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

  Fuck her! I banged the phone back down on the receiver and the second I did, it rang. “Hello?” I blurted out.

  I was sure it was Dessa, but it wasn’t. It was Leo.

  Yeah, all right, I’d go fishing with him. I didn’t have anything better to do. Six o’clock? All right. Yeah.

  When I went downstairs, Thomas was slumped in the middle of the couch, wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms and this stupid red and blue striped stocking cap on his head. He’d worn that thing all winter long. Inside the dorm. Seeing that hat on his head brought everything back: that weird first year of school, his weird behavior. He was staring like a zombie at the TV.

  “Where’s Ma?” I said. He wouldn’t answer me.

  I went out to the kitchen and came back with cereal, milk, a bowl, a spoon. “Shove over,” I said. Flopped down on the couch next to him. The proximity was a half-baked attempt at peacemaking.

  He was watching an old Tarzan movie—Johnny Weissmuller and Brenda Joyce. When we were kids, Thomas had maintained that Johnny Weissmuller was the best Tarzan and I’d insisted Lex Barker was. I’d even half-convinced myself that Thomas and I resembled Lex Barker—that maybe he was our father and would come back to claim us. I was always doing that when I was little: dreaming up fantasy dads, Hollywood rescues from Ray. It was pathetic. But now, sitting there on the couch eating Cheerios, it suddenly struck me funny: Lex Barker swinging through the trees on Hollyhock Avenue and coming in for a landing in Ma’s bedroom. Ma getting pregnant by Tarzan the Ape Man. Him coming back years later to get us and bring us back to where? The jungles of Africa? Hollywood, California? God, little kids are such idiots.

  “Hey, Jerk Face,” I said to Thomas. “I still say Lex Barker’s a better Tarzan than this guy. Hands down. No contest.”

  No answer.

  “So where’d you say Ma and Ray were?”

  Nothing.

  I reached over and clapped my hands in front of his face. “Hey, Thomas! Wake up! Where are they at?”

  “Who?”

  “Ma and Ray!”

  “At a picnic,” he said, still watching the tube.

  “Ray’s union picnic? That’s today?”

  No response.

  I poured myself more cereal. I almost needed the silent treatment from Ding Dong after all the other bullshit I’d been through in the past forty-eight hours.

  The Tarzan movie had been spliced in about a hundred different places; the action sort of hiccuped every couple of seconds. As usual, it was the white hunters in their freshly ironed safari clothes who’d caused the problem—whose greed had stirred up the entire sleeping jungle. Tarzan hustled Jane and Boy down a jungle path, the Zambezis in hot pursuit. Then the three of them jumped into a crystal-clear pool and swam like speedboats. I’d seen this one about a hundred times when I was a kid but had never before noticed the cut of Brenda Joyce’s little jungle dress, the way she half-fondled her tits as she climbed from the glassy water.

  “We will return in a moment to Big Three Matinee Theater,” the announcer said.

  I looked down at my brother’s hand on the couch cushion next to me. His fingers and fingernails were bitten to shreds, the skin red and raw, dried blood in the cuticles. All that past year in our dorm room, he had gnawed and bitten, bitten and gnawed. In two semesters, he’d probably chewed off about five pounds of his own skin. “I think there’s a Yankees game on channel ten,” I said. “You want to watch it?”

  No answer.

  “Thomas? Hey! You want to watch the ball game?”

  He put the weight of the world into the sigh he gave me. “If I wanted to watch stupid baseball, then I’d be watching it.”

  I let it pass. Got up and tried Dessa again. Maybe I’d have better luck on the downstairs phone. But there was still no answer.

  I sat back down next to Thomas. My leg was tapping against the floor a mile a minute. “Hey, you remember that time at Ray’s labor union picnic when he made us sing those stupid songs for everybody? Those war songs he taught us when we were little kids? What were those songs again?”

  Thomas blinked three or four times in a row. Swiped at his nose. “’You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap’ and ‘Good-bye Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama,’” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s right! ‘You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap.’” I shook my head. “Fucking Ray, man. Fucking racist bastard.”

  I poured myself more cereal. Ate a few spoonfuls and put the bowl down on the coffee table. “Me and Dessa had a big fight last night,” I said. “It was my fault.”

  The disclosure just slipped out—took me as much by surprise as it did Thomas. He looked over at me. “Nothing too serious, though,” I said. “Nothing we can’t straighten out. You and her will really have to meet each other one of these days. I think you’d like her. She’s good people. I want you to meet her sometime.”

  “I’m going to meet her tomorrow afternoon,” Thomas said.

  “What? . . . What are you talking about?” I felt suddenly panicky.

  “She called this morning. While you were still sleeping. She thought I was you.”

  “Dessa? What’d she say?”

  “She told me what happened last night.”

  I just sat there, trying to figure out how to respond. “What do you mean—what happened?” I finally said.

  “She said you forgot your bike in her car. She’s going someplace all day with her mother and her sister, but she said she could come over tomorrow afternoon and bring it back. She wanted to know if I was going to be around so she could meet me.”

  “Yeah? She say anything else?”

  “No.”

