We knew what they were looking for. People drowned in that river. It had one of the most dangerous currents in the country, especially here, at its mouth, and I wished we’d left then before the divers brought up the body. It was bloated to three times a man’s normal size, the round head matted with blond hair, the face a pale pumpkin, his mouth open, dark, and bottomless.
We didn’t know how we’d get back home without being found, but Jeb dropped his pieces of glass and we both crawled fast out from under that pier and ran under the sun.
THE HOUSE was almost always dirty. Whatever chores Mom would give us, we just did not do. But some days, cooped up in that small hot house, one or two of us would finally leave the TV, grab the broom, and start sweeping the floorboards, the narrow wooden stairs and hallway. We might wash the backed-up dishes in the kitchen, find the mop and scrub the floor. We’d go up to our rooms and make our beds, pick dirty clothes out of the corners, and stuff them into a garbage bag for when we went to the laundromat. Sometimes I’d go out to our tiny enclosed yard and sweep the concrete stoop. In the corner of the fence was a rusty rake and I’d use it on our dirt yard. I made straight even lines parallel to the fence. It was still a dirt yard, but standing on the concrete stoop after, looking down at it, our home seemed somehow more orderly, our lives within it more comprehensible.
NONE OF Mom’s cars ever worked for long, but she was able to drive home the Head Start van and at least two Friday nights a month, she would load the four of us into it and take us on a Mystery Ride. If we asked where we were going, she’d say, “Who knows? It’s a mystery.”
Suzanne, at thirteen, wearing hip-huggers and smoking Kools in her room, acted like she was too old for this game, but I think she secretly liked it as much as Jeb, Nicole, and I did, each of us sitting on our own seat, the windows open, the radio playing rock and roll, the warm air blowing in as we drove out of the South End and the abandoned buildings of downtown. Sometimes we’d get on the highway and go fast and leave it all behind. Or else Mom would stay on the back roads near the Merrimack, winding through groves of hardwood and pines where people with enough money lived in houses you could barely see from the road.
Mom—only thirty-three years old, slender, and beautiful to men, I knew, because they were still always coming around—she nodded her head to the music and blew the smoke from her Pall Mall out the window and she sang along and tried to raise us all up out of the hole we were in. Soon we’d be hungry and somehow the mystery ended at Skippy’s, a hamburger joint built off a fast two-lane in the pine trees. The cheeseburgers were cheap and juicy, and they were served in red-and-white-checkered baskets heaped with curlicue fries. We’d sit at a picnic table spotted with squirrel and pigeon shit, and we’d eat this hot and perfect food and wash it down with cold Cokes.
Afterward, if she had the money, we’d continue our Mystery and find ourselves at the drive-in, the sun setting over a massive movie screen rising up out of scrub and weeds. Because of the van, she had to park in the far back and she’d pull it sideways so we could hook three or four speakers onto our open windows, each of us with our own bench seat to stretch out on.
Most of the movies were rated R and most were bad; I remember fast cars and naked breasts and pistol barrels flashing in the sun. Some disturbed me, like Joe where a father hates hippies and gets another father to go shoot up a commune where the first father accidentally kills his own daughter, her dead body lying bloody in the snow. There was Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, Dustin Hoffman playing a hit music composer who has a split personality and ends up committing suicide in his private plane. There was Woody Allen, who talked fast and said funny things about sex I was embarrassed to hear in the van with my mother. But it was the Clint Eastwood westerns I really liked; he could shoot and kill and did it all night long to bad men who’d done bad things to him and his family. He didn’t run from them. He didn’t hide. He faced them, usually three or four at once, and in just a few words he told them what he thought of them, then drew his Colt and gunned them down like the pigs they were.
