The World of Normal Boys Read online

  “You, Robin, are the kind of kid who’s been mollycoddled all his life and thinks he’s better than everyone else. I knew a kid like you when I was growing up. Dodo Scanlon. Donald, but we called him Dodo. Which is funny, now that I think about it, ’cause a dodo is a bird, and you’re named after a bird, so there’s something to it.”

  “Dodo Scanlon?” Dorothy is suddenly in the doorway, her voice trembling. “Dodo Scanlon was a little genius whose life became the ninth circle of hell thanks to you. You and that bunch of greasers you associated with! Stan, you just don’t know when to stop—”

  Stan interrupts, his voice smug. “At least I know when to stop drinking.”

  “You bastard.” A curtain of silent tension descends upon the room. Robin’s head is spinning; it feels as if he’s on a playground, waiting for the punches to fly. He wants to speak up, to help his mother, but before he comes up with anything to say or do, Dorothy’s gaze meets his. “I think,” she says, “you should go fetch your brother and sister.”

  Summer has made one last defiant appearance. The evening air is warm, the streets bruised with orange light punching through the empty oaks. Robin heads toward the playground. He makes a path between the sidewalk and the curb, kicking up leaves as he goes. The ones on top are dry and crisp and flutter to his side; beneath these, a slick layer has already been flattened into the dying grass.

  He walks down Bergen Avenue, where he has lived for nine of the thirteen years of his life, past the Delatores’ and the Feeneys’, past the house where Mr. Kelly, whose wife died last year, lives, past Mrs. Lueger, who is sweeping her cement stoop as she does every night before her husband comes home from work. Robin waves to Mrs. Lueger out of habit, and she waves back without a word. He watches her turn her gaze across the hedge, trying to catch a look at the young couple next door, who are laughing over a flaming hibachi at the back of their driveway. Robin doesn’t know their names; they are new to the block. Everyone refers to them as The Hippies. They have friends who ride motorcycles. A few days before, Robin heard Mrs. Feeney announce that she is sure the couple smoke dope, to which Mrs. Delatore responded: “They’re probably growing it back there.” There has been a lot of talk about drugs lately; in group guidance, Robin has sat through several films depicting teenagers who were “slipped a mickey” and wind up throwing themselves from open windows or losing their minds into a trippy haze of colors and wild sounds; even the ones who try to return to regular lives are always at the mercy of acid flashbacks.

  He turns left onto Hopkins, crosses Kickmer and then Whalen and then Tully. The streets of Greenlawn are all named for local men killed in wars. Every year the names are read at the Memorial Day rally in the park. He turns down Lester, takes it to the end, where the woods begin. There is a broken concrete path that cuts between the old oaks and winds into the playground behind Crossroads Elementary.

  The school is an orderly brick building, one story high with a flat roof, tucked between the street and the woods. He has spent more time in this building—kindergarten through sixth grade—than any place except home, but in the three years since he’s gone to school here everything, he realizes, has changed. The building is so small. The windows are low to the ground, the doors, painted green, look quaint, like doors on a clubhouse. Crude, construction paper goblins and witches and pumpkins are taped to the windows. He remembers creating such things himself. It didn’t change, he realizes. I changed. He sticks his hands in his pockets and fingers the sharp foil edge of the Trojan wrapper. He is unexpectedly struck by the notion that he was a child here, that he is not a child, not in the same way. He wonders, how did this happen? I didn’t plan for it.

  The sun is now quite low in the sky, a blood red disk licking the tops of trees and houses. Across the playground, almost in silhouette, is the slide. With the asphalt ground, its two legs form a triangle: on one side the ascending ladder, on the other the metal trough. Ruby is in a dress on the tiny platform at the top, gripping the handrails, Jackson stands at the base of the ladder, and Larry leans upward from the mouth of the chute, yelling, “Ruby MacKenzie, slide on down!” As Robin gets closer he can see that Larry is wagging his tongue at her and wiggling his butt in the air like an excited puppy ready to pounce.

  Ruby pivots to climb back down the ladder, but Jackson, at the bottom, is an obstacle to her escape. “Come on, Ruby,” he says. “Time’s a-wastin’.”

