Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  Herbie made a scoffing noise. “Parachutes,” he said. (A couple of his front teeth were missing, which caused bubbles to form when he laughed at me.) “Anyway, don’t be stupid. We’ll drop bombs on people. Bomb my house.”

  So we filled mason jars with gasoline. Through July and August, in the soft, grave density of that prairie summer, we practiced our bombing runs, getting the feel of it, the lift, the swoop. Herbie was eight, I was seven. We made the sounds an engine would make. In our heads, where the world was, we bombed Mrs. Catchitt’s garage, the church across the street, Jerry Powell and his cousin Ernest and other people we feared or despised. Mostly, though, we bombed Herbie’s house. The place was huge and bright yellow, a half block away, full of cousins and uncles and nuns and priests and leathery old grandmothers. A scary house, I thought, and Herbie thought so too. He liked yelling “Die!” as he banked into a dive; he said things about his mother, about black bones and fires in the attic.

  For me, the bombing was fine. It seemed useful, vaguely productive, but the best part was flight itself, or the anticipation of flight, and over those summer days the word engine did important engine work in my thoughts. I did not envision machinery. I envisioned thrust: a force pressing upward and outward, even beyond. This notion had its objective component—properties both firm and man-made—but on a higher level, as pure idea, the engine that my father would be bringing home did not operate on mechanical principles. I knew nothing, for example, of propellers and gears and such. My engine would somehow contain flight. Like a box, I imagined, which when opened would release the magical qualities of levitation into the plywood boards of my airplane.

  At night, in bed, I would find myself murmuring that powerful, empowering word: engine. I loved its sound. I loved everything it meant, everything it did not mean but should.

  Summer ended, autumn came, and what my father finally brought home was a turtle. A mud turtle—small and black. My father had a proud look on his face as he stooped down and placed it on our backyard runway.

  “That thing’s a turtle,” Herbie said.

  “Toby,” said my father. “I think his name is Toby.”

  “Well, God, I know that,” Herbie said. “Every turtle on earth, they’re all named Toby. It’s still just a stupid old turtle.”

  “A pretty good one,” my father said.

  Herbie’s face seemed to curdle in the bright sunlight. He scooped up the turtle, searched for its head, then dropped it upside down on the runway. I remember backing away, feeling a web of tensions far too complex for me: disappointment, partly, and confusion, but mostly I was afraid for my father. Herbie could be vicious at times, very loud, very demonstrative, easily unnerved by the wrongs of the world.

  “Oh, boy,” he muttered.

  He took a few slow steps, then ran.

  If anything was said between my father and me, I cannot remember it. What I do remember—vividly—is feeling stupid. The words turtle and engine seemed to do loops in the backyard sunlight. There had to be some sort of meaningful connection, a turtleness inside engineness, or the other way around, but right then I could not locate the logic.

  The backyard was silent. I remember my father’s pale-blue eyes, how he gazed at something just beyond the birdbath. “Well,” he said, then stopped and carefully folded his hands. “Sorry, Tommy. Best I could do.” Then he turned and went into the house.

  Afterward, I stood studying Toby. I poked at him with my foot. “Hey, you,” I murmured, but it was a very stupid turtle, more object than animal. It showed no interest in my foot, or my voice, or anything else in the physical universe. Turtle, I kept thinking, and even now, in my middle age, those twin syllables still claw at me. The quick t’s on my tongue: turtle. Even after four decades I cannot encounter that word without a gate creaking open inside me. Turtle for the world—turtle for you—will never be turtle for me.

  Nor this: corn.

  Nor this: Pontiac.

  Have you ever loved a man, then lost him, then learned he lives on Fiji with a new lover? Is Fiji still Fiji? Coconuts and palm trees?

  At sixteen, in a windy autumn cornfield, I made first love on the hood of my father’s green Pontiac. I remember the steel against my skin. I remember darkness, too, and a sharp wind, and rustlings in the corn. I was terrified. Pontiac means: Will this improve? And that Indian-head ornament on the hood—did the bastard bite my feet? Did I hear a chuckle? Peeping Tom, ogler, eyewitness, sly critic: the word Indian embraces all of these meanings and many more.

