This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  When we were close enough to touch, Arthur stopped and said, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  We stood there, looking at each other. Then he looked down at Pepper. “Do you want to pet my dog?” he asked.

  “Sure.” I dropped to one knee and held out my hand. Pepper sniffed it.

  “She can talk,” Arthur said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I just about believe you.”

  “Hey Pepper,” he said, “what’s on a tree?”

  She yapped twice.

  “Bark!” Arthur said. “Way to go, Pepper. Okay, Pepper, how’s the world treating you?”

  She looked up at him.

  “How’s the world treating you, Pepper?”

  She yapped again.

  “Rough! Good girl!”

  It was a dumb joke, but I had to laugh. While I stroked Pepper’s wiry fur she grunted softly and looked up at me with keen, unremembering eyes.

  Skipper’s car was a 1949 Ford that Dwight had gotten a deal on from some rube in Marblemount. Dwight bought it so Skipper could take girls out and go hunting and fishing without borrowing his own car, but Skipper put it in a corrugated iron shed at the edge of camp and commenced taking it to pieces. It had been in pieces for over a year when I moved up to Chinook, and it was still in pieces six months later when Skipper graduated from Concrete High.

  Skipper didn’t leave Chinook when he graduated, but took a job with the power company and continued living at home so he could put all his money into the car. Sometimes at night I dropped by to look at it while I was out collecting from my subscribers. At home Skipper took little notice of me, but in the shed he became hospitable. He turned off whatever tool he happened to be plying at the time and raised his goggles to his forehead. He gave me Cokes to drink while he explained what the various parts of the car were and what he planned to do with them. I nodded as if I understood, and really believed that one day this mess would put itself together again.

  Though Skipper was supposed to start at the University of Washington in September, he didn’t give any sign of leaving. Dwight began to ride him. He wanted to know where Skipper expected to live, and how he was going to pay for his education. He wanted to know what the plan was. Skipper said he had it all worked out.

  Dwight kept at him, but Skipper just smiled his polite uninterested smile and did as he pleased. And then, late that summer, the car began to come together just as Skipper had said it would. I was in the shed the night he and his friends put the rebuilt engine in. Skipper had installed racing carbs and bored out the cylinders to make it more powerful, then he’d had it chromed. It was beautiful. His friends wrestled it in with a block and tackle while Skipper shouted orders at them, and within an hour he had it roaring.

  The body looked beyond saving. It was dented, dull, and full of holes from the ornaments Skipper had stripped off. He leaded in the holes, fiberglassed the dents, laid on a coat of primer, sanded it smooth, and put on sixteen coats of candy-apple red lacquer paint. He fine-sanded each coat before adding the next. It took him over a month, and by the time he was done the paint had such clarity and depth it was like looking into a glaze of thick red ice. The lines of the car were fluid, clean; he had been right to take off the ornaments.

  Once the painting was done Skipper put on new white-wall tires with chrome hubcaps, not the flipper hubcaps that were in fashion then but simple globes as bright as mirrors. Along the sides, under the doors, he hung chrome Laker exhaust pipes that bent out slightly at the end as if to cough the smoke discreetly away from the car. He put a rechromed bumper in front and attached a Continental kit to the rear end—an unusually long bumper with an external case for the spare tire.

  It was cherry. The only thing that needed fixing was the interior. Skipper told me he had just enough money left to take the car down to Tijuana and have it upholstered there. He was going to have it done in white leather, tucked, rolled, and pleated.

  When I asked him if I could come along he told me he’d think about it.

  I thought he was serious. I thought that he would actually consider taking me with him, and since I could imagine no reasonable argument against my going I assumed that he couldn’t either. It was as good as decided. I saw myself riding shotgun beside Skipper in this fast, beautiful red car, the two of us having adventures along the way and helping people out of situations too tough for them to handle by themselves. They would want us to stay afterward but we would always move on, leaving them to stare at our dust as we receded down the highway. It seemed to me that Mexico, a barren place with unseen trumpet players wandering in the background, was a long way off, and that we would be a long time gone.

