第3章

Uncool

We lived in a boardinghouse in West Seattle. At night, if my mother wasn't too tired, we took walks around the neighborhood, stopping in front of different houses to consider them as candidates for future purchase. We went for the biggest and most pretentious, sneering at ranches and duplexes-anything that smelled of economy. We chose half-timbered houses, houses with columns, houses with sculpted bushes in front. Then we went back to our room, where I read novels about heroic collies while my mother practiced typing and shorthand so she wouldn't fall behind in her new job.

Our room was in a converted attic. It had two camp beds and between them, under the window, a desk and chair. It smelled of mildew. The yellow wallpaper was new but badly hung and already curling at the edges. It was the kind of room that B-movie detectives wake up in, bound and gagged, after they've been slipped a Mickey.

The boardinghouse was full of old men and men who probably only seemed old. Besides my mother only two women lived there. One was a secretary named Kathy. Kathy was young and plain and shy. She stayed in her room most of the time. When people addressed her she would look at them with a drowning expression, then softly ask them to repeat what they had said. As time went on, her pregnancy began to show through the loose clothes she wore. There didn't seem to be a man in the picture.

The other woman was Marian, the housekeeper. Marian was big and loud. Her arms were as thick as a man's, and when she pounded out hamburger patties the whole kitchen shook. Marian went with a marine sergeant from Bremerton who was even bigger than she was but more gentle and soft-spoken. He had been in the Pacific during the war. When I kept after him to tell me about it he finally showed me an album of photographs he'd taken. Most of the pictures were of his buddies. Doc, a man with glasses. Curly, a man with no hair. Jesus, a man with a beard. But there were also pictures of corpses. He meant to scare me off the subject with these pictures but instead they made me more interested. Finally Marian told me to stop bothering him.

Marian and I disliked each other. Later we both found reasons for it, but our dislike was instinctive and mysterious. I tried to cover mine with a treacly stream of yes ma'ams and no ma'ams and offers of help. Marian wasn't fooled. She knew I didn't like her, and that I was not the young gentleman I pretended to be. She went out a lot, running errands, and she sometimes saw me on the street with my friends-bad company, from the looks of them. She knew I combed my hair differently after I left the house and rearranged my clothes. Once, driving past us, she yelled at me to pull up my pants.

* * *

MY FRIENDS WERE Terry Taylor and Terry Silver. All three of us lived with our mothers. Terry Taylor's father was stationed in Korea. The war had been over for two years but he still hadn't come home. Mrs. Taylor had filled the house with pictures of him, graduation portraits, snapshots in and out of uniform-always alone, leaning against trees, standing in front of houses. The living room was like a shrine; if you didn't know better you would have thought that he had not survived Korea but had died some kind of hero's death there, as Mrs. Taylor had perhaps anticipated.

This sepulchral atmosphere owed a lot to the presence of Mrs. Taylor herself. She was a tall, stooped woman with deep-set eyes. She sat in her living room all day long and chain-smoked cigarettes and stared out the picture window with an air of unutterable sadness, as if she knew things beyond mortal bearing. Sometimes she would call Taylor over and wrap her long arms around him, then close her eyes and hoarsely whisper, "Terence! Terence!" Eyes still closed, she would turn her head and resolutely push him away.

Silver and I immediately saw the potential of this scene and we replayed it often, so often that we could bring tears to Taylor's eyes just by saying "Terence! Terence!" Taylor was a dreamy thin-skinned boy who cried easily, a weakness from which he tried to distract us by committing acts of ferocious vandalism. He'd once been to juvenile court for breaking windows.

Mrs. Taylor also had two daughters, both older than Terry and full of scorn for us and all our works. "Oh, God," they'd say when they saw us. "Look what the cat dragged in." Silver and I suffered their insults meekly, but Taylor always had an answer. "Does your face hurt?" he would say. "I just wondered, it's killing me." "Is that sweater made of camel's hair? I just wondered, I thought I saw two humps."

But they always had the last word. As girls went they were nothing special, but they were girls, and empowered by that fact to render judgment on us. They could make us cringe just by rolling their eyes. Silver and I were afraid of them, and confused by Mrs. Taylor and the funereal atmosphere of the house. The only reason we went there was to steal Mrs. Taylor's cigarettes.

We couldn't go to my place. Phil, the man who owned the boardinghouse, had no use for kids. He rented the room to my mother only after she promised that I would be quiet and never bring other kids home with me. Phil was always there, reeking of chewing tobacco, drooling strings of it into the chipped enamel mug he carried with him everywhere. Phil had been badly burned in a warehouse fire that left his skin blister-smooth and invested with an angry glow, as if the fire still burned somewhere inside him. The fingers of one hand were welded together.

He was right not to want me around. When we passed one another in the hallway or on the stairs, I couldn't keep my eyes from him and he saw in them no sympathy or friendliness, only disgust. He responded by touching me constantly. He knew better but could not help himself. He touched me on the shoulders, on the head, on the neck, using all the gestures of fatherly affection while measuring my horror with a cold bitter gaze, giving new pain to himself as if he had no choice.

My place was off-limits and Terry Taylor's was full of trolls, so we usually ended up at Silver's apartment. Silver was an only child, clever, skinny, malicious, a shameless coward when his big mouth brought trouble down on us. His father was a cantor who lived in Tacoma with his new wife. Silver's mother worked all day at Boeing. That meant we had the apartment to ourselves for hours at a stretch.

But first we made our rounds. As we left school we followed girls at a safe distance and offered up smart remarks. We drifted in and out of stores, palming anything that wasn't under glass. We coasted stolen tricycles down the hills around Alkai Point, standing on the seats and jumping off at the last moment to send them crashing into parked cars. Sometimes, if we had the money, we took a bus downtown and weaved through the winos around Pioneer Square to stare at guns in the windows of pawnshops. For all three of us the Luger was the weapon of choice; our passion for this pistol was profound and about the only passion we admitted to. In the presence of a Luger we stopped our continual jostling of each other and stood wide-eyed.

