It was then that the kitchen door opened and the boy’s mother appeared, took in the situation at a glance and smiled unpleasantly at her husband, Peter, who had that moment emerged from the den, where the baby started to cry. Now ringed by speechless adults, Wacker continued to bump and hoot and squirt along the floor, impossible to ignore, impossible to take seriously.
Robert Halsey took all this in from the living room and made no attempt to get up from his chair. By his own calculations, seconded by numerous physicians, he had no more than three months to live, and he studied the cluster of humans in the next room with detached, almost clinical interest. Both sexes and the spectrum of ages were represented, and the old man managed to take in each person efficiently—his unhappy daughter, Vera, and her long-suffering husband, his crippled ex-son-in-law, Sully, the little boy’s father, Peter, and his large, graceless, sad wife, and the boy himself, his great-grandson, little dick in hand, so full of life and energy. Robert Halsey took them all in, felt affection for one and all, but concluded then and there that even if his next breath of pure oxygen proved to be his last, he wouldn’t trade places with any of these people, and so he closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep, riddles still unanswered, mysteries still unsolved.
When Wacker bolted from the bathroom, his brother Will closed the door behind him and locked it. He wasn’t afraid of getting spanked. His father never spanked him hard. Nor was he afraid of the humiliation attendant upon what he’d done. His young life was full of embarrassment, all of which he shouldered with adult resignation. What he was afraid of was his little brother, who had made no promises of amnesty and who would not honor them if he had. Wacker was a boy without honor, a boy born to terrorize other boys, even bigger ones. Will was deeply afraid of Wacker’s fearlessness, which, combined with the little boy’s long memory, made him a formidable adversary. His parents understood none of this, Will knew. They were simply disgusted with Will’s cowardice. “You’re bigger than he is, for Christ sake,” his father always said. “He’s a half-pint. You’re a full pint. Are you going to go through life tattling and running to Mommy and Daddy? It’s”—his father took a while to locate the right word—“unnatural,” he finally said.
In Will’s opinion it was Wacker who was unnatural. It was unnatural the way his brother’s eyes narrowed when he contemplated a new act of terror, the way those narrowed eyes focused on Will to let him know that once he’d perfected whatever he was concocting, Will would derive its full benefit. Also, Wacker’s lack of fear was unnatural. He wasn’t afraid of anything, even Grandpa Sully, who looked like a murderer on TV, all limping and grinning and covered with dirt. Will himself liked his grandfather, even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to. Grandpa Sully had at least tried to scare Wacker yesterday, warning him not to whack his bad knee again. How was he to know that nothing scared Wacker, whose attack on Grandpa yesterday signaled to Will that his little brother had reached a new plateau of courage and malice? He had actually attacked and hurt a grown-up. That Wacker truly inflicted pain was one of the things Will had never been able to convince his father, who seemed to think Wacker was too small to really hurt anyone. Will knew better. Pain was Wacker’s business. He gave it to you like a present. You’ll like this, the expression on his face always said.
Until recently Wacker’s favorite act of terror had been the twisting pinch, administered from behind. Wacker had learned somehow that the loose skin on the underside of the arm, just above the elbow, was especially tender, and he always waited until Will’s back was turned before sneaking up and locking on with thumb and forefinger. Wacker was still perfecting the twist-pinch maneuver that sent Will high onto his tiptoes, howling in pain. The injuries that Wacker inflicted never had a chance to heal either, because he always returned to the same spot, where the broken blood vessels and flesh were still tender. And lately Wacker had shown indications of branching out. At the dinner table he’d catch Will’s eye and show him the sharp tines of his fork.
Anymore, Will thought of little except keeping Wacker in front of him and in full view. He relaxed only when his brother was asleep. Each night Will remained awake in their room until he was sure Wacker was sleeping soundly, and his last waking thought was to remind himself that he must wake up before his brother. Wacker seemed aware of how much he occupied his older brother’s thoughts and was proud to be his waking nightmare.
