Sometimes I’d get shoved and kicked and pushed to the ground. I was still trying to figure out what I’d done to make them mad, I had not yet learned that cruelty was cruelty and you don’t ask why, just hit first and hit hard.
There was more fighting at home. My parents must’ve tried to keep it from us because it seemed to happen only late at night, both of them screaming at each other, swearing, sometimes throwing things—pots or pans, a plate or glass or ashtray, anything close by. When they fought, their Southern accents were easier to hear, especially my mother’s, “Goddamn you, you sonofabitch.” Pop’s voice would get chest-deep and he’d yell back at her as if she were a Marine under his command.
Many nights my brother and two sisters and I would listen from the stairs in our pajamas, not because we enjoyed it but because it was easier to bear when we weren’t hearing it alone in our beds.
But by morning, the sun shone through the trees and most of the thrown or broken dishes in the living room would be picked up, the kitchen smelling like bacon and eggs, grits and toast and coffee, the night before a bad dream already receding into the shadows where it belonged.
FOR MY tenth birthday, I got a Daisy BB gun. It had a real wooden stock and a long metal barrel, and Pop took me out to the porch and showed me how to load it. It was a warm September morning, the sun glinting off the pond through the trees, and I could smell pine needles and tree bark and Pop’s Old Spice as he put one arm around me and pulled the rifle stock into my shoulder, as he reminded me how to narrow one eye down between the metal sights at my target, how to hold my breath and squeeze the trigger, not pull it. I’d shot my first gun when I was five, a long-barreled .22 pistol that was hard to grip with both hands. Pop smiled and took the pistol from me and then I was grasping the feet of the rabbit he’d shot and Pop was skinning it with his KA-BAR knife from the Marines, the dead rabbit still warm but shitting pellets down my forearms. Four years later he taught me and Jeb how to aim and fire a .22 rifle, how you rest your cheek on the wooden stock and squint your eye and line the sights on your target, how you hold your breath before you squeeze the trigger, the empty soup can flying off the stump. He’d been an expert marksman in the Marines, taught us to never point an unloaded gun at anyone, that the man with the gun always walks ahead of those without, that a gun always stays unloaded in the house.
I pointed my new BB rifle at a spruce tree. I aimed and squeezed, the tick of the BB hitting the bark, a piece of it falling to the ground. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s it.”
Soon I was taking my gun off into the woods by myself. For a while I shot dusty beer cans off of rocks, leaves hanging still on a branch, thin dead branches that would crack with the shot. But I wanted to kill something. I wanted to aim my rifle at something that was alive and make it dead.
The woods were full of birds and squirrels, but they were always moving, the birds flitting from one tree to the next, the squirrels scampering up trunks into higher branches where they disappeared. But one afternoon, just past the boarded-up summer camps not far from our house, I saw a small blackbird perched on a limb. It was looking away from where I stood, and I raised my rifle, pushed the stock into my shoulder, aimed down the sights at the bird’s small black breast, held my breath, and squeezed. There was the soft recoil of the rifle’s spring, then the bird falling sideways off the branch to the ground. My heart was pulsing in both hands. I’d seen what I’d done with just one shot, and as I walked to the base of the tree, I felt like some lone hunter-warrior, a man who could do something that most could not. I looked down at the bird. There was no blood, and I couldn’t see where the BB had entered, but the bird lay on its back, its dead eyes open, its gray beak pointing up at me like an accusation. I felt queasy. Saliva gathered in my mouth, and I wanted to flee my own skin somehow, this boy who had killed so easily, who had enjoyed it.
