Herman really has me sweating about my left arm. I keep hearing it pop. I know it's broken, but Gordy's taking it easy with my other one.
Charles thinks a minute. "I can't believe you even had to tell them about the goddamn dogs. Just for that, I'm giving you something to convince you of my good intentions. Do you have any scars on you, Bobby?"
This seems important to him, and I'm afraid that no matter which answer I give him it's not going to be good for me. I have to think a little. "No," I say. "I don't."
"Good, Bobby. That's real good. You're still a virgin. I'll just make a little slit here just above your collarbone." He pulls out a switchblade with a bright red handle, flips it open.
"Oh no, Charles. Don't do it to him," say Gordy, and he almost lets go of my right arm.
"Down, Gordy. Down. You're a psycho." And then Charles turns back to me, bends over me so that I can smell his breath. "Poke a hole, here in the little hollow of your neck," he says, pushing my head to the side.
And I feel the sharp sting just below my neck, can't keep from flinching as I feel the blade poke through my skin, the cutting edge slice, then grate against my collar bone, the blood puddle, run down my chest.
"Well, that's enough for now," he says, like he just took a sip of whiskey from a fresh bottle and recorked it because he wanted to save the rest till later. He takes a deep, satisfying breath. "From now on, I'm going to stalk you. Every time you round a corner, I'll be there. Every time you're out in your car alone at night, or maybe with a girl parked on some lonesome road, I'll be there. When you're plowing a field for your mama all alone late at night, I'll be there too. Maybe you'll be in your own bed and I'll sneak in a window. But sometime I'll do it, Bobby Hammer. You can depend on it. Sometime I'll kill you for what you've done to me."
*
I don't know how I got home. Just seems like I appeared at the door. I didn't tell Loretta what happened. Told her I had a nosebleed. My left arm felt better after Herman turned it loose. But later I told Jess what Charles said to me. He just laughed. "Charles isn't going to mess with you anymore, Bobby. Don't you know that? He had you all by yourself, him with two of his buddies out in a field. He's afraid of you, Bobby. I tell you he's afraid of you."
"But why did I run from him?" I asked Jess. "Am I a coward?"
CHAPTER 56: Graduation
It all comes down to this. Either I graduate or I don't. And we're all sitting here at the fairgrounds grandstand where they had the rodeo three weeks ago, listening to Mr. Sonnett give us what-for. Can't keep from squiggling in my seat. We're really a strange looking crew with all these flat hats and tassels. But I know I'll make it out of here even if I don't graduate. I'd like to get that diploma, but I can make it without it. I'll find a job somewhere. Sure I will.
I hear Charles has left town. Some say for good. So I don't have to be on the lookout for him here in the graduation crowd. I'm looking at it like Charles has done me a favor by threatening to kill me. Now I'm looking at my life like it's more important. I look at each day as though it will be the last I get to be here on this earth. Everything and everybody just seems so important to me now. And I don't know that my situation is really that much different from anyone else's. Life hangs in the balance with every tick of the clock. Most people don't realize that. But that's the way life is, and either you put that ticking out of your mind or you recognize it and learn to live by it. Charles has forced me to recognize it. That time after I tried to kill Charles and couldn't, that day that I was afraid of myself, taught me a lot. I know now that something inside of me is more threatening than Charles or anything that exists outside of me. If I can learn to recognize that fear, live with the fear of what is inside me, I can live with anything. When I remember that, I'm not so afraid of Charles anymore. And if Charles really knew me, and what I'm capable of, he'd know better than to come around.
Papa has taught me the most important lesson of all. I know that Papa wished that he hadn't killed himself. I saw it in his face the instant after the shotgun went off. Papa didn't have the courage to keep living. He was afraid to face what he had done. As Jess put it, Papa found his nigger, but he couldn't face him. The same was true for Heidi Kunze and Lenny. They couldn't face the truth of their lives.
Brenda didn't get to be valedictorian. Billie Wade, the doctor's daughter, beat her out. "Thank God," Brenda said. "Now I can enjoy graduation." So Billie is up there giving her talk and she has a lot of important things to say, and while she's saying them, I'm listening close, but I'm also sitting here feeling how much I like Chowchilla and its people. I can't believe how much my opinion of this place has changed after all that has happened. But I still realize that this isn't my home anymore. Whether I graduate or not is not really the point.
This afternoon, before I got dressed for graduation, I walked to the far side of Mama's field in my old dirty Levis, work boots and an old T-shirt I've been wearing for four years. And I noticed how much I love the land. Not just the land that I've lived on here for the last eighteen years. It's not just Chowchilla. It's this whole valley, the San Joaquin Valley. I like flat country. I like the way the sun goes all the way to the horizon at sundown. I like the way the ice cracks in the mud puddles when I step in them of a morning in wintertime. I like the feel of fog closing in, the feel when it lifts and the sun comes out. I like heat in the summer that makes sweat pour out of my body. This Valley won't leave me alone. It never will. But it's not home anymore.
