This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  My mother called a few days before Dwight was supposed to drive down and pick her up. She talked to him for a while, then asked to speak to me. She wanted to know how I was.

  Okay, I told her.

  She said she had been feeling kind of low and just wanted to check with me, make sure I felt good about everything. It was such a big step. Were Dwight and I getting along all right?

  I said we were. He was in the living room with me, painting some chairs, but I probably would have given the same answer if I’d been alone.

  My mother told me she could still change her mind. She could keep her job and find another place to live. I understood, didn’t I, that it wasn’t too late?

  I said I did, but I didn’t. I had come to feel that all of this was fated, that I was bound to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in, and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it. I did not believe my mother when she told me it wasn’t too late. I knew she meant what she said, but it seemed to me that she was deceiving herself. Things had gone too far. And somehow it was her telling me it wasn’t too late that made me believe, past all doubt, that it was. Those words still sound to me less like a hope than an epitaph, the last lie we tell before hurling ourselves over the brink.

  After my mother hung up, Dwight and I finished painting the dining-room chairs. Then he lit a cigarette and looked around, his brush still in his hands. He gazed pensively at the piano. He said, “Sort of stands out, doesn’t it?”

  I looked at it with him. It was an old Baldwin upright, cased in black walnut, that he had bought for twenty dollars from a family on the move who’d grown tired of hauling it around. Dwight did a victory dance after bringing it home. He said the stupid compones had no idea what it was worth, that it was worth twice that much. Dwight sat down at it one night with the idea of demonstrating his virtuosity, but after making a few sour chords he slammed it shut and pronounced it out of tune. He never went near it again. Sometimes Pearl banged out “Chopsticks” but otherwise it got no play at all. It was just a piece of furniture, so dark in all this whiteness that it seemed to be pulsing. You really couldn’t look anywhere else.

  I agreed that it stood out.

  We went to work on it. Using fine bristles so our brush strokes wouldn’t show, we painted the bench, the pedestal, the fluted columns that rose from the pedestal to the keyboard. We painted the carved scrollwork. We painted the elaborate inlaid picture above the keyboard, a picture of a girl with braided yellow hair leaning out of her gabled window to listen to a redbird on a branch. We painted the lustrous cabinet. We even painted the foot pedals. Finally, because the antique yellow of the ivory looked wrong to Dwight against the new white, we very carefully painted the keys, all except the black ones, of course.

  I was standing on the road with two other boys, my news bag still heavy with papers, when I saw him coming toward us with his little dog Pepper. The three of us started making cracks about him. His name was Arthur Gayle and he was the uncoolest boy in the sixth grade, maybe even the whole camp. Arthur was a sissy. His mother was said to have turned him into a sissy by dressing him in girls’ clothes when he was little. He walked like a girl, ran like a girl, and threw like a girl. Arthur was my father’s name, so that seemed okay to me, but the name Gayle implicated him further in sissyhood. He was clever. He had an arch, subtle voice that he used to good effect as an instrument of his cleverness. I’d come away smarting from all my exchanges with him.

  Arthur was testy with me. He seemed to want something. At times I caught him looking at me expectantly, as if I were holding out on him. And I was. All my life I have recognized almost at a glance those who were meant to be my friends, and they have recognized me. Arthur was one of these. I liked him. I liked his acid wit and the wild stories he told and his apparent indifference to what other people thought of him. But I had withheld my friendship, because I was afraid of what it would cost me.

  As Arthur came toward us he set his face in a careless smirk. He must have known we were talking about him. Instead of walking past, he turned to me and said, “Didn’t your momma teach you to wash your hands after you go pee?”

  My hands weren’t all that yellow anymore, in fact they were nearly back to normal. I’d finished shucking the nuts weeks before.

  It was springtime. The earth was spongy with melted snow, and on the warmest days, if you listened for it, you could hear a faint steady sibilance of evaporation, almost like a light rain. The trees were hazy with new growth. Bears had begun to appear on the glistening granite faces of the mountainsides above us, taking the sun and soaking up heat from the rock; at lunchtime people came out onto their steps and watched them with upturned, benevolent faces. My mother was with me again. The nuts were all husked and drying in the attic. What did I need trouble for?

  I was inclined to let it go. But I didn’t like being laughed at, and I didn’t like comments about my hands. Arthur had made other such comments. He was bigger than me, especially around the middle, but I factored out this weight as blubber. I could take him, I felt sure. I had provocation, and I had witnesses to carry the news. It seemed like a good time to make a point.

  I started things off by calling him Fatso.

  Arthur continued to smile at me. “Excuse me,” he said, “but has anyone ever told you that. you look exactly like a pile of wet vomit?”

  We went on like this, and then I called him a sissy.

  The smile left his face. And at that moment it came to me that although everyone referred to Arthur as a sissy, I had never heard anyone actually use the word in front of him. And in the same moment, seeing how everything about him changed after the word was spoken, how suddenly red and awful his face became, I understood that there must be a reason for this. A crucial bit of history I should have known about, and didn’t.

