Scenes from a Boyhood in Central Texas

Scenes from a Boyhood in Central Texas

     He was old enough at seven to be upset when they moved.  He hardly noticed the other moves, but he liked their street in Fort Worth and didn’t want to leave it.  He liked playing ball in the street until dark.  He liked playing in the sand box next door.  It was superior to any other sandbox he’d ever seen because his friend’s father worked for the railroad and brought different colors and textures of sand home from work.  He liked playing hide and seek on the trails of the tall marshy reeds at the bottom of the street and sitting on the rock wall at the top of the street, speculating with his friends about who lived in the big house behind them in the middle of the field.  He liked his best friend, Billy, and Billy’s mother Jo, who his mother later said was a little “rough.”  And he liked Skip and T.J., his parents’ friends who lived on the corner and the pretty woman from Mississippi with the strange but pleasant accent who played Canasta and made hush puppies.  He learned a lot that year in Fort Worth.  How to play ball, cowboys and Indians, hide and seek, Canasta, jacks, hopscotch.  How stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back, that there was no Santa Claus, no tooth fairy, and that he didn’t care much for Easter.  The problem with Easter was that it always came on a Sunday, ham wasn’t as good as turkey, it was usually cold and windy outside, and he had to dress up to go to church and spend the afternoon in a park with relatives he didn’t know.  He also learned that he liked frozen strawberries.  His mother insisted that he try one bite, and after that he couldn’t get enough of them.  He already knew how to ride a bike, a blue one with pedals on the front wheel, but he didn’t know until a few weeks later how much it hurt to crash and get a long cut on your knee cap.  It was also the first time his parents disappointed him at Christmas.  He wanted holsters and pistols, but he wanted them to be tan, not white like Hopalong Cassidy.  He acted as if he liked them, and he wore them outside to play with his friends, but he was embarrassed.  No one seemed to notice.  No one made fun of him.  But he was ashamed of them.  Fort Worth was also the first time he was sick, or the first time he remembered it, with infetigo, which nearly drove him crazy.  He itched so bad he couldn’t sleep.  And he learned eeny, meeny, miny mo, and that LSMFT meant Lord Save Me From Truman, which his parents couldn’t really explain, or didn’t want to, saying only that some people didn’t like President Truman.  And war games, in which killing Japs was always the point.

*****

     In the new town, not far from Ft. Worth but much smaller, Bosley lived on the next street over, but he always got there through a break in the hedge in the backyard.  It was a big yard with a pile of dirt for playing war and a good enough but not perfect backboard.  It leaned a little and was probably not exactly the right height.  And two pear trees, the pears always, or so he remembered it, lying around rotting on the ground.  The Bosley’s didn’t have air conditioning.  Instead, they had an attic fan and sometimes they had ice cream in the refrigerator.  Neither of his parents ever seemed to be there and the house was always a mess.  They would turn on the fan, eat the ice cream out of the carton, and listen to Bosley’s older sister’s records.  They listened to the Elvis Presley album with Blue Moon Over Kentucky on it.  They listened to Sam Cooke, over and over again.  They collected baseball cards—he convinced Bosley that the smaller Bowman cards, which weren’t made after ‘55, were better than the Topps, because they “looked neater”--and they played All-Star Baseball.

     Bosley didn’t like to lose, at anything, and usually didn’t.  They didn’t choose their teams in the same way.  Hitting was all that mattered in the game, and they both knew it, but only Bosley chose only the best hitters.  Roy chose players he liked, often for reasons that were obscure even to himself.  He might like the name.  Solly Hemus.  A mediocre hitter.  Preacher Roe.  A terrible hitter, even for a pitcher.  Or he might like the way the card looked.  They often doctored the cards to make them more in line with the latest batting averages of the players, so many were touched up with black and white ink, which gave them a distinctive look.  And of course all the cards looked different anyway, since the names never fit in exactly the same way, and the spaces for singles, 13 and 7, and doubles, 11, and home runs, 1, were different sizes for different players. 

     But Bosley had no such esthetic handicap.  He picked the best hitters, period, and he usually won.  One day, though, Roy got lucky, and he was ahead of Bosley by ten runs by the seventh inning.  He knew Bosley was mad, but he underestimated how mad.  He gleefully kept spinning and celebrated when, already ahead by a wide margin, some mediocre second baseman hit a bases loaded home run.  Bosley blew up.  He picked up the game board and broke it across his knee and threw it against the wall.  The spinner broke off.

     They made it up eventually, and his father fixed the spinner, but it was a good lesson about Bosley, one he never forgot, and the older he got the more Bosley faded out of the picture.  Pretty soon his best friend was Weaver, a boy he hadn’t liked much when they were younger because he didn’t know much.  Nor was he interested in knowing much.  They’d had a shouting match once about Weaver not knowing who Yogi Berra was, which should have taught him a lesson.  Weaver didn’t seem to think it was important, and most of the people around him, girls and boys, seemed to agree with him, maybe because they didn’t know who Berra was either.  But the ignorance outraged him.  He couldn’t see how people could live in the world and not know, or at least be ashamed and appalled by their own ignorance.  Or, at the very least, care and be curious.  But no one around them that day supported him, and that wasn’t the worst of it.  Weaver actually won the argument.  He wanted to know what knowing the Yankee lineup had to do with wanting to be a doctor or a lawyer.  His older sister was a nurse, saved people’s lives, and he was sure she didn’t know who Yogi Berra was.  Did that mean she was stupid?

     It should have taught him a lesson, and it did to the extent that he tried to keep his opinion about people’s ignorance to himself.  That made it possible for him to be friends with Weaver, although he couldn’t say that he liked him.  It wasn’t possible to like someone who was so stubbornly incurious and unwaveringly practical.  Weaver didn’t mind learning and wasn’t half bad at it, as long as he could see that it was something that would pay off, or someone he trusted had told him it would.  He was fun to be with.  That’s the most he could say for Weaver, but he even had to qualify that.  He was fun to do things with, or maybe fun because of what he would do, since for a brief time, what they wanted to do was the same.  Ride bikes all over town.  Both had new ten speed bikes, so they could get from one end of the town to the other in a reasonable amount of time.  He got so absorbed in riding his bike that he never thought of the outdoors as outdoors when he was on it, hardly even noticed that it was hot or raining, and in the summer it was almost always one or the other.

     They could ride downtown anytime.  Ride the streets, the alleys, and drop their bikes anywhere, almost without thinking about it.  Just so they, the bikes, wouldn’t get run over.  He liked it because in most places nobody paid the least bit of attention to them.  They were almost invisible.  And he liked it because downtown provided the most opportunities for flirting with trouble.  Shoplifting at the dime stores.  Reading the magazines without buying anything at the drug stores.  Examining the exit doors of the movie theaters for ways to pry it open.  Stealing coke bottles from behind the grocery store and selling them back.  Nothing really serious.  They knew that.  They knew they weren’t bad.  Just pests, and that only when anyone bothered to notice or care.  They knew they didn’t have the nerve to be bad, or, truth be told, even the inclination.  They weren’t mad at anybody and they didn’t need anything.

*****

     McGill knocked on his door almost every morning at eight o’clock in the summer and wanted him to “come out” and play.  That meant Stewart’s lot; baseball.  His mother always answered the door because he was always asleep at eight a.m. in the summer.  Very asleep.  Being a child, he slept like one.  Even when he resisted McGill’s persistence and stayed in bed until ten-thirty or eleven, he had to force himself up, and only got up then because he had to pee.  He staggered into the bathroom, painfully concentrated on hitting the water in the toilet bowl so that he wouldn’t get yelled at, and washed his face not for hygiene’s sake and not with soap, but with cold water, to get the sleep out of his eyes and his body.  And even then he sometimes plopped back into bed, not really wanting to sleep more but unable to get his body to feel like doing anything else. 

     His mother usually coaxed him out of bed, asking repeatedly if he was going to sleep all day.  She put the cereal out for him, which, if he was going down to Stewart’s lot, he would hurry through, and which, if he wasn’t, he would eat two bowls of, heavy on the sugar, lots of milk, and read the sports page, mostly for the numbers, taking great pleasure in memorizing the standings of both major leagues and the Texas League, right down to Shreveport, usually in the cellar, 12 games behind, and the lineups of his favorite teams, Giants, Yankees, Dodgers, in that order, the Dodgers not because he liked them, he didn’t, but they were too important not to know about.  He didn’t like the Dodgers because everybody else liked them.  He liked the Giants because no one else did and Willie Mays.  His father had to tell him the details about Willie Mays.  He didn’t read it anywhere.  The “say hey” kid and the basket catch, which was part of making it look easy, a quality his father admired.  In fact, he seemed to think it was the highest quality a major league baseball player could have.  Joe DiMaggio had it, he said.  He usually didn’t have to move more than a few steps to catch a fly ball.  He made playing center field in Yankee Stadium look easy, but behind that was knowing the hitters, which took a lot of work.

     It was hot in the summer even at eight in the morning, baseball was not possible after ten, and he was always tempted to forget about McGill, even when he got up early, and instead grab a book and lie down under the air-conditioner.  On the other hand, he knew that once he got down there, he would have a good time.  They played flies and skinners, which he liked better than Little League.  No grown-ups.  A good hitter could often hit the ball on the fly over the chain link fence into the Stewart’s back yard.  It was rare the first summer they played, and then got more and more frequent, until in the end the gate to the fence was left open and the best fielders played in the Stewart’s front yard, at the edge of it just in front of the border of scrawny rose bushes, so that they could run between the rose bushes for a short fly, or through the gate if necessary and into the backyard for a long one.  Anything hit over the fence or beyond the rose bushes was a home run unless it was caught, so when it became common to hit it that far, make home runs, the only way to score, became rare.  The fielders had to drop or misjudge it, which was also rare.  They’d outgrown the lot, but no one wanted to change the rule and say it was a home run whether it was caught or not.  Catching the flies when it didn’t mean anything would not be near as much fun.

