Clouds were visible again on the horizon. Serena no longer insisted that they were mountains, but Nana saw a house on a rocky promontory, a trick of the waning light.
If clouds were mountains, they could be in the Rockies, surrounded by stone that would keep them safe, in a cabin with oak doors and thick forest all around them. She saw a big, naked tree held fast by its roots in the middle of a faraway, stubbled field. “We’re like that tree,” she said, “except it’s rooted in one place, a part of everything, and for some reason we can’t stop. We have to keep going.”
To nowhere, she thought, remembering the lyrics of a long-ago song. I could stand there naked, she thought, in one of those distant windows, in that imposing mansion, inside a mirage. I could stand there, not like an exhibitionist, longing for attention, making a statement, protesting so much merde, but simply to say, “Here I am. I stand here naked in my chrysalis; make of it what you will.”
“Whatever,” Serena said, as if it explained everything, and maybe it did. “Whatever.” She shrugged and stared toward the horizon until the highway angled away from the children’s moon. “Nana? You listening?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I am. Whatever. It is what it is.”
They drove under the moon, now covered by clouds that still looked like mountains. Snow. It was a cold place much of the year, always had been. That would never change. Things might be different in Tulsa.
They could see the horizon.
Would they ever reach it?
The Cafeteria Strut
Chuck Larson, all-state in three sports but particularly potent on the football field, was the most popular boy in high school despite his guess in History that the Rosetta Stone was a ski mountain in Colorado. He was so popular girls actually fainted—this is no joke—at the sight of him each day as he strutted from the gym after practice to the cafeteria with Coach at his side and a phalanx of back-seat buddies and beefy linemen. Coach had his table tennis paddle with him so that he could whack anybody who didn’t hustle. When Chuck and his entourage reached the cafeteria, carefully trained food service personnel served them a special gourmet meal, food and service the rest of us couldn’t buy even at Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que. If we had tuna fish, for Chuck and his cronies it was steak and walleye. If we had hamburger stretched with soybeans, for Chuck it was a fifty-four-ounce tomahawk ribeye.
Those were simple times. All of us felt safe inside whatever cocoon we happened to inhabit. Except for me. Or that’s how I felt, anyway, as if I was alone and hung out to dry in the teeter-totter world that went bad. Chuck bathed in adulation the way a voluptuary samples powders and perfumes, seldom so ravenous that he didn’t take a good twenty minutes to strut to the cafeteria. He soaked up glory like a sponge. By the time he became a senior with two Dakota state championships under his belt, the fainting girls were a problem. Coach recruited several misfits like myself to sit on benches at strategic points on the cafeteria route. “Do a bang-up job,” Coach said, tapping his paddle against one humongous thigh, “and I won’t run the hell out of you.” Coach was famous for those fifty-minute runs. He would take us outside and sit himself down in a lawn chair that sagged under his weight. He would place his paddle on one thigh, take out his stopwatch, and shout, “Go”!”
We went. It was good training for life’s hard knocks, he liked to say. “When you go out in the world,” he said, “you’ll need a pistol in one pocket and brass knuckles on almost every finger.”
Sad thing is, he turned out to be something like right.
We were supposed to protect the fainting girls from bruises, concussions, and an unladylike disarray of clothing when they keeled over. The job was a privilege, Coach told us, and he would see to it that we were recognized at the year’s last pep rally. “Chuck himself will give you a salute,” Coach said in a high nasal voice that sounded almost feminine, the result of a near-fatal accident. Maxwell, the misfit who took credit for the accident, loved to parody Coach’s reedy voice. Before Coach dismissed us, he told us we would have to bring our lunches and stay to the sidewalk benches we were assigned. “Chuck doesn’t like to see the girls get hurt.”
“If he doesn’t do right by us,” Maxwell said to me, “I’ll start pounding nails into his footprints again. Maybe a spear in the pipes wasn’t enough for the old geezer, huh?” Maxwell was a gamer. He believed in magic.
I shrugged. One must fasten one’s gaze, I thought—something I’d read in a book and taken to heart. I lived on the bench anyway, staring at the water tower across campus that glinted in the bright sun, the same tower I could see from the rented house where I lived with my sick mother and my father, a trucker who was seldom at home, which was a good thing. When he was in the house, things went to hell in a handbasket. As I waited for a glimpse of Molly, the girl I loved hopelessly, it was easy to pretend that the water tower really was the Rosetta Stone and that Chuck flew down its hieroglyphic slopes in a hooded red parka, studying the terrain below with glances through a pair of sleek goggles. As for Molly, I was too bashful to speak to her, but I knew her schedule. She had pep squad when Chuck practiced, and I would see her jog to the gym in khaki shorts and top, stopping at the tall door to leap, one hand stretched high and her caramel-colored hair, if unbraided, flying every which way as a finger touched the head of the door with grace and triumph.
