This Boy's Life (16 page)

About halfway through the show, Dwight would take out his old Conn saxophone and finger the stops in time to the music. Sometimes, when he got really carried away, he would forget himself and blow on it, and a squawk would come out.

 

AFTER NORMA GRADUATED from Concrete High she moved down to Seattle. She worked in an office where she met a man named Kenneth who took her for long drives in his Austin Healey sports car and tried to talk her into getting married. Norma called my mother all the time and asked for advice. What should she do? She still loved Bobby Crow, but Bobby wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t even have a job. Kenneth was ambitious. On the other hand, nobody liked him. He had very strong opinions about everything and was also a Seventh-day Adventist. But that wasn’t it, exactly. Kenneth just didn’t have a very good personality.

Then Norma called up and said she’d decided to marry Kenneth. She refused to explain her decision, but insisted it was final. Naturally, she wanted to invite Kenneth to Chinook to meet the family, and it was finally settled that he should come up during Christmas, when Skipper would also be home.

Dwight got the spirit that year. He made a wreath for the door and hung pine boughs all over the living room. A couple of weeks before Christmas he and I drove up into the mountains to get a tree. It was early afternoon, a cold light rain falling. Dwight drank from a pint bottle as we scouted the woods. We found a fine blue spruce growing all by itself in the middle of a clearing, and Dwight let me cut it down while he took nips off his bottle and squinted up at the misty peaks all around us. Once I got the tree down we started wrestling it through the dense growth, back toward the fire road where we’d left the car. We had walked a good distance and the going was rough. I could hear Dwight laboring for breath and muttering when he stumbled. I kept waiting for him to bark at me, but he never did. He was that pleased about Norma coming home.

After dinner that night Dwight went into the living room with a can of spray paint and began to shake it. He was very thorough when it came to painting, and if he was using spray paint he always followed the directions to the letter and shook the can well. The agitator rattled loudly as he swung the can back and forth. Pearl and I were doing our homework at the dining-room table. We pretended not to watch. My mother was out somewhere or else she would’ve asked him what he thought he was doing, and possibly even stopped him.

When he finished shaking the can, Dwight pulled the tree into the middle of the living room and walked around it two or three times. Then, starting at the top and working his way down, he proceeded to spray it with white paint. I thought he meant to put a few splashes here and there to suggest snow, but he sprayed the whole thing—trunk and all. The needles drank up the paint and turned faintly blue again. Dwight put on another coat. It took him three cans before he was done, but the tree stayed white.

By the next day, when we decorated the tree, the needles had already begun to drop off. Every time you touched a limb it set off a little cascade of them. No one said anything. My mother hung a few balls, then sat down and stared at the tree.

The needles kept falling, pattering softly down on the white crepe paper spread around the trunk. By the time Norma and Skipper arrived the tree was half bare. They had driven up together from Seattle; Kenneth had to work, but he was all set to join us the following day.

Norma must have told Bobby Crow she was coming. He showed up just after dinner that night, restless and grim, silent when Skipper tried to banter with him. He took Norma somewhere, then drove her back a couple of hours later. But she didn’t get out of the car. The rest of us sat around in the living room, and watched the lights blink on the tree, and talked about anything but the fact that Norma was still outside with Bobby Crow. The lights didn’t blink at different times like twinkling stars but all at once, flashing on and off like a neon sign outside a roadhouse.

I was in bed when Norma finally came inside and ran to her room, giving long ululating cries that appalled me and made me cringe in anticipation. I heard Pearl try to soothe her, then my mother joined them and I heard her voice too, lower than Pearl’s, the two of them speaking sometimes in turn and sometimes together so that their voices formed one murmurous braid of sound. Skipper shifted in his bed but slept on, and in time, as Norma’s keening subsided, I lay back and went to sleep myself.

