by Wally Lamb
A decade or so later—after the doctors had stripped Thomas of the label “manic-depressive” and declared him, instead, a paranoid schizophrenic—my brother’s then most recent medication had begun to stabilize him. Had seemed like the real miracle this time. Dosed with two hundred daily milligrams of Thorazine, Thomas was granted a state hospital “grounds card.” He was pleased and proud of this achievement; the card allowed him roaming privileges in the company of staff or family.
Dessa and I would pick him up on Sunday afternoons at the entrance to the Settle Building and wander with him past the hospital’s original brick monstrosities and the Ribicoff Research Center, and then over the rear boundary and down to the Sachem River. My brother liked to watch the water, I remember—watch its movement and listen to it. He liked, sometimes, to take off his shoes and socks and wade into the cedar-tinted current. More often than not, the three of us would walk the banks and end up a quarter of a mile down, at the little Indian graveyard. Dessa and I would study the stones—the remnants of those old, buried lives—while Thomas sat on the grass, smoking cigarette after cigarette and reading his Bible. By then, he had already pretty much proclaimed himself God’s right-hand man and a target of the KGB. Sooner or later, he’d get up off the ground and follow me and Dess, treating us to some Biblical interpretation or another—some prediction of coming doom based on what he’d seen in the papers or on the nightly news or in his sleep. I’d get itchy and tell him we had to go—hustle ahead of both him and Dessa and back to Settle, where I could sign him back in and leave. Check off my obligation for another week and get myself the hell out of there. “Be patient with him, Dominick,” Dessa used to advise me on the drive home from those visits. “If he needs to babble, then just let him babble. Who’s he hurting?” My answer to that question—Me! He’s hurting me!—went unspoken. If you’re the sane identical twin of a schizophrenic sibling—if natural selection has somehow allowed you to beat the odds, scoot under the fence—then the fence is the last thing you want to lean against.
At the southern end of the Indian graveyard, a packed dirt path leads away from the river, up past pines and pin oaks and cedars, and then through a grove of mountain laurel that blossoms spectacularly every June. Climbing higher and higher, you follow the path and the sound of water, jump from boulder to boulder, and come abruptly to a spot that takes your breath away. The Sachem River, suddenly visible again, rushes between two sheer rock cliffs and spills crazily over a steep gorge.
Everyone in Three Rivers calls this spot, simply, the Falls. According to history or legend or some hybrid of the two, Chief Samuel once pursued an enemy sachem to the cliff’s edge and forced him to a no-win decision: either surrender and be executed or attempt the suicide leap to the opposite ledge. The enemy chief leapt, making it somehow to the other side, but breaking his leg in the process. Samuel arrived shortly after and leapt, too, intact. He quickly overtook his nemesis, bashed in his skull with a rock, and then sliced and ate a piece of his shoulder to signify to the universe who had prevailed. My tenth-grade American history teacher, Mr. LoPresto, was the one who told us about Samuel’s flesh-eating, delighting in the class’s squeamish reaction to the gory details.
Mr. LoPresto was a plump, middle-aged man with hips like a woman. I hated his sarcasm, which he usually aimed at the weakest kids in our class. Hated his mannerisms and the wen on his forehead and the way he landmined his tests with trick questions. He paced when he lectured, referred to us collectively as “historians,” and yanked his pants up over his little paunch every couple of steps, every few sentences. It was an embarrassment to me that Mr. LoPresto and his white-haired mother went to the same Sunday Mass as my family. They sat each week in the second pew and were always the first ones up for Communion. They seemed to bound up to that rail. “The body of Christ,” Father Fox would say, suspending the host before Mr. LoPresto. As he prepared to receive the bread-made-flesh, you could hear Mr. LoPresto’s pious “Amen!” all the way in the back of the church, where I slumped and scowled.
When Mr. LoPresto told us about Samuel’s having eaten the shoulder of his enemy, he advised us not to judge the Indians by our own higher standards. They were indigenous savages and we were the product of ancient Greece and Rome and the rest of Western civilization. It was like comparing apples to oranges, monkeys to men. We sat silently and obediently, taking the notes we’d regurgitate back up to him at test time.