  I told Arthur I was going. I also told a few other kids, and some of the people on my paper route. As we were eating dinner one night Dwight said, “Say there, mister, what’s this I hear about you going to Mexico?” He was looking at me.

  Pearl said, “If he gets to go, I get to go too.”

  My mother laughed. “Mexico! Who said anything about Mexico?”

  “He did,” Dwight told her.

  “Jack, is that true?” my mother asked. “Did you tell someone you were going to Mexico?”

  “Skipper said I could,” I told her.

  “Huh?” Skipper said. “I said what?”

  I looked at him and remembered for the first time in days that he hadn’t actually said I could go along. “You said you’d think about it,” I told him.

  “No kidding? I said that?”

  I nodded.

  “Solly, Cholly,” he said. “No can do.” He must have seen the effect these words had on me, because he went on to explain that his friend Ray was planning to go along. They’d be sleeping in the car to save money and that meant there was only room for the two of them.

  “It’s a moot point,” Dwight said. It’s a moot point was one of his favorite weighty utterances, that and It’s academic.

  “Some other time,” Skipper said.

  Pearl asked him to get her a sombrero.

  “I want castanets,” Norma said. She wiggled her shoulders and sang “La Cucaracha” until Dwight told her to pipe down.

  SKIPPER AND i shared the smallest room in the house. We used the same desk, the same dresser, the same closet. A space of five or six feet separated our beds. But I never felt cramped in there until Skipper left for Mexico. Because he took up so much room when he was home, I could not forget that he was gone, and that led me to think about him and his friend Ray out on the road, free as birds. And those thoughts made me feel cheated and confined. I believed that Skipper should have taken me instead of Ray. I had asked first and, after all, I was his brother. This meant something to me but I saw that it meant nothing to him. I hadn’t always gotten along with my own brother, and we hadn’t even seen each other in four years, but I still missed him and began to imagine how much better he would treat me.

  I also missed my father. My mother never complained to me about him, but sometimes Dwight would make sarcastic comments about Daddy Warbucks and Lord High-and-Mighty. He meant to impugn my father for being rich and living far away and having nothing to do with me, but all these qualities, even the last, perhaps especially the last, made my father fascinating. He had the advantage always enjoyed by the inconstant parent, of not being there to be found imperfect. I could see him as I wanted to see him. I could give him sterling qualities and imagine good reasons, even romantic reasons, why he had taken no interest, why he had never written to me, why he seemed to have forgotten I existed. I made excuses for him long after I should have known better. Then, when I did know better, I resolved to put the fact of his desertion from my mind. I visited him on my way to Vietnam, and then again when I got back, and we became friends. He was no monster—he’d had troubles of his own. Anyway, only crybabies groused about their parents.

  This way of thinking worked pretty well until my first child was born. He came three weeks early, when I was away from home. The first time I saw him, in the hospital n
ursery, a nurse was trying to take a blood sample from him. She couldn’t find a vein. She kept jabbing him, and every time the needle went in I felt it myself. My impatience made her so clumsy that another nurse had to take over. When I finally got my hands on him I felt as if I had snatched him from a pack of wolves, and as I held him something hard broke in me, and I knew that I was more alive than I had been before. But at the same time I felt a shadow, a coldness at the edges. It made me uneasy, so I ignored it. I didn’t understand what it was until it came upon me again that night, so sharply I wanted to cry out. It was about my father, ten years dead by then. It was grief and rage, mostly rage, and for days I shook with it when I wasn’t shaking with joy for my son, and for the new life I had been given.

  But that was still to come. As a boy, I found no fault in my father. I made him out of dreams and memories. One of these memories was of sitting in the kitchen of my stepmother’s beautiful old house in Connecticut, where I had come for a visit, and watching him unload a box full of fireworks onto the table. It was all heavy ordnance, seriously life threatening and illegal. My step-mother was scolding him. She wanted to know what he planned to do with them. He pushed a bunch of cherry bombs over to me and said, “Blow‘em up, dear, blow’em up.”

