Beetle Boy Read online

  I grimace, not so much because I am in pain but because I want her to see that all I can manage at the moment is walking.

  We make it all the way around—four blocks of walking on crutches, the most exercise I’ve had since the accident. Clara says she is proud of me. I am hoping the walk will help me to sleep better. But another dream awaits me. This one is more absurd than scary, naturally, because it involves my dad.

  A commotion from outside has awakened me, and I crawl on all fours, dragging my leg, scraping it on Clara’s wood floors, making my way to the picture window in the living room. I pull the blinds up a few inches and lift my head to the sill, resting my chin on it to brace myself for whatever I will see. There, in the street in front of the house, is my dad, riding a black horse, wearing a cowboy hat and a fringed leather vest. He is shouting at the moon, and his horse is bucking and making a tremendous clatter with its hooves. Oh, wait. It’s not a horse. It has six legs, and its hooves are claws. Dad is sitting in a saddle on its flat, shiny back. Dad sees my face in the window.

  “Charlie!” he hollers, and the beetle also screams in recognition—an alien sound, like brakes screeching. “We know you’re hiding in there!”

  I pull back from the window, appalled that they have found me. I am crouched on the floor under the window, shaking and holding my ears. Dad is laughing his insane, bellowing laugh, his drunken laugh. The beetle screams.

  I wake up in my bed and take a pill.

  THREE

  How did I find someone like Clara? A normal girl who says she loves me. And why does she love me? Is love different for her, something you can just extend, like a handshake, to another person? Hello, I’m Clara. I have love available—here, take some.

  The first time she said she loved me we were walking away from downtown, where we had just had lunch, my treat. I was living in the motel then, working at the bike shop, and I had a little extra money because the motel was so cheap. I was a high school graduate (barely) and I was single and I had money in my wallet. And I would have taken Clara out to lunch every single day, just to be able to sit across a table from her and watch her chew. I had never met a girl who seemed to enjoy just being with me. She laughed at my jokes. She said I had irresistible eyes.

  Clara is tiny, but that day she walked beside me and kept pace with me, scurrying a little on the icy sidewalks. I was on my way back to the bike shop, which was a block away from the Rite Aid. She gave this big, happy sigh and tipped her head back and looked at the sky and said, “I think I might be falling in love with somebody named Charlie.”

  I did not stop walking, but we had been chatting about something else and I know I stopped talking. For several beats.

  “Oops, that just popped out of me,” she said. “I can take it back.”

  “What do you mean, you can take it back?” I asked, confused. Was she kidding about it?

  “I mean I can take it back if you didn’t like hearing it.” She was getting nervous now; she giggles when she’s nervous.

  “It’s just that … Clara, how can you like me that much … already?”

  We had come to a full stop. She was looking up at me, shivering and squinting in the bright winter sun. “You like me already, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but … you’re beautiful.”

  “Well, you’re pretty cute, Charlie. But that isn’t the only reason.”

  “You think I’m cute?”

  Clara exhaled noisily, then put an arm around my waist and started us both walking again, picking up the pace. “We’d better keep moving if I’m going to get back to work on time.”

  We walked a few more blocks to the Rite Aid, talking about her job and my job, like nothing had changed or like it was totally possible that a beautiful girl was falling in love with me. When actually I was in a state of shock about it that has never completely gone away. When we came to the sliding glass doors of the Rite Aid, she said, “Call me tonight?”

  It was very convenient, the way she would instruct me to call her, so that it never seemed like I was calling her because I couldn’t stop myself from calling her.

  But love? How do you love someone when you are carrying around as much secret baggage as I am carrying around? How do you go from that to intelligently, generously loving another person? I have no idea.

  Okay, let me get this straight, Charlie. Your mom ran away when you were seven. And after that you lived with your dad in a little apartment over on Grove Street, right?

  “Didn’t we already talk about this today, Clara?”

  I was just wondering where you lived before your mom left. What happened to your house?

