The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (116 page)

The job I enjoyed most was mowing and weeding out at the town cemeteries: the ancient graveyard up in Rivertown with its crazy epitaphs, the Indian burial grounds down by the Falls, and the bigger cemeteries on Boswell Avenue and Slater Street. That first day out at Boswell Avenue, I located my grandfather’s grave: a six-foot granite monument, presided over by a pair of grief-stricken cement angels.
Domenico Onofrio Tempesta (1880–1949) “The greatest griefs are silent.”
His wife,
Ignazia (1897–1925),
was buried across the cemetery beneath a smaller, more modest stone. Thomas was the one who found Ma’s mother’s grave, halfway through the summer. “Oh, I don’t know. . . . No reason, really,” Ma said when I asked her why the two of them hadn’t been buried together.

I was nervous, at first, about Thomas. For one thing, I was still a little freaked out about that busted typewriter bullshit. For another, he wasn’t exactly the manual labor type. But I shut my mouth and kept my eyes open, and after the first week or so, I began to relax. Let down my guard.

Sometimes he’d lose track of what he was doing or drift off in a fog somewhere, but nothing out of the ordinary. He pretty much held his own. By the beginning of July, he had tanned and bulked up a little and lost his Lurch look. So college
hadn’t
driven him over the edge after all, I told myself. He’d just been exhausted. He was okay. And come September, he could begin digging himself out of the academic hole he’d dug for himself with all those class cuts, the stupid asshole. The jerk.

Thomas never ate those extra sandwiches Ma packed for him.
I
ate them. Sometimes, when he didn’t hand them to me outright, I’d go looking for them and find the notes Ma had written him. She knew better than to write
me
those things. One time she’d pulled that in high school, and my buddies had snatched the note away and passed it around. I’d gone home and screamed bloody murder at her.
But that TLC stuff never embarrassed Thomas the way it did me. He thrived on that kind of crap.

I’ll say this for Thomas: he went out and got our typewriter fixed without my bugging him about it. Without Ma or Ray catching wind of what had happened. He took the initiative, paid for the repairs out of his first paycheck from the city, and had the machine back within a week. The only problem was, he couldn’t buy another carrying case. When Ma noticed it was missing, it was
me
she asked about it, not Thomas. I told her someone at school had swiped it. She stood there, looking worried, not saying anything. “It’s no big deal, Ma,” I assured her. “Better they took the case than the typewriter. Right?”

Ma said she couldn’t believe that college boys would steal from each other.

I told her it would surprise her what college boys did.

“Is it drugs, Dominick?” she said. “Is that why he lost all that weight?”

I reached down and gave her a smooch. Told her she was a worrywart. Teased the fear out of her eyes. He’s
fine,
Ma, I said.
Really.
It was just his nerves.

Each workday morning at seven-thirty, Thomas and I reported to the city barn where Lou Clukey dispatched the work crews around Three Rivers. Thomas and I were assigned this big burly foreman named Dell Weeks. Dell was a strange one. He had a shaved head, a silver tooth in front, and the filthiest mouth I’d ever heard on anyone. Dell couldn’t stand Lou Clukey, who was an ex-Navy officer and a straight arrow, and you could tell the feeling was mutual. You could
feel
the tension when Dell and Lou were within twenty feet of each other. So it was no big surprise that our crew usually drew the day’s dirtiest work. All morning long, we shoveled sand, cut swamp brush, pumped sewage, disinfected campground toilets. We saved the mowing jobs for afternoon.

Not counting Dell Weeks, there were four guys on our crew: Thomas, me, Leo Blood, and Ralph Drinkwater. Leo was seasonal
like Thomas and me, a year ahead of us at UConn. Drinkwater was full-time. If the draft or Electric Boat didn’t get him first, he ran the risk of becoming a Three Rivers Public Works “lifer” like Dell.

Drinkwater hadn’t grown much since that year in high school when he’d gotten thrown out of Mr. LoPresto’s class for laughing out loud at the concept that the red man had been annihilated because of the white man’s natural superiority. He was still only five-six, five-seven, maybe, but he was tougher and cockier than he’d been back then. A bantamweight. He had tight, ropy muscles and walked with the trace of a strut; he even mowed lawns with an attitude. That whole summer, Drinkwater wore the exact same clothes to work. He didn’t stink or anything, the way Dell sometimes did. He just never wore anything else but these same black jeans and this blue tank top. Leo and I had a twenty-dollar bet going as to when Drinkwater would finally break down and change his clothes. I had the odd calendar days and Leo had the evens, and we both waited all summer to collect.

