The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind

  My father pulled cautiously into the drive of our new home: “This is it, guys,” he said. We spilled out onto the sidewalk together; my mother, producing a key from a chain around her neck, ceremoniously unlocked the front door. Then all of us wandered through the vacant rooms together, the freshness of things inspiring in us a brand of reverence—“Don’t touch the walls,” said my mother. Our voices echoed in the empty, painted chambers, alien, unsettling sounds. In astonishment we stood at the threshold of our dining room. An imitation chandelier, festooned with vaguely absurd cut-glass diamonds, hung by a chain from the ceiling. In the bathroom two sinks had been set in the tile; the wings of the mirrors swiveled on chrome hinges and the cabinets were stained with linseed oil. We inspected the kitchen together. My mother operated the garbage disposal; my father slipped the brass bolt in the Dutch door. We admired the counters and the window sills and closets. It seemed that some diminutive empire had been created for us, bordered by fences and careful rockeries, to close out that other world of wind and sand from which we had recently emerged together.

  “We have to celebrate,” announced my father. “We’ll bring everything in first, then eat, have a party.” He backed my mother against the kitchen sink, hoisted her up and turned her in a circle; her heels flew out behind her. “I should have carried you across the threshold,” he said, snapping his fingers. “What was I thinking of?”

  “It’s not too late,” my mother told him.

  He carried her across, of course. It must have seemed to him then that the life he had dreamed of was within reach. How was he to know then what he would have to bear? That my mother would die of lymphoma twelve years later? That they would sell this new house within five years? That he would sit by her in the hospital and wish for an end to it all?

  That night, since we had no beds yet, Harold and I slept on the living-room floor—or rather didn’t sleep because the place was too strange, the house too noxious with fumes of paint, the night too sultry, too windless. I’d always slept in the same room with Harold and had carried this tradition with me to the new place. But it occurred to me now that I didn’t have to. In the new place there was a bedroom for everyone.

  “You think things are going to be different here?” I said.

  “Some things,” said Harold. “Sure they are.”

  “Like what?” I asked. “Name something.”

  Harold turned onto his back beside me. We’d stripped to our underwear, and lay facing the ceiling with our hands behind our heads, our elbows pointing out like wings. The light from a streetlamp gathered in the window and swarmed across Harold’s tightened rib cage and over the as yet untainted plasterboard. “Like a lot of things,” he answered. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m glad I’m going to have my own room,” I told him. “I can do whatever I want now.”

  We were silent for some time. It was the kind of silence that often follows insult, when no one is quite certain of the meaning of silence—a nervous interim, even between brothers.

  “That’s fine,” said Harold, after a while. “Fine.”

  “It has to be,” I told him. “So there.”

  He slept after a while. I didn’t. I never slept as well as Harold did, and still today I seem always to be restless when others have slipped into the world of dreams.

  It was the day of the moonwalk, a thing that seemed to us more distant than the moon; while planets disintegrate and stars are born we migrate, love, make plans, pare our fingernails, hate one another ceaselessly.

  Before ten o’clock that morning Harold and I were at the basketball court our father had pointed out to us.

  “Shoot for outs,” he said.

  “You shoot.”

  “First one to make it.”

  “You go first.”

  Harold shot. It went in, naturally, a swish.

  “By ones to fifteen,” said Harold, after I missed. “Win by two, make it–keep it.”

  “Take it out,” I said.

  I gave him the ball. He tucked it under his wiry forearm and smiled at me with what I took to be an underhanded beneficence.

  “Good luck, brother,” he said to me.

  He drove to his right, turned his back to the hoop, and committed himself to that subtle chess match all basketball players know about: maneuvering toward a half-inch of shooting space or, if the defense can be duped, toward a spin-and-drive to the basket. I was mesmerized by little things—a dip of the head, a twitch in the shoulder, a convincing set to the mouth—then a fall-away jumper, his slim body going up strong against the backdrop of the city streets. An incandescent moment with the sun around his head like a halo; then the ball rattling through the chains.

  “One-o,” said Harold. “I’m up.”

  He went left now, as if heading for the corner, then ignited in a curl toward the baseline. At eight feet he swiveled in a running hook that swirled twice around the iron before dropping.

  “Two-o,” he announced.

  He banked in a jumper two steps left of the foul line. Then, going to his left again, a running floater. A reverse lay-up flipped back over his right shoulder. A hook shot from the right baseline.

  “Six-o,” he said. “Mine.”

  “Take it out,” I answered.

  In Seaside we’d played one-on-one a thousand times in the yard at the elementary school. There was sand on the court, and no net, and a sea wind to grow accustomed to. We’d sat against the wall of the school chewing gum and drinking soda pop when we were done. Harold was going to play for the Celtics one day; I was going to play for the Lakers.

  A slashing lay-up from the left, protected. He missed, and I scored twice from the top. Seven to two, Harold.

