Mad Boys (8 page)

Father then did something real strange, so strange that I knew something had gone terribly wrong between us: he apologized for striking me.

The days passed. The cash came in dribs, drabs, and dispatches. Father read the notes, burned them so I wouldn’t see them, and spent the money on his addictions. But he was not happy. He was morose.

One day we drove to Keene, and he bought a Polaroid camera.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked him on the ride on the way back.

“Take your picture,” he said.

“My what?” I was suddenly shivering, as if in an icy wind, although the air was still and warm.

“Your picture. It’s no big deal.”

“You’re lying to me.”

Father wound up to knock me, but I didn’t flinch and he didn’t throw the blow. I knew right then and there that he didn’t love me anymore. I wanted to beg him to beat me, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good.

When we got home in the woods, he made me take off my shirt, and he took a whole bunch of pictures of me outside. I stood amidst ferns. I sat on rocks. I swung from branches. Finally, we ended up at the huge, fallen maple. “Strip to your shorts,” Father said. I stripped to my shorts. “Straddle the maple.” I straddled the maple. “Look wistful.” I looked wistful. “Good.” He took my picture. I didn’t feel cold. I didn’t feel anything. There was a great silence within me, a great stillness, a huge nothingness, an immensity of white light taking up the space of a limitless void. From the light emerged a figure, walking toward me.

“Langdon?” I wasn’t sure it was him.

“Stop mumbling!” shouted father.

Kill him in his sleep! Kill him in his drunken sleep! Kill him in his stoned sleep
.

“What? What did you say?” I said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Father said. “Stop mumbling and be still.”

Langdon tore off his cap. It vanished after a noiseless explosion. His dark hair was on fire. He unzipped his magnificent suit. A second later: fireworks. When they faded, I saw a boy covered with black, slimy mud.

“Langdon?” I whispered.

“Langdon is gone,” said the boy as muck dripped from him. “I am the real dead boy, I am Xiphi.”

A second later he was gone, and Father was yelling at me to stop babbling.

The next day, Father went out of his way to make it seem as if nothing unusual had happened. He didn’t yell at me, didn’t hit me, hardly even talked to me. He wasn’t my father; I wasn’t his son; I was just a boarder who was staying with him, and he didn’t have any strong feelings about me one way or another. I felt like an android. In a way, everything was easier. For several days, we walked through our routines, cold to each other, cold to our own feelings, cold to the world outside.

One afternoon after Father had bought a case of beer and we were driving back to the land he said, “Web, I’ve got some business that’s going to keep me on the move for quite a while.”

I could tell that he’d chosen to talk to me while he drove because that way he didn’t have to look at me.

“Where we going?” I said.

“Not we. Me. I can’t take you along. You’ll be staying with a friend.”

“Who? The one who sends you the money. Is it the Alien?”

“I don’t know who it is. But I’ve heard his voice. He’s a friend, I’m sure of that. I can’t take care of you anymore, Web.”

“When is he going to come?”

“I’ll let you know. It’s not decided yet.”

I could tell it was decided. “When?” I said. I was trying to work up some anger, some fear, some alarm, but all I could feel was a clamminess.

“Tomorrow, first thing in the morning.”

“What if I don’t want to go?”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to go, but you do want to go. I know you do.”

“Okay, I want to go. But what if I didn’t?”

“I can’t take care of you anymore. I just don’t have the. . . wherewithal. You just do what he says and everything is going to be all right. He’s going to take care of you. Good care, he promised. I have his solemn word, and I believe it.”

Father never looked at me when he delivered this speech.

“Okay, no problem,” I said, kind of cheerfullike.

That night in our school bus home, Father got even more drunk and stoned than usual. It was way past midnight, and he was on his bed about to pass out when he called me over. It was real dark.

“Listen,” he said in a wet whisper, “I’m far out, far out.”

“I know,” I said, and I could just barely see his face in the darkness.

“I should tie you up. You’ll run away, won’t you?”

“No, Father.” I tried to see his face. The barest of moon glow coming in through the tie-dyed curtains reflected off his sweat. “Father, if we could find Mother, maybe she’d take care of both of us.”

Father laughed a little, a tiny heh-heh.

“She’s in Sorrows, New Mexico, right?” I said.

