I was a little surprised that so much time went by without Little Big Tom acknowledging my peace and love note. It wasn’t like him. I’d sent him notes like that before when there had been equally explosive substitute- father/son trouble in the past, and he always responded in some way. Like putting 127
a little Post-it on my door that said “We’re cool.” Plus, Little Big Tom was almost immediately back to his old self once the conflict had wound down.
I had pretty much decided to pick up the pieces and move on with my life in that particular area when there was a knock on my door that turned out to have come from Little Big Tom’s Celtic knot ’n’ serpent wedding ring. That was unusual. I mean, that’s how he always knocked on things, but when he had something to say to me he would usually just stick his head in and out without warning.
He walked in carrying the weapons-and-tactics magazines in a stack on one upturned palm, like a waiter with a platter of hors d’oeuvres.
He set them down on my dresser and said:
“We cool?” One eyebrow was raised, and his head was tilted and his neck was trained in such a way that he almost looked like he had turned into a question mark for a moment.
“Well,” I said, drawing out the word in an exaggerated fashion and making a little motion with my hands as though I were physically weighing whether we were cool or not—
mime isn’t my strong suit, but, see, I was trying to communicate with Little Big Tom in his own language. Finally, I made a “well, what do you know?” face and said, “We are cool.”
He said he had overreacted and was sorry, especially for reading my notebook, but he used way more words than necessary to get that across, and before he was finished he was starting to get a little flustered. I was trying to look at him neutrally while he talked, but the more neutral I tried to look, the less comfortable he seemed to get. Finally, after two half-finished word clumps that were more like automobile accidents than sentences, he gave up trying to get in touch with his feelings and said, in a more familiar tone:
“Some of the things you said the other day have been rat-128
tling around in the old brain box. Young men always think they know everything and that old men know nothing, and old men always think the same thing. But maybe the answer could be somewhere in between.”
Mmm, deep.
That’s what I thought, but what I said was “We’re cool, Big Tom.” Then I added, uncharacteristically, but because I knew he’d like it: “You’re not even that old.” I’m shameless.
He looked at me, still expecting something.
I held up two fingers at about shoulder level in a peace sign with what I hoped was the right attitude, slightly sardonic but good-natured.
His mouth crinkled just a bit at the left corner, and he did this little sniffy laugh while shaking his head. Then he rumpled my hair, which was the real sign that he was more or less satisfied with how things had concluded.
“Rock and roll,” he said as he went out, sighing just a bit, I think.
LADI E S’ WE E K?
I was starting to lose track of all of the mysteries. There was Tit’s code and the cryptic notes and documents associated with my dad’s teen library. There was my adult dad’s death.
There was Sam Hellerman’s unusual behavior. And above all, there was Fiona. I still had the sense that somehow all the puzzles were related and could solve each other if only one were to come undone. I also had the sense that that was crazy. At any rate, I thought about Fiona practically constantly, both as a context within which to experience my horniness and as a puzzle piece. I decided to write down everything I knew about her, imagining that it might be 129
useful one day if I ever gathered my possessions in a satchel, kissed my mom good-bye, and set off on a perilous journey to track her down and discover her secret. Like a hard-boiled detective. Or a hobbit.
I hardly knew anything about Fiona. I sure wished I had paid more attention to what she had been saying while I was ogling her like a sex maniac.
To summarize what I came up with:
Fiona was most likely a junior. She was in drama, acted in plays, made costumes and her own clothes, and was kind of hung up on vocabulary-level feminism but not in any way that mattered practically. She was interested in the occult and the paranormal, though in fact she had no psychokinetic or supernatural powers. She was nearsighted. She liked the Who. She had a boyfriend who was not at the party but who had friends who were. She wouldn’t go past second base with anonymous strangers in dark basements; or, the party had coincided with her period (ladies’ week, as my mom calls it).
She liked to smoke pot.
If she went to CHS, she was known by a name other than Fiona, and dressed and behaved so differently from how she had been at the party that no one who would have seen her at school recognized the description. But most likely she didn’t go to CHS. I had assumed she did because she had been at a party with lots of CHS kids, and having the Who shirt and being in drama had made it seem like she had to be one of the CHS drama mods. But that wasn’t necessarily the case. She could go to another high school but know some of the CHS drama mods well enough that she would be invited to their parties.
In fact, the Who shirt was the only definite mod-related thing about her, so maybe she wasn’t even a real fake mod at all. Maybe the drama people at her high school were all on 130
some other trip (though I don’t know what—crochet-core?) and the Who shirt was just random, or worn because she knew she’d be hanging out with CHS drama mods on that particular evening.
There was another reason I had assumed she went to CHS, though. Something in the back of my mind that had been bugging me, though I didn’t consciously realize what it was at first: somehow she had known I was from Hellmont.
I had instinctively assumed that she had reached that conclusion because she didn’t recognize me from school