Television was very big on the Nazis then. Every week they screened new horrors, always with a somber narrator to remind us that this wasn't make-believe but actual history, that what we were seeing had really happened and could happen again if we did not maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance. These shows always ended the same way. Overviews of ruined Berlin. Grinning GIs rousting the defeated Aryan soldiery from their hiding places in barn and cave and sewer. Himmler dead in his cell, hollow-eyed Hess in Spandau. The now lathered-up narrator crowing, "Thus was the high-flying Prussian eagle brought to ground!" and "Thus did the little Führer and his bullyboys turn tail and run, giving up forever their dream of The Thousand Year Reich!"

But these glimpses of humiliation and loss lasted only a few minutes. They were tacked on as a pretense that the point of the show was to celebrate the victory of goodness over evil. We saw through this fraud, of course. We saw that the real point was to celebrate snappy uniforms and racy Mercedes staff cars and great marching, thousands of boots slamming down together on cobbled streets while banners streamed overhead and strong voices sang songs that stirred our blood though we couldn't understand a word. The point was to watch Stukas peel off and dive toward burning cities, tanks blowing holes in buildings, men with Lugers and dogs ordering people around. These shows instructed us further in the faith we were already beginning to hold: that victims are contemptible, no matter how much people pretend otherwise; that it is more fun to be inside than outside, to be arrogant than to be kind, to be with a crowd than to be alone.

Terry Silver had a Nazi armband that he swore was genuine, though anyone could see he'd made it himself. As soon as we reached his apartment Silver would get this armband from its hiding place and slip it on. Then he would strut around and treat Taylor and me like lackeys. We let him do it because of the candy Mrs. Silver left out in crystal bowls, because of the television set, and because without Silver to tell us what to do we were reduced to wandering the sidewalks, listlessly throwing rocks at signs.

First we made a few calls. Taylor and I listened in on the extension in Mrs. Silver's bedroom while Silver did the talking. He looked up people with Jewish-sounding names and screamed at them in pig German. He ordered entire banquets of Chinese food for his father and stepmother. Sometimes he called the parents of kids we didn't like and assumed the voice and manner of a Concerned Adult-teacher, coach, counselor-just touching base to ask whether there was some problem at home that might account for Paul's unusual behaviour at school the other day. Silver never laughed, never gave himself away. When he was being particularly plausible and suave, Taylor and I had to stuff Mrs. Silver's coverlet in our mouths and flail the mattress with our fists.

Then, bumping each other with our hips to make room, the three of us would press together in front of Mrs. Silver's full-length mirror to comb our hair and practice looking cool. We wore our hair long at the sides, swept back into a ducktail. The hair on top we combed toward the center and then forward, with spit curls breaking over our foreheads. My mother detested this hairdo and forbade me to wear it, which meant that I wore it everywhere but at home, sustaining the distinctness of two different styles with gobs of Butch Wax that left my hair glossy and hard and my forehead ringed with little pimples.

Unlit cigarettes dangling from the corners of our mouths, eyelids at half mast, we studied ourselves in the mirror. Spit curls. Pants pulled down low on our hips, thin white belts buckled on the side. Shirts with three-quarterlength sleeves. Collars raised behind our necks. We should have looked cool, but we didn't. Silver was emaciated. His eyes bulged, his Adam's apple protruded, his arms poked out of his sleeves like pencils with gloves stuck on the ends. Taylor had the liquid eyes and long lashes and broad blank face of a cow. I didn't look that great myself. But it wasn't really our looks that made us uncool. Coolness did not demand anything as obvious as that. Like chess or music, coolness claimed its own out of some mysterious impulse of recognition. Uncoolness did likewise. We had been claimed by uncoolness.

At five o'clock we turned on the television and watched The Mickey Mouse Club. It was understood that we were all holding a giant bone for Annette. This was our excuse for watching the show, and for me it was partly true. I had certain ideas of the greater world that Annette belonged to, and I wanted a place in this world. I wanted it with all the feverish, disabling hunger of first love.

At the end of every show the local station gave an address for Mousketeer Mail. I had begun writing Annette. At first I described myself in pretty much the same terms as I had in my letters to Alice, who was now very much past tense, with the difference that instead of owning a ranch my father, Cap'n Wolff, now owned a fleet of fishing boats. I was first mate, myself, and a pretty fair hand at reeling in the big ones. I gave Annette some very detailed descriptions of my contests with the friskier fellows I ran up against. I also invited her to consider the fun to be had in visiting Seattle. I told her we had lots of room. I did not tell her that I was eleven years old.

I got back some chipper official responses encouraging me to start an Annette fan club. In other words, to organize my competition. Fat chance. But when I upped the ante in my letters to her, they stopped sending me anything at all. The Disney Studio must have had a kind of secret service that monitored Mousketeer Mail for inappropriate sentiments and declarations. When my name went off the mailing list, it probably went onto some other list. But Alice had taught me about coyness. I kept writing Annette and began to imagine a terrible accident in front of her house that would almost but not quite kill me, leaving me dependent on her care and sympathy, which in time would turn to admiration, love…

As soon as she appeared on the show-Hi, I'm Annette!-Taylor would start moaning and Silver would lick the screen with his tongue. "Come here, baby," he'd say, "I've got six inches of piping hot flesh just for you."

We all said things like that-It was a formality-then we shut up and watched the show. Our absorption was complete. We softened. We surrendered. We joined the club. Taylor forgot himself and sucked his thumb, and Silver and I let him get away with it. We watched the Mousketeers get all excited about wholesome projects and have wimpy adventures and talk about their feelings, and we didn't laugh at them. We didn't laugh at them when they said nice things about their parents, or when they were polite to each other, or when they said, "Hey, gang…" We watched every minute of it, our eyes glistening in the blue light, and we went on staring at the television after they had sung the anthem and faded away into commercials for toothpaste and candy. Then, blinking and awkward, we would rouse ourselves and talk dirty about Annette.

