When You Were Older (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  But it wasn’t really going to be a talk. I thought it was. At first. But then I heard him open the front closet. Instead of going straight to Ben’s room. If he’d gone straight, that would be a talk. Stop at the hall closet, that’s a strapping. That’s where he goes to pick up the strap.

  Then I got even more scared, more than I’d been so far that entire night. Because monsters and robbers were in a sort of maybe category. But Ben, if I got him strapped … which I guess I did … that was more dangerous than anything.

  I heard him yelping. I counted the number of times Ben yelped. Fourteen. Fourteen lashes. Fourteen welts on his butt, or on the backs of his legs. So maybe no more public pool for a few weeks, or maybe he could just wear bigger, longer trunks.

  I heard my dad saying things to him, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  Then silence.

  I wondered if anybody would even remember to come tuck me in.

  My dad came in, the strap still hanging from his hand.

  ‘Your mother does not have a weak heart,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. Good. Why would Ben say so, then?’

  ‘Kiddo, I have no idea why Ben does half the things he does. In the future, just figure if Ben says it, it isn’t true.’

  ‘So you think maybe nothing went by the window?’

  ‘I can just about guarantee nothing went by the window.’

  ‘What about the monster in the bathroom sink?’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’ His voice rose sharply, and he turned back toward my door, like he was going to go strap Ben again.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Please don’t. You already did.’

  ‘Right.’ He came and sat on my bed with me. ‘If there was a monster in the sink, you’d see it.’

  ‘No. It’s in the pipe.’

  ‘Oh. In the pipe. But I told you there’s no such thing as monsters.’

  ‘But you can hear him drinking.’

  ‘Rusty. Kiddo. That’s just the sound water makes when it goes down the drain.’

  ‘Oh. But …’

  My dad sighed. ‘Go ahead. But what?’

  ‘What if Ben’s a big liar and there’s a robber outside? Both?’

  He sighed again. More deeply this time. ‘Want me to go look?’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks.’

  He wasn’t gone thirty seconds when Ben appeared in my doorway and shut off the light, throwing me into darkness.

  ‘You are so dead, Wussy Boy,’ he said.

  But he knew my father would be back. So he’d have to kill me later. Like the monster in the pipe, he’d just have to lie in wait for the perfect moment.

  I’m sure he killed me later, but I don’t specifically remember the incident. He killed me an awful lot of times.

  5 July 1983

  BEN LET OUT a whoop and jerked the end of his fishing rod high, just like my father was always trying to teach him not to do. But he paid no price for impetuous fishing – this time. A trout landed in the bottom of our canoe, right at my feet. In fact, it landed on my feet, then flipped its way off again.

  I watched in horror as it began the process of dying.

  Of course, Ben laughed at me.

  ‘Don’t look so horrified, Wussy Boy,’ he said.

  But it’s horrifying. I’m sorry, it just is. I’ve never been a vegetarian, and I don’t have a moral issue with killing an animal for food, but nothing could be worse than fishing. Because you just sit there and watch the fish die. Watch it flop around, desperate for air, until it’s too weak to flop any more. At least hunters try for a clean kill. They try to end the animal’s suffering on the first shot. They don’t hold the deer’s head underwater and watch while it drowns.

  I’ve been told that many fishermen hit the fish once in the head, hard, to minimize its suffering. Needless to say, my brother Ben was not one of them.

  ‘Hold it up, Ben,’ my father called over from his canoe, paddling closer.

  Ben held the fish up and smiled widely, and my father raised and aimed a disposable camera. I smiled, too. But later, when the picture was developed, I found out I wasn’t in it.

  I popped the end of my fishing rod up and down, like I was trying to interest a trout in my worm. But I had no worm. As always, I’d snuck my hook into the water baitless, careful to work while Ben wasn’t looking.

  Later, when I reeled it in, he would laugh at me and say something like, ‘Ha, ha, your bait got stolen and you didn’t even know it, and you’ve been fishing without bait this whole time, Wussy.’

  ‘Reel in,’ my father yelled at us. ‘We’re going to paddle over to that bank.’

