The McClanaghans

Literary Review, Fall, 1995 by Peter La Salle

. . . because once it started there was no stopping it, and what was at first just opening the imitation wood-grain kitchen cabinets and taking out some striped dishes and smashing them on the Congoleum with its bright yellow-and-red, kind of Mexican, print was soon crazier and crazier stuff, while Space then ripped the beige phone right from the wall, not just unplugging it, then he did the same to the two white ones upstairs, in the big bedroom and in the den, saying, "Heh, I'm busy now, I don't want to be disturbed," and mahogany chairs in the dining room were whacked against door casings, not splitting the way that those balsa-wood chairs do in the movies, but splitting pretty good if you whacked and whacked and crazily whacked until your hands hurt, and then Space and Tom-Tom almost got into this contest to see who could do something crazier, and in a closet in the den with a lot of old Parcheesi and Scrabble games, some badminton stuff, there was a big bow-and-arrow for archery practice, and Space loved finding that, and in the den there was an oversize stereo with its more-than-oversize speakers, one of the first things we noticed in the house, big black ones without grills like you get for a rock show, and he stood back a few feet and shot three arrows into one speaker then moved sideways a few steps to shoot three arrows into the other, as if it were work to do, and not to be outdone, Tom-Tom had come up from the basement lugging a bunch of half-filled pails of Sears wall paint from a storage corner down there, and soon everybody else was following his lead and trying to use a butter knife to pry open the lids (nobody found a screwdriver for that, but a walk out to the garage surely would have given us a dozen of them), and we all started what we called some "touching up," and there was touching up with a color called "periwinkle blue" of the beige-white wall-to-wall carpet in the giant sunken living room, and there was touching up with a color called "autumn gold" of the wallpaper in what must have been the kids' bedroom and then the guest bedroom, the same size, next to it upstairs, the sugary-smelling latex stuff heaved on in splashes as if we were putting out a fire in a bucket brigade, then everybody got in on taking turns using the hammer we did find under the kitchen sink to reduce the downstairs toilet to just so much of a pile of porcelain and the dust that made us cough, water leaking onto the floor, then the upstairs toilet in the master bedroom and the other upstairs one near the two other bedrooms, though as Space started in on the long light-green tub there, he had to admit it would probably take him a month, Space forgetting it before long with a final half-hearted whack, "Fuck this," he said, giving up (Tom-Tom later claimed that he looked out an upstairs bedroom window around that time and across the cedar privacy fence he saw prim old Mrs.

Devereaux watching it all from an upstairs room in her own house, because she must have heard us, and, here's where it gets weird, he claims her blue eyes under that neat white hair looked right at him and she was smiling, grinning away, knowing what was going on, doing nothing about it, definitely enjoying it), because the McClanaghans were in California, it was as simple as that, and the house was just there almost begging for us to wreck it, and what the papers said later about the "tragedy" of bored children living neglected in an "upscale neighborhood," kids raised in a fine suburb like ours by a single mother off somewhere, or if the parents were a couple, a couple that made even less of an effort because they had stayed together and that was effort enough as far as they were concerned (which was all stupid, because the papers didn't know, and it had nothing to do with that, there was just a house and it invited us to wreck it, and maybe old Mrs. Devereaux was smiling), and we could have been there a half-hour or we could have been there for days, the best any of us knew, ripping and whacking and stomping and ripping some more, and I think it almost broke Tom-Tom's heart, because Tom-Tom was the one poor Jimmy was always telling those things about himself that were so embarrassing, Jimmy with his stutter half the time when he turned nervous, and maybe it did break Tom-Tom's heart, crunched it the way that bathtub was crunched to dust, to watch poor Jimmy discover a couple of barbecue skewers and head into a small darkened room off the breezeway that, surprisingly, none of us had noticed before, where the McClanaghans had a giant, elaborate aquarium tank that maybe Mrs. Devereaux had been looking after while they were gone, with big pouty-mouth angel fish, goldfish the size of small trout, or so it seemed in the bubbly water's magnification, and even if Jimmy wasn't getting anywhere with his attempts to madly, splashingly, spear one of them with a barbecue skewer, a mini-harpoon, even if he hadn't come up with an idea as good as the bow-and-arrow gag or the paint gag, at least Jimmy had invented something, and when Space told Jimmy, "That's stupid, you feeb," Tom-Tom, his hands covered with paint, even blood from having smashed through glass somewhere, Tom-Tom lunged at Space, tackled him, and pinning him to the floor told him to "Shut the fuck up! Don't ever call him a fucking feeb, you hear me!" and Jimmy didn't even notice them, he laughed and laughed, speared away, and soon the rest of us joined in too, because even wise-guy Space knew that it had been so long since anybody had seen Jimmy really happy, seen him really laughing (Jimmy who had been made fun of by that ass-hole of a substitute teacher, Jimmy who was scared of a girl's twat), and as we left the house and straddled onto our bikes, knowing it would be only minutes before the cops showed at our own houses, knowing that even if we snuck around in our own garages with rags and gasoline to clean ourselves up some, get rid of the paint, anyway, there was no denying that we would eventually be caught (sent to the famous "Boys' Farm," the reform school?), even then it didn't hit us at first, because we simply agreed, happily, having done our work well, we agreed that "Those McClanaghans are going to be surprised when they see this, all right," and today we probably only dream of it all, dream that it was a dream, and in the dream we know that old Mrs. Devereaux in her cardigan sweater who watched us with her grin knew (she died last month, eighty years old), she knew that none of it matters because every one of us is going to die at some point, and Jimmy's moping doesn't matter, and poor Dirty Debbie doing what she did doesn't matter, and Ohio State there in Columbus winning or losing doesn't matter, and once you understand that, the house of somebody like the McClanaghans matters least of all (maybe that big-shot Civics substitute teacher, if he does become a writer like he claimed to his class that he was going to be, maybe he will have the words to tell everybody the truth without the bullshit - at last), and even with the police, and the national TV news clip about it, and the whole month of putting on good clothes to go to the so-called Family Court again, the dreams are more important, and in the dreams again the velvety black fabric of one of those bookcase-high stereo speakers snaps in a firecracker pop as an archery arrow whacks clean through it, the bluer-than-blue of that wonderful periwinkle blue paint seeps deeper and deeper into the sponge cake of that too-clean beige-white carpet that would never be the same, and Jimmy, the afternoon of the half-hour trial after all the counseling and all the meetings, Jimmy whispered to Tom-Tom that he dreamed of . . .