This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  I said that I could take care of myself.

  “I don’t mean physically rough,” Mr. Howard said. “Boys talk about all kinds of things. Even at a school like Hill you don’t hear a whole lot of boys sitting around at night talking about Shakespeare. They’re going to talk about other things. Sex, whatever. And they’re going to take the gloves off.”

  I said nothing.

  “You can’t expect everyone to be, you know, an Eagle Scout.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “I’m just saying that life in a boys’ school can come as a bit of a shock to someone who’s led a sheltered life.” I began to make an answer, but Mr. Howard said, “Let me just say one more thing. You’re obviously doing a great job here. With your grades and so on you should be able to get into an excellent college later on. I’m not sure that a prep school is exactly the right move for you. You might end up doing yourself more harm than good. It’s something to consider.”

  I told Mr. Howard that I had not led a sheltered life, and that I was determined to get myself a better education than the one I was getting now. In trying to keep my voice from breaking I ended up sounding angry.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” Mr. Howard said. “You’re a fine boy and I’ll be happy to give you a good report.” He said these words quickly, as if reciting them. Then he added, “You have a strong case. But you should know what you’re getting into.” He said he would write to the school the next day, then we’d just have to wait and see. From what he understood, I was one of many boys being considered for the few remaining places.

  “I assume you’ve got applications in at other schools,” he said.

  “Just Choate. But I’d rather go to Hill. Hill is my first choice.”

  We were parked in front of the school. Mr. Howard took a business card from his wallet and told me to call him if I had any questions. He advised me not to worry, said whatever happened would surely be for the best. Then he said good-bye and drove away. I watched the Thunderbird all the way down the hill to the main road, watched it as a man might watch a woman he’d just met leave his life, taking with her some hope of change that she had made him feel. The Thunderbird turned south at the main road and disappeared behind some trees.

  I was running a board through the table saw at school and joking around with the boy next in line. Then I felt a sharp pinch and looked down. The ring finger on my left hand was spouting blood. I had cut off the last joint. It lay beside the whirling blade, fingernail and all. The boy I’d been talking to looked at it with me, his mouth working strangely, then turned and walked away. “Hey,” I said. The shop was loud; no one heard. I sank to my knees. Somebody saw me and started yelling.

  Horseface Greeley took me to the doctor. He brought along another teacher, who drove the car while Horseface asked me leading questions whose answers would protect him if we should ever go to court. I understood his purpose and gave him the answers he wanted. I thought that the accident had been my fault, and that it would be unfair of me to get him in trouble. I’d been a fool. I’d cut off part of my own finger. Now I wanted above all, as the only redemption left to me, to be a good sport.

  The finger was a mess. My mother gave the doctor permission to take me to the hospital in Mount Vernon for surgery. I went under the knife that afternoon, and awoke the next morning with a bandage from my wrist to my remaining fingertips. I was supposed to stay in the hospital for three days, but the doctor was worried about infection and it was almost a week before I got home. By then I was addicted to morphine, which the nurses had given me freely because when I didn’t get it I disturbed the ward with my screams. At first I wanted it for the pain; the pain was terrible. Then I wanted it for the peace it gave me. On morphine I didn’t worry. I didn’t even think. I rose out of myself and dreamed benevolent dreams, soaring like a gull in the balmy updraft.

  The doctor gave me some tablets when I left the hospital, but they had no effect. I was hurting in two ways now, from my finger and from narcotic withdrawal. Though it must have been a mild episode of withdrawal it did not seem mild to me, especially since I didn’t know what it was, or that it would come to an end. Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

  If I had lived in a place where drugs were bought and sold, I would have bought them. I would have done anything to get them. But nobody I knew used drugs. The possibility didn’t even occur to us. The marijuana scare films that might have sparked our interest never made it to Concrete, and heroin use was understood to be unique to the residents of New York City.

  I was all through being a good sport. Everything was a grievance to me. I complained about school, I complained about the uselessness of my medicine, I complained about how hard it was to eat and dress myself. I begged for comfort and then despised it. I talked back and found fault, especially with Dwight. From behind my wound I said things to Dwight I never would have said to him before.

