Voice of Our Shadow (3 page)

We were moving at the same pace, our legs lifting and falling at the same time. Then Ross stumbled on something and fell straight forward. I heard an angry buzz like an outboard motor, the gravel skittering away from under my brother’s sneaker. His shoulder touched the third rail, and his head twisted around on his neck. There was a loud hum, a sharp hiss and snap. His face twisted up and up and up into an impossible, irretrievable smile.

Why am I lying? Why am I already leaving out a part of this story that is so necessary? What difference does it make now? All right. Before I go on, here’s a piece of the puzzle I’ve been hiding behind my back.

Bobby had an older sister named Lee. At eighteen she was the most stunning girl you’d ever want to see. By the time Ross and Bobby became close friends, she had been out of school for a few years, but people still talked about her because she was really incredible.

She’d been captain of the cheerleaders, a member of the Pep Club and the Gourmet Club. I knew all of this by heart because Ross had a high school yearbook from when she graduated, and as is so often the case with the prettiest girl in school, it seemed as if her face was on every other page: cartwheeling, being crowned Prom Queen, smiling magnificently at us from behind an armload of books. How many times had I devoured those pictures? Hundreds? A thousand? A lot.

What I didn’t understand until later was that part of her special aura came from pure sensuality. I didn’t know if she was “fast,” because my only authority on her was my brother, who contended he’d had her a million times, but even the most innocent of those pictures gave off an aroma of sexiness as strong as the smell of fresh baked bread.

Ross’s birthday present when I turned twelve was to teach me how to masturbate. Part of the gift was a three-month-old copy of
Gent
magazine, but from the first I could only climax if I thought of real women. The zeppelin breasts and sex-crazed expressions of those pinup girls scared me more than turned me on. No, my idea of sexual frenzy was the photograph of Lee Hanley doing a jump cheer at a football game that had somehow caught a delicious smidgen of her underpants while she was in mid-flight.

Let me say, though, that I’d fallen in love with her long before I learned to play with myself, so the first time I used her as my fantasy woman I felt rotten, because I knew I’d somehow let her down, regardless of the fact I’d never said two words to her. But that guilt was short-lived, because my twelve-year-old penis was anxious to get on with business, so I continued to ravish her picture with my hungry eyes and myself with a jumpy hand.

Sometimes I’d get completely carried away, and looking at the ceiling as I felt my body blast off into the stratosphere, I’d start to call her name again and again.
Lee Hanley! Oh! Leeee!
Although I tried to waltz myself around only when I was sure no one else was home, I made the mistake of not checking one afternoon, and that oversight was disastrous.

Bermuda shorts down at my knees, the school yearbook Propped comfortably on my chest, I had started singing my Lee song when the door suddenly flew open and Ross appeared.

“
I caught you!
Lee Hanley, huh? You’re jerking off to Lee Hanley? Boy, wait’ll Bobby hears this! He’s going to chop you into hamburger. Hey, what’ve you got there? That’s
my
yearbook! Gimme that!” He snatched it out of my hand and looked at the picture. “Jeez, wait’ll I tell Bobby, man. Shit, I’d hate to be you.” His face was pure triumph.

From that moment on, the taunts and torture began and didn’t end for more than a year. That night I pulled down the bedspread and found a photograph taped to my pillow: a mutilated body on a battlefield with a soldier looking at it indifferently. In blood-red ink the soldier was labeled
Bobby
, and I was the corpse.

A lot of that sort of thing went on, but the most frightening moments were when Ross would casually say to Bobby, “Want to know what my brother does, Bobby? Wait’ll you hear this one, the little pig!” Looking straight at me, a gleam smeared across his face, he’d pause for millenniums, making me wish I was either in Sumatra or dead, or both. Inevitably he’d finish by saying, “He picks his nose,” or something equally mean and true, but nothing compared to “it,” and I could breathe easily again.

It ran in cycles; at times I was hopeful he’d forgotten. But like a bat flying through the window, it would suddenly be there again, right on you, days or weeks later, and he’d have me squirming and twisting at the drop of his hat. When we were alone he would tell me what a sludge I was to jerk off to a friend’s
sister
. He was as convincing as any angry, unforgiving priest.

