I Know This Much Is True (13 page)

“Close that door!” Robocop yelled.

In the middle of the scuffle, I saw the social worker’s door close.

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ward. “They’re nailing me to the cross, Dominick!” Thomas screamed. “They’re nailing me to the cross!”

The doors slammed shut behind them.

Robocop wrenched my arm back, slammed me up against the wall. “This one’s crazier than the other one, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

“Take your motherfucking hands off me!” I screamed, spitting and straining and trying to pull away. Mercado and Fatso and the other escort held me back. The third guard came running out from behind the glass office. Robocop leaned his knee in toward my groin—no pain, just the promise of it. Just the pressure.

“You get off on this or something?” I said. “Feeling guys up while you’re frisking them? Give you a cheap thrill, does it?”

He kneed me.

One hard, quick jerk that dropped me to the floor. I think I blacked out for a minute, and when I came back, it took me a while to realize that the moaning and heaving I heard was coming from me, not my brother. The pain is something I can’t even try to describe.

That’s when I knew what Thomas was up against. That’s when I felt it for myself: the spike against flesh, the hammer’s piercing thud.

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5

f

1958

Thomas and I are going to the movies with Ma—the Back-to-School Festival of Fun. We’re on the city bus. I get to pull the stop cord when we get to the five-and-ten because Thomas did it last time. The bus won’t stop at the show, only the five-and-ten.

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,
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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!”
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:
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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.