My best friend was Nick Hauser. If it was a time of privation, we did not think of it as such, primarily because no one in our neighborhood had money and most considered themselves fortunate to have survived the Depression years with their families intact. Wake Island and Corregidor fell and we heard terrible stories about the decapitation of American prisoners. But on our block—and that is all we ever called the place we lived, “our block”—the era was marked not so much by a distant war as it was by the presence of radios in people’s windows and on their front porches, the visits to the block of the bookmobile and the Popsicle man, and games of street ball and hide-and-seek on summer evenings that smelled of flowers and water sprayed from garden hoses.
One night a week during the summer of 1942 the entire city was blacked out for an air-raid drill. My father sat on the front porch, smoking a cigarette, a white volunteer Civil Defense helmet cocked on his head, sometimes reading the newspaper with a flashlight. Once the drill was over, the theater tower in the distance rippled with neon, and the voices of Fred Allen and Senator Claghorn or Fibber McGee and Molly could be heard all over the neighborhood. I believed no evil would ever enter the quiet world in which we lived.
But if you crossed Westheimer Street, the soft aesthetic blend of the rural South and prewar urban America ended dramatically. On our side of Westheimer was a watermelon stand among giant live oaks, and on the other side of the street a neighborhood of boxlike, utilitarian houses and unkept yards where bitterness and penury were a way of life, and personal failure the fault of black people, Yankees, and foreigners.
The kids on the opposite side of Westheimer gave no quarter in a fight and asked for none in return. Some of them carried switchblades and went nigger-knocking with BB guns and firecrackers. Their cruelty was seldom done in heat but instead visited upon the victim dispassionately, as though the perpetrator were simply passing on an instruction about the way the world worked.
The five Dunlop brothers were legendary in the city’s school system. Each of them was a living testimony to the power of the fist or the hobnailed boot over the written word. The youngest and meanest of them was Vernon—two years older than Nick Hauser and me, bullnecked, his lime-green eyes wide-set, his arms always pumped, his body as hard as a man’s at age fourteen. He threw an afternoon paper route and set pins side by side with blacks at the bowling alley and as a consequence had more money to spend than we did. But that fact did not make us safe from Vernon Dunlop.
In July and August, Nick Hauser and I picked blackberries and sold them in fat quart jars door-to-door for two bits apiece. Vernon would wait for us on his bicycle behind the watermelon stand, where he knew we would come in the evening, then pelt us with clods of dried clay, never saying a word, sometimes slapping us to the ground, kneeling on one of our chests, frogging our arms and shoulders black and blue. There was neither apparent purpose nor motivation in his attacks. It was just Vernon doing what he did best—making people miserable.
Then one evening he got serious. His lip was puffed and one eye swollen, his forearms streaked with red welts, his T-shirt pulled out of shape at the neck. Obviously, Vernon had just taken a licking from his father or his brothers. While Nick stood by helplessly, Vernon hit me until I cried, twisting his knuckles with each blow, driving the pain deep into the bone. Then I committed one of those cowardly acts that seems to remain inside you forever, like you give up on being you and admit your worthlessness before the world. “I’ll give you half my money. The blackberries are for everybody anyway. We should have included you in, Vernon,” I said.
“Yeah? That’s good of you. Let’s see it,” he said.
He was still straddled on my chest, but he lifted one knee so I could reach into my trouser pocket. I pressed three quarters into his palm, my eyes locked on his. I felt his weight shift on me, his buttocks and thighs clench me tighter.
He cupped his palm to his mouth, spit a long string of saliva on the coins, and stuffed them inside my shirt, pressing the cloth down on them so they stuck to my skin.
“I just thought of names for you guys,” he said. “Nick, you’re Snarf. That’s a guy who gets his rocks sniffing girls’ bicycle seats. Charlie, you’re Frump. Don’t know what a frump is? A guy who farts in the bathtub and bites the bubbles. Snarf and Frump. Perfect.”
He wiped his hand on my shirt as he got off my chest. I wanted to kill Vernon Dunlop. Instead, I ran home crying, the wet coins still inside my clothes, sure in some perverse fashion that Nick had betrayed me because he had not been Vernon’s victim, too.
That evening I sat by myself at the picnic table in the backyard, throwing a screwdriver end over end into the St. Augustine grass. Our lawn was uncut, the mower propped at an odd angle in the dirt alleyway. I threw the screwdriver hard into the grass, so it embedded almost to the handle in the sod. The kitchen light was on, the window open, and I could hear my parents arguing. The argument was about money or the amount of time my father spent with his friends at the icehouse and beer garden on Alabama Boulevard. I went through the side door into my bedroom, and stuffed my soiled shirt and trousers into the clothes hamper. I bathed and put on my pajamas, and did not tell my parents of what Vernon had done to me. I told my mother I was sick and couldn’t eat. Through my screen window I could hear the other kids playing ball in the twilight.
When I woke the next morning, I felt dirty all over, my skin scalded in the places Vernon’s saliva had touched it. I was convinced I was a weakling and a moral failure. The song of mockingbirds and the sunlight filtering through the mulberr
y tree that shaded our driveway seemed created for someone else.
Nick did not come over to play, nor did he come out of his house when the Popsicle man pedaled his cart down the block that afternoon. At 5:00 p.m. my mother sent me to the icehouse to tell my father it was time for supper. He was talking with three other men about baseball, at a plank table under a striped canopy that flapped in the wind, a bottle of Jax and a small glass and salt shaker in front of him.
He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it. He had started his vacation that day and had been at the icehouse since noon. “Is it that time already? Well, I bet we still have time for a root beer, don’t we?” he said, and told the waiter to bring me a Hires and my father another Jax.
My father was an antithetically mixed, eccentric man who lost his best friend in the trenches on the last day of World War I. He detested war and particularly the demagogues who championed it but had never participated in one themselves. He flew the flag on our front porch, unfurling it from its staff each morning, putting it away in the hall closet at sunset. He taught me how to fold the flag in a tucked square and told me it should never touch the ground or be left in the rain or flown after it had become sun-faded or frayed by the wind. But he attended no veterans’ functions, nor would he discuss the current war in front of me or let me look at the photographs of enemy dead that sometimes appeared in Life magazine.
My father had wanted to be a journalist, but he had left college without completing his degree and had gone to work for a natural gas pipeline company. After the Crash of ’29, any hope of his changing careers was over. He never complained about the work he did, but each day he came home from the job and repeatedly washed his hands, as though he were scrubbing an irremovable stain from fabric.
As we walked home from the icehouse, I asked him if we could go fishing down at Galveston.
“Sure. You want to ask Nick?” he said.
“I don’t hang around with Nick anymore,” I replied.
“You boys have a fight?”
“No,” I replied. Then I felt my mouth flex, waiting for the words to come out that would explain how I let Vernon rub his spit on me and call me Frump, how I gave him half my money just so he would climb off my chest, how I could still feel his scrotum and buttocks pressing against my body.
But I crimped my lips and looked at the cars passing on the street, gas ration stickers glued to their front windows. The light on the trees and lawns and cars seemed to shimmer and break apart.
“You all right, son? You having trouble with the other kids on the block or something?” my father said.
“There’s a new kid on the next street from Chicago. He thinks he’s better than everybody else. Why doesn’t he go back where he came from?” I said.
“Hey, hey,” my father said, patting me on the back. “Don’t talk about a chum like that. He can’t help where he’s from. No more of that now, okay?”
“Are we going fishing?”
“We’ll see. Your mother has a bunch of things for me to do. Let’s take one thing at a time here,” my father said.