Four Years from Home Page 4

  Kate’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Say that you agree that something happened to Harry on purpose. That it was no accident. Say it.”

  “Someone’s supposed to be here tomorrow to tell us what happened.” The Tom from long ago would not let me admit I was fighting the truth. Harry had met with some evil — we all knew it. It was just that none of us could understand why, not even me.

  Sam replied, “Yeah, right.” We all laughed. He could make the funniest faces. His look could also be deadly serious. “They’re predicting another storm and it’s a three-hour drive from Kenyon on a good day. No one’s coming tomorrow or any time soon.”

  “We should at least wait and see.” Kate could be so sensible when she wanted to, but she turned it on and off like a spigot.

  So could I. “Okay then, how about we say I won the game like I always do, and we can call it a night?” I started to clean up the game and, one by one, we all put our cards and pieces away until all that was left were Harry’s blue men in Australia. Something held me back, held us all back from touching those sacred little blocks of painted wood. The shared smile of the four of us at that moment will remain with me always as a memory that we actually could function as a family when we put our minds to it.

  I have to tell you that, even though I usually have no trouble at all getting to sleep, I slept very little that Christmas night. No visions of sugarplums, no Dasher, no Dancer… My favorite toy had been broken, and I was plotting revenge on the one who had broken it. No, I’m not crazy. I just found it easier to think of Harry’s death in a more impersonal way. He was such an idealist, such a fool, such a great guy. And putting it in the context of something I understood — paybacks — made it somehow more palatable.

  Frankie Marx — now there was a kid deserving of paybacks. And I got him. I got him good. Every day he would do something obnoxious, something to get me in trouble. I was in marching band with him my freshman year at South. Every morning we would practice before school and every morning I would be late for homeroom. I had a good excuse — most everyone in the band was a few minutes late for homeroom.

  But not Frankie. No, not that brown-noser. He would run (something which I could have gotten him in trouble for, but that was too easy) from band to Brother Henry’s homeroom just to be on time. Since I was the only other boy in Brother Henry’s homeroom who was in the band, I was of course dead. Frankie can make it. Why can’t you? Frankie has no problem being on time, why do you? Frankie’s a brown-nosing little wiener, why aren’t you? Yes, I made that last part up. Brother Henry would never say that out loud, but I knew in his heart that he felt it and used it against me. He was known school-wide as a cruel and heartless person who took every opportunity to punish students. I admired him for that, even thought of him as a perfect candidate to head up the secret police in my kingdom. Every morning he made me do deep knee bends in the back of the room for being late, often holding a textbook in each hand, arms stretched out at my sides. God, that was painful. My only comfort in those painful minutes was the knowledge that I would get Frankie back someday.

  For years I plotted against him, chalking up many minor victories, but it was not until our senior year that I finally scored the big one. It was graduation night and the school had booked the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh. We all went by bus from South Catholic, dressed in our caps and gowns. It was a long ride and a warm, June evening. It was stuffy in the smelly, old school bus. I was feeling good, having taken a nap during the afternoon rehearsal, but Frankie had spent a grueling day in front of the school’s television cameras practicing his speech. He was the class valedictorian, a.k.a., biggest brown-noser in the school. From the seat behind, I could see his head nodding. I always sat behind him just in case an opportunity arose, and this was just such an opportunity.

  God, Super Glue is a wonderful thing — one of modern man’s most significant inventions. Anything can be glued with it: wood, metal, glass, paper, and, yes, even hair. I calculated the angle of deflection (a physics term for determining which way his head would bob) and the prevailing winds (there being none), pretended to look out the window at the river, and applied a liberal amount of glue to the seat back. I remember how he rubbed his nose slightly at the irritating smell of the glue as the right side of his head met the seat with a soft squish, but that was quickly replaced by a blissful smile as he nodded off to sleep again, dreaming no doubt of his wonderfully important and meaningful speech. All that remained was for me to sit back and close my eyes. No one usually sat with me on school trips so no worries about witnesses.

