P: The Porn Books

Chapter: Kid, the Porn Books

It is raining so hard that school has been cancelled. We are sent home
on the bus, the driver screaming for everyone to be quiet while she
drives through the flooded streets. She yells, "I want everyone to shut
up so I can concentrate," a pause between each word. The noise inside
the bus goes up and down, depending on whether or not we can see the
driver looking at us in the long mirror hanging at the front of the
bus. We are dropped off at the end of each of our streets, so the bus
makes several stops instead of the normal two. My sister and I run
through the rain, soaking wet before the bus even pulls away. When we
get to our house, we stop and take off our shoes on the front porch. My
socks are damp.

My father turns on the oven, puts two chairs in front of it, and tells
us to sit in the chairs until we've dried off. We don't change our
clothes before sitting down, and my rear end itches from the wet. I'm
not cold, but the heat from the oven feels good. My sister and I talk
about what we should do with this time off, a surprise because it rains
all the time when we are in school but we have never been sent
home.

"We could build a raft," my sister suggests, "By now the bayou will be
high enough."

"You're not going back outside in this," my father says. He is sitting
at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and staring out the window.
The rain makes a steady sheet of water on the glass, the outside gray
and hazy. It looks like a bad pencil drawing. My father is annoyed with
us, at how we surprised him when we opened the front door and found him
lying across the couch in his underwear. He has two beer cans in front
of him, one that he's using as an ashtray, and he has put his pants on.
When I turn my head I can see his bare feet under the table, one
crossed over the other. Black hairs grow out of the tops of his feet
and toes, which are short and stubby and have thin slivers for
toenails. My sister and I have toes like my mother, long and skinny,
almost like little fingers. My father smokes while the rain hisses. I
don't know what time it is, but it's before noon because we didn't eat
lunch at school.

"You could die in weather like this," my father says, standing up. He
tells us to find him an umbrella.

"Can I get away from the stove if I find it?" my sister asks. He nods
yes. I stay put, even though I know where the umbrella is. My sister
and I were using it as a parachute, jumping off of the low brick wall
attached to the neighbor's house. It didn't slow us down as we fell,
and finally I refused to jump anymore, umbrella or not. My sister
remembers that we threw it in the garage when we were done with it, and
in less than a minute she hands the umbrella to my father. One of the
spikes has come through the fabric. He opens it in the kitchen while my
sister and I stare at each other, eyes wide. Everyone knows you don't
open an umbrella in the house.

"Stay here. No going outside. If I catch you outside, you're going to
get it," my father says. He pulls his keys out of his pocket, opens the
front door, and is gone. I can barely hear his car starting and pulling
away, but it's enough for me. I get out of my chair and follow my
sister into her room.

"What do you want to do?" I ask. She is digging around under her bed. I
can tell she's glad my father has left, because I am, too. She pulls
out her box of colored pencils and markers.

"Have you ever made a book?" she asks me. She's smiling but her eyes
look like trouble. Her hair, like mine, gets curly when it gets wet.
She looks like a doll I saw on the television. The doll would come
alive and scare people, giving them heart attacks or causing them to
fall down stairs. For a second I consider going to my own room to find
something to do, but then my sister hands me what looks like a bunch of
notebook paper, folded into fourths with red yarn along the edge.

The paper has been cut to make a tiny book. My sister has punched holes
along the sides and tied the paper together with the red yarn. On the
cover she has written "ESCAPE" in big block letters, then colored the
letters in with blue pencil. There is a picture of a bush with eyes
under the title. The bush is green, and looks like a sheep, only
without the head or the legs. A brown stump sticks out from the
bottom.

I sit on the edge of my sister's bed and begin to read the book. She
sits next to me, her leg touching mine. I open the book carefully. All
of the words are dialogue, and it begins with a woman sitting on a
bench. The woman stares into space, her yellow hair shaped like a
beehive and her hands folded in her lap. Along comes a man, who begins
to bother the woman. She tells him to leave her alone, but he keeps
pestering her. Eventually, the man rips off all of the woman's clothes.
By the fourth page, the woman is running naked into a forest, screaming
"No! No!" while the man runs after her. For two pages the woman talks
to herself and wonders what she will do, shivering under a branch while
balloons of the man's voice appear from the sides of the pages. "Come
on," he says, "I'm not going to hurt you."

