This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  So I passed the hours after school. Sometimes, not very often, I felt lonely. Then I would go home to Roy.

  ROY HAD TRACKED us down to Salt Lake a few weeks after we arrived. He took a room somewhere across town but spent most of his time in our apartment, making it clear that he would hold no grudges as long as my mother walked the line.

  Roy didn’t work. He had a small inheritance and supplemented that with disability checks from the VA, which he claimed he would lose if he took a job. When he wasn’t hunting or fishing or checking up on my mother, he sat at the kitchen table with a cigarette in his mouth and squinted at The Shooter’s Bible through the smoke that veiled his face. He always seemed glad to see me. If I was lucky he would put a couple of rifles in his Jeep and we’d drive into the desert to shoot at cans and look for ore. He’d caught the uranium bug from my mother.

  Roy rarely spoke on these trips. Every so often he would look at me and smile, then look away again. He seemed always deep in thought, staring at the road through mirrored sunglasses, the wind ruffling the perfect waves of his hair. Roy was handsome in the conventional way that appeals to boys. He had a tattoo. He’d been to war and kept a kind of silence about it that was full of heroic implication. He was graceful in his movements. He could fix the Jeep if he had to, though he preferred to drive halfway across Utah to a mechanic he’d heard about from some loudmouth in a bar. He was an expert hunter who always got his buck. He taught both my mother and me to shoot, taught my mother so well that she became a better shot than he was—a real deadeye.

  My mother didn’t tell me what went on between her and Roy, the threats and occasional brutality with which he held her in place. She was the same as ever with me, full of schemes and quick to laugh. Only now and then there came a night when she couldn’t do anything but sit and cry, and then I comforted her, but I never knew her reasons. When these nights were over I put them from my mind. If there were other signs, I didn’t see them. Roy’s strangeness and the strangeness of our life with him had, over the years, become ordinary to me.

  I thought Roy was what a man should be. My mother must have thought so too, once. I believed that I should like him, and pretended to myself that I did like him, even to the point of seeking out his company. He turned on me just one time. I had discovered that my mother’s cooking oil glowed like phosphorus under the black light, the way uranium was supposed to, and one day I splashed it all over some rocks we’d brought in. Roy got pretty worked up when he looked at them. I had to tell him why I was laughing so hard, and he didn’t take it well. He gave me a hard, mean look. He stood there for a while, just holding me with this look, and finally he said, “That’s not funny,” and didn’t speak to me again the rest of the night.

  On our way back from the desert Roy would park near the insurance company where my mother, after learning that Kennecott really was out on strike, had found work as a secretary. He waited outside until she got off work. Then he followed her home, idling along the road, here and there pulling into a driveway to let her get ahead, then pulling out again to keep her in sight. If my mother had ever glanced behind her she would have spotted the Jeep immediately. But she didn’t. She walked along in her crisp military stride, shoulders braced, head erect, and never looked back. Roy acted as though this were a game we were all playing. I knew it wasn’t a game but I didn’t know what it was, so I kept the promises he extracted from me to say nothing to her.

  One afternoon near Christmas we missed her. She was not among the people who left when the building closed. Roy waited for a while, peering up at the darkened windows, watching the guard lock the doors. Then he panicked. He threw the Jeep into gear and sped around the block. He stopped in front of the building again. He turned off the engine and began whispering to himself. “Yes,” he said, “okay, okay,” and turned the engine back on. He drove around the block one more time and then tore down the neighboring streets, alternately slamming on the brakes and gunning the engine, his cheeks wet with tears, his lips moving like a supplicant’s. This had all happened before, in Sarasota, and I knew better than to say anything. I just held onto the passenger grip and tried to look normal.

  Finally he came to a stop. We sat there for a few minutes. When he seemed better I asked if we could go home. He nodded without looking at me, then took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, blew his nose, and put the handkerchief away.

  My mother was cooking dinner and listening to carols when we came in. The windows were all steamed up. Roy watched me go over to the stove and lean against her. He kept looking at me until I looked at him. Then he winked. I knew he wanted me to wink back, and I also knew that it would somehow put me on his side if I did.

  My mother hung one arm around my shoulders while she stirred the sauce. A glass of beer stood on the counter next to her.

  “So how was archery?” she asked.

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine.”

  Roy said, “We went out afterwards and shot a few bottles. Then we went tomcatting.”

  “Tomcatting,” my mother repeated coldly. She hated the word.

  Roy leaned against the refrigerator. “Busy day?”

  “Real busy. Hectic.”

  “Not a minute to spare, huh?”

  “They kept us hopping,” she said. She took a sip of beer and licked her lips.

  “Must’ve been good to get out.”

  “It was. Real good.”

  “Terrific,” Roy said. “Have a nice walk home?”

  She nodded.

  Roy smiled at me, and I gave in. I smiled back.

  “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling,” Roy said to her. “Even your own kid knows what you’re up to.” He turned and walked back into the living room. My mother closed her eyes, then opened them again and went on stirring.