  When the bus stopped in the Civic Arena parking lot and the students began piling out, I quickly got up and into line ahead of my place, and ahead of Frankie’s row, clinching the appearance of innocence. After all, how could I have done it if I had been seated in front of him? Once outside, I hustled to the side of the bus so I could get a good look into the window at his face. Without seeing the look on his face, my victory would have been hollow indeed. I was not disappointed. His expression was of sheer terror and the bus windows were open, so I could see and hear clearly his scream when he immortalized forever “Frankie’s Furry Seat” on bus 25. He required immediate medical attention and a rather large bandage on his head where the hair had been torn away. And no amount of calming or soothing, no amount of “it’s okay” and “it will be all right” could negate my triumph. Mr. Band-Aid Head’s speech was a total disaster, but lucky for him, brief. He forgot most of his lines. We all clapped and cheered him. Even me. It was perfect.

  I had gotten up for a drink of water and heard Sam stir in his room. Growing up in that split-level house, I had always had my own room. Mary had her own room until Kate came along, and Sam and Harry had always shared a room. And even though I had long since moved out, my room was still my room though my “Keep Out or Die” sign had come down. But even I respected the others’ privacy and I knocked lightly at his door before sticking my head in.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “You okay?”

  “No.”

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “I feel sick.”

  I thought about it for a second and let myself in, closing the door behind me, crossing the palely moonlit room to Harry’s dresser. I opened his sock drawer, still containing about a dozen balled up pairs of sweat socks, and pulled out a likely well-rounded pair. Walking deliberately to the foul line, I took a shot and swished it. Two steps and a little jump and I had retrieved the sock ball from the curtain rod and returned to take another shot. This one banked off the ceiling and fell perfectly through the top rod to the bottom where it awaited retrieval.

  “You stepped over the line,” Sam scoffed.

  “Did not.”

  “Did too. The line is right where the light is attached to the wall and you went over it.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “Is there anything you don’t cheat at?”

  It didn’t take long for me to reply. “Nope.”

  Sam laughed. “Harry really sucked at sockball. Remember how he kept breaking the curtain rods with his dunks? Boy, did Dad get mad.”

  “And remember when he filled the hole in the wall with bubble gum and attached the bracket with scotch tape?”

  “Yeah, that really held the bracket in tight, didn’t it? The next dunk and he brought the whole thing down on himself. The hole was even bigger then. It’s a shame Dad never knew that was your idea.”

  “Was not.” How did he know that?

  “Was too.”

  “I suggested it as a possibility. It was his decision.”

  The winter night sounds of the woods next to our house filled the silence. An owl hooted from somewhere in the distance, and I could hear the crunching steps of animals making their way across our yard to our neighbor’s, the Ioli’s. Their place also bordered the woods, but Carmen Ioli, their only son, never went into them. There were no cars, no burger joints, and no chicks there. Carmen was as likely to be found in those woods
as it was likely to find me at an opera.

  It had to be deer. They were the bane of her fruit trees, eating them down to the trunk in the hard winters and crapping on them in the spring. I had offered her my services once when I was fifteen, but she squirted me off her property with the garden hose and threatened to call the “radio cops.” I wondered why she called them that. I know they all had radios, but they also all had badges and she didn’t call them the “badge cops.”

  Despite the fact that housing developments had sprung up all around those woods, it remained ours. It was our private playground. Our hideouts were there (we had several of them). The cherry tree, the tallest tree in the woods, was ours to climb and claim as our crow’s nest. Our foxhole, cleverly concealed, was there on Pork Chop Hill. We were the ones who had found the infamous Pink Lady’s pink Corvette when it had been stolen and dumped in the woods. And we were the ones who terrorized anyone who tried to move in on our territory. Well, actually, that last part was me. Harry and Sam never terrorized anyone. I could never sleep with all that “nature racket” in the background, so I kept my window closed. But Harry and Sam always had theirs open a crack, even in winter. Thank God, Mom and Dad had shown the good sense to make sure my room did not face the woods when they built the house.

