Townie_ A Memoir Part 3

But I felt watched by no one. Those weekday mornings we slept late and didn't go to school, our report cards showed as sixty to eighty absences a year, dozens and dozens of marks for tardiness. No adult at school really seemed to notice much. There'd be an occasional letter sent home to our mother, but the counselor or vice princ.i.p.al or whoever it was always wanted to meet during a weekday. How could she do that? She had to work.

I'd make my way through town, past the boarded-up shops on Winter Street, the gas station and used car lot, the pizza shop and Dunkin' Donuts where on summer nights old men would sit in lawn chairs in the parking lot, smoking and talking and spitting.

At Railroad Square, I'd walk under the black iron trestle covered with hot-paint graffiti: Joey and Nina 4-ever Joey and Nina 4-ever, Tommy loves Denise! Tommy loves Denise!, USMC Cpl. Steve L. RIP USMC Cpl. Steve L. RIP, U suck! U suck! I'd walk over broken gla.s.s and cigarette b.u.t.ts in my Dingo boots and leather jacket, my hair tied back. Maybe I'd thought if I looked like the toughest kids at the high school, they'd leave me alone and I wouldn't have to fight for just glancing at them a second too long. After a while it worked; because I looked like them, they didn't see me anymore. But the cops did. Especially those late weekday mornings walking through town when I should've been in algebra cla.s.s, world history, gym; I'd pa.s.s more barrooms, a lock shop, St. Joe's Catholic Church, a cruiser pulling up and a cop yelling out at me, "Why ain't you in school?" I'd walk over broken gla.s.s and cigarette b.u.t.ts in my Dingo boots and leather jacket, my hair tied back. Maybe I'd thought if I looked like the toughest kids at the high school, they'd leave me alone and I wouldn't have to fight for just glancing at them a second too long. After a while it worked; because I looked like them, they didn't see me anymore. But the cops did. Especially those late weekday mornings walking through town when I should've been in algebra cla.s.s, world history, gym; I'd pa.s.s more barrooms, a lock shop, St. Joe's Catholic Church, a cruiser pulling up and a cop yelling out at me, "Why ain't you in school?"

"I had a doctor's appointment."

"Where's your parents?"

"Working."

"How'd you get to the doctor?"

"Walked."

"Well, keep walkin'." And he'd drive off in his police car, his antennas swaying back and forth like a scolding finger.

It seemed that each day I got up just wanting to get through it. I didn't know if my brother and sisters felt the same way, but my mother seemed to; most weeknights, Bruce quietly drunk, sipping a bourbon and reading in the front room, she'd be stretched out on the floor in front of the TV asleep in her work clothes by eight o'clock, my brother and sisters and me free to do whatever we wanted, do homework or not do homework, fight or ignore each other, ignore the five days of dishes stacked in the kitchen sink and on the counters; ignore the overflowing garbage in the trash bucket or the mountain of bags in the garage because none of us carried any out to the curb on garbage night; ignore the dirty clothes hanging out of the full hampers in both bathrooms; ignore the fact that we each did our own laundry when we needed to, one at a time, going down into the bas.e.m.e.nt and putting into the machine one pair of underwear, a pair of jeans, a pair of socks, a T-shirt and sweater, using an entire load, then drying the same outfit for an hour in the dryer, each of us doing it this way; ignore the dust everywhere, the loose hairs, the grit tracked over the linoleum floors and throw rugs; ignore that our dog, Dirt, shat regularly up on the second-floor hallway in the dark corner near the stairs up to my attic bedroom; ignore that we could walk out of that house and not come home till midnight or later; ignore that most nights Suzanne would go up to her room with a boyfriend and smoke dope and listen to her alb.u.ms; ignore that twelve-year-old Nicole had installed by herself a padlock on her bedroom door, one she locked with a key she kept with her at all times; ignore that our father never called us and we never called him.

