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

  But anyway, this was how I found out about that friendship that was brewing between Belinda Jean and Joe Jones. When I bought my ticket that day—West Side Story was what was playing—Peggy Konicki’s mother told me that Belinda Jean had already gone in and was probably waiting for me in the lobby. “Oh, thanks,” I said, pretending like what she assumed to be true was true: that my daughter and me had made a plan to meet at the show. There was no one in line behind me, and that Mrs. Konicki has got a gift for gab. She was telling me all this stuff like how West Side Story was a Broadway show before it was a movie, and that Natalie Wood didn’t do her own singing for the picture—that she just mouthed the words to someone else’s voice. I was getting a little impatient with her, but when you’re a spy, you have to act nonchalant so no one gets suspicious.

  Mrs. Konicki said, “Natalie Wood is Peggy’s favorite actress. That girl will go to see whatever picture Natalie Wood is in.”

  “Oh, Belinda Jean, too,” I said. “They’re two peas in a pod.” Which was an out-and-out fib. Belinda likes Debbie Reynolds the best—all those Tammy movies. But while I was chatting with Mrs. Konicki, I was worrying that Belinda Jean might see me before I could get up to the balcony because, like I said, she didn’t know about this job of mine. And also I was wondering why Belinda was at the movies instead of at the library where she said she was going. She’d started her part-time job there that summer, but it wasn’t one of her regular days. One of the other girls had called in sick, she said, and they’d asked her to fill in. “Well,” I told Peggy’s mother. “I guess if Belinda’s already in there, I better not keep her waiting.”

  Up in the balcony, after my eyes adjusted to the dark, I made out Belinda Jean from her silhouette. She was sitting by her lonesome in one of the middle rows. The movie had already been going for about five minutes when I see some boy come in and sit in the row behind Belinda and one seat over, even though there were plenty of empty seats all over the place. Well, more a man than a boy, it looked like to me. He was more solid than skinny like a high school boy, tall and wide-shouldered. I just hoped he wasn’t some masher. But I figured that wasn’t the case when he leaned forward with his elbows resting on the seat in front of him, the one next to Belinda Jean’s, and him and her started shooting the breeze. Kept it up, too. They were doing more giggling and talking to each other than watching the movie, and of course, neither of them realized that I was watching them. I didn’t know yet that it was Jones that was sitting right behind her. That come later, after I had to sneak down and use the ladies’ room and I saw him out at the snack bar buying popcorn and two sodas. I was a little bit tipsy from the Old Grand-Dad by then, and when I realized who it was, I missed a step and had to catch myself. The refreshments lady looked up at me, but thank God Joe Jones didn’t turn around. Not that he would have even recognized me, probably, but I didn’t want to chance it. Whether you’re spying for a movie company or spying on your own daughter, the last thing you want to do is get noticed.

  When I got back to my seat, all I could think about was what would happen if Claude found out that Belinda Jean was sitting in a public theater and acting so chummy with a colored man. It give me the shakes, I got so worked up. Well, that afternoon I finished the Old Grand-Dad before I slid the bottle under my seat; usually, I put the cap back on and leave some for home. But it didn’t matter how much I drank. I still couldn’t concentrate on the movie. I knew it was about two groups of dancing hoodlums, but that was about all. And later, after the credits come on and everyone started walking out, I realized I’d been so distracted that I’d forgotten to count the number of people in the audience. So in addition to all my fretting, I was going to be out my spot-checking money. I could have just made up a number, I suppose, but I’d never do such a thing. I’m as honest as the day is long and I’d like to think my good character’s worth more than nine dollars.

  That night, before Claude come home, I told Belinda Jean that I’d gone shopping downtown and had stopped in at the library to say hello but hadn’t seen her. “They had me downstairs, shelving books in the stacks,” she said.

  “Oh, then I guess it wasn’t you I saw coming out of the Loew’s Poli after all,” I said. “But boy, it sure looked like you. Same blue checked skirt and white blouse with puffy sleeves. You two could have been twins.”

  Oh yeah, she said. That was her. She forgot. The girl she was supposed to cover for came in anyway, so they let her go early. She didn’t feel like coming home yet, so she went to the movies instead.

  “You know, Belinda Jean,” I said, “you are judged by the company you keep. Just remember that.”

  She asked me what that was supposed to mean. Said it defiantlike. But I could see the blood drain out of her face.

  “It means just what you think it means,” I told her. “You should always pick your friends wisely and act the way you would if you were out in public with your father and me.” She stood there, clenching her fists and jutting her chin out like she was gunning for a fight. Then she lost her nerve, I guess, because she stormed out of the kitchen, stomped up the stairs, and slammed her bedroom door behind her. That was when I first suspected that she and Jones might have gone past the “friends” stage. I got down on my knees and prayed on it that night, and for the next several nights. Prayed that it wasn’t so, because if it was and Claude got wind of it, he’d raise holy Hell and then some.

