A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (26 page)

And Dad said, trust no one.

 

37

It was around this time that Crazy Mike caught up with Olive in Seattle. It could have been worse. Calliope could have been home when it happened. But at thirteen she was an early bloomer. She was out of the country with her boyfriend when Mike showed up on their doorstep. The way Dad told me the story, Mike took his time with Olive. He beat her in every room of the house. Broke her jaw and some ribs, and knocked out all her teeth. He beat her until he got hungry, then he went into the kitchen to get something to eat. Olive was a tall skinny thing, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, but she had the constitution of a vending machine. When Mike left her in the living room, she got up and went after him.

She hit him with an antique iron. Back before electric irons were invented, people used an actual slug of iron to press their clothes; eight or nine pounds, shaped like a boat, with a long curved handle that was designed to stay cool when the main body of the iron had been heated up in a fireplace or over a stove. Olive had a couple of them around the house, as quaint preindustrial decorations and conversation pieces. While Mike was digging through her refrigerator, she picked one up off the bookshelf, walked up behind him, swung it from down low, over her head, and down as hard as she could—tip-first, right into the top of Mike's skull.

“It didn't even knock him down,” Dad said. “He just turned around and looked at her and started kicking her ass all over again.”

The iron didn't kill him, but it did give him a vicious cut on top of his head, and beating the shit out of Olive was hard work. Mike's heart really got going. As he dragged her around the house, kicking her and punching her, gouts of blood shot four feet out of the top of his head, spraying across the walls and the furniture. In some places, it was splashed on the ceiling. Between the two of them, they pretty much repainted the apartment.

By that time, Mike had been working Olive over for quite a while, and Will, the late-night crying masturbator, happened to come by for a social call. Will was half Mike's size, but he carried a straight razor in his boot. He went after Mike with the knife and splashed more blood around the apartment. Mike ran away. Will got Olive into a hospital and put the word out to all our people to be on the lookout for Mike.

“When's Calliope coming home?” I asked, when Dad was done telling me the story.

“Next week,” Dad said.

“When's Olive getting out of the hospital?” I asked.

“Dunno,” Dad said. “Be a lot longer than a week though.”

*   *   *

I caught a bus over there a few days after Calliope came home. I found her in her room, cleaning blood off her comic book collection. She kept most of them in flat cellophane bags, so the damage wasn't as bad as it could have been, but there was more blood on everything else in the house—all over her bed, all over the kitchen. Rubbed into the carpet in the living room and the hallway. Splashed all over the bathroom. I could see the spatters Dad had talked about in Calliope's room. It looked exactly like someone had flicked a paintbrush soaked with rust-brown paint, spraying streamers of color across the smoke-stained walls and ceiling.

Calliope was wearing heavy yellow dish-washing gloves while she wiped at her comics with a soapy sponge. She didn't look at me when I came into her room.

“You okay?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Not me that got my ass kicked.”

“You wanna come over to our place?”

I hoped she would. I could weather all this shit easier with her there. I hoped she'd move in. I hoped she'd leave this fucking madhouse behind and come stay with me and keep me safe from all the bullshit going on in my life. We could protect each other. But she just shook her head.

“I'm gonna stay with friends for a while,” she said. “But I've gotta clean all this up first.”

I thought about offering to help, but I didn't know where to begin.

“How's Olive doing?” I asked.

“Fuck,” she said. “Her jaw's wired shut. No teeth left. Half the bones in her fucking face are broken. Stupid. So fucking stupid.”

“You gonna be okay?” I asked.

She finally looked up at me. She looked tired, but that was all. She frowned, like I'd just insulted her somehow.

“Why wouldn't I be okay?” she asked.

*   *   *

Olive was released from the hospital a few weeks later. She came by our place in Ballard once. The soft tissue and bones had mostly healed up, and she looked like she always had, except that her lips were kind of puckered because she was missing all her teeth now and she hadn't gotten dentures yet. She showed me the .22 caliber two-shot Derringer she'd picked up in case Mike came back.

