Authors: Vestal McIntyre
After a few seconds, Coop said, “Well, principal, I guess I have three things to say in response to your question. One is that I’m pleased by your concern with the safety and well-being of the children. I’ve been drivin’ the bus for many years and I’ve seen three principals come and go, and watched ’em struggle to put ideas in kids’ heads when that’s no longer their job. Principal’s job is to maintain order and ensure safety, so I thank you for doin’ it. Second thing, I haven’t had a drink since my daddy died twenty-seven years ago, and I was a kid back then who didn’t do much drinkin’ anyhow.”
Fred Campbell nodded vigorously as if he were the one being disciplined.
“And thirdly, what I buy at Albertson’s is my own goddamn business, pardon my French, and next time you talk to that parent you can extend an invitation to her to come over and visit sometime and meet my uncle, who’s the one I was buyin’ all that beer for, and the one I buy the same heap of beer for every week. I do it because if he didn’t have his drink, I’m fairly certain he’d just lay down and die. Everyone needs somethin’ to hold on to and, sadly, for him it’s his drink. Most folks know a little bit of the Cooper family history, but my guess is this parent is a newcomer from California who don’t. So I’d be pleased if you’d extend an invitation to her to come over and meet my uncle and maybe have a beer with him, ’cause that might cure her of nosin’ in other folks’ business.”
Light-headed with relief, Fred continued to nod. Coop’s ire was directed at the parent, not him, and its impact was mitigated by the strained smile. Still, Fred felt accused. He was from Utah originally, and didn’t know Coop’s family.
Coop came around the desk and put his big hand on Fred’s back. “Thank you, principal. You’re doin’ a good job. Don’t worry so much.”
“Thank
you
, Coop. You put my mind at ease.” Fred rose and shook Coop’s hand. “And I’m sorry about your uncle. You’ll both be in my prayers.”
This made Coop laugh. “That’s very nice. Yes, pray for us,” he said.
E
NRIQUE TOLD
L
INA
about the science fair as they ate. “And if we win, we go to State, and if we win there, we go to National.”
“Oh my God,
mijo
, that’s exciting. What are you going to do?”
“I don’ know. Maybe something on supernovas.”
“Is that a really fast car?” Sometimes she liked to play dumb to let him feel smart.
“No, Ma, it’s in outer space.”
They had the same posture, hunched over like dogs protecting their dinner.
“You know,” Lina said, “there’s a new train they’re making in Japan. It’s called a maglev train and it doesn’t touch the tracks. It goes three hundred miles an hour.” Why did she want to plant little clues? She wanted to seem different to him.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s science. Maybe you can do it for the science fair.”
“What, make a train that flies?”
“I don’ know,
mijo
, it’s just an idea I heard about today is all.”
The ringing clap of a basketball being dribbled up the walk made their laughter die. The door swung wide and Jay kicked the basketball into the corner of the tiny living room.
“There’s plenty of food, Jay. Sit down with us,” said Lina in a different voice.
He said nothing, but loaded a plate, turned on the TV in the living room, and went into his room, leaving the door open. He had turned the TV to be at such an angle that he could see it from his bed.
Lina and Enrique didn’t look at each other, didn’t say much, and soon Lina rose to clean. Through the window she could see Connie’s car alone in its spot. No voices emerged from the trailer. Gene’s grandparents clearly hadn’t come after all.
Later, Enrique lay in bed and Lina next to him on top of the covers. This was their habit, which had begun in their old trailer when Enrique was afraid of the dark. Together they would open the pullout couch, and Lina would lie with Enrique until he fell asleep, then go to her own bed in the trailer’s tiny bedroom. She knew she was spoiling him, but she didn’t care. Her frustrated love for her first son, Jesús, who was being raised by the Van Bekes and liked to be called Jay, had turned her love for Enrique into something wild. Back then she worked so hard cleaning at the hospital and topping corn in the fall that she’d nod off next to Enrique and sleep there half the night.
Darkness no longer frightened Enrique, and he had his own bedroom in the doublewide. Now this was simply their time to talk privately.
“You’d tell me if Jay said mean things to you, right, baby?” she said in Spanish.
“I guess,” he said in English.
“Does he?”
“I don’ know.”
“All right.”
She stroked his hair.
“Today,” she said in English, “a man kissed me.”
“What? Who?”
“It was nothing. A man. I clean his house. I didn’t let him do nothing.”
“Why’d you do that, Ma?”
“I don’ know.”
“You’re not supposed to.”
“Why?”
“Because!”
“Do you think it’s a big deal?”
“Yes.”
“
Cariño
, don’ be upset. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m lonely, I guess.”
