The Escape of Bobby Ray Hammer A Novel of a '50s Family Read online

  "Don't hit him anymore, Papa. Can't you see? You dumb old goat. He's already beat up." Then she throws the broom at him, but he catches it by the handle, throws it at the TV.

  Papa's still on me. "Tell me, Bobby Ray. Damn it! Who was it?"

  "A bunch of Mexicans jumped me." Leroy's words just pop out of my mouth.

  First he looks real serious, like this means big trouble, then looks puzzled. "If I thought you were telling the truth, I'd put my pistol to work, but you're telling me one. I know you are. There's a story behind this." And damn if Leroy isn't right. Papa has already changed. "Come on. Who was it? I've got to know."

  I don't want to tell him, but it comes out in a little tiny sound anyway, "Melvin Swensen."

  Trish is on her feet again, but she's still mad. "A bunch of damn animals, all we are," she says. "A pack of dogs, all with rabies." She heads down the hall to her bedroom.

  "Melvin? Jack Swensen that's got that little dairy out on Road 7? His boy?" I think Papa even has a smile on his face now. "Little Melvin kicked your ass? That shit shoveler? God, this is getting better by the minute."

  "I didn't do so bad, Papa. He didn't come out of it looking like he'd been shooting pool." Papa hasn't seen Melvin since he was twelve. Besides, I'm not so sure he's any smaller than me. I just keep going over that fight in my mind, seeing Melvin coming at me and wondering why I couldn't throw that right hand that was going to put him down. I had him in my sights, like when you get a deer in your sights and you squeeze the trigger and he goes down. Only with Melvin, I went down instead.

  I hear the front door slam as Curt goes out into the dark. I feel sorry for poor old Curt. He must be feeling low. I'm walking into the kitchen, smelling fried chicken, thinking maybe I'll get something to eat. My face is beginning to throb again, so I better have a handful of aspirins. I go to the refrigerator for a glass of milk, Papa coming up behind explaining how tough Melvin has to be. He stands in the doorway, and I can still see his spit flying.

  "Your big ass football buddies are going to think you're one tough sonofabitch. You'll have to tell me how they take it."

  *

  I'm in bed now in the dark. I'm on my side facing the window, listening to Trish cry in the next bedroom. God, Papa ought to put a sump pump in her bed with all the tears she sheds. Curt sleeps with me but against the wall. I hear him wrestling around over there now. I get kicked in the ribs a lot.

  Before I go to sleep I always see bridges. I count bridges like other people count sheep. When I go to the library at school, sometimes I get the encyclopedia and look up bridges. I try to memorize where all the big ones are. My favorite is the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I've been looking through my new physics book for Mr. Wood's class. It has a chapter on bridges.

  "You asleep yet, Bobby Ray?" Curt asks.

  I thought he was asleep. I don't say anything at first, just listen to Stan's Private Line that comes out of Fresno on my little Philco radio. They've been reading dedications for Elvis' "Don't Be Cruel" for the last fifteen minutes. I'm listening for kids from Chowchilla and trying to remember how much homework I should've done for tomorrow.

  "No, not yet," I say.

  "You fight down at the high school?"

  "No. Beacon Road."

  "Anybody see it?"

  "Just about half the school."

  "You afraid to go to school in the morning?"

  "Always afraid to go to school, Curt."

  He has to laugh at that. "Me too," he says.

  We lie here listening to the radio some more, and now I am worrying about how my face is going to look in the morning. Wonder what the girls are going to think.

  Just when I'm sure Curt is asleep, he says, "You ever think about Lenny anymore?"

  This really takes me by surprise because we don't talk about our dead brother. I wait a little before I can answer that. "Just all the time. Seems like I still follow him around asking questions, and he just keeps on answering back. Don't even seem like he's gone sometimes."

  "You ever worry about dying?"

  "No. I don't think so."

  "You're almost as old as Lenny was when he got killed, you know."

