That Was Then, This Is Now

I wouldn't talk about what had happened to anyone but Cathy and Mark. The next few weeks it seemed as if I was moving in slow motion while other people were speeded up. Mom came home from the hospital and I flunked chemistry and Angela got married to some creep friend of her brother's. I called Cathy every day. Mark was the one who explained everything to the police. The police were very impressed with Charlie's having saved our lives and all that. They were local cops who had known and liked him anyway. They told us we could have his car.

I took it because I figured he would have given it to us if he had had the time.

I guess I was acting pretty strange during those weeks because one day Mark said, "Lookit, man, Charlie knew what kind of people came into his bar--why do you think he kept a shotgun handy? He knew those cowboys had a gun, he knew what kind of a chance he was taking."

"He told us to be careful," I said. I couldn't get it out of my mind, Charlie's warning us about hustling. "He didn't have to try to get us off the hook. Mark--can't you see? This ain't some story, some TV show, bang! you're dead, big deal. This is the real thing. Charlie is dead! He was all set for life, he wasn't gonna get drafted, he had his business, he was all set, and then we blew it for him."

"We didn't blow nothing, Bryon. Things happen, that's all there is to it."

"Not things like that," I said.

Mark didn't understand and Cathy did. I started spending more and more time with Cathy. Since I had the car, we went for a lot of drives and got a lot of Cokes together. We were always talking to each other about the way we felt--I tried telling her how I felt about Charlie, about how shook the whole thing had me. She told me about herself, about how she wanted to go to college more than anything, about how she worried about M&M, and about life in a big family, something I wasn't familiar with. She was so smart, yet she didn't know a lot of things. She was one of the few really innocent chicks I had ever run into. But I could talk to her about anything, talk to her better than I could anyone, even Mark.

After a few weeks we'd drive by the park and make out for a little while. It was different for me though, because I had quit thinking only about myself, quit pushing for all I could get.

*

Mark was acting strange these days, too. He would stare at me for long periods of time when he thought I wasn't watching, like he was trying to find the old Bryon in this stranger, like he was trying to figure out who I was. One night he even almost lost his temper with me when I told him I was going goofing around with Cathy instead of with him. It was as if he felt something slipping and was trying to hang on. I couldn't help him; I was trying to hang on myself.

He even acted like he was jealous of Cathy. In all the years I'd known him, in all the years I'd gone with different girls, he had never acted like that.

I was changing and he wasn't.

6

The Texans were finally caught and tried. I had to go to the trial to testify. Mark did too. He watched me closely at first--I guess he couldn't forget that by the time the police had showed up at Charlie's I had been hysterical. He didn't have to worry. I went through the whole trial calm, collected, numb, and empty. I felt like a tape recorder playing back something it had impersonally recorded. The Texans were sentenced to life after a trial that didn't last as long as I thought it would, I guess because there wasn't any defense. I didn't feel glad, or vengeful, or anything. I really hadn't much cared whether or not they even caught those guys. Charlie was dead, nothing was going to change that.

I tried to figure out what made me so shook up about it. I knew people died, although I still can't see me doin' it. My father had died, so I knew that people close to you died the same as strangers did. I guess I just couldn't see standing there--alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being--one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn't the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain't the same.

That winter Mark and me were kind of celebrities because of our involvement in the trial. We were invited to Soc parties and we were stared at in the halls and even the teachers treated us differently. I just put up with it. Mark kind of enjoyed it. He felt bad about Charlie being dead though, enough to shut up people who tried to get him to talk about it.

Mark and me used to go down to the bar and just sit on the curb across the street and stare at the boarded-up windows. Just sit and stare and not say anything. It's funny how you don't think about people until after they're dead. Or gone.

*

Mom had to stay in bed for a month, so we were really getting hard up for money. I got to thinking about what Charlie had said when I asked him for a job. I decided I needed a haircut, clean clothes, and a really big change in attitude. I've told you that I don't like authority. This gives people the impression that I'm a smart-aleck kid. I'll admit I'm pretty mouthy. I got to thinking, Who's going to hire a mouthy kid who acts like he already knows it all?

"Even if you do know it all," Mark said one evening while we were sitting on the porch, "you don't have to let them know it."

"Very good idea." I grinned at him. We were getting along better lately--he had given up trying to keep us together the same as we used to be. I know now this must have been a struggle. Branching off from Mark couldn't affect me so much--I was all wrapped up in Cathy. He was on his own. I didn't know how he spent his time when I was with Cathy, and I didn't bother to find out.

"When you go so far as to get a haircut and iron a shirt, I know you're serious. We're really hard up, ain't we, Bryon?"