SINCE IOWA City, my family had lived in the country, places where Jeb and I spent hours and hours happily outside. We raided a tackle box we found and took long sticks and tied to them fishing line, bobbers, hooks, and pea-sized lead we pinched onto the line with pliers. We dug up worms and fished off the dock, catching perch and kibbies and bass. One week we found a towering pine deep in the trees, then ran back to the garage full of our landlord’s tools. We stole his handsaw and hammer and a rusty can of nails, and we built a tree house out of scrap lumber we found under the other cottages. Another time we took his pick and a spade shovel and dug a hole for us to lie down in, then we cut pine branches with the handsaw, the blade binding in the sappy grain, and we covered the hole with them and knew it was always there for our family to hide in, just in case the Viet Cong made it up into our woods. We found an ax in the garage and cut down saplings and sawed off their branches and leaned them all together in a widening circle for our teepee. We tied the tops together with string, and for the skin we used all the pine branches we’d already cut, weaving them in and around the poles from bottom to top. When we were done, we could crawl inside and stand up in a darkened conical room, the air smelling like pine sap and sweat and dust.
In the winter we’d build an igloo. From our gravel driveway it looked like a snowbank, but if you rolled aside a snow boulder you could crawl into a snow tunnel and come out into a snow room you could stand in. We carved benches into the walls and punched a hole through the ceiling for the smoke when we made a fire.
By now we had a friend who lived in one of the cottages on the other side of the pond. His name was Dean Matheson. He was long-limbed and yellow-toothed and at eleven years old said shit and fuck. He’d stolen a bone-handled switchblade, and we took turns in our igloo throwing it down at each other’s feet, trying to stick it into the packed snow as close as possible to our toes, the first to pull away a chicken shit.
One day in the fall, when all the summer cottages next to ours were boarded up for the season, we found a box of shotgun shells in the attic. Our parents and sisters were off somewhere, and Jeb and Dean and I laid the shells at the base of a pine tree, poured gasoline over them, and lit them up just to watch them explode. But there was a breeze coming in off the pond and the flames grew and leapt and in no time one of the cottages was on fire. We ran into the woods. Some adult must’ve seen the smoke and soon a huge pumper truck came rattling over the gravel road and there were hoses and men yelling and sparks and steam, the house saved, but its front porch gone.
Our family got home to see two police cars. As Pop talked to one of the cops, he kept glancing down at me and Jeb crouching and waiting near the pond. And he didn’t look mad; he looked scared and relieved; he looked guilty.
ONE SUNLIT afternoon in the early fall our parents sat us down in the living room and told us they were getting separated. My father stood in the kitchen doorway. My mother leaned against the wall on the other side of the room. Separated. It was a word I’d never thought much about before, but now I pictured them being cut one from the other with a big, sharp knife. I sat in my father’s chair, and I couldn’t stop crying.
Then Pop was gone for weeks. One night, after Suzanne and Jeb and Nicole were asleep, I lay in bed listening to my mother crying in her room. It sounded like she was doing it into her pillow, but I could still hear it, and I got up and walked down the creaking floorboards of the hallway and knocked on her door. Her bedside lamp was on. She lifted her head, wiped her eyes, and smiled at me. I asked her if she was all right. She sat up and looked me up and down. She said, “I’m going to tell you because you’re old enough to hear it. Your father left me for Betsy Armstrong. That’s where he is right now, staying with her.”
Betsy was one of the rich girls from the college. She had long straight hair and a pretty face. I remembered her laughing once in the kitchen with my mother. Now my mother got out of bed and leaned down and hugged me. I hugged her back.
Then Pop was home again. I woke one morning and heard his voice downstairs. I ran down there, and he hugged me. Later that day he was in the bathroom shaving. I went in there just to watch. I was ten y
ears old, he was thirty-three. He turned from the mirror and said, “So you know about Betsy then?”
The air in the room felt thicker somehow. “Yeah.”
He reached into his wallet and pulled out a small photograph. He handed it to me. “That’s her.”
It was of a girl I barely remembered seeing before, not the one I’d thought she was. “She’s pretty.”
“Yes, she is.” Pop took the photo and slid it back into his wallet. I left the bathroom and walked straight to the kitchen where Mom stood at the sink washing dishes. I looked up at her face. She smiled down at me.
“Dad’s girlfriend is prettier than you are, Mom.” Her smile faded and she looked into the dishwater and kept scrubbing. I walked back to the bathroom and told my father what I’d said.
He was wiping shaving cream from his face with a towel. He stopped, the towel still pressed to his cheek. “No, go apologize to her. Go tell her you’re sorry right now.”
