The Dream Life of Astronauts Page 9

  “Cross-your-heart bra thinks he’s going somewhere,” Howie said.

  Mitch stepped in front of Julian and peered at him, taking stock of him—as if it were the Burke brothers, and not Julian, who’d discovered a new species. “Maybe he is,” Mitch said, his face glistening with sweat. A stench was coming off him that reminded Julian of cabbage. “Get the dogs.”

  “We got the dogs,” Mitch said.

  “Then get the boards, and make sure he doesn’t escape.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Painville,” Mitch said, his gaze fixed on Julian’s.

  “Where?” Howie asked.

  “Home, asswipe. We’re taking him home.”

  The dogs pulled Mitch at a pace more trot than gallop. Julian pulled Howie, who hung on to the back of his shorts and rolled alongside him.

  When they got to the house, Julian’s heart sank at the sight of the empty carport, because it meant that no grown-ups were home. Carrying their skateboards under their arms, the brothers led him across the lawn, through the side gate, and into their backyard, where they turned the dogs loose and told Julian to stand against the toolshed.

  They seemed undecided on the manner of execution. Howie suggested they pour Windex into Julian’s ears, but Mitch wasn’t interested in the idea. Then Howie said they could just “throw stuff at him until he dies,” and when Mitch asked what stuff, Howie said cumquats, grapefruits, potted geraniums. Julian knew they could throw fruit at him for about a month and it probably wouldn’t kill him, but the potted geranium plants lining the patio looked heavy.

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out the bicentennial coin and showed it to them.

  “What the hell’s that?” Mitch asked.

  “It’s a souvenir coin, but it’s real money too. It’s an actual dollar. I could buy my freedom.”

  Mitch squinted at the coin, said, “Cool,” and took it from him. He tucked it into his own pocket and looked back at his brother. “We’d get into huge trouble if we broke all those geranium pots. I’ve got a better idea.”

  By order of the good state of Florida, Mitch declared, the prisoner would be drawn and quartered. Specifically, by dogs.

  This prompted some follow-up questions, since Howie didn’t know what it meant to draw and quarter someone, and then, after it was explained to him, wanted to know how they’d quarter Julian with only two dogs.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mitch said. “We’ll catch him on the rebound.”

  They dragged Julian away from the shed and told him to lie flat on his back on the ground. They tied one leash to his right ankle and the other to his left wrist. Then they hooked up the dogs. But the dogs wouldn’t sit still, so they had to hold them, aim their heads away from Julian, tell them to Sit! over and over again and then, finally, Go! The dogs walked over to Julian and began to lick his face. One of them nudged the baseball cap off his head.

  The brothers tried throwing tennis balls for the dogs to fetch. They tried holding the dogs’ attention with pig ears and walking backward away from them. This worked in that each dog leaned as far as the leash would allow, stretching Julian crossways, but it was hardly a dismemberment. In fact, the execution was such a failure that Julian started to giggle—and immediately regretted it, for Mitch declared the dogs brain-damaged and told Howie to untie them, then squatted down and planted his knee on Julian’s chest.

  “Open your mouth,” he said.

  Julian mashed his lips together.

  “Open your mouth and eat this, or eat something worse.”

  Julian couldn’t see what Mitch had in his hand but knew the threat to make it worse was real. When he opened his mouth, Mitch shoved in one of the soggy pig ears. Julian clutched it with his teeth to keep it from touching the back of his throat while Mitch took hold of his arms and Howie his legs. His body lifted off the ground as the brothers strained in opposite directions.

  And that was when Mrs. Burke, having finally come home from wherever she’d been, stepped out onto the porch, purse in hand, and gasped.

  —

  For a while after the stroke, Leo had tried an eye patch. He’d ordered it from an address he’d found in the back of a fishing magazine while waiting to get a haircut, and it had taken almost three weeks to arrive. Marie didn’t like the patch. She said there was nothing wrong with his eye other than the tic (she called it “the tic”), and there was no reason to cover it up. Not that she knew what it was like, having a traumatized palpebral ligament. Not that she’d ever tried to carry on a conversation with herself, or the boys, or the Technicolor staff, and seen how even the most well-meaning person was drawn to the fluttering eye.