JEB AND I had a new friend now, Cleary, whom everybody called by his last name. After the high school let out at two-thirty, I'd take the bus home and wait for my brother to walk back from the middle school, then he and I would go to Cleary's house down the dirt alley behind our garage. It was a tiny two-story of four rooms and a bathroom, the backyard just big enough for his father's Chevy, though we rarely saw him. We saw his mother a lot, a big-breasted woman who started her drinking every morning in tall plastic cups filled with vodka and Pepsi. Some afternoons we'd knock on Cleary's door, hear nothing, then walk in over the yellow linoleum of the kitchen and the living room where his mother would be pa.s.sed out on the couch in front of the TV, her mouth open, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray.

We'd call our friend and he'd come leaping down the stairs smiling, always smiling, his short dark hair sticking up in a cowlick, a smattering of freckles across his cheeks. In the summer he wore cutoff shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. In the winter it'd be fake jeans from Zayre's, a T-shirt and denim jacket covered with magic marker peace signs.

We'd walk a half mile down Main Street past houses built so close together there were no yards. Window shades were drawn and you never saw anybody sitting on a porch. Cleary walked on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet and bounce-walked, and he was always scheming, talking about the girl he was going to screw or the Corvette he'd own one day or the real Mexican switchblades he heard you could order from a magazine. He'd shove you into a mailbox and laugh and start running, and we'd chase him, Jeb's wild frizzy hair bouncing, my ponytail slapping my back, and we'd go through GAR Park where, when the weather was warm, Dominican and Puerto Rican families laid out blankets and ate together. In the middle of the green was a statue of Hannah Duston, this woman who long ago was kidnapped by Indians along with one of her children, and late one of those first nights, after her ten captors were asleep, she crawled out from under her blanket and took a hatchet and killed every single one of them in their sleep. Then she scalped them. The statue is of her in a long dress, a hatchet in her half-raised arm, her eyes on Main Street which sloped down past the shopping plaza to the river and the Basilere Bridge over the Merrimack. It was named for the first soldier from Haverhill to get killed in Vietnam, a war that was still going on, though we didn't think much about that.

One February morning we skipped school and went downtown. It was ten or eleven degrees and the dirty snow piled along both sides of Washington Street had become ice; the air made my lungs hurt. Our noses, ears, and fingers felt burned. The three of us had a dollar to share so we sat in a booth at Valhally's Diner and drank coffee with so much milk and sugar in it you couldn't call it coffee anymore. The Greek man behind the counter hated us; he folded his black hairy forearms across his chest and watched us take our free refills until we were giddy with caffeine. Cleary went for his seventh cup and the owner yelled something at him in Greek. On the way out Cleary stole two dollars someone had left on their check under a sugar shaker.

He paid our way on the city bus that was heated and made a loop all the way through town, along the river, up to the Westgate shopping center, then back again. We stayed on it for two hours, taking the loop six times. For a while I looked out the window at all the red brick mills, the storefronts with their dusty windows, barrooms on every block. The bus was warm, too warm. In the far rear, away from the driver, Cleary took out his black-handled Buck knife and carved a peace sign into the aluminum-backed seat in front of him.

After the bus, we made our way through the narrow factory streets, most of the buildings' windows covered with gray plywood, though Cleary's mother still worked at Cohen's Shoes, when she wasn't drinking. We walked along the railroad tracks, its silver rails flushed with the packed snow, the wooden ties gone under. The summer before we'd built a barricade for the train, a wall of broken creosote ties, an upside-down shopping cart, cinderblocks, and a rusted oil drum. We covered it with brush, then Cleary siphoned gas from a station wagon behind Cohen's and poured it on. Jeb and I lit it, air sucked by us in a whoosh, and we ran down the bank across the parking lot into the abandoned brewery to the second floor to watch our fire, to wait for the Boston & Maine, to hear the screaming brakes as it rounded the blind curve just off the trestle over the river. But a fat man in a good shirt and tie showed up at the tracks, then a cop, and we ran laughing to the first floor where we turned on the keg conveyor belt, lay on it belly-first, and rode it up through its trapdoor over and over.

