The Republic of Nothing (22 page)

Casey thought the rock was magic but my mother assured her there was no magic, that everything was as normal as could be. Besides, it was not the rock who spoke, but Diaz. So now there were four men in my mother's life: my father, my-self, Diaz and Ben Ackerman.

Ben had begun to arrive for dinner once a week. He would stay around until nine o'clock and have a strange three-way conversation with my mother and Diaz. The talk was very esoteric and very deep. Sometimes as I sat nearby in the over-stuffed armchair that the sea had delivered to Hants Buckler and passed on to us, I would look up at Ben and think it was my father sitting there. Or he would look over at me while my mother was communing through the amethyst and we would give each other a friendly but worried look. The chameleon doctor, the quick learner, the ultimate Samaritan and paramount fake was changing again, becoming something else in his quick study.

At those moments, I feared that planets were colliding in
space, stars were shifting off route, suns collapsing. Something was being jarred and rattled in the pillars of the world and I worried that we would all tumble off into emptiness. Was it all only a dream, a thin, false veneer of appearances? The night of the yelping dogs still haunted me. What had I been looking at? Where was I really at that moment? How was my mother there in the yard and in her bed asleep at the same time? My eyes were closed and someone was asking me something. My mother touched my shoulder. “Diaz says there is something you want to ask?” she said to me.

I looked at Ben, saw the worry in his eyes. Was he afraid I was about to spill his secrets?
Did
I have a question I wanted to ask of the fifteenth-century sailor who had died at the teeth of seven ravenous sharks? Another loose stone foundation had just proved fragile and a section of wall tumbled down, scattering meaningless, unregimented stones everywhere. I looked at Casey, asleep on the chesterfield, her arm dangling down towards the floor. I could not look at Ben again or at my mother.

“I want to know the truth,” I said. “Ask Diaz if he can tell me the truth about all of us.”

The words came out with anger, frustration. So much I didn't understand, including all this Diaz madness. Was my mother a seer or a lunatic? Was there a difference between them? Were we all insane and living on an isolated island of crazy people? Why was I forever on the edge of understanding but never certain? Was I going to lose my father forever, lose him to politics and power? Was my mother falling in love with the wonderfully altruistic and fanatically false Doctor Ackerman?

“The truth,” my mother said after a brief silence, her eyes closed now as she cupped her hands around the purple crystal. “Diaz says that there is no final and permanent truth. There's nothing for any of us to do but pick and choose as best we can what is true to each of us. He says that he learned that only after he had jumped in the water to save his drowning friend, that it was the last thing he learned in that life, but it had made it all worthwhile. His friend drowned anyway, they both made fine meals for the seven sharks. He said that he had made a big mistake by jumping in. He should have known he could do nothing under the circumstances. He goofed, but it was the best he could do. He's glad you asked so he can pass the news along to you.”

How or why Burnet Jr. and I became friends remains a real mystery to me. I had always believed him to be a ruthless bully, and perhaps at his worst, a killer. I'd seen him mutilate snakes and frogs just for the pleasure of it. We had plenty of reasons to hate each other's guts. My mother, however, assured me that it did no good to have enemies. “You have no enemies. It's just an illusion that boys have when they are growing up.”

“Sure, Mom,” I said.

It was a cold March morning when I went to catch the bus. Casey was staying home with the flu. Gwen was not going to school that day. Her father had made some sort of break-through in his attempt to receive radio-wave transmissions from a dark star in a distant galaxy. “It's possible that he's about to unlock one of the secrets of the universe,” she explained on the previous day to our homeroom teacher, Mr. Dower. He had granted her permission to stay home for the big event.

So I was all alone by the bridge to the republic, just standing there with the big brown paper bag that held my lunch when I heard Burnet Sr. scream above the perennial barking of his backyard dogs. I looked over to their house and saw Burnet
Jr. come running, his pants half undone and his shirt flapping free in the air. It was their car. Old Burnet had been changing a tire and the jack had slipped. The wheel had not been off, but it had fallen down on his hand that had been gripping the bottom of the tire.

