The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (88 page)

There was a pretty good stretch in the early eighties. Dr. Filyaw started Thomas on Haldol in 1983. My brother began doing so well that they transferred him to a group home and got him that maintenance job at McDonald’s. (Thomas had me photocopy his first paycheck before we cashed it, I remember. He kept it framed on his bedroom wall at the group home, along with a ten-dollar bill that somebody stole later on to buy cigarettes.) Thomas even had himself a girlfriend back then, this bride-of-Frankenstein chick named Nadine. Nadine was a holy roller like him but not nuts in any offi
cial way. Not
categorized
as crazy. They met in a Bible study group. She was in her midforties, a good ten years older than he was at the time. Don’t ask me how they squared it with God and their holy roller group, but my brother and Nadine were doing it. I should know. I’m the guy who had to buy Thomas his Trojans. It was Nadine who convinced him that if his faith was strong enough, he didn’t have to rely on medication—that
what God wanted from him was a test of faith.

It’s tempting to delude yourself when your screwed-up brother becomes gainfully employed and starts acting less screwed up for a while. You begin to take sanity for granted—convince yourself that optimism’s in order. Thomas had a girlfriend and a job and was living semi-independently. If the signs were there, I guess I overlooked them. Let down my guard. Big mistake.

Nobody except Thomas and Nadine knew he’d stopped taking his Haldol. Or that he’d begun to wear a ring of aluminum foil around his head every night when he went to bed because it somehow let God’s voice through but scrambled the messages of his enemies. My brother: the human radio receiver pulling in the Jesus frequency. Mr. Tinfoil Head. I mean, it’s not funny, but it is. If I didn’t laugh about it sometimes, I’d be down in the bughouse in the bed next to his.

The new drive-thru window at McDonald’s had been installed only about a week or two before Thomas cracked. Later on, he blamed his assistant manager, who had balked that morning when Thomas showed up for work wearing his aluminum foil hat. Thomas had tried to explain to the guy that Communist agents were ridiculing him through the outside speaker—calling to him as he emptied the garbage or swept the parking lot, encouraging him to go inside and eat the rat poison in the utility closet. By the time the police got there, Thomas, wielding his floor polisher, had already knocked off Ronald McDonald’s life-sized fiberglass head and wasted the restaurant’s brand-new drive-thru speaker. The cops found him sobbing away behind the Dumpster, bees hovering all around him. Thomas had to check out of the group home, of
course—check back into the hospital. About a month after that, he got a postcard of the Grand Ole Opry from Nadine and Chuckie, this other high-on-Jesus buddy of theirs. Chuckie
and Nadine had eloped, were honeymooning in Tennessee. I was worried the news from Nadine was going to set Thomas back further, but he took it like a stoic and held no grudges.

“Read me something from my Bible, Dominick,” Thomas ordered me now in the cruiser, midway between Shanley Memorial and the hospital. He’d been making demands for four days: get him this, check on that. Ordering instead of asking, the way he always did when he was in bad shape. I turned around and looked back at him. The lights from a passing car illuminated his face. Despite the Valium, his eyes looked clear, hungry for something. “Read to me from the Book of Psalms,” he said.

The binding on Thomas’s Bible is broken, its loose pages nearly translucent from finger oil. The whole thing’s held together with rubber bands. “The Book of Psalms?” I said. I pulled off the elastics, flipped through the tissuey pages. “Where are they at?”

“In the middle. Between the Book of Job and the Book of Proverbs. Read me the Twenty-sixth Psalm.”

In the confusion at the library five days earlier, my brother’s Bible had been left behind, then scooped up by the police detectives assigned to the case. Later, in the recovery room, Thomas had bubbled up from the anesthetic calling for it. He called for it all the next day, too. Clamored for it. A substitute wouldn’t do—it had to be
his
Bible—the one Ma had given him for his confirmation back when we were in sixth grade. (She’d given us each one, but mine was long gone. Gone where is anyone’s guess.) After several hours of listening to his bellyaching, I’d finally gone down to police headquarters and told the guy behind the glass that we needed that Bible over at the hospital a lot more than they needed it at the station. I’d repeated my request to his supervisor, then to
that
guy’s supervisor. It was Jerry Martineau, the deputy chief, who finally cut through all the
“official police investigation” bullshit and ended the impasse. Martineau and
I had played hoops together in high school. Well, to be accurate, we’d mostly kept each other company on the bench while the hotshots played. Jerry was the comedian type—the kind of kid that could get you laughing so hard, you couldn’t breathe. He did this imitation of Jerry Lewis from
The Nutty Professor
that still makes me crack a smile when I think of it. Martineau could do anybody: Elmer Fudd, President Kennedy, Maxwell Smart. One time, our coach, Coach Kaminski, walked into the locker room and caught Jerry imitating
him.
Martineau was doing laps for about the next three months.

