Adults

Christopher sat on the ground in the pine grove with his back up against a tree and smoked a cigarette that was very badly bent. Christopher carried the pack in his right pants pocket because he thought his mother did not know he smoked, and the cigarettes got crushed when he moved around. Christopher said he was not going to baseball practice.

The late-afternoon sun did not penetrate the branches of the tall trees in the pine grove. Beyond the grove, the sunlight was flat and bright and unshadowed on the grass of the deep outfield of the baseball field, and the heat bugs sawed away at their version of music in the heat, but it was dim in the pine grove and Luke could not see Christopher's face well. Luke's eyes were still somewhat dazzled from the sunlight he had left behind when he crossed the abandoned railroad siding into the grove and found Christopher sitting under the tree. Luke wore a Red Sox hat and a yellow T-shirt with the Pitt Panthers' logo, and he pounded his left fist into his Dave Concepción-model fielder's glove as he talked. "How come?" Luke said.

"Because it don't mean nothing," Christopher said. He exhaled smoke. "I thought about it and it don't mean nothing. It used to, but it don't anymore. It's something I already done, all right? I don't want to do no more of it."

"Mr. Kenney'll be mad," Luke said. "He was counting on you, start against Our Lady's tomorrow night. Brian already pitched this week."

"Mr. Kenney," Christopher said. "Yeah, Mr. Kenney. I know Mr. Kenney. Fuck him. He's all bullshit. Mr. Kenney."

"He was gonna start you," Luke said. "He always started you before when he said so, didn't he? You pitched a lot. He really likes you."

"Yeah," Christopher said. "Mr. Kenney started me, all right. You know something? I don't give a shit what Mr. Kenney likes. Who he likes. I ain't going."

Luke sat down on the ground in the yoga position. He continued to pound his glove with his fist. "What about Father Driscoll?" he said. "Father Driscoll'll be mad, too. He's gonna want to know what happened. What're you gonna tell him? He'll be calling up your house and everything, you don't show up."

"Big fucking deal," Christopher said. "Once, he'll call. Then he'll forget about it. All he wants, all he wants is people he can tell what to do. That and money. That's all any of them want."

"He doesn't seem like that kind of guy to me," Luke said.

"They're all that kind of guy," Christopher said. "You're not even a Catholic. How'd you know? My father says they're all the same. All they want is money, money, money. They don't give a shit about people. Just their money. My father says that."

"Then why's he go to church, then?" Luke said.

"He doesn't," Christopher said. "Well, he goes to church. He just don't go in. He says that's why he doesn't. All they want's his money, and he's sick of hearing about it. He takes my mother and my little brother and my sisters and we all go, and he gets out of the car with us when we go in and he buys the paper from the kid that sells them out of the box outside the church there, and he gets back in the car and he reads the paper."

"Can't your mother drive?" Luke said.

"Sure," Christopher said. "You seen her drive. She's got the brown station wagon, the Ford with the phony wood on it."

"Then," Luke said, "why'n't your mother just drive you guys to church, if your father does it and he doesn't go inside?"

"My father says," Christopher said, "he promised to raise us kids inna Catholic faith, and that means he has to make sure we go to church. He says he didn't promise to keep going himself. My mother, she likes to go to church. She doesn't like it when my father starts yelling that all they're after's his money. She gets mad at him. They had a big fight last Christmas Eve. He got all dressed up and she asked him if he was going inside for once. See, he used to only go inside at Christmas and Easter, and that made her mad. So he says yeah, he is going inside. And then he says, 'Look, it's not Sunday, and it's cold out. I won't have anything to read and I'll be sitting there running the heater for nothing. Besides, it's the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!' And he starts to sing Adeste Fideles or something. He was half in the bag. He always is Christmas.