The Falls is and has been both a calendar picture and a trouble spot in Three Rivers. Kids cut school and party there, taking crazy risks and pushing the evidence in the town’s face: smashed beer bottles, graffiti spray-painted somehow on the sheer faces of the cliffs, underpants up in the trees. I don’t begrudge these kids their hormones or their illusions of immortality. I took stupid risks myself out at the Falls when I was their age—did things I’m not comfortable thinking about twenty-something years later. But I worry for them. Suicides have happened there. Accidents, murders. The year Thomas and I were third-graders, the dead body of a girl from our class was found out at the Falls. Penny Ann Drinkwater: Lonnie Peck’s cousin, Ralph’s twin.
Penny Ann and Ralph were the only other set of twins at River Street School. Back then, we thought of the Drinkwaters as colored kids, but they were mixed: part black, part white, part Wequonnoc Indian. They were a year older than Thomas and me. Penny Ann should have been in fourth grade like her brother, but she’d stayed back and been assigned the seat right next to mine.
I didn’t like her. She had one long eyebrow instead of two separate ones, and some mornings she smelled like pee. She ate paste, sucked on the buttons of her ratty blue sweater, chewed her crayons. To this day, I can see her big front teeth smeared hideously with waxy pigment.
The Drinkwaters were poor; we all knew that. At our school, you could usually tell who the needy kids were: most of them were in the reading groups that stumbled along and lost their place and read baby books. They stood at the chalkboard, stumped by arithmetic problems, their backs turned against the sea of waving hands of kids who knew the answers. The teachers were less patient with the poor kids than they were with the rest of us. But Penny Ann wasn’t just poor; she was bad.
She stole. She stole Genevieve Wilmark’s rhinestone barrettes and Calvin Cobb’s glass egg and Frances Strempek’s autographed photo of Annette Funicello, which was later found ripped into small pieces and hidden under the wastebasket. She snatched kids’ recess snacks right out of our cloakroom, my own and Thomas’s included. When something in our class was missing, it became routine for Miss Higgins to walk to the back of the class and inspect Penny Ann’s sloppy desk. Penny Ann always denied any knowledge of how the stolen goods had landed in her possession. She cried frequently. Her nose ran. She was always coughing.
She disappeared the day a surprise snowstorm freed us from school early and our mothers put on their kerchiefs, boots, and winter coats and trudged through the driving snow to pick us up. The day before, Penny Ann had stood in front of me in line at the drinking fountain, turned abruptly, and told me her mother was buying her a Shetland pony as soon as she returned from a trip. Contempt for Penny Ann was acceptable at River Street School—even the nice kids sprayed her with imaginary cootie spray—and so I looked her in the eye and told her she was nothing but a big fat liar. Then I got my drink and went back to class and told Miss Higgins a lie of my own. “Penny Ann Drinkwater was eating Oreos in the hallway,” I said. “She said she stole them from some kid. She was bragging about it.”
Miss Higgins wrote a note to Miss Haas, the principal, and sent us both to the office. Miss Haas believed me, not Penny Ann, whose repeated denials turned into a combination of crying and coughing that sounded oddly like a dog’s bark. Miss Haas thanked me for my information and told me to go back to class. I remember returning to Miss Higgins’s room feeling satisfied that justice had been served, and then belatedly remembering that the theft of the Oreos had been pure invention on my part. Well, Penny Ann must have stolen so
meone or another’s cookies at some recent point, I reassured myself. Miss Higgins announced from the front of the room that I was a good citizen for having reported a theft. Then she wrote it on the board: “Dominick Birdsey is a good citizen.” The public declaration made me feel both pleased and queasy, and although I didn’t meet his eye, I could feel, across the room, my brother’s gaze.
For the week or so after Penny Ann disappeared during the snowstorm, the newspaper printed her picture—first on the front page, and then in the middle pages, and then not at all. At school, her empty chair, her sloppy desk with its contents protruding, became harder and harder to sit next to. Her shabby blue sweater had been balled up and jammed in there. One sleeve, threadbare and loaded with what my mother called “sweater pills,” hung halfway to the floor. I asked to have my seat changed, but Miss Higgins denied the request.
