Voice of Our Shadow (2 page)

Soon he was stealing whatever he could lay his hands on. He was a premier thief, due in large part to chutzpah. He was constantly stopped in stores and asked where he was going with that watch (book, lighter …). With a guileless, uncomprehending look, he would say he was just bringing it over there to his mother. After being stared down by Ross, the salesperson would apologize for being so gruff with him. Five minutes later Ross would have the thing in his pocket and be out on the street.

Once, he had a fight with my mother the day after Christmas and told her he’d stolen every one of the presents he’d given us. She erupted, but my calm father — saddened but used to it by then — just asked which store they’d come from. Ross wouldn’t say, and we were off on the carousel again.

Five days later my parents went out to a New Year’s Eve party and made Ross babysit for me. Ten minutes after they were out the door, he dared me to slide down the banister with my eyes closed. I’d gone a couple of feet before I felt something hideous and burning on the back of my hand. I threw both arms up, knocking away the cigarette he’d been singeing me with. Losing my balance, I fell over the side and landed on my arm, which instantly snapped in two places. All I remember besides the pain is Ross’s face right up next to mine, telling me again and again I’d better keeping my fucking little mouth shut about this.

Was I a fool? Yes. Should I have screamed bloody murder? Yes. Did I want my brother to love me just a little? Yes.

When he was fifteen Ross changed his image and became a tough guy. Leather jacket with a thousand zippers and chrome studs, a bone-handled switchblade knife from Italy, a tube of Brylcreem hair goop on the shelf in the bathroom.

He hung around with a bunch of dimwits who, instead of talking, smoked Marlboros and spat on the ground. The leader of this pack was named Bobby Hanley, who, although short and skinny as a car antenna, had a nasty reputation. It was assumed that anyone who messed with him was out of his mind.

The first time I ever saw Bobby was at a high school basketball game. I was eleven, and because I was still in elementary school, I didn’t know who he was. I’d come to the game with Ross (who’d been forced into taking me by my parents), but he ditched me seconds after we got there. I’d looked around frantically for someone to sit with, but it seemed as if everyone was a stranger. I ended up standing by the main door. A few minutes into the game an old janitor who I knew was named Vince came in and stood next to me. He had one of those long wooden brooms in his hand; every time our side scored he’d stamp it on the ground. We started talking, and I felt more comfortable. It was very pleasant, and I started thinking about how great it would be when I was in high school and could come to these games all the time with my friends.

A few minutes before the end of the first quarter the door whacked open and a bunch of tough guys sashayed in. Vince muttered something about “little turds,” and since I didn’t know anything, I nodded.

They walked right up to the out-of-bounds line and stood there, checking out the crowd, ignoring the game completely. Then one of them took out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. He threw the match on the floor. Vince walked up and told him there was no smoking in the gym. Bobby Hanley didn’t even look his way. Instead, he took a long, slow drag and said, “Blow it out your ass, Pop.”

I couldn’t believe it! The even more astonishing thing was, Vince mumbled something, but walked back to the door.

A few of Hanley’s crew snickered, but none of them had the nerve to light up too. Standing next to me, Vince cursed and kept moving his hands around on the top of the broom. I didn’t know what to do. How could this kid get away with that? What kind of crazy power did he have?

The quarter ended as Bobby smoked his cigarette down to the brown filter. When he was done he dropped it on the hardwood floor and ground it out with his boot heel. I watched his foot move back and forth. Much too loudly I said, “What a big jerk.”

“Hey, Bobby, numb-nuts over there called you a jerk.”

I froze.

“Who did?”

“The little fuck over there by the door. The orange sweater.”

“A jerk, huh?”

I wouldn’t look up. I wanted to close my eyes, but I didn’t. I saw the lower half of Hanley push through his entourage and walk toward me. He grabbed my ear and pulled it up next to his mouth.

“You called me a jerk?”

“Leave the kid alone, Hanley.”

Still holding me tight, Bobby told the janitor to fuck off.

“I asked you a question, scumbag. I’m a jerk?”

“You’re not supposed to smoke in the gym. Ow!”

“Says who, scumbag? Who’s going to stop me?”