As we made our way through town it began to snow. My brother and I were hungry, but Cleary was never hungry; he was hawny, he said. One morning, as we sat in the bas.e.m.e.nt of his house and pa.s.sed a homemade pipe between us, his mother upstairs drunk and singing to herself, Cleary said: "I'm always hawny in the mawnin'."

Jeb and I laughed and Cleary didn't know why, then he inhaled resin on his next hit and said, "s.h.i.t, man, the screem's broken."

"The what what?"

"The screem. You know, the screem screem. Like a screem door?"

By the time we reached the avenues the snow had blanketed the streets. On Cedar, cars spun out snow as they drove from the curb or the corner store. Cleary let out a yelp and a holler and went running after a Chevy that had just pulled away, skidding slightly as it went. Cleary ran low, bent over so the driver wouldn't see him, and when he reached the back b.u.mper he grabbed it and squatted on his sneakers, his b.u.t.t an inch or two from the road. And he skied away, just like that, the snow shooting out from under the wheels of the car, out from under his Zayre Department Store sneakers, blue exhaust coughing out its pipe beside him.

IN OUR living room stood tall pine bookshelves loaded with hardcover novels and short story collections. They were the sole objects our mother and father had ever owned, and our house seemed to be the only one in the neighborhood that had them. In Cleary's living room, there was the TV, a few gla.s.s knickknacks on the shelf beneath it. On the walls were department store prints of daisies in a vase, a kitten with sad, round eyes. Once I saw a slim hardcover lying on the coffee table, The Ill.u.s.trated Bible. The Ill.u.s.trated Bible.

The first time Cleary was in our house, he walked up to the shelves and ran his fingers along the spines of Faulkner, Chekhov, and Balzac, books I'd never quite noticed myself.

"Are these all real?"

"What?"

"I thought they were for looks, you know, like in a store."

"Nope."

"You read 'em all?"

I shrugged. I hadn't read any of them. "My old man has. And my mother."

Cleary kept running his fingers along all those books, shaking his head.

ON WEEKENDS at parties down on Seventh, or out in a weed lot, or up in the woods of Round Pond, we'd try whatever drugs were going around; we'd eat tabs of brown mescaline, or a quarter of LSD 25, or half a tab of four-way purple blotter acid, chemically treated paper you dissolved under the tongue. It tasted like earwax and the rush came on in twenty or thirty minutes, the feeling the world was a strange and fascinating place really, a special place. That life life was special. was special.

But it made your heart pound hard and fast in your rib cage and sometimes we just had to get up and run, Jeb and Cleary and I flying down the dark avenues in our sneakers or boots, which seemed to be moving us, making our legs lift and our knees bend, and we could go on forever. It was long after midnight, and one of us was screaming, the wind in our faces that smelled like green leaves and motor oil and rotting wood and tin siding cooling off. We ran past a brick church, dark and locked up, like G.o.d's house was closed for business, had always been closed for business, and we ran past a packy and its lighted beer signs, bright blue and red neon slashing into my brain, bad to look at, and a car tore by us, some angry machine driven by no one, and we kept running and running, past the auto parts yard, all the angry machines quiet in there, a rusted hulking darkness behind a plank fence Cleary kicked himself onto sideways for a stride, the German shepherd behind there barking, straining against his chain which sounded like jangling treasure, bad men and gold and now there were golden lights ahead, Jeb already there, his hair flapping like a small child barely connected to his head, and the gold was Christmas glowing, lighted strings of bulbs hanging over used cars with hot pink price decals on their windshields, numbers I couldn't decipher, then, without sound, the lights exploded, six or seven of them going dark, broken gla.s.s falling like snow onto the cars. Cleary was whooping and yelling, and a bottle broke against a post, brown gla.s.s spraying, and he ran up and down the gutter looking for something else to throw.