Maxwell was assigned the bench closest to the gym; it was his job to report the first sighting each day. Maxwell sometimes spent his free time creeping around campus with a silver ball-peen hammer in his book bag to pound fourpenny nails into Coach’s footprints. He had learned in Anthropology that one tribe believed that such a ritual cursed the victim with impotence or caused some unpredictable tragedy to occur. When he wasn’t stalking Coach with his silver hammer, his idea of a good joke was to tiptoe up to you while you daydreamed and squirt a mouthful of water in your ear.
His vendetta against Coach dated back to the day he spit, on a dare, into the face of a jock strutting toward him who said something demeaning to him. The jock, instead of beating him to a bloody pulp then and there and maybe getting suspended, dragged him to Coach, who was also the school’s drama director and unofficial disciplinarian. The jock, aching for revenge, threw Maxwell down like a sack of potatoes on the proscenium as Coach worked in despair with the homecoming queen, or the HQ as we called her.
The HQ, whose name was Tina and who later came to a tragic end, was trying without much luck to learn her lines in A Streetcar Named Desire, a play chosen only because she and Chuck had seen the movie in a film class together and decided they had to play Blanche and Stanley. It would be a hoot, they thought, but the HQ had trouble remembering what time of the month it was, much less her lines. She was an atrocious actress even by the standards of Coach, whose idea of great drama were the television reruns of a sitcom called Father Knows Best. In need of a break, he opened his mouth into a broad smile and left the HQ to her own mnemonic devices. He nodded to the jock, who dragged Maxwell across a baseball diamond and two football fields to the school’s septic tank.
Maxwell fought like hell, kicking and screaming. “You fuckface! Your fate is sealed!” That didn’t deter the jock, his facial muscles as tight as a drum. He pulled Maxwell up the tank’s metal ladder, rung by rung, with Coach urging him onward. The way Maxwell told it, Coach had a rubber-duckie smile the whole time that would have wiped clean a filthy latrine, but moments before the jock drowned him like the runt in a litter of kittens, Coach benevolently interceded. Instead of a dunking, Maxwell received the paddling of his young life. Coach saved him from what would have been a possibly terminal dunking, but also earned his undying animus.
Each day after our new assignment, which, absurd as it was, was sanctioned by the school’s principal, Maxwell took a bologna sandwich and two checkered flags to a perch near the gym. The rest of us, tense, nervous, sat on other benches farther along the school’s covered walk, quickly dispatching our own gummy cheese sandwiches as we waited for Chuck. Maxwell was supposed to follow Chuck like a familiar. If there was an early flurry of fainting, we expected him to wave the flags like a switchman, but he was unreliable.
Sometimes he gave greater priority to his lunch than to the protection of delicate female skulls. They fell like tenpins. At other times he waved the black-and-white flags like an artist covering airy canvas with fluid swirls of checkered cloth, hypnotizing himself, working off adrenaline and anger, oblivious to our confusion.
We hated Coach too, but at least we got the chance to cradle fainting coeds. Maxwell had only the taste of bologna on his breath and, for company, only his checkered flags, his silver hammer, and his fourpenny nails.
The girls would synchronize their watches during morning announcements and gather near noon in sleek coteries along the covered walk. Without Maxwell’s flags to warn us, they sometimes fell like glass trinkets, eyes rolling back as though watching themselves faint. “Is he hot or what?” we heard them say, which was often fair warning. It was a form of sexual hysteria that I had never witnessed before. It required adolescents of a certain age with overactive metabolisms and imaginations to drop as if shot through the head at the sight of a muscular, hormone-crazed young man. One of them, Dee Dee—an airhead if ever there was one—followed him everywhere with such devotion that she became a bad joke, though she was nice to me; and later, when I heard that she ended up in prison after a bizarre accident that killed a man, I was sorry I hadn’t tried to help her before she went completely off the rails.
