Читать книгу The Voiceover Artist - Dave Reidy - Страница 8

2

Young Simon

SIMON WATCHED THROUGH his open bedroom door as his mother, May, tried to roust his father from an easy chair.

“I— I— I’ll s— stay h— home with C— Connor,” Frank said, keeping his eyes on the television. “He— he’s s— still f— f— feverish.”

“Connor is coming with us,” May said.

Simon’s father looked up at his wife. “He’s s— s— still sick, m— May!”

“He’s fine, actually. His fever broke last night.”

“H— he should be h— here!” he said. “R— r— resting!”

“Frank,” she said, calmly. “Please.”

Out in the yard, Simon climbed up and into the back seat of the pickup truck and scooted to its far side. He pulled a seatbelt across his lap and buckled it at his right hip. Connor hoisted himself up on the truck step, squealed as he fell forward into the cab, and took the seat next to the near window. May leaned in and drew Connor’s seat belt from its sheath.

“I don’t need the seat belt, mommy,” Connor said.

“Everyone needs a seat belt,” May said.

“Not me, mommy. I can hold on. See?”

“I see,” she said, and clicked the tongue of the buckle into its clasp. May looked up at her older son and found that he was already strapped in safely. “Oh!” she said. “Thank you for buckling yourself, Simon.”

Simon did not reply.

“Next time I’ll buckle myself, mommy,” Connor said.

“Okay,” May said.

Frank covered the three-and-a-half miles to St. Paul’s, the only Catholic parish in Leyton, in less than five minutes, delivering himself and his family to church ten minutes before mass would start. Having unbuckled himself and announced his achievement, Connor was lifted out of the back seat by his mother.

“Whoa!” Connor said. “You’re strong, mommy!”

May laughed. “Well, thank you!”

She extended a hand to Simon, but he ignored it and jumped down to the asphalt. Cloaked in the solitude of his newly adopted silence, Simon felt rugged and brave. No one could make him say how his father had failed him. No one could make Simon say a word.

As they neared the church doors, Frank said, “I— I— I’m having a cigarette.”

“Okay,” May said. “We’ll see you inside.”

“See you inside, daddy,” Connor said, turning his head to smile at his unsmiling father.

On another day, Simon would have gladly followed his father to the patch of grass beside the church doors and pulled needles off the evergreen shrubs while Frank smoked. But today, Simon followed his mother into the flowers-and-old-people smell of the church, hoping that his father felt very much alone.

•••

FEVER AND SORE throat had kept Simon out of second grade the previous Friday and put him in bed early Friday night. Before sunrise on Saturday morning, he walked into the dark living room to find an empty pizza box on the folding tray next to his father’s recliner and, on the couch, a plate with the crusts—Connor never ate the crusts—of three pieces of pizza. Standing with one bare foot on top of the other, Simon fretted that he had missed out on some fun with his father, fun that could neither be recreated nor recouped. Later that morning, Simon heard his mother telling his father that Connor woke up with a throat so sore he wouldn’t talk, and that she’d be taking Connor to see the doctor. Simon was not happy that his brother’s throat was sore, but he was not sad, either. Simon had been sick; now, it was Connor’s turn to be.

When his father went out to rake the leaves in the yard, Simon returned to his bedroom, sat on the bed with his radio in his lap, and listened to the voices. They spoke of football and test drives and lawn tractors. Simon repeated after the voices, the way that Connor repeated after the television characters, and counted how many words he could speak before his stutter caught one in his throat and clutched it tight. Simon’s all-time record was six consecutive, cleanly repeated words. That Saturday morning, his best was three in a row.

When Frank opened Simon’s bedroom door, Simon’s first thought was that he was in trouble.

Frank’s flannel shirtsleeves were cuffed to the elbow and he smelled of wet leaves.

“W— we’re going into t— town,” Frank said.

