Revod

Revod Marc Schuster

When Revod Nebs was ten years old, his family moved eight blocks west of their home on Cotton Street and into a new parish. The sycamores dropped their leaves early here, and a high school girl just three houses down was already pregnant with twins. Revod’s sister Magda said she’d seen the girl twice: once at the gas station, and once coming out of the beer distributor. Both times, Magda said, the girl was buying cigarettes.

“So?” Revod asked, untangling a praying mantis from his sister’s hair.

September had finally rolled around, hot and lazy like August but with the sweet autumn rot of dead leaves that brought with it a combination of gypsy moths and dread. School would be starting soon—another year of math, science and religion and other stuff he didn’t need to know, another room full of kids who’d watch him with narrow eyes because he was new, because he had a funny name, because he’d crack like all new kids eventually do, because it’s fun to watch a guy stumble, a real blast to see him fall.

He’d have to learn to tie a tie—that much was certain. No more clipons. No more excuses. You tied your own tie in the sixth grade, you made your own way. It was the kind of place that could make or break a fellow.

On top of that, if he killed the mantis in Magda’s hair, he’d end up in federal prison for life, or so the rumor went. And as if that weren’t enough, Magda had the nerve to bother him with gossip about the pregnant girl.

“So everyone knows that if you smoke while you’re pregnant, your kids come out retarded.” Magda said.

The mantis cocked its head to one side, green legs twitching in her jetblack hair as Revod cursed under his breath and asked how the hell the bug got there in the first place.

“I don’t know,” Magda said. “It fell from the sky.”

Animals falling from the sky. Revod shook his head in disbelief, though he knew stranger things had happened. They were sitting on the porch their father had built over the last three weekends after experiencing what he liked to call a moment of clarity—as if God Himself had taken a look at their three-bedroom twin and told Revod’s father that what it really needed was a back porch. When he came home from the library with a spiralbound book on decks and porches, Revod knew his dad was serious. That was on a Saturday. By Sunday morning, he’d drawn up the blueprints and was out purchasing lumber. Revod helped with the measuring and sawing the following Saturday, and on Sunday his dad worked alone, singing nasal Negro spirituals while he hammered away the hours under a hot August sun. And in the end, there was a porch, perfectly level and architecturally sound. To the best of Revod’s knowledge, the man had never picked up a hammer in his life, and he would probably never do it again. Their mom

took care of all the handiwork. Their father taught high school math for a living.

“But what about the pregnant girl?” Magda demanded. “Don’t you think her baby’s going to come out retarded?”

“As retarded as you or me,” Revod said.

Magda made a bitter face and shook her head.

“Mom doesn’t smoke,” she said, and the mantis flew into a conniption.

“She used to,” Revod told her. He wondered if he could pull the bug’s legs off without killing it. Of course, he mused, the federal prison system was not without merits. Three square meals a day, a roof over his head.

And he imagined he might get some leniency, considering this was a first offense. “She didn’t quit until she was pregnant with Lacey.”

“What about us?”

“I guess we’re retarded then.”

Peanut butter might do the trick, he thought. It worked on bubble gum.

“I don’t believe you,” Magda said. She was a year younger than Revod and two grades behind. “Mom wouldn’t do that to us.”

“Believe what you want,” Revod told her. “It’s still true.”

He sometimes worried that she’d grow up to marry a professional wrestler.

“Mom says the pregnant girl’s dad is in the hospital with a heart attack,” Magda said. “Mom says she probably gave it to him, coming home pregnant like she did. And with twins. Mom says she heard some people talking at the grocery store that the girl’s mom’s an alcoholic, and they don’t even know if the babies have one father or two, that’s how easy the girl is.”

“Mom told you this?”

The mantis watched Revod with bulging eyes.

“No,” Magda said. “She told dad. I was listening in.”

“And what did dad say?”

“Nothing. He was watching TV.” Revod thought about tying a tie. He was born six months after his parents got married and knew from books that it took nine months to have a baby. That left three months unaccounted for, and though his mom smoked while she was pregnant, he didn’t remember being born earlier than he was supposed to be. He could ask his dad about it, but that might bring about a sex talk. On the same token, he refused to ask his dad how to tie a tie, charged with its own coming-of-age implications as that activity was. In fact, there were very few topics Revod could imagine that would not somehow lead to a discussion of sex, and sex was the last thing Revod wanted to discuss with his father. Ever.

