CHAPTER FOUR
Noah's father, it would be interesting to note, never once thought of himself as Noah's father. This is something that bears scrutiny, considering how widely he was considered such. Noah Bunch was driven to excel. The people who grew up with him were inclined to say that he'd always been that way. They were wrong but in an innocent fashion they must be forgiven for. They said it as a compliment, something attesting to his character and personal makeup. It was nice in a naive style so he never let it bother him much, even knowing that they were wrong. It was not part of his nature.
It was a choice.
Noah had decided somewhere around the time of his tenth birthday. He looked at himself and the way he was feeling about the world and decided he couldn't keep doing the things he was doing. He figured out that there were choices everyone had to make or get made for them. What sort of person are you? What kind of person are you going to be tomorrow? These were things that could be left to chance or decided when the power was still in your hands. He was young, alright. Just ten but that was the choice he made and he was willing to do what it took to be able to look at his life and be proud of the things he'd done.
Anybody been ten years old? Good. Then you realize that is bullshit and as big a fabrication as the story other's told of him always being the way he was, now. He was no more responsible for his character because of prepubescent choices he'd made than by something that happened in the womb. Both ideas represent different ways of looking at the world and people fall all over the place when it comes to deciding which way you're most apt to believe. Nature or nurture? Sure that's a good one and something that would keep a crowd up late at Crow's, ordering highball after highball as they made their case and grew more certain of the opinions they'd walked in with. No one is ever convinced in a lounge conversation over bourbon and branch water, that they've been mistaken and it took this to point it out. Oh, were it only true. Noah would be more than a co-owner with a niche like that; the whiskey philosophers. Has a ring to it, it surely does.
Nature or nurture is, if nothing else, an over-simplification but a start in the right direction. To admit that no single person is totally independent, without a need to reference any influences in a world we all swim in like a thin ocean. Folly, really. That, or short-sighted to the n-th degree. You decide on that one, while Noah's history unravels here, balling at his feet in a dangerous rat's nest of bandages and baling twine. If he moved right now he'd fall to be strangled in the morass. Don't worry about that, Chuck. It is was it is and that is what that is, too. One quick way of ending an argument and capping all speculation.
Noah tended to do well at sports. Again, the trap here was people acting as if there is a god-granted talent pie and only certain individuals get a larger serving than the rest. It ignores the fact that there is nothing natural in swinging a turned-oak stick at a coiled ball of string covered in horsehide. Think about it, folks. Really! Jesus. Everything takes work, it doesn't matter how you come at at it or where you begin. Everything. You take an oblong slice of pigskin wrapped around a piece of rubber which should have, and more than likely would have, been a tire in any other place in the world. Not here. It gets shaped in a bastardized oval and pumped to 12.5 to 13.5 psi and is instinctively worth dying for? Don't you believe that for even a moment. It just isn't accurate, nor embracing enough.
The fact is a person has to reach down inside themselves to grab hold of something, some conviction this is the way to go, or a misguided sense of self-worth whispering that if you throw this damned thing a long way -- even twenty or thirty yards, and somebody at the other end who you want to catch it, does catch it, you can be alright. That other people will look at you and perceive you as having value. Self-worth, there's the words for it.;
How can you get self-worth from something other people think of you or your performance on a grassy field on a Friday evening? On the very face of it, a contradiction and that is available to anyone, even a casual observer. A fellow wrapped up in Ace bandages and shielded under layers of padded armor would take a bit longer to arrive at the same conclusion, no doubt. Goodness knows that Noah did. By the time he got there, the high school coaches and biggest male teachers, those great big brutes who always look about to burst out of their K-Mart white shirts and clip on ties while they watch over study hall or get pulled in as torpedoes, backing a nervous administrator's play. They all told him he "had the stuff".
He liked having the stuff. He did. And though he wasn't at all sure exactly what the hell the stuff was, or how they could see something that he couldn't, he continued down the road they were guiding him onto, led by the promise of cute cheerleader pussy and the ability to do damned near anything in English class or the hallways outside the library, so long as he showed up for the big games and played like he had some kind of natural talent. It was a myth but it worked its own particular magic. As the people supporting and the members of the teams opposing became more convinced, so did he. It was a bottomless cup of confidence and would keep getting filled up by people expecting him to do well, if it was not being topped of by his own certainty. A great little scam and he played it like a first chair violin plays Beethoven, just by closing their eyes and feeling it flow.
So why, then didn't Walter Bunch feel a great wondrous pride at the incredible natural talent he and his wife injected into their progeny, each pitching in a few choice chromosomes that would combine to a high school sports hero with a god-given talent for anything that happened in front of crowd under electric lights and might get reported in the newspaper, depending on the state of the other world, national, and local news of the day. He didn't because he knew it wasn't so. He knew the kid was a pussy who used to pee his pants right up to the day he walked into the first grade class at the Paul Revere Elementary School, his little pecker squirting juice like a drinking fountain, soaking his tiny little blue jeans to the side of his leg. A natural, huh?
Walter was just walking in the front door, the Rambler barely shutdown from dropping the boy at the corner near the school, telling him "Go on, boy. Get your butt in there and learn some shit." when he heard the phone hanging on the wall ringing. This was a chocolate brown Western Electric 554 wall phone, built to handle the vital communication essential to the lifeblood of a family. Calls about people dying in the middle of the night. Calls to Doreen's to tell her everybody was gone and Walt would be over to take a dive off her cliff, again.
Or a call like this.
"Are you the father of Noah Bunch?"
He would've liked to say "No" and be done with it. Looking back, who knows how much embarrassment he'd have saved himself if he had. Himself? Hell! The entire family. This kid was a pansy. Always had been. Probably, in Walt's considered opinion, always would be. The sort of kid they'd run over in jeeps and never even looked back to see if he was getting up, towards the end of mopping up the troops that Hitler had left to throw against the might of the American Eighth Division. It was a wonder the kids had been trained long enough to know how to reload the battered and battle-scarred old Mausers they were packing. Maybe that hadn't been an issue, either considering the fact Allied bombing had wiped the munitions plants out months before the final push across the Rhine. The poor Krauts they were stomping now, more than likely, didn't even have a full magazine to go against them with. It was sad in a way but nothing Walt or the boys stopped to think about. They had, many of them, already swept through the wire that surrounded some of the worst concentration camps the Nazis had ever put together and they were in no mod for a little self-reflective mercy. What was the point. Murder the bastards and get the hell out of here. He'd had enough time in Europe by the end spring of 1945. He was ready to go home and drink good American lager and bang girls with freckles and shaved armpits with names like Shirley and Sharon. Or Doreen.
He'd come home to buy a house on the GI Bill and marry the first girl he slept with, stateside. They had three kids. The first, a set of twins, had died at birth. When they were ready to try again they got him. This. A little scrap of humanity they named Noah He was a cute enough, Walt guessed. Fuck! What did he know about kids and cute? Not much.
"What's he done?"
"Mr. Bunch?"
"Yeah," Walter said. He was willing to admit to that much, if it was going to move the conversation along a little bit.
"We have a problem?"
"You do?"
"Ummmm. Ha Ha. No sir. Actually, you have a problem," the voice said.
And he'd never been Noah's father, again. Not even in casual conversation.
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