Voice of our Shadow

1

Formori, Greece

At night here I often dream of my parents. They are good dreams and I wake happy and refreshed, although nothing very important happens in them. We will be sitting on the porch in summer, drinking iced tea and watching our scottie dog, Jordan, lope across the front yard. Although we talk, the words are pale and dreamy, unimportant. It makes no difference — we are all very glad to be there, even my brother, Ross.

Now and then Mother laughs or throws her arms out in those great swoops and arcs when she talks — her most familiar gesture. My father smokes a cigarette, inhaling so deeply that I once asked him when I was young if the smoke went down into his legs.

As is true with so many couples, my parents' temperaments were diametrically opposed. Mother ate life as fast as she could get her hands on it. Dad, on the other hand, was clear and predictable and forever the straight man to her passion and shenanigans. I think the only great sadness in their relationship for him was knowing that although she loved him in a warm, companionable way, she went all-out in adoring her two sons. Originally she had wanted to have five children, but both my brother and I had such difficult births the doctor told her having another child would be a deadly risk. She compensated in the end by pouring the love for those five kids into the two of us.

Dad was a veterinarian; still is a veterinarian. He'd had a successful practice in Manhattan when they were first married, but gave it up to move to the country right after his first son was born. He wanted his children to have a yard to play in and the safety to come and go as they pleased any time of the day.

As with everything else in her life, my mother pounced on the new house and tore it limb from limb. New paint inside and out, new wallpaper, floors stripped and sealed, leaks stopped. . When she was done she had created a solid, amiable place with more than enough room, light, warmth, and security to assure each of us this was a home as well as a house.

All that and two little boys to raise. Later she said those first two years in the house were her happiest. Everywhere she went, either someone or something needed her, and that is what she thrived on. With one boy in her arms and another clinging to her skirt, she telephoned, cooked, and hammered the house and our new life there into submission. It took a few years, but when she was done, things both worked and gleamed. Ross was starting school, she'd taught me how to read, and every meal she put on the table was tasty and different.

When she felt we were all taken care of, she went out and bought the dog for us.

My brother, Ross, quickly turned into an eager, curious kid who, at five years old, was already supremely naughty. The kind who does ghastly things but is constantly being forgiven because people think the act was either accidental or cute.

When he was a toddler he used to scour the house looking for new things to poke into or take apart. Over the years he moved through Tinkertoys, Silly Putty, and Erector Sets like an express train. Much against my dad's wishes, Mother bought him a wood-burning kit for his sixth birthday. He used it properly for a couple of weeks, spelling his name on any piece of scrap wood he could find. Then he spelled ROSS LENNOX on an oak armchair. Mother spanked him and threw the burner away. She was like that — very determined, and sure that the only way to raise children was to love them all the time, notwithstanding the necessary smack now and then when they deserved it. No excuses, no apologies — if you did it, you got hit. Five minutes later she was hugging you again and would do anything in the world for you. I must have understood her way very early in life, because I was rarely hit. But not Ross; God, not Ross. The reason I'm mentioning the episode is that it was the first time the two of them really knocked heads over something. Ross burned the chair, Mother spanked him and threw the thing in the garbage. When she was gone he took it out of the garbage and carefully burned holes in the bottoms of her expensive new leather boots.

She discovered them an hour later and, to my horror, asked me if I'd done it. Me! I was the dullard who watched these titans with awe and trembling. No, I hadn't done it. Of course she knew that, but needed to hear it from me before she took action. Marching into Ross's room, she found him sitting calmly on the bed reading a comic book. Just as calmly, she went over to his dresser and picked up his favorite model airplane. Lifting the burner out of her apron pocket, she plugged it into the wall and, in front of his astonished eyes, burned holes through the middle of both wings. He wailed, the room stank horribly, and those black. wispy threads of singed plastic floated everywhere. When she was done she put the plane back on the dresser and walked out of the room, winner and still champion.

She won that time, but as he grew older, Ross became increasingly more clever and wily; their duel continued, but on an equal level.

What happened was, my brother had inherited her vitality and appetite for life, but rather than desiring everything, as she did, he preferred specific courses in huge servings. If life was a massive feast, he only wanted the pвtй, but he wanted all of it.

And manipulate? There was no one who could do it better. I was the world's biggest pushover and no challenge at all, but in the short span of three months one summer he got me to: break the window in my father's study, throw a rock point-blank at a beehive (while he stood inside the house watching), give him my allowance so he'd protect me from God, who, he said, was always on the brink of throwing me into hell for my evil six-year-old behavior. My father had an old copy of The Inferno with Dorй's illustrations, and Ross showed it to me one afternoon to let me know what I was in for if I didn't continue to pay him protection money. The pictures were both so horrific and so engrossing that I needed no prompting after that (and for the next few weeks, until the spell wore off) to take the book down on my own and marvel at what I'd just barely avoided with my brother's help.

I was certainly his prime chump, but he could throw his lasso around most people. He knew how to work my mother so she'd let him stay home from school, my father so he'd take us to a Yankee game or a drive-in movie. Naturally he got caught once in a while and was hit or punished, but his record (what he called his «won-lost record») was astounding compared to most other kids'.

In comparison, I was the archangel Gabriel. I think I made my bed from the day I could toddle, and in my endless prayers at night I asked God to bless everyone I could think of, including the Barnum & Bailey circus.

I had a hamster in a silver-colored cage, a Lone Ranger rug, and college pennants on my walls. I kept all my pencils sharpened and my Hardy Boys books in strict alphabetical order. In answer to this, one of the many things Ross liked to do was come into my room and dive-bomb my bed. He'd spread his arms out as far as they would go and hit it at top speed. Often one of the wooden support slats groaned or even broke, and the pillow would fly up in the air from shock. I'd whine, and he'd hee-hee with delight. But having him in there was a great treat, so I never complained too loudly. He once put half a dead cat on my pillow with a little baseball cap on its head, and I never told a soul. I tried to pretend it was a special secret we had between us.