One Friday when there was a warm, misty rain and we had to roll the van’s windows up, we watched Billy Jack. The lead actor wore a tight black T-shirt that showed off his chest and arm muscles, and he plays an Indian and a Green Beret who fought in Vietnam. He’s also a master in some form of martial art, and he spends a lot of time alone, walking softly, his carved and handsome face shadowed beneath the brim of his black cowboy hat and its band of beads. But then his wife, a kind and pretty blonde, opens a Freedom School for Native American children on the reservation and when she drives the kids into town for ice cream, they get chased out by white racists and she ends up being staked to the ground spread-eagled where she’s raped and left to the ants and the sun and Billy Jack spends the rest of the movie hunting down the men who did it and he beats them to death using roundhouse kicks to the temple, straight rights to the face and heart and groin, fast and lethal moves I’d never seen, these cruel, vicious men reduced to silent bloody heaps on the floor or in the dust.
That night I couldn’t sleep; my heart wouldn’t slow down. I kept seeing myself do that to Clay Whelan and George Labelle and every kid who’d ever punched or kicked or pushed me; I saw myself doing it to the drunk who’d pissed in our hallway; I saw myself doing it to the two or three boyfriends of my mother’s I never liked; I saw myself doing it to anyone, everyone.
3
ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Pop drove up to our house on Lime with Theo Metrakos. He had thinning dark hair and a thick mustache, and he was an inch or two shorter than my father but well-built. He was a first-generation Greek studying for his Ph.D. in literature, one of Pop’s roommates in an apartment in Bradford, though I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew is he had muscles like Billy Jack, that later in the day I cut my foot on a piece of broken glass in the sand and Metrakos carried me piggyback a hundred yards up the beach to the blanket where Pop had a cooler with ice and drinks. I put ice on the cut, and Metrakos ran back to the water and dived in and swam over the waves and stayed out there swimming for close to an hour.
This beach was ten or twelve miles away on the New Hampshire coast. Sometimes, if a Sunday was real hot and Pop couldn’t afford a movie, he’d take us there. He’d park his Lancer across from a row of tiny beach houses and lead us over the bright sand to a wide-open place scattered with families and couples and little kids, the waves breaking softly in front of us. While we were pale and sunburned easily, he was tanned and had his shirt off right away, his chest and flat belly covered with dark, curly hair, his skin a deep red-brown. He’d lay out a blanket for us, then roll out a reed mat for himself. When I was older, I would learn this had always been his favorite season, that after a morning of writing, then a long run, he came here every afternoon to read and doze and lie in the sun. Most of the time he’d bring a girlfriend with him, though he rarely did when he was with us. Maybe because there wasn’t room in the car. Maybe because he didn’t want to mix his two lives, but I knew from photos he’d still sometimes show me that his girlfriends were young and rich-looking and beautiful, students he’d met at the college.
At the end of the day, the sun setting in the dunes behind us, Metrakos put on running shoes and ran the fifteen miles home. He left thirty minutes before we did but was already four miles down the road when we saw him. He wore a bandanna around his head and no shirt, his back gleaming with sweat. As we passed, Pop honked the horn and we all waved at Theo and he smiled and waved back. On both sides of us were salt marshes, acres of mudflats and sea grass, deep yellow-green under the last of the sun. I sat back in my seat and wondered how anyone could run fifteen miles. I also liked how kind Metrakos was, how respectful he was to everyone he talked to. And smart, too. Educated.
OUR MOTHER had a new boyfriend now, Bruce M. Her other boyfriends looked like convicts compared to him; he picked her up on a Saturday night in the summer, and as soon as he pulled to our cu
rb on Lime Street, we knew this one was different. He didn’t drive a beat-up van or a motorcycle or a loud muscle car, he drove a sleek gray Jaguar XJ6, a car I didn’t even know existed, and when he stepped out of it, we saw a slim, clean-shaven man wearing good shoes, ironed pants, and a shirt and tie. It was navy blue, and when he got close enough, we could see dozens of tiny peace signs sewn into it.
Mom introduced us to him and he smiled down at each of us and reached out his hand. He actually looked happy to meet us. Mom wore a skirt and earrings and as they crossed Lime in the late-afternoon light, the four of us huddled at a window and watched him open the passenger door for her. He laughed easily at something she said, then he walked around the hood of the Jaguar and climbed in behind the wheel. We must’ve been leaning on the curtain because the rod pulled from the window jambs and came down on us and we all hit the floor laughing, sure they saw us spying.
“I like that one,” Suzanne said.