“You’re not going to do it again, are you? When do you clean his house?”
“Don’ cry, baby. I won’t do it again.”
They both gazed at the ceiling. Lina wondered if Enrique was still crying.
“Why does it bother you so much, Enrique?”
“I don’ know.”
“I’m lonely,
mi vida
.” That was her name for him—“my life.”
He threw his arms around her and they both cried for a moment, then Lina lifted herself from bed. “No more blubbering. Time for sleep.” She kissed him, and went to the living room. Jay had come in from his bedroom to lie on the couch. Lina wiped her eyes. “What’s on?” she said, sitting in the recliner.
“Just news,” Jay said, turning away slightly, embarrassed, it seemed, by her tears.
In his bed, Enrique still cried. It seemed so dirty, this kiss from some old man who liked watching her clean his toilet. She should have said no.
He thought back to a night the previous summer, before Gene quit Boy Scouts. “Don’t kiss me,” Gene had said.
“Why?” They were in their tent and had zipped up their sleeping bags together as they always did. It was very dark.
“It’s what boys and girls do. It’s for reproduction.”
“All right.” Enrique was disappointed, but not really ashamed. Gene felt no shame or regret about anything; it was a capacity he had been born without. So their friendship was one of a kind: the forces of fear and guilt that buffeted Enrique about in the rest of his life were quiet here.
Enrique listened to the crickets and waited for Gene to start snoring, but then he did it again—he touched Enrique’s hair, searched out his earlobe, and rubbed it lightly between his thumb and forefinger. Then his hand made a padding journey to Enrique’s mouth. The thumb glided back and forth across Enrique’s lips, while the fingers rested on his cheek. That was what Gene had done minutes earlier that made Enrique decide to try to kiss him.
Enrique rolled away from the hand and went to sleep.
T
he bun in which Connie kept her hair and the boxy blue dresses she wore on her days off led people in the street to think she was a Mennonite. But she wasn’t. All her life she had attended First Church of the Nazarene, Eula’s largest. When she was a child, First Church had been a traditional small-town, white-steepled structure that stood at Eula’s center point, the corner of Twelfth and Main, like a dignified old gentleman waiting to cross the street. That building was still there, but now it housed First Church’s ministries for Hispanics and its senior center. The congregation now met two blocks away in a huge, modern, semicircular structure of white plaster painted to look like marble. First Church now had three ordained ministers: the senior pastor, who gave sermons, traveled on church business, and ministered to the dying; the worship leader, who organized the Sunday service, met with congregation members in need, and oversaw the church’s administrative office; and the youth minister. The block between the new and old churches contained a parking lot and a sports center. If Connie had still been a deaconess when they proposed that sports center, she would have voted against it. Basketball courts, when people here in Eula and around the world were dying without Christ—it smacked of vanity.
On a Sunday morning, Connie and Gene sat in their pew, which was not a proper pew but something more like a row of movie-theater seats. “Mom?” said Gene, scratching at his wrists, as he tended to do when he wore his nice shirt.
“Yes?”
“Can we go to Boise?”
“I suppose so, if you’re quiet during the service and you don’t fidget.”
Gene rocked to one side, then the other to sit on his hands.
The sermon that morning was on Christ and the lepers. This made Connie happy. She loved sermons drawn directly from Christ’s life and words, because they brought to mind images of her savior strolling the countryside in his robes and because they seemed more appropriate than, say, last week’s sermon on how the church should stand behind President Reagan through these arms-for-hostages accusations, just as the disciples stood behind Christ when the Pharisees accused him of violating the Sabbath. “And you,” said Reverend Keane, “how do you treat Eula’s lepers when they come begging? Do you embrace them and take them in, or are you so concerned with your own health and safety and the contents of your own wallet that you spurn them?”
With the nauseating wave she always felt when God was talking to her directly, Connie remembered how she had treated Wanda Cooper the day before. With the exception of Coop, who drove the school bus, the Coopers were bad news, so when Connie saw Wanda in a coffee-stained undershirt with her raw knuckles approach in the mini-mart parking lot, she had quickened her pace.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” Wanda said. “I’m tryin’ to buy some formula for my baby. Could you maybe spare a dollar or two?”
“I could,” Connie said without slowing her pace, “if I didn’t know what you’d do with it, seeing’s you have no baby, Wanda Cooper.” Wanda stopped abruptly, but Connie went on: “And if your mind was intact, you might remember telling me the same story last year.”
Just as Connie reached the entrance, Wanda called her a name—a horrible name—in a voice just loud enough for her to hear. She called her a
twat
.
