Under the Wolf, Under the Dog Read online

  The other day they finally took the rail off the foot of my bed. I was having to sleep with my legs all bunched up and I was getting these crazy cramps in the middle of the night. Now I can finally stretch out and sleep like a regular human.

  “Tell me more about your brother,” Mrs. Leene said to me during our session this morning. She made it a point to tell me about how I tend to get sleepy whenever the subject of Welton comes up. She said that phenomenon’s called “conflict narcolepsy,” which would make a pretty interesting band name if you think about it.

  But before I begin, I must confess that I think Mrs. Leene is sort of hot. I know she’s in her forties and old enough to be my mother, but I can’t help it. She has these big brown eyes and nice wet lips.

  Okay.

  Enough of that.

  So my brother . . .

  For most of the last year of his life, Welton worked at a nursing home where he and this guy named Dantly would steal medication. As I already said, he was definitely half Red Grouper. Dantly, however, is a hundred percent Red Grouper. That guy will take anything. I saw him eat a light bulb once and I’m not kidding. He smashed it with a hammer and put all the glass between two slices of Wonder bread and ate it like a sandwich. And nothing happened. He just burped and then jumped over this fence and tackled my brother. Dantly’s a freak through and through. A total burnout. Half shark. A quarter invincible. Maybe even part machine. Instead of blood, the guy probably has motor oil coursing through his veins. He and my brother mostly took this drug called Haldol, which according to Welton makes you feel like you’re half-asleep in a snowdrift.

  My brother was eventually fired from the nursing home because he got caught leaving the grounds with a potted poinsettia. That’s kind of funny if you think about it — a drug addict getting busted for stealing a holiday plant. Welton told me later that he was planning to grow marijuana in the planter, that Dantly had already ripped off these special UV lamps from the high school science lab and that they were hiding them at this condemned building over in the Foote warehouse district.

  So the thing that screws me up the most, I think, is our basement.

  Welton stopped coming upstairs after he lost his job at the nursing home. Every so often you would hear him shuffling around. The basement toilet would flush or a door would close, and that would be his way of talking to us.

  “Was that Welton?” my dad would ask.

  “Yeah, that was him,” I’d say.

  My dad, Richard Nugent, manages and half owns a secondhand electronics shop on the other side of the river. It’s mostly microwaves and clock radios and other totally unnecessary household appliances. He used to go for only vintage stuff, like old Victrola record players, but it eventually turned into a kind of modern swap shop.

  My dad started watching a lot of TV after my mom got sick. Lyman Singer, my dad’s business partner, insisted that he take some time off so he could spend more time at home, but I don’t think it did my dad any good. All he did was gorge himself on health cereal and watch sitcoms. And he passed gas about every twelve seconds, too. There’s nothing like your dad farting you out of your own living room.

  Once that previous winter, after my mom got diagnosed, I came home and he was wearing a swimsuit. It was December and the house was freezing. He was sitting in his chair, watching a rerun of Malcolm in the Middle. The studio audience was laughing so hard it sounded like they’d been bribed.

  “Dad, what are you doing?” I asked.

  “Goin’ swimmin’,” he said.

  I said, “Dad, it’s like twelve below. The river’s totally frozen.”

  “There’s ways around that,” he said, and kept staring at the TV.

  Yeah, he was pretty depressed, now that I think about it.

  I was afraid that he actually was going to try to swim the river, so for the rest of Malcolm in the Middle, I sat on the sofa with my coat zipped. It got so cold you could see your own breath curling through the Magnavox light.

  My dad eventually got up and went into his room. I thought I heard him crying, but when I pressed my ear to his door, the noise turned out to be a commercial on his clock radio about a ten-dollar all-you-can-eat buffet special at some restaurant in Monson.

  Another time I came home from school and he was naked. He was watching this old sitcom from the seventies called Three’s Company, and there were three cereal bowls at his feet. He was all skinny and sad like one of those totally defeated-looking guys you see in concentration camp pictures.

  I was like, “Dad, you’re naked.”

  He didn’t even look up.

  For some reason, I kept trying to see how much pubic hair he had. It was all matted and kind of orange, like something you use to scrub soap scum. When he caught me looking, he told me that the landlord on the show — Mr. Furley or whatever his name was — didn’t try hard enough.

  “That guy doesn’t try hard enough, Steve,” he said.

  I felt weirdly ashamed when he said that. So much so that I went into his room and urinated on his bed.

  I don’t know why I did that.

  I know this is supposed to be about my brother, but I guess it’s about my dad, too.

  3.

  So before I came to Burnstone Grove, I was going to this special school because of my math ability.

  There are only like twenty kids in each grade and just about everybody is rich, and the few who aren’t are so ridiculously smart it doesn’t even matter. The place is called the East Foote School for the Gifted.

  As a freshman at the regular East Foote high school, I got put in this advanced math class and I did well, so this guidance counselor called my parents and told them I was “percentile elite.”

  My mom hung up the phone and cried to my dad, “He’s percentile elite, Dick!”

  She was overjoyed and animated.

