This Boy's Life (11 page)

“For sure?”

“For sure.”

We would be walking slowly toward the car, Dwight watching our approach. “If there’s anything I should know, you tell me. Okay?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Promise.”

I would promise. And then I would get in the car with Dwight and he would drive me back to the mountains, smoking, brooding, looking over at me to see if he could catch some expression on my face that would give me away and explain why my mother kept putting off her decision. When we reached Marblemount he would stop at the tavern and drink for a couple of hours, then take me through the turns above the river and tell me some more things that were wrong with me.

Dwight’s bill of particulars contained some truth. But it went on and on. It never ended, and before long it lost its power to hurt me. I experienced it as more bad weather to get through, not biting, just close and dim and heavy.

I walked my paper route at glacial speed, the news bag swinging against my chest and back. I sat on my customers’ steps, staring off at nothing. I did multiplication tables in my head. I dreamed of doing brave, selfless deeds, generally of a military character; dreamed them so elaborately that I knew the histories of my comrades, saw their faces, heard their voices, felt grief when my heroism was insufficient to save them. As the dusk turned to night Dwight would send Pearl out with messages for me: Dad says you better get a move on, or else. Dad says hustle your buns, or else.

 

ONE NIGHT A week I went to Boy Scout meetings. To make sure that I wouldn’t just play grab-ass at the meetings but really do some serious scouting, as he had done when he was my age, Dwight signed up as Assistant Scoutmaster. He gave me an outsize uniform that Skipper had once worn. For himself he bought a new uniform and all the accoutrements. Unlike the Scoutmaster, who wore jeans and sneakers with his regulation shirt, Dwight came to every meeting in the full plumage of insignia and braid and scarves, wearing shoes that I had spit-shined as he looked on to point out spots I’d missed or brought to an imperfect luster. While the Scoutmaster ran the meetings Dwight stood against the wall or chatted with the older boys, smoking and laughing at their jokes. We always left the meetings together, like father and son, smiling and waving good-bye, then walked home in silence.

As soon as we got home, Dwight sat down at the kitchen table with a glass of Old Crow and reviewed my performance. I hadn’t paid attention during the announcements. I’d spent too much time goofing off with the wrong boys. I’d forgotten to check for the tongue during artificial respiration. Why couldn’t I remember that? Check for the goddam tongue! I could work on some poor drowned sonofabitch till the cows came home but it wasn’t going to do squat for him if he’d swallowed his tongue. Was that so hard to remember?

And I would say No, next time I’d remember, but the truth was I hadn’t forgotten at all, I just didn’t want to put my fingers in some kid’s mouth after he’d been eating peanut butter and crackers. If I ever came across an actual drowned person I would do everything I was supposed to do, even the business with the tongue; I just couldn’t perform solemn and efficient resuscitation upon the body of a boy who was whispering that his pud was waterlogged and in need of a big squeeze.

But I liked being a Scout. I was stirred by the elevated diction in which we swore our fealty to the chaste chivalric fantasies of Lord Baden-Powell. My uniform, baggy and barren though it was, made me feel like a soldier. I became a serious student of the ranks and honors available to the ambitious, and made up calenders of deadlines by which I planned my rise from Tenderfoot to Eagle. I developed a headwaiter’s eye; when we met with other troops to compete at Scout skills I could read their uniforms at a glance and know exactly who was who. The main purpose of scouting as I understood it was to accumulate symbols that would compel respect, or at least civility, from those who shared them and envy from those who did not. Conspicuous deeds of patriotism and piety, rope craft, water wisdom, fire wizardry, first-aid, all the arts of forest and mountain and stream, seemed to me just different ways of getting badges.

