This Boy's Life (7 page)

Kathy and Marian went mute when they saw it. Shoulders hunched, faces set, they carried their boxes up the walk without looking to right or left. That night they slammed and banged and muttered in their rooms. But in the end my mother wore them down. She gave no sign that she saw any difference between our house and the houses of our neighbors except for a few details that we ourselves, during a spare hour now and then, could easily put right. She helped us picture the house after we had made these repairs. She was so good at making us see it her way that we began to feel as if everything needful had already been done, and settled in without lifting a finger to save the house from its final decrepitude.

Soon after we took the house, Kathy had a baby boy, Willy. Willy was a clown. Even when he was alone he cackled and squawked like a parrot. The sweet, almost cloying smell of milk filled the house.

Kathy and my mother worked at their jobs downtown while Marian kept the house and did the meals and looked after Willy. She was supposed to take care of me, too, but I ran around with Taylor and Silver after school and didn’t come home until just before I knew my mother would arrive. When Marian asked me where I’d been I told her lies. She knew I was lying, but she couldn’t control me or even convince my mother that I needed controlling. My mother had faith in me. She didn’t have faith in discipline. Her father, Daddy, had given her plenty and she had yet to see the profit from it.

Daddy was a great believer in the rod. When my mother was still in her cradle he slapped her for sucking her thumb. To correct her toddler’s habit of walking with her toes turned slightly inward he forced her to walk with her toes turned out, like a duck. Once she started school, Daddy spanked her almost every night on the theory that she must have done something wrong that day whether he knew about it or not. He told her that he was going to spank her well in advance, as the family sat down to dinner, so she could think about it while she ate and listened to him talk about the stock market and the fool in the White House. After dessert he spanked her. Then she had to kiss him and say, “Thank you, Daddy, for earning the delicious meal.”

My grandmother was a gentle woman. She tried to defend her daughter, but her heart was bad and she couldn’t even defend herself. Whenever she was bedridden, Daddy would read to her from the works of Mary Baker Eddy to prove that her suffering was illusory, the result of improper thinking. On their Sunday drives he boosted her pulse by going through stop signs and racing trains to railroad crossings. Once he scooped a man onto his hood and carried him at speed for several blocks, screaming, “Get off my car!”

My mother was on her own with Daddy. When she started high school he forced her to wear bloomers—pink silk bloomers with ruffled legs. He’d brought several pairs home with him from a cruise to China, where they were still in vogue among missionaries’ wives. He badgered her into smoking cigarettes so she wouldn’t eat much, and when they went to restaurants he made her fill up on bread. She wasn’t allowed to go out with boys. But the boys wouldn’t give up. One night some of them parked in front of her house and sang “When It’s Springtime in the Rockies.” When they called out, “Goodnight, Rose-mar
^y
!” Daddy went berserk. He ran into the street waving his Navy .45. As the driver sped off Daddy fired several shots at a boy in the rumble seat, who ducked just before two bullets whanged into the metal over his head. My grandmother collapsed and had to be given digitalis.

Daddy didn’t let it go at that. In full uniform he prowled the school parking lot the next morning, inspecting cars for bullet holes.

My mother took off a few months after her mother died, when she was still a girl. But Daddy left some marks on her. One of them was a strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed. Another was a contradictory hatred of coercion. She’d never been able to spank me. The few times she tried I came away laughing. She couldn’t even raise her voice convincingly. That wasn’t the way she wanted to be with me, and she didn’t think I needed it anyway.

Marian thought otherwise. Sometimes at night I heard the two of them arguing about me, Marian strident, my mother quiet and implacable. It was just the age I was going through, she said. I’d grow out of it. I was a good boy.

 

ON HALLOWEEN, TAYLOR and Silver and I broke out some windows in the school cafeteria. The next day two policemen came to school and several boys with bad reputations were called out of class to talk to them. Nobody thought of us, not even of Taylor, who had a recorded history of window breaking. The reason nobody thought of us was that at school, in the presence of really tough kids who got into fights and talked back to teachers, we were colorless and mild.