  I BEGAN TO take a sharp, acquisitive interest in cars after Skipper customized the Ford. As I walked my paper route I took apart the cars I saw and put them back together in more interesting ways, lowered, louvered, dagoed, chopped-and-channeled. I read the used-car advertisements in the papers, comparing prices, measuring them against the money I was making. I thought of what it would be like to own a car, to be able to just get in and go.

  After I’d delivered my papers one day I folded up my news bag and crossed the bridge leading out of camp, then waited with my thumb in the air until a car stopped for me. I didn’t know the man—he was a construction worker from the dam upriver. I got in and he asked me where I was going. He added, “You’re good as far as Seattle. Then you’re on your own.”

  Seattle. I could, if I chose, ride all the way to Seattle. I said that I was going to Concrete, which seemed far enough for now, but by the time we reached Marblemount I lost my nerve and asked the man to let me out. Within moments I caught another ride back to Chinook. This was my first time hitchhiking. As the summer went on I ranged farther and farther down the valley, to Concrete and Bird’s Eye and Van Horn and Sedro Woolley; once, just before school started, all the way to Mount Vernon. I would walk around the streets of these towns for a few minutes, waiting for something to happen, and when it didn’t I would go back to the road and stick my thumb out again. I was always home by the time Dwight and my mother got off work. No one ever missed me. Now and then I went with Arthur, but usually alone. Alone I could lie more freely and I felt more open to chance. Someday, I thought, someone would stop for me and say, “You’re good as far as Wilton, Connecticut ...”

  SKIPPER WAS AWAY for only a couple of weeks. He came back, packed up his things, and was gone the next morning. I saw him occasionally after that, when he came home for Thanksgiving and Christmas or when we visited him in Seattle. He lived in little apartments with other men for a couple of years, then he got married and took another job with the power company. I sat around with him the night before his wedding. It was one of two times I ever saw him choked up. In this case the emotion was brought on not by the prospect of losing his freedom but by a song he kept playing on his new hi-fi—“The Everglades,” by the Kingston Trio. It told the story of a man who kills another man in a fight over a woman. Seeing what he has done, he takes to the glades,Where a man can hide, and never be found

  And have no fear of the bayin’ hound

  But he better keep movin’ and don’t stand still

  ’Cause if the skeeters don’t get him then the gators

  will

  What the man doesn’t know, and of course will never find out, is that the jury has acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. This kicker is revealed in the last verse, and every time it came around Skipper lowered his eyes and shook his head mournfully.

  The other time I saw him choked up was when he got back from Mexico. We were eating dinner. The sound of the engine was unmistakable, and when we heard it Pearl and Norma and I jumped up and ran outside. Dwight and my mother followed a moment later. The family that shared our building came outside too, and so did some other neighbors, all of them struck speechless by the sight of the car.

  It looked as if it had been sandblasted. The paint was pitted and dull. The hubcaps and bumpers and Laker pipes were also pitted, and beginning to rust. It was a sad sight.

  Skipper told us what had happened. After he had the car upholstered he and Ray took a run down to Ensenada, and on the way back they got caught in a sandstorm. The sand was so thick they couldn’t see more than a foot or two in front of them. They’d had to pull off the road and wait it out, which took the best part of a day. The sand fouled the engine, too—Skipper had been tinkering with it all the way home. He made jokes about the whole episode but his voice was close to breaking. He’d been holding it in all this time, probably putting up a show of nonchalance for Ray, but now the sight of his home and family was unmanning him. He did not break down, but he was close to it.

  While Skipper talked I circled the car, toting up the damage. I opened the driver’s door and poked my head inside. The floor had been carpeted in white. White leather covered the seats, side panels, roof and dashboard. The light inside was rich and creamy. I got in behind the wheel and closed the door. I breathed in the smell of the leather. I ran my fingers over the seats, then leaned back with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gear shift. Softly, so no one would hear me, I made engine noises and worked the gears, looking through the pitted windshield at the blurry outline of the trees along the road. If I didn’t look too hard I could almost believe I was moving.