  Clara, in her innocence, believes that every family lives in a house. I take a sip of the coffee she has just brought me, stalling. How much to tell her? How deep to go into it? How awful to remember that place, that apartment.

  “My memories are pretty fuzzy,” I try for the millionth time.

  Oh, but they are such unfuzzy memories. Painfully sharp, actually. We moved into the apartment in the middle of a blizzard, a snowstorm from hell, Liam crying, snot running all down the front of his snowsuit. I remember telling him to shut up. Like, over and over. I feel terrible about that now, but I was dying inside for Dad. It’s so strange to think of this now, but I was worried sick about him after Mom left. Like Liam was irrelevant on the scale of tragedy. I felt this way for years. Dad was the eye of the storm, and Liam was just a little branch blown off a tree. No wonder he hates me.

  I meet Clara’s eyes and confess, “There was never a house for the Porter family. We never got our act together enough to have a house. We always lived in crappy apartments.”

  Her face falls. I ask her if she could make me a quick sandwich in the kitchen. I want her in a different room than the room I am in, a room that now contains a terrible memory, one that she has caused to surface.

  The complex was named Green Grove Apartments, and ours was No. 6. The three-story building was so dilapidated and unsafe that it was condemned and torn down less than a year after we left the premises. There are no longer any traces of it; the corner where I spent most of my childhood has been converted to a strip mall with half a dozen little businesses—shoe repair, Thai restaurant, chiropractor. All of this could have made the No. 6 apartment easier to forget, but from where I sit in Clara’s house, the rooms are calling back to me—all three and a half of them—the main room with a kitchen along one wall, the little one-window bedroom I shared with Liam, Dad’s master bedroom, and a bathroom the size of a closet with a rotten floor and a rust-stained toilet and a shower stall so small I don’t know how Dad even got himself in there. Liam was afraid to take a shower—he washed himself at the sink for all those years, standing on a towel. Somehow all three of us went from those first traumatic days of realizing this was our new home without Mom to feeling like we would live there forever. Then, over the course of a single year, we were all relocated, and the building was gone. Did it ever exist?

  Dad’s car. An old Toyota hatchback. Silver. January. Dad telling us this was going to be the coolest apartment ever for the three amigos, the three dudes, with plenty of space for entertaining (no furniture, except for one sofa and three beds), no bedtime rules (we all had insomnia), and no women allowed (this lasted about two weeks). Eventually, we had furniture—beds, bedding, a television, dishes, and used appliances—but for those first few days, it was like we had crash-landed into an empty bunker. We were scared. Have I mentioned Liam crying? That wasn’t the worst of it.

  Dad bought all these groceries for us right away—all the forbidden food that Mom wouldn’t let us eat—ice-cream pies, pizza rolls, Pop-Tarts, Coke. He carried these supplies into the bachelor pad, a bag in each arm. But that was when we learned that the ancient refrigerator didn’t work—it was plugged in and turned on but dead as a doornail, and it smelled really bad when we opened the door. It smelled like death. And it was like the third thing in the apartment that wasn’t working. My dad put the grocery bags on the fl
oor, and then he did this thing that I’d never seen him do before—he balled his hands up into two fists and he put his fists into his eye sockets and then he just let out this really, really, really weird noise and then he yelled my mom’s name in this insanely high voice. Lucinda! He yelled Lucinda three times, like the broken refrigerator was her fault. Then he put his arms around his head and started quaking. And making sounds. And my dad was not someone who made those sounds.

  I moved to his side, tugged on the hem of his sweatshirt, and said, manfully, “Hey, come on over here in our new living room and lie down on this nice, comfortable sofa, Dad. Take a load off.”

  “Take a load off” was one of his own expressions. I tugged harder, and Dad let me lead him to the sofa with his arms still wrapped around his head. He lowered himself onto the lumpy sofa and lay on his side, still making those sounds. They terrified me, but I made my voice especially cheery.

  “This is a great place,” I said. “Wow, we can really be the three amigos here. Relax, Dad. How ’bout I tell you a little story?”

