Текст книги "The Porcupine of Truth"

Автор книги: Bill Konigsberg

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

FIVE MINUTES AFTER the pastor leaves for work in the morning, Aisha leads me to his front door and illustrates her devious plan. She turns the doorknob and pushes open the door.

“This is Billings. Lots of people don’t lock their doors here,” she says as we walk into the living room. It feels weird to be in there without him knowing, but on the other hand, at least we haven’t broken and entered; we have simply entered.

The door to his office is closed. She pushes the door open.

She exhales. “Shoot.” There is no box there.

“Damn,” I say back.

We wander the house, peeking into other rooms. The box is nowhere to be found. I begin to wonder if she was seeing things yesterday. We scour his bedroom. No box anywhere. Then I think about last night, and seeing him in an upstairs room. I know it’s a two-story house, but we open all the doors and don’t come upon a staircase.

“There has to be a way upstairs,” I say, leaving out the part about me seeing him last night. I don’t need to make this any creepier than it already is. Aisha takes the lead, wandering until she comes to a stop next to the bathroom. We look up. A string dangles from a square in the ceiling.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, there is.”

She pulls the string and slowly a hatch opens. A ladder comes down, and we climb up. She goes first, and I follow, staring at her apple-shaped ass.

The room upstairs has such a low ceiling that we both have to hunch our shoulders. At the far end sits a window alcove with a brown, high-backed, weathered leather chair facing the attic. I maneuver behind it to the window and see that it looks down into our house, through the window above our kitchen sink. As I do, the chair swivels a bit.

Next to the chair is a small table with a half-full coffee cup on it. Probably from last night, when I saw him up here. There is an album cover next to the cup. At the mouth of the alcove is a record player with a record on it. I’ve never seen one in real life before.

“Uh,” Aisha says, pointing across the room. I turn around. The “2” box. A shiver runs through me.

She opens the box, and I walk over to the pastor’s chair. On the table next to the coffee cup, the album cover reads “Steve Forbert” in big red letters. Mr. Forbert has a mullet and a pug nose. He looks like no one who is alive in the world currently. The eighties. Wow. I pick up the album, turn it over, and a name is scrawled across the top in black Magic Marker:

Smith.

“My grandfather’s,” I say, almost like I’m croaking out the words, and Aisha comes over and takes the album cover from me.

“It was just out on the table?” she asks. I nod. The album itself is on the record player.

She hands the album cover back to me, and as she does, an envelope falls out. Its corners are frayed and yellow. I pick it up, and the first thing I see is that it is addressed to “Pastor John Logan, 923 Rimrock Road, Billings, MT 59041.” There is no return address, but there is a postmark in the upper right corner, on top of a twenty-cent stamp with Eleanor Roosevelt on it. The postmark reads, “Thermopolis, WY, 7/19/82.” The envelope has been opened carefully with a letter opener, with the letter neatly folded inside.

I remove the letter from the envelope. Even the paper feels old.

I turn the letter over and back again, scanning for a name. I find it on the bottom of the second page: R. S.

“Those are my grandfather’s initials! Holy crap!”

We look at each other, amazed.

“Well … Read it,” Aisha says.

I read the letter out loud.

I look at Aisha and crack up. She looks horrified, so I keep reading.

“My dad and my grandma,” I say.

Aisha nods. I look back at the letter and speed up my reading.

I look up at Aisha and hiss, “What the …?”

“Wow,” she says. “Just, wow.”

Suddenly, I’m very aware that we’re in the pastor’s house without his permission, and I am in possession of something he surely does not want me to have. A piece of information, maybe, but there are more questions than answers in it.

“It was in the album the pastor was listening to?” Aisha asks.

“Yup.”

“He must have been rereading it,” she says.

I think about him watching our house last night, and I get this chill, like he’s been thinking about me. It’s super creepy. “Well, we’re definitely taking this,” I say.

She nods slowly. “Just know, if we take this stuff, he’s gonna know it’s missing. You were just asking about your grandfather and the divorce. He’s gonna know you took it.”

I think about that, and then I stuff the letter into my pocket. My grandfather had a secret. A nightmare and a secret we take to our graves? I have to find out what this is.