Connie could now see that she had been proud and sarcastic, and in spurning Wanda she had spurned Christ Himself. She deserved Wanda’s rebuke. Well, not that word, of course, but . . .
A woman in the next row shot an irritated glance over her shoulder. This made Connie realize that Gene had been noisily crumpling his bulletin while she had been lost in thought.
“Eu
gene
,” whispered Connie, “quiet, or no Boise!”
Gene froze like a mannequin, still holding the bulletin. Another mother would have thought he was being willful, making a joke of his mother’s order by obeying it so instantaneously and dramatically, but not Connie. Gene didn’t make jokes.
Eugene. People called him Gene, except for Connie, when she was angry, and his schoolmates, when they were making fun of him.
Eugene
seemed to his schoolmates a very funny name, and to Connie, a very serious one. It had been the name of Gene’s father, who had left her.
Gene had always been strange. When he was a toddler, Connie’s keys fell again and again into his clutches. Rather than jangling them and throwing them, as any other child would, Gene frowned at them critically and ran his tiny fingertip along their jagged edges. As he grew and Connie wrenched things one by one from his ball-like hand, he turned his focus from objects to the empty space in the air about a foot in front of his chest. In the mornings he walked to the bus stop with his head bowed, focusing on this spot, which seemed to have become an imaginary scratch pad. He would scribble across it with his finger or, if frustrated, swat at it. He even seemed to talk to the space, although he never opened his mouth. His lips stayed bunched up under his nose, but his jaw lurched and his short, blunt eyebrows rose and fell independently of each other, as if they were fighting over the small patch of hair between them. There usually seemed to be a battle, or several battles—a war—going on in Gene’s face. When his gaze rose from his scratch pad, it was never to the path before him but to something in the air—a bug, fairy, or idea—that swirled around him and caused his head to pivot and crane.
Socially, things had gone better for Gene back in grade school. Although he was single-minded in his play, stubborn with his rules, and miserly with his toys, the other children took him or left him without branding him an outcast. And he had a buffer: Enrique, who had a natural understanding of Gene, embraced the role of translator between the boy who didn’t care to be understood and the world, which only became less understanding with time. Enrique apologized to the little girl whom Gene had made cry by yanking back a toy he had lent, then quieted the storm in Gene’s face by whispering something into his ear. But come fifth grade, it seemed that even Enrique couldn’t save Gene. The boys began to notice and comment on his stunted height, his pumpkin head, his shuffling, pigeon-toed gait, and the pimples that were sprouting too early on his tiny, upturned nose. A mere acorn tossed across the playground was enough to draw Gene suddenly out of his reverie. His head swiveled, eyes squinted as his attention cast wildly about like a fly fisherman’s line. The boys laughed and laughed. It was
so funny
.
In the sixth grade Gene added to his collection of odd traits an aversion to walking under the open sky. He began to walk in the shade of tree branches rather than cross an open field, even if it doubled the distance. At recess he played under the concrete canopy that extended from the building, or in the grove of maples at the center of the schoolyard, and cast a suspicious squint toward the sky as he darted in-between. Enrique indulged this new foible and rode the bus home with Gene, even on warm afternoons.
Given Gene’s strange behavior and the white baseball cap he took to wearing with the bill pulled low to shelter his eyes from the sky, it was little wonder people often assumed he was mentally retarded. Idaho’s State School and Hospital for the Developmentally Disabled, or “the State School,” as it was commonly called, was in Eula, so the town had far more than its share of “special” citizens. When Gene opened his mouth, though, his voice was high-pitched, precise, and intelligent.
Would his voice ever change? He already had a little fuzz on his upper lip. His mother would do good, said the concerned ladies at church, to give Gene a razor and encourage him to use it, not only on his upper lip, but on that tuft between his eyebrows, too. Then the concerned ladies shook their heads. It was so hard for single mothers.
But she had. Connie had taken Gene into the bathroom and told him he had to start shaving. He had gazed grumpily at the water swirling down the drain. Connie soaped up her hands and lathered his face. He squirmed a little, and Connie’s pink disposable razor caught his attention as it approached—he seemed apprehensive—but nothing prepared Connie for his reaction when he felt the blade drawn down his cheek. His arm shot up as if of its own volition and knocked the razor across the room. He dropped to his knees and released a bawl that was loud and barely human. Connie backed away, frightened of Gene, frightened that the neighbors could hear.