  It was one of those dinners where we didn’t talk. Afterward my mother got out her typewriter. She had lied about her typing speed in order to get work, and now her boss expected more from her than she could really do. That meant having to finish at night the reports she couldn’t get through at the office. While she typed, Roy glowered at her over the the rifles he was cleaning and I wrote a letter to Alice. I put the letter in an envelope and gave it to my mother to mail. Then I went to bed.

  Late that night I woke up and heard Roy’s special nagging murmur, the different words blurring into one continuous sound through the wall that separated us. It seemed to go on and on. Then I heard my mother say, Shopping ! I was shopping! Can’t I go shopping? Roy resumed his murmur. I lay there, hugging the stuffed bear I was too old for and had promised to give up when I officially got my new name. Moonlight filled my room, an unheated addition at the rear of the apartment. On bright cold nights like this one I could see the cloud of my breath and pretend that I was smoking, as I did now until I fell asleep again.

  I WAS BAPTIZED during Easter along with several others from my catechism class. To prepare ourselves for communion we were supposed to make a confession, and Sister James appointed a time that week for each of us to come to the rectory and be escorted by her to the confessional. She would wait outside until we were finished and then guide us through our penance.

  I thought about what to confess, but I could not break my sense of being at fault down to its components. Trying to get a particular sin out of it was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you’ve snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line. Nothing came to mind. I didn’t see how I could go through with it, but in the end I hauled myself down to the church and kept my appointment. To have skipped it would have called attention to all my other absences and possibly provoked a visit from Sister James to my mother. I couldn’t risk having the two of them compare notes.

  Sister James met me as I was coming into the rectory. She asked if I was ready and I said I guessed so.

  “It won’t hurt,” she said. “No more than
a shot, anyway.”

  We walked over to the church and down the side aisle to the confessional. Sister James opened the door for me. “In you go,” she said. “Make a good one now.”

  I knelt with my face to the screen as we had been told to do and said, “Bless me Father for I have sinned.”

  I could hear someone breathing loudly on the other side. After a time he said, “Well?”

  I folded my hands together and closed my eyes and waited for something to present itself.

  “You seem to be having some trouble.” His voice was deep and scratchy.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Call me Father. I’m a priest, not a gentleman. Now then, you understand that whatever gets said in here stays in here.”

  “Yes Father.”

  “I suppose you’ve thought a lot about this. Is that right?”

  I said that I had.

  “Well, you’ve just given yourself a case of nerves, that’s all. How about if we try again a little later. Shall we do that?”

  “Yes please, Father.”

  “That’s what we’ll do, then. Just wait outside a second.”

  I stood and left the confessional. Sister James came toward me from where she’d been standing against the wall. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” she asked.

  “I’m supposed to wait,” I told her.

  She looked at me. I could see she was curious, but she didn’t ask any questions.

  The priest came out soon after. He was old and very tall and walked with a limp. He stood close beside me, and when I looked up at him I saw the white hair in his nostrils. He smelled strongly of tobacco. “We had a little trouble getting started,” he said.

  “Yes, Father?”

  “He’s just a bit nervous is all,” the priest said. “Needs to relax. Nothing like a glass of milk for that.”

  She nodded.

  “Why don’t we try again a little later. Say twenty minutes?”

  “We’ll be here, Father.”

  Sister James and I went to the rectory kitchen. I sat at a steel cutting table while she poured me a glass of milk. “You want some cookies?” she asked.

  “That’s all right, Sister.”

  “Sure you do.” She put a package of Oreos on a plate and brought it to me. Then she sat down. With her arms crossed, hands hidden in her sleeves, she watched me eat and drink. Finally she said, “What happened, then? Cat get your tongue?”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe you’re just thinking of it wrong,” she said.

  I stared at my hands on the tabletop.

  “I forgot to give you a napkin,” she said. “Go on and lick them. Don’t be shy.”

  She waited until I looked up, and when I did I saw that she was younger than I’d thought her to be. Not that I’d given much thought to her age. Except for the really old nuns with canes or facial hair they all seemed outside of time, without past or future. But now—forced to look at Sister James across the narrow space of this gleaming table—I saw her differently. I saw an anxious woman of about my mother’s age who wanted to help me without knowing what kind of help I needed. Her good will worked strongly on me. My eyes burned and my throat swelled up. I would have surrendered to her if only I’d known how.

  “It probably isn’t as bad as you think it is,” Sister James said. “Whatever it is, someday you’ll look back and you’ll see that it was natural. But you’ve got to bring it to the light. Keeping it in the dark is what makes it feel so bad.” She added, “I’m not asking you to tell me, understand. That’s not my place. I’m just saying that we all go through these things.”

  Sister James leaned forward over the table. “When I was your age,” she said, “maybe even a little older, I used to go through my father’s wallet while he was taking his bath at night. I didn’t take bills, just pennies and nickels, maybe a dime. Nothing he’d miss. My father would’ve given me the money if I’d asked for it. But I preferred to steal it. Stealing from him made me feel awful, but I did it all the same.”