  His first swing caught me dead on the ear. There was an explosion inside my head, then a continuous rustling sound as of someone crumpling paper. It lasted for days. When he swung again I turned away and took his fist on the back of my head. He threw punches the way he threw balls, sidearm, with a lot of wrist, but he somehow got his weight behind them before they landed. This one knocked me to my knees. He drew back his foot and kicked me in the stomach. The papers in my bag deadened the blow but I was stunned by the fact that he had kicked me at all. I saw that his commitment to this fight was absolute.

  His dog barked in my face.

  When I got up Arthur rushed me, arms flailing, fists raining on my shoulders. He almost knocked me down again but I surprised us both by landing one on his eye. He stopped and roared. The eye was already closing up, his face gone scarlet, his nostrils streaming gouts of snot. When I saw his eye I got worried. I was ready to stop, but he wasn’t. He flew at me again. I closed with him and got him in a hug to keep his arms still. We staggered over the road like drunken dancers, and then he hooked my leg and tripped me and we rolled off the shoulder and down the long muddy embankment, both of us flailing and kicking with our knees and screaming gibberish in each other’s ears. He had gone insane, I could see that, and it seemed to me that my only chance was to go insane too.

  Still rolling, we hit the boggy swale at the foot of the bank. He got on top of me, I got on top of him, he got back on top of me. My news bag had armored me well when I was on my feet but now it was heavy with mud and twisted around my shoulders. I couldn’t get off a good swing. All I could do was hold on to Arthur and try to keep him from getting one off at me. He struggled, then abruptly collapsed on top of me. He was panting for breath. His weight pressed me into the mud. I gathered myself and bucked him off. It took everything I had. We lay next to each other, gasping strenuously. Pepper tugged at my pant leg and growled.

  Arthur stirred. He got to his feet and started up the bank. I followed him, thinking it was all over, but when he got to the top he turned and said, “Take it back.”

  The other boys were watching me. I shook my head.


  Arthur pushed me and I began sliding down the bank.

  “Take it back,” he yelled.

  Pepper followed me in my descent, yapping and lunging. There hadn’t been a moment since the fight began when Pepper wasn’t worrying me in some way, if only to bark and bounce around me, and finally it was this more than anything else that made me lose heart. It wounded my spirit to have a dog against me. I liked dogs. I liked dogs more than I liked people, and I expected them to like me back.

  I started up the bank again, Pepper still at my heels.

  “Take it back,” Arthur said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Say it.”

  “Okay. I take it back.”

  . “No. Say, ‘You’re not a sissy.’ ”

  I looked up at him and the other two boys. There was pleasure and scorn on their faces, but not on his. He wore, instead, an expression of such earnestness that it seemed impossible to refuse him what he asked. I said, “You’re not a sissy.”

  He called Pepper and turned away. When I got to the top he was walking toward home. The other two boys were excited, restless, twitching with the blows they’d imagined striking. They wanted to talk about the fight, but I had lost interest in it. My clothes were caked with mud. My news bag, full of mud and ruined papers, pulled down on me. My ear hurt.

  I trudged homeward.

  Pearl was sitting on the steps, eating something. She looked me over as I walked up. “You’re in Dutch,” she said.

  MY MOTHER HAD me undress in the utility room and take a shower. Then she sat me down in the kitchen and dabbed iodine on some scratches I’d picked up, probably from rolling around on the road. She tried to be severe. I knew she wasn’t angry, but I also knew she would become angry if I did not produce some mimicry of remorse, so I hung my head and declared that I would certainly think twice before letting myself be goaded into another fight. “You better tell Dad,” Pearl said to my mother.

  My mother nodded wearily. “You can tell him,” she said.

  She and Dwight weren’t getting along. They hadn’t gotten along since the night they returned from their honeymoon in Vancouver, two days early, silent and grim, not even looking at each other as they carried the suitcases into the house and down the hall to Dwight’s room. That night Dwight sat up drinking and went to sleep on the sofa. He did this often, sometimes three or four nights in a row, weekends especially. I was always the first one up on Saturday and Sunday because the papers came in early on those days, and when I got up I usually found Dwight asleep on the sofa, a test pattern hissing on the TV.

  For the first few weeks my mother was utterly cast down. She slept late, something she had never done before, and when I came home for lunch I sometimes found her still in her bathrobe, sitting at the kitchen table and staring dazedly down the bright white tunnel of the house. I had never seen my mother give up. I hadn’t even known the possibility existed, but now I knew, and it gave me pause. It made me feel for a little while the truth that everything good in my life could be lost, that it was all drawn day by day from someone else’s store of hope and will. But my mother got better, and I found other things to think about.

  She did not give up. Instead, she chose to believe that she could still make a life in Chinook. She joined the PTA and persuaded the head of the rifle club to admit her as a member. She took a part-time job waitressing in the bachelors’ mess hall. She filled the house with plants, mothered Pearl, and insisted that all of us spend time together like a real family.

  And so we did. But our failure was ordained, because the real family we set out to imitate does not exist in nature; a real family as troubled as ours would never dream of spending time together.

  Dwight thought that most of these troubles were my fault. And a lot of them were. I screwed up constantly, even when I meant to do well. Every screwup was good for a scene, and this fight I’d gotten into with Arthur Gayle was going to be good for a big one.