I ran outside and into the woods. I don’t remember ever apologizing to my mother, but Pop was back, girlfriend or not, and for a while things seemed to get back to normal, and there was less fighting than before. Each night when Pop came home from teaching, Mom would be cooking in the kitchen and they’d have cocktail hour, which meant none of us kids was allowed in there while they sipped Jim Beam and our father unwound and told Mom his day and she told him hers.
Soon the hour would be over, and the six of us would sit at the rickety table in that small, hot kitchen and we’d eat. We lived in New England, but at suppertime our house smelled like any in South Louisiana: Mom fried chicken, or simmered smothered breakfast steak or cheap cuts of pork, all served up with rice and gravy and baking powder biscuits. On the side there’d be collard greens or sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions she’d put ice cubes on to keep crisp. She baked us hot tamale pies, and macaroni and cheese, or vegetable soup she’d cook for hours in a chicken stock, then serve in a hollowed-out crust of French bread, its top a steaming layer of melted cheddar. But while the food was wonderful, my mother and father hardly even looked at one another anymore and instead kept their attention on us, asking about school, about the tree fort Jeb and I were building out in the woods, about the Beatles album Suzanne listened to, the drawings Nicole did each afternoon. We rarely left the table hungry, but there was a hollowness in the air, a dark unspeakable stillness, one my father would soon drive into, and away.
IT HAPPENED early on a Sunday in November. Pop was so much taller than the four of us, and we were following him down the porch stairs and along the path, Suzanne behind him in her cotton nightgown, then me and Jeb in our pajamas, Nicole last, her thick red hair and small face. We were eleven, ten, nine, and six. Ahead of us, there was the glint of frost on the gravel driveway and our car, the old Lancer, packed now with Pop’s things: his clothes, his books, his shaving kit. The house was surrounded by tall pines and it was too cold to smell them, the air so clear and bright. Inside the house Mom was crying as if her pain were physical, as if someone were holding her down and doing something bad to her.
Daddy! Nicole ran past us over the gravel and she leapt and Pop turned, his eyes welling up, and he caught her, her arms around his neck, her face buried under his chin. I tried to ignore our mother’s cries coming from the house. When my father looked down at me over Nicole’s small shoulder, I stood as straight as I could and I hoped I looked strong.
Pop kissed Nicole’s red hair. He lowered her to the gravel. His beard was thick and dark, his cheeks and throat shaved clean. He was wearing a sweatshirt and corduroy pants, and he glanced up at our house. There was only the sound of our mother’s cries, so maybe he would change his mind. Maybe he would stay.
He looked down at us. “I’ll see you soon. We’ll go out to eat.”
He hugged Suzanne, squeezed my shoulder. He tousled Jeb’s hair, then he was in his car driving down the hill through the pines, blue exhaust coughing out its pipe. Jeb scooped up a handful of gravel and ran down the hill after him, “You bum! You bum! You bum!” He threw it all at once, the small rocks scattering across the road and into the woods like shrapnel.
Pop drove across the short bridge, then up a rise through more trees. Mom would need to be comforted now. Nicole too. There was food to think about. How to get it with no car. I tried to keep standing as straight as I could.
SOMETIMES WHEN the husband leaves, his friends leave with him. That’s what happened to my mother; after Pop was gone, so too were his friends. And the parties. I don’t know how long it was before my mother was able to buy a second car or got her first job working as a nurse’s aide, or when exactly she went back to school, got her degree, and started working in social services. I do remember that we moved even more frequently now, from one cheap rented house to the next.
To be closer to Pop, we ended up in Massachusetts and moved to the first of three towns we would live in on the Merrimack River. It was 1969, and for the first time since moving East from Iowa, we lived in a house on a street with a sidewalk and other houses and there were kids to play with, and so we played.
Once more we were the new kids in school. Jeb and I had long hair and sat in the back of the bus singing Beatles songs to the girls next to us. They began to like us, which was a sweet surprise, and then a few of the boys did too. Every day after school and that summer Jeb and I played war with Craig and Danny D. and Scotty K.; it’s what we knew from the TV every night. It’s what grown-ups argued about and lost friendships over. And we killed all day long.
