Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [7]
“You’re hurt. You’re hurt.”
I held up my hands. They were smeared with blood. My sheet and my clothes, too. For a second my heart almost stopped, then I realized it wasn’t my blood. “It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I just got into a fight.” My mother went back to bed, and I washed up. Yet all night I shook, wondering how badly I’d beaten the bakery-truck boy. When I fought I never thought about anyone actually dying.
The next morning I forced myself to return to the scene. My victim was gone. For two days I worried. Then I saw him driving the truck, his face swollen and wrapped in bandages. I wanted to whoop and holler—not because he was alive, of course, but because I had really fixed him.
WITH EACH DAY I grew more erratic—touchy, irritable, defiant one moment, happy-go-lucky the next. One night at dinner, my parents, long mystified by my behavior, finally said, “Why can’t you be a good boy like your brother?”
I felt like I’d been stabbed in the heart. But my response was sullen instead of emotional: “You love Pete more than you love me.” My parents were shocked speechless for a moment, then choking back tears, my mother said, “Louie, let me tell you this: if the Lord asked me to give up one of my children, He’d have to take whichever one He wanted. I couldn’t say take this one or that one. I wouldn’t.”
“Well,” I grumbled, “how come you always pick on me?”
“How can I help it?” she shot back. “You’re the one who, if I say, ‘Empty the garbage,’ says ‘Just a minute’ and then disappears!” I knew she could have rattled off plenty of other examples, but instead she jumped up from the table and ran to the bedroom crying. It killed me to see my mother hurt, but all I did was scowl, shove back my chair, and leave in disgust.
I wasn’t jealous of Pete. It wasn’t his fault that I thought my mother liked him better. I respected him. He was my hero. When he’d go somewhere with a buddy and he wouldn’t let me come along, I’d follow anyway. Sometimes he’d have to insist I go back, and I’d resent it, but I wasn’t mad. When you’re a kid, a brother two years younger seems like ten years younger. Otherwise, we were close and eventually inseparable. We shared the same room. We played games together. We slept outside on the grass a lot, especially on hot nights.
I even stuck my fists into situations when other kids gave him a hard time. When I was thirteen, a local bully who was about a foot taller than Pete had him cornered about half a block from our house. He threatened and shoved him, trying to get Pete to fight. Pete refused. On my way home from school I heard the commotion, and when I saw Pete get shoved I just walked right up and punched the bully right in the teeth, then ran like hell. He chased me all the way home, but I made it into the house.
But none of that mattered now. I hated being compared with Pete. As a result I withdrew even more. I kept to myself at home and moved my bedding into the backyard. If anyone came to the front door, I retreated to the garage until the visitor left. I even refused to eat with the family. To my mind, I lived alone, and although I was often miserable, I liked it that way.
WHAT I DIDN’T like was getting caught and risking being sent to Juvenile Hall, way up in Los Angeles. One day, after I was nabbed for some prank, Chief Collier of the Torrance Police took me to the local jail to meet the inmates. He idled purposefully in front of two guys sharing a cell, then asked me, “Where do you go on Saturdays?”
“I go to the beach,” I said.
“When you’re in there,” he countered, shrugging toward the cell, “you can’t go to the beach.” Then he said, “Louie, if we didn’t respect your folks so much, you’d be in reform school right now. But we’re warning you: this is where you’ll end up if you don’t wise up.”
I knew he wanted to scare me, and