This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  We couldn’t go to my place. Phil, the man who owned the boardinghouse, had no use for kids. He rented the room to my mother only after she promised that I would be quiet and never bring other kids home with me. Phil was always there, reeking of chewing tobacco, drooling strings of it into the chipped enamel mug he carried with him everywhere. Phil had been badly burned in a warehouse fire that left his skin blister-smooth and invested with an angry glow, as if the fire still burned somewhere inside him. The fingers of one hand were welded together.

  He was right not to want me around. When we passed one another in the hallway or on the stairs, I couldn’t keep my eyes from him and he saw in them no sympathy or friendliness, only disgust. He responded by touching me constantly. He knew better but could not help himself. He touched me on the shoulders, on the head, on the neck, using all the gestures of fatherly affection while measuring my horror with a cold bitter gaze, giving new pain to himself as if he had no choice.

  My place was off-limits and Terry Taylor’s was full of trolls, so we usually ended up at Silver’s apartment. Silver was an only child, clever, skinny, malicious, a shameless coward when his big mouth brought trouble down on us. His father was a cantor who lived in Tacoma with his new wife. Silver’s mother worked all day at Boeing. That meant we had the apartment to ourselves for hours at a stretch.

  But first we made our rounds. As we left school we followed girls at a safe distance and offered up smart remarks. We drifted in and out of stores, palming anything that wasn’t under glass. We coasted stolen tricycles down the hills around Alkai Point, standing on the seats and jumping off at the last moment to send them crashing into parked cars. Sometimes, if we had the money, we took a bus downtown and weaved through the winos around Pioneer Square to stare at guns in the windows of pawnshops. For all three of us the Luger was the weapon of choice; our passion for this pistol was profound and about the only passion we admitted to. In the presence of a Luger we stopped our continual jostling of each other and stood wide-eyed.

  Television was very big on the Nazis then. Every week they screened new horrors, always with a somber narrator to remind us that this wasn’t make-believe but actual history, that what we were seeing had really happened and could happen again if we did not maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance. These shows always ended the same way. Overviews of ruined Berlin. Grinning GIs rousting the defeated Aryan soldiery from their hiding places in barn and cave and sewer. Himmler dead in his cell, hollow-eyed Hess in Spandau. The now lathered-up narrator crowing, “Thus was the high-flying Prussian eagle brought to ground!” and “Thus did the little Führer and his bullyboys turn tail and run, giving up forever their dream of The Thousand Year Reich!”

  But these glimpses of humiliation and loss lasted only a few minutes. They were tacked on as a pretense that the point of the show was to celebrate the victory of goodness over evil. We saw through this fraud, of course. We saw that the real point was to celebrate snappy uniforms and racy Mercedes staff cars and great marching, thousands of boots slamming down together on cobbled streets while banners streamed overhead and strong voices sang songs that stirred our blood though we couldn’t understand a word. The point was to watch Stukas peel off and dive toward burning cities, tanks blowing holes in buildings, men with Lugers and dogs ordering people around. These shows instructed us further in the faith we were already beginning to hold: that victims are contemptible, no matter how much people pretend otherwise; that it is more fun to be inside than outside, to be arrogant than to be kind, to be with a crowd than to be alone.

  Terry Silver had a Nazi armband that he swore was genuine, though anyone could see he’d made it himself. As soon as we reached his apartment Silver would get this armband from its hiding place and slip it on. Then he would strut around and treat Taylor and me like lackeys. We let him do it because of the candy Mrs. Silver left out in crystal bowls, because of the television set, and because without Silver to tell us what to do we were reduced to wandering the sidewalks, listlessly throwing rocks at signs.

