Cartoonist (3 page)

“I gotta go, Tree. This is my corner.”

“Oh, all right. Come up later if you get through with your
studying.”

They parted and Alfie walked toward his house. The house looked even stranger from a distance. A house made without a plan. Alfie liked the idea. Three men started building a house. “You two start at those corners. I’ll start over here.”

They’d begin. They’d hammer and saw and raise beams and lay bricks, and when they finally met in the center, they’d step back to admire their work. Their mouths would fall open in surprise. “Hey, are we building the same house?”

“I’m working on the Mason house.”

“I’m on the Kovac job.”

“Well, I’m doing the new Pizza Hut.”

They’d consult their blueprints. “No wonder it looks so weird,” they’d say, and leave, dragging their tools behind them. “If that don’t beat all.” It would make a nice animated cartoon, Alfie thought. Someday he’d do it.

He glanced down at his turned-in feet. His shoes were eating his socks as he walked.

He had once said he could make a cartoon about anything. Life was very close to cartoons, he had said, whether you liked it or not. That’s why they were funny. Cartoons took life and sifted out the beauty, the sweetness, the fleeting moments of glory and left you as you really were.

He could do a cartoon about himself, he thought, about his turned-in feet. That was the stuff of cartoons, no beauty or sweetness, no moments of glory in turned-in feet.

In the first scene he’d be walking down the sidewalk with his turned-in feet and he’d meet a man with regular feet. The man would say, “Turn those feet out, son.”

In the next scene he’d meet a woman. She’d say, “Better turn those feet out, sonny.”

In the next scene he’d meet a group of children. They’d yell, “Hey, turn your feet out like us. Look at our feet. See how they turn out!”

In the last scene he’d meet a duck and a pigeon. They’d say, “Your feet look all right to us.” And the three of them would waddle off into the sunset.

He smiled.

He came to the front door of the house and paused before entering. The smile left his face because he was afraid he couldn’t get to the attic before his mother caught him.

“What happened at school?” she’d ask, eyes shining. She loved gossip, even about people she’d never heard of.

“Nothing.”

“Oh, come on.
Something
must have happened.”

“No.”

“Come
on.
I’ve been sitting in this house with nothing but Pap and TV for company. What happened?” Sometimes she would make him tell her at least one thing before he could go to the attic. “Well, we had a substitute teacher in World Studies.”

He opened the front door quietly. There was no one in the living room, but he could hear the rattle of dishes in the kitchen. Quickly, silently he climbed the ladder and pushed open the trap door. The warm attic air felt good against his face. He thought of this door as an escape hatch, like the kind on a submarine.

Long ago, when his father was alive, he had felt like this about the junkyard. His father, starting from nothing, had built up a wrecking business. He called himself the Wreck King of West Virginia. His junkyard covered seven acres. On top of the concrete building where his father conducted business was a huge crown made of hubcaps.

To Alfie, the junkyard had been as good as Disneyland. Car after car, some brand new, some rusted and old, an ocean of cars that would never move again. To crawl into those cars, to work controls, to sit and dream was as good as a ride on a roller coaster.

Alfie especially liked to sit in the old Dodge sedan because every window in it was cracked and splintered, so that when the sun shone through, it was as beautiful as being in church. And the Chrysler Imperial—its windows had a smoky distortion, so that, beyond, figures seemed to float through the junkyard like spirits through the cemetery.

His last memory of the junkyard still hurt him. It was the day the yard was sold at auction. Alfie had sat on a wrecked Ford pick-up truck, on the fender where a dent made a perfect seat, and had watched the junkyard go to a man named Harvey Sweet. For a long time after that, Alfie had been as lost as a bird without a nest. Then he had found this attic.

Suddenly he heard his mother’s voice in the kitchen. She was complaining to Pap. “Oh, I wish Bubba was here, don’t you, Pap?”

“What?”

“Don’t you miss him?”

“Who?”

“Pap, put down that paper!” Alfie heard her crumple it. “I’m talking about Bubba. Don’t you miss Bubba?”

“No.”

“Don’t you ever miss anything?” she asked in exasperation.

He took the question seriously. “I miss the junkyard,” he said after a moment.

