Suddenly the Cat

Robert Locke

A Ghost in Silence

the original picture book by

Clayton Bess

boblocke@csus.edu

http://webpages.csus.edu/~boblocke/index.htm

A Ghost in Silence

A Ghost in Silence

by Clayton Bess

I felt like a ghost today. All day, walking around school, I felt just like a ghost. No one looked at me. Or if they looked, they didn't see me. Nobody knew who I was. Or if they knew me, they didn't call me by name. Or if they called me by name, they didn't know it was me, a ghost, and not Dillon.

Yesterday I didn't even know myself. What I mean is that yesterday I knew my name was Dillon Moore, but I didn't know who Dillon Moore was. I knew I was the son of Chaswick Moore and Linda Dillon Moore and the brother to Chazz Moore the baseball legend of Hanover High, but I didn't know I was a ghost.

Hanover High is where they tell me I'll go. "That's where you're going, Dillon, when you get old enough," is what my mother always tells me when we drive past. That's what you do when you're a kid growing up in Hanover. First you go to Hanover Elementary, where I'm going now. Then you go to Hanover Middle School and then you go to Hanover High.

"And you're going to be as big and bright a star as Chazz," my Dad always tells me, "You're going to be such a star you're going to light up the night. You're going to follow in your famous brother's famous footsteps."

But today I wasn't so sure. It didn't seem to me like ghosts would be welcome at Hanover High. In fact, it didn't seem to me like I would ever even get to Hanover High, or that I would ever even get through this awful day.

This awful day came after last night's awful night, Sunday night, usually the best night of the week, the night that Chazz comes home for dinner, the night my mother's eyes seem to have a couple of zillion stars in them, the night my dad can't stop talking, the night Chazz makes my heart beat so fast, just by being there across the table, that I think I may throw up all over the table. Then when Chazz gets up to leave, and my mother loads him down with leftovers, and my dad pretends to have a boxing match with him at the front door, and then I watch Chazz go down the walk and get into his car and drive away, my heart pinches up until it hurts. That's because we all love Chazz so much.

Or we used to love him. Until last night. Until awful last night.

Last night at the dinner table Chazz seemed to be the same old Chazz. Maybe he was a little weird, now that I think back on it. Maybe he was a little quiet. Then, just at the end of the meal, just as Mom and Dad were about to push their chairs back from the table, Chazz said, "Mom. Dad. Dillon," and he looked at each one of us. "I've got something to tell you. I've been wanting to tell you a long time, and I thought Sunday night would be the best time."

My mom looked down at her plate and put her finger over a nick in the edge. My dad folded his napkin. I looked down at Rumble, my cat, who was sitting at me feet, with his eyes curved down and his lips curved up, the way he grins. Chazz kept talking. I don't remember any more of Chazz's words, not exactly. But he told us he was living a lie, and he told us he couldn't live a lie any more, and he told us he was gay. I kind of knew what that meant. I mean, I do know what that means. But I kind of don't. I think I mostly don't. No one in our family has ever talked about it before.

But Chazz didn't get very far before my mom stood up and took the plate with what was left of the roast beef and walked into the kitchen. She turned her back on Chazz and talked over his voice. "No, you are not," she said.

"Go up to your room, Dillon," my dad said to me, and when I started to ask why, he raised his voice. "I said go up to your room, and I mean now!" I started to leave the table but Chazz was trying to say something about how he wanted me to stay and hear. My dad said in like a whisper. "And you shut up in front of your brother like that. He's just a kid."

"Dillon, stay, please," my brother said to me, and he looked right in my eyes, and his face was red, and he was sweating. He really wanted me to stay, and I really wanted to stay.

But my father got to his feet and screamed at me with the veins popping out on his forehead and in his neck. "I said go to your room, Dillon!"

