Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (7 page)

Nancy's nasal twang brings a few guffaws from the heavy metal set, but we settle in on the lyrics, which talk about how “from a distance”—like maybe out in space—the world looks good. The air appears crisp and blue, mountains are capped with a pure, clean, snow frosting, and there's no scum floating where the ocean meets the shore. From that distance you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys, and when that's true, there's no reason to fight. You can't see germs and people dying from diseases; it's just all one big whole thing that needs to be taken care of by everyone, like a beautiful house and yard. Then, in the last verse, Nancy says that's where God watches us from: from a distance.

It's a good song. A great song.

“There's a stroke of real genius,” Brittain says immediately. “Wouldn't you just expect some theological prodigy driving a blasphemous Pontiac station wagon to bring us his religious view packaged in a country-western song.”

“If thine enemy offend thee, Reverend Swaggart,” Ellerby says back, “meet him out behind the gym after school.”

Lemry looks around the room in mock exaggeration. “Did anyone hear me say ‘No personal remarks'?” Her eyebrows arc for the sky as she points one index finger at each. “Those are the rules. Don't make me enforce them at workout.”

I see her point is well taken:
Mess up my class and I'll swim you so hard your arms will drift, unattached, to the bottom of the pool.

Lemry says, “So make your point, Mr. Ellerby.”

“My point is that God created a prototype for a reasonably sturdy carbon unit, gave us a perfectly usable place to live, some excellent advice, as in ‘words to live by'—most of which are misunderstood by the least of my brethren—and stood back to see what we'd do with it.”

I'm surprised. I didn't know Ellerby had any philosophical considerations. I thought he just drove his Christian Cruiser through the world seeing whose nose he could get up. And how far.

Lemry's eyes land on me. “Mobe?”

My hands shoot up in surrender. “I give a wide berth to all religious discussions. My plan is to get baptized late in the afternoon of the evening I die, so I don't have time to sin. A spot in heaven awaits me.”

“Cute,” she says. “And chicken. Jody?”

Shoot. I should have uttered something biblical.

Jody flashes a sideways glance at Mark, saying simply, “I guess I think God takes a closer look than that.”

I could go either way on this. I don't have a quarrel with Christianity one way or the other. As near as I know, Mom doesn't have religious beliefs, so I wasn't brought up with any. I know some Bible stories from going to Sunday School with my friends when I was younger, but mostly they were just good stories. I see where getting religion quick here could work to my advantage with Jody, but I can't jump ship on my friend Ellerby. Steve has a reputation as a verbal troublemaker, and I would abandon him in a second for Jody alone, but not for Mark Brittain. So though I can once again see how the Russians and the Americans fought on the same side in WWII, I'm Switzerland. Good-bye, Jody, my love.

“Give us more information, Steve,” Lemry says. “If you're right, what does it mean?”

“I'm not sure what all it means,” he says. “But I'll tell you what made me bring it in. The other day when Mobe was trying to figure out whether the world was a good place or a bad place, and he used Sarah Byrnes for an example, I was ready to agree with him. No ques
tion, she's got a rough road to go down. But when I thought about it more, I realized the world is a good place for me, most of the time anyway, and that got me to thinking about fairness. If God is fair, how do you explain me and Sarah Byrnes on the same planet? And if he really rewards piousness and public prayer and all that, like Brittain seems to think, how come he lets me drive my car around without blowing out my tires, and how come he lets me kick Brittain's butt in the pool?”

Lemry says, “Watch it…”

“I had this Sunday School teacher,” Ellerby goes on, “and every time I asked her a tough question—like ‘How come nobody ever caught Jack the Ripper?' or ‘Why did my big brother get killed when he got straight A's clear through college and was going into the seminary?'—she'd say the Lord works in strange and mysterious ways that we may not understand.” Ellerby leans forward on his desk now, his intensity as visible as the pulse in his temple. “But I think there's nothing strange and mysterious about it. I figure if those things were in God's jurisdiction, he'd do something different about them. But they aren't. Those are in our jurisdiction.”

I glance over to check Jody's reaction, but can't read a thing. Brittain, on the other hand, is having blood pressure difficulty, and explodes. “This is so much BS!
People throw out this line of crap for one reason: so they can do whatever they darn well please. It's a bogus way of not having to be accountable to God.”

