by Wally Lamb
During our first week as dormmates, Leo and I spoke in grudging single syllables, then in guarded, self-conscious sentences, then normally again. I threw a twenty-dollar bill on his desk, partial payment for the damaged tapes, but not all of it. Neither of us apologized. Neither of us said much at all about our near-arrest by the state police and how we’d gotten out of it and how I’d lost it and almost busted his face in. We just let it lie. Let it get layered over with classes, loud music on the turntable, guys busting into the room for a bull session or a game of poker or pitch. Leo’s drama professor cast a better actor as Hamlet and gave Leo the part of Osric, court asshole, Elizabethan “Cool Jerk.” Leo had five or six lines, maybe. Two or three sorry little scenes. Watching Leo in that performance—the costumer had outfitted him in checked tights, a floppy hat with a big plume—I forgave him for who he was: a buffoon, a bigmouth, a guy who couldn’t be trusted any further than you could throw him.
Across campus, Thomas and his new roommate began their awkward adjustment to each other. Randall Deitz was a nice enough guy—one of those quiet, fade-into-the-woodwork types. “How’s it going with my brother?” I asked him one morning when I bumped into him on the way to class. I was afraid to hear his answer.
“Fair,” he said. “He’s different.”
Against the odds, Thomas’s relationship with Angie Constantine continued—went into overdrive, in fact. At the same time, killer classes and a leaking radiator on that piece-of-shit car I’d bought from Dell had temporarily downshifted Dessa’s and my relationship. Angie started driving up to UConn on weekends and sleeping over. (Deitz worked weekends at a pharmacy back home and was never around.) The Constantines were pissed. Big Gene threatened to fire Angie from her accountant trainee’s job down at the dealership if she didn’t start acting like the decent girl they’d brought her up to be. But Angie called her father’s bluff. Daddy’s disapproval was a big part of the appeal, see? A way to get herself noticed. In a way, she was just using my stupid brother. But part of me was relieved: Thomas was normal, I told myself. Normal enough to shack up on weekends, like anyone else.
One Sunday morning, Angie phoned Dessa up in Boston. This was it, she said. The real thing. She and Thomas were in love. Angie told Dess they might be getting engaged. And something else: she might be pregnant. It was okay, though. They wanted kids. Wanted a family as soon as possible. Dessa called me from Boston, in tears.
I waited until Angie’s car had left the dorm parking lot that afternoon, then barged into my brother’s room and reamed him out. He was already on academic probation, I reminded him—hanging on by a thread, and now this? Dessa and Angie’s parents were going to go apeshit when they found out. And what about Ma and Ray? Wasn’t she on the pill? Hadn’t he even been using a rubber? How could he be so stupid? Thomas gave me that space alien look again, as if knocking up your girlfriend carried no complications whatsoever.
Then something weird happened. Thomas did something that Angie said she was never, ever going to talk about, not even to Dessa. Something that freaked her out. She broke up with him—dropped him cold—and started telling anyone who’d listen that my brother was “the weirdest guy on earth.”
She did talk about what had happened, eventually: blabbed it all over creation, once she got started, about how my brother had bought this book called The Lives of the Martyred Saints and become preoccupied with the descriptions of the saints’ bizarre and gory persecutions. He’d lie there naked on his bed, Angie said, and make her read aloud about the saints’ beatings and amputations and flesh burnings, their being pierced with arrows, gashed with hooks. She didn’t want to do it, she said—read him that stuff—but he’d beg her. So she’d read it, and he’d writhe and roll around, moaning and groaning. And then . . . and then he’d . . . well, you know. All by himself, on the bed, right in front of her. Without her even touching him. Angie said she’d done it twice—that he’d pleaded with her. He was just too weird for words. She wanted a normal boyfriend: someone who liked to dance and have fun and double with other couples. There was no more talk about a baby. There had never been a baby, Angie told Dessa. She’d just been late; she’d just miscounted, okay? She didn’t care whether Miss Perfect believed her or not.
