This Boy's Life (3 page)

Sister James met me as I was coming into the rectory. She asked if I was ready and I said I guessed so.

“It won’t hurt,” she said. “No more than a shot, anyway.”

We walked over to the church and down the side aisle to the confessional. Sister James opened the door for me. “In you go,” she said. “Make a good one now.”

I knelt with my face to the screen as we had been told to do and said, “Bless me Father for I have sinned.”

I could hear someone breathing loudly on the other side. After a time he said, “Well?”

I folded my hands together and closed my eyes and waited for something to present itself.

“You seem to be having some trouble.” His voice was deep and scratchy.

“Yes sir.”

“Call me Father. I’m a priest, not a gentleman. Now then, you understand that whatever gets said in here stays in here.”

“Yes Father.”

“I suppose you’ve thought a lot about this. Is that right?”

I said that I had.

“Well, you’ve just given yourself a case of nerves, that’s all. How about if we try again a little later. Shall we do that?”

“Yes please, Father.”

“That’s what we’ll do, then. Just wait outside a second.”

I stood and left the confessional. Sister James came toward me from where she’d been standing against the wall. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” she asked.

“I’m supposed to wait,” I told her.

She looked at me. I could see she was curious, but she didn’t ask any questions.

The priest came out soon after. He was old and very tall and walked with a limp. He stood close beside me, and when I looked up at him I saw the white hair in his nostrils. He smelled strongly of tobacco. “We had a little trouble getting started,” he said.

“Yes, Father?”

“He’s just a bit nervous is all,” the priest said. “Needs to relax. Nothing like a glass of milk for that.”

She nodded.

“Why don’t we try again a little later. Say twenty minutes?”

“We’ll be here, Father.”

Sister James and I went to the rectory kitchen. I sat at a steel cutting table while she poured me a glass of milk. “You want some cookies?” she asked.

“That’s all right, Sister.”

“Sure you do.” She put a package of Oreos on a plate and brought it to me. Then she sat down. With her arms crossed, hands hidden in her sleeves, she watched me eat and drink. Finally she said, “What happened, then? Cat get your tongue?”

“Yes, Sister.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I know.”

“Maybe you’re just thinking of it wrong,” she said.

I stared at my hands on the tabletop.

“I forgot to give you a napkin,” she said. “Go on and lick them. Don’t be shy.”

She waited until I looked up, and when I did I saw that she was younger than I’d thought her to be. Not that I’d given much thought to her age. Except for the really old nuns with canes or facial hair they all seemed outside of time, without past or future. But now—forced to look at Sister James across the narrow space of this gleaming table—I saw her differently. I saw an anxious woman of about my mother’s age who wanted to help me without knowing what kind of help I needed. Her good will worked strongly on me. My eyes burned and my throat swelled up. I would have surrendered to her if only I’d known how.

“It probably isn’t as bad as you think it is,” Sister James said. “Whatever it is, someday you’ll look back and you’ll see that it was natural. But you’ve got to bring it to the light. Keeping it in the dark is what makes it feel so bad.” She added, “I’m not asking you to tell me, understand. That’s not my place. I’m just saying that we all go through these things.”

Sister James leaned forward over the table. “When I was your age,” she said, “maybe even a little older, I used to go through my father’s wallet while he was taking his bath at night. I didn’t take bills, just pennies and nickels, maybe a dime. Nothing he’d miss. My father would’ve given me the money if I’d asked for it. But I preferred to steal it. Stealing from him made me feel awful, but I did it all the same.”

She looked down at the tabletop. “I was a backbiter, too. Whenever I was with one friend I would say terrible things about my other friends, and then turn around and do the same thing to the one I had just been with. I knew what I was doing, too. I hated myself for it, I really did, but that didn’t stop me. I used to wish that my mother and my brothers would die in a car crash so I could grow up with just my father and have everyone feel sorry for me.”

