Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  It wasn’t in the lot. Rourke poked around and found it off by itself in a little nook behind the club, where it wouldn’t get run into by drunks. He was going back tonight to give Mr. Vick Barnes a taste of his own medicine, plus a little extra for the vigorish.

  “You can’t,” Gold said. “They’ll know it was you.”

  “Let ’em prove it.”

  Gold had understood from the start where this story was taking him, even if Rourke hadn’t. When he said “I’ll do it,” he felt as if he were reading the words from a script.

  “No need, Brian. I got it covered.”

  “Wait a minute. Just hang on.” Gold put the receiver down and took care of an old woman who was renting The Sound of Music. Then he picked it up and said, “They’ll bust you for sure.”

  “Look, I can’t let this guy fuck me over and just walk away. Next thing, everybody in town’ll be lining up to give me the wood.”

  “I told you, I’ll handle it. Not tonight—there’s a talent show at school. Thursday.”

  “You sure, Brian?”

  “I said I’d do it. Didn’t I just say I’d do it?”

  “Only if you really want to. Okay? Don’t feel like you have to.”

  Rourke stopped by the store Thursday afternoon with instructions and equipment: two gallons of Olympic redwood stain to pour over the BMW, a hunting knife to slash the tires and score the paint, and a crowbar to break the windshield. Gold was to exercise extreme caution. He should work fast. He should leave his car running and pointed in the direction of a clear exit. If for any reason things didn’t look right he should leave immediately.

  They loaded the stuff in the trunk of Gold’s car.

  “Where are you going to be?” Gold asked.

  “Chez Nicole. Same place you’d have gone if you had any class.”

  “I had a good sole meunière last time I was there.”

  “Prime rib for this bad boy. Rare. Taste of blood, eh, Brian?”

  Gold watched him drive off. It was a warm day, the third in a row. Last week’s snow had turned gray and was offering up its holdings of beer cans and dog turds. The gutters overflowed with runoff, and the sun shone on the wet pavement and the broken glass in front of Domino’s, which had abruptly closed three weeks earlier. Rourke’s brake lights flashed. He stopped and backed up. Gold waited while the electric window descended, then leaned toward the car.

  “Careful, Brian, okay?”

  “You know me.”

  “Don’t get caught. I have to say, that’s something you definitely want to avoid.”

  Gold drove to the club at eleven-thirty, with the idea there wouldn’t be much coming and going at that hour on a weeknight. The casual drinkers would already be home, the serious crowd settling in for the duration. A dozen or so cars were scattered across the lot. Gold backed into a space as close to the rear of the building as he could get. He turned the engine off and looked around, then popped the trunk, took the crowbar, and moved into the shadows around back. The BMW was parked where Rourke said it would be, in the short driveway between the alley and the dumpster.

  Gold had no intention of using the stain or the knife. Rourke had suffered a dent; that was no reason to destroy a man’s car. One good dent in return would even things up, and settle his own debt in the bargain. If Rourke wanted more, he was strictly on his own.

  Gold walked around the car—a beautiful machine, a gleaming black 328 with those special wheels that gang members were supposedly killing one another over. The dealership where Gold took his Toyota for repairs also had the local BMW boutique, and he always paid a visit to the showroom while he waited. He liked to open and close the doors, sit in the leather seats and work the gears, compare options and prices. Fully loaded, this model ran in the neighborhood of forty grand. Gold couldn’t imagine Mr. Vick Barnes qualifying for that kind of a loan on a deejay’s salary, so he must have paid in cash. Rourke was right. He was dealing.

  Gold hefted the crowbar. He felt the driving pulse of the music through the club walls, heard the vocalist—he wouldn’t call him a singer—shouting along with menace and complaint. It was a strange thing. You sold drugs to your own people, ruined their neighborhoods, turned their children into prostitutes and thugs, and you became a big shot. A man of property and respect. But try to run a modest business, bring something good into their community, and you were a bloodsucking parasite. Mr. Gold. He smacked the bar against his palm. He was thinking maybe he’d do a little something with that knife after all. The stain too. He could find uses for the stain.