Ellerby ignores him—I mean like Brittain isn't even in the room—and continues. “From a distance,” he says, “my car looks like every other car on the freeway, and Sarah Byrnes looks just like the rest of us. And if she's going to get help, she'll get it from herself or she'll get it from us. Let me tell you why I brought this up. Because the other day when I saw how hard it was for Mobe to go to the hospital to see her, I was embarrassed that I didn't know her better, that I ever laughed at one joke about her. I was embarrassed that I let some kid go to school with me for twelve years and turned my back on pain that must be unbearable. I was embarrassed that I haven't found a way to include her somehow the way Mobe has.”

Jesus. I feel tears welling up, and I see them running down Ellerby's cheeks. Lemry better get a handle on this class before it turns into some kind of therapy group.

“So,” Lemry says quietly, “your subject will be the juxtaposition of man and God in the universe?”

Ellerby shakes his head. “My subject will be shame.”

From across the ward I watch Virgil Byrnes sitting next to Sarah Byrnes on the couch, his eyes burning into the side of her head, teeth clenched so tight it looks like there's a marble below his jawbone. He's talking, but his lips barely move. Dressed in his traditional black, angular as a hawk, he cuts a fearsome, dangerous profile. I can't see her eyes, but Sarah Byrnes's head moves not one iota, and I'm guessing she's locked onto her favorite spot. Mr. Byrnes sits back, breathing deep, then momentarily puts his mouth close to her ear and stands to leave.

Virgil Byrnes really is a scary dude. He's one of those shadowy people you can't imagine ever having been a kid; the kind of man a dog circles warily, his hackles at attention. Mr. Byrnes doesn't talk much, but
his glare makes Mautz look like Bambi. The most telling thing about him is how afraid he makes Sarah Byrnes. Sarah Byrnes isn't afraid of much, but your mention of her dad's name dramatically increases your chances of a black eye and a bloody nose.

I stand against the back desk, trying hard to fade into the background as he moves toward the exit, but he spots me and moves in my direction. His black, broad-brimmed hat rides low over his eyes, and a tattered black cotton sportcoat pulls tight on his broad shoulders. His gray shirt is buttoned to the top, and his dark baggy pants complete the picture of Death, come calling at your door in the middle of a dark, rainy night. That may sound a bit dramatic, but I wanna tell you, Sarah Byrnes's pappy gives me maximum creeps. “You're Calhoune,” he says, standing a few feet from me.

“Yes sir.”

He glances back at Sarah Byrnes, then back to me. “She say anything to you?”

“No sir.”

He's quiet another moment, staring hard at my eyes. I hold his gaze, vowing not to blink or look away, while sweat glands pop open like kernels of popcorn. “You let me know if she does.”

“Yes sir.”

The attendant stands patiently by the open door, keys dangling from her hand, and Mr. Byrnes disappears into the outer hallway.

I think I detect the fleeting shadow of a sneer across Sarah Byrnes's lip as I slip onto the seat beside her, but I know it must be my imagination, and I can't help thinking back to what Dale Thornton said that day.

 

“I think we oughta do a
ex
-pose on that little rat Elgin Greene,” Dale said, pacing the wooden floor of our attic hideaway. “Little goofball's got some kinda bad news stink to him. We could chase it down, maybe find out it come from a giant comet turd landin' in his backyard or somethin'. You know, explodin' all over his whole family whenever it hit.” Dale had definitely become comfortable with the content, if not the spirit of our biweekly rag.

I sat at the keyboard, chin propped in one hand, feeding myself nonstop Lorna Doones with the other, a major writer's block shrouding me like the stench around Elgin Greene.

Sarah Byrnes lay on the couch, heels planted firmly against the arm, absently drumming her hands on her stomach along with the Kingston Trio, one of whom was runnin' like a dog through the Everglades. “I've
told you a thousand times, we don't pick on guys like Elgin Greene. He's one of us, only helpless.”

“Ole Greene ain't helpless. Get downwind from that kid, he's a powerful mother.” He laughed, nodding. “Yup. I think a ex-pose on Elgin Greene is right what we need.”

“First of all, it's
ex-po-say,”
Sarah Byrnes said. “Not
ex
-pose. Jesus, you could at least learn to say it right. And second, we pick on people who do us dirt. Picture us as good guys, Dale, hard as that may be for you. We're champions of the underdog. Underdogs call Elgin Greene an underdog. We're not giving him a hard time and that's it.”

“So you come up with somethin',” Dale said. “You're so damn smart, got your brains all wrapped up in your ugly head by them scars.” Dale was going for the throat; it didn't take much to wound him. Killing him was something else…. “That's the only reason you stay so smart. None of it gets out 'cause it's packed in there so good.”