  It occurred to me that alcohol might make me feel better. I stole some of Dwight’s Old Crow but the first drink made me choke, so I replenished the bottle with water and put it back. A few nights later Dwight asked me if I had been into his whiskey. It was watery, he said. He seemed more curious than anything else. He probably would have let me off with a warning if I’d admitted it, but I said, “I’m not the drinker in this house.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that, mister,” he said, and jabbed his fingers against my chest.

  He didn’t push all that hard, but he caught me off balance. I stumbled backward, tripping on my own feet, and as I went down I threw my hands out behind me to break the fall. All this seemed to happen very slowly, until the moment I landed on my finger.

  I forgot who I was. I heard a steady howling all around me as I thrashed on the floor. Other sounds. Then I was sitting on the couch, drenched in sweat, and my mother was trying to calm me. It was all over, she said. This was it, this was the last time. We were getting out of here.

  I LEFT FIRST. After all the years of thinking about leaving, I actually did it. My mother talked to Chuck Bolger’s parents and they agreed to let me live with them in Van Horn for the next few months, until the end of the school year. By then my mother hoped to have a job in Seattle. Once she started work and found a place to live I would follow her down. Mr. Bolger had serious doubts at first. He suspected that I was partly to blame for Chuck’s wildness. But Chuck had been wild for years and Mr. Bolger was too smart a man not to know it, and too good a man to turn down a request for asylum. He did make certain conditions. I would help out in his store, and go to church with the rest of his family. I would accept his authority. I would neither smoke nor drink nor swear.

  I gave my word on all counts.

  Chuck drove up to get me. He and Pearl and my mother helped me carry my things out to the car while Dwight sat in the kitchen. When we were about to leave, Dwight came outside and watched us. I could tell he wanted to make it up with me. He already had a bad reputation in the camp, and to have one of his family leave his house like this would disgrace him. He knew I would tell people he had bullied me in my invalid condition. And though my mother had said nothing to him of her own plans to go, he must have known that with me out of the way there was nothing left to hold her, nothing but threats.

  I could see him gearing up for an approach. Finally he walked over and said we ought to talk about things. I had planned to make some hurtful answer when this moment came, but all I did was shake my head and look away. I kissed my mother good-bye and told Pearl I’d see her in school. Then I got in the car. Dwight came up to the window, and said, “Well, good luck.” He put out his hand. Helpless to stop myself, I shook it and wished him good luck too. But I didn’t mean it any more than he did.

  We hated each other. We hate
d each other so much that other feelings didn’t get enough light. It disfigured me. When I think of Chinook I have to search for the faces of my friends, their voices, the rooms where I was made welcome. But I can always see Dwight’s face and hear his voice. I hear his voice in my own when I speak to my children in anger. They hear it too, and look at me in surprise. My youngest once said, “Don’t you love me anymore?”

  I left Chinook without a thought for the years I’d lived there. When we crossed the bridge out of camp, Chuck reached under his seat and brought out a jar of gorilla blood he’d mixed up for me. I worked on that while Chuck took sips from a pint of Canadian Club. I remember the wheat-colored label with the two big C’s, the way Chuck squinted when he tipped the bottle, the sloshing of the liquor when he lowered it again. I remember the glint of the liquor in the comer of his mouth.

  The Amen Corner

  Chuck got drunk almost every night. Some nights he was jolly. Other nights he went into silent rages in which his face would redden and swell, and his lips move to the words he was shouting inside his head. At the peak of his fury he threw himself against unyielding objects. He would ram his shoulder into a wall, then back up and do it again. Sometimes he just stood there, saying nothing, and pummeled the wall with his fists. In the morning he would ask me what he’d done the night before. I didn’t really believe that he had forgotten, but I played along and told him how wiped out he’d been, how totally out of control. He shook his head at the behavior of this strange other person.