From my bench I would stare down the walkway, dazzled by the carnival of swirling color. Their suntanned legs were more suitable for bareback riding over ranchland than for restless drumming beneath desks smudged with inky fingerprints and carved with graffiti. The most provocative girls had permanents or carefully styled bouffants, a sight seldom seen anymore except in old movies or TV series set in the middle of the last century. We lived in an alternate universe. They wore short skirts and stood on heels, hips cocked. Almost without exception, rumor had them available for more than malted milks if you were Chuck or one of the anointed members of his offensive line. The linemen favored long, thick mullets that year. Some things never change.
A few of the girls were more modest, more ladylike, at least until Chuck arrived. They would lean toward Chuck like long-stemmed flowers, their faces clear with health or the miracles of dermatology. Once, I passed Molly in the doorway of the Social Science building, her hair braided and her eyes full of sparkles of light as Chuck flirted with her. He winked at me. “You a freshman?”
I blushed, my mind paralyzed by his attention, until Molly slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Hush, sweetie,” she said. “He’s a senior, same as us. Name of Heimlich.” She pronounced it as Heimlich, with a “k” at the end, as if my mission in life was to apply pressure on the abdomen between the naval and the rib cage.
“Heimlich?” Chuck said, grinning his infamous good-natured, shit-eating grin. “Is that maneuver named after you?”
But Chuck was more than just a senior. Robust and good-looking like some muscle-bound steroid freak, with high cheekbones and a square jaw, he always focused his eyes modestly on the middle distance. In Streetcar he flaunted his stuff, as though going all the way for a score, improvising like a pro when the HQ fainted on stage after he removed his shirt and thumped his chest. He stayed in character and carried her to the wings. While Coach revived her with smelling salts, Chuck put his shirt back on and returned with her understudy. Everyone except the stage technicians, like me, backstage, hooted and hollered and thought the fainting spell was part of the script.
The day after this performance, the campus was abuzz. “Oh, my God; is he hot or what? Oh, my God!” the girls murmured. Dee Dee, one of the high-maintenance girls, had fainted more than a dozen times. Like Tina, she too came to a bad end later when she got a guy’s head stuck in her car’s windshield, which is a story for another time, but that day she was high only on Chuck.
Coach expected an epidemic of fainting. He spoke to us briefly in the well-modulated tones of a snake oil salesman, invoking the saintly power of positive thinking. Then he waved his paddle in our faces, reminding us that this was one day when mistakes would not be tolerated. Finally, he armed us with a medical device purchased through the generosity of an anonymous donor, “a philanthropist from over in Bismarck.”
We pocketed these devices and hastened to our posts, behind and slightly to the side of whichever girl we had been selected to protect.
As luck would have it, I was assigned to Molly. She was one of the few girls who had never fainted, but I had studied her habits for so long that I was certain I would be able to predict when the amount of blood reaching her brain was no longer sufficient to compensate for the sight of Chuck. Then I would have three options: I could use my medical device, cushion her slow-motion tumble, or miss her and let her smack her skull as a way to hurt what I loved most.
In those days my empathy was limited. I imagined Molly would faint the way an alcoholic might pass out after one too many shots of rye. The sight of Chuck made girls about his age drunk, and I don’t just mean Dee Dee; I mean girls I couldn’t get out of my head. I was jealous of Chuck to beat the band. Those young women stared at him, their breathing grew short and heavy, some kind of sigh or grunt involuntarily escaping from their mouths, and they swooned to the ground like flowers that wilt after too much sun and rain.
Chuck knew what was waiting for him, of course, and he loved it. Unless he was especially hungry or running late, he took his time, loitering with each group of admirers, and the day after Streetcar would certainly be no exception. It was hard on all of us. I feared his occasional outbursts, but at least they were quick and merciful. He would emerge from the gym ravenous, crouched low, his steel-trap muscles rippling as he sprinted in a dazzle of broken-field running, bowling over any moving object without a skirt or faculty badge. The girls, bedazzled by such power, dropped like ticks pinched off the skin. Our low-budget reflexes were no match for such a blitzkrieg. On such days, Chuck seemed like perfection itself.
In fact, he only made one public mistake in his high school career; that near-fatal blunder, though nobody else knew it, was brought on by Maxwell and his penny nails. At a track meet, Chuck was scheduled to throw the javelin, and he hoped to break the state record. He had flirted with it at several previous meets, he was well rested, and he was performing in a good wind before the home crowd.
But something went terribly wrong. He miscalculated on the crucial throw and hurled the javelin like a spear, right through Coach’s neck.
