This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  Dwight was quiet after my mother told her story. Then he told one of his own about a Thanksgiving he’d spent in the Philippines, when starving Japanese soldiers ran out of the jungle and grabbed food right off the chow line, and nobody even tried to shoot them.

  That story reminded Pearl of Chinese checkers. Dwight and Skipper refused to play, but the rest of us joined in. First we played as free agents and then in teams. Pearl and I played the last round together. It was close—very close. When Pearl made the winning move we jumped up and down, and crowed, and pounded each other on the back.

  DWIGHT DROVE US down to Seattle early the next morning. He stopped on the bridge leading out of camp so we could see the salmon in the water below. He pointed them out to us, dark shapes among the rocks. They had come all the way from the ocean to spawn here, Dwight said, and then they would die. They were already dying. The change from salt to fresh water had turned their flesh rotten. Long strips of it hung off their bodies, waving in the current.

  Taylor and Silver and I sometimes hung out in the bathroom during lunch hour. We smoked cigarettes and combed our hair and exchanged interesting facts not available to the general public about women.

  It was just after Thanksgiving. I told Taylor and Silver and a couple of weed fiends who practically lived in the bathroom the story of how I’d killed the turkey in Chinook. “I mean I blew it off, man—I blew his fucking head right off!”

  At first nobody responded. Silver did the French inhale, then slowly blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “With a .22,” he said.

  “Fuckin’ A,” I said. “Winchester .22. Pump.”

  “Wolff,” he said, “you are so full of shit.”

  “Fuck you, Silver. I don’t care what you think.”

  “All a .22 would do is just make a hole in his head.”

  I took a drag and let the smoke come out of my mouth as I talked. “One bullet, maybe.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see—you hit him more than once. While he was flying. In the head.”

  I nodded.

  Silver howled. The other guys were also manifesting signs of disbelief. “Fuck you, Silver,” I said, and when he howled again I said, “Fuck. You. Fuck. You.” Still saying this, I went over to the wall, which had just been repainted, and took out my comb. It was a girl’s comb. We all carried them, tails sticking out of our back pockets. With the tail of the comb I scratched FUCK YOU into the soft paint and once more told Silver, “Fuck you.”

  The two weed fiends ditched their cigarettes and cleared out. So did Silver and Taylor. I threw away the comb and followed.

  During the first period after lunch the vice-principal visited each classroom and demanded the names of those responsible for the obscenity that had been written in the boys’ lavatory. He said that he was fed up with the delinquent behavior of a few rotten apples. They had names. Well, he wanted those names, and he was going to get them if he had to keep every single one of us here all night long.

  The vice-principal was new and hard-nosed; he meant what he said. I knew he wouldn’t let this drop, that he would keep at it until he caught me. I got scared. Even more than his anger, his righteousness scared me to the point where my stomach cramped up. As the afternoon went on the cramp got worse and I had to go to the nurse’s office. That was where the vice-principal finally came for me.

  He kicked at the cot where I lay doubled up and sweating. “Get up,” he said.

  I gave him a confused look and said, “What?”

  “Get moving. Now!”

  I sat up partway, still miming incomprehension. The school nurse came to the doorway and asked what the problem was. The vice-principal told her I was faking.

  “I’m not either,” I said hotly.

  “He’s definitely in pain,” she told him.

  “He’s faking it,” the vice-principal said, and explained that this was nothing but a stratagem to avoid punishment for something disgusting I had done. The nurse turned to me with a quizzical expression. She had been warm and gentle; I couldn’t bear for her to think that I was the kind of person who took advantage of other people’s kindness, or wrote filth on bathroom walls. And at that moment I wasn’t.

  I began to say something along this line, but the vice-principal wasn’t having any. “Let’s go,” he said. He grabbed one of my ears and brought me to my feet. “I’m not here to bandy words with you.”

  The nurse stared at him. “Now wait just a minute,” she said.

