Thumbsucker

by Walter Kirn

  Because of a white-water rafting trip to Oregon, Perry Lyman couldn’t perform the hypnosis right away. Each morning during my week of waiting, Mike used a pen with purple ink to print his initials, MFC—Michael Forrest Cobb—on the pad of my right thumb. He gripped my wrist to steady my hand, and my fingers went numb. At night he checked for fadedness and smearing. He promised me a portable TV if I managed to go a whole month, but I knew from experience he’d forget the deal if I succeeded in keeping up my end of it. He had a way of forgetting the bargains we struck.

  “You swear?” I said the second night, after Mike inspected my thumb. “You swear it won’t be like the Honda and the chin-ups?” Two years ago, Mike had promised me a dirt bike if I won the President’s Physical Fitness certificate. I’d missed the award by two chin-ups and gotten nothing, a bitter reminder that a deal’s a deal.

  “What Honda? When?” Mike said.

  I couldn’t believe this. “I want you to buy that TV tomorrow morning and keep it in its box with the receipt.”

  One afternoon Rebecca startled me by asking what the writing on my thumb was. She had a chest cold and was at her house, wrapped in an electric blanket. She shared her codeine cough syrup with me. Her wet brown eyes looked drugged and trusting, and for a light-headed moment or two I considered telling her the truth. I felt the confession slowly rising inside me like a bubble in honey.

  Then I panicked.

  “MFC,” I said. “ ‘Motherfucking cocksucker.’ ”

  Tears came into Rebecca’s staring eyes. Her line on me had always been that I was afraid of mature conversation, unwilling to share my fears and weaknesses. She assured me that doing this would bring us closer, but I noticed that she expected me to go first.

  “Why do you have to act so tough?” she said. “Have I done something to hurt you? Don’t you trust me? What’s the point of spending time together if it doesn’t lead to openness?”

  “Motherfucking cocksucker,” I said.

  I shut my eyes and let my shoulders fall as music featuring harp, piano, and birdsong drifted from the tape player on Perry Lyman’s desk. His voice was low and smooth. “Safety surrounds you. Peace pervades your being. Security such as you’ve never known descends.” He circled me as he spoke, stirring currents in the Lysoled air. The sticky, peeling sound of his crepe-soled shoes made me wonder how often he mopped his floors.

  “Imagine yourself on a path,” he said after a few more minutes of warm-up. “You’re deep in the forest. You glimpse a clearing. In its center, a shaft of yellow light shines down, illuminating a wild animal.”

  I wondered if I was “under” and concluded that if I could be wondering this then I wasn’t. Perry Lyman’s voice, annoyingly smooth and aware of its own resonance, kept on about the animal, calling it my “power animal” and urging me to see it in detail. Eventually, I managed to picture a deer. Seen straight on and eye-to-eye, it had the face of Ned Lesser, the diaper boy, but when it looked away it was a deer again.

  “When you feel like sucking your thumb,” said Perry Lyman, “call your power animal for help. It will comfort you and give you strength. Call it to you now.”

  “Come here,” I whispered.

  “Do it in your mind.”

  I did it in my mind.

  When I got up from the chair, I was surprised at how limp and warm my legs felt. I remembered reading an article about a professional hockey team that had been hypnotized before a play-off game. I asked Perry Lyman if he used self-hypnosis to help himself win races.

  “In fact, I do. I find it sharpens me.”

  “What’s your power animal?” I said.

  Perry Lyman glanced at the poster above his desk, a poster from the Sierra Club.

  “That’s personal.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just not the same, I’m afraid, if other people know.”

  The poster showed a pack of running wolves.

  When people try to quit things, other things take their places. A woman stops smoking and starts inhaling pizza. A man cuts out doughnuts and heads off to Las Vegas. After Perry Lyman hypnotized me, my desire to suck just drained away, and so did all the pleasure. My thumb became a neutral object, like the end of a broomstick in my mouth.

  “What’s the despairing look?” Mike asked me one morning, sitting down to bran flakes after his bike ride. His face was red and sweaty and invigorated. “You wear a long face, it’ll end up wearing you.”

  “Stop quoting Woody Wolff.”

  “That one was mine.”

