The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (104 page)

“You’re already made and what a mess.”

It’s not like Mrs. Hanka’s going to let us sit wherever we want to when we get to Radio City, anyway. She’ll make us all sit together in the same row, like babies, and I bet you any amount of money she plops right down next to Otero. Last week we had the word
incorrigible
on our vocabulary list and Muriel Baby used Otero as an example.

I’ve been over to Channy’s house three times. The last time I was there, he told me he once saw all these women who were stark naked. At a beach in California where people don’t have to wear bathing suits if they don’t want to. Channy kept talking about the women’s “fur burgers.” At first, I didn’t know what he meant by fur burgers, but I kept my mouth shut. Later on, we snuck into his brother Trent’s room and Channy showed me Trent’s dirty magazines. That’s when I got it—what fur burgers were. I’d never seen
any women naked before, not even in pictures. I never even knew they had hair down there, like men. It was Channy’s brother Clay who took Channy to that beach. Him and some of his friends from college. From his baseball team. Channy says California has lots of those kinds of beaches. He’s always talking about how much better California is than Connecticut. He says in his old classroom, all the desks had little buttons
on the side and, at the end of the day, you just pushed the button and the desks disappeared into the floor. I’m pretty sure that’s a bunch of bull. Maybe that stuff about the beaches is, too. But maybe not. I haven’t even been to four states yet. What do I know?

Thomas gets up from his seat, climbs over Eugene, and walks back toward us. Someone trips him accidentally on purpose and everyone laughs, Channy and Eddie Otero loudest of all. Thomas acts so retarded sometimes. I look out the window so that I don’t have to look at him.

He opens the bathroom door. “Don’t get any on you,” Channy says.

“If Althea comes down here, I’ll send her in for you,” Otero promises. He means Althea Ebbs, this big fat girl in our class who has BO and cries all the time. Thomas doesn’t answer them. I hear the bathroom door click shut. Hear him slide the bolt.

Five minutes go by and he’s still in there. Then six or seven minutes. I heard him flush a long time ago. Marie Sexton and Bunny Borsa have both gotten out of their seats about a million times to see if the john’s free. “Who’s in there?” Bunny asks us.

“His brother,” Otero says, jabbing his thumb at me. “He’s taking a two-ton dump.”

“Either that or he’s pulling his pud,” Channy jokes.

They laugh when Bunny calls us dirty pigs.

Then the door handle starts clicking back and forth like crazy. “Dominick?” It’s Thomas. “Dominick?”

He’s locked himself in there. He can’t get out. I can hear the panic in his voice, in the frantic clicking of that door handle, the thump of his fists against the door. Channy and Otero are busting a gut.

Marie Sexton and Susan and I start calling instructions to Thomas, but he’s either too scared or too spastic to follow them. “I’m going to get sick if I don’t get out of here!” he warns. That makes Otero and Channy laugh even harder.

“Calm down,” I keep telling him. “Keep your voice down. You’re making it worse.”

“It’s stuck! It won’t budge!”

Five or six other kids are standing there now; everyone’s shouting orders at Thomas. Some of the girls are complaining that they really have to go. Mrs. Hanka starts down the aisle. In class, she likes my brother better than me. You can tell. Mr. Goody Two-shoes. Mr. Perfect. But now she’s mad at him. “To the left! Push it to the left!” she shouts, in the exasperated voice she usually saves for Otero or Althea Ebbs.

I know it’s serious when the driver pulls over to the side of the highway and stops the bus. “Sit down! Sit down!” he’s yelling at everyone, elbowing his way down the aisle. I can’t believe it: my stupid, retarded brother is wrecking our entire trip to New York City.

“
Together!
Move the handle and the bolt
together
!” the driver keeps screaming at the locked door. He takes off his uniform jacket and the back of his shirt is soaked in sweat. His face is the same color as rare roast beef. We’ve been on the side of the highway for fifteen minutes.

“Let . . . me . . . out . . . of . . . here!” Thomas keeps shouting. “Please! Please! LET ME OUT!” His body keeps making thudding noises against the door. My stomach feels like I’m on this elevator that’s dropping way too fast. If I start crying in front of Channy and Otero, I don’t care what anyone says. I’m changing schools.