  My father was about twenty feet away, in his own canoe. He pointed to a brushy/reedy area on the shore of the lake.

  My father drank a lot of beer while we fished. A lot. Much more than he would drink later in camp. Though it never occurred to me at the time, I now think his love of fishing was closely wrapped around his love of beer, and our mother’s hatred of watching him drink it.

  I noticed something just now. I said ‘my father’ and ‘our mother’. So maybe Ben’s insecurities, which I’ll get to soon enough, were not so far off track. But now I’m getting off track.

  When my father said he was paddling ashore, he meant he needed to pee. Again. Granted, it’s not impossible for a man to pee over the side of a canoe. But every time my father peed he also needed to offload an armful of beer bottles, usually behind some vegetation. And we needed to paddle along with him, so we weren’t too far out on the lake by ourselves. After all, we were only six and twelve. Too young to be out in a canoe alone. Or with a drunken father. But of course I’m stacking on that last observation after the fact.

  I reeled in, and Ben and I watched as my bare hook broke the waterline.

  He said something new this time. He said, ‘You think I’m stupid? You think I don’t know you always cast it in there with no worm?’

  I said nothing. Just felt my face grow hot and – probably – red. I looked down at Ben’s trout, which now lay perfectly still. I wondered if it was dead, or just accepting the inevitability of its fate.

  Ben shook his head and began to paddle.

  We watched my father land his canoe on the muddy bank and step out, his rubber boots sinking into the mud up to his mid-calves. He cursed loudly, embarrassing me. I looked around to see if anyone could hear, but saw no one on the shore, no one within sight on the lake.

  ‘Scared of the worms, Wussy Boy?’ Ben asked.

  ‘No.’ A little grossed out, maybe. ‘I just don’t want to kill them.’

  ‘The fish? Or the worms?’

  ‘Both, I guess.’

  I could hear the sucking sound my father’s boots made as he pulled them up out of the mud, step after step. He struggled for balance, his arms loaded with empty brown-glass bottles.

  I looked up at Ben, and his face was dark. ‘So I’m a killer? Is that it? You’re saying I’m a killer?’

  Of course it’s easy to look back and know what I should have said. But everything just happened so fast. I looked at the blank, open eye of the trout, lying in the bottom of the canoe. And I nodded. It just seemed so obvious.

  I realized my mistake quickly enough, but too late. My father had disappeared behind the vegetation, where he couldn’t save me. I felt myself lifted by the back of my shirt and propelled up and through the air. I broke the water and swirled down into the greenish lake for a frightening space of time, increasingly desperate for oxygen. If I had known Ben was about to throw me in, I’d have taken a deep breath and made it last. But I’d had no such preparation.

  I thought of the trout. I thought, I know now. Just how you felt.

  I began to push for the surface, and it wasn’t until my face broke out into the air, and I gasped for breath, that I looked at my hands and saw they were empty. I no longer had my dad’s ultra-light rod and reel.

  Ben wasn’t laughing. Or taunting me. But he had a satisfied look on his face that I found deeply disturbing.

 
I treaded water for a minute or two before I heard my father.

  ‘What the hell just happened?’ he yelled.

  I looked over to see him struggle back into the canoe without taking time to rinse the mud off his boots. If I hadn’t been in the water, he would have dangled and swished his boots in the lake, one at a time, while half the canoe was still grounded, to keep all that mud out of the rented boat.

  ‘He fell in!’ Ben yelled back.

  My father said nothing. Just paddled over to me. He couldn’t pull me into his canoe without tipping it over, so instead he handed me the end of a rope, which I held on to as he paddled me over to the shore.

  ‘Can you stand up now?’ he asked.

  I put my feet down, and they sank deeply into the silty mud. When I pulled my right foot up again, it came up bare. The mud kept one of my good sandals. I fell over into the water, hands buried in the silt, popped up blubbering, and pulled out my other foot, careful to bend my foot to grip the sandal. As if it really mattered to hold on to your one remaining sandal once it had lost its mate. My father had the canoe landed by then, and he picked me up by the shirt, much the way Ben had, rinsed me off by dunking me in the lake a few times almost to my neck, and then loaded me in.