  I open my eyes. Look around the bedroom with the pale light coming through the window from the full moon outside. I've always thought of Lenny as being a lot older than me. But Curt's right. Lenny died in his senior year. And his best friend, Charles, got killed too. At least I think he did. I've always wondered if God would let me live to be older than Lenny was. I feel kind of strange now, like maybe I should be looking out for myself. I listen to the sounds of the house creaking, watch the darkness out in the hall. Try to see something that'll fill it up. Wish I'd closed our door.

  "Yes, and you're the same age I was then," I tell him.

  It's his turn to be quiet for a minute. "You think any of us 'll get out of here alive?"

  "Yes. I will. And so will you and Trish. I'm going to see to it."

  "That a promise?" He's starting to cry now.

  "You bet it is. Just wait and see."

  Then I hear Curt sniffling for a while. After I don't hear him anymore, I turn off the radio. Guess Trish quit crying too.

  I remember how I found out that Lenny was dead. I think the way I found out was worse than him getting killed. Maybe not, but it seems like it. And after Lenny's funeral, Mama and Papa's whispering behind their closed bedroom door bothered me. First that policeman, Brock, came. Then Mama and Papa whispered. People dying is just a strange thing. And it happened to my big brother. I think maybe the whispering had something to do with God. God is a strange thing too. But I wish I could have understood the whispering. There's something else that bothers me about Lenny getting killed, something about me, but I can't remember what anymore.

  I've been thinking about keeping a little notebook of things that go on inside my head, like Lenny used to do. But with the life I'm living, what's the use? A lot of things happen to me that I don't like. I don't like Papa hitting on me. I don't like anybody hitting on me. I hope I graduate. My grades are taking it hard too. If I don't graduate, there's no leaving this place.

  CHAPTER 5: The '48 Hudson

  Here comes big Thomas Powers walking across the courtyard, arms out from his body a little, stopping now and then to pinch a girl on the arm or tweak an ear, just bouncing along. He has on white pants and white bucks, and just because he's the big man on the football team, he thinks all the girls are in love with him. Claims he's going to be one of those big-city college boys after he graduates, talks a lot about USC.

  It's noontime and we're parked in the vacant lot across the street from the high school, just leaning back in Leroy's old brown Ford. I'll be glad when I get my car out of the shop. I'm eating an orange.

  "You've got to give it to him, Bobby," he says. "He's got style." Leroy has an opinion about everything.

  "That's not style," I say, "it's show. Thomas has never made an honest move in his life," and I have to slow talking a little to swallow some orange. "That's what makes him a good running back. His whole life's a fake."

  "Well, whatever it is, it works. He gets any girl he wants."

  "They just put up with him. Don't want to hurt his feelings."

  "Seems to me, they like him. Well, come to think of it, maybe it's just fat girls. Me and Wayne caught him and Brenda going at it this summer."

  "Going at what?"

  "What do you think? Bobby. I'll give you three guesses. Three guesses and a hint. We caught them in the backseat of his car up at Raymond." Raymond is this little town in the foothills about twenty miles west of Chowchilla where us kids go sometimes to get away from prying eyes.

  "Couldn't have been her, Leroy," I tell him. What do you mean, "fat girls" anyway. I've known Brenda McCallum since seventh grade. She's not fat. Besides, she's just not like that."

  I remember when Mr. Johns, the principal at Wilson School, brought Brenda into our seventh grade classroom one morning the second week of school. That was fi
ve years ago. I thought she had the prettiest blond hair I'd ever seen, it falling down in ringlets. Walked in like she belonged there. Just a short little thing. She was fat then, new to the town, new to the state even. Didn't matter to her. Just walked in and took over. Now she's the senior class president. Not anybody touching that girl. I throw some orange peal out the window, watch the kids sitting in the shade on that big lawn out front of the high school.

  "Sure looked like her with Thomas to me."

  "You can look again on that one," I tell him. "Wayne being there doesn't help your story any either." Wayne Hickman is the undertaker's son. He doesn't like anybody. "I don't know why you've started running around with him anyway."

  I look over at the car next to us. My sister, Trish, is in the front seat cuddled up with her boyfriend, Eugene Waggoner. He's the first boyfriend she's ever had.