By the time he freed the mantis, the sun was beginning to set and the bug had lost two legs to the thick, black tangles of Magda’s hair. The swing set next door pulsed with a high aluminum squeal, and a pair of tattered Nikes peeked over the hedge at regular intervals.

2

“He’s at it again,” Magda said, and Revod nodded. In the two months since they moved in, Bernie Biggins had tried on an almost daily basis to catapult himself over the eight-foot hedge that separated the yards. A sprained ankle in August barely slowed him down, and now that the leaves were falling, Bernie said he’d have a natural cushion to break his fall.

The swing set groaned as Bernie pumped harder, Nikes gaining altitude with each pass. Letting himself fly, Bernie let out a shout. The hedge gave slightly when he slammed into it, then tossed him to the ground with a casual thud. Magda rolled her eyes, and Revod smiled.

“We better check on him.”

“Why?” Magda asked. “It’s his own fault if he’s dead.”

“He’s our friend,” Revod told her. “And we don’t have many of those yet.”

“So we can forget about him when we get some better friends?”

“We’re not getting any better friends,” Revod said. “We have weird names and people are always going to laugh at us.”

“Not me.” Magda shook her head again. If she wasn’t careful, Revod imagined, she’d develop a tick in no time flat—shaking her head and muttering at the ground like their grandmother did before she died. “As soon as school starts, I’m telling everyone my name’s Mary and I come from New York. No one laughs at people from New York.”

“Do what you want,” Revod said, unhooking the rusty latch to Bernie’s fence. He thought about tetanus, thought about lockjaw, thought about Alzheimer’s disease, which killed his grandmother by and by. Her brain tied itself into tiny knots. Revod saw pictures on a good-health segment of the morning news: black and white CAT scans of diseased brains glowing like ghosts while his mother paused over a bowl of Cheerios and said that’s what killed his grandmother. “They’re still going to laugh at us.”

Some nights, Revod could feel the knots twisting inside his own head.

“I almost got it that time,” Bernie said, lying on his back and squinting at the darkening sky. He spoke with a lisp and tacked a giggle onto everything he said. “I saw clear into Stutz’s backyard.”

Irving Stutz lived in the house attached to Revod’s and rarely ventured outdoors. His daughter, Angie, was supposed to mow his lawn every Sunday but usually waited until the grass grew to her knees before firing up the rickety old lawn mower. Revod had only seen Angie once, cutting jagged lines across Stutz’s front yard two days before Bernie sprained his ankle. She wore black stretch pants, and her butt jiggled as she pushed the rattletrap lawnmower back and forth through the thick and tangled grass.

When she finished, the lawn looked like one of Lacey’s do-it-yourself haircuts. Dark clumps of grass stained the sidewalk with dripping shades of green, and Revod had a picture of Angie’s jiggling butt stuck in his head for days. He guessed she was a drug addict, but didn’t know which drug.

3

“He has one of those shelters,” Bernie said. “I saw it when I cleared the hedge.”

“Almost cleared the hedge,” Magda corrected him. “But not quite.”

“Shelters?” Revod asked. He wondered what it was in Magda that made her so spiteful, so full of hate.

“In case of war,” Bernie said. His tongue clicked in his mouth, and his eyes wandered lazily between Revod and Magda. “Everyone talks about how he used to live underground. That’s howcome his wife left him.”

“That’s howcome, huh?” Magda said.

“Shh,” Revod told her. He offered a hand to Bernie and pulled him to his feet. “Let the boy speak.”

“She left him because all he ever talked about was communists and nuclear war. That’s what my dad said anyway. He kept her locked down in the shelter with him and all their kids until one day she went nuts and he cracked her in the jaw and had to drive her to the hospital. That’s not when they got divorced, though. It’s just when they stopped living underground.”

Bernie tacked a giggle onto his monologue before anyone could laugh at him, and Magda asked if he’d heard any news about the pregnant girl.