  He used the paddle to push off from the shore, and it came up with a deep half-moon of mud on the blade. My father looked at me as he paddled on one side only, turning the boat toward camp.

  ‘Where’s my ultra-light?’ he asked. Quietly.

  I pointed straight down, and he nodded. As if he’d known that much already.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, miserably.

  ‘Not your fault,’ he whispered. But he didn’t elaborate. Not at the time.

  We paddled the rest of the way in silence.

  My mother was waiting for us back in camp, looking artificially cheerful. And Sandy was there, wagging her whole body. She barked once, sharply, as if to insist that Ben and my father paddle faster.

  ‘You weren’t out very long,’ our mother said. ‘Already catch your limit?’

  Ben climbed out of the boat and held up his trout proudly, to show her. He had it on a stringer now. I wondered when he’d put it on the stringer.

  My father jumped out of our canoe, stepped up behind Ben. I was behind them, so I couldn’t see his face, but my mother’s face served as a mirror. I saw the trouble reflected in hers, and I know Ben saw it, too. He’d just barely begun to turn when my father smacked him across the back of the head, sending him sprawling into the dirt. The trout landed three or four feet away, and flopped once, weakly. Sandy sniffed it. Oh, dear God, I thought. It’s still alive. How can it still be alive?

  ‘Heeeey!’ Ben’s voice was whiny, wounded. He struggled to his feet. ‘What was that for?’

  ‘You think I’m stupid?’ my father roared. Yes, my father. So long as we’re being specific about it. ‘I don’t know what pisses me off more: when you torture your little brother, or when you treat me like I’m stupid. If Rusty had fallen out of the canoe, he’d’ve tipped it over. He didn’t fall. Did he, Ben? Did he?’

  Silence. I still hadn’t gotten out of my father’s canoe. Nobody moved or spoke for a long time. My mother’s eyes fell on me, as if just now noticing I was dripping wet. Sandy slouched into our open tent and lay down, looking guilty.

  ‘Get your things,’ my father said, more quietly. ‘I’m taking you home.’

  ‘But, Bert,’ our mother said. ‘We just got here.’

  ‘Not you,’ he said. ‘You stay here. Rusty stay here. Ben’s going back.’

  ‘Bert, he can’t stay alone,’ she said, a model of artificial patience. I think, looking back, that she always knew when my father was drunk, and tried to correct his mistakes without mentioning that obvious fact. ‘He’s only twelve.’

  ‘I’ll ask the Jesperses to look after him, then. But me and Rusty and you, we’re going to have a decent vacation. For a change. We’re not going to let Ben mess it up for us. Not this time.’

  Ben said nothing. Just ducked into our tent and began to stuff a few things into his duffel bag. My father stood by the tent flap like a prison guard, watching and waiting, arms laced across his chest.

  I climbed out of the canoe and stood in front of my mother, and she looked down at me, and noticed I was wearing only one sandal. I could see it register on her face, see the loss of something recorded in her eyes. Sandals cost money. So that was one more expense to add to all the other expenses we boys were constantly wringing out of the family budget.

  I hobbled over and picked up the trout by its stringer. Determined that its death would not be in vain. I brought it to my mother. But she was busy watching the drama play out. We watched together as Ben and my father loaded up the truck with Ben’s things. They drove off without further comment.

  I stood, holding the stringer, feeling the sun burn the back of my neck and the tops of my ears. I’d already gotten too much sun without realizing it. It seemed to take her for ever, and I didn’t know why, but eventually she broke her statue-like status and took the fish from me.

  ‘Go get into some dry clothes,’ she said.

  I didn’t. I sat in the tent for a while, stroking Sandy’s ears and watching my mother make a fire. She still hadn’t said another word since they’d left.

  Suddenly she looked in at me. ‘You don’t want trout, do you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I knew that. I knew that once you’d watched it die, you wouldn’t eat it. You’re my sensitive guy.’

