Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (6 page)

“Right.”

“So what do we do about it?”

Sarah Byrnes shook her head. “Boy, are you limited. I
long
for my intellectual equal and I get you. For twenty dollars in the Second World War category: Who fought on the side of right in World War II?” We had recently studied WWII in social studies.

“Easy,” I said. “The good old US of A.”

“Correct for twenty dollars. For forty dollars in the same category, who did the good old US of A fight against?”

“Germany and Japan. And Italy, I think.”

“Correct again for forty dollars. Now for Double Jeopardy, Final Jeopardy, and all the Daily Doubles on the board, who fought
with
the good old US of A?”

“England.”

“Who else?”

“Russia.”

“Right for a million dollars and the right to put out a dozen more issues of
Crispy Pork Rinds.
Russia. Until 1991 our very worst enemy in the world. The Evil Empire. Why do you think we were fighting
on the
same side
as the commies in World War II?”

“Maybe they were different then. Maybe they weren't commies. That was a long time ago.”

“Zooooooonk!
Back to zero. Your consolation prize is three days and two lovely nights locked in a room with my dad. They were just the same. They fought on our side because we had a
common enemy.
If that common enemy won, Russia
and
the USA were hamburger. Now, Final, Final, No-More-Last-Chance Jeopardy. For all your money back and the chance to be my friend long enough to put out another issue,
our
new friend is going to be…”

“Oh, Jeez,” I said as the bulb above my head flashed bright.

“Close enough!”

I froze. We were going to make friends with Dale Thornton.

 

On their return from the R.V. show, Carver and my mother find a perfect indentation of my body in the couch, and I'm in it. I know it's after midnight because there's major skin all over the screen, in living color. Always the best on HBO.

Mom sees the woman in the flick touching herself in a full-length mirror and elbows Carver in the ribs.
Carver is obviously embarrassed—probably because of his uncertain position with me—but he needn't be, because Mom has always been completely open about sexual stuff with me, so I don't react like a lot of my friends would if they saw their moms getting itchy.

But I decide to make him squirm a little anyway. “I've got the safe sex video here, Mom. Want me to slip it in?”

The woman on the screen has turned from the mirror, approaching the guy on the bed, who looks to have the IQ of a cucumber. He also looks to have a cucumber. “I better get your blindfold,” Mom says. “Carver will call Child Protection Services on me for letting you watch this.”

Carver eeps out an embarrassed laugh and says, “What's that number again?” It's a feeble attempt.

“What happens behind my eyelids is a lot hotter than that,” I say.

Carver retires to the bathroom.

“When he comes out,” Mom whispers, “you
can
it, okay? No more. Carver's a little modest for this family.”

“I know topless exotic dancers who are a little modest for this family,” I say. “Carver's too modest for a Barry Manilow concert. God, Mom, get a life.”

We hear the toilet flush. “
You
get some manners,” she says, “or you're going to be doing your own cooking and cleaning.”

“Yes, Mommy Dearest.”

My mother is a writer. A real one, not just somebody with a manuscript in a desk drawer that she'll finish someday when her kid finally gets arrested or goes to college. She writes a regular column in the local newspaper about women in sports and has had three articles published in
Sports Illustrated.
Two of them were space fillers, but one was a feature on a teenage girl who swam the English Channel. They sent her to the girl's house in Southern California and even put her up in a motel with a telephone in the bathroom. I know, she called me from there.

Mom has always had primo word processing equipment, including the latest in laser printers so sophisticated they double as weapons guidance systems, which is why Sarah Byrnes and I were able to bring to our
readers such a high-quality rag from the information underground. Mom taught me to use her fancy electronic gadgetry clear back in grade school when she encouraged me to keep a journal, but even though she taught me to hide it in the computer so even she couldn't get to it without the code, I'm smarter than to put my thoughts about myself and others down in writing, where somebody might chance onto them and have me put to death.

Anyway, Sarah Byrnes and I had decided to lay off Dale Thornton for a while—at least until our wounds healed—and concentrate on an exposé about Mautz's two-headed son, the outcome of his clandestine sexual foray with a group of particularly brutal aliens one night several years back when he was wigged out on cocaine. According to our meticulously researched story, whenever Mautz came up short on new ways to treat kids astonishingly, he consulted with Huey-Dewey (one name for each head), whom he kept locked in an earth cellar behind his house.

I was revising the part where Huey-Dewey got into an argument with itself regarding the relative value of humiliating a kid in front of the class versus the three-holed paddle, and began banging its heads together in violent confrontation, when my doorbell rang. I looked
out the window to see whether I wanted to answer the door, and standing right there beside Sarah Byrnes, looking almost as if he had come above ground to live full-time, was Dale Thornton. Sarah Byrnes was bringing a future freeway sniper into my home.

Oh, God, I promise never to shoplift again or touch myself without my clothes on if you'll please, just please let me live through this day.