 

KENNETH PULLED UP the next afternoon and by dinner-time we all hated him. He knew it, and relished it, even sought it out. As soon as he stepped out of his Austin Healey, he started complaining about the remoteness of the camp and the discomfort of the drive and the imprecision of the directions Norma had left behind for him. He had a fussy, aggrieved voice and thin disappointed lips. He wore a golf cap and perforated leather gloves that snapped across the wrist. He removed one of his gloves as he complained, tugging delicately at each finger, then going on to the next until the glove came free. He took off the other just as slowly and carefully, then turned to Norma. “Don’t I get a kiss?”

She bent forward to peck him on the cheek but he seized her face between his hands and kissed her long and full on the lips. It was obvious that he was French-kissing her. We stood watching this and smiling the same foolish smiles we had brought outside to welcome him with.

After Kenneth had wolfed down a sandwich, Dwight made the mistake of offering him a drink. “Oh, boy,” Kenneth said. “I guess you don’t know much about me.” He said that he believed he had a duty to lay his cards on the table, and so he did.

“I don’t know,” Dwight said. “I don’t see the harm in a drink now and then.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” Kenneth said. “I’m sure the drug fiend doesn’t see the harm in a needle now and then.”

This led to an exchange of words. My mother stepped in and acted jolly and moved us from the kitchen into the living room, where she must have hoped that the presence of the tree and the gifts would remind us why we were together, and call us to our better selves. But Kenneth started laying more cards on the table. There truly was no end of them. Skipper finally said, “Look, Kenneth ... why don’t you lay off?”

“What are you afraid of, Skipper?”

“Afraid?” Skipper’s eyelids fluttered as if he were trying to confirm some improbable image.

“I only tell you this because I love you,” Kenneth said, “but you are very frightened people. Very frightened. But hey, there’s no need to be—the news is good!”

“Just who the hell do you think you are?” Dwight said.

Kenneth smiled. “Go on. I can take it.”

Norma tried to change the subject but Kenneth could take any comment and find something in it to deplore. Argument was the only kind of sound he knew how to make. And if you didn’t give in to him he smirked and offered you his pity for being so ignorant and missed. He wasn’t reluctant to get personal. Soon enough Dwight and Skipper got personal back, and then Pearl and I put our oars in. Insulting this man was a profound pleasure, and a pleasure not only for us; a flush of excitement came into his pallid face as the words got meaner and harder to take back. He kept our blood up by saying, “If you think that bothers me, you’re sadly mistaken,” and “Sorry, try again,” and “I’ve had worse than that.”

This went on for some time. As we baited him Kenneth smiled in a secretive way and sucked on an empty Yellow-Bole pipe with which, he later told me, he strengthened his will power by tempting himself to smoke.

Norma was mute. She sat next to Kenneth on the sofa and stared at the floor while he absently rubbed his hand up and down her back. Every time he touched her I felt despair. At last my mother came in from the kitchen and suggested that Norma take Kenneth out and show him around Chinook. Norma nodded and stood up, but Kenneth said he didn’t want to leave now, just when things were getting interesting.

Norma implored him with her eyes.

Finally he left with her. In the wake of his going we exchanged looks of exultation and shame. A fidgety silence came upon us. One by one we drifted away to other parts of the house.

But at dinner it started up again. Kenneth couldn’t stop himself. Even when he was quiet you could feel him preparing his next charge. The only thing that could shut him up was the TV. When the TV came on Kenneth went silent, staring and still as an owl in a tree.

Over the next couple of days my mother talked each of us into spending some time alone with him so we could get to know one another as individuals. This proved a mistake. Some people are better left unknown. Our walks and drives with Kenneth ended early and culminated in shouts and slamming doors. Years later my mother told me he’d made a pass at her.

 

WE COULD ALL see that Norma didn’t love Kenneth. But she stayed next to him, and submitted to his demonstrations of passion, and refused to say a word against him. She even, in the end, married him. But not before Dwight had nearly killed himself trying to stop her. He drove down to Seattle almost every weekend, sometimes bringing us along, more often by himself, always with some new scheme for luring her away from Kenneth. Nothing worked. He returned late Sunday night or early Monday morning, eyes bloodshot from the long drive, too tired and baffled even to quarrel.

