by Lamb, Wally
Minority customers is what Omar’s assigned: blacks and Ricans, according to Leo. He also gets sports nuts, women in their twenties, and—get this—gay guys. The obvious ones—the ones sizing up his butt and his basket when he goes back and forth to Costas’s office during the “good cop/bad cop” routine—that game they play where the Nice Sales Guy has to keep checking the numbers with the Big Bad Manager and the customer’s supposed to sit there with his free cup of styro-coffee and feel sorry for the poor guy’s humiliation. Isn’t that weak?
The consultants even worked with Leo and the others on the kind of shit they have laying around on their desks and filing cabinets. They call it “image projection.” Omar’s got two or three of his trophies sitting behind him and these autographed pictures—one of him and Larry Bird and another of him with President Bush. Leo’s got framed pictures of Angie and the kids. They face out toward the customers, not in at Leo. Lorna keeps magazines on her desk—Glamour, Cosmo, People. She’s got this picture of Michael Bolton taped to her filing cabinet.
“So who does she get?” I asked Leo. “All the women in love with Michael Bolton?”
“Nope,” he said. “I get them. Lorna gets professional white guys who think they can outdeal some dippy broad. Not that I should be telling you any of this, Birdseed. I could get in deep doo-doo for talking about it. But you should see these guys who buy from Lorna—they strut out of here with their bill of sale, cocky as hell, like they just fucked her or something. Not a clue in the world that two hours before they signed on the dotted line, we sold the exact same model with two or three more options for five hundred dollars less.”
Leo claims he’s fucked Lorna twice—once at her place and the other time in a LeBaron lease car they had to deliver in Warwick, Rhode Island. According to Leo, the two of them were sitting there in this parking lot where they’d stopped for coffee on the way to Warwick and she just started playing stroke-a-thigh with him. She was so hot for him, he says, he had to pull off somewhere on the Old Post Road and put her out of her misery. Doubtful, though. Sometimes Leo’s life sounds a little too much like a porn movie to be real. “If this stuff really happened and isn’t some pipe dream,” I told him, flat out, the day he told me about him and Lorna, “then you’re a fucking idiot. She took you back once, Leo. Twice might be pushing the envelope.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Leo told me, grinning. “I’m a sex addict. Me and Wade Boggs.”
When I got up to go, Leo walked me back to my truck. “Body on this thing’s getting some corrosion, huh?” he said, fingering the passenger’s side door panel.
“Well, stop poking at it then,” I said.
I got in. Started her up and backed out of the space. Gave Leo the peace sign and began driving out of the lot.
“Hey, Dominick!” he yelled. “Hold up!”
He came running toward me, that fancy suit of his fluttering in the breeze. He bent down to the window. “Hey, I was just thinking,” he said. “You know that visitors’ list you were telling me about? How many visitors did you say your brother gets?”
“Five.”
“Well, tell him he can put me on it. If he wants to. I wouldn’t mind going down there, seeing how he’s doing. Saying hello. I mean, what the hell? 1969, you said? I go back a few years with Thomas, too.”
I nodded—took in the gift he’d just given me. “I’ll mention it to him,” I said. “Thanks.”
“No problem, man. Later.”
See, that’s the thing with Leo: he’s sleazy and he’s decent. He takes you by surprise. I drove away, one hand on the wheel, the other wiping the goddamned water out of my eyes. Leo, man. The guy’s a trip.
13
The Indian cemetery that abuts the sprawling Three Rivers State Hospital grounds is a modest place: a few rolling acres studded with nameless foot markers, a hundred or so gravestones. A ten-foot-high pyramid of plump, fist-sized rocks stands at the center of things. The monument commemorates Samuel, the Great Sachem of the Wequonnoc Nation, who, back in the seventeenth century, warred against the neighboring Nipmucks and Pequots and Narragansetts and cast his lot with the white settlers. Big mistake. The town of Three Rivers was incorporated in 1653 and grew steadily and legally, the law being white. Conversely, the reservation kept shrinking in acreage, the tribe’s numbers dwindling.