"Him and Mr. Stein from across the street always help each other decorate their Christmas trees on Christmas Eve. See, Mr. Stein started the whole thing the first year we lived there. He comes over and he tells my father he married this Christian woman and she wants a goddamned Christmas tree and he don't know anything about that, on account of him being Jewish and all, and would my father maybe give him a hand so he doesn't get in all kinds of shit with this Christian woman that he married that's got to have a Christmas tree. So they started doing it then, and after they finish doing the Steins' tree, they come over and they do ours. They always get about half smashed doing it, on account they both work in offices where I guess everybody gives everybody else booze for Christmas so they can get bombed at home instead of having a Christmas party in the office or someplace else where they all get bombed and then come home and get in the shit with their wives. So, when Mr. Stein and my father're decorating the trees, they get crocked out of their minds. My mother's always saying she wishes some year they would do our tree first, because the Steins' tree always looks pretty good because that's where they start drinking, but ours always looks as though it was decorated by a couple drunks. Which it was.

"There was one time about three years ago," Christopher said, "when they got so stiff they got the whole tree decorated, the balls and the tinsel and the snow that you spray on from cans and everything, and the little angel on the top, and then my father says to Mr. Stein that he should plug the lights in and they would see how it looks. And Mr. Stein gets down on his hands and knees and crawls around under it looking for the plug, and he starts screaming, 'I can't find the plug, Leo. Where's the goddamned plug?' And my father says, 'You stupid bastard, Steve, can't even find a goddamned plug. Lemme look; I'll find it.' So my father gets down and he starts crawling around under the tree, looking for the plug, and Mr. Stein starts singing, 'Here we go round the mulberry bush,' and my father starts singing with him and they're crawling around in circles onna rug, singing, and my mother comes in and says, 'What the hell're you two fools doing?' And they're laughing like hell and my father says, 'This'll kill you, Lillian. We forgot to put any lights on. We forgot the lights.' And they're both laughing and laughing and laughing, and then my father threw up on the rug."

"Jesus," Luke said.

"Yup," Christopher said, "right on my mother's brand-new wall-to-wall. And the dog--we had this big Airedale then, and he hears all the noise and he comes in and smells it and he starts eating it. And Mr. Stein decides he doesn't like the smell and the dog eating the throw-up and everything, so he stands up and he knocks the tree over and all the ornaments break on the floor, and the water that they put in the bottom of the tree to keep it from drying out--you know, in the stand?--all that goes all over the rug, too.

"So," Christopher said, "naturally, my mother is screaming, and Mr. Stein says he is going home and my father throws up again. Then he yells at my mother that she should stop yelling at him, because the dog is cleaning it up, and he gets mad at Mr. Stein because Mr. Stein is running out on him and how's he gonna get the tree up and the lights on all alone, and Mr. Stein says he doesn't know how, but he is going home. And my father gets mad and says that is good and Mr. Stein is a no-good drunk Jew bastard, and Mr. Stein gets all mad and runs out the front door and falls down on the porch.

"Then my father gets up and my mother tells him he should go to bed and sleep it off, and he won't do that. He gets up and he is staggering back and forth and he is going to finish decorating the tree all by himself and this time he won't have Stein fucking him up and he will have lights on it. So he goes down cellar to get the lights that they forgot to bring up the first time and he falls on the stairs and sprains his ankle.

"You should've heard him hollering down there. Took my mother and me and my little brother Tony to get him upstairs, and he's swearing at us all the way. And then up the stairs to the bedroom, and my mother threw us out and got him undressed and cleaned him off and he went to sleep. Then we took care of cleaning up the living room and we got the lights on the tree. Not many ornaments, though. And so we had a tree. And my mother took us to church that year."

"Jesus," Luke said. "That's awful. My mother and father used to fight a lot. She used to throw things at him. Pots and dishes and stuff. One night, when she got really mad at him, he said he was leaving and going to stay in a hotel, and he took this little bag he kept packed all the time, and when he was outside putting it in the car, she threw all his suits and shirts out the window into the driveway, and then his electric razor and the bathroom scales. But I never saw nothing like that, with the dog and everything. How come (continued on page 297) Adults (continued from page 148) they don't get divorced, huh?"

