Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  Along another wall were shelves filled with his camera equipment—lenses, portable lights, tins of film. He worked for the newspaper. He’d also placed a few pictures with magazines and newspapers in New York City. He had always taken the family photos—endlessly rearranging people and backdrops until everyone lost patience and dispersed. The money from his paper route he used to buy sophisticated cameras and lenses.

  He suspected his stamp collection, his photography, had a lot to do with his not making junior varsity football his freshman year. Too small, Coach Clancy said. Try again when he reached his growth. Three years later he was still short and skinny, with that ox of a younger brother to rub it in all the time. Coach Clancy had a huge chest and narrow hips. Destined for lower back pain in late middle age. Veins stood out on his red face. “Yall seniors is good students, but that’s about it. It’s all most of you’uns can do to stand up on two feet. Tatro over there, he slouches around here all doubled over like a dog trying to hump a football.” Everybody cracked up. They’d been calling him the Ball Banger ever since. That was their idea of a good joke. Ha ha. Coach Clancy was wrong, though: Raymond wasn’t a good student. An “underachiever,” the guidance counselor called him. Did well on tests but had lousy grades.

  Well, it figured. Jed got cheered for smashing heads. Him, he got called names for trying to stay out of the way and mind his own business. He sometimes thought he and Jed, by unspoken agreement, had laid claims to noncompeting areas. In any physical confrontation, Jed could beat him to a pulp, so he learned to fight with his tongue, mocking people, usually without their knowing it. Sometimes he felt like a gnat buzzing around a lion, just out of reach of its paws, driving it to distraction. But Jed had certainly claimed the more prestigious area in terms of living in Newland. Raymond couldn’t help but be aware of the pride in his parents’ eyes when their neighbors came over and said, “Some boy, your Jed. Did you see that tackle on the two-yard line against Chattanooga?” His parents had fifty-yard-line seats at the stadium for home games and drove all over the state to away games. They were outraged when Raymond began playing chess on Friday nights. “Your own brother, and you won’t even go see him!” his mother shrieked.

  “I see him all the time,” Raymond pointed out. “Much more than I want to.” Recently they’d given up, gazing at him glumly as they left the house with their cushions, blanket, and thermos.

  Raymond sometimes imagined the town gathered in the football stadium while he stood on the fifty-yard line and flipped through Natural History magazine showing his full-color spread on Appalachian wild flowers. Sally Prince would bound out and lead the crowd in spelling out “Trillium.” Everyone would roar with admiration …

  Alongside his bed hung several of his favorite pictures—the weathered faces and hands of some people in the area of Kentucky his father came from. One picture, taken from the files of the newspaper office, was of an elephant hanging by its neck from a crane. In 1922 an elephant came to town with the circus. During the parade she trampled to death a boy who was pelting her with watermelon rind. The town tried the elephant, found her guilty, and lynched her. Raymond lay on his bed studying this picture. A crowd of townspeople howled in the foreground. Their faces were distorted with—what? Cruelty? Righteousness? Whatever it was, it made him uneasy. A contact at one of the New York City magazines had offered him a job in a print shop upon graduation from high school. Every time he thought about moving to New York, he got homesick. How could he possibly leave everything and everyone familiar to him? He couldn’t. It was out of the question. But at odd moments, he found himself gazing at that dangling elephant.

  Chapter Two

  The Sadie Hawkins Day Dance

  The gym was decorated with posters of Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae, of hound dogs and stills and outhouses with half-moon holes in the doors. The boys were wearing bib overalls with no shirts, straw hats. Their feet were bare, and some carried jugs and chewed on pieces of straw. The girls wore tight short shorts with straw sticking out of the pockets, halter tops, no shoes. They’d rouged their cheeks and drawn freckles with eyebrow pencil. It was hard to tell one person from another. Except that Emily had no difficulty picking out Sally. She sat, smiling, on Jed’s back as he did pushups. A crowd of admirers counted: “… thirty-four, thirty-five …”

  “Do you see what your gorgeous brother is up to?” she asked Raymond, who sat beside her on the bleachers gazing down at the gym floor.

