American Youth

by Phil LaMarche

  “What?” said Colleen.

  “Stop,” he said. “Stop, here.”

  “They know you’re with me, right?”

  “Don’t pull in,” he said. “Keep going, keep going.” He grabbed the steering wheel and pulled the car back onto the road.

  “Why?”

  “Pull over up there, past the house,” he said. Colleen coasted the car to the spot he directed her to. She stopped the car, but kept it running. She looked straight ahead.

  “What?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’m already late.”

  “Did you even say you were with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t you want me to drop you off?”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “My dad’s home. I don’t want to wake him up.”

  “I thought your parents were divorced.”

  “I never said that.”

  “He’s never here,” she said. “I just thought—”

  “He moved for work. My mom and I will too.”

  “Move?” she said. “When?”

  “When the house sells.”

  “Why didn’t you say?”

  He shrugged.

  She looked out the window.

  “I’m late,” he said. “I got to go.”

  The two leaned in and exchanged a quick peck. He left the car and tried to close the door as quietly as possible.

  At the front porch he took his shoes off, to creep more quietly. The decking was wet but the porch was creaky as hell. He inserted the key and slowly turned the bolt. Once the door was free of the jamb, he swung it quickly to avoid the haunted-house groan that happened if it opened slowly. He held his breath to hear. The furnace kicked on with a rumble. He stepped inside and set his sneakers down.

  As he made his way to the kitchen, he saw his father’s slippered feet propped up on the coffee table in the living room. He stopped. He could see the hem of his father’s blue bathrobe.

  “What are you doing up?” he said. The stairway blocked any eye contact between the two.

  “Can’t sleep,” the father said, in the hushed tone of a man with a wife asleep in the house. The boy walked around the front of the stairs and entered his line of sight. The father looked up over a paperback, the title declared in a daunting raised font on the front cover.

  “A little late?” he said, looking back to his book.

  The boy shrugged.

  “What you been up to?”

  “Hanging out.”

  “She says you got a girl. The ex of one of these political guys.”

  The boy nodded.

  “You be careful.”

  “They were broke up,” he said.

  “You watch out for her too,” the father said. “Don’t go and get yourself hurt.”

  The boy nodded.

  “Still no word on the charges,” the father said.

  He shook his head.

  The father nodded. “I’d be calling it a night. We got a funeral in the morning.”

  “Who?” the boy said.

  “Lawrence,” the father said. “Your mother’s uncle.”

  “How?” the boy said.

  “Diabetes, mostly. Then he killed himself. Apparently.”

  “How?”

  The father made the shape of a gun with his hand and put his index finger in his mouth. The cocked hammer of his thumb fell.

  “Wow,” the boy said.

  The father reached for the fallen book with his open hand. The boy stooped and handed it to him. “Sleep tight,” his father said.

  The boy stood for a moment before he nodded and left.

  In the darkness of his room he pulled the covers over his head, and in the confines of his sheets his body convulsed in several quick sobs. He didn’t tell his father that he loved him, or that he was glad to see him. And he did. And he was. Something had grown up between the two.

  When the boy’s childhood dog had been struck down in the street, there had been such a draw to his father, that, once in his arms, the boy stayed there for hours. He buried his face in his father and hid there, crying and soaking his shirt. His father rubbed warm circles across his back.

  But now it was as if the poles had reversed. The closer the boy and father became, the harder they pushed each other away. The boy felt broken up and confused. There was something that he couldn’t get his head around. He wished he could still seek comfort in the father’s arms, but his body chose instead to turn in on itself, milking the last warm remnants of the night’s beer buzz.

  He ran his fingers over the scars and scabs on the inside of his arm. Each was in the shape of a simple smiling face. The rollers of the lighter formed two eyes, the curved metal flame guard a deep smile. When the boy made a muscle in the bathroom mirror, they all stared back at him, laughing.

  13

  It was a Catholic service and, like most, it did little for the boy. He was bored by all the repetition. And they were stuck with Father Thomas—he was in his seventies and his recent hip replacement had aged him considerably more. At one point in the service Father Thomas started saying Clarence instead of Lawrence. The boy scarcely knew his great-uncle, but from what he gathered, his life had grown difficult. The diabetes he’d managed for most of his life had finally overrun him. It had sapped a good deal of his sight and worked on his legs—subtracting from them a joint at a time—leaving him confined to a wheelchair, half blind.

  He did it with a .45 pistol, in his mouth. They found him behind the barn, as he told them they would. He had said, “You got yourself a lame horse, you know what you do: You take it out back, you take care of it.” The story of him saying this went around and around at his service. Perhaps to help purge the guilt of those who had actually heard him say it and had done nothing, or maybe because some found it eerily noble, as some final expression of virility. It seemed like strength, control, some manifest destiny. In the action, Lawrence had proclaimed: I cannot live my life as I would like; therefore I assume the responsibility of ending it. Or perhaps it was more like: This sucks—fuck it.