Sister James shook her head. “I had all these bad thoughts I didn’t want to let go of. Know what I mean?”

I nodded, and presented her with an expression that was meant to register dawning comprehension.

“Good!” she said. She slapped her palms down on the table. “Ready to try again?

I said that I was.

Sister James led me back to the confessional. I knelt and began again: “Bless me Father, for—”

“All right,” he said. “We’ve been here before. Just talk plain.”

“Yes Father.”

Again I closed my eyes over my folded hands.

“Come come,” he said, with a certain sharpness.

“Yes, Father.” I bent close to the screen and whispered, “Father, I steal.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What do you steal?”

“I steal money, Father. From my mother’s purse when she’s in the shower.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

I didn’t answer.

“Well?” he said. “A week? A year? Two years?”

I chose the one in the middle. “A year.”

“A year,” he repeated. “That won’t do. You have to stop. Do you intend to stop?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Honestly, now.”

“Honestly, Father.”

“All right. Good. What else?”

“I’m a backbiter.”

“A backbiter?”

“I say things about my friends when they’re not around.”

“That won’t do either,” he said.

“No, Father.”

“That certainly won’t do. Your friends will desert you if you persist in this and let me tell you, a life without friends is no life at all.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Do you sincerely intend to stop?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Good. Be sure that you do. I tell you this in all seriousness. Anything else?”

“I have bad thoughts, Father.”

“Yes. Well,” he said, “why don’t we save those for next time. You have enough to work on.”

The priest gave me my penance and absolved me. As I left the confessional I heard his own door open and close. Sister James came forward to meet me again, and we waited together as the priest made his way to where we stood. Breathing hoarsely, he steadied himself against a pillar. He laid his other hand on my shoulder. “That was fine,” he said. “Just fine.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You have a fine boy here, Sister James.”

She smiled. “So I do, Father. So I do.”

J
ust after Easter Roy gave me the Winchester .22 rifle I’d learned to shoot with. It was a light, pump-action, beautifully balanced piece with a walnut stock black from all its oilings. Roy had carried it when he was a boy and it was still as good as new. Better than new. The action was silky from long use, and the wood of a quality no longer to be found.

The gift did not come as a surprise. Roy was stingy, and slow to take a hint, but I’d put him under siege. I had my heart set on that rifle. A weapon was the first condition of self-sufficiency, and of being a real Westerner, and of all acceptable employment—trapping, riding herd, soldiering, law enforcement, and outlawry. I needed that rifle, for itself and for the way it completed me when I held it.

My mother said I couldn’t have it. Absolutely not. Roy took the rifle back but promised me he’d bring her around. He could not imagine anyone refusing him anything and treated the refusals he did encounter as perverse and insincere. Normally mute, he became at these times a relentless whiner. He would follow my mother from room to room, emitting one ceaseless note of complaint that was pitched perfectly to jelly her nerves and bring her to a state where she would agree to anything to make it stop.

After a few days of this my mother caved in. She said I could have the rifle if, and only if, I promised never to take it out or even touch it except when she and Roy were with me. Okay, I said. Sure. Naturally. But even then she wasn’t satisfied. She plain didn’t like the fact of me owning a rifle. Roy said he had owned several rifles by the time he was my age, but this did not reassure her. She didn’t think I could be trusted with it. Roy said now was the time to find out.

For a week or so I kept my promises. But now that the weather had turned warm Roy was usually off somewhere, and eventually, in the dead hours after school when I found myself alone in the apartment, I decided that there couldn’t be any harm in taking the rifle out to clean it. Only to clean it, nothing more. I was sure it would be enough just to break it down, oil it, rub linseed into the stock, polish the octagonal barrel and then hold it up to the light to confirm the perfection of the bore. But it wasn’t enough. From cleaning the rifle I went to marching around the apartment with it, and then to striking brave poses in front of the mirror. Roy had saved one of his army uniforms and I sometimes dressed up in this, together with martial-looking articles of hunting gear: fur trooper’s hat, camouflage coat, boots that reached nearly to my knees.

