The Acolytes of Crane "Updated Edition" (5 page)

‘Who
did you call? What did you say?’ they asked me fearfully.

I
had called the one institution that I hoped would fight for me, the police.
Based on the bruising, my mother’s injury, the testimony from my teachers at
school, and the state of our thrashed apartment—the cops had a clear idea. Due
to the shock that registered with my parents—even with their sorry history of
cycles of abuse—they left me alone during the foreboding few minutes it took
for the police to arrive. The prospect of jail does focus the mind wonderfully.

The
events that transpired unraveled all misconceptions of my family. I, Theodore
Daniel Crane, would arrive at my grandparents’ house that day. My mother’s
parents.

Throughout
the year, in court and in counseling, it was deemed that my parents were
unsuitable. The social worker decided it was necessary for me to remain in my
maternal grandparent’s custody until my parents could rehabilitate, and not
just ‘talk the talk’ like a couple of failing addicts.

They
never did rehabilitate.

My
father did hard time in county jail, and that day at the Red Bricks was the
last I would ever see of him. 

My
mother slipped further into depression over my father’s incarceration. She
moved to Florida, where she was born. My grandparents said she was happy, and
that in turn, made me happy.

“I
found love in the arms of my grandparents, who were named Marvin and Laverne. 
Finally, I experienced triumph, despite the deeply repressed stigma of failure,
which threatened to re-surface anytime if I were not careful.”

“Every
year for the next couple of years I visited Taylors Falls to pay my respects to
Jason. My grandparents and I camped in the woods east of the cliffs. They loved
driving north and observing the change in leaf color. What the—”

I
hear the vault start to open, and I make a run for the far wall of the cell,
accidentally ramming into it. I throw myself quickly into the static pose.

“Prisoner,
are you talking to yourself in here? Do I need to get the warden?”

I
shake my head and say, “I am talking into this tablet.” Looking down, I realize
the tablet is absent from my hands.

“I
have been watching you for about an hour now, and that tablet has not been
activated. I am going to shut the door, if you so much as fart while it is
closing—I will flame you up so quick!”

“Yes,
sir.”

I
worry about wasting my time, and that I might be losing my mind. My pants are
dry, but they still stink. My tablet is sitting flat on the mat, off and
charging. I pick it up quickly, irrational in my concern that it will not work
anymore.

I
slide my finger across the screen to activate it, and I jump up and down.

“Yes,
I knew you were not broken!” That’s how dubious my mental state was. The tablet
was my only friend in the prison, and here I was, experiencing separation
anxiety with this cold, rigid device. I definitely need warm human conversation
and contact.

“Is
there a problem in there, prisoner?”

“No
sir,” I say, and I start up right away to satisfy my longing for it. Under my
breath, I continue, “I wish some people would mind their own business.”

“What
is that, prisoner, did you say something?”

I
lower my voice to a squeak and say, “No, nothing.”

I
caress my new toy; the tablet is on and working great, so I start by saying,
“Okay it is only you and I now, so let’s begin. Each visit to the cliffs I did
the same ritual. I hiked up the cliff, yelled out Jason’s name—loud enough to
disturb the dead, and carved an inspirational message in the lone tree at the top.
Almost every time that I returned to the scene, I found that my words were
ignominiously overlayed by fresh carvings left behind by other people.”

The
ground was at times littered with the remains of a party. Another annoyance was
the shards of glass from broken bottles or the occasional revolting needle or
tourniquet. I thought the drunken punks that wandered the cliffs on the
weekends were defacing my etchings.

The
next trip to Taylors Falls was the last time I could practice the tradition.

It
was 2016, two years after Jason’s accident. I was fifteen years old and still
could not command enough charisma to increase my popularity. I spurted quite a
bit, but I wasn’t attracting the girls—just yet.

My
hair sprouted sandy in color. I was a dirty blond, my grandmother proclaimed. I
was still a twig of a boy and was tanned from cruising around town on my
bicycle.

My
eyes were still bluish-green in color. My granny Laverne always compared them
to an old print of a ship at sea, mounted above her bed. She said that when she
looked deep into my eyes, she could see that eager ship battling the raging
waves.  My grandmother was as tall as I was, with a curly permed hairdo and a
face that was cute like a kitten.

