“Ow,” she said, but I could tell she wasn’t mad. She squeezed back.
We were in the living room again. Mr. Simpson had finished speaking into the microphone.
“Idden ’at cute,” he sneered when he saw us holding hands. “Annie got her a little boyfriend.”
Annie said nothing. Neither did I—I was waiting to see what would happen next.
“Ambulance is comin’,” said Mr. Simpson. “But if you think I’m gonna take you back down the fuckin’ hill in my truck, you’re outa yer fuckin’ mind. Too much ice.”
I looked away, embarrassed. I hadn’t expected him to do anything of the sort. I felt a sort of gratitude to him for having called for help, but even at the age of seven I sensed that he’d done it because it was expected of him, not because he’d wanted to. My gaze fell on another device, a large box with a glass screen in it. My curiosity overcame my disgust and fear.
“What’s that?” I asked, dropping Annie’s hand to point.
Mr. Simpson snorted, superior and supercilious. “Ain’t you never seen a TV before?”
“I’ve seen it plenty of times,” I said defensively. I almost gave away the fact that I’d been spying on him and his family, but I remembered to keep quiet about that. A good spy, my father often told me during our games, never gives away his secrets. Grandpa told me that too—if the Munchkins captured me, I was never to talk, even if they tortured me.
“The damn women in this house have it on all day and all night,” said Mr. Simpson. I wondered where these “damn women” were. As far as I could tell, the house was empty except for the three of us and the frightening creature in the back room. “These goddamn bitches,” he went on. “They don’t do nothin’ but sit around and watch TV all day and all night. Annie too. She’s gonna grow up just like her momma. Fat and useless and ugly.”
I felt Annie flinch next to me.
“No she isn’t,” I said, before I knew the words were out of my mouth.
For a fat man, Mr. Simpson moved surprisingly fast. He was up off the couch and in front of me before I’d even noticed he’d moved, and one meaty hand was wrapped around my muffler, drawing it tight around my throat.
“You got a big mouth,” he said. “Course, maybe you think ’cause you got all that money you can say whatever you want. Well, lemme tell you somethin’, you little bastard. You Manns ain’t shit. You ain’t got any more money anyway. Ain’t so great now that all those damn birds ran off on you, are you?”
I tried to swallow. My knees were trembling and I knew that in a moment the tears were going to come, no matter what I did to stop them.
“I know where you kids went,” he went on, loosening his grip. “You went into the back to do bad things to each other. Grown-up things. Huh? Huh?” He had Annie by the arm now, and he was shaking her. “Did you touch each other back there? Did you? Did you touch her, you little bastard?”
“No,” I said miserably, but I was lying. I had held her hand. Was that bad? It must have been, to make him so mad. But she had grabbed my hand first. It wasn’t my idea.
Mr. Simpson went into the kitchen suddenly. I heard the refrigerator door open and slam shut, and the shushing sound of a can of beer being opened. He came back out again, swilling from the can.
“You Manns think you’re mighty fine,” he said. “That old man down there always had his damn nose in the air. Too good to talk to us, too good to help us out. And his goddamn kid gets to be a pilot while mine has to join the regular infantry. Lemme tell you something, you little shit. I was in the goddamn infantry in the big one and there ain’t nobody else there but niggers and spics and the white folks who ain’t got the money to be pilots. And I didn’t get no parade neither when I came home. I got off the train and there wasn’t no crowd of people waitin’ for me with signs and whatnot. I fought three years in France and I didn’t get shit for it. I ain’t ashamed to say it. My kid had to fight down on the ground with the niggers while his kid got to fly around in a nice cozy airplane. Huh. Well, if you were back there I guess you saw him. My boy ain’t much now, but at least he came home. His didn’t make it. And that’s what he gets for havin’ his damn nose in the air.”
I couldn’t even bring myself to say another word to Annie. I was out the door and back on the mower before I knew my feet were moving. It started with a roar. I headed back down the hill, weeping furiously, going far too fast. Before I was halfway down the hill I lost control of it and went sliding into the ditch. I was thrown up onto the far bank, smacking my lip for the second time on the ice. I tasted the familiar flavor of salt and copper that was my blood. I was crying even harder now because I knew I couldn’t kill him until I was big, and that wouldn’t happen for a long time yet.
I had no chance of righting the mower. I didn’t even try. I left it roaring in the ditch, gasoline trickling from some smashed valve. I crawled back on the road and scooted down the rest of the hill on my bottom. If I hadn’t been so furious I would have been delighted at the new game I’d discovered—sliding down the hill was even better than sliding across the yard. And if Annie’s father hadn’t been such a monster, maybe Annie and I could have played on the hill all day, sliding down and climbing up it, in another world where there were no people who spoke like that to children and who weren’t filled with hate because of the things they didn’t have. But these thoughts never entered my mind. There was nothing in me but blind rage, the impotent anger of a tiny male who would not be a man for a long time yet and who had no choice but to submit to whatever happened to him, and for the first time that I can remember, I was angry enough to kill someone. It made me sick to my stomach, but at least I wasn’t afraid any more. I didn’t even give the Scarum a thought.