     Flies and skinners in the summer and touch football in the winter.  That’s all they did down there, his friends, but every kid in the neighborhood used Stewart’s lot.  Joanne Davenport’s older brother was electrocuted and died there, flying a model airplane.  One Christmas Day a kid came out with a real bow and arrow set.  He shot one of the arrows straight up, a good distance, and it came down and stuck right in the center of another kid’s football helmet.  He didn’t see Jerry Davenport get electrocuted, but he saw the arrow stick in the helmet.  It looked like a gag in a Bob Hope or Three Stooges movie.  It was crowded that day.  Everyone had come to the lot with their Christmas presents.  Kids were everywhere and quite a few of them saw the arrow come down.  The kid was okay, the arrow never touched him, but the kid who shot it was just old enough to be scared and embarrassed.  He didn’t stop shooting arrows, but he was more careful after that.  No grownup ever told Roy about Jerry Davenport.  One of his friends casually mentioned it one day, when they saw someone else flying a model airplane.  And as far as he knew, no one ever told a parent about the helmet incident.

     McGill had walked with a crutch until the fourth or fifth grade, but even before he didn’t have to use the crutch anymore, he wanted to play every day.  He would even run foot races, carrying the crutch.  It wasn’t polio, according to his mother.  She might have told him what it was, but he’d never heard of it and so soon forgot.  It didn’t matter.  McGill was never a friend like Bosley and Weaver.  He never talked to McGill about anything.  He never did anything with McGill except play ball.  He never even saw his mother or his father or the inside of his house.  McGill was the boy on crutches, who was now completely healthy and a pretty good athlete, and who wanted to play ball every day.  That was McGill.  Front and back.  Beginning to end.

     Bosley didn’t play ball very much.  Less the older they got.  He didn’t know what Bosley did all day.  He didn’t think about it.  Weaver played all the time, and he was better than anybody, which was another reason not to like him.  He could hit the ball further than anyone and further a lot more often, and although he wasn’t a great fielder, he was just as good as anyone else without really trying.  He was good at cutting to the chase, at making things simple.  He didn’t care if he looked like anyone in the major leagues.  He didn’t care if the rules made sense.  He stood, crouched and ran naturally, and looked good doing it, and he wanted the rules to be whatever was most fun, regardless of logic.  He never thought about form and was impatient with anyone who did, and just as he’d been right about Yogi Berra, he was right about that.  It couldn’t be denied.  He had the best argument, irritating though it could be.  Stewart’s lot was not the major leagues.

     Weaver’s father was a barber.  A good one.  His own father was happy to find him, saying that he was the only barber in town good enough to give you a haircut that didn’t make you look like you’d just had one.  That was a lesson in how to be manly without being a hick, valuing that, subtlety, and Mr. Weaver and his haircuts were lessons in themselves.  Part of making it look easy.  He was the only barber who wouldn’t jerk a boy’s head around to make him hold it right and be still.  He was the only barber who paid any attention to what people said they wanted and the only one who was good at doing it.  He was the only one who was naturally soft-spoken and friendly.  He didn’t try to be.  He just was, all the time. 

     Weaver had a number of interesting facts to tell about his father.  He slept in the nude, he never wore a hat because it made you bald, he dyed his hair, he walked to work and back every day, he watched Gunsmoke every Saturday night and then went to bed.  He also fell out of a car once that was going fifty miles an hour and wasn’t hurt except for a few scratches.  Weaver knew that for a fact because he’d been driving.  He’d started driving at twelve years old and took over on out of town trips when his father got sleepy, which was often.  He said they were driving to Waco one night and he noticed that he didn’t hear his father snoring anymore, and when he looked over, his father wasn’t there.  He stopped, backed up, and found him sitting on the side of the road.  They decided he hadn’t been hurt because he’d been asleep.  Relaxed as if a baby, as if drunk.  His mother said it was God’s will.

     Weaver’s mother was just as easy going as his father, in spite of the fact that she went to every church service given by the North Side Baptist Church, which was more fundamentalist than First Baptist, almost like holy-rollers, and didn’t believe in dancing, drinking, card playing, pool, dominos, boys and girls swimming together, going to movies on Sunday, and a host of other things.  She said one day that cutting down two oak trees for a hamburger stand was a sin, and Weaver laughed at her, and as usual, he had the best argument.  Despite knowing the Bible backwards and forwards and every sin in the book, she couldn’t say why cutting down the trees was a sin.  It didn’t seem right.  They were pretty.  They were over a hundred years old.  Not an argument and they all knew it.  Mrs. Weaver was driving.  They were stopped at a light, and to their right were the uprooted trees being moved around by machinery.  Dust and noise everywhere.  Roy agreed with Mrs. Weaver and knew why.  He liked the trees.  He didn’t like the dust or the noise.  The town already had two or three good hamburger stands.  What was the point?  But he knew better than to say as much.  There are plenty more trees, Weaver said, and he was right.

     Mrs. Weaver talked too much.  She never shut up.  He liked her but could only take her for a certain amount of time, and he was glad he didn’t live in the same house.  He much preferred his own mother, who was younger, prettier and listened as much or more than she talked.  He wasn’t sure, though, that he preferred his own father.  His father was not as easy going as Mr. Weaver.  In fact, he wasn’t easy going at all.  Rare was the second question that didn’t irritate him.  First questions were usually okay.  Second questions were best avoided.  Also to be avoided was any talk about girl friends, which he’d tried only once and found out immediately that it embarrassed his father, and therefore it embarrassed him.  The one exception to the second question rule was math.  His father sat at the dinner table with him one night for half an hour patiently explaining why the 1900’s were the 20^th Century, using a peeling an orange analogy.  He’d have been good also at showing him how to peel an orange, did show him more than once, but it was something he could never remember.  More often, actually, it was an apple, and he was fascinated by the elegance of his father’s peeling with his pocket knife, the apple almost seeming to peel itself, the skin coming off so effortlessly and in such a perfect spiral.  The effortless way he used his thumb against the blade to make it almost seem like the apple was spinning under it.  But Roy could never even get holding the knife right, and at first his father was easy going about it, laughing gently, showing only mock impatience, but after a while, after a certain amount of failure, he sensed the real irritation creep in.  He was not good with his hands.  That quickly became a family fact.

*****

     Raymond’s baseball story went like this:  “When I was 16, around the time of The Great War, I got signed by the New York Giants.  I was playing centerfield for a semi-pro league in Indiana, and one of their scouts saw me have a pretty good day.  They sent me to one of their farm clubs down in Alabama.  The rest of that season, three months or so, I hit .455 with 30 home runs.  During the off-season I went back to work at the factory, and then in the spring the Giants sent me to play Triple-A ball in Pennsylvania.  I hit over four hundred there too and had just hit home run number fifty when they called me up.  It was late in the season and they were still in the pennant race.  I was there to pinch hit, but I was low man on the totem pole, so it took them five or six games to get around to me.  It was extra innings and the bases were loaded.  We were behind a run.  Two out.  They put me up only because they’d used everybody else.  I guess they figured green as I was I still had a better chance of getting on than the pitcher did.  I took three balls in a row.  Not even close.  I looked down at third base, got the take sign of course, and then the pitcher wound up and threw me the fattest pitch you ever saw.  I knew he would.  He didn’t have no other choice, and well boys, like Dizzy Dean always says, I went for the downs.  I swung so hard that my feet came off the ground, and I hit that ball right out of the park.  Cleared right center by twenty feet.  I felt like Babe Ruth jogging around those bases, let me tell you, never felt better in my life, but it didn’t last long.  I knew the minute I rounded second and saw the look on the third base coach’s face that I was in deep trouble.  No one said a word to me.  No one would look at me.  The players too, not just the coaches.  And the next day they sent me back to Alabama, but I didn’t go.  I went back home.  Didn’t even have the heart to play semi-pro after that.  Screw’em.”

     It was the first time Roy had ever heard an adult say “screw” in that way, and it shocked him.  He couldn’t remember when people forgot that screw means fuck, or decided it didn’t matter.  Maybe early in the sixties, or even before that.  Maybe it was more common than he thought.  His world was a lot smaller then.  He’d just turned twelve.  He played baseball in the morning, rode his bike in the afternoon and watched TV at night.  Actually, he read a lot too, either in the library downtown or on the floor of the one room in his house that was air-conditioned.  Sports and war.  Mostly baseball.  Mostly the Civil War.  And he ate whatever was put in front of him, and more if he could get it.  About that time he also started noticing the exposed legs of dancers on TV when they did twirls, and how the skirts of the women on the covers of 25 cent novels were always well above their knees.  The magazines on a separate rack in a certain drug store caught his eye as well, and he was sorely tempted to look, but he was afraid that if he was seen, he wouldn’t be allowed to read The Sporting News for free anymore.

     Adults never told you anything in those days, but he’d guess that the man who told him the grand slam story was already widely known to be of “no account.”  He was Mrs. Phelps’ brother-in-law, recently arrived from “somewhere up north.”  They knew that because he talked funny.  Mrs. Phelps ran the little store they rode their bikes to for cold drinks after baseball.  She’d run it forever for all he knew, but her brother-in-law appeared for the first time that summer, and he was always sitting in front of the store in a metal lawn chair, the kind that give a little when you sit down.  Or give a lot if you’re fat, which Raymond was.  He insisted they call him Raymond, and after a while they got used to it. 

     Another story he told them was about Tojo’s son, what the G.I.’s did to him when he was captured.  According to Raymond, who claimed to have been there in person, they put a reed in Tojo Jr.’s mouth, buried him alive in a shallow grave and took turns peeing into the reed.  That went on for several days, Raymond said, but no one knows how long it took him to die and no one bothered to dig him up.  He laughed when he told that story, laughed so heartily that it made his face turn red, which made him even uglier than usual.  His teeth were yellow and crooked.  His face was unhealthy, the color and consistency of chalk.  It reminded Roy of an illustration in a Robin Hood book he’d come across in the library.  Not Friar Tuck, but another monk, a bad one.

     By ten in the morning it was too hot to play baseball even for us.  We all felt drained and had cotton-mouth, but we didn’t always go to Phelps’s store.  Sometimes we wanted a place where we could also read magazines, or if we were short on cash, we stole bottles from behind the supermarket and traded them in up front for cold drinks.  At times we stole from Mrs. Phelps but we never sold her back the bottles.  The bottle deposit was two cents, but Mrs. Phelps would only give us a penny.

