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

by Lamb, Wally

  He was pretty antisocial at first. He seemed always to be watching Thomas and me. About fifty times a day, I’d look up and catch Ralph looking away from one of us. It wasn’t anything new: people had always stared at Thomas and me. Oh, look, Muriel! Twins! But Ralph had been a twin, too. What was he looking at?

  Riding out to a job, Thomas, Leo, and I would usually hop into the back of the truck and Ralph would ride up front with Dell. He’d talk to Dell sometimes, but he hardly ever said a word to us, even when one of us asked him something directly. Ralph’s older cousin Lonnie had been killed in Nam earlier that year—had been buried in the Indian graveyard. When we were mowing out there, Ralph would steer clear of Lonnie’s headstone. It was me who’d usually trim around it; we’d divide the cemetery into quadrants, and that was always my section. I’d be clipping and yanking weeds and start thinking about Lonnie—the time he got in trouble for spitting on kids at the playground, that time at the movies, in the downstairs bathroom, when he’d grabbed me by the wrist and humiliated me for his and Ralph’s entertainment. Why you hitting yourself, kid? Huh? Why you hitting yourself? . . . It was good-sized—Lonnie’s gravestone. Granite, rough-hewn on one side, polished on the other. Placed there by the VFW, it said, in honor of Lonnie’s having been one of the first Three Rivers kids to fall in Vietnam. Some honor: giving up your life for our national mistake. For nothing. When Thomas and I were little kids, the big villains of the world were other kids. Bad kids. Troublemakers like Lonnie Peck. Now Nixon was the enemy. Nixon and those other neckless old farts who kept escalating the war over there—kept sending kids over to the jungle to get their heads blown off.

  Ralph’s sister’s grave was out there, too. Penny Ann’s. It was close by Lonnie’s but not right next to it, twenty-five or thirty feet away. Hers was just a small sandstone foot marker with her initials, P.A.D. I’d missed it the first couple of times we were out there. Then, bam! It hit me whose stone it was. I kept trying to say something to Ralph about the graves. About Lonnie’s at least. The death of a soldier was easier to talk about than the rape and murder of a little girl. But I didn’t say anything about either one. Ralph gave me no openings. Didn’t let down his guard for a second. One time during the first week, the two of us—Ralph and me—were loading tools back into the truck bed. I reminded him that we’d both been at River Street Elementary School together and then together again in Asshole LoPresto’s history class at JFK. Drinkwater just looked at me, expressionless. “Remember?” I finally said. He stood there, staring at me like I was from Mars or something.

  “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “What about it?”

  “Nothing,” I sputtered. “Sorry I mentioned it. Excuse me for breathing, okay?”

  When the morning was cool and the job wasn’t too strenuous—or if Lou Clukey was in the vicinity—Dell would become a working foreman—would labor alongside us. Otherwise, he’d sit in the truck, leaning against the open driver’s side door, smoking his Old Golds and finding fault. Sometimes he’d get up off his ass and go over to my brother. Snatch Thomas’s push broom or bow saw away from him and give him a little demonstration on how he should be doing it. Or else he’d tell Drinkwater to stop work and go show Thomas the right way to do something. It was degrading for both Thomas and Ralph—enough so that you’d have to look away. But Dell liked the flustered reaction Thomas never failed to give him and the look of contempt he’d get from Ralph. He enjoyed busting their balls, Thomas’s especially. Dell started this joke about how he couldn’t tell my brother and me apart unless we each had a shovel in our hands. Then he knew who was who, no problem. He nicknamed us the Dicky Bird brothers, Dick and Dickless.

  Of the four of us, Dell came to favor Leo and me. We were the ones he always picked to stop work and drive over to Central Soda Shop for coffees, or fill up the water jugs at the town spring, or run and get him some cigs. Leo and I were the ones that Dell started addressing his stupid jokes to.

  “Nigger’s walking down the street leading a bull on a rope, and the bull’s got this hard-on that’s yea-big. Woman comes up to him and says, ‘Hey, how much would it cost me to slip that foot-and-a-half of meat up my cunt?’ So the nigger says, ‘Well, I’ll fuck you for free, lady, but I’ll have to get someone to watch my bull here.’”

