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

  FORMER NEIGHBOR CHARGED IN GIRL’S DEATH, the newspaper announced one morning during the summer. Now the killer had a name, Joseph Monk, and a face. “This guy is pure evil,” my stepfather told my mother that morning at breakfast after he’d read aloud the details of Monk’s confession. “The electric chair’s too good for this guy after what he did to that poor little kid.”

  Neither Ray nor my mother knew I was within earshot—in the pantry adjacent to the kitchen, making toast. Their strategy had been to avoid talking about our murdered classmate in front of Thomas and me—to shield us, I suppose, from a situation we had been facing every day at school, anyway.

  “They ought to take him out somewhere and beat his head in with baseball bats,” Ray continued. “Snap his neck just like he snapped hers.”

  “Okay, okay,” my mother said. She told Ray she didn’t even want to think about that poor little girl and rushed from the room in tears. Ray slapped the newspaper back down on the table and went after her.

  I walked into the kitchen and picked up the newspaper. Brought it with me back into the privacy of the pantry where I stood, transfixed, staring and staring at the photo of “pure evil” being led up the police station steps. I had expected a monster—someone dirty and ugly with wild hair and crazy eyes. Someone like the crazy man who had gotten on the city bus that time and sat next to my mother and touched her leg. But Joseph Monk had short hair and black glasses, a half-smile on his lips, a plaid short-sleeve shirt.

  I was still staring at Joseph Monk’s ordinary looks when my toast popped up, startling me, and I saw, in the toaster’s chrome face, my own face, familiar and strange. And when my brother walked sleepily, innocently, into the kitchen that morning, I remember feeling, suddenly, alone and afraid—as untwinned as Ralph Drinkwater.

  After a while, Ralph disappeared from the hallways at River Street School. It wasn’t a noticeable exit; I remember his absence dawning on me after the fact. He resurfaced years later during my sophomore year of high school, when he slouched into Mr. LoPresto’s American history class midsemester and handed him an “add” slip.

  I recognized him immediately but was surprised by his size. I was, at fifteen, a backup forward on Kennedy High’s JV basketball team and already wearing shoes three sizes bigger than my stepfather’s. Sometimes at supper I ate third and fourth helpings now, and drank milk in such vast quantity that my mother would watch with a combination of awe and fear. I had an inch and a half and twelve pounds on my brother. Ralph Drinkwater had seemed big and tough and intimidating at River Street School. Now he was a runt.

  “Drinkwater, eh?” Mr. LoPresto said, reading the slip. “Well, that’s what I always say. When you’re thirsty, drink water.” Several of the students rolled their eyes and groaned, but Ralph betrayed no reaction whatsoever. LoPresto assigned him the empty desk at the back of the room next to mine. On the way there, Ralph glanced at me for a half-second with what may or may not have been a flicker of recognition.

  For the next several weeks, nothing much happened in American history. At the front of the room, LoPresto talked and paced and hiked up his pants; in back by the windows, Ralph slouched in his seat and sometimes dozed. Then one day, there was an unexpected showdown between the two.

  Over the clank of the radiator, Mr. LoPresto was droning on and on about Manifest Destiny. Chin resting in the palm of my propped-up hand, half-stupid from too much monologue and radiator heat, I was listlessly recording notes about America’s sacred, Darwinian duty to spread Democracy when, next to me, Ralph Drinkwater laughed out loud. A belly laugh, public and unmistakable.

  Mr. LoPresto stopped talking and squinted back at Ralph, whose laughter was immediately interesting to him. To all of us. Ralph’s outburst was the only interesting thing that had happened all period.

  “Do you find something amusing, Mr. . . . uh . . .”

  LoPresto grabbed for the seating chart in an effort to refresh his memory as to Ralph’s existence. “If you find something comical, Mr. Go Drink Water, then maybe you’d like to share it with the rest of us. We all like a good joke, don’t we, historians? Please. Tell us. What’s so funny?”