Life
at my grandparents’ house wasn’t at all peaches and cream. They followed a
highly structured daily regimen, thanks to my grandpa Marv’s army training.

The
fridge was over-flowing with food, and I ate so much during mealtime that my
grandmother called me, ‘Ted, the human garbage disposal.’

I
ate almost every meal that my grandmother served, but I hated liver. Liver to
me was awful. It was like placing a dog’s feces in a pan, flattening it out
with a burger spatula, and covering it in onions to give evidence to the fact
that some people try to make unappetizing food taste good.

I
poured almost an entire bottle of ketchup on the feces every time I had to eat
it. Something good came out of eating liver. Every time we did so, my grandpa
Marv always told me a story or one like it.

With
the three servings of liver whimpering in agony on the table, the stage for the
tale was set. He said, ‘Theodore, when I was about twenty-five and I was
finally home from the Korean War, I went into this fine restaurant downtown.
The restaurant was one of the best in the Twin Cities. I cannot remember what
the name of it was.’ He hollered, ‘Laverne! Do you remember the name of that
restaurant?’

My
grandmother was in the bathroom, and she didn’t answer.

‘Anyway,
I ordered a T-bone steak, and it was absolutely dreadful. There was too much
fat on it, not enough meat, and you know I like my fat crispy. So what did I
do?’ he asked, pausing for a moment to see if I would respond. ‘I poured a half
a bottle of ketchup on it. I figured it would take too long to send it back to
get spit on, so I may as well get my money’s worth right?’ he asked, and I
nodded my head rather than say anything because I was choking down some dry
liver.

Chuckling,
Marv continued his story and told me the chef stormed out and yelled at him for
pouring ketchup on
his steaks
. That tale sometimes tailed off into a
rant about how pineapple slices should never be cooked on pizzas, because that
is such an abomination.

Then
the real wisdom kicked in.

‘The
point is, son…’ he said. He called me son a lot. I wasn’t sure if that was by
error or intention. ‘…if you don’t like something, you don’t have to eat it. If
you keep eating that liver, your lips are going to fall off, and liver will
grow in their place.’ Marv chuckled.

‘People
will call you liver lips,’ my grandma would add.

My
grandpa Marv dragged his liver tale out even further, and my grandma said his
name in a long Minnesota-nice voice, to encourage him to stop, ‘Marv!’

‘Well,
I guess what I am saying, Ted, is that if you keep eating the liver, we will
keep feeding it to you,’ he said.

What
an amazing concept it was. If I led people to believe I enjoyed liver, they
would keep serving it to me.

My
grandpa was a non-filtered cigarette smoker.  He picked up the habit from when
they issued packs in food rations during his tour overseas. Laverne so hated
the filthy habit; she ordered him to go down into the basement, windows wide
open, if he wanted to smoke during wintertime. Stubbornly refusing to break his
connection with me, he always asked me to come down with him whenever he wanted
to light up. I loved him so much, I always agreed, although it always reeked in
the basement and made me feel like gagging. The stacks of cigarette butts,
piled precariously on top of old-fashioned glass ashtrays, made me dizzy even to
just look at them.

Despite
his faults, I always laughed when I thought about my grandpa. My grandpa was a
racist. Not that being a racist is funny. The era of racism was so ridiculous
at the time, that it made me laugh. I am entirely disgusted by it now. It was
his one apparent flaw.

When
we watched pro basketball on TV, Marv pointed to a towering black man, all
decked out in team colors, graceful as he expertly dribbled around the court.
He asked me, ‘Ted, do you know why those basketball players’ eyes are really
big?’ Most of the time I didn’t have a clue what my grandpa was talking about.
He continued and said, ‘Because, when they came over to the United States, we
had to pull off their tails, and their eyes popped out of their heads!’

Afterwards,
he tallied a couple of chuckles and released a scattered hiss that was almost
never ending. If I didn’t get the joke, it didn’t matter, because his versatile
tone of voice and quirky mannerisms alone drove me into a guffawing frenzy.

My
laugh sounded like that of a hyena lying on its back, being tickled in its most
sensitive spots. The idea of anyone having a tail pulled off is hilarious
regardless of the color being referenced.

My
grandpa always told the same stories and jokes throughout the years—including
those periods before I joined his home. I don’t think he ever recalled
previously sharing them with me. If I kept laughing at his jokes, he kept
telling them.