“I hope she marries him.”
One of us said that. I don’t remember who, but it could have been me.
HE SLEPT over that first night and most every weekend after that. He gave Mom money and there was food in the fridge, gas in the car, and he drove us to Schwinn Bicycles up the river and bought each of us a brand-new bike. I forget what the girls got, but Jeb picked out a yellow ten-speed and I chose a bright tangerine five-speed chopper with a banana seat and two-foot sissy bar in the back. It looked just like the motorcycle Peter Fonda rode in Easy Rider. It was the bike of outlaws.
That afternoon we rode those bikes up and down the streets of the South End. When the sun went down, Bruce wanted to take us all out to eat somewhere and before we left, Jeb and I went out back with our new rubber-coated chain locks and ran them through the four bike frames, locking them to a cross-brace in the fence. I checked the latch on the gate, then dragged two cinderblocks over and wedged them against it.
At the restaurant, an air-conditioned one in Andover that had white linen table cloths and rolled napkins, Bruce said we could order whatever we wanted. He and Mom sipped bourbons and laughed a lot and kept looking at each other over the table. We’d never gone out with any of her other boyfriends before. Part of me felt guilty; if there was going to be a man eating at the table with Mom and us, it should be Pop, shouldn’t it? But Bruce was warm and easy to talk to and somehow whatever we said, he found interesting or funny or intelligent, and he would say so, looking us directly in the eye.
I looked away. I looked down at my plate. In our weekly dinners with Pop, he would talk with the four of us too, but he didn’t look us in the eye very long. Instead, there was the feeling he had a lot to do, that this meal was something it was hard for him to take time for. But there was something else, too. Many years later, when I was in my twenties and staying for a few weeks with my father and his third wife Peggy, I’d watch her set a romantic dinner for the two of them, light candles, and complain later that he never wanted to eat that way with her. “Why?” I asked.
“Because he’s shy. Don’t you know that about him? Your father is actually shy.” But Bruce wasn’t, and he was looking at me in a way no adult ever had, not a man anyway.
WE GOT home from the restaurant after dark, and I walked straight through the house to turn on the outside light and look at my bike. At first I thought I was seeing dead snakes. Our cut bike chains were lying in the dirt and the rest of the yard was empty, the gate wide open.
Then I knew what I was seeing, and how could we have been so stupid? Why did we go riding those bikes in this neighborhood, advertising them like that? And I should’ve known you can’t trust good things to stay good. I should have known that.
Lying in bed that night, Nicole crying in her room, Suzanne still trying to soothe her, Jeb silent in his bed beside mine, I pictured us getting home just as the bike thieves were putting the hacksaw to our chains. In my vision they were grown men and I was the first in the yard and I said nothing to them, just started punching and kicking until they were dead. Not hurt, but dead.
A few days later I was sitting on our front step, one eye open—the way it always was—for Clay Whelan. The sun was high over the town, and a kid on a bike came riding up from Water Street. I could see the chopper forks and the sissy bar. I could see the knob of the five-speed gear shifter, and as the rider got closer I could see the frame itself was no longer orange but a dull, spray-painted black and red and green. The kid started pedaling standing up and I saw how new the seat looked, how brightly orange it shone in the sunlight, though it’d been sliced down the middle to make it look older, its white foam protruding like guts.
My heart was punching a hole in my chest and I was about to run into the street. Then I saw who the rider was: Cody Perkins. He glanced down at me like I was not there. Like I was not. And I watched him pedal my new bike all the way up Lime Street and away.
THE MAILMAN came in the afternoons while the four of us sat in front of the TV. Our mailbox was rusty and hung crooked against the clapboards, and we could hear him opening it, the creak of its hinges, his footsteps walking away on the concrete. One afternoon amongst the bills was a blue envelope from Lake Jackson, Texas. It was addressed to all of us, and Suzanne opened it. It was a card from our mother’s older sister, our Aunt Jeannie, and her husband, our Uncle Eddie, two people we’d heard of but barely knew. Inside it were four checks, each one made out to each of us kids for fifty dollars. The four of us looked at each other. We kept looking down at the checks in our hands, but I was drawn even more to the card and those two handwritten words: Aunt and Uncle. The fact of them, living two thousand miles south of us. Our grandfather and grandmothers, too. Mom had told us we had fifteen first cousins down there, that thirteen of them were our ages, Pop’s sisters’ kids, and they lived one block away from each other in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I knew only a few of their names. Standing there with that check, there was the feeling that our family of six had been marooned up here, that our young mother and father had somehow taken a wrong turn.
