The Life and Times of Benny Alvarez (6 page)

Night Crawler

I
n class, things aren't going too well with Sara, and right now I'd rather be in my after-school drawing class sketching cartoons.

Ms. D tries to help, telling everyone to let our minds “roam” on whatever images come to mind. “Free-associate,” she says.

When we talk individually, Sara asks me to describe how a night crawler is different from a regular worm, so I repeat how in late spring my grandfather and I patrol his backyard with flashlights, trying to catch worms peeking out from their holes before they see the light and recoil.

“What do you do with them?”

“We use them for bait.”

“You mean you stick a hook into them?”

I wonder how someone so smart can ask such a dumb question, but I say, “Yeah, they're usually very juicy.”

She cringes, and I'm guessing that's what Caulfield means by an image being powerful. So I decide to tone things down or we'll end up writing about ballet shoes instead of night crawlers.

“Did you write a draft of the poem last night?” I ask.

“I focused more on jotting down nighttime images.”

“Really?” I say, thinking this won't be too helpful. “Like what?”

“Like the sound of a railroad car, wet grass, a streetlight, a baby crying.” And she rattles off about five more. “What about you?” she asks.

“I actually wrote the whole poem last night.”

She seems surprised and asks me to read it.

“‘My grandpa and me go fishing, but first we get night crawlers, creepy little creatures with big noses. They look like fingers someone cut off as they crawl around. But we grab them and I don't mind getting all wet and dirty.'”

She's looking at my sheet of paper, pursing her lips like she just sucked on a lemon. “It kind of reads like sentences,” she says, way too loudly, and I can feel Claudine eavesdropping. “Also,” she adds, “we can't have the name of the object in the poem. People are supposed to guess it.” She's right about that.

“But it's got poetry,” I say, “the way I talk about them having noses and compare them to fingers.”

Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm sure she glances at Claudine before saying, “That's good, but we're going to have line breaks, right, and maybe rhyme?”

In fact, I had no intention of having line breaks. “Yeah, sure,” I say.

“I mean,” she adds, “I thought we could make the poem sound like the slurping noise night crawlers make when they go in and out of their holes.”

Slurping noise?

“We'll get it right,” I say, “but maybe we should write something we can take home and fiddle with.”

So we write separately for a while, and I give her this:

 

My grandpa and me

go fishing but first

we capture them,

creepy little creatures with big noses.

They look like fingers someone cut off

as they crawl around. But we grab them

and I don't mind getting all wet and dirty.

 

Why mess with perfection? So all I do is get rid of the “night crawlers” and change “get” to “capture.” Who cares where I break the lines?

Right before class ends, she slides a sheet over to me:

 

The last automobile of the night passes,

And I fall on a blanket of grass.

My left hand catches them coupling.

Rooted to the ground yet aspiring upward.

Anonymous.

 

I'm not too sure what I think of this, but at least it doesn't rhyme. “Really terrific, Sara,” I say.

“You think so?”

“Yeah, it almost reads like a finished poem,” and I'm not lying about that, though I can't make sense of that “Anonymous.”

Ms. D interrupts us by saying, “Time's up. Why don't you work on each other's drafts tonight? Then on Friday, you can meet in pairs again, and on Monday we'll read them.”

In the hall, I ask Beanie how he made out. He was paired with Bethany Briggs. “Okay, I guess.”

“Just okay?”

“I don't think either one of us cares much.”

“What are you writing on?”

Suddenly, Claudine's busybody voice invades my space. “You can't ask him that.”

Beanie doesn't want to agree but knows she's right. “It
is
a kind of a contest, dude.”

Claudine smiles, and before walking away, shakes her finger at me. “And don't think you're going to bully Sara into writing a prose poem.”

Ah, so maybe Sara isn't a neutral. Maybe she's been turned to the Dark Side.

Samuel Morse

I
t's hard to say when Claudine and I became enemies, but obviously our fates are linked, because she's been in my classes since first grade. She's taller than everyone, and unlike the rest of us, who are always slouching, thinking someone's making fun of us, she has the posture of a figure skater or gymnast. Also, she has so much confidence when she talks that she's very intimidating. You would think most kids would hate her, but girls buzz around her like she's the queen bee, and she usually ends up president of the class. She never gets the boy vote, but there are enough guys who are either scared of her or so used to her winning, they just don't care.

