This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  What kinds of things, she wanted to know. Her voice was low and flat.

  Four rifles, I told her. Also two shotguns. A couple of other items.

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “My father left them to me,” I said. “After he died.” When she didn’t say anything, I added, “My mom needs the money.”

  She grunted. This was the moment when the other pawnbrokers had told me to get lost. “Get your thieving ass out of here,” was what the first one had said.

  I watched her pick things up and set them down again, record players, clarinets, toasters, cameras, whatever came to hand. The shop was long and narrow. Electric guitars hung from the ceiling. Rifles and shotguns were locked in racks against the far wall, beneath a pipe holding up a row of shiny suits with flyaway lapels.

  “I’m about to close up,” she said. Then she added, as if I had begged her, “All right, maybe I can take a look.”

  Chuck opened and closed the trunk while I carried the stuff inside. He looked ready to bolt. His face was sickly white and he rolled his eyes like a spooked horse at the people moving past—derelicts, sailors, Indians in cowboy hats, winos doing their wino shuffle and shouting at enemies they alone could see. I was skittish myself. But it took more than a boy with his arms full of firepower to get the attention of these citizens. No one gave us a second look.

  The pawnbroker ignored me as I went back and forth to the car. I lined everything up on the top of the cabinet and waited.

  “That it?” she said.

  I said that was it.

  She came from around back and locked the door. Then she went behind the counter again. She ran her eyes over the goods. She picked up the double-barreled shotgun, broke it open, held the barrels up to the light and squinted through each of them in turn. Then she snapped the gun shut again, hard, too hard. It was painful to watch. I knew that gun, as I knew the other gun and the rifles. I had used them all and felt respect for them, and something more than respect. I did not like to see them handled as this woman handled them, slapping them around, levering and pumping the actions as if she were trying to break them. But I said nothing. I was unnerved by her big competent hands and her doll’s face that never changed expression, and most of all by her refusal to look at me. The longer she didn’t look at me the more I wanted her to. She made me feel insubstantial, which gave her the edge. And she knew what she was doing. She tore down every gun and rifle without hesitation, checked its barrel, checked its firing mechanism, and put it together again as fast as I could have.

  Once she’d looked at them all she shrugged and said, “I don’t need this truck.”

  “But you said you’d look at them.”

  She turned to the shelf behind her and started lifting things again. “I looked at them.”

  I stared at her back.

  She said, “I might be able to take them as pawn.”

  “Pawn? How much can I pawn them for?”

  She shrugged. “Five apiece.”

  “Five dollars? But that’s not fair!”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Your sign says you buy guns.”

  “I’m not buying any now.”

  “They’re worth a lot more than that,” I said. “A lot more.”

  “Then go get more.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said, but I knew better now. I also knew that if Chuck saw me walk out the door with all these shooters in my hands he would leave without me. “I could sell them for twenty,” I said.

  “I already told you, I’m not buying. If you want to pawn, five’s the limit.” Then she said, “All right. Throw in those other whatnots and you got yourself a deal.”

  “You mean twenty apiece?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Ten. Sixty for everything. Final offer.”

  “The binoculars are worth more than that,” I said. “All by themselves.”

  “Not as pawn they aren’t.”

  I kept staring at her back. She wasn’t moving. She knew I was going to give in, I could feel her knowing it, and that made me determined not to give in. I picked up the shotguns. Then I put them down again. “Okay,” I said.

  She locked the door behind me when I left. The lock shot home with a smack. I dropped the pawn tickets in the gutter, just as she knew I would.

  Amen

  My father took off for Las Vegas with his girlfriend the day after I arrived in California. He left me with the keys to a rented Pontiac and a charge account at the corner grocery. For two weeks I drove back and forth along the beach and ate TV dinners and went to movies with an acquaintance of my father’s who had offered to keep an eye on me. One morning I woke up to find this man embracing me and making declarations of love. I got him out of the apartment and called my father, who told me to “shoot the bastard” if he came back. For this purpose he directed me to a .223 Air Force Survival Rifle he had hidden in the closet. He waited on the telephone while I fetched the rifle from its hiding place, then instructed me in its assembly.

  That night the man leaned against the apartment door and sobbed while I stood in the darkness on the other side, silently hugging the rifle, sweating and shaking as in a fever.

  My father came home a few days before my brother arrived. He took me to meet Geoffrey’s bus and dropped us both off at the apartment while he went out to buy some groceries for dinner. He didn’t return. Several hours later his girlfriend called to say that he had gone crazy and was now in the custody of the police. My brother went down to the police station and confirmed that my father had indeed suffered some kind of breakdown. He committed him to Buena Vista Sanitarium, where, for the rest of the summer, my father played genial host to us on Sundays and became engaged to a series of women with even bigger problems than he had.

  My mother saw which way the wind was blowing and declined to join us.

  Geoffrey supported us all by working at Convair Astronautics. He had no time to write his novel, or even to prepare the classes he would be teaching in Istanbul that fall. While he worked I ran wild. He tried to keep me busy and get me ready for school by having me write essays on assigned reading. “Disease as Metaphor in The Plague. ” “Modes of Blindness in Oedipus Rex. ” “Conscience and Law in Huckleberry Finn.” But he had better luck teaching me to love Django Reinhardt and Joe Venuti, and to sing, while he took tenor, the bass line in the glee-club songs he’d learned at Choate. We still sing them.