     A liveoak is an evergreen with relatively small leaves, but its trunk and branches are stout and gnarled like the oaks you see in children’s books.  It might smile or frown at you, but it seems in any case to have its arms out wide, to shelter or smother, to welcome or frighten you.  Raymond’s chair, as they quickly began to think of it, sat under such a tree, and more often than not, when they rode up to the front of the store, he was in it, doing absolutely nothing but rocking and staring into space.  He never greeted them, and when one of them said, “Hey Raymond,” he’d just barely lift his head, and sometimes an eyebrow.  It’s how northeners are, someone said.  It doesn’t mean anything.  And they’d be settled down and talking among ourselves before he ever said a word, if he was going to say anything that day at all.  “Tell us one of your stories, Raymond,” didn’t work.  He’d either spit or not do anything, so they learned fast to leave him alone.  Most days though he’d come up with something.  He’d just start talking.  He never worried about interrupting anyone.

     “They should have given that nigger the electric chair,” he said one day.  They all knew who he was talking about.  Most of their parents had similar opinions, but to know that you had to listen from the other room, and they didn’t express themselves in the same way.  “Colored” was the more acceptable term on the social level most of our families belonged to, and mothers especially preferred to focus on “that poor woman.”  Opinions about the sentence were given more indirectly:  “He got off easy,” or “I just don’t know if life in prison is enough for someone who would do that.”  They’d learned from Weaver, whose older brothers tended to be less discreet than most parents, that a nineteen-year-old black man, “colored boy” or “nigger” to everyone they knew, had been convicted of raping an 84-year old-woman.  None of them knew or asked whether she was white or black.  Roy didn’t even think to ask.  He was too amazed at the crime itself.  It didn’t seem to make any sense.  He was beginning to understand how a person might get so horny that he’d lose control of himself and do something he later regretted, but he couldn’t imagine getting that way over an old woman. 

     “Fry his balls and feed’em to the crows,” Raymond said.  Then he told them about seeing a lynching in East Texas when he worked in the oil fields.  The only lynchings he’d ever heard of before were in cowboy movies.  They were bad things that almost but never actually happened.  The guy with a rope around his neck was usually saved at the last minute, but Raymond’s lynching did actually happen, and they all heard about it in detail.  The kicking, the weird grimace on the victim’s face, the shouts of approval, even cheers, from the men in the crowd as the body was suddenly released, how quick it fell, with such violence, and bounced up and down for a minute.  I can’t look at a photograph of a lynching now without thinking about Raymond.  Sometimes I think that metal lawn chair started to squeak as he told us about it, but I couldn’t swear to that.  I just remember for sure that I’d never seen him so excited before, not even when he told about hitting the home run.

     But it was Tojo’s son that got him into trouble.  Someone’s little brother decided to tell it at the dinner table, and that was the end of the bike rides to Mrs. Phelps’s store.  Weaver wanted to go anyway, but no one else had the nerve to go against his parents, and Roy suspected they’d have been run off.  Reilly’s father was a lawyer, and he took it upon himself to speak to Raymond.  No one at that time had much affection for the Japanese, but as my mother put it, “the story is too gruesome for boys your age.”  Roy’s father had his doubts about it being true, at least the part about Raymond being there in person, which made Roy decide not to tell him about the grand slam.  He had his own doubts about that one.  He might have believed it a year earlier, but at twelve it seemed a little too perfect to be true.  And he could already see the dreaded condescending look on his father’s face, even if he told him in advance he didn’t believe it.  He’d know he sort of had at one point and still wished it was true.                             

*****

     He probably knew people who believed that Mr. Rosen was evil, but what he heard people actually say about Jews was not that extreme.  His father said they were tight and implied their shrewdness with money by noting that they tended to start businesses with high markups, like jewelry and furniture stores.  No Jews in town were in the grocery business, for example.  One was a record store owner, but you had to allow for their near monopoly of the entertainment business.  A Jewish uncle by marriage was a musician, for example.  And shoes?  Were shoes high markup?  And the clothing business in general?  Jews were everywhere in the clothing business.  Every department store he’d ever heard of in Texas was owned by Jews.  Were clothes high markup?  He didn’t know, but still, the theory probably had more exceptions than it could bear, but he got the idea.  Jews were good with money, to an unseemly degree by the standards of other people. 

     Sunday school teachers also had something to say about Jews.  At the First Baptist Church he was taught not to hate Jews but to pity them, as we would anyone who rejected Christ.  But extreme views were there, he was sure, and what kept him from them when he was little was propriety, an understanding among a certain class of adults that there were limits to what could be openly discussed among children.  Inevitably, though, there are those who test the limits, either from coarseness or idealism—children can’t be protected from the truth forever and isn’t it our duty to tell them the truth, to prepare them?  Or just from spite.  Not being able to bear such innocence, one that would make no distinctions.

      Dr. Laban was his Sunday school teacher when he was sixteen.  He was a surgeon who believed that prayer could cure cancer and that Karl Marx never did an honest day’s work in his life.  No socialist, i.e., communist, or anyone who lived under such a system of government, ever did an honest day’s work, and that alone proved it was evil.  Dr. Laban knew the truth about everything, and he gave his time to share that knowledge with young people, to make a better world.  At first Roy liked him because he was singled out for being smart.  The doctor flattered him by asking if he’d ever considered medicine as a profession and offered recommendations, even money if he needed it, which should have warned him right away, not the money, but reading him so badly.  Roy had won his respect by asking him questions in his Sunday school class, even arguing with him, but he had no interest in science.  Nevertheless, Dr. Laban took him so seriously that he prepared detailed responses, which had the unintended consequence of trapping him into regular attendance.

     Dr. Laban thought he was answering his call for reason with reason, but it soon became clear that what really interested him were miracles.  Not only did God heal cancer, but people came back to life after dying in car wrecks.  All nonsense, of course, Roy was old enough to see that, but he was glad to find someone who would address his concerns and not go silent or hostile.  Dr. Laban was a newcomer to town and perhaps a little too dark complected.  Lebanese, people said.  He had two beautiful daughters and a comfortable brick home in a fashionable part of town, but his downfall came when he invited the Sunday school class over to his house one night to watch his home movies of the Texas City oil refinery explosion.  They ate cookies and drank punch and watched mangled bodies, serious blood and guts, accompanied by the doctor’s clinical narration.  No one threw up on his carpet, but everyone thought it was a little creepy, and word soon got out among parents that Dr. Laban’s parties for boys were to be avoided.

     It was around that time that he started liking Mr. Rosen.  When he was little he was afraid of him.  Not because he was Jewish, but because he was such a strange, imposing presence.  He was built like one of those men at cocktail parties in the New Yorker, a graceful S, only a little stooped, and his teeth were yellow and his mouth always seemed to be full of mucus.  He had a strange accent, patrician New York he guessed later when he knew what that was, all of which was odd enough, but he compounded his own strangeness by standing out on the sidewalk in front of his store in order to collar passersby.  That’s what had scared him as a kid.  That stooping aggressiveness, standing on the sidewalk like some big bug about to scoop in little kids, all the while smiling between those yellow teeth and speaking in a way that sounded like whining to a Texas ear.

     The first clue about Mr. Rosen’s real nature came when he brought both a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of scotch to his father when he had his appendix out, saying he didn’t know which he drank.  Next came an afternoon spent in his store, the old man showing him and a friend his boxing trophies and photographs from his service days at around the turn of the century, and then demonstrating “a real Army spit shine,” spitting on shoes, cracking the rag.  He was always fond of Mr. Rosen after that, and bought shoes from him whenever he could, but the real clincher came when he saw him at the airport one day with his family.  Mr. Rosen didn’t see him, and he kept his distance.  It was a family affair.  The occasion was that Mr. Rosen was on his way to the LBJ inaugural, and there was something about the elegant way he sat at the gate, a smile on his face, basking in his family’s admiration, that tugged at Roy’s heart.         

*****

     It was probably Juapo, but he didn’t know that until years after, and it remained stubbornly in his brain as Wappo, a man who like Mr. Rosen talked as if his mouth was full of mush, or yellow phelgm, or mucus, his walk a slow shuffle, his profile a graceful but sickly S, an old zoot-suiter now racking balls at the Navarro Club, Members Only.  Despite superficial similarities, he couldn’t have been more different from Mr. Rosen.  Wappo never hurried, never smiled, never said anything anyone could understand.  He was always there.

     He didn’t own the place.  That was Mr. Wappo, also the owner of the Army Navy store next door, who sometimes sat on a stool in his dark suit to watch the high rollers play nine ball for five dollars a game.  That was where Roy learned about shape, standing on his toes to see the good players between the heads of the not so good.  That’s what it all came down to.  Shape.  Nothing else mattered if you didn’t have it.  Hard hitting.  Finesse.  Brains.  Grace under pressure.  Endurance.  None of that was enough if you didn’t have shape and didn’t know how to get it.            

     He and his friends weren’t supposed to be there, but once inside they were tolerated.  The sign on the door said No One Under Eighteen Allowed, so they kept a low profile and minded their manners.  They put their nickels on the edge of the table, a nickel a cue a game, and meekly waited for Wappo to notice them and come shuffling back to rack the balls.  It never occurred to them that the nine ball players probably tipped him. 

      Wappo’s was long and narrow, hardly room enough at either end of a table to draw back a stick without hitting a wall.  There were about eight tables, side by side in single file, and the kids played eight ball at the last two on worn felt, even ripped in places, and got used to the urine smell from the toilet at the rear of the building.  The only light came from the flourescent bulbs over each table.  The heat came from little gas stoves up front, nearer the nine ball players, and in the summer there were a couple of revolving table fans, also up front.

     The only person their age who ever played on the front tables was Bosley.  He’d been part of their crowd in grade school, but by high school they’d almost forgotten about him, and then one day he started showing up at Wappo’s with his own stick in a leather case, determined to play with the nine ball players.  It took nerve.  More nerve than any of them had, even if they’d been good enough.  They had to respect that, but on the other hand, who did he think he was?  Maybe he’d paid a fortune for his stick and his leather case, and somehow had the money to lose, and was actually good enough not to make a total fool of himself, but it still didn’t seem right.  At first they thought the nine ball players would laugh at him and turn him away, refuse to take his money, but they didn’t, and then they wanted him to lose.  They looked forward to seeing him walk out of there with his tail between his legs, especially since he never acknowledged them, always had his game face on, as if he had something to prove.  They laughed at him behind his back, partly in resentment, partly in embarrassment for him, he looked so ridiculous, so comically serious.  He never won even one game.  He didn’t completely make a fool of himself, he wasn’t that bad.  He made some tough shots and could have beaten any of the kids blindfolded, but he wasn’t in the same league as the nine ball players.  After two or three months of losing every Saturday morning, patiently waiting his turn and then showing everyone he was pretty good but not good enough, he stopped showing up.  One Saturday he wasn’t there, and then the next, and pretty soon they stopped talking about it.

