This Boy's Life Read online

  And even though Dwight kept driving down from the mountains to see my mother, every other weekend at first, then every weekend, he seemed to sense the futility of his case. His attentions to my mother were puppyish, fawning, as if he knew that the odds of getting his hands on her were pathetically slim and that even being in her presence was a piece of luck that depended on his displaying at every moment deference, bounce, optimism, and all manner of good cheer.

  He tried too hard. No eye is quicker to detect that kind of effort than the eye of a competitor who also happens to be a child. I seized on and stored away every nuance of Dwight’s abjection, his habit of licking his lips, the way his eyes darted from face to face to search out warning signs of disagreement or boredom, his uncertain smile, the phony timbre of his laughter at jokes he didn’t really get. Nobody could just go to the kitchen and make a drink, Dwight had to jump up and do it himself. Nobody could open a door or put on a coat without his help. They couldn’t even smoke their own cigarettes, they had to take one of Dwight’s and submit to a prolonged drama of ignition: the unsheathing of his monogrammed Zippo from its velvet case; the snapping open of the top against his pant leg; the presentation of the tall flame with its crown of oily smoke—then the whole ritual in reverse.

  I was a good mimic, or at least a cruel one, and Dwight was an easy target. I went to work as soon as he left the house. My mother and Kathy tried not to laugh but they did, and so did Marian, though she never really abandoned herself to it. “Dwight’s not that bad,” she would say to my mother, and my mother would nod. “He’s very nice,” Marian would add, and my mother would nod again and say, “Jack, that’s enough.”

  We spent Thanksgiving in Chinook with Dwight and his kids. Snow had fallen a few nights earlier. It had melted in the valley but still covered the trees on the upper slopes, which were purple with shadow when we arrived. Though it was still late afternoon the sun had already set behind the mountains.

  Dwight’s kids came out to meet us when we drove up. The two oldest, a boy and a girl, waited at the bottom of the steps as a girl about my age ran up to my mother and threw her arms around her waist. I was completely disgusted. The girl was pinch-faced and scrawny, and on the back of her head she had a bald spot the size of a silver dollar. She made a kind of crooning noise as she clutched my mother, who, instead of pushing this person away, laughed and hugged her back.

  “This is Pearl,” Dwight said, and somehow freed my mother from her grasp. Pearl looked over at me. She did not smile, and neither did I.

  We walked up to the house and met the other two. Both of them were taller than Dwight. Skipper had a wedge-shaped head, flat in the back and sharp in front, with close-set eyes and a long blade of a nose. He wore a crew cut. Skipper regarded me with polite lack of interest and turned his attention to my mother, greeting her with grave but perfect courtesy. Norma just said “Hi!” and ruffled my hair. I looked up at her, and until we left Chinook two days later I stopped looking at her only when I was asleep or when someone walked between us.

  Norma was seventeen, ripe and lovely. Her lips were full and red, always a little swollen-looking as if she’d just woken up, and she moved sleepily too, languidly, stretching often. When she stretched, her blouse went taut and parted slightly between the buttons, showing milky slices of belly. She had the whitest skin. Thick red hair that she pushed sleepily back from her forehead. Green eyes flecked with brown. She used lavender water, and the faint sweetness of the smell got mixed up with the warmth she gave off. Sometimes, just fooling around, thinking nothing of it, she would put her arm around my shoulder and bump me with her hip, or pull me up against her.

  If Norma noticed my unblinking stare she took it for granted. She never seemed surprised by it, or embarrassed. When our eyes met she smiled.

  We brought our bags inside and took a tour of the house. It wasn’t really a house, but half of a barracks where German prisoners of war had been quartered. After the war the barracks had been converted to a duplex. A family named Miller lived on one side, Dwight’s family on the other, in three bedrooms that faced the kitchen, dining room, and living room across a narrow hallway. The rooms were small and dark. Her arms crossed over her chest, my mother peered into them and gushed falsely. Dwight sensed her reserve. He waved his hands around, declaring the plans he had for renovation. My mother couldn’t help but offer a few suggestions of her own, which Dwight admired so much that he adopted them all, right then and there.