  All I could think about was Rebecca. Suddenly, with leechlike intensity, I had to be around her all the time. As soon as her father’s car drove off each morning, I hurried to her porch and rang the doorbell, loaded down with field guides and binoculars. When I sensed her interest in bird-watching decreasing, I started buying the movie magazines I’d seen her reading with her older sister. Day after day, I barraged Rebecca with Hollywood trivia questions and fun facts.

  “What’s Farrah Fawcett’s beauty secret?”

  “Do we?”

  “She conditions her hair with egg whites.”

  “I said ‘Do we?’ ”

  “Do we what, Rebecca?”

  “Do we care?”

  I watched Rebecca grow to despise me. My shining moment with her—ordering her to remove her shirt and facing her down, bare-chested, until she did—seemed impossible to duplicate now that I cared so deeply about her opinion of me. My attentions took on a doomed and ingrown quality. I would insult myself in front of her, saying I was stupid, short, deformed, and then resent her for not defending me. When I saw how much she pitied wayward movie stars—drug addicts, wife beaters, hotel room wreckers—I began to regret not having confessed my weakness. That would have won her over, I felt sure, but now it was too late.

  One day on her porch, with her father standing behind her, his broad, callused hands on her shoulders, Rebecca said, “Justin, we think you’re bothering me. We think this isn’t a healthy teenage friendship. We want you to stop coming over.”

  “Move it, son.”

  For the last time, I sought solace in my thumb. The deer with the face of the diaper boy appeared, but even after I chased the creature off, I felt nothing—no comfort, no relief. My thumb felt dead and so did my whole body.

  I blamed them all, but especially Perry Lyman. He’d pretended to be my friend but had snatched my soul.

  The course of the Labor Day bike race ran, for part of its last and twenty-fifth mile, through a highway tunnel. The cyclists emerging from darkness made for dramatic snapshots, so spectators liked to gather at one end. I stood with Joel in the barrow ditch on the other side, where no one could see what we were going to do.

  Perry Lyman approached, head down, pedaling with the steady, flowing strokes that usually guaranteed him victory. The hazy dot behind him was Mike. I signaled Joel to raise the poster I’d stapled to a stick, then broke into a trot along the road. I saw Perry Lyman glance over at Joel’s sign and I noticed his front tire start to wobble. That’s when I started howling. Joel howled, too. The howls came out of me like weird black scarves. They scared me. And they rattled Perry Lyman. He turned and flipped me the bird as he passed, a look of disintegration on his face. He couldn’t have guessed what he’d done to deserve this—the Sierra Club wolf pack splattered with bloodred paint and my demented yapping. I knew at that moment that I’d broken his power, just as he had mine. In a photo Audrey took of him emerging from the tunnel, he had the face of a man who knew he’d lose.

  He came in seventh. Mike was first.

  That night at our backyard picnic table, when Joel and Audrey went in to get some knives, I said to Mike, “You owe me a TV set.”

  His hand grazed around in a bowl of salted nuts, pausing for the almonds. He was still lost in the haze of victory, and I knew I could get away with more than usual. In front of him was a foaming-over beer can and a can he hadn’t opened yet. Mike had been having an extra drink with
dinner ever since Reagan had been shot that spring.

  “I knew you’d forget,” I said, reaching for a beer. “I knew you wouldn’t pay up.”

  “Pay up for what?”

  Mike watched me open the beer and start to gulp it. I opened my throat and let the cold pour into me.

  “Easy,” he said. “Slow down. A sip or two.”

  I think we both knew that would be impossible.

  2

  Next I lost my desire for food, my appetite. It happened in late October and took four days. It was as though my mouth were turning against me, my one source of pleasure becoming a dry hole.

  We’d been eating venison all month, trying to empty the chest freezer of game before Mike started filling it back up. We started with the chops, a cut I liked, and worked our way down to the sausages and roasts, which coated my mouth with waxy, rancid fat. I said I thought we should throw the meat away, the first time I’d ever spoken out like this, but Mike said a moral issue was at stake. With another bow-hunting season coming up, he just wouldn’t feel right, he told the family, if last year’s kill and this year’s overlapped.

  “Ah, the ethics of savagery,” said Audrey. Smoke from the roast she’d been cooking all afternoon hung in thin gray layers above her head.