My
grandparent’s house was covered floor to ceiling in interesting trinkets, which
were grouped into different categories from one room to another. For example,
Laverne made sure to exhibit her prized porcelain doll collection in the living
room.

As
for their furniture, it was suitable back in  its time, but I thought it was
ugly. They had gaudy wood paneling both on the main floor and in the basement.

A
grandfather clock chimed at the top of each hour. I sat by that clock and
played solitaire for hours. Whenever the bells chimed, I ding-donged along with
them. The kitchen had a shelf spanned the entire perimeter of the room,
strategically placed ten inches down from the ceiling. It was home to
fifty-three miniature rocking horses. I counted and named each of them. I had
trouble remembering all the names, so upon the third attempt, I wrote them all
down on a list, meticulously folded the paper, and hid it in a slot in the
grandfather clock.

Of
particular delight to me was the walkout three-season deck in the backyard,
perfect for me to practice my skateboarding tricks. Concrete stone slabs,
firmly laid long ago although now they had become somewhat uneven over time,
surrounded the deck. I would set my back wheels into the space between the
planks. It was a good way to keep the board still while I practiced ollying. I
figured that since the old, badly maintained deck jutted out to a huge backyard
surrounded by forest, they wouldn’t mind if my skateboard ground down their
steps. To my surprise, Laverne had shrugged and said, ‘As long as you don’t
kill yourself, it’ll be nice for the deck to finally be of some use.’ 

Three
days before our trip to Taylors Falls, my grandpa and I decided to work in the
flower garden together. My favorite flowers were the bleeding hearts. They had
dark pink heart-shaped outer petals with drooping white inner petals protruding
from the heart. They always had a slew of aphids crawling on them. In the
garden, there was also a gigantic over-grown rose bush. He grew types of roses
known as floribundas and grandiflora. The flowers were pretty, thanks to his
incessant shapely pruning.

While
he pruned, I took up shelter in my tree fort, which grandpa helped me build
last year. Equipped with two tiny haphazard home-constructed chairs made only
of sawed-off planks, the fort afforded me a space in which I could hide and
write in my journal. The trauma I experienced at the cliffs two years earlier
had placed me in a social rut, and I regressed to preferring to “chill out”
alone.

I
was enjoying the quiet, when I heard a pop. I dropped my journal. My amulet
displayed its typical response by glowing.

The
sharp sound was like that of a cap gun or one of those little white bags of
poppers we used every July 4 holiday. I heard my grandpa let out a man-scream,
which was more or less an indirect yell.

I
hopped down from the tree and searched the neighboring patches of woods for the
origin of the sound. Two kids were hiding at the wood-line by the fence. The
neighbor boy had a friend over, and they were both sharing a pellet gun. Dimly,
they had thought they could have their fun by taking one crack at an old man,
and get away with it, too. They sat in disbelief for a moment and then booked
beyond the pines. They hadn’t reckoned on one of their own kind resting away
nearby in a fort.

I
yelled, ‘Ey, you get back here you punks! No one does that to my grandpa!’ I
tried to make out their faces, but the forest cover was too thick.

‘What
are you going on about, boy? I was stung by a damn bee,’ my grandpa said to me,
not aware there were other boys about.

‘I
saw two boys at the fence firing a gun at you,’ I said, sure of myself, but
worried that my grandpa would not believe me.

Marv
turned to look and he saw the boys sprinting up the cherry stained deck of the
neighboring house. Boy, I had never seen my grandpa run so fast, confuting his
advanced age. He darted into his kitchen. He called the police, and no sooner
than my grandma could fry a quail egg, two cops were knocking at our door.

They
introduced themselves. Officer Johnson, who looked like a kid right out of
cadet school, had the lead role. I guessed the police force were anxious to
train the newbies while a more experienced colleague looked on. The other man,
Officer Carruthers, had sergeant rank. I could tell he was a sergeant, because
of my gramps’ military ID that he saved from his term in the army. They both
had high-n-tight hairstyles—the most severe buzz cut possible, popular with
military guys.

We
walked over to the troublesome kid’s house. I marched next to the cops like a
sidekick with an itchy trigger finger.

Officer
Johnson knocked on the window beside the storm door with his knuckles—fingers
curled, while his more seasoned partner looked on. The tapping was light, as if
he was trying to see if a bathroom was occupied.