Sometimes, when The Mickey Mouse Club was over, we went up to the roof. Silver's apartment building overlooked California Avenue. Though the street was busy we chose our targets carefully. Most days we didn't throw anything at all. But now and then someone would appear who had no chance of getting past us, like the man in the Thunderbird.

Thunderbirds had been out for only a year now, since '55, and because they were new and there weren't that many of them they were considered somewhat cooler than Corvettes. It was early evening. The Thunderbird was idling before a red light at the intersection, and from our perch behind the parapet we could hear the song on the radio-"Over the Mountains and across the Seas"-and hear too, just below the music, the full-throated purr of the engine. The black body glistened like obsidian. Blue smoke chugged from the twin exhausts. The top was rolled back. We could see the red leather upholstery and the blond man in the dinner jacket sitting in the driver's seat. He was young and handsome and fresh. You could almost smell the Listerine on his breath, the Mennen on his cheeks. We were looking right down at him. With the palm of his left hand he kept the beat of the song against the steering wheel. His right arm rested on the back of the empty seat beside him, which would not remain empty for long. He was on his way to pick someone up.

We held no conference. One look was enough to see that he was everything we were not, his life a progress of satisfactions we had no hope of attaining in any future we could seriously propose for ourselves.

The first egg hit the street beside him. The second egg hit the front fender. The third egg hit the trunk and splattered his shoulders and neck and hair. We looked down just long enough to tally the damage before pulling our heads back. A moment passed. Then a howl rose skyward. No words-just one solitary soul cry of disbelief. We could still hear the music coming from his radio. The light must have changed, because a horn honked, and honked again, and someone yelled something, and another voice answered harshly, and the song was suddenly lost in the noise of engines.

We rolled back and forth on the roof for a while. Just as we were getting ready to go back down to Silver's apartment, the Thunderbird screeched around the corner up the block. We could hear the driver cursing. The car moved slowly toward the light, combusting loudly. As it passed below we peered over the parapet again. The driver was scanning the sidewalks with stiff angry jerks of his head. He seemed to have no idea where the eggs had come from. We let fly again. One hit the hood with a loud boom, another landed in the seat beside him, the last exploded on the dashboard. Covered with egg and eggshell, he rose in his seat and bellowed.

There was more honking at the light. Again he tore away and again he came back, still bellowing. Six eggs were left in the carton. Each of us took two. Silver knelt by the edge, risking a few hurried glances into the street while holding his arm out behind him to keep us in check until the moment was right. Then he beckoned furiously and we reared up beside him and got rid of our eggs and dropped back out of sight before they hit. The driver was looking up at the building across the street; he never laid eyes on us. We heard the eggs smack the pavement, boom against the car. This time there was no cry of protest. The silence made me uncomfortable and in my discomfort I grinned at Silver, but Silver did not grin back. His face was purple and twitching with anger as if he had been the one set upon and outraged. He was beside himself. Breathing loudly, clenching and unclenching his jaw, he leaned over the edge and cupped his hands in front of his mouth and screamed a word I had heard only once, years before, when my father shouted it at a man who had cut him off in traffic.

"Yid!" Silver screamed, and again, "Yid!"

One day my mother and I went down to Alkai Point to watch a mock naval battle between the Odd Fellows and the Lions Club. This was during Seafair, when the hydroplane races were held. The park overlooked the harbor; we could just make out the figures on the two sailboats throwing water-balloons back and forth and trying to repel each other's boarding parties. There was a crowd in the park, and whenever one of these boarding parties got thrown back into the water everybody would laugh.

My mother was laughing with the rest. She loved to watch men goof around with each other; lifeguards, soldiers in bus stations, fraternity brothers having a car wash.

It was a clear day. Hawkers moved through the crowd, selling sun glasses and hats and Seafair souvenirs. Girls were sunning themselves on blankets. The air smelled of coconut oil.

Two men holding bottles of beer stood nearby. They kept turning and looking at us. Then one of them walked over, a pair of binoculars swinging from a strap in his hand. He was darkly tanned and wore tennis whites. He had a thin moustache and a crew cut. "Hey, Bub," he said to me, "want to give these a try?" While he adjusted the strap around my neck and showed me how to focus the lenses, the other man came up and said something to my mother. She answered him, but continued gazing out toward the water with her hand shielding her eyes. I brought the Lions and the Odd Fellows into focus and watched them push each other overboard. They seemed so close I could see their pale bodies and the expressions of fatigue on their faces. Despite the hearty shouts they gave, they climbed the ropes with difficulty and fell back as soon as they met resistance. Each time they hit the water they stayed there a while longer, paddling just enough to keep themselves afloat, looking wearily up at the boats they were supposed to capture.

My mother accepted a beer from the man beside her. The one who'd offered me the binoculars sensed my restlessness, maybe even my jealousy. He knelt down beside me and explained the battle as if I were a little kid, but I took the binoculars off and handed them back to him.

"I don't know," my mother was saying. "We should probably get home pretty soon."

The man she'd been talking with turned to me. He was the older of the two, a tall angular man with gingercolored hair and a disjointed way of moving, as if he were always off balance. He wore Bermudas and black socks. His long face was sunburned, making his teeth look strangely prominent. "Let's ask the big fella," he said. "What say, big fella? You want to watch the fun from my place?" He pointed at a large brick house on the edge of the park.

I ignored him. "Mom," I said. "I'm hungry."

"He hasn't had lunch yet," my mother said.

"Lunch," the man said. "That's no problem. What do you like?" he asked me. "What's your absolute favorite thing to have for lunch?"