  He pulled me into the corridor and down toward his office, jerking on my ear so that I had to walk sideways and keep my face toward the ceiling, stumbling all the way and spastically waving my arms.

  “I’m going to call his mother,” the nurse said. “Right now!”

  “I already did,” the vice-principal said.

  BY THE TIME my mother arrived, I’d spent almost an hour with the vice-principal and had become completely convinced of my own innocence. The more I insisted on it the angrier he got, and the angrier he got the more impossible it was for me to believe that I had done anything to deserve such anger. He was, I knew, very close to hitting me; this made me feel a contempt for him that he could see, which in turn brought him closer to violence, inflating even further my sense of injury and innocence. And as his rage grew so did my contempt, because I saw that it was not self-restraint that kept him from hitting me but some kind of institutional restraint.

  But he still had me scared. It was like being lunged at by a dog on the end of its leash.

  Things stood thus when my mother came in. She’d spoken with the school nurse and immediately asked the vice-principal what he thought he was doing, hauling me around by the ears. He said that was beside the point, Mrs. Wolff, let’s not muddy the water here, but she said, No, to her it wasn’t beside the point at all. She faced him across his desk. She was erect, pale, and unfriendly.

  The point, he told her, was that I had violated school property and the law. Not to mention decency.

  My mother looked over at me. I saw how tired she was, and she must have seen the pain I was in. I shook my head.

  “You’re mistaken,” she told him.

  He laughed disagreeably. Then he set out his case, which consisted of eyewitness testimony by two boys who had been in the lavatory at the time the obscene words in question were inscribed on the wall.

  “What obscene words?” she asked.

  He hesitated. Then, demurely, he said, “Fuck you.”

  “That’s one obscene word,” my mother said.

  He pondered this. He said that, given the particular context, he considered you to be an obscene word as well.

  I said I didn’t do it.

  “If he says he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it,” my mother said. “He doesn’t lie.”

  “Well, I don’t either!” The vice-principal rocked forward onto his feet. He opened the door and beckoned to the weed fiends, who were waiting in the outer office. They came in together and after a hangdog glance in my direction serially mumbled their dismal narrative at the floor, while I looked at them with brazen incredulity.

  When they were done the vice-principal gave them passes and sent them out. He was acting very much in control now, very much on top of the situation.

  “They’re lying,” I said.

  His placidity fell off like a mask. “Why?” he asked. “Give me one reason.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but they are.”

  “We’re not getting anywhere,” my mother said. “I think I’d better talk to the principal.”

  The vice-principal said that he had been given full authority in this case. He was in charge. We’d better realize that what he said went.

  But my mother would not be moved. And in the end we got in to see the principal.

  The principal was a furtive, whey-faced man who feared children and avoided us by staying in his office all day. He was right to avoid us. He wore his weakness in a way that excited belligerence and cruelty. When my mother and I came into his office, he insis
ted on making small talk with her as if she had just dropped by to see how things were going.

  At one point he leaned over and peered at my fingers. “Is that nicotine?” he asked.

  “No sir.”

  “I hope not.” He leaned back. His jacket parted, revealing green suspenders. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “Take it for what it’s worth. I’m not accusing you of anything, but if you hear something you can use, so much the better.” He smiled and made a steeple of his fingers. “I used to smoke cigarettes. I started smoking in college because of peer pressure, and before I knew it I was up to a couple of packs a day. Those were real ciga rettes, too, not with the filters like you have now. The first thing I would do when I woke up in the morning was reach for a cigarette, and I always had a cigarette before I went to bed at night.

  “Well, one night I went to have my cigarette and lo and behold, the pack was empty. I had run completely out. It was late, too late to wake up anyone else in the dorm. Normally I would have just taken a couple of butts out of the ashtray, but it so happened that when I finished studying I had emptied the ashtray into my wastebasket and dumped it down the incinerator shaft. So there I was, without my nightly cigarette.”

