I Know This Much Is True (47 page)

Drinkwater’s dope shifted the whole dynamic. Ralph, Leo, and I turned into a trio and Thomas became the odd man out. If we had a field to mow or an acre of brush to clear, the three of us would cook up a plan to make it go faster, easier, and Thomas would plod along on his own, uninvited. At lunchtime, he’d sit by himself in a huff, hardly speaking to the rest of us. Sometimes Dell would assign Thomas a separate job altogether—send the three of us off someplace and then sit there and watch Thomas work. Criticize him. Bust his balls. Dell began to take a special interest in making Thomas’s life miserable.

“Tell your brother he better watch out for Dell,” Ralph said to me one afternoon. The two of us were painting picnic tables side by side down at the fairgrounds, high on hemp and paint fumes. Dell and Thomas were across the field, painting a set of bleachers.

“What do you mean, ‘watch out for him’?” I said.

He shrugged. “I don’t mean nothing. Just tell him.”

During the first couple of weeks on the job, it was Drinkwater who’d ridden shotgun in the cab with Dell, but now Thomas sat up front. That saddens me now, but it didn’t back then. I was
glad
for the reprieve—grateful to be a free agent for a change. I remember Thomas, sitting up front, craning his neck back at Leo and Ralph and me—the three of us laughing and hooting at girls on the street or sipping another joint on the way back to the city barn.

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“That brother of yours is fucked
up,
” Leo said one time when he caught Thomas looking back at us.

“He’s more fucked up than a soup sandwich,” Ralph added. And the three of us broke into snorts and giggles, courtesy of Thomas.

On another of those rides, Leo started blowing kisses to this woman in a convertible behind us. She yelled back something about us being the Three Stooges, and Ralph launched into this imitation of Curly Joe that was so dead-on and unexpected, none of us could breathe from laughing so hard. Leo made up a theme song for us:

“Three Dumb Fucks,” sung to the tune of “Three Blind Mice.”

Sometimes we’d sing that song all the way back to the barn, making up new lyrics that struck us all as hilarious. The three of us were happy as pigs in shit to be wasted and working for the Three Rivers Public Works.

But as tight as Leo, Drinkwater, and I got that summer, there was always a kind of mystery about Ralph. A question mark hanging over his circumstances. He never volunteered much. We knew he didn’t live at home, but he never quite said where he
did
live. He took a ride home from Dell sometimes, but he always refused one from Leo. He was always “too busy” to hang out with us on the weekend. The only time that whole summer that Leo and I got together with Ralph was one Sunday when the three of us drove up to Fenway for a doubleheader.

And even then, Ralph acted like some kind of secret agent about where he lived. We had to pick him up downtown in front of the post office, I remember. And drop him off there, too, even though we got back late in the middle of a rainstorm—the three of us soaked to the bone because of Leo’s broken convertible top.

Part of what was between us was Ralph’s race. You’d see it sometimes when Dell started up with his stupid jokes, or when Leo hit a nerve. Indian or mulatto or whatever he was, Drinkwater was different from us lily-white college boys who got to go back to school at the end of the summer while he stayed stuck in Three Rivers. And it wasn’t like he was stupid. He was always trying to talk to us about politics or something he’d seen on the news or read about in some science article. He read a lot—as much as any college kid. He kept I Know[264-339] 7/24/02 12:45 PM Page 312

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trying to get us to read this one book,
Soul on Ice,
by Eldridge Cleaver. He recommended that book to us so many times, it got to be a joke.

One time Leo called Ralph “Tonto,” and he got pissed about it.

He told Leo that Leo wasn’t fit to lick the foot of a Wequonnoc Indian. Another time the three of us were toking up out at the reservoir. I was sucking away on the end of the roach and Leo said,

“Jesus Christ, Birdseed, you don’t have to nigger-lip the thing to death.” Drinkwater and I both laughed a little when he said it, but then there was this silence that lasted about fifteen seconds longer than it should have. Ralph got up and walked off into the woods.