  “I mean it,” she says.

  “No way,” Jackson says. “Only one way up, only one way down.”

  Larry lets out a “Woo-hoo!”

  Robin calls across the playground, “You guys.” And then louder when they don’t respond, “It’s suppertime.”

  “Move it, Ruby,” Jackson says, then steps onto the ladder.

  “No fair,” Ruby yells. “Get off!” Jackson takes another step. Ruby sees Robin approaching. She calls to him, “Make him cut it out.”

  “Jackson, get off,” Robin says.

  So many years of recess on this playground have imprinted certain rules in Robin’s head, and one of the first ones is that you can’t get on the ladder until the person before you slides down. The ease with which Jackson dismisses this concept angers Robin, not because he cares about the rule so much but because Jackson cares about it not at all. He is nagged by Jackson’s carefree attitude, more so by the way it intimidates him.

  “Get out of the way, Larry,” Robin says.

  “Shut up. I’m not doing anything.”

  Jackson is now halfway up the ladder. Robin reaches up and swats his leg. “Jackson, get off.” But Jackson continues his climb, one step at a time. Then Larry, on the other end of the slide, begins walking up. The metal is too smooth for his shoes to get a grip so he drops to his belly and begins slithering up toward the top.

  Ruby yells, “I’ll jump over the side. I mean it.”

  “No, no, don’t jump,” Larry snarls, continuing his upward slither. “Let me rescue you.” He is about halfway to her, his chest at the point where the slide bulges.

  “We’re eating dinner, cut it out,” Robin says. “Get off the ladder, Jackson. Cut it out, Larry.”

  He hates the sound of his own voice. He knows that they won’t listen to him. He makes another grab for Jackson, which sends Jackson scampering to the top. Jackson pauses long enough to smirk at Robin and wave his fists above his shoulders, like a weightlifter flexing his muscles.

  Robin’s exasperation is at its limit, and he does something he doesn’t want to do—something he thinks is exactly what Jackson wants him to do, which makes it even worse—he gets on the ladder himself. He scurries up the steps and reaches out for Jackson’s leg. Jackson hops up one final rung, forcing himself onto the landing right next to Ruby. He circles his arm around her neck and hisses back toward Robin. “One false move and she’s dead.”

  Ruby shrieks. From the other side, Larry grabs her by the ankles and she shrieks again. Robin thinks they might really push Ruby off. He improvises a karate chop into Jackson’s shinbone. Jackson yelps and loosens his grip enough for Ruby to free herself. She squats down and pounds her fists into Larry’s head.

  “Everyone go down the slide,” Robin yells. “Now!” He hears the command in his words—his voice at last has some authority to it—but he knows it is too late. Ruby is twisting out of Larry’s grip and leaning back into Jackson, and Robin is trying to hold Jackson in place and reach toward Ruby at the same time, and then Ruby and Robin are both squeezing Jackson between them. Disorientation overwhelms him—the sky is darkening above and the pavement blurs way down below and the four of them, somewhere in the center of it all, compress tighter in struggle. No one is speaking, their throats release only grunts. Robin grabs the denim of Jackson’s pants in his fist and feels him wriggling away, feels the material pull across his fingernails, senses the intent in Jackson’s escape. He tightens his fist but now there is nothing to hold, he senses Jackson lurching away from him, away from all of them. Robin makes a lunge at Jackson, and then J
ackson is being pulled upward, his legs rising, his body slipping across the metal curve of the railing, arcing into the wide empty dusk. Jackson is flying.

  There is a gasp. Then a sucking whoosh. Then a collision, a stone split open.

  Stillness.

  Robin looks at Ruby, at her amazed eyes, her mouth straining against silence. He looks at Larry, who is sliding backwards on his belly. He looks into the air where he last saw Jackson. The only place left to look is down.

  The wrinkled red and blue stripes of Jackson’s shirt, the back of his shirt.

  A curve of skin—Jackson’s neck, very white against the ground.

  His face in profile, an open eye, the shell of his ear.

  His legs are stretched apart from each other. It is all twisted up, it is not making sense to Robin.

