“You did such a nice job in Mame,” she said. “You’re very talented.”
Not long before, I had played the role of Young Patrick, the ward of the flamboyant Auntie Mame, in a local fine arts center production, having been recruited by the director, Rex LaPage, who had seen me as Michael Darling in a summer theater production of Peter Pan. As the play’s one child actor, I had been afforded the delusion of considering myself a professional.
“You saw that?” I asked.
“When we heard our new neighbor had a speaking part, we had to attend,” she said, smiling and winking at my mother. “I’m so looking forward to living next door to a rising star!”
I smiled and blushed.
“Come meet Mr. Culver, son,” the Old Man said, as if I had never seen him before.
Even in his pressed slacks and camel-hair blazer, Brad Culver still struck me as a walking cadaver, with sunken eyes and bared teeth.
“Hey there, sport,” Culver said, extending his hand.
If I were Paul, I’d have let that hand hang in the air. But I was not Paul, so I shook it, doing my seven-year-old level best to hide my hatred and bewilderment. How could the Old Man court the friendship of the same man who might very well have killed his son—a man he himself had threatened to kill?
Before long, the Old Man and Culver were golfing buddies. Paul remained philosophical about it all.
“Dad would have shot Culver,” he reflected, “but he knew they needed someone to fill out his Saturday foursome after Buddy Watkins came down with the gout.”
THE FIRST WEEK of June, Anne came back to Spencerville to see Paul graduate from Macon. This time, the Old Man arranged for her to stay at the Hilton out near the new shopping mall by Monacan Mountain. With her was a man named Bill.
Anne’s Bill looked as worthless and dilapidated as the suit he wore, which even a second grader could see was cheap and old. His posture was stooped and his hair greasy and in need of a trim. His teeth and fingers were stained with nicotine. I later wondered whether Anne had plucked him off a stool in some skid row dive, or even from beside an oil-drum fire underneath a woebegone Rust Belt overpass.
Anne and Bill smoked and talked throughout the ceremony. Nearby, the Old Man sat with his arms crossed, his balding pate flaming red.
Paul’s more illustrious classmates were honored with awards and prizes—Spanish and English and Science medals, scholarships and cash awards named for the school’s legendary high achievers and wealthy benefactors, the Headmaster’s Award, Best Boy.
“Paul would have had perfect attendance,” Anne muttered, “if he hadn’t been shot in the leg.”
Afterward I rode with my parents to a reception at the home of one of Paul’s classmates. Waiters wearing white jackets and black bow ties served flutes of champagne and hors d’oeuvres from silver trays. A keg was provided for the new graduates, who congregated around the pool house in the backyard grotto.
The adults were divided between the families of day and boarding students. For the most part the groups parted naturally, like boys and girls on opposite sides of the gym at a junior high sock hop. Anne and Bill mingled with the out-of-towners while my parents sequestered themselves with their friends in another room.
As soon as I could, I slipped away from my mother and weaved through the legs of tippling grown-ups and out to the backyard, where I found Paul below on the pool deck with his fellow graduates, neckties loosened, nursing red plastic cups. Together they joked and laughed, basking in temporary triumph. Around them were the girls, whose smiling faces betrayed occasional flashes of apprehension, as if they sensed already that, like high school, they were also being graduated from.
Leigh had less reason to fear than the rest. Paul was going no farther than Farmville, only forty-five minutes’ drive away, to another all-boys school, famous for the loyalty of its alumni and the epic debauchery of its annual Greek Week. The Old Man wanted him on a short leash, Paul had explained. We’d probably see more of him than we wanted. Nevertheless, Leigh hung on his arm, looking especially young and fragile in her delicate cotton sundress, clinging to Paul like a misbegotten waif.
Behind me I heard the sound of adult voices emerging from the house. I took cover in the hedges so I could spy on the scene unnoticed. Through a gap in the bushes, I saw the casual cheerfulness on Paul’s face melt into a more familiar expression.
“There’s my darling boy,” I heard Anne say.