Then one day Penny Ann’s face was back on the front page, enlarged. girl’s body found at falls, the headline declared. The paper said Penny Ann’s unknown killer had broken her neck and taken off all her clothes—details that both scared and baffled me. It was the middle of February. There was a foot of snow. Had making her cold been part of her torture?
In the wake of Penny Ann’s unsolved murder, I began to resurrect her in my nightmares. In one dream, she was giving me a ride on her new Shetland pony when the spooked animal began galloping without warning toward the edge of the Falls. In another, she kept daring me to lick a skeleton. In a third dream, Miss Haas announced matter-of-factly over the intercom that Penny’s murderer had come to our school for a visit and was now going to kill the kindergartners. When I had these nightmares, I would scream out and my mother would come stumbling into Thomas’s and my room. She’d rub my arm and tell me I was safe and let me leave the light on. Illuminated but still too afraid to sleep, I’d hang my head over the edge of the top bunk and watch my sleeping brother—listen to the evenness of his breathing, count his breaths into the hundreds—until his repose became my own.
At school, we held a penny drive in Penny Ann Drinkwater’s honor. Our class was in charge, and Miss Higgins chose me and my brother to be the “bankers,” an appointment that inflated me with a sense of importance. The job required us to separate and walk each morning from classroom to classroom, up and down rows, holding out the cardboard buckets into which kids dropped their nickels and dimes and pennies. Ralph Drinkwater, Penny’s brother, was in Mrs. Jeffrey’s class. He never gave any money, never even looked at the bucket when I passed by his desk, even when I dared to pause for a second and wait. One morning, when Thomas was collecting in Mrs. Jeffrey’s room, Ralph kicked him in the leg. Thomas reported what had happened, but Ralph denied it and Mrs. Jeffrey said it had probably been an accident. That same day, out at recess, I saw Ralph trip a boy during a game of Red Rover, Red Rover. His victim had been barreling full force toward the human chain which the game obliged him to break through. When Ralph tripped him, the boy fell face first on the blacktop and skidded, and by the time the teacher on duty had been summoned, he was a bloody, shrieking mess with red teeth and a raw meat chin. I didn’t squeal on Ralph the way I would have squealed on his sister. Penny Ann had been an annoyance; her brother was lethal. He, too, began to menace me in my dreams.
With the money we collected from the penny drive, the school bought a small willow tree and a plaque. By then, the air had warmed and the Pawtucket Red Sox had resumed play and even the most stubborn gray gutter ice had melted and trickled down the storm drains. Penny Ann’s mother came to the tree-planting ceremony at the edge of the schoolyard. She had a single eyebrow like Penny’s and straight black hair and big dark circles under her eyes that made her look like a raccoon. Earlier that week, Miss Higgins had made us write essays on what we would always remember about our dear friend Penny Ann. Unlike my brother, I usually knew what teachers were after and had written so sentimentally that I was one of the students chosen to read my tribute aloud into the microphone. My words brought tears to the eyes of the adults at the tree-planting, Penny Ann’s mother and the lady reporter from the Daily Record and Miss Haas included. Miss Haas’s tears surprised me. Our principal had a reputation for being mean and “strictly business.” Beyond that, she and I had collaborated in making Penny Ann’s life miserable not twenty-four hours before her abduction and murder. Together, we had made her cry. Had made her bark like a dog. But when I walked back to my metal folding chair after reading my essay, Miss Haas reached out, took my hand in her own liver-spotted hand, and squeezed it. During the ceremony, Ralph Drinkwater stood beside his mother. (No father materialized, not even talk of a father.) Ralph behaved poorly during the speech-making, I remember, fidgeting so badly that his mother had to yank his arm twice and even swat him one in front of the entire school.
FORMER NEIGHBOR CHARGED IN GIRL’S DEATH, the newspaper announced one morning during the summer. Now the killer had a name, Joseph Monk, and a face. “This guy is pure evil,” my stepfather told my mother that morning at breakfast after he’d read aloud the details of Monk’s confession. “The electric chair’s too good for this guy after what he did to that poor little kid.”
