This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  The game resumed, but with a difference. The crowd was quieter now, almost hushed. When the other team had the ball, a few scattered voices called polite encouragement ; when they made a basket the applause was subdued. The room came into focus for me. I caught my breath, found my rhythm, and settled into the game. I still had trouble keeping my feet, but nobody laughed when I fell down. The crowd was on my side now, and the other team seemed to know it. They played with an air of deference, almost of apology. I began to see myself from the stands and became sentimentally aroused by the consciousness of my own nobility and grit in seeing this game through. I had wrenched my knee slightly in a fall, and I parlayed this annoyance into a limp sufficiently pronounced to draw sympathy without forcing the referee to end the game. I hobbled gamely up and down the floor and the other team slowed down too, as if to refuse any further advantage over us.

  They won by a mile. When the buzzer went off, their coach ran onto the court and had them give us three cheers.

  NORMA AND BOBBY were late picking me up. The parking lot was almost empty when they pulled in.

  “Who won?” Norma asked. She pushed the door open for me and leaned forward as I squeezed past her into the backseat.

  “They did.”

  “Next time,” Bobby said.

  Norma closed the door and slid back over next to Bobby. They looked at each other. He put the car in gear and drove slowly out of the lot. It was warm inside the car, cloying. Norma stretched, fiddled with the radio, teased the hair on Bobby’s neck. She called him Bobo, her pet name for him, and said something that made him laugh. Her voice was low, her movements languorous. I watched them. As we drove on I kept watching them. I was nervously alert, suspicious without knowing what I was suspicious of. And then I knew. The knowledge did not come to me as a thought but as a sudden physical oppression. I had never understood before, not really, what they did when they were off alone together. I knew they fooled around but I thought they were mainly friends. I never thought she would do this to me.

  In the darkness of the backseat I sat rigid and mute, punching her, slapping her, calling her names. I took away the blue convertible I was going to give her, the furs and filmy clothes. I threw her out of the mansion.

  Then I let her back in. There was no choice. And later, whenever I heard Ray Charles sing “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” I just had to stop and get sad for a while.

  When my mother joined the rifle club she recruited several other wives, and more couples signed up as time went on. It had been a loose society of beery guys who liked to plink at cans, but that changed. Some of the new members were serious shooters, and after the club got smeared by a couple of other clubs the old members either got serious themselves or dropped out.

  My mother did well at matches. She loved to win. Winning made her jaunty and bright. Her shooting jacket was covered with badges and ribbons, but Dwight’s jacket had none, because he always lost. He claimed that the Remington target rifle he’d bought was imperfectly balanced. He bought another, and when that also proved defective he bought a third. He continued to lose, but it wasn’t from lack of trying. He spent two or three nights a week practicing at the club, and used the long hallway in our house as a dry-firing range. He fixed a target to the door at one end and sighted down at it from the other, arms twined through the straps, cheek mashed to the stock. Breathe in, breathe out, squeeze off. Breathe in, breathe out, squeeze off. When I came in from my paper route I often found myself looking down the barrel of Dwight’s latest piece, which he, in outrageous violation of the code governing even unloaded weapons, held on me until I moved out of the way.

  Dwight made Pearl and me come along when the club had matches in other towns. They always turned out the same: my mother did well and Dwight choked. He pretended not to care, but on the drive home he began to sulk. His face darkened, his lower lip protruded, his neck sank down into his shoulders. Pearl and I kept quiet in the backseat until one of us forgot and started humming, or said something. Then Dwight snarled so viciously that my mother felt obliged to put in a soothing word. He turned on her and said that as far as he knew he was still the father of this so-called family, or did she have another candidate?

  “Dwight ...” she said.

  “Dwight,” he mimicked, not sounding at all like her.

  Then, until we reached Marblemount, he railed at her for refusing to appreciate his sacrifice in taking on a divorced woman with a kid, let alone a kid like me, a liar, a thief, a sissy. If my mother argued back he accused her of being disloyal; if she did not argue he became apoplectic with the sound of his own voice. Nothing could stop him but the sight of the Marblemount tavern.

  He pulled into the parking lot and jammed on the brakes, skidding through the loose gravel. He got out, stuck his head back inside, pronounced some final judgment on us and slammed the door. My mother sat with Pearl and me for a while, stony-faced, watching the tavern. She never cried. Finally she got out of the car and went inside herself.

  I WAS A liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn’t help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions failed to persuade. I was also a thief. Dwight’s reason for calling me one was trivial, based on my having taken his hunting knife without permission. My thefts were real. I’d begun by stealing candy from the rooms of newspaper subscribers who lived in the bachelors’ quarters. Most of these men kept candy around. I fell into the habit of taking a piece here, a piece there. Then I stole money from them. At first I took only small change, to buy Cokes and ice cream, but later I stole fifty-cent pieces and even dollar bills. I stashed the money in an ammunition box under one of the barracks.

