I Know This Much Is True (31 page)

For the week or so after Penny Ann disappeared during the snowstorm, the newspaper printed her picture—first on the front page, and then in the middle pages, and then not at all. At school, her empty chair, her sloppy desk with its contents protruding, became harder and harder to sit next to. Her shabby blue sweater had been balled up and jammed in there. One sleeve, threadbare and loaded with what my mother called “sweater pills,” hung halfway to the floor. I asked to have my seat changed, but Miss Higgins denied the request.

Then one day Penny Ann’s face was back on the front page, enlarged. GIRL’S BODY FOUND AT FALLS, the headline declared. The paper said Penny Ann’s unknown killer had broken her neck and taken off all her clothes—details that both scared and baffled me. It was the middle of February. There was a foot of snow. Had making her cold been part of her torture?

I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 202

202

WALLY LAMB

In the wake of Penny Ann’s unsolved murder, I began to resurrect her in my nightmares. In one dream, she was giving me a ride on her new Shetland pony when the spooked animal began galloping without warning toward the edge of the Falls. In another, she kept daring me to lick a skeleton. In a third dream, Miss Haas announced matter-of-factly over the intercom that Penny’s murderer had come to our school for a visit and was now going to kill the kindergartners. When I had these nightmares, I would scream out and my mother would come stumbling into Thomas’s and my room. She’d rub my arm and tell me I was safe and let me leave the light on. Illuminated but still too afraid to sleep, I’d hang my head over the edge of the top bunk and watch my sleeping brother—lis-ten to the evenness of his breathing, count his breaths into the hundreds—until his repose became my own.

At school, we held a penny drive in Penny Ann Drinkwater’s honor. Our class was in charge, and Miss Higgins chose me and my brother to be the “bankers,” an appointment that inflated me with a sense of importance. The job required us to separate and walk each morning from classroom to classroom, up and down rows, holding out the cardboard buckets into which kids dropped their nickels and dimes and pennies. Ralph Drinkwater, Penny’s brother, was in Mrs.

Jeffrey’s class. He never gave any money, never even looked at the bucket when I passed by his desk, even when I dared to pause for a second and wait. One morning, when Thomas was collecting in Mrs.

Jeffrey’s room, Ralph kicked him in the leg. Thomas reported what had happened, but Ralph denied it and Mrs. Jeffrey said it had probably been an accident. That same day, out at recess, I saw Ralph trip a boy during a game of Red Rover, Red Rover. His victim had been barreling full force toward the human chain which the game obliged him to break through. When Ralph tripped him, the boy fell face first on the blacktop and skidded, and by the time the teacher on duty had been summoned, he was a bloody, shrieking mess with red teeth and a raw meat chin. I didn’t squeal on Ralph the way I would have squealed on his sister. Penny Ann had been an annoyance; her brother was lethal. He, too, began to menace me in my dreams.

I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 203

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE

203

With the money we collected from the penny drive, the school bought a small willow tree and a plaque. By then, the air had warmed and the Pawtucket Red Sox had resumed play and even the most stubborn gray gutter ice had melted and trickled down the storm drains. Penny Ann’s mother came to the tree-planting ceremony at the edge of the schoolyard. She had a single eyebrow like Penny’s and straight black hair and big dark circles under her eyes that made her look like a raccoon. Earlier that week, Miss Higgins had made us write essays on what we would always remember about our dear friend Penny Ann. Unlike my brother, I usually knew what teachers were after and had written so sentimentally that I was one of the students chosen to read my tribute aloud into the micro-phone. My words brought tears to the eyes of the adults at the tree-planting, Penny Ann’s mother and the lady reporter from the
Daily
Record
and Miss Haas included. Miss Haas’s tears surprised me.

Our principal had a reputation for being mean and “strictly business.” Beyond that, she and I had collaborated in making Penny Ann’s life miserable not twenty-four hours before her abduction and murder. Together, we had made her cry. Had made her bark like a dog. But when I walked back to my metal folding chair after reading my essay, Miss Haas reached out, took my hand in her own liver-spotted hand, and squeezed it. During the ceremony, Ralph Drinkwater stood beside his mother. (No father materialized, not even talk of a father.) Ralph behaved poorly during the speech-making, I remember, fidgeting so badly that his mother had to yank his arm twice and even swat him one in front of the entire school.