At the end of the day the principal came on the public address system and announced that the guilty parties had been identified. Before taking action, however, he wanted to give these individuals a chance to come forward on their own. A voluntary confession now would work greatly in their favor later on. Taylor and Silver and I avoided looking at each other. We knew it was a bluff, because we’d been in the same classroom all day long. Otherwise the trick would have worked. We didn’t trust each other, and any suspicion that one of us was weakening would have created a stampede of betrayal.

We got away with it. A week later we came back after a movie to break some more windows, then chickened out when a car turned into the parking lot and sat there with its engine running for a few minutes before driving away.

Instead of making us more careful, the interest of the police in what we’d done elated us. We became self-important, cocksure, insane in our arrogance. We broke windows. We broke streetlights. We opened the doors of cars parked on hills and released the emergency brakes so they smashed into the cars below. We set bags of shit on fire and left them on doorsteps, but people didn’t stamp them out as they were supposed to do; instead they waited with weary expressions as the bags burned, now and then looking up to scan the shadows from which they felt us watching them.

We did these things in darkness and in the light of day, moving always to the sound of breaking glass and yowling cats and grinding metal.

And we stole. At first we stole as part of our general hoodlum routine, and for Taylor and Silver it never had any more importance than that. But for me the stealing was serious business, so much so that I dissembled its seriousness, not letting Taylor and Silver see the hold it had on me. I was a thief. By my own estimation, a master thief. When I cruised the aisles of dime stores, lingering over jackknives and model cars, a bland expression on my face, looking more innocent than an innocent person has any business looking, I imagined that the saleswomen who sometimes glanced over at me saw an earnest young shopper instead of a transparent little klepto. And when I finally managed to steal something I figured I was getting away with it because I was so sharp, and not because these women had been on their feet all day and were too tired to deal with a shoplifter and the trouble he would cause them: his false outrage, then his terror, his weeping, the triumphant descent of the manager, policemen, paperwork, the hollowness they would feel when it was over.

I hid the things I stole. Now and then I took them out and turned them over in my hands, dully considering them. Out of the store they did not interest me, except for the jackknives, which I threw at trees until the blades broke off.

 

A FEW MONTHS after we moved into the house Marian got engaged to her marine boyfriend. Then Kathy got engaged to a man in her office. Marian thought my mother should get engaged too, and tried to fix her up. She set in motion a brief parade of suitors. One by one they came up the walk, stared at the broken steps, went around to the back; then, entering the kitchen, braced themselves and put on joviality like a party hat. Even I could see the hopelessness in their imitation of gaiety though not its source in their belief, already sufficiently formed to make itself come true, that this woman too would find them unacceptable.

There was a marine who did tricks for me with lengths of string tied to his fingers, and seemed unwilling to leave the house with my mother. There was a man who arrived drunk and had to be sent away in a cab. There was an old man who, my mother told me later, tried to borrow money from her. And then came Dwight.

Dwight was a short man with curly brown hair and sad, restless brown eyes. He smelled of gasoline. His legs were small for his thick-chested body, but what they lacked in length they made up for in spring; he had an abrupt, surprising way of springing to his feet. He dressed like no one I’d ever met before—two-tone shoes, hand-painted tie, monogrammed blazer with a monogrammed handkerchief in the breast pocket. Dwight kept coming back, which made him chief among the suitors. My mother said he was a good dancer—he could really make those shoes of his get up and go. Also he was very nice, very considerate.

I didn’t worry about him. He was too short. He was a mechanic. His clothes were wrong. I didn’t know why they were wrong, but they were. We hadn’t come all the way out here to end up with him. He didn’t even live in Seattle; he lived in a place called Chinook, a tiny village three hours north of Seattle, up in the Cascade Mountains. Besides, he’d already been married. He had three kids of his own living with him, all teenagers. I knew my mother would never let herself get tangled up in a mess like that.