  “Hunting’s the basis of civilization,” Mike said. “Read your anthropology.”

  “I have. While you were out vanquishing Ohio State, your sweetheart was actually attending classes. And the basis of civilization, my dear, is agriculture.”

  Mike bore down hard as he carved the roast and it slid around on its bed of wrinkled carrots. He’d managed to convince me over the years that venison tasted better than beef or pork, even though my own senses told me other wise. This year, however, I wasn’t buying it. I tasted what I tasted, and it disgusted me. I remembered reading an article once that said the muscles of hunted animals produce a fear hormone that cooking doesn’t break down. I wondered how much of this substance was in me now.

  Half the roast remained when we finished dinner. Audrey wrapped it in cling film and in foil and stashed it in the back of the refrigerator next to an open box of baking soda, which meant she didn’t intend to touch it again. “Maybe your folks will take some venison home with them.”

  Mike’s parents were set to arrive the following morning on one of their rare trips west to Minnesota, a state which they considered the frontier. Everybody was on edge about it.

  “My mother thinks deer are precious creatures,” Mike said. “She thinks they have feelings.”

  “So do I,” said Audrey.

  “Human feelings. Not just the primal drives.”

  “And what would those be?”

  “Hunger. Thirst. Lust. Pain.”

  Audrey closed the refrigerator door. “It bothers me that you can tick them off like that.”

  Mike went into the yard after dinner to practice his archery in the fading daylight. His target was a paper bull’s-eye pinned to a stack of straw bales. Joel, who’d never shown interest in the outdoors—unlike me, who’d faked it out of guilt—was allowed to go to a neighbor’s house to play, but Mike demanded that I stay near and watch him. He notched an arrow, drew the string, let fly.

  “I used to have to sneak out to hunt,” he said. “My mother had some idea that it was cruel. What’s cruel is not letting a boy grow into a man because you’ve had a bad experience.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone hit her once. A boyfriend. A smack me and Dad have been paying for all our lives. We snuck out to see a boxing match downtown once and when we got home she’d changed the locks on us.”

  “I’m surprised she let you play football.”

  “Dad drew the line.”

  Mike made a bull’s-eye. Another. I pulled the arrows out.

  “Your mother was wrong about civilization,” he said. “Civilization is a perfect lung shot.”

  Mike’s parents pulled in around lunchtime the next day in their new Winnebago motor home, the Horizoneer. Mike had asked them to visit at Thanksgiving, when it wouldn’t interrupt his hunting, but Grandma had insisted on seeing Joel and me before the cold weather set in. She got her way. From what I’d witnessed of Mike’s dealings with her, he’d never really been a match for her. At Christmas he sent her the presents that she asked for, luxury items like jewelry and crystal, then settled for souvenir coffee mugs in return. And though she called him home to Buffalo whenever she caught the flu or had a mole removed, she only came here when she was passing through anyway.

  I felt anxious as my grandparents parked the camper. The last time I’d seen them was a couple of years ago at a family reunion out east, but all I could remember of the event was a sack race through a muddy field. Still, I told them I missed them when I hugged them. Grandma Cobb’s body felt hard and armored, as if her underwear were lined with metal, while Grandpa’s felt pulpy, like a bruised banana. Behind a pair of dandruff-speckled bifocals his hazel eyes were mild and remote and I immediately liked him more than her.

  “Let me get your bags,” Mike said. Already he sounded exhausted by the visit.

  “We’re staying in the Horizoneer,” said Grandma. “All we need is a long extension cord.”

  “We made up the guest room,” Mike said.

  “We like our motor home.”

  Grandpa brought a brown case into the house and set it on the kitchen counter next to a package of thawing venison sausage that Audrey planned to make into spaghetti sauce. Inside the case, held by velvet straps that buttoned, were a silver cocktail shaker, a flask, four glasses, a jigger, and some swizzle sticks. “Long dry trip,” he said, and smacked his lips, which were surprisingly juicy for his age. He mixed a double-shot Manhattan for Grandma and waited until she’d tasted it and nodded before making drinks for Audrey and himself. His hands, I noticed, were fat and padded, the fingers locked in a clawlike curl. They matched his thick, tufted eyebrows and pitted red nose.

