The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (108 page)

I looked up at him. “That’s not the law of the jungle. The law of the jungle is: Only the strong survive. Eat or be eaten.”

“Exactly!” Leo said. “Next audition I go to, the casting director walks out in the waiting room. Who do you think he’s going to notice first—all the miscellaneous assholes wearing Levis and sweatshirts or the guy in the Armani?”

Omar walked by drinking a Diet Coke. Wearing a lime-green suit.

“Yo, Omar, get over here,” Leo said. “This guy sitting here says the law of the jungle is: Eat or be eaten. What do you think?”

Omar took a swig of his soda. “Either one’s fine with me,” he said. “When’s she getting here?”

“My man!” Leo shouted. He jumped out of his seat and high-fived the guy. He’d been the hero of the sports pages four or five years back: Omar Rodriguez and his famous buzzer-beater that had won Three Rivers the state high school championship. He’d gone on to UConn; it was during the mideighties. Played for them a couple of years. It was just before Calhoun came in as coach and UConn hit pay dirt in the NCAA. If I remembered right, Omar played a season in Europe before he packed it in. Point guard, he was.

“You hear that, Lorna?” Leo said. The saleswoman across the floor looked up from her paperwork. “Omar says, eat or be eaten. It’s ladies’ choice.”

She looked down again, shook her head. “You guys,” she said.

“Cut the crap, Leo,” I mumbled. “You’re embarrassing her.”

“Am I embarrassing you over there, Lorna?” Leo called. “Hurting those virgin ears of yours?” Without looking up, she gave him the finger.

Leo turned back to me. “See, it’s the same with selling cars, Dominick. Which is why this suit’s a smart investment twice over. Joe Six-pack comes in here with his fat-assed wife and his Patriots cap, you got basically one whack at him, see? So you stand up, let him know he’s dealing with class—intimidate the slob a little with how good you
look. Use the upper hand to your advantage. Shoot a little spark up the little woman’s thighs while you’re at it, too, see, so that
she’s
in your corner at decision time. Gives you a hidden advantage before you even open your mouth. You see what I’m saying? The law of the jungle.”

“So who does that make you?” I said. “Cheetah?”

He adjusted his tie, yanked on his shirt cuff. “Hey, what do you know, Birdseed? Like I said, you wear bib overalls.”

“And that makes you a better person than me, right, Leo?” I shot back. “The fact that you dress up for work like a high-class gigolo?”

Lorna looked over at me. I cleared my throat, looked away.

“No, Birdsey, it doesn’t make me a better person. Or a worse person, either. Because we’re all whores. Even what’s her face—that dried-up little nun over there in India, looks like a monkey. Even the Pope. Even housepainters.”

I snorted at him. “How’s a housepainter a whore?”

“Would you climb up a second-story ladder and scrape paint up your nostrils for
free
? For the fucking
art
of it? You got your bod out there like the rest of us, Numb Nuts. Don’t fucking kid yourself.”

“All right. How’s Mother Teresa a whore?”

“I couldn’t tell you how,” he said. “I don’t know the woman personally. I just know the theory’s right. That we’re all playing bang-for-the-buck. Putting whatever we got out there on the open market. I’m just being
honest
about it.”

A couple of racquetball games ago, Leo himself had called car sales a “whore’s game.” Had started blabbing about this top-secret book on the psychology of selling cars that no one in the business is ever supposed to talk about. Last winter, Gene, Costas, and Peter Jr. went to some “Meeting the Challenges of the Nineties” convention down in Miami—Leo got his nose whacked out of joint because
he
wasn’t invited—and when they came back, the three of them with their Mediterranean tans renewed, they began making changes. Pushing leasing, hiring women and minorities to sell. The Old Man paid big bucks for these “consultants” to come in and work with the new sales team. Taught them how to categorize each potential victim who’s outside on the lot peeking at sticker prices. They’ve got
this system where they know before someone even walks through the door which salesperson’s going to stand up smiling with his hand stuck out, and which approach
they’re going to use.