Danny D.’s father had a barn full of junk. We found a box of brass light sockets which we turned into hand grenades because you could yank the chain and hurl the socket and if one landed close to you, you were gone. We knew about the Viet Cong stabbing our soldiers’ bodies after they were dead just to make sure they were dead, so when some of us were down, the others went around poking sticks into their back or ribs.
Danny D.’s big brothers, Gary and Sean, would light firecrackers and toss them at us. They’d let us come to their room and listen to the Doors and watch them smoke dope. One rainy afternoon, Sean, who was big with dull brown eyes, tied me to a utility pole out back of the barn and stacked twigs at my feet. He covered them with gas from the lawn mower and tried to light me up. But the gas was mixed with oil, and his matches were damp from his pocket, and when he ran back into the house for more I wrenched my wrists from the rope and ran for home.
In the summer, we’d catch frogs down on the muddy banks and haul them back in a coffee can. We’d stack bricks into a square prison yard and drop the frogs in, then Sean would douse them with gasoline, light a cherry bomb or M-80, and jump back for the bang and flame and smoke. Danny’s brother Gary, sixteen maybe, with long brown hair and a cross around his neck, he’d tie the blackened frogs’ bodies together with string, then run it to the back of his three-speed and drag them up and down the street. I’d be laughing with the rest, but that queasiness would come again.
Years later Gary would die running from the cops.
It was after midnight and it’d been a long, dangerous chase along the back roads and the police had radioed ahead for the drawbridge over the Merrimack to be raised. I don’t know what Gary was driving, but he must’ve thought it was light and fast because when he got to the bridge it was already rising past 40 degrees and he gave the engine all it had and flew up into the air, then down into the swirling black water where he drowned.
Once I was sleeping over and Big Sean squeezed my neck in a headlock, digging his knuckles hard into my skull. I screamed, and Gary came out of his room. Jim Morrison was singing. Gary wore only underwear and a T-shirt, and he punched Sean in the back and slapped him twice in the face.
“Fuckin’ leave him alone, all right? He’s a nice kid, Sean. He’s a good kid.”
“I didn’t do nothin’.” Sean let go. Gary looked down at me, his dark eyes fiery and sad and kind, and he turned and walked back into his room and shut the door.
THE SUMMER of 1970 was hot
and dry, and we moved to Newburyport where Mom had gotten a job working for Head Start helping poor kids. Newburyport was at the mouth of the river, the Atlantic Ocean three miles away on the other side of the salt marshes. The town was called “Clipper City” because of all the sailing ships built here in the 1800s, but when we came along the place looked abandoned. The streets of downtown were lined with empty mill buildings, their windows boarded up, some of the plywood rotted and hanging by one corner so you could walk in and step over loose papers, dusty machine parts, dog and bird shit, maybe human too. The only businesses still open were three barrooms, a diner, and a newsstand. In Market Square, two or three battered cars were left on the curb, their tires gone, a windshield caved in.
We lived three streets east of downtown on Fair in a half-house we were renting. On the other side lived another single mother. Her kids were small and dirty and she would leave her windows open and you could hear her TV all day and night, even when she was sitting on the stoop drinking a can of beer and smoking. Across the street was an empty lot with weeds, dry and yellow and high as our chests. Jeb and I thought we’d build something deep in there where no one could see you, but some drunks had gotten there first, their camp a steel barrel they sat around on broken lawn chairs and a naked mattress covered with stains so brown I was convinced they had to be blood.
Kids roamed the neighborhood like dogs. The first week I was sitting in the sun on our steps, I made the mistake of watching them go by as they walked up the middle of the street, three or four boys with no shirts, a couple of girls in shorts and halter tops. The tallest one, his short hair so blond it looked white, said, “What’re you lookin’ at, fuck face?”
“Nothing.”
Then he was on our bottom step. He pushed me hard in the chest and kicked my shin. “You want your face rearranged, faggot?”
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