  First we made a few calls. Taylor and I listened in on the extension in Mrs. Silver’s bedroom while Silver did the talking. He looked up people with Jewish-sounding names and screamed at them in pig German. He ordered entire banquets of Chinese food for his father and step-mother. Sometimes he called the parents of kids we didn’t like and assumed the voice and manner of a Concerned Adult—teacher, coach, counselor—just touching base to ask whether there was some problem at home that might account for Paul’s unusual behaviour at school the other day. Silver never laughed, never gave himself away. When he was being particularly plausible and suave, Taylor and I had to stuff Mrs. Silver’s coverlet in our mouths and flail the mattress with our fists.

  Then, bumping each other with our hips to make room, the three of us would press together in front of Mrs. Silver’s full-length mirror to comb our hair and practice looking cool. We wore our hair long at the sides, swept back into a ducktail. The hair on top we combed toward the center and then forward, with spit curls breaking over our foreheads. My mother detested this hairdo and forbade me to wear it, which meant that I wore it everywhere but at home, sustaining the distinctness of two different styles with gobs of Butch Wax that left my hair glossy and hard and my forehead ringed with little pimples.

  Unlit cigarettes dangling from the comers of our mouths, eyelids at half mast, we studied ourselves in the mirror. Spit curls. Pants pulled down low on our hips, thin white belts buckled on the side. Shirts with three-quarter-length sleeves. Collars raised behind our necks. We should have looked cool, but we didn’t. Silver was emaciated. His eyes bulged, his Adam’s apple protruded, his arms poked out of his sleeves like pencils with gloves stuck on the ends. Taylor had the liquid eyes and long lashes and broad blank face of a cow. I didn’t look that great myself. But it wasn’t really our looks that made us uncool. Coolness did not demand anything as obvious as that. Like chess or music, coolness claimed its own out of some mysterious impulse of recognition. Uncoolness did likewise. We had been claimed by uncoolness.

  At five o’clock we turned on the television and watched The Mickey Mouse Club. It was understood that we were all holding a giant bone for Annette. This was our excuse for watching the show, and for me it was partly true. I had certain ideas of the greater world that Annette belonged to, and I wanted a place in this world. I wanted it with all the feverish, disabling hunger of first love.

  At the end of every show the local station gave an address for Mousketeer Mail. I had begun writing Annette. At first I described myself in pretty much the same terms as I had in my letters to Alice, who was now very much past tense, with the difference that instead of owning a ranch my father, Cap’n Wolff, now owned a fleet of fishing boats. I was first mate, myself, and a pretty fair hand at reeling in the big ones. I gave Annette some very detailed descriptions of my contests with the friskier fellows I ran up against. I also invited her to consider the fun to be had in visiting Seattle. I told her we had lots of room. I did not tell her that I was eleven years old.

  I got back some chipper official responses encouraging me to start an Annette fan club. In other words, to organize my competition. Fat chance. But when I upped the ante in my letters to her, they stopped sending me anything at all. The Disney Studio must have had a kind of secret service that monitored Mousketeer Mail for inappropriate sentiments and declarations. When my name went off the mailing list, it probably went onto some other list. But Alice had taught me about coyness. I kept writing Annette and began to imagine a terrible accident in front of her house that would almost but not quite kill me, leaving me dependent on her care and sympathy, which in time would turn to admiration, love ...

  As soon as she appeared on the show—Hi, I’m Annette! —Taylor would start moaning and Silver would lick the screen with his tongue. “Come here, baby,” he’d say, “I’ve got six inches of piping hot flesh just for you.”

  We all said things like that—It was a formality—then we shut up and wa
tched the show. Our absorption was complete. We softened. We surrendered. We joined the club. Taylor forgot himself and sucked his thumb, and Silver and I let him get away with it. We watched the Mousketeers get all excited about wholesome projects and have wimpy adventures and talk about their feelings, and we didn’t laugh at them. We didn’t laugh at them when they said nice things about their parents, or when they were polite to each other, or when they said, “Hey, gang ...” We watched every minute of it, our eyes glistening in the blue light, and we went on staring at the television after they had sung the anthem and faded away into commercials for toothpaste and candy. Then, blinking and awkward, we would rouse ourselves and talk dirty about Annette.

