Alan Sincic

         In the twelfth year of my innocent life I’d somehow managed to move – almost imperceptibly, like the drift of a cloud or a tide or a continent – from the country of fun to the very border of the country of trouble. And here I was again, in the here and the now, browsing at the border. Got a gift shop at the border with a fat yellow line up the aisle. Snow-globes and blow-guns and thunder eggs, bullwhips and gator back-scratchers and nudie pics in a peep-o-rama the size of a thumb. You got the state of Fun to the portside. To the starboard? Trouble.

         “By the Lord Harry… You kids!” Big voice in a ricochet up under the carport rafters. Diesel Engine Dad. Fuel injected directly into the cylinder for rapid-fire ignition. “Can’t you kids even manage to – dammit to hell – all you kids! You kids get yourself out here! Right now!”

         Fun’s what I’m looking for but – what? I’m what? Where? I scramble out the treehouse and down the trunk. Touchdown. Trouble. Damn near drown before you know you’re wet.

         I crouch at the mailbox, foot of the drive.

         Dad’s quizzing Lennie, what’s the deal, what happened, what’d I do to Lennie’s shoe?

         “Kicked it,” says Lennie. “He kicked it.”

         “Kicked it where?”

         “Off. Offa his foot.”

         “Kicked it offa your foot?”

         “No. Kicked it offa his foot.”

         “He kicked your shoe offa his foot?”

         Betcha I can kick it over the power line is what I said. Did it, too. Slipped it on, loosened it up, you know, till it hinged out at the heel, like a slipper, then the kick-off – big kick, straight-legged, straight up into the blue.

         “Tell that brother of yours I told you, tell him I said for him to give you your shoe back.”

         “But I don’t... he don’t... He don’t got it.”

         “Blow your nose. Where did he put your shoe? Where –

         “He… it… I… ”

         “Jackson! Cece! Sal!” Dad always musters an audience when the spirit of The Great And Terrible Oz overpowers him. You hold the fire, the flash and the bang, till the munchkins appear. “All you kids! Out! Now!”

         He takes a knee. Drops that big face of his level to Len’s. “Where’d the damn shoe go?”

         “On the roof. He deliberately... he... he... I told him... I... I... ” 

         Len he’s working his way up to a crescendo now. I know what’s coming next. Dad’ll step out onto the drive, cock a thumb and a finger up under the lips, whistle once (there it is) to shock the sky, then again to shiver the birds, to crack open the stratosphere. I sneak round to the edge of the carport.

         “Who in Sam Hill stuck these Ju-Jubes in the ashtray?” says Dad.

         “Not me,” says Cece.

         “Cece did it,” says Len.

         “Did not,” says Cece.

         Dad: “I don’t care who… what is that on your shirt?”

         Len: “I – ”

         “Go change your shirt. You’re not getting in the car with – don’t rub it on your – let me see your hands. Let me see. What is that?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “You don’t know?  What’s that smell like to you?”

         “I don’t -- ”

            “Syrup? Chocolate? Hershey? Starts with a H?”

         “I – ”

         “You sure that’s your shirt?”

         “Yessir.”

         “Didn’t just jump off some other kid to land on you?”

         “No sir,” he says.

         Only the shadow knows. I slip in behind Cece. Sit on the ground so as to, as they say, lower my profile.

         Dad fingers the evidence. Tugs at the shirt like you tug at a zipper. “So the chocolate – ”

         “It was a accident.”

“Oh. So the can to blame.” He holds it up, this imaginary can. “Come zinging up the drive to smack you on the lips?”

         “It was Jackson’s the one who took it. He’s the one took it out the fridge.”

         Dad gives me the once over, opens his mouth to say -- something about shoes or jujubes or rooftops or chocolate or -- but then -- I can see it. The moment it clicks in. He gives up, he looks up, into the rafters where even the whorls in the wood bear witness to a universe outraged by the idiocies of man. “Both a you boys. What I gotta kick your butt into the next century?”

         “But it’s Jackson’s the one who should be... he should be the one in trouble.”