  In Seattle we found the sun fell pale and motionless and the chain net gave a satisfying swush when the ball passed through it. In Seattle we found an audience in passing cars and young couples decked out in tennis whites. In Seaside the throes of Pacific waves had forever been there, lulling me—the sound of my life passing. Now, in the city, there was no such sound, no vista from home of an endless ocean beyond which any possibility lay; in the city, I realized, there were millions of people, all like me: dreamers falling short of their absurd dreams.

  Harold banked one in from thirty. He drove right, coiled through a three-sixty and released the basketball from the graceful fingertips of his left hand. Swish.

  “Nine to two,” he said. “My outs.”

  A jumper off the dribble drive, left. Down the middle, straight at my fear, the right knee in my chest, an exaggerated arc and off the board.

  “Eleven-two,” said Harold.

  He missed from the top of the key. I struggled in low. A turnaround from five feet—in.

  “Eleven-three,” I said.

  Once, in Seaside, we picked clean a cherry tree together. Harold, stains on his face, sat against its base spitting pits for distance while I watched him from a branch high above.

  Two fall-aways. A scooping lay-up. Harold’s breath, stinking of peanut butter. His elbows and most of all his tenacious rear end, bumping me out of position.

  “Game point,” announced Harold.

  We’d gone smelt fishing together. Millions of them, spawning in the breakers, Harold and I yarding on our net in tandem while the Pacific smashed the sand around us.

  He went right. I leaned into him; Harold leaned back, of course. And for a moment we were frozen that way, two islands of tension, the both of us seized up, intractable. He held the ball cradled between his hip and forearm, he ducked low, laying his shoulder against my chest. I could feel the spring coiling in him, and when he dipped away from me I followed forward brutally, going with his weight. Harold kept falling back, the ball looping over us and against the sky, far short of its mark, an airball, happily, and then that ligament in his knee buckled and snapped and his face darkened, a shadow formed in the pupil of his eye. I was standing over him and Harold was on the concrete, his knee braced in both hands, his face contorted in soundless pain. H
e seemed naked, exposed and utterly helpless while I stood over him, observing.

  The evening astronauts first walked on the moon Harold was at the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. I went there too, and sat beside him with a transistor radio, and we heard Neil Armstrong tell the world that his was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. For some time we pondered the meaning of this; it seemed to Harold that Armstrong had left a word out. Didn’t he mean a man had taken one small step toward peace for all of mankind? Yet my father, from the foot of the bed, insisted that either way Neil Armstrong was a phony—that the experience should have been beautiful, but that Armstrong was there so that one day, if necessary, we could knock the stuffing out of the Russians from the surface of the age-old moon.

  We sat there in that hospital room and listened to men speak to us from the Sea of Tranquillity; Armstrong called it a “magnificent desolation”; then a broadcaster reported that a Russian probe, “bent on reconnaissance during the mission,” was preparing, soon, to land in lunar soil. My father laughed at this, at which point my brother asked grimly for a dose of painkiller and I bolted through the door to find his nurse, thankful to have this convenient task to do for Harold just then.

  * * *

  My father never found a job in Seattle. For two weeks in August he labored at a flour mill on Harbor Island, a paid trainee who in the end would not be hired permanently. Each evening he came home with a film of flour dust against his skin and clothes, dressed in work whites and Converse tennis shoes, the smell of beer on his breath. Then it was over. My mother, using a yellow highlighting pen, marked those classified advertisements she felt in her heart he ought to give his attention to. She packed him a sack lunch and sent him off in the Bel Air to spend his days filling out forms. But to no avail, really. Whether it was self-willed, or the times, or both together, my father found no work in the city. Sometimes on fall evenings he would sit on the patio and smoke cigarette after cigarette in a shroud of silence, his head hung between his knees. This went on throughout that autumn until my mother’s inheritance was depleted. Then my father took out a small business loan and bought up a parking lot in downtown Seattle, where he spent his days drinking coffee and reading magazines in a drafty and cold plywood hut.

  My mother cleaned houses and the offices of dentists for many years in Seattle. It was what she knew how to do, and she was much in demand among the ladies of the North End, who found in her a methodical, reliable worker. With her hair tucked up under a scarf and not a speck of makeup to conceal her real face she looked downtrodden, weary. She died when she was forty-eight; the day before I had tried feeding her applesauce through a straw but my mother could not keep it down.

  My brother stopped playing basketball. After his knee went he was through with sports, not because he had to be but because he wanted it that way. When I came home from practice he’d be wearing a sweater and looking at bugs through his microscope. On certain occasions he would look up at me as if mystified by what he beheld in my face; then his eye would travel to the lens again, leaving me out of its field of vision and focusing on something very small he never offered to share. It would stay there peering steadily down, insistently, patient, until I left in the direction of my own room—a solitary place.