His room was the opposite of mine, but ten times more wonderful, always. I admit it. Everything was in an uproar, from sneakers on the desk to a radio under his mattress. He and my mother had world wars about his room, but it stayed his way three quarters of the time, regardless of her hair-pulling or threats. The most amazing thing about it was the variety of stuff he'd accumulated.

None of those college pennants for him. He'd gotten hold of an immense movie poster advertising Godzilla. That covered one wall in flames, blood, and lightning. On another was a tattered Albanian flag my father'd brought back from the war. On the bookshelves were a complete collection of Famous Monsters magazine, a leprous-looking stuffed skunk, all of the Oz books, and several of those old cartoon-like cast-iron banks that are so popular in antique shops these days.

He loved to go to the town dump and spend hours with a long metal pole, rummaging through piles, flipping aside things that he wanted to take home. He'd found a porcelain snuff box there, a railroad clock with no hands, a book on paper dolls that had been published in 1873.

I remember all this because some time ago I woke up in the middle of the night after having had one of those remarkably clear dreams; the kind where everything you experience is in such cold, clear light that you feel out of place in the real world once you wake up. Anyway, my dream took place in his old room, and when I came awake, I grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote down a list of all the things I'd seen.

If a boy's room is an out-of-focus picture of what he'll later turn out to be in life, Ross would have been. . an antique dealer? An eccentric? Something unforeseeable but very special, I think. What I remember best was lying on his bed (whenever he'd permit me in the room — I had to knock before I entered) and letting my eyes run over his shelves and walls and things. Feeling as if I were in some land or on a planet that was impossibly far from our house, from my life. And when I'd seen everything for the hundredth time, I would look at Ross and be delighted that however foreign or strange or cruel, he was my brother and we shared a house, a name, our blood.

His taste changed as he got older, but that only meant things became more wacky. For a while he was obsessed with old typewriters. At any one time he would have three or four of them lying around in a thousand pieces on his desk. He joined a club for antique typewriter collectors and for months wrote and received hundreds of letters. Swapping parts, getting and giving repair tips. . Once in a while a strange, mossy voice from Perry, Oklahoma, or Hickory, North Carolina, would call and ask for him. Ross talked to these other fanatics with the poise and assurance of a forty-year-old master repairman.

From typewriters he moved on to antique kites, then Shar-Pei dogs, followed closely by Edgar Cayce and the Rosicrucians.

It sounds as if he was a burgeoning wunderkind, and to a degree he was, but away from his obsessions Ross was sullen and sly as a splinter. He constantly locked the door to his room and was consequently suspected by my parents of doing all kinds of «things» in there. I kept telling them he did it to get their goat, but they didn't listen to me.

For any number of reasons, he would have a battle royal with my mother two or three times a week. With her hair-trigger temper, he knew how easy it was to make her mad (chew with his mouth open, not wipe his feet. .), but that didn't satisfy him. When he was in the mood, he wanted her tied in fiery knots, raging, stumbling from a fury so blind she actually bumped into things.

I gather it's not uncommon for families to be at one another's throats during the kids' so-called formative years, but what happened in our family was that as Mother lost more and more ground to Ross, it made her increasingly wary of both of us. I was a coward and took to the hills whenever I felt her temperature rising, but I couldn't always escape. The fallout from her flashes of anger often hurt me, and I couldn't believe the unfairness of the world. I knew I was a happy, normal little boy. I knew, too, that my brother was everything but. I knew he drove my mother nuts, and I readily understood why she blew her top at him. But what never made sense to me was how I got dragged into their often brutal melees and ended up being slapped or screamed at or punished for no reason at all.

Did that scar me for life and make me hate all mothers I've met since? Not at all. It scared and awed me to see Ross act that way, but I was also the most captive member of his audience. Even including the occasional whack, I wouldn't have traded living on the outskirts of hurricane country for anything in the world.

Soon he was stealing whatever he could lay his hands on. He was a premier thief, due in large part to chutzpah. He was constantly stopped in stores and asked where he was going with that watch (book, lighter. .). With a guileless, uncomprehending look, he would say he was just bringing it over there to his mother. After being stared down by Ross, the salesperson would apologize for being so gruff with him. Five minutes later Ross would have the thing in his pocket and be out on the street.

Once, he had a fight with my mother the day after Christmas and told her he'd stolen every one of the presents he'd given us. She erupted, but my calm father — saddened but used to it by then — just asked which store they'd come from. Ross wouldn't say, and we were off on the carousel again.

Five days later my parents went out to a New Year's Eve party and made Ross babysit for me. Ten minutes after they were out the door, he dared me to slide down the banister with my eyes closed. I'd gone a couple of feet before I felt something hideous and burning on the back of my hand. I threw both arms up, knocking away the cigarette he'd been singeing me with. Losing my balance, I fell over the side and landed on my arm, which instantly snapped in two places. All I remember besides the pain is Ross's face right up next to mine, telling me again and again I'd better keeping my fucking little mouth shut about this.

Was I a fool? Yes. Should I have screamed bloody murder? Yes. Did I want my brother to love me just a little? Yes.

2

When he was fifteen Ross changed his image and became a tough guy. Leather jacket with a thousand zippers and chrome studs, a bone-handled switchblade knife from Italy, a tube of Brylcreem hair goop on the shelf in the bathroom.