*****

     We had no business on Commerce Street.  Across from Wappo’s was a pawn shop and down the block was the Tex Theater, which none of us ever went to.  It showed double features of old westerns and somebody’s older brother said it was only for Mexicans.  That meant you’d probably get knifed, not to mention sick if you ate or touched anything.  We didn’t belong on Commerce Street, but no one paid us any attention.  We stared at the switch blade knives in the pawn shop.  We looked at the gas masks and bayonets in the Army Navy store.  We tried to find the damage on the furniture at the damaged freight outlet.  The next street over, Beaton, the main street, was respectable.  Very wide, metered angle parking, Penney’s, Sears, two banks, two barber shops, two drug stores, two shoe stores, two jewelry stores, three dime stores.  Two restaurants, one Mexican, one home cooking.  Two record shops.  Penney’s still had hardwood floors and pneumatic message carriers.  Here and there you could find an old hitching ring in the sidewalk.  Farmers in bib overwalls sometimes sat on the curbs outside the drug stores.  Traffic was bumper to bumper on Saturdays.  Nearly every day the smell of cottonseed oil permeated all of downtown.    

      The third street over was Main.  A local department store, three stories high, a bakery, a printer, a stationer, shoe repair.  Black people were never seen on Beaton or Main.  There was a side door in Sears that could be reached from Commerce, which was on their side of town, and separate facilities.  Sometimes you saw them crossing Beaton to go to the Ideal theater, where they were allowed in the balcony.               

     There were two ushers at the Palace, which had no balcony and allowed no black people anywhere.  One usher had a big ass and the other had very bad acne.  It was thought of as a sissy job, but their word was law.  No talking.  No knees on the backs of seats.  They’d warn you the first time, sometimes knocking your knees down with a flashlight, then throw you out if you did it again.  The one in charge was the one with the bad acne.  The rumor was that the manager of the theater had a big stash of pornography in his office, and if the usher with bad acne liked you, he’d let you see it.  Some also said that he liked you only if he wanted to suck your cock.

     The Palace was part of a chain of small town movie theaters, which meant that everything was standardized.  What movies played, how it looked, what you could buy at the concession stand, maybe even including the giant dill pickles in a jar.  You couldn’t get ice in your drinks.  You couldn’t get Coke.  Just Pepsi.  But the Palace was the only game in town for first run movies.  They changed after two or three days.  One for the first half of the weekend, another for the second half, and usually a third (always a B movie) for the middle of the week.  He went two or three times a week, often by himself, depending on how much money he had.  He never worried about when the feature started.  He’d just ride his bike downtown in the afternoon and go.

     He also went to the Ideal, but not as often, certainly not as part of a routine.  It was always second best, more the kind of place he went to when he couldn’t think of anything else to do.  But it had its attractions.  You could always get Coke with ice at the Ideal, you never saw an usher, and although he wasn’t conscious of it being a big deal back then, perhaps the opera boxes, faded murals on the walls and ceiling and grand staircase to the balcony, made an impression.  It was pretty rundown by the fifties, but it was hard not to be aware, sense in some way, that unlike the Palace, which hardly existed except as a nearly invisible vehicle for the films that played there, the Ideal had a past.  More of a past than a future, which would have been clear even to him, if he’d ever thought about anything changing, since he never saw it even half full.  Was it the black people in the balcony that kept people away?  Its seediness?  I’m sure neither of those things helped, but the main thing had to be the movies.  When I think of the Ideal, I think of films that were already old:  Lash LaRue and the Cisco Kid serials, short subjects like the Bowery Boys, The Three Stooges.  Tom and Jerry cartoons instead of Bugs Bunny.  And many of the movies weren’t just second run, but borderline respectable.  Foreign movies.  Documentaris about childbirth, marijuana, prostitution.  Rock and roll.  Brigitte Bardot, Mondo Cane, High School Confidential, La Dolce Vita.

*****

     He liked his father’s side of the family better than his mother’s.  On his mother’s side they were all country people, all hicks.  They knew nothing.  They talked in a way that was comical, similar to Ma and Pa Kettle.  His father often became impatient and irritable when they visited his grandparents.  His father’s face would turn red when his grandfather urged another piece of chicken on him or more mashed potatoes.  He would answer curtly that when he wanted more food, he’d ask for it, and Roy knew what his father really meant by his answer.  His father thought his grandfather was stupid and his manners ridiculous, and his tone made that clear to anyone with half a brain, a message apparently lost on his grandfather, who never changed.  Later in the car, on the way home, he often heard his father tell his mother that if he wanted more chicken or mashed potatoes, he would ask.  He didn’t say, Why can’t the old bastard take no for an answer?, but Sonny knew that’s what he was thinking.

     At dinner was about the only time his grandfather seemed completely alive.  The rest of the time he seemed to be more or less in hibernation.  He would sit on a straight backed wooden chair in a corner of the living room, wearing dark glasses even inside, and watch television without comment or visible reaction, his arms folded across his chest, apparently indifferent to what he was watching, perhaps not even knowing.  He might or might not have been listening to the conversation going on around him.  He never entered into conversation, not even at the dinner table, except to urge more food on people. 

     He would answer a question politely, but as briefly as possible.  Not because he was taciturn or ill-tempered.  He was placid, at least on the surface.  His father used to say that Abner was the only man he’d ever known to whom nothing had ever happened.  He grew up on a farm near Greenville.  He courted Roy’s grandmother in a horse and buggy.  He’d been in the infantry in the First World War.  He went to a Baptist church service every Sunday of his life.  He’d been a postman in Dallas for most of his working life.  He learned all that from his mother. 

     He did have one story, though, which Roy got out of him one day.  For God knows how many years, his route consisted of delivering mail in the same building in downtown Dallas, and for all that time he started at the top and walked down.  One day a customer asked him why he couldn’t vary his route a little, so that at times he could get his mail earlier, and Abner replied, firmly, that he’d always done it from top to bottom, for God knows how many years, and that he wouldn’t change.  When he told the story, he got red in the face and laughed at the end of it indignantly.  The point of the story, it seemed, was that he’d held his own, but against what Roy was never sure.  Against an unreasonable request?  Against chaos?  Perhaps he thought that if he gave in to even a reasonable request, a fair one, politely delivered, it would start a trickle of disorder that would inevitably lead to an avalanche, and pretty soon the people in the building would have him hopping back and forth from floor to floor, trying to please everyone.  But his grandfather didn’t say.  That was his one story and all he had to say about it.

     His grandmother was completely different.  You couldn’t find two more different people.  Mamaw was never off her feet.  She was always cooking and serving and gossiping and laughing.  She was the life of the party and the perfect host.  At Christmas she would even drink a little egg nog with bourbon in it, courtesy of Roy’s father.  His father hated egg nog, but once he found out that Mamaw would drink it with bourbon, he brought it to the house every Christmas Eve, probably less to please Mamaw than to irritate Abner, who, being a devout Southern Baptist, never had a drink in his life.  He didn’t seem irritated, though.  In fact, he even grinned a little at the jokes about “Mamaw getting drunk.”  He could be a good sport, even when Roy’s father turned the tables on him and tried to get him to try a little spiked egg nog.  “No, thank you.  I’ve never had a drink and never will,” he said.  “Not even in France?” his father teased.  “You mean to say you spent six months in France, went to Paris where all those madameioselles are, and never had one drink the whole time?”  “Not even in France,” he answered.  And no one doubted it.

     Christmas Eve at the King’s was raucous.  All the adults except Abner drank, and there were enough young cousins running around for it to be a madhouse.  The cousins, actually, were a big part of the problem with his mother’s side of the family.  All girls, all younger than him and all spoiled brats.  Invariably, they got better presents and more attention.  Even his mother hardly noticed when he opened his presents, which was just as well, since they were always stupid.  Clothes, usually.  Shirts he wouldn’t be caught dead in.  Hicks didn’t know how to buy Christmas presents.

     Nevertheless, it was not possible to dislike Mamaw, no one didn’t like her, but he didn’t like it that she favored his cousin Sally.  He knew he was being unreasonable and unfair.  She raised Sally.  Sally was like a daughter to her.  He knew that, but he still didn’t like it.  The story, told by his mother, was that Sally’s mother left when Sally was a baby.  Sally’s father, moved back in with his parents, so it fell to Mamaw to take care of her.  That was plenty for a reason, but he was only a kid and still resented it.                          

*****

     He felt more at home in the house on Marlborough Street than he did at home.  It was just him and Dee, his father’s mother, and she left him alone.  She didn’t even speak to him, except to answer questions, or tell him dinner was ready, or that it was time to pull out the bed.  She never hugged him or fussed over him.  She rarely smiled or laughed, except with other grownups or at something on television.  She wore shapeless print dresses that all looked the same and old-fashioned glasses like Franklin Roosevelt had worn, with small round lenses and wire rims.  She worked the TV Guide crossword puzzle every week.  She made sure when he visited that the refrigerator was stocked with Dr. Pepper, and not having a machine or anyone to crank it, she made her own version of homemade ice cream for him, putting it in the freezer in bread pans and stirring it now and then as it froze.  By far, she was his favorite grownup.

     During and after supper he watched television with her.  She preferred variety shows to dramas and knew everything about everybody.  Arthur Godfrey, Garry Moore, Dave Garroway, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, Ed Sullivan, anyone who’d ever appeared on Ed Sullivan, John Daly and all the panelists and mystery guests on What’s My Line.  She could answer any question about them and had an opinion, when asked, about all of them.  Artie Shaw, she thought, had been married more than anyone.  Nine times.  Arthur Godfrey showed his true colors when he fired Julius LaRosa.  He liked to hog the spotlight.  He couldn’t allow anyone to take it away from him.  Jack Paar was smart, but he wasn’t as refined as John Daly or Bennett Cerf.  He squirmed too much and went too far.  Jack Benny was Jack Benny, like Bob Hope or Bing Crosby.  They’d always been around and always would be.  That went without saying.