         “You wouldn’t know trouble if it pooped in your pocket. You, that brother a yours, all you kids…”  Dad he can’t help but to ventilate his own sermons with, now and again, a bit of shrapnel. “Ever had to pee down the bolt action of your carbine to melt off the ice?  Pee with one hand, eat with the other?  Care to try that some time?”

            “No sir,” I say.

         “See this tooth?  Right here. Look at that. Ever tried to bite down on a Spam sandwich, twenty below zero?”

            “No sir,” says Len.

         “Trees all spitting out splinters...”  Looks up at the oak down the end of the drive. He stops. Takes in the picture he just hung out there to dry. We’re looking up into his face, watching him watch the invisible scene he’s conjuring up for our benefit. Reaches up to stroke his jaw. “Cracked a tooth.”

         “Yes sir,” I say.

         “A tooth?” says Cece.

         Semper Fi. Decades away from Hiroshima but still tuned in to the echo, the crackle of background radiation, ghost of the Big Bang that percolates down into the aquifer and then effervesces back up, cleansed of all its poison, to freckle the landscape with little mementos of imaginary combat. Quonset hut garages and torpedo-grill cars with missile tails and bombardier-style bucket seats, aviator shades and haute couture flak jackets... little pinch of danger, little tang of salt in the air. Strategic Air Command pinball and Revel authentic 1/200th scale USS Vigilant Escort Destroyer with rotatable turret and a bonus steam catapult; dog-tags all a-jangle on grammar school ballerinas; Sergeant Rock comics and Iwo Jima flicks and -- stirred into the crunch of cowboys and Indians at the bottom of my sock drawer -- four-score and seven injection-molded freeze-frame kelly-green army men. All of it kind of a cartoony tribute, not to the war itself or even to the legends engendered by the war, but to the simple kinetic excitement of objects in collision.

         “For example,” says Dad as he flings open the double side-doors of the VW Bus, “por-e-hemp-lo,” says he as he pulls the koolade keg out onto the running board to demonstrate, “you gotta close the nozzle when you get done. C-L-O-S-E it. Close it. I am sick and tired of scrubbing this da– ”  Halfway out his mouth the word damn mutates into a hybridized version of the words damn, day, darn, iron, barn, barm, and arg – product of Mom’s anti-cussing campaign, as in:  “… sick and tired of scrubbing this daa—ay—ahee – arrnnn floor-mat every time you kids –”

         “Mom cleaned it last time.”

         “Yeah. She cleaned it.”

         “We saw her.”

         “Would you please slap yourself to save me the effort?”  He steps back onto a day-old Sugar Daddy crusted with dog hair, lug nuts, Frito bits and fractionated Chicklets. Crackles underfoot as he un-sticks and sticks and un-sticks himself from the floor. “That is not the point. The point… the point is…”

         The point is not where Dad put it the last time he looked. Somebody has wandered off with the point. He jabs at the air with his finger, jabs with adamant precision at this one particular molecule of oxygen.

         “The point is this.”  With the other hand he gaffs the mat one-handed, like a trout you haul up by the gills.  “This, look at this, you can’t just… slop!  This slop!  Cherry Koolade you kids slopped it all over the car.”

         “I don’t drink Cherry,” I say.

         “I don’t care,” says Dad. A reddish goo oozes out across his knuckles. “The last time your Mother and I paid good money to take you out to the Drive-In, and I’m telling you right now, you don’t straighten up this’ll be the last time that you kids ever – ”

         From inside the house the baby bawls.

         “We’re gonna be late, Dad,” I say.

         Len: “It’s getting darker.”

         “And the Drive-In starts – ” I say.

         “Don’t you walk away,” says Dad. “You take a look at this. You look at this mat.”  Swings it up arms-length and head-high, like he’s waiting for somebody to snap a picture. Strange how that is the picture I picture when I picture him. Always heaving something up against the push of gravity – rucksack or rafter beam, string of fish or can of paint, cinderblock or chainsaw. Hell, he’d even bump us up, one-handed, big hand up under the butt, right up to the ceiling. I couldn’t have weighed much more than a sack of squirrels, but it was the ease of the thing that made him big in our eyes, see -- the absence of effort.