  “Yeah. Isn’t he wonderful? I just can’t figure out how he’s become such an exhibitionist. He used to be a shy little punk. Remember? He could hardly open his mouth without blushing and ducking his head.” Raymond demonstrated. Emily laughed.

  They sat in silence. The athletes and the girls in the social clubs were monopolizing the area in front of the bandstand. They barn-danced to the country music being played by men in white Western suits, string ties, and rhinestone-studded shirts, cowboy hats and boots.

  Sally looked into the bleachers and saw Emily and Raymond. She sighed. Poor Emily. She just didn’t know how to have fun. And Raymond … well, Raymond was hopeless, was all. He didn’t even try. There he sat in his long-sleeved rayon shirt. You’d never know one of the best dressers in the whole school was his brother.

  She looked around the gym. She loved organizing parties and watching her friends enjoy them. Maybe that was why Emily and Raymond bothered her. They reminded her of the little match girl in the fairy tale who stood in the snow, dressed in rags, and watched the people in the restaurant laughing and eating. But they didn’t have to stay out in the cold. They chose to. Stubborn.

  “Don’t look now, but we’re being watched,” Sally murmured in Jed’s ear as he crushed her to his chest and swung her around.

  Jed looked up and moaned, “Lord, they look like chaperones.” He whirled her again and yelped like a beaten dog. He felt good! He loved the way his body moved—dancing, doing pushups, playing ball. He knew that Raymond had contempt for these things, but to hell with Raymond.

  “Shoot boys, this is living, ain’t it?” he yelled in an exaggerated hillbilly accent to Bobby.

  “Lord, you’d better know it!” Bobby called back. “Hell, I ain’t had this much fun since my hound dog treed a skunk!” “God, I’m freezing,” Emily muttered. “You ought to be, in that handkerchief,” Raymond replied, gesturing to her bandanna halter. He put his arm around her—under the pretense of warming her, but actually because he found her touching. She tried hard to participate in this crap. He found it difficult to believe she could want to. She was dressed like the other girls, but she couldn’t carry it off. She looked white and cold and self-conscious.

  He had already accepted that he would never be “one of the boys,” with a case of Bud in his trunk and a pack of Trojan Enz in his glove compartment. He was beginning to take pride in it. Last fall he’d gone hunting with Jed and two of his dumb football friends, Hank and Bobby. Raymond wanted to do a photo-series on hunting. Hank’s family had a hunting shack on the side of Buck Mountain. Their Jeep lurched along a rutted dirt track for miles. The shack consisted of a ten-by-ten room, lean-to kitchen, and attached latrine. Bunks along the wall, chairs and table, wood stove.

  The first night they sat around the table drinking Bud and playing stud poker and discussing who had done what to which of their female classmates.

  “Sure Betty will blow you,” Jed assured Hank. “She loves it. Just give her a call.”

  “She loves to blow you maybe. That don’t mean she’d blow me.”

  “Betty don’t love to blow me. She loves to blow, period. You call her and see if that ain’t so.”

  Once they were drunk, they rolled outside with their pistols and conducted target practice by the full moon, howling with laughter as bullets ricocheted through the forest

  When they stumbled back in, Raymond was feigning sleep in his bunk. After more beer and more poker, Hank took off his belt, and they used it to measure their erections.

  “Christ,” Bobby
muttered, “you could use that damn thing for a crutch, Tatro.” They collapsed on the table with laughter.

  “Jesus, you’re a goddam homo, Bobby!” Hank yelled.

  Raymond fell authentically asleep. Sometime later he woke up and saw the three still at the table. Hank and Bobby were smoking Pall Malls, holding them between thumb and forefinger. They were looking at each other, smiling and nodding, as they slowly lowered the cigarettes, burning tips first, toward their forearms. Repeatedly they glanced back and forth from the burning tips to each other’s eyes. Raymond watched, fascinated, as the tips got closer and closer to flesh, each waiting for the other to back out

  Hairs on each forearm flared and shriveled. Raymond felt his stomach turn as both tips burned into both forearms. Neither Hank nor Bobby made a sound or ceased to smile as he ground out his cigarette in his arm. The odor of seared flesh filled the cabin. Hank and Bobby laughed and shook hands.