I skated on my boots once I reached the bottom of the hill, screaming and sobbing through the blood that trickled from my lip down my chin. The trip home was much faster than the trip up had been. Long before I arrived at the farmhouse I could see the flashing lights of the ambulance. When I arrived, I found the paramedics just loading Grandpa into the back of it on a stretcher. I forgot my sense of balance and tried to run, and I fell and hit my lip yet a third time, and that was how I got to ride in the back of the ambulance with Grandpa, because I needed to be stitched up.
I sat next to him and cried as he held my hand, too furious to explain any of it. It was all right, he said. He knew I was scared. He knew it was scary to be a kid when something bad went wrong. But it wasn’t my fault. I mustn’t worry and I mustn’t cry. I didn’t have to tell him I wasn’t crying because of my split lip. He knew I didn’t cry over little things like that. I was a daredevil, and the son and grandson and great-grandson of daredevils, and he was Grandpa. He knew everything about me, right down to the dreams I had at night, and he understood that I was crying because today I had caught a glimpse of how the world could be sometimes, and because that sight is horrifying to children.
I hadn’t intended to tell Grandpa about what I saw at the Simpson house, but being young and excitable, the words were flying out of me before I could stop them. He lay wincing in pain as I rattled on—he’d been doped up already, so he was feeling much better, more like his usual self, but he was still conscious. The ambulance proceeded at about five miles per hour, and the siren, much to my delight, was blaring.
“They have a man in the back of their house with no arms or legs!” I told Grandpa. “He just lays there in bed and looks up at the ceiling, except I think his eyes are shut, and he was in Vietnam just like my father was!”
“There were lots of people in Vietnam,” said Grandpa.
“Do you think they knew each other?”
“Do I think who knew each other?”
“My dad and that man in the back room.”
“Just because they were in the same war doesn’t mean they knew each other,” said Grandpa. “It was a big war, though not so big as some.”
“Yeah, but did they?” I sensed I was being put off about something Grandpa didn’t wish to discuss,
but I was tired of not being told things and I decided I wasn’t going to let it go this time. “You never said if they did or didn’t.”
“Did or didn’t what?”
“Know each other!”
“Billy, I’m tired,” said Grandpa. We sat in silence for a while, the ambulance swaying gently as we got onto the county road and were able to pick up speed a little. A salt-and-sand spreader had been by recently and I could hear the tiny particles pinging against the bottom of the ambulance. The siren, to my disappointment, fell silent.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, they did know each other. But not in Vietnam. They were friends here in Mannville when they were little boys.”
“How little?”
“Your age.”
“They played together?”
“Yeah.”
“What did they play?”
“I don’t know. They ran around in the woods a lot. There were a hell of a lot more trees back then.”
“Did you play Munchkins with them?”
A brief smile flickered across Grandpa’s face. “Yes, I did,” he said. “The three of us played Munchkins together.”
“Just the same way? With dynamite and all that stuff?”
“Yeah. Just the same way.”
“What’s his name?”
Grandpa frowned. “Why do you want to know his name?”
“Because! You never tell me anything, that’s why.”
“Never tell you anything! Hah! Don’t I tell you every story about this family I know?”
“I guess.”
“You guess. You know more about your own family than most kids do, my boy, so no complaints. Knowing the kind of people you come from is just as important as knowing yourself. In fact, you can’t know yourself if you don’t know your people.”
Grandpa may not have realized it, but at that moment he was paraphrasing something Willie Mann had written in his diary on precisely this subject, which I would read many years later:
The Delphic Oracle urges one to “Know yourself,” but how are Americans to know themselves? We have practically no history, and our future, although promising, is hazy. We have only our present, which we are continually creating and recreating. For one to know the self, one must examine the past, and inquire without hesitation into the nature of the people from whom he has sprung. This way, we can avoid making the same mistakes which were made by our ancestors.
I was confused. “How do you know yourself? You can’t meet yourself and know yourself like how you meet someone else and get to be their friend.”
“No, you’re right,” said Grandpa. “It’s not like that at all.”
“Well then, what is it like?”
“You’ll understand later, when you’re big.”
“I’m pretty big now.”
“You’re seven years old. That’s not very big.”
“I’m going to be big enough someday to go back there and beat up that fat old man with the mustache!”
“What?” Grandpa was instantly alert. “Why would you want to do that? Did he do something to you?”
I was silent. I hadn’t wanted to tell Grandpa about how mean Mr. Simpson was. That’s how children are—when something bad happens to them, they tend to think it’s their fault. This is true in a multitude of situations: divorce, abuse, molestation. On the other hand, children are also very bad at keeping secrets. I couldn’t keep Mr. Simpson a secret from my Grandpa. I couldn’t keep anything a secret from him.
