Mad Boys (9 page)

The Autodidact talked on. Father and I used to finish our food quicker than you can say oink oink. With this fellow, eating was different. It was dining. That meant food for thought as well as belly. It took forever to get through the meal, though, and I was anxious to put some miles between New Hampshire and me.

“There’s another butterfly whose name escapes me at the moment, but which I find even more intriguing than the monarch and the viceroy.” The Autodidact flipped through the pages of the book, and showed me a picture of a drab bug with wings. “In its caterpillar state, this creature crawls down into an ant hole.”

“And the ants kill it and eat it,” I said.

“No, the ants bring eggs from their queen for the caterpillar to feast upon. You see, the caterpillar gives off an essence which intoxicates the ants.”

“It gets the ants stoned?”

“That’s correct. You are worldly indeed. This creature is a like an entertainer. As long as it intoxicates its audience, it’s loved and revered. The minute its charm wears off it’s attacked and destroyed by its audience. With luck, the caterpillar pupates.”

“What?”

“Pupates. It means transformation. Its body is transformed from a caterpillar to a butterfly. It crawls out of the ant hole, spreads its wings, and flies away.”

If a caterpillar could pupate, why not me? Maybe it had already happened. Maybe before coming out of the mud, I had not been a boy at all, but some other kind of being. I thought about the Alien. The Autodidact sounded like a robot at times—maybe he
was
a robot!—and the Alien had sent him to confound me. I mulled all this over and concluded I had not yet pupated.

“Where you from?” I said.

“Native of New Hampshire, via French Canada. When I was a kid, the Yankees and the Irish called us Frogs. That made me mad, and I got into a lot of trouble.”

“Are you still mad?”

“At times, yes, but I am no longer violent. My people came here to earn enough money to return to the farm in Quebec. It didn’t work out that way. Temporary became permanent. Destination became destiny.”

I liked that word “destiny.” It meant headed not for a place, but for a position in the universe, like a star in the heavens. Father had taken a wrong turn and missed his destiny. Royal was pursuing his destiny like a shark after a swimmer. Me? I was waiting to pupate. Was that enough for destiny?

“So are you a monarch or a viceroy?” I asked the Autodidact.

My question caught him off guard. The half-smile disappeared, and his mouth turned mean. “You do have a meddling little mind, don’t you, young man?” I thought for a second he might hit me, but the smile returned, and he said, “You make me stop and think. Perhaps I’m so happy being free that I’m not suffering enough to write. Perhaps thirty-nine years is insufficient atonement. I can’t say.”

I should have guessed from his ramblings that something was unusual about the Autodidact, but I was so satisfied by the food in my gut that my guard was down. I cleaned my plate and drank three glasses of milk. I would have had a fourth, but the milk carton was empty.

A breeze tiptoed through the trees and kissed our faces, and the Autodidact said, “I’m thinking about trading the trailer for a sailboat. Have you ever been sailing?”

“No, my dad preferred to fly his jet plane,” I said, “but he did take me fishing when he was home from a war or when the Congress was let out. We would catch perch in the daytime and hornpout at night.” As I rattled off this lie, it reminded me of a true-life experience, and I related it to the Autodidact. “Once Father saw a Fish and Game truck stocking brookies in a stream. Father and I showed up an hour later. We cleaned out the hole, took a hundred of the state’s trout.”

“As a boy, I too fished, but for thirty-nine years I never saw water except in toilets and faucets. I contented myself with dreaming and reading. Joshua Slocum, Francis Chichester—wonderful writers, wonderful adventurers. Now it’s my turn, and I find myself excited but also a little hesitant, a little befuddled by the world on the outside. A little afraid.”

“Afraid of losing your life?”

“No, most of my life is already lost.”

“Lost? Where?” I was thinking: lost destiny.

“Back there.” The Autodidact pointed behind him.

“What’s back there?”

“Time.”

“Oh, I get it. You’re old.”

He laughed suddenly, roaring loud as a waterfall. The laugh, the force in it, scared me a little. I thought about Father, how mad he’d be when he woke and found me gone. He wouldn’t be laughing. He might be waking at this very moment. A little frantic, I said, “I have to go.”

“Have to get back to your family, I suppose.”

“That’s right.” I got up from my seat in the woods.

The Autodidact stood, took my hand into his own, and shook it. “Have a good trip.”

