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

  De-fense! De-fense!

  “It’s not like . . . Look, I’m not saying he never hit her. Ray. He did. It’s just—”

  The office door banged open—so loudly and abruptly that the doc and I both jumped. “Jesus!” I snapped at Sheffer. “You ever hear of knocking?”

  “At my own office door?” she shot back.

  She threw a stack of files on her desk. Took in the tape recorder, the warning look I caught Dr. Patel giving her, the way I guess I must have looked right about then. Sheffer looked a little whipped herself.

  Her hands went into the air, palms up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Give me a couple of minutes, will you? I just need to go to the ladies’ room for a second.”

  After the door closed behind her, Dr. Patel asked me if I was all right.

  I told her I’d live.

  “Which do you want first?” Sheffer asked us. “The bad news or the good?”

  “The bad,” I said and, simultaneously, Dr. Patel said, “The good.”

  Sheffer said the probate judge had decided to drop the criminal charge against my brother. The weapon thing. The bad news—potentially bad, anyway—was that Thomas had been released to the custody of the Psychiatric Security Review Board.

  “The law-and-order guys, right?” I said. “The ones that want to lock up everyone and throw away the key?”

  “Not everyone, Domenico. But the headline-grabbers do tend to have a built-in disadvantage.” She looked over at Dr. Patel. “In my opinion, anyway.”

  “But Lisa,” Dr. Patel said, “Mr. Birdsey’s case is quite different from some of the other high-profile cases that have come before the Board. There’s no criminal charge, no victim.”

  “Arguable,” Sheffer said. “The other people in the library that day were terrified, right? Afraid for their safety? Doesn’t that make them victims? They could argue that.”

  I thought of Mrs. Fenneck’s appearance at my front door—that librarian telling me how she hadn’t been able to eat or sleep since. “Who could argue it?” I said.

  “The Review Board. Or how about this: that Thomas was both perpetrator and victim. They could say they need to commit him long term to keep him safe from himself. Which may be a perfectly valid point. The weird part—the thing that worries me, frankly—is that they’ve already scheduled his hearing. Know when it is? The thirty-first.”

  “The thirty-first of October?” Dr. Patel said.

  Sheffer nodded. “Trick or treat, kids.”

  “But that’s next week, Lisa,” Patel said. “His medication will have barely had time to stabilize him by then. He’ll have been back on his neuroleptics less than three weeks.”

  “Not to mention that the fifteen-day observation period will be up that day.”

  “Ridiculous,” Dr. Patel said. “How are they proposing to use our recommendations if we don’t even have time to observe him and write them up?”

  Sheffer said the judge wouldn’t even listen to her argument about postponement. “Ironic, isn’t it?” she said. “I’m usually complaining about how inefficient the judicial system is, but in this case, it’s the efficiency that scares me. Why are they being so expedient?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “If this is some kind of bag job—if they’re trying to rush this through so they can sentence him to this rathole for another whole year—I’m going to raise holy hell.”

  “You know, Domenico,” Sheffer said. “Hatch might be the most appropriate place for Thomas. Or it might not be. That’s the point: it’s just too soon to call it. But I’ll be honest with you: if you show up at the hearing ‘raising holy hell,’ that may just be your best shot at getting him out of here. At least it’ll make a statement: that he’s got family that cares. That his family might be willing to shoulder some of the responsibility. They might hear that, if you put it right. It all depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  She looked over at Dr. Patel. “I don’t know. On politics, maybe. On who—if anyone—might be pulling from the opposite direction.”

  When I got up to go, Dr. Patel asked me if I’d wait for a minute while she returned the tape recorder to her office. She’d see me to the front entrance, she said. She’d only be a minute.

  Sheffer went over to her filing cabinet. She was wearing a tan suit and little matching high heels. Dressed up like that, she looked even more like a pip-squeak.

  “Where’s your sneakers?” I asked her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your high-tops. I almost didn’t recognize you in your lady lawyer disguise.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’ve gotta dress the part for these conservative judges. Nothing wilder than Sandra Day O’Connor. You see the lengths I go to?”

