by Wally Lamb
“Yeah, that’s right! ‘You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap.’” I shook my head. “Fucking Ray, man. Fucking racist bastard.”
I poured myself more cereal. Ate a few spoonfuls and put the bowl down on the coffee table. “Me and Dessa had a big fight last night,” I said. “It was my fault.”
The disclosure just slipped out—took me as much by surprise as it did Thomas. He looked over at me. “Nothing too serious, though,” I said. “Nothing we can’t straighten out. You and her will really have to meet each other one of these days. I think you’d like her. She’s good people. I want you to meet her sometime.”
“I’m going to meet her tomorrow afternoon,” Thomas said.
“What? . . . What are you talking about?” I felt suddenly panicky.
“She called this morning. While you were still sleeping. She thought I was you.”
“Dessa? What’d she say?”
“She told me what happened last night.”
I just sat there, trying to figure out how to respond. “What do you mean—what happened?” I finally said.
“She said you forgot your bike in her car. She’s going someplace all day with her mother and her sister, but she said she could come over tomorrow afternoon and bring it back. She wanted to know if I was going to be around so she could meet me.”
“Yeah? She say anything else?”
“No.”
“How’d she sound?”
“I don’t know. She sounded nice.”
“Yeah? Good. Great. . . . She is nice. She’s real nice.”
I was suddenly overwhelmed with relief. Overwhelmed with sympathy for my goofy brother. “Hey, Thomas, about this roommate stuff,” I said. “Leo just asked me one day, you know? It’s not like this master plot against you or anything. I just . . . I figured I’d make a change. It’ll be good for you and me. That’s partly why I did it. For you.”
He laughed at the baldness of the lie.
“Hey, don’t believe me,” I told him. “I don’t give a crap. But it’s the truth.”
He muttered something under his voice.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Neither of us said anything for a minute or more. On TV, the Zambezis had captured Jane and Boy and tied them up. They were doing this psycho-looking dance around them. If Thomas was going to meet Dessa, he had better not embarrass me. As a matter of fact, now that I thought about it, he wasn’t going to meet her. Not yet. I’d find some way around it. “So what’s with the stocking cap?” I asked him. “What are you wearing that thing for in the middle of summer?”
But Thomas was on some other wavelength. “As if he’s Mr. Innocent,” he said.
“What? Who you talking about?” I waited. “As if who’s Mr. Innocent?”
“Would you do me a favor?” he said.
“Depends. What is it?”
“Would you just stop playing Mr. Friendly Brother? Because it’s not convincing at all. I know what all three of you are up to.”
I laughed. “Who’s ‘all three’ of us?”
“You and your two buddy-buddies. You’ve been plotting against me all summer. I have all the information I need.”
That crazy note I’d flushed down the toilet the night before came flying back at me again. What had that thing said? “Whatever you’re talking about, you’re full of shit,” I told him. “What are you—paranoid or something?”
“No, I’m just aware.”
“Yeah? Aware of what?”
He yanked down the stocking cap until it nearly covered his eyes. Then he picked up the TV Guide and started ripping the pages into strips.
“Hey, that’s the new one, asshole,” I said. “What are you doing?”
In response, he started singing “You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap.” Louder and louder. Started screaming it at me.
“Cut it out!” I warned him. “Stop it!” And when he didn’t stop, I grabbed him. Jumped on him and made him stop. He screamed loudest when I yanked that fucking hat off his head. He began fighting back with more strength than I thought he had. The two of us toppled off the back of the couch, knocked over an end table, rolled across the floor. A lamp fell; it didn’t break but the shade got bent to shit. When I got on top of him and pinned his shoulders to the floor, he lunged up and spat in my face. That was it: I popped him one, in the nose. Put him in a choke hold while he was trying to get away from me. Gave him a couple of good jabs in the ribs and tightened my grip around his neck. He gagged. Went limp. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said.
I let go. He coughed, cleared his throat.