"Yep. Or hasn't the shortage of food bugged you at all?"

"I don't eat like some people. I'm goin' to start bringin' in some money. You wait and see, buddy, I ain't gonna sponge forever."

This was the first time in all the years that he had lived with us that Mark ever said anything about being dependent on us.

I looked at him quickly, and I wanted to say: "What do you mean, sponge? We love you and we want you here, and Mark, you're my brother and you've got a right to whatever I've got."

I didn't. I said, "Don't be a ding-a-ling." Now I wish I had told him how much he meant to us, to me and Mom, how he made us seem more like a family. But I never have been able to say things like that, to tell people I loved them, unless it was some nitwit chick I couldn't care less about. So I just gave him a punch on the shoulder. He grinned at me, but absently, like he was thinking of something else.

That night Cathy and I went for a drive. I wanted to tell her about my new approach to getting a job, but before I could she said suddenly, "I think M&M is smoking marijuana." She sounded worried.

I was puzzled. "So what?"

She gave me an incredulous look. "So what? Have you smoked it?"

"Yeah," I said. "You haven't?"

"No!"

"It ain't much. I'd rather have beer any day. I think a lot of these kids just dig it because it's in, it's against the law, and it's supposed to be cool. Me, I think it's O.K., but it sure ain't worth five years in a state prison."

"You won't smoke it any more?" It was a request, not an order, so I answered, "I said I wasn't nuts about it."

Cathy still seemed concerned. "Did you like it? Did it make you want to try stronger stuff?"

"Like acid? Nope, I can't say that it did. But maybe it affects some people like that. At least that's what I read in the magazines."

Cathy sat back with a sigh. "But it's different with you, Bryon. You're smart enough to enjoy yourself without artificial stimulants."

I didn't say anything to this, as I never turn down compliments. She continued, "But M&M, he's so trusting. If he's running around with people who give him grass, he'll take it. If someone handed him LSD and said, 'This is groovy,' he'd say O.K. and take it. I worry because, well, because before M&M always seemed so happy at home; he never seemed to need anything else. But lately he's gotten so much grief for his hair and some of his ideas. I wish Daddy would leave him alone. M&M isn't happy at home now, so he goes other places, I don't know where. I don't even know his friends any more."

"You love him a lot, don't you?" I said, vaguely jealous, feeling a mild form of whatever it was that Mark felt about Cathy.

"Sure, don't you?" Cathy said, amazed at the possibility that someone might not love simple, brilliant, trusting M&M.

"Yeah," I said, because at that moment I loved anything that Cathy loved, because I loved her. I did. I thought it was corny--love is always corny to anyone not experiencing it himself, and even now to me it was corny

. But I couldn't help it. I thought about all the times I had said "I love you" to girls I didn't love--to some I didn't even like--and it had been so easy. And now I couldn't even look at her for fear she could tell somehow. It was really weird.

"I think you'd be a good influence on him," Cathy was saying, and I realized I hadn't heard a thing she'd been saying. "I know what," she continued. "Let's pick up him and Mark and go get a Coke over on the Ribbon."

"O.K.," I said. The last thing I wanted just then was to be alone with her; I could easily say something really dumb.

We picked up Mark pretty quick--he was walking home from Terry Jones's house. We had to hunt and hunt for M&M, but we finally found him in the bowling alley.

The Ribbon was a two-mile stretch of hot dog and hamburger stands, drive-ins, and supermarkets over on the West Side, close to where the Socs lived. At night the parking lots were filled with kids sitting on their cars and waving, watching, and yelling at other kids driving by. You could drive up and down the street looking at people, or park your car and look at people. The cops sometimes came along and told everyone to get back into their cars, but the cops were mostly guys who had been patrolling the Ribbon for a long time. The kids had worn them down by being pleasantly smart-aleck and smilingly uncooperative, so unless the kids were openly smoking grass or fighting, the cops were content to sit on the cars with them and yell rude things to chicks driving by.

It was a great place to go to pick up chicks. If you followed a carload of them around for a while, they might pull over and exchange phone numbers with you. Everyone in town went there to see who was going with who and who had what car. If you found someone you wanted to drive around with, you parked your car and left it while you goofed around with maybe a dozen different people in one night. Just the driving up and down was a blast. There had been all kinds of editorials in the paper about it because a lot of pushers took advantage of the filled parking lots, and quite a bit of grass and money exchanged hands there, but mostly it was harmless. Fights down on the Ribbon had really died off in the last year. It had gotten pretty safe, except for drag racing, which caused a wreck or two a week.