Although I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, Drinkwater was the best worker of the four of us, focused and steady-paced, no matter how hot it got. All day long, he listened to the transistor radio he kept hitched to his belt loop—Top 40, baseball if the Red Sox had an afternoon game. He played that radio so relentlessly, I
still
know half the commercials by heart.
Come alive, you’re in the Pepsi generation. . . . You’ve got a friend at Three Rivers Savings. . . . Come on down to Constantine Motors, where we’re on the hill but on the level.
All day long, the music and talk moved with Drinkwater.

He was pretty antisocial at first. He seemed always to be watching Thomas and me. About fifty times a day, I’d look up and catch Ralph looking away from one of us. It wasn’t anything new: people had always stared at Thomas and me
. Oh, look, Muriel! Twins!
But Ralph had been a twin, too. What was
he
looking at?

Riding out to a job, Thomas, Leo, and I would usually hop into the back of the truck and Ralph would ride up front with Dell. He’d talk to Dell sometimes, but he hardly ever said a word to us, even when one of us asked him something directly. Ralph’s older cousin
Lonnie had been killed in Nam earlier that year—had been buried in the Indian graveyard. When we were mowing out there, Ralph would steer clear of Lonnie’s headstone. It was me who’d usually trim around it; we’d divide the cemetery into quadrants, and that was always my section. I’d be clipping and yanking weeds and start thinking about Lonnie—the time he got in trouble for spitting on kids at the playground, that time at the movies, in the downstairs bathroom, when he’d grabbed me by the wrist and humiliated me for his and Ralph’s entertainment.
Why you hitting yourself, kid? Huh? Why you hitting yourself? . . .
It was good-sized—Lonnie’s gravestone. Granite, rough-hewn
on one side, polished on the other. Placed there by the VFW, it said, in honor of Lonnie’s having been one of the first Three Rivers kids to fall in Vietnam. Some honor: giving up your life for our national mistake. For nothing. When Thomas and I were little kids, the big villains of the world were other kids.
Bad
kids. Troublemakers like Lonnie Peck. Now Nixon was the enemy. Nixon and those other neckless old farts who kept escalating the war over there—kept sending kids over to the jungle to get their heads blown off.

Ralph’s sister’s grave was out there, too. Penny Ann’s. It was close by Lonnie’s but not right next to it, twenty-five or thirty feet away. Hers was just a small sandstone foot marker with her initials,
P.A.D.
I’d missed it the first couple of times we were out there. Then,
bam!
It hit me whose stone it was. I kept trying to say something to Ralph about the graves. About Lonnie’s at least. The death of a soldier was easier to talk about than the rape and murder of a little girl. But I didn’t say anything about either one. Ralph gave me no openings. Didn’t let down his guard for a second. One time during the first week, the two of us—Ralph and me—were loading tools back into the truck bed. I reminded him that we’d both been at River Street Elementary School together and then together again in Asshole LoPresto’s history class at JFK. Drinkwater just looked at me, expressionless. “Remember?” I finally said. He stood there, staring
at me like I was from Mars or something.

“Yeah, I remember,” he said. “What about it?”

“Nothing,” I sputtered. “Sorry I mentioned it. Excuse me for breathing, okay?”

When the morning was cool and the job wasn’t too strenuous—or if Lou Clukey was in the vicinity—Dell would become a
working
foreman—would labor alongside us. Otherwise, he’d sit in the truck, leaning against the open driver’s side door, smoking his Old Golds and finding fault. Sometimes he’d get up off his ass and go over to my brother. Snatch Thomas’s push broom or bow saw away from him and give him a little demonstration on how he
should
be doing it. Or else he’d tell Drinkwater to stop work and go show Thomas the right way to do something. It was degrading for both Thomas and Ralph—enough so that you’d have to look away. But Dell liked the flustered reaction Thomas never failed to give him and the look of contempt he’d get from Ralph. He
enjoyed
busting their balls, Thomas’s especially. Dell started this joke about how he couldn’t tell my brother and me apart unless we each had a shovel in our hands. Then he knew who was who,
no problem. He nicknamed us the Dicky Bird brothers, Dick and Dickless.

Of the four of us, Dell came to favor Leo and me. We were the ones he always picked to stop work and drive over to Central Soda Shop for coffees, or fill up the water jugs at the town spring, or run and get him some cigs. Leo and I were the ones that Dell started addressing his stupid jokes to.

