King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography Page 10

  One day the following summer Eddie couldn’t find anything to do. His buddies were all busy, and his sisters and their friends wanted to dress him up like a girl when he went to play with them. Otto was at the schoolhouse remodeling some small rooms just off the stage at the end of the gymnasium, so Eddie went up to hang out with him, maybe angry because there was no one to play with. Several sheets of Sheetrock were leaning against a wall in the gym, and Eddie must have kicked one of them, then turned and walked away. The piece he kicked had been standing nearly vertical, and it fell outward, caught him at the base of the neck, and snapped it. Eddie Breidenbach was dead at the age of seven. For a long time my untrained ear told me Eddie had been killed by sheep rock, and though I had no idea what that might look like or why sheep even needed it, I kept a close eye out for any.

  When you’re seven going on eight yourself, dead is a difficult concept to accommodate. Dead people were gone. They wouldn’t be back. They were in Heaven, no matter where anyone said they would go while they were still alive, and they were walking around up there on streets paved with gold looking pretty much the same way they looked down here, only happier because God and Jesus and Esus were there. We should be happy for them, too. Only nobody ever seemed that happy. Several months earlier, when my granddad Glen had died, no one had seemed happy at all. I rounded the corner to our block on my way home from school to see cars parked bumper to bumper along the rock ledge next to the dirt road that ran alongside of our house. Inside, my grandmother sat on our couch sobbing. I had never even seen her cry. My mother took my arm as I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and scooted me outside. She told me Glen had died, that I was to wait for my brother to come home and then stay outside and play with him. She had sent Candy to a baby-sitter.

  I climbed up into the rafters of the garage and tried to decide what it meant. I would have some rugged bouts with death, some involving people I loved and some involving people I barely knew or didn’t know at all. But this wasn’t one of those bouts. This one merely set me to wishing and wondering. I wished I could go inside and make my grandmother feel better. She hadn’t gone to the Red Brick Church enough to know that Glen was in a Better Place. A saint guy named Peter would meet him at the Pearly Gates, which I guessed were on the fence around Heaven. The streets inside the fence would have gold pavement, which I thought was good but wasn’t totally sure because my granddad always had grease on his boots, but on the other hand, a couple of bricks off of that street would bring a guy about all the money he needed for the rest of his life according to my dad, who had once told me a solid gold brick would be worth enough to buy yourself a damn nice car with “a nice chunk of change” left over. I had the sense that Glen’s greasy boots wouldn’t get him into the same kind of trouble with God as they did with my grandmother. And since there was no disease in Heaven, he wouldn’t have to eat milk toast all the time and have Sucaryl on his cereal because he had sugardi betees. But I didn’t like the fact that it meant I would never see him again.

  About a week after Eddie Breidenbach’s funeral, I began having dreams about sledding with him. It was the middle of July, high eighties in the afternoons; but in the dream Summer’s Hill was covered in three feet of snow, and we stood with other kids at the top with our red Flyer sleds. Eddie was without his sled and asked if we could ride double.

  I said, “Sure. Hey, I thought you were dead.”

  “I am,” he said.

  “Where’s your sled?”

  “They don’t got ’em in Heaven.”

  “Is that where you live?”

  “Yup.”

  “What’s it like?” I asked.

  “You know. It’s real nice and they got angels.”

  “Like with wings and stuff?”

  Eddie nodded. “You gonna take me down the hill?”

  “Sure, you want top or bottom?” Some kids sat on the sled when they rode double, bigger older person behind, guiding with his feet, while the smaller younger one sat between his legs. But I only felt safe lying on my stomach with the other guy riding on his stomach on top of me. It was hard to breathe, but you could guide the sled better with your hands, and since the hill dumped onto a road that wasn’t blocked off for sledders, you wanted to be able to swerve into the ditch pretty quick to avoid getting a permanent residence with Eddie Breidenbach. Eddie and I had been about the same size.

