After the Parade (10 page)

He went into his bedroom and put on his pants, dividing the pennies between his front pockets. Then he sat on the floor and wiggled his feet into his shoes. They had become tighter, but that did not change the fact that these were the shoes with which he had kicked Paul Bunyan. He could not imagine starting school without them.

*  *  *

The store carried only children's shoes and was decorated to appeal to its audience: a carousel horse stood out front, its coin slot filled with gum, and just inside the door was a gumball machine, flanked by dusty statues of Buster Brown and his dog, whose tail had been broken off and propped against his leg. When they entered, a bell above the door rang.

“And what can we help you with today?” the saleswoman called out to them.

“Aaron is starting school next week,” his mother told the woman.

“Starting school?” the woman said, bending toward him. “And what grade are you going to be in, young man?”

Aaron looked up at the woman. Everything about her was
exaggerated—the tone of her voice, the redness of her lipstick, the puff of her hair—each feature rivaling the others like choir members who had decided to out-sing one another. He put his hands in his pockets, letting the pennies trickle through his fingers. “Kindergarten,” he said.

“Kindergarten!” the woman repeated, making her eyes large as if to suggest that meeting a boy about to start kindergarten was rare indeed in her line of work.

“Do you carry cowboy boots?” he asked.

“We do,” she replied, looking at his mother for guidance.

“Absolutely not,” his mother said. “I'm not going to spend all day polishing boots.”

“I would polish them,” Aaron mumbled.

His mother picked up a pair of dress shoes, checked the price, and held them out to him. “Now aren't these nice?” she said. Aaron looked at them. They were not nice.

“That's a really snazzy pair,” the saleswoman said. “They've been very popular with boys your age.”

Aaron succumbed to the process, allowing the woman to pry off his old shoes, measure his foot, and lace him into a pair of the cheap dress shoes.

“How do they feel?” his mother asked. He stood and paced for her, realizing that the carpet was so worn because all day long other children did as he was doing, walked back and forth while their mothers looked on. His mother and the saleswoman took turns pressing on the toes. “I guess we'll take them,” his mother said, sighing as she got to her feet, and he could tell then that she did not think the cheap dress shoes were nice either.

“I like them,” he declared.

They moved to the counter, where the saleswoman wound a length of string around the shoebox while chatting about the weather. His mother stood writing a check, her lips moving as though she were dictating the information to her hand. In the past, she had been able to carry on a conversation while writing checks, but lately most tasks required her full concentration so that even when she did get out of bed to make supper, for example, she no longer invited him to cook with
her, did not show him how to measure salt in the palm of his hand or check the temperature of the roast.

“Looks like we'll have a lot of rhubarb this year,” the saleswoman said.

“I used to make rhubarb crisp,” his mother told the woman as she handed her the check.

“I love crisp,” the woman replied. “May I see your driver's license?”

His mother fumbled with her purse. “Of course, that was before the parade,” she said, handing the woman her license.

The woman began copying information onto the check. “The parade?”

Aaron looked at his mother. Large, evenly spaced tears rolled down her cheeks, what she called “crocodile tears” when he produced them. Once, she had pretended to catch his crocodile tears with a needle and thread, stringing them into a necklace. She had done it to make him laugh, but his mother no longer seemed to be thinking about his laughter.

“Yes, the parade,” his mother said.

He backed away, feigning interest in a pair of Hush Puppies.

“I'm afraid I don't know what parade you're talking about, dear,” the saleswoman said. She returned his mother's license and pivoted toward the cash register.

“The parade,” his mother screamed. The woman jerked back around. “The parade,” she said again, this time with quiet authority. “Don't you know anything?” She shook her head as though she pitied the woman and then rested it on the counter, atop the nest that she'd made of her arms.

