Part 37 (2/2)

'You're a good boy, Clivey.'

'Thank you, sir.'

His grandfather stood ruminating, his Kool burning with unnatural rapidity (the tobacco was dry, and although he puffed seldom, the greedy hilltop wind smoked the cigarette ceaselessly), and Clive thought the old man had said everything he had to say. He was sorry. He loved to hear Grandpa talk. The things Grandpa said continually amazed him because they almost always made sense. His mother, his father, Gramma, Uncle Don - they all said things he was supposed to take to heart, but they rarely made sense. Handsome is as handsome does, for instance - what did that mean?

He had a sister, Patty, who was six years older. He understood her but didn't care because most of what she said out loud was stupid. The rest was communicated in vicious little pinches. The worst of these she called 'Peter-Pinches'. She told him that, if he ever told about the Peter-Pinches, she'd murdalize him. Patty was always talking about people she was going to murdalize; she had a hit-list to rival Murder, Incorporated. It made you want to laugh . . . until you took a good look at her thin, grim face, that was. When you saw what was really there, you lost your desire to laugh. Clive did, anyway. And you had to be careful of her - she sounded stupid but was far from it.

'I don't want dates,' she had announced at supper one night not long ago - around the time that boys traditionally invited girls to either the Spring Dance at the country club or to the prom at the high school, in fact. 'I don't care if I never have a date.' And she had looked at them with wide-eyed defiance from above her plate of steaming meat and vegetables.

Clive had looked at the still and somehow spooky face of his sister peering through the steam and remembered something that had happened two months before, when there had still been snow on the ground. He'd come along the upstairs hallway in his bare feet so she hadn't heard him, and he had looked into the bathroom because the door was open - he hadn't had the slightest idea old Pukey Patty was in there. What he saw had frozen him dead in his tracks. If she had turned her head even a h'ttle to the left, she would have seen him.

She didn't, though. She had been too preoccupied with her inspection of herself. She had been standing there as naked as one of the slinky babes in Foxy Brannigan's well-thumbed Model Delights, her bath towel lying puddled around her feet. She was no slinky babe, though - Clive knew it, and she knew it too, from the look of her. Tears were rolling down her pimply cheeks. They were big tears and there were a lot of them, but she never made a sound. At last Clive had regained enough of his sense of self-preservation to tiptoe away, and he had never said a word to anyone about the incident, least of all to Patty herself. He didn't know if she would have been mad about her kid brother seeing her barea.s.s, but he had a good idea about how she'd react to the idea that he had seen her bawling (even that weird boohoo-less bawling she'd been doing); for that she would have murdalized him for sure.

'I think boys are dumb and most of them smell like gone-over cottage cheese,' she had said on that spring night. She stuck a forkful of roast beef into her mouth. 'If a boy ever asked me for a date, I'd laugh.'

'You'll change your mind about that, Punkin,' Dad said, chewing his roast beef and not looking up from the book beside his plate. Mom had given up trying to get him to stop reading at the table.

'No I won't,' Patty said, and Clive knew she wouldn't. When Patty said things she most always meant them. That was something Clive understood about her that his parents didn't. He wasn't sure she meant it - you know, really - about murdalizing him if he tattled on her about the Peter-Pinches, but he wasn't going to take chances. Even if she didn't actually kill him, she would find some spectacular yet untraceable way to hurt him, that was for sure. Besides, sometimes the Peter-Pinches weren't really pinches at all; they were more like the way Patty sometimes stroked her little half-breed poodle, Brandy, and he knew she was doing it because he was bad, but he had a secret he certainly did not intend to tell her: these other Peter-Pinches, the stroking ones, actually felt sort of good.

When Grandpa opened his mouth, Give thought he would say Time to go back t'the house, Clivey, but instead he told the boy: 'I'm going to tell you something, if you want to hear it. Won't take long. You want to hear it, Clivey?'

'Yes, sir!'

'You really do, don't you?' Grandpa said in a bemused voice.

'Yes, sir.'

'Sometimes I think I ought to steal you from your folks and keep you around forever. Sometimes I think if I had you on hand most the time, I'd live forever, G.o.ddam bad heart or not.'

He removed the Kool from his mouth, dropped it to the ground, and stamped it to death under one workboot, revolving the heel back and forth and then covering the b.u.t.t with the dirt his heel had loosened just to be sure. When he looked up at Clive again, it was with eyes that gleamed.

'I stopped giving advice a long time ago,' he said. 'Thirty years or more, I guess. I stopped when I noticed only fools gave it and only fools took it. Instruction, now . . . instruction's a different thing. A smart man will give a little from time to time, and a smart man - or boy - will take a little from time to time.'

Clive said nothing, only looked at his grandfather with close concentration.

'There are three kinds of time,' Grandpa said, 'and while all of them are real, only one is really real. You want to make sure you know them all and can always tell them apart. Do you understand that?'

'No, sir.'

