The most embarrassing moment of all came after a run of frequent baptisms at their church; Craig broke away after a service, walked up to the pastor and told him to tell people not to have so many babies.
A psychologist didn`t help, and, at $90 a week, couldn`t be afforded for long anyway. What did help was a job arranged through CETA, a now-defunct government program that paid wages to handicapped people like Craig through a series of training programs.
He worked at a place called Smitty`s for two years, assembling lawnmowers and other tools, and that calmed some of the rage that he could only indirectly express. Once, he turned off the air conditioner because he thought it was wasteful and got a five-day suspension from work for his trouble. Despite the punishment, he would do it again.
To help themselves cope, Hank and Gert began attending a support group for families of head-injury victims, where speakers like Anita Zatz, a Florida speech pathologist, explained things to them.
”With head injuries, there are often problems with memory and deductive reasoning,” she would say. ”Victims often tend to interpret things literally, and they`re quite capable of forming rather bizarre beliefs and relationships.”
Gert embarked on a program of intensive reasoning with her son that was hampered by the fact that Craig`s thought processes were essentially irrational to everybody but him. ”You can`t force other people to live in the dark just because you want to,” she would say.
As for the cast-off clothing, Gert washed it, hung it up and told him,
”All right. You now have enough jackets and underwear for the rest of your life. Don`t bring home any more.”
Through all of this–the family tensions, the aberrant behavior verging on madness, two heart operations for her husband–Gert kept a kind of miraculous equilibrium. ”I live by faith and positive thinking,” she would say, while at the same time being tormented by doubts about whether or not she was doing the right thing for Craig and the rest of her family. What kept her going was her belief that ”What is necessary is to do what gets set before us.`
Ultimately, Gert believed, you have to accept things and deal with them. Every once in a while, she would wonder whether Craig might not really be happier in an institution. And then she would stop and think about life inside those places, and the idea would gradually fade away like the unsettling residue of a bad dream dissipating in the daylight.
”I always wanted to retire when I was 30. I thought I was going to do it through jumping my motorcycle, but I didn`t quite make it. Do you think my wreck was as bad as Evel Knievel`s?”
Craig Scheeringa sits quietly in his bedroom, browsing through a book of photographs. There are pictures of fishing trips, of Craig caught blurringly in the middle of a cycle jump. The colors in the snapshots are turning into a faded green; the focus, if it was ever sharp, has long since turned fuzzy.
Craig walks in his slightly askew, awkward fashion, over to the bed. He is affable, enthusiastic even, and handsome, deeply tanned. His cat, an aloof Manx named Bickley, is asleep near some of the jigsaw puzzles that Craig works. He is not as proud of them as he is of the 21 trophies he won for his prowess on his motorcycle that he keeps crowded together on a couple of narrow shelves.
”After the accident, I lost my coordination and some of my balance,” he says, his conversation cracked by an occasional unbidden chortle. ”But I keep working and keep getting some of my coordination back. I still wanna ride.”
And he still plans to be a millionaire, too. ”I have lots of money,” he says, and enumerates how much he makes at the lumberyard and from mowing lawns in the neighborhood. He pays his parents $50 a week for board, but even so, he says he`s going to be rich very soon.
Something remains of his mechanical facility; he can still take a bicycle apart, but the motorcycles he used to disassemble and put together in a whiz- bang fashion now stymy him. The sexual side of his nature is apparently gone; his interest in girls is on a prepubescent level.
There are those who think that Craig Scheeringa has recovered about as many of his faculties as he is likely to do. But his mother, taking things day by day, is sure that things are going to get better.
”He wouldn`t use ice cubes for the longest time,” she says. ”Something about them being a waste of water. But just the other day, he started to use them again. So you see, we`re getting there.”
Craig`s recovery and his family`s self-realization proceed at a modest but nonetheless discernible pace. Gert no longer plays softball, but she has taken up Appalachian-style clog dancing, plays tennis and handles all her husband`s taxes and reports from his contracting business.
Craig seems conscious of the fact that he is different and does not like to mix with people. Weeknights he comes home from his job and plays Scrabble; he can beat the whole family. Since he didn`t want to pay for a fishing permit, his mother bought him one, and he has begun to spend his Sundays on the pier. He still has the yellow Yamaha that crashed; Craig likes to have it around as a symbol of the day when he will be able to ride again. But his mother would like him to get rid of it.
”Really,” she muses, ”it`s a great life. You just can`t weaken.”
Things go along fine and then something happens to make the family realize that there is not going to be a convenient happy ending, not to this story anyway.
A few months ago Hank Scheeringa, acting as a Good Samaritan, brought home a drunk to try to dry him out. But the derelict lifestyle suddenly seemed attractive to Craig, who took off on his bicycle for two days. He made it as far as Miami before giving up. He had been on his way to the Keys, where the family vacationed in better days.
The two children who are still at home are not entirely comfortable with Craig. Lonnie, because of the threats that Craig used to make against him, flat-out refuses to sleep in the house alone with his brother. When his parents are out, a friend sleeps over.
A few months ago, Craig was playing in a baseball game with some mentally retarded kids. He seemed to enjoy himself, and when his mother asked him how he liked it, he said, ”It was okay. They`re a little bit `that way` . . . but I guess I`m a little bit `that way` too.”
Says his mother: ”My goal is to have Craig in a place of his own in about two years. I think that`s a real possibility.” And Craig, observing Bickley stalking past the swimming pool, suddenly brightens.
”What do I wanna do? I don`t wanna get married or anything. And I still plan to be a millionaire. Do you know that I do the best belly-floppers of anybody?” he says. ”Sometimes I climb up on a four foot-ladder and turn all the lights in the pool off and jump in. Doesn`t hurt, not even a little bit.”