  My idea was to steal enough to run away. I was ready to do anything to get clear of Dwight. I even thought of killing him, shooting him down some night while he was picking on my mother. I not only carried newspapers, I read them, and reading them had taught me that you can kill a man and get away with it. You just had to appear in the right role, like Cheryl Crane when she stabbed Johnny Stampanato to death for threatening Lana Turner.

  Sometimes I took the Winchester down when I heard Dwight start in on my mother, but his abuse was more boring than dangerous. She didn’t respect him. She looked down on him. He was doing just fine until we came along. Who did she think she was? Mainly I wanted to shoot him just to quiet him down.

  Dwight wasn’t wrong when he called me a liar and a thief, but these accusations did not hurt me, because I did not see myself that way. Only one of his charges had stinging power—that I was a sissy. My best friend was a thoroughbred sissy, and because of our friendship I worried that others might think the same of me. To put myself in the clear I habitually mocked Arthur, always behind his back, imitating his speech and way of walking, even betraying his secrets. I also got into fights. I didn’t fight Arthur again, but I had learned from him the trick of going crazy when insulted. I had also learned that getting hit a few times wouldn’t kill me and that other people, even Dwight, would treat me with a certain deference for a few days after a fight. And of course it made other boys think twice about their words, to know that they were accountable for them.

  All of Dwight’s complaints against me had the aim of giving me a definition of myself. They succeeded, but not in the way he wished. I defined myself by opposition to him. In the past I had been ready, even when innocent, to believe any evil thing of myself. Now that I had grounds for guilt I could no longer feel it.

  WHILE PEARL AND I waited in the car we did our best to get on each other’s nerves. Pearl hummed. Her humming had nothing to do with music. It held to no pattern of melody or rhythm but spun itself out endlessly, moronic as me cracking my knuckles, which was what I did to get her goat. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack

  We could keep this up for quite a while. Once it got boring I went for walks along the road, just far enough away that I could still see the tavern but Pearl couldn’t see me and would, I hoped, imagine
herself abandoned, and become afraid. I stood on the roadside with my collar up and my hands in my pockets, watching the lights of passing cars. I was a murderer on the run, a drifter about to be swept up into the passion of a lonely woman ...

  When I got tired of this I went back to the car. By now I would be lonely myself, dying to talk, but our official position was that we couldn’t stand each other. Pearl and I sat in our comers and stared out our windows until I couldn’t take another second of it; then I leaned over the seat and turned the radio on. Pearl warned me not to, but she didn’t really mean it. She wanted to listen to the radio as much as I did. We were both big fans of American Bandstand and the local product, Seattle Bandstand. She watched them at home. I watched them at the houses of kids along my route, staying for the length of a song and then tearing down the street to my next outpost, hooking papers over my head as I ran.

  I knew all the words to all the songs. So did Pearl. And as we sat in the darkness with music flooding the car we could not stop ourselves from singing along, at first privately, then together. Pearl didn’t have a good voice but I never ragged her about it. That would have been too low, like ragging her about her bald spot. Anyway, you didn’t need a good voice for the songs we liked; you needed timing and inflection. Pearl had these, and she could do backup and harmony. You can’t sing harmony without leaning close together, taking cues from a nod, a sudden narrowing of the eyes, an intake of breath, and when it’s going well you have to smile. There’s no way not to smile. We did some songs well—“To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “My Happiness,” “Mister Blue,” most of the Everly Brothers—and we sang them as if to each other, smiling, face to face.

  Until Dwight came out of the tavern. Then we turned off the radio and leaned back into our comers. Dwight walked toward the car with my mother following a few steps behind, her arms crossed, her eyes on the ground. She didn’t look like a winner now. Dwight got in smelling of bourbon. My mother stayed outside. She said she wouldn’t get in unless Dwight gave her the keys. He just sat there, and after a time she got in. As he pulled the car out of the lot my mother gnawed at her lower lip and watched the road come at us.

  “Please, Dwight,” she said.

  “Please, Dwight,” he mimicked.

  As we went into the first curve I felt Pearl’s fingers sinking into my forearm.

  “Please, Dwight,” I said.

  “Please, Dwight, ” he said.

  And then he took us through the turns above the river, tires wailing, headlights swinging between cliff and space, and the more we begged him the faster he went, only slowing down for a breath after the really close calls, and then laughing to show he wasn’t afraid.

  When I was alone in the house I went through everyone’s private things. One day I found in my mother’s bureau a letter from her brother Stephen, who lived in Paris. It was filled with descriptions of the city and the pleasures to be had there. I read it a couple of times, then copied the address from the flimsy blue envelope and put it back in the drawer.

  That night I wrote my uncle a long letter in which I created a nightmare picture of our life in Chinook. It seemed true enough as I wrote it, but I got carried away. At the end of the letter I pleaded with my uncle to bring my mother and me to Paris. If he would just help us get started, I said, we’d be on our feet in no time. We would find jobs and pay him back whatever we owed. I said I didn’t know how much longer we could hold out—everything depended on him. I plastered an envelope with stamps and mailed it off.