I introduced Angie to Leo a couple of months later. It was Angie’s idea, not mine or Dessa’s. I promised I’d fix her up if she stopped telling the world about my brother. The funny part is, for better or worse, it’s been Angie and Leo ever since. They made it through two kids, two separations and reconciliations, Leo’s drug rehab, his little flings on the side. They’re an institution by now, Leo and Angie. But before that—for a month or so, way the hell back—it was Angie and my brother, hot and heavy. Hard to imagine now that it ever even happened—that it ever could have happened. It was one of life’s stranger twists, I guess. . . . Not that things didn’t get a whole lot stranger after that. Not that, by the fall of 1969, the whole fucking world wasn’t falling apart, anyway.
My Lai, the antiwar protests, the cops gunning down the Panthers. And then, one morning, a headline that hit closer to home. “Look at this, Birdsey!” Leo said, bursting into our room. He was waving a Hartford Courant in my face like a victory flag. “Jesus Christ! Look!”
COUPLE INDICTED FOR CHILD PORNOGRAPHY; POLICE RAID YIELDS FILMS, PHOTOS
It was November by then, I think—two or three months after Leo and I had lied to the state cops about Ralph. Accompanying the newspaper article was a picture of Dell Weeks and his wheelchair-bound wife entering the same state police barracks where Leo and I had been. Originally under surveillance for suspected drug trafficking, the paper said, the Weekses’ Bickel Road home had been searched in September by state police, who had unexpectedly come upon an extensive cache of child pornography. Confiscated materials included equipment for production and distribution as well as hundreds of obscene photographs and amateur eight-millimeter films featuring minors as subjects. A twenty-year-old resident of the Weekses’ home, unrelated to the accused, had turned state’s evidence in the continuing investigation. The witness, whose name was being withheld, was reportedly the subject of many of the confiscated photographs and films, the earliest dating back ten years.
“God, just think, Birdsey. We worked all summer long with those two slimeballs,” Leo said. “We were inside their house, for Christ’s sake.”
Ten years, I thought. Which meant it would have started when Ralph was ten years old. Joseph Monk had killed his twin sister, then his mother had folded, then Dell Weeks and his wife had moved in for the kill. They’d taken him in, fed him, and used him for ten years—had killed him every time the camera rolled, every time the shutter blinked.
“Jesus, Birdsey. You know what?” Leo said. “If it wasn’t for the two of us, the cops would have never even gone into that scummy house. You know what we did? I’ll tell you what. We performed a public service, that’s what. We did society a favor. They should give us an award or something.”
On the evening of December 1, 1969, Leo and I and a couple dozen other guys from our dorm parked ourselves in front of the lounge TV and watched the first U.S. draft lottery since 1942. It was prime-time entertainment that night: some fat-assed Selective Service guy down in Washington reaching into a revolving drum and yanking out, birth date by birth date, the fates of all American guys, ages nineteen to twenty-six. Selective Service estimated that the men whose birthdays were among the first 120 or so pulled from the drum would get their “greetings” from Tricky Dick and go to war.
“Life is absurd!” my philosophy professor had declared that same morning in a lecture hall of two hundred sleepy students. “That was the conclusion of Sartre and Camus and the other existentialists living through the insanity of war-torn, bombed-out Europe.” But at least World War II had had clearly defined battlefields, heroes and villains—villagers who didn’t switch their allegiance at nightfall and then back again in the morning. Ray and his fellow servicemen had entered their war convinced that they were doing
the right thing. That we were the good guys. Not us, though. Not in 1969 with Nixon in charge, and the death tolls mounting, and My Lai splattered all over the full-color pages of Life magazine.
Fat Ass reached into that drum 366 times, counting leap year, randomly determining which of our birthdays would send us off to active duty once our student deferments were up and which birthdays would save us from that waste of a war. Someone in the dorm had taken up a collection and we’d tapped a keg. By the time the lottery was over that night, both the guys who were celebrating and the ones who were drowning their sorrows had used the occasion to get shit-faced drunk. Leo was home free at number 266. Born at 12:03 A.M. on January 1, I was in even better shape: number 305. But my brother, born six minutes before me, at 11:57 P.M. on December 31, had drawn number 100. He and his academic probation were bobbing around in the pool most likely to be called to active duty—safe only as long as his 2-S student deferment remained intact. I fell drunk into bed that night, feeling both relieved and guilty, both saved and doomed.