I looked at my mother. She was in high spirits and that made me even grimmer, because I knew they were not due to my influence. "He likes hamburgers," she told him.

"You got it," he said. He took my mother's elbow and led her across the park toward the house. I was left to follow along with the other man, who seemed to find me interesting. He wanted to know my name, where I went to school, where I lived, my mother's name, the whereabouts of my father. I was a sucker for any grown-up who asked me questions. By the time we reached the house I had forgotten to be sullen and told him everything about us.

The house was cavernous inside, hushed and cool. The windows had stained-glass medallions set within their mullioned panes. They were arched, and so were the heavy doors. The living room ceiling, ribbed with beams, curved to an arch high overhead. I sat down on the couch. The coffee table in front of me was crowded with empty beer bottles. My mother went to the open windows on the harbor side of the room. "Boy!" she said. "What a view!"

The sunburned man said, "Judd, take care of our friend."

"Come on, Bub," said the man I'd been talking to. "I'll rustle you up something to eat."

I followed him to the kitchen and sat at a counter while Judd pulled things out of the refrigerator. He slapped together a baloney sandwich and set it in front of me. He seemed to have forgotten about the hamburger. I would have said something, but I had a pretty good idea that even if I did there still wasn't going to be any hamburger.

When we came back to the living room, my mother was looking out the window through the binoculars. The sunburned man stood beside her, his head bent close to hers, one hand resting on her shoulder as he gestured with his beer bottle at some point of interest. He turned as we came in and grinned at us. "There's our guy," he said. "How's it going? You get some lunch? Judd, did you get this man some lunch?"

"Yes sir."

"Great! That's the ticket! Have a seat, Rosemary. Right over here. Sit down, Jack, that's the boy. You like peanuts? Great! Judd, bring him some peanuts. And for Christ's sake get these bottles out of here." He sat next to my mother on the couch and smiled steadily at me while Judd stuck his fingers into the bottles and carried them clinking away. Judd returned with a dish of nuts and left with the rest of the bottles.

"There you go, Jack. Dig in! Dig in!" He watched me eat a few handfuls, nodding to himself as if I were acting in accordance with some prediction he had made. "You're an athlete," he said. "It's written all over you. The eyes, the build. What do you play, Jack, what's your game?"

"Baseball," I said. This was somewhere in the neighborhood of truth. In Florida I'd played nearly every day, and gotten good at it. But I hadn't played much since. I wasn't an athlete and I didn't look like one, but I was glad he thought so.

"Baseball!" he cried. "Judd, what did I tell you?"

Judd had taken a chair on the other side of the room, apart from the rest of us. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head at the other man's perspicacity.

My mother laughed and said something teasing. She called the man Gil.

"Wait a minute!" he said. "You think I'm just shooting the bull? Judd, what did I say about Jack here? What did I say he played?"

Judd crossed his dark legs. "Baseball," he said.

"All right," Gil said. "All right, I hope we've got that straightened out. Jack. Back to you. What other activities do you enjoy?"

"I like to ride bikes," I said, "but I don't have one."

I saw the good humor leave my mother's face, just as I knew it would. She looked at me coldly and I looked coldly back at her. The subject of bicycles turned us into enemies. Our problem was that I wanted a bike and she didn't have enough money to buy me one. She had no money at all. She had explained this to me many times. I understood perfectly, but not having a bike seemed too hard a thing to bear in silence.

Gil mugged disbelief. He looked from me to my mother and back to me. "No bike? A boy with no bike?"

"We'll discuss this later," my mother told me.

"I just said-"

"I know what you said." She frowned and looked away.

"Hold on!" Gil said. "Just hold on. Now what's the story here, Mom? Are you seriously telling me that this boy does not have a bicycle?"

My mother said, "He's going to have to wait a little longer, that's all."

"Boys can't wait for bikes, Rosemary. Boys need bikes now!"

My mother shrugged and smiled tightly, as she usually did when she was cornered. "I don't have the money," she said quietly.

The word money left a heavy silence in its wake.

Then Gil said, "Judd, let's have another round. See if there's some ginger ale for the slugger."

Judd rose and left the room.

Gil said, "What kind of bicycle would you like to have, Jack?"

"A Schwinn, I guess."

"Really? You'd rather have a Schwinn than an English racer?" He saw me hesitate. "Or would you rather have an English racer?"

I nodded.

"Well then, say so! I can't read your mind."

"I'd rather have an English racer."

"That's the way. Now what kind of English racer are we talking about?"

Judd brought the drinks. Mine was bitter. I recognized it as Collins mix.

My mother leaned forward and said, "Gil."

He held up his hand. "What kind, Jack?"

"Raleigh," I told him. Gil smiled and I smiled back.

"Champagne taste," he said. "Go for the best, that's the way. What color?"

"Red."

"Red. Fair enough. I think we can manage that. Did you get all that, Judd? One bicycle, English racer, Raleigh, red."

"Got it," Judd said.

My mother said thanks but she couldn't accept it. Gil said it was for me to accept, not her. She began to argue, not halfheartedly but with resolve. Gil wouldn't hear a word of it. At one point he even put his hands over his ears.

At last she gave up. She leaned back and drank from her beer. And I saw that in spite of what she'd said she was really happy at the way things had turned out, not only because it meant the end of these arguments of ours but also because, after all, she wanted very much for me to have a bicycle.

"How are the peanuts, Jack?" Gil asked.

I said they were fine.

"Great," he said. "That's just great."

GIL AND MY mother had a few more beers and talked while Judd and I watched the hydroplane qualifying heats on television. In the early evening Judd drove us back to the boardinghouse. My mother and I lay on our beds for a while with the lights off, feeling the breeze, listening to the treetops rustle outside. She asked if I would mind staying home alone that night. She had been invited out for dinner. "Who with?" I asked. "Gil and Judd?"

"Gil," she said.