Her voice had taken on a timbre I recognized from her short visit to our house those months before. She steadied herself on the railing and descended to the pool deck, her Bill in his cheap green suit behind her. An unlit cigarette dangled from her painted red lips.
“Do you have a light, darling?” she asked.
“Sure, Mom,” Paul said.
Paul removed his Zippo from its home in his breast pocket.
“Isn’t he a handsome boy, Bill?” Anne said between drags. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“He sure is,” Bill said.
“And what a pretty flower,” Anne said, reaching out to stroke Leigh’s long hair.
“Exquisite,” Bill said.
“She reminds me of Annie Bet,” Anne said. “Doesn’t she remind you of Annie Bet, Paul?”
“Sure, Mom,” Paul said.
I had never heard Annie Elizabeth, the sister who had died before I was born, referred to as Annie Bet.
“She’d have been so proud of you, darling,” Anne said.
Perhaps made uncomfortable by being compared to Paul’s dead sister, or perhaps by Bill’s flagrant ogling, Leigh had lowered her eyes to the ground. She was the first to see the stain spreading down the length of Anne’s panty hose and darkening the concrete beneath her feet.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Paul.”
“Shit,” Anne hissed.
One of the other boys noticed. A murmur rippled through the navy blazers and neckties. All eyes turned toward the foot of the stairs where Paul Askew’s drunk mother had pissed herself.
I felt an unexpected well of sympathy for the woman. It happened, I knew. Sometimes you just get a little excited. Or you forget to go. Or you dream you’re in a lake or a pool, where you can feel the peculiarly pleasant warmth in the water, and afterward you wake up in your bed startled, between soaked, clinging sheets.
“Oopsy,” Anne said. “I made a boo-boo.”
She tossed her lit cigarette into the pool.
“Aw, Mom,” Paul said.
He leaned in toward Leigh and whispered something to her. She nodded. They set their red cups on the ground and came around behind Anne, each taking hold of one of her elbows. Paul took the scotch glass from her hand and handed it to Bill without looking at him. Anne tottered up the stairs between them, muttering something I couldn’t make out. The wretched Bill followed, admiring Leigh from behind with an appreciative leer.
Paul and Leigh steered Anne off the walk and around the side of the house toward the row of cars parked along the road. Just as they reached the shadows, they stopped. Paul left his mother hanging on to Leigh and hurried back down the hill. He drew up to the hedgerow where I was hidden and knelt to peer in at me, his face almost shaking with indignation. I felt my face redden.
“Don’t tell him,” he said.
“I won’t,” I whispered.
“I mean it, Rocky.”
“I swear,” I said.
“Come out of there and go inside,” he said.
I crawled out and stood before him, covered with grime. Paul gripped my arm—firmly, but not painfully. With his free hand, he beat the dust and dirt from my elbows and knees. When he was finished, he released my arm and tousled my hair to clear away a string of cobwebs.
“There,” he said. “Now, go.”
I trudged up along the moss-flecked bricks to the house, afraid to look back or to search for Leigh and Anne and Bill in the shadowy distance.
“I mean it, Rocky,” Paul called. “Don’t tell him. Don’t tell a soul.”
4
WE DID SEE PAUL OFTEN, for the first year at least. He always arrived unannounced, even for the holidays. He might appear a week before Thanksgiving, to my mother’s chagrin, loafing around the house, filling the upstairs with the smell of cigarette smoke. Or he might arrive on Christmas Eve, minutes before the Old Man’s beloved salt-cured Virginia ham hit the table. Sometimes he just showed up in the middle of the week, to do laundry or switch out some of the records he kept in his dorm room to play on the new portable turntable and cassette player the Old Man had given him as a graduation gift.
The Old Man could never exhibit anything but delight when Paul appeared. When Paul left, the Old Man invariably sank into a mood of quiet longing that might stretch on for days.
“That boy has you on a string,” I heard my mother tell him. “He’s a born manipulator.”
For the longest time, I thought “born manipulator” was a single word.
“He’s a man now,” the Old Man replied. “I can’t force him to do anything.”