He hung around with a bunch of dimwits who, instead of talking, smoked Marlboros and spat on the ground. The leader of this pack was named Bobby Hanley, who, although short and skinny as a car antenna, had a nasty reputation. It was assumed that anyone who messed with him was out of his mind.

The first time I ever saw Bobby was at a high school basketball game. I was eleven, and because I was still in elementary school, I didn't know who he was. I'd come to the game with Ross (who'd been forced into taking me by my parents), but he ditched me seconds after we got there. I'd looked around frantically for someone to sit with, but it seemed as if everyone was a stranger. I ended up standing by the main door. A few minutes into the game an old janitor who I knew was named Vince came in and stood next to me. He had one of those long wooden brooms in his hand; every time our side scored he'd stamp it on the ground. We started talking, and I felt more comfortable. It was very pleasant, and I started thinking about how great it would be when I was in high school and could come to these games all the time with my friends.

A few minutes before the end of the first quarter the door whacked open and a bunch of tough guys sashayed in. Vince muttered something about «little turds,» and since I didn't know anything, I nodded.

They walked right up to the out-of-bounds line and stood there, checking out the crowd, ignoring the game completely. Then one of them took out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. He threw the match on the floor. Vince walked up and told him there was no smoking in the gym. Bobby Hanley didn't even look his way. Instead, he took a long, slow drag and said, «Blow it out your ass, Pop.»

I couldn't believe it! The even more astonishing thing was, Vince mumbled something, but walked back to the door.

A few of Hanley's crew snickered, but none of them had the nerve to light up too. Standing next to me, Vince cursed and kept moving his hands around on the top of the broom. I didn't know what to do. How could this kid get away with that? What kind of crazy power did he have?

The quarter ended as Bobby smoked his cigarette down to the brown filter. When he was done he dropped it on the hardwood floor and ground it out with his boot heel. I watched his foot move back and forth. Much too loudly I said, «What a big jerk.»

«Hey, Bobby, numb-nuts over there called you a jerk.»

I froze.

«Who did?»

«The little fuck over there by the door. The orange sweater.»

«A jerk, huh?»

I wouldn't look up. I wanted to close my eyes, but I didn't. I saw the lower half of Hanley push through his entourage and walk toward me. He grabbed my ear and pulled it up next to his mouth.

«You called me a jerk?»

«Leave the kid alone, Hanley.»

Still holding me tight, Bobby told the janitor to fuck off.

«I asked you a question, scumbag. I'm a jerk?»

«You're not supposed to smoke in the gym. Ow!»

«Says who, scumbag? Who's going to stop me?»

Silence. People moved around us. I was so scared and ashamed. I had no guts. Everyone in the world was looking at me. No one knew who I was, but that made no difference. Whoever I was, I was a chickenshit. Hanley was slowly tearing my ear off. I was sure I could hear little things coming apart in there: muscles from bone, soft little membranes and hairs like the thinnest spiderwebs. . His friends stood around us in a semicircle, delighted to be part of the scene.

«Listen to me, scumbag.» He stepped forward and planted his heel on top of my sneaker. He shoved down on it; I yelped as the pain soared up through my body. I started to cry. «Scumbag's crying now. Why're you crying?»

Where was Vince? Where was my father? My brother? My brother — ha! Even then, in the midst of that scene, I knew if Ross had been around he would've laughed himself sick.

«Hey, Bobby, Madeleine's waiting for you.»

I looked directly at him for the first time. He was much shorter than I'd thought. Who was Madeleine? Was he going to go away now?

«Look, scummy, don't you ever let me see you around here again, understand? 'Cause if I do, I'm going to cut your fuckin' eyes out with this.» He pulled a beer opener out of his pocket and pressed it hard against my nose. I remember how warm it was. I nodded as best I could, and he shoved me away. I cracked my head on a bleacher and went down like a stone in water. When I looked up again the whole gang of them was gone.

For months afterward I skulked around school like a haunted shadow. When I crept into the building in the morning, I checked every corridor, every classroom, every bathroom before I went in or out, just in case he was there. I knew the chances of his ever being in the elementary school were remote, but I wasn't about to tempt fate.

I told no one about it, especially not Ross. At night I sometimes dreamed I was running as fast as I could on a soft rubber road chased by a gigantic dancing beer opener.

Nothing ever happened, so by the time Ross and Bobby teamed up a year later, I felt only a sharp cut of fear when I saw them together for the first time.

The final indignity was that when Bobby came over to our house for the first time he didn't even recognize me. When Ross said by way of introduction, «That's my shitty little brother,» Bobby only smiled and said, «How're you doin', man?»

How was I doing? I wanted to tell him. . No, I wanted to demand that he recognize me. Me, scumbag, the one he'd scared so badly for huge months of my life.

But I didn't. Later I got up the guts to remind him of that first meeting. He snapped his fingers as if he'd forgotten to buy shoelaces. «Yeah, sure, I thought I knew your face.» And that was all.

Naturally the longer he hung around with Ross, the more I liked him. He was very funny and had a kind of sensitivity that enabled him, like my brother, to see right through to a person's strengths and weaknesses. He used this ability to his own benefit about ninety percent of the time, but once in a while he did something so extraordinarily nice you were knocked for a loop.

Just before my thirteenth birthday the three of us were in a stationery store and I wistfully mentioned how much I wanted a certain model of the aircraft carrier Forrestal they had on the shelves. When my big day arrived, Bobby came over to the house and handed me the model, gift-wrapped. «Shit, man, did you ever try to steal something that big? It's fucking hard!» I made the model more carefully than any other. I showed it to him only after I'd spent hours painting and sanding it to perfection. He nodded appreciatively and told Ross I knew what I was doing. That year Ross's present to me was a small rubber doll of a woman in a bathing suit whose breasts popped out from behind the suit whenever you squeezed her stomach.