Minority customers is what Omar’s assigned: blacks and Ricans, according to Leo. He also gets sports nuts, women in their twenties, and—get this—gay guys. The obvious ones—the ones sizing up his butt and his basket when he goes back and forth to Costas’s office during the “good cop/bad cop” routine—that game they play where the Nice Sales Guy has to keep checking the numbers with the Big Bad Manager and the customer’s supposed to sit there with his free cup of styro-coffee and feel sorry for the poor guy’s humiliation. Isn’t that weak?

The consultants even worked with Leo and the others on the kind of shit they have laying around on their desks and filing cabinets. They call it “image projection.” Omar’s got two or three of his trophies sitting behind him and these autographed pictures—one of him and Larry Bird and another of him with President Bush. Leo’s got framed pictures of Angie and the kids. They face out toward the customers, not in at Leo. Lorna keeps magazines on her desk—
Glamour, Cosmo, People.
She’s got this picture of Michael Bolton taped to her filing cabinet.

“So who does she get?” I asked Leo. “All the women in love with Michael Bolton?”

“Nope,” he said. “I get them. Lorna gets professional white guys who think they can outdeal some dippy broad. Not that I should be telling you any of this, Birdseed. I could get in deep doo-doo for talking about it. But you should see these guys who buy from Lorna—they strut out of here with their bill of sale, cocky as hell, like they just fucked her or something. Not a clue in the world that two hours before they signed on the dotted line, we sold the exact same model with two or three more options for five hundred dollars less.”

Leo claims he’s fucked Lorna twice—once at her place and the other time in a LeBaron lease car they had to deliver in Warwick, Rhode Island. According to Leo, the two of them were sitting there in this parking lot where they’d stopped for coffee on the way to
Warwick and she just started playing stroke-a-thigh with him. She was so hot for him, he says, he had to pull off somewhere on the Old Post Road and put her out of her misery. Doubtful, though. Sometimes Leo’s life sounds a little too much like a porn movie to be real. “If this stuff really happened and isn’t some pipe dream,” I told him, flat out, the day he told me about him and Lorna, “then you’re a fucking idiot. She took you back once, Leo. Twice might be pushing the envelope.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Leo told me, grinning. “I’m a sex addict. Me and Wade Boggs.”

When I got up to go, Leo walked me back to my truck. “Body on this thing’s getting some corrosion, huh?” he said, fingering the passenger’s side door panel.

“Well, stop poking at it then,” I said.

I got in. Started her up and backed out of the space. Gave Leo the peace sign and began driving out of the lot.

“Hey, Dominick!” he yelled. “Hold up!”

He came running toward me, that fancy suit of his fluttering in the breeze. He bent down to the window. “Hey, I was just thinking,” he said. “You know that visitors’ list you were telling me about? How many visitors did you say your brother gets?”

“Five.”

“Well, tell him he can put me on it. If he wants to. I wouldn’t mind going down there, seeing how he’s doing. Saying hello. I mean, what the hell? 1969, you said? I go back a few years with Thomas, too.”

I nodded—took in the gift he’d just given me. “I’ll mention it to him,” I said. “Thanks.”

“No problem, man. Later.”

See, that’s the thing with Leo: he’s sleazy
and
he’s decent. He takes you by surprise. I drove away, one hand on the wheel, the other wiping the goddamned water out of my eyes. Leo, man. The guy’s a trip.

The Indian cemetery that abuts the sprawling Three Rivers State Hospital grounds is a modest place: a few rolling acres studded with nameless foot markers, a hundred or so gravestones. A ten-foot-high pyramid of plump, fist-sized rocks stands at the center of things. The monument commemorates Samuel, the Great Sachem of the Wequonnoc Nation, who, back in the seventeenth century, warred against the neighboring Nipmucks and Pequots and Narragansetts and cast his lot with the white settlers. Big mistake. The town of Three Rivers was incorporated in 1653 and grew steadily and legally, the law being white. Conversely, the reservation kept shrinking in acreage, the tribe’s numbers dwindling.

