Original Sins (7 page)

“They wasn't thieves,” Jed called. “They was pioneers. They was better men than you'll ever be, prissing around with your camera like some kind of goddam Yankee newspaper reporter!”

“Jed honey, watch your language,” his mother called.

Jed walked over to the chart. It was two halves of a circle, joined in the center by his and Raymond's names. Radiating out from their names were hundreds of names of ancestors. Whenever he was feeling lousy—like right now when he'd been fighting with Sally, or when he brought home straight C's on his report card, or when they'd lost a ball game—he'd come look at this thing and feel better. He was the hub of his entire family. Its whole purpose appeared to be to bring Jed Tatro into existence. It had taken a dozen generations to get from prison in England to Newland, Tennessee. All these dead people was expecting big things from him, and he intended not to disappoint them. Already he was varsity tackle on a state championship team. And at the end of every year his class had voted him “Best Personality.” He sometimes thought he hated Raymond for his scorn for this chart and his people, and for the way he used this scorn to hurt their mama. Raymond was always penciling in names that no one but him thought was funny—Alger Hiss and Martin Luther King and Stalin and Mae West. Raymond thought he was a regular scream. But it pretty much proved that nobody else did when his class never voted him “Best Sense of Humor.” They never voted old Raymond nothing. In the first place he looked almost thirty years old, with his big thick glasses and thin hair. Most Likely to Recede, they ought to vote him. (Now
that
was funny.) He had no friends. You saw him around school with that Audio-Visual Club bunch—those fairies that put together ham radios from kits. Hundreds of dollars those creeps spent, trying to talk about the weather to a bunch of foreigners. They all dressed like models for a rummage sale—rayon shirts, white socks, sweater vests with reindeers on them, pleated trousers. A bunch of brains. Hell, they played chess on Friday nights when everyone else in town was at the ball games. Yankees mostly. Didn't know no better. Their fathers was chemists and stuff over at the paper plant. One of them's father was that new man at the mill—Mackay or something. Jed's daddy had come home the other night grumbling about Mackay bringing down this faggot from some Yankee university who sat around with a stopwatch timing how long everyone sat in the can.

Jed didn't like to think about his childhood. He'd been scrawny and weak. Raymond and Emily and Donny had been older and had bossed him around. Teachers always mentioned how smart Raymond was, how well he'd done on the tests Jed had just flunked. But he was showing them now. Raymond maybe had the brains, but Jed felt like that he had everything else. He lifted weights every day and probably had the best body in town. Sally said so. He dated Sally, who was the prettiest girl at school in a lot of people's opinions. Their class always voted her “Most Popular Girl.” True, she wasn't putting out for him much. But it was just a question of time. She made him angry sometimes, though—she could be such a prissy little hypocrite. She'd get out there on the gym floor during a pep rally, like this afternoon, and wiggle her ass at the whole entire student body. She'd leap up and try to touch the soles of her saddle shoes to the back of her bouffant hairdo. She'd flash her panties all over town. But get her alone in a car, and she became Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. She'd dribble her tits all up and down the basketball court, but just try to get ahold of one. Either she should put out, or she should make it clear she wouldn't. As things was, about half the time when she said no, she meant yes. But you never knew which was which. Sometimes he suspected she'd like him just to go ahead and do it to her, so she wouldn't have to take responsibility. Girls was like that. They wanted it, but they knew they wasn't supposed to want it, so they tried to get you to force them into it. It got confusing. Sometimes he wished he was a girl and didn't have to be the one to make everything happen. If you was a man, you wasn't supposed to get confused. You was supposed to know all the time what you wanted and how to get it. That was partly why he loved football. Never any question what your goal was. Like Coach Clancy was always saying, “Winning ball games isn't the most important thing, it's the
only
thing. Why, I wouldn't give the steam off of my shit for a man who don't go out there to win.” But win or lose, you knew you could count on every man on that team if you was in trouble. You loved those men like they was your own …
brother
, he started to say, but he hated Raymond.

