Cruise Control Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Antonia Markiet

  EPIGRAPH

  “… the possibility of the miracle is here with us

  almost every day …”

  —Charles Bukowski, “60 Yard Pass”

  From War All the Time:

  Poems 1981–1984

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Q&A with Terry Trueman

  Excerpt from Life Happens Next

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  Back Ad

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  My only brother is a veg. Yep, a full-fledged, drooling, fourteen-year-old idiot. If you were to call him that, you’d have a big problem on your hands—namely, me! But in fact, that’s what my bro is. His name is Shawn, and he’s got a totally whacked-out brain.

  My name is Paul, but don’t call me Pauly. I mean never. Two things annoy me more than anything else. First, anybody being mean to my brother, second, being called Pauly.

  Shawn lives with us—my sister, Cindy, and my mom, Lindy, and me—in our house here on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. My dad, a piece of butt fluff named Sydney McDaniel, moved out on the rest of us a long time ago. After he left, he wrote a poem about my brother, won a dumb-ass Pulitzer Prize, got all famous, and now thinks he’s cool. My dad wouldn’t stay with us and help us take care of my brother—no, he left me to handle all that so he could jet around and make a bunch of money whining about his tragic plight. He makes me want to puke. In case this isn’t clear yet—I pretty much hate my dad.

  Yeah, I’ve got what you might call a bad temper. Officially, I suppose you could say it’s an “anger management” problem, although I’ve never had to go talk to a school counselor or anybody about it. Hey, it’s not as big a problem for me as for the guys whose butts I kick. And every time I lose my temper and worry that I’m going too far, all I have to do is think about my old man, and bam, it’s like hitting my violence refresh key.

  My brother, Shawn, the veg, is sitting across the room from me right now. He’s in his wheelchair, sitting where Mom always sets him, in front of the window looking out at the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound. There’s this big strand of spit hanging off Shawn’s lower lip down onto the front of his T-shirt and coveralls. Shawn’s T-shirt is a Denver Broncos–Orange Crush number, about twenty years old. I think it used to belong to my dad. Dad left lots of his useless junk here when he moved out.

  Shawn’s also wearing special coveralls because he wears diapers and these coveralls have tear-apart inseams—you know, like the Velcro tear-apart warm-ups they give you for sports. Why Mom doesn’t use regular warm-up pants, so that Shawn doesn’t look like such a totally messed-up dweeb, is a mystery to me. I even gave Mom two pair of my old warm-ups that I had left over after my sophomore and junior varsity b-ball seasons. No good. Mom’s committed to making sure Shawn looks moronic, and he does.

  Now Shawn is going “ahhhhhh … ahhhhhh” over and over again, just making noise to entertain himself. He does this a lot; it’s actually pretty irritating. Shawn is “profoundly developmentally disabled.” That’s what the doctors call him. He can’t feed himself, walk, talk, or do anything at all. Yep, my bro’s a veg.

  It’s funny, though, that in some ways I sometimes kind of envy Shawn. He doesn’t have a clue in the world about what’s happening around him. He just sits there and drools and goes “ahhhhh” all day. He doesn’t worry about the stuff that makes my life crazy, like what college might take him or whether he’s going to get an athletic scholarship, or anything at all. My life, a lot of the time, feels like a car roaring down the freeway in cruise control, where you don’t even have to touch the gas, only I’m on bald tires going 120 miles per hour, wild-ass flying, and I have no idea where I’m headed, and maybe the cruise control is broken and I can’t even slow down. Shawn never worries about that kind of crap. He can’t worry about anything, since he’s got no brain.

  Suddenly there’s a huge gasping sound and I know that it’s not quite true that Shawn has no brain. You can’t have a seizure, like he’s having right now, if you don’t have any brain at all. I walk over to Shawn. His seizure, something they call a grand mal, starts with a crazy-sounding laugh and a strange, completely weird smile. But now his face is twisted and quivering, lips a bluish-purple color, eyes staring and glazed over. His arms, hands, and legs shake and vibrate as the electrical crap in his brain slams his body. There’s a sickening odor coming from him, like the smell of vomit. As I reach his side, I hear him choking and gagging.

  I touch his head gently, letting my hand rest above his ear, and now I brush his hair back off his forehead like I’ve seen Mom do a thousand times when she’s helping him through a seizure. Saliva pours out of his mouth, and for almost a whole minute, since that first gasping sound, he can’t breathe. His face turns redder and redder until finally he gasps loud again and collapses into his chair. He starts to breathe normally and his color turns a yellowish pale. Every time this seizure crap happens, I worry about what if he doesn’t start breathing again.

  So Shawn’s got a brain all right—a useless one that does nothing but hurt him.

  “I sometimes kind of envy Shawn”? Right—what the hell was I thinking, especially since I’m the guy most other kids envy?