“Yeah,” Bernie said. “She’s having twins.”

Two weeks into the school year, people were still calling Revod the new kid as if he’d just rolled off an assembly line in Detroit. The girls wore plaid jumpers and blue blouses and slouched their shoulders forward to hide their newly developing breasts while the boys kept a strict inventory of names and estimated cup sizes on the back pages of their wide-ruled notebooks.

The boys didn’t shower much here at St. Alice’s—maybe twice a week, Revod estimated by the degree of prepubescent body odor that hung over the room like a thick and poisonous fog. They slicked their hair back with multi-colored plastic combs they kept in their breast pockets and wrote obscenities on anything they could get their hands on—plywood desktops, ragged pencil cases, overflowing urinals stuffed with paper napkins, each other. Their favorite expression, Revod noted, was jugs. As in Gina has awesome jugs.

What kind of a name is Revod? his classmates asked on a regular basis, losing interest in the answer before they’d even finished the question. It was a quiet form of torture that Revod learned to recognize as he passed through other schools, other grades, soccer teams and a brief stint in the Cub Scouts. A department store Santa Claus once told him that boys named Revod don’t get presents unless they’re extra good because Santa watches the kids with funny names extra close. Funny names, Santa explained, spell trouble.

“Okay, Santa Claus,” Revod muttered under his breath at recess, obsessing over the incident one morning during recess. Lonnie Turner, whose head was shaped like a bullet, followed Janine Lodge at a short 4

distance and held a granola bar at his crotch to imitate an erection. He called himself Boner Man and liked to whisper his pornographic fantasies to Revod during Social Studies class while Sister Mary David talked about salutary neglect and taxation without representation.

“Santa Claus?” Bernie Biggins asked, chewing on a soft pretzel with his mouth open. “Christmas ain’t for three months.” He counted the months off on his fingers, mouthing October, November, December to make sure his math was correct.

“Just thinking. Tell me about Irving Stutz, Bernie. Is he a decent guy?

Aside from the time he cracked his wife in the jaw, I mean. Have you heard anything about him one way or the other?”

“No one talks to him,” Bernie said, wordlessly offering a doughy lump of pretzel to Revod. Lonnie Turner waddled between them, murmuring boner, boner, boner and clutching his granola bar. “Paul Keenan’s out again.

You know, if you leave your pretzel on the radiator long enough, it’ll get warm. Just like at the mall.”

Revod declined the pretzel and handed a tissue to Bernie.

“Wipe your nose, pal. The girls are looking at you.”

“His dad’s in the hospital. They say it’s a stroke this time.”

Bernie wiped his nose to no obvious effect and shoved the tissue into his pocket. When Revod pressed him on the Irving Stutz issue, Bernie explained that a stroke is what happens when someone’s brain springs a leak. His grandfather on his mother’s side had a stroke, Bernie said, and now he only spoke Polish.

“But Irving Stutz,” Revod said. “Do you think he’ll want to talk business?”

“Business?” Bernie asked. “He don’t talk about anything. He’s crazy.

Besides, my dad says Angie don’t let anyone in the house unless they drive a Mustang or a Harley. And you don’t even have a skateboard.”

“Don’t worry,” Revod said. “I’ll think of something.”

The radiator coughed and Lonnie Turner waddled by again. The air in here was hot and oppressive and made Revod’s bones feel like rubber.

Boner, boner, boner, Lonnie said to Revod as Sister Mary David drew a map of the Yorktown peninsula on the blackboard. His teeth stuck out of his mouth at odd angles, and his nostrils flared when he spoke. I’m telling you man, I’m gonna bone her.

Janine Lodge looked in their direction, lips thin and red and twisted into a nervous smile that reminded Revod of an iguana. Lonnie smiled back at her with his crooked teeth and made the obvious gestures with his granola bar. Rolling his eyes back in his bullet-shaped head, he let out a soft howl, and Sister Mary David rapped her yardstick on the podium.

The classroom was no place for children, Revod decided, palms tingling with sweat as he took his seat. No place for children at all. Drying his 5

hands on the front of his shirt, he opened his Social Studies book to a profile of George Washington.

