Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  “Everybody’s crazy,” Don said. “What you got to do is look at what made them crazy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I have this feeling Ross was crazy when he was born.”

  “There you got it totally wrong, Tony. Ross is a deep-down good person who got derailed for doing something that wasn’t his fault.”

  I’d never seen Don spark like that, like I’d gone and said something that offended him. But I wasn’t letting go—I guess I was pissed at being dragged out here to go fishing in the middle of the winter. I guess I was hating all of this stuff.

  “What do you mean, derailed?” I said.

  Don looked down in the bottom of the boat, where there was water. We’d bailed some before coming out—but not completely.

  “I mean thrown off track,” he said. “I mean, like somebody came round and lifted him up and tossed him in a ditch.”

  “Oh,” I said. I kept tugging on my line, not that there was any point to it, but it was something to do. The water was this oily gray color.

  “Ever hear of The Delta Hut?” Don asked me. He was sitting in the middle of the boat, fooling with the bait. “Nah,” he said, “you wouldn’t have.”

  I hadn’t, either.

  “Well, it was some fine restaurant,” he said. “Ross is one fine cook. All sorts of your famous people ate there—movie stars, politicians. There was this register in front where you could sign, and you wouldn’t believe some of the names that were in that book. Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye. Dale Evans.”

  I waited for him to go on, but he just sat there threading the bait on his hook like it was some kind of sewing job. Monica wasn’t paying us any attention—she was concentrating on her line that fed out into the water. I don’t think she wanted to listen to all this.

  “So this restaurant,” I said.

  “Well,” Don said, “he was set up. Bunch of college kids from New York City, do-gooders—came down on a bus. Got all hepped up about things. Help the Negroes, that sort of stuff. Lord knows how they found The Delta Hut, but they did. Decided to walk all over Ross in the name of so-called civil rights.”

  Monica wasn’t looking at her dad, but she wasn’t looking at me either. I’d really wandered into it this time.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said. I remembered Verbena’s stories about Carlos in Alabama, how he thought he could make everything better. I remembered those water moccasins Monica’s brother tried to shoot with a shotgun in this very lake. I don’t know why I remembered those two things together like that, but I did.

  “Well,” Don said. “What do you expect? There was this ugly scene. Everybody knows it was ugly—Ross knows it was ugly, he’ll be the first person to tell you. But he was set up for it. Now you tell me—what was a man like him supposed to do, a couple of colored boys from up North trying to bust their way into his place to get dinner? See—The Delta Hut wasn’t exactly on Main Street. It was this place for people who knew about it, not for everybody. It wasn’t advertising itself, it wasn’t throwing itself in the face of the Negroes.”

  Don was really going at his bait, threading it on that hook. There wasn’t too much left of it. “I’m not prejudiced,” he said. “You know me, so you know I’m not prejudiced. I’m just telling you this so you can see Ross’s point of view. Everybody always hears the Negroes’ point of view, and I’ll be the first to admit they have a right to their own point of view, but nobody ever hears Ross’s point of view. His point of view just got censored out of all the books, no different than what they do in Communist countries.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What did they do?” It was starting to drizzle, the way a cloudy day can shade into this fine rain without your hardly noticing it. And in fact Monica and Don didn’t seem to be noticing it. But I could tell we were going to have full-fledged rain out there.

  “Those fellows,” Don said, “went in there looking to get beat up. That’s my opinion. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened for sure, and there’re fifty different stories, depending. But if you ask me what’s my opinion, that’s it.”

  “You’re telling me he went and beat up some black guys who wanted to eat at his restaurant?” I said.

  The cold was making us all look pretty miserable out on that water. Don especially looked pretty miserable. He gave up trying to get that bait on the hook. He threw it down on the floor of the boat and just sat there. We all could tell now how it was starting to rain.

  “You have to understand,” he told me. “This was 1964. You weren’t even born in 1964.”

  “Well,” I said, “just barely.”