I'm thinking about all this when I hear somebody behind me. It's Brenda on her knees behind my chair. She's left her seat and whispering in my ear. "What are you doing after the ceremony?" she wants to know.
To tell the truth, I don't have anything planned beyond the time that I get that little red-leather folder from Mr. Sonnett. Maybe it'll have a diploma in it, and maybe it'll just have a blank sheet of paper. But regardless of what's in it, I don't know what my next step is. My car's in the junkyard, so I don't have a way around tonight either. Everybody I could go with wants to go get drunk. I'm not interested in drinking. Maybe I'll just go on home afterward. So this is what I tell Brenda, not in so many words, but she can see that I'm not up for much of anything. I may not have anything to celebrate anyway. I could go in my room and pullout some of those college catalogs, some that go back to 1941, that Loretta gave to me a couple of years ago. She said they were her dead dreams.
"Come with me, Bobby," says Brenda. "Please. It's just Phyllis, her new boyfriend from Merced and me. We'll go to dinner first, then to the dance. My mother's willing to fix a big breakfast for us at two o'clock in the morning. She's promised not to complain too much."
I think about it a second. Can't wait too long because somebody will get on her case for being out of her seat.
"I would have asked you sooner," she says. "But I thought you had plans with someone else."
Me and Bev did have plans. I don't want to think about who she will be with, but I know anyway. It's Melvin in his stinking milking boots.
"No drinking, I promise," Brenda says. "And we might even have some time for just the two of us. Just you and me."
How can I pass up an offer like that?
Now Brenda is back in her seat and Billie has finished the valedictorian speech and all the other speakers are finished too. So we start filing past the reviewing stand. Mr. Sonnett calls a name and whoever it is walks by, takes the red-leather folder, gets a handshake and passes on back to their seat.
I'm standing at the edge of the platform now and over the loudspeaker I hear, "Bobby Ray Hammer." So here I go.
Mr. Sonnett's head is shining in these floodlights like it has a new coat of floor wax. "Good job, son," he says to me. He tries hard to look me in the eyes, but he can't quite make it. Got his eyes down to about my eyebrows.
I wonder what he meant, "good job"? I take the folder from him and shake his hand. But as I walk off, he does something he hasn't done to anybody else. He slaps me on the back, up there be
tween my shoulder blades where my neck starts. "Take care of yourself, Bobby," he says. Squeezes a little. And he didn't do that to anybody else. Just me.
So I walk off of that platform, and we all walk in single file back to our seats. I have my head down. Brenda is the first one to me. "Tell me, Bobby. Tell me. Did you graduate? I have to know." I think she is about to wet her pants.
"I don't have the courage to look," I tell her.
"Give it to me then," she says, and she jerks the folder out of my hand. She's just silent for a second and when she looks up, I think I see tears in her eyes and she looks stunned. "My god, Bobby, you made it!" she shouts. "You made it. You graduated!" I start smiling and everyone in Chowchilla now knows that I have just graduated from high school.
Mr. Wood, my physics teacher, comes to me after the ceremony, shakes my hand. "I want to tell you something, Bobby. And please don't be offended."
I take a step back from him when he says that.
"You are a smart young man, but you sell yourself as a dunce. And, like everything you do, you're very good at it. Not only have you sold it to the rest of the world, you've sold it to yourself. But you can't fool me, not anymore. I've seen what's underneath that false front. Stop it or it'll affect your future. Let it end here, Bobby. Let it end tonight."
Then Loretta finally finds me. She's with Jess again. Jess even has on a jacket and tie. And Loretta. It's the first time I have ever seen her look like a woman. I just grab her and hug her because I love her so much. But she has something for me, and she can't wait for me to get it open. It's just a card, but what the heck. It's from my mother. But when I get it open I find a tiny little leather book with gold writing on the front that says Bank of America. My eyes start to fill with tears over this because I know how she's scrimped and saved all these years. Sure enough it's a savings account in the name of Bobby Ray Hammer. She keeps pushing pages until we get to the last entry in it. And she stands back beaming. Jess just has his head down. But Loretta has saved three thousand dollars for my college education.
So now I'm standing in front of Trish and Curt. Trish wants to know what I'm crying about. "It's just a graduation," says Curt. Mama stands behind them, but she's not saying much. God, I wish Papa could see me.
Then Brenda grabs me and it's just, "Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. It's over, Bobby. It's all over. We're free for the rest of our lives!"
