by Lamb, Wally
“You said that when you emerged from the pond, you realized that one cannot swim away from one’s sins.”
“Yeah? And?”
“I merely note that you described your swim almost as an attempt at purification. And now, this second reference to guilt and sin. I’m just struck by your religious—”
“It’s just a figure of speech. ‘Guilty of sin’: people say it all the time.”
“Are you angry?”
“No, I just . . . I think you’re confusing me with the other Birdsey brother.”
“No, no. I assure you. I know the difference between—”
“Look, Ma! Two hands!”
“Dominick, sit down, please.”
“I don’t want to sit down! I just . . . You know something? Let me clue you in to something. When you go to lift your kid—your beautiful little baby girl—out of the bassinet some morning and . . . and she’s . . . Well, never mind. Just don’t start confusing me with my one-handed Holy-Roller brother. I don’t do religion, okay? I gave up on God a long time ago. . . . I was just some stupid, mixed-up kid up there at that pond that morning. I was hot and tired and . . . “
“Take my hands, please, Dominick. That’s it. Now, look at me. That’s right. Good. I want to assure you, my friend, that I do not confuse you and your brother. I am quite aware of the distinctions between you. All right?”
“I—”
“I only ask this: that, during this process, you try not to disown your insights.”
“My insights? Have I had any insights yet?”
“Yes! And more will come in time. Be patient, Dominick. They’re coming. Do you, by any chance, know who Bhagirath was? In Hindu legend?”
“Who?”
“Bhagirath. He brought the Ganges from heaven to earth.”
“Yeah? Neat trick. What was he—a civil engineer?”
“Of sorts, I suppose. You see, Bhagirath had a mission. He needed to cleanse the honor of his ancestors because they had been cursed. Burned to cinders. So he routed the river from the feet of Brahma, the Creator, through the tangled locks of Shiva, the Destroyer, and thus to earth. It was his gift. The holy river. And that is why orthodox Hindus bathe there: to cleanse themselves of their imperfections. To wash away their ancestors’ sins.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Keep thinking back, Dominick. Keep remembering.”
“I just . . . It’s painful. I don’t see the point.”
“The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness. Perhaps, Dominick, you have yet to emerge fully from the pond where you swam that morning so long ago. And perhaps, when you do, you will no longer look into the water and see the reflection of a son of a bitch.”
24
1969–1970
The next day, Dessa and I drove out to the Falls to talk. We made up. Made love.
On Monday morning, I quit the Public Works so I wouldn’t have to face Ralph. Walked into Lou Clukey’s office and told him I needed to leave earlier than I’d figured because of school. Leo had quit, too, Lou said. At least I’d come in and told him in person. On the way out of the yard, I ran right into Ralph. He acted embarrassed, not angry. If the cops were going to haul him in for questioning, they hadn’t done it yet.
“Well,” I said. “It’s been real.” I held out my hand for him to shake.
“It’s been real,” Ralph repeated. And he grasped and shook the dirty hand of betrayal. The white boy’s hand.
The weekend before school started, Dessa came over to the house with her sister. Thomas and I were out on the front porch, shucking corn for supper. Angie plopped herself down next to my brother and started teasing him. Flirting with him. Then and forever engaged in a one-sided competition with her big sister, Angie had decided on the spot that if Dessa wanted me, what she wanted was the closest facsimile. It was Angie who suggested the four of us drive down to Ocean Beach to play miniature golf. On the way home, Angie and Thomas started making out in the backseat. In a way, it was kind of funny: Thomas getting the moves slapped on him. And, if the rearview mirror didn’t lie, responding. Acting normal for once in his life. Acting human. . . . It was funny, but it wasn’t funny, either. Thomas’s behavior was always a wild card. And Dessa’s little sister was just plain wild.
Angie and Thomas went out the next night, and then the next. The morning before we were due back at school, I stepped out of the shower and saw Thomas standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, shirtless, touching the hickeys Angie Constantine had sucked into his chest and neck. “Hey, listen, loverboy,” I said. “You do anything stupid—anything to mess up Dessa and me—and you’re a dead man. Understand?” Thomas just stared at me, bewildered, as if sex and girls and fratricide weren’t options on the planet where he came from. Then he went back to the mirror—touched his chest again, passed his fingers over his rose-colored bruises.