  I winced inwardly, figuring that was her polite way of saying ‘Wussy Boy’.

  ‘Hot dogs?’

  I nodded.

  I climbed out of the tent after a while. When I could smell them. When the smell made me realize how hungry I was. I sat by the fire and watched them sizzle on the iron grate, watched Sandy lick the air, as if the aroma could be stolen.

  ‘You know he’s just jealous of you,’ my mother said.

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘Ben?’

  ‘Yes. Ben.’

  ‘How could he be?’

  My mother sighed deeply. Rolled the three hot dogs over with a long barbecue fork, exposing blackened ridges on their undersides. ‘He doesn’t see his father any more, and he probably never will again, and your father isn’t Ben’s father, and Ben knows it … and … I don’t think he ever stops testing that. At least, it doesn’t seem like he does. I think Ben feels like your father … loves you better. You know. Because you’re his.’

  ‘Does he?’

  I looked up at her face for the first time in quite a long while. She had a little bit of gray at the part line of her hair, and I don’t think I’d ever noticed it before. She wasn’t very old.

  She sighed again. ‘Oh, Rusty. You ask the hardest … I don’t know … I think he tries to love you both the same. But Ben makes it so hard. And it just keeps going around in a circle like that.’

  I think I didn’t know, at the time, what she meant. I didn’t know what kept going around in a circle. I do now. I know for a fact that I didn’t believe her. I didn’t think she was lying to me, I just thought she was wrong. Ben wasn’t jealous of me. That was impossible. He just hated me. For a number of very concrete reasons.

  I should note that my father was too drunk to be out on the road, and we both knew it. And that cast a pall over lunch. Well. It was hard to tell what was what inside that pall, but I think drunk-driving was a big part of it. Not that he didn’t go out on the road in that – or an even more advanced – condition pretty regularly. But you still worry every time.

  But he made it back. He dropped Ben at the Jesperses’ house and made it back to the lake safely. His drunkenness didn’t come back to bite us.

  Not that time.

  Later that night, when I couldn’t sleep, I got out of the tent and walked down to the lake shore in the moonlight, Sandy padding along behind me. My feet were bare, and the cool ground felt good. I stripped out of my shirt and pants, and stoo
d at the edge of the lake, in the dark, in just my underpants. When I stepped into the water, the silty mud felt funny but nice squeezing between my toes. The bank was firmer at camp, and I didn’t sink in any deeper than the tops of my feet. The moon was full, casting a stream of silver on the water, and I fell forward and swam into it. Sandy barked once, not wanting me to go beyond her reach. I swam back and stumbled to her and gently held her graying muzzle shut for a moment.

  I told her, ‘Shhhhh.’

  She sank into a down position on the muddy bank, her long muzzle touching one front paw. She still didn’t like the idea. But she wouldn’t question me again. She placed the judgement of her humans ahead of her own, as a matter of courtesy and pride, even if she was always right and we were always wrong. Good dogs are like that.

  I swam out into the silver light and paddled in place for a few minutes, treading water. Savoring the feel of the coolness against my skin. Savoring the knowledge that I existed, for that brief moment, in a safe window. There was no one to hold my head under the water just to be mean.

  Then I thought of lake monsters creeping up in the dark behind or underneath me, and I scrambled out of the water as fast as I could. Ben had left a mark on me, just the mark he had intended. Whether he was present or not, I would always feel the seeds of fear he had planted in me. I was still only six, and didn’t know how not to be willing soil.

  But, anyway, we had a decent vacation. For a change.

  2 October 1984

  I WAS SITTING on my bed reading a comic book I’d probably already read fifteen times. I couldn’t afford new ones every time I wanted them.

  Ben opened my door and stuck his head in.

  ‘Come ’ere in my room for a minute.’

  I reflexively pushed against the bedspread with my feet, pressing my back tighter up against the headboard. This felt like the beginning of a game I was destined to lose.

  He noticed.

  ‘I’m not gonna do anything to you. I promise.’

  I tried to swallow, but only half-succeeded. ‘Promise?’

  ‘I just want to talk to you.’