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A Better Angel

Stories

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

HIGH SPEEDS

* * *

That November I'm nine and stealing: candy from the supermarket; toys from the dime store; books from the bookstore. And not Curious George and the Bad Touch or Tales of a Fourth Grade Fuck-Up, though I am in fourth grade, and fucked-up. I'm too smart for those books, too smart for the fourth grade, but Mama won't let them skip me. I'm too smart for Miami Springs, and too smart for my own good.

In November of 1979 I'm four feet ten inches tall, and Papa has been dead for nine months. My little brother is crazy, and I want sometimes to take over the world. I am nine but not nine. I am ancient in blood and heart and bones. Sometimes I feel as wise as a pharaoh. I am in class, listening to Miss Ouida Montoya read to us.

Wild Nights! — Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

She goes on, finishing as passionately as she began. She's panting when she stops. "Can anyone tell me who wrote that one?" she asks into the silence. She's not our real teacher, just a substitute who came to us after Ms. Orton's incident with the bus.

"No one?" This is the first time she's done the poetry thing. Yesterday we mostly made paper-plate turkeys and paper-cup Pilgrims for the upcoming Thanksgiving feast, held annually in the cafeteria, at which we will sing Thanksgiving hymns in between courses of turkeyburger, canned corn, and pumpkin pudding. The day before, she extended our Spanish lesson, reading to us all day from a Spanish translation of The Mouse and the Motorcycle. "Well?" she asks.

"Ask Con," says Maria Josiah, a girl from Hialeah with an ax-shaped head.

There are snickers all around the room. Buddy Washington, behind me, kicks my chair. "Freaky boy," he whispers.

"Well, Con?" says Ouida Montoya.

"Well what?" I ask, in a sharp, little-bastardly voice.

"Can you tell me who wrote this poem?"

"Isn't this a little advanced for us?"

She looks at me, then takes off her glasses. "You know, Con, I got up this morning in a very good mood. I was thinking, I'm going to make a difference today. I'm going to go into class and I am going to make a difference there. I'm going to use this little spell of substitute time to make some small change in your lives. Some small change, a tiny little change." She snaps her fingers very softly, so I can barely hear it. "And what better way to make a little change than with a little poetry?" She smiles at me, a sweet, honest smile, aiming her teeth right at me.

"But poetry makes nothing happen," I say. She puts her glasses back on and lifts her head up, like she just smelled something interesting or nice.

"Who wrote our poem?" Our poem, I think, but I know right off she doesn't mean it that way.

"My life closed twice," I say, "before its close. It yet remains to see."

She smiles wider — impossibly wide, so I think her top lip is going to flip over her nose, and she uncrosses her legs, then crosses them again. In the quiet I can hear the sound of nylon scraping against nylon.

"If immortality unveil," she says.

"A third event to me," I reply.

"So huge."

"So hopeless to conceive."

"As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of Heaven."

"And all we need," I say, "of Hell."

Maria Josiah bursts into laughter. "Con said the H word!" She covers her own mouth, as if she was the one that said Hell. The rest of the class just looks at me like, "Weirdo!" and looks at Ouida Montoya like they're afraid of what she might do next.

"Miss Emily Dickinson," she says. "That's who wrote these poems. Everyone please repeat after me. Emily Dickinson!"

"Emily Dickinson!" they say, sounding a little fearful.

"Very good," she says. "Shall we hear another?" She waits until someone raises a hand. "Yes, Maria?"

"Can't we just finish our turkeys?"

"Possibly. Let's take a vote."

Turkeys win twenty-four to zero, with me abstaining. So we get out the turkey halves we had previously cut from paper plates and spend the rest of the period stapling them together and coloring them. They are supposed to serve as place markers at the feast, but I write on mine, Happy Birthday, you sorry ass little fucker. What's in a birthday? Get over it, asshole. Your bellyaching is grating on my anus. Birthdays make nothing happen. They survive in the valley of their own making.

