The Home for Wayward Clocks (50 page)

This clock could do it all. Even bring life to other things. I impressed myself by creating it and while the wood was cheap and wouldn’t polish to a shine, I tried anyway. When I turned it in to the teacher, I was already a week and a half late and behind on the next project, dollhouses, which we were going to donate to the Salvation Army at Christmastime. The teacher marked me down to a C because I was late, but he put the clock in the showcase, just outside the classroom.

My mother continued her phone-calling campaign. It didn’t help, it never did, but the guidance counselor brought me in, asked me to talk about my feelings. I told her no. I told her that as a guidance counselor, she ought to be able to figure out for herself what it felt like to hear Ernie and Bert gay jokes for ten years straight and what it did to a psyche or even a soul to be called Viagra at the tender age of fourteen. She gave me a couple pamphlets on adolescent depression. I threw them away. I didn’t see what good it would do to read about something that I already knew intimately.

I told my mother that I was going to change my name and I was going to change it now and if she didn’t let me, I would do it on my eighteenth birthday, without her blessing. She regarded me steadily through the steam from her coffee. “So what would you change your name to, Ernesto?” she said.

And I went mute. I never thought past the changing part before. After thinking for several minutes, I finally shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe John Smith. Even that’s better than Ernesto Viagrasa.”

She frowned. “You figure out who you are, Ernesto,” she said. “When you have the name, tell me. Then I will talk to your father.”

So I thought about it. I thought about it while I sanded the floors of my dollhouse, cut windows, added a chimney. I thought about it while I ducked during gym class volleyball, though Freckled Heckler’s spiked balls always found my nose. I thought about it while running home after school, cries of “Hey, Viagra! What’s up!” stabbing me in the back of the neck. And I thought about it when I snuck out of school during my one study hall and climbed the hill and sat and stared as the leaves changed colors, then fell, then were covered with snow.

But there just wasn’t any other name. Trying to match the inside with the outside, all I came up with was Ernesto Viagrasa. But I could hear it spoken the way my mother said it, firmly, with solid volume and graceful R’s. So I began to correct people. “It’s Ernesto,” I said to my teachers, whenever they said Ernie. “It’s Ernesto,” I said to the geeks at my table in shop class. “It’s Viagrasa, asshole!” I shouted at Freckled Heckler and his pals as I stood on the porch to my house. I ducked in before the slew of snowballs hit their mark. If my mother heard me, she never said. But she started making me hot chocolate, meeting me just inside the door with a steaming mug loaded with whipped cream from an aerosol can.

I stayed after school one day to wire a doorbell into my dollhouse. I was behind again, plus I thought an extended stay in the shop on a cold snowy day would get Freckled Heckler to head on home without his daily fix of jibes. As I was getting ready to leave, my dollhouse now merrily singing Westminster chimes whenever the little red button by the little red door was pushed, the shop teacher came in, carrying my clock.

“You can take this home today, Ernie,” he said. He set it on my table. “Too bad you didn’t get it in on time. You would have gotten an A.”

“It’s Ernesto,” I said and he nodded.

The clock wouldn’t fit in my backpack, so I carefully cradled it as I began the walk home. It was getting late and everything was shaded that bluish-gray, the hallmark of evenings during Iowa winters. I felt invisible as I walked home, my shoes not making a sound on the shoveled sidewalks. The silence worked for me and I relished it, the invisibility and the bluish-gray too, grateful that the air wasn’t purple with profanity.

So I was surprised when I was knocked forward. The clock left me, flying through the air to land with a soft whoosh in a snowbank. My arms were twisted behind my back and even before I heard the voice, I knew who it was. Freckled Heckler said, “No one calls me an asshole, especially a faggot like you.” He and his friends pulled me off the sidewalk and back behind someone’s garage.

I went numb before they had my clothes off. Before they packed my penis in snow. Before they kicked me and peed on me. Before Freckled Heckler jammed his dick in my mouth and told me to suck him off so I could taste a real man. I closed my eyes and I did it. They buried me in the snow, face down, so I would be, they said, like dead Ernie, waiting butt up in his grave for Bert to pop in for a cold one.