         “Gonna miss the whole movie, Dad,” I say.

         “Ghydron The Three-Headed Monster,” says Len.

         “Ghee-don, Ghee-don,” says Cece.

         “You think this mat is going to clean itself?” says Dad.

         I tell him it’s too heavy to pick up.

         “Then maybe you should have thought of that when you were – ”  When we were what?  Driving a golden spike through the Transcontinental Railroad?  Hauling up Alaskan King Crab off the Bering Straits?  He takes in my Tinker-Toy physique. Len in cowboy boots and underwear. Cece in her tutu, cradling a bouquet of Barbies, moisturizing her cheeks with a mash of Hershey’s Syrup.

         The phone rings. Mom’s voice from out the kitchen window. “It’s Dori. Says somebody tossed a shoe through her front window... ”

         The secret password is shoe, as in why am I wearing only one?

         “Says it’s a boy’s shoe.”

         “You. You!”  Dad grabs the Etch-A-Sketch out of my hand and frisbees it into the trash. “I am this close, this close to trashing all them toys of yours.”

         Len starts up wailing all over again. That was his Etch-A-Sketch got pitched into the compost. Dad shakes the mat on all-them-toys. Blips of candy corn ricochet into his trouser cuffs. Shards of Cracker Jack velcro themselves to his tie. A squib of ketchup executes a double-twisting half-pike in the tucked position to land splat-first above his left eyebrow.

         “If I ever see,” says Dad, “if I ever hear, if I ever get word of... ” 

         Can’t tell if Dad’s shaking the mat or if the mat’s shaking him. Spray of vaguely Koolade-like molecules sugars him from head to toe. The baby bumps it up an octave. The neighbor-dog yips. The mutts down the block yowl. And that’s when it begins. Perfect timing. That exact moment -- when every damn dog cat goat duck and goldfish for miles around decide to pitch themselves into the fray – that’s when Len decides that he has had enough and that he is going to run away from home. Grabs the Etch-A-Sketch and off he goes. Down to the end of the driveway he stops. Can of Check Crème Soda plops out the holster of his gun belt. He’s not allowed to cross the street. No matter. For the next half hour (running away being a process not actually a single event) he keeps running back into the house to fetch things he’ll need in his new life. Accumulates it in a pile by the mailbox. Like maybe he’s going to mail himself away from home.

                                     *       *       *       *

         “Jee-dron, Jay-dron,” I chant as I circle the kitchen counter. “Jee-dron the Three-Headed Monster.” 

         “Put your shoes on.”  Mom’s in broadcast mode now. “Shoes on. Everybody.”

         “No fair,” I say.

         Got her hands in the sink. Suds up to the elbows. “No more piggyback rides to the snack bar. I am not – ”

         “But I got my pajamas on.”

         “We are not a family of hillbillies.”

         “You can’t wear shoes with PJs.”

         “I am not pulling up to the Rimar with a wagon-full of piglets.”

         “You’re calling me a – ”

         “Half-naked piglets.”

         “Listen to your mother,” says Dad as he clunks in the door with an armful of cooler.

         “But PJs with shoes on? Talk about dorky.”

         “You want a tetanus shot?”  Mom’s voice transposes to a higher key. “Is that what you want?”

         “Lockjaw,” says Dad. The ice-chest he maneuvers into position at the foot of the fridge. “That’s what they call it.”

         Cece pads into the kitchen barefoot and dragging a canteen. “I’m running away from home.”

         “Me too,” says Mom. She kneels. Wipes down Cece with a damp washcloth – the face, the hands, the elbows. “Let’s run away together.”

         “Say Killer,” says Mom to Dad. Killer she calls him. Dad cracks the tray with a twist of the knuckles. Pop goes the cube. Pop. Then pop. A depth charge, pop out over the side and into the cooler. “Ever thought about running away from home?”

