This Boy's Life (19 page)

“He cleaned it up,” she added, “Every bit of it. I wouldn’t go near it.”

I hadn’t asked. I guess she just thought I’d like to know.

 

CHAMPION DIDN’T ALWAYS growl when I came in. Usually he ignored me, and in time I would let down my guard, and then he would do it again and scare the hell out of me. One night he gave me such a fright that I grabbed a sponge mop and hit him over the head. Champion snarled and I hit him again and kept hitting him, screaming myself hysterical while he tried to get away, his paws scrabbling on the wooden floor. Finally he stuck his head behind the water heater and kept it there as I worked the rest of him over. At some point I got tired, and saw what I was doing, and stopped.

I was alone in the house. I tried to pace off the jangling I felt, and the guilt. I could forgive myself for most things, but not cruelty.

I went back to the utility room. Champion was lying on his blanket again. I prodded his bones and examined him for cuts. He seemed okay. The sponge had taken the force of the blows. While I checked him over, Champion whined and licked my hands. I spoke gently to him. This was a mistake. It gave him the idea that I liked him, that we were pals. From that night on he wanted to be with me all the time. Whenever I passed through the utility room he groveled and abased himself, hoping to keep me there, then barked and hurled himself against the door as I went outside.

This caused me some trouble. For almost a year now, ever since I started high school, I’d been sneaking out of the house after midnight to take the car for joy rides. Dwight wouldn’t teach me to drive—he claimed to believe that I would kill us both—so I had taken the teaching function upon myself. After Champion attached himself to me, I had to bring him along or he would raise the household with his cries.

With Champion beside me on the front seat, gazing out the window like a real passenger or snapping his chops at the wind, I cruised the empty streets of the camp. When I got bored I took the car to a stretch of road halfway to Marblemount where I could get it up to a hundred miles an hour without having to make any turns. As Champion placidly watched the white line shivering between the headlights I chattered like a gibbon and wept tears of pure terror. Then I stopped the car in the middle of the road, turned it around, and did the same thing headed the other way. I drove a little farther each time. Someday, I thought, I would just keep going.

One morning I backed the car into a ditch while turning it around for my run home. I spun the wheels for a while, then got out and looked things over. I spun the wheels some more, until I was dug in good and deep. Then I gave up and started the trek back to camp. It was nearly three o’clock, and the walk home would take at least four hours. They would find me missing before I got there. The car too. I let off a string of swear words, but they seemed to be coming at me, not from me, and I soon stopped.

Champion ran ahead through the forest that crowded the road on both sides. The mountains were black all around, the stars brilliant in the inky sky. My footsteps were loud on the roadway. I heard them as if they came from somebody else. The movement of my legs began to feel foreign to me, and then the rest of my body, foreign he said, “I’m going,” but just then Champion bounded out of the trees. The man looked at him. “God almighty,” he said, but he opened the door for us and drove us back to the car. He was silent during the drive and silent while he winched the car up onto the road. When I thanked him, he just nodded slightly and drove away.

I made it into bed not long before my mother came to wake me. “I don’t feel so good,” I told her.

She put her hand on my forehead, and at that gesture I wanted to tell her everything, the whole scrape, not by way of confession but in my exhilaration at having gotten out of it. She liked hearing stories about close calls; they confirmed her faith in luck. But I knew that I couldn’t tell her without at least promising never to take the car again, which I had every intention of doing, or at worst forcing her to betray me to Dwight.

She looked down at me in the gray light of dawn. “You don’t have a fever,” she said. “But I have to admit, you look awful.” She told me I could stay home from school that day if I promised not to watch TV.

I slept until lunchtime. I was sitting up in bed, eating a sandwich, when Dwight came to my room. He leaned in the doorway with his hands in his pockets like a mime acting out Relaxation. It made me wary.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

I said I was.

“Wouldn’t want you to come down with anything serious,” he said. “Get some sleep, did you?”

“Yes sir.”

“You must’ve needed it.”

I waited.