Grandpa nodded. 'If you'd said ”Yes, sir”, I would have swatted the seat of your pants and taken you back to the farm.'

Clive looked down at the smeared results of Grandpa's cigarette, face hot with blush, proud.

'When a fellow is only a sprat, like you, time is long. Take a for-instance. When May comes, you think school's never gonna let out, that mid-month June will just never come. Ain't that pretty much how it is?'

Clive thought of that last weight of drowsy, chalk-smelling schooldays and nodded.

'And when mid-month June finally does come and Teacher gives you your report card and lets you go free, it seems like school's never gonna let back in. Ain't that pretty much right, too?'

Clive thought of that highway of days and nodded so hard his neck actually popped. 'Boy, it sure is! I mean, sir.' Those days. All those days, stretching away across the plains of June and July and over the unimaginable horizon of August. So many days, so many dawns, so many noon lunches of bologna sandwiches with mustard and raw chopped onion and giant gla.s.ses of milk while his mom sat silently in the living room with her bottomless gla.s.s of wine, watching the soap operas on the TV; so many depthless afternoons when sweat grew in the short hedge of your crewcut and then ran down your cheeks, afternoons when the moment you noticed that your blob of a shadow had grown a boy always came as a surprise, so many endless twilights with the sweat cooling away to nothing but a smell like aftershave on your cheeks and forearms while you played tag or red rover or capture the flag; sounds of bike chains, slots clicking neatly into oiled cogs, smells of honeysuckle and cooling asphalt and green leaves and cut gra.s.s, sounds of the slap of baseball cards being laid out on some kid's front walk, solemn and portentous trades which changed the faces of both leagues, councils that went on in the slow shady axial tilt of a July evening until the call of 'Cliiiiive! Sup-per!' put an end to that business; and that call was always as expected and yet as shocking as the noon blob that had, by three or so, become a black boy-shape running in the street beside him - and that boy stapled to his heels had actually become a man by five or so, albeit an extraordinarily skinny one; velvet evenings of television, the occasional rattle of pages as his father read one book after another (he never tired of them; words, words, words, his dad never tired of them, and Clive had meant once to ask him how that could be but lost his nerve), his mother getting up once in a while and going into the kitchen, followed only by his sister's worried, angry eyes and his own simply curious ones; the soft clink as Mom replenished the gla.s.s which was never empty after eleven in the morning or so (and their father never looking up from his book, although Clive had an idea he heard it all and knew it all, although Patty had called him a stupid liar and had given him a Peter-Pinch that hurt all day long the one time he had dared to tell her that); the sound of mosquitoes whining against the screens, always so much louder, it seemed, after the sun had gone down; the decree of bedtime, so unfair and unavoidable, all arguments lost before they were begun; his father's brusque kiss, smelling of tobacco, his mother's softer, both sugary and sour with the smell of wine; the sound of his sister telling Mom she ought to go to bed after Dad had gone down to the corner tavern to drink a couple of beers and watch the wrestling matches on the television over the bar; his mom telling Patty to mind her own p's and q's, a conversational pattern that was upsetting in its content but somehow soothing in its predictability; fireflies gleaming in the gloom; a car horn, distant, as he drifted into sleep's long dark channel; then the next day, which seemed the same but wasn't, not quite. Summer. That was summer. And it did not just seem long; it was long.

Grandpa, watching him closely, seemed to read all this in the boy's brown eyes, to know all the words for all the things the boy never could have found a way to tell, things that could not escape him because his mouth could never articulate the language of his heart. And then Grandpa nodded, as if he wanted to confirm this very idea, and suddenly Clive was terrified that Grandpa would spoil everything by saying something soft and soothing and meaningless. Sure, he would say. I know all about it, Clivey - I was a boy once myself, you know.

But he didn't, and Clive understood he had been stupid to fear the possibility even for a moment. Worse, faithless. Because this was Grandpa, and Grandpa never talked meaningless s.h.i.+t like other grownups so often did. Instead of speaking softly and soothingly, he spoke with the dry finality of a judge p.r.o.nouncing a harsh sentence for a capital crime.

'All that changes,' he said.

Clive looked up at him, a little apprehensive at the idea but very much liking the wild way the old man's hair blew around his head. He thought Grandpa looked the way the church-preacher would if he really knew the truth about G.o.d instead of just guessing. 'Time does? Are you sure?'

'Yes. When you get to a certain age - right around fourteen, I think, mostly when the two halves of the human race go on and make the mistake of discovering each other - time starts to be real time. The real real time. It ain't long like it was or short like it gets to be. It does, you know. But for most of your life it's mostly the real real time. You know what that is, Clivey?'

'No, sir.'

'Then take instruction: real real time is your pretty pony. Say it: ”My pretty pony'.”

Feeling dumb, wondering if Grandpa was having him on for some reason ('trying to get your goat', as Uncle Don would have said), Clive said what he wanted him to say. He waited for the old man to laugh, to say, 'Boy, I really got your goat that time, Clivey!' But Grandpa only nodded matter-of-factly, in a way that took all the dumb out of it.