She goes back over to the “2” box and opens it. Inside are neatly stacked envelopes, a notebook, several folders, and a couple cassette tapes and albums. It’s my grandfather’s stuff. I just know it.

Aisha rushes to the window as if she hears something. She peers as far right as she can.

“Shit shit shit,” she says.

“What?”

“That would be the pastor’s car,” she says, panic obvious in her voice.

We rush into action. I repack the box as neatly as I can, and Aisha dashes over to the stairs. She pulls them up with all her might. They barely budge.

“They’re stuck. Maybe they don’t close from up here,” she says, sounding desperate.

“Fuck,” I say.

“Okay,” she says. “Hang tight.”

Before I can even react, Aisha leaps down the stairs, and in one quick movement she pushes the stairs up and slams them shut. I stare at the closed attic hatch like an idiot, thinking, What the hell just happened? Then I run over to the window, and, to my right, I watch the pastor slowly ambling toward the house from his car. I quickly shut the box, turn off the attic light, and hide behind the chair. The back door creaks open downstairs, and I glance out the window to my left just in time to watch Aisha scamper from the back door to the front yard of our house. She’s safely out.

That’s a lot more than I can say for me.

I SIT MOTIONLESS behind a leather chair in a window alcove of my neighbor’s attic, thinking about betrayal.

If I ever get out of here, Aisha is gone. She couldn’t have taken one extra second to explain to me that we were going to leap down the stairs? She had to lock me in? I am so pissed with her that I don’t care where the hell she sleeps. Just not in my basement. I’ll go back to being the guy with not too much going on, stuck for the summer with his crazy, dying father and his weird, psychobabbling mother.

I take out my cell phone. I make sure it’s on vibrate, and then I text Aisha.

wtf???

She doesn’t respond. My blood boils.

seriously. wtf.

Nothing.

If I’m stuck here for a full day, or worse, overnight, I’m in trouble. There’s no bathroom up here, and I already have to pee, damn it. I could crawl across the floor to the box and go through it. But when I press down on the flooring below me, it creaks. I’m not going anywhere. I’m stuck behind this chair.

Finally, after seventeen minutes, my phone buzzes.

Didn’t want to text you when I got out cause I figured your sound was on. Forgot to keep my eye on my phone. Trying to get you out.

I type back furiously.

Well try harder. You abandoned me!

Wtf choice did I have?

I need to pee

Well, pee. Mice probably do it.

Mice?!?

Sorry. Not good in a crisis.

Wait. Is this a crisis?

See what I mean?

I put my phone away. Clearly I’m gonna need to figure this one out myself. How do you get out of an attic without taking the stairs? The window doesn’t open, and even if did, it’s a small, round thing, and it’s pretty high up.

I hear a noise and I tense my muscles. It’s a sliding sound. And then the slide gets louder.

Shit.

He’s lowering the stairs.

He’s coming up to the attic.

Shit shit shit. How am I going to explain this? Oh hi, Pastor. I just enjoy crouching behind chairs in strangers’ attics. It’s my thing.

Slow footsteps enter the attic, and then the light comes on. I crouch down low, and from my angle I can see the pastor’s shoes and the bottom of his pants as he walks directly toward me.

I used to play this video game set in Nazi Germany where you hide from the SS guards. They march right at you, and you only see their boots and the bottom of their legs. Sometimes they stop before they get to you, and other times you hear them yell something in German and then gunfire, and you’re dead. This feels exactly like that.

Pastor Logan strides slowly to the chair, and then to the left, like he’s going around it. I close my eyes, as if that will make me invisible when he steps on me.

I brace for contact. But there is none. Then I hear some sounds coming from a speaker at ear level. He’s put on a record.

I take a silent, slow, deep breath. The song starts with a harmonica, then a steel guitar comes up, and the beat starts. Then there’s a huge rustling noise. The pastor has sat down in the chair, inches from me. There’s no way this ends well.

The pastor starts tapping his foot to the beat. It must be that album that my grandfather had put our last name on – Steve something. It’s old music. The lyrics are all about going down to Laurel to see a girl. I try to imagine the pastor being young enough to think about going somewhere to see a girl. Surely my granddad felt that way about my grandmother when they were young. It’s all so impossible to imagine, the past – when old people were young and had the pervy thoughts I have today.