The moment his father finished speaking, Simon turned off the radio and returned it to the top of his wooden bedside table. Then he hopped down off of his bed and followed Frank out of the house. The leaves from the two big oaks were gone from the front lawn but still littered the larger sideyard, covering most of the orange and yellow blooms of the marigolds in his mother’s garden. A black mound of leaves smoldered, sending wisps of gray smoke into the wind. It seemed strange to Simon that his father was leaving a chore half done, but he didn’t mention it.

Most of the four-mile drive between the Davies residence and Leyton town square was two-lane highway. Simon sat in the front seat, fighting the urge to smile as his mind made a flipbook of the rows of tall, dying corn stalks on either side of the road. It’s not that a trip into town was a rare event. Frank would bring Simon and Connor into town whenever their mother spent the better part of a Saturday at a baby or bridal shower. What made today different was that Connor was not along for the ride, which meant that Simon now had what Connor had enjoyed the night before while Simon lay in bed breaking a fever: their father all to himself.

At the western boundary of incorporated Leyton, Frank slowed at a stop sign and rolled through an empty intersection. To Simon, whose closest neighbor lived an eighth of a mile away, the modest one-story homes that lined both sides of the street seemed to be just inches away from each other. Simon wondered if any of his classmates lived in these houses. He had never been invited to a classmate’s home, and Simon’s own home was, as he’d heard his mother say before, seldom presentable, even if the visitors were just kids.

“Kids have parents,” May would say.

The streets surrounding Leyton’s town square were paved in red brick. As the truck’s worn tires rumbled over the masonry, Simon stared out the windshield, and then his father’s window, at the obelisk at the center of the square. The pointed column reminded Simon of the big monument in Washington, D.C., a picture of which hung above the blackboard in his classroom. Simon figured the smaller version commemorated something, but what was a mystery to him. The idea that he and his father might solve that mystery together made Simon want to smile again.

Frank parked the pickup two storefronts down from the confectioner’s. Simon unlatched the passenger-side door and kicked it open with his right foot. He shoved the door closed, then ran around the front of the truck to the window of the candy store, pressing his nose to the glass and cupping his hands at the side of his head to better see the jars and boxes filled with sweets.

“T— t—”

Take your face off the glass.

Simon knew what his father was trying to say, but he knew better than to do what his father said before he had finished saying it. He kept his face and hands where they were.

“T— take your f— face off that glass.”

Simon stepped back as soon as his father had finished speaking. He eyed the smudges he’d left on the window and felt bad, but figured that trying to wipe them off with the sleeve of his shirt would only make his father angry.

Frank pulled open the candy store’s door, ringing the rusty bells that hung down its interior side. Simon rushed in ahead of him and stood over the central display: clear plastic boxes, four across and six rows high, tiered up and back like stadium seating, each box protecting a different treat from the open air. Simon ogled loose chocolate-covered raisins, chocolate-covered almonds, and malted-milk balls as densely packed and plentiful as the multi-colored plastic balls in the nets at the Chuck E. Cheese in Peoria. There were also individually wrapped hard candies: root-beer barrels, peppermint swirls and butterscotch disks. Beneath one of the scratched plastic box lids were several pounds of cashews, a favorite of Simon’s father.

“C— candy,” Simon remembered his father telling him, “is k— kids’ s— stuff.”

Sensing that his father’s patience for browsing was running short, Simon hurried to the shelves lined with cardboard boxes of wrapped candies he had never seen anywhere outside this store. They had names like Necco and Beemans and Zotz. Something about the names and the letterforms on the wrappers told Simon that these were the kind of candies his father might have enjoyed when he was a kid.

“A— a— all right, ch— choose something,” Frank said.

Simon walked straight to the store’s front counter, no longer a browser but a serious buyer. Suckers were his candy of choice. They were sweet from start to finish, and each had a clean, white paper stick that kept his hands from getting sticky. But what Simon liked best about suckers was his recent discovery that, when he was actively working a sucker, melting its layers of hard sugar with his tongue, people were more likely to ask him yes-or-no questions that he could answer with a nod or a shrug instead of a stuttered word. Only Connor’s presence did more than a sucker to ensure that no one asked Simon to speak. Connor could make himself sound like the cartoon characters on TV and mimic the announcers who narrated his father’s ballgames. Even when Connor spoke in his regular voice, people listened to him, and they laughed right when Connor wanted them to.