“Thanks.” I pulled away. He looked at me for a moment in pity or disgust, I couldn’t say which, and started breaking camp. I hurried off, planning to start hitchhiking. Instead, when I reached the trailer, I paused. Maybe I could stow away in this rolling library. The door was ajar, and I walked in. A kitchen flowed into a living area. Beyond was a narrow hall, a bath, then the bedroom. Everywhere, on shelves, on tables, on the floor, were books. I couldn’t imagine what one person would want with all that reading matter.

A minute or so passed when I heard the Autodidact coming. A split second before the door opened, I slipped into what seemed like a linen drawer under the living room couch built into the wall. I dropped down with a thump. It was surprisingly roomy in this compartment. I could hear the Autodidact humming and strumming to himself and putting away dishes and the like. Happy in his solitude.

I lit a match and saw that I was in a storage space built underneath the floor. There were a couple of suitcases and yet more books, but I still had room to wiggle around. My match went out. I lit another. Now I could see a side entry that must have led to the outdoors. Just then the engine in the pickup started, and the rig jerked forward, rolling me into some luggage. The transmission yowled like a treed cat. The Autodidact wasn’t much of a driver. For all his problems, Father never had trouble shifting gears.

I worked my way forward to the hatch under the couch and came out of my hole. In the living room, in the light, I felt safe, and I launched a serious search to look for cigarettes and just to be nosy. But it was difficult to concentrate on criminal behavior, because there were so many books to draw my attention. The old paper in the books gave the place a pleasant, dank smell.

I sat down by a window in a big easy chair, feeling blank and silly and almost happy for a minute or so. In that relaxation, I spotted a notebook on the table beside me. Folded inside was a map of the United States. I thought about my mother and looked up Sorrows, New Mexico. It wasn’t on the map. Maybe it was just too small and insignificant a town to put on a road map. Or maybe Father had lied to me. How could I find my mother if the town she was supposed to be in didn’t even exist? I folded the map, returned it to the notebook, and looked out the window, reading bumper stickers as they flashed by: “Too Old to Be a Yuppie, Too Young to Die”; “Cree Dance Music”; “Rework Norman Mailer for Movies and You Get Danny Divito”; “Rush Limbaugh and Willard Scott in ’96”; “Kids Leave Home So They Don’t Have to Lie to Their Parents”; “Why Would Anybody Want to Make a Computer That Thinks Like a Human Being?”; “The EPA Should Regulate Nocturnal Emission Standards;” “If You Can Fool Yourself, You Can Fool Anybody”; “Work Hard—Hard Is Good”; “For a Better World, Put Women with Small Children in Charge”; “A Waist Is a Terrible Thing To Mind”; “If You Were Always Nice I Couldn’t Love You.” I grew bored, picked up a pencil, and doodled on the Autodidact’s notepad. I drew a picture of the sausage-shaped mother ship; I wrote “Daygalaygi Straygreet, Saygouth Braygonx.”

Soon I started to feel drowsy. Trailer wall opens, the Alien, backed by white light, wiggles his forked tongue. “Follow me,” he hisses. I float through the opening and on slippery feet ski on a long, silvery ramp slick as ice, swooping up into the sky to the mother ship.

When I woke up, I was sweating from the heat in the trailer. I yawned, stretched, stood, and stared out the window. We were on I-95. A sign said: “Housatonic, NY—5 Miles.” I glanced at the clock on the desk. I’d been out cold for four hours, and it was already midafternoon.

I had some energy now and I had the urge to do something. I knelt on the floor and just let my imagination run wild. I pictured an avalanche of books burying me in knowledge, me waking in heaven knowing everything. I pictured myself back in the forest behind Father’s place except Father was gone. Out of the nowhere of my imagination appeared a woman in blue robes. She wasn’t Mother, though. She was bossier.
Maybe she’s a Witch
. That was it: she was a Witch. She had a book.
I will teach you the ways of evil
. I grabbed the Autodidact’s notebook and held it to my chest, bending my neck so my nose was in the pages smelling the paper. I absorbed the powers of evil.

Bored with this game, I decided to read the Autodidact’s notebook. The story of his life, he’d said. I wondered why he’d waited so long to tell it. I only had to read the first sentence to get my answer. At the same time, the rig slowed and pulled off the highway. The words on the title page said BOOKS AND PRISON BARS:
The Autobiography of John LeFauve
. I flipped to page 1. “After thirty-nine years in the New Hampshire State Prison, following my conviction of murdering a young boy, I am now a free man.” Murdering a young boy!