  To me she shouted, “Steven, honey, you’re percentile elite!”

  After that, she looked into the gifted school and found out that I would qualify for some low-income scholarship, and so that’s where I spent the past two years.

  The gifted school is this little brick building on a hill overlooking this enormous cornfield that seems to go on for infinity. It’s mostly populated by these totally nerdy-looking, antisocial geniuses with terrible eyesight. I’m not saying that I’m any better-looking, given how skinny and pale I am and how my voice still hasn’t changed — in some ways I’m as nerdy as it goes — but the prodigies at the gifted school are all pocket-protectored-out and dressed by their nannies. The few who are even halfway normal-looking are so supremely stuck up they can hardly stand themselves.

  Most of the gifted school graduates wind up going to MIT or Harvard or one of those places on the East Coast where the skyscrapers look like they’re full of some dark, evil liquid.

  At the end of my sophomore year, as part of this special program, I took the SATs and my scores were pretty high, so I started getting all these letters from Ivy League schools. I got really tired when I started looking at the brochures, though: nothing but fir trees and tennis courts and stone buildings with turrets and all of this other architecture that looks like it was built by the Catholic Church. I eventually threw most of that stuff out.

  I don’t understand why everyone makes such a big deal about SAT scores. Welton used to say that if you want to truly test somebody’s intelligence, drop them in the middle of a jungle and give them like four matches, an unbreakable comb, and a rubber band and see how far they get. Throw a few wild beasts in there, too. Like a lion and a gorilla. There isn’t a single kid at the gifted school who could survive something like that.

  When my mom was still alive, she loved bringing up the subject of college. She really wanted me to go to a prestigious school and take charge of my future and find myself and all of that. Whenever she’d start lecturing, I’d wait for a lull and sneak out of her hospice room. It was easy because she was almost always falling asleep in the middle of a sentence. The morphine knocked her o
ut pretty good. I know sneaking out of her hospice room isn’t exactly being the model son or whatever, but the subject of higher education can turn just about anyone into an escape artist, trust me.

  I’ve thought about the army, but I think all of the pushups and Yes, sirs and No, sirs would make me nervous.

  To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t mind flying planes, but I’ve been told that I’m too tall for the air force. I know that I said I was six three, but I might actually be closer to six four. The only reason I say that is because the other day in the lounge, Shannon asked me in his sleepy voice, “Are you like six six, Steve?”

  We were playing foosball, and he was pretty much handing my ass to me in a sling.

  “No way,” I said. “I’m not even six four.”

  “You’re definitely six four,” he said.

  So maybe I am; I don’t know. Lately my knees have been sore. The nurse here thinks I have this condition called Osgood-Schlatter, which is where the tissue under your patella tendon gets inflamed because you grow too fast.

  When I was a freshman at EFHS, the junior varsity basketball coach kept stalking me to try out for the team. I know it was because of how Welton broke the single-season scoring record and made the all-conference team as a sophomore. The JV coach assumed that it ran in the family, and trust me, it doesn’t. The only sport I’ve ever been good at is sleeping. I could win a gold medal in the Olympic sleeping marathon.

  Welton was a legitimate six six. Just looking at him, you would have thought he was all slow and uncoordinated because of how he always slumped, but when he played basketball, something would come to life. He had like a thirty-five-inch vertical jump, and he could slam-dunk any way you wanted. The rim in our backyard is so bent, you can’t even play on it anymore.

  The JV basketball coach eventually stopped stalking me after I standing-broad-jumped four-feet-something for the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.

  “Oh,” he said when he wrote my pathetic distance on his clipboard.

  Man, being tall is funny like that. Everyone wants you to play basketball or star in the school play or whatever. If I had my choice, I’d be like five two. Then the only people who would come after me would be the ones who’d want me to sack groceries or scrape rust off the bottoms of cars.

  I should probably talk about Mary Mills a bit, because she certainly plays a part in the past several months.

  “Have you ever had a girlfriend?” Mrs. Leene asked me the other day.

  “No,” I said. “Not really. There was this one girl, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  Then I started to tell her about Mary Mills. I tried, I really did — but just as I felt myself ready to launch into the whole drama, I sort of stopped talking and just sat there.

  “Breathe, Steven,” she said.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “You’re not breathing, Steven. Settle down and breathe.”

  I settled down and breathed.

  I definitely needed to do that.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I lied.

  “Is this girl a source of embarrassment for you?”

  “No,” I lied again.

  “Maybe you should write about her a little,” she suggested.

  So here it goes.

  Mary Mills Mary Mills Mary Mills Mary Mills.

  Mary Mills is this girl who was in the gifted school senior class. She played classical piano and had the prettiest hands I’ve ever seen. Even writing about her now makes me feel like my head is too heavy for my shoulders. She always had this look on her face like she was thinking about someplace far, far away. Like she was meant to live in a better, more primitive world where people walk around in loincloths and make their own tools or whatever. I just realized that I am writing about her in the past tense even though I’m sure she’s still very much alive.

  Mrs. Leene says I should think about people in the present tense.

  “It forces you to take responsibility for them,” she says.

