The Wonders of the Invisible World by David Gates Read Free Book Online

Salinger character?”
    Deke looks back at him. “What’s a sowinger character?”
    It scares Billy that he’s allowed himself to say such an out-there thing. “Nothing. It’s just a—you know, I was thinking what you could be for Halloween. Why don’t you look in the dash and see if the Barney tape’s in there?”
    Deke opens the glove compartment and reaches in. “Yay!” He hands the cassette to Billy.
    “Do you want to be Barney for Halloween?” Billy says. “They have a Barney costume at CVS.”
    “Could I be what you said?”
    “What I said? Oh. A Salinger character?” It’s a pretty beguiling idea. “Tell you what. When we get home, I’ll show you a picture of one, and you can decide if that’s what you want to be. Basically you’d wear a backwards baseball cap and a long coat. And you’d be carrying a suitcase.”
    “Oh.” Deke looks out the window again. Barney and the kids start singing. “
Everybody in the old brass wagon
 …” Oh, well. It would’ve been lost on the good people of Menands anyway. A vista opens: Deke in doublet and hose with a skull in his hand; Deke with greatcoat, bowler hat secured by string,stones in his pockets; Deke in a black frock coat, with fake whiskers, a harpoon over his shoulder and some kind of fake pegleg. The vista closes. Billy would never take advantage. He makes another left turn, which should eventually get them over to Route 40 and then back down into Troy.
    After supper they carve the pumpkin, Deke drawing the face on it in Magic Marker, Billy doing the actual cutting. He hasn’t done this since he was a kid, when his mother did the actual cutting. They scoop out the seeds in slippery, sticky handfuls and spread them on his mother’s cookie sheet to roast. Just as his mother used to do, probably on the same cookie sheet. (The pie project, thank God, has been forgotten.) Deke’s rendering of the face isn’t much use as a practical guide to cutting, so Billy tries to keep the positions and proportions of eyes, nose and mouth the same while improvising the details. His mother never aspired to more than upside-down triangles for eyes, a right-side-up triangle for the nose and a crescent mouth. Billy now finds he can cut out eyes, leaving half-round pupils in the lower-left corners for a furtive expression, and a snaggletoothed cartoon-hillbilly mouth with irregularly spaced square teeth. He considers a Picasso nose—in profile, to the right of both eyes—but Deke put a pig-style snout in the center, so he’d better play it straight: a pair of round nostrils punched into the space implied by a thin, semicircular incision.
    As Billy’s gouging out a hole in the bottom for a candle, the phone rings. This must be Dennis: crap, what to say? Deke runs to pick it up, then cries, “Mommy! We’re making a pumpkin!”
    Billy considers it indecent to listen outright; still, he can’t help but hear the conversation dwindle to the usual
Yeah, No, I don’t know
and
Okay.
Finally Deke says, “She wants to talk to you,” and clunks the phone onto the table without even a
Love you too.
    “Billy?” Cassie says. “This is breaking my heart.”
    “I know.”
    “You
don’t
know. Listen, we have to talk.”
    “Okay.”
    “Well, we can’t talk now. He’s right there, isn’t he?”
    “This is true,” Billy says. “How about Monday? You’ve got my work number.”
    “God, imagine putting yourself in a position where you’re allowed one phone call a day. I’ve fucked up so badly.”
    “Nothing irretrievable.” One call a day: it’s never before occurred to Billy to wonder whom she calls on alternate days. “Except what wasn’t worth retrieving anyway. If you know who I mean. So, you have any idea yet when Betty Ford’s going to get out of that house she’s in?”
    “Betty
Ford?
I thought she was dead, for Christ’s—”
    “No no no, I mean the Betty Ford
I
know.”
    “The Betty—oh.
That
Betty Ford. That’s cute. I don’t know,