  When Dell told his jokes, I’d usually give him a fake smile or a nervous laugh. Sometimes I’d sneak a glance over at Drinkwater. Ralph might have been a full-blooded Wequonnoc Indian like he’d claimed that day in Mr. LoPresto’s class, but he was pretty dark-skinned. I’d never seen an Indian with an Afro. All summer long, Ralph’s transistor radio kept singing about the dawning of the age of Aquarius and everybody smiling on their brother and loving one another, but Dell’s jokes had a way of curdling those songs.

  Drinkwater was always deadpan when Dell got to the punch lines of those racist jokes. He never cracked a smile, but he never gave him an argument, either—never challenged him the way he had that day in class with Mr. LoPresto. I hated those jokes of Dell’s, really hated them, but I was too gutless to object. Not that I admitted it to myself. With thirty college credits under my belt, I was able to intellectualize my silence: eventually, people our age would be in charge and all the bigots of the world would die off. And anyway, if Drinkwater didn’t say anything—he had to be at least partly black—then why should I? So I kept selling myself for the privilege of making those big-deal errands to the spring and the coffee shop. I smiled and kept my mouth shut and maintained my “favored worker status.” Leo did the same.

  That summer, Leo and I rekindled the friendship we had started a couple years before in summer school math class. The few times I’ve ever bothered to think about it—to analyze what it was that made us friends in the first place, way before we were brothers-in-law married to the Constantine sisters—the only thing I ever came up with was the fact that we’re opposites. Always have been. At high school dances, I was your basic fade-into-the-woodwork type. The kind of guy who’d stand there all night watching the band because he was too scared to ask any girl to dance. Not Leo, though. Leo was a performer. That was back when his nickname was “Cool Jerk.” Sooner or later, someone would request that song, “Cool Jerk,” and Leo’d get out there in the middle of the gym floor and dance this spastic solo. Kids used to circle him four or five deep, clapping and hooting and laughing their heads off at him, and Leo’s fat would flop in all directions, the sweat would fly off his face. I admired his nerve, I guess, in some screwy way. One time, in the middle of a schoolwide assembly—one of those slide-show yawners about people from other lands—Leo raised his hand as a volunteer and got up on stage, yanked on a grass skirt, and took a hula lesson from these visiting Hawaiians. “Cool Jerk! Cool Jerk!” everyone started chanting over the ukulele music, until Leo’s hip-rolling began to look like something other than the hula, and the crowd went wild, and even the Hawaiians stopped smiling. Neck Veins, the vice principal, walked onstage, stopped the show, and told the rest of us to go back to our third-period classes. Instead of taking off his grass skirt and exiting gracefully, Leo started giving a speech about how JFK High was a dictatorship like Cuba and we should all go on strike. He was suspended for two weeks and barred from extracurricular activities.

  “How can you hang around with the biggest a-hole in our entire school?” Thomas kept asking me that whole summer when Leo and I had been in remedial algebra together. Leo was an asshole; I knew that. But, like I said, he was also everything my brother and I were not: uninhibited, carefree, and funny as hell. Leo’s colossal nerve had gotten the two of us access to all kinds of forbidden pleasures that my goody two-shoes brother would have objected to and my stepfather would have beaten me for: the X-rated Eros Drive-In out on Route 165, the racetrack at Narragansett, a liquor store on Pachaug Pond Road that gave minors the benefit of the doubt. The first time I ever got shit-faced drunk was out at the Falls in Leo’s mother’s Biscayne, smoking Muriel air tips and passing a jug of Bali Hai back and forth. I was fifteen.
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  Now, four years later—during our work-crew summer—Thomas was just as resentful of Leo’s and my rekindled friendship as he’d been the first time around. “Just what I need: another dose of Leo Blood,” Thomas would say if I told Thomas that Leo was coming over after supper to hang out or to pick me up. Ma liked Leo because he was a good eater. Ray said he’d learned in the Navy not to trust the Leos of the world any further than you could throw them. “Watch your rear flank with that one,” Ray told me. “He’s too full of himself. Guys like that will sell you right down the river.”

