It was around that time, in the scared loneliness of night, that I started thinking of the social services as the Clean People. They were the first Clean People, the enforcers amidst the superblobs. I imagined them pulling up in a white, windowless van, a cage separating the cargo area from the cab so the feral children they dragged from these filthy homes couldn't attack the driver. They would get out of the van, a whole herd of them dressed in sparkling white jumpsuits, white gloves on their hands. They would undoubtedly hook me up to some form of lie detector.

I wasn't exactly right but I was on the right track. Two of them showed up, both women. They drove a clean, new white car and they were outrageously overdressed. I guess that was so they could feel slightly better than the people they were investigating. Laughing, they knocked on the door.

When the mother opened the door, their smiles were gone completely. The Clean People exchanged a volley of pleasantries with the mother and she invited them in. When it was just us, home alone, the mother was a very powerful woman, never failing to speak her mind. It was horrible to see her like this, wringing her hands and stumbling to get out of those other women's way.

"Well, I guess you're here to have a look around," she said.

"We received a complaint," the younger woman said. "We have to follow up on every complaint made." The older woman was letting the younger woman do the talking.

"I'm Mrs. Jones," the older woman said, holding out her hand. The mother wiped her hands off on her dress and shook hands with the woman. "And this is Mrs. Johnson. I'm training her, so she'll be conducting the session."

"Of course," the mother said. "I'm Sadie, that's my husband Carl over there in the wheelchair and this is Wallace."

"h.e.l.lo, Wallace," the women said simultaneously and I was certain those smiles they flashed were nearly predatory. "h.e.l.lo, Clean People. Goodbye, Mom and Dad," I thought.

I sat there on the couch while the Clean People searched the house. Every muscle was drawn tight. It took a lot of effort to breathe and I felt like I was going to throw up. I yearned for a drink of water.

It seemed like they looked around for hours. I imagined them turning over every object in the house, looking for traces of drugs or blood or, h.e.l.l, I didn't know, whatever it was that made people bad. But my parents weren't bad. Not yet, anyway. I wanted to tell the Clean People this. I felt like my tight little nerves could snap at any moment and I would have to run up to the Clean People, letting their shampoo and perfume smell they dragged with them envelop me, and tell them the parents weren't bad people and even if they were a little bit bad that was okay because I liked it there and didn't want to go anywhere in that little white car.

I had been digging my nails into my thighs so hard both my fingers and my legs were hurting. I looked over at the father, when he was just a gimp and not so angry. He stared straight ahead, his strong arms digging into the armrests of his wheelchair. I smelled the nervous sweat shooting out of his skin.

Eventually, the threesome emerged from the back of the house. I tried to gain some clue as to how things were going by looking at the mother's eyes, but she was playing it off pretty good. They were talking rather loudly, laughing it up, but I really couldn't make out anything they were saying. The whumming sound in my head was huge. Then I noticed their voices were lowered.

My heart pounded. This had to be it, I thought. Maybe they had just tried to make the mother feel comfortable before dropping the bomb. Now was the time they'd lean in and say, "Oh yeah, by the way, we gotta take the kid."

They broke up their little huddle and the mother walked over to where the father sat. I think she must have told him to act r.e.t.a.r.ded or mute or something, the way he just sat there like that. The mother dropped her head to the floor, focusing very intently on moving the father into the kitchen. She refused to look at me.

Then the Clean People came over. Mrs. Johnson, the Clean Person-in-Training, sat closest to me, her knees nearly touching mine. Mrs. Jones sat behind her, leaning back on the couch and crossing her arms over her girth.

The mother came back into the living room. She lifted me up off the couch and sat down, pulling me back onto her lap. I wanted to thrash. I wanted to throw myself off the mother and run outside, run away from those first horrifying glimpses of f.u.c.kness. At least that way I'd get to decide where it was I went. Knowing my instincts, I guess, the mother put her arms around me.

I don't remember all of the questions they asked. Mrs. Johnson read them off a piece of typing paper, jotting down comments while me or the mother talked. I remember the first question though and, now that I think about it, Mrs. Johnson must have been nervous too.

