The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (124 page)

Because of our work schedules, I saw her on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. Come eleven or midnight, I’d throw a couple cups of coffee in me and then get back on my bike—pedal like a maniac down Lakeside, across Woodlawn, and out onto Route 165.
By the time I got home, Ray would be at work and Ma and Thomas would have gone to bed. I’d sit in our pathetic plastic-tiled kitchen with its corny knickknacks, its flypaper hanging from the ceiling, studded with victims, and feel embarrassed about who and what we were. Or else I’d lie in the dark in the living room on our shabby, unraveling braided rug from Sears and think, here I am, a rich girl’s boyfriend, the only guy who can make her feel safe. And not just any rich girl, either.
Dessa.
And I’d feel again the small heft of her breast, my lips against her nipples—see my fingers unraveling that long black braid of hers. Exhausted but wired, I’d twist and fidget, unable to go upstairs and sleep. Unable to get filled
up with her.

I thought I was playing it cool. I didn’t think it showed, but it must have. At work, Leo teased me about my yawning, my dozing at lunchtime—about what I must be “ordering off the menu from my little waitress friend.” At home, Ma kept asking me when she was going to be able to meet my “new gal.” Thomas kept bugging me about what Dessa looked like. Possessive of what I had—reluctant to share even information about her—I volunteered the minimum. “She’s short,” I told him. “Brunette.”

“What else?”

“That’s it,” I said, shrugging. “Short and brunette. She goes to Boston College.”

One morning while I was shaving at the bathroom sink, Ray walked in and stood behind me, studying my sleepy face in the medicine cabinet mirror. I’d gotten in at three that same morning, had copped a grand total of three hours’ sleep before I’d had to get up for work.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Your mother tells me you were out late again last night,” he said.

I shut up. Kept shaving.

“You and this chippy of yours being careful?” he said.

The night before, Dessa had shaken her dialpack at me like a box of Good & Plentys, then kissed me and gulped down one of the tiny tablets that kept us safe from complications. “Safety” was something I saw as her department.

“This
chippy
?” I said. Tried on a Ralph Drinkwater smirk of indifference.

Ray took a box of Trojans out of his workshirt pocket and tossed them onto the top of the toilet tank. Said nothing. I steadied the razor in my hand and shaved—tried as hard as I could to act nonchalant, to ignore his big investigation.
De-
fense!
De-
fense!

“I’m not discussing my personal life with you, Ray,” I said. “It’s private.”

Ray let go a one-note chuckle. “Fine with me, Romeo. As far as I’m concerned, you can go out and be as private as you want. Just don’t come back here telling your mother and me that you got the clap or that you knocked up some little tootsie.”

I turned and faced him, half of my face lathered, the other half clean-shaven. “Atta boy, Ray,” I said. “Go to it. Make love sound as ugly as possible.” Then I turned back and faced the mirror.

He stood there for another several seconds, watching as I nicked myself, winced, dabbed at the blood. Then he did something totally unexpected: reached up and grabbed my arm with his leathery hand. More in a fatherly than a threatening way. For a couple of seconds, we stared at each other in the mirror. “All I’m saying, hothead, is that I remember what it’s like to be your age and getting a little pussy,” he said. “I was in the Navy, kiddo. I know the ropes. Just be careful where you’re sticking your dipstick—that’s all I’m saying. Don’t let it get complicated.”

I couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t accept this sudden father-to-son stuff. I resented him anywhere
near
what Dessa and I had put in motion. So when he walked out of the bathroom, I called his name. Reached over to the toilet tank for the box of safes. “Here,” I said, tossing them back. “You forgot these.”

He caught them. Threw them back again. They landed in the sink bowl, under the running water. “I didn’t forget them,” he said. “Who do you think I went out and bought the damn things for? The Pope? Your brother?”

After a week or so of graveball, Ralph Drinkwater
did
start passing around those joints of his. The first couple of times, it was a novelty for Leo and me, getting high on the job, working with a buzz on. Then it turned into a kind of semiroutine. While Dell was sleeping one off—and even some afternoons when he wasn’t—Leo and Drinkwater and I would find something real interesting out in the woods, then circulate the wacky weed. Get wrecked on company time. Leo kept trying to get Thomas high, too, poking the lit roach in front of his face no matter how many times my brother refused. It flustered Thomas, having to keep saying no; he’d get up on his high horse. “Just what I want to do, Leo,” he told him once. “Inhale something that’s going to turn me into as big a goofball as you are.”

