David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

“Just something about it. I guess I like how you don’t really know anything about the Old Brass Wagon. It’s just, there it is. The Old Brass Wagon. Deal with it. You know what I mean?”

Deke looks out the window.

“What do you like about it?” Billy says.

“I don’t know, it’s good.”

Billy says, “Tell me something. Are you actually a Salinger character?”

Deke looks back at him. “What’s a sowinger character?”

It scares Billy that he’s allowed himself to say such an out-there thing. “Nothing. It’s just a — you know, I was thinking what you could be for Halloween. Why don’t you look in the dash and see if the Barney tape’s in there?”

Deke opens the glove compartment and reaches in. “Yay!” He hands the cassette to Billy.

“Do you want to be Barney for Halloween?” Billy says. “They have a Barney costume at CVS.”

“Could I be what you said?”

“What I said? Oh. A Salinger character?” It’s a pretty beguiling idea. “Tell you what. When we get home, I’ll show you a picture of one, and you can decide if that’s what you want to be. Basically you’d wear a backwards baseball cap and a long coat. And you’d be carrying a suitcase.”

“Oh.” Deke looks out the window again. Barney and the kids start singing. “ Everybody in the old brass wagon …” Oh, well. It would’ve been lost on the good people of Menands anyway. A vista opens: Deke in doublet and hose with a skull in his hand; Deke with greatcoat, bowler hat secured by string, stones in his pockets; Deke in a black frock coat, with fake whiskers, a harpoon over his shoulder and some kind of fake pegleg. The vista closes. Billy would never take advantage. He makes another left turn, which should eventually get them over to Route 40 and then back down into Troy.

After supper they carve the pumpkin, Deke drawing the face on it in Magic Marker, Billy doing the actual cutting. He hasn’t done this since he was a kid, when his mother did the actual cutting. They scoop out the seeds in slippery, sticky handfuls and spread them on his mother’s cookie sheet to roast. Just as his mother used to do, probably on the same cookie sheet. (The pie project, thank God, has been forgotten.) Deke’s rendering of the face isn’t much use as a practical guide to cutting, so Billy tries to keep the positions and proportions of eyes, nose and mouth the same while improvising the details. His mother never aspired to more than upside-down triangles for eyes, a right-side-up triangle for the nose and a crescent mouth. Billy now finds he can cut out eyes, leaving half-round pupils in the lower-left corners for a furtive expression, and a snaggletoothed cartoon-hillbilly mouth with irregularly spaced square teeth. He considers a Picasso nose — in profile, to the right of both eyes — but Deke put a pig-style snout in the center, so he’d better play it straight: a pair of round nostrils punched into the space implied by a thin, semicircular incision.

As Billy’s gouging out a hole in the bottom for a candle, the phone rings. This must be Dennis: crap, what to say? Deke runs to pick it up, then cries, “Mommy! We’re making a pumpkin!”

Billy considers it indecent to listen outright; still, he can’t help but hear the conversation dwindle to the usual Yeah, No, I don’t know and Okay. Finally Deke says, “She wants to talk to you,” and clunks the phone onto the table without even a Love you too.

“Billy?” Cassie says. “This is breaking my heart.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know. Listen, we have to talk.”

“Okay.”

“Well, we can’t talk now. He’s right there, isn’t he?”

“This is true,” Billy says. “How about Monday? You’ve got my work number.”

“God, imagine putting yourself in a position where you’re allowed one phone call a day. I’ve fucked up so badly.”

“Nothing irretrievable.” One call a day: it’s never before occurred to Billy to wonder whom she calls on alternate days. “Except what wasn’t worth retrieving anyway. If you know who I mean. So, you have any idea yet when Betty Ford’s going to get out of that house she’s in?”

“Betty Ford? I thought she was dead, for Christ’s—”

“No no no, I mean the Betty Ford I know.”

“The Betty — oh. That Betty Ford. That’s cute. I don’t know, really, but just from little things they let drop, I’m thinking sooner rather than later. But there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“Well, whenever. I’m not going anywhere. Always on the spot. Like Johnny.” It also strikes him that she must be free to call him from work: how could her keepers monitor that? Or do they have her on the honor system?

“You really have been,” Cassie says. “Don’t think I don’t know that I can never, ever repay you — that’s a lot of negatives, isn’t it? I mean, to say a positive thing.”

When Billy finally gets the hole gouged out and a votive candle in it, he burns his goddamn fingers reaching into the pumpkin with a match. He guesses the technique is to light a dinner candle, stick it through the mouth and torch it off that way. But when they turn the lights out, Deke says “Yesss” and Billy has to agree. The thing looks both sly and mind-blown.

“We should have a picture of this,” Billy says, then realizes he doesn’t own a camera. His mother’s Minolta must be somewhere. Right: he packed it in one of the boxes in the basement. “Tell you what. You want to take a ride to CVS? We can buy one of those disposable cameras.”

“Yay!”

Billy ends up buying two, twenty-four exposures each. Since Halloween’s coming up. Cassie will surely want pictures: otherwise there’d be these undocumented months in her son’s life — though he suspects that before the crash-and-burn Cassie had let the picture-taking slide. On the way out, he shows Deke the Barney costume. “Cool,” Deke says, looking away.

When they get back home, Billy checks the answering machine. No calls.

On Sunday morning, he takes Deke to the Methodist church he and Cassie used to go to with their mother — his craziest bit of behavior yet, though to Deke it must seem no crazier than any of the rest. Sure enough, the 9:30 service still has a children’s choir, and Billy and Deke share a hymnal and try to sing along, Billy moving his finger underneath the words for him. “See?” he whispers. “When those notes go up and down, the tune goes up and down.” Deke nods, either pretending he knows or just humoring him. Wouldn’t Cassie have explained this much? They’ve got a new minister — old Dr. Griffin must be dead by now — about Billy’s age, whose glasses make him look like Philip Larkin. One of those not-queer/not- not -queer types. Billy checks the left hand: a wedding ring, for whatever that’s worth. The first word of his sermon is enough for Billy to cross him off: Hopefully some of you watched last night’s special on the Holocaust … If news of this ever gets back to Cassie, look out. In fact, maybe he should tell Deke not to tell her — or would that just make it stick out more in the kid’s mind? Plus the whole issue of keeping secrets. No, thank you. Too much like queer-uncle behavior.

“So how was that?” he says as they walk down the steps into the sunshine. They’ve gone out a side door to avoid shaking hands with the minister.

“I don’t think kids should sing,” Deke says.

“How come?”

“ ’Cause they stink.”

“Really? I thought they did great.”

“They shouldn’t be allowed.”

What’s this about? Billy can’t think what the right response might be; then inspiration kicks in. “Well, adults aren’t always perfect singers either. People sing just because they enjoy it sometimes.” And another inspiration. “What about the kids who sing with Barney? They’re not perfect either, but it’s fun to listen to them.”