The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  “Twelve years I’ve been driving these things,” the driver tells Mrs. Hanka. “And I bet I could count on one hand the number of times I forgot my tools.” He says we’ll have to get off at the next exit and get to a gas station. Maybe with a flatbar, he can jimmy the door open. Or maybe the gas station will have a drill he can use to unfreeze the bolts. If not, he’ll have to call the bus company and have someone drive down with the right tools.

  “Well, how long will that take?” Mrs. Hanka demands. “Our Radio City tickets are for the 2:30 P.M. show. We have to get on the ferry by 10:45 at the latest or we’ll miss the Statue of Liberty.”

  “I don’t know how long it’ll take, lady,” he says. “I can’t give you any guarantees.”

  “I’m sorry, Dominick!” Thomas screams from behind the door. “I’m sorry!”

  The bus gets off at the next exit and is crawling through traffic on some main street. Eugene Savitsky has gotten up and come to the back of the bus. He stands there, picking at his seat and staring at the locked bathroom door like it’s a science problem. “Have him push the bolt the opposite way,” he tells me. “Have him push it to the right instead of the left.”

  “It doesn’t go to the right,” someone says.

  “But just tell him. Maybe he’s mixed up.”

  “Push it to the right,” I tell Thomas.

  The bolt thunks. The door squeaks open.

  Thomas emerges to the sound of hoots and applause. He’s so pale, his skin looks blue. At first, he smiles. Then his face crumples up. He begins to cry.

  I feel bad for him. And mad. And humiliated. Kids are looking at me, too, not just at Thomas. The Birdsey brothers: identical twin retards. I’d like to punch that smirk off of Channy Harrington’s rich little stupid face. Bust Eddie Otero’s big, fat Spic nose.

  The bus driver turns around in an empty parking lot and heads back toward the interstate. Mrs. Hanka reassigns seats. Now Thomas and I sit together up front and Otero has to sit with Eugene Savitsky. Channy and Debbie Chase and Yvette Magritte are giggling together in the back.

  For the rest of that whole, long day, Thomas acts really out of it. At the Statue of Liberty, he tells Mrs. Hanka he feels too scared to go up inside. She makes me stay down with him. Some guy in a uniform comes over and yells at me for chucking gravel into the water. After that, my brother and I sit on a wall, looking out at the harbor. “Just think,” Thomas says, finally breaking the silence. “This is exactly what our grandfather saw the day he first came over from Italy.”

  “Would you do me a favor?” I tell him. “Would you just shut the fuck up?” I’ve never said “fuck” out loud before. Saying it feels good. I feel as mad, as mean, as Ray.

  I spend all my money. At Radio City, I buy a three-dollar deluxe souvenir book that I don’t even really want. At that novelty shop in Times Square—it is the same one Marie thought it was—I buy a back scratcher, a Roger Maris & Mickey Mantle plaque, a rubber tarantula, a puddle of plastic vomit. At the restaurant on the way home, I order shrimp cocktail, a T-bone steak, and Dutch apple pie à la mode. Channy and Otero eat their hamburgers at a booth with Debbie and Yvette. I get stuck at a table with fat, stupid Eugene Savitsky and my stupid, ugly brother. Eugene orders liver and onions. All Thomas has is chicken noodle soup and saltines.

  Channy’s brother Trent gives Thomas and me a ride home. It had been arranged before—Channy’s idea. Channy and Trent sit up front and Thomas and I sit in back. Channy doesn’t say two words to either of us. He talks to his brother, turns the radio up loud, mentions something about someone they knew in stupid California. I know I’m never going over to Channy’s house again—that the Harringtons’ housekeeper has already made me the last of those peanut butter and fluff sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I’ve taken my last swing at those machine-hurled pitches.

  “How was your trip?” Ma asks us when we get home.

  “Pretty good,” Thomas says. “I really liked the Easter show. It was nice.” He says nothing about locking himself in the bathroom. I say nothing either.

  “And how about you, Dominick?” Ma goes. “Did you have a good time?”