  It was me who brought the whole thing to a head. Not on purpose, Good Lord! If I had only known, I would have avoided that art show like the plague. The Tercentenary celebration had been going on all summer and was having its final event that Sunday: a pancake breakfast inside the festival tent and a big art show outside of it. Between Rufus Jones winning the ice-melting contest and that incident at the history pageant, Claude had been a stick-in-the-mud about anything having to do with the Tercentenary—hadn’t wanted us to go to the parade, or the fireworks, or the firemen-versus-policemen rope pull, or either of the two concerts, the one with Les Paul and Mary Ford or the other one with Johnnie Ray and that Tommy Sands fellow who married Frank Sinatra’s daughter. I suspected it was because, after he’d made a scene that night at the history pageant and humiliated Belinda Jean, Claude was embarrassed to show his face at any of the other events. But both those things had happened in June and now it was August. I wanted to go to something. So I went on and on about pancakes and arts and crafts, and finally Claude gave in and said he’d take me if I’d just stop my “goddamn belly-aching.” We went right after I got home from early church, and the crowd was already so big, we had to park four streets over from the tent.

  When we got there, we had our pancakes and coffee. Then we walked around looking at the booths inside, the pottery and homemade jewelry and leather goods and such, and I could tell that Claude was bored to tears. The paintings were all outside, hanging up on chicken wire fencing. When we started walking around out there, Claude kept making comments like “You call this art?” and “Some kindergarten kid could have made a prettier picture than that,” and there were the artists, sitting right there on stools and webbed chairs and most likely hearing what he said. Not all of the artwork was my cup of tea either, but I knew each person had tried their best. So I was relieved when Claude run into someone he knew and started talking with him. “I’ll just keep going and look at the rest and then we can leave,” I said.

  Claude said, “Hallelujah for that,” and the other man laughed.

  Joe Jones had his pictures set up at the south end of the show. Most of the other artists were chitchatting with the passersby, but he was standing there all by his lonesome, waiting for people to stop and look, I guess, which nobody was doing. It was hot and humid out, and his dark skin was shiny with sweat. He had on canvas pants and canvas shoes and a tight red-and-white-striped T-shirt that showed off his muscles. Whenever he moved, you could see them shifting under his shirt. He glanced up at me for a second or two, but I could tell he didn’t know who I was. His sign said JOSEPHUS JONES
, ENAMEL PAINTINGS ON POSTER BOARD AND MASONITE BOARD. SMALL ONES $5, BIG ONES $20.

  To my eye, those paintings of his were crazy-looking. In one called Hunting Day, two men were out in the woods and one was holding his rifle to the back of the other one’s neck. In another called The Cercus People, a clown was pointing a stick at a woman in a bathing suit who was riding on top of an elephant. I looked away from the one called Three Nude Women in a Garden and another called Taking a Bath with the Seneoritas. I wished he had shown better judgment than to put those naked ones up; there were a lot of families with children at that art show. And I’m no great shakes when it comes to spelling, but I was pretty sure that senoritas only had one e in it, not two. Lord, but he’d sure brought enough of his pictures to show—forty or fifty of them, it looked like! There were paintings of colored cowboys and colored Indians, jungle animals fighting each other, a mountain lion up in a tree getting ready to pounce on a mother deer and her fawn. They were all very colorful, I’ll give him that much, but not one of those paintings was something you’d want to pay good money for and then go home and hang up behind the sofa in your living room.

  But I guess I must not know art that well because Jones’s biggest painting, Adam and Eve, had a blue ribbon hanging next to it that said BEST IN SHOW. I stopped and looked at that one, trying to figure out why it was a prizewinner, my eyes bouncing from the blue ribbon to Adam and Eve in the all-together, except for the fig leaves he’d been decent enough to paint on their privates. Adam was reaching out for Eve and Eve was reaching up to pick herself that apple that would cast them out of the Garden of Eden. And this was curious: they both had gray skin instead of flesh-colored skin—as gray as cement. There were some ghostly-looking baby goats at their feet and cows behind them, and the snake was coiled up in the apple tree. A shiver ran through me when I looked at Adam’s and Eve’s faces. Despite that gray skin of theirs, Adam had Josephus Jones’s Negro face and Eve had Belinda Jean’s! Good God Almighty, I said to myself. If Claude sees this, he’ll go berserk. But when I looked from that painting to where I’d left him talking to that fellow he knew, I saw him walking straight toward me.

  I reached him first and tried to turn him around. “Come on,” I said. “It’s hot out here and I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.” Except he wouldn’t turn around.

  “Our car’s parked this-a-way,” he said.

  I watched him look over at Jones, and then start scanning his paintings, snickering. But when he saw Adam and Eve, the smile dropped off his face. He went right for it, aiming to destroy it, I guess.