A cell phone rings, and I automatically tense up. But it isn’t mine.

The pastor stands up and strolls over to the record player to stop the music. He answers the phone. I stay as still as I can and try not to breathe.

“Hello? … This is he…. How can I help you? … Well, I should be heading back that way in an hour or two…. Oh my word…. When you say emergency, what do you – … Okay…. Of course…. I’ll be happy to – okay. Good-bye.”

The pastor mutters, “Dadgummit,” and I watch as his lower legs carry him back toward the stairs. He takes a long, long time to climb down, and I find myself holding my breath longer than I need to. The stairs slowly rise up into the attic, and the trapdoor gently closes.

I exhale. Out the window, the pastor ambles to his car, the car lights flash, and he backs up and pulls onto Rimrock Road.

I text madly, Get here! Now! He’s gone!

No response. Damn it. C’mon, Aisha. C’mon.

I hurry over to the stairs and try to push the trapdoor open. It won’t budge. I check my phone again. Nothing. I call, figuring maybe she’ll hear the ring.

And then I hear a ringtone – something sort of jazzy – playing within the house, and the stairs are pulled down, and there’s Aisha at the bottom, smiling at me.

“Thank God,” I say. “He got a call and left.”

“Who do you think made the call? Give me a little credit,” she says. I’m about to climb down when she adds, “We oughtta take the stuff – the box. Clearly can’t stay here. He comes and goes too much.”

I figure, What the hell? I pass the box to her. I climb down, we close the hatch, and we run out the back door as quickly as we can.

BACK IN MY dad’s basement, Aisha explains what she had to do to get me out of there. She wanted to call Pastor Logan right away, but she didn’t have his number. My mom was on the phone with someone back in New York, so Aisha bugged my dad, who was not too happy that she actually wanted to speak to the pastor. He almost didn’t give her the number, but finally relented, telling her she was crazy for wanting to talk to some religious dude.

“I’m sorry,” she explains. “I know you must have been freaked when I left you up there.”

“I was fine,” I say, lying.

The first thing we take out of the box are a stack of letters, some opened and most not. Every single envelope looks like it’s been through a flood. In some cases, the ink has washed off entirely. In others, it’s just been smudged beyond recognition.

On one, I can just about make out a postmark with the date October 19, 1988. The place it comes from, however, I can’t decipher – only what appears to be an S or an E as the first letter. On another, the month and day are unreadable, but the year appears to be 1985. The stamp is Duke Ellington, and it’s twenty-two cents.

There seem to be about twenty of these letters. A few have opened from the moisture, but I can tell that the letters inside have never been removed or read. I take one out of an open envelope, and the ink has bled over the entire piece of stationery and dried.

“Do you think these are from your grandfather to your dad?” Aisha asks.

I don’t even have to answer, because I lift away an old, empty photo frame, and underneath, in a plastic baggie, is another opened letter. I grab it and just about tear the baggie open. Aisha takes the box and keeps digging.

The letter is short, and it’s in the same handwriting as the letter my grandfather sent to the pastor. Unlike most of the other letters, this one has no water damage. I read it out loud.

I look up at Aisha in amazement. She returns the look.

“You think my dad ever saw this?” I ask.

“He said he never heard from him again. And yet this is open,” Aisha says. Her eyes are wide. Wider than I’d expect, like she’s even more shocked by all this than I am. “You ready to get your mind blown?”

“Um,” I say. “Try me?”

Tentatively, she hands me another opened letter. It isn’t waterlogged, and it is very readable.

“It was stuck on the side, like it was hidden away on purpose,” she tells me.

It is postmarked December 21 of last year, no return address. I look at Aisha. “Holy —”

“I know,” she says, blinking. “I know.”

She watches as I open the letter.

The handwriting is a little different now – maybe older, more shaky, the letters less controlled, perhaps. Like my grandfather grew up over the course of thirty-two years.

I feel my head go numb, and I struggle for air. “My grandfather is alive! And the pastor knows it. Holy …”

“I know,” Aisha says. “This is crazy.”

