This Boy's Life Read Free Page A

lock the doors. Then he panicked. He threw the Jeep into gear and sped around the block. He stopped in front of the building again. He turned off the engine and began whispering to himself. “Yes,” he said, “okay, okay,” and turned the engine back on. He drove around the block one more time and then tore down the neighboring streets, alternately slamming on the brakes and gunning the engine, his cheeks wet with tears, his lips moving like a supplicant’s. This had all happened before, in Sarasota, and I knew better than to say anything. I just held onto the passenger grip and tried to look normal.
    Finally he came to a stop. We sat there for a few minutes. When he seemed better I asked if we could go home. He nodded without looking at me, then took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, blew his nose, and put the handkerchief away.
    My mother was cooking dinner and listening to carols when we came in. The windows were all steamed up. Roy watched me go over to the stove and lean against her. He kept looking at me until I looked at him. Then he winked. I knew he wanted me to wink back, and I also knew that it would somehow put me on his side if I did.
    My mother hung one arm around my shoulders while she stirred the sauce. A glass of beer stood on the counter next to her.
    “So how was archery?” she asked.
    “Okay,” I said. “Fine.”
    Roy said, “We went out afterwards and shot a few bottles. Then we went tomcatting.”
    “Tomcatting,” my mother repeated coldly. She hated the word.
    Roy leaned against the refrigerator. “Busy day?”
    “Real busy. Hectic.”
    “Not a minute to spare, huh?”
    “They kept us hopping,” she said. She took a sip of beer and licked her lips.
    “Must’ve been good to get out.”
    “It was. Real good.”
    “Terrific,” Roy said. “Have a nice walk home?”
    She nodded.
    Roy smiled at me, and I gave in. I smiled back.
    “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling,” Roy said to her. “Even your own kid knows what you’re up to.” He turned and walked back into the living room. My mother closed her eyes, then opened them again and went on stirring.
    It was one of those dinners where we didn’t talk. Afterward my mother got out her typewriter. She had lied about her typing speed in order to get work, and now her boss expected more from her than she could really do. That meant having to finish at night the reports she couldn’t get through at the office. While she typed, Roy glowered at her over the the rifles he was cleaning and I wrote a letter to Alice. I put the letter in an envelope and gave it to my mother to mail. Then I went to bed.
    Late that night I woke up and heard Roy’s special nagging murmur, the different words blurring into one continuous sound through the wall that separated us. It seemed to go on and on. Then I heard my mother say, Shopping ! I was shopping! Can’t I go shopping? Roy resumed his murmur. I lay there, hugging the stuffed bear I was too old for and had promised to give up when I officially got my new name. Moonlight filled my room, an unheated addition at the rear of the apartment. On bright cold nights like this one I could see the cloud of my breath and pretend that I was smoking, as I did now until I fell asleep again.
     
    I WAS BAPTIZED during Easter along with several others from my catechism class. To prepare ourselves for communion we were supposed to make a confession, and Sister James appointed a time that week for each of us to come to the rectory and be escorted by her to the confessional. She would wait outside until we were finished and then guide us through our penance.
    I thought about what to confess, but I could not break my sense of being at fault down to its components. Trying to get a particular sin out of it was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you’ve snagged the bottom, that you have the whole