  AFTER DINNER MY mother went out with Dwight to meet some of his friends. I helped Norma and Pearl do the dishes, then Skipper took out the Monopoly board and we played a couple of games. Pearl won both of them because she cared so much. She watched us suspiciously and recited rules at us while she gloated over her rising pile of deeds and money. After she won she told the rest of us everything we’d done wrong.

  My mother woke me when she came in. We were sharing the sofa bed in the living room, and she kept turning and plumping the pillow. She couldn’t settle down. When I asked what was wrong she said, “Nothing. Go to sleep.” Then she raised herself up on one elbow and whispered, “What do you think?”

  “They’re okay,” I said. “Norma’s nice.”

  “They’re all nice,” she said. She lay back again. Still whispering, she told me she liked them all, but felt a little hurried. She didn’t want to hurry into anything.

  That made sense, I said.

  She said she was doing really well at work. She felt like she was finally starting to get somewhere. She didn’t want to stop, not right now. Did I know what she meant?

  I said I knew exactly what she meant.

  Is that selfish? she asked. Marian thought she should get married. Marian thought I needed a father in the worst way. But she didn’t want to get married, not really.

  Not now, anyway. Maybe later, when she felt ready, but not now.

  That was fine with me, I said. Later would be fine.

  THE NEXT DAY was Thanksgiving. After breakfast Dwight packed everyone into the car and drove us around Chinook. Chinook was a company village owned by Seattle City Light. A couple of hundred people lived there in neat rows of houses and converted barracks, all white with green trim. The lanes between the houses had been hedged with rhododendron, and Dwight said the flowers bloomed all summer long. The village had the gracious, well tended look of an old military camp, and that was what everyone called it—the camp. Most of the men worked at the powerhouse or at one of three dams along the Skagit. The river ran through the village, a deep, powerful river crowded on both sides by steep mountains. These mountains faced each other across a valley half a mile wide at the point where Chinook had been built. The slopes were heavily forested, the trees taking root even in granite outcroppings and gullies of scree. Mists hung in the treetops.

  Dwight took his time showing us around. After we had seen the village, he drove us upstream along a narrow road dropping sheer to the river on one side and overhung by boulders on the other. As he drove he listed the advantages of life in Chinook. The air. The water. No crime, no juvenile delinquency. For scenery all you had to do was step out your front door, which you never had to lock. Hunting. Fishing. In fact the Skagit was one of the best trout streams in the world. Ted Williams—who, not many people realized, was a world-class angler as well as a baseball great, not to mention a war hero—had been fishing here for years.

  Pearl sat up front between Dwight and my mother. She had her head on my mother’s shoulder and was almost in her lap. I sat in the backseat between Skipper and Norma. They were quiet. At one point my mother turned and asked, “How about you guys? How do you like it here?”

  They looked at each other. Skipper said, “Fine.”

  “Fine,” Norma said. “It’s just a little isolated, is all.”

  “Not that isolated,” Dwight said.

  “Well,” Norma said, “maybe not that isolated. Pretty isolated, though.”

  “There’s plenty to do here if you kids would just take a litt
le initiative,” Dwight said. “When I was growing up we didn’t have all the things you kids have, we didn’t have record players, we didn’t have TVs, all of that, but we were never bored. We were never bored. We used our imaginations. We read the classics. We played musical instruments. There is absolutely no excuse for a kid to be bored, not in my book there isn’t. You show me a bored kid and I’ll show you a lazy kid.”

  My mother glanced at Dwight, then turned back to Norma and Skipper. “You’ll be graduating this year, right?” she said to Skipper.

  He nodded.

  “And you have another year,” she said to Norma.

  “One more year,” Norma said. “One more year and watch my dust.”

  “How’s the school here?”

  “They don’t have one. Just a grade school. We go to Concrete.”

  “Concrete?”

  “Concrete High,” Norma said.