JEB AND I fought a lot. He was younger by a year but taller and stronger and he almost always won. One afternoon in the house on Lime Street he had me pinned to the floor of the upstairs hall, his foot on my neck while he kicked me in the ribs. Suzanne broke it up, yelling at us, swearing, her black eyeliner looking so dark against her pale skin. She made Jeb go downstairs, then she went back into her bedroom, and I pulled from behind my door the metal stilt leaning against the wall. I don’t remember where we got it or where the other one was, but it was an adjustable stilt like circus performers use and it was heavy and over four feet long.
The only bathroom in the house was at the bottom of the back stairs, and we had to walk through the kitchen and the rear landing to get to it. I knew Jeb would have to go sometime, and I stood there at the top of the stairs, the stilt resting over my shoulder like a spear, and I waited.
Thirty minutes or an hour went by. Suzanne kept playing her favorite 45 at the time, “D.O.A.” by Bloodrock, the sirens wailing over and over again as the lead singer’s character dies in the ambulance of an overdose. I could hear the TV voices too, then there were footsteps over the kitchen floor and I raised the stilt and pulled my arm back and there was my seven-year-old sister Nicole’s red hair, and I let out a breath and lowered the stilt.
Twenty minutes later, Jeb came. Over Suzanne’s record player I could hear his heavier footsteps down in the kitchen. I held my breath and when I saw his frizzy hair I hurled the stilt down the stairwell. There was the dull clank of metal on bone, his head jerking sideways as he and the stilt fell to the floor.
I thought he was dead. But he began to cry and raised both hands to his temple. Then he saw me at the top of the stairs and he dropped his hands and sprinted up the steps and he punched and kicked me and called me motherfucker.
ONE AFTERNOON I chased him with a butcher knife. He made it to the bathroom and slammed the door, one with slats, and I kept jabbing the blade through the cracks, trying to stab him in his
wrists and hands.
IN MOVIES now, whenever a bad man would die a bloody and well-deserved death, I would feel so much pleasure I would nearly laugh. One was Walking Tall, the true story of Buford Pusser who single-handedly cleans up the evil that has overtaken his small town, swinging a homemade bat into the bones and skulls of criminals. Buford Pusser is who I wanted to be. Billy Jack, too. And later, Charles Bronson in the Death Wish movies, Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. When I thought of the word man, I could only think of those who could defend themselves and those they loved.
WE MOVED again, this time to Haverhill, and when the doctor evicted my mother and us four kids from his old office near the hospital, we moved to the west side of town and lived first on Marshland Ave, then, a year later, on Columbia Park. These were streets of well-maintained two-and three-story houses with hedges and real lawns fathers mowed on weekends. There were late-model cars in the driveways, and Columbia Park was really a boulevard with a long grassy center shaded by oak and elm and maple trees. Our new rented house was a Victorian with a rounded turret and a front and back porch. The yard was small, but it had grass, and in the rear corner was a tall beech tree that rose as high as the house.
Mom was working in Boston now, forcing slumlords to remove lead paint from their buildings. I knew she made $133 a week doing this, and I knew Pop’s child support was $340 a month, but just the rent for this new place was $500 a month. How would we afford it? I was expecting to get evicted pretty quickly.
But Bruce helped. He had bought us new bikes again, a Sony color TV, and a stereo. He gave Mom money to cover some of the bills and groceries, and he started sleeping over not just on the weekend but weeknights too. He was still warm and seemed interested in whatever we might say, but he also drank a lot of bourbon at night, quietly and alone, reading a book or watching some sport on TV. By now we knew he was separated from his wife, that they had seven children who lived with her south of Boston.