         “Every day,” says Dad.

         She stabs at me with the wash-cloth but I duck away, dash back to my room. Calls out after me “Shoes! Pronto!”

         “Tap shoes,” I say. “Right?”

         Dad freezes. “You don’t talk to your mother like – ”

         “Don’t you take that tone with me,” says Mom. “And three candies. No more. And not the Christmas candy. Take the Halloween before it goes bad.”

         “I’ll tap shoe you,” says Dad. You get your adverbs and then you get your Dad-verbs.

         I find Harrison Carter in my room, trying on shoes. My shoes. He gives his ankle a shake. A fine white sand, like sugar, pours out the cuff and onto the carpet. Caked with mud the broken knee of the trouser, the flap hanging loose. Stick of a kid, H, got the fidgets so bad he – how do you say it? -- imparts a kinda buzz to everything he touches.

         “You got a smaller pair?” he says as he clunks back and forth in my rain-boots.

         “Not for you I don’t.”

         “Or Kleenex?” He shuffles. Jabs at the air. Rocky Marciano. “I could stuff it in the toe.”

         “Get your stinky feet outta my – ”

         “I got socks on. I got socks.” He pulls off a boot to show me the candy-cane socks I got last Christmas. “But look. Looky how loose. Gotta get me another pair.”

         It don’t do any good to smack him. Too dodgy, and even when you land a good one, all he does is laugh. Best part of the banana is the bruise, he’d say, show me the welts where his mama smacked him, like it was a art project and he was the canvas.

         “Get out of my room,” I say.

         “But your window was open,” he says. Now you gotta know H to appreciate the logic. Doors, windows, portholes. Where he comes from, all that stuff’s more like a suggestion than a rule. The couch, the floor, the table -- it’s all the same to them Carters when it’s bedtime calling, H and his mom and whoever. Mattress no better than the bed of a pickup if that’s where you happen to find yourself when the mood hits. We step out over the morning dew to fetch the paper and curbside there, over to the Carter’s, that cocoon of a hammock there, with the bare foot hatching out the end? Likely as not it’s another suitor. Flame of the month club or – if it’s got a pedicure – the queen herself.

         “I’m just going by what your Mom said.”

         “What? Said what? Steal my shoes?”

         “Said we had to wear shoes.”

         “What?”

         “Shoes.”

         “Like hell she did.”

         “I was in the bushes. I heard.”

         “We?  You mean me, me and Len and Cece.”

         He wiggles into my baseball cleats. “Said she didn’t want us looking like a bunch of animals.”

         “She didn’t invite you.”

         “Did so.”

         “She – ”

         “You heard her yourself. We gotta get ready is what she said. That means me. That we means me too.”

         “We means we, H. Not you.”

         “You flip that M upside-down and you got yourself a W. That’s what Bobby says.” Bobby – the daddy du jour of the Carter clan.

         “Say what?”

         “That’s what Bobby says. Turn that me into a we.”

         So much for the logic. I follow him into the kitchen, into the smell of the witch hazel and the hair-spray and the banana mash. Mom’s got the baby on her hip, baby tugging at the curler in her hair, got Cece propped up onto the counter in the heart of the patchery – the tissue and the gauze and the washcloth. The Que-tips, Aspergum, mercurochrome.

         “I got my shoes like you said,” says he as he clacks out over the floorboards. “And thanks for the invite.”

         Mom opens her mouth as if to say On what planet? Like you crack an egg and bam, out pops a chick, but H, H, he’s no slouch. To be a good liar you gotta be quick.

         “And Mama thanks you, too,” he says. Nice touch, that tilt of the head, that sideways look.

         “Oh don’t mention it,” she says, quick-like, but the whole thing, it’s all out of synch. She keeps dabbing the same spot on the same knee, the smile like a millisecond off-tempo.

         “So what’s for dinner?” he says.

         “Well, the boys have already -- do you like peanut butter?”