Her face was very composed as she looked at the mother. Then she asked, "Do you, uh, s.h.i.t on the floor?"

Mrs. Johnson's face cracked like something whooshed out of her. Mrs. Jones immediately stepped up. "I'm sorry. What she meant to say was, 'Do you and your family ever, uh, defecate on the floor... rather than in the toilet?"

"Well, no," the mother said, slightly confused. "I mean, there has been a couple of times when Carl, if he was sick or something... You know he used to not be able to do that by himself. Wallace went through a phase a few years ago, but I always cleaned it up."

"I see," Mrs. Johnson said. She'd gained a little of her composure back.

All the questions they asked me were "yes"- or "no"-type things. My mouth was completely dry. I think if I'd actually tried to talk I would have vomited so I just shook or nodded my head. They were all stupid questions like: Does your mother cook dinner? Have you ever went to bed hungry? When you get in trouble, are you spanked? Have you ever been spanked so hard it's left a bruise? Do you go to school?

The more questions they asked, the more nervous I became. I still thought the hammer was going to fall, this was just some sick and twisted way to make all of this my fault. I was wiggling so much by the time Mrs. Johnson finally asked the last question that I had almost flopped off the mother entirely.

"It was nice meeting you, Wallace," Mrs. Johnson said, holding out her hand, again with that predatory stare. It made me think I'd be seeing her again, in the soft moonglow of my room, waiting to s.n.a.t.c.h me away.

At this point my mother followed them outside. I flopped down on the couch, grabbing a pillow and wrapping my arms tightly around it. I stared up at the light yellow water stains on the ceiling, wondering if the mother had successfully scrubbed out the poor. It was another eternity they were outside.

"You okay in there?" the father called, on his way into the living room.

I gave a response that the dry mouth and nausea turned into something like, "Yeeung."

"Hang in there."

"Tell me what they're doing out there."

He wheeled himself over to the window, pulling back the clean white curtains the mother had bought at the Dollar General.

"The c.u.n.ts are leaving," he said.

I sat up.

"Really?"

"S'what it looks like."

"They gone yet?"

"Getting in the car."

The mother came in and shut the door. She leaned against it, throwing her weight against the world that could so easily penetrate it. A huge smile spread across her face.

"They're closing the case," she said.

The father hung his head. He was crying, his muscled arms trembling as he clutched the wheels of his chair.

"Does that mean I won't be going anywhere?"

"You're staying right here, baby."

That was the feeling. It flooded me. Over the past few weeks everything had seemed dark and depressing. Everywhere I looked, something else was flawed. My behavior wasn't right, despite the straight 'A's. But, in that moment, everything became bright. Everything became right. Energy rushed through my body. I couldn't help smiling. If I smiled like that now, I'd think I was an idiot, but then it was just the smile of a child. The smile of a creature who didn't have a care in the world, a creature who shouldn't have a care in the world.

The next few days I had walked around suppressing my laughter. I wanted to laugh at everyone and everything. I felt giddy.

Someone, if not those Clean People that came to the house, then the Clean People who called them, had figured the parents weren't doing a good enough job of turning me into a blob and they wanted to take me away from the parents, reckoning they could do it right. I wanted them to see me after they left, not the idiot sad child who refused to speak but the smiling, confident, fully-hydrated child who was willing to ramble endlessly about the talents of any major league baseball team or the Top 40 charts.

That's the way I felt as I left that school. I wanted to laugh at everything, even my own condition, trudging down the road with those ridiculous horns on top of my head. I wanted them to see me, all those faceless blobs that had made the last few years of my life a living h.e.l.l. No, I didn't want them to see me at all. I wanted them to go away and that's what I imagined. I imagined all those shapeless, colorless ma.s.ses melting into the ground, into the rotten soot and s.h.i.t-covered earth that created them.

Feeling a second wind, I picked my speed up again and started back into a slow trot. f.u.c.k it, f.u.c.k it, f.u.c.k them all-the thought meshed with my footsteps as I struggled not to fall down.