  When he done that, Jones went right for Claude. The two of them rassled with each other and fell to the ground. Claude’s punches weren’t connecting, but Jones’s were. He was getting the best of Claude and then some. When I started screaming, a crowd come rushing over. And then the cops were there. They pulled Jones off of Claude and separated the two. One of the cops talked to Claude and the other talked to Jones. I could hear Jones say something about having a right to defend his work since it was under attack, and the policeman he was talking to kept saying, “Yes, sir. I understand, sir. He was clearly the perpetrator.” Claude was throwing around words like “nigger” and “kill the black son of a bitch,” and I was scared to death they were going to arrest him. But they didn’t, thank the Lord. They just escorted him off the fairgrounds with me hurrying behind them. If Claude came back to the art show, one of the policemen warned him, he’d be cooling off in jail for the night. “You can’t attack someone’s artwork just because you don’t like it,” the other one told Claude. Of course, it was about much more than that. It was about Belinda Jean and Joe Jones, naked as jaybirds in the Garden of Eden, on display for those crowds of people to see. And it was about how that painting got painted—who’d gotten naked with who, and why, and what else might have happened. Not that Claude told those police that “Eve” had his daughter’s face and body. He was mum about that, figuring, I guess, that he’d rather have them think he was a crackpot than that his daughter’d been with a colored man that way.

  When we got back to the house, Belinda Jean wasn’t there, thank God. She and Peggy Konicki had gone down to Ocean Beach for the day. I tried to calm Claude down, but he wasn’t in any mood to listen to the likes of me. And when I suggested that maybe Belinda and me could go see Pastor Frickee and he could talk some sense into her, he grabbed my arm and squeezed it and said I was to leave that do-gooding minister out of our personal business or else. All day long, Claude kept walking around the house and out in the yard, short of breath and slamming things and mumbling to himself about “killing that black bastard.” I’d never seen him so mad, and I was scared skinny for Belinda Jean.

  When Belinda come home around seven or so, she was wearing that terry cloth poncho I’d sewn her and her bathing suit underneath. He hair was in a ponytail and she was looking sunburnt and healthy. Claude come right at her, backhanding her in the face and splitting her lip. He called her “a disgrace” and “a coon’s whore” and told her to pack her things and get out of his house.

  “And go where?” she sobbed. I was crying. She was crying. Claude was wheezing like he’d just run all the way up Jailhouse Hill.

  “I don’t care where,” he said. “Plumb to Hell for all I care, because that’s where you’re headed sooner or later anyway. Or why don’t you go next door and live with those two niggers and that white slut they share.”

  “Daddy,” she kept sobbing. “Daddy, please. We’re just friends, that’s all. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “No? Letting him see you the way only a husband’s got a right to see his wife? Letting him make a dirty picture of the two of you and hang it up for everyone in town to ogle? I don’t know what devil spawned you, little girl, because you sure ain’t my child. Not anymore you ain’t. Now go! Get out of my sight! You don’t live here no more, period.” He wouldn’t back down. Wouldn’t listen to reason. And so she put a few things in a paper bag and left.

  I was sick to my stomach all night long with worry about her. Where was she? Was she safe? Should I call the police? I would have, but I was afraid it would set him off again. I didn’t sleep a wink all night with him in the other bed, wheezing and cursing and muttering terrible things about having a score to settle with the nigger who’d ruined his daughter.

  Belinda called me the next morning after Claude left for work. What she’d done, she told me, was walk five miles over to Peggy’s house wearing just her flip-flops and her poncho and bathing suit underneath. She’d slept there the night before, and would sleep there that night, too. Then Mrs. Konicki got on the line and said something about how Belinda Jean’s problem reminded her of West Side Story. Whatever she meant by that I didn’t know, but I just agreed with her to shut her up. I was grateful to her, nonetheless. As long as Belinda was staying with the Konickis, I figured, she was safe.

  It didn’t turn out so bad, though. Because on the third night, he let her come back home. See, she’d written him a letter and snuck back here and tucked it in the Evening Record, so that when Claude come home from the icehouse and sat down to read his paper, Belinda Jean’s letter fell out. I read it after he did. In the letter, she said Jones and her were nothing more than “acquaintances,” and that she had never disrobed in front of him, nor he in front of her. All that had happened was that he’d come into the library one afternoon while she was working at the front desk and drawn a picture of her face. A pencil sketch that looked just like her. She hadn’t even known he was doing it until he showed it to her, she said. She had no idea he was going to bring that sketch home and use it to paint her face on Eve’s naked body. Whether what she said in her letter was the truth or a lie, I couldn’t tell. But Claude took it as gospel. When I looked up from reading what she’d written, I saw something I’d never seen before: my husband’s tears. “Why are you crying, Claude?” I asked him.

  “Because my little girl’s still pure,” he said. “He didn’t foul her after all, except in his filthy min
d.”

  I pulled the tucked-up hanky from the sleeve of my dress and handed it to him. “Here,” I said. He wiped his eyes, blew his nose, stood and shoved the hanky into the pocket of his overalls. Then he walked out the door.

  When I heard him start his truck, and then heard those truck tires on our gravel driveway, I knew where he was going: over to the Konickis’ to bring his daughter back home. And while he was gone, I sat in the rocking chair, rocking and thinking about what I’d seen that day in the movie theater: their two silhouettes down below me in the middle rows. They were talking and laughing easily with each other, like they were more than just acquaintances. Then I thought about what else I’d seen: that picture of his, Eve reaching up to pick that apple. Well, I thought, if it brings us peace around here, then let him believe what he wants to believe. But in the Bible, that’s not the way it went. Once Eve bit into that apple and got banished, there was no coming back. Paradise wasn’t hers no more. Life was hard for her and Adam and all of us who come after.