This Boy's Life (21 page)

I picked up copies of The Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s
Digest,
then prowled the aisle for other adult items. I collected some Old Spice aftershave, brass-plated fingernail clippers, a hairbrush, and a package of pipe tobacco. As I approached the cash register she smiled and asked me how I was today.

“Grand,” I said “just grand.”

She added up my bill and asked if I wanted anything else.

“I believe that will do the trick,” I said. I put my hand in my right rear pocket and frowned. Still frowning, I patted my other pockets. “Wouldn’t you know it,” I said. “I seem to have left my wallet at home. Drat! Sorry for the inconvenience.”

She refused my offer to return the merchandise to the shelves and told me not to worry, it happened all the time. I thanked her and turned away, then turned back. “I could write you a check,” I said. “Do you accept checks?”

“We sure do.”

“Terrific.” I produced the check I’d taken from the bank and laid it on the counter. “I’ll make it out for fifty if that’s all right.”

She hesitated. “Fifty should be fine.”

She watched me fill the check out. I had seen Dwight do it and knew the tricks, like writing “fifty and no/100” on the amount line. I signed it with a flourish and handed it to her.

She studied it. I waited, smiling patiently. When she spoke, her voice had changed somehow. “Thomas,” she said, “do you have any identification?”

“Of course,” I said, and reached for my rear pocket again. Then I stopped. “That darn wallet,” I said. “It’s all in there. I don’t know, maybe I’ve got something.” I searched through all my pockets, and with a show of relief I discovered the library card. “There we go,” I said. “Now we’re back in business.”

She studied the card as she had studied the check. “Where do you live, Thomas?”

“Sorry?”

She looked at me over her glasses. “What’s your address
^?
”

I had utterly forgotten what the card said. I stood there, blinking stupidly, then I leaned over the counter and plucked the card from her fingers and said, “It’s right here.” I read the address to her and handed the card back.

She nodded, watching me. Then she raised her head and called out, “Albert, could you come here a minute?”

A short, frail old man in a white jacket came slowly down the aisle from the prescription desk. She handed him the check and library card. She fixed her eyes on him and said in a deliberate voice, “Albert, the young man here wrote us this check. Take care of it, please.” He looked at her, uncertainly at first, then with some sharpness. “Right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.” He walked back down the aisle. I began to follow him but she said, “He’ll be right back, Thomas. Just wait here.”

She put my purchases in a bag and we stood without speaking for a time. “I don’t usually keep that much cash on hand,” she finally said.

I looked toward the rear of the store. I couldn’t see the man.

“So how long have you been living here, Thomas?”

“About six months,” I said.

“And how do you like it so far?”

“Okay. I mean I really like it.”

“Good. I do too, it’s a nice place to live. People here are nice.”

Then I saw that she was trembling, close to tears, and I knew she had betrayed me. I glanced toward the empty prescription desk again and said, “You know, I’ve got some other things to do, I’ll just come back later.”

I started down the aisle. She said, “Wait, Thomas.” When I reached the door I looked around and saw that she had come from behind the counter and was following me. “Wait,” she said, holding me with her eyes as I stood there, and I saw in her eyes what I had heard in her voice earlier: sorrow. I pulled the door open and stepped outside and began walking fast down the street. I passed a few shops and then I heard her voice behind me again—“Thomas
^!
” I quickened my pace. She kept following and calling out to me. I looked over my shoulder. She was running, slowly and clumsily, but running. I squeezed the overnight bag against my side with my elbow and broke into a run myself. The two of us ran down the street, twenty, twenty-five feet apart. I was holding back, just loping along. “Thomas!” she said, “Thomas, wait!” and every time she spoke I felt a tug from this voice so full of care. I felt she knew all of me, all my foolishness and trouble, and wanted only to take hold of me and set me right.

The sidewalk was crowded. If the men and women we ran through had thought there was any reason to stop me, they would have. If she had yelled “Thief!” just once, I would have been mobbed on the spot. Everyone must have thought it was a family affair. They must have heard what I heard, the voice of a mother trying to reach her child.