“Oh, by the way, you didn’t happen to hear a funny little pinging noise in the engine, did you?”

“What engine?”

He smiled.

Then he said he’d been at the commissary a few minutes ago with Champion, and that he’d met a man there who recognized the dog and told a pretty interesting story of how they happened to cross paths earlier that morning. What did I think about that?

I said I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Then he was on me. He caught me with one hand under the covers and the other holding the sandwich, and at first, instead of protecting myself, I jerked the sandwich away as if that was what he wanted. His open hands lashed back and forth across my face. I dropped the sandwich and covered my face with my forearm, but I couldn’t keep his hands away. He was kneeling on the bed, his legs on either side of me, locking me in with the blankets. I shouted his name, but he kept hitting me in a fast convulsive rhythm and I knew he was beyond all hearing. Somehow, with no conscious intention, I pulled my other arm free and hit him in the throat. He reared back, gasping. I pushed him off the bed and kicked the covers away, but before I could get up he grabbed my hair and forced my face down hard against the mattress. Then he hit me in the back of the neck. I went rigid with the shock. He tightened his grip on my hair. I waited for him to hit me again. I could hear him panting. We stayed like that for a while. Then he pushed me away and got up. He stood over me, breathing hoarsely. “Clean up this mess,” he said. He turned at the door and said, “I hope you learned your lesson.”

I learned a couple of lessons. I learned that a punch in the throat does not always stop the other fellow. And I learned that it’s a bad idea to curse when you’re in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.

 

CHAMPION HAD SEEN his last merganser. He turned out to be a cat killer. Three times he brought dead cats back to the house between those famously soft jaws of his.

C
oncrete was a company town, home of the Lone Star Cement Company. The streets and houses and cars were gray with cement dust from the plant. On still days a pall of dust hung in the air, so thick they sometimes had to cancel football practice. Concrete High overlooked the town from a hill whose slopes had been covered with cement to keep them from washing away. By the time I started there, not long after the school was built, its cement banks had begun to crack and slide, revealing the chicken wire over which they had been poured.

The school took students from up and down the valley. They were the children of farmers, waitresses, loggers, construction workers, truck drivers, itinerant laborers. Most of the boys already had jobs themselves. They worked not to save money but to spend it on their cars and girlfriends. Many of them got married while they were still in school, then dropped out to work full-time. Others joined the army or the marines—never the navy. A few became petty criminals. The boys of Concrete High tended not to see themselves as college material.

The school had some good teachers, mostly older women who didn’t care if they were laughed at for reciting poetry, or for letting a tear fall while they described the Battle of Verdun. There were not many of them.

Mr. Mitchell taught civics. He also acted as unofficial recruiter for the army. He had served during World War II in “the European Theater,” as he liked to say, and had actually killed men. He sometimes brought in different items he had taken from their bodies, not only medals and bayonets, which you could buy in any pawnshop, but also letters in German and wallets with pictures of families inside. Whenever we wanted to distract Mr. Mitchell from collecting essays we hadn’t written, we would ask about the circumstances of his kills. Mr. Mitchell would crouch behind his desk, peer over the top, then roll into the middle of the room and spring to his feet yelling
da-da-da-da-da.
But he praised the courage and discipline of the Germans, and said that in his opinion we had fought on the wrong side. We should have gone into Moscow, not Berlin. As far as the concentration camps were concerned, we had to remember that nearly all the Jewish scientists had perished there. If they had lived, they would have helped Hitler develop his atomic bomb before we developed ours, and we would all be speaking German today.

Mr. Mitchell relied heavily on audiovisual aids in teaching his classes. We saw the same movies many times, combat documentaries and FBI-produced cautionary tales about high-school kids tricked into joining communist cells in Anytown, U.S.A. On our final examination Mr. Mitchell asked, “What is your favorite amendment?” We were ready for this question, and all of us gave the correct answer—“The Right to Bear Arms”—except for a girl who answered “Freedom of Speech.” For this impertinence she failed not only the question but the whole test. When she argued that she could not logically be marked wrong on this question, Mr. Mitchell blew up and ordered her out of the classroom. She complained to the principal but nothing came of it. Most of the kids in the class thought she was being a smarty-pants, and so did I.

