In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [46]
I hear the car roar up the driveway and a wave of terror breaks over me, the tenor that a kid feels when he knows that retribution is about to be meted out for something that he’s been hiding forever—his rottenness. The basic rottenness has been uncovered, and now it’s the Wrath of God, which you are not only going to get but which you deserve!
I hear him in the kitchen now. I’m in the front bedroom, cowering on the daybed. The normal sounds—he’s hollering around with the newspaper. Finally my mother says:
“Come on, supper’s ready. Come on, kids, wash up.”
I painfully drag myself off the daybed and sneak along the woodwork, under the buffet, sneaking, skulking into the bathroom. My kid brother and I wash together over the sink. He says nothing.
Then I am sitting at the kitchen table, toying with the red cabbage. My Old Man looks up from the Sport page:
“Well, what happened today?”
Here it comes! There is a short pause, and then my mother says:
“Oh, not much. Ralph had a little fight.”
“Fight? What kind of fight!”
“Oh, you know how kids are,” she says.
The axe is poised over my naked neck! There is no way out! Mechanically I continue to shovel in the mashed potatoes and red cabbage, the meat loaf. But I am tasting nothing, just eating and eating.
“Oh, it wasn’t much. I gave him a talking to. By the way, I see the White Sox won today.…”
About two thirds of the way through the meal I slowly began to realize that I was not about to be destroyed. And then a very peculiar thing happened. A sudden unbelievable twisting, heaving stomach cramp hit me so bad I could feel my shoes coming right up through my ears.
I rushed back into the bathroom, so sick to my stomach that my knees were buckling. It was all coming up, pouring out of me, the conglomeration of it all. The terror of Grover Dill, the fear of yelling the things that I had yelled, my father coming home, my obscenities … I heaved it all out. It poured out of me in great heaving rushes, splattering the walls, the floor, the sink. Old erasers that I had eaten years before, library paste that I had downed in second grade, an Indian Head penny that I had gulped when I was two! It all came up in thunderous, retching heaves.
My father hovered out in the hall, saying:
“What’s the matter with him? What’s the matter? Let’s call Doctor Slicker!”
My mother knew what was the matter with me.
“Now he’s going to be all right. Just take it easy. Go back and finish eating. Go on.”
She pressed a washrag to the back of my neck. “Now take it easy. I’m not going to say anything. Just be quiet. Take it easy.”
Down comes the bottle of Pepto-Bismol and the spoon. “Take this. Stop crying.”
But then I really started to cry, yelling and blubbering. She was talking low and quiet to me.
“We’ll tell him your stomach is upset, that you ate something at school.”
The Pepto-Bismol slides down my throat, amid my blubbering. It is now really coming out! I’m scared of Grover Dill again, scared of everything. I’m convinced that I will never grow up to be twenty-one, that I’m going blind!
I’m lying in bed, sobbing, and I finally drifted off to sleep, completely passed out from sheer nervous exhaustion. The soft warm air blew the curtains back and forth as we caught the tail of a breeze from the Great North Woods, the wilderness at the head of the Lake. Both of us slept quietly, me and my little red-eyed, fanged, furry Tasmanian Devil. Both of us slept. For the time being.
XV FLICK DISPLAYS A PETTY JEALOUS STREAK
Flick chuckled in a somewhat dirty way.
“The next time that bastard comes in here, I’ll tell him you’re in the phone booth.”
All the beer I had drunk had brought upon me a feeling of great peace and magnanimity. I stared dreamily at the gas station down the street. The wind sighed through the high-tension wires