Things always went my way, Thomas told me the next day in Leo’s and my dorm room. They had gone my way since the day we were born.
The days we were born, I thought, but didn’t say. We’d been born six minutes apart on different days. In two different years, even.
The deck had always been stacked in my favor, Thomas said, exasperated. He lit another cigarette. He smoked now—Trues. He’d begun smoking after Angie gave him the hook. He bummed Deitz’s at first—Deitz smoked like a chimney—and then he’d started buying his own. Except Thomas didn’t smoke like a guy—didn’t hold the cigarette in like he was hoarding it, the way most guys do. Thomas held it pointing up and out, like a European. Like a flit. He still smokes that way, as a matter of fact. After all these years. I still hate to see the way my brother smokes.
“Never mind whether or not the deck’s stacked,” I told him. “If your grades are okay, you have a three-year reprieve. In three years, this fucking war’ll probably be over. You been studying? You been going to class? How are your grades?”
Instead of answering me directly, he recycled the same excuses he’d used the year before: his dorm was too hot, he couldn’t concentrate, his teachers asked trick questions because they were out to get him personally.
During midyear exams, Thomas withdrew himself from school.
“What do you mean, you withdrew?” I screamed into the phone when he called me. “Are you nuts or something? Are you crazy?” He was back home in Three Rivers by then—had packed and left campus without even telling me. “Why don’t you just go and fucking enlist, Thomas?” I shouted. “Why don’t you just volunteer to go over there and get blown up?”
He was a nervous wreck all through the holidays, I remember. He tried calling Angie so many times that her father threatened to notify the police. He hadn’t bought anyone any Christmas presents—not even anything for Ma—which was really weird. Which wasn’t like him at all. Thomas had always been a big Christmas guy, generous to the point where you’d open up your present and be embarrassed about what you’d gotten him. But that Christmas, nothing. Not even for Ma. He burst out crying right in the middle of opening his presents, I remember. Started talking about what a bad person he was and how by Christmas of the following year, he probably wouldn’t even be alive and didn’t deserve to be. Then Ma was crying. Ray got so disgusted with the both of them that he got up and walked out—didn’t come back until late afternoon. Ho ho ho. Happy Holidays at the Birdsey house. It was typical.
On Thomas’s birthday a week later, Ma made him a cake. Dessa and I were going out for New Year’s Eve, so we sang “Happy Birthday” early—Ma, Dessa, and me. Ray wouldn’t come away from the TV. He hadn’t spoken to anybody for that whole week. Thomas stood fidgeting in front of his twenty candles. Then, when the singing stopped, instead of blowing them out, he picked them up one by one and shoved the lit ends into the frosting. The three of us just stood there, watching him, speechless. And when he’d extinguished the last candle—when the room was hazy with smoke and burnt sugar—Ma started singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” As if everything was normal. As if everything was what Ma liked to call “hunky-dory.” That was the night Dessa told me about Thomas and her sister: all that Lives of the Martyred Saints bullshit—Thomas lying there, getting off on all that ripped and burned flesh, all that suffering. Happy New Year, folks! Happy 1970! Welcome to a brand-new decade!
In mid-January, I went back to school and Thomas stayed home. Stayed up till all hours, Ma said, and then slept all day long as if he was working the night shift, same as Ray. She was trying as hard as she could to keep Ray from flying off the handle, Ma told me, but he was getting fed up. It could be months before the draft board called up Thomas, Ray said; he should be out there looking for a job instead of goofing off. He was lazy and irresponsible. The Army would knock that out of him, quick.
“Something’s wrong with him, Dominick,” Ma told me over the phone. “I think it’s more than just nerves.” He kept refusing to see the doctor, she said. But what could she do? She couldn’t pick him up and carry him there if he didn’t want to go. She just hoped he stayed out of Ray’s way. That was all she asked for. Prayed for. She didn’t want to bother me, but she was just sick about it. I should stay up at school and study hard, she said. She was so proud of me. I had enough to worry about. She could handle things at home. She was worried, but she could handle things.
