King Dork (39 page)

would in some ways depend on what Sam Hellerman knew and

when he knew it. And what he planned to do about it.

So the real question concerning that second article was

what Sam Hellerman was trying to tell me with it. Was he

trying to tell me something about CEH and Tit and Timothy

J. Anderson, or was he trying to tell me something about

Deanna Schumacher? I started to rack my brains for a way to find out without his realizing that I knew there was anything to find out.

F I R EC RAC KE R

There was a pay phone down the hall in the hospital, and I used it to call Sam Hellerman shortly after I had opened the second envelope. He seemed pretty pleased with himself.

“You mean you haven’t been able to figure it out?” he

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said, when I’d as much as told him I hadn’t been able to figure it out. “It all makes sense if you look at it a certain way,”

he added. Well, I doubted that very much. But he said we

could get together to discuss it when I got out of the hospital. I tried to come up with a way to get him to talk about Deanna Schumacher without actually mentioning her myself,

but I couldn’t manage it. The best I could do was:

“So, when you say it all adds up, you mean Timothy J.

Anderson and Tit and my dad and the
Catcher
code and Matthew chapter Three verse nine?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, with that “no duh” inflection where

you make “yeah” into two syllables, kind of swooping down

on the last one.

“Hey, how about that Celeste Fletcher,” I said, after a

pause, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“She’s a firecracker,” said Sam Hellerman.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Really?” I said. I guess there are guys who can sound

cool saying that a girl is a firecracker, but Sam Hellerman isn’t one of them. Anyway, that exhausted my material, so I said

“Later” and hung up.

Life feels a little easier when you don’t have to make your own schedule. I didn’t have to worry about calling Deanna

Schumacher till Thursday, which was a relief. Wednesday,

Celeste Fletcher’s “safe” day, was right around the corner, though. I was due to be released Thursday, so that meant I’d have to call from the pay phone in the hall. Even though I didn’t find calling Celeste Fletcher quite as scary as calling Deanna Schumacher, I was still pretty nervous about it.

Maybe you never get used to calling girls on the phone.

I stalled and avoided it for a while, but eventually I got up the nerve to go out to the hall and call from the pay phone.

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“Oh, thank God!” she said, when she realized it was me.

I kid you not. “Oh, thank God.” Could anyone be so happy to hear from me that they would spontaneously burst into a

prayer of thanks? Sounds dubious, I know. She said she

hadn’t been sure I would call her, showing just how little she really understood me and what I was all about. That was

okay—I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of her being able to understand me that easily anyway.

Our phone conversation was quite long, considering that

my half of it was on a pay phone in the hallway of a hospital floor surrounded by angry fellow convalescents who thought I was taking too long and didn’t much like what they were

hearing me say. It resembled the phone-side scene at the

Henderson-Tucci household a bit, in other words, and it was not the first time I’d noted similarities between my house and a sanitarium, I can tell you that.

I knew there was one thing we would have to cover even-

tually, so I got it out of the way near the beginning. I assured her I wasn’t going to tell anyone about us or our activities, past, present, or (and here I knew I was taking an optimistic leap) future. We’d just pretend we hardly knew each other.

Okay? She sounded relieved that she didn’t have to figure out a way to bring it up, as I’d known she would.

“Because it would be really bad if my boyfriend found

out,” she said.

I took a stab. “Shinefield?”

“Him too.” She laughed, a little nervously maybe. I wasn’t sure who her actual real official boyfriend was, but it seemed safest just to adopt a blanket policy of nondisclosure that would cover him along with everyone else. Make things simpler. How had she explained the smudged breastographs, I

wondered? Well, I was sure she had it all figured out. She had 300

that air. “And, um, you might not want to mention anything to Sam, either.”

Way ahead of you, babe. Not that I thought she was still

messing around with Sam Hellerman, too. Did I? Was she?

She was a busy girl, but I sincerely hoped not.

“Or Yasmynne.”

Okay, this was getting weird. But I didn’t want to kill the

“Oh, thank God” vibe, so I let it slide. “Don’t worry, Fiona.

No one will find out.”

“Stop calling me Fiona,” she said.

“Okay, if you stop calling me Trombone.” Because she

had started to call me Trombone somewhere during the con-

versation. But that was a deal she couldn’t or wouldn’t make, so I guess Fiona was back on the menu in at least a limited way. Plus, for obvious reasons the word “trombone” would

now forever bring to mind her breasts, or one of them, anyway. So I suddenly found I kind of liked hearing the word

“trombone.”

With the nondisclosure agreement out of the way, the

rest went pretty well.

“For the record,” she said, “I never thought you belonged

on the dude chart.”

Dude chart? Now, that was hard to interpret. In a variety

of ways, that statement went against everything I had understood about Dud Chart, the Sisterhood, and Celeste

Fletcher’s role in the whole thing. Or at least, it seemed to give the game slightly different implications. Had Sam

Hellerman gotten it a bit wrong, or contrived that I should get it a bit wrong? But wait: why didn’t I belong on it, if it was a “dude chart” rather than a “dud chart”? What was she trying to say? Who fucking knows? Nevertheless, even though I didn’t quite understand it, it was just about the nicest thing 301

anyone had ever said to me. I think. So I said thanks and left it at that. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

On the other hand, “dude chart” may just have been a

playful mispronunciation. See, one thing I learned from the conversation really blew me away—and this is so typical of me it’s not even funny: Celeste Fletcher was actually in Mr.

Schtuppe’s English class, and was something of a champion

mispronouncer in her own right. I had been too devil-head

oblivious even to notice. So while I was obsessing over the mystery girl, the mystery girl had been right under my nose, and we had been reading about Jane Gallagher and mispronouncing the same words from
Catcher in the Rye
all along without my realizing it. Hell God damn. So that’s why, when it was finally time to wrap it up, I asked her how things were in Old Nocturnal Emission Hills.