A cruiser pulled up, its spotlight on us brighter than the sun, but it was night and now we ran blind through the used car lot and over a chain-link fence, running through yards and side streets, a door opening and slamming, a woman yelling, her voice hoa.r.s.e so maybe it was another dog yelling at us, and the cop was too slow, his cruiser shooting up all the wrong side streets, its engine angry like the others.

It was better not to go anywhere.

Sometime that year, I'd moved my room up into the attic. Our rented house had that three-story turret, and the third story was part of the attic, but it had a finished floor and light blue wallpaper and trim around the windows. It was unheated, but there were electrical outlets that worked, and there was even an old bed with a headboard. I moved my things up there, hung my blacklight posters of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Tacked to the wall my blacklight, a birthday or Christmas present, and I got hold of some glow-in-the dark paints and painted a s.p.a.ce galaxy on the ceiling. At night, when only the blacklight was on, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix pulsing light from the walls like insistent spirits, I lay on the bed and stared at the moon and stars and distant worlds.

It was a better place to trip. No cops or dogs or angry machines. Just Bob Dylan on my record player, the expanding cosmos over our heads. But one night in winter we ate a batch of blotter cut with strychnine. Every ninety seconds or so a hot knife seemed to push through my heart, and I had to stand and hold my breath as it pa.s.sed, my shoulders rounded, my chest sunken, this feeling I'd been yanked through all the decades of my life and now I was old and dying and it was my fault.

ON THE other side of the river was Bradford. It's where a lot of Jocks at the high school lived, the kids who wore corduroys and sweaters and looked clean. It's where houses had big green lawns. It's where the college was where Pop taught. It's where he lived in an apartment building with Theo Metrakos and his friend Dave Supple, a writer too.

Since leaving our mother, Pop had lived in a few places, but we rarely saw them and never slept there. Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere. For a few years now he was taking us to church too. He'd pull up in his rusted-out Lancer and drive us to Ma.s.s at Sacred Hearts in Bradford Square. The five of us would walk down the aisle between the crowded pews, Jeb and I with our long hair, Suzanne in her tight hip-huggers, Nicole in her brace she now wore for scoliosis, Pop one of the only men in church not wearing a jacket or tie. He refused to put money in the collection basket, too. Many times I'd hear him say, "You think Jesus ever wore a f.u.c.king tie? Did Jesus spend money on buildings buildings?"

One night, when we were still living at the doctor's house, I heard Mom on the phone trying to convince Pop that he should start taking out each of us one at a time, that he was never going to know us as individual people if he didn't.

I don't know if I cared then about that or not, but a cool sweat broke out on my forehead just thinking about being alone with Pop. I'd never been alone with him. What would I say? What would we talk about? What would we do?

When Mom got off the phone, she said, "I can't believe it. Your father says he'll be too shy with each of you. He's scared of his own kids!"

This made me feel better and worse, but every Wednesday night he'd drive up to the house and take one of us back to his apartment across the river. It was on the third floor of an old brick building covered with ivy. Across the street was the Bradford Green, a lawn and trees and a gazebo, and you could see it from his bedroom where his bed was always made and there were shelves of books and his black wooden desk I remembered from when he used to live with us, its surface clean and organized, notebooks stacked neatly beside his typewriter beside his humidor and pipe stand, six or eight of them each with a white pipe cleaner sticking out of the mouthpiece.

In his small kitchen we'd cook something, pasta and a quick tomato sauce and garlic bread we warmed in the oven. Maybe a bacon and cheese omelet. This was something I looked forward to the most; it seemed I was hungry all the time. At home across the river, unless Bruce had given our mother a new check, something he was able to do less and less now, there just wasn't much food in the house. Breakfast was usually a c.o.ke from Pleasant Spa bought with change we'd found in our mother's purse or under the cushions of our wicker couch. When other kids filed into the cafeteria, we didn't have the money so drifted out back where the pot heads stood on the grates, too cool to sit with the others, pa.s.sing a pipe around, a bag of potato chips, too.