In February, the Selective Service Board notified my brother that he’d been reclassified from 2-S to 1-A. In early March, Thomas was ordered to New Haven for his preinduction physical. Ray drove him there. Later, Ray told Ma that Thomas was mostly quiet along the way, but fidgety. He’d had to go to the toilet three different times en route. He probably hadn’t said more than ten words. He’d acted “in the normal range,” though, according to Ray. Ray told Thomas that the service would be good for him. Reassured him that more guys stayed stateside or got stationed in Germany or the Philippines than ended up in Nam, anyway. Whatever happened, the military would change him for the better, Ray promised. Toughen him up. Give him something to feel proud about. He’d see.
Thomas passed the vision, hearing, and coordination tests. His heart rate and blood pressure were fine. He was neither color-blind nor flat-footed.
He failed the psychiatric examination.
Ray drove him back home again.
“I don’t know, Dominick,” Ma said. “If you could manage to get home over the weekend, that would be great. I know you’re busy. But he’s not eating, he won’t take a bath. I hear him traipsing around the house all night long. He won’t even talk to me anymore, honey. Remember how he used to talk to me all the time? ‘Hey, Ma, let’s have one of our talks,’ he always used to say. But now he hardly says anything, except all this mumbling under his breath. And when he does say something, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“What do you mean? What’s he saying?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He keeps talking about the Russians. He’s got Russians on the brain. And I’ve been finding blood in the bathroom sink. I ask him where the blood’s coming from, but he won’t tell me. Maybe he’ll talk to you, Dominick. Maybe he’ll tell you what’s bothering him. If you can make it home, that would be great. If you can’t, you can’t. I understand. But I’m worried sick about him. I used to think it was just his nerves, but I think it’s more than that. I don’t know what it is, honey. I’m afraid to talk to Ray.”
The following Saturday, Thomas and I went to lunch at McDonald’s. It was my idea: get him to take a bath, get him out of the house. He neither welcomed the idea nor resisted it wholeheartedly. Ma said he was having one of his good days.
It’s stupid—the things you remember: we both got those shamrock shake things McDonald’s has every year for St. Patrick’s Day. Cheeseburgers and fries and green milkshakes: that’s what we ate. It was crowded; we were seated near a kids’ birthday party. The kids kept looking over, staring at the two ident
ical twins eating their identical orders. I remember asking Thomas if he’d seen in the newspaper that week about Dell and Ralph and that whole mess. The trial was over. Dell had been found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years at Somers Prison; his wife had gotten six months in Niantic. They’d let Ralph off with a suspended sentence. “Weird, isn’t it?” I said. “That all that stuff had been going on and here we were working with those guys? That that shit had been going on since you and me and Ralph were in grammar school?”
“No comment,” Thomas said. He was doing something weird to his hamburger bun: picking off the crust bit by bit. Examining each little shred he pulled off.
“What are you doing that for?” I asked him.
He told me the Communists had targeted places like McDonald’s.
“Yeah?” I said. “For what?”
He said it was better for me if I didn’t know.
“Hey, what’s going on with you, anyway?” I asked him. “Ma says you’re having a hard time. She’s worried about you, man. What’s bothering you?”
He asked me if I knew that Dr. DiMarco, our dentist since boyhood, was a Communist agent and a member of the Manson family.
“Dr. DiMarco?” I said. When we were kids, Dr. DiMarco had given us his back issues of Jack and Jill magazine, serenaded us as he worked on our teeth with songs like “Mairzy Doats.” It was so ridiculous, it was funny.
Dr. DiMarco had drugged him and planted tiny radio receivers in his fillings, Thomas said. It was part of an elaborate plan by the Soviets to brainwash him. They sent messages to him twenty-four hours a day. They were trying to enlist his help in blowing up the submarine base in Groton. Thomas was key to their success, he said—the “linchpin” of their entire plan—but so far he’d been able to resist. “The body of Christ,” he said, placing a shred of his hamburger bun on his tongue. “Amen.”