‘I know I ain’t supposed to,’ he said, ‘and I ain’t gonna tell you to lie or even ask you to. If Gramma asks you right out — ‘Was that old man smokin up there?’ — you go on and tell her I was. I don’t need a kid to lie for me.’ He didn’t smile, but his shrewd, side-slanted eyes made Clive feel part of a conspiracy that seemed amiable and sinless. ‘But then, if Gramma asks me right out if you took the Savior’s name in vain when I gave you that watch, I’d look her right in the eye and say, ‘No’m. He said thanks as pretty as could be and that was all he done.”
Now Clive was the one to burst out laughing, and the old man grinned, revealing his few remaining teeth.
‘Course, if she don’t ask neither of us nothing, I guess we don’t have to volunteer nothing . . .
do we, Clivey? Does that seem fair?’
‘Yes,’ Clive said. He wasn’t a good-looking boy and never became the sort of man women exactly consider handsome, but as he smiled in complete understanding of the old man’s rhetorical sleight-of-hand, he was beautiful, at least for a moment, and Grandpa ruffled his hair.
‘You’re a good boy, Clivey.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
His grandfather stood ruminating, his Kool burning with unnatural rapidity (the tobacco was dry, and although he puffed seldom, the greedy hilltop wind smoked the cigarette ceaselessly), and Clive thought the old man had said everything he had to say. He was sorry. He loved to hear Grandpa talk. The things Grandpa said continually amazed him because they almost always made sense. His mother, his father, Gramma, Uncle Don — they all said things he was supposed
to take to heart, but they rarely made sense. Handsome is as handsome does, for instance —
what did that mean?
He had a sister, Patty, who was six years older. He understood her but didn’t care because most of what she said out loud was stupid. The rest was communicated in vicious little pinches.
The worst of these she called ‘Peter-Pinches’. She told him that, if he ever told about the Peter-Pinches, she’d murdalize him. Patty was always talking about people she was going to murdalize; she had a hit-list to rival Murder, Incorporated. It made you want to laugh . . . until you took a good look at her thin, grim face, that was. When you saw what was really there, you lost your desire to laugh. Clive did, anyway. And you had to be careful of her — she sounded stupid but was far from it.
‘I don’t want dates,’ she had announced at supper one night not long ago — around the time that boys traditionally invited girls to either the Spring Dance at the country club or to the prom at the high school, in fact. ‘I don’t care if I never have a date.’ And she had looked at them with wide-eyed defiance from above her plate of steaming meat and vegetables.
Clive had looked at the still and somehow spooky face of his sister peering through the steam and remembered something that had happened two months before, when there had still been snow on the ground. He’d come along the upstairs hallway in his bare feet so she hadn’t heard him, and he had looked into the bathroom because the door was open — he hadn’t had the slightest idea old Pukey Patty was in there. What he saw had frozen him dead in his tracks. If she had turned her head even a h’ttle to the left, she would have seen him.
She didn’t, though. She had been too preoccupied with her inspection of herself. She had been standing there as naked as one of the slinky babes in Foxy Brannigan’s well-thumbed Model Delights, her bath towel lying puddled around her feet. She was no slinky babe, though — Clive knew it, and she knew it too, from the look of her. Tears were rolling down her pimply cheeks.
They were big tears and there were a lot of them, but she never made a sound. At last Clive had regained enough of his sense of self-preservation to tiptoe away, and he had never said a word to anyone about the incident, least of all to Patty herself. He didn’t know if she would have been mad about her kid brother seeing her bareass, but he had a good idea about how she’d react to the idea that he had seen her bawling (even that weird boohoo-less bawling she’d been doing); for that she would have murdalized him for sure.
‘I think boys are dumb and most of them smell like gone-over cottage cheese,’ she had said on that spring night. She stuck a forkful of roast beef into her mouth. ‘If a boy ever asked me for a date, I’d laugh.’
‘You’ll change your mind about that, Punkin,’ Dad said, chewing his roast beef and not looking up from the book beside his plate. Mom had given up trying to get him to stop reading at the table.