  At the risk of sounding full of myself (hey, it’s not bragging if you can back it up), I’m the best athlete in our school. I was last year too, even though I was only in eleventh grade then. I’ve been the starting quarterback on our football team since halfway through our sophomore year. I’m starting point guard and captain on our basketball team, and I play third base, the hot corner, on our baseball team. If you asked any kid in our school who is the studliest jock, they’d tell you it’s me. I also get straight As. Sorry, but it’s all true.

  How sick is this: I’m the major jock-stud in a high school of over eighteen hundred kids, but my brother has the brain of a badminton birdie and a body to match. I’ve got everything and he’s got nothing. I’m a three-year, three-sport letterman and Shawn can’t even stand up! Like I said, sick, huh?

  Sometimes life really sucks!

  CHAPTER TWO

  Like I said, I’ve got a temper. It’s so bad, it makes me sick sometimes. Last summer these two bullies were picking on Shawn, and I almost burned them alive. Really, I flipped out and poured gasoline all over them and then tried to set them on fire. Only my sister, Cindy, stopped me from doing it. Hey, they were picking on little messed-up, in-a-wheelchair, idiot Shawn—these two wads were flicking a Bic lighter right under Shawn’s chin and laughing at him! But worse than my nearly killing them—something else happened that day that I don’t talk about. Maybe that’s why I’m so pissed off all the time, but I don’t know for sure and I don’t even like to think about it, so never mind.

  But being the brother to a kid like Shawn isn’t easy. I love hi
m because he’s my brother, but he can’t do or feel anything, I mean anything, and it’s hard to love someone who can’t love back. Then, of course, you feel like a total butt wad to say something like that because it basically means that the only reason you love somebody is to get their love in return, which is pretty selfish. There’s probably some big psychological explanation to why fighting, even though I hate it, sometimes feels so good to me and why I often think about Shawn and my dad and our family being so messed up when I’m kicking the crap out of somebody—but to be honest, I don’t really care about psychology. All I know is that sometimes I feel like I’m going to explode, and fighting, as sick as it feels afterward, gives me some kind of weird relief.

  My baddest fights actually happen in my dreams. In these dreams, a lot of the times it’s my dad and me going at it, and he’s tough and tall and stronger than he is in real life, and he’s hurting me. Shawn is usually there, sitting back in his wheelchair, real quiet, just watching us. But finally I always get the upper hand on my old man, and as I’m pounding on him, he wants me to quit. But no matter how much he begs, no matter how hurt he is, I can’t seem to stop. These dreams are nightmares really; sometimes I’ve got blood all over my hands and Dad’s face is being shredded. It’s always ugly and messy and horrible.

  Why do I hate my dad so much? Isn’t it obvious? He left us. He ran away from Mom and Cindy and me, but most of all from Shawn. How could Dad abandon a kid who needs him like Shawn does? And how can I ever go anywhere or do anything with my life when I’m the only guy left around here? How can I go away to college and leave Mom and Shawn with nobody to watch out for them? My dad is a self-centered jerk. If he didn’t send money every month to pay for our family’s expenses, I’d give him the bloody, vicious ass whippin’ he deserves for ruining my life and for running out on my brother. Since I’m not allowed to kick my dad’s ass, I guess maybe sometimes I take it out on other people.

  But I worry that someday, fighting the way I do, I’m going to go too far and get into serious trouble. So I try to push all this out of my mind and concentrate on sports—where I always work harder than anybody else. Right now, it’s basketball season. I love hoops, and it helps me keep from being crazy.

  What else can I do?

  CHAPTER THREE

  It’s Tuesday afternoon at basketball practice. The way Coach Davis does practice is that when we first come out, he has us all grab the rock and start shooting from various spots on the court. After a few minutes of this shoot-around, once we’re a little warmed up, Coach blows his whistle and everybody stops. Whoever’s holding a ball gets one more shot, and if you make it, the ball is rebounded and tossed back to you, then you take a couple steps back, or to the side, and after somebody else takes a turn, you shoot again. This keeps happening, everybody taking turns back and forth, until you miss. Once you do, you take a slow warm-up jog around the outside of the court. Shoot-around keeps going until everyone has missed and we’re all jogging together. Obviously, the better a shooter you are, the less you have to run. Shoot-around usually lasts for about ten minutes; I like it ’cause I’m a shooter.

  Coach blows his whistle. I have a ball in my hands and Coach yells to me.

  “McDaniel, you’re up.”

  I’m about ten feet out, a little to the right side, and I put up a nice, arching jump shot. Swish.

  Coach yells to Hank Kliment. “The Hankster,” our huge center, is only about six feet away from the backboard, right in front; he puts up one of his classic, beeline brick jumpers that, of course, clanks off the rim. The Hankster is not a shooter. Everybody laughs and Hank moans.

  “Have nice run, ’ster,” somebody yells. Hank gives us all a death-ray stare that makes everybody laugh even more.

  “McDaniel,” Coach calls again. I take a couple steps back and I shoot. The ball ticks the rim just a hair but goes through real easy.

  Coach yells to John-Boy Reich.

  Reich shoots, makes it, and we keep going around.

