The Secret of Life Read online

  The instant the miracle dawned on Conrad, it was over. He fell the rest of the way forward and landed heavily on the cracked cement. For a full minute, he lay there, trying to bring back the state of mind that had let him float. He’d had the feeling before ... on New Year’s Day in the pasture with Hank. And he often flew in dreams. But now the feeling was gone, and Conrad didn’t know how to bring it back.

  Maybe he’d just made the whole thing up. Maybe he was going nuts.

  He got to his feet and walked around the corner. There was a lit-up supermarket. He drifted in. Muzak washed up and down the empty aisles; the fluorescent lights oozed their jerky glow.Someday I’ll be buying food for my children , thought Conrad;someday I’ll be dead. He found a package of bologna and a small bunch of bananas. Thiscar trip will never end; I’ll be in high school for the rest of my life.

  . “He just bought lunchmeat and ate it out in the street.”

  Dee Decca sat next to Conrad at breakfast. She was impressed by Conrad’s bid for freedom. “Where are you going to college next year?” she asked him. “I don’t know yet,” said Conrad. This Dee Decca had short dark hair and a reasonably pretty face, though there was something odd-looking about her body. “Harvard already turned me down and I haven’t heard from Swarthmore. Georgetown is my ace in the hole. They’re dying to have me because I go to a Catholic high school.” He paused to light one of Dee’s cigarettes. “I sort of wish they’d all turn me down. Then I could go off and bum around.” “I want to go to San Jose State in California,” said Dee. “I want to join a big sorority and go to a lot of parties. I missed the boat in high school.” “A frat house with an ever-present keg of beer,” mused Conrad. “Surfing. That sounds cool.”

  “Listen up now,” yelled leather-lunged Jeannie. “It’s time to divide into our discussion groups. We’re going to share our feelings about the liturgy.” “What’s that mean?” whispered Dee. She had a husky, sophisticated voice.

  “Let’s sneak off,” answered Conrad. “I’ll meet you outside by the pavilion.”

  The Kentucky State Episcopal Conference Center was a collection of buildings something like a summer camp. Two groups of cabins, a dining hall, an administration building, and a large outdoor pavilion. The buildings were perched at the top of a long empty hill that bulged down to a forlorn brown river. It was almost spring. The ground was wet but not muddy. The pale sun was like a chalk mark on the cloudy sky. Conrad took Dee’s hand; she let him. They walked downhill, lacing their fingers. Her face was creamy white, with two brown moles. Her mouth had an interesting double-bowed curve to it.

  “Question,” Dee said after a while, saying it as if she were in a college seminar.

  “Yes?” “Where are we going?”

  “To make out?” As Conrad said this, he released Dee’s hand and put his arm around her waist. They were over the brow of the hill now, and the buildings were nowhere in sight. “I hope you don’t have W-H-D.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Wandering Hands Disease.”

  “Oh. That’s ...”too stupid of you to even talk about , Conrad wanted to say. On the other hand, it could be a come-on, couldn’t it, that she would bring uppetting right off the bat? He steered them into a grove of trees and slid his hand up from her waist and toward her bra strap. “Stop that, Conrad.” She planted her feet and turned up her face. He kissed her. She pushed her tongue in his mouth. She tasted like tobacco. He pushed his tongue back. Her mouth was cool inside. The taste of her spit. Her smell. They were hugging, hugging and French kissing, not wanting to stop, afraid they wouldn’t know how to start again. “CONRAD!!!”The voice was rough and distant.

  “Don’t worry, Dee, that’s just my father. They won’t come all the way down here. They’ll give up in a minute.” They kissed some more. Conrad didn’t bother trying for her tits again. This was plenty.

  As Conrad had predicted, the grown-ups gave up on them. He and Dee made their way down to the river and walked along the bank. Apparently the river flooded frequently, for the shore was littered with sticks. There were big sycamore trees. In one spot the river had eaten a great dirt cave into the hillside.

  Conrad and Dee sat on a rock in there and talked.

  “Did you have a happy childhood, Conrad?”

  “I guess so. I can hardly remember anything about it. My mother used to give me hay-fever pills. The first thing I remember really clearly is my tenth birthday. It was the day my family moved to Louisville. My brother and I saw a flying wing.” “Awhat ?”