Mr. Mitchell also taught PE. He had introduced boxing to the school, and every year he organized a smoker where hundreds of people paid good money to watch us boys beat the bejesus out of each other.

Miss Houlihan taught speech. She had adopted some years back a theory of elocution that had to do with “reaching down” for words rather than merely saying them, as if they were already perfectly formed in our stomachs and waiting to be brought up like trout from a stock pond. Instead of using our lips we were supposed to simply let the words “escape.” This was hard to get the hang of. Miss Houlihan believed in getting the first thing right before moving on to the next, so we spent most of the year grunting “Hiawatha” in a choral arrangement she herself had devised. She liked it so much that in the spring she took us to a speech tournament in Mount Vernon. The competition was held outside, and it started to rain while we sat declaiming in The Great Circle. We wore Indian costumes made from burlap sacks that had once held onions. When the burlap got wet it started to stink. We were not the only ones to notice. Miss Houlihan wouldn’t let us quit. She walked around behind the circle, whispering, “Reach down, reach down.” In the end we were disqualified for keeping time on a tom-tom.

Horseface Greeley taught shop. At the introductory class for each group of freshmen it was his custom to drop a fifty-pound block of iron on his foot. He did this as an attention-getter and to show off his Tuff-Top shoes, which had reinforced steel uppers. He thought we should all wear Tuff-Tops. We couldn’t buy them in the stores but we could order them through him. When I was in my second year at Concrete an impetuous freshman tried to catch the block of iron as it fell toward Horseface’s foot, and got his fingers crushed.

 

I BROUGHT HOME good grades at first. They were a fraud—I copied other kids’ homework on the bus down from Chinook and studied for tests in the hallways as I walked from class to class. After the first marking period I didn’t bother to do that much. I stopped studying altogether. Then I was given C’s instead of A’s, yet no one at home ever knew that my grades had fallen. The report cards were made out, incredibly enough, in pencil, and I owned some pencils myself.

All I had to do was go to class, and sometimes even that seemed too much. I had fallen in with some notorious older boys from Concrete who took me on as a curiosity when they discovered that I’d never been drunk and still had my cherry. I was grateful for their interest. I wanted distinction, and the respectable forms of it seemed to be eluding me. If I couldn’t have it as a citizen I would have it as an outlaw.

We smoked cigarettes every morning in a shallow gully behind the school, and we often stayed there when the bell rang for class, then cut downhill through a field of ferns—ferns so tall we seemed to be swimming through them—to the side road where Chuck Bolger kept his car.

Chuck’s father owned a big auto parts store near Van Horn and was also the minister of a Pentecostal church. Chuck himself talked dark religion when he was drinking. He was haunted and wild, but his manner was gentle; even, at least with me, brotherly. For that reason I felt easier with him than with the others. I believed that there were at least some things he would not do. I did not have that feeling about the rest. One of them had already spent time in jail, first for stealing a chain saw and then for kidnapping a cat. He was big and stupid and peculiar. Everyone called him Psycho and he had accepted the name like a vocation.

Chuck was with Psycho when he snatched the cat. The cat walked up to them while they were standing outside the Concrete drugstore and began to rub against their legs. Psycho picked the cat up to do it some injury, but when he saw the name on its collar he got an idea. The cat belonged to a widow whose husband had owned a car dealership in town. Psycho figured she must be loaded, and decided to put the arm on her. He called the widow from a pay phone and told her he had the cat and would sell it back to her for twenty dollars. Otherwise he would kill it. To show he meant business he held the cat up to the receiver and pulled its tail, but it wouldn’t make any noise. Finally Psycho moved the receiver back to his own mouth and said, “Meow, meow.” Then he told the widow to get the money and meet him at a certain place at a certain time. When Chuck tried to talk him out of going, Psycho called him a pussy. The widow wasn’t there. Some other people were.