This Boy's Life (14 page)

We played our games at night. When they were away my mother usually drove me, but if she was busy Norma would get Bobby Crow to take me in his car. Of course Norma came along too. This was one of their ways to steal time together. On the drive to the game Bobby gave me tips, inside dope about passing, shooting, feinting. I hung over the front seat as Bobby talked, nodding shrewdly at everything he said. Bobby had played football for Concrete High. He’d been their quarterback, the smallest and best player on the team, so much better than the others that he seemed alone on the field. His solitary excellence made him beautiful and tragic, because you knew that whatever prodigies he performed would be undone by the rest of the team. He made sly, unseen handoffs to butterfingered halfbacks, long bull’s-eye passes to ends who couldn’t catch them. But his true wizardry was broken-field running: sprinting and stopping dead, jumping sideways, pirouetting on his toes and wriggling his hips girlishly as he spun away from the furious hulks who pursued him, slipping between them like a trout shooting down a boulder-strewn creek.

Bobby was small-boned and slender. He neither drank nor smoked. He had the narrow features of his half-caste mother and the dark eyes and skin of his Nez Percé father, who, Norma told me, was a direct descendant of Chief Joseph. Bobby did not play basketball for Concrete, but I listened to all his words of advice and squeezed my mind around them so they would sink in deep and change my game. Bobby had a very soft voice, and this made what he said seem confidential, even a little shady.

 

I PLAYED MY first game in street shoes against Van Horn. Bobby and Norma let me off outside the school and drove away. They had been glum and prickly with each other on the way down. In a few months they’d be graduating, and their plans didn’t agree.

I knew I was in trouble as soon as we started our lay-up drills. The shoes were heavy and squarish, chosen by Dwight to go with both my school clothes and my Scout uniform. They clomped loudly as I ran and the slick new soles slipped like skates on the profoundly varnished floor. I fell down twice before the game began. By tip-off the kids from the other school were already hooting at me. I didn’t want to play, but only five of us had shown up that night so I had no choice. My shoes clomped as I ran blindly up and down the court. Sometimes the ball came at me. I dribbled it once or twice and threw it at someone else in red. Jumped when I saw everyone else jumping. Ran back and forth. Fell down whenever I tried to stop too fast.

In the din of voices I heard one in particular, a woman’s, shrieking high above the rest. It was like the crazy voice on laugh tracks. Once I picked it up I couldn’t stop listening for it. It distressed me and made me even clumsier. Every time I slipped or fell down she shrieked higher and louder, and then there came a time when she didn’t stop between falls but kept on shrieking in a breathless, broken voice that had no trace of laughter. I wasn’t the only one to notice. The gym grew quiet. Eventually hers was the only voice to be heard. She didn’t stop. Our coach called time-out, and we went to the sidelines to towel off and slake our thirst. People were turning in their seats to look up at her. She was standing in the top row of the bleachers, a woman I’d never seen before, a huge broad-shouldered woman wearing curlers and toreador pants. She had her hands over her face. Her shoulders jerked as muffled barking sounds escaped her. A short man with scarlet cheeks and downcast eyes was leading her by the elbow. They passed along their row and down the steps, then across the gym floor to the exit, the woman barking convulsively through her fingers.

The game resumed, but with a difference. The crowd was quieter now, almost hushed. When the other team had the ball, a few scattered voices called polite encouragement ; when they made a basket the applause was subdued. The room came into focus for me. I caught my breath, found my rhythm, and settled into the game. I still had trouble keeping my feet, but nobody laughed when I fell down. The crowd was on my side now, and the other team seemed to know it. They played with an air of deference, almost of apology. I began to see myself from the stands and became sentimentally aroused by the consciousness of my own nobility and grit in seeing this game through. I had wrenched my knee slightly in a fall, and I parlayed this annoyance into a limp sufficiently pronounced to draw sympathy without forcing the referee to end the game. I hobbled gamely up and down the floor and the other team slowed down too, as if to refuse any further advantage over us.