  A woman laughed in the parking lot and a man answered in a low voice. Gold crouched behind the dumpster and waited until their headlights raked the darkness and vanished. His hand was tight around the metal. He could feel his own rage, and distrusted it. Only a fool acted out of anger. No, he would do exactly what was fair, and nothing more.

  Gold walked around to the driver’s side of the BMW. He held the crowbar with both hands and touched the curved end against the door at bumper height, where Rourke’s car would have been hit. He adjusted his feet. He touched the door again, then cocked the crowbar like a bat and swung it with everything he had, knowing just as the act passed beyond recall how absolutely he had betrayed himself. The shock of the blow raced up his arms. He dropped the crowbar and left it where it fell.

  Victor Emmanuel Barnes found it there three hours later. He knelt and ran his hand along the jagged cleft in the car door, flecks of paint curling away under his fingertips. He knew exactly who had done this. He picked up the crowbar, tossed it on the passenger seat, and drove straight to the apartment building where Devereaux lived. As he sped through the empty streets he howled and pounded the dashboard. He stopped in a shriek of brakes and seized the crowbar and ran up the stairs to Devereaux’s door. He pounded the door with his fist. “I told you next week, you motherfucker! I told you next week!” He heard voices, but when no one answered him he cursed them and began working at the door with the crowbar. It creaked and strained. Then it gave and Barnes staggered into the apartment, yelling for Devereaux.

  But Devereaux wasn’t home. His sixteen-year-old nephew Marcel was spending the night on the couch after helping Devereaux’s little girl write an essay. He stood facing the door while Barnes jimmied it, his aunt and cousins and grandmother gathered behind him at the end of the hall, shaking and clinging to one another. When Barnes stumbled bellowing inside, Marcel tried to push him back out. They struggled. Barnes shoved him away and swung the crowbar, catching Marcel right across the temple. The boy’s eyes went wide. His mouth opened. He sank to his knees and pitched facedown on the floor. Barnes looked at Marcel, then at the old woman coming toward him. “Oh God,” he said, and dropped the crowbar and ran down the stairs and outside to his car. He drove to his grandmother’s house and told her what had happened, and she held his head in her lap and rocked over him and wept and prayed. Then she called the police.

  Marcel’s death was on the morning news. Every half hour they ran the story, with pictures of both him and Barnes. Barnes was shown being hustled into a cruiser, Marcel standing before his exhibit at the All-County Science Fair. He had been an honors student at Morris Fields High, a volunteer in the school’s Big Brother program, and a past president of the Christian Youth Association. There was no known motive for the attack.

  Camera crews from the TV stations followed students from their buses to the school doors, asking about Marcel and getting close-ups of the most distraught. At the beginning of second period, the principal came on the PA system and said that crisis counselors were available for those who wished to speak to them. Any students who felt unable to continue with their classes that day were to be excused.

  Garvey Banks looked over at his girlfriend, Tiffany. Neither of them had known Marcel, but it was nice out and there wasn’t anything happening at school except people crying and carrying on. When he nodded toward the door, she gave him her special smile and gathered her books and collected a pass from the te
acher. Garvey waited a few minutes, then followed her outside.

  They walked up to Bickel Park and sat on a bench overlooking the pond. Two old white ladies were throwing bread to the ducks. The wet grass steamed in the sun. Tiffany put her head on Garvey’s shoulder and hummed to herself. Garvey wanted to feel sad over that boy getting killed, but it was good being warm like this and close to Tiffany.

  They sat on the bench in the sun. They didn’t talk; they hardly ever talked. Tiffany liked to look at things and be quiet in herself. Pretty soon they’d rent a movie and go over to Garvey’s. They’d kiss. Though they wouldn’t take any chances, they’d make each other happy. All of that was going to happen, and Garvey was glad to wait for it.