Drinkwater’s dope shifted the whole dynamic. Ralph, Leo, and I turned into a trio and Thomas became the odd man out. If we had a field to mow or an acre of brush to clear, the three of us would cook up a plan to make it go faster, easier, and Thomas would plod along on his own, uninvited. At lunchtime, he’d sit by himself in a huff, hardly speaking to the rest of us. Sometimes Dell would assign Thomas a separate job altogether—send the three of us off someplace and then sit there and watch Thomas work. Criticize him. Bust his balls. Dell began to take a special interest in making Thomas’s life miserable.

“Tell your brother he better watch out for Dell,” Ralph said to me one afternoon. The two of us were painting picnic tables side by side down at the fairgrounds, high on hemp and paint fumes. Dell and Thomas were across the field, painting a set of bleachers.

“What do you mean, ‘watch out for him’?” I said.

He shrugged. “I don’t mean nothing. Just tell him.”

During the first couple of weeks on the job, it was Drinkwater who’d ridden shotgun in the cab with Dell, but now Thomas sat up front. That saddens me now, but it didn’t back then. I was
glad
for the reprieve—grateful to be a free agent for a change. I remember Thomas, sitting up front, craning his neck back at Leo and Ralph and me—the three of us laughing and hooting at girls on the street or sipping another joint on the way back to the city barn.

“That brother of yours is fucked
up,
” Leo said one time when he caught Thomas looking back at us.

“He’s more fucked up than a soup sandwich,” Ralph added. And the three of us broke into snorts and giggles, courtesy of Thomas. On another of those rides, Leo started blowing kisses to this woman in a convertible behind us. She yelled back something about us being the Three Stooges, and Ralph launched into this imitation of Curly Joe that was so dead-on and unexpected, none of us could breathe from laughing so hard. Leo made up a theme song for us: “Three Dumb Fucks,” sung to the tune of “Three Blind Mice.” Sometimes we’d sing that song all the way back to the barn, making up new lyrics that struck us all as hilarious. The three of us were happy as pigs in shit to be wasted and working for the Three Rivers Public Works.

But as tight as Leo, Drinkwater, and I got that summer, there was always a kind of mystery about Ralph. A question mark hanging over his circumstances. He never volunteered much. We knew he didn’t live at home, but he never quite said where he
did
live. He took a ride home from Dell sometimes, but he always refused one from Leo. He was always “too busy” to hang out with us on the weekend. The only time that whole summer that Leo and I got together with Ralph was one Sunday when the three of us drove up to Fenway for a doubleheader. And even then, Ralph acted like some kind of secret agent about where he lived. We had to pick him up downtown in front of the post office, I remember. And drop him off there, too, even though we got back late in the middle of a rainstorm—the three of us soaked to the bone because of Leo’s broken convertible top.

Part of what was between us was Ralph’s race. You’d see it sometimes when Dell started up with his stupid jokes, or when Leo hit a nerve. Indian or mulatto or whatever he was, Drinkwater was different from us lily-white college boys who got to go back to school at the end of the summer while he stayed stuck in Three Rivers. And it wasn’t like he was stupid. He was always trying to talk to us about politics or something he’d seen on the news or read about in some science article. He read a lot—as much as any college kid. He kept
trying to get us to read this one book,
Soul on Ice,
by Eldridge Cleaver. He recommended that book to us so many times, it got to be a joke.

One time Leo called Ralph “Tonto,” and he got pissed about it. He told Leo that Leo wasn’t fit to lick the foot of a Wequonnoc Indian. Another time the three of us were toking up out at the reservoir. I was sucking away on the end of the roach and Leo said, “Jesus Christ, Birdseed, you don’t have to nigger-lip the thing to death.” Drinkwater and I both laughed a little when he said it, but then there was this silence that lasted about fifteen seconds longer than it should have. Ralph got up and walked off into the woods. “That was real swift of you,” I told Leo. “Congratulations, man.”