The cemetery’s oldest tombstones date back to the eighteenth century and are now so eroded and encrusted with parasites that trying to read them is a joint effort between vision and touch. Below the ground are the remains of Fletchers and Crowells, Johnsons and Grays—assimilated Indians, assimilation meaning that the dick doesn’t discriminate. The newer stones mark the graves of Wequonnoc war dead:
veterans of the Civil and Spanish American Wars, the World Wars, Korea. During the late 1960s, when America was once again eating its young, the Indian graveyard’s final stone was erected. It honors Lonnie Peck, Ralph Drinkwater’s older cousin, killed by sniper fire in the jungle near Vinh Long in 1969.

That was the summer man landed on the moon and Mary Jo Kopechne went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick and Woodstock happened. The summer I saw Dessa Constantine jockeying drinks at the Dial-Tone Lounge and fell in love for life. Home from college after our bumpy freshman year, my brother and I had jobs as seasonal laborers for the Three Rivers Public Works Department. Ralph Drinkwater, Leo, Thomas, and me: what a quartet
that
was. Our duties included clearing brush out at the reservoir, pumping the sump at the town fairgrounds, and mowing the town cemeteries, the little Indian graveyard among them. Thomas’s voices had already started whispering to him by then, I think, but not so badly that you couldn’t just call him high-strung or moody and then get lost in your own more important shit. We were nineteen.

A decade or so later—after the doctors had stripped Thomas of the label “manic-depressive” and declared him, instead, a paranoid schizophrenic—my brother’s then most recent medication had begun to stabilize him. Had seemed like the
real
miracle this time. Dosed with two hundred daily milligrams of Thorazine, Thomas was granted a state hospital “grounds card.” He was pleased and proud of this achievement; the card allowed him roaming privileges in the company of staff or family.

Dessa and I would pick him up on Sunday afternoons at the entrance to the Settle Building and wander with him past the hospital’s original brick monstrosities and the Ribicoff Research Center, and then over the rear boundary and down to the Sachem River. My brother liked to watch the water, I remember—watch its movement and listen to it. He liked, sometimes, to take off his shoes and socks and wade into the cedar-tinted current. More often than not, the three of us would walk the banks and end up a quarter of a mile down, at the little Indian graveyard. Dessa and I would study the stones—the rem
nants of those old, buried lives—while Thomas sat on the grass, smoking cigarette after cigarette and reading his Bible. By then, he had already pretty much proclaimed himself God’s right-hand man and a target of the KGB. Sooner or later, he’d get up off the ground and follow me and Dess, treating us to some Biblical interpretation or another—some prediction of coming doom based
on what he’d seen in the papers or on the nightly news or in his sleep. I’d get itchy and tell him we had to go—hustle ahead of both him and Dessa and back to Settle, where I could sign him back in and leave. Check off my obligation for another week and get myself the hell out of there. “Be patient with him, Dominick,” Dessa used to advise me on the drive home from those visits. “If he needs to babble, then just let him babble. Who’s he hurting?” My answer to that question—
Me!
He’s hurting
me!
—went unspoken. If you’re the sane identical twin of a schizophrenic sibling—if natural selection has somehow allowed you to beat the odds, scoot under the fence—then the fence is the last thing you want to lean against.

At the southern end of the Indian graveyard, a packed dirt path leads away from the river, up past pines and pin oaks and cedars, and then through a grove of mountain laurel that blossoms spectacularly every June. Climbing higher and higher, you follow the path and the sound of water, jump from boulder to boulder, and come abruptly to a spot that takes your breath away. The Sachem River, suddenly visible again, rushes between two sheer rock cliffs and spills crazily over a steep gorge.

Everyone in Three Rivers calls this spot, simply, the Falls. According to history or legend or some hybrid of the two, Chief Samuel once pursued an enemy sachem to the cliff’s edge and forced him to a no-win decision: either surrender and be executed or attempt the suicide leap to the opposite ledge. The enemy chief leapt, making it somehow to the other side, but breaking his leg in the process. Samuel arrived shortly after and leapt, too, intact. He quickly overtook his nemesis, bashed in his skull with a rock, and then sliced and ate a piece of his shoulder to signify to the universe who had prevailed. My tenth-grade American history teacher, Mr. LoPresto, was the one who told us
about Samuel’s flesh-eating, delighting in the class’s squeamish reaction to the gory details.