  I’ve left my deluxe souvenir program on the bus. Someone has sat on my back scratcher and broken it. Of the thirty-seven dollars I brought with me, I have only eighty-three cents left. For a second or more, I’m on the verge of tears. Then I’m all right again. “It was boring,” I tell my mother. “It stunk, just like everything always stinks.”

  That night, I dream I’m trapped in a small, dark cave in a woods I don’t recognize. It’s pitch dark. I bang and cry for help and when, at last, I discover a way out, I realize I’ve not been trapped in a cave after all, but inside the Statue of Liberty.

  11

  It was musical chairs and months-old Newsweeks at the medical clinic. In the hour I waited, I put up with the sneaky peeks and sidelong glances of everyone who wanted to check out that library lunatic’s duplicate. One teenage girl out and out stared at my two hands. The receptionist who gave me the insurance forms to sign jerked her hand away when I reached for her pen. After my name was called, I cooled my jets in the examining room for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Then I told my story to Dr. Judy Yup.

  Dr. Yup, whose smile never left her face during my ten-minute examination, pronounced me damaged and said she’d testify to the fact. She told me she’d studied a year abroad in China and had friends who’d been involved in Tiananmen Square. Her cousin, she said, had been in hiding in the southern provinces ever since.

  “Well,” I said, “you can’t really compare one jerky guard to what happened over there.”

  “Why can’t you?” she countered, the smile finally dropping off her face. “Oppression is oppression.”

  Dale, the nurse’s aide who took the pictures of my injuries, treated me to a running monologue about the time he and his cousin got pulled over and roughed up by some state cops on their way home from an Aerosmith concert. “I wish I’d had the smarts to do what you’re doing, man,” he said. “We could have cashed in bigtime.”

  I didn’t want to cash in. But a picture was forming in my head: my brother walking out the main door at Hatch, squinting into the sunshine. That social worker had been right, I guess; I had acted like an asshole down there the night before. Whatever came of this medical exam, Sheffer had stuck her neck out to suggest it. Thinking about her down there at Hatch, keeping an eye on my brother, gave me some relief. Relaxed me. Made me sleepy. When I got back in the truck, I just sat there, almost dozing off before I managed to put the key in the ignition and drive away.

  From the clinic, I swung over to Henry Rood’s house. Might as well get this one over with, too, I told myself. I’d finish power-washing that goddamned place over the weekend, try to have it scraped and primed by the middle of the following week. Maybe with Ray’s help, I could get that three-story headache finished up by Halloween. I didn’t want to push it beyond that. November temperatures were iffy for oil-based paint; you’d only have three or four hours of good midday sun, and that’s if you were lucky. While I was at it, I’d tell Rood to cool it on the phone messages. I’d had enough of his harassment.

  It had been cold that morning, but now the air was dry and warm, the temperature in the midseventies. Perfect painting weather. When I pulled up to the house on Gillette Street, Rood’s wife Ruth was out on their front porch step, sunning herself. With her stringy black hair and her pasty complexion, she reminded me a little of Morticia Addams. Especially parked in front of that Victorian house of horrors of theirs. She smiled as I approached. “I should be inside grading papers,” she said, “but here I am, celebrating Indian summer instead.” Beside her, a portable radio was broadcasting the opening game of the World Series.

  When I asked to speak to Henry, she told me she didn’t want to disturb him. He was either writing at the computer or else napping, she said. Or passed out in an alcoholic stupor, I figured. Ruth was having a little afternoon snort herself. A sweating glass of so
mething or other sat on the porch floor next to her.

  “Just tell him I apologize about the delay,” I said. “It can’t be helped. There’s been a bunch of circumstances beyond my control the past several days.”

  “So we read,” she said. I looked away.

  “Tell him . . . tell him I can probably have the house prepped by next Wednesday or Thursday—depends on how much of the trim I have to burn off.” I told her I should have the job wrapped up and the scaffolding down in a couple of weeks, max, as long as the weather cooperated. “I should be able to go full-steam next week,” I said. “So tell him he doesn’t have to keep calling me.”

  When she asked me how Thomas was doing, I addressed their porch railing rather than look at her. “He’s all right,” I said. “He’s better.”