  Raymond had been here before—out at the lake once with some boys from school. They dove from a cliff into an impossibly small pool with submerged boulders around its edges. As more and more beer was consumed, they climbed higher and higher up the cliff. Raymond squatted to one side, watching as one boy after another made his dive and surfaced in one piece. He couldn’t remember what had finally stopped them.

  Throughout junior high and high school he was witness to dozens of fights in response to real or fabricated insults, which were preceded by an elaborate round of challenge and rebuttal, conducted by friends of the combatants, culminating in the setting of a time and a place for the fight Once he himself had been swept into this ritual. He’d been standing outside the junior high doorway chatting with friends. Louanne Little slunk by in a full skirt with many crinolines, a cinch belt, and a tight short-sleeved angora sweater that revealed massive tits at a time when most girls still wore slips. Raymond had been impressed, and a little bit awed; also somewhat frightened. A friend muttered something about how “trashy” she was. Her boyfriend Clyde stalked up in his black leather motorcycle cap and jacket and stomping boots and asked, “Hey, you guys seen Louanne?”

  They pointed in the direction of her departure. As Clyde stomped off, Raymond opened the lid to the trash can, peered into it, and called, “Louanne honey, you down there?” His friends killed themselves laughing. But Clyde heard too. He turned around glaring. Raymond released the lid and gave him a sickly smile. All day he received messages via Clyde’s minions that he was to meet him at the bus stop after school. All day he sent messages back that he had a dentist appointment, was sorry about the misunderstanding, etc. As he sneaked out the side door after school, Clyde was waiting for him. A circle of heckling bystanders rapidly closed around them.

  “Look, Clyde, I’m sorry. I was just trying to be funny. But I can see it wasn’t funny. It was just mean. And untrue.” Clyde had his fists up and was circling him. “Let’s shake,” Raymond suggested with a weak smile, holding out his hand. “Get your hands up, fairy punk.”

  Raymond felt as though he were in a madhouse. A switch had been thrown, and the charge of electricity had to complete its circuit. There was no way out. The crowd was howling words of encouragement, taunts, and jeers. He lifted his fists.

  “Oh come on, Clyde, let’s forget it,” he pleaded, as Clyde’s fist buried itself in his stomach. He doubled over.

  As he straightened up and tried to catch his breath, he gasped. “OK, I give up. You win, Clyde.” A blow to the side of his head felled him. But it also made him really angry. He leaped up and hurled himself at Clyde, his fists flailing, David confronting Goliath.

  A couple of minutes later someone yelled that the principal was on his way. The crowd fled in all directions. Clyde and Raymond snarled, then shook hands hastily. Raymond dragged himself home with bloodied mouth, swelling eyes, and aching knuckles.

  Jed, Bobby, Hank, and Raymond stalked through the autumn leaves. Raymond toted his camera and attachments. He shot pictures while the others shot birds and rabbits and looked for deer. They emerged into a field, tromped across it, and came to a small house. Nearby was a pen. A man in overalls sat on the fence looking down into the pen. It contained two huge pigs. They were grunting furiously and circling each other.

  “Howdy,” Jed said.

  “Howdy,” the farmer replied. They leaned on the fence, watching the boar trying to mount the sow.

  After a while Jed said with a grin, “Hell, I’d a been on her and off again three times by now.” Everyone but the farmer chuckled.

  He looked Jed up and down and drawled, “I reckon I oughta hire you to breed her instead.”

  They hit a dirt road and followed it, leaving the forest behind. At a crossroads was a general store. Out front, on scales, hung a deer carcass. Blood dripped onto the dirt, languid flies buzzed. Half a dozen pickup trucks were parked nearby, a couple with does tied to their roofs. A dozen unshaven men in overalls and undershirts and work shoes stood by the scales drinking clear liquid from Mason jars. A poster on the side of the store was entitled Doe Pool, and underneath were names and numbers. In a cage next to the scale was a moth-eaten black bear. One man kept poking his rifle barrel through the wire mesh. The bear swatted at it and shrank up against the far side. The man would move around to the bear’s new location and poke her again, grinning and looking to the others for approval.