Since starting school, Magda kept track of everything everyone said in a notebook labeled The Private Diary of Mary Nebs. She’d toyed in the past with telling people to call her Maggie, but it never worked out. There were too many questions about what Maggie was short for, and people always learned at some point about the funny name at the root of her identity. As Mary Nebs, Magda avoided those questions and got on with her life, keeping a detailed account of the pregnant girl’s comings and goings in her diary.

“The pregnant girl’s brother is in Revod’s grade,” Magda offered at the dinner table, probing for gossip. Revod’s father watched the weather report on television, and his mother mashed Lacey’s baked potato with a fork.

Lacey was six years old, but everyone called her the baby as if she were still crawling around on her hands and knees and eating lint off the carpet. “His name is Paul, and all the girls think he’s cute. Do you know him, Revod?

Do you know Paul Keenan?”

“No,” Revod said.

Magda made a note in her diary and asked if Revod knew where babies came from.

“Christ,” he muttered as their mother looked up from Lacey’s potatoes and their father tore himself away from the television. There were acceptable answers to this question, even at the dinner table—vague pleasantries from books their mother had read aloud while pregnant with Lacey, mild explanations of hospitals and delivery rooms and why mom was getting so fat, pink diagrams of babies with square heads and tiny dinosaur arms that eventually grew into real human limbs—but Revod couldn’t find the words. Magda watched him closely, dark brown eyes smiling at his discomfort. Revod’s ears grew hot with embarrassment.

“I don’t like to talk about that kind of thing,” Revod finally said.

Excusing himself, he went upstairs to practice tying his tie.

“That was a dirty trick you played at dinner,” Magda said later.

Revod’s room was on the third floor, far from the cramped kitchen where his mother was washing dishes and his father was watching I Love Lucy on the fuzzy television set. He’d called it an attic once, back when they first moved in, but his mother corrected him. It was a third floor, finished and furnished and perfectly suited for habitation. If he ducked down low enough, he hardly ever banged his head on the low, sloping ceiling.

“What trick?” he asked, studying the instructions that came with his tie.

A series of blue diagrams outlined the process in detail, but the skinny end always wound up longer than the fat end, and Revod was beginning to grind his teeth. If he didn’t figure the secret out soon, he’d be wearing a clip-on for the rest of his life and would probably end up pumping gas for a living.

6

“You lied to me,” Magda said. “You know all about Paul Keenan. I’ve seen him in your classroom. He sits two seats behind you and never has his homework done on time. He’s got brown eyes and is supposed to wear glasses, but he doesn’t. Probably because he thinks they make him look funny, but they don’t. All the girls say he looks really cute in his glasses.

I’ve never seen him with his glasses on, but I believe them because he’s the kind of guy who you can tell looks really cute no matter what.”

“He’s just like anyone else,” Revod shrugged.

“But he’s the pregnant girl’s brother, Revod. You should talk to him.”

“He’s not the type. Besides, he’s been out all week. Bernie said his dad had a stroke.”

“A stroke?” Magda asked, flipping to a blank page in her notebook.

“That’s like a heart attack, right?”

“Except it happens in your brain.”

“Like grandma.”

“That was Alzheimer’s.” Revod felt the knots twisting in his own brain.

He imagined they looked like tiny half-Windsors. “That was totally different.”

“But he could die, right?”

“Anyone can die, Magda.”

“Yeah, but he’s a little closer than the rest of us. I mean it goes stroke, then coma, then death, right?”

Magda drew a chart in the air with the tip of her pen, and Revod marveled at her sense of hierarchy. He nodded his head, and she made a note in her book, murmuring stroke, coma, death. When she finished scribbling, Magda made Revod promise to tell her the minute he heard more news about the pregnant girl’s father.

“I’m serious,” she said. “I want to know everything.”

“Everything,” Revod repeated. “I promise. Now get the hell out of here. I’m busy.”

Magda turned to leave but stopped at the top of the stairs that led from Revod’s perch to the rest of the family.

“Mom wants dad to have a talk with you,” she said. “The one about…”

“I know,” Revod said. He didn’t want to hear the words just yet.

