Indentations and Other Stories. Joe Schall
by the lowering volume of his father’s voice. Soon all he heard was the slowing pull and release of the asthma engine in his chest. He reached a comfortable rhythm, getting to where he pretended there were tiny bunches of bubbles packed into the pasta crescents lying somewhere beneath his lungs. With each exhale he managed to release a few bubbles at a time, which rose up to scrape and tickle his throat, then escaped out onto the bed, where they popped and left small damp circles. Now he would be able to fall asleep if he propped himself up on an extra pillow. Now he could pull down the poster and lean his forehead against the blank, cream wall.
Tomorrow, he decided firmly, he would quit the band, take the trumpet to the pet store, leave it by the birdcages, and carry Goldy home in a tiny, fold-out, colored box.
2
No Sheetin Way
The next day was Saturday, so Bub couldn’t quit the band, but his dad stood talking to him in the living room about it anyway. Bub knelt on the floor, folding the newspapers, while Mr. Lilly talked.
“Being in the band is your own business, I guess. Quit if you want, but let’s just get one thing settled right now. If you want to quit the band you’re on your own with it. I can’t go to Mr. Bailey for you. He’s a friend and a colleague. He’ll be surprised, and I’ll be the one who he stares at. You’ve got to do it and tie it all up yourself. Like a package.”
He waited.
“Okay,” said Bub.
“Now next week is the first football game. So do yourself and Mr. Bailey and the whole team a favor and quit on Monday morning first thing if you’re going to do it. If you’re going to go through with it that’s the right way. Or else you should at least stick out the season. And don’t expect me to quit for you. Like with the Boy Scouts. Not this time.”
Bub had stopped folding his papers and was just staring at his father’s mouth, sort of entranced by how the lips never quite seemed to close, yet moved around far too much on the face, always a few utterances ahead of themselves. He knew when his dad was about to end a speech because an odd sort of punctuation started creeping into his lips. A dash here. Two periods in a row there. Something similar to a sputter or a tentative throat-clearing or the beginning of a muffled cough. Any one of these was a sure trigger to Bub that his dad was through thinking up things to say for awhile.
“And Bubba,” Mr. Lilly said, stepping back gently into the stairwell, “your Mom and I talked it over and if you still want to I hope you won’t feel like I pressured you into going in in the first place. I know it’s not like the army or something, where you have to join up. I think, that is I hope, I didn’t really talk you into something. You didn’t want to do it anyway, that’s okay.”
“Okay,” said Bub.
“Now let’s get those papers out,” Mr. Lilly said, sort of mussing up Bub’s hair in his mind.
Bub hiked the two Hilton Times paperbags over his shoulders, ran down the porch steps, and rode off on his bike, happy to be away from the house and outside the circumference of his father’s voice. He turned down the alley in the middle of the block, thinking that there were probably only about ten paperboys in all of Hilton, and some of them were girls.
His paper route was the most unpredictable thing in his life. Every day he guessed the number of pages that he thought would be in the paper, and almost every day he was wrong. On the day before Thanksgiving of the previous year, the paper had been quadruple-thick because of the Christmas advertising, and Bub was off by fifty-six pages. He had to make two trips and his shoulders were sore for three days.
But there were victories as well. Using the thumbs-turn method, Bub could fold a paper in three seconds, with the empty white spaces between the columns matching up exactly to the folds. He could read the front page in under seven minutes, and usually found at least one typo with ease. With his friend Spotty’s help, Bub could do his own half of the route in under thirty minutes.
He stopped his bike and waited in the alley behind Spotty’s house.
“How many today, Booble?” said Spotty, skidding his back tire neatly up to within a few inches of Bub’s. He rarely called Bub by his given name, but delighted in coming up with variations and testing out the reaction. “Booble” was a brand new one which Bub completely ignored because he had no idea what it might mean.
“Thirty-two,” said Bub, lifting one of the bags over his head and handing it to Spotty.
“I knew it! Absolutely,” said Spotty. “Every third Saturday.”
“You didn’t know it,” Bub said quietly, uncertain.
Spotty’s real name was Scotty, but he had nicknamed himself Spotty two years before because of his tendency to freckle, and the name had stuck. Even Mr. Bailey called him Spotty.
“So you’re really quitting,” Spotty said, incredulous, hoisting the bag over his own shoulder.
“Yup,” Bub said. “First thing Monday.”
“No way sheet,” said Spotty. The printer’s ink from the bag strap had smudged a neat curl across his pudgy chin, but Bub didn’t tell him. “No sheetin way. Bailey Boy will have a turd. An outright turd. Right there in the bandroom.”
“A turd and a half,” Bub said, confident.
“No sheetin way.”
“It’s definite,” Bub said. “I told my dad even.”
“To hell you did. Two turds at least.”
“Yup.”
“You told your father, no freakin sheet? Mister Math. I’ll bet he cussed you out”
“No way.”
They straddled their bikes side by side in the alley, tips of the handlebars touching, looking like ludicrous fraternal flesh and metal twins with a bulging sac at opposite hips.
“I’ll bet he railed your Buttinski. A wall shot. I can see it now.”
“Nope. He told me it was a package for Bailey Boy. A favor. That the band isn’t the army. My dad is weird.”
“Your dad is gay,” Spotty said. “No freakin way. You’re definitely sheetin my ass. Spank my monkey. Spank it.”
“You’re a queer,” Bub said.
Right away he knew he shouldn’t have said it. Spotty was pretty fat, Bub knew. He was almost fourteen, outweighed Bub by over seventy pounds, and his bike reached two inches higher and was a BMX. It also cost fifty-two dollars more. Bub noted most of this, with far less precision, as Spotty tried to sort of jump off his bike and punch Bub in the chest all in one motion. He ended up kicking his own bike over onto Bub’s, his foot caught under the pedal, and they all sprawled together into an unruly heap on the stones. The neatly folded papers formed a slowly growing island around them as the two boys squirmed together briefly, then Spotty tightened his hold around Bub’s chest and someone’s sissy bar. It was their fifth fight.
“Take it back Bubbowl.”
“You’re a freakin queer.”
“Take it back Sally.”
Bub weakly kicked his feet against Spotty’s ankles a few times, then, in a sudden gasp, the engine in his chest churned and the asthma took over. Wheeze in. Wheeze out. Wheeze in. Out. Wheeze in was always first. Bub didn’t know why.
“Lemme up. I got asthma.”
By now Spotty was half sitting, half lying, on his own front tire and Bub’s stomach. The rim of Bub’s back wheel nearly bent from all the shuffling weight. A woman with two big bows of hair framing her head stood watching them from the mouth of the alley, a Chow Chow straining at the leash in her hand.
“Take it—” Spotty said, shifting his weight and nearly