Chapter Twelve.

Elf I continued to trudge along by the side of the road, careful not to twist my ankle where the asphalt disintegrated into the gra.s.s. The landscape of Ohio is as erratic and temperamental as the weather. One mile, I was back there near all the factories and f.u.c.kness, miles of dingy brick and rusted iron, all coughing up into the sky. Now I was in relative countryside. The only houses were way back off the road. Soon I would be in relative filth again, in the Tar District. The Tar District's factories were much smaller and older than the ones in Milltown proper. They made things like paper and rubber and didn't have contracts with places like General Motors. Milltown kind of slouches down toward the Saints River, the Tar District, and I could see all that smoke against the deepening blue of the spring sky.

Behind me, the dark clouds were still rumbling and rolling, threatening to consume me. I slowed down and started thinking about a place to hide from the inevitable driving rains. There's a popular saying in Ohio that goes: "If you don't like the weather, stick around for about ten minutes and it'll change." If this storm had come a day earlier, it would have been snow. Today, it was nearly sixty before the clouds rolled over and the rain and wind would drop it to nearly freezing.

There weren't a lot of places to hide out there. I was kind of looking for a barn or something, but there weren't any in sight. I didn't think it would be such a good idea to run into the woods if there was going to be lightning. I still had that weightless feeling and I wasn't quite ready for G.o.d to strike me down just yet.

f.u.c.k it, I thought. I didn't care about the storm a half an hour ago, so why the h.e.l.l should I care now.

The f.u.c.kness was going to come. No matter how I combated it, the f.u.c.kness would come. The harder I fought, the worse it would be. Hadn't I battled f.u.c.kness enough for the day? Why not just let it land right on top of me?

I went over to the yellow gra.s.s beside the road and threw myself on the ground. I rolled over on my back and looked up at the sky. I liked the way the sky looked before a storm as much as I did at dawn or sunset. The colors were just as vibrant but they were darker-blue, gray, black. It was the type of thing I imagined b.u.mpkins doing, lying there musing up at the sky except, in the cla.s.sical image of this, it was usually a clear blue day, possibly sparkling, huge fluffy white clouds floating slowly across the sky. How many times was that said in the country, I wondered? "Look at the fluffy white clouds. Look at heaven floating by in the sky." I wondered what life would have been like if we'd never left Farmertown. We didn't have a farm or any f.u.c.kness like that but our house was a lot nicer and the school seemed a lot less violent and everything else didn't seem so threatening either.

I was sure of one thing-if the Clean People had taken me that day, things wouldn't have turned out any better. When I was in the sixth grade at Clinton Elementary, there was a new kid there. The elementary was small enough so whenever there was a new kid who showed up, everyone knew right away who they were. Everyone called this kid Elf because he was so much smaller than the other kids were and his ears were sort of abnormally pointed. Like a lot of losers did, we started talking to each other because no one else would give us the time of day.

The family had lived in Milltown since I was in the second grade and I had yet to meet a big enough loser to call a friend. I was in sixth grade before Elf came along. And I couldn't really say that Elf was a friend. Losers always have kind of shaky relationships, especially when they're adolescents, which pretty much puts them in the same category as a sociopath. Like they just spend time together until something better comes along, avoiding any real emotional attachments. For instance, I can't remember Elf's real name. He probably wouldn't remember my name at all.

Anyway, Elf had been through one of those blobbification programs. He was actually taken out of his home. The people who took him away from his folks though, he didn't call them the Clean People. He said his father called them the Ringmasters. Elf really didn't find out why he was taken out of the house until he went to live with the new people. They had told Elf how glad he should be to be living with them.

Apparently, his real parents didn't send him to school. I always thought that was weird because Elf was probably the smartest kid in the sixth grade. It sounded like Elf's real parents were fantastic. He couldn't stand the new parents. They already had three kids of their own and didn't really pay any attention to Elf. He said they only took him in so they could get paid for it. They left most of the discipline up to their oldest son, who would lock Elf in a closet just for the h.e.l.l of it. Just like I had imagined, Elf was their pet, something cute and new for the family to fawn over for a few weeks until they realized he had needs like every other living thing.