I think Hanley originally liked my brother because Ross was very smart. School was easy for him, and he often ended up doing Bobby's homework for him, although the latter was a grade ahead.

However, I'm not trying to say that was the only reason for their friendship. When he felt like it, my brother not only could charm the birds out of the trees but could make anyone in the world laugh. He wasn't a clown, but among his many gifts was an acute sensitivity to your likes and dislikes, as well as the ability to send you howling. Since Hanley was the undisputed king of the high school, Ross cased the scene before making his move. He decided to become the older boy's court jester. He wasn't tough like the others in the gang, but he was damned shrewd! After only a short time there were a million punks in town who wanted to beat Ross to smithereens, but they left him alone because they all knew he was safely under Bobby's dangerous wing.

In a different environment who knows what might have happened to the two of them. Both Bobby and Ross had an йlan, the magician's touch; that special rare ability to turn cruelty into pink handkerchiefs and kindness into thin air.

The two of them palled around more and more, but my parents didn't mind because Bobby was quiet and courteous when he came over for dinner. Also, he appeared to be having a very good effect. At home, Ross wasn't half as nasty or selfish as he had been. He didn't go out of his way to be friendly or helpful, but there were faint glimmerings that he might have turned a corner and was heading in some kind of right direction.

The night before Ross died, Bobby slept over at our house. Ross was very excited because he had been given a twelve-gauge shotgun for his birthday a few days before. My father loved to shoot trap and skeet and had promised to teach us the sport when we reached sixteen.

Bobby had guns of his own, but this one was a beauty he could appreciate. They allowed me to stay in the room with them that evening, even when Ross pulled out the new dirty magazines he'd stolen from the candy store. They smoked almost a full pack of cigarettes and spent the hours talking about the girls at school, different kinds of cars, what Bobby would do when he graduated.

I slept on a hassock that opened out into a bed. Ross let me do that, too. Hours later, I jerked awake when I felt something thick and warm and gooey on my face. Both of them were standing by my bed, and in the dim light I saw Ross tipping a bottle of something over me. I opened my mouth to protest and tasted the heavy sweetness of maple syrup. By that time it was all over me. There was nothing I could do but get up and bump my way out of the room, followed by their pleased laughter. I washed out my pajama top in the sink as best I could, so that my mother would never know about it. Then I took a long shower in the dark.

When I awoke the next day, I felt feverish and uncomfortable. The strong morning sunlight poured through the windows and over me like an extra, unnecessary blanket.

After I brushed my teeth, I went to Ross's room and knocked on the door. When there was no answer I cautiously pushed it open. There were wooden bunk beds in both our rooms. I saw Ross hanging over the edge of the top one, busily talking to Bobby, who was lying on his back with his hands behind his head.

«What do you want, asshole? More syrup?»

Bobby fanned a fly away from his nose and yawned. Last night's joke was last night, and now it was time for something new.

«You know, Ross, if you could sneak that shotgun out of the house, we could go down to the river and pick off a few seagulls. I hate those fucking birds.»

We lived half a mile from a river. It was a place where you went in the summer when there was nothing else to do, or if you were lucky enough to have convinced a girl to go «swimming» there with you. Since the water was so brown and polluted, you never swam — as soon as you got your towels down on the beach you started necking.

To get to the water you had to cross railroad tracks. You did it carefully and stepped ridiculously high over anything that looked even vaguely suspicious: down there somewhere on the ground was the third rail and you knew that if you ever so much as touched it you would be instantly electrocuted.

Bobby and Ross had been down to the tracks before with guns. In fact, Ross was the only other member of the gang who'd had the «guts» to shoot at passing cattle cars with one of Bobby's many rifles. They were never caught.

My parents went shopping that morning, so there was no problem taking the gun out of the house. Ross slid it back into its cardboard box, and that was that for camouflage. They allowed me to tag along on the threat that if I said anything about it afterward they'd boil me in oil.

When we got down to the tracks Bobby told Ross to get the gun out — he wanted to take a couple of shots. I could see Ross wanted to shoot first; a peeved, mean look swept across his face. But it was gone in an instant. He handed the gun over, along with a bunch of red and brassy-gold shells he had stuffed in his back pocket. The only thing he had left was the empty box; he threw that at me.

The sun was hot, and I peeled off my T-shirt. When it was halfway over my head, I heard the pof of the first shot and an instantaneous crash of glass somewhere.

«Holy shit, Bobby! You think you hit the station?» Ross's voice was high and scared.

«I'll be fucked if I know, man.» He reloaded and shot off in another direction. I put my hands over my ears and looked at the ground. I was already petrified, and things had just begun.

«Ross, baby, this is one honey of a gun. I can tell already. Let's go, man.»

We walked twelve or fifteen feet apart. Bobby, Ross, then me. That's very important, as you'll see in a moment. Bobby held the shotgun down at his side, barrel toward the ground. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It was dull blue and the railroad tracks under our feet were hot silver as we stepped gingerly over them. The light everywhere burned my eyes and made me squint. I wished to God I was home. What were they going to do now? What would happen if they were in the mood for something unnecessary and vicious, like shooting at cattle as they moved slowly by in those slatted red and brown freight cars, already on their way to the slaughterhouse? I hated the gun, I hated my great fear, I hated my brother and his friend. But they would never, ever know that.

We were moving at the same pace, our legs lifting and falling at the same time. Then Ross stumbled on something and fell straight forward. I heard an angry buzz like an outboard motor, the gravel skittering away from under my brother's sneaker. His shoulder touched the third rail, and his head twisted around on his neck. There was a loud hum, a sharp hiss and snap. His face twisted up and up and up into an impossible, irretrievable smile.