“He yelled at me,” I admitted, and my lower lip began to quiver.
Grandpa took my little hand in his big warm one. “Did he?” he said, his voice soft. “Did he yell at you?”
“Yeah.” I was feeling miserable again, but I was glad to be telling him about it.
“Why?”
“He was mad I was talking to Annie.”
“Who’s Annie?”
“A little girl who lives there. She’s my age. We’re friends.”
“So there’s another one,” Grandpa muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. You say you’re friends with this little girl?”
“Yeah.”
“And he was mad about it?”
“Yeah. And he was mad about the man in the back of the house with no arms and legs.”
“He was, huh?”
“Yeah. And he was mad about my dad.”
Grandpa stiffened a moment and then relaxed, as much as one can relax with a broken hip. “What did he say about your dad?” he asked, letting go of my hand.
“That he was lucky because he got to fly and he didn’t have to be in the intrafy—”
“Infantry,” Grandpa corrected me.
“—and his nose was in the air and Mr. Simpson had to be down on the ground with the niggers in the war.”
“Don’t say that word.”
“What word? War?”
“Niggers.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means black people, but it’s not a nice word. Only white trash use that word.”
“What’s white trash?”
“The Simpsons are white trash. Dirty and poor, but mostly dirty. There’s plenty of poor people who aren’t trashy at all because they know how to hold themselves upright like people, and they don’t go around talking about other people who work harder than they do and calling them names. Mr. Simpson is angry for a lot of reasons, Billy, but mostly because he never worked hard at anything in his life. He always expected everything to be given to him. A Mann never expects anything to be given to him. That’s the difference between us and the Simpsons. That’s what makes them white trash. It has nothing to do with money.”
“What are black people like?”
Grandpa smiled again. “What are they like?”
“Yeah. I don’t know any. Do you?”
“I knew some in the Army,” he said. “A few guys. They were very nice and they had a rough time because they were black. They didn’t get any breaks. None. But they knew a lot of good stories and songs, and I used to talk with them a lot. I wasn’t really supposed to, but I did anyway.”
“You weren’t supposed to?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they were black and I was white.”
“So?”
“That’s exactly what I thought,” said Grandpa. “I thought, So? An officer told me once I shouldn’t hang around with them anymore because it was against policy. I thought, I don’t give a shit about your policies, Mr. U.S. Army Guy. I didn’t get shot down over the ocean and escape from sharks and live on an island with a Japanese pilot who saved me from starving just so I could come back and be told about Army policy against talking to black people by some little rodent from down South who happened to be an officer. God, those people were stupid. Back then they kept black people separate from whites. They had to ride in the back of the bus, use separate drinking fountains, separate bathrooms, separate schools, separate neighborhoods, separate everything. What a mess.”
“Separate drinking fountains?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because white people were afraid they would get a disease if they drank from the same fountains as black people.”
“Would they?”
“No, of course not.”
“What was his name?” I changed the subject abruptly.
“Who? The black guys?”
“No, the man with no arms and legs. You never told me.”
“Because I never tell you anything, right?”
“Just tell me!”
“His name was Frederic,” said Grandpa. “Is Frederic, I mean. We called him Freddy.”
“Did he like my dad?”
“Yes, he did,” said Grandpa. “He liked him a lot.”
“Did my dad like him?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like him?”
“Yes,” said Grandpa. “He was a very sweet-natured boy, and he didn’t take
after his father at all. He got into some trouble later, but when I knew him he was very polite. At least to me he was. Probably because I used to take them on little trips and play with them, which that fat old drunk never did. Excuse me, Billy, I shouldn’t talk like that about Simpson in front of you. That’s not good manners. Forget I said that.”
“Okay. What kind of trouble did he get into?”
“He stole something.”
“What did he steal?”
“A car.”
“Who from?”
“From me,” said Grandpa. His lips were tight.
“He stole your car? The Galaxie?”
“No. I had a different car then. A Chevy.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Yes, but that was before I knew who took it. If I’d known it was him I wouldn’t have called the police.”
“Why not?”
“Because I knew that boy. I knew he was just acting crazy, that he wasn’t really bad. And I knew when his father found out about it he would give him a hell of a beating.”
“Did he?”
“Yes. The police found him and took him home and his father beat the daylights out of him. He had to go to the hospital afterward. The same hospital we’re going to now. If we ever get there.”
“Why did he beat him up?”
“Because he’s mean, and don’t ever forget it.”
“He yelled at Annie.”
“In front of you?”
“He yells at her all the time.”
Grandpa eyed me suspiciously. “How do you know that?”
I said nothing, but I could feel my face getting red.
“Have you been going up there? Were you ever up there before today?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes or no. Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
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