     Sometimes he spent all day reading, from morning until night, switching now and then from the sofa bed to the floor to D’s bed as the spirit moved him.  In the summer, the time when he was there the most, he liked the damp straw smell of the swamp cooler, and he would often lie on the floor directly in front of it not just to be cooler but to take in more of the smell.  The windows and doors were kept open, but the curtains were always drawn to keep out the light, and revolving table fans helped out in the other rooms.  He read boys’ books.  Sports.  Biographies.  The Hardy Boys.  He also read all of D’s movie magazines from cover to cover.  And he sometimes brought All-Star baseball with him and his baseball cards.  Or he might be briefly obsessed with another board game or something similar.  He liked a little hand held device with red and white tiles that could be moved around to make different sequences of numbers.  And D showed him how to play solitaire, which took hold of him completely for several days.

     D rode the street car with him the first time or two, to show him how, and then she let him ride by himself down to what she called, for a reason he never thought to ask about, “Boundary,” the shopping area around the corner of Marlborough and Jefferson.  He never quite got over the anxiety of deciding exactly when to pull the cord for stopping, how soon or how late, the dread of calling attention to himself always with him, of seeming like someone who didn’t know what he was doing, or like someone, as his father would have said later, who had his head up his ass, but he liked riding the street car so much that he accepted the anxiety as a price he was willing to pay.  And being at the movies, the main reason for riding the streetcar, he liked perhaps more than anything.  The Bison theater, named after the mascot of Sunset High School, where his mother went, was not very big.  It had a “loge” instead of a real balcony, but that was okay, and the movies it showed were all drenched in color and so forgettable that he sometimes couldn’t even remember the title when he got back to D’s, but that was okay too.  It was cool and dark in the theater, and hardly anyone came to the matinees in the summer and sat in the loge.  And he liked to eat popcorn and have a Pepsi with ice in it.  He especially liked chewing up a big wad of popcorn and keeping it in his mouth until all the flavor seeped out of it.

      Boundary was where his aunt had her dance studio.  “The football coach at Sunset sends his players over here to learn tap,” his aunt told him.  “It makes them more agile.”  She was trying to coax him into taking lessons when he visited D.  “It doesn’t mean you’re a sissy,” she added, which was the point of course of mentioning the football players, and he showed up once or twice just to please her, but he had no feel for it or interest in it.  It was too hard to remember the steps and listen to the rhythm at the same time, and he didn’t like to look clumsy in front of people.  Not to mention that he saw no point in it. 

     His aunt was a lot younger than Dee and completely different.  She was the life of any party.  She was tiny, had orange hair, smoked Old Gold’s constantly, and drove around in a not new but not too old green Oldsmobile with power windows.  He called her O.  He didn’t know why and never thought to ask, even though unlike Dee, it wasn’t short for anything that he knew of.  Her real name was Maedelle.  She had a son named Ron, who was nine years older than him and fat and freckled, and a husband named Freddie, a man he saw only in the evenings, around suppertime, sitting in front of a little magnified mirror, doing something with his face.  He was a musician.  Their last name was Freeman, and for a while they lived in the other part of the house on Marlborough Street, a duplex with two front doors.

     It also had a little house in the back, a converted garage, and until she died, Mama, his great-grandmother, lived there.  She actually lived in the back of the house in back, right on the alley, in a room so small that there was just enough space for the single bed, her chair, a table and a place to stand up and talk to her.  He was never forced but always asked by D to go in and say hello to Mama, and she was always in her bathrobe in the chair.  She told him that she read the dictionary every day, that it was a habit she recommended.  “I learn something every day,” she said.  “Did you know, for example, that ‘noggin’ is a real word, not just slang.  I always thought it was slang.”  She showed him the Webster’s paperback she kept beside her on the table.  To her he was “little Roy,” Sonny’s boy.  When he told her, in answer to the question that all old people ask children, that he wanted to be a writer, she told him he ought to send in something to the Readers’ Digest, to the section called “Life in These United States.”  “Send them a funny story,” she said.  “It shouldn’t be more than a couple of paragraphs.”  She showed him the section, then gave him a back copy to make sure he’d have the address.  She quoted Mark Twain to him, via Readers’ Digest:  “Cauliflower is cabbage with a college education.”  He smiled but he didn’t like it as much as she did.  He got it.  He understood why it was funny and had no problem with the populist, Will Rogers-like sentiment, but he was such a serious boy, and that kind of cleverness just didn’t do much for him.

     Only once did he get mad at D.  It was when Luther died.  Luther was on the other side of the family, one of Mamaw’s brothers.  He owned a barber shop on Greenville, way on the other side of town, not Oak Cliff, and once in a while he went with his mother and father to visit Luther and his wife Nina.  They were famous in the family for saying “my how you’ve grown” every time they saw him and his brother, and Nina was famous later for attending funerals.  They had no children, and aside from remarking on his growth and patting him on the head, they had nothing to say to him.  But Luther was friendly.  All of MaMaw’s brothers were always smiling and friendly, easy going in a mischievous country sort of way.  He was “Addie’s grandson” or “Mary’s boy” in their house.  They always had hard candy in cellophane wrappers on the coffee table, in a heavy glass bowl, and he was welcome to help himself, but he didn’t like it much.  Nor was he much interested in their round screen television.  It was hard to see anything for all the snow in the picture. 

     He endured the visits to see Luther and Nina, a social obligation of his parents that included him, but he didn’t really know either one of them, and there was nothing to do while he was there.  Even listening to the adults talk, which he usually liked, was boring at Luther and Nina’s, which probably explains why he didn’t go with his parents to visit them the day Luther died.  But he talked to Luther that day.  He called the house around noon to find out if his parents would be back in time for lunch, and Luther answered the phone.  He sounded perfectly normal, except that he didn’t know who was calling him.  “It’s Roy Jr.,” he said.  “Little Roy.  Mary’s son.”  But Luther still didn’t know who he was, and it must have been right after that, according to what his parents said, that Luther walked out to his car and dropped dead.

     Are you sure it was Luther?  Yes.  Are you sure you dialed the right number?  Yes.  Did you tell him who you were?  Yes.  No one could explain it, but he overheard D say to his parents, “He probably didn’t insist.  You know how Jack is.”  Of course he knew already that he was shy, painfully so at times, but he didn’t know that D knew it, or thought it important.  Thought less of him for it.   That was the hard part to take, since he heard that in her voice.  And to make it worse, it contradicted what he knew to be true and had told them.  For once, he had insisted, both to Luther and to them about what he’d said to Luther.  He’d been so amazed at Luther’s inability to understand who he was, that he forgot to be shy.  Two or three times, louder than normal, speaking slowly and clearly, he had explained who he was, who he was related to, how he was related to Luther, all to no avail.  And D didn’t believe him, or at least doubted it, “knowing him.”  He didn’t think that she didn’t like him in general for being shy, or even for that specifically.  But it was something she knew about, and it was a flaw, and on top of that, and perhaps more important, she didn’t know how honest he was.

*****

     He believed everything he read and almost everything his teachers and parents told him.  When his sixth grade teacher said that Stalin was a dictator and a dictator could do anything he wanted, he believed her.  He did not think to ask, as his friend did, if she meant that Stalin could make a person eat worms, or hop around all day on one leg, and when his teacher answered his friend in the affirmative, he wasn’t so sure she was right.  Or even if she knew.  She was the best teacher he’d ever had, his favorite for life, but that day, when she answered his friend’s question, he thought she seemed uncertain, which was not like her.  She was a big ugly woman, perhaps the ugliest woman he’d ever known.  Her face and body together made him think of an elephant, and the boys, referring to her body in motion, said she looked like a Sherman tank.  They might also have been thinking about her personality.  She came on as tough, no nonsense, and she could lose her temper.  There was a big crack in the gray concrete block wall at the back of the room, and the other kids said it was made when she banged a boy’s head against the lockers.  It was true, his mother reluctantly told him, that his teacher almost lost her job for slapping and shaking a boy.  She doubted, though, that she hit him hard enough to make a crack in the wall.

     For an hour most afternoons the class played Scrabble, and his teacher often sat in at the table where he played.  He beat her consistently.  At times she seemed irritated when she lost, at other times pleased.  It was difficult to predict her moods.  He and his two best friends were her favorites, and there were days when they could do no wrong.  She would laugh when they cut up.  Answer them back when they teased her.  Ignore the spit wads and the paper airplanes and the whispers and the notes passed back and forth.  But on other days she would turn red in the face and act like they’d been put on this earth just to torment her.  One day during the lunch period, the three of them were sitting around together in the almost empty class, doing nothing in particular, when the principal came in carrying a paddle.  “Just the three I was looking for,” he said.  “Follow me.”

     They were ushered into a storage closet.  There was barely room enough for all of them.  The boys had to sit on boxes of toilet paper and floor wax.  The principal told them that their teacher had complained about them, that they were making her life miserable, that she couldn’t control them, and he’d come to see if a good paddling might not convince them to behave.  He was a nice man.  He’d shown them how to plant a pecan tree.  He was friendly and outgoing when he filled in for the cashier at lunch.  And when the teacher was sick and he taught the class for her, he always made the lesson interesting, the discussion lively.  They had never seen him mad before, and his show of temper shocked them.  The paddle was the last resort, he said, but from what their teacher had told him, they deserved it.  He made a long speech, emphasizing that he didn’t really want to do it, but he didn’t think he had a choice, and the longer he talked, the madder he seemed to get.

     They didn’t say a word.  They knew that would only make it worse.  They didn’t like it, but there didn’t seem to be any way of escape, and then came a knock on the door.  It was the principal’s secretary.  He had a phone call.  “Don’t move,” he told them.  “I’ll be right back.”  He was gone for about five minutes, and when he came back he resumed his speech.  He didn’t understand how they could show their teacher so much disrespect.  He knew they weren’t bad boys, but they had certainly been behaving badly.  A good  teacher like theirs would come to him only as a last resort.  It had to stop.  He meant for it to stop.  They should be very ashamed of themselves for driving her to this extreme.  And then came another knock on the door.  “Don’t move.  I’ll be right back.” 