I am very intent on this, making every letter in a different color and all that shit, so when Ouida Montoya comes over I don't even notice she's there until it occurs to me that the flea-spray smell in my head is her perfume. I put my hand over the turkey but she moves it away so she can read the last lines.

"Everything is so hard," she says, leaning down to put the hyphen in sorry-ass with her red substitute teacher's pen.

At recess I'm on top of a jungle gym that everyone avoids when I'm on it. I'm looking out at all the children playing, and I'm thinking, You! Maria Josiah! Death to you! A razor across your eye, Maria!

Buddy Washington, a shovel hard on your head, so hard that raspberry jelly flies out of your nose!

And Molly LaRouche, your head in a vise!

Sammy Fie, coat you in honey and feed you to the bees!

Rosetta Pablo, feed you to a dog with dull teeth!

I run all down the class list. This is how I pass my recess. When they're about all dead I hang upside down and close my eyes until I hear somebody come up next to me. It's Yatha McIlvoy, who happens to be the only person I habitually spare.

"Happy birthday," she says. "I made you something." She hands me a Pilgrim. Birthday Pilgrim for Con, it says.

"How'd you know it was my birthday?"

"Ms. Orton said. Last week. Remember?" Ouida Montoya is coming over. She's in the sun. From where I'm hanging it looks like she's coming in like an enemy plane. She puts her hand on Yatha's shoulder.

"Could I talk to Con a moment, Yatha?"

"Sure," she says and walks off backwards. After a few feet she waves at me, turns, and runs away.

"May I join you?"

"No," I say and pull myself up. I'm sitting on top again when she gets there.

"You aren't happy," she says.

"I'm fine."

"I'm sorry I forgot your birthday yesterday," she says.

"I don't care."

"This says different." It's the turkey card, which I'd torn into eight pieces and thrown away. She's taped it back together.

"Not to you," I say. "I don't care about you, lady. My mama forgot."

"Ah," she says. "Poor Con."

"Hey," I say. "Fuck you." I wait for her to go away, or drag me to see the principal, Sister Gertrude, like Ms. Orton always does. But she just sits there, her long silk skirt hanging down between the bars.

"I said fuck you," I say. "Nobody asked you to play Good Samaritan to the lonesome birthday boy."

She leans back, putting her arms behind her, and puts her head back as far as she can get it and still be looking at me. "You're an angry little fucker, aren't you?" I just look back. I do not love her then, but when she talks to me like I'm real, when she's the first person in this bore-me-to-death place to talk to me like I'm real, then something happens, and I feel it. A little lurch, like something has just moved inside me. She says, "I meant it earlier. This morning was halcyon. I looked at the sunlight on my wood floor, and I said out loud, 'Ouida Montoya, today you will help somebody.' And I never talk out loud when nobody else is there. Never. So let me help." She reaches out and touches my shoulder. "Won't you tell me what's the matter with you?"

"My mama forgot my birthday," I say. "It's no big deal."

"It's more than that," she says. "I read your file in the office." She brings her face close to mine, close enough for a kiss. Wild Nights, I'm thinking suddenly, and I get a little dizzy. Christ, lady, I think. It's life, is all it is. I fall back away from her, and swing down backwards through the bars to drop to the ground.

"See you in class," I say, walking away and not looking up.

"Let's go for a ride, later!" she calls after me.

"Whatever," I mutter. I want to mangle something, so I crush Yatha's pilgrim, and then I feel bad and smooth him out, but he still looks pretty fucked-up.

At home yesterday there was the note on the television:

Con and Caleb

Gone shopping for guitar picks etc. with Milo. Back early evening about. Five dollars in the secret place for dinner. Love,

You-Know-Who

I felt something sharp in the appendix zone when I read it. I don't care about birthdays. I haven't cared about them since I was three but still there was that sharp pain like somebody got me with a voodoo, and a little voice, somewhere in my middle ear, whispering, "She forgot."