“You want to be there when I show it to my dad?”

She shakes her head hard. “Not my drama. I’ll stay down here.”

My heart pounds as I climb the stairs. My dad. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who takes things well, at least not without alcohol. But this is good news. Shocking news, maybe, but also good. His dad is alive.

He answers his door bleary-eyed, and I quickly sniff. I don’t smell any alcohol on him, but I’m not sure which is better – him drunk or him not drunk – for something like this. “Hey, kiddo,” he says.

“Hey.” Suddenly I’m at a loss for words.

“Your lesbian friend wanted to talk to the pastor. I don’t know about that girl,” he says.

I laugh. “She’s something, all right.”

“Pretty, and nice,” my dad says, and I wonder if he knows just how pretty I think she is.

“She’s cool. So I have to ask you something. Did you ever see this?”

I hand him the letter from 1982 first. I don’t want to freak him out all at once.

He brings the letter close to his face and squints, and then he holds it as far away from his face as he can and strains his eyes.

Something registers. He looks up at me, shocked. “Where the fuck did you get this?” He thrusts the letter back at me, and I take it.

“I … We found it in a box.”

“How the …? What the …?” He stumbles backward a couple of steps.

“Dad,” I say, walking toward him.

He puts his arms out to stop me from following him. His face is a mask of pain. Agony.

“Don’t you ever,” he yells, his voice thin. “Don’t you … Did I ask you to – fucking …”

He grabs his chest and he starts to cough, and then he keeps coughing and coughing. I stand there, paralyzed. My mother comes running. By the time she gets to him, his face is turning slightly blue and I’m still standing there like a helpless moron.

“What happened?” she asks, sitting him down on the bed.

“I was telling him about something I found. It’s from his dad,” I say. “There’s more —”

She doesn’t look up at me. “This isn’t a good time to upset him,” she says. “Go downstairs.”

“But —”

“DOWNSTAIRS,” she barks. It’s as angry as she’s ever been with me.

My blood freezes. I walk, numb, through the kitchen to the basement stairs. I descend. I count to 255 by fifteens. It does nothing for me.

When I see Aisha, I try to breathe normally. I feel underwater. I sit back down next to her.

“What’d he say?” she asks.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I go to pull it out, but the case gets stuck against the fabric. I pull harder, and it won’t come out, and then I’m tugging with all my might, and it just won’t budge. When I give up and remove my hand, the phone slips out of my pocket and onto the floor. I stomp on it. I slam my foot down, again and again, and I keep slamming my foot down until my phone is in pieces, strewn across the basement carpet.

Aisha is expressionless. Just sort of there. This is a dealbreaker. She thinks I’m totally messed up, and she’s going to walk away, out of my life, and I’ll never see her again. Which is perfect, because finally I have a friend. Someone who kind of gets me. It’s been a long time, as in forever, and now she’s here, and soon she’ll be gone, because that’s what happens when people get close to you. And I’m so frustrated that I walk into the bathroom and slam the door behind me.

The tub is still a little wet from this morning’s showers, but I don’t care. I sit down in the cold puddle, lean back, and close my eyes.

I just kind of disappear into my brain for a while and allow the world to go away. It’s what I do sometimes back home in New York. Sometimes it’s better to be nowhere than somewhere. So that’s where I go. Not mad, not sad. Just nowhere, nothing. I go there for a while.

WHEN I OPEN my eyes, Aisha is sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor, looking at me. I have no idea how long I’ve been out. More importantly, a hot girl has been watching me sleep. I check my breath to make sure it’s not terrible, then I rub my eyes and sit up.

“Sorry,” I say, about nothing in particular. Or maybe everything.

She shrugs it off, digs into her pocket, and pulls out my phone. She has Scotch-taped the pieces together. It’s clearly never going to work again, but it feels like the kindest possible thing for her to have done while I slept.

“Thank you,” I say, taking it from her. “It’s perfect.” I pretend to make a call on it. “Hey, Dad? Great to hear from you! I miss you too. I always love our conversations. You aren’t the shittiest father on the planet at all!”

“Hey, at least he didn’t kick you out,” she says.

