This Boy's Life (28 page)

“What do you mean, what did I tell them. I didn’t tell them anything. I just applied.”

“Come on.”

“My test scores were pretty high.”

“You must have told them something.”

“Thanks, Mom. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Are you going to get in trouble?”

“Get in
trouble.
What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Are you going to get in trouble?”

“No. I’m not going to get in trouble.”

“Promise?”

“I’m not going to get in trouble, I promise. What do you want, blood?”

We passed on to other things. She was happy for me, after all, and willing not to question fortune too closely.

She had good news of her own. She’d found a job in Seattle, a secretarial job at Aetna Life Insurance. She was supposed to start there in another week. A woman she knew had offered to put her up until she found a place to live so she wouldn’t be under pressure to rent something she didn’t like. She could afford to relax and take her time, especially since I would be going off to California in June rather than coming to live with her. My father had been in touch, she told me. He’d arranged everything. I would take the bus down to La Jolla as soon as school let out, and Geoffrey would join me there after his graduation from Princeton.

“What about you?” I said.

“What about me?”

“Are you going to come too? Later, if things go all right?”

“I’d be a fool if I did,” she said morosely, as if she knew that wouldn’t keep her from doing it.

We talked about Dwight and his little ways. How he used to stay up late counting all the pieces of candy in the house to see how many I’d eaten that day. How he used to run into the living room when he came home and put his hand on top of the TV to see if it was warm. How he bought vacuum cleaner bags by the dozen and wrote month-apart dates on each one so they would last exactly a year. My mother said he’d been on his best behavior since she started looking for work. He didn’t want her to leave. Now that she’d found a job he was falling all over himself to be nice to her. He was sort of courting her, she said. Being friendly and having Pearl cozy up to her all the time. He had even applied for a transfer to Seattle so he could be close to her.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “He doesn’t even like me. He just wants to hang on. It’s so strange.”

Then my mother said she had something to tell me, and I knew from the way she said it that it wasn’t going to be good. It was about my money, she said, the money Dwight had been saving for me from my paper route. She knew I was planning to use it to pay the fees not covered by my scholarship. The trouble was, Dwight hadn’t really been saving it. It wasn’t there. Not a penny of it. She had asked him about it and he stalled and avoided the subject until she finally cornered him, and then he admitted that he didn’t have it. He also didn’t have the money she had earned at the cookhouse. The account was completely empty.

“I’ll get the five hundred,” she said, “don’t worry about that.”

All I could do was look at her.

“There isn’t anything we can do about it. It’s gone. You just have to forget about it.”

That wasn’t what I was doing. I wasn’t forgetting about it. I was remembering it. Over $1,300. But it wasn’t really the money that made me feel sorry for myself, it was the time. For two and a half years I had spent all my afternoons delivering papers. Most nights I went out again after dinner to collect from my subscribers and to try to recruit new ones. People didn’t like to pay me. Even the honest ones put me off again and again. Then there were the deadbeats. They either told me sob stories about lost checks and doctor bills or turned off the lights and the TV when they heard me coming, then whispered and peered out the blinds until I gave up and left. In the winter my shoes were always wet and my head stuffed up, my nose chapped and red. I was bored crazy. One of my ways of distracting myself was to tally up over and over again, to the last penny, the money I had made.

I said, “What happened to it?”

My mother shrugged and said, “Beats me.” She was ready for a change of subject. Her tolerance was good for most things, but she had no time for crybabies. Whining turned her to ice.

I didn’t stop. “That was my money,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“He stole it.”

“He probably meant to pay you back. I don’t know. It’s gone. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that. I said I’d pay the school bills.”

I pulled a face.

“It’s probably a little my fault too.” She said she should have known better than to let Dwight handle the money, she should have insisted on a joint account. But it was a point of pride with him to deal with the finances and she hadn’t wanted to get him all worked up over it. She’d wanted all of us to get along.