  The fact that my stepfather worked third shift meant that he was home all day and had first dibs on the mail. I had two magazine subscriptions coming to the house back then, Newsweek and the Sporting News. It always bugged me that Ray got his hands all over them before I did—bent back the pages, wrinkled up the covers, left them all over the place so’s I’d have to go looking for the things. At our house, mail was Ray’s property no matter whose name was on the envelope, and if you complained about it, it was you who was committing the federal offense.

  One day in July, Thomas and I got home from work and found Ray sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a bottle of Moxie and waiting for us. “Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t the two geniuses. Have a seat, fellas. I want to have a little chat with you guys.”

  Ma was waiting, too, looking ashen, twisting a dish towel in her hands. She had made sweet cucumber pickles that day, a favorite of Thomas’s and mine. A row of canning jars was lined up on the counter. The kitchen smelled sweet and vinegary.

  We sat. Ray turned to Thomas. “Suppose you explain this!” he said.

  In his hand, he was crinkling Thomas’s tissue-paper grade report from UConn—all those D’s, F’s, and Incompletes my brother had said nothing about. Ray waved it back and forth like evidence. “What’s the story here, Einstein? You been taking a joy ride up there? First you flimflam me out of my hard-earned money and then you can’t even bother to study?”

  “Come on now, Ray,” Ma said. “You said you’d give him a chance to explain.”

  “That’s right, Suzie Q. And that’s exactly what I want to hear. His explanation. And it better be a good one.”

  Thomas sat there, hands in his lap, eyes averted and brimming with tears. Like I said, Thomas never could defend himself. So Ray continued to bully him.

  He himself had never been to college, Ray said, so maybe he was just stupid. But for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why he should keep throwing away his hard-earned money so that this clown sitting here across from him could make a joke out of his college education. What, exactly, was he paying for? Could either of us two Einstein college boys or our mother tell him that?

  Thomas’s whole body shook. He could explain what had happened, he said, but could he please just get a drink of water first?

  No, he could not just get a drink of water first, Ray told him. He could tell them what the hell he’d been doing all year long instead of studying. Ray took a long sip of his Moxie and slammed the bottle back down on the table in a way that made me jump. Made all thirty of those college credits evaporate.

  Thomas cleared his throat. “Well . . . ,” he began. His voice was loud one second, nearly inaudible the next; he explained in a rambling way that he had had a tough time adjusting to college. A hard time sleeping. “I was always so tired. And so nervous. I just couldn’t concentrate. . . . I kept trying and trying, but it was always so noisy there.”

  “It was noisy?” Ray said. “That’s your excuse? That it was noisy?”

  “Not just that. I felt. . . . It was a lot of things. I guess . . . I guess I was homesick.”

  Ma took a step toward him, then stopped. Caught herself.

  “Oh, gee whiz,” Ray mocked. “Mama’s poor little bunny rabbit was homesick.” Each time Thomas opened his mouth, he handed our stepfather more ammunition.

  “I’m really sorry, Ray. I know I let you down. You, too, Ma. All I can say is that it’s not going to happen again.”

  Ray leaned toward him. Got right in his face. “You’re goddamned right it isn’t, buddy boy. Not with my money.” He turned to Ma, jabbing a finger at her. “And not with yours, either, Suzie Q, just in case you’re getting any cockamamy ideas about getting another job. Maybe you don’t know a con game when you see it, but I sure as hell do. This guy’s going to stay home in September and work for a living.”

  Thomas was silent for several long seconds. Then he told Ray that if he had another chance, he could get things under control.

  “Oh, you could, eh? How?”

  Thomas looked over at me. “Dominick goes to the library to study,” he said. “Maybe I could try that. Go study at the library with Dominick. And if some of the teachers could just give me a little extra help . . .”

  I could tell by Thomas’s thickening voice, by the way his words kept catching in his throat, that he was about to surrender to full-out sobbing—the kind of snorting, sore-throat wailing that Ray had been able to draw from him ever since we were kids. I wanted to save my brother from that. Didn’t want him to hand Ray that satisfaction. So I put my own neck on the chopping block.