  “Look,” Don said, “what I’m saying is, here’s this man minding his own business. He’s not hurting anybody. And then they make a big case out of it—this bunch of Jews from New York. Lawyers volunteering their time to help the blacks. They go and back him into a corner so he looks like some kind of monster and…”

  “I think,” Monica said, “I’ve got a fish.”

  Don looked over the side of the boat at where she was tugging her line. The rain was stinging into the water. “You got a fish all right,” Don said. “You got a big one.”

  I don’t know why I’m telling all this. I don’t know why we were even talking about it out there. It’s got nothing to do with fishing. It’s got nothing to do with sitting around out there in the freezing cold and rain, waiting for something to happen and then nothing—except, somebody, maybe it was Ross, started shooting off a gun in the distance. Drunk and shooting at tin cans, I guess. We were out there maybe two hours and caught two little fish whose names I forget, and which we threw back in, and Monica’s catfish, which we kept, this big ugly flat thing with whiskers and a dull shine to its body.

  When we got back, Ross had made good on his promise. That shack was all steamy with him cooking on a greasy black griddle. Sonny was passed out on a cot with an army blanket pulled over him. Ross had opened another bottle of whisky. This one was Canadian Club.

  Good old Canadian Club, I thought. We used to be acquainted. We used to be good friends. I poured myself some in a coffee cup. The wind and the wet had gone and chilled me right through. I remember thinking about a lot of things—Sammy eating those tomatoes of his with some kind of delicious old man’s greed, Verbena and her jimson weed, her conjure stories, and T.J., the way his birds shot off the roof to then come funneling back down like water in a spout. I remember thinking about Carlos sending me out to scout those runaway kids at Port Authority to bring them back to the South Bronx, to that empty abandoned old church we were using for his movie.

  It was a great breakfast Ross cooked there for us, one of the best I ever ate—scrambled eggs with hot sauce, and sausage, and salty ham and redeye gravy and cheese grits and cornbread, and of course that catfish from the lake that Monica gutted right there into a slop bucket.

  It all made me want to throw up.

  SO EARL’S FINALLY GONE AND PLAYED HIS HAND—which I knew would have to happen sooner or later but it’s always a surprise when it does. This whole time, he’s been moving in on me—he’s probably a pretty good hunter out there in the woods with his rifle. Patient. But then when he gets a chance, he bags his game with a clean shot. I guess that’s how they told him to go after me—bag him with a clean shot.

  He showed up yesterday with his Bible, and my heart sank. You think you’ve got a mystery on your hands, and it turns out to be just another person out to save your soul.

  “Tony,” he asked me, “do you know the story of Cain and Abel?” He hefted his Bible, I guess to show me it was inside there somewhere.

  “I know lots of stories,” I told him. “Some better than others.”

  “This is one of the famous ones,” he said. “It’s about these two brothers. One’s a farmer and the other one raises sheep and goats. So they each have a different sacrifice to give up to God. Abel gives goats, and Cain gives grain from the field. God likes the goat sacrifice better, because meat’s better than vegetables. It’s more serious. Wh
ich makes Cain jealous, because it’s not his fault all he had was grain to give. But God’s not listening. He wants meat. So Cain kills his brother, Abel. And God punishes Cain. You’re never going to have a home anymore, he tells him. No matter where you go, you’re not going to have a home.”

  “I’ve heard that story,” I told Earl. “It’s a stupid story. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  He looked disappointed, like he was sure I’d understand. “I want to save your soul,” he said. It was the same thing I used to hear years ago in the bars in New York—only then it was “I want to fuck you.” I’ve always liked people who are direct.

  “You’ve got one, you know,” he went on. “Your soul’s beautiful. I can see it inside you, Tony. I can see it in your life. You see, there’s no reason why you have to be going through all this. All you have to do is to ask God, and he’ll set you free.”

  I could tell he really believed what he was telling me—the same way all those guys used to believe it when they said I was good-looking.

