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  “She’s loud,” she said, toying with her cardigan button. “Yells a bit more.”

  “I don’t mind that my ear grew back on,” said Eric. “Guy without an ear would look screwball.”

  “Hey, my dad can call them,” said Franny. “He does that all the time.”

  “Absolutely not, but thank you. I’ll look after this.”

  “So then can we all go to class, Beanie Babies?” She climbed to her feet and brushed down her jean skirt. “Or is Abel sending us to hot, hot lesbian prison?”

  “I guess I could take a ninja down,” Clint said to no one. “They aren’t tough.”

  “So was the idea that Harv would eat the head?” Shawn asked Franny.

  “I think you should all go home and get some sleep,” I said. “Seriously, does anybody know where Harv is?”

  My concern was that I’d have disemboweled Dave Saunders if I was in Harv’s position and the committee might frown upon that when Harv applied for scholarships.

  Chemistry 11 was last period, in my stuffy classroom with its tattered entomology posters and faded globe—Czechoslovakia was apparently still one country—and Dr. Reid’s informational fax still on the desk. The only kids perched at their benches, of course, were the three who’d missed Friday’s field trip.

  “Where the heck are they all?” asked Devon.

  “They found the bale of pot that fell out of that airplane,” said Jordie.

  I told the three boys that if you sketch the atoms in an inorganic molecule they’ll line up to look either left- or right-handed, but an organic molecule is always left-handed, and how did nature possibly come up with that? Not curriculum, but it was cool, and kept me from smashing my forehead through the cabinet of Bunsen burners. Then I gave them handouts to color and, because I had a bad feeling, trotted to the office to ask Kathleen if there’d been any calls from Harv Saunders’ home to explain his absence.

  “There was this morning,” she said, red hair in a bun now. “His dad said flu.”

  After the dismissal bell she called me back to the office over the pa—an update on Harv, I figured. But Kathleen slid a milky-yellow business card across the counter.

  “This, ah, gentleman just left,” she explained. “Wanted to know the names and addresses of the kids and teacher who were over in Velouria yesterday. Said he represented the parent company. I said that access to that information would be between him and the school district, my hands were completely tied as far as handing over that sort of information. So he left this.”

  James Jones, the card read. Penzler Industries. And a fax number.

  “Thought you’d want to know,” Kathleen said.

  “He didn’t say why?”

  Compensation! I was thinking. Deep-breathing methods to calm us down!

  “No. Just looked at me and wrote in a little book, then said he had lots of appointments and out he went.”

  “What’d he look like? Maybe I’ll spot him around.”

  “Gray suit,” said Kathleen, shrugging. “Gray hair.”

  Or maybe he’s come to explain what the hell’s happened to us.

  In the Pizza Hut parking lot a woman with a baggie over her hand picked up her little dog’s poop.

  “In the future the dogs will pick up after us,” Josie said from the back of the car.

  “And dogs’ll poop in the toilet!” said Ray.

  “That stuff’s science fiction,” Deb told them.

  We waited behind a guy in a wheelchair at the takeout counter, manned by a fuzzy-moustached senior from the high school. A plastic bin beside the till asked for Spare Change for the Congo Refugees. I made Deb walk all around the restaurant, hunting for a short girl with a brown ponytail, and if there was no sign of her then all we were going to get out of Pizza Hut was pizza. Then just as it was our turn, the guy at the counter went on break and Harv’s sister pushed past him, her black visor square to her brow like she was a ninth-inning relief pitcher.

  “Hey,” I said, “I don’t know if you remember me, I was at your house—”

  “What?” she said.

  “Come on, we’re starving,” someone hissed behind me.

  “Well, I’m one of Harv’s teachers and I was worried he might’ve been sick today, because…”

  “Harv’s fine,” she said. “Ask him yourself, he’s across the street.”

  I peered out the window. A half-dozen people ambled around in front of Walgreens—mostly seniors with piles of plastic grocery bags.