And so today Will had finally retaliated. Neither forgiveness nor negotiation nor sweeping policies of appeasement had the least effect on Wacker, and Will had come to suspect that his brother was permanently stuck in attack mode. Until recently Will had tried to do anything he could to avoid even greater cruelty. He now understood that there was no need to fear greater cruelty. If Wacker were capable of greater cruelty, he’d already be engaging in it. And so, this afternoon, when Will saw his opportunity, he’d seized it.
He’d been awaiting his turn at the commode, and Wacker was stalling as usual. The water running in the tub made Will have to go bad, and Wacker would not share Grandma Vera’s tall, old-fashioned commode, which Wacker was just tall enough to pee over if he stood on his toes and rested his little penis on the cold porcelain. His trickle had stopped minutes before, but he refused to budge.
“Come on, Wacker,” Will had whined. “I gotta go.”
Wacker responded by grinning and releasing another spurt of urine into the commode to prove he wasn’t done.
Will clutched himself. He knew from experience that this could go on a long time. His brother liked to “save it.” He’d stop peeing, then start again, half a dozen times.
The toilet seat, Will noticed, was raised. Will stared at the seat, then at his brother, who emitted two short blasts of urine, like a signal in Morse code. It acted like a signal for Will, who, before he allowed himself to consider the consequences, let go of his penis, stepped around his brother, grabbed the upraised toilet seat and slammed it, hard.
Wacker had not been badly hurt. The bottom of the toilet seat was prevented from lying flat against the porcelain by four small rubber knobs that were of approximately the same thickness as Wacker’s penis and which protected him from the full impact. He’d been startled mostly, and the tip of his penis tingled from the concussion. In the split second before he cried out, Wacker formulated a plan, and his eyes narrowed in that way that terrified his brother, and he’d bolted, bare-assed, from the bathroom to play the scene out, a strictly over-the-top performance, for the adults in the kitchen. Will watched through the keyhole while his father and Grandpa Ralph took turns examining Wacker’s penis. Their evident concern for his brother’s well-being caused Will’s heart to sink. Didn’t they understand anything? Didn’t they know that Wacker couldn’t be hurt?
When he couldn’t stand to watch anymore, Will backed away from the door, realizing as he did so that he was standing in warm water. Grandma Vera’s tub was finally full, the water a level sheet right at the top, like glass. He turned off the faucets then, understanding as he did so the full consequences of his rash act. By trying and failing to inflict pain upon Wacker, he had succeeded only in losing the sympathy and slender protection of the adults, all of whom now sided with Wacker. Neither his father nor his mother would protect Will now. By flooding the bathroom, he’d even lost the protection of Grandma Vera, who, he suspected, had been on his side. She alone had seemed to understand that Wacker was cruel and unnatural. Now even she would be on Wacker’s side.
The way Will saw it, he had two options. One was to stay locked in Grandma Vera’s bathroom for the rest of his life, the other to make a break for it. Maybe Grandpa Sully would take him. He recalled with fondness Grandpa Sully’s fearlessness yesterday, and remembered how his grandfather had winked at him as they drove off, a wink that had conveyed an understanding.
When the bathroom door rattled and his father’s angry voice ordered him to unlock the door, Will was already half dressed and fully resolved. Thankfully, he’d piled his clothes on top of the bathroom sink, and t
hey were dry, whereas Wacker’s were a soggy lump on the floor. His sneakers were a little wet, but he didn’t care. By standing on the commode he was able to reach the lock on the small bathroom window. The screen was loose, the air outside cold, the ground a long way down, but Will’s decision was made. He would find a new life.