“Shouldn't you have something … bigger?” I asked. “With more bullets?”

“No,” she hissed through her wired jaw. “Anything I shot him with, he'd take it away from me and use it against me. This way, I shoot him twice, he's dying, he takes it away from me and it's empty. Best of all possible worlds.”

Of course, everyone knew Mike's name. He had a lengthy arrest record. All Olive had to do was drop a dime on him and the cops would be all over him, but we just didn't do that. Ever. It was the only rule everybody stuck to. Everyone was breaking laws all the time. If someone called the cops, everyone could burn. So even for really heavy shit, if it happened between people who were in our network, it stayed in the network. Olive would tell the cops about who beat her up after she shot Mike, if it came to that. Otherwise, it stayed in the family.

It didn't leave Olive with a lot of options. So she was taking Calliope with her and moving to Hawaii.

“What's in Hawaii?” I asked. Everything I knew about Hawaii was derived from
Magnum, P.I.
reruns.

“Sun,” Olive said. “And two thousand miles of ocean between me and Mike. He just drove up here, Jason. Just drove up from Oregon. Took him eight hours.”

I saw Calliope twice more before they left, always on her way in or her way out. The last time I saw her before she left she was in her room at her house, packing up to go. She was hanging out with some girl I didn't know. I was wearing a bunch of army surplus clothes that I thought made me look cool, but really they just made me look fat. Or that's what my dad had been telling me. He was always on me about my weight lately.

When I came into her room, Calliope looked up from packing and smiled at me.

“What's up, doughboy?” she asked, using the World War I slang term for a soldier.

I didn't get the reference. I thought she was calling me fat, too.

I hung around awkwardly for a while. I didn't know what to say. Calliope's friend kept bad-vibing me, like I was messing up some intimate dynamic the two of them had going before I showed up. I tried to ignore it, but even I didn't know what I was doing there.

“All right,” I said, after forty-five minutes or so. “I guess I should get home.”

“Hey,” she said, as I turned to leave. “Write me.”

“I'll try,” I said.

“You'd fucking better,” she said.

 

38

I went to the principal's office every Wednesday for weeks. We talked. Sometimes he held my hand while we talked. He called me honey, sweetie, and dear a lot, but he never crossed any lines I could use against him. Not that I would have called the cops, or talked to a teacher about it. But if he'd done something bad enough, I could have told my dad. And for something like this, I figured Dad would probably call someone like Sean, our friend back in Eugene who'd shot all the windows out of his house.

But first, something would have to happen. I almost hoped it would. I wasn't sure how much longer I could handle having this smarmy fuck touching me and telling me how special he thought I was.

I was still having problems with other kids. Chad had friends in my class, and I was getting into arguments and shoving matches, even in front of my teacher, Mr. Burke. Mr. Adams was keeping Mr. Burke off my back, but he said we'd have to do something to settle the situation soon. He tried talking to me about “psycho-semantics,” and how I carried myself like a victim. I thought that was funny, coming from him, but the insight didn't do much to keep me out of trouble in class. And there were no other classes I could go to. There were three sixth grade classes in the school. Chad was in one of them, and he had good friends in the other two.

“Have you ever had an IQ test?” Mr. Adams asked me one Wednesday, after I'd been coming to his office for about a month.

“No,” I said. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Why wouldn't you?”

“I'm stupid,” I said. “Why take a test that proves it?”

“Does your dad tell you you're stupid?”

“No,” I said. “He's always telling me I'm too smart for school. But I can't spell. I'm bad at math. And every single other person here tells me I'm stupid all the time. You know they wanted to put me in special ed at Stevens.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me.

“I'd like to call your dad,” he said.

“What?”

“You're not in trouble,” he said, gesturing for me to calm down. “I want to send you for testing. The school district does it. It shouldn't cost you any money. And it may mean we can get you into a class where you'll have fewer problems. A class where Chad doesn't have any friends.”