  She told me that when she was a girl, a neighbor of hers back in Ohio had ripped out his own eye. For religious reasons, she said, same as my brother. She’d been sitting on the couch, reading a book, when she heard the man’s wife screaming. Later, she watched them lead him out the door and into an ambulance, a towel wrapped around his neck. What she always remembered was how calm he looked—how much at peace he was to have blinded himself like that. It was eerie, she said. They moved away shortly after that—the man and his wife and their two little girls. But Ruth said a month didn’t go by without her thinking about him. “And I was just his neighbor. So I can’t even imagine what you’re going through,” she said. “Well, I can and I can’t. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry.”

  I nodded. Looked into her nervous, jumpy eyes. Compassion was the last thing I’d expected at this place.

  Ruth asked me if I wanted to join her in a rye and ginger. They had beer, too, she said. Pabst Blue Ribbon, she was pretty sure. Or gin. Her body fidgeted with anticipation.

  I begged off—invented some errands I had to run. I nodded over at the radio—the game. “So who’s your money on?” I said.

  “Oh, I’m strictly a Cincinnati fan,” she said. “From way back. My father used to take my brother and me to Red Legs games when we were kids. How about you?”

  “Yeah, Cincinnati, I guess. Now that Boston’s blown it as usual. If Clemens hadn’t had that little temper tantrum during the playoffs and gotten ejected, maybe the Sox would have been playing in the Series instead of the A’s. Personally, I can’t stand Oakland.”

  “Me either,” she said. “José Canseco? Yecch.”

  I nodded up at Rood’s office window. “So what’s he writing up there, anyway?” I said. “The Great American Novel?”

  She shook her head. Nonfiction, she said. An exposé.

  “Yeah? What’s he exposing? Housepainters?”

  She smiled, fiddled with a blouse button. Even two and a half sheets to the wind, she was a nervous wreck. Henry had been writing this book for eleven years now, she told me. It was hard on him; it had taken its toll. She couldn’t really discuss the subject matter. It would upset Henry for her to talk about it.

  It made me think of what Ma had told me about her father’s autobiography: how everything had been so hush-hush that summer when he wrote that thing. How he’d hired and fired a stenographer, rented a Dictaphone, and then finally retreated to the backyard and finished it himself.

  I told Ruth Rood I’d see her in a couple of days—that by the time I was through, she and her husband would be sick of seeing me.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” she said. On the radio, the crowd roared. The announcer’s voice went manic. Eric Davis had just clobbered a two-run homer off of Dave Stewart. “Yippee!” Mrs. Rood said, draining her rye and ginger.

  With two down and one to go, I headed over to Hollyhock Avenue to see Ray. Started thinking about that goddamned goofy Nedra Frank. She’d stolen that manuscript of my grandfather’s, really. Cashed my check and disappeared. By now, she’d probably trashed the thing. It probably didn’t even exist.

  I rolled slowly up Hollyhock Avenue, pulled in front of the house, and cut the engine. Sat there, just looking up at it: the house that “Papa” had built. . . . The shrubs looked gawky and overgrown; the hedges needed a trim. It was unusual for Ray to let the yard go like that. Thomas used to say that Ray couldn’t sleep unless the hedges stood at attention and the front lawn had a crewcut as short as his. The garbage barrels were out front, too—emptied the day before and still waiting to be brought around to the back. It had always been another of Ray’s pet peeves: people who didn’t bother putting away their trash barrels. We used to hear lectures on the subject.

  I got out of the truck. Walked right by those friggin’ garbage cans and up the flight of cement stairs to the front of the family duplex. Home Sweet Home, aka the House of Horrors. The statute of limitations was long since up on most of the crap Ray had pulled on us while we were growing up, but being back at 68 Hollyhock Avenue always made me feel pissed and small. Ten years old again, and powerless.

  It was funny, kind of—the way things had worked out. Ma was gone, I owned the condo now over on Hillyndale. Over the past several years, Thomas had lived either at the hospital or in the group home, not here. The only one left at the house old Domenico Tempesta had built for his family was Ray Birdsey, a WASP from Youngstown, Ohio. No Tempesta blood in residence. No Italian blood, even. Ray hadn’t wanted to rent the other side of the duplex after Little Sal, the last of the Tusia family, moved to Arizona where his daughter lived. “Why don’t you move back in?” he asked me, after Dessa’s and my divorce. “Save yourself a mortgage payment. You and him own half this place, anyway. After I kick the bucket, the whole thing’ll be yours.”