  Leo had worn the patch to work and had told his coworkers that a sensitivity to light had set in. Nothing major, just a temporary adjustment. But the patch, it seemed, made everyone even more distracted than they’d been before. They stared at the black oval as if trying to discern the problem it was hiding. They asked him if the patch was elastic or if it tied around back. They asked him if it itched.

  “You sure it’s not leaching toxins into your eye?” one of them wanted to know when they crossed paths at the watercooler.

  That was a real question, from a grown man who had a job and showed up five days a week and presumably tied his own shoes in the morning. Spotted a coworker wearing an eye patch and asked if the patch was leaching toxins.

  The boys, of course, were fit to collapse when they saw the patch. Leo threw it away after listening to their spontaneous list of pirate names.

  On the evening of the day Mitch and Howie tried to pull Julian apart, Leo came home from work to find Marie not in the dining room or in the kitchen, where she sometimes sat working on her lesson plans, but in their darkened bedroom, lying on top of the covers with one arm folded over her eyes.

  She stirred a little when he came in. He asked if she was feeling okay.

  “Just trying to escape from the world for a few minutes,” she said. “I can’t really sleep, though.”

  Leo seldom took naps, but suddenly the thought of curling up with Marie was what he wanted more than anything. He pulled off his shoes and lay down beside her, then turned toward her and folded his leg and his arm around her. He rested his head in the crook of her neck, and it felt perfect. Then Marie took the arm from her face and draped it over his shoulder, and that felt perfect too.

  “Tell me something,” she said.

  He heard this as an invitation to tell her whatever was on his mind. “I’m slipping,” he said, surprised at how small his voice sounded, how childlike. “I don’t feel right anymore. I feel like a—time bomb. Like there’s another stroke just waiting to happen.”

  “What does the doctor say?”

  “Nothing. Nothing that’s useful, anyway. Basically, he says I should cross my fingers. The thing is, I feel—” He almost said scared, but even if that were true, he wasn’t ready to utter it aloud. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d come even close to speaking like this—had he ever in his adult life told anyone he felt scared? “Fragile,” he said. “I feel fragile.”

  “You’re going to be fine,” she said, patting the side of his head.

  Empty words, no more reassuring than Dr. Loudon’s babble. Still, Leo was glad to hear her say them. He tried to hug tighter into their embrace but already felt her squirming out of it, sliding herself up on the mattress to a sitting position.

  “Tell me something,” she said again, and he realized she wasn’t just making conversation; there was something specific she wanted to talk about. Not the boys, he thought, not the boys.

  “What are we going to do about Mitch and Howie?”

  His head was now resting against her hip, hardly a comfortable position. He rolled over onto his back. “What did they do now?”

  She described for him the scene she’d come home to, the scuffle in the backyard.

  “Christ,” he said. “They’re kids. Isn’t that what kids do?”

  “They told me flat
out they were trying to dismember him,” she said. “They shoved a pig ear in his mouth! I cleaned him up as best I could, and told him there really wasn’t any need to mention this to his parents. I gave him an entire package of Oreos to keep him quiet. But honestly, Leo, this is getting out of hand.”

  “Did you talk to them?”

  “They don’t listen to me,” she said. “They barely listen to you.”

  And so he got up, grumbling under his breath, and walked down the hall to the boys’ bedroom. Outside their door, he stopped and listened for a moment. Then he grabbed the knob and pushed the door open.

  Mitch was sitting on one side of the partner’s desk the boys shared, leafing through a comic book. Howie was lying on one of the beds with his head hanging upside down, staring at his index finger. The finger had a piece of string tied around it and had turned purple.

  “What are you two doing?” Leo asked.

  “Reading,” Mitch said.

  “Killing my finger,” Howie said.