Rumble jumped out from under the table and ran up the stairs and I started up after him, but then there was a crash in the kitchen like Mom dropped the plate, and I stopped. Then more crashes. Dad went to the door and looked into the kitchen. The crashes stopped. My dad stood there a couple of seconds, then he said in a quiet voice to my mom, "Are you all right?" I couldn't hear anything. My dad turned to Chazz. "You. Look what you've done. Go home now."

"You think about it, Dad," Chazz said. "We'll talk about it later."

"No." My dad pointed at my brother and came back to the table. "You. You are not a faggot. You can't be. You hear that? You are not!"

"No, I'm not a faggot," Chazz said, and he looked just exactly like my dad, face to face across the table. "I'm gay."

"You get that out of your head. And when you do, then you come back here and you apologize to your mother. Don't you dare do this to her."

Then my dad looked over and saw me on the stairs. He didn't say anything. He didn't yell at me again. But I ran up the stairs. I ran to get away. In my room, everything was silence. Rumble was on my bed, up against the pillows, blinking at me. I scratched his head and pretty soon he started to rumble. Rumble was born on the same day I was, but everyone says that he is an old cat now, but I'm not old. I'm just a kid.

At breakfast, no one talked. I went to school. At school I was a ghost. At recess, all the guys were playing and they were yelling at each other, "You fag!" the way they do when somebody messes up. They say it all the time, but now I knew they were making fun of my brother.

At lunch I went back to the room early to get some silence. Mrs. Whitehall looked at me weird. "What's the matter with you?" she said. She's usually nice. Maybe she was trying to be nice.

I said, "Nothing."

"You don't look so good."

"What's a faggot?" I asked.

Mrs. Whitehall looked at me hard and then looked away and pressed her lips together in a couple of wrinkled bunches the way she does when she wants you to know that you've messed up. "That's not a word we use," she said.

"They use it on the playground."

"Who does?"

"Everybody does."

"Promise me that you won't use that word ever again, Dillon. It's not nice, and we don't use it. We don't even think it."

I nodded my head. And that was supposed to mean that I understood. But I didn't understand, not really. My brother is living a lie. He is a faggot, but my dad says, and my brother says, that he's not a faggot. And we can't talk about it.

I went back onto the playground. I saw Principal Peabody. "The principal's your pal," everybody's always saying. But he never seems much like a pal to me, and so I decided not to go talk to him. Instead I walked to the public library, which is right next door to the school. We are allowed to go there at lunch time if we don't go in gangs and if we don't make trouble for Mary Moppin.

Mary Moppin is this really nice woman who works in the kids' section. She's always giving you a book you'll like to read and then talking to you about it afterwards. She tells some of the kids, like me, that it's all right to call her Mary, but my mother told me that it's rude for kids to call grownups by their first name, and so I call her Mary Moppin. I went up to her now and said, "Hi, Mary Moppin."

"Hi, Dillon Moore," she said back and smiled the way she does.

"Do you have any good books on faggots?" I asked.

Mary Moppin looked at me with almost exactly the same look in her eyes as in Mrs. Whitehall's eyes. She said, "Do you mean gay people?"

"Yes," I said. "Gay."

Mary Moppin was looking right at me. She opened her mouth and closed it a couple of times like she had a lot of words and she was trying to find the right ones. "Not ... for your age," she said.

"How come?"

"They don't make them."

"Why not?"

"It's complicated."

I didn't say anything, but I wanted something more. I think Mary Moppin knew what I was thinking because she said, "Wait here a second." She went into one of the back rooms, and pretty soon she came back with two books for kids. One of them was called Heather Has Two Mommies and the other was called Daddy's Roommate. "You have to read them here," she said. "You can't check them out."

"Why?" I said.

"Because they're special books," she said.

"What makes them special?"

"Well, the truth is, every time we put these two books on the shelf, they get stolen. Then we have to buy new copies."

"People steal books out of the library?"

"Sometimes."

"Because they want them so much?"

"No, because they don't want them, but they don't want other people to see them, so they steal them. That's why we keep these two books locked up."

I took the books to a table and read them. They were short and easy, and I was able to finish them before lunch period was over. When I gave them back to Mary Moppin, she said, "Did they help you with your question?"