  Larry is there, down below. Larry breathing loud, his breath is a chain pulling sounds back into the night—cars moving in the street and crickets chirping and a distant door slamming shut. Larry shoves Jackson’s shoulder and Jackson’s torso rolls sideways but his head stays the same. There is a terrible new noise: the sound of knuckles cracking. Not knuckles. Jackson’s neck.

  “Get up,” Larry says. And then louder: “Get up!”

  “Stop!” Ruby cries out. “You’re hurting him!” She slides down to the ground.

  Alone on the platform Robin’s confusion dissolves, and he grasps at last what has happened. He begins the climb down the ladder, but each step seems to take an eternity so he leaps out, into the air where Jackson just flew. For a moment he believes he’ll hurt himself, and then he obeys an instinct that says bend your knees for the landing. His feet smack, his knees rush into his armpits, his palms screech along the blacktop. The ground burns into his skin.

  Larry is repeating, “Get up, get up,” and Ruby is yelling, “Leave him alone,” and finally Robin speaks in a hollow voice. He says, “Be quiet.” And they are.

  Larry runs away. Ruby runs away. Robin calls after them, “Go tell somebody what we did.”

  It is just the two of them on the playground for a long time.

  This much registers: Jackson is breathing. Robin kneels next to him, watching his body inflate and subside. He brushes his fingertips along the back of Jackson’s neck. The spine is not right, he can tell from the way the skin pulls. He says aloud the words he has heard on TV shows: It’ll be all right. Hang in there. You can make it. He says, Don’t die, and then thinks, No more Jackson. No more dragging him home for dinner. No more having to apologize to strangers for Jackson saying the wrong thing. No more Jackson bouncing around on his bed practicing new curse words. They’ll plant a cherry blossom tree in front of the school like they did for that girl who had leukemia. They’ll write about this in the Community News. They’ll ask me questions.

  He is sure he will be blamed.

  He wonders if an unconscious person can read minds. He thinks, Can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me, Jackson.

  A wet ribbon of blood draws from Jackson’s mouth, inching along the ground. Robin dips his index finger into the tip of the stream and it pools around the nail. He puts this finger in his mouth—the taste of a nosebleed. A grain of stone from the playground floor is mixed in with the blood, he pushes it between the tip of his tongue and the back of his teeth. He remembers his own jump to the pavement, checks his hands. There is blood there, too.

  It’ll be all right. Hang in there. You can make it. Don’t die. A faint groan travels up from somewhere inside of Jackson. A sob through mucus. His breaths continue, eerie. Wind moving through a cave.

  The pavement pushes up into Robin’s knees. He feels it. The hard ground is everything, there is nothing else beneath. No soil, no tangled roots, no Indian bones, no fossils, no magma, no core of the earth. He could not dig down to China. The earth is nothing more than a solid slab of playground.

  He puts his fingers in Jackson’s hair, lifts his hand, lets the hair drop back against the skull.

  “Don’t touch him!” Dorothy is screaming from the car window. She is speeding onto the playground. The vibrations of the auto reach him first, then the headlights. Jackson looks sicker in the blinding glow. The car seems to roll even after Dorothy jumps out of it. She is hurtling toward them. The place is filled with new smelts—exhaust fumes, scorched tires, the tobacco and wine on Dorothy’s breath.

  The ambulance siren cries into the night.

  They wait in the hospital, sitting on chairs covered in fuzzy brown material that scratches Robin’s legs and ass through his pants. They entered through the emergency room and then into intensive care. There is a nursing station nearby where the sounds of muffled phone calls can be heard. The sheer amount of activity in the building—two car accidents, a heart attack and Jackson all within the same hour—shrinks the walls around them. Nurses appear from around corners and out of doorways and pass by on their way somewhere else. Robin follows everyone with his eyes.

  Jackson is being operated on. A specialist has been called in from New York City. The first time Robin sees a doctor in aqua blue scrubs, face mask and a shower cap he thinks, That must be the specialist. On General Hospital, doctors wear long white coats, their full hair combed neatly. Then he sees another man dressed like this, going a different direction. Later, another. He doesn’t know who anyone is, which ones might have seen his brother’s body, which ones might know the story of the fall. He had tried to explain to his mother in the car but she only listened for a few minutes before making him stop. He tries to picture the surgery. He thinks of a game he owned a couple of years back called “Operation.” A cartoon body with tiny removable body parts. Take out wrenched ankle, the card said. If you touched the skin with the tweezers the game honked at you.