  Leo sat on the other bed. He waved them over, told Mitch to put down the comic book, told Howie to take the string off his finger. They stood side by side in front of him, looking down at the floor.

  “Suppose you tell me what happened today.”

  “Suppose we don’t,” Mitch said, and in the next instant, without his even deciding to do it, Leo’s hand crossed paths with the boy’s face. The sting in Leo’s palm was immediate, and the handprint—red and angry—was already rising on Mitch’s cheek. It was the first time Leo had hit either of them on anything but their butts, and because he wanted this to be a one-shot deal, something they’d both remember, he smacked Howie too. Howie’s head knocked into Mitch’s shoulder.

  “Tell me what happened,” Leo said.

  They started talking in tandem, at a rapid pace. They’d just wanted to scare the Ferris boy—he’d been calling them names—they hadn’t been doing anything—really, they hadn’t!—you know how joggers stretch before they jog?—that’s what he’d said, that he’d wanted to jog, that he’d needed to stretch—so they were helping him—and they told him if it started to hurt to just say so, but instead he said he wanted to eat one of the pig ears, and—

  “Stop,” Leo said, holding up the hand he’d used to hit them. He was both impressed and a little saddened when he saw them flinch. His eye was spasming. He tried to squint, but that only made the drag on the opposite side of his mouth feel worse. Normally, he didn’t touch the eye when he was in front of other people, but now he clenched his teeth and pressed the heel of his still-warm hand against the socket.

  “Enough malarkey,” he said carefully. “Just tell me why you have it in for this boy. Help me understand what’s so irresistible about him.” Meaning, he thought, I know he’s an easy target, but why can’t you branch out a little? Pick on somebody else now and then? But they weren’t that ambitious, he knew, and they no longer seemed to care if they got into trouble.

  “It’s his hair,” Howie finally said. “We don’t like it.”

  Leo wanted to rub his eye again, but didn’t.

  “We don’t like this hair, either,” Mitch said. He reached up and tugged as best he could on his crew cut. Then he reached over and tugged on Howie’s. Howie let out an exaggerated ouch! “No one has their hair like this anymore, Dad,” Mitch said.

  Leo might have reminded them that he’d worn a crew cut since his army days, that their grandfather had worn a crew cut his entire life, that the astronauts had always worn crew cuts. But it was nothing he hadn’t said before. “Do you realize how humidifying this is for me?”

  He hadn’t meant to say that, but it’s what his brain had served up. The same thing had happened, only more severely, in the moments leading up to his stroke. It had been a Sunday afternoon, the boys had been watching football on TV, Marie had been walking into the kitchen and saying she might make pepper steak for dinner, and Leo, sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper open in front of him, had opened his mouth to say, “I’d rather not have pepper steak, if it’s all the same to you,” but what had come out was akin to Dr. Loudon’s Yahtzee analogy.

  “ ‘Mother flap steak on a blue-skinned cruller?’ ” Marie repeated back to him word for word, tacking a question mark to the end of it, looking bewildered and a little put out. “What am I supposed to say to that?”

  Leo remembered pushing his chair back and standing. He remembered feeling like his balance was somewhere outside his body, and resting a hand on the table, and then thinking it was a good idea to lie down flat on the linoleum floor.

  “Leo!” Marie said. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Something’s happening,” he said—or tried to say; he wasn’t sure what actually came out of his mouth.

  She knelt down and leaned over him. “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” she said.

  “Get away from me,” he said. “Let me breathe. Call an ambulance?”

  “Oh god,” she said, “I can’t understand a word you’re saying!”

  You might still call, he thought. She was doing just that. He could hear her talking to the operator, and then waiting while the operator connected her to the hospital. As she was frantically repeating their address into the phone, Leo stared up at the swirls in the ceiling, trying to swallow, trying to stay calm. And then the boys came in from either side, their two yellow heads blinking down at him, eclipsing his view.

  “Not ‘humidifying,’ ” he said now, feeling even more agitated than he’d been a few moments ago. “Humilifying. Humiliating. Skip Ferris works for me. He works under me, you know that. It’s humiliating to have to keep apologizing for the two of you.”

