Andrew – Seneca, Fall 1982
Come September, Andrew spies on Jimmy Gilmore in seventh grade Music Appreciation. The class follows lunch on Andrew’s schedule, and today, like every day, a scratchy symphony fills the air, emanating from frayed speakers by the teacher’s desk. Talking is forbidden. The students are left to gain what culture they can as they sit in their seats and digest their food. Most fall asleep, drooling onto desktops. But a few manage to stay awake like Andrew and Jimmy: a girl with a frizzy perm reading a contraband paperback by Judy Blume. A couple of brainiacs studying science and math—subjects for which the county buys actual books. And, of course, the Lachlan twins, who sit at the double-desk ahead of Andrew’s and block his view, working quietly and intently on erasing themselves, rubbing pencil nubs over their forearms until the skin rises up as pink as a scar. Daughters of a Pentecostal preacher, they wear long sleeves and cornflower skirts to cover marks on arms and calves. As scratchy strains of Beethoven fill the room, the twins rub crosses into their flesh, lines that loop their wrists like bracelets—abrading
themselves as casually as other girls braid hair. Andrew hopes the two of them will hurry and disappear; they’re hard to see past as he keeps watch on Jimmy, who brings an itch to Andrew’s own skin as well, the disheveled, devilish sight of him leaving its own kind of mark.
Miss Fehlinger doesn’t care about anything that goes on, hunched over her copy of Good
Housekeeping magazine. She considers children some sort of contagion. Each hour when the bell rings and the students swarm past, she pulls out a spray bottle of diluted lemon juice and vinegar, and wipes desktops and door handles free of sticky germs. All the students know how crazy she is—over sixty but still living with her mother; making rich kids wear disposable gloves when giving lessons on her Steinway after school. She has a reputation for being as easy to torture as a crawdad in a plastic cup. But though she has given up any intention of teaching, Miss Fehlinger remains hunkered down, wearing away the days one album at a time, looking up only when noise breaks out or the record needle skips so bad she has to tape on a nickel to weigh down the arm.
Andrew is glad for the tranquility of the room. He sits in back at his twin desk alone, drawing to the music in his spiral-bound notebook. He is trying to replicate the wings of the music room mascot, a yellow canary named Tweety who fidgets in a cage nearby. In Andrew’s drawings, the bird’s wings rise from the back of a boy: Jimmy Gilmore.
Four rows ahead Jimmy sits, in the troublemaker chair next to Miss Fehlinger’s desk, his legs sprawled sideways as he rests his head on his arm. Being held back a year has forced him to assume a role of swaggering bravado, and Andrew envies his bad-boy air. Since the start of the term Andrew has watched
Jimmy grow taller day by day, his voice deepening, his body surging, fast on his way to becoming a man. Andrew’s come to admire Jimmy’s brazen panache, like now, how Jimmy raises his head and clears his throat, speaking above the gravelly music. A few sleepy-eyed students perk up to watch as well, the way Jimmy, with a smirk, compliments Miss Fehlinger’s outdated sense of style--aquamarine Jackie O dress and matching cat’s-eye glasses. Jimmy Gilmore is something Andrew fears he will never be: tall, strong, capable of sparring with words or fists. Andrew is forced to be a “good boy” instead. His mother has picked up part-time clerical work at the Board of Education; she tells Andrew that his behavior reflects on her. If she is ever to make it onto the county substitute teacher list, he needs to study hard and behave himself. Make her proud. He should be studying his math for next period, not drawing pictures of Jimmy.
* * *
This fear of being found out is what makes Andrew’s heart leap the day he comes upon Jimmy Gilmore alone in an empty school hallway on the second floor. It is during the short break after lunch and Andrew is walking from the bathroom to the playground outside, a wet paper towel pressed against his face to staunch one of the nosebleeds that plague him on a regular basis. Growing pains, Momma has told him, though Andrew thinks it’s suspicious how they only started after she backhanded him last fall. He told himself that Momma was only angry because Daddy’d recently left, but the nosebleeds continued, and now he wonders if she has ruined him in a way nobody else can see.
But right at this moment it’s the sight of Jimmy Gilmore crouched before the music room door that makes Andrew McKenna stop dead in his tracks. Unlike the angelic aliens Andrew draws in his notebook, the real-life Jimmy Gilmore has no psychic antenna on his head, but still he senses someone else’s
presence. His face jerks up with a look of fear that dissipates as soon as he sees it’s Andrew and not a teacher. Jimmy turns back to breaking in, while Andrew tries to hold onto the look on Jimmy’s face.
It’s a long moment before Andrew realizes he is stupidly standing there. Mechanically he forces his legs to start up the hall while he attempts to cover as much of his face as possible with his paper towel.
“Stupid fuck,” Jimmy growls low as Andrew passes.
These are the first words Jimmy Gilmore has ever said to him. Andrew swallows hard, his stomach muscles tensing in case of a punch. He feels his nose starting to trickle again. But Jimmy makes no move, only continues messing with Miss Fehlinger’s door. He is talking to it, not to Andrew. In fact, Jimmy’s face breaks into a grin as he looks up a second time. Mischief flickers in his eyes quiet and quick, like heat lightning.