  “That’s the name of a town?”

  “We passed it on the way up,” Dwight said. “Concrete.”

  “Concrete,” my mother repeated.

  “It’s a few miles downriver,” Dwight said.

  “Forty miles,” Norma said.

  “Come off it,” Dwight said. “It’s not that far.”

  “Thirty-nine miles,” Skipper said. “Exactly. I measured it on the odometer.”

  “What’s the difference!” Dwight said. “You’d bellyache just as much if the goddamned school was next door. If all you can do is complain, I would thank you to just stow it. Just kindly stow it.” Dwight kept looking back as he talked. His lower lip was curled out, and his bottom teeth showed. The car wandered the road.

  “I’m in fifth grade,” Pearl said.

  Nobody answered her.

  We drove on for a while. Then my mother asked Dwight to pull over. She wanted to take some pictures. She had Dwight and Norma and Skipper and Pearl stand together on the side of the road with snowy peaks sticking up behind them. Then Norma grabbed the camera and started ordering everyone around. The last picture she took was of me and Pearl. “Closer!” she yelled. “Come on! Okay, now hold hands. Hold hands! You know, hands? Like on the end of your arms?” She ran up to us, took Pearl’s left hand, put it in my right hand, wrapped my fingers around it, then ran back to her vantage point and aimed the camera at us.

  Pearl let her hand go dead limp. So did I. We both stared at Norma. “Jeez,” she said. “Dead on arrival.”

  On the way back to Chinook my mother said, “Dwight, I didn’t know you played an instrument. What do you play?”

  Dwight was chewing on an unlit cigar. He took it out of his mouth. “A little piano,” he said. “Mainly sax. Alto sax.”

  Skipper and Norma looked quickly at each other, then looked away again, out the windows.

  WHEN DWIGHT FIRST invited us to Chinook he’d won me over by mentioning that the rifle club was going to hold a turkey shoot. If I wanted to, he said, I could bring my Winchester along and enter the contest. I hadn’t fired or even held my rifle since we left Salt Lake. Every couple of weeks or so I tore the house apart looking for it, but my mother had it hidden somewhere else, probably in her office downtown.

  I thought of the trip to Chinook as a reunion with my rifle. During art period I made drawings of it and showed them to Taylor and Silver, who affected disbelief in its existence. I also painted a picture that depicted me sighting down the the barrel of my rifle at a big gobbler with rolling eyes and long red wattles.

  The turkey shoot was at noon. Dwight and Pearl and my mother and I drove down to the firing range while Skipper went off to work on a car that he was customizing and Norma stayed home to cook. Not until we reached the range did Dwight get around to telling me that in fact there would be no turkey at this turkey shoot. The targets were paper—regulation match targets. They weren’t even giving a turkey away; the prize was a smoked Virginia ham. Turkey shoot was just a figure of speech, Dwight said. He thought everybody knew that.

  He also let drop, casually, as if the information were of no consequence, that I would not be allowed to shoot after all. It was for grown-ups, not kids. That was all they needed, a bunch of kids running around with guns.

  “But you said I could.”

  Dwight was assembling my Winchester, which he apparently meant to use himself. “They just told me a couple of days ago,” he said.

  I could tell he was lying—that he’d known all along. I couldn’t do a thing but stand there and look at him. Pearl, smiling a little, watched me.

  “Dwight,” my mother said, “you did tell him.”

  He said, “I don’t make the rules, Rosemary.”

  I started to argue, but my mother gave my shoulder a hard squeeze. When I glanced up at her she shook her head.

  Dwight couldn’t figure out how the rifle fit together, so I did it for him while he looked on. “That,” he said, “is the most stupidly constructed firearm I have ever seen, bar none.”

  A man with a clipboard came up to us. He was collecting entry fees. After Dwight paid him he started to move off, but my mother stopped him and held out some money. He looked at it, then down at his clipboard.

  “Wolff,” she said. “Rosemary Wolff.”

  Still studying his clipboard, he asked if she wanted to shoot.