I nod a few times. “Yep, he’s a gem.” I pick up the phone again. “Hi Mom! Thanks for making me feel like it was my fault that my dad turned blue!”

Aisha reaches out and touches my forearm. “I saw your mom upstairs and filled her in a little. She felt bad. She said he was having a tough day before all that. You just talked to him at a bad time.”

I nod and nod. I don’t know what to say.

“So are we gonna look at more of your grandpa’s stuff?”

I don’t have to be asked twice. I start to climb out of the tub.

“But first,” she says. She reaches into her pocket and hands me a smartphone. It looks new. “I thought you might need another one without all the tape on it,” she says.

I look at her and then look back at the phone. “You got this for me?”

She nods. “Consider it the least I could do. You’re putting me up and all.”

I shake my head. I have never had a friend who would do something like this for me. Surprise me with a gift. “You don’t have the money to waste on this,” I say.

“It was fifty bucks at Best Buy, and your mom went halvsies with me. She told me you’re on Verizon. She gave me your password. I already activated it with your number.”

I feel this tightness in my throat and I have to avoid her eyes and look at the floor. “I’ll pay you back,” I finally say, still studying the carpet beneath my feet.

“Forget about it.”

“Thanks,” I say, and I remind myself to thank my mom too. That was pretty surprising, and pretty darn nice.

We walk out of the bathroom and go through the rest of my grandfather’s box. I find a spiral notebook with a mustard-yellow cover. Some of the pages are yellowed and water-stained. I open it to the first page.

I crack a smile. These are puns I could have come up with, definitely. And something about seeing his edits makes me feel like I’m watching his brain work, that he is alive and with me. I say, “Listen to this,” and I read the page to Aisha.

She snorts a few times. The dead giveaway one makes her laugh.

“There’s like pages and pages of this stuff,” I say, thumbing through the notebook.

“Save it,” she says.

“For when?”

“When I’m not around? I dunno.”

I read another page or two to myself. One page is titled “Little-Known Bible Verses,” and the first one listed is “The Parboil of the Evil Farmer.” The second starts, “In the beginning, God created light bulbs. Wait. That was General Electric.”

While I don’t know much about the Bible, it seems wacky funny. I like wacky funny. And as much as I know my grandfather left his family and was a drunk and is mostly responsible for my dad being the way he is, I feel like the person who wrote these might actually understand me.

“I think I want to find him,” I say.

“You think we could?” Aisha asks, and I like that she uses the word we.

I pull out my laptop and Google the name Russ Smith, and I find out that there’s a college basketball star with that name. I try Russell, and I get a Wikipedia page devoted to all the famous people with that name. There are eleven. I am about to click on one who is a writer when I realize what I’m doing. Yeah. He’s probably not famous. Not a lot of people disappear and escape detection for thirty years by becoming famous.

I do a census search, and there are 6,713 Russell Smiths. I narrow it to Montana and suddenly there are only thirty-five, and my heart jumps. Then I look closer, and I see that the census search results stop at 1940.

“Dang,” I say.

Surely someone must have done this. My dad must have searched for his own dad online, right? But how the hell can I be sure of that? He’s a drunk. It’s hard to predict what he’s done in his life or on Google. I have no idea.

I soldier on to ancestry.com. I put in Russ’s name, choose a birth date of 1940, and set the parameters to plus or minus ten years. I figure if my dad was born in the 1960s, that’s about right for my grandfather. I specify Billings, Montana.

A bunch of newspaper articles come up with what appear to be baseball box scores with the name Russell in it. Not helpful. This search is futile.

“What about those references in the letter to the pastor?” Aisha asks. She’s busy going through the box.

“Oh yeah.” I pull the letter out of my pocket and scan it. I type KSREF into Google and study the results. “Kenya Sugar Research Foundation. Yeah. Unless he moved to Africa or was looking to become a soccer referee in Kansas, that’s not so helpful.”

I type in “world’s most dangerous and expensive grid.” All sorts of stuff about clean energy and airports come up. I sigh deeply. “Meh. I think we’re back to step one.”

“Who were those people in the letter? From Wyoming?” she asks.

“Thermopolis. Thomas and Laurelei. He also says something about ‘Leff.’ Maybe that’s the last name?”

