Stokeses lived next door to us and I was privy to all kinds of secrets about Timothy that I had absolutely no desire to know. I forbade myself, with an almost religious severity, to show Timothy any kindness or regard. I would never let him sit beside me, at lunch or in class, and if he tried to talk to me on the playground I ignored him; it was bad enough that I had to live next door to him.
It was toward Virginia that Timothy now advanced, a rattling growl in his throat. She drew back behind her girlfriends, and their screaming now grew less melodious, less purely formal. Timothy crouched down on all fours. He rolled his wild white eyes and took a last look around him. That was when he saw me, halfway across the yellow distance of the soccer field. He was looking at me, I thought, as though he hoped I might have something I wanted to tell him. Instantly I dropped flat on my belly, my heart pounding the way it did when I was spotted trying to spy on a baseball game or a birthday party. I slid down into the ravine backward, doing considerable damage to the ramparts of my city, flattening one wing of the imperial palace. All through the ten minutes of growling and alarums that followed I lay there, without moving. I lay with my cheek in the dirt. At first I could hear the girls shouting for Mrs. Gladfelter, and then I heard Mrs. Gladfelter herself, sounding very angry, and then I thought I could hear the voice of Mr. Albert, the P.E. teacher, who always stepped in to break up fights when it was too late, and some bully had already knocked the glasses from your face and sent your books spinning away across the floor of the gym. Then the bell sounded the end of recess, and everything got very quiet, but I just stayed there in the ravine, at the gates of the city of the ants.
As I tried to repair the damage I had done to its walls, I told myself that I didn’t feel sorry at all for stupid old Timothy Stokes, but then I would remember the confused look in his eyes as I had abandoned him to his fate, to all the unimaginable things that would be done to him in the fabulous corridors of the Special School. I kept recalling something that I had heard Timothy’s mother say to mine, just a couple of days earlier. I should explain that at this point in my childhood I had acquired the shameful habit of eavesdropping on the conversations of adults, particularly my parents, and, worse, of snooping in their drawers – a pastime or compulsion that in recent months had led me to discover nude photographs of my mother taken with my father’s Polaroid; school documents and physicians’ reports detailing my own learning disability, juvenile obesity, hyperactivity, and loneliness; and, most recently, a letter from my mother’s attorney cheerily explaining that if my father persisted in his current pattern of violent behavior he could be restrained from coming anywhere near my mother ever again – a development for which I had on certain bad evenings prayed to God with desperation, but which, now that it had become an actual possibility, struck me as the most miraculous of all the awful wonders set loose upon the world in the course of the past year. There had been no mention in the lawyer’s letter of whether my father would be allowed to come near me. At any rate, I had been hanging over the banister of the hall stairs the other morning, listening in, when Mrs. Stokes – her name was Althea – came over to retrieve a two-hundred-dollar pair of Zeiss binoculars Timothy had given me the day before in exchange for three tattered Mister Miracle comic books and a 1794 one-dollar coin that he believed to be genuine but that I knew perfectly well to have been a premium my father received several years before on subscribing to American Heritage.
“You know,” Althea Stokes had told my mother, in that big, sad donkey voice of hers, “your little Paul is Timothy’s only friend.”
I decided to spend the afternoon in the ravine. The sun started down behind the embankment, and the moon, rising early, emerged from the rooftops of the houses somebody was putting up in front of the school – brand-new split-level houses my mother and her company were having a hard time selling. The moon, I noticed, was not quite full. As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness. The very last line of that letter I’d found among my mother’s papers was “I think we should be able to have this thing wrapped up by November fifteenth.” If this was true, then I had less than one month in which to effect a reconciliation between my parents – a goal that, apart from, wishing for, I had done nothing at all to bring about. Now it appeared that my father would not even be allowed to come home anymore. My fingers grew stiff and caked with clay, and my nose ran, and I cried for a while and then stopped crying, and still it seemed that my absence from the classroom went unnoticed. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. After a while I gave up on my city building and just lay there on my back, gazing up at the moon. I didn’t hear the scrape of footsteps until they were just above my head.
“Paul?” said Mrs. Gladfelter, leaning over the lip of the ravine, hands against her thighs. “Paul Kovel, what on earth are you doing out here?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t hear the bell.”
“Paul,” she said. “Now, listen to me. Paul, I need your help.”
“With what?” I didn’t think she looked angry, but her face was upside down and it was hard to tell.
“Well, with Timothy, Paul. I guess he’s just very wound up right now. You know. Well, he’s pretending he’s a werewolf today, and even though that’s fine, and we all know how Timothy is sometimes, we have serious things to discuss with him, and we’d like him to stop pretending for just a little while.”
“But what if he isn’t pretending, Mrs. Gladfelter?” I said. “What if he really is a werewolf?”
“Well, maybe he is, Paul, but if you would just come inside and talk to him for a little bit, I think we might be able to persuade him to change back into Timothy. You’re his friend, Paul. I asked him if he’d like to talk to you, and he said yes.”
“I’m not his friend, Mrs. Gladfelter. I swear to God. I can’t do anything.”
“Couldn’t you try?”
I shook my head. I hoped that I didn’t start crying again.
“Paul, Timothy is in trouble.” All at once her voice grew sharp. “He needs your help, and I need your help, too. Now if you come right this minute, and get up out of that dirt, then I’ll forget that you didn’t come in from recess. If you don’t come back inside, I’ll have to speak to your mother.” She held out her hand. “Now, come on, Paul. Please.”
And so I took her hand, and let her pull me out of the ravine and across the deserted playground, aware that in doing so I was merely proving the unspoken corollary that my mother had left hanging, the other morning, in the air between her and Mrs. Stokes. There was a song about me, too, I’m afraid – a popular little number that went
What’s that smell-o?
Paul Kovel-o
He’s a big fat hippo Jell-O
He’s a snoop
He smells like poop
He smells like tomato beef
Alphabet soup
because at some point in my career I had acquired the reputation, inexplicable to me, for exuding an odor of Campbell’s tomato soup – a reputation that no amount of bathing or studied avoidance of all the brands and varieties of canned soup ever rid me of. As if this were not bad enough, I had to go around with a thick wad of electrician’s tape on the hinge of my eyeglasses and a huge Western-style tooled-leather belt stuffed one and a half times around the loops of my trousers. It had been my father’s belt, and bore his name, Melvin, stamped along its length, in big yellow capital letters set amid bright green cacti, like a cheery frontier invitation for all to come and yank my underpants up into my crack. I sat alone at lunch under an invisible and mysterious hood of tomato smell – a scent dangerously similar to the acrid tang of vomit – walked myself home from school, and figured in all the dramas, ceremonials, and epic struggles of my classmates only in the unlikely but mythologically requisite role of King of the Retards. Timothy Stokes, I knew, as I followed Mrs. Gladfelter down the long, silent hallway to the office, hating him more and more with each step, was my only friend.
He