FORMER NEIGHBOR CHARGED IN GIRL’S DEATH, the newspaper announced one morning during the summer. Now the killer had a name, Joseph Monk, and a face. “This guy is pure evil,” my stepfather told my mother that morning at breakfast after he’d read aloud the details of Monk’s confession. “The electric chair’s too good for
this
guy after what he did to that poor little kid.”

Neither Ray nor my mother knew I was within earshot—in the pantry adjacent to the kitchen, making toast. Their strategy had been to avoid talking about our murdered classmate in front of I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 204

204

WALLY LAMB

Thomas and me—to shield us, I suppose, from a situation we had been facing every day at school, anyway.

“They ought to take him out somewhere and beat his head in with baseball bats,” Ray continued. “Snap
his
neck just like he snapped
hers.
”

“Okay, okay,” my mother said. She told Ray she didn’t even want to think about that poor little girl and rushed from the room in tears. Ray slapped the newspaper back down on the table and went after her.

I walked into the kitchen and picked up the newspaper. Brought it with me back into the privacy of the pantry where I stood, trans-fixed, staring and staring at the photo of “pure evil” being led up the police station steps. I had expected a monster—someone dirty and ugly with wild hair and crazy eyes. Someone like the crazy man who had gotten on the city bus that time and sat next to my mother and touched her leg. But Joseph Monk had short hair and black glasses, a half-smile on his lips, a plaid short-sleeve shirt.

I was still staring at Joseph Monk’s ordinary looks when my toast popped up, startling me, and I saw, in the toaster’s chrome face, my own face, familiar and strange. And when my brother walked sleepily, innocently, into the kitchen that morning, I remember feeling, suddenly, alone and afraid—as untwinned as Ralph Drinkwater.

After a while, Ralph disappeared from the hallways at River Street School. It wasn’t a noticeable exit; I remember his absence dawning on me after the fact. He resurfaced years later during my sophomore year of high school, when he slouched into Mr. LoPresto’s American history class midsemester and handed him an “add” slip.

I recognized him immediately but was surprised by his size. I was, at fifteen, a backup forward on Kennedy High’s JV basketball team and already wearing shoes three sizes bigger than my stepfather’s. Sometimes at supper I ate third and fourth helpings now, and drank milk in such vast quantity that my mother would watch with a combination of awe and fear. I had an inch and a half and twelve pounds on my brother. Ralph Drinkwater had seemed big and tough and intimidating at River Street School. Now he was a runt.

I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 205

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE

205

“Drinkwater, eh?” Mr. LoPresto said, reading the slip. “Well, that’s what I always say. When you’re thirsty, drink water.” Several of the students rolled their eyes and groaned, but Ralph betrayed no reaction whatsoever. LoPresto assigned him the empty desk at the back of the room next to mine. On the way there, Ralph glanced at me for a half-second with what may or may not have been a flicker of recognition.

For the next several weeks, nothing much happened in American history. At the front of the room, LoPresto talked and paced and hiked up his pants; in back by the windows, Ralph slouched in his seat and sometimes dozed. Then one day, there was an unexpected showdown between the two.

Over the clank of the radiator, Mr. LoPresto was droning on and on about Manifest Destiny. Chin resting in the palm of my propped-up hand, half-stupid from too much monologue and radiator heat, I was listlessly recording notes about America’s sacred, Darwinian duty to spread Democracy when, next to me, Ralph Drinkwater laughed out loud. A belly laugh, public and unmistakable.

Mr. LoPresto stopped talking and squinted back at Ralph, whose laughter was immediately interesting to him. To all of us. Ralph’s outburst was the only interesting thing that had happened all period.

“Do you find something amusing, Mr. . . . uh . . .”

LoPresto grabbed for the seating chart in an effort to refresh his memory as to Ralph’s existence. “If you find something comical, Mr.

Go Drink Water, then maybe you’d like to share it with the rest of us.

We all like a good joke, don’t we, historians? Please. Tell us. What’s so funny?”

