Brock Clarke - Exley

“What the fuck?” the white guy said again, aloud this time, but he was laughing now. “Mario, take a look at this clown,” he said. But Mario had already put down the phone book and was looking and laughing, too. Even the guys with the ski hats were chuckling and shaking their heads in an amused way. The game went to commercial and my dad got to his feet, walked over to the bar, and stood next to me. His chest was heaving, his breathing raspy through his nose, but his eyes were bright and happy and satisfied , like he’d accomplished what he’d set out to accomplish. I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad look that way before. Laurel smiled at him, said, “You’re that crazy guy from the Crystal. I heard about you,” and then handed him another Genny Light and refused to take his money when he gave it to her. When she walked away, my dad said to me, “We can go now if you want, bud.”

“That’s all right,” I said. Because I knew now why my dad had brought me to M.’s. It was like how other fathers brought their sons to work on Bring Your Son to Work Day. My dad had brought me to M.’s so I could see what he did every Sunday and be impressed by it. “We can stay if you want,” I told him, even though I still wanted to go. I really did. Because I was a kid and my dad had acted crazy and everyone had laughed at him and I was embarrassed. I really was. But I knew it would feel worse for my dad to know I was embarrassed than it would for me to feel embarrassed. I wanted to go, but I could lie to him and say that I didn’t. It wouldn’t kill me to lie, but it would kill my dad if I told the truth. So I lied. Because this is what it means to be in love with someone. “I’m having fun,” I told him. “I don’t want to go yet.”

My dad smiled at me. It was the first time he’d smiled at me since he’d lied about taking me to the zoo. “Why don’t we just stay until halftime,” he said.

I was about to say that would be fine when the old lady, the one who was sitting by herself at the table, came wobbling over to the bar. Her juice glass was empty, although I’m guessing from the way she was wobbling that it hadn’t been filled with juice. She was wearing a dress that had once been nice but was now frayed and filthy; it looked like something she’d worn to church fifty years ago. The lady put her glass on the bar next to me. She smelled like wine and Band-Aids and old perfume. I turned my head to say hello and saw she had this angry look on her face. It was the same look Mrs. C. always had on her face right before she told me to use my mine-duh.

“That boy is too young to be in a place like this,” she told my dad.

This wasn’t a question, which was maybe why my dad didn’t answer. He put one hand on my head and ruffled my hair and held his beer can with his other hand and then drank from it with his mouth, and then he looked up at the Giants game on TV. This seemed to make the lady even madder. “You should be ashamed of yourself, bringing a boy his age into a place like this,” she said. “Don’t you feel ashamed?”

Later, when we got home, Mother looked up from her work and asked my dad, “How was the zoo?”

“It wasn’t so bad,” he said.

She nodded like that was the answer she expected of him. Then she turned to me. It was like she was sniffing me with her eyes. She asked, “How about you, Miller?” But I knew what Mother was really asking. She was asking, “Your dad has turned me into a ______, Miller; the question is, what are you going to turn me into?”

“The zoo was fun,” I said. “I liked the animals.”

“Oh, Miller,” she said. She looked away from me and back toward her work; her shoulders slumped like she’d just been beaten at something, which was exactly what my dad had looked like after the lady in the bar asked if he didn’t feel ashamed. He’d drained his beer and placed it gently on the bar, then took his hand off my head and reached into his pocket for his keys. I could hear the sad little muted jingling of the keys as he pulled them out. My dad wasn’t looking at me or her or the TV or anything. I glanced up at the TV, hoping there was something good going on there with the Giants that would cheer my dad up. But the other team was jumping around and the Giants players were standing there staring at the ground, shoulders slumped, looking defeated, just like my dad, just like Mother did later on when I told her I liked the animals in the zoo.

“Lady, of course I feel ashamed,” my dad finally said to the lady in the bar. “If I didn’t feel ashamed, then I might not feel anything at all.”

The Real French Word for “Penis”

Ineeded to go to Alexandria Bay to find Exley, and in order to do that, I’d have to skip school. And everyone knows the best way to skip school is to report first thing in the morning to homeroom, so that when you don’t show up to classes after that, they think — if you’ve been an otherwise good kid who has not already proved he’s a class skipper — that you’re getting sick in the bathroom, or you’re in the nurse’s office, or you’re lost or something.

But something funny happened when I went to school the next morning. Dr. Pahnee was waiting for me, right in front of the stairs that led from the sidewalk to the school’s main entrance. He was wearing the same clothes — faded blue jeans and a blue corduroy shirt and his clunky work shoes — that he’d worn the day before; they didn’t look dirty, but they did look a little ragged. Dr. Pahnee looked a little ragged, too: he had big bags under his eyes, and his beard wasn’t trimmed and was headed up north on his cheeks, toward his baggy eyes. And he was smoking! A cigarette! I wouldn’t have thought he was the kind of guy who smoked. But now that he was smoking, he did look like that kind of guy. I guess you don’t know what kind of guy you are until you start acting like one. Smoking was against school rules, of course, but the kids going into school didn’t seem to notice. They didn’t seem to notice Dr. Pahnee at all. It was like he stood there every morning. They just walked around him, like he was a teacher or a pole. But still, he made me nervous, the way he was standing there, staring at me in an angry way.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Do you know the real French word for ‘penis’?” he asked.

I didn’t know the real French word for “penis,” and I didn’t know why he was asking me if I did, either. Something weird was going on, and I didn’t know what it was, and that made me feel a little panicky, which was maybe why I blurted out: “I thought I saw someone in my living room last night.”

“You did?” he said. Dr. Pahnee was still staring at me, but the stare was a little less angry and a little more something else. “Who was it?”

“I thought it was my dad, at first,” I said. “But then I thought it was someone else.”

“Someone else,” Dr. Pahnee said.

“It was probably nobody,” I said.

“I think you’re probably right,” Dr. Pahnee said. I waited for him to say something more about the French word for “penis,” but he didn’t. A big gust of wind hit him in the face, blowing his hair straight up. He looked like a rooster. The wind also put out his cigarette. He flicked it off to the side with his thumb and index finger and it happened to hit Harold, who was walking by, right in the pant leg.

“Hey!” Harold said. But then he looked at Dr. Pahnee and touched the spot on his lip where the second-to-last guy who wasn’t Exley had hit him. This is a different guy , I almost told Harold when I realized that this morning Dr. Pahnee did look a little like that guy, and he looked a little like Exley, too. Harold scurried away from us and into the school, and a second later I could hear the bell ring. It was the bell that rang a minute before the other bell rang. I could never remember whether the second bell meant that you were late, or if it meant that you were right on time. In any case, I’d never been later than the first bell. I could see Harold’s face through the window in one of the doors. His eyes were telling me, Hurry .