Into the Great Wide Open by Kevin Canty Read Free Book Online

experiment wasn’t over yet.
    “I can see you thought you had to ask,” Kenny said at last. “I’m fine, though, really.”
    “I’ve heard things about this friend of yours, Wentworth, too,” his father said.
    “I’m sorry,” Kenny said. “I’m fine, really, I’m all right but I’m tired and I want to get my clothes on. I just don’t want to talk about whatever Ralph Briscoe might have said to you in some conference.”
    “He’s not a complete jerk,” his father said. “I know you don’t like him, but it seems like he’s trying to help you.”
    The thought of his father and Ralph J. Briscoe, his guidance counselor, teaming up to set Kenny straight was funny at first butscary afterward. Eagles, sharp talons. Blind to themselves. They wanted Kenny to live their way, they wanted victory. Kenny was
prey
.
    “I’m just trying to ask you if you’re a doper,” his father said. “You can get in over your head. I’ve had my problems, you know that, and your mother even worse. I don’t want to see you go through the kind of hell we’ve both been through.”
    “Well, thanks,” Kenny said. “I’m all right, though. Can I put my clothes on, now?”
    His father rose from the bed, and for a moment Kenny was afraid that his father might strike him; the way the hurt place shies away from danger, years later. Kenny broke his arm once, second grade or so, and still went to protect it whenever he was falling. And he had stepped on his father’s John Wayne speech.
    “I’m trying to help you,” his father said angrily. “I’m trying to keep your life from turning to shit. Do you understand that?”
    Kenny’s voice was softer and softer. “I do,” he said, turning his face away.
Now
, he thought, expecting the slap, it wouldn’t be the first time. But it didn’t come. His father sighed, a long mechanical sound like a train engine. You are the King, Kenny thought. You are the Elvis of depression, center of the known universe. He was small again, and dirty.
    When his father left, Kenny put on the last of his clean clothes: tan corduroy jeans, a purple golf shirt with alligator, motley that his mother had bought him in the hope that he would turn out to be a social success after all, a popular student. Laundry time, he thought. His father sent his laundry out but Kenny did his own. He started to sort, white sock/black sock, then slowed down and finally stopped. He stared out the window, listening to the cars go by. It must have started to rain again: the streets were black, the noise of the cars exaggerated by water. He was thinking about his brother: lying in the next bed—they shared a bedroom in the old house—and watchingthe shadows that the headlights made crawl across the ceiling, whenever a car would pass. Ray was asleep in Sydney, or eating breakfast, Kenny never could keep it straight. It was almost springtime there. If Ray was here, if Kenny was in Australia, they would be fighting about something—a pair of pants, what channel to watch, something, it was hard to remember but Kenny made himself remember. It was easy to get into some kind of daydream where everything would be fine and beautiful between them. And their father would be fine, their mother would return from Baltimore, the sun would shine and the birds would sing … Ray was just another boy, just another little dick. Kenny needed to remember this, not to make it worse by pretending it was different.
    It was interesting, how much of adult life consisted of pretending. At the country club, for instance, where he worked the summer before, everybody did a lousy job of whatever they were supposed to be doing. The pool manager, for instance, forgot to switch the chlorine and filter kit on the Jacuzzi and two dozen people came down with an ugly skin rash. Kenny himself almost let a baby drown when he was lifeguarding stoned. The grounds crew ran over the sidewalks with the mower blades, leaving white scars in the cement. The Coke from the