The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (92 page)

We have the
nice
bus driver today—the one who says, “Hey, whaddaya got in there?” and pulls candy out of your ears. Last time we came downtown, we got the grouchy driver with no thumb. Ma thinks maybe he lost it in the war or in a machine. She told me not to look at it if I was afraid of it, but I did look. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to but I did.

Here’s the five-and-ten. Ma lifts me up and I pull the cord. “See you later, alligator!” the bus driver says when we get off. Ma smiles and puts her hand to her mouth, and Thomas says nothing. From the safety of the sidewalk, I yell, “After a while, crocodile!” The driver laughs. He makes his fingers into a “V” and slaps the bus doors shut.

We walk over to the show. There’s a line at the ticket booth. The kids right in front of us are big kids. Wiseguys. “Well, next time,
bring your birth certificate then!” the ticket lady yells. It’s the crippled lady. Sometimes she works inside at the candy counter and sometimes she sells the tickets. Her and this other lady switch around. Ma says the crippled lady got polio before they had polio shots. Maybe that’s why she’s always crabby.

Inside, a bulgy-eyed man rips our tickets and gives Thomas and me our free back-to-school pencil boxes. With his pen, he makes an X on the back of our hands. “One to a customer,” he tells Ma. “I mark them so I can tell if some kid tries to pull a fast one.”

I want to go all the way down in front, but Ma says no, it will hurt our eyes. She makes us stop halfway. Here’s how we’re sitting: first Thomas, then Ma, then me on the end. “Now, don’t open your pencil boxes,” Ma says.

The man in charge is called the husher. He has a uniform and a flashlight, and he’s very, very tall. His job is to yell at kids when they put their feet on the seats in front of them. If they answer him back, he shines his flashlight right in their face.

They show cartoons first: Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Tweety, Road Runner.
Beep-beep! Beep-beep!
On the radio, they said they were showing ten cartoons, but they don’t. They show eight. I’m only on my eighth finger when the Three Stooges come on.

Ma doesn’t like the Three Stooges. When Moe pokes his fingers in Larry’s eyes, Ma leans over and whispers, “Don’t you ever try anything like that now.” Her voice in my ear tickles—makes me scrunch up my shoulder. In this one, the Three Stooges are bakers. They just finished decorating this fancy cake for a snotty rich lady, and she’s yelling at them. Then Larry slips and falls back against Curly and Curly bumps into the rich lady and she falls right into the cake! All three of us laugh—Thomas and Ma and me. From this side, you can’t even tell my mother has a funny lip. You can only tell from Thomas’s side.

There are lots of bad kids here with no mothers or fathers. They’re talking loud and fooling around instead of watching the movie. “
I tawt I taw a puddy cat!”
one kid keeps yelling out, even though the cartoons are over. Every time he yells it, other kids
laugh. Some boys in front have flattened their popcorn boxes and they’re throwing them up in the air. The boxes make shadows on the screen.

“Can we get some popcorn?” I whisper to Ma.

“No,” she whispers back.

“Why not?”

“Just watch the movie.”

Thomas taps Ma’s arm and I lean over to listen. “Ma, I’m thinking about her again,” he says. “What should I do?”

“Think about something else,” she says. “Watch the movie.”

Thomas means Miss Higgins. In just one more week, we’ll be third-graders and Miss Higgins will be our new teacher. She’s the meanest teacher in our whole school. All summer long, Thomas has been getting stomachaches thinking about her.

Thomas opens his pencil box even though we’re not supposed to. He starts chewing on one of his brand-new pencils like it’s corn on the cob. The last time Ray caught Thomas putting stuff in his mouth, he said, “One of these days I’m going to get a roll of EB green tape and tape up your hands. See if
that
cures you! See how you like
them
apples!”

I open my pencil box, too. If Thomas can, then so can I. I bend and bend my eraser to see how far I can bend it, and it boings out of my hand and into the dark.

“See!” Ma says. “What did I tell you?”

She says I can’t look for it under the seats because it’s too filthy down there and because it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. One time when Ma was a little girl, she went to the show and saw a rat under her seat. It was at a different movie theater than this one. They tore it down. People used to call it the “scratch house” because the seats had fleas.

Down in front, someone yells a naughty word. Another kid screams.
Ping!
Something hits the back of my seat.

