The Boys of My Youth (3 page)

It occurs to me that Grandma and Ralph have nothing, they don’t even enjoy
Bonanza
all that much, they just turned it on because my mom told them to let me watch it. There can’t be
anything for them to enjoy, with their long empty days, full of curled-up old ladies and dirty sheep. They don’t even drink
pop.

I am crying on the floor, the tears go sideways and land coldly in my ears or on the velveteen pillow. I can’t bear, suddenly,
the way the television sends out its sad blue light, making the edges of the room seem darker. A coffee can covered with contact
paper holds red, white, and blue Fourth of July flowers, taken from a dead person. I wish suddenly that my grandma was dead,
so she wouldn’t have to knit that afghan anymore. The rest of the year, while I’m gone back home and am playing with my friends,
this is where my grandma is, her needles going, her teeth in the bathroom in a plastic bowl. My ears are swimming pools, and
I feel trapped suddenly inside the small circle of light in the center of the room. I’m tiny Eva, watching Little Joe Cartwright
through the bars of my crib, I’m a monkey, strapped into a space capsule and flung far out into the galaxy, weightless, hurtling
along upside down through the Milky Way. Alone, alone, and alone. Against my will, I sob out loud. I turn over and weep into
the Arkansas pillow, wrecking the velveteen. Suddenly my grandma’s hand is on my hair, the knitting needles have been set
down.

There is telephone talk, and muffled comments from Grandma to Ralph, from Ralph to the person on the other end of the phone.
My nose is pressed against the pillow and I’m still crying, or trying to. I suddenly want to hear what’s going on but I don’t
have the nerve to sit up. My clothes are gathered, the television is shut off, I am walked outside and put in the back seat
of their great big yellow car. In the back window, there’s a dog with a bobbing head that I usually like to mess around with
when I’m riding in the car. I don’t even bother to look at it; I just stare out the back window at the night sky.

After about a half hour of driving we pull over and sit at the
side of the road. I’m no longer weightless, but unbearably heavy, and tired. My dad pulls up with a crunch of gravel, words
are exchanged through open windows, quiet chuckles, I am placed in the front seat between my parents. We pull away, and as
we head toward home, the galaxy recedes, the stars move back into position, and the sky stretches out overhead, black and
familiar.

They’ve decided not to hassle me about this. “What happened, honey?” my mom asks once, gently.

“
Bonanza
made me sad,” I reply.

H
ere is a scene. Two sisters are
fishing together in a flat-bottomed boat on an olive green lake. They sit slumped like men, facing in opposite directions,
drinking coffee out of a metal-sided thermos, smoking intently. Without their lipstick they look strangely weary, and passive,
like pale replicas of their real selves. They both have a touch of morning sickness but neither is admitting it. Instead,
they watch their bobbers and argue about worms versus minnows.

My cousin and I are floating in separate, saline oceans. I’m the size of a cocktail shrimp and she’s the size of a man’s thumb.
My mother is the one on the left, wearing baggy gabardine trousers and a man’s shirt. My cousin’s mother is wearing blue jeans,
cuffed at the bottom, and a cotton blouse printed with wild cowboys roping steers. Their voices carry, as usual, but at this
point we can’t hear them.

It is five
A.M.
A duck stands up, shakes out its feathers, and peers above the still grass at the edge of the water. The skin of the lake
twitches suddenly and a fish springs loose into the air, drops back down with a flat splash. Ripples move across the surface
like radio waves. The sun hoists itself up and gets busy, laying a sparkling rug across the water, burning the beads of dew
off the reeds, baking the tops of our mothers’ heads. One puts on sunglasses and the other a plaid fishing cap with a wide
brim.

In the cold dark underwater, a long fish with a tattered tail discovers something interesting. He circles once and then has
his breakfast before becoming theirs. As he breaks from the water to the air he twists hard, sending out a cold spray, sparks
of green light. My aunt reels him in, triumphant, and grins at her sister, big teeth in a friendly mouth.

“Why you dirty rotten so-and-so,” my mother says admiringly.

It is nine o’clock on Saturday night, the sky is black and glittering with pinholes, old trees are bent down over the highway.
In the dark field behind, the corn gathers its strength, grows an inch in the silence, then stops to rest. Next to the highway,
screened in vegetation, a deer with muscular ears and glamorous eyes stands waiting to spring out from the wings into the
next moving spotlight. The asphalt sighs in anticipation.

The car is a late-model Firebird, black on black with a T-roof and a tape deck that pelts out anguish, Fleetwood Mac. My cousin
looks just like me except she has coarse hair and the jawline of an angel. She’s driving and I’m shotgun, talking to her profile.
The story I’m recounting to her is full of what I said back to people when they said things to me. She can sing and
listen at the same time, so she does that, nodding and grimacing when necessary.

She interrupts me once. “What’s my hair doing?”

“Laying down. I’ll tell you if it tries anything.” Her hair is short but so dense it has a tendency to stay wherever the wind
pushes it. When she wakes up in the morning her head is like a landscape, with cliffs and valleys, spectacular pinnacles.

“Okay, go ahead,” she says. I finish my story before my favorite song comes on so I can devote myself to it.