  “The snow’s coming in,” I said closing the window.

  “Leave that open. It’s stuffy in here.”

  I cracked it again. “Should I go get you a shovel then?”

  “Look, I appreciate you’re trying to cheer me up, but I really just want to be left alone. Night, Tom.”

  With that summary dismissal, I closed the door behind me and went back to my room. It was stuffy, so I opened the front window a crack. The three deer had ventured into the Ioli’s and were fighting over a sapling they had broken off. It was so odd how they never made a peep, at least not that I could ever hear. I imagined they did actually talk to each other in some way, maybe a secret code of nods and grunts and pawing the ground. I mean, I did see Bambi, you know. I’m not totally illiterate.

  Chapter 3

  I’ve never liked the day after Christmas. Being raised a Catholic, I suppose I should have been joyous about the birth of Christ. After all, he did save a wretch like me. And I suppose that joy should have carried through to at least one day after the blessed event, but the day after Christmas was always more like a hangover than a continuation of celestial bliss. All those presents, those piles and piles of toys and games, the boxes and packaging that seemed to have much more imagination put into them than the toys themselves, all those things, were simply intoxicating. We had to play with every last one of them on Christmas Day and we had to play with them until we all got sick. I was not the throwing up kind. But you should have seen Harry. He probably had the weakest stomach of us all. I called him the Vomit Comet.

  Any good Irishman will tell you that the only real way to fix a hangover is to have another drink. Of course, my knowledge of this comes from my Granddad Ryan, who used to take us for “walks” on Sundays, which meant his dropping us off in Frick Park and heading to Clancy’s pub for a pint of bitters. We never minded. We all loved the park and I loved the little “nip” he gave me afterwards. My backwards-thinking parents, however, never saw fit to dispense even a medicinal dose of liquor on the morning after Christmas. They did, however, somehow stumble onto what I thought was an even better plan. For a few years after Kate was born, the family started having a Christmas-plus-one celebration — the relatives, who were never invited over Christmas day, would come over the day after with more loot. It was fantastic. I can’t begin to tell you how satisfying it was to have even more of my underlings’ things to break. But somewhere along the line, through some sick twist of fate, our day-after celebration evolved into a morbid clothing-fest that was worse than being dragged to Gimbels by Mom to look for new pants. At least there you could change in a dressing room instead of in the living room in front of Aunt Clara.

  Sleeping late was generally never an option at the Ryan’s. Dad was an early riser, five-ish usually, and the first thing he did was start the coffee. This had no effect on me until fourth grade when coffee began to smell interesting. Then it became my alarm clock. It was impossible to stay in bed with the heavenly aroma of Chock-Full-O-Nuts filling the house. But what I could never figure out was how Dad’s coffee could taste so awful. It wasn’t until after college when I started making my own that I concluded that it took no effort to make any coffee smell good, but it took Dad boiling it to death to make it taste like an old sardine.

  I finally rolled out of bed at seven and went downstairs. He handed me a cup of his finest. It had been brewing for two hours. How could I refuse?

  “I want us all to go to church today, Tom.”

  My lips curled as the vile liquid washed over my tongue. I needed caffeine. “I haven’t been to church in years.”

  “I don’t care. I want us all to go to church.”

  “It’s snowing.”

  We’ll go to the ten o’clock service.”

  Stubborn as ever… Dad would never change. One winter Sunday when I was in high school and we were still going to church as a family in the Nash Rambler (this was after I’d claimed the front window seat from Mom on a permanent basis), I remember that it was one of the worst storms I’d ever seen. We didn’t even have our paper route that day because the trucks couldn’t make their deliveries. But Dad had insisted on us going to church because it was our holy obligation to freeze to death in a snowdrift.