  The ceremony at the cemetery had an altogether different effect on the boy. His great-uncle had served in Korea and he was buried with full military honors. The boy had never seen anything like it. He watched the soldiers in full dress march through the procedure. There were two things that broke him up: The first—while folding up the flag from his great-uncle’s coffin, one of the soldiers was clearly in tears. The image of that sadness amid the formality was wrenching. The boy thought he must have been a relation, but at the end, he left in the ROTC van without a word to anyone. The second thing was the gunfire. The first shots were so sharp and so startling that the boy flinched, and in this motion something seemed to come loose in him. The man calling out the command for the shots had a southern accent and it came out, Aiem, faher! As the shots continued, they grew less shocking, but for some reason he didn’t want them to end. Aiem, faher! There was something tremendously beautiful about it. Aiem, faher! By the last volley the boy was choked up and wet in the eyes. It confused him. He’d never really known the guy.

  After the services there was a get-together at the local Elks’ Lodge. The family had congregated there time and again for wedding and funeral receptions, graduation parties and wedding anniversaries. It was an enormous sharp-white Victorian building of three floors. From the windows at the front there was a beautiful view of the lake. During the many events in the past the boy and several cousins had explored what they could of the building. In the basement they’d found a bar at the head of six bowling lanes. The boy was the first to get a running start and baseball-slide into the pins. On the third floor the kids thought they had found an illegal gambling operation when they discovered a room with a roulette wheel, tables for craps, poker, and blackjack. The father, hearing of the conspiracy, chuckled and said, “It’s pretend—they use play money, for charity.” And then more seriously, “The hell you doing up there?
Stay where you belong.”

  The father, the mother, and the boy stood in the middle of the room that ran adjacent to the first-floor bar and looked out upon the lake.

  “Donna?” the father said. “Whiskey and ginger?” The mother nodded. The grandfather and grandmother left another circle of folks and approached them.

  “You all set?” the father said to his in-laws. He made a motion to the bar. The two held up their usual cocktails—the grandmother a Manhattan, the grandfather scotch and water.

  “Come give me a hand,” the father said. The boy followed.

  The father rested on the bar, a twenty in his hand so that the bartender would know his intentions. It was only slightly past noon and it was a funeral reception, but still the bartender was rushed. It was this way with the family. The father made a motion for the boy to stand next to him at the bar.

  “I been thinking,” he said to the boy. “Seems like you’ve been having a hard go of it.”

  The boy nodded. His father handed him his mother’s cocktail and grabbed his own after carrying out the transaction with the bartender.

  “You want,” said the father, “you can come down and stay with me.”

  The boy nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

  “That’s it?” said the father. “‘Yeah’?”

  The boy shrugged.

  The father shook his head and turned away. The boy stood for a moment and watched his father walk back to the family. He looked across the room and saw the lake through the wall of windows. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t want to go to Pennsylvania with his father.

  The boy’s mother was busy talking to his grandparents when he approached, so he waited at her elbow until there was a break in the conversation. He handed her the drink.

  “Well, Teddy.” His grandmother pulled him by the back of the neck to kiss his cheek.

  “Hey, Grandma,” the boy said.

  His grandfather reached out his hand and the boy shook it. He was an old man, but his hand was still heavy and hard. He had broad forearms and his neck was thick like a linebacker’s.

  “Howdy, Chief,” his grandfather said.

  “Grandpa,” the boy said. He nodded and stayed silent so as to allow their conversation to resume. In no time they were talking about Lawrence. They agreed that it was a shame, but his grandmother claimed that if he’d taken better care of himself he would’ve lasted longer. She said that a diabetic shouldn’t have drunk like he did. When the boy felt that they had sufficiently forgotten his presence in their conversation, he left the circle.

  He went to a corner and stood alone, watching other groups about the room. He felt uneasy in large gatherings of his family. They were strangers, after all, for the most part. Sure, they were allowed to hug and kiss you, but this made it worse. Most of them only saw one another on these ceremonial occasions—and that didn’t seem to constitute an intimate relationship. Yet somehow it did. He looked for his uncle John, but he was nowhere to be found. John had arrived late to the funeral and remained standing at the rear of the church. At the burial he stayed out along the fringes of the crowd.

  The boy crossed the room to the buffet on the far wall. Passing over the two tin pans of lasagna, he noticed that his grandfather was choosing from the several bowls of coleslaw. Before leaving the line, the boy split a dinner roll and stuffed it with roast beef from the cold-cut plate at the end of the table. He found a small bowl of shock-yellow mustard and doused the makeshift sandwich.

  He chose a folding seat at a round folding table that was covered with a linen cloth. He was surprised when his grandfather took a seat just two chairs over. As a child the boy had felt a distinct dislike from his grandfather, but as he had grown he’d realized that the grandfather seemed annoyed by all children. They frustrated him with their dependence and their inadequacy.

  “Say I shouldn’t eat like I do,” his grandfather said. “Say I’ll end up like old Lawrence there. Well, not like him, I suppose.”