  I could not keep up with him and I stopped trying. He never said anything, but I knew he was disappointed in me.

  Chuck’s father had run a dairy before he became a storekeeper and preacher. The family still owned the farm, though now they leased the pastures and barn to a neighbor. Mr. and Mrs. Bolger and their two young daughters lived in the main house. Chuck and I were off by ourselves in a converted storage shed a couple of hundred feet away. Mr. Bolger had the idea that a good dose of trust would rouse us to some adult conception of ourselves. It should have. It didn’t.

  The Bolgers went to bed at nine-thirty sharp. Around ten, if Chuck wasn’t already in the bag, we pushed his car down the drive a ways, then cranked it up and drove over to Veronica’s house. Arch and Psycho were usually there, sometimes Huff. They drank and played poker. I had no money, so I sat on the floor and watched the late show with Veronica. Veronica ruined the movies by telling me all about the stars. She had the inside track on Hollywood. She knew which actor, supposedly dead, was actually a drooling vegetable, and which actress could not be satisfied except by entire football teams. She was especially hard on the men. According to Veronica they were all a bunch of homos, and she proved it by pointing out the little signals and gestures by which they advertised their persuasion. The lighting of a cigarette, the position of a handkerchief in a breast pocket, the way an actor glanced at his watch or angled his hat—everything was evidence to Veronica. Even when she wasn’t talking I could feel her watching the men on the screen, ready to pounce.

  On the way home Chuck scared me by weaving all over the road and giving sermons about damnation. He meant these sermons to be parodies of his father’s, but they were all his own. Mr. Bolger did not preach like this. Chuck could catch his father’s inflections and rhythms, but not his music. What came out instead was his own fear of being condemned.

  I wasn’t used to people who took religion seriously. My mother never had, and Dwight was an atheist of the Popular Science orthodoxy. (Jesus hadn’t really died, he had taken a drug that made him look dead so he could fake a resurrection later. The parting of the Red Sea was caused by a comet passing overhead. Manna was just the ancient word for potato.) There was an Episcopalian minister, Father Karl, who drove up to Chinook every couple of weeks and was entirely serious, but the possibilities Father Karl made me feel when I listened to him did not stay with me after he left.

  Mr. Bolger was careful never to pressure me, but I understood that he was a fisher of men and that I was fair game. Not a prize catch, maybe, but legal. The danger wasn’t that he would force me into anything but that I would force myself in order to get on his good side. Mr. Bolger was tall and dignified. He had a long face and brooding eyes. When I talked to him, he looked at me in so direct a way that I sometimes forgot what I was saying. I had the feeling that he could see into me. He treated me with courtesy, though without affection; always he seemed to be holding something back. I wanted him to think well of me.

  That was one danger. The other was the music. At Mr. Bolger’s church the music was passionate, not like the menopausal Catholic hymns I’d learned in Salt Lake. People got carried away singing these songs. They wept and clapped their hands, they cried out, they swayed up the aisle to the Amen Comer. I felt like doing it myself sometimes but I held back. Chuck was always beside me, silent as a stone. He moved his lips without singing. He had never been to the Amen Comer, and I was afraid he would ridicule me if I went. So I hung back even though I wanted, out of musical sentimentality and eagerness to please, to go forward. And after church I was always glad I hadn’t done it, because I knew that Mr. Bolger would see through me and be disgusted.

  Chuck never turned on me. In his drunkest, darkest rages he hurt only himself. That was my good luck. Chuck was bullishly built, thickset and chesty. I wouldn’t have stood a chance against him. Other boys left him in peace and he left them in peace, which he was inclined to do anyway. Except with himself he was gentle—not as his father was, with that least suggestion of effort dignified men give to their gentleness, but as his mother was. He looked like her, too. Milky skin with a wintry spot of red on each cheek. Yellow hair that turned white in sunshine. Wide forehead. He also had his mother’s pale blue eyes and her way of narrowing them when she listened, looking down at the floor and nodding in agreement with whatever you said.