  The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

  In the backyard that afternoon, alone with Toby, I felt a helplessness that went beyond engines or turtles. It had to do with treachery. Even back then, in a dark, preknowledge way, I understood that language was involved, its frailties and mutabilities, its potential for betrayal. My airplane, after all, was not an airplane. No engine on earth would make it fly. And over the years I have come to realize that Herbie and I had willfully deceived ourselves, renaming things, reinventing the world, which was both pretending and a kind of lying.

  But there were also the words my father had used: “One airplane engine, coming up.”

  His intent, I know, was benign. To encourage. To engage. And yet for me, as a seven-year-old, the language he had chosen took on the power of a binding commitment, one I kept pestering him to honor, and through July and August, as summer heated up, my father must have felt trapped by a promise he neither had intended nor could possibly keep.

  “Right. I’m working on it,” he’d say, whenever I brought up the subject.

  He’d say, “Pretty soon, partner.” He’d say, “No sweat.” He’d say, “Be patient. I’ve placed the order.”

  But a turtle?

  Why not broccoli?

  The next morning was a Sunday. Maybe an hour after Mass, Herbie walked into my backyard.

  “Your dad’s a liar,” he said.

  “Yeah, sort of,” I told him, “but not usually,” then I tried to mount a defense. I talked about Toby, what a fine turtle he was, how I could get him to stick his head out from under the shell by putting a pan of water in front of him. I talked about using Toby as a bomb. “It’ll be neat,” I said. “Drop him on the mailman.”

  Herbie looked at me hard. “Except your dad’s still a liar, Tommy. They all are. They just lie and lie. They can’t even help it. That’s what fathers are for. Nothing else. They lie.”

  I stood silent. Arguments, I knew, were useless. All I could do was wait—which I did—and after a few moments Herbie strolled over to our plywood airplane, picked it up, and carried it across the lawn. He placed it tail down against the garage.

  “It’s not a plane anymore,” he said. “It’s a cross.”

  “Cross how?” I asked.

  “Like in the Bible,” said Herbie. “A cross. Let’s go get my sister. Lorna Sue—we’ll nail her to it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We walked the half block to Herbie’s yellow house. The place was enormous, especially to a child, and it took a long while to find Lorna Sue, who sat playing with her dollhouse up in the attic. She was seven years old. Very pretty: black hair, summer-brown skin. I liked her a lot, and Lorna Sue liked me too, which was obvious, and a decade later we would find ourselves in a cornfield along Highway 16, completely in love, very cold, testing our courage on the hood of my father’s Pontiac.

  The world sometimes precedes itself. In the attic that day—September 1952—I am almost certain that both Lorna Sue and I understood deep in our bones that significant events were now in motion.

  I remember the smell of that attic, so dank and fungal, so dangerous. I remember Herbie gazing down at his sister.

  “We need you,” he said.

  “What for?” said Lorna Sue.

  “It’ll be neat. Tommy and me, we’ve got this cross—we’ll nail you to it.”

  Lorna Sue smiled at me.

  This was love. Seven years old. Even then.
/>   “Well,” she said, “I guess so.”

  And so the three of us trooped back to my house. Impatiently, under Herbie’s supervision, Lorna Sue stood against the cross and spread out her slender brown arms. “This better be fun,” she said, “because I’m pretty busy.” Herbie and I went into the garage, where we found a hammer and two rusty nails. I remember a frothiness in my stomach; I felt queasy, yes, but also curious. As we walked back toward Lorna Sue, I lagged behind a little.

  “You think this’ll hurt?” I asked.

  Herbie shrugged. His eyes had a hard, fixed, enthusiastic shine, like the eyes of certain trained assassins I would later encounter in the mountains of Vietnam. Herbie gripped the hammer in his right hand. Quietly, like a doctor, he told Lorna Sue to close her eyes, which she did, and at that point, thank God, my mother came out the back door with a basket of damp laundry. The basket was blue, the laundry mostly white.

  “What’s this?” my mother asked.

