Thumbsucker (3 page)

I did it in my mind.

When I got up from the chair, I was surprised at how limp and warm my legs felt. I remembered reading an article about a professional hockey team that had been hypnotized before a play-off game. I asked Perry Lyman if he used self-hypnosis to help himself win races.

“In fact, I do. I find it sharpens me.”

“What’s your power animal?” I said.

Perry Lyman glanced at the poster above his desk, a poster from the Sierra Club.

“That’s personal.”

“Come on.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just not the same, I’m afraid, if other people know.”

The poster showed a pack of running wolves.

When people try to quit things, other things take their places. A woman stops smoking and starts inhaling pizza. A man cuts out doughnuts and heads off to Las Vegas. After Perry Lyman hypnotized me, my desire to suck just
drained away, and so did all the pleasure. My thumb became a neutral object, like the end of a broomstick in my mouth.

“What’s the despairing look?” Mike asked me one morning, sitting down to bran flakes after his bike ride. His face was red and sweaty and invigorated. “You wear a long face, it’ll end up wearing you.”

“Stop quoting Woody Wolff.”

“That one was mine.”

All I could think about was Rebecca. Suddenly, with leechlike intensity, I had to be around her all the time. As soon as her father’s car drove off each morning, I hurried to her porch and rang the doorbell, loaded down with field guides and binoculars. When I sensed her interest in bird-watching decreasing, I started buying the movie magazines I’d seen her reading with her older sister. Day after day, I barraged Rebecca with Hollywood trivia questions and fun facts.

“What’s Farrah Fawcett’s beauty secret?”

“Do we?”

“She conditions her hair with egg whites.”

“I said ‘Do we?’ ”

“Do we what, Rebecca?”

“Do we
care
?”

I watched Rebecca grow to despise me. My shining moment with her—ordering her to remove her shirt and facing her down, bare-chested, until she did—seemed impossible to duplicate now that I cared so deeply about her opinion of me. My attentions took on a doomed and
ingrown quality. I would insult myself in front of her, saying I was stupid, short, deformed, and then resent her for not defending me. When I saw how much she pitied wayward movie stars—drug addicts, wife beaters, hotel room wreckers—I began to regret not having confessed my weakness. That would have won her over, I felt sure, but now it was too late.

One day on her porch, with her father standing behind her, his broad, callused hands on her shoulders, Rebecca said, “Justin, we think you’re bothering me. We think this isn’t a healthy teenage friendship. We want you to stop coming over.”

“Move it, son.”

For the last time, I sought solace in my thumb. The deer with the face of the diaper boy appeared, but even after I chased the creature off, I felt nothing—no comfort, no relief. My thumb felt dead and so did my whole body.

I blamed them all, but especially Perry Lyman. He’d pretended to be my friend but had snatched my soul.

The course of the Labor Day bike race ran, for part of its last and twenty-fifth mile, through a highway tunnel. The cyclists emerging from darkness made for dramatic snapshots, so spectators liked to gather at one end. I stood with Joel in the barrow ditch on the other side, where no one could see what we were going to do.

Perry Lyman approached, head down, pedaling with
the steady, flowing strokes that usually guaranteed him victory. The hazy dot behind him was Mike. I signaled Joel to raise the poster I’d stapled to a stick, then broke into a trot along the road. I saw Perry Lyman glance over at Joel’s sign and I noticed his front tire start to wobble. That’s when I started howling. Joel howled, too. The howls came out of me like weird black scarves. They scared me. And they rattled Perry Lyman. He turned and flipped me the bird as he passed, a look of disintegration on his face. He couldn’t have guessed what he’d done to deserve this—the Sierra Club wolf pack splattered with bloodred paint and my demented yapping. I knew at that moment that I’d broken his power, just as he had mine. In a photo Audrey took of him emerging from the tunnel, he had the face of a man who knew he’d lose.

He came in seventh. Mike was first.

That night at our backyard picnic table, when Joel and Audrey went in to get some knives, I said to Mike, “You owe me a TV set.”

His hand grazed around in a bowl of salted nuts, pausing for the almonds. He was still lost in the haze of victory, and I knew I could get away with more than usual. In front of him was a foaming-over beer can and a can he hadn’t opened yet. Mike had been having an extra drink with dinner ever since Reagan had been shot that spring.

“I knew you’d forget,” I said, reaching for a beer. “I knew you wouldn’t pay up.”

“Pay up for what?”

Mike watched me open the beer and start to gulp it. I opened my throat and let the cold pour into me.

“Easy,” he said. “Slow down. A sip or two.”

I think we both knew that would be impossible.

Next I lost my desire for food, my appetite. It happened in late October and took four days. It was as though my mouth were turning against me, my one source of pleasure becoming a dry hole.

We’d been eating venison all month, trying to empty the chest freezer of game before Mike started filling it back up. We started with the chops, a cut I liked, and worked our way down to the sausages and roasts, which coated my mouth with waxy, rancid fat. I said I thought we should throw the meat away, the first time I’d ever
spoken out like this, but Mike said a moral issue was at stake. With another bow-hunting season coming up, he just wouldn’t feel right, he told the family, if last year’s kill and this year’s overlapped.

