Four Years from Home Read online

  Each year, a Mass was celebrated to honor Sister Concepta. One year, Harry had the privilege of serving as one of the altar boys at her Mass and the misfortune of fainting while kneeling under the hot spotlights. It was priceless. Father Sherer carried him to the sacristy for the nuns to care for him while he went back to finish the service. When I saw Sister Concepta get up and head for the sacristy, I knew there would be more than Christ’s blood shed for our sins that day. It was easy enough to slide out of my end seat in the pew and hit the exit. Everyone was watching the spectacle and no one cared about little old me. I circled around to the back of the church and came in to the sacristy from the outside door. I was fully expecting Harry to be dead and the good Sister wiping the blood off her hands with the shreds of his white vestments. With a little sharpening, that big cross she always wore around her neck would make a great sword. She could easily run him through quickly, but hopefully not painlessly. I slid behind the cabinet so I wouldn’t be seen. I didn’t feel like testifying at a murder trial that day. I just wanted to watch, maybe pick up a few pointers. But it wasn’t a murder I was witnessing. It was a disgusting scene of the good Sister hugging and kissing Harry on the cheek, asking him softly if he was all right and — this is the worst part — crying. It was then I began looking for another leader for my kingdom’s secret police.

  Disturbing, twisting thoughts tore at me — thoughts I couldn’t make sense of and didn’t particularly want to. Everything that had happened since Christmas had been dumped into the same can that held my world, taken to the MAB paint store, put into one of those paint can shakers and mixed into a gooey, gray mess. Whoever was behind this was pure evil — worse than Frankie Marx, Carmen Ioli, and Nicky Amendola combined. This clever mastermind even had the nerve to paint over the Tom label that clearly marked it as my realm and replace it with a blood red Harry. Someday I’d find whoever had done this and get even.

  The signs for Zanesville solidified in the mist hanging over U.S. 70 as I drove that poor Pontiac and myself relentlessly westward. I felt sorry for myself being thrust into such a stupid situation by my siblings, but I didn’t feel any sympathy for the car. Cars were made to be driven, and driven was what I did to them. If they couldn’t take it, they got traded in or junked. People are like cars in that respect. A sudden panic swept over me with the realization that I had been passing the time daydreaming and had probably missed the turnoff for Kenyon. Damn it. Why couldn’t they make cars that drove themselves? I reached for my mental notebook to make an entry to go back in time and punch Henry Ford in his “better ideas,” but it, too, was covered with the same sticky, gray slop from the inside of my paint can world. Oh, I’d get even.

  I waited for the next sign. And waited. And waited. I fumbled for the map Sam had drawn for me. I’m not sure why — I could still clearly see its image in my photographic memory, and what I saw would not have helped me just then. It wasn’t like I was taking a multiple choice exam and had to simply run down the image of the answers in my mind gleaned from my brief glimpse of Jean Mykita’s test when she got up to turn it in. This was different. A map is only helpful if you know where you are on it.

  When I saw the sign for “Mount Vernon” it became the little yellow star labeled “You are here” on the map, and my world again fell into place. I decelerated onto the exit ramp. This was the part of the drive that I knew I would hate. The roads were too windy and twisty to get up much speed, and they had gotten a ton more snow than Pittsburgh. And, of course, the destination was Mount Vernon, which I had pre-ordained as a crummy little town that didn’t even have a McDonald’s and whose only claim to fame was that people came through it to get somewhere else. It was a good hour before I entered what was apparently the town, judging by the subtle increase in density of the houses and numbers of people, and of course, the Welcome to Mount Vernon sign. My assessment was right on target. In five minutes I was through the nearly empty town square and back onto an even more desolate highway, leaving Mount Vernon behind, skidding and sliding my way up the steeper hills toward Kenyon.

  Kenyon was a small college of about fifteen hundred young punks with no future (at least not in my kingdom), a hundred or so faculty, and a town that wasn’t much more than a speed bump at the end of the campus. It called itself the Harvard of the Midwest, but this dump was nothing like Harvard. I’d spent many nights drinking at Harvard and Kenyon was about as close to this as the moon is to Uranus. I know what you’re thinking and, no, I didn’t go to Harvard. I merely drank there because it was the place to drink in Cambridge if you wanted to pretend to be a student, and pick up women who knew you weren’t a student but played along anyway.

  In the aftermath of the storm you could easily have missed Kenyon and headed down the other side of the hill toward some even smaller and more obscure Ohio town. But my years of leading patrols through the woods and looking for tracks and signs of the enemy had honed my senses to the point where I immediately knew I was in Gambier, Ohio, the town that was home to Kenyon College.

  I stopped at the Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, sign and looked around. It was cloudy and dark, and the wind whistled through the Pontiac’s worn insulation. To my right was the main campus of the college and to my left the town, if you could call it that. I turned left and circled the one block that was Gambier — a restaurant, a bookstore, a pizza place, a grocery, a post office, a bank, a couple of houses that looked like they had been converted to offices, and my next destination — the Alumni House. The sign out front said Vacancy. I pondered the foresight and depth of planning that had sent me more than a hundred fifty miles in the aftermath of a winter storm with no reservation for the night, but I was too tired to make any notes on getting back at the trip planners so I parked the car, grabbed my bag, and headed inside.