The cemetery’s oldest tombstones date back to the eighteenth century and are now so eroded and encrusted with parasites that trying to read them is a joint effort between vision and touch. Below the ground are the remains of Fletchers and Crowells, Johnsons and Grays—assimilated Indians, assimilation meaning that the dick doesn’t discriminate. The newer stones mark the graves of Wequonnoc war dead: veterans of the Civil and Spanish American Wars, the World Wars, Korea. During the late 1960s, when America was once again eating its young, the Indian graveyard’s final stone was erected. It honors Lonnie Peck, Ralph Drinkwater’s older cousin, killed by sniper fire in the jungle near Vinh Long in 1969.
That was the summer man landed on the moon and Mary Jo Kopechne went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick and Woodstock happened. The summer I saw Dessa Constantine jockeying drinks at the Dial-Tone Lounge and fell in love for life. Home from college after our bumpy freshman year, my brother and I had jobs as seasonal laborers for the Three Rivers Public Works Department. Ralph Drinkwater, Leo, Thomas, and me: what a quartet that was. Our duties included clearing brush out at the reservoir, pumping the sump at the town fairgrounds, and mowing the town cemeteries, the little Indian graveyard among them. Thomas’s voices had already started whispering to him by then, I think, but not so badly that you couldn’t just call him high-strung or moody and then get lost in your own more important shit. We were nineteen.
A decade or so later—after the doctors had stripped Thomas of the label “manic-depressive” and declared him, instead, a paranoid schizophrenic—my brother’s then most recent medication had begun to stabilize him. Had seemed like the real miracle this time. Dosed with two hundred daily milligrams of Thorazine, Thomas was granted a state hospital “grounds card.” He was pleased and proud of this achievement; the card allowed him roaming privileges in the company of staff or family.
Dessa and I would pick him up on Sunday afternoons at the entrance to the Settle Building and wander with him past the hospital’s original brick monstrosities and the Ribicoff Research Center, and then over the rear boundary and down to the Sachem River. My brother liked to watch the water, I remember—watch its movement and listen to it. He liked, sometimes, to take off his shoes and socks and wade into the cedar-tinted current. More often than not, the three of us would walk the banks and end up a quarter of a mile down, at the little Indian graveyard. Dessa and I would study the stones—the remnants of those old, buried lives—while Thomas sat on the grass, smoking cigarette after cigarette and reading his Bible. By then, he had already pretty much proclaimed himself God’s right-hand man and a target of the KGB. Sooner or later, he’d get up off the ground and follow me and Dess, treating us to some Biblical interpretation or another—some prediction of coming doom based on what he’d seen in the papers or on the nightly news or in his sleep. I’d get itchy and tell him we had to go—hustle ahead of both him and Dessa and back to Settle, where I could sign him back in and leave. Check off my obligation for another week and get myself the hell out of there. “Be patient with him, Dominick,” Dessa used to advise me on the drive home from those visits. “If he needs to babble, then just let him babble. Who’s he hurting?” My answer to that question—Me! He’s hurting me!—went unspoken. If you’re the sane identical twin of a schizophrenic sibling—if natural selection has somehow allowed you to beat the odds, scoot under the fence—then the fence is the last thing you want to lean against.
At the southern end of the Indian graveyard, a packed dirt path leads away from the river, up past pines and pin oaks and cedars, and then through a grove of mountain laurel that blossoms spectacularly every June. Climbing higher and higher, you follow the pa
th and the sound of water, jump from boulder to boulder, and come abruptly to a spot that takes your breath away. The Sachem River, suddenly visible again, rushes between two sheer rock cliffs and spills crazily over a steep gorge.
Everyone in Three Rivers calls this spot, simply, the Falls. According to history or legend or some hybrid of the two, Chief Samuel once pursued an enemy sachem to the cliff’s edge and forced him to a no-win decision: either surrender and be executed or attempt the suicide leap to the opposite ledge. The enemy chief leapt, making it somehow to the other side, but breaking his leg in the process. Samuel arrived shortly after and leapt, too, intact. He quickly overtook his nemesis, bashed in his skull with a rock, and then sliced and ate a piece of his shoulder to signify to the universe who had prevailed. My tenth-grade American history teacher, Mr. LoPresto, was the one who told us about Samuel’s flesh-eating, delighting in the class’s squeamish reaction to the gory details.
