right, and everybody thought he would turn out bad … including Chris. His brothers had
lived up to the town’s expectations admirably. Dave, the eldest, ran away from home
when he was seventeen, joined the Navy, and ended up doing a long stretch in
Portsmouth for rape and criminal assault. The next-eldest, Richard (his right eye was all
funny and jittery, which was why everybody called him Eyeball), had dropped out of high
school in the tenth grade, and chummed around with Charlie and Billy Tessio and their jd
buddies.
‘I think all that’ll work,’ I told Chris. ‘What about John and Marty?’ John and Marty
DeSpain were two other members of our regular gang.
‘They’re still away,’ Chris said. ‘They won’t be back until Monday.’
‘Oh. That’s too bad.’
‘So are we set?’ Vern asked, still squirming. He didn’t want the conversation
sidetracked even for a minute.
‘I guess we are,’ Chris said. ‘Who wants to play some more scat?’
No one did. We were too excited to play cards. We climbed down from the treehouse, climbed the fence into the vacant lot, and played three-flies-six-grounders for a while
with Vein’s old friction-taped baseball, but that was no fun, either. All we could think
about was that kid Brower, hit by a train, and how we were going to see him, or what was
left of him. Around ten o’clock we all drifted away home to fix it with our parents.
6
I got to my house at quarter to eleven, after stopping at the drugstore to check out the
paperbacks. I did that every couple of days to see if there were any new John D
MacDonalds. I had a quarter and I figured if there was, I’d take it along. But there were
only the old ones, and I’d read most of those half a dozen times.
When I got home the car was gone and I remembered that my mom and some of her
hen-party friends had gone to Boston to see a concert. A great old concert-goer, my
mother. And why not? Her only kid was dead and she had to do something to take her
mind off it. I guess that sounds pretty bitter. And I guess if you’d been there, you’d
understand why I felt that way.
Dad was out back, passing a fine spray from the hose over his ruined garden. If you
couldn’t tell it was a lost cause from his glum face, you sure could by looking at the
garden itself. The soil was light, powdery grey. Everything in it was dead except for the
corn, which had never grown so much as a single edible ear. Dad said he’d never known
how to water a garden; it had to be mother nature or nobody. He’d water too long in one
spot and drown the plants. In the next row, plants were dying of thirst. He could never hit
a happy medium. But he didn’t talk about it often. He’d lost a son in April and a garden in
August. And if he didn’t want to talk about either one, I guess that was his privilege. It
just bugged me that he’d given up talking about everything else, too. That was taking
democracy too fucking far.
‘Hi, daddy,’ I said, standing beside him. I offered him the Rollos I’d bought at the
drugstore. ‘Want one?’
‘Hello, Gordon. No thanks.’ He kept flicking the fine spray over the hopeless grey
earth.
‘Be okay if I camp out in Vern Tessio’s back field tonight with some of the guys?’
‘What guys?’
‘Vern. Teddy Duchamp. Maybe Chris.’ I expected him to start right in on Chris – how
Chris was bad company, a rotten apple from the bottom of the barrel, a thief, and an
apprentice juvenile delinquent. But he just sighed and said, ‘I suppose it’s okay.’ ‘Great!
Thanks!’
I turned to go into the house and check out what was on the boob tube when he
stopped me with: Those are the only people you want to be with, aren’t they, Gordon?’
I looked back at him, braced for an argument, but there was no argument in him that
morning. It would have been better if there had been, I think. His shoulders were
slumped. His face, pointed towards the dead garden and not towards me, sagged. There
was a certain unnatural sparkle in his eyes that might have been tears.
‘Aw, dad, they’re okay -‘
‘Of course they are. A thief and two feebs. Fine company for my son.’
‘Vern Tessio isn’t feeble,’ I said. Teddy was a harder case to argue.
Twelve years old and still in the fifth grade,’ my dad said. ‘And that time he slept over.
When the Sunday paper came the next morning, he took an hour and a half to read the
funnypages.’
That made me mad, because I didn’t think he was being fair. He was judging Vern the
way he judged all my friends, from having seen them off and on, mostly going in and out
of the house. He was wrong about them. And when he called Chris a thief I always saw
red, because he didn’t know anything about Chris. I wanted to tell him that, but if I pissed him off he’d keep me home. And he wasn’t really mad anyway, not like he got at the
supper-table sometimes, ranting so loud that nobody wanted to eat. Now he just looked
sad and tired out and used. He was sixty three years old, old enough to be my grandfather.
My mom was fifty-five – no spring chicken, either. When she and dad got married they
tried to start a family right away and my mom got pregnant and had a miscarriage. She
miscarried two more and the doctor told her she’d never be able to carry a baby to term. I
got all of this stuff, chapter and verse, whenever one of them was lecturing me, you
understand. They wanted me to think I was a special delivery from God and I wasn’t
appreciating my great good fortune in being conceived when my mother was forty-two
and starting ro grey. I wasn’t appreciating my great good fortune and I wasn’t appreciating
her tremendous pain and sacrifices, either.
Five years after the doctor said mom would never have a baby she got pregnant with
Dennis. She carried him fpr eight months and then he just sort of fell out, all eight pounds
of him – my father used to say that if she had carried Dennis to term, the kid would have
weighed fifteen pounds. The doctor said, Well, sometimes nature fools us, but he’ll be the
only one you’ll ever have. Thank God for him and be content. Ten years later she got
pregnant with me. She not only carried me to term, the doctor had to use forceps to yank
me out. Did you ever hear of such a fucked-up family? I came into the world the child of
two Geritol-chuggers, not to go on and on about it, and my only brother was playing
league baseball in the big kids’ park before I even got out of diapers.
In the case of my mom and dad, one gift from God had been enough. I won’t say they
treated me badly, and they sure never beat me, but I was a hell of a big surprise and I
guess when you get into your forties you’re not as partial to surprises as you were in your
twenties. After I was born, Mom got that operation her hen-party friends referred to as
‘the Band-Aid’. I guess she wanted to make a hundred per cent sure that there wouldn’t be
any more gifts from God. When I got to college I found out I’d beaten long odds just by
not being born retarded … although I think my dad had his doubts when he saw my friend
Vern taking ten minutes to puzzle out the dialogue in Beetle Bailey.
This business about being ignored: I could never really pin it down until I did a book
report in high school on this novel called Invisible Man. When I agreed to do the book for Miss Hardy I thought it was going to be the science fiction story about the guy in
bandages and Foster Grants – Claude Rains played him in the movies. When I found out
this was a different story I tried to give the book back but Miss Hardy wouldn’t let me off
the hook. I ended up being real glad. This Invisible Man is about a Negro. Nobody ever
notices him at all unless he fucks up. People look right through him. When he talks,
nobody answers. He’s like a black ghost. Once I got into it, I ate that book up like it was a
John D MacDonald, because that cat Ralph Ellison was writing about me. At the supper
table it was Denny how many did you strike out and Denny who asked you to the Sadie