‘No I won’t,’ Patty said, and Clive knew she wouldn’t. When Patty said things she most always meant them. That was something Clive understood about her that his parents didn’t. He wasn’t sure she meant it — you know, really — about murdalizing him if he tattled on her about the Peter-Pinches, but he wasn’t going to take chances. Even if she didn’t actually kill him, she would find some spectacular yet untraceable way to hurt him, that was for sure. Besides, sometimes the Peter-Pinches weren’t really pinches at all; they were more like the way Patty sometimes stroked her little half-breed poodle, Brandy, and he knew she was doing it because he was bad, but he had a secret he certainly did not intend to tell her: these other Peter-Pinches, the stroking ones, actually felt sort of good.
When Grandpa opened his mouth, Give thought he would say Time to go back t’the house, Clivey, but instead he told the boy: ‘I’m going to tell you something, if you want to hear it. Won’t take long. You want to hear it, Clivey?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘You really do, don’t you?’ Grandpa said in a bemused voice.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Sometimes I think I ought to steal you from your folks and keep you around forever.
Sometimes I think if I had you on hand most the time, I’d live forever, goddam bad heart or not.’
He removed the Kool from his mouth, dropped it to the ground, and stamped it to death under one workboot, revolving the heel back and forth and then covering the butt with the dirt his heel had loosened just to be sure. When he looked up at Clive again, it was with eyes that gleamed.
‘I stopped giving advice a long time ago,’ he said. ‘Thirty years or more, I guess. I stopped when I noticed only fools gave it and only fools took it. Instruction, now . . . instruction’s a different thing. A smart man will give a little from time to time, and a smart man — or boy —
will take a little from time to time.’
Clive said nothing, only looked at his grandfather with close concentration.
‘There are three kinds of time,’ Grandpa said, ‘and while all of them are real, only one is really real. You want to make sure you know them all and can always tell them apart. Do you understand that?’
‘No, sir.’
Grandpa nodded. ‘If you’d said “Yes, sir”, I would have swatted the seat of your pants and taken you back to the farm.’
Clive looked down at the smeared results of Grandpa’s cigarette, face hot with blush, proud.
‘When a fellow is only a sprat, like you, time is long. Take a for-instance. When May comes, you think school’s never gonna let out, that mid-month June will just never come. Ain’t that pretty much how it is?’
Clive thought of that last weight of drowsy, chalk-smelling schooldays and nodded.
‘And when mid-month June finally does come and Teacher gives you your report card and lets you go free, it seems like school’s never gonna let back in. Ain’t that pretty much right, too?’
Clive thought of that highway of days and nodded so hard his neck actually popped. ‘Boy, it sure is! I mean, sir.’ Those days. All those days, stretching away across the plains of June and July and over the unimaginable horizon of August. So many days, so many dawns, so many noon lunches of bologna sandwiches with mustard and raw chopped onion and giant glasses of milk while his mom sat silently in the living room with her bottomless glass of wine, watching the soap operas on the TV; so many depthless afternoons when sweat grew in the short hedge of your crewcut and then ran down your cheeks, afternoons when the moment you noticed that your blob of a shadow had grown a boy always came as a surprise, so many endless twilights with the sweat cooling away to nothing but a smell like aftershave on your cheeks and forearms while you played tag or red rover or capture the flag; sounds of bike chains, slots clicking neatly into oiled cogs, smells of honeysuckle and cooling asphalt and green leaves and cut grass, sounds of the slap of baseball cards being laid out on some kid’s front walk, solemn and portentous trades which changed the faces of both leagues, councils that went on in the slow shady axial tilt of a July evening until the call of ‘Cliiiiive! Sup-per!’ put an end to that business; and that call was always as expected and yet as shocking as the noon blob that had, by three or so, become a black boy-shape running in the street beside him — and that boy stapled to his heels had actually become a man by five or so, albeit an extraordinarily skinny one; velvet evenings of television,