Norma married Kenneth, and had their baby, and they moved into a duplex near Bothell. When we came down for visits she acted happy and never complained about anything. But she was pale and angular, all her lazy lushness gone. Her green eyes blazed in the starkness of her face. She had taken up smoking—out on their little patio where Kenneth wouldn’t smell it when he got home—and she continuously excused herself during our visits to go outside and puff greedily on a cigarette, tapping her feet and looking up at the sky, now and then glancing back at us through the sliding glass door.

I saw Bobby Crow in Concrete a year or so later, just after I’d started high school there. He was standing beside a truck with some other men, most of them Indians. Bobby still had a measure of renown for his gridiron magic, and I thought I would impress the two boys I was with by a show of familiarity. As we walked past the truck I said, “Hey, Bobo, how’s it going?” The men fell quiet and looked over at us. Bobby fixed me with a stare. “Who the hell are you talking to?” he said. His eyes were full of murder.

 

WE WATCHED TV most of Christmas Eve. When it got dark, Dwight left the house lights off so we could get the full effect of the lights on the tree. We broke to eat, then went back to the set. By the time the “Lawrence Welk Christmas Special” came on we were glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, stunned with viewing. The Champagne Orchestra played a medley of Christmas favorites, the sacred and profane mixed effervescently together, and then someone wearing knee-britches and a tricorner hat acted the part of Franz Gruber while Lawrence Welk intoned the narrative: “It was Christmas Eve in the little town of Obemdorf, and snow was falling as the organist Franz Gruber made his weary way to the little church that was soon to become famous throughout the world....” The Gruber character paused on the church steps, looked up suddenly with the fire of inspiration in his eyes, then dashed inside and plunked out “Silent Night.” He had to change a couple of notes here and there, but after he got it right the orchestra segued in and subsumed it into their own champagne arrangement, with Joe Feeney sobbing out a verse a cappella at the very end.

The scene shifted. We found ourselves in an elegant room where, under a shimmering tree, The Lovely Little Lennon Sisters began to sing a medley of their own. Firelight gleamed on their faces. Snow fell slowly past the window behind them, a glockenspiel chimed in accompaniment. They were singing “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” when Dwight nudged me and motioned me to follow him. He looked pleased with himself. “It’s about time we got some use out of those chestnuts,” he said.

The chestnuts. Almost two years had passed since I’d shucked them and stored them away. In all that time no one had said a word about them. They’d been forgotten by everyone but me, and I’d kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to remind Dwight to give me the job again.

We climbed up into the attic and worked our way down to where I’d put the boxes. It was cramped and musty. From below I could hear faint voices singing. Dwight led the way, probing the darkness with a flash-light. When he found the boxes he stopped and held the beam on them. Mold covered the cardboard sides and rose from the tops of the boxes like dough swelling out of a breadpan. Its surface, dark and solid-looking, gullied and creased like cauliflower, glistened in the light. Dwight played the beam over the boxes, then turned it on the basin where the beaver, also forgotten these two years past, had been left to cure. Only a pulp remained. This too was covered with mold, but a different kind than the one that had gotten the chestnuts. This mold was white and transparent, a network of gossamer filaments that had flowered to a height of two feet or so above the basin. It was like cotton candy but more loosely spun. And as Dwight played the light over it I saw something strange. The mold had no features, of course, but its outline somehow suggested the shape of the beaver it had consumed: a vague cloud-picture of a beaver crouching in the air.

If Dwight noticed it he didn’t say anything. I followed him back downstairs and into the living room. My mother had gone to bed, but everyone else was still watching TV. Dwight picked up his saxaphone again and played silently along with the Champagne Orchestra. The tree blinked. Our faces darkened and flared, darkened and flared.

B
y the time I started my first year at Concrete High School, I had over eighty dollars squirreled away in the ammunition box. Some of it had been given to me by customers on my paper route, as tips for good service; the rest I’d stolen from other customers. Eighty dollars seemed a lot of money, more than enough for my purpose, which was to run away to Alaska.