     Not until he was a grown man did it occur to him that the principal never had any intention of paddling them.  He had the paddle in his hand and his face was red.  Until he came back after the second interruption, he seemed really mad, almost like a different person, and it scared them.  He was also right about their behavior.  Their only defense might have been their teacher’s unpredictable moods, but that was far too complicated, and besides, they were guilty.  Period.  No two ways about it.  Best to keep their mouths shut and take it like men.  Try not to cry.  Try not to put their hands back there.  Those were the two most important rules of getting paddled.  No crying.  No cowardly putting your hand in the way.  Everyone knew them, even though he didn’t know anyone who’d ever been paddled.       

*****

     Two very strange kids were in his class.  One was a girl who ate ink.  Not every day, but several times he and his friends noticed that she had blue ink on her lips and all over her hands.  The other was a boy who dressed in overalls like a farmer and sat in a far corner of the cafeteria, as far away from everyone else as possible, and caught flies with his hands and ate them.  He and his friends talked about those kids among themselves and joked about them, maybe a little too loudly, but they never teased them directly.  There was a distance between the strange kids and everyone else, a separation that seemed to suit everyone involved.  He tried to imagine doing what they did, being how they were, but it was hard.  He didn’t think he would like the taste of ink or flies, but the worst part would be the attention.  He’d be ruined for life, as his mother said.

     Also separated were the project kids.  Their clothes were different and they came to school barefoot until the weather changed.  They were “rough,” yet another term he’d learned from his mother.  All the bullies in the school were project kids.  The project kid who made A’s was rare.  They often needed haircuts.  They were not always clean.  They caused trouble.  He had a fist fight back by the lockers with a project kid over the 1956 World Series.  If you were not for the Dodgers, the kid would hit you on the arm until you changed your mind.  No one, then, was not for the Dodgers, but he decided he couldn’t give in.  It was very simple, a matter of courage, and the rule was clear:  if you didn’t fight back, you were a coward.  He believed that and did not want to be a coward.  He was afraid of fighting, but he was more afraid of being a coward.  He had no idea even what a fight was, since he knew that movies were probably not a reliable guide.  He said Yankees, and the project kid looked at him as if he couldn’t believe it.  In his eyes there was doubt, hesitation.  Not fear, but he had not expected to hear Yankees.          Nevertheless, the kid hit him on the arm, one knuckle out to make it sting more, and knowing he couldn’t let himself think about it even for a second, he hit back.  They traded one or two more arm blows, and then it accelerated.  It became a real fight, but it didn’t last more than a few seconds.  They flailed at each other, aiming for the head, but neither connected very solidly, and then the project kid backed off.  Not enough to lose the fight, but enough to suggest a truce, and Roy took the hint.  No more flailing.  He was crying, but he hadn’t said Dodgers.  The project kid didn’t look happy, but he wasn’t crying.  He just shrugged his shoulders and walked away.  It was a victory of sorts, or at least a draw, a draw with a project kid, but he was ashamed of crying.

*****

     He went through a period of sitting in the front row of the movie theater and eating Tootsie-Rolls and popcorn together.  He chewed the popcorn up in a ball and then added a Tootsie-Roll or two for flavor.  About that time he started thinking about making left and right even.  If he touched something with his left hand, he had to touch something else with his right, and he had to apply exactly the same amount of pressure in both cases.  In fact, he needed to touch each in as similar a way as possible, as close as he could get it, and he had to get it perfect before he could stop.  Mostly, though, when he went to the movies, he did something a little different.  He counted with his fingers, either touching something or not, maybe just moving them, it didn’t matter, but he had to count up to the same amount on each hand.  For a while, he had difficulty not doing this, especially when he was alone.  Instead of getting lost in the movie, as he wanted to do, he was compelled to count and make it even.

     He did not know where that came from, or why he wanted to do it, but in Little League he did something that he knew was similar.  He prayed before every pitch that a ball wouldn’t be hit to him.  A quick prayer with an “amen” at the end.  He was a good first baseman.  So good in fact that he never missed a throw, even when it bounced in front of him.  Or a grounder.  Or a line drive.  Popups, though, were a problem.  He could never judge them right.  They always landed behind him no matter how much he told himself when the ball was in the air not to run in until it arced.  He couldn’t make himself do it.  He played the ball the way it looked, and then it was too late.  He could throw the ball up in the air and catch it almost without thinking about it, but real popups during a game were different.  Luckily, there weren’t many of them.  He knew then, all things considered, that his prayer was irrational, like making things come out even, that when the ball was hit to him, unless it was a popup, he would play it well, but he couldn’t stop himself.

*****

     Robert E. Lee was a flawed hero.  A man of impeccable integrity who made the wrong decision.  The Civil War was about two things.  The North wanted to abolish slavery.  The South was defending states’ rights.  Both, therefore, were right.  The South was wrong, however, to break up the Union, and Lee was wrong when he chose to support it.  That was his flaw.  He was too loyal to Virginia, blinded by his love for it to the greater good of preserving the Union.  His photograph, the kindly looking, portly man with the white beard, in full uniform, not unlike Santa Claus, showed everyone what was good about the South.  It was run by gentlemen, and yet the sword that hung at his side, like the pistol of a gunfighter, gave fair warning.  Here was a man who would defend himself, who would hurt you if given a good reason.

     Robin Hood, on the other hand, had no flaws, and although he enjoyed humiliating fools and cowards, he killed no one.  Robin Hood was a natural.  He could shoot a bow and arrow better than anyone who ever lived, and he was good-natured and smart.  When Little John knocked him into the water, he came up laughing and was so impressed that he invited Little John to join his Merry Men.  He was a good loser and knew how to turn defeat into victory.  In a way, his whole way of life was that.  When faced with death for shooting the king’s deer, Robin and his men disappeared into the green woods and created a life for themselves that was better than what they’d had before.  They lived hidden away in a beautiful forest, ate wholesome and succulent venison cooked on a spit over a fire, amused themselves with games that honed their physical skills and their cunning, and robbed from the rich to give to the poor.  He could not imagine a better life, and although he was glad for Robin when King Richard returned from the Crusades and put everything right again, he was sorry that the life in the forest had to end.

     There was no King Richard for Robert E. Lee and his rebels.  Only Lincoln and Grant and whatever scrap of dignity Lee might have preserved at Appomattox.  Roy liked Grant better than Lincoln.  Grant was a drinker and a fighter.  He wasn’t sure what to make of Lincoln.  He knew how to look at the face as if it were that of a saint.  Sad, ascetic and, the truth be told, boring.  He much preferred the handsome, robust figure of Grant, a smart man of action like Robin Hood.  Even Lee, with his tragic flaw, was not up to Grant.  Lee too was boring.  Too good, like Lincoln.  And Washington.  He liked his heroes to be bold and reckless, and a little bit mean.  Or at least mischievous.  He could tell by the way Grant sat in his camp chair, cocky and careless, legs spraddled and a drink in his hand, that he was that way. 

     The Sam Houston given to him at school was more like Lee and Lincoln, a little too good not to be boring, and everyone knew that Travis, with his line drawn in the dirt, was too strict and narrow-minded.  Davy Crockett was plenty wild, but too much like someone who might work on your car.  His grammar wasn’t good enough to be a real hero.  Roy’s man was Bowie.  Both a craftsman and a gentleman.  He even knew Spanish.  He’d been in duels, lived in New Orleans and dressed well.  He had a temper and was quick to fight, but he was fair and friendly to people who deserved it.

     The Alamo was the main event of history, far more important than Gettysburg or Valley Forge.  Even San Jacinto was an afterthought.  Victory was never as good at explaining how things were as defeat, and how things were, thanks to the Alamo, was very clear.  The Mexicans, the brown little men in their old-fashioned soldier uniforms, hordes of them, all wearing peaked hats and carrying rifles with bayonets over their shoulders, scrambled up ladders like bees or ants, not because they were brave or believed in anything in particular, but because they were afraid of their cruel and ridiculous little leader.  They might as well take their chances on the ladders, since if they turned back, Santa Ana would certainly have them shot.  That’s why the heroes died at the Alamo.  Unlike the little brown hordes, who’d probably been turned cruel by their master, like fierce dogs, savage yet cowardly, the men at the Alamo were brave enough to resist the tyranny of Santa Ana.  They stood for freedom.  They didn’t want Mexicans telling them what to do.  They wanted to decide for themselves, and they died for that cause, so that the other white people in Texas could throw off Santa Ana’s yoke and live in peace and freedom.

*****

     When they first moved to the new town, his parents joined the church and were baptized together in the aquarium-like tub that held the water, located above and behind the pulpit.  They held their noses before being dunked, which washed their sins away, and for a while they all went to church every Sunday, but not for long.  It was too tempting to stay in bed and read the sports page and the funny papers in your pajamas.  On the way to church once, they saw a man in his bathrobe stooping over to get his Sunday paper, and his father said, “Now there’s a man who knows how to spend a Sunday morning.”  He saw his mother jab his father in the ribs for saying that, but it was too tempting for everyone in the family, although he went more often than his parents, usually just to Sunday School.  He liked Sunday School.  Both before and after he was saved, he was interested in what his teachers had to say, since he knew they talked about how things were, what was important and what was not.     

     He didn’t tell his parents that he was going to walk down the aisle the day he was saved.  He’d worked it out by himself that it was something he needed to do, and he was afraid they would try to talk him out of it if he told them.  Or even forbid him to do it.  “Wait until you’re older,” he could hear his mother saying.  And besides, it might not even be right to tell anyone.  It was his decision.  Everyone knew that and everyone was always saying it, especially the preacher.  His decision alone, and what it amounted to was whether he wanted to go to heaven or hell.  He had until he was twelve to decide, but he didn’t want to go for three years worrying about it, not the going to hell part, but the dread of walking up the aisle, the short conference with the preacher, and then being the absolute center of attention.  Too bad about that, but it seemed like life was full of things that required you to make yourself the center of attention, if you were ever going to amount to anything.  If you were going to join what everyone else joined, and be a leader, you had to prove your worthiness by embarrassing yourself in front of a lot of people.  That’s just how it was, and it seemed to him better to get it over with than to dread it.