They won by a mile. When the buzzer went off, their coach ran onto the court and had them give us three cheers.

 

NORMA AND BOBBY were late picking me up. The parking lot was almost empty when they pulled in.

“Who won?” Norma asked. She pushed the door open for me and leaned forward as I squeezed past her into the backseat.

“They did.”

“Next time,” Bobby said.

Norma closed the door and slid back over next to Bobby. They looked at each other. He put the car in gear and drove slowly out of the lot. It was warm inside the car, cloying. Norma stretched, fiddled with the radio, teased the hair on Bobby’s neck. She called him Bobo, her pet name for him, and said something that made him laugh. Her voice was low, her movements languorous. I watched them. As we drove on I kept watching them. I was nervously alert, suspicious without knowing what I was suspicious of. And then I knew. The knowledge did not come to me as a thought but as a sudden physical oppression. I had never understood before, not really, what they did when they were off alone together. I knew they fooled around but I thought they were mainly friends. I never thought she would do this to me.

In the darkness of the backseat I sat rigid and mute, punching her, slapping her, calling her names. I took away the blue convertible I was going to give her, the furs and filmy clothes. I threw her out of the mansion.

Then I let her back in. There was no choice. And later, whenever I heard Ray Charles sing “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” I just had to stop and get sad for a while.

W
hen my mother joined the rifle club she recruited several other wives, and more couples signed up as time went on. It had been a loose society of beery guys who liked to plink at cans, but that changed. Some of the new members were serious shooters, and after the club got smeared by a couple of other clubs the old members either got serious themselves or dropped out.

My mother did well at matches. She loved to win. Winning made her jaunty and bright. Her shooting jacket was covered with badges and ribbons, but Dwight’s jacket had none, because he always lost. He claimed that the Remington target rifle he’d bought was imperfectly balanced. He bought another, and when that also proved defective he bought a third. He continued to lose, but it wasn’t from lack of trying. He spent two or three nights a week practicing at the club, and used the long hallway in our house as a dry-firing range. He fixed a target to the door at one end and sighted down at it from the other, arms twined through the straps, cheek mashed to the stock. Breathe in, breathe out, squeeze off. Breathe in, breathe out, squeeze off. When I came in from my paper route I often found myself looking down the barrel of Dwight’s latest piece, which he, in outrageous violation of the code governing even unloaded weapons, held on me until I moved out of the way.

Dwight made Pearl and me come along when the club had matches in other towns. They always turned out the same: my mother did well and Dwight choked. He pretended not to care, but on the drive home he began to sulk. His face darkened, his lower lip protruded, his neck sank down into his shoulders. Pearl and I kept quiet in the backseat until one of us forgot and started humming, or said something. Then Dwight snarled so viciously that my mother felt obliged to put in a soothing word. He turned on her and said that as far as he knew he was still the father of this so-called family, or did she have another candidate?

“Dwight ...” she said.

“Dwight,” he mimicked, not sounding at all like her.

Then, until we reached Marblemount, he railed at her for refusing to appreciate his sacrifice in taking on a divorced woman with a kid, let alone a kid like me, a liar, a thief, a sissy. If my mother argued back he accused her of being disloyal; if she did not argue he became apoplectic with the sound of his own voice. Nothing could stop him but the sight of the Marblemount tavern.

He pulled into the parking lot and jammed on the brakes, skidding through the loose gravel. He got out, stuck his head back inside, pronounced some final judgment on us and slammed the door. My mother sat with Pearl and me for a while, stony-faced, watching the tavern. She never cried. Finally she got out of the car and went inside herself.

 

I WAS A liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn’t help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions failed to persuade. I was also a thief. Dwight’s reason for calling me one was trivial, based on my having taken his hunting knife without permission. My thefts were real. I’d begun by stealing candy from the rooms of newspaper subscribers who lived in the bachelors’ quarters. Most of these men kept candy around. I fell into the habit of taking a piece here, a piece there. Then I stole money from them. At first I took only small change, to buy Cokes and ice cream, but later I stole fifty-cent pieces and even dollar bills. I stashed the money in an ammunition box under one of the barracks.