Suzanne was selling dope. One afternoon I stuck my head in her bedroom doorway, and she was sitting on her mattress with Glenn P. rolling dozens of joints from a garbage bag full of Mexican gold. Edgar Winter was playing on her record player. Kids at school walked up to her with a hungry look in their eyes, and my sister had cash and after school she'd sometimes buy us subs, potato chips and c.o.kes and candy bars, our first real meal of the day. When Mom got home from work at close to eight o'clock, she'd open a can of Spaghettios or stew for us and heat it up on the stove. Sometimes she'd fry us Spam, or make that Frito Pie, too tired to do much else, too broke to buy much else. And Bruce didn't cook. He'd drink bourbon in the kitchen with her and talk about the new job he had in Boston doing the same thing she was, getting slumlords to rid their buildings of lead paint. She'd nod her head, moving quickly in her work clothes, a far-off look in her eyes, as if she was trying to put back together how her life had taken her here to this: this milltown, this canned food she never would have used when she was first married, these four hungry, depressed teenagers, this hovering man who wasn't their father.

Those Wednesday nights at Pop's apartment waiting to eat, he probably asked me questions about my life-school, homework, friends-but what I remember is feeling like a liar and a fake. I'd be in a T-shirt and jeans I'd washed earlier so they wouldn't smell like dope. I probably told him I was getting good grades, mostly B's, which, miraculously, I was, but I left out that I regularly skipped half my cla.s.ses, slept late, and didn't go to school several days a month, that I was flunking algebra because it was the first cla.s.s of the morning when I was most high, that Jeb and I and our friend Cleary spent our afternoons looking for a house party where we could get a free buzz, or we'd be downtown in one of the shops, usually the Army and Navy store distracting the man behind the register so Cleary could stuff a T-shirt or a pair of socks or wool cap down his pants. Sometimes we called the cops on ourselves. One of us would lower his voice and report kids throwing eggs at houses and we'd give them the street, then run there with eggs in our pockets and as soon as we saw the cruiser we'd pelt it and run. One time a cop stuck his head out the window and shouted, "I'll shoot shoot you f.u.c.kin' a.s.sholes!" you f.u.c.kin' a.s.sholes!"

We'd end up down by the river and stand on the railroad trestle over the swirling brown water below, betting who had the b.a.l.l.s to stay on the longest before the train came, and what would be worse? Getting hit by the Boston & Maine? Or having to jump into the Merrimack River where you'd probably be poisoned to death before you drowned anyway?

There were girls in these neighborhoods who just gave it away. One was Janice Woods, who at fifteen had cropped blonde hair and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and hips and liked to walk up to guys and stick her fingers down their pants just so she could feel them get hard in her hand. Lately she'd been coming around, spending afternoons with Jeb in his room.

I could have told my father about her, or her father, Daryl Woods, whom our mother got to know from her work somehow. He was short and wore tight jeans and motorcycle boots, his mustache thick and blond. One night he and my mother went out for a drink at the VFW off Monument Square. They were sitting on stools at the bar when a muscular kid with a long ponytail walked in and asked Daryl for a light. Woods looked him over and told him to get lost. The kid pushed him and Daryl Woods threw a short right into his face and dropped him.

It was winter, and when I got up for school the next morning, the house still dark, the hallway lit up Daryl Woods sleeping on the wicker couch in the living room. He was snoring, his arm over his eyes, and I could see the dried blood and st.i.tches in his forearm from his wrist to his elbow. After their drink, my mother and Daryl had gotten back into our car, a used red Toyota. Mom said she'd just started it up when that same muscled kid with the ponytail ran up to her side of the car and yelled, "Duck, lady." Then he threw a Molotov c.o.c.ktail past her face at Woods in the pa.s.senger side, the bottle smashing against his raised forearm, gla.s.s and gasoline spraying over them both. But the fuse had gone out and my mother was flooring it, downshifting and swearing, the kid in the street behind them swearing back.