  Eugene is a mousy little kid that keeps his head in a book all the time. He thinks he's an athlete too. I hear he's not bad at track. Trish went crazy the first time he asked her out. It was her first date ever. She was covered with little beads of sweat. I heard her talking to someone in her bedroom the night before, so I stood by her door to see if I could tell who it was. She was talking to herself, practicing conversations. It was like she was two people. Finally she came to me. "Ever kissed a girl?" she wanted to know. I looked her right straight in the face and laughed. She blushed but asked another question. "I've got to know this," she said and swallowed real deep. "What's a girl supposed to do with her tongue when she gets kissed?" She'd asked her girlfriends but they laughed and wouldn't tell her.

  Mama doesn't like Eugene a whole lot. Papa, he thinks she could've picked worse. But he knows the Waggoner's. He's done some business with the old man.

  Thomas crosses the road, comes by me.

  "You tell your old man that the stalk cutter he's been asking about came in." Thomas' father owns one of the implement shops here in town.

  "So what makes you think he'll buy it from you guys instead of going down the street?" I ask.

  "Come on now, Bobby. Your dad knows he gets a better deal from us than anybody in town."

  "Well, maybe he might want to go to Fresno," I say looking down at those white bucks. Isn't he something? "They've got some big implement stores there. Got a good selection."

  "But you've got to think about service. We're just a couple of miles away."

  "Ya. If we buy from you, we'd better think about service."

  "Come on, Bobby. Quit it, would you? You tell your old man to come into the shop."

  "Lighten up, Thomas," I tell him. "You act like you're running your old man's business."

  "I'm going to someday. And when you start farming on your own, you'll be one of my best customers."

  "Well, we'll have to see about that," I say.

  "By the way," he asks, "how is Pistoresi doing on your car."

  "I haven't seen it, but Larry says it's supposed to be out next week."

  He stands there for a minute like he's waiting on a train, brushing the blond hair out of his eyes, and he keeps looking down at me, his black eyes working their way around my face. "You coming to football practice?" he asks, walking on.

  "Sure," I say.

  He says, looking back, "Too bad you can't put that face in the shop while it's getting well."

  The first bell rings and all the car doors open at once and everybody is putting cigarettes out in the dirt, but not me because if coach sees me sucking on a weed, that's it for football, so I just stick the last slice of orange in my mouth. I see Bev up by the school building, stepping into her shoes and brushing the grass off her blue skirt that flowers out, showing the edge of all those petticoats. We're all crossing the street now, and Leroy, he comes up behind, pokes me with his skinny elbow. But I've already seen Melvin out the corner of my eye. I wonder why he's not with Bev. His upper lip is still a little puffy, but he doesn't look so bad. If I'd hit him with that last right I had for him, he'd be hunkered over and walking sideways. I get a grin on real easy and look over at him.

  "How you doing, Melvin?"

  "Sore as hell," he says.

  And then I see it, a car coming straight for me, but I'm not worried about that. I recognize the car. It's Lenny's. But it can't be because Lenny's car was totaled when he got killed. I stand at the edge of the road to get a close look at who's driving it. Sure enough, it's a '48 Hudson. Not many still around. The guy looks kind of familiar, I think, but just as he gets even with me, so I can get a good look at his face, he turns his head. For a second there, I thought I recognized him, and it scared me.

  CHAPTER 6: Expelled and No Football

  In the middle of my second afternoon class, here comes a mousy kid from the office with a note for fat old Mrs. Biggs, the history teacher. I'm listening close because I'm in trouble trying to learn this stuff. I'm trying hard to get Lenny's car out of my mind. I don't like that car being on the road again. These history dates just seem to come out of nowhere, and I don't have anyplace to put them. Mrs. Biggs doesn't quit talking, doesn't even slow down, just waddles over to my desk and lays the note in front of me without a word. Next thing I know, I'm opening the door to old man Sonnett's office. He's the new principal. I had typing from him last year. We all call him Clyde because that's his name. Just one step inside and I see Mama. That doesn't look good for me.

  "Now, Mrs. Hammer, I'm sure we can work this out. But I've got to do something, considering the circumstances." Clyde doesn't even look at me. Mama doesn't act like I'm here either. She's too busy working on Clyde, and I think she has him on the run.