  Because Mom used to do that. Mom always said that a “little story” was a present to make you feel safe. To help you sleep. I came closer to my dad’s head and began telling him one of my favorites. This one was about a character that just happened to be a beetle. A happy beetle with very poor eyesight, which made it necessary for him to wear glasses. I remembered the story vividly, although it had been a long time since I’d heard it last. I used the voice that she had used when she was trying to soothe us into sleep—kind of hushed, kind of excited, and I did this thing with my hands—the same thing she did—lifting them up and then bringing them back down, sometimes clasping them when I paused for emphasis.

  My dad’s shoulders stopped shaking, and he uncovered his head. He was lying very still. If I hadn’t noticed that his eyes were open, I might have thought that I had lulled him to sleep. I got halfway through the story, and then I stopped. Dad blinked at me, focusing intently. His eyes were a little wet, a little bloodshot, but other than that he looked perfectly normal.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “You like it?”

  “Go on,” he repeated. “Finish the story.”

  I kept going—details about the beetle were coming back to me with total clarity, almost faster than I could speak them. Dad sat up and rearranged himself on the sofa, leaning forward now, hands on his knees but keeping very still, listening to every word, watching me without moving, the way a cat watches a—yes—beetle, before it pounces.

  “The end,” I said. I exhaled noisily. I was drained. I sat down on the couch beside him and covered my head as he had done earlier. Dad pushed my arms away and ruffled my hair. When he spoke, his voice was raspy and excited.

  “I want you to write it down. Just like you told me there, write that story down. Here, I’ll get you a piece of paper.” He got up from the sofa and rummaged in a box on the kitchen counter for a couple of old utility bills, still sealed in their envelopes. “Write what you just told me,” he said, handing me the envelopes and a pen. I wanted to tell him that I had just told him one of Mom’s bedtime stories, which he wouldn’t have known about since he was never around at our bedtime, but we had a deal—the three amigos—no talking about Mom. Liam wasn’t so good at it yet, but I was totally cooperating.

  “That was a damn good story, Charlie,” he said. “If you think of another one, write it down too.”

  “There’s lots more stories about the beetle,” I said. “He gets friends. And he tries living in a tree.” I was trying to indirectly tell him that the stories weren’t actually mine.

  “We’re on to something,” he said. “I don’t think most seven-year-olds could come up with a story that good.”

  “Well … if you want to know the truth …”

  “Start writing,” he said. “Don’t talk, write!”

  I wrote as best I could in my scribbly handwriting. I probably misspelled every other word, but I put my heart into it for Dad. He was unloading the groceries onto the kitchen counter as I wrote.

  “Keep writing, Charlie-boy,” he said. “I’ll go get us some ice to keep the food cold till tomorrow.” He put his coat back on, whistling. Before he left, he checked on Liam, who had cried himself to sleep on a bare mattress in our soon-to-be new bedroom. This seemed like a hopeful sign to me—Dad was still our dad. He would handle the situation.

  I had successfully revived him.

  I got it into my head that Mom’s story had saved him and, by saving him, saved me. That was incorrect. That was an early big mistake.

  FOUR

  I am in the little corner grocery store where I used to buy cereal, milk, and junk food whenever Dad left money for us in the food jar. I am at the checkout counter, getting ready to pay for a box of frozen waffles, when I hear Liam yelling my name from outside the store. I leave my waffles on the counter and go back to the glass door, where I see that four-year-old Liam has followed me from our apartment, and he is standing naked in the middle of the parking lot. Behind a parked car, very near my naked brother, I see several hairy black legs showing; something is crouched behind the car, hiding. I rush back to the counter to pay for my food so I can save my brother, but all I have in my pockets are ripped-out pages from assorted Beetle Boy books. No money! The clerk says I have to put all the food back, which takes forever. When I finally make it back out to the parking lot, Liam is gone. Where is he? Where is the beetle? Behind the car—no beetle, no Liam—nothing but a pile of bones and more torn-out pages. Liam! Liam!

