This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face.

  Arthur and I had fallen into a sharp way of talking to each other. It was supposed to be banter, but it turned easily cruel and sometimes led to shoving matches, grunting, scuffling affairs during which we smiled fixedly to show how little of our strength we were using. We started doing this after school one day while we were at the bus stop. It would have played itself out as usual except that some other boys took an interest and began shouting encouragement. This in turn attracted the attention of Mr. Mitchell, who ran across the street yelling, “Break it up! Break it up!” He came between us and held us apart as if we were slavering to get at each other.

  “Okay,” he said, “what’s the problem here?”

  Neither of us answered. I knew exactly what was going to happen, and that nothing I could say would change it.

  “You don’t fight on school property,” Mr. Mitchell told us. “If you’ve got a grudge, I’ve got the place to work it out.” He took out his notebook, wrote down our names, and congratulated us on volunteering for the smoker.

  MR. MITCHELL HAD started the smokers some years back to showcase the boxing talent of a few boys, and his own talent as their coach, but since then they had become big business. The tickets cost three dollars and sold out in a matter of days. This didn’t happen because the quality of the fights got better, but because they got worse. Nobody wanted to see artful flyweights dance up and down, moving their shoulders prettily while darting in for another scientific love tap. They wanted to see slope-shouldered bruisers stand toe to toe and pound each other into goulash. They wanted to see blood. They wanted to see pain.

  Mr. Mitchell gave it to them. The smokers turned into brawls. He matched up the hardest cases he could find, and he did not trouble himself overmuch with questions of height and weight. A mismatch could be just as much fun as an even match. More fun. You couldn’t help but be interested in watching some jiggling fatty like Bull Slatter—Full Bladder, as he was known—defend his farflung borders against the malice of a brutal pygmy like Huff. Style wasn’t the issue here. The folks wanted action, and the best action of the night happened in the grudge fights.

  The grudge fights came last. Mr. Mitchell announced them as such to raise the temperature in the gym, and to remind the fighters that they were honor-bound to try and kill each other. Most of these boys weren’t real enemies. Maybe they’d ragged each other too hard, like Arthur and me, or tried to muscle in front of each other in the cafeteria, or just happened to feel ornery on the same day. The only thing they had in common was the bad luck of getting caught by Mr. Mitchell.

  Mr. Mitchell kept his eyes peeled for grudge fighters, and when he found a couple of likely candidates he signed them up on the spot. It made no difference how slight their disagreement was, or how long a time remained until the next smoker. Arthur and I were lucky; we had to wait only three weeks. There were boys in the lists who’d been waiting since September, and who would’ve had trouble remembering just what their grudge was supposed to be. But none of them ever refused to fight—it wasn’t conceivable. They kept their enmity alive for as long as they had to, and when the time came they fought as they were expected to fight, viciously, hatefully, as if to erase one another from the earth.

  Arthur and I steered clear of each other when we could, gave each other evil looks when we couldn’t. It would have been indecorous and unwise for a pair of grudge fighters to let themselves get friendly. We needed to keep our hostility intact for the smoker. I had no trouble doing this. Now that the situation called for ill will, I found I had large stores of it to draw on.

  We had been close. Whatever it is that makes closeness possible between people also puts them in the way of hard feelings if that closeness ends. Arthur and I were moving apart, and had been ever since we started high school. Arthur was trying to be a citizen. He stayed out of trouble and earned high grades. He played bass guitar with the Deltones, a pretty good band for which I had once tried out as drummer and been haughtily dismissed. The guys he ran around with at Concrete were all straight-arrows and strivers, what few of them there were in our class. He even had a girlfriend. And yet, knowing him as I did, I saw all this respectability as a performance, and a strained performance at that. Whatever their virtues, his new friends were dull. To fit in with them he had to hold his tongue and refrain from eccentric behavior. He had to act dull himself, which he wasn’t and could only seem to be by an effort of will that was plain to me if to no one else.

  The weakest part of his act was the girlfriend, Beth Mathis. Though Beth wasn’t pretty she wasn’t exactly a gorgon either, as you would have thought from the way Arthur treated her. He gripped Beth’s hand as they walked from class to class, but he never talked to her or even looked at her. Instead he stared testily into the faces he passed as if looking for signs of skepticism or amusement. No one seemed to notice, but I did. It troubled me. It seemed so strange that I kept my mouth shut.

  But I knew he was no citizen and he knew I was no outlaw—that I was not hard, or uncaring of the future, or contemptuous of opinion. I could see him knowing it as he watched me with my outlaw friends. This disbelief of his was vexing to me, as my own ill-concealed disbelief in his respectability must have been vexing to him. I could accept the distance growing between us. I wanted it there, most of the time. But I could not accept that he knew I was not the person I tried so hard to seem. For owning such knowledge there could be no pardon, for either of us, until we both pardoned ourselves for being who we were.

  I did not have to draw only on my own poisons for inspiration. I had sympathizers and counselors. Some of these boys disliked Arthur, but most of them just wanted to be in on a fight without getting hit. They subjected me to endless pep talks and tutorials and demonstrations of unbeatable combinations they had devised and were willing to let me use. Dwight was in his glory. He cleared the utility room for action and put me back in training. There was no question of dry-gulching Arthur this time around. I needed a strategy. How did Arthur swing, Dwight wanted to know.