  Their eyes were like spiders crawling over his face.

  “I need you to promise me something,” he said, “both of you. I need you to promise you’ll stop acting like little assholes all the time. Because kids who act like little assholes grow up to be big assholes. And nobody wants to be around a big asshole.” He tried to think of something he could add to this. “Nobody who’s an asshole becomes an Eagle Scout. That’s a known fact.” He tried to think of something else. “And you shouldn’t be picking on this Ferris boy, anyway. He’s half your size.”

  Slipping, he thought. He was slipping by inches, losing his grip.

  “If it takes smacking you both across the face each and every time I hear that you’ve picked on this boy, then that’s what’s going to happen. And the dogs, the TV privileges, the basketball hoop you want for the driveway—you can kiss all that goodbye.”

  His lateral palpebral ligament was throbbing.

  “Look, it’s my job to make sure the two of you learn common sense,” he said. “And one day I won’t be around to try, and you’re going to wish I was. You both know that, don’t you?”

  Mitch didn’t respond, was looking at either Leo’s fluttering eye or at the sag in his mouth, hard to say which. Howie sank his hands into his pockets.

  “Don’t you?”

  —

  Several days before Halloween, Julian asked his mother if he could use his First Holy Communion blazer as part of his costume. She said yes. A day later he asked his father what was the strongest tape they had, and his father said duct tape. “Duck tape?” Julian asked, and his father told him no, duct tape, for ducts, but when he pulled a roll out of the utility closet to show Julian, the brand was, indeed, called Duck Tape.

  “How about that?” his father said.

  Julian asked if he could borrow the tape, and his father said, “Go for it, champ.” Then Julian asked if they had any black spray paint, knowing they did because his father had used some to paint their house number on their garbage cans not long ago.

  “What for?”

  “My Halloween costume.”

  His father stepped onto his toolbox to get the can down from the shelf. “Outside only,” he said, handing the can to Julian. “And aim it away from your face.”

  Alone in the backyard, Julian folded up the bottom flaps of the Communion
blazer and used the duct tape to hold them against the lining, shortening the blazer at the waist. Then he lay the blazer on the grass and spray-painted it black: front and back, sleeves, collar, armpits.

  Halloween night, he put on jeans and a white T-shirt, his school shoes, the jacket. He took a bottle of Wesson Oil down from the kitchen cabinet, carried it to the bathroom, and combed a handful of oil into his hair, catching the drips with a towel. The oil flattened and lengthened his hair—not what he’d been going for. He did his best to swoop it up in the front.

  He was carrying the bottle back into the kitchen when his mother looked over from the couch, where she was watching a game show.

  “What are you doing with the Wesson Oil?” she asked.

  “I needed it for my costume.”

  “Well, I hope you didn’t make a—is that your Communion blazer?”

  He set the bottle down, cocked his head to the side, and gave her two thumbs up. “Heeeyyyyy.”

  His mother brought a hand to her mouth.

  After dinner, with his parents trailing him, he traveled up and down their street and the next street over, rang the bell at every house, did his double-thumb maneuver, and by dark he’d made a decent haul, nearly filling his plastic pumpkin. Back at home, still in costume, he ate Zotz and waited for the doorbell to ring, answering it every time with “Heeeyyyyy.”

  He recognized the Burke brothers right away. Mitch was dressed as Spock, in black dress pants and a blue pajama top, with masking tape crowning his ears. Howie was in the store-bought Dr. Zaius costume Mitch had worn the previous year. They were about to laugh at his getup, Julian thought. They were about to muss his hair, congratulate him on finding a way to make it even greasier than it normally was. But, no: they just stood side by side, holding their pillowcases open.

  He dropped a single piece of candy into each case.

  Howie lifted his mask and peered down at the candy, a smirk set into his face, but Mitch knocked his little brother with his elbow and said, “Let’s go.” Even more surprising, he added “Thanks” over his shoulder as they were walking away.