Elf's real mother stayed home all day with Elf and they had their own school, without the distractions of the other kids. The most fantastic thing was that Elf's dad was a professional clown. Elf said his dad thoroughly enjoyed being a clown. Sometimes he wouldn't change his clothes when he came home from clowning. In fact, sometimes when his dad came home, Elf and his mother would dress like clowns before they all sat down to dinner. Elf's dad told him the only thing funnier than watching a clown was actually being a clown. Elf enjoyed dressing like a clown but he still had more fun watching his dad. Elf said dressing like a clown made him feel like he had to perform, like he was somehow obligated to entertain his parents. Like I said, Elf was the smartest kid I knew. These were the things Elf talked about. It wasn't until years later that I realized he could have been lying to me. Not about his being taken from his parents, I'm pretty sure he was telling the truth about that, but what his parents were actually like before he was taken away.

The new parents had also told Elf that his old house was a complete and total wreck. Elf said he was upset when he had to leave the house because, ever since he was able to pick up a crayon, the parents had let him draw on the walls. Just before he was taken away, Elf was heavy into magazines and was working on a giant collage in his bedroom. Even in the sixth grade, Elf could see that the walls of his house were going to be his life's work. Until being yanked out, he said he felt like that was what he was chosen to do.

About the other messes, Elf said his dad couldn't understand the point of putting anything back when you were just going to be getting it right back out. Shelving merely eliminated the wall s.p.a.ce, which was invaluable for Elf's artistic endeavors. If they decided they didn't want something anymore, they would set it out on the curb for someone else to take. Also, through the week, they just threw all their trash out the backdoor and made this big pile. At the end of the week they would rake it all up and burn it. Elf's dad told him if they put all their stuff in the trashcan it would eventually just be buried into the earth. Elf's dad also had a hatred of trashbags. He said if humans weren't careful, they would find themselves living on a giant trashbag.

If there was one thing I didn't like about Elf, it was that he talked about himself too much. I would rather have known he was making everything up. While he knew virtually nothing about me, I had a firm handle on his life history. But I liked Elf. It's always seemed like everyone has annoyed me in some way or the other.

One day at school, Elf talked about running away. I think Elf had seen too many movies. He seemed to think he would be able to go to some large city and be taken in by some fabulously rich family who had always wanted a child. He said he wanted to go to New York. He'd heard that was where you could paint and get paid for it. Also, a lot of the trains that came through Milltown had elaborate spraypainted designs on them. He said if no one would buy his paintings then he would be perfectly happy spraypainting those trains and maybe walls and subways also. He said it would be like starting his life's work over again except, this way, the whole country would be able to see it. It always amazed me how serious Elf was. Lying there beside the road and waiting for those black clouds to break over my body, I didn't have any more plans or ideas than I did on that sixth grade playground talking to Elf. The next day, after telling me about running away, he wasn't at school. I never saw him again. I hoped he made it to New York. I hoped he was able to make it. I hoped he was able to make himself weightless enough to do whatever it was he wanted to do.

I never told anyone he had mentioned running away, not even the mother and father. When I thought about that, I wondered if Elf wasn't a rent-a-kid. That's what happens to the children the social services take. They don't always put them up for adoption into good homes. That usually only happened to babies. An older child was usually put into foster care, rented out. And maybe Elf knew he was like a book that had lain around the house too long. Maybe he knew he was going back to the library and decided to make it sound romantic and grand. No doubt the orphanages were just like a library. When a book first comes out, there is a waiting list for it. Two years later, people will deny they'd ever read the thing in the first place.