  Charlie! Charlie! Stop rolling around! You’re going to hurt yourself!

  “Oh … what? Oh, okay. Okay. I’ll just go back to sleep.

  You were calling for your brother again. Why were you doing that? What was going on in your dream?

  “I told you, you can’t ask me to explain my dreams. I promise I’ll sleep now, okay? Thanks for checking on me.”

  I turn away from her and thump my pillow. Make a big show of returning to peaceful sleep. She sits at the side of the mattress for a long time.

  Her parents want to meet me, which is only fair, since I have been camping out in their daughter’s living room for weeks, the same daughter who waits on me hand and foot whenever she’s home. “Tell me what they know,” I say. “So I can prepare.”

  Well … they do know that you’re my boyfriend, Charlie.

  “Oh God.”

  No, they’re glad I have a new boyfriend! They didn’t like my old boyfriend. And they totally get that somebody has to help you recover from your accident. I mean … since your parents can’t. So it makes sense to them that you’re staying here.

  “Do they know you’ve seen me naked?”

  Well … that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?

  “Do they know that I’ve seen you naked?”

  (Laughs) We didn’t discuss it! They probably think you can’t do anything because of your broken leg.

  Which is only partly true. Every few days we try to have sex, but so far, it is the worst combination of pain and pleasure you can possibly imagine. Where afterward you are trying for like five minutes not to scream. Then, a few days later, it starts seeming like a good idea again.

  These efforts only happen in Clara’s bed. Somehow the sofa—my recovery station and the site of my nightmares—seems a terrible place to be romantic or even energetic. Not that Clara’s bed is the greatest place for sex. Sometimes it seems like we are having sex at a party in the room of some little kid. But she uses the headboard to brace herself gently on top of me. I have to lie on my back, naturally. It’s very limiting, but it has its rewards.

  I find the fact that Clara is an older woman exciting, although neither of us knew much of anything about sex when we met. Apparently, her previous boyfriend was very conflicted about having sex before marriage; they only tried it a few times. So we were not virgins, but we were morons. Actually, before I tore out my Achilles, we had sex twice—once in her car, very moronic, and once on the beach in the
moonlight, romantically moronic. I am sure it would have been just as traumatic and humiliating as the few sexcapades from my senior year of high school if it hadn’t been for Clara acting like it was perfectly okay for us to be awkward at sex—like maybe it was even better than being experienced—because it was going to be so much fun to improve. Why did she think that? Why was she so optimistic about everything? Is it because she’s pretty? She tells me I’m handsome! Sometimes after she says it, I want to run and look into a full-length mirror, to see if something about me has radically changed. I don’t know what it would feel like to ever believe in my own handsomeness.

  Who besides Clara has ever expressed pleasure about my appearance?

  And knowing that she is attracted to me—it’s like a super-power, the ability to become worthy of her attention. It’s just that right now her attention is so confusingly inescapable! She keeps trying to dissect me! And now—God help me—the parents are coming! I am fucking terrified to meet Clara’s parents. I’m not good with parents—parents bring only disaster, humiliation, and pain.

  Ugh, I know I have to do it. I have to meet Don and Susan. To earn my spot on the sleeper sofa and keep Clara close to me, helping me, fetching my crutches, rubbing my aching back, bringing me food.

  One month after the three amigos moved into the bachelor apartment, Dad took the first two of the beetle stories to the public library and typed them on a computer. He corrected all the spelling and transcribed my sentences into complete, grammatically correct sentences. Probably a librarian helped him.

  After that he contacted his old friend Sam Church, the only person he knew personally who was any sort of artist. Dad offered him half of our eventual book sales if he would illustrate the books. Sam said yes. The next week Sam brought over a used computer and a scanner that had been in a closet where he worked at a downtown copy store. I was home when he arrived, and I watched him come into the living room, grinning ear to ear and making a big fuss about how nice the apartment was. Are you blind? I was thinking.