  After a while Tiffany stopped humming. “Ready, Gar?”

  “Ready.”

  They stopped in at Gold’s Video, and Garvey took Breakfast at Tiffany’s off the shelf. They’d rented it the first time because of the title, then it became their favorite movie. Someday, they were going to live in New York City and know all kinds of people—that was for sure.

  Mr. Gold was slow writing up the receipt. He looked sick. He counted out Garvey’s change and said, “Why aren’t you kids in school?”

  Garvey felt cornered, and decided to blow a little smoke at the man. “Friend of mine got killed,” he said.

  “You knew him? You knew Marcel Foley?”

  “Yes sir. From way back.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Marcel? Hey, Marcel was the best. You got a problem, you took it to Marcel. You know, trouble with your girlfriend or whatever. Trouble at home. Trouble with a friend. Marcel had this thing—right, Tiff? He could bring people together. He just had this easy way and he talked to you like you were important, like everybody’s important. He could get people to come together, know what I’m saying? Come together and get on with it. Peacemaker. Marcel was a peacemaker. And that’s the best thing you can be.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Gold said. “It is.” He put his hands on the counter and lowered his head.

  Then Garvey saw that he was grieving, and it came to him how unfair a thing it was that Marcel Foley had been struck down with his life still before him, all his sunny days stolen away. It was wrong, and Garvey knew it would not end there. He touched Mr. Gold’s shoulder. “That man’ll get his,” he said. “He’ll get what’s coming to him. Count on it.”

  Smorgasbord

  “A prep school in March is like a ship in the doldrums.” Our history master said this, as if to himself, while we were waiting for the bell to ring after class. He stood by the window and tapped the glass with his ring in a dreamy, abstracted way meant to make us think he’d forgotten we were there. We were supposed to get the impression that when we weren’t around he turned into someone interesting, someone witty and profound, who uttered impromptu bons mots and had a poetic vision of life.

  The bell rang.

  I went to lunch. The dining hall was almost empty, because it was a free weekend and most of the boys had gone to New York, or home, or to their friends’ homes, as soon as their last class let out. About the only ones left were foreigners and scholarship students like me and a few other untouchables of various stripes. The school had laid on a nice lunch for us, cheese soufflé, but the portions were small and I went back to my room still hungry. I was always hungry.

  Sleety rain fell past my window. The snow on the quad looked grimy; it had melted above the underground heating pipes, exposing long brown lines of mud.

  I couldn’t get to work. On the next floor down someone kept playing “Mack the Knife.” That one song incessantly repeating itself made the dorm seem not just empty but abandoned, as if those who’d left were never coming back. I cleaned my room, then tried to read. I looked out the window. I sat down at my desk and studied the new picture my girlfriend had sent me, unable to imagine her from it; I had to close my eyes to do that, and then I could see her, her solemn eyes and the heavy white breasts she would gravely let me hold sometimes, but not kiss. Not yet, anyway. I had a promise, though. That summer, as soon as I got home, we were going to become lovers. “Become lovers.” That was what she’d said, very deliberately, listening to the words as she spoke them. All year I had repeated them to myself to take the edge off my loneliness and the fits of lust that made me want to scream and drive my fists through walls. We were going to become lovers that summer, and we were going to be lovers all through college, true to each other even if we ended up thousands of miles apart again, and after college we were going to marry and join the Peace Corps and do something together that would help people. This was our plan. Back in September, the night before I left for school, we wrote it all down along with a lot of other specifics concerning our future: number of children (six), their names, the kinds of dogs we would own, a sketch of our perfect house. We sealed the paper in a bottle and buried it in her backyard. On our golden anniversary we’d dig it up and show it to our children and grandchildren to prove that dreams can come true.