         God knows how Harrison ends up with – in a kitchen still stinking of burnt Velveeta and succotash alfredo – his own personal petit-four, toasty slab of Wonder Bread with the crust all clipped away, and the mint jelly, and the itty-bitty purple pirate sword of a toothpick, and a bag of barbeque Fritos and – as if His Holiness required it -- an ice-cold can of A&W. The whole can.

         He gurgles. Burps. Grins. I plant myself in the center of the kitchen, hands on my hips in my new plaid pajamas with the collar-button and the blue piping, the white cuffs and the triangular hankie poking out the breast pocket. “Just cause you got a free dinner don’t mean you get to go with us. It’s not like anybody can up and go to the drive-in. You gotta have the proper dress, H, which I am sorry to say, you don’t.”

         Meantime Dad’s outside butting heads with Sal, Sal the sister God (as punishment for my sins) awarded me at birth, Sal who yammers on and on, some screech about being kidnapped and forced to eke out a living here in Crummysville. Got herself a little doggie beauty parlor up on the porch, up as in the height of a dog, porch as in a slab of cement the size of a pool table, parlor as in baby bib, bobby pins, toiletries from Avon. Got that poodle of hers mounted up onto the nose-cone of Dad’s VW bug, some kind of doggie gel swirled up into that little pompadour, pair of clippers buzzing away. Always been a country unto herself, Sal: The Queen of Pre-Teenia.

         “Get that animal off the hood of my car.”

         Her Majesty: “She is not an animal.”

         “Get – ”

         “I don’t call you an animal -- ”

                   “And what in the hell is, what in blue blazes you –”

                            “-- how would you like to be called an animal?”

                                     “— painting that mutt with your mother’s nail polish -- ”

                                               “—my nail polish and Muffet is my dog -- ”

         She stamps her foot on the my. Both just booming along now –

         “Don’t you stomp your foot at – ”

         “I’m not a little – ”

                   “ – me!”

                            “ -- kid!”

         -- but not what you’d call a dialogue. More like that clackety-hash you get halfway up the radio dial where the channels overlap.

         Mom yanks me off the window-pane and back into the kitchen. She’s already got that launched-out-of-a-cannon look. “Four cookies apiece,” she says.

         Len elbows his way in. “I’m running away from home.”

         “Not with those filthy hands you’re not.”

         “I get Len’s then,” I say. “I get Lennie’s cookies.”

         She slaps my hand away mid-grab. “You want a mouthful of germs?  Go. Go. Wash your hands. Wash your hands first.”

         “How come he gets to run away?” says Cece. She plucks up her skirt so she can watch it float back down again. “If he gets to run away then I get to run away too.”

         “In that outfit?” I say.

         “I’m a fairy.”

         “You got a fairy car?  You got a fairy house?”

         “I can fly.”  Random burst of choreography, skirt umbrellas out as she jetés across the room. “I can fly.” You know them giant rainbow suckers you get at the fair? Big as a fry pan, all them fluorescent colors in a swirl? Girl’s got all them colors up and down her legs. Took her all day to paint her toenails, glitter-glue the scabs on her knees, embroider her bare skin with – toe-tip to thigh-top – girly curly-ques and Magic Marker doodles.

         Mom swats the air and we scatter. “All you kids go wash your hands. You want pinworms?  Is that what you want?”

         Mom always likes to spice up her warnings with these mysterious threats. The threat is never about what she’s going to do, no -- it’s always what this power is going to do, this power out of her control. Exotic mold bubbling up through the floorboards, invisible bacteria insinuating itself down through the ceiling tiles. Solar flares and viral spores and rabid nocturnal marsupials. The cosmos a creaky four-dimensional claptrapery of deadly confections, baited with candy and triggered by the twitch of a finger. Your finger. You and you alone are the one responsible should any of these misfortunes befall.

         “What’s a pin-worm?”

         “You keep biting those nails, you’ll know soon enough.”