  Everyone liked Chuck. Sober, he was friendly and calm and openhanded. When I admired a sweater of his he gave it to me, and later he gave me a Buddy Holly album we used to sing along with. Chuck liked to sing when he wasn’t in church. It was hard to believe, seeing him in the light of day, that he had spent the previous night throwing himself against a tree. That was why the Bolgers had so much trouble coming to terms with his wildness. They saw nothing of it. He lingered over meals in the main house, talked with his father about the store, helped his mother with the dishes. His little sisters fawned on him like spaniels. Chuck seemed for all the world a boy at home with himself, and at these times he was. It wasn’t an act. So when the other Chuck, the bad Chuck, did something, it always caught the Bolgers on their blind side and knocked them flat.

  ONE NIGHT PSYCHO and Huff came over to play cards. They were as broke as I was, so I joined the game. We drank and played for matchsticks until we got bored. Then we decided that it would be a great idea to drive over to Bellingham and back. Chuck didn’t have enough gas for the trip but said he knew where we could get some. He collected a couple of five-gallon cans and a length of hose, and the four of us set off across the fields.

  It had rained heavily that day. A fine spray still fell through the mist around us. The ground, just ploughed for sowing, was boggy. It pulled at our shoes, then let them go with a rich mucky gasp. Psycho was wearing loafers, and he kept coming out of them. Finally he gave up and turned back. The rest of us pushed on. Every few steps we could hear Psycho shout with rage behind us.

  We walked a good half mile before we got to the Welch farm. We loitered by the outbuildings for a while, then crossed the yard to Mr. Welch’s truck. Chuck siphoned gas out of the tank while Huff and I watched the house. I had never been here before, but I knew the Welch boys from school. There were three of them, all sad, shabbily dressed, and quiet to the point of muteness. One of the boys, Jack, was in my class. He was forlorn and stale-smelling, like an old man who has lost his pride. Because we had the same first name it amused Mr. Mitchell to match us up as sparring partners during PE. Then the other boys would circle us and shout, “Go, Jack
! Get him, Jack! Kill him, Jack!” But Jack Welch had no stomach for it. He held his gloves up dubiously, as if he thought they might turn on him, and gave me a look of apology whenever Mr. Mitchell goaded him into taking a swing. It was strange to think of him in that dark house, his unhappy eyes closed in sleep, while I kept watch outside. Huff grunted as he scraped at his shoes with a stick. The air smelled of gasoline.

  Chuck filled the cans and we started back. The going was harder than the coming. We were headed uphill now. We took turns carrying the cans, swinging them forward and stumbling after them. Their weight drove us into the mud and threw us off balance, making us flounder and fall. By the time we got back we were caked with mud. I had torn my shirt on some barbed wire. My good arm was dead from the pull of the cans, the other arm pulsing with pain where I had brushed my finger against a post. I was dead tired and so were the others. Nobody said a thing about Bellingham. While Chuck drove Huff and Psycho home, I cleaned myself off and fell into bed.

  Mr. Bolger woke us late the next morning. He only put his head in the door and said, “Get up,” but something in his voice snapped me upright, wide awake. Chuck too. We looked at each other and got out of bed without a word. Mr. Bolger waited by the door. Once we were dressed he said, “Come on,” and set off toward the main house. He walked in long pushing strides, head bent forward as if under a weight, and never once turned to see if we were behind him. When I glanced over at Chuck his eyes were on his father’s back. His face was blank.

  We followed Mr. Bolger into the kitchen. Mrs. Bolger was sitting at the breakfast table, crying into a napkin. Her eyes were red and a blue vein stood out on her pale forehead. “Sit down,” Mr. Bolger said. I sat down across from Mrs. Bolger and looked at the tablecloth. Mr. Bolger said that Mr. Welch had just been by, for reasons we would have no trouble figuring out. I kept quiet. So did Chuck. Mr. Bolger waited, but we still said nothing. Then, to spare himself the stupidity of a denial, he told us we’d left a trail anyone could follow. You didn’t even have to follow it—you could see it all the way from here.