Dwight gave me Skipper’s old Scout manual,
Hand-book
for Boys, outdated even when Skipper had it, a 1942 edition full of pictures of “Fighting Scouts” keeping a lookout for Nazi subs and Jap bombers. I read the
Hand-book
almost every night, cruising for easy merit badges like Indian Lore, Bookbinding, Reptile Study, and Personal Health (“Show proper method of brushing teeth and discuss the importance of dental care....”). The merit-badge index was followed by advertisements for official Scout gear, and then a list of The Firms That Make the Things You Want, among them Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, Evinrude and Nestle’s (“The Boy Scout Emergency Ration”), and finally by a section called Where to Go to School. The schools were mostly military academies with sonorous double-barreled names. Carson Long. Morgan Park. Cochran-Bryan. Valley Forge. Castle Heights.

I liked reading all these advertisements. They were a natural part of the Handbook, in whose pages the Scout Spirit and the spirit of commerce mingled freely, and often indistinguishably. “What the Scout Is determines his progress in whatever line of business he may seek success—and Scout Ideals mean progress in business.” Suggested good turns were enumerated on a ledger, so the Scout could check them off as he performed them:
Assisted a foreign
boy with some English grammar.
Helped
put out
a
burning field. Gave water to
crippled
dog. Here, even the murky enterprise of self-examination could be expressed as a problem in accounting. “On a scale of 100, what all-around rating would I be justified in giving myself ?”

I liked all these numbers and lists, because they offered the clear possibility of mastery. But what I liked best about the Handbook was its voice, the bluff hail-fellow language by which it tried to make being a good boy seem adventurous, even romantic. The Scout Spirit was traced to King Arthur’s Round Table, and from there to the explorers and pioneers and warriors whose conquests had been achieved through fair play and clean living. “No man given over to dissipation can stand the gaff. He quickly tires. He is the type who usually lacks courage at the crucial moment. He cannot take punishment and come back smiling.”

I yielded easily to this comradely tone, forgetting while I did so that I was not the boy it supposed I was.

Boy’s Life, the official Scout magazine, worked on me in the same way. I read it in a trance, accepting without question its narcotic invitation to believe that I was really no different from the boys whose hustle and pluck it celebrated. Boys who raised treasure from Spanish galleons, and put empty barns to use by building operational airplanes in them. Boys who skied to the North Pole. Boys who sailed around the Horn, solo. Boys who saved lives, and were accepted into savage tribes, and sent themselves to college by running traplines in the wilderness. Reading about these boys made me restless, feverish with schemes.

My mother had allowed me to bring the Winchester to Chinook. When I was alone in the house I sometimes dressed up in my Scout uniform, slung the rifle across my back, and practiced Indian sign language in front of the mirror.

Hungry.

Brother.

Food.

Want.

Great Mystery.

 

MY MOTHER FINALLY gave Dwight a date in March. Once he knew she was coming he began to talk about his plans for renovating the house, but he drank at night and didn’t get anything done. A couple of weeks before she quit her job he brought home a trunkful of paint in five-gallon cans. All of it was white. Dwight spread out his tarps and for several nights running we stayed up late painting the ceilings and walls. When we had finished those, Dwight looked around, saw that it was good, and kept going. He painted the coffee table white. He painted all the beds white, and the chests of drawers, and the dining-room table. He called it “blond” when he put it on the furniture, but it wasn’t blond or even off-white; it was stark, industrial strength, eye-frying white. The house reeked of oil.

My mother called a few days before Dwight was supposed to drive down and pick her up. She talked to him for a while, then asked to speak to me. She wanted to know how I was.

Okay, I told her.

She said she had been feeling kind of low and just wanted to check with me, make sure I felt good about everything. It was such a big step. Were Dwight and I getting along all right?

I said we were. He was in the living room with me, painting some chairs, but I probably would have given the same answer if I’d been alone.

My mother told me she could still change her mind. She could keep her job and find another place to live. I understood, didn’t I, that it wasn’t too late?

I said I did, but I didn’t. I had come to feel that all of this was fated, that I was bound to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in, and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it. I did not believe my mother when she told me it wasn’t too late. I knew she meant what she said, but it seemed to me that she was deceiving herself. Things had gone too far. And somehow it was her telling me it wasn’t too late that made me believe, past all doubt, that it was. Those words still sound to me less like a hope than an epitaph, the last lie we tell before hurling ourselves over the brink.

