygi Straygeet. Come on, let’s go for a last drive.”

While Father went off to the bar, Royal drove to the cemetery. We got out of the car and looked around. The place was quiet and restful, which of course is what a cemetery is supposed to be.

“This is the place, right?” Royal said.

“Right.”

“And you still can’t remember.”

“No,” I said.

“Listen, Web, I’m ambitious. I want more. More of everything. Glory. Money. Power. I need a right-hand man. I believe you’re ready, and I want you to come with me to New York.”

I thought about Royal’s offer for a minute, and then I said, “I want to go with you, but I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?” For the first time since I’d known him, I saw disappointment and hurt in Royal’s face.

“It’s Father. If I go, he’ll just chew himself to death with his own character flaws.”

“Saygo fayguckayging whaygat?”

“I got a plan, Royal. When we have enough saved, and Father’s outgrown his drug habit, I figure him and me will strike out for New Mexico. We’ll find my mother and reunite the family.”

“Maybe she’s dead.”

“Maybe she’s alive,” I countered.

“What about me? I thought we were tight as brothers.”

“You can come and live with us, Royal.”

Royal burst into laughter, and then he sneak-punched me in the mouth, cutting my lip.

“You frog,” he said, choking back tears. “You betrayed me.”

“Did not.”

“Did so. Betrayer! Betrayer!”

“I’m just doing what I can for my old man,” I said.

Royal pulled himself together real fast. “You’re right. I lost my head. I was starting to care. When you care, you’re dead. I have no love in my heart.”

“No love in your heart, right,” I said.

He raised his hand suddenly, as if to hit me. I flinched, and he slapped me on the back on in a friendly way. “Don’t let Dirty Joe push you around, and if things get desperate, come to Dali Street.” Then he gave me the finger, turned his back on me, hopped in his car, and drove away. I had to walk a mile to the bar. By then Father was almost passed out.

Father and I were both broken up. I’d lost my only friend, and Father had lost his meal ticket. We went back into the firewood business, but the money wasn’t enough to support Father’s drug habit.

March ground into April. What passed for spring in New Hampshire was really another version of winter. Wet, rainy, dull—mud season. Father’s four-wheel drive just barely made it on our road, and some days we got stuck and had to winch ourselves out. Father got grouchier and more selfish and kind of wild. He’d shout at nobody in particular that the revolution was coming. He rambled on. The country was going to hell because the rich people had said screw you to everybody, and a fellow couldn’t buy land to homestead anymore, and women just couldn’t seem to stop having babies, and nobody understood anybody else. The country was going to be turned upside down, inside out, ass backward, and bottoms up. Start over with the scratch of a match. I concluded that Father was spinning out of control. I began to feel scared. Something terrible was coming on, something like bad weather.

Item. After father had gone on the lam in the late 1960s, he gave up not only friends but relatives. Since I was lonesome most of the time, it would have been natural for me to want to get to know Father’s people, but I couldn’t seem to warm to the idea. Maybe I was afraid they’d be too much like him.

Item. Father as Joe Webster used to be on mailing lists having to do with subjects like homesteading, wood-burning for heat, organic agriculture, goat-raising, solar energy, and weird building construction, such as houses of logs, stones, dirt, beer cans, or car tires. But most of the old-time hippie companies had gone out of business and no longer sent out their catalogs and magazines.

Item roundup. Because father had no family, no friends, and no catalog outlets we didn’t get much mail. Even so, it was a treat to go down to the post office, because Father would be full of anticipation, the meanness gone out of him for a while. You see, Father had a dream. Royal had got a big laugh when I had told him about it, but I thought it was a pretty good dream.

When he was growing up, Father used to watch a program on television called “The Millionaire.” Every week some lucky person would be given $1 million by a billionaire named John Baresford Tipton. Father loved that program, and throughout his life, especially after the 60s turned turtle on him, he used to soothe himself by imagining that a billionaire was watching over him, waiting for the right moment to give him a million.

Wouldn’t you know it, but one day somebody really did send Father some money, although it wasn’t anywhere near a million. I know he was surprised, or else he never would have opened the package in front of me. “What’s this?” Father said, a little excited as he tore into a book-mailer and reached inside. There it was, in his hand before he even knew it, a fistful of bills. No note, no writing of any kind in the bundle. No return address. Just money. Not a million, but enough for a couple weeks of high-on-the-hog living, at least by our standards. Father gave me a big hug, and he started to cry with joy. I cried too; but I don’t know if it was for joy.

That night Father took me with him when he bought his drugs. He made a telephone call from a pay phone, and then there was a switcheroo in the parking lot of a supermarket. A van pulled up beside Father’s truck, a hand reached from the window. Father put an envelope in the hand. The hand disappeared for a moment and then emerged again with another envelope. Father took it and drove off. The whole thing took less than a minute.

Later Father got drunk and stoned in our school bus home. He was content as a pig in you know what. His good mood rubbed off on me. For a couple of hours, I thought things might work out.

Next day, Father practically ran to the post office. No mail that day. Day after that, no mail. And so on for a couple of weeks, right into May. By then, the cash Father had was gone, the drugs were used up, the booze was drunk. Father was in a grumpy mood again. But just when he figured that things weren’t going to get any better, there was another package with money in it. This time there was a note. Father didn’t tell me what the note said, but I could see right away that it didn’t make him happy. He spent hours deep in thought, a very rare activity for Father. And he had some orders for me. Stay close to him. Don’t go anywhere alone.

This went on for a couple of days. I asked Father what he was thinking about, and out of nowhere he cracked me against the side of the head with the flat of his hand. The blow didn’t draw blood, but it did leave my ear ringing for a couple of hours.

“Get the message?” he said.

I knew the right answer and gave it to him. “Yah, don’t ask questions.”