  The lobby was fairly nondescript except for the Kenyon paraphernalia all over the place. I gravitated to a wall of class photos with a drawing in the middle. The photos were of the last twenty years or so of graduating classes, and the drawing was of a holy-looking guy (at least insofar as he was dressed in a black frock with a stiff white collar and was carrying a Bible). He was surrounded by a small group of people who were kneeling and apparently praying. The artist had added some light ray lines coming from the clouds above. Obviously the sun or God or both was shining down on them all. The handwritten caption read: They climbed a hill and said a prayer, and founded Kenyon College there.

  I glanced around the room. Ice had formed on the inside of a window and framed the bleak, soulless night. This was the answer to their prayer? Example number three hundred sixty four of why I never pray: the answer is never good. Sister John Anne had told me once, while she was repeatedly hitting me on the head with her fist, that God hears all prayers. He just doesn’t answer them all. I was convinced that He never answered mine, considering that I didn’t get that nuclear missile or even the one with the conventional warhead. I mean, I did give him options and giving me nothing was not one of them. In the case of the drawing, this dreary place called Kenyon seemed more like a “No, but how about this booby prize and we’ll call it Kenyon?” than a “Sure — here you go, this is the answer to all your prayers.” Kenyon was the Gulag Archipelago of Midwest Siberia, Ohio. Remind me again why Harry would want to come here? Why I would want to come here? Why anyone would want to come here?

  Mom and Dad knew I had given up on praying — I had pretty much told them as much — but they also thought that Harry had stopped too after he quit going to church. I secretly knew otherwise, but I wasn’t about to tell them. I caught him at it many times, mostly outside and in the woods for some odd reason. I never understood that. Praying was bad enough, kneeling worse. Why would you do it outside? I’d asked Harry that only once and his answer had enraged me — he said he couldn’t explain it to someone like me — that I wouldn’t understand. Someone like me? Wouldn’t understand? What the hell did that mean anyway? My Revenge notebook had pages and pages of hash marks beside his name. I think I ad
ded ten of them for that crack.

  The clerk’s atonal incantation, “Your room is ready now,” brought me back from my suppressed unforgotten anger and I snatched up the room key. The Alumni House only had two floors and my room was at the top of the stairs. It was chilly in the room, but I could hear the hopeful snapping of the radiator as hot water warmed up the cold cast iron. I really wanted a shower, but I needed to lie down for a bit. My muscles were still vibrating from the long car ride and I had an enormous headache. The shower would just have to wait…

  “Are we there yet?”

  “No.”

  “Are we there yet?”

  “No.”

  “Are we there yet?”

  “Shut up, or I’ll kill you, you little dweeb.”

  “Tom! What an awful thing to say.”

  I could hear the shock in Mom’s voice and I elbowed Harry hard before turning to look out the car window.

  “He’s being a pain.” And how the hell did I end up in the back? My place was in the front window seat, not here with the losers. Somehow this was Harry’s fault, but I couldn’t figure out how yet, and he was torturing me. He knew what a humiliating demotion this was for me and was rubbing it in — hard.

  “Want to play a game?”

  A game? With him? “Sure, how about my fist and your face play hide and seek?”

  Dad usually ignored any commotion in the back seat while he was driving but he always made a special exception for me. “That’s enough, Tom. You two just sit quietly there, or there will be consequences.”

  I looked at Harry’s shit-eating grin and gave him the finger. I could have killed him.

  Chapter 6

  The cold glare of morning pushed rudely through the window and washed away a dream I couldn’t remember. It had been quite a while since I’d remembered my dreams — four or five years easily. When I was growing up, they had always been so vivid and real, usually in Technicolor by Deluxe with Dolby sound, but one day they just stopped. I’d wake up, knowing I had been dreaming but unable to remember anything at all about it. Like now. Hungry, smelly, pasty-mouthed, head still pounding; for an instant I couldn’t decide which of these problems to fix first.

  That grip of indecision often strangles lesser folk — too many things have gone wrong to know where to start making them right. It freezes the weak-minded in an inertia that becomes overwhelming — but not me. I had been using my bag as a pillow, mounding it into a little hill of comfort during my sleep; so I climbed that hill (but said no prayer) and found my aspirin bottle there. Catchy — maybe I’d graffiti that over the drawing downstairs. I popped a couple with no water and grimaced a swallow, just like the tough guy in the movies who takes his pain meds after the big fight. Nothing to wash it down, no reason to call him sissy. That wouldn’t be enough. I took two more. With that out of the way, the other problems fell one by one like outposts on the Maginot line.

  “That’s not how it happened, Tom.”

  “It’s Sergeant to you, Private, or do I have to remind your face with the butt of my rifle?”

  “The Maginot Line was French, not German, and the Americans didn’t defeat them one at a time. The Nazis just went around them and they eventually surrendered when they were cut off.”

  “Maybe in some other war, but not this war. In the big WW II it was our squad that bumped them off one by one.”