  It would have been a smart move financially and a kind of emotional suicide. So I bought the condo instead, and the other side of the duplex on Hollyhock Avenue stayed empty. When I asked him once about renting it, Ray said he didn’t need the extra income. “Yeah, well maybe you don’t,” I told him, “but I can’t afford to turn my nose up at half of a $700-a-month rental income.” Rather than rent, Ray went down to the Liberty Bank and took out a savings account with Thomas and me as beneficiaries. Each month, he deposited $350 into it. It was worth it, he told me. You never knew who you might get stuck with. His buddy Nickerson down at the Boat had rented his upstairs to a bunch of pigs he couldn’t get rid of, no matter what he did. Ray didn’t need that kind of grief. So he paid into that account each month and lived by himself in Domenico Tempesta’s sprawling, sixteen-room, two-family house.

  Rather than knock, I let myself in with my key. La chiave, I thought. I walked through the house, front to back. I hadn’t been over there for a while. The rooms looked cluttered, everything in neat piles but nothing put away. Tools, stacks of old newspapers, and a half-completed jigsaw puzzle littered the dining room table. The rugs felt gritty under my work boots. In the kitchen, the heavy stink of fried food hung in the air. Dishes and pans and cups were clean and stacked on the counter, but Ray hadn’t bothered to put anything back in the cabinets. Lined up on the table were his blood pressure and diabetes medications, a stack of Reader’s Digests, and two piles of mail held together with elastic bands. That day’s Daily Record was folded in quarters, heads up to the article about Thomas’s committal to Hatch.

  So Ray knew already. That much was over with.

  I found him in the back bedroom, tangled up in his blanket, snoring away in the semidarkness. He’d begun sleeping downstairs after Ma died. His official reason was that there’d been a prowler in the neighborhood—someone had jimmied open the Anthonys’ cellar door across the street. But I was pretty sure that wasn’t really it. After Dessa left me, one of the toughest things I had to get used to was her empty side of the bed. I’d find myself falling asleep down on the couch in front of the TV just so’s I wouldn’t have to go upstairs and deal with that empty space. Not that it was something you could have ever talked about with Ray. He had to sleep downstairs with a crowbar under the bed so he could fend off burglars. Be a tough guy instead of facing whatever he was feeling about the death of his wife.
<
br />   If Ray was sleeping days, then the shipyard must have him working nights again. You had to hand it to him, really. Sixty-seven years old and the guy’s still working like a plowhorse. I stood there, staring at him. The midafternoon sun came through the open blinds, striping his face with light. With his mouth open and his teeth out, he looked older. Old. His hair was more white than gray now. When had all this happened?

  Growing up, I had wished my stepfather dead so often, it was practically a hobby. I’d killed him over and over in my mind—driven him off cliffs, electrocuted him in the bathtub, shot him dead in hunting accidents. He’d said and done things that still weren’t scabbed over. Had made this place a house of fear. Still, seeing him like this—white-haired and vulnerable, a snoring corpse—I was filled with an unexpected sympathy for the guy.

  Which I didn’t want to feel. Which I shook off.

  I went back into the kitchen. Found a piece of paper and wrote him a note about Thomas. I explained what Sheffer had said about the fifteen-day paper, the security check they had to run on visitors, the upcoming hearing in front of that Review Board. “Call me if you have any questions,” I scrawled at the bottom. But my guess was that he wouldn’t call. My guess was that Ray had already walked away from this one.

  On the way back out to the truck, I passed those garbage pails again. Then I stopped. Grabbed one handle in each hand and walked them up the front stairs and around to the backyard. Saved him a trip.

  Our old backyard . . .

  I put the cans down and walked past the two cement urns where Ma had always grown her parsley and basil. Fresh basil. God, I loved the smell of that stuff—the way it perfumed your fingers for the rest of the day. . . . Dominick? Do me a favor, honey? Go out back and pick me some basilico. Half a dozen leaves or so. I want to put some in the sauce. . . .