Different Seasons(116)
“Aw, Dad, they’re okay—”
“Of course they are. A thief and two feebs. Fine company for my son.”
“Vern Tessio isn’t feeble,” I said. Teddy was a harder case to argue.
“Twelve years old and still in the fifth grade,” my dad said. “And that time he slept over. When the Sunday paper came the next morning, he took an hour and a half to read the funnypages.”
That made me mad, because I didn’t think he was being fair. He was judging Vem the way he judged all my friends, from having seen them off and on, mostly going in and out of the house. He was wrong about them. And when he called Chris a thief I always saw red, because he didn’t know anything about Chris. I wanted to tell him that, but if I pissed him off he’d keep me home. And he wasn’t really mad anyway, not like he got at the supper-table sometimes, ranting so loud that nobody wanted to eat. Now he just looked sad and tired and used. He was sixty-three years old, old enough to be my grandfather.
My mom was fifty-five—no spring chicken, either. When she and dad got married they tried to start a family right away and my mom got pregnant and had a miscarriage. She miscarried two more and the doctor told her she’d never be able to carry a baby to term. I got all of this stuff, chapter and verse, whenever one of them was lecturing me, you understand. They wanted me to think I was a special delivery from God and I wasn’t appreciating my great good fortune in being conceived when my mother was forty-two and starting to gray. I wasn’t appreciating my great good fortune and I wasn’t appreciating her tremendous pain and sacrifices, either.
Five years after the doctor said Mom would never have a baby she got pregnant with Dennis. She carried him for eight months and then he just sort of fell out, all eight pounds of him—my father used to say that if she had carried Dennis to term, the kid would have weighed fifteen pounds. The doctor said: Well, sometimes nature fools us, but he’ll be the only one you’ll ever have. Thank God for him and be content. Ten years later she got pregnant with me. She not only carried me to term, the doctor had to use forceps to yank me out. Did you ever hear of such a f**ked-up family? I came into the world the child of two Geritol-chuggers, not to go on and on about it, and my only brother was playing league baseball in the big kids’ park before I even got out of diapers.
In the case of my mom and dad, one gift from God had been enough. I won’t say they treated me badly, and they sure never beat me, but I was a hell of a big surprise and I guess when you get into your forties you’re not as partial to surprises as you were in your twenties. After I was born, Mom got the operation her hen-party friends referred to as “The Band-Aid.” I guess she wanted to make a hundred percent sure that there wouldn’t be any more gifts from God. When I got to college I found out I’d beaten long odds just by not being born retarded ... although I think my dad had his doubts when he saw my friend Vern taking ten minutes to puzzle out the dialogue in Beetle Baily.
This business about being ignored: I could never really pin it down until I did a book report in high school on this novel called The Invisible Man. When I agreed to do the book for Miss Hardy I thought it was going to be the science fiction story about the guy in bandages and Foster Grants—Claude Rains played him in the movies. When I found out this was a different story I tried to give the book back but Miss Hardy wouldn’t let me off the hook. I ended up being real glad. This Invisible Man is about a Negro. Nobody ever notices him at all unless he f**ks up. People look right through him. When he talks, nobody answers. He’s like a black ghost. Once I got into it, I ate that book up like it was a John D. MacDonald, because that cat Ralph Ellison was writing about me. At the supper-table it was Denny how many did you strike out and Denny who asked you to the Sadie Hawkins dance and Denny I want to talk to you man to man about that car we were looking at. I’d say: “Pass the butter,” and Dad would say: Denny, are you sure the Army is what you want? I’d say: “Pass the butter someone, okay?” and Mom would ask Denny if he wanted her to pick him up one of the Pendleton shirts on sale downtown, and I’d end up getting the butter myself. One night when I was nine, just to see what would happen: I said, “Please pass those goddam spuds.” And my mom said: Denny, Auntie Grace called today and she asked after you and Gordon.
The night Dennis graduated with honors from Castle Rock High School I played sick and stayed home. I got Stevie Darabont’s oldest brother Royce to buy me a bottle of Wild Irish Rose and I drank half of it and puked in my bed in the middle of the night.
In a family situation like that, you’re supposed to either hate the older brother or idolize him hopelessly—at least that’s what they teach you in college psychology. Bullshit, right? But so far as I can tell, I didn’t feel either way about Dennis. We rarely argued and never had a fist-fight. That would have been ridiculous. Can you see a fourteen-year-old boy finding something to beat up his four-year-old brother about? And our folks were always a little too impressed with him to burden him with the care of his kid brother, so he never resented me the way some older kids come to resent their sibs. When Denny took me with him somewhere, it was of his own free will, and those were some of the happiest times I can remember.
“Hey Lachance, who the f**k is that?”
“My kid brother and you better watch your mouth, Davis. He’ll beat the crap out of you. Gordie’s tough.”