  “You ought to rewrite history books for a living. You’re so good at it, a regular 1984.”

  “That just shows how stupid you are. It happened in the 1940s, not 1984. And obviously, Harry, you didn’t pay attention in class when they covered the Maginot Line. Obviously, the Germans skirted around it and obviously the French surrendered it, but — and here’s the part where you look like a total idiot — it was the Americans that retook it, one outpost at a time from the Nazis. Numbnuts.” History is a fluid thing, changeable in the mere retelling of it. And as the stories evolve and are retold, they continue to rewrite the history that will someday be remembered as fact. Or, as I am more apt to say, the more you tell the lie, the truer it gets.

  Breakfast, the last of the unretaken outposts, fell before my knife like a sentry in the way of my infiltration mission. The thought crossed my mind that the waitress at the Alumni House was some relation to the waitress at the Pancake House, given that Ohio was actually the Indian word for inbreeding, or so I thought I had read on some diner placemat somewhere. So I tried to ignore her for the most part by reading a copy of the Alumni Bulletin that had come with breakfast. I really didn’t want another bizarre scene like that one, especially not knowing my escape route. I could have kicked myself for not reconnoitering the area before advancing into enemy territory. It wasn’t like Sergeant Saunders to head into enemy territory without knowing his way back to friendly lines. Fortunately, she had as little interest in making conversation with me as I had with her, and the meal passed uneventfully into my digestive system.

  Most times, this time included, I don’t take much pleasure in eating — it’s just something that has to be done, like sleeping or going to the bathroom or dying. It’s far more enjoyable and satisfying to do things that involve danger and the possibility of getting caught and being punished. I reached for my notebook and jotted down a few random thoughts about hiring scientists to develop foods that either contained adrenaline or some other like chemical that would introduce fear and anticipation into the eating ritual. Another thought occurred to me and I added, “Can they also find a way to make other people sleep, piss, and die for you?”

  By my cosmic calendar, it was 9:00 a.m. Monday, though it wasn’t clear to me that the quaint folk of Gambier had yet awakened and begun their trek to work, school, or whatever other rustic endeavor they were involved in. There was no activity outside the Alumni House except for a constant wind blowing snow across Wiggin Street, piling it up on the campus side of the road against an old fence. I was glad I had remembered to bring my army boots and parka. The snow-covered path onto campus, marked only by a break in the fence, was undisturbed by human traffic. But, then, I am always prepared for any eventuality. I always have a Plan B. That’s why I am king and they are just “the others.”

  “Okay, this is what we say. When Mom asks us why, we tell her that we were only trying to help. We wanted to weed the garden for her as a surprise.”

  “But you dug up all the flowers, Tom.”

  “We dug up all the flowers, not me.”

  “You were pulling my hair. You made me do it.”

  True, but irrelevant. “Shut up, Mary. You’re not listening. This is only going to work if we stick together. We tell her we didn’t know they were flowers. We thought they were weeds. Get it?”

  “Weeds don’t have pretty yellow flowers on them.”

  “Dandelions do.” I could always count on Harry to say something useful, although I was sure he wasn’t trying to help me.

  It didn’t matter. “There you go. We thought they were dandelions so we dug them up.”

  Mary was ever persistent. “They were daffodils and Mom and I planted them. She won’t believe you. She won’t believe me.”

  In the end, I went with Harry’s dandelion idea, though I knew he was trying to trick me. I just had no other options at the moment — probably the last time I had no Plan B. And I paid for it; oh I paid for it. I had to replant Mom’s garden by myself. If you ask me, Dad’s punishment was far worse than the crime. They all knew I hated working outside. But the lesson was learned. I had a Plan B ready for his punishment; a payback plan that was totally untraceable, a thing of beauty. For every flower, a dandelion was also planted. Plan B… always have a Plan B.

  The snow was over a foot deep along the path into the main campus. “Middle Path,” they called it in the Alumni Bulletin. There was a section in the magazine titled “Along Middle Path,” a collection of whimsical memories submitted by graduates recounting their stupid college years. “Oh, I remember the pristine beauty of the leaves in the fall… blah, blah, blah.�
� And, “We used to have the most intensely personal classes outside sitting by Middle Path and watching the students meander through campus on their path to blah, blah, blah knowledge.” Meander? The path was a straight line in the photos. Of course, now there was no path. It was a barely visible indentation in a foot of unplowed and unmarked snow. But maybe it would be my path to knowledge of what had happened to Harry.

  I headed in. I didn’t feel anything special walking on the path they treated with such reverence and remembered as if magical. It made me wonder how something could be so special when its only claim to fame was that it happened to be in the middle. Most things stuck in the middle were there for a reason and it wasn’t exactly a good one — monkey in the middle, middle class, middle of the road, and middle aged came to mind. None of these was anything to cherish or aspire to, but maybe that is what attracted Harry to this place. I never thought of him as mediocre. Had I, he never would have been such a threat to my kingdom. On the other hand, he might have seen in Kenyon an opportunity to get out from under my rule and start his own little country. What made him think this was out of my reach? He must have known that I would find him eventually and put an end to his insubordination. After all, he wasn’t stupid.