  “You take the bottom,” he said. “I can’t guide. I’m dead.” When we got down the hill, he said, “That was fun. You can’t go sledding in Heaven. They don’t got snow.”

  I guessed it was pretty hard to sled on golden streets. We started back up the hill. “You ever see my granddad up there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “His real name’s Glen Morris.”

  “Yeah, I know your granddad, but I never seen him.”

  I asked him to look real careful next time, and if he came back I’d let him ride double on the sled again, but before he could answer, my eyes blinked open to see the sky just over East Mountain turning pink and it was fifty degrees outside and the snow and Eddie melted away. As many times as I dreamed some variation of that dream, Eddie never guided the sled and he never remembered seeing my granddad.

  When school resumed in the fall, Otto seemed exactly the same. He didn’t talk much anyway, and he still fixed things around the school and fixed things for us kids down in his room. I started to tell him once about my dreams, but I was afraid I might make him sad, because even though people were supposed to be in a Better Place, most folks seemed to hurt at the emptiness.

  It wasn’t quite so bittersweet the next time I ran into the Reaper. I was eleven and had nearly perfected the art of throwing up at Little League games just before it was my turn to bat. Today, when someone uses the phrase “like a deer caught in the headlights,” I automatically translate it into “like Chris Crutcher caught staring at a high inside beanball.” The problem with playing Little League in Cascade, Idaho, was there weren’t enough kids to play in age groups. Four teams, nine players on a team, ten if I was lucky, age range up to fourteen. Eleven-year-old Chris Crutcher wound up standing in the batter’s box facing fourteen-year-old Jon Probst, later of slugfest fame, who had a fastball as nasty as his temper and zero control. When one of the bigger kids would get a hit off Jon, he’d get even by scaring the next younger kid into outer space. Very few of the younger, smaller kids could hit at all, so we were supposed to rely on our small strike zones to get on base so the big kids could knock us in. That required a good eye and the capacity for quick evasive action, an art I perfected by dropping to the good earth before the ball actually left Jon’s hand—because once it had, and I saw it coming, I inevitably froze until the last second when I turned my back, took the hit between the shoulder blades, and squalled like the bawlbaby I had become.

  “Shake it off and go to first,” my coach would yell, embarrassed at my writhing in the dirt like a stomped-on garter snake. But I was a far-reaching thinker and knew if I were hurt badly enough, my stint as a target for the vengeful Jon Probst for that day was over. On one such day Coach disgustedly sent me home, but what seemed like a reprieve turned out to be the beginning of a nightmarish summer: C.C. vs. the Very Grim Reaper.

  My parents stayed at the game, probably as disgusted as my coach by my less-than-manly behavior, and once I stumbled out of sight of the spectators, I dashed home to spend the last few innings in solitude, scouring the house for my dad’s old Playboys and sneaking through my brother’s storage closet to retrieve baseball cards I was sure he’d stolen from me. God, I loved solitude.

  The newest issue of the Saturday Evening Post lay on the coffee table. I loved the Saturday Evening Post: the Norman Rockwell covers, the filler cartoons at the bottoms of many pages, sometimes even the articles. I always opened the magazine to the middle, about where I thought the cartoons began. On this day, there were no cartoons on that page, only the two-by-three picture of a six-year-old boy.

&
nbsp; On the title page was a black-and-white picture of a vacant lot on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The article said a college student driving back from a weekend visit had noticed a refrigerator box in the lot, one he didn’t remember seeing before. He stopped and found the body of a naked six-year-old boy, frozen in the winter temperatures. The caption under the boy said the picture was postmortem. I found the word in the dictionary. It meant the picture was taken after the boy was dead. Somebody cut this little boy’s hair, the article said. Somebody bathed him and trimmed his nails. Does anyone out there know who he is? There were no faces on milk cartons back then, no “Have You Seen This Child?” ads in magazines and newspapers. I stared at the boy’s face, the eyes unfocused, a small patch of skin peeling from his lower lip. They didn’t know how long he’d been dead; his body wouldn’t have decomposed in those temperatures. Back to the picture. Short blond hair, a cowlick in front; eyes a little slanted. Flat. Dead.