I turned the comer at the end of the block, and this somehow broke her hold on me. All the speed I’d been saving seemed to come to me at once. I tore down to the next corner, turned, turned again half a block later and ran through an alley. Only then did I slow down and look behind me. She could not possibly have kept up, but I needed to look to be sure. She wasn’t there. I had lost her. I believed I had lost her forever, but in this I was mistaken.

The alley ended across the street from a diner. The street was under repair. No cars, only a few pedestrians. I waited for a time, trying to get my wind back, then crossed over to the diner. It was almost empty. The cashier grunted when I came in but didn’t look up from the tablet he was writing on. I walked to the back and locked myself in the men’s room.

I leaned against the door. I stood there, just letting myself breathe. My eyes burned with sweat and my shirt was soaked through. My throat was raw. I bent my head to the faucet and let the water run into my mouth. Then I stripped to the waist and bathed myself with paper towels. When I was dry, I took off my pants and stuffed them into the overnight bag with my shirt and my glasses. I took out my Boy Scout uniform and slowly, carefully, unfolded it and put it on. I ran a damp tissue over my shoes, then straightened up and inspected myself. Everything was as it should be, the set of my scarf, the alignment of my belt buckle, the angle of my cap, the drape of my two sashes. One was the Order of the Arrow sash, a red arrow on a brilliant white background. The other was my merit-badge sash. It was thick with proofs of competence. At camp that summer, with little else to do, I had worked myself into a delirium of badge-grubbing. I was a Life Scout now, with only one merit badge to go for Eagle. That badge was Citizenship in the Nation. I had already fulfilled the numerous requirements for it, including attendance at a jury trial to observe the rule of law, but Dwight refused to send in my papers. He wouldn’t explain why, except to say I didn’t deserve to be an Eagle. It was an issue between us.

I shouldered my bag and left the diner.

 

BETWEEN MY FLIGHT from the drugstore and my return, no more than fifteen minutes had gone by. An empty police car was parked outside the store with its light blinking. Calmly, eyes front and center, I walked past and up the street to the hotel where the banquet was to take place.

Though an hour remained until chow time the lobby was already full of Scouts in OA sashes, preening themselves and looking each other over. I checked my bag and said hello to some acquaintances from other troops. One of them was in charge of setting up chairs. He asked me to help him out, and when that job was done he posted me at the door with a couple of other boys to greet the guests as they arrived. The three of us sparked each other. By the time people began filing past our table we were laying down a steady line of scintillant repartee. Between gags I checked off names on the invitation list, the second boy wrote them down on adhesive nameplates, and the third escorted the guests to their tables.

Then she was there, in line behind an old couple. I looked up and saw her watching me. The room bucked but I kept my balance. I didn’t even blink. I checked off the old couple’s name, and made a friendly joke they laughed at.

And then I turned to her. I gave her a welcoming smile and said, “Name, ma’am?” She stepped up to the table and stood there thoughtfully, holding her pocketbook in front of her with both hands. She still had on the white sweater and plaid skirt she’d been wearing in the store. I felt no fear, nor any surprise after the first shock had passed. I knew she hadn’t followed me here. Of course she would have a boy in the Scouts, and of course he would belong to OA. She read my nameplate and looked me up and down, and I could see her face grow smooth and serene as she decided that she had been mistaken, that it couldn’t possibly be me. She returned my smile and gave me her name. I saw from the list that she had two boys in the Order. Already she was searching for them, glancing around her and peering into the noisy hall. She picked up her nameplate, gave her arm to the boy at the door, and passed into the banquet.

M
y brother sent me a story he had written called “A Hank o’ Hair, A Piece of Bone.” It was about an American imprisoned in Italy for murdering a prostitute. His father was rich, but the young man refused to ask him for help. He was alienated from his father and from everyone else. He was so alienated that he wouldn’t even say he was sorry for killing the girl. He was sony—he’d been drunk at the time—but such was his contempt for society that he would do nothing to court its mercy. The story was filled with closely observed details of prison life, such as automatic toilets flushing every few minutes and inmates banging on their bars with tin cups.