After my mother hung up, Dwight and I finished painting the dining-room chairs. Then he lit a cigarette and looked around, his brush still in his hands. He gazed pensively at the piano. He said, “Sort of stands out, doesn’t it?”

I looked at it with him. It was an old Baldwin upright, cased in black walnut, that he had bought for twenty dollars from a family on the move who’d grown tired of hauling it around. Dwight did a victory dance after bringing it home. He said the stupid compones had no idea what it was worth, that it was worth twice that much. Dwight sat down at it one night with the idea of demonstrating his virtuosity, but after making a few sour chords he slammed it shut and pronounced it out of tune. He never went near it again. Sometimes Pearl banged out “Chopsticks” but otherwise it got no play at all. It was just a piece of furniture, so dark in all this whiteness that it seemed to be pulsing. You really couldn’t look anywhere else.

I agreed that it stood out.

We went to work on it. Using fine bristles so our brush strokes wouldn’t show, we painted the bench, the pedestal, the fluted columns that rose from the pedestal to the keyboard. We painted the carved scrollwork. We painted the elaborate inlaid picture above the keyboard, a picture of a girl with braided yellow hair leaning out of her gabled window to listen to a redbird on a branch. We painted the lustrous cabinet. We even painted the foot pedals. Finally, because the antique yellow of the ivory looked wrong to Dwight against the new white, we very carefully painted the keys, all except the black ones, of course.

I
was standing on the road with two other boys, my news bag still heavy with papers, when I saw him coming toward us with his little dog Pepper. The three of us started making cracks about him. His name was Arthur Gayle and he was the uncoolest boy in the sixth grade, maybe even the whole camp. Arthur was a sissy. His mother was said to have turned him into a sissy by dressing him in girls’ clothes when he was little. He walked like a girl, ran like a girl, and threw like a girl. Arthur was my father’s name, so that seemed okay to me, but the name Gayle implicated him further in sissyhood. He was clever. He had an arch, subtle voice that he used to good effect as an instrument of his cleverness. I’d come away smarting from all my exchanges with him.

Arthur was testy with me. He seemed to want something. At times I caught him looking at me expectantly, as if I were holding out on him. And I was. All my life I have recognized almost at a glance those who were meant to be my friends, and they have recognized me. Arthur was one of these. I liked him. I liked his acid wit and the wild stories he told and his apparent indifference to what other people thought of him. But I had withheld my friendship, because I was afraid of what it would cost me.

As Arthur came toward us he set his face in a careless smirk. He must have known we were talking about him. Instead of walking past, he turned to me and said, “Didn’t your momma teach you to wash your hands after you go pee?”

My hands weren’t all that yellow anymore, in fact they were nearly back to normal. I’d finished shucking the nuts weeks before.

It was springtime. The earth was spongy with melted snow, and on the warmest days, if you listened for it, you could hear a faint steady sibilance of evaporation, almost like a light rain. The trees were hazy with new growth. Bears had begun to appear on the glistening granite faces of the mountainsides above us, taking the sun and soaking up heat from the rock; at lunchtime people came out onto their steps and watched them with upturned, benevolent faces. My mother was with me again. The nuts were all husked and drying in the attic. What did I need trouble for?

I was inclined to let it go. But I didn’t like being laughed at, and I didn’t like comments about my hands. Arthur had made other such comments. He was bigger than me, especially around the middle, but I factored out this weight as blubber. I could take him, I felt sure. I had provocation, and I had witnesses to carry the news. It seemed like a good time to make a point.

I started things off by calling him Fatso.

Arthur continued to smile at me. “Excuse me,” he said, “but has anyone ever told you that. you look exactly like a pile of wet vomit?”

We went on like this, and then I called him a sissy.

The smile left his face. And at that moment it came to me that although everyone referred to Arthur as a sissy, I had never heard anyone actually use the word in front of him. And in the same moment, seeing how everything about him changed after the word was spoken, how suddenly red and awful his face became, I understood that there must be a reason for this. A crucial bit of history I should have known about, and didn’t.