  There was a long pause, I remember—a standoff. Ralph’s face was a smirk, but I saw small tremors in his hands. His foot was tapping the linoleum a mile a minute. As the rest of us waited, I glanced over at his notebook. He had recorded nothing about Manifest Destiny but, instead, had drawn a bizarre caricature of Mr. LoPresto. In the picture, our teacher stood stark naked, equipped with both a baseball bat–sized hard-on and a pair of breasts that rivaled Jayne Mansfield’s. Ralph had sunk an ax into LoPresto’s head.

  “I repeat,” Mr. LoPresto said from the front of the room. “What’s so funny?”

  He would not have challenged most of the other boys in our class: Hank Witkiewicz, who was state wrestling champ, or Kevin Anderson, whose father was the city engineer. He probably wouldn’t even have challenged me, a nonstarter in JV basketball, a pipe fitter’s stepson. But Mr. LoPresto, oblivious of Ralph’s notebook illustration, had misjudged him as an easy target.

  “Nothing’s funny,” Ralph finally said. LoPresto might have let it go at that—might have continued with his argument about America’s holy duty to expand her territory—but Ralph’s face would not stop smirking.

  “No, go on,” Mr. LoPresto said. He parked his big fanny atop his desk. “Tell us.”

  “It’s that stuff you’re talking about,” Ralph said. “That stuff about survival of the fittest and the Indians disappearing because of progress.”

  I looked down at the notes which, until then, I had been recording in a kind of trance. It surprised me, I remember, that Ralph Drinkwater had been paying better attention than I had.

  “Manifest Destiny, you mean?” Mr. LoPresto said. “It’s funny to you?”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  It was shocking enough that Ralph had cursed in class, more shocking still when Mr. LoPresto repeated it.

  “Bullshit?” Now our teacher was smirking, too. He smirked at Anderson and Witkiewicz and they smirked back. “Bullshit?”

  He stood, walked halfway up Ralph’s aisle, and then stopped. “Well, for your information, Mr. Go Drink Water, I hold a bachelor’s degree in United States history from Fordham University and a master’s degree in nineteenth-century American history from the University of Pennsylvania. I was under the impression that I knew what I was talking about, but I guess I stand corrected. What, pray tell, are your credentials?”

  “My what?” Ralph said.

  “Your credentials. Your qualifications. In other words, what makes you an expert?”

  “I ain’t an expert,” Ralph said.

  “Oh. You ain’t?” Nervous titters from some of the girls.

  “No. But I’m a full-blooded Wequonnoc Indian. So I guess not all of us ‘indigenous people’ have ‘disappeared’ like you just said we did.”

  Ralph had coffee-colored skin and green eyes, a modified Afro hairstyle. I was pretty sure he was only “full-blooded” for the sake of argument. Mr. LoPresto denied that he had used the term disappeared. He suggested that if Ralph listened more carefully, he wouldn’t be so apt to misinterpret. But he had used that word; it was right there in front of me in my notes. Mr. LoPresto took a pink slip from his desk, wrote out Ralph’s disciplinary referral, and ordered him down to the office. “Fuckin’ faggot,” Ralph mumbled as he rose from his seat. If Mr. LoPresto heard him, he pretended he hadn’t. The classroom door slammed behind Ralph, and we waited out the sound of his boots clomping down the concrete corridor.

  “Well, then, historians,” Mr. LoPresto finally said. He smiled and, with a flourish, extended his hand back at Ralph’s empty seat. “I guess the Indians have disappeared after all.” Kevin and Hank and some of the others guffawed.

  Not me. I was suddenly, powerfully, on Ralph’s side—abruptly filled with an anger that set me shaking, a hot-faced shame that brought water to my eyes. Penny Ann had stolen kids’ food beca
use she was hungry. When Ralph had tripped that boy during Red Rover—had kicked my brother in the leg—he’d been tripping and kicking everyone who had stolen from him and lied to him and killed his sister. I had lied about those Oreos, knowing—even as a third-grader—that they would believe me, not Penny Ann. I had piously collected pennies on her behalf and then whitewashed her memory at the tree-planting. Had whitewashed my sin.

  Rewritten history.