We finished our Cokes and walked up the street to the car, my mother moving with the buoyancy of someone who has just dropped a burden. When she was worried she wore a pale, tight-lipped mask. Lately it had started to become her own face. Now the mask was gone. She looked young and pretty. The day was warm, the air hazy with cement dust. Logging trucks banged past us through the town, grinding gears and spewing black exhaust. As we walked we made plans. Considered different possibilities. We were ourselves again—restless, scheming, poised for flight.

 

CHUCK CONGRATULATED ME when I told him about the scholarship, but I was careful not to let my happiness show too much. His day of reckoning was at hand and he might well have wondered why we should have drawn such different cards. This question would have crossed my mind if I had been in his place. But he probably thought nothing of the kind. He didn’t want what I wanted, and he was a lot more interested in what was going to become of himself than in what was going to become of me.

Then the sheriff paid his last visit. He hadn’t dropped by in over a week, and he had left that night in an angry mood, fed up with Chuck’s bullheadedness. He’d given Chuck an ultimatum: Get with the program or else. If Chuck did not call him with the answer he wanted by such and such a day, he was going to let justice take its course. Chuck hadn’t called the sheriff with the answer he wanted. He hadn’t called him at all.

We heard his cruiser in the drive. The sound of the big engine was familiar to us by now. Chuck put his shoes on and waited for Mr. Bolger to come and get him, then the two of them walked up to the house. While he was gone I kept going to the window and looking out. I had a bad feeling through and through.

When Chuck came back I was sitting on my bed in a kind of trance. He looked at me without any sign of recognition and closed the door gently behind him. Then he jumped on the floor and started pounding it with his fists like a brat having a tantrum, except that instead of crying he was laughing. After he’d done this a while he got up and staggered from wall to wall. His face was red. He grabbed me by the shoulders and danced me across the room. “Wolfman!” he shouted. “Wolfman!”

“Yo, Chuckles.”

“I love you, Wolfman! I fucking love you!”

I said “Terrific,” but I was watching him.

“Listen, Wolfman. Listen.” He leaned into my face. “There’s gonna be a wedding, Wolfman. The old wedding bells are gonna chime. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”

“What do I think? I think it’s fucking great, Wolfman, what do you fucking think I think?” He went into the closet and got his Canadian Club. “Let’s drink to the bride,” he said. He took a drink and handed me the bottle. “Now drink to the lucky groom,” he said. “Go on, drink up.” He grabbed the bottle back and said, “What are you gonna call Tina after the wedding, Wolfman?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“What are you gonna call her?”

I told him I didn’t know.

“How about Mrs. Huff?” he said. “How about Mrs. Gerald Lucius Huff?” When he saw how I looked at him, he held up his right hand and said, “Gospel, Wolfman. I shit you not.”

. “Huff? Huff’s marrying Tina?”

Chuck started to answer but suddenly bent over, coughing and snorting. Canadian Club ran out of his nose. I pounded him on the back. I heard myself cawing harshly. Something was breaking loose in me, some hysterical heartless tide of joy. I could hardly breathe. My face twitched. I was shaking with relief and joy and cruel pleasure, for the truth was I didn’t like Huff and felt no pity for Tina. To me she was just The Flood and now I saw Huff trapped in its grip, paddling feebly on its broad heaving surface, pummeled and smothered, going under and bobbing up again somewhere else with his hairy arms churning and his pompadour agleam.

Pearl felt abandoned after my mother left, and I was sorry for her. I let her eat lunch with me sometimes. We had, after all, plenty to talk about. I patronized her shamelessly and she let me do it, listening without argument to my frank opinions on the measures she should take to make herself cuter and more popular. In fact she wasn’t so bad, especially since my mother had taken her to a doctor to have her bald spot fixed. She had a gaunt sinewy beauty, but I didn’t see it. I thought she was pathetic and so did she.

On a warm Friday afternoon in May we carried our lunches to the bleachers overlooking the football field. Other kids were eating and smoking in bunches around us, staring out at the brilliant grass as if a game were in progress. We talked about one thing and another, and Pearl mentioned that Dwight was planning to drive down to Seattle that night, supposedly to spend the weekend with Norma but really to see my mother and try to talk her into getting back together. He was bringing Pearl along for extra ammunition.