  Sometimes, when The Mickey Mouse Club was over, we went up to the roof. Silver’s apartment building overlooked California Avenue. Though the street was busy we chose our targets carefully. Most days we didn’t throw anything at all. But now and then someone would appear who had no chance of getting past us, like the man in the Thunderbird.

  Thunderbirds had been out for only a year now, since ’55, and because they were new and there weren’t that many of them they were considered somewhat cooler than Corvettes. It was early evening. The Thunderbird was idling before a red light at the intersection, and from our perch behind the parapet we could hear the song on the radio—“Over the Mountains and across the Seas”—and hear too, just below the music, the full-throated purr of the engine. The black body glistened like obsidian. Blue smoke chugged from the twin exhausts. The top was rolled back. We could see the red leather upholstery and the blond man in the dinner jacket sitting in the driver’s seat. He was young and handsome and fresh. You could almost smell the Listerine on his breath, the Mennen on his cheeks. We were looking right down at him. With the palm of his left hand he kept the beat of the song against the steering wheel. His right arm rested on the back of the empty seat beside him, which would not remain empty for long. He was on his way to pick someone up.

  We held no conference. One look was enough to see that he was everything we were not, his life a progress of satisfactions we had no hope of attaining in any future we could seriously propose for ourselves.

  The first egg hit the street beside him. The second egg hit the front fender. The third egg hit the trunk and splattered his shoulders and neck and hair. We looked down. just long enough to tally the damage before pulling our heads back. A moment passed. Then a howl rose skyward. No words—just one solitary soul cry of disbelief. We could still hear the music coming from his radio. The light must have changed, because a horn honked, and honked again, and someone yelled something, and another voice answered harshly, and the song was suddenly lost in the noise of engines.

  We rolled back and forth on the roof for a while. Just as we were getting ready to go back down to Silver’s apartment, the Thunderbird screeched around the corner up the block. We could hear the driver cursing. The car moved slowly toward the light, combusting loudly. As it passed below we peered over the parapet again. The driver was scanning the sidewalks with stiff angry jerks of his head. He seemed to have no idea where the eggs had come from. We let fly again. One hit the hood with a loud boom, another landed in the seat beside him, the last exploded on the dashboard. Covered with egg and egg-shell, he rose in his seat and bellowed.

  There was more honking at the light. Again he tore away and again he came back, still bellowing. Six eggs were left in the carton. Each of us took two. Silver knelt by the edge, risking a few hurried glances into the street while holding his arm out behind him to keep us in check until the moment was right. Then he beckoned furiously and we reared up beside him and got rid of our eggs and dropped back out of sight before they hit. The driver was looking up at the building across the street; he never laid eyes on us. We heard the eggs smack the pavement, boom against the car. This time there was no cry of protest. The silence made me uncomfortable and in my discomfort I grinned at Silver, but Silver did not grin back. His face was purple and twitching with anger as if he had been the one set upon and outraged. He was beside himself. Breathing loudly, clenching and unclenching his jaw, he leaned over the edge and cupped his hands in front of his mouth and screamed a word I had heard only once, years before, when my father shouted it at a man who had cut him off in traffic.

  “Yid!” Silver screamed, and again, “Yid!”

  One day my mother and I went down to Alkai Point to watch a mock naval battle between the Odd Fellows and the Lions Club. This was during Seafair, when the hydroplane races were held. The park overlooked the harbor; we could just make out the figures on the two sailboats throwing water-balloons back and forth and trying to repel each other’s boarding parties. There was a crowd in the park, and whenever one of these boarding parties got thrown back into the water everybody would laugh.

  My mother was laughing with the rest. She loved to watch men goof around with each other; lifeguards, soldiers in bus stations, fraternity brothers having a car wash.

  It was a clear day. Hawkers moved through the crowd, selling sun glasses and hats and Seafair souvenirs. Girls were sunning themselves on blankets. The air smelled of coconut oil.