“That was real swift of you,” I told Leo. “Congratulations, man.”

“Hey, shoot me, okay, Birdsey,” Leo snapped back. “I can’t keep track of whether he’s an Indian or Afroman or
what
he is.”

Another wedge between Ralph and us—between Ralph and everyone—was the death of his sister. I didn’t catch on at first. Couldn’t read where some of his moodiness was coming from. I knew the obvious: that Penny Ann was buried out there at the Indian cemetery. His cousin Lonnie, too. You couldn’t miss Lonnie’s gravestone.
“In Memory
of a Modern Warrior.”
In contrast, Penny Ann’s stone was about the size of a dictionary.
“P.A.D.”
was all it said.
“1948–1958.”

Ralph would get sulky every week when we mowed the Indian graveyard. Nothing anyone said out there struck him as funny. It was something I thought I understood. Then one day it hit me like a brick in the head: this wasn’t just the place where his sister’s and cousin’s graves were. It was worse than that. This was the place where that sick bastard Monk had taken Penny Ann during the snowstorm. This was where they’d found her body.

Dell liked to save the Indian cemetery—the smallest of the town graveyards—for Friday afternoons. We always finished ahead of time, and more often than not, Dell would take out his Seagram’s and start celebrating the weekend early. One hot afternoon, Leo got the bright idea that we should head up the path to the Falls, then climb down and go swimming in the river. I figured Drinkwater would steer clear of the place. It made me a little squeamish myself.

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But Ralph surprised me and followed us up the path. I don’t remember Thomas being there that day. It may have been around the time he cut his foot.

There were “no trespassing” signs posted all over the place and chain-link fence on both cliff edges at the waterspill. All that stuff had been put up by the town years ago in response to Penny Ann’s murder. But by the summer of ’69, those “keep out” signs had all rusted and chipped. Kids had long ago bent an opening in the fence and trampled a path down to the water.

Leo went first. I followed, half-walking and half-running down the steep path. Drinkwater brought up the rear. Down by the water’s edge, Leo and I shucked off our clothes and eased into the cedar-tinted water. Ralph yanked off his boots and socks, threw his wallet onto the pile. Then he waded in, still wearing his tank top and jeans.

I wondered why—what all the modesty was about—but I didn’t say anything. Didn’t kid him about it. If I didn’t really understand the
whys
of Ralph’s boundaries, I at least had a sense of what they were.

Unlike Leo.

“Hey, you guys! Look!” Leo called over the roar of the water. He was pointing to the middle of the river. “Holy shit! Is this what I think it is?”

Ralph and I stood watching as he dived underwater, swam to the spot where he’d been pointing, and resurfaced. “Hey! I don’t believe it! It
is
!”

“
What?
” I yelled. Ralph and I waited, riveted.

Instead of answering, Leo dived again. Surfaced. “Yup. Just like I thought. Holy Christ!”

“What?” I said. “What the fuck you talking about?”

“It’s that Mary Jo Kopechne broad. She must have floated down-stream from Massachusetts. Psyche!” He broke into obnoxious guffawing that ricocheted into the treetops. “Man, I got you two
bad
!”

I shot a nervous glance over toward Ralph. “Shut up, Leo,” I called to him.

“What’s the matter with
you,
Birdsey?” he laughed. “You related to the Kennedys or something?”

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Then Ralph went under. I waited. He resurfaced fifty feet or so up the river. Climbed the bank and disappeared back into the woods.

I swam upriver myself, wanting to distance myself from Leo. I cooled off for five or ten minutes. When I got back to the Falls, Leo called my name. He was pointing straight up.

Ralph had climbed back up the path, but instead of crawling through the opening in the fence, he was scaling the remaining ten or twelve feet of cliff wall. We watched him in silence until he was out on the unprotected side of the ledge. From there, he started climbing the mammoth oak tree that grew right at the cliff ’s edge.