  He sits on a chair next to his mother, who clutches his hand in hers. Across from them, Ruby is laying her head in Clark’s lap. She hardly blinks, as if she might be sleeping with her eyes open. His father is crying. He has been crying the entire time, not making a sound, wiping his wet cheeks again and again. Robin is amazed by this sight. He wants to ask questions, but those tears are what keeps him quiet. He looks so handsome, Robin thinks. They both look like new people, so beautiful and serious in their tragic faces.

  A man dressed all in white is there suddenly. He is young, with a helmet of blow-dried hair and dark bars on his sleeves. “Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie,” he says in a delicate voice.

  His father says, “Yes, Doctor?”

  The man smiles. “Oh, I’m the nurse,” he says. “Dr. Glade would like to speak with you. Come with me.”

  Robin gets up to go along, but his mother motions for him to stay. “Watch your sister for a minute.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Dorothy holds her finger to her lips. “Shhh ...”

  The man who is a nurse smiles at Robin. As they walk away, Robin hears a siren from down the hallway, toward the parking lot. He imagines that they have left him and Ruby behind to be arrested by the police. You killed your brother, they will accuse. You have the right to remain silent.

  The nurse returns and comes over to them. “You must be Robin and Ruby,” he says. “I’m Harold.” Ruby sits up. Robin nods, fearful.

  “I hear you got a little scratched up, too,” Harold says to Robin. “Let’s see.” Robin turns his palms face up and lays them on Harold’s outstretched hands, which are warm, a little callused. His own palms are streaked with cuts, some already scabs. There is a film of blacktop powder embedded in his skin. “Why don’t we clean things up a bit?” He motions for them to come with him.

  Ruby crosses her arms in front of her. “I’ll wait here,” she says.

  “Let’s stick together, OK?” Harold says. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out hard candies wrapped in cellophane. They each refuse.

  “I’m staying here for my mom and dad,” Ruby says.

  “Come on, Ruby,” Robin pleads.

  “No.”

  Robin thinks of her at the top of the slide, trapped between Jackson
and Larry. He thinks none of this would have happened if she had just slid down into Larry and kicked him. “Don’t act like a baby,” he snaps.

  She bursts into loud sobs—her body instantly convulsing. Harold motions to an older woman in white at the nursing station. “Would you keep an eye on Ruby while I clean out Robin’s cuts?” Harold asks.

  Ruby’s stare implores Robin to stay, but he feels the sudden urge for an escape. He follows Harold toward an examining room. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and Ruby heaves herself into the lap of the other nurse. “Good girl,” the nurse says. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a hard candy wrapped in cellophane.

  The examination room is cold and bright with a black window facing the parking lot. Harold pats his hand on an examination table. The paper crinkles as it gives in to Robin’s weight.

  Robin’s hands sting under the antiseptic; he squeezes shut his eyes and bites down on his teeth. Harold is talking about something but Robin doesn’t hear the words. When the bandages have been taped down, he looks up and Harold is smiling.

  “How come you have stripes on your uniform?” Robin asks him.

  “They give these to the male nurses to identify us.”

  “Why? Don’t they already know that you’re a guy?” Robin asks, and Harold laughs. It seems like a real laugh, a laugh that they share.

  “Any other questions?” Harold says, lifting him back to his feet.

  “Yeah, about a million. Like, about my brother . . .”

  Harold pauses, wiping off his instrument table. He sighs. “I’ll take you back out to your parents.”

  When he comes back into the waiting area Dorothy is there. “Your father took Ruby home,” she says. “I need a cigarette.” It is the most she’s said to him since they got here.

  She walks him out to the parking lot and is lighting up before the automatic doors swing closed behind them. Neither of them has a coat, and the temperature has dropped, so they hurry to the car and sit inside with the heat on and the windows cracked to let out the smoke.