My idea was to steal enough to run away. I was ready to do anything to get clear of Dwight. I even thought of killing him, shooting him down some night while he was picking on my mother. I not only carried newspapers, I read them, and reading them had taught me that you can kill a man and get away with it. You just had to appear in the right role, like Cheryl Crane when she stabbed Johnny Stampanato to death for threatening Lana Turner.

Sometimes I took the Winchester down when I heard Dwight start in on my mother, but his abuse was more boring than dangerous. She didn’t respect him. She looked down on him. He was doing just fine until we came along. Who did she think she was? Mainly I wanted to shoot him just to quiet him down.

Dwight wasn’t wrong when he called me a liar and a thief, but these accusations did not hurt me, because I did not see myself that way. Only one of his charges had stinging power—that I was a sissy. My best friend was a thoroughbred sissy, and because of our friendship I worried that others might think the same of me. To put myself in the clear I habitually mocked Arthur, always behind his back, imitating his speech and way of walking, even betraying his secrets. I also got into fights. I didn’t fight Arthur again, but I had learned from him the trick of going crazy when insulted. I had also learned that getting hit a few times wouldn’t kill me and that other people, even Dwight, would treat me with a certain deference for a few days after a fight. And of course it made other boys think twice about their words, to know that they were accountable for them.

All of Dwight’s complaints against me had the aim of giving me a definition of myself. They succeeded, but not in the way he wished. I defined myself by opposition to him. In the past I had been ready, even when innocent, to believe any evil thing of myself. Now that I had grounds for guilt I could no longer feel it.

 

WHILE PEARL AND I waited in the car we did our best to get on each other’s nerves. Pearl hummed. Her humming had nothing to do with music. It held to no pattern of melody or rhythm but spun itself out endlessly, moronic as me cracking my knuckles, which was what I did to get her goat. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack

We could keep this up for quite a while. Once it got boring I went for walks along the road, just far enough away that I could still see the tavern but Pearl couldn’t see me and would, I hoped, imagine herself abandoned, and become afraid. I stood on the roadside with my collar up and my hands in my pockets, watching the lights of passing cars. I was a murderer on the run, a drifter about to be swept up into the passion of a lonely woman ...

When I got tired of this I went back to the car. By now I would be lonely myself, dying to talk, but our official position was that we couldn’t stand each other. Pearl and I sat in our comers and stared out our windows until I couldn’t take another second of it; then I leaned over the seat and turned the radio on. Pearl warned me not to, but she didn’t really mean it. She wanted to listen to the radio as much as I did. We were both big fans of American
Bandstand
and the local product, Seattle
Bandstand.
She watched them at home. I watched them at the houses of kids along my route, staying for the length of a song and then tearing down the street to my next outpost, hooking papers over my head as I ran.

I knew all the words to all the songs. So did Pearl. And as we sat in the darkness with music flooding the car we could not stop ourselves from singing along, at first privately, then together. Pearl didn’t have a good voice but I never ragged her about it. That would have been too low, like ragging her about her bald spot. Anyway, you didn’t need a good voice for the songs we liked; you needed timing and inflection. Pearl had these, and she could do backup and harmony. You can’t sing harmony without leaning close together, taking cues from a nod, a sudden narrowing of the eyes, an intake of breath, and when it’s going well you have to smile. There’s no way not to smile. We did some songs well—“To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “My Happiness,” “Mister Blue,” most of the Everly Brothers—and we sang them as if to each other, smiling, face to face.

Until Dwight came out of the tavern. Then we turned off the radio and leaned back into our comers. Dwight walked toward the car with my mother following a few steps behind, her arms crossed, her eyes on the ground. She didn’t look like a winner now. Dwight got in smelling of bourbon. My mother stayed outside. She said she wouldn’t get in unless Dwight gave her the keys. He just sat there, and after a time she got in. As he pulled the car out of the lot my mother gnawed at her lower lip and watched the road come at us.