But Father wasn’t listening to me. “You wouldn’t do your father a favor and tie yourself up, would you?”

“No, Father, I won’t tie myself up.”

He took my hand and gripped it hard. I thought he was going to tie me up, but he only said, “I tried to live free. Put it on my gravestone, will you? He lived free and died.”

It occurred to me that Father and Royal had the same motto. “Please don’t die,” I said.

“We died a long time ago, your mother and me. We died at Woodstock. We died at Altamont. We died far out. Far out. Far out.” His grip on my hand slowly loosened. “We were already dead when we had you—the son of the dead.” He shuddered, just vibrated as if in an earthquake. After that his hand went limp and I slipped free. I stayed with him, kneeling beside his bed; I think I dozed off, half-waking to Xiphi’s voice, “Kill him in his sleep! Kill him in his drunken sleep! Kill him in his stoned sleep!”

Father was dead asleep. Why not just plain dead? I could kill him right now. I put my hands around his throat. If he woke up, he would kill me. Or maybe we would kill each other. That would be perfect. Peace. Together in hell. I squeezed, cutting off his air for maybe two or three minutes. Then I let him go and fetched a flashlight and shined it into his face. It was sweaty and pale. I lifted open an eyelid. The eye looked at me, not seeing. I dribbled some spit in the eye. No reaction. Maybe he was already dead. But no, I could smell his breath, like radioactive flowers.

I started to squeeze again, determined to continue until the life was far out. But I couldn’t do it. I relaxed my grip. I had to face the fact that I was too much of a coward to kill anyone. Father picked that moment to wake up. He grabbed his throat, and his eyes opened wide.

“You’re trying to kill me, my own son.” He jumped up and made a grab for me, but I was too quick for him. He came after me. I opened the door to the school bus and ran out. Father lunged for me, missed, fell, and cracked his head on a rock. From out of nowhere, Xiphi leaped between us. He picked up a stone and brought it crashing down on Father’s head. I heard a squashing sound. I stopped, watching Xiphi run off into the woods. Father lay on the ground. I knelt beside him, and put my arm around him and just held him.

Maybe I fell asleep or maybe I was out of my mind, frozen in place by madness. Anyway, the next thing I knew there was a wall of kingdom-come white light. I threw my hand across my face to protect my eyes from the light until I realized it was only the dawn. Father didn’t move. I figured he’d be knocked out for quite a while, three or four hours before he’d wake up and come after me. I went through his pockets and took all the bills from his wallet: about enough money for a pizza and ten video games.

The weather was cool but I could feel warm temperatures coming on. It was going to be a nice day, maybe even a summer’s day. That’s spring in New Hampshire, jumping back and forth between raw winter and cooked summer, rarely behaving like spring. I wondered what the weather was doing in Sorrows, New Mexico, as I started down our hill.

THE AUTODIDACT

I didn’t take any changes of clothes or a coat or anything. I even forgot my cigarettes. When I reached the town road I stuck my thumb out for a ride, and a few cars went by but nobody stopped. Local people wouldn’t give me a ride, because they wanted nothing to do with Dirty Joe Webster’s son. Once I reached the state highway, the traffic would thicken and I’d stand a better chance of getting a ride. I calmed myself down by running a mental video of a good Sam who’d pick me up. A feeble, little old man. “Hop in, son,” he says. I can tell that he’s not very strong. I could rob him if I felt like it. But I don’t want to. I give him the money I took from Father, and he brings me home to his feeble, old wife who feeds me a hot meal. They’re farmers. I work with them in the fields. We’re happy together. The day I turn twenty-one, they die in each other’s arms, me kneeling at their deathbed. I inherit the farm. I open an orphanage for lost boys. Royal shows up, and establishes his empire. After that I couldn’t create clear images in my head, so I rewound the mental video of the old folks and ran it again.

Three or four miles went by and I began to feel the fatigue of the long night, plus I was hungry. Half a mile before the main highway, I came upon a pickup truck hauling a trailer home pulled over to the side of the road. The vanity plate was memorable. In big letters it said FREE over the New Hampshire motto in little letters, “Live Free or Die.” The driver was outside, a pale-skinned, dark-eyed man. He was gazing off into the valley like any gooney tourist. Which was strange, considering the New Hampshire plates. I crept toward him until I reached the trailer, and peeked through a window. Amazing! Books lined every wall of dark wood. The furnishings included a cherry wood desk, a stuffed leather easy chair, a wooden table holding magazines and yet more books. It was as if somebody had built a motor home around a library. At that point, the man sensed my presence and slowly turned around.

