problems with his teachers. He could see the potential for arousing teacher fury. “So what happened? You just didn’t go in one day? You just said to your family, ‘I have quit’?”
“O.K., here’s what happened.” Orlando spoke in a weary voice as though harried beyond bearing. “In this school I was in a class. The teacher’s name was Miss Termino. We called her ‘the Terminator.’ And ‘the Termite.’ She assigned this dumb-ass paper, ‘What I Plan to Do with My Life.’ Everybody had to read his little masterpiece in class. It was the usual dumb shit, kids who wanted to be computer programmers, software entrepreneurs, doctors and nurses, motorcycle racers, deejays.”
He had touched on a subject that greatly interested Bob.
“How do they know?” he said. “How do they know what they want to be?”
But Orlando avoided philosophical discussion and continued his story.
“So, everybody reads their little paper except me and then the Terminator says, ‘That was excellent, class.’ She didn’t mention that nobody said they wanted to be a scientist or a mathematician, which everybody knows is what’s wrong with the country. One of the things wrong with the country. So I said, ‘Miss Termino, I didn’t read mine. You skipped me.’ And she said, ‘I didn’t skip you, Orlando, I assumed you would not have done the assignment, as usual.’ So I go, ‘I did this one,’ and I got up and walked to the front. Kind of stamping. And I read my paper. I knew it by heart. I go: ‘Orlando’s Ice City. I do not want to be a brain surgeon or president, I wouldn’t mind being a champion wrestler or a guy who raises pit bulls or the captain of an ocean liner but first I am going to build an ice city at the South Pole and I’ll get money from big corporations and hire a bunch of guys with no jobs – clean up the bums in Kansas City – to build the ice city. The buildings will all be clear ice and I’ll have a big furnace to melt snow and squirt the water into molds – rectangles cubes cones and cylinders – and the bums will put them together into big ice skyscrapers and domes and I’ll have all these lights inside so the ice buildings at night will shine in colors and the best and biggest buildings will be huge tetragons, and if people want to tour the city I’d charge fifty dollars each and that would include penguin steaks for dinner.’ So then a girl goes, ‘Penguin steaks! Agk! Gross!’ and I gave her a shove because it was proof of a closed mind and penguin steaks are probably pretty good, but the girl fell on her desk and broke her teeth off just like a hockey player and the Terminator said go to the office. I said not a word but picked up my books and walked. Quit. My father – he’s a jerk but so what – sided with me. Then two weeks later we moved here.”
“I guess you got a good imagination or you’re a big liar,” said Bob Dollar.
“Well, that’s for you to find out.” Orlando hung from the strap so his body swayed with the bus’s motion.
Bob said, “I don’t get how people know what they want to be before they’re old, like twenty or something.”
“You don’t have a clue?”
“No. Do you? I mean, after building the ice city.”
“Sure. I want to be rich and rule the world. I want to be a computer geek. And I don’t want to build the fucking ice city no more. That was kid stuff Why you want to know about quitting school? You planning on doing that?”
“No. My uncle wouldn’t let me.”
“What does he have to do with it? What about your parents?”
“They disappeared when I was seven.”
“Holy shit! What do you mean, disappeared? Ran off in the night? Abducted by aliens? Exploded? Killed by gangsters or venomous reptiles? Man, I am impressed. I wish my parents would disappear. My mother – know what she does?”
“What?”
“She cooks stuff with the labels on. Those dumb stickers they put on the tomatoes saying ‘tomato’ or the avocados saying ‘avocado’? She forgets to take them off so you find these little labels in the salad. Or the chicken’s got this metal tag on its wing and she cooks it with the tag on and there’s lead and all kinds of poison comes out of the metal. So I’m half-poisoned. My father suffers the worst. He’s all bent over and coughing. Poisoned by metal chicken labels.”
The bus was filling up and Bob stood closer to Orlando. He could smell dirty hair and spearmint chewing gum.
“My mother and father went to Alaska to build a cabin for us to live in and I got to stay with my uncle until they came back. Except they never did. Never called up, never wrote. My uncle called the Alaska police and they put out a missing-persons report but they never found them. My uncle Xylo went to Alaska to look for them. Somehow they just disappeared. Couldn’t ever find out what part of Alaska they went to. So I got to stay with my uncle forever. He runs a junk shop on Colfax and we live in the back and upstairs. At first my uncle thought something had happened to them. But later he changed his mind. I think he figured out that they dumped me.”
“Man, that is weird! So are you going to go to Alaska and search for your parents when you turn eighteen?”
“I thought about it.” He had never told his uncle this deep fantasy that had started a few months after they disappeared: he imagined himself flying to Fairbanks, looking in the phone book and finding Adam and Viola Dollar with an address and telephone number. Later, after he found out that Fairbanks was just another ordinary city, he had amended the scenario: now he (metamorphosed into a hirsute and muscular adult) paddled a red canoe up a raging Alaskan river, and then hiked into the wilderness as winter was coming on. Just when he was on the verge of freezing in a terrific blizzard he came upon a cabin in the wilderness. Inside was an old couple, feeble and emaciated. Their fire was out and they huddled under ragged blankets. He found the axe and the woodshed and chopped great armfuls of wood, made a fire, cooked hot dogs and mashed potatoes, fed the old couple, who sobbed with gratitude, and then he washed the dishes. There was a dog – a husky – and he fed the dog. Later he enlarged the husky to a whole pack of starving sled dogs and he fed them all and they licked his hands. The old couple exclaimed over him and when they were strong again they begged him to stay. The old man said, “We had a boy who would have been about your age but we were never able to go back to Denver and get him.” And he imagined himself gently asking why and being told of a desperado – Rick Moomaw, with bushy hair and a face like a whiskered hot water bottle – on the neighboring claim, who was waiting for them to leave, even for a weekend, when he would manage to steal their entire property, even the cabin, even the deed. Finally Bob told them who he was, their long-lost son, and they fell on his neck and told him they had found gold but Rick Moomaw was after their claim. In the fantasy he laughed and flexed his arms, said he could and would break Moomaw into pieces.
Later this fantasy faded, replaced by dreams of sluttish blonds with enameled toenails, but when he met the fat boy it was still blazing. He had never told anyone about his hope to find his parents, yet within a few minutes of their meeting Orlando had guessed it.
A few months after his parents’ fateful departure Bob had started thinking of his slippery self as a reindeer, and he carried his head carefully to avoid hitting his antlers against cupboards or wall projections. It became an intensely vivid fantasy. He had no idea who he was, as his parents had taken his identity with them to Alaska. The world was on casters, rolling away as he was about to step into it. He knew he had a solitary heart for he had no sense of belonging anywhere. Uncle Tam’s house and shop were way stations where he waited for the meaningful connection, the event or person who would show him who he was. At some point he would