“Hey, shoot me, okay, Birdsey,” Leo snapped back. “I can’t keep track of whether he’s an Indian or Afroman or
what
he is.”

Another wedge between Ralph and us—between Ralph and everyone—was the death of his sister. I didn’t catch on at first. Couldn’t read where some of his moodiness was coming from. I knew the obvious: that Penny Ann was buried out there at the Indian cemetery. His cousin Lonnie, too. You couldn’t miss Lonnie’s gravestone.
“In Memory of a Modern Warrior.”
In contrast, Penny Ann’s stone was about the size of a dictionary.
“P.A.D.”
was all it said.
“1948–1958.”

Ralph would get sulky every week when we mowed the Indian graveyard. Nothing anyone said out there struck him as funny. It was something I thought I understood. Then one day it hit me like a brick in the head: this wasn’t just the place where his sister’s and cousin’s graves were. It was worse than that. This was the place where that sick bastard Monk had taken Penny Ann during the snowstorm. This was where they’d found her body.

Dell liked to save the Indian cemetery—the smallest of the town graveyards—for Friday afternoons. We always finished ahead of time, and more often than not, Dell would take out his Seagram’s and start celebrating the weekend early. One hot afternoon, Leo got the bright idea that we should head up the path to the Falls, then climb down and go swimming in the river. I figured Drinkwater would steer clear of the place. It made me a little squeamish myself.
But Ralph surprised me and followed us up the path. I don’t remember Thomas being there that day. It may have been around the time he cut his foot.

There were “no trespassing” signs posted all over the place and chain-link fence on both cliff edges at the waterspill. All that stuff had been put up by the town years ago in response to Penny Ann’s murder. But by the summer of ’69, those “keep out” signs had all rusted and chipped. Kids had long ago bent an opening in the fence and trampled a path down to the water.

Leo went first. I followed, half-walking and half-running down the steep path. Drinkwater brought up the rear. Down by the water’s edge, Leo and I shucked off our clothes and eased into the cedar-tinted water. Ralph yanked off his boots and socks, threw his wallet onto the pile. Then he waded in, still wearing his tank top and jeans. I wondered why—what all the modesty was about—but I didn’t say anything. Didn’t kid him about it. If I didn’t really understand the
whys
of Ralph’s boundaries, I at least had a sense of what they were. Unlike Leo.

“Hey, you guys! Look!” Leo called over the roar of the water. He was pointing to the middle of the river. “Holy shit! Is this what I think it is?”

Ralph and I stood watching as he dived underwater, swam to the spot where he’d been pointing, and resurfaced. “Hey! I don’t believe it! It
is
!”

“
What?
” I yelled. Ralph and I waited, riveted.

Instead of answering, Leo dived again. Surfaced. “Yup. Just like I thought. Holy Christ!”

“What?” I said. “What the fuck you talking about?”

“It’s that Mary Jo Kopechne broad. She must have floated downstream from Massachusetts. Psyche!” He broke into obnoxious guffawing that ricocheted into the treetops. “Man, I got you two
bad
!”

I shot a nervous glance over toward Ralph. “Shut up, Leo,” I called to him.

“What’s the matter with
you,
Birdsey?” he laughed. “You related to the Kennedys or something?”

Then Ralph went under. I waited. He resurfaced fifty feet or so up the river. Climbed the bank and disappeared back into the woods.

I swam upriver myself, wanting to distance myself from Leo. I cooled off for five or ten minutes. When I got back to the Falls, Leo called my name. He was pointing straight up.

Ralph had climbed back up the path, but instead of crawling through the opening in the fence, he was scaling the remaining ten or twelve feet of cliff wall. We watched him in silence until he was out on the unprotected side of the ledge. From there, he started climbing the mammoth oak tree that grew right at the cliff’s edge. He rose way the hell up into the branches and leaves, until he was so high up there that it made me nauseous to even look. Finally he climbed out onto a branch and just sat there, his legs dangling over the sides. He was staring down into the falling water, smirking that smirk. What struck me most was the loneliness of his position: the black Indian, the nonseasonal worker. The untwinned twin. There was something about Ralph that filled me up with sadness. Some pain that was readable just in the way he sat up there on that tree limb. But not completely readable. Something
un
readable, too.