“Nigger’s walking down the street leading a bull on a rope, and the bull’s got this hard-on that’s yea-big. Woman comes up to him and says, ‘Hey, how much would it cost me to slip that foot-and-a-half of meat up my cunt?’ So the nigger says, ‘Well, I’ll fuck you for free, lady, but I’ll have to get someone to watch my bull here.’”

When Dell told his jokes, I’d usually give him a fake smile or a nervous laugh. Sometimes I’d sneak a glance over at Drinkwater. Ralph might have been a full-blooded Wequonnoc Indian like he’d claimed that day in Mr. LoPresto’s class, but he was pretty dark-skinned. I’d never seen an Indian with an Afro. All summer long, Ralph’s transistor radio kept singing about the dawning of the age of
Aquarius and everybody smiling on their brother and loving one another, but Dell’s jokes had a way of curdling those songs.

Drinkwater was always deadpan when Dell got to the punch lines of those racist jokes. He never cracked a smile, but he never gave him an argument, either—never challenged him the way he had that day in class with Mr. LoPresto. I hated those jokes of Dell’s, really
hated
them, but I was too gutless to object. Not that I admitted it to myself. With thirty college credits under my belt, I was able to intellectualize my silence: eventually, people our age would be in charge and all the bigots of the world would die off. And anyway, if Drinkwater didn’t say anything—he had to be at least
partly
black—then why should I? So I kept selling myself for the privilege of making those big-deal errands to the spring and the coffee shop. I smiled and kept my mouth shut and maintained my “favored worker status.” Leo did the same.

That summer, Leo and I rekindled the friendship we had started a couple years before in summer school math class. The few times I’ve ever bothered to think about it—to analyze what it was that made us friends in the first place, way before we were brothers-in-law married to the Constantine sisters—the only thing I ever came up with was the fact that we’re opposites. Always have been. At high school dances, I was your basic fade-into-the-woodwork type. The kind of guy who’d stand there all night watching the band because he was too scared to ask any girl to dance. Not Leo, though. Leo was a performer. That was back when his nickname was “Cool Jerk.” Sooner or later, someone would request that song, “Cool Jerk,” and Leo’d get out there in the middle of the gym floor and dance this spastic solo. Kids used to circle him four or five deep, clapping and hooting and laughing their heads off at him, and Leo’s fat would flop in all directions, the sweat would
fly off his face. I admired his nerve, I guess, in
some
screwy way. One time, in the middle of a schoolwide assembly—one of those slide-show yawners about people from other lands—Leo raised his hand as a volunteer and got up on stage, yanked on a grass skirt, and took a hula lesson from these visiting Hawaiians. “Cool Jerk! Cool Jerk!” everyone started chant
ing over the ukulele music, until Leo’s hip-rolling began to look like something other than the hula, and the crowd went wild, and even the Hawaiians stopped smiling. Neck Veins, the vice principal, walked onstage, stopped the show, and told the rest of us to go back to our third-period classes. Instead of taking off his grass skirt and exiting gracefully, Leo started giving a speech about how JFK High was a dictatorship like Cuba and we should all go on strike. He was suspended for two weeks and barred from extracurricular activities.

“How can you hang around with the biggest a-hole in our entire school?” Thomas kept asking me that whole summer when Leo and I had been in remedial algebra together. Leo
was
an asshole; I knew that. But, like I said, he was also everything my brother and I were not: uninhibited, carefree, and funny as hell. Leo’s colossal nerve had gotten the two of us access to all kinds of forbidden pleasures that my goody two-shoes brother would have objected to and my stepfather would have beaten me for: the X-rated Eros Drive-In out on Route 165, the racetrack at Narragansett, a liquor store on Pachaug Pond Road that gave minors the benefit of the doubt. The first time I ever got shit-faced drunk was out at the Falls in Leo’s mother’s Biscayne, smoking Muriel air tips and passing a jug of Bali Hai back and forth. I was fifteen.

Now, four years later—during our work-crew summer—Thomas was just as resentful of Leo’s and my rekindled friendship as he’d been the first time around. “Just what I need: another dose of Leo Blood,” Thomas would say if I told Thomas that Leo was coming over after supper to hang out or to pick me up. Ma liked Leo because he was a good eater. Ray said he’d learned in the Navy not to trust the Leos of the world any further than you could throw them. “Watch your rear flank with that one,” Ray told me. “He’s too full of himself. Guys like that will sell you right down the river.”