| |
THE TRI-COLORED PHILLIPS 66 SIGNS and Sinclair logos with their green dinosaurs have all changed to the orange globes of Union 76 stations, like trees changing in autumn. He has lost the X-Ray glasses and found them again. There have been other changes. His father’s work truck has been in and out of the shop, meaning the bed of the Camino is often full of five-gallon paint buckets. Often it is filled with more—sections of scaffolding, a blue-green compressor, brushes and rollers soaking in thinner, transmission fluid containers—everything splashed in paint, everything dirty. His father has been spending more time at home and more time in taverns. He drives the Camino to Seattle most weekends, looking for work but invariably calling home, causing his mother to run her hands through her hair and say, “Why don’t you head on back.” A yellow bandage over a cotton ball may be seen when she does this. When asked about it she tells him that she has been donating blood.
They head out to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, ostensibly to see the hydroplanes. They won’t be racing or anything—it is evening, after all—but his father thinks they might find some down by the bay, just moored in the moonlight. He wants to show the Kid (who has had a hydroplane fixation since hearing Sheldon describe them as “jet-boats”) what they look like. They don’t see any, but a man walking along the pier tells them that there are some in Sandpoint, about 40 miles northeast, as part of a traveling exhibition.
To get there they have to cross what his mother calls “The Longest Bridge,” a two-mile-long road on stilts that traverses the northernmost end of Lake Pend Oreille—a lake so vast and deep, says his father, the U.S. Navy uses it to test submarines. For the Kid, the notion of a two-mile-long bridge over that kind of depth is awe-inspiring, even if he isn’t sure what constitutes a mile. His mother (who has a gift for showmanship and can make even the most mundane thing seem novel and thrilling) adds to this awe, making hyperbolic pronouncements as they approach the bridge.
“Here it comes,” she says as they draw near. “Look, Sweetie! We’re about to go over The Longest Bridge!”
By the time they clack over the entry point and onto the bridge, he is primed for any manner of wonderment: a road which rolls like a rollercoaster, a glimpse of something swimming beneath the surface—a surviving plesiosaur, even, as in Loch Ness?—a glimpse of a Polaris submarine’s conning tower... Instead he sees only blackness, and the yellow-orange lights of the homes and businesses along the far banks.
Yet there is something hypnotic about their passage over the black lake. The distant, glittering lights, the wavering, moonlit water, and the drone of the radials combined with the clackity-clack! each time they pass over the joints between prefabricated sections, create an aura of reverie. His mother turns on the radio and begins humming along with Johnny Cash, whom she normally doesn’t like. He is singing “Ring of Fire.” The Kid opens his magazine. Dad just whistles into oblivion, which is typical.
He opens to a picture of a sweat-soaked Doc Savage, the fabled Man of Bronze, from the movie of the same name. He has piercing, steely-blue eyes and fair, shortly cropped hair. He is wearing a Khaki shirt ripped open nearly to the waist (where a massive sidearm gleams), and German soldier-type trousers tucked into tall, black boots. He is standing at the rail of a ship—or a nuclear submarine—a shining bronze (but really Idealized White) action-figure, the Aryan Nephilim.
He shows the picture to his mother.
“That’s what you’ll look like someday,” she says.
He stares at the picture for the longest time, lost in his own cathedral. So that’s what he’ll be, after all: a commanding officer—for that’s what the man is, clearly—a “Doctor,” even. A Leader of Men. Yet, though he is elated that he will grow up to be such a specimen, that he will grow taller—which in fact he has begun to do—more muscular; that he will overcome his shyness and indecision and cowardice, he finds the idea unsettling also. For her words suggest he will change, which implies she and Dad will change, will age, and so will the world.
He listens to the road and imagines that the El Camino is in fact a time machine, that each clackity-clack! represents a decade traversed forward or back in time. He becomes so enthralled by the notion that he gropes for his X-Ray glasses and dives across his mother, hanging head and shoulders out the window, peering into the void, the wind whipping his hair which lashes his face—attempting to see the water but seeing only the dull green guardrail, and beyond that, space. He strains and strains, but with no lights to assist him, he cannot penetrate the darkness.