Even though that was most probably the truth, Elf's present parents simply returning him after they'd paid off the mortgage on the house or something, I didn't want to believe it. I realized that, more than anything, more than the f.u.c.kness or the parents or miserable little Milltown Middle, I was tired of reality. Maybe everything outside of reality was a lie but, lying there on the ground, I realized I needed all those fantasies. I needed Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I needed to believe the movies were just like real life. I needed to believe people weren't judged by how much money they made or how much schooling they'd had. I needed to believe the moon was made of cheese. Maybe I even needed to believe the parents were always right and maybe I even needed a G.o.d to pray to.

Maybe I needed it or maybe I needed to deny it all. There was a rip somewhere in the middle of my body or my brain-half of it said I needed to believe everything and the other half said I shouldn't believe any of it. Was it a breakdown? That's what it felt like except I thought of it as more of a meltdown. Like everything that had ever been said to me, everything I'd ever done, every feeling I'd ever felt-all pressed down on me. I felt it enter my skin and crawl around in my veins. I felt all the f.u.c.kness beating a tattoo against my bones.

The whumming clanged along in my skull, a black death train. Nausea wrestled with my stomach and fought its way up to the back of my throat.

What came out was a shriek.

I raised myself up to my knees, holding my whumming head with both hands. The storm broke, the rain a distant whisper over the hills before drumming down on my face. Wicked lightning snapped, a jagged blue across the black of the sky.

"Why the h.e.l.l is this happening to me!" I shouted at the clouds.

I grabbed the horns and wrestled with them. Were they fate, handed down to me? If so, maybe this would be my last tangle with it, the last chance to change it. Violently, I tugged and pulled at them with every ounce of strength I had. I flopped all around on the wet ground, splashing around on the gra.s.s as I tried to brace myself against the ground, pulling and pulling to get them off.

It was hopeless. Exhausted, I sprawled back down on the gra.s.s, opening my eyes wide and letting the cold rain cleanse them, wash the burning away.

A car sped by and a McDonald's sack hit me in the face.

I stood up on trembling legs. My skin felt hot against the rain.

Maybe it was fate, I thought. Maybe I didn't have any will of my own. But there were directions. Above all the contradictory voices there was that singular feeling I felt, more and more, like I had to listen to. I knew I still had to get to the Tar District and, amazingly, I still felt weightless.

Chapter Thirteen.

Johnny Metal Maybe it was just the storm but it seemed like it was getting dark incredibly early. Of course, I had no real idea of what time it actually was. For all I knew, I could have lain down by the road for a half an hour or three hours. I didn't know and I didn't really care. Maybe I cared too much. I don't know. It seemed like as the sky got darker, my mood darkened also. The weightlessness was replaced with some sort of grim determination. The rain had tapered off a little. The lightning and thunder had rolled on. In the distance I could see the depressing yellow glow of the Tar District, the drizzle and mist creating tainted haloes around the street lamps.

Pretty much what I did was just stay on the state route. Honestly, I don't really know if it was Milltown that was curved or if it was the state route. One time, when we were still living in Farmertown, Racecar drove us out for a vacation on the East Coast. I remember we took all state routes because the mother wanted to see all the historical small towns of Eastern America for some reason I now found vaguely obscene. I remember it so well because Racecar was mad that he couldn't drive on the highway.

"If we'd taken the highway we coulda been there by now on half the gas."

He decided to elaborate on this theory when we were stuck at a traffic light at the end of a long line. "You wanted your chance to see the small towns, well, here you go. If you want to, you could probably get out and catch some local color before we ever get movin again. d.a.m.ned state routes."

"Oh, Carl, relax," the mother said.

Perhaps from that experience, I should have known that all state routes were, in some form or the other, d.a.m.ned. I could still hear the click of the father's cigarette lighter, becoming more incessant as we got closer to Maine. Eventually he just lit one right off the other. He certainly didn't do a very good job of relaxing.

I felt kind of like the mother and the father as I slurped along the side of that road. All those conflicts that had first started a while ago were still raging along inside of me-half of them driving me onward, telling me I had to get to the Tar District and whatever wild bleak yonder lay after that and the other half telling me I should just relax, soak it all up.

"These are the best days of your life," I laughed to myself.

