Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [48]
My mother often had made the observation that I was the good boy, Paul the bad boy. I heard it a hundred times: “Paul, you’re so bad!” For many years, I believed it. Looking back, I see that it’s enough to make a child psychiatrist shudder. Many years had to pass before I saw the inaccuracy and unfairness of it.
A story my mother repeated over and over again was about the time Paul, at age five, had deliberately gotten himself lost at the Korvettes department store in East Brunswick, New Jersey, so he could hear his name called over the public address system. “Shoppers, we have a lost boy in the office. His name is Paul. Will his family please come to the office at the rear of the store?” My mother was pushing dresses on hangers up and down the rack to find something that would fit when she heard her son’s name. She looked around. There was no Paul. She knew immediately that it was her Paul at the office. Her reaction was not worry. The announcement of the lost child was affirmation of her view that Paul just wanted to make a little excitement for himself or stir up some trouble whenever possible. We retrieved him. There he was, savoring his fame, attended by the store’s female assistant manager among piles of clothes, bare hangers and empty coffee cups in the tiny office. Paul was physically small then, even for his age, with blue-gray eyes, light brown hair and an impish grin. He greeted us sitting down. “You’re so bad!” my mother said as she grabbed him by the hand and led us both back to the dress rack, somewhere between sizes 16 and 18. It was only much later that I understood that she had secretly loved him for his unruliness. She admired rebellion. Maybe it was one of the reasons our family was always on the wrong side of authority and, indirectly, why we were always broke and on the move.
My earliest memory of Paul was the time the robbers held up our stagecoach at Cowboy City. I could not have been more than seven years old, because my father is in the memory. Paul would have been three or four. Our mother and father—a memorable event in itself, that they were together—had taken Paul and me to Cowboy City, a low-budget theme park near our home in central New Jersey. There was a saloon, general store, wood-plank sidewalk and sheriff’s office with a jail. Cowboys with chaps and guns on their hips swaggered around the little town. They came flying out of the saloon and were dragged into jail by the sheriff and his deputies. In their big boots and spurs, they seemed seven feet tall. There was a stagecoach ride, which we took, and at the edge of town the coach was stopped by a group of cowboys on horseback wearing neckerchiefs over their faces and firing their guns into the air. The horses spun around and made a big cloud of dust.
The cowboys ordered all of us out of the coach. It was a holdup. They demanded the chest from the driver. I had not been let in on the joke, and to me all this was as real as a traffic accident. When one of the cowboys approached us, to heighten the drama, I stepped forward and said something like, “Leave us alone. We weren’t bothering you.” Of course, the cowboy thought this was funny. My eyes must have flashed, or maybe they had filled with tears. I stood my ground and held Paul by the hand close to me. “Don’t you hurt my brother,” I warned the cowboy. The cowboy stopped laughing, and so did the adults who had been on the stagecoach enjoying this little bit of theater. I was dead serious, and while I was unarmed, I was prepared to do whatever it took to defend my brother and me.
My mother loved to tell this story, too, because it contained the elements of character that she honored most: resistance, courage and fealty to blood. Somehow lost in her retellings of the story were the points that I was scared out of my wits and that I hadn’t turned to the adults around me for protection. I may have wet the cowboy pants I was wearing for the day, the ones with fringes down the legs—not the last time my bladder let loose in a childhood full of close calls, real and imagined.