She grabs my laptop from me and goes to whitepages.com, where she types “thomas and laurelei leff thermopolis wyoming.” As the cursor spins, I think about whether we should ask the pastor again. He must know something. But he didn’t tell us before, and now we’ve stolen stuff from him. It won’t take him long to figure that out.

Up pops an entry for Laurelei V. Leff, age sixty-five to seventy. There’s an address in Thermopolis, but no phone number. Aisha elbows me and she pulls up Google Maps and types in the address. The location appears on-screen, and Aisha asks for directions, putting Billings in as the origin. It’s 190 miles away, and it would take a little over three hours to drive there.

I realize what’s happening, and it fills me with shivers. “We don’t have to,” I say, but I don’t really mean it.

“Of course we do,” she says. “You want to find your grandfather. We have one lead. I got wheels, you got a credit card. We can leave in the morning and be back by dinner.”

I think about the credit card part. I mean, it all comes down to what’s a “reasonable” expense. Coffee is reasonable. A movie. But a trip to Wyoming? Is this reasonable? It’s tough to say. The whole thing is so unreasonable it’s hard to find a lot of reason.

We are interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs, then the back door opening. A strange voice says, “So you’ll give him the morphine rectally when needed?”

My mother says, “Yes.”

I give Aisha an embarrassed look, but she doesn’t react to it.

“He’s in a lot of pain,” the man’s voice says. “That’s typical and to be expected. When these things progress …”

“And it’s progressing?” Mom says.

“Sadly, it appears that way.”

“How much time do we have?”

The man clears his throat. “Maybe a few months.”

“Well, thank you,” my mother says.

“Call if you need anything,” the man says, and we hear the door shut.

Aisha and I look at each other. There are footsteps on the stairs. My mother is paying her first visit to our lair. She rounds the corner, a brave smile on her face. She doesn’t look like my mom, the practiced, controlled woman I know. She looks like she’s trying to be someone else.

“I assume you heard that.” Her voice is softer than usual. This is her in crisis mode.

I nod and keep my head down.

She addresses Aisha. “I’m sure it’s odd to be here for all this family drama.”

Aisha shrugs her shoulders. “I wish I could help.”

My mother says, “Did you give him the phone?”

Aisha nods.

“Thanks, by the way,” I say to my mom. “Really.”

She nods, and then addresses Aisha again. “I feel very glad to know you’re here with Carson. He needs the distraction.” Mom faces me. “I understand that you must feel terribly sad about your father. And I want you to know I feel that too. And it’s okay to feel that.”

I nod, and the chilly, empty feeling in my gut returns.

“I don’t know exactly what it is you’ve found down here, kids, but I have to ask you to not bother your father with that right now. What he needs is to rest.”

I nod again.

“It must be very hard for you to understand what this is all about. Aisha told me you found some information that might mean your grandfather is still alive. What you need to understand is that even if that’s true, he walked out on your father. Even if you found him, your father does not have the strength for some kind of reconciliation. He doesn’t want that. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

I nod a third time.

“Can you say something, Carson?”

“I get it,” I say.

She smiles. “Good. And I do understand that what you were doing was done from the goodness of your heart. What I want to say to you is that you’re a beautiful young man, and the impulse to help is exactly what I’d expect from you. Just not in this way, perhaps.”

“Gotcha.”

My mother heads upstairs, and Aisha and I sit on the bed in silence for a bit. I’m trying to put it all together. My grandfather is still alive. My father is dying, and he doesn’t know his dad is still alive. My father doesn’t want to know. And he’s got maybe months left in his life.

“I just want to know where he is for me, you know?” I say finally. “He’s my grandfather.”

“Yup. Me too, now that I’m like your honorary sister.”

“Yeah, congratulations on that,” I say ruefully.

“Hey, I like your family,” she says.

I’ll have to think about that one for a bit. Like a long bit, probably.

I spend a few more hours poring over the contents of the box. I open every letter. They are all illegible, soggy, faded, blurred. I stare at the unreadable words and try to will them to be as they were before the flood. It’s mostly useless, this box we’ve found. It’s a pulsing beacon in the dark recesses of our basement, pulling us toward a mystery that may never be solved.