Free Riding In Cars With Boys by Beverly Donofrio Page B

rocker was the beginning of the problem. Or the beginning of my noticing there was a problem at all. Raymond had taken to half sleeping in the rocker for hours and hours, kind of scratching his nose, which was peeling from all the rubbing, and sitting there with his head on his chest nodding out. Since it often happened when we were smoking marijuana, I thought maybe it was giving Raymond brain damage. But since I was so happy, I didn’t pay much attention until one night.
    Beatrice and I had gone to the Coleman Brothers’ carnival and I’d left Ray at home baby-sitting and expecting some friends to come over. Ever since I was a little kid, I’d loved the carnival. I had this friend, when I was very little, named Joannie Devon, who lived on top of some rickety ill-lighted stairs in a shabby apartment alone with her mother. Rumor had it that her mother had had an affair with a carnie who left town and her pregnant with Joannie. Joannie was very poor but extremely beautiful. And even as a little child, though I couldn’t put a word to it, I knew Joannie had grace. There was something in the way she looked at you and moved and smiled that I thought saintly. In other words, if the Virgin Mary were going to appear to anybody, it would be Joannie. We moved away from our first house and I lost track of her. But I remembered her every time the Coleman Brothers came to town. Then I’d look at all those carnies in their booths with tattoos on their arms and voices daring you on and I’d wonder which one had fathered Joannie Devon, the angel.
    Beatrice and I smoked some pot, then rode the Fer ris wheel. Then we saw a trailer advertising Siamese twins. Inside there were two boys around my age, attached at the hips. They sat back to back watching the same shows on separate TVs. The pink printed sheet we were handed at the door said they were born that way and that their parents had put them in the carnival to help pay for college. The twins just sat there, their eyes riveted on their TVs, as though they were completely unaware that hundreds of people were walking behind a rope in their living room, gawking. I felt so sad after I saw those twins, I wanted to cry. The twins, I knew, would never go to college. I got the idea that maybe the next day I could drop by, real early, before the carnival opened, and make friends with them. Have a real talk, maybe about books. I didn’t tell Beatrice any of this. I just said I felt depressed. She said, “Me too.”
    We drove back to my house, where Peter Dodd had said he might stop later.
    Ocho Perez’s truck was in the driveway, which meant some of the guys from the Animal Pack were probably with Raymond.
    When we walked in, Raymond was in the rocker and three guys dressed in black and blue sat shoulder to shoulder on the couch. I only knew Ocho Perez, who was in the middle, his thumbs in his belt, his head on his chest, snoozing with everyone else. Raymond heard the screen door slam, pulled his head up, opened his eyes, which took a while to focus, then he blinked at the TV. It was flashing silver specks. “Hey, man,” he said. “Why don’t one a you change the fucking channel?”
    “Why don’t you change the channel, man?” Ocho said when he pulled his head up too.
    “It’s my house, man. My TV. You want to watch it, you change it.”
    “For Christ’s sake,” I said, embarrassed at Raymond’s rudeness. “What channel do you want? I’ll change it.”
    “Shit, Bev,” Ray said. “You home?”
    I whispered to Beatrice in the kitchen that I thought the pot was making Raymond retarded.
    “Do you think it can?” Beatrice asked.
    “I don’t know. Maybe. But they’re all like that. Look at them.”
    “Maybe they’re just tired,” she said.
    “I don’t know what from. None of them work.”
    “What’s dat show?” one of the guys said.
    “I don’t know,” Raymond said.
    “Ain’t that Clint Eastwood?”
    “Shit, man,” Ocho said. “If that’s Clint Eastwood,