  “A plane that was just a wing. Anyway, I was happy for a while, but recently ... It’s like you said before.I missed the boat in high school. I’m not cool, and I don’t know what anything means. I’ll be glad to go off to college. Everything here seems so stupid and unreal.” “I’m not unreal.” Dee gave Conrad a little nudge. “And not everyone is stupid.” She paused, then glanced over. “I’m quite intelligent, you know.”

  “Well, fine. I used to date a girl who couldn’t understand anything. Have you heard of existentialism?” “Yes. Existence precedes essence. You are what you do.”

  “That’s good,” exclaimed Conrad, a little surprised. He’d never heard it summed up so simply. “And nothingness is behind everything.” “I wrote a term paper on existentialism.”

  “Did you readNausea ?”

  “Yes. You have too?”

  “It’s my favorite. The part where he’s in a park looking at the roots of a chestnut tree, and the persistence of matter begins to disgust him ... ugh!” Conrad looked at a nearby tree, trying to summon up Roquentin’s nausea.

  “This river,” said Dee slowly, “it’s been here for hundreds of years. It’ll be here for hundreds more.”

  “We could live in this cave,” observed Conrad. “Build fires and catch fish.” “Not in the winter.”

  “Do you believe in God, Dee?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I ... I don’t think so. Not really. Not like in church, anyway. Maybe the universe is God?”

  “That’s called pantheism. Everything fits together into a whole, and that Whole is God.”

  “That’s like my own theory.” Conrad explained about death and the life-force.

  “Are you always so deep, Conrad?” She was smiling into his eyes. He’d caught her fancy.

  “I ... I think I’m different from other people. I think maybe I can ...”

  “Can what?”

  “I think I might be able to levitate. You know? Fly.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Conrad strained, and rose up maybe an inch from the rock they were sitting on. But he fell back right away, and then it wouldn’t work at all.

  “You just stood up a little,” laughed Dee. “You’re wild, Conrad.” She paused and gave him a pert look. “You know what I thought you were going to say at first? When you said you’re different from other people?”

  “What?”

  Dee’s voice grew flat with tension. “I thought you were going to tell me that you ...masturbate .”

  “Uh ... well, I do, as a matter of fact.”

  “So do I. Most girls do.”

  “You do?”

  “I do it every night.”

  This was incredible. “So do I, nearly. We call it ‘beating off.’ I found out about it when I was twelve. I’d be lying in bed, and for some reason I’d start thinking about naked women with big breasts. A whole stream of them—each woman would march into my room, smile, and march out. One after the other. And my bee would get real hard and I’d rub it.”

  “Your what?”

  “We called it a bee. What did your family call your ... your ...”

  “We called it the cushy. I used to rub my cushy way before I was twelve. I did it even when I was real little. I used to think of it as ‘my bestest spot.’ ” They both giggled wildly.

  This was just incredible. Conrad grabbed Dee and pushed his tongue deep into her mouth. He took one of her hands and pressed it in his crotch to feel
his boner. She drew her hand back, but she kept kissing him. They kissed for so long that Conrad came in his pants. Dee noticed the stain.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “I like you, Dee. All trillion of my sperms like you.”

  They joined the others for lunch. For the whole lunch, Conrad was on a cloud. Dee knew he had a dick, and she’d seen him come. Maybe he wasn’t going to have to wait for nuclear war after all.

  When Conrad got back to Louisville and told Hank about his new girl, Hank made fun of him.

  “Decca? That phony? And you didn’t even get tit off her?”

  “Look, Hank, I made out with her for a long time. I even came in my pants. And she’s readNausea .”

  “Bo-way. I heard the cops caught her naked with Billy Ballhouse in a car last fall.”

  “Oh, shut up. Do you know what pantheism is?”

  “Sure. It’s a bunch of dumb shits kneeling in front of a rock.” Hank began laughing uncontrollably, and offeringsalaams to his radio. “O voice from sky, please speak me heap truth.”

  Conrad waited for his friend’s laughter to die down. “What if I told you I could fly, Hank?”