  After I went East to school my mother took a job in Washington, D.C. During the Christmas holidays Dwight trailed her there and tried to strangle her in the lobby of our apartment building. Just before she blacked out she kneed him in the balls. He hollered and let her go; then he grabbed her purse and ran. While all this went on I was sitting in our room, reading Hawaii and languidly pretending to believe that the strange noises I heard came from cats. The neighborhood was rough, and I had formed the habit of assigning all such sounds to inhuman origin. When my mother stumbled upstairs and told me what had happened, I tore off blindly down the street and was immediately collared by a plainclothesman who suspected me of another crime. By the time I got home Dwight had been arrested. He was standing outside with my mother and two cops, staring at the ground, the lights of the cruiser flashing across his face.

  “Bastard,” I said, but I said it almost gently, conscious of the falseness of my position. I had known someone was in trouble and had done nothing.

  Dwight raised his head. He seemed confused, as if he didn’t recognize me. He lowered his head again. His curly hair glistened with melting snowflakes. This was my last sight of him. My mother got a cease-and-desist order, and the police put him on a bus for Seattle the next morning.

  I DID NOT do well at Hill. How could I? I knew nothing. My ignorance was so profound that entire class periods would pass without my understanding anything that was said. The masters thought I was lazy, except for my English master, who saw that I loved books but had no way of talking about them beyond what I’d begun to learn from my brother. This m
an befriended me. He tutored me, cast me in some of the plays he directed, and tolerated the presumption his kindness sometimes gave rise to. But most of my teachers were clearly disappointed. It scared me to do so poorly when so much was expected, and to cover my fear I became one of the school wildmen—a drinker, a smoker, a make-out artist at the mixers we had with Baldwin and Shipley and Miss Fine’s. But that’s another story.

  If I worked hard I could just stay afloat; as soon as I relaxed I went under. When I felt myself going under I panicked and did wildman things that got me in trouble. My demerit count was almost always the highest in the class. While the boys around me nodded off during Chapel I prayed like a Moslem, prayed that I would somehow pull myself up again so I could stay in this place that I secretly and deeply loved.

  The school was patient, but not inexhaustibly patient. In my last year I broke the bank and was asked to leave. My mother met my train and took me to a piano bar full of men in Nehru jackets where she let me drink myself under the table. She wanted me to know that she wasn’t mad about anything, that I’d lasted longer than she ever thought I would. She was in a mood to celebrate, having just landed a good job in the church across the street from the White House. “I’ve got a better view than Kennedy,” she told me.

  My best friend got kicked out of school a few weeks after me, and the two of us proceeded to rage. I wore myself out with raging. Then I went into the army. I did so with a sense of relief and homecoming. It was good to find myself back in the clear life of uniforms and ranks and weapons. It seemed to me when I got there that this was where I had been going all along, and where I might still redeem myself. All I needed was a war.

  Careful what you pray for.

  WHEN WE ARE green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.

  That assurance bums very bright at certain moments. It was burning bright for me when Chuck and I left Seattle and started the long drive home. I had just dumped a load of stolen goods. My wallet was thick with bills which I would lose at cards in one night, but which I then believed would keep me going for months. In a couple of weeks I was leaving for California to be with my father and my brother. Soon after I got there, my mother would join us. We would all be together again, as we were meant to be.

  And when the summer was over I would go East to a noble school where I would earn good marks, captain the swimming team, and be welcomed into the great world that was my desire and my right. In this world nothing was impossible that I could imagine for myself. In this world the only task was to pick and choose.

  Chuck felt good too. His trunk had no guns in it. He had escaped Tina Flood, he had escaped prison, and before long he would escape me. We weren’t friends any more, but we both had cause to rejoice and this helped us imagine we were friends. We sang along with the radio and shared a bottle of Canadian Club that Chuck had brought along. The deejay was playing songs from two and three years before, songs that already made us nostalgic. The farther we got from Seattle the louder we sang. We were rubes, after all, and for a rube the whole point of a trip to the city is the moment of leaving it, the moment it closes behind his back like a trap sprung too late.

  The night was hazy. There was no moon. Farmhouse windows burned with a soft buttery light, as if they were under water. We went from farmland to forest and then picked up the river and followed the river into the mountains. I looked at the country we passed through with a lordly eye, allowing myself small stirrings of fondness for what I thought had failed to hold me. I did not know that the word home would forever after be filled with this place.

  The air grew clearer as we climbed, and colder. The curves followed fast on one another as the road took the snaky shape of the river. We could see the moon now, a thin silver moon swinging between the black treetops overhead. Chuck kept losing the radio station. Finally he turned off the radio, and we sang Buddy Holly songs for a while. When we got tired of those, we sang hymns. First we sang “I Walk to the Garden Alone” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” and a few other quiet ones, just to find our range and get in the spirit. Then we sang the roofraisers. We sang them with respect and we sang them hard, swaying from side to side and dipping our shoulders in counterpoint. Between hymns we drank from the bottle. Our voices were strong. It was a good night to sing and we sang for all we were worth, as if we’d been saved.