I didn’t like hearing this. Chuck would be driving me down to Seattle the next day so I could have lunch with Mr. Howard and get fitted for my clothes, and I had hoped to go see my mother on the way home. Now that there was a chance of running into Dwight I had to give the idea up.

But later that day I saw exactly what to do. Chuck agreed to help, though with certain conditions. An hour or so past midnight we pushed his car out to the main road, then drove up the valley to Chinook. Chuck kept to the speed limit and did not drink.

The camp was dark and silent. When we got close to the house, Chuck turned off the lights and cut the engine and coasted to a stop. Dwight’s Ford was nowhere in sight. I got out and looked around back, just to be sure. Chuck stayed in the car. We both believed that as long as he did not enter the house or touch anything he could not be held legally responsible if I got caught.

The door was unlocked, as always. I put on the gloves I had brought along and let myself into the utility room. I knew I should tend to business and get out of there fast, but instead I wandered into the kitchen. The refrigerator was almost empty. I put together a peanut butter sandwich and poured myself a glass of milk and carried them in my gloved hands from one room to the next, flipping on light switches until the house was ablaze.

Pearl’s room smelled of perfume. I sat at her desk and read her diary. She hadn’t written in it since the last time I looked. I got up and went down the hall to my old room. Both beds were bare. Skipper still had a few things around, old boots, fishing gear, a stack of car magazines, but my Scout uniform hanging in the closet was the only sign that I had ever lived there.

I went to Dwight’s room. Even though I knew he was gone I held my breath and turned the doorknob slowly, then threw the door open. The bed was unmade. The air smelled sour. I turned on the light and poked around. In one of the dresser drawers I found a carton of Camels from which I shook two packs. I also found a stack of official Scout forms, including those that Scoutmasters sent to headquarters to report their boys’ completion of the requirements for various ranks and badges. I took a few of these. If Dwight wouldn’t promote me to Eagle, I’d just have to promote myself.

I went to the kitchen, rinsed out the glass, put it back in the cupboard. Then I turned off all the lights in the house and carried a couple of target rifles out to the car. Chuck came around to open the trunk and started hissing at me. What the fuck was I doing, where the fuck had I been? I could see he was beside himself, so I didn’t try to answer. I went back in the house and got the two shotguns. Then I got the Marlin and the Garand. On my last trip I rounded up the Zeiss binoculars and the Puma hunting knife and a tooled leather scabbard Dwight had bought for the Marlin. He’d planned to use it when he went elk hunting by horseback, something he had never gotten around to doing.

Chuck arranged these things in the trunk and covered them with the sandbags he carried for traction when it snowed. Then we cleared out. Chuck was still browned off at me, but too rattled to say anything. He kept to the speed limit again and drove with histrionic correctness. Our big fear was getting stopped. The possibility made us edgy and silent. We smoked. We listened to the radio, the songs blaring and fading as mountain gave way to field and field to mountain. We looked out the window at the looming purple shapes of the mountains, at the river, at the deserted winding road. Whenever we met another car Chuck reflexively dimmed the lights and slowed down as if he’d been speeding. He drove so fussily that any competent patrolman would have pulled us over on the spot.

But we were lucky. We made it home, pushed the car down the drive, went to bed and caught ourselves a few hours sleep before Mr. Bolger had one of the girls come down to fetch us for breakfast. Mr. Bolger was in good humor. He had reason to be. The morning was fresh, Chuck was still free and single, and in another couple of weeks I would be on my way to California. While we feasted on ham and grits and eggs, Mr. Bolger spread a map on the table and marked our route to Seattle. Without actually saying so, he gave us to understand that this trip was a new chance to prove ourselves. We were to drive directly to Seattle and directly home. No sidetrips. No hitchhikers. No drinking. Mr. Bolger tried to be stem as he gave us our marching orders, but it was clear that he enjoyed sending us off on what he considered to be a business of some pith and moment, which it was, if not exactly in the way he imagined.