I thought it was great. I couldn’t get over Geoffrey’s audacity in writing it. I sent him one of mine, a story about two wolves fighting to the death in the Yukon, but I knew his was better and contemplated submitting it to my English teacher as if it were my own. In the end I decided not to. I knew I’d never get away with it.

Geoffrey wrote again to say he had liked my story and wanted me to send more. His letter was affectionate and full of news. This was his last year at Princeton. He hoped to move to Europe when he graduated, to work on a novel. There was also the possibility of a teaching job in Turkey. Princeton had been good to him, he said, and I ought to give it some serious consideration when the time came to choose my own college.

Geoffrey also sent word of my father. He and his wife were separated. He had moved to California and found work at Convair Astronautics, the first real job he had had in years. In fact, Geoffrey said, they’d all been having a bumpy time of it for quite a while now. He would tell me more when he saw me, which he hoped to do before he left the country. It had been too long, he said.

Geoffrey wanted to see me. That was plain. I had been wanting to see him for years, but before now, even when I hatched plans to join up with him, I never knew whether he felt the same way. In most respects we were strangers. But it mattered to me that he was my brother, and it seemed to matter to him. In his letters, elegance of tone had given way to simple friendliness. I carried the letters around with me and read them with elation.

 

DWIGHT CAME INTO the kitchen one afternoon while Pearl and I were eating some hot dogs I’d cooked up. He noticed a jar of French’s mustard in the garbage pail and fished it out. “Who threw this away?” he asked.

I told him I had.

“Why did you throw it away?”

“Because it was empty.”

“Because it was
empty?
Does this look empty to you?” He held the bottle close to my face. There were a few streaks of mustard congealed under the neck and in the grooves at the bottom.

Pearl said, “It looks empty to me.”

“I didn’t ask you,” Dwight told her.

“Well, it does,” she said.

I said that it looked empty to me, too.

“Look again,” he said, and pushed the open neck of the jar against my eye. When I jerked away he grabbed me by the hair and shoved my face back down toward the jar. “Does this look empty to you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Dad,” Pearl said.

He asked me again if the jar looked empty. It was hurting my eye, so I said no, it didn’t look empty. He let go of me. “Clean it out,” he said. He handed me the jar. I picked up a knife and began scraping at the mustard while he watched. After a time he sat down across the table. The streaks were hard to get at, especially under the neck where the knife wouldn’t go. Dwight grew impatient. He said, “You’re going to have to do better than that if you think you’re ever going to be an engineer.”

Back in the days when Skipper talked of going to engineering school I had insincerely declared the same ambition, hoping to pick up some points by echoing his sober program. The more I said it the more possible it seemed. I had no interest in the specifics of the profession, and no aptitude, but my father was an engineer and I liked the sound of the word.

I got out as much of the mustard as I could. It made a brown and yellow smudge where I’d scraped it off on the edge of my plate.

“All right,” Dwight said. “Now—was it empty?”

“Yes,” I said.

He leaned across the table and slapped my face. He didn’t swing hard but the slap was loud. Pearl started yelling at him, and while he was yelling back I got up and left the house. I wandered around feeling sorry for myself. Then I decided to buy a Coke from the machine on the loading ramp of the main warehouse. There was also a phone booth on the ramp, and as I drank the Coke I formed the idea of calling my brother. I didn’t know how to do it, but the operator was amused by my helplessness and steered me through. She got Geoffrey’s number from Princeton information, then calmed me when I panicked at her request for money. “We’ll just make it collect,” she said. I listened to the muffled signal ring through the static. I was quaking. And then I heard his voice. I had not heard it for six years, but I knew it right away. He accepted the call and said, “Hello, Toby.”

I tried to say hello back but the word got stuck in my throat. Every time I tried to speak I seized up again. It wasn’t self-pity; it was hearing my brother’s voice and, for the first time in all these years, the sound of my own name. But I couldn’t explain any of this. Geoffrey kept asking me what was wrong, and when I found my voice I told him the first thing that came to mind—that Dwight had hit me.