  “Is that him with the hat?” I asked.

  “That’s our boy,” she said. “Were you going to order? Because—”

  “Hawaiian!” screamed Josie and Ray.

  “A large Hawaiian with triple bacon.”

  “I don’t know why I bought the veggie burgers,” said Deb.

  The pizza was going to be twenty-five minutes so I left her and the kids solving a word search on the back of a menu and jogged across the street to where Harv, arms folded, leaned against the pay phone outside the Walgreens entrance. The setting sun was in his eyes so he had to tilt his sky-blue Oklahoma City Thunder cap to look at me from under the brim.

  “Sir, would you be able to buy me a pack of Camels?” he asked, rolling a crumpled five between his fingers.

  “Harv, it’s me,” I said. “Mr. Giller, remember?”

  “Oh, sure.” The five disappeared. “I was just out today with the flu.”

  “What are you—you don’t smoke, do you?”

  “Ah, no, no. My dad just…”

  He lifted off his ball cap to scratch his hairline and in the blaze of setting sun across his head I saw a thick scar stretching from his left eyebrow across to behind his right ear. Weird I’d never noticed it before, since he’d always had a buzz cut. Tiny bald patches ran up either side of the scar.

  “Jesus, man,” I said, “did something happen to your head?”

  He muttered that he’d been pruning elms with his dad and there’d been an accident.

  “What in hell were you pruning with?”

  “Chainsaws,” he said.

  “Christ almighty, how long ago was that?”

  “Yesterday morning,” he grinned. “My dad looked after it. He said we’re going out on the dirt bikes on Saturday!”

  “Well, Jesus,” I said. “Maybe wear a helmet.”

  He peered behind me, so I looked too. No prospective Camel-buyers.

  “Want to hear my movie idea?” He twisted his hat back onto his head. “See, there’s this town where nothing’s going on, but the parents think the basketball team might win the state championship even though the guys on the team are all, ‘No way.’ ”

  “Sounds great,” I said through my teeth. “Look, I wanted to ask—”

  “But then they sign up for this science experiment with, like, a professor who gives them all this strength and agility and stuff, so then they win the championship and the whole town’s going crazy, shooting off fireworks, but then, just as the soundtrack’s going all high-pitched and violins, the guys all fall down dead.”

  “Because of the experiment?”

  “Yeah! So in the audience you’d feel really happy one second and then the next super-sad. And the parents would be looking down at the dead kids, and they’d be, like, ‘Man, jeez, was that really what we wanted?’ Cool, right?”

  “What made you think of that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—I missed the game the other night because we were late from Velouria, so I had to help Dad staple his notices up, that’s when I thought of it.”

  “Jeez. What do his notices say exactly?”

  out-of-towners bring in unwanted elements?

  “Oh, just ads. He goes to old people’s houses and gives ’em massages. Lot of his clients have passed away but Kim, that’s his girlfriend, she makes good money. Sh
e’s a notary public.”

  “Dad!” Josie stood outside the restaurant, hands cupping her mouth. “Pizza!”

  “That your kid?”

  “One of them,” I said.

  So if babbling and unrestrained healing were any indication of good health, I had nothing to worry about regarding Harv. I handed him five more dollars for lack of anything better to do, then I jogged back across.

  “See you at school!” he called. “Don’t tell my idea!”

  Harv’s sister stood behind the counter, our cardboard box merrily steaming. The guy in the wheelchair still waited for his order, hands folded in his lap, reminding me uncomfortably of my mom.

  “I rushed it through,” she announced coolly, “so you could be on your way.”

  As we walked back to the car, each kid propping up a side of the box, I saw that Harv was already gone. Just the pay phone dangling by its cord.

  Those tiny bald flecks had been left by the staples they’d used to put his head back together. And how badly could Harv use some of that James Jones money? And who could bring that to resolution but me? I hadn’t done nearly enough for my students, that was clear as Sprite, and though there was a telephone at home I couldn’t walk back through my orderly front door until I’d talked to someone from Dockside.