  She looked down at the tabletop. “I was a backbiter, too. Whenever I was with one friend I would say terrible things about my other friends, and then turn around and do the same thing to the one I had just been with. I knew what I was doing, too. I hated myself for it, I really did, but that didn’t stop me. I used to wish that my mother and my brothers would die in a car crash so I could grow up with just my father and have everyone feel sorry for me.”

  Sister James shook her head. “I had all these bad thoughts I didn’t want to let go of. Know what I mean?”

  I nodded, and presented her with an expression that was meant to register dawning comprehension.

  “Good!” she said. She slapped her palms down on the table. “Ready to try again?

  I said that I was.

  Sister James led me back to the confessional. I knelt and began again: “Bless me Father, for—”

  “All right,” he said. “We’ve been here before. Just talk plain.”

  “Yes Father.”

  Again I closed my eyes over my folded hands.

  “Come come,” he said, with a certain sharpness.

  “Yes, Father.” I bent close to the screen and whispered, “Father, I steal.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What do you steal?”

  “I steal money, Father. From my mother’s purse when she’s in the shower.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Well?” he said. “A week? A year? Two years?”

  I chose the one in the middle. “A year.”

  “A year,” he repeated. “That won’t do. You have to stop. Do you intend to stop?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Honestly, now.”

  “Honestly, Father.”

  “All right. Good. What else?”

  “I’m a backbiter.”

  “A backbiter?”

  “I say things about my friends when they’re not around.”

  “That won’t do either,” he said.

  “No, Father.”

  “That certainly won’t do. Your friends will desert you if you persist in this and let me tell you, a life without friends is no life at all.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Do you sincerely intend to stop?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Good. Be sure that you do. I tell you this in all seriousness. Anything else?”

  “I have bad thoughts, Father.”

  “Yes. Well,” he said, “why don’t we save those for next time. You have enough to work on.”

  The priest gave me my penance and absolved me. As I left the confessional I heard his own door open and close. Sister James came forward to meet me again, and we waited together as the priest made his way to where we stood. Breathing hoarsely, he steadied himself against a pillar. He laid his other hand on my shoulder. “That was fine,” he said. “Just fine.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You have a fine boy here, Sister James.”

  She smiled. “So I do, Father. So I do.”

  Just after Easter Roy gave me the Winchester .22 rifle I’d learned to shoot with. It was a light, pump-action, beautifully balanced piece with a walnut stock black from all its oilings. Roy had carried it when he was a boy and it was still as good as new. Better than new. The action was silky from long use, and the wood of a quality no longer to be found.

  The gift did not come as a surprise. Roy was stingy, and slow to take a hint, but I’d put him under siege. I had my heart set on that rifle. A weapon was the first condition of self-sufficiency, and of being a real Westerner, and of all acceptable employment—trapping, riding herd, soldiering, law enforcement, and outlawry. I needed that rifle, for itself and for the way it completed me when I held it.

  My mother said I couldn’t have it. Absolutely not. Roy took the rifle back but promised me he’d bring her around. He cou
ld not imagine anyone refusing him anything and treated the refusals he did encounter as perverse and insincere. Normally mute, he became at these times a relentless whiner. He would follow my mother from room to room, emitting one ceaseless note of complaint that was pitched perfectly to jelly her nerves and bring her to a state where she would agree to anything to make it stop.

  After a few days of this my mother caved in. She said I could have the rifle if, and only if, I promised never to take it out or even touch it except when she and Roy were with me. Okay, I said. Sure. Naturally. But even then she wasn’t satisfied. She plain didn’t like the fact of me owning a rifle. Roy said he had owned several rifles by the time he was my age, but this did not reassure her. She didn’t think I could be trusted with it. Roy said now was the time to find out.

  For a week or so I kept my promises. But now that the weather had turned warm Roy was usually off somewhere, and eventually, in the dead hours after school when I found myself alone in the apartment, I decided that there couldn’t be any harm in taking the rifle out to clean it. Only to clean it, nothing more. I was sure it would be enough just to break it down, oil it, rub linseed into the stock, polish the octagonal barrel and then hold it up to the light to confirm the perfection of the bore. But it wasn’t enough. From cleaning the rifle I went to marching around the apartment with it, and then to striking brave poses in front of the mirror. Roy had saved one of his army uniforms and I sometimes dressed up in this, together with martial-looking articles of hunting gear: fur trooper’s hat, camouflage coat, boots that reached nearly to my knees.

  The camouflage coat made me feel like a sniper, and before long I began to act like one. I set up a nest on the couch by the front window. I drew the shades to darken the apartment, and took up my position. Nudging the shade aside with the rifle barrel, I followed people in my sights as they walked or drove along the street. At first I made shooting sounds—kyoo! kyoo! Then I started cocking the hammer and letting it snap down.