“Hey! Cut it out down there!” a voice yells. I look back. It’s not the husher. It’s Bulgy Eyes, the man who gave us our pencil boxes. Ma says those bad kids better behave because he sounds like he
really means business. She says Bulgy Eyes is the boss even though the husher is bigger. Now Thomas has his eraser in his mouth. He’s sucking on it.
Slurp, slurp, slurp.
“What are you doing that for?” I say. He says he’s cleaning it. Which is stupid. It’s already clean. It’s brand new.

The Three Stooges are over and Francis the Talking Mule comes on.
Francis Goes to West Point
. Ma says West Point’s a school. . . . You know what? Last year, at our school, a dog snuck in. He came running into our classroom during spelling and knocked over the easel. All the kids were laughing and saying, “Here, boy! Here, boy!” and Miss Henault made us flip our spelling papers over and put our heads on our desks to calm down. That dog came right up our row. He was tan and white and had a smiley face, and he smelled a little like a sewer. He had a collar on, though, so he must have belonged to somebody. When Mr. Grymkowski pulled him out of our room, he was choking him and that dog made a noise like
gak-gak-gak.

Ping! Ping!
Ma says don’t turn around or we might get hit in the eye. She says someone should complain to the manager before someone gets hurt.
Ping!
We’re cowboys. Bad guys are shooting at us.

My new favorite cowboy show is
The Rifleman
. I used to like
Cheyenne
the best, but now I like
The Rifleman
. Lucas McCain can fire his rifle in three-tenths of a second. Plus he’s nice to his son, Mark McCain. Lucas has to raise Mark all on his own because his wife died. Ray says Lucas McCain used to play baseball before he became a cowboy. For the Chicago Cubs. “He couldn’t hit the ball, and now he can’t act, either, and he’s probably a goddamned millionaire,” Ray said. If you say “damn,” it’s a venial sin, but if you say “goddamn,” then it’s a mortal sin. That’s what the nun told us in catechism. She said every time you sin, it makes a little dirty mark on your soul, and people like Khrushchev and Jayne Mansfield have jet-black souls.

I’m not really paying attention to this movie. I’m watching those bad kids instead—the ones up in front. Popcorn boxes swoop in the dark like bats. Someone yells another bad word. The “P” word. Piss. . . . Sometimes bats come out on our street when it’s getting dark.
They look like birds but they’re not. They trick you.
Ping!

“Piss on you, too!” some kid shouts.

A girl laughs a shrieky laugh.

“
I tawt I taw a puddy cat!
”

The lights come on even though the movie’s still playing. “Hey!” everyone starts going. “Hey!” Then the movie stops.

Bulgy Eyes and the husher walk down the aisle and up on the stage, and Bulgy Eyes starts yelling at us. Ma’s scared. Her hand taps against her mouth like it does when Ray yells. With the lights on, I can see the bad kids better. I see Lonnie Peck and Ralph Drinkwater from our school. Last summer, Lonnie spit on the playground instructor and got kicked off playground for a whole week. He used to come anyway and stand outside and spit at us through the fence. We were supposed to just ignore him. Penny Ann Drinkwater’s up in front, too, sitting by herself. Her and Ralph are twins, like Thomas and me, but Penny Ann stayed back. Ralph’s going to be in fourth, but she’s going to be in our class. She has to have Miss Higgins
twice.
Penny Ann’s a big baby. She cries every single recess. The Drinkwaters and us are the only twins in our whole school. They’re colored kids.

Up on the stage, Bulgy Eyes points his thumb at the husher. “You see this guy here? From now on, him and me are going to be looking for troublemakers. And when we find ’em, we’re going to kick ’em out and not give ’em their money back.
And
call their fathers. Understand?”

“Good,” Ma whispers from behind her hand. “It serves them right.”

Now everyone’s real quiet. Just sitting there. The lights go off. The movie starts up. Bulgy Eyes and the husher walk up and down the aisles. All the bad kids are being good.

Thomas pulls on Ma’s sleeve again. He says he can’t help it—he’s thinking about Miss Higgins so much, he has the runs. He wants Ma to go to the bathroom with him, not me. “Can you stay here by yourself?” Ma asks me. I say yes, and Ma goes up the aisle with Thomas. I hold his pencil box.

Slide it open.

His pencil is rough and bumpy where he chewed it. His eraser’s all wet. If Ray
does
tape up Thomas’s hands, he should do it while it’s still summer vacation because how could Thomas do his work? He’d get in trouble with Miss Higgins right off the bat. I bend Thomas’s eraser way, way back. It goes flying. It was an accident. Cross my heart and hope to die.

