The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
and sliding in the snow.
“Okay, let’s make like a tree and leave,” Daddy finally said. We were almost out the door when he grabbed my shoulder. “Hey, how would you like to be my lookout?” he said. He got down on his hands and knees and stuck his hand up inside the cigarette machine. My job was to tell him if either Fatty or Lucille was looking. Then Daddy said some bad words, and when he got up off the floor, his hand was bleeding. When he kicked the front of the machine, the glass smashed. “They’re looking!” I said. We ran.
The problem was, all those root beers made me have to go. Daddy took me to the alley between Loew’s Poli and Mother’s bank. “Go piss down there,” he said. “Go on. Hurry up.” His blood was dripping on the snow.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Sure you can. No one’s gonna see you. This is what guys do when they get caught short. It’s what I do.”
I started crying. “I want to, Daddy, but I can’t.”
He looked mixed up, not mad. “All right, all right. Come on, then.”
Whenever Mother and I went in the Mama Mia Bakery, the Italian lady was nice. But she was mean to Daddy. “Drunk as a skunk, and with a little boy, no less! You ought to hang your head in shame!”
“He just needs to use your toilet,” Daddy said.
“Get the hell out before I call the cops!”
Daddy said the Esso station would let us use their restroom, if his friend Shrimp was on and the boss wasn’t around. Shrimp and Daddy were friends, from when Daddy used to work there, before he got fired.
“Harvey comes back from the bank and sees you here, he’ll probably shitcan me,” Shrimp said. The other mechanic stopped working and came over.
“Jesus Christ Almighty, Shrimp,” Dad said. “You’re gonna let the kid have an accident?” Shrimp gave Daddy the key, and Daddy unlocked the door. “I’ll wait right out here,” he said. “Make it snappy.”
I was all shaking at first, and I got some on the seat and the floor. I kept peeing and peeing and peeing. The flusher didn’t work. There were dirty words on the wall and someone had drawn a picture of a man’s pee-pee. The sink had a spider in it. I put on the faucets full blast and watched it get caught in the tidal wave. It was dirty in there, but it was warm from this steamy radiator. I wanted to leave, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t like it when Daddy got drunk.
He wasn’t waiting right outside. He was in where Shrimp and the other guy were fixing the cars. He was talking louder than everyone else. “What do you mean you don’t want to dance with me, darlin’?” he said to some lady in a mink stole. “Sure you do!” He kept trying to waltz, and the woman kept trying not to, and when Shrimp tried to stop it, Daddy shoved him away. Then that Harvey guy got back from the bank.
It was a dirty fight. Three against one, plus Harvey kept hitting Daddy in the face with a bag of change. The lady’s stole got ripped, and she got rippy stockings and a skinned knee. Dad’s mouth was all bloody, and one of his front teeth was just hanging there. Stop crying, kid, everyone kept telling me. It’s okay. Stop crying. And I wasn’t even crying. I was just choking.
At the police station, we had to wait and wait. The blood on Daddy’s hand and his mouth turned rusty-colored. He still had egg yolk in his beard. When he reached up and pulled on his hanging tooth, I looked away. “My name is mud,” he kept saying. “Alden George Quirk the Third Mud.”
“Yeah, but don’t forget,” I said. “You invented the maze.”
And he laughed and said no, he didn’t. All’s he did was copy the idea from some farm he seen when he was hitchhiking through New Jersey. Then he touched my cheek with his sandpaper hands and told me I was his California kid. “How come I’m that?” I asked, but he didn’t answer me.
Later, one of the policemen who arrested us at the Esso station came over and said they finally got ahold of Grandpa.
“What’d he say?” Daddy asked.
“That he can’t come pick up the boy because you have his truck. But that’s okay. We can run him back out there.”
“What did he say about me?” Daddy said.
“That we should lock you up and let you dry out, same as we do with all the other bums.”
The cruiser had a radio, and a siren, and chains on the tires because of the snow. The policeman told me to sit in the back. “Did I get arrested?” I said. He said I didn’t because I didn’t do anything wrong. “You know what you need for the ride back home?” he said. He pulled in front of the Mama Mia Bakery.
I don’t think the Italian lady recognized me, because she was nice again. “Which would you like, sweetheart? A sugar cookie or a chocolate chip?” I took a chocolate chip and it was free. The policeman got a free cruller. He was going to pay for it, but the bakery lady said, “Oh, go on. Get out of here. Your money’s no good in here.” She said it nice, though. Not mean.
On the way home, I remembered about my hula hoop and my Silly Putty: I’d forgotten them back at the Cheery-O. I didn’t eat my cookie. I just held it, all the way back. Even with the snow chains on, the police car kept wiggling back and forth on the snowy road. The cows were out in the pasture still, not in the barn. They had smoky breath and snow on their backs, and when I saw them, I started crying.
One time, I had a scary dream that Daddy was giving me a ride in a helicopter. We were flying over our farm, and he said, “Hang on. Something’s wrong. We’re going to crash!” And then I woke up.
In this other scary dream, Mr. Zadzilko grabbed me and put me in that dark space under the stage where the folding chairs go. He locked that little door and nobody knew I was there. When I tried to scream, nothing came out.
Mr. Zadzilko told me he killed a dog once, by tying a rope around the dog’s neck and throwing the other end over a tree branch, and then yanking. “You oughta have seen the way that dog was dancing,” he said. “You got a dog. Don’t you, Dirty Boy?” he said.
I said no, I didn’t.
“Yes, you do. He’s brown and white. I seen him that time my mother and me drove out to your farm for cider. Maybe if Dirty Boy tells certain secrets, his dog will get the Stan Zadzilko rope treatment.”
“How come you have a mother but no wife?” I said, and he got all red, and told me that was his business.
I DUCK UNDER THE KEEP-OUT rope and take the shortcut to the middle of the maze. That’s where Daddy meets me. His tent’s somewhere in the woods, past the gravel pit. Sometimes he’s by himself and sometimes he’s with that kerchief lady who always stares at me and smiles. He’s trespassing.
I hide the ham and the cookies and potatoes in the baby carriage, under the Quirk baby, the way he says to do when he’s not here. I’m glad he’s not here this morning—him, and that lady, and his stupid jack-o-lantern missing teeth.
Back at the farm, there’s trouble: a big fight, Hennie and Aunt Lolly on one side, and Zinnia and Chicago on the other. “One little raggedy-ass jug of cider—that’s all I ever snitched from here, so help me Jesus!” Zinnia says. “So that later on down the line, I could sip me a little applejack.”
“Then why’s half a ham missing?” Hennie says. “Why is it that this morning a package of icebox cookies was unopened, and now it’s half-gone?”
“I don’t know about no icebox cookies!” Zinnia says. “Ax him!” Her finger’s pointing at me.
“Caelum?” Aunt Lolly says. “Did you eat some of the cookies that were in the pantry?” I shake my head. And I’m not lying, either. I took them but I didn’t eat them.
“Come on, Zinnia,” Aunt Lolly says. “I’m escorting you back. You’ve broken a trust, so I can’t have you working here anymore.”