  I waited a few days for his answer, then forgot about it.

  MY MOTHER CAUGHT me on the steps one afternoon as I was coming in from my paper route. She said she wanted me to take a walk with her. Not far from the house there was a footbridge over the river, and when we got there she stopped and asked me what in the world I had written to her brother.

  I said I didn’t remember, exactly.

  “It must’ve been pretty bad,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How did you get his address?”

  I told her I’d found the letter on top of her bureau. She shook her head and looked out over the water. “I was just trying to help,” I said.

  “Read this,” she said, and handed me a blue envelope. Inside was another letter from Uncle Stephen. He expressed his shock and sympathy at the wretchedness of our condition, but explained that he wasn’t able to launch a rescue operation on the scale of the one I had proposed. They didn’t have room for both of us, and as far as finding jobs was concerned we had no prospects at all. We didn’t speak French, and even if we did we would never be able to get working papers. I belonged in school, anyway. The whole idea was ridiculous.

  Still, he and his wife wanted to do what they could. They had talked it over and come up with a plan they wanted us to consider. This was that I should come alone to Paris and live with them and go to school with my cousins, one of whom, Kathy, was my age and would be able to help me make friends and learn the ropes. While I lived with them my mother would be free to get away from Dwight and look for work. Once she got settled, really settled—say in a year or so—I could rejoin her.

  My uncle referred to a check he’d apparently enclosed, saying he was sorry he couldn’t send more. He hoped my mother would give every consideration to his plan, which seemed to him a good one. In the future he thought it would be best if she wrote him herself.

  “What do you think?” my mother asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Paris.”

  She said, “Just think of it. You in Paris.”

  “Paris,” I said.

  She nodded. “So what do you think?”

  “I don’t know. What about you?”

  “He has some pretty good points. It would be a great experience for you, living in Paris. And it would give me some time to see how things go here.”

  I was trying to be sober and so was she, but we ended up grinning at each other.

  “Just don’t say anything about the check,” my mother said.

  DWIGHT WAS ALL for packing me off to Paris. The thought that I would soon be leaving softened him and disposed him toward reminiscence. He said that his travels during the war had given him a whole nother outlook on life. He gave me advice on how to treat Frenchmen, and counseled me to be broad-minded when confronted with their effeminate customs. I heard a lot about the French people’s appetite for frogs, and learned that this was how they came to be known as Frogs by the people of other nations. From a set of pre-World War I English encyclopedias he had bought at a yard sale, Dwight read me long passages on French history (tumultuous, despotic, distinguished by the Gallic taste for conspiracy and betrayal), French culture (full of Gallic wit and high spirits, but generally derivative, superficial, arid, and atheistic), and the French national character (endowed with a certain Gallic warmth and charm, but excitable, sensual, and, on the whole, unreliable).

  Pearl burned. She could not accept that I was going to live in Paris. I added to her unhappiness by treating her with condescension. I also condescended to Arthur and my other friends, as if they had served their purpose and were already dematerializing into quaint, vaporous memories. At school I asked for and received permission to take time off from my regular studies to complete a series of “special projects” on the history, culture, and national character of France.

  All my impressions of Paris came from American movies, in which everyone wore berets and striped jerseys and sat around smoking cigarettes while accordian music played in the background. It was the same instrument I heard in the background of my mother’s Piaf records. But I didn’t know that it was an accordian. I thought it was a harmonica, and that everyone in Paris knew how to play one. So I bought a harmonica, a Hohner Marine Band, and wandered around Chinook blowing on it, honking out moony approximations of “La Vie en Rose” and the theme from Moulin Rouge to prepare myself for my new life in Paris, France.

  I WAS SUPPOSED to leave as soon as I finished seventh grade so I’d have the summer to study
French and learn my way around before starting school in the fall. My mother had made reservations for me on planes from Seattle to New York, and New York to Paris. She was about to drive me down to Mount Vernon to apply for a passport when my uncle changed the plan.

  He wrote that he and his wife had had second thoughts about the original idea. It simply didn’t make sense for us to go to the immense trouble and cost of uprooting me from my family, my community, and my school, not to mention my language, only to do it all over again a year later. It took more than a year to get to know a country as complex as France. And there was also the question of authority. They gathered that I had a history of discipline problems. How could they be sure that I would obey them when I didn’t seem to obey my own mother, especially since I knew I’d be leaving at the end of the year?

  They foresaw a lot of problems, to say the least.

  But they still wanted to help, and believed I would benefit greatly from the experience of foreign travel, a good school, and a well-regulated family. So they proposed that I should live with them not for just one year but for five years, until I finished high school. And to make sure that I regarded them as my own family, they offered to become my own family. They offered to adopt me. In fact they insisted on adopting me as a condition of the rest of the plan. This was, they said, the only way it could work. My mother was welcome to visit whenever she wanted, of course, but they meant the adoption to be genuine and not just a pro forma arrangement. Henceforth I would be their son.