Probably because the torment increased, the image of Lee Hanley’s underpants became the sexiest thing in the world, and they became my one and only fantasy. I masturbated at all times of the day; my high point was probably the time I came while sitting perfectly still at a junior high school assembly where a Cherokee Indian demonstrated tribal war dances.

I was a fool. I gave Ross my allowance, did his chores for him, brought him snacks at the snap of his fingers. Once, I even realized that what I’d been doing was a kind of compliment to Lee, but when I tried explaining that to Ross, he closed his eyes and flicked his wrist at me as if I were a fly on his hand.

What really happened the day he died was this: as we were crossing the railroad tracks together, Ross’s anger flared at Bobby for having taken his shotgun away. Halfway to the other platform, he casually asked his friend how many times a week he beat off.

“I don’t know. Every day, I guess. That is, if I’m not gettin’ any from some chick. Why? How ‘bout you?”

My brother’s voice went up a notch. “About the same. Do you ever think of anyone when you do it?”

My face tightened, and I almost stopped moving.

“Sure, what do you think I do, count to a hundred? What’s with you, Ross? You gone pervert or something?”

“Naah, I was just thinking. Do you know who Joe thinks about when he does it?”

“Joey? You beating your meat already, boy? Shame! You know how old I was when I first started doing it? About three!” He laughed.

I could only look at my feet. I knew it was coming; Ross was about to open the door on my blackest secret and there was nothing I could do about it.

“Okay, so spill it. Who do you think about, Joe? Suzanne Pleshette?”

Before Ross could answer, a high train whistle hooted frighteningly down the track. At that moment I did something I’d never done before. Shouting “No!” I shoved Ross as hard as I could. So help me God, I was so afraid of what he was going to say I’d totally forgotten where we were.

“Holy shit, Ross, a train’s coming!” Without looking our way, Bobby charged ahead toward the other side of the tracks. My brother fell. I stood still and watched. Yes.

I was so shocked by what had happened I couldn’t say anything. A few days later I was too afraid to speak.

Conveniently, as far as people were concerned (including Bobby, who testified that the sound of the train whistle must have scared Ross into stumbling), it was simply a tragic accident.

My mother went mad. A week after the funeral she stood at the bottom of the staircase and started screaming incoherently to my dead brother to get up and go to school. She had to be institutionalized. I began shaking and was put on heavy doses of tranquilizer, which made me feel as if I were floating in blue space.

When they decided to keep my mother in the hospital, my father took me to dinner. Neither of us ate anything. Halfway through the meal he pushed the plates aside and took hold of both my hands.

“Joe, son, it’s going to be just you and me for a while now, and we’ve got some tough times ahead of us.”

I nodded and was for the first time on the brink of telling him everything, every bit of it. Then he looked at me, and I saw big clear tears on his face.

“I’m crying, Joe, because of your brother, and because I already miss your mama very much. It makes me feel as if parts of my body had been ripped off. I’m telling you that because I think you can understand and because I’m going to need you to help me be strong. I’ll help you and you’ll help me, okay? You’re the best boy a man could have, and we’re not going to let anything get us or pull us down from now on. Not anything! Right?”

I saw Bobby only two or three times after Ross died. When the school year ended he enlisted in the Marines. He left town at the end of June, but stories trickled back about him. Apparently he turned out to be a very good soldier. He stayed in the service for four years. By the time he returned I was a freshman in college.

In my sophomore year I came home for a long weekend. On Saturday night I had a dreary argument with my father about what I was going to do with “my future.” I left the house in a huff and went to a bar in town to drown my angst in beer.

Along about the third one, someone sat down next to me at the bar and touched my elbow. I was watching television and ignored it. Whoever it was touched me again, and annoyed, I looked over. It was Bobby. His hair was very long, and he had a Fu Manchu mustache that grew down and off his square chin. He smiled and patted my arm.

“My God, Bobby!”

“How are you doin’ there, Joe College?”

He kept smiling, and I realized, with some relief, he was very stoned.