3

Why am I lying? Why am I already leaving out a part of this story that is so necessary? What difference does it make now? All right. Before I go on, here's a piece of the puzzle I've been hiding behind my back.

Bobby had an older sister named Lee. At eighteen she was the most stunning girl you'd ever want to see. By the time Ross and Bobby became close friends, she had been out of school for a few years, but people still talked about her because she was really incredible.

She'd been captain of the cheerleaders, a member of the Pep Club and the Gourmet Club. I knew all of this by heart because Ross had a high school yearbook from when she graduated, and as is so often the case with the prettiest girl in school, it seemed as if her face was on every other page: cartwheeling, being crowned Prom Queen, smiling magnificently at us from behind an armload of books. How many times had I devoured those pictures? Hundreds? A thousand? A lot.

What I didn't understand until later was that part of her special aura came from pure sensuality. I didn't know if she was «fast,» because my only authority on her was my brother, who contended he'd had her a million times, but even the most innocent of those pictures gave off an aroma of sexiness as strong as the smell of fresh baked bread.

Ross's birthday present when I turned twelve was to teach me how to masturbate. Part of the gift was a three-month-old copy of Gent magazine, but from the first I could only climax if I thought of real women. The zeppelin breasts and sex-crazed expressions of those pinup girls scared me more than turned me on. No, my idea of sexual frenzy was the photograph of Lee Hanley doing a jump cheer at a football game that had somehow caught a delicious smidgen of her underpants while she was in mid-flight.

Let me say, though, that I'd fallen in love with her long before I learned to play with myself, so the first time I used her as my fantasy woman I felt rotten, because I knew I'd somehow let her down, regardless of the fact I'd never said two words to her. But that guilt was short-lived, because my twelve-year-old penis was anxious to get on with business, so I continued to ravish her picture with my hungry eyes and myself with a jumpy hand.

Sometimes I'd get completely carried away, and looking at the ceiling as I felt my body blast off into the stratosphere, I'd start to call her name again and again. Lee Hanley! Oh! Leeee! Although I tried to waltz myself around only when I was sure no one else was home, I made the mistake of not checking one afternoon, and that oversight was disastrous.

Bermuda shorts down at my knees, the school yearbook Propped comfortably on my chest, I had started singing my Lee song when the door suddenly flew open and Ross appeared.

«I caught you! Lee Hanley, huh? You're jerking off to Lee Hanley? Boy, wait'll Bobby hears this! He's going to chop you into hamburger. Hey, what've you got there? That's my yearbook! Gimme that!» He snatched it out of my hand and looked at the picture. «Jeez, wait'll I tell Bobby, man. Shit, I'd hate to be you.» His face was pure triumph.

From that moment on, the taunts and torture began and didn't end for more than a year. That night I pulled down the bedspread and found a photograph taped to my pillow: a mutilated body on a battlefield with a soldier looking at it indifferently. In blood-red ink the soldier was labeled Bobby, and I was the corpse.

A lot of that sort of thing went on, but the most frightening moments were when Ross would casually say to Bobby, «Want to know what my brother does, Bobby? Wait'll you hear this one, the little pig!» Looking straight at me, a gleam smeared across his face, he'd pause for millenniums, making me wish I was either in Sumatra or dead, or both. Inevitably he'd finish by saying, «He picks his nose,» or something equally mean and true, but nothing compared to «it,» and I could breathe easily again.

It ran in cycles; at times I was hopeful he'd forgotten. But like a bat flying through the window, it would suddenly be there again, right on you, days or weeks later, and he'd have me squirming and twisting at the drop of his hat. When we were alone he would tell me what a sludge I was to jerk off to a friend's sister. He was as convincing as any angry, unforgiving priest.

Probably because the torment increased, the image of Lee Hanley's underpants became the sexiest thing in the world, and they became my one and only fantasy. I masturbated at all times of the day; my high point was probably the time I came while sitting perfectly still at a junior high school assembly where a Cherokee Indian demonstrated tribal war dances.

I was a fool. I gave Ross my allowance, did his chores for him, brought him snacks at the snap of his fingers. Once, I even realized that what I'd been doing was a kind of compliment to Lee, but when I tried explaining that to Ross, he closed his eyes and flicked his wrist at me as if I were a fly on his hand.

What really happened the day he died was this: as we were crossing the railroad tracks together, Ross's anger flared at Bobby for having taken his shotgun away. Halfway to the other platform, he casually asked his friend how many times a week he beat off.

«I don't know. Every day, I guess. That is, if I'm not gettin' any from some chick. Why? How 'bout you?»

My brother's voice went up a notch. «About the same. Do you ever think of anyone when you do it?»

My face tightened, and I almost stopped moving.

«Sure, what do you think I do, count to a hundred? What's with you, Ross? You gone pervert or something?»

«Naah, I was just thinking. Do you know who Joe thinks about when he does it?»

«Joey? You beating your meat already, boy? Shame! You know how old I was when I first started doing it? About three!» He laughed.

I could only look at my feet. I knew it was coming; Ross was about to open the door on my blackest secret and there was nothing I could do about it.

«Okay, so spill it. Who do you think about, Joe? Suzanne Pleshette?»

Before Ross could answer, a high train whistle hooted frighteningly down the track. At that moment I did something I'd never done before. Shouting «No!» I shoved Ross as hard as I could. So help me God, I was so afraid of what he was going to say I'd totally forgotten where we were.

«Holy shit, Ross, a train's coming!» Without looking our way, Bobby charged ahead toward the other side of the tracks. My brother fell. I stood still and watched. Yes.