Slowly Alfie let the trap door close. He knew what Pap meant about missing the junkyard. It was possible to miss a place more than a person, if the place was where you felt at home. And Pap had been more at home sitting on an old Coca-Cola crate in the shade of the hubcap crown than he had ever felt in his chair in front of the television.

He also understood why Pap did not miss Bubba. He himself was glad Bubba was gone—working at a gas station in Maidsville, married to a girl named Maureen. There was something about Bubba that overshadowed everyone, like the walnut tree in their old yard whose leaves were so thick nothing could grow beneath. Its shadow had been as black at noon as it was at midnight.

“Well, I do miss him,” his mother said loudly below. She had come into the living room and was standing right below the trap door. “Something was always happening when Bubba was here. It was like all the life and all the fun went into Bubba, and the other children, well …”

Alfie wished suddenly there was an easy way to close the ears. He could hear too much in the attic. You could shut your eyes, he thought, block out everything you didn’t want to see, but the ears …

Alfie sat down quietly at his table. He did not turn on the lamp. A little light filtered in through the slits in the eaves, a soft dusty light like in very old paintings.

“Oh, I’m going out,” his mother said below.

“Where to?”

“Out!”

“Well, if you’re going to the beer hall, wait for me.”

“You got any money, Pap?” she sneered. “They don’t take food stamps.”

“They take Social Security money, don’t they? The government ain’t made a law about how we spend that, have they?”

Alfie heard the front door close. He reached out and turned on the light. He looked up at his cartoons, his comic strips, his drawings.

With one hand he reached for a pencil, with the other a fresh sheet of paper. A slight smile came over his face. He was home.

A
LFIE LAY IN HIS
bed. He was staring up at the ceiling. He did not see the sheets of pale plywood or the dark nail heads, because in his mind he was looking beyond the ceiling into the attic.

Alfie squinted his eyes. He tried to imagine the house without ceilings, with only the rafters. He imagined his cartoons, Scotch-taped, pinned, thumbtacked to the underside of the roof, hanging down, enlivening the whole crooked house. He imagined people dropping by the house to look up at his drawings the way they went into the Sistine Chapel to see Michelangelo’s.

Someday the attic would be famous. “This is where he began his cartoons,” they’d say. There would be people filing through, climbing, one by one, up the ladder to the attic. There would be a souvenir stand where copies of his comic strips could be bought and machines where his cartoons could be viewed for a quarter.

He shifted and sighed. He was restless. He could not fall asleep. He knew this was because of the comic strip he had drawn after supper. He had been so pleased with it that he had taken it down to show his mother.

“What’s this?” Squinting, she had turned it first one way and then another, as if it were a modern painting.

“Like
that,”
he had said, putting it right. He looked over her shoulder with a pleased, expectant smile. It was the strip about his turned-in feet, and she would
have
to laugh at that. When he was little, she had laughed about his feet all the time and called him “Duck” and “Pigeon.” For the first time he had felt secure about pleasing her.

“What is this thing?”

“It’s a comic strip. I drew it.”

She held it at a distance to see it better.

“It’s about me,” he went on. “Don’t you see the feet?”

“What feet? Turn up the light, Pap.”

“It’s up high as it can get,” Pap said. “Forty watts is forty watts.”

She tried turning the strip of paper sideways.

“Never mind,” Alfie said angrily. He snatched it from her. The paper tore.

“I
want
to see your drawing,” she said, offering to take it again.

“Never
mind.”

“Well, just ’cause I can’t tell which way is up, that’s no reason to get mad, is it, Pap?”

“Getting mad runs in our family,” Pap said, leaning back, getting ready to start a story. “Did I ever tell you about the time Cousin Cooley and me—”

“Yes!”

“I got to study,” Alfie said.

“Leave your drawing or your cartoon or whatever it is, honey, and I’ll look at it in the morning.”

Holding the comic strip to his chest, he went quickly to the ladder.

“Well, the way it started was that Cousin Cooley had got himself what he called an antique can opener, bought it off—”

“Pap!”

“—bought it off Jimmy Hammond at the hardware. Well, soon as I seen it, I knew that …”

Alfie slammed the trap door shut, and he had sat in the attic until they were all in bed. He had heard the water in the basin as Alma washed her hair, the brushing of teeth, the flushing of the toilet, the dropping of bobby pins, and then finally the snores.