     He had no trouble saying “yes” when the preacher asked him if he was ready to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Savior.  He understood the question and he believed his answer.  He’d listened carefully to what the preacher said in his sermons and what his Sunday School teacher said, and he accepted as truth their unanimous opinion that being saved was absolutely necessary if a person was going to have a good life and go to heaven.  But Jesus didn’t speak to him.  He accepted him as his personal Savior, but he thought very little about Jesus, probably because everyone talked more about God the Father.  He worked it out in his head.  God made the law.  Jesus amended it a little, but he followed it, and when you accepted him, you agreed to follow it too.  After that it got too complicated, the part about Jesus dying for everyone’s sins, why his dying washed away all the sins of the world.  But he didn’t think he had to understand that, not yet.  What he had to do was walk down the aisle, say yes to the question, and submit himself to the undivided attention of a lot of grownups.  He knew that if he did that, the dread of doing it would leave him, and he’d never have to do it again.  And he was right.  The preacher leaned down and put his arm around him, whispered softly in his ear, and every grownup he could see was looking at him and smiling.

*****

     Of all the Ten Commandments the only one he thought he might have any trouble with was lying, but fortunately, lying was not something he was good at getting away with, and when he did, he felt so guilty that it was worse than if he’d told the truth.  Not for fooling people, he didn’t feel bad about that, but for being afraid to tell the truth.  The temptation to lie was always cowardly. 

     Which was completely different from the first temptation he remembered ever having.  It had nothing to do with lying.  He was real little, perhaps in the second grade.  While everyone else napped on Sunday afternoon, he lay on the linoleum in the kitchen with a butcher knife.  He held it in both hands and pointed it at his chest.  He wondered what it would be like to push it into his body.  He did this and thought about it a lot and sensed more than knew that it would be a sin.  But he was curious.  So curious that he was tempted to try it, and he didn’t only because he lacked the courage.  He could feel the temptation in his hands.  His hands anticipated the pleasure of forcing, the downward plunge.  They were alive with it, which was a pleasure in itself.  And a pain.  The hands were impatient with him.  They wanted him to finish what he started.  They were not concerned with the consequences, and he had no clear idea himself what they would be.  He tried to think past it, but he couldn’t, which was part of both the appeal and the restraint.  Not fear exactly, but something very similar.  Perhaps he didn’t lack courage.  Surely, it didn’t take courage to sin.  Wasn’t it supposed to be just the opposite?  He always ignored his hands in the end, what they wanted to do, and put the knife back where he found it.  At the very least, if not a sin, it would be an unacceptable act.  No one would like it.  It would create a scene.

*****

     His mother said that unless he wanted to be considered “rough” like the project kids, he would use good English.   Not say “ain’t,” no double negatives, and no bad words, especially in front of girls.  A bad word in front of a girl can ruin your reputation for life.  It’s best to be extremely careful at all times.  Any reference to things having to do with bathrooms was strictly taboo.  He believed her, just as he believed everything else she said, and therefore found it puzzling when one afternoon at a girl’s house, all the girls giggled over a lampshade that showed a boy peeing.  So puzzling that he made a fool of himself.  The girl’s mother worked.  No one was there but kids.  Four or five girls and two or three boys.  It was exciting just to be in the house.  A house with no grownups.  Just kids, mostly girls.  This was a major event.  He expected it to be fun.  Girls liked him, and he liked girls, unless they were mean.  One girl had picked on him in the second grade, and since his mother had told him never to hit a girl, even if she hit you first, that it could ruin your reputation for life, he spent most of his recess trying to avoid her.  “She has a crush on you,” his mother said, which turned out to be true, but not really useful.  Most girls, especially those with a crush on him, weren’t mean.  They could be difficult, hard to understand, but not mean.  He didn’t expect to feel ganged up on by girls, even when the boys were in the minority.  Nor did he expect to be shocked.

     The girls went as a group into the parents’ bedroom and came out screaming and giggling.  He’d never seen that before.  Girls having fun by acting as if something was naughty and yet clearly enjoying it.  It was a new experience and he wasn’t ready for it.  Even before he went into the bedroom, he knew it didn’t fit with the way he thought the world worked.  Surely, girls couldn’t like something bad.  It wasn’t natural, and of course, new as it was, strange as it was, it excited him.  He had to see for himself.  He wasn’t invited to see, but he was allowed.  No one told him to go see.  That would be going too far, crossing the line.  But they didn’t stop him.  He was already embarrassed, he could feel himself blushing, either way.  Not to go would be cowardly, but going might be crossing the line of what was allowed.  No one would simply tell him what it was, but he knew it had to do with a lamp.  He looked around hurriedly after entering the bedroom, knowing he was where he shouldn’t be, and then he found it.  A lampshade, the lamp not lit, had a picture on it of a boy peeing.  On impulse, he pulled the cord, and when the shade turned, the pee seemed to move in a stream.  He ran out of the room.  He shouted, once he reached the living room, “You can see it coming out!”  He said it too loud, too fast, almost shrieking, and the girls went into hysterics.  They fell against each other as if about to faint.  They repeated what he said.  They pointed at him.  They wouldn’t stop laughing, and he wanted to disappear.  He defended himself, his face hot, by saying, “Well, you can.”  And they laughed even more. 

*****

      The television was in the room across the hall from his parents’ bedroom.  His younger brother slept on the bunk bed.  There was also a couch.  When the whole family watched TV, the most common arrangement was for his mother to be on the couch, his father on the bottom bunk, his brother on the top bunk, and him on the floor.  The room was just the right size for the four of them.  Even when he was little, he could almost stretch out on the floor and touch the TV with his fingers, the bunk bed with his toes, and the couch with his left hand.  But the whole family didn’t watch TV together every night.  Only on Sundays for sure, and then only Ed Sullivan.  Sunday night was also the only time they didn’t eat supper at the table.  They had Campbell’s chicken noodle soup or grilled cheese sandwiches, usually during Maverick.  His father liked Maverick.  It was almost the only TV show he’d ever known his father to make it a point to watch.  His mother was usually busy in the kitchen until right before Ed Sullivan, when she brought in dessert.  His father never laughed at the comedians, not out loud.  He liked a few of them, but he never laughed out loud.  He was pretty hard on most of the acts.  Not funny.  Too oddball.  Got on his nerves.  A has been or never was.  His mother’s favorite comment was that a performer liked himself or herself too much, or that a female singer was showing too much cleavage.  He wondered why they watched Ed Sullivan.  He liked just about everything, even the acrobats and spinning plates.  Even Maurice Chevaliar.  Even Mary Martin in Peter Pan, although the only really good thing about that was being able to see the wires that held her up.

     He learned never to recommend or praise anything, since his father never liked it.  Besides Maverick, the only thing they watched together was Charlie Chan movies, and those not very often since they only came on after bedtime during the week.  But in the summer, when there were no bedtime rules, he and his father sometimes watched Charlie Chan.  His father started calling him his number one son and his younger brother his number two son.  He understood that his father liked the detective’s amused and condescending attitude, along with the deference the Chan sons showed him.

      He was not a sickly child.  He rarely if ever missed school.  He never threw up, never even had earaches like his brother.  He was healthy except for one thing, maybe two.  His nose was always “stuffed up,” and he apparently made a lot of noise breathing when he slept.  They took him first to Dallas and then to Oklahoma City to an allergy clinic where the doctors stuck little pins in his arms and back.  It didn’t hurt too much, but it was very hard to sit still for so long a time.  He was allergic to a million things, they said, but especially chocolate and corn.  For a while his mother gave him allergy shots twice a week, and he ate candy bars with no chocolate, Paydays and peanut butter logs, and passed up popcorn at the movies.  He didn’t know if it helped.  He didn’t even know he was “stuffed up” until his mother told him.  She noticed, she said, because he was always sniffing.  He didn’t know he was sniffing.  He’d sniffed his whole life, she told him, and has trouble breathing from time to time.  At one point he found himself in a children’s hospital in Dallas for a couple of weeks.  He had bronchitis, they told him.  That’s okay.  He didn’t feel sick and he liked spending the day reading baseball magazines and playing a horse racing board game. 

     The only thing he didn’t like about the hospital was the food, and that was almost completely made up for when his father sneaked a box of fried chicken past the nurses one night.  With french fries and a coke.  It was probably the best food he’d ever tasted.  Nevertheless, it brought him no closer to his father.  Nor did the times when he got Roy to tell another grownup the American and National League standings that day, and how many games separated the first three or four teams.  Or how to spell something.  He could spell nearly any word any grownup could think of.  Most days he hardly saw his father.  During the week his father was gone before breakfast and got home after he and his brother had eaten.  On Saturdays his father was running errands or mowing the lawn or doing paperwork at the dining room table.  On Sundays he read the paper and took a nap.  Sunday dinner was always a roast, and although he liked roast and all the things his mother usually made to go with it, he did not think of those meals with pleasure.  Or any meal when his father was present.  He had to pay more attention when his father was there.  He had to be more careful to mind his manners.  He had to ask for someone to pass the peas rather than reach across the table for them.  Use his napkin and not the back of his hand.  Not drop his fork.  Not eat too fast.  He had to do most of those things when it was just him and his brother and his mother at the table, but he didn’t care so much when his mother reminded him.  It was not quite so much like he did something wrong.  It didn’t embarrass him.  Even when his father’s tone was not particularly harsh, when he did something wrong in front of him, when it was necessary to be corrected by him, he was embarrassed.