Neither Ray nor my mother knew I was within earshot—in the pantry adjacent to the kitchen, making toast. Their strategy had been to avoid talking about our murdered classmate in front of Thomas and me—to shield us, I suppose, from a situation we had been facing every day at school, anyway.
“They ought to take him out somewhere and beat his head in with baseball bats,” Ray continued. “Snap his neck just like he snapped hers.”
“Okay, okay,” my mother said. She told Ray she didn’t even want to think about that poor little girl and rushed from the room in tears. Ray slapped the newspaper back down on the table and went after her.
I walked into the kitchen and picked up the newspaper. Brought it with me back into the privacy of the pantry where I stood, transfixed, staring and staring at the photo of “pure evil” being led up the police station steps. I had expected a monster—someone dirty and ugly with wild hair and crazy eyes. Someone like the crazy man who had gotten on the city bus that time and sat next to my mother and touched her leg. But Joseph Monk had short hair and black glasses, a half-smile on his lips, a plaid short-sleeve shirt.
I was still staring at Joseph Monk’s ordinary looks when my toast popped up, startling me, and I saw, in the toaster’s chrome face, my own face, familiar and strange. And when my brother walked sleepily, innocently, into the kitchen that morning, I remember feeling, suddenly, alone and afraid—as untwinned as Ralph Drinkwater.
After a while, Ralph disappeared from the hallways at River Street School. It wasn’t a noticeable exit; I remember his absence dawning on me after the fact. He resurfaced years later during my sophomore year of high school, when he slouched into Mr. LoPresto’s American history class midsemester and handed him an “add” slip.
I recognized him immediately but was surprised by his size. I was, at fifteen, a backup forward on Kennedy High’s JV basketball team and already wearing shoes three sizes bigger than my stepfather’s. Sometimes at supper I ate third and fourth helpings now, and drank milk in such vast quantity that my mother would watch with a combination of awe and fear. I had an inch and a half and twelve pounds on my brother. Ralph Drinkwater had seemed big and tough and intimidating at River Street School. Now he was a runt.
“Drinkwater, eh?” Mr. LoPresto said, reading the slip. “Well, that’s what I always say. When you’re thirsty, drink water.” Several of the students rolled their eyes and groaned, but Ralph betrayed no reaction whatsoever. LoPresto assigned him the empty desk at the back of the room next to mine. On the way there, Ralph glanced at me for a half-second with what may or may not have been a flicker of recognition.
For the next several weeks, nothing much happened in American history. At the front of the room, LoPresto talked and paced and hiked up his pants; in back by the windows, Ralph slouched in his seat and sometimes dozed. Then one day, there was an unexpec
ted showdown between the two.
Over the clank of the radiator, Mr. LoPresto was droning on and on about Manifest Destiny. Chin resting in the palm of my propped-up hand, half-stupid from too much monologue and radiator heat, I was listlessly recording notes about America’s sacred, Darwinian duty to spread Democracy when, next to me, Ralph Drinkwater laughed out loud. A belly laugh, public and unmistakable.
Mr. LoPresto stopped talking and squinted back at Ralph, whose laughter was immediately interesting to him. To all of us. Ralph’s outburst was the only interesting thing that had happened all period.
“Do you find something amusing, Mr. . . . uh . . .”
LoPresto grabbed for the seating chart in an effort to refresh his memory as to Ralph’s existence. “If you find something comical, Mr. Go Drink Water, then maybe you’d like to share it with the rest of us. We all like a good joke, don’t we, historians? Please. Tell us. What’s so funny?”
There was a long pause, I remember—a standoff. Ralph’s face was a smirk, but I saw small tremors in his hands. His foot was tapping the linoleum a mile a minute. As the rest of us waited, I glanced over at his notebook. He had recorded nothing about Manifest Destiny but, instead, had drawn a bizarre caricature of Mr. LoPresto. In the picture, our teacher stood stark naked, equipped with both a baseball bat–sized hard-on and a pair of breasts that rivaled Jayne Mansfield’s. Ralph had sunk an ax into LoPresto’s head.