The confusion reigning in his ex-wife’s house reminded Sully of the confusion of war, the principal difference being that at Vera’s it seemed no terribly dishonorable thing to slip out the back, which was what he did when the others converged on the bathroom door to cajole Will into opening it. Peter was the only one who’d noticed him go, and Sully had thought he saw his son smirk. Was it that knowing smirk or the chaos of Vera’s family that he was fleeing? he wondered, turning his key in the ignition. Whichever. When he pulled away from the curb, he stomped the gas pedal hard and the truck roared up the quiet street at unsafe speed, taking the corner as if he feared pursuit. Only when he turned onto Main and stopped at the traffic light in front of the OTB did he feel relatively safe. At The Horse, in the company of relatively sane men, he’d feel even safer, and since this could not be brought about soon enough, he considered just driving on through the long red light he was sitting beneath. His was the only moving vehicle on the whole dark deserted street, which made obedience to the traffic signal seem even more ridiculous than usual, so he revved the engine, inched forward, did a quick scan of the street and checked the rearview for cops.
What he saw in the mirror so startled him that his foot slipped off the clutch, causing the truck to lurch forward and die beneath the traffic light. There in the mirror, for just a moment, like an ancient accusation, were the frightened eyes of his son. Not Peter the adult, whom he’d left at Vera’s talking to the bathroom door, twisting the doorknob back and forth, but the boy he’d been so long ago. The plea in those eyes in the mirror had been so urgent, so real that Sully thought for a second that this must be another dream, like the sauna one, that he’d again fallen asleep in the truck. The light turned green, but Sully sat, stalled, the need to flee suddenly gone out of him. And then the eyes were there again, along with the apologetic smile of a stowaway.
“Hi, Grandpa,” Will said when Sully got out of the truck, his voice as thin with fear as a voice could be.
Sully searched for his grandson’s name, locating it finally. “You okay?” Sully said, lifting the boy out of the pickup’s bed.
He’d hidden beneath an old swatch of burlap, daring to come out from under it only when the truck stopped at the traffic light. Then when it lurched, he’d lost his balance and hit his forehead against the cab.
Will seemed not to hear his grandfather’s question. What had captured his attention was the lump magically growing on his forehead, just below the hairline. The lump didn’t hurt, at least not like the hurts his brother inflicted, but it made him feel woozy and he was impressed by the way the lump had sprung magically into being, how it was still growing. He could tell it was growing as he fingered it. “I’m not going back,” he finally told his grandfather. “Ever.”
Sully nodded. “Who are you going to live with?”
Will sighed. “You, I guess.” It seemed the only sensible thing, and he tried to conceal from his grandfather that he’d have preferred some other arrangement.
A car pulled up behind them at the traffic light, which had turned green for the second time. “Okay, get in then,” Sully suggested, picking the boy up again, placing him inside the cab. “Slide over,” he said when it became clear that the boy wouldn’t do it unless specifically instructed. Peter had been the same way, an almost comatose kid, it had seemed to Sully. If you didn’t tell him to open a door, he’d just stand in front of it. At the time it had not occurred to Sully that the reason might be fear. The fear of doing the wrong thing. It seemed obvious now.
When his grandson had made room, Sully climbed in after him, banging the door shut behind him, causing the boy to jump. How did he get to be such a bundle of nerves? Sully wondered.
“So,” Sully said. “You got back at your brother, huh?”
Will shrugged, again reminding Sully of Peter, who as a boy had been almost impossible to engage in conversation.
When the driver behind Sully made the mistake of tooting, Sully got out of the truck and stared at him until the man shrugged sheepishly, backed up and pulled around, giving Sully wide berth. “Two cars in the whole street, and you’ve got to toot at me,” Sully called as the man slid by into the intersection.
Will was studying him nervously when Sully got back in. “Dad does that too,” he observed sadly, as if he’d discovered a genetic flaw.
“Does what?”
“Gets mad at people in cars,” Will explained. “He doesn’t get out, though.”
Sully nodded. That sounded about right. His son seemed exactly this sort of man. Angry enough to yell, not angry enough to get out.
At a pretty nearly complete loss about what to do with his grandson, he said, “How about some ice cream?”
“We had dessert already,” Will said.
Sully sighed. Vera did raise good citizens. Another boy who could not tell a lie. It was discouraging. “You had ice cream?”
“Pumpkin pie.”
“With ice cream?”
“No.”
“Then you can have the ice cream now. We’ll pretend it was on top of the pie.”