  I kept outgrowing my shoes, two pairs in the seventh grade alone. Dwight was indignant. He thought I was growing out of malice. He put off buying the third pair until I could hardly walk, and said there would be no sneakers this time. We would talk about sneakers when I settled down and decided what size my feet were going to be. I wanted to buy them myself out of my savings from the paper route, but Dwight refused to withdraw the money from the bank.

  I wouldn’t have cared that much about the sneakers except for basketball. The Chinook grade school had very few boys to draw on for sports, which meant that I got to play in most of the games, and wear a sharp uniform—red satin with white stripes. I was not wrong to suppose that this uniform would lose a certain something with the addition of brown street shoes.

  We played our games at night. When they were away my mother usually drove me, but if she was busy Norma would get Bobby Crow to take me in his car. Of course Norma came along too. This was one of their ways to steal time together. On the drive to the game Bobby gave me tips, inside dope about passing, shooting, feinting. I hung over the front seat as Bobby talked, nodding shrewdly at everything he said. Bobby had played football for Concrete High. He’d been their quarterback, the smallest and best player on the team, so much better than the others that he seemed alone on the field. His solitary excellence made him beautiful and tragic, because you knew that whatever prodigies he performed would be undone by the rest of the team. He made sly, unseen handoffs to butterfingered halfbacks, long bull’s-eye passes to ends who couldn’t catch them. But his true wizardry was broken-field running: sprinting and stopping dead, jumping sideways, pirouetting on his toes and wriggling his hips girlishly as he spun away from the furious hulks who pursued him, slipping between them like a trout shooting down a boulder-strewn creek.

  Bobby was small-boned and slender. He neither drank nor smoked. He had the narrow features of his half-caste mother and the dark eyes and skin of his Nez Percé father, who, Norma told me, was a direct descendant of Chief Joseph. Bobby did not play basketball for Concrete, but I listened to all his words of advice and squeezed my mind around them s
o they would sink in deep and change my game. Bobby had a very soft voice, and this made what he said seem confidential, even a little shady.

  I PLAYED MY first game in street shoes against Van Horn. Bobby and Norma let me off outside the school and drove away. They had been glum and prickly with each other on the way down. In a few months they’d be graduating, and their plans didn’t agree.

  I knew I was in trouble as soon as we started our lay-up drills. The shoes were heavy and squarish, chosen by Dwight to go with both my school clothes and my Scout uniform. They clomped loudly as I ran and the slick new soles slipped like skates on the profoundly varnished floor. I fell down twice before the game began. By tip-off the kids from the other school were already hooting at me. I didn’t want to play, but only five of us had shown up that night so I had no choice. My shoes clomped as I ran blindly up and down the court. Sometimes the ball came at me. I dribbled it once or twice and threw it at someone else in red. Jumped when I saw everyone else jumping. Ran back and forth. Fell down whenever I tried to stop too fast.

  In the din of voices I heard one in particular, a woman’s, shrieking high above the rest. It was like the crazy voice on laugh tracks. Once I picked it up I couldn’t stop listening for it. It distressed me and made me even clumsier. Every time I slipped or fell down she shrieked higher and louder, and then there came a time when she didn’t stop between falls but kept on shrieking in a breathless, broken voice that had no trace of laughter. I wasn’t the only one to notice. The gym grew quiet. Eventually hers was the only voice to be heard. She didn’t stop. Our coach called time-out, and we went to the sidelines to towel off and slake our thirst. People were turning in their seats to look up at her. She was standing in the top row of the bleachers, a woman I’d never seen before, a huge broad-shouldered woman wearing curlers and toreador pants. She had her hands over her face. Her shoulders jerked as muffled barking sounds escaped her. A short man with scarlet cheeks and downcast eyes was leading her by the elbow. They passed along their row and down the steps, then across the gym floor to the exit, the woman barking convulsively through her fingers.