That night, I dreamed I was screwing Angie. “Don’t tell Dessa,” I kept begging her, mid-fuck. When she told me she wouldn’t, I hooked my chin over her shoulder and closed my eyes and we went at it something fierce. And when I opened my eyes again, there was my brother, watching us.
During our first week as dormmates, Leo and I spoke in grudging single syllables, then in guarded, self-conscious sentences, then normally again. I threw a twenty-dollar bill on his desk, partial payment for the damaged tapes, but not all of it. Neither of us apologized. Neither of us said much at all about our near-arrest by the state police and how we’d gotten out of it and how I’d lost it and almost busted his face in. We just let it lie. Let it get layered over with classes, loud music on the turntable, guys busting into the room for a bull session or a game of poker or pitch. Leo’s drama professor cast a better actor as Hamlet and gave Leo the part of Osric, court asshole, Elizabethan “Cool Jerk.” Leo had five or six lines, maybe. Two or three sorry little scenes. Watching Leo in that performance—the costumer had outfitted him in checked tights, a floppy hat with a big plume—I forgave him for who he was: a buffoon, a bigmouth, a guy who couldn’t be trusted any further than you could throw him.
Across campus, Thomas and his new roommate began their awkward adjustment to each other. Randall Deitz was a nice enough guy—one of those quiet, fade-into-the-woodwork types. “How’s it going with my brother?” I asked him one morning when I bumped into him on the way to class. I was afraid to hear his answer.
“Fair,” he said. “He’s different.”
Against the odds, Thomas’s relationship with Angie Constantine continued—went into overdrive, in fact. At the same time, killer classes and a leaking radiator on that piece-of-shit car I’d bought from Dell had temporarily downshifted Dessa’s and my relationship. Angie started driving up to UConn on weekends and sleeping over. (Deitz worked weekends at a pharmacy back home and was never around.) The Constantines were pissed. Big Gene threatened to fire Angie from her accountant trainee’s job down at the dealership if she didn’t start acting like the decent girl they’d brought her up to be. But Angie called her father’s bluff. Daddy’s disapproval was a big part of the appeal, see? A way to get herself noticed. In a way, she was just using my stupid brother. But part of me was relieved: Thomas was normal, I told myself. Normal enough to shack up on weekends, like anyone else.
One Sunday morning, Angie phoned Dessa up in Boston. This was it, she said. The real thing. She and Thomas were in love. Angie told Dess they might be getting engaged. And something else: she might be pregnant. It was okay, though. They wanted kids. Wanted a family as soon as possible. Dessa called me from Boston, in tears.
I waited until Angie’s car had left the dorm parking lot that afternoon, then barged into my brother’s room and reamed him out. He was already on academic probation, I reminded him—hanging on by a thread, and now this? Dessa and Angie’s parents were going to go apeshit when they found out. And what about Ma and Ray? Wasn’t she on the pill? Hadn’t he even been using a rubber
? How could he be so stupid? Thomas gave me that space alien look again, as if knocking up your girlfriend carried no complications whatsoever.
Then something weird happened. Thomas did something that Angie said she was never, ever going to talk about, not even to Dessa. Something that freaked her out. She broke up with him—dropped him cold—and started telling anyone who’d listen that my brother was “the weirdest guy on earth.”
She did talk about what had happened, eventually: blabbed it all over creation, once she got started, about how my brother had bought this book called The Lives of the Martyred Saints and become preoccupied with the descriptions of the saints’ bizarre and gory persecutions. He’d lie there naked on his bed, Angie said, and make her read aloud about the saints’ beatings and amputations and flesh burnings, their being pierced with arrows, gashed with hooks. She didn’t want to do it, she said—read him that stuff—but he’d beg her. So she’d read it, and he’d writhe and roll around, moaning and groaning. And then . . . and then he’d . . . well, you know. All by himself, on the bed, right in front of her. Without her even touching him. Angie said she’d done it twice—that he’d pleaded with her. He was just too weird for words. She wanted a normal boyfriend: someone who liked to dance and have fun and double with other couples. There was no more talk about a baby. There had never been a baby, Angie told Dessa. She’d just been late; she’d just miscounted, okay? She didn’t care whether Miss Perfect believed her or not.