  “Hard,” I told him.

  . “Yeah, but how?”

  Arthur and I hadn’t had a real fight since that day on the road four years earlier, but we’d gone a few rounds in PE and I’d seen him spar with other boys. “Sort of like this,” I said, moving my arms as Arthur did.

  “So he windmills,” Dwight said.

  “He does it a lot faster than that,” I said. “A lot harder, too.”

  “It doesn’t matter how hard he does it. If he windmills, he’s yours. He’s in the bag.” Dwight said that all I had to do was sidestep when Arthur came at me, then uppercut him to the jaw. It was that simple: sidestep, uppercut.

  Using the peculiar patience, almost tenderness, that he reserved for instruction in combat, Dwight rehearsed this move with me several times before the smoker. I learned it but I didn’t believe in it, any more than I believed in the moves I’d been shown by my other counselors. I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell against Arthur unless I threw strategy aside and went absolutely berserk, as he was sure to do.

  EACH FIGHT CONSISTED of three one-minute rounds. All the fighters waited together in the locker room until Mr. Mitchell called them out. The locker room was dimly lit. We didn’t talk. Except for the real heavies we looked almost frail in our big gloves and oversized, billowing shorts. A few boys lay back on the benches, their forearms over their eyes. The rest of us sat hunched with our gloves on our knees and stared at the floor, listening to the noise in the gym. The roar was steady, almost mechanically so, except when it fell off during the breaks between rounds and when it rose during what must have been particularly violent passages in the fight then under way. At these times the roar became almost palpable. We raised our heads, then
lowered them again as the sound ebbed. Every five minutes or so the door would swing open and two more boys would go out, passing on their way the sweating, gasping wrecks whose fight had just ended.

  Arthur and I had a long wait. We sat at opposite ends of the locker room and didn’t look at each other. Boys came and went. I had questions about what I was doing here, and what was to come. I entered a trance of perplexity and apprehension. Then I heard my name, and jumped to my feet, and ran outside into the gym with Arthur behind me. The lights dazzled my eyes. I saw the people in the stands only as a mass of color. They roared when we ran out, and the sound was even louder than I’d thought it would be, a thrilling pagan din that washed the fear clean out of me. We went to our corners and Mr. Mitchell introduced us as two boys with bad blood between us, which, by now, we were. I raised my gloves at the sound of my name and the stands roared again. That was when I realized that I was invincible. I was going to give him a beating, the beating of his life, and I couldn’t wait to start.

  The bell rang and we went at it.

  MY MOTHER WOULD hardly talk to me on the drive home that night, she was so appalled. She refused to understand that I’d really had to fight, that there was no choice. The entire spectacle had disgusted her, and most of all my own losing part in it. She said she’d been so mortified she had to put her face in her hands. I resented this. I thought I had run a pretty close second, and so did Dwight, who praised the use I had made of his coaching.

  The truth was, I hadn’t made nearly enough use of it. During the first round I followed my intention and fought like a crazy man. Arthur was all over me, his craziness proving more radical than my own. Twice his windmilling gloves came straight down on my head and knocked me to my knees. He knocked me to my knees again during the second round. After I got up he rushed me, and without calculation I sidestepped and threw him an uppercut. It stopped him cold. He just stood there, shaking his head. I hit him again and the bell rang.

  I caught him with that uppercut twice more during the final round, but neither of them rocked him like that first one. That first one was a beaut. I launched it from my toes and put everything I had into it, and it shivered his timbers. I could feel it travel through him in one pure line. I could feel it hurt him. And when it landed, and my old friend’s head snapped back so terribly, I felt a surge of pride and connection; connection not to him but to Dwight. I was distinctly aware of Dwight in that bellowing mass all around me. I could feel his exultation at the blow I’d struck, feel his own pride in it, see him smiling down at me with recognition, and pleasure, and something like love.

  I had done well on the tests I’d taken in Seattle. But not long after my scores came in I got a rejection letter from Andover. Then St. Paul’s turned me down. Then Exeter. The letters were polite, professed regret for the news they bore, and wished me well. I never heard back from Choate at all.

  The rejections disappointed me, but I hadn’t really counted on these schools anyway. I was counting on Deerfield. When I got their letter I went off by myself. I sat by the river and read it. I read it many times, first because I was too numb to take it all in, then to find some word or tone that would cancel out everything else the letter said, or at least give me hope for an appeal. But they knew what they were doing, the people who wrote these letters. They knew how to close the door so that no seam showed, no light glimmered at the edges. I understood that the game was over.

  A week or so later the school secretary summoned me out of class to take a telephone call in the office. She said it sounded long distance. I thought it might be my brother, or even my father, but the caller turned out to be a Hill School alumnus who lived in Seattle. His name was Mr. Howard. He told me the school was “interested” in my application, and had asked him to meet with me and have a talk. Just an informal chat, he said. He said he’d always wanted to see our part of the state, and this would give him a good excuse. We arranged to meet outside Concrete High after classes let out the next day. Mr. Howard said he’d be driving a blue Thunderbird. He didn’t say anything about wanting to meet my teachers, thank God.