 

I stared across our attic room at Dale Thornton, who, unlike Sarah Byrnes, had not refused my offer of Oreos and was, in fact, finishing up the package. Feeling invaded, I wondered if General Eisenhower let the Russians come to his house when he invited them to be on his side in World War II. If he did, I'll bet Mamie—that was Ike's wife—didn't use the good silverware.

“So this is where you freakos hang out,” Dale said through a mouth full of dark brown crumbs and frosting. He was sunk into a bean-bag chair, scanning the room, gripping the sack of cookies as if it were a flotation device on the Titanic and the captain had just yelled, “Save the women and children first!” A home-crafted tattoo sporting
BORN TO RASE HELL
on a banner across a very poor excuse for a Harley-Davidson
insignia graced his right forearm. He wore blue jeans, more hole than jean, and a black Twisted Sister T-shirt—the complementary pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve—which also showed serious signs of aging. His curly brown hair clung matted to his forehead, and my olfactory senses said without question it was closing in on the time of month when the Thorntons should consider emptying the moonshine out of the bathtub.

Sarah Byrnes followed Dale's suspicious eyes around our attic hideaway. “Pretty nice, huh?” she said.

“Been in nicer.”

“Maybe till you heard the sirens coming,” Sarah Byrnes said, and I closed my eyes and held my breath. “I been by your place, Dale Thornton. You got a bunch of old wrecked cars in your yard, and I'd live in any one of them before I'd live in that house. And there's gotta be a skinny old dog factory out back somewhere. I don't care if you wanna live like a pig, nobody can help what their family's like, but don't you go saying, ‘Been in nicer' like you live in some castle.”

“You guys invite me down here to polish off these cookies, or you got something you wanna talk about?”

I looked to Sarah Byrnes. This was her idea.

She said, “What happened when you got home the other night after school? Old Man Mautz call your dad
and tell him about the chewing tobacco?”

“None a your damn business,” Dale snapped. “He didn't do nothin'.”

“That right?” Sarah Byrnes challenged. “That why you didn't show up to school for three days and why you wore that stupid-lookin' turtleneck sweater for three days?”

“My brother gimme that sweater, Scarface!”

“Doesn't mean you have to wear it.”

Just offer him a deal, I pleaded in my head, unable for the life of me to understand why Sarah Byrnes wanted to stir him up. Someone could get hurt, and I was farthest from the door.

“So what did your daddy do? Really.”

“Same thing your daddy woulda done.” He nodded toward me. “Or Fat Boy's. He kicked my ass. Whaddaya care?”

“Just wondered.”

I started to tell Dale I didn't have a dad and my mom has never raised a hand in violence toward me, if you don't count when I was three and peed down the heat register during a week-long seige of below-zero weather, but I thought better. If Dale Thornton has a need to believe I get a regular ass-kicking, think away, Dale Thornton. I have recuperative work to do before I
mess with you again.

“So I got places to go,” Dale said. “I don't got all day to sit around and talk to a couple of freakos. What do you guys want? Got anything else to eat?”

Out of self-preservation, I went behind the dusty overstuffed couch at the far end of the attic, returning with a giant bag of corn chips. “Yeah!” Dale said, tearing them out of my hand before I could sit down, scattering perfectly good and unbroken chips across the hardwood floor. “Damn. They make these bags so you can't hardly get 'em open.”

“The point is,” Sarah Byrnes said as Dale stuffed his face with my corn chips, “that Mautz singed Eric's butt for producing a paper he said was trash, but he used the information in it to singe your butt. And speaking of butts, who do you think got the biggest bang out of you kicking Eric's?”

“Me?” Dale said, smiling, nodding toward me, salty crumbs sticking to his lower lip and chin.

Sarah Byrnes shook her head. “Couldn't have been much of a big deal for you, unless you're the biggest wus since Mr. Rogers.” She cast a semidisgusted look at me. “You could've got a better fight out of Norman Nickerson. Mautz, that's who really got off on it. He got Eric good and didn't have to lift a finger because he
had a goon do it for him.”

Dale achieved a passable imitation of thinking. “Maybe you're right,” he said finally. “So what?”

“So we want to keep printing the paper and we don't want to get killed doing it. We have a deal to make with you.”

“Make it.”

“You protect us, and your name is never seen in
Crispy Pork Rinds
again, unless it's for receiving a Congressional Medal of Honor. You can be on the staff. Every week we'll let you pick one thing to write about and we'll do all the grunt work. It'll be like you're literate.”

Dale didn't pick up on the last comment, but the rest must have sounded good, though he didn't make any promises. Sarah Byrnes said after he was gone that we were free to go right on pleading the Fifth and cranking out our weekly rag.

 

It is nearly impossible for me to admit to people, be they friend or foe, what is important to me. A counselor friend of Mom's once said that's merely a function of adolescence—that teenagers are into separating from our parents and others in authority in order to establish our independence. To do that effectively we have to
believe ourselves as immortal and are therefore incapable of facing our emotional truths.

Well, let me make something perfectly clear (as Richard Nixon says on those old news clips about the Watergate scandal, right before he's about to fill the room with fog) I am not immortal. I've spent more than ten hours in the psych ward with Sarah Byrnes—really and truly the toughest person in our solar system—and I'll tell you what, if life can shoot Sarah Byrnes out of the sky, it can nail me blindfolded.