Mr. LoPresto was a plump, middle-aged man with hips like a woman. I hated his sarcasm, which he usually aimed at the weakest kids in our class. Hated his mannerisms and the wen on his forehead and the way he landmined his tests with trick questions. He paced when he lectured, referred to us collectively as “historians,” and yanked his pants up over his little paunch every couple of steps, every few sentences. It was an embarrassment to me that Mr. LoPresto and his white-haired mother went to the same Sunday Mass as my family. They sat each week in the second pew and were always the first ones up for Communion. They seemed to bound up to that rail. “The body of Christ,” Father Fox would say, suspending the host before Mr. LoPresto. As he prepared to receive the bread-made-flesh, you could hear Mr. LoPresto’s pious “Amen!” all the way in the back of the church, where I slumped and scowled.
When Mr. LoPresto told us about Samuel’s having eaten the shoulder of his enemy, he advised us not to judge the Indians by our own higher standards. They were indigenous savages and we were the product of ancient Greece and Rome and the rest of Western civilization. It was like comparing apples to oranges, monkeys to men. We sat silently and obediently, taking the notes we’d regurgitate back up to him at test time.
The Falls is and has been both a calendar picture and a trouble spot in Three Rivers. Kids cut school and party there, taking crazy risks and pushing the evidence in the town’s face: smashed beer bottles, graffiti spray-painted somehow on the sheer faces of the cliffs, underpants up in the trees. I don’t begrudge these kids their hormones or their illusions of immortality. I took stupid risks myself out at the Falls when I was their age—did things I’m not comfortable thinking about twenty-something years later. But I worry for them. Suicides have happened there. Accidents, murders. The year Thomas and I were third-graders, the dead body of a girl from our class was found out at the Falls. Penny Ann Drinkwater: Lonnie Peck’s cousin, Ralph’s twin.
Penny Ann and Ralph were the only other set of twins at River Street School. Back then, we thought of the Drinkwaters as colored kids, but they were mixed: part black, part white, part Wequonnoc Indian. They were a year older than Thomas and me. Penny Ann should have been in fourth grade like her brother, but she’d stayed back and been assigned the seat right next to mine.
I didn’t like her. She had one long eyebrow instead of two separate ones, and some mornings she smelled like pee. She ate paste, sucked on the buttons of her ratty blue sweater, chewed her crayons. To this day, I can see her big front teeth smeared hideously with waxy pigment.
The Drinkwaters were poor; we all knew that. At our school, you could usually tell who the needy kids were: most of them were in the reading groups that stumbled along and lost their place and read baby books. They stood at the chalkboard, stumped by arithmetic problems, their backs turned against the sea of waving hands of kids who knew the answers. The teachers were less patient with the poor kids than they were with the rest of us. But Penny Ann wasn’t just poor; she was bad.
She stole. She stole Genevieve Wilmark’s rhinestone barrettes and Calvin Cobb’s glass egg and Frances Strempek’s autographed photo of Annette Funicello, which was later found ripped into small pieces and hidden under the wastebasket. She snatched kids’ recess snacks right out of our cloakroom, my own and Thomas’s included. When something in our class was missing, it became routine for Miss Higgins to walk to the back of the class and inspect Penny Ann’s sloppy desk. Penny Ann always denied any knowledge of how the stolen goods had landed in her possession. She cried frequently. Her nose ran. She was always coughing.
She disappeared the day a surprise snowstorm freed us from school early and our mothers put on their kerchiefs, boots, and winter coats and trudged through the driving snow to pick us up. The day before, Penny Ann had stood in front of me in line at the drinking fountain, turned abruptly, and told me her mother was buying her a Shetland pony as soon as she returned from a trip. Contempt for Penny Ann was acceptable at River Street School—even the nice kids sprayed her with imaginary cootie spray—and so I looked her in the eye and told her she was nothing but a big fat liar. Then I got my drink and went back to class and told Miss Higgins a lie of my own. “Penny Ann Drinkwater was eating Oreos in the hallway,” I said. “She said she stole them from some kid. She was bragging about it.”
Miss Higgins wrote a note to Miss Haas, the principal, and sent us both to the office. Miss Haas believed me, not Penny Ann, whose repeated denials turned into a combination of crying and coughing that sounded oddly like a dog’s bark. Miss Haas thanked me for my information and told me to go back to class. I remember returning to Miss Higgins’s room feeling satisfied that justice had been served, and then belatedly remembering that the theft of the Oreos had been pure invention on my part. Well, Penny Ann must have stolen someone or another’s cookies at some recent point, I reassured myself. Miss Higgins announced from the front of the room that I was a good citizen for having reported a theft. Then she wrote it on the board: “Dominick Birdsey is a good citizen.” The public declaration made me feel both pleased and queasy, and although I didn’t meet his eye, I could feel, across the room, my brother’s gaze.