The inside of the car smelled like gas for weeks.

One March afternoon, at a day party down on Seventh, Cleary and I taking the joint pa.s.sed to us in the loud smoking noise, a couple of rent collectors told us to beat it and before we could stand and go, they yanked us up and pushed us down the stairs. They kicked open the door and shoved us onto the plywood porch, then off it into the mud. I remember Cleary saying, "C'mon, Ricky, we didn't do nothin'. C'mon."

And Ricky J., who months later would get stabbed in the same apartment he was kicking us out of, punched Cleary in the face, his head snapping back, a whimper coming out of him as Kenny V. shouldered me up against the porch, then, without a word, started throwing punches into my chest and ribs and arms. I covered up and he smacked me in the forehead and the temple and I raised my hands and then he went to work on my body. But he wasn't hitting as hard as Clay Whelan had, and a voice in my head said, This is it? This is all? This is it? This is all? I nearly clenched my fist and started punching back. But they both carried Buck knives and the one whaling on Cleary, Ricky J., was on top of him now, punching him over and over in the head. I nearly clenched my fist and started punching back. But they both carried Buck knives and the one whaling on Cleary, Ricky J., was on top of him now, punching him over and over in the head.

Then it was done. They were on the porch breathing hard, looking down at us. Cleary was just getting to his feet, blood dripping from one eye and between his teeth.

Ricky J. lit up a cigarette and flicked the match over our heads. "No more f.u.c.king moochers. Now screw. screw."

Before we were even to the street Cleary started laughing. He turned and yelled, "f.u.c.kin' losers losers!," and we ran up the hill and across Main Street and down the alley to his house and mother.

There were the Murphy brothers, four of them. They'd drive up to house parties where they didn't know anyone. Walk in, drink what they wanted, smoke what they wanted, eat what they wanted, grab the b.u.t.t or b.r.e.a.s.t.s of any girl or woman nearby, and if anybody ever said anything to them about it or even looked at them wrong, they'd jump him right there, four of them on one.

Dennis was the youngest. He was tall and had dirty blond curly hair and a cracked front tooth. It was a warm afternoon in April or May, and Jeb and Cleary and I were walking back from Round Pond, a reservoir where there were woods and you could find kids smoking dope there in the trees, or pa.s.sing Tall Boys around in front of a fire till somebody called the cops or the fire department and you'd run and not look back. That afternoon Cleary taught us how to get high just by breathing deep and fast for a full minute, then have someone put you in a bear hug and squeeze till you felt your brain float up and fizz out the top of your head. I was afraid to do it, it seemed dangerous to me. Bad for your heart. But I watched Jeb squeeze Cleary and dump him in the pine needles where he lay a long time, his eyes closed, his mouth open. When he came to he was pale, but he smiled and said, "That was boss. boss. That was so friggin' That was so friggin' boss. boss."

We were on the sidewalk close to Monument Square. There was a sub shop there between a drugstore and convenience store. Sometimes the owners tossed out a pizza or a sub n.o.body ever picked up for takeout, and we'd find them in the dumpster out back, still warm and in the box or wrapped tightly in white deli paper.

"Hey, f.a.ggots!" It was Dennis Murphy. He ran across the street, then fell in step with us as if we knew him, as if we were friends. "How's it hangin'? Suckin' any hog?"