  What could I do? “I hate to tell you this, Earl,” I had to say, “because you’re a nice guy, you’ve been pretty decent to me and everything, and I like you. But you got to understand one thing. This soul of mine—forget it, okay? Maybe it looks to you like it’s there, but it’s not. Maybe in some people, and that’s their business. But not me, Earl. Not me. And you know what? I don’t miss it. It’s like somebody missing having a long furry tail that they never had in the first place. That’s the amount I miss it.”

  I could tell Earl wasn’t believing me. He thought all this was something sin was making me say.

  “Aren’t you sorry for anything?” he asked. He was holding that Bible of his like it was some kind of weapon, which I guess in some way it was.

  “Sure,” I told him. “I’m sorry about a lot of things. I’d be crazy if I wasn’t. And I’m not crazy. So yeah. I’m sorry about all of it. But you know what? At the same time I’m not. I’m not sorry about any of it. It’s what happened, because something had to happen, and so why not that? At least we were alive. That’s what counts, isn’t it? To be alive?”

  We’d never talked like this, and I could tell Earl wasn’t understanding a thing I was saying to him. That’s one thing you can always count on Earl for. Still, I hoped it’d upset him a little.

  “I just want to read you something out of here,” he told me. He flipped through his Bible to where I could see he’d marked sentences with a yellow highlighter. It made me feel sorry for him: how he was trying to muddle his way through all this stuff he didn’t understand.

  “Then there were brought unto him little children,” Earl read to me, “that he should put his hands on them, and pray.” I’d never heard Earl read from a book before, and he kept stumbling over the words—but then, the Bible’s not written in regular English anyway. While he read, he followed the words along with his finger. “And the disciples rebuked them,” he read me. “But Jesus said, Suffer little children and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

  “That’s just a lot of words,” I said. “Come on and tell me what you’re really trying to get at.”

  Earl closed his Bible and looked at me. He has these big sad eyes and bags under them like he doesn’t get much sleep at night. He sat down on my bunk, which he’d never done before. I was sitting on the little stool at the foot of the bed, and it sort of surprised me when he sat down.

  “My wife took my kids from me,” he said. “She just took them away from me.”

  It wasn’t what I’d guessed he was going to say next.

  “I didn’t know,” I told him. “I’m really sorry about that.” Which I meant.

  Sometimes when you downshift on a car, you feel like you’re inside this river that’s widening out—that’s what it was like. Downshifting.

  “She said I wasn’t fit, Tony. You’ve been around. Do you think I’m fit?”

  “Sure I think you’re fit,” I told him.

  “They’re in Ohio now,” he said. “Last time I saw my kids was Christmastime. She accused me of brainwashing them.”

  “Brainwashing?” I said. I could tell how all this was eating at him. For some reason, people’ve always wanted to sit me down and tell me their stories.

  “You remind me of my boys,” he said.

  “No,” I told him. I was shaking my head. “I’m sure I don’t. You’ve got nice kids.”

  But he was off on his own track, and he was going to follow it through.

  “Sometimes,” he went on, “when I lie down at night, I find myself having these thoughts, Tony. Like a dream, but it’s not a dream—my eyes are wide open and I’m still awake. But I see it so clear. There I am with my rifle, and I’m hunting. It’s the rifle I had when I was a kid, I haven’t shot that thing in fifteen years. But now I’m hunting, like I used to do, only it’s not deer or nothing. I’m hunting my wife and my kids. And when I find them I’m gonna shoot them. I’m gonna watch them go down—not a sound, they just sink down to their knees and go pitching forward. I go over to where they are: turn them over, lay them out, side by side facing up. And their eyes are open—that’s something I notice, how they’re staring up at me with these totally black eyes like deer eyes.”

  I thought it was all pretty scary—stuff I didn’t want to know. I wanted to ask him, did he ever jerk off, thinking about things like that? But I didn’t ask. I told him, “Everybody has bad dreams. You should see some of my dreams.”

  At least I could give him the comfort of my perspective.