Will thought about this. He’d been warned about Grandpa Sully, who was irresponsible. Still, if he was going to live with his grandfather, he was going to have to get used to such things. He sighed. “Okay.”
“Good,” Sully said, turning the key in the ignition. Thank God, in fact.
They headed out of town, Will silently fingering the lump on his forehead. Almost as interesting as the lump was the fact that his grandfather’s truck had a hole the size of a basketball in the floor beneath the passenger’s seat.
“Don’t fall through,” Sully warned when he saw his grandson peering down through the hole at the racing pavement below.
When they got to the new spur and had it pretty much to themselves, Sully said, “You want to drive?”
Will looked at him fearfully.
“Slide over,” Sully said, adding, “be careful of my bum knee.”
Will settled carefully onto Sully’s right leg, allowing his own small legs to dangle in the direction of the gas pedal and brake, careful not to let them bump his grandfather’s left knee. Together they held the steering wheel.
“It’s jiggling,” Will observed, clearly unsure whether this vibration was natural.
“Trucks do,” Sully explained. “Especially broken-down old trucks like Grandpa’s.”
“It’s a nice truck,” Will said, his voice vibrating from holding the wheel.
“I’m glad you like it,” Sully said, taken aback by the little boy’s compliment, and without planning to, he kissed his grandson on the top of his head. “Now you’ve driven a car. I bet you didn’t know you could,” he said, adding, “don’t tell your mother.”
Some phrases were truly magical in their ability to dredge up the past from the bottom of life’s lake, and for Sully, like all errant fathers, “Don’t tell your mother” was such a phrase. He hadn’t used it in about thirty years. But the words were right there, anxious to be spoken again after so long, a holy incantation. It was the phrase he’d been born to speak, having learned the words from his own father, who, if they hadn’t already existed, would have had to invent them. “We’ll stop in here for just a minute,” Big Jim had been fond of saying outside his favorite tavern, and Sully and his brother, Patrick, would wait a beat or two until his father pulled the heavy door toward them and pushed them gently into the cool darkness, warning as he did so, “Don’t tell your mother.” Inside, Sully and his brother were always bribed with nickels to play shuffleboard and pinball while Big Jim located a spot at the bar and ordered the first of many boilermakers, paid for with money he withheld from Sully’s mother, whom he kept on a strict allowan
ce, money Big Jim now kept in a careless pile on the bar to ensure his welcome. Sometimes, when Sully got tired of pinball (he had to stand on a wooden stool and even then couldn’t reach the buttons comfortably) or ran out of nickels and joined his father at the bar, he’d stare at the pile of bills, aware that this was the same money his mother talked about so bitterly when his father wasn’t around, money she’d have spent on food and clothes if she had it, so they could have decent things, she said. His father, already on his third boilermaker and getting mean, would see Sully staring at the money and cuff him a good one to get his attention. “Don’t tell your mother,” he’d say. “She don’t have to have every last nickel I earn, does she?” And so Sully would promise, not wanting to get cuffed again because subsequent cuffs always got harder, not softer. Then Big Jim would order another boilermaker or toss a dollar off the top of the now diminishing pile at the bartender, who doubled as a bookie. “On his goddamn nose,” Big Jim always instructed, having decided on a horse. To him, place and show bets were cowardly and he wanted no part of their measly payoff. “You hear me? Right on his goddamn nose.”
Most of these afternoons had ended the same way, with Big Jim being told he’d have to leave, because the more he drank, the meaner he got, and it was only a matter of time before he’d start a fight. Sometimes one of the men in the bar would try to reason with him and head off hostilities. What did he want to go and behave like this for, in front of his boys? the man would ask. This tactic, which should have worked, was always a mistake. Big Jim Sullivan was not a man tortured by self-doubt, and of all the things he was certain of, he was most certain of his skill as a parent. When anyone offered even the slightest hint that he might be less than a model father, that person did well to duck, because Big Jim always defended himself in this matter with all of his pugilistic skills.
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