This Boy's Life (4 page)

I stayed away for several days after that. Then I came back again. For an hour or so I aimed at people passing by. Again I teased myself by leaving the rifle unloaded, snapping the hammer on air, trying my own patience like a loose tooth. I had just followed a car out of sight when another car turned the comer at the bottom of the hill. I zeroed in on it, then lowered the rifle. I don’t know whether I had ever seen this particular car before, but it was of a type and color—big, plain, blue—usually driven only by government workers and nuns. You could tell if it was nuns by the way their headgear filled the windows and by the way they drove, which was very slowly and anxiously. Even from a distance you could feel the tension radiating from a car full of nuns.

The car crept up the hill. It moved even slower as it approached my building, and then it stopped. The front door on the passenger side opened and Sister James got out. I drew back from the window. When I looked out again, the car was still there but Sister James was not. I knew that the apartment door was locked—I always locked it when I took the rifle out—but I went over and double-checked it anyway. I heard her coming up the steps. She was whistling. She stopped outside the door and knocked. It was an imperative knock. She continued to whistle as she waited. She knocked again.

I stayed where I was, still and silent, rifle in hand, afraid that Sister James would somehow pass through the locked door and discover me. What would she think? What would she make of the rifle, the fur hat, the uniform, the darkened room? What would she make of me? I feared her disapproval, but even more than that I feared her incomprehension, even her amusement, at what she could not possibly understand. I didn’t understand it myself. Being so close to so much robust identity made me feel the poverty of my own, the ludicrous aspect of my costume and props. I didn’t want to let her in. At the same time, strangely, I did.

After a few moments of this an envelope slid under the door and I heard Sister James going back down the steps. I went to the window and saw her bend low to enter the car, lifting her habit with one hand and reaching inside with the other. She arranged herself on the seat, closed the door, and the car started slowly up the hill. I never saw her again.

The envelope was addressed to Mrs. Wolff. I tore it open and read the note. Sister James wanted my mother to call her. I burned the envelope and note in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain.

R
oy was tying flies at the kitchen table. I was drinking a Pepsi and watching him. He bent close to his work, grunting with concentration. He said, in an offhand way, “What do you think about a little brother?”

“A little brother?”

He nodded. “Me and your mom’ve been thinking about starting a family.”

I didn’t like this idea at all, in fact it froze me solid.

He looked up from the vise. “We’re already pretty much of a family when you think about it,” he said.

I said I guessed we were.

“We have a lot of fun.” He looked down at the vise again. “A lot of fun. We’re thinking about it,” he said. “Nothing like a little guy around the house. You could teach him things. You could teach him to shoot.”

I nodded.

“That’s what we were thinking too,” he said. “I don’t know about names, though. What do you think of Bill as a name?”

I said I liked it.

“Bill,” Roy said. “Bill. Bill.” He turned silent again, staring down at the fly in the vise, his hands on the table. I finished off my Pepsi and went outside.

While my mother and I ate breakfast the next morning Roy carried fishing gear and camping equipment out to the Jeep. He was lashing down something in back when I left for school. I yelled “Good luck!” and he waved at me, and I never saw him again either. My mother was in the apartment when I got home that day, folding clothes into a suitcase that lay open on her bed. Two other suitcases were already packed full. She was singing to herself. Her color was high, her movements quick and sure, everything about her flushed with gaiety. I knew we were on our way the moment I heard her voice, even before I saw the suitcases.

She asked me why I wasn’t at archery. There was no suspicion behind the question.

“They canceled it,” I told her.

“Great,” she said. “Now I won’t have to go looking for you. Why don’t you check your room and make sure I’ve got everything.”

“We going somewhere?”

“Yes.” She smoothed out a dress. “We sure are.”

“Where?”

She laughed. “I don’t know. Any suggestions?”

“Phoenix,” I said immediately.

She didn’t ask why. She hung the dress in a garment bag and said, “That’s a real coincidence, because I was thinking about Phoenix myself. I even got the Phoenix paper. They have lots of opportunities there. Seattle too. What do you think about Seattle?”

I sat down on the bed. It was starting to take hold of me too, the giddiness of flight. My knees shook and I felt myself grin. Everything was racing. I said, “What about Roy?”

She kept on packing. “What about him?”

“I don’t know. Is he coming too?”

“Not if I can help it, he isn’t.” She said she hoped that was okay with me.

I didn’t answer. I was afraid of saying something she would remember if they got back together. But I was glad to be once more on the run and glad that I would have her to myself again.

“I know you two are close,” she said.

“Not that close.”

She said there wasn’t time to explain everything now, but later on she would. She tried to sound serious, but she was close to laughing and so was I.

“Better check your room,” my mother said again.

“When are we leaving?”

“Right away. As soon as we can.”

I ate a bowl of soup while my mother finished packing. She carried the suitcases into the front hall and then walked down to the corner to call a cab. That was when I remembered the rifle. I went to the closet and saw it there with Roy’s things, his boots and jackets and ammo boxes. I carried the rifle to the living room and waited for my mother to come back.

“That thing stays,” she said when she saw it.

“It’s mine,” I said.

“Don’t make a scene,” she told me. “I’ve had enough of those things. I’m sick of them. Now put it back.”

“It’s mine,” I repeated. “He gave it to me.”

“No. I’m sick of guns.”

“Mom, it’s
mine. ”

She looked out the window. “No. We don’t have room for it.”

This was a mistake. She had put the argument in prac tical terms and now it would be impossible for her to argue from principle again. “Look,” I said, “There’s room. See, I can break it down.” And before she could stop me I had unscrewed the locking bolt and pulled the rifle apart. I dragged one of the suitcases back into the living room and unzipped it and slid the two halves of the rifle in between the clothes. “See?” I said. “There’s plenty of room.”