Everything that happened next would remain in Aaron's memory as a set of images and sounds, devoid of chronology. He knew that the saleswoman had called to him repeatedly, “Young man, there's something wrong with your mother,” and that he had stood with his back to them, focusing on the gumball machine by the door. He recalled the feel of his hands dipping repeatedly into his pockets, the way they seemed separate from him, not his own hands at all, and the things he told himself as he turned the metal crank of the machine, things like
“If it's blue, she'll stop crying and we'll go home.” He remembered the whirring as the saleswoman dialed the telephone and what she said first: “I'm calling to request medical assistance.” She said other things, but those things he did not remember because nothing had impressed him like that first sentence.

By the time the ambulance arrived, his pockets were empty, his dead-father pennies converted into bubblegum, which had formed a wad in his mouth the size of a Ping-Pong ball. “What's your name, son?” one of the paramedics asked. Aaron stared up at the man, cheeks puffed out, lips pulled back menacingly. His jaw had gone numb, so he did not know that he was drooling, his spittle tinged green and pink and blue. With his pockets empty, he felt as though he might float away, so he stood very still, watching as they strapped his mother to a gurney and wheeled her to the ambulance and as the saleswoman ran after them with the cheap dress shoes. She returned looking satisfied, her transaction complete, but she saw him then and stopped.

“How can you just stand there chewing gum?” she asked in a cool, steady voice.

He stared back at her, feeling the familiar urge to vomit, but he knew nothing could get past the gum. He panicked, the pastel spittle foaming around his mouth as he struggled to breathe.

“What kind of a boy are you?” the saleswoman said just before he passed out.

*  *  *

His jaw ached as it did after a visit to the dentist, but the bubblegum was gone. He kept his eyes closed and breathed in, focusing on the smells: metal, ointments, and Band-Aids fresh from the wrapper, as well as something unfamiliar, a thick odor that he thought might be dead people, for he knew that he was in a hospital. He had never actually smelled a dead person, not even his father, but he knew they smelled. His father had said so at supper one night, describing, almost gleefully, the odor of an old woman, five days dead, whom he had found that morning after the mailman noted an accumulation of mail.

“We had to break in,” his father said. The idea of the police
breaking into a house had shocked Aaron. “Found her tipped back in her recliner with a bowl of grapes in her lap. She choked.” His father paused. “The stink of the human body,” he said with awe. He took a long drink of milk, got up, and retrieved the shirt he had worn that day. “Smell here,” he said to Aaron's mother as he held it to her nose repeatedly, wanting her to be impressed by the stink of the old woman also, but his mother said, “It just smells like you, Jerry.”

Aaron opened his eyes. On a chair was the box with his cheap dress shoes. He remembered the saleswoman running out to the ambulance with it, and he wondered whether this meant his mother was nearby. A man came in. “How are you, Aaron?” asked the man.

“Are you the doctor?”

“I'm a nurse,” the man said. He held Aaron's wrist and stared up at the clock on the wall. Aaron had not known that men could be nurses.

“Do you feel groggy?” the man asked. “We had to give you a sedative to loosen your jaw.”
Groggy
was a word Aaron knew. The man was looking at a chart, and when he glanced up and smiled, Aaron was startled to see that he was wearing braces.

“Yes,” he said, “I feel groggy. Is my mother here?”

“Your uncle's here,” the man said, as if that were the same thing.

When the door opened, it was not Uncle Petey but a stranger with a nub for an ear, the skin smooth and pink. “Hello, Aaron,” said the stranger. “I'm your uncle.”

“My uncle is Petey,” Aaron informed the man politely.

“Ah, yes, Petey,” the man said. “A name better suited for a parakeet, don't you think?” He gave Aaron a moment to agree, but Aaron did not. “Lives up on the Iron Range. Fine country, the Iron Range. They're really doing God's work up there, though I suspect your uncle Petey's not involved with any of that.”

“He works in a mine,” Aaron said. He did not tell the man that the mine was closed or that Uncle Petey had quit even before that because he was afraid of the dark.

“My name is Irv Englund,” said the man. “You can call me Mr. Englund. We need to get going because it's nearly suppertime, but let's have a prayer first.”

He took Aaron's hand and prayed aloud in a fast, rhythmic chant, asking God to make Aaron into a child worthy of becoming a lamb. When he said “Amen,” he pressed Aaron's hand hard against his nub. It was as smooth as Play-Doh. Aaron pulled away, and his uncle laughed.