  Two men holding bottles of beer stood nearby. They kept turning and looking at us. Then one of them walked over, a pair of binoculars swinging from a strap in his hand. He was darkly tanned and wore tennis whites. He had a thin moustache and a crew cut. “Hey, Bub,” he said to me, “want to give these a try?” While he adjusted the strap around my neck and showed me how to focus the lenses, the other man came up and said something to my mother. She answered him, but continued gazing out toward the water with her hand shielding her eyes. I brought the Lions and the Odd Fellows into focus and watched them push each other overboard. They seemed so close I could see their pale bodies and the expressions of fatigue on their faces. Despite the hearty shouts they gave, they climbed the ropes with difficulty and fell back as soon as they met resistance. Each time they hit the water they stayed there a while longer, paddling just enough to keep themselves afloat, looking wearily up at the boats they were supposed to capture.

  My mother accepted a beer from the man beside her. The one who’d offered me the binoculars sensed my restlessness, maybe even my jealousy. He knelt down beside me and explained the battle as if I were a little kid, but I took the binoculars off and handed them back to him.

  “I don’t know,” my mother was saying. “We should probably get home pretty soon.”

  The man she’d been talking with turned to me. He was the older of the two, a tall angular man with ginger-colored hair and a disjointed way of moving, as if he were always off balance. He wore Bermudas and black socks. His long face was sunburned, making his teeth look strangely prominent. “Let’s ask the big fella,” he said.

  “What say, big fella? You want to watch the fun from my place?” He pointed at a large brick house on the edge of the park.

  I ignored him. “Mom,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

  “He hasn’t had lunch yet,” my mother said.

  “Lunch,” the man said. “That’s no problem. What do you like?” he asked me. “What’s your absolute favorite thing to have for lunch?”

  I looked at my mother. She was in high spirits and that made me even grimmer, because I knew they were not due to my influence. “He likes hamburgers,” she told him.

  “You got it,” he said. He took my mother’s elbow and led her across the park toward the house. I was left to follow along with the other man, who seemed to find me interesting. He wanted to know my name, where I went to school, where I lived, my mother’s name, the where-abouts of my father. I was a sucker for any grown-up who asked me questions. By the time we reached the house I had forgotten to be sullen and told him everything about us.

  The house was cavernous inside, hushed and cool. The windows had stained-glass medallions set within their mullioned panes. They were arched, and so were the heavy doors. The living room ceiling, ribbed with beams, curved to an arch high overhead. I sat down on the couch. Th
e coffee table in front of me was crowded with empty beer bottles. My mother went to the open windows on the harbor side of the room. “Boy!” she said. “What a view!”

  The sunburned man said, “Judd, take care of our friend.”

  “Come on, Bub,” said the man I’d been talking to. “I’ll rustle you up something to eat.”

  I followed him to the kitchen and sat at a counter while Judd pulled things out of the refrigerator. He slapped together a baloney sandwich and set it in front of me. He seemed to have forgotten about the hamburger. I would have said something, but I had a pretty good idea that even if I did there still wasn’t going to be any hamburger.

  When we came back to the living room, my mother was looking out the window through the binoculars. The sunburned man stood beside her, his head bent close to hers, one hand resting on her shoulder as he gestured with his beer bottle at some point of interest. He turned as we came in and grinned at us. “There’s our guy,” he said. “How’s it going? You get some lunch? Judd, did you get this man some lunch?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Great! That’s the ticket! Have a seat, Rosemary. Right over here. Sit down, Jack, that’s the boy. You like peanuts? Great! Judd, bring him some peanuts. And for Christ’s sake get these bottles out of here.” He sat next to my mother on the couch and smiled steadily at me while Judd stuck his fingers into the bottles and carried them clinking away. Judd returned with a dish of nuts and left with the rest of the bottles.

  “There you go, Jack. Dig in! Dig in!” He watched me eat a few handfuls, nodding to himself as if I were acting in accordance with some prediction he had made. “You’re an athlete,” he said. “It’s written all over you. The eyes, the build. What do you play, Jack, what’s your game?”