I introduced Angie to Leo a couple of months later. It was Angie’s idea, not mine or Dessa’s. I promised I’d fix her up if she stopped telling the world about my brother. The funny part is, for better or worse, it’s been Angie and Leo ever since. They made it through two kids, two separations and reconciliations, Leo’s drug rehab, his little flings on the side. They’re an institution by now, Leo and Angie. But before that—for a month or so, way the hell back—it was Angie and my brother, hot and heavy. Hard to imagine now that it ever even happened—that it ever could have happened. It was one of life’s stranger twists, I guess. . . . Not that things didn’t get a whole lot stranger after that. Not that, by the fall of 1969, the whole fucking world wasn’t falling apart, anyway.
My Lai, the antiwar protests, the cops gunning down the Panthers. And then, one morning, a headline that hit closer to home. “Look at this, Birdsey!” Leo said, bursting into our room. He was waving a Hartford Courant in my face like a victory flag. “Jesus Christ! Look!”
COUPLE INDICTED FOR CHILD PORNOGRAPHY; POLICE RAID YIELDS FILMS, PHOTOS
It was November by then, I think—two or three months after Leo and I had lied to the state cops about Ralph. Accompanying the newspaper article was a picture of Dell Weeks and his wheelchair-bound wife entering the same state police barracks where Leo and I had been. Originally under surveillance for suspected drug trafficking, the paper said, the Weekses’ Bickel Road home had been searched in September by state police, who had unexpectedly come upon an extensive cache of child pornography. Confiscated materials included equipment for production and distribution as well as hundreds of obscene photographs and amateur eight-millimeter films featuring minors as subjects. A twenty-year-old resident of the Weekses’ home, unrelated to the accused, had turned state’s evidence in the continuing investigation. The witness, whose name was being withheld, was reportedly the subject of many of the confiscated photographs and films, the earliest dating back ten years.
“God, just think, Birdsey. We worked all summer long with those two slimeballs,” Leo said. “We were inside their house, for Christ’s sake.”
Ten years, I thought. Which meant it would have started when Ralph was ten years old. Joseph Monk had killed his twin sister, then his mother had folded, then Dell Weeks and his wife had moved in for the kill. They’d taken him in, fed him, and used him for ten years—had killed him every time the camera rolled, every time the shutter blinked.
“Jesus, Birdsey. You know what?” Leo said. “If it wasn’t for the two of us, the cops would have never even gone into that scummy house. You know what we did? I’ll tell you what. We performed a public service, that’s what. We did society a favor. They should give us an award or something.”
On the evening of December 1, 1969, Leo and I and a couple dozen other guys from our dorm parked ourselves in front of the lounge TV and watched the first U.S. draft lottery since 1942. It was prime-time entertainment that night: some fat-assed Selective Service guy down in Washington reaching into a revolving drum and yanking out, birth date by birth date, the fates of all American guys, ages nineteen to twenty-six. Selective Service estimated that the men whose birthdays were among the first 120 or so pulled from the drum would get their “greetings” from Tricky Dick and go to war.
“Life is absurd!” my philosophy professor had declared that same morning in a lecture hall of two hundred sleepy students. “That was the conclusion of Sartre and Camus and the other existentialists living through the insanity of war-torn, bombed-out Europe.” But at least World War II had had clearly defined battlefields, heroes and villains—villagers who didn’t switch their allegiance at nightfall and then back again in the morning. Ray and his fellow servicemen had entered their war convinced that they were doing the right thing. That we were the good guys. Not us, though. Not in 1969 with Nixon in charge, and the death tolls mounting, and My Lai splattered all over the full-color pages of Life magazine.