  “Deb,” I said, “please just drive them up the hill. I’ll walk up in a minute.”

  “Do, do you want us to wait for you?”

  “Dad?” Josie called from the back seat. “What’s going on?”

  “Climb in for pizza!” Ray yelled.

  “Easy, easy, guys. I’ll catch up.”

  Deb rolled down the driver-side window. “Is this really what they need right now? Whatever this is can’t wait ten minutes?”

  “Stephen Hawking,” I told her, not knowing what the hell I was saying, “maybe didn’t have ten minutes.”

  As the car drifted up the street I trotted across to the pay phone. The bus must’ve come because the people waiting had disappeared, or maybe Amber had pulled up in a convertible and invited Harv and the old people to a nitrite-dripping sex party.

  Dr. Reid’s fax came out of my pants pocket. His sender’s number across the top read 805-504-9090, which seemed weird since that wasn’t a Nebraska area code.

  Contact person at site: Rob Aiken, 402-466-9807 (cell.)

  I slid my Visa card through the slot and dialed. A breeze pushed an empty Lucky Strikes pack up the sidewalk toward me while I listened to one ring follow another.

  “Yeah? Hello?”

  Sounded like our tour guide had maybe had a few beer.

  “Hi, yes, this Peter Giller, we met on Friday? The field trip from Hoover?”

  Nine-second pause. Glasses clinking in the background?

  “This isn’t such a good time for me. What do you want exactly?”

  “Well, after our visit and the, uh, the spill, the students and I have experienced some side effects.”

  Not loss of appetite, numbing of extremities, weight loss, hair loss or colorectal disasters—those were Lydia’s side effects. I’d moved on to something new.

  “Okay, yeah,” Rob said blandly.

  “I was wondering whether you might be able to give some insight into what we’re, um, experiencing—whether we can expect it to get more intense or if it’ll calm down before too long.”

  “You talking about the bacon, wanting bacon?” A long, ragged sigh. And wheels on gravel? “No, from what I’ve heard that doesn’t quit. What about the temper, smashing things up, has that started?”

  Ten feet away, an elderly woman crept up to the bus stop, her purse’s strap clutched in her hands like it was a weight she could hardly bear.

  “Nothing like that has happened,” I lied, just to see how he’d predict the other stupid things I’d already done.

  “All right.” He yawned. “Maybe you ought to bring your people out to see my people.”

  “What, at the factory? Hey, did you talk to this James Jones?”

  “Jones. No sé. And, no, not at Dockside—Old Man Penzler’s seen the last of me. You know Lancaster County?”

  “Way out east, sure, around Lincoln? I’m from Pawnee.”

  “Yeah, we’ve got sort of a new facility out there. I’m going that way now. Get out to where Route 77 meets the interstate, then call me again, all right?”

  “And would this be for a meaningful conversation between the two of us, or should I haul these kids two hundred miles too?”

  “Ah!” His chuckle sounded like a shot glass rattling inside another. “Another night or two, you won’t need me to answer that.”

  “Hey, why be a jackass? All we want is some kind of answer if—”

  “I don’t have an answer but we’ve got a solution, how’s that sound? All right, looks like I’m getting pulled over,” said Rob. “Look forward to seeing you.”

  I looked down at the receiver as though it might say something of its own volition. Get thee to Velouria, why woulds’t thou be a breeder of sinners?

  The bus-stop woman shifted a patent-leather shoe on the concrete.

  “Excuse me.” I hung up the phone. “Do any buses head up toward Hawthorne?”

  “This next.” She wore a single dot of pink lipstick. “We can go together!”