  “My GPA is 3.2, Ray,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong with that?”

  He looked over at me. Took the bait. “Well, why don’t you tell me what a goddamned GPA is then, Mr. Smart Ass?” Ray said, turning to me. “After all, I only went as far as my third year of high school. I only fought in two wars, that’s all. I’m not a walking encyclopedia like you and Smarty Pants over there. I’m just the working stiff that puts food on the table.”

  I stared him down. “It’s a grade point average,” I said. “Four points for an A, three for a B, two for a C. I made the dean’s list, Ray.”

  “I made the dean’s list, Ray,” he mimicked back. “So who does that make you? King Farouk? Does that mean my shit stinks and yours doesn’t?”

  “No. All it means is that I made the dean’s list.”

  “Gee, that’s great, honey,” Ma said wearily. “Congratulations.”

  Ray told her to shut her trap and stay out of it. He put down Thomas’s grade report and picked up mine, then proceeded to discredit my accomplishments one by one. B-plus in psychology? Big deal! That stuff was a bunch of happy horseshit as far as he was concerned. A-minus in probability? He didn’t even know what that was, for Christ’s sweet sake. He laughed with particular disdain at the A I had earned in art appreciation. “Kids your age are over there dying for their country, and you’re sittin’ in some nice little classroom, ‘appreciatin’ paintin’s on a wall? And I’m paying for it? I never heard of anything so goddamned pathetic.”

  “So what is it you want, Ray?” I said. “You want the two of us to go over there and get our heads blown off by the Viet Cong? Is that what would make you happy?”

  “Don’t say that, honey,” Ma said.

  Ray leaned forward and took hold of me by the front of my T-shirt. Pulled me up to a standing position. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that, buddy boy,” he said. “Understand? I don’t care how many A’s you got on your lousy—”

  “Let go of me, Ray,” I said.

  “You hear me? Huh?”

  My T-shirt twisted a little in his grip. Cut into the back of my neck. “I said, let go of my fuckin’ shirt.”

  “All right, you two,” Ma said. “Come on now. This isn’t necessary. Calm down.”

  “Calm down?” Ray said. He let go, shoving me backward so that I lost my balance, fell against one of the kitchen chairs. “You want me to calm down, Connie? Okay, I’ll calm down. Let me show you how calm I can get.”

  Ray took Ma by the arm and walked her over to the counter where her pickles were. He grabbed one of the jars and flung it like a grenade against the refrigerator door. Grabbed another. It smashed on the floor in front of Thomas. A third smashed against a leg of the kitchen table. By the time he’d finished, the floor was littered with broken glass and pickles and rivers of ju
ice—the ruins of my mother’s day.

  I wanted to kill the bastard. Imagined picking up one of those jagged pieces of glass and going after him with it. Sinking it into his heart. But I just stood there, terrified.

  “How’s that for calm, honey bunch?” Ray asked Ma. He was red-faced, short of breath. “How do you like them apples? Huh?”

  Ma went for the broom and the mop, but Ray told her to stay put and to shut her big trap for once in her life. He had something to say to all three of us and all he wanted us to do was shut up and listen.

  Thomas and I were both a couple of pantywaists, he said, and as far as he was concerned, it was all Ma’s fault. We were Suzy and Betty Pinkus, the little college mama’s boys, hiding behind her apron strings instead of doing what was right. Neither of us gave a good goddamn about our country—about anything except ourselves. Did we think he had wanted to go over there and fight the Krauts? Did we think he wanted to put his life on the line a few years later in Korea? Men did what they had to do, not what they wanted to do. Our mother had spoiled us rotten—had treated us like a couple of crown princes. The two of us were nothing but take, take, take. We’d been like that our whole fucking lives and he was sick of it. We could go plumb to hell if we thought he was going to keep shelling out. He was finished with that bullshit.

  It was futile to defend yourself when Ray went full-tilt into one of his rages. Whatever shots you got in weren’t worth what he’d come back at you with—weren’t worth the toll it took on Ma. The best thing you could do was cut your losses. Relax your face of any emotion. Play defense.