I couldn’t breathe and I took it for as long as I could, until my head swam from the cold and the pain and the lack of oxygen. Then I slowly pushed up through the snow and shook it out of my hair. The bluish-gray was darker now, but with what light was left, I could see they were gone. I got up and dressed, my fingers too numb to push the buttons through the holes, zip up my zipper. I pulled on my jacket, found my backpack, washed my mouth out over and over with handfuls of snow. Then I went to look for my clock. It was almost buried in the snow too, but a corner of its square humpback poked through and I found it right away. It seemed fine, but I wouldn’t know for sure until I got home and plugged it in. Walking was painful. Everything hurt.

I saw my mother looking out the window as I moved up the street. She met me at the door, hot chocolate in hand. Hot chocolate she dropped as I tried to climb the steps. The snow was stained brown. It smelled good. The steam looked warm.

“Ernesto!” she cried.

“Mom,” I said and then I cried too.

A
fter the emergency room, my mother insisted I eat a bowl of hot soup, drink some fresh hot chocolate, take a hot bath. She put me in bed, covered me to the chin with her own electric blanket and turned it on high. She left my door partway open, a way I hadn’t slept in three years.

But as soon as she was out of my room, I got up and plugged in my clock. It worked and I sat and watched the hands go around, waiting for it to chime. In my room, it was ten o’clock central. I reached out and touched the knob. Eleven o’clock eastern. Eight o’clock pacific. Nine o’clock mountain. And I wished I was in any other time zone but here.

I returned to school a few weeks later, after it was all over. My broken ribs and frostbite healed and Freckled Heckler and his friends were sent away, but I learned quickly that it made no difference. Everyone knew. Even the geeks in shop class moved away from me, leaving me to sit alone at the corner of the table. The teacher, someone I hoped might say my name in that deep soft voice I heard in the boy’s bathroom, stopped calling me anything at all.

All that mattered was that I was Ernesto Viagrasa, Ernie, Viagra What’s-up, a boy who sucked off real men on demand. A boy who curled up and allowed himself to be kicked, to be humiliated. Ernesto Viagrasa was a boy who could disappear butt-up in the snow, waiting for someone to pop by for a cold one.

What mattered was that I matched the inside to the outside.

S
o what do you do with a ghost in your head, a ghost who drifts through your body in a silent but boiling river? A ghost who wants to come out, but you know with absolute certainty if she did, it would be your destruction. What do you do with a ghost that is your mother, a mother who haunted long before she died?

You decide to visit the graveyard. You’ve never seen it; when your mother died years ago, you did all the arrangements via the telephone. She was found, you were told, by the mailman who was concerned that so many days of mail were ignored, overflowing the small metal box just outside her front door. He peeked in the living room window and saw your mother, old, gray, tiny, in her favorite place: a sunny spot on the living room floor. You were assured that she died in her sleep.

There was no funeral. She didn’t provide one for your father; you didn’t provide one for her. She was placed next to him in the ground, under an identical stone, a stone you ordered without ever seeing, and you asked that only her name and dates be engraved. No “Mother.” No “Wife.” No “Beloved.”

You’re sure that there were some in the town who thought this was a disgrace. But there were also some, you figured, who just looked the other way, the way they always did. The way they always will.

So now you go back to that little town and for the first time in your life, you go behind the Catholic church and walk through the graveyard. It takes a while, but you find them. They are in the middle of a back row, their stones together, the grass mowed. They are unadorned, no flowers, nothing. You stand at their feet and read their names. Plain. Simple. They wouldn’t mean anything to anybody.

Except to you. Imagine. What do they mean to you?

You look at them and you think Mother. Father. And as your eyes start to well, the internal river surges up in you and you stumble forward, lean on the stones, one hand on each. And you feel your connection. To them, to your mother and your father. And you feel the rage that threatens to bend you in half, force you to rip the stones out of the earth, and beat them against each other. Beat them until they are senseless. Beat them until they are no more. Just shattered chunks of stone scattered on the ground. Unintelligible. Unknowable.