He rose way the hell up into the branches and leaves, until he was so high up there that it made me nauseous to even look. Finally he climbed out onto a branch and just sat there, his legs dangling over the sides. He was staring down into the falling water, smirking that smirk. What struck me most was the loneliness of his position: the black Indian, the nonseasonal worker. The untwinned twin. There was something about Ralph that filled me up with sadness. Some pain that was readable just in the way he sat up there on that tree limb. But not completely readable. Something
un
readable, too.

“Hey, Drinkwater,” Leo shouted up. “Let’s see a dive! Come on, you chicken-shit bastard.
Jump!
”

I saw Penny Ann’s body falling over the edge and down. “Shut up!” I yelled and whacked Leo one across the mouth.

“Hey! What’d you fucking do that for?”

“To shut you up, asshole.” I grabbed his wrist as his fist came flying at me in retaliation. The two of us tussled, went under. I’d split his lip. Bloodied up his teeth. I got him in a hold from behind. “His
sister
died out here, you idiot,” I hissed into his ear. “The guy threw her body over—”

“Whose sister? What the fuck you talking about?”

We both stopped. Looked up. Ralph was standing on the tree limb now. Rocking the branch. For a few seconds, I thought we were witnessing his suicide. Then he turned back toward the trunk, climbed limb by limb back down the tree. Got to the ground, the ledge.

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swam, as far away from Leo as I could get. If I hadn’t, I would have pummeled him. Uncapped his capped teeth. Rearranged his entire fucking face.

By the time Leo and I got dressed, got back to the truck and roused Dell out of his stupor, Drinkwater still hadn’t shown. “Screw the bastard,” Dell said. “It’s quitting time. I ain’t waiting around forever.” He threw the truck in gear. Drove us out of the graveyard.

During the ride back to the barn, neither Leo nor I spoke. “Hey, Dominick, I’m
sorry
already!” he finally blurted out as the truck pulled back into the Public Works yard. “My mother and I didn’t even
move
here until 1963, okay? So shoot me, already. I didn’t even know the guy
had
a sister!”

That same night, Thomas began to lecture me on the evils of smoking marijuana. We were lying in the dark, in our bedroom, neither of us able to sleep. Nighttime hadn’t done dick to cool things down, take away a little of the humidity. The air just hung there, pressing against me.

I’d planned that night to ride up to Dessa’s house, but she’d called at the last minute and said she had to go to work—cover for another waitress. “If you’d stop being so stubborn and just quit that stupid job, then things like this wouldn’t happen,” I’d snapped at her.

She’d given it right back to me. Why didn’t I quit
my
stupid job?

Make
my
self available when it was convenient for
her
?

“Because I’m not Daddy’s little girl, that’s why. Because if
I
want to go back to school next month instead of going off to Vietnam, I’ve got to bust my ass five days a week to pay for it. Okay, princess?”

She’d hung up in my ear. Not answered when I called her back.

Between what had happened out at the Falls that day with Ralph and Leo and the argument I’d had with Dessa, I was in no mood to take any shit from Thomas.

“It’s just not right, Dominick,” he argued from the bottom bunk.

“You guys are getting paid to work, not to smoke that stuff.”

“The town gets more of their money’s worth out of us working
stoned
than it does out of you working straight,” I said. “
Much
more.”

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“That’s not the point. The point is, that stuff turns you into a whole different person. Plus, you’re breaking the law. What if Dell finds out what you guys are up to?”

I hung my head down over the top bunk and laughed in his face.

“What if
Dell
finds out?
Dell,
who gets so cocked on the job that he has to sleep it off?
He’s
going to blow the whistle on
us
?”

“Well, what if Lou Clukey gets wind of what’s going on? I hate to tell you, Dominick, but you guys
reek
after you smoke that stuff.

And your eyes glaze over—yours especially. I’ve seen guys from the other crews
stare
at the three of you when we get back to the barn sometimes. What if Lou Clukey catches on and calls the cops? That would make Ma feel great, wouldn’t it? Reading your name in the arrest report? What do you think Ray would do to you?”

I told him he was being paranoid—that nobody at the barn was staring at us.

“Oh, yeah, right,” he said.