We were both out of breath. Both scared, I guess. I got up and righted the coffee table, the end table lamp. Threw away the wasted TV Guide, vacuumed up spilt cereal, bent the lampshade back in place the best I could. Thomas just sat there on the floor, rubbing his arm over and over.
Down in the cellar, I got my fishing gear ready. Checked my tackle box, my lures. I tried and tried to untie a knot in my line, but my fingers wouldn’t stop shaking. What was the matter with him, anyway? Writing that stupid note. Accusing us of plotting against him. If this was some kind of stupid bullshit game he was playing, he was going to be sorry he started it. I’d see to that personally. I’d had it with him. . . . But what if it wasn’t a game? And if it wasn’t, what the fuck was it? What was happening?
I went outside and stood on the cement steps, casting my line over and over across the backyard, into the honeysuckle bush. After her father retired, my mother told me, he used to spend whole days out in that little yard, sitting in his grape arbor, smoking cigars, and thinking about Sicily. He’d died out there, of a stroke, the summer Ma was pregnant with us.
No shit, man. What was wrong with him? Something must be wrong.
Just before Leo was due to pick me up, I went back inside the house. Thomas was still sitting on the floor where I’d left him, still rubbing his arm. The cap was back on his head. “You hurt your arm?” I asked him.
No answer.
“Is it sprained or something? You okay?”
Nothing.
Part of me wanted to deck him again and part of me wanted to reach down and pull him off the floor. “If I were you,” I said, “I’d turn off the boob tube and go down to the store and get another TV Guide. Ray sees you wrecked the new one, he’s going to go apeshit.”
Thomas looked up and faced me. “You are me,” he said.
“Come again?”
“You said if you were me, you’d buy a new TV Guide. But you are me.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “Far from it.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
Thomas’s smile was private and serene. My heart thumped, wild with fear.
22
1969
I was outside in front, waiting on the wall, when Leo pulled up in his Skylark.
I threw my fishing gear in the backseat and got in the front. “Here,” I said, tossing him one of the foil-wrapped eggplant grinders Ma had made me the night before. “Present from my mother.”
“See that, Birdsey,” he said. “Even the older babes love me. When you got it, you got it.” Ma a babe? I had to laugh in spite of my headache, and the mess I’d made with Dessa, and the fight I’d just had with my stupid, whacked-out brother.
Leo norfed down the sandwich as he drove. Asked what was new since yesterday.
“Not much,” I told him. “Just that, in a twenty-four-hour span, I managed to get my brother, my mother, and my girlfriend totally pissed at me.” I skipped the part about Thomas acting like a psycho.
“Whoa, my man’s three for three,” Leo laughed. “What’s your little honey honked off about? You forget to heat up the oven before you stuck the meat in or something?”
I shot him a look, amazed at how close he’d come to the truth. But Leo, oblivious, took another bite out of his sandwich. “I figured we could try out by the trestle bridge,” he said. “Ralphie told me the bluegills were biting like mothers up there a coup
le nights ago. Says he caught a nice-sized trout last week, too.”
“You should have asked him if he wanted to come with us,” I said.
Leo took another bite. “I did ask him. Said he was busy, as usual. Hey, speaking of Drinkwater, look in the glove compartment.”
“Drinkwater’s in the glove compartment?” I said.
“Real funny, Dominick. Go ahead. Look.”
I did what he said. Fished through what was in there. “Yeah?” I said. “What? Glove compartment shit.”
“Check out the Sucrets,” he said.
Inside the tin were three joints, tightly wrapped in red rolling papers. “Ralphie just got this new stuff from a friend of his. Says he might be able to get us some if we want. What do you think, Birds? You want to go halves on a little back-to-school stash?”
I didn’t. Getting wasted while you were mowing lawns was one thing; doing it while you were trying to survive a killer semester like the one I had coming up was another. I’d signed up for another poly sci course, British lit, Western civ, trig. The last thing I wanted to do was wake up from a semester-long stupor with a grade point average that looked like my brother’s. Still, I picked up one of the joints, sniffing the sweetness of the weed, the scented paper. “How much?” I said. “Nickel bag? Dime bag?”
