This Boy's Life (20 page)

Then there was Jerry Huff. Huff was handsome in a pouty, heavy-lidded way. Girls liked him, which was bad luck for them. He was short but enormously strong and vain. His vanity crested above his head in a stupendous gleaming pompadour. He was a bully. He loitered in the bathrooms and made fun of other boys’ dicks and stepped on their white buck shoes and held them over toilet bowls by their ankles. Bullies are supposed to be cowards but Huff confounded this wisdom. He would try to bully anyone, even guys who had already beaten him up.

Arch Cook also ran with us. Arch was an amiable simpleton who talked to himself and sometimes shouted or laughed for no reason. His head was long and thin and flat on the sides. Chuck told me that a car had driven over him when he was a baby. This was probably true. Huff used to tell him, “Arch, you might’ve been okay if that guy hadn’t backed up to see what he hit.” Arch was Huff’s cousin.

There were five of us. We piled into Chuck’s ’53 Chevy and drove around looking for a car we could siphon gas out of. If we found one we emptied a few gallons from its tank into Chuck’s and spent the morning tearing up the fire roads into the mountains. Around lunchtime we usually drove back down to Concrete and dropped in on Arch’s sister Veronica. She’d been in Norma’s class at Concrete. She still had the pert nose and wide blue eyes of the lesser Homecoming royalty she’d once been, but her face was going splotchy and loose from drink. Veronica was married to a sawyer who worked at a mill near Everett and came home only on the weekends. She had two fat little girls who wandered the wreckage of the house in their underpants, whining for their mother’s attention and eating potato chips from economy packs almost as big as they were. Veronica was crazy about Chuck. If he wasn’t in the mood, she would try to get him in the mood by walking around in short-shorts and high heels, or by sitting in his lap and sticking her tongue in his ear.

We hung around the house all afternoon, playing cards and reading Veronica’s detective magazines. Now and then I tried to play games with the little girls, but they were too morose to pretend or imagine anything. At three o’clock I walked back up to Concrete High to catch my bus home.

CHUCK AND THE others knew a lot of women like Veronica, and girls on their way to being like Veronica. When they found a new one they shared her. They tried to fix me up with some of them, but I always backed out. I didn’t know what these girls expected; I did know I was sure to disappoint them. Their availability unmanned me. And I didn’t want it to be like that, squalid and public, with a stranger. I wanted it to be with the girl I loved.

This was not going to happen, because the girl I loved never knew I loved her. I kept my feelings secret because I believed she would find them laughable, even insulting. Her name was Rhea Clark. Rhea moved to Concrete from North Carolina halfway through her junior year, when I was a freshman. She had flaxen hair that hung to her waist, calm brown eyes, golden skin that glowed like a jar of honey. Her mouth was full, almost loose. She wore tight skirts that showed the flex and roll of her hips as she walked, clinging pastel sweaters whose sleeves she pushed up to her elbows, revealing a heartbreaking slice of creamy inner arm.

Just after Rhea came to Concrete I asked her to dance with me during a mixer in the gym. She nodded and followed me out onto the floor. It was a slow dance. When I turned to face her she moved into my arms as no other girl had ever done, frankly and fully. She melted against me and stayed against me, pliant to my least motion, her legs against mine, her cheek against mine, her fingers brushing the back of my neck. I understood that she didn’t know who I was, that all of this was a new girl’s mistake. But I felt justified in taking advantage of it. I thought we were meeting rightly, true self to true self, free of the accidents of age.

After a while she said, “Y’all don’t know how to party.”

Her voice was throaty and deep. I could feel it in my chest.

“Them old boys back in Norville could flat party,” she said, “and that’s no lie.”

I couldn’t speak. I just held her and moved her and breathed in her hair. I had her for three minutes and then I lost her forever. Older boys, boys I didn’t have the courage to cut in on, danced with her the rest of the night. A week or so later she took up with Lloyd Sly, a basketball player with a hot car. When we passed in the hall she didn’t even recognize me.

I wrote her long, grandiloquent letters which I then destroyed. I thought of the different ways that fate might put her in my power, so I could show her who I really was and make her love me. Most of these possibilities involved death or severe maiming for Lloyd Sly.

And when, as sometimes happened, a girl my own age showed some interest in me, I treated her swinishly. I walked her home from a dance or a game, made out with her on her front steps, then cut her dead the next day. I only ever wanted what I couldn’t have.

 

CHUCK AND THE others had better luck getting me drunk. Though liquor disagreed with me they were patient, and willing to experiment, and time was on their side. They finally broke through during a basketball game, the last game of the season. It had rained earlier and the air was steamy. The windows of the school were open, and from our gully outside we could hear the cheerleaders warming up the people in the stands while the players did their lay-up drills.

Huff was passing around a can of Hawaiian Punch cut with vodka. Gorilla blood, he called it. I thought it would probably make me sick but I took a swig anyway. It stayed down. In fact I liked it, it tasted exactly like Hawaiian Punch. I took another swig.

 

I WAS UP on the school roof with Chuck. He was looking at me and nodding meditatively. “Wolff,” he said. “Jack Wolff.”

“Yo.”

“Wolff, your teeth are too big.”

“I know they are. I know they are.”

“Wolf-man.”

“Yo, Chuckles.”

He held up his hands. They were bleeding. “Don’t hit trees, Jack. Okay?”

I said I wouldn’t.

“Don’t hit trees.”

 

I WAS LYING on my back with Huff kneeling on me, slapping my cheeks. He said, “Speak to me, dicklick,” and I said, “Hi, Huff.” Everybody laughed. Huff’s pompadour had come unstuck and was hanging in long strands over his face. I smiled and said, “Hi, Huff.”

