This Boy's Life (2 page)

That fall, once a week after school, I went to catechism. Yellow leaves drifted past the windows as Sister James instructed us in the life of faith. She was a woman of passion. Her square jaw trembled when something moved her, and as she talked her eyes grew brilliant behind her winking rimless glasses. She could not sit still. Instead she paced between our desks, her habit rustling against us. She had no timidity or coyness. Even about sex she spoke graphically and with gusto. Sometimes she would forget where she was and start whistling.

Sister James did not like the idea of us running free after school. She feared we would spend our time with friends from the public schools we attended and possibly end up as Mormons. To account for our afternoons she had formed the Archery Club, the Painting Club, and the Chess Club, and she demanded that each of us join one. They met twice a week. Attendance was compulsory. No one thought of disobeying her.

I belonged to the Archery Club. Girls were free to join but none did. On rainy days we practiced in the church basement, on clear days outside. Sister James watched us when she could; at other times we were supervised by an older nun who was nearsighted and tried to control us by saying, “Boys, boys ...”

The people next door kept cats. The cats were used to having the run of the churchyard and it took them a while to understand that they were no longer predators but prey—big calicoes and marmalades sitting in the sunshine, tails curled prettily around themselves, cocking their heads from side to side as our arrows zipped past. We never hit any of them, but we came close. Finally the cats caught on and quit the field. When this happened we began hunting each other.

Pretending to look for overshot arrows, we would drift beyond the targets to a stand of trees where the old nun couldn’t see us. There the game began. At first the idea was to creep around and let fly in such a way that your arrow thunked into the tree nearest your quarry. For a time we were content to count this a hit. But the rule proved too confining for some, and then the rest of us had no choice but to throw it over too, as friends of mine would later throw over the rules governing fights with water balloons, rocks, and BB guns.

The game got interesting. All of us had close calls, close calls that were recounted until they became legend. The Time Donny Got Hit in the Wallet. The Time Patrick Had His Shoe Shot Off. A few of the boys came to their senses and dropped out but the rest of us carried on. We did so in a resolutely innocent way, never admitting to ourselves what the real object was: that is, to bring somebody down. Among the trees I achieved absolute vacancy of mind. I had no thought of being hurt or of hurting anyone else, not even as I notched my arrow and pulled it back, intent on some movement in the shadows ahead. I was doing just that one afternoon, drawing my bow, ready to fire as soon as my target showed himself again, when I heard a rustling behind me. I spun around.

Sister James had been about to say something. Her mouth was open. She looked at the arrow I was aiming at her, then looked at me. In her presence my thoughtlessness forsook me. I knew exactly what I had been doing. We stood like that for a time. Finally I pointed the arrow at the ground. I unnotched it and started to make some excuse, but she closed her eyes at the sound of my voice and waved her hands as if to shoo away gnats. “Practice is over,” she said. Then she turned and left me there.

 

I WAS SUBJECT to fits of feeling myself unworthy, somehow deeply at fault. It didn’t take much to bring this sensation to life, along with the certainty that everybody but my mother saw through me and did not like what they saw. There was no reason for me to have this feeling. I thought I’d left it back in Florida, together with my fear of fighting and my shyness with girls, but here it was, come to meet me.

Sister James had nothing to do with it. She hated talking about sin, and was plainly bored by our obsessive questions about Hell and Purgatory and Limbo. The business with the arrow probably meant nothing to her. To her I was just another boy doing some dumb boyish thing. But I began to feel that she knew all about me, and that a good part of her life was now given over to considering how bad I was.

I became furtive around her. I began skipping archery and even some of my catechism classes. There was no immediate way for my mother to find out. We didn’t have a telephone and she never went to church. She thought it was good for me but beside the point for herself, especially now that she was divorced and once again involved with Roy, the man she’d left Florida to get away from.

When I could, I ran around with boys from school. But they all came from Mormon families. When they weren’t being instructed in their own faith, which was a lot of the time, their parents liked to have them close by. Most afternoons I wandered around in the trance that habitual solitude induces. I walked downtown and stared at merchandise. I imagined being adopted by different people I saw on the street. Sometimes, seeing a man in a suit come toward me from a distance that blurred his features, I would prepare myself to recognize my father and to be recognized by him. Then we would pass each other and a few minutes later I would pick someone else. I talked to anyone who would talk back. When the need came upon me, I knocked on the door of the nearest house and asked to use the bathroom. No one ever refused. I sat in other people’s yards and played with their dogs. The dogs got to know me—by the end of the year they’d be waiting for me.

I also wrote long letters to my pen pal in Phoenix, Arizona. Her name was Alice. My class had been exchanging letters with her class since school began. We were supposed to write once a month but I wrote at least once a week, ten, twelve, fifteen pages at a time. I represented myself to her as the owner of a palomino horse named Smiley who shared my encounters with mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and packs of coyotes on my father’s ranch, the Lazy B. When I wasn’t busy on the ranch I raised German shepherds and played for several athletic teams. Although Alice was a terse and irregular correspondent, I believed that she must be in awe of me, and imagined someday presenting myself at her door to claim her adoration.

So I passed the hours after school. Sometimes, not very often, I felt lonely. Then I would go home to Roy.

 

ROY HAD TRACKED us down to Salt Lake a few weeks after we arrived. He took a room somewhere across town but spent most of his time in our apartment, making it clear that he would hold no grudges as long as my mother walked the line.

Roy didn’t work. He had a small inheritance and supplemented that with disability checks from the VA, which he claimed he would lose if he took a job. When he wasn’t hunting or fishing or checking up on my mother, he sat at the kitchen table with a cigarette in his mouth and squinted at The
Shooter’s
Bible through the smoke that veiled his face. He always seemed glad to see me. If I was lucky he would put a couple of rifles in his Jeep and we’d drive into the desert to shoot at cans and look for ore. He’d caught the uranium bug from my mother.