No half-witted remark about burn scars ever got a rise out of Sarah Byrnes—not since maybe first grade. “Oh, Dale,” she said sarcastically, “you're just so darn clever. I bet all the girls swoon. Got lots of dates lined up for the weekend?”

“Up yours,” he said. “You really ain't so damn
smart. You think you got everybody fooled about them scars, but you ain't fooled me. Them scars didn't come from no pot of spaghetti. No way.”

Sarah Byrnes was off the couch in a second, her teeth clenched like a sprung bear trap. “You better just shut up.”

Dale laughed. “I'll shut up, okay, but that don't change the truth.”

I said, “Why do you say stuff like that, Dale? Man, you got to be careful when you go slandering one of
us
. We're supposed to save that for the enemy.”

“Ain't no slander. Just fact. I know it same way Sarah Byrnes knowed how my daddy kicked my ass when he found out about the chew. I seen her with her daddy. She got a shit family, just like me.”

The fire in Sarah Byrnes's eyes blazed. “You're a Thornton. You wouldn't know the truth if it walked up behind you and bit your ass and stole your wallet.” She sat back. “You know what? I'm kind of tired of this paper anyway. Maybe we should just quit. We've made our point.”

I wanted to leap up and stop her, but I couldn't let Dale see us disagree without paying dearly after he was gone. We had published eight papers, in the course of which we had detailed each and every year of the sordid
past of Mautz's illegitimate, twin-beaned alien son, including the two years he spent as Elvis's secret gay lover.

I certainly didn't want to halt the presses before we completed our four-part exposé, and this confrontation between Sarah Byrnes and Dale Thornton threatened to do just that. Though I was responsible for the word-smithery of about ninety percent of all written material, no way would I have had guts enough to continue without Sarah Byrnes's fierce resolve. Dale Thornton, I could have done without anytime.

Crispy Pork Rinds
slid downhill from that moment. Sarah Byrnes said we needed to move on to other modes of terrorism and that Dale Thornton was as stupid as she had always thought and she didn't want him around us too much longer or our brain cells might start to melt. We printed only one more edition, in which I doubled up to complete reports on the Mautz family tree.

A few weeks later Dale Thornton was unceremoniously dumped as unassistant editor, and Sarah Byrnes and I began other kinds of tactical assaults on those who wronged us: a box of fish guts planted in a locker here at the beginning of a long weekend, analgesic balm spread lavishly there in someone's underpants while he was dressed down for PE. By year's end we had suc
cessfully distributed more than twenty hollow gumballs doctored with Tabasco sauce from a hypodermic syringe. All were single acts of vengeance requiring no protection from Dale Thornton. Sarah Byrnes and I were on a roll.

But that summer Lemry saw me swimming at a public pool and talked me into trying out for her AAU swim team, and Sarah Byrnes and I began drifting away from each other. She said it was me and I said it was her. For the first year, I ate like more of a pig than I am just to show her I wouldn't get svelte and handsome and popular so she'd have to hate me, but as workouts increased in length and intensity, my eating barrage couldn't stand up to my changing metabolism and I began to get occasional glimpses of my feet.

“Look,” Sarah Byrnes said one day during our freshman year, after I'd been working out almost eleven months, “if you keep eating like a starving Biafran turned loose at the Food Circus just to prove me wrong about why we're friends, you'll die of a heart attack before you're fifteen. So stop already.”

It was a relief, because I was actually starting to feel good about myself from swimming—at least better—and Lemry was ready to send me to “Ripley's Believe It or Not!” to find out why I was swimming four to six
thousand yards a day and still puffing up like a blowfish. “But what if I'm not fat?” I blurted in desperation. “Will you still be my friend?”

“God,” Sarah Byrnes said. “You're such a lamebrain. It isn't me who'll go away, it's you. People will just look at you differently than they do now. Other people will like you, and you'll go to them. It's not a big deal, Eric. It's just the way things work.”

For the thousandth time I protested, but she raised a scarred hand. “Don't worry. I've always known this. It doesn't even hurt.”

Sarah Byrnes wasn't completely right, though she wasn't completely wrong, either. We did spend less time together, but mostly just because swimming takes a lot of time. I tried to get her to turn out with me, but she gave me a quick, graphic dermatology lesson on the effects of chlorine and intense sunlight on burn scars and that was that. I still saw her almost every day and we still did things together on a regular basis, but she struck up a cautious friendship with Dale Thornton, I think as a hedge against possible losses, and wasn't available as much of the time.