“S-E-X.” “Thanks.”

Magda darted down the narrow staircase. She was a good sister, Revod mused, all things considered. Highly observant and fairly good with figures.

And she knew when to back off, which most people couldn’t learn if they tried. At the very least, she could grow up to be a professional gambler.

Revod thought about his father. The talk. This was beyond mortification, and the real killer was that Revod already knew about sex— the fallopian tubes and the uterus, the egg, the sperm and the zygote. He’d read all about it in books, and what he didn’t read, he’d seen on TV or 7

figured out for himself. The last thing he needed was to talk to someone about it, least of all his father, so he turned out the lights and pretended to sleep.

Revod visited Irving Stutz on a Sunday afternoon. By then, his lawn was brown and wet and still jagged from a summer of bad haircuts. Dead leaves stuck to the damp sidewalk, torn and sickly in a late September mist. The gypsy moths were dying now, but their handiwork remained—whitish tree limbs reaching like bony fingers toward a gray, unmoving sky. A straight line of perfectly trimmed grass marked the boundary between Stutz’s lawn and Revod’s. Crossing the line, Revod straightened his tie, held his breath and rang Stutz’s doorbell.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” Revod said to Angie when she opened the door. “My name is Revod Nebs, and I’d like to speak with Mr. Stutz.”

“He’s not home,” Angie said. The TV clattered behind her, and the house smelled like kitty litter. She played with a tangled clump of red hair that hung in front of her wide, sagging face. Revod wondered if she recognized him and tried to jog her memory by saying that he lived in the house next door.

“Yeah?” she asked, and Revod played with his necktie. After eleven tries, he finally managed to get the fat end longer than the skinny end. A minor triumph, but not one Angie seemed interested in hearing about. The tone of her voice told Revod she wasn’t one for exchanging pleasantries, and he wondered what Magda would do in a situation like this.

“Well,” Revod said, shivering for effect, “my parents are away for the weekend, and I just got back from church and realized that I didn’t have my house key. I was doing okay for a while, but it really started to get cold, and I was wondering if maybe I could wait here for a little while until my parents came back. Do you think Mr. Stutz would mind?”

Angie stood deliberating in the doorway while Revod tried to make himself look timid and meek. He sucked in his cheeks and shivered some more. He bit his lip and knitted his eyebrows together. When his eyes refused to tear up, he looked down at the ground and saw Angie’s yellowing toenails poking through the tips of her frayed pink slippers. He drew a sharp breath as if to start sobbing and she pulled him into the house.

“Keep quiet,” she said. “And don’t touch anything.”

“Who’s there?” someone called from upstairs.

“No one, Dad,” Angie called back. She left Revod in the tiny foyer that separated the living and dining rooms and re-lit a cigarette that had died in an ashtray by the television. “It’s just the kid next door.”

Revod wrinkled his nose at the smell of stale smoke and kitty litter and asked if he could use the bathroom. Without looking away from the television, Angie told him it was at the top of the steps and to jiggle the handle when he flushed or the bowl would never stop refilling itself. He 8

stood for a moment, watching her blow smoke in the electric blue light of the television and moving her lips as if she were speaking with someone.

The blinds were drawn behind her, and the sofa where she sat sagged in the middle. She played with her hair and echoed commercials for cars, fast food restaurants and legal services. She knew all the 800-numbers by heart.

“Boy,” the old man growled from upstairs. “Come here.”

Revod had only ever seen Irving Stutz from a distance—muttering bitterly on his front porch or quickly drawing the blinds to his living room as if to shut out the noise when the neighborhood grew too loud for his liking—but the old man’s icy blue eyes and bony, pointed chin were unmistakable. He called to Revod again, and Revod paused halfway up the stairs to straighten his tie and slick his hair back with spit before venturing any further. Downstairs, the TV continued to talk to Angie.

“Hello, Mr. Stutz,” Revod said, thrusting a hand forward. His dad always told him to offer a firm handshake and look people directly in the eye when speaking to them. As long as sex wasn’t involved, Revod could talk to his father for hours. The moment they skirted the topic with talk of babies, love or facial hair, Revod’s face went red, and the conversation drifted into an awkward series of gulps and nods. “My name is Revod Nebs, and I’d like to discuss a business proposition with you.”