I still wondered if I cared about what was happening to me at all or if I cared too much. Maybe it was better not to care. None of the f.u.c.king blobs cared-they didn't care about anything. And there was something about their not caring that made them perfectly happy.

That kind of brought me back to the question of what the h.e.l.l I was really doing. Was it some sort of moral dilemma or some sort of quest for freedom? I thought I was really too young to be having a moral dilemma and I guess it could have been both but those sets of voices in my head or body wanted things to be one way or another and they wanted those things to be in direct opposition to each other. A moral dilemma became a moral crisis. A quest for freedom became a violent and binding struggle.

Did Pearlbottom ever have a moral dilemma? I doubted it. I mean, the f.u.c.king blob devoured livestock in the hallway, for f.u.c.king Chrissake. And that fata.s.s Swarth and his merry gang of Marlboro men. The only moral dilemma they had was when they raped someone, if they should do it single-handedly or if they should have their friends help. I was certain the only dilemma Mary Lou ever had was whether she should wear red or hot pink. I'm pretty sure there was a time when the parents had had moral dilemmas, but the mother had since used alcohol and a vigorous zest for cleaning to take her mind off any questions of morality. The father channeled all of it into hate-pure, unadulterated, stumpy hate.

Whatever it was I was feeling, it certainly wasn't weightlessness. Not anymore. It was now like some kind of heavy soulhurt.

I was in a daze, just about ready to enter the Tar District. I stood hypnotized by the closeness of the dingy brown buildings. The storefronts were all adorned with outdated neon signs. I was sure all of these places were still open. Unlike the Historic District of Milltown, there weren't 9-5 businesses like insurance agencies and banks. The Tar District was bars and tattoo parlors and bars and pool halls and triple- X video places and bars and p.a.w.nshops and bars and check cashing places and 24-hour diners for people to sober up in after the bars closed. I stood just outside that sickly yellow glow, watching the distant images of people shuffling around. According to the mother, these people were all either drunk or high on crack. A giant wave of depression washed over me. So this was where I wanted to come. This is where the inner feeling brought me. I felt both afraid and pathetic. Was I going to be one of them? Relax, I told myself, you're just here to meet your Uncle Skad.

But what if he's one of them?

And then I was lost, frozen. I stood there staring into the Tar District, nearly legendary for its seductive cruelty, and was completely unable to move.

I don't know how much time pa.s.sed before I was finally jolted alive by an excruciatingly loud train horn. I realized that I was standing maybe five feet away from the tracks.

For those who haven't lived right next to train tracks, as I had for the past several years, a train's sound seems to be made only of the whistle, somewhere far off in the distance, dragging its mysterious freight through the thick night air. During the day, some other distraction could keep you from noticing the sound at all. But a train's sounds are really deafening. There's the whistle, sure, but it is augmented, as though it's funneled through a bullhorn. And there are other sounds, almost as deafening. There's the rumblesqueak of the train itself, shooting along those steel rails, coupled with a nearly constant bell that tingalings throughout the train's entire pa.s.sing. Standing there, so close to the train, I was still overwhelmed by how loud it was. This one wasn't going very fast. I figured it must have been dragging something away from one of those factories.

I looked to my right, down the train's length. It was a long one. Something else caught my eye. Some dark object, not large enough to be a person, flew off the train, landed in the gra.s.s, and kind of skipped down the small incline there. I took a few steps toward the object, whatever the f.u.c.k it was, before the man flew out nearly right in front of me. He hit the ground with a bit of a grunt and went rolling down the hill, a few feet from the object he'd just hurled out.

I was excited to think this might be my first meeting with an honest-to-G.o.d hobo. Drifter Ken was adamant about being a drifter. According to him, a hobo was more clearly defined as someone who was constantly moving, often traveling in a pack, and usually by train. Sometimes they conjured up lovingly outdated images of a folksy person, a guitar slung over one shoulder, a knapsack tied around a stick slung over the other. Drifter Ken stayed some place until the law ran him out of town and then he want to the next place by foot. I think he liked the outlaw spin placed on drifters.