 

I WAS WALKING along a branch. I was way out on it, over the far lip of the gully where the cement bank began. They were all looking up at me and yelling. They were fools, my balance was perfect. I bounced on the branch and flapped my arms. Then I put my hands in my pockets and strolled out along the branch until it broke.

I didn’t feel myself land, but I heard the wind leave me in a rush. I was rolling sideways down the hillside with my hands still in my pockets, rolling around and around like a log, faster and faster, picking up speed on the steep cement. The cement ended in a drop where the earth below had washed away. I flew off the edge and went spinning through the air and landed hard and rolled downhill through the ferns, bouncing over rocks and deadfall, the ferns rustling around me, and then I hit something hard and stopped cold.

I was on my back. I could not move, I could not breathe. I was too empty to take the first breath, and my body would not respond to the bulletins I sent. Blackness came up from the bottom of my eyes. I was drowning, and then I drowned.

 

WHEN I OPENED my eyes I was still on my back. I heard voices calling my name but I did not answer. I lay amidst a profusion of ferns, their fronds glittering with raindrops. The fronds made a lattice above me. The voices came closer and still I did not answer. I was happy where I was. There was movement in the bushes all around me, and again and again I heard my name. I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh and give myself away, and finally they left.

I spent the night there. In the morning I walked down to the main road and thumbed a ride home. My clothes were wet and torn, but except for a certain tenderness down the length of my back I was unhurt, just creaky from my night on the ground.

Dwight was at the kitchen table when I came in. He looked me over and said—quietly, he knew he had me this time—“Where were you last night?”

I said, “I got drunk and fell off a cliff.”

He grinned in spite of himself, just as I knew he would. He let me off with a lecture and some advice about hangovers while my mother stood by the sink in her bathrobe, listening without expression. After Dwight dismissed me she followed me down the hall. She stopped in my doorway, arms crossed, and waited for me to look at her. Finally she said, “You’re not helping anymore.”

 

NO, BUT i was happy that night, listening to them search for me, listening to them call my name. I knew they wouldn’t find me. After they went away I lay there smiling in my perfect place. Through the ferns above me I saw the nimbus of the moon in the dense, dark sky. Cool beads of water rolled down the ferns onto my face. I could just make out the sounds of the game going on up the hill, the cheers, the drumming of feet in the stands. I listened with godly condescension. I was all alone where no one could find me, only the faint excitements of a game and some voices crying Concrete, Concrete, Concrete.

M
y brother and I hadn’t seen each other in six years. After leaving Salt Lake I lost touch with him until, in the fall of my second year at Concrete High, he wrote me a letter and sent me a Princeton sweatshirt. The letter was full of impressive phrases—“In a world where contraception and the hydrogen bomb usurp each other as negative values...”—that I tried to use in conversation as if they had just occurred to me. I wore the sweatshirt everywhere, and told strangers who picked me up on the road that I was a Princeton student coming home for a visit. I even had my hair cut in a style called “The Princeton” —flat on top, long and swept back on the sides.

I decided to make my way there. My mother was busy campaigning for Senator Jackson and John F. Kennedy. Dwight called Kennedy “the Pope’s candidate” and “the senator from Rome.” He didn’t like him, possibly because of his effect on my mother, who was stirred by Kennedy’s hopefulness and also a little in love with him. With her out of the house so much Dwight had grown casual about pushing me around. He didn’t really beat me but he kept the possibility alive. I hated being alone with him.

My idea was to hitchhike to Princeton and hand myself over to Geoffrey. I had no money for the trip. To get it, I planned to forge a check. For some time I had been struck by the innocence of banks, the trusting way they left checkbooks out on the service tables for their customers. People walked in off the street, wrote down their wishes, then walked out again with their pockets full of money. There was nothing to keep me from taking a few blanks to fill out later. I couldn’t cash them in Chinook or Concrete, where I was too familiar to use a false name, but in another town it would be easy.

I belonged to the Order of the Arrow, a Scout honor society whose annual banquet was to be held in Bellingham that year. I drove down in the afternoon with some other OA members from my troop, and shook loose from them soon after we arrived. First I went to a bank. Before going inside I put on the horn-rimmed glasses my mother had bought me so I could see the blackboards at school. They made me look owlish, but older. I walked across the bank to one of the tables and tore off a check from the convenience checkbook. I waited in line for a while, then, snapping my fingers as if I had just remembered something, turned on my heels and walked back outside.

At the main branch of the public library I took out a card in the name of Thomas Findon. I chose “Thomas Findon” because I’d worked as a camp counselor with a boy of that name during the summer. He was an Eagle Scout from Portland, a soft-spoken athlete with the body of a man and an easy way with the girls who came to camp to visit their little brothers. We taught swimming together until I got demoted to the archery range, where I almost lost my job altogether for arranging twenty-five-cent matches with the young Scouts I was supposed to be teaching.

The library was as simple as the bank. All I had to do was give the librarian my name, and an address I’d copied at random from the telephone book. She typed up the card while I waited.

 

I WALKED THE streets for over an hour, looking at stores, at the people behind the counters. I was searching for someone I could trust. I found her in a corner drugstore in the business section, just up the street from the Swedish Sailors’ Home. For several minutes I walked back and forth and watched her through the drugstore window. Then I went inside and stood by the magazine racks, pretending to read and nervously shifting my overnight bag from shoulder to shoulder. She was gray-haired but her face was smooth, her expression direct and open as a young girl’s. A guileless, lovely face. She wore half-moon glasses that she peered over to look at her customers while she rang up their purchases. Afterward she passed the time with them, mostly listening but sometimes adding a comment of her own. Her laugh was soft and pleasant. She made the store like a home.