“Well, here’s what I was thinking,” Leo said. “If this shit’s as good as Ralphie says it is, why don’t we see if we can get, say, a couple of pounds.”
“Couple of pounds?” I said.
“Shut up and listen a minute,” he said. “What I was thinking was we could maybe keep a little of it and sell the rest. There’s some serious dopers down at South Campus. We could unload this stuff no problem.”
“Nope.”
“Wait a minute, Birdsey. Listen. We get the stuff from Drinkwater, then jack the price up say seven or eight bucks an ounce and make a little profit. We could each clear over a hundred apiece.”
“I said no.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not interested in dealing, and Drinkwater’s probably not interested in being your supplier, either. He gave you these jays, right? Did he say anything to you about selling?”
“No, he didn’t. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t. You ever hear of capitalism?”
“And anyways, Leo, I can’t be buying any two pounds of marijuana. I’m trying to finance a car. Hey, speaking of which, could you do me a favor? As long as we’re going out to the bridge, could you stop at Dell’s first for a couple of minutes?”
“Dell’s?” he said. “Dell’s house?”
I told him about Dell’s wife’s car. “He lives out near the old mill on Bickel Road,” I said. “He says his house is just past there. It’s right on the way—wouldn’t take more than ten minutes.”
“All right, Birdsey. All right. But I tell you, man, the last thing I want to do after I’ve been looking at Dell’s ugly puss all week is go and fuckin’ visit him on the weekend.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a trouper, Leo,” I said. “A prince among men.”
“Hey,” he said. “What you just said? Maybe that’s an omen.”
“What?”
“You just said I’m a prince among men. I got this thing in the mail today from the theater department. They just announced their new schedule for this coming year. They’re doing Hamlet, and this play by some Spanish dude—somebody-somebody Lorca—and a musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. And you just said it: I’m a prince among men. Maybe I’ll audition for Hamlet.” He rolled up the foil that Ma had wrapped his grinder in and chucked it on the floor of his car.
“Yeah, and if they do that Charlie Brown thing, you probably got the part of Pigpen locked up,” I said. You should have seen all the crap rolling around on that car floor. Leo’s cars have always been disgusting like that.
He ignored the comment, though. For someone who more or less dedicated his life to being a goof, Leo could get amazingly serious when he talked about acting. “See, they usually cast juniors and seniors for the major roles, right? But this teacher I had last semester for Shakespearean theater—this guy named Brendan? He said he really likes my work. Says I’ve got great projection and that I’m not afraid to—how did he put it?—‘let people in.’ And he’s the one who’s directing Hamlet. So who knows? I might have a shot at it. Check this out: ‘To die, to sleep—to sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.’”
“Rub this,” I said.
“Hey, you know what your problem is, Birdsey? You’re like a fucking one-man cultural wasteland. You couldn’t tell a Shakespearean tragedy from What’s New, Pussycat?” He belched, wiped his mouth on his arm. “So what’s your mother mad at you for?”
“She found out I’m not rooming with Thomas.”
“Uh-oh. You finally lowered the boom?”
I shook my head. “I was going to tell him,” I said. “This weekend. But the fucking housing office beat me to it.”
“They called him?”
“Sent him a letter. They matched him up with some guy from Waterbury.”
“Hey, look. Your brother’s a big boy. How’d he take it?”
I pictured Thomas on the couch, wearing that foolish cap and shredding TV Guide. I didn’t answer Leo.
“He’s a trip, though, huh? How ’bout that stunt he pulled out at the reservoir yesterday? Dropping trou, showing Dell his dick. That was weird, man.”
“He quit,” I said.
“Thomas? Quit work, you mean? What’d he do that for?”
I told Leo I wanted to talk about something else—that I’d settle for any subject that wasn’t my stupid brother.