  He paused, contemplating his outrageous youthful self. “You know what I did? I’ll tell you. I started walking in circles with my heart beating a mile a minute. ‘What’ll I do? What’ll I do?’ I kept asking myself. What I ended up doing was, I ended up running downstairs to the lounge. The ashtrays were empty. Then I started going through the garbage cans in the hallway. At last I found one with butts in it. But as I reached down—right down into a garbage can—I suddenly thought, ‘Whoa. Hold on right there, buster.’ And I did. I went back to my room and to this day I haven’t smoked another cigarette.”

  He looked up at me. “But you know what I did? Every day I saved the exact amount of money I would have spent on cigarettes. Just as an experiment. Then last year I put it all together, and you know what I bought?”

  I shook my head.

  “I took that money and I bought a Nash Rambler.”

  My mother burst out laughing.

  The principal sat back and smiled uncertainly. My mother was sniffing and searching in her purse. She found a Kleenex and blew her nose as if she had some kind of cold that made her shriek.

  “Think about it,” the principal said. “That’s all I’m saying—just think about it.”

  My mother let the principal maunder on for a time, then brought him back to business. He became restless and uncomfortable. He said he would prefer that the vice-principal decide this question.

  My mother refused. She told him that the the vice-principal had manhandled me while I was sick. The school nurse had seen him do it. If she had to, my mother said, she was prepared to talk to a lawyer. She didn’t want to, but she would.

  The principal saw no reason why it had to come to that. Not over one obscenity.

  “He didn’t do it,” my mother said.

  The principal tentatively, even reluctantly, mentioned the testimony of the weed fiends. My mother turned to me and asked if they were telling the truth.

  “No ma’am.”

  “He doesn’t lie to me,” my mother said.

  The principal was fidgeting. He seemed about ready to bolt. “Well,” he said, “there is obviously some kind of confusion here.”

  My mother waited.

  He looked from her to me and back to her. “What am I supposed to do? Just let it drop?” When she didn’t answer he said, “All right. What about two weeks?”

  “Two weeks what?”

  “Suspension.”

  “Two weeks suspension?”

  “One week, then. We’ll split it. Does that seem fair?” She frowned at the desk and said nothing.

  He looked at her imploringly. “It’s not that long. Just five days.” Then he said, abruptly, “All right then, I’ll let it go this time. That’s fine for you,” he added. “You don’t have to work here.”

  School was over when we left the principal’s office. We walked through the empty corridors, our footsteps echoing between long lines of lockers. I still had cramps. They got worse as I started moving around again, and on our way out I ducked into the lavatory. The janitor had already been there. He had changed what I’d written to BOCK YOU.

  IT WAS TOO late for my mother to go back to work, so she went home early with me. Marian smelled a story and pressed my mother until she got it. We were sitting at the kitchen table, and as she listened to my mother Marian began looking back and forth between us and giving hard little shakes of her head as if to clear it of water. Then her eyes came to rest on me and did not move. When my mother came to the end, indignant all over again at the way I’d been treated, Marian asked me to leave them alone.

  I listened from the living room. My mother argued at first but Marian overwhelmed her. This time, by God, she was going to make my mother see the light. Marian didn’t have all the goods on me, but she had enough to keep her going for a while and she put her heart into it, hitting every note she knew in the song of my malfeasance.

  It went on and on. I retreated upstairs to the bedroom and waited for my mother, rehearsing answers to the charges Marian had made against me. But when my mother came into the room she said nothing. She sat for a while on the edge of her bed, rubbing her eyes; then, moving slowly, she undressed to her slip and went into the bathroom and drew herself a bath, and lay in the water for a long time as she sometimes did when she got chilled coming home at night in a cold rain.

  I had my answers ready but there were no questions. After my mother finished her bath she lay down and read, then fixed us dinner and read some more. She turned in early. Answers kept coming to me in the dark, proofs of my blamelessness that I knew to be false but could not stop myself from devising.