CHAPTER 57: One More Stop at the Cemetery
Strange how I feel about Chowchilla after being away at college for a while. I survived summer school and Loretta survived without me. Jess seems to like being with her more when I'm not around. And now the fall semester has started. Phyllis was right about going to a junior college. They are less expensive, and the teachers have more time for their students. By the time I finish my two years here, I'll be ready for a four-year college. I'm thinking about civil engineering, still planning to build bridges some day. This is the first time in my life I've been away from Chowchilla for more than a couple of days, and now late at night when I'm studying in my dorm room here on campus, after all the other guys have gone to sleep, I think that all the things that happened to me there seem like a dream.
Back in October I went back to Chowchilla for a couple of weeks to work for Loretta with the turkeys. I'd been thinking a lot and I had a plan. I gathered up all the guns I could find. I had Lenny's pistol that I almost killed Charles with, Papa's black pistol that he would have killed Charles with if I'd let him, my little twenty-two that I shot the back of Lenny's car with, and Papa's shotgun that he killed himself with, and I took them all with me to the far side of Mama's farm, back to the junkyard where Lenny and I used to hunt rabbits and where Helen first told me that she and Lenny had been married. I dug a hole with an old rusted shovel I found and buried all those guns three feet down. I hope no one ever finds them. It won't be long before they rust enough that they won't shoot anyway.
On the way back by the house, I had Trish steal Mama's big black Bible from her bedroom, and then we rounded up Curt. We went out to the Cemetery and as we drove through the gate, I saw Gretta standing still watching for us, and little Samantha jumping from gravestone to gravestone like she was playing hopscotch. And then, on that autumn day, with the sun on my head and gold maple leaves scattered about, I looked down at Lenny's tombstone with all the others gathered round. Papa's grave still looked fresh beside Lenny's. But we'd come for Lenny. We talked about what verse we wanted for a while and ended up with St. John 14:27.
"Lenny," I said, "we want you to listen to this because we have something important to say. We bring a message from Jesus." I started crying but I didn't care, and I didn't care what Mama had said about how Jesus felt about me. No one there would question who Samantha's father was either. The little red letters stood out clear in the bright sunlight, but they didn't come out of my mouth very well because my voice kept cracking.
Peace I leave with you, my peace
I give unto you: not as the world giveth,
give I unto you. Let not your heart
be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
"We still wish you were here, Lenny," I said aloud, "but we forgive you for taking yourself from us. We think that if you had it to do over again, you'd decide to stay with us." It took me three tries to get all the words out. I wished, more than anything that he could have answered back and forgiven me for the mean things I did to him. But that's something that just won't happen in my lifetime. Then we all came together, me, Trish and Curt, Gretta and Samantha, put our arms around each other and stood together around Lenny's grave for a long time.
"Why's everybody crying, Mommy?" asked Samantha.
"We're crying cause we still love your daddy so much and he can't be with us."
Then Samantha cried too.
Lenny didn't graduate from high school, and I was already in college. I wished so much that I could have told him all that I'd learned. I wished so much that he'd made it to that point. Then he wouldn't have killed himself. Somehow I just knew that. Standing there that fall day, something happened to me, happened inside me, while I was standing before those two graves. It was what Gretta had just told Samantha that got me. And then I remembered something. And I dropped to my knees again, buried them in the earth there on top of their graves, because I hurt so much I couldn't stand it. Papa spent eighteen years of his life raising me. And Lenny was my older brother that I followed around pestering all the time. And then, while I felt my tears run down my cheeks, drip off my chin into the soft grass, I knew that, just then, I had found inside of me what I had been looking for ever since me and Curt and Trish drove home on the tractor the night Lenny died. I knew that I had lost everything that night, but I could never figure out what I meant by everything. And I'd been worrying about the words I used out in that alfalfa field to convince Papa not to kill himself. The words didn't get the job done. But no wonder. Everything I said was unimportant. I didn't tell Papa that I loved him. I didn't even know that I loved him.
Bev called Phyllis the other day, said that she and Melvin are expecting their first kid in March. They've been married four months. And I've been seeing Phyllis some lately. We both go to Fresno City College. We have the same English class, and we like to go to movies together. She likes to just sit and talk about things as much as I do. She's as pretty as ever. Guess she'll always be skinny too. I have seen Brenda a couple of times since high school graduation, but she goes to Fresno State and is so busy she doesn't have much time for socializing.
I'm having bad dreams again. This time about Mama. I'm still carrying around some things I'd like to talk to her about, but she seems more distant than ever. Mama keeps one of Lenny's baby pictures with her all the time, and Dr. Wade has had her under sedation the last two months. She sleepwalks at night, and Trish has to follow her around the house because she might go outside. Two weeks ago Mama came up missing at two o'clock in the morning, and Curt found her just at daybreak lying in the old pump house fa
st asleep on the loose floorboards. Mama had shut off the pump for some reason.
THE END
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