We sing along to a tune about a woman who rings like a bell through the night. Neither of us knows what that means, but we’re
in favor of it. We want to ring like bells, we want our hair to act right, we want to go out with guys who wear boots with
turned-up toes and worn-down heels. We’re out in the country, on my cousin’s turf. My car is stalled in the city somewhere
on four low tires, a blue-and-rust Volkswagen with the door coat-hangered shut. Her car is this streamlined, dark-eyed Firebird
with its back end hiked up like a skirt. We are hurtling through the night, as they say, on our way to a bar where the guys
own speedboats, snowmobiles, whatever else is current. I sing full-throttle:
You can take me to paradise, but then again you can be cold as ice; I’m over my head, but it sure feels nice
. I turn the rearview mirror around, check to see what’s happening with the face.

Nothing good. But there you have it. It’s yours at least, and your hair isn’t liable to thrust itself upward into stray pointing
fingers. It doesn’t sound like corn husks when you brush it.

My cousin, beautiful in the dashboard light, glances over at me. She has a first name but I’ve always called her Wendell.
She pushes it up to eighty and the song ends, a less wonderful one comes on. We’re coming to the spot on the highway where
the giant trees dangle their wrists over the ground. In the crotch of an elm, during daylight hours, a gnarled car is visible,
wedged among the branches.

Up ahead, the cornfields are dark and rustling. The deer shifts nervously behind the curtain of weeds, waiting for its cue.
The car in the tree’s crotch is a warning to fast drivers, careening kids. Hidden beneath the driver’s seat, way up in the
branches, is a silver pocketwatch with a broken face. It had been someone’s great-grandfather’s, handed down and handed down,
until it reached the boy who drove his car into the side of a tree. Below the drifting branches, the ground is black and loamy,
moving with bugs. In the silence, stalks of corn stretch their thin, thready feet and gather in the moisture. The pocket-watch
is stopped at precisely 11:47, as was the boy. Fleetwood Mac rolls around the bend and the deer springs full-blown out of
the brocade trees. In the white pool of headlights, in front of a swerving audience, it does a short, stark, modern dance,
and exits to the right. We recover and slow it down, shaking.

“He could have wrecked my whole front end,” Wendell says. This is the farm-kid mentality. Her idea of a gorgeous deer is one
that hangs upside down on the wall of the shed, a rib cage, a pair of antlers, a gamy hunk of dinner. She feels the same way
about cows and pigs.

We’re in the sticks. Way out here things are measured in shitloads, and every third guy you meet is named Junior. I’ve decided
I don’t even like this bar we’re going to, that howling three-man band and the bathroom with no stalls, just stools. Now I’m
slumped and surly, an old pose for me. That deer had legs like canes, feet like Dixie cups.

Wendell pats my knee, grinning. “Settle down,” she says. “It didn’t
hit
us. We’re safe.” She likes excitement as long as her car doesn’t get hurt. I light a cigarette, begin dirtying up her ashtray,
and mess with the tape until our favorite song comes on again. We’re back up to eighty on the narrow highway, daring the ignorant
to take a step onto the asphalt. This is Illinois, a land of lumbering raccoons, snake-tailed possums, and flatout
running bunnies, all trying to cross the road. The interior of the car smells like leather and evergreen trees, the moon peers
through the roof, and Wendell drives with one finger.

“Hey, how’s my hair?” she asks suddenly. Her eyes are clear brown, her cheekbones are high and delicate, brushed with pink,
her lips aren’t too big or too little. She’s wearing my shirt. A clump of hair has pushed itself forward in the excitement.
It looks like a small, startled hand rising from the back of her head.

I make an okay sign, thumb and forefinger. The music is deafening.

Back in the cluster of trees, the deer moves into position again and the willows run their fingers along the ground. The corn
whispers encouragement to itself. In the bar up ahead waitresses slam sloe-gin fizzes down on wet tables and men point pool
cues at each other in the early stages of drunkenness. The singer in the three-man band whispers
test
into the microphone and rolls his eyes at the feedback. The sound guy jumps up from a table full of ladies and heads over
to turn knobs.

We crunch over the parking lot gravel and wait for our song to finish.
I’m over my head, but it sure feels nice
. The bar is low and windowless, with patched siding and a kicked-in door; the lot is full of muscle cars and pickups. A man
and a woman burst through the door and stand negotiating who will drive. He’s got the keys but she looks fiercer. In the blinking
neon our faces are malarial and buttery. As the song winds down, the drama in front of us ends. He throws the keys at her
as hard as he can but she jumps nimbly out of the way and picks them up with a handful of gravel, begins pelting his back
as he weaves into the darkness.

Wendell turns to me with a grin, a question on her lips. Before she can ask I reach over and press her excited hair back down.

Their house has a face on it, two windows with the shades half down, a brown slot of a door, and a glaring mouthful of railing
with a few pickets missing. Pink geraniums grow like earrings on either side of the porch. It’s August and the grass is golden
and spiky against our ankles, the geraniums smell like dust. A row of hollyhocks stands out by the road, the flowers are upside-down
ladies, red, maroon, and dried-up brown. An exploded raccoon is abuzz over on the far side of the highway and crows are dropping
down from time to time to sort among the pieces. On either side of the house, fields fall away, rolling and baking in the
heat.

The sisters are sitting on the stoop shelling peas, talking overtop of each other. My mother says mayonnaise goes bad in two
hours in the hot sun and my aunt says bullshit. They’ve just driven out to the fields and left the lunches for the hired men.
They argue energetically about this, until the rooster walks up and my aunt carries her bowl in the house to finish the discussion
through the screen door. She and the rooster hate each other.