  That evening I showed the picture to my brother. “I thought you were hurt,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in the hospital or something?”

  “Yeah, but look at this picture. I mean, do you know what postmortem is? They took this picture after this kid was dead.”

  “Yeah, I know what postmortem is. There should be a picture like that of you right now, after the way you were rolling in the dirt like you’d been shot. Man, why do you have to act like you’re being crucified every time you get hurt a little?”

  “Okay, I won’t do that anymore. But look at this picture.”

  I showed it to my parents. My mom could tell how much it bothered me. My dad probably could, too, but he didn’t like that it bothered me so much, so in his perception, it didn’t.

  I showed it to my sister and explained to her that the kid was dead. She said, “Oh, no, sir.”

  Sometime after midnight, I crept into John’s room and asked if I could sleep with him. He was groggy enough to let me in bed for about fifteen minutes, but then woke up enough to kick me out onto the floor. “Jeez, you little weirdo, go back to your room.” No chance. I hadn’t been in bed with my parents since I was five or six, but I crept downstairs to request asylum. That was my last decent night’s sleep indoors that summer.

  A stack of Saturday Evening Posts dating back to 1936 stood in our basement storage room. It wasn’t a complete set—several issues from the war years were missing—but my mother collected as many as she could. It didn’t take her long to discover I was stalking the Philadelphia kid, so instead of putting it with the rest, she hid it. Every day I’d find it. Every day she’d ask if I’d been looking at it, and every day I’d lie and say no, then she’d hide it somewhere else, and in the first hours of the following morning, when she’d gone to the service station to do some of my dad’s light bookkeeping, I’d ransack the house until I found it, then sit on the couch and stare at those eyes that were so obviously not staring back. I’d read the article again. I’d touch the picture. Then I’d put it back almost exactly as I’d found it, but not quite, because sometime in the evening my mom would accuse me of looking at it again. Why did I want to torture myself like that? she’d ask. Why not just let it go?

  I found if I slept on the lawn in my sleeping bag, I was less afraid. If someone were really going to do me in, it would have been a lot easier to creep up on my sleeping bag in the middle of the lawn in the dead of night and ball peen me than to find a way into my second-story bedroom and dig through the 600 pounds of covers I was hidden beneath. But I’d go to bed and my room would start to feel like a closed refrigerator box, and I’d grab my sleeping bag and head for the great outdoors.

  Then death began leaking all over everything. A picture of a twelve-year-old girl named Charlene Zahn showed up down at the post office. Charlene had disappeared from her Boise home, and the entire state was on the lookout for her. She and the Philadelphia boy began hanging out together in my dreams. Soon I was scouring the obituaries in the Idaho Daily Statesman with the zeal of a mail-order grief hustler. I knew the names of the people who died in Idaho on any given day better than I knew the TV schedule in the newspaper.

  It may simply have been that time in my life when I realized that nothing was forever, that a person could be there one minute and not the next. I wasn’t particularly worried about grieving survivors, though the thought of them made me sad; I wanted to know what it was like to be dead. And I started trying to be very good. I made daily attempts to stop swearing. I cut stealing money out of my mother’s purse almost in half, cut ripping off the candy and pop machines at my dad’s service station by almost forty percent. My daily prayer sessions could have landed me a guest spot on the Trinity Network, had it been invented yet. Lazarus became my new personal hero.

  There is only one remedy for all that, though I didn’t know it then. That remedy is time. At some point, a few months down the road, I simply said, If you’re going to get me, Mr. Reaper, just do it. I’m tired of hiding under the covers until my sheets are soaked, tired of trying to discover whether every nocturnal sound is coming from the waking dead in my storage closet or the parade of zombies moving up Main Street in the dead of night to discover the phantom ladder leaning against the house outside my bedroom. Have at it. Hack me up. Suck my blood. Peel off my hide in two-inch strips. Kiss my ass. I’m going to sleep.

