Peru. Gordon Lish

so, even so, it still felt to me like he could—or it felt good to me when I thought that he could, even if I really knew otherwise, even if I knew that the colored man was probably just a big man and a strong man and was not any of the other things I thought he was.

      I was always the boy who was winning.

      Whichever one the game was, whichever game Andy Lieblich and I were playing, whether it be Builder or Gardener or Farmer, I was always head and shoulders above Andy Lieblich when it came to who would come out winning it, to who would be the one who would come out being better at it, even if he himself always had the shovel—and make no mistake of it, even if nobody actually said it was a game, even if nobody had gone ahead and said it was a game to begin with, set it up that way as a game to begin with, still and all, there was always a winner, there was always a winner, and the loser knew it just as much as the winner did, just as the nanny always herself did, just as she herself from just sitting there did.

      The chair she sat in was a slatted chair. By this I mean that it was a chair which was made out of wooden slats like slats of wood, which I think, I have the idea, that this was a pretty common kind of a chair for the out-of-doors back in those days, which were the days of 1938 and 1939 and 1940.

      His muscles were so amazing to me—the muscles that I could see in his back when the colored man had his back facing me, I could see them even though he didn’t have his shirt off, even though he always had a shirt on, except for when he went into the garage to do his changing into one and then, later on after that, out of one—you could always see the colored man’s muscles through his clothes because he had so many of them and they were so big.

      I tell you, it was so amazing to me, it all was so amazing to me, how wide his wrists were, how thick his wrists were, or how the way the back of his hand looked when he kept the water from the hose always running over it so that there always would be fresh clean water in the sponge and so the dirt wouldn’t get rubbed back on all over the Buick again after the colored man had got it all washed off.

      You know what was amazing to me?

      The way the colored man turned over the sponge.

      It made me tremble. It made me almost tremble when the colored man lifted the sponge up off of the Buick just a little ways and then flopped it back down over on the other side of it—and then some of the soppiness in it flounced out, flushed out, flooded out, before the colored man mashed his hand again back down on it.

      Fluffed out—that’s the way it looked—I am trying to really say the way all of these things actually looked.

      You could really make a list of favorite things. You can’t do it anymore, you can’t do it now—but you could have done it every day of your life when you were six—Andy Lieblich and the sandbox first, the colored man after that, the colored man next, the colored man and the Buick after Andy Lieblich and the sandbox, then Miss Donnelly and the storybooks coming third.

      Other things which I can think of are these—namely, seeing Iris Lieblich’s place, or actually her seeing my place, Iris Lieblich seeing my place—and then the rest would be things I smelled or hearing the corduroy or just looking at the house where the Lieblichs lived.

      I almost forgot.

      Mah-jongg—I almost forgot.

      When the ladies came over to my house to play mah-jongg with my mother—talk about favorite things, talk about favorite things—the sound of them doing it and the things they said, to me this was one of the greatest things in the world—plus the fact that it usually worked out to me getting at least one whole handful of All Sorts, which was another one of my favorite things.

      Killing Steven Adinoff—there is no sense in not saying so, there is no reason for me not to say so—killing Steven Adinoff was one of the best of these things.

      Not that there were not times when the colored man must have seen me in the sandbox. Because it stands to reason that when he came out back to hook up the hose, or to get it back off of the spigot, that the colored man could have seen me doing different things in Andy Lieblich’s sandbox, he could have looked up and seen me in the middle of doing something which not just any boy could.

      The nanny, however, there was not an instant when she herself was not always there, keeping an eye out for us as regards our behavior, keeping an eye out in relation to how we were playing, to the whole question of if whether we were behaving ourselves and playing nicely enough and not letting any of the sand get out of the sandbox and get out into any of the Lieblichs’ grass back there, and meanwhile keeping herself busy with the thing she always had of rolling up and down a wristfiil of rubber bands on her wrist, actually rolling them up and down over her wristwatch, so that the rubber bands kept rolling over on themselves, kept twisting, kept winding up too much and then untwisting and making all of these sounds of unwinding and snapping, which you could hear, which you heard going on all of the time when you were playing something in the sandbox.

      I’ll tell you one of the worst things in my life. This is one of the worst things in my life—a day when the nanny said that I couldn’t come over and play but one when she went ahead and changed her mind later on and said that I could actually do it—and then it started raining just a little bit after she’d said it, like just instants, just instants after she had given me her blessing—and then for the whole rest of the day, all the rest of that day after Andy Lieblich went in and the nanny went in with him, I sat down inside of our garage and kept feeling funny and out of the ordinary, like as if I was in some kind of trouble and that certain things which I did not exactly know about yet were probably dangerously unfinished, lying lopsided somewhere and being dangerous, and it made me feel a terrible wildness, this strange feeling, it made me feel like as if I had to feel the wildness if I was ever going to get rid of the strange feeling, which I think, to my way of thinking as a child, was the worse one, the feeling before the feeling of wildness, the feeling of incompletion and of chaos, a feeling of things getting started and of never getting them over with, of parts of them being impossible for you to ever get them totally taken care of yourself.

      In a halfway sense, I think I can say that the day I killed Steven Adinoff, that it, that that particular day—but only in this halfway sense of things which I have mentioned—was a day like that. On the other hand, now that I have said that, I think it is only fair for me to say that I have the feeling that I am making too much out of the thing, that I am probably not really remembering anything.

      I should be skipping the feelings and be sticking to other things, anyway. To what I remember because I actually heard it or saw it or so forth and so on—I should be sticking to things like this before things start getting too mixed up.

      I heard the water going.

      The whole time I was killing him I heard the water getting out of where the colored man had it hooked up to the Lieblichs’ spigot—the water he was using for the Buick, the whole time the other thing was happening, the water for the Buick was sizzling or was crackling or hissing from where the fit between the hose, on the one hand, and the spigot, on the other, was a little bit loose, even though it was the colored man who had hooked it up and who—next to me, next to me—was the world’s most watchful human being in the whole wide world.

      Even afterwards, even when I was going home, it was still going then, the tiny hissing was, like a sizzle, like the way a frying pan with some drops of water in it will sizzle, or make a sizzle, or sound like it’s sizzling.

      The nanny saw it. Andy Lieblich saw it. So did Steven Adinoff himself. We all saw it. We all watched. Steven Adinoff watched just as much as anybody else.

      That’s the thing about it—you watch.

      That’s the unbelievable thing about it—that you watch it even if it’s you yourself that’s getting killed.

      He watched himself get chopped up.

      To me it looked like he was interested in just lying there and watching it. Because isn’t it interesting to watch it even if it’s happening to you? That you’re the one who’s getting it doesn’t make any difference. Actually, if my own personal experience can be counted for anything, that part