4

I was so shocked by what had happened I couldn't say anything. A few days later I was too afraid to speak.

Conveniently, as far as people were concerned (including Bobby, who testified that the sound of the train whistle must have scared Ross into stumbling), it was simply a tragic accident.

My mother went mad. A week after the funeral she stood at the bottom of the staircase and started screaming incoherently to my dead brother to get up and go to school. She had to be institutionalized. I began shaking and was put on heavy doses of tranquilizer, which made me feel as if I were floating in blue space.

When they decided to keep my mother in the hospital, my father took me to dinner. Neither of us ate anything. Halfway through the meal he pushed the plates aside and took hold of both my hands.

«Joe, son, it's going to be just you and me for a while now, and we've got some tough times ahead of us.»

I nodded and was for the first time on the brink of telling him everything, every bit of it. Then he looked at me, and I saw big clear tears on his face.

«I'm crying, Joe, because of your brother, and because I already miss your mama very much. It makes me feel as if parts of my body had been ripped off. I'm telling you that because I think you can understand and because I'm going to need you to help me be strong. I'll help you and you'll help me, okay? You're the best boy a man could have, and we're not going to let anything get us or pull us down from now on. Not anything! Right?»

I saw Bobby only two or three times after Ross died. When the school year ended he enlisted in the Marines. He left town at the end of June, but stories trickled back about him. Apparently he turned out to be a very good soldier. He stayed in the service for four years. By the time he returned I was a freshman in college.

In my sophomore year I came home for a long weekend. On Saturday night I had a dreary argument with my father about what I was going to do with «my future.» I left the house in a huff and went to a bar in town to drown my angst in beer.

Along about the third one, someone sat down next to me at the bar and touched my elbow. I was watching television and ignored it. Whoever it was touched me again, and annoyed, I looked over. It was Bobby. His hair was very long, and he had a Fu Manchu mustache that grew down and off his square chin. He smiled and patted my arm.

«My God, Bobby!»

«How are you doin' there, Joe College?»

He kept smiling, and I realized, with some relief, he was very stoned.

«How's college, Joe?»

«Great, Bobby. But how are you?»

«Good, man. Everything is very cool.»

«Yeah? Well, what are you doing? I mean, uh, what kind of work are you into?»

«Listen, Joe, I've been wanting to rap with you for like a long time, you know? There's a lot to talk about between us, you know?»

His face was thin and tired, and there was an uncertainty that said he'd banged around through the years without having found much of anything. I felt very sorry for him, but knew there was little I could do. His hand was on my shoulder, so I reached over and took it, wanting him to know that in a strange way he was still an important part of me.

I've mentioned before how he had always been very sensitive. Touching his hand like that set something off. He snatched it away, and his look changed abruptly. The snaky, malicious Bobby Hanley who'd held a beer opener to my face rushed back. Rage flew up into his eyes like a small bird hitting a window. I winced and tried to smile us back to a moment ago.

«Hey, man, I got a question for you. You ever go out to your brother's grave? Huh? You ever go there and give Ross flowers or anything?»

«I —»

"You bullshit! You don't, man, and I know it! I'm out there all the fucking time, do you know that? The guy was the greatest friend I ever had in the world! You're his own little brother and you don't do squat for him. No wonder he thought you were a little pussy. You shithead!" He wrenched himself off the stool and dug into his pocket for money. Coming up with a dollar bill that had been crumpled into a small green ball, he threw it on the counter. It rolled until it fell over the other edge. "You think I don't know about you, Joe? You think I don't know how you feel about Ross? Well, let me tell you something, man. He was a king, and don't ever forget that. He was a fucking king. You — Christ, all you are is a scumbag!"

He walked out of the bar without looking back. I wanted to go after him and tell him he was wrong. I waited, pretending I was trying to think of what I'd say when I caught up with him. Say? I didn't have anything to tell him; there was nothing more to say.

A month later I wrote a short story entitled «Wooden Pajamas» for a creative-writing class I was taking. The teacher had encouraged us umpteen times to write from our own experience. Because I was still shaken by the meeting with Bobby, I decided to follow the advice and try driving some of the guilt monsters away by writing a story about Bobby, Ross, and their gang.

The problem was what to write. In my first attempt, I tried describing the time they planned to rob the American Legion post of all its guns, only to be cheated out of the chance when the building burned down the night before the caper was to be pulled off. I say I tried writing about it, but all I came up with was a bunch of crap. I realized I didn't know how to approach my brother and his world. He and all he'd been had flowed through my veins for so long that when I stopped to think about who and what he was, I drew a blank. I knew what colors he was, but since I couldn't separate them, they all merged into a big white blank. Just try to describe the color white to someone beyond saying it's all colors in one.

I tried a first-person narrator — a girl who'd been jilted by one of the guys. That didn't work, so I tried being one of their parents. Absolutely nothing. Next I filled three sheets of paper with Ross and Bobby stories. Some of them made me laugh; others made me guilty or sad. Remembering everything made me obsessed with the idea of getting a bit of their world down on paper. Nothing was going to stop me.

It's funny, but in the beginning I never once thought of making something up and using my brother and his gang as characters in my story. Ross had been such a strong presence in my life and had done so many wild things that I'd never considered upstaging him with an action or thought that came strictly from my own head. Yet that's what happened. While driving across campus one Saturday night, I saw a bunch of tough guys strutting down Main Street, all duded up for a big night on the town.

How many times had I watched my brother brush his long hair into a perfect shining swirl, slap on a gallon of English Leather cologne, and wink at himself in the bathroom mirror when he was done? «Looking good, Joe. Your brother is look-ing good!»