"I don't think so," I said. "They're for little kids. But they were pretty good books. I wouldn't steal them, though."

And I went back to my class, feeling even more like a ghost. I was the brother of something so bad that no one could talk about it, and books about it had to be locked up.

There was this other thing I was wondering, too. Chazz is my brother. We look a lot alike. That's what people tell us all the time. Same eyes, same hair. People even tell us that we walk alike and talk alike and stand alike and sit on a chair alike. So, what if we're gay alike? What if I'm a faggot, too, and living a lie?

The bell rings and school is out and I make a split-second decision. One second I'm at baseball practice with my mitt, and the next second I'm talking to Coach West and I'm telling him that I can't practice today because I've got to go see my brother. I tell him my brother's got an emergency. I guess that's not a lie. And the next second after that I'm running to catch the bus headed downtown.

I know how. I've done it before. My mother told me how, and she let me go once on my own and said it would be good experience, and she gave me notes for the bus drivers. It's just two buses you have to remember. And I've got the money because I took extra money out of my stash this morning before I left for school. So now I know. And I knew right from the start of this awful ghost day. I knew in the back of my head that after school I was going to catch the bus to go see Chazz.

There's a policeman giving a ticket to a guy on a motorcycle in the street in front of Chazz's apartment. The policeman looks up at me weird, like maybe I'm breaking some law by walking down the street. Maybe kids walking on the street are somehow bad and the police can give the kid a ticket. I start up the steps to Chazz's apartment, keeping one eye on the policeman. The front door is open with only the screen door latched, and I can hear voices inside. The front room is empty and I can see through the kitchen doorway that someone's got his feet up on the kitchen table, which is this old table that Chazz bought at the garage sale where he bought my mitt for me. And through the kitchen doorway I can see this baseball being tossed back and forth across the table.

I say, "Hey! No throwing baseballs in the house, and get your shoes off the table." The voices stop. The feet come off the table and then Chazz comes into the kitchen doorway, and then this other guy comes and stands behind him.

"Hey, it's my brother, Dillon," Chazz says and he comes to the front door and unlatches it and says, "Hey, Dill."

"Hey," I say back. And then I don't know what to say next, and suddenly I can't help it but I start crying like a baby. It's stupid to cry like a baby and I can't tell you why I did that, only that I did. And I just couldn't stop. And I hated it.

"Hey, hey, Dilly, come on in here," Chazz says and pulls me inside. The next thing I'm sure of, I'm sitting at the table in the kitchen and Chazz is getting me a soda out of the refrigerator and this other guy is standing looking at me. The guy's name is Kenny, Chazz tells me, and Kenny's all grinning at me, but not in a mean way.

"Let's take Dillon out where it's cool, Chazz," Kenny says. "I'll show you my fountain, Dillon." And he opens the back door and I go down the steps and Kenny points to this fountain that he's made out of a garden hose and some rocks. He turns it on. It splashes nice, and it's nice to be in the shade of the big trees, at Chazz's apartment, and having a soda with Chazz, and this guy, Kenny. And pretty soon I'm not feeling so stupid anymore.

Then Chazz says to me, "Sup?"

"Sup with you?" I say back. "Sup with last night?"

"Well, did you understand what I was trying to tell all of you?"

"Yeah."

"That I'm gay?"

"Yeah. Sup with that?"

"And Kenny's my partner. You understand that?"

"Sure, if you say so."

"I love Kenny."

"And I love Chazz," Kenny says. "Chazz is my partner."

"Well," I say, "I love Chazz, too. Chazz is my brother. Only I'm not so sure about that any more."

"That you love me?"

"That you're my brother. Mom and Dad are weird. I think maybe they're dropping you out of the family."

"Did they say anything to you about me?"

"No. They're not talking at all. Are you coming for dinner next Sunday night? You're not, are you?"