“Twelve years I’ve been driving these things,” the driver tells Mrs. Hanka. “And I bet I could count on one hand the number of times I forgot my tools.”
He says we’ll have to get off at the next exit and get to a gas station. Maybe with a flatbar, he can jimmy the door open. Or maybe the gas station will have a drill he can use to unfreeze the bolts. If not, he’ll have to call the bus company and have someone drive down with the right tools.

“Well, how long will that take?” Mrs. Hanka demands. “Our Radio City tickets are for the 2:30
P.M.
show. We have to get on the ferry by 10:45 at the latest or we’ll miss the Statue of Liberty.”

“I don’t know how long it’ll take, lady,” he says. “I can’t give you any guarantees.”

“I’m sorry, Dominick!” Thomas screams from behind the door. “I’m sorry!”

The bus gets off at the next exit and is crawling through traffic on some main street. Eugene Savitsky has gotten up and come to the back of the bus. He stands there, picking at his seat and staring at the locked bathroom door like it’s a science problem. “Have him push the bolt the opposite way,” he tells me. “Have him push it to the right instead of the left.”

“It doesn’t
go
to the right,” someone says.

“But just tell him. Maybe he’s mixed up.”

“Push it to the right,” I tell Thomas.

The bolt thunks. The door squeaks open.

Thomas emerges to the sound of hoots and applause. He’s so pale, his skin looks blue. At first, he smiles. Then his face crumples up. He begins to cry.

I feel bad for him. And mad. And humiliated. Kids are looking at me, too, not just at Thomas. The Birdsey brothers: identical twin retards. I’d like to punch that smirk off of Channy Harrington’s rich little stupid face. Bust Eddie Otero’s big, fat Spic nose.

The bus driver turns around in an empty parking lot and heads back toward the interstate. Mrs. Hanka reassigns seats. Now Thomas and I sit together up front and Otero has to sit with Eugene Savitsky. Channy and Debbie Chase and Yvette Magritte are giggling together in the back.

For the rest of that whole, long day, Thomas acts really out of it. At the Statue of Liberty, he tells Mrs. Hanka he feels too scared to go up inside. She makes me stay down with him. Some guy in a uniform comes over and yells at me for chucking gravel into the water. After that, my brother and I sit on a wall, looking out at the harbor.
“Just think,” Thomas says, finally breaking the silence. “This is exactly what our grandfather saw the day he first came over from Italy.”

“Would you do me a favor?” I tell him. “Would you just shut the fuck up?” I’ve never said “fuck” out loud before. Saying it feels good. I feel as mad, as mean, as Ray.

I spend all my money. At Radio City, I buy a three-dollar deluxe souvenir book that I don’t even really want. At that novelty shop in Times Square—it
is
the same one Marie thought it was—I buy a back scratcher, a Roger Maris & Mickey Mantle plaque, a rubber tarantula, a puddle of plastic vomit. At the restaurant on the way home, I order shrimp cocktail, a T-bone steak, and Dutch apple pie à la mode. Channy and Otero eat their hamburgers at a booth with Debbie and Yvette. I get stuck at a table with fat, stupid Eugene Savitsky and my stupid, ugly brother. Eugene orders liver and onions. All Thomas has is chicken noodle soup and saltines.

Channy’s brother Trent gives Thomas and me a ride home. It had been arranged before—Channy’s idea. Channy and Trent sit up front and Thomas and I sit in back. Channy doesn’t say two words to either of us. He talks to his brother, turns the radio up loud, mentions something about someone they knew in stupid California. I know I’m never going over to Channy’s house again—that the Harringtons’ housekeeper has already made me the last of those peanut butter and fluff sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I’ve taken my last swing at those machine-hurled pitches.

“How was your trip?” Ma asks us when we get home.

“Pretty good,” Thomas says. “I really liked the Easter show. It was nice.” He says nothing about locking himself in the bathroom. I say nothing either.