In truth, the only reason I don't allow people up close and personal with my emotional self is that I hate to be embarrassed. I can't afford it. I spent
years
being embarrassed because I was fat and clumsy and afraid. I wanted to be tough like Sarah Byrnes, to stand straight and tall, oblivious to my gut eclipsing my belt buckle, and say, “Up yours!” But I was paralyzed, so I developed this pretty credible comedy act—I'm the I-Don't-Care-Kid—which is what I assume most other kids do. But I'm not stupid; I believe there is important shit to be dealt with.

That's why I like Lemry's Contemporary American Thought class, which we call CAT for short. Lemry makes it safe to give any idea consideration, and she is ferocious in protecting the sensibilities of anyone willing
to take a risk. You can celebrate or slam any idea you want, but you can't slam people. It's the most important class I have, and I'm glad both my friends and enemies are signed up.

Ellerby is there, and so is Mark Brittain.

And so is Jody Mueller.

 

I almost bowl Brittain over beating the bell into CAT. He's standing just inside the doorway talking with his girlfriend—who should be mine but doesn't know it—Jody Mueller, the classiest-looking girl in our school and maybe the Milky Way.

“Hey, Mobe, take it easy.” Brittain acts as if he likes me, but after Ellerby, I would be the first on his secret ballot for candidates to be buried in a shallow grave with a small air pipe pushing up into a bus garage.

I say, “Sorry.” I'm not, but until Jody understands that beauty is only skin deep, I want to appear civil in her eyes.

Brittain puts out his hand. “You guys sure got me the other day.”

I don't know what he's talking about.

“At workout. It was a good move.”

I smile and raise my eyebrows. It
was
a good move. I turn for my seat as the bell rings, but Mark catches me
softly by the shoulder. “Could I ask you something?” Jody stands silently beside him.

“Sure.”

“Why did you guys do it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You and Ellerby must really hate me. I hit ninety-seven repeats with you, and you sucked me into losing out on the last three. I can't imagine ever doing that to either of you.”

I can. My stare drifts to Jody. I'm guessing she believes Brittain was victimized by a couple of insensitive pagan mermen.

“We were just being ornery,” I say slowly, hoping to avoid alienating my future wife, “but you were on a free ride. I'd set the pace and you'd hang in. Ellerby would set the pace and you'd hang in. You never set the pace.”

“All you'd have had to do was ask,” he says. Then, “It wasn't a very Christian thing to do, that's all.”

You don't get very far into a conversation with Mark Brittain without hearing that word. It irritates me because what he really means is, “You're wrong and I'm right and God knows it.” I want to tell him I'm not a Christian, but that won't likely put me in better standing with Jody, who goes to Mark's church, so I just look away.

“You could be a little more compassionate, Calhoune. You know, you guys run around in that car, making fun of important things and blaspheming, and you don't have much consideration for the people you may hurt.”

I'm caught. I mean, I can't take a guy seriously when he's using words like “blaspheming,” but I'm over a barrel if I don't want to look like the worst kind of heretic in front of Jody. What I'd like to do is make Brittain horizontal, but that would only put me another rung lower on Jacob's ladder in Jody's eyes. It's a close call, though. I'm pretty embarrassed, and if Brittain says much more I might at least have to do verbal surgery on him.

Brittain looks wounded; my portrait as an ogre is complete. I make a note that he will not finish ahead of me on even one repeat today in workout. He and Jody walk off to their seats as I tell her, “Nice blouse.” Great moves, Mobe.

“Park it,” Lemry says, scanning her attendance book. She moves to the front of her desk, hoisting herself up. “At the end of last class I asked each of you to be ready with a subject for your class presentation—something that addresses a contemporary social or psychological or spiritual dilemma. I asked that it be
something with particular meaning to your life. Now. Today. I gave you possibilities such as war, world hunger, abortion, the homeless, children's rights, spiritual beliefs, political ideologies, et cetera. All I require is that you be willing to look at your subject from a personal perspective, that is, how the dilemma affects you.” She glances quickly around the room. “Anybody want to step up and save those who didn't believe I meant what I said?”

Ellerby's hand shoots up. That's a surprise. “To the rescue,” he says. “I want to talk about religion.”

“As long as you don't try to lead us in prayer. It's against the law.”

“Rest assured,” Ellerby says, “I won't lead us in prayer. I'll leave that to Brittain.”

“And no personal remarks,” Lemry warns.

Ellerby nods assent. “I brought a tape,” he says. “I want to play it.”

Lemry has audio and video equipment available because she has encouraged us to bring in outside stimuli to promote discussion.

“It's a song,” Ellerby says. “Everybody's recording it these days, but this was the first person I ever heard.” He pops in the cassette and passes out a sheet of lyrics, some of which are underlined, along with a color
reproduction of the NASA photo of the earth taken from the moon. The song is “From a Distance” by Julie Gold, and it's sung by a country singer named Nancy Griffith.