“Libidinous,” she said, but she pronounced it so it

rhymed with “shyness.” She was the real deal. A slan chick with a great rack, a devious nature, and a powerful vocabulary. Not bad at all. I think I’m in love, I thought, whatever I might have meant by that.

ALWAYS TH E QU I ET ON E S

In movies and books there’s this thing called a character arc, where the main guy is supposed to change and grow and become a better person and learn something about himself.

Essentially, there’s supposed to be this part right at the end where he says: “And as for me, well, I learned the most valuable lesson of all.” Now, if I were the main guy in a movie, I’d have the most retarded character arc anyone ever heard of. I didn’t learn anything. What’s the opposite of learning something? I mean, I knew stuff at the beginning that I don’t know 302

anymore. Bits of my life simply disappeared. I’m more con-

fused than I ever was before, and that’s really saying something.

But if you’re expecting that touchy-feely “you have

touched me, I have grown” character arc stuff, here it is.

Because, well, as for me, I have learned the most valuable lesson of all.

As I originally described the King Dork card game, a

player automatically loses if he gets a king in his hand. Now I see that it’s a little more complicated. You can bluff and fake your way out of getting kicked out of the game. In other

words, if you play in such a way that no one knows you have any kings, you stay in. I still need to work out the details, because somehow there also has to be a way that two or more

players, like, say, Deanna Schumacher and Celeste Fletcher, can hold the same king card at the same time without realizing it. And maybe some way for the queens to masquerade as each other or something. Anyway, I don’t know how you

win. Maybe no one ever wins, and you just keep accumulat-

ing cards and bluffing about them till everyone dies and is forgotten.

I don’t know how it is if you’re a normal guy with one

special girl who is your official girlfriend in the approving sight of God and country. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s just not available to everyone. So this only applies if you’re the schlumpy King Dork type whom girls don’t tend to want

to associate with in public if they can help it. But here it is, the lesson:

If you’re in a band, even an extremely sucky band, girls,

even semihot ones like Celeste Fletcher and Deanna

Schumacher, will totally mess around with you and give you blow jobs and so forth, provided you can assure them that no one will ever find out about it. Start a band. Or go around 303

saying you’re in a band, which is, let’s face it, pretty much the same thing. The quality of your life can only improve.

I admit, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of an actual Sex Alliance Against Society. Maybe a Sex Alliance Against

Society is in the end too much to hope for for some of us. But even though there is a small part of me that reacts with fury and indignation over that fact, another part of me would argue that considering where I was at the beginning of the

school year and throughout my entire life previous to it, the current lack of a Sex Alliance Against Society is quite an improvement over the previous lack of a S. A. A. S. This second small part understands where the first small part is coming from, but still, all things considered, it can’t really see the flaw in it. Of course, the huge, hunkin’ part that’s left over has no idea what to think and is still totally confused and melan-choly and bitter. So it’s not like we’re looking at a tremendous change here. My poor, adorable, flimsy character arc: you

blink, you miss it, bless its little cotton socks.

Still. I’ve got two slightly less-than-imaginary secret quasi girlfriends whom I can call on Mondays and Thursdays, and

on Wednesdays, respectively, when their official boyfriends are temporarily out of the picture because they’re on the late shift at the convenience store.

What you got?

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S H E R LO C K H E LLE R MAN

We were in my room at the beginning of Christmas vacation, listening to
Ace of Spades
. Sam Hellerman was seated on the floor, leaning against the dresser, with a glass of bourbon between his feet and a couple of my deluxe hospital-issued

painkillers, one balanced on each knee. He had promised to delay actually taking them till he had finished explaining his Timothy J. Anderson theory—I didn’t want him to pass out in the middle of a sentence—but I could see it was going to be a struggle for him. Sam Hellerman had very little self-control when it came to tranquilizers.

“Once you realize that Timothy J. Anderson was a kid, or

a teenager,” he said, tapping on the microfilm printout about the hanged student in the Most Precious Blood gym, “the

whole thing starts to make a little more sense.”

He paused to headbang slightly, and to sing “the ace of

spades” a couple times under his breath, but stopped when he saw me giving him a rather desperate “mercy, please, I beg of you” look.

“Okay,” he said, after taking a little sip of bourbon.

“Starting with that Bible quote you’re so hung up on. Why

did the mountain monk have the same quotation in his book

that Timothy J. Anderson had on his funeral card? You had

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guessed that the connection might be that they were both

monks or clergymen. But they had something else in com-

mon, too—they were kids. I mean the mountain story guy was writing about his childhood; Timothy J. Anderson died while still a kid. And that quotation really suits a kid’s funeral as much as an I-was-a-teenaged-monk book.”

Clearly, Sam Hellerman hadn’t actually read
The Seven

Storey Mountain,
but I could see his point. “God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” Matthew

3:9–11 did sound like something you might want to quote at a kid’s funeral.

The Catholic Church, he added, had had a pretty strict

antisuicide policy, especially at that time. Adults who killed themselves weren’t allowed to have Catholic burials. Kids

sometimes were, depending on their age, according to his research, though, of course, we didn’t know the hanged kid’s exact age.

“They were changing all the rules around at that time,” he said, pointing to the date, 1963, “including the rules about who got to have funerals and all that.” I hadn’t realized you had to earn the right to have a funeral by dying in the proper manner—it never ends, does it? But of course, a taboo like that doesn’t disappear just because they change the wording of

something in Rome. Sam Hellerman thought that might be a

reason why, even if there had been a funeral, as there appeared to have been, they might not have been eager to draw attention to it by publishing an obituary. “That’s assuming everyone believed it was a suicide, whether or not it really was.”