But though your arms shake and your breath comes in shudders, you do nothing more than step back, release your touch. Release yourself. Breathe deep. And it is that easy. Like so many years ago, walking away from your mother as she lay bleeding on the ground, it is that easy.

They are here now. You can see them. Their names are plain as day, and their bodies are moldering in simple cheap caskets six feet underground. This is where they will stay. You, stepping back, can leave them behind. Can leave it all behind to decay here, in a small graveyard, under the snows of winter, the leaves of fall, the rich and splendid greens and yellows of spring and summer. It will all fall away to nothing.

But first, you cry.

Your tears flow from the river and as they fall faster, they form streams down both of your cheeks. You feel the heat of them washing your face, then falling away from you onto the ground as you kneel in the grass. As the river empties, you feel weak and alone, and yet, it’s not a bad feeling. It’s like that moment after a severe case of the flu when you are drained and empty, but know you will recover. Bracing yourself, you raise one knee, then the other, then slowly pull yourself to your full height. Looking around, you notice flowers and cards and plastic decorations on the other graves. You think for a moment about going to the little florist in town, buying some daisies, some carnations. A hint of baby’s breath. And leaving the bouquet at the graves. Settled directly in the middle between the two of them.

Imagine.

But you don’t. And you know, as you turn your back and walk away, that you never, ever will.

James knew that day that he needed to leave his rage where it belonged. Where they belonged. It all needed to stay there, in two simple and plain grave plots, under two simple and plain gravestones. Their bodies were there. Their sins were there. What better place to lay his rage to rest? Than with those who would understand it the most. Who would deserve it the most.

Imagine.

****

The next morning, Cooley wasn’t at the breakfast table. James checked her room and found her bed rumpled from her confessions of the night before, but empty. He stood there for a moment before he made the connection and went downstairs to the workshop. She was there, asleep, her head cradled on her arms as she slumped at the bench.

“Cooley,” he said and tapped her shoulder. There was no response. He tapped a little harder, called her name again. Then he touched her hair and was amazed that harsh purple could be so soft. Again, he saw it as blonde, grown out, falling down her back in corkscrew curls. Goldilocks, Shirley Temple. Cooley could be both, though never with the wide blue eyes of innocence. For both of them, innocence left before they even knew what it was, how to spell it. James touched her back, patted it, trying to find the right way to wake a sleeping child, and he felt the muscles tensed even in sleep. “Cooley,” he said, a little louder.

She woke and sat straight up, looking around as she tried to place herself. When she saw James, she smiled.

“You must’ve fallen asleep down here, even though I told you to get to bed,” he said. “You’ve got to hurry…it’s almost time for school.”

Her smile faded and she nodded. Quickly, she patted the shop class clock and then she ran upstairs. Before she left, she stopped in the kitchen to grab a day-old doughnut and a glass of milk and the few dollars James set out for her lunch. He watched as she ran through the door and down the road, her backpack bouncing against her hips. He tried to tell himself that there was a lilt to her step that showed happiness settling in.

And James wondered what kind of parent he was, if he was a parent at all. Letting a teenage girl stay up all night fixing an unfixable clock. Sending her off to school on a stale doughnut and with money she would use to buy junk.

But he just didn’t know how to do it. James thought of the previous night, of shoving Cooley, watching her fall, feeling the blackness come over him that was his mother’s shadow, and he shuddered. The anger that hit at times was so hard to control. It was more than anger, it was a rage that slid between his brain and his soul and possessed his whole body, his thoughts, his heart rate, his sight. It was so much more than seeing red; it was being Red with a capital R. But with Cooley, James had to find control. He couldn’t do to her what had already been done. What had been done to him. It had to stop here.

James stood in the kitchen, not sure what to do next. What do you do when you know that the seeds of meanness, of cruelty, are already planted inside of you? How do you dig them out, how do you keep them from taking deeper root, from blooming into lush lilies of the valley or the darkest of nightshade? James leaned on the kitchen sink and looked outside. How could he become someone other than who he knew he really was, deep inside?