Raymond locked his door. Sometimes he thought he'd go crazy in this madhouse if he weren't able to lock himself in here. That chart—either it or he had to go one day soon. It made his insane family and their random matings and birthings and wanderings look like the whole point to the universe. There was his name in the center of that demented bunch, with the implication that he was not only accountable to them but inseparable from them. They'd pass some drunken hillbilly on the street when he was little and his mother would say, “Say howdy to Bill Flanders, your fifth cousin twice removed on your daddy's side.” Everybody in this town was related; it was why they were all maniacs. His family were distant cousins to Emily's, as his mother insisted on showing everyone who set foot in the house. One big happy family. One big happy, crazy-as-treed-coons family.

Against one wall was a table holding his stamp albums. Over the table hung a map of the world. Better than anything he loved sorting through the packets of stamps he ordered from New York City and finding one from Mauritania or Sumatra or Afghanistan. In the beginning he'd had to check the map almost constantly. Now he knew where every country was and had a few stamps from most. There were people out there he was not related to. That knowledge was an incredible relief.

People looked at him strangely and asked why he wanted to collect stamps from foreigners. He was never able to answer. He remembered seeing an English stamp on a Christmas card his father received from an army buddy. He'd salvaged it from the garbage and studied it for weeks. One day an acned older boy named Wayne who lived in a house on his paper route invited him inside to see his stamp albums. Raymond had been so enchanted by the huge books filled with colorful stamps from dozens of countries that he scarcely noticed Wayne's hand moving gently but firmly in his pants. He went back often, at first for the stamps Wayne gave him, but soon for the pleasure of his touch and his talk—about other parts of the country his family had lived in. His father, a car salesman, was always on the road in search of a better job. When Wayne moved away, they kissed with tears running down their faces. Wayne presented Raymond with his best album. Raymond hadn't realized until a couple of years later when boys at school began giggling and whispering about homos and queers and faggots that what he and Wayne had done was something to be ashamed of.

Along another wall were shelves filled with his camera equipment—lenses, portable lights, tins of film. He worked for the newspaper. He'd also placed a few pictures with magazines and newspapers in New York City. He had always taken the family photos—endlessly rearranging people and backdrops until everyone lost patience and dispersed. The money from his paper route he used to buy sophisticated cameras and lenses.

He suspected his stamp collection, his photography, had a lot to do with his not making junior varsity football his freshman year. Too small, Coach Clancy said. Try again when he reached his growth. Three years later he was still short and skinny, with that ox of a younger brother to rub it in all the time. Coach Clancy had a huge chest and narrow hips. Destined for lower back pain in late middle age. Veins stood out on his red face. “Yall seniors is good students, but that's about it. It's all most of you'uns can do to stand up on two feet. Tatro over there, he slouches around here all doubled over like a dog trying to hump a football.” Everybody cracked up. They'd been calling him the Ball Banger ever since. That was their idea of a good joke. Ha ha. Coach Clancy was wrong, though: Raymond wasn't a good student. An “underachiever,” the guidance counselor called him. Did well on tests but had lousy grades.

Well, it figured. Jed got cheered for smashing heads. Him, he got called names for trying to stay out of the way and mind his own business. He sometimes thought he and Jed, by unspoken agreement, had laid claims to noncompeting areas. In any physical confrontation, Jed could beat him to a pulp, so he learned to fight with his tongue, mocking people, usually without their knowing it. Sometimes he felt like a gnat buzzing around a lion, just out of reach of its paws, driving it to distraction. But Jed had certainly claimed the more prestigious area in terms of living in Newland. Raymond couldn't help but be aware of the pride in his parents' eyes when their neighbors came over and said, “Some boy, your Jed. Did you see that tackle on the two-yard line against Chattanooga?” His parents had fifty-yard-line seats at the stadium for home games and drove all over the state to away games. They were outraged when Raymond began playing chess on Friday nights. “Your own brother, and you won't even go see him!” his mother shrieked.

“I see him all the time,” Raymond pointed out. “Much more than I want to.” Recently they'd given up, gazing at him glumly as they left the house with their cushions, blanket, and thermos.