  “Whatever you do, just don’t try to impress him,” my mother said when I told her about the call. “Just be yourself.”

  WHEN MR. HOWARD asked me where we might go to talk, I suggested the Concrete drugstore. I knew there would be kids from school there. I wanted them to see me pull up in the Thunderbird and get out with this man, who was just old enough to be my father, and different from other men you might see in the Concrete drugstore. Without affecting boyishness, Mr. Howard still had the boy in him. He bounced a little as he walked. His narrow face was lively, foxlike. He looked around with a certain expectancy, as if he were ready to be interested in what he saw, and when he was interested he allowed himself to show it. He wore a suit and tie. The men who taught at the high school also wore suits and ties, but less easily. They were always pulling at their cuffs and running their fingers between their collars and their necks. To watch them was to suffocate. Mr. Howard wore his suit and tie as if he didn’t know he had them on.

  We sat at a booth in the back. Mr. Howard bought us milkshakes, and while we drank them he asked me about Concrete High. I told him I enjoyed my classes, especially the more demanding ones, but that I was feeling a little restless lately. It was hard to explain.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “It’s easy to explain. You’re bored.”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t going to speak badly of the teachers who had written so well of me.

  “You wouldn’t be bored at Hill,” Mr. Howard said. “I can promise you that. But you might find it difficult in other ways.” He told me about his own time there in the years just before World War II. He had grown up in Seattle, where he’d done well in school. He expected that he would fall easily into life at Hill, but he hadn’t. The academic work was much harder. He missed his family and hated the snowy Pennsylvania winters. And the boys at Hill were different from his friends back home, more reserved, more concerned with money and social position. He had found the school a cold place. Then, in his last year, something changed. The members of his class grew close in ways that he had never thought possible, until they were more like brothers than friends. It came, he said, from the simple fact of sharing the same life for a period of years. It made them a family. That was how he thought of the school now—as his second family.

  But he’d had a rough time getting to that point, and some of the boys never got to it at all. They lived unhappily at the edge of things. These same boys might have done well if they’d stayed at home. A prep school was a world unto itself, and not the right world for everyone.

  If any of this was supposed to put me off, it didn’t. Of course the boys were concerned with money and social position. Of course a prep school wasn’t for everyone—otherwise, what would be the point?

  But I put on a thoughtful expression and said that I was aware of these problems. My father and my brother had given me similar warnings, I explained, and I was willing to endure whatever was necessary to get a good education.

  Mr. Howard seemed amused by this answer, and asked me on what experience my father and brother had based their warnings. I told him that they had both gone to prep schools.

  “Is that right? Where?”

  “Deerfield and Choate.”

  “I see.” He looked at me with a different quality of interest than before, as I had hoped he would. Though Mr. Howard was not a snob, I could see he was worried that I might not fit in at his school.

  “My brother’s at Princeton now,” I added.

  He asked me about my father. When I told him that my father was an aeronautical engineer, Mr. Howard perked up. It turned out he had been a pilot during the war, and was familiar with a plane my father had helped design—the P-51 Mustang. He hadn’t flown it himself but he knew men who had. This led him to memories of his time in uniform, the pilots he had served with and the nutty things they used to do. “We were just a bunch of kids,” he said. He spoke to me a
s if I were not a kid myself but someone who could understand him, someone of his world, family even. His hands were folded on the tabletop, his head bent slightly. I leaned forward to hear him better. We were really getting along. And then Huff showed up.

  Huff had a peculiar voice, high and nasal. I had my back to the door but I heard him come in and settle into the booth behind ours with another boy, whose voice I did not recognize. The two of them were discussing a fight they’d seen the previous weekend. A guy from Concrete had broken a guy from Sedro Woolley’s nose.

  Mr. Howard stopped talking. He leaned back, blinking a little as if he had dozed off. He did not speak, nor did I. I didn’t want Huff to know I was there. Huff had certain rituals of greeting that I was anxious to avoid, and if he sensed he was embarrassing me he would never let me get away. He would sink my ship but good. So I kept my head down and my mouth shut while Huff and the other boy talked about the fight, and about the girl the two boys had been fighting over. They talked about another girl. Then they talked about eating pussy. Huff took the floor on this subject, and showed no sign of giving it up. He went on at length. I heard boys hold forth like this all the time, and I did it myself, but now I thought I’d better show some horror. I frowned and shook my head, and stared down at the tabletop.

  “Shall we go?” Mr. Howard asked.

  I did not want to break cover but I had no choice. I got up and walked past Huff’s booth, Mr. Howard behind me. Though I kept my face averted I was sure that Huff would see me, and as I moved toward the door I was waiting to hear him shout, “Hey! Dicklick!” The shout never came.

  Mr. Howard drove around Concrete for a while before taking me back to school. He was curious about the cement plant, and disappointed that I could tell him nothing about what went on inside it. He was quiet for a time. Then he said, “You should know that a boys’ school can be a pretty rough-and-tumble place.”