I made it my life's resolution to refuse any invitation that excluded Sarah Byrnes. Even though she rarely agreed to go anywhere with me, when I brought her
name up, if one nose crinkled, I uninvited myself on the spot. That's how I stay fat for her now.

 

“Wanna have an adventure?” Ellerby and I navigate the Christian Cruiser through the dusky streets. It's Saturday night, about 7:30, and we're killing time before the dance over at the school gym.

“What'll it be?” he says. “Zero to thirteen miles an hour in the space of one short city block? Crank up the sound system and drive back and forth in front of Brittain's place?”

“Better,” I said. “Let's take her down to the Edison district.”

“You want to be an organ donor?” The Edison district has a tavern for approximately every three-point-five people over the age of six, and Spokane absolutely depends on it to keep our crime rate equal to or above other US cities of our relative size.

“There's somebody down there I need to talk to,” I say. “We won't be there long.”

“No,” Ellerby says, flipping a U-ie, “we probably won't.”

In the neighborhoods behind the Edison strip, most streetlights are broken, and twisted street signs point in directions where there aren't streets, so it takes us a
while to find West Reardon. Ellerby drops the Cruiser to about ten miles per hour so I can read the numbers. I've only been to Dale Thornton's place once, and that was back in junior high when he made Sarah Byrnes and me prove we liked him by going there. I went, but I didn't like him.

“Here.” Ellerby pulls up in front of a ramshackle cottage with a tilted garage off to one side and several rusted-out cars and a truck on blocks in the front yard. “This has to be it—I remember that truck. Be careful. I think a dog lives in it.”

Ellerby leaves the engine running, and I step onto a dirt road thinly coated with ice. A dim light shines from the living room, and I move cautiously up the sidewalk, eyeing the old truck from which I fully expect a saber-toothed junkyard mutt to spring, flashing yellow eyes locked on my jugular.

It doesn't happen. I take a deep breath and knock as Ellerby moves silently up the walk behind me. Canine thunder bursts forth from inside, followed by a deep, booming, “SHUT UP!” When the door opens, I'm staring at the three-day-stubbled face of Morton Thornton, aka Butch. I hope Dale never told him about the
Crispy Pork Rinds
story, or at least who wrote it. His beer-blurred eyes tell me he wouldn't remember anyway.

“Is Dale at home?”

He squints suspiciously. “Yeah. Out back. In the garage.”

“Okay if we talk with him?”

“Okay with me,” he says, “if it's okay with him. Go around and kick the door,” and we hop off the side of the porch. “An' don't come knockin' on my door at night without no appointment.”

“Right friendly part of town,” Ellerby whispers as we make our way through the pitch dark, over batteries and car hoods and enough spare parts to build a spaceship.

A bright light shines through the broken windowpane in the garage door, and I peer in to see a body bent over the engine of a station wagon that is the match of Ellerby's from a negative universe. A radio on the workbench blares pure country and Dale sings along, amazingly on key.

My hard knock brings no response, so I follow Mr. Thornton's advice and give it a kick, bringing Dale's head up hard under the sharp rim of the hood. He says, “Shit!” and turns down the radio.

I'm surprised at the neatness of his makeshift shop. Each tool hangs on the wall inside a meticulously drawn outline of that tool. The surface of the workbench is clean and the floor is swept. Dale stands, bright light shining in his eyes, holding his end wrench like a
revolver recently fired, his legs spread like a gunslinger's. But he's so
small
. Dale Thornton hasn't grown one inch since junior high school. His tight, sleeveless T-shirt displays the same muscle definition, outlining his washboard stomach, but he's little.

“Dale?” I say.

He squints. “Who wants to know?”

“It's Eric. Eric Calhoune.”

“Who?”

“Remember? From junior high? I wrote that newspaper with you and Sarah Byrnes.”

He smiles a bit and steps forward. “Scarface?” he says. Then, “Oh, Fat Boy.”

“Yeah. That's me.”

He places the wrench carefully on the workbench, pulling a grease rag from his hip pocket. “What the hell you doin' here? Who's this?”

“This is Ellerby,” I say, and Steve steps forward, offering his hand. Dale looks down at his own hand, still black with grease, smiles and shakes Ellerby's hand. Dale hasn't changed much.