  “How’d she sound?”

  “I don’t know. She sounded nice.”

  “Yeah? Good. Great. . . . She is nice. She’s real nice.”

  I was suddenly overwhelmed with relief. Overwhelmed with sympathy for my goofy brother. “Hey, Thomas, about this roommate stuff,” I said. “Leo just asked me one day, you know? It’s not like this master plot against you or anything. I just . . . I figured I’d make a change. It’ll be good for you and me. That’s partly why I did it. For you.”

  He laughed at the baldness of the lie.

  “Hey, don’t believe me,” I told him. “I don’t give a crap. But it’s the truth.”

  He muttered something under his voice.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Neither of us said anything for a minute or more. On TV, the Zambezis had captured Jane and Boy and tied them up. They were doing this psycho-looking dance around them. If Thomas was going to meet Dessa, he had better not embarrass me. As a matter of fact, now that I thought about it, he wasn’t going to meet her. Not yet. I’d find some way around it. “So what’s with the stocking cap?” I asked him. “What are you wearing that thing for in the middle of summer?”

  But Thomas was on some other wavelength. “As if he’s Mr. Innocent,” he said.

  “What? Who you talking about?” I waited. “As if who’s Mr. Innocent?”

  “Would you do me a favor?” he said.

  “Depends. What is it?”

  “Would you just stop playing Mr. Friendly Brother? Because it’s not convincing at all. I know what all three of you are up to.”

  I laughed. “Who’s ‘all three’ of us?”

  “You and your two buddy-buddies. You’ve been plotting against me all summer. I have all the information I need.”

  That crazy note I’d flushed down the toilet the night before came flying back at me again. What had that thing said? “Whatever you’re talking about, you’re full of shit,” I told him. “What are you—paranoid or something?”

  “No, I’m just aware.”

  “Yeah? Aware of what?”

  He yanked down the stocking cap until it nearly covered his eyes. Then he picked up the TV Guide and started ripping the pages into strips.

  “Hey, that’s the new one, asshole,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  In response, he started singing “You’r
e a Sap, Mr. Jap.” Louder and louder. Started screaming it at me.

  “Cut it out!” I warned him. “Stop it!” And when he didn’t stop, I grabbed him. Jumped on him and made him stop. He screamed loudest when I yanked that fucking hat off his head. He began fighting back with more strength than I thought he had. The two of us toppled off the back of the couch, knocked over an end table, rolled across the floor. A lamp fell; it didn’t break but the shade got bent to shit. When I got on top of him and pinned his shoulders to the floor, he lunged up and spat in my face. That was it: I popped him one, in the nose. Put him in a choke hold while he was trying to get away from me. Gave him a couple of good jabs in the ribs and tightened my grip around his neck. He gagged. Went limp. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said.

  I let go. He coughed, cleared his throat.

  We were both out of breath. Both scared, I guess. I got up and righted the coffee table, the end table lamp. Threw away the wasted TV Guide, vacuumed up spilt cereal, bent the lampshade back in place the best I could. Thomas just sat there on the floor, rubbing his arm over and over.

  Down in the cellar, I got my fishing gear ready. Checked my tackle box, my lures. I tried and tried to untie a knot in my line, but my fingers wouldn’t stop shaking. What was the matter with him, anyway? Writing that stupid note. Accusing us of plotting against him. If this was some kind of stupid bullshit game he was playing, he was going to be sorry he started it. I’d see to that personally. I’d had it with him. . . . But what if it wasn’t a game? And if it wasn’t, what the fuck was it? What was happening?

  I went outside and stood on the cement steps, casting my line over and over across the backyard, into the honeysuckle bush. After her father retired, my mother told me, he used to spend whole days out in that little yard, sitting in his grape arbor, smoking cigars, and thinking about Sicily. He’d died out there, of a stroke, the summer Ma was pregnant with us.

  No shit, man. What was wrong with him? Something must be wrong.

  Just before Leo was due to pick me up, I went back inside the house. Thomas was still sitting on the floor where I’d left him, still rubbing his arm. The cap was back on his head. “You hurt your arm?” I asked him.

  No answer.

  “Is it sprained or something? You okay?”

  Nothing.

  Part of me wanted to deck him again and part of me wanted to reach down and pull him off the floor. “If I were you,” I said, “I’d turn off the boob tube and go down to the store and get another TV Guide. Ray sees you wrecked the new one, he’s going to go apeshit.”

  Thomas looked up and faced me. “You are me,” he said.

  “Come again?”

  “You said if you were me, you’d buy a new TV Guide. But you are me.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “Far from it.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Thomas’s smile was private and serene. My heart thumped, wild with fear.

  22

  1969

  I was outside in front, waiting on the wall, when Leo pulled up in his Skylark.

  I threw my fishing gear in the backseat and got in the front. “Here,” I said, tossing him one of the foil-wrapped eggplant grinders Ma had made me the night before. “Present from my mother.”

  “See that, Birdsey,” he said. “Even the older babes love me. When you got it, you got it.” Ma a babe? I had to laugh in spite of my headache, and the mess I’d made with Dessa, and the fight I’d just had with my stupid, whacked-out brother.