Why don't the boys like her? Probably because she's always waiting for us to say something dumb, so she can pounce on us, proving her point at our expense. I imagine her staying up all night, eyes as big as Ping-Pong balls, anticipating some bonehead guy's response to the day's lesson, so she can get in his face. I should admire what Ms. D calls Claudine's “determination,” but the Book has taught me there are other words for “determination,” like “pushy, obnoxious, egotistical, bullheaded, intolerant, tyrannical”—well, you get the picture.

Claudine and I wouldn't battle so much if I zoned her out the way most guys do, but one of my traits is that I don't like being bullied or seeing others bullied. Another one of my traits is that I can argue you to death. You want to argue that the cafeteria pizza is great, I can counter with a hundred reasons why it isn't, even if it's my favorite meal. This so-called negative characteristic drives my mother nuts, but it's like I can't stop myself. I always see the other side of an argument. My mother thinks I'm going to be a lawyer. My father says I'm going to be a huge pain in the neck, though that's not the word he uses, and you don't need a thesaurus to guess it.

So, in a way, Claudine and I had no choice but to be enemies from day one, and school was our battlefield. I had my breakthrough in fifth grade. The teacher, Ms. Bright, assigned us a two-paragraph report on Samuel Morse. I already knew he had invented the telegraph, but I discovered he'd been a pretty good painter, too, so I wrote about that, thinking it would be more interesting. When my time came, I proudly recited my report, and right as I finished, Claudine's hand shot up. She's a sly one. Teachers would hate her if she said, “Benny's report is dumb because he missed Samuel Morse's most important contribution,” or if she was smirking and sighing and shaking her head disgustedly as I spoke. But not Claudine. Even then, she had perfected this fake look of interest, a whole routine where she compliments you first before lowering the boom.

That day she said, “Benny makes many good points, but a man's real accomplishment is judged by how many lives he has changed, and
certainly
the telegraph and Morse code are more important than
mediocre
paintings.” It was the way she emphasized “certainly” and “mediocre” that sent me over the edge.

“Why wouldn't painting be important?” I asked, surprising myself.

Fake concern again. “It's not unimportant. It's just not
as
important as the telegraph.”

“So you're saying if I give a hand to some old guy who's fallen down and no one sees me, that's not as important as helping a hundred people on national TV?”

She was a bit baffled by that, and I was waiting for the teacher to interrupt, but Ms. Bright seemed to be enjoying the conflict. After a long pause, Claudine said, “I would be glad you helped someone, but helping a hundred people is better.”

“What if I was helping all those people so I'd be famous? What if I hated them all? Isn't the feeling behind something important? Maybe Morse hated creating the telegraph. Maybe he invented it to make money. Maybe he was laughing his head off as he watched people tapping away like a bunch of idiots.”

Silence again. Then Claudine said, “Well, if Samuel Morse was such a great painter, why didn't anyone else mention it in their reports?”

I wanted to say, “Because everyone got their two paragraphs done, then didn't read the rest of the entry in the encyclopedia,” but it was clear the class was liking this confrontation, so I didn't want to push them toward Claudine's side.

Rather than play her game, I pulled out a sheet of other facts on Morse's painting that I didn't have space to include. “Did you know,” I said, “that the famous painter Washington Allston liked Morse's paintings so much, he took him to England, where Morse studied and was so good he was admitted to the Royal Academy?” And then I read from my notes. “‘And there Morse studied the paintings of Michelangelo and created his masterpiece
Dying Hercules
.'” To be honest, I had never seen the painting and didn't really know how significant it was to be admitted to the Royal Academy, but all those facts seemed to stun Claudine, as if she had lunged forward with her sword and I had disarmed her. But she recovered enough to save face, saying, “Honestly, Benny, you didn't give those facts in your report. Now I may have to reconsider. The telegraph was Morse's most important contribution, but maybe his paintings were
equally
as important.”

Too late, Claudine,
I thought, and I was about to go for the jugular when Ms. Bright came to her rescue, saying, “It's clear we've learned two things today: First, great people are often multitalented; second, two different views on those people can be
equally
correct.” Had she gone over to the Dark Side too?

What's important is that after that day, I became a legend with the boys. I had stood up for every guy who had been turned into a donkey by Claudine. But I had also alienated her until death do us part. The difference was that now
she
had to be on top of her game, because instead of feeling sick to my stomach every time I spoke in class, I thought,
Bring it on, girl
.