“You’re going to keep it up until you lose those,” says his mother. He feels her curl a finger through one of his belt loops. He clasps his hands to his temples, securing the paper glasses. In fact he has resolved to never lose them again. He raises his head, looks through the lenses at the lights across the lake, each of which instantly becomes the word X-RAY—a train of X-RAYS, marching parallel to them but in the opposite direction. Out here he can really hear the clackity-clacking—but it isn’t just tires against the bridge. It is the sound he heard while lying on the floor by the cement quarry and by the store where he’d picked out his first comic book; the sound of a failing transmission, yes, but also Johnny Cash playing on the Motorola, singing, “Oh, it burns, burns, burns...the ring of fire...the ring of fire.” The sound of swarming yellow jackets and flapping sheets, swishing swings, pounding pistons. A sound coming from everywhere at once and from everything, not just the bowels of the Camino—a sound so dense and deep that it sinks through the floor of the car and becomes far away again. A sound with individual parts until you hear it from out here, going this fast, where it becomes a single whirring entity, a roar at the heart of the universe.
––––––––
THEY DRIVE AROUND SANDPOINT for what seems like hours, but don’t see any hydroplanes. Finally, in the spring of 1978, he sees his first “jet boat.” It is during a matinee-showing of Sun Classic Pictures’ The Mysterious Monsters at the Garland Theater in west Spokane. The movie is a documentary about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and is narrated by Peter Graves, who introduces a loop of grainy, black and white footage purporting to show a speeding jet boat being destroyed by an unidentified object beneath the surface of Loch Ness.
His brother, who in the fall will begin high school as the Kid begins junior high, balks as he starts the Camino (he has a learning permit to drive so long as their father is in the car, which he is, having dropped them off and returned). “That could have been anything—it could have been a school of fish, for all you know.”
The Kid is unmoved. “A jet-boat would have cut through fish like butter.”
“Easy does it,” says their father.
“Not at that velocity,” says his brother. “A penny dropped from the Empire State Building will bore into concrete.” He laughs as he backs from the slot, “Shows what you know.”
“Watch out, Sheldon,” says their father.
“I know you look stupid in those red velvet hippie pants—”
“Watch out, Sheldon!”
There is a crunch as Sheldon backs into another car—not hard, merely a tap. They all turn around, see a maroon Volkswagen Beetle being driven by a twenty-something woman in a blue halter top and wide-brimmed hat. She has long, straight hair the color of shredded wheat and is the prettiest girl the Kid has ever seen. She is giving them all the finger.
“All right now goddammit,” says their father. “See what happens when you don’t pay attention...”
Everyone gathers between the vehicles, inspects the damage. It isn’t horrible—the Camino’s rear quarter panel has sustained a minor dent, which is smeared with maroon. The Beetle looks the same only inversed. The damage is so minor, in fact, that the woman tells them to never mind, and quickly climbs back into her car—peeling from the lot with an acidic chirp.
Their father stares at the quarter panel, hands on his hips. “Well, it could have been worse. But a first dent is a first dent. That’ll rust.”
––––––––
HIS SUMMER SCHOOL TEACHER, Mr. Booker, has a special treat for the class. He is impressed overall with the quality of the students’ creative writing assignments, and wants to use one in particular to illustrate the day’s topic—which shall remain a secret until after “the treat.” Mr. Booker is a short, stocky, dark-eyed man who always wears Hawaiian shirts, and whose black hair curls against his forehead like Superman’s. He isn’t one of the Kid’s favorites—those are almost invariably the women—but the Kid has a certain respect for him, as do the rest of the students, because he is young and good-looking, by adult standards, and no nicknames seem to apply to him as they do other teachers, names such as “Keg-legs Monahan” or “Butt-lips Cooligan.” Booker can always be relied upon to wander far a field of the topic, as when he gets dreamy-eyed about his high school days—which he does about every two weeks—and says, “They’ll be the best days of your lives. The best days of your lives.”
Mr. Booker presents a sheaf of papers, hitches his Khakis an inch, and sits on the edge of his desk. “The assignment, as you know, was to write a prologue, but to write it in such a way that it reflects the entire story. I think we have someone here who has done just that. That, and so much more.”
The Kid stiffens. He knows what’s coming. He doesn’t know how he knows it, but he knows it, and it thrills him. It thrills him because he has found something he can do well besides draw—which he enjoys but is slow at—which compliments his drawing, works in tandem with it, as when he draws comics, so that he owns it, all of it. So that he is beholden to no one’s whim but his own—is a businessperson, in a sense, like his parents. Has his own equipment, his own scaffolding and compressor, works for no one.