We’re not supposed to say that: cross my heart and hope to die. The nun says it’s the exact same thing as swearing. I didn’t say it, though. I just thought it.

Ray swears when he gets mad at Ma. One time he yanked her arm and gave her a black-and-blue, mark and I got so mad, I drew a picture of him with big giant daggers in his head. Then I ripped it up. At first, Ray wasn’t going to let us come to the movies today because movies are nothing but a waste of money. Then he changed his mind. One time, a long long time ago, he came with us to the show—with Ma and me and Thomas. It was on Sunday afternoon. The night before, he and Ma had a big fight and Ray made Ma cry. Then, the next morning, he was nice. He went to Mass with us and we ate at a restaurant and then we came to the movies. We saw
The Wizard of Oz.
Thomas spoiled it, though. Him and his stupid crying. Thomas always wrecks things.

They come back from the bathroom. “Push over, push over,” Ma says. Now Thomas is sitting next to me. He has a box of Good & Plentys. It’s for both of us to share, Ma says, but Thomas gets to hold it because the last time we went to the show and I held the popcorn, I kept stuffing it in my mouth instead of eating it nice so that Thomas wouldn’t get as much. “Take two at a time,” Thomas tells me, holding out the Good & Plenty box. “That’s the rule.” I tell him okay, but I take more than two every single time. One time, I put two fingers down real deep and get five. Thomas doesn’t even realize it. You can always trick Thomas. It’s easy. He doesn’t even know his stupid eraser’s missing.

Here’s what Thomas was crying about that time we saw
The Wizard of Oz:
those flying monkeys. The ones who work for the Wicked Witch and swoop down and kidnap Dorothy. Thomas was
crying so hard that I started crying, too. At first, I didn’t even think they were scary, but then I did. Ray took us out in the lobby and yelled at us and said we were wrecking our mother’s whole nice day. The candy counter lady kept looking at us. That crippled lady. Ray said if we didn’t stop acting like two little scaredy-girls, he was going to take us to a store and buy us dresses. “Suzie and Betty Pinkus, the little scaredy-girls,” he said. That was when we were little—first-graders. If I saw those flying monkeys now, I’d just laugh because they’d be so fake.

Last year at recess, the third-graders used to sing this song:

First grade, babies!

Second grade, dumb!

Third grade, angels!

Fourth grade, bums!

This year,
we
can sing it. Thomas and me. Because we’re big. By the way, my muscles are bigger than Thomas’s.

Now
I
have to go to the bathroom. “Well, why didn’t you go before when your brother went?” Ma leans past Thomas and whispers. Her mouth is so close to my ear, she gets spit in it. I tell her I didn’t have to go until just now. It’s okay, I say. I’m big. I can go by myself. So she lets me. Thomas holds my pencil box because I held his.

I begin walking up the long, long aisle. At first, I’m a little afraid, but then I’m not.
Ping!
It misses. They better watch out. I’m Mark McCain. My father’s The Rifleman.

I like being out here in the lobby all by myself. At the soda machine, a man is buying his little boy a grape soda. I stop to watch the cup drop down, the streams of soda and syrup. “Boy, I’m thirsty,” I say out loud. The boy looks at me, but the man doesn’t.

Downstairs, in the room outside the lavatory, they have ashtrays with sand in them. There’s cigarette butts poking out of the sand. I play with them a little—the cigarette butts are bulldozers. I make bulldozer sounds.

Guess who’s in the bathroom? The husher. He’s leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings. Cigarette smoke swirls around his head. His mouth is a smoke-ring factory.

“I could have worked at the First National this summer,” he says. I’m the only one in there, but he’s watching himself in the mirror. I can’t tell if he’s talking to me. If he can even see me. Maybe I’m invisible. “But then I didn’t because he said he might let me run the projector. Only he hasn’t. Not once.” He makes another smoke ring—a big fat one. A smoke doughnut. He sticks his tongue out and pokes it in the middle. Follows it as it floats away.

“Guess what my mother saw one time in the show?” I say. “A rat.” I didn’t plan on talking. It just came out.

“Big deal,” he says, still looking at himself smoking. “We see ’em all the time in here. They come up from the river.” He has big red pimples on his forehead. “What do you think I cleaned off the top of the candy counter this morning? Rat crap, that’s what. We set traps. You can hear ’em going off in the basement—right during the movie sometimes.
Snap!
The springs are set so tight, it breaks their frickin’ backs.” He chucks his cigarette in one of the toilets, and it makes a little sound like
tsst.