  I was writing her a letter when Crosley came to my room. Crosley was a science whiz. He won the science prize every year and spent his summers working as an intern in different laboratories. He was also a fanatical weight lifter. His arms were so knotty he had to hold them out from his sides as he walked, as if he were carrying buckets. Even his features seemed muscular. His face had a permanent flush. Crosley lived down the hall by himself in one of the only singles in the school. He was said to be a thief; that supposedly was the reason he’d ended up without a roommate. I didn’t know if it was true and tried to avoid forming an opinion on the matter, but whenever we passed each other I felt embarrassed and looked away.

  Crosley leaned in the door and asked me how things were.

  I said okay.

  He stepped inside and gazed around the room, tilting his head to read my roommate’s pennants and the titles of our books. I was uneasy. I said, “So what can I do for you?” not meaning to sound as cold as I did but not exactly regretting it either.

  He caught my tone and smiled. It was the kind of smile you put on when you pass a group of people you suspect are talking about you; his usual expression, in other words.

  He said, “You know García, right?”

  “García? Sure. I think so.”

  “You know him,” Crosley said. “He runs around with Hidalgo and those guys. He’s the tall one.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know who García is.”

  “Well, his stepmother’s in New York for a fashion show or something, and tonight she’s going to drive up and take him out to dinner. She told him to bring along some friends. You want to come?”

  “What about Hidalgo and the rest of them?”

  “They’re at some kind of polo deal in Maryland. Buying horses. Or ponies, I guess it would be.”

  The notion of someone my age buying ponies to play a game was so unexpected that I couldn’t quite take it in. “Jesus,” I said.

  “How about it?” Crosley said. “You want to come?”

  I’d never even spoken to García. He was the nephew of a famous dictator, and all his friends were nephews and cousins of other dictators. They lived as they pleased here. Most of them kept cars a few blocks from the campus, though that was completely against the rules. They were cocky and prankish and charming. They moved everywhere in a body, sunglasses pushed up on their heads and jackets slung over their shoulders, twittering all at once like birds, chinga this and chinga that. The headmaster was completely buffaloed. After Christmas vacation a bunch of them came down with gonorrhea, and all he did was call them in and advise them that they should not be in too great a hurry to lose their innocence. It became a school joke. All you had to do was say “innocence” and everyone would crack up.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Come on,” Crosley said.

  “But I don’t even know the guy.”

  “So what? I don’t either.”

  “Then why did he ask you?”

  �
�I was sitting next to him at lunch.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “That explains you. What about me? How come he asked me?”

  “He didn’t. He told me to bring someone else.”

  “What, just anybody? Just whoever happened to present himself to your attention?”

  Crosley shrugged.

  “Sounds great,” I said. “Sounds like a recipe for a really memorable evening.”

  “You got something better to do?” Crosley asked.

  “No,” I said.

  The limousine picked us up under the awning of the headmaster’s house. The driver, an old man, got out slowly and then slowly adjusted his cap before opening the door for us. García slid in beside the woman in back. Crosley and I sat across from them on seats that pulled down. I caught her scent immediately. For some years afterward I bought perfume for women, and I was never able to find that one.

  García erupted into Spanish as soon as the driver closed the door behind me. He sounded angry, spitting words at the woman and gesticulating violently. She rocked back a little, then let loose a burst of her own. I stared openly at her. Her skin was very white. She wore a black cape over a black dress cut just low enough to show her pale throat and the bones at the base of her throat. Her mouth was red. There was a spot of rouge high on each cheek, not rubbed in to look like real color but left there carelessly, or carefully, to make you think again how white her skin was. Her teeth were small and sharp looking, and she bared them in concert with certain gestures and inflections. As she talked her pointed little tongue flicked in and out.

  She wasn’t a lot older than we were.

  She said something definitive and cut her hand through the air. García began to answer her but she said “No!” and chopped the air again. Then she turned and smiled at Crosley and me. It was a completely false smile. She said, “Where would you fellows like to eat?” Her voice sounded lower in English, even a little harsh. She called us “fallows.”