  “Dad, do you remember the time you made us go to Mass in that snowstorm and you tried backing the car up Oregon to get a head start going up the other side?” His expression was blank. Our house was at the bottom of a valley and Oregon Trail, the main street out of our development, climbed steeply up both sides of the valley. It was never well plowed and sometimes Dad would back up one side of Oregon to get a running start up the other. “The windows were all fogged up so you opened the door to see out the back?” I could tell no bells were ringing yet so I pulled the cord harder. I had a point to make and he wasn’t going to stonewall me. Not this time. “And there was so much snow that the door shaved off the top layer and buried you in the front seat?” We had all laughed so hard it hurt… until Dad had started swearing, which he never did. Then we were all very silent for the rest of the trip to church — a trip that took so long that we missed Mass anyway.

  Dad’s expression changed. He smiled. That was a surprise. My memory of that fiasco was that he was so upset about the whole thing that Mom had forbidden us to even mention it. “You kids laughed about that for weeks.” Well, we did do a lot of laughing behind his back, or at least we thought it was behind his back. Apparently not. I made a mental note to add that to the evidentiary file I was compiling to prove my theory that parents possess a radar system that allows them to detect things behind their backs, around corners, through walls, and behind locked bedroom doors.

  “Dad, this is the same thing. It’ll take an hour to shovel the driveway, then at least another hour to get to church if we’re lucky.” It was a ten-minute drive on a clear day, but during the winter the side roads in the south hills of Pittsburgh were no place for the faint-hearted or the inexperienced driver. Unfortunately, Dad was neither. He could make it. There was no doubt in my mind about that. I just didn’t want to go.

  “Then you’d better get everyone up now and we’ll leave at eight thirty just to be sure.” He turned back to his coffee and newspaper, Dad’s signal that he had made his decision. Further discussion was pointless. Actually, any discussion at all was usually pointless, but I usually felt obligated to press him to this point of finality.

  Overnight, the wind had blown a sizable pile of snow onto the floor of Sam and Harry’s room and the forced-air heat had melted it enough to make it nicely packable. It was too tempting. I never was much for resisting temptation. That and my impulsivity are probably the two things that get me into the most trouble — my only two tragic character flaws
.

  Just ask Brother Patrick. In my sophomore year, his Latin II class was a persistently annoying series of detentions and parent-teacher conferences. It was one of the few classes I couldn’t cheat my way through, not having the eyes in the back of my head that my parents had and having not yet developed any long distance peripheral vision. Seating me in the corner facing the wall with no one to copy answers from except Derrick Dietz, the only Latin student worse than me, was Brother Patrick’s way of condemning me to the hell of failing and having to repeat Latin with him next year.

  My desk was there for various minor infractions — throwing spitballs at the class nerds, sticking wads of gum to Brother Patrick’s robes during his patrols of the aisles, coughing obscenities while his back was turned. But the main reason was that I had tried to sell “grace points” on the black market. The good Brother handed out “grace points” during class to any student who excelled. “Conjugation correct! Fifty grace points,” he would say, proudly patting the accepting student on the back. Being ever the practical, realistic one, the first week of class I asked him how many grace points equaled a grade point. That was my first detention and the beginning of the end of our amicable relationship. From then on, I was nothing but a troublemaker.

  Naturally, I had to live up to my preordained reputation, so I stole a handful of blank diplomas from the main office one day while waiting to see the principal. I couldn’t resist. They were begging me to take them. “Take me! Take me!” These I doctored up to look like “grace point” certificates, properly signed by Brother Patrick. Since I had never seen his real signature, I assumed no one else had either, so I didn’t even bother trying to fake it. I just signed with my left hand so it would look different from my own chicken scratch. Each certificate had a different value, the highest being a one million point note. I hand wrote a “grace point” translation chart on a piece of “from the desk of Brother Patrick” notepaper. (One million grace points were worth ten grade points, by the way.) I started selling them the next day during lunch, charging fifty cents per ten thousand grace points. Being a real whiz at math, I had not calculated out that it would cost fifty dollars for the million pointer. I never sold that one, but its effect was startling and a super selling tool. I had almost ten dollars before the Latin II Hitler Youth Corps turned me in for their reward — one hundred grace points — a whopping thousandth of a grade point.