  “Is this one of yourTwilight Zone stories? Remember the one you made up about coming from a flying saucer?” Hank’s mood of mockery had passed. “I’m all ears, Conrad. For my money, you’re a fucking genius.”

  “It only lasted a second. It was on the way down to the conference center—we all stopped for food, and I was walking to the supermarket. I tripped on the sidewalk, and instead of falling, I just hung there.

  Maybe I’m some kind of mutant, Hank.” “Did you tell Decca?”

  “I mentioned it. She was excited, but she didn’t believe me.”

  “That’s just as well. You know, if you really did turn out to have any superpowers, Conrad, it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell everyone. People hate mutants.” Hank was laughing again. “Gunjy mue.”

  Chapter 5:

  Saturday, May 4, 1963 “Blatz beer, I don’t believe it. I thought that was only a kind of beer in comic books.” Conrad threw back his head and laughed. God, he felt wonderful. Drunk on the first Saturday in May.

  “We’ve got Falstaff, too,” said Jim Ardmore with his dark sly smirk. “Not to mention Mr. Leggett’s liquor cabinet.”

  “You all stay out of the liquor,” cautioned Donny Leggett. “Somebody stole a bottle of peppermint schnapps last week, and my father was really ...”

  “That was Bunger on a rampage,” chortled Ardmore. “He came up here with his friend Hank Larsen and stole a bottle from your house. It’s the gospel truth. The good word.”

  Conrad shrugged and opened his beer. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. It was Derby Day, and all the grown-ups were at the track. Conrad and a bunch of Chevalier guys were getting drunk together at Donny Leggett’s house, a hilltop estate with a swimming pool.

  “When I know I’m going to have a chance to get drunk, I get all twitchy, like a junkie, and then after the first drink, I’m so relaxed.” Conrad grinned. “This is great. I’m going swimming.” He chugged the rest of his beer, stripped down to his underwear, and dove into the Leggetts’ pool.

  Some of the cooler Chevalier boys were there, too. Billy Ballhouse, Worth Wadsworth, and Custer Buckingham. They didn’t like the way Conrad was acting. It was ungentlemanly.

  When Conrad lurched out of the pool and began trying to open his fourth Blatz, Ballhouse spoke up.

  “Take it easy, Bunger. You’ve got all afternoon.” “You want money for beer, Ballhouse? Maybe you should make a run. Where’s the beer opener?”

  “I mean, Donny’s parents live here, Bunger. You can’t just throw up all over the place and act like a wino.” “Eat shit, Billy. You’re a goddamn candy-ass. You don’t know about death.” Conrad walked over to where Ardmore and Leggett were sitting. He remembered having seen the beer opener there.

  He put all his attention into getting two triangles punched into the top of his beer can. But then someone was shoving him. Ballhouse. “You can’t talk to me that way, Bunger. Apologize.”

  “Sure, Billy. I’m sorry you’re a dipshit.”

  Ardmore howled with delight, and Leggett burst into giggles. Ballhouse shook his head and gave up.

  “Come on,” he called to Wadsworth and Buckingham. “Let’s go pick up some stuff.”

  “Would you get me a half-pint?” put in Conrad.

  “I’m sorry, Conrad.” The contempt on Ballhouse’s face was profound. “Girls don’t come in half-pints.” Pause. “I’m surprised Dee would have anything to do with a drunk like you.”

  There was a whole fridge of beer, and the three remaining boys spent the rest of the afternoon working on it. At some point the Derby was on TV. Watching it, Conrad realized he was seeing double. It was time to leave. He and Ardmore decided to go to Sue Pohlboggen’s house.

  “Can you drive?” asked Ardmore.

  “Sure, Jim. I used to race these things in South Korea.” Conrad revved the VW’s engine to a chattering scream.

  There was a long gravel driveway leading downhill from the Leggetts’ house to River Road. It felt like a crunchy sliding board. So that he wouldn’t have to use the brakes, Conrad began slaloming, swooping back and forth from left to right, faster and ... suddenly everything was wrong. The steering wheel

  jerked like a living thing, the wheels locked sideways, Ardmore was yelling and—

  A sound that Conrad felt, rather than heard, a sound and a brief moment of frenzied motion. His power.