I ran over to help. Old Burnet let out a string of ungodly curses. His son was in a panic, flapping his arms as he tried to figure out what to do. His father was not much help trying to explain about the jack. The last time I'd seen old Burnet up close was when my own father had aimed the dog straight at the man's crotch. His was a body that took a lot of abuse, that was sure. Now he had a hand pinned under the wheel. His son was fooling with the jack. I knelt down to help. But we both could see that something had been bent when the car had rolled forward and the jack could no longer work properly.

Old Burnet tried to pull his hand out, but it only made the pain more intense. Then he lashed out with his good arm and grabbed a hold of his helpless son by the shank oi: his long hair. “Get this goddamn car off my hand you little son of a bitch!” he screamed. He pulled hard on his son's hair until the kid fell over backwards on the ground. Burnet Jr. got up slowly and scowled at his old man. I had the feeling he was about to walk away. Fifteen years of being bashed around by his father was maybe enough. He was trying to help and what does his old man do but pull him down on the ground. I fiddled with the jack again, knowing it would not work. McCully growled now, cursed the sky for giving him such a stupid son. He looked at me with as much hostility. He was a hard man to like.

Then young Burnet slowly and deliberately took the jack out of my hands and held it up in the air. I think he was ready to bash his father on the skull with it. It seemed somehow logical, but instead he threw it over his back and it clattered onto a boulder that sat like a stone Buddha in their front yard. He motioned to me to grab onto the bumper. I bent over alongside
Burnet, our arms touching, our hands gripped onto the rusted bumper of the old Pontiac. I was certain we would not have the strength. Burnet heaved and grunted and I threw my muscle into it as best I could. We could lift the chassis but not high enough to lift the wheel. Burnet let out his oxygen as the car settled back down. His father was taking deeps gulps of air and gritting his teeth at the sky. In a new-found desperation of pain, he'd found the stopper for the hate. Now he looked at his son differently, then at me. “Please, boys. Please?”

Burnet looked at me. “Let's try again,” he said. “We can do it.”

As we put our muscles to it, this time we were in perfect sync. I could feel the blood rush to my face as I strained beyond what I knew was my limit, and Burnet seemed about ready to break every blood vessel in his body. It was a slow, steady lift. The wheel barely lifted off the ground but gravity relented ever so minutely, allowing old Burnet to pull his crushed hand out and fall over backwards on the ground. We both let go at once and the car settled back to earth. Burnet Sr. was working his hand now in the air. It was not crushed. It had imbedded in the soft muck of the driveway and miraculously he had been spared the broken bones.

Our bus had arrived and the driver, unaware of the crisis, was blowing his horn. I think I expected a heartfelt thank you from old Burnet but obviously I had not grown up in his skin, did not have his way of repaying those who tried to help out. The old coot never even looked at me. Instead, he walked over to his son, and with his good hand curled into a fist let go a punch that caught Burnet Jr. square in the side of the head, knocking him to the ground. “You sure took your time about it, you little bastard.” The dogs were watching from behind their fence and began to bark more loudly. They'd seen it all before.

The bus driver lay on his horn again. I sure didn't want to hang around any longer. I helped Burnet up off the ground and
we walked ever so slowly towards the waiting bus. At the bridge I grabbed my lunch bag, sitting there like a sleeping brown hawk on the railing. Burnet shoved in alongside of me on the back seat of the bus. I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything. When Hank, the bus driver, had the big yellow machine turned around and headed properly back on the mainland and the rest of the kids had turned around and stopped staring at us, Burnet yanked my arm up hard against my back and snarled directly into my ear, “You go telling anybody about that and I'll break your face off.” I could feel his spit inside my ear, could feel his stupid hot breath on my neck. “You don't ever say
anything
to anyone about my father,” he added. My arm was about to break off at the shoulder. Burnet would have been strong enough and mean enough to do it, too.

I didn't have any intention of talking to the other kids about what just happened. That wasn't my style. I was quiet, shy. Language was a tangled fishnet of impossible knots and confusion. I was no storyteller, no gloater.