  “I’m starting to,” I said. Caught her eye. “Thanks.”

  “I just hope it works,” she said. “Rough session today?”

  “What?”

  “Your brother’s session? You looked a little shell-shocked when I barged in here. Which I apologize for, by the way.”

  I shrugged. Looked away from her. “No problem,” I mumbled.

  When Dr. Patel returned, she took my arm and walked me back through Hatch’s liver-colored corridors. Past the guard station, up to the metal detector at the front entrance. Under the halogen glare, her gold and tangerine–colored sari was almost too much to take.

  “It was difficult for you today,” she said. Gave my arm a squeeze. “And yet, I hope, productive.”

  I told her I was sorry.

  “Yes? Sorry for what, Dominick?”

  “For losing it. For screaming. All those four-letter words I was letting rip back there.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “Your reactions—your insights—have been very helpful to me, Dominick. Perhaps they’ll prove crucial in the long run. One never knows. I think, however, that we should discontinue the practice of having you listen to the tapes of your brother’s sessions.”

  “Why? I thought you said it helped.”

  “It does. But one brother’s treatment should not put another brother at risk.”

  “Look, if I can help him . . . I want to help him. If you can learn things.”

  She reached for my hand. Squeezed it. “I learned something very useful today,” she said.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “I learned that there are two young men lost in the woods. Not one. Two.”

  She gave me one of those half-smiles of hers—one of those noncommittal jobs. “I may never find one of the young men,” she said. “He has been gone so long. The odds, I’m afraid, may be against it. But as for the other, I may have better luck. The other young man may be calling me.”

  18

  1969

  The summer Thomas and I worked for the Three Rivers Public Works was also the summer of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, and Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind.” Ray was so thrilled that we were about to beat the Russians to the moon that he went down to Abram’s Appliance Store the week before the launch and traded in our old black-and-white Emerson TV for a new cabinet-model color Sylvania. He said he didn’t care for himself, but he wanted my brother, Ma, and me to be able to see history being made on a TV where the picture didn’t roll whenever it felt like it and make everyone look like a bunch of pinheads.

  Ray spent that whole first week jumping out of his chair to readjust his tint and contrast buttons; none of the rest of us was allowed to adjust the color on the new set. He must have been trying to get his money’s worth, I guess, because he always made the picture ridiculously bright—so vivid it seemed obscene. He’d fiddle with those little knobs until the NBC peacock’s tail feathers bled into each other and the field at Yankee Stadium turned psychedelic lime green. Newscasters’ complexions glowed like jack-o’-lanterns.

  On the big night of the moon landing, I was on Ray’s shit list because I’d made plans with Leo Blood to drive down to Easterly Beach. “One of the biggest moments in American history and you’r
e going to some dance hall?” he asked.

  “That’s the beauty of America, Ray,” I said. “It’s a free country.”

  The wisecrack was one I could afford to spend in the wake of Ray’s tantrum with the pickle jars. For several days, he’d acted subdued with Ma. Indulgent, even. With Thomas, too, who had walked barefoot into the kitchen the morning after Ray’s jar-smashing and stepped directly onto the one jagged shard my mother’s cleanup had missed. The one-inch piece of glass had lodged itself so firmly into the heel of Thomas’s foot that neither Ma nor I had wanted to extract it. Instead, we hustled Thomas to the emergency room, where an intern poked and prodded and removed the glass. Thomas passed out during his ordeal. The gash had required both inside and outside stitches. By the time we got back home, Ray had returned from work and cleaned up the blood that trailed from the kitchen through the house and down the front stairs. He waited for us at the front door, pale and shaken. “What the hell happened?” he said. The three of us let him wait for an answer until Thomas had negotiated the cement stairs with his crutches.

  More than anything, the new TV was Ray’s unspoken apology. And my going out on the night of the moon landing was my way of saying thanks but no thanks.

  “They serve alcohol at this place you’re going to?” he asked, passing me as I waited at the front door for Leo to show.