The camouflage coat made me feel like a sniper, and before long I began to act like one. I set up a nest on the couch by the front window. I drew the shades to darken the apartment, and took up my position. Nudging the shade aside with the rifle barrel, I followed people in my sights as they walked or drove along the street. At first I made shooting sounds—kyoo! kyoo! Then I started cocking the hammer and letting it snap down.

Roy stored his ammunition in a metal box he kept hidden in the closet. As with everything else hidden in the apartment, I knew exactly where to find it. There was a layer of loose.22 rounds on the bottom of the box under shells of bigger caliber, dropped there by the handful the way men drop pennies on their dressers at night. I took some and put them in a hiding place of my own. With these I started loading up the rifle. Hammer cocked, a round in the chamber, finger resting lightly on the trigger, I drew a bead on whoever walked by—women pushing strollers, children, garbage collectors laughing and calling to each other, anyone—and as they passed under my window I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and at their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe.

But over time the innocence I laughed at began to irritate me. It was a peculiar kind of irritation. I saw it years later in men I served with, and felt it myself, when unarmed Vietnamese civilians talked back to us while we were herding them around. Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.

One afternoon I pulled the trigger. I had been aiming at two old people, a man and a woman, who walked so slowly that by the time they turned the comer at the bottom of the hill my little store of self-control was exhausted. I had to shoot. I looked up and down the street. It was empty. Nothing moved but a pair of squirrels chasing each other back and forth on the telephone wires. I followed one in my sights. Finally it stopped for a moment and I fired. The squirrel dropped straight into the road. I pulled back into the shadows and waited for something to happen, sure that someone must have heard the shot or seen the squirrel fall. But the sound that was so loud to me probably seemed to our neighbors no more than the bang of a cupboard slammed shut. After a while I sneaked a glance into the street. The squirrel hadn’t moved. It looked like a scarf someone had dropped.

When my mother got home from work I told her there was a dead squirrel in the street. Like me, she was an animal lover. She took a cellophane bag off a loaf of bread and we went outside and looked at the squirrel. “Poor little thing,” she said. She stuck her hand in the wrapper and picked up the squirrel, then pulled the bag inside out away from her hand. We buried it behind our building under a cross made of popsicle sticks, and I blubbered the whole time.

I blubbered again in bed that night. At last I got out of bed and knelt down and did an imitation of somebody praying, and then I did an imitation of somebody receiving divine reassurance and inspiration. I stopped crying. I smiled to myself and forced a feeling of warmth into my chest. Then I climbed back in bed and looked up at the ceiling with a blissful expression until I went to sleep.

For several days I stayed away from the apartment at times when I knew I’d be alone there. I resumed my old patrol around the city or fooled around with my Mormon friends. One of these was a boy who’d caught everyone’s notice on the first day of school by yelling, when a class-mate named Boone had his name read out, “Hey!—any relation to Daniel?” His own name was called soon after, and this turned out to be Crockett. He seemed puzzled by the hoots of laughter that followed. Not angry, just puzzled. His father was a jocular man who liked children and used to take mobs of us swimming at the Y and to youth concerts given by the Tabernacle Choir. Mr. Crockett later became a justice of the state supreme court, the same one that granted Gary Gilmore his wish to die.

Though I avoided the apartment, I could not shake the idea that sooner or later I would get the rifle out again. All my images of myself as I wished to be were images of myself armed. Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me. This much I understand now. But the man can give no help to the boy, not in this matter nor in those that follow. The boy moves always out of reach.

One afternoon I walked a friend of my mine to his house. After he went inside I sat on his steps for a while, then got to my feet and started toward home, walking fast. The apartment was empty. I took the rifle out and cleaned it. Put it back. Ate a sandwich. Took the rifle out again. Though I didn’t load it, I did turn the lights off and pull down the shades and assume my position on the couch.