“And how about you, Dominick?” Ma goes. “Did you have a good time?”

I’ve left my deluxe souvenir program on the bus. Someone has sat on my back scratcher and broken it. Of the thirty-seven dollars I brought with me, I have only eighty-three cents left. For a second or
more, I’m on the verge of tears. Then I’m all right again. “It was boring,” I tell my mother. “It stunk, just like everything always stinks.”

That night, I dream I’m trapped in a small, dark cave in a woods I don’t recognize. It’s pitch dark. I bang and cry for help and when, at last, I discover a way out, I realize I’ve not been trapped in a cave after all, but inside the Statue of Liberty.

It was musical chairs and months-old
Newsweek
s at the medical clinic. In the hour I waited, I put up with the sneaky peeks and sidelong glances of everyone who wanted to check out that library lunatic’s duplicate. One teenage girl out and out stared at my two hands. The receptionist who gave me the insurance forms to sign jerked her hand away when I reached for her pen. After my name was called, I cooled my jets in the examining room for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Then I told my story to Dr. Judy Yup.

Dr. Yup, whose smile never left her face during my ten-minute examination, pronounced me damaged and said she’d testify to the fact. She told me she’d studied a year abroad in China and had friends who’d been involved in Tiananmen Square. Her cousin, she said, had been in hiding in the southern provinces ever since.

“Well,” I said, “you can’t really compare one jerky guard to what happened over there.”

“Why can’t you?” she countered, the smile finally dropping off her face. “Oppression is oppression.”

Dale, the nurse’s aide who took the pictures of my injuries, treated me to a running monologue about the time he and his cousin got pulled over and roughed up by some state cops on their way home from an Aerosmith concert. “I wish I’d had the smarts to do what you’re doing, man,” he said. “We could have cashed in bigtime.”

I didn’t want to cash in. But a picture was forming in my head: my brother walking out the main door at Hatch, squinting into the sunshine. That social worker had been right, I guess; I
had
acted like an asshole down there the night before. Whatever came of this medical exam, Sheffer had stuck her neck out to suggest it. Thinking about her down there at Hatch, keeping an eye on my brother, gave me some relief. Relaxed me. Made me sleepy. When I got back in the truck, I just sat there, almost dozing off before I managed to put the key in the ignition and drive away.

From the clinic, I swung over to Henry Rood’s house. Might as well get this one over with, too, I told myself. I’d finish power-washing that goddamned place over the weekend, try to have it scraped and primed by the middle of the following week. Maybe with Ray’s help, I could get that three-story headache finished up by Halloween. I didn’t want to push it beyond that. November temperatures were iffy for oil-based paint; you’d only have three or four hours of good midday sun, and that’s if you were lucky. While I was at it, I’d tell Rood to cool it on the phone messages. I’d had enough of his harassment.

It had been cold that morning, but now the air was dry and warm, the temperature in the midseventies. Perfect painting weather. When I pulled up to the house on Gillette Street, Rood’s wife Ruth was out on their front porch step, sunning herself. With her stringy black hair and her pasty complexion, she reminded me a little of Morticia Addams. Especially parked in front of that Victorian house of horrors of theirs. She smiled as I approached. “I
should
be inside grading papers,” she said, “but here I am, celebrating Indian summer instead.” Beside her, a portable radio was broadcasting the opening game of the World Series.

When I asked to speak to Henry, she told me she didn’t want to
disturb him. He was either writing at the computer or else napping, she said. Or passed out in an alcoholic stupor, I figured. Ruth was having a little afternoon snort herself. A sweating glass of something or other sat on the porch floor next to her.

“Just tell him I apologize about the delay,” I said. “It can’t be helped. There’s been a bunch of circumstances beyond my control the past several days.”

“So we read,” she said. I looked away.

“Tell him . . . tell him I can probably have the house prepped by next Wednesday or Thursday—depends on how much of the trim I have to burn off.” I told her I should have the job wrapped up and the scaffolding down in a couple of weeks, max, as long as the weather cooperated. “I should be able to go full-steam next week,” I said. “So tell him he doesn’t have to keep calling me.”