As he opened each of her letters and pulled it out Bobby would think, This is the last. I won’t hear from her again. Kids don’t write letters for long even if they promise they will.
There are too many new things coming along. Time goes by so fast. Too fast. She’ll forget me.
But he would not help her to do so. After each of her letters came he would sit down and write a response. He told her about the house in Brookline his mother sold for twenty-five thousand dollars — six months’ salary at her old job in a single commission. He told her about the A-Plus on his English theme. He told her about his friend Morrie, who was teaching him to play chess. He didn’t tell her that sometimes he and Morrie went on window-breaking expeditions, riding their bikes (Bobby had finally saved up enough to buy one) as fast as they could past the scuzzy old apartment houses on Plymouth Street and throwing rocks out of their baskets as they went. He skipped the story of how he had told Mr Hurley, the assistant principal at Danvers Elementary, to kiss his rosy red ass and how Mr Hurley had responded by slapping him across the face and calling him an insolent, wearisome little boy. He didn’t confide that he had begun shoplifting or that he had been drunk four or five times (once with Morrie, the other times by himself) or that sometimes he walked over to the train tracks and
wondered if getting run over by the South Shore Express would be the quickest way to finish the job. Just a whiff of diesel fuel, a shadow falling over your face, and then blooey. Or maybe not that quick.
Each letter he wrote to Carol ended the same way:
You are sadly missed by
Your friend,
Bobby
Weeks would pass with no mail — not for him — and then there would be another
envelope with hearts and teddy bears stuck to the back, another sheet of deckle-edged paper, more stuff about skating and baton twirling and new shoes and how she was still stuck on fractions. Each letter was like one more labored breath from a loved one whose death now seems inevitable. One more breath.
Even Sully-John wrote him a few letters. They stopped early in 1961, but Bobby was amazed and touched that Sully would try at all. In S-J’s childishly big handwriting and painful misspellings Bobby could make out the approach of a good-hearted teenage boy who would play sports and lay cheerleaders with equal joy, a boy who would become lost in the thickets of punctuation as easily as he would weave through the defensive lines of opposing football teams. Bobby thought he could even see the man who was waiting for Sully up ahead in the seventies and eighties, waiting for him the way you’d wait for a taxi to arrive: a car salesman who’d eventually own his own dealership. Honest John’s, of course; Honest John’s Harwich Chevrolet. He’d have a big stomach hanging over his belt and lots of plaques on the wall of his office and he’d coach youth sports and start every peptalk with Listen up, guys and go to church and march in parades and be on the city council and all that. It would be a good life, Bobby reckoned — the farm and the rabbits instead of the stick sharpened at both ends.
Although for Sully the stick turned out to be waiting after all; it was waiting in Dong Ha Province along with the old mamasan, the one who would never completely go away.
Bobby was fourteen when the cop caught him coming out of the convenience store with two sixpacks of beer (Narragansett) and three cartons of cigarettes (Chesterfields, naturally; twenty-one great tobaccos make twenty wonderful smokes). This was the blond Village of the Damned cop.
Bobby told the cop he hadn’t broken in, that the back door was open and he’d just walked in, but when the cop shone his flashlight on the lock it hung askew in the old wood, half gouged out. What about this? the cop asked, and Bobby shrugged. Sitting in the car (the cop let Bobby sit in the front seat with him but wouldn’t let him have a butt when Bobby asked), the cop began filling out a form on a clipboard. He asked the sullen, skinny kid beside him what his name was. Ralph, Bobby said. Ralph Garfield. But when they pulled up in front of the house where he now lived with his mom — a whole house, upstairs and downstairs both, times were good -he told the cop he had lied.