Simon stood on his toes and reached into a fish bowl filled with Dum Dums. When he pulled his hand out, he was holding two suckers—one butterscotch-flavored, the other cherry soda. He looked up at his father.

“O— Okay, get ‘em both.”

Simon set both Dum Dums on the glass top of the counter while the bespectacled man behind it rang them up on his mechanical register.

“Fifty cents.”

Frank handed the man two quarters.

“Do you need a bag?” the man asked Simon.

Simon shook his head and grabbed his suckers off the counter.

“Y— you mean, n— no— no thank you.”

Simon turned back toward the man, but did not look up at him. “N— no th— th— tha— thank you.”

“Okay,” the man said. “See you soon.”

Simon followed his father to the door, unwrapping the butterscotch sucker as he walked. Outside, lost in the task of scraping away a piece of waxed paper from the sucker’s upper hemisphere, Simon headed for the truck.

“Th— this way,” Frank said.

Simon’s father was still standing in front of the candy store, jerking his thumb in the other direction. Simon eyed the obelisk and considered asking his father if they could have a look at the inscriptions on its base.

“C— come on, now.”

Walking slowly toward his father, Simon picked the last bit of paper from the sucker and popped the tiny yellow planet into his mouth.

Lately, Simon had been thinking about going silent permanently, whether he had a sucker or not. He recognized that, at first, when he stopped speaking, his parents and teachers and schoolmates would try, with commands and demands and unkind words, to make him talk. Simon also knew that they could not make him speak, that to speak or not was his decision. Simon felt powerful in silence, but he also felt alone. And he worried that Frank would take his silence as an insinuation that he, too, would be better off shutting up than stuttering. Silence was something fun to imagine, something to enjoy with the sweetness of a sucker, but Simon understood that he could not allow himself to go silent forever unless his father went first.

Simon kept his head down, milking the sucker for a slow, steady stream of flavor and watching the backs of his father’s boots. The boots stopped in front of a single cement step.

“Pit—pit stop,” Frank said.

He held open a green door and waved Simon through it. The sign above the door read, The Four Corners.

Simon had been to the Four Corners before. It was dark inside, he remembered, and smelled clean and dirty all at once. He didn’t like this place, but Frank’s hand clamped down on his shoulder, and they were inside before he knew it.

“Hey, Frank,” someone said.

The voice came from one of the three silhouettes at a table toward the back, to the left of the bar. As their faces became visible in the low neon light thrown around them by the beer signs, Simon did not recognize the men from church or school or anywhere. He figured that they worked with his father at the factory, as many parents of his classmates did.

Frank raised one hand to the men and pushed Simon away from them, toward the bar, with the other. “F—fellas,” he said.

Frank lifted Simon up, set him on a barstool directly in front of the television, and took the stool to his son’s left. Peering behind his father’s back, Simon spied on the men at the table. He wished that they would ask his father and him to join them. He wished that the men were his father’s friends. So far as Simon knew, his father didn’t have any friends. Simon imagined that his father felt the same way about men his own age that Simon felt about the kids at school: that they knew too much about him without understanding him at all.

Afraid that his father would somehow read his thoughts, Simon turned away from the men at the back table and followed Frank’s eyes to the small television. Two gray-haired men holding microphones and wearing jackets and ties stared out from the screen, a wide expanse of green spread out behind and beneath them. The bartender stepped over and stood in front of Frank. “What can I get you?”

“W— whiskey. Double.”

The bartender looked at Simon. “How about you, little guy? Want a pop or something?”

Simon locked his lips around his sucker and shook his head.

“No? Okay.”

The bartender poured Simon’s father a double whiskey and served it neat in a cloudy glass.

“Thanks,” Frank said.