Burnet let go of my arm and I heaved a sigh of relief. I'd been squeezing back the tears. I worked my fingers in the air, trying to get the feeling back, trying to entice the blood, to suggest it was safe for it to start flowing back into my arm. I didn't say yes, no, or maybe to the guy's demands. Burnet was expecting me to croak out something, but then again maybe he didn't know what to make of me, the son of Everett and Dorothy McQuade. A strange, unorthodox family that drew on powers beyond his recognition.

What to make of Burnet? A complete jerk, a pig, a bully — all of the above. But something else was so clear to me now. All his life his father had been kicking his butt and all he could do was go out into the world and do the same to someone weaker than him. Trapped by his home life, by his madman of a father, unable to break free.

I picked up my lunch bag beside me on the seat. My mother
made meals of heroic proportions for me these days because she knew that food was one of my best friends. Still skinny as a rail, I could eat. Boy, could I eat. Inside were three thick sandwiches, each wrapped in waxed paper and each labelled with a piece of masking tape and a crayon marker: ham, egg salad, sardine. The bread, the home-made brown molasses bread, was cut a full inch thick. Not everyone had the jaw drop to even get a toothhold on one of my mother's sandwiches. The bag also contained a home-made garlic and dill pickle, large as a fist and wrapped also in waxed paper taped with masking tape, two apples, several home-made oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies the size of hockey pucks, and a wedge of bitter chocolate. We were all addicts of bitter chocolate at my house ever since Hants had found a fifty pound crate of it floating up to his wharf and unmolested by the cravings of the sea.

Lunch was my meditative time of day. While other kids cursed at each other, tried to rattle each other's nerves, figure out some way to lie about their homework or cause grief for Mr. Dower, I was quite happy to sit alone in the noisy cafeteria and commune with my food. It was morning. I'd just had a big breakfast. But the excitement and confusion had made me very hungry. The sound of the opening of the tightly furled top of the brown shopping bag was like a prayer for me, or a chant. I opened it and looked in, my mind already running through the possibilities: ham, gouda cheese and sloppy home-made mayonnaise, egg salad with paprika and onions, sardines in mustard sauce. I put my face over the bag and breathed in the options.

Suddenly, I felt Burnet's breath on my neck. He was watching me, still waiting for some kind of an answer to his threat while I had drifted off into less than idle speculation about the food in my lunch bag. I should have been annoyed, felt threatened or maybe even protective, possibly pissed-off at this asshole who could not let a thing drop and let another man get
on with reveries more important than revenge. But I didn't. I dipped into the bag, selecting a weapon of peace. I decided on ham, gouda and sloppy home-made mayonnaise. I raised the sandwich out of the bag, studied for a briet instant my mother's delicate black crayon writing on the masking tape label and then, setting the rest of my lunch aside, listened with rapture to the sound of masking tape peeling off waxed paper as I broke the seal. The metaphysics of lunch had just sprung free from the traps of time, from the restricted limits of the usual noon-hour reprieve. I folded back the waxed paper and saw the immaculate beauty of the brown bread, sliced precisely in half — two thick humps of home-made heaven. I lifted one half of the sandwich out of the paper and handed it to Burnet.

Had I the proper occasion I could, in later years, suggest to diplomats how to work out hostilities. I could have told George Bush and Saddam Hussein how to avert war. The proper food at the proper time. Surprise attack of thick sandwiches in the grip of threats and hatred. Maybe I've glorified the moment. Maybe I was just hungry and couldn't eat without getting Burnet off my case, but I believe it: went deeper than that. I think it went way beyond the bounty of the shop-ping bag that I split equally. I would not say to you that I was willing to love this enemy who sat beside me, but the evidence of the morning was clear. Burnet Jr. was not the master of his own fate. All his life he'd been battered by his old man, and long after he had escaped to his own pitiful freedom he would never really be free. A cycle of history would travel around in his genes for God knows how long before all his grief and hatred for the laws of Burnet Sr. would thin out.