“How’s college, Joe?”

“Great, Bobby. But how are you?”

“Good, man. Everything is very cool.”

“Yeah? Well, what are you doing? I mean, uh, what kind of work are you into?”

“Listen, Joe, I’ve been wanting to rap with you for like a long time, you know? There’s a lot to talk about between us, you know?”

His face was thin and tired, and there was an uncertainty that said he’d banged around through the years without having found much of anything. I felt very sorry for him, but knew there was little I could do. His hand was on my shoulder, so I reached over and took it, wanting him to know that in a strange way he was still an important part of me.

I’ve mentioned before how he had always been very sensitive. Touching his hand like that set something off. He snatched it away, and his look changed abruptly. The snaky, malicious Bobby Hanley who’d held a beer opener to my face rushed back. Rage flew up into his eyes like a small bird hitting a window. I winced and tried to smile us back to a moment ago.

“Hey, man, I got a question for you. You ever go out to your brother’s grave? Huh? You ever go there and give Ross flowers or anything?”

“I —”

“You bullshit! You don’t, man, and I know it! I’m out there all the fucking time, do you know that? The guy was the greatest friend I ever had in the world! You’re his own little brother and you don’t do squat for him. No wonder he thought you were a little pussy. You shithead!” He wrenched himself off the stool and dug into his pocket for money. Coming up with a dollar bill that had been crumpled into a small green ball, he threw it on the counter. It rolled until it fell over the other edge. “You think I don’t know about you, Joe? You think I don’t know how you feel about Ross? Well, let me tell you something, man. He was a king, and don’t ever forget that. He was a fucking
king
. You — Christ, all you are is a scumbag!”

He walked out of the bar without looking back. I wanted to go after him and tell him he was wrong. I waited, pretending I was trying to think of what I’d say when I caught up with him. Say? I didn’t have anything to tell him; there was nothing more
to
say.

A month later I wrote a short story entitled “Wooden Pajamas” for a creative-writing class I was taking. The teacher had encouraged us umpteen times to write from our own experience. Because I was still shaken by the meeting with Bobby, I decided to follow the advice and try driving some of the guilt monsters away by writing a story about Bobby, Ross, and their gang.

The problem was what to write. In my first attempt, I tried describing the time they planned to rob the American Legion post of all its guns, only to be cheated out of the chance when the building burned down the night before the caper was to be pulled off. I say I tried writing about it, but all I came up with was a bunch of crap. I realized I didn’t know how to approach my brother and his world. He and all he’d been had flowed through my veins for so long that when I stopped to think about who and what he was, I drew a blank. I knew what colors he was, but since I couldn’t separate them, they all merged into a big white blank. Just try to describe the color white to someone beyond saying it’s all colors in one.

I tried a first-person narrator — a girl who’d been jilted by one of the guys. That didn’t work, so I tried being one of their parents. Absolutely nothing. Next I filled three sheets of paper with Ross and Bobby stories. Some of them made me laugh; others made me guilty or sad. Remembering everything made me obsessed with the idea of getting a bit of their world down on paper. Nothing was going to stop me.

It’s funny, but in the beginning I never once thought of making something up and using my brother and his gang as characters in
my
story. Ross had been such a strong presence in my life and had done so many wild things that I’d never considered upstaging him with an action or thought that came strictly from my own head. Yet that’s what happened. While driving across campus one Saturday night, I saw a bunch of tough guys strutting down Main Street, all duded up for a big night on the town.

How many times had I watched my brother brush his long hair into a perfect shining swirl, slap on a gallon of English Leather cologne, and wink at himself in the bathroom mirror when he was done? “Looking good, Joe. Your brother is looking good!”

I thought about it for a while and, sitting down at the typewriter one afternoon, opened the story with those same words addressed to an adoring little brother who sat on the edge of the bathtub watching him prepare for … I had no idea of where to go from there.

It took me two weeks to write. It was about a bunch of toughs in a small town who are getting ready to go to a big party at a girl’s house. Each boy has a little section of the story, and in turn tells you about their lives and what he thinks will happen tonight when the party gets going up at Brenda’s.