  Dwight drove down that weekend. They spent a lot of time together, and finally my mother told me that Dwight was urging a proposal which she felt bound to consider. He proposed that after Christmas I move up to Chinook and live with him and go to school there. If things worked out, if I made a real effort and got along with him and his kids, she would quit her job and accept his offer of marriage.

  She did not try to make any of this sound like great news. Instead she spoke as if she saw in this plan a duty which she would be selfish not to acknowledge. But first she wanted my approval. I thought I had no choice, so I gave it.

  A Whole New Deal

  Dwight drove in a sullen reverie. When I spoke he answered curtly or not at all. Now and then his expression changed, and he grunted as if to claim some point of argument. He kept a Camel burning on his lower lip. Just the other side of Concrete he pulled the car hard to the left and hit a beaver that was crossing the road. Dwight said he had swerved to miss the beaver, but that wasn’t true. He had gone out of his way to run over it. He stopped the car on the shoulder of the road and backed up to where the beaver lay.

  We got out and looked at it. I saw no blood. The beaver was on its back with its eyes open and its curved yellow teeth bared. Dwight prodded it with his foot. “Dead,” he said.

  It was dead all right.

  “Pick it up,” Dwight told me. He opened the trunk of the car and said, “Pick it up. We’ll skin the sucker out when we get home.”

  I wanted to do what Dwight expected me to do, but I couldn’t. I stood where I was and stared at the beaver.

  Dwight came up beside me. “That pelt’s worth fifty dollars, bare minimum.” He added, “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the damned thing.”

  “No sir.”

  “Then pick it up.” He watched me. “It’s dead, for Christ’s sake. It’s just meat. Are you afraid of hamburger? Look.” He bent down and gripped the tail in one hand and lifted the beaver off the ground. He tried to make this appear effortless but I could see he was surprised and strained by the beaver’s weight. A stream of blood ran out of its nose, then stopped. A few drops fell on Dwight’s shoes before he jerked the body awa
y. Holding the beaver in front of him with both hands, Dwight carried it to the open trunk and let go. It landed hard. “There,” he said, and wiped his hands on his pant leg.

  We drove farther into the mountains. It was late afternoon. Pale cold light. The river flashed green through the trees beside the road, then turned gray as pewter when the sun dropped. The mountains darkened. Night came on.

  Dwight stopped at a tavern in a village called Marblemount, the last settlement before Chinook. He brought a hamburger and fries out to the car and told me to sit tight for a while, then he went back inside. After I finished eating I put my coat on and waited for Dwight. Time passed, and more time. Every so often I got out of the car and walked short distances up and down the road. Once I risked a look through the tavern window but the glass was fogged up. I went back to the car and listened to the radio, keeping a sharp eye on the tavern door. Dwight had told me not to use the radio because it might wear down the battery. I still felt bad about being afraid of the beaver, and I didn’t want to get in more trouble. I wanted everything to go just right.

  I had agreed to move to Chinook partly because I thought I had no choice. But there was more to it than that. Unlike my mother, I was fiercely conventional. I was tempted by the idea of belonging to a conventional family, and living in a house, and having a big brother and a couple of sisters—especially if one of those sisters was Norma. And in my heart I despised the life I led in Seattle. I was sick of it and had no idea how to change it. I thought that in Chinook, away from Taylor and Silver, away from Marian, away from people who had already made up their minds about me, I could be different. I could introduce myself as a scholar-athlete, a boy of dignity and consequence, and without any reason to doubt me people would believe I was that boy, and thus allow me to be that boy. I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all.

  I played the radio softly, thinking I’d use less power that way. Dwight came out of the tavern a long time after he went in, at least as long a time as we’d spent getting there from Seattle, and gunned the car out of the lot. He drove fast, but I didn’t worry until we hit a long series of curves and the car began to fishtail. This stretch of the road ran alongside a steep gorge; to our right the slope fell almost sheer to the river. Dwight sawed the wheel back and forth, seeming not to hear the scream of the tires. When I reached out for the dashboard he glanced at me and asked what I was afraid of now.