  When the whistle blew at five o’clock Pearl went out- side to wait for Dwight.

  HE CAME STRAIGHT to my room. When the door opened behind me I stared at the homework on my desk and prepared a bland, innocent face. I turned and presented it to him. He was grinning. He crossed the room and sat on Skipper’s bed. Still grinning, he said, “Who won?”

  He had me tell the story again and again. Each time I told it he laughed and slapped his leg. I began by admitting, reluctantly, that I might have started the fight by calling Arthur a sissy; then, seeing how much pleasure it gave Dwight to hear this, I recalled that my actual words were “big fat sissy.” I told him I’d knocked Arthur down and I described his swollen eye. I allowed Dwight to think that I had kicked some very serious ass that day.

  “You actually gave him a black eye?” Dwight said.

  “Well, it wasn’t black yet.”

  “But it was all puffed up?”

  I nodded.

  “Then it’s a shiner,” he said. “For sure.”

  I hedged the big question, the question of who had won. I let on that my victory had been less than decisive because Arthur had hit me in the ear when I wasn’t expecting it.

  “That was your fault,” Dwight told me. “You must have had your guard down. There’s no excuse for getting dry-gulched.” He started pacing the room. “I can show you a couple of moves that’ll leave little lord Gayle wondering what month he’s in.”

  At dinner that night Dwight had me repeat the story to Skipper and Norma, and then he told a story of his own. “When I was your age,” he said, “there was a kid who used to sit behind me in school and lip off all the time. He had what I call diarrhea of the mouth. Well, he lipped off just once too often and I told him to shut up. Oh yeah? he says. Who’s gonna make me? I am, I tell him. Oh yeah? he says. You and who else’s army? Just the three of us, I say. Me, myself, and I.

  “Well, after school that day he waits across the street with this friend of his and as soon as I come out of the building he yells something. I guess he thought I was just going to go home and forget about it. But I’ll tell you something. With people like that, you’ve got to hurt them, you’ve got to inflict pain. It’s the only thing they understand. Otherwise you’ve got them on your back for good. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience.

  “Okay. It was really cold out, really freezing. There were these frozen horse turds lying all over the place—road apples, we called them. So I picked one up and went over to this guy, but not acting tough, okay? Not acting tough. Acting more like, Oh gee, I’m so scared, please don’t hurt me. Sort of like this.” Dwight slumped his shoulders and dropped his chin and simpered up from beneath his eyebrows.

  “So I came over to him and in this little scaredy-cat voice I say, Excuse me, what’s the problem? He of course starts in on me again, blah blah blah, and while he’s got his mouth open I jam a road apple into it! You should’ve seen the look on his face. Then I hit the sucker in the breadbasket, and down he goes. I sit on him for a while and hold my hand over his mouth until the road apple starts melting, then I get up and leave him there. I caught holy hell for it later on, but so what.”

  After dinner Dwight took me into the utility room and showed me some moves. He taught me how to stand and shuffle my feet and guard myself. He showed me how to throw a punch from the shoulder instead of winding up and leaving myself open. Then he showed me how to dry-gulch somebody. It wasn’t a thing I should do casually, Dwight said, but only if I had good reason to think that the other fellow might dry-gulch me. There were many techniques but Dwight didn’t want to confuse me, so he showed me two of the best.

  It was simple, really. You just walked up to someone and acted friendly or even scared, then you kicked him in the balls. That was the first technique. The second was almost exactly the same, except that instead of kicking the other guy in the balls you punched him in the wind-pipe. According to Dwight this worked best on tall guys. We practiced both moves. Dwight had me approach him nonchalantly, say “Hello,” and then kick or swing.
At first I was afraid he would use these maneuvers as an excuse to cream me—all in the spirit of serious training, of course. But he didn’t. He caught my fist or foot almost gently, let go, spoke a few words of correction, and told me to try again. He was quick and strong, and enjoyed watching me realize it.

  Feet squeaking on the floor, faces shiny with sweat, we worked out until I had the moves down cold. Then we went back into the kitchen. Dwight had a drink and gave me tips about dealing with Arthur: how I should bide my time, and make sure we were alone, and not give him any warning, and so on. I saw that he considered this to be my right and my duty. Bide your time, he told me.

  A few people called that night to complain about their missing newspapers. Dwight took the calls and explained that the papers had been ruined in a fight, adding that his boy Jack had hung a real shiner on the Gayle kid.

  I HAD, TOO. Arthur’s eye did not immediately turn black, but first went through a liverish spectrum of yellows and purples and greens. Arthur sometimes stared at me in a way that convinced me he knew I’d been telling lies about the fight. But he made no move to start it up again. We kept away from each other. Once school let out for the summer, we hardly ever met except in a crowd of other boys at baseball games and Scout meetings.

  But one afternoon I was doing my route and saw Arthur coming toward me down the main road. We would meet each other not far from where the fight had started. There was no one else around. I walked on and so did he, Pepper mincing along behind him. And as we approached each other it occurred to me, more as nervousness than thought, that Arthur might also have received some instruction in dry-gulching, and in biding his time. I had bided my own beyond Dwight’s patience, that was for sure.