  She said she did.

  He looked over at Dwight, who busied himself with the rifle. Then he dropped his eyes again and mumbled something about the rules.

  “This is an NRA club, isn’t it?” my mother asked.

  He nodded.

  “Well, I am a dues-paying member of the NRA, and that gives me the right to participate in the activities of other chapters when I’m away from my own.” She said all of this very pleasantly.

  Finally he took the money. “You’ll be the only woman shooting,” he said.

  She smiled.

  He wrote her name down. “Why not?” he said suddenly, uncertainly. “Why the heck not.” He gave her a number and wandered off to another group of shooters.

  Dwight’s number was called early. He fired his ten rounds in rapid succession, hardly pausing for breath, and got a rotten score. A couple of his shots hadn’t even hit the paper. When his score was announced he handed my mother the rifle. “Where’d you get this blunderbuss, anyway?” he asked me.

  My mother answered. “A friend of mine gave it to him.”

  “Some friend,” he said. “That thing is a menace. You ought to get rid of it. It shoots wild.” He added, “The bore is probably rusted out.”

  “The bore is perfect,” I said.

  My mother’s number should have been called after Dwight’s, but it wasn’t. One man after another went up to the line while she stood there watching. I got antsy and cold. After a long wait I walked over to the river and tried to skip rocks. A mist drifted over the water. My fingers grew numb but I kept at it until the sound of rifle fire stopped, leaving a silence in which I felt too much alone. When I came back my mother had finished her turn. She was standing around with some of the men. Others were putting their rifles in their cars, passing bottles back and forth, calling to each other as they drove away into the dusk.

  “You missed me!” she said when I came up.

  I asked her how she had done.

  “Dwight brought in a ringer,” one of the men said.

  “Did you win?”

  She nodded.

  “You won? No kidding?”

  She struck a pose with the rifle.

  I waited while my mother joked around with the men, laughing, trading mild insults, flushed with cold and the pleasure of being admired. Then she said good-bye and we walked toward the car. I said, “I didn’t know you were a member of the NRA.”

  “I’m a little behind in my dues,” she said.

  Dwight and Pearl were sitting in the front seat with the ham between them. Neither of them spoke when we got in. Dwight pulled away fast and drove straight back to the house, where he clomped down the hall to his room and closed the door behind him.

&nbs
p; We joined Norma and Skipper in the kitchen. Norma had taken the turkey out of the oven, and the house was rich with its smell. When she found out that my mother had won, she said, “Oh boy, now we’re really in for it. He thinks he’s some kind of big hunter.”

  “He killed a deer once,” Pearl said.

  “That was with the car,” Norma said.

  Skipper got up and went down the hall to Dwight’s room. A few minutes later they both came back, Dwight stiff and awkward. Skipper teased him in a shy, affectionate way, and Dwight took it well, and my mother acted as if nothing had happened. Then Dwight perked up and made drinks for the two of them and pretty soon we were having a good time. We sat down at the beautiful table Norma had laid for us, and we ate turkey and dressing and candied yams and giblet gravy and cranberry sauce. After we ate, we sang. We sang “Harvest Moon,” “Side by Side,” “Moonlight Bay,” “Birmingham Jail,” and “High above Cayuga’s Waters.” I got compliments for knowing all the words. We toasted Norma for cooking the turkey, and my mother for winning the turkey shoot.

  My mother was still flushed, expansive. All the talk about turkey reminded her of a Thanksgiving she and my brother and I had spent on a turkey farm in Connecticut after the war. Housing was scarce, and we were broke, so my father had boarded us with these turkey farmers while he went down to work in Peru. The turkey farmers were novices. Before Thanksgiving they’d butchered their birds in an unheated shed, and all the blood froze in their bodies and turned them purple. The local butcher came out for a look. He suggested that the birds be kept in a warm bath for a few days—maybe that would loosen things up and turn them pink. The bath they used was ours. For almost two weeks we had these bumpy blue carcasses floating in the tub.