“Hey, relax, Birdsey,” Leo said. “It was just a little freaky, what he did. That’s all I’m saying. Him taking Dell that serious. . . . I almost envy him, though. I can’t wait until it’s sayonara to that job. Fuckin’ Public Works Department. But anyway, Birds, I’m telling you. I think we ought to sample a little of Ralph’s reefer tonight, and if it’s any good, we should make ourselves an investment. Earn a little spare change this semester.”
I couldn’t remember Dell’s street number. We drove past the mill, then slowed down when we got to the dingy strip of row houses just past the mill. It was one of those neighborhoods with car engines in front yards and abandoned grocery store carts overturned at the curb. Most of the people hanging around outside their houses were black or Spanish—not exactly the kind of neighborhood you’d figure a racist like Dell would live in. But it was typical, according to my sociology teacher. The biggest bigots were the ones who felt most directly threatened by the “underclass.” The ones who felt the most moved in on. We drove up and down, up and down, collecting dirty looks and trying to scope out Dell’s car. Finally, I got out and began looking in backyards while Leo rolled along in the Skylark.
I found the Valiant Dell was selling sitting in a yard at the end of the street. It was faded red with black-and-white-checked upholstery. The body had cancer; two of the tires were bald. You could wobble the tailpipe with your foot.
“Well, it ain’t going to win any beauty contests,” Leo said, approaching. He squinted in at the dashboard. “What’d you say he told you this thing had for mileage?”
“Around sixty.”
“Try seventy-eight and change. You seen the driver’s side seat? Stuffing’s coming out. Dell’s wife must have done some powerful farting while she was driving around in this thing. Let’s go, Birdsey. You don’t want this piece of junk.”
“I do if it runs okay and he lets me have it for two hundred,” I said. “I could put a seat cover over it. Come on. We’re already here. Let’s go talk to him.”
“Keep pointing out everything that’s wrong with it,” Leo advised me. “Make a list in your head. That’s how you get them down.”
The garbage out by Dell’s back porch was ripe and overflowing; about a zillion flies lifted off it as we passed. The porch steps were rotting away. “This is exactly the sort of dump I expected him t
o live in,” Leo whispered. “Dell Weeks, the guy from Scumville.”
I rapped softly. Squinted through the screen door. A cat was up on the stove, licking the inside of a frying pan. Somewhere inside, a TV was blaring.
I rapped again, louder. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” someone called.
Then Ralph Drinkwater was at the door, shirtless and barefoot, as dumbstruck to see us as we were to see him. For a couple of seconds, the three of us just stood there. “What the hell are you doing here?” Leo finally said.
Ralph looked flustered. He disappeared back inside for a second and then came back again, yanking on a shirt as he pushed past us. “I was just leaving,” he said. He had his shoes in his hand.
“Hey!” I called after him. “Is Dell home?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Ralph said, not bothering to look back. At the front sidewalk, he broke into a run, shirttails flying behind him.
Leo and I stood there, watching him go. I remember thinking, stupidly, that he’d just killed Dell—had come to Dell’s house and murdered the bastard and then, by some quirky twist of fate, had run smack into us. What other reason did he have for being there? Why else would he be running?
“Birdsey, what day is it?” Leo said.
“What? It’s . . . it’s the twenty-second. Why?”
“Because you owe me twenty bucks.”
“What?”
“Our bet. It’s an even-numbered day and Ralphie’s wearing something besides his blue tank top. You owe me twenty bucks.”
I waited for another couple of seconds, trying to figure out what to do. Then Leo turned the screen door handle and walked in. “Hey, Dell?” he called. “You home?”
No answer.
“It’s Leo and Dominick. We came to look at that car.”
From down the hall, I heard Dell cough. “I thought I told you to call first.”
“I would have,” I said. “But we were going fishing and I just thought. . . . We can come back some other time if—”
“I’ll be with youse in a couple minutes. Go out back and give ‘er a look.”
“We just did, asshole,” Leo whispered. We stood there, waiting.