I went into the room I share with Caleb. He was napping on the bottom bunk. I took out the Boy's Life I stole for him from the school library and put it on his chest. He'd been a Cub Scout when he went crazy, insisting that he was from Mars and that they lit fires like this on Mars, and that they ran their soap-box derbies in this manner, and it was all superior to how they did it in the Cub Scouts Chapter Earth. I am not glad he's crazy but I'm glad they threw him out. I would rather he was a brown-pantied little fascist Brownie than a Cub Scout but better neither than either.

I sat down by the bed, watching him sleep. His face was puffy, his eyes were rolling around behind his lids. I emptied my book bag on the floor. I had stopped by the bookstore, too, and bought Thuvia, Maid of Mars, and the October issue of Scientific American. Frieda, who owns the place, sells me the last month's issue for half price at the beginning of the new month. She's a lesbian. I know about lesbians because I have stolen, from Frieda's Little Professor Bookstore, The Joy of Lesbian Sex, The Joy of Sex, The Joy of Gay Sex, and More Joy of Sex. They lurk under my mattress. I've looked in these books and seen all the gory fucking, every brand. I know what it's all about, generally and specifically.

Also I got myself The Seven Storey Mountain but didn't pay for that. Generally I follow a policy of buy one, steal one from the Little Professor. I'm reading Thomas Merton to become a better person.

And I stopped at the dime store and got two giant chocolate bars and two squirt guns — presents for me and for Caleb on my birthday. These fell out on the floor with the Merton and the magazines. I put the chocolate and the gun on his chest, too, then sat with my back against the side of the bed and read aloud until Caleb started to stir.

"Con," he said, sitting up.

"Nice nap?"

"Too short. But I dreamed." He picked up the gun and the magazine, hugging the magazine to his chest. It really broke his heart when they threw him out. "Thank you."

"No problem," I said. "Happy birthday."

"It's not mine. It's yours."

"You know that. I know that. Somebody doesn't know that."

"She knows."

"She forgot. So it's hamburgers for us tonight."

"Hamburgers," he said. "That's okay."

"You hungry?"

"Okay." He shot me with the empty gun.

"Wash your face," I said. "It's all wrinkled." He got out of bed and ran to the bathroom, gun in one hand, Boy's Life in the other.

I went and watched him, standing in his bare feet in the tub, bending down to put his face in the water. He doesn't care for the sink. This face-under-the-tap business is how they wash up on Mars, how they do it, he says, at home. In the past nine months I've read Stranger in a Strange Land, Podkayne of Mars, The Martian Chronicles, and all of Burroughs's series except Thuvia, which for some reason is hard to obtain. All this to better understand my little brother. When Mama told us that Papa's plane had gone down in the Everglades, Caleb had looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, "Who?"

"Your papa," said Mama.

"And who are you?" he asked, turning to me. I didn't say anything. Caleb passed out, falling right onto the carpet. Mama and I watched him, like it was a trick we'd paid to see him do. Then we both freaked out. When he woke up he did not speak for two weeks, but only peered at us like we and everything else around him were totally unfamiliar. When he began speaking it was clear we would have to get to know him all over again. He insisted that his name was Belac, and that he came from Barsoom. Papa used to read to us from Burroughs on our weekends with him, when he couldn't sleep. First we got all the Tarzan books and then one through three of the Mars books. Dr. Mouw, Caleb's shrink, and occasionally my own shrink, says we must live in his fantasy in order to draw him out of it.

Dr. Mouw dresses in dark suits and has dark, sad eyes and a pixie-cut hairdo, and I like her, usually, but only an idiot would become a psychiatrist. I wanted briefly to be a psychiatrist. Now I think I would like to become either a cat burglar or a Trappist monk, or else just a plain old evil genius, the kind that takes over the world.

"Ready," said Caleb.

"Put on your shoes." He put them on and looked at the laces. "Yes, you can," I said, before he could say that he couldn't tie them.

"We don't have these on Barsoom," he said crossly. But he tied the shoes. Mama ties them for him. Dr. Mouw and I agree that that is going too far.