  Jerk-stop to blank. Black. The horn was blowing. The horn was stuck. He was in a barbed-wire fence and the car was wrapped around a black locust tree and Jim was lying still.

  “Hey, Jim,” Conrad screamed. The horn wouldn’t stop. The bleat of that stuck horn was driving him nuts. “Jim, wake up!”

  “Don’t get hysterical, Conrad.” Ardmore sat up and looked around. He hadn’t been thrown as far as Conrad had. “Let’s tear out the wires to the horn.”

  They did that, and things got a little better. Some time passed. Conrad’s parents came, and they took him home. So that he wouldn’t have to face them, he went to bed early, but it took him a long time to go to sleep. It was the black space that bothered him the most, the black space when he’d been unconscious.

  If I had died, thought Conrad,it would have been just like that ... except I wouldn’t have woken up. Dead black nothing with no time left.

  He flinched away from that and began struggling to reconstruct the details of the accident, trying to fit it into some rational frame.

  The tree had been on the right side of the road. The VW’s left front fender had hit the tree. Momentum made the car slew to the left, and Conrad had been thrown out of his door. He’d flown past the tree and landed in that barbed-wire fence.

  The funny thing was that the tree had been blocking the path from the car to where Conrad had landed.

  By all rights, Conrad should have sailed into the tree and broken his neck. He struggled to remember the details. How had he managed to miss the tree? The power. Somehow he hadlevitated his way around it . Yes.

  Just as he was dropping off to sleep, Conrad realized he was floating above the mattress again. He flash-jerked, and jolted back down. All night he dreamed about the flame-people.

  “You should thank God you’re alive,” his mother told him the next morning on their way to church.

  “I don’t think God has anything to do with it,” said Conrad, trying to keep a quaver out of his voice. “I madesure to stay alive. Like a cat landing on its feet. I think maybe I have psychic powers, Mom. What does God have to do with it?”

  “Plenty. God is everything, Conrad. God takes care of us in different ways. You should stop imagining that you’re so great, and thank Him for saving your life.”

  “If He’s so wonderful, then He doesn’t need my thanks, does He?”

  “No, God doesn’t need your thanks. Praying is something you do for your own self.”


  “But what good is praying? There’s no afterlife. I saw yesterday. When I hit that fence, everything just got black. It wasn’t like dreaming or like being asleep. It was just black nothing. I think that must be what happens when you die, no matter what.Nothing. You don’t believe in heaven and hell, do you, Mom?”

  “I think heaven and hell are right here in our own lives. And that’s enough. What happens after you die doesn’t matter.”

  Conrad’s father took him for a walk after lunch.

  “I’m sorry about the car, Pop. It’s practically totaled.”

  “I don’t care about thecar , Conrad. I care aboutyou .”

  When the Bungers had moved to Louisville, Conrad’s father had started calling himSausage . “Where’s my Sausage?” he might shout when he came home from work. That first Louisville summer had been hot, and old Caldwell had bought Conrad a giant wading pool. On Saturday, the two of them would soak in it, Conrad with the hose, and Pop with a long-necked bottle of Oertl’s beer. The old man’s amazing bulk took up most of the pool, but happy Conrad would splash in the empty spaces, yelling whatever popped into his head.

  “I don’t care if you don’t go to church, Conrad,” his father was saying now. “You’re free to rebel and think whatever you want to. Butdon’t get yourself killed. If you’re too drunk to drive, then phone me up.”

  “You’d get mad at me.”

  “Conrad, I was a teenager, too. I got drunk and made trouble. But my father always told me,The main thing is don’t get killed. Call a cab if you have to.”

  “Did you ever call a cab?”

  “Once or twice. There was one morning when I woke up and I didn’t know where the car was. My father was waiting for me at the breakfast table. He was the kindest man, Conrad; I wish you could have met him. That morning he just looked up at me and said, ‘Well, son, let’s go find the car. What’s the last thing you remember?’ ” Mr. Bunger’s distant gaze wandered back to Conrad. “Don’t do this again, Conrad. Don’t get killed. All my and Mom’s relatives are dead. It would destroy us to lose you.”