Irving Stutz eyed Revod with suspicion. Blades of gray light penetrated the cracks in his brittle, yellow window shades, illuminating objects at random: silver and gold bowling trophies, sun-bleached photographs in dull metal frames, a half-empty bottle of brown liquor. A slow, steady wind rattled the windows, and Revod squinted to make out the writing on a wooden plaque that decorated Stutz’s dresser. A crucifix hung over the bed. The heavy script on the plaque, Revod realized when his eyes adjusted to the light, spelled out Good Samaritan.

“The hell kind of name is Revod?” Stutz finally asked. He sat on a wooden chair by his bed, back stiff, surrounded by everything he owned.

Revod’s hand still hung in the air like an abandoned satellite.

“My father’s Armenian,” Revod said, not quite answering the question.

“Communist?”

“Oh, no sir. He likes money just as much as anybody. Better dead than red. That’s what dad always says.”

“Good man,” Irving Stutz said. His breath came in soft, wet gasps.

“What do you want?”

“We’re going out,” Irving Stutz said to his daughter. “We’ll be back later.”

Angie nodded slowly, vaguely aware of the noise her father made when he spoke. Revod waved goodbye, and Irving Stutz led him through the kitchen and out the backdoor. The steps on the back porch creaked as the pair descended them, and Stutz said that his daughter was trying to kill him.

Not in the usual way, he insisted. Not with poison or starvation or over9

medication. And not the way anyone with a backbone would do it either.

She hadn’t handled a gun since she was fourteen, he said, and the sight of blood made her sick. His daughter was trying to kill him, slowly and silently, the only way she knew how. She was trying to make him go soft.

“Soft in the head,” Irving Stutz said, clutching an oversized Eveready flashlight in his bony hand. “And where the brain goes, so goes the body.

It’s a good thing you came when you did, boy. A fella’s got to be prepared in this world. Prepared for anything.” He spoke calmly, evenly as if discussing the weather. “They laughed at me when I started building this shelter. Said the reds weren’t dumb enough to start a war they couldn’t finish. Said no one was crazy enough to push the button. But it’s not about crazy, and it’s not about dumb, is it, son? It’s about evil, and that’s exactly what the communists are—evil, pure and simple. They want to infiltrate our schools, poison the minds of little kids with dope and pornography, am I right?”

“Yes, sir,” Revod said, nodding his head. When he wasn’t chasing girls with his granola boner, Lonnie Turner liked to stand at the classroom window and watch the neighboring train station for soviet agents.

There was no electricity in the shelter, Stutz explained, sweeping the underground room with the golden arc of his flashlight, because there would be no power in the event of a nuclear attack. “If you want to survive,” he said, “you’ve got to live without things.” His voice echoed like an old record. The concrete walls glowed in the dark, sick and yellow.

Reddish lines and numbers decorated the floor—the faded remnants of a hopscotch board. Stutz nodded, satisfied with something that Revod could not put his finger on. The old man spoke of survival, spoke of resilience.

A man could be strong, he explained, but all the strength in the world wasn’t worth a damn if he couldn’t bounce back from bad fortune.

“Everything you need to know is right here,” Stutz said, fanning out a small stack of red and yellow pamphlets with titles like The Enemy Within and Walter Stanley’s Guide to Surviving Nuclear Apocalypse. “You know what they told my girls in school? They said hide under the desk. For the love of God, what good’s that going to do?”

“None at all, sir,” Revod said. He shook his head gravely and wondered where exactly the old man had been standing when he cracked his wife in the jaw. “None at all.”

Irving Stutz tripped over a whiskey box filled with old record albums and cursed out loud. “I told her not to keep her junk in here,” he said, gritting his teeth. He swung the flashlight around wildly, and Revod ducked to keep from getting clipped. The bunk beds were covered with high-heel shoes and old dresses, and someone had left a broken television in the far corner of the room. “Of course you’ll have to clean the place out,” Stutz said. “Or it won’t be any use to you. Don’t worry about saving anything.