  Deb must’ve believed that if you can’t say something nice you shouldn’t say anything at all, because the instant I bounded onto the porch she hurried out for that evening’s power walk. The kids and I played Hungry Hungry Hippos and when Ray put a marble up his nose I didn’t even lose my cool. Good, right? Then I was sitting at the table mowing through cold pizza with that weekend’s Hoover Hunter-Gatherer up in front of me—only thing suspicious out of Velouria was an attempted truck-jacking—when Ray apparently thought it’d be hilarious to knock the newspaper out of my hands with a hammer because the same thing had happened to the tipsy admiral in The Little Wretch. I saw his white-socked feet shuffle up, then the hammer tore through the sports page like a fork of lightning, bisecting the Orioles’ catcher until the steel claw embedded itself in the base of the ring finger of my left hand.

  It happened as fast as that. I stared down at that hammer’s silver head, streaked with rust and now a single unit with my body, and did I scream? No. I thought, Ah, yes. This makes sense, it’s all been building up to this exact thing.

  “Oh,” I told Ray. “Let’s be careful here.”

  I yanked the claw out of the pale finger then dropped a burgundy placemat over my hand while Ray shrank against the wall. His hands were little white balls and it looked like his neck was trying to eat his chin.

  “A hammer is for what?” I asked.

  “It’s for…”

  “It’s for driving a nail, Bugface, you do not use it on people. Josie?” I called, voice straining only slightly. “Take Ray down and turn on SpongeBob, okay?”

  He forced a tight smile, pale even under that blond hair.

  “Sorry, Dad,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  And once they’d thumped down the stairs I finally lifted the placemat—I would deal with it on my own before Deb came home. Something yellow showed inside the cut and I figured that might be bone. But it still didn’t hurt.

  In the bathroom I wiped it with a Kleenex and put Neosporin in the cut.

  “Pyjamas!” I called down the stairs.

  Deb read them their stories while I sat in the kitchen with an ice pack on the hand, then she went to bed herself. I could still make a fist. While I was brushing my teeth I tugged at the poor finger to see if the bone would click out of place or go a little wobbly.

  Instead the finger snapped off in my hand.

  No spray of good red blood, just a few drops of purple. The thing just looked wrong, sitting there in the palm of my right hand, and my left hand with a gap where my ring finger had been looked
even more wrong, but it still didn’t even sting, and I thought of those lizards that lose their tails for self-preservation—that can’t hurt the lizard, can it? The shock would kill them. The shock ought to have killed Amber on Monday morning, too, and if it had killed her I would’ve been standing there on my porch with my useless arms at my sides. Wasn’t I capable of more than that? I needed the bacon, sure, but I couldn’t allow bacon to cloud my brain anymore.

  I glanced at myself in the mirror—my eyes looked enormous—then dropped the finger into the breast pocket of my pyjamas and spat my toothpaste into the sink.

  I took my tool kit out of the broom closet, found the staple gun, and with four half-inch staples, two on each side, I reattached the finger—those webs of skin between the digits gave me some raw material. Eric had been right to recommend staples. I lived in the science-fiction future where dogs sat on the toilet.

  “How’d that happen?” asked Josie.

  She stood in her nightgown in the kitchen doorway, holding a glass of apple juice.

  “Ray got a little rough,” I said, stowing the tool kit.

  “But no emergency room, right?”

  I shook my head.

  “Can we get, um, pizza again tomorrow?”

  “Grandma probably still wants hamburgers.” I let my left hand lay flat on my pyjama leg. “You know you’ll need to brush your teeth again after you drink that.”

  She grinned like we were in an ad, showing a mouthful of teeth perfect as Chiclets. Her kids would have perfect teeth too. Things would come up roses for my kids even if they’d already lost a parent and a parental finger.

  Thursday, October 27.

  With a constant knot of bacon in my gut I’d gone on teaching for three more days, battling successfully to keep my cool when students handed in half-digested worksheets or Ray forgot to flush, tugging my ear so relentlessly that the lobe scabbed over. I’d only seen my Chemistry 11 kids out in the parking lot, driving doughnuts in their parents’ cars until Cam waved them off-site.