He took a long look at me, the way you’d look at the clock on a time bomb, then in a voice rich as hot chocolate, he said, “Good day.”

I liked his greeting and answered back with it myself, “Good day to you.”

He came toward me, and I got a good look at him in the morning sun. He was fifty-five or sixty but husky with a shiny head shaved smooth as a bowling ball, a gigantic salt and pepper mustache, waxed and curled up at the ends, white teeth, basset-hound eyes, sly full mouth in a half-smile.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” He seemed to be looking past the valley into the heart of the country.

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m near-sighted as a bat, and anyway I like it better at home.”

The man broke out in a grin. “Is that so? Well, where are you from?”

“I’m from a little western town called Yonder, Arizona,” I answered.

“I suppose one way or another we all come from yonder. Your family with you?”

“Oh sure, I was just taking a walk. My family’s around the corner, collecting firewood and fiddlehead ferns, my brothers, Craig, John, Howard, Frank, Russell, and young Robert, my sisters, Cathy, Carolyn, Annie, Cleopatra, Cynthia, and my mother, Grace, and my father, Tom. My dad’s got tattoos and he’s a gunner on an F-16 fighter plane and a Congressman. My mom’s a school teacher, a lawyer, a singer, and she bakes pies.”

“Splendid performance. I don’t have a family, unless you count a thousand or so books.”

“So, you’re a bookworm.”

“Yes, a bookworm. The way a silkworm spins a web of silk, a bookworm restructures the very web of mind. The result: . . .” He let the answer hang for a minute, tapped his bald head, just above a cliff-overhang brow, and said in a voice full of importance, “an autodidact.”

I was about floored by the word, but I didn’t show it. “You don’t look like one.”

“And what do I look like?”

“A retired boxer.”

“I’ll take that. And how would you describe yourself?”

“I’m a spy for the Xi government of the Fourth Dimension,” I said.

“You spell that the way it sounds? Zy, z-y?”

“Sorry, I can’t say. The spelling is a secret.”

“You must have a code name.”

“Xiphi. But my friends call me Web.”

“I am known as Professor John LeFauve, Professor Emeritus, Department of Autodidactism, Harvard University.”

“I guess I can call you the Autodidact, then,” I said.

“Done deal,” he said, and we shook hands. I smelled something that made my mouth water.

“What’s that?” I sniffed the air.

“Breakfast. I suppose you’ll want some.”

The next thing I knew I found myself sitting down for victuals with the Autodidact. He’d set up a camp about fifty feet into the woods, with cooking gear, a small fire, a log to sit upon, and, inevitably, a book. We ate bacon, eggs, and toast off paper plates.

“Why don’t you eat in your trailer?” I said, and shooed away bugs.

“I like to be among the birds and the bees.”

“Don’t forget the black flies and the mosquitoes.”

“And the snakes in the grass. And the hawks above. Enemies everywhere. Even in the midst of beauty. It’s nature’s way. I willingly submit myself to it.”

“Is that so?” I dug into the food. A minute passed with no conversation, just eating. Then I took a break from chewing, and just to be polite I asked him about the book he’d been reading.

“I’m glad you’re interested. In this book, you’ll find example after example of how nature mediates against necessary violence with elegance.” The Autodidact picked up the book and showed me a picture of an orange and black butterfly. “Do you know what this is?”

“Sure, it’s a monarch.”

“That’s correct. It’s marked so vividly to warn off birds. You see, it’s poisonous.”

I thought about Royal, whose colors were orange and black.

The Autodidact showed me a picture of another orange and black butterfly. “What’s this?” he asked me.

“Trick question,” I said. “I’m supposed to say it’s a monarch and you’re going to call me a liar.”

“I can see that you have some experience in the world of deception. This is a viceroy, which is not poisonous and which therefore is a fine meal for a bird. But the viceroy, like the monarch, is orange and black and good-sized. It’s a deceiver. It fools the birds into thinking that it’s a monarch.”