It thrills him too because Jenny will be listening, Jenny who sits kitty-corner from him in the back of the room—Jenny with the pug nose and the freckles beneath her eyes, the sharp chin, the tallish forehead—Jenny whose wheat-colored hair frames her face just so, whose shoulders are small and square, whose arms are strong-looking like a boy’s, who wears an Indian arrowhead on a leather string around her neck and never makes fun of him, not for being skinny or having platinum hair like an albino or a crooked front tooth or anything. That Jenny.
Mr. Booker clears his throat and gives the sheaf of papers a snap, like a newspaper. “‘The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes,’ by Wayne K. Spitzer. Once upon a time in 1978, in an elm-dark town with lots of grain elevators and dim orange streetlamps, there lived a boy who had X-ray eyes. Almost nothing about this boy was remarkable other than he had X-ray eyes, though he could draw reasonably well and bore a striking resemblance to the crinkly-antennaed ant from The Ant and the Aardvark, and not just because he had cowlicks.”
A few muted laughs, nice laughs, not hostile. Jenny and two others, a girl and a boy. His heart races.
“But he did have X-ray eyes, and he used them, as would any boy, to see what he was going to get for Christmas, or to cheat on math tests, or to see what all the most popular girls looked like naked.”
A small uproar—some snickers but mostly approval. He doesn’t move an inch. Doesn’t breathe.
“But as he grew up his X-ray vision became more acute, so that he came to see not just through clothes and skin but through the walls of the world itself. Indeed, he came to see through to the center of time and space, where he saw something that terrified him, something whose tentacles—for that’s what they seemed—reached the corners of creation.” He emphasizes this part, for dramatic effect, then leans forward, scanning the room, making eye contact with everyone. “And it saw him. This of course was so startling to the boy that he died instantly, though he continued to wander the earth as a ghost for many years—a dead boy walking. He got excited about something once in a while, and threw himself into bursts of activity, but mostly he just went through the motions, and, as a ghost can spawn no offspring, continued to fade until at last he was no more, white sheet, chains and all. Yet the ghost never forgot the boy, and before he faded away he set about telling the boy’s story, having come to the belief—in his years wandering the earth—that, beyond the particulars, this was really every boy’s story, and every girl’s too. This, then, is the story of the Boy with the X-ray Eyes. A boy that time almost forgot, but didn’t. A boy who saw too much, went too high, and finally fell to earth. It opens with the Universal International logo, the one that comes before movies such as The Mole People and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It closes with an enormous explosion and the boy’s death and the end of his world, an end he saw coming while it was still way out in space-time, because he had X-ray eyes. The end.”
The room erupts in applause, like something from a television program, everyone clapping, turning and looking at him, faces red and jolly, smiles showing white. He has no idea how to react, how to respond. He is not one of the popular kids. What does one do? How does one behave in such a situation—where does one place one’s eyes? He tries placing them on Jenny but her shining gaze is too much, her smile too broad, her straight teeth too white. He is not worthy of that gaze. He could save the world, cure disease, end all war, and still he would not be worthy of that gaze. Who could be?
Mr. Booker is clapping too, pages flapping back and forth in his hand, like the wings of a bird. “Yeah,” he says, nodding. “You bet. Let’s hear it. Why don’t you all stand up.”
Everyone stands, the legs of their desks squeaking. They clap and clap and clap. At last Booker says, “All right, all right...” He spreads his arms, gestures, Down, down. Everyone sits down. Mr. Booker holds up the sheaf of papers, squints. “Pretty good, pretty good. Listen to some of these: ‘Elm-dark...crinkly-antennaed...the corners of creation. Amazing for a twelve-year-old—more like something you’d read in a book. A real book...” He picks up the paperback on his desk, The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. “Like this one.”
He tosses the paperback back onto his desk, then holds the sheaf of papers at eye-level. He rotates them horizontally, places his thumb and forefingers at the center, and rips. Then he lays the halves together and rips again. He lays the quarters together and rips again. Then he tosses the stack into the wastebasket and says, “Today we’re going to talk about plagiarism.”