Silence. People moved around us. I was so scared and ashamed. I had no guts. Everyone in the world was looking at me. No one knew who I was, but that made no difference. Whoever I was, I was a chickenshit. Hanley was slowly tearing my ear off. I was sure I could hear little things coming apart in there: muscles from bone, soft little membranes and hairs like the thinnest spiderwebs … His friends stood around us in a semicircle, delighted to be part of the scene.

“Listen to me, scumbag.” He stepped forward and planted his heel on top of my sneaker. He shoved down on it; I yelped as the pain soared up through my body. I started to cry. “Scumbag’s crying now. Why’re you crying?”

Where was Vince? Where was my father? My brother? My brother — ha! Even then, in the midst of that scene, I knew if Ross had been around he would’ve laughed himself sick.

“Hey, Bobby, Madeleine’s waiting for you.”

I looked directly at him for the first time. He was much shorter than I’d thought. Who was Madeleine? Was he going to go away now?

“Look, scummy, don’t you ever let me see you around here again, understand? ‘Cause if I do, I’m going to cut your fuckin’ eyes out with this.” He pulled a beer opener out of his pocket and pressed it hard against my nose. I remember how warm it was. I nodded as best I could, and he shoved me away. I cracked my head on a bleacher and went down like a stone in water. When I looked up again the whole gang of them was gone.

For months afterward I skulked around school like a haunted shadow. When I crept into the building in the morning, I checked every corridor, every classroom, every bathroom before I went in or out, just in case he was there. I knew the chances of his ever being in the elementary school were remote, but I wasn’t about to tempt fate.

I told no one about it, especially not Ross. At night I sometimes dreamed I was running as fast as I could on a soft rubber road chased by a gigantic dancing beer opener.

Nothing ever happened, so by the time Ross and Bobby teamed up a year later, I felt only a sharp cut of fear when I saw them together for the first time.

The final indignity was that when Bobby came over to our house for the first time he didn’t even recognize me. When Ross said by way of introduction, “That’s my shitty little brother,” Bobby only smiled and said, “How’re you doin’, man?”

How was I
doing
? I wanted to tell him … No, I wanted to demand that he recognize me. Me, scumbag, the one he’d scared so badly for huge months of my life.

But I didn’t. Later I got up the guts to remind him of that first meeting. He snapped his fingers as if he’d forgotten to buy shoelaces. “Yeah, sure, I thought I knew your face.” And that was all.

Naturally the longer he hung around with Ross, the more I liked him. He was very funny and had a kind of sensitivity that enabled him, like my brother, to see right through to a person’s strengths and weaknesses. He used this ability to his own benefit about ninety percent of the time, but once in a while he did something so extraordinarily nice you were knocked for a loop.

Just before my thirteenth birthday the three of us were in a stationery store and I wistfully mentioned how much I wanted a certain model of the aircraft carrier
Forrestal
they had on the shelves. When my big day arrived, Bobby came over to the house and handed me the model, gift-wrapped. “Shit, man, did you ever try to steal something that big? It’s fucking hard!” I made the model more carefully than any other. I showed it to him only after I’d spent hours painting and sanding it to perfection. He nodded appreciatively and told Ross I knew what I was doing. That year Ross’s present to me was a small rubber doll of a woman in a bathing suit whose breasts popped out from behind the suit whenever you squeezed her stomach.

I think Hanley originally liked my brother because Ross was very smart. School was easy for him, and he often ended up doing Bobby’s homework for him, although the latter was a grade ahead.

However, I’m not trying to say that was the only reason for their friendship. When he felt like it, my brother not only could charm the birds out of the trees but could make anyone in the world laugh. He wasn’t a clown, but among his many gifts was an acute sensitivity to your likes and dislikes, as well as the ability to send you howling. Since Hanley was the undisputed king of the high school, Ross cased the scene before making his move. He decided to become the older boy’s court jester. He wasn’t tough like the others in the gang, but he was damned shrewd! After only a short time there were a million punks in town who wanted to beat Ross to smithereens, but they left him alone because they all knew he was safely under Bobby’s dangerous wing.

In a different environment who knows what might have happened to the two of them. Both Bobby and Ross had an élan, the magician’s touch; that special rare ability to turn cruelty into pink handkerchiefs and kindness into thin air.