Suddenly, a voice from above, in the form of another balloon, tells the
woman that it will save her. "Thank you, thank you," she says, and
turns into a bush herself on the next page. Like the bush on the book
cover, this one has eyes, which watch the man as he comes back into the
picture. The man only spends another page looking for the woman before
he decides to pee on the bush with eyes just like the woman's.

"The end," my sister says, "What do you think?" She is very close to
me; I can smell her breath and her wet clothes. I'm impressed with her
book, but not sure what to say. I don't know who changed the naked
woman into a bush, and I wonder if she gets turned back into a person
later, after the man has left. Also I can't decide if she was really
saved or if she has to spend forever as a bush, getting peed on. But
before I can ask, my sister tells me I can make a book of my own.

"You can draw it and then tie it together with yarn," she says, "You
can do anything you want."

While my sister cuts the paper for my book, I think about what my story
will be about. I have read a lot of real books, at school and at home,
but none of them are like my sister's story. My sister doesn't have to
tell me that our books will not be shown to my mother or father, so I
think I can make a book about whatever I want. I like being in my
sister's room at that moment, the rain still falling outside and my
father gone, even if we are doing something that would surely mean
trouble.

"Okay," my sister says, "You're ready to go." She hands me a tiny stack
of pages, the holes already punched through along the sides. "What are
you going to do?"

"It's a secret," I say, because really I haven't decided yet. I've seen
the dirty magazines my father keeps hidden in his closet. They have
comic strips in them that I don't understand, except maybe the one
where the naked man stands in front of a woman, his private parts
hidden by her head. The man is round, like a balloon, and he is waving
his fat arms and screaming, "The other way! The other way!" I could
even feel the ache in my jaw from when I've blown up balloons. But that
was just one drawing. I am supposed to make a book.

After a while, I decide on an old movie my father let me stay up late
to watch with him once. I fell asleep before it was over, but it was
about a giant gorilla named King Kong that gets taken from an island on
a boat and then gets loose in the city. The movie was in black and
white, and King Kong looked like he was made out of clay (except for
the big gorilla hand, black and furry, that comes through a window and
grabs a screaming woman. That looked real, even if the woman was stupid
and just stood there so the hand could get her).

"Have you decided what you're going to do yet?" my sister asks. I just
smile at her, pick up my paper, and sit on the floor on the other side
of the bed. I know my sister won't be able to keep herself from trying
to look, but up against the wall, the paper on a real book across my
knees, I can pretty much hide what I'm doing.

On the first page, in red crayon, I write "King Dong" in big block
letters, almost filling the page. I color the letters in with blue,
like my sister's book, being careful to stay in the lines. Then I start
the book, not bothering with where the big gorilla has come from.
Instead, King Dong shows up on the very first page, already holding a
car in one hand and a man in the other. The man screams, "Help! Help!"
but by the second page he is flying through the air and hitting a
building, his eyes two small X's to show that he is dead.

The next few pages are pretty much the same. I make King Dong's mouth
open in a constant roar, with huge fangs and pink tongue that curls.
His eyebrows are two slashes that make him look mean and angry. He
walks on people, who become red and yellow splotches on the bottom of
the paper. The whole time, his long wiener hangs between his legs,
almost hitting the ground. He doesn't have any balls.

Finally, a man wearing a gray helmet shows up, talking into a
walkie-talkie. Jets fly in from the sky, red marks shooting out of
their tiny guns and hitting King Dong, who roars and screams and then
falls to the ground and onto his back, his wiener sticking straight up
in the air.

I draw a page of people shouting "Yay! Yay!" Then the man with the gray
helmet shows up again, and tells everyone he has an idea. He takes out
a thin knife as long as his arm. He raises it over his head.

On the last page, I draw the people standing around a camp fire, over
which King Dong's wiener smokes and sends out little red lines of heat.
The people are smiling as they stand on a sign that says "THE END,"
written in capital letters.

"Are you finished?" my sister asks. I can't wait for her to see my book
before I tie the red yarn through the holds on the sides of the paper,
so I hand it to her. She reads it slowly and quietly, until she gets to
the end. The she starts giggling, her hand over her mouth while she
rocks back and forth. I know she will soon jump off of the bed and run
to the bathroom, where she will laugh and pee at the same time. But for
now she just laughs. I laugh, too, glad that she likes it, glad that I
made it. Also I laugh because I want to stay in my sister's room, where
the rain is outside and so is my father, who would not be laughing if
he were here.