“Ah, the ethics of savagery,” said Audrey. Smoke from the roast she’d been cooking all afternoon hung in thin gray layers above her head.

“Hunting’s the basis of civilization,” Mike said. “Read your anthropology.”

“I have. While you were out vanquishing Ohio State, your sweetheart was actually attending classes. And the basis of civilization, my dear, is agriculture.”

Mike bore down hard as he carved the roast and it slid around on its bed of wrinkled carrots. He’d managed to convince me over the years that venison tasted better than beef or pork, even though my own senses told me other wise. This year, however, I wasn’t buying it. I tasted what I tasted, and it disgusted me. I remembered reading an article once that said the muscles of hunted animals produce a fear hormone that cooking doesn’t break down. I wondered how much of this substance was in me now.

Half the roast remained when we finished dinner. Audrey wrapped it in cling film and in foil and stashed it in the back of the refrigerator next to an open box of baking soda, which meant she didn’t intend to touch it again. “Maybe your folks will take some venison home with them.”

Mike’s parents were set to arrive the following morning
on one of their rare trips west to Minnesota, a state which they considered the frontier. Everybody was on edge about it.

“My mother thinks deer are precious creatures,” Mike said. “She thinks they have feelings.”

“So do I,” said Audrey.

“Human feelings. Not just the primal drives.”

“And what would those be?”

“Hunger. Thirst. Lust. Pain.”

Audrey closed the refrigerator door. “It bothers me that you can tick them off like that.”

Mike went into the yard after dinner to practice his archery in the fading daylight. His target was a paper bull’s-eye pinned to a stack of straw bales. Joel, who’d never shown interest in the outdoors—unlike me, who’d faked it out of guilt—was allowed to go to a neighbor’s house to play, but Mike demanded that I stay near and watch him. He notched an arrow, drew the string, let fly.

“I used to have to sneak out to hunt,” he said. “My mother had some idea that it was cruel. What’s cruel is not letting a boy grow into a man because you’ve had a bad experience.”

“What happened?”

“Someone hit her once. A boyfriend. A smack me and Dad have been paying for all our lives. We snuck out to see a boxing match downtown once and when we got home she’d changed the locks on us.”

“I’m surprised she let you play football.”

“Dad drew the line.”

Mike made a bull’s-eye. Another. I pulled the arrows out.

“Your mother was wrong about civilization,” he said. “Civilization is a perfect lung shot.”

Mike’s parents pulled in around lunchtime the next day in their new Winnebago motor home, the Horizoneer. Mike had asked them to visit at Thanksgiving, when it wouldn’t interrupt his hunting, but Grandma had insisted on seeing Joel and me before the cold weather set in. She got her way. From what I’d witnessed of Mike’s dealings with her, he’d never really been a match for her. At Christmas he sent her the presents that she asked for, luxury items like jewelry and crystal, then settled for souvenir coffee mugs in return. And though she called him home to Buffalo whenever she caught the flu or had a mole removed, she only came here when she was passing through anyway.

I felt anxious as my grandparents parked the camper. The last time I’d seen them was a couple of years ago at a family reunion out east, but all I could remember of the event was a sack race through a muddy field. Still, I told them I missed them when I hugged them. Grandma Cobb’s body felt hard and armored, as if her underwear were lined with metal, while Grandpa’s felt pulpy, like a bruised banana. Behind a pair of dandruff-speckled bifocals his hazel eyes were mild and remote and I immediately liked him more than her.

“Let me get your bags,” Mike said. Already he sounded exhausted by the visit.

“We’re staying in the Horizoneer,” said Grandma. “All we need is a long extension cord.”

“We made up the guest room,” Mike said.

“We like our motor home.”

Grandpa brought a brown case into the house and set it on the kitchen counter next to a package of thawing venison sausage that Audrey planned to make into spaghetti sauce. Inside the case, held by velvet straps that buttoned, were a silver cocktail shaker, a flask, four glasses, a jigger, and some swizzle sticks. “Long dry trip,” he said, and smacked his lips, which were surprisingly juicy for his age. He mixed a double-shot Manhattan for Grandma and waited until she’d tasted it and nodded before making drinks for Audrey and himself. His hands, I noticed, were fat and padded, the fingers locked in a clawlike curl. They matched his thick, tufted eyebrows and pitted red nose.

Audrey browned sausage and diced tomatoes as Grandma brought Mike up-to-date about our relatives. My aunts’ and uncles’ names were unfamiliar to me, their life situations hard to picture, and hearing about them made me feel lonesome. When Mike left home for college, he’d told me once, he’d put his family behind him, where it belonged. He said he expected me to do the same someday.

“Wendy’s back with the born-agains,” said Grandma. “They practically hold her hostage in that
church. She feels guilty about her miscarriages or something, but that’s no reason to sacrifice her youth.”