  “Sunday school,” Lorna Sue said. “I get to be Jesus.”

  At dinner that evening, the hammer and nails lay at the center of the kitchen table. It was a long and very difficult meal. Over and over, I had to explain how the whole thing had been a game, just for fun, not even a real cross. My father studied me as if I’d come down with polio.

  “The hammer,” he said. “You see the hammer?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is it real?”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  He nodded. “And the nails? Real or unreal?”

  “Real,” I told him, “but not like … I mean, is Toby a real engine?”

  My father was unhappy with that. I remember how his jaw firmed up, how he leaned back, glanced over at my mother, then segued into a vigorous lecture about the difference between playing games and driving nails through people’s hands. Even as a seven-year-old, I already knew the difference—it was obvious—but sitting there at the kitchen table, feeling wronged and defenseless, I could not find words to say the many things I wanted to say: that I was not a murderer, that events had unfolded like a story in a book, that I had been pulled along by awe and wonder, that I had never really believed in any of it, that I was almost positive that Herbie would not have hammered those nails through Lorna Sue’s pretty brown hands.

  These and other thoughts spun through my head. But all I could do was stare down at my plate and say, “All right.”

  “All right what?” my father said.

  “You know. I won’t nail anybody.”

  “What about Herbie?”

  “He won’t either,” I said. “I’m pretty sure.”

  But he did. The left palm. Halfway through. Almost dead center.

  Accuracy matters.

  Herbie Zylstra was not a mean-spirited child. Nothing of the sort. Hyperactive, to be sure, and so impulsive he could sometimes make my stomach wobble, but I never felt physical fear in his presence. More like wariness—a butterfly sensation.

  In a later decade, Herbie would have been a candidate for Ritalin or some similar drug, gallons of the stuff, a long rubber hose running from pharmacy to vein.

  Accuracy, though.

  September. A Saturday morning, two weeks after school opened. Around noon Herbie stopped by. “Til need the cross,” he said.

  I was busy with Toby; I barely looked up.

  Herbie muttered something and picked up the cross and carried it over to his house and set it up against a big elm tree on the front lawn. He found Lorna Sue. He told her to stay steady. He squinted and pursed his lips and put the point of the nail against the center of her left palm and took aim and cocked his wrist. He did not have the strength, I suppose, to drive the nail all the way through, or maybe it wasn’t a solid strike, or maybe at the last instant Herbie held back out of some secret virtue, pity or humility.

  I was not there to witness it. All I can attest to is the sound of sirens.

  Voices too, I think. And maybe a scream. But maybe not.

  Later in the day my mother called me inside and told me about it. Immediately, I ran for my bedroom. I slammed the door, crawled under the bed, made fists, yelled something, banged the floor. What I was feeling, oddly enough, was a kind of rage, a cheated sensation: denied access to something rare and mysterious and important. I should have been there—an eyewitness to the nailing. I deserved it. Even now, half a lifetime later, my absence that day remains a source of regret and bitterness. I had earned the right. It was my plywood. My green paint. Other reasons too: because at age sixteen I would make first love with Lorna Sue Zylstra on the hood of my father’s Pontiac, and because ten years later we would be married, and because twenty-some years after that Lorna Sue would discover romance with another man, and betray me, and move to Tampa.

  After the nailing, I did not see Herbie for almost a year.

  He was dispatched to a Jesuit boys’ school up in the Twin Cities—a “hospital school,” my mother called it, which was probably close to accurate—and when he returned the following summer, in early June, things were different. I had new friends; Herbie had a new personality. He was a loner now. Silent and self-absorbed. The transformation was remarkable, edging up on radical, and if I were a believer in the Pauline epiphanies, or in divine intervention, which I most certainly am not, I might be tempted to argue that Herbie had been visited by some higher power during his stay with the good Catholics of Minneapolis.

  Contrition, so rare in any of us, seemed to have struck Herbie Zylstra as a nine-year-old.

  This is not to say that the reformation was absolute. He still had a temper; he could go hard and hostile. In fact, from all I could tell, the new Herbie was wound tighter than ever. The sweetness was gone. The naive, impish exuberance had been sucked out of him, recklessness replaced by qualities much more stern—something zealous and rigid, a severity of spirit that seemed a little eerie.