“A man supports himself,” my mother said. “If you live off your father, you’re still a boy. And a boy has to follow his father’s rules.”
“You don’t understand, Alice,” the Old Man pleaded.
“No, Dick,” she said. “It’s you who doesn’t understand.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the Old Man moaned.
Almost every conversation they had about Paul ended with the Old Man invoking some holy personage.
Because of what had become or appeared to be becoming of Paul, mine was an excessively governed and supervised childhood. Mothers like mine—hovering, smothering, overinvolved parents who schedule their children’s lives down to the minute—seem now to be the rule rather than the exception. But at the end of the seventies, Spencerville still felt beyond the reach of the looming dread of American life. The worst thing anyone could remember in our neighborhood was Paul’s being shot by Brad Culver, an incident considered roughly equivalent to an old crank firing a round of rock salt into the rear ends of teenagers TP’ing the poplars or playing “ring and run.”
Nevertheless, I was imprisoned by my mother’s anxieties. After school, as my peers piled onto the cacophonous yellow buses or wheeled off on their dirt bikes to do whatever they pleased, I plodded sullenly over to my mother’s gigantic, faux-wood-paneled station wagon, ready to drive me off to voice or acting or dance lessons.
My mother could not, however, protect me from the slings and arrows of elementary school—namely, Jimmy Hutter.
We must all recall the incomprehensible spite of the schoolyard bully: The random selectivity of his malice, the helpless acquiescence of his prey. Perhaps worst of all, the pathetic betrayal of the victim’s so-called friends, who stand aside or perhaps even laugh and jeer, loyalty being a far less powerful instinct than self-preservation. Instead of forming a line of defense, they part and flee, like the herd of wildebeests on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, blithely trotting away as the lion gorges on the entrails of some unfortunate straggler while Marlin Perkins voices airy platitudes about the circle of life.
Surely Paul had never had to worry about being bullied—or so it seemed when I told him about Jimmy Hutter on one of his quick visits home to do laundry and hit the Old Man up for cash.
“If the kid messes with you,” Paul said with a shrug, “just kick him in the balls.”
“In the balls?”
“Do it quick,” he added. “He won’t expect it. Then sock him in the nose, as hard as you can.”
Paul explained his plan, which, it turned out, he’d learned from the Old Man, of all people.
“A firm kick in the balls will double a guy over,” Paul said. “A hard jab to the nose will make him see stars, which will sort of blind him for a minute or so.”
“Then what do you do?” I asked.
Paul admitted that the Old Man had said that after the second blow he should run away. The strategy was designed by the soldiers in the Old Man’s unit during the postwar occupation of Japan, for getting out of situations where they might be cornered alone in an unfriendly bar or back alley.
“Should I run?” I asked.
I felt certain that Paul had never run away from a fight himself.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just sock him again, I guess.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and hopped off the bed.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
On the rug in front of the windows, Paul taught me how to throw a punch.
“Don’t swing,” Paul said. “Get your dukes up and fire from right beside your head, like this.”
I mimicked how he held his fists up below his eyes.
“Plant your feet and get your legs into it,” he said. “Same with the kick. Lean forward so you don’t fall down.”
Paul demonstrated a few quick jab-cross combinations, followed by short, fast knee kicks.
“Here,” he said, holding out his palm. “Hit me.”
I aimed at his palm and punched it as hard as I could.
“Come on, Rocky,” Paul said. “The Italian Stallion can’t hit like a girl.”
He took out Led Zeppelin’s first album and dropped the needle on “Good Times, Bad Times.”
“Try again,” he said. “And yell when you do it.”
“Yell?” I asked.
He turned the knob up on the stereo. The floor buzzed with the heavy bass.
“Yeah. Yell. ARGH!” he bellowed.
“AAAAAAAARGGHHH!” I screamed.
By the end of the album side, I had it down: hard kick to the crotch, cross to the chin, jab to the solar plexus. After Paul left the next day to return to college, I continued my training. Each afternoon, I put on something heavy like Zeppelin or Black Sabbath and practiced, imagining Jimmy Hutter’s face floating in the air in front of me, waiting to be pulverized by my furious fists.