"I don't know. I'll have to see if they invite me. Us," he says, and he nods his head to Kenny. "I want them to invite me and Kenny together." Then he turns to Kenny and says to him, "But they didn't even give me a chance to tell them about you."

"It's going to take some time," Kenny says. "It did with my folks."

"I don't think so," I tell them. "That's not what Dad said last night. I think you're just going to have to get it out of your head, Chazz." I take a drink of my soda and nod my head. That's what Dad said, and it makes good sense to me.

Chazz looks at me a long time. Finally he says "Why do you hold that soda in your left hand, Dill?"

"Because I'm left-handed."

"What if I told you to hold it in your right hand?"

I take the soda from my left hand and hold it in my right hand. "No problem. But why?"

"What if I said to never hold a soda in your left hand again? What if I told you never to write another word with your left hand? That you can't ever draw another picture with your left hand? That you have to get yourself a new right-hander mitt, and that you always have to throw with your right hand from now on? That you can't use your left hand, ever again?"

"Well, but that would be stupid. That wouldn't be fair. It would be mean."

"What if I told you to do it or else you wouldn't ever see me again?"

"But that's none of your business."

"I'm your big brother. I'm smarter than you are. I care about you. I know what's best for you."

"But you're wrong. If you care about me, let me use my left hand, Chazz. I'm no good with my right hand."

Chazz looks at me a long time. And then I understand what he means, sort of. He comes over to me and smacks me on the shoulder with his right hand and says, "Hey, you're my kid brother, and you've got a great left hand, and you're going to be the greatest southpaw they ever had at Hanover High." Then he takes the soda out of my right hand and puts it in my left.

This is when I notice for the first time that Chazz is right-handed. I never noticed that before. Or I never paid attention because it didn't seem all that important. But now I'm thinking something more. But I don't know how to say it out loud. I say, "You're right-handed, and I'm left-handed."

Chazz watches me. He says, "Yeah?"

"Well," I say. "I mean, a lot of people say we're a lot alike. And so, I'm just wondering, you know."

"You mean about whether or not you're gay?"

"Well, we're a lot alike. I mean, how do you know?"

"You just know. And if you don't know, chances are it's not time for you to know. Or there's nothing to know. Chances are you're probably straight and you just don't know it yet."

"What do you mean, straight?"

"Like Mom and Dad, like Aunt Ruth and Uncle Bill, and most of the people who get married and have kids."

"Well, when did you know?"

"Oh, I was a lot younger than you. I was in second grade, and I know it was second grade because we were living in that place over on Madison and we moved from there when I was in the middle of the second grade. I remember walking down the sidewalk and there was this bigger kid walking up ahead of me. And I had some feelings about that kid. I didn't understand then, but I do now."

"Did you feel like a ghost?"

"A ghost? No."

"I felt like a ghost today, all day."

"I've felt like that," Kenny says. "It's when people don't see you, right, Dillon?"

"Yeah, and the silence, and how no one talks. Chazz is my brother, and he said he was living a lie, and all this time I didn't know him, so he was like a ghost to me, and I was like a ghost to him."

"You know me," Chazz says.

"Now I do."

"That's the whole point, Dill. That's it, right there. That's why I wanted to talk to you last night, and Mom and Dad. Now you know me. And now we don't have to have silence anymore, you and me."

I think about that for a while. Then I think, yeah. Then I say, "Okay, then, what are we going to do about Mom and Dad?"

"Well, Dill, I guess that's not anything you have to do anything about. I guess that's up to me."

I think about that. Then I say, "Okay, then, I guess I can go home then."

"Sure," Chazz says. "Whenever you're ready."

I'm still thinking though. I say, "You could give me a ride home, if you wanted, Chazz. You and Kenny, if you wanted. You don't have to come in. If you don't want to. They might see you through the window."

Chazz thinks about this. "Yeah," he says. "We could do that. Okay, Kenny?"

Kenny thinks about it, too. "Okay," he says.

"Okay," I say. "I guess I'm ready."

The End

Contact: Clayton Bess

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