He pushed aside his blanket. They were all snorers. Pap was the loudest. Alma was the quietest, with just a ladylike wheeze. He had told her that once as a compliment and she had erupted like a volcano. “Don’t you ever say I snore! I do not snore!” His mom snorted every once in a while as if she had thought of something funny.

Alfie closed his eyes. He suddenly found himself thinking, as he had earlier, of the one and only time he had made his mother laugh.

He and Tree had been coming down Elm Street one evening on their way home from the Fall Festival at school. Tree had been talking about the general sorriness of the booths. “Did you go in the Haunted House, Alfie? It was in Mrs. Lorensen’s room.”

“No.”

“Well, some girl in a witch suit—I think it was Jenny DeCarlo—said, ‘And now you have to feel
eyeballs,
’ and I knew it was going to be grapes, but, Alfie, these grapes weren’t even
peeled
—” He broke off abruptly. “Hey, what’s going on at the corner?”

Ahead they could see two people pushing a car down the street. Alfie and Tree edged closer, sensing the two people were not just trying to get the car started. Moving from the shelter of one tree to another, they got closer. When they were almost at the corner, Tree said, “Hey, that’s your brother! That’s Bubba! What’s he up to?”

Alfie ran forward in his concern. “What are you doing, Bubba?” He glanced over his shoulder at the deserted street behind him.

Bubba, smiling, turned to Alfie. The other boy was Goat McMillan.

“Is this your car, Goat?” Tree asked. He was standing apart, keeping himself separated from what might be trouble.

“No, it’s not his car. Goat wouldn’t have a car like this, would you, Goat?” Bubba said.

“Not if I could help it.”

“But whose car is it?” Alfie asked.

“It’s Perry Fletcher’s.” The sound of the name on Goat’s lips caused Bubba to double over the fender with laughter.

“Who’s he?”

Bubba and Goat were laughing too hard to answer. Alfie reached out and touched the sleeve of Bubba’s football sweater. “Who’s Perry Fletcher?”

Bubba straightened. “Perry Fletcher’s this boy, see, and all he can do is talk about his car and his boat and his stereo and how wonderful everything he owns is. So me and Goat see Perry Fletcher park his car in front of Maria Martini’s house and go inside. We know the car’s brand new, see. We know this is the first time he ever drove it.”

“But why are you pushing it down the street?” Alfie asked in a worried way.

“Because we’re going to hide it in somebody’s driveway,” Goat explained.

“Yeah, and then we’re going back and sit on Goat’s porch, see, and watch Perry Fletcher come out and find his new car gone.”

Goat broke in with, “If I know him, he’ll call the fuzz first thing. ‘Officer, Officer, come at once. I’ve been robbed!’”

“Hey—hey—” Bubba was laughing so hard he could barely speak. “Hey, let’s hide it in
Big Bertha’s
driveway!” Big Bertha was their algebra teacher.

“I don’t think you ought to be doing this,” Alfie said. Again he glanced up and down the deserted street.

“Yeah, we’ll put it in Big Bertha’s driveway,” Goat said. “Hey, this is better than Friday.” He turned to Alfie and Tree. “See, last Friday we let the brakes off Ted Copple’s Buick and pushed it into a tow-away zone because Ted Copple wouldn’t let me copy his math, and then we went in a phone booth and called the police and pretended to be irate citizens—Morrie Hutchinson was the irate citizen—and he demanded that the police do something about illegal parking in front of the high school. Ten minutes later Brant’s tow truck arrived. It made my day.”

“I gotta go,” Tree said.

“Me too,” Alfie said. They turned together and began running up Elm Street.

“Wait, you can help us,” Bubba called.

“Yeah, Alfie, we may need help getting up Big Bertha’s driveway!”

At the top of the hill Alfie and Tree separated without a word. Alfie cut through the park. The swings were moving slightly in the wind from the river. He ran around them. He stumbled over his feet and fell.

On his knees in the dust by the swings he remembered that when Bubba had played in this park, he could swing higher than anybody. And at the peak of his swing he could slide off the seat, easy as grease, fall through the air, and land, catlike, on his feet. Another boy who tried it landed so hard in a stoop that he had bitten a piece out of his knee.