Now all I have to do is stop blushing when she talks to me.

Ostriches and Pigeons

T
hursday afternoons I go to my grandfather's house and we work on language. It's something he looks forward to. That and watching sports on TV. Crash used to come, until he freaked out and I found him in the kitchen crying. I was doing opposites with my grandfather, where I say a word, show him its picture, then ask him to say the opposite. It's something any first grader can do, but after the stroke it would've been easier for my grandfather to slip on a pair of ballet shoes and walk on a tightrope across the gorge at Niagara Falls with a four-hundred-pound gorilla on his back.

That day he was doing okay, but after about the tenth opposite, I saw him struggling. When this happens, as tough as he is, he looks like he's about five years old. He becomes very frustrated and sad, and I wish I could open his skull and repair the connections that got messed up.

Because he was struggling, I shifted to another word exercise, but he was spent by then, and he got emotional, holding Crash's hand and slowly rubbing it, saying what a good boy he was. His PT Boat hat was turned a bit sideways, so Crash straightened it, and when he did, my grandfather's eyes welled up. Crash kind of lost it and ran into the kitchen. My grandfather looked a little perplexed, but I distracted him by talking about the Patriots, which always works.

Today, though, is going well. We start naming things around the house: a sugar bowl, a Patriots calendar, a clock on the wall. Then I grab a box containing pictures of ten kinds of birds, and they aren't the easiest ones to recognize. My father told me researchers discovered that sometimes stroke patients recover faster by challenging their brains, moving from harder pictures and words to easier ones instead of vice versa. Grandpa does great today on the birds, though ostriches and pigeons always throw him. I tell him that whenever he sees a pigeon, he should think of crap, because that's all they do. He laughs loudly and says, “How's Crap doing, anyway?”

“It's Crash, Grandpa.”

“That's what I said.”

“The hawk hasn't come back, so he's just being his usual nasty self.”

“Yeah, he's a piece of work, but I guess all Alvarez boys are.”

“What do you mean?”

“We're all pains in the butt.” Then he lowers his voice and looks around. “I don't want her”—meaning Gloria—“to hear that. I want her to think she married a Greek god.”

Not much chance of that happening,
I think. “You know, my mom says I'm negative.”

“A wonderful woman, your mom. Two chances, and I couldn't get one like her.” Gloria's sitting in the other room, watching some religious TV show, so I ask Grandpa to lower his voice. That's another Alvarez trait. You always know when we're around.

“She's great, Grandpa, but all that ‘don't sweat the small stuff' garbage and those lists she posts all over the house wear me down.”

“What lists?” And then I remember Grandpa hasn't been able to read the newest ones.

“Mostly quotes from famous people saying life's wonderful. I don't need a dumb movie star to tell me that.”

“Real nonsense, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You think the world's a lousy place, Benny?”

“Don't you ever watch TV, Grandpa, or pay attention to how people treat one another?”

“Hmmmm,” he says.

“The way I see it, it's best to think of the worst that can happen. Then you're never disappointed. Whatever goes down is better than what you expected.”

He squints at me. “Never get hurt that way, do you?”

“You bet,” I say, proud that Grandpa sees the genius of my approach.

“Don't really live, though, either.”

Because he can be as contrary as the rest of us, I wonder if he's teasing me with that comment, so I don't answer. Instead, we move to another word game, then go to the living room, where we putt balls into a Dixie cup for about a half hour, every once in a while moving the cup farther away. Gloria has fallen asleep on the couch, so we turn off the TV right as some guy with greasy black hair combed back like Dracula and wearing a shiny gray suit and red tie explains that the Devil is everywhere, even at your local bowling alley.

“A bunch of screwballs,” Grandpa says. “Devils don't bowl. Like your dad says, they live in Washington and make laws.”

That's the weird thing about Grandpa. One minute he can't tell you what an ostrich is, the next minute he makes complete sense.

“Don't talk so loud,” I say, “or you'll wake up Gloria.”

“You could shoot a gun next to that woman and she wouldn't wake up.”

“Probably not a good idea, Grandpa.”

“You're a real card, Benny. You're going to be famous someday.”

Personally, I just want to make it through Becky Walters's party without getting insulted by Claudine or having to dance.