“Here you go, Dominick,” he said when he slipped my brother’s blood-splattered Bible from a plastic bag labeled “official police evidence” and handed it to me. “Keep the faith, man.”

I looked into Jerry’s eyes for the joke—the mimicry—but there was none. That’s when I remembered that his father had committed suicide when we were in high school—had gone out to the woods one afternoon and blown out his brains. The whole team went to the wake together, I remember—sat slumped in those cushioned chairs, our knees pushed against the seats in front of us, our big feet tapping the carpeted floor a mile a minute. Martineau’s old man had been a cop, too.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear?
I read now to my brother, squinting in the dim light of streetlamps.
The Lord is my life’s refuge; of whom should I be afraid?
The driver reached over and turned off the radio. Even the dispatcher back at the station shut up.
When evildoers come at me to devour my flesh, my foes and my enemies themselves stumble and fall. . . . Though war be waged upon me, even then will I trust.

I felt my chest tighten. Tasted acid in my throat as I read the words. If Thomas hadn’t latched onto that Bible voodoo—that “if your right hand sinneth, then cut it off” crap—then none of this would have happened. We wouldn’t be taking this ride. My phone at home wouldn’t be ringing off the wall with calls from reporters and
religious crackpots. “You know, Thomas,” I told him, clearing my throat, “I can hardly see what’s on the page here. I’m going to go blind if I keep reading this.”

“Please,” he said. “Just a little more. I like hearing your voice say the words.”

I could hear him whispering along with me as I read.
Hear, O Lord, the sound of my call; have pity on me, and answer me. . . . Though my father and mother forsake me, yet will the Lord receive me.

“How’s Ray?” Thomas asked, out of the blue.

“Ray? He’s okay, I guess. He’s fine.”

“Is he mad at me?”

“Mad? No, he’s not mad.” It embarrassed me to have him ask about our stepfather in front of those two cops.

“He hasn’t come to see me.”

“Oh, well . . . he just got home. From fishing.”

“Today?”

“Yesterday. Well, day before yesterday, I guess it was. This week’s been so screwed up, I can’t even keep the days straight.”

“Screwed up because of me?” Thomas asked.

My fingers tap-tapped against the open Bible. “They’ve probably got Ray working overtime or something,” I said. “He’ll come see you. He’ll probably stop in this weekend down at the other place.”

“He’s mad at me, isn’t he?”

I could feel myself blush when the cop next to me looked over for my answer. “Nah,” I said. “He’s . . . he’s just worried. He’s not mad.”

Three days earlier, when Ray had gotten back from his fishing trip, I’d driven over to Hollyhock Avenue to tell him the news. He was out in the garage cleaning his gear when I pulled my pickup into the driveway. He started telling me all about these largemouth bass he and his buddy had caught. “So you haven’t heard, have you?” I asked.

“Heard what?” I looked away from the fear in his eyes. He’d been caught with his guard down, same as me.

He didn’t say much when I told him. He just stood there and listened, his face going gray while I delivered the particulars: that Thomas had used Ray’s ceremonial knife from World War II to do it—had gone over to the house, taken it off Ray and Ma’s bedroom wall, even sharpened the damn thing on the grinding stone out in the garage. I told Ray what the doctor had said: that the complete severance had been nearly “superhuman,” given the obstruction of the wrist bone and the amount of pain he must have had to endure—that Thomas’s determination was, in a way, remarkable. I told Ray I was the one who’d decided not to have them attempt a reattachment.

Even for a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man, my stepfather seemed that afternoon to take extraordinary care to put all his gleaming fishing paraphernalia back in its proper order. Back inside the house, he scrubbed his hands with Boraxo at the kitchen sink, then went upstairs to shower and change his clothes so that we could go to the hospital.

“Jesus God,” I heard him groan to himself up there. Heard him blow his nose once, twice. Then, again, “Jesus. Jesus.”

We rode over to Shanley Memorial in my pickup, Ray reading the two-day-old front-page story in the
Daily Record
while I drove. A veteran of both World War II and Korea, Ray was angry with the article’s mention of Thomas’s act as a sacrifice to end the standstill over Kuwait. “The kid’s crazy—doesn’t even know what the hell he’s doing—and they’re playing it up like he’s some goddamned antiwar protester.” Alongside the story, the paper had run my brother’s twenty-two-year-old high school yearbook picture: long hair, muttonchop sideburns, peace sign pinned to his sports jacket lapel. Back during Vietnam, Ray had maintained that all draft dodgers should be taken somewhere and shot.