'My pretty pony. Those are three words you'll never forget if you're as smart's I think y'might be. My pretty pony. That's the truth of time.'

Grandpa took the battered package of cigarettes from his pocket, considered it briefly, then put it back.

'From the time you're fourteen until, oh, I'm gonna say until you're sixty or so, most time is my-pretty-pony time. There's times when it goes back to being long like it was when you were a kid, but those ain't good times any more. You'd give your soul for some my-pretty-pony time then, let alone short time. If you was to tell Gramma what I'm gonna tell you now, Clivey, she'd call me a blasphemer and wouldn't bring me no hot-water bottle for a week. Maybe two.'

Nevertheless, Grandpa's lips twisted into a bitter and unregenerate jag.

'If I was to tell it to that Reverend Chadband the wife sets such a store by, he'd trot out the one about how we see through a gla.s.s darkly or that old chestnut about how G.o.d works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, but I'll tell you what I think, Clivey. I think G.o.d must be one mean old son of a b.i.t.c.h to make the only long times a grownup has the times when he is hurt bad, like with crushed ribs or stove-in guts or something like that. A G.o.d like that, why, He makes a kid who sticks pins in flies look like that saint who was so good the birds'd come and roost all over him. I think about how long them weeks were after the hay-rick turned turtle on me, and I wonder why G.o.d wanted to make living, thinking creatures in the first place. If He needed something to p.i.s.s on, why couldn't He have just made Him some sumac bushes and left it at that? Or what about poor old Johnny Brinkmayer, who went so slow with the bone cancer last year.'

Clive hardly heard that last, although he remembered later, on their ride back to the city, that Johnny Brinkmayer, who had owned what his mother and father called the grocery store and what Grandpa and Gramma still both called 'the mercantile', was the only man Grandpa went to see of an evening . . . and the only man who came to see Grandpa of an evening. On the long ride back to town it came to Clive that Johnny Brinkmayer, whom he remembered only vaguely as a man with a very large wart on his forehead and a way of hitching at his crotch as he walked, must have been Grandpa's only real friend. The fact that Gramma tended to turn up her nose when Brinkmayer's name was mentioned - and often complained about the way the man had smelled - only reinforced the idea.

Such reflections could not have come now, anyway, because Clive was waiting breathlessly for G.o.d to strike Grandpa dead. Surely He would for such a blasphemy. No one could get away with calling G.o.d the Father Almighty a mean old son of a b.i.t.c.h, or suggest that the Being who made the universe was no better than a mean third-grader who got his kicks sticking pins into flies.

Clive took a nervous step away from the figure in the bib overalls, who had ceased being his Grandpa and had become instead a lightning rod. Any moment now a bolt would come out of the blue sky, sizzling his Grandpa dead as doggy-doo and turning the apple trees into torches that would signal the old man's d.a.m.nation to all and sundry. The apple blossoms blowing through the air would be turned into something like the bits of char that went floating up from the incinerator in their backyard when his father burned the week's worth of newspapers on late Sunday afternoons.

Nothing happened.

Clive waited, his dreadful surety eroding, and when a robin twittered cheerily somewhere nearby (as if Grandpa had said nothing more awful than kiss-my-foot), he knew no lightning was going to come. And at the moment of that realization, a small but fundamental change took place in Clive Banning's life. His Grandpa's unpunished blasphemy would not make him a criminal or a bad boy, or even such a small thing as a 'problem child' (a phrase that had only recently come into vogue). Yet the true north of belief s.h.i.+fted just a little in Clive's mind, and the way he listened to his Grandpa changed at once. Before, he had listened to the old man. Now he attended him.

Times when you're hurt go on forever, seems like,' Grandpa was saying. 'Believe me, Clivey - a week of being hurt makes the best summer vacation you ever had when you was a kid seem like a weekend. h.e.l.l, makes it seem like a Sat'dy mornin! When I think of the seven months Johnny lay there with that . . . that thing that was inside him, inside him and eating on his guts . . . Jesus, I ain't got no business talkin this way to a kid. Your Gramma's right. I got the sense of a chicken.'

Grandpa brooded down at his shoes for a moment. At last he looked up and shook his head, not darkly, but with brisk, almost humorous dismissiveness.

'Ain't a bit of that matters. I said I was gonna give you instruction, and instead I stand here howlin like a woe-dog. You know what a woe-dog is, Clivey?'

The boy shook his head.

'Never mind; that's for another day.' Of course there had never been another, because the next time he saw Grandpa, Grandpa was in a box, and Clive supposed that was an important part of the instruction Grandpa had to give that day. The fact that the old man didn't know he was giving it made it no less important. 'Old men are like old trains in a switchin yard, Clivey - too many d.a.m.ned tracks. So they loop the d.a.m.ned roundhouse five times before they ever get in.'

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