The two of them palled around more and more, but my parents didn’t mind because Bobby was quiet and courteous when he came over for dinner. Also, he appeared to be having a very good effect. At home, Ross wasn’t half as nasty or selfish as he had been. He didn’t go out of his way to be friendly or helpful, but there were faint glimmerings that he might have turned a corner and was heading in some kind of right direction.

The night before Ross died, Bobby slept over at our house. Ross was very excited because he had been given a twelve-gauge shotgun for his birthday a few days before. My father loved to shoot trap and skeet and had promised to teach us the sport when we reached sixteen.

Bobby had guns of his own, but this one was a beauty he could appreciate. They allowed me to stay in the room with them that evening, even when Ross pulled out the new dirty magazines he’d stolen from the candy store. They smoked almost a full pack of cigarettes and spent the hours talking about the girls at school, different kinds of cars, what Bobby would do when he graduated.

I slept on a hassock that opened out into a bed. Ross let me do that, too. Hours later, I jerked awake when I felt something thick and warm and gooey on my face. Both of them were standing by my bed, and in the dim light I saw Ross tipping a bottle of something over me. I opened my mouth to protest and tasted the heavy sweetness of maple syrup. By that time it was all over me. There was nothing I could do but get up and bump my way out of the room, followed by their pleased laughter. I washed out my pajama top in the sink as best I could, so that my mother would never know about it. Then I took a long shower in the dark.

When I awoke the next day, I felt feverish and uncomfortable. The strong morning sunlight poured through the windows and over me like an extra, unnecessary blanket.

After I brushed my teeth, I went to Ross’s room and knocked on the door. When there was no answer I cautiously pushed it open. There were wooden bunk beds in both our rooms. I saw Ross hanging over the edge of the top one, busily talking to Bobby, who was lying on his back with his hands behind his head.

“What do you want, asshole? More syrup?”

Bobby fanned a fly away from his nose and yawned. Last night’s joke was last night, and now it was time for something new.

“You know, Ross, if you could sneak that shotgun out of the house, we could go down to the river and pick off a few seagulls. I hate those fucking birds.”

We lived half a mile from a river. It was a place where you went in the summer when there was nothing else to do, or if you were lucky enough to have convinced a girl to go “swimming” there with you. Since the water was so brown and polluted, you never swam — as soon as you got your towels down on the beach you started necking.

To get to the water you had to cross railroad tracks. You did it carefully and stepped ridiculously high over anything that looked even vaguely suspicious: down there somewhere on the ground was the
third rail
and you knew that if you ever so much as touched it you would be instantly electrocuted.

Bobby and Ross had been down to the tracks before with guns. In fact, Ross was the only other member of the gang who’d had the “guts” to shoot at passing cattle cars with one of Bobby’s many rifles. They were never caught.

My parents went shopping that morning, so there was no problem taking the gun out of the house. Ross slid it back into its cardboard box, and that was that for camouflage. They allowed me to tag along on the threat that if I said anything about it afterward they’d boil me in oil.

When we got down to the tracks Bobby told Ross to get the gun out — he wanted to take a couple of shots. I could see Ross wanted to shoot first; a peeved, mean look swept across his face. But it was gone in an instant. He handed the gun over, along with a bunch of red and brassy-gold shells he had stuffed in his back pocket. The only thing he had left was the empty box; he threw that at me.

The sun was hot, and I peeled off my T-shirt. When it was halfway over my head, I heard the
pof
of the first shot and an instantaneous crash of glass somewhere.

“Holy shit, Bobby! You think you hit the station?” Ross’s voice was high and scared.

“I’ll be fucked if I know, man.” He reloaded and shot off in another direction. I put my hands over my ears and looked at the ground. I was already petrified, and things had just begun.

“Ross, baby, this is one honey of a gun. I can tell already. Let’s go, man.”

We walked twelve or fifteen feet apart. Bobby, Ross, then me. That’s very important, as you’ll see in a moment. Bobby held the shotgun down at his side, barrel toward the ground. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It was dull blue and the railroad tracks under our feet were hot silver as we stepped gingerly over them. The light everywhere burned my eyes and made me squint. I wished to God I was home. What were they going to do now? What would happen if they were in the mood for something unnecessary and vicious, like shooting at cattle as they moved slowly by in those slatted red and brown freight cars, already on their way to the slaughterhouse? I hated the gun, I hated my great fear, I hated my brother and his friend. But they would never, ever know that.