"No," I said. I was glad. This would firm things up.

The room filled with shadows. My mother got up and took a bath, then put on a full blue skirt and an off-theshoulder Mexican blouse and the fine turquoise jewelry my father had bought her when they were driving through Arizona before the war. Earrings, necklace, heavy bracelet, concha belt. She'd picked up some sun that day; the blue of the turquoise seemed especially vivid, and so did the blue of her eyes. She dabbed perfume behind her ears, in the crook of her elbow, on her wrists. She rubbed her wrists together and touched them to her neck and chest. She turned from side to side, checking herself in the mirror. Then she stopped turning and studied herself head-on in a sober way. Without taking her eyes from the mirror she asked me how she looked. Really pretty, I told her.

"That's what you always say."

"Well, it's true."

"Good," she said. She gave herself one last look and we went downstairs.

Marian and Kathy came in while my mother was cooking dinner for me. They had her turn around for them, both of them smiling and exclaiming, and Marian pushed her away from the stove and finished making my dinner so she wouldn't get stains on her blouse. My mother was cagey with their questions. They teased her about this mystery man, and when the horn honked outside they followed her down the hall, adjusting her clothes, patting her hair, issuing final instructions.

"He should have come to the door," Marian said when they were back in the kitchen.

Kathy shrugged, and looked down at the table. She was hugely pregnant by this time and may have felt unsure of her right to decide the finer points of dating.

"He should have come to the door," Marian said again.

I SLEPT BADLY that night. I always did when my mother went out, which wasn't often these days. She came back late. I listened to her walk up the stairs and down the hall to our room. The door opened and closed. She stood just inside for a moment, then crossed the room and sat down on her bed. She was crying softly. "Mom?" I said. When she didn't answer I got up and went over to her. "What's wrong, Mom?" She looked at me, tried to say something, shook her head. I sat beside her and put my arms around her. She was gasping as if someone had held her underwater.

I rocked her and murmured to her. I was practiced at this and happy doing it, not because she was unhappy but because she needed me, and to be needed made me feel capable. Soothing her soothed me.

She exhausted herself, and I helped her into bed. She became giddy then, laughing and making fun of herself, but she didn't let go of my hand until she fell asleep.

In the morning we were shy with each other. I somehow managed not to ask her my question. That night I continued to master myself, but my self-mastery seemed like an act; I knew I was too weak to keep it up.

My mother was reading.

"Mom?" I said.

She looked up.

"What about the Raleigh?"

She went back to her book without answering. I did not ask again.

Marian and Kathy and my mother decided to rent a house together. My mother offered to find the house, and so she did. It was the most scabrous eyesore in West Seattle. Paint hung in strips off the sides, the bare wood weathered to a gray, antlerish sheen. The yard was kneehigh in weeds. The sagging eaves had been propped up with long planks, and the front steps were rotted through. To get inside you had to go around to the back door. Behind the house was a partly collapsed barn that little kids liked to sneak into, drawn there by the chance to play with broken glass and rusty tools.

My mother took it on the spot. The price was right, next to nothing, and she believed in its possibilities, a word used often by the man who showed it to her. He insisted on meeting us there at night and led us through the house like a thief, describing its good points in a whisper. My mother, listening with narrowed eyes to show that she was shrewd and would not be easily taken in, ended up agreeing with him that the place was just a few steps away from being a real nice home. She signed the contract on the hood of the man's car while he held a flashlight over the paper.

The other houses on the street were small, obsessively groomed Cape Cods and colonials with lawns like putting greens. Ivy grew on the chimneys. Each of the colonials had a black, spread-winged eagle above its door. The people who lived in these houses came outside to watch us move in. They looked very glum. Later on we found out that our house, the original farmhouse in the area, had recently been scheduled for demolition and then spared at the last hour by the cynical manipulations of its owner.

Kathy and Marian went mute when they saw it. Shoulders hunched, faces set, they carried their boxes up the walk without looking to right or left. That night they slammed and banged and muttered in their rooms. But in the end my mother wore them down. She gave no sign that she saw any difference between our house and the houses of our neighbors except for a few details that we ourselves, during a spare hour now and then, could easily put right. She helped us picture the house after we had made these repairs. She was so good at making us see it her way that we began to feel as if everything needful had already been done, and settled in without lifting a finger to save the house from its final decrepitude.

Soon after we took the house, Kathy had a baby boy, Willy. Willy was a clown. Even when he was alone he cackled and squawked like a parrot. The sweet, almost cloying smell of milk filled the house.

Kathy and my mother worked at their jobs downtown while Marian kept the house and did the meals and looked after Willy. She was supposed to take care of me, too, but I ran around with Taylor and Silver after school and didn't come home until just before I knew my mother would arrive. When Marian asked me where I'd been I told her lies. She knew I was lying, but she couldn't control me or even convince my mother that I needed controlling. My mother had faith in me. She didn't have faith in discipline. Her father, Daddy, had given her plenty and she had yet to see the profit from it.

Daddy was a great believer in the rod. When my mother was still in her cradle he slapped her for sucking her thumb. To correct her toddler's habit of walking with her toes turned slightly inward he forced her to walk with her toes turned out, like a duck. Once she started school, Daddy spanked her almost every night on the theory that she must have done something wrong that day whether he knew about it or not. He told her that he was going to spank her well in advance, as the family sat down to dinner, so she could think about it while she ate and listened to him talk about the stock market and the fool in the White House. After dessert he spanked her. Then she had to kiss him and say, "Thank you, Daddy, for earning the delicious meal."

My grandmother was a gentle woman. She tried to defend her daughter, but her heart was bad and she couldn't even defend herself. Whenever she was bedridden, Daddy would read to her from the works of Mary Baker Eddy to prove that her suffering was illusory, the result of improper thinking. On their Sunday drives he boosted her pulse by going through stop signs and racing trains to railroad crossings. Once he scooped a man onto his hood and carried him at speed for several blocks, screaming, "Get off my car!"