Coach had been bearing down without mercy on the geeks, the gamers, the gearheads, and the ones like me who kept our heads inside a book. All of us had been designated to carry water for the jocks. During the track meet Maxwell had made his way onto the field to pound fourpenny nails wherever he could. Coach had caught him red-handed. When Chuck made his fateful toss, Coach was swinging his paddle wildly above Maxwell’s skull, so the javelin took him completely by surprise. Flailing his arms wildly, he went down, pinned like a biology specimen to the grassy infield, the paddle still flapping spasmodically. He had taught Chuck everything he knew about the javelin, had directed him through his every stage performance, and at one pep rally had claimed to love him like a son.
After a few paralyzed moments, Chuck, his arm still dangling before him, tried to rush to Coach. Everyone could see what he wanted to do: yank away the javelin and make things right, reverse time, change the fabric of reality. And probably he would have done it—that’s how magical his charisma was—but his teammates restrained him.
Two medical technicians rushed to the stricken coach. As delicately as Boy Scouts they unfastened him, like unpegging the corner of a tent, and gently placed him on a stretcher, the javelin still in his neck. They had to cut it with a hacksaw before they could maneuver him into the waiting ambulance. Miraculously, Coach was alert the entire time, able to wave his paddle to the shocked spectators before the ambulance, its siren bleeping, rushed him to surgery.
Maxwell nodded knowingly, his lips pursed in triumph, and pointed to his nearby book bag, which was clunky with his silver hammer and what was left of a pound of fourpenny nails.
Though I was shocked by the accident, I had to stifle a laugh when Coach went down like one of the fainting girls. I didn’t know what to do with my mixed emotions. I imagined the javelin holding my father to the ground during one of his drinking bouts when he swung his belt instead of a paddle at any part of my body he could reach.
Coach was finally taken off the critical list and Chuck became himself again, as though he had walked into and out of somebody else’s nightmare. Miraculously, Coach had only a nasty scar and that voice, high and sweet like Molly’s, to remind us of his brush with death, and Chuck received a great outpouring of sympathy. “He’s more human now, don’t you think?” I overheard Molly say. “Now I can see he needs love and compassion more than the rest of us.”
When I heard that, I wanted the son of a bitch dead like a doornail. I went looking for Maxwell, determined to ask him to conjure up more magic.
Even so, the day after A Streetcar Named Desire, I stood as ordered behind and slightly to Molly’s side as Chuck and his phalanx approached. He was still strutting like Stanley, still the spit and image of Brando in the movie all of us had been forced to watch in English class, and I knew my work was cut out for me. We had also read Julius Caesar in English, and looking at Chuck it was easy to imagine Caesar in Rome, desperate petitioners reaching out with their pleas. Crossing up Chuck on his exalted plane was as unthinkable as betraying Caesar. Like Chuck, Caesar no doubt consoled a few with a clap on the back, an intimate nod. He probably nudged others in a generous show of affection, deigning to treat a second-string senator as his peer. For the girls, Chuck had his patented vague smile, that sensuously full underlip slightly curled at the corners. His smile, sometimes aided by a hooded wink, was usually what did them in. First a sigh, then a rolling of the eyes, and finally a seasick swaying before the swoon. Chuck took them down like deadfall.
That day, when he seemed most like a deity, I revived Molly with the medical device from the philanthropist: a vial of smelling salts so strong it would make a dead horse kick. “Never rely on the kindness of a stranger,” I murmured, waving the salts like a wand before her upturned, neighing nostrils, cradling her gently and smelling her soapy aroma. “Take advantage of the one who loves you.”
Her eyes fluttered and her mouth opened in a bright smile. She laughed. “Gotcha,” she said. “I don’t faint, even over a dreamboat like him.” For a moment we were intimate and carefree, as if lying alone on a checkered blanket in a prairie field full of high grass with a picnic basket beside us. It was a moment of camaraderie, of joyous freedom, that I’ve seldom managed to find again. It was as if Chuck had magically transferred some of his charisma to me. Then she stared away to the cafeteria. “Did you see him in Streetcar?” she asked.
I stood and pulled her to her feet. I stared darkly at her. I didn’t say a word.
“Wasn’t it the loveliest thing you ever saw? He was wonderful, like one of those statues come to life. We get to live in the Time of Chuck. Are we lucky to have him here among us, or what?” She laughed again, this time so hard she had trouble catching her breath.
“Got me for the second time,” I said.