We never stopped walking and he walked with us. He had a light pine branch in his hand a foot and a half long, and he was slapping it against his palm as he walked. My heart was beating fast, and my mouth had gone gummy. We were getting close to the square, the gas stations and shops, cars driving around the statue of the Union soldier in the middle of the asphalt. An old woman was walking in our direction on the sidewalk ahead of us. She was short and small. Her hair was white. Even though the air was warm she wore a thin coat b.u.t.toned to the top, and she carried two full grocery bags, one in each arm. I started to move to the side. I remember hoping Murphy wouldn't say anything about sucking hog as we pa.s.sed her. Her eyes had been on the concrete, on where it was cracked and where it was heaved and buckled, but now she looked up at us and she seemed to pull her groceries in tighter. None of us moved to the side and she had to nearly step in the street as we pa.s.sed and that's when Murphy flicked his branch out and slapped her face, her eyes blinking and tearing up, and he kept walking. We all kept walking. Cleary laughed like he thought it was funny when I knew he didn't. I don't remember what Jeb said or did, but I did nothing. The old woman was yelling something at us. I could hear the shock in her voice, the outrage. She said something about the police and her dead husband. She yelled, "I hope you're proud proud of yourselves," her voice tremulous. And to walk beside Dennis Murphy for even another heartbeat felt like poison to my own blood, but I kept walking. of yourselves," her voice tremulous. And to walk beside Dennis Murphy for even another heartbeat felt like poison to my own blood, but I kept walking.

In my visits with Pop once a month, I could have told him that story, or the others, but why would I?

4.

ONE WEDNESDAY IN late spring, Pop set up a hibachi grill outside on the half-wall alongside his apartment building. The air was cool and I could smell the lighter fluid he'd just lit up, the mud in the street drains. There was about an hour of daylight left and my father was throwing a ball to me on the sidewalk.

It was a baseball that belonged to one of his roommates. For a while Pop looked in his buddy's bedroom for a couple of gloves too, and I was relieved he didn't find them. I was fourteen but wouldn't know what to do with a baseball glove. What hand do you put it on? How do you catch a ball in it?

So we stood forty feet away from each other on the sidewalk and threw bare-handed. Soft arcing tosses that were fun to catch. Fun. Fun. At first, as the white ball sailed at me, I tensed up and jumped at it with both hands. But then, as I kept catching it, I began to look forward to catching it again, to see it spin in the air as it came, its dark st.i.tching rotating. I had no idea how to throw it back. I have a vague memory of my father telling me to lift my leg, to throw over my shoulder, though he may not have. But I knew we were talking about something as we threw the ball back and forth, an occasional car pa.s.sing in the street beside us, the charcoal glowing hotter for our burgers, and there was so much surprise in his face that I clearly had no experience with a baseball whatsoever, that I did not know one thing about it. I could see he didn't want to draw too much attention to this. In my father's eyes above his trimmed beard, I saw pity for me, and maybe I began to feel sorry for myself too, but what I remember most is being surprised that he was surprised. What did he think kids did in my neighborhood? What did he think we At first, as the white ball sailed at me, I tensed up and jumped at it with both hands. But then, as I kept catching it, I began to look forward to catching it again, to see it spin in the air as it came, its dark st.i.tching rotating. I had no idea how to throw it back. I have a vague memory of my father telling me to lift my leg, to throw over my shoulder, though he may not have. But I knew we were talking about something as we threw the ball back and forth, an occasional car pa.s.sing in the street beside us, the charcoal glowing hotter for our burgers, and there was so much surprise in his face that I clearly had no experience with a baseball whatsoever, that I did not know one thing about it. I could see he didn't want to draw too much attention to this. In my father's eyes above his trimmed beard, I saw pity for me, and maybe I began to feel sorry for myself too, but what I remember most is being surprised that he was surprised. What did he think kids did in my neighborhood? What did he think we did did? But how could I tell him anything without incriminating us all, especially my mother, whom he would blame? And when we sat down to eat at his tiny table in his tiny kitchen we were both quiet and ate too quickly, so much to say there was nothing to say.

ONE WEEKDAY morning, I woke late and was surprised to hear Mom's voice downstairs. She and Bruce were talking in the front room. I dressed and walked to the first floor. The sun was out and shone through the window across the dusty rug. From Suzanne's room I could hear Mick Jagger singing how beautiful Angie was. It sounded like Mom and Bruce were arguing about something, which didn't happen too often. I climbed the stairs to my sister's room.