I thought about it for a while and, sitting down at the typewriter one afternoon, opened the story with those same words addressed to an adoring little brother who sat on the edge of the bathtub watching him prepare for. . I had no idea of where to go from there.

It took me two weeks to write. It was about a bunch of toughs in a small town who are getting ready to go to a big party at a girl's house. Each boy has a little section of the story, and in turn tells you about their lives and what he thinks will happen tonight when the party gets going up at Brenda's.

I never worked on anything so hard in my life. I loved it. I laid each story on top of the previous one as gently as if I were building a house of cards. I shifted them around and around incessantly for best effect and made my teacher mad because I turned the assignment in a week after it was due. When I was done, however, I knew I'd written something good, maybe even special. I was really proud of it.

My teacher liked it, too, and suggested I submit it to a magazine. I did; over the months it made the rounds of all the major and minor places. Finally Timepiece — circulation 700 — took it. Payment was only two contributor's copies, but I was overjoyed. I had the cover of that issue framed and put it up on the wall in front of my desk.

Three months later a theatrical producer in New York called and asked if I'd be willing to sell him the world rights to the story for two thousand dollars. Amazed, I was on the verge of saying yes when I remembered stories of writers being gypped out of carloads of money by conniving producers; so I told him to call me back in a few days. I found a copy of Writer's Market in the college library and got the names and telephone numbers of four or five literary agents. I explained the situation to the first one I called and asked her what I should do. By the end of the conversation she'd agreed to represent me, and when the man called back from New York, I told him to arrange everything through her.

You know what happens when you sell a story to someone: they push it and pull it and turn it inside out. When they're done eviscerating it («shaping it up,» they like to call it), they put it in front of the public with a line in the program that reads something like «Based on an original short story by Joseph Lennox.»

The producer of the play, a tall man with bright-red hair named Phil Westberg, called me just after he'd bought the story and politely asked how I would approach it as a play. I didn't know anything, so I said something dumb and forgettable, but he didn't want to hear what I had to say anyway, because he had it all planned out. He began to tell me his plan, and at one point I took the telephone receiver away from my ear and looked at it as if it were an eggplant. He was talking about «Wooden Pajamas,» but they weren't my pajamas. The short story began in a bathroom, the play at the big party, which instantly cut out about four thousand words of my work. The protagonist in the play was thrown in as an afterthought in the story. But Westberg knew what he wanted, and he sure didn't want much of what I'd written. When I finally got that through my thick skull, I skulked away into the night, never to hear from «Phil» again — until he sent me one free ticket for opening night a year and a half later.

Phil and his gang went on to use my story as the basis for the wildly successful (and depressing) play, The Voice of Our Shadow. Among other things, it is about sadness and the small dreams of the young, and besides running for two years on Broadway, where it won the Pulitzer Prize, it was made into a halfway-decent film. I retained a small but lucrative percentage of those subsidiary and world rights, thank God.

The hoopla over the play began in my senior year in college. I thought it was great at the beginning and horrible from then on. People were convinced I had written the whole thing, and I spent most of the time explaining that my contribution had been little more than, well, microscopic. On opening night, I sat in the audience and stared at the young actors playing Ross and Bobby and those other guys and girls I had known so well a hundred years ago in my life. I watched them being changed and distorted, and when I walked out of the theater I ached with guilt at the death of my brother. But did I ache to tell anyone what had actually happened that day? No. Guilt can be molded. It is a funny kind of clay; if you know how to handle it right, you can twist and knead and form or place it anyway you want. I know that is a generalization, but it is what I did; and as I got older, I had less and less trouble rationalizing the fact that I had murdered my brother. It was an accident. I had never meant for it to happen. He was a monster and had deserved it. If he hadn't brought up the subject of masturbation that day. . It all helped me to punch the bare, ghastly fact that I had done it into the shape I wanted.

Within a few months I had more money than King Tut. I was also exhausted and embittered by the same well-meant questions and the same disappointed looks on faces when I told them no, no, I didn't write the play, you see. .

When I discovered that my university offered a six-week course in modern German literature in Vienna, I jumped at the chance. I had majored in German because it was hard and challenging and something I wanted to become very good at in my life. I was convinced I would be able to surface again all clean and absolved after a few months of sacher torte, outings on the Blue Danube, and Robert Musil. I arranged it so my six weeks there would come at the end of the school year, which would allow me to stay through the summer if I liked the town.

I loved Vienna from the beginning. The Viennese are well fed, obedient, and a little behind the times in almost everything they do. Because of this, or because the city is exotic in that it is far to the East — the last free, decadent stronghold before you roll over the flat gray plains into Hungary or Czechoslovakia — all my memories of it are washed in a slow, end-of-the-afternoon light. Sometimes even now, even after everything that has happened, I wish very much that I was back there.

There are cafйs where you can sit all morning over one cup of wonderful coffee and read a book without anyone ever disturbing you. Small, smelly movie theaters with wooden seats, where a couple of sad-looking models put on a «live» fashion show for you before the feature goes on. I had a favorite gasthaus where the waiter brought dogs water in a white porcelain bowl with the name of the restaurant on the side.

It is also the only city I know that gives up its best parts grudgingly, unhappily. Paris slaps you in the face with oceanic boulevards, golden croissants, and charm on every square inch of its surface. New York sneers — completely assured and indifferent. It knows that no matter how much dirt or crime or fear there is, it is still the center of everything. It can do what it wants because it knows you will always need it.

Most visitors like Vienna at first sight (including myself!) because of the Opera or the Ringstrasse or the Brueghels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but these things are only grand camouflage. The first summer I was there, I discovered that beneath the lovely gloss is a sad, suspicious city that reached its peak a hundred, two hundred years ago. It is now regarded by the world as a delightful oddity — a Miss Havisham in her wedding dress — and the Viennese know it.

