The Excellent Lombards(45)

“In…a…minute,” one of them might say. Hours later, finally registering hunger, the three of them, William, Bert, Max, pounded up the stairs. I was occasionally in the family room amusing Crystal Plumly, a girl three years my junior, she and I playing Pretty Pretty Princess and watching Oprah. The boys sat at the island, waiting for Ma Plumly to produce the blue bowls. While she busied herself they tracked the robotic vacuum cleaner spinning through the living area, the disk bumping into the wall, the red light blinking, the boys narrating in Gregorian tones, “I meant to do that, I am not an idiot, who put this frigging table leg here.”

At the library Ma Plumly said to my mother, “At least the boys aren’t into drugs.”

“Or women,” my mother said.

Their faces, those boys, were puffy, and they wore heavy canvas pants several sizes too big, the bottoms frayed from dragging along the ground, their black T-shirts with a human-type man on the front but no irises in the eyes.

There was the seminal night when William, twelve or so, went to Bert’s house, my father shuttling him over there with all the usual requirements in the back of the van, including his new chair, an ergonomic wonder he’d gotten for his birthday. Max had acquired a game called Posse through a quasi-legal file share, a new game that he handed off to Bert and William, the two of them playing until eight in the morning, tipping over to sleep on the nubbly carpet for forty-five minutes and waking to continue. They knew their lives were forever changed, the thing that would mark them arrived.

In order to develop their skills they had to play Posse starting in the late afternoon and going through the night, William abruptly nocturnal. They were soon recruited by a kid in Iceland to be on his most excellent team and not long after—so dedicated and talented were they—positions of responsibility were conferred upon them. They were in the lineup to be Posse Executives, to someday be the CEOs of their own teams, hiring players, assessing their gifts, firing them if necessary. What, really, Ma Plumly said, could be a better education?

Through July and August she as usual went down the basement, laundry basket in hand, walking slowly past the bank of computers to see if anything had changed. Always the virtual missiles were sighted on metal-plated hulks looming in the bleak distance, each live boy wearing a headset, speaking in a new language to similarly afflicted boys out in the ether.

“It’s a nice day,” Ma Plumly said in her vain attempt. She’d bring them liquids. She made cupcakes in pastel fluted papers. “You do need fuel,” she’d remind them. When she spilled some milk she used one of their Posse swear-words, shouting theatrically, “Shazbot!” She sprang on the puddle with a dishcloth, “Gotta go fast”—another of their memes. When I said Shazbot at the dinner table William looked up from his hamburger and told me, “You did not just say that.” I was not even allowed to speak his language.

In those months I most often played with Amanda, Gloria sometimes taking us to swim in a nearby lake, Gloria also making do without William. She had returned to us in June, right away taking up her Gloria things, gardening and knitting and working and talking about apples so that we soon forgot she’d ever had to go to Colorado. At the end of summer, William did without question come with us when we went to The Hills, we called it, the annual outing of the Lombards, the spree that took place in the briefest pause between the early apples and the beginning of the Macintosh harvest. Amanda and Adam, Frankie and William got in the back of the Ford pickup, Sherwood and my father in the dented cab, and over the path through the woods we shrieked when we bounced, and otherwise Amanda and I sang, bursting our lungs, William and Adam shouting at nothing, at the world passing. The loggers from the Forest Management Program had made a road right through to The Hills, which abutted our land and was owned by a gravel company, the mining far off in the future. Each grassy hill had been formed by the glacier in the last Ice Age, during the Pleistocene, Sherwood explained, the scooped-out valley a natural amphitheater.

Dolly and my mother met us at the highest peak, The Top Of The Earth, with the picnic baskets. Before lunch Sherwood produced his best invention: waxed cardboard boxes pulled apart with a little curl on the end, that was it, the sleds so simple. He always went down the hill a few times in order to pave the way, so that by our turn the trip to the bottom, with a great push, was as slick as a luge run, we were sure of it, holding tight to the lip of our cardboards, screaming our joyful fright. Sherwood and my father went down, too, behaving just as they must have when they were cousins together, when they were the boys of summer. In those hours it was as if the Lombard partnership had not yet occurred. My mother and Dolly watched from under the lone burr oak at The Top Of The Earth, Dolly relaying the antics of her siblings, twelve of them, never a dull moment in the Muellenbach clan. Nellie lay on her side with her elbow crooked to support her head and laughed and laughed.

I was at the bottom of the hill, tumbling off my cardboard, looking up at the mothers when it struck me that they never went to war. We all knew that it was fine for the fathers to blow up, we expected their biannual arguments, but the mothers of course would never speak harshly to one another, never show their true colors. In our kitchen Nellie Lombard might say fond, somewhat disparaging things about Dolly, or make jokes about her endless talking, but Dolly would never know about my mother’s unkindness. I sat down at the bottom of the hill with those thoughts that seemed pleasant, the idea of the mothers all of a sudden baring their fangs and shouting. Such a scene could be enjoyable and not at all frightening because I knew it would never happen. When I climbed back up the hill they were naturally still laughing.