“Man, you almost made me pop a vein,” Jimmy laughs.
Andrew wants to dash out the fire door at then end of the hall. But Jimmy’s presence holds him there. The older boy is not trying to break into the room after all. Andrew presses the cold paper towel hard against his nose, transfixed as he watches Jimmy tear open a cafeteria mayonnaise packet and squirt its
“What’s that?”
Jimmy looks up at Andrew like his is mildly retarded. “A rubber, you jerk.” A crescent scar Andrew has never noticed before grazes Jimmy’s skull, and he wants to run his finger along it. “You’re dead if you tell anyone,” Jimmy warns.
“I won’t.”
“Wise man. Quick. See if anyone’s coming.”
Andrew goes to the fire door and stands on tiptoes to peek out the small glass window there. “Safe,” he tells him.
Jimmy stands and shoves the empty packet through the vent of a locker, then stretches the mouth of the rubber over the music room’s doorknob. With a lewd grin, he milks the sheath like a cow’s udder, and Andrew shrinks farther behind his damp paper towel. Jimmy wipes a trail of mayonnaise across the music room door, cleaning his fingers, then hooks his thumbs into his jeans and struts toward Andrew. Stretched across Jimmy’s frame is a washed-out T-shirt picturing Frankenstein’s monster. The older boy leans in close to study Andrew’s face. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Bloody nose,” Andrew tells him. Up close, he can see one of Jimmy’s teeth is chipped.
Jimmy pulls the paper towel from Andrew’s face. He reaches out and runs his index finger down the side of Andrew’s nose, brushing just above his lips before pulling away. Jimmy looks at his finger: a daub of bright red. He licks it clean, then pokes Andrew hard in the chest.
“I’m a vampire,” he whispers. “You better not tell.”
Jimmy tosses the wadded paper towel at Andrew, who closes his eyes as it smacks him in the face. Later, after recess, students swamp the hall outside music class, marveling at Jimmy’s condom surprise, eager to see Miss Fehlinger’s reaction. The metallic taste of blood still clings to the back of Andrew’s throat. The crowd hushes at the familiar click of Miss Fehlinger’s low-heels. Her rhinestone glasses flash as she parts the throng in her bright green dress, key extended. At the sight of the rubber, Miss Fehlinger nearly collapses. Jimmy shoots Andrew a look of sniggering satisfaction. Andrew’s face burns as Miss Fehlinger--mouth agape, eyes glazed--reels across the hall to Coach Wyatt’s health class. Students giggle and yelp in disgust. Jimmy bites his lip and pounds the flat of his hand against a locker. Rugged Coach Wyatt finally shows up, removes the rubber, and throws it in the trash. “Who is
responsible?” he shouts, glaring from kid to kid. Old Miss Fehlinger starts to cry. Andrew looks at Jimmy laughing and says not a word.
* * *
Afterward, each time Andrew looks at Miss Fehlinger’s new can of industrial-strength Lysol and the box of disposable medical gloves she now keeps on her desk, he steals a glance at Jimmy and feels the ghost-poke of his finger. The aliens in his notebooks have batwings now, and Andrew has begun drawing old
battling it out against the Wolfman, Dracula transforming into a vampire bat--and always, at Jimmy’s insistence, a damsel in distress fainting in a nightgown that barely covers her breasts. “More guts,” Jimmy writes on the reverse of the pages he slides back to Andrew. “Bigger fangs.” “Give the Bride of
Frankenstein some monster tits.”
In return, Jimmy takes Andrew under his vampire-batwing. His family lives out past Andrew’s, so later after school Jimmy has his older brother Wayne give Andrew a lift . Though the weather’s cool now and they have to wear jackets, Andrew likes sitting across from Jimmy on the wheel well in the back of Wayne’s truck. Through the cab window, beyond the empty gun rack, Andrew studies the back of Wayne’s brush cut. The sight of Wayne’s arm draped casually across the seatback reminds Andrew of his father. Enough time has gone by. The man is never coming home.
Wayne brings the truck to a halt at the foot of Andrew’s hollow. His turnoff winds up the hillside past a low, uncut field, the start of Beaman’s property line. No one will be home, Andrew realizes. This week the Board of Education finally allowed Momma to pick up some substitute teaching work over in Harman half an hour away. And Allison’s started going to Grandma Rose’s after school to help take care of their baby sister there. Momma will have to pick the two of them up; no one will be home for an hour or more.
Andrew swings a leg over the truck’s tailgate and turns to Jimmy. Now, he decides, is the time to show his new friend what he has bought for him. “Want to come up?” Andrew asks, trying to keep his voice casual and even. “I got some monster models we can put together.”