  In my fantasy version of what happened next, I stood and confronted Mr. LoPresto—avenged all of the losers and nonstarters that he and his sarcasm had shat all over. Threw the motherfucker up against the wall in the name of justice and followed Ralph out of there. But in reality, I sat there. Said nothing. Wrote down whatever he said so that I could puke it back to him at test time.

  Years and years later, when my marriage to Dessa was still intact but in trouble, the evening manager at Benny’s hardware store called me one rainy spring night and asked me to please come and get my brother. Thomas had taken a bus from the hospital into town—he’d earned the privilege—and then had caused a disturbance, screaming and flinging items off shelves in the electrical department because everywhere he looked, he saw surveillance equipment. The store manager knew who we were—we had all gone to school together—and said he thought I’d have wanted him to call me instead of the police. When I got there, I convinced Thomas to lower his voice and to remove from his head the coat hanger hat he’d fashioned for himself. (It scrambled enemy frequencies, he told me; Soviet operatives were in pursuit.) I thanked the manager and coaxed Thomas into my truck. On the way back to the hospital, neither of us said much, letting the windshield wipers do the talking instead. And when we got back to Settle and the night nurse was escorting Thomas to his room, he turned back unexpectedly and said, “That’s the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn’t it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.” His voice, I remember, was cool and rational. To this day, what he said was a mystery to me. To this day, I can’t decide if it was his craziness or his sanity talking.

  After his showdown with Mr. LoPresto, Ralph Drinkwater came to history class less and less frequently, and when he did attend, it was always with a cool, indelible half-smile on his face. By second semester, he stopped coming to school altogether. In May, he quit officially. “Left: Ralph T. Drinkwater,” was the succinct way the absentee sheet put it. At the end of that same school day, as my classmates and I streamed out of the building and hustled toward our buses, I saw Ralph reeling and staggering on the sidewalk across the street. “Get fucked!” I remember him screaming drunkenly, his middle finger stabbing the air. “Hey, you! Hey, white boy! Get fucked!”

  I boarded the school bus, telling myself he hadn’t been shouting it directly at me—that his condemnation was random and miscellaneous.

  That he was just plastered.

  Wasted.

  Smashed.

  14

  Dr. Patel had warned me she might be running late. If I saw a blue Volvo with Delaware plates in the parking lot, I could come right up. If I didn’t, I’d have to wait until she got there. There was no receptionist, she said; hers was a part-time private practice.

  A week and a half had passed since Thomas’s transfer to Hatch. Barred from visiting my brother until the security clearance came through, I had settled for daily telephone updates from Lisa Sheffer and several over-the-phone conversations with Dr. Patel, Thomas’s new psychologist. Both Sheffer and Dr. Patel had assured me my brother was holding his own. An infection at the site of his skin graft had been successfully treated with a more powerful antibiotic; his vitals were fine. Although he was generally uncommunicative with the other patients of Unit Two and troubled by the surveillance cameras that were everywhere, he was eating and sleeping satisfactorily. He had developed a rapport with Sheffer, whom he seemed to trust. And now that he’d been back on Haldol for several days, the medication was beginning to reduce his agitation. All in all, Thomas’s treatment had been proceeding on course.

  But that afternoon, while I was high up near the eaves at the Roods’ house, Joy had left a message which Ruth Rood shouted up to me from the ground below. Dr. Patel wanted to see me. There’d been an incident involving my brother. Could we get together later in the day?

  We’d set up the appointment for five o’clock. At Dr. Patel’s suggestion, I’d agreed to meet her not at Hatch but at her office in that two-story strip mall on Division Street where she shared space with a Blockbuster Video, a Chinese takeout restaurant, a locksmith, and Miss Patti’s Academy of World Dance. For ten minutes, I had sat in the truck, watching people go in and out of the video store with their blue plastic boxes and catching glimpses of the little girls in leotards who leapt and tippy-toed, arms raised, past Miss Patti’s upstairs window. Six- and seven-year-olds, maybe. About the age Angela would have been, if she had lived. I picked out a dark-haired kid in a yellow leotard. Made her Angela.