Suzanne sat on her mattress, her back against the wall. She was smoking a cigarette, and when I walked in she looked up and stubbed it out as if she'd been waiting for me.

"You hear what happened?" She blew smoke out the side of her mouth.

"No, what?"

"Jeb tried to kill himself last night."

"What?"

She told me how sometime after midnight our thirteen-year-old brother had called a rock station down in Boston, how he'd requested a drum solo, how he'd crept outside with Bruce's car keys, a blanket, tape, and our vacuum cleaner's hose, how he then attached it to the exhaust pipe of Bruce's Jaguar XJ6, how he taped it airtight, then pushed the other end into the crack above the back window and stuffed the blanket around it till it, too, was airtight. How he climbed in behind the wheel, started the engine, and waited.

Maybe if Bruce hadn't been a drinker, Jeb would have died, but Bruce woke needing to p.i.s.s and that's when he'd heard his engine idling out in the driveway. That's when he went out there and found Jeb half-conscious behind smoky gla.s.s. That's when he jerked open the door and pulled our brother out, switched off the Jaguar, and walked Jeb up and down the street till his head had cleared.

"Jeb wrote Mom a note. I guess Janice f.u.c.king Woods broke his heart or something."

Mick Jagger was singing on about Angie, how he still loved her. Suzanne shook her head at me. I stared down at her floor, shaking my head too. There was a twisting in the marrow of my bones, a twisting that vibrated with sound. You should've done something. You knew Janice Woods was bad news. Why didn't you do something? You should've done something. You knew Janice Woods was bad news. Why didn't you do something?

"Where is he?"

"School. Mom's p.i.s.sed at Bruce 'cause he didn't even wake her up last night to tell her about it."

THAT AFTERNOON after school I waited on the porch steps for my brother. It was a warm day in spring, and I could smell damp earth, the dry paint of the railing. Soon he was walking down Columbia Park, then he was standing on the sidewalk in front of me. He was smiling guiltily and his cheeks were pale, his T-shirt ripped under the collar. I stood. "You try something like that again, I'll I'll f.u.c.king kill you." f.u.c.king kill you."

"Sure, governor." He said this in a British accent, smiling through me as he climbed the steps and brushed past me. We both knew I was full of s.h.i.t. We both knew I wasn't capable of killing anyone.

Jeb may have gone to a counselor after that, but I don't think so. The days became again what they were, and life continued as it was.

BECAUSE THERE was never a mother or father home in the afternoons, our big rented house on Columbia Park became another place for kids to gather and get high. There were some from the bus stop and the avenues, Nicky G. and Glenn P., Bryan, and Anne Marie and Dawn, but also many people I'd never seen before. Some were grown men, their motorcycles on the sidewalk leading to our porch. By three in the afternoon, the house would be thick with pot and cigarette smoke, the stereo Bruce bought us blaring in the front room: the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Ten Years After, Pink Floyd. In the living room, girls would be sitting on the laps of their boyfriends, some of them sharing a beer or cigarette or joint. In the dining room, at the table that came with the house and one we rarely used, five or six would be playing 45, using for an ashtray their beer cans or one of our cereal bowls.

I hadn't moved up to the attic yet, and my room was still on the second floor in the back of the house across from Jeb's. I'd go up there and shut the door behind me. I'd lie on my bed and try to ignore the weekday afternoon party voices and laughter, the yelling or loud trash-talking from Nicky G. or one of the rent collectors from Seventh who'd started coming around too. I'd lie there and imagine being a different kind of kid, one who could walk downstairs and open the front door and yell at them all to just get the f.u.c.k out. And when they wouldn't, I'd jerk the men to their feet one at a time. They'd swing at me, and I'd duck and then start hurling punches and kicks like Billy Jack, smashing bones and severing arteries, all with my hands and feet.

Instead I stayed in my room and waited for the sun to go down and for them to drift off, two or three at a time.