  “I can’t get into a place that serves alcohol,” I said. “They card you at the door.”

  “They better,” he said. “I catch you doing something you’re not supposed to be doing and I’ll make your ass bleed.”

  Like you made his foot bleed, you son of a bitch, I thought.

  Leo’s horn finally honked somewhere after the landing of the Eagle but before Armstrong’s descent to the moon. He no longer drove his mother’s Biscayne. Now Leo tooled around in his own car, a ’66 Skylark convertible, cobalt blue, with a V-8, four on the floor, and a built-in eight-track with rear reverb speakers. He’d gotten a good deal on it because the engine leaked oil and the convertible top was stuck down, more or less permanently. He kept a case of Quaker State, a plastic sheet, and a stack of bath towels in the trunk for emergencies.

  Leo drove the convertible fast and recklessly, which appealed to me, especially that night. Neil Armstrong and company may have torn through the heavens, but Leo and I were tearing down Route 22 with the Stones on the tape deck and a wall of oxygen rushing against us. I felt like I could breathe again. We drank beers all the way down there, chucking the cans out on the side of the road as we flew. Fuck Ray and fuck the moon and the astronauts, too. We were cooking.

  Leo wanted to check out two clubs, the Blue Sands and a new place called the Dial-Tone Lounge. “We’re gonna get us some action, tonight, Birdsey Boy,” he called over to me. “I can feel it underneath the old loincloth.”

  “The old loincloth?” I laughed. Leo let go of the steering wheel and beat his chest. Then he grabbed the wheel again, stood up straight, and yelled like Tarzan. The Skylark weaved and wobbled onto the shoulder and back again.

  In the Blue Sands parking lot, Leo handed me a bogus majority card and told me to memorize my name and birthday and to look the guy at the door right in the eye. Don’t ask me why I still remember this, but I was Charles Crookshank, born January 19, 1947. “Where do you get these things, anyway?” I asked Leo.

  “It’s a kit. You send away.”

  The guy posted at the door looked like something out of Planet of the Apes. He studied our IDs with his flashlight, then shone the light right in our faces, pretty much killing off the idea of eye contact. “So,” Leo said. “How about this moon landing stuff? Pretty wild, eh?”

  The gatekeeper ignored Leo and looked at me. “You got a driver’s license or some other form of identification, Mr. Crookshank?” he asked.

  “Funny you should mention that,” Leo intervened. “We’re both from Manhattan, see? With all the buses and subways there, we just never bothered to get licenses. You don’t really need them in New York.”

  “Wasn’t that you who just drove in? In the Buick with Connecticut plates?”

  “Yes, it was. Very observant,” Leo laughed. “We borrowed my sister’s car.”

  The guy took another look at Leo’s fake ID and asked him when his birthday was. Leo got the day right but messed up on the month. “Hit the road, you two,” the Ape Man said.

  “That’s fine, my man,” Leo told him. “Peace, brother. And may I congratulate you on this great career you got going for yourself. There’s an awful lot of guys would love to be at the top of the heap like you, collecting soggy dollar bills and stamping people’s hands at a bar as scuzzy as this one.” We had to run back to the Skylark and hop over the doors, King Kong lumbering across the parking lot after us.

  At the Dial-Tone Lounge, those same phony IDs got us in, no sweat. All the tables at the Dial-Tone were numbered in neon and came equipped with telephones. The gimmick was: you could scope out some chick, then call up her table and flirt for a few minutes while she and her girlfriends checked out all the guys and tried to match the conversation to the moving lips.

  There were more guys than girls at the Dial-Tone. The place was crawling with sailors from the submarine base over in Groton. Most of the squids wore tie-dye and love beads and bell-bottom jeans—by ’69 it was bad for your sex life to look military—but the accents and haircuts gave them away. Leo and I managed to snag the last table, a two-seater stuck in the corner behind a couple of squids. One was a tall, skinny doofus and the other a squat fire hydrant with eyes. “Just what we needed,” Leo mumbled as we sat down. “Popeye and Bluto blocking our view.”