  I don’t fully understand that concept, but I’ll switch tenses anyway.

  So Mary Mills’s hair is beautifully black the way horses are black, and her eyes are as gray as the Michigan winter sky. Sometimes they change and look green. Once she was wearing this navy blue turtleneck sweater and her eyes looked silver. Like jewelry or something.

  At the beginning of my junior year at the gifted school, there was a rumor floating around that Mary Mills was going to go to this elite conservatory in New York City called the Juilliard School, where apparently only a handful of our nation’s most promising musicians, actors, and dancers are admitted. She performed at a school assembly once. Debussy, it was, I think. She played in front of the whole school for like an hour. This one piece called Claire de Lune haunted me for a long time.

  I tried talking to her once, but she gave me the evil eye because I accidentally touched her. I didn’t mean to, I swear — my hand just sort of reached out. She shot me this penetrating look, then I sort of bowed my head.

  “Sorry about that,” I offered.

  My face was totally hot with shame.

  For some reason, she sort of bowed her head, too, like we were about to do karate or something. I still can’t figure out why she did that. When she looked up, her eyes were so gray-green pretty, I practically asked her to marry me right there at the Dr. Gordon Berlin Memorial Water Fountain.

  I must confess that I do this thing sometimes where I close my eyes and envision Mary Mills playing the piano. She is sitting on the bench, facing away from the keys, and her breasts are just sort of floating out in front of her. Then she turns and starts to play and the music is really sad, sadder than Claire de Lune, sadder than old skinny trees in winter. And then I move toward her and everything slows down. Like slower than slow motion. And she might be crying a little and then I start comforting her and we’re hugging and laughing a little and maybe I’ve got a stick of gum and I offer it to her and she says, “No thank you,” but her mouth opens just enough so that I can see that she wants me to maybe kiss her, just enough for a penny to slip through, and she kind of flips her black hair over her shoulder and one thing leads to another and we start making love right there on the piano bench.

  Jesus, that’s a lot to take in.

  Sorry.

  I almost can’t stand those thoughts, and yet again they’re the ones that keep you going, right?

  To be honest, there are only a few halfway decent-looking girls here at Burnstone Grove. That Silent Starla is pretty interesting. She has really milky-white skin, pale blue, dark-eyeliner eyes, and a nice smile, which she only exhibited once, after group when Dr. Shays asked if anyone ever prayed. We were talking about God and atheism and the subject of faith in general.

  “Do any of you pray?” he asked.

  Nobody answered. We just sort of looked around at each other.

  “Starla?” he said.

  “What?” she answered.

  “Do you pray?”

  “What?” she said again.

  “Do you pray?” he stated very sternly, repeating himself.

  “Like to God?” Starla asked.

  “Yes,” Dr. Shays answered.

  That’s when Starla started laughing in this very high-pitched tone. No one else laughed, and it made for an uncomfortable end of group. One of her teeth is gray, like it died or somehow got permanently stained. This characteristic makes her more interesting-looking — there’s something about having a minor flaw like that.

  I think Shannon Lynch has sort of a crush on her, so I won’t meddle.

  “She’s sound,” he says sometimes.

  I don’t know what that means. I think it’s supposed to be British for sexy or something.

  4.

  Last night this Blue Grouper named Gary Ship tried to hang himself with an extension cord. Apparently the thing snapped because it couldn’t sust
ain his weight. One of the meds nurses found him sprawled under the fake Christmas tree in the lounge. He’d somehow secured the makeshift noose to a hook that holds the big dome light in the lounge. When the extension cord snapped, he sort of pitched into the Christmas tree. Now the tree is crooked and looks more turquoise than evergreen.

  This morning at our session, the first thing Mrs. Leene asked me was if I was okay.

  “Are you okay, Steve?” she asked. She was putting lotion on her hands and it was making the whole room smell good.

  “I’m fine,” I said. And I thought I was, until my hands started shaking like crazy. I guess I can’t deny that the whole Gary Ship thing freaked me out a little. Part of me just wishes that anyone who wants to hang himself would just use a rope like you’re supposed to. Welton with the necktie and Gary Ship with the extension cord. I mean, unless I’m missing something, there’s not like some global shortage of rope.

  Gary Ship found the extension cord in the lounge, where they were putting up the Christmas tree lights. You would think the Burnstone Grove administration would be more careful about stuff like that.

  Gary Ship has a face like a koala bear, and Shannon told me that he earned a trip to Burnstone Grove three months ago because he was found half-dead in a refrigerated bin in the frozen-foods section of a Kroger’s in Auburn Hills. He worked the graveyard shift cleaning supermarket floors with one of those oscillating buffers. He had attempted to slash his wrists with an ice scraper, of all things. I can just imagine the blood all over the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

  This morning they helicoptered him away to some hospital in Traverse City.

  “We don’t have to talk about Gary,” Mrs. Leene said.

  So we didn’t.

  I basically just sat there in her office and stared at the spines of her books. Which is okay with Mrs. Leene — she doesn’t mind long silences. She says that sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all and that just thinking with her can be useful, too.