I got the five dollars out of the lettuce crisper and we headed down De Soto to the McDonald's. Caleb had filled his squirt gun in the tub and was shooting all the palm trees.

"Hi!" he said. "Hi! Hi! Bowbee do impapa!"

"Speak English, dammit," I said.

"Die, enemies of Helium!" he said, then sucked thoughtfully on the gun. "Those trees," he said. "What do you call them?"

"You know damn well what they're called."

"Those trees look like the kalai-zee."

"I'm sure I want to know what those are."

"A race of scaly giants," he said. "With bushy green hair. You know when they've been eating children because the crumbs of skin stick around their mouths."

"Where do you get this morbid shit?"

"Just telling it like it is," he said, Papa's line whenever he recounted the gross things he saw working as a doctor when he was very young, before he met Mama, before he learned to fly, and before he became a drug smuggler.

"Fuck it's hot," I said. Caleb shot me in the hair. "You're lucky I didn't bring mine," I said.

"I'm cooling you off. It's hotter on Mars, anyway. When it is very hot we sit in the shade of the bolinga tree, under the feathery bolinga leaves, and drink iced hoopa."

Caleb is smart, like me, probably a little smarter, but he pours all his smarts into his delusion. In nine months it's gotten pretty detailed, yet it's still almost all stuff he got from Papa in one form or another. It boils down to about three-fifths Burroughs, onefifth Dr. Seuss, and one-fifth shit he makes up all by himself. He could be in the second grade at St. Theresa's, getting all the normal socialization shit Mama insists on for me, but instead he's in an "indeterminate grade" at Dr. Mouw's Virginia Key Academy along with assorted little Napoléons and Jesus Christs and a scattering of ADD freak-outs.

"Happy birthday," said Caleb.

"Yeah."

"You're angry."

"No."

"On Barsoom we have a ritual of forgotten birthdays. When someone forgets, the offended shoots the offender with a harmless kama gun. Then we have a party." He handed me his gun, butt first.

"Knock off the Mars shit a minute," I said.

"Sometimes we use a zona gun, which is needlessly harmful," he said and put the gun back in his pocket and took my hand. I squeezed it.

At McDonald's Caleb spent five minutes trying to order a Happy Meal, except he was calling it a Biba Fa, and the guy behind the counter didn't have a clue what he was talking about.

"One of the ones in the box," I said. I didn't want to say Happy Meal because I would prefer not to buy into fucking McDonald's newspeak. Sometimes Frieda tells me to watch my language, and she doesn't mean don't say fuck, she means don't say Whopper or Barbie's Dream House or Happy Meal.

"We've got all kinds of boxes, if you want boxes," said the man. "All the big sandwiches come in boxes." Usually I have to fight like hell to order anything but a Happy Meal, because they start shoving them at you as soon as you open your mouth.

"Biba Fa!" says Caleb, for the tenth time. "Are you deaf?"

"You know," I said. "A children's meal."

"Oh," the man said. "A Happy Meal. Why didn't you say so?" We just looked at him. I didn't want a fucking Happy Meal, but the guy brought two and I just wanted to sit down. So I paid him and we sat by the window, looking out on NW Thirty-sixth Street, at all the airline buildings, which depressed me because they have to do with planes and flight and Papa going down in the swamp. I gave Caleb my top and then unwrapped my hamburger and looked at it.

"Hey," Caleb said. "This is called the Ela Ecksta formation." He spun the two tops toward each other.

"Eat," I told him. He put down the tops and started tracing his finger on the back of the box. "I'm going to eat your food if you don't start eating it right now." He picked up his hamburger, then smelled it and took a little bite. I bit into mine and thought it tasted like disappointment. And then I thought, You little baby, it's just a birthday, and it means nothing. And then I thought, Happy birthday to me. And then I thought, Fuck!

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Excerpted from A Better Angel by Chris Adrian. Copyright © 2008 Chris Adrian. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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