“No problem.”

Frank drank down the whiskey and stared up at the television while Simon worked the sucker. When it was roughly half its original size, Simon stashed the head of the candy scepter between his molars and his cheek, hoping to make it last a little longer.

The bartender moved toward Simon’s father, smiling. “Another whiskey?”

“Y— Y— Y—Yeah. And a p— pack of p—Pall Malls.”

Simon stared at his father. Whatever whiskey is, Simon thought, it’s worse for his stutter than beer is.

One of the three men, the one sitting with his back to the wall, spoke to Simon’s father.

“So how you been, Frank?”

Frank turned a few degrees to the left and looked at the men over his shoulder. “N—n— not bad.”

“No?” the man said. “Everything’s good?”

Frank shrugged. “C— c— c— can’t c— c— complain.”

“Sure you can,” the man said. “It just takes you a little longer.”

One of the other men laughed.

Simon felt his father summon all the eloquence he could with a deep, quiet inhalation.

“W— we’re good. Th— thanks.”

The bartender poured another whiskey into Frank’s glass and laid a pack of cigarettes and a green Four Corners matchbook in front of him. Keeping his eyes on the television, Frank unwrapped the cellophane on the pack, flipped open its cardboard lid, and fished out a cigarette. He held the cigarette between his lips, struck a match, and bowed his head to the licking orange flame. His hand was shaking as he waved out the match with more vigor than was necessary, nearly catching Simon’s ear with his elbow.

The men at the table laughed again as one of them poured liquid from a brown bottle into their glasses. Then one of the men, the first one to speak, stared hard at Simon. That’s when Simon realized he had been eyeballing the men again. He looked away as quickly as he could.

“Is that your son, Frank?”

Too late.

Frank exhaled the smoke in his lungs. “Y— y— yes.”

“What’s his name?”

Frank threw his hand up toward the television and yelled, “Oh, c— come on!” at someone or something on the screen.

“What’s your boy’s name, Frank?”

Simon’s father smiled and took another drag from his cigarette. Though the words themselves weren’t mean, Simon heard something unkind in the man’s questions, and neither the football nor the whiskey nor the cigarette had stopped the man from asking them. Frank was finally trying what Simon would have tried first: silence.

“I don’t think his mother would like him being in a bar, would she, Frank?”

Listening to the men laugh, Simon wished that Connor were there. Connor would know what to say. He would answer all the questions and make the men laugh with him, not at him.

With a start, Simon remembered the second sucker—maybe the sucker would stop the questions. Simon pulled the sucker out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and held it in front of his father’s face.

Frank took the Dum Dum and dipped it, bulb first, into his whiskey glass. He stirred the whiskey twice before pinning the paper stick to the side of the glass with his finger and taking another deep sip.

“What’s your name, son?”

Frank stared at the television. Simon tried to read his father’s face for some direction—Answer the question, or Don’t answer the question, or Get up, we’re getting out of here—but he couldn’t tell what his father wanted him to do.

Maybe it’s up to me, Simon thought. Maybe my answering will make them stop.

So Simon pulled the sucker stick out of his mouth and, throwing unhelpful force behind it, started his answer.

“S— S— S—”

“Whaddya know, Frank! He’s part snake!”

The men laughed. Simon’s father didn’t move.

“—S— S— Simon.”

As soon as he had said his name, Simon put the saliva-soaked sucker stick back into his mouth.

“Glad to meet you, Simon,” the man said. “You’re a chip off the old block.”

“Jesus, Artie,” the bartender said, shaking his head but smiling.

Shame rose from Simon’s neck as a kind of heat that warmed his face and ears. He knew the men were making fun of him. Worse, Simon knew that his answering had done no good. The men were not through with him yet.

Simon looked at his father and begged him with his eyes: Say anything that will make it stop.

But Frank stayed silent, right when Simon needed him most, and Simon embraced his own silence as the punishment his father deserved.