  Aliens

  I met Dan Wyman in Auto Shop One, a course I took mainly to intrigue and offend certain acquaintances of mine at Roosevelt High School. These were kids I’d sat among for years in honors classes—kids who seemed to know where they were headed at fifteen, kids with clear reasons worked out inside for taking Business Law or Ancient History. (How could they? I used to ask myself. How did they know with so much certainty what it was they would need?) At fifteen I wore an overcoat from the Goodwill Store and shoulder-length, unkempt hair. That coat, as voluminous and awkward as a camping tent, a gray wool number with slack lapels and limp-threaded, large cuff buttons, made me a sort of celebrity, I thought. But I was wrong. I sensed without recognizing the special sort of loathing that here and there had been reserved for my appearance, but the more general unconcern for my existence in the world I couldn’t perceive.

  Strangely, I felt a widespread aversion to my character most powerfully in the auto shop. The students there knew I was a Laurelhurst boy, a white-collar refugee merely trying on blue-collar life as a form of novelty or minor diversion. They were instinctively offended by my presence among them, as if I had made a game out of their lives or stepped across an invisible border into a nation where I didn’t belong. Two or three times I was openly insulted when my obvious lack of experience with automobiles manifested itself to these guys. Then almost all thirty of them turned on me. “That’s a fucking spark plug,” somebody would say. “Counterclockwise,” somebody else would say. “Don’t fuck around with those adjustments.” “Don’t be such a fucking idiot.” “Don’t touch anything around here, all right, dipshit?”

  Naturally I did my best to conceal my ineptitude. I talked a half-decent game, but sooner or later you had to take a tool in your hand in that course, and when I did there was no hope of sustaining the pretense. With each mistake, each embarrassing confusion, I retreated further into the silence of the tourist who knows he will never communicate. Even my hands seemed to become more tentative and unworkable in the face of the loathing I felt directed at me. I began to consider skipping, another strategy of mine, a flirtation with danger I knew would garner me even more inverse social status than my street wino’s overcoat, since skipping involved putting your grades on the line and taking a chance, however insignificant, on being expelled or suspended. No real honors student would ever skip.

  But how did I meet Dan Wyman? Fifteen lawn mower engines were clamped to workbenches around the auto shop and everybody, daily, paired up. The partners I had, as a matter of course, ignored me with a studied sullenness. They picked up the tools and went to work. I stood there. Some universal agreement or unspoken policy prevented the unlucky greaser who drew me as a partner from extending the slightest measure of friendship. I became in that room an alien presence, an idea rather than a human being. But not with Wyman. He ignored me only until he needed a third hand, then asked straightforwardly for help. “Hold this down, please,” he said softly, pointing with his cleft chin. “Hold this. Right here.” So my hands began to work among his, that’s all, and he exhibited no disgust for me. He even seemed ignorant of the sphere of animosity circumscribing my being, though in retrospect I don’t think he really was. He didn’t care. He had a knack for coaxing even the most recalcitrant engine to life, particularly when others asserted such a feat was impossible. The challenge of infinitely small physical problems arranged in a long and methodical series gave him a special pleasure. It dawned on me that, by the time he graduated, Wyman would be a paid mechanic. This was something he didn’t seem to know yet. He took a completely innocent joy in his ability, viewing it as nothing special. His father, he said, was a flight mechanic in Texas; his brothers were also mechanics. His parents were divorced but when Wyman spoke of it his face did not indicate pain. He was muscular. His features were good. At the end of class each day he washed his strong hands carefully and combed his hair with water, parting it at the side. There was no graffiti scrawled on his notebook, as there was all over mine. He gave to the world the appearance of a neat, scrubbed, well-mannered boy, a budding Mr. Goodwrench, healthy and attractive but not in love with himself or fashion-conscious—the kind of boy who might be a marine someday, or a police officer, if he wanted to be. But he didn’t. He’d cut himself off, I noticed, in a manner that precluded that kind of future. There was a distance between Wyman and everybody in that room, a studied distance, that he had placed there. He was always very quiet, very busy.

  Once, while we were cleaning up our workbench and getting ready to leave, Wyman asked me a question.

  “What’s with the overcoat?”

  “It was cheap,” I said.

  “They didn’t have any that fit?” said Wyman.

  “
No, they didn’t.”

  He was silent for a while. I could see that his brain was working on this problem. His face stayed even, but the movements with which he worked, putting tools away, sped up.

  “You mostly get As?” he said.

  “In some things. Yeah.”

  “Then why can’t you spend a few bucks on a coat? One that fits?”

  In his mind this made good sense. And in a way he was right. If I could get As I should be able to find a decent coat. Wyman wore a neat and trim Eddie Bauer jacket and, in courses like History and Algebra-Trig, received mostly low Bs and Cs.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t gotten around to it, I guess.”

  “Oh,” said Wyman.

  “I hate going into stores.”

  “Same here,” said Wyman.

  “Besides, I don’t mind this thing,” I said, holding it by the lapels. “It’s good enough. It does the job.”

  Wyman looked at me like he’d never seen my face before. “You look like a fucking bum,” he said.