     They went to the 1954 Cotton Bowl game.  Just the two of them, Rice versus Alabama.  Forty yard line tickets, about halfway up.  Good seats.  His father was shooting pictures with an 8mm movie camera when an Alabama player, identified later as Tommy Lewis, jumped off the bench and tackled Dicky Maegle, the star Rice halfback.  Dicky Maegle is a big part of why they were there.  It was still the era of college halfbacks.  Broken field runners, as they were called.  Doak Walker of SMU.  Jim Swink of TCU.  Billy Cannon of LSU.  It was late in the second half, and Dicky Maegle had already run circles around the Crimson Tide.  He couldn’t get over that team nickname, mainly because it wasn’t an animal, or even really a thing.  Not an owl or a mustang or a horned frog.  It was a tide, whatever that was, and why crimson?  Crimson is red, his father explained, and a tide is how the water comes in from the ocean, but he didn’t know either why a football team from Alabama would be named the Crimson Tide, or that Alabama had a crimson tide, or exactly what one would be.  In any case, the Crimson Tide was getting soundly beat by the Owls, by Dicky Maegle in particular, and as Maegle ran for yet another touchdown along the sideline, the nearest opposing player several yards behind and losing ground, a player comes out of nowhere and tackles him.  The whole Alabama bench stands up and gathers around, blocking whatever is happening on the field.  Nothing like this has ever happened before, but it didn’t take long for the referees to award the touchdown to Rice.  Maegle was only fifteen yards from the goal line.  No one was near him until Tommy Lewis jumped off the bench and tackled him.

     He couldn’t think of a worse thing.  It was painful to think of being Tommy Lewis, but he couldn’t help it.  He couldn’t stop himself from feeling Tommy Lewis’ embarrassment.  Ruined for life was one of his mother’s favorite expressions, and surely, if anyone was ever in that situation, it had to be Tommy Lewis.  He didn’t know how he could live with himself, how he could ever stop thinking about it.  And what was he thinking?  He tried to understand it.  He tried to put himself on the Alabama bench.  The paper the next day said that Lewis got “carried away.”  He couldn’t imagine it.  It would be the same as jumping off a skyscraper, or from an airplane without a parachute.  No one got that carried away.  The paper didn’t say he was crazy, but that’s what everyone thought.  And yet, it wasn’t quite crazy enough.  It wasn’t really jumping from an airplane, not that extreme.  It made too much sense.  He couldn’t imagine doing it, having the nerve, but he could imagine wanting to.  He could see, the more he thought about it, how Tommy Lewis could want to stop Dicky Maegle so bad that he couldn’t make himself not do it.  And that’s what made it really painful.  Even scary.  Everyone knew that Tommy Lewis couldn’t control himself, that he was incapable of not doing something that was absolutely forbidden, and in newspapers all over the country there were pictures of him doing it.

     It is the only college football game he attended as a boy, and it didn’t make him any closer to his father.  He knew his father wouldn’t have bought the tickets if it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t said at some point, not meaning it as a hint since he never imagined that it was possible, that he wished he could go to the Cotton Bowl.  He knew how special it was, and he and his father both enjoyed the game, but their relationship afterwards was the same as always. 

     He and his brother were told one night by their mother to go wake up their father.  He was asleep on the couch in the living room.  It was time for him to come to bed.  They didn’t like the assignment.  Waking up their father was not something they wanted to do.  They even objected, but their mother told them not to be silly.  He’s not going to bite.  She shamed them into it, but they still kept their distance and called out “Daddy” in quiet voices.  No response, until finally Roy worked up the nerve to tap him on the shoulder.  His father jumped.  Roy and his brother jumped back.  His father opened his eyes and sat up.  He said, “Go tell your mother to come here.”  It made no sense.  That’s why they woke him up, so that she wouldn’t have to get out of bed.  The brothers looked at each other, on the verge of objecting, but not wanting to get yelled at.  Finally, Roy screwed up his courage once again and asked his father what he’d just said.  He was told again, this time more firmly.  “Go tell your mother to come here.”  They ran to the bedroom to tell their mother that something was wrong with Daddy.  She shook her head like they’d gone crazy, got out of bed in a huff and went to the kitchen.  His father was standing at the counter, drinking a glass of milk.  He remembered nothing of the incident, not even that the boys woke him up.

     The closest he ever felt to his father was in a car one summer afternoon in the New Mexico desert, his mother and younger brother in the back seat, his father drinking bourbon and driving eighty miles an hour.  “You’re going too fast,” his mother said, and his father slowed down a little, but not much and not for long.  His father was in such a good mood that he asked him what he wanted for dinner, and he said enchiladas, and his parents asked at the motel if there was a good Mexican place in town, his mother telling him that the woman said the restaurant was “just a little hole in the wall.”  He didn’t know what that meant.  He imagined a place that only a mouse could get into.  “A small place,” she explained.  He didn’t care for the enchiladas.  The sauce was dark brown and bitter.  Not at all like Texas enchiladas.  But he tried to hide his disappointment.  He didn’t want to spoil his father’s mood. 

     The trip in general, to Colorado, was a failure, the only vacation they ever took.  All he and his brother wanted to do was swim and play miniature golf.  It was too cold in the mountains to swim and the motels they stayed at didn’t have heated pools.  They were on a very tight budget.  His father would inquire about the price at the motel office, and if it was eleven or twelve dollars a night instead of eight, they would try another one.  His parents discussed it in the car, and it was mostly his mother who insisted on keeping to the budget.  His mother was cheap.  His father wasn’t.  That was something that was always understood.  He and his brother felt that his father would have stayed at the twelve dollar places if his mother hadn’t been so stern about it.  A few times his parents debated the issue, not really an argument, since his father gave in so quickly.  He apparently thought she was right.  About his driving, though, he wouldn’t listen to her.  She was afraid of the gravel road up to Pike’s Peak.  She kept saying that if he didn’t slow down they were going to run off the road and fall off the mountain, until his father finally blew up. 

     Those were the worst times.  It was time to be absolutely quiet, to disappear in the back seat.  His father got irritated about the swimming and the miniature golf.  The sites, the mountains and caves and old mining towns, were why they came to Colorado.  Why couldn’t his boys appreciate that?  He got very irritated.  He got red in the face and he grumbled, he made sarcastic remarks, but he didn’t blow up.  He blew up only when someone didn’t do what he told them to do.  Not caring about the mountains, preferring swimming pools and miniature golf, took its toll, pushed him a little further away from his father, but in itself it was only a minor offense.

*****

     He talked often with his mother and for a long time told her everything.  Everything he thought and almost everything he did.  He never thought about having secrets from her, and he began to have them only with great reluctance, when he realized that there were some things she’d rather not hear.  They embarrassed her, and when she was embarrassed, he was embarrassed.  Slowly but surely, then, and only to avoid such moments, he developed a sense for what was going too far, and every time he pulled himself up, it hurt a little.  He wanted to tell her everything, and he wanted her to understand it all, every last confidence, every last emotion, every last thought.  Everything. 

     He knew, even before he was old enough to actually think it, he knew his father was a lost cause in that regard.  He must always say the right thing around his father.  He was cut no slack.  Even when his father was indifferent to or puzzled by what he said, rather than angry or impatient, he didn’t like to say the wrong thing, which made the separation from his father complete.      

     But he did not want to be separated from his mother.  In a perfect world, she would be with him everywhere, and she would understand him completely, know everything about him.  In a way, he would be no more than an extension of her.  When he played ball.  When he looked at the maps in the encyclopedia.  When he swam naked at the Y.  When he went to the bathroom.  When he slept and dreamed.  And on each occasion, when he first stepped out of her body, he would be like a ghost, transparent, spirit-like, and then he would turn into a real boy, solid, absorbed in play, but only until she called him back. 

     He does not learn this anywhere.  The only time he ever read anything about mothers was in a biography of Lou Gehrig.  Lou Gehrig and his mother were very close and fished for eels in the middle of the night.  He appreciated Gehrig’s devotion to his mother, but he did not connect it with his own feelings.  Gehrig’s mother was not his mother, and he wasn’t Gehrig.  Nor did he talk about mothers with anyone, except his father, whose sole message was respect, which meant obey and no talking back.  He rarely talked back—he knew how serious his father was about that—and only when he was upset enough to do it without thinking.  He disobeyed more often, but in a similar way.  Not thinking.  Or not allowing himself to think.  If he remembered, he felt his face turn red, and he stopped.  Usually, it involved not coming home when expected, a serious offense, but one he could not resist when he was having fun.  And sometimes, he had to willfully not remember, almost force himself to lose track of time.  It was a giddy feeling, losing track of time.  There was no other word for it.  When he was giddy, he was both excited and scared.

     His mother had a small hump on her back and her arms and the backs of her hands were always covered with scratches.  It was two completely separate problems.  When she was about fourteen, her mother noticed that one side of her back was larger, stuck out, more than the other.  The doctor said she had curvature of the spine, probably from carrying her school books.  She needed an operation, the doctor said, or else when she was fully grown she’d be able to touch the ground with her fingers without bending over.  This frightened everyone.  They agreed to the operation.  A bone was taken out of her leg and put in her back.  She was in a cast, flat on her back, for six months when she was sixteen.  She showed him the scar on her leg.  She told him she had to buy loose tops so that the hump, which was still there, wouldn’t show.  It seemed to be slowly but surely getting worse.  It was sore most of the time.  Her back hurt if she did “too much.”  They no longer did that operation.  She wasn’t sure if it was a success or not, since she had no way of knowing what would have happened if she hadn’t had it.

     The scars had a simpler explanation.  She was allergic to direct sunlight.  Her arms itched and she would scratch them until they bled.  Yes, she tried to keep them covered whenever she went outside, but sometimes she forgot.

     He didm’t feel sorry for his mother.  Even when she said she was always self-

conscious about her back, there was no reason to feel sorry for her.  That’s just how it was, how she was.  It didn’t make her any different.  He knew more about her, but that didn’t change anything.  Nothing he could ever learn about her would change his mother.  It would only make her more clear to him, like the story about how his father courted her when she was in the cast.  They had only met once, at a party, from which he would have taken her home, but he had a flat tire.  And then he showed up at the house when she was in the cast.  “He came to visit me,” she said, “nearly every day for six months, and me flat on my back.”  She talked about how bad it was to be in the cast.  She alluded only vaguely to the physical problems, something about bed sores, and emphasized the tedium.  Six months of not being able to get off of your back, but he didn’t feel sorry for her, or admire her for enduring it.  She was his mother.  It would be like feeling sorry for or admiring himself, which he never did.  It just made her more clear to him. 

     She was always there, almost always in the kitchen when he got home from school, and they talked while he ate his snack, and then he went out to shoot baskets.  His father put up a backboard above the carport, and it wasn’t long before he had a deadly jump shot that he almost never missed.  It was a good place for it, the perfect arrangement.  From the kitchen his mother could hear the ball bounce on the asphalt driveway, and he didn’t have to worry about losing track of time. 

 

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