My mother was on her own with Daddy. When she started high school he forced her to wear bloomers-pink silk bloomers with ruffled legs. He'd brought several pairs home with him from a cruise to China, where they were still in vogue among missionaries' wives. He badgered her into smoking cigarettes so she wouldn't eat much, and when they went to restaurants he made her fill up on bread. She wasn't allowed to go out with boys. But the boys wouldn't give up. One night some of them parked in front of her house and sang "When It's Springtime in the Rockies." When they called out, "Goodnight, Rosemary!" Daddy went berserk. He ran into the street waving his Navy .45. As the driver sped off Daddy fired several shots at a boy in the rumble seat, who ducked just before two bullets whanged into the metal over his head. My grandmother collapsed and had to be given digitalis.

Daddy didn't let it go at that. In full uniform he prowled the school parking lot the next morning, inspecting cars for bullet holes.

My mother took off a few months after her mother died, when she was still a girl. But Daddy left some marks on her. One of them was a strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed. Another was a contradictory hatred of coercion. She'd never been able to spank me. The few times she tried I came away laughing. She couldn't even raise her voice convincingly. That wasn't the way she wanted to be with me, and she didn't think I needed it anyway.

Marian thought otherwise. Sometimes at night I heard the two of them arguing about me, Marian strident, my mother quiet and implacable. It was just the age I was going through, she said. I'd grow out of it. I was a good boy.

ON HALLOWEEN, TAYLOR and Silver and I broke out some windows in the school cafeteria. The next day two policemen came to school and several boys with bad reputations were called out of class to talk to them. Nobody thought of us, not even of Taylor, who had a recorded history of window breaking. The reason nobody thought of us was that at school, in the presence of really tough kids who got into fights and talked back to teachers, we were colorless and mild.

At the end of the day the principal came on the public address system and announced that the guilty parties had been identified. Before taking action, however, he wanted to give these individuals a chance to come forward on their own. A voluntary confession now would work greatly in their favor later on. Taylor and Silver and I avoided looking at each other. We knew it was a bluff, because we'd been in the same classroom all day long. Otherwise the trick would have worked. We didn't trust each other, and any suspicion that one of us was weakening would have created a stampede of betrayal.

We got away with it. A week later we came back after a movie to break some more windows, then chickened out when a car turned into the parking lot and sat there with its engine running for a few minutes before driving away.

Instead of making us more careful, the interest of the police in what we'd done elated us. We became selfimportant, cocksure, insane in our arrogance. We broke windows. We broke streetlights. We opened the doors of cars parked on hills and released the emergency brakes so they smashed into the cars below. We set bags of shit on fire and left them on doorsteps, but people didn't stamp them out as they were supposed to do; instead they waited with weary expressions as the bags burned, now and then looking up to scan the shadows from which they felt us watching them.

We did these things in darkness and in the light of day, moving always to the sound of breaking glass and yowling cats and grinding metal.

And we stole. At first we stole as part of our general hoodlum routine, and for Taylor and Silver it never had any more importance than that. But for me the stealing was serious business, so much so that I dissembled its seriousness, not letting Taylor and Silver see the hold it had on me. I was a thief. By my own estimation, a master thief. When I cruised the aisles of dime stores, lingering over jackknives and model cars, a bland expression on my face, looking more innocent than an innocent person has any business looking, I imagined that the saleswomen who sometimes glanced over at me saw an earnest young shopper instead of a transparent little klepto. And when I finally managed to steal something I figured I was getting away with it because I was so sharp, and not because these women had been on their feet all day and were too tired to deal with a shoplifter and the trouble he would cause them: his false outrage, then his terror, his weeping, the triumphant descent of the manager, policemen, paperwork, the hollowness they would feel when it was over.

I hid the things I stole. Now and then I took them out and turned them over in my hands, dully considering them. Out of the store they did not interest me, except for the jackknives, which I threw at trees until the blades broke off.

A FEW MONTHS after we moved into the house Marian got engaged to her marine boyfriend. Then Kathy got engaged to a man in her office. Marian thought my mother should get engaged too, and tried to fix her up. She set in motion a brief parade of suitors. One by one they came up the walk, stared at the broken steps, went around to the back; then, entering the kitchen, braced themselves and put on joviality like a party hat. Even I could see the hopelessness in their imitation of gaiety though not its source in their belief, already sufficiently formed to make itself come true, that this woman too would find them unacceptable.

There was a marine who did tricks for me with lengths of string tied to his fingers, and seemed unwilling to leave the house with my mother. There was a man who arrived drunk and had to be sent away in a cab. There was an old man who, my mother told me later, tried to borrow money from her. And then came Dwight.

Dwight was a short man with curly brown hair and sad, restless brown eyes. He smelled of gasoline. His legs were small for his thick-chested body, but what they lacked in length they made up for in spring; he had an abrupt, surprising way of springing to his feet. He dressed like no one I'd ever met before-two-tone shoes, hand-painted tie, monogrammed blazer with a monogrammed handkerchief in the breast pocket. Dwight kept coming back, which made him chief among the suitors. My mother said he was a good dancer-he could really make those shoes of his get up and go. Also he was very nice, very considerate.

I didn't worry about him. He was too short. He was a mechanic. His clothes were wrong. I didn't know why they were wrong, but they were. We hadn't come all the way out here to end up with him. He didn't even live in Seattle; he lived in a place called Chinook, a tiny village three hours north of Seattle, up in the Cascade Mountains. Besides, he'd already been married. He had three kids of his own living with him, all teenagers. I knew my mother would never let herself get tangled up in a mess like that.

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 little 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.

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.

Dwight was quiet after my mother told her story. Then he told one of his own about a Thanksgiving he'd spent in the Philippines, when starving Japanese soldiers ran out of the jungle and grabbed food right off the chow line, and nobody even tried to shoot them.