  For the next eight years, until he graduated from high school, Herbie and I went our separate ways. Not unfriendly but never friendly either. He kept to himself, earned respectable grades, played a skillful forward on a basketball team that twice advanced to the state semifinals. In a cautious way, most people admired him, especially girls. He moved well. He was tall and lean, with gray eyes and wavy brown hair, but beneath this handsome exterior was a quiet, smoldering aloofness. There were times, I thought, when he gave off a dangerous glow, like fire in a jar, rectitude squeezed inside muscle—a physicality I envied.

  On the surface, at least, things were neutral between us. I lived in one world, Herbie in another, and our childhood was never a topic of discussion. There were no topics at all. In school, or at church, his eyes swept across me as if I were air; he avoided me at parties, rarely even nodded when we happened to cross paths on a sidewalk. In a way, it seemed, my old pal had willfully erased me from memory, along with our joint history, and I have since come to suspect that this was a means of wiping away his own shame, obliterating guilt by obliterating me. I was invisible to him: not even a ghost.

  All this changed when I began dating Lorna Sue in the middle of my junior year.

  To put it simply, Herbie did not approve.

  In the school hallways, in classes and the cafeteria, I could feel him glaring at me like an Old Testament judge, wary and suspicious, alert to sin, his bright gray eyes locking onto me with what can only be called loathing. When I complained to Lorna Sue, she laughed and told me to forget it. “That’s Herbie,” she said. “That’s not us.”

  I nodded. “Maybe. But it feels strange.”

  “Just ignore him,” she said. “Pretend you don’t notice. It’ll drive him crazy.”

  “I don’t want him crazy.”

  Lorna Sue shrugged and went silent. “All right, I’ll talk to him,” she finally said, then hesitated. “Except I don’t think … I mean, I don’t think you’ll ever please him. Nobody can. That’s how he is.”

  “How?”

  “You know. The big brother.”

  “Okay, sure,” I said, “but t
here’s something else too. It feels like—I don’t know—almost like he owns you.”

  “Well, he doesn’t,” said Lorna Sue, but again there was a wrinkle in her voice, as if she was afraid of something. She held up the palm of her left hand, displaying a small, star-shaped, purply-red scar. “The opposite, Tommy. I own him.”

  I nodded and said, “Right.”

  Lorna Sue said, “Right.”

  But what she meant, exactly, was a puzzle to me, and always will be.

  From that point onward, well into adulthood, Herbie seemed possessed by a sullen, brooding jealousy, as if I had stolen his sister from him or somehow defiled her. Even when Lorna Sue and I were alone—in a movie theater, in my father’s Pontiac—I could sense his shadow nearby: a drop in the temperature, a pressure against my spine.

  It’s a mystery. Four decades have passed, so much pain, so much horror, yet I cannot begin to understand the causes. All I know is this: I am alone now.

  Herbie killed my marriage.

  He murdered love. Intentionally. Systematically. He found the weakness in me, and he showed it to Lorna Sue.

  Why me? I cannot help but wonder. I deserved better. By any estimate I am a man of some majesty, tall and eye-catching, no paunch, no deficits worth the spill of ink. I am a full professor of linguistics, the author of twenty-one highly regarded monographs; I am beloved by my students,* esteemed by my academic confederates. And, yes—beyond everything—I adored Lorna Sue with every fiery corpuscle of my being.

  So why?

  In my bleakest moods, when black gets blackest, I think of it as raw perversion: Herbie coveted his own sister. Which is a fact. The stone truth. He was in love with her. More generously, I will sometimes concede that it was not sexual love, or not entirely, and that Herbie was driven by the obsessions of a penitent, a torturer turned savior. Partly, too, I am quite certain that Herbie secretly associated me with his own guilt. I was present at the beginning. My backyard, my plywood, my green paint. And it was my father who had failed to deliver an airplane engine, who had instead brought home a turtle named Toby.

  Toby: it’s an obscenity to me.