         On our way to the bathroom I pluck Bayonet Guy from out of my squadron of army men, grant him a battlefield promotion to Clean Under The Fingernails guy. I hear a thumping outside. I climb up onto the toilet seat to spy out the window. My fingers stick to the ledge, crack the glaze of melted soap that’s glued all the clutter up there together. I plow to one side a couple empty bottles of Mr. Bubble, a petrified sponge, a tube of some goo Mom got years ago to plaster her elbow joints and the butter the kinks around her eyes.

         Harrison elbows up alongside me. “What?  What?  What is it?”

         “Shut-up.”

         There’s Dad out front with the floor-mat slung over the deck rail. He’s beating it with a yardstick, but it keeps wobbling off to land in the dirt.

         “And I am not coming back,” shouts Sal from halfway down the drive.

         “Atta girl,” says Dad, suddenly calm now, like he burned up all of that temper just whamming away at the rubber mat. Got himself a set of chores to attend. Easy does it. He leans into this Phillips Head screwdriver, chisels away at a chunk of gum stuck to the running board of the VW. “Send us a postcard.”

         “A postcard?”  Sal stops. “A postcard?  As if anybody in this... family would know how to read.”  On the word family she jams a Teen-Beat into the waistband of her Capri’s.

         “We could look at the pictures,” says Dad.

         “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”

         “Good for you. Save on stamp money.”

         Muffet comes clipping down the drive to lick her hand. Thing’s got a half a haircut now, more like a Mohawk than a pompadour. “Look what you did to her,” Sal says. Dog looks like the piñata after the party. “Just look what you – Heel, Muffet. Heel!”  Muffet is not what you would call a show dog. She sinks down into a split, scoots her butt up and down the lawn.

         “Thought you said you trained that dog,” says Dad.

         Sal clicks open the lid of her Campus Queen lunch-box. “When you’re not too busy brutalizing the children, tell Mother – ”

         “You could send her a telegram.”

         “ – tell Mother that I will write.”

         “Course a telegram’d cost money.”

         Sal clicks the lid closed and gives the box a rattle. “Money means nothing to me.”

         “You living off the land then?”

         “Got what I need right here, thank you very much.”

         Having graduated beyond this childish need for food that marks the rest of us as savages, Sal has turned her chow-bucket into a make-up kit. We’re the ones should be tossed out into the wilderness, not her. I turn to say something smart to H, but he’s gone. Kite without a string, that kid.

         Dad picks the gum out the Phillip’s Head with his penknife. “And you got how much money?”

         “This conversation is at an end,” says Sal. “We have nothing more to say. Muffet?”

         Muffet stops licking her doggie parts and looks up. Sal gathers up the gear and steps off the curb.

         “Keep in touch,” says Dad as he – in one smooth motion – pockets the knife, rises to his feet, flips the screwdriver back into the toolbox with a clang. “Lend me a dollar and I’ll send you a telegram myself.”

         “You can just keep your dollar.”

         “No. I mean, you lend me a dollar and – ”

         “We do not need you, and we do not need your dollar.”

         Sal’s packed a second lunch-bucket as well, hoists it up to her chest and cradles it one-handed, this one for doggie treats and underwear and other such niceties, this one upgraded from one of those tin-with-a-dome top, Cheeto-colored, Disney cartoon school-bus dealies. You know the one I’m talking about: got Goofy at the wheel, got Donald and Dumbo, got Jiminy Cricket dancing in the doorway and Pluto pissing on the tires -- the whole menagerie buried under three coats of Decoupage and a half-dozen cut-outs of Frankie, Fabian, Elvis and (smoldering up from out of a bed of red magic marker roses) Dr. Kildaire. Up under Fabian’s left nipple you can still catch a glint of Dopey there, goo-goo eyed under that ancient yellow glaze, little insect frozen in the amber.

         Halfway down the block, this School-Bus-To-The-Stars clamshells open and out spill the doggie shears, but that don’t stop Sal. You don’t stop to pick up doggie shears when you’re running away from home. You don’t see Annette Funicello stopping for no doggie shears when she walks out on that Frankie in Beach Blanket Bingo.

                                     *       *       *       *