Then one night, as Connie straightened up after dinner, a program on PBS caught her attention. The narrator, who was English, was talking about artistic children. But the facts presented about these children became more and more extraordinary, and at last Connie sat down, paid attention, and realized this was something else: the program was actually on
autistic
children. Connie had never heard of autism, but here it was; here
he
was; here was Gene. She felt both horrified and liberated. It wasn’t her fault! She had always suspected that she might have hurt him without realizing it when he was an infant and, as a result, he had developed wrong and with a built-in resentment against her; this is why his eyes never met hers. But it wasn’t her!
After the program Connie called her prayer partner, Myra, who, before retiring, had worked as a nurse at the State School. Myra had heard of autism, although they hadn’t had any autistic kids on her floor. She doubted Gene was autistic, because, as she put it, “Those kids tend to raise Ned when they don’t get what they want.”
You haven’t seen Gene when I try to put a scratchy sweater on him
, thought Connie. Still, it was true that the kids on that show had seemed barely functional. Was that a result of autism, though? Connie and Myra prayed together, and before they said good-bye Myra gave Connie the telephone number of the doctor under whom she had worked at the State School—a fine, Christian man.
The State School was located on the hill north of town, where, legend had it, the cavalry had finally tracked down and killed Chief Eula, for whom the town was named. Connie had driven past the hill and peeked up the willow-lined lane innumerable times, but had never driven up it until now. She parked atop the hill, where there were five box-like brick buildings arranged around a cul-de-sac and a chapel at its farthest end. A vegetable garden at the plateau’s edge was visible in the gap between the buildings, and in it several adults in straw hats stood on their knees in a line, staring at her. Connie waved. One hand shot up and waved back emphatically; another rose in a vague acknowledgment. A woman nodded at Connie and turned to the others, said something, and went back to digging with her trowel. Whatever she said, the others didn’t obey, but continued to stare at Connie until she passed out of their line of vision. It occurred to Connie that this place was a humane sort of prison.
She entered a large, open hall with shining floors that reflected the light from the windows and empty walls that echoed the sound of her footsteps. The odors—bleach, feces, and aerosol air freshener—didn’t bother Connie, as they also filled the nursing home where she worked.
The room number the doctor had given her was 210. Connie expected on her way to encounter a receptionist, or a nurse, or even an inmate, but there was no one. She found room 210, knocked, and a voice from within told her to enter.
The doctor who sat behind the desk was very old. Older, even, than Myra. He wore a crewneck cotton sweater with no undershirt. This was the way the old men at the nursing home dressed when they were in their last stage of unassisted living; they selected their clothes for the ease with which they could be put on and taken off. Connie suspected (though she couldn’t see, as the doctor remained seated behind his desk) that he wore no socks and his shoes were slip-ons.
“So,” said the doctor after they had introduced themselves and chatted for a minute about Myra, “you have some questions about your boy?”
Shyly, at first, Connie told the doctor how Gene never looked her in the eye, and never embraced her, and when he told her that he loved her, he said it as if it was something he had memorized. Although the doctor’s bottom eyelids sagged open like a Saint Bernard’s, revealing the red veins inside, his gaze was focused. She told him how he would take things apart and put them back together when she wasn’t around, and she would only know when the phone receiver felt different in her hand, or the answering machine’s buttons were a little crooked, or the toaster, the doorbell, the curling iron behaved a little differently. And how, recently, he had taken to tearing flowers apart. If she brought home a bouquet from work, she’d have to give him one rose, and put the rest by her bed where she could guard them. Connie didn’t mention the obscene details of how Gene would lay his flower under the desk lamp and slowly peel back its petals to expose the powder-tipped shag, dig for the inner parts with his thumbs, then turn away to sneeze.
“He checked out Bach records from the library and sat right in front of the speakers to listen to them. I asked him why, and he told me, ‘Bach is talking to me.’ ” Connie didn’t say what Gene had said next. She had asked him how Bach could be talking to him, and he had replied, “He asks questions and I answer.” Then he had shaken his head wildly, a gesture he used frequently, implying both a clearing of the head and exasperation at having to waste his time explaining when he certainly wouldn’t be understood. “I mean, Bach poses a question, and I predict the answer.”
Bach poses a question
. A sixth-grader. Connie couldn’t string together all his habits for display, even to a doctor. She was embarrassed on Gene’s behalf for doing such things and on her own for putting up with it, for having been defeated by him. She had witnessed children defeat their parents before, but never using such roundabout tactics. It didn’t seem fair.
“His teacher called me just last week,” she said. “Gene is putting the date on his papers in the Hebrew or Chinese calendars. He refuses to use ours. These things frighten me a little, doctor. It seems wrong to refuse to date things from the Lord’s birth.” She stopped.
The doctor said, “Mrs. Anderson, sounds like you’ve got yourself a unique little feller.”