I stared out through curtain slits in the window while the rig came to a stop in front of a gas pump. I figured I’d stowed away long enough; it was time to get out of here. I watched the Autodidact come around and put the gas nozzle in the hole. It took forever to fill that tank, and I started to pace. Finally, I peeked through the window again. The nozzle was hung up, and no sign of the Autodidact. Maybe he’d gone to pay. Now was my chance to escape. I threw open the door. And there he was. Right in front of my nose, the Autodidact. For a split second I looked at his face: cliff-overhang brow, black-white mustache twitching, basset-hound eyes wide open with surprise. I bolted past him, and he reached out a hand that grabbed the back flap of one of the hip pockets on my jeans. “Hey, boy!” he bellowed. I twisted away, leaving him holding fabric. The Autodidact’s shout drew the attention of a woman pushing a baby carriage and a mailman wearing shorts.

I screamed, “He kidnapped me! He kidnapped me!” And then I ran, almost knocking over the baby carriage.

I must have run for half an hour straight at top speed. I ran through streets, across people’s yards, and finally into some woods. I never looked back, and I never slowed until the brush was thick and slapped my face. Finally, I stumbled upon a trail amidst tall trees that ended at the bank of a big, sluggish river. Exhausted, I paused. The river made a gentle breathing sound.

I relaxed. A minute later, I felt a thump on my shoulder. What looked like blood stained my shirt, although I didn’t feel any pain. A second later, another thump, this time on my head. The “blood” was blue.

“You’re dead!” I heard the voice of a boy about my own age from above. I looked up. I couldn’t see the boy who had challenged me, but I did see the nose of his paint gun sticking out of the tree house sprawling across the branches of a huge oak. Something about the structure looked familiar. And then I realized where I’d seen it before: in my daydreams, my home aboard the mother ship.

“You got me, I’m dead,” I said.

“Who goes there?” shouted another boy.

What should I answer? “Langdon Webster”? “Xiphi”? “Some unknown person”?

“Web goes there,” I said.

“Friend or foe?”

“Friend.”

“What are you doing in our territory?”

“Am escaping pursuit by an autodidact,” I answered.

I could hear two or three boys argue for a minute, and then a voice said, “So what?”

“So, how about a cigarette?” I yelled.

A moment later a rope ladder dropped down from the tree house.

RIVER RATS

There were five of them, Terry (handsome as a movie star), Ronnie (built like a stump), Dunc (fat), Chuck (blond and quick), and Aristotle (a geek), and they all carried paint guns. They called themselves the River Rats, and they had taken over the tree house, built over the last twenty or thirty years by who knows who. It sprawled through the giant oak, and you had to scramble along branches to get from one section to another. The rooms included the “dungeon,” which had a solid floor and a roof that didn’t leak; the “hole,” which was full of rot and stank like the armpit of a sweaty giant; and the “torture chamber,” which was almost as big as the dungeon, but leaked like a punctured bladder.

I told the Rats about the man who wanted to kill me. I said he was seven feet tall and that he looked just like a river carp, and I pursed my mouth to show them. They laughed, even Chuck, who didn’t believe me. Terry gave me a cigarette and we smoked. I asked if I could join their club. Dunc, whose father was a trooper for the highway patrol, said I might have AIDS and that the boys should call the Po and turn me in.

“Shut up, Dunc,” said Ronnie.

Dune bumped Ronnie with his big belly, and the two boys wrestled briefly until Terry put his foot between them.

Chuck tried to stare me down, but I beat him at that game.

“Let’s burn his eyeballs with lighted cigarettes until he tells us the truth,” said Chuck.

“You’re so gross,” said Aristotle.

And then there was just the slightest “umm” sound from Terry. I could see that it didn’t matter what the rest of the boys said, because Terry was the leader. In the time I spent in the tree house with the Rats I rarely saw Terry smile or laugh. He was not happy, but he lived to make his friends happy. That was why the Rats had made him their leader.

“Speak,” commanded Terry, and I knew it was time for me to perform.

I told the Rats that my real father was the exiled king of French Canada. Once he was restored to power he would come and take me home, and I would be a prince. When I was eighteen I would rejoin him in the underground and fight the evil cartel of Eskimos and drug runners that had taken over the country and made it cold.