Fat Ass reached into that drum 366 times, counting leap year, randomly determining which of our birthdays would send us off to active duty once our student deferments were up and which birthdays would save us from that waste of a war. Someone in the dorm had taken up a collection and we’d tapped a keg. By the time the lottery was over that night, both the guys who were celebrating and the ones who were drowning their sorrows had used the occasion to get shit-faced drunk. Leo was home free at number 266. Born at 12:03 A.M. on January 1, I was in even better shape: number 305. But my brother, born six minutes before me, at 11:57 P.M. on December 31, had drawn number 100. He and his academic probation were bobbing around in the pool most likely to be called to active duty—safe only as long as his 2-S student deferment remained intact. I fell drunk into bed that night, feeling both relieved and guilty, both saved and doomed.
Things always went my way, Thomas told me the next day in Leo’s and my dorm room. They had gone my way since the day we were born.
The days we were born, I thought, but didn’t say. We’d been born six minutes apart on different days. In two different years, even.
The deck had always been stacked in my favor, Thomas said, exasperated. He lit another cigarette. He smoked now—Trues. He’d begun smoking after Angie gave him the hook. He bummed Deitz’s at first—Deitz smoked like a chimney—and then he’d started buying his own. Except Thomas didn’t smoke like a guy—didn’t hold the cigarette in like he was hoarding it, the way most guys do. Thomas held it pointing up and out, like a European. Like a flit. He still smokes that way, as a matter of fact. After all these years. I still hate to see the way my brother smokes.
“Never mind whether or not the deck’s stacked,” I told him. “If your grades are okay, you have a three-year reprieve. In three years, this fucking war’ll probably be over. You been studying? You been going to class? How are your grades?”
Instead of answering me directly, he recycled the same excuses he’d used the year before: his dorm was too hot, he couldn’t concentrate, his teachers asked trick questions because they were out to get him personally.
During midyear exams, Thomas withdrew himself from school.
“What do you mean, you withdrew?” I screamed into the phone when he called me. “Are you nuts or something? Are you crazy?” He was back home in Three Rivers by then—had packed and left campus without even telling me. “Why don’t you just go and fucking enlist, Thomas?” I shouted. “Why don’t you just volunteer to go over there and get blown up?”
He was a nervous wreck all through the holidays, I remember. He tried calling
Angie so many times that her father threatened to notify the police. He hadn’t bought anyone any Christmas presents—not even anything for Ma—which was really weird. Which wasn’t like him at all. Thomas had always been a big Christmas guy, generous to the point where you’d open up your present and be embarrassed about what you’d gotten him. But that Christmas, nothing. Not even for Ma. He burst out crying right in the middle of opening his presents, I remember. Started talking about what a bad person he was and how by Christmas of the following year, he probably wouldn’t even be alive and didn’t deserve to be. Then Ma was crying. Ray got so disgusted with the both of them that he got up and walked out—didn’t come back until late afternoon. Ho ho ho. Happy Holidays at the Birdsey house. It was typical.
On Thomas’s birthday a week later, Ma made him a cake. Dessa and I were going out for New Year’s Eve, so we sang “Happy Birthday” early—Ma, Dessa, and me. Ray wouldn’t come away from the TV. He hadn’t spoken to anybody for that whole week. Thomas stood fidgeting in front of his twenty candles. Then, when the singing stopped, instead of blowing them out, he picked them up one by one and shoved the lit ends into the frosting. The three of us just stood there, watching him, speechless. And when he’d extinguished the last candle—when the room was hazy with smoke and burnt sugar—Ma started singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” As if everything was normal. As if everything was what Ma liked to call “hunky-dory.” That was the night Dessa told me about Thomas and her sister: all that Lives of the Martyred Saints bullshit—Thomas lying there, getting off on all that ripped and burned flesh, all that suffering. Happy New Year, folks! Happy 1970! Welcome to a brand-new decade!
In mid-January, I went back to school and Thomas stayed home. Stayed up till all hours, Ma said, and then slept all day long as if he was working the night shift, same as Ray. She was trying as hard as she could to keep Ray from flying off the handle, Ma told me, but he was getting fed up. It could be months before the draft board called up Thomas, Ray said; he should be out there looking for a job instead of goofing off. He was lazy and irresponsible. The Army would knock that out of him, quick.