  Leo norfed down the sandwich as he drove. Asked what was new since yesterday.

  “Not much,” I told him. “Just that, in a twenty-four-hour span, I managed to get my brother, my mother, and my girlfriend totally pissed at me.” I skipped the part about Thomas acting like a psycho.

  “Whoa, my man’s three for three,” Leo laughed. “What’s your little honey honked off about? You forget to heat up the oven before you stuck the meat in or something?”

  I shot him a look, amazed at how close he’d come to the truth. But Leo, oblivious, took another bite out of his sandwich. “I figured we could try out by the trestle bridge,” he said. “Ralphie told me the bluegills were biting like mothers up there a couple nights ago. Says he caught a nice-sized trout last week, too.”

  “You should have asked him if he wanted to come with us,” I said.

  Leo took another bite. “I did ask him. Said he was busy, as usual. Hey, speaking of Drinkwater, look in the glove compartment.”

  “Drinkwater’s in the glove compartment?” I said.

  “Real funny, Dominick. Go ahead. Look.”

  I did what he said. Fished through what was in there. “Yeah?” I said. “What? Glove compartment shit.”

  “Check out the Sucrets,” he said.

  Inside the tin were three joints, tightly wrapped in red rolling papers. “Ralphie just got this new stuff from a friend of his. Says he might be able to get us some if we want. What do you think, Birds? You want to go halves on a little back-to-school stash?”

  I didn’t. Getting wasted while you were mowing lawns was one thing; doing it while you were trying to survive a killer semester like the one I had coming up was another. I’d signed up for another poly sci course, British lit, Western civ, trig. The last thing I wanted to do was wake up from a semester-long stupor with a grade point average that looked like my brother’s. Still, I picked up one of the joints, sniffing the sweetness of the weed, the scented paper. “How much?” I said. “Nickel bag? Dime bag?”

  “Well, here’s what I was thinking,” Leo said. “If this shit’s as good as Ralphie says it is, why don’t we see if we can get, say, a couple of pounds.”

  “Couple of pounds?” I said.

  “Shut up and listen a minute,” he said. “What I was thinking was we could maybe keep a little of it and sell the rest. There’s some serious dopers down at South Campus. We could unload this stuff no problem.”

  “Nope.”

  “Wait a minute, Birdsey. Listen. We get the stuff from Drinkwater, then jack the price up say seven or eight bucks an ounce and make a little profit. We could each clear over a hundred apiece.”

  “I said no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not interested in dealing, and Drinkwater’s probably not interested in being your supplier, either. He gave you these jays, right? Did he say anything to you about selling?”

  “No, he didn’t. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t. You ever hear of capitalism?”

  “And anyways, Leo, I can’t be buying any two pounds of marijuana. I’m trying to finance a car. Hey, speaking of which, could you do me a favor? As long as we’re going out to the bridge, could you stop at Dell’s first for a couple of minutes?”

  “Dell’s?” he said. “Dell’s house?”

  I told him about Dell’s wife’s car. “He lives out near the old mill on Bickel Road,” I said. “He says his house is just past there. It’s right on the way—wouldn’t take more than ten minutes.”

  “All right, Birdsey. All right. But I tell you, man, the last thing I want to do after I’ve been looking at Dell’s ugly puss all week is go and fuckin’ visit him on the weekend.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re a trouper, Leo,” I said. “A prince among men.”

  “Hey,” he said. “What you just said? Maybe that’s an omen.”

  “What?”

  “You just said I’m a prince among men. I got this thing in the mail today from the theater department. They just announced their new schedule for this coming year. They’re doing Hamlet, and this play by some Spanish dude—somebody-somebody Lorca—and a musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. And you just said it: I’m a prince among men. Maybe I’ll audition for Hamlet.” He rolled up the foil that Ma had wrapped his grinder in and chucked it on the floor of his car.

  “Yeah, and if they do that Charlie Brown thing, you probably got the part of Pigpen locked up,” I said. You should have seen all the crap rolli
ng around on that car floor. Leo’s cars have always been disgusting like that.

  He ignored the comment, though. For someone who more or less dedicated his life to being a goof, Leo could get amazingly serious when he talked about acting. “See, they usually cast juniors and seniors for the major roles, right? But this teacher I had last semester for Shakespearean theater—this guy named Brendan? He said he really likes my work. Says I’ve got great projection and that I’m not afraid to—how did he put it?—‘let people in.’ And he’s the one who’s directing Hamlet. So who knows? I might have a shot at it. Check this out: ‘To die, to sleep—to sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.’”

  “Rub this,” I said.

  “Hey, you know what your problem is, Birdsey? You’re like a fucking one-man cultural wasteland. You couldn’t tell a Shakespearean tragedy from What’s New, Pussycat?” He belched, wiped his mouth on his arm. “So what’s your mother mad at you for?”

  “She found out I’m not rooming with Thomas.”

  “Uh-oh. You finally lowered the boom?”

  I shook my head. “I was going to tell him,” I said. “This weekend. But the fucking housing office beat me to it.”

  “They called him?”