Just dump it all in the trash. That’s where it belongs anyway, all this crap.

10

In the trash. I don’t know why she ever bothered to save it in the first place.”

Revod nodded.

“And when you mow the lawn, make sure you save the clippings.

Makes good fertilizer.” The gears turned in Stutz’s head. Now that there was a boy in his life, Revod figured, he’d want to leave his mark, let the world know that Irving Stutz had something to say, something worth passing on to future generations. “And when it snows, I want to see you out there first thing in the morning. Shoveling’s no good if someone’s already trampled across your snow. Trampling leaves footprints, and footprints turn to ice. And the last thing I need is someone slipping on my sidewalk and suing me for everything I’ve got, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Revod said and imagined Stutz fighting off a pack of lawyers intent on taking his bowling trophies and Good Samaritan plaque.

“And, boy,” Stutz said, grabbing Revod’s shoulder and clutching him with long, bony fingers. The old man’s eyes grew wide in the darkness.

Revod remained perfectly still. “If the reds do attack, I want you to come and get me. I don’t care what time it is. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night. I want you to get me out of bed and down into that shelter. And whatever else happens, the girl stays outside. I don’t care how much she begs or cries or pleads with you. This place is holy, and she’s not one of us.”

Again, Revod nodded. When Stutz left him alone, he cleared the shoes off the bunk and laid his head down on a foam pillow. Closing his eyes, he folded his hands on his chest and thought about his grandmother, underground and in a box. Breathing deeply, Revod listened to his heartbeat, felt his brain ticking like a clock. There was no school here, no Boner Man, no talk of sex. And there was no red threat, either. There was only Revod—alone, at peace. This is what it would be like to die, his brain told him, and it wasn’t so bad. A guy could get used to it if he got enough practice.

On Monday, the principal made an announcement over the loudspeaker.

Paul Keenan’s father was dead. She asked that everyone pray for his soul and keep his family in their thoughts. Especially Paul’s sister, someone said, and the popular girls tittered in the far corners of the classroom. Over in the fourth grade, Revod figured, Magda was making a note. When Paul returned to school the following Wednesday, everyone’s eyes followed him as if he were the new kid, and they spread their rumors in soft tones out of respect for the dead.

“Man, that’s rough,” Bernie whispered at recess. “I don’t know what I’d do if my dad died. Probably get a job or something. Support the family.

It’s what a guy has to do, you know?”

11

Revod nodded vaguely and thought about his own father. Today was the day. It was written on the kitchen calendar in thick, black pencil: Talk with Revod.

“I hear his mom’s an alcoholic.”

Lonnie Turner waddled by. Bernie tore a loop off his pretzel. The radiator coughed. Paul Keenan stood by the blackboard, hands in his pockets, staring at the cracked leather of his brown shoes. It was, Revod realized, what his father might call a moment of clarity. What Paul needed more than anything right now was a friend. And if everything went the way Revod envisioned it, maybe he’d get an invitation to visit the twins when they were born. Or, if he was really lucky, they’d name one of the babies Revod, and there’d be another one in the world. At the very least, he’d be a hero in Magda’s eyes, so he nodded slightly in Paul’s direction and told Bernie it was time to pay their classmate a visit.

“You’re sure about that?” Bernie asked. “He’s a little, I don’t know…

Aren’t you supposed to leave people like that alone? I mean, if my dad was dead, I don’t think I’d be up for talking to a whole lot of people just yet.”

“Don’t worry,” Revod said. “This is exactly what the boy needs.”

“I don’t know about this, Revod,” Bernie whispered as they made their approach. “The whole thing’s kind of creepy. His dad’s dead. His mom’s an alcoholic. And his sister, you know about her, right? What if, you know, it’s contagious or something?”

“Hi there,” Revod said to Paul, Bernie squirming in tow. “We really didn’t get a chance to meet yet. My name’s Revod Nebs, and I’m pretty new here.” He held out his hand, and Paul shook it limply. “I’m really sorry about your father. My grandmother died about a year ago, so I know what you’re going through—grief, denial, anger. It’s all perfectly natural.