•••

THE DAY AFTER Frank took Simon to the Four Corners, May led Connor and Simon into the narthex of St. Paul’s Catholic Church. Two women much older than May, widows who had appointed themselves the parish’s greeters and observers, were standing just inside the door.

“Oh, look, it’s May,” the shorter woman said.

“Hello May!”

“Hi there, Agnes,” May said. “Hello, Bea. How are you?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” said Bea, the shorter one. “Hello, boys.”

“Hello to you!” Connor said.

He arched his back to display his smiling, squinting face to the ladies, who put their hands to their chests and opened their eyes wide.

“Oh my!” Bea said, laughing.

“And how are you today, young man?” Agnes asked.

“This young man,” Connor said, thrusting his thumb against his chest, “is pretty good.”

Again the ladies pressed their fingers to their bony bosoms and laughed.

Simon was used to seeing his brother hold the rapt attention of strangers. Connor’s pronunciation was so exact that he sounded more like a high-voiced adult than a kid. In his head, Simon again paid his younger brother the highest compliment he knew: Connor could be on the radio.

“And how about your brother?” Bea asked, keeping her eyes on Connor. “How is he doing?”

Simon’s mother looked down at him. “How are you, Simon?” she asked, quietly offering Simon the respectful but distressing opportunity to answer the question himself.

As he stood there in silence, wishing he still had the sucker he had wasted on his father the day before, Simon felt Connor’s eyes on him and met them.

“He’s been better,” Connor said.

Though Simon could hear that Connor wasn’t trying to be funny, the ladies laughed again, delighted.

Simon caught sight of his father pacing past one of the anteroom’s windows with his head down and a lit cigarette cupped in his hand. In that moment, Simon wished that he were out on the church lawn with his father. It wasn’t that Simon had forgiven Frank for what happened at the Four Corners—he had not—but Simon was disturbed that even a cloak of silence could not hide his true feelings from his little brother. He wanted a brick wall between himself and Connor’s see-through powers.

“Do you want to know something, ladies?” Connor asked.

“Tell us,” Bea said.

“My mom is really strong.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah. She can carry me!”

“Really!”

“Yeah!” Connor said. He turned to May. “Show them, mommy!”

And before May could answer, Connor threw himself at his mother’s torso. She caught him awkwardly and gathered him up into her arms with a groan.

Bea and Agnes applauded and said, “Well done!”

Connor, now seated on his mother’s left arm, faced the ladies and beamed.

Bea took a halting step toward May to say, “You must be very proud.”

May pulled Simon gently to her side with her free hand. “Oh, I am,” she said.

When she squeezed his shoulder, Simon looked up at May, worried that she expected him to say something. But May smiled without expectation or condition, and Simon understood that his mother had intended for the ladies to see her do so.

“We’ll see you after mass?” May said.

“Oh, of course, dear,” Agnes said. “’Til then.”

“Goodbye, ladies!” Connor said, still beaming.

“Goodbye!” the women said.

Simon’s mother turned toward the sanctuary doors and lowered Connor to the ground with another groan. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s find our seats.”

“But it’s not starting yet,” Connor said.

“It’s starting soon.”

Connor looked back at the dozen or so people—his audience—milling about the anteroom. “I don’t want to go in early.”

“Come on,” May insisted calmly. “We need to say our prayers.”

“I don’t want to say my prayers.”

Holding the interior door with her backside, May ushered Connor through the doorway with a hand between his shoulder blades, and Simon followed her.

Simon knew what praying was, but found it hard to pray at church. How could he be expected to talk to God with all of these strangers around, whispering and sneezing? Simon prayed only when he was alone in his bedroom, with the lights and the radio off. He articulated his wants, worries and thanks in his head only, putting each sentence beyond the reach of his stutter by leaving it unspoken. Kneeling beside May, his chin resting on the back of the pew in front of him, Simon decided that whenever he prayed next, he would start by thanking God for his mother. And when he heard his father coughing as he entered the church, Simon relished the thought that no one—not his father, not God himself—could make him break his silence.