That story reminded Pearl of Chinese checkers. Dwight and Skipper refused to play, but the rest of us joined in. First we played as free agents and then in teams. Pearl and I played the last round together. It was close-very close. When Pearl made the winning move we jumped up and down, and crowed, and pounded each other on the back.

DWIGHT DROVE US down to Seattle early the next morning. He stopped on the bridge leading out of camp so we could see the salmon in the water below. He pointed them out to us, dark shapes among the rocks. They had come all the way from the ocean to spawn here, Dwight said, and then they would die. They were already dying. The change from salt to fresh water had turned their flesh rotten. Long strips of it hung off their bodies, waving in the current.

Taylor and Silver and I sometimes hung out in the bathroom during lunch hour. We smoked cigarettes and combed our hair and exchanged interesting facts not available to the general public about women.

It was just after Thanksgiving. I told Taylor and Silver and a couple of weed fiends who practically lived in the bathroom the story of how I'd killed the turkey in Chinook. "I mean I blew it off, man-I blew his fucking head right off!"

At first nobody responded. Silver did the French inhale, then slowly blew the smoke toward the ceiling. "With a .22," he said.

"Fuckin' A," I said. "Winchester .22. Pump."

"Wolff," he said, "you are so full of shit."

"Fuck you, Silver. I don't care what you think."

"All a .22 would do is just make a hole in his head."

I took a drag and let the smoke come out of my mouth as I talked. "One bullet, maybe."

"Oh. Oh, I see-you hit him more than once. While he was flying. In the head."

I nodded.

Silver howled. The other guys were also manifesting signs of disbelief. "Fuck you, Silver," I said, and when he howled again I said, "Fuck. You. Fuck. You." Still saying this, I went over to the wall, which had just been repainted, and took out my comb. It was a girl's comb. We all carried them, tails sticking out of our back pockets. With the tail of the comb I scratched FUCK YOU into the soft paint and once more told Silver, "Fuck you."

The two weed fiends ditched their cigarettes and cleared out. So did Silver and Taylor. I threw away the comb and followed.

During the first period after lunch the vice-principal visited each classroom and demanded the names of those responsible for the obscenity that had been written in the boys' lavatory. He said that he was fed up with the delinquent behavior of a few rotten apples. They had names. Well, he wanted those names, and he was going to get them if he had to keep every single one of us here all night long.

The vice-principal was new and hard-nosed; he meant what he said. I knew he wouldn't let this drop, that he would keep at it until he caught me. I got scared. Even more than his anger, his righteousness scared me to the point where my stomach cramped up. As the afternoon went on the cramp got worse and I had to go to the nurse's office. That was where the vice-principal finally came for me.

He kicked at the cot where I lay doubled up and sweating. "Get up," he said. I gave him a confused look and said, "What?"

"Get moving. Now!"

I sat up partway, still miming incomprehension. The school nurse came to the doorway and asked what the problem was. The vice-principal told her I was faking.

"I'm not either," I said hotly.

"He's definitely in pain," she told him.

"He's faking it," the vice-principal said, and explained that this was nothing but a stratagem to avoid punishment for something disgusting I had done. The nurse turned to me with a quizzical expression. She had been warm and gentle; I couldn't bear for her to think that I was the kind of person who took advantage of other people's kindness, or wrote filth on bathroom walls. And at that moment I wasn't.

I began to say something along this line, but the viceprincipal wasn't having any. "Let's go," he said. He grabbed one of my ears and brought me to my feet. "I'm not here to bandy words with you."

The nurse stared at him. "Now wait just a minute," she said.

He pulled me into the corridor and down toward his office, jerking on my ear so that I had to walk sideways and keep my face toward the ceiling, stumbling all the way and spastically waving my arms.

"I'm going to call his mother," the nurse said. "Right now!"

"I already did," the vice-principal said.

BY THE TIME my mother arrived, I'd spent almost an hour with the vice-principal and had become completely convinced of my own innocence. The more I insisted on it the angrier he got, and the angrier he got the more impossible it was for me to believe that I had done anything to deserve such anger. He was, I knew, very close to hitting me; this made me feel a contempt for him that he could see, which in turn brought him closer to violence, inflating even further my sense of injury and innocence. And as his rage grew so did my contempt, because I saw that it was not self-restraint that kept him from hitting me but some kind of institutional restraint.

But he still had me scared. It was like being lunged at by a dog on the end of its leash.

Things stood thus when my mother came in. She'd spoken with the school nurse and immediately asked the vice-principal what he thought he was doing, hauling me around by the ears. He said that was beside the point, Mrs. Wolff, let's not muddy the water here, but she said, No, to her it wasn't beside the point at all. She faced him across his desk. She was erect, pale, and unfriendly.

The point, he told her, was that I had violated school property and the law. Not to mention decency.

My mother looked over at me. I saw how tired she was, and she must have seen the pain I was in. I shook my head.

"You're mistaken," she told him.

He laughed disagreeably. Then he set out his case, which consisted of eyewitness testimony by two boys who had been in the lavatory at the time the obscene words in question were inscribed on the wall.

"What obscene words?" she asked.

He hesitated. Then, demurely, he said, "Fuck you."

"That's one obscene word," my mother said.

He pondered this. He said that, given the particular context, he considered you to be an obscene word as well.

I said I didn't do it.

"If he says he didn't do it, he didn't do it," my mother said. "He doesn't lie."

"Well, I don't either!" The vice-principal rocked forward onto his feet. He opened the door and beckoned to the weed fiends, who were waiting in the outer office. They came in together and after a hangdog glance in my direction serially mumbled their dismal narrative at the floor, while I looked at them with brazen incredulity.

When they were done the vice-principal gave them passes and sent them out. He was acting very much in control now, very much on top of the situation.