“But it
was
an antiwar statement, Ray,” I said. “That was his whole point: he thought if he cut off his hand, Hussein and Bush would both stop and notice. Come to their senses. He thought he could short-circuit a war. It was heroic, in its own goofy way.”

“
Heroic?
” Ray said. He rolled down the window, spat, rolled it
back up again. “
Heroic?
I’ve seen heroics, buddy boy. I’ve been there. Don’t you sit there and tell me this stunt he pulled was
heroic!
”

As a kid, I had had a recurring fantasy in which my biological father was Sky King, the adventuresome pilot on Saturday morning TV. After the worst times, the loudest shouting, I’d sometimes circle around the backyard, my arms swooping wildly at passing planes. Sky would spot me, I imagined—make an emergency landing, having located us at last: his long-lost wife, his twin sons. He’d help Ma and Thomas and me into the
Songbird,
then make Ray pay—punch him a couple of good ones, buzz him all the way down our street to make him sorry for the way he bullied us. The four of us would fly away. Later, somewhere around the time I began to sprout armpit hair and lift weights down in the cellar, I gave up on heroes and took to buzzing Ray myself, goading him in small ways—stepping, usually,
on
the line but not quite
over
it. I was still afraid of his anger but saw, now, how he punished weakness—pounced on it. Out of self-preservation, I hid my fear. Smirked at the dinner table, answered
him in grudging single syllables, and learned how to look him back in the eye. Because Ray was a bully, I showed him as often as possible that Thomas was the weaker brother. Fed him Thomas to save myself.

When I pulled into the parking lot at Shanley Memorial, I put the brake on and kept the engine running. Ray got out of the truck. I just sat there, immobile, my legs as heavy as lead. I looked up at the sound of his Navy ring click-clicking against the glass.

“Aren’t you coming?” he asked me.

I rolled down the window. “You know what?” I said. “I felt the truck pulling a little while I was driving over here. I think one of the front tires is soft. I’m just going to go to the gas station and have them check it out.”

He scowled, glanced quickly at the tires. “I didn’t feel any pull,” he said.

“It won’t take long. He’s in room 210 West. I’ll see you up there.”

I watched him pass through the revolving door. Watched visitors and delivery men and a vendor in a Patriots jacket selling hot dogs
from a cart. Punched the radio buttons, settling finally for a duet: Willie Nelson’s croon and Dylan’s nasal twang, together.

There’s a big aching hole in my chest now where my heart was

And a hole in the sky where God used to be

I don’t know how long I sat there.

I was just about to throw her in reverse and get the hell out of there—drive somewhere, anywhere—when my ex-wife rolled past me in her van and pulled in three spaces away. good earth potters it says on the side. It’s
his
van, I guess, not hers. From time to time, I’ve seen the two of them, Dessa and her live-in boyfriend, driving around town in that truck. Dessa runs a day care place.
He’s
the potter.

She got out of the truck holding a pot of chrysanthemums and one of those silver balloon things. The wind had picked up and that balloon was bobbing around like crazy. When I saw her, I was glad I’d put her name on the “approved visitors” list. I figured she might come. Dessa had always been good to my brother.

She was wearing jeans and a purple turtleneck and this short little jacket. She looked more like thirty than forty. She looked better than ever. She walked right past my truck without seeing me. It wasn’t until after she’d passed through the revolving door that I realized I’d been holding my breath.

Danny Mixx, the boyfriend’s name is. Don’t ask me what kind of a name Mixx is, or what nationality. He’s sort of the ex-hippie type: bib overalls, red hair that he wears in a braid that goes halfway down his back. I saw him in two braids once. . . . If you ask me, they’re a mismatch. He’s successful, I guess, not that I know anything about pottery. He’s won awards and shit. A while back, they did a story about him in
Connecticut
magazine. Dessa was in one of the pictures—in the background. Dessa’s sister Angie told me about it when I ran into her in the parking lot at ShopRite, and I went back in and bought a copy. That magazine hung around our house for over a month.
See this woman?
I kept imagining myself telling Joy.
That’s her. She’s why I hold back. This is who’s between us.
I looked at
that picture of Dessa so many times that, after a while, the magazine opened to it automatically. Then, one day, it was gone. Thrown out with
the trash. Recycled.