  Jed, Hank, and Bobby were soon passing the jars back and forth, talking and laughing. Raymond stood to one side, trying to be unobtrusive about snapping pictures. He was aware he was using his camera as an excuse not to join in. Because he couldn’t. He got drunk on one beer. He always lost at poker. He choked when he tried to smoke. He hadn’t shot a gun since he used to go mistletoe shooting at Christmas. Once his father had taken him and Jed hunting. They very carefully flushed a big buck in his direction. He raised his rifle, trained it on the buck. He was a pretty good shot from years of target practice on beer cans in the fields behind the Princes’ house. There was no way he could miss. But when the moment came to squeeze the trigger, he didn’t.

  “What’s the point?” he asked as his father and Jed came yelling toward him. “If we were starving, I could see it, but we’re not.” They stared.

  “I tell you the truth,” Jed was saying, “when I get a buck in my sights and am getting ready to pull that trigger, I just love that animal. I really do. It’s like I’m a part of it, and it’s a part of me.” What is wrong with me? Raymond wondered as he glanced at the rifle barrels glinting in the sun, and at the patches of gore drying in the dust.

  As Raymond and Emily stood up to dance, the music stopped. The president of the Girls’ Union, which was sponsoring the dance, appeared before the microphone. “Well, I guess this is the moment we’ve all been waiting for!” she shouted. “Now, I want all the boys over on my right, and all the girls on my left” Chaos, as the room rearranged itself. She shrieked over the din, “Now, the boys will get them a thirty-second head start … and the last boy to get caught and brought back here wins a prize! So put on your track shoes, boys. And get set. And—go!” Boys raced into the halls, up into the bleachers, into the dressing rooms, searching for hiding places like ants under an overturned stone.

  “See you,” Emily called to Raymond as he sauntered away, torn between wanting to participate for Emily’s sake and thinking it was dumb.

  “All right, girls!” screamed the president. “Go get ’em!”

  The gym floor erupted into squeals and giggles as girls charged off in all directions. Sally flew up the bleacher steps two at a time, grabbed a post with one hand and swung around it, raced down the aisle, jumped and grabbed Jed around the neck and shoulders from behind. He staggered and fell, and they lay on the floor giggling and panting.

  Emily spotted Raymond in the hall, standing with one hand on his hip, looking into the trophy case. Short and skinny and acned, the only boy not in overalls. She sauntered over, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Gotcha.” They gazed into the trophy case at the dozens of gold-plated me
n bearing aloft balls of different sizes, bats, javelins. There were real balls, autographed and dated. Photos of championship teams.

  After the dance they sat in his father’s car in Emily’s driveway, positioned so that a magnolia tree shielded them from the house, though this precaution was hardly necessary since they sat on opposite sides of the seat. Raymond knew what was expected of him: He should slide across, wrap Emily in his arms, cover her face with wet kisses, rummage around with his hands until she called him off. It was insulting not to at least try. But he wasn’t interested. Emily was like a sister. Maybe it was the incest taboo? The ritual of courtship. He just couldn’t see it. All the maneuvering, knowing that in the end you’d still have to jerk yourself off when you got home. The girl would be scared of wrecking her reputation, or of getting pregnant. Wayne had maybe ruined him for this game. That had been so straightforward. Each had needs the other could fulfill—for talk, tenderness, and ejaculation, in approximately that order. The idea of backseat struggles with some confused girl left him cold.

  Emily regarded him from the corner of her eye, hoping he wasn’t about to pounce, as he did every now and then. They’d spent some time in the past kissing, without fervor. What was the point? They were friends. Why not leave it at that? But boys seemed to feel they had to prove something or other. Emily pretended to respond so as not to hurt their feelings.

  Raymond drew a deep breath and scooted dutifully across the seat. Gingerly he took Emily in his arms. He pressed his mouth to hers.

  Emily trembled all over trying to conceal revulsion. Probably she was frigid. Poor Raymond. She remembered their first kiss—during Spin the Bottle in seventh grade, behind the furnace in someone’s basement. She had been a wreck trying to decide whether to moisten her lips with her tongue as they walked back there. Where did the noses go? Where did people put their hands? Should she close her eyes? Now she knew none of this made much difference—it was still awkward and pointless.