  “Call her,” the skinny one kept goading his no-neck friend.

  “Which one?”

  “The one I was talking to at the bar.”

  “Should I?”

  “Hell, yeah. Go for it, man! Her name’s Cindy.”

  No Neck picked up the phone and dialed. “Hello? Cindy? You don’t know me, but I got a message for you from Dick Hertz.”

  He cupped his hand over the receiver and winced in his effort not to laugh. “Whose Dick Hertz? Well, now that you mention it, Cindy, mine’s killing me. Care to give it some relief?” He slammed down the receiver. Their loud guffawing and table-whacking made half the people in the place look over in our direction.

  “Jesus Christ, Birdsey, these guys make you look suave,” Leo said. “No wonder we’re losing the fucking war.”

  No Neck’s buddy stared over at us for a couple of seconds, then leaned forward and tapped Leo on the shoulder. “Excuse me, pal, but what’d you just say?”

  “Huh?” Leo said.

  “I asked you what you just said. To your friend here. Something about my buddy and me and the ‘fucking war’?”

  Leo looked bewildered. Then he laughed. “Fucking whores, is what I said. I said this place is full of fucking whores.”

  “Oh. Well.” He looked over at his buddy and back again. “You got that right. I thought you said something else.”

  “No problem, my man,” Leo said, flashing him the peace sign. I shook my head and smiled.

  Leo was all horny energy as he scanned the room. His leg was tapping a mile a minute, his knuckles rapping against the tabletop. “Table 7, over by the bar?” he said. “From left to right: C-minus, C-plus, B-minus, C. Table 18, near the door, everyone’s an F except for the brunette in the white top—the one just sitting down. I’ll give her a B. Nice ass, nice set of lungs, but she loses it on the schnoz.”

  “The nose knows,” No Neck leaned toward us and said.

  “She could bend over and use that thing as a dildo on her friends,” his buddy added. Leo acted like Popeye and Bluto were invisible.

  “Now there’s a couple of A chicks right over there, Birdsey. Table 12. Those two brunettes in the minidresses. What do you say we put them out of their misery?” He picked up the phone and told me I could have the one with bangs.

  It was “mine” who answered. Leo told her he and I were visit
ing the East Coast from L.A. and we just had to know something. “You work for Twentieth Century Fox, too, don’t you? Haven’t we seen you on the lot out there?”

  I groaned and shook my head. “Honest to Christ, Leo,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t believe you.”

  He cupped his hand over the receiver. “You can eat shit, Birdseed. You’re listening to a maestro at work. You ought to be taking notes.”

  He wove an elaborate story about how he and I were both Hollywood stuntmen and personal friends of Steve McQueen. Leo said he’d done some stunt work in Bullitt and that he’d just finished filming a new James Bond that wasn’t out yet. Had she and her girlfriend seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? The part where Paul Newman and Robert Redford say goodbye to each other and jump off the cliff? That was really Leo free-falling in that scene, not Rob Redford. That was what all his friends called him, by the way: Rob. He and Leo played cards together once or twice a month.

  You could tell from the girls’ body language and the way they were looking over at us that they were skeptical. Then the one with the bangs handed the phone to the other one, who said something snotty to Leo. He told her she could blow it out her ass.

  “See, that’s what I hate,” he said, hanging up. “An A chick who knows she’s an A chick. It goes to her head, like a brain disease. I’ll take a good-natured B chick over an A with a bad attitude any day. Your basic B chick knows enough to be grateful.”

  Our waitress stood at the table, dark and slight, her long hair twisted into a braid. “You’re scoring these women?” she said.

  “No, we’re hoping to score a couple,” Leo told her, looking her up and down. “Hopefully two from the A or B division.”

  “Oh, well, I’m sure they’ll be impressed by your sensitivity,” she said. “What’ll you guys have?”

  In the middle of writing down our orders, one of the sailors at the next table reached over and yanked our waitress’s braid. She banged her tray down, pivoted, and faced them. “Keep your hands to yourselves or I’ll have you thrown out of here,” she warned. “You understand?”