  “See,” Earl reminded me, “this isn’t a dream. I told you, my eyes are open. I stand there looking down at them; then I take out my knife and slit open their bellies, like you’d gut a deer. But you know what? It’s not blood and guts inside—it’s money. It’s dollar bills, and then I remember how I stored that money there, inside my kids, instead of putting it in the bank. I’d gone and forgot that.”

  He started laughing—this out-of-control laugh, which I knew meant he didn’t find any of it very funny. And I had to laugh too—not a laugh like Earl’s, but just laughing along with him as far as I could go, and then him laughing his way along to whatever craziness it was taking him to. But all of a sudden Earl wasn’t laughing. He was looking at me with this pleading look, like in the next instant I was going to blow him away, and here he was begging some kind of mercy.

  His Bible was one of those floppy soft-covered kinds, and he was rolling it up between his hands like he was about to swat something with it.

  “Someday I’m going to wake up and think I was just dreaming again, and then I’m going to turn on the TV and find out I really went and did something. What makes me think things like that, Tony? Like sometimes I’m going crazy. It scares me to death.”

  He was looking at me like I was really somebody who could tell him about that.

  “It’s probably really hard,” I told him, “not seeing your kids and everything.” I didn’t know what on earth to say. “You probably feel really rotten about your wife taking them off like that. I never knew about that.”

  “I go and read in my Bible,” Earl said, “how the sins of the fathers get visited on the sons, even down through three generations—and I wonder, why does that have to be like that? What does all that mean?”

  I really had to laugh that time. “You’re asking totally the wrong person, Earl,” I told him. “I don’t know anything. If I knew anything, I wouldn’t be here.”

  That didn’t put him off any.

  “Look, Tony,” he told me. “Could we pray? Would you pray with me?”

  “No way,” I said. What I thought was—even though you’ve got this belly on you like no tomorrow and your dick’s too scary to think about, I’d still probably rather go down on you than go praying with you. I’d gotten through this much of life without praying, and I wasn’t about to start yet.

  “If we just believe in the Lord, Tony, in Jesus Christ, and we pray, then there’ll be a way to ge
t through all this. You and me both, Tony. We need each other. You got to admit that. We need each other to pray together. To pray for each other together.”

  So this was where being a penitentiary guard got you. Asking to pray with prisoners.

  I had this sudden picture: it was the last time in my life I ever prayed. Not that it was much of a prayer—just the last time I remember closing my eyes and saying the words, because I was still too young to really know any better, even though all the time I knew better. I must’ve been about eight and we were visiting my mom’s mother across the border in Tennessee. We’d go down there on a Saturday night, stay over for Sunday School the next morning, then drive back after Sunday dinner. My mom was never a church person—as you can probably tell—but her mom was, though that didn’t stop that old lady from being a pretty mean bitch most of the time. She used to shoot at stray cats when they came in her yard, and she fixed razor blades on the stems of her shrubs because one Halloween night somebody pulled up something she’d just planted, and if they ever did that again they were going to get what was coming to them. But she was a firm believer in church, which probably goes hand in hand with shooting stray cats, and so whenever we visited her, we’d do the right thing. Church, that is. I hated it. This creepy old man named Mr. Polk taught the Sunday School class, which they held in this Quonset hut that was an annex to the regular building. He always used to come into the Sunday School room with this wet spot on his trousers where he’d peed before class and didn’t shake himself dry. He’d stand in front of this easel and draw us pictures with colored chalk while he talked: Bible scenes, I guess to keep us entertained. His favorite was Jonah and the whale. He’d draw this man you could see crouched down inside the whale’s belly, like he was sleeping there. It always made me think of stomach cancer—I don’t know why. Everybody thought Mr. Polk was the greatest because he drew those pictures and then colored them in, and the person who answered the most Bible questions right got to keep the picture of the day. I never paid much attention. I used to watch that wet spot on Mr. Polk’s trousers, and I always knew Sunday School was almost over when that spot’d had time to completely dry up.