  "If you'd just listen a minute you'd understand that Bobby Ray's not your problem down here. I know you've got a bunch of kids that you can't control, but Bobby Ray's not one of them. His papa will straighten him out if he doesn't mind his teachers. What do they say? They complaining?"

  Old Clyde, he's just the picture of cool, sitting behind his big wood desk. He has his head shaved to get rid of those few wild hairs he had on top last year and that ring around the bottom that made his bald head look like a cap. But his head is still flat in back like somebody, maybe his mother, hit him in the back of the head with a baseball bat, and he's not going to do anything about that.

  "Now Mrs. Hammer, I checked with his teachers just this morning. And quite honestly, he's becoming a distraction this year. His grades are reflecting it too. He received an F on his first test in civics. An F and we're not even through September."

  I'm tired of standing and take the wood chair next to Mama, looking around at Clyde's office. He has all these square picture frames with nothing but papers in them that say what a big asshole he is.

  "I don't see what his grades have to do with this problem. We're talking about the fight he had after school yesterday, not his grades." Mama's voice is getting higher and higher like she does before she jumps into the middle of me. I figure I'm about to see a good one.

  "Grades are always an indication of what's going on inside a boy, Mrs. Hammer. He's not paying attention to his schoolwork. He's distracted and he's distracting others."

  "Bobby Ray, you told me you didn't get into trouble anymore and that you're doing good in your classes. And now I find out this. What am I to think?"

  "Ah, Mama, there wasn't any real trouble and I didn't flunk that test. Old lady Watson gave me an F cause I said something after the bell rang."

  Old Clyde, he perks up to hear me talk. I think maybe his face is going to be red. I can't believe he has me in here for something that happened after school, off the school grounds even, and now he's pulling my grades into it. He has it in for me.

  "That's Mrs. Watson to you, young man. She has a perfect right to adjust grades based on classroom behavior."

  "The only other problem I have," I say, "is in physics and I've already talked to Mr. Wood about that. He knows I'm taking a chance by taking his class, but he's willing to work with me. It's important."

  "That's another class I'm concerned about,
Mrs. Hammer. Bobby shouldn't be in a class like that and I'm thinking of taking him out."

  "You can't do that," I tell him. "Talk to Mr. Wood. He knows why I'm there."

  "I intend to. You can depend on it." But Clyde doesn't look very satisfied. He better not screw that up. When he screws with physics, he's screwing with my life. I'm going to build bridges someday if it kills me. Besides, he isn't looking at me, and I'm beginning to think he isn't looking at Mama either. "Look, Mrs. Hammer, this is what I mean," he says. "We have a system here. Bobby received fourteen tardy slips in the last three months of last year, and we'll not tolerate that manner of behavior this year. But he's already started on the same track." He's looking just above Mama's head at the wall. So I turn to see what's so interesting up there. Mama sure looks pretty in that light-blue, dress-up dress and her long hair pulled back tight in a big bun, and I'm thinking how proud I am of that woman standing up for me like this.

  "Bobby Ray, how could you be late to class that much? You know better than that"

  "Ah, Mama. I've never been late to class. They give me those for not having a pencil or saying something to the kid next to me. They've got a different rule for everything. Teachers don't have brains. All they have is rules." That ought to set him straight.

  Clyde lowers his head then looks out the window.

  "What you doing up here, Mr. Sonnett? You making rules to keep these kids in school or out?"

  And now he's getting real patient with Mama too, so he talks real slow. "Mrs. Hammer, I told you that students who are a disruption will not be tolerated. They'll be expelled. If your son's one of them, and I think he is, he'll be dealt with accordingly. And now I'm making a decision on this case. There's no talking to either of you. He gets one week now, and if he doesn't straighten up, it's out the door, for keeps." And then he stands up, starts shuffling papers on his desk like this business with me is over. He hasn't even looked at me straight yet.

  I'm thinking, hey, he didn't say anything about being suspended. "What you mean, I get one week? You kicking me out of school?"

  "That's the verdict, young man."

  "I've got some classes I can't afford to miss."

  "You heard me, and it's final. You can come back to school a week from Monday." And he has that look like he's enjoying this, has a little smile on his face.