  I still did that sometimes: snatched back my daughter’s life from the children of strangers. Made them the parents of a dead child instead of Dessa and me. In this particular fantasy, Dessa and I were still together and Angela’s drawings and school papers were stuck to our refrigerator door and her dance recital was coming up. Our lives were happy and matter-of-fact.

  She died in May of 1983, three weeks and three days after her birth. I was the one who found her. Hard as it was, I’ve always been grateful for that much, at least: grateful that I’d spared Dessa that little bit. I’d been up past midnight the night before, correcting term papers for my students because I’d promised to get them back before the weekend. Then, in the morning, I’d turned off the alarm in my sleep and overslept. I was halfway out the door that morning when I decided, hey, screw it if I’m a little late, I’ll sneak back and kiss the baby. Dessa had been up twice with her in the middle of the night. She’d mumbled the morning report while I was dressing. Said she was seizing the moment, sleeping in.

  My plan was to really get to know Angela once school was out for the summer. Once my schedule let up. I was assistant coach in track that spring and a member of the negotiating committee for the union. And there were always my brother’s needs to factor in—visits every Sunday afternoon at the bare minimum. I was planning to slow down after school let out, though. Take some time, take stock. After all, I was a father now. I’d have all of July and August to hang out with my new family. Two months of playtime with my wife and baby daughter.

  Her arms were raised up stiff over the edge of the bassinet: that was the first thing I saw. Her fists were clenched. There was pink foam at her nostrils and the corners of her mouth. Her small bald head looked gray. I stood there, shaking my head, telling myself, Uh-uh, no, this wasn’t happening. Not to our baby. Not to Angela. But I knew. I knew even before I picked her up and held her against me, trying to get Dessa’s name out. Trying to scream for Dessa.

  In the seven years since, I have tried on sleepless nights to unsee the EMTs, the doctors, the priest my in-laws called in from the Greek church, the hospital social worker—all of them performing their useless rituals. On the worst anniversaries—Angela’s birthday, or her death day, or sometimes around the holidays—I still see Dessa, doubled over and wailing as the ambulance pulled out of our driveway. Or later on that morning, at the hospital, shrunken inside her clothes. Those two milk stains on the front of her shirt. . . . She didn’t want to take anything to dry up, I remember; she could have, but she didn’t want to. It was a kind of denial, I guess—a rejection of life’s ability to be this bad. Later on—in the middle of the next night—I’d woken with a start and gone all over the house looking for her. Finally found her in the downstairs bathroom, standing dazed and topless in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, the milk dripping from her nipples like tears.

  In those first days afterward, Dessa was a zombie and I was Management Central—the one who dealt with the coroner and the cops and all those casseroles people kept bringing to the door. The covered-dis
h brigade. Most of that stuff just sat in our refrigerator and went bad; we couldn’t eat. A week or so later, I threw everything out, washed everyone’s dishes, and went driving around town returning them. I forced myself to do it. I usually just left the stuff at the door and drove away without ringing the bell. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Hear over and over and over those empty if-there’s-anything-I-can-do’s.

  Dessa couldn’t handle going to the funeral home to make the arrangements, so her mother and my mother went with me instead. Big Gene drove us over there, in one of those luxury demonstration models from the dealership instead of his own car. One of those big showboat Chryslers. As if riding in style to the funeral parlor was going to be some kind of comfort. As if anything was. Gene stayed out in the car, I remember. He wouldn’t or couldn’t go in.

  A lot of the funeral’s a blank. I remember the pink tea roses that blanketed Angela’s silver casket. Remember Dessa and her sister huddled together, propping each other up. It was brutal receiving condolences from my high school students—inarticulate enough to begin with, they were nearly tongue-tied by their teacher’s baby’s death. (In the weeks prior, I’d been entertaining my classes with comical stories of diaper-changing and car-seat straps and baby vomit—had turned fatherhood into a comedy routine. My world history class had organized a lottery around the baby’s weight and height and birth date; the winner, Nina Frechette, came to the wake and sobbed inconsolably.)