The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
why?”
When the teachers are around, Mr. Zadzilko’s all nice to me. He calls me his best helper, and his junior janitor, and stuff. When it’s just him and me, he calls me “Dirty Boy,” and he keeps flicking his finger at me down there. “That’s to remind you that if you ever blab about certain secrets you and me got, I’ll tell everyone that Little Dirty Boy likes to look at his teachers’ twats.” And I think that means their girdles.
I killed something once. One of our chickens—the brown speckled one with the broken beak and the pecked-at head. “Nervous Nellie,” Grandpa always used to call her. He says a fox probably got her, but it didn’t. The other chickens were out front, pecking at the dirt, and she was all by herself behind the barn. I never liked her—never liked to look at that broken beak. At first, I was just tossing pebbles to bother her. Then I tossed a rock. Then I threw a rock, hard as I could, and it bounced off the barn and beaned her on the head. It looked funny at first, the way she just dropped, but then I realized she was dead and I got sad. She had blood coming out her eye. When I picked her up, she felt limp, like the rag doll Great-Grandma Lydia always wants me to hold and kiss. “Hold my baby,” she always says. “Kiss my Lillian.” Mother says Great-Grandma Lydia has cracks in her brain, and that’s what makes her crazy. The cracks are because she’s so old. All day long, she laughs at nothing and wants me to kiss her dolly. When Nervous Nellie died? I said a Hail Mary for her and buried her under some mucky leaves by the brook. Mother says God has a different heaven for animals than the one for people, but there’s no hell for animals, on account of animals don’t commit sins.
If Daddy steps one foot onto our farm, Grandpa’s getting him arrested for trespassing. Mother says I can’t tell anyone at school because that’s private information. Private information is like a secret, and trespassing’s when you step on someone’s private property and wreck things—like when those bad teenagers wrecked the Quirk family. At school, during morning exercises, we always say something about bad people who trespass against us. It’s in either the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer. I always get those two mixed up. You know what? Miss Hogan’s picked me to lead morning exercises twice this year, and some kids haven’t even done it once.
“Tell him he can go to hell!” Grandpa said, that time the phone rang at supper, and Aunt Lolly answered it. It was Daddy.
“He just wants to apologize to you, Pop,” Aunt Lolly said. “Why don’t you let him apologize?” The phone in her hand was shaking, and Grandpa let out a big breath and got up from the table.
“Apologize for what?” I asked Mother, but she shushed me.
“Here, give me that thing,” Grandpa said.
Mother leaned toward me and whispered. “For what he did when you two went downtown to buy your present.”
“What is it, Alden?” Grandpa said. I could hear Daddy’s little voice coming out of the telephone, except not what he was saying. “Yep,” Grandpa kept saying. “Yep…Yep.” Then he said, “You know how I end each day, Alden? I go upstairs. Kiss my poor, dear mother goodnight—make sure she’s quiet and comfortable. Then I take my bath. Then, before I climb into bed, I get down on my two bad knees and pray to God that my beloved Catherine, who gave her life to bring you into this world, is resting peacefully in heaven. And do you want to know what else I pray for, Alden? I pray that your son doesn’t grow up to be a no-good bum like his father.”
Then I could hear what Daddy was saying. “But just listen to me. Okay, Pop? Can you please just listen to me?”
Grandpa said something about a broken record and hung up in the middle of Daddy’s talking. He looked over at Aunt Lolly. “There,” he said. “You satisfied?” Aunt Lolly didn’t say anything, but she was almost-crying-looking.
And later? When Lolly and me were feeding the chickens? I said, “Do you love Daddy, even though he’s bad?”
“He’s not bad,” she said. “He’s just got his troubles, that’s all. And of course I love him. He’s my brother. You love him, too. Don’t you?”
“I love him but I hate him,” I said.
She shook her head. “Those two cancel each other out. You’ve got to choose one or the other.”
I shrugged. Thought about it. “Love him, I guess.”
Lolly smiled. Then she reached over, grabbed my nose, and gave it a little tug.
WHAT DADDY DID WHEN WE went downtown was: first, he got drunk, and then he broke the cigarette machine, and then he made that gas station lady dance with him. It was my fault, in a way, because I couldn’t pee in the alley.
Grandpa had let Daddy borrow the truck, but Daddy and me were only supposed to go to Tepper’s, pick me out my present, and then come right back.
On the way into town, it started snowing—little snowflakes, not the big fat ones. We were both pretty quiet for a while. Being alone with Daddy felt different than being with him when Grandpa and Aunt Lolly were there. Daddy said, “You know what I’m thinking of buying you? One of those genuine Davy Crockett coonskin caps. How would you like one of those?”
“Good,” I said. I didn’t really want another one, but I didn’t want to say I didn’t. I was a little scared, but not that much.
“You want to play Antarctica?” he said.
I didn’t answer him because I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Well?” he said. “Do you or don’t you?”
I shrugged. “How do you play?”
He rolled down his window, then reached past me and rolled down mine. Cold air blasted in at us, and snow. “I don’t suppose your mother ever allowed you the pleasure of spitting out the car window,” Dad said. “But here in Antarctica, you can go right ahead and spit.” So I did. Then we rolled our windows back up and played the radio loud. Antarctica was kind of fun, but not really. There was a parking place right in front of Tepper’s.
The cash register lady said they didn’t sell coonskin caps anymore, so Daddy said, “Let me speak to the owner.” “No, sir,” Mr. Tepper said. “Davy Crockett kind of came and went. How about a hula hoop?” I didn’t really want one of those, either, but I picked out their last black one. “This thing’s only two ninety-nine,” Dad said. “Go ahead. Pick out something else.” He didn’t have enough money for ice skates, though, or this Cheyenne Bode rifle I kind of liked. So I got the hula hoop, some Dubble Bubble, and a Silly Putty egg. By the time we left Tepper’s, the snow had started sticking. “Well, Merry Christmas in February,” Daddy said. “Better late than never, right? You thirsty?”
The Cheery-O tavern had these two bartenders, Lucille and Fatty. Lucille asked Daddy what he wanted to wet his whistle, and Daddy said, “How ’bout a root beer for my buddy here, and I’ll have a root beer without the root. And maybe you can get that good-for-nothing husband of yours to cook us up a couple of his fried egg sandwiches.”
“Coming right up, Ace,” Fatty said. Everyone at the Cheery-O was calling Daddy “Ace.”
I ate my sandwich neat, but Daddy got yolk in his beard. He kept making me sing “Inka Dinka Do” for everybody. Then he started playing cards and drinking these drinks called Wild Turkeys. Fatty kept filling up my root beer mug without me even saying anything. I had to show some man with watery eyes how, when you press Silly Putty onto the funny papers and peel it off again, it makes a copy. “The Japs must make this gunk,” he said. “Because when you copy it, the words come out Japanese.”
“No, they don’t,” I said. “They’re just backward.” And the man laughed and called over to Daddy. “Hey, Ace! There’s no flies on this one.”
“No, but there’s flies all over you, you piece a shit!” Daddy called back. I thought the man was going to get mad, but he just laughed. Everyone laughed.
At first, the Cheery-O was kind of fun, but then it got boring. Daddy kept playing cards, and then