There was a long pause, I remember—a standoff. Ralph’s face was a smirk, but I saw small tremors in his hands. His foot was tapping the linoleum a mile a minute. As the rest of us waited, I glanced over at his notebook. He had recorded nothing about Manifest Destiny but, instead, had drawn a bizarre caricature of Mr. LoPresto. In the picture, our teacher stood stark naked, equipped with both a baseball bat–sized hard-on and a pair of breasts that rivaled Jayne Mansfield’s.

Ralph had sunk an ax into LoPresto’s head.

I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 206

206

WALLY LAMB

“I
repeat,
” Mr. LoPresto said from the front of the room. “What’s so
funny
?”

He would not have challenged most of the other boys in our class: Hank Witkiewicz, who was state wrestling champ, or Kevin Anderson, whose father was the city engineer. He probably wouldn’t even have challenged me, a nonstarter in JV basketball, a pipe fitter’s stepson. But Mr. LoPresto, oblivious of Ralph’s notebook illustration, had misjudged him as an easy target.

“
Nothing’s
funny,” Ralph finally said. LoPresto might have let it go at that—might have continued with his argument about America’s holy duty to expand her territory—but Ralph’s face would not stop smirking.

“No, go on,” Mr. LoPresto said. He parked his big fanny atop his desk. “Tell us.”

“It’s that stuff you’re talking about,” Ralph said. “That stuff about survival of the fittest and the Indians disappearing because of progress.”

I looked down at the notes which, until then, I had been recording in a kind of trance. It surprised me, I remember, that Ralph Drinkwater had been paying better attention than I had.

“Manifest Destiny, you mean?” Mr. LoPresto said. “It’s
funny
to you?”

“It’s bullshit.”

It was shocking enough that Ralph had cursed in class, more shocking still when Mr. LoPresto repeated it.

“Bullshit?” Now our teacher was smirking, too. He smirked at Anderson and Witkiewicz and they smirked back. “
Bullshit?
”

He stood, walked halfway up Ralph’s aisle, and then stopped.

“Well, for your information, Mr. Go Drink Water, I hold a bachelor’s degree in United States history from Fordham University and a master’s degree in nineteenth-century American history from the University of Pennsylvania. I was under the impression that I knew what I was talking about, but I guess I stand corrected. What, pray tell, are
your
credentials?”

“My what?” Ralph said.

I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 207

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE

207

“Your
credentials.
Your
qualifications.
In other words, what makes
you
an expert?”

“I
ain’t
an expert,” Ralph said.

“Oh. You
ain’t
?” Nervous titters from some of the girls.

“No. But I’m a full-blooded Wequonnoc Indian. So I guess not all of us ‘indigenous people’ have ‘disappeared’ like you just said we did.”

Ralph had coffee-colored skin and green eyes, a modified Afro hairstyle. I was pretty sure he was only “full-blooded” for the sake of argument. Mr. LoPresto denied that he had used the term
disappeared.
He suggested that if Ralph listened more carefully, he wouldn’t be so apt to misinterpret. But he
had
used that word; it was right there in front of me in my notes. Mr. LoPresto took a pink slip from his desk, wrote out Ralph’s disciplinary referral, and ordered him down to the office. “Fuckin’ faggot,” Ralph mumbled as he rose from his seat. If Mr. LoPresto heard him, he pretended he hadn’t. The classroom door slammed behind Ralph, and we waited out the sound of his boots clomping down the concrete corridor.

“Well, then, historians,” Mr. LoPresto finally said. He smiled and, with a flourish, extended his hand back at Ralph’s empty seat.

“I guess the Indians have disappeared after all.” Kevin and Hank and some of the others guffawed.

Not me. I was suddenly, powerfully, on Ralph’s side—abruptly filled with an anger that set me shaking, a hot-faced shame that brought water to my eyes. Penny Ann had stolen kids’ food because she was
hungry.
When Ralph had tripped that boy during Red Rover—had kicked my brother in the leg—he’d been tripping and kicking everyone who had stolen from him and lied to him and killed his sister. I had
lied
about those Oreos, knowing—even as a third-grader—that they would believe me, not Penny Ann. I had piously collected pennies on her behalf and then whitewashed her memory at the tree-planting. Had whitewashed my sin.