"They're lying," I said.

His placidity fell off like a mask. "Why?" he asked. "Give me one reason."

"I don't know," I said, "but they are."

"We're not getting anywhere," my mother said. "I think I'd better talk to the principal."

The vice-principal said that he had been given full authority in this case. He was in charge. We'd better realize that what he said went.

But my mother would not be moved. And in the end we got in to see the principal.

The principal was a furtive, whey-faced man who feared children and avoided us by staying in his office all day. He was right to avoid us. He wore his weakness in a way that excited belligerence and cruelty. When my mother and I came into his office, he insisted on making small talk with her as if she had just dropped by to see how things were going.

At one point he leaned over and peered at my fingers. "Is that nicotine?" he asked.

"No sir."

"I hope not." He leaned back. His jacket parted, revealing green suspenders. "Let me tell you a story," he said. "Take it for what it's worth. I'm not accusing you of anything, but if you hear something you can use, so much the better." He smiled and made a steeple of his fingers. "I used to smoke cigarettes. I started smoking in college because of peer pressure, and before I knew it I was up to a couple of packs a day. Those were real cigarettes, too, not with the filters like you have now. The first thing I would do when I woke up in the morning was reach for a cigarette, and I always had a cigarette before I went to bed at night.

"Well, one night I went to have my cigarette and lo and behold, the pack was empty. I had run completely out. It was late, too late to wake up anyone else in the dorm. Normally I would have just taken a couple of butts out of the ashtray, but it so happened that when I finished studying I had emptied the ashtray into my wastebasket and dumped it down the incinerator shaft. So there I was, without my nightly cigarette."

He paused, contemplating his outrageous youthful self. "You know what I did? I'll tell you. I started walking in circles with my heart beating a mile a minute. 'What'll I do? What'll I do?' I kept asking myself. What I ended up doing was, I ended up running downstairs to the lounge. The ashtrays were empty. Then I started going through the garbage cans in the hallway. At last I found one with butts in it. But as I reached down-right down into a garbage can-I suddenly thought, 'Whoa. Hold on right there, buster.' And I did. I went back to my room and to this day I haven't smoked another cigarette."

He looked up at me. "But you know what I did? Every day I saved the exact amount of money I would have spent on cigarettes. Just as an experiment. Then last year I put it all together, and you know what I bought?"

I shook my head.

"I took that money and I bought a Nash Rambler."

My mother burst out laughing.

The principal sat back and smiled uncertainly. My mother was sniffing and searching in her purse. She found a Kleenex and blew her nose as if she had some kind of cold that made her shriek.

"Think about it," the principal said. "That's all I'm saying-just think about it."

My mother let the principal maunder on for a time, then brought him back to business. He became restless and uncomfortable. He said he would prefer that the vice-principal decide this question.

My mother refused. She told him that the the vice-principal had manhandled me while I was sick. The school nurse had seen him do it. If she had to, my mother said, she was prepared to talk to a lawyer. She didn't want to, but she would.

The principal saw no reason why it had to come to that. Not over one obscenity.

"He didn't do it," my mother said.

The principal tentatively, even reluctantly, mentioned the testimony of the weed fiends. My mother turned to me and asked if they were telling the truth.

"No ma'am."

"He doesn't lie to me," my mother said.

The principal was fidgeting. He seemed about ready to bolt. "Well," he said, "there is obviously some kind of confusion here."

My mother waited.

He looked from her to me and back to her. "What am I supposed to do? Just let it drop?" When she didn't answer he said, "All right. What about two weeks?"

"Two weeks what?"

"Suspension."

"Two weeks suspension?"

"One week, then. We'll split it. Does that seem fair?"

She frowned at the desk and said nothing.

He looked at her imploringly. "It's not that long. Just five days." Then he said, abruptly, "All right then, I'll let it go this time. That's fine for you," he added. "You don't have to work here."

School was over when we left the principal's office. We walked through the empty corridors, our footsteps echoing between long lines of lockers. I still had cramps. They got worse as I started moving around again, and on our way out I ducked into the lavatory. The janitor had already been there. He had changed what I'd written to BOCK YOU

IT WAS TOO late for my mother to go back to work, so she went home early with me. Marian smelled a story and pressed my mother until she got it. We were sitting at the kitchen table, and as she listened to my mother Marian began looking back and forth between us and giving hard little shakes of her head as if to clear it of water. Then her eyes came to rest on me and did not move. When my mother came to the end, indignant all over again at the way I'd been treated, Marian asked me to leave them alone.

I listened from the living room. My mother argued at first but Marian overwhelmed her. This time, by God, she was going to make my mother see the light. Marian didn't have all the goods on me, but she had enough to keep her going for a while and she put her heart into it, hitting every note she knew in the song of my malfeasance.

It went on and on. I retreated upstairs to the bedroom and waited for my mother, rehearsing answers to the charges Marian had made against me. But when my mother came into the room she said nothing. She sat for a while on the edge of her bed, rubbing her eyes; then, moving slowly, she undressed to her slip and went into the bathroom and drew herself a bath, and lay in the water for a long time as she sometimes did when she got chilled coming home at night in a cold rain.

I had my answers ready but there were no questions. After my mother finished her bath she lay down and read, then fixed us dinner and read some more. She turned in early. Answers kept coming to me in the dark, proofs of my blamelessness that I knew to be false but could not stop myself from devising.

Dwight drove down that weekend. They spent a lot of time together, and finally my mother told me that Dwight was urging a proposal which she felt bound to consider. He proposed that after Christmas I move up to Chinook and live with him and go to school there. If things worked out, if I made a real effort and got along with him and his kids, she would quit her job and accept his offer of marriage.

She did not try to make any of this sound like great news. Instead she spoke as if she saw in this plan a duty which she would be selfish not to acknowledge. But first she wanted my approval. I thought I had no choice, so I gave it.