  Audrey browned sausage and diced tomatoes as Grandma brought Mike up-to-date about our relatives. My aunts’ and uncles’ names were unfamiliar to me, their life situations hard to picture, and hearing about them made me feel lonesome. When Mike left home for college, he’d told me once, he’d put his family behind him, where it belonged. He said he expected me to do the same someday.

  “Wendy’s back with the born-agains,” said Grandma. “They practically hold her hostage in that church. She feels guilty about her miscarriages or something, but that’s no reason to sacrifice her youth.”

  “Mom,” said Mike, “my God. The kids.”

  “And Rupert, your little nephew you’ve never seen, is still having tests. Poor baby’s almost bald now. They’re treating him at St. Joseph’s, a Catholic place.”

  “Catholic hospitals bother you?” Mike said.

  “You didn’t grow up with an Irish mother,” said Grandma.

  “You’re an Irish mother.”

  “Once removed.”

  “Removed by what?”

  “Americanization.”

  Grandma turned from Mike and smiled at Joel, her makeup cracking and flaking around her mouth. Purple lipstick smeared her capped front teeth. “How nice to see you, dear. It’s such a treat. I’d tell you you’ve grown, but I really wouldn’t know.”

  Grandpa opened his flask and freshened his drink, making a show of measuring precisely but adding an extra splash at the end. A stillness came over the kitchen, a lull, as if a storm had cut the power off and left us sitting together in the gloom.

  “Imagine,” said Audrey, “a camper with a shower. Doesn’t that sound cozy to you, Mike?”

  Mike didn’t respond; he was gazing out the window. Opening day was the day after tomorrow and the forecast was iffy, with a chance of snow. He had on his autumn face, calm and sorrowful.

  “What’s that smell?” said Grandma. “Something stinks.”

  “Tell Audrey about the Horizoneer,” said Grandpa.

  “I will in a minute. What’s that awful stenc
h?”

  Mike rose from the table. “I’ve got a store to run. It’s the busy season. Shotguns. Licenses. I can’t afford to be away all day.”

  “It’s deer meat,” said Grandma. “You’re making me eat deer meat.”

  Mike left the kitchen and Audrey said, “I’m sorry. I don’t like venison, either.”

  “No one does.” Grandma opened a silver cigarette case and drew out a Vantage. Grandpa flicked a lighter. He was her permanent bartender, her servant.

  “So this is your life,” said Grandma. “Does he make money?”

  “He’s building a business,” said Audrey. “It takes time. I could microwave something for you. Some lasagna?”

  “Not if it’s been in the same refrigerator. Max, get our luggage from the motor home. I want to sleep in the house. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Your bunk’s all made up. Your sheets. Your special pillow.”

  “I want to be near my grandkids,” Grandma said. “While you’re out there, fetch me a potpie.”

  Grandpa drank up and went out to do his errand, leaving his minibar open on the counter. From the outside it looked like a briefcase, inconspicuous, but the inner compartments were lined with crushed gold velvet. I wanted to curl up inside it and pull it shut.

  Grandma got sick to her stomach the next day while showing slides to Joel and me. Mike was in the woods preparing his hunting blind, Audrey was at the county hospital working her emergency room shift, and Grandpa was under the Horizoneer draining and replacing the antifreeze.

  “That’s your cousin Brent,” said Grandma. “He wins all his track meets. He’ll do well. He’s handsome.”

  “How old is he?” Joel said.

  “Exactly Justin’s age.”

  “He looks older,” Joel said.

  “It’s his dress sense,” Grandma said. “Here he is at the Park Club, on the cabin cruiser. That boy with him is the son of Homer Morse, the biggest wholesale grocer in Buffalo.”

  The slides annoyed me and I couldn’t sit still. My cousins, two boys and two girls, looked spoiled and cruel, the sort of kids who can see into a future of Ivy League educations, good jobs, big houses. The boys had stylish, shaggy haircuts and movie-star suntans that showed off their slim builds. The girls wore pink polo shirts with the collars turned up and had professionally highlighted blond hair clipped into place with jeweled barrettes. They belonged to a world of country clubs and beach parties that might have been my world if Mike had stayed in Buffalo, where the Cobb family had a street named after it and Grandpa, an ad salesman for the morning newspaper, had been a vice-president of the Rotary.