"She says," Christopher said, "she says my father only does it once a year. But he always does it once a year. At Christmas. She says she only wishes he would do it on Halloween or something, so it wouldn't ruin Christmas for everybody else. But he won't. She says if that's the worst she has to put up with, she is probably pretty lucky, because she knows a lot of women that have to stand for a lot more'n that. My father never gets drunk, except at Christmas. He has one or two beers and he stops. He just doesn't drink very much. Except Christmas. Then he gets stiff. She says maybe that's the only way she can get him into church that day, because he's in the bag and he doesn't know where she's taking him. He sure stinks, though. He walks all right, except for that year when he sprained his ankle and he couldn't walk at all, and he keeps his mouth shut so you don't notice he can't talk very good, but I guess everybody else in the church when he goes on Christmas must be loaded, too, or else they would smell him and know he was plastered. If he is sober, except at Easter, he won't go. Because of the money thing. 'You ever see one of those bastards give away money to somebody else?' he says. 'No, you never did.' "

"I don't know," Luke said.

"I do," Christopher said. "Everybody stinks. They're all doing something. My father says that you can't ever rule anything out and say that there's no way that anybody can do a certain thing, because somewhere there is some asshole that can do it, look up his own asshole or something. I wouldn't want to, but maybe there's somebody that can and does want to. They're all assholes. I don't know. My father says we mostly hang around with normal people that do normal things and we get to thinking that's the only kind of people there is. Like the monster shows at the carnivals, you know? The guys that got skin like alligators and the woman that weighs nine hundred pounds, that everybody says they got to be fakes? What if they aren't? What if there really is a boy that was raised by wild dogs and now he grows up and gets killed chasing cars? My father says that. He told me," Christopher said, "he told me one night when he finally got around to making sure I knew the facts of life and everything, when he was in the Service he went in a bar one night and they had a woman in there that could smoke cigarettes with her cunt. 'I couldn't fucking believe it,' my father said. See, my father and I can swear when my mother and the other kids aren't around. 'If somebody told me there was a woman that could do that, I would've said he was crazy. But I saw it. She was standing up there with no clothes on, and she was puffing away to beat the band.' "

"I don't believe it," Luke said.

"See?" Christopher said. "That's exactly what he was saying. He said if he didn't see it done with his own eyes, he would not believe it, either, and he didn't expect me to really believe it until I saw it for myself sometime. But he said it can be done, because he's seen it, and he bets there's a lot of other things that aren't anywhere near as weird that can be done, except we don't believe they can be done because we haven't ever seen them.

"My father," Christopher said, "he worked with a guy once that was a draftsman on projects and stuff, you know? I actually met the guy. I was little, so I don't remember him so good, but my father took me down the office one Saturday when we were going to see the Bruins and he hadda drop some stuff off that he was working on at home because he hadda go to New York on Monday and they needed the work he was doing for while he was gone. And this guy was in there. Name was Harold. I remember he wore glasses. And one day the cops come and arrested him.

" 'That was another one I couldn't believe,' my father said. 'Harold was one of the best draftsmen we ever had working for us. He was steady, never missed a day of work. He was accurate. He was patient--if he did something and the contractor didn't like it or else the contractor made some changes in the project but he never bothered to tell us, Harold would work late and come in weekends and never complain a bit. Lived with his mother. I thought he went home every night and cooked dinner for the two of them. She was an invalid, I guess, and that was another thing about Harold--he never told anybody else about his troubles. But he had some, I guess.'

"When the cops came, they said he was a pervert. He was writing dirty letters to the high school girls and signing his own name to them. And then they took him back to his house and they found out he was keeping carbon copies of them. And he told them he couldn't understand none the young girls ever answered him. He really didn't understand it. And then he showed the cops his dresses. After his mother went to sleep at night, he would put on a dress and go down the woods and hump a tree. But he said he gave that up on account he got poison oak doing it.

"So the cops," Christopher said, "told him he hadda cut it out, sending those letters. They said he could write them if he wanted, but no sending them. And he could fuck trees if he wanted. But if he started mailing those letters again, they were gonna tell his mother on him. My father said that worked pretty good for about four years, but then Harold started mailing the letters again and they hadda put him away for a while and let the doctors try to talk him out of it."

"Jesus," Luke said.

"Well," Christopher said, "that's what I mean."

The two boys sat silently in the shaded heat. After a while, Luke said, "Did something happen?"

Christopher said, "Yes. Mr. Kenney bothered me. He put his hand on my balls. I don't want to grow up. Not ever."

" 'There's a lot of other things that aren't anywhere near as weird that can be done. . . .' "