What is Real (8 page)

“We're not.” He laughed. “We're renting a house on his property. Don't be so stupid. It works and you know it.”

I thought about how, when my sister and I were little, Dad made us cross the street when Our Joe was coming. I thought about how Mom flinched and screamed when he knocked on our car window once to offer her a half-dead flower, grinning enough to reveal the gaps between his silver teeth. How she stomped on the gas and squealed away.

The thing with Our Joe was that, from a certain angle, he looked like a kindly old man. But everyone knew that he wasn't.

Just knew. Like how dogs always know when you're scared.

Everyone knew, that is, except him. He thought he was charming, you could tell. He thought he was “fun.”

Crazy fucker.

So then we were driving toward Our Joe's cornfields, lurching and sliding this way and that in the snow, narrowly missing the ditch so many times that I thought we'd both be in wheelchairs before long.

Dad didn't seem to notice, he was rambling on about our new “life.” The car stank of stale cigarette smoke even though neither of us smoked. I felt sick from that smell. I felt like the smell was in my throat, choking me.

“We 're going to make a killing,” Dad said.

I wanted to grab him and say, “What the FUCK, Dad? What are you SAYING?” But there was a ringing in my ears, and my eyes kept blurring. I kept thinking of the time he taught me to swim in the lake down the road. Like that's anything to do with anything, but it's what I thought about. How he stood there waist-deep in the lake for what felt like the entire summer with mosquitoes biting a belt around his waist. The water was not quite clear, and through the silty screen my feet looked a million miles away. I kept pushing off because he told me to, letting go of the ground with my feet. And each time I'd float for a second, and then I'd stop.

I sank and I sank and I sank and cried a million times. I remember crying. Snot bubbles. The whole works. But he wouldn't let me quit. T-dot would swim by like a goddamn mermaid, and I just couldn't do it and couldn't do it. My dad kept waiting and trying and showing me again, and suddenly I could do it. I did do it. I took in great mouthfuls of that filthy water, which I could taste in my nose for days, but I did it. I splashed along for a few strokes and I stopped crying and I didn't drown, and my dad said, “There.” Like that was that. The end of swimming lessons.

I guess a good end to that story would be that I turned into an Olympic swimmer but I didn't. At least I know how not to drown. But in that Volkswagen with the heat blasting on that freezing cold day, driving toward “home,” listening to my dad talking about different strains of marijuana, drowning was exactly what I was doing. All that was missing was the snot bubbles.

“It's a plant,” Dad added, like that clarified everything. “Anyway, fuck it. Fuck the system. Fuck it all.”

“Dad,” I said. But didn't know really what to say. When my dad said “fuck,” it stung. He kept saying it. It's all I could hear.
Fuck, fuck, fuck
. Here's your fucking childhood, and fuck it. I was dizzy with images. Dad reading me bedtime stories. Dad pretending to be Santa Claus for the school Christmas party. Dad laughing, bent over by the side of the road while I rode by on my bike. Dad smiling, Dad talking, Dad not fucking swearing.
Fuck, fuck, fuck
. He kept talking.

I felt like I was being swarmed by wasps. I needed him to stop. I had to concentrate on the road. A brown deer suddenly darted out in front of the car and stopped, stock still, in my path. I slammed on the brakes, swearing. The swerve spun us in a whole slow-motion circle. My heartbeat swirled. I held my breath. The deer stared and then took off.

“Be careful,” Dad said mildly when we finally stopped, still pointing in the direction we were going in the first place. “Try not to kill us.”

“That's fucking ironic,” I muttered, but I'm pretty sure he didn't hear me.

And then we were there, and it was worse than I thought, and it was home.

I was surprised how quickly my friends came back to me.

T-dot, at least. He was there the day we moved in, just sitting there on the front stoop like that was a totally normal thing to do. Waiting to help me move like I was moving into a college dorm or something.

That was T-dot. Big grin like it was a Welcome Home party and not as entirely messed up as it was. When we were kids, we 'd egg this house on Halloween. This exact house. It was as close as we had to a haunted house in our town, and besides, Our Joe's presence made it scary enough. We used to toilet paper the front porch. No one had lived here, ever, as far as I knew, except Our Joe and his wife, back in the day.

It was snowing lightly and snow was stuck in T-dot's hair. The white dusting on the house made it look pretty from a distance, but from up close, it looked like a clapboard catastrophe, like a place where squatters would smoke crack or a house where someone had died ten years before and no one had noticed.

“Dude,” T-dot said. He clapped me on the shoulder, hard enough that my skin hurt through my ski jacket.

“What's up?” I said. “Don't have anything better to do than hang around this dump? It isn't Halloween, you know.” Embarrassingly, my voice kind of caught, like a stuck zipper. He pretended not to notice. I stared at him with cold eyes, daring him to say something about the house, about me, about the whole fucking mess that it was, but he didn't.

He grinned.