A few weeks later, the inevitable moment arrived. As I sat at the lunch table among the other nerds, runts, and oddballs, I felt Jimmy Hutter looming behind me.
“You know what I heard?” Jimmy said, his voice low and menacing.
“No,” I said.
“My dad says your dad is one cold-blooded son of a bitch.”
The other boys looked on, hushed and alert.
“Is not,” I said, my eyes fixed on the table in front of me.
“You callin’ me a liar?” Jimmy snarled.
I looked around, trying to spot Mrs. Goode, the lunch lady, who monitored the twittering crowd through the Coke-bottle lenses of her glasses. Mrs. Goode operated the traffic light used to regulate the noise level. If the children were too loud, the light turned red, which meant Silent Lunch, where everyone would be confined to a chair and could only get up with her permission. I prayed vainly that the chatter would rise and Mrs. Goode would turn on the red light, sending Jimmy back to his seat.
“I think you and me need to settle this in the bathroom,” Jimmy said.
I remembered something else Paul had told me when I explained Jimmy’s intimidation methods.
“How does he get away with pounding kids right there in the cafeteria?” Paul had asked.
“He doesn’t,” I said. “He always says, ‘Let’s go settle this in the bathroom,’ so the teachers won’t see.”
“And has anyone ever gone in there with him?”
“No,” I replied.
“So you’ve never really seen this kid beat anyone up.”
“No.”
“Huh,” Paul said.
Paul’s inference was clear, even to me. Jimmy Hutter was big and mean, and he acted tough, but it was easy to act tough if no one ever stood up to you. And Jimmy Hutter didn’t have training or a strategy. Jimmy Hutter didn’t have Paul.
“So are you coming, or are you too pussy?” Jimmy said.
An expansive knowledge of vulgarities was part of Jimmy’s special menace.
“No,” I said. “Let’s do it right here.”
The ch
air screeched on the floor beneath me as I stood and backed away from the table. The din of voices rose around us. But the aging, visually impaired Mrs. Goode, usually so reliably vigilant, made no sound; the traffic light remained green. There would be no rescue, no escape. I took in a deep breath, clenched my fists, reared back, and swung my foot toward Jimmy Hutter’s balls with all the force I could muster.
So intent was I on Jimmy’s crotch that I didn’t notice the steel leg of the red cafeteria chair obstructing the path of the blow. Instead of connecting with Jimmy’s scrotum, the kick sent the chair crashing into the table. With my foot twisted in the legs of the chair between us, I tumbled toward Jimmy, who fell to the floor with me, where we lamely slapped and pawed at each other while a cheering throng formed around us.
I felt a pair of powerful hands grasp my arms and lift me from the floor. Byron, the janitor, had stepped through the crowd to snatch the two of us up and scuttle us off to the Main Office. There we sat in front of the desk of Miss Hallenbeck, school secretary and assistant to Principal Powell, while we waited to be summoned, one at a time, for our interrogations.
Jimmy Hutter crossed his arms and stared at the wall, his lips pursed in a sullen scowl, trying to mask his fear. For my own part, I made no effort to disguise my distress. The tears flowed freely.
Jimmy was called in first. I listened intently through the door, hoping to pick up fragments of the conversation, all the while envisioning the stern visage of Mr. Powell, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk. Behind him, hanging on the wall, was the infamous paddle he’d personally constructed: a lean, varnished piece of rosewood with a dozen neat holes bored in two parallel lines across its surface to maximize the speed and force with which it inflicted its discipline. Mr. Powell had even given it a name, etched into its regulation four-inch handle: Swift Justice.
There was more to fear than Swift Justice. Fighting at school generally meant a lengthy suspension. I had never been suspended before; in fact, I’d never been in serious trouble of any kind. Paul was the bad seed—everyone knew this. I had overheard more than a few adults observe how fortunate my parents were that, after Paul, I appeared to be turning out so well.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart Page 4