Jimmy shrugs, then smiles, rising to follow. * * *
In the room he now shares with his sister, Andrew lies atop his bed with the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s head in his mouth, watching Jimmy piece together the amphibian’s body. A massacre of plastic model limbs lie scattered before Jimmy on the chipped surface of Andrew’s desk. Now and then Jimmy pauses to take a whiff of model glue before passing the bottle on to Andrew, the glue’s scent sharp and jagged in Andrew’s nostrils each time he draws it deep into his lungs. After each hit, Andrew sucks harder on the Creature’s head, running his tongue over the finned intricacies of the monster’s glow-in-the-dark skull.
Jimmy looks up. “What the fuck you doing?” He swears as well as Momma, cusswords shot with effortless aim.
Andrew flinches from their BB impact, spits the Creature’s head into his hand. “Nothing.” Andrew’s feels woozy. Behind his sister’s taped-up posters, the walls of the room seem to slightly shift.
“Gimme that,” Jimmy demands, and Andrew forks over the Creature’s head. Jimmy rubs the wet plastic against his shirt. “Christ,” he groans.
Andrew rolls on his side to better stare at Jimmy as hunches over the model on the desk and continues to work. Perspiration glistens off the nape of Jimmy’s neck where his hair tapers to a feather point. Jimmy has told Andrew how he is the youngest of six brothers--three already gone from home, the other two struggling through high school with girls on their minds. Jimmy’s let it leak how the ones who remain have no patience left over for their hey-guys-wait-up kid brother. Don’t they see how cool Jimmy is, how strong and sure of himself? Andrew knows it is only by default that he has managed this tenuous grip on his new friend. And he knows, too, that he is desperate for anything that will maintain it.
Like these models he picked up while accompanying Momma on one of her weekly yard sale jaunts. A bunch of 4-Hers were holding a flea-market carnival to fight muscular dystrophy. While Allison ran off to the face-painting stand, Andrew had followed Momma over to the sale. Old clothes and ancient appliances covered a card table. Picnic benches were stacked with Milton Bradley games and jigsaw puzzles. Andrew was scouting for old comics when he spied something better, a pile of ‘60s vintage Aurora models: Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein’s Monster, King Kong and Dracula--kits half-finished or never started. The 4-H leader minding the moneybox told Andrew’s mother they had been some kid’s who’d never come back from Vietnam. Andrew didn’t care; the Bride of Frankenstein model had never even been opened. Elsa Lancaster lay strapped to a board, her lightning bolt hair-do sizzling straight up. Though Momma shook her head at such foolishness, she held her tongue as Andrew--armed with his money from mowing Grandma Rose’s lawn all summer--bought out the whole under-priced collection.
How could Jimmy Gilmore ever resist such temptation? * * *
And so their fall comes to this: the two boys meeting every few days after school to work side by side as they complete first Dracula’s Dragster and The Wolfman’s Wagon, then struggle over The Munsters’ complicated diorama. One day in late October Jimmy is given permission to stay for supper. The smell of fried chicken and biscuits trails up through the house from where Allison busies herself in the kitchen below, having taken responsibility for supper ever since the new baby was born. This past August, when Elizabeth finally came, Grandma Rose stayed in their house until Momma could get back on her feet. Andrew’s mother was sad then, crying in her room all day, unwilling to nurse her new little girl so that their grandmother had to buy formula and teach Andrew and his sister how to mix it up, warm a bottle, test a dribble on their wrists. Eventually Momma came around, started nursing the baby--though Allison refused to altogether give up bottle-feeding her tiny charge.
Lately, Momma’s acted better. Tonight, as they wait for dinner, Jimmy sits fully welcomed beside Andrew, hunched over his desk, working hard on their latest creation, Frankenstein’s Monster. Andrew savors the luxury of being close to Jimmy. Never mind that outside an almost-Halloween wind rises; the water pipe rattle of Momma showering in the bathroom is nearly enough to drown the sound. And anyway,
Andrew and Jimmy’s newest monster model creation deserves to be made on a night like this—windy outside, spooky branches slapping the window glass. Safe next to Jimmy, his nose full of glue fumes, Andrew feels a current crackling between them, as powerful as anything cooked up in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.
But then a loud crash and the baby’s cry come from a room down the hall. Andrew spits out the paintbrush he was chewing on. He is halfway to his feet when a blur of flesh streaks past the open door. Can that really be Momma? Andrew lopes forward, stepping on model parts strewn across the floor. Jimmy follows close behind.
Shower water trails the hall carpet, a line from the bathroom to the nursery’s open door. Andrew races to that far room, the one that used to be his. There he finds Momma lifting his wailing sister from her crib, her baby blanket full of glass shards, Elizabeth’s tiny fist curled like an apricot around an alphabet mobile’s tangled strings. Andrew looks up at the exposed ceiling fixture where the milk glass lampshade and attached mobile have come unmoored.
Momma lifts Elizabeth toward the light, and when she sees the baby is unscathed, she cradles the infant against her breast. The child’s mouth finds its familiar anchor; the baby hushes and begins to nurse. Momma’s face softens as his sister’s fist unclenches. The mobile falls to the floor in a tangle of ABC shapes. The whole world goes silent except for the baby’s soft suckling.