I laughed. It felt weird. I hadn't laughed for a long time. And then we were both laughing, hitting each other, but not really. Doing that thing where you wrestle but maybe it's a hug, but it's not. And then we're lying in the snow-covered dirt, him all wholesome white teeth and wet hair from the pool, and me too skinny and wild-eyed and given up for dead, laughing in the snow.

“Oh, man,” he said. “Where have you been? I totally missed you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, I was in Vancouver.” That was the truth, but there was more that I couldn't say. That he wouldn't understand. T-dot had never once stuck something in his arm. Never once smoked anything. Never once left himself, twirled around the universe and came back fucked in the head.

“I know it,” he said. “Vancouver's awesome.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good to see you too.”

We lay there and watched it snow for a while. It wasn't long ago that we would have
played
in the goddamned snow. Now we just looked at it.

“Snow sucks,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. Moving was shitty enough without slipping on the steps. I wanted so much in that moment to go back to the me that would have thrown a snowball or written my name in the snow with piss or something. I felt like I could practically reach out and grab that part of myself, but there was glass in between the two of us, or ice, and then the moment passed and it was too late.

“We better do it now,” I said. “It's only going to get worse. I can't believe this fucking weather.”

“Yeah,” he said, but he was grinning. We got up. He kicked some snow into a little pile. Bent down and rolled it into a ball. Threw it hard against the mailbox, where it exploded like a hand grenade. Ice flying through the air.

“Score,” I said.

We dusted ourselves off and slowly unloaded the U-Haul that Dad had packed all those months before. Everything was dirty. I don't know how it got so dirty. We didn't talk much, except when the couch slipped out of our hands and fell hard, upside down, the underside issuing up a giant belch of dust, and we fought to right it just as the snow turned thick and started to fall for real.

“Never thought you'd be back, dude,” said T-dot.

“Never thought I would be either,” I said. I was sweating. My breath steamed hot against the falling flakes.

“Dex?” he said. “Sorry about your dad.”

“Well,
you
didn't do it,” I said. I noticed he was sweating too. Red-faced. There was a lump in my throat. I wasn't going to goddamn
cry
. “Everyone's sorry,” I added. “Especially me.”

“Sure,” he said. “I just meant…nah, forget it.”

I shrugged. Pretended there was something in my eye.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do. Tell him everything? Nothing? Pretend it was all normal?

In the end, that's what I went with: Pretending.

I never told him about Feral.

In return, T-dot didn't tell me what I missed. I figured I knew. Enough anyway.

We shoved the furniture around in the rooms. In the end, we had all this extra junk: My little sister Chelsea's bedroom stuff. The bed that was in the guest room at our old house. Mom's old desk. Two couches and nowhere to put them. A
TV
the size of a fireplace.

“I'll dump them,” offered T-dot.

“Thanks,” I said. “Let's just shove them downstairs.” I was exhausted. My entire body hurt. But it was done. The work was done. I was home. I shook T-dot's hand. “Thanks,” I said. “Really. I totally couldn't have done this alone.”

“Hey,” he said, “forget it.”

I drove him back home. T-dot lived down at the bottom of the valley in a “new” subdivision that was twenty years old. His house was all lit up with Christmas lights and a fake Santa on the lawn that waved and spun. It looked so
normal
. My mouth filled with acid. It was something about how the windows glowed in the falling snow. I guessed that our windows would glow too, but somehow it wouldn't be the same. I bet his family still had a family
game
night.

“See you,” he said.

“Tell your mom and dad ‘hi,'” I said. I wanted him to invite me in. I wanted hot chocolate and
SpongeBob
movies, just like when we were kids. I wanted.

But whatever.

“Yeah,” he said. “Will do.” He didn't mention my dad.

As soon as he got out, I wished I'd said more. I needed to talk to someone. I needed it bad. I had never felt so fucking alone.

Never.

Enter Tanis, stage right. Or left. Or wherever.

Tanis Bowerman.

I'd known her my whole life, but I'd never paid much attention to her. I don't know why.

But there she was, behind the till at the Safeway I stopped at on the way back to the motel where Dad was watching
TV
or mapping out our future with a Bic pen and a yellow legal pad. Calculating. Waiting.

I had dried sweat itching all over me, and the cold made it worse. I felt like my entire head was chapped. I wanted something, but I wasn't going to find it at Safeway. I felt like I was hopping under my skin. I wanted.

I wanted.

I grabbed some chips and soda, a bag of apples, my dad's favorite tea.

Tanis rang in my stuff. Then she looked me slowly up and down, and she said, “Dexter Fuckin' Pratt. Slumming, are you?”

“Fuck you, Tanis,” I said automatically. She had the most bizarre-colored eyes. Gray, I guess, but they looked silver. One big, the other much smaller, or maybe they just seemed that way because of the way her face was. Everything about her made me think of shadows.

“Hey,” she said. She bit her lip, and I almost threw myself over the counter to kiss it. It was like that. Instant. Like I didn't have a choice. Like a brainstorm, only this one came from somewhere in my pants. I shuddered.