  When I was a junior in high school, Alan Thompson’s cousin mistook him for a deer and killed him. Alan was a relatively new kid; his family had moved down from McCall so his dad could take a job in the mill. He was pleasant, with a good sense of humor, not outstanding in any obvious way. He sat behind me in study hall, so we got to know each other in our mutual attempts to keep from doing homework.

  I only knew Alan a few months before he was killed. I heard the news over the weekend, and it didn’t faze me much; I’ve always had a delayed reaction to traumatic events. On the following Wednesday the majority of the high-school population migrated to the funeral over at the Mormon church, which was filled way over capacity because two busloads of students also came down from McCall. It was an open casket funeral, but I didn’t look. I’d seen one dead kid too many. Later, as we stood outside the church watching the pallbearers, including Alan’s cousin—the one who killed him—bring the casket to the hearse, his cousin’s knees buckled and a moan escaped his throat that pierced my heart. I knew instinctively that, given the choice, I’d rather be Alan than his cousin. Death didn’t haunt me like it did in the days of the Philadelphia boy, but the ache of loss set free by that boy’s moan scooped out my insides. I went home that night praying the people I cared most about would stay alive until I could be a better human being, and asking a version of the same question I’d heard the pastor ask: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” which was, “Why does Alan Thompson get it when the Thornton brothers, who spend half their time threatening to kick my ass and the other half kicking it, roam the planet with impunity?” No good answer came, and I went through another period of trying to be good. Got the stealing down to about a third, though the swearing remained about the same. Shit.

  I made it nearly through college holding death at arm’s length—only old people died, people whose time had come—but when I was a senior, a close friend’s girlfriend was killed in a senseless car accident.

  Linc was one of the toughest guys I’d ever known; he still is. He was my age, but a year behind me in school. He’d had to take two shots at his senior year in high school because he punched out a student teacher for harassing his girlfriend. He was expelled for the rest of the year, and his father, every bit as tough as Linc, contacted a friend who was sailing around the world and bought Linc passage on the boat. To make a long story short, the boat shipwrecked and Linc had to pull several of the crew to shore. When he got back home, instead of receiving a hero’s welcome from his father, his father enlisted him in the marine reserves, since he couldn’t get back into school until the following year and the father didn’t want Linc wasting his time. By the time I met Linc, he already owned
his first bayonet.

  You crossed Linc at your own peril. He had a “magic tooth,” which I would years later insert, along with Linc himself, into my book Stotan! It was low-level magic. He’d had an abscessed front tooth before entering the marine reserves, and his dentist drilled a hole in the back to let the abscess drain. For some reason the hole was never filled in, and the swill that drained out of that tooth could easily bring a mink running with a smile on her face. If you disappointed Linc, or refused to do his bidding, he would clutch you by your shirtfront, bring you very close, suck the tooth, and blow in your face. If you survived, you honored his wishes. He was barrel chested and strong and redheaded and known for his creative capacity to get even. No one got a leg up on Linc. No one but the universe.

  On New Year’s Eve of my senior year in college, a bunch of the swimmers were together at a friend’s house, watching bowl games, when our coach knocked. It was surreal seeing him there in the doorway; few of us had ever seen him away from the college or the pool. He called Linc into the kitchen. We glanced at one another, turned back to the game. When Linc came back, he said his girlfriend was dead.

  For a while all the toughness ran out of my friend. He swam through workouts, hung out with us at our very edges, and complained to no one. Once in awhile he would come down the hall to my room in the wee hours of the morning and reminisce about the things he and his girlfriend had done together and the things he missed. Then he would walk back to his room, broken. Now I really wanted to know why bad things happen to good people. I demanded it.