  Because I don’t miss, I move farther and farther away from the basket with each shot, way off to the left, way off to the right, way behind the key. But the weirdest thing happens. It’s like I can’t miss. I mean, I’m not trying to miss, of course, but most times I would have missed by now. My teammate and best friend, Tim “Tim-bo” Gunther, hangs in with me for a while, hitting six or seven shots before he misses, but after a couple dozen shots, I’m the only guy left shooting. The rest of the guys stop running and watch me. I hit another half dozen shots, and everybody starts to cheer.

  All kinds of strange crap starts going through my head: I think about if I miss, it will mean my dad’s a way cool guy—swoosh. I think about if I make it, it’ll mean I’m gonna get a full-ride scholarship to Georgetown and be the greatest point guard since Allen Iverson—swish. I even think about if I hit this shot, it means that my veg brother will someday learn to talk and walk and be all right—nothing but net. The weirdest thought, though, is impossible to explain—it’s not even a thought, it’s a feeling. What I mean is that it is for moments like this that I love playing sports: Right this second I’m not thinking about Shawn or my dad or anybody or anything; right now, the truth is, it feels like my feet are barely even touching the ground, I’m floating, soaring on the pure energy of this shooting touch. It’s like nothing can hurt me. It feels like I could almost fly....

  Coach interrupts the magic by yelling to me, “One more, hot dog, from the opposite foul line. You make this and we cancel ball breakers at the end of practice.”

  “Ball breakers” are wind sprints, which everyone hates; Coach makes us run them for conditioning. By “opposite foul line,” Coach means that he wants me to shoot a ridiculous seventy-footer, almost the full length of the court.

  I answer Coach, “If I hit it, we cancel ball breakers for the rest of the week.” As team captain, I can jerk his chain a little.

  “It’s a deal,” Coach says, “but you gotta shoot with your eyes closed.”

  A groan goes up from the sidelines, but I give them my oh-ye-of-little-faith look, and everybody shuts up.

  I answer, “You got it.”

  Coach never has us shoot stupid shots like this; he always has us focus on shots that might save a win for us, shots that could actually happen in a game situation. But I hustle down to the opposite foul line and take a couple steps back so that I can really step into the throw.

  I study the distance a little and bounce the ball a couple times. Everybody is quiet. I hear the Hankster and some of the other big guys who really hate ball breakers mumbling prayers, which makes me smile. I look at the basket seventy feet away, get a good read on the distance, then close my eyes; I bounce the ball, take my steps, and loft the shot.

  I keep my head down; I don’t even watch the ball go but just keep my eyes shut, thinking about all the shots I’ve made and about how perfect my touch has been, about flying, soaring, and about how freaky—

  The cheers just about blow me over. You’d think we just won Districts.

  All the guys rush me and start pounding on me.

  Coach smiles and says, “I think you snuck a peek, but I can’t prove it. Okay, slackers, a couple more laps to break another sweat, and if hot-hand doesn’t mind, I think we’ll get on with a little actual basketball practice.”

  As we all start to run, the Hankster jogs up behind me and says softly, “You got us out of ball breakers for a week.... I wanna have your child!”

  Normally this kind of challenge to my heterosexual pride would not be allowed. The Hankster is 6 feet, 9 inches and weighs 286, which wouldn’t dissuade me a bit. But we need the ’ster’s bulk in the middle if we’re gonna win this season, so I’ll let him live.

  John-Boy Reich comes up behind me and says, “That was pretty amazing, bro.”

  I snap back at him, “I’m not your bro.”

  I’ve got a brother, and John-Boy ain’t him. Suddenly somebody shoves me from behind and I look around fast, but it’s Tim Gunther smilin
g at me. Tim-bo says, “Lighten up, man—John-Boy didn’t mean anything bad.”

  I take a couple deep breaths, and I smile back at Tim. I know he’s right. It’s just that word, “bro,” the way people throw it around so off-the-cuff. I hate that. It always reminds me about the incredible unfairness of the world, and about what a sadistic madman God must be to have thrown Shawn and me into the same family—when I think of that crap, all I feel is bummed.

  John-Boy walks away without another word. I’m such a dumb-ass! “Hey,” I yell to him. “You owe me for ball breakers and don’t forget it!”

  He smiles back at me. It’s okay. This time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After practice I walk out of the gym and head for my car. I’ve got an older Honda. It’s not a junker, but it’s not exactly a luxury ride either. I’ve got a stereo system that hits pretty hard, though, so rides home are always one of my favorite times to chill.

  Eddie Farr yells over to me, “Hey, Paul, can I catch a lift?”

  I answer, “Sure.”

  So much for chillin’. The idea of spending any time with Eddie Farr isn’t all that appealing, but what are you gonna do?

  You know how some guys are just so dumb that they can’t seem to help saying moronic things without meaning any harm? Why is it that guys like this are always weak and defenseless, too?

  “How’s your sister?” Eddie asks.

  This is exactly what I mean!

  I know that Eddie would cut off the little fingers of both hands to get into my sister’s pants. He has to know that I know this. Does he really think that I’m going to pimp for him?