Mr. Englund drove an El Camino, a type of car Aaron knew because his father had always pointed them out. “The car that wants to be a truck,” his father liked to say, “or maybe it's a truck that wants to be a car.” He had smirked as though they were talking about much more than automobiles.

They got into the El Camino. “Ready?” said his uncle. He slapped Aaron's leg as though they were pals, but the pain was sudden and sharp. Aaron nodded.

Several minutes later, they exited the interstate and stopped at the top of the ramp to wait for the light to change. Aaron thought they were in Fargo, though the two towns were connected and he could rarely tell them apart. Just outside Aaron's window was a man perched on a backpack, a sleeping bag and pan attached to it, a crutch across his lap. His uncle leaned over and locked Aaron's door. “Homeless people like to sit here and wait for the light to turn,” he said. “Just when you're rolling away, they reach in your window or yank open the door and grab something.”

“What do they grab?” Aaron asked.

“Whatever they can get their hands on—a purse or briefcase, even a sack of groceries.” Groceries, his uncle explained, were not as popular because the homeless people wanted money. “For their vices,” he added.

Aaron knew what a vise was. There was one attached to his father's worktable in the basement. When his father was away at work, Aaron used to go down and look at his tools, trying to make sense of them but really trying to make sense of his father, who was attracted to them. The vise had perplexed him. When he finally got up the courage to ask his father what it was for, his father said, “Here, I'll show you,” and he took Aaron's hand, held it in the air between the two sides of the vise, and began to turn the handle so that the sides moved toward each other, toward Aaron's hand. Aaron felt an unpleasant pressure, which
crossed over into pain. He tried to pull away but couldn't. His father was watching him, waiting. Aaron whimpered, and his father loosened the vise. “Now you see how that works,” he had said.

“They use the money to buy vises?” Aaron asked. It made no sense to him.

“They're addicted,” said his uncle. “Vices cost money, so they take what they can get and run down under the bridge over there.”

Aaron looked out at the homeless man, who gazed steadily back at him as he brought his empty hand to his mouth, fingertips pressed together. “I don't think he can run,” Aaron said. “He has a crutch.”

“The crutch?” his uncle snorted. “That's a prop.”

Aaron did not ask what a prop was. The light changed, and they drove in silence, finally pulling into the driveway of a white brick house, a house that looked like every other house around it. Aaron wondered whether he had driven by the house before, on family outings or trips to the dentist. His father had known everything about both towns. He took shortcuts and never got lost and told stories as he drove, like a tour guide pointing out important sites. “You see that house with the red roof?” he had said as they left town on the Englund family vacation. “I answered a call there a few weeks ago, a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen. Cute thing. A garter snake got inside the pipes and came up through the bathroom faucet. It was stuck halfway out of the tap, and the kid was afraid to call her parents because they told her never to call them at work unless it was an emergency. She told me she'd shut the door and tried to forget about the snake, but she couldn't stop thinking about it wiggling around in there.”

“What did you do, Jerry?” asked his mother.

“I yanked it out and lopped off its head with my pocket knife.” His father laughed, perhaps recalling the weight of the dead snake in his hands.

“I hope you didn't just leave it there,” said his mother breathlessly.

“Of course not,” his father said. “Why would I do that? The kid was in tears. She hugged me when I left. You think I'd just leave a dead snake in her bathroom?”

Aaron had not been able to stop thinking about it: that the girl,
afraid to call her own parents, had called his father. Even more confusing was that his father had not laughed at her for being afraid or dangled the dead snake in front of her. He had not yelled at her to stop crying. Instead, he had helped the girl, and she had hugged him.

His father had pointed out houses belonging to drug dealers and a park where a homeless man who eschewed shoes, even in winter, had been found beaten and tied to a swing set by his hair. While they waited for the paramedics, his father had freed the man by cutting off his hair. “I did him a favor,” his father said. “It was filled with bugs and leaves and shit, actual shit, but Rapunzel there actually swore at me for cutting it.”