She had watched all this with her arms crossed, her lips pressed tightly together. She turned to the window again. “Keep it then,” she said. “If it means that much to you.”

 

IT WAS RAINING when our cab pulled up. The cabby honked and my mother started wrestling one of the suitcases down the steps. The cabby saw her and got out to help, a big man in a fancy Western shirt that got soaked in the drizzle. He went back for the other two bags while we waited in the cab. My mother kidded him about how wet he was and he kidded her back, looking in the rearview mirror constantly as if to make sure she was still there. As we approached the Greyhound station he stopped joking and began to quiz her in a low, hurried voice, asking one question after another, and when I got out of the cab he pulled the door shut behind me, leaving the two of them alone inside. Through the rain streaming down the window I could see him talking, talking, and my mother smiling and shaking her head. Then they both got out and he took our bags from the trunk. “You’re sure, now?” he said to her. She nodded. When she tried to pay him he said that her money was no good, not to him it wasn’t, but she held it out again and he took it.

My mother broke out laughing after he drove away. “Of all things,” she said. She kept laughing to herself as we hauled the bags inside, where she settled me on a bench and went to the ticket window. The station was empty except for a family of Indians. All of them, even the children, looked straight ahead and said nothing. A few minutes later my mother came back with our tickets. The Phoenix bus had left already and the next one didn’t come through until late that night, but we were in luck—there was a bus leaving for Portland in a couple of hours, and from there we could make an easy connection to Seattle. I tried to conceal my disappointment but my mother saw it and bought me off with a handful of change. I played the pinball machines for a while and then stocked up on candy bars for the trip, Milk Duds and Sugar Babies and Idaho Spuds, most of which were already curdling in my stomach when at dusk we boarded our bus and stood in the dazed regard of the other passengers. We hesitated for a moment as if we might get off. Then my mother took my hand and we made our way down the aisle, nodding to anyone who looked at us, smiling to show we meant well.

W
e lived in a boardinghouse in West Seattle. At night, if my mother wasn’t too tired, we took walks around the neighborhood, stopping in front of different houses to consider them as candidates for future purchase. We went for the biggest and most pretentious, sneering at ranches and duplexes—anything that smelled of economy. We chose half-timbered houses, houses with columns, houses with sculpted bushes in front. Then we went back to our room, where I read novels about heroic collies while my mother practiced typing and shorthand so she wouldn’t fall behind in her new job.

Our room was in a converted attic. It had two camp beds and between them, under the window, a desk and chair. It smelled of mildew. The yellow wallpaper was new but badly hung and already curling at the edges. It was the kind of room that B-movie detectives wake up in, bound and gagged, after they’ve been slipped a Mickey.

The boardinghouse was full of old men and men who probably only seemed old. Besides my mother only two women lived there. One was a secretary named Kathy. Kathy was young and plain and shy. She stayed in her room most of the time. When people addressed her she would look at them with a drowning expression, then softly ask them to repeat what they had said. As time went on, her pregnancy began to show through the loose clothes she wore. There didn’t seem to be a man in the picture.

The other woman was Marian, the housekeeper. Marian was big and loud. Her arms were as thick as a man’s, and when she pounded out hamburger patties the whole kitchen shook. Marian went with a marine sergeant from Bremerton who was even bigger than she was but more gentle and soft-spoken. He had been in the Pacific during the war. When I kept after him to tell me about it he finally showed me an album of photographs he’d taken. Most of the pictures were of his buddies. Doc, a man with glasses. Curly, a man with no hair. Jesus, a man with a beard. But there were also pictures of corpses. He meant to scare me off the subject with these pictures but instead they made me more interested. Finally Marian told me to stop bothering him.

Marian and I disliked each other. Later we both found reasons for it, but our dislike was instinctive and mysterious. I tried to cover mine with a treacly stream of yes ma‘ams and no ma’ams and offers of help. Marian wasn’t fooled. She knew I didn’t like her, and that I was not the young gentleman I pretended to be. She went out a lot, running errands, and she sometimes saw me on the street with my friends—bad company, from the looks of them. She knew I combed my hair differently after I left the house and rearranged my clothes. Once, driving past us, she yelled at me to pull up my pants.

MY FRIENDS WERE Terry Taylor and Terry Silver. All three of us lived with our mothers. Terry Taylor’s father was stationed in Korea. The war had been over for two years but he still hadn’t come home. Mrs. Taylor had filled the house with pictures of him, graduation portraits, snapshots in and out of uniform—always alone, leaning against trees, standing in front of houses. The living room was like a shrine; if you didn’t know better you would have thought that he had not survived Korea but had died some kind of hero’s death there, as Mrs. Taylor had perhaps anticipated.

This sepulchral atmosphere owed a lot to the presence of Mrs. Taylor herself. She was a tall, stooped woman with deep-set eyes. She sat in her living room all day long and chain-smoked cigarettes and stared out the picture window with an air of unutterable sadness, as if she knew things beyond mortal bearing. Sometimes she would call Taylor over and wrap her long arms around him, then close her eyes and hoarsely whisper, “Terence! Terence!” Eyes still closed, she would turn her head and resolutely push him away.

Silver and I immediately saw the potential of this scene and we replayed it often, so often that we could bring tears to Taylor’s eyes just by saying “Terence! Terence!” Taylor was a dreamy thin-skinned boy who cried easily, a weakness from which he tried to distract us by committing acts of ferocious vandalism. He’d once been to juvenile court for breaking windows.