Everything went right for me. I met a nice girl from the Tirol, and we had a fling that left us tired but unscarred. She was a tour guide for one of the companies in town and consequently knew every nook and cranny in the place: the Jugendstil swimming pool at the top of the Wienerwald, a cozy restaurant where they served the original Czech Budweiser beer, a walk through the First District that made you feel as if you were back in the fifteenth century. We had a rainy weekend in Venice and a sunny one in Salzburg. She took me to the airport at the end of August, and we promised to write. A few months later she did, telling me she was marrying a nice computer salesman from Charlottesville, Virginia, and if I was ever down their way. .

My father picked me up at the airport and, as soon as we were in the car, told me Mother had leukemia. What came to mind was a picture of the last time I had seen her: a white hospital room — white curtains, bedspread, chairs. In the middle of the bed hovering over that eternity of white was her small red head. Her hair had been chopped short, and she no longer made the quick, sharp movements of a hummingbird. Because they kept her sedated most of the time, it often took minutes before she fully recognized anyone.

«Mama? It's Joe. I'm here, Mama. Joe.»

«Joe? Joe. Joe! Joe and Ross! Where are my two boys?» She wasn't disappointed when we told her Ross wasn't there. She accepted it as she accepted each spoonful of colorless soup or creamed spinach from her plate.

I went directly to the hospital. The only obvious change was a pronounced thinness about her face. Taken together, her features and the wrong color of her skin reminded me of a very thin, very old letter written on gray paper in violet ink. She asked me where I had been; when I said Europe, she gazed for a time at the wall as if she was trying to figure out what Europe was. She was dead by Christmas.

After her funeral my father and I took a week off and flew down to the heat, colors, and freshness of the Virgin Islands. We sat on the beach, swam, and took long, panting walks up into the hills. Each night the beauty of the sunset made us feel sad, empty, and heroic. We agreed on that. We drank dark rum and talked until two or three in the morning. I told him I wanted to go back and live in Europe after I had graduated. Two more of my short stories had been published, and I wondered excitedly if I might have the makings of a real writer. I realize now he would have liked me to stay with him for a while, but he said he thought Europe was a good idea.

My last semester in college was full of a girl named Olivia Lofting. It was the first time I'd ever really fallen hard for someone, and there was a period when I needed Olivia as I needed air. She liked me because I had money and a certain prestige on campus, but she kept reminding me her heart belonged to a guy who had graduated the year before and was serving a hitch in the Army. I did what I could to lure her away, but she remained true to him despite the fact we'd been sleeping together since our third date.

May came, and so did Olivia's boyfriend, home on leave. I saw the two of them one afternoon at the Student Center. They were so obviously mad for each other and so obviously tired from making love that I went right to the bathroom and sat on a toilet for an hour with my face in my hands.

She called after he left, but I didn't have the strength to see her again. Oddly enough, my refusal sparked her interest, and for the few weeks left of the year, we had one endless conversation after another over the phone. The last time we talked she demanded we get together. I asked if she was a sadist, and with a delighted laugh she said she probably was. I had barely enough willpower to say no, but did I ever hate myself after I hung up and realized how unnecessarily empty my bed would be that night.

Although Vienna was always in the back of my mind, I flew to London and spent the summer trying on different cities — Munich, Copenhagen, Milan — before I realized there really was only one place for me.

Ironically, I arrived just as the German version of The Voice of Our Shadow was premiering at the Theatre an der Josefstдdt. Out of what I'm sure he thought was kindness, Phil Westberg told the Austrians I was there, and for a month or two I was the belle of the ball. Again, all I did was backpedal about my involvement in the original production, only this time auf deutsch.

Luckily the Viennese critics didn't like the play; after a month's run it packed its bag and went back to America. That ended my notoriety as well, and from then on I was blissfully anonymous. The one good thing that came from Shadow rearing its confusing head in Wien was that I met a lot of important people who, again assuming I'd been the moving force behind the play, began to give me writing assignments as soon as they heard I wanted to settle down there. The pay for these assignments was usually terrible, but I was making new contacts all the time. When the International Herald Tribune did a supplement on Austria, a friend snuck me in the back door, and they published a little article I'd done on the Bregenz Summer Festival.

About the time I started making money from my articles, my father remarried and I returned to America for the wedding. It was my first time back in two years, and I was bowled over by the speed and intensity of the States. So much stimulus! So many things to see and buy and do! I loved it for two weeks, but then hurried back to my Vienna, where things were just the way I liked them — quiet and settled and cozily dull.

I was twenty-four, and in some distant, mute part of my brain I had the notion it was time to try writing my world-beater, gargantuan novel. When I returned from America I started. . and started again and started again. . until I had worn out all my thin beginnings. That was all right, but too quickly I realized I had no middles or ends to work on instead. At that point I bowed out of the race for the Great American Novel.

I am convinced every writer would like to be either a poet or a novelist, but in my case the realization that I would never be another Hart Crane or Tolstoy wasn't too painful. It might have been a couple of years earlier, but I was being regularly published now, and there were even a few people around who knew who I was. Not many, but some.

After living a couple of years in Vienna, what I missed most was having a good close friend. For a while I thought I'd found one in a sleek, classy French woman who worked as a translator for the United Nations. We hit it off from the first and for a few weeks were inseparable. Then we went to bed, and the familiarity that had come so easily was pushed aside by the purple mysteries of sex. We were lovers for a time, but it was easy to see we were better as friends than as lovers. Unfortunately too, because there was no way back once we had turned the lights down low. She transferred to Geneva, and I went back to being prolific. . and lonely.