And even though Dwight kept driving down from the mountains to see my mother, every other weekend at first, then every weekend, he seemed to sense the futility of his case. His attentions to my mother were puppyish, fawning, as if he knew that the odds of getting his hands on her were pathetically slim and that even being in her presence was a piece of luck that depended on his displaying at every moment deference, bounce, optimism, and all manner of good cheer.

He tried too hard. No eye is quicker to detect that kind of effort than the eye of a competitor who also happens to be a child. I seized on and stored away every nuance of Dwight’s abjection, his habit of licking his lips, the way his eyes darted from face to face to search out warning signs of disagreement or boredom, his uncertain smile, the phony timbre of his laughter at jokes he didn’t really get. Nobody could just go to the kitchen and make a drink, Dwight had to jump up and do it himself. Nobody could open a door or put on a coat without his help. They couldn’t even smoke their own cigarettes, they had to take one of Dwight’s and submit to a prolonged drama of ignition: the unsheathing of his monogrammed Zippo from its velvet case; the snapping open of the top against his pant leg; the presentation of the tall flame with its crown of oily smoke—then the whole ritual in reverse.

I was a good mimic, or at least a cruel one, and Dwight was an easy target. I went to work as soon as he left the house. My mother and Kathy tried not to laugh but they did, and so did Marian, though she never really abandoned herself to it. “Dwight’s not that bad,” she would say to my mother, and my mother would nod. “He’s very nice,” Marian would add, and my mother would nod again and say, “Jack, that’s enough.”

W
e spent Thanksgiving in Chinook with Dwight and his kids. Snow had fallen a few nights earlier. It had melted in the valley but still covered the trees on the upper slopes, which were purple with shadow when we arrived. Though it was still late afternoon the sun had already set behind the mountains.

Dwight’s kids came out to meet us when we drove up. The two oldest, a boy and a girl, waited at the bottom of the steps as a girl about my age ran up to my mother and threw her arms around her waist. I was completely disgusted. The girl was pinch-faced and scrawny, and on the back of her head she had a bald spot the size of a silver dollar. She made a kind of crooning noise as she clutched my mother, who, instead of pushing this person away, laughed and hugged her back.

“This is Pearl,” Dwight said, and somehow freed my mother from her grasp. Pearl looked over at me. She did not smile, and neither did I.

We walked up to the house and met the other two. Both of them were taller than Dwight. Skipper had a wedge-shaped head, flat in the back and sharp in front, with close-set eyes and a long blade of a nose. He wore a crew cut. Skipper regarded me with polite lack of interest and turned his attention to my mother, greeting her with grave but perfect courtesy. Norma just said “Hi!” and ruffled my hair. I looked up at her, and until we left Chinook two days later I stopped looking at her only when I was asleep or when someone walked between us.

Norma was seventeen, ripe and lovely. Her lips were full and red, always a little swollen-looking as if she’d just woken up, and she moved sleepily too, languidly, stretching often. When she stretched, her blouse went taut and parted slightly between the buttons, showing milky slices of belly. She had the whitest skin. Thick red hair that she pushed sleepily back from her forehead. Green eyes flecked with brown. She used lavender water, and the faint sweetness of the smell got mixed up with the warmth she gave off. Sometimes, just fooling around, thinking nothing of it, she would put her arm around my shoulder and bump me with her hip, or pull me up against her.

If Norma noticed my unblinking stare she took it for granted. She never seemed surprised by it, or embarrassed. When our eyes met she smiled.

We brought our bags inside and took a tour of the house. It wasn’t really a house, but half of a barracks where German prisoners of war had been quartered. After the war the barracks had been converted to a duplex. A family named Miller lived on one side, Dwight’s family on the other, in three bedrooms that faced the kitchen, dining room, and living room across a narrow hallway. The rooms were small and dark. Her arms crossed over her chest, my mother peered into them and gushed falsely. Dwight sensed her reserve. He waved his hands around, declaring the plans he had for renovation. My mother couldn’t help but offer a few suggestions of her own, which Dwight admired so much that he adopted them all, right then and there.