Raymond sometimes imagined the town gathered in the football stadium while he stood on the fifty-yard line and flipped through
Natural History
magazine showing his full-color spread on Appalachian wild flowers. Sally Prince would bound out and lead the crowd in spelling out “Trillium.” Everyone would roar with admiration …

Alongside his bed hung several of his favorite pictures—the weathered faces and hands of some people in the area of Kentucky his father came from. One picture, taken from the files of the newspaper office, was of an elephant hanging by its neck from a crane. In 1922 an elephant came to town with the circus. During the parade she trampled to death a boy who was pelting her with watermelon rind. The town tried the elephant, found her guilty, and lynched her. Raymond lay on his bed studying this picture. A crowd of townspeople howled in the foreground. Their faces were distorted with—what? Cruelty? Righteousness? Whatever it was, it made him uneasy. A contact at one of the New York City magazines had offered him a job in a print shop upon graduation from high school. Every time he thought about moving to New York, he got homesick. How could he possibly leave everything and everyone familiar to him? He couldn't. It was out of the question. But at odd moments, he found himself gazing at that dangling elephant.

Chapter Two
The Sadie Hawkins Day Dance

The gym was decorated with posters of Li'l Abner and Daisy Mae, of hound dogs and stills and outhouses with half-moon holes in the doors. The boys were wearing bib overalls with no shirts, straw hats. Their feet were bare, and some carried jugs and chewed on pieces of straw. The girls wore tight short shorts with straw sticking out of the pockets, halter tops, no shoes. They'd rouged their cheeks and drawn freckles with eyebrow pencil. It was hard to tell one person from another. Except that Emily had no difficulty picking out Sally. She sat, smiling, on Jed's back as he did pushups. A crowd of admirers counted: “… thirty-four, thirty-five …”

“Do you see what your gorgeous brother is up to?” she asked Raymond, who sat beside her on the bleachers gazing down at the gym floor.

“Yeah. Isn't he wonderful? I just can't figure out how he's become such an exhibitionist. He used to be a shy little punk. Remember? He could hardly open his mouth without blushing and ducking his head.” Raymond demonstrated. Emily laughed.

They sat in silence. The athletes and the girls in the social clubs were monopolizing the area in front of the bandstand. They barn-danced to the country music being played by men in white Western suits, string ties, and rhinestone-studded shirts, cowboy hats and boots.

Sally looked into the bleachers and saw Emily and Raymond. She sighed. Poor Emily. She just didn't know how to have fun. And Raymond … well, Raymond was hopeless, was all. He didn't even try. There he sat in his long-sleeved rayon shirt. You'd never know one of the best dressers in the whole school was his brother.

She looked around the gym. She loved organizing parties and watching her friends enjoy them. Maybe that was why Emily and Raymond bothered her. They reminded her of the little match girl in the fairy tale who stood in the snow, dressed in rags, and watched the people in the restaurant laughing and eating. But they didn't have to stay out in the cold. They chose to. Stubborn.

“Don't look now, but we're being watched,” Sally murmured in Jed's ear as he crushed her to his chest and swung her around.

Jed looked up and moaned, “Lord, they look like chaperones.” He whirled her again and yelped like a beaten dog. He felt good! He loved the way his body moved—dancing, doing pushups, playing ball. He knew that Raymond had contempt for these things, but to hell with Raymond.

“Shoot boys, this is living, ain't it?” he yelled in an exaggerated hillbilly accent to Bobby.

“Lord, you'd better know it!” Bobby called back. “Hell, I ain't had this much fun since my hound dog treed a skunk!” “God, I'm freezing,” Emily muttered. “You ought to be, in that handkerchief,” Raymond replied, gesturing to her bandanna halter. He put his arm around her—under the pretense of warming her, but actually because he found her touching. She tried hard to participate in this crap. He found it difficult to believe she could want to. She was dressed like the other girls, but she couldn't carry it off. She looked white and cold and self-conscious.

He had already accepted that he would never be “one of the boys,” with a case of Bud in his trunk and a pack of Trojan Enz in his glove compartment. He was beginning to take pride in it. Last fall he'd gone hunting with Jed and two of his dumb football friends, Hank and Bobby. Raymond wanted to do a photo-series on hunting. Hank's family had a hunting shack on the side of Buck Mountain. Their Jeep lurched along a rutted dirt track for miles. The shack consisted of a ten-by-ten room, lean-to kitchen, and attached latrine. Bunks along the wall, chairs and table, wood stove.