After a while, though, you figure out that it’s no big deal. Dying, I mean.

For one thing, you don’t have to worry about anything anymore. For another, you finally get some peace and quiet.”

Surrounding conversations collapsed in swift concentric circles. Bernie took a step back as if his pal were radioactive. The popular girls stopped tittering for a moment, and Lonnie Turner dropped his granola bar to the floor. Sister Mary David rang slapped the podium with her yardstick in vain as Revod continued to speak, telling Paul all about Irving Stutz’s fallout shelter—how quiet it was, how dark and relaxing.

“It’s nice,” Revod said, oblivious to the fists balling at Paul’s side.

“You’ll have to come down some time and check it out for yourself. I’m telling you, it’s just like being dead. You know, like your dad. The trick is, you just need to get used to it. I’m getting some practice in on the weekends and a little after school, but I think at some point I’d like to take a few days off and spend them underground, just to get a better feel for it. In the end, I imagine it’s just like tying a tie. If you practice enough, it just 12

comes naturally, and you don’t have to worry about the skinny end coming out longer than the fat end, if you catch my drift.”

Down in the nurse’s office, the school secretary held a yellow finger in front of Revod’s face and told him to follow it with his eyes. The nurse only came on Tuesdays and Thursdays but left a batch of pamphlets behind so the secretary could pick up the slack the rest of the week and keep an eye out for chicken pox and curvature of the spine and other childhood maladies.

“You need to be more careful,” the secretary said, studying the pamphlet on head injuries. “Didn’t your dad ever tell you to block with your left?”

“No,” Revod said. “He told me to offer a firm handshake and look people in the eye.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” the secretary said. She folded the pamphlet in half and touched his cheek. A poster over her right shoulder warned against drug abuse and listed the effects of cocaine, marijuana and PCP on the human body. “You have a mild concussion.

That means your brain has a small bruise on it, probably from when you hit the floor.”

“Or the blackboard,” Revod volunteered. On Friday his class watched a movie about a race car driver who wore black leather pants and crashed his car on the highway after taking Quaaludes to relax. He had a mustache and wore gold chains around his neck. His girlfriend cried when they put him in the ground. She was the one who gave him the Quaaludes in the first place.

The Friday before that, they watched a cartoon about dragons who started smoking and contracted lung cancer. Charlotte Rae provided a voice for one of the dragons, and rumors were beginning to spread that the drug movies would end after Christmas. That’s when they’d start watching the sex movies. “I’m pretty sure I hit the blackboard first.”

“That’ll do it,” the secretary said. “Now, whatever you do, don’t go falling asleep on me, okay? I need you to stay awake.”

“Why?” Revod asked. “Could it kill me if I fall asleep?”

“I just don’t think it would be a good idea.”

“You can tell me if I’m going to die,” Revod said. “I’m ready for it.

I’ve been practicing. Every day for two hours since Sunday. And I think about it all the time. I’m going to get Alzheimer’s one day if this concussion doesn’t get me first. I’ll forget things little by little until one day I can’t even remember my name. Pretty soon after that I’ll be dead. Just like my grandmother.”

“Kids your age shouldn’t talk like that,” the secretary told him.

“But we do,” Revod said quietly as she dialed the phone. He hugged his legs to his body and rested his chin on his knee because the back of his head was tender. His mother would be coming soon, just like she always did, to 13

take him home, to take care of him, to pretend he was still her baby for maybe the last time before his dad gave him the talk. It wasn’t sex that bothered him so much, but talking about it.

The nurse’s office smelled like rubbing alcohol, and the bright light hurt his eyes. He thought about Irving Stutz and his ongoing battle with the communists. He thought about Angie and her cigarettes and her TV commercials. He thought about Magda’s journal and wondered if Bernie Biggins would ever make it over the hedge. He thought about Paul Keenan and the pregnant girl and her twins. If they were smart, they’d stay exactly where they were. This world was no place for children, he decided. And it was no place for Revod either, so he closed his eyes and dreamed he was on his back, hands folded over his chest in the quiet solitude of Irving Stutz’s fallout shelter.

This story originally appeared in Redivider 1:1.

14