For the week or so after Penny Ann disappeared during the snowstorm, the newspaper printed her picture—first on the front page, and then in the middle pages, and then not at all. At school, her empty chair, her sloppy desk with its contents protruding, became harder and harder to sit next to. Her shabby blue sweater had been balled up and jammed in there. One sleeve, threadbare and loaded with what my mother called “sweater pills,” hung halfway to the floor. I asked to have my seat changed, but Miss Higgins denied the request.
Then one day Penny Ann’s face was back on the front page, enlarged. girl’s body found at falls, the headline declared. The paper said Penny Ann’s unknown killer had broken her neck and taken off all her clothes—details that both scared and baffled me. It was the middle of February. There was a foot of snow. Had making her cold been part of her torture?
In the wake of Penny Ann’s unsolved murder, I began to resurrect her in my nightmares. In one dream, she was giving me a ride on her new Shetland pony when the spooked animal began galloping without warning toward the edge of the Falls. In another, she kept daring me to lick a skeleton. In a third dream, Miss Haas announced matter-of-factly over the intercom that Penny’s murderer had come to our school for a visit and was now going to kill the kindergartners. When I had these nightmares, I would scream out and my mother would come stumbling into Thomas’s and my room. She’d rub my arm and tell me I was safe and let me leave the light on. Illuminated but still too afraid to sleep, I’d hang my head over the edge of the top bunk and watch my sleeping brother—listen to the evenness of his breathing, count his breaths into the hundreds—until his repose became my own.
At school, we held a penny drive in Penny Ann Drinkwater’s honor. Our class was in charge, and Miss Higgins chose me and my brother to be the “bankers,” an appointment that inflated me with a sense of importance. The job required us to separate and walk each morning from classroom to c
lassroom, up and down rows, holding out the cardboard buckets into which kids dropped their nickels and dimes and pennies. Ralph Drinkwater, Penny’s brother, was in Mrs. Jeffrey’s class. He never gave any money, never even looked at the bucket when I passed by his desk, even when I dared to pause for a second and wait. One morning, when Thomas was collecting in Mrs. Jeffrey’s room, Ralph kicked him in the leg. Thomas reported what had happened, but Ralph denied it and Mrs. Jeffrey said it had probably been an accident. That same day, out at recess, I saw Ralph trip a boy during a game of Red Rover, Red Rover. His victim had been barreling full force toward the human chain which the game obliged him to break through. When Ralph tripped him, the boy fell face first on the blacktop and skidded, and by the time the teacher on duty had been summoned, he was a bloody, shrieking mess with red teeth and a raw meat chin. I didn’t squeal on Ralph the way I would have squealed on his sister. Penny Ann had been an annoyance; her brother was lethal. He, too, began to menace me in my dreams.
With the money we collected from the penny drive, the school bought a small willow tree and a plaque. By then, the air had warmed and the Pawtucket Red Sox had resumed play and even the most stubborn gray gutter ice had melted and trickled down the storm drains. Penny Ann’s mother came to the tree-planting ceremony at the edge of the schoolyard. She had a single eyebrow like Penny’s and straight black hair and big dark circles under her eyes that made her look like a raccoon. Earlier that week, Miss Higgins had made us write essays on what we would always remember about our dear friend Penny Ann. Unlike my brother, I usually knew what teachers were after and had written so sentimentally that I was one of the students chosen to read my tribute aloud into the microphone. My words brought tears to the eyes of the adults at the tree-planting, Penny Ann’s mother and the lady reporter from the Daily Record and Miss Haas included. Miss Haas’s tears surprised me. Our principal had a reputation for being mean and “strictly business.” Beyond that, she and I had collaborated in making Penny Ann’s life miserable not twenty-four hours before her abduction and murder. Together, we had made her cry. Had made her bark like a dog. But when I walked back to my metal folding chair after reading my essay, Miss Haas reached out, took my hand in her own liver-spotted hand, and squeezed it. During the ceremony, Ralph Drinkwater stood beside his mother. (No father materialized, not even talk of a father.) Ralph behaved poorly during the speech-making, I remember, fidgeting so badly that his mother had to yank his arm twice and even swat him one in front of the entire school.