  “He was your younger brother?” the boy asked.

  “Yup, old Lawrence,” said the grandfather. “Weren’t like brothers you’d think today. They didn’t let kids stay ’round much.”

  The boy nodded.

  “How’s it sit with you?” the grandfather asked him. “The way he done it?”

  The boy didn’t know what answer his grandfather was looking for, so he used a mouthful of sandwich as an excuse to shrug.

  “Women seem upset,” the grandfather said. “Don’t bother me none.” The grandfather ate a forkful of coleslaw. “I take a man’s word. You?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Some ways are just no way. You follow me?”

  The boy nodded again.

  “Weren’t like that boy that got himself killed,” the grandfather said. “What was his name?”

  “Bobby,” said the boy. “Bobby Dennison.”

  “Now that’s a goddamn shame. At his age?”

  The boy nodded.

  “They still investigating?”

  The boy’s mouth was full with a bite of sandwich, so he didn’t respond.

  “Doesn’t seem right, really. You didn’t do nothing wrong,” the grandfather said. “Leaving a couple fools with a gun ain’t the brightest thing I ever heard, but how can you be held responsible for something they did on their own?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said.

  “What you think will come of it?”

  The boy shrugged.

  The two ate in silence for some time.

  “Old Lawrence,” the grandfather said. “Now there was one miserable son of a bitch. Told me once, ‘I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.’” He raised an eyebrow and nodded at the boy. “Just the way he was. Probably ain’t right to talk like that but he was never one to try to tell you what a sweetheart he was.”

  After saying their good-byes, the father, son, and mother walked across the parking lot. The mother put her arm through the boy’s and squeezed it tight.

  “What’d you and your grandfather talk about?”

  “Suicide.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Thinks it’s fine,” he said.

  “I don’t know what makes them think they have the right,” she said.

  “They’re a different generation,” the father said. He unlocked the car doors and they climbed in.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can’t do that to your family.”

  “I’m sure he thought he was doing them a favor,” the father said.

  “If he even thought about them at all.”

  “I’m just saying he probably felt like he was a burden.”

  “It’s selfish,” she said.

  “Can we talk about something else?” the father said. “Something decent?”

  “Yes,” said the mother. “You’re right.”

  “Thank you.”

  A moment of silence passed before the boy blurted out, “I don’t want to move to Pennsylvania.”

  “Did you hear your father?” the mother said. “He drove eight hours to spend the weekend with us—the least we can do is make it time well spent. Right?”

  The boy remained silent.

  “Well?” the mother asked again.

  “This is fucked,” he whispered.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” said the boy.

  “What did you say?”

  “We’re so screwed up.”

  The mother spun in her seat and shot a finger in the boy’s face. “Don’t you ever say that about my family. You don’t have the right. Did you ever stop to think why we’re in this mess?”

  “Back off,” the father hollered. “The both of you.”

  The mother turned and sat back in her seat. The car was silent until the boy heard the mother’s pained and sporadic breathing.

  “We’re fine,” she sobbed. “Everything is fine.” Her voice was hollow and aching. “It’s just the funeral,” she said. “Everyone’s a little emotional, t
hat’s all. A little overtired—we just need some rest. Everything’s fine,” she repeated. “We’re fine.”

  The boy wanted to open the door and jump from the moving vehicle, haul ass into the woods, and hide there. Instead, he found himself pondering Lawrence’s suicide. He tried to imagine what he might do in the position of Lawrence’s children—if it had been his father to put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. What would he do with the pistol that had taken his father’s life? Of course he would have to wait for the police to finish their investigation and rule out wrongdoing before he could even have access to it, but after that, what?

  The boy imagined retrieving it—bagged as it had been found—and some night, after his mother had gone to sleep, he would take it to the kitchen sink and wash the sidearm free of his father’s remains. Covering the kitchen table with newspaper, he would disassemble the gun and clean its intricacies to the best of his ability. Oiling the many moving parts, he would put it back together and wrap the gun in the light-blue felt of a Crown Royal bag. Then what? Sell it? The thought sickened him. Bury it? It seemed such a waste.

  The boy leaned his face against the cool glass of the window and watched the passing world. They were nearly home and the car was quiet. He turned away from the window, where everything was dark and indistinguishable, and looked at the shadowed dome of his father’s head. He was happy it was whole. He was glad he didn’t have to see inside.

  14

  In school the following Monday, Colleen held the boy’s hand in front of people. She held her head up to be kissed when they parted, even when the hallway was busy with other students. The boy did his best at making minor, casual objections, but he finally blurted out, “We can’t do this.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” he said.

  “We’re together.”

  “I’m going to get my ass kicked.”

  “You’re afraid of them,” she said.

  “Shut up.” He stormed down the hallway to his next class.

  Later in the day Colleen approached him at his locker. She tugged on his shirt.

  “I’ll talk to George,” she said. “I’ll make him understand.”