I went home that afternoon with a sinking feeling. A few hours later the phone rang, and sure enough, it was Mr. Adams, wanting to talk to my dad.

“Jason,” Dad said. “Why don't you go outside and play for a while.”

I didn't have anything to do outside, so I went down in the basement and used my BB gun to shoot targets I'd set up against one of the concrete walls, putting dings and dents in old toys I didn't play with anymore. I could hear Dad's voice through the ceiling above me.

A week later Dad took me to another school, in a part of town I didn't recognize. When we got there, I went into a classroom with some other kids and did a bunch of things that seemed like games to me, with shapes and matching symbols, and other tasks that didn't seem like a test at all. I was normally bad at taking tests. I had trouble with reading. Trying to write was even worse. I couldn't spell to save my life. But there was hardly any reading or writing in this test.

A week later Dad got a letter in the mail, from the school district. He opened it up and started laughing.

“What's it say?” I asked.

“It says you're in the ninety-ninth percentile,” he said.

“Is that an A?” I asked, assuming there was a letter grade associated with the IQ test.

“Not exactly. They aren't scored that way.”

“So how are they scored?” I asked. “What's a ninety-nine mean?”

“It means that if you take a hundred people at random and put them in a room, you're smarter than ninety-eight of them,” Dad said.

I didn't believe that for a second. Nobody besides my dad and grownups who were basically family ever told me I was smart. Everyone—even Calliope—told me I was dumb pretty much all the time; teased me for not knowing things, or for misunderstanding things, or for not being able to read. This was just one more sick joke some bureaucrat at the school district was playing on me. Dad seemed confused by my reaction.

“You're going to be in the gifted program,” he said. “They're moving you to a new class starting next week. One where you won't be so bored all the time.”

The last time I'd gone to a class where I wouldn't be so bored all the time I'd ended up in counseling, but I had to acknowledge that Mr. Adams had put together a pretty good plan. The gifted class was, indeed, the only sixth grade class in the school where Chad didn't have any friends. I started there the following Monday, and it was everything I'd hoped it would be: a room full of kids where nobody tried to shove me into a wall when the teacher wasn't looking. I celebrated by unilaterally ending my Wednesday trips to Mr. Adams's office. He didn't make a fuss about it.

 

39

Dad started dating a new guy that year—Bruce. I was annoyed. I'd just started to like Charles, and now here was Bruce. But where Charles was all sharp angles and subtle, literate intelligence, Bruce was like a Disney version of an urban gay man: brightly colored, round, and resoundingly boring.

Bruce had worked as a display artist at one of the big department stores downtown for fifteen years. His favorite records were from the Pointer Sisters and Yma Sumac. He was the same height as my dad, but thicker in the hips and shoulders, with an oval face on an oval head—baggy eyes, too much jaw under too little mouth, and a straight nose that ended in a little ball. He was bald like my dad, and had a mustache like my dad, but none of it looked right on him. He smiled a lot but never seemed to get any of our jokes. He wore short-sleeved button-down shirts in colors like turquoise or magenta. His living room had a lot of potted palm trees and indirect lighting. After a few weeks of having him around the house, I happened to see him naked in the bathroom. He had the whitest, smoothest, most hairless ass I'd ever seen on a human being in my life. It looked like two pools of milk on a moonlit night. It didn't even look real. Dad and I made jokes about it when Bruce wasn't around, but whenever I expressed a desire to eject Bruce from our lives, Dad would bristle.

Because whatever I thought of Bruce, as far as Dad was concerned Bruce's most attractive feature seemed to be that he had been gainfully employed and extremely frugal since he was about twenty-two. He owned a one-bedroom condominium in South Capitol Hill and had about $10,000 in the bank. His job didn't pay especially well, and he didn't come from money. He was just careful, and lived within his means. Naturally Dad saw this as an opportunity.