Roy rarely spoke on these trips. Every so often he would look at me and smile, then look away again. He seemed always deep in thought, staring at the road through mirrored sunglasses, the wind ruffling the perfect waves of his hair. Roy was handsome in the conventional way that appeals to boys. He had a tattoo. He’d been to war and kept a kind of silence about it that was full of heroic implication. He was graceful in his movements. He could fix the Jeep if he had to, though he preferred to drive halfway across Utah to a mechanic he’d heard about from some loudmouth in a bar. He was an expert hunter who always got his buck. He taught both my mother and me to shoot, taught my mother so well that she became a better shot than he was—a real deadeye.

My mother didn’t tell me what went on between her and Roy, the threats and occasional brutality with which he held her in place. She was the same as ever with me, full of schemes and quick to laugh. Only now and then there came a night when she couldn’t do anything but sit and cry, and then I comforted her, but I never knew her reasons. When these nights were over I put them from my mind. If there were other signs, I didn’t see them. Roy’s strangeness and the strangeness of our life with him had, over the years, become ordinary to me.

I thought Roy was what a man should be. My mother must have thought so too, once. I believed that I should like him, and pretended to myself that I did like him, even to the point of seeking out his company. He turned on me just one time. I had discovered that my mother’s cooking oil glowed like phosphorus under the black light, the way uranium was supposed to, and one day I splashed it all over some rocks we’d brought in. Roy got pretty worked up when he looked at them. I had to tell him why I was laughing so hard, and he didn’t take it well. He gave me a hard, mean look. He stood there for a while, just holding me with this look, and finally he said, “That’s not funny,” and didn’t speak to me again the rest of the night.

On our way back from the desert Roy would park near the insurance company where my mother, after learning that Kennecott really was out on strike, had found work as a secretary. He waited outside until she got off work. Then he followed her home, idling along the road, here and there pulling into a driveway to let her get ahead, then pulling out again to keep her in sight. If my mother had ever glanced behind her she would have spotted the Jeep immediately. But she didn’t. She walked along in her crisp military stride, shoulders braced, head erect, and never looked back. Roy acted as though this were a game we were all playing. I knew it wasn’t a game but I didn’t know what it was, so I kept the promises he extracted from me to say nothing to her.

One afternoon near Christmas we missed her. She was not among the people who left when the building closed. Roy waited for a while, peering up at the darkened windows, watching the guard lock the doors. Then he panicked. He threw the Jeep into gear and sped around the block. He stopped in front of the building again. He turned off the engine and began whispering to himself. “Yes,” he said, “okay, okay,” and turned the engine back on. He drove around the block one more time and then tore down the neighboring streets, alternately slamming on the brakes and gunning the engine, his cheeks wet with tears, his lips moving like a supplicant’s. This had all happened before, in Sarasota, and I knew better than to say anything. I just held onto the passenger grip and tried to look normal.

Finally he came to a stop. We sat there for a few minutes. When he seemed better I asked if we could go home. He nodded without looking at me, then took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, blew his nose, and put the handkerchief away.

My mother was cooking dinner and listening to carols when we came in. The windows were all steamed up. Roy watched me go over to the stove and lean against her. He kept looking at me until I looked at him. Then he winked. I knew he wanted me to wink back, and I also knew that it would somehow put me on his side if I did.

My mother hung one arm around my shoulders while she stirred the sauce. A glass of beer stood on the counter next to her.

“So how was archery?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine.”

Roy said, “We went out afterwards and shot a few bottles. Then we went tomcatting.”

“Tomcatting,” my mother repeated coldly. She hated the word.

Roy leaned against the refrigerator. “Busy day?”

“Real busy. Hectic.”

“Not a minute to spare, huh?”

“They kept us hopping,” she said. She took a sip of beer and licked her lips.

“Must’ve been good to get out.”

“It was. Real good.”

“Terrific,” Roy said. “Have a nice walk home?”

She nodded.

Roy smiled at me, and I gave in. I smiled back.

“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling,” Roy said to her. “Even your own kid knows what you’re up to.” He turned and walked back into the living room. My mother closed her eyes, then opened them again and went on stirring.

It was one of those dinners where we didn’t talk. Afterward my mother got out her typewriter. She had lied about her typing speed in order to get work, and now her boss expected more from her than she could really do. That meant having to finish at night the reports she couldn’t get through at the office. While she typed, Roy glowered at her over the the rifles he was cleaning and I wrote a letter to Alice. I put the letter in an envelope and gave it to my mother to mail. Then I went to bed.

Late that night I woke up and heard Roy’s special nagging murmur, the different words blurring into one continuous sound through the wall that separated us. It seemed to go on and on. Then I heard my mother say, Shopping ! I was shopping! Can’t I go shopping? Roy resumed his murmur. I lay there, hugging the stuffed bear I was too old for and had promised to give up when I officially got my new name. Moonlight filled my room, an unheated addition at the rear of the apartment. On bright cold nights like this one I could see the cloud of my breath and pretend that I was smoking, as I did now until I fell asleep again.

 

I WAS BAPTIZED during Easter along with several others from my catechism class. To prepare ourselves for communion we were supposed to make a confession, and Sister James appointed a time that week for each of us to come to the rectory and be escorted by her to the confessional. She would wait outside until we were finished and then guide us through our penance.

I thought about what to confess, but I could not break my sense of being at fault down to its components. Trying to get a particular sin out of it was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you’ve